matter is plastic and when growth and replacement exceed disintegration.
Brain workers do their best between the ages of twenty-five and forty-five before that they are preparing for work, after that their work, no matter how extensive, is largely routine. Lawyers and physicians do much of their practise after forty, but the learning was accomplished before forty or forty-five. Successful merchants lay the foundations for wealth and success in youth and middle life. The great men that we know are all old men; but the foundations for their greatness were laid when they were young. Philosophers have founded and announced their systems in youth and early manhood; divines and religious teachers have originated their creeds and have been most effective as preachers in early manhood.
Statesmen have projected their greatest acts of legislation, diplomacy and reform in early life. In the morning of life scientists have wrought out their data and practically formulated their theories; generals and admirals have gained their greatest victories; lawyers have paved the way for leadership at the bar, physicians have laid the groundwork for their greatest discoveries, poets and artists and musicians have planned and in many instances executed their greatest masterpieces.
You, young men and women of the colleges and high schools, are picked individuals. A process of selection and sifting going on for many years in your own lives, and for generations in your ancestors, determined who should go to college. The state endows its universities to enable its intellectual elite to secure the development which their native worth makes possible. The function of the school and the university is not to create brains, but to mature them. The school is like a problem in multiplication in which the student is the multiplicand and the institution the multiplier, and, as in mathematics, if we have significant figures for our multiplicand the result is significant, but if we have ciphers for the multiplicand the result must be zero.
Your efficiency in life depends largely upon your physical and mental health and your habits of work, rest and recreation. To conserve your inborn potentialities and to multiply your talents is not only a high privilege but your greatest immediate duty. To fail is to be morally culpable, to succeed betokens true wisdom and virtue. No worthier object of contemplation can occupy your mind than the Socratic admonition, "Know thyself."
