A Man's Value to Society: Studies in Self Culture and Character

by Newell Dwight Hillis

When, then, reason approaches its task under the inspiration of enthusiasm and love, nature yields up all her secrets. Here is the author sitting down to write. Memory refuses facts, and reason declines to create fictions. The mind is dull and dead. Suddenly the step of some friend long absent is heard at the door. Then how do the faculties awake! Through all the long winter evening, the mind brings forth its treasures of wit, of anecdote, of instructive fact and charming allusion. Here is some Edison, with an enthusiasm for invention, who found his electric lamps that burned well for a month had suddenly gone out, and read in the morning paper the judgment of the scientist that his electric bulb was a good toy but a poor tool.

In his enthusiasm for his work, the man exclaimed, "I will make a statue of that professor, and illumine him with electric lamps, and make his ignorance memorable." Then Edison went away to begin a series of experiments that drove sleep from his eyes and slumber from his eyelids through five successive days and nights, until love and enthusiasm helped reason to wrest victory from defeat.

Here is the boy Mozart, with his love of music, toiling through the long days at tasks he hated, and in the darkening twilight stealing into the old church, where he poured out his very soul over the organ keys, sobbing out his mournful melodies. Here is Lincoln, with his enthusiasm for books, coming in at night all aching with cold and wet, and rising when parents slept, to roll another log upon the blazing hearth, while midst the grateful heat his eager eyes searched out the treasures that lay along the line of the printed page, until his mind grew rich and strong. And here are the Scottish clansmen and patriots, for love's sake, following the noble chieftain, their hearts all aflame, who, if they had a hundred lives, would gladly have given them all for their heroic leader. And here is the orator rising to plead the cause of the savage, and of the slave, before men who feel no sympathy, and are as castles locked and barred. But the love for the poor shines in Wendell Phillips' eyes, trembles in his voice, pleads in his thinking, until the multitude become all plastic to his thought, and his smile becomes their smile, his tear their tear, the throb of his heart the throb of the whole assembly. Here is the Scottish girl, in love with truth, standing midst the sea, within the clutches of the incoming tide. She is bound down midst the rising waters. Doomed is she and soon must die. But her eyes are turned upward toward the sky, and a great sweet light is on her face that tells us enthusiasm and love in her have been victorious over death. Truly, that Greek did well to call enthusiasm "a god within," for love is stronger than death.

The historian tells us that all the liberties, reforms and political achievements of society have been gained by nations thrilling and throbbing to one great enthusiasm. The Renaissance does not mean a single Dante, nor Boccaccio, but a national enthusiasm and a "god within all minds." The Reformation is not a single Savonarola, nor Luther, but a universal enthusiasm and "a god within," all heart and conscience. If we study these movements of society as typified by their leaders, these heroes stand forth before us with hearts all aflame and with minds that grow like suns. In times of great danger men develop unsuspected physical strength, and the force of the whole body seems to rush upward and compact itself with the thumb or fist. And in the mental world lawyers and orators tell us that at heated crises, when great issues hang upon their words, the memory achieves feats otherwise impossible. In these hours the mind becomes luminous. All the experience of the past passes before the orator with the majesty of a mighty wave or a rushing storm. Similarly, the hero inflamed with love or liberty becomes invincible. When some Garibaldi or Lincoln appears, and the people behold his greatness and beauty and magnanimity, every heart catches the sacred passion. Then the narrow-minded youth tumbles down his little idols, sets up diviner ideals, and finds new measurements for the thrones of heaven and earth. Then, in a great abandonment of love, the nation pours out its heart for the cause it loves.

Froude tells us that self-government has cost mankind hundreds of wars and thousands of battle-fields. Tennyson writes of the boy who was following his father's plow when the share turned up a human skull. There, where the plow stayed, the patriot had fallen in battle. Sitting upon the furrow with the child upon his knee, the father caused his boy to see a million men in arms fighting for some great principle; to see the battle-fields all red with blood; the hillsides all billowy with graves; caused him to hear the shrieking shot and shell; pointed out the army of cripples hobbling homeward. When the child shivered in fear the father whispered, "Your ancestors would have gladly died daily for the liberty they loved." And if to-day good men brood over the wrongs of Armenia, and breathe a silent prayer for those who struggle against desperate odds and "the unspeakable Turk," and if to-morrow and on the morrow's morrow editors and orators unite in words of sympathy and encouragement for the patriots fighting in some Cuba, it is because we believe the love of liberty implies the right to liberty; that despotism corrupts manhood; that self-government is the best for industry, the best for integrity, the best for intelligence. If the red plowshare of war must pass through the soil of the nations, may it bury forever the seeds of oppression and injustice, and sow for future generations the seeds of liberty, intelligence and religion!

Moreover, an overmastering passion is the secret of all eminence in scholarship. Each autumn the golden gates of learning swing wide to welcome the thousands who enter our colleges and universities. If it were possible for each young student to sit down and speak with the library and laboratory as with a familiar friend, we would hear wisdom's voice uttering one report: "I love them that love me." None of those forms of mental wealth called art or science or literature, enters the mind unasked or stays unurged. All the shelves are heavy with mental treasure, but only the eager mind may harvest it. Beauty sleeps in all the quarries, but only the eager chisel wakens it. Wealth is in every crack and crevice of the soil, but nature forbids the sluggard to mine it. Those forms of paradise called fame, position, influence, stand with gates open by day and night, but the cherubim with flaming swords wave back all idle youth. When the Grecian king set forth upon his expedition he stayed his golden chariot at the market-place. Lifting up his voice he forbade any man's body to enter his chariot whose heart remained behind. Thus the mind is a chariot that sweeps no unwilling student upward toward those heights where wisdom and happiness dwell.

To-day our young men and women stand in the midst of arts, vast, beautiful and useful; they are surrounded by all the facts of man's marvelous history; they breathe an atmosphere charged with refinement. But the youth who hates his books might as well be the poor savage lying on the banks of the Niger, whose soul sits in silence and starves to death in a silent dungeon. Should a kind heaven give us the power to select some charmed gift to be dropped down upon our youth, parents and teachers could ask nothing better than that each young heart should storm the gates of learning with such enthusiasm as belonged to Milton or Epictetus. The Roman slave had one leg broken and twisted by a cruel master, but in his enthusiasm for knowledge he used the dim light of his cell for copying the thoughts of great authors, and lay awake at night reflecting upon the problems of life and death with man's mysterious nature, and so made himself immortal by his devotion to the truth. For the student, enthusiasm is indeed "a god within." Ignorance is want of mental animation. The scientist tells us the Patagonians sleep eighteen hours each day, with a tendency to doze through the other six. Their minds are unable to make any kind of movement, and the chief once told Sir John Lubbock that he would love to talk were it not that large ideas made him very sleepy.

But it is all in vain that man has reason or learning or imagination if these talents lie sleeping. Not long ago the ruins of an old temple were discovered in Rome. When the spade had turned up the soil, lo, seeds long hidden awakened to cover the soil with rich verdure. For 2,000 years these germs had slept, waiting for the day of warmth and quickening. Thus each faculty of man is latent, until some powerful enthusiasm passes over it. Indeed, mental power is not in the multitude of knowledge acquired, but in the powerful enthusiasms that drive the informed soul along some noble path. Power is not in the engine, but in the steam that pounds the piston; and the soul is a mechanism driven forward by those motives called enthusiasm for learning or influence or wealth. Success might be defined as a full casting of the heart into some worthy cause.

It is high time that our young men should recognize that prosperity and wealth are won only when the mind moves enthusiastically along the pathway of industry. Our young men have been deeply injured by the fact that now and then some one stumbles upon sudden wealth, or by accident gains great treasure. But for every one such fortunate person, there are ten thousand who have failed of success for want of a purposeful enthusiasm.

The Persians have a strange story of the Golconda diamond mines. Once Ali Hafed sat with his wife looking out upon the river that flowed through their farm. Soon their children came through the trees bringing with them a traveler. In confidence the stranger showed Ali Hafed a diamond that shone like a drop of condensed sunshine. He told his host that one large diamond was worth whole mines of copper and silver; that a handful would make him a prince; that a mine of diamonds would buy a kingdom. That night wealthy Ali Hafed went to bed a poor man, for poverty is discontent. When the morning came he sold his farm for gold, and went forth in search of diamonds. Years passed. Old and gray he returned in rags and poverty. He found his dear ones had all died in penury. He also found that the peasant who bought his farm was now a prince. One day, digging in the white sand in the stream at the foot of the garden, the peasant saw a shining something that sent his heart to his mouth. Running his hands through the sand, he found it sown with gems. Thus were discovered the Golconda mines. Had Ali Hafed dug in his own garden, instead of starvation, poverty and a broken heart, he would have owned gems that made nations rich.