All who will persevere with calm determination cannot fail ere long to gain a certain success, and this achieved, the second step is much easier.  However, there are many people who after doing all in their power to get to the gold or diamond mines, hasten away even when in the full tide of success, because they are fickle—­and it is precisely such people who easily tire who are most easily attracted, be it to mesmerism, hypnotism, or any other wonder.  And they are more wearisome and greater foes to true Science than the utterly indifferent or the ignorant.

This work will not have been written in vain should it induce the reader to reflect on what is implied by patient repetition or perseverance, and what an incredible and varied power that man acquires who masters it.  He who can lead himself, or others, into a habit can do anything.  Even Religion is, in fact, nothing else.  “Religion,” said the reviewer of “The Evolution of the Idea of God,” by GRANT ALLEN, “he defines as Custom or Practice—­not theory, not theology, not ethics, not spiritual aspirations, but a certain set of more or less similar observances:  propitiation, prayer, praise, offerings, the request for Divine favors, the deprecation of Divine anger, or other misfortunes”—­in short, Ritual.  That is to say, it is the aggregate of the different parts of religion, of which many take one for the whole.  But this aggregation was the result of earnest patience and had good results.  And it is by the careful analysis and all-round examination of Ideas that we acquire valuable knowledge, and may learn how very few there are current which are more than very superficially understood—­as I have shown in what I have said of the Will, the Imagination, Forethought, and many other faculties which are flippantly used to explain a thousand problems by people who can hardly define the things themselves.

CHAPTER V.

WILL AND CHARACTER.

    “And I have felt
    A Presence that disturbs me with the joy
    Of elevated thoughts, a sense sublime
    Of something far more deeply interposed,
    Whose dwelling is . . . all in the mind of man;
    A motion and a spirit that impels
    All thinking things.”—­Wordsworth.

As the vast majority of people are not agreed as to what really constitutes a Gentleman, while a great many seem to be practically, at least, very much abroad as to the nature of a Christian, so it will be found that, in fact, there is a great deal of difference as regards the Will.  I have known many men, and some women, to be credited by others, and who very much credited themselves, with having iron wills, when, in fact, their every deed, which was supposed to prove it, was based on brazen want of conscience.  Mere want of principle or unscrupulousness passes with many, especially its possessors, for strong will.  And even decision of character itself, as MAGINN remarks,