Part 13

Our own limited experience and a little reason may be a sufficient guide in many cases. They teach us to overrule certain inclinations, whose consequences we understand and which we deem contrary to our interests.

In many other cases, the consequences may be just as contrary to our interests, though they lie beyond our own experience and present understanding. For that reason people have been taught throughout the centuries to accept and be guided by the accumulated experience and wisdom of those who have gone before. This accumulated experience has been preserved and made available to each new generation, in many ways--traditions, conventions, customs, familiar quotations, standard books, the schools and the Bible. Most of all, it has been the special care and function of parents to instill it into their children. For the first ten or fifteen years of life, children are constantly being told what to do and what not to do, in all sorts of contingencies. And what they are told is the result of accumulated experience in crystallized practical form.

In the days of obedience, discipline and fear of punishment, children accepted and respected this guidance, as authoritative. They formed the habit of doing not what they felt like, but what was considered right and best for them. Very often the true reasons, the complicated motives and remote consequences, involved in a question of conduct were not comprehended by the young people, and only vaguely sensed by their parents. They were traditional ideas, generally approved by right-minded people and passed along. Their origin, in nearly all cases, was the accumulated experience and wisdom of people who did comprehend.

So it happens that a young woman, or a young man, of the new school, without respect for old-fashioned teachings, and with insufficient experience, or knowledge of their own, can fall into the error of imagining that their selfish interests are best served by gratifying each passing inclination.

Their first shallow mistake, as I have tried to show, is in overlooking the lessons of others' experience.

This whole point-of-view, of course, is absolutely selfish and for the time being, I have been content to meet them on their own ground and answer them in terms of absolute selfishness. Even on the assumption that a human being is a kind of animal, which feels no need of consideration for others' welfare, and is devoid of any higher aspirations than a full measure of selfish enjoyment--even then, purely as a question of intelligence, a matter of policy, there are excellent reasons why various impulses and inclinations should be resisted and denied. The nature of these reasons I have attempted to suggest and make clear by some haphazard examples and as previously noted, the basis of them all is Experience.

AFFECTION

There remain two other sets of reasons why our selfish inclinations should often be denied--affection and faith. They are of a higher and finer order. We will take them one at a time.

The conscious life of a human being is by no means limited to the perception of sensations and the exercise of reason. These are important functions, but they are not all. A human being is also provided with a heart, which is capable of feeling sympathy for other human beings--for all living things. This sympathetic feeling may cover a wide range--pity, commiseration, friendship, admiration, devotion, adoration.

It is not the nature of mankind to live an isolated existence, in loneliness. Boys and girls, men and women, from the beginning of life to the end, yearn for the companionship of others with whom they can share their thoughts and feelings, their pleasures and their pains. Through association with others come affectionate feelings for certain ones. We attach ourselves to them with bonds of sympathy, understanding, love.

The feeling of affection is such a normal and essential part of human life that it seeks to find expression at every opportunity. A warm-hearted child will lavish it on a kitten, or a rag doll; or will show it for a mongrel dog. If the kitten, or the dog is hurt, or sick, or even hungry, the girl or boy will be distressed by its trouble and want to help it.

This is a primitive form of the feeling; carried to its full development in the heart of a sensitive, noble nature it becomes one of the most beautiful and vital of human attributes.

As we share our thoughts and feelings with another and are allowed to share his in return, our centre of interest expands, as it were, and the essence of life within us enriches itself by this sympathetic mingling with the essence of the other. His thoughts, his feelings, his welfare are no longer a matter of indifference to us. As our sympathy and attachment grow, we become more and more concerned in this other's interests; they become a part of our existence, in a strange and lovely way, just as real and just as dear to us as if they were our own. Any pleasure, or good fortune, becomes doubly grateful, if we may share it with him; no pleasure is worth considering, if in order to obtain it, we would be obliged to cause him a deprivation. We cannot forget his welfare, or his happiness, we do not wish to forget his welfare or his happiness, because through our sympathy and affection, the essence of another life has become inexpressively near and dear to us.

To a greater or less degree, this capacity for affection is inherent in human kind, from the lowest to the highest. It is a most precious human quality and it opens the gates of life to a sort of satisfaction that is infinitely bigger and finer and more lasting than anything that can be obtained from the mere gratification of selfish and material impulses.

Now, while it is true that practically everybody is aware of this feeling and has a need for affection and sympathy, not all people by any means have big enough hearts, or fine enough natures, to respond to the need very deeply. Cold, superficial, self-centered people may go through life giving a very small modicum of sympathy or affection to anybody and receiving very little in return. Many a man is incapable and unworthy of being a real true friend to anybody. He may have brains and breeding and plenty of animal desires, but in his heart there is no understanding of what it means to be devoted to a welfare not his own. The same is true no doubt of a great many women, those whose characters are too fickle and unstable to permit of any deep and lasting attachment. Fortunately, even in the case of such men and women, if they marry and have children, some of the joy and meaning of this heart-life is still vouchsafed them. They feel it for their sons and daughters.

If they have no children and are unmarried, there are mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters to keep alive some measure of sympathy and endearment. A human being who is totally bereft of such attachments, without any feeling that comes from the heart for any one, is such a rare exception that he need not be considered. Such lives, if they do exist, would appear to normal beings as very pitiful.

As a usual thing, for most of us, the affections are constantly in operation. Certain people who are near and dear to us are never really out of our lives at all. Consciously or subconsciously, we carry them with us wherever we go, tucked away in our hearts, ready to rise up at the slightest provocation and take a vital part in our innermost deliberations.

A little boy or girl of the right sort, with the right kind of loving parents, grows up naturally with this feeling for them. In all sorts of new experiences and questions of conduct, the thought comes spontaneously: "What will mother think about this?" "She'll be terribly surprised when I tell her that." "Father will be pleased and proud when he knows what I've done." "I don't think she'd approve of that." "He'll laugh at me, when he hears this." And so forth and so on, countless times, in countless connections.

Mothers and fathers carry around a similar feeling with regard to their children. Things that they see, things that they hear, things that they read, plans and projects of all kinds, are spontaneously colored by the consideration of their effect on the son or daughter--surprise, pleasure, disappointment, good or ill.

The same thing takes place to a remarkable extent between a man and a woman who love each other deeply. Nothing of importance can happen to one, without an immediate reflection of the effect and bearing it will have on the other. A frequent result of this is that, in order to give pleasure to the other, one will act contrary to his own selfish inclination. And the anticipation of this pleasure to be given to the other can be strong enough to transform this denial and deprivation of self into a sweeter and finer form of satisfaction.

This same order of feeling, based on sympathy and affection, springing from the heart, extends and ramifies and attaches itself in a great variety of ways, in the life of a human being, as we have already suggested.

While instances of complete devotion of one nature to another are comparatively rare, in any walk of life, and while most individuals are lacking in the bigness of heart and depth of feeling to be capable of it, under any circumstances, the importance of affection comes home to nearly everybody, to greater or less extent, and is treasured up as one of the essentials of life.

As a result of this human sympathy and affection, it would seem only natural and obvious that there should come to everyone a realization of the fact that in many of the things we do, for our own good or ill, other people besides ourselves can't help being concerned. We may, by thinking only of our own inclinations and seeking to gain our selfish ends, be doing great harm and injustice to them. If other people are affected by what we do, and they have feelings of the same sort as ours, are not they, too, entitled to some consideration?

This idea seems so simple and evident that any thinking person might be expected to admit it and understand it. Yet, as we have seen repeatedly in discussing the attitude of the new generation, it is one of the questions about which there prevails the greatest misconception and confusion of mind. Up-to-date young people, absorbed in the habit of doing what they like and deciding for themselves, very easily fall into the way of overlooking this consideration almost entirely. They fail to grasp the importance of the part that sympathy and affection have been assigned to play in their own natures; and at the same time they lose sight of the feelings and interests of others who must be affected by the consequences of their acts. Lack of consideration for others has come to be spoken of currently as one of the marked characteristics of this new generation.

For this reason, if for no other, it may be just as well to linger on the subject and make explanations doubly plain, rather than leave any possible ground for a continuation of the confusion and misunderstanding.

Suppose you were walking along a country road and you came upon a nice little boy, named Harry, one of your neighbor's sons, and Harry was sitting hunched up on a stump, sniffling and sobbing, with tears streaming down his cheeks. Upon enquiring the cause of his trouble, you learn that a bigger boy, Jake, had taken away Harry's apple. Strictly speaking, the apple didn't belong to either of them, but Harry had spied it on the tree and after a great deal of determined effort had managed to climb out on the branch and shake it down. Then Jake came along and took it.

Now, to see a little fellow sobbing with disappointment, deprived of something his heart was set on and which he had worked hard to get, is enough to arouse a feeling of sympathy in any normal and kindly person. You feel sorry for Harry and you'd like to do something for him.

Suppose you happen to look along the road, just then, and you spy Jake seated on a fence rail with an air of contentment, proceeding to eat the apple--what would you feel like doing and saying to him? Suppose you controlled yourself and asked him quietly why he took that apple away from Harry, and he replied, with a defiant grin "Because I wanted it. I like apples, and this is a fine big one!" If you continue to talk quietly to Jake, and show him Harry sobbing on the stump, and make him realize the situation, as like as not it will end up by Jake's saying: "All right--if he feels as bad as that, let him have it. I didn't know he was that kind of a cry baby." And he will pass up his own inclination, rather than cause that much harm to another.