to the hall bedroom or even the ten-cent lodging house, the lunch wagon, and the pawn shop. But even at the lowest ebb of his fortunes, he never seemed to lose his cheerfulness, his good nature, his grand manners, and his easy, confident hope and conviction about the huge sums that were to come into his possession "within a few days."
A DILETTANTE IN REAL ESTATE
Do not imagine that this man's dreams of great and easy fortunes were mere idle fancies—far from it. He was nearly always engaged in negotiations for some big deal. One of his favorite pastimes was to hunt up large holdings of real estate offered for sale, go to the owners, represent himself as a real estate broker, and secure permission to put these properties on his "list." This permission obtained, he would go about trying to find buyers. But his ideas of real estate values, of the adaptation of properties to purchasers, of the details of a real estate transaction and of salesmanship were so vague and so impractical that if he ever succeeded in selling a piece of real estate, we have not yet heard of it. He lacked the practical sense necessary to inform himself upon such important matters as taxes, assessments, insurance rates, trend of population, direction and character of commercial expansion, bank clearings, freight shipments, volume of retail and wholesale business, projected municipal and public service improvements, crop reports, output of manufacturies, and many other items which form the basis for intelligent negotiation, in a real estate deal. He could talk only in glittering generalities, and his suggestions were usually so impracticable that he failed to secure the confidence of those who were in a position to purchase properties so valuable as those he invariably hit upon for his ambitious projects.
AN UNDESERVED BAD REPUTATION
Here, then, was a man of unusual intelligence and capacity along theoretical, abstract, philosophical, and spiritual lines. His intentions were good. He was kindly, sympathetic,
generous to a fault, refined, ambitious, high principled at heart and a thorough gentleman by birth, training, and instinct. Yet, because of a lack of clear knowledge, his life has been one of hardship, privation, disappointment, disillusionment, galling poverty, and utter failure. He has been subjected to ridicule and the even more blighting cruelty of good-natured, patronizing, contemptuous tolerance. His reputation is that of a lazy, good-for-nothing, disreputable dead beat and loafer. And yet, in a sense, nothing is further from the truth. Notwithstanding his many disappointments, no one could have been more sincere than he in believing that just around the corner fortune awaited him.
DIAGNOSIS OF THE IMPRACTICAL MAN'S CASE
The fundamental difficulty with the impractical man is two fold. First, his powers of observation are so deficient that it is difficult for him to obtain facts. It is an axiom of conscious life that there is pleasure and satisfaction in the use of well-developed powers and a disinclination to use powers which are deficient in development. Because it is difficult for the impractical man to obtain facts, he has little desire to obtain them. He takes little interest in them, does not appreciate their value. He, therefore, assumes his facts, takes them for granted or proceeds almost wholly without them. Even when he does take the trouble to ascertain the facts, he is inclined to be hasty and slipshod in his methods. He, therefore does not obtain all of the necessary information bearing upon his problem. He does not painstakingly verify his knowledge through repeated observations, under all kinds of conditions. So he is frequently mistaken and reasons to his conclusions upon supposed facts which are not facts at all.
Second, the impractical man, as a general rule, has well-developed powers of reason, logic, and imagination. His mind easily and unerringly leaps from premises to conclusion and weaves long and beautiful chains of reasoning, each link perfectly formed. The only trouble is that none of the chains are attached to anything solid and substantial at either end.
With highly developed powers of imagination, it follows that the impractical man loves to dream, to build castles in the air. When he attempts to form a judgment or reach a conclusion, he may possibly begin by attempting to ascertain the facts. But observation for him is a slow and painful process. He does not enjoy it. He has no patience with it. Mere facts restrict him. Practical reasoning is like walking painfully, step by step, along a narrow, steep pathway, leading to a fixed destination at which the traveler arrives whether he wills it or not. The impractical man's form of reasoning, starting at the same place, soars into the air, dips and sweeps in magnificent and inspiring curves and finally sets him down at whatever destination seems most desirable to him. His well-developed powers of imagination are usually more than willing to supply the deficiencies in his powers of observation. In his own realm he is a valuable member of society—often becomes rich and famous. But he is a misfit in any vocation which deals wholly with concrete things.