Part 9

PRINCIPLES (continued).

Suppose a small child steals jam in the pantry. So long as he pretends that he did not do it, or did not know it was wrong, he suffers a certain oppression.

You can explain to an intelligent child that if he tells the whole truth about the thing, the telling will cost him pain and leave him happy. But you cannot save him the pain. So long as he persists in lying, some of his faculties lie under an inhibition; the vital energies flow past them instead of through them. The first shock of a through passage gives a spasm of pain, and then the child is happy. It is one of the facts of the world that moral awakening is accompanied by pain.

The quarrel that the world has with its agitators is that they do really agitate. People express this by saying that the men are dangerous or have bad taste. The epithets vary with the age. They are intended to excite public contempt, and they embody the aversions of society. In a martial age the reformer is called a molly-coddle; in a commercial age an incompetent, a disturber of values; in a fanatical age, a heretic. If an agitator is not reviled, he is a quack.

These epithets are mere figures of speech. What they really express is suffering caused by the workings of conscience. And so in any educational movement that runs across the country, there is always a track of pain turning to happiness. When we get in the path of one of these things, we find that the division between contending ideas passes through the individual man. It does not fall between men. The struggle is always the struggle of forces within an individual. A is trying to convince B. The struggle in A’s mind is to make the matter clear, in B’s mind to make the opposite clear. In the course of time one view prevails; but the struggle continues, for B occupies A’s position and is now struggling to convince C. It is in this way that a movement runs through a community. The firing line passes through a series of individuals, and as they succumb, through them to the next.

If you take any particular case of conflict, you will find that the man is divided between two courses, one of which is disagreeable because it involves effort and sacrifice and offence. The other is agreeable because it involves personal ease or personal advancement. The two motives in man result from the structure of his brain, whose operations we are obliged to accept: we cannot amend them; they are the facts of psychology.

It would seem as if the brain of man were so constituted that at the moment of its full operation the man himself disappears. His consciousness becomes wholly occupied with impersonal interests. Thus, in the process of thought, a man begins to see his own personal interests threatened. If he continues to think, they must vanish. This is the struggle between right and wrong. It is really a struggle between two attitudes of mind. It is the experience we suffer when the mind is passing from the self-regardant to the non-self-regardant attitude.

Perhaps the discomfort of doing one’s duty is an inseparable incident of the storage of energy, and the pleasure of neglecting one’s duty, an incident of the leakage of energy. When I get up and poke the fire, because I see it will go out if I don’t, I return to my chair a more energetic being than I was the moment before. At any rate, our oscillation between two states of consciousness has preoccupied mankind from the earliest times, and has given rise to all the dualistic philosophies. The great fact as to the reality of the struggle is proved to us, not merely by our own consciousness, but because we can see the logical results of it everywhere in society.

A community is a collection of palpitating animals. Each of us is one of them, and each of us receives and transmits millions of impressions hourly. We get heard. We have our exact weight and force. There is no difficulty about our power of intercourse. Indeed it is the thing we cannot get away from. No man walks by himself. Between his feet and the ground are invisible pedals that play upon, and are played upon by other men. You cannot live or move except by transmitting influence. The whole of practical life is made up of contact with the passions of others. A lawyer or a broker is like an engineer who sits behind his machine, managing its levers and its stopcocks. A trader, a writer, or a philanthropist, a laborer or a clergyman, does nothing but open and shut valves in other people. There is no other way of serving your fellows; there is no other way of earning your living or of wasting your substance.

We saw that in politics it was impossible to draw a dividing line anywhere in that series of men whose joint activity and inactivity held up what we call the evils of politics. Money interest shaded off into prejudice, and that into mistaken loyalty, and that into indifference. The striking truth about the whole series was that it showed different shades of selfishness, lack of energy, and inability to use the mind accurately. So also any unselfish or accurate use of his mind by the laborer or by the journalist was, as we saw, apt to throw him out of employment.

In politics and in morals, all that we condemn, turns out on inspection to be mere selfishness. But anything in the world that we dislike, turns out, on inspection, to be self-regardant effort or avoidance of effort. Bad art may show the gross selfishness of the pot-boiler, or the refined laziness of prejudice, or the mere weakness that was unable to see the world for itself, and has been forced to see it with some one else’s eyes. It is a makeshift. So of bad carpentry or bad cooking. There is no such special province in life as morality. Each man regards that thing as immoral which he sees to be selfish. A proofreader will show the same indignation over a careless job, that a musician shows over a weak phrasing.

The unimaginable subtlety of our comprehension enables us to detect selfishness in arts of whose methods we know nothing; we read it like large print. To speak accurately, all we get from any communication is a transcript, an image, a picture of the author’s thought, the jar of intellect and character. Is it supposed that communication between men goes forward by ratiocination, or that education is a thing taken in by linear measurement? Thought cannot creep, but only fly. It proceeds by the magic of stimulation. A good judge can read a good brief almost as fast as he can turn the pages. If a thing is well put, it is almost our own before it is said. Ideas pass into us so quickly that Plato thought we knew them in a former existence. This is due to the subtlety of our apprehension. We are not satisfied except by an appeal so refined that our only sensation is one of being made more alive. “Rien ne me choque” was Chopin’s highest praise. What wonder, then, that we resent the self-sufficiency of any inferior mind? The whole of life is no more than a series of pulsations, and all the books and Bibles, sign-boards, music-boxes, and telegraph wires are the machinery by which in one way or another the mind of man touches the mind of man. The world has been going on for so long that we have many such devices, and out of the millions that have been made, all but the very best get discarded as old lumber. These things are the language of the unselfish force upon the globe. It is much nearer truth to think of them as a single influence than as multifarious. Their origin and tendency, their practical utility, the veneration in which they are held, bind them together and make them one. For the world values the seer above all men, and has always done so. Nay, it values all men in proportion as they partake of the character of seers. The Elgin Marbles and a decision of John Marshall are valued for the same reason. What we feel in them is a painstaking submission to facts beyond the author’s control, and to ideas imposed upon him by his vision. So with Beethoven’s Symphonies, with Adam Smith’s “Wealth of Nations,”--with any conceivable output of the human mind of which you approve. You love them because you say, “These things were not made, they were seen.”

Thus the forces of an unselfish sort upon the globe are cumulative. The dead heroes fight on forever, and the dead mathematicians expound forever. It is true that the organization of the selfish forces is overwhelmingly visible, and that of the unselfish ones invisible. Napoleon is seen by his contemporaries; Spinoza is not seen. The reason is simple. The man who wants something must have an office address. But the man who wants nothing for himself, but spends his whole time in so using his mind that he himself disappears, lives only as an influence in the minds of others. He is a song, a theory, a proposition in algebra. These two conflicting forms of force are then flashed up and down, forward and back ceaselessly, through and across every social meeting, through and across society. The novelists and playwrights deal with this instantaneous interplay of motive; and the time-honored analysis of self for self on the villain’s side, and sacrifice for principle on the hero’s side is a true thing. It is a fair abstract of the world.

You can illustrate in an instant the immediacy of these two hierarchies of power under which we live and from which we cannot escape. The selfish ones need not be named; they oppress us. But the unselfish ones are equally near. If you take any bit of poetry or speech or writing that you consider great, and examine it, you will find that it illustrates the logical coherence of all the ideas and feelings that make you happy; it is a digest of a law of influence. Or conversely, if you set about to illustrate some experience, and if you can get it profoundly and accurately stated as what you believe to be the bottom truth, it will turn under your hands into something familiar. If you are successful, it will be a kind of poetry.

VII

CONCLUSION

There is force enough in ordinary sunshine to turn all the mills in the world; and there is beneficent energy enough in any community to make the people perfectly happy. But it is cramped and deflected, poisoned by misuse, and turned to hateful ends. The question is how to liberate energy.

People are fond of thinking the millennium is impossible; but so long as happiness is dependent on a right use of the faculties, there is no reason why the millennium should not be reached, and that soon or unexpectedly. We all know individuals so harmoniously framed that we say, “If theirs were the common temper of mankind, we should be happy.” None of the externals of life, about which there is so much buffeting, control the question. Happiness is in a nutshell. Anybody can have it. You are happy if you get out of bed on the right side. I can never stop wondering at the awful simplicity of the principle on which mankind is constructed. Little Alice in the Looking-Glass could not reach the porch till she turned her back on it and walked straight into the door. Renounce the search for happiness and you find the substance. There is nothing else in the law and the prophets.

We see most men like tee-totums spinning to the left and leading a dismal life. How shall we get their motive power to spin them to the right, and make them happy? The practical question is: how to use the power of sunlight to turn our mills. How can we hold up a prism to the times that shall disintegrate these rays of complex force, and then adjust a lens that shall focus the powers of good and make them turn the wheels of society? The elements are before us, ceaselessly in motion. πάντα ῥεῖ. The most adamantine institutions are cloud palaces. There is no stability anywhere; and if you have a steady eye you will see that the whole fabric is in a flux. Nor are the changes arbitrary. The formations and re-formations are governed by laws as certain as those of astronomy. Study the changes and you will find the laws. Subserve the laws and you can affect the formations. Julius Cæsar did no more.

The strands of prejudice and passion that bind people together pulsate with life. All these fellow-citizens are human beings, and there is no one of them whom we cannot understand, reach, influence. The ordinary modes of intercourse are at hand. Chief among them you find the great machinery of government. It dwarfs every other agency, whether for good or ill. In America this machinery was designed to be at the service of anybody. It is an advertising agency for ideas, and it is very much more than this; since the fact that a man is to vote forces him to think. You may preach to a congregation by the year and not affect its thought because it is not called upon for definite action. But throw your subject into a campaign and it becomes a challenge. You can get assent to almost any proposition so long as you are not going to do anything about it. And on the other hand, no amount of verbal proof will justify a new thought until it has been put in practice.

Alas for ink and paper! There is in all speech and writing a conventional presumption that human beings shall be logical, or fixed quantities, or at least coherent creatures. For the purposes of an essay or a speech, you prove your case, and carry weight accordingly. If you are very cogent and conclusive, why, you win. Hurrah! the world is saved. But in real life there are no fixed quantities; all the terms are variables.

For example, everybody understands what is meant by the “Moral Law.” People differ only as to the application of that law. Not long ago I heard a sermon on this law, in which great stress was laid on the fact that it was a discovered law whereby the truth prevailed. Any truce with evil meant defeat for the cause of righteousness. This was the law of God, tested by experience, and in constant operation like the law of gravity, a thing you could not escape. The preacher pictured the solitary struggle of the great man seeking truth, his proclamation of the truth, the refusal of the world to receive it, and the prophet’s isolation and apparent failure. Nevertheless what the prophet said had always the same content. It was an appeal to the instincts of man upon the question of right and wrong, and in the end it was accepted.

Now the man who made this exposition, and it was admirable, is in regard to politics a believer in compromise. I think I have never known him support the idealist cause in a campaign; and upon most occasions of crisis he is found heartily throwing stones at the crusaders.

What words in any language can make this man understand that his law--which he really does profoundly understand as a law--applies to reform movements? Why, no words will do it, only example. New statements about morality, however eloquent, add nothing to our knowledge. Everything is known about the moral law, except how you yourself will act under given circumstances. You have nothing but example to contribute.

People interrogate force. They are unconvinced, and are carried, still protesting, through the air and deposited in a new place. And then, thereafter, they agree with you about the whole matter. Mere intellectual assent to your proposition is, even when you can get it, worth nothing. Your object is not to confute, but to stimulate. What you really want is that every man you meet shall drop his business and devote his entire life and energy to your cause. You will accept nothing less than this. Is it not clear that people are not moved by logic? Your conduct must ultimately square with reason and be justified by the laws of the universe and the constitution of other people’s minds; but you must value only that approval which comes from the deeper fibres in men. You need not be concerned about the bickerings of contemporary misunderstanding. Leave these for the historical society. Act first--explain afterwards. That is the way to get heard. Must you show your passport and certificate of birth and legitimacy to every editor and every lackey? They’ll find out who you are by and by. It is easier to knock a man down than to say why you do it. The act is sometimes needed, and wisdom then approves it after the event. People who love soft methods and hate iniquity forget this,--that reform consists in taking a bone from a dog. Philosophy will not do it.

Such are the practical dictates of agitation. Their justification lies always with events. It may be that you must wait seven centuries for an audience, or it may be that in two years your voice will be heeded. If you are really a forerunner of better times, the times will appear and explain you. It will then turn out that your movement was the keynote of the national life. You really differed from your neighbors only in this,--that your mind had gone faster than theirs along the road all were travelling.

We are all slaves of the age; we can only see such principles as society reveals. The philosophy of other ages does us little good. We repeat the old formulas and cry up the prophets; but we see no connection between the truth we know so well in print and its counterpart in real life. The moral commonplaces, as, for instance, “Honesty is the best policy,” “A single just man can influence an entire community,” “Never compromise a principle,” are social truths. They are always true, but they are only obviously true in very virtuous communities. In a vile community the influence of a just man is potent but not visible. In a perfectly virtuous era it is clear that a cheat could not drive a fraudulent trade.

A seer is a man with such sharp eyes for cause and effect that he sees social truth, even under unfavorable conditions. And yet even the seers generally had auspicious weather,--that is to say, storms of moral passion. The whole race of Jews lived in fervent exaltation for generations, and revealed to their sharp-sighted prophets deep glimpses of social truth. Hence the Bible. “A prophet is not without honor save in his own country.” What happy precision! What sound generalization! But every township in Israel had its prophet, and the truth was a commonplace.