educator, reformer, he has gained a unique place in American life. In social work he has unquestionably been a powerful and progressive force. With Theodore Roosevelt, Jacob Riis and others he led in Tene ment Reform, and the first, best efforts for municipal welfare and civic decency in New York. He founded the first workingmen's schools, the first kindergartens; he was a leader in the earliest childlabor legislation and in the vocational school movement.

But the essential quality of the man, that which makes him a significant and luminous figure, is not to be found in these things. It must be sought elsewhere. Not in his writings or philosophy, not in the movement he has founded, nor in the words he speaks, but in the man himself, in his being the secret must be sought. Some men are not equal to their achievements. Adler's achievements are unequal to himself.

To see, to meet, to hear him is to understand this. A personality of spiritual majesty and light, one is awed in his presence, one does him unconscious reverence. A reverence all the more remarkable because his are none of the external attributes of authority. A smallish man, shuffling of gait, insignificant of form. But his eyes are the eyes of a Buddha; his manner that of a seer; his voice vibrant with suppressed passion, the voice of a Delphic Oracle.

He does not move easily among men-for he is not one of them. Nor are men at ease or happy in his presence. On the heights of Mount Everest explorers have found the air too rarified for long sojourning. On the mountain peaks of the spirit

where Adler habitually dwells most men find a spiritual atmosphere that stimulates but that exhausts. Adler will not descend to meet. Those who are his friends and followers worship for the most part from afar. Grayhaired men as well as children are hushed before him. Nor is this remoteness, this aloof and unapproachable quality a wholly unconscious one. It is said that when Adler returned from Europe after having received the Doctorate of Philosophy, his old friends and comrades, who naturally greeted him as Felix, were corrected and informed that he wished to be addressed in the future as Dr. Adler.

What is interesting about the story is its reported result. Another man making the same request would have found himself to be either hated or ridiculous. Adler was neither. His friends acceded to his request-and remained his friends! For what he asked of others was only an outward indication of an inward change. Already he had withdrawn into himself, begun that ascent of the spirit which was to carry him high, somewhat too high perhaps, above his contemporaries. One wonders whether, even had he not made the request as the story goes, his friends would not instinctively and inevitably and of their own initiative have taken to using the more formal title.

Lest the foregoing seem to smack too much of arrogance of spirit, as in a sense it does, it must be made clear that there is much of profound humility in Adler, which maintains his spiritual balance. It is not an instinctive humility, not a humility of the heart such as one ascribes to a Francis of Assisi; like everything about him save his instinctive passion

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for righteousness, it is reasoned, self-taught, slightly self-conscious. He is impersonally humble. His is the humility of the philosopher, not of the saint.

Yet it runs deep. The story is told of a meeting of Dr. Adler with two or three other great ministers and teachers in the city of Boston. They were discussing various phases of the personality and teachings of Jesus, when the question was raised as to what each would ask of Jesus if he were to walk into the room. One said that he would ask exactly what Jesus meant by the expression, "The Kingdom of Heaven is within you." Another would inquire about the implications of Jesus' doctrine of non-resistance. What would Adler's question be? "None. I should be silent, lost in wonder and in awe." The story is an index of the real power and greatness of the man. They lie in his depth of insight and understanding. When he thinks or writes or speaks on a subject, he goes just that little distance further which so vastly separates all that he does from the banal and the commonplace. His mind and spirit cut deep and true. In his public addresses one feels that any subject which he touches is illuminated a little more clearly than it had ever been before.

For he speaks as he lives-simply. He rarely gesticulates; he seldom raises his voice; he never orates. Yet he holds an audience to a degree of rapt attention unequaled by any other preacher of our day. It is not the attention which the spellbinder, the player on emotions commands. It is an attention of the mind. For Adler does not speak at or even to his auditors. He thinks aloud rather

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and invites them to join in communion with his thought. One feels that he is not so much trying to convince others as to restate his own convictions to himself; that his eyes are turned, almost physically, within himself, even as he tacitly urges his hearers to turn their own vision inward. And if there is in him the power to move and to uplift men's souls, it is a power gained by no trick of voice or manner or emphasis, but arises simply from the utter serenity of his mind and the pure truth of what he says. A mighty power!

Yet Adler's one feels is not a happy spirit. Outward success has crowned his endeavors. He has been acknowledged repeatedly as a leader of contemporary thought. As a professor in Columbia University, as Roosevelt Exchange Professor, as one of the Hibbert lecturers he has been signally honored. But his is too profound a nature to take outer recognition too seriously. Like his judgments of others, his judgment of himself is stern:

"I look back on my life and its net results. I have seen spiritual ideals, and the more clearly I saw them, the wider appeared the distance between them and the empirical conditions, the changes I could effect in those conditions. I have worked in social reform, and the impression I have been able to make now seems to me so utterly insignificant as to make my early sanguine aspirations appear pathetic. . . . I scrutinize closely my relations to those who have been closest to me and I find that I have been groping in the dark with respect to their most real needs, and that my faculty of divination

has been feeble. I look lastly into my heart, my own character, and the effort I have made to fuse the discordant elements there, to achieve a genuine integrity there, and I find the disappointment in that respect the deepest of all."

Adler's fellow philosophers be moan the fact that he did not devote himself to pure philosophy; their respect for his mind borders on reverence, and they cannot forgive him for the human and empirical setting that he has given to all the concepts he has evolved. For philosophy is a jealous mistress, and Adler has had the final audacity to use it as a means rather than an end, a means to an ethical end.

For that reason perhaps he will have made no lasting contribution to the history of philosophy. Let the academicians mourn. He has done something lesser and greater. He has given to the understanding of human life and to its living at least one fundamentally correct and essentially new insight, that of the necessity and purpose of frustration in life —of the dark splendor of spiritual tragedy. Splendor because frustration is not used in the pathetic but in the spiritually creative sense:

"First because there is partial achievement, moments in life at which the rainbow actually seems to touch the earth. Love and marriage, the completing of a beautiful work of art, the discovery of a new law of nature, the emancipation of an oppressed class, are examples. But these partial successes are presently seen to be partial; they are followed, or even in the moment of triumph, permeated, with the sense of incompleteness and the foreboding of

new obscurities and perplexities advancing upon the mind. Yet essentially the doctrine is not a melancholy doctrine, because frustration, though a painful instrument, is yet a necessary instrument of spiritual development. We are not open to the reproach of dampening the zest and relish for life of those who are setting out to try the hazard of their fortunes. They shall put forth their best effort to succeed, but let them be so guided herein that they may meet in the right attitude of mind the disillusionment which is the condition of the revelation."

Adler himself has met it. It has brought him defeat and anguish of the spirit. Yet even at the worst these have not been unwelcome. For to Adler, release from spiritual pain, freedom from bondage is to be achieved not in Nirvana, nor selfdelusion, nor even in the hope of a future life, but in the very pain, in the frustration itself. "The peace that passeth understanding is that which comes when the pain is not relieved, which subsists in the midst of the painful situation, suffusing it, which springs out of the pain itself, which shimmers on the crest of the wave of pain, which is the spear of frustration transfigured into the shaft of light."

A noble doctrine this, worthy of being the last vision, the final insight of a great soul, of Adler Agonistes. For it is not too prying, too personal to attempt to understand Adler's word and world in terms of his own life. And these have been the terms of ultimate frustration-frustration which his greatness of soul alone makes apparent, which the grandeur of his spirit alone transcends!

S

UPPOSE you try this Chinese story on three or four of your friends, none of whom is a doctor: "A doctor who had mismanaged a case was seized by the relatives of the patient and tied up. In the night he managed to free himself and escaped by swimming across a river. When he reached home, he was met by his son who had just begun to study medicine, and said to him: 'Don't be in a hurry with your books; the first and most important thing is to learn to swim!"" One of your friends would think this a most amusing story, one would have no difficulty in smiling quite happily about it, but the third would see nothing funny about it at all.

If you tried many stories on many friends as you probably have you would soon arrive at an important principle, which is that individuals differ widely in their sense of humor. This would show that the sense of humor is like other human traits. Individuals differ in height, they differ in weight, they differ in intelligence, they differ in the speed of their reactions, and in a whole host of other characteristics. It is naturally to be expected that they would differ the same way in their appreciation of jokes, even though, as some one has said, wide differences in this

regard put a great strain on the affections.

The psychologist tells us that humor is an emotion, much like such emotions as anger, fear, and grief. The physical expression of humor is called laughter. It is a very complex form of behavior. The mouth widens, the face wrinkles up, the eyes sparkle, the chest is expanded and contracted more rapidly, the heart-beat and breathing are accelerated, and a warm pleasant feeling suffuses the whole body. This pleasant feeling comes because we laugh, just as we feel angry because we clench our fists. and strike, or feel fear because we tremble and run away. It is literally true that one whose facial muscles are paralyzed cannot "see" a joke. Laughter is usually looked upon as a therapeutic. Galen, it is said, used to prescribe comic songs for his patients instead of drugs.

It is hardly possible that a person can experience two or more emotions to any pronounced degree, at the same time. One cannot feel anger, and grief, and joy at the same moment. One given to strong exhibitions of anger, grief and fear is not likely to do much laughing; not because he lacks the capacity, not because he does not perceive laughable situations, but because he has formed

other habitual outlets for his emotions that interfere with the expression of humor. The way to feel happy is to laugh, and this not only brings the exhilarating feeling which is called humor, but it also inhibits such unpleasant emotions as grief, fear and anger.

The sense of humor does not explain all that is significant in humor. Suppose that instead of trying one joke on three or four of your friends, you were to tell one friend three or four jokes. You might tell him a mother-in-law joke, an Irish joke and a farmer joke. He might laugh loudly at the first, slightly at the second, and not at all at the third. Such an experiment if carried out on a sufficiently broad scale would demonstrate that jokes and humorous descriptions and situations differ widely in their capacity to produce laughter and its pleasurable feeling. A joke may be funny under certain conditions and not under other conditions. One may laugh heartily at the spectacle of a conceited, pompous, over-dignified individual's collapsing on the icy pavement, but may easily restrain his amusement when he himself, or a crippled child is in a like predicament.

but goes on to say that, “A fat man falling down on his own hat and crushing it beyond repair is funnier still," while "A fat man falling down on his hat and breaking his umbrella or his leg is too funny for words." He also has a substantial list of intrinsically funny things: fried eggs, cheese, onions, lemons, squash, stringbeans, ham, fish-balls, soup, hash, and custard pie.

Still others have pointed out the narrow range of subjects for jokes. Max Beerbohm reports that an analysis of all the funny stories in English comic papers proved that they and all their tribe are based upon sixteen subjects only: mothers-in-law, henpecked husbands, twins, old maids, Jews, foreigners (especially Frenchmen, Germans, and Italians), fatness, thinness, long hair, baldness, seasickness, stuttering, bloomers, cheese, red noses, and skipping the board bill. Another authority says that all stage humor is concerned with drunkenness, the desperate spinster, the woman who lies about her age, the gay deceiver husband, the motherin-law, and the sight of some one in a predicament.

Nearly every one agrees that many common things, not funny because they are common, may be made amusing by giving them a new association or connection with something to which they are not ordinarily related. A silk hat alone or a man alone does not necessarily make us laugh; a man sitting on a silk hat produces laughter because the relationship is somewhat extraordinary. Of course, the observer must be aware of the incongruity. If he does not know it is extraordinary for a man to sit on a silk hat he will not