These facts have been neglected by philosophers, because the facts defy formulation. You cannot get them into a statement. They are life. But in the practical, workaday world, they have always been understood. Men of action owe their success to the habit of using their minds and bodies in a direct way. Men in every profession rely upon the accuracy of direct impressions. The great doctor, or the great general, or the great business man uses the whole of his sensibilities in each act of reading a man. There is no other way to read him correctly. People whose brains are preoccupied with formulated knowledge are not apt to be as good judges of character as spontaneous persons. Their thoughts are on logic. They follow what is said. A very small fraction of them is alive. They are like chess-players who are not listening to the opera.
The answer to any question in psychology always lies under our hand. We have only to ask what the normal man does. It will be found that he uses his faculties according to their nature, though it may be, he is embryonic and inarticulate. We speak of great men as “simple,” because they retain a sensitiveness to immediate impressions very common in uneducated persons and in children. Their thought subserves the direct currents of suggestion. Their instincts rule them. Their minds serve them. They are great because of this power to read the thoughts of others through the pores of their skin, and answer blindfold to unuttered appeals, whether of weakness or of strength. To do this means intellect, whether in Napoleon or Gladstone. Every pianist and public speaker, every actor and singer knows that his whole art consists in getting his intellectual apparatus into focus, so that the vibrations of his formulated thought shall correspond and fall in with the direct and spontaneous vibrations of his audience. This is truth, this is the discovery of law, this is art.
Men are profound and complicated creatures, and when any one of them expresses the laws of his construction and reveals his own natural history, he is called a genius. But he is a genius solely because he is comprehensible, and others say of him, “I am like that.” His suggestions carry. Their extreme subtlety baffles analysis, just as the suggestions of real life baffle analysis. The miracle of reality in art is due to refinement of suggestion. We cannot follow its steps or say how it is done. We see only the idea. Shakespeare gives you all the meaning, and none of the means. This is first-class artificial communication. It almost competes with the every-day, commonplace, familiar transfer of the incommunicable essence of life from man to man.
Our present problem is, how to influence people for their good. It is clear that when you and another man meet, the personal equation is the controlling thing. If you are more high-minded than he, the way to influence him is to stick to your own beliefs; for they alone can keep you high-minded. They alone can make you vibrate. It is they and not you that will do the work. There you stand, and there he stands; and you can only qualify him by the ideas that control you. It makes no difference whether you are an emperor and he a peasant, or you a Good Government Club man and he a merchant, the same forces are at work. Shift your ground, and he feels the shift; you are encouraging him to be shifty, like yourself. What can you do for him except to follow your conscience? But this is equally true of every meeting of all men everywhere. You address a labor meeting and talk about the Philippines. You meet the Turkish Ambassador and talk about Kipling’s poems. You talk to your son about kite-flying. To each of these contacts with another’s mind you bring the same power. If you start with the psychical value of 6, no matter what you do, a cross-section of your whole activity in the world will at any instant of time read 6. It may be that a page of ciphering cannot express the formula, but it will mean 6.
The immense amount of thought that man has given, during the last few thousand years, to his social arrangements and his destiny, has filled our minds with tangled formulas, and has attached our affection to particular matters. The pomp of preambles and the stress of language stun us. There is so much of organized society. There are so many good ends. If there were only one man in the world, we know that it would be impossible to do good to him by suggesting evil. We know that if we gave him a hint that contained both good and evil, the good would do him good, and the evil, evil. If we were bent on nothing but benefit, we should have to confine ourselves to suggestions of unalloyed virtue. But the world is such a tangle of personalities, that we do not hesitate to mix a little evil in the good we do, hoping that the evil will not be operative. We half believe that there may, somewhere in the community, be a hitch in the multiplication table that brings out good for evil. Liberty and democracy are thought to be such worthy ends, that we must obtain them by any means and all means, even by hiring mercenaries. Can we wonder that in the past, men’s minds were staggered by the importance of a papacy or of some dynastic succession? To-day everybody jumps to shield vice because it is called republicanism or democracy. The irony of history could go no further.
Let us consider our local reforms by the light of these views. Civil service laws, ballot-reform, elections, taxation,—dissolve all these into acts and impulses, and see whether the laws of human influence do not make a short cut through them all, like X-rays. No matter what I talk about to the Emperor, I am really conveying to him by suggestion a tendency to become as good or as bad a man as I myself. Chinese Gordon turned a dynamo of personal force upon the Orientals, and they understood him. He was talking religion, and he gave it to them straight. Now all religion, as everybody knows, is purely a matter of suggestion. But so is all other intercourse. We want honesty. Well, what makes people honest? Honesty. Does anything else spread the influence of honesty, except honesty? Are we here facing a scientific fact? Is this a law of the transference of human energy, or is it not? If it is, you cannot beat it. You cannot imagine any situation where your own total force, in favor of honesty, will consist of anything else than honesty. Of course you may put a case where honesty will result in somebody’s death. If in that case, you want his life, why, lie. But what you will get will be his life, not the spread of honesty. If the event is chronicled, you will find it used as a means of justifying dishonesty forever afterwards.
We do not want any of these reforms except as a means of stimulating character, and it is a law of nature that character can only be stimulated directly. Sincerity is the only need, courage the all-sufficing virtue. We can dump them into every occasion, and sleep sound at night. What interest can any rational man have in our municipal issues except as a grindstone on which to whet the people’s moral sense? How is it possible to deceive ourselves into looking at our own political activity from any other standpoint than this? You are to make a speech at Cooper Union on ballot reform. Somebody says, “Do not mention the liquor question or you will lose votes.” But some phase of that question seems to you pertinent and important. Shall you omit and submit? That would be an odd way of stimulating character. The need of the times is not ballot laws but sincerity. The maximum that any man can do toward the spread of sincerity is to display it himself.
All the virtues spread themselves by direct propagation; and the vices likewise. Our people are deficient in righteous indignation. When you see a man righteously indignant, rejoice; this is the seed, this the force. Nothing else will arouse courage but courage, faith but faith. You see, for instance, a knot of men who are really indignant at the injustice of the times. But their indignation seems to you a danger; because it is likely to defeat some candidate, some pet measure of yours. You wish to allay it. You wish yourself well rid of this sacred indignation; it is inconvenient. Open your eyes to the light of science. Here is a spark of that fire with which everybody ought to be filled. All your scheming was only for the purpose of getting this fire. Then foment it.
Virtue then, is a mode of motion, or it is an attitude of mind in a human organism, which enables that organism to transmit virtue to others. But vice is also a mere attitude of mind by which vice is transmitted. We know less about the natural history of vice than we do of dipsomania and consumption; but we know this much, that the vices are co-related, and breed one another in transitu; the tendency being towards lighter forms in the later catchers. Avoid another’s guilty side, and you reinforce it; sympathize with it, and you catch his disease, or some disease. I have held hands with my friend (who is in the wrong) over his family troubles, and it has given me the distemper for a week. The German actor, Devrient, went mad while studying the inmates of asylums, as a preparation to playing King Lear. It was not the living in asylums that drove him mad, but his sympathetic attitude toward the disease. This exposed him. Why is it we commend the man whose antagonism to crooked work is so great that he shows a tempter the door before he has finished his proposition? Parleying is not only a danger; it is the beginning of the trouble itself.
It is very difficult and very odious offending people, by forcing them to see in which direction our wheels really go round; and yet the alternative is to have our machinery forced back to a standstill. We are interlocked with other people and cannot break free. We are held in place by fate, and played upon against our will. When you see cruelty going on before you, you are put to the alternative of interposing to stop it, or of losing your sensibility. There is a law of growth here involved. It is inexorable. You are at the mercy of it. You wish yourself elsewhere, but you are here; you are a mere illustration of pitiless and undying force. The part you take, may run through a fit of bad temper or malice. It may turn to covetousness or conceit, who can tell? Some poison has entered your eye because you looked negligently upon corruption. It will cost you some part of your sense of smell. “Use or lose,” says Nature when she gives us capacities. What you condone, you support; what you neglect, you confirm.