Chapter XIV.
Racial Experience.
There is a general agreement among men that experience is the most
effective and successful of teachers; that for many men no other form
of education is possible; and that those who enjoy the fullest
educational opportunities miss the deeper processes of training if
they fail of that wide contact with the happenings of life which we
call experience. To touch the world at many points; to come into
relations with many kinds of men; to think, to feel, and to act on a
generous scale,--these are prime opportunities for growth. For it is
not only true, as Browning said so often and in so many kinds of speech,
that a man's greatest good fortune is to have the opportunity of
giving out freely and powerfully all the force that is in him, but it
is also true that almost equal good fortune attends the man who has
the opportunity of receiving truth and instruction through a wide and
rich experience.
But individual experience, however inclusive and deep, is necessarily
limited, and the life of the greatest man would be confined within
narrow boundaries if he were shut within the circle of his own
individual contact with things and persons.
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