Humility, like self-approval, has forms that consist with a high type of character and are felt to be praiseworthy, and others that are felt to be base. There is a sort that goes with vanity and indicates instability, an excessive and indiscriminate yielding to another’s view of one’s self. We wish a man to be humble only before what, from his own characteristic point of view, is truly superior. His humility should imply self-respect; it should be that attitude of deference which a stable but growing character takes in the presence of whatever embodies its ideals. Every outreaching person has masters in whose imagined presence he drops resistance and becomes like clay in the hands of the potter, that they may make something better of him. He does this from a feeling that the master is more himself than he is; there is a receptive enthusiasm, a sense of new life that swallows up the old self and makes his ordinary personality appear tedious, base and despicable. Humility of this sort goes with self-reverence, because a sense of the higher or ideal self plunges the present and commonplace self into humility. The man aims at “so high an ideal that he always feels his unworthiness in his own sight and that of others, though aware of his own desert by the ordinary standards of his community, country, or generation.”[[60]] But a humility that is self-abandonment, a cringing before opinion alien to one’s self, is felt to be mere cowardice and servility.
Books of the inner life praise and enjoin lowliness, contrition, repentance, self-abnegation; but it is apparent to all thoughtful readers that the sort of humility inculcated is quite consistent with the self-reverence of Goethe or the self-reliance of Emerson—comes, indeed, to much the same thing. The “Imitatio Christi” is the type of such teaching, yet it is a manly book, and the earlier part especially contains exhortations to self-trust worthy of Emerson. “Certa viriliter,” the writer says, “consuetudo consuetudine vincitur. Si tu scis homines dimittere, ipsi bene te dimittent tua facta facere.”[[61]] The yielding constantly enjoined is either to God—that is, to an ideal personality developed in one’s own mind—or, if to men, it is a submission to external rule which is designed to leave the will free for what are regarded as its higher functions. The whole teaching tends to the aggrandizement of an ideal but intensely private self, worked out in solitary meditation—to insure which worldly ambition is to be renounced—and symbolized as God, conscience, or grace. The just criticism of the doctrine that Thomas stands for is not that it depreciates manhood and self-reliance, but that it calls these away from the worldly activities where they are so much needed, and exercises them in a region of abstract imagination. No healthy mind can cast out self-assertion and the idea of personal freedom, however the form of expression may seem to deny these things, and accordingly the Imitation, and still more the New Testament, are full of them. Where there is no self-feeling, no ambition of any sort, there is no efficacy or significance. To lose the sense of a separate, productive, resisting self, would be to melt and merge and cease to be.
Healthy, balanced minds, of only medium sensibility, in a congenial environment and occupied with wholesome activity, keep the middle road of self-respect and reasonable ambition. They may require no special effort, no conscious struggle with recalcitrant egotism, to avoid heart-burning, jealousy, arrogance, anxious running after approval, and other maladies of the social self. With enough self-feeling to stimulate and not enough to torment him, with a social circle appreciative but not flattering, with good health and moderate success, a man may go through life with very little use for the moral and religious weapons that have been wrought for the repression of a contumacious self. There are many, particularly in an active, hopeful, and materially prosperous time like this, who have little experience of inner conflict and no interest in the literature and doctrine that relate to it.
But nearly all persons of the finer, more sensitive sort find the social self at times a source of passion and pain. In so far as a man amounts to anything, stands for anything, is truly an individual, he has an ego about which his passions cluster, and to aggrandize which must be a principal aim with him. But the very fact that the self is the object of our schemes and endeavors makes it a centre of mental disturbance: its suggestions are of effort, responsibility, doubt, hope, and fear. Just as a man cannot enjoy the grass and trees in his own grounds with quite the peace and freedom that he can those abroad, because they remind him of improvements that he ought to make and the like; so any part of the self is, in its nature, likely to be suggestive of exertion rather than rest. Moreover, it would seem that self-feeling, though pleasant in normal duration and intensity, is disagreeable in excess, like any other sort of feeling. One reason why we get tired of ourselves is simply that we have exhausted our capacity for experiencing with pleasure a certain kind of emotion.
As we have seen, the self that is most importunate is a reflection, largely, from the minds of others. This phase of self is related to character very much as credit is related to the gold and other securities upon which it rests. It easily and willingly expands, in most of us, and is liable to sudden, irrational, and grievous collapses. We live on, cheerful, self-confident, conscious of helping make the world go round, until in some rude hour we learn that we do not stand so well as we thought we did, that the image of us is tarnished. Perhaps we do something, quite naturally, that we find the social order is set against, or perhaps it is the ordinary course of our life that is not so well regarded as we supposed. At any rate, we find with a chill of terror that the world is cold and strange, and that our self-esteem, self-confidence, and hope, being chiefly founded upon opinions, attributed to others, go down in the crash. Our reason may tell us that we are no less worthy than we were before, but dread and doubt do not permit us to believe it. The sensitive mind will certainly suffer, because of the instability of opinion. Cadit cum labili. As social beings we live with our eyes upon our reflection, but have no assurance of the tranquillity of the waters in which we see it. In the days of witchcraft it used to be believed that if one person secretly made a waxen image of another and stuck pins into the image, its counterpart would suffer tortures, and that if the image was melted the person would die. This superstition is almost realized in the relation between the private self and its social reflection. They seem separate but are darkly united, and what is done to the one is done to the other.
If a person of energetic and fine-strung temperament is neither vain nor proud, and lives equably without suffering seriously from mortification, jealousy, and the like; it is because he has in some way learned to discipline and control his self-feeling, and thus to escape the pains to which it makes him liable. To effect some such escape has always been a present and urgent problem with sensitive minds, and the literature of the inner life is very largely a record of struggle with the inordinate passions of the social self. To the commoner and somewhat sluggish sorts of people these passions are, on the whole, agreeable and beneficent. Emulation, ambition, honor, even pride and vanity in moderation, belong to the higher and more imaginative parts of our thought; they awaken us from sensuality and inspire us with ideal and socially determined purposes. The doctrine that they are evil could have originated only with those who felt them so; that is, I take it, with unusually sensitive spirits, or those whom circumstances denied a normal and wholesome self-expression. To such the thought of self becomes painful, not because of any lack of self-feeling; but, quite the reverse, because, being too sensitive and tender, it becomes overwrought, so that this thought sets in vibration an emotional chord already strained and in need of rest. To such minds self-abnegation becomes an ideal, an ideal of rest, peace and freedom, like green pastures and still waters. The prophets of the inner life, like Marcus Aurelius, St. Paul, St. Augustine, Thomas à Kempis, and Pascal, were men distinguished not by the lack of an aggressive self, but by a success in controlling and elevating it which makes them the examples of all who undergo a like struggle with it. If their ego had not been naturally importunate they would not have been forced to contend with it, and to develop the tactics of that contention for the edification of times to come.
The social self may be protected either in the negative way, by some sort of withdrawal from the suggestions that agitate and harass it, or in the positive way, by contending with them and learning to control and transform them, so that they are no longer painful; most teachers inculcating some sort of a combination of these two kinds of tactics.
Physical withdrawal from the presence of men has always been much in favor with those in search of a calmer, surer life. The passions to be regulated are sympathetic in origin, awakened by imagination of the minds of other persons with whom we come in contact. As Contarini Fleming remarks in Disraeli’s novel, “So soon as I was among men I desired to influence them.” To retire to the monastery, or the woods, or the sea, is to escape from the sharp suggestions that spur on ambition; and even to change from the associates and competitors of our active life into the company of strangers, or at least of those whose aims and ambitions are different from ours, has much the same effect. To get away from one’s working environment is, in a sense, to get away from one’s self; and this is often the chief advantage of travel and change. I can hardly agree with those who imagine that a special instinct of withdrawal is necessary to explain the prominence of retirement in the ordinances of religion. People wish to retire from the world because they are weary, harassed, driven by it, so that they feel that they cannot recover their equanimity without getting away from it. To the impressible mind life is a theatre of alarms and contentions, even when a phlegmatic person can see no cause for agitation—and to such a mind peace often seems the one thing fair and desirable, so that the cloister or the forest, or the vessel on the lonesome sea, is the most grateful object of imagination. The imaginative self, which is, for most purposes, the real self, may be more battered, wounded and strained by a striving, ambitious life than the material body could be in a more visible battle, and its wounds are usually more lasting and draw more deeply upon the vitality. Mortification, resentment, jealousy, the fear of disgrace and failure, sometimes even hope and elation, are exhausting passions; and it is after a severe experience of them that retirement seems most healing and desirable.
A subtler kind of withdrawal takes place in the imagination alone by curtailing ambition, by trimming down one’s idea of himself to a measure that need not fear further diminution. How secure and restful it would be if one could be consistently and sincerely humble! There is no sweeter feeling than contrition, self-abnegation, after a course of alternate conceit and mortification. This also is an established part of the religious discipline of the mind. Thus we find the following in Thomas: “Son, now I will teach thee the way of peace and of true liberty.... Study to do another’s will rather than thine own. Choose ever to have less rather than more. Seek ever the lower place and to be subject to all; ever wish and pray that the will of God may be perfectly done in thee and in all. Behold such a man enters the bounds of peace and calm.”[[62]] In other words, lop off the aggressive social self altogether, renounce the ordinary objects of ambition, accustom yourself to an humble place in others’ thoughts, and you will be at peace; because you will have nothing to lose, nothing to fear. No one at all acquainted with the moralists, pagan or Christian, will need to be more than reminded that this imaginative withdrawal of the self from strife and uncertainty has ever been inculcated as a means to happiness and edification. Many persons who are sensitive to the good opinion of others, and, by impulse, take great pleasure in it, shrink from indulging this pleasure because they know by experience that it puts them into others’ power and introduces an element of weakness, unrest, and probable mortification. By recognizing a favorable opinion of yourself, and taking pleasure in it, you in a measure give yourself and your peace of mind into the keeping of another, of whose attitude you can never be certain. You have a new source of doubt and apprehension. One learns in time the wisdom of entering into such relations only with persons of whose sincerity, stability, and justice one is as sure as possible; and also of having nothing to do with approval of himself which he does not feel to have a secure basis in his character. And so regarding self-aggrandizement in the various forms implicitly condemned by Thomas’s four rules of peace; if a man is of so eager a temperament that he does not need these motives to awaken him and call his faculties into normal action, he will be happier and possibly more useful to the world if he is able to subdue them by some sort of discipline. In this way, it seems to me, we may chiefly account for and justify the stringent self-suppression of Pascal and of many other fine spirits. “So jealous was he of any surprise of pleasure, of any thought of vanity or complacency in himself and his work, that he wore a girdle of iron next his skin, the sharp points of which he pressed closely when he thought himself in any danger....”[[63]]
Of course the objection to withdrawal, physical or imaginative, is that it seems to be a refusal of social functions, a rejection of life, leading logically to other-worldism, to the idea that it is better to die than to live. According to this teaching, in its extreme form, the best thing that can happen to a man is to die and go to heaven; but if that is not permitted, then let the private, ambitious self, set to play the tunes of this world, die in him, and be replaced by humble and secluded meditation in preparation for the life to come. When this doctrine was taught and believed to such an extent that a great part of the finer spirits were led, during centuries, to isolate themselves in deserts and cloisters, or at least to renounce and depreciate the affections and duties of the family, the effect was no doubt bad; but in our time there is little tendency to this extreme, and there is perhaps danger that the usefulness of partial or occasional withdrawal may be overlooked. Mr. Lecky thinks, for instance, that the complete suppression of the conventual system by Protestantism has been far from a benefit to women or the world, and that it is impossible to conceive of any institution more needed than one which should furnish a shelter for unprotected women and convert them into agents of charity.[[64]] The amount and kind of social stimulation that a man can bear without harm to his character and working power depends, roughly speaking, upon his sensitiveness, which determines the emotional disturbance, and upon the vigor of the controlling or co-ordinating functions, which measures his power to guide or quell emotion and make it subsidiary to healthy life. There has always been a class of persons, including a large proportion of those capable of the higher sorts of intellectual production, for whom the competitive struggles of ordinary life are overstimulating and destructive, and who therefore cannot serve the world well without apparently secluding themselves from it. It would seem, then, that withdrawal and asceticism are often too sweepingly condemned. A sound practical morality will consider these things in relation to various types of character and circumstance, and find, I believe, important functions for both.