his arrow with such force that it took fire as it flew and went up
into the air all aflame, thus opening from the place where the archer
stood a pathway of light into the heavens. Now it is given to man's
thoughts to fulfill this beautiful story, in that they open up shining
pathways along which the human steps may move. On the practical side,
it is by the thinking alone that man solves his bread-winning problem.
Standing, each in his place, using his strongest faculty and working
in the line of least resistance, each must conquer for himself food
and support. To say that society owes us a living or to consume more
than we produce is to sink to the level of pauper and parasite. The
successful man is one whose thoughts about his bread-winning problem
have been wise thoughts; paupers and tramps, with their hunger and
rags, are men who have thought foolishly about how they could best
earn a livelihood.
He who has one strong faculty, the using of which would give delight
and success, yet passes it by, to use a weaker faculty, is doomed to
mediocrity and heart-breaking failure. The eagle has powerful muscles
under the wings, but slender and feeble legs; the fawn lacks the
weight of the draught horse, but has limbs for swiftness. Now, if an
eagle should become a competitor in a walking race and if the fawn
should enter the list of draught horses, we should have that which
answers precisely to the way in which some men seek to gain their
livelihood, by tying up their strongest gift and using their feeblest
faculties. When it is said that only five merchants out of a hundred
succeed we perceive that the great majority of men do not think to any
purpose in choosing an occupation. Recalling his friends who had
misfitted themselves, Sidney Smith once said: "If we represent the
occupations of life by holes in a table, some round, some square, some
oblong, and persons by bits of wood of like shapes, we shall generally
find that the triangular person has got into the square hole, the
oblong into the triangular, while the square person has squeezed
himself into the round hole." For lack of wise thinking beforehand,
multitudes have died of broken hearts midst failure and misery who
might have achieved great happiness and success had they used their
thoughts in choosing their life-work. He who approaches his task with
a leaden heart is out of the race before he is in it. Success means
that the heart loves what the hand does. The bread-winning problem is
the one that touches us first and most closely, and to wise thoughts
only is it given to solve that problem.
The number and value of our thoughts determine a man's value to
society. No investments bring so high a rate of interest as
investments of brain. Hand work earns little, but head work much. In a
Western camp one miner put his lower brain into the pickaxe and earned
$2.00 a day; another miner put his higher brain into the stamp-mill
and soon was receiving a score of dollars daily for his work; a third
youth, toiling in the same mine, put his genius into an electric
process for extracting ore, and sold his invention for a fortune. It
seems that wealth was not in the pick, but in the thoughts that
handled it. Had God intended man to do his work through the body,
man's legs would have been long enough to cover leagues at a stride,
his biceps would have been strong enough to turn the crank for
steamships, his back would have been Atlantean for carrying freight
cars across the plains.
But, instead of giving man long legs, God gave him a mind able to make
locomotives. Instead of telescopic eyes, he gave man mind to invent
far-seeing glasses. Instead of a thousand fingers for weaving, he gave
man five fingers and genius for inventing a thousand steel fingers to
do his spinning. Wealth is not in things, but in the brain that shapes
raw material. Vast was the sum of gold taken out of California, but
this nation might well pay down a hundred Californias for a man to
invent a process to make coal drive the engine without the
intervention of steam. That inventor would enable the street cars for
one cent to carry the people of the tenement-house district ten miles
into the country in ten minutes, and thereby, through sunshine and
fresh air and solitude, would solve a hundred problems that now vex
the statesman and the moralist. A young botanist in Kansas has just
announced his purpose to cross the milkweed and the strawberry, so
that hereafter strawberries and cream may grow upon the same bush. His
task may be doomed to failure, but that youth at least understands
that thought turned the wild rice into wheat; thought turned the sweet
briar into the crimson rose; brains mixed the pigments for Paul
Veronese, and gave the canvas worth a few florins the value of tens of
thousand of dollars. Already wise thoughts have turned the barbarian
into a gentleman and citizen, and some glad day thoughts will crown
man with the attributes and qualities of God.
Of old, the Greek philosopher described the origin of man. One day
Ceres, in crossing a stream, saw a human face emerging from the soil.
It was the face of a man. Standing by this earth-born creature, the
goddess extricated his head and chest; but left his legs fastened in
the soil. Now, the invisible friends that free man from his earth
fetters are those divine visitors called ideas and thoughts. God hath
made thoughts to be golden chariots, in which the soul is swept upward
into the heavenly heights.
When thoughts have sown man's pathway with happiness and peace they go
on to determine character and futurity. Each life memorable for
goodness and nobility has for its motive power some noble thought.
Each hero has climbed up to immortality upon those golden rounds
called good thoughts. Here is that cathedral spirit, John Milton. In
his loneliness and blindness his mind was his kingdom. He loved to
think of things true and pure and of good report. Oft at midnight upon
the poet's ear there fell the sound of celestial music, that afterward
he transposed into his "Paradise Regained." Dying, it was given him to
proudly say: "I am not one of those who have disgraced beauty of
sentiment by deformity of conduct, nor the maxims of the freeman by
the actions of the slave, but by the grace of God, I have kept my soul
unsullied." Here is the immortal Bunyan, spending his best years in
Bedford jail because he insisted on giving men the message God had
first given him; but he, too, opened his mind only to good thoughts.
For him, also, dawned the heavenly vision. As the prison doors opened
before Peter and the angel, so the dungeon walls parted before his
thoughts. Walking about in glad freedom, he crossed the portals of the
Palace Beautiful. From its marble steps he saw afar off the Delectable
Mountains. Hard by ran the River of the Water of Life. The breezes of
the hills of Paradise cooled his hot temples and lifted his hair. His
regal thoughts crowned the Bedford tinker and made him king in English
literature.
Here also is the carpenter's Son rising before each earthly pilgrim
like a star in the night. A man of truly colossal intellect,
incomparable as He strides across the realms and ages, yet always
thinking the gentlest, kindliest thoughts; thoughts of mildness as
well as of majesty; thoughts of humanity as well as divinity. His
thoughts were medicines for hurt hearts; His thoughts were wings to
all the low-flying; His thoughts freed those who had been snared in
the thickets; His thoughts set an angel down beside each cradle; His
thoughts of the incarnation rendered the human body forever sacred;
His thoughts of the grave sanctified the tomb. Dying and rising, His
thoughts clove an open pathway through the sky. Taught by Him, the
people have learned to think--not only great thoughts, but good ones,
and also how to turn thoughts into life.
Bringing their thoughts to God, God has turned thinking into
character. Each spinner who in modesty and fidelity tends his loom,
spins indeed, garments for others, but also weaves himself invisible
garments of everlasting life. Each shipbuilder fastening his timbers
together with honest thoughts will find that his thoughts have become
ships carrying him over the sea to the harbor of God. Each worker
putting integrity into gold and silver will find that he has carved
his own character into a beauty beyond that of gems and sapphires. For
his thoughts drag into futurity after them. So deeply was St. George
Mivart impressed by this that he said: "The old pauper woman whom I
saw to-day in the poorhouse, in her hunger saving her apple to give to
the little orphan just brought in, and unraveling her stocking and
bending her twisted old fingers to knit its yarn into socks for the
blue feet of the child will, I verily believe, begin her life at death
with more intellectual genius--mark the words, intellectual
genius--than will begin that second life any statesman or prime
minister or man famed in our day. For I know of none who hath been
faithful in his much after the fashion of the pauper woman's fidelity
with her little."
For intellect weighs light as punk against the gold of character.
Should God give us to choose between goodness and genius, we may well
say, "Give genius to Lucifer, let mine be the better part." Intellect
is cold as the ice-palace in Quebec. Heart-broken and weary-worn by
life's battle, men draw near to some great-hearted men, as pilgrims
crowd close to the winter's fire. Men neither draw their chairs close
around a block of ice, nor about a brilliant intellect. Our quarrel
with the foolish scientist is that he makes God out as infinite brain.
We rejoice at the revelation of Christ, because He portrays God as
heart and not genius.
God be thanked for great thoughts, but a thousand times more, God be
praised for good thoughts! They are fuel for the fires of enthusiasm.
They are rudders that guide us heavenward. They are seeds for great
harvests of joy. They fulfill the tale of the fairies who in the night
while men slept bridged chasms, builded palaces, laid out streets and
lined them with homes, built the city around with walls. For every
thought is a builder, every purpose a mansion, and every affection a
carpenter. As the builders of the Cologne Cathedral were guided by the
plan and pattern of Von Rile, so man's thoughts are builded after that
matchless model, Jesus Christ. And while our thoughts work, His
thoughts work, also adding beauty to the soul's strength. In the olden
tale the artist pupil through very weariness fell asleep before the
picture that disappointed him. While he slept his master stole into
the room, and with a few swift touches corrected the errors and
brought out the lines of lustrous beauty, kindling new hope within the
boy's heart. And there are unexpected providences in life, strange
influences, interventions and voices in the night. These events over
which we have no control, these thoughts of the Master above, shape us
not less than the thoughts that build from within. It seems that not
one, but two are working upon the soul's structure. As one day in the
presence of his master Michael Angelo pulled down the scaffolding in
the Sistine Chapel, and the workmen cleared away the ropes and plaster
and litter, and looking up men saw the faces of angels and seraphs,
with their lustrous and immortal beauty, so some glad day will that
angel named Death pull down life's scaffolding and set forever in the
sunlight that structure built of thoughts, the stately mansion reared
in the mind, the building not made with hands, the character, eternal
in the heavens.
THE MORAL USES OF MEMORY
"Without memory, man is a perpetual infant."--_Locke._
"The memory plays a great part in ranking men. Quintilian
reckoned it the measure of genius. The poets represented
the muses as the daughters of memory."--_Emerson._
"Recollection is the only paradise from which we cannot
be turned out."--_Richter._
"A land of promise, a land of memory,
A land of promise flowing with the milk
And honey of delicious memories."
--_Tennyson._
"I have a room wherein no one enters save I myself alone;
There sits a blessed memory on a throne.
There my life centers."
--_C.G. Rosetti._
VI
THE MORAL USES OF MEMORY
The soul is a monarch whose rule includes three realms. Its throne is
in the present, but its scepter extends backward over yesterday and
forward over to-morrow. The divinity that presides over the past is
memory; to-day is ruled by reason, to-morrow is under the regency of
hope. In every age memory has been an unpopular goddess. The poet
Byron pictures this divinity as sitting sorrowing midst mouldering
ruins and withering leaves. But the orators unveil the future as a
tropic realm, magical, mysterious and surpassingly rich. The temple
where hope is worshiped is always crowded; her shrines are never
without gifts of flowers and sweet songs.
But at length has come a day when man perceives that the vast treasure
to which the present has fallen heir was bequeathed by that friend
called yesterday. The soul increases in knowledge and culture, because
as it passes through life's rich fields memory plucks the ripe
treasure on either hand, leaving behind no golden sheaf. Philosophy,
therefore, opposes that form of poetry that portrays yesterday by the
falling tower, the yellow leaf, the setting sun. Memory is a gallery
holding pictures of the past. Memory is a library holding wisdom for
to-morrow's emergencies. Memory is a banqueting-hall on whose walls
are the shields of vanquished enemies. Memory is a granary holding
bread for to-morrow's hunger, seed for to-morrow's sowing. That man
alone has a great to-morrow who has back of him a multitude of great
yesterdays.
Aristotle used memory as a measure of genius. He believed that every
great man was possessed of a great memory in his own department. He
was the great artist whose mind searched out and whose memory retained
the beauty of each sweet child, the loveliness of each maiden and
mother. He was the great scientist who remembered all the facts,
forgot no exception, and grouped all under laws. The great orator was
he whose memory stood ready to furnish all truths gleaned from books
and conversation, from travel and experience--weapons these with which
the orator faces his hearers in a noble cause, controls and conquers
them.
After driving through Windsor Park, Dore, the artist, recognized his
debt to memory by observing that he could recall every tree he had
passed, and draw each shrub from memory. We are indebted to the
mechanical genius of Watt for the steam engine; but, before beginning
his work, the inventive faculty asked memory to bring forward all
objects, forces and facts suggested by and relating to that steaming
tea kettle. Genius cannot create without material upon which to work.
It is given to the eye and the ear and the reason to obtain the facts;
memory stores these treasures away until they are needed; and,
selecting therefrom, the inventive faculty fashions physical things
into tools, beautiful things into pictures, ideas into intellectual
philosophies, morals into ethical systems. The architect is helpless
unless he remembers where are the quarries and what their kinds; where
the marbles and what their colors; where the forests and what their
trees.
Thus all the creative minds, from Phidias to Shakespeare, have united
strength of memory with fertility of invention. As the Gobelin
tapestry, depicting the siege of Troy, is woven out of myriads of
tinted threads, so each Hamlet and each "In Memoriam" is an
intellectual texture woven out of ideas and aspirations furnished by
memory. Indeed, without this faculty there could be no knowledge or
culture. Destroy memory and man would remain a perpetual infant.
Because the mind carries forward each new idea and experience, there
comes a day when the youth stands forth a master in his chosen craft
or profession. It is memory that unifies man's life and thought, and
binds all his experiences into one bundle.
In a large sense civilization itself is a kind of racial memory.
Moving backward toward the dawn of history, we come to a time when man
stood forth as a savage, his house a cave, his clothes a leather
girdle, his food locusts and berries. But to-day he is surrounded by
home, and books and pictures, by looms and trains and ships. Now
yesterday was the friend that gave man all this rich treasure. We
pluck clusters from vines other generations planted. We ride in trains
and ships other thinkers invented. We admire pictures and statues
other hands painted and carved. Our happiness is through laws and
institutions for which other multitudes died. We sing songs that the
past did write, and speak a language that generations long dead did
fashion.
When De Tocqueville visited our country, he journeyed westward until
he stood upon the very frontier of civilization. Before him lay the
forests and prairies, stretching for thousands of miles toward the
setting sun. But what impressed him most deeply was the civilization
behind him, reaching to the Atlantic--a civilization including towns
and villages, with free institutions, with schoolroom and church and
library. With joy he reflected that the mental and moral harvests
behind him were sufficient to sow the vast unconquered land with
treasure. Thus each to-day is a frontier line upon which the soul
stands. It is the necessity of life for man to journey backward into
the past for food and seed with which to sow the unconquered future.
For each individual yesterday holds the beginnings of art and
architecture. Yesterday holds the beginnings of reform and
philanthropy. Yesterday contains the rise and victory of freedom.
Yesterday holds the first schoolroom and college and library.
Yesterday holds the cross and all its victories over ignorance and
sin. Yesterday is a river pouring its rich floods forward, lending
majesty and momentum to all man's enterprises. Yesterday is a temple
whose high domes and wide walls and flaming altars other hands and
hearts have built. For the individual, memory is a granary for mental
treasure; and, for the race, civilization is a kind of social memory.
Consider the task laid upon memory. The activity and fruitfulness of
the human mind are immeasurable. Reason does not so much weave
thoughts as exhale them. Objects march in caravans through the eye
gate and the ear gate, each provoking its own train of thought. And
the unconscious processes of the mind are of even greater number. The
silent songs that genius hears, the invisible pictures that genius
paints, the hidden castles that genius builds--no building of a city
without can compare for wonder and beauty and richness with the
building processes of the soul within. If some angelic reporter could
reduce all man's thoughts to physical volume, how vast the book would
be! Thoughts do not go single, but march in armies. Feelings and
aspirations move like flocks of caroling songsters. Desires swarm
forth from the soul like bees from a hive. The soul is a city through
whose gates troop innumerable caravans, bearing treasure within,
carrying treasure forth without. No Great Eastern ever carried a cargo
that was comparable for vastness and richness with that voyaging
forward in the mind.
Now the power and skill of God is nowhere more manifest than in this.
He has endowed the mind with full power to carry forward all its joys,
its friendships and victories. It is given to man to journey in a
single summer over that pathway along which the human race has
walked. For happiness and culture the traveler lingers by some
Runnymede or Marston Moor; stays by castle or cathedral, remains long
in gallery or museum. It is the necessity of his body for the traveler
to leave the mountain behind him when he returns to the city in the
plain. But it is the privilege of the mind to take up these sights and
scenes and carry them away as so much treasure made portable by
memory. By a secret process mountains and valleys and palaces are
reduced in size, photographed and put away ready to be enlarged to the
original proportions.
We have already heard of the inventor who planned an engine that laid
its track and took it up again while it journeyed forward. But this
mechanical dream is literally fulfilled in memory. Grown old and
blind, each Milton may pass before his mind all the panorama of the
past, to find the events of childhood more helpful in memory than they
were in reality. Looking backward, Longfellow reflected that the paths
of childhood had lost their roughness; each way was bordered with
flowers; sweet songs were in the air; the old home was more beautiful
than king's palaces that had opened to his manhood's touch.
Similarly, Dante, storm-beaten, harassed, weary of selfishness,
voyaged and traveled into that foreign land that he called "youth."
There he hid himself until the storms were passed. For him memory held
so much that was bright and beautiful that it became to him a
portfolio of engravings, a gallery of pictures, a palace of many
chambers. Hidden therein, earth's troubles became as harmless as hail
and snow upon tiled castle roofs. Men wonder oft how statesmen and
generals and reformers, oppressed beyond endurance, have borne up
under their burdens. This is their secret: they have sheltered
themselves in the past, found medicines in memory, bathed themselves
in old-time scenes that refreshed and cleansed away life's grime. From
the chill of arctic enmity, it is given to the soul through memory to
rise above the storm and cold and in a moment to enter the tropic
atmosphere of noble friendship, where are fragrance and beauty,
perpetual warmth and wealth.
It was a favorite principle with Socrates that the lesser man never
comprehends the latent strength in his reason or imagination until he
witnesses its skill in the greatest. He implies that the eloquence,
art, and skill that crown the children of genius exist in rudimentary
form in all men. In order, therefore, to understand memory in its
ordinary processes, let us consider its functions in those in whom it
is unique. Fortunately scholars in every age have preserved important
facts concerning the power of recollection. The classic orators
contain repeated reference to traveling singers, who could recite the
entire Iliad and Odyssey. In his "Declamations," speaking of the
inroads disease had made upon him, Seneca remarks that he could speak
two thousand words and names in the order read to him, and that one
morning he listened to the reading of two hundred verses of poetry,
and in the afternoon recited them in their order and without mistake.
Muretus remarks that the stories of Seneca's memory seemed to him
almost incredible, until he witnessed a still more marvelous
occurrence. The sum of his statement is that at Padua there dwelt a
young Corsican, a brilliant and distinguished student of civil law.
Having heard of his marvelous faculty of memory a company of gentlemen
requested from him an exhibition of his power. Six Venetian noblemen
were judges, though there were many other witnesses of the feat.
Muretus dictated words, Latin, Greek, barbaric, disconnected and
connected, until he wearied himself and the man who wrote them down,
and the audience who were present. Afterward the young man repeated
the entire list of words in the same order, then backward, then every
other word, then every fifth word, etc., and all without error.
Sir William Hamilton says that the librarian for the Grand Duke of
Tuscany read every book and pamphlet in his master's library and took
a mental photograph of each page. When asked where a certain passage
was to be found, he would name the alcove, shelf, book, page
containing the passage in question. Scaliger, the scholar, who has
been called the most learned man that ever lived, committed the Iliad
to memory in three weeks and mastered all the Greek poets in four
months. Ben Jonson could repeat all he had ever written and many
volumes he had read, as could Niebuhr, the historian. Macaulay
believed that he had never forgotten anything he had ever read, seen,
or thought. Coleridge tells of an ignorant family servant, who in
moments of unconsciousness through fever, recited passages of Greek
and Hebrew. The explanation was that the servant had been long in the
family of an old clergyman whose habit it was to read aloud the Bible
in the originals.