Thus the forces of an unselfish sort upon the globe are cumulative. The dead heroes fight on forever, and the dead mathematicians expound forever. It is true that the organization of the selfish forces is overwhelmingly visible, and that of the unselfish ones invisible. Napoleon is seen by his contemporaries; Spinoza is not seen. The reason is simple. The man who wants something must have an office address. But the man who wants nothing for himself, but spends his whole time in so using his mind that he himself disappears, lives only as an influence in the minds of others. He is a song, a theory, a proposition in algebra. These two conflicting forms of force are then flashed up and down, forward and back ceaselessly, through and across every social meeting, through and across society. The novelists and playwrights deal with this instantaneous interplay of motive; and the time-honored analysis of self for self on the villain’s side, and sacrifice for principle on the hero’s side is a true thing. It is a fair abstract of the world.
You can illustrate in an instant the immediacy of these two hierarchies of power under which we live and from which we cannot escape. The selfish ones need not be named; they oppress us. But the unselfish ones are equally near. If you take any bit of poetry or speech or writing that you consider great, and examine it, you will find that it illustrates the logical coherence of all the ideas and feelings that make you happy; it is a digest of a law of influence. Or conversely, if you set about to illustrate some experience, and if you can get it profoundly and accurately stated as what you believe to be the bottom truth, it will turn under your hands into something familiar. If you are successful, it will be a kind of poetry.
VII
CONCLUSION
There is force enough in ordinary sunshine to turn all the mills in the world; and there is beneficent energy enough in any community to make the people perfectly happy. But it is cramped and deflected, poisoned by misuse, and turned to hateful ends. The question is how to liberate energy.
People are fond of thinking the millennium is impossible; but so long as happiness is dependent on a right use of the faculties, there is no reason why the millennium should not be reached, and that soon or unexpectedly. We all know individuals so harmoniously framed that we say, “If theirs were the common temper of mankind, we should be happy.” None of the externals of life, about which there is so much buffeting, control the question. Happiness is in a nutshell. Anybody can have it. You are happy if you get out of bed on the right side. I can never stop wondering at the awful simplicity of the principle on which mankind is constructed. Little Alice in the Looking-Glass could not reach the porch till she turned her back on it and walked straight into the door. Renounce the search for happiness and you find the substance. There is nothing else in the law and the prophets.
We see most men like tee-totums spinning to the left and leading a dismal life. How shall we get their motive power to spin them to the right, and make them happy? The practical question is: how to use the power of sunlight to turn our mills. How can we hold up a prism to the times that shall disintegrate these rays of complex force, and then adjust a lens that shall focus the powers of good and make them turn the wheels of society? The elements are before us, ceaselessly in motion. πάντα ῥεῖ. The most adamantine institutions are cloud palaces. There is no stability anywhere; and if you have a steady eye you will see that the whole fabric is in a flux. Nor are the changes arbitrary. The formations and re-formations are governed by laws as certain as those of astronomy. Study the changes and you will find the laws. Subserve the laws and you can affect the formations. Julius Cæsar did no more.
The strands of prejudice and passion that bind people together pulsate with life. All these fellow-citizens are human beings, and there is no one of them whom we cannot understand, reach, influence. The ordinary modes of intercourse are at hand. Chief among them you find the great machinery of government. It dwarfs every other agency, whether for good or ill. In America this machinery was designed to be at the service of anybody. It is an advertising agency for ideas, and it is very much more than this; since the fact that a man is to vote forces him to think. You may preach to a congregation by the year and not affect its thought because it is not called upon for definite action. But throw your subject into a campaign and it becomes a challenge. You can get assent to almost any proposition so long as you are not going to do anything about it. And on the other hand, no amount of verbal proof will justify a new thought until it has been put in practice.
Alas for ink and paper! There is in all speech and writing a conventional presumption that human beings shall be logical, or fixed quantities, or at least coherent creatures. For the purposes of an essay or a speech, you prove your case, and carry weight accordingly. If you are very cogent and conclusive, why, you win. Hurrah! the world is saved. But in real life there are no fixed quantities; all the terms are variables.
For example, everybody understands what is meant by the “Moral Law.” People differ only as to the application of that law. Not long ago I heard a sermon on this law, in which great stress was laid on the fact that it was a discovered law whereby the truth prevailed. Any truce with evil meant defeat for the cause of righteousness. This was the law of God, tested by experience, and in constant operation like the law of gravity, a thing you could not escape. The preacher pictured the solitary struggle of the great man seeking truth, his proclamation of the truth, the refusal of the world to receive it, and the prophet’s isolation and apparent failure. Nevertheless what the prophet said had always the same content. It was an appeal to the instincts of man upon the question of right and wrong, and in the end it was accepted.
Now the man who made this exposition, and it was admirable, is in regard to politics a believer in compromise. I think I have never known him support the idealist cause in a campaign; and upon most occasions of crisis he is found heartily throwing stones at the crusaders.