THE SUPREMACY OF HEART OVER BRAIN.
To-day there has sprung up a rivalry between brain and heart. Men are coming to idolize intellect. Brilliancy is placed before goodness and intellectual dexterity above fidelity. Intellect walks the earth a crowned king, while affection and sentiment toil as bond slaves. Doubtless our scholars, with the natural bias for their own class, are largely responsible for this worship of intellectuality. When the historian calls the roll of earth's favorite sons he causes these immortals to stand forth an army of great thinkers, including philosophers, scientists, poets, jurists, generals. The great minds are exalted, the great hearts are neglected.
Artists also have united with authors for strengthening this idolatry of intellect. One of the great pictures in the French Academy of Design assembles the immortals of all ages. Having erected a tribunal in the center of the scene, Delaroche places Intellect upon the throne. Also, when the sons of genius are assembled about that glowing center, all are seen to be great thinkers. There stand Democritus, a thinker about invisible atoms; Euclid, a thinker about invisible lines and angles; Newton, a thinker about an invisible force named gravity; La Place, a thinker about the invisible law that sweeps suns and stars forward toward an unseen goal.
The artist also remembers the inventors whose useful thoughts blossom into engines and ships; statesmen whose wise thoughts blossom into codes and constitutions; speakers whose true thoughts blossom into orations, and artists whose beautiful thoughts appear as pictures. At this assembly of the immortals great thinkers touch and jostle. But if the great minds are remembered, no chair is made ready for the great hearts. He who lingers long before this painting will believe that brain is king of the world; that great thinkers are the sole architects of civilization; that science is the only providence for the future; that God himself is simply an infinite brain, an eternal logic engine, cold as steel, weaving endless ideas about life and art, about nature and man.
But the throne of the universe is mercy and not marble; the name of the world-ruler is Great Heart, rather than Crystalline Mind, and God is the Eternal Friend who pulsates out through his world those forms of love called reforms, philanthropies, social bounties and benefactions, even as the ocean pulsates its life-giving tides into every bay and creek and river. The springs of civilization are not in the mind. For the individual and the state, "out of the heart are the issues of life."
What intellect can dream, only the heart realizes! John Cabot's mind did, indeed, blaze a pathway through the New England forest. But with burning hearts and iron will the Pilgrim Fathers loved liberty, law and learning, and soon they broadened the path into a highway for commerce, turned tepees into temples and made the forests a land of vineyards and villages. Mind is the beginning of civilization, but the ends and fruitage thereof are of the heart.
Christopher Wren's intellect wrought out the plan for St. Paul's Cathedral. But all impotent to realize themselves, these plans, lying in the King's council chamber grew yellow with age and thick with dust. One day a great heart stood forth before the people of London, pointing them to an unseen God, "from whom cometh every good and perfect gift," and, plying men with the generosity of God, he asked gifts of gold and silver and houses and lands, that England might erect a temple worthy of him "whom the heaven of heavens could not contain." The mind of a great architect had created a plan and a "blue-print," but eager hearts inspiring earnest hands turned the plan into granite and hung in the air a dome of marble.
Thus all the great achievements for civilization are the achievements of heart. What we call the fine arts are only red-hot ingots of passion cooled off into visible shape. All high music is emotion gushing forth at those faucets named musical notes. As unseen vapors cool into those visible forms named snowflakes, so Gothic enthusiasms cooled off into cathedrals.
Our art critics speak of the eight great paintings of history. Each of these masterpieces does but represent a holy passion flung forth upon a canvas. The reformation also was not achieved by intellect nor scholarship. Erasmus represents pure mind. Yet his intellect was cold as winter sunshine that falls upon a snowdrift and dazzles the eyes with brightness, yet is impotent to unlock the streams, or bore a hole through the snowdrifts, or release the roots from the grip of ice and frost, or cover the land with waving harvests. Powerless as winter sunshine were Erasmus' thoughts. But what the scholar could not do, Luther, the great heart, wrought easily.
Thus all the reforms represent passions and enthusiasms. That citadel called "The Divine Right of Kings" was not overthrown by colleges with books and pamphlets. It was the pulse-beats of the heart of the people that pounded down the Bastille. Ideas of the iniquity of slavery floated through our land for three centuries, yet the slave pen and auction block still cursed our land. At last an enthusiasm for man as man and a great passion for the poor stood behind these ideas of human brotherhood, and as powder stands behind the bullet, flinging forth its weapons, slavery perished before the onslaught of the heart.