THE SUPREMACY OF HEART OVER BRAIN.
To-day there has sprung up a rivalry between brain and heart. Men are
coming to idolize intellect. Brilliancy is placed before goodness and
intellectual dexterity above fidelity. Intellect walks the earth a
crowned king, while affection and sentiment toil as bond slaves.
Doubtless our scholars, with the natural bias for their own class, are
largely responsible for this worship of intellectuality. When the
historian calls the roll of earth's favorite sons he causes these
immortals to stand forth an army of great thinkers, including
philosophers, scientists, poets, jurists, generals. The great minds
are exalted, the great hearts are neglected.
Artists also have united with authors for strengthening this idolatry
of intellect. One of the great pictures in the French Academy of
Design assembles the immortals of all ages. Having erected a tribunal
in the center of the scene, Delaroche places Intellect upon the throne.
Also, when the sons of genius are assembled about that glowing center,
all are seen to be great thinkers. There stand Democritus, a thinker
about invisible atoms; Euclid, a thinker about invisible lines and
angles; Newton, a thinker about an invisible force named gravity; La
Place, a thinker about the invisible law that sweeps suns and stars
forward toward an unseen goal.
The artist also remembers the inventors whose useful thoughts blossom
into engines and ships; statesmen whose wise thoughts blossom into
codes and constitutions; speakers whose true thoughts blossom into
orations, and artists whose beautiful thoughts appear as pictures. At
this assembly of the immortals great thinkers touch and jostle. But if
the great minds are remembered, no chair is made ready for the great
hearts. He who lingers long before this painting will believe that
brain is king of the world; that great thinkers are the sole architects
of civilization; that science is the only providence for the future;
that God himself is simply an infinite brain, an eternal logic engine,
cold as steel, weaving endless ideas about life and art, about nature
and man.
But the throne of the universe is mercy and not marble; the name of the
world-ruler is Great Heart, rather than Crystalline Mind, and God is
the Eternal Friend who pulsates out through his world those forms of
love called reforms, philanthropies, social bounties and benefactions,
even as the ocean pulsates its life-giving tides into every bay and
creek and river. The springs of civilization are not in the mind. For
the individual and the state, "out of the heart are the issues of life."
What intellect can dream, only the heart realizes! John Cabot's mind
did, indeed, blaze a pathway through the New England forest. But with
burning hearts and iron will the Pilgrim Fathers loved liberty, law and
learning, and soon they broadened the path into a highway for commerce,
turned tepees into temples and made the forests a land of vineyards and
villages. Mind is the beginning of civilization, but the ends and
fruitage thereof are of the heart.
Christopher Wren's intellect wrought out the plan for St. Paul's
Cathedral. But all impotent to realize themselves, these plans, lying
in the King's council chamber grew yellow with age and thick with dust.
One day a great heart stood forth before the people of London, pointing
them to an unseen God, "from whom cometh every good and perfect gift,"
and, plying men with the generosity of God, he asked gifts of gold and
silver and houses and lands, that England might erect a temple worthy
of him "whom the heaven of heavens could not contain." The mind of a
great architect had created a plan and a "blue-print," but eager hearts
inspiring earnest hands turned the plan into granite and hung in the
air a dome of marble.
Thus all the great achievements for civilization are the achievements
of heart. What we call the fine arts are only red-hot ingots of
passion cooled off into visible shape. All high music is emotion
gushing forth at those faucets named musical notes. As unseen vapors
cool into those visible forms named snowflakes, so Gothic enthusiasms
cooled off into cathedrals.
Our art critics speak of the eight great paintings of history. Each of
these masterpieces does but represent a holy passion flung forth upon a
canvas. The reformation also was not achieved by intellect nor
scholarship. Erasmus represents pure mind. Yet his intellect was cold
as winter sunshine that falls upon a snowdrift and dazzles the eyes
with brightness, yet is impotent to unlock the streams, or bore a hole
through the snowdrifts, or release the roots from the grip of ice and
frost, or cover the land with waving harvests. Powerless as winter
sunshine were Erasmus' thoughts. But what the scholar could not do,
Luther, the great heart, wrought easily.
Thus all the reforms represent passions and enthusiasms. That citadel
called "The Divine Right of Kings" was not overthrown by colleges with
books and pamphlets. It was the pulse-beats of the heart of the people
that pounded down the Bastille. Ideas of the iniquity of slavery
floated through our land for three centuries, yet the slave pen and
auction block still cursed our land. At last an enthusiasm for man as
man and a great passion for the poor stood behind these ideas of human
brotherhood, and as powder stands behind the bullet, flinging forth its
weapons, slavery perished before the onslaught of the heart.
The men whose duty it was to follow the line of battle and bury our
dead soldiers tell us that in the dying hour the soldier's hand
unclasped his weapon and reached for the inner pocket to touch some
faded letter; some little keepsake, some likeness of wife or mother.
This pathetic fact tells us that soldiers have won their battles not by
holding before the mind some abstract thought about the rights of man.
The philosopher did, indeed, teach the theory, and the general marked
out the line of attack or defense, but it was love of home and God and
native land that entered into the soldier and made his arm invincible.
Back of the emancipation proclamation stands a great heart named
Lincoln. Back of Africa's new life stands a great heart named
Livingstone. Back of the Sermon on the Mount stands earth's greatest
heart--man's Savior. Christ's truth is enlightening man's ignorance,
but his tears, falling upon our earth, are washing away man's sin and
woe.
Impotent the intellect without the support of the heart. How thickly
are the shores of time strewn with those forms of wreckage called great
thoughts. In those far-off days when the overseers of the Egyptian
King scourged 80,000 slaves forth to their task of building a pyramid,
a great mind discovered the use of steam. Intellect achieved an
instrument for lifting blocks of granite into proper place. In that
hour thought made possible the freedom of innumerable slaves. But the
heart of the tyrant held no love for his bondsmen. The poor seemed of
less worth than cattle. Because the King's heart felt no woes to be
cured, his hand pushed away the engine. A great thought was there, but
not the kindly impulse to use it. Then, full 2,000 years passed over
our earth. At last came an era when man's heart journeyed forward with
his mind. Then the woes of miners and the world's burden-bearers
filled the ears of James Watt with torment, and his sympathetic heart
would not let him stay until he had fashioned his redemptive tool.
For generations, also, the thoughts of liberty waited for the heart to
re-enforce them and make them practical in institutions. Two thousand
years before the era of Cromwell and Hampden, Grecian philosophers
wrought out a full statement for the republic and individual liberty.
The right of life and liberty and the pursuit of happiness were truths
clearly perceived by Plato and Pericles. But the heart loved luxury
and soft, silken refinements, and Grecian philosophers in their palaces
refused to let their slaves go.
Wide, indeed, the gulf separating our age of kindness from Cicero's age
of cruelty! The difference is almost wholly a difference of heart.
This age has oratory and wisdom, and so had Cicero's; this age has
poetry and art, and so had that; but our age has heart and sympathy,
and Cicero's had not. Caesar's mind was the mind of a scholar, but his
hands were red with the blood of a half-million men slain in unjust
wars. Augustus loved refinement, literature and music. He assembled
at his table the scholars of a nation, yet his culture did not forbid
the slaying of ten thousand gladiators at his various garden parties.
We admire Pliny's literary style. One evening Pliny returned home from
the funeral of the wife of a friend and sat down to write that friend a
note of gratitude for having so arranged the gladiatorial spectacle as
to make the funeral service pass off quite pleasantly. For that age of
intellect was also an age of blood; the era of art and luxury was also
an era of cruelty and crime. The intellect lent a shining luster to
the era of Augustus, but because it was intellect only it was gilt and
not gold. Had the heart re-enforced the intellect with sympathy and
justice the age of Augustus might have been an era golden, indeed, and
also perpetual.
Great men capitalize the impotency of unsupported intellect.
Ten-talent men have often known more than they would do. The children
of genius have not always lived up to their moral light. Burns' mind
ran swiftly forward, but his will followed afar off. If the poet's
forehead was in the clouds, his feet were in the mire. How noble,
also, Byron's thoughts, but how mean his life! Goethe uttered the
wisdom of a sage, as did Rousseau, yet their deeds were often those we
would expect from a slave with a low brow. Even of Shakespeare, it is
said in the morning he polished his sonnets, while at midnight he
poached game from a neighboring estate. Our era bestows unstinted
admiration upon the essays of Lord Bacon. How noble his aphorisms!
How petty his envy and avarice! What scholarship was his, and what
cunning also! With what splendor of argument does he plead for the
advancement of learning and liberty! With what meanness does he take
bribes from the rich against the poor! His mind seems like a palace of
marble with splendid galleries and library and banqueting hall, yet in
this palace the spider spins its web and vermin make the foundations to
be a noisome place.
In all ages also the intellect of the common people has discerned truth
and light that the will has refused to fulfill. Generations ago
society discovered the doctrine of industry and integrity, and yet
thousands of individuals still prefer to steal or beg or starve rather
than work. For centuries the work of moralists and public instructors
has not been so much the making known new truth as the inspiring men to
do a truth already known. As of old, so now, the word is nigh man,
even in his mouth, for enabling society to lift every social burden,
right every social wrong, turn each rookery into a house, make each
place wealth, make every home happiness, make every child a scholar, a
patriot and a Christian. In Solomon's day wisdom stood in the corner
of the streets but man would not regard, and the city perished. Should
the heart now join the intellect, man's feet would swiftly find these
paths that lead to prosperity and perfect peace.
Fascinating, indeed, the question how feeling and sentiment control
conduct and character. Modern machinery has thrown light upon the
problems of the soul. The engineer finds that his locomotive will not
run itself, but waits for the steam to pound upon the piston. The
great ships also are becalmed until the trade winds come to beat upon
the sails. Informed by these physical facts, we now see a noble
thought or ambition or social ideal is a mechanism that will not work
itself, but asks the enthusiastic heart to lend power divine. Some of
earth's greatest orators, like Patrick Henry, have been unlearned men,
but no orator has ever fallen short of being an enthusiastic man. A
generation ago there appeared in Paris one whose voice was counted the
most perfect voice in Europe. Musical critics gave unstinted praise to
the purity of tone and accuracy of execution. Yet in a few weeks the
audiences had dwindled to a handful, and in a few years the singer's
name was forgotten. Obscurity overtook the singer because there was no
heart behind the voice and so the tones became metallic. Contrariwise,
the history of Jenny Lind contains a letter to a friend in Sweden, in
which the singer writes: "Oh, that I may live two years longer and be
permitted to save enough money to complete my orphans' home!" As the
sun's warm beams lend a soft blush to the rose and pulsate the crimson
tides through to the uttermost edge of each petal, so a great, loving
sympathy, sang and sighed, thrilled and throbbed through the tones of
the Swedish singer, and ravished the hearts of the people and made her
name immortal.
History portrays many men of giant minds whose intellect could not
redeem them from aimlessness and obscurity. Not until some divine
enthusiasm descended upon the mind and baptized it with heroic action
did these men find themselves. To that young patrician, Saul,
journeying to Damascus, came the heavenly vision, and the new impulse
of the heart made his cold mind warm, lent wings to his slow feet, made
all his days powerful, made his soul the center of an immense activity.
This glowing heart of Paul explains for us the fact that he achieved
freedom of thought and speech, endured the stones with which he was
bruised, the stocks in which he was bound, the mobbings with which he
was mutilated; explains also his eloquence, known and unrecorded;
explains his faith and fortitude, his heroism in death. And not only
has the zeal of the heart made strong men stronger, turned weak men
into giants, lent the soldier his conquering courage and lent the
scholar a stainless life--to men whose will has been made weak by
indulgence, the new love has come to redeem intellect and will from the
bondage of habit.
No one who ever heard John B. Gough can forget his marvelous eloquence,
his wit and his pathos, his scintillating humor, his inimitable
dramatisms. He did not have the polished brilliancy of Everett or the
elegant scholarship of Phillips, and yet when these numbered thousands
of admirers, Gough numbered his tens of thousands. In his
autobiography this man tells us to what sad straits passion had brought
him; how he reflected upon the injury he was doing himself and others,
only to find that his reflections and resolutions snapped like cobwebs
before the onslaught of temptation. One night the young bookbinder
drifted into a little meeting and, buttoning his seedy overcoat to
conceal his rags, in some way he found himself upon his feet and began
to speak. The address that proved a pleasure to others was a
revelation to himself. For the first time Gough tasted the joys of
moving men and mastering them for good. Within a week that love of
public speech and useful service had kindled his mental faculties into
a creative glow. The new and higher love of the heart consumed the
lower love of the body, just as the sun melts manacles of ice from a
man's wrist.
History is full of these transformations wrought by the heart. It was
a new enthusiasm that changed Augustine the epicurean into Augustine
the church father. It was a new enthusiasm that turned Howard the
pleasure-lover into Howard the prison-reformer. It was a glowing heart
that lent power to Mazzini and Garibaldi and gave Italy her new hope
and liberty. Indeed, the history of each life is the history of its
new loves. The enthusiasms are beacon lights that glow in the highway
along which the soul journeys forward. When the hero's ships were
becalmed Virgil tells us that Aeolus struck the hollow mountain with
his staff and straightway, released from their caves, the winds went
forth to stir the waves and smite upon the sails and sweep the becalmed
ship on toward its harbor. Oh, beautiful story, telling us how Christ
touches the heart with his regenerating hand to release the soul's
deeper convictions, to sweep man forward to the heavenly haven!
If sentiment working in sound can make music; if working in colors,
etc., it can fill galleries with statues and pictures; if sentiment
working in literature can produce poems, it should not seem strange
that the heart, with its affections, furnishes the key of knowledge and
wisdom. The time was when authors were supposed to think out their
truths; now we know that the greatest truths are felt out. Matthew
Arnold said that mere knowledge is cold as an icicle, but once
experienced and touched with noble feelings truth becomes sweetness and
light. This author thought that the first requisite for a good writer
was a sensitive and sympathetic heart.
Even in Shakespeare the springs of genius were not in the mind. The
heart of our greatest poet was so sensitive that he could not see an
apple blossom without hoping that no untimely frost would nip it; could
not see the clusters turn purple under the autumn sun without hoping
that hailstones would not pound off the rich clusters; could not see a
youth leave his home to seek his fortune without praying that he would
return to his mother laden with rich treasures; could not see a bride
go down the aisle of the church without sending up a petition that many
years might intervene before death's hand should touch her white brow.
Sympathy in the heart so fed the springs of thought in the mind that it
was easy for the poet to put himself in another's place. And so, while
his pen wrote, his heart felt itself to be the king and also his
servant, to be the merchant and also his clerk, to be the general and
also his soldier. He saw the assassin drawing near the throne with a
dagger beneath his cloak; he went forth with King Lear to shiver
beneath the wintry blasts; he rejoiced with Rosalind and wept with
Hamlet, and there was no joy or grief or woe or wrong that ever touched
a human heart that he did not perfectly feel and, therefore, perfectly
describe. For depth of mind begins with depth of heart. The greatest
writers are primarily seers and only incidentally thinkers. As of old,
so now, for a thousand thinkers there is only one great seer.
Having affirmed the influence of the heart upon the intellect and
scholarship, let us hasten to confess that the heart determines the
religious belief and creed. It is often said that belief is a matter
of pure reason determined wholly by evidence. And doubtless it is true
that in approaching mathematical proofs man is to discharge his mind of
all color. That two and two are four is true for the poet and the
miser, for the peaceable man not less than the litigious. But of the
other truths of life it is a fact that with the heart man believes. We
approach wheat with scales, we measure silk with a yardstick; we test
the painting with taste and imagination, and the symphony with the
sense of melody; motives and actions are tested by conscience; we
approach the stars with a telescope, while purity of heart is the glass
by which we see God. The scales that are useful in the laboratory are
utterly valueless in the art gallery. The scientific faculty that fits
Spencer for studying nature unfits him for studying art. In his old
age Huxley, the scientist, wrote an essay forty pages long to prove
that man was more beautiful than woman. Imagine some Tyndall
approaching the transfiguration of Raphael to scrape off the colors and
test them with acid and alkali for finding out the proportion of blue
and crimson and gold. These are the methods that would give the
village paint-grinder precedency above genius itself.
In 1837 two boys entered Faneuil hall and heard Wendell Phillips'
defense of Lovejoy. One youth was an English visitor who saw the
portraits of Otis and Hancock, yet saw them not; heard the words of
Phillips, yet heard them not, and because his heart was in London
believed not unto patriotism. But the blood of Adams was in the veins
of the other youth. He thought of Samuel Adams, who heard the firing
at Lexington and exclaimed; "What a glorious morning this is!" He
thought of John Adams and his love of liberty. He thought of the old
man eloquent, John Quincy Adams, in the Halls of Congress, and as he
listened to the burning words of the speaker, tears filled his eyes and
pride filled his soul. It was his native land. With his heart he
believed unto patriotism.
What the man is determines largely what his intellect thinks about God.
When the heart is narrow, harsh, and rigorous its theology is despotic
and cruel. When the heart grows kindly, sympathetic and of autumnal
richness, it emphasizes the sympathy and love of God. Each man paints
his own picture of God. The heart lends the pigments. Souls full of
sweetness and light fill the divine portrait with the lineaments of
love. For with the heart man believeth unto righteousness.
Happy, indeed, our age, in that the heart is now beginning to color our
civilization. Vast, indeed, the influence of library and lecture-hall,
of gallery and store and market-place, but the most significant fact of
our day is that sympathy is baptizing our industries and institutions
with new effort. Intellect has lent the modern youth instruments many
and powerful. Inventive thought has lent fire to man's forge, tools
for his hands, books for his reading, has lent arts, sciences,
institutions. The modern youth stands forth in the aspect of the Roman
conqueror to whom the citizens went forth to bestow gifts, one taking
his chariot, one leading a steed, the children scattering flowers in
the way, young men and maidens taking the hero's name upon their lips.
Unfortunately multitudes have declined those high gifts, turning away
from the open door of the schoolhouse and college; many young feet have
crossed the threshold of the saloon. Having entered our museum or
art-gallery, multitudes enter places of evil resort.
Despising the opportunity offered by music or eloquence, by book or
newspaper, by trade and profession, many choose sloth and
self-indulgence. These needy millions, blinded with sin and ignorance,
stand forth as a great opportunity for loving hearts. Sympathy is
making beautiful the pathway of knowledge, that young hearts may be
allured along the shining way. By a thousand arts and devices young
people of refinement and culture are founding centers of light among
the poor. The opportunity that William the Silent found in the
starving millions of Holland; that Garrison found in the miserable
slaves of the South; that Livingstone found in Africa, the modern hero
is finding in the tenement-house district. Through sympathy a new hope
is entering into all classes of society.
The heart is also coloring industry. This year it is said that more
than a score of great industrial institutions in our country have, to
the factory, added gymnasium, recreation-hall, schoolroom, library,
free musicals and lectures. The intellect has failed to solve the
social problems by giving allopathic doses from Poor Richard's Almanac.
Impotent also those dreamers who have insisted that society must have
socialism--either God's or the devil's. Impotent those who, during the
past week, have proposed to cure economic ills by spitting the heads of
tyrants upon bayonets. But what force and law cannot do is slowly
being done by sympathy and good-will. The heart is taking the rigor
out of toil, the drudgery out of service, the cruelty out of laws,
harshness out of theology, injustice out of politics. Love has done
much. The social gains of the future are to be to the gradual progress
of sympathy and love.
Unto man who goes through life working, weeping, laughing, loving,
comes the heart believing unto immortality. For reason oft the
immortal hope burns low and the stars dim and disappear, but for the
heart, never! Scientists tell us matter is indestructible. And the
heart nourishes an immortal hope that no doubt can quench, no argument
destroy, no misfortune annihilate. Comforting, indeed, for reasons,
the arguments of Socrates that life survives death. After the death of
his beloved daughter Tullia, Cicero outlined arguments which have
consoled the mind of multitudes. But in the hour of darkness and
blackness, for a man to put out upon Death's dark sea, upon the
argument of Cicero, is like some Columbus committing himself to a
single plank in the hope of discovering an unseen continent.
In these dark hours the heart speaks. In the poet's vision, to blind
Homer, falling into the bog, torn by the thorns and thickets and lost
in the forest and the night, came the young goddess, the daughter of
Light and Beauty, to take the sightless poet by the hand and lead him
up the heavenly heights. Sometimes intellect seems sightless and
wanders lost in the maze. Then comes the heart to lead man along the
upward path. For even in its dreams the heart hears the sound of
invisible music. Oft before reason's eye the heart unveils the Vision
Splendid. The soul is big with immortality. When the heart speaks it
is God within making overtures for man to come upward toward home and
heaven.
RENOWN THROUGH SELF-RENUNCIATION.
"To live absolutely each man for himself could not be possible if all
were to live together. In course of time, in addition to utility,
certain more sensitive individuals began to see a charm, a beauty in
this consideration for others. Gradually a sort of sanctity attached
to it, and nature had once more illustrated her mysterious method of
evolving from rough and even savage necessities her lovely shapes and
her tender dreams. To assert, then, with some recent critics of
Christianity, that that law of brotherly love which is its central
teaching is impracticable of application to the needs of society, is
simply to deny the very first law by which society exists."--_Richard
Le Galliene, in "The Religion of a Literary Man._"
"It is only with renunciations that life, properly speaking, can be
said to begin. . . . In a valiant suffering for others, not in a
slothful making others suffer for us, did nobleness ever
lie."--_Carlyle_.
"You talk of self as the motive to exertion. I tell you it is the
abnegation of self which has wrought out all that is noble, all that is
good, all that is useful, nearly all that is ornamental in the
world."--_Whyte Melville_.
"Jesus said; 'Whosoever will come after Me, let him renounce himself,
and take up his cross daily and follow Me.' Perhaps there is no other
maxim of Jesus which has such a combined stress of evidence for it and
may be taken as so eminently His."--Matthew Arnold.