2. The social reformer who adopts the fallacy of provisionalism is apt to be absorbed in the mechanical details of his work,—the settlement or the municipal reform society, or the charitable association tend to become highly organized and efficient pieces of machinery. But moral idealism declines in proportion as this kind of efficiency increases,—the salt loses its savor.
3. The social reformer who sets his heart on external changes is apt to become impatient to bring about those changes. For since he attempts to work from without inwardly, and not at the same time from within outwardly, he has nothing to show for his pains unless the desired outward changes are actually effected. In this way may be explained a certain dictatorial manner, a certain arbitrariness sometimes observed in social workers of whose earnestness and devotion there can be no question, the preposterous outcome being that in attempting to carry out plans of reform in a democratic community such reformers offend against the very principle of democracy by over-riding the personality of others.
4. The Social reformer who concentrates his attention on external changes is apt to be ambitious of large results, to measure betterment by statistical standards. Though quality be not overlooked, quantity is likely to be over-emphasized.
5. The painful spectacle is sometimes presented of a leader in social movements who goes to pieces morally in his private relations (becomes a bad father, a worthless husband, an unscrupulous sponge on his friends, etc.). Absorption in extensive public movements has this danger in it that it often tends to make men neglectful of the nearer duties.
Facts of this kind, which came repeatedly under my observation in the course of years, drove home to my mind the conviction that the provisional method in social reform (the method of working for external changes without definition of the end) is morally perilous, both in its effects on those who are to be benefited, and in its reaction on the character of the reformer himself. I parted company with opportunism in every one of its forms; I became more and more imbued with the belief that no one can really help others who in the effort to do so is not himself morally helped, i.e., whose character is not improved in every respect, who does not become a better father, husband, citizen, a more upright man in all his relations in and because of his endeavors to benefit society. I became convinced that the ethical principle must run like a golden thread through the whole of a man’s life, in a word, that social reform unless inspired by the spiritual view of it, that is, unless it is made tributary to the spiritual, the total end of life, is not social reform in any true sense at all.[15]
The fundamental question, therefore, echoed and re-echoed with ever intenser insistence: “What then is the holy thing in others? What is the supreme end or good to which all the lesser goods should be subordinate and subservient? And what is the holy thing in me?—for I may not spiritually sacrifice myself. My own highest good must be achievable in agreement with that of others. What definition of the essential end is possible that shall reconcile egoism and altruism by transforming and transcending them? And if there be such end thinkable and definable, how establish the applicability of this end to empirical man, either in the person of others or in my own?”
I shall have to dwell on this subject at length in the sequel. Here at the outset I cannot forbear expressing my sense of the obliquities, the folly, the meanness, the cruelties which human nature often exhibits on the empirical side when dispassionately contemplated. That there are also finer traits in people, gleams of gold in the quartz, I do not deny. But even in the best exemplars of the race the alloy is not wanting. And it is an open question how far any human being, if his whole make-up and all the circumstances that influenced him be considered, can be called predominantly good, assuming that goodness is a matter of desert and not of chance. How, therefore, a being that to actual, impartial observation reveals himself as so dubiously worth while, can be regarded as possessing the quality of transcendent worth (which seems to be implied in the idea of personality as inviolable and precious) will be the starting point of my inquiry into the philosophical first principle in the second part of this volume.
CHAPTER VI
THE INFLUENCE OF MY VOCATION ON INNER DEVELOPMENT
The present chapter deals with my inner development as I believe it to have been furthered by my connection with the Society for Ethical Culture. The functions intrusted to me in this connection were, first, various forms of so-called philanthropic activity. The effects of the experience gathered in them has been described in a preceding chapter; they may be summed up in the formula: littleness in the external results achieved, consciousness of moral danger to self.