wants to give a man a keen desire for social progress, a love for the
arts, a delight in sheer thinking, and a confidence in his own powers.
It will do little good to teach a man about what men have thought and
done and built unless some spark is kindled, some reaction produced
that will have consequences for the future; it will do little good
to teach him about literature and the arts unless some kind of an
emotional push is imparted to him that will drive him on to teach
himself further and grow into a larger appreciation of the best; it
will do little good to enforce scientific discipline unless by it
the mind is forged into a keener weapon for attacking problems and
solving them scientifically and not superficially. And it is just this
enthusiasm that the college, and only the college, can impart. We come
there to learn from men, not from books. We could learn from books
as well at home, but years of individual study will not equal the
inspirational value of one short term of listening to the words of a
wise and good man. Only enthusiasm can knit the scattered ideals and
timorous aspirations into a constructive whole.
Some such spirit as I have endeavored to outline, the college is
beginning to be infused with to-day; some such spirit the undergraduate
must get if he is to be in the best sense educated and adequately
equipped for the complex work of the world. If such a spirit is
instilled, it almost matters little what the details of his courses
are, or the mere material of his knowledge. Such an attitude will be a
sufficient preparation for life, and adequate training for citizenship.
We want citizens who are enthusiastic thinkers, not docile and
uncritical followers of tradition; we want leaders of public opinion
with the scientific point of view: unclassed men, not men like the
leaders of the passing generation, saturated with class prejudices and
class ideals.
The college is rapidly revising its curriculum in line with the new
standards. The movement is so new, to be sure, that things have hardly
got their bearings yet. Men who graduated only ten years ago tell me
that there was nothing like this new spirit when they were in college.
The student finds a glut of courses, and flounders around for two or
three years before he gets any poise at all. A judicious mixture of
compulsory and elective courses seems to be furnishing a helpful guide,
and a system of honor courses like that recently introduced at Columbia
provides an admirable means, not only to a more intensive culture, but
also to the synthesis of intellectual interests that creates a definite
attitude toward life, and yet for the absence of which so many young
men of ability and power stand helpless and undecided on the threshold
of active life. To replace the classics, now irretrievably gone as the
backbone of the curriculum, the study of history seems an admirable
discipline, besides furnishing the indispensable background for the
literary and philosophical studies. Scientific ethics and social
psychology should occupy an important place in the revised curriculum.
The college cannot afford to leave the undergraduate to the mercies of
conventional religion and a shifting moral tradition.
The pedantic, Germanistic type of scholarship is rapidly passing.
The divisions, between the departments are beginning to break down.
Already the younger instructors are finding their ideal professor in
the man who, while he knows one branch thoroughly, is interested in a
wide range of subjects. The departments are reacting upon one another;
both undergraduates and instructors are coming to see intellectual
life as a whole, and not as a miscellaneous collection of specialized
chunks of knowledge. The type of man is becoming common who could go to
almost any other department of the college and give a suggestive and
interesting, if not erudite, lecture on some subject in connection with
its work. It is becoming more and more common now that when you touch a
professor you touch a man and not an intellectual specialty.
The undergraduate himself is beginning to react strongly to this sort
of scholarship. He catches an inspiration from the men in the faculty
who exhibit it, and he is becoming expert in separating the sheep from
the goats. He does not want experiments in educational psychology tried
upon him: all he demands in his teacher is personality. He wants to
feel that the instructor is not simply passing on dead knowledge in the
form it was passed on to him, but that he has assimilated it and has
read his own experience into it, so that it has come to mean more to
him than almost anything in the world.
Professors are fond of saying that they like to have their students
react to what they bring them; the student in turn likes to feel that
the professor himself has reacted to what he is teaching. Otherwise his
teaching is very apt to be in vain. American youth are very much less
docile than they used to be, and they are little content any longer to
have second-hand knowledge, a little damaged in transit, thrust upon
them. The undergraduate wants to feel that the instructor is giving him
his best all the time, a piece out of the very warp and woof of his own
thinking.
The problem of the college in the immediate future is thus to make
these ideals good, to permeate undergraduate society with the new
spirit, and to raise the level of scholarship by making learning not an
end in itself but a means to life. The curriculum and administrative
routine will be seen simply as means to the cultivation of an attitude
towards life. As the ideals crystallize out and the college becomes
surer and surer of its purpose, it will find itself leading the thought
of the age in new channels of conviction and constructive statesmanship
through its inspirational influence on the young men of the time.
Admitting that these ideals are still unorganized and unestablished,
that in many of the colleges they have hardly begun to appear, while
even in the larger ones they are little more than tendencies as
yet,--is it too much to hope that a few years will see the college
conscious of its purpose, and already beginning to impose on the rank
and file of its members, instructors and undergraduates alike, the
ideals which have been felt this last decade by the more sensitive?
XIV
A PHILOSOPHY OF HANDICAP
It would not perhaps be thought, ordinarily, that the man whom physical
disabilities have made so helpless that he is unable to move around
among his fellows, can bear his lot more happily, even though he suffer
pain, and face life with a more cheerful and contented spirit, than
can the man whose handicaps are merely enough to mark him out from the
rest of his fellows without preventing him from entering with them
into most of their common affairs and experiences. But the fact is
that the former’s very helplessness makes him content to rest and not
to strive. I know a young man so helplessly disabled that he has to be
carried about, who is happy in reading a little, playing chess, taking
a course or two in college, and all with the sunniest good-will in
the world, and a happiness that seems strange and unaccountable to my
restlessness. He does not cry for the moon.
When the handicapped youth, however, is in full possession of his
faculties, and can move about freely, he is perforce drawn into all
the currents of life. Particularly if he has his own way in the world
to make, his road is apt to be hard and rugged, and he will penetrate
to an unusual depth in his interpretation both of the world’s attitude
toward such misfortunes, and of the attitude toward the world which
such misfortunes tend to cultivate in men like him. For he has all the
battles of a stronger man to fight, and he is at a double disadvantage
in fighting them. He has constantly with him the sense of being obliged
to make extra efforts to overcome the bad impression of his physical
defects, and he is haunted with a constant feeling of weakness and
low vitality which makes effort more difficult and renders him easily
faint-hearted and discouraged by failure. He is never confident of
himself, because he has grown up in an atmosphere where nobody has been
very confident of him; and yet his environment and circumstances call
out all sorts of ambitions and energies in him which, from the nature
of his case, are bound to be immediately thwarted. This attitude is
likely to keep him at a generally low level of accomplishment unless he
have an unusually strong will, and a strong will is perhaps the last
thing to develop under such circumstances.
The handicapped man is always conscious that the world does not
expect very much from him. And it takes him a long time to see in
this a challenge instead of a firm pressing down to a low level of
accomplishment. As a result, he does not expect very much of himself;
he is timid in approaching people, and distrustful of his ability to
persuade and convince. He becomes extraordinarily sensitive to other
people’s first impressions of him. Those who are to be his friends he
knows instantly, and further acquaintance adds little to the intimacy
and warm friendship that he at once feels for them. On the other hand,
those who do not respond to him immediately cannot by any effort either
on his part or theirs overcome that first alienation.
This sensitiveness has both its good and its bad sides. It makes
friendship the most precious thing in the world to him, and he finds
that he arrives at a much richer and wider intimacy with his friends
than do ordinary men with their light, surface friendships, based on
good fellowship or the convenience of the moment. But on the other hand
this sensitiveness absolutely unfits him for business and the practice
of a profession, where one must be “all things to all men,” and the
professional manner is indispensable to success. For here, where he
has to meet a constant stream of men of all sorts and conditions, his
sensitiveness to these first impressions will make his case hopeless.
Except with those few who by some secret sympathy will seem to respond,
his physical deficiencies will stand like a huge barrier between his
personality and other men’s. The magical good fortune of attractive
personal appearance makes its way almost without effort in the world,
breaking down all sorts of walls of disapproval and lack of interest.
Even the homely person can attract by personal charm.
The doors of the handicapped man are always locked, and the key is
on the outside. He may have treasures of charm inside, but they will
never be revealed unless the person outside coöperates with him in
unlocking the door. A friend becomes, to a much greater degree than
with the ordinary man, the indispensable means of discovering one’s own
personality. One only exists, so to speak, with friends. It is easy
to see how hopelessly such a sensitiveness incapacitates a man for
business, professional or social life, where the hasty and superficial
impression is everything, and disaster is the fate of the man who has
not all the treasures of his personality in the front window, where
they can be readily inspected and appraised.
It thus takes the handicapped man a long time to get adjusted to his
world. Childhood is perhaps the hardest time of all. As a child he is
a strange creature in a strange land. It was my own fate to be just
strong enough to play about with the other boys, and attempt all their
games and “stunts,” without being strong enough actually to succeed in
any of them. It never used to occur to me that my failures and lack of
skill were due to circumstances beyond my control, but I would always
impute them, in consequence of my rigid Calvinistic bringing-up, I
suppose, to some moral weakness of my own. I suffered tortures in
trying to learn to skate, to climb trees, to play ball, to conform
in general to the ways of the world. I never resigned myself to the
inevitable, but over-exerted myself constantly in a grim determination
to succeed. I was good at my lessons, and through timidity rather
than priggishness, I hope, a very well-behaved boy at school; I was
devoted, too, to music, and learned to play the piano pretty well. But
I despised my reputation for excellence in these things, and instead of
adapting myself philosophically to the situation, I strove and have
been striving ever since to do the things I could not.
As I look back now it seems perfectly natural that I should have
followed the standards of the crowd, and loathed my high marks in
lessons and deportment, and the concerts to which I was sent by my
aunt, and the exhibitions of my musical skill that I had to give
before admiring ladies. Whether or not such an experience is typical
of handicapped children, there is tragedy there for those situated as
I was. For had I been a little weaker physically, I should have been
thrown back on reading omnivorously and cultivating my music, with
some possible results; while if I had been a little stronger, I could
have participated in the play on an equal footing with the rest. As it
was, I simply tantalized myself, and grew up with a deepening sense of
failure, and a lack of pride in that at which I really excelled.
When the world became one of dances and parties and social evenings and
boy-and-girl attachments,--the world of youth,--I was to find myself
still less adapted to it. And this was the harder to bear because I was
naturally sociable, and all these things appealed tremendously to me.
This world of admiration and gayety and smiles and favors and quick
interest and companionship, however, is only for the well-begotten
and the debonair. It was not through any cruelty or dislike, I think,
that I was refused admittance; indeed they were always very kind
about inviting me. But it was more as if a ragged urchin had been
asked to come and look through the window at the light and warmth of
a glittering party; I was truly in the world, but not of the world.
Indeed there were times when one would almost prefer conscious cruelty
to this silent, unconscious, gentle oblivion. And this is the tragedy,
I suppose, of all the ill-favored and unattractive to a greater or less
degree; the world of youth is a world of so many conventions, and the
abnormal in any direction is so glaringly and hideously abnormal.
Although it took me a long time to understand this, and I continued
to attribute my failure mostly to my own character, trying hard to
compensate for my physical deficiencies by skill and cleverness, I
suffered comparatively few pangs, and got much better adjusted to this
world than to the other. For I was older, and I had acquired a lively
interest in all the social politics; I would get so interested in
watching how people behaved, and in sizing them up, that only at rare
intervals would I remember that I was really having no hand in the
game. This interest just in the ways people are human, has become more
and more a positive advantage in my life, and has kept sweet many a
situation that might easily have cost me a pang. Not that a person with
disabilities should be a sort of detective, evil-mindedly using his
social opportunities for spying out and analyzing his friends’ foibles,
but that, if he does acquire an interest in people quite apart from
their relation to him, he may go into society with an easy conscience
and a certainty that he will be entertained and possibly entertaining,
even though he cuts a poor enough social figure. He must simply not
expect too much.
Perhaps the bitterest struggles of the handicapped man come when he
tackles the business world. If he has to go out for himself to look
for work, without fortune, training, or influence, as I personally
did, his way will indeed be rugged. His disability will work against
him for any position where he must be much in the eyes of men, and his
general insignificance has a subtle influence in convincing those to
whom he applies that he is unfitted for any kind of work. As I have
suggested, his keen sensitiveness to other people’s impressions of him
makes him more than usually timid and unable to counteract that fatal
first impression by any display of personal force and will. He cannot
get his personality over across that barrier. The cards seem stacked
against him from the start. With training and influence something
might be done, but alone and unaided his case is almost hopeless. The
attitude toward him ranges from, “You can’t expect us to create a place
for you,” to, “How could it enter your head that we should find any use
for you?” He is discounted at the start: it is not business to make
allowances for anybody; and while people are not cruel or unkind, it is
the hopeless finality of the thing that fills one’s heart with despair.
The environment of a big city is perhaps the worst possible that a
man in such a situation could have. For the thousands of seeming
opportunities lead one restlessly on and on, and keep one’s mind
perpetually unsettled and depressed. There is a poignant mental torture
that comes with such an experience,--the urgent need, the repeated
failure, or rather the repeated failure even to obtain a chance to
fail, the realization that those at home can ill afford to have you
idle, the growing dread of encountering people,--all this is something
that those who have never been through it can never realize. Personally
I know of no particular way of escape. One can expect to do little by
one’s own unaided efforts. I solved my difficulties only by evading
them, by throwing overboard some of my responsibility, and taking the
desperate step of entering college on a scholarship. Desultory work
is not nearly so humiliating when one is using one’s time to some
advantage, and college furnishes an ideal environment where the things
at which a man handicapped like myself can succeed really count. One’s
self-respect can begin to grow like a weed.
For at the bottom of all the difficulties of a man like me is really
the fact that his self-respect is so slow in growing up. Accustomed
from childhood to being discounted, his self-respect is not naturally
very strong, and it would require pretty constant success in a
congenial line of work really to confirm it. If he could only more
easily separate the factors that are due to his physical disability
from those that are due to his weak will and character, he might
more quickly attain self-respect, for he would realize what he is
responsible for, and what he is not. But at the beginning he rarely
makes allowances for himself; he is his own severest judge. He longs
for a “strong will,” and yet the experience of having his efforts
promptly nipped off at the beginning is the last thing on earth to
produce that will.
If the handicapped youth is brought into harsh and direct touch with
the real world, life proves a much more complex thing to him than to
the ordinary man. Many of his inherited platitudes vanish at the first
touch. Life appears to him as a grim struggle, where ability does not
necessarily mean opportunity and success, nor piety sympathy, and where
helplessness cannot count on assistance and kindly interest. Human
affairs seem to be running on a wholly irrational plan, and success
to be founded on chance as much as on anything. But if he can stand
the first shock of disillusionment, he may find himself enormously
interested in discovering how they actually do run, and he will want
to burrow into the motives of men, and find the reasons for the crass
inequalities and injustices of the world he sees around him. He has
practically to construct anew a world of his own, and explain a great
many things to himself that the ordinary person never dreams of finding
unintelligible at all. He will be filled with a profound sympathy
for all who are despised and ignored in the world. When he has been
through the neglect and struggles of a handicapped and ill-favored man
himself, he will begin to understand the feelings of all the horde of
the unpresentable and the unemployable, the incompetent and the ugly,
the queer and crotchety people who make up so large a proportion of
human folk.
We are perhaps too prone to get our ideas and standards of worth from
the successful, without reflecting that the interpretations of life
which patriotic legend, copy-book philosophy, and the sayings of the
wealthy give us, are pitifully inadequate for those who fall behind in
the race. Surely there are enough people to whom the task of making a
decent living and maintaining themselves and their families in their
social class, or of winning and keeping the respect of their fellows,
is a hard and bitter task, to make a philosophy gained through personal
disability and failure as just and true a method of appraising the life
around us as the cheap optimism of the ordinary professional man. And
certainly a kindlier, for it has no shade of contempt or disparagement
about it.
It irritates me as if I had been spoken of contemptuously myself, to
hear people called “common” or “ordinary,” or to see that deadly and
delicate feeling for social gradations crop out, which so many of our
upper middle-class women seem to have. It makes me wince to hear a man
spoken of as a failure, or to have it said of one that he “doesn’t
amount to much.” Instantly I want to know why he has not succeeded, and
what have been the forces that have been working against him. He is
the truly interesting person, and yet how little our eager-pressing,
on-rushing world cares about such aspects of life, and how hideously
though unconsciously cruel and heartless it usually is!
Often I had tried in argument to show my friends how much of
circumstance and chance go to the making of success; and when I reached
the age of sober reading, a long series of the works of radical social
philosophers, beginning with Henry George, provided me with the
materials for a philosophy which explained why men were miserable and
overworked, and why there was on the whole so little joy and gladness
among us,--and which fixed the blame. Here was suggested a goal, and a
definite glorious future, toward which all good men might work. My own
working hours became filled with visions of how men could be brought
to see all that this meant, and how I in particular might work some
great and wonderful thing for human betterment. In more recent years,
the study of history and social psychology and ethics has made those
crude outlines sounder and more normal, and brought them into a saner
relation to other aspects of life and thought, but I have not lost the
first glow of enthusiasm, nor my belief in social progress as the first
right and permanent interest for every thinking and true-hearted man or
woman.
I am ashamed that my experience has given me so little chance to count
in any way either toward the spreading of such a philosophy or toward
direct influence and action. Nor do I yet see clearly how I shall be
able to count effectually toward this ideal. Of one thing I am sure,
however: that life will have little meaning for me except as I am
able to contribute toward some such ideal of social betterment, if
not in deed, then in word. For this is the faith that I believe we
need to-day, all of us,--a truly religious belief in human progress,
a thorough social consciousness, an eager delight in every sign and
promise of social improvement, and best of all, a new spirit of courage
that will dare. I want to give to the young men whom I see,--who, with
fine intellect and high principles, lack just that light of the future
on their faces that would give them a purpose and meaning in life,--to
them I want to give some touch of this philosophy, that will energize
their lives, and save them from the disheartening effects of that
poisonous counsel of timidity and distrust of human ideals which pours
out in steady stream from reactionary press and pulpit.
It is hard to tell just how much of this philosophy has been due to
handicap. If it is solely to that that I owe its existence, the price
has not been a heavy one to pay. For it has given me something that I
should not know how to be without. For, however gained, this radical
philosophy has not only made the world intelligible and dynamic to
me, but has furnished me with the strongest spiritual support. I know
that many people, handicapped by physical weakness and failure, find
consolation and satisfaction in a very different sort of faith,--in
an evangelical religion, and a feeling of close dependence on God
and close communion with him. But my experience has made my ideal of
character militant rather than long-suffering.