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Title: Happiness: Essays on the meaning of life

Author: Karl Hilty

Translator: Francis Greenwood Peabody

Release date: August 23, 2022 [eBook #68817]

Language: English

Original publication: United States: Macmillan, 1903

Credits: Turgut Dincer, David E. Brown, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HAPPINESS: ESSAYS ON THE MEANING OF LIFE ***





HAPPINESS: BY CARL HILTY

[Illustration]




  HAPPINESS

  ESSAYS ON THE MEANING
  OF LIFE BY CARL HILTY

  PROFESSOR OF CONSTITUTIONAL LAW
  UNIVERSITY OF BERN. TRANSLATED BY
  FRANCIS GREENWOOD PEABODY
  PROFESSOR OF CHRISTIAN MORALS IN
  HARVARD UNIVERSITY, CAMBRIDGE

  [Illustration]

  NEW YORK: THE MACMILLAN CO.
  LONDON: MACMILLAN & CO., L^{TD.} 1903




  COPYRIGHT, 1903, BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY

  Set up and electrotyped January, 1903. Reprinted June,
  October, 1903.

  Norwood Press:
  Berwick & Smith Co., Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.




CONTENTS


  ESSAY I                             PAGE
  THE ART OF WORK                        3

  ESSAY II
  HOW TO FIGHT THE BATTLES OF LIFE      25

  ESSAY III
  GOOD HABITS                           45

  ESSAY IV
  THE CHILDREN OF THIS WORLD ARE
  WISER THAN THE CHILDREN OF LIGHT      61

  ESSAY V
  THE ART OF HAVING TIME                73

  ESSAY VI
  HAPPINESS                             97

  ESSAY VII
  THE MEANING OF LIFE                  127

  NOTES                                153




PREFACE


_Great numbers of thoughtful people are just now much perplexed to
know what to make of the facts of life, and are looking about them
for some reasonable interpretation of the modern world. They cannot
abandon the work of the world, but they are conscious that they have
not learned the art of work. They have to fight the battle of life, but
they are not sure what weapons are fit for that battle. They are so
beset by the cares of living that they have no time for life itself.
They observe that happiness often eludes those who most eagerly pursue
it; and that the meaning of life is often hidden from those whose
way would seem to be most free. To this state of mind--hesitating,
restless, and dissatisfied, in the world but not content to be of the
world--the reflections of Professor Hilty, as published in Switzerland
and Germany, have already brought much reassurance and composure; and
their message seems hardly less applicable to English and American
life. Here also the fever of commercialism threatens the vitality of
idealism, and here also the art of life is lost in the pace of living.
Religion to a great many educated people still seems, as Bishop Butler
wrote in 1736, “not so much as a subject of inquiry. This seems agreed
among persons of discernment”; and a book about religion might still
begin with the words which Schleiermacher wrote in 1806: “It may well
surprise the wise men of this age that any one should still venture to
ask their attention for a subject which they have so wholly abandoned.”
And yet, in regions of experience which no one fails sooner or later to
enter,--regions of great joy and sorrow, experiences of serious duty
and bewildering doubts of the meaning of life,--many a mind that has
seemed to itself to have outgrown religion looks about for a religion
that is real. Such a mind will not be satisfied with a left-over faith;
it will not be tempted by an ecclesiastical omniscience. It demands
sanity, reserve, wisdom, and insight, a competent witness of the things
of the Spirit. This is the state of mind to which this little book
is addressed. The author makes his appeal not to discussion, but to
life. He reports the story of a rational experience. He walks with
confidence because he knows the way. He accepts the saying of Pico
della Mirandola: “Philosophia veritatem quaerit, ... religio possidet.”
Let us take life, he says, just as it is and must be, and observe that
the doors which lead into its inner meaning open only to the key of a
reasonable faith._

_It might be fancied that a writer thus described must be a recluse
or mystic, remote from the spirit of the modern world and judging
experiences which he does not share. Quite the contrary is the fact.
The philosophy of life which he teaches is wrought out of large
experience, both of academic and political affairs, and that which
draws readers to the author is his capacity to maintain in the midst of
important duties of public service an unusual detachment of desire and
an interior quietness of mind. His short Essays are the Meditations of
Marcus Aurelius, told in the language of modern life; the Imitation of
Christ, expressed with the academic reserve of a modern gentleman._

_Some years ago I obtained permission from Professor Hilty to translate
for English and American readers a few of these Essays which had
found such acceptance in Switzerland and Germany; and the present
volume, containing his first series, has been a pleasant occupation of
some vacation days. I have found it necessary, however, to use much
freedom in dealing with his idiomatic and epigrammatic style, and have
perhaps exceeded the legitimate right of a translator in the attempt
to reproduce the tone and temper of the author. Nothing, I think, is
here which Professor Hilty has not said; but there are many shiftings
of phrase and many ruptures of German sentences; and here and there
a passage has been omitted which seemed important to Swiss readers
only. The Essay on Epictetus, being rather a compilation and review
than an illustration of Hilty’s own philosophy of life, is omitted;
as are also the copious and discursive footnotes which enrich the
original. I trust that these liberties and omissions may not obscure
the qualities of Professor Hilty’s mind--its insight, sagacity, humor,
and devoutness--which no one who has had the privilege of his personal
acquaintance can recall without affection and gratitude._

                                                     FRANCIS G. PEABODY.

  _Cambridge, Massachusetts, October 15, 1902._




NOTE


_Carl Hilty was born February 28, 1833, at Chur, Switzerland. He
was a student at Göttingen, Heidelberg, London, and Paris; and an
advocate at Chur, 1855-1874. In 1874 he was appointed Professor of
Constitutional Law (Staats- und Völkerrecht) in the University of Bern,
which position he still holds. Since 1890 he has been a member of
the Swiss House of Representatives (Nationalrat); and in 1901 he was
Rector of the University of Bern. Among his scientific writings may be
named the following: Theorists and Idealists of Democracy (Theoristen
und Idealisten der Demokratie), Bern, 1868; Ideas and Ideals of Swiss
Politics (Ideen und Ideale schweizerischer Politik), Bern, 1875;
Lectures on the Swiss Political System (Vorlesungen über die Politik
der Eidgenossenschaft), Bern, 1879; On Capital Punishment (Ueber die
Wiedereinführung der Todesstrafe), Bern, 1879; The Neutrality of
Switzerland (Die Neutralität der Schweiz in ihrer heutigen Auffassung),
Bern, 1889 (French translation by Mentha, 1889); The Referendum in
Switzerland (Das Referendum im schweizerischen Staatsrecht), Archiv
für öffentliches Recht, 1887; The Boer War (Der Burenkrieg), Bern,
1900. He has also been the editor of the Journal of Swiss Jurisprudence
(Politisches Jahrbuch der schweizerischen Eidgenossenschaft) since
1886._

_In the midst of this scientific activity Professor Hilty has expressed
his inner life through a series of little books issued at intervals
during the last ten years, as follows: Happiness (Glück), First Series,
1891, Second Series, 1895, Third Series, 1898; On Reading and Speaking
(Lesen und Reden), 1891; For Sleepless Nights (Für schlaflose Nächte)
[Brief Readings for each Day of the Year], 1901._




I. THE ART OF WORK




I. THE ART OF WORK


The most important of all arts is the art of work; for if one could
thoroughly understand this art, all other knowledge and conduct would
be infinitely simplified. Few people, however, really know how to work,
and even in an age when oftener perhaps than ever before we hear of
“work” and “workers” one cannot observe that the art of work makes much
positive progress. On the contrary, the general inclination seems to be
to work as little as possible, or to work for a short time in order to
pass the remainder of one’s life in rest.

Work and rest--are they then aims in life which are positively
contradictory? This must be our first inquiry; for while every one is
ready with praise of work, pleasure in work does not always come with
the praising. So long as the disinclination to work is so common an
evil, indeed almost a disease of modern civilization, so long as every
one as soon as possible endeavors to escape from the work which he thus
theoretically praises, there is absolutely no hope for any bettering of
our social condition. Indeed, if work and rest were contradictories,
our social conditions would be wholly beyond redemption.

For every human heart longs for rest. The humblest and least
intellectual know the need of it, and in its highest moods, the soul
seeks relief from constant strain. Indeed, the imagination has found
no better name for a future and happier existence than a state of
eternal rest. If work, then, is necessary, and rest is the cessation
of work, then the saying--“In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat
bread”--is indeed a bitter curse and this earth is a “vale of tears.”
In every generation there are but few who can on such terms be said
to lead a worthy or a human life; and even these can do so only by
dooming other human beings to the curse of work and by holding these
others fast bound in its slavery. It was from this point of view that
the ancient authors pictured the hopeless slavery of the many as the
condition under which the few might become free citizens of a civilized
State; and even in the nineteenth century, a considerable part of the
population of one great nation, with Christian preachers, Bible in
hand, directing them, maintained on the field of battle the proposition
that one race should be from generation to generation condemned to be
the slave of another. Culture, it is said, grows only under conditions
of wealth, and wealth only through accumulation of capital, and capital
only through accumulation of the work of those who are not justly
paid; that is to say, through injustice.

Such are the conceptions of society which at once confront us as we
approach our subject. The following pages are not, however, to be
devoted to any profound consideration either of the relative or of the
absolute truth of these conceptions. I suggest, at this point, only the
obvious truth, that if, not some people, but all, would work and work
faithfully, the “Social Question,” as it is called, would be forthwith
solved; and I may add, that by no other means whatever is it likely
to be solved. Faithful work, however, is not to be brought about by
compulsion. Even if the physical means of universal compulsion were
present, no fruitful work would come of it. It is the desire for work
which must be kindled in man; and this brings us back again to consider
the principles which may be applied to this desire.

The desire for work, we must, first of all, admit, cannot be attained
by instruction; or even--as our daily experience sadly testifies--by
mere example. It must be reached by reflection and experience; and
experience thus reflected on will reveal to any serious inquirer the
following facts. Rest, such as is desired, is not to be found in
complete inactivity of mind or body, or in as little activity as
possible. On the contrary, it is to be found only in well-adapted and
well-ordered activity of both body and mind. The whole nature of man is
created for activity, and Nature revenges herself bitterly on him who
would rashly defy this law. Man is indeed driven out of the paradise of
absolute rest, and God gives him the command to work, but with the work
comes the consolation that work is essential to happiness.

True rest, therefore, issues from work. Intellectual rest occurs
through the perception of fruitful progress in one’s work, and through
the solving of one’s problems. Physical rest is found in those natural
intermissions which are given by daily sleep and daily food, and the
essential and restful pause of Sunday. Such a condition of continuous
and wholesome activity, interrupted only by these natural pauses, is
the happiest condition on earth, and no man should wish for himself
any other outward happiness. Indeed, we may go a step farther and add
that it does not very much matter what the nature of this activity may
be. Genuine activity, which is not mere sport, has the property of
becoming interesting as soon as a man becomes seriously absorbed in it.
It is not the kind of activity which ensures happiness to us; it is the
joy of action and attainment. The greatest unhappiness which one can
experience is to have a life to live without a work to do, and to come
to the end of life without its fruit of accomplished work.

It is, therefore, wholly justifiable to speak of the “right to work.”
Indeed, it is the most primitive of all human rights. The unemployed
are, we must admit, the most unfortunate of people. There are, however,
quite as many of these, and perhaps more of them, in what we call
the better classes than among what we call the working classes. The
latter are driven to work by necessity, while the former, through
their mistaken ways of education, their prejudices, and the imperious
custom which in certain classes forbids genuine work, find themselves
almost absolutely and by heredity condemned to this great unhappiness.
Each year we see them turning their steps with spiritual weariness and
_ennui_ to the Swiss mountains and health-resorts, from which in vain
they anticipate refreshment. Once, the summer was enough to give them
at least a temporary restoration from their disease of idleness. Now,
they have to add the winter also, and soon the fair valleys which they
have converted into hospitals will be open all the year to a restless
throng, ever seeking rest and never finding it, because it does not
seek rest in work. “Six days shalt thou labor,” not less and not
more,--with this prescription most of the nervous diseases of our time
would be healed, except so far as they are an inherited curse from idle
ancestors. With this prescription most of the physicians in sanitariums
and insane asylums would lose their practice. Life is not given to man
to enjoy, but, so far as may be, to use effectively. One who does not
recognize this has already lost his spiritual health. Indeed, it is not
possible for him to retain even his physical health as he might under
conditions of natural activity and reasonable ways of living. The days
of our age are threescore years and ten, and some are so strong that
they come to fourscore years; yet though there be labor and sorrow in
these years of work, still they have been precious: thus we read the
ancient saying. Perhaps, indeed, this was its original meaning.

We do well, however, to add at once one limitation. Not all work
is of equal value, and there is spurious work which is directed to
fictitious ends, and work which is itself fictitious in its form.
Much, for instance, of the sewing and embroidering done by cultivated
women, much of the parading of soldiers, much of what is called art,
like the useless drumming on the piano by persons with no musical
sense, a considerable part of the sportsman’s life, and, not least,
the time devoted to keeping one’s accounts,--all these are occupations
of this fictitious nature. A sagacious and wide-awake person must look
for something more satisfying than these. Here also is the reason why
factory labor, and, in short, all mechanical occupation in which one
does but a part of the work, gives meagre satisfaction, and why an
artisan who completes his work, or an agricultural laborer, is, as
a rule, much more contented than factory operatives, among whom the
social discontent of the modern world first uttered itself. The factory
workman sees little of the outcome of his work. It is the machine
that works, and he is a part of it. He contributes to the making of
one little wheel, but he never makes a whole clock, which might be to
him his work of art and an achievement worthy of a man. Mechanical
work like this fails to satisfy because it offends that natural
consciousness of human worth which the humblest human being feels. On
the other hand, the happiest workmen are those who can absolutely lose
themselves in their work: the artist whose soul must be wholly occupied
with his subject, if he hopes to grasp and reproduce it; the scholar
who has no eye for anything beyond his special task. Indeed, the same
thing is to be said of those people whom we call “one-idea-ed” and
who have created their own little world within one narrow sphere. All
these have at least the feeling--sometimes, no doubt, without adequate
reason--that they are accomplishing real work for the world; a true,
useful, necessary work, which is not mere play; and many such persons,
by this continuous, strenuous, and sometimes even physically unhealthy
activity, attain great old age, while idle and luxurious men and women
of society, who are, perhaps, the least useful and least productive
class of the modern world, must devote much of their time to the
restoration of their health.

The first thing, then, for our modern world to acquire is the
conviction and experience that well-directed work is the necessary and
universal condition of physical and intellectual health, and for this
reason is the way to happiness. From this it necessarily follows that
the idle class is to be regarded, not as a superior and favored class,
but as that which they are,--spiritually defective and diseased persons
who have lost the right principle for the guidance of their lives.
As soon as this opinion becomes general and established, then, and
only then, will the better era for the world begin. Until that time,
the world will suffer from the excessive work of some, balancing the
insufficient work of others, and it still remains a question which of
these two types is in reality the more unfortunate.

Why is it then that these principles--to which the experience of
thousands of years testifies, which any one, whether he works or
does not work, can test for himself, and which all the religions and
philosophies preach--have not made their just impression? Why is it,
for instance, that there are still thousands of women who defend with
much passion many passages of Bible-teaching, and yet, with astonishing
composure and in opposition to an express command of the Bible, take
one day at the most, or perhaps none at all, for work, and six for
refined idleness? All this proceeds in large degree from an irrational
division and arrangement of work, which thus ill-arranged may indeed
become a positive burden.

And this brings me back to the title of my Essay. Instruction in
the art of work is possible only for him who is already convinced
of my first proposition, that some work is necessary, and who would
gladly give himself to work if it were not that, to his surprise,
some hindrance confronts him. Yet, work, like every other art, has
its ways of dexterity, by means of which one may greatly lessen its
laboriousness; and not only the willingness to work, but even the
capacity to work, is so difficult to acquire that many persons fail of
it altogether.

The first step, then, toward the overcoming of a difficulty is in
recognizing the difficulty. And what is the difficulty which chiefly
hinders work? It is laziness. Every man is naturally lazy. It always
costs one an effort to rise above one’s customary condition of physical
indolence. Moral laziness is, in short, our original sin. No one is
naturally fond of work; there are only differences of natural and
constitutional excitability. Even the most active-minded, if they
yielded to their natural disposition, would amuse themselves with other
things rather than with work.

Love of work must, therefore, proceed from a motive which is stronger
than the motive of physical idleness. And this motive is to be found in
either of two ways. It may be a low motive, as, for instance, a passion
like ambition or self-seeking, or, indeed, the sense of necessity, as
in the preservation of life; or it may be a high motive, like the sense
of duty or love, either for the work itself, or for the persons for
whom the work is done. The nobler motive has this advantage, that it is
the more permanent and is not dependent on the mere success of work.
It does not lose its force either through the disheartening effect of
failure, or the satisfying effect of success. Thus it happens that
ambitious and self-seeking persons are often very diligent workers, but
are seldom continuous and evenly progressive workers. They are almost
always content with that which looks like work, if it produce favorable
conditions for themselves, although it does nothing of this for their
neighbors. Much of our mercantile and industrial activity--and, alas!
we must add, much of the work of scholars and artists--has this mark of
unreality.

If, then, one were to give to a young man entering into life a word
of preliminary counsel, it would be this: Do your work from a sense
of duty, or for love of what you are doing, or for love of certain
definite persons: attach yourself to some great interest of human
life--to a national movement for political liberty; to the extension
of the Christian religion; to the elevation of the neglected classes;
to the abolition of drunkenness; to the restoration of permanent peace
among the nations; to social reform; to ballot reform; to prison
reform;--there are plenty of such causes inviting us to-day;--and
you will soon discover an impulse proceeding from these causes to
yourself; and in addition you will have--what at first is a great
help--companionship in your work. There should be no young person,
man or woman, to-day among civilized nations who is not actively
enlisted in some such army of progress. The only means of elevating and
strengthening youth, and training it in perseverance, is this: that
early in life one is freed from himself, and does not live for himself
alone. Selfishness is always enfeebling, and from it proceeds no work
that is strong.

I go on to remark that the most effective instrument to overcome one’s
laziness in work is the force of habit. Why should we use this mighty
force in the service of our physical nature and not put it to use in
our higher life as well? As a matter of fact, one can as well accustom
himself to work or to self-control, to virtue, or truthfulness, or
generosity, as he can to laziness, or self-indulgence, or extravagance,
or exaggeration, or stinginess. And this is to be said further--that no
virtue is securely possessed until it has become a habit. Thus it is
that as a man trains himself to the habit of work, the resistance of
idleness constantly diminishes until at last work becomes a necessity.
When this happens, one has become free from a very great part of the
troubles of life.

There remain a few elementary rules with which one can the more easily
find his way to this habit of work. And first among such rules is the
knowing how to begin. The resolution to set oneself to work and to
fix one’s whole mind on the matter in hand is really the hardest part
of working. When one has once taken his pen or his spade in hand, and
has made the first stroke, his whole work has already grown easier.
There are people who always find something especially hard about
beginning their work, and who are always so busy with preparations,
behind which lurks their laziness, that they never apply themselves
to their work until they are compelled; and then the intellectual and
even the physical excitement roused by the sense of insufficient time
in which to do one’s work injures the work itself. Other people wait
for some special inspiration, which in reality is much more likely to
come by means of, or in the midst of, work itself. It is at least my
experience that one’s work, while one is doing it, takes on a different
look from that which one anticipated, and that one does not reach so
many fruitful and new ideas in his times of rest as he does during
the work itself. From all this follows the rule, not to postpone
work, or lightly to accept the pretext of physical or intellectual
indisposition, but to dedicate a definite and well-considered amount of
time every day to one’s work. Then, if the “old man,” as St. Paul calls
him, is cunning enough to see that he must in any event do some work at
a special time and cannot wholly give himself to rest, he may usually
be trusted to resolve to do each day that which for each day is most
necessary.

Again, there are a great many men, occupied in intellectual work of a
productive kind, who waste their time and lose the happiness of work by
devoting themselves to the arrangement of their work, or still oftener,
to the introduction of their work. As a general rule, no artistic,
or profound, or remote introduction to one’s work is desirable. On
the contrary, it usually anticipates unsuitably that which should
come later. Even if this be doubted, the advice is at any rate good
that one’s introduction and one’s title should be written last. Thus
composed, they commonly cost no labor. One makes a beginning much more
easily when he starts without any preamble, with that chapter of his
work with which he is most familiar. For the same reason, when one
reads a book, it is well to omit at the first reading the preface and
often the first chapter. For my own part, I never read a preface until
I have finished a book, and I discover, almost without exception, that
when, after reading the book, I turn back for a look at the preface, I
have lost nothing by omitting it. Of course, it must be said that there
are books of which the preface is the best part. Of these, however, it
may also be said that they are not worth reading at all.

And now I may safely take still another step and add, that, with the
exception of an introduction to your work or its central treatment,
it is best to begin with that part which is easiest to you. The chief
thing is to begin. One may indeed advance less directly in his work by
doing it unsystematically, but this loss is more than made good by his
gain of time. Under this head also should be added two other rules. One
is the law: “Take no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take
thought for the things of itself.” Man is endowed with the dangerous
gift of imagination, and imagination has a much larger realm than
that of one’s capacity. Through one’s imagination one sees his whole
work lying before him as a task to be achieved all at once, while his
capacity, on the other hand, can conquer its task only by degrees, and
must constantly renew its strength. Do your work, then, as a rule, for
each day. The morrow will come in its own time, and with it will come
the strength for the morrow. The second rule is this: In intellectual
work one should, indeed, deal with his material thoroughly; but he
should not expect to exhaust his material, so that there shall be
nothing further left to say or to read. No man’s strength is in these
days sufficient for absolute thoroughness. The best principle is to
be completely master of a relatively small region of research; and to
deal with the larger inquiries only in their essential features. He who
tries to do too much usually accomplishes too little.

A further condition of good work is this,--that one should not persist
in working when work has lost its freshness and pleasure. I have
already said that one may begin without pleasure, for otherwise one, as
a rule, would not begin at all. But one should stop as soon as his work
itself brings fatigue. This does not mean that one should, for this
reason, stop all work, but only that he should stop the special kind of
work which is fatiguing him. Change in work is almost as refreshing as
complete rest. Indeed, without this characteristic of human nature, we
should hardly accomplish anything.

Again, in order to be able to do much work, one must economize one’s
force, and the practical means to this is by wasting no time on
useless activities. I can hardly make plain how much pleasure and
power for work is lost by this form of wastefulness. First of all,
among such ways of wasting time should be reckoned the excessive
reading of newspapers; and to this should be added the excessive
devotion to societies and meetings. An immense number of people, for
instance, begin their morning, the best time they have for work, with
the newspaper, and end their day quite as regularly in some club or
meeting. They read each morning the whole of a paper, or perhaps
of several papers, but it would be hard, as a rule, to say what
intellectual acquisition remained the next day from such reading.
This, at least, is certain, that after one has finished his paper, he
experiences a certain disinclination for work, and snatches up another
paper, if it happen to be within reach. Any one, therefore, who desires
to do much work must carefully avoid all useless occupation of his
mind, and, one may even add, of his body. He must reserve his powers
for that which it is his business to do.

Finally, and for intellectual work,--with which throughout I am
specially concerned,--there is one last and important help. It is
the habit of reviewing, and revising, one’s material. Almost every
intellectual work is at first grasped only in its general outlines,
and then, as one attacks it a second time, its finer aspects reveal
themselves, and the appreciation of them becomes more complete. One’s
chief endeavor, then, should be, as a famous writer of our day remarks,
“not to achieve the constant productiveness which permits itself no
pause, but rather to lose oneself in that which one would create. Hence
issues the desire to reproduce one’s ideal in visible forms. External
industry, the effort to grasp one’s material and promptly master
it,--these are, indeed, obvious conditions of authorship, but they are
of less value than that higher and spiritual industry which steadily
works toward an unattained end.”

The conception of work, thus excellently stated, meets a final
difficulty which our discussion has already recognized. For work,
under this view, maintains continuity, in spite of and even during
one’s necessary rest. Here is the ideal of the highest work. The mind
works continuously, when it has once acquired the genuine industry
which comes through devotion to one’s task. In fact, it is curious
to notice how often, after pauses in one’s work not excessively
prolonged, one’s material has unconsciously advanced. Everything has
grown spontaneously. Many difficulties seem suddenly disposed of,
one’s first supply of ideas is multiplied, assumes picturesqueness, and
lends itself to expression; so that the renewal of one’s work occurs
with ease, as though it were merely the gathering of fruit which in the
interval had ripened without effort of our own.

This, then, is a second reward of work, in addition to that which
one commonly recognizes. Only he who works knows what enjoyment and
refreshment are. Rest which does not follow work is like eating without
appetite. The best, the pleasantest, and the most rewarding--and
also the cheapest--way of passing the time is to be busy with one’s
work. And as matters stand in the world to-day, it seems reasonable
to anticipate that at the end of our century some social revolution
will make those who are then at work the ruling class; just as at the
beginning of the last century a social revolution gave to industrious
citizens their victory over the idle nobility and the idle priests.
Wherever any social class sinks into idleness, subsisting like those
idlers of the past on incomes created by the work of others, there
such non-productive citizens again must yield. The ruling class of the
future must be the working class.




II. HOW TO FIGHT THE BATTLES OF LIFE




II. HOW TO FIGHT THE BATTLES OF LIFE


Many people in our day--even well-intentioned people--have lost their
faith in idealism. They regard it as a respectable form of philosophy
for the education of the young, but as a creed of little use in later
life. Theoretically, they say, and for purposes of education, idealism
has much to commend it, but, practically, things turn out to be
brutally material. Thus such persons divide life into two parts, in one
of which we may indulge ourselves in fine theories and sentiments, and,
indeed, are to be encouraged in them; and in the other of which we wake
rudely from this dream and deal with reality as best we can. Kant, in
one of his briefer writings, dealt a hundred years ago with this state
of mind. He examined the phrase which was even then familiar: “That may
be well enough in theory, but does not work in practice”; and he showed
that it expressed an absurd contradiction unworthy of a thinking being.

The logical realism of our day, however, is not concerned with
theoretical propositions. It turns, on the contrary, to the hard fact
of the struggle for existence, in which indifference to others and
absolute self-interest are not only permissible, but, as one looks at
the real conditions of life, seem more or less positively demanded.
These modern realists say: “The world we see about us is one where only
a few can succeed and where many must fail. There are not good things
enough for all. The question is not whether such a state of things
is right or just. On the contrary, it must be admitted to be a hard,
unreasonable, unjust universe. It is not for the individual, however,
set without consent of his own in such a universe, to change it. His
only problem is to make it certain that in such a universe he is ‘the
hammer, not the anvil.’”

Such is the essence of that worldly wisdom which is the creed of many
cultivated people to-day. With it disappears, of course, any need of
moral or religious education. Such instruction in schools might as
well be abandoned. Indeed, Saint-Just made the original suggestion
that instead of such instruction there should be substituted the daily
study of the placards posted on the street corners which announce
the police regulations of the government as to the conduct of life.
Under such a theory of education, young people would grow immensely
clever and practical. They would be trained to get and to keep. They
would be free from every sentiment of honor which might be a hindrance
in their path. Most of them, it must be confessed, would, early in
life, lose physical, intellectual, and moral vigor, and others would
lament, perhaps too late, that their youth had been sacrificed to that
which was not worth their seeking. At the best, they would acquire
but uncertain possessions to be defended daily against a thousand
competitors, and these possessions would bring bitterness along with
them, both to those who have them and to those who have them not. Peace
and happiness would be secured to no one. Such seems to be the issue of
this view of life which is now so common among us, and which we call
the view of the “practical” man.

But what is idealism? It is, as I understand it, a form of faith, an
inward conviction. It is absolutely necessary for the permanence of
the world; yet it never can be proved true, and indeed for him who
has it needs no proof. Further, no one becomes an idealist by being
taught about it or by reasoning concerning it. Nor is this so strange
as it might seem, for the very trustworthiness of the human reason
itself is proved to us only by experience. The very truths of religion
remain unproved unless the moral power which issues from them provides
their proof. That which has power must have reality. No other proof
of reality is final. Even our senses could not convince us, if our
experience and the experience of all other men did not assure us that
we could--not unconditionally, but under normal conditions--trust them
not to deceive. That which brings conviction to one is his experience,
and that which rouses in him the desire and the inward disposition to
believe in his own experience is the testimony of others who have had
that experience themselves.

There is a short treatise, written by one who in his youth was a
friend of Goethe’s,--the Russian General von Klinger,--which gives its
testimony in a few words concerning this idealism in practical life.
It may be found in von Klinger’s rarely opened works, under the title:
“How it is possible without deceit, and even in constant conflict with
evil, to overcome the world.” Its contents are simply a series of
weighty aphorisms, of which I select a few:

“First of all,” says von Klinger, “one who would overcome the world
must give up thinking of what people call happiness, and must with all
his might, without indirectness, or fear, or self-seeking, simply do
his duty. He must, that is to say, be pure in mind and heart, so that
none of his actions shall be stained by selfishness. Where justice and
right-dealing are called for, there must be in him no distinction of
great or small, of significant or insignificant....

“Secondly, for the protection of his own strength and his purity of
conduct, he must be free from the desire to shine, free from the
shallowness of vanity and the restless search for fame and power. Most
human follies proceed from the restlessness of ambition. Ambition
demoralizes both those whom it masters and those through whom it
accomplishes its ends. The boldest and most candid criticism does not
wound so deeply as does the foolish longing for praise....

“Again, one who is thus pure in motive will permit himself to be
conspicuous only when and where his duty demands it. For the rest, he
will live a life of seclusion in his family, with few friends, among
his books, and in the world of the spirit. Thus he avoids that conflict
with others about trifles which to many persons are of such absorbing
concern. One may be pardoned for eccentricity in such affairs by having
no place at all among them. His life does not touch the circle of
society, and he asks of society only to let him do his duty, and then
to be permitted to live in peace. It may be that he will thus stir
others to envy or to hate, but it will be an envy and hate too petty
for expression, or at any rate ineffective for harm. He who has thus
withdrawn from trifles gets much out of life. Indeed, he gets more than
he expects and more than he has intended; for he finally gains that
which men in its coarser sense call happiness....

“To all this,” says von Klinger, “I add another point: that one must
withhold himself from all ambition to pose as a reformer and from
all signs of that desire. He must not enter into controversy about
opinions with people who have nothing but opinions. He must speak of
himself only to himself and think of himself only in himself.... I
have developed,” concludes von Klinger, “my own character and my own
inner experience as my power and disposition have permitted; and so far
as I have done this seriously and honestly, so far has come to me of
itself what men call happiness and prosperity. I have observed myself
more deeply than others and dealt with myself more unsparingly than
with others. I have never played a part, never felt inclined thereto,
and have ever expressed the convictions I have reached without fear,
and have held them fast, so that I now no more fear the possibility
of being or doing other than my convictions demand. One is safe from
the temptations of others only when one can no more tempt himself. I
have borne many responsibilities, but at the conclusion of each I have
passed the rest of my time in the profoundest solitude and the most
complete obscurity.”[1]

The author of these weighty aphorisms was dealing especially with
political life. He does not seek for them any philosophical basis. He
offers them simply as the result of his stirring and often adventurous
career, and as such his testimony is far more valuable than if it
had issued from the closet of a philosopher or a theologian who had
slight contact with practical affairs. It is not my intention to
translate these suggestions into abstract form and make them less real
and persuasive. I only desire to annotate them with a few practical
comments.

I. Concerning von Klinger’s first proposition, it is to be said that
true idealism is not the deceiving of oneself concerning reality, or
the intentional ignoring of reality, or the hiding from reality, or the
creating for oneself a world of unreality. Idealism, on the contrary,
is reached by a deeper interpretation of the world, by victory over it
and especially by victory over oneself. For we, too, are an integral
part of the world and we cannot conquer the whole unless, first of
all, we conquer our own part of it, by strength of principles and force
of habit. Hence issues that right judgment of success which von Klinger
lays down. One of our own contemporaries, Thiers, a man who had in
high degree attained success, and who at certain points in his life
pursued it with excessive zeal, once made this striking remark: “Men
of principle need not succeed. Success is necessary only to schemers.”
In other words, a genuine victory over the world is not to be achieved
through that kind of success which the French call _succès_ and which
for many men makes the end of effort. He who plays this game of
ambition may as well abandon the hope of peace of mind or of peace with
others, and in most cases he must forfeit outright his self-respect.

Real success in life, then, the attainment of the highest human
perfection and of true and fruitful activity, necessarily and
repeatedly involves outward failure. Success, to von Klinger, means
an honorable career with victory at its close. The work of life is
regarded in its wholeness, as a brave and honorable man should wish
and hope it to be. Unbroken success is necessary only for cowards.
Indeed, one may go further and say that the secret of the highest
success in important affairs often lies in failure. The men who have
most completely commanded the admiration of the world, and who are
most conspicuous in history, are not those who have reached the goal
of life through success alone. Cæsar and Napoleon would have been
remembered only as examples of tyranny if it had not been for Brutus,
Waterloo and St. Helena. The Maid of Orléans would be recalled as a
masterful woman like many others had it not been for her martyrdom.
Hannibal would be no noble example if Carthage had conquered. A traitor
like Charles I. of England is still held in high honor by many persons
who cannot endure the memory of the most heroic character in modern
history,--Cromwell. Had Cromwell died on the scaffold and Charles on
the throne, this estimate of them would have been reversed. The life
of the Emperor Frederick III. is another example and will be a still
more impressive one as the better future looks back on it. The greatest
example of all, the cross, the gallows of its time, became for all
the world a sign of honor and subdued to itself the power of Rome.
Looking at Christianity in a wholly human and untheological way, one
may believe that its unexampled success would not have been possible
if the scholars and scribes of that day had welcomed it. Something
of such failure comes with all right ways of life. Without it, life
sinks in the rut of commonplace. This kind of failure should not bear
the common reproach of misfortune. It is, on the contrary, the crown
of thorns which marks the way of the cross, and proves to be the true
crown after all.

II. Concerning the second aphorism of von Klinger’s there is this to
add: that no self-seeking person ever reaches the end he most desires.
It is surprising to see what one may accomplish when he gives his
attention and energy wholly to the doing of one thing. Examples of this
kind of success meet us at every turn. What these persons at heart
desire, however, is not the wealth, or honor, or power, or learning
which they reach. They prize these possessions only as the necessary
prerequisites for happiness. What is it, then, of which they must first
of all be convinced? It is the truth that happiness does not come
through these possessions, that, in fact, these possessions are likely
to bring unhappiness. When this conviction is attained, then, at last,
the self-seeking spirit will perhaps abandon its aim.

Of all self-seekers, the most unfortunate are to be found among the
educated. When they stand on the lower rung of the ladder which
they wish to climb, they are consumed by envy of those above them;
and of all the emotions which degrade a man in his own eyes the most
humiliating is envy. When, on the other hand, they have climbed to
the top, then they are distressed by the constant fear of those who
are climbing toward them and whose thoughts and purposes they well
know from their own experience. If they seek safety by surrounding
themselves by flatterers, then they are never safe from betrayal; for
if they seem likely to fall, no one cares to hold them up. If, finally,
they shut their ears to these disturbing voices within their hearts and
give themselves to self-indulgence, then they lose the very qualities
which are most essential to success.

Besides all this, the chances of success for the self-seeker are
slight. Not one in ten attains what he desires, and, even of those whom
we call fortunate, few should be so reckoned until they die. It is not
necessary to cite examples of such failure. The daily paper reports
them to us every morning. Long ago one of the prophets of Israel
described this unsatisfying result of life and effort in classic words
which we may well repeat: “Ye have sown much, and bring in little; ye
eat, but ye have not enough; ye drink, but ye are not filled with
drink; ye clothe you, but there is none warm; and he that earneth wages
earneth wages to put it into a bag with holes.”

Still further, nothing is so exhausting as this self-seeking effort.
The passion which it develops is like an access of fever which burns
away one’s vitality. The strength of health, on the other hand, renews
itself through self-forgetting work; and thrives on unselfish service
done for worthy ends. Only in such service are other people sincerely
inclined to help. Thus it happens that some people, though they work
hard and never retire to the health-resorts, still live to a robust old
age, while other people spend half the year or perhaps the whole of it
at the baths and remain without rest. The many nervous diseases of our
time are for the most part caused by the self-centred life, and their
real cure must be through a renewal in health of mind and will.

III. As to von Klinger’s third suggestion, it is to be said that
the inclination to solitude is absolutely necessary not only for
happiness, but for the tranquil development of one’s spiritual life.
The happiness which can really be attained, and which is independent of
all changes, is to be found in a life given to great thoughts and in a
work peacefully directed toward great ends. Such a life is, however,
necessarily withdrawn from fruitless sociability. As Goethe says, “To
such a life, all else is vanity and illusion.” It is by such a course
of life that one by degrees escapes from the fickleness and moodiness
of life. He learns not to take people too seriously. He comes to regard
with tranquillity the shifting changes of opinions and inclinations. So
far as his inclination goes and his duties permit, he would rather shun
popularity than seek it.

IV. As to the last of von Klinger’s paragraphs, it may be said to
contain the philosophy of his life. Looking at people as individuals,
their lives appear full of contrasts; but taking them all together,
their lives are in fact much alike. One section of humanity, of high
and of low estate, lives either consciously or unconsciously a merely
animal life. Such persons simply follow the path which their physical
nature indicates, fulfilling their little span of life, and knowing
no other destiny. Another group is ever seeking some escape from this
unsatisfying end of life. Dante, in the first canto of his Divine
Comedy, very beautifully describes these seekers for the better life;
and this search makes in reality the spiritual experience of all great
personalities.

The first step in this way of life is taken when one becomes
discontented with life as it is and longs for something better. One’s
reason seeks an outlet from the labyrinth of the world and at last from
sheer weariness resolves, at any cost, to forsake the world’s ways and
to seek peace. When one has come to this resolution, then he is on the
way to salvation, and experiences that inner happiness which one gains
who has found at last the way he ought to go. And, indeed, this man is
essentially saved; for he is now open to the unhindered influences of
new spiritual forces, against which in his early life his will had set
itself.

Yet, as a matter of fact, he is only ready for his second step. It is
the long conflict for supremacy between what the Apostle calls “the
old and the new man.” Both of them are in him still and his problem is
to realize the “new man” and bring it to fulness of life. Many people
who are striving for the better life come to this second step and stay
there all their days; and this is the reason why so many lives which
are rightly directed still give the impression of imperfection, and
why they do not seem to contribute much--though often more than we
think--to the ennobling of human relationships.

There remains the third step of spiritual growth, which, once fairly
taken, leads to the complete interpretation of life. It is the stage
of practical activity, the participating in the creation of a spiritual
kingdom. Sometimes it has been likened to the taking part in a great
work of architecture, sometimes to the enlistment in an active war.
Nothing less than this life of unselfish service can bring to the
individual true content. So long as one lives for himself and is
considering, even in the highest and noblest way, his own self-culture,
there lingers in him some taint of his original selfishness, or, at
best, he but half sees his way. As Goethe has expressed it: “While one
strives, he errs.” This self-directed effort must, at last, cease.
Nothing is more untrue, nothing is more fundamentally disheartening,
than the maxim of Lessing which so many have admired, according to
which endless effort after truth is to be preferred to the possession
of the truth. One might as well say that endless thirst, or endless
cold, was more acceptable than the finding of a refreshing fountain or
the warmth of the quickening sun.

Here then, in this attitude of life, removed from religious or
philosophical restlessness, is the path to continuous inward peace
and power. It leads, first of all, to humility and to freedom from
self-complacency. It is possible to hold to this path through the
midst of all natural ills; it is the best way that life has to offer.
What the happiness is which one then finds is hard to communicate to
another. It comes of ceasing to think first of all of oneself. It has,
as Rothe says, “no private business to transact.” It does its work
tranquilly, with absolute certainty that, though the issue of its
work may be unrecognized, still it is secure. This way of life brings
with it courage, and this courage manifests itself, not in feverish
excitement, but in an outward habit of composure which testifies to
inward and central stability. Such a life trusts its way and its
destiny. Outward experiences and the judgments of other men have no
power to move it. It is, perhaps, not essential that in the education
of youth these truths should be urgently pressed, for they may easily
appear visionary and in such a matter all appearance of obscurity and
unreality is to be deplored. God permits only high-minded souls, like
von Klinger, fully to attain this way of life.

We need not discuss whether all this should be called idealism--a name
which would drive many clever people from its acceptance. Whatever
it may be named, it is a faith which has brought to those who have
confidently given themselves to it greater inward peace than is found
in any more familiar creed. It needs but slight observation of life or
of history to be convinced of this. And yet, I fear, most of my readers
may be more inclined to say with King Agrippa: “Almost thou persuadest
me,” little as Agrippa profited by the success he attained.

A German poet sums up the richness of this spiritual peace, which men
like von Klinger exhibit, in lines which I thus slightly adapt:

  “_Outward life is light and shadow,
  Mingled wrong and struggling right,
  But within the outward trouble
  Shines a healing, inward light._

  _Not to us may come fulfilment,
  Not below our struggles cease,
  Yet the heavenly vision gives us,
  Even here, an inward peace._”




III. GOOD HABITS




III. GOOD HABITS


The most important experience which, sooner or later, meets every
thoughtful person, both in his own intellectual development and in
his observation of others, is this,--that every act, and, indeed,
every definite thought, leaves behind it an inclination which is like
a material influence, and which makes the next similar thought, or
act, easier, and the next dissimilar thought, or act, more difficult.
This is the curse of evil conduct,--that it ever brings forth more
evil conduct; and this too is the sure and chief reward of good
conduct,--that it strengthens the tendency to good and makes permanent
what has been gained. Here is the solemn and tragic fact which lies
behind all human life,--that what we have once done we can never
change. There it remains, just as it happened, little as we may be
inclined to believe, or to admit, that it is there. And hence it is
that history truly written is no entertaining drama, ending in general
reconciliation and embrace, but a tragedy which describes the movement
of destiny.

If, then, one begins thus to take life seriously, he will soon observe
that its main problem does not concern its thought or its faith,
still less any outward confession which may leave the soul within
quite undisturbed. The real problem of life is simply and solely one
of habit, and the end of all education should be to train people to
inclinations toward good. To choose discreetly between good and evil is
not always practicable, for human passions are sometimes too strong;
but what may be developed is a prompt and spontaneous instinct for the
good; and the ideal of human life is one in which all that is good has
become sheer habit, and all that is bad is so contrary to nature, that
it gives one even a physically perceptible and painful shock. Failing
this, all that one calls virtue or piety is but a series of those good
intentions with which the path to evil, as to good, may be paved.

What, then, are the most important of good habits? I propose to name a
few, not in any systematic fashion; for of systems of morals the modern
world seems to have had more than enough, and it is much more likely to
give some attention to purely practical suggestions based on practical
experience.

The first and chief rule seems to be this,--that one should try rather
to cultivate good habits than merely negatively to escape from bad
ones. It is much easier in the inner life, as in the outer, to attack
positively than to repel defensively; for in aggressive conduct every
success brings joy, while in mere resistance much of one’s effort seems
to have no positive result. The main point to be gained is the habit of
prompt resolution, directed immediately toward action. What Voltaire
said of the history of nations is in large degree true of human life:
“I have noticed that destiny in every case depends upon the act of a
moment.”

The second principle of good habits is fearlessness. Perhaps this is
not possible to acquire in a high degree without a strong religious
faith. This I will not discuss. It is, at any rate, certain that fear
is not only the least agreeable of human emotions, so that one should
at any cost conquer it, but that it is also the most superfluous. For
fear does not prevent the approach of that which is feared; it only
exhausts beforehand the strength which one needs to meet the thing he
fears. Most of the things which we fear to meet are not in reality so
terrible as they appear to be when looked at from afar. When they meet
us, they can be borne. The imagination is inclined to picture evils as
more permanent and persistent than they are really to be. If, as one’s
trouble approached, he should say to himself: “This is likely to last
about three days,” one would in many cases be justified by the event,
and, at any rate, would proceed to meet the trouble with a better
courage. On the whole, the best defence against fear which philosophy
can provide is the conviction that every fear is a symptom of some
wrong condition in ourselves. If one search for that weakness and rid
himself of it, then, for the most part, fear will vanish also.

Beyond this philosophical defence from fear, however, lie certain
spiritual conditions of courage. The chief of these is determining for
oneself what are the best blessings of life. First of all, one must
acquire as soon as possible the habit of preferring the better things
to the worse. He must especially abandon the expectation of possessing
at the same time different things which are contradictory of each
other. Here is the secret of failure in many a career. In my opinion,
a man may not only freely choose his aims in life, but he may attain
all those aims which he seriously and wholly desires, provided that
for the sake of this desire he is ready to surrender all other desires
which are inconsistent with it. The best possessions one can have in
life, and the things which, with reasonable sagacity, are the easiest
to get, are these: firm moral principles, intellectual discipline,
love, loyalty, the capacity for work and the enjoyment of it, spiritual
and physical health, and very moderate worldly possessions. No other
blessings can be compared with these, and some other possessions are
inconsistent with these--for instance, great wealth, great worldly
honor and power, habitual self-indulgence. These are the things which
people commonly most desire, and which they very often attain, but they
must always be attained through the surrender of the better things.

One must, therefore, promptly and unhesitatingly determine to surrender
the desire for wealth, honor, and luxury, and to take in their place
other possessions. Without this determination, there can be no
religious or philosophical basis of spiritual education. What seems
to be spiritual development ends in unreality, vacillation, at last
hypocrisy. It must be confessed that even the best of men are, as a
rule, but half-hearted in making this fundamental resolution. They
give up under compulsion one or another fragment of their desires. Few
are sagacious enough to foresee the choice which sooner or later must
be made, and free themselves while they are still young from their
prolonged perplexity by one quick and sublime decision.

A further obstacle to any worthy life is the desire for praise, or for
pleasure. The man who is dominated by either of these motives is simply
a slave of the opinions or tastes of others. Both of these desires must
be, without compromise, expelled, and sympathy, which one has always
at his command, must take their place. For, if the lower desires have
been cast out and no higher impulses enter, then we have simply an
unendurable emptiness in life. “When the unclean spirit,” says the
Gospel, “is gone out of a man, he walketh through dry places, seeking
rest, and findeth none.... Then goeth he, and taketh with himself seven
other spirits more wicked than himself, and they enter in and dwell
there: and the last state of that man is worse than the first.”

Thus, at any cost, and even for the sake of one’s own soul, one must
make it his habit to cultivate love for others, not first of all
inquiring whether they deserve that love or not--a question which
is often too hard to answer. For without love life is without joy,
especially when one has outgrown his youth. Lacking love, we sink into
indifference, and indifference passes easily into aversion, and one’s
aversions so poison life that life is no better than death.

Further, our dislikes must be directed, not against people, but
against things. Good and evil are too much mingled in persons to be
justly distinguished, and each unjust judgment reacts upon those who
have permitted themselves to be unjust and embitters their lives.
Therefore, permit neither your philosophy nor your experience to crowd
out of your life the power to love. Dismiss the preliminary question
of another’s right to be loved. Love is the only way of keeping one’s
inner life in peace, and of maintaining an interest in people and
in things. Without it, both people and things become by degrees an
annoyance and affront. Thus love is, at the same time, the highest
worldly wisdom. One who loves is always, though unconsciously, wiser
than one who does not. If you incline to say with the poet:

  “_This is my creed and this will ever be,
  To love and hate as others may treat me!_”

live for a while by this creed, and you will learn soon enough how much
of hate and how little of love you are likely to receive.

In all the points thus far indicated, and especially in the last, there
is no place for half-way conduct. There must be a complete and absolute
decision, with no petty and clever computations of consequences. And in
addition to these more decisive rules of habit, there are many smaller
ones which go to reinforce and make practicable the larger principles.
For instance, there is the Gospel command: “Let the dead bury their
dead.” The dead are the best people to do this work. If one refrain
from controversy about what is past and gone, then one may give himself
to tasks of positive construction, and not merely to that destructive
work which, even if it be essential, should be subordinate. Many a
memorial has been dedicated to those who destroy which should have been
reserved for those who fulfil.

And yet, one must not let himself be cheated. He must not even be
thought to be easily duped. He must let the would-be clever people know
that he reads their thoughts and knows what they are seeking. One may,
as I have already said, read such thoughts quite thoroughly if one be
no longer blinded by any selfishness of his own.

Apart from this degree of self-defence, which is so far necessary,
the better plan in general is to see the good side of people and
to take for granted that there is good in them. Then it not only
happens that they often make the effort to be good and become actually
better through one’s appreciation of them, but it also happens that
one is saved from a personal experience of regret or distress. For
intercourse with persons whom one recognizes as bad, demoralizes one’s
own nature, and in the case of sensitive persons may go so far as to
have even a physical effect. What is bad needs no severity of criticism
or of reproach. In most cases it needs only to be brought to the light.
Then, even if the man protest that he is not bad, his conscience
judges him. Therefore, when one must blame others, he should proceed
with great calmness, speak of the matter without disguise and without
glossing, but simply and without passion. Passionate reproaches seldom
do good, and good people who lack sympathy are apt to be very trying.
There is a kind of virtuous character not unfamiliar in some Protestant
circles which to those who differ from its convictions seems to have
no capacity for love. It is especially aggravating to young people, so
that they often prefer the company of the vicious to that of moral but
cold-blooded friends.

Finally, it may not appear possible for you to be equally friendly with
everybody. Well, then, discriminate among people, but always in favor
of the humble, the poor, the simple, the uneducated, the children, even
the animals and plants. Never, on the other hand, if you desire a quiet
mind, seek the favor of important people, and never expect gratitude
for condescension to the humble, but count the love they have for you
as precious as you do your love for them.

There are many other of these lesser instances of good habits which I
might still further mention, and if my reader should recall them, he
is not to regard them as unrecognized by me. I only invite him, in the
first place, to put to practical use my list as thus far suggested. As
he does so, let him notice--as he soon must notice--that it is much
more to his purpose to begin practically with one good habit than to
begin by making a complete catalogue of all. The real difficulty in
this cultivation of good habits--indeed the only difficulty--is in
ridding the heart of its natural selfishness. For selfishness is the
practical obstacle to good habits, though it may pretend to believe in
them. No one who understands himself will deny that there is in every
one a curious tendency to moral degeneration. It is often something
that literally borders on depravity. Now, this inclination to evil is
to be conquered only by a superior force; and the whole problem, both
of philosophy and of religion,--a problem as old as the world and yet
new with each individual,--is summed up in the question: “Where shall I
find this superior force which shall make me inclined to goodness and
shall renew that spiritual health which is essential for the right
conduct of life?”

To this question, there are still given many different answers. Dante,
in the famous twenty-seventh canto of the Purgatorio, says:

  “_When underneath us was the stairway all
  Run o’er, and we were on the highest step,
  Virgilius fastened upon me his eyes,
  And said_:

         *       *       *       *       *

  _By intellect and art I here have brought thee._”[2]

By the guidance of reason, then, the traveller has been led to the Holy
Mountain, where at last he hears his guide say:

  “_Take thine own pleasure for thy guide henceforth;
  Beyond the steep ways and the narrow art thou._”

And yet--and here we notice a marked inconsistency in the great
mediæval poet and philosopher--it is an angel who bears these mortal
souls across the sea and brings them to the foot of this mountain,
and another angel repeatedly restrains them from returning on their
way, even when they have passed the Gate of Grace; and by the diamond
threshold, beyond which none may pass without his bidding, sits a third
angel, to whom one may approach only by a miracle of God’s grace. In
all this journey, then, the “intellect and art” which accompany the
traveller play, we must confess, a very limited rôle.

This great question, however, of the moral dynamic is, for the moment,
not my theme, and its answer is, I doubt not, to be finally reached
only by the way of personal experience. Only this is to be said, once
more, that one’s self-discipline begins with the discipline of the
will. First of all comes the definite resolution to pursue one worthy
end of life with singleness of mind and to turn from all that is
opposed to it. Given this decision of the will, and there follows the
capacity to act. And this search is not in vain, when one determines
to make it a universal and an unreserved search, and to recognize
the power that is attained as the only possible proof that the right
way has been found. Whatever brings with it no sense of supporting,
calming, ethical power is not true, and whatever does contribute this
power must, at least, have some degree of truth in it. In the future,
any philosophy of life which proposes to be more effective than our
present philosophy must meet this test. All else leads astray.

  “_Why is it that we shrink away
  When death, our friend, draws near some day?
  We see the shadowy presence stand,
  But not the gift within the hand!
  So shrinks from love the human heart
  As though, like death, love came to part,
  For where love enters, self must die
  And life find love its destiny.
  O death of self! Pass like the night,
  And waken us from death to light!_”




IV. THE CHILDREN OF THIS WORLD ARE WISER THAN THE CHILDREN OF LIGHT




IV. THE CHILDREN OF THIS WORLD ARE WISER THAN THE CHILDREN OF LIGHT


I do not question the truth of this text, but I cannot fail to observe
in it the most familiar defence of worldly wisdom against the spirit
of idealism. The objection to idealism which we most commonly hear is
this, that it is well enough in theory, but that it does not work in
practice; and if it be really true that worldly wisdom and idealism are
irreconcilable, then most people must hold to the first. They have to
live on this earth, and to deal with life as it is; they must accept
the inevitable, even though it costs them a moment of deep regret to
abandon their idealism. This world calls for worldly wisdom; another
world may be blessed with light--on this stone of stumbling many a life
which has already overcome the common temptation of selfishness is
still wrecked and lost.

The first thing that strikes us, then, in this dangerous text is its
high appreciation of what it calls the children of this world. Indeed,
these people are never so severely handled by Christ as are the priests
and the devout Pharisees of his time. Such sayings as: “The publicans
and the harlots go into the kingdom of God before you,” are not uttered
against the children of this world. The children of this world know
what they want and pursue the end they set before themselves with
energy and persistence, putting away all that stands between them and
it; and this the children of light, at least in their earlier stages
of development, seldom do. Still further, the children of this world
are not wholly impervious to the higher motives of life. Their hearts
are not the rock where the good seed falls in vain. They are merely
the soil which is choked by other growth, where the seed takes root
but cannot prosper. The children of this world may at any rate claim
that it is not they who have built the crosses and scaffolds for the
servants of the truth.

We must not then think of the children of this world as absolutely
bad or as unappreciative of the excellent. On the contrary, they are
generally better than they pretend to be, and among them are many
persons who are, as it were, hypocrites reversed; who conceal, that is
to say, their best thoughts. What they lack is commonly the courage
to be good. They do not have a sufficiently substantial confidence
in the moral order of the world to guide them in the struggle for
existence. And, in fact, this assurance of the moral order does
not at first sight appear to be justified. On the contrary, one who
deserts the wisdom of the world must anticipate, first of all, that
he will be deserted by the world and that he will not improbably pass
the greater part of his life in uncertainty whether he has chosen the
better path. Such is the testimony of all who have practically followed
this path and have not merely heard of it or preached about it. Thus,
the children of this world are simply the people who prefer to travel
the common and well-known road. The unfamiliar path may appear to
them in theory very beautiful and sublime, but they do not find it a
practicable path to follow.

It is still more difficult to say who are the children of light. It is
true that the Gospels sometimes mention them, but what is the meaning
of the light of which the Gospels speak? Whence comes it, and how does
it shine into the life of men? Here we touch at once the greatest of
human problems. Whence come we? Whither do we go? What is our destiny?
All that can be said in plain words of the children of light is this:
that they are seeking that which is beyond reality, and are receptive
to the suggestions of the ideal world. The children of light are
those who supremely desire something better than to eat and drink and
to-morrow die. This is the motive which most stirs their hearts and
wills, and out of this desire comes to them by degrees, first, faith,
and then conviction.

This way to the light is in a certain degree indicated in the Gospel
of Matthew: “Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God”;
and it is more precisely described in the Gospel of Luke: “If thy
whole body be full of light, the whole shall be full of light”--a
passage whose exact meaning no one has clearly determined. Beyond such
evidence as this one can hardly go; for, if we do, the children of
this world, who know nothing of such experiences and regard them as
extravagances or worse, will at the best turn away like Felix and the
Athenians, saying: “We will hear thee again of this matter”; having no
more inclination than Felix to be further drawn into such disturbing
and unprofitable discussions. The dreams of the children of light, they
will say, lead to nothing and had better be forgotten.

It must be sadly confessed that a great part of religious instruction
has been singularly unfruitful. Indeed, religion cannot be imparted
by instruction. It assumes not only a faith in that which is beyond
the world of knowledge, but also a faith in the teachers of religion.
The teachers of religion, therefore, can, at the best, only produce
in one a kind of mental disposition. They can free the mind from
disinclination to their view or from positive incapacity to share it,
and they can fortify conviction by their teaching. This limitation in
religious instruction has more than one cause. It sometimes happens
because the hearer’s way of life is inconsistent with idealism. It is
also, and quite as often, caused by a false definition of religion--the
notion that religion is a matter of doctrine, a kind of science which
can be taught and learned.

Wherein, then, it will be asked, lies the advantage of the wisdom
of the light over the wisdom of this world? Surely, the wisdom of
the world is a more obvious possession, and guarantees to us more of
the good things of life than the children of light can secure. The
advantage of the children of light, I answer, is threefold. It is to
be found, first, in the assurance that they are the possessors of
truth and are made thereby inwardly and wholly at peace. Lessing, in
his well-known words, announced that truth was not a thing which men
should desire to possess. Happiness, he conceived, was to be found in
the search for truth, not in its possession. But the possession of
the truth brings with it the only true happiness--a happiness which
is abundant and unspeakable, and which no man who has in any degree
obtained it would exchange for all the other good things of earth. For
the fundamental question is not of possessing any definite outward
thing, but of the inward happiness attained through that possession.
Even the selfish, the envious, and the self-indulgent do not regard
that which they want to possess as their real aim. It is only in their
eyes the essential means to the real end, and that end is their own
inward happiness. And this is precisely where they are self-deceived.
For there is this solemn fact about the order of the world, which
reveals itself to every candid observer,--that such people may attain
all that they earnestly desire, yet not attain with it their own peace.
Their attainment itself, their very success, becomes their punishment.
All this may be perhaps somewhat hard to understand, but for the moment
it may be accepted merely as a working hypothesis, and one may later
observe in life whether it is not true. It is by using thus a working
hypothesis that even natural science most easily reaches the truth.

The second advantage which the spirit of the truth, as we may
paraphrase it, has over the wisdom of this world is this: that when
brought to the test it is in reality much wiser than worldly wisdom.
Nothing but the wisdom of the children of light is in harmony with
the real laws of the universe. That is the reason why these seemingly
unwise persons still for the most part pass through the experiences
of life with less trouble and harm than the wise of this world. The
consciences of the children of light are undisturbed, and a troubled
conscience embitters the best joys. They pass through life also with
much less hurry, worry, and fear, both of people and of events. None
of these distresses of life is to be escaped except through this frame
of mind. Finally, they live more peacefully--not only in their own
hearts, but also with other people--because they live without the
passions, hatreds, and jealousies which make life hard to endure. Even
those who do not desire for themselves this habit of mind, and are not
indeed capable of it, as soon as they are convinced that the children
of light mean what they seem, that their attitude is not merely a
cloak to cover the wisdom of the world, and that they are not vain and
supercilious, grow more attached to these “Idealists” than to people
like themselves. The affection which goes out toward such persons is
quite beyond parallel. It is the reverence, for instance, felt toward
characters like Nicolaus von Flüe, or Francis of Assisi, or Catherine
of Siena, or in our own time Gordon Pasha. Thousands, for example, in
all lands deeply lamented General Gordon’s death and felt it to be a
national disaster, although they had not the least notion of following
his life. It is a form of sentiment which the most distinguished and
most successful political ruler of our own time does not inspire.
Persons like these, just because they have denied themselves what seem
to others the good things of life and have abandoned the competition
for them, have become the true rulers of their people and the heroes
of humanity. Truth, happiness, freedom from fear and care, peace
with oneself and with all men, the sincere respect and affection of
all,--one would think that these might be recognized as beyond a
doubt the good things of life, compared with which the accumulation
of wealth, the increase of honor, and the resources of luxury have no
weight or significance. Indeed, the blessings of the children of light
would outweigh the rewards of worldly wisdom, even if these rewards
could be attained with certainty and without the bitterness, anxiety,
and rivalry which inevitably accompany them.

Lastly, these ideal possessions have this further advantage,--that when
attained, they are secure; and that they are within any one’s power to
attain. One need only desire them seriously and wholly, and cease from
a hesitating dependence on the wisdom and the successes of this world,
and then, as many witnesses will testify from their own experience, the
blessings of the children of light are surely attained. It may not be
through one effort. Indeed, in most cases, it only happens after one or
more crises in one’s life--crises which are in fact not unlike death
itself, and in which a man renounces all his early hopes. In such a
crisis, however, the worst of the way of light is passed. In everything
else it is a much easier and more agreeable way than the worldly way,
and one is sure to meet much better company.

Christ has compared his way of life to the bearing of a yoke, and
indeed it always is a yoke; but compared with other ways of life, it is
a much easier and lighter yoke. That is the testimony of all, without
exception, who have ever borne that yoke, and not one single person
has ever been found who, at the end of such a life, whatever may have
been its outward circumstances, has looked back upon it with regret, or
has confessed that the way of the world was better and happier. On the
other hand, how many there have been since the days of King Solomon
who have come to the end of a life which, to the wisdom of this world,
seemed successful and free, and have found it only “vanity of vanities.”

One would think that this single fact of human experience would be
decisive. It fails of its effect only, as we know, because the lower
wisdom withholds one from that higher wisdom which ventures the larger
gain for the higher stake. Yet, I will not reproach those who follow
the lower wisdom. I simply leave it to the reader’s own reflection to
decide whether, on weighing the case as he best can, and considering
the conditions in which human life is ordinarily placed, he will do
better to choose the lower or the higher way. For, after all, the most
foolish people are beyond question those who follow this pilgrimage of
life for seventy or eighty years without ever clearly deciding whether
to choose the wisdom of this world or the wisdom of light; and to this
class of foolish persons, who, for the most part, accomplish nothing in
the world, belong, curiously enough, a very considerable number of what
we call the cultivated people of our day.




V. THE ART OF HAVING TIME




V. THE ART OF HAVING TIME


I have no time,--that is not only the most familiar and convenient
excuse for not doing one’s duty; it is also, one must confess, the
excuse which has in it the greatest appearance of truth. Is it a good
excuse? I must at once admit that within certain limits the excuse is
reasonable, but I shall try to show how it is that this lack of time
occurs, and how one may, at least in some degree, find the time he
needs. Thus my sermon differs from those of the preachers, in having,
not three heads, but only two. This I say to propitiate those who may
protest that they have no time for reading.

The most immediate reason, then, for lack of time is to be found in
the character of the present age. There is just now a prevailing
restlessness, and a continuous mood of excitement, from which, unless
one make himself a hermit, he cannot wholly escape. One who lives at
all in these days must live fast. If one could observe the modern
world as a bird might look down upon it, and at the same time could
distinguish the details of its life, he would see beneath him a picture
like that of a restless and swarming ant-hill, where even the railway
trains, as they cross and recross each other by night and day, would
be enough to bewilder his brain. Something of this bewilderment is,
in fact, felt by almost every one who is involved in the movement of
the time. There are a great many people who have not the least idea
why they are thus all day long in a hurry. People whose circumstances
permit complete leisure are to be seen rushing through the streets, or
whirling away in a train, or crowding out of the theatre, as if there
were awaiting them at home the most serious tasks. The fact is that
they simply yield to the general movement. One might be led to fancy
that the most precious and most unusual possession on earth was the
possession of time. We say that time is money, yet people who have
plenty of money seem to have no time; and even the people who despise
money are constantly admonishing us, and our over-worked children,
to remember the Apostle’s saying, and “to redeem the time.” Thus the
modern world seems pitiless in its exhortation to work. Human beings
are driven like horses until they drop. Many lives are ruined by the
pace, but there are always more lives ready like horses to be driven.

Yet the results of this restless haste are in the main not convincing.
There have been periods in history when people, without the
restlessness and fatigue that now prevail, accomplished far more in
many forms of human activity than men achieve to-day. Where are we now
to find a man like Luther, who could write his incomparable translation
of the Bible in an incredibly brief space of time, and yet not break
down at the end of the task, or be forced to spend months or years
in recreation or vacation? Where are the scholars whose works fill
thousands of volumes, or the artists like Michael Angelo and Raphael,
who could be at once painters, architects, sculptors and poets? Where
shall we find a man like Titian, who at ninety years of age could still
do his work without the necessity of retiring each year to a summer
resort or sanitarium? The fact is that the nervous haste of our day
cannot be wholly explained by assuming that modern men do more work,
or better work, than their predecessors. It must be possible to live,
if not without perfect rest, still without haste, and yet accomplish
something.

The first condition of escape from this ineffective haste is, beyond
doubt, the resolution not to be swept away by the prevailing current
of the age, as though one had no will of his own. On the contrary, one
must oppose this current and determine to live as a free man, and not
as a slave either of work or of pleasure. Our present system of the
organization of labor makes this resolution far from easy. Indeed,
our whole manner of thinking about money-making and our painstaking
provision of money for future generations--our capitalist system, in
short--increase the difficulty. Here is the solemn background of our
present question, with which I do not propose to deal. We may simply
notice that the problem of the use of time is closely involved with
the problem of that radical change which civilization itself must
experience before it reaches a more equitable division of labor and a
more equitable distribution of prosperity. So long as there are people,
and especially educated people, who work only when they are forced
to work and for no other purpose than to free themselves and their
children as soon as possible from the burden of work; so long as there
are people who proudly say: “Je suis d’une famille où on n’avait pas
de plume qu’aux chapeaux,”--so long must there be many people who have
too little time simply because a few have too much. All this, however,
is of the future. The only practical problem for our own age is to
maintain a sort of defensive attitude toward our lack of time, and to
seek less radical ways of fortifying ourselves. Let me enumerate some
of these ways.

The best way of all to have time is to have the habit of regular
work, not to work by fits and starts, but in definite hours of the
day,--though not of the night,--and to work six days in the week, not
five and not seven. To turn night into day or Sunday into a work-day
is the best way to have neither time nor capacity for work. Even
a vacation fails of its purpose, if it be given to no occupation
whatever. I am not without hope that the time may come when medical
science will positively demonstrate that regular work, especially
as one grows older, is the best preservative both of physical and
intellectual health. I may even add for the sake of women among my
readers, that here is the best preservative of beauty also. Idleness
is infinitely more wearisome than work, and induces also much more
nervousness; for it weakens that power of resistance which is the
foundation of health.

Work, it is true, may be excessive, but this is most obviously the
case when one cares more for the result of his work than he does for
the work itself. Under such conditions, it is peculiarly difficult
to exercise moderation, and as an ancient preacher remarks with a
sigh: “Work is given to every man according to his power, but his
heart cannot abide by it.” In such cases, however, Nature herself
has given us a monitor in that physical fatigue which work itself
produces. One need only take account of such fatigue, and not cheat it
by stimulants, and then, even without much philosophizing, he will not
lack self-control.

The habit of regular work is further greatly encouraged by having a
definite vocation which involves positive tasks and obligations. Thus
the socialistic romances which draw a picture of the future of the
world are quite justified when they describe the universal organization
of industry under the form of an army, for an army represents that way
of life in which order and duty in one’s work are most emphasized.
Every Swiss citizen knows that, with the exception of occasional
excessive demands, he has never been in better health than when serving
his term in the army. Every hour in the day then had its regular and
sufficient task, and no one was called to consider whether he desired
to do things or not to do them, while no one had time to anticipate
the tasks of the following day. Here is the misfortune of many rich
people in our day,--that they have no definite vocation. As the common
saying has it, “There is no ‘must’ for them.” For many such persons, a
specific business would be a redemption from the dilettantism which now
threatens their peace of mind. They might well follow the example of
that Bavarian prince who has undertaken the profession of an oculist. I
am even inclined to believe that part of the movement toward the higher
education which is so conspicuous among women in our day is simply the
response to this demand of human nature for some definite vocation.

Another question much discussed in our time concerns the division of
one’s working day. In great cities with their vast distances, in the
case of unmarried persons engaged in more or less mechanical tasks,
and in the case of all people who regard their work as a burden to be
thrown off as soon as possible, there is some advantage in working
continuously and without interruption. This is what we are in the
habit of calling the English method. It is never possible, however,
to accomplish in this way so much intellectual work of a productive
character as may be done under the Swiss custom of a pause at midday.
No one can continuously, or even with momentary pauses, devote himself
for six or eight hours to work of an intellectual character. Even if
he allow himself an hour’s interval, the sense of strain remains,
together with an abbreviation of time for work in the afternoon.
On the other hand, under the Swiss custom, it is perfectly easy to
work for ten or eleven hours a day,--four in the morning, four in
the afternoon, and two or three in the evening, and few of us could
accomplish our work in that eight-hour day of which we hear so much,
although we have not the honor of being reckoned as of the class known
as “working-people.”

The next essential point is not to have too much fussiness about one’s
work, or, in other words, not to permit oneself elaborate preparations
as to time, place, surroundings, inclination, or mood. The inclination
to work comes of itself when one has begun his work, and it is even
true that a kind of fatigue with which one often begins--unless,
indeed, it has some positive or physical cause--disappears as one
seriously attacks his work, and does not simply, as it were, defend
himself from it.

  “_Begin with cheerfulness thy task
    Nor ask how it may end,
  Farther than all that thou couldst ask
    Its issues surely tend._”

In short, if one permit himself habitually to stop and ask that
indolent part of him which the Apostle Paul calls “the old man” what
he would like to do, or would prefer not to do, “the old man” is most
unlikely to vote for serious work, but betakes himself to excellent
religious or moral advice. The bad part of one must be forced to the
habit of obeying, without grumbling, the “categorical imperative”
of the better part. When one has achieved this amount of soldierly
discipline in himself, then he is on the right path, and until he has
reached this point, he has not found his way. Here he first learns
whether his life is saved or lost. Sometimes a man proposes to himself
to collect his thoughts before he begins, or to meditate on the work
he is going to do. In most cases, this is merely an excuse for doing
nothing, and it is most obviously such an excuse, when, to encourage
this preliminary reflection, a man lights his cigar. In short, one’s
best ideas come while he is working, and often, indeed, while he is
working on a wholly different topic. A distinguished modern preacher
has remarked with originality, though not with strict accuracy, that
there is not a single case mentioned in the Bible in which an angel
appeared to a man who was not at work.

In close connection with this point should be mentioned the habit of
using fragments of time. Many people have no time because they always
want to have a large amount of uninterrupted time before they set
themselves to work. In such a plan they are doubly deceived. On the
one hand, in many circumstances of life these prolonged periods are
difficult to secure, and, on the other hand, the power of work which
one possesses is not so unlimited that it can continuously utilize
long stretches of time. This is peculiarly true of such intellectual
work as is devoted to productive effort. Of such work it may be said
without exaggeration that the first hour, or even the first half-hour,
is the most fruitful. Dismissing, however, these large intellectual
undertakings, there are to be found in connection with every piece of
work a great number of subordinate tasks of preparation or arrangement
which are of a mechanical nature, and for each of which a quarter of an
hour or so is sufficient. These minor matters, if not disposed of in
small fragments of time which would otherwise be wasted, will absorb
the time and power which should be devoted to one’s important task. It
might, indeed, be reasonably maintained that the use of these fragments
of time, together with the complete dismissal of the thought, “It is
not worth while to begin to-day,” accounts for half of the intellectual
results which one attains.

Another important means for saving time is the habit of changing the
kind of work in which one is engaged. Change is almost as restful
as complete rest, and if one acquire a certain degree of skill in
his ways of change,--a skill which comes from experience rather than
from theorizing,--one may carry on his work for almost the entire
day. Moreover, so far as my experience goes, it is a mistake to plan
that one piece of work shall be finished before another is begun.
The judicious course, on the contrary, is that which prevails among
artists, who are often engaged on a whole series of sketches, and turn,
according to the momentary inclination which overmasters them, first to
one piece of work and then to another. Here, too, it may be remarked is
an excellent way of maintaining one’s self-control. The old Adam in us
often persuades the better nature that he is not really lazy, but is
simply not in the mood for a certain piece of work. In this state of
things, one should forthwith say to himself: “Well, if you do not feel
inclined to this piece of work, take up with another.” Then one will
discover whether the difficulty is a disinclination to a special form
of work, to which one might yield, or a disinclination to do any work
at all. In short, one must not permit oneself to deceive oneself.

Another point to be considered is the habit of working quickly, not
giving too much care to outward form, but devoting one’s efforts to
the content of the task. The experience of most workers will bear
me out when I say that the most profitable and effective tasks are
those which have been done quickly. I am well aware that Horace
advises one to take nine years for the perfecting of verses; but such
scrupulousness presupposes an excessive notion of the quality of one’s
work. Thoroughness is a very beautiful and necessary trait, in so far
as it concerns truth, for truth cannot be too thoroughly explored; but
there is a spurious thoroughness which absorbs itself in all manner of
details and subordinate questions which are not worth investigating,
or which cannot be wholly known. Thoroughness of this kind is never
satisfied with itself. It is sometimes mistaken for great learning;
for to many people learning is profound only when wholly detached from
practical usefulness, or when an author, for a whole lifetime, has
brooded over one book.

Truth, wherever it may be sought, is, as a rule, so simple that it
often does not look learned enough. People feel as if they must
add to it something which is not essential to the nature of truth,
in order to give to truth a respectable and academic look. Among
learned people, it is often the case that one must first earn his
reputation by some piece of work which is of no use to himself or to
any one else, and in which he heaps together the hitherto undiscovered
rubbish of some remote century. Lassalle was able to write his famous
work on Herakleitos without forfeiting his interest in the affairs
of modern life, but there are few authors with this capacity for
practical concerns. On the contrary, many authors in their maiden
venture of learned work not only have their eyesight ruined by their
researches, but lose their inward vision, which is a matter of much
more consequence. They reach the goal of their ambition and become of
no further use.

A further way of saving a deal of time is to do one’s work and be
done with it; not to deal with it, that is to say, in a provisional
or preparatory manner. This kind of immediate thoroughness is in our
day extremely rare, and in my opinion much of the blame should be
laid to the newspapers, which accustom people to superficial surveys
of truth. The editorial writer says, at the close of his article, “We
shall return to this subject later”; but in fact he never returns. So
it is with the modern reader. If he wants to make use of what he has
read, he has to begin the reading of it afresh. His skimming of the
subject--as the phrase is--has had no result, and so the time that he
has given to skimming has been lost. This is the reason why people
have so little thorough knowledge in our day, and why, though they
have studied a subject ten times, on the eleventh occasion when they
need it, they must study it again. Indeed, there are people who would
be extremely glad if they could remember even the works of which they
themselves were the authors.

With this point is obviously connected the need of orderliness and of
the reading of original authorities. The habit of orderliness saves one
from the need of hunting for material, and this search for material is
not only, as we all know, a great waste of time, but tempts us also to
lose pleasure in our work. Further, orderliness permits us to allow
one subject to be forgotten, while we apply ourselves to the next. The
reading of original sources, on the other hand, gives one the advantage
of being sure of his material, and of having his own judgment about
it. There is this further advantage, that the original sources are in
most cases not only much briefer, but much more interesting and much
easier to remember than the books that have been written about them.
Second-hand knowledge never gives the courage and self-confidence which
one gets from acquaintance with original sources. One of the great
mistakes of modern scholarship, as distinguished from that of the
classic world, is--as Winkelmann has pointed out--that our learning in
so many cases consists in knowing only what other people have known.

But, after all, we have not yet named the chief element in the
art of having time. It consists in banishing from one’s life all
superfluities. Much which modern civilization regards as essential,
is, in reality, superfluous, and while I shall indicate several things
which appear to me unnecessary, I shall be quite content to have my
reader supplement them by his own impressions. For instance, one
superfluity is beer. It is superfluous at any time of the day and
especially when drunk in the morning, after the fashion made popular by
Prince Bismarck. Perhaps the greatest contributors to waste of time in
this century are the brewers, and the time will come when people may
regard the excessive drinking of beer as they now regard the excessive
use of alcohol in other forms.

I may name as a second superfluity the excessive reading of newspapers.
There are in our day people who regard themselves as educated, and who
yet read nothing but newspapers. Their houses are built and furnished
in all possible--and impossible--styles, and yet you will find in
them hardly a dozen good books. They get their whole supply of ideas
out of the newspapers and magazines, and these publications are more
and more designed to meet the needs of such people. This excessive,
or even exclusive, reading of newspapers is often excused on account
of our political interests; but one has only to notice what it is in
the newspapers which people are most anxious to read to arrive at a
judgment whether this excuse is sound. I may add that the time of day
dedicated to the newspaper is by no means unimportant. People, for
instance, who devote their first hour in the morning to the reading of
one or two newspapers lose thereby the freshest interest in their day’s
work.

Another superfluity is the excessive going to meetings. A man who is
much devoted to such gatherings can scarcely find time for serious
work. Indeed, it is not necessary for him to do independent work; for
he has substituted for his own judgment the judgment of the crowd, and
the crowd carries him on its shoulders. A great waste of time occurs,
further, among one class of people at the present time, through a
pretended devotion to art. I do not refer to art practised by oneself,
but to art as passively accepted; and I should perhaps make exception
in what I say, of the art of music. In other forms of art many persons
permit those impulses which should have stirred them to idealism,
and to responsiveness toward the beautiful, to evaporate in æsthetic
satisfactions. Many women, to speak frankly, are educated to acquire
mere artistic appreciation; and they cannot, without severe struggles
and against great hindrances, find the way back from this mood to any
profitable and spiritually satisfying work.

Another superfluity is the devotion to social duties and the whole
purposeless system of making “calls.” These habits are the mere shadows
of genuine friendship, and of the intellectual stimulus through
personal intercourse which they were originally intended to express. I
need not speak of superfluous amusements. The theatre, for instance,
to accomplish its legitimate aim needs so fundamental a reform that
there would be really nothing left of its present methods. Finally,
and of quite another category among the elements of culture in our
time, I may name as superfluous the superficial and popular products
of materialism, and with these the debasing French novels and dramas
of the day. People of the educated class in our time, and especially
people of the academic circle, ought to have the courage to say of
such literature: “We know nothing about it.” Then perhaps one might
have time to read something each day which was serious and educative;
something that tended to strengthen the mind and to bring one into real
contact with the intellectual movement of the age.

And now, lest there should be complaint of time wasted on such reading
as this, I shall add but two other points. One of these, stated by
Rothe, is the advice that it is most desirable not to take up one’s
time with the details of one’s business affairs. Even if this is not
altogether possible, one may, if he wish it, greatly reduce the care of
details of administration, and live in a world of larger and happier
thoughts. The other point, which has even more practical significance,
is this: Limit yourself to that which you really know and which has
been especially committed to your care. For your special task you will
almost always have time enough. An Old Testament saying states it even
more plainly: “He that tilleth his land shall have plenty of bread: but
he that followeth after vain persons shall have poverty enough.” As
to the things which do not concern one’s special calling, but which
have a certain significance in the world and a certain importance for
culture, it may be necessary for one, once in his life, to acquire a
superficial survey of them by a glance at the best original sources.
One should thereafter leave these matters alone and not concern himself
with them further.

Finally, in this enumeration of the things which waste one’s time,
I may add that one must not permit himself to be overburdened with
superfluous tasks. There are in our day an infinite number of
these,--correspondence, committees, reports, and not the least,
lectures. All of them take time, and it is extremely probable that
nothing will come of them. When the Apostle Paul was addressing the
Athenians, he remarked that they did nothing else than to hear some new
thing. It was not the serious part of his address, or its spiritual
quickening, to which they gave their attention, it was its novelty; and
the outcome of his sermon was simply that some mocked, and the most
friendly said with patronizing kindness: “We will hear thee again of
this matter.” Indeed, the reporter of the incident finds it necessary
to mention expressly, that one member of the Athenian City-Council
and one woman in the audience received some lasting good from the
Apostle’s address. How is it, let me ask you, with yourselves? Have
the lectures which you have heard been to you in any way positive
influences of insight and decision, or have they been merely the
evidences of the speaker’s erudition?

Such are the ways which in our present social conditions are open to
any one to use for saving time. I must add, however, that if one tries
to use these ways of saving time, he will make another discovery. For
one of the most essential elements of such happiness as we can reach on
earth lies in not having too much time. The vastly greater proportion
of human happiness consists in continuous and progressive work, with
the blessing which is given to work and which in the end makes work
itself a pleasure. The spirit of man is never more cheerful than when
it has discovered its proper work. Make this discovery, first of all,
if you wish to be happy. Most of the wrecks of human life are caused by
having either no work, or too little work, or uncongenial work; and the
human heart, which is so easily agitated, never beats more peacefully
than in the natural activity of vigorous, yet satisfying, work. Only
one must guard against making of work an idol, instead of serving
God through one’s work. Those who forget this last distinction find
themselves in later life doomed to intellectual or physical prostration.

There are, then, but two possessions which may be attained by persons
of every condition, which never desert one through life, and are a
constant consolation in misfortune. These are work and love. Those who
shut these blessings out of life commit a greater sin than suicide.
They do not even know what it is that they throw away. Rest without
work is a thing which in this life one cannot endure. The best blessing
which can be promised is that last blessing of Moses for Asher: “Thy
shoes shall be iron and brass; and as thy days, so shall thy strength
be.” Better than this one should not desire, and if one has this he
should be thankful. Yet, it must be added, this contentedness in
continuous work is possible only when one abandons ambition; for
ambition is always most deeply anxious not to do work, but as soon as
possible to get the result of work, even if that result is illusive.
Ambition is the Moloch of our time, to whom we feel bound to sacrifice
even our own children, and who, more than all other foes, destroys the
bodies and the souls of youth.

If, still further, one commit himself, as is so often the case, to
that philosophy of materialism in which this brief life is the end of
opportunity, so that but a few years are ours for the accomplishment
of all which the pitiless and endless struggle for existence and the
survival of the fittest permit, then there is an end of all restfulness
and blessedness in work. Under such a view, time is indeed too short,
and every art is indeed too long. The true spirit of work, which has
no time for superfluities, but time enough for what is right and
true, grows best in the soil of that philosophy which sees one’s work
extending into the infinite world, and one’s life on earth as but one
part of life itself. Then one gets strength to do his highest tasks,
and patience among the grave difficulties and hindrances which confront
him both within himself and in the times in which he lives. One is
calmly indifferent to much which in the sight of this world alone
may seem important, but which, seen in the light of eternity, loses
significance. This is the meaning of that beautiful saying of the
philosopher of Görlitz, which brings to our troubled time its message
of comfort:

  “_He who, while here, lives the eternal life
  Is through eternity set free from strife._”[3]




VI. HAPPINESS




VI. HAPPINESS


Whatever the philosophers may say, it remains true that, from the first
hour of man’s waking consciousness until that consciousness ceases,
his most ardent desire is to be happy, and that the moment of his
profoundest regret is when he becomes convinced that on this earth
perfect happiness cannot be found. Here is the problem which gives to
the various ages of human history their special characters. Blithe are
those ages when young and progressive nations still hope for happiness,
or when men believe that in some new formula of philosophy, or of
religion, or perhaps in some new industrial programme, the secret of
human happiness has at last been found. Gloomy are those ages in which,
as in our time, great masses of people are burdened with the conviction
that all these familiar formulas have been illusions, and when persons
of the keenest insight say--as they are now saying--that the very word
happiness has in it a note of melancholy. No sooner, we are told, does
one speak of happiness than it flees from him. In its very nature it
lies beyond the sphere of practical realization.

I do not share this opinion. I believe that happiness can be found.
If I thought otherwise, I should be silent and not make unhappiness
the more bitter by discussing it. It is, indeed, true that those who
talk of happiness utter therewith a sigh, as if there were doubt
whether happiness could be attained. It is still further true that
irrational views of happiness seem to be for the present forced upon
us. Only through these imperfect views can individuals or communities
approach that degree of spiritual and material development which is the
necessary foundation for real happiness.

And here our question seems to involve a serious contradiction. For we
have, first of all, to learn from our own experience much that does not
bring us happiness. Each in his own way must pass, with the greatest of
all poets, through the “forest dark” to the “city dolent,” and climb
the steep path of the “Holy Mountain,” before he may learn how

  “_That apple sweet, which through so many branches
  The care of mortals goeth in pursuit of,
  To-day shall put in peace thy hungerings._”[4]

All this is to be attained, not through instruction, but through
experience. It is a path, and especially the latter part of it, which
each must walk alone. No visible help is on any side, and as one meets
each of those obstacles which in his own strength perhaps he could not
overcome, he is upborne by that

  “... _eagle in the sky, with plumes of gold,
  With wings wide open, and intent to stoop,_

         *       *       *       *       *

  _Then wheeling somewhat more, it seemed to me,
  Terrible as the lightning he descended,
  And snatched me upward even to the fire._”[5]

Thus the suggestions which now follow concern themselves merely with
the many misleading ways which purport to lead toward happiness, and
in which each new generation in its restless longing is tempted to go
astray.

The paths by which people journey toward happiness lie in part through
the world about them and in part through the experience of their souls.
On the one hand, there is the happiness which comes from wealth, honor,
the enjoyment of life, from health, culture, science, or art; and, on
the other hand, there is the happiness which is to be found in a good
conscience, in virtue, work, philanthropy, religion, devotion to great
ideas and great deeds.

The outward ways to happiness are, however, all, in one respect,
disappointing. They are not paths which are possible for every one
to follow, and therefore, for many cannot lead to happiness. Still
further, the possession of good things which others do not possess
cannot but bring with it to any noble soul some twinge of conscience.
One who enjoys these outward blessings, and recalls the millions of
human beings by his side who are perishing for lack of them, must be
either thoroughly selfish or profoundly unhappy. It is of such persons
that Jesus is thinking when he speaks of the “unrighteous Mammon,” and
even goes on to say: “How hardly shall they that have riches enter into
the kingdom.” No man, that is to say, can attain to Christian happiness
who attains distinction at the cost of others. “One that is proud in
heart,” says the Book of Proverbs, “is an abomination to the Lord.”

Thus it was that Francis of Assisi, and many a saint before and
after him, resolved, at any price, to break the chains of worldly
possessions. It was a logical resolution. Wealth is the gravest of
obstacles to the spiritual life, and few men are wholly free from its
solicitations or slavery. The possession and administration of a large
property, and, indeed, every position of exceptional honor and power,
induce with almost absolute certainty a hardening of the disposition
which is the very opposite of happiness. One shudders as he observes
how dull life seems to that spiritless throng which in ever-increasing
numbers visits each year the Swiss mountains to escape the emptiness of
their prosperous lives.

Such is the result of these external ways of seeking happiness. But we
do not fare much better when we turn to that form of happiness which
lays claim to a nobler and a spiritual source,--the happiness of the
æsthetic life. For the boundaries between this form of happiness and
that of mere materialism are by no means easy to define. Æsthetic
enjoyment often passes over into mere sensualism, as Goethe, the great
model of æsthetic interest, has proved to us both in his poetry--as
in the case of Faust--and in his own life. Indeed, the new school of
æstheticism runs grave risk of interpreting much in terms of art which
is in fact mere materialism. Those who thus seek happiness should
recall the saying of their illustrious predecessor, who possessed in
an extraordinary degree the capacity to attain whatever happiness in
life æstheticism had to offer. “When all is said,” remarks Goethe, “my
life has been nothing but care and work. I can even say that in my
seventy-five years, I have not had four weeks of real happiness. It
has been a continuous rolling up hill of a stone which must ever be
pushed again from the bottom.” Four weeks of happiness in seventy-five
years! This man of art declares that in his view life is nothing else
than misery! There is hardly an honest day-laborer who at the end of
his life, full as it may have been of genuine troubles, could give so
poor an account of himself.

The fact is, then, that human nature seems obviously not intended for
this kind of happiness. Life is made for activity; and this kind of
receptive enjoyment, even in its highest forms, is designed merely
to give flavor and change to life, and to be sparingly used; so that
those who give themselves too confidently to such enjoyment bitterly
deceive themselves. Genuine happiness cannot be arbitrarily produced.
It issues from obedience to a genuine demand of human nature, and from
intelligent activity naturally employed. Here is the rational basis
of that faith in human equality and that contentment with the simple
joys of life, in which people to-day believe much too little, and which
awhile ago people praised with perhaps exaggerated sentiment.

Still further, as regards such æsthetic enjoyment, it is to be
observed that the level of æsthetic judgments in literature and art
is now so visibly sinking that these resources cannot long satisfy
minds that can be called educated, or nations that can be called
progressive. The time may soon come when people will weary of this
“efflorescence” of science, literature, and art; and may even wish
to exchange it for a taste of healthy barbarism. The Austrian poet
Rosegger has thus described a not impossible future: “We already
see each year a great migration of people passing from the cities
to the country and the mountains, and not until the leaves are
touched with autumn color returning to the city walls. The time will
come, however, when prosperous city-folk will betake themselves
permanently to country life; and when the work-people of the city
will migrate to the wilderness and subdue it. They will abandon the
search for book-knowledge, they will find their pleasure and renewal
in physical work, they will make laws under which an independent and
self-respecting livelihood will be ensured to country-dwellers; and the
notion of an ignorant peasantry will disappear.” However this may be,
it is at least certain that we are approaching a period marked by a
return to nature, and by a taste for simplicity, such as existed at the
end of the last century, when Marie Antoinette played shepherdess with
her courtiers at the Trianon. It is a simplicity which is caricatured
by the luxurious folk who parade each summer through Switzerland
in mountain dresses and spiked shoes, and attempt an intimacy with
the life of nature. Even these folk, strange as is their attire and
laughable as is their mimicry of the life of peasants and mountaineers,
find themselves as happy as their conventional lives permit.

One other external notion of happiness may be dealt with in a word. It
is the happiness which is sought in freedom from care. Such happiness
is an ideal for those only who have never had the experience of such
freedom. For the fact is that through our cares, when not excessive,
and through our victory over cares, comes the most essential part of
human happiness. Cares of a reasonable nature do not constitute what we
call care. Many a life of the widest experience would testify that the
most unendurable experience is to be found, not in a series of stormy
days, but in a series of cloudless ones.

I pass, then, from those who seek for happiness in material and
outward conditions to those more rational inquirers who seek it in the
spiritual life. These persons expect that happiness will be secured
in the doing of their duty, in a good conscience, in personal work of
public good, in patriotism, or charity, or some form of philanthropy,
or perhaps in conformity to the teachings of their Church. And yet, a
very considerable part of the drift to pessimism which one observes in
our day comes of the experience that no one of these ways leads surely
to happiness, or, at least, that one does not get in such ways the
happiness for which he hoped. Indeed, it is perhaps still further true
that a great part of the reckless “Realism,” now so prevalent among us,
comes not of the conviction that it will make one happy, but only of
the despair of finding any other way of happiness. For if it be true
that neither our work, nor what we call our virtues, can bring peace
to the soul; if outward activity, and charity, and patriotism, are but
a mockery of happiness; if religion is for the most part only a form
or a phrase, without objective certainty; if all is thus but vanity of
vanities, then indeed: “Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die.”

I do not join in the condemnation with which the moralists usually
meet this view of life. I deny only the conclusions which are drawn
from such a view. I recognize the honest purpose of these modern
philosophers. They represent, at least, a sincere love of truth; they
are hostile to all mere phrases. The spirit of the modern world looks
for a happiness which is not mere philosophical composure, but which
has objective results. It demands a kind of contentment in which
every human being may have a share. In all this, the spirit of the
age is wholly right, and this demand for objective happiness which it
utters is a note which has not been heard for two thousand years. I,
too, desire happiness; but I know that one who would find the way to
happiness must, first of all, and without hesitation, throw overboard
all the false idols which have tempted him to worship them. As he
dismisses the prejudices which birth, or circumstances, or habits, have
created, he takes one step after another toward true happiness. As the
Emperor Maximilian of Mexico, one of the least fortunate persons of our
day, rightly said: “The abandoning of an untruth, or of a prejudice,
brings with it forthwith a sensation of joy.” Here, then, is our guide
along this darkened road, which without some such guidance we could not
find at all.

  “_The happy life lies straight before our eyes,--
  We see it, but we know not how to prize._”

First of all, then, we must admit that happiness does not consist in
the sense of virtue alone. This idol of the incorruptible Robespierre
will not serve us. For virtue in its completeness dwells in no human
heart. One must have but a meagre conception of virtue, or else a very
limited intellectual capacity, who finds himself always self-contented.
Even the vainest of men are not in reality contented; their vanity
itself is in large degree only a sense of uncertainty about their
worth, so that they need the constant endorsement of others to satisfy
them. The maxim says that a good conscience makes a soft pillow, and
he who has this unfailing sense of duty done no doubt has happiness;
but I have not, as yet, fallen in with such a man. My impression is
that there is not one of us who has ever, even for a single day, done
his whole duty. Beyond this, I need not go. If one of my readers says
to me: “I am the man who has thus done his duty,”--well, he may be
quite right, but I do not care for that man’s nearer acquaintance.
The farther a man advances in the doing of his duty, so much the more
his conscience and perception grow refined. The circle of his duties
widens continually before him, so that he understands the Apostle Paul,
when, with perfect sincerity, and without false humility, he speaks of
himself as the “chief of sinners.”

Are, then, I ask again, philanthropy and the good deeds--public and
private--which it suggests, the secret of happiness? Love is a great
word, and the Apostle is altogether justified when in the familiar
passage of his letters he says that among the many things which perish,
love abides. But when in the same passage he says that it is possible
to speak with the tongues of angels, and give all one’s goods to feed
the poor, and even give one’s body to be burned, and yet not have
love,--then we comprehend without further explanation what he means by
love. For love is a part of God’s own being, which does not originate
in the hearts of men. One who possesses it knows well enough that it
is not his own. Even the pale human reflection of this Divine love
brings happiness, but it is a temporary happiness; and always with
the perilous uncertainty of a love which anticipates return, so that
the happiness depends upon the will of others. He, then, who yields
his heart absolutely to others, and stakes his happiness on their
affection, may some day find the terrible words of the Jewish prophet
true: “Cursed be the man that trusteth in man, and maketh flesh his
arm, and whose heart departeth from the Lord.” All this may be one day
a spiritual experience, which may convert his love into hate. That
apotheosis of hate which marks the talk of many a social agitator in
our day is but the evidence of those bitter disillusions of affection
which millions have been called to feel.

Is, then, happiness to be found in work? Work is certainly one great
factor of human happiness--indeed, in one sense, the greatest; for
without work all happiness which is not mere intoxication is absolutely
denied. In order to get the capacity for happiness, one must obey the
commands: “Six days shalt thou labor,” and “In the sweat of thy face
shalt thou eat bread.” Of all seekers for happiness, the most foolish
are those who evade these two conditions. Without work no man can be
happy. In this negative statement the saying is absolutely true. And
yet, it is a greater error to suppose that work is in itself happiness,
or to believe that every work leads to happiness. It is not alone our
imagination that pictures another ideal, so that one can hardly imagine
a heaven, or an earthly paradise, as devoted to unremitting work; it
is also true--and it is much more to be remembered--that only a fool
can be wholly contented with the work that he does. One might even say
that the wisest see most clearly the incompleteness of their work, so
that not one of them has been able, at the end of his day’s work, to
say of it: “Behold, it is very good.” This mere praise of work, then,
is, for the most part, only a sort of a spur, or whip, with which one
urges himself, or others, to the tasks of life; so that even those
who take pride in describing themselves as “working-people” are much
concerned to reduce as far as possible their working day. If work were
essentially the same as happiness, these people would be seeking to
prolong as much as possible the hours of work.

Of all seekers for happiness, however, the most extraordinary are those
who look for it in the philosophy of pessimism; yet of these there
are not a few, and by no means of the baser sort. There is, however,
almost always associated with the creed of pessimism a certain false
impression of one’s own importance. It has an appearance of magnanimity
to throw overboard all one’s hopes, and to believe that everything,
oneself included, is bad. For this, at least, is true, that if all are
bad, he who sees that it is so, and admits it, is, after all, the least
bad; and if he is sincerely contented that others should regard him as
bad, he may be not far from the way to something better. Yet, pessimism
as a permanent habit of mind is, for the most part, only a mantle of
philosophy through which, when it is thrown back, there looks out the
face of vanity;--a vanity which is never satisfied and which withholds
one forever from a contented mind.

Finally, of all people who seek for happiness, the most unhappy are
those who seek it in mere conformity to religious creeds. There are
many such people in our day, and they find themselves in the end
bitterly disappointed. For all church organizations are inclined to
promise more than they can assure, and are like nets to catch all
manner of fish. In a passage from the works of the late Professor
Gelzer, he remarks that, for most church-going people, worship is
nothing more than “appearing at Court once a week to present one’s
respects to the throne.” He adds that there is the same formal
service of man also; for one sometimes does this service, or, as the
Bible says, “Hath wrought a good work upon me,” only for the better
maintenance in the future of one’s own self-esteem.

I shall not contradict what so distinguished a man out of his rich
experience has said on this subject. Yet, for my own part, I must still
believe that if a human soul worships God even in the most irrational
way, and recognizes its dependence on Him, God will not forsake that
soul. I must believe, still further, that the feeblest and most
superstitious expressions of religion bring to one who, even with
occasional sincerity, persists in them, more happiness than the most
brilliant philosophy of atheism can offer. Yet this blessing bestowed
upon simple souls by the patience of God is not to be attained in
its fulness by those who are capable of larger insight. Such persons
have the duty laid on them to free the Christian Religion from the
lukewarmness which for two thousand years has afflicted it. Theirs is
the duty of dissatisfaction with the forms and formulas of the Church.
No mere science of religion should content them; for such a science
alone never brought happiness to man, and still offers to a people who
do not really understand its teachings, stones instead of bread. So
long as people seek contentment in these ways, their path to happiness
must abound in disappointments; and these disappointments become the
harder to bear because people, as a rule, do not dare to confess either
to themselves, or to others, that they are thus disappointed. They must
pretend to themselves that they are satisfied because they see no path
which may lead them back to happiness and peace.

Such, then, are some of the ways by which, with slight modifications
and combinations, the human race through all its history has sought
for happiness; and if we do not recognize these ways in history, we may
find them all with more or less distinctness in our own experience. And
yet by no one of these ways has the race found the happiness it seeks.
What, then, I ask once more, is the path to this end?

The first and the most essential condition of true happiness, I answer,
is a firm faith in the moral order of the world. If one lack this, if
it be held that the world is governed by chance or by those changeless
laws of nature which in their dealings with the weak are merciless, or
if, finally, one imagine the world controlled by the cunning and power
of man,--then there is no hope of personal happiness. In such an order
of the world, there is nothing left for the individual but to rule, or
to be ruled; to be either the anvil or the hammer; and it is hard to
say which of the two would be to an honorable man the more unworthy lot.

In national life especially, this view of the world leads to constant
war and preparation for war, and the text-book of politics becomes
The Prince of Machiavelli. From such a condition of war the only
possible, though partial, deliverance would be through some vast
governmental control, ruling with iron force and comprehending in
itself all civilized peoples. Such a State would, at least, make war
between States impossible, as it was impossible in the Roman Empire of
the Cæsars, and as Napoleon I. dreamed that it might be impossible in
Europe. Every right-minded man must inwardly protest against a view
which thus robs man in his person of his will and in his politics of
his freedom; and history also teaches, in many incidents, the emptiness
and folly of such a view. There are some persons who believe that they
are forced to accept this social creed, because the conception of the
world as a moral order does not seem to them sufficiently proved.
To such persons, I can only repeat that which is written above the
entrance to Dante’s hell:

  “_Through me the way is to the city dolent;
  Through me the way is to eternal dole;
  Through me the way among the people lost._

         *       *       *       *       *

  _All hope abandon, ye who enter in!_”[6]

I go on to say, however, that formal proof of this moral order of the
world is impossible. The ancient Hebrews believed that one could not
look upon the face of God and live, and Christianity, in its turn,
offers us no formal proof of the character of God. The only path that
leads to the proof of God is that which is followed in the Sermon on
the Mount: “Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God.”
Here is a proof which any one may test whose heart is pure; while
from those who merely reason about God’s order of the world He hides
Himself, and no man may rend by force the veil that covers Him.

If, then, one begins simply to live as in a moral world, his path to
happiness lies plainly before him. The door is open and no man can shut
it. Within his heart there is a certain stability, rest, and assurance,
which endure and even gather strength amid all outward storms. His
heart becomes, as the Psalmist says, not froward or fearful, but
“fixed.” The only peril from which he now has to guard himself is
the peril of regarding too seriously the changeful impressions and
events of each day. His desire must be to live resolutely in one even
mood, and to look for his daily share of conscious happiness not in
his emotions, but in his activity. Then for the first time he learns
what work really is. It is no more to him a fetish, to be served
with anxious fear; it is no longer an idol through which he worships
himself; it is simply the natural and healthy way of life, which frees
him not only from the many spiritual evils which are produced by
idleness, but also from numberless physical evils which have the same
source. Happy work is the healthiest of human conditions. Honest sweat
on the brow is the source of permanent and self-renewing power and of
light-heartedness; and these together make one really happy. Indeed,
the later discoveries of medical science are teaching us that physical
health is secured only by a high degree of power of resistance against
enemies which life cannot avoid. But this power of resistance--as one
may soon discover--is not a merely physical capacity; it is quite as
much a moral quality and in large part the product of moral effort.
Here, then, are two secrets of happiness which are fundamentally
inseparable: Life directed by faith in the permanent moral order of
the world, and Work done in that same faith. Beyond these two, and one
other which I shall mention later, all other ways of happiness are
secondary, and indeed all else comes of its own accord, according to
one’s special needs, if only one holds firmly to these primary sources
of spiritual power.

I go on to mention a few of these subordinate rules for happiness which
may be deduced from the experience of life. They are mere maxims of
conduct to which many others might be added.

We need, for instance, to be at the same time both brave and humble.
That is the meaning of the strange word of the Apostle: “When I am
weak, then am I strong.” Either quality alone does more harm than good.

Again, one must not make pleasure an end, for pleasure comes of its own
accord in the right way of life, and the simplest, the cheapest, and
the most inevitable pleasures are the best.

Again, one can bear all troubles, except two: worry and sin.

Further, all that is really excellent has a small beginning. The good
does not show its best at once.

Finally, all paths which it is best to follow, are entered by open
doors.

There are, it must be added, some difficulties and problems which
thoughtful people should take into account in their intercourse with
others. One must not hate other people, or, on the other hand, idolize
them, or take their opinions, demands, and judgments too seriously.
One must not sit in judgment on others, or, on the other hand, submit
himself to their judgment. One must not court the society of those who
think much of themselves. Indeed, I may say in general that, except
in certain callings, one should not cultivate acquaintance with great
people, or fine people, with the rich, or the fashionable, but so far
as possible, without repelling them, should avoid their company. Among
the best sources of happiness is the enjoyment found in small things
and among humble people; and many a bitter experience is avoided by the
habit of an unassuming life. The best way to have permanent peace with
the world is not to expect much of it; not to be afraid of it; so far
as one can without self-deception see the good in it; and to regard the
evil as something powerless and temporary which will soon defeat itself.

In short, I may in conclusion say, that one must not take this life too
seriously. As soon as we live above it, much of it becomes unimportant,
and if the essentials are secure we must not care too much for the
subordinate. Many of the best people suffer from this magnifying
of trifles, and especially from their dependence on other people’s
opinions; and this lack of proportion makes for such people each day’s
work much more difficult than it would otherwise be.

I have said that these practical rules might be indefinitely
multiplied. But they are all, as I have also said, in reality
superfluous. For if the soil of the heart is fertilized, as I
have already described, then these fruits of life grow out of it
spontaneously, and serve the special needs of the individual. The
essential question concerns the soil itself, without which not one
of these practical fruits can grow. Thus I may say in general that
I take no great interest in what people call systems of morals, or
in the rules of conduct which they prescribe. A system of morals
either issues spontaneously from a habit of mind, which in its turn
issues from a view of life, attained even through the death of one’s
old self; or else such a system is nothing but a series of beautiful
maxims, pleasant to hear, good to record in diaries and calendars, but
incapable of converting the human heart.

I do not care to multiply the material for these collections of maxims.
I shall only add one last and solemn truth. It is this,--that under
the conditions of human life unhappiness also is necessary. Indeed,
if one cared to state it in a paradox, he might say that unhappiness
is essential to happiness. In the first place, as the experience of
life plainly shows, unhappiness is inevitable, and one must in one way
or another reconcile himself to it. The most to which one can attain
in this human lot is perfect adjustment to one’s destiny; that inward
and permanent peace which, as Isaiah says, is like an “overflowing
stream.” It is this peace and this alone which Christ promises to
his disciples, and it is this, and no outward satisfaction, which the
Apostle Paul expects for his fellow-Christians, when, at the end of his
unpeaceful life, he prays that “the peace of Christ may rule” in their
hearts.

Thus, for real happiness the outward issue of events may come to
have no high importance. Stoicism endeavored to solve the problem of
happiness by developing insensibility to pain, but its endeavor was
vain. The problem of happiness is to be solved in quite another way.
One must accept his suffering and unhappiness, and adjust himself to
them. And to this end one is, first of all, helped by considering what
unhappiness implies, and by living consistently above the sway of
momentary feeling. For unhappiness does us good in no less than three
ways,--ways which are cumulative in their effect. It is, in the first
place, a punishment, the natural consequence of our deeds. It is,
thus considered, a part of those deeds themselves, and therefore must
follow them as surely as a logical consequence follows its premise.
Unhappiness is, secondly, a cleansing process, waking us to greater
seriousness and greater receptivity to truth. Thirdly, unhappiness
recalls us to self-examination and fortifies us by disclosing what is
our own strength, and what is God’s strength. By no other experience
does one attain that spiritual courage which is far removed from
self-confidence and very near to humility. In a word, it must be said
that the deeper life of man and that noble bearing which we remark in
some people, and which no one, whatever be his station, can falsely
assume, are attained only through faithful endurance of misfortune.
That word of the Apostle Paul, “We glory in tribulations,” is, like
many of his sayings, absolutely unintelligible to any one who has not
experienced what renewal of power and what profound happiness may be
discovered through misfortune itself. It is a form of happiness which
one never forgets if he has once really experienced it.

This, then, is the riddle of life which perplexes many a man and turns
him from the right way,--that good people do not get the good things
which might seem to them their due.

  “_The prophet host, the martyr throng,
      Reckoned, the world as dross,
  Despised the shame, endured the wrong,
      Counting their gain, their loss;
  And He, to whom they sang their song,
      Was nailed upon the cross._”

Suffering, then, lies on the road to life, and one must expect to meet
it if he would be happy. Many a person, when he sees this lion in
his path, turns about and contents himself with something less than
happiness. And yet it is also true, as experience teaches, that in
our misfortunes, as in our enjoyments, imagination greatly outruns
reality. Our pain is seldom as great as our imagination pictures it.
Sorrow is often the gate which opens into great happiness. Thus the
true life calls for a certain severity of dealing, as if one should
say to himself: “You may like to do this thing, or you may not like
to do it, but you must do it”; and true education rests on these two
foundation stones,--love of truth and courage for the right. Without
them, education is worthless. It is like the kingdom of God which is to
be taken by violence, “And the violent take it with force.” And thus,
of all the human qualities which lead to happiness, certainly the most
essential is courage.

We look back, then, finally, over what has been said, and repeat what
a gifted authoress of our time, Gisela Grimm, has said in her drama
of Old Scotland: “Happiness is communion with God, and the central
spiritual quality which attains this communion is courage.” Other
happiness than this is not to be found on earth, and if there were
happiness without these traits, it would not be the happiness we
should desire. And this kind of happiness is real. It is not, like
every other dream of happiness, an illusion from which sooner or
later one must wake. It does not issue from our achievements or our
compulsions. On the contrary, when we have once accepted and made our
own the view of life which I have described, and have ceased to look
about us for some other view, then happiness comes to us by the way.
It is a stream of inward peace; broadening as we grow older, first
enriching our own souls and then pouring itself forth to bless other
lives.

This is the goal to which our life must attain, if it hope for
happiness, and to this goal it can attain. Indeed, if once the first
decision be made, and the first steps taken, then, as Dante says:

  ... “_This mount is such, that ever
  At the beginning down below ’tis tiresome,
  And aye the more one climbs, the less it hurts.
  Therefore, when it shall seem so pleasant to thee,
  That going up shall be to thee as easy
  As going down the current in a boat,
  Then at this pathway’s ending thou wilt be._”[7]

Below at the foot of the mountain the fixed decision is demanded. There
one must absolutely determine to pay any price which shall be asked
for the happiness which is real. No further step can be taken without
this first resolution, and by no easier path has any one attained the
happiness he sought. Goethe, the teacher of those who sought happiness
in other ways, admitted--as I have said--that in seventy-five years of
life he had had four weeks of content, and no one who has followed him
can, at the end of life, when asked what his conscience testifies, make
better reply. We, on the other hand, should be able, at the last, to
say: “The days of our years are threescore years and ten, and though we
be so strong as to come to fourscore years, and though there has been
much labor and sorrow, still it has been a life of happiness.”




VII. THE MEANING OF LIFE




VII. THE MEANING OF LIFE


This is the question of questions. A man must be wholly superficial or
wholly animal who does not at some time in his life ask what is the
meaning of his life. Yet, sad to say, most men end their lives without
finding an answer. Some repeat, in their darker moods, the melancholy
confession of a mediæval philosopher: “I live, but know not how long;
I die, but know not when; I depart, but know not whither. How is it
possible for me to fancy myself happy!” Others drive from their minds
these morbid reflections which, as they say, “lead to nothing,” and
repeat: “Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die.”

Even among what we call cultivated people, where education has made a
profounder view accessible, the number of those who find the meaning
of life is by no means large. After some vain and superficial attempts
to save themselves they yield at last, and often far too soon, to the
pitiful programme of self-indulgence. And what is their next step? It
is to pursue consistently this programme. But there is not long left
the health which is necessary for this life of eating and drinking, and
then in throngs they make their pilgrimages, the women at the front,
to Pastor Kneipp, or Dr. Metzger, or some other infallible healer,
hoping for a quick restoration and a second chance to waste their lives.

Still others there are who have not the means to adopt this plan of
life. Many of these seek a substitute for it in some form of social
scrambling; or if this fails, commit themselves to the new doctrine
of economics, according to which the only real problem of life is the
“stomach problem,” and which teaches that in satisfying the stomach the
social ideals of the race will be also satisfied.

Still others there are who are more subtle and more critical. They have
come to see how impracticable are all these schemes to redeem life
from its troubles. Thus, after they have tried many half-way measures,
they come at last to the confession of the wisest of kings: “Vanity
of vanities, all is vanity.” They commit themselves to scepticism
concerning any meaning in life and to the worship of non-existence. To
them the end of life is to be Nirvana, annihilation, the forgetfulness
of that which life has been; and they fancy that they have attained
a very noble attitude toward life when, after many years of sharp
contention with their healthy human nature, which steadily protests
against these subtle negations, they are able at last to repeat the
words of the Hindoo sage:

  “_Through birth and rebirth’s endless round
  I ran and sought, but never found
  Who framed and built this house of clay.
  What misery!--birth for ay and ay!_

  _O builder! thee at last I see!
  Ne’er shalt thou build again for me._

  _Thy rafters all are broken now,
  Demolished lies thy ridgepole, low._

  _My heart, demolished too, I ween,
  An end of all desire hath seen._”[8]

Such is the final word of their philosophy. Neither light nor hope
is left for human life. He does the best who earliest recognizes the
hopelessness of life and hastens to its end.

Human nature, however, is so abounding in life and so eager for life
that except in those transitory and morbid conditions which we have
come to describe as _fin de siècle_ moods, it is never long content to
interpret experience in terms of universal bankruptcy. On the contrary,
it insists that the problem of philosophy must be in the future, as it
has been in the past, the shedding of light on the meaning of life. It
is a problem which philosophy has often answered with mere phrases,
which have brought no meaning or comfort to the troubled heart of man,
and it is not surprising that since the climax of this hollow formalism
was reached in Hegel, there has been a natural distrust of philosophy.

And what is it in this speculative philosophy which creates this
distrust? It is its attempt to regard the universe as self-explanatory.
Here, even at the present time, is one of the fundamental propositions
of most philosophizing, against which no argument may be permitted.
It seems an essential assumption of philosophy; since if other ways
of explanation of the universe were superadded, philosophy as an
independent science would seem to be superfluous. Is it certain,
however, that the subordination of philosophy thus apprehended would
be, after all, a great misfortune? What the human mind is concerned
about is not the perpetuation of philosophy as a science, but the
discovery of some meaning in life itself, its destiny, its past and
its future; and one is quite justified in losing interest in any
science which does not in the end contribute to the interpretation and
amelioration of human life. We have a right to demand of philosophy
that she contribute to this end, and that she shall speak also with
some degree of simplicity of language, dismissing the attempt to
satisfy with empty and unintelligible phrases the hunger of the soul
for fundamental truth.

And yet, from the time of Plato to that of Hegel, Schopenhauer, and
Nietzsche, the making of phrases has been the special business of
philosophy. It has created a language of its own, which separates it
as by an impenetrable hedge from the region of men’s common talk; and
when one translates such language into the familiar speech of his own
time, where words have a definite meaning, it is as though he withdrew
from a veiled goddess the disguise which gave her all her power and
dignity. The fact is that abstract philosophy has never explained to
any satisfaction either the existence or the development of the world;
still less has philosophy brought into unity these two conceptions,
and interpreted them through a single cause. On the contrary, the
history of philosophy has been a history of words, conveying no real
interpretation, and it would seem as if in the thousands of years of
philosophic speculation either some interpretation should have been
attained or that there should at last be heard the confession that
philosophy can throw no further light on these fundamental facts.
Here, it would seem, we should reach the end of philosophy, and should
assume that the first cause of things is unknowable.

Philosophy, however, has seldom consented to this confession of
impotence. On the contrary, it has repeatedly reverted to some absolute
assumption of an adequate cause which lies behind the possibility of
proof. Sometimes it is the assumption of a vital Substance, one and
unchangeable; sometimes it is the assumption of an infinite concourse
of atoms. Yet such conceptions are in the highest degree elusive, and
force us to inquire whence such substance, be it simple or infinitely
divided, comes, how it becomes quickened with life, and how it imparts
the life it has. The transition from such mere movements of atoms to
phenomena of feeling or thought or will, makes a leap in nature which
no man has in the remotest degree proposed to explain. On the contrary,
instead of bridging such a chasm the most famous inquirers simply
record the melancholy confession: “Ignoramus, ignorabimus.”

Sometimes, again, philosophy has taught, with many and large words,
that the meaning of the world resides in an opposition between Being
and Not-being. This is no new doctrine and it is at least intelligent
and intelligible. Yet what we really need to know concerns Being
alone. It is the world that lies before our eyes that interests us. How
has this world come to be, we ask, or is it perhaps a mere illusion,
the mirage of our own thought, with no reality but that which our own
minds assign, as people in their despair have sometimes believed it to
be? As for Non-existence, what rational interest has this for us? Is
it even an intelligible conception? Does it not rather set before us a
contradiction which we may conceive, but can never verify, and which
has for life itself no significance at all?

Still other philosophers invite us to turn from the outward world whose
final cause thus eludes us, and to consider our own self-conscious
nature, the Ego, concerning which no one can doubt and which no
philosophy is needed to prove. Yet no sooner does this poor Ego issue
from its own self-consciousness and, as it were, take a step into the
outward world, as though to interpret through itself the meaning of
life, than it becomes aware that some further and external cause is
necessary to explain even the Ego to itself.

Finally, philosophy, in its search for the meaning of life, bows to
the authority of natural science and proposes to interpret experience
through some doctrine of development, or evolution, or heredity,
or natural selection. All that exists, it announces, comes of some
primitive protoplasm, or even of some single primitive cell. Yet
still there presses the ancient question how such cells may have been
made and how there has been imparted to them their infinite capacity
for life and growth. It is the question which the keen and practical
Napoleon asked as he stood a century ago under the mystery of the
stars in Egypt. Turning to the scholar Monge, he said: “Qui a fait
tout cela?” To such a question neither abstract philosophy nor natural
science has as yet given and, so far as we can judge, will ever give
any answer.

To interpret the world, then, by itself or through itself is
impossible, for there is in the world itself no final cause. If
the mind of man is the final interpreter of the world, then it
becomes itself the God it seeks, and the philosophers become the
object of a kind of worship. Here, indeed, is the outcome of much
philosophy to-day. If, however, the philosophers have any power of
observation, they soon discover one positive barrier to this excessive
self-importance. It is the humbling consciousness of limitation in
their own powers and in their own hold on life itself; the inevitable
impression, which no human praise can remove, of their own defects;
the impossibility of finding a meaning even for their own lives within
those lives themselves.

Here is the weakness of that pantheism which, from the time of
Spinoza, has so largely controlled speculative thought, and, from
the time of Hegel, Schopenhauer, and Goethe, has been the prevailing
creed of cultivated people, so far as they concern themselves with
philosophy. No form of philosophy is so demoralizing in its ethical
consequences as this. It breeds contempt of moral activity; it
forfeits the right of the will to oppose what is evil and to create
what is good. Sooner or later the corollary of such a faith appears in
some form of superstition, crude but compelling,--like hypnotism or
spiritualism, or the vulgar and noisy substitutes for religion which
are now so conspicuous. Thus the cycle of philosophical speculation
fulfils itself, and returns after centuries to the same point at which
it began. The final form of truth may come to be, not the systems of
abstract philosophy or of speculative theology, which have proved so
misleading and unsatisfying, but simply a summing-up of the experience
of mankind, as it has affected human destiny through the history of
the world; and in this experience we have a philosophy better than
abstractions, and always within one’s reach.

And where do we find this philosophy which discovers the meaning of
life not through speculative reasoning but through the interpretation
of experience, and which observes in experience a spiritual power
creating and maintaining both the world and the individual? This is
the view of life which had its origin in Israel and was fulfilled in
Christianity. It cannot indeed be called in the technical sense a
philosophy, for philosophy would feel itself called upon to explain
still further that Cause which it thus reached. Theology as a positive
science meets the same fate as philosophy. It cannot prove its God,
as philosophy cannot interpret the world or human life in or through
themselves. What people call ontology, or the proofs of the being of
God, is no real science, and convinces none but him who is already
pledged. It is in the nature of God to be beyond our interpretations.
A god who could be explained would not be God, and a man who could
explain God would not be man. The legitimate aim of life is not to
see God as He is, but to see the affairs of this world and of human
life somewhat as God might see them. It is, therefore, no new thing to
question whether theology can be fairly called a science at all. On
this point, for instance, the evidence of Christ is in the negative,
and the theological speculations of Christians are, in fact, not
derived from him. They proceed, on the contrary, from the Apostle Paul,
who applied to the proving of Christianity the subtlety of theological
training which he had received under Judaism; and even in his case it
must be remembered that his teaching was directed to convince those who
had been, like him, trained in the theology of Israel.

It must not be imagined, therefore, that the final Cause of the world
which we call God, can be philosophically proved. Faith in God is first
of all a personal experience. Nothing should disguise this proposition,
though it is the stone of offence where many stumble who are seeking
an adequate meaning of life. Nothing can be done to help those who
refuse this experience. No argument can convince them. There is no
philosophical refutation of a determined atheism.

Here is an admission which must gravely affect not only our religious
and philosophical relations with others, but even our practical and
political life. Here is the fundamental difference between people
of the same nation, or condition, or time, or even family. In other
differences of opinion there may be found some common ground, but
between faith and denial there is no common ground, because we are
dealing with a question of the will and because the human will is free.
The saying of Tertullian, that the human soul is naturally Christian,
is in a literal sense quite untrue. Every man who reflects on his
responsibilities recognizes that he is not naturally Christian. He
is, at the most, only possibly Christian, as Tertullian perhaps meant
to say. He is capable of becoming Christian through the experience of
life. Atheism and Christianity are equally accessible to the nature of
man.

Faith in God, then, is a form of experience, not a form of proof. If
experience were as unfruitful as proof, then faith in God would be
nothing more than a nervous condition, and the answer of Festus--“Paul,
thou art beside thyself!”--would be the just estimate of a faith
like that of Paul. Each period of history has in fact produced many
a Festus, sedulously guarding his reason and conscience against all
that cannot be proved. Other faith, however, than that which proceeds
from experience is not expected by God from any man; while to every
man, in his own experience and in the witness of history, this faith
is abundantly offered. There is, therefore, in the refusal of faith a
confession, not merely of intellectual error, but of moral neglect; and
many a man who has surrendered his faith would be slow to confess to
others how well aware he is that the fault is his own.

Here, then, is the first step toward the discovery of the meaning of
life. It is an act of will, a moral venture, a listening to experience.
No man can omit this initial step, and no man can teach another the
lesson which lies in his own experience. The prophets of the Old
Testament found an accurate expression for this act of will when they
described it as a “turning,” and they went on to assure their people
of the perfect inward peace and the sense of confidence which followed
from this act. “Look unto me, and be ye saved,” says Isaiah; “Incline
your ear, and come unto me: hear, and your soul shall live.” From that
time to this, thousands of those who have thus changed the direction
of their wills have entered into the same sense of peace; while no man
who has thus given his will to God has ever felt himself permanently
bewildered or forsaken.

Here, also, in this free act of the will, is attained that sense of
liberty which in both the Old and New Testaments is described as
“righteousness.” It is a sense of initiative and power, as though one
were not wholly the subject of arbitrary grace, but had a certain
positive companionship with God. It is what the Old Testament calls a
“covenant,” involving mutual rights and obligations. No man, however,
who accepts this relation is inclined to urge overmuch his own rights,
knowing as he well does that his part in the covenant falls ever short
and is even then made possible only through his steady confidence in
God. Grace, unearned and undeserved, he still knows that he needs;
yet behind this grace lies ever the initiative of personal “turning,”
and the free assertion of the will as the first step toward complete
redemption. To say with Paul that a man is “justified by faith,” or to
emphasize as Luther does, even more strongly, the province of grace, is
to run some risk of forgetting the constant demand for an initial step
of one’s own.

This step once taken, both the world in which one lives and one’s own
personal life get a clear and intelligible meaning. On the one hand
stands the free will of God, creating and directing the world, not
restricted by the so-called laws of nature, yet a God of order, whose
desires are not arbitrary or lawless. On the other hand is the free
will of man, with the free choice before it of obedience or refusal;--a
will, therefore, which may choose the wrong though it may not thereby
thwart the Divine purpose. The evil-doer, if impenitent, must suffer,
but his evil is converted into good. In such a philosophy what is a
wisely adjusted human life? It is a life of free obedience to the
eternal and unchangeable laws of God; a life, therefore, which attains
through self-discipline successive steps of spiritual power. Life on
other terms brings on a progressive decline of spiritual power and with
this a sense of self-condemnation. What is the happy life? It is a life
of conscious harmony with this Divine order of the world, a sense,
that is to say, of God’s companionship. And wherein is the profoundest
unhappiness? It is in the sense of remoteness from God, issuing into
incurable restlessness of heart, and finally into incapacity to make
one’s life fruitful or effective.

If, then, we are at times tempted to fancy that all this undemonstrable
experience is unreal, or metaphysical, or purposeless, or imaginary,
it is best to deal with such returning scepticism much as we deal with
the selfish or mean thoughts which we are trying to outgrow. Let all
these hindrances to the higher life be quietly but firmly repelled.
The better world we enter is indeed entered by faith and not by sight;
but this faith grows more confident and more supporting, until it is
like an inward faculty of sight itself. To substitute for this a world
of the outward senses is to find no meaning in life which can convey
confidence and peace. It is but to embitter every noble and thoughtful
nature with restless doubts from which there is no escape.

Such was religion as it disclosed itself to the early Hebrews. Soon,
indeed, that religion was overgrown by the formalism which converted
its practical teaching into mere prohibitions or mere mechanism; but
behind these abuses of later history lay the primitive simplicity of
spiritual liberty and life. Such also was the historical beginning
of the Christian religion. The mission of Christ, like that of each
genuine reformer, was to recall men to their original consciousness
of God; and it is perhaps the greatest tragedy of history, while at
the same time the best proof of the free will of man, that the Hebrew
people, to whom Christ announced that he was expressly sent, could
not, as a whole, bring themselves to obey his call. They were held in
bondage by their accumulated formalism, as many a man has been ever
since. They could not rise to the thought of a worship which was in
spirit and in truth. Had they, with their extraordinary gifts, been
able to hear Christ’s message, they would have become the dominant
nation of the world.

And what is to be said of those Gentile peoples who listened more
willingly to the message of Christ, those “wild olive trees,” as St.
Paul calls them, which were grafted on the “broken branches”? They also
have had the same history. They also, in their own way, have become
enslaved by the same formalism; and they also must regain their liberty
through the return of individual souls to a personal experience of the
method of Christ.

Here is the evidence of the indestructible truth and the extraordinary
vitality of the Christian religion. To subdue its opponents was but a
slight achievement; for every positive truth must in the end prevail.
Its real conflict has been with the forces of accumulated opinion, of
superfluous learning, of sickly fancies among its friends, and with
the intellectual slavery to which these influences have led. Through
these obstructions the light and power of genuine Christianity have
broken like sunshine through a mist; and with such Christianity have
appeared in history the political liberty on which the permanence of
civilization rests, the philosophical truth which solves the problems
of human life, and the present comfort for the human heart, beyond the
power of misfortune to disturb.

We reach, then, a philosophy of life which is not speculative or
fanciful, but rests on the facts of history. This is “the way,
the truth, and the life.” Better is it for one if he finds this
“way” without too many companions or professional guides, for many
a religious teaching, designed to show the way, has repelled young
lives from following it. As one follows the way, he gains, first of
all, courage, so that he dares to go on in his search. He goes still
further, and the way opens into the assurance that life, with all its
mystery, is not lived in vain. He pushes on, and the way issues into
health, not only of the soul but even of the body; for bodily health
is more dependent on spiritual condition than spiritual condition on
bodily health; and modern medicine can never restore and assure health
to the body if it limit its problem to physical relief alone. Nor is
even this the end of the “way” of Christ. It leads not only to personal
health, but to social health as well; not by continually inciting the
masses to some social programme, but by strengthening the individuals
of which the masses are made. Here alone is positive social redemption;
while the hopes that turn to other ways of social reform are for the
most part deceptive dreams.

Finally, the way is sure to lead every life which follows it, and is
willing to pay the price for the possession of truth, into the region
of spiritual peace. No other way of life permits this comprehensive
sense of peace and assurance. Apart from it we have but the unremitting
and bitter struggle for existence, the enforcement of national
self-seeking, the temporary victory of the strong, the hell of the weak
and the poor; yet, at the same time, no peace even for the strong, who
have their little day of power, but live in daily fear that this power
will fail and leave them at the mercy of the wolves, their neighbors.
Meantime, on every page of the world’s history, and in the experience
of daily life, God writes the opposite teaching, that out of the midst
of evil issues at last the mastery of the good; and that, in modern
as in ancient time, the meek both inherit and control the earth.
History is not a record of despotic control like that of a Roman Cæsar,
effective and intelligent, but necessarily involving a progressive
degeneration of his subjects; it is a story of progressive amelioration
in moral standards and achievements; and this fact of moral progress is
the most convincing proof of the being of God.

Thus it happens that to one who loves liberty and who reads history,
the logic of thought leads to faith in God. Without such faith it
is difficult to believe in human progress through freedom, or to
view the movement of the modern world with hope. Without such faith
the popular agitations of the time are disquieting and alarming,
and the only refuge of the spirit is in submission to some human
authority either of Church or of State. Without such faith it would
be increasingly impossible to maintain a democratic republic like
Switzerland in the midst of the autocratic monarchies of Europe. With
profound truthfulness the Swiss Parliament at Aarau opened its session
with these simple words: “Our help is in the Lord our God, who hath
made heaven and earth.” And, finally, without political liberty there
would be but a brief survival of religious liberty itself, and it
too would be supplanted by a condition of servitude. A State-Church
is a self-contradictory expression. State and Church alike need
self-government for self-development. A free Church and a free State
are not only most representative of Christianity, but are beyond
doubt the forms of Christian citizenship which are to survive. Not
compulsion, nor any form of authority, will in the end dominate the
world, but freedom, in all its forms and its effects. The end of social
evolution is to be the free obedience of men and nations to the moral
order of the world.

And yet, we must repeat, the secret of true progress is not to be
found in an achievement of philosophy, or a process of thought; but
in a historical process, a living experience. To each man’s will is
offered the choice of this way which leads to personal recognition
of the truth and personal experience of happiness. To each nation
the same choice is presented. No philosophy or religion has real
significance which does not lead this way. No man can rightly call it
mere misfortune, or confess his unbelief with sentimental regret, when
he misses the way and forfeits his peace of mind. His pessimism is not,
as he fondly thinks, a mark of distinction; it is, on the contrary, as
a rule, an evidence of moral defect or weakness, and should stir in him
a positive moral scorn.

What is it, then, which makes one unable to find the way of Jesus? It
is, for the most part, either unwillingness to make a serious effort to
find it, or disinclination to accept the consequences of the choice.
To take up with some philosophical novelty, involving no demand upon
the will; to surrender oneself to the pleasures of life; to attach
oneself, with superficial and unreflecting devotion, to some form of
Church or sect;--how much easier is any one of these refuges of the
mind than serious meditation on the great problems of life and the
growth of a personal conviction! And yet, how unmistakable have been
the joy, and the strength to live and to die, and the peace of mind and
sense of right adjustment to the Universe, which those have found who
have followed with patience the way I have described! In the testimony
of such souls there is complete accord. Consciously or unconsciously,
every heart desires the satisfactions which this way of life can give,
and without these satisfactions of the spirit no other possessions or
pleasures can insure spiritual peace.

What infinite pains are taken by people in the modern world for the
sake of their health of body or the welfare of their souls! For health
of body they go barefoot in the daytime or sleep in wet sheets at
night; for the good of their souls they go on pilgrimages and into
retreats, or submit themselves to other forms of spiritual exercise.
They go even farther in their pious credulity. There is not a hardship
or a folly, or a risk of body or soul, or any form of martyrdom, which
is not accepted by thousands in the hope that it will save their souls.
And all the time the simple way to the meaning of life lies straight
before their feet,--a way, however, let us last of all remember, which
it is not enough to know, but which is given us to follow. This is the
truth which a scholar of the time of Luther teaches, though he himself
had not fully attained the truth. Not, he writes, by knowing the way
but by going it, is the meaning of life to be found. He put into the
mouth of Christ his lesson:

  “_Why art thou then so faint of heart,
    O man of little faith?
  Have I not strength to do My part
    As God’s word promiseth?_

  _Why wilt thou not return to Me
    Whose pity will receive?
  Why seek not Him whose grace can free
    And every fault forgive?_

  _Why was it hard the way to find,
    Which straight before thee ran?
  Why dost thou wander as though blind?
    ’Tis thine own choice, O man!_”




NOTES


NOTE 1

_“Friedrich Max von Klinger,” says Professor Hilty, “was born in 1752,
at Frankfort. His family were poor, and after he had with difficulty
pursued his studies at the University of Giessen, he became at first
a play-writer for a travelling company. He then served during the
Bavarian War of Succession in a corps of volunteers. Later he became
reader and travelling companion to the Czarevitch Paul of Russia,
afterwards the Emperor. He was made Director of the corps of cadets
of the nobility, as well as of the Emperor’s pages, and of the girls’
school for the nobility. Under Alexander I. he was also made Curator
of the University of Dorpat. In all these relations of life, which
were as difficult as can be imagined, in his contact with actors,
crown-princes, Czars, noble pages and women of the court, diplomats
and professors--who, taken together, are certainly not of the classes
most easy to deal with--and living at a court thoroughly degraded and
beset by self-seekers of the lowest kind as was the court of Catherine
II., von Klinger preserved his candid character and moral courage and
gained the high respect of his contemporaries. In Goethe’s Wahrheit
und Dichtung, he mentions von Klinger as follows: ‘This maintenance
of a sterling character is the more creditable when it occurs in the
midst of worldly and business life and when a way of conduct which
might appear to many curt and abrupt, being judiciously followed,
accomplishes its ends. Such was his character. Without subservience
(which, indeed, has never been a quality of the natives of Frankfort)
he attained to the most important positions, was able to maintain
himself there and to continue his services with the highest approval
and gratitude of his noble patrons. Through all this, he never forgot
either his old friends or the paths which he had come.’ In the later
years of his life, Goethe renewed the study of von Klinger’s writings,
‘which recalled to me his unwearied activity and his remarkable
character.’”_


NOTE 2

_Dante, Purgatorio, xxvii, 126, 131._


NOTE 3

_Jakob Böhme, from a supplement to his works (Historische Uebersicht)._


NOTE 4

_Dante, Purgatorio, xxvii, 115._


NOTE 5

_Dante, Purgatorio, ix, 19._


NOTE 6

_Dante, Inferno, iii, 1, 9._


NOTE 7

_Dante, Purgatorio, iv, 88._


NOTE 8

_Dhammapada, transl. Charles R. Lanman, in Hymns of the Faith, A. J.
Edmunds, Chicago, 1902, page 38._




  THE QUEST OF HAPPINESS

  A STUDY OF VICTORY OVER LIFE’S TROUBLES

  BY NEWELL DWIGHT HILLIS

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It is a book full of help and sympathy, marked by a wide acquaintance
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