but it may lead in the long run to a fruitful reconsideration of the relation between usefulness and the special powers of the individual. And it is advice which may be given, mutatis mutandis, with just as much pertinence to a poet as to an engineer.
It is a platitude, which nevertheless each generation has to discover afresh, that one serves the world best by doing eagerly what one can do best, and not something else. Therefore Pindar gave as a rule of life this injunction: "Become what you are." It is not quite so simple as it sounds, to become what one is. Most of us are creatures moving about in worlds half-realized—only half-conscious, only half emerged from our own dullness and indolence and inefficiency. We do not know what we want or what we can do because we do not know clearly what we are. Meanwhile we play the ape and the parrot to our companions. We become creatures of convention and, careless habit. We accept the task work thrusts into our empty hands by whatever busy man passes our way. We become what our parents were or what our neighbors are. We make a virtue of our indolence, and call a lazy yielding to chance or a passive drifting with the stream, a patient acceptance of destiny. This destiny is a weak-
