[46] Die Erziehung des Menschengeschlechts.
[47] I have spoken of the sick bed as surrounded by loving friends and near of kin. There are sick beds where the situation is quite different,—in the poor wards of hospitals for instance. Nevertheless, the loneliest person is never without certain human relations. It may be the pauper in the next bed, the nurse, or the physician, to whom his behavior will be of lasting meaning.
I would add a word as to the attitude of a person who is threatened with insanity, and who is aware that the disease is approaching. His last conscious act should be to honor the community to which he belongs by voluntarily putting himself out of the way of harming them. Not that the physical harm is itself the principal thing, but that the wish not to harm physically is the sign of his sense of the ethical relation in which he stands to his fellows. Also a person threatened in this way ought to be willing to put himself in the keeping of others, even of strangers, as being no longer himself competent to judge rightly of what shall be done to him. It is true that in accepting the judgment of strangers as a substitute for his own he is taking the risk of being treated with insufficient consideration, and possibly even mistreated. Yet the jeopardy in which he thus puts his future, the sacrificial act he performs, is evidence of mental nobility at the very moment when mental night is about to set in for him.
[48] In the New Testament, despite the preference expressed for celibacy, the relation of the bridegroom to the bride is used metaphorically to represent that of Christ with the church, and among the mystics the same figure represents the union of Christ with the believing soul.
[49] I call attention to the difference between the view here expressed and that of Emerson in the last paragraphs of his Essay on Love, where he says: “Our affections are tents of a night. Our warm loves are clouds that pass over the firmament of mind with its overarching vault, its galaxies of immutable lights. In the personal relations we are put in training for impersonal submergence and absorption in God.” In my own view the infinite community of spiritual beings that takes the place of God consists altogether of personalities. Godhead, if you choose to apply that name to this infinite society, is not a person but a community of personalities. Personality is not drowned in the impersonal. On the contrary, the individual becomes a personality through his relation to his associates in the eternal life.
[50] I have real intercourse with Aristotle and Kant, as the outgoings of their minds are still effectual in me—more vital intercourse than with many of those who surround me.
[51] The category of interdependence implies that the lines of energy between A and B cross, so that A is subject to B’s influence, B subject to A’s influence, simultaneously. The simultaneity of the relation distinguishes the category of interdependence from that of causality.
[52] This implies that the evil deed shall not be lost sight of, simply forgotten. Compare the inadequate account of repentance as given by Goethe in Faust and elsewhere.
[53] Vide note at the end of the Chapter.
[54] A right is a claim of one person upon another or others, and the justification consists in its relation to personality. Rights exist between persons for the sake of the maintenance and development of personality.