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Now, adults, of course, are tremendously clever and accomplished persons and children are no match for them; but still, with all their talents and omniscience and power, adults seem to lack important pieces of knowledge which children possess; they seem to forget, and to fail to profit by, their infantile experience.  Else why should adults in general be so extraordinarily ignorant of the great truth that the secret of goodwill lies in the sympathetic exercise of the imagination?  Since goodwill is the secret of human happiness, it follows that the secret of goodwill must be one of the most precious aids to sensible living; and yet adults, though they once knew it, have gone and forgotten it!  Children may well be excused for concluding that the ways of the adult, in their capricious irrationality, are past finding out.

To increase your goodwill for a fellow creature, it is necessary to imagine that you are he:  and nothing else is necessary.  This feat is not easy; but it can be done.  Some people have less of the divine faculty of imagination than others, but nobody is without it, and, like all other faculties, it improves with use, just as it deteriorates with neglect.  Imagination is a function of the brain.  In order to cultivate goodwill for a person, you must think frequently about that person.  You must inform yourself about all his activities.  You must be able in your mind’s eye to follow him hour by hour throughout the day, and you must ascertain if he sleeps well at night—­because this is not a trifle.  And you must reflect upon his existence with the same partiality as you reflect upon your own. (Why not?) That is to say, you must lay the fullest stress on his difficulties, disappointments and unhappinesses, and you must minimise his good fortune.  You must magnify his efforts after righteousness, and forget his failures.  You must ever remember that, after all, he is not to blame for the faults of his character, which faults, in his case as in yours, are due partly to heredity and partly to environment.  And beyond everything you must always give him credit for good intentions.  Do not you, though sometimes mistakenly, always act for the best?  You know you do!  And are you alone among mortals in rectitude?

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This mental exercise in relation to another person takes time, and it involves a fatiguing effort.  I repeat that it is not easy.  Nor is it invariably agreeable.  You may, indeed, find it tedious, for example, to picture in vivid detail all the worries that have brought about your wife’s exacerbation—­negligent maid, dishonest tradesman, milk in a thunder storm, hypercritical husband, dirt in the wrong place—­but, when you have faithfully done so, I absolutely defy you to speak to her in the same tone as you used to employ, and to cherish resentment against her as you used to do.  And I absolutely defy you not to feel