The experimenter with life, then, must go into his laboratory with the mind of the scientist. He has nothing at stake except the discovery of the truth, and he is willing to work carefully and methodically and even cold-bloodedly in eliciting it from the tangled skein of phenomena. But it is exactly in this cheerful, matter-of-fact way that we are never willing to examine our own personalities and ideas. We take ourselves too seriously, and handle our tastes and enthusiasms as gingerly as if we feared they would shrivel away at the touch. We perpetually either underestimate or overestimate our powers and worth, and suffer such losses on account of the one and humiliations on account of the other, as serve to unbalance our knowledge of ourselves, and discourage attempts to find real guiding principles of our own or others’ actions. We need this objective attitude of the scientist. We must be self-conscious with a detached self-consciousness, treating ourselves as we treat others, experimenting to discover our possibilities and traits, testing ourselves with situations, and gradually building up a body of law and doctrine for ourselves, a real morality that will have far more worth and power and virtue than all that has been tried and tested before by no matter how much of alien human experience. We must start our quest with no prepossessions, with no theory of what ought to happen when we expose ourselves to certain stimuli. It is our business to see what does happen, and then act accordingly. If the electrical experimenter started with a theory that like magnetic poles attract each other, he would be shocked to discover that they actually repelled each other. He might even set it down to some inherent depravity of matter. But if his theory was not a prejudice but a hypothesis, he would find it possible to revise it quickly when he saw how the poles actually behaved. And he would not feel any particular chagrin or humiliation.
But we usually find it so hard to revise our theories about ourselves and each other. We hold them as prejudices and not as hypotheses, and when the facts of life seem to disprove them, we either angrily clutch at our theories and snarl in defiance, or we pull them out of us with such a wrench that they draw blood. The scientist’s way is to start with a hypothesis and then to proceed to verify it by experiment. Similarly ought we to approach life and test all our hypotheses by experience. Our methods have been too rigid. We have started with moral dogmas, and when life obstinately refused to ratify them, we have railed at it, questioned its sincerity, instead of adopting some new hypothesis, which more nearly fitted our experience, and testing it until we hit on the principle which explained our workings to ourselves. The common-sense, rule-of-thumb morality which has come down to us is no more valid than the common-sense, scientific observation that the sun goes round the earth. We can rely no longer on the loose gleanings of homely proverb and common sense for our knowledge of personality and human nature and life.
If we do not adopt the experimental life, we are still in bondage to convention. To learn of life from others’ words is like learning to build a steam-engine from books in the class-room. We may learn of principles in the spiritual life that have proven true for millions of men, but even these we must test to see if they hold true for our individual world. We can never attain any self-reliant morality if we allow ourselves to be hypnotized by fixed ideas of what is good or bad. No matter how good our principles, our devotion to morality will be mere lip-service unless each belief is individually tested, and its power to work vitally in our lives demonstrated.
But this moral experimentation is not the mere mechanical repetition of the elementary student in the laboratory, who makes simple experiments which are sure to come out as the law predicts. The laws of personality and life are far more complex, and each experiment discovers something really novel and unique. The spiritual world is ever-creative; the same experiments may turn out differently for different experimenters, and yet they may both be right. In the spiritual experimental life, we must have the attitude of the scientist, but we are able to surpass him in daring and boldness. We can be certain of a physical law that as it has worked in the past, so it will work in the future. But of a spiritual law we have no such guarantee. This it is that gives the zest of perpetual adventure to the moral life. Human nature is an exhaustless field for investigation and experiment. It is inexhaustible in its richness and variety.
The old rigid morality, with its emphasis on the prudential virtues, neglected the fundamental fact of our irrationality. It believed that if we only knew what was good, we would do it. It was therefore satisfied with telling us what was good, and expecting us automatically to do it. But there was a hiatus somewhere. For we do not do what we want to, but what is easiest and most natural for us to do, and if it is easy for us to do the wrong thing, it is that that we will do. We are creatures of instincts and impulses that we do not set going. And education has never taught us more than very imperfectly how to train these impulses in accordance with our worthy desires. Instead of endeavoring to cure this irrationality by directing our energy into the channel of experimentation, it has worked along the lines of greatest resistance, and held up an ideal of inhibition and restraint. We have been alternately exhorted to stifle our bad impulses, and to strain and struggle to make good our worthy purposes and ambitions. Now the irrational man is certainly a slave to his impulses, but is not the rational man a slave to his motives and reasons? The rational ideal has made directly for inflexibility of character, a deadening conservatism that is unable to adapt itself to situations, or make allowance for the changes and ironies of life. It has riveted the moral life to logic, when it should have been yoked up with sympathy. The logic of the heart is usually better than the logic of the head, and the consistency of sympathy is superior as a rule for life to the consistency of the intellect.
Life is a laboratory to work out experiments in living. That same freedom which we demand for ourselves, we must grant to every one. Instead of falling with our spite upon those who vary from the textbook rules of life, we must look upon their acts as new and very interesting hypotheses to be duly tested and judged by the way they work when carried out into action. Nonconformity, instead of being irritating and suspicious, as it is now to us, will be distinctly pleasurable, as affording more material for our understanding of life and our formulation of its satisfying philosophy. The world has never favored the experimental life. It despises poets, fanatics, prophets, and lovers. It admires physical courage, but it has small use for moral courage. Yet it has always been those who experimented with life, who formed their philosophy of life as a crystallization out of that experimenting, who were the light and life of the world. Causes have only finally triumphed when the rational “gradual progress” men have been overwhelmed. Better crude irrationality than the rationality that checks hope and stifles faith.
In place, then, of the rational or the irrational life, we preach the experimental life. There is much chance in the world, but there is also a modicum of free will, and it is this modicum that we exploit to direct our energies. Recognizing the precariousness and haphazardness of life, we can yet generalize out of our experience certain probabilities and satisfactions that will serve us as well as scientific laws. Only they must be flexible and they must be tested. Life is not a rich province to conquer by our will, or to wring enjoyment out of with our appetites, nor is it a market where we pay our money over the counter and receive the goods we desire. It is rather a great tract of spiritual soil, which we can cultivate or misuse. With certain restrictions, we have the choice of the crops which we can grow. Our duty is evidently to experiment until we find those which grow most favorably and profitably, to vary our crops according to the quality of the soil, to protect them against prowling animals, to keep the ground clear of noxious weeds. Contending against wind and weather and pests, we can yet with skill and vigilance win a living for ourselves. None can cultivate this garden of our personality but ourselves. Others may supply the seed; it is we who must plough and reap. We are owners in fee simple, and we cannot lease. None can live my life but myself. And the life that I live depends on my courage, skill, and wisdom in experimentation.
XI
THE DODGING OF PRESSURES
For a truly sincere life one talent is needed,—the ability to steer clear of the forces that would warp and conventionalize and harden the personality and its own free choices and bents. All the kingdoms of this world lie waiting to claim the allegiance of the youth who enters on the career of life, and sentinels and guards stand ready to fetter and enslave him the moment he steps unwarily over the wall out of the free open road of his own individuality. And unless he dodges them and keeps straight on his path, dusty and barren though it may be, he will find himself chained a prisoner for life, and little by little his own soul will rot out of him and vanish. The wise men of the past have often preached the duty of this open road, they have summoned youth to self-reliance, but they have not paid sufficient heed to the enemies that would impede his progress. They have been too intent on encouraging him to be independent and lead his own life, to point out to him the direction from which the subtle influences that might control him would come. As a result, young men have too often believed that they were hewing out a career for themselves when they were really simply offering themselves up to some institutional Moloch to be destroyed, or, at the best, passively allowing the career or profession they had adopted to mould and carve them. Instead of working out their own destiny, they were actually allowing an alien destiny to work them out. Youth enters the big world of acting and thinking, a huge bundle of susceptibilities, keenly alive and plastic, and so eager to achieve and perform that it will accept almost the first opportunity that comes to it. Now each youth has his own unique personality and interweaving web of tendencies and inclinations, such as no other person has ever had before. It is essential that these trends and abilities be so stimulated by experience that they shall be developed to their highest capacity. And they can usually be depended upon, if freedom and opportunity are given, to grow of themselves upward towards the sun and air. If a youth does not develop, it is usually because his nature has been blocked and thwarted by the social pressures to which every one of us is subjected, and which only a few have the strength or the wisdom to resist. These pressures come often in the guise of good fortune, and the youth meets them halfway, goes with them gladly, and lets them crush him. He will do it all, too, with so easy a conscience, for is not this meeting the world and making it one’s own? It is meeting the world, but it is too often only to have the world make the youth its own.
Our spiritual guides and leaders, then, have been too positive, too heartening, if such a thing be possible. They have either not seen the dangers that lurked in the path, or they have not cared to discourage and depress us by pointing them out. Many of our modern guides, in their panegyrics on success, even glorify as aids on the journey these very dangers themselves, and urge the youth to rely upon them, when he should have been warned not to gaze at all on the dazzling lure. The youth is urged to imitate men who are themselves victims of the very influences that he should dodge, and doctrines and habits are pressed upon him which he should ceaselessly question and never once make his own unless he is sure that they fit him. He will have need to be ever alert to the dangers, and, in early youth at least, would better think more of dodging them than of attaining the goal to which his elders tempt him. Their best service to him would be to warn him against themselves and their influence, rather than to encourage him to become like them.