Talks To Teachers On Psychology; And To Students On Some Of Life's Ideals
The significance of a human life for communicable and publicly
recognizable purposes is thus the offspring of a marriage of two
different parents, either of whom alone is barren. The ideals taken by
themselves give no reality, the virtues by themselves no novelty. And
let the orientalists and pessimists say what they will, the thing of
deepest--or, at any rate, of comparatively deepest--significance in life
does seem to be its character of _progress_, or that strange union of
reality with ideal novelty which it continues from one moment to another
to present. To recognize ideal novelty is the task of what we call
intelligence. Not every one's intelligence can tell which novelties are
ideal. For many the ideal thing will always seem to cling still to the
older more familiar good. In this case character, though not
significant totally, may be still significant pathetically. So, if we
are to choose which is the more essential factor of human character, the
fighting virtue or the intellectual breadth, we must side with Tolstoi,
and choose that simple faithfulness to his light or darkness which any
common unintellectual man can show.
* * * * *
But, with all this beating and tacking on my part, I fear you take me to
be reaching a confused result. I seem to be just taking things up and
dropping them again. First I took up Chautauqua, and dropped that; then
Tolstoi and the heroism of common toil, and dropped them; finally, I
took up ideals, and seem now almost dropping those. But please observe
in what sense it is that I drop them. It is when they pretend _singly_
to redeem life from insignificance. Culture and refinement all alone are
not enough to do so. Ideal aspirations are not enough, when uncombined
with pluck and will. But neither are pluck and will, dogged endurance
and insensibility to danger enough, when taken all alone. There must be
some sort of fusion, some chemical combination among these principles,
for a life objectively and thoroughly significant to result.
Of course, this is a somewhat vague conclusion. But in a question of
significance, of worth, like this, conclusions can never be precise. The
answer of appreciation, of sentiment, is always a more or a less, a
balance struck by sympathy, insight, and good will. But it is an answer,
all the same, a real conclusion. And, in the course of getting it, it
seems to me that our eyes have been opened to many important things.
Some of you are, perhaps, more livingly aware than you were an hour ago
of the depths of worth that lie around you, hid in alien lives. And,
when you ask how much sympathy you ought to bestow, although the amount
is, truly enough, a matter of ideal on your own part, yet in this notion
of the combination of ideals with active virtues you have a rough
standard for shaping your decision. In any case, your imagination is
extended. You divine in the world about you matter for a little more
humility on your own part, and tolerance, reverence, and love for
others; and you gain a certain inner joyfulness at the increased
importance of our common life. Such joyfulness is a religious
inspiration and an element of spiritual health, and worth more than
large amounts of that sort of technical and accurate information which
we professors are supposed to be able to impart.
To show the sort of thing I mean by these words, I will just make one
brief practical illustration and then close.
We are suffering to-day in America from what is called the
labor-question; and, when you go out into the world, you will each and
all of you be caught up in its perplexities. I use the brief term
labor-question to cover all sorts of anarchistic discontents and
socialistic projects, and the conservative resistances which they
provoke. So far as this conflict is unhealthy and regrettable,--and I
think it is so only to a limited extent,--the unhealthiness consists
solely in the fact that one-half of our fellow-countrymen remain
entirely blind to the internal significance of the lives of the other
half. They miss the joys and sorrows, they fail to feel the moral
virtue, and they do not guess the presence of the intellectual ideals.
They are at cross-purposes all along the line, regarding each other as
they might regard a set of dangerously gesticulating automata, or, if
they seek to get at the inner motivation, making the most horrible
mistakes. Often all that the poor man can think of in the rich man is a
cowardly greediness for safety, luxury, and effeminacy, and a boundless
affectation. What he is, is not a human being, but a pocket-book, a
bank-account. And a similar greediness, turned by disappointment into
envy, is all that many rich men can see in the state of mind of the
dissatisfied poor. And, if the rich man begins to do the sentimental act
over the poor man, what senseless blunders does he make, pitying him for
just those very duties and those very immunities which, rightly taken,
are the condition of his most abiding and characteristic joys! Each, in
short, ignores the fact that happiness and unhappiness and significance
are a vital mystery; each pins them absolutely on some ridiculous
feature of the external situation; and everybody remains outside of
everybody else's sight.
Society has, with all this, undoubtedly got to pass toward some newer
and better equilibrium, and the distribution of wealth has doubtless
slowly got to change: such changes have always happened, and will happen
to the end of time. But if, after all that I have said, any of you
expect that they will make any _genuine vital difference_ on a large
scale, to the lives of our descendants, you will have missed the
significance of my entire lecture. The solid meaning of life is always
the same eternal thing,--the marriage, namely, of some unhabitual ideal,
however special, with some fidelity, courage, and endurance; with some
man's or woman's pains.--And, whatever or wherever life may be, there
will always be the chance for that marriage to take place.
Fitz-James Stephen wrote many years ago words to this effect more
eloquent than any I can speak: "The 'Great Eastern,' or some of her
successors," he said, "will perhaps defy the roll of the Atlantic, and
cross the seas without allowing their passengers to feel that they have
left the firm land. The voyage from the cradle to the grave may come to
be performed with similar facility. Progress and science may perhaps
enable untold millions to live and die without a care, without a pang,
without an anxiety. They will have a pleasant passage and plenty of
brilliant conversation. They will wonder that men ever believed at all
in clanging fights and blazing towns and sinking ships and praying
hands; and, when they come to the end of their course, they will go
their way, and the place thereof will know them no more. But it seems
unlikely that they will have such a knowledge of the great ocean on
which they sail, with its storms and wrecks, its currents and icebergs,
its huge waves and mighty winds, as those who battled with it for years
together in the little craft, which, if they had few other merits,
brought those who navigated them full into the presence of time and
eternity, their maker and themselves, and forced them to have some
definite view of their relations to them and to each other."[T]
[T] Essays by a Barrister, London, 1862, p. 318.
In this solid and tridimensional sense, so to call it, those
philosophers are right who contend that the world is a standing thing,
with no progress, no real history. The changing conditions of history
touch only the surface of the show. The altered equilibriums and
redistributions only diversify our opportunities and open chances to us
for new ideals. But, with each new ideal that comes into life, the
chance for a life based on some old ideal will vanish; and he would
needs be a presumptuous calculator who should with confidence say that
the total sum of significances is positively and absolutely greater at
any one epoch than at any other of the world.
I am speaking broadly, I know, and omitting to consider certain
qualifications in which I myself believe. But one can only make one
point in one lecture, and I shall be well content if I have brought my
point home to you this evening in even a slight degree. _There are
compensations_: and no outward changes of condition in life can keep the
nightingale of its eternal meaning from singing in all sorts of
different men's hearts. That is the main fact to remember. If we could
not only admit it with our lips, but really and truly believe it, how
our convulsive insistencies, how our antipathies and dreads of each
other, would soften down! If the poor and the rich could look at each
other in this way, _sub specie aeternatis_, how gentle would grow their
disputes! what tolerance and good humor, what willingness to live and
let live, would come into the world!
THE END.