A single man, as we see him in one of the great modern civilizations, looks like a bit of machinery, a cog or a crank or an air-brake. The business man is especially mechanical, his functions are so accurate, so delimited and specialized. And yet any theory that dwells upon these limitations is put to shame in five minutes, for the creature eats and sheds tears before your eyes. All of the reasons for not doing some particular act that you think wise to be done, turn out to be founded on the idea that this man is a driving-wheel, and nothing but a driving-wheel. You cannot change him, they say, you must take him as he is. I have never heard any argument given against the wisdom of righteousness, except the existence of evil. “It exists, therefore subserve it.” Is it not clear that evil exists only because people subserve it? It has no fixity. Withdraw your support and it begins to perish. One man says, “Oh, let the world go. All the wickedness and unhappiness in it are inevitable.” Another says, “Some little concession to present conditions must be made.” Nothing can be said to justify the second man that is not moral support to the first. Your concession is always the acknowledgment of somebody’s weakness. Now you may make allowances for a man who has not come up to the mark; but if you make allowances for him beforehand, and assume that he is not going to do right, you corrupt him. If these things are true, then we are absolved from all complicity with vice. We need never take a course that requires to be explained. We thus get rid of a great oppression and can breathe freely. In the language of the old piety, Christian’s pack falls from his back. That pack has, in all ages, been a perversion of the conscience, a mistake as to the size of the universe.
We have seen all these ranks and armies of humanity pass in review before us, each man with his eyes fixed in mesmeric intensity upon some set of opinions, until he grew to be the thing he looked on. These opinions of his are all we know of him. They are not our own opinions. They often appear to us misguided and illusory; yet there is always to be found in them the light of some benevolence. They are like broken mirrors and give back fractions of a larger idea. The hope and courage in each of these men bless and advance the world; but not in the way that the men themselves expect. They seem all to be bent over a game of chess, where every move has its real significance upon another board which they do not see. Each man seems to be following some will-o’-the-wisp across a landscape at night. No cannon can waken these insensate sleepers. And yet they are tracing out patterns and geometrical diagrams upon the sward; they are weaving a magical dance that, for all its intricacy, has a planetary rhythm, and the sober motion of a pendulum. Each individual in this unthinkable host gives an instance of the same fatality; first, that he becomes the thing he looks on, and second, that he accomplishes something that he does not understand.
And both parts of this fatality must hold true of ourselves. Certainly, our subjection to the thing we look on is almost pitiable. We cannot even remember a righteous hatred without beginning to take color from the thing we hate. Our goodness comes solely from thinking on goodness; our wickedness from thinking on wickedness. We too are the victims of our own contemplation.
As for the last half of that fatality, that keeps us forever ignorant of the true meaning of our lives, it is not an absolute ignorance, like our ignorance of how we came to exist. It is a qualified ignorance, like our ignorance that we have hurt some one’s feelings. The elements of understanding are within us: to-morrow the whole matter may become clear. The borders of our understanding extend, as we push outward our frontier of inquiry. This is both a frontier of scepticism, and of faith. It is a bulwark of doubt as to the value of our last new formula, and of faith as to the reality behind that formula. As we go forward, bringing our lives down to date, holding our experience at arm’s length and examining it with a merciless endeavor to wring the truth out of it, we do, from day to day, get a clearer notion of the actual world, a truer idea of our own place in it. This qualified and modest understanding of life, that comes from putting things together that seem to go together, is within the power of any one.
And we find this: the more unselfish men become, the more sensitive do they become in understanding human relations. The gambler cannot see that he is giving pain to his family; his self-indulgence has blunted his sensibilities. The faith healer knows that he is curing a man in a neighboring State; his love for mankind has refined his sensibilities. Most of us stand somewhere between these two extremes in the scale of understanding, and are moving towards one or the other. Education, then, is the process by which we gradually discover both the real nature of the human life about us, and our own relation to the whole of it. The process is never complete. Even poets and great men are in the dark about their own function; but they are less in the dark than the rest of us. They speak from a knowledge that is greater than ours. They have a wonderful power over us; for they help us in our struggle to see the world as it is.
OTHER BOOKS BY JOHN JAY CHAPMAN
EMERSON AND OTHER ESSAYS
12mo. $1.25.
Emerson. Walt Whitman. A Study
of Romeo. Michael Angelo’s Sonnets.
Robert Browning. R. L.
Stevenson. The Fourth
Canto of the Inferno.