Morale : the supreme standard of life and conduct / by G. Stanley Hall.

  • Hall, G. Stanley (Granville Stanley), 1844-1924.
Date:
1920
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Morale : the supreme standard of life and conduct / by G. Stanley Hall. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    and even the protozoa. He has won out and thus proved his stirps best fitted to survive. Even though anthropologists now tell us that civilized is by no means so superior to savage man as we have thought, there is at any rate a vast difference between the best and even the second-best individuals, and to excel others as well as our own past selves is one of the strongest and noblest springs of true ambition. No leveling Bolshevism can ever efface the true aristoc¬ racy of native gifts or even of individual attainments. Men are and should strive to be equal in nothing save in opportunity. There will always be some whose services to the community and the world will be worth hundreds and even thousands as much as others, and originators, pioneers, geniuses, leaders, and experts will always deserve and get more of the rewards of life than those whose services are worth less to man¬ kind. Indeed almost all can excel in something, and that something it is the business of not only voca¬ tional guidance but of home, school, and every other agency that can be utilized for that end to find out. If everyone were always doing his best thing, the world would leap forward, and there would be vastly more just and saving self-respect in all of us; while nothing so cankers as the realization of the danger of failing because there is no opportunity to do our best. But the real superman, like the moralist, is too self- conscious. The best man in the world who knows himself to be such is already spoiled by that knowl¬ edge. Even Socrates was the wisest of men only be-