A plumber wants to be exactly like the next successful plumber he sees; a grocer, the same; an undertaker, the same. Most rich men would like to live in a house like that of all the other rich men they know. Show them the very different house of a rich man in Spain, in Egypt, in India, in Japan—it would never, never do. It is not like that which they know. Their thoughts and desires, like their faces, are those of the species to which they belong. In the main, they are of a trivial, commonplace character, as unimportant as a bean or a pea. Like animals of so limited a mentality as the duck and the penguin, if you know one you know all. You might almost say that they have come to their end spiritually. Nothing can be done for them. Some more vigorous active thing—i. e., the thinking, restless, dissatisfied individual—must come along to rebel and push them aside. If ever the surface of the commonplace is to be disturbed the individual moved by some inherited or bestowed impulse must do it: Luther, Galileo, Keppler, Newton, Columbus.
Anything that is strong, special, different must, as a matter of course and by its very nature, stand alone in the world where so many things are not strong, special, different. That which places one being over another and sets differences between man and man is not alone intellect or knowledge, as some would have us believe (Schopenhauer, for one), but these plus, other things being equal, the vital energy to apply them or the hypnotic power of attracting attention to them—in other words, personality. It is that peculiar quality or ability which makes a way for our plans, desires, dreams. Cunning, which is by no means knowledge in the sense in which we use that word, nor intellect of a high order perhaps (although it may well be), still may play a magnificent share in personality and contribute to its triumph. No truer book than Machiavelli’s “The Prince,” although it earned him the distinction of equaling the devil, was ever written, although the necessary gift of hypnotic personality was by no means sufficiently insisted upon. Was not one of the amazing qualities of Julius Cæsar, as of Hannibal, Napoleon and, indeed, most of the outstanding figures of history, cunning? The average man, realizing his own limitations, does not like to believe it, but it is none the less true. Did Alexander the Great, for instance, lack it? Or Lincoln? On the other hand, mere strength without cunning is so little. Contrast the tiger and the Norman horse or an elephant. Which of the three is truly superior? Which one commands your innate respect?
Whatever else you do, believe nothing in regard to the individual’s ability to develop an especial and remarkable capacity, unless it is already inherent in him at birth. Nature works in no other way. Another thing, life cannot do without brains, however much disassociated from beatific virtues these may be; for these are a gift and can no more be created here than you can add to your height by taking thought. What life does is to develop and train especial inherent capacities—an eye, a hand, a taste, a smell perhaps; but the instinct and the ability to foreknow, to appreciate, understand—these things are not taught in schools. Schools labor with them to improve, polish, give them a special turn or bent; little more and little less.
A COUNSEL TO PERFECTION
BRIEF as are the sensations of success, victory, happiness, etc., yet these are things of actually some duration and as such can be looked forward to and back upon with pleasure, which in itself is a kind of reward for living. Love is real, a kinetic vibration of great comfort and a reward, as well as are the gratifications which arise from a sense of wealth or power or any hunger satiated. All these may be exceedingly brief and do fade, but however brief and however quickly faded they endure for at least a minute fraction of time and are therefore, and legitimately so, the basis of much human hope, ambition, delight, as well as despair and all the other contraries which might otherwise be inexplicable. The pathetic thing in connection with them all is that they are so plainly baits as well as rewards, that they do prove man to be the victim or evoluted mechanism if not tool of some higher, perhaps scheming force by no means essentially friendly to, if it is even conscious of, him, and that an enduring state of pleasure for anything is not contemplated by Nature as an essential portion of the career of man; also that it may be by no means concerned as to whether or no man, its tool, achieves any moments of triumph or satiation.
Looking at most lives—the defeated, the hungry, the poorly equipped mentally and physically, the homely, those seized on in childhood by the strong and shrewd and made to serve pointless and wretched purposes entirely alien to their lives—I should say that Nature does not care and that distinctly for them life may not be worth its pains. On the other hand, where crass chance lifts a given organism to great power or builds it with such care that it is an almost perfect and delicately responsive machine, life may well be and no doubt is worth all its costs. Many organisms, by accident of dullness or non-responsiveness of a higher sort, come off with less pain, and Nature, either accidentally or intentionally, builds most of these. They are machines well suited to the rough grind of material and psychic forces, and may be said to strike such a neat equation with the circumstances of life that they achieve a kind of sensory comfort or satiation and so do well enough. Again, dulling religion or illusions of one type and another, fatuitous hopes far beyond the pale of possibility, sensory response of a comfortable character to this earthly scene as a spectacle, or depleted nervous energy or force which reduces many to the point where nervous or sensory response is lacking, eases many to the place where it may be said that if they do not enjoy keenly they at least do not suffer keenly.
But is man happy? Is his game worth the candle? The sophisticated reply that the fear of death proves that life is worth while, since all are so eager to avoid it. But this is worse than no answer for it predicates either no life at all, which is certainly no recommendation, or that there may be worse things there than those which befall man here—certainly no proof of a keen joy in this.
The essential tragedy of life, then, and the thing which makes it painful to consider, is this: that once man is raised above the non-cerebrating and automatic sensory responsiveness of the beast he becomes conscious of the rather obvious fact that he is either an intelligently or an accidentally evoluted mechanism or minute tool in the hands of something so much more significant than himself that he is as nothing; and again, that to this force or intelligence above him his little earthly schemes bear about as much relationship as do those of an office boy bent on becoming a baseball pitcher to those of the Standard Oil Company or the German Emperor bent on world dominion. And again—and this is the darkest thought of all—it, our personal Creator, assumed by the religionists at least to be so careful of our individual welfare, may be little more than the veriest tyro in so far as the larger and largest creative forces or impulses in the universe are concerned. Manifesting little or no interest in us, no more perhaps than is needful to its own welfare, it may be as little to the powers above it as are we to it. For who can guess whether the thing or power which makes man is the ultimate power or guiding force in so spacious a thing as the universe? Already our chemists and physicists are inclined to doubt it. Its impulses, humors, appetites and methods, as manifest in man, are by no means of so glorious or illuminating a character as to inspire admiration, even in its machine: man. Plainly, its methods and actions bespeak as much of the lowest as of the highest that we know, and this is as much evidenced by the thoughts, aspirations, tastes or habits, chemically compulsory or no, of man, its product, and through whom it seemingly expresses itself, as by its methods and procedure in other ways, fumbling efforts and failures of all kinds. For man in his capacity as chemist, physicist, fumbling philosopher, didactic or synchronetic poet, experimenter or agnostic is scarcely a fit creature for one to contemplate as the highest product of a so-called supreme intelligence or God, or Good, however well he might look as the product of a minor and so seeking hieratic power. For if God, or Good, as so many have already pointed out, can do no better than produce the quarreling, eating, seeking, spewing thing we know as man—and that is the chief concern of His intelligence—!!!
We will assume that you have read at least a simple work on astronomy or chemistry or physics. If so, could you possibly believe that the present intelligence of man, or even any conceivable progress which he can make in his present limited form and with his present equipment of senses, would be of sufficient force to gather either the meaning or sensory impact of spaces, distances, weights, relationships which at present, except in the most minute and fragmentary way, are entirely beyond him? Consider the meaninglessness of numbers to you, of great weights, distances. I for one would be the last to cast a shadow upon man’s dreams or pride, but when one investigates even the little we are permitted to know—the darkness, the inexplicable confusion, the non-reason in all the things we think, believe, hope for—it would, at the least, suggest that æons must elapse and man himself change radically and develop powers (which, if they are his at all at present, are in embryo) before he could begin to conceive of the significance of even the smallest of the forces which he seems to use but which in reality use him.
All the great things, the creative impulses and substances such as produce even the most minute forms of life which at present we can see, are entirely outside the range of his limited group of senses. He does not know, for instance, where heat or cold begin or end; what shades lie beyond the outer edges of the spectrum; what are the limits or the immediate beyond of sound, light, weight, space, etc. His weak senses plus his devised instrumental aids offer him no real help. They merely multiply his difficulties. Something has invented an eye, an ear, an olfactory nerve, the ganglia of the fingertips, the central cerebral cortex and so-called reason, all of which appear to be nothing more than assembled and synchronized reactions to other and unknown stimuli, wherewith it is possible now for man to apprehend only minute portions of the immense energies and substances blowing about him. Yet with all these aids and the evidences of the mechanism of the universe outside him which they yield, still man, attacking special bits and portions, finds it quite impossible to suggest the reason for anything. He lacks the equipment and power, which even the thing which made him may not have, of creating such finer perceptive organs as might aid him. At present and at best apparently, he is allowed only to invent some things—such, for instance, as are or may be useful to the propagation and rearing of man in the matter of numbers, not brains. His Creator apparently is either unable or unwilling to endow him with such equipment as might make for great knowledge. Tremendous psychic opportunities appear and go by, as when a duller and more ignorant Rome conquers a sensitive and highly perceptive and meditative Greece. Owing to his minor equipment, ignorance and vain beliefs flourish, and he stumbles from one vain illusion and delusion to another—to achieve what? Something, possibly, which his Creator can use. Or so it would seem.