THE PURPOSE OF LIFE
In the preceding chapters, we have attempted to get a view of life
from a purely physical standpoint, and to show in what ways our race
is connected with the terrestrial past, and how much the individual
is dependent upon physical conditions, beyond his control, which
constitute both the background and the framework of his existence. But
as great as are these limitations, they are still not so important
as they at first sight would seem, since at least a portion of each
person's environment is of his own choosing, and both his body and his
mind are, to a greater or lesser degree, what he may elect to make
them. Diligence and pertinacity have accomplished wonders along this
line, and the poor struggling manual laborer very frequently turns out
to be the great discoverer, not only in the province of geography,
perhaps on the "Dark Continent," but along all the lines of truth. Nor
is even age a bar to achievement, as our own bard tells us:
"Cato learned Greek at eighty; Sophocles
Wrote his grand Oedipus, and Simonides
Bore off the prize of verse from his compeers
When each had numbered more than fourscore years;
And Theophrastus, at fourscore and ten,
Had but begun his 'Characters of Men.'
Chaucer at Woodstock, with his nightingales,
At sixty, wrote the Canterbury Tales.
Goethe, at Weimar, toiling to the last,
Completed Faust, when eighty years were past."
However, it is far more safe to assume that, whatever we have to
do, should be started early in life, for, if we are to carve out
our own destinies, we shall need all the time which we have at our
disposal. While fully realizing the limiting conditions of heredity and
environment, it is difficult to disprove the statement of Cassius, when
he says:
"Men, at some time, are masters of their fates;
The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars
But in ourselves; that we are underlings."
Perhaps Bulwer-Lytton has, in other words, more forcibly expressed a
similar idea when he says:
"We are our own fates. Our own deeds
Are our own doomsmen."
Let us not shift the responsibility of our being other than we desire
upon the shoulders of either our progenitors or circumstances, but,
taking what is, as a fact, we should try to so regulate our conduct
that what we wish may come to pass. It is not he who mourns the power
which he has not--who becomes either the master of himself or of
others, as the parable of the talents tells us, but it is he who,
with a strong heart, dares and does, that achieves the great things
on this earth. Perhaps as close an analogy as we can get to the real
life-condition, is to represent the individual's power over himself
and his destiny, by one line, and the power of heredity and forced
environment by one of equal length; then his power of accomplishment
will be the _vector sum_ of these two lines. The line representing the
uncontrollable condition will necessarily be longer (as the influence
is more powerful) in youth, while, during the life period, it gradually
shortens up until it reaches its minimum at the physical and mental
culmination of life, or when the individual is at his best, and
lengthens again as old age comes on, and the physical and mental forces
decline, and habit and environment become the prevailing factors. With
our responsibility clearly before us, then, let us investigate what is
worth having.
At this particular time, when all of the Occidental world is hopelessly
insane with its Machiavelian money greed, it would seem that one of
Horace's sentiments, uttered satirically, had become the slogan of the
battle:
"Get place and wealth, if possible, with grace;
If not, by any means, get wealth and place."
Everything is thrown away by the average individual to-day, in his
haste to satisfy his desire for inordinate wealth;--friendship,
liberty, decency, humanity, honor, and even life itself, is hurled into
the maw of this Mammon, which is not satisfied with such sacrifices,
and gives only hard, cold gold as a return for the priceless jewels of
the human soul, and even this usually at a time in life when the little
value which the mental ever possessed has gone, since there are no
longer desires to gratify by it, with the one exception of that calling
constantly for more of the counters which have lost their purchasing
power. Our forefathers thought of wealth as worth having only
because with it came leisure, and with leisure came culture through
application. Sir John Lubbock has well said, "If wealth is to be valued
because it gives leisure, clearly it would be a mistake to sacrifice
leisure in the struggle for wealth."
Unfortunately, our country is going through that period which all other
nations that have risen to "world power" have had to pass through,
only, in our case, we have reached this period much earlier in point of
time, owing to our vast natural resources, the activity of scientific
research, and the multitude of inventions resulting therefrom within
the last century. But, with the enormous increase in our national
wealth, the legislative branch of our Government neglected to pass
such restraining measures as would insure that no gigantic individual
fortunes were amassed, or, in case that they were to have such wealth,
bear its proportion of the tax; and, consequently, we are confronting
a condition of both anarchy and socialism, inasmuch as, to-day, our
law-making and higher judiciary branches of Government both have a
decided leaning toward whatever is favorable to capital, as against
the interests of the laboring people. Our lower judicial and executive
officials, however, are in this country and in England, owing to rank
partisan political influence, almost hopelessly under the domination
of organized labor, whose leaders (necessarily demagogues) use all the
means within their power to corrupt our system of jurisprudence to
further their own ends. It remains to be seen whether our Government,
owing to its democratic form, will be able to right these evils and
withstand the stress and strain which such a changed social system
must necessarily involve. Remembering our experience at the time of
the Civil War, which was brought about by very similar causes, we have
every reason to be hopeful of the outcome. Our vast alien population is
the only factor which would be decidedly against us at a time such as
this, since these foreigners have not had the privileges of citizenship
where they were born, and into them has been instilled the blind hatred
of all who possess wealth, owing to the monarchical feudal oppression
of the poorer laboring classes, by the titled and plutocratic nobility
of Europe. The most crying need of our time is a law equitable for poor
and rich alike, and a judicial and executive system which will see that
this law is enforced and its penalties are imposed impartially.
Perhaps the worst feature about the possession of wealth, is that
it tends to dwarf and belittle the finer sensibilities of man. Its
acquisition becomes a passion of such violence that, in the majority of
cases, its possessor no longer cares for anything but the few paltry
pleasures which it will buy. And as few as these apparently are, they
are even less upon closer examination, since only the counterfeits
of anything of real moral value can be purchased for money. Purity,
sincerity, culture, or love, owing to their nature, never could be
bought for gold. Yet many an individual has acquired the opposite of
the four "pearls of great price" just mentioned, by having too much
money at his disposal; and most truly has it been said that "poverty is
one of the greatest teachers of virtue." In fact, if it were not for
the truth of our American aphorism, that "three generations cover the
time it takes one of our wealthy families to go from shirt-sleeves to
shirt-sleeves," our wealthy aristocracy would be much more profligate.
There can be no heritage of equal value to children, so long as
their poverty does not interfere with their fundamental education,
comparable to their being born in straitened, rather than in opulent,
circumstances. Consequently, we must accept the fact that beyond a
small competence set aside against age, money has no value of moment,
nor is it worthy of greater than a reasonable effort being spent to
acquire it.
In this age of bustle and hurry, the nervous system is operated at
a very high tension, and as a result often refuses to do the work
demanded of it. As a consequence, artificial stimulants are resorted
to, with the most baneful effects upon our citizen body. Caffine,
thermo-bromine, nicotine, narcine, alcohol, and, frequently, chloral,
cocaine, morphine, and hyoscine, are used in some quantity, and often
under several forms, for this purpose by over seventy-five per cent.
of our population; and we have seen the statement that over ninety per
cent. of the males, over the age of twenty-one, are addicted to some
narcotic habit in this country. As a result of this, the vitality of
the individual, suffering from these habits, is eventually lowered,
owing to the effect which such stimulants have upon the involuntary
muscular fibre; while the over-wrought nervous system, sooner or later,
collapses, and we become, both mentally and physically, human wrecks.
Particularly is the taking of the weaker stimulants, such as are more
commonly used, harmful to children, inasmuch as, at this period of
development, nature has about all that she can well care for, without
interference from the outside, and abnormal activity of the imagination
at this time is not to be desired; since, under these circumstances
with the majority of human beings, the imaginative impulse runs more to
sensual than to æsthetic things.
The demands of our present civilization upon the individual, especially
if he belongs to the coterie constituting the so-called social set, is
so great for both time and effort, that the use of narcotic stimulants
with this class is even greater than with the majority. Hence, it
happens in America, where wealth is often acquired very quickly, that
instead of bringing with it leisure, health, education, and refinement,
as it should, we see very frequently the opposite result. On this
account, in our country, we have no aristocracy, in any real sense of
the word, and, in general we are forced to believe that real culture
and refinement are becoming all the time more rare. The late Mark Twain
has well illustrated this tendency in his trite character sketch, "The
Man who Corrupted Hadleyburg." If our age tends toward degeneration
ethically from this cause, it does so even more from a physiological
point of view. It is becoming more imperative all the while that
we ascertain, for certain, that those with whom we must enter upon
intimate relationship, should be able to show a clean bill of health,
not only in a strictly physical sense, but in a moral sense as well.
To-day, luxury and vice in our centers of population are corrupting and
ruining a far larger proportion of our young and middle-aged men than
ever before. Since all branches of our Government are influenced by
plutocratic power, we are at a loss immediately to rectify these evils
by closing up the dens of vice, and raising the age of consent, to stem
the tide of infamy.
Any system of ethics is valuable as a guide for conduct just to that
extent to which our interest is aroused. Inasmuch as with us all, self
is always the paramount consideration, the safest and surest basis
upon which we can build an ethical system is self-interest. Every
human being of intelligence must sooner or later realize that he is
on earth primarily by no choice of his own, and, since he is here,
it is of the first importance to him that he should know, early in
life, in just what way he will be able to secure the most out of his
terrestrial existence. Now, as we take it, happiness, in its broadest
and best sense, is alone the desideratum which is _per se_ worth the
individual's effort, and, in the aggregate, is worth the pains, both
as an end to be attained, and through the effects of the struggle
of obtaining it upon others. By happiness, we mean that feeling of
contentment and satisfaction which should, at all times, be with the
conscientious and sincere being, whether he is expecting to live a few
more decades, or if he has arrived at that inevitable hour which must
sometime come to all. In other words, let his end come when it will, if
he has happiness, in our sense, he feels and knows that he has had all
that he could get out of life, and, if he had to live it over again,
he would wish to operate upon only those principles which he had used
to guide his existence. In this sense, then, should happiness be the
purpose of life, we will now attempt to show what conditions must, of
necessity, be fulfilled in order to attain it.
Happiness, for the individual, is but slightly dependent upon
circumstances outside of his control, and, in general, is the result of
living up to the highest moral possibility, which means the development
of self in the highest conception. Since any environment can be made
to serve the purpose, we are always so conditioned that some degree of
happiness may be ours. The presence of the objects of our affection,
in the form of human beings, is perhaps an actual necessary detail of
our environment, without which we cannot experience that feeling of
satisfaction and contentment which we call "happiness."
The matter of the greatest importance is so ordering your life that,
in all your actions, you may be equitable in the most amplified sense
of the word. This has, at all times, been understood by those teachers
of humanity who have been reformers or saviors, from the priests of
Osiris in Egypt and Zoroaster in Bactria, more than five thousand
years ago, to Abbas Effendi in Palestine, within the last century.
And, strange as it may seem, the world has advanced perhaps less in
the understanding and practice of this, than in any of the truths of
lesser importance. The exposition of the Decalogue of the Pentateuch
is less refined and more constricted in meaning and application than
the Negative Confession in the Egyptian Book of the Dead, or the
Vedantic philosophy, as given in the older Hindoo writings, or in the
more modern Upanishads. From this point of view, the ethics of the
Zend or of the Chinese sages are infinitely beyond the best modern
practice of a majority of the people in any part of the earth. But
all conscientious and fearless thinkers, regardless of the date or
locality in which they existed, have realized that in every sense the
"Golden Rule" is the only safe guide for conduct, if contentment and
real happiness were the end sought. And if we once get thoroughly fixed
in the individual's mind that this is certain, and that, no matter
what the intention, if our acts are not ordered in accordance with
this fundamental principle of equity, we cannot be happy; we can rest
assured that the individual would no sooner pursue a line of action
which he absolutely knows will end in his own misery, than he would
wilfully take a dose of poison. It is the putting of ethical matters
upon a plain commonsense basis that will greatly assist, socially and
morally, in revolutionizing the world. We have too long deformed and
twisted facts to fit our fancies and prejudices, and we, as well as the
rest of the human race, have paid "a pretty penny" for our delusion.
The prevalence in all of the Western countries since Constantine raised
Christianity to the prominence of a State religion, of a belief in a
scheme of vicarious atonement, has worked inestimable harm to the human
race. Certainly, in one particular, the doctrine taught by the gospel
of Gautama Buddha is immeasurably further advanced ethically than that
of his subsequent rival, Jesus of Nazareth, if we accept their gospels
as correct reports of their teachings. Our blood, to-day, is tainted
with venereal diseases, and our minds with a predisposition to infamy,
because our ancestors were not taught, and did not know, that from the
consequence of their actions, both physically and mentally, they could
not escape. How many men would work day and night to accumulate wealth,
at the expense of their fellows, through unfair advantage and unjust
means, if they only knew that this could not, on account of immutable
law, add one iota to their happiness after they had secured possession
of their so much coveted gold? How many women, for the consideration
of a home of leisure and luxury, would rush into a marriage "of
convenience" with a man for whom they knew they had no semblance of
an affection, if they felt, with certainty, that nature does not
discriminate, even for a marriage license and a religious ceremony,
between prostitution within the bonds of wedlock, and without, and that
the horrors of remorse and disappointment are just as frightful in one
case as in the other? How many young men would go out into the world
with a Satanic sneer upon their faces, a cigarette between their lips,
and a glass of champagne in their hands, to sow their wild oats under
the tutelage of their older degenerate friends, if they fully realized
that, in this one act, they were forever incapacitating themselves for
the highest pleasure of life, and that no matter what their lives might
be thereafter, that nature would ruthlessly hold them to the strictest
accountability for their actions, and that ignorance would be no plea
for mercy before her bar? This inexorable impartiality of nature is at
once the saddest and the sublimest matter of contemplation, depending
entirely upon whether we are considering the awful weight of her
penalties or the magnificence of her rewards. The old axiom of prudery
that "knowledge often comes hard," is, in the cold light of fact and
reason, a most palpable absurdity. It is to-day, the man and woman
who _knows_; not necessarily from his or her own experience, but from
the authentic records of the results of the actions of others, whose
motives of narration cannot be questioned, who are well-equipped to
fight the battles of life, and get from terrestrial existence all the
real pleasure which is to be obtained. It is from such simple yet grand
souls that we have inspirations, and fortunate is that individual
who can call himself a friend to a man or woman whose life has, from
the earliest childhood, been so ordered that purity and sincerity
have been kept inviolate, and all of the fundamental conditions of
equity, as applicable to our fellow human beings, have been observed.
A friendship with this character of human being is one of the few
unalloyed pleasures of life, inasmuch as their company, when present,
or their memory, when absent, is equally delightful. But to get the
highest enjoyment from such a person, we must not only strive to reach
his or her level, but, just in proportion as we do attain their moral
altitude, we will have our capacity for enjoyment augmented.
Perhaps in nothing more than in our moments of relaxation and amusement
should we be careful that we make our actions accord with this law
of equity. How many a careless thing we do without thinking what
the result will be upon someone else! While the indulging in some
amusements, such as a game of chance, for an insignificant stake, in
order to maintain the interest, may be done with impunity by parties
whose financial condition is such that the counters involved are of
no moment to them, and the stability of their temperament is sedate
enough so that the excitement of the game will not fascinate them
with a snake's charm; yet are these particular participants sure that
this is true of all of the company at such times? If not--and in no
gathering of this kind can we be sure--there is a possibility of great
harm being done. The same is also true of an occasional glass of
stimulant, so much in vogue on all social occasions; of the occasional
cigar or cigarette; of a little gossip or scandalous small-talk, which
we all enjoy so much; and of a thousand and one other things which,
in themselves, are almost positively not so harmful when properly
conditioned, but which may, and frequently do, become the means of
a fellow mortal's ruin. It is the lack of discerning and realizing
our responsibility in these matters of conduct that causes almost all
of the misery of the world. It is not, however, enough that we act
equitably only toward our friends and strangers, but we must, within
reasonable limits, follow the injunction which the Chinese philosopher
has so well enunciated twenty-five hundred years ago: "Requite hatred
with goodness." In this particular instance, Lao-Tse's philosophy is
more sensible than Christ's, who commanded us to turn the other cheek.
It is not the part of good judgment that we should throw ourselves
open to the ravages of our enemies, but it is essential that we do
not wilfully harm or wrong even the least of human beings. It has
been the most unfortunate thing for the Occidental world that those
in high authority in the Christian movement should have so belittled
their physical self in comparison with their spiritual natures, that
anything pertaining to the flesh was thought unclean and worthy of no
consideration. Everything which tends toward real beauty and sincerity,
and helps to make us learned, just, and charitable, must necessarily
be worth striving for; and the possession of this should be counted
above all other things. At the same time, we must appreciate the
awfulness of our responsibility, and continually test our actions in
the light of their equity toward others, if we would be following the
safe line of conduct. On the other hand, we should not be blind to
the evil in others, and we should be willing to go to any reasonable
self-sacrifice to better terrestrial conditions.
The philosophy, as enunciated in the foregoing, is not at all
altruistic; it is, on the contrary, very selfish, and as such it has
its chief value. If we teach our children that they must be good,
not for the sake of doing the right thing, but for the purpose of
increasing their happiness, it would seem but reasonable that such
incentive in the latter case would be more potent than that given in
the former one. Above all, the idea of vicarious atonement must be
abhorred as a false conceit, and human beings should be taught that, in
the moral as in the physical world, consequences are always absolutely
true to their antecedents. As Orlando J. Smith so forcefully and
tritely says, "Know that the consequences of your every act and thought
are registered instantly in your character. This day, this hour, this
moment, is your time of judgment. He who deceives, betrays, kills--he
who entertains malice, treachery, or other vileness, secretly in his
heart--takes the penalty instantly in the debasement of his character.
And so, also, for every good thought or act, be it open or secret, he
shall receive an instant reward in the improvement of his character.
"Every night as you lie down to sleep, you are a little better or a
little worse, a little richer or a little poorer, than you were in
the morning. You have nothing that is substantial, nothing that is
truly your own, but your character. You shall lose your money and your
property; your home shall be your home no longer; the scenes which know
you now shall know you no more; your flesh shall be food for worms;
the earth upon which you tread shall be cinders and cosmic dust. Your
character alone shall stay with you, surviving all wreckage, decay, and
death; your character is you, it shall be you forever. Your character
is the perfect register of your progress or of your degradation, of
your victory or of your defeat; it shall be your glory or your shame,
your blessing or your curse, your heaven or your hell."
Truly has Plato said: "Character is man's destiny." "Whatsoever a man
soweth, that shall he also reap."