Happiness: Essays on the meaning of life

HAPPINESS ESSAYS ON THE MEANING OF LIFE BY CARL HILTY PROFESSOR OF CONSTITUTIONAL LAW UNIVERSITY OF BERN. TRANSLATED BY FRANCIS GREENWOOD PEABODY PROFESSOR OF CHRISTIAN MORALS IN HARVARD UNIVERSITY, CAMBRIDGE
NEW YORK: THE MACMILLAN CO. LONDON: MACMILLAN & CO., L TD. 1903
COPYRIGHT, 1903, BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY Set up and electrotyped January, 1903. Reprinted June, October, 1903. Norwood Press: Berwick & Smith Co., Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.
Great numbers of thoughtful people are just now much perplexed to know what to make of the facts of life, and are looking about them for some reasonable interpretation of the modern world. They cannot abandon the work of the world, but they are conscious that they have not learned the art of work. They have to fight the battle of life, but they are not sure what weapons are fit for that battle. They are so beset by the cares of living that they have no time for life itself. They observe that happiness often eludes those who most eagerly pursue it; and that the meaning of life is often hidden from those whose way would seem to be most free. To this state of mind—hesitating, restless, and dissatisfied, in the world but not content to be of the world—the reflections of Professor Hilty, as published in Switzerland and Germany, have already brought much reassurance and composure; and their message seems hardly less applicable to English and American life. Here also the fever of commercialism threatens the vitality of idealism, and here also the art of life is lost in the pace of living. Religion to a great many educated people still seems, as Bishop Butler wrote in 1736, “not so much as a subject of inquiry. This seems agreed among persons of discernment”; and a book about religion might still begin with the words which Schleiermacher wrote in 1806: “It may well surprise the wise men of this age that any one should still venture to ask their attention for a subject which they have so wholly abandoned.” And yet, in regions of experience which no one fails sooner or later to enter,—regions of great joy and sorrow, experiences of serious duty and bewildering doubts of the meaning of life,—many a mind that has seemed to itself to have outgrown religion looks about for a religion that is real. Such a mind will not be satisfied with a left-over faith; it will not be tempted by an ecclesiastical omniscience. It demands sanity, reserve, wisdom, and insight, a competent witness of the things of the Spirit. This is the state of mind to which this little book is addressed. The author makes his appeal not to discussion, but to life. He reports the story of a rational experience. He walks with confidence because he knows the way. He accepts the saying of Pico della Mirandola: “Philosophia veritatem quaerit, ... religio possidet.” Let us take life, he says, just as it is and must be, and observe that the doors which lead into its inner meaning open only to the key of a reasonable faith.