SO, if you are not content with increasing your chest expansion or your biceps, if you want to enlarge that mystic organ whence flows true kindness, you must cultivate your imagination, you must learn to put yourself in another’s place, think his thoughts. There is but one substitute for imagination, and that is experience. If you have deeply suffered, perhaps you may have found from your very pain, what real kindness is. Like Confucius you may have learned politeness from the impolite. And if you haven’t—well, I scarcely think it should be necessary for you to break a leg or inoculate yourself with the germs of typhoid. You might do a great deal, really, by exercising just your common sense.
Take a little thought, therefore, upon what style really is. In costume, you’ll see that style is not what most people, but what the best people, wear. If you wished to be strictly up to date, then, you’d go to the leading shops for your clothes, wouldn’t you? You’d haunt the Opera, the smartest assemblies, the most aristocratic homes, to see what fashionable people selected. If you wanted to learn modern surgery you’d visit the clinic of the most eminent surgeon, wouldn’t you, to observe his technique?
THEN, if you desire to be really kind, elegantly kind, artistically kind, why not seek the highest authorities on kindness, and emulate their expert taste and method? Wherefore, let me recommend to you the greatest examples of altruistic love, past masters of sympathetic consideration, whose kindness is directed by an inspired imagination.
Two perfect exponents of the Educated Heart there are—only two, but I am sure you have known them. The mother, who sees her child as truly a part of herself; and the true lover whose imagination is fired with romance. In those two is most perfectly manifest the love which passeth understanding. Forever, unconsciously, they demonstrate the radiant truth:
“The heart hath its reasons, which the reason knoweth not of.”