Perhaps the most curious and interesting phrase ever put into a public
document is "the pursuit of happiness." It is declared to be an
inalienable right. It cannot be sold. It cannot be given away. It is
doubtful if it could be left by will.
The right of every man to be six feet high, and of every woman to be five
feet four, was regarded as self-evident until women asserted their
undoubted right to be six feet high also, when some confusion was
introduced into the interpretation of this rhetorical fragment of the
eighteenth century.
But the inalienable right to the pursuit of happiness has never been
questioned since it was proclaimed as a new gospel for the New World. The
American people accepted it with enthusiasm, as if it had been the
discovery of a gold-prospector, and started out in the pursuit as if the
devil were after them.
If the proclamation had been that happiness is a common right of the
race, alienable or otherwise, that all men are or may be happy, history
and tradition might have interfered to raise a doubt whether even the new
form of government could so change the ethical condition. But the right
to make a pursuit of happiness, given in a fundamental bill of rights,
had quite a different aspect. Men had been engaged in many pursuits, most
of them disastrous, some of them highly commendable. A sect in Galilee
had set up the pursuit of righteousness as the only or the highest object
of man's immortal powers. The rewards of it, however, were not always
immediate. Here was a political sanction of a pursuit that everybody
acknowledged to be of a good thing.
Given a heart-aching longing in every human being for happiness, here was
high warrant for going in pursuit of it. And the curious effect of this
'mot d'ordre' was that the pursuit arrested the attention as the most
essential, and the happiness was postponed, almost invariably, to some
future season, when leisure or plethora, that is, relaxation or gorged
desire, should induce that physical and moral glow which is commonly
accepted as happiness. This glow of well-being is sometimes called
contentment, but contentment was not in the programme. If it came at all,
it was only to come after strenuous pursuit, that being the inalienable
right.
People, to be sure, have different conceptions of happiness, but whatever
they are, it is the custom, almost universal, to postpone the thing
itself. This, of course, is specially true in our American system, where
we have a chartered right to the thing itself. Other nations who have no
such right may take it out in occasional driblets, odd moments that come,
no doubt, to men and races who have no privilege of voting, or to such
favored places as New York city, whose government is always the same,
however they vote.
We are all authorized to pursue happiness, and we do as a general thing
make a pursuit of it. Instead of simply being happy in the condition
where we are, getting the sweets of life in human intercourse, hour by
hour, as the bees take honey from every flower that opens in the summer
air, finding happiness in the well-filled and orderly mind, in the sane
and enlightened spirit, in the self that has become what the self should
be, we say that tomorrow, next year, in ten or twenty or thirty years,
when we have arrived at certain coveted possessions or situation, we will
be happy. Some philosophers dignify this postponement with the name of
hope.
Sometimes wandering in a primeval forest, in all the witchery of the
woods, besought by the kindliest solicitations of nature, wild flowers in
the trail, the call of the squirrel, the flutter of birds, the great
world-music of the wind in the pine-tops, the flecks of sunlight on the
brown carpet and on the rough bark of immemorial trees, I find myself
unconsciously postponing my enjoyment until I shall reach a hoped-for
open place of full sun and boundless prospect.
The analogy cannot be pushed, for it is the common experience that these
open spots in life, where leisure and space and contentment await us, are
usually grown up with thickets, fuller of obstacles, to say nothing of
labors and duties and difficulties, than any part of the weary path we
have trod.
Why add the pursuit of happiness to our other inalienable worries?
Perhaps there is something wrong in ourselves when we hear the complaint
so often that men are pursued by disaster instead of being pursued by
happiness.
We all believe in happiness as something desirable and attainable, and I
take it that this is the underlying desire when we speak of the pursuit
of wealth, the pursuit of learning, the pursuit of power in office or in
influence, that is, that we shall come into happiness when the objects
last named are attained. No amount of failure seems to lessen this
belief. It is matter of experience that wealth and learning and power are
as likely to bring unhappiness as happiness, and yet this constant lesson
of experience makes not the least impression upon human conduct. I
suppose that the reason of this unheeding of experience is that every
person born into the world is the only one exactly of that kind that ever
was or ever will be created, so that he thinks he may be exempt from the
general rules. At any rate, he goes at the pursuit of happiness in
exactly the old way, as if it were an original undertaking. Perhaps the
most melancholy spectacle offered to us in our short sojourn in this
pilgrimage, where the roads are so dusty and the caravansaries so ill
provided, is the credulity of this pursuit. Mind, I am not objecting to
the pursuit of wealth, or of learning, or of power, they are all
explainable, if not justifiable,--but to the blindness that does not
perceive their futility as a means of attaining the end sought, which is
happiness, an end that can only be compassed by the right adjustment of
each soul to this and to any coming state of existence. For whether the
great scholar who is stuffed with knowledge is happier than the great
money-getter who is gorged with riches, or the wily politician who is a
Warwick in his realm, depends entirely upon what sort of a man this
pursuit has made him. There is a kind of fallacy current nowadays that a
very rich man, no matter by what unscrupulous means he has gathered an
undue proportion of the world into his possession, can be happy if he can
turn round and make a generous and lavish distribution of it for worthy
purposes. If he has preserved a remnant of conscience, this distribution
may give him much satisfaction, and justly increase his good opinion of
his own deserts; but the fallacy is in leaving out of account the sort of
man he has become in this sort of pursuit. Has he escaped that hardening
of the nature, that drying up of the sweet springs of sympathy, which
usually attend a long-continued selfish undertaking? Has either he or the
great politician or the great scholar cultivated the real sources of
enjoyment?
The pursuit of happiness! It is not strange that men call it an illusion.
But I am well satisfied that it is not the thing itself, but the pursuit,
that is an illusion. Instead of thinking of the pursuit, why not fix our
thoughts upon the moments, the hours, perhaps the days, of this divine
peace, this merriment of body and mind, that can be repeated and perhaps
indefinitely extended by the simplest of all means, namely, a disposition
to make the best of whatever comes to us? Perhaps the Latin poet was
right in saying that no man can count himself happy while in this life,
that is, in a continuous state of happiness; but as there is for the soul
no time save the conscious moment called "now," it is quite possible to
make that "now" a happy state of existence. The point I make is that we
should not habitually postpone that season of happiness to the future.
No one, I trust, wishes to cloud the dreams of youth, or to dispel by
excess of light what are called the illusions of hope. But why should the
boy be nurtured in the current notion that he is to be really happy only
when he has finished school, when he has got a business or profession by
which money can be made, when he has come to manhood? The girl also
dreams that for her happiness lies ahead, in that springtime when she is
crossing the line of womanhood,--all the poets make much of this,--when
she is married and learns the supreme lesson how to rule by obeying. It
is only when the girl and the boy look back upon the years of adolescence
that they realize how happy they might have been then if they had only
known they were happy, and did not need to go in pursuit of happiness.
The pitiful part of this inalienable right to the pursuit of happiness
is, however, that most men interpret it to mean the pursuit of wealth,
and strive for that always, postponing being happy until they get a
fortune, and if they are lucky in that, find at the end that the
happiness has somehow eluded them, that; in short, they have not
cultivated that in themselves that alone can bring happiness. More than
that, they have lost the power of the enjoyment of the essential
pleasures of life. I think that the woman in the Scriptures who out of
her poverty put her mite into the contribution-box got more happiness out
of that driblet of generosity and self-sacrifice than some men in our day
have experienced in founding a university.
And how fares it with the intellectual man? To be a selfish miner of
learning, for self-gratification only, is no nobler in reality than to be
a miser of money. And even when the scholar is lavish of his knowledge in
helping an ignorant world, he may find that if he has made his studies as
a pursuit of happiness he has missed his object. Much knowledge increases
the possibility of enjoyment, but also the possibility of sorrow. If
intellectual pursuits contribute to an enlightened and altogether
admirable character, then indeed has the student found the inner springs
of happiness. Otherwise one cannot say that the wise man is happier than
the ignorant man.
In fine, and in spite of the political injunction, we need to consider
that happiness is an inner condition, not to be raced after. And what an
advance in our situation it would be if we could get it into our heads
here in this land of inalienable rights that the world would turn round
just the same if we stood still and waited for the daily coming of our
Lord!