special kind of affection towards their own children, different from
that which they feel towards each other or towards other children. It
is true that some parents feel little or no parental affection, and
it is also true that some women are capable of feeling an affection
for children not their own almost as strong as that which they could
feel for their own. Nevertheless, the broad fact remains that parental
affection is a special kind of feeling which the normal human being
experiences towards his or her own children, but not towards any
other human being. This emotion is one which we inherit from our
animal ancestors. In this respect Freud seems to me not sufficiently
biological in his outlook, for anyone who will observe an animal mother
with her young can see that her behaviour towards them follows an
entirely different pattern from her behaviour towards the male with
whom she has sex relations. And this same different and instinctive
pattern, though in a modified and less definite form, exists among
human beings. If it were not for this special emotion there would be
almost nothing to be said for the family as an institution, since
children might equally well be left to the care of professionals. As
things are, however, the special affection which parents have for
children, provided their instincts are not atrophied, is of value both
to the parents themselves and to the children. The value of parental
affection to children lies largely in the fact that it is more reliable
than any other affection. One’s friends like one for one’s merits,
one’s lovers for one’s charms; if the merits or the charms diminish,
friends and lovers may vanish. But it is in times of misfortune that
parents are most to be relied upon, in illness, and even in disgrace
if the parents are of the right sort. We all feel pleasure when we are
admired for our merits, but most of us are sufficiently modest at heart
to feel that such admiration is precarious. Our parents love us because
we are their children, and this is an unalterable fact, so that we feel
more safe with them than with anyone else. In times of success this may
seem unimportant, but in times of failure it affords a consolation and
a security not to be found elsewhere.
In all human relations it is fairly easy to secure happiness for one
party, but much more difficult to secure it for both. The gaoler may
enjoy guarding the prisoner; the employer may enjoy browbeating the
employee; the ruler may enjoy governing his subjects with a firm hand;
and the old-fashioned father no doubt enjoyed instilling virtue into
his son by means of the rod. These, however, are one-sided pleasures;
to the other party in the transaction the situation is less agreeable.
We have come to feel that there is something unsatisfactory about
these one-sided delights: we believe that a good human relation should
be satisfying to both parties. This applies more particularly to the
relations of parents and children, with the result that parents obtain
far less pleasure from children than they did formerly, while children
reciprocally suffer less at the hands of their parents than they did
in bygone generations. I do not think there is any real reason why
parents should derive less happiness from their children than they did
in former times, although undoubtedly this is the case at present.
Nor do I think that there is any reason why parents should fail to
increase the happiness of their children. But this requires, as do all
those equal relationships at which the modern world aims, a certain
delicacy and tenderness, a certain reverence for another personality,
which are by no means encouraged by the pugnacity of ordinary life.
Let us consider the happiness of parenthood, first in its biological
essence, and then as it may become in a parent inspired by that kind
of attitude towards other personalities which we have been suggesting
as essential to a world that believes in equality.
The primitive root of the pleasure of parenthood is two-fold. On the
one hand there is the feeling of part of one’s own body externalized,
prolonging its life beyond the death of the rest of one’s body, and
possibly in its turn externalizing part of itself in the same fashion,
and so securing the immortality of the germ-plasm. On the other hand
there is an intimate blend of power and tenderness. The new creature
is helpless, and there is an impulse to supply its needs, an impulse
which gratifies not only the parent’s love towards the child, but
also the parent’s desire for power. So long as the infant is felt to
be helpless, the affection which is bestowed upon it does not feel
unselfish, since it is in the nature of protection to a vulnerable
portion of oneself. But from a very early age there comes to be a
conflict between love of parental power and desire for the child’s
good, for, while power over the child is to a certain extent decreed
by the nature of things, it is nevertheless desirable that the child
should as soon as possible learn to be independent in as many ways as
possible, which is unpleasant to the power impulse in a parent. Some
parents never become conscious of this conflict, and remain tyrants
until the children are in a position to rebel. Others, however, become
conscious of it, and thus find themselves a prey to conflicting
emotions. In this conflict their parental happiness is lost. After
all the care that they have bestowed on the child, they find to their
mortification that he turns out quite different from what they had
hoped. They wanted him to be a soldier, and they find him a pacifist,
or, like Tolstoy, they wanted him to be a pacifist, and he joins the
Black Hundreds. But it is not only in these later developments that
the difficulty is felt. If you feed an infant who is already capable
of feeding himself, you are putting love of power before the child’s
welfare, although it seems to you that you are only being kind in
saving him trouble. If you make him too vividly aware of dangers, you
are probably actuated by a desire to keep him dependent upon you. If
you give him demonstrative affection to which you expect a response,
you are probably endeavouring to grapple him to you by means of his
emotions. In a thousand ways, great and small, the possessive impulse
of parents will lead them astray, unless they are very watchful or very
pure in heart. Modern parents, aware of these dangers, sometimes lose
confidence in handling their children, and become therefore even less
able to be of use to them than if they permitted themselves spontaneous
mistakes, for nothing causes so much worry in a child’s mind as lack
of certainty and self-confidence on the part of an adult. Better than
being careful, therefore, is to be pure in heart. The parent who
genuinely desires the child’s welfare more than his or her power over
the child will not need textbooks on psycho-analysis to say what should
and what should not be done, but will be guided aright by impulse.
And in that case the relation of parent and child will be harmonious
from first to last, causing no rebellion in the child and no feeling
of frustration in the parent. But this demands on the part of the
parent from the first a respect for the personality of the child--a
respect which must be not merely a matter of principle, whether moral
or intellectual, but something deeply felt with almost mystical
conviction to such a degree that possessiveness and oppression become
utterly impossible. It is of course not only towards children that an
attitude of this sort is desirable: it is very necessary in marriage,
and in friendship also, though in friendship it is less difficult. In a
good world it would pervade the political relations between groups of
human beings, though this is so distant a hope that we need not linger
over it. But universal as is the need for this kind of gentleness, it
is needed most of all where children are concerned, because of their
helplessness, and because their small size and feeble strength cause
vulgar souls to despise them.
But to return to the problems with which this book is concerned, the
full joy of parenthood in the modern world is only to be obtained by
those who can deeply feel this attitude of respect towards the child
of which I have been speaking. For to them there will be no irksome
restraint upon their love of power, and no need to dread the bitter
disillusionment which despotic parents experience when their children
acquire freedom. And to the parent who has this attitude there is more
joy in parenthood than ever was possible to the despot in the hey-day
of parental power. For the love that has been purged by gentleness
of all tendency towards tyranny can give a joy more exquisite, more
tender, more capable of transmuting the base metal of daily life into
the pure gold of mystic ecstasy, than any emotion that is possible to
the man still fighting and struggling to maintain his ascendancy in
this slippery world.
While I attach a very high value to the parental emotion, I do not draw
the inference, which is too commonly drawn, that mothers should do as
much as possible themselves for their children. There is a convention
on this subject which was all very well in the days when nothing was
known about the care of children except the unscientific odds and ends
that old women handed on to younger ones. Nowadays there is a great
deal in the care of children which is best done by those who have
made a special study of some department of this subject. In relation
to that part of their education which is _called_ “education”
this is recognized. A mother is not expected to teach her son the
calculus, however much she may love him. So far as the acquisition of
book-learning is concerned, it is recognized that children can acquire
it better from those who have it than from a mother who does not have
it. But in regard to many other departments in the care of children
this is not recognized, because the experience required is not yet
recognized. Undoubtedly certain things are better done by the mother,
but as the child gets older, there will be an increasing number of
things better done by someone else. If this were generally recognized,
mothers would be saved a great deal of labour which is irksome to them,
because it is not that in which they have professional competence. A
woman who has acquired any kind of professional skill ought, both for
her own sake and for that of the community, to be free to continue to
exercise this skill in spite of motherhood. She may be unable to do
so during the later months of pregnancy and during lactation, but a
child over nine months old ought not to form an insuperable barrier
to its mother’s professional activities. Whenever society demands
of a mother sacrifices to her child which go beyond reason, the
mother, if she is not unusually saintly, will expect from her child
compensations exceeding those she has a right to expect. The mother
who is conventionally called self-sacrificing is, in a great majority
of cases, exceptionally selfish towards her children, for, important
as parenthood is as an element in life, it is not satisfying if it is
treated as the whole of life, and the unsatisfied parent is likely to
be an emotionally grasping parent. It is important, therefore, quite
as much in the interests of the children as in those of the mother,
that motherhood should not cut her off from all other interests and
pursuits. If she has a real vocation for the care of children and that
amount of knowledge which will enable her to care adequately for her
own children, her skill ought to be more widely used, and she ought to
be engaged professionally in the care of some group of children which
may be expected to include her own. It is right that parents, provided
they fulfil the minimum requirements insisted upon by the State, should
have a say as to how their children are cared for and by whom, so long
as they do not go outside the ranks of qualified persons. But there
should be no convention demanding that every mother should do herself
what some other woman can do better. Mothers who feel baffled and
incompetent when faced with their children, as many mothers do, should
have no hesitation in having their children cared for by women who have
an aptitude for this work and have undergone the necessary training.
There is no heaven-sent instinct which teaches women the right thing
to do by their children, and solicitude when it goes beyond a point
is a camouflage for possessiveness. Many a child is psychologically
ruined by ignorant and sentimental handling on the part of its mother.
It has always been recognized that fathers cannot be expected to do
very much for their children, and yet children are quite as apt to
love their fathers as to love their mothers. The relation of the
mother to the child will have in future to resemble more and more that
which at present the father has, if women’s lives are to be freed from
unnecessary slavery and children are to be allowed to profit by the
scientific knowledge which is accumulating as to the care of their
minds and bodies in early years.
CHAPTER XIV
WORK
Whether work should be placed among the causes of happiness or among
the causes of unhappiness may perhaps be regarded as a doubtful
question. There is certainly much work which is exceedingly irksome,
and an excess of work is always very painful. I think, however, that,
provided work is not excessive in amount, even the dullest work is to
most people less painful than idleness. There are in work all grades,
from mere relief of tedium up to the profoundest delights, according
to the nature of the work and the abilities of the worker. Most of
the work that most people have to do is not in itself interesting,
but even such work has certain great advantages. To begin with, it
fills a good many hours of the day without the need of deciding what
one shall do. Most people, when they are left free to fill their own
time according to their own choice, are at a loss to think of anything
sufficiently pleasant to be worth doing. And whatever they decide
on, they are troubled by the feeling that something else would have
been pleasanter. To be able to fill leisure intelligently is the last
product of civilization, and at present very few people have reached
this level. Moreover, the exercise of choice is in itself tiresome.
Except to people with unusual initiative it is positively agreeable to
be told what to do at each hour of the day, provided the orders are
not too unpleasant. Most of the idle rich suffer unspeakable boredom as
the price of their freedom from drudgery. At times they may find relief
by hunting big game in Africa, or by flying round the world, but the
number of such sensations is limited, especially after youth is past.
Accordingly, the more intelligent rich men work nearly as hard as if
they were poor, while rich women for the most part keep themselves busy
with innumerable trifles of whose earth-shaking importance they are
firmly persuaded.
Work, therefore, is desirable, first and foremost, as a preventive of
boredom, for the boredom that a man feels when he is doing necessary
though uninteresting work is as nothing in comparison with the boredom
that he feels when he has nothing to do with his days. With this
advantage of work another is associated, namely that it makes holidays
much more delicious when they come. Provided a man does not have to
work so hard as to impair his vigour, he is likely to find far more
zest in his free time than an idle man could possibly find.
The second advantage of most paid work and of some unpaid work is
that it gives chances of success and opportunities for ambition. In
most work success is measured by income, and while our capitalistic
society continues, this is inevitable. It is only where the best work
is concerned that this measure ceases to be the natural one to apply.
The desire that men feel to increase their income is quite as much a
desire for success as for the extra comforts that a higher income can
procure. However dull work may be, it becomes bearable if it is a means
of building up a reputation, whether in the world at large or only in
one’s own circle. Continuity of purpose is one of the most essential
ingredients of happiness in the long run, and for most men this comes
chiefly through their work. In this respect those women whose lives
are occupied with house-work are much less fortunate than men, or than
women who work outside the home. The domesticated wife does not receive
wages, has no means of bettering herself, is taken for granted by her
husband (who sees practically nothing of what she does), and is valued
by him not for her house-work but for quite other qualities. Of course,
this does not apply to those women who are sufficiently well-to-do to
make beautiful houses and beautiful gardens and become the envy of
their neighbours; but such women are comparatively few, and for the
great majority house-work cannot bring as much satisfaction as work of
other kinds brings to men and to professional women.
The satisfaction of killing time and of affording some outlet, however
modest, for ambition, belongs to most work, and is sufficient to make
even a man whose work is dull happier on the average than a man who has
no work at all. But when work is interesting, it is capable of giving
satisfaction of a far higher order than mere relief from tedium. The
kinds of work in which there is some interest may be arranged in a
hierarchy. I shall begin with those which are only mildly interesting
and end with those that are worthy to absorb the whole energies of a
great man.
Two chief elements make work interesting: first, the exercise of skill,
and second, construction.
Every man who has acquired some unusual skill enjoys exercising it
until it has become a matter of course, or until he can no longer
improve himself. This motive to activity begins in early childhood: a
boy who can stand on his head becomes reluctant to stand on his feet.
A great deal of work gives the same pleasure that is to be derived
from games of skill. The work of a lawyer or a politician must contain
in a more delectable form a great deal of the same pleasure that is
to be derived from playing bridge. Here, of course, there is not only
the exercise of skill but the outwitting of a skilled opponent. Even
where this competitive element is absent, however, the performance of
difficult feats is agreeable. A man who can do stunts in an aeroplane
finds the pleasure so great that for the sake of it he is willing to
risk his life. I imagine that an able surgeon, in spite of the painful
circumstances in which his work is done, derives satisfaction from
the exquisite precision of his operations. The same kind of pleasure,
though in a less intense form, is to be derived from a great deal of
work of a humbler kind. I have even heard of plumbers who enjoyed
their work, though I have never had the good fortune to meet one. All
skilled work can be pleasurable, provided the skill required is either
variable or capable of indefinite improvement. If these conditions
are absent, it will cease to be interesting when a man has acquired
his maximum skill. A man who runs three-mile races will cease to find
pleasure in this occupation when he passes the age at which he can
beat his own previous record. Fortunately there is a very considerable
amount of work in which new circumstances call for new skill and a man
can go on improving, at any rate until he has reached middle age. In
some kinds of skilled work, such as politics, for example, it seems
that men are at their best between sixty and seventy, the reason being
that in such occupations a wide experience of other men is essential.
For this reason successful politicians are apt to be happier at the age
of seventy than any other men of equal age. Their only competitors in
this respect are the men who are the heads of big businesses.
There is, however, another element possessed by the best work, which
is even more important as a source of happiness than is the exercise
of skill. This is the element of constructiveness. In some work,
though by no means in most, something is built up which remains as a
monument when the work is completed. We may distinguish construction
from destruction by the following criterion. In construction the
initial state of affairs is comparatively haphazard, while the final
state of affairs embodies a purpose; in destruction the reverse is the
case: the initial state of affairs embodies a purpose, while the final
state of affairs is haphazard, that is to say, all that is intended by
the destroyer is to produce a state of affairs which does not embody
a certain purpose. This criterion applies in the most literal and
obvious case, namely the construction and destruction of buildings. In
constructing a building a previously made plan is carried out, whereas
in destroying it no one decides exactly how the materials are to lie
when the demolition is complete. Destruction is of course necessary
very often as a preliminary to subsequent construction; in that case it
is part of a whole which is constructive. But not infrequently a man
will engage in activities of which the purpose is destructive without
regard to any construction that may come after. Frequently he will
conceal this from himself by the belief that he is only sweeping away
in order to build afresh, but it is generally possible to unmask this
pretence, when it is a pretence, by asking him what the subsequent
construction is to be. On this subject it will be found that he will
speak vaguely and without enthusiasm, whereas on the preliminary
destruction he has spoken precisely and with zest. This applies to not
a few revolutionaries and militarists and other apostles of violence.
They are actuated, usually without their own knowledge, by hatred; the
destruction of what they hate is their real purpose, and they are
comparatively indifferent to the question what is to come after it.
Now I cannot deny that in the work of destruction as in the work of
construction there may be joy. It is a fiercer joy, perhaps at moments
more intense, but it is less profoundly satisfying, since the result is
one in which little satisfaction is to be found. You kill your enemy,
and when he is dead your occupation is gone, and the satisfaction that
you derive from victory quickly fades. The work of construction, on the
other hand, when completed, is delightful to contemplate, and moreover
is never so fully completed that there is nothing further to do about
it. The most satisfactory purposes are those that lead on indefinitely
from one success to another without ever coming to a dead end; and in
this respect it will be found that construction is a greater source of
happiness than destruction. Perhaps it would be more correct to say
that those who find satisfaction in construction find in it greater
satisfaction than the lovers of destruction can find in destruction,
for if once you have become filled with hate you will not easily derive
from construction the pleasure which another man would derive from it.
At the same time few things are so likely to cure the habit of hatred
as the opportunity to do constructive work of an important kind.
The satisfaction to be derived from success in a great constructive
enterprise is one of the most massive that life has to offer,
although unfortunately in its highest forms it is only open to men
of exceptional ability. Nothing can rob a man of the happiness of
successful achievement in an important piece of work, unless it be
the proof that after all his work was bad. There are many forms of
such satisfaction. The man who by a scheme of irrigation has caused
the wilderness to blossom like the rose enjoys it in one of its most
tangible forms. The creation of an organization may be a work of
supreme importance. So is the work of those few statesmen who have
devoted their lives to producing order out of chaos, of whom Lenin is
the supreme type in our day. The most obvious examples are artists
and men of science. Shakespeare says of his verse: “So long as men
can breathe, or eyes can see, so long lives this.” And it cannot be
doubted that the thought consoled him for misfortune. In his sonnets he
maintains that the thought of his friend reconciled him to life, but
I cannot help suspecting that the sonnets he wrote to his friend were
even more effective for this purpose than the friend himself. Great
artists and great men of science do work which is in itself delightful;
while they are doing it, it secures them the respect of those whose
respect is worth having, which gives them the most fundamental kind
of power, namely power over men’s thoughts and feelings. They have
also the most solid reasons for thinking well of themselves. This
combination of fortunate circumstances ought, one would think, to
be enough to make any man happy. Nevertheless it is not so. Michael
Angelo, for example, was a profoundly unhappy man and maintained (not,
I am sure, with truth) that he would not have troubled to produce works
of art if he had not had to pay the debts of his impecunious relations.
The power to produce great art is very often, though by no means
always, associated with a temperamental unhappiness, so great that but
for the joy which the artist derives from his work he would be driven
to suicide. We cannot therefore maintain that even the greatest work
must make a man happy; we can only maintain that it must make him less
unhappy. Men of science, however, are far less often temperamentally
unhappy than artists are, and in the main the men who do great work in
science are happy men, whose happiness is derived primarily from their
work.
One of the causes of unhappiness among intellectuals in the present day
is that so many of them, especially those whose skill is literary, find
no opportunity for the independent exercise of their talents, but have
to hire themselves out to rich corporations directed by Philistines,
who insist upon their producing what they themselves regard as
pernicious nonsense. If you were to inquire among journalists either in
England or America whether they believed in the policy of the newspaper
for which they worked, you would find, I believe, that only a small
minority do so; the rest, for the sake of a livelihood, prostitute
their skill to purposes which they believe to be harmful. Such work
cannot bring any real satisfaction, and in the course of reconciling
himself to the doing of it a man has to make himself so cynical that he
can no longer derive whole-hearted satisfaction from anything whatever.
I cannot condemn men who undertake work of this sort, since starvation
is too serious an alternative, but I think that where it is possible to
do work that is satisfactory to a man’s constructive impulses without
entirely starving, he will be well advised from the point of view of
his own happiness if he chooses it in preference to work much more
highly paid but not seeming to him worth doing on its own account.
Without self-respect genuine happiness is scarcely possible. And the
man who is ashamed of his work can hardly achieve self-respect.
The satisfaction of constructive work, though it may, as things are,
be the privilege of a minority, can nevertheless be the privilege of
a quite large minority. Any man who is his own master in his work can
feel it; so can any man whose work appears to him useful and requires
considerable skill. The production of satisfactory children is a
difficult constructive work capable of affording profound satisfaction.
Any woman who has achieved this can feel that as a result of her labour
the world contains something of value which it would not otherwise
contain.
Human beings differ profoundly in regard to the tendency to regard
their lives as a whole. To some men it is natural to do so, and
essential to happiness to be able to do so with some satisfaction. To
others life is a series of detached incidents without directed movement
and without unity. I think the former sort are more likely to achieve
happiness than the latter, since they will gradually build up those
circumstances from which they can derive contentment and self-respect,
whereas the others will be blown about by the winds of circumstance
now this way, now that, without ever arriving at any haven. The habit
of viewing life as a whole is an essential part both of wisdom and of
true morality, and is one of the things which ought to be encouraged in
education. Consistent purpose is not enough to make life happy, but it
is an almost indispensable condition of a happy life. And consistent
purpose embodies itself mainly in work.
CHAPTER XV
IMPERSONAL INTERESTS
In this chapter I wish to consider not those major interests about
which a man’s life is built, but those minor interests which fill his
leisure and afford relaxation from the tenseness of his more serious
pre-occupations. In the life of the average man his wife and children,
his work and his financial position occupy the main part of his anxious
and serious thought. Even if he has extra-matrimonial love affairs,
they probably do not concern him as profoundly in themselves as in
their possible effects upon his home life. The interests which are
bound up with his work I am not for the present regarding as impersonal
interests. A man of science, for example, must keep abreast of research
in his own line. Towards such research his feelings have the warmth
and vividness belonging to something intimately concerned with his
career, but if he reads about research in some quite other science with
which he is not professionally concerned he reads in quite a different
spirit, not professionally, less critically, more disinterestedly. Even
if he has to use his mind in order to follow what is said, his reading
is nevertheless a relaxation, because it is not connected with his
responsibilities. If the book interests him, his interest is impersonal
in a sense which cannot be applied to the books upon his own subject.
It is such interests lying outside the main activities of a man’s life
that I wish to speak about in the present chapter.
One of the sources of unhappiness, fatigue, and nervous strain is
inability to be interested in anything that is not of practical
importance in one’s own life. The result of this is that the conscious
mind gets no rest from a certain small number of matters, each of
which probably involves some anxiety and some element of worry.
Except in sleep the conscious mind is never allowed to lie fallow
while subconscious thought matures its gradual wisdom. The result is
excitability, lack of sagacity, irritability, and a loss of sense of
proportion. All these are both causes and effects of fatigue. As a man
gets more tired, his external interests fade, and as they fade he loses
the relief which they afford him and becomes still more tired. This
vicious circle is only too apt to end in a breakdown. What is restful
about external interests is the fact that they do not call for any
action. Making decisions and exercising volition are very fatiguing,
especially if they have to be done hurriedly and without the help of
the subconscious. Men who feel that they must “sleep on it” before
coming to an important decision are profoundly right. But it is not
only in sleep that the subconscious mental processes can work. They can
work also while a man’s conscious mind is occupied elsewhere. The man
who can forget his work when it is over and not remember it until it
begins again next day is likely to do his work far better than the man
who worries about it throughout the intervening hours. And it is very
much easier to forget work at the times when it ought to be forgotten
if a man has many interests other than his work than it is if he has
not. It is, however, essential that these interests should not exercise
those very faculties which have been exhausted by his day’s work. They
should not involve will and quick decision, they should not, like
gambling, involve any financial element, and they should as a rule
not be so exciting as to produce emotional fatigue and preoccupy the
subconscious as well as the conscious mind.
A great many amusements fulfil all these conditions. Watching games,
going to the theatre, playing golf, are all irreproachable from this
point of view. For a man of a bookish turn of mind reading unconnected
with his professional activities is very satisfactory. However
important a worry may be, it should not be thought about throughout the
whole of the waking hours.
In this respect there is a great difference between men and women. Men
on the whole find it very much easier to forget their work than women
do. In the case of women whose work is in the home this is natural,
since they do not have the change of place that a man has when he
leaves the office to help them to acquire a new mood. But if I am not
mistaken, women whose work is outside the home differ from men in
this respect almost as much as those who work at home. They find it,
that is to say, very difficult to be interested in anything that has
for them no practical importance. Their purposes govern their thoughts
and their activities, and they seldom become absorbed in some wholly
irresponsible interest. I do not of course deny that exceptions exist,
but I am speaking of what seems to me to be the usual rule. In a
woman’s college, for example, the women teachers, if no man is present,
talk shop in the evening, while in a man’s college the men do not. This
characteristic appears to women as a higher degree of conscientiousness
than that of men, but I do not think that in the long run it improves
the quality of their work. And it tends to produce a certain narrowness
of outlook leading not infrequently to a kind of fanaticism.
All impersonal interests, apart from their importance as relaxation,
have various other uses. To begin with, they help a man to retain his
sense of proportion. It is very easy to become so absorbed in our
own pursuits, our own circle, our own type of work, that we forget
how small a part this is of the total of human activity and how many
things in the world are entirely unaffected by what we do. Why should
one remember this? you may ask. There are several answers. In the
first place, it is good to have as true a picture of the world as is
compatible with necessary activities. Each of us is in the world for no
very long time, and within the few years of his life has to acquire
whatever he is to know of this strange planet and its place in the
universe. To ignore our opportunities for knowledge, imperfect as they
are, is like going to the theatre and not listening to the play. The
world is full of things that are tragic or comic, heroic or bizarre or
surprising, and those who fail to be interested in the spectacle that
it offers are forgoing one of the privileges that life has to offer.
Then again a sense of proportion is very valuable and at times very
consoling. We are all inclined to get unduly excited, unduly strained,
unduly impressed with the importance of the little corner of the world
in which we live, and of the little moment of time comprised between
our birth and death. In this excitement and over-estimation of our
own importance there is nothing desirable. True, it may make us work
harder, but it will not make us work better. A little work directed to
a good end is better than a great deal of work directed to a bad end,
though the apostles of the strenuous life seem to think otherwise.
Those who care much for their work are always in danger of falling
into fanaticism, which consists essentially in remembering one or two
desirable things while forgetting all the rest, and in supposing that
in the pursuit of these one or two any incidental harm of other sorts
is of little account. Against this fanatical temper there is no better
prophylactic than a large conception of the life of man and his place
in the universe. This may seem a very big thing to invoke in such a
connection, but apart from this particular use it is in itself a thing
of great value.
It is one of the defects of modern higher education that it has become
too much a training in the acquisition of certain kinds of skill, and
too little an enlargement of the mind and heart by an impartial survey
of the world. You become absorbed, let us say, in a political contest,
and work hard for the victory of your own party. So far, so good. But
it may happen in the course of the contest that some opportunity of
victory presents itself which involves the use of methods calculated
to increase hatred, violence and suspicion in the world. For example,
you may find that the best road to victory is to insult some foreign
nation. If your mental purview is limited to the present, or if you
have imbibed the doctrine that what is called efficiency is the only
thing that matters, you will adopt such dubious means. Through them
you will be victorious in your immediate purpose, while the more
distant consequences may be disastrous. If, on the other hand, you
have as part of the habitual furniture of your mind the past ages of
man, his slow and partial emergence out of barbarism, and the brevity
of his total existence in comparison with astronomical epochs--if,
I say, such thoughts have moulded your habitual feelings, you will
realize that the momentary battle upon which you are engaged cannot be
of such importance as to risk a backward step towards the darkness
out of which we have been slowly emerging. Nay, more, if you suffer
defeat in your immediate objective, you will be sustained by the same
sense of its momentariness that made you unwilling to adopt degrading
weapons. You will have, beyond your immediate activities, purposes that
are distant and slowly unfolding, in which you are not an isolated
individual but one of the great army of those who have led mankind
towards a civilized existence. If you have attained to this outlook,
a certain deep happiness will never leave you, whatever your personal
fate may be. Life will become a communion with the great of all ages,
and personal death no more than a negligible incident.
If I had the power to organize higher education as I should
wish it to be, I should seek to substitute for the old orthodox
religions--which appeal to few among the young, and those as a rule
the least intelligent and the most obscurantist--something which is
perhaps hardly to be called religion, since it is merely a focusing
of attention upon well-ascertained facts. I should seek to make young
people vividly aware of the past, vividly realizing that the future
of man will in all likelihood be immeasurably longer than his past,
profoundly conscious of the minuteness of the planet upon which we live
and of the fact that life on this planet is only a temporary incident;
and at the same time with these facts which tend to emphasize the
insignificance of the individual I should present quite another set
of facts designed to impress upon the mind of the young the greatness
of which the individual is capable, and the knowledge that throughout
all the depths of stellar space nothing of equal value is known to us.
Spinoza long ago wrote of human bondage and human freedom; his form and
his language make his thought difficult of access to all but students
of philosophy, but the essence of what I wish to convey differs little
from what he has said.
A man who has once perceived, however temporarily and however briefly,
what makes greatness of soul, can no longer be happy if he allows
himself to be petty, self-seeking, troubled by trivial misfortunes,
dreading what fate may have in store for him. The man capable of
greatness of soul will open wide the windows of his mind, letting the
winds blow freely upon it from every portion of the universe. He will
see himself and life and the world as truly as our human limitations
will permit; realizing the brevity and minuteness of human life, he
will realize also that in individual minds is concentrated whatever of
value the known universe contains. And he will see that the man whose
mind mirrors the world becomes in a sense as great as the world. In
emancipation from the fears that beset the slave of circumstance he
will experience a profound joy, and through all the vicissitudes of his
outward life he will remain in the depths of his being a happy man.
Leaving these large speculations and returning to our more immediate
subject, namely the value of impersonal interests, there is another
consideration which makes them a great help towards happiness. Even
in the most fortunate lives there are times when things go wrong.
Few men except bachelors have never quarrelled with their wives; few
parents have not endured grave anxiety owing to the illnesses of their
children; few business men have avoided times of financial stress; few
professional men have not known periods when failure stared them in
the face. At such times a capacity to become interested in something
outside the cause of anxiety is an immense boon. At such times, when
in spite of anxiety there is nothing to be done at the moment, one man
will play chess, another will read detective stories, a third will
become absorbed in popular astronomy, a fourth will console himself by
reading about the excavations at Ur of the Chaldees. Any one of these
four is acting wisely, whereas the man who does nothing to distract his
mind and allows his trouble to acquire a complete empire over him is
acting unwisely and making himself less fit to cope with his troubles
when the moment for action arrives. Very similar considerations apply
to irreparable sorrows such as the death of some person deeply loved.
No good is done to anyone by allowing oneself to become sunk in grief
on such an occasion. Grief is unavoidable and must be expected, but
everything that can be done should be done to minimize it. It is mere
sentimentality to aim, as some do, at extracting the very uttermost
drop of misery from misfortune. I do not of course deny that a man may
be broken by sorrow, but I do say that every man should do his utmost
to escape this fate, and should seek any distraction, however trivial,
provided it is not in itself harmful or degrading. Among those that I
regard as harmful and degrading I include such things as drunkenness
and drugs, of which the purpose is to destroy thought, at least for the
time being. The proper course is not to destroy thought but to turn
it into new channels, or at any rate into channels remote from the
present misfortune. It is difficult to do this if life has hitherto
been concentrated upon a very few interests and those few have now
become suffused with sorrow. To bear misfortune well when it comes,
it is wise to have cultivated in happier times a certain width of
interests, so that the mind may find prepared for it some undisturbed
place suggesting other associations and other emotions than those which
are making the present difficult to bear.
A man of adequate vitality and zest will surmount all misfortunes by
the emergence after each blow of an interest in life and the world
which cannot be narrowed down so much as to make one loss fatal. To be
defeated by one loss or even by several is not something to be admired
as a proof of sensibility, but something to be deplored as a failure
in vitality. All our affections are at the mercy of death, which may
strike down those whom we love at any moment. It is therefore necessary
that our lives should not have that narrow intensity which puts the
whole meaning and purpose of our life at the mercy of accident.
For all these reasons the man who pursues happiness wisely will aim at
the possession of a number of subsidiary interests in addition to those
central ones upon which his life is built.
CHAPTER XVI
EFFORT AND RESIGNATION
The golden mean is an uninteresting doctrine, and I can remember when I
was young rejecting it with scorn and indignation, since in those days
it was heroic extremes that I admired. Truth, however, is not always
interesting, and many things are believed because they are interesting
although, in fact, there is little other evidence in their favour. The
golden mean is a case in point: it may be an uninteresting doctrine,
but in a very great many matters it is a true one.
One respect in which it is necessary to preserve the golden mean is as
regards the balance between effort and resignation. Both doctrines have
had extreme advocates. The doctrine of resignation has been preached
by saints and mystics; the doctrine of effort has been preached by
efficiency experts and muscular Christians. Each of these opposing
schools has had a part of the truth, but not the whole. I want in this
chapter to try and strike the balance, and I shall begin with the case
in favour of effort.
Happiness is not, except in very rare cases, something that drops
into the mouth, like a ripe fruit, by the mere operation of fortunate
circumstances. That is why I have called this book _The Conquest of
Happiness_. For in a world so full of avoidable and unavoidable
misfortunes, of illness and psychological tangles, of struggle and
poverty and ill will, the man or woman who is to be happy must find
ways of coping with the multitudinous causes of unhappiness by which
each individual is assailed. In some rare cases no great effort may
be required. A man of easy good nature, who inherits an ample fortune
and enjoys good health together with simple tastes, may slip through
life comfortably and wonder what all the fuss is about; a good-looking
woman of an indolent disposition, if she happens to marry a well-to-do
husband who demands no exertion from her, and if after marriage she
does not mind growing fat, may equally enjoy a certain lazy comfort,
provided she has good luck as regards her children. But such cases
are exceptional. Most people are not rich; many people are not born
good-natured; many people have uneasy passions which make a quiet and
well-regulated life seem intolerably boring; health is a blessing which
no one can be sure of preserving; marriage is not invariably a source
of bliss. For all these reasons, happiness must be, for most men and
women, an achievement rather than a gift of the gods, and in this
achievement effort, both inward and outward, must play a great part.
The inward effort may include the effort of necessary resignation; for
the present, therefore, let us consider only outward effort.
In the case of any person, whether man or woman, who has to work for
a living, the need of effort in this respect is too obvious to need
emphasizing. The Indian fakir, it is true, can make a living without
effort by merely offering a bowl for the alms of the faithful, but in
Western countries the authorities do not view with a favourable eye
this method of obtaining an income. Moreover, the climate makes it less
pleasant than in hotter and dryer countries: in the winter-time, at any
rate, few people are so lazy as to prefer idleness out of doors to work
in heated rooms. Resignation alone, therefore, is not in the West one
of the roads to fortune.
To a very large percentage of men in Western countries, more than a
bare living is necessary to happiness, since they desire the feeling of
being successful. In some occupations, such, for example, as scientific
research, this feeling can be obtained by men who do not earn a large
income, but in the majority of occupations income has become the
measure of success. At this point we touch upon a matter in regard to
which an element of resignation is desirable in most cases, since in a
competitive world conspicuous success is possible only for a minority.
Marriage is a matter in regard to which effort may or may not be
necessary, according to circumstances. Where one sex is in the
minority, as men are in England and women are in Australia, members
of that sex require, as a rule, little effort in order to marry as
they wish. For members of the sex which is in the majority, however,
the opposite is the case. The amount of effort and thought expended
in this direction by women where they are in the majority is obvious
to anyone who will study the advertisements in women’s magazines.
Men, where they are in a majority, frequently adopt more expeditious
methods, such as skill with the revolver. This is natural, since
a majority of men occurs most frequently on the border-line of
civilization. I do not know what men would do if a discriminating
pestilence caused them to become a majority in England; they might have
to revert to the manners of gallants in a bygone age.
The amount of effort involved in the successful rearing of children is
so evident that probably no one would deny it. Countries which believe
in resignation and what is mistakenly called a “spiritual” view of life
are countries with a high infant mortality. Medicine, hygiene, asepsis,
suitable diet, are things not achieved without mundane pre-occupations;
they require energy and intelligence directed to the material
environment. Those who think that matter is an illusion are apt to
think the same of dirt, and by so thinking to cause their children to
die.
Speaking more generally, one may say that some kind of power forms the
normal and legitimate aim of every person whose natural desires are
not atrophied. The kind of power that a man desires depends upon his
predominant passions; one man desires power over the actions of men,
another desires power over their thoughts, a third power over their
emotions. One man desires to change the material environment, another
desires the sense of power that comes from intellectual mastery.
Every kind of public work involves desire for some kind of power,
unless it is undertaken solely with a view to the wealth obtainable
by corruption. The man who is actuated by purely altruistic suffering
caused by the spectacle of human misery will, if his suffering is
genuine, desire power to alleviate misery. The only man totally
indifferent to power is the man totally indifferent to his fellow-men.
Some form of desire for power is therefore to be accepted as part of
the equipment of the kind of men out of whom a good community can be
made. And every form of desire for power involves, so long as it is
not thwarted, a correlative form of effort. To the mentality of the
West this conclusion may seem a commonplace, but there are not a few
in Western countries who coquette with what is called “the wisdom of
the East” just at the moment when the East is abandoning it. To them
perhaps what we have been saying may appear questionable, and if so, it
has been worth saying.
Resignation, however, has also its part to play in the conquest of
happiness, and it is a part no less essential than that played by
effort. The wise man, though he will not sit down under preventable
misfortunes, will not waste time and emotion upon such as are
unavoidable, and even such as are in themselves avoidable he will
submit to if the time and labour required to avoid them would interfere
with the pursuit of some more important object. Many people get into
a fret or a fury over every little thing that goes wrong, and in
this way waste a great deal of energy that might be more usefully
employed. Even in the pursuit of really important objects it is unwise
to become so deeply involved emotionally that the thought of possible
failure becomes a constant menace to peace of mind. Christianity
taught submission to the will of God, and even for those who cannot
accept this phraseology there should be something of the same kind
pervading all their activities. Efficiency in a practical task is not
proportional to the emotion that we put into it; indeed, emotion is
sometimes an obstacle to efficiency. The attitude required is that of
doing one’s best while leaving the issue to fate. Resignation is of
two sorts, one rooted in despair, the other in unconquerable hope.
The first is bad; the second is good. The man who has suffered such
fundamental defeat that he has given up hope of serious achievement may
learn the resignation of despair, and, if he does, he will abandon all
serious activity. He may camouflage his despair by religious phrases,
or by the doctrine that contemplation is the true end of man, but
whatever disguise he may adopt to conceal his inward defeat, he will
remain essentially useless and fundamentally unhappy. The man whose
resignation is based on unconquerable hope acts in quite a different
way. Hope which is to be unconquerable must be large and impersonal.
Whatever my personal activities, I may be defeated by death, or by
certain kinds of diseases; I may be overcome by my enemies; I may
find that I have embarked upon an unwise course which cannot lead to
success. In a thousand ways the failure of purely personal hopes may be
unavoidable, but if personal aims have been part of larger hopes for
humanity, there is not the same utter defeat when failure comes. The
man of science who desires to make great discoveries himself may fail
to do so, or may have to abandon his work owing to a blow on the head,
but if he desires profoundly the progress of science and not merely his
personal contribution to this object, he will not feel the same despair
as would be felt by a man whose research had purely egoistic motives.
The man who is working for some much needed reform may find all his
efforts side-tracked by a war, and may be forced to realize that what
he has worked for will not come about in his lifetime. But he need
not on that account sink into complete despair, provided that he is
interested in the future of mankind apart from his own participation in
it.
The cases we have been considering are those in which resignation
is most difficult; there are a number of others in which it is much
easier. These are the cases in which only subsidiary purposes suffer a
check, while the major purposes of life continue to offer a prospect
of success. A man, for example, who is engaged in important work shows
a failure in the desirable kind of resignation if he is distracted by
matrimonial unhappiness; if his work is really absorbing, he should
regard such incidental troubles in the way in which one regards a wet
day, that is to say, as a nuisance about which it would be foolish to
make a fuss.
Some people are unable to bear with patience even those minor troubles
which make up, if we permit them to do so, a very large part of life.
They are furious when they miss a train, transported with rage if their
dinner is badly cooked, sunk in despair if the chimney smokes, and
vowing vengeance against the whole industrial order when their clothes
fail to return from the sanitary steam laundry. The energy that such
people waste on trivial troubles would be sufficient, if more wisely
directed, to make and unmake empires. The wise man fails to observe the
dust that the housemaid has not dusted, the potato that the cook has
not cooked, and the soot that the sweep has not swept. I do not mean
that he takes no steps to remedy these matters, provided he has time
to do so; I mean only that he deals with them without emotion. Worry
and fret and irritation are emotions which serve no purpose. Those who
feel them strongly may say that they are incapable of overcoming them,
and I am not sure that they can be overcome by anything short of that
fundamental resignation of which we spoke earlier. The same kind of
concentration upon large impersonal hopes which enables a man to bear
personal failure in his work, or the troubles of an unhappy marriage,
will also make it possible for him to be patient when he misses a train
or drops his umbrella in the mud. If he is of a fretful disposition, I
am not sure that anything less than this will cure him.
The man who has become emancipated from the empire of worry will find
life a much more cheerful affair than it used to be while he was
perpetually being irritated. Personal idiosyncrasies of acquaintances,
which formerly made him wish to scream, will now seem merely amusing.
When Mr. A. for the three hundred and forty-seventh time relates the
anecdote of the Bishop of Tierra del Fuego, he amuses himself by noting
the score, and feels no inclination to attempt a vain diversion by an
anecdote of his own. When his bootlace breaks just as he is in a hurry
to catch an early morning train, he reflects, after the appropriate
expletives, that in the history of the cosmos the event in question
has no very great importance. When he is interrupted in a proposal
of marriage by a visit of a tedious neighbour, he considers that all
mankind have been liable to this disaster, with the exception of Adam,
and that even he had his troubles. There is no limit to what can be
done in the way of finding consolation from minor misfortunes by
means of bizarre analogies and quaint parallels. Every civilized man
or woman has, I suppose, some picture of himself or herself, and is
annoyed when anything happens that seems to spoil this picture. The
best cure is to have not only one picture, but a whole gallery, and to
select the one appropriate to the incident in question. If some of the
portraits are a trifle laughable, so much the better; it is not wise to
see oneself all day long as a hero of high tragedy. I do not suggest
that one should see oneself always as a clown in comedy, for those who
do this are even more irritating; a little tact is required in choosing
a rôle appropriate to the situation. Of course, if you can forget
yourself and not play a part at all that is admirable. But if playing a
part has become second nature, consider that you act in repertory, and
so avoid monotony.
Many active people are of opinion that the slightest grain of
resignation, the faintest gleam of humour, would destroy the energy
with which they do their work and the determination by which, as
they believe, they achieve success. These people, in my opinion, are
mistaken. Work that is worth doing can be done even by those who do
not deceive themselves either as to its importance or as to the ease
with which it can be done. Those who can only do their work when
upheld by self-deception had better first take a course in learning to
endure the truth before continuing their career, since sooner or later
the need of being sustained by myths will cause their work to become
harmful instead of beneficial. It is better to do nothing than to
do harm. Half the useful work in the world consists of combating the
harmful work. A little time spent in learning to appreciate facts is
not time wasted, and the work that will be done afterwards is far less
likely to be harmful than the work done by those who need a continual
inflation of their ego as a stimulant to their energy. A certain
kind of resignation is involved in willingness to face the truth
about ourselves; this kind, though it may involve pain in the first
moments, affords ultimately a protection--indeed the only possible
protection--against the disappointments and disillusionments to which
the self-deceiver is liable. Nothing is more fatiguing nor, in the
long run, more exasperating than the daily effort to believe things
which daily become more incredible. To be done with this effort is an
indispensable condition of secure and lasting happiness.
CHAPTER XVII
THE HAPPY MAN
Happiness, as is evident, depends partly upon external circumstances
and partly upon oneself. We have been concerned in this volume with the
part which depends upon oneself, and we have been led to the view that
so far as this part is concerned the recipe for happiness is a very
simple one. It is thought by many, among whom I think we must include
Mr. Krutch, whom we considered in an earlier chapter, that happiness
is impossible without a creed of a more or less religious kind. It is
thought by many who are themselves unhappy that their sorrows have
complicated and highly intellectualized sources. I do not believe that
such things are genuine causes of either happiness or unhappiness;
I think they are only symptoms. The man who is unhappy will, as a
rule, adopt an unhappy creed, while the man who is happy will adopt a
happy creed; each may attribute his happiness or unhappiness to his
beliefs, while the real causation is the other way round. Certain
things are indispensable to the happiness of most men, but these are
simple things: food and shelter, health, love, successful work and
the respect of one’s own herd. To some people parenthood also is
essential. Where these things are lacking, only the exceptional man can
achieve happiness, but where they are enjoyed, or can be obtained by
well-directed effort, the man who is still unhappy is suffering from
some psychological maladjustment which, if it is very grave, may need
the services of a psychiatrist, but can in ordinary cases be cured by
the patient himself, provided he sets about the matter in the right
way. Where outward circumstances are not definitely unfortunate, a man
should be able to achieve happiness, provided that his passions and
interests are directed outward, not inward. It should be our endeavour
therefore, both in education and in attempts to adjust ourselves to the
world, to aim at avoiding self-centred passions and at acquiring those
affections and those interests which will prevent our thoughts from
dwelling perpetually upon ourselves. It is not the nature of most men
to be happy in a prison, and the passions which shut us up in ourselves
constitute one of the worst kinds of prisons. Among such passions
some of the commonest are fear, envy, the sense of sin, self-pity and
self-admiration. In all these our desires are centred upon ourselves:
there is no genuine interest in the outer world, but only a concern
lest it should in some way injure us or fail to feed our ego. Fear is
the principal reason why men are so unwilling to admit facts and so
anxious to wrap themselves round in a warm garment of myth. But the
thorns tear the warm garment and the cold blasts penetrate through the
rents, and the man who has become accustomed to its warmth suffers far
more from these blasts than a man who has hardened himself to them from
the first. Moreover, those who deceive themselves generally know at
bottom that they are doing so, and live in a state of apprehension lest
some untoward event should force unwelcome realizations upon them.
One of the great drawbacks to self-centred passions is that they afford
so little variety in life. The man who loves only himself cannot, it
is true, be accused of promiscuity in his affections, but he is bound
in the end to suffer intolerable boredom from the invariable sameness
of the object of his devotion. The man who suffers from a sense of sin
is suffering from a particular kind of self-love. In all this vast
universe the thing that appears to him of most importance is that he
himself should be virtuous. It is a grave defect in certain forms of
traditional religion that they have encouraged this particular kind of
self-absorption.
The happy man is the man who lives objectively, who has free affections
and wide interests, who secures his happiness through these interests
and affections and through the fact that they, in turn, make him an
object of interest and affection to many others. To be the recipient
of affection is a potent cause of happiness, but the man who demands
affection is not the man upon whom it is bestowed. The man who receives
affection is, speaking broadly, the man who gives it. But it is useless
to attempt to give it as a calculation, in the way in which one might
lend money at interest, for a calculated affection is not genuine and
is not felt to be so by the recipient.
What then can a man do who is unhappy because he is encased in self?
So long as he continues to think about the causes of his unhappiness,
he continues to be self-centred and therefore does not get outside
the vicious circle; if he is to get outside it, it must be by genuine
interests, not by simulated interests adopted merely as a medicine.
Although this difficulty is real, there is nevertheless much that he
can do if he has rightly diagnosed his trouble. If, for example, his
trouble is due to a sense of sin, conscious or unconscious, he can
first persuade his conscious mind that he has no reason to feel sinful,
and then proceed, by the kind of technique that we have considered in
earlier chapters, to plant this rational conviction in his unconscious
mind, concerning himself meanwhile with some more or less neutral
activity. If he succeeds in dispelling the sense of sin, it is
probable that genuinely objective interests will arise spontaneously.
If his trouble is self-pity, he can deal with it in the same manner
after first persuading himself that there is nothing extraordinarily
unfortunate in his circumstances. If fear is his trouble, let him
practise exercises designed to give courage. Courage in war has
been recognized from time immemorial as an important virtue, and a
great part of the training of boys and young men has been devoted to
producing a type of character capable of fearlessness in battle. But
moral courage and intellectual courage have been much less studied;
they also, however, have their technique. Admit to yourself every
day at least one painful truth; you will find this quite as useful
as the Boy Scout’s daily kind action. Teach yourself to feel that
life would still be worth living even if you were not, as of course
you are, immeasurably superior to all your friends in virtue and in
intelligence. Exercises of this sort prolonged through several years
will at last enable you to admit facts without flinching, and will, in
so doing, free you from the empire of fear over a very large field.
What the objective interests are to be that will arise in you when
you have overcome the disease of self-absorption must be left to the
spontaneous workings of your nature and of external circumstances. Do
not say to yourself in advance, “I should be happy if I could become
absorbed in stamp-collecting”, and thereupon set to work to collect
stamps, for it may well happen that you will fail altogether to find
stamp-collecting interesting. Only what genuinely interests you can be
of any use to you, but you may be pretty sure that genuine objective
interests will grow up as soon as you have learnt not to be immersed in
self.
The happy life is to an extraordinary extent the same as the good life.
Professional moralists have made too much of self-denial, and in so
doing have put the emphasis in the wrong place. Conscious self-denial
leaves a man self-absorbed and vividly aware of what he has sacrificed;
in consequence it fails often of its immediate object and almost always
of its ultimate purpose. What is needed is not self-denial, but that
kind of direction of interest outward which will lead spontaneously and
naturally to the same acts that a person absorbed in the pursuit of
his own virtue could only perform by means of conscious self-denial.
I have written in this book as a hedonist, that is to say, as one who
regards happiness as the good, but the acts to be recommended from the
point of view of the hedonist are on the whole the same as those to be
recommended by the sane moralist. The moralist, however, is too apt,
though this is not, of course, universally true, to stress the act
rather than the state of mind. The effects of an act upon the agent
will be widely different, according to his state of mind at the moment.
If you see a child drowning and save it as the result of a direct
impulse to bring help, you will emerge none the worse morally. If,
on the other hand, you say to yourself, “It is the part of virtue to
succour the helpless, and I wish to be a virtuous man, therefore I must
save this child”, you will be an even worse man afterwards than you
were before. What applies in this extreme case applies in many other
instances that are less obvious.
There is another difference, somewhat more subtle, between the
attitude towards life that I have been recommending and that which is
recommended by the traditional moralists. The traditional moralist, for
example, will say that love should be unselfish. In a certain sense
he is right, that is to say, it should not be selfish beyond a point,
but it should undoubtedly be of such a nature that one’s own happiness
is bound up in its success. If a man were to invite a lady to marry
him on the ground that he ardently desired her happiness and at the
same time considered that she would afford him ideal opportunities
of self-abnegation, I think it may be doubted whether she would be
altogether pleased. Undoubtedly we should desire the happiness of those
whom we love, but not as an alternative to our own. In fact the whole
antithesis between self and the rest of the world, which is implied in
the doctrine of self-denial, disappears as soon as we have any genuine
interest in persons or things outside ourselves. Through such interests
a man comes to feel himself part of the stream of life, not a hard
separate entity like a billiard-ball, which can have no relation with
other such entities except that of collision. All unhappiness depends
upon some kind of disintegration or lack of integration; there is
disintegration within the self through lack of co-ordination between
the conscious and the unconscious mind; there is lack of integration
between the self and society, where the two are not knit together by
the force of objective interests and affections. The happy man is the
man who does not suffer from either of these failures of unity, whose
personality is neither divided against itself nor pitted against the
world. Such a man feels himself a citizen of the universe, enjoying
freely the spectacle that it offers and the joys that it affords,
untroubled by the thought of death because he feels himself not really
separate from those who will come after him. It is in such profound
instinctive union with the stream of life that the greatest joy is to
be found.
INDEX
acquiescence, the attitude of, 128
admiration, 86, 106
adolescence often a time of great unhappiness, 129
affection, 175, 177–85, 243
alcohol, 16, 71, 100
altruism, 118–20, 123
America, 49, 51, 130
Angelo, Michael, 216
animals and boredom, 57, 94
anxieties, 77
applause, desire for, 122
aristocracy, one of the advantages of, 137
ascetic element in morality, 100
autobiography, the author’s 18–19
Bacon, Roger, 35–6
belief in a cause, 152–3
birth-rate, decline of the, 193–4
Blake, William, 128
boredom, 18, 57–68, 209
Brontë, Emily and Charlotte, 128
Browning, Robert, 37–8
business man, the, 46–50
Byron, 28
Caution in love, 185
child and envy, the, 83, 87
child and inventiveness, the, 64
China and Japan, 148–9
cities, 190
competition, 91
competitive success and happiness, 50, 52, 55
congenial companionship, 132, 138, 152
conscience, 96–7
conscious upon the unconscious, operation of the, 76, 102, 220–1
constructiveness, 212–14, 217
conventional people, 131
courage, 79, 244–5
craftsman’s joy, the, 150–1
creeds, 241
cure for envy, 86–9
Democracy, 84, 91, 191
diversity of morals and beliefs, 126
drink, 16, 25, 169, 228
drugs, 61–2, 228
Earth, contact with, 66–8, 81
_Ecclesiastes_, 28–31, 33
effort, 230–4
ego, unimportance of one’s, 74, 123, 222
emotional fatigue, 74–5
enjoyment, 16, 51
environment, 133
envy, 80–95
envy, fatigue as a cause of, 92
excitement, 58, 60, 62, 65, 79–81, 110
external interests, 220, 222
Family, the, 186–207
fanaticism, 222–3
fatigue, 69–81, 92, 220
fear, 77–9, 242, 244
fear of public opinion, 126–39
flat, life in a, 190–1
freedom of the Press, 139
Golden mean, the, 230
gormandizer, the, 158, 165–8
grief, 227–8
Happiness an achievement, 231
happiness and competitive success, 50
happiness, sources of, 143–4, 148–9, 152–7, 166, 174, 197, 208,
210, 217–18, 226, 228–9, 231, 234, 240–5
happiness, the best touchstone for, 110
happiness the only cure for envy, 86–7
hatred, the habit of, 213–14
hatred stirred by propaganda, 94
hedonism, 246
herd, fear of the, 97–8, 126, 131–3
hobbies, 153–4
hope must be impersonal, 236
housewife, the, 188–9, 210
Ibsen, 41–2
idealistic theories, 84, 92, 119
ill-treatment, hallucinations of, 111–13
impersonal interests, 219, 227
individual, problem of the, 17
infantile moral teaching, 99, 101, 104–5
infantile suggestions, 103
insanity, 111, 124
instinctive happiness, rareness of, 93
intelligentsia, young, 148
interest in oneself, 19
interest in persons, 154–5
interest in things, 156
introvert, malady of the, 160, 180
Justice and envy, 92
Krutch, J. W., 28, 32–8, 41–4, 241
Leisure, employment of, 52–3, 55–6
Lenin, 215
_Liaisons Dangereuses_, 22
love, 36–41, 67, 247
lunacy, 23–4, 111
Malicious gossip, 113–14
marriage, 80–1, 232
_Massenmench_, Ernst Toller’s, 43
masters and slaves, 191
maternal element in love, the, 21
maxims to prevent persecution mania, 118–25
megalomania, 23–5
mental discipline, 72, 75, 89
minor interests, 219, 229
moderation, 165, 167
_Modern Temper, The_, Krutch’s, 28, 32–34
modesty, 89–90
monk, the, 19–20
monotony, 64–5
moralist, the traditional, 246–7
motherhood, 204–7
Napoleon, 24
Narcissism, 20–3, 25
nervous breakdown, 75
nervous fatigue, 69–70, 73, 81, 220
Objective interests, 243, 245
oblivion, 169
Œdipus complex, the, 101, 192
opinions of others, the, 136
overwork, 74
Parental affection, 198–9
parental feeling, 41
parenthood, 200–4
parents and children, 192–3
passions and reason, the, 108–10, 166–7
peacocks, 90–1
persecution mania, 111–25
pessimism, 32–4
philosophy of competition, 54–5
physical fatigue, 69
pleasure of work, the, 149–52, 211–12, 216
pleasure, pursuit of, 16, 25, 80–1
pleasures of achievement, 145
pleasures of great men, the, 64
power, love of, 23–4, 119, 203, 233–4
preventatives of persecution mania, 118
propaganda and hatred, 93–4
proportion, sense of, 116, 221–3
Protestantism and sin, 96
Protestants and Catholics, 126–7
psycho-analytic repression, 24
public opinion, tyranny of, 130, 136, 138–9
Puritanism, 54–5
Rationality, 108–9
reading, 52–3, 63
reason, hatred of, 109–10
religion, 225, 241
Religious Orders, 35
religious psychology of sin, 96
resignation, 230–40
_Retreat from Parenthood_, Jean Aylin’s, 189
Roland, Madame, 84
Russian, the young, 148
Sages of antiquity, the, 36
scientists, happiness of, 145–7
secret of happiness, 157
security, sense of, 176–7
self-absorption, 20, 107, 243, 245
self-centred passions, 242–3
self-confidence, 177
self-deception, 124–5
self-denial, 245–7
self-regarding motives, 120
sense of sin, 20–1, 35, 96, 98, 102, 106, 244
sex and sin, 101–2
sex attraction, 67, 184
sex education, 102
sex majority, 232–3
sexual source of envy, 93
Shakespeare, 41–3, 67, 215
sin, consciousness of, 20–1, 35, 96, 98, 102, 106, 109, 243
skill, 211, 224
social freedom, 137
social inequalities, 91
social justice, 92
social persecution, 139
social system, the, 17
socialism, equalitarian doctrines of, 91
Solomon, 31–3, 88
Spinoza, 226
spinster, the, 187
sterility and civilization, 194
Stoics, the, 40
struggle for life, the, 45–6
superstitions of childhood, 105
Test of genius, 122
toleration, 139
tragedy, 41–4
tyranny of public opinion, 130
Unhappiness, Causes of, 17–18, 24–5, 27, 111, 127, 155, 185, 208,
220, 231, 235, 242, 244, 247
unhappiness, kinds of, 15–16, 27
unloved, feeling of being, 175–6
unrecognized merit, 121
Vanity, 23, 119
Victorians and love, the, 36–9
Women and external interests, 222
women and zest, 172–4
Wordsworth, 65
work, 208–18, 223
worry, 72–3, 75–8, 237–8
Youth and the tyranny of ignorance, 133–5
Zest, 158–9, 161, 163–5, 169–75, 209, 228
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FOOTNOTES:
[1] Ecclesiastes was not, of course, really written by Solomon, but it
is convenient to allude to the author by this name.
[2] Quoted from Coulton’s _From St. Francis to Dante_, p. 57.
[3] Mistranslated in English as _Masses and Men_, whereas the
correct translation is _The Mass-Man_.
[4] This whole problem as it affects the professional classes is
treated with remarkable insight and constructive ability in _The
Retreat from Parenthood_, by Jean Aylin.
Transcriber’s Notes:
1. Obvious printers’, punctuation and spelling errors have been
corrected silently.
2. Some hyphenated and non-hyphenated versions of the same words have
been retained as in the original.
3. Italics are shown as _xxx_.