Page:Liberalism (1919).djvu/257

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it of value to the University graduate equally with the salesman, to the woman of leisure and to the busy financier, to the Army officer and to the commercial clerk. The Pelmanist is in no danger of becoming stereotyped in thought, speech, or action: on the contrary, individuality becomes more pronounced. Greater diversity of "character" would be apparent amongst fifty Pelmanists than amongst any fifty people who had not studied the Course.

The system is, in fact, not a mental strait-jacket but an instrument: instead of attempting to impose universal ideals upon its students, it shows them how to give practical effect to their own ideals and aims. It completes man or woman in the mental sense, just as bodily training completes them in the physical sense.

There are many who adopt it as a means of regaining lost mental activities. Elderly men and women whose lives have been so fully occupied with business, social, or household matters that the intellectual side has been partly or wholly submerged: successful men in the commercial world whose enterprises have heretofore left them too little leisure to devote to self-culture: Army officers who find that the routine of a military life invites intellectual stagnation—these find that the Pelman Course offers them a stairway up to the higher things of life.

Here are two letters which emphasise this. The first is from an Army student, who says:

The Course has prevented me becoming slack and stagnating during my Army life—this is a most virulent danger, I may add. It inculcates a clear, thorough, courageous method of playing the game of Life—admirably suited

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