Your first pages as I read them, your confessions in them of your private life so far, speak often of indecision, of astonishment, but never of enervation or of definite loss of will. I am sure that enthusiasm is still a living force with you. I know well that those notes of discouragement and pain which the absolute sincerity of your thought—a virtue even greater than hope itself—has caused to spring from the tortures of your meditation in your sad but inevitable meetings with Doubt, were not an indication of a permanent soul-condition; and did not signify in any case your want of confidence in the eternal virtue-force of life. But when the cry of anguish rose to your lips from the depths of your hearts, you did not suffocate it before utterance, like the austere and proudly silent Stoic in his punishment, but ended your cry with an invocation to that ideal which “shall come”—as with the note of a Messianic inspiration.

On the other hand, though I speak to you of hope and enthusiasm as high and fertile virtues, I would by no means cross that inviolable line which divides scepticism from belief, illusion from happiness. Nothing is farther from my thought than to confound with the natural gifts of youth, with its beautiful spontaneity of spirit, that indolent frivolity of thinking, which, as it is incapable of seeing more than a gambler’s motive in any human action, buys love, or tries to, buys life's pleasures at the cost of ignorance of all those things that may give one pause before the mysterious front, the solemn face of all realities. That is not the noble meaning of youth individual, or of the youth of peoples. I have always thought vain the policy of those statesmen, who shape America’s policies and guard her fate, to suppress, before they ever reach our shores, any sound or echo of human suffering from the older world or its literature—fearing lest, morbid or unhealthy, it put in peril our fragile optimism. No firm training of the intelligence can be based on simple-minded isolation or on voluntary ignorance. Every problem proposed to human thought by the spirit of Doubt, every sincere reproach which is fulminated against Nature or against God himself from the breast of disheartenment or sorrow, has a right to reach our consciousness and there be considered and faced. The strength of our heart must show itself in accepting the riddle of the Sphinx; not in evading its awesome question.

Nor should you forget that even in bitterness of thought, as in joy, there may ever be a starting-point for action, often a fertile suggestion. When grief unmans, when it seems so irresistible as to prompt the abdication of the power to will, the philosophy which breeds such thoughts is unworthy of youthful souls. Then may the poet denounce “ the slack soldier who fights beneath the flag of Death.” But when there rises from the heart of sorrow the manly wish for battle, for conquest or reconquest of that boon which is denied us, then it becomes a double spur to action, most potent impulse to life. So Helvetius thought the very loathing of one’s own lot a high prerogative of man, if, instead of dulling our sensibility in a slothful submission, it awaken it and become a spur to action. In that sense it has been well said that there are pessimisms which aré like inverted optimism: far from supposing the renouncement and condemnation of all being, they teach, with their discontent of the actual, the necessity of its renewal. That which humanity needs, to be saved from all pessimistic negation, is not so much a belief that all is well at present, as the faith that it is possible through life’s growth to arrive at a better state, hastened and discovered by the actions of men. Such faith in the future, belief in the efficacy of human energy, are the necessary condition of all strong action and all fecund thought. That is why I have wanted to begin with praising the eternal value of that faith which, being in youth a very instinct, needs the teaching of no dogma. For you all feel it stirring at the depths of your being, and know it for the divine suggestion of Nature itself.

Animated by this sentiment, enter you on life, its deep horizons before you, with the noble ambition of making your presence felt therein from the moment when you confront it with the glance of a conquistador. Join to the spirit of youth the initiative of the bold, the innovation of the genius. Perhaps everywhere to-day the action and the influence of youth is less effective in the march of human society than it ought to be, and less intense. Gaston Deschamps has noted it, in France, commenting on the tardy initiative of the younger generation in public life or cul- ture, and the scanty original thought which they contribute to the beaten track of the prevailing ideas. My impressions of the present America, so far as I can form a general opinion, despite the sad isolation in which live its peoples, would perhaps justify a like remark. And yet I seem to see everywhere expressed a need for some active revelation of new forces; and I hold that America stands much in need of her youth. Here is the reason for which I speak to you. This is why I am so extraordinarily concerned with the moral development of your minds. The force of your word and your example may come to embody the living energies of the past in the work of the future. I hold with Michelet that the right idea of education does not include only the teaching to the minds of the sons the experience of the fathers, but as well, and often more, the informing of the fathers’ experience with the innovating inspiration of the sons.

Let us then discuss how you shall consider the life that is awaiting you.

The divergence of individual vocations will impress divers directions upon your activities and cause to predominate in each one of you a disposition of mind predetermined by a definite aptitude. Some will be men of science, others of art, others still, of action. But over all the inclinations which may bind you severally to different tasks and ways of life, you should guard in your inner soul the consciousness of the fundamental unity of our nature, which demands that every human being be, above and before all, the unspoiled pattern of a man in whom no noble faculty of the mind be obliterated, and no lofty interest for all men have lost its communicative virtue. Before all modifications of profession and training stands the fulfilment of the destiny common to all rational beings.