But presence of mind connects itself with an interesting fact in our grammar about the present tense. The present tense, in contrast with past and future tenses, expresses presence of mind, attention to the wonder of the moment, the opportunity of the moment. But it also expresses a wholly different thing, namely, the eternal. Some languages have an eternal tense and use it about facts that are not present or past or future. We use the present tense for the eternal. Two and two make four. When? Well, not of course at ten minutes before twelve on the 11th of November, 1918, more than at any other time. We might just as well use the future tense. Two and two always will make four. But by a peculiar accident we have hitched on to one tense the whole body of eternal truth. Why did we hitch the eternal to the present rather than to the past or to the future? Because anything that we really grasp now, as truth or as joy or as beauty, anything that we really comprehend, can be eternally ours. In the physical sense it is so. The electric light that I am now looking at and which might be turned off at any moment, is eternal, for its vibrations are travelling off through space and always will be. The fact that those vibrations are going off through the ether is ever the same.
Any present fact, then, so far as we realize its truth or its wonder, is eternally ours. Hence presence of mind is the quality needed in social work to balance the scientific habit which looks for past and future, for what is not present. Investigation and history-taking must always be completed by appreciation, the other half of our mental life, which is acutely conscious of the present and therefore can be conscious of eternity.
I hope I have not put the contrast of science and art in social work so sharply that it seems as if one must take one extreme or the other. I do not feel any such contradiction. I believe that we can get courage for the long, discouraging search for causes out of the present joy which we find in speaking and listening to a person now. On the other hand, these momentary contacts are thin, capricious, and insufficient if we are not also planning some solid progress which will give us something to show for it at the end of a day or a year. One of the dreary things in human beings' work is that sometimes, after a month or a year, they cannot see that they have accomplished anything. It is all a mass of details. I remember a very marvellous social worker saying to me, "I do not want to die thinking that I have never done anything but case work." Case work seems to me as great a thing as any one can do. One might as well say, "I have never done anything but miracles." But I know what she meant. She meant that through case work she wanted to feel that there was a thread of continuity which ought to be science or character or friendship, a thread whereon something accumulates. We ought each year to be able to say and to write what we have learned, or given.
3. How to give in social treatment
Social treatment is giving and constructing. We want to give
Pleasure
Beauty
Money
Information
Education
Courage
and to help build the power to get more of each.
1. Pleasure. As we want to find pleasure in our work, we surely want to try, so far as our human capacities allow us, to give pleasure, to make people feel comfortable, to be always so polite to them and finally so fond of them, that they will enjoy the momentary contact no matter what it is about. As I look back over medical work of twenty-five years, I should say that in most of my cases I have failed from the medical point of view. Yet in a great many of those failures I can see some redeeming feature because of the friendships that the patient and I built while I was failing in my medical job.
Such a blending of success and failure is the rule, not the exception. We make elaborate social plans, but we know that many of them are going to fail. It is humanly impossible that they should not fail. But they will not be flat failures if along the way we have tried to treat people, not as they deserve, but a great deal better.[4]