You already know, from our former discussion, how our reason views the
situation thus created by this chaos of social and of individual
interests. How real and how confused this chaos is, the daily record
of certain aspects of the ordinary social life of men which you see in
each morning's newspaper {187} may serve to illustrate. These princes
and peoples, these rebels and executioners, these strikers and
employers, these lovers and murderers, these traders and bankrupts,
these who seem for the moment to triumph and these who just now appear
to be ground under the opponent's or the oppressor's heel, what arts
of living were they and are they all following? Well, each in his way
appears to have been choosing to have his own will; yet each, being a
social creature, had learned from his fellows all his vain little arts
of life. Each loved some of his fellows and was the rival of others.
Each had his standards of living, standards due to some more or less
accidental and unstable union of all the motives thus barely
suggested. The news of the day tells you how some of these won their
aims, for the moment, while others were thwarted. What I ask you to
note, and what the reason of every man in his more enlightened moments
shows him, is that each of these who at any moment was thwarted,
precisely in so far as he had any will of his own at all, was defeated
not only by his fellows, but by himself. For this special will of his
was some caprice not large enough to meet his own ends. The career,
for instance, of that man who failed in love or in business or in
politics is wrecked. His reputation is lost. Well, it was his will, as
a social being, to aim at just such a career and to value just that
sort of reputation. Had he chosen to be a hermit, or a saint, or a
Stoic, what would just such {188} a career and such a reputation have
been to him? How could he have lost unless he had sought? And his
failure, to what was it due? No doubt to some choice of his own quite
as much as to his rival's skill. He wanted freedom to carry on his own
speculations. He got that freedom and lost his fortune. He wanted to
be free to choose whom and how to love. He had his way and defeated
his own aim. He chose to follow his ambitions. They have led him where
he is.
Such are perfectly reasonable reflections upon the course of ordinary
social conflicts. They suggest to our more considerate moments the
very sort of reflection which, at the outset of the present
discussion, led us to define the religious ideal of salvation. Only
now this type of reflection appears as aiming to lead us to some
practical rule for guiding our active life. For our attention is now
fixed, not on a condition to be called salvation, but on a rule for
doing something in accordance with our own true will. This rule is,
negatively stated, the following: Do _not_ seek, either in your
individual self as you are or in your social experience as it comes,
for the whole truth either about what your own will is or about how
you can get your aims. For if you confine yourself to such sources of
moral insight, you will go on thwarting yourself quite as genuinely,
even if by good luck, not quite as scandalously, as the bankrupt
speculators and the strikers and the outcast oppressors, and the
politicians {189} and the murderers, and the deposed monarchs and the
defeated revolutionists, of whom you read in the newspapers, have
thwarted both their individual and their social will. In brief: Put
not your trust in caprices, either individual or social. On the
positive side, the rule here in question is: In order to find out what
is your true choice, and how you can live without thwarting yourself,
make your _principle_ of life such that whatever fortune besets you,
you can inwardly say: "I have not really failed, for I have acted as I
intended, and also as I still intend to act, and have had my will
whatever the consequences that fortune has brought to me, or however
my momentary mood happens to change, or however this or that social
caprice leads men to love or to despise me." Such is the moral insight
that the first use of your reason, in thus reviewing life, suggests.
Or, as the moral common-sense of the wise has often stated the rule
here in question: So act that, upon any calm review of the sense of
your individual and of your social life, you shall never have ground
to regret the principle of your action, never have ground to say: "By
choosing thus I thwarted my own will."
As you hear these statements, I hope that, reduced to their very
lowest terms: _"So act as never to have reason to regret the principle
of your action,"_ they express a sort of counsel for life which is not
strange to common-sense, even if it has received an abstract
expression in the famous ethical philosophy of Kant. {190} Only, as
you will rightly insist, this counsel is indeed a seemingly hopeless
counsel of perfection when it is addressed to the natural man, who
merely has taken his instincts as he found them developing, and his
social world as he has felt it fascinating or disturbing him, and who
has then stumbled on, more or less prudently and obstinately trying to
find out what it really is that he wants to do in life. Such a man
will cry out: "But how shall I discover a principle of life such that,
if I hold thereto, I shall never, upon any reasonable survey of life,
regret following that principle?"
V
Here at length let life itself answer the question. As I was preparing
these very words, and thinking what new instance to choose, in order
to illustrate afresh the very principle that I have in mind, the
newspaper of the day, side by side with its usual chronicle of
unreason and of disaster, reported the approaching end of a public
servant. This public servant was Ida Lewis, who for fifty years was
the official keeper of the Lime Rock lighthouse in Narragansett Bay.
She had been known for more than fifty years for her early and later
often-repeated heroism as a life-saver. And now she was at last on her
death-bed. She has since died. I know nothing of her career but what
public reports have told. So far as her duty required her at her post,
{191} she kept her light burning through all the nights and the storms
of those many years. She saved, in all, upon various occasions,
eighteen lives of those who were in danger from wreck. Her occupation
thus had its perils. It had, what must have been much harder to
endure, its steady call upon daily fidelity. It was, on the whole, an
obscure and humble occupation; although by chance, as well as by
reason of her skill and devotion, this particular lighthouse keeper
was privileged to become in a sense famous. But certainly it could
have been no part of her original plan to pursue a famous career. When
we seek public prominence we do not select the calling of the
lighthouse keeper. I do not know how she came to find this calling.
She may not even have chosen it. But she certainly chose how to live
her life when she had found it. What it means for the world to have
such lives lived, a very little thought will show us. What spirit is
needed to live such lives as they should be lived, we seldom consider,
until such a public servant, dying with the fruits of her years to
some extent known to the public, reminds us of our debt and of her
devotion.
The newspaper in which I read of this case, in commenting upon its
significance, also reported (I do not know how accurately), this
incident, of which some of you may know more than I do. I quote the
words: [Footnote: _Boston Evening Transcript,_ October 23, 1911.]
"Forty-one years ago, Daniel Williams, keeper of {192} the light at
Little Traverse Bay, in Lake Michigan, went out in a boat for the
rescue of a ship's crew in distress, and did not come back alive.
For three days the storm continued. But his sorrowing widow did not
forget other lives, and each night climbed the winding stairs and
trimmed the lamp. This duty she discharged until the government
learned the situation, when it authorised her to continue. And she
is still at her post."
Lighthouse keepers are not the only people who live thus. There are
countless lights kept alive in homes where want or weariness or stormy
sorrow have long since and often entered, and have again and again
seemed about to overwhelm, but where, after many years, faithful
souls, well known to many of you, are, despite fortune, still at their
post, with the light burning.
And now, I ask you, What is the spirit which rules such lives? It is a
spirit which is familiar in song and story; for men always love to
tell about it when they meet with impressive examples of its workings.
What I regret is that, when men repeat such songs and stories,
familiarity breeds, not indeed contempt (for our whole nature rejoices
to think of such deeds), but a certain tendency to false emphasis. We
notice the dramatic and heroic incidents of such lives, and are
charmed with the picturesque or with the thrilling features of the
tale. And so we seem to ourselves to be dealing mainly with anecdotes
and with accidents. We fail {193} sufficiently to consider that back
of the exceptional show of heroism there has to be the personal
character, itself the result of years of devotion and of training--
the character that has made itself ready for these dramatic but, after
all, not supremely significant opportunities. Only when we in mind run
over series of such cases do we see that we are dealing with a spirit
suited not only to great occasions, but to every moment of reasonable
life, and not only to any one or two callings, but to all sorts and
conditions of men.
The spirit in question is the one which is often well illustrated in
the lives of warriors who willingly face death for their flag--if only
they face death not merely as brutes may also face it (because their
fighting blood is aroused), but as reasonable men face death who
clearly see what conditions make it "man's perdition to be safe."
There are two tests by which we may know whether the warriors really
have the spirit of which I am speaking, namely, the spirit that was
also, and quite equally, present in the widow who, in all the agony of
a new grief, and through the storm that had taken away her husband,
still climbed the lonely stairway and trimmed the lamp which he could
never again tend. The first test that the warrior and the lighthouse
tender are moved by the same spirit is furnished by the fact that
those warriors who are rightly filled with this spirit are as well
able to live by it in peace as in war; are, for instance, able even to
surrender to {194} the foe, when fortune and duty require them to do
so--to surrender, I say, with the same calm dignity and unbroken
courage that Lee showed in his interview with Grant at Appomattox, and
that inspired him in the years of defeat and of new toils through
which he had still to live after the war. That is, the warrior, if
rightly inspired, is as ready for life as for death, is as ready for
peace as for war; and despises defeat as much as danger--fearing only
sloth and dishonour and abandonment of the service. The other test is
whether the warrior is ready to recognise and to honour, with clear
cordiality, this same spirit when it is manifested in another calling,
or in another service, and, in particular, is manifested by his enemy.
For then the warrior knows that warfare itself is only the accident of
fortune, and that the true spirit of his own act is one which could be
manifested without regard to the special occasion that has required
him to face death just here or to fight on this side. If the spirit of
the warrior bears these tests, his faithfulness is of the type that
could be shown as well by the lonely light-tender in her grief as by
the hero for whom glory waits. And again, this spirit is the very one
that martyrs have shown when they died for their faith; that patient
mothers and fathers, however obscure and humble, show when they toil,
in true devotion, for their homes; that lovers mean to express when
they utter such words as the ones which we earlier quoted from Mrs.
Browning. And lest all these {195} instances should impress you with
the idea that the spirit in question has to do only with brilliant
emotional colourings, such as those which fill our imaginations when
we think of war, and of brave deaths, and of heroic triumph over
grief, and of lovers' vows, let me turn at once to what some of you
may think to be the other extreme of life. Let me say that, to my
mind, the calm and laborious devotion to a science which has made
possible the life-work of a Newton, or of a Maxwell, or of a Darwin is
still another example, and a very great example, of this same
spirit--an example full of the same strenuousness, the same fascinated
love of an idealised object, and, best of all, full of the willingness
to face unknown fortunes, however hard, and to abandon, when that is
necessary, momentary joys, however dear, in a pursuit of one of the
principal goods which humanity needs--namely, an understanding of the
wonderful world in which we mortals are required to work out our
destiny. It is not a superficial resemblance that the lighthouse
tender and the scientific man both seek to keep and to spread light
for the guidance of men.
The lighthouse tender, the mother, the warrior, the patriot, the
martyr, the true lover, the scientific investigator--they all may
show, I insist, this same essential spirit,
"Patient through the watches long,
Serving most with none to see;"
{196} superior to fortune because something that is worthier than any
fortune seems to call them to their task. Such are undismayed in
defeat. So Newton was undismayed when he looked for the needed
confirmation of his theory in the motion of the moon and for the time
failed. He worked on steadily, without any effort to win renown by
hasty publication of possible explanations, until new advances of
science showed why confirmation had so far been lacking and brought
him what he needed. So Lee turned to the new life after the war. So
the widow climbed the lonely stairway, despite her lost one, and
because of her lost one. So the martyrs faced the lions. These all
were sustained through long toil, or bewildering grief, by a spirit
that tended to make them masters of their own lives and to bring them
into unity with the master of all life.
We have illustrated the spirit. We now ask: What is the principle
which dominates such lives? Is it or is it not a principle such, that
one at any time wholly devoted to it could thereafter, upon a
reasonable review of life, wisely regret having chosen to live thus?
If it is not such a principle, if on the contrary it is a principle
such that any reasonable view of life approves it, let us know what it
is, let us detach it from the accidental conditions which at once
adorn and disguise it for our imagination, let us read it so as to see
how it applies to every sort of reasonable life--and then we shall be
in possession {197} of the solution of our moral problem. Then we
shall know what it is that, if we are indeed rational, we really
choose to do so soon as we learn how to live.