How to be happy though human / by W. Béran Wolfe.

“ I want to be a millionaire,” or “ I want to be a big man ”, or “I want to travel and see everything in the world This tendency to develop toward a goal of totality is a phenomenon common both to living and to dead matter. A drop of oil suspended in a solution of water tends to assume a spherical form regardless of its shape on being introduced into the solution. The acorn grows into an oak by a fixed and unchanging evolution. The acorn is the microcosm of the oak, just as the child-personality is the microcosm or prototype of the adult-personality. The tadpole and the larva develop in a straight line of evolution into frog and bee in much the same fashion that “ the child is father to the man ”. 3. The goal of an individual's life usually represents the complete compensation or over-compensation of his own inadequacies. In early childhood the goal-idea is usually concretized in some one person who, to the child, seems a perfect, all-powerful being. Thus the small boy who suffers from rickets and cannot coordinate his muscles properly wants to be a motor-cycle policeman because the motor-cycle policeman seems to embody all the strengths which he lacks. The poor boy wants to be rich. The ugly duckling finds its ideal in the stately swan. The child with poor digestion dreams of himself as a fat banker with great wealth, the social compensation of his interest in food. The short-sighted child wants to study the stars. Nature fills in defects with a lavish hand. If a tubercle bacillus lodges in our lung, nature throws up a more than adequate defence of fibrous tissue. The callous formation about a fracture in a bone is always larger and stronger than the bone itself. A boil represents the overwhelming defence of the body against invasion of germs. The child seeks an over-plus of activity in adult life to compensate him for the inadequacies of his childhood. 4. The goal of an individual's life-pattern is fixed when his critical faculties are still undeveloped. It may therefore represent the compensation for defects which only seem to exist, and it may he concretized in a goal-ideal which, to adults, seems very inadequate. (Our goal in life, therefore,