PART II.. How Far Our Happiness Depends on Nature and Fate.

How far our Happiness depends on Nature and Fate.

I. Our Bodily and Mental Constitutions.

To live happily, we must in the first place live. Transparent truism, but how often forgotten! How many of our pleasures tend to weaken life, rather than to strengthen and to lengthen it!

Some philosophers have found the sense of existence a sufficient synonym for happiness. Sir William Hamilton expressed this opinion with perhaps an ambiguous under-meaning when he said,――“To lead a happy life is to live all the days of one’s life;” but Dr. Johnson, moralizing on the learned pig, expanded the idea more clearly when he maintained that the mere prolongation of existence is a sufficient compensation for a very considerable amount of suffering. We see the correctness of his observation in the multitude of examples of those who cherish their years when poverty, old age, and disease would seem to have robbed them of all value. When nothing else is left but life, life alone becomes worth all else.

Self-preservation, therefore, which means the care of life and health, is the first and a necessary condition of personal happiness. But what a task is this!

When the child wakes to consciousness and surveys the scene around him, he finds himself on a battle-field divided between two mighty combatants in unremitting conflict――Necessity and Chance, the laws of Nature and the caprices of Accident. Not even the gods, said the ancient Greeks, can struggle with Fate and Fortune, those elemental powers, Anangke and Tyke. What is man that he dare venture the fray?

Each individual is scarcely more than a volume of quotations from the works of his ancestors, selected with little appropriateness to the Essay on Life which he has himself to compose. Mysterious and unrecorded influences extending over untold generations have combined to make him what he is, and to endow him with a personality which he can never escape from, nor transcend. The boy, the man, can no more run away from his parents than he can from himself. He may renounce and cast out the traits which he has inherited, but he cannot get rid of them. Unbidden and unnoticed, they will slink back and abide with him forever. They are not his servants, but belong to his family, his clan, his race. He can change or dismiss them no easier than he can the color of his skin or the shape of his skull.

These are the laws of Heredity. They bind the individual as with a tether to an immovable stake. But the tether is not a fetter. It allows him a certain freedom, so that within the limits of those laws he can wonderfully modify himself and better his fortunes. More than that, he can “cozen the gods,” and outwit both Fate and Fortune, if he sets about it right. And how is that? By learning the laws of his own nature and of the physical surroundings which environ him. Knowing them, he can turn them to his own advantage.

Let us see what these are; and first, those which concern the bodily and mental constitution of the individual, so far as they bear upon his happiness in life.

Those who have studied this subject, physicians and physiologists, draw a twofold distinction in the traits of the individual, discriminating between those which he has by birth, and those which can be traced to incidents in his own history after birth. Of the former, some are “hereditary,” that is, traceable with reasonable surety to his ancestors; and others “congenital,” meaning those which appear to be due to incidents in his own history before birth. To this latter curious class belongs the development of what anatomists call “monsters;” and there are thousands such in the moral world from allied causes, of whom the anatomist takes no heed, the whole complexion of whose lives has been changed by some light impression at this infinitely susceptible period.

Of hereditary traits, the most salient are those which stamp on the individual his racial and ethnic characteristics. He is a white man or a negro, a Mongolian or an American Indian; he is, within these limits, a Jew or a Greek, a Chinaman or a Japanese; each with his own features, color of skin, straight or crisp hair, and all the other marks, mental and physical, which belong to his particular race and people. Each one of these will help or handicap him in the pursuit of happiness.

Less prominent, but yet indefinitely potent, are those characteristics which he inherits from his family or clan, and from his immediate parents. To these he generally owes his stature, his physical strength, his symmetry and beauty, or his lack of these, his constitutional diseases, his longevity, and his language,――all mighty agents in turning the kaleidoscopic pictures of his future life. From this source he probably also derives that which physicians call his “temperament,” which is in many instances the trait which decides on his general happiness or unhappiness in life; for it is often observed that a particular temperament descends for generations in the same family.

The “congenital” peculiarities are those which especially mark the individual. Sex is one of these. Physiologists now know that the human individual commences of the neuter gender, and that the decision as to whether it shall be masculine or feminine is an incident, or more justly an accident, of its later life. Certain diseases, malformations, and bodily marks are also congenital, as well as those slight variations of the form and features which make up the physical personality; and more than all, to the obscure and momentous period when the spirit is folded in the womb does the individual owe his strongest tastes and inclinations, his talents, and, when he possesses it, the divine endowment of genius. Therefore the physicians of ancient times established the maxim,――“Ingenium est ingenitum.”

With this miscellaneous stock of heirlooms, with this farrago of festering rags and family jewels, poisoned fangs of serpents and fragments of holy crosses, ancient formulas of withering curses and saintly blessings whispered by a thousand generations of ancestors, the babe is born into the world. His one duty in life is to battle with these unseen but fateful influences, to defend his freedom against their subtle approaches, to master their armories, and to maintain and develop ever more and more his own separate individuality, utilizing his inherited powers and tendencies or destroying them, as they make for or against his own true happiness.

To accomplish this, he will call to his aid such powerful allies as education, self-training, personal hygiene, the establishment of desirable habits, and the assistance of trusty friends. By such aids he can modify his own nature, and Fate cannot wholly prevail against him. He will realize the meaning of the noble words of Buddha, the Awakened,――“Self is the Lord of Self; who else should be the Lord?”

Let us see in some detail what he has to contend with, and how he should set about it.

Nature is equitable. The more inflexible her laws, the wider the liberty they allow; the stronger the rivets of her chains, the longer they are. Thus it is that racial peculiarities, though the most indelible of all, do not stand in the way of man’s enjoyment. They do indeed limit the quality, but probably not the quantity, of pleasure in life. The race which anatomists consider the lowest, the African negroes, is famous for its gayety and buoyant spirits. Danger, poverty, even slavery, do not quench their cheery, care-free disposition. The majority of them are like Hamlet’s friend, Horatio, with naught but their good spirits to feed and clothe them. Little reck they of the future. Music and song, talk and laughter, are all they want to fill their days.

How different the American Indian! not that he is the solemn and taciturn savage whom the romance-writers depict. In his native state he is light-hearted, too; but there is one poison a single drop of which embitters all his cup of joy, the poison of restriction. Lessen his liberty ever so little, and all light is shut out of his days. Everywhere the race is the same. Its surroundings count as nothing. In the long Arctic night the Eskimo is blithe and carolsome, far from the approach of the white man; while amid the glorious scenery and Eden-like climate of Central America, the native languages have a dozen words for pain and misery and sorrow for one with any cheerful signification.

The white race has a greater range and a higher quality in sensation and emotion than any other. Modern psychologists――who are in fact physiologists――have demonstrated this by experiments. The white race alone responds to the most delicate stimuli in art, in religion, and in scientific thought; and probably its members alone are, as a race, capable of the highest degrees of happiness; though single individuals of the other races doubtless may equal them in this respect.

Let the individual of any race not despair of joy. Let him pursue it with a firm intent and a clear understanding of what it is, and he will surely receive it to the capacity of which his nature is capable. The barriers of race or nation fence him off from no flowery fields or sun-lit pastures. There are gates, if he will seek them, which open on them all.

More ominous to his welfare are the traits he inherits from his own family, his immediate ancestors. How true it is that a man’s worst enemies may be those of his own household! How dreadful it is that they may be those who love him most, who brought him into the world, who would die for him! As in Ibsen’s terrible drama, the ghosts of the follies of our fathers may ever hover near us, poisoning our blood, darkening our daylight, blighting our lives, transmitting to us the seeds of insanity, the mortal leaven of consumption, or the loathsome virus sucked from the breasts of illicit pleasure. Who can deliver us from the body of this death?

No one but ourselves. Here more than elsewhere it is vain to sit by the wayside and cry to the passers-by for aid. Scant is the consolation and slight the assistance they can proffer us. We must ourselves search the arid plains for such meagre roses and shriveled leaves as remain for us to twine the chaplets of pleasure. He who is born to an inheritance of disease――and the majority are――should boldly recognize it as his special danger, and should study the means of its prevention. If of the serious character of those I have mentioned, he should make it his main business to escape its inroads by choosing an appropriate avocation, by removal to other surroundings, and by adopting a course of life which medical science prescribes as that most likely to postpone indefinitely its outbreak. There are thousands of such wise men in every civilized community, who were born with these blood-taints, but who successfully escape them,――till they fall a victim to some other malady. Nor have these by any means the worst part of life. The habit of constant watchfulness and forethought thus engendered is one of the most valuable guarantees of personal happiness; this is why among confirmed and chronic invalids we often meet a degree of cheerfulness and even gayety which surprises us.

These beings are doubly fortunate; for they have escaped not only their particular malady, but another not less dangerous to their own well-being and that of those around them――a morbid valetudinarianism, a perpetual fussiness about their own ills and ails. The victims of this complaint are the malades imaginaires, constantly coddling themselves, thinking of no one but themselves, of whom we meet an endless number in the wealthier classes of society. It must have been of such as these that old Dr. Johnson blurted out his rough judgment,――“Every sick man is a scoundrel!” They usually forfeit more than they win by such selfish concentration. It is a symptom of disease to think constantly about one’s health. The most effectual remedy for it is to think about increasing the comfort of others.

There is no need for me to go into details of what such a training should be to protect one as much as possible against the development of hereditary diseases. The precepts must be adapted to the particular case and circumstances, and in this age Personal Hygiene is a science by itself, with abundant and competent instructors. Its scope is not limited to the prevention of disease, but extends to the strengthening and symmetrical development of the whole body. No one who intelligently pursues his happiness will omit the study and practice of its precepts. Health is not indispensable to happiness. Fortunately, no one condition is indispensable. But there is no other condition which so generally and potently contributes to it. Therefore, he who intelligently seeks enjoyment will pay early and frequent attention to athletic culture; he will seek some healthful and agreeable physical exercise; his posture will be erect and his breathing full; his periods of effort will be prolonged to positive fatigue, and will be judiciously alternated by others of changed activity or complete repose.

The trainer of athletes lays down for his pupils a rigid discipline. He is as far from encouraging overstrain and excessive exercise as he is indolence. He condemns stimulants and narcotics beyond a most moderate use; and he is solicitous about such things as sleep, and food, and cleanliness. If his pupils find it repays them to submit to his stringent dicta for the hope of winning a champion’s belt or a silver medal, is it not worth while to accept the much less severe regimen necessary to obtain the Olympian garland woven of the joys which a sound and elastic health offers?

All that I have said on this subject applies with even greater force to girls and women than it does to youths and men. Women, alas, as I have before remarked, have the worser part in life. No one but a physician sees how much of their wretchedness is owing to ignorance or neglect of the laws of physical health. There is no excuse for this in this day. The wicked old doctrine which taught that ignorance of their own nature is a necessary condition of innocence in girls ought long since to have been cast out of window. It is as false as that the seclusion of a harem is necessary to insure the virtue of wives. In nine cases out of ten a woman’s health in life depends on the care she exercises between early puberty and the birth of her first child; and this is the precise period when the prejudices of society strive to keep her in profoundest ignorance of the laws which govern her own bodily functions!

More delightful to any true woman than the pleasures of health or the praise of her faculties is the adoration compelled by her beauty. Madame de Stael regretted that she could not exchange her magnificent powers and her literary fame for the personal charms of Madame Recamier. She was right. Let no woman be persuaded to abate one jot or tittle in her cult and culture of the comely in face and form. Only cramped bigots and dull pedants cheapen the value of beauty.

Beauty is real; it is that which alone is permanent and visible; it lurks behind a thousand masks and distorted countenances, ever struggling to body itself forth; it is the manifestation of potent and mysterious natural laws, which but for it would remain forever hidden from us. Its proud power is to awaken Love with all her joyous train; and Love means the unconscious attraction of the Ideal, the noblest incitement to human endeavor.

These are not mere phrases. They are facts proved by the life-history of the human race. As nations advance in civilization from the savage condition to one of enlightenment, their ideals of physical beauty steadily near a definite and the same conception of the perfect human form, the underlying motive of which is the highest function and a perfected capacity. This progress is rapid in proportion as that which is peculiarly human in man is cultivated beyond that which is merely animal. Not that any rigid canon of proportion or mechanical norm will ever be attained; because the endeavor is toward the Ideal, and this is beyond the reach of mortals.

These are the teachings of the learned in the Science of Man; they are constantly supported by the experience of history. Beauty is and ever has been the Desire of all Nations. For it, in all time, men have counted as nought their honor, their gold, and their hopes of heaven. For it, they have poured their heart’s blood on a thousand stricken fields, and laughed at death and hell. Think you that the noblest of the race would have thus reckoned the world well lost, and paid all that, wisdom holds precious for a smile from the lips of loveliness, were there not some strange and wondrous compensation, some immortal and unearthly significance, in Beauty itself?

There is such significance, and nowhere is it so visible as in the perfect female face and form. This is the most beautiful of all objects in nature or art. To it we turn to gaze, forgetting the works of the greatest masters which may be spread before us; unmindful of the sublimest scenes which mountain and lake may combine to show us. Nearer than anything else does it bring us to that Ideal World whose margin forever recedes as we approach it; louder in its presence sound the tinkling bells of that Fairyland which guards the fruition of our sweetest hopes and dreams.

The beauty of woman has been the incentive of physical progress in the race and the inspiration of its noblest arts. It shadows forth the embodied ideal of humanity, and in its resistless strength binds men as slaves to its chariot. But does it confer happiness on the possessor? Sad and faithful is the reply of the poet,――

“In every land I saw, wherever light illumineth, Beauty and Anguish walking hand in hand The downward slope to death.”

La fatale donna di bellezza, “the fatal gift of beauty,” says the proverb of the Italians. Perilous is the path of mortals who walk too near the gods. The brightest beacons are those which most attract the foul birds of night. The men or the women who shine beyond their fellows through the bounteous gifts of nature are the chosen targets for envy and hatred and calumny and all their ugly crew. In the clash of violent emotions excited by the radiance of fair faces, in the contention of love and jealousy, despair and passion, it is rare that the cause of it all escapes scot free. Her wisdom is also weakened by the adoration she receives; she assumes that it is for herself, forgetful that a passing disease or the accident of a moment may rob her of her charms forever. She has yet to learn that those alone are worthy of admiration to whom it is not a necessity.

Thus it happens that the vis superba formæ, the “proud strength of beauty,” so often proves a fatal weakness to its possessor. American women who have followed the fortunes of generations of belles tell me that those distinguished for their physical charms have as a rule met with less success and less happiness in their after life than their plainer sisters. This is not as it should be. Regularity of features, mobility of expression, harmony of coloring, symmetry of form, and gracefulness of motion are the five sides of the mystic pentagram of beauty, and, like that of the ancient astrologers, it should have power to exorcise and banish all evil spirits, and constrain men and demons to the willing service of ennobling joys.

A beautiful woman is the nearest approach we have to the perfected ideal of humanity in general. When in their statues of Apollo, Adonis, and the Hellenized Antinous, the ancient Greek sculptors portrayed their highest conception of manly beauty, in many points they approximated the male to the female form, recognizing in the lines of the latter a superior artistic excellence and the consummate expression of the ideal of the beautiful; nay, even the embodiment of the supreme of intellectual gifts. “Something feminine,” observed Coleridge in his Table Talk, “is discoverable in the countenances of all men of genius.” Therefore the artists represent angels as of that age when the male is most similar to the female,――tra giovane e fanciullo, between youth and childhood, as Tasso describes the archangel Gabriel.

Great is the value of physical culture; but let there be no misunderstanding as to what this value is. Such culture, under whatever title it appears, is but a means to an end. They miss its meaning who make it an end in itself. Its sole worth is to aid in bringing about that mental condition or process which we term felicity, or joyousness.

This point is more easily carried in some constitutions than in others. Much depends on what is called the “temperament,” and so much has been written about temperaments that I cannot afford to omit a reference to them. To be sure, they do not fill so many pages in modern writings as in those of an earlier age; but this may be because they are not now so well marked as they once were. Functions, like fashions, are subject to the law of periodicity.

The four leading temperaments with their mental traits are as follows: the sanguine, characterized by buoyant hope and strong self-confidence; the nervous, with rapid alternations of confidence and anxiety, prone to enthusiasm and to dejection; the phlegmatic, equally remote from the extremes of exaltation and despair, collected, temperate, and slow; and the bilious, inclined to take the gloomy view of events and to dwell on their darker side.

Most people can be classed under the one or the other of these, and the arrangement is not useless in self-culture, for it will furnish hints as to the manner of training required to correct unwholesome mental tendencies.

The temperament toward which they should all be modified is not included in the list. It is the cheerful temperament, that which is lighted by the rays of reasonable hope and a confidence in one’s own powers grounded on a knowledge of their strength.

Cheerfulness, however, is a coy favorite, and is not to be had for the asking. It is a condition of mind which a man cannot think himself into, nor reason himself into, nor directly acquire by an effort of the will. No man can seat himself in his chair and say to himself,――“Go to! I will be merry!” It can in part be secured by a skillful disposition of the emotions at our command; but it is, in the main, the mental result of physical processes, and the profitable study of it must begin with these.

So very physical is it, that physiologists have undertaken to locate its exact seat in the human body. They place it in the great ganglia of the sympathetic nervous system, near the stomach and the heart, where also is located the seat of the sense of general miserableness that the French call malaise. No one feels happy in his head or in his foot; but we do speak of being light of heart, as well as heart-heavy and heart-broken. Those savage tribes who believe that the soul dwells in the pit of the stomach are not the worst physiologists.

The mental condition in certain diseases show how correct this is. Those which directly involve the stomach, the liver, the heart, and the intestinal canal are always associated with undue depression of spirits; while those which are confined to the lungs or the brain, though of the most fatal gravity, may be connected with undiminished cheerfulness. The spes phthisica, the hopefulness of the consumptive, is proverbial among physicians, but as deceptive to them as to others. A friend of mine, a medical man, who had fought this disease for three years, wrote me three days before his death, sketching a series of literary schemes which he had decided to undertake! Another malady of similar character is a variety of paralysis, always fatal, not uncommon among overworked business men of middle life. The patient will never acknowledge that he is ill or feels badly, and when so paralyzed that he cannot rise from his couch will insist that he is in splendid health and is merely lazy! How different from the dyspeptic, always magnifying his symptoms; from the hypochondriac with engorged liver; or from the sufferer from heart disease, with his long and inexplicable spells of low spirits!

The moral of these facts is evident. If we wish to have a cheerful disposition we must begin with attention to our physical functions. Even slight symptoms of dyspepsia, liver complaints, and disturbances of the digestive organs must receive appropriate treatment. In this country malarial poisoning is common, and as it spends its force on the spleen, it is always associated with low spirits. Hemorrhoids, which are usually connected with deficient action of the liver, and in women many diseases peculiar to their sex, act directly in inducing a condition of gloom and anxiety.

Of course, it is no part of my plan to suggest the proper treatment for these ails. But it does come within its purview to offer some hints to those who, without assignable physical cause, are subject to periodic depression of spirits, to what we familiarly call “an attack of the blues.”

This is generally a reaction from mental overstrain or mental lethargy,――from the too intent pursuit of an object, or from having no object to pursue. A life without leisure and a life without labor are equally fatal to cheerfulness. The hurry and rush of business affairs, the atmosphere of excitement and unrest which surrounds them, are dangerous to a mind not extremely well poised. Not less so are the alternate phases of gloom and exaltation which attend religious revivals, prayer meetings, and the various manifestations of fanaticism. “That way madness lies,” and our asylums show a heavy percentage of inmates who have lost their reason from religious excitement. The prolonged concentration of attention on one’s heavenly interests is just as detrimental as on those of this world. Self-isolation is fatal; and anxiety for self-salvation is but one of its varieties.

While the multiplicity of rapid impressions leads to exhaustion and mental lassitude, variety and novelty are desirable. Change of diet is as salutary for the mind as for the body. One should have some agreeable occupation outside of his business, to which he can turn in his leisure moments and at the time when he quits active affairs. How many have I seen with enough to retire on, but with nothing to retire to! They are the unhappiest of mortals.

An occasional fit of depression can be broken by some simple measures. The hot bath is one of these. It is highly physiological, as its imperative summons of the nervous force to the periphery of the body breaks up the stagnation about the ganglionic centres. For the same reason the cold shower is excellent. No man leaves it in the same train of thought with which he entered it. Active exercise, society, games, and amusements will occur to all. Stimulants and narcotics are perilous palliatives. Better try Lord Lytton’s advice, and resolutely attack a new language; or Ruskin’s, to drive a restless horse or sail a cranky skiff, where the least inattention to what you have in hand means immediate danger to your life. You will have no time for the blues.

Self-preservation, I have said, is the prime condition of happiness. A long life, therefore, is the desire of all sane minds. Old age, that which all abhor, is the hope of all. It alone justifies a man to himself and before others. The sage is he whose life is a consistent whole, and who carries out in his age the plans which he laid in youth. They are not many; but even they deceive us by their number. On the ocean of existence, who counts the shipwrecked? We see the votive offerings of the saved displayed with ostentation, but who notes the number of the drowned? In the scenery of the drama of human life, the most conspicuous buildings are the hospitals and asylums, and into these sooner or later most of the actors disappear.

A learned French physician has maintained that the normal duration of human life is one hundred years; only a fifth of those born reach one half that age. Longevity is partly a birthright; it runs in families; but it is still more a question of occupation, mode of life, and personal hygiene. The Jews of Frankfurt average ten years more of life than the non-Jewish citizens, because they avoid unsanitary avocations and observe wiser rules of diet. I know a skillful physician who claims that he can lengthen the life of an individual a decade beyond the average of his ancestors by a judicious system of safeguards. Such an adviser is acquainted with the special dangers to which age is exposed. He knows, for instance, that at seventy-five exposure to cold is thirty-two times more dangerous than it is at thirty years of age.

The sorrows of age are usually the returns of the investments of youth, these proving of that sort which levy assessments instead of paying dividends. “A short life and a merry one,” is the maxim of many a youngster. The hidden falsehood at the core of his philosophy is the belief that happiness belongs to youth alone. I have already referred to this dangerous fallacy. The bliss of youth, as portrayed by poets and romancers, did not belong to the youth I had, nor does it to the youths I know. The admiration of the early periods of life is one of a common class of illusions. There is greater charm in beauty half-concealed than wholly shown, in the dawn rather than in the day, in the promise of youth rather than in the maturity of manhood. Potentialities please more than actualities, because they excite our imagination and release us from the fetters of facts.

He who would work securely for his own welfare will not be led astray by the belief that any one period of life contains solely or in any large measure the enjoyments of life as a whole. He will, therefore, not eat to-day the bread of to-morrow. Rather he will consider the problem of life akin to a problem of Euclid, the quod erat demonstrandum of which is reached only in the last line. He will guard the fires of youth, that he may not in age have to sit by the cold ashes of exhausted pleasures.

Sad indeed is the fate of those men who live to outlive themselves. You find them in every community, and especially in those classes of society which offer the greatest opportunities for early liberty and enjoyment. They suffer from a kind of premature senility. They have fallen in the struggle, though they are not visibly wounded. To them, life has lost its zest and action its aim. Usually this is the result of the early exhaustion of irrational enjoyments; but it may proceed from some blow of disappointed ambition, from a violent shock to the emotions, from the vertigo of unlooked-for prosperity, or the discouragement of persistent adversity. The stroke has fallen, and no voice can awake them to action again.

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The continuing satisfaction of an intense love of living,――that would be a fairly good definition of happiness, and not far from one which Fichte proposed.

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Few at any age could say with Fontenelle at ninety-three,――“Had I my life to live again, I should change nothing.”

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What nobler compliment could be paid a man than this, which Vittoria Colonna wrote to Michael Angelo,――“You have disposed the labor of your whole life as one single great work of art.”

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No road is the right one to him who knows not whither he is going.

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If you will stand in the rain, why pray the gods to keep you dry?

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Many a defeat, claimed as a victory, passes for one.

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Joys that are present are alone those that are real.

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There is wisdom in the Spanish saying, “The water of your own village is better than the wine of Rome.”

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Think over this, that Walt Whitman wrote:――

Will you seek afar off? You surely come back at last, In things best known to you finding the best, or as good as the best, In folks nearest to you finding the sweetest, strongest, lovingest, Happiness, knowledge, not in another place but in this place, not for another hour but this hour.

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The two misfortunes of life are, that we are born young, and become old.

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True, the mind of a child is a plot of virgin soil; but, like this, it is made up of strata of incalculable antiquity.

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The moral lessons of our youth are like our old love letters,――carefully preserved, but never read.

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Time wears out masks; the old show what they are.

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The mellowest fruits of life should ripen in its autumn; but if the spring had not its seeding, and the summer its flowers, what harvest can we look for?

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Many a man passes his youth in preparing misery for his age, and his age in repairing misconduct in his youth.

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The old story says that the flowers you gather in Fairyland prove to be withered weeds on your return.

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It is folly to be youthful unless you are young.

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An old man who indulges in love-making had better derive his pleasure from his own sentiments, than from the hope that they will be reciprocated.

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“Old men become frivolous,” once said to me Weir Mitchell, poet, physician, philosophic observer of life. Yes, frivolous and sense-bound. Youth is earnest and spiritual, because it is sentient of creative force.

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It is with health as with money; we wait till our stock is diminishing before we give it careful attention.

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A Chinese proverb says, it is easy enough to die, but difficult to die at the right time. Many a man has lived to destroy his own well-earned reputation or fortune.

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The danger of shipwreck is less in mid-ocean than near shore.

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Hurry to reap ruins the harvest. To garner the grain we must bide from the sowing till the seed-time.

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Pleasure is an expenditure of stored force. We must save up in order to have a good time. Nature is a merciless usurer, and demands heavy interest on her advances.

II. Our Physical Surroundings.

Palpably the nearest to us of all our physical surroundings is our clothing. Philosophers do not agree whether man originally adopted some covering for his body out of the desire of warmth, the sense of modesty, or the love of decoration. Enough that at present all these motives are operative, and all are to be respected.

The first purpose of clothing is to preserve the health by keeping out the cold. There is more in this than mere comfort. Warm clothing economizes nervous energy, which otherwise has to be expended on the extremities of the nerves to maintain the capillaries in activity. A man when comfortably warm can think more clearly than when he feels chilly. Mind and body are alike benumbed by extreme cold. Exposure to even a moderately low temperature is dangerous to the aged and the frail. Those who have studied the meteorology of health have established the maxim,――“Waves of cold are waves of death.”

In his clothing the sensible man will conform to the customs and station of society in which he moves. He will leave to his tailor the cut of his coat. It is a sign of greater weakness to affect a fashion of one’s own than to follow that of others. He will not be without a dress suit in civilized lands, and will not wear top boots in drawing rooms, as did in London a semi-celebrated American poet.

A century or two ago the dress of men was far more costly and significant. That they have now adopted a simple and uniform style shows that higher interests are occupying their minds. The first sign that women are approaching the same level will be their enfranchisement from the slavery of dress and fashion, to which so many of them devote the best part of their lives. To woman, clothing will always be more a question of art than utility. But most of the modes which she now follows are caricatures of art. For them, however, she will sacrifice not only good taste but good morals. Vanity in dress, not the deception of men, leads the majority of fallen women to their life. They feel more degraded by an unbecoming costume than by a tarnished reputation.

A man changes his character with his garments. Dirty clothes excuse dirty actions. I heard of a carpenter who was at a fire where he could easily have carried off articles; but he explained that he had on his best clothes, and that prevented him. The reason why sermons have so little effect is that we lay aside our Sunday suits on Monday morning. This is the value of uniform. Dress a hundred men alike, and they will think alike. The character is subdued to what ’tis clothed in. Outward, develops inward conformity. The world recognizes this, and accepts the clothing as the index of the mind. A well-dressed man is supposed to be a gentleman, and an officer with sword and epaulettes is regarded as a tactician and a hero. Would you change the current of your thoughts, change your raiment, and you will at once feel the effect. Would you assuage your grief, lay aside your mourning.

Next to our clothing, our immediate surroundings are the room and its furniture. A third of our lives is passed in our sleeping apartment, and most of the remainder in sitting-room, library, or office. It is well worth while, therefore, to give it attention. How much pleasure it can be made to render! The genial Xavier de Maistre consumed a month in making his celebrated Voyage autour de ma Chambre, and then regretted his time was so short. What harmonies of light and color, shade and perspective, even the humblest adornment of a room is capable of yielding! How each article of furniture comes to take its place in our lives and memories! The clock, the desk, the lounge, these are what make up the sense of Home. Even the noble sentiment of patriotism is founded upon them. To defend our hearth is its intimate purpose, and love of our easy-chair is a large share of our love of country. To all women and many men the most constant happiness of life is centred in the room and its furniture. Here is the temple of the Goddess of the Household, and her name should be Lætitia.

How much, therefore, depends on the selection of our living rooms! They should be light, bright, dry, airy, well-ventilated, equably warmed, appropriately furnished, free from bad odors, far from brutal noises, screened from impertinent curiosity. All these requirements ought to be easily obtained and at no great cost. But so little does modern architecture consider the true comfort and the real happiness of house-dwellers that it is rare that one can find all combined.

If he can, therefore, the wise man will prefer to build his own house. Some will question this. Somewhere in his works――they are too voluminous for me to look up the reference――Rousseau argues that a philosopher will not desire a house of his own, but will prefer to live in one that is rented. He will thus consult his independence, be free to come and go, not engage his affections on inanimate objects, find his fatherland wherever he may be, and the like.

For myself, I incline rather to the opinion of Abraham Cowley, less of a philosopher than Rousseau but more in sympathy with the general sentiments of mankind. I agree with him that “the pleasantest work of human industry is the improvement of something which we may call our own.” There is something in itself delightful in the mere sense of ownership of a part of the surface of the earth. It was not mere greed in Cosmo de Medici, who, when asked why he preferred his villa in the Apennines to his palace in Florence, replied,――“Because there, every foot of land I see is my own.” No prospect is quite so pleasing as that of our own acres, and those governments are strongest which base their institutions on the personal tenure of land.

The old proverb prescribes the chief duties of a man to be to build a house and beget a child. The character of his child he can but slightly control; the plan of his house is in his own hands, and his health and happiness are deeply involved in it. “He that builds a fair house on an ill site,” observes Bacon, “committeth himself to prison;” and I may add, he that builds an ill house on any site, sends himself and family to a hospital. One half of the deaths in England are from preventable causes, and one-half of these are causes connected with defective house building. The most perfect buildings are the gaols. Both in England and America the best care is taken of the worst men. The chances of life for the convict who is in prison is seven times better than when he is at liberty. If health is the highest good, we had better all apply to be sent to gaol.

The principal foes to fight are dampness, darkness, chilliness, draughtiness, insufficient ventilation, sewer-gas or other poisonous effluvia, contaminated or scanty water supply, and unhealthful situation. Architects know little about these matters. Decorative effects rather than sanitary perfection are what occupy their attention. Every house-builder should be his own architect to the extent of clearly knowing what he wants, and seeing that it is looked after in the plans.

A beautiful feature of American life is the ease with which every one can acquire his own home. Rapid transit facilitates this even for those who dwell in great cities.

The possession of his own house is within the reasonable ambition of every man, and should ever form a part of it. What if it must be a small house? He can say with Socrates――“Lucky me, if I have friends enough to fill it!”

“Cosiness!” how much that word implies! What pictures of intimate delights it brings before the mind! But who can imagine it in great, straggling mansions, or in “palace chambers far apart”? In the vast and gloomy palace of the Escorial, the only rooms I saw which would not induce an attack of melancholia to live in were a suite not larger than those in an ordinary American house, in which the royal family sought escape from the pressure of their own magnificence in their occasional visits to this famous pile. Happiness dwells not in spacious halls and stately apartments, and he who seeks it will not envy their possessors.

Has a house ever been built with an eye solely to the highest happiness of its inmates? to their health, sometimes; to their comfort, occasionally; to the parade of their riches, constantly; but to their happiness? I doubt. Conveniences, sanitary arrangements, agreeable vistas, balconies, porches, fireplaces, these would not be omitted, but would be merely the beginning of the plan. How to conciliate isolation with social relations, how to promote harmony between those serving and those served, how to provide that the employments of one do not jar with those of others, these would be some of the questions to consider. How many family troubles could be avoided by a properly built house! Faulty architecture is more frequently the ruin of family felicity than is heterodox doctrine.

The Greeks called man the “earth-born,” and the love of his native place is ever one of the most responsive of his heartstrings. Some say it is lacking in Americans, because they are so restless, but this is an error. The poor boy who wanders away from his native village to make his fortune does not forget the scenes of his childhood, and should his dreams be realized, returns to the old familiar places to leave at least some token of his affection. More than half the public libraries in New England towns have been given wholly or in large part by those who were to the manor born, but who had found fortune under strange skies.

The scenery of our dreams is generally that with which we were first familiar, and the dying old man babbles of the green fields of his boyhood. We may admire grand views from foreign belvederes, but those which we first saw remain unsurpassed. I crossed the ocean with an intelligent woman returning from the Rhine and the Alps; but her longing was for the vast, treeless prairies of Illinois, her girlish home, where sky meets earth all round the horizon, and the soul feels no confinement of mountains or forests.

Love of place rather than love of persons leads to the unhappy condition of homesickness. As “nostalgia,” it becomes an actual disease of body and mind, and men will die of it, unless allowed to return to their native land. Haunting, imperious thirst of the soul for the scenes of its early pleasures! Heaven cannot be imagined without them.

The thoughtful writer, Herder, who was the first to cultivate history as the seed-field of philosophy, was of opinion that it is less the earth on which we tread, than the air we breathe, which gives the peculiar charm to the scenes of childhood; meaning that it is the climate, and the sequence of the seasons which leave the chief impress on the budding observation of our surroundings. The eternal summer of the tropics becomes monotonous to the native of temperate latitudes, and the Eskimo or the Laplander in the more genial climes pines for the short, hot summer and bitter winter to which he has been accustomed. The desire, therefore, for more favorable climates, except for purposes of health, is an illusion. The “summer isles of Eden” would fatigue with their monotony and enervate by their excellence. The enjoyment of life is independent of the thermometer, if we determine it shall be. Sunshine within more than compensates for its absence without.

By climate we usually mean the weather, and this unquestionably exerts a powerful influence on human happiness. That of most portions of the United States keeps the character which William Penn gave it two hundred years ago――“constant in nothing but inconstancy.” Many a project of pleasure does it mar, and many a discomfort does it create! but in its very changeableness there is something attractive, as always lurks in the unexpected. If we travel the same road every day in the year, on no two are sky and landscape the same. Daily, new scenes are offered to our sight, each with its peculiar charm, if we take the trouble to look for it. Almost can one reason himself into an equality with that unapproachable philosopher, the Shepherd of Salisbury Plain, who, when asked what the weather would be on the morrow, replied that it would be just what he preferred; and on further inquiry as to what this might be, triumphantly answered, “Whatever the Lord sends.”

On some temperaments, a low barometer produces a peculiarly depressing effect. The advice often given them is to make renewed exertion at their customary employments, and combat the disinclination with the Will. My advice would be more agreeable; they should lay aside the customary routine, if possible, and seek in change, recreation, and amusements the cheerfulness which their ordinary employment refuses them. Do not spur the jaded horse, but rather offer repose and variety of motion.

The pressure of the atmosphere as indicated by the barometer has a great deal to do directly with health and spirits, and therefore with happiness. Those with a tendency to heart disease should seek a residence at the sea level, while many who have weak lungs will improve where the air is rarefied by a high altitude. What the Swiss call le mal des montagnes is a general sense of discomfort which some feel a few thousand feet above the sea, and which even prolonged residence does not entirely banish. An asthmatic can have no pleasure in life unless he finds the climate where he can breathe with comfort.

Worst of all for personal happiness is a malarial climate, and, unfortunately, they are very common in this country. The miasmatic poison is peculiarly depressing to the mind, and is always associated with debility and despondency. Malarial regions cannot be left uninhabited, but those whose evil fortune it is to be condemned to dwell in them have a heavy additional burden laid upon them in life.

* * * * *

We are all more or less like those lower animals whose colors change with their surroundings.

* * * * *

Seek the open air; the fruits which grow outdoors are alone those which ripen in season.

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He who loves his country more than he does his kind, loves himself more than either.

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To die for our country is truly noble, when our country is the world and our fellow-citizens all mankind.

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Love of country is sometimes a fine phrase for love of comfort.

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Woman, like the Emperor Tiberius, is smothered with clothes.

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Woman is philocosmic because she is philanthropic.

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Fine clothes are the stilts to individuality.

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A new suit is a new sensation.

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We do not wholly leave our bed-room all day long.

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Make the places you must occupy as pleasure-giving as possible.

* * * * *

Frugality is never better displayed than in furnishing.

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Outdoors, let Action rule in the ascendant; indoors, Repose.

* * * * *

Houses used to be built to protect from foes without; the need now is more protection for friends within.

III. Luck and its Laws.

When the wisest of the seven wise men of Greece was asked to name some happy person, he cited several, all of whom were among the dead. “And do you know none living who is happy?” queried his royal host, who had expected his own name to be mentioned among the fortunate few. “Call no man happy,” replied the sage, “until he is dead.” He forgot not that in the temples of his native land, Tyche, Goddess of Chance, was represented holding in one hand a rudder, for it is she who guides the affairs of men; but in the other hand a sphere, to warn of the instability of her favors. Like the King of Lydia, most of her modern votaries remember her former but forget her latter attribute.

Science preaches that the progress of thought has been from a time when Caprice and Chance were deemed everything in nature and Law was nothing, to the present day, when Law is known to be everything and Caprice and Chance are nothing.

Science may preach till it is hoarse, but there is something in the human mind ever insisting that the ancient Goddess, or some other inscrutable fatality, coerces the history of the individual; and that, from his birth, luck, good or bad, merriment or melancholy, marks him for her own. Rarely have I asked a man of large experience who denied the mighty influence of the unforeseen and unforeseeable in practical affairs. Some of the most extensive enterprises are based on the recognition of this truth, and it is mathematically demonstrable; for mathematicians are prepared to show that disorder itself is orderly, and that the vagaries of chance are bound by laws, and pinned in a straight jacket of formulas.

But what their apparatus of signs and symbols does not show, where it completely breaks down, is precisely the only point of human interest in the whole matter,――in its application to the individual life and fortunes. Averages and general laws they give us; but it is also a mathematical law that the average is never applicable to the individual. What is true of the whole series is never true of any one member of the series. No man who insured his life ever died at the precise minute which, according to the actuary’s tables, terminated his calculable expectation of life.

Let us see what, from this point of view, these computations about luck or chance teach.

In mathematics they are included in the Calculus of Probabilities, the discovery of which is attributed to Pascal. A gambling nobleman asked him what are the chances of turning a red or black card in cutting the pack a given number of times. As all the cards are either red or black, Pascal replied that it would be expressed by the formula x/2. In ordinary language, this means that when two events are equally probable, they will occur equally in the long run; and in practical affairs, when we neither know nor suspect things are unequal, we must assume them to be equal.

On these simple principles all calculations of chances, to be worth anything, must be based. But they are not so simple as they sound. Pascal’s formula, like all formulas of the higher mathematics, expresses an abstract truth only, and one that can never be realized in fact. The longer the run, the more certain will it be that the two events never will occur equally; and the more frequent will be long series of the recurrence of one or the other.

Turning aside from abstruse calculations, which can be readily found elsewhere by those who would like to see them, let us inquire as to the practical results of this Logic of Chance when applied to the fortunes of the individual.

These observed and calculated results establish the following interesting rule:――In matters of pure luck, about two-thirds of any given number of persons will come out substantially even, in any large number of trials; of the remaining third, about one-half will be noticeably lucky, and the remaining one-half noticeably unlucky. Thus, of six who venture, four will have no special fortune, good or bad; one will be quite “in vein”; one quite “out of vein.”

Suppose the players are thirty-six, and we select the lucky six, and pit them against each other, as in “progressive” games; the same law will hold good, one coming out noticeably better, one noticeably worse than the rest; and so on indefinitely, the number of the extremes diminishing at the rate of six to one at each new trial.

This is the Law of Luck; but it is obvious that it leaves luck, good and bad, a real fact; and among a million men, or in a great city like New York or London, we must find extraordinary examples of “sequences,” both of the favors and the frowns of fortune; not in gambling only, but in those thousands of accidental events which make up the welfare or misery of personal experience.

All the moralists I have read on the subject seem to blink and stagger at this obvious and necessary conclusion,――that the history of many individuals is and must be enormously controlled, in spite of any efforts of their own, by pure luck. In cutting the cards twenty times in succession, about twenty people in a million will cut red every time and another twenty will cut black every time; and so it will be with all other matters of pure chance in life. There is no use in trying to dodge this certain result of a sum in simple division. We must count it in, in all plans and calculations for success and happiness in our individual life.

The important question is, what value must we assign to it?

Here is where men make several frequent and disastrous errors.

The most common is an error in arithmetic which the little I have above said on the calculus of chance should be enough to correct. It is putting faith in their good luck, or falling into discouragement from their bad luck. Each is equally silly. A sequence of any kind of luck does not offer the slightest presumption that it will continue. The chances remain precisely as at the beginning, and are about six to one against the continuance of either extreme in the same individual. In matters of pure chance no sustained coincidence in either direction adds the least probability to its continuance. This is what is so difficult for men to believe; and so it comes about that faith in good luck is the source of most bad luck. A “run of good luck” has wrecked the lives of more men than has the repetition of disasters.

The reason for this is easily shown. The general rule in life is that a man’s prosperity is conditioned closely by the amount and kind of his knowledge, and his skill in the use of it. But the man who “trusts to luck” distinctly renounces the advantages of knowledge, and builds his hopes on his acknowledged impotence to influence the results. He abandons himself to the current of events, and makes no effort to look forward and see whether it will suck him into a whirlpool, or land him on some sunny shore. Scarcely any state of mind could be fraught with greater peril to his future.

We have the sayings, “dumb luck” and “a fool for luck;” and the Italians their proverb that one must have a little of the fool in him, un poco di matto, to be lucky. Most men are fools, so it is inherently probable that the lucky man will belong to the majority; but beyond that, his folly is conspicuous who bases his hopes of fortune rather on luck than on labor and forethought. The immorality of gambling and its ruinous influence on the happiness of life lie in the fact that it disclaims as useless every precept which prudence, skill, and knowledge lay down as essential to individual success.

It is mathematically certain that some people will have an astonishing succession of fortunate experiences which they have nowise aided in bringing about, ripe plums dropping into their mouths from invisible trees. They are popularly called “lucky fellows.” But the ancient Greeks, with that wonderful acumen in practical affairs which was their own, considered them peculiarly dangerous associates, to be avoided as partners in regular business, scarcely safe to associate with as companions. When Polycrates, King of Samos, was crowned with such repeated successes that it seemed as if the very gods might envy him, his friend, the King of Egypt, advised him to throw his most precious jewel, a wonderfully carved signet-ring, into the sea; and when this was brought back the next day by a fisherman, who had found it in the belly of a fish that had swallowed it, the King of Egypt withdrew his fleet and severed his treaty; for he knew some dreadful disaster awaited such unheard-of fortune; and it soon came when Polycrates fell into the hands of his enemy, and was crucified alive on the Asian strand.

The story is probably a fable; but its moral is an eternal truth. The hour of prosperity is ever dangerous; but when the prosperity has come without labor or effort or forethought, it is nearly always fatal. Unexpected success enervates the will and fosters illusions of the mind. The ancients represented the goddess Fortuna as proffering a cup of intoxicating wine to her favorites. Either they recognize their success as the result of pure chance, and persuade themselves that they are fortune’s favorite children, and can safely hazard any risks; or their vanity leads them to attribute what was the result of chance to their own miraculous sagacity, and they thus magnify to a dangerous degree their own capacities. Either conclusion leads them surely on the downward road to ruin.

Nowhere is this mental debility which seizes the believers in luck more absurdly shown than in the return to primeval superstition which it brings with it. The gambler, in his faith in caprice and chance, sinks to the level of the primitive savage, and accepts the superstitions of that level with equal readiness. The most cultivated habitué of Monte Carlo has his fetishes; he watches for signs and omens; he is as much the slave of auspicious or inauspicious auguries as an Australian cannibal. Pitiable retrogression of the human intellect! What absurdity will he not commit to “break the run of the luck” when it is against him! He will turn his chair thrice around; he will avoid playing if a red-whiskered man opposite him stakes; he will go to his hotel and change his coat. He knows that every principle of right reason and sound logic teaches that events cannot be modified by actions in no way relating to them, but he quietly renounces reason and logic as his guides!

Surely no man who is engaged in the intelligent pursuit of happiness will put himself in that position! I do not forget the pleasure of the game. That will be considered on a later page. But there is no need to argue that a pleasure which leads to the habitual disregard of reason as a monitor cannot be trusted as a permanent contributor to happiness.

One important practical point remains to be noted. Neither in the gambling room, nor outside, is there half so much mere luck in affairs as most people imagine. The cards are stacked, the dice are loaded, the balls are weighted. Only the gulls believe the game is fair. Shrewd men in business transactions like to conceal their hands, and persuade their clients and associates that much is the result of accident which they themselves have brought about. The plan has many advantages, and plays successfully on the most responsive chords of human weakness. It is said that the late Baron Rothschild of London declined to embark in an enterprise unless its promoters were known as lucky men. Do not imagine that he was governed by any foolish superstition. He knew, perhaps better than any one, what is the real significance of constant luck in the stock market; and would have been the last to have accepted it in the sense of the guileless gambler.

Much that in the lives of others we are apt to attribute to luck turns out on closer examination to be the natural though infrequent result of certain cultivated qualities. I have heard of several persons who have had handsome legacies left them by strangers in unexpected acknowledgment of kindness shown. Uniform courtesy is almost sure to be followed sooner or later by some such reward. People who are what we call “quick-witted,” whose judgment is cool and action prompt, are apt to be lucky even in misfortune. William of Normandy, landing for the conquest of England, tripped and fell on the sand. It was an evil presage, and his soldiers shrank back in terror. But William, seizing a handful of the soil, cried――“Thus I grasp this earth, and, by the splendor of God, I shall keep it.” With this he turned the gloomy portent into one the most auspicious. Moderate luck with good sense will repair any blunder, while folly will spoil the best of chances. “Fortune favors the bold,” simply because they have the courage to act; but she rarely favors them when they act without knowledge and prudence. When Shakespeare in the familiar passage says, “There is a tide in the affairs of men, which taken at the flood leads on to fortune,” he assumes that the fortunate man knows when flood-tide arrives.

As we are thus often deceived in the lives of others, so we are almost as frequently the dupes of our own experience. It is not easy to decide, concerning our successes and failures, which are owing to luck and which to ourselves. Confucius advises those who fail to follow the example of the archer when he misses the target, and examine first the instruments employed, and then themselves, as the cause of failure is likely to be in one or the other. Some minds are more exhilarated by gains than they are depressed by losses; others deplore losses more keenly than they enjoy successes; few estimate both at a just relative value.

Even the very unlucky should feel some cheerfulness when he reflects how in modern times we have learned to conciliate the Fates, and compel even the most adverse destiny to drop the ugliest of its masks. This we accomplish through the various forms of insurance, all of them based on the study of the very caprices of Fortune herself. Marvelous example of mind setting at nought the threats of brute nature! The very disasters before which our ancestors bowed most hopeless and most helpless, are those whose attacks we dread the least. Hail and lightning, storms on the ocean and fire in populous cities, we read about with small concern providing our property is well insured. By the same process we can protect our children from poverty and our own old age from want. Beneficent discovery, which in its varied forms has added incalculably to the happiness of man by freeing him from the terrors of the unknown, and providing him with a shield behind which he can afford to smile at the gloomiest frowns of Fate!

Subtler than any beast of the field is man, and filled with Promethean courage to rob the gods themselves! But behind the impenetrable veil, through which he sees not even darkly, are powers who smile in derision at his attempts to free himself from their eternal mastery. No logic can explain and no calculus compute the workings of their mysterious ways. Against the elemental wrath of fire and water man can guard himself; but against the results of the most thoughtless of his words or the slightest of his actions he has no protection, for he has not and cannot form the least idea of their consequences. Here Destiny rules undisputed and supreme.

Such reflections led the great Goethe in his old age to dwell more and more on the illimitable influence of trifling events, bedeutende Kleinigkeiten. Dull critics have misunderstood and some of the dullest have even made merry about his insistence on this pivotal truth in the history of every individual and in that of the world. The fate of nations has ever been decided by the most trivial occurrences. Cæsar, going to the Senate, refused to read a letter which was handed him, saying, “Business for to-morrow.” Had he opened it, the greatest empire that ever was would have had a different story to transmit to a different posterity. One summer morning the pretty Arleta, daughter of a Norman butcher, tripped down to the brook to wash her mother’s soiled linen. Had she waited a few minutes later, Robert the Devil would have already passed, and neither their son, the bastard William of Normandy, nor his thousands of knights would have set their iron heels on English soil. Louis XVI stops at St. Ménéhould to eat a pig’s foot, and the great and famous line of the Bourbons of France is extinguished by that single dish.

These are celebrated examples. But the thoughtful man will recognize in his own life and in the lives of those around him how they have been altered, directed, completely transformed by such slightest of incidents. His decision to pursue this or that avocation, that as to where he should settle, the first meeting with her who is his wife, the conversation which led to such or such an investment of the first importance, these, the most momentous actions of his life, turned on such casual and insignificant incidents that it makes him shiver to think of it! In such moments he is ready to exclaim,

“We do confess ourselves the slaves of chance And flies of every wind that blows.”

The prime motors of the thought of the world have not been the ponderous tomes of schoolmen nor the decrees of councils and universities. What, asks a philosophical historian, were the two most important events in the intellectual history of England during the seventeenth century? The Paradise Lost? The King James’ Version? No. One was the commitment of a strolling tinker to Bedford Jail; the other the decision of a distempered youth to make himself a coat of leather and go to live in a hollow tree. The one gave us the “Pilgrim’s Progress;” the other the immortal doctrine that faith, the true faith, “finds center everywhere,” and cares not to fix itself in form.

“Slaves of Chance!” Of Chance? Have I the right word? Is it Chance which through millions of years has steadily guided the increasing purpose which runs through all nature, which has multiplied the organs of animals and widened the minds of men with the progress of the suns; which has disabled the armies of kings by the weaponless words of a peasant; which has confounded wisdom by folly and foiled strength by weakness; never anywhere losing sight of the goal, unseen of men but surely divined, toward which tends the Motion of the World?

Chance? No. But by what other name shall I name it? Shall I take refuge in the jargon of the pulpit and call these “special providences?” Helpless evasion of the question! Impotent effort to distinguish between the special and the general designs of the Designer, obscuring the one central point to be kept in sight, that the special is the general and the general the special.

But why seek a name? A name becomes a fetish as much as a stock or a stone, and men bow down to it and worship it with as much abasement of their better natures. Enough, if in the fates of mighty nations and in each lightest act of the individual life we recognize the same Directing Force, invisible but nowise unintelligible, rather speaking with sun-clear words to our enlightened reason of conscious purpose and definite intention, to which the iron laws of Nature and the wild vagaries of Chance are ductile instruments and obedient servants.

This is the ultimate expression of abstract science and of that solid philosophy which is built on the inductive study of both nature and man. Its lesson to the individual is, that he is neither the helpless creature of necessity nor the slave of chance; that he is master of his immediate action, but of its consequences he is not master; that there are unseen forces at work arranging the incidents and accidents of his life, and these forces he can in no wise control; but if he is alert and diligent they cannot entangle his own individuality in the mesh of events, he can rise superior to them, can be himself, and win happiness to some degree in any surroundings; and he may go forward in the sublime and certain confidence that his existence is an essential part of an eternal plan, which asks neither faith nor authority for its recognition, for it is the logical condition of the very reason by which he knows that he is Himself and not another.

* * * * *

The calculus of probabilities has already destroyed the gods; if it could rule out the unexpected, it would promote man to their seats; but the fleshless face of old Time wears a perpetual though silent grin.

* * * * *

Fortune-tellers are put in jail because they deceive; they should be hanged, did they tell the truth. How dull were life, could it be read ahead! Only a weak nature, such as his, would say with Hartley Coleridge, “Happiness is the exclusion of all hap, that is, chance.” More virile are the words of Charles James Fox, inveterate gambler that he was, “The next best thing to winning is to lose.” The uncertainty of the future is the only stimulus to exertion, and its obscurity is the source of our chief delights.

* * * * *

Always expect a change of luck. Then, if it is from good to bad, you will be prepared for it; and if from bad to good, you will have enjoyed the pleasure of expecting it, as well as its arrival.

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“Give your son luck and throw him in the sea,” says a Spanish proverb.

* * * * *

There are men who succeed through their misfortunes rather than their good fortunes.

* * * * *

People regard bad luck as a kind of injustice. They secretly say with Louis XIV, when his armies were defeated in Flanders, “Has God forgotten all I have done for Him?”

* * * * *

The ancients reckoned a man’s luck, good or bad, among the gifts with which he is endowed by nature.

* * * * *

In very strong characters there is something which eludes analysis and defies definition, the very goad of destiny, driving them on their allotted paths with unrelenting and inevitable impulse. This is what the ancient Greeks, and among the moderns especially Goethe, recognized as the “demonic force.” It endows a life with dramatic unity and historic completeness.

* * * * *

Fate lies in fetters, so she no longer rules the stage.

* * * * *

The folly of some men turns out better than the foresight of others.

* * * * *

With Courage and Civility as allies you can often take captive Good-luck.

* * * * *

He who has well considered all the chances is prepared for the worst.

* * * * *

Because one cannot see ahead clearly, should he put out his eyes?

* * * * *

The captain who prefers trusting to luck to taking an observation is not the man to sail with.

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Bacon advises to use such as have been lucky because of the confidence they breed in others and the effort they will make “to maintain their prescription.”

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The first principle of success in the game of life is to be willing to lose. The player who will not sacrifice his pawns will soon have his king in check.

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Keep your wits about you. In the immediate exigencies of life a full pocketbook is more useful than a fine bank balance.

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Do you ever ask yourself why you expect good fortune to come without effort and bad fortune to stay away without precautions?