Causes and Consequences

by John Jay Chapman

Once feel this truth, and you begin to lose the sense of your identity, to know that your destiny, your self, is an organic part of all men. It is they that speak. It is themselves that have been found and expressed. It was this toward which we tended, this that we cared for—action, art, intellect, unselfishness, are they not one thing?

The complete development of every individual is necessary to our complete happiness. And there is no reason why any one who has ever been to a dull dinner party should doubt this. Nay, history gives proof that solitude is dangerous. Man cannot sing, nor write, nor paint, nor reform, nor build, nor do anything except die, alone. The reasons for this are showered upon us by the idea of Froebel, no matter which side of it is turned toward us.

This philosophy which seemed so dry till we began to see what it meant, begins now to circumscribe God and include everything. For Christ himself was one whose thoughts were laws and whose deeds are universal truth. Shakespeare’s plays are universal truth. They are the projection of a completely developed and completely unconscious human intellect. They educated Germany, and it is to the study of them that Hegel’s view of life is due. The great educational forces in the world are proportioned in power to the development of the individual man in the epochs they date from. Here and there, out of a hotbed, arises a personal influence which directs thought for a thousand years and qualifies time forever.

The division of the old ethics into egoism and altruism receives the sanction of science. The turning of the attention upon selfish ends, no matter how remote nor how momentary, hurts the organism, contracts the intellect, dries up the emotions, and is felt as unhappiness. The turning of the attention toward public aims benefits the organism, enlarges the intellect, and is felt as happiness. There is no complexity possible, for any mixed motive is a selfish motive.

All the virtues are different names for the injunction of self-mastery, by which the internal struggle is made more severe, and the force cooped in and controlled until it is released in the functioning of the whole man.

In any sincere struggle for right, then, no matter how petty, we are fighting for mankind, and this is just what everybody has always known, always believed.

It is thrown at us as a great paradox, that somebody must pay the bills; that if you live upon charity and can succeed in getting yourself crucified, you are still a mere product of thrift and selfishness somewhere. But the paradox is the same if put the other way, for selfishness would never support you.

The question is purely one of fact, what thing comes first, what thing satisfies the heart of man. He may support himself merely as a means to help others. A man may start a pauper and die a millionaire, and yet never think a thought or do an act which does not add to the welfare of man. It is a question of ultimate controlling intention.

Man the microcosm is a kingdom where reigns continual war. Now he is a furnace of love, the next moment he is a mean scamp. We know very little about the mechanism by which these microcosms communicate with one another. It seems likely that every iota of feeling must be either transmitted or transformed; that if a spasm of selfishness be conveyed, or some part of it, even by a glimpse of the eye, it must leave a record of injury and start on a career of injury, just so much loss to the world. On the other hand it may be transformed into the other kind of force and expended later in good.

The thing is governed by some simple law, although man has not yet been able to reduce it to algebra. What is most curious is this, that the tendency of any man to believe in the reaction as a law, is not dependent upon his scientific training, but upon his moral experience. The best heads in physics will still betray a belief that a man must be able to afford to be unselfish, that selfishness often does good, that it is a muddled up affair, and a thing outside of science which they will get round to later. Everybody sees a few degrees in the arc of this law. Read the index on the quadrant and you will have his character. Now and then some saint swears he sees a circle.