I yield entire faith to the doctrine before you, that, estimate these evils as highly as you may, a balance of enjoyment may still be struck in favor of life. I do not doubt, that more than one half the suffering and sorrow which every individual endures is simply of his own procuring, and not only that it might have been wholly avoided, but that positive enjoyment might have been substituted in its place. An inconceivable mass of misery would at once be struck from the sum if, as I have already remarked, we knew the physical, organic and moral laws of our being, and conformed ourselves to them. A uniform, consistent and thorough education would cure us of innumerable errors of opinion, injurious habits, and a servile conformity to established and prescribed prejudices, and would impart to us wisdom, force of character and resignation, to enable us to sustain, as we ought, those that are unavoidable. Imperfection, pain, decay and death, in the inevitable measures belonging to organized beings, would remain. The dignity of true philosophy, the stern consciousness of the necessity of courage, profound and filial submission to the divine will, and the well defined and investigated hopes of religion would accomplish the remainder.
Consider one single evil—fear, unnecessary fear, an entirely gratuitous infusion of bitterness in the cup of life. I ask the man who has seen fourscore winters to tell me, were all that he has suffered in his pilgrimage cast into one account, what would be the greatest item in the sum? I believe that almost every one might answer, that more than half might be charged to one single source of suffering—fear—fear of opinion, reproach, shame, poverty, pain, danger, disease and death. I pause not to consider the usual dull illustrations of the wisdom and utility of assigning to us the instinct of fear, to put us on our guard and to enable us to ward off evils. It is not this instinctive shrinking and vigilance to avoid evil that I consider. Let education have its most perfect work in raising us superior to this servile and tormenting passion, and too much of it would still remain. Of all that we have suffered from fear, what portion has been of any service in shielding us from that which we apprehended? Not only have we avoided no evil in consequence, but the enervating indulgence of this passion has taken from us our quickness of foresight, our coolness of deliberation, our firmness of action and resolve, by the exercise of which, we might have escaped all that we dreaded. We may calculate then, that every pang we have felt from this source has been just so much gratuitous agony.
Not only natural instincts, but acquired habits are transmitted; and this evil of fearfulness, this foreboding of apprehension, shaping the fashion of uncertain ills, has been the growing inheritance of countless generations; and a shrinking and effeminate timidity has been woven into our mental constitution by nature. Education, instead of resisting, or counteracting, or diminishing the transmitted mischief, has labored with terrible effect, to make it a principle and a motive to action, and the most efficient engine of the inculcated systems of morality and religion. Fear of death, and a slavish terror, springing from misapprehensions of the character of the divine being, and unmanly and debilitating horrors in regard to the unknown future in another life, these have been the chief sources of this evil. Terribly have the father and the mother, the minister and the school-master, and general prescription and example concurred, to strengthen this barbarous instrument of governing, which never inspired a good action, and which it would be cruel to apply to a slave. Horrible have been the bondage, the mean abjectness of spirit, the long agony of the soul, which this inculcation has inspired.—We have been sedulously trained in a course of discipline which has made us afraid of our own shadows in the dark, and inspired us with shrinking and terror in view of a silent and peaceful corpse, which, in the eye of sober reason, should originate associations no more fearful, than a waxen figure. We, who are the victims of this inborn and instinctive inheritance, we, who have had it inwoven by precept, education and example, and the prevalent impression, that it is one of the purest and most religious motives of action, are best able from our own consciousness, and the memory of what we have suffered from it, to present just views of it to others.—It may be in us an ingrafted principle, too deep to be uprooted by any rules, or reasons, or system of discipline; a habit too unyieldingly become a part of our nature, to be overcome. But with minds more docile, with temperaments more pliant, with habits less fixed, it may be otherwise. The next generation may transmit a more manly and less timid nature to the generations to come. Education, building on the basis of minds of more force, may then accomplish its perfect work, imbuing them with a filial confidence in the Almighty, a sense of the beauty of well-doing, and a perfect fearlessness in regard to everything, but doing wrong. The happier generation of that era, will be spared the agony of all deaths, but the single one of nature; and will be fortified by discipline, and the force of general opinion and example, to regard this inevitable law of our being, this merciful provision of providence, this rest for the worn and weary, as the hireling regards the evening shade, when he reposes from his labors and receives his reward. I shall elsewhere advert to this evil in more detail, and point out such remedies, as appear to me to be suggested by reason, education and religion.
This classification of the great divisions of our species, as they are occupied in the pursuit of happiness, seems to me to unite truth with poetry and philosophy, and to be both happy and just. The disappointed, who affirm that the earth offers no happiness, the gloomy, who view life as a place of penance, austerity and tears, the dissipated and voluptuous, who seek only pleasure, and whose doctrine is, that life offers no happiness but in unbridled indulgence, the ambitious, who consider happiness to consist only in wealth, power and distinction, and a very numerous class, who have no object in view, but to vegetate through life by chance, constitute the great mass of mankind. The number of those who have lived by system, and disciplined themselves to the wise and calculating pursuit of happiness, has always been small. But there have still been some, enough to prove the practicability of the art.—Wherever we find a person, who declares that he has lived happily, if his enjoyments have been of a higher kind, than the mere vegetative easiness of a felicitous temperament and an unthinking joyousness, we shall find on inquiry, that he has been a philosopher in the highest and best sense. He may scarcely understand the import of the term; but, however ignorant of systems, and the learning of the schools, if he have made it his chief business, to learn by the study of himself, and general observation, how to be happy, he is the true sage. He may well be content, let others regard him as they may; for he has put in requisition the best wisdom of life. No one maxim, especially, ever included more important and practical truth, than that, to be happy, we must assiduously train ourselves to retain through life a keen and juvenile freshness of sensibility to enjoyment, and must early learn to anticipate the effect of experience and years in cultivating a stern indifference, a strong spirit of endurance, and unshrinking obtuseness to pain. It has been my fortune to see examples of persons who enjoyed life even to old age with all the ardor and the quick perception of the young, and who had always been as remarkable for their impassive and heroic endurance of pain.
We are told, in ridicule of this study, that men have been very happy without rules, and before any system had been laid down, and will continue to be happy, unconscious of the means by which they arrived at their enjoyment. So have men reasoned without acquaintance with the rules of logic; but this proves not the inutility of the study. Let the objector convince us that the happy without thought and rules would not have been happier if they had sought enjoyment with the keen and practical intelligence of a Franklin.
Whatever men do well without definite aim and without rules, it is clear to me, they would do better with these advantages. The same argument equally militates with all means of moral instruction. ‘The world,’ the objector may say, ‘will proceed as before, say what we may.’ But this would be deemed no just ground of objection to an attempt to improve the age, though the efforts may have little visible and apparent effect.
No term has been more hackneyed, in these days, than education. We have had system upon system, and treatise upon treatise; and more has been written and declaimed upon this subject than almost any other. And yet, scarcely a word has been said upon a grand and radical defect in all existing systems which reduces to a very humble scale the results of the best concerted efforts. I lay out of the question all other incongruities, that I might easily mention, and come directly to that which I have chiefly in my mind. Each of the different instructors, through whose forming hands the pupil passes, communicates to him different, militant and incompatible impulses; so that, instead of a continuous operation and an onward movement, it seems to be the work of each successive teacher to undo that of all the others. The father and mother, besides various minor inculcations, labor, as their highest object, to infuse into the mind of their child, ambition, the desire of preëminence and distinction. The school-master instils the same principles under such different circumstances as to render the envy, rivalry and competition of the school-room almost another series of impulses. The minister and the catechism enjoin humility, meekness and a disposition to prefer others in honor before themselves. ‘Be honest and high-minded,’ say the parents and teachers. ‘Be adroit, and circumvent those who are watching to take advantage of your weakness and inexperience,’ says the master at the counting-desk. The elder friends teach one class of maxims, and the younger another. The actual world inculcates rules different from all the rest. Thus the parents, the school-master, the minister, the politician, society and the world are continually varying the direction of the youthful traveller. No wonder that most people either have no character, or one that is a compound of the most incongruous elements. A pupil, to have a strong, wise, marked and efficient character, should have had it steadily trained to one end; and every impulse ought to have been in a right line and concurrent with every other. Such must be the case before honest and uniform characters will be formed.