Talks To Teachers On Psychology; And To Students On Some Of Life's Ideals
"That when an occasion of practising some virtue offered, he addressed
himself to God, saying, 'Lord, I cannot do this unless thou enablest
me'; and that then he received strength more than sufficient. That, when
he had failed in his duty, he only confessed his fault, saying to God,
'I shall never do otherwise, if You leave me to myself; it is You who
must hinder my failing, and mend what is amiss.' That after this he gave
himself no further uneasiness about it."
"That he had been lately sent into Burgundy to buy the provision of wine
for the society, which was a very unwelcome task for him, because he had
no turn for business, and because he was lame, and could not go about
the boat but by rolling himself over the casks. That, however, he gave
himself no uneasiness about it, nor about the purchase of the wine. That
he said to God, 'It was his business he was about,' and that he
afterward found it well performed. That he had been sent into Auvergne,
the year before, upon the same account; that he could not tell how the
matter passed, but that it proved very well."
"So, likewise, in his business in the kitchen (to which he had naturally
a great aversion), having accustomed himself to do everything there for
the love of God, and with prayer upon all occasions, for his grace to do
his work well, he had found everything easy during fifteen years that he
had been employed there."
"That he was very well pleased with the post he was now in, but that he
was as ready to quit that as the former, since he was always pleasing
himself in every condition, by doing little things for the love of God."
"That the goodness of God assured him he would not forsake him utterly,
and that he would give him strength to bear whatever evil he permitted
to happen to him; and, therefore, that he feared nothing, and had no
occasion to consult with anybody about his state. That, when he had
attempted to do it, he had always come away more perplexed."
The simple-heartedness of the good Brother Lawrence, and the relaxation
of all unnecessary solicitudes and anxieties in him, is a refreshing
spectacle.
* * * * *
The need of feeling responsible all the livelong day has been preached
long enough in our New England. Long enough exclusively, at any
rate,--and long enough to the female sex. What our girl-students and
woman-teachers most need nowadays is not the exacerbation, but rather
the toning-down of their moral tensions. Even now I fear that some one
of my fair hearers may be making an undying resolve to become
strenuously relaxed, cost what it will, for the remainder of her life.
It is needless to say that that is not the way to do it. The way to do
it, paradoxical as it may seem, is genuinely not to care whether you are
doing it or not. Then, possibly, by the grace of God, you may all at
once find that you _are_ doing it, and, having learned what the trick
feels like, you may (again by the grace of God) be enabled to go on.
And that something like this may be the happy experience of all my
hearers is, in closing, my most earnest wish.
II. ON A CERTAIN BLINDNESS IN HUMAN BEINGS
Our judgments concerning the worth of things, big or little, depend on
the _feelings_ the things arouse in us. Where we judge a thing to be
precious in consequence of the _idea_ we frame of it, this is only
because the idea is itself associated already with a feeling. If we were
radically feelingless, and if ideas were the only things our mind could
entertain, we should lose all our likes and dislikes at a stroke, and be
unable to point to any one situation or experience in life more valuable
or significant than any other.
Now the blindness in human beings, of which this discourse will treat,
is the blindness with which we all are afflicted in regard to the
feelings of creatures and people different from ourselves.
We are practical beings, each of us with limited functions and duties to
perform. Each is bound to feel intensely the importance of his own
duties and the significance of the situations that call these forth.
But this feeling is in each of us a vital secret, for sympathy with
which we vainly look to others. The others are too much absorbed in
their own vital secrets to take an interest in ours. Hence the stupidity
and injustice of our opinions, so far as they deal with the significance
of alien lives. Hence the falsity of our judgments, so far as they
presume to decide in an absolute way on the value of other persons'
conditions or ideals.
Take our dogs and ourselves, connected as we are by a tie more intimate
than most ties in this world; and yet, outside of that tie of friendly
fondness, how insensible, each of us, to all that makes life significant
for the other!--we to the rapture of bones under hedges, or smells of
trees and lamp-posts, they to the delights of literature and art. As you
sit reading the most moving romance you ever fell upon, what sort of a
judge is your fox-terrier of your behavior? With all his good will
toward you, the nature of your conduct is absolutely excluded from his
comprehension. To sit there like a senseless statue, when you might be
taking him to walk and throwing sticks for him to catch! What queer
disease is this that comes over you every day, of holding things and
staring at them like that for hours together, paralyzed of motion and
vacant of all conscious life? The African savages came nearer the truth;
but they, too, missed it, when they gathered wonderingly round one of
our American travellers who, in the interior, had just come into
possession of a stray copy of the New York _Commercial Advertiser_, and
was devouring it column by column. When he got through, they offered him
a high price for the mysterious object; and, being asked for what they
wanted it, they said: "For an eye medicine,"--that being the only reason
they could conceive of for the protracted bath which he had given his
eyes upon its surface.
The spectator's judgment is sure to miss the root of the matter, and to
possess no truth. The subject judged knows a part of the world of
reality which the judging spectator fails to see, knows more while the
spectator knows less; and, wherever there is conflict of opinion and
difference of vision, we are bound to believe that the truer side is the
side that feels the more, and not the side that feels the less.
Let me take a personal example of the kind that befalls each one of us
daily:--
Some years ago, while journeying in the mountains of North Carolina, I
passed by a large number of 'coves,' as they call them there, or heads
of small valleys between the hills, which had been newly cleared and
planted. The impression on my mind was one of unmitigated squalor. The
settler had in every case cut down the more manageable trees, and left
their charred stumps standing. The larger trees he had girdled and
killed, in order that their foliage should not cast a shade. He had then
built a log cabin, plastering its chinks with clay, and had set up a
tall zigzag rail fence around the scene of his havoc, to keep the pigs
and cattle out. Finally, he had irregularly planted the intervals
between the stumps and trees with Indian corn, which grew among the
chips; and there he dwelt with his wife and babes--an axe, a gun, a few
utensils, and some pigs and chickens feeding in the woods, being the sum
total of his possessions.
The forest had been destroyed; and what had 'improved' it out of
existence was hideous, a sort of ulcer, without a single element of
artificial grace to make up for the loss of Nature's beauty. Ugly,
indeed, seemed the life of the squatter, scudding, as the sailors say,
under bare poles, beginning again away back where our first ancestors
started, and by hardly a single item the better off for all the
achievements of the intervening generations.
Talk about going back to nature! I said to myself, oppressed by the
dreariness, as I drove by. Talk of a country life for one's old age and
for one's children! Never thus, with nothing but the bare ground and
one's bare hands to fight the battle! Never, without the best spoils of
culture woven in! The beauties and commodities gained by the centuries
are sacred. They are our heritage and birthright. No modern person ought
to be willing to live a day in such a state of rudimentariness and
denudation.
Then I said to the mountaineer who was driving me, "What sort of people
are they who have to make these new clearings?" "All of us," he replied.
"Why, we ain't happy here, unless we are getting one of these coves
under cultivation." I instantly felt that I had been losing the whole
inward significance of the situation. Because to me the clearings spoke
of naught but denudation, I thought that to those whose sturdy arms and
obedient axes had made them they could tell no other story. But, when
_they_ looked on the hideous stumps, what they thought of was personal
victory. The chips, the girdled trees, and the vile split rails spoke
of honest sweat, persistent toil and final reward. The cabin was a
warrant of safety for self and wife and babes. In short, the clearing,
which to me was a mere ugly picture on the retina, was to them a symbol
redolent with moral memories and sang a very paean of duty, struggle, and
success.
I had been as blind to the peculiar ideality of their conditions as they
certainly would also have been to the ideality of mine, had they had a
peep at my strange indoor academic ways of life at Cambridge.
* * * * *
Wherever a process of life communicates an eagerness to him who lives
it, there the life becomes genuinely significant. Sometimes the
eagerness is more knit up with the motor activities, sometimes with the
perceptions, sometimes with the imagination, sometimes with reflective
thought. But, wherever it is found, there is the zest, the tingle, the
excitement of reality; and there _is_ 'importance' in the only real and
positive sense in which importance ever anywhere can be.
Robert Louis Stevenson has illustrated this by a case, drawn from the
sphere of the imagination, in an essay which I really think deserves to
become immortal, both for the truth of its matter and the excellence of
its form.
"Toward the end of September," Stevenson writes, "when school-time was
drawing near, and the nights were already black, we would begin to sally
from our respective villas, each equipped with a tin bull's-eye lantern.
The thing was so well known that it had worn a rut in the commerce of
Great Britain; and the grocers, about the due time, began to garnish
their windows with our particular brand of luminary. We wore them
buckled to the waist upon a cricket belt, and over them, such was the
rigor of the game, a buttoned top-coat. They smelled noisomely of
blistered tin. They never burned aright, though they would always burn
our fingers. Their use was naught, the pleasure of them merely fanciful,
and yet a boy with a bull's-eye under his top-coat asked for nothing
more. The fishermen used lanterns about their boats, and it was from
them, I suppose, that we had got the hint; but theirs were not
bull's-eyes, nor did we ever play at being fishermen. The police carried
them at their belts, and we had plainly copied them in that; yet we did
not pretend to be policemen. Burglars, indeed, we may have had some
haunting thought of; and we had certainly an eye to past ages when
lanterns were more common, and to certain story-books in which we had
found them to figure very largely. But take it for all in all, the
pleasure of the thing was substantive; and to be a boy with a bull's-eye
under his top-coat was good enough for us.
"When two of these asses met, there would be an anxious 'Have you got