Since this is true, personality can be developed and its latent powers brought

out by careful cultivation. We have long since ceased to believe that we are

living in a realm of chance. So clear and exact are nature's laws that we

forecast, scores of years in advance, the appearance of a certain comet and

foretell to the minute an eclipse of the Sun. And we understand this law of

cause and effect in all our material realms. We do not plant potatoes and expect

to pluck hyacinths. The law is universal: it applies to our mental powers, to

morality, to personality, quite as much as to the heavenly bodies and the grain

of the fields. "Whatsoever a man soweth that shall he also reap," and nothing

else.

 

Character has always been regarded as one of the chief factors of the speaker's

power. Cato defined the orator as _vir bonus dicendi peritus_--a good man

skilled in speaking. Phillips Brooks says: "Nobody can truly stand as a utterer

before the world, unless he be profoundly living and earnestly thinking."

"Character," says Emerson, "is a natural power, like light and heat, and all

nature cooperates with it. The reason why we feel one man's presence, and do not

feel another's is as simple as gravity. Truth is the summit of being: justice is

the application of it to affairs. All individual natures stand in a scale,

according to the purity of this element in them. The will of the pure runs down

into other natures, as water runs down from a higher into a lower vessel. This

natural force is no more to be withstood than any other natural force....

Character is nature in the highest form."

 

It is absolutely impossible for impure, bestial and selfish thoughts to blossom