Happiness as Found in Forethought Minus Fearthought

by Horace Fletcher

The merit of loving is in the act, and should not—cannot—be qualified by the merit or demerit of the object under consideration.

There may be more effort required, perhaps, in loving something that seems to us unlovely, but no more virtue in so doing, as loving, like virtue, is its own reward.

God-love does not discriminate. It is, therefore, ungodly to discriminate. In the performance of the Man-Nature partnership-function of "divine selection" in the harmonizing of things that are antagonistic to each other and to Man—selecting for survival those things that are not deterrent to the harmonious growth and happiness of Man—if selection is to be made, it should be done in the spirit of calm justice, and not in the spirit of hate, for, as love blesses the lover, so does hate react upon the hater.

We cannot afford not to love.

There are animals and insects that seem to us to be undesirable and prejudicial to the harmony we are seeking to secure, that may serve most excellent purposes in relation to existing conditions. They are frequently a warning against unfavorable conditions, in the same way that pain is a warning against diseased conditions in the body. In the same way, crime is a warning against social or political conditions which invite or compel crime, and remedy should be sought in change of the conditions in preference to the punishment of the crime. I believe that a change of our point-of-view—our attitude towards causes and effects—would find punishment generally unnecessary, and, as such, brutal.

There is, then, a double reason why we should hate nothing. In the first place, it is probable that we are hating the wrong thing, and thereby are unjust, and we are certainly doing injury to ourselves by nursing the feeling of hatred.

Disapproval—calm disapproval—is a better judge in the exercise of "divine selection" than angry antagonism. Pity, as well as love, is a divine attribute, but hate is an attribute of the devil. Pity suggests change of conditions producing inharmonious results. Hate suggests punishment of the victim of the inharmony.

In its relation to personal comfort, the practice of not permitting hate, nor annoyance, nor irritation, nor repulsion to possess one's feelings, will bring greatest good results. Take the mosquito pest, for instance: One who begins to feel irritation at the sound made by the wings of the insect, is already creating within himself a condition favorable to inflammation from the effects of the bite. Many who suffer by mosquitos admit that the buzz is worse, to them, than the bite, which is proof of a purely mental and unnecessary affliction.

There was a time in my boyhood when mosquitos poisoned and annoyed me beyond endurance. Each bite represented a great itching welt, and the buzzing was full of terror in consequence, or, more likely, in the light of present knowledge, the buzzing inspired fearthought or dread, and the bite was very poisonous in consequence. At present, mosquito bites are not poisonous to me, and mosquito sounds are no longer disagreeable. I do not remember when the deliverance came. Possibly the cure came through intimate acquaintance. I have lived in localities where the mosquito thrives all the year round, and in such numbers that he tires his victims into a state of non-resistance, and in the calm of non-resistance, physical and mental irritations cease. This is sometimes called acclimatization, but it proves the contention, whichever way it is interpreted.

In the practice of my freedom from what was once a great affliction, I sometimes brave a swarm of mosquitos by sleeping in their presence without drawing the bar. If the mosquitos light on me freely, I find comfort in the evidence of my popularity, and in the fact that I am probably being of service to something, or somebody, by possibly diverting attentions that would not be appreciated in like manner by them. In the morning, when I look in the glass and note the little red spots that the bites have left, but of which I am not otherwise conscious, I consider them as a record of my hospitality, and am proud of them, as the German corps student is proud of the scars on his face, that are a record of equally foolish bravery or exposure, taken out of his university course at Heidelberg or elsewhere. My braving of the mosquitos would certainly be classed as foolish, except as a test of superiority, but the pin-point red spots soon disappear and do no permanent harm.