POWER.
“Excessive devotion to the material is the evil of our epoch; hence a certain sluggishness.
“The great problem is to restore to the human mind something of the ideal. Whence shall we draw the ideal? Wherever it is to be found. The poets, the philosophers, the thinkers, are its urns.
“The ideal is in Æschylus, in Isaiah, in Juvenal, in Alighieri, in Shakspere. Throw Æschylus, throw Isaiah, throw Juvenal, throw Dante, throw Shakspere into the deep soul of the human race.
“Pour Job, Solomon, Pindar, Ezekiel, Sophocles, Euripides, Herodotus, Theocritus, Plautus, Lucretius, Virgil, Terence, Horace, Catulus, Tacitus, Saint Paul, Saint Augustine, Tertullian, Petrarch, Pascal, Milton, Descartes, Corneille, La Fontaine, Montesquieu, Diderot, Beaumarchais, Sedaine, André Chenier, Kant, Schiller—pour all these souls into man.”
CHAPTER II.
THE PROVISION FOR THE SOCIAL NATURE OF MAN.
I.
Man has a body and a spirit. By the one, he is individual; by the other, he is social. As individual, he needs bread; as social, he needs power. As body, he is born from the loins; as spirit, he is born from the social organism. In the process of finding food, clothing, shelter, to meet the needs of himself as individual, he discovers that illimitable social side of himself the material necessities of life do not supply. Here he finds power, a more subtle and universal element, ready to serve his higher need. This is the provision for the social side of man’s nature; for, as individual, he does not need it, and could not appropriate and use it if he did. As an individual, he can only avail himself of the use of power, through the attempt of the social whole of which he forms a member. In the primitive, unrelated, unorganized state, man is satisfied if he can secure food to satisfy his hunger, and a cave to shelter him from the storm. He does not even utilize the winds to draw his boat, until, through interdependence and mutual relations, he has reached a high degree of social life. The servants of man, on his individual side, are the foods of the field, the waters of the spring, the woods of the forest, the fruits of the orchard, and the wool on the sheep’s back. The servants of man, on his social side, are the driving power of the winds, the transporting power of heat, and the thought-defying power of the lightning. As individual, he is a citizen of the community where he first sees the light. As social, he is a citizen of the world. Through his body, he is naturally related to his ancestors; through his spirit, he is related to the human race. The rude elements of food, clothing, and shelter, he might secure as individual; but power, which waits to serve his higher, nobler nature, he can only secure through society. As individual, he is narrow, meager, local. As social, he is broad, rich, universal. On his individual side, he is centripetal; on his social side, centrifugal. Self-centered, self-contained, and self-included, on the one side; while, upon the other, he is possessed of the conviction that private right must be subordinated to public good. Tethered to the earth on the one side, linked with the immensities on the other. On the one side, his outlook is hard and literal and low; on the other, he seeks, through intellect, to transcend the infinite in time and space and truth. On the side of himself, as individual, he knows no right or wrong. On the side of himself, as social, he recognizes the infinite in duty, and seeks harmony through the infinite in love.