[Illustration]




When a Man Comes to Himself

by Woodrow Wilson
Ph.D., Litt.D., LL.D.

President of the United States

1901.


Contents

 I.
 II.
 III.
 IV.
 V.
 VI.




I


It is a very wholesome and regenerating change which a man undergoes
when he “comes to himself.” It is not only after periods of
recklessness or infatuation, when he has played the spendthrift or the
fool, that a man comes to himself. He comes to himself after
experiences of which he alone may be aware: when he has left off being
wholly preoccupied with his own powers and interests and with every
petty plan that centers in himself; when he has cleared his eyes to see
the world as it is, and his own true place and function in it.

It is a process of disillusionment. The scales have fallen away. He
sees himself soberly, and knows under what conditions his powers must
act, as well as what his powers are. He has got rid of earlier
prepossessions about the world of men and affairs, both those which
were too favorable and those which were too unfavorable—both those of
the nursery and those of a young man’s reading. He has learned his own
paces, or, at any rate, is in a fair way to learn them; has found his
footing and the true nature of the “going” he must look for in the
world; over what sorts of roads he must expect to make his running, and
at what expenditure of effort; whither his goal lies, and what cheer he
may expect by the way. It is a process of disillusionment, but it
disheartens no soundly made man. It brings him into a light which
guides instead of deceiving him; a light which does not make the way
look cold to any man whose eyes are fit for use in the open, but which
shines wholesomely, rather upon the obvious path, like the honest rays
of the frank sun, and makes traveling both safe and cheerful.




II


There is no fixed time in a man’s life at which he comes to himself,
and some men never come to themselves at all. It is a change reserved
for the thoroughly sane and healthy, and for those who can detach
themselves from tasks and drudgery long and often enough to get, at any
rate once and again, a view of the proportions of life and of the stage
and plot of its action. We speak often with amusement, sometimes with
distaste and uneasiness, of men who “have no sense of humor,” who take
themselves too seriously, who are intense, self-absorbed,
over-confident in matters of opinion, or else go plumed with conceit,
proud of we cannot tell what, enjoying, appreciating, thinking of
nothing so much as themselves. These are men who have not suffered that
wholesome change. They have not come to themselves. If they be serious
men, and real forces in the world, we may conclude that they have been
too much and too long absorbed; that their tasks and responsibilities
long ago rose about them like a flood, and have kept them swimming with
sturdy stroke the years through, their eyes level with the troubled
surface—no horizon in sight, no passing fleets, no comrades but those
who struggled in the flood like themselves. If they be frivolous,
light-headed men without purpose or achievement, we may conjecture, if
we do not know, that they were born so, or spoiled by fortune, or
befuddled by self-indulgence. It is no great matter what we think of
them.

It is enough to know that there are some laws which govern a man’s
awakening to know himself and the right part to play. A man _is_ the
part he plays among his fellows. He is not isolated; he cannot be. His
life is made up of the relations he bears to others—is made or marred
by those relations, guided by them, judged by them, expressed in them.
There is nothing else upon which he can spend his spirit—nothing else
that we can see. It is by these he gets his spiritual growth; it is by
these we see his character revealed, his purpose and his gifts. Some
play with a certain natural passion, an unstudied directness, without
grace, without modulation, with no study of the masters or
consciousness of the pervading spirit of the plot; others give all
their thought to their costume and think only of the audience; a few
act as those who have mastered the secrets of a serious art, with
deliberate subordination of themselves to the great end and motive of
the play, spending themselves like good servants, indulging no
wilfulness, obtruding no eccentricity, lending heart and tone and
gesture to the perfect progress of the action. These have “found
themselves,” and have all the ease of a perfect adjustment.

Adjustment is exactly what a man gains when he comes to himself. Some
men gain it late, some early; some get it all at once, as if by one
distinct act of deliberate accommodation; others get it by degrees and
quite imperceptibly. No doubt to most men it comes by slow processes of
experience—at each stage of life a little. A college man feels the
first shock of it at graduation, when the boy’s life has been lived out
and the man’s life suddenly begins. He has measured himself with boys;
he knows their code and feels the spur of their ideals of achievement.
But what the world expects of him he has yet to find out, and it works,
when he has discovered, a veritable revolution in his ways both of
thought and of action. He finds a new sort of fitness demanded of him,
executive, thorough-going, careful of details, full of drudgery and
obedience to orders. Everybody is ahead of him. Just now he was a
senior, at the top of the world he knows and reigned in, a finished
product and pattern of good form. Of a sudden he is a novice again, as
green as in his first school year, studying a thing that seems to have
no rules—at sea amid crosswinds, and a bit seasick withal. Presently,
if he be made of stuff that will shake into shape and fitness, he
settles to his tasks and is comfortable. He has come to himself:
understands what capacity is, and what it is meant for; sees that his
training was not for ornament or personal gratification, but to teach
him how to use himself and develop faculties worth using. Henceforth
there is a zest in action, and he loves to see his strokes tell.

The same thing happens to the lad come from the farm into the city, a
big and novel field, where crowds rush and jostle, and a rustic boy
must stand puzzled for a little how to use his placid and unjaded
strength. It happens, too, though in a deeper and more subtle way, to
the man who marries for love, if the love be true and fit for foul
weather. Mr. Bagehot used to say that a bachelor was “an amateur at
life,” and wit and wisdom are married in the jest. A man who lives only
for himself has not begun to live—has yet to learn his use, and his
real pleasure, too, in the world. It is not necessary he should marry
to find himself out, but it is necessary he should love. Men have come
to themselves serving their mothers with an unselfish devotion, or
their sisters, or a cause for whose sake they forsook ease and left off
thinking of themselves. It is unselfish action, growing slowly into the
high habit of devotion, and at last, it may be, into a sort of
consecration, that teaches a man the wide meaning of his life, and
makes of him a steady professional in living, if the motive be not
necessity, but love. Necessity may make a mere drudge of a man, and no
mere drudge ever made a professional of himself; that demands a higher
spirit and a finer incentive than his.




III


Surely a man has come to himself only when he has found the best that
is in him, and has satisfied his heart with the highest achievement he
is fit for. It is only then that he knows of what he is capable and
what his heart demands. And, assuredly, no thoughtful man ever came to
the end of his life, and had time and a little space of calm from which
to look back upon it, who did not know and acknowledge that it was what
he had done unselfishly and for others, and nothing else, that
satisfied him in the retrospect, and made him feel that he had played
the man. That alone seems to him the real measure of himself, the real
standard of his manhood. And so men grow by having responsibility laid
upon them, the burden of other people’s business. Their powers are put
out at interest, and they get usury in kind. They are like men
multiplied. Each counts manifold. Men who live with an eye only upon
what is their own are dwarfed beside them—seem fractions while they are
integers. The trustworthiness of men trusted seems often to grow with
the trust.

It is for this reason that men are in love with power and greatness: it
affords them so pleasurable an expansion of faculty, so large a run for
their minds, an exercise of spirit so various and refreshing; they have
the freedom of so wide a tract of the world of affairs. But if they use
power only for their own ends, if there be no unselfish service in it,
if its object be only their personal aggrandizement, their love to see
other men tools in their hands, they go out of the world small,
disquieted, beggared, no enlargement of soul vouchsafed them, no usury
of satisfaction. They have added nothing to themselves. Mental and
physical powers alike grow by use, as every one knows; but labor for
oneself is like exercise in a gymnasium. No healthy man can remain
satisfied with it, or regard it as anything but a preparation for tasks
in the open, amid the affairs of the world—not sport, but
business—where there is no orderly apparatus, and every man must devise
the means by which he is to make the most of himself. To make the most
of himself means the multiplication of his activities, and he must turn
away from himself for that. He looks about him, studies the facts of
business or of affairs, catches some intimation of their larger
objects, is guided by the intimation, and presently finds himself part
of the motive force of communities or of nations. It makes no
difference how small a part, how insignificant, how unnoticed. When his
powers begin to play outward, and he loves the task at hand, not
because it gains him a livelihood, but because it makes him a life, he
has come to himself.

Necessity is no mother to enthusiasm. Necessity carries a whip. Its
method is compulsion, not love. It has no thought to make itself
attractive; it is content to drive. Enthusiasm comes with the
revelation of true and satisfying objects of devotion; and it is
enthusiasm that sets the powers free. It is a sort of enlightenment. It
shines straight upon ideals, and for those who see it the race and
struggle are henceforth toward these. An instance will point the
meaning. One of the most distinguished and most justly honored of our
great philanthropists spent the major part of his life absolutely
absorbed in the making of money—so it seemed to those who did not know
him. In fact, he had very early passed the stage at which he looked
upon his business as a means of support or of material comfort.
Business had become for him an intellectual pursuit, a study in
enterprise and increment. The field of commerce lay before him like a
chess-board; the moves interested him like the manoeuvers of a game.
More money was more power, a great advantage in the game, the means of
shaping men and events and markets to his own ends and uses. It was his
will that set fleets afloat and determined the havens they were bound
for; it was his foresight that brought goods to market at the right
time; it was his suggestion that made the industry of unthinking men
efficacious; his sagacity saw itself justified at home not only, but at
the ends of the earth. And as the money poured in, his government and
mastery increased, and his mind was the more satisfied. It is so that
men make little kingdoms for themselves, and an international power
undarkened by diplomacy, undirected by parliaments.




IV


It is a mistake to suppose that the great captains of industry, the
great organizers and directors of manufacture and commerce and monetary
exchange, are engrossed in a vulgar pursuit of wealth. Too often they
suffer the vulgarity of wealth to display itself in the idleness and
ostentation of their wives and children, who “devote themselves,” it
may be, “to expense regardless of pleasure”; but we ought not to
misunderstand even that, or condemn it unjustly. The masters of
industry are often too busy with their own sober and momentous calling
to have time or spare thought enough to govern their own households. A
king may be too faithful a statesman to be a watchful father. These men
are not fascinated by the glitter of gold: the appetite for power has
got hold upon them. They are in love with the exercise of their
faculties upon a great scale; they are organizing and overseeing a
great part of the life of the world. No wonder they are captivated.
Business is more interesting than pleasure, as Mr. Bagehot said, and
when once the mind has caught its zest, there’s no disengaging it. The
world has reason to be grateful for the fact.

It was this fascination that had got hold upon the faculties of the man
whom the world was afterward to know, not as a prince among
merchants—for the world forgets merchant princes—but as a prince among
benefactors; for beneficence breeds gratitude, gratitude admiration,
admiration fame, and the world remembers its benefactors. Business, and
business alone, interested him, or seemed to him worthwhile. The first
time he was asked to subscribe money for a benevolent object he
declined. Why _should_ he subscribe? What affair would be set forward,
what increase of efficiency would the money buy, what return would it
bring in? Was good money to be simply given away, like water poured on
a barren soil, to be sucked up and yield nothing? It was not until men
who understood benevolence on its sensible, systematic, practical, and
really helpful side explained it to him as an investment that his mind
took hold of it and turned to it for satisfaction. He began to see that
education was a thing of infinite usury; that money devoted to it would
yield a singular increase to which there was no calculable end, an
increase in perpetuity—increase of knowledge, and therefore of
intelligence and efficiency, touching generation after generation with
new impulses, adding to the sum total of the world’s fitness for
affairs—an invisible but intensely real spiritual usury beyond
reckoning, because compounded in an unknown ratio from age to age.
Henceforward beneficence was as interesting to him as business—was,
indeed, a sort of sublimated business in which money moved new forces
in a commerce which no man could bind or limit.

He had come to himself—to the full realization of his powers, the true
and clear perception of what it was his mind demanded for its
satisfaction. His faculties were consciously stretched to their right
measure, were at last exercised at their best. He felt the keen zest,
not of success merely, but also of honor, and was raised to a sort of
majesty among his fellow-men, who attended him in death like a dead
sovereign. He had died dwarfed had he not broken the bonds of mere
money-getting; would never have known himself had he not learned how to
spend it; and ambition itself could not have shown him a straighter
road to fame.

This is the positive side of a man’s discovery of the way in which his
faculties are to be made to fit into the world’s affairs, and released
for effort in a way that will bring real satisfaction. There is a
negative side also. Men come to themselves by discovering their
limitations no less than by discovering their deeper endowments and the
mastery that will make them happy. It is the discovery of what they can
_not_ do, and ought not to attempt, that transforms reformers into
statesmen; and great should be the joy of the world over every reformer
who comes to himself. The spectacle is not rare; the method is not
hidden. The practicability of every reform is determined absolutely and
always by “the circumstances of the case,” and only those who put
themselves into the midst of affairs, either by action or by
observation, can know what those circumstances are or perceive what
they signify. No statesman dreams of doing whatever he pleases; he
knows that it does not follow that because a point of morals or of
policy is obvious to him it will be obvious to the nation, or even to
his own friends; and it is the strength of a democratic polity that
there are so many minds to be consulted and brought to agreement, and
that nothing can be wisely done for which the thought, and a good deal
more than the thought, of the country, its sentiment and its purpose,
have not been prepared. Social reform is a matter of cooperation, and
if it be of a novel kind, requires an infinite deal of converting to
bring the efficient majority to believe in it and support it. Without
their agreement and support it is impossible.




V


It is this that the more imaginative and impatient reformers find out
when they come to themselves, if that calming change ever comes to
them. Oftentimes the most immediate and drastic means of bringing them
to themselves is to elect them to legislative or executive office. That
will reduce over-sanguine persons to their simplest terms. Not because
they find their fellow-legislators or officials incapable of high
purpose or indifferent to the betterment of the communities which they
represent. Only cynics hold that to be the chief reason why we approach
the millennium so slowly, and cynics are usually very ill-informed
persons. Nor is it because under our modern democratic arrangements we
so subdivide power and balance parts in government that no one man can
tell for much or turn affairs to his will. One of the most instructive
studies a politician could undertake would be a study of the infinite
limitations laid upon the power of the Russian Czar, notwithstanding
the despotic theory of the Russian constitution—limitations of social
habit, of official prejudice, of race jealousies, of religious
predilections, of administrative machinery even, and the inconvenience
of being himself only one man, caught amidst a rush of duties and
responsibilities which never halt or pause. He can do only what can be
done with the Russian people. He cannot change them at will. He is
himself of their own stuff, and immersed in the life which forms them,
as it forms him. He is simply the leader of the Russians.

An English or American statesman is better off. He leads a thinking
nation, not a race of peasants topped by a class of revolutionists and
a caste of nobles and officials. He can explain new things to men able
to understand, persuade men willing and accustomed to make independent
and intelligent choices of their own. An English statesman has an even
better opportunity to lead than an American statesman, because in
England executive power and legislative initiative are both intrusted
to the same grand committee, the ministry of the day. The ministers
both propose what shall be law and determine how it shall be enforced
when enacted. And yet English reformers, like American, have found
office a veritable cold-water bath for their ardor for change. Many a
man who has made his place in affairs as the spokesman of those who see
abuses and demand their reformation has passed from denunciation to
calm and moderate advice when he got into Parliament, and has turned
veritable conservative when made a minister of the crown. Mr. Bright
was a notable example. Slow and careful men had looked upon him as
little better than a revolutionist so long as his voice rang free and
imperious from the platforms of public meetings. They greatly feared
the influence he should exercise in Parliament, and would have deemed
the constitution itself unsafe could they have foreseen that he would
some day be invited to take office and a hand of direction in affairs.
But it turned out that there was nothing to fear. Mr. Bright lived to
see almost every reform he had urged accepted and embodied in
legislation; but he assisted at the process of their realization with
greater and greater temperateness and wise deliberation as his part in
affairs became more and more prominent and responsible, and was at the
last as little like an agitator as any man that served the queen.

It is not that such men lose courage when they find themselves charged
with the actual direction of the affairs concerning which they have
held and uttered such strong, unhesitating, drastic opinions. They have
only learned discretion. For the first time they see in its entirety
what it was that they were attempting. They are at last at close
quarters with the world. Men of every interest and variety crowd about
them; new impressions throng them; in the midst of affairs the former
special objects of their zeal fall into new environments, a better and
truer perspective; seem no longer so susceptible to separate and
radical change. The real nature of the complex stuff of life they were
seeking to work in is revealed to them—its intricate and delicate
fiber, and the subtle, secret interrelationship of its parts—and they
work circumspectly, lest they should mar more than they mend. Moral
enthusiasm is not, uninstructed and of itself, a suitable guide to
practicable and lasting reformation; and if the reform sought be the
reformation of others as well as of himself, the reformer should look
to it that he knows the true relation of his will to the wills of those
he would change and guide. When he has discovered that relation, he has
come to himself: has discovered his real use and planning part in the
general world of men; has come to the full command and satisfying
employment of his faculties. Otherwise he is doomed to live for ever in
a fool’s paradise, and can be said to have come to himself only on the
supposition that he is a fool.




VI


Every man—if I may adopt and paraphrase a passage from Dr. South—every
man hath both an absolute and a relative capacity: an absolute in that
he hath been endued with such a nature and such parts and faculties;
and a relative in that he is part of the universal community of men,
and so stands in such a relation to the whole. When we say that a man
has come to himself, it is not of his absolute capacity that we are
thinking, but of his relative. He has begun to realize that he is part
of a whole, and to know _what_ part, suitable for what service and
achievement.

It was once fashionable—and that not a very long time ago—to speak of
political society with a certain distaste, as a necessary evil, an
irritating but inevitable restriction upon the “natural” sovereignty
and entire self-government of the individual. That was the dream of the
egotist. It was a theory in which men were seen to strut in the proud
consciousness of their several and “absolute” capacities. It would be
as instructive as it would be difficult to count the errors it has bred
in political thinking. As a matter of fact, men have never dreamed of
wishing to do without the “trammels” of organized society, for the very
good reason that those trammels are in reality but no trammels at all,
but indispensable aids and spurs to the attainment of the highest and
most enjoyable things man is capable of. Political society, the life of
men in states, is an abiding natural relationship. It is neither a mere
convenience nor a mere necessity. It is not a mere voluntary
association, not a mere corporation. It is nothing deliberate or
artificial, devised for a special purpose. It is in real truth the
eternal and natural expression and embodiment of a form of life higher
than that of the individual—that common life of mutual helpfulness,
stimulation, and contest which gives leave and opportunity to the
individual life, makes it possible, makes it full and complete.

It is in such a scene that man looks about to discover his own place
and force. In the midst of men organized, infinitely cross-related,
bound by ties of interest, hope, affection, subject to authorities, to
opinion, to passion, to visions and desires which no man can reckon, he
casts eagerly about to find where he may enter in with the rest and be
a man among his fellows. In making his place he finds, if he seek
intelligently and with eyes that see, more than ease of spirit and
scope for his mind. He finds himself—as if mists had cleared away about
him and he knew at last his neighborhood among men and tasks.

What every man seeks is satisfaction. He deceives himself so long as he
imagines it to lie in self-indulgence, so long as he deems himself the
center and object of effort. His mind is spent in vain upon itself. Not
in action itself, not in “pleasure,” shall it find its desires
satisfied, but in consciousness of right, of powers greatly and nobly
spent. It comes to know itself in the motives which satisfy it, in the
zest and power of rectitude. Christianity has liberated the world, not
as a system of ethics, not as a philosophy of altruism, but by its
revelation of the power of pure and unselfish love. Its vital principle
is not its code, but its motive. Love, clear-sighted, loyal, personal,
is its breath and immortality. Christ came, not to save Himself,
assuredly, but to save the world. His motive, His example, are every
man’s key to his own gifts and happiness. The ethical code he taught
may no doubt be matched, here a piece and there a piece, out of other
religions, other teachings and philosophies. Every thoughtful man born
with a conscience must know a code of right and of pity to which he
ought to conform; but without the motive of Christianity, without love,
he may be the purest altruist and yet be as sad and as unsatisfied as
Marcus Aurelius.

Christianity gave us, in the fullness of time, the perfect image of
right living, the secret of social and of individual well-being; for
the two are not separable, and the man who receives and verifies that
secret in his own living has discovered not only the best and only way
to serve the world, but also the one happy way to satisfy himself.
Then, indeed, has he come to himself. Henceforth he knows what his
powers mean, what spiritual air they breathe, what ardors of service
clear them of lethargy, relieve them of all sense of effort, put them
at their best. After this fretfulness passes away, experience mellows
and strengthens and makes more fit, and old age brings, not senility,
not satiety, not regret, but higher hope and serene maturity.

THE END