The Making of a Man

by James W. Lee

IV.

The explanation of this question is to be found in the fact that man has a dual nature, a body and a spirit, by virtue of which he is individual and social. When the center of gravity is on the social side of human nature, the fortunes of man go up; when the center of gravity is on the individual side, the fortunes of man go down. On the individual side, he is the subject of physical law. On the social side, of moral law.

That man was intended to express the force of his life through the social side of himself and in accordance with moral law, instead of through the individual side of himself and in accordance with physical law, is plain, from the fact that it is only when he gives social expression to his life that he reaches any degree of commanding and permanent influence.

The unrivaled place which the Greece of Pericles holds in history is due to the fact that he lived at a time when the emphasis was altogether on the social side of her people. The individual side was completely subordinated to the life of the whole. It is doubtless true that she pressed a right to rule too far, and stressed the citizen too much, and considered the claims of the individual too little. A proper balance is to be preserved between the individual and the social man. But it is true that in merging the life of the individual into that of the state, Greece did prepare a soil compact and rich enough to grow the most ample harvest of literature, art, poetry, philosophy, and men, the world ever saw. As soon as the emphasis passed over from the social to the individual side, the process of pulverization began, and the continuities of thought and aspiration were broken up. National unity was dissolved, and the conditions of great men and great results were no longer present.

The difference between the Greece of 300 B. C. and the Greece of to-day, is the difference between giving the national life a social and an individual expression. The Greece of 300 B. C. was a compact whole, made so by each man putting in his individual life as a contribution to the life of the state. The Greece of to-day is an aggregate of self-centered units, held together like so many potatoes in a basket, by outward force and barriers, rather than by loyalty, patriotism, fidelity, and the cling of man to man. In the Greece of 300 B. C. each man, while giving his individual life to his fellows, gathered into his own being all the life they had to give. Hence in Socrates we had a reproduction of all Greece. In Homer, all her poetic passion, and expression. In the orations of Demosthenes, all the aspirations of her heart and all her love of liberty. In the Greece of to-day, we have not the same intimacy of companionship, or the same network of relationships. Each man, thinking more of himself as individual than of himself as social, finds it no longer possible to make levies on the lives of his fellows, to think his thought, conceive his temple, deliver his oration, or write his poem. So it follows, they no longer think great thoughts, conceive great temples, deliver great orations, or write great poems. Each man, in the high sense, being a separate sand, they have a social soil as barren as a desert.

Rome won her victories, wrote her laws, and laid the foundations of her world-wide empire, when her people gave social rather than individual expression to the force of their lives. A typical illustration we have of this in the fidelity of Regulus. A prisoner at Carthage, he is permitted to go to Rome to induce his countrymen to make peace with the Carthaginians. He pledged his word to return if he failed. On reaching Rome, however, instead of seeking to persuade his people to make peace, he appealed to them to continue the war. The social side of himself belonged to Rome; speaking through that, he called upon her to prosecute the war. The individual side of himself was personal; acting through that, he went back to Carthage in honor of his pledge, to be cruelly put to death by his captors. This single incident is sufficient to help us understand why, from her seven hills, Rome conquered and for a long time ruled the world. The individual was sunk in the Roman. Not, as in the case of Greece, that his personal identity might be swallowed up in the mass, but that he might find a personal identity as great as the empire, of whose social life he was the embodiment. Regulus was an epitome of Rome. In him was all her indomitable will, her moral sturdiness, her iron probity. In him she had a son, in the depth of whose spirit all the glory she had won in war, and all the control she had found in sacrifice, was safe. Regulus had the advantage of the Carthaginians, in that the larger, nobler side of himself was safe from their hate. The Roman, the social Regulus, was as eternal as the majesty, and fame, and mystery of the Roman empire.

The doom of Rome, as a nation, was never sealed till the stress was removed from the social to the individual side of her people. She might have lived on among the nations, as fixed as her own eternal hills, if the temptations to self-indulgence and self-gratification had been resisted. Her downfall was not due to physical causes, but to her sins. Observance of the moral laws, which made her great, would have kept her great. When she threw her larger, social self into the fires of her individual lust and passion, she burned the foundations of her dominion, and a mighty wreck of shapeless ruins was all that was left of the once proud mistress of the world.

V.

What is the correlate to the social side of man’s nature? Where is the domain that matches it? Where is the vast realm, large enough to furnish sufficient scope for all the possibilities which seem to lie folded within it? A study of the eye reveals the fact that the light of the sun is necessary to furnish an element wide and ethereal enough for the exercise of its functions. By a study of the ear, we learn that it is related to sound with all its possibilities of harmony. The fin of the fish is related to the waters of the sea. The bird’s wing is a prophecy of the sky. The migrating instinct of the wild goose is related to the South, with its soft skies and balmy air.

In the calculations of Adams, in England, and of Leverrier, in France, the perturbations of the planet Uranus were in correspondence with the planet Neptune.