Everybody's Unnatural Desire to Be Himself.

That entertaining essayist SAMUEL CROTHERS writes in the Atlantic Monthly on "Everybody's Natural Desire to Be Some One Else," but it has been our observation that everybody, at some time or other, is the victim of an unnatural and deplorable desire to be himself.

"To thine own self be true" is the one sentiment which can be relied upon to strike an answering chord in every breast. The laudable idea of the poet may have been that we should not lie, thieve or otherwise misbehave at the urging of another; but in actual practice his exhortation is used to justify all manner of eccentricities and even crimes.

A man is suddenly seized with the conviction that he is not being true to himself as a painter. Why should he thwart his innate genius by painting in accustomed ways? So he exhibits his originality by delineating a cotangent and a secant descending a staircase under the last X-rays of the setting sun.

A philosopher decides that everything is wrong with the popular attitude toward pragmatism and he must employ the special talents which indubitably are his to make it clear how categorical imperatives condition each subliminal phase of the spiritual unemployment problem. So he establishes a Board for the Reconciliation of Internal Antagonisms and the Mediation and Arbitration of Spiritual Strikes.

A woman who has knitted two pairs of socks and three helmets for soldiers feels overwhelming need for self-expression and goes out and buys hyacinth blue wool, out of which she fabricates a sweater to wear over her yellow silk. She does not so much express herself as the imp of restlessness that has her momentarily at his mercy.

Yes, everybody's occasional and unnatural desire to be himself explains most of the perplexing contradictions we see all about us. The only thing that does more general damage is everybody's constant desire to make every one else like him. New York Sun