If he has led a clean, healthy, vigorous life, he cannot have experienced the feelings and problems of a drunkard and dope-fiend slowly submerging in dissipation and vice. If he married young and has known the joy of entire devotion to a loyal and loving helpmate, he cannot have had the experience of a profligate who has been divorced four times and is about to take another chance with a dashing grass-widow. Hundreds and thousands of situations that other human beings are called upon to face, he cannot have gone through on his own account.
But if we are able to find out and bear in mind the experience of other people, we can make use of it, as a warning and a guide, in much the same way as if it had happened to ourselves. If I have seen a boy try to run across the road in front of an automobile and stumble and get killed, it is not necessary for me to get killed in order to appreciate the danger of the experiment. You may never have seen this happen, but if I have and I tell you about it, you can use the information you get from me and still save yourself the necessity of risking your neck.
This principle is not at all difficult to understand. It has always been applied, to greater or less extent, in the lives of all human beings, everywhere. It is no more than common sense to profit by the experiences of others, and try to avoid their mistakes.
It seems strange that such a universal principle should be overlooked by the up-to-date minds of the new generation. Yet the least little glimmer of light from it would in itself seem to be a sufficient answer to their question.
"Why shouldn't I go ahead and gratify all my impulses?"
Because although your own limited experience may be insufficient to warn you and guide you, the experience of other people has shown repeatedly that such and such impulses usually lead to such and such consequences which would be very harmful to you.
In the long run the results of others' experience are a better guide to follow than your selfish impulses. You wish to be intelligent and reasonable, don't you? Well, if you lack experience and understanding, it is neither intelligent nor reasonable to imagine that you are the best judge of the consequences.
Of course, the examples we have cited so far—the strange dog that bites, the boy and the automobile, typhoid fever and polluted water—are very elementary. Also the questions they involve—the harmful consequences of certain impulses—are direct and immediate and entirely material. They serve well enough to answer a question and illustrate a principle and that is all they were intended for. The principle is worth bearing in mind, because its application extends to all sorts of complicated questions of conduct. One reason that the young people of to-day are so confused in their moral ideas is just because they have been allowed to overlook this simple, fundamental principle.
It frequently happens that the most important consequences of the thing you do, or fail to do, are not direct and immediate but fairly remote and obscure. An individual without much experience or knowledge of the world may easily neglect to consider them.
For instance, I have known several cases where young men of good family forged their fathers' names. They were up-to-date young men, of course. But even so, how could they come to do such a thing?