going out, the steering of their own lives taken from their hands.  Then there has been the sense of the coming danger, the dark presentiment of how it all must end when the “powers that tend the soul to help it from the death that cannot die, and save it even in extremes, begin to vex and plague it.”  There has been the dreadful sense of life drifting toward a great crash, nearer and nearer to what must be the wreck of all things.  What does the humanist have to offer to these men and women who know perfectly well where they are, and what they are about, and where they would like to be, but who can’t get there and who are, today and every day, putting forth their last and somber efforts, trying in vain to just keep clear of ruin until the darkness and the helplessness shall lift and something or someone shall give them peace!

Now, it is this defect in the will which automatically limits the power of the intellect.  It is this which the Socratic identification ignores.  So while we might readily grant that it is in the essential nature of things that virtue and truth, wisdom and character, understanding and goodness, are but two aspects of one thing, is it not trifling with one of the most serious facts of human destiny to interpret the truism to mean that, when a man knows that a contemplated act is wrong or foolish or ugly, he is thereby restrained from accomplishing it?  Knowledge is not virtue in the sense that mere reason or mere perception can control the will.  And this is the conclusion that Aristotle also comes to when he says:  “Some people say that incontinence is impossible, if one has knowledge.  It seems to them strange, as it did to Socrates, that where knowledge exists in man, something else should master it and drag it about like a slave.  Socrates was wholly opposed to this idea; he denied the existence of incontinence, arguing that nobody with a conception of what was best could act against it, and therefore, if he did so act, his action must be due to ignorance.”  And then Aristotle adds, “The theory is evidently at variance with the facts of experience."[35] Plato himself exposes the theoretical nature of the assertion, its inhuman demand upon the will, the superreasonableness which it expects but offers no way of obtaining, when he says, “Every one will admit that a nature having in perfection all the qualities which are required in a philosopher is a rare plant seldom seen among men."[36]

[Footnote 35:  Ethics, Book VII, ch. iii, pp. 206-207.]

[Footnote 36:  Republic, VI, 491.]

It would be well if those people who are going about the world today teaching social hygiene to adolescents (on the whole an admirable thing to do) but proceeding on the assumption that when youth knows what is right and what is wrong, and why it is right and why it is wrong, and what are the consequences of right and wrong, that then, ipso facto, youth will become chaste,—­well if they would acquaint themselves either with the