The Art of Being Happy / In a Series of Letters from a Father to His Children: with Observations and Comments

by Joseph Droz

‘A man, aged about fifty, possessed a brain, in which the animal, moral, and knowing intellectual organs were all strong, but the reflecting weak. He was pious, but destitute of education; he married an unhealthy young woman, deficient in moral development, but of considerable force of character; and several children were born. The father and mother were far from being happy; and, when the children attained to eighteen or twenty years of age, they were adepts in every species of immorality and profligacy; they picked their father’s pockets, stole his goods, and got them sold back to him, by accomplices, for money, which was spent in betting and cock-fighting, drinking, and low debauchery. The father was heavily grieved; but knowing only two resources, he beat the children severely as long as he was able, and prayed for them; his words were, that “if, after that, it pleased the Lord to make vessels of wrath of them, the Lord’s will must just be done.” I mention this last observation, not in jest, but in great seriousness. It was impossible not to pity the unhappy father; yet who that sees the institutions of the Creator to be in themselves wise, but in this instance to have been directly violated, will not acknowledge that the bitter pangs of the poor old man were the consequences of his own ignorance; and that it was an erroneous view of the divine administration, which led him to overlook his own mistakes, and to attribute to the Almighty the purpose of making vessels of wrath of his children, as the only explanation which he could give of their wicked dispositions. Who that sees the cause of his misery must not lament that his piety should not have been enlightened by philosophy, and directed to obedience, in the first instance, to the organic institutions of the Creator, as one of the prescribed conditions, without observance of which he had no title to expect a blessing upon his offspring.

‘In another instance, a man, in whom the animal organs, particularly those of Combativeness and Destructiveness, were very large, but with a pretty fair moral and intellectual development, married, against her inclination, a young woman, fashionably and showily educated, but with a very decided deficiency in Conscientiousness. They soon became unhappy, and even blows were said to have passed between them, although they belonged to the middle rank of life. The mother, in this case, employed the children to deceive and plunder the father, and, latterly, spent the produce in drink. The sons inherited the deficient morality of the mother, and the ill temper of the father. The family fireside became a theatre of war, and, before the sons attained a majority, the father was glad to get them removed from his house, as the only means by which he could feel even his life in safety from their violence; for they had by that time retaliated the blows with which he had visited them in their younger years; and he stated that he actually considered his life to be in danger from his own offspring.

‘In another family, the mother possesses an excellent development of the moral and intellectual organs, while, in the father, the animal organs predominate in great excess. She has been the unhappy victim of ceaseless misfortune, originating from the misconduct of her husband. Some of the children have inherited the father’s brain, and some the mother’s; and of the sons whose heads resembled the father’s, several have died through mere debauchery and profligacy under thirty years of age; whereas, those who resemble the mother are alive and little contaminated, even amidst all the disadvantages of evil example.

‘On the other hand, I am not acquainted with a single instance in which the moral and intellectual organs predominated in size, in both father and mother, and whose external circumstances also permitted their general activity, in which the whole children did not partake of a moral and intellectual character, differing slightly in degrees of excellence one from another, but all presenting the decided predominance of the human over the animal faculties.

‘There are well-known examples of the children of religious and moral fathers exhibiting dispositions of a very inferior description; but in all of these instances that I have been able to observe, there has been a large development of the animal organs in the one parent, which was just controlled, but not much more, by the moral and intellectual powers; and in the other parent, the moral organs did not appear to be in large proportion. The unfortunate child inherited the large animal development of the one, with the defective moral development of the other; and, in this way, was inferior to both. The way to satisfy one’s self on this point, is to examine the heads of the parents. In all such cases, a large base of the brain, which is the region of the animal propensities, will very probably be found in one or other of them.

‘Another organic law of the animal kingdom deserves attention; viz. that by which marriages betwixt blood relations tend decidedly to the deterioration of the physical and mental qualities of the offspring. In Spain, kings marry their nieces, and, in this country, first and second cousins marry without scruple; although every philosophical physiologist will declare that this is in direct opposition to the institutions of nature. This law holds also in the vegetable kingdom. “A provision, of a very simple kind, is, in some cases, made to prevent the male and female blossoms of the same plant from breeding together, this being found to hurt the breed of vegetables, just as breeding in and in does the breed of animals. It is contrived, that the dust shall be shed by the male blossom before the female is ready to be affected by it, so that the impregnation must be performed by the dust of some other plant, and in this way the breed be crossed.”’

Such considerations, I hope, will induce you to exercise cautious examination of this subject, if either of you should ever be placed in circumstances to contemplate assuming the duties of the wedded life. If you do not, you will have cast the pursuit of happiness upon the die of chance at the very outset of your career. Allow me, before I dismiss the book, from which I have already so liberally quoted, to extract one passage more, touching the application of the natural laws to the practical arrangements of life.

‘If a system of living and occupation were to be framed for human beings, founded on the exposition of their nature, which I have now given, it would be something like this.