THE CHOOSING OF LIFE
(Discusses the standards by which we may judge what is best in
life, and decide what we wish to make of it.)
We have made the point about evolution, that it may go forward or it may
go backward. There is no guarantee in nature that because a thing
changes, it must necessarily become better than it was. On the contrary,
degeneration is as definitely established a fact as growth, and it is of
the utmost importance, in studying the problem of human happiness and
how to make it, to get clear the fact that nature has produced, and
continues to produce, all kinds of monstrosities and parasites and
failures and abortions. And all these blunders of our great mother
struggle just as hard, desire life just as ardently as normal creatures,
and suffer just as cruelly when they fail. Blind optimism about life is
just as fatuous and just as dangerous as blind pessimism, and if we
propose to take charge of life, and to make it over, we shall find that
we have to get quickly to the task of deciding what our purpose is.
"Choose well, your choice is brief and yet endless," says Carlyle. You
are driven in your choice by two facts--first, that you have to choose,
regardless of whether you want to or not; and second, that upon your
choice depend infinite possibilities of happiness or of misery. The
interdependence of life is such that you are choosing not merely for the
present, but for the future; you are choosing for your posterity
forever, and to some extent you are choosing for all mankind. Matthew
Arnold has said that "Conduct is three-fourths of life"; but I, for my
part, have never been able to see where he got his figures. It seems to
me that conduct is practically everything in life that really counts.
Conduct is not merely marriage and birth and premature death; it is not
merely eating and drinking and sleeping: it is thinking and aspiring; it
is religion and science, music and literature and art. It is not yet the
lightning and the cyclone, but with the spread of knowledge it is coming
to be these things, and I suspect that some day it may be even the comet
and the rising of the sun.
We are now going to apply our reason to this enormous problem of human
conduct; we are going to ask ourselves the question: What kind of life
do we want? What kind of life are we going to make? What are the
standards by which we may know excellence in life, and distinguish it
from failure and waste and blunder in life? Obviously, when we have done
this, we shall have solved the moral problem; all we shall have to say
is, act so that your actions help to bring the desirable things into
being, and do not act so as to hinder or weaken them.
We shall not be able to go to nature to settle this question for us.
This is our problem, not nature's. But we shall find, as usual, that we
can pick up precious hints from her; we shall be wise to study her ways,
and learn from her successes and her failures. We are proud of her
latest product, ourselves. Let us see how she made us; what were the
stages on the way to man?
First in the scale of evolution, it appears, came inert matter. We call
it inert, because it looks that way, though we know, of course, that it
consists of infinite numbers of molecules vibrating with speed which we
can measure even though we cannot imagine it. This "matter" is
enormously fascinating, and a wise man will hesitate to speak
patronizingly about it. Nevertheless, considering matter apart from the
mind which studies it, we decide that it represents a low stage of
being. We speak contemptuously of stones and clods and lumps of clay. We
award more respect to things like mountains and tempest-tossed oceans,
because they are big; in the early days of our race we used to worship
these things, but now we think of them merely as the raw material of
life, and we should not be in the least interested in becoming a
mountain or an ocean.
Almost everyone would agree, therefore, that what we call "life" is a
higher and more important achievement of nature. And if we wish to grade
this life, we do so according to its sentience--that is to say, the
amount and intensity of the consciousness which grows in it. We are
interested in the one-celled organisms which swarm everywhere throughout
nature, and we study the mysterious processes by which they nourish and
beget themselves; we suspect that they have a germ of consciousness in
them; but we are surer of the meaning and importance of the
consciousness we detect in some complex organism like a fish or bird.
We learn to know the signs of consciousness, of dawning intelligence,
and we esteem the various kinds of creatures according to the amount of
it they possess. We reject mere physical bigness and mere strength.
Joyce Kilmer may write:
"Poems are made by men like me,
But only God can make a tree"--
And that seems to us a charming bit of fancy; but the common sense of
the thing is voiced to us much better in the lines of old Ben Jonson:
"It is not growing like a tree
In bulk doth make man better be."
If we take two animals of equal bulk, the hippopotamus and the elephant,
we shall be far more interested in the elephant, because of the
intelligence and what we call "character" which he displays. There are
good elephants and bad elephants, kind ones and treacherous ones. We
love the dog because we can make a companion of him; that is, because we
can teach him to react to human stimuli. Of all animals we are
fascinated most by the monkey, because he is nearest to man, and
displays the keenest intelligence.
Someone may say that this is all mere human egotism, and that we have no
way of really being sure that the life of elephants and hippopotami is
not more interesting and significant than the life of men. Never having
been either of these animals, I cannot say with assurance; but I know
that I have the power to exterminate these creatures, or to pen them in
cages, and they are helpless to protect themselves, or even to
understand what is happening to them. So I am irresistibly driven to
conclude that intelligence is more safe and more worth while than
unintelligence; in short, that intelligence is nature's highest product
up to date, and that to foster and develop it is the best guess I can
make as to the path of wisdom--that is, of intelligence!
When we come to deal with human values, we find that we can trace much
the same kind of evolution. Back in the days of the cave man, it was
physical strength which dominated the horde; but nowadays, except in the
imagination of the small boy, the "strong man" does not cut much of a
figure. We go once, perhaps, to see him lift his heavy weights and
break his iron bars, but then we are tired of him. Mere strength had to
yield in the struggle for life to quickness of eye and hand, to energy
which for lack of a better name we may call "nervous." The pugilist who
has nothing but muscle goes down before his lighter antagonist who can
keep out of his reach, and the crowd loves the football hero who can
duck and dodge and make the long runs. One might cite a thousand
illustrations, such as the British bowmen breaking down the heavily
armored knights, or the quick-moving, light vessels of Britain
overcoming the huge galleons of Spain. And as society develops and
becomes more complex, the fighting man becomes less and less a man of
muscle, and more and more a man of "nerve." Alexander, Caesar and
Napoleon would have stood a poor chance in personal combat against many
of their followers. They led, because they were men of energy and
cunning, able to maintain the subtle thing we call prestige.
Now the world has moved into an industrial era, and who are the great
men of our time, the men whose lightest words are heeded, whose doings
are spread upon the front pages of our newspapers? Obviously, they are
the men of money. We may pretend to ourselves that we do not really
stand in awe of a Morgan or a Rockefeller, but that we admire, let us
say, an Edison or a Roosevelt. But Edison himself is a man of money, and
will tell you that he had to be a man of money in order to be free to
conduct his experiments. As for our politicians and statesmen, they
either serve the men of money, or the men of money suppress them, as
they did Roosevelt. The Morgans and the Rockefellers do not do much
talking; they do not have to. They content themselves with being obeyed,
and the shaping of our society is in their hands.
And yet, some of us really believe that there are higher faculties in
man than the ability to manipulate the stock market. We consider that
the great inventor, the great poet, the great moralist, contributes more
to human happiness than the man who, by cunning and persistence,
succeeds in monopolizing some material necessity of human life. "Poets,"
says Shelley, "are the unacknowledged legislators of mankind." If this
strange statement is anywhere near to truth, it is surely of importance
that we should decide what are the higher powers in men, and how they
may be recognized, and how fostered and developed.
What is, in its essence, the process of evolution from the lower to the
higher forms of mental life? It is a process of expanding consciousness;
the developing of ability to apprehend a wider and wider circle of
existence, to share it, to struggle for it as we do for the life we call
our "own." The test of the higher mental forms is therefore a test of
universality, of sympathetic inclusiveness; or, to use commoner words,
it is a test of enlightened unselfishness.
Every human individual has the will to life, the instinct of
self-preservation, which persuades him that he is of importance; but the
test of his development is his ability to realize that, important though
he may be, he is but a small part of the universe, and his highest
interests are not in himself alone, his highest duties are not owed to
himself alone. And as the life becomes more of the intellect, this fact
becomes more and more obvious, more and more dominating. Men who
monopolize the material things of the world and their control are
necessarily self-seeking; but in the realm of the higher faculties this
element, in the very nature of the case, is forced into the background.
It is evident that truth is not truth for the Standard Oil Company, nor
for J. P. Morgan and Company, nor yet for the government of the United
States; it is truth for the whole of mankind, and one who sincerely
labors for the truth does so for the universal benefit.
There may be, of course, an element of selfishness in the activities of
poets and inventors. They may be seeking for fame; they may be hoping to
make money out of their discoveries; but the greatest men we know have
been dominated by an overwhelming impulse of creation, and when we read
their lives, and discover in them signs of petty vanity or jealousy or
greed, we are pained and shocked. What touches us most deeply is some
mark of self-consecration and humility; as, for example, when Newton
tells us that after all his life's labors he felt himself as a little
child gathering sea-shells on the shore of the great ocean of truth; or
when Alfred Russel Wallace, discovering that Darwin had been working
longer than himself over the theory of the origin of species, generously
withdrew and permitted the theory to go to the world in Darwin's name.
There are three faculties in man, usually described as intellect,
feeling and will. According as one or the other faculty predominates,
we have a great scientist, a great poet, or a great moralist. We might
choose a representative of each type--let us say Newton, Shakespeare and
Jesus--and spend much time in controversy as to which of the three types
is the greatest, which makes the greatest contribution to human
happiness. But it will suffice here to point out that the three
faculties do not exclude one another; every man must have all three, and
a perfectly rounded man should seek to develop all three. Jesus was
considerable of a poet, and we should pay far less heed to Shakespeare
if he had not been a moralist. Also there have been instances of great
poets and painters who were scientists--for example, Leonardo and
Goethe.
The fundamental difference between the scientist and the poet is that
one is exploring nature and discovering things which actually exist,
whereas the other is creating new life out of his own spirit. But the
poet will find that his creations take but little hold upon life, if
they are not guided and shaped by a deep understanding of life's
fundamental nature and needs--in other words, if the poet is not
something of a scientist. And in the same way, the very greatest
discoveries of science seem to us like leaps of creative imagination; as
if the mind had completed nature, through some intuitive and sympathetic
understanding of what nature wished to be.
The point about these higher forms of human activity is that they renew
and multiply life. We may say that if Jesus had never lived, others
would have embodied and set forth with equal poignancy the revolutionary
idea of the equality of all men as children of one common father. And
perhaps this is true; but we have no way of being sure that it is true,
and as we look back upon the last nineteen hundred years of human
history, we are unable to imagine just what the life of mankind during
those centuries would have been if Jesus had died when he was a baby. We
do not know what modern thought might have been without Kant, or what
modern music might have been without Beethoven. We are forced to admit
that if it had not been for the patient wisdom and persuasive kindness
of Lincoln, the Slave Power might have won its independence, and America
today might have been a military camp like Europe, and the lives and
thoughts of every one of us would have been different.
Or take the activities of the poet. Many years ago the writer was asked
to name the men who had exercised the greatest influence upon him, and
after much thought he named three: Jesus, Hamlet and Shelley. And now
consider the significance of this reply. One of these people, Shelley,
was what we call a "real" person; that is, a man who actually lived and
walked upon the earth. Concerning Hamlet, it is believed there was once
a Prince of Denmark by that name, but the character who is known to us
as Hamlet is the creation of a poet's brain. As to the third figure,
Jesus, the authorities dispute. Some say that he was a man who actually
lived; others believe that he was God on earth; yet others, very
learned, maintain that he is a legendary name around which a number of
traditions have gathered.
To me it does not make a particle of difference which of the three
possibilities happens to be true about Jesus. If he was God on earth, he
was God in human form, under human limitations, and in that sense we are
all gods on earth. And whether he really lived, or whether some poet
invented him, matters not a particle so far as concerns his effect upon
others. The emotions which moved him, the loves, the griefs, the high
resolves, existed in the soul of someone, whether his name were Jesus or
John; and these emotions have been recorded in such form that they
communicate themselves to us, they become a part of our souls, they make
us something different from what we were before we encountered them.
In other words, the poet makes in his own soul a new life, and then
projects it into the world, and it becomes a force which makes over the
lives of millions of other people. If you read the vast mass of
criticism which has grown up about the figure of Hamlet, you learn that
Hamlet is the type of the "modern man." Shakespeare was able to divine
what the modern man would be; or perhaps we can go farther and say that
Shakespeare helped to make the modern man what he is; the modern man is
more of Hamlet, because he has taken Hamlet to his heart and pondered
over Hamlet's problem. Or take Don Quixote. No doubt the follies of the
"age of chivalry" would have died out of men's hearts in the end; but
how much sooner they died because of the laughter of Cervantes! Or take
"Les Miserables." Our prison system is not ideal by any means, but it is
far less cruel than it was half a century ago, and we owe this in part
to Victor Hugo. Every convict in the world is to some degree a happier
man because of this vision which was projected upon the world from the
soul of one great poet. No one can estimate the part which the writings
of Tolstoi have played in the present revolution in Russia, but this we
may say with certainty: there is not one man, woman or child in Russia
at the present moment who is quite the same as he would have been if
"Resurrection" had never been written.
In discussing the highest faculties of man we have so far refrained from
using the word "genius." It is a word which has been cheapened by
misuse, but we are now in position to use it. The things which we have
just been considering are the phenomena of genius--and we can say this,
even though we may not know exactly what genius is. Perhaps it is, as
Frederic Myers asserts, a "subliminal uprush," the welling up into the
consciousness of some part of the content of the subconscious mind. Or
perhaps it is something of what man calls "divine." Or perhaps it is the
first dawning, the first hint of that super-race which will some day
replace mankind. Perhaps we are witnessing the same thing that happened
on the earth when glimmerings of reason first broke upon the mind of
some poor, bewildered ape. We cannot be sure; but this much we can say:
the man of genius represents the highest activity of the mind of which
we as yet have knowledge. He represents the spirit of man, fully
emancipated, fully conscious, and taking up the task of creation; taking
human life as raw material, and making it over into something more
subtle, more intense, more significant, more universal than it ever was
before, or ever would have been without the intervention of this new
God-man.