What Makes a Life Significant
by William James
from Talks to Teachers on Psychology and
to Students on Some of Life’s Ideals (1900)
Every
Jack sees in his own particular Jill charms and perfections to the enchantment
of which we stolid onlookers are stone-cold. And which has the superior view of
the absolute truth, he or we? Which has the more vital insight into the nature
of Jill's existence, as a fact? Is he in excess, being in this matter a maniac?
or are we in defect, being victims of a pathological anæsthesia
as regards Jill's magical importance? Surely the latter; surely to Jack are the
profounder truths revealed; surely poor Jill's palpitating little life-throbs are
among the wonders of creation, are worthy of this sympathetic interest;
and it is to our shame that the rest of us cannot feel like Jack. For Jack
realizes Jill concretely, and we do not. He struggles toward a union with her
inner life, divining her feelings, anticipating her desires, understanding her
limits as manfully as he can, and yet inadequately, too; for he is also
afflicted with some blindness, even here. Whilst we, dead clods that we are, do
not even seek after these things, but are contented that that portion of
eternal fact named Jill should be for us as if it were not. Jill, who knows her
inner life, knows that Jack's way of taking it—so importantly—is the true and
serious way; and she responds to the truth in him by taking him truly and
seriously, too. May the ancient blindness never wrap its clouds about either of
them again! Where would any of us be, were there no one willing to know
us as we really are or ready to repay us for our insight by making
recognizant return? We ought, all of us, to realize each other in this intense,
pathetic, and important way.
If
you say that this is absurd, and that we cannot be in love with everyone at
once, I merely point out to you that, as a matter of fact, certain persons do
exist with an enormous capacity for friendship and for taking delight in other
people's lives; and that such persons know more of truth than if their hearts
were not so big. The vice of ordinary Jack and Jill affection is not its
intensity, but its exclusions and its jealousies. Leave those out, and you see
that the ideal I am holding up before you, however impracticable to-day, yet
contains nothing intrinsically absurd.
We
have unquestionably a great cloud-bank of ancestral blindness weighing down
upon us, only transiently riven here and there by
fitful revelations of the truth. It is vain to hope for this state of things to
alter much. Our inner secrets must remain for the most part impenetrable by
others, for beings as essentially practical as we are are
necessarily short of sight. But, if we cannot gain much positive insight into
one another, cannot we at least use our sense of our own blindness to make us
more cautious in going over the dark places? Cannot we escape some of those
hideous ancestral intolerances and cruelties, and positive reversals of the
truth?
For
the remainder of this hour I invite you to seek with me some principle to make
our tolerance less chaotic. And, as I began my previous lecture by a personal
reminiscence, I am going to ask your indulgence for a similar bit of egotism
now.
A
few summers ago I spent a happy week at the famous Assembly Grounds on the
borders of Chautauqua Lake. The moment one treads that sacred enclosure, one
feels one's self in an atmosphere of success. Sobriety and industry,
intelligence and goodness, orderliness and ideality, prosperity and
cheerfulness, pervade the air. It is a serious and studious picnic on a
gigantic scale. Here you have a town of many thousands of inhabitants,
beautifully laid out in the forest and drained, and equipped with means for satisfying
all the necessary lower and most of the superfluous higher wants of man. You
have a first-class college in full blast. You have magnificent music—a chorus
of seven hundred voices, with possibly the most perfect open-air auditorium in
the world. You have every sort of athletic exercise from sailing, rowing,
swimming, bicycling, to the ball-field and the more artificial doings which the
gymnasium affords. You have kindergartens and model secondary schools. You have
general religious services and special club-houses for the several sects. You
have perpetually running soda-water fountains, and daily popular lectures by
distinguished men. You have the best of company, and yet no effort. You have no
zymotic diseases, no poverty, no drunkenness, no
crime, no police. You have culture, you have kindness, you have cheapness, you
have equality, you have the best fruits of what mankind has fought and bled and
striven for tinder the name of civilization for centuries. You have, in short,
a foretaste of what human society might be, were it all in the light, with no
suffering and no dark corners.
I
went in curiosity for a day. I stayed for a week, held spell-bound by the charm
and ease of everything, by the middle-class paradise, without a sin, without a
victim, without a blot, without a tear.
And
yet what was my own astonishment, on emerging into the dark and wicked world
again, to catch myself quite unexpectedly and involuntarily saying: "Ouf! what a relief! Now for something primordial and
savage, even though it were as bad as an Armenian massacre, to set the balance
straight again. This order is too tame, this culture too second-rate, this
goodness too uninspiring. This human drama without a villain or a pang; this
community so refined that ice-cream soda-water is the utmost offering it can
make to the brute animal in man; this city simmering in the tepid lakeside sun;
this atrocious harmlessness of all things,—I cannot abide with them. Let me
take my chances again in the big outside worldly wilderness with all its sins
and sufferings. There are the heights and depths, the precipices and the steep
ideals, the gleams of the awful and the infinite; and there is more hope and
help a thousand times than in this dead level and quintessence of every
mediocrity."
Such
was the sudden right-about-face performed for me by my lawless fancy! There had
been spread before me the realization—on a small, sample scale of course—of all
the ideals for which our civilization has been striving: security,
intelligence, humanity, and order; and here was the instinctive hostile
reaction, not of the natural man, but of a so-called cultivated man upon such a
Utopia. There seemed thus to be a self-contradiction and paradox somewhere,
which I, as a professor drawing a full salary, was in duty bound to unravel and
explain, if I could.
So
I meditated. And, first of all, I asked myself what the thing was that was so
lacking in this Sabbatical city, and the lack of which kept one forever falling
short of the higher sort of contentment. And I soon recognized that it was the
element that gives to the wicked outer world all its moral style,
expressiveness and picturesqueness,—the element of precipitousness, so to call it, of strength and
strenuousness, intensity and danger.
What
excites and interests the looker-on at life, what the romances and the statues
celebrate and the grim civic monuments remind us of, is the everlasting battle
of the powers of light with those of darkness; with heroism, reduced to its
bare chance, yet ever and anon snatching victory from the jaws of death. But in
this unspeakable Chautauqua there was no potentiality of death in sight
anywhere, and no point of the compass visible from which danger might possibly
appear. The ideal was so completely victorious already that no sign of any previous
battle remained, the place just resting on its oars. But what our human
emotions seem to require is the sight of the struggle going on. The moment the
fruits are being merely eaten, things become ignoble. Sweat and effort, human
nature strained to its uttermost and on the rack, yet getting through alive,
and then turning its back on its success to pursue another more rare and
arduous still—this is the sort of thing the presence of which inspires us, and
the reality of which it seems to be the function of all the higher forms of
literature and fine art to bring home to us and suggest. At Chautauqua there
were no racks, even in the place's historical museum; and no sweat, except
possibly the gentle moisture on the brow of some lecturer, or on the sides of
some player in the ball-field.
Such
absence of human nature in extremis anywhere seemed, then, a sufficient
explanation for Chautauqua's flatness and lack of zest.
But
was not this a paradox well calculated to fill one with dismay? It looks
indeed, thought I, as if the romantic idealists with their pessimism about our
civilization were, after all, quite right. An irremediable flatness is coming
over the world. Bourgeoisie and mediocrity, church sociables
and teachers' conventions, are taking the place of the old heights and depths
and romantic chiaroscuro. And, to get human life in its wild intensity, we must
in future turn more and more away from the actual, and forget it, if we can, in
the romancer's or the poet's pages. The whole world, delightful and sinful as
it may still appear for a moment to one just escaped from the Chautauquan enclosure, is nevertheless obeying more and
more just those ideals that are sure to make of it in the end a mere Chautauqua
Assembly on an enormous scale. Was im Gesang soll leben
muss im Leben untergehn. Even now, in our own country, correctness,
fairness, and compromise for every small advantage are crowding out all other
qualities. The higher heroisms and the old rare flavors are passing out of life.[1]
With these thoughts in my mind, I was
speeding with the train toward Buffalo, when, near that city, the sight of a
workman doing something on the dizzy edge of a sky-scaling iron construction
brought me to my senses very suddenly. And now I perceived, by a flash of
insight, that I had been steeping myself in pure ancestral blindness, and
looking at life with the eyes of a remote spectator. Wishing for heroism and
the spectacle of human nature on the rack, I had never noticed the great fields
of heroism lying round about me, I had failed to see it present and alive. I
could only think of it as dead and embalmed, labelled
and costumed, as it is in the pages of romance. And yet there it was before me
in the daily lives of the laboring classes. Not in clanging fights and
desperate marches only is heroism to be looked for, but on every railway bridge
and fire-proof building that is going up to-day. On freight-trains, on the
decks of vessels, in cattle-yards and mines, on lumber-rafts, among the firemen
and the policemen, the demand for courage is incessant; and the supply never
fails. There, every day of the year somewhere, is human nature in extremis
for you. And wherever a scythe, an axe, a pick, or a shovel is wielded, you
have it sweating and aching and with its powers of patient endurance racked to
the utmost under the length of hours of the strain.
As I awoke to all this unidealized
heroic life around me, the scales seemed to fall from my eyes; and a wave of
sympathy greater than anything I had ever before felt with the common life of
common men began to fill my soul. It began to seem as if virtue with horny
hands and dirty skin were the only virtue genuine and vital enough to take
account of. Every other virtue poses; none is absolutely unconscious and
simple, and unexpectant of decoration or recognition,
like this. These are our soldiers, thought I, these our sustainers, these the
very parents of our life.
Many years ago, when in Vienna, I had had a similar feeling
of awe and reverence in looking at the peasant-women, in from the country on
their business at the market for the day. Old hags many of them were, dried and
brown and wrinkled, kerchiefed and short-petticoated, with thick wool stockings on their bony
shanks, stumping through the glittering thoroughfares, looking neither to the
right nor the left, bent on duty, envying nothing, humble-hearted, remote;—and
yet at bottom, when you came to think of it, bearing the whole fabric of the
splendors and corruptions of that city on their laborious backs. For where
would any of it have been without their unremitting, unrewarded labor in the
fields? And so with us: not to our generals and poets, I thought, but to the
Italian and Hungarian laborers in the Subway, rather, ought the monuments of
gratitude and reverence of a city like Boston to be reared.
If any of you have been readers of Tolstoï,
you will see that I passed into a vein of feeling similar to his, with its
abhorrence of all that conventionally passes for distinguished, and its
exclusive deification of the bravery, patience, kindliness, and dumbness of the
unconscious natural man.
Where now is our Tolstoï, I
said, to bring the truth of all this home to our American bosoms, fill us with
a better insight, and wean us away from that spurious literary romanticism on
which our wretched culture—as it calls itself—is fed? Divinity lies all about
us, and culture is too hidebound to even suspect the fact. Could a Howells or a
Kipling be enlisted in this mission? or are they still too deep in the
ancestral blindness, and not humane enough for the inner joy and meaning of the
laborer's existence to be really revealed? Must we wait for some
one born and bred and living as a laborer himself, but who, by grace of
Heaven, shall also find a literary voice?
And there I rested on that day, with a sense of widening of
vision, and with what it is surely fair to call an increase of religious
insight into life. In God's eyes the differences of social position, of
intellect, of culture, of cleanliness, of dress, which different men exhibit,
and all the other rarities and exceptions on which they so fantastically pin their
pride, must be so small as practically quite to vanish; and all that should
remain is the common fact that here we are, a countless multitude of vessels of
life, each of us pent in to peculiar difficulties, with which we must severally
struggle by using whatever of fortitude and goodness we can summon up. The
exercise of the courage, patience, and kindness, must be the significant
portion of the whole business; and the distinctions of position can only be a
manner of diversifying the phenomenal surface upon which these underground
virtues may manifest their effects. At this rate, the deepest human life is
everywhere, is eternal. And, if any human attributes exist only in particular
individuals, they must belong to the mere trapping and decoration of the surface-show.
Thus are men's lives levelled up
as well as levelled down,—levelled
up in their common inner meaning, levelled down in
their outer gloriousness and show. Yet always, we must confess, this levelling insight tends to be obscured again; and always
the ancestral blindness returns and wraps us up, so that we end once more by
thinking that creation can be for no other purpose than to develop remarkable
situations and conventional distinctions and merits. And then always some new leveller in the shape of a religious prophet has to
arise—the Buddha, the Christ, or some Saint Francis, some Rousseau or Tolstoï—to redispel our
blindness. Yet, little by little, there comes some stable gain; for the world
does get more humane, and the religion of democracy tends toward permanent
increase.
This, as I said, became for a time my conviction, and gave
me great content. I have put the matter into the form of a personal
reminiscence, so that I might lead you into it more directly and completely,
and so save time. But now I am going to discuss the rest of it with you in a
more impersonal way.
Tolstoï's levelling
philosophy began long before he had the crisis of melancholy commemorated in
that wonderful document of his entitled 'My Confession,' which led the way to
his more specifically religious works. In his masterpiece 'War and
Peace,'—assuredly the greatest of human novels,—the rôle
of the spiritual hero is given to a poor little soldier named Karataïeff, so helpful, so cheerful, and so devout that, in
spite of his ignorance and filthiness, the sight of him opens the heavens,
which have been closed, to the mind of the principal character of the book; and
his example evidently is meant by Tolstoï to let God
into the world again for the reader. Poor little Karataïeff
is taken prisoner by the French; and, when too exhausted by hardship and fever
to march, is shot as other prisoners were in the famous retreat from Moscow.
The last view one gets of him is his little figure leaning against a white
birch-tree, and uncomplainingly awaiting the end.
"The more," writes Tolstoï
in the work 'My Confession,' "the more I examined the life of these
laboring folks, the more persuaded I became that they veritably have faith, and
get from it alone the sense and the possibility of life.... Contrariwise to
those of our own class, who protest against destiny and grow indignant at its
rigor, these people receive maladies and misfortunes without revolt, without
opposition, and with a firm and tranquil confidence that all had to be like that,
could not be otherwise, and that it is all right so.... The more we live by our
intellect, the less we understand the meaning of life. We see only a cruel jest
in suffering and death, whereas these people live, suffer, and draw near to
death with tranquillity, and oftener than not with
joy.... There are enormous multitudes of them happy with the most perfect
happiness, although deprived of what for us is the sole good of life. Those who
understand life's meaning, and know how to live and die thus, are to be counted
not by twos, threes, tens, but by hundreds, thousands, millions. They labor
quietly, endure privations and pains, live and die, and throughout everything
see the good without seeing the vanity. I had to love these people. The more I
entered into their life, the more I loved them; and the more it became possible
for me to live, too. It came about not only that the life of our society, of
the learned and of the rich, disgusted me—more than that, it lost all semblance
of meaning in my eyes. All our actions, our deliberations, our sciences, our
arts, all appeared to me with a new significance. I understood that these
things might be charming pastimes, but that one need seek in them no depth,
whereas the life of the hard-working populace, of that multitude of human
beings who really contribute to existence, appeared to me in its true light. I
understood that there veritably is life, that the meaning which life there
receives is the truth; and I accepted it." [2]
In a similar way does Stevenson appeal to our piety toward
the elemental virtue of mankind.
"What a wonderful thing," he writes, [3]
"is this Man! How surprising are his attributes! Poor soul, here for so
little, cast among so many hardships, savagely surrounded, savagely descended,
irremediably condemned to prey upon his fellow-lives,—who should have blamed
him, had he been of a piece with his destiny and a being merely barbarous?...
[Yet] it matters not where we look, under what climate we observe him, in what
stage of society, in what depth of ignorance, burdened with what erroneous
morality; in ships at sea, a man inured to hardship and vile pleasures, his
brightest hope a fiddle in a tavern, and a bedizened trull
who sells herself to rob him, and he, for all that, simple, innocent, cheerful,
kindly like a child, constant to toil, brave to drown, for others;... in the
slums of cities, moving among indifferent millions to mechanical employments,
without hope of change in the future, with scarce a pleasure in the present,
and yet true to his virtues, honest up to his lights, kind to his neighbors,
tempted perhaps in vain by the bright gin-palace,... often repaying the world's
scorn with service, often standing firm upon a scruple;... everywhere some
virtue cherished or affected, everywhere some decency of thought and courage,
everywhere the ensign of man's ineffectual goodness,—ah! if I could show you
this! If I could show you these men and women all the world over, in every
stage of history, under every abuse of error, under every circumstance of
failure, without hope, without help, without thanks, still obscurely fighting
the lost fight of virtue, still clinging to some rag of honor, the poor jewel
of their souls."
All
this is as true as it is splendid, and terribly do we need our Tolstoïs and Stevensons to keep
our sense for it alive. Yet you remember the Irishman who, when asked, "Is
not one man as good as another?" replied, "Yes; and a great deal
better, too!" Similarly (it seems to me) does Tolstoï
overcorrect our social prejudices, when he makes his love of the peasant so
exclusive, and hardens his heart toward the educated man as absolutely as he
does. Grant that at Chautauqua there was little moral effort, little sweat or
muscular strain in view. Still, deep down in the souls of the participants we
may be sure that something of the sort was hid, some inner stress, some vital
virtue not found wanting when required. And, after all, the question recurs,
and forces itself upon us, Is it so certain that the surroundings and
circumstances of the virtue do make so little difference in the importance of
the result? Is the functional utility, the worth to the universe of a certain
definite amount of courage, kindliness, and patience, no greater if the
possessor of these virtues is in an educated situation, working out
far-reaching tasks, than if he be an illiterate nobody, hewing wood and drawing
water, just to keep himself alive? Tolstoï's
philosophy, deeply enlightening though it certainly is, remains a false
abstraction. It savors too much of that Oriental pessimism and nihilism of his,
which declares the whole phenomenal world and its facts and their distinctions
to be a cunning fraud.
A mere bare fraud is just what our Western common sense will
never believe the phenomenal world to be. It admits fully that the inner joys
and virtues are the essential part of life's business, but it is sure
that some positive part is also played by the adjuncts of the show. If
it is idiotic in romanticism to recognize the heroic only when it sees it labelled and dressed-up in books, it is really just as
idiotic to see it only in the dirty boots and sweaty shirt of some one in the fields. It is with us really under every
disguise: at Chautauqua; here in your college; in the stock-yards and on the
freight-trains; and in the czar of Russia's court. But, instinctively, we make
a combination of two things in judging the total significance of a human being.
We feel it to be some sort of a product (if such a product only could be
calculated) of his inner virtue and his outer place,—neither singly
taken, but both conjoined. If the outer differences had no meaning for life,
why indeed should all this immense variety of them exist? They must be
significant elements of the world as well.
Just test Tolstoï's deification of
the mere manual laborer by the facts. This is what Mr. Walter Wyckoff, after
working as an unskilled laborer in the demolition of some buildings at West
Point, writes of the spiritual condition of the class of men to which he
temporarily chose to belong:—
"The salient features of our condition are plain
enough. We are grown men, and are without a trade. In the labor-market we stand
ready to sell to the highest bidder our mere muscular strength for so many
hours each day. We are thus in the lowest grade of labor. And, selling our
muscular strength in the open market for what it will bring, we sell it under
peculiar conditions. It is all the capital that we have. We have no reserve
means of subsistence, and cannot, therefore, stand off for a 'reserve price.'
We sell under the necessity of satisfying imminent hunger. Broadly speaking, we
must sell our labor or starve; and, as hunger is a matter of a few hours, and
we have no other way of meeting this need, we must sell at once for what the
market offers for our labor.
"Our employer is buying labor in a dear market, and he
will certainly get from us as much work as he can at the price. The gang-boss
is secured for this purpose, and thoroughly does he know his business. He has
sole command of us. He never saw us before, and he will discharge us all when
the débris is cleared away. In the mean time he must
get from us, if he can, the utmost of physical labor which we, individually and
collectively, are capable of. If he should drive some of us to exhaustion, and
we should not be able to continue at work, he would not be the loser; for the
market would soon supply him with others to take our places.
"We are ignorant men, but so much we clearly see,—that
we have sold our labor where we could sell it dearest, and our employer has
bought it where he could buy it cheapest. He has paid high, and he must get all
the labor that he can; and, by a strong instinct which possesses us, we shall
part with as little as we can. From work like ours there seems to us to have
been eliminated every element which constitutes the nobility of labor. We feel
no personal pride in its progress, and no community of interest with our
employer. There is none of the joy of responsibility, none of the sense of
achievement, only the dull monotony of grinding toil, with the longing for the
signal to quit work, and for our wages at the end.
"And being what we are, the dregs of the labor-market,
and having no certainty of permanent employment, and no organization among
ourselves, we must expect to work under the watchful eye of a gang-boss, and be
driven, like the wage-slaves that we are, through our tasks.
"All this is to tell us, in effect, that our lives are
hard, barren, hopeless lives."
And such hard, barren, hopeless lives, surely, are not lives
in which one ought to be willing permanently to remain. And why is this so? Is
it because they are so dirty? Well, Nansen grew a great deal dirtier on his
polar expedition; and we think none the worse of his life for that. Is it the
insensibility? Our soldiers have to grow vastly more insensible, and we extol
them to the skies. Is it the poverty? Poverty has been reckoned the crowning
beauty of many a heroic career. Is it the slavery to a task, the loss of finer
pleasures?
Such slavery and loss are of the very essence of the higher
fortitude, and are always counted to its credit,—read the records of missionary
devotion all over the world. It is not any one of these things, then, taken by
itself,—no, nor all of them together,—that make such a life undesirable. A man
might in truth live like an unskilled laborer, and do the work of one, and yet
count as one of the noblest of God's creatures. Quite possibly there were some
such persons in the gang that our author describes; but the current of their
souls ran underground; and he was too steeped in the ancestral blindness to
discern it.
If there were any such morally exceptional
individuals, however, what made them different from the rest? It can only have
been this,—that their souls worked and endured in obedience to some inner ideal,
while their comrades were not actuated by anything worthy of that name. These
ideals of other lives are among those secrets that we can almost never
penetrate, although something about the man may often tell us when they are
there. In Mr. Wyckoff's own case we know exactly what the self-imposed ideal
was. Partly he had stumped himself, as the boys say, to carry through a
strenuous achievement; but mainly he wished to enlarge his sympathetic insight
into fellow-lives. For this his sweat and toil acquire a certain heroic
significance, and make us accord to him exceptional esteem. But it is easy to
imagine his fellows with various other ideals. To say nothing of wives and
babies, one may have been a convert of the Salvation Army, and had a
nightingale singing of expiation and forgiveness in his heart all the while he
labored. Or there might have been an apostle like Tolstoï
himself, or his compatriot Bondareff, in the gang,
voluntarily embracing labor as their religious mission. Class-loyalty was
undoubtedly an ideal with many. And who knows how much of that higher manliness
of poverty, of which Phillips Brooks has spoken so penetratingly, was or was
not present in that gang?
"A rugged, barren land," says Phillips Brooks,
"is poverty to live in,—a land where I am thankful very often if I can get
a berry or a root to eat. But living in it really, letting it bear witness to
me of itself, not dishonoring it all the time by judging it after the standard
of the other lands, gradually there come out its qualities. Behold! no land
like this barren and naked land of poverty could show the moral geology of the
world. See how the hard ribs ... stand out strong and solid. No life like
poverty could so get one to the heart of things and make men know their
meaning, could so let us feel life and the world with all the soft cushions
stripped off and thrown away.... Poverty makes men come very near each other,
and recognize each other's human hearts; and poverty, highest and best of all,
demands and cries out for faith in God.... I know how superficial and
unfeeling, how like mere mockery, words in praise of poverty may seem.... But I
am sure that the poor man's dignity and freedom, his self-respect and energy,
depend upon his cordial knowledge that his poverty is a true region and kind of
life, with its own chances of character, its own springs of happiness and
revelations of God. Let him resist the characterlessness
which often goes with being poor. Let him insist on respecting the condition
where he lives. Let him learn to love it, so that by and by, [if] he grows
rich, he shall go out of the low door of the old familiar poverty with a true
pang of regret, and with a true honor for the narrow home in which he has lived
so long." [4]
The barrenness and ignobleness of the more usual laborer's
life consist in the fact that it is moved by no such ideal inner springs. The
backache, the long hours, the danger, are patiently endured—for what? To gain a
quid of tobacco, a glass of beer, a cup of coffee, a meal, and a bed, and to
begin again the next day and shirk as much as one can. This really is why we
raise no monument to the laborers in the Subway, even though they be our
conscripts, and even though after a fashion our city is indeed based upon their
patient hearts and enduring backs and shoulders. And this is why we do raise
monuments to our soldiers, whose outward conditions were even brutaller still. The soldiers are supposed to have followed
an ideal, and the laborers are supposed to have followed none.
You see, my friends, how the plot now thickens; and how
strangely the complexities of this wonderful human nature of ours begin to
develop under our hands. We have seen the blindness and deadness to each other
which are our natural inheritance; and, in spite of them, we have been led to
acknowledge an inner meaning which passeth show, and
which may be present in the lives of others where we least descry it. And now
we are led to say that such inner meaning can be complete and valid
for us also, only when the inner joy, courage, and endurance are joined
with an ideal.
But what, exactly, do we mean by an ideal? Can we give no
definite account of such a word?
To a certain extent we can. An ideal, for instance, must be
something intellectually conceived, something of which we are not unconscious,
if we have it; and it must carry with it that sort of outlook, uplift, and
brightness that go with all intellectual facts. Secondly, there must be novelty
in an ideal,—novelty at least for him whom the ideal grasps. Sodden routine is
incompatible with ideality, although what is sodden routine for one person may
be ideal novelty for another. This shows that there is nothing absolutely
ideal: ideals are relative to the lives that entertain them. To keep out of the
gutter is for us here no part of consciousness at all, yet for many of our
brethren it is the most legitimately engrossing of ideals.
Now, taken nakedly, abstractly, and immediately, you see
that mere ideals are the cheapest things in life. Everybody has them in some
shape or other, personal or general, sound or mistaken, low or high; and the
most worthless sentimentalists and dreamers, drunkards, shirks and
verse-makers, who never show a grain of effort, courage, or endurance, possibly
have them on the most copious scale. Education, enlarging as it does our
horizon and perspective, is a means of multiplying our ideals, of bringing new
ones into view. And your college professor, with a starched shirt and
spectacles, would, if a stock of ideals were all alone by itself enough to
render a life significant, be the most absolutely and deeply significant of
men. Tolstoï would be completely blind in despising
him for a prig, a pedant and a parody; and all our new insight into the
divinity of muscular labor would be altogether off the track of truth.
But such consequences as this, you instinctively feel, are
erroneous. The more ideals a man has, the more contemptible, on the whole, do
you continue to deem him, if the matter ends there for him, and if none of the
laboring man's virtues are called into action on his part,—no courage shown, no
privations undergone, no dirt or scars contracted in the attempt to get them
realized. It is quite obvious that something more than the mere possession of
ideals is required to make a life significant in any sense that claims the
spectator's admiration. Inner joy, to be sure, it may have, with its
ideals; but that is its own private sentimental matter. To extort from us,
outsiders as we are, with our own ideals to look after, the tribute of our
grudging recognition, it must back its ideal visions with what the laborers
have, the sterner stuff of manly virtue; it must multiply their sentimental
surface by the dimension of the active will, if we are to have depth, if
we are to have anything cubical and solid in the way of character.
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 Tolstoï, 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 Tolstoï 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." [5]
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 æternatis,
how gentle would grow their disputes! what tolerance and good humor, what
willingness to live and let live, would come into the world!
[1] This address was composed before the Cuban and Philippine wars. Such outbursts of the passion of mastery are, however, only episodes in a social process which in the long run seems everywhere tending toward the Chautauquan ideals.
[2] My Confession, X. (condensed).
[3] Across the Plains: "Pulvis et Umbra" (abridged).
[4] Sermons. 5th Series, New York, 1893, pp. 166, 167.
[5] Essays by a
Barrister, London, 1862, p. 318.