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  THE
  PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS

  A BOOK OF
  STUDIES AND STROWINGS

  BY
  DANIEL G. BRINTON, A.M., M.D., LL.D.

  AUTHOR OF “RACES AND PEOPLES,” “THE MYTHS OF THE NEW WORLD,” “ESSAYS
  OF AN AMERICANIST,” ETC., ETC.

  PHILADELPHIA
  DAVID MCKAY, PUBLISHER
  NO. 23 SOUTH NINTH STREET
  1893




  COPYRIGHT, 1892, BY D. G. BRINTON.




  WM. F. FELL & CO.,
  ELECTROTYPERS AND PRINTERS
  1220-24 SANSOM ST.,
  PHILADELPHIA.




  TO THE
  HON. GEORGE PIERCE ANDREWS,
  JUSTICE OF THE SUPREME COURT OF THE STATE OF NEW YORK,

  This Book is Inscribed,

  IN MEMORY OF A FRIENDSHIP WHICH HAS CONTINUED
  UNINTERRUPTED SINCE OUR EARLIEST
  COLLEGE DAYS.




“We hold these truths to be self-evident,――that all men are created
equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable
rights; that among these are life, liberty, and THE PURSUIT OF
HAPPINESS.”――_The Declaration of Independence of the United States of
America._


  “The sun and stars that float in the open air,
   The apple-shaped earth and we upon it, surely the drift of them is
        something grand,
   I do not know what it is except that it is something grand, and
        that it is Happiness.”
                                    _――Walt Whitman._




  CONTENTS.


  PART I.
  Happiness as the Aim of Life.

  I. _Is a Guide to Happiness Possible? And if Possible, is it
     Desirable?_

  Objections to the Pursuit of Happiness as a Low and Selfish
    Aim.――Answered by the Fact that we Cannot do Otherwise than Pursue
    it.――Enjoyment is not a Sin, but a Duty.――No One Can Impart
    Happiness who does not Possess it Himself.――It is Desirable,
    therefore, that Men be Taught How to become Happy.――Nor is this a
    Commendation of Selfishness,                             pp. 9-14

  II. _The Definition of Happiness._

  Happiness is not Pleasure, but is Built Upon it.――Explanation of
    Pleasure and Pain in Sensation.――Happiness Dependent on the Will
    and Self-consciousness.――Difference Between Self-feeling and
    Self-seeking.――Happiness is the Increasing Consciousness of
    Self.――It may be Derived from Other than Pleasurable
    Feelings.――The Yearning for Joy is a Cry of Nature.――It is the
    Secret of Evolution,                                     pp. 15-20

  III. _The Relative Value of Pleasures._

  All Pleasures are Inseparably Connected.――The Error of Religions and
    Philosophies which Condemn Any.――Escape from Pain the Lowest Form
    of Pleasure.――Indifference to Pleasure a Sign of Mental
    Failing.――Contentment is not Happiness.――Happiness means Expansion
    and Growth.――Practical Difficulty in Comparing Pleasures.――The
    Hierarchy of Enjoyments.――The Blunders of Asceticism.――The
    Equality of Pleasures, as Such,                          pp. 21-25

  IV. _The Distribution of Happiness._

  Relation of Happiness to the Means of Happiness.――Law of the “Rate
    of Pleasure.”――The Extremes of the Social Order Equally
    Unfavorable.――Civilization does not Increase Personal
    Enjoyment.――Social Evils Diminish, but Personal Sufferings
    Increase.――The Motive of the True Civilization.――Women Have Less
    Happiness than Men.――Partly through their Physical Nature, Partly
    through Social Impositions.――Pernicious, Legal and Ecclesiastical
    Restrictions.――The True and False Education of Women.――Man will
    Profit by Woman’s Improvement.――Childhood and Youth not the
    Happiest Periods of Life.――Enjoyment Should Increase with Mental
    and Physical Vigor.――Old Age is not the Period of Wisdom.――Spurious
    Enjoyments of the Aged.                                  pp. 26-35

  V. _Principles of a Self-Education for the Promotion of One’s Own
     Happiness._

  Happiness is the Reward of Effort.――The Greatest Efficiency is not
    the Greatest Happiness.――The Principles of a Self-Education:――I.
    The Multiplication of the Sources of Enjoyment――What these Sources
    Are――The Avoidance of Profitless Pain――The Value of Knowledge――The
    True End of Culture――Falsity of “Contentment with Little.”――The
    Kind of Knowledge Required:――1. Of Our Bodily Constitution――2. Of
    the Elements of the Sciences――3. Of the Nature of the Mind――4. Of
    the Principles of Business――5. Of the Value of Evidence.――II. The
    Maintenance of a Sensibility to Pleasure.――The Criteria of
    Pleasurable Sensations.――The Anatomy of Ennui.――III. The Search
    for Variety of Impressions.――Variety Necessary to High
    Pleasure.――Pleasure must be Remitted.――The Individual should Seek
    Novelty.――The Evil Effects of Habit.――IV. The Proper Proportion
    Between Desire and Pleasure.――The Wisdom of Counting the
    Cost.――Precepts for the Regulation of Desire.――V. Make all
    Pleasures a Part of Happiness.――All Pleasures are
    Excellent.――Error of the Contrary Doctrine.――All Pleasures should
    be Brought into Relation.――The Bond of Sense to what is Beyond
    Sense.――The Reality of the Ideal.

  STROWINGS                                                  pp. 36-56


  PART II.

  How Far Our Happiness Depends on Nature and Fate.

  I. _Our Bodily and Mental Constitutions._

  Life as a Synonym of Happiness.――Necessity and Chance the Arbiters
    of Life.――The Endowment of the Child.――The Laws of
    Heredity.――Hereditary and Congenital Traits.――The Heritage of the
    Race.――Family Jewels and Family Curses.――The Avenue of
    Escape.――Precepts for Self-training.――Words for Women.――Beauty and
    its Cult.――Its Perils and its Power.――The Ideal of the
    Beautiful.――The Four Temperaments.――Cheerfulness and its Physical
    Seat.――Diseases that are Cheerful and those that are Not.――What to
    do in an Attack of the Blues.――Old Age and its Attainment.――The
    Fallacious Bliss of Youth.――Men who Outlive Themselves.

  STROWINGS,                                                 pp. 57-80

  II. _Our Physical Surroundings._

  Clothing and its Objects.――The Dress of Women.――The Value of Good
    Clothes.――The Room and its Furniture.――Our Living Rooms.――Own Your
    Own House.――Foes to Fight in House-building.――A New Principle for
    Architects.――Love of Home and Homesickness.――How Climate
    Influences Cheerfulness.

  STROWINGS,                                                 pp. 81-91

  III. _Luck and its Laws._

  What Solon said about Happiness.――Destiny in Human Affairs.――The
    Calculation of Chances.――Results of the Laws of Luck.――They Cannot
    be Escaped.――Runs of Luck and their Results.――“A Fool for Luck,”
    and Why.――The Story of Polycrates and its Moral.――The Fetichism of
    Gamblers.――Luck Does Less Than Many Think.――The Miracles of
    Insurance.――The Dark Hand of Destiny.――Trifles Rule the World.――We
    Are the Slaves of Chance.――But What is Chance?

  STROWINGS,                                                pp. 92-108


  PART III.

  How Far Our Happiness Depends on Ourselves.

  I. _Our Occupations――Those of Necessity and those of Choice._

  The Washerwoman’s Ideal of Happiness.――Labor is the True Source of
    Enjoyment.――Selection of an Occupation.――How to Find Pleasure in
    Its Pursuit.――Fitness and Unfitness for Certain
    Occupations.――Dangers of Diligence in Business.――The Rare
    Complaint, Over-Conscientiousness.――Making a Living a Mean
    Business.――Occupations of Choice.――Reflections on Recreations.

  STROWINGS,                                               pp. 109-117

  II. _Money-making, Its Laws and Its Limits._

  The Universal Prayer.――Property the Foundation of Progress.――Wealth
    is Welcome to All.――What Riches Give.――“Effective” and
    “Productive” Riches.――The Author Discovers the Fortunate
    Isles.――But is Promptly Disenchanted.――How to Get Rich.――Another
    Way to Get Rich.――New Lamps for Old.――Riches and Happiness.

  STROWINGS,                                               pp. 118-127

  III. _The Pleasures we may Derive from Our Senses._

  The Elect of God are those who Improve their Faculties.――Division of
    the Faculties.――The Rules of Pleasure.――The Rule of
    Moderation.――The Rule of Variety.――Pleasures of the Muscular
    Sense.――Of the Sense of Touch.――Of the Sense of Smell.――Of Tobacco
    Using.――Eating as a Fine Art.――The Symmetry of a Well-served
    Dinner.――Gastronomic Precepts.――Pleasures of the Sense of
    Hearing.――Of the Sense of Sight.

  STROWINGS,                                               pp. 128-141

  IV. _The Pleasures we may Derive from Our Emotions._

  Hope and Fear.――The Folly of Philosophies.――Hopes which are
    Incompatibles.――A Most Useful Suggestion.――Fear is a
    Safeguard.――Worry and its Remedies.――Courage and Apathy.――Remorse
    and Regret.――Anger, Hatred, and Revenge.――The Imagination.――The
    Esthetic Emotions.――The Contemplation of Nature.――The Arts of
    Pleasure.――The Excellence of Good Taste.――Plot-Interest.――The
    Emotions of Pursuit.――The Emotions of Risk.

  STROWINGS,                                               pp. 142-155

  V. _The Pleasures we may Derive from Our Intellect._

  The Search for Truth.――Advantages of Intellectual
    Pleasures.――Especially to Women.――Riddles and Puzzles.――Reading,
    and Rules for It.――My Own Plan.――What Line to Read In.――A Plea for
    Poetry.――Thinking About Reading.――What Meditation Means.――Social
    Intellectual Pleasures.――Writing and Letter Writing.――Keeping a
    Diary.――The Pursuit of Truth.――What Truth Is.――The Study of
    Science.

  STROWINGS,                                               pp. 156-168

  VI. _The Satisfaction of the Religious Sentiment._

  Happiness the Only Standard of Value.――The Strange Law of
    Evolution.――The Ideal of Humanity.――The Position of Dogmatic
    Religion.-The Unhappiness Produced by Religions.――The Happiness
    Derived from Religions.――The Doctrine of Faith.――Morality and
    Religion.――Erroneous Estimate of the Moral Life.――True Religious
    Unity.――The Religion of the Future.

  STROWINGS,                                               pp. 169-180

  VII. _The Cultivation of Our Individuality._

  The Prevailing Lack of Individuality.――Examples of Great
    Teachers.――The Man of Strong Personality.――What Individuality Is
    and Is Not.――Value of Self-knowledge.――The Pains of
    Diffidence.――Dangers of Self-conceit.――The Tyranny of
    Opinion.――The Foolishness of Fixed Principles.――Obstinate
    Asseveration.――Giving and Taking Advice.――Decision of
    Character.――Importance of Reserve.――Sincerity is
    Essential.――Veracity at Least to Oneself.――Seek Many-sidedness of
    Character.

  STROWINGS,                                               pp. 181-193


  PART IV.

  How Far Our Happiness Depends on Others.

  I. _What Others Give Us: Safety, Liberty, Education._

  Man’s Dependence on Society for his Safety.――Security the Aim of
    Government.――Two Theories of Government.――Justice as the Aim of
    Government.――Freedom the Aim of Law.――Another Theory of
    Government.――Knowledge the Brother of Liberty.――Education a
    Necessity.――Defective Education of Women.――What it Should
    Be.――Study Should Be Made a Pleasure.――Man’s Dependence on Others.

  STROWINGS,                                               pp. 195-205

  II. _What we Owe Others: Morality, Duty, Benevolence._

  Happiness and Virtue are Independent Aims.――Morality and the Moral
    Sense not the Same.――What Morality Is.――No Universal Moral
    Precepts.――The Dualism of Morals.――The Sense of Duty.――The
    Pleasures of the Moral Sense.――What “A Clear Conscience”
    Means.――What is “The Chief End of Man.”――The Moral Sense Opposes
    Moral Laws.――The Benevolent Emotions.

  STROWINGS,                                               pp. 206-215

  III. _The Practice of Business and the Enjoyment of Society._

  The Value of Association.――Society Should Not Ask the Sacrifice of
    the Individual.――Maxims for Dealing with Men: First, Distrust;
    Second, Trust.――What “Society” is.――The Drawing-room as the Shrine
    of Civilization.――Good-will the Basis of Good Society.――Ordinary
    People are the Most Agreeable.――Maxim for Success in Society.――The
    Aim of Society.――Good Society Not Selfish.――The Power of
    Society.――What Politeness is.――Society Conversation.――The Expert
    in Small Talk.

  STROWINGS,                                               pp. 216-227

  IV. _On Fellowship, Comradeship, and Friendship._

  Man’s Highest Pleasure is in Humanity.――What Fellowship
    Means.――Mutuality of Interests the Basis of Social Progress.――But
    the Individual must be Respected.――Comradeship is Based on Tastes
    in Common.――It is a Substitute for Friendship.――Examples of
    it.――The Meaning of Friendship.――What Weakens and what Strengthens
    it.――It should be Carefully Cultivated.――Friendship Between Men
    and Women.――Examples of it.

  STROWINGS,                                               pp. 228-237

  V. _Love, Marriage, and the Family Relation._

  The Single Life Ever Incomplete.――The Holiness of Maternity.――The
    Emotion of Love Explained.――Love and Beauty.――Love Immortalized in
    Posterity.――The History of Marriage.――The Three Conditions of
    Marriage.――The Question of Divorce.――What True Marriage
    Means.――Opinions of Thinkers About Divorce.――The Family as the
    Object of Marriage.――The Family Tie Among Us.

  STROWINGS,                                               pp. 238-247


  PART V.

  The Consolations of Affliction.

  I. _The Removal of Unhappiness._

  Suffering is Unavoidable.――Where to Look for Consolation.――Two
    Consoling Reflections.――Advantage of a Multitude of Miseries.――The
    Habit of Unhappiness.――Some Require Ill Fortune.――Two Popular
    Methods of Consolation.――Talk It Over, and Why.――Our Strange Claim
    for Happiness.――The Tolerance of Suffering.――The Universal
    Panacea.――Look Before and After.――Deal Justly by Yourself.――How to
    Regard Incivility and Ingratitude.――Success Arising from
    Failures.――Resignation, Sympathy.――Remember Your
    Advantages.――Thoughts About Time and Death.

  STROWINGS,                                               pp. 248-280

  II. _The Inseparable Connection of Pleasure and Pain._

  Pleasure Requires Pain, and Joy Sorrow.――The Words of
    Socrates.――Physiological Relations of Pleasure and Pain.――Their
    Analogy to Joy and Sorrow.――The Oneness of the Pleasure-Pain
    Sensation.――The Rhythm of Sensations and Emotions.――Pleasure
    Derived from Pain, Joy from Sorrow.――Quotation from Leigh
    Hunt.――Quotation from Sir Richard Steele.――Sadness the Best
    Preparative for Gladness.――Influence of Time on Pleasures and
    Pains.

  STROWINGS,                                               pp. 263-272

  III. _The Education of Suffering._

  What is Suffering?――The Human Passion of Sorrow.――Sorrow as the
    Initiation into the Mysteries of Life.――The Noblest Prizes Won
    Only by Suffering.――It is the Highest Inspiration of Religion and
    Art.――It Alone Teaches the Elder Truths.――The Ministry of
    Grief.――The Sweetness of Departed Joys.――The Compensations of
    Loves that are Lost.――The Despair that is Divine.

  STROWINGS,                                               pp. 273-280




PART I.

Happiness as the Aim of Life.




I. _Is a Guide to Happiness Possible? And, if Possible, is it
Desirable?_


The pursuit of happiness,――the pursuit of one’s own happiness,――is it
a vain quest? and, if not vain, is it a worthy object of life?

There have been plenty to condemn it on both grounds. They have said
that the endeavor is hopeless; that to study the art of being happy is
like studying the art of making gold, which is the only art by which
gold can never be made. Nothing, they add, is so unpropitious to
happiness as the very effort to attain it.

They go farther. “Let life,” they proclaim, “have a larger purpose
than enjoyment.” They quote the mighty Plato, when he demands that the
right aim of living shall stand apart, and out of all relation to
pleasure or pain. They declare that the theory of happiness as an end
is the most dangerous of all in modern sociology――the tap-root of the
worst weeds in the political theories of the day, for the reason that
the individual pursuit of enjoyment is necessarily destructive of that
of society at large. Moreover, they urge, who dares write of it? For
he who has not enjoyed it, cannot speak wisely of it; and in him who
has attained it, ’twere insolence to boast of it.

Over against these stands another school, not, by any means, solely a
modern school. If that boasts Plato as its leader, this can claim
Aristotle as its master. It is with the single aim to become happier,
said that wise teacher, that we deliberately perform any act of our
lives. This is the final end of every conscious action of man. That
alone is the true purpose of existence, which, by itself, and not as a
means to something else, makes life worth living and desirable for its
own sake; and happiness――happiness alone――fulfills this requirement.

Through the ages this conflict has continued. We find the thoughtful
Pascal declaring that every free act of the will has, and can have, no
other end in view than the increase of the individual happiness, be it
so seemingly inconsistent as drowning or hanging oneself; while the
distinctively modern school of social philosophers, without any
exception, pin to their banners the maxim of their master, Jeremy
Bentham, “The common end of every person’s efforts is happiness;” and
they love to confound the ascetics by proclaiming, with Spencer, that
“Without pleasure there is no good in life;” or asserting, with Ward,
that the sole aim of a right sociology is the organization of
happiness. Nay, they have gone so far as to project a series of
sciences by which the human race is to reach a condition of entire
enjoyment. They give us “Eudæmonics,” or the art of the attainment of
well-being; “Hedonism,” or the theory of the securing of pleasure; and
even the “Hedonical Calculus,” by which we can to a nicety calculate
how much any object, if secured, will add to our felicity.

These excellent authorities have therefore answered the inquiry
whether the pursuit of happiness is a possible occupation, by showing
that in fact we cannot of our own wills do anything else; and though
we often pursue it blindly and by false routes, we can, by taking
thought and learning of others, follow it up successfully. So also
taught Aristotle, who tells us in his _Ethics_, “It is possible for
every man by certain studies and appropriate care to reach a condition
of happiness.”

Since the aim of enjoyment is thus natural, even thus necessary, to
man, since it is the motive of his every action, how important that it
should be guided by the dictates of wisdom, and not condemned and
discarded as evil! Have not those who declared it criminal smothered
the germ which they should have nursed?

Away with the cold and cruel doctrines which for ages have darkened
the lives of men by teaching them that enjoyment is folly and pleasure
a sin! If the reasoned pursuit of happiness conflicts with current
morality, so much the worse for that morality. Away with it, and in
the light of a younger day seek a better one. What is right is
reasonable, and what is reasonable is right. Enjoy yourself; it is the
highest wisdom. Diffuse enjoyment; it is the loftiest virtue. Not only
are the two compatible; they are inseparable; as the sage Rasselas
said to the Princess: “It is our business to consider what beings like
us may perform; each laboring for his own happiness by promoting
within his circle, however narrow, the happiness of others.”

All agree that we should strive for the happiness of others; it has
even been said that this is the only moral justification of any act of
our lives. But the cup which we are to proffer to all, we are,
forsooth, forbidden to taste ourselves! What is good for everybody
else is bad for oneself!

There is something radically wrong here, both in fact and logic.
Mental moods are contagious, and the man who enjoys little will prove
a kill-joy to others. Who are more disagreeable than those Philistines
and Pharisees who insist on making you happy against your will, and
contrary to your inclinations? I have noticed that the usual pretext
for annoying people is solicitude about their welfare. But, as a rule,
people are not happy whose pleasures are assigned them by others.
Nobody’s vegetables are so sweet as those from my own garden, and if
the whole world set to work to please me, I am sure I should be
discontented. These moralists put the cart before the horse. Before we
are qualified to make others happy we must compass happiness in some
degree for ourselves; and our success with others will be just to that
degree and no more. The quality and intensity of enjoyment which we
ourselves have is alone that which we are able to impart to others. To
assert, therefore, that we should make no effort to obtain or increase
this, is as illogical as can be.

Here some one may think I am caught in my own trap. For if people
cannot assign pleasures to others, is it not an impertinence to offer
instruction on the subject? Can anybody tell me better than myself
what I like and what I desire?

True, but the difference is wide between telling me what things should
please me, and telling me how I can best please myself; and the latter
is the aim of right instruction in this matter. That it is badly
needed, one who runs may read. Most people pursue unhappiness more
steadily than happiness. Only fools find life an easy thing; to the
wise it is a perpetual surprise that they get along at all. To them,
life is a lesson to be learned, and happiness is a science the first
axiom in which is to seek knowledge. To be happy one must work for it,
and not merely have the wish and possess the requisites; as Aristotle
so prettily expresses it, “As at the Olympic games, it is not the
strongest or handsomest who gain the crown, but only those who join in
the combat.”

There is boundless need for a clear statement of the true theory of
personal happiness. It has been neglected, misconceived, and decried
long enough, and countless lives have been darkened in consequence.
Such a theory, to be true, must be applicable to all men, of all sorts
and conditions, because the desire of happiness is the common motive
of all. Has it yet been discovered? That is the object of the present
inquiry――for it is little more than an inquiry; but be sure that when
it is discovered and set forth, it will come not as something new or
strange, but like some half-forgotten, long familiar truth.

Not only, therefore, is it desirable, it is the bounden duty of every
man to consider his own highest happiness, to learn what that is, and
to go to work to secure it. It is his duty to his neighbors as well as
to himself; more than that, it is his first duty to his kind. It is
incumbent on every generation to transmit an increased store of social
and personal felicity to posterity. This is the only good reason for
the continuance of the race. But a generation does nothing except
through its individual members; hence, it all comes back to the
personal effort for happiness.

But the moralist will object, Is not this doctrine one of absolute
egotism, of stark selfishness?

This objection is what has nullified and cast into disfavor every
essay ever written, from the Nichomachean Ethics downward, which
attempted a reasoned and practical art of increasing personal
happiness. They have all been frowned down as selfish and, therefore,
immoral.

It is time for this opposition to cease. It rests on a misunderstanding
of terms, on a confusion of different sensations, on the bad books of
some writers, but mostly on ancient prejudice and an ignorance of
facts. Let the subject be approached with a mind free from bias; let
the false beacons hung out by some schools be disregarded; above all,
let a clear understanding of what happiness consists in be gained; and
this potent objection will be dismissed from the case.

Let us turn, then, to the definition of happiness.




II. _The Definition of Happiness._


In science a definition is not a resting-place, but a stepping-stone.
It is needless, therefore, to call the catalogue of obsolete and
obscure definitions of happiness. Some, indeed, say that the
definition, like the thing itself, is still unfound.

I do not think this is so. Between the physiologists and the
psychologists, I believe we are in a position to explain what
happiness is; and if in parts the explanation is a trifle subtle, it
is not really obscure.

Happiness is not the same as pleasure, but it is generally built upon
or grows out of pleasurable feelings. We must begin, therefore, our
analysis with these, and with their opposites――the painful feelings.

Pleasure and pain are both ultimate and undefinable experiences of the
mind. We cannot resolve them further; but we can note certain
unfailing relations they bear to the organism, which explain their
significance. Pleasure characterizes the normal and unimpeded exercise
of physiological functions of all kinds. There are as many elementary
pleasures as there are sensations. Pain is present only in the reverse
conditions. Modern physiologists have established, therefore, the
fundamental law, that pleasure connects itself with vital energy, pain
with its opposite; in which they have not gone beyond, even if they
have caught up to, the maxim of Spinoza: “Pleasure is an affection
whereby the mind passes to a greater perfection; pain is an affection
whereby it passes to a lesser perfection.”

Such is the meaning of pleasure or of pleasurable feelings; and there
is no lack of writers, and weighty ones, too, who maintain that
happiness is merely the excess of pleasure over pain; or the utmost
pleasure we are capable of; or the aggregate of continued pleasurable
feelings. All such phrases are wide of the mark. They confound
distinct things, and ignore the boundaries between the different
realms of mental action.

We must leave the physiologists and turn to profound analysts of
purely mental action, such as Hume and Kant, for the right
understanding of the meaning of happiness. For these, its inseparable
factors, are the Will and Self-consciousness. As Kant expresses
it,――“The Desire of Happiness is the general title for all subjective
motives of the Will.” Desire is really stimulated, not by the image of
past pleasure, as Locke and his followers teach, but by the conception
of Self. The satisfaction of desire is not merely such, but is the
satisfaction of the Self, in thus reaching a greater perfection, to
use Spinoza’s phrase. Only by discriminating the object from the Self
can the pleasure of the subject become an end in itself. Hence the
real aim of the pleasure-seeker, though he is rarely intellectually
conscious of it, is to feel his own Self, his own being, more keenly.
Aristotle expressed this when he wrote,――“Pleasure is the feeling
which accompanies Self-realization.”

To the extent, therefore, that pleasure develops the sense of
Self-consciousness it partakes of a higher nature than mere sensation,
which man shares in common with the brutes; and to that extent it can
claim the name of Happiness, a feeling inseparable from free will and
conscious individuality. In man a true pleasure must always be a
pleasure in something else than the pleasure itself; that is, it must
heighten the sense of personal existence.

It is only the conception of Self as a permanent subject to be
pleased, that stimulates man to fresh endeavors, that makes him seek
knowledge and freedom, that lifts him above the beast, contented with
the satisfaction of its appetites. This is what Fichte meant when he
said that the consciousness of Self alone enables us to understand
life and enjoy it. Nothing is truer than the motto, “_Être heureux,
c’est vivre_,”――to be happy is to live.

Here, again, some uneasy moralist will point the finger and raise the
cry of “selfishness.” It is time to have done with this purblind, this
high-gravel-blind moralist, who refuses to distinguish between
self-feeling and self-seeking. There are two self-loves. The one is
inseparable from personal existence, the necessary point of departure
of every conscious action, whose activity and whose end are alike in
the object outside of the self; the other is that egoism which directs
both the action and its end toward itself. The former is fecund,
ennobling, inspiring; the latter is sterile and enfeebling. Rightly
understood, nothing is so admirable as self-love; but love yourself,
not for what you are, but for what you may be. The wisest of teachers
set no higher mark for duty than, “Love thy neighbor _as thyself_.” It
was a modern and unphilosophical derogation which substituted for it,
“_Vivre pour autrui_.” In living the best for ourselves, we live the
best for others.

The conclusion which we have now arrived at, that happiness is the
increasing consciousness of Self, leads us to reflect whether this
mental state is brought about solely by what is generally known as
“pleasures,” or whether some other feeling, not usually classed as
such, may not have the same effect. Man can enjoy only through action,
and all his happiness depends on action; but there may be a great deal
and very intense activity in spheres of experience to which the terms
pleasure and pain, in their physiological sense, do not apply. Indeed,
such activities may be present along with physical pain and mental
suffering, and yet the law hold good: that if these are of a nature to
exalt the consciousness of self, they may be a well-spring of
happiness under circumstances the most unfavorable. This explains a
passage of Epictetus which I thought over a long time before I
mastered its significance,――“Happiness is an _equivalent_ for all
troublesome things;” not that it excludes or abolishes them, but that
it is a compensation for them. This puts the whole art of happiness in
a different light. It may teach us to avoid some pains and troubles,
and this is well; but the best of it will ever be to give us an
_equivalent_ for the many that remain. Any text-book of felicity which
leaves this out of account may as well be burned by Monsieur de Paris.

Now we can understand what Plato meant when he said that the right aim
of living should stand out of relation to pleasure or pain. He had in
mind these other activities which give in some natures an intenser
sense to self-consciousness than any mere nerve reaction. The ancient
ideal was the greatness of the individual, the richness of his
imagination, the reach of his intellect, the strength of his will, the
firmness of his friendship, the devotion of his patriotism, the
singleness of his life and purpose in some noble aim. This it was that
floated before the intellectual vision of Plato and led him to scorn
the pleasures of the sense and the charms of tranquillity.

Let us applaud him; for we moderns are not ignorant of the luxury of
toil and the joy of strong endeavor; we too, like Othello, “do agnize
an alacrity for hardness;” with Seneca we can say, “_Res severa est
verum gaudium_.” But we hold it needless and unwise to leave any sunny
field uncultured on whose soil may be trained to bloom the fragrant
flower of pleasure.

The yearning for joy is a cry of nature which can never be stifled.
Give heed to it and obey it. It calls you to wider horizons, to warmer
sympathies, to a fuller growth, to a completer development. It holds
the secret of Evolution. It is the incessant prompter to a higher form
of existence. Biologists have discovered that the avoidance of painful
and the search for pleasurable sensations are the first principles of
organic animal life, and are those which have developed the amœba into
the man. In him, this general consciousness has blossomed into
Self-consciousness, and to this he owes all the growth of his higher
nature, his essentially human powers. To the extent that this is
brought into harmony with the sum of his faculties and with his
surroundings, he wins that something greater than pleasure which we
call happiness. From the culture of this, if from any source, he must
look for the advent of those new spirit-powers which more fortunate
generations in the hereafter may enjoy. Who knows but those, our dear
children of after days, may gain a still higher form of consciousness,
one through which they will be brought into harmony with the perfect
working of the Cosmos, and the ancient fable be realized, of men who
walked the earth as gods?




III. _The Relative Value of Pleasures._


The learned have established what they call “a hierarchy of the
sciences,” a scheme which shows the relative value and scope of the
various departments of knowledge, and how the one rises upon the
other. So in the Science of Happiness there is a series of degrees, a
_gradus ad gaudium_, which measures the relative value of human
enjoyments and the dependence of the higher upon the lower.

The ignorance or the disregard of this fact has led to the ruin of
more individual lives, and to more fatal misfortunes to the race, than
any other error whatsoever. The poison of all false religions and
philosophies lies either in condemning pleasure or in commending low
forms of it; and the one is as hurtful as the other. The religion
which to-day numbers more believers than any other, Buddhism, aims its
loftiest aspirations to the extinction of all desire and the abolition
of all enjoyment. These are the words of Buddha himself:――

     “Let no man look for what is pleasant; for not to find it is
     pain.

     “Let no man love anything; for the loss of the beloved is
     sorrow.

     “After pleasure follows grief, and from affection comes
     fear.

     “I have run through many births, and painful it is to be
     born again and again; but now, O Thou Builder of this house,
     Thou hast been seen, and not again shalt Thou rebuild it.
     The mind has attained to the extinction of all desire.”

This is the ideal of happiness that four hundred millions of human
beings hold before their minds to-day. If there is any truth in the
modern philosophy which teaches that pleasure lies in functional
activity, no more pernicious message could be commended to mankind
than that which Buddha brought.

He is far from the only preacher of such a gospel. “To rest in peace,”
“to sleep in the Lord,”――is not this the religious hope and aspiration
of millions of Christians? It is not a whit higher than the Nirvana of
the Buddhist.

The avoidance of pain is the lowest form of happiness; more correctly,
it is its mere negative, and scarcely deserves to rank as one of its
grades. Yet, alas! to how many millions is it the highest form
imagined! To how many is the only escape from unhappiness to forget
themselves! This is the cause of that thirst for intoxicants and
narcotics which undermines and infects modern society. Dr. Johnson
would still find the multitude agree with him in his opinion, that a
man is never happy except when he is drunk!

Those Quietists who preach tranquillity and contentment as the goal
which all should seek are but one step higher. Indifference to
pleasure, or a reduction of the number of pleasures, is a sign of
weakening of the reason and of a retrogression in development. No man
has a right to be happy because he is contented; though he may well be
contented because he is happy. To be “void of strong desire,” set free
from hope and fear, snugly harbored from all storms of feeling, so far
from being the condition of the sage, is the aspiration of the fool.
Keen sensations awaken the sentiments, emotions fertilize the
intellect, passions educate the reason. The brute goes through life
without a smile or a tear; man’s proud privilege is to weep and to
laugh.

The ancients taught that philosophical happiness is to want little,
and that it is the error of the vulgar to want much and to enjoy many
things. The truer doctrine is that happiness is expansion and growth,
the enriching of our natures by manifold experiences, and the securing
this by the multiplication of our desires. The avoidance of pain and
the limitation of our hopes to our powers are sometimes valuable
preliminaries to the pursuit of happiness, but are not always
essential to it, and in many instances an over-solicitude about them
destroys all chance for a higher felicity. Happiness does not come of
itself. It has to be worked for, fought for; and courage and endurance
are as necessary in this as in any other struggle. In the path of
every pilgrim to the Celestial City stand from time to time the giant
figures of Death and Pain, and shake their spears, saying, “Wilt thou
dare?”

The sources of pleasure should, therefore, be multiplied to the
utmost, and they should be classified, so that undue value should not
be assigned any one class. Theoretically, there is nothing troublesome
about this; practically, it is often an insurmountable difficulty. The
pleasures of the senses are inferior to those of the emotions, and
these in turn are ranked by the enjoyments which pertain to the
exercise of the intellectual powers. No one of these can wholly
exclude the others. They are all inseparably united in the individual
entity; but the individual can enjoy only with the faculties he
possesses, and in proportion to their relative strength. It is as
absurd to ask more of him, as it were to invite the gouty to a foot
race, or the blind to admire the colors in a painting.

It is well to establish and to recognize this hierarchy of enjoyments,
beginning with those of the sensations common to animal life
everywhere and culminating in those of pure reason, whose crowning
felicity is the pursuit of truth; it has been done, and well done, by
many writers; but what has been generally overlooked is that this
scheme can have small practical application to the conduct of life if
it is not fully recognized that no one of these roads to happiness can
be successfully pursued while the others are neglected, or branded
with the sign, “Entrance forbidden.”

This is where Asceticism has committed its fatal blunder, and for
thousands of years has made miserable the lives of millions. Instead
of self-control, it has demanded self-abnegation; instead of the due
and proportioned exercise of all the powers, it has ordered the
absolute disuse of some of them; quite as often of the highest as of
the lowest, of reason as often as lust. Under this baleful doctrine
nations have become misshapen in mind, atrophied in culture, distorted
from honest nature’s rule, mean, miserable, and inefficient. Yet this
same doctrine is preached to-day from thousands of pulpits in lands of
highest civilization. Is it not time for the common sense of most to
rise in protest against such a survival from the Dark Ages of the life
of the race? Reason blushes only for pleasures which she cannot
explain, and he who acquaints himself with the whole nature of man
knows that all his powers and faculties have their appropriate use.
The ascetic may claim a happiness all his own; but so do the
extravagant and the vicious; both stand condemned before the results
of their own successes.

The intellect has no right to chide the enjoyments of the senses.
Pleasures differ in degree and permanence, but not in kind. _As
pleasures_ they are on a par, whether derived from objects of sense,
from the emotions, or from the understanding. Such analysts of mind as
Kant and Epictetus agree that there is no _essential_ distinction
between the most refined and the coarsest gratifications. “It is one
and the same vital force expressing itself in the Desires, which is
affected by all objects which cause Pleasure.”




IV. _The Distribution of Happiness._


Having reached an understanding about what happiness means, and some
notion as to its various grades, it will next be worth while to study
its distribution in the several classes of society, in contrasting
grades of civilization, in the two sexes, and at various ages. This
will be dealing with the subject according to the methods of natural
science, and it ought to lead to some interesting conclusions.

One might expect to find a general agreement as to the main facts. Far
from it. The common belief is that happiness increases with the means,
or at least with the capacity, for happiness. It is this belief which
inspires men to labor for the means and improve their capacities. But
the philosophers nowise concede its correctness. Hume argued that all
who are happy are equally happy; and Paley maintained that happiness
is about equally distributed among all orders of the community; that
the plowman gets as much real enjoyment out of life as the
philosopher, and the beggar at the gate as much as the monarch on the
throne. To which Dr. Johnson replied that a small glass and a large
one might be equally full, but the latter holds more. The capacity, he
justly argued, of the philosopher to receive a multiplicity of
agreeable impressions is greater than that of the peasant, and
therefore, other things being equal, the quantity of his enjoyment
will be greater.

The learned Doctor, indeed, sometimes insisted that felicity increases
directly with the means of enjoyment. Representing the latter by
money, he would say that a man with six thousand pounds a year should
be ten times as happy as the one with six hundred a year; and if he is
not, it is because he is an ass.

Here he was certainly wrong. Some of the main elements of ordinary
happiness are in the possession of every class of society, high and
low, poor and rich; such as the means of self-preservation, family
ties, friendship, amusement, and repose. What wealth and power add to
this common stock becomes less and less at each remove. This
consideration led Bentham to question whether the prince is twice as
happy as the laborer, and to doubt whether ten thousand times the
wealth brings with it twice the enjoyment. His followers have
attempted to frame the relation in a mathematical formula, and have
expressed it in the maxim, “The rate of increase of pleasure decreases
as its means increase.”

The conclusion is a satisfactory one for several reasons, and appears
to be borne out by the experience of mankind. Gibbon quotes the saying
of the potent Sultan Abderrahman, who at the close of his brilliant
reign of forty years asserted that during the whole of that time he
had had but fourteen days of happiness; on which the historian
comments that he himself could claim many more than the famous Prince.

The moral of the story is, that it is not the multiplication of the
_means_, but of the _sources_ of pleasure which is the secret of
happiness.

The extremes of the social conditions are almost equally unfavorable,
the one through the privations it entails, the other through the
burdens it imposes and the distractions it brings. Both are
unpropitious to self-culture, and this alone lays substantial
foundations for a considerable enjoyment of life.

A similar debate has taken place in reference to the distribution of
happiness in the different grades of civilization. Rousseau and his
followers never tired of portraying the delights of the savage state.
Like the ancient Greeks, he placed the Golden Age in some Arcadia of
untutored shepherds and lawless huntsmen. It is the fashion to smile
at his notion as the vagary of a crank; but the scientist of our own
day whose studies of the conditions of savage tribes stand ahead of
all others, has deliberately expressed almost the same opinion as the
result of his long researches. “Civilization,” writes Dr. Theodore
Waitz, “has proved itself impotent to increase the sum of human
enjoyment.”

What a sad conclusion to reach! And what a comment on the jubilant
shouts of those optimistic philosophers who have been telling us how
vastly better off we are than any of our ancestors!

Yet these also are right in a certain sense. The most careless reader
of history must hug himself for joy to think of the multitude of
miseries and oppressions which have disappeared from society in the
last few centuries. The inquisition, slavery, trial by torture, the
press gang, are but a few of them. At that time the fate and the
happiness of the individual were in the hands of priests and kings and
nobles; now, thank Heaven! in most countries, especially in our own,
they are chiefly in the control of the individual himself.

Nevertheless, it is quite possible in a given state of society that
general evils may diminish while personal suffering increases, owing
to an undue exaltation of sensitiveness, a sort of moral
hyperesthesia, together with the multiplication of desires beyond the
means of satisfying them. This is, in fact, the condition of modern
society; and these traits, together with its instability and rapid
changes, and the bitter competition instigated by its enlarged
freedom, have unquestionably very greatly diminished the amount of
happiness which might have been expected from the ameliorations of the
last few centuries.

There is but one remedy which will be of permanent avail, and that is
to educate the individual into some other ideal of happiness than that
which is filled by the acquisition of property or the gratification of
the senses. The main purpose of all social institutions which have
been created up to the present time has been the getting and the
keeping of property; the motive of the higher civilization which is to
come will be the preparation of the race for a life which will be
filled and sustained by its intellectual and spiritual contents.

The Greek philosopher thanked the gods especially for two
blessings,――that they had created him a Greek and not a barbarian, and
a man and not a woman. Evidently he held strongly to the opinion that
in his own country, at least, the men had the better part in life.

Though woman held an honorable position in Greek society, it was
inferior to what she enjoys in the United States to-day; yet the
philosopher, were he among us, would probably repeat his thanks. It is
quite certain that in the distribution of happiness the stronger sex
has seized the lion’s share.

To be sure, there are certain advantages in the struggle for life
which a woman seems to be conceded, and others which she by nature
possesses. She is less exposed to dangers than men; she escapes
avocations of the greatest hardship and risk; she is generally
supported by the labor of others, and she is allowed privileges in
many small matters of daily life which are denied the other sex. Of
her own nature she is less the slave of passion, less reckless, less
of an egotist, less inclined to deeds of violence and crime. In all
civilized countries the convictions of women for criminal offenses are
less than one-third those of men.

These points are in favor of her securing a larger share of happiness;
but they are checked by many and serious countervails. She is born an
invalid. Her periodic sickness, the burden of pregnancy, the pains of
childbed, the years of distress at her climacteric age, place her for
the best part of her life at a fearful disadvantage. Enter the library
of a physician and turn the leaves of his thick volumes on obstetrics
and the diseases of women if you would have your sympathies harrowed
by a long list of dreadful maladies of which men know nothing.

Another thought disables a woman, and must lessen and darken the
enjoyment of her life in every rank and condition of society. Unless
under immediate protection, she is always exposed to the possibility
of insult and assault, and no general safeguards will ever entirely
remove this danger.

Outside of these inevitable disabilities, the unfortunate elements in
the modern condition of women are owing to the legal and religious
tyranny of men. The dogmas of Christianity distinctly lowered her
position compared to what it was in the Roman Republic or the cities
of Etruria. At Delphi, the thoughts of the gods found expression
through the mouth of the priestess; but the founder of Christian
institutions forbade women to speak in the churches. The ancient Greek
prayed to the goddesses, Minerva, Aphrodite, and Demeter, as the
givers of the good things of life, of wisdom, of love, and the fruits
of the field; but to the Christian, evil and death and pain were what
the first mother of the race brought as a dower to her husband and
left as a legacy to her children.

These pernicious teachings led to a steady oppression of woman in all
ages of Christianity, our own included. So thoroughly did they become
ingrained in the minds of men that the most liberal scarcely
recognized their presence. The priest laid on the bride the obligation
of obedience to her husband; and the philosopher, Rousseau, servile in
this to the ideas of his time, when he has completed the education of
his Emile, contents himself with saying to Sophie, “This is the man
whom it is your duty _to endeavor to please_!” Not until a man arose
emancipated from all tradition, did the teaching of Plato that the
sexes should be socially and politically equal find a modern
philosopher to echo it; that was when John Stuart Mill wrote his essay
on the freedom of woman; though it would be unfair to the growth of
religious thought not to add that he had been anticipated in most
practical points by the despised dissenter, George Fox. Only when the
spirit of teachers such as these will have permeated the institutions,
the religions, and the social traditions of the day, will women have a
fair chance with men at the common stock of happiness possible for the
race.

Most fatal of all measures to the happiness of woman has been the
unceasing effort of ecclesiasticism to make marriage, for her, an
indissoluble sacrament of servitude, instead of an equal civil
contract, in which no obligation is assumed on the one side which is
not as fully accepted on the other. Mill well remarks that the
miseries produced in the lives of individual women by subjection to
individual men are simply incalculable. Guarantee the wife every right
and every privilege that the husband has, and the increased happiness
of both will be sure to crown the concession.

The remedy for this state of things is the proper education of girls
and women. But it is a remedy not likely to be administered soon, in
spite of the talk about it. Men prefer ignorance in women, as women
admire blind devotion in men; because these enable each sex to cheat
the other more easily. Nothing is more essential to her happiness than
that she should be taught the hygiene of her sex early in life; but
the popular voice says ignorance means innocence, and thousands of
women are condemned to life-long misery in consequence. I had a
medical friend who wrote a volume of excellent advice to mothers, and
his profession almost ostracized him for it. Beyond all things, a
girl’s education should be directed toward manual training and
exercises of the understanding; instead of that, she is taught the
fine arts and regaled with poetry and fiction. Her imagination is
fostered by lectures on esthetics, and her memory crammed with moral
platitudes which have no place in real life; while the principles of
business and the maintenance of her own rights are left out of her
training. I cannot but attribute to this the most common and fatal
defect of the female mind,――its lack of the sense of abstract justice.

Men are so selfish and ignorant that they do not understand how much
they themselves forfeit by thus reducing the position of woman. In my
studies of ethnology, I first inquire the position occupied by woman
in a given tribe or nation; for I have discovered no better common
measure of civilization. The profoundest thinkers of the age have
recognized the principle here involved. Goethe closes the second part
of Faust――which is a poetic presentation of the evolution of European
culture――with the significant words,――“The forever feminine leads us
onward.” His friend, Wilhelm von Humboldt, expressed a double fact in
the phrase,――“The Woman stands nearer the ideal of Humanity than the
Man; but she more rarely attains it.” She does not, because she is
prevented by prejudice, by dogmas, and by laws. Until these weeds are
scorched to ashes by the growing flame of free intelligence, neither
will she secure the meed of happiness which is her due, nor will man
have found the right road to his best prosperity.

Plato proposed to banish poets from his ideal Republic because they
are such liars. The prevalent notion that childhood and youth are the
happiest periods of life is largely owing to this mendacious crew. I
have rarely met an intelligent person of years who held the opinion.
It arises from forgetfulness of early sorrows, from false pictures of
youthful joys, and from undue attention to present pains. Most of
those who really feel such regret are the moral or literal prodigals,
who have wasted their substance in riotous living, and bewail, not the
lost happiness, but their inability to repeat their follies.

The rule of honest nature is that enjoyment should steadily increase
up to the full maturity of the powers, mental and physical. This,
under favorable circumstances, is between forty-five and fifty years
of age. After that, physical decadence sets in, and only by
exceptional strength or by increased effort can its fatal progress be
for a while stayed. From inquiry of many persons, I am persuaded that
the rule of the increase of enjoyment up to this turning-point is on
the average correct.

That old age is synonymous with wisdom is a comical deception which
the graybeards have palmed off on the world, because by laws and
customs they hold most of the property, and want most of the power as
well. In fact, diminution of the physical powers means decay all
round. “As we grow old,” observes Thoreau, “we cease to obey our finer
instincts.” It is an error to talk of the accumulated wisdom of years.
The experience of youth serves but to lead old age astray; and this is
seen nowhere so plainly as when an old man pretends a zest for the
pleasures of the young. “No fool like an old fool” is the proverb.
Such men are “out of their class,” as a trainer of athletes would say.
Every age has pleasures sufficient, which are appropriate to it, and
these alone should be sought for. To those who know and respect these
laws of nature, old age is very tolerable. It brings many
compensations for its inevitable losses; and though not likely to be
so happy as the best of middle life, it should be and often is
superior in this respect to youth. Probably it would generally be so
were it more willing to learn the lessons appropriate to it.
Bonstetten goes so far as to say, “No one can be happy till he is past
sixty;” but the proverb of the ancient Rabbis holds forever good,――“He
who teacheth the old, is like one who writes on blotted paper.”




V. _Principles of a Self-Education for the Promotion of One’s Own
Happiness._


The purpose of this chapter is not to enter into practical details of
an education for happiness――that is the mission of the rest of the
book,――but to establish certain general theoretical principles on
which such an education must be carried out in order to be successful.

And first, I must repeat what I have already intimated, that any
permanent and even moderate stock of happiness does not fall into the
open mouth, like the roasted quails in the fairy story, but can be
obtained only by methodical pursuit and constant watchfulness. Eternal
vigilance is said to be the price of liberty; and liberty is only one
of the necessary elements of happiness. Meditation, forethought, and
the formation of a clearly defined Plan of Life are all required, and
even then success is far from certain.

At the outset, I must attack as unsound a maxim which has been
assiduously disseminated by the school of economists of which Herbert
Spencer is the leader. It is put in the form,――“The greatest
efficiency is the greatest happiness.” It would be a calamity if this
were true. The pursuit of happiness would be hopelessly circumscribed,
as but few in the world can attain maximum efficiency in anything.
Fortunately, it is historically false. Those men who have won fame by
their enormous personal capacity have certainly not been the happiest
of their kind. Far from it. They have been men of one idea, absorbed
by some “ruling passion,” to which they have sacrificed all else, and
consequently, so far from gaining happiness, have usually ended by
wrecking their own and others’. It is not the reach of a man’s
abilities, but the use he makes of them, that decides his fortune.
Spencer’s maxim is precisely the reverse of the principle which should
govern an education intended to secure the utmost enjoyment for the
individual and those around him. Such an education should not be
concentrated on one faculty of the mind nor on one subject of study,
but should extend in all directions, be broad and many-sided. It is an
education within the reach of every one, which requires no
schoolmaster but oneself; and yet confers a degree on its graduates
more valuable than any university can bestow.

Its leading theoretical principles may be grouped under five
propositions:――

I. The multiplication of the sources of pleasure and the diminution of
those of pain.

II. The maintenance of a high sensibility to pleasurable impressions.

III. The search for novelty and variety of impressions.

IV. The establishment of a proper relation between desires and
pleasures.

V. The subjection of all pleasures to the increase of happiness.

These principles are not speculative or doctrinal, but are based on
the physiology of the nervous system and the constitution of the human
mind.

I. Let us begin with the first, for it is the basis of the whole Art
of Pleasure. Differently expressed, it means that the sum of our
enjoyment must be enlarged by increasing our sources of enjoyment. In
other words, we must set to work to acquire tastes in addition to
those which we already have by nature or previous education. The most
useful instruction is that which teaches us to profit by all our
chances. People are never so unhappy as they think they are, because
at the moment they forget how many sources of pleasure remain for
them.

Review the field. Take an “account of stock.” Most people have five
senses in tolerably good order. How many have seriously calculated the
number of different gratifications each of these senses is capable of
yielding? Beyond these lie the inviting fields of the Agreeable
Emotions, whose prolific soil needs but to be stirred to teem with
flower and fruit; and still beyond, but in easy reach, the uplands of
Reason and Thought rise into the purer air, and offer perspectives of
entrancing beauty.

All these resources are, to some extent, open to every one. But most
sit like a peasant at the table of a prince, refusing to taste the
choice viands which are before him, because he cares only for the
beans and hodge-podge of his daily fare.

Along with the multiplication of the sources of enjoyment must go the
studied avoidance of profitless pain. I say _profitless_ pain, because
there is pain which is profitable, and to avoid that would be to miss
the best of life, as I shall try to show on a later page,――a
distinction too often forgotten by those political economists who are
preparing the race for the era of universal happiness.

All pain is profitless which is incurred by a deliberate violation of
natural law, such as needless neglect of health or disregard of social
custom. When we confess that we have “made fools of ourselves,” we
suffer what our knowledge could have prevented, and we recognize it.
The part of wisdom is to avoid such suffering.

Here lies the incalculable value of knowledge in this pursuit. I do
not mean extensive learning or erudition, but knowledge of ourselves,
of our immediate natural surroundings, and of our own sphere of
probable activity. The chief value of Knowledge, says Epictetus, is
that it destroys Fear. We do not dread the known, but the unknown. Its
worth does not stop there. It enables us to escape disasters, to
lessen pain, to mitigate suffering in ourselves and others, and to
secure many joys. Three verbs, observes the philosophical Littré,
express the ideal perfection of human happiness――to know, to love, and
to serve.

The true end of what is called “culture,” or a “liberal education,” is
not to store the mind with a variety of facts useful in managing men
or in making money, but to expand our sympathies, to bring us in touch
with all that is beautiful and enjoyable in our lives; it is to
increase the sensitiveness of our finer instincts, so that they will
respond more readily to the delicate stimuli of pleasurable
impressions. Thoreau, walking behind the farmer’s cart, claimed to
have stolen the best part of the load of apples when he inhaled the
fragrant aroma from the fruit. To him it was more gratifying than to
have filled his stomach with the acid pippins.

Of all false maxims for happiness, that to be “content with little” is
the falsest. We should want immensely, but want wisely. To supply such
wants there is no need of the revenue of a kingdom or the lore of a
pedagogue. Not one man in a thousand exhausts the means of wise
enjoyment which are daily within the reach of his hand. Why go far
a-field to seek the treasure buried neath his own hearth-stone? What
he needs is to study himself and his environment, so as to protect
himself from the dangers to which he is exposed, and to draw from such
circumstances as he is placed in, and from such faculties as he is
possessed of, the maximum of gratification which they can render him.
If all persons acted consistently on this principle, the general sum
of human happiness would be indefinitely increased.

The kind of knowledge which is most serviceable to this end is by no
means difficult to acquire. It falls within the range of a common
school education, and ought to be made a part of it, with the definite
aim of promoting personal happiness. Professor Alexander Bain, who
belongs to the Scotch common-sense school of philosophers, and who
treats all questions in a business-like manner, has drawn up a scheme
of such an education, which any one can carry out for himself. It is
so excellent that I present its main features, with amplifications of
my own.

_a._ A Knowledge of the Bodily Constitution.

This means an acquaintance with the outlines of anatomy and
physiology, the rules of personal and general hygiene, some
understanding of the most prevalent diseases in the locality in which
we live and those to which we are individually most liable, and the
simplest means for their prevention and treatment; what best to do in
cases of sudden accidents and emergencies; and last, though not least,
the precepts for training, strengthening, and beautifying the body and
the features.

_b._ The Elements of the principal Physical and Chemical Sciences.

Even a rudimentary knowledge of the sciences of chemistry, geology,
geography, astronomy, of mechanics, steam, electricity, etc., such as
can be acquired from primary text-books, increases wonderfully our
interest in the world around us and in what we see and hear every day
of our lives, and thus furnishes a thousand sources of enjoyment,
besides being certain to find numerous practical applications of
utility.

_c._ The Study of the Mind.

This is at once a delightful pastime and an indispensable art for
success in many lines of business. It means an acquaintance with the
motives which actuate men in their decisions, the personal traits
which make up their characters, their passions and their ambitions,
their weaknesses and their prejudices. Men distinguished for what is
called “executive ability,” statesmen, diplomatists, promoters and
managers of great enterprises, all either possess by nature or have
acquired by study this insight, and to it they owe their success. To
some degree, all can attain it by observation of those around them,
and by the perusal of works which explain the constitution of the mind
and the dominant motives of human action. To this should be added an
unprejudiced reading of modern politics and history, especially of
one’s own country and State.

_d._ A Knowledge of the Principles of Business.

Worry about business affairs is probably the commonest cause of
unhappiness. A great deal of it is inevitable; but a large share of it
would be prevented were both sexes taught early in life the general
rules and customs of business, and those principles of financial
management, investment, prudence, and economy, which are nearly as
fixed in their operation as those of the motions of the stars. There
are many popular handbooks on this subject, and one such ought to be
in every household.

_e._ A Study of the Value of Evidence.

A remarkable writer, De Senancour, who under the name of Obermann
composed some strange books early in this century, maintained that if
men would tell the truth and could predict the weather, nearly all the
sufferings which afflict humanity would disappear. There is a great
deal in his opinion. At present, all men have a rooted aversion to
truth, and neither wish to tell it nor to hear it beyond a strictly
limited amount. But as a knowledge of facts is essential to right
action, the estimation of evidence and the calculation of
probabilities are necessary to a prosperous life. A man who has this
faculty is said to be gifted with “sound judgment,” but it is quite as
much an acquirement as a gift. There are well-known principles by
which the value of testimony is balanced and the weight of evidence
decided. They are in daily application in our courts, and can be
applied at least as successfully to affairs outside.

Such are the outlines of an education directed toward increasing the
sources of enjoyment and diminishing the causes of suffering; and what
remains to be said is little more than an extension of the principles
thus laid down.

II. The second principle is the maintenance of a high sensibility to
pleasurable impressions.

To reach the right meaning of this we must begin with physiology. All
impressions of the nervous system, that is to say, all feelings, may
be compared or studied with reference to three criteria, their
Quality, their Intensity, and their Persistence. Feelings of the same
quality, as a rule, heighten each other’s intensity, but persistence
is usually inversely to intensity. The keener the sensation, the
shorter its duration. The story is told of a French scholar who, for
suspected heresy, was subjected to judicial torture on the rack. When
the instrument was extended the first time, dislocating several of his
joints, he uttered a cry of agony; but at the second extension he
burst into laughter. “At my own ignorance,” he explained, “to suppose
that I could feel such suffering twice.”

It is essential to anything like a constant flow of pleasurable
feelings that we maintain a high state of vigor in the organs of
sensibility; and this can only be accomplished by a careful limitation
of intensity in favor of persistence of feeling. Occasional nervous
impressions of a very high degree of intensity are not only consistent
with health, but increase it; but their frequent repetition, and
especially the determined effort to maintain them for long periods,
inevitably result in a deadening of the sensibility and a lack of
response to ordinary and healthful stimuli.

The ignorance or disregard of these physiological laws explains some
of the most disastrous and conspicuous failures to attain happiness
where every circumstance seems propitious. The neglect of them is the
origin of that morbid condition of the mind which has been called “the
disease of the century,” _la maladie de la siècle_,――Ennui.

The bitter pessimist, Schopenhauer, delighted to show the
worthlessness of life, whose only variety is from the toil of pursuit
to the ennui of possession; while the sweet mystic, Pascal,
discovering in the same feeling the greatest misery of man, saw in it
that which would prove his salvation, for it would lead him to
renounce the vanities of the world and give himself unto God. The one
opinion is worth as much as the other.

If we make an anatomy of Ennui, as Burton made an anatomy of
Melancholy, we shall find that two different, though allied, mental
conditions have been grouped under the name.

The one is that sense of immeasurable boredom which we feel when
placed in uncongenial conditions, especially such as ought to be
welcome to us, as listening to good advice, or hearing instructive
lectures, or reading useful books,――like this one. We are driven to
any revolt by such inflictions. The scholar will turn gypsy and the
virtuous youth a vagrant to escape them. As a boy, at stiff company
dinners, I used to suffer from a keen desire to throw a plate through
the window, or commit some other outrageous breach of decorum.

What is the meaning of this innate revolt against conventionalism and
formality and respectability? The divines are ready to tell you that
it is a clear case of original sin. It is nothing of the kind. It is
the inherited and unquenchable thirst for freedom in the human heart,
and in some temperaments the strength of this passion for liberty is
such that any sacrifice is cheap to purchase it.

Perhaps these have not the worst of the bargain. “Who is the happiest
man in France?” some one asked the academician, D’Alembert. _Quelque
misérable_, “Some wretched fellow,” he replied. There is infinite
philosophy in his answer. Browning, in _Fifine at the Fair_, discusses
the question with amazing insight into human motive. He demands,――

  “What compensating joy, unknown and infinite,
   Turns lawlessness to law, makes destitution――wealth,
   Vice――virtue, and disease of mind and body――health?”

He finds the answer in the “frenzy to be free” which is the ruling
passion in such characters as he describes. He is right, for ennui of
this kind is unknown in conditions of the largest personal freedom, as
in the savage state and among the vagabonds of society.

The other form of ennui arises not from external conditions, but from
those which are within. It is a species of dissatisfaction with self.
A man is generally his own stupidest companion. According to the
proverb, “Poor company is better than none;” because the poorest of
all is oneself. A curious paradox that has been noted is that the more
a man thinks about himself, the less he cares to be alone with
himself! We no longer shun solitude from the dread of bandits or
ghosts, but to escape the sight of the specters which arise within
ourselves. How many of us can boast of the “sessions of sweet silent
thought” which the poet praises as the crown of felicity? Amid the gay
throng of pleasure-seekers at Ranelagh, Dr. Johnson felt himself
distressed by the reflection, “That there was not one in all that
brilliant circle who was not afraid to go home and think.”

There is a moral virtue which the Roman philosophers called
_sufficientia_ and the Germans _Selbstgenügsamkeit_, which terms are
not at all translated by the English “self-sufficiency.” Let the word
go; the thing is what is needed. Make yourself an agreeable companion
to yourself, and this form of ennui will be known to you no longer.
This can only be accomplished by the constant and well-directed
exercise of your personal activities, and by the maintenance of a high
degree of sensibility to pleasurable impressions.

III. The search for novelty and variety of impressions.

The Art of Happiness prescribes that instead of cultivating a limited
number of pleasurable impressions up to a high degree of intensity, we
should seek a large variety, diverse in quality, moderate in
intensity, considerable in persistence. This precept, properly
understood, is consistent not only with a high, but perhaps with the
highest degree of gratification, for it is supported by another
physiological law of the greatest interest. This is, that the utmost
zest of pleasure is invariably conditioned on the entire novelty of
the sensation. This fact is so familiar that it is embalmed in common
proverbs, as that “Variety is the spice of life,” and the like. But
the deep significance and the manifold applications of these sayings
are rarely considered.

Entire novelties are within the reach of few, and come of themselves
but seldom. Fortunately, their agreeable effect can be closely
imitated by influences quite within our own control; that is, by the
remission and alternation of the pleasures already our own. This alone
will maintain the efficacy of any pleasure, for it is a sad fact that
in impressions on the nervous system, persistence can never become
permanence. Remission and reaction in all sensations are demanded by
that eternal and infinite law of Periodicity, or Rhythmical
Recurrence, which is the last and highest in the Universe of mind or
matter. This in turn enforces on us the importance of aiming for a
multiplicity of sources of pleasure, so that we may heighten their
impressions by frequent variety.

Here again we come into conflict with that cherished delusion which
makes contentment and tranquillity the chief elements of happiness.
With political economists, it often arises from a confusion of the
spheres of the State and the Individual. The State properly aims at
peace, established order, routine, and material ends; but the
Individual should seek variety and activity, he should try untrodden
paths and risk unknown crises. This alone will make him a many-sided,
strong character, responsive up to the full measure of his powers to
all impressions of natural enjoyment.

The foe he has to guard against in this joyous quest is Habit. This is
the tyrant whose iron scepter enslaves most men. The promptings of
pleasure and pain are far from being the only incentives; probably
they are by no means the most numerous or potent. The “ruling motives”
of most persons are simply the associations, customs, ideas, and aims
with which they have been longest in contact. A given mental tendency
soon becomes predominant, its easy yoke becomes adjusted to the neck,
and the man pursues his way in life without more resistance than the
ox to the wain. Vain the attempt to break his fetters and sever the
bonds of his habits. He is satisfied to reply, as the Arab to the
visitor, who would teach him a better agriculture――“Thus did my father
before me and thus my mother taught me; and in this manner shall I
continue.”

All attempts to make men happier on a large scale have been shattered
against the rock of this stubborn conservatism. Only at rare intervals
has it been riven by the shock of some mighty emotion which has swept,
tornado-like, over the soul of a nation, uprooting the tangled growths
of bigotry and routine. The only hope is that here and there an
individual will arise and say to himself, “I shall believe nothing
merely because those around me believe it; I shall do nothing merely
because I am accustomed to do it; I shall render to myself a reason
for my every decision and act.”

If some one asks, Why this invective against Habit, easy Habit, soft
as a padded chair, comfortable as an old shoe? the answer must come
from an analysis of mind. I have before shown that all true motives of
the Will are directed toward the avoidance of pain or the attainment
of pleasure. These alone are clearly conscious motives, distinguishing
between Self and Object, and therefore heightening to the sense of
individual life. Whatever we do “by habit,” on the other hand, we do,
in a greater or less degree, by what physiologists call “unconscious
cerebration,” and through the involuntary action of our nervous and
muscular systems. This automatic action of our organism is constantly
encroaching on our consciousness, submerging it, like the tide the
shore; darkening it, like the night the landscape; swallowing it inch
by inch, like the boa his prey. The struggle against Habit, therefore,
and all that Habit means, prejudice, bias, bigotry, authority, is a
struggle for life, and the nation, the society, the individual, who
succumbs in the contest is, by the very fact, bound hand and foot and
cast into utter darkness.

IV. The establishment of a proper proportion between desire and
pleasure.

Through the mouth of Hamlet Shakespeare makes the philosophical
reflection――“There is nothing either good or bad but _thinking_ makes
it so;” in other words, the value of anything reckoned in the currency
of enjoyment, lies not in the thing itself but in the strength of our
wish for it. Most of the aims of effort are like curios, whose price
is gauged entirely by the anxiety of the amateur to obtain them, and
not by any intrinsic quality.

In life there is no more useful faculty than to be able to put the
right price on pleasures. The best of prudential maxims is “Count the
cost.” The outlay of effort should be in a just relation to the return
which can be reasonably reckoned upon. A given pleasure should be
sought with an energy strictly in proportion to the gratification
which it can actually yield,――not in proportion to a false ideal of
that gratification as portrayed by the exaggerations of passion or
morbid desire. When infatuation or fascination or an over-heated
imagination leads the chase, horse and rider will be soon landed in
the ditch. Pain and disappointment ever follow an end sought in excess
of its real value. Again to quote the great dramatist, the “expense of
passion” is sure to be succeeded by “a waste of shame.”

The precept of education which is thus enforced is the regulation of
desire by reflection and deliberation. Proceed to an appraisement, as
in business affairs. Ask yourself the grounds of your desire. Is it
from experience, or merely on hearsay, and from a groundless imagining
of what the object might yield if attained? If it is from experience,
and the tasted sweet whets anew the appetite, recall the reaction and
the consequences, and if they were unpleasant, present them fully
before the bar of your judgment. If imagination alone influences you,
remember that you are playing the children’s game of “swapping in the
dark,” and are liable to exchange solid value for dross. “Depraved
affections,” observes Lord Bacon, “are false valuations.”

V. The last of the five principles stated is the crown of all of
them,――Make all pleasures a part of happiness.

I have already explained the difference between mere pleasurable
sensation and happiness in the true sense of the term. While the
former belongs to man’s animal nature, the latter is intimately
associated with the consciousness of Self. The power of
discriminating one’s Self from the rest of the universe, and
making one’s Self the subject of one’s own observation is a
faculty peculiar to man alone. There is nothing which lends him
more potent aid to accomplish this than his pleasurable
sensations. This alone imparts to them any real value in the
history of the individual or the race, and through this their
value becomes inestimable.

This has always been recognized as true of some of them; but the error
of most teachers has been that they have refused to acknowledge the
value of all pleasure to this end, the excellence of all enjoyment,
when it is brought into relation to the full nature of man. Some have
claimed that the charms derived from the esthetic and benevolent
emotions are enough to fill our lives; others advocate intellectual
joys; many preach that the religious sentiment offers all that man
needs; while counselors of an opposite tendency cry, “Eat, drink, and
be merry, for to-morrow ye die.”

All are wrong. The spirit of sound culture will recognize the whole
nature of man and the solidarity of all his parts, and will insist on
respecting that unity, if his true development is to be accomplished.
For this reason it will strive to render the pleasures of the senses
and emotions as intellectual as possible; and with not less
earnestness will aim to keep the pleasures of the intellect in touch
with the emotions and the senses. Its principle will be that the more
intimately the gratifications of sense are infused with emotion and
thought, the more they will be both purified and strengthened; and the
closer the web into which we can weave the austere joys of the reason
along with the emotions and the feelings, the more sympathetic,
wide-reaching, and ennobling will those joys become. As the ancient
mason mingled water from the sky with clay from the earth to make the
bricks wherewith to build the temple, so the permanent structure of
human progress can be erected only by combining in due proportion the
extremes of man’s delights.

A real though mysterious bond unites sense with that which is above
and beyond sense. Toward this Unknown it is ever striving, though
blindly and unconsciously. In lower forms of life this has led to that
marvelous series of transformations which, at last, have reached their
culmination in man. In him the struggle no longer expends itself in
physical changes, but frames the ideals which float before his mind,
constantly spurring him to attempt the impossible. Rest assured that
the analogy which holds good throughout all organic nature fails not
in him, its most perfect production. Somehow, by unknown ways and
under the guidance of unseen laws, his unwearying effort to discover
the invisible in the visible, the permanent in the transient, the
ideal in the real, will infallibly lead him in triumph to the final
goal of all Life. Whenever, without ulterior aim and for its own sake,
we give ourselves up to the admiration of some grand scene in nature
or masterful production of human art, we feel and recognize how near
to us, how much a part of us, is that invisible and ideal world in
which are set up the goals of man’s noblest aspirations. To unite
these opposites, to illuminate the pleasures of sense with the light
of the ideal, and, on the other hand, to capture its evanescent rays
by entangling them in material enjoyments, is the final precept of the
Art of Happiness.

       *     *     *     *     *

Anthropology, the Science of Man, is the point of convergence of all
the other sciences; and the one aim of the Science of Man is the
Happiness of man; thus the Pursuit of Happiness is the end of all
pursuits. Pope displayed the inspiration of the poet when he devoted
the final epistle of the Essay on Man to a discussion of,

  “Happiness, our being’s end and aim.”

       *     *     *     *     *

The study of Philosophy, said Socrates, is the studying how to die. I
add, that the study of Happiness is the studying how to live; and that
he who acquires either, possesses both.

       *     *     *     *     *

Rules for happiness are worth studying, even if they are no better
than the rules for writing poetry: which are said to prevent ill
poets, if they never make good ones.

       *     *     *     *     *

Fortunately, happiness is a tree with many roots. It does not depend
entirely on outward circumstances; nor entirely on temperament or
health; nor entirely on ourselves or on others; nor entirely on
prudence or study. By cultivating any one of these, the tree will bear
some fruit. So bounteous are the gifts of nature, that if we simply
reduce the evils of life to something manageable, our happiness will
often take care of itself.

       *     *     *     *     *

All history teaches that those who renounce pleasure for themselves
are least scrupulous about inflicting pain on others.

       *     *     *     *     *

Genuine pleasure has this unique trait: the more you get for yourself,
the more you provide for others.

       *     *     *     *     *

Pleasure and pain are common to all animals; and man’s most exalted
joys and sorrows bear a family likeness to these universal sensations.

       *     *     *     *     *

In a certain sense, every pleasure is a victory, every pain a defeat;
the former is allied to movements of attack, the latter to those of
defense or submission.

       *     *     *     *     *

Pains are pains to all; while there are many pleasures which are such
to but a few; though there is no reason but ignorance why they are not
shared by the many.

       *     *     *     *     *

The bliss of ignorance consists in not knowing how much we never had,
and in living unaware of the worst of our mistakes.

       *     *     *     *     *

Spiritualize your senses; the lowest of them may become first in the
kingdom of culture. Sensualize your intellect; only thus can you
attain the companionship of those noble brethren, Humanity and
Urbanity.

       *     *     *     *     *

Our happiest moments are those in which we believe we can realize our
ideals.

       *     *     *     *     *

Those who condemn the pursuit of Happiness reveal the baseness of
their own conception of it.

       *     *     *     *     *

The doctrine that we should get rid of our wants by extinguishing our
desires is suited to the clown in the story, who cut off his ears
because they were cold.

       *     *     *     *     *

Self-realization is widely different from self-manifestation.

       *     *     *     *     *

An error that persuades us we are happy is more welcome than a truth
which shows us we are not.

       *     *     *     *     *

Life is a sphere with an infinite number of sides; but, like the
terrestrial globe, to each individual it seems a plain, bounded by his
own horizon, with himself in its center.




PART II.

How far our Happiness depends on Nature and Fate.




I. _Our Bodily and Mental Constitutions._


To live happily, we must in the first place _live_. Transparent
truism, but how often forgotten! How many of our pleasures tend to
weaken life, rather than to strengthen and to lengthen it!

Some philosophers have found the sense of existence a sufficient
synonym for happiness. Sir William Hamilton expressed this opinion
with perhaps an ambiguous under-meaning when he said,――“To lead a
happy life is to live all the days of one’s life;” but Dr. Johnson,
moralizing on the learned pig, expanded the idea more clearly when he
maintained that the mere prolongation of existence is a sufficient
compensation for a very considerable amount of suffering. We see the
correctness of his observation in the multitude of examples of those
who cherish their years when poverty, old age, and disease would seem
to have robbed them of all value. When nothing else is left but life,
life alone becomes worth all else.

Self-preservation, therefore, which means the care of life and health,
is the first and a necessary condition of personal happiness. But what
a task is this!

When the child wakes to consciousness and surveys the scene around
him, he finds himself on a battle-field divided between two mighty
combatants in unremitting conflict――Necessity and Chance, the laws of
Nature and the caprices of Accident. Not even the gods, said the
ancient Greeks, can struggle with Fate and Fortune, those elemental
powers, Anangke and Tyke. What is man that he dare venture the fray?

Each individual is scarcely more than a volume of quotations from the
works of his ancestors, selected with little appropriateness to the
Essay on Life which he has himself to compose. Mysterious and
unrecorded influences extending over untold generations have combined
to make him what he is, and to endow him with a personality which he
can never escape from, nor transcend. The boy, the man, can no more
run away from his parents than he can from himself. He may renounce
and cast out the traits which he has inherited, but he cannot get rid
of them. Unbidden and unnoticed, they will slink back and abide with
him forever. They are not his servants, but belong to his family, his
clan, his race. He can change or dismiss them no easier than he can
the color of his skin or the shape of his skull.

These are the laws of Heredity. They bind the individual as with a
tether to an immovable stake. But the tether is not a fetter. It
allows him a certain freedom, so that within the limits of those laws
he can wonderfully modify himself and better his fortunes. More than
that, he can “cozen the gods,” and outwit both Fate and Fortune, if he
sets about it right. And how is that? By learning the laws of his own
nature and of the physical surroundings which environ him. Knowing
them, he can turn them to his own advantage.

Let us see what these are; and first, those which concern the bodily
and mental constitution of the individual, so far as they bear upon
his happiness in life.

Those who have studied this subject, physicians and physiologists,
draw a twofold distinction in the traits of the individual,
discriminating between those which he has by birth, and those which
can be traced to incidents in his own history after birth. Of the
former, some are “hereditary,” that is, traceable with reasonable
surety to his ancestors; and others “congenital,” meaning those which
appear to be due to incidents in his own history before birth. To this
latter curious class belongs the development of what anatomists call
“monsters;” and there are thousands such in the moral world from
allied causes, of whom the anatomist takes no heed, the whole
complexion of whose lives has been changed by some light impression at
this infinitely susceptible period.

Of hereditary traits, the most salient are those which stamp on the
individual his racial and ethnic characteristics. He is a white man or
a <DW64>, a Mongolian or an American Indian; he is, within these
limits, a Jew or a Greek, a Chinaman or a Japanese; each with his own
features, color of skin, straight or crisp hair, and all the other
marks, mental and physical, which belong to his particular race and
people. Each one of these will help or handicap him in the pursuit of
happiness.

Less prominent, but yet indefinitely potent, are those characteristics
which he inherits from his family or clan, and from his immediate
parents. To these he generally owes his stature, his physical
strength, his symmetry and beauty, or his lack of these, his
constitutional diseases, his longevity, and his language,――all mighty
agents in turning the kaleidoscopic pictures of his future life. From
this source he probably also derives that which physicians call his
“temperament,” which is in many instances the trait which decides on
his general happiness or unhappiness in life; for it is often observed
that a particular temperament descends for generations in the same
family.

The “congenital” peculiarities are those which especially mark the
individual. Sex is one of these. Physiologists now know that the human
individual commences of the neuter gender, and that the decision as to
whether it shall be masculine or feminine is an incident, or more
justly an accident, of its later life. Certain diseases,
malformations, and bodily marks are also congenital, as well as those
slight variations of the form and features which make up the physical
personality; and more than all, to the obscure and momentous period
when the spirit is folded in the womb does the individual owe his
strongest tastes and inclinations, his talents, and, when he possesses
it, the divine endowment of genius. Therefore the physicians of
ancient times established the maxim,――“_Ingenium est ingenitum_.”

With this miscellaneous stock of heirlooms, with this farrago of
festering rags and family jewels, poisoned fangs of serpents and
fragments of holy crosses, ancient formulas of withering curses and
saintly blessings whispered by a thousand generations of ancestors,
the babe is born into the world. His one duty in life is to battle
with these unseen but fateful influences, to defend his freedom
against their subtle approaches, to master their armories, and to
maintain and develop ever more and more his own separate
individuality, utilizing his inherited powers and tendencies or
destroying them, as they make for or against his own true happiness.

To accomplish this, he will call to his aid such powerful allies as
education, self-training, personal hygiene, the establishment of
desirable habits, and the assistance of trusty friends. By such aids
he can modify his own nature, and Fate cannot wholly prevail against
him. He will realize the meaning of the noble words of Buddha, the
Awakened,――“Self is the Lord of Self; who else should be the Lord?”

Let us see in some detail what he has to contend with, and how he
should set about it.

Nature is equitable. The more inflexible her laws, the wider the
liberty they allow; the stronger the rivets of her chains, the longer
they are. Thus it is that racial peculiarities, though the most
indelible of all, do not stand in the way of man’s enjoyment. They do
indeed limit the quality, but probably not the quantity, of pleasure
in life. The race which anatomists consider the lowest, the African
<DW64>s, is famous for its gayety and buoyant spirits. Danger,
poverty, even slavery, do not quench their cheery, care-free
disposition. The majority of them are like Hamlet’s friend, Horatio,
with naught but their good spirits to feed and clothe them. Little
reck they of the future. Music and song, talk and laughter, are all
they want to fill their days.

How different the American Indian! not that he is the solemn and
taciturn savage whom the romance-writers depict. In his native state
he is light-hearted, too; but there is one poison a single drop of
which embitters all his cup of joy, the poison of restriction. Lessen
his liberty ever so little, and all light is shut out of his days.
Everywhere the race is the same. Its surroundings count as nothing. In
the long Arctic night the Eskimo is blithe and carolsome, far from the
approach of the white man; while amid the glorious scenery and
Eden-like climate of Central America, the native languages have a
dozen words for pain and misery and sorrow for one with any cheerful
signification.

The white race has a greater range and a higher quality in sensation
and emotion than any other. Modern psychologists――who are in fact
physiologists――have demonstrated this by experiments. The white race
alone responds to the most delicate stimuli in art, in religion, and
in scientific thought; and probably its members alone are, as a race,
capable of the highest degrees of happiness; though single individuals
of the other races doubtless may equal them in this respect.

Let the individual of any race not despair of joy. Let him pursue it
with a firm intent and a clear understanding of what it is, and he
will surely receive it to the capacity of which his nature is capable.
The barriers of race or nation fence him off from no flowery fields or
sun-lit pastures. There are gates, if he will seek them, which open on
them all.

More ominous to his welfare are the traits he inherits from his own
family, his immediate ancestors. How true it is that a man’s worst
enemies may be those of his own household! How dreadful it is that
they may be those who love him most, who brought him into the world,
who would die for him! As in Ibsen’s terrible drama, the ghosts of the
follies of our fathers may ever hover near us, poisoning our blood,
darkening our daylight, blighting our lives, transmitting to us the
seeds of insanity, the mortal leaven of consumption, or the loathsome
virus sucked from the breasts of illicit pleasure. Who can deliver us
from the body of this death?

No one but ourselves. Here more than elsewhere it is vain to sit by
the wayside and cry to the passers-by for aid. Scant is the
consolation and slight the assistance they can proffer us. We must
ourselves search the arid plains for such meagre roses and shriveled
leaves as remain for us to twine the chaplets of pleasure. He who is
born to an inheritance of disease――and the majority are――should boldly
recognize it as his special danger, and should study the means of its
prevention. If of the serious character of those I have mentioned, he
should make it his main business to escape its inroads by choosing an
appropriate avocation, by removal to other surroundings, and by
adopting a course of life which medical science prescribes as that
most likely to postpone indefinitely its outbreak. There are thousands
of such wise men in every civilized community, who were born with
these blood-taints, but who successfully escape them,――till they fall
a victim to some other malady. Nor have these by any means the worst
part of life. The habit of constant watchfulness and forethought thus
engendered is one of the most valuable guarantees of personal
happiness; this is why among confirmed and chronic invalids we often
meet a degree of cheerfulness and even gayety which surprises us.

These beings are doubly fortunate; for they have escaped not only
their particular malady, but another not less dangerous to their own
well-being and that of those around them――a morbid valetudinarianism,
a perpetual fussiness about their own ills and ails. The victims of
this complaint are the _malades imaginaires_, constantly coddling
themselves, thinking of no one but themselves, of whom we meet an
endless number in the wealthier classes of society. It must have been
of such as these that old Dr. Johnson blurted out his rough
judgment,――“Every sick man is a scoundrel!” They usually forfeit more
than they win by such selfish concentration. It is a symptom of
disease to think constantly about one’s health. The most effectual
remedy for it is to think about increasing the comfort of others.

There is no need for me to go into details of what such a training
should be to protect one as much as possible against the development
of hereditary diseases. The precepts must be adapted to the particular
case and circumstances, and in this age Personal Hygiene is a science
by itself, with abundant and competent instructors. Its scope is not
limited to the prevention of disease, but extends to the strengthening
and symmetrical development of the whole body. No one who
intelligently pursues his happiness will omit the study and practice
of its precepts. Health is not indispensable to happiness.
Fortunately, no one condition is indispensable. But there is no other
condition which so generally and potently contributes to it.
Therefore, he who intelligently seeks enjoyment will pay early and
frequent attention to athletic culture; he will seek some healthful
and agreeable physical exercise; his posture will be erect and his
breathing full; his periods of effort will be prolonged to positive
fatigue, and will be judiciously alternated by others of changed
activity or complete repose.

The trainer of athletes lays down for his pupils a rigid discipline.
He is as far from encouraging overstrain and excessive exercise as he
is indolence. He condemns stimulants and narcotics beyond a most
moderate use; and he is solicitous about such things as sleep, and
food, and cleanliness. If his pupils find it repays them to submit to
his stringent dicta for the hope of winning a champion’s belt or a
silver medal, is it not worth while to accept the much less severe
regimen necessary to obtain the Olympian garland woven of the joys
which a sound and elastic health offers?

All that I have said on this subject applies with even greater force
to girls and women than it does to youths and men. Women, alas, as I
have before remarked, have the worser part in life. No one but a
physician sees how much of their wretchedness is owing to ignorance or
neglect of the laws of physical health. There is no excuse for this in
this day. The wicked old doctrine which taught that ignorance of their
own nature is a necessary condition of innocence in girls ought long
since to have been cast out of window. It is as false as that the
seclusion of a harem is necessary to insure the virtue of wives. In
nine cases out of ten a woman’s health in life depends on the care she
exercises between early puberty and the birth of her first child; and
this is the precise period when the prejudices of society strive to
keep her in profoundest ignorance of the laws which govern her own
bodily functions!

More delightful to any true woman than the pleasures of health or the
praise of her faculties is the adoration compelled by her beauty.
Madame de Stael regretted that she could not exchange her magnificent
powers and her literary fame for the personal charms of Madame
Recamier. She was right. Let no woman be persuaded to abate one jot or
tittle in her cult and culture of the comely in face and form. Only
cramped bigots and dull pedants cheapen the value of beauty.

Beauty is real; it is that which alone is permanent and visible; it
lurks behind a thousand masks and distorted countenances, ever
struggling to body itself forth; it is the manifestation of potent and
mysterious natural laws, which but for it would remain forever hidden
from us. Its proud power is to awaken Love with all her joyous train;
and Love means the unconscious attraction of the Ideal, the noblest
incitement to human endeavor.

These are not mere phrases. They are facts proved by the life-history
of the human race. As nations advance in civilization from the savage
condition to one of enlightenment, their ideals of physical beauty
steadily near a definite and the same conception of the perfect human
form, the underlying motive of which is the highest function and a
perfected capacity. This progress is rapid in proportion as that which
is peculiarly human in man is cultivated beyond that which is merely
animal. Not that any rigid canon of proportion or mechanical norm will
ever be attained; because the endeavor is toward the Ideal, and this
is beyond the reach of mortals.

These are the teachings of the learned in the Science of Man; they are
constantly supported by the experience of history. Beauty is and ever
has been the Desire of all Nations. For it, in all time, men have
counted as nought their honor, their gold, and their hopes of heaven.
For it, they have poured their heart’s blood on a thousand stricken
fields, and laughed at death and hell. Think you that the noblest of
the race would have thus reckoned the world well lost, and paid all
that, wisdom holds precious for a smile from the lips of loveliness,
were there not some strange and wondrous compensation, some immortal
and unearthly significance, in Beauty itself?

There is such significance, and nowhere is it so visible as in the
perfect female face and form. This is the most beautiful of all
objects in nature or art. To it we turn to gaze, forgetting the works
of the greatest masters which may be spread before us; unmindful of
the sublimest scenes which mountain and lake may combine to show us.
Nearer than anything else does it bring us to that Ideal World whose
margin forever recedes as we approach it; louder in its presence sound
the tinkling bells of that Fairyland which guards the fruition of our
sweetest hopes and dreams.

The beauty of woman has been the incentive of physical progress in the
race and the inspiration of its noblest arts. It shadows forth the
embodied ideal of humanity, and in its resistless strength binds men
as slaves to its chariot. But does it confer happiness on the
possessor? Sad and faithful is the reply of the poet,――

                    “In every land
      I saw, wherever light illumineth,
  Beauty and Anguish walking hand in hand
      The downward <DW72> to death.”

_La fatale donna di bellezza_, “the fatal gift of beauty,” says the
proverb of the Italians. Perilous is the path of mortals who walk too
near the gods. The brightest beacons are those which most attract the
foul birds of night. The men or the women who shine beyond their
fellows through the bounteous gifts of nature are the chosen targets
for envy and hatred and calumny and all their ugly crew. In the clash
of violent emotions excited by the radiance of fair faces, in the
contention of love and jealousy, despair and passion, it is rare that
the cause of it all escapes scot free. Her wisdom is also weakened by
the adoration she receives; she assumes that it is for herself,
forgetful that a passing disease or the accident of a moment may rob
her of her charms forever. She has yet to learn that those alone are
worthy of admiration to whom it is not a necessity.

Thus it happens that the _vis superba formæ_, the “proud strength of
beauty,” so often proves a fatal weakness to its possessor. American
women who have followed the fortunes of generations of belles tell me
that those distinguished for their physical charms have as a rule met
with less success and less happiness in their after life than their
plainer sisters. This is not as it should be. Regularity of features,
mobility of expression, harmony of coloring, symmetry of form, and
gracefulness of motion are the five sides of the mystic pentagram of
beauty, and, like that of the ancient astrologers, it should have
power to exorcise and banish all evil spirits, and constrain men and
demons to the willing service of ennobling joys.

A beautiful woman is the nearest approach we have to the perfected
ideal of humanity in general. When in their statues of Apollo, Adonis,
and the Hellenized Antinous, the ancient Greek sculptors portrayed
their highest conception of manly beauty, in many points they
approximated the male to the female form, recognizing in the lines of
the latter a superior artistic excellence and the consummate
expression of the ideal of the beautiful; nay, even the embodiment of
the supreme of intellectual gifts. “Something feminine,” observed
Coleridge in his Table Talk, “is discoverable in the countenances of
all men of genius.” Therefore the artists represent angels as of that
age when the male is most similar to the female,――_tra giovane e
fanciullo_, between youth and childhood, as Tasso describes the
archangel Gabriel.

Great is the value of physical culture; but let there be no
misunderstanding as to what this value is. Such culture, under
whatever title it appears, is but a means to an end. They miss its
meaning who make it an end in itself. Its sole worth is to aid in
bringing about that mental condition or process which we term
felicity, or joyousness.

This point is more easily carried in some constitutions than in
others. Much depends on what is called the “temperament,” and so much
has been written about temperaments that I cannot afford to omit a
reference to them. To be sure, they do not fill so many pages in
modern writings as in those of an earlier age; but this may be because
they are not now so well marked as they once were. Functions, like
fashions, are subject to the law of periodicity.

The four leading temperaments with their mental traits are as follows:
the sanguine, characterized by buoyant hope and strong self-confidence;
the nervous, with rapid alternations of confidence and anxiety, prone
to enthusiasm and to dejection; the phlegmatic, equally remote from
the extremes of exaltation and despair, collected, temperate, and
slow; and the bilious, inclined to take the gloomy view of events and
to dwell on their darker side.

Most people can be classed under the one or the other of these, and
the arrangement is not useless in self-culture, for it will furnish
hints as to the manner of training required to correct unwholesome
mental tendencies.

The temperament toward which they should all be modified is not
included in the list. It is the _cheerful_ temperament, that which is
lighted by the rays of reasonable hope and a confidence in one’s own
powers grounded on a knowledge of their strength.

Cheerfulness, however, is a coy favorite, and is not to be had for the
asking. It is a condition of mind which a man cannot think himself
into, nor reason himself into, nor directly acquire by an effort of
the will. No man can seat himself in his chair and say to
himself,――“Go to! I will be merry!” It can in part be secured by a
skillful disposition of the emotions at our command; but it is, in the
main, the mental result of physical processes, and the profitable
study of it must begin with these.

So very physical is it, that physiologists have undertaken to locate
its exact seat in the human body. They place it in the great ganglia
of the sympathetic nervous system, near the stomach and the heart,
where also is located the seat of the sense of general miserableness
that the French call _malaise_. No one feels happy in his head or in
his foot; but we do speak of being light of heart, as well as
heart-heavy and heart-broken. Those savage tribes who believe that the
soul dwells in the pit of the stomach are not the worst physiologists.

The mental condition in certain diseases show how correct this is.
Those which directly involve the stomach, the liver, the heart, and
the intestinal canal are always associated with undue depression of
spirits; while those which are confined to the lungs or the brain,
though of the most fatal gravity, may be connected with undiminished
cheerfulness. The _spes phthisica_, the hopefulness of the
consumptive, is proverbial among physicians, but as deceptive to them
as to others. A friend of mine, a medical man, who had fought this
disease for three years, wrote me three days before his death,
sketching a series of literary schemes which he had decided to
undertake! Another malady of similar character is a variety of
paralysis, always fatal, not uncommon among overworked business men of
middle life. The patient will never acknowledge that he is ill or
feels badly, and when so paralyzed that he cannot rise from his couch
will insist that he is in splendid health and is merely lazy! How
different from the dyspeptic, always magnifying his symptoms; from the
hypochondriac with engorged liver; or from the sufferer from heart
disease, with his long and inexplicable spells of low spirits!

The moral of these facts is evident. If we wish to have a cheerful
disposition we must begin with attention to our physical functions.
Even slight symptoms of dyspepsia, liver complaints, and disturbances
of the digestive organs must receive appropriate treatment. In this
country malarial poisoning is common, and as it spends its force on
the spleen, it is always associated with low spirits. Hemorrhoids,
which are usually connected with deficient action of the liver, and in
women many diseases peculiar to their sex, act directly in inducing a
condition of gloom and anxiety.

Of course, it is no part of my plan to suggest the proper treatment
for these ails. But it does come within its purview to offer some
hints to those who, without assignable physical cause, are subject to
periodic depression of spirits, to what we familiarly call “an attack
of the blues.”

This is generally a reaction from mental overstrain or mental
lethargy,――from the too intent pursuit of an object, or from having no
object to pursue. A life without leisure and a life without labor are
equally fatal to cheerfulness. The hurry and rush of business affairs,
the atmosphere of excitement and unrest which surrounds them, are
dangerous to a mind not extremely well poised. Not less so are the
alternate phases of gloom and exaltation which attend religious
revivals, prayer meetings, and the various manifestations of
fanaticism. “That way madness lies,” and our asylums show a heavy
percentage of inmates who have lost their reason from religious
excitement. The prolonged concentration of attention on one’s heavenly
interests is just as detrimental as on those of this world.
Self-isolation is fatal; and anxiety for self-salvation is but one of
its varieties.

While the multiplicity of rapid impressions leads to exhaustion and
mental lassitude, variety and novelty are desirable. Change of diet is
as salutary for the mind as for the body. One should have some
agreeable occupation outside of his business, to which he can turn in
his leisure moments and at the time when he quits active affairs. How
many have I seen with enough to retire _on_, but with nothing to
retire _to_! They are the unhappiest of mortals.

An occasional fit of depression can be broken by some simple measures.
The hot bath is one of these. It is highly physiological, as its
imperative summons of the nervous force to the periphery of the body
breaks up the stagnation about the ganglionic centres. For the same
reason the cold shower is excellent. No man leaves it in the same
train of thought with which he entered it. Active exercise, society,
games, and amusements will occur to all. Stimulants and narcotics are
perilous palliatives. Better try Lord Lytton’s advice, and resolutely
attack a new language; or Ruskin’s, to drive a restless horse or sail
a cranky skiff, where the least inattention to what you have in hand
means immediate danger to your life. You will have no time for the
blues.

Self-preservation, I have said, is the prime condition of happiness. A
long life, therefore, is the desire of all sane minds. Old age, that
which all abhor, is the hope of all. It alone justifies a man to
himself and before others. The sage is he whose life is a consistent
whole, and who carries out in his age the plans which he laid in
youth. They are not many; but even they deceive us by their number. On
the ocean of existence, who counts the shipwrecked? We see the votive
offerings of the saved displayed with ostentation, but who notes the
number of the drowned? In the scenery of the drama of human life, the
most conspicuous buildings are the hospitals and asylums, and into
these sooner or later most of the actors disappear.

A learned French physician has maintained that the normal duration of
human life is one hundred years; only a fifth of those born reach one
half that age. Longevity is partly a birthright; it runs in families;
but it is still more a question of occupation, mode of life, and
personal hygiene. The Jews of Frankfurt average ten years more of life
than the non-Jewish citizens, because they avoid unsanitary avocations
and observe wiser rules of diet. I know a skillful physician who
claims that he can lengthen the life of an individual a decade beyond
the average of his ancestors by a judicious system of safeguards. Such
an adviser is acquainted with the special dangers to which age is
exposed. He knows, for instance, that at seventy-five exposure to cold
is thirty-two times more dangerous than it is at thirty years of age.

The sorrows of age are usually the returns of the investments of
youth, these proving of that sort which levy assessments instead of
paying dividends. “A short life and a merry one,” is the maxim of many
a youngster. The hidden falsehood at the core of his philosophy is the
belief that happiness belongs to youth alone. I have already referred
to this dangerous fallacy. The bliss of youth, as portrayed by poets
and romancers, did not belong to the youth I had, nor does it to the
youths I know. The admiration of the early periods of life is one of a
common class of illusions. There is greater charm in beauty
half-concealed than wholly shown, in the dawn rather than in the day,
in the promise of youth rather than in the maturity of manhood.
Potentialities please more than actualities, because they excite our
imagination and release us from the fetters of facts.

He who would work securely for his own welfare will not be led astray
by the belief that any one period of life contains solely or in any
large measure the enjoyments of life as a whole. He will, therefore,
not eat to-day the bread of to-morrow. Rather he will consider the
problem of life akin to a problem of Euclid, the _quod erat
demonstrandum_ of which is reached only in the last line. He will guard
the fires of youth, that he may not in age have to sit by the cold
ashes of exhausted pleasures.

Sad indeed is the fate of those men who live to outlive themselves.
You find them in every community, and especially in those classes of
society which offer the greatest opportunities for early liberty and
enjoyment. They suffer from a kind of premature senility. They have
fallen in the struggle, though they are not visibly wounded. To them,
life has lost its zest and action its aim. Usually this is the result
of the early exhaustion of irrational enjoyments; but it may proceed
from some blow of disappointed ambition, from a violent shock to the
emotions, from the vertigo of unlooked-for prosperity, or the
discouragement of persistent adversity. The stroke has fallen, and no
voice can awake them to action again.

       *     *     *     *     *

The continuing satisfaction of an intense love of living,――that would
be a fairly good definition of happiness, and not far from one which
Fichte proposed.

       *     *     *     *     *

Few at any age could say with Fontenelle at ninety-three,――“Had I my
life to live again, I should change nothing.”

       *     *     *     *     *

What nobler compliment could be paid a man than this, which Vittoria
Colonna wrote to Michael Angelo,――“You have disposed the labor of your
whole life as one single great work of art.”

       *     *     *     *     *

No road is the right one to him who knows not whither he is going.

       *     *     *     *     *

If you _will_ stand in the rain, why pray the gods to keep you dry?

       *     *     *     *     *

Many a defeat, claimed as a victory, passes for one.

       *     *     *     *     *

Joys that are present are alone those that are real.

       *     *     *     *     *

There is wisdom in the Spanish saying, “The water of your own village
is better than the wine of Rome.”

       *     *     *     *     *

Think over this, that Walt Whitman wrote:――

  Will you seek afar off? You surely come back at last,
  In things best known to you finding the best, or as good as the
     best,
  In folks nearest to you finding the sweetest, strongest, lovingest,
  Happiness, knowledge, not in another place but in this place, not
     for another hour but this hour.

       *     *     *     *     *

The two misfortunes of life are, that we are born young, and become
old.

       *     *     *     *     *

True, the mind of a child is a plot of virgin soil; but, like this, it
is made up of strata of incalculable antiquity.

       *     *     *     *     *

The moral lessons of our youth are like our old love letters,――carefully
preserved, but never read.

       *     *     *     *     *

Time wears out masks; the old show what they are.

       *     *     *     *     *

The mellowest fruits of life should ripen in its autumn; but if the
spring had not its seeding, and the summer its flowers, what harvest
can we look for?

       *     *     *     *     *

Many a man passes his youth in preparing misery for his age, and his
age in repairing misconduct in his youth.

       *     *     *     *     *

The old story says that the flowers you gather in Fairyland prove to
be withered weeds on your return.

       *     *     *     *     *

It is folly to be youthful unless you are young.

       *     *     *     *     *

An old man who indulges in love-making had better derive his pleasure
from his own sentiments, than from the hope that they will be
reciprocated.

       *     *     *     *     *

“Old men become frivolous,” once said to me Weir Mitchell, poet,
physician, philosophic observer of life. Yes, frivolous and
sense-bound. Youth is earnest and spiritual, because it is sentient of
creative force.

       *     *     *     *     *

It is with health as with money; we wait till our stock is diminishing
before we give it careful attention.

       *     *     *     *     *

A Chinese proverb says, it is easy enough to die, but difficult to die
at the right time. Many a man has lived to destroy his own well-earned
reputation or fortune.

       *     *     *     *     *

The danger of shipwreck is less in mid-ocean than near shore.

       *     *     *     *     *

Hurry to reap ruins the harvest. To garner the grain we must bide from
the sowing till the seed-time.

       *     *     *     *     *

Pleasure is an expenditure of stored force. We must save up in order
to have a good time. Nature is a merciless usurer, and demands heavy
interest on her advances.




II. _Our Physical Surroundings._


Palpably the nearest to us of all our physical surroundings is our
clothing. Philosophers do not agree whether man originally adopted
some covering for his body out of the desire of warmth, the sense of
modesty, or the love of decoration. Enough that at present all these
motives are operative, and all are to be respected.

The first purpose of clothing is to preserve the health by keeping out
the cold. There is more in this than mere comfort. Warm clothing
economizes nervous energy, which otherwise has to be expended on the
extremities of the nerves to maintain the capillaries in activity. A
man when comfortably warm can think more clearly than when he feels
chilly. Mind and body are alike benumbed by extreme cold. Exposure to
even a moderately low temperature is dangerous to the aged and the
frail. Those who have studied the meteorology of health have
established the maxim,――“Waves of cold are waves of death.”

In his clothing the sensible man will conform to the customs and
station of society in which he moves. He will leave to his tailor the
cut of his coat. It is a sign of greater weakness to affect a fashion
of one’s own than to follow that of others. He will not be without a
dress suit in civilized lands, and will not wear top boots in drawing
rooms, as did in London a semi-celebrated American poet.

A century or two ago the dress of men was far more costly and
significant. That they have now adopted a simple and uniform style
shows that higher interests are occupying their minds. The first sign
that women are approaching the same level will be their
enfranchisement from the slavery of dress and fashion, to which so
many of them devote the best part of their lives. To woman, clothing
will always be more a question of art than utility. But most of the
modes which she now follows are caricatures of art. For them, however,
she will sacrifice not only good taste but good morals. Vanity in
dress, not the deception of men, leads the majority of fallen women to
their life. They feel more degraded by an unbecoming costume than by a
tarnished reputation.

A man changes his character with his garments. Dirty clothes excuse
dirty actions. I heard of a carpenter who was at a fire where he could
easily have carried off articles; but he explained that he had on his
best clothes, and that prevented him. The reason why sermons have so
little effect is that we lay aside our Sunday suits on Monday morning.
This is the value of uniform. Dress a hundred men alike, and they will
think alike. The character is subdued to what ’tis clothed in.
Outward, develops inward conformity. The world recognizes this, and
accepts the clothing as the index of the mind. A well-dressed man is
supposed to be a gentleman, and an officer with sword and epaulettes
is regarded as a tactician and a hero. Would you change the current of
your thoughts, change your raiment, and you will at once feel the
effect. Would you assuage your grief, lay aside your mourning.

Next to our clothing, our immediate surroundings are the room and its
furniture. A third of our lives is passed in our sleeping apartment,
and most of the remainder in sitting-room, library, or office. It is
well worth while, therefore, to give it attention. How much pleasure
it can be made to render! The genial Xavier de Maistre consumed a
month in making his celebrated _Voyage autour de ma Chambre_, and then
regretted his time was so short. What harmonies of light and color,
shade and perspective, even the humblest adornment of a room is
capable of yielding! How each article of furniture comes to take its
place in our lives and memories! The clock, the desk, the lounge,
these are what make up the sense of Home. Even the noble sentiment of
patriotism is founded upon them. To defend our hearth is its intimate
purpose, and love of our easy-chair is a large share of our love of
country. To all women and many men the most constant happiness of life
is centred in the room and its furniture. Here is the temple of the
Goddess of the Household, and her name should be Lætitia.

How much, therefore, depends on the selection of our living rooms!
They should be light, bright, dry, airy, well-ventilated, equably
warmed, appropriately furnished, free from bad odors, far from brutal
noises, screened from impertinent curiosity. All these requirements
ought to be easily obtained and at no great cost. But so little does
modern architecture consider the true comfort and the real happiness
of house-dwellers that it is rare that one can find all combined.

If he can, therefore, the wise man will prefer to build his own house.
Some will question this. Somewhere in his works――they are too
voluminous for me to look up the reference――Rousseau argues that a
philosopher will not desire a house of his own, but will prefer to
live in one that is rented. He will thus consult his independence, be
free to come and go, not engage his affections on inanimate objects,
find his fatherland wherever he may be, and the like.

For myself, I incline rather to the opinion of Abraham Cowley, less of
a philosopher than Rousseau but more in sympathy with the general
sentiments of mankind. I agree with him that “the pleasantest work of
human industry is the improvement of something which we may call our
own.” There is something in itself delightful in the mere sense of
ownership of a part of the surface of the earth. It was not mere greed
in Cosmo de Medici, who, when asked why he preferred his villa in the
Apennines to his palace in Florence, replied,――“Because there, every
foot of land I see is my own.” No prospect is quite so pleasing as
that of our own acres, and those governments are strongest which base
their institutions on the personal tenure of land.

The old proverb prescribes the chief duties of a man to be to build a
house and beget a child. The character of his child he can but
slightly control; the plan of his house is in his own hands, and his
health and happiness are deeply involved in it. “He that builds a fair
house on an ill site,” observes Bacon, “committeth himself to prison;”
and I may add, he that builds an ill house on any site, sends himself
and family to a hospital. One half of the deaths in England are from
preventable causes, and one-half of these are causes connected with
defective house building. The most perfect buildings are the gaols.
Both in England and America the best care is taken of the worst men.
The chances of life for the convict who is in prison is seven times
better than when he is at liberty. If health is the highest good, we
had better all apply to be sent to gaol.

The principal foes to fight are dampness, darkness, chilliness,
draughtiness, insufficient ventilation, sewer-gas or other poisonous
effluvia, contaminated or scanty water supply, and unhealthful
situation. Architects know little about these matters. Decorative
effects rather than sanitary perfection are what occupy their
attention. Every house-builder should be his own architect to the
extent of clearly knowing what he wants, and seeing that it is looked
after in the plans.

A beautiful feature of American life is the ease with which every one
can acquire his own home. Rapid transit facilitates this even for
those who dwell in great cities.

The possession of his own house is within the reasonable ambition of
every man, and should ever form a part of it. What if it must be a
small house? He can say with Socrates――“Lucky me, if I have friends
enough to fill it!”

“Cosiness!” how much that word implies! What pictures of intimate
delights it brings before the mind! But who can imagine it in great,
straggling mansions, or in “palace chambers far apart”? In the vast
and gloomy palace of the Escorial, the only rooms I saw which would
not induce an attack of melancholia to live in were a suite not larger
than those in an ordinary American house, in which the royal family
sought escape from the pressure of their own magnificence in their
occasional visits to this famous pile. Happiness dwells not in
spacious halls and stately apartments, and he who seeks it will not
envy their possessors.

Has a house ever been built with an eye solely to the highest
happiness of its inmates? to their health, sometimes; to their
comfort, occasionally; to the parade of their riches, constantly; but
to their happiness? I doubt. Conveniences, sanitary arrangements,
agreeable vistas, balconies, porches, fireplaces, these would not be
omitted, but would be merely the beginning of the plan. How to
conciliate isolation with social relations, how to promote harmony
between those serving and those served, how to provide that the
employments of one do not jar with those of others, these would be
some of the questions to consider. How many family troubles could be
avoided by a properly built house! Faulty architecture is more
frequently the ruin of family felicity than is heterodox doctrine.

The Greeks called man the “earth-born,” and the love of his native
place is ever one of the most responsive of his heartstrings. Some say
it is lacking in Americans, because they are so restless, but this is
an error. The poor boy who wanders away from his native village to
make his fortune does not forget the scenes of his childhood, and
should his dreams be realized, returns to the old familiar places to
leave at least some token of his affection. More than half the public
libraries in New England towns have been given wholly or in large part
by those who were to the manor born, but who had found fortune under
strange skies.

The scenery of our dreams is generally that with which we were first
familiar, and the dying old man babbles of the green fields of his
boyhood. We may admire grand views from foreign belvederes, but those
which we first saw remain unsurpassed. I crossed the ocean with an
intelligent woman returning from the Rhine and the Alps; but her
longing was for the vast, treeless prairies of Illinois, her girlish
home, where sky meets earth all round the horizon, and the soul feels
no confinement of mountains or forests.

Love of place rather than love of persons leads to the unhappy
condition of homesickness. As “nostalgia,” it becomes an actual
disease of body and mind, and men will die of it, unless allowed to
return to their native land. Haunting, imperious thirst of the soul
for the scenes of its early pleasures! Heaven cannot be imagined
without them.

The thoughtful writer, Herder, who was the first to cultivate history
as the seed-field of philosophy, was of opinion that it is less the
earth on which we tread, than the air we breathe, which gives the
peculiar charm to the scenes of childhood; meaning that it is the
climate, and the sequence of the seasons which leave the chief impress
on the budding observation of our surroundings. The eternal summer of
the tropics becomes monotonous to the native of temperate latitudes,
and the Eskimo or the Laplander in the more genial climes pines for
the short, hot summer and bitter winter to which he has been
accustomed. The desire, therefore, for more favorable climates, except
for purposes of health, is an illusion. The “summer isles of Eden”
would fatigue with their monotony and enervate by their excellence.
The enjoyment of life is independent of the thermometer, if we
determine it shall be. Sunshine within more than compensates for its
absence without.

By climate we usually mean the weather, and this unquestionably exerts
a powerful influence on human happiness. That of most portions of the
United States keeps the character which William Penn gave it two
hundred years ago――“constant in nothing but inconstancy.” Many a
project of pleasure does it mar, and many a discomfort does it create!
but in its very changeableness there is something attractive, as
always lurks in the unexpected. If we travel the same road every day
in the year, on no two are sky and landscape the same. Daily, new
scenes are offered to our sight, each with its peculiar charm, if we
take the trouble to look for it. Almost can one reason himself into an
equality with that unapproachable philosopher, the Shepherd of
Salisbury Plain, who, when asked what the weather would be on the
morrow, replied that it would be just what he preferred; and on
further inquiry as to what this might be, triumphantly answered,
“Whatever the Lord sends.”

On some temperaments, a low barometer produces a peculiarly depressing
effect. The advice often given them is to make renewed exertion at
their customary employments, and combat the disinclination with the
Will. My advice would be more agreeable; they should lay aside the
customary routine, if possible, and seek in change, recreation, and
amusements the cheerfulness which their ordinary employment refuses
them. Do not spur the jaded horse, but rather offer repose and variety
of motion.

The pressure of the atmosphere as indicated by the barometer has a
great deal to do directly with health and spirits, and therefore with
happiness. Those with a tendency to heart disease should seek a
residence at the sea level, while many who have weak lungs will
improve where the air is rarefied by a high altitude. What the Swiss
call _le mal des montagnes_ is a general sense of discomfort which
some feel a few thousand feet above the sea, and which even prolonged
residence does not entirely banish. An asthmatic can have no pleasure
in life unless he finds the climate where he can breathe with comfort.

Worst of all for personal happiness is a malarial climate, and,
unfortunately, they are very common in this country. The miasmatic
poison is peculiarly depressing to the mind, and is always associated
with debility and despondency. Malarial regions cannot be left
uninhabited, but those whose evil fortune it is to be condemned to
dwell in them have a heavy additional burden laid upon them in life.

       *     *     *     *     *

We are all more or less like those lower animals whose colors change
with their surroundings.

       *     *     *     *     *

Seek the open air; the fruits which grow outdoors are alone those
which ripen in season.

       *     *     *     *     *

He who loves his country more than he does his kind, loves himself
more than either.

       *     *     *     *     *

To die for our country is truly noble, when our country is the world
and our fellow-citizens all mankind.

       *     *     *     *     *

Love of country is sometimes a fine phrase for love of comfort.

       *     *     *     *     *

Woman, like the Emperor Tiberius, is smothered with clothes.

       *     *     *     *     *

Woman is philocosmic because she is philanthropic.

       *     *     *     *     *

Fine clothes are the stilts to individuality.

       *     *     *     *     *

A new suit is a new sensation.

       *     *     *     *     *

We do not wholly leave our bed-room all day long.

       *     *     *     *     *

Make the places you must occupy as pleasure-giving as possible.

       *     *     *     *     *

Frugality is never better displayed than in furnishing.

       *     *     *     *     *

Outdoors, let Action rule in the ascendant; indoors, Repose.

       *     *     *     *     *

Houses used to be built to protect from foes without; the need now is
more protection for friends within.




III. _Luck and its Laws._


When the wisest of the seven wise men of Greece was asked to name some
happy person, he cited several, all of whom were among the dead. “And
do you know none living who is happy?” queried his royal host, who had
expected his own name to be mentioned among the fortunate few. “Call
no man happy,” replied the sage, “until he is dead.” He forgot not
that in the temples of his native land, Tyche, Goddess of Chance, was
represented holding in one hand a rudder, for it is she who guides the
affairs of men; but in the other hand a sphere, to warn of the
instability of her favors. Like the King of Lydia, most of her modern
votaries remember her former but forget her latter attribute.

Science preaches that the progress of thought has been from a time
when Caprice and Chance were deemed everything in nature and Law was
nothing, to the present day, when Law is known to be everything and
Caprice and Chance are nothing.

Science may preach till it is hoarse, but there is something in the
human mind ever insisting that the ancient Goddess, or some other
inscrutable fatality, coerces the history of the individual; and that,
from his birth, luck, good or bad, merriment or melancholy, marks him
for her own. Rarely have I asked a man of large experience who denied
the mighty influence of the unforeseen and unforeseeable in practical
affairs. Some of the most extensive enterprises are based on the
recognition of this truth, and it is mathematically demonstrable; for
mathematicians are prepared to show that disorder itself is orderly,
and that the vagaries of chance are bound by laws, and pinned in a
straight jacket of formulas.

But what their apparatus of signs and symbols does not show, where it
completely breaks down, is precisely the only point of human interest
in the whole matter,――in its application to the individual life and
fortunes. Averages and general laws they give us; but it is also a
mathematical law that the average is never applicable to the
individual. What is true of the whole series is never true of any one
member of the series. No man who insured his life ever died at the
precise minute which, according to the actuary’s tables, terminated
his calculable expectation of life.

Let us see what, from this point of view, these computations about
luck or chance teach.

In mathematics they are included in the Calculus of Probabilities, the
discovery of which is attributed to Pascal. A gambling nobleman asked
him what are the chances of turning a red or black card in cutting the
pack a given number of times. As all the cards are either red or
black, Pascal replied that it would be expressed by the formula x/2.
In ordinary language, this means that when two events are equally
probable, they will occur equally in the long run; and in practical
affairs, when we neither know nor suspect things are unequal, we must
assume them to be equal.

On these simple principles all calculations of chances, to be worth
anything, must be based. But they are not so simple as they sound.
Pascal’s formula, like all formulas of the higher mathematics,
expresses an abstract truth only, and one that can never be realized
in fact. The longer the run, the more certain will it be that the two
events never will occur equally; and the more frequent will be long
series of the recurrence of one or the other.

Turning aside from abstruse calculations, which can be readily found
elsewhere by those who would like to see them, let us inquire as to
the practical results of this Logic of Chance when applied to the
fortunes of the individual.

These observed and calculated results establish the following
interesting rule:――In matters of pure luck, about two-thirds of any
given number of persons will come out substantially even, in any large
number of trials; of the remaining third, about one-half will be
noticeably lucky, and the remaining one-half noticeably unlucky. Thus,
of six who venture, four will have no special fortune, good or bad;
one will be quite “in vein”; one quite “out of vein.”

Suppose the players are thirty-six, and we select the lucky six, and
pit them against each other, as in “progressive” games; the same law
will hold good, one coming out noticeably better, one noticeably worse
than the rest; and so on indefinitely, the number of the extremes
diminishing at the rate of six to one at each new trial.

This is the Law of Luck; but it is obvious that it leaves luck, good
and bad, a real fact; and among a million men, or in a great city like
New York or London, we must find extraordinary examples of
“sequences,” both of the favors and the frowns of fortune; not in
gambling only, but in those thousands of accidental events which make
up the welfare or misery of personal experience.

All the moralists I have read on the subject seem to blink and stagger
at this obvious and necessary conclusion,――that the history of many
individuals is and must be enormously controlled, in spite of any
efforts of their own, by pure luck. In cutting the cards twenty times
in succession, about twenty people in a million will cut red every
time and another twenty will cut black every time; and so it will be
with all other matters of pure chance in life. There is no use in
trying to dodge this certain result of a sum in simple division. We
must count it in, in all plans and calculations for success and
happiness in our individual life.

The important question is, what value must we assign to it?

Here is where men make several frequent and disastrous errors.

The most common is an error in arithmetic which the little I have
above said on the calculus of chance should be enough to correct. It
is putting faith in their good luck, or falling into discouragement
from their bad luck. Each is equally silly. A sequence of any kind of
luck does not offer the slightest presumption that it will continue.
The chances remain precisely as at the beginning, and are about six to
one against the continuance of either extreme in the same individual.
In matters of pure chance no sustained coincidence in either direction
adds the least probability to its continuance. This is what is so
difficult for men to believe; and so it comes about that faith in good
luck is the source of most bad luck. A “run of good luck” has wrecked
the lives of more men than has the repetition of disasters.

The reason for this is easily shown. The general rule in life is that
a man’s prosperity is conditioned closely by the amount and kind of
his knowledge, and his skill in the use of it. But the man who “trusts
to luck” distinctly renounces the advantages of knowledge, and builds
his hopes on his acknowledged impotence to influence the results. He
abandons himself to the current of events, and makes no effort to look
forward and see whether it will suck him into a whirlpool, or land him
on some sunny shore. Scarcely any state of mind could be fraught with
greater peril to his future.

We have the sayings, “dumb luck” and “a fool for luck;” and the
Italians their proverb that one must have a little of the fool in him,
_un poco di matto_, to be lucky. Most men are fools, so it is
inherently probable that the lucky man will belong to the majority;
but beyond that, _his_ folly is conspicuous who bases his hopes of
fortune rather on luck than on labor and forethought. The immorality
of gambling and its ruinous influence on the happiness of life lie in
the fact that it disclaims as useless every precept which prudence,
skill, and knowledge lay down as essential to individual success.

It is mathematically certain that some people will have an astonishing
succession of fortunate experiences which they have nowise aided in
bringing about, ripe plums dropping into their mouths from invisible
trees. They are popularly called “lucky fellows.” But the ancient
Greeks, with that wonderful acumen in practical affairs which was
their own, considered them peculiarly dangerous associates, to be
avoided as partners in regular business, scarcely safe to associate
with as companions. When Polycrates, King of Samos, was crowned with
such repeated successes that it seemed as if the very gods might envy
him, his friend, the King of Egypt, advised him to throw his most
precious jewel, a wonderfully carved signet-ring, into the sea; and
when this was brought back the next day by a fisherman, who had found
it in the belly of a fish that had swallowed it, the King of Egypt
withdrew his fleet and severed his treaty; for he knew some dreadful
disaster awaited such unheard-of fortune; and it soon came when
Polycrates fell into the hands of his enemy, and was crucified alive
on the Asian strand.

The story is probably a fable; but its moral is an eternal truth. The
hour of prosperity is ever dangerous; but when the prosperity has come
without labor or effort or forethought, it is nearly always fatal.
Unexpected success enervates the will and fosters illusions of the
mind. The ancients represented the goddess Fortuna as proffering a cup
of intoxicating wine to her favorites. Either they recognize their
success as the result of pure chance, and persuade themselves that
they are fortune’s favorite children, and can safely hazard any risks;
or their vanity leads them to attribute what was the result of chance
to their own miraculous sagacity, and they thus magnify to a dangerous
degree their own capacities. Either conclusion leads them surely on
the downward road to ruin.

Nowhere is this mental debility which seizes the believers in luck
more absurdly shown than in the return to primeval superstition which
it brings with it. The gambler, in his faith in caprice and chance,
sinks to the level of the primitive savage, and accepts the
superstitions of that level with equal readiness. The most cultivated
habitué of Monte Carlo has his fetishes; he watches for signs and
omens; he is as much the slave of auspicious or inauspicious auguries
as an Australian cannibal. Pitiable retrogression of the human
intellect! What absurdity will he not commit to “break the run of the
luck” when it is against him! He will turn his chair thrice around; he
will avoid playing if a red-whiskered man opposite him stakes; he will
go to his hotel and change his coat. He knows that every principle of
right reason and sound logic teaches that events cannot be modified by
actions in no way relating to them, but he quietly renounces reason
and logic as his guides!

Surely no man who is engaged in the intelligent pursuit of happiness
will put himself in that position! I do not forget the pleasure of the
game. That will be considered on a later page. But there is no need to
argue that a pleasure which leads to the habitual disregard of reason
as a monitor cannot be trusted as a permanent contributor to
happiness.

One important practical point remains to be noted. Neither in the
gambling room, nor outside, is there half so much mere luck in affairs
as most people imagine. The cards are stacked, the dice are loaded,
the balls are weighted. Only the gulls believe the game is fair.
Shrewd men in business transactions like to conceal their hands, and
persuade their clients and associates that much is the result of
accident which they themselves have brought about. The plan has many
advantages, and plays successfully on the most responsive chords of
human weakness. It is said that the late Baron Rothschild of London
declined to embark in an enterprise unless its promoters were known as
lucky men. Do not imagine that he was governed by any foolish
superstition. He knew, perhaps better than any one, what is the real
significance of constant luck in the stock market; and would have been
the last to have accepted it in the sense of the guileless gambler.

Much that in the lives of others we are apt to attribute to luck turns
out on closer examination to be the natural though infrequent result
of certain cultivated qualities. I have heard of several persons who
have had handsome legacies left them by strangers in unexpected
acknowledgment of kindness shown. Uniform courtesy is almost sure to
be followed sooner or later by some such reward. People who are what
we call “quick-witted,” whose judgment is cool and action prompt, are
apt to be lucky even in misfortune. William of Normandy, landing for
the conquest of England, tripped and fell on the sand. It was an evil
presage, and his soldiers shrank back in terror. But William, seizing
a handful of the soil, cried――“Thus I grasp this earth, and, by the
splendor of God, I shall keep it.” With this he turned the gloomy
portent into one the most auspicious. Moderate luck with good sense
will repair any blunder, while folly will spoil the best of chances.
“Fortune favors the bold,” simply because they have the courage to
act; but she rarely favors them when they act without knowledge and
prudence. When Shakespeare in the familiar passage says, “There is a
tide in the affairs of men, which taken at the flood leads on to
fortune,” he assumes that the fortunate man knows when flood-tide
arrives.

As we are thus often deceived in the lives of others, so we are almost
as frequently the dupes of our own experience. It is not easy to
decide, concerning our successes and failures, which are owing to luck
and which to ourselves. Confucius advises those who fail to follow the
example of the archer when he misses the target, and examine first the
instruments employed, and then themselves, as the cause of failure is
likely to be in one or the other. Some minds are more exhilarated by
gains than they are depressed by losses; others deplore losses more
keenly than they enjoy successes; few estimate both at a just relative
value.

Even the very unlucky should feel some cheerfulness when he reflects
how in modern times we have learned to conciliate the Fates, and
compel even the most adverse destiny to drop the ugliest of its masks.
This we accomplish through the various forms of _insurance_, all of
them based on the study of the very caprices of Fortune herself.
Marvelous example of mind setting at nought the threats of brute
nature! The very disasters before which our ancestors bowed most
hopeless and most helpless, are those whose attacks we dread the
least. Hail and lightning, storms on the ocean and fire in populous
cities, we read about with small concern providing our property is
well insured. By the same process we can protect our children from
poverty and our own old age from want. Beneficent discovery, which in
its varied forms has added incalculably to the happiness of man by
freeing him from the terrors of the unknown, and providing him with a
shield behind which he can afford to smile at the gloomiest frowns of
Fate!

Subtler than any beast of the field is man, and filled with Promethean
courage to rob the gods themselves! But behind the impenetrable veil,
through which he sees not even darkly, are powers who smile in
derision at his attempts to free himself from their eternal mastery.
No logic can explain and no calculus compute the workings of their
mysterious ways. Against the elemental wrath of fire and water man can
guard himself; but against the results of the most thoughtless of his
words or the slightest of his actions he has no protection, for he has
not and cannot form the least idea of their consequences. Here Destiny
rules undisputed and supreme.

Such reflections led the great Goethe in his old age to dwell more and
more on the illimitable influence of trifling events, _bedeutende
Kleinigkeiten_. Dull critics have misunderstood and some of the
dullest have even made merry about his insistence on this pivotal
truth in the history of every individual and in that of the world. The
fate of nations has ever been decided by the most trivial occurrences.
Cæsar, going to the Senate, refused to read a letter which was handed
him, saying, “Business for to-morrow.” Had he opened it, the greatest
empire that ever was would have had a different story to transmit to a
different posterity. One summer morning the pretty Arleta, daughter of
a Norman butcher, tripped down to the brook to wash her mother’s
soiled linen. Had she waited a few minutes later, Robert the Devil
would have already passed, and neither their son, the bastard William
of Normandy, nor his thousands of knights would have set their iron
heels on English soil. Louis XVI stops at St. Ménéhould to eat a pig’s
foot, and the great and famous line of the Bourbons of France is
extinguished by that single dish.

These are celebrated examples. But the thoughtful man will recognize
in his own life and in the lives of those around him how they have
been altered, directed, completely transformed by such slightest of
incidents. His decision to pursue this or that avocation, that as to
where he should settle, the first meeting with her who is his wife,
the conversation which led to such or such an investment of the first
importance, these, the most momentous actions of his life, turned on
such casual and insignificant incidents that it makes him shiver to
think of it! In such moments he is ready to exclaim,

  “We do confess ourselves the slaves of chance
   And flies of every wind that blows.”

The prime motors of the thought of the world have not been the
ponderous tomes of schoolmen nor the decrees of councils and
universities. What, asks a philosophical historian, were the two most
important events in the intellectual history of England during the
seventeenth century? The Paradise Lost? The King James’ Version? No.
One was the commitment of a strolling tinker to Bedford Jail; the
other the decision of a distempered youth to make himself a coat of
leather and go to live in a hollow tree. The one gave us the
“Pilgrim’s Progress;” the other the immortal doctrine that faith, the
true faith, “finds center everywhere,” and cares not to fix itself in
form.

“Slaves of Chance!” Of Chance? Have I the right word? Is it Chance
which through millions of years has steadily guided the increasing
purpose which runs through all nature, which has multiplied the organs
of animals and widened the minds of men with the progress of the suns;
which has disabled the armies of kings by the weaponless words of a
peasant; which has confounded wisdom by folly and foiled strength by
weakness; never anywhere losing sight of the goal, unseen of men but
surely divined, toward which tends the Motion of the World?

Chance? No. But by what other name shall I name it? Shall I take
refuge in the jargon of the pulpit and call these “special
providences?” Helpless evasion of the question! Impotent effort to
distinguish between the special and the general designs of the
Designer, obscuring the one central point to be kept in sight, that
the special is the general and the general the special.

But why seek a name? A name becomes a fetish as much as a stock or a
stone, and men bow down to it and worship it with as much abasement of
their better natures. Enough, if in the fates of mighty nations and in
each lightest act of the individual life we recognize the same
Directing Force, invisible but nowise unintelligible, rather speaking
with sun-clear words to our enlightened reason of conscious purpose
and definite intention, to which the iron laws of Nature and the wild
vagaries of Chance are ductile instruments and obedient servants.

This is the ultimate expression of abstract science and of that solid
philosophy which is built on the inductive study of both nature and
man. Its lesson to the individual is, that he is neither the helpless
creature of necessity nor the slave of chance; that he is master of
his immediate action, but of its consequences he is not master; that
there are unseen forces at work arranging the incidents and accidents
of his life, and these forces he can in no wise control; but if he is
alert and diligent they cannot entangle his own individuality in the
mesh of events, he can rise superior to them, can be _himself_, and
win happiness to some degree in any surroundings; and he may go
forward in the sublime and certain confidence that his existence is an
essential part of an eternal plan, which asks neither faith nor
authority for its recognition, for it is the logical condition of the
very reason by which he knows that he is Himself and not another.

       *     *     *     *     *

The calculus of probabilities has already destroyed the gods; if it
could rule out the unexpected, it would promote man to their seats;
but the fleshless face of old Time wears a perpetual though silent
grin.

       *     *     *     *     *

Fortune-tellers are put in jail because they deceive; they should be
hanged, did they tell the truth. How dull were life, could it be read
ahead! Only a weak nature, such as his, would say with Hartley
Coleridge, “Happiness is the exclusion of all _hap_, that is, chance.”
More virile are the words of Charles James Fox, inveterate gambler
that he was, “The next best thing to winning is to lose.” The
uncertainty of the future is the only stimulus to exertion, and its
obscurity is the source of our chief delights.

       *     *     *     *     *

Always expect a change of luck. Then, if it is from good to bad, you
will be prepared for it; and if from bad to good, you will have
enjoyed the pleasure of expecting it, as well as its arrival.

       *     *     *     *     *

“Give your son luck and throw him in the sea,” says a Spanish proverb.

       *     *     *     *     *

There are men who succeed through their misfortunes rather than their
good fortunes.

       *     *     *     *     *

People regard bad luck as a kind of injustice. They secretly say with
Louis XIV, when his armies were defeated in Flanders, “Has God
forgotten all I have done for Him?”

       *     *     *     *     *

The ancients reckoned a man’s luck, good or bad, among the gifts with
which he is endowed by nature.

       *     *     *     *     *

In very strong characters there is something which eludes analysis and
defies definition, the very goad of destiny, driving them on their
allotted paths with unrelenting and inevitable impulse. This is what
the ancient Greeks, and among the moderns especially Goethe,
recognized as the “demonic force.” It endows a life with dramatic
unity and historic completeness.

       *     *     *     *     *

Fate lies in fetters, so she no longer rules the stage.

       *     *     *     *     *

The folly of some men turns out better than the foresight of others.

       *     *     *     *     *

With Courage and Civility as allies you can often take captive
Good-luck.

       *     *     *     *     *

He who has well considered all the chances is prepared for the worst.

       *     *     *     *     *

Because one cannot see ahead clearly, should he put out his eyes?

       *     *     *     *     *

The captain who prefers trusting to luck to taking an observation is
not the man to sail with.

       *     *     *     *     *

Bacon advises to use such as have been lucky because of the confidence
they breed in others and the effort they will make “to maintain their
prescription.”

       *     *     *     *     *

The first principle of success in the game of life is to be willing to
lose. The player who will not sacrifice his pawns will soon have his
king in check.

       *     *     *     *     *

Keep your wits about you. In the immediate exigencies of life a full
pocketbook is more useful than a fine bank balance.

       *     *     *     *     *

Do you ever ask yourself why you expect good fortune to come without
effort and bad fortune to stay away without precautions?




PART III.

How far our Happiness depends on Ourselves.




I. _Our Occupations, those of Necessity and those of Choice._


In one of his novels, Emile Zola describes a conversation between the
workwomen of a Parisian laundry. The subject was, what each would do
if she had ten thousand francs a year. They were all of one mind. They
would do just nothing at all!

This washerwoman’s ideal of happiness has also commended itself to
various philosophic minds. “I have often said,” writes Pascal, “that
all misfortunes befall men because they do not know enough to stay
quietly in their own rooms.” What puzzled him was that men will make
the most toilsome efforts to secure a period of repose; and as soon as
they obtain it, they weary of it and demand action. He might have
learned from this the fallacy of his own definition.

The genial Herder taught that simplicity and repose are the two valves
of the shell that secretes the pearl of human felicity; but he
neglected to add that it must be the simplicity of aims combined with
a multiplicity of means; and repose enjoyed merely as a preparation
for renewed activity.

The true doctrine is that Labor, systematic, effective, congenial
Labor, is not only a necessity, it is the source of the highest
enjoyment to men. The ancients were right when they said the gods sell
all pleasures at the price of toil. “Function in healthful action” is
the definition which the modern physiologist gives of the feeling of
pleasure; and he but translates into prose the poetic expression of
the old Greek. The elements of true happiness must be sought in
activity, not in repose; and it is high time that the world and the
wiseacres found it out, and ceased singing peans to idleness and
cursing the necessity of work.

Most men and a great many women have to work for their living. They
usually accept the necessity with discontent and with envy of those
who are idle or are in other pursuits. The farmer thinks he would have
done better to have gone to the city. The lawyer regrets that he did
not study medicine. As in Dr. Johnson’s story:――

“Surely,” said Rasselas, “the wise men to whom we listen with
reverence chose that mode of life for themselves which they thought
most likely to make them happy.”

“Very few,” replied the poet, “live by choice. Every man is placed in
his present condition by causes which acted without his foresight, and
with which he did not always co-operate.”

In this country most men select for themselves the occupation which
they pursue for a livelihood; but I doubt whether the freedom in their
choice makes them more contented with it. The root of their discontent
lies deeper than is suggested in Dr. Johnson’s philosophic tale, and
its removal, so indispensable to personal happiness, must be sought
for elsewhere than in still wider license of choosing.

So far as either happiness or success is concerned it makes no
difference, in nine cases out of ten, what business or profession a
young man adopts, so that it is suitable to his education and social
position. The rare exceptions are where there is some strong natural
bent or aptitude; and even then the pursuit of it is more likely to
bring enjoyment than money. Men are about equally fitted by nature for
all the ordinary avocations of life, and the choice of a business is
less important than is generally believed.

That is not where the secret of success and happiness lies. It lies in
learning to practice one’s trade or profession as an art, to like it
for its own sake, to derive a considerable portion of our pleasure
from its pursuit, to have, as the French say, our heart in it, _Avoir
le cœur au métier_. But how is this possible, one will ask, with the
drudgery of the counting house, or the mill, or the harvest field, or
the Court of Quarter Sessions? It is possible with any avocation, if
one will take the trouble to think about it as one of the manifold
branches of human industry, to study its relations to other branches
and to the lives and fates of human beings, to try to improve it, and
to learn its attractions for those who do like it, and endeavor to
enter into their feelings. Every occupation has some such attractions
and some such possibilities. Those who are willing to see and seize
them are those who derive both solid enjoyment and substantial rewards
from their work.

Another secret lies in the cultivation of a sort of analogy or harmony
between our mental disposition and the occurrences and surroundings in
which our obligatory labor places us. This is quite within our own
power to effect by the voluntary control of our thoughts. Why busy our
imaginations and disturb our minds with dreaming of the pleasures of
foreign travel when we know we have to stay at home and work ten hours
a day? Far better occupy ourselves with the interests around us and
the easily attainable pleasures within our reach. Have no fear that
this course is narrowing or lowering. There are no nobler games than
those which can be played on any village lawn, and the hyssop on your
garden wall, could you read it, would teach you the laws of all
organic nature.

The considerations which should have weight in the choice of avocation
are less those of capacity or inclination, since these differ little
and can readily be cultivated, than those referred to on an earlier
page which relate to health, bodily and mental. It is not necessary to
be very clever to succeed in business; only a little more clever than
those around you. But it is necessary to have your health; for in the
struggle for bread, the weak are thrust to the wall without remorse.
No one who chooses wisely will select a business which will aggravate
an hereditary or acquired malady. It is more satisfactory to be
honor-man of a lower class, than come in at the tail-end of a higher
one.

There are also certain mental disqualifications which apply especially
to the professions. William Hazlitt objected to all professions which
depend on reputation, because this is “as often got without merit as
lost without deserving;” but this is less the case now than it was
formerly. The point is rather a mental unfitness for the work
required, a state of things which may exist with plenty of ability.
The politician with an instinctive shrinking from publicity, the
lawyer who has an aversion to argument, the physician who is unable to
show sympathy and interest where he feels none, may succeed in his
profession, but he will scarcely enjoy it.

Intense application to an occupation is a common cause of distaste for
it and unhappiness in it. Such concentration is nearly always
needless, and is often fruitless. The most brilliant fortunes have not
been the products of hard work, but of shrewd planning. The sweetness
of the chimes does not depend on the violence of the ringing, but on
the skill of the bellman. I had a friend who was brought up a broker,
but remained a philosopher. He used to say that energy in business is
the most common cause of failures. He referred, of course, to that
exclusive and persistent zeal which is pretty sure to end by
enfeebling the body and exhausting the mind.

Dissatisfaction with one’s lot sometimes arises from over
conscientiousness,――a rare disease, I confess, in business circles,
but I have met a few cases of it. “Always try to do your best,” is one
of several hundred copy-book maxims which hypocrisy pretends are
necessary to success, but which common sense and practical life
quietly ignore. Very much less than your best will often answer the
purpose, and the rope that reaches is long enough. I have witnessed
considerable distress, especially among young men, because their books
of account were not so immaculate, or their press-articles so studied,
as they might have been by greater toil; yet they were good
enough,――and good enough is good.

At the best, making one’s living is often a sad affair. Business life
is like a dinner at a crowded third-rate hotel, ――one’s clothing is so
torn in the struggle for place, and there is so much dirt to eat
before the dessert is served, that either the appetite turns to
nausea, or its satisfaction is followed by indigestion. Hence so many
able men prefer permanent positions on small salaries to embarking in
affairs on their own account. Many a lawyer will give up a large
practice to become a judge on one-third of the income. Politics in the
United States is, as a business, notoriously unsafe, but the
attraction of fixed salaries overcrowds it with aspirants. The dream
of the Socialists is for all citizens to be salaried. Individual
effort, however, alone insures general progress; not to dispense with
it, but to favor its pleasurable development, is the real social
problem.

The true aim of Occupations of Necessity is to provide us time, not
for repose and inaction, as most moralists teach, but for Occupations
of Choice. We call these our recreations, amusements, pastimes,
favorite studies, hobbies, fads, if you please. In these lie the
mainsprings of our felicity; and their character reveals pretty
clearly the measure of our capacity for happiness, and the degree of
our mastery of its theory. If we pass our leisure in cultivating
delusions and pursuing inanities, our enjoyment is that of the insane
and the idiotic, and arises not from the health, but from the disease
or debility, of our minds. Yet how many men, skillful in securing the
means of pleasure, are witless in the use of it!

“Those are the best recreations,” says old Thomas Fuller, “which,
besides refreshing, enable men to some other good ends.” His words,
though they sound well, are only half-wise. To enjoy to the utmost any
favorite pastime or study, it should be pursued for itself alone, and
with no ulterior purpose or hope in view. “’Twere to cramp its use, to
hook it to some useful end.” Pleasure is nobler than profit, enjoyment
is higher than utility, whatever political economists or pulpit
orators say to the contrary. I know some men who always explain their
relaxations as a part of their serious lives; and others who, if
detected in an act of benevolence, hasten to show that it was prompted
by their self-interest; of the two, I admire the latter more.

       *     *     *     *     *

Success is another name for Perseverance. When Newton was asked how he
reached his great discovery, he replied, “By making it incessantly the
subject of my thoughts.”

       *     *     *     *     *

Happiness follows success, provided the latter is rightly achieved and
received.

       *     *     *     *     *

A contented spirit is merely one which pleases itself with little
effort. Contentment differs from Happiness, as repose from recreation.

       *     *     *     *     *

For most, it will be easier to learn to like what they have to do,
than to find the chance of doing what they like.

       *     *     *     *     *

To teach what they do not know, and to live by a trade that they do
not understand, are feats that many are surprised that they cannot
perform.

       *     *     *     *     *

All paths seem rough to the bare feet of those who are used to wearing
shoes.

       *     *     *     *     *

Would you have pleasant yesterdays and welcome to-morrows, let to-day
be busy and confident.

       *     *     *     *     *

You may pound away with the hammer, but if you are not driving a nail,
you will break instead of building.

       *     *     *     *     *

Most divers bring up mud; but few, pearls.

       *     *     *     *     *

The honey which we gather ourselves tastes the sweetest.

       *     *     *     *     *

The measure of value of work is the amount of play it provides for;
the measure of value of play is the amount of work there is in it.

       *     *     *     *     *

Play-time should be perfecting-time; the use of leisure hours is to
get rid of the lees of life.

       *     *     *     *     *

Before all days are made holidays, all men should become heroes.




II. _Money-making, its Laws and its Limits._


There are some prayers which belong to the universal Religion of
Humanity, and none more so than this, which is found in the oldest
prayer-book of the Aryan race, the Rig Veda,――“O Lord, prosper us in
the getting and the keeping!” “To make money” is certainly the “soul’s
sincere desire” of most citizens of the world at the present day, and
nowhere is it more fervently uttered than in this country.

This is no discredit. So far as we can trace the history of man from
the Old Stone Age upward, the one efficient motive to his progress has
been the acquisition and preservation of property. This has been the
immediate aim of all his arts and institutions and the chief incentive
to individual exertion. The time may come――indeed, there are signs of
its approach――when nations will consciously aim at some other than a
property career, and individuals will perceive that the purpose of
riches is something else than to offer facilities for their further
increase or for inglorious ease.

In this devotion to the accumulation of property men have not been led
astray by what Shakespeare so magnificently calls――

                      “The prophetic soul
  Of the wide world, dreaming on things to come.”

Material resources are the indispensable requisites to progress. The
miseries of poverty are manifest, and there are none greater. The
utterly poor man is condemned to servitude and suffering, the woman to
degradation. The imperative demands of the animal wants quench the
finer elements of character, and the brutal stamps out the human in
the desperate struggle for existence.

What wonder that the pauper turns in bestial fury against the rich,
who flaunt before him a superfluous luxury? But his passion springs
from his ignorance.

Wealth is no longer “spoils,” the product of robbery; rather may it be
called the reward paid by society for services rendered humanity. It
is frequently the booty won in some victory over the elements of
nature or of self, and by the practice of those maxims which make men
stronger and more useful to those around them. To the possessor it
supplies the leisure necessary to the cultivation of his nobler
faculties and to the highest of duties――self-development.

The terms “wealth” and “riches” are vague, and to understand the
relation of property to personal happiness, which is my present theme,
we must define them closer.

The time has gone by when either love is satisfied to live in “a cot
beside the hill,” or a philosopher in a tub. Both prefer to possess a
house in a city street and a cottage by the sea; which is a sign that
both the philosophy of love and the love of philosophy have improved.
The affectation of despising riches――which never was anything but an
affectation――is no longer good form, even among sages.

Let us count what riches give.

The list is short and it is pleasant reading. Riches supply us with
the food and drink we like, clothing, shelter, and surroundings to our
taste, means of warmth and light, the services and to some extent the
companionship of those we choose, and especially leisure and means to
pursue our “occupations of choice.”

These are the immediate benefits we derive from riches, and
practically there are none others. Political economists have therefore
called these “real” or “effective” riches, to distinguish them from
“potential” or “productive” riches, by which latter they mean property
or capital invested with the object of supplying “effective” riches,
without personal effort on the part of the owner.

In looking over the list of “effective” riches, one sees that they are
all very desirable, and perhaps, I may as well say, essential to
personal happiness. I am sure nine-tenths of the civilized world will
agree with me. About that, the discussion will be short; but about how
to obtain them, that inquiry is not to be disposed of so quickly.

We are now talking business. Let us be practical. _Les affaires avant
tout._ Just how much a year do I need to be rich? Here I make an
extraordinary discovery, comparable only to that of the Fortunate
Isles, where apple trees bore fruits of gold; or the valley of Sinbad
the Sailor, where the common pebbles were rubies and diamonds. On
turning to that list of “effective” riches, I perceive that very
little of it has to do with _things_, and very much of it with _me_.
It is based on what _I_ like, prefer, choose. If, like the Emperor
Nero, I cannot be satisfied with less than peacocks’ brains and
nightingales’ tongues for dinner, I must have the revenues of an
empire; but if I am content with bread and beans, with a shanty to
keep out the wind and a slop-shop suit for warmth, then a few
fifty-cent fees a day――I happen to be a doctor――will make me rich as a
Rothschild.

Marvelous discovery! beatific vision! only, at the moment of utmost
complacency, calm reflection, like a chill wind, “disencharms the late
enchantment.” My tastes are not my own. They belong to my parents and
my race. I cannot help it that I was born with a thin skin, which
requires fine silk next it to be comfortable; with a queasy stomach,
that demands delicate dishes; with a thirst for remote and useless
learning, which must have expensive books. So from this time forth I
flout at and deride that solemn prig of antiquity, whose name I am
glad to have forgotten, who taught that there are two ways of getting
rich, each equally satisfactory, but one much easier than the
other――the one to diminish our wants, the other to increase our
incomes. I have no better opinion of his teaching than had Malvolio of
the doctrine of Pythagoras, that “the soul of his grandam might haply
inhabit a partridge;” and, really, which of the two the antiquated
mentor thought the easier I cannot imagine. To me, it has been the
latter.

Money, therefore, we must have.

Her physician said of Cleopatra that she had “pursued conclusions
infinite, of easy ways to die.” The expression might be used of many a
modern schemer with reference to getting wealth. But alas! I am
afraid, of the thousands of schemes, that of the dry, unimaginative,
political economists is the only one worth mentioning; and that is
summed up in the hateful word――Economize! or, as they put it in their
stiff dialect,――“Diminish the consumption of your 'effective’ riches,
in order that you may add the surplus to your 'productive’ riches, or
invested capital.”

Some of them are even meddlesome enough to lay down exact rules as to
how much one should put aside from an annual income and securely
invest, in order to meet the demands of what they call “an enlightened
prudence.” This, they say, should be one-fourth of such income, and
they add that if this with its increment is continued for about
five-and-twenty years, the return from your “productive” riches will
then be sufficient to supply you with the amount of “effective” riches
to which you have been accustomed, without further labor on your part;
and you can quietly sit in the chimney corner and live in bliss all
the rest of your days, like the prince in the fairy story. This is a
page, therefore, good for young married people to read who are
starting out in life and have their fortunes to make, and want to
“retire” at their silver wedding.

Such slow work will not suit the energetic young man whose
determination is to get rich quick and have a good time while he is
about it. He has no occasion to go back to antiquity for his two ways
of succeeding, and he proposes to use them both as strings to his bow,
so that by one or the other he will drive his arrow into the bull’s
eye of fortune’s target. Speculation! Advertising! These are the words
of power with which he will enslave the spirits which guard the hidden
pots of gold. He is well aware that a bit of red flannel is bait
enough for many fishes, and that in angling false flies catch more
trout than real ones. The value of knowledge to him is measured by the
ability it gives to detect the ignorance of others and to take
advantage of it. His plans, like those of Cardinal de Retz, are so
laid that, though they fail, they will bring in some return. He will
manage to secure a commission even on the expenditures he makes for
his pleasures. Such a character, and there are many such in our
country, often enough succeeds in his ambitions.

I was in active business for twenty years, and I made the discovery
that the excellent precepts which all are taught in infancy and
continue to praise in after years undergo certain modifications when
it comes to practical life “in the street.” Once I amused myself by
writing them out as I found them really observed, and I am inclined to
insert a few specimens, which I will call


  NEW LAMPS FOR OLD.

  Not how business should be done, but how others do business, is
  the proper study.

  The brighter your virtues shine, the more fish will be
  attracted within reach of your gig.

  Always praise veracity and honesty; they are useful qualities
  in others.

  The louder you condemn dissimulation, the less you will be
  suspected of it.

  Be virtuous; nothing so enables you to appear superior to those
  around you.

  If you are stingy, do not pretend to be generous; the effort
  will betray you.

  When people express surprise at your meanness, it shows that
  you must have established a reputation for liberality.

  Punctuality is excellent; but the man who comes last to an
  engagement is the only one who is not kept waiting.

  The value of time is its value to yourself.

  The simplest device to capture other people’s money is to let
  them think that they can capture yours.

  Truth is bright and strong; too bright for most eyes, and too
  strong to be administered without dilution.

  The man who attends the funeral of his own reputation often has
  a jolly wake.

  Marry for love, work for your living; marry for money, work for
  your liberty.

But enough of these. It will ever hold true that competitive business
breeds deception and selfish greed. The business man who pretends
otherwise is either a hypocrite or of dull moral sense.

In this race for riches, whether along the peaceful avenue of economy
or jostling in the streets of speculation, where comes in the Pursuit
of Happiness? Riches, as I have shown, are and can be nothing more
than means to this end, and those who, through avarice, greed, or
rapacity, make them the end and aim of their aspirations, trade gold
for dross. Scarcely less is the error of those who are ever postponing
the hour of enjoyment until a certain sum is reached, and their
fortune can be rounded off with additional thousands. It is a general
tendency in human nature to live in the past or the future, although
the present alone is man’s. What to him is _now_, and _here_, is all
that he can ever possess or enjoy; and if you ask him, he will grant
it; but he is driven ever by what seems an irrational and demonic
power to seek his joy in what is somewhere else, far off, out of
reach, impossible of attainment, beyond his capacities.

The illusive pictures drawn by memory, by hope, and by imagination
have their proper place in the palace of Human Happiness; but the
majority fix their gaze steadily on these alone, and wander through
halls and chambers filled with rich stuffs and costly ware, through
corridors looking out on entrancing views and courts opening to the
starry heavens, their eyes fixed vacantly on the far distance, and
noting nothing of the beauties by which they are surrounded. To waken
them by some whisper of what they are missing, and to persuade them to
turn their eyes on what is around them, will be my purpose in the
chapters immediately to follow.

       *     *     *     *     *

Bishop Berkeley declared that he was the richest man in England,
because he had trained himself to the habit of mind of regarding
everything which gave him pleasure as his own. In our days, most
philosophers of that school reside in penitentiaries.

       *     *     *     *     *

The disappointments of the _nouveau riche_ are, that what he would
like to buy is not on sale, and what he expected to get for nothing,
he finds can only be had by paying for it.

       *     *     *     *     *

That you are rich, is nothing to me; but only whether you are willing
to spend your money.

       *     *     *     *     *

Many strive harder to appear happy than to be so. Ostentation is
wealth shamming happiness. Envy is the fool who does not see through
the sham.

       *     *     *     *     *

The rich have less advantage over the poor than the latter suppose.

       *     *     *     *     *

Not the inventory of your property, but that of your unsatisfied
wants, measures your fortune; not your annual income, but your annual
deficit or surplus, makes you rich or poor.

       *     *     *     *     *

After all, the worst of poverty is that it leaves us so little money
to give away.

       *     *     *     *     *

In Grecian legend, the apple of discord was made of gold.

       *     *     *     *     *

If you teach your son to love money well, you will have such success
that he will soon love it better than he does you.

       *     *     *     *     *

A miser has merry mourners.

       *     *     *     *     *

Youth saves for age, age for its heirs, and these for nobody.

       *     *     *     *     *

Do not starve your horse to save your hay.

       *     *     *     *     *

When you deliver a eulogy on a plutocrat, you had better dwell on his
millions than on his methods of getting them.




III. _The Pleasures we may Derive from our Senses._


The odious doctrine of the ascetics has been that whatever is
agreeable to man is offensive to God; and that to cultivate the
pleasurable sensations is to prepare one’s self for perdition.

Far more sane than they was that Mohammedan teacher quoted by Gibbon,
who, when asked to describe the true believers, replied,――“_They_ are
the elect of God, whose lives are devoted to the improvement of their
own natural faculties.”

As mistaken as the ascetics, are those wooden-souled disciplinarians
who maintain that we should not look for recreation in our daily work,
but put off the thoughts of it to holidays and vacations. These are
but one degree better than those hypocrites who will tell you that
benevolence should have no place in business, and who will offer you a
round sum for a public charity, while they squeeze the salaries of
their shop-girls down to the lowest quarter-of-a-dollar.

Down with such imposters! Each hour of our lives is the best hour for
enjoying ourselves and for providing others the means of enjoyment;
and there is no better way to accomplish both these objects than that
suggested by the pious Arab,――“The improvement of our own natural
faculties.”

These have been divided by experts in such matters into three
classes,――the Sensations, the Emotions, and the Intellect. I shall
consider the training of each with reference to the special pleasures
it can furnish. All are equally worth cultivating. The delights of one
are not lower than those of another, if accepted in the proper spirit.
He who has right self-culture will derive gratification from them all;
and will not be, like the French peasant in Halevy’s story, unable to
understand how heaven could be attractive unless his native village
were transported there.

Some general rules must be respected if the exercise of any of our
faculties is to yield the maximum of pleasure. These rules are derived
from the physiology of the nervous system; for it cannot be doubted
that this underlies, if it is not identical with, every feeling and
function of the mind.

I hasten to say this, lest the reader should suppose they are derived
from moral philosophy, or based on duty or virtue. I am well aware
they could expect a scant hearing were this the case. Men dislike as
much to be urged to their good, as to be forbidden what is hurtful.
Nor are they difficult to understand; but this helps little; it is
easy enough to learn and to teach wisdom; to apply it to our own
conduct is what is hard.

The first rule is that of Moderation. Restrain the indulgence in any
one pleasure. Immoderation is sure to be followed by exhaustion of the
nerve-fibres and subsequent painful reaction. We should not think
highly of a gardener who when he picks his flowers pulls his plants up
by the roots. Yet this is the fashion in which many men treat their
own faculties.

The second rule is that of Variety. Multiply the sources and kinds of
pleasure. Increase the susceptibility of all your faculties to its
sweet appeals. Seek it in all directions immediately around you. But
do not confound the love of variety with instability and freakishness;
nor imitate those prodigals who throw the bottle away after the first
sip of its contents:――

              “Ces buveurs de bière,
  Qui jette la bouteille après la première verre.”

There are other rules; but to recite them would make this page as dull
as a sermon, and it would have as little effect. These two are the
chief, and they supplement each other; for he who indulges moderately
in all his pleasures will have the capacity to indulge in many, and
will preserve those features which are the most desirable in
all,――fineness of Quality and persistence of Duration. He will deal
with his faculties as a good government with its subjects,――whose aim
is not to make a few extremely happy, but to provide for all a fair
share of enjoyment, without making any miserable.

The most general sense we possess is that which is called the
“muscular” sense. This it is which yields the pleasurable feeling in
exercise, in athletic sports, in rowing, riding, dancing, and what old
Thomas Fuller called “the descants on the plain air of walking.”
Through it we gain the sensation of buoyancy and elasticity, we “feel
good,” our personality is sharpened, and our appreciation of life and
what it has to offer is heightened. It is the synonym of healthful
activity, and thus becomes the most advantageous preparation for all
species of enjoyment.

By physiologists, this muscular sense is not included in the list of
“special” senses, because it cannot be localized in any one set of
nerves. It is nearest allied to the special sense of Touch, which is
centred in certain “tactile corpuscles,” distributed irregularly
beneath the skin, principally on the finger-tips. They are extremely
useful, but not prominently serviceable in the production of
pleasurable sensations. The stroking of soft and warm substances, such
as velvet and fur, excites agreeable impressions, but they are not
very keen. Irritations to the skin are a source of acute annoyance,
but their removal affords merely a negatively acceptable condition.

When we consider how slightly most sensations of touch excite
subjective states of mind, it is remarkable that in response to one
stimulant they are among the most powerful known in nature. This
stimulus is that of another personality. The most positive feelings of
both aversion and attraction are those excited by physical contact of
the naked flesh. This is why it has been accepted in so many countries
as a sign and proof of amity. The savage Africans touch noses and the
civilized European shakes hands or kisses the hand or the cheek. Such
actions are barren conventionalities, unaccompanied by either pleasure
or pain; but they are indeed unfortunate who cannot recall any moment
of heart’s utmost joy and triumph when “the spirits rushed together at
the touching of the lips.” Such moments are sacred, priceless gifts of
the gods, not to be had for gold nor secured by taking thought, so
their consideration has no place in this book.

In spite of the active business done at the perfumery counters, the
pleasures of the sense of Smell do not seem to come in for a large
share of admiration in the modern world. It was different in the days
of old. They were considered the most delightful of all, even to
Divinity itself. Among the earliest rites of religion was that of
burning aromatic incense to the gods; and in the books of Moses good
works are described as affording “a sweet savor of satisfaction” to
the Almighty. One of the Fathers of the Church speaks of a holy prayer
as “the perfume of a just soul” rising to Heaven; and when a good man
passed away he was said to die “in the odor of sanctity.” Such solemn
authorities should justify the cultivation of the pleasures of this
sense. They could be supported by abundant quotations from those
philosophers, the poets, who have much to say about “the spicy gales
of Araby the blest,” and other such odoriferous associations.

Some odors are as intoxicating as wine, and others cling to the memory
like the impressions of childhood. Yet it is rare for the insane to
have delusions of the olfactory sense; and I have found few persons
who dream of odors. Some writers who claim to be scientific have set
up “a gamut of scents,” and others pretend such a harmonic scale can
be made the basis of a sort of music of perfumes. This is riding
theory beyond sight of practice; but who does not inhale with
conscious joy the balsamic fragrance of the pines, the salt and
stimulating whiffs from old ocean, or the laden redolence from gardens
of roses?

Many writers attribute the pleasure which tobacco gives to its
influence on the sense of smell; but this, I am sure, will not explain
the intense satisfaction which it yields to men in all climes,
consuming it in so many varied ways. I know nothing in physiology more
surprising or more puzzling than the eager demand for this plant,
which sprang up throughout the world after its discovery in America. I
have been a smoker from boyhood, and am just as unable to analyze the
pleasure it gives me as to explain it in others.

That prince of epicures, Brillat-Savarin, spent some time in the
United States, and in his delightful volume on the _Physiology of the
Taste_ has a chapter on “cookery in America,”――which is filled with
nothing but asterisks and interrogation points!

A hundred years have passed since he was among us, and we have
reformed our cuisine indifferently, though not altogether. We have
been too much hampered by fatuous bigots preaching that we should eat
to live, and not live to eat; whereas we should most certainly live to
eat during two or three hours out of every twenty-four; and so doing
we shall be passing them more creditably than do most men, or probably
ourselves, the remainder of the day. The game of “beggar your
neighbor” has advocates enough and fervent disciples, so I shall have
something to say about eating for the fun of it and as a fine art.

All nations of culture have connected a certain solemn joy with the
act of taking food. To “break bread” with one is the expression of the
sweet sentiment of hospitality, and for the lovers to share the same
loaf before the High Priest was the simple and beautiful marriage-rite
among the ancient Romans. The “love feasts” of the early Christians
were the repetitions of the only ceremony which their Founder
prescribed; and science traces to appropriate nutrition the growth of
both physical and mental abilities. The devout Novalis called
meal-times the “flower-seasons of the day,” and claimed that all
spiritual joys can be expressed through the service of the table. Can
there be anything in it unworthy or debasing?

In the light of such declaration should we look on our food-taking,
and not merely as feeding and filling. Were the kitchen more of a
studio in American homes, we should see a higher style of art in the
drawing-rooms. The worst preparation for a day’s work is a poor
breakfast, and its shabbiest reward is a bad dinner. If our daughters
studied more diligently what the Italians call the _melodia_ _del
gusto_, their married lives would be attuned to a more harmonious
accord.

Consider the appointments and symmetry of a well-served dinner in that
high style of art which the French have brought to perfection. The
mere sight of the table awakens our esthetic feelings, disperses the
cares that have infested the day, and softens the asperities which its
rude conflicts have developed. The snowy cloth with its embroidered
centre-piece, bearing a vase of roses or restful green; the gay
triumphs of the potter’s skill, flanked by polished metal and
diaphanous crystal, whose varied forms hint of the manifold gifts of
the grape; the chairs, so disposed as to suggest how we should live
our whole lives――ever near to others, but not jostling them. Then how
rhythmical the progress of the repast! the cold, salt shellfish,
followed by the hot and spicy soup, harmonized by the neutral flavor
of the fish, its creamy sauce relieved by the bare suspicion of the
clean acid of the lemon; and so on through the courses, until the
aromatic coffee and the tiny glass of liqueur, redolent of wild herbs
or of Alpine flowers, remove both thoughts of food and sense of
satiety.

The sequence of such a repast is not a conventionality. Medical men as
well as epicures know that it is based on physiology. Once, with a
friend of like inquiring mind, I ordered a dinner at a restaurant of
renown, exactly reversing the usual sequence, beginning with
Chartreuse, coffee, and ice-cream, ending with soup, oysters, and
hock. The experiment convinced us that the received is the right
sequence, and we made no second attempt to put the wrong end foremost.

Many will cry that such a dinner as I describe is one for the
millionaire and not for the million. They are in error. In France I
have repeatedly partaken of such in families of very humble means.
They are, in fact, economical. At an ordinary American dinner I have
seen seven vegetables and two meats served at once. Half the number
would have set forth a much better repast, if served in the French
manner. Moreover, an elaborate dinner is not desirable daily; but to
have one, say weekly, is as improving as going to the opera, or
listening to a great poet read his own verses.

An essential precept of gastronomic culture is to cultivate a taste
for all customary dishes. Every locality has its own. Snails and
mussels and cockscombs are favorite dishes in Paris, but I have found
few Americans enlightened enough to be willing to like them. A broad
taste adds to one’s own pleasure and that of others. How disappointing
the guest who refuses dish after dish planned with an eye to his
pleasure!

Do not be ashamed of the enjoyments of life which are derived from
judicious eating and drinking. There are no more accurate standards of
a family than its table-manners, table-service, table-talk. Culture is
reflected in them as in a mirror. Care not if the bigots and Pharisees
call you a wine-bibber and a glutton. You will not be the first to
whom they have applied those epithets, and you need not be ashamed of
your company. In the city of Paris, where the art of cookery has its
home and the Prohibition party no adherents, dyspepsia is scarcely
heard of, and the arrests for drunkenness during the entire year of
1890 were――how many, think you?――just thirty-eight!

If I have dwelt with some emphasis on the pleasures of taste, it is
because they are little understood in this country and there is a
prevalent tendency to decry them. Those which are derived from the
sense of Hearing will need no defense. Many of them are matters of
constant and intelligent cultivation. We are said not to be a musical
nation, but certainly both vocal and instrumental artists are not
rare, and those from other countries find among us their most
profitable harvest-fields. The intensity and the value of the
enjoyment derived from music depend on individual peculiarities which
are little modified by cultivation. Of all the exalted pleasures it is
the one least communicable and least connected with other faculties.
One of the finest pianists in the United States is a <DW64> idiot, and
intellectually an appreciative musical audience need not be above him.
But I have been told that I have no right to speak about this art. Six
generations of Quaker ancestors, who would not permit an instrument of
music in the house, have nearly extinguished the musical sense in me.

The music of nature is free to all and intelligible to all. No
instruction is demanded to listen with rapture to the blithesome carol
of the meadow-lark or the cheery notes of the wood-thrush, joyous
denizens of our American fields. The many voices of the wind, now
whispering secrets to the pines, now whistling impudently outside our
windows, now strident and threatening through the bare branches of
winter, bring us messages suited to all moods, and play melodies on
our hearts as though their strings were stretched on an Æolian harp.
On a sensitive mind the power of these sounds of the wind is
altogether peculiar, and appears to be owing to the fact that the
agency which produces them is hidden, veiled, and invisible. I would
liken it to the effect of distant church bells, heard through the
stillness of some Sabbath morn, soft, rhythmical, earnest, inviting us
to sweet societies and unseen shrines.

We appreciate too little the delight we almost unconsciously derive
from the sense of hearing through the power it gives us to have
unrestricted social intercourse in conversation, and to listen to
oratory, instruction, and public entertainments. When we observe how
even slight deafness circumscribes the life and reduces the number of
its sources of enjoyment, we first understand the extent of the
gratifications we owe to the faculty of audition, and how important to
our happiness are its enjoyment and cultivation.

But how vast is the capacity of man for happiness! How many sources of
joy would remain to one deprived of every sense but that of Sight! All
his life would not suffice to explore the boundless fields of
enjoyment which it alone throws open to him. He has but to cast his
eyes around him to revel in the ever-changing garb of earth, in the
sky with its majestic clouds sailing across the measureless blue
depths, in the splendors of sunrise and sunset, in the transient glory
of the rainbow, and in the immortal light of the stars. Stretched on
the strand, he may mark the far-off, many-hued, sparkling brine, or
elsewhere see great mountains lift their summits to eternal snow and
watch them bathed in the rosy glamour of the afterglow, seemingly
suspended in mid-air, when night obscures their base.

The beauties of form, line, color, and proportion are open to him, and
the treasures of joy which the noble arts of painting, sculpture,
architecture, drawing, and engraving have been laboring for thousands
of years to enrich the world with in their fullness belong to him. The
delicate suggestions of light-and-shade and the inexhaustible
fertility of the colorist supply him with storehouses from which he
can fill countless hours of gratification. Those elements in our
nature which respond to the amusing, the pleasing, the picturesque,
and the sublime are almost equally appealed to through the sense of
sight; and were we to devote ourselves to answering their fascinating
invitations, little leisure should we have left for occupation with
any other sense. Nor among these have I enumerated those crowning
delights to many minds, the faculty of acquainting themselves with the
thoughts of others through reading, and giving perhaps equal pleasure
to others by writing, both of which are chiefly conditioned on the
sense of sight.

What I have written is but an outline, a scatter of unfinished
suggestions, of the numerous enjoyments which we can obtain by the
proper cultivation of our senses. Their training, and the rational
development of all their functions, are just as essential to our
higher life as the cultivation of those which are sometimes, though
falsely, called our nobler faculties. There is no aristocracy in the
kingdom of nature, and the lowest of our powers, if appropriately
directed and educated, is as worthy to occupy the throne as any which
in popular repute is deemed the highest.

       *     *     *     *     *

Sensation is the sense of existence.

       *     *     *     *     *

There is no “order of excellence” in the faculties of man. One is as
excellent as another. The only difference is in the scope of their
activities. We should give play to all according to their strength.
This is the profound lesson of Walt Whitman’s writings.

       *     *     *     *     *

Sensation, Emotion, Intellect, all three, enter into every action. We
should conduct our lives as one plays a game of three-handed euchre,
where the two players who are behind constantly enter into
combinations against the one who is ahead.

       *     *     *     *     *

Quaff pleasure in sips, not gulps; let it fall like the manna in the
wilderness, a sufficiency daily, not a quantity at once.

       *     *     *     *     *

Healthy mirth has no reaction. Laughter is lightsome.

       *     *     *     *     *

Good fare, good manners, good company,――these are the three graces
which should preside over the dinner table. Then will the meal
include, in the words of Sydney Smith, “Everything of sensual and
intellectual gratification which a great nation can glory in
producing.”

       *     *     *     *     *

Table-talk,――the best of talk. Even Kant thought it not beneath him to
give rules for it: first, of the weather and the roads; next, the
current events of the day; then history, art, and philosophy. So did
Marsilius Ficinus: first, of divine things; then anecdotes; finally,
of art and music.

       *     *     *     *     *

The unthinking are prone to confine the meaning of Pleasure to
Sensation. The coarsest philosophy of life is the most popular,
because it is most easily understood, and because it appeals to the
universal, which are the merely animal, traits of human nature.




IV. _The Pleasures we may Derive from our Emotions._


The emotions are sensations translated into Memory and commented on by
the Imagination, with the usual distortion and falsification of the
original, characteristic of all translators and commentators.

The primary emotions of Hope and Fear are the recollections of
pleasure or pain projected into the future; the disappointment of hope
or the realization of fear brings sorrow, regret, or remorse, feelings
which are concerned with the past alone.

These reflections suggest how much our happiness has to do with Time.
If each could estimate for himself the relative value of the past, the
present, and the future, the pursuit of happiness would be a science
with results as certain as geometry. As it is, most men pass their
days, not in enjoying life, but in getting ready to enjoy it, or in
regretting they did not enjoy it; and those who think they are wiser,
and who boast that they cultivate the present alone, usually sow it
with the seed of thistles and tares to pester their later lives.

The folly of philosophies――and, I may add, religions――has been their
effort to divest man of these natural emotions.

“Expect nothing, and you will not be disappointed,” is the cheerful
advice of the pessimist and the Buddhist; “Fear nothing, for you are
in the hands of God,” says the Christian fatalist. “Regrets are vain,”
cries the opportunist; “live in the present, and let the dead past
bury its dead.”

In practical affairs, the best philosophy is common sense, which is
nothing else than the abstract and epitome of the experience of all
mankind through all time; and this arbiter condemns all three of the
above maxims as the words of folly and not of wisdom. Hope, fear, and
regret are equally necessary to the safe conduct of life with a view
to securing the greatest enjoyment from it, and the only point left to
consider is the relative extent in which each should be indulged.
About this I shall offer a few suggestions.

The skillful architect of his own career will not draw a plan which is
either too broad or too high for his means to construct. His hopes
will be neither too exalted nor too extended. To be as happy as
possible, we must never expect to be extremely happy. Complete
happiness is an ideal condition, and we are never farther from the
ideal than when we think we have it in our grasp. Nor will his plans
be elaborate. The larger the foundation, the more time and money it
takes to build the house. The chief enjoyment in life should be drawn
from a few, easily accessible sources; though this should not lead us
to neglect others that come in our way. One should not refuse a
bequest because he has a profitable business. Few understand the
limits of their own capacity for happiness. They do not know, as the
saying is, when they are well off, and, like a restless inventor,
spoil the machine by constantly seeking to improve it. They should
ponder on an epitaph on a tombstone in a London churchyard:――“I was
well; I would be better; I am here.”

Our hopes should not belong to the class called by physicians
“incompatibles;” that is, when the realization of one will certainly
or probably prevent that of the other. Few errors are more common than
this, and few are productive of greater disappointment. Reasonable
reflection and ordinary self-knowledge will generally suffice to
prevent it. If I set out in life to make a million dollars I cannot
expect also to become a distinguished Sanscrit scholar.

The fruition of our hopes should not be placed in a distant future.
Life is uncertain, but that is the least objection. What is certain
is, that we ourselves shall not be the same next year or next week
that we are to-day. Our tastes and moods will change, and it is quite
likely that we shall care nothing for the fruit of the plants we are
now so diligently cultivating.

This consideration leads up to the last and probably the most useful
of all the suggestions on this subject which I shall offer, that is,
that in planning for the future, it will, as a rule, repay us best to
devote our most earnest and constant attention to the avoidance of
pain or misfortune rather than to the preparation of projects of
pleasure. We know what we are about when we set to work to forestall a
danger or to prevent a disaster; we are by no means so sure as to what
course of action will yield us pleasure. The best laid schemes “gang
aft a-gley.”

Hope and Fear are both deceivers; but we like the company of Hope even
when we know she lies; and dislike that of Fear the more, the closer
we believe she tells the truth. Many temperaments are tortured more by
the dread of misfortune than by misfortune, and are constantly
sacrificing the happiness of the present for fear they may not enjoy
the future. To such as these would apply the pregnant maxim of Lord
Bacon,――“The only thing to be feared is fear.”

When in reason and in due proportion to its object, the emotion is
salutary and protective. To know what to fear, to take precautions and
thus to avoid dangers, are the very conditions of existence. Cowardice
is contemptible, but foolhardiness is senseless.

In modern life the most common forms of fear are worry and anxiety. To
a certain extent these also are wholesome; there may be good ground
for them, and so long as they act as stimulants to healthful activity,
they are not to be shirked; but when they lead to morbid states of
mind and body, they should be met with appropriate remedies.

The first of these is a deliberate and calm study of the situation and
the real causes for fear, if there are any. Spectres lose their
terrors by daylight, and most fears are vastly diminished by
reflection. What if the worst does come? The worst is never as bad as
we imagine it will be. We may also call to mind how useless are many
of our anxieties. Why worry about disasters which we cannot prevent?
Still less should we worry about those which we can prevent.

When reason and thought will not dispel our fears, we must fight the
devil with fire, and conquer one emotion with another. The opponent of
Fear is not so much Hope as Courage. Courage recognizes the danger and
meets it with a serene front. Confidence in one’s powers, the thought
of the prize to be won, the love of glory and reputation, a knowledge
of the means at our disposal, and a faith in fortune are the
considerations which strengthen courage, and if they are marshaled in
battle array and led by Enthusiasm, the fears which hovered over our
path will be routed like flocks of evil-boding birds.

An easier though less noble escape from fear is Apathy. In different
forms it appears as resignation to the will of God, or the inevitable,
indifference to results, and philosophic or religious fatalism. An
Arab proverb says there are two days on which it is needless to fear
death,――the day on which it is decreed we shall not die, and the day
on which it is decreed we shall die; and if death need not be feared,
what else should be? Modern science is inclined to the doctrine that
men’s doings are ruled by absolute necessity, and that free will is a
delusion. For one, I do not accept the doctrine; but he that does
should be released from fear if his logic has any validity.

As the future is clouded with fear and its congeners, so the past is
embittered with regret, if not with its gloomier fellows, the pains of
contrition and the agonies of remorse. Of all mental misery I have
ever witnessed, that of remorse for irreparable injuries done to
others was by far the acutest. No one who intimately sees such a
spectacle but will learn a lesson which will be a warning for a
lifetime. Suicide or insanity is its usual result. But for the lighter
forms of regret, reflection on their uselessness, willingness to make
reparation, intelligent study of the mistakes of the past as lessons
for the future, are remedies which we can always apply with benefit.
The keen regret which we feel at our own blunders and shortcomings
produces almost a distaste for life. But we may recall the homely
business proverb, that he who never makes mistakes never makes
anything; and it is something of a satisfaction to think that we did
not display the full measure of our capacities in a transaction, but
could do it much better had we to do it over again.

The emotions which I have been considering are passive in their
nature, and their presence does not markedly influence our external
lives. This is not the case with the emotion of Anger, the
manifestations of which are primarily external. This is why it is so
extremely detrimental to family and social happiness. A person who is
choleric, of a bad temper, or an irritable disposition, is heavily
handicapped for both the pursuit of happiness and the race for
success. I think I have seen more fine prospects ruined by this than
by any other single trait; and on the ruins promptly sprang up the
weeds of dejection, misanthropy, and moroseness. No other weakness so
frequently poisons the joys of married life as a “tempery”
disposition. Its control is always difficult, never impossible. The
simple precept is, to remain entirely silent and motionless for at
least a minute after every flash of anger or sense of irritability.
Lord Herbert of Cherbury tells of a splenetic friend of his, whose
face would flush almost purple at such moments, but who never broke
his self-imposed silence, and therefore never spoke a word which he
had to regret. A determined intention to control oneself, and steady
practice, will always give such self-mastery.

Anger, when it passes into the chronic form of Hatred, seeks its
satisfaction in Revenge. It is rather surprising to find such a calm
author as Professor Bain including revenge among the essentials of
happiness. In moments of anger the thirst for vengeance is keen, and
its gratification pleasant for the time; but from my own experience
and that of others whom I have asked, the vengeance which finally
appeases long hatred falls far short of affording the gratification we
expected, and is even associated with some dissatisfaction with self.
The game has not been worth the candle. The satisfaction is greater
when our enemy brings ruin on himself through the traits and acts we
abhor in him. We can then indulge in an unselfish joy in the
spectacle, as did the Israelites when the pride of the Pharaohs
was humbled by the consequences of their own arrogance and
stiff-neckedness.

The Imagination belongs to the emotional rather than the intellectual
faculties, as it has small regard for truth and casts on all things
the glamour of that light “which never was on sea or land.” Its
judicious cultivation adds to the higher enjoyments of life by lifting
the events and thoughts of our daily rounds into the mystic realm of
the ideal. It is cultivated by the perusal of works of poetry and
fiction, and by yielding to the sweet influences of music, song, and
the arts of pleasure. In the young it generally needs to be, not so
much curbed, as directed in the right road, and in the old to be
stimulated. The neglect of it so common in middle life is an unwise
preparation for those years which at the best can expect but scant
pleasure in watching the mirage of ideal anticipation.

Under the Esthetic Emotions we may class all those which arise from
the occupation with what is interesting or beautiful in nature or art.
They are perennial fonts of enjoyment to those who will cultivate them
in the right spirit――which is, to study them exclusively for the
pleasure they yield, and without ulterior aim of utility or didactic
purpose. True art acknowledges no allegiance either to utilitarianism
or morality――though it is never useless or immoral. Its right aim is
to excite within us the consciousness of ourselves by stirring our
imagination and feelings into agreeable activity. The emotions which
it inspires in the individual rise in value in proportion as they are
communicable to others, and thereby develop their contrast to the
pleasures of the senses, which are and always remain personal. On the
other hand, they differ from those of the intellect by their aim being
directed to exciting the faculties which are human. Their limits are
defined by these, while the intellect soars far beyond. In the
esthetic arts, Man is everything; all refers to him; in science he is
nothing, or, at most, a drop in the shoreless ocean of the Universe.

What justice can I render within the limit of a few sentences to the
pleasurable emotions excited by the contemplation of Nature? Volumes
have been written about and have not exhausted the catalogue of joys
offered by the solitary walk through forest and mead, surrounded by
that mysterious world in blade and leaf, in bird and insect, in brook
and bower, so tantalizingly open and yet so impenetrably closed to our
vision. We need no laborious learning, and require no Alps, or ocean,
or mighty cataracts, to surcharge our souls with that strange calm and
silent joy which Mother Nature ever has ready to pour into the wounds
of her returned and wounded sons. A stroll at sunset, through the
cow-pasture, by the stream, is all we need, if only our minds are open
to the voices and the pictures spread before us. Need I mention the
pleasures of gardening, or the charms of the training and
companionship of those humbler animals, our pets and favorites, to
whose sincerity and affection we so often turn with relief from
association with our own species?

Nor shall I go at any length into the obvious pleasure afforded by
even a slight acquaintance with painting, sculpture, architecture,
photographic reproductions, engraving, those avocations distinctively
called by some writers the “arts of pleasure.” The very purpose of
their creation was to increase the happiness of life, and those who
are content to live without understanding and to some extent
appreciating what they contribute to human enjoyment, may as well lay
down this book at this point, for its whole purpose is alien to them.
In some quarters there is a prejudice against these arts; in many more
a suspicion that they are frivolous or enervating. Far from it.
Goethe, who beyond any other man of this century studied the
strengthening of his faculties, recommended that each day we should
for at least a few minutes give our minds to the contemplation of some
fine work of art or beautiful natural object, were it but a careful
engraving, the reproduction of some masterpiece, a pot of natural
flowers, or a sunset from our windows. He had found this in his own
experience both strengthening and comforting, and none is so indigent
or so occupied that it is beyond his reach.

In museums and picture galleries, in the theatre and the opera, in
illustrated books and collections of photographs, we have abundant
resources to gratify our desire for observing art; and if we wish to
share the delights of practicing it, there are the numerous “minor
arts,” admirably set forth for self-instruction in excellent
manuals,――free-hand drawing, water-colors, china painting,
embroidery――who can remember all of them?

The finest fruit of the culture of the esthetic emotions, culled from
their sunniest sides and served as “human nature’s daily food,” is
what we call “good taste.” What an admirable faculty! It is the best
of good sense, and walks hand in hand with good manners and good
morals. It prunes away exaggerations and affectations, it erases
superlatives, it modifies antipathies, and lessens prejudices. The
modest home lighted by its fairy lamp shines with a radiance that the
luxury of the vulgar plutocrat can never approach. The damsel whose
simple garb has been hung by its unfaltering hands will please, when
the elaborate toilettes of fashion leave the heart untouched. How much
to be envied is the natural possessor of this charming quality! More
profitable than envying would be the effort to cultivate it, through
the study of the rules of art, the observations of the best models of
harmony, and the willingness to accept the opinions of others on
subjects where they are acknowledged authorities and to search the
reasons on which they are grounded.

The pleasure which we derive from the emotion which is called
“Plot-interest” is peculiar and popular. We see it in the avidity with
which we follow the adventures of imaginary characters in a novel or
drama. It evokes the liveliest sympathy and excitement. Tears follow
laughter in quick succession, and with as little real cause. We yield
ourselves willingly to the situation, and in the fancied sorrows of
the heroine forget our own, which are real.

Akin to those of plot-interest are the Emotions of Pursuit, which
impart such zest to hunting, fishing, and allied sports. We care
little for the quarry; a “paper chase” is almost as exciting as a lion
hunt; but it is the sense of the self-conscious and strenuous exertion
of our faculties which gives us the enjoyment. This explanation may
not be obvious in the case of the enthusiastic angler, who sits by a
dull canal under an umbrella all the afternoon, satisfied with a few
gudgeons; but this enthusiasm makes up for the lack of positive
exertion.

More obscure is the intense and absorbing pleasure which most derive
from the Emotions of Risk, which are excited by games, especially
those of chance, or where skill is so equally balanced that chance
comes in for a large share of the result. This is pre-eminently the
emotion which most men cultivate in their hours of recreation.
Billiards, chess, pool, cards, backgammon, horse-racing, athletic
games, and personal contests, where the opponents are as equally
matched as practicable, make up to most minds the definition of
Enjoyment. The various games of cards offer the most favorable types
of games, as when played fairly and well they have a large and
constant element of chance. They have been in ill odor, as being the
most convenient means for gambling. But to the one who really enjoys
the emotions of risk, the stakes are subordinate. Any one who
appreciates the charms of a rubber of whist, or the agreeable exercise
of a game of billiards, will not want the additional and often
unpleasant addition of a stake, and those who fail to appreciate, or
neglect to cultivate, these emotions as a source of pleasure in life,
deprive themselves of that which would cheer many a sad hour by
innocent and healthful employment.

When I glance back at what I have written, I see I have done little
more than catalogue, and that incompletely, the sources of enjoyment
offered by the Emotions. But if this superficial survey developed such
possibilities, how much of the pure gold of joy awaits the careful
prospector who will follow the veins and sift the sands of the region
thus thrown open to his energies?

       *     *     *     *     *

There is this peculiarity in both works of art and scenes of natural
beauty, that they impress us most vividly in periods of deepest
dejection or highest elation, and are thus incomparable aids in
restoring mental equilibrium.

       *     *     *     *     *

The painful, the hideous, and the shocking are legitimate inspirations
of art, as well as the beautiful and agreeable. The latter intimate
the direction we should go, the former the dangers we may have to
encounter and the existence of suffering which calls for our sympathy.

       *     *     *     *     *

Fear and Folly are the couple whose offspring is Distress.

       *     *     *     *     *

The emotion that does not incite to action, enfeebles.

       *     *     *     *     *

Activity does not mean excitement. Healthful action is uniform. The
wheel of most rapid revolution is the most regular in its motion.

       *     *     *     *     *

Nature soothes because she knows nothing of our conflicts. Like
Spinoza’s God, she loves no one and hates no one.

       *     *     *     *     *

Not nature, but nature’s infinite analogies, are what quicken the
heart and supply it with endless interpretations of its own
experiences.

       *     *     *     *     *

The sombre, the desolate, and the vast in nature appeal most strongly
to the educated spirit, because they typify what is measureless, and
therefore mournful, in its aspirations.




V. _The Pleasures we may Derive from the Intellect._


When I speak about billiards and fishing and opera-going as pleasures,
I am sure everybody understands me. But now that I have to refer to
the enjoyment derived from study and thinking and scientific research,
I fear the majority will prepare to stifle their yawns or skip the
chapter.

Yet I have heard of, and even known, men who turned to such
occupations for their highest felicity, and counted such joys above
gold or lust or glory or love,――because enemies might rob them of
these, but never of the treasures of the understanding. The one aim of
their lives was the Search for Truth; and to them all truths seemed
equally great, equally worthy devotion. One spent years in the study
of polyps and fungi, and by them learned to explain the laws which
have developed man and mind; another neglected his profession in order
to investigate the anatomy of a worm, and made a discovery which
restored thousands of his fellow-beings from wretched invalidism to
happy health.

Such exceptional beings are not to be set up as the pole stars for all
mariners over life’s ocean. A man cannot be happy beyond the tastes
and faculties which he has; and it is as absurd to expect all to enjoy
equally the pleasures of the intellect as it would be to look for all
to be pleased with the flavor of the same dish. Every man, however,
who is not idiotic or insane possesses an intellect, and can derive a
great deal of pleasure from its cultivation; and it is always to some
degree in his power to cultivate it in the right manner.

If he only knew the many advantages of these pleasures he would not
fail to give them his attention. Almost alone of enjoyments they leave
behind them no sense of exhaustion, no painful reaction or regrets.
They are as varied as our moods, suited as well to assuage our sadness
as to prolong our cheerful moments. At no period of the year are they
out of season, age does not wither them, nor does “custom stale their
infinite variety.” They are social or solitary as we choose to make
them, and they know no sense of satiety, as with them the appetite
grows by what it feeds on. They flatter our self-complacency by
showing us that we are growing wiser, and they stir within us sympathy
and appreciation for others. They are always at hand, for the
appreciative student carries between the covers of his Shakespeare
more pleasure than the millionaire can stow in his yacht. Finally, and
as the clinching argument in their favor, they are economical, doubly
economical, for they cost little or nothing, and they save us many a
broad piece which we should have had to spend for pleasures gratifying
the senses the same length of time; economical also of our lives, for
the student class are those who have the greatest longevity.

Especially would I urge women to pursue intellectual pleasures rather
than those of the emotions, to which they are now largely confined.
Some of the most promising marriages fail through lack of intellectual
sympathy in the wife. How sad it is to read these words of John Stuart
Mill in his essay on the liberty of women,――“Young men of the greatest
promise generally cease to improve as soon as they marry;” a result
which he attributes directly to the absence of sympathy in their wives
for that which constitutes the highest culture, and often a direct
opposition to it. His opinion is valid everywhere, though it should be
true nowhere. For the sake of her husband and her children, she should
resolutely turn to the cultivation of her mind as one of the firmest
holds on their affections.

One of the simplest forms of intellectual pleasure is that which is
derived from riddles, puzzles, conundrums, and rebuses. Children and
primitive nations are especially captivated by these agreeable
stimulants to their ingenuity. In French country towns they are highly
popular, and many of the cafés have _cercles_ who meet nightly to
solve the enigmas proposed in the weekly papers and forward the
solutions to the editor. Those which are successful receive a small
prize or an honorable mention. The placid bourgeois appear to derive
extraordinary enjoyment from this pastime.

Most people understand “cultivating the intellect” to mean reading.
Sometimes it has this result, but generally it is too desultory,
miscellaneous, and aimless. Were it directed to a more definite
purpose it could be made to yield more profit and more enjoyment. I do
not mean to the purpose of instruction, as probably the reader has
been in haste to suppose, but so as to endow the mind with a wider
range of interests and thus with more sources of pleasure.

Read what interests you and interest yourself in what you read――that
is the best rule. I have a small opinion of lists of the “hundred best
books,” or courses of reading cut and dried for you by large
societies. They may instruct, as do lessons appointed by a master; but
I am speaking of reading for pleasure; and really that is the only
kind worth mentioning. I have always liked reading, but I never could
bear to lay out a course for myself, still less follow any proposed by
another.

My own very satisfactory plan has been like that of the prospector for
minerals. He wanders aimlessly over the mountains till he finds the
sign of ore; then he ceases his roving and traces out the vein with
zeal and patience. You read an article in a magazine; on one point
mentioned you would like further information. Do not pass it by and
forget it, but go to the encyclopedia or the library and follow it up;
it will lead you to two or three volumes, not to be read, but to be
consulted; these will start several allied points of interest; look
them up in the same manner; and before you know it you will be
burrowing for hours among books with the greatest delight.

By adopting this plan you not only pursue the bent of your own
inclination and follow your own fancies, but without knowing it you
are obeying some of the most scholastic rules for reading laid down by
the learned.

One of these is to “distribute the attention;” by which they mean to
learn to pass easily from one subject to another. Do not become so
absorbed in one line that others have no charm for you. This is a
common error with students of specialties. The great Darwin regretted
that toward the close of his life his unremitted attention to science
had destroyed his power of appreciating poetry and the drama. Yet
neither should one hurry from book to book, or from topic to topic.
Each should be pursued up to the point of commencing fatigue; then the
volume should be laid down, and an effort made to recall the main
facts we have read, and arrange them in order in the mind. What looks
like desultory reading will not remain desultory long if pursued in
accordance with these suggestions.

As to what kind of books to read, the brief answer is, all kinds.
Variety is the guiding principle. Do not read in ruts. Some say we
should always have some main theme to which others should be
subordinate. The advice is good for those who have by nature some such
leading interest; only for them it is unnecessary; and for those who
have not, I believe it is useless, for such an interest can rarely be
created by the will. I doubt if one can say off-hand,――“From this out,
my chief interest shall be in the history of Ancient Egypt,” or
something of that kind. Disraeli once remarked that biography has a
greater interest than history, because it is life without theory; and
French writers are better than English, because they have fewer
ridiculous ideas of life. Some such plea could be entered for every
department of literature, and each would be just. Unquestionably, the
tendency at present is to read too exclusively works of the
imagination, novels, romances, dramas, and the like; the pleasure they
yield is ephemeral and is apt to disqualify for that which is more
persistent though less intense, derived from works based on objective
realities.

For one branch of literature I must, however, put in a special claim,
as it has been such a pleasure to me ever since I learned to read, and
that is Poetry. I have heard it sometimes said that this is a taste of
youth, and dies a natural death with advancing years. My own
experience is quite the contrary. The delight we derive from accurate
rhythm, melodious words, fine thoughts, and the depicting of deep
emotions, ought to increase as our experience of the world and wider
learning make us more familiar with them. This has been the result in
my own case and in that of others whom I know or have heard of; for
instance, Sir Henry Holland, writing his biography when about eighty
years of age, lays stress on the enjoyment the study of the poets
continued to afford him; and my mother, at eighty, derived much
pleasure in committing to memory and repeating new poems. There is a
sense of completeness, of perfection, which is given a fine thought by
appropriate expression in rhythmical language, which prose can never
equal, and which, through the potent magic of Form, lifts the mind out
of the material into the ideal world, and grants us a momentary
glimpse of the Infinite.

If we do not recall to mind and think over what we read we lose most
of the pleasure and all the profit of the action. This was what the
English philosopher Hobbes meant when he said,――“If I had read as many
books as some men, I should be as ignorant as they.” To read without
reflecting is like buying grain for food and never grinding it.
Through reflection on the images, incidents, and forms of expression
with which reading has stored the memory, the highest enjoyment from
the process is secured. The mind, like the body, is maintained in a
state of pleasurable activity, not by what it swallows, but by what it
digests and assimilates. Many people, however, are like dear Charles
Lamb, who artlessly confessed,――“I cannot sit and think――books think
for me;” and if they think for all to such good purpose as they did
for him, no one could complain.

In fact, reflection, meditation, though its pleasures have been
chanted by poets and sages for thousands of years, is probably that
form of intellectual activity which is least admired and least desired
of any. It is not the same as “studying out a subject,” or exerting
the creative faculty, as an inventor when he is devising a machine;
but the leisurely calling up from our memory of its various contents.
They may be from reading or from conversation or from our experience
of life. We may present these to ourselves as the pictures of a
gallery or as the scenes of a drama or as a series of connected
events; and we may endeavor to discern what relations they bore to
each other, or speculate on what would have been the results had they
occurred differently, or not at all. We may renew half-forgotten
pleasures, or smile at useless pains, or recall long since vanished
woes. Lessons for our guidance or knowledge of ourselves may
unexpectedly come to us as the results of such self-communing; or we
may cast our eyes to the future, and enjoy in prolonged anticipation
those pleasures which may never come, or, if they come, can last but a
moment. This is the nature of that reflection which, if we learn it
and cultivate it, will enable us to pass many a pleasant hour, when
otherwise we should be cut off from all sources of amusement, as in
some dreary waiting for a train or enforced and lonely vigil.

As solitude is thus relieved by exercise of our minds, society by the
same may have many an added charm. What a fund of rational enjoyment
is offered by reading circles, debating societies, literary coteries,
and associations for the purpose of studying Shakespeare or Browning
or Ibsen, or whatever other literary star may be in the ascendant!
There are some pretentious persons who profess to be above such
gatherings. They can well be dispensed with in them. The tendency to
be guarded against in order to make such schemes prosperous is that of
improving the mind. This should be entirely incidental and secondary.
When one joins a dining club, he expects a dinner which he likes, not
a special diet prescribed by his medical adviser; and so it should be
with literary clubs. Let the improvement take care of itself. It will
do so.

Alongside of reading and reflection we must place writing. Many will
need no explanation why this should be classed among the pleasures of
life; while to others it is always a distasteful drudgery. They escape
it whenever possible, and reduce it to its lowest terms, which means
letter-writing――and in their case always the writing of very middling
letters. A letter, indeed, is a great tell-tale, and tells the more
the less it says. A score of years in editorial work, during which the
competency of numerous writers had to be gauged by some quick
standard, taught me that the letter of transmittal is generally enough
to decide on the merits of the manuscript offered. To him who can
appreciate its revelations there is no more infallible test of general
culture than an ordinary letter.

Correspondence by some is classed among the lost arts. As an art, we
can let it go; but as one of the most agreeable of pleasures, it will
ever remain. Nature, not art, is what gives it its charm. The free
expressions of personal feelings, thoughts, and observations, the
intimacy and confidence which we can never find in books or magazines,
the household words and pet phrases which grow up between
correspondents, the tacit assumptions of common tastes and knowledge,
these are what endow correspondence with its boundless charms for
those who cultivate it.

Some writers have extolled the pleasure to be derived from keeping a
diary. They claim it gives one much delight to turn back to an
accurate record of what he did or heard or saw at a given period of
his past life. They add that it is also a judicious habit for our own
well-being, teaching us what errors we have made, what false opinions
harbored, what aims pursued fruitlessly, and the like. I believe what
these writers say, and commend their advice to those for whom it is
suited. As for myself, I never could follow it. The diaries which I
have occasionally begun, I have usually ended by throwing into the
fire. It seems to me a man must either progress very little, be
supernaturally wise to begin with, or have incredible self-complacency,
to read with satisfaction a diary of his own five years old which
contains anything but the most naked facts. Amiel’s diary is one of the
most attractive published of recent years; but it certainly could have
been no pleasure to his sensitive mind to have renewed its sorrows by
perusing its morbid reflections.

I have left to the last the consideration of the highest of all
intellectual joys,――the Pursuit of Truth. This should be the aim of
every thought, and the sole, conscious occupation of our
understandings. As our senses are satisfied only with pleasure, in
like manner our reason finds no rest until it attains to what is true.
That man is useless on the face of the earth, and wastes his life, who
devotes his time to anything else than the pursuit of happiness or the
search for truth.

They are not antagonistic. They are compatible one with the other;
perhaps they are identical, when both are clearly seen and correctly
understood. That great teacher who rejected the narrow prescriptions
of asceticism, and came eating meat and drinking wine, also taught
that the one comforter, the Paraclete, which should in future ages
complete the happiness of man, is “the Spirit of Truth.”

There need be no discussion as to what Truth is, nor need we, like
jesting Pilate, make the inquiry and “stop not to hear reply.” The
answer is as clear as it is brief. Truth is that which will bear
constant and free examination. Renewed observation, verification,
re-examination, investigation――whatever is true will bear all these
without diminution of its lustre; and any statement which men advance
as true, but are unwilling to submit to these tests, they know is more
or less of a lie.

The highest and clearest truths are to be found in the physical and
natural sciences. The latter especially offer unending pleasant vistas
to those who can interest themselves in them. The passion of
collecting in natural history is a rich source of enjoyment,
inexpensive, always open, exhaustless in extent. Whether it be
minerals, plants, insects, coins, weapons, or what not, their
accumulation occupies vacant hours and they furnish abundant materials
for thought, reading, study, and conversation. The man who has a
cabinet stocked by his own efforts is one who never complains of
ennui. The day for him is never too long.

As for the devotees of Science, there is no need for me to inform them
of the pleasure they derive from its pursuit. They are too well
acquainted with its joys, transcending any which wealth or popular
renown can offer, to care to read their eulogy. But this intense
devotion must be born with one or date from some early association,
and can rarely be acquired in mature years, so that it need not be
dwelt upon here.

       *     *     *     *     *

“Life according to reason,”――this was Aristotle’s definition of
happiness.

       *     *     *     *     *

The intellect is cold because it is unsympathetic. We must cultivate
with it the imagination, which by vividly portraying pain, develops
sympathy.

       *     *     *     *     *

Do you wish to improve your mind? Then read carefully what you do not
understand, and listen dispassionately to what you do not agree with.

       *     *     *     *     *

Error is more agreeable than truth, because the latter points out our
limitations and the former conceals them.

       *     *     *     *     *

An error actively advocated is healthier than a truth lazily accepted.
Thought becomes fecund only in action.

       *     *     *     *     *

A mistake is sooner corrected than a falsehood, because it is nobody’s
interest to maintain it.

       *     *     *     *     *

Novel-reading is the fashionable narcotic; opium, chloral, and
hasheesh together count fewer victims.

       *     *     *     *     *

All that is, is a prophecy of what will be; hence, to a philosopher,
the chief interest in things is their symbolical value.

       *     *     *     *     *

_Vivre caché, c’est vivre heureux._ This was Descartes’ motto. It
should be translated: “To be able to retire with pleasure to your own
thoughts, is to be happy.”

       *     *     *     *     *

What is the pleasure of being famous? That of being talked of by those
you do not know, who do not know you, and in whom you take no interest.




VI. _The Satisfaction of the Religious Sentiment._


After all, the only standard of value which we need apply to anything
is the amount and quality of Happiness it yields. This alone can
concern Man anywhere and at any time. His religions should be measured
by no other mete-yard. All were created by man, for the happiness of
man; though all claim another, a superhuman, origin, and pretend to
bear the sign-manual of the Divine.

They are right, and what seems a paradox is a sober fact. As much the
productions of human hands and brains as are the robes and paintings
in which they are bedecked, they have something in them which no
externals can represent, and which lifts them above their material
drapery. Human beyond all else that man has devised, for that very
reason they are superhuman.

The strange law of Evolution is, that nothing in nature reaches its
perfection but by becoming something else. The species in attaining
its utmost development is transformed into another species. Man would
not be the noblest product of the earth did he not feel himself too
noble for it; did not the presage and aura of a higher destiny forever
float around his thoughts, making themselves felt at the moments of
the utmost tension of his faculties; as when behind the parapet of
Chillon one rises on extreme tip-toe, and catches a glimpse of the
glittering lake and massive Alps beyond.

The vital principle, the motive power, which has created and
maintained all religions is the Ideal of Humanity. Each age has had
its own, each individual has his own, no two the same. Creeds and
churches do but formulate and endeavor to materialize the average
conceptions of a period or a class; but their labor is vain. Rejecting
the old, putting on the new, the race marches forward to loftier
ideals, the milestones of its progress being the wrecks of temples and
the ruins of churches. Religions rise and fall and disappear; but
Religion grows forever, because it is the inseparable associate, aye,
the very expression, of that mysterious impulse on which man’s future
development depends, and which makes him part and parcel of the
infinite Energy in which he lives and moves and has his being.

Time and Truth will reconcile all religions; but the time will be long
and the truth will be slow to make its way. The schools of dogmatic
doctrine claim to have embalmed in a creed and confined in a code the
whole truth necessary for the happiness of man; not perceiving that
they are like children to whom a magician hands a box in which he
seems to have shut a pigeon; they open it cautiously, to discover that
it is empty, and he points to the bird soaring up to the sky. Only
they take good care not to open the box. Their schools and teachers
resemble those feeble-minded folk who imagine they increase in
knowledge by constantly talking to themselves.

Always boasting of their devotion to truth, they steadily repudiate
it. That alone is true which will bear repeated, free, and unbiased
investigation; but dogmatists cry,――“Never discuss your faith; never
doubt your creed; for he that doubteth is damned.” What progress they
make is not from within, but is forced on them from without by the
free spirit of inquiry; and what they thus unwillingly accept, they
audaciously claim as the product of their own efforts. Everywhere the
spirit of ecclesiasticism is the secret or open foe of strict and
complete veracity; and yet no permanent alleviation of the sufferings
of mankind can come except from veracity. And from this it will come.
No matter what the weather is, this seed is sure to grow.

What unspeakable unhappiness religions have brought on the race!
Altars dripping with the blood of human victims, mothers casting their
babes into the fires of Moloch, teachers crucified by the rabble whom
they sought to instruct, millions perishing between the Crescent and
the Cross, hideous chambers of the Inquisition, Bruno burning alive in
Catholic Rome, and Legate in Protestant London,――a thousand such
historic events would give no notion of the miseries which religions
have inflicted on mankind, and continue to inflict.

Worse than these have been their blighting breath on individual minds,
darkening them with terrors of the supernatural, with racking doubts,
despair, and madness; destroying the natural and beautiful growths of
the affections; frowning on the attractions of the arts of beauty;
crushing the desire of knowledge and the love of investigation; urging
men in the ignoble egotism of self-salvation to sacrifice their own
happiness and that of those nearest and dearest to them. These
influences still exist; they are ever in the spirit of clericalism and
dogmatism, and are restrained from plunging mankind again into the
dark ages only by that higher and real religion which acknowledges
neither form nor creed nor dogma, but only the might and right of
Truth and Love.

I would ask what teachings do religions――and I have those in mind
which are prevalent in civilized countries to-day――impart, which in
any way compensate for the enormous unhappiness and intellectual
degradation thus caused?

Most sects calling themselves Christian will at once reply that the
happiness they promise is not of this world but of the next, and that
he who looks for enjoyment here will forfeit it hereafter. Yet when
the evidence for this daring statement is asked for, not an iota can
be offered on which there is unanimous concurrence among the sects
themselves.

What they do offer, and what gives them their real control over men’s
minds, may be summed up as follows: A belief in the Divine government
of the world and the paternal care of God over each believer in Him;
greater cheerfulness in the acceptance of the misfortunes of life as
the wise and ultimately beneficent decisions of His will; an
expectation of a life after death; the hope that sins will be
forgiven; and the improvement in morals which follows these
convictions.

These are undoubtedly valuable aids to human happiness. The question
is, what part of them belong to Religion and what to religions; in
other words, will not the religious sentiment itself, freed from the
shackles of dogmatic belief, yield to man all the happiness offered by
sectarian doctrines, relieved of the misery to which they condemn him?
When I think of the mental agony caused in millions of lives by the
pictures of hell, of eternal damnation, of the last judgment, and of a
cruel and merciless God, which most Christian teachers hold before
their congregations, I long for the time predicted by that apostle of
the new life, Giordano Bruno,――“When the gods shall lie in Orcus, and
the dread of everlasting punishment shall vanish from the world.”

Reason has no conflict with religion. Science is based on the
assumption that the order of the Universe is one of intelligence, and
of an intelligence identical with ours. All force is directed by
reasoning energy, which means that it is purposive. Why seek further?
Call it Energy or Force or God, the thought is the same.

Whether that share which we possess in the energy of the All remains
in personality after physical death, what dogma can prove? what
science deny? Enough that in the beautiful words of the burial service
of the Protestant Episcopal Church, we are justified in retaining “a
reasonable and holy hope” that the victory of the grave is not
eternal. Should it be so, what is the dread of it but a delusion of
the imagination, which pictures non-existence as felt in
non-existence?

The sense of sin, the story of the fall and its expiation by a divine
sacrifice; is it not strange that no one word that this was His
mission escaped the lips of Him who is said to have been the willing
victim? The notion of sin as taught in dogmatic belief has no
existence in the unwarped mind nor in scientific psychology. Men are
involved in a chain of cause and effect from which they have little
chance of escape; and even human justice revolts at administering
punishment for involuntary acts. _Tout comprendre, c’est tout
pardonner_; that infinite Mind, which sees before and after, asks the
blood of no victim to understand and to pardon the blind gropings of
the wretched children of men.

What abuse has been made of the doctrine of Faith! Its upas-shade has
harbored the grossest growths of superstition. Faith is either
laziness or cowardice. We accept the opinions of others to save
ourselves the trouble of forming our own, or to escape the pains of
doubt. But doubt is painful only to him who accepts on authority, not
to him who honestly seeks, truth through the efforts of his own
powers.

But piety, morality, how can these be secured without dogmatic
religions? This is the answer so often hurled as final in their
defense. The history of sectarianism shows anything but a clean bill
of morality, as I have already hinted; if there is any one
corner-stone to the edifice of ethics, it is the honest pursuit of
verifiable truth, and that no dogmatic religion dares to advocate.
History shows that every great reformer of the morals of his day has
been called a schismatic by the Churches.

The arch error is, however, not in these directions, but in the
universal assumption that the moral life, that piety, is the chief end
of man and an object in itself. Nothing of the kind. The moral law
neither exhausts nor completes the nature of man. It is but one strand
in the many-fibred thread of his existence; and to suspend his whole
life and destiny from this will always, as it always has in the past,
lead to the fall and the destruction of his noblest aspirations.
Piety, a devout morality, the culture of the religious sentiment,
these are only some and far from all of the means and steps to the
highest culture of the individual life.

They are not individual in the sense that their culture can be
successfully conducted in solitude or by mystical meditation. True
religion never isolates, but unites. Not the happiness of himself in
another world, but the happiness of others in this, is the aim of the
true believer. From theirs, he derives his own. The “Communion of
Saints,” the “Congregation of the Righteous,” the “Society of
Friends,”――these are the expressions which indicate the direction of
the religious sentiment in unimpeded activity. In such “solemn troops
and sweet societies,” it yields that joy to man which his nature is
capable of receiving only in its highest moments of exaltation, and
which it would be sad to think he could ever be deprived of.

But this we need not fear. A religion that is not afraid of free
investigation, but courts it; one that dismisses the supernatural
because it recognizes that no law can be higher than that of nature;
whose maxim is the utmost veracity in thought and action at all costs;
whose aim is to produce as much visible happiness and to prevent as
much misery as possible; which binds men together through united
sympathies for these aims; which constantly prompts to healthful and
fruitful activity; which is truly an inspiration, and sanctifies by
its presence the equally true inspirations of the highest art and the
purest science; and whose clearly recognized purpose is to promote the
ideal perfection of humanity as represented in the individual
man;――this is the Religion of the Future, and one that the future will
not allow to perish.

       *     *     *     *     *

The aim of science is the Real; of art, the Ideal; of action,
Happiness. It is for religion to unite this trinity into a unity in
each individual life.

       *     *     *     *     *

Man’s highest efforts in art or thought or life are in themselves
religious, because they represent elements in the better future life
of the race. This is what Michael Angelo meant when he said, “Who
strives after perfection in Art, strives after something Divine.”

       *     *     *     *     *

The divine is not the superhuman, but the ideally human. The infinite
must become incarnate to be intelligible. It is so in all great
religious acts and works.

       *     *     *     *     *

The ideally true is the potentially true.

       *     *     *     *     *

Physical science is opposed to both religion and metaphysics, and yet
is forever attracted toward them; because, struggle as it may, in them
alone can it find its own completion.

       *     *     *     *     *

The religious sect that condemns reason, condemns itself; and the
latter sentence is the only one which will be executed.

       *     *     *     *     *

The poetry of science will be the inspiration of the religion of the
future.

       *     *     *     *     *

Were there a religion other than human, it could not appeal to
humanity.

       *     *     *     *     *

The human cannot get along without the divine in some form. The least
religious men, such as gamblers, are the most superstitious. As
Novalis says, “Where the gods are not, ghosts take their place.”

       *     *     *     *     *

The aim of classic religions was the salvation of the State; of
Christianity, the salvation of certain individuals, the Elect; of the
religion of the future, the salvation of the whole race of man.

       *     *     *     *     *

A religious doctrine should compel belief, like a theorem in geometry.
Most doctrines are accepted because their believers know too much to
disturb their tranquillity by examining them, or too little to
comprehend them.

       *     *     *     *     *

As in dreams the impressions of childhood continue to recur, so in
modern religions conceptions belonging to the childhood of the race
are still urged upon us.

       *     *     *     *     *

The dogmatists prefer to frame rules, rather than give reasons;
because the latter will be judged on their merits, while the former
are accepted on authority.

       *     *     *     *     *

Half-true is harder to refute than wholly false. The defenders shield
themselves behind the part that is true. Not the mud at the bottom,
but the stain in the water, clouds the stream. This is why numerous
sects continue to survive, perpetuating many errors by means of a few
truths.

       *     *     *     *     *

There is something comical in a man making a business of religion,
levying a charge on this world for his services to the next. The
Quakers must have had a vein of humor in their opposition to all sorts
of paid priests.

       *     *     *     *     *

The priests of the Church of the Future will be the spiritual leaders
of their generation, those educators, poets, scientists, physicians,
journalists, and others, who practice their avocations with a view to
the interests of others as well as their own.

       *     *     *     *     *

Eating your dinner is as sacred as saying your prayers, and making
your living is as noble as dying for your faith.

       *     *     *     *     *

I heard Walt Whitman once say that life without immortality would be
like a railroad train made up entirely of engines. The forces of
individuality seemed to him too mighty, to conceive as possible their
limitation to this world.

       *     *     *     *     *

The spirit of Christ’s teachings is too democratic to be in hearty
sympathy with either science, philosophy, art, or the pursuit of
pleasure.

       *     *     *     *     *

Piety is sometimes merely the last passion; sometimes merely the last
fashion.

       *     *     *     *     *

The devout are the disappointed.

       *     *     *     *     *

Prayer refreshes and relieves the mind by strengthening the
confidence, by diverting the thoughts, and by admonishing the soul of
higher themes. The Jew prays to Jehovah, most Christians to the Virgin
or the Saints, the Buddhist to himself; all are consoled and
benefitted; equally so is he who meditates on the laws, the life, the
love, and the power, manifested in the universe of matter and mind
around him.




VII. _The Cultivation of Our Individuality._


When you tell a person that he resembles so-and-so, he is always
surprised. He does not see the slightest similarity. Were he to meet
his double in the street, he would pass him without recognition. It
would be the same with his mental counterpart; in fact, most men are
so slightly acquainted with themselves, and are so lost in the crowd,
that they no longer know the way home. They are merely composite
photographs of the people they have met. Unconscious actors, they
speak the words and imitate the feelings of those around them until
they lose the cue of their own proper parts.

This deplorable lack of Individuality is the fruitful cause of many a
failure and much unhappiness. It arises from a lack of self-knowledge,
self-confidence, and self-respect, and is constantly leading men
astray in their plans of life.

The complaint is often made that men deceive each other; but they
deceive themselves far more. They imagine they have talents which they
do not possess, and overlook those which are their own; they attempt
what is beyond their powers, and allow those they have to rust through
want of use. They believe that is their own which they have but
borrowed, and go forth to till imaginary fields, leaving their own
garden-plots lie fallow.

How much better to live one’s own life, to be oneself, to cultivate
what abilities we have rather than to waste time on those we have not,
to learn the limits of our own capacities and insure success by
working within them! The advice of the sages of all times has been to
swear by the words of no teacher, to call no man Master, to think our
own thoughts, to be true to ourselves, to make our own felicity, and
not to run about the world trying to share that of others by aping
their sentiments and actions.

The greatest teachers have not desired disciples, but friends. They
have never exerted authority, and where they could not persuade or
convince, they have sought no proselytes. To them the independance of
the individual mind has been of more importance than the dissemination
of any article of faith or element of instruction. Spinoza, Herder,
Wilhelm von Humboldt, our own Emerson, have all in spirit joined with
Goethe in singing that the secret of the highest happiness of man
rests in the preservation of his own free personality:――

  Höchstes Glück der Erdenkinder
  Sei nur die Persönlichkeit.

Peer in this august company, deeper than any in his devotion, speaking
at every hazard, I name my late friend, Walt Whitman, the “singer of
one’s self,” “chanter of Personality,” “self-balanced for all
contingencies,” holding creeds and schools in abeyance, ceasing not
till death.

The man of independent mind and strong personality is never trivial or
vulgar, no matter what his education or social position. The artist
who plays solo commands our attention. The plant which is indigenous
is alone strong and hardy; exotics are starvelings. Individuality is
contagious, and it is bracing and stimulating to meet such a
character. His presence is a benefit to a whole company, and a company
of such is worth a regiment of nonentities. The richest agricultural
community I ever saw was in France, where every peasant cultivated his
own little field; and the poorest was in our own country, where every
man was trying to feed his cattle on somebody else’s range.

The latter theory, however, is that which is popular to-day. Dreamers
are constantly devising schemes by which the idle and incompetent may
live off the proceeds of the diligent; labor unions deprive their
members of the liberty of speech and the liberty of work; socialism
would reduce all to a common level; syndicates and trusts break down
individual enterprise; sectarian colleges limit their calls to
professors who will echo their tenets; and thus in all directions the
free growth of the individual is hemmed in by the hedges of prejudice,
tradition, creed, and false theory.

Many people scarcely know what Individuality is. They think it means
to wear a straw hat in winter, or in some other way to make oneself
conspicuous. This is precisely what it does not mean. The man who is
himself is always simple and natural; he buys his hat at the hatter’s
and allows the tailor to make his clothes. To act otherwise is
affectation and singularity, not individuality. Simplicity is a
charming characteristic of the strongest minds. It is recorded of Sir
Isaac Newton that he was not distinguished from other men by any
peculiarity, either natural or affected; upon which Dr. Johnson makes
the excellent remark,――“Newton stood alone merely because he had left
the rest of mankind behind him, not because he deviated from the
beaten path.” Those who met Robert Browning for the first time were
agreeably surprised to find the great poet was in ordinary society
simply a gentleman. All forms of affectation are confessions that we
are not what we pretend to be, and are inconsistent with true
individuality.

Nor is it obstinacy and self-assertiveness, as others suppose. The man
who aims to be himself will wish others to remain themselves, and will
be the last to obtrude his personality in a disagreeable way upon
them. Obedience, voluntary subjection to the will of others, is part
of his self-training. He who cannot obey, cannot command. Nor is he
one who lives for himself, is solitary or selfish. The characters who
in history shine with the most marked individuality have been those
who moved most actively among their fellow men.

True individuality is that confidence in self which arises from a
knowledge of one’s own powers, their extent and their limitations.
This knowledge can be obtained only by experience, by testing the
powers, and by gauging their strength in the contest of life.

From how many vexations does a correct estimate of our capacities free
us? Envy, disappointed ambition, premature exhaustion, disgust of the
world, these arise from inadequate notions of our own abilities. On
the other hand, that life has always a large share of happiness which
is spent in the prosecution of some object to which our faculties are
equal, and which therefore we prosecute with success.

In judging of our own powers we are just as likely to under- as to
over-estimate them, and the results are equally painful.

How acute are the sufferings of a diffident, shy, self-distrustful,
over-sensitive disposition! Such a temperament is a sad make-weight in
the struggle of life. More men fail through ignorance of their
strength than through knowledge of their weakness. They are like a
farmer, who gathers scanty harvests all his life from fields covering
rich deposits of ore, which, did he but work them, would enrich him.
The fear of falling often hinders from climbing.

Let such remember that few score success, but after failures. Few
experiences are indeed more painful than to devote ourselves earnestly
to an undertaking and discover that it is beyond our powers; but the
failure teaches us the extent of our strength and increases it for the
next effort. We can never learn our own abilities but by trying for
what is beyond them; like the athlete, who lifts heavier and heavier
weights until he reaches those which he cannot move. Practice and
persistence are strong cards. “Time and I,” said Philip II, “against
any other two.”

Much of our sensitiveness, did we but know it, springs from concealed
vanity. We covertly fear that if we display our powers it will give
others the opportunity to take their measure; and this we mistrust
will not prove favorable to us. But there is a consolation in view. We
may call to mind that as the best of authors do not escape censure, so
the poorest do not lack admirers.

The over-estimation of one’s faculties leads to vanity and
self-conceit, traits not generally painful to the individual, and not
so injurious as excessive diffidence. It does a youth no harm to
believe that he was born to perform great deeds. It is easier to cut
back rank shoots than to fertilize sterile roots. He who is confident
that he can leap beyond the mark, will be pretty certain to reach it.
Attrition with the world usually reduces vanity to its proper limits.
Disappointed ambition is bitter, but some bitters are excellent
tonics.

That individuality is genuine which is confidence in self, based on
knowledge of self.

Nowhere does it show its worth more than when it comes into contact
with Opinion――that Queen of the World, as it has been called. How many
are its abject slaves, ordering their lives and measuring their
tastes, not by what they think right or desirable, but by what society
and the world around them dictate. Pitiable creatures! the only solid
ground of happiness is not what others think of you, but what you
think of yourself; not what they believe you to be, but what you know
you are.

On most subjects a sensible man will be extremely tolerant. He has
differed too often from himself in the course of his life to be
positive with others. He also knows that opinions may differ, yet not
be contradictory. Most questions have not only two sides, but many
sides; they are polygonal, and, like a table of that shape, can
accommodate many without elbowing. The value of anybody’s opinion on
any subject is much less than is popularly supposed. The fact, and not
the opinion based on it, is alone of supreme importance. For that
reason, what are called “fixed principles” and “settled convictions”
are signs of mental debility or indolence. I think it is Ruskin who
says that he would be ashamed of himself if he entertained the same
opinions on any subject which he did twenty years ago. It would be a
sign of ossification of the intelligence.

The characteristic of true individuality is a readiness to adopt the
views of others on proper evidence, and not obstinacy, as many think.
A certain flexibility of opinion strengthens personality; as the free
swaying to and fro of the branches of a tree toughens the fibres of
its trunk.

Obstinate asseveration is usually a sign of ignorance or falsehood.
The man who swears he is telling you the truth is generally lying.
When you see men in violent discussion about subjects of which they
cannot know much, such as religion or politics, take a seat and laugh.
They are the fools in the Comedy of Life, and the spectacle is
humorous.

It is proverbial that argument never convinces, but leaves each side
more strongly confirmed in its opinions. Not thus do the shrewd makers
of converts go about their work. They well know that the timely hint,
the insidious suggestion, the light touch, leaves the permanent
impression; like the brands of animals, which to be lasting must
scorch only the superficial layers of the skin, and if burnt deeper,
are obliterated by the healing of the wound.

That form of opinion which is called Advice has much to do with our
felicity. If a man fails, the usual explanation is that he refused to
take advice. Advice which is the expression of the general results of
human action――such as is supplied in such abundance in this volume――is
worthy of consideration; but that which is offered to meet particular
cases is generally worth about what it costs to give,――nothing. Advice
is never as wise as it seems. Usually it is claimed to be the fruit of
experience; but we may know the world ever so well to-day, and
to-morrow our knowledge will be out of date. Good advice usually loses
good opportunity. Even if by rejecting it we fail, the loss may not be
real. Sometimes the money we lose turns out to be that which was best
invested.

One of the choicest fruits of the culture of individuality is Decision
of Character. Nothing more constantly contributes to the happiness of
life. This has been so well shown by John Foster in his essay on the
subject that I shall do better by the reader to persuade him to peruse
it, than to enlarge on the subject here. The state of indecision,
vacillation, and uncertainty, in which many persons pass a good share
of their waking hours, is reason enough for the unhappiness of which
they complain. The habit of decision can be readily acquired by making
it a rule to decide promptly on small matters, and not allowing them
again to occupy the attention.

I do not esteem highly the spirit of that Arab proverb which
says,――“What you wish to conceal from your enemy, tell not to your
friend;” but there is a certain reserve which every person of strong
character instinctively observes toward even his intimates. It is not
secretiveness, and still less taciturnity or dissimulation. Rather it
is the sense of the sacredness of personality, and is the nucleus of
that lofty sense of Self-reverence, which is the worthiest feeling one
can entertain toward himself. There are certain recesses of the soul,
certain feelings, which belong imperiously to the Ego, such as are so
powerfully limned in Charlotte Bronte’s poem beginning,――

  “When thou sleepest lulled in night,
   Art thou lost in vacancy?”

which cannot be disclosed to others, though they may be divined by
them.

Such reticence in no wise interferes with Sincerity of character. This
is beyond all else the trait of the person of marked individuality. He
alone can be sincere; not that other, who borrows his opinions from
those around him, and is a mere dealer in other men’s goods, and hence
has none of his own to offer as security for what he says.

The casuists love to argue that veracity is a relative quality; that
half a lie often conveys a more correct impression than the whole
truth; that to show the seamy as well as the shiny side of great
characters is an injury to the community; that courtesy obliges us to
chicane with facts; that limping morality itself is much assisted by
the friendly hand of mendacity. These questions may be left to the
conscience of each to work out for himself; but about one kind of
veracity there should be no quibbling, and that is, veracity to
oneself. Deceive others if you will; but never try to persuade
yourself that you are what you are not, or have what you have not. How
can you expect to succeed in making yourself happy, if you studiously
attempt to remain ignorant of the nature, capacities, and qualities
which you aim to please?

Finally, the foundation of Individuality must be broad, if the edifice
is to be solid. One must constantly have in view the symmetrical
development of all the powers and faculties. He must seek
many-sidedness in his knowledge and in his sympathies. All the
facettes of his nature must be polished through use. Narrow views,
petty interests, routine, paucity of affections, these must be avoided
would he so develop his nature as to derive from it the utmost
enjoyment in life.

       *     *     *     *     *

The mission of the species is the perfecting of the individual.

       *     *     *     *     *

For all our power in the present, we are indebted to the past; for
future power――or weakness,――we shall owe the present.

       *     *     *     *     *

The man of strong personality is not apt to perceive how much he
differs from others, because he is quick to recognize the personality
in them. This trait always impressed me in Walt Whitman. He seemed to
take for granted that everybody had as much personality as himself.
They had,――to him.

       *     *     *     *     *

To Walt Whitman, Self was sacred,――and little else. He was intoxicated
with individuality.

       *     *     *     *     *

Distrust the current estimates of great men. They alone are not tried
by their peers.

       *     *     *     *     *

If you climb a height, you will be easier seen, but will look smaller.

       *     *     *     *     *

It is difficult to say which is the weaker: He who cultivates
self-admiration, or he whose chief aim is to elicit the admiration of
others. When Cromwell entered London as Lord Protector, a flatterer
called his attention to the crowds assembled to welcome him. “They
would come just the same to see me hanged,” was his reply.

       *     *     *     *     *

Self-complacency is a successful counterfeit of happiness. Were it the
genuine article, then the madman who believes himself Deity is the
happiest of mortals. But if he is cured?

       *     *     *     *     *

Singularity is not an effort to be oneself, but to be what others are
not.

       *     *     *     *     *

Some people cannot be blamed for affectation, for they have nothing of
their own to show.

       *     *     *     *     *

Some men, by pretending to be other than what they believe they are,
show themselves in their true character.

       *     *     *     *     *

Common minds like commonplaces. When the audience applauds, you have
probably said nothing worth hearing.

       *     *     *     *     *

It requires more courage to differ from public opinion in matters of
thought than in action.

       *     *     *     *     *

A man is apt to attribute his failure to having accepted advice; his
friends, to his having rejected it.

       *     *     *     *     *

Those listen most respectfully to advice who have resolved not to take
it.

       *     *     *     *     *

We are apt to discover the best reasons for our actions after
committing them.

       *     *     *     *     *

Most men do not base their opinions on reasoning; but their reasoning
on their opinions.

       *     *     *     *     *

Never revolt against the laws you make for yourself.

       *     *     *     *     *

Our worst disappointments are when we disappoint ourselves. This is
the feeling of Chagrin, the painful, inward acknowledgment that we
“have made fools of ourselves.” Few reflections are more bitter, or
less easily escaped.

       *     *     *     *     *

Our wisest warnings are often most applicable to ourselves. Steele,
deviled by duns, wrote of the disgrace of contracting debts which one
cannot pay; and Bacon scribbled wise saws about domestic economy at
one end of the room, while his steward was robbing him at the other.

       *     *     *     *     *

Individuality is anarchic and subversive; it accepts no institution
because it is old and reverend; it brings a jewel which fits into no
ready-made setting; it cries with Walt Whitman:――

  My call is the call of battle; I nourish active rebellion,
  He going with me must go well-armed.

       *     *     *     *     *

Individuality is the antithesis of egotism. He who is most himself
best appreciates and most respects the self of others.

       *     *     *     *     *

Self-distrust is nowhere more appropriate than in discussing difficult
questions, and nowhere less displayed.

       *     *     *     *     *

That we have not the ability to do, rather than that we have not the
opportunity to enjoy, is the source of most of our unhappiness.

       *     *     *     *     *

The misanthropy of the young is dissatisfaction with self; that of the
old is detestation of others. Youth hopes to find life a romance,
himself as its hero; age would like it a history which posterity would
prize. When disappointed, youth is despairing; age is resentful.




PART IV.

How far our Happiness depends on Others.




I. _What Others Give Us: Safety, Liberty, Education._


A student of human affairs has observed that it is very difficult to
find happiness within oneself, and impossible to discover it
elsewhere. Were the witticism reversed it would be equally true.
“Imperfect happiness,” observes the philosopher Kant, “arises from
man’s _unsocial_ passions.” Man’s only enemy is man, but he is also
his only ally. In the pursuit of happiness each must aid himself with
all his might, but all his might will prove of no avail without the
aid of others.

The well-being of the individual depends directly on the social
organization around him. From it alone can he obtain safety, freedom,
and the means of knowledge; in return, it demands respect for its
rules,――that which we call Morality.

For security, safety, man is absolutely dependent on his fellows, on
society. Deprived of it, a prey to well-grounded fears, he can neither
develop his own powers nor enjoy the fruit of his labors. If you know
the bloodhounds are on your track, the most beautiful landscape will
lose its attractions. When the courtier Damocles praised Dionysius to
his face as the happiest man on earth, the tyrant seated the sycophant
at a luxurious repast with a sword suspended above his head by a
single hair. The story is familiar to all, because its moral is a
universal truth. The king stood alone on the giddy height of his
power, and the dread of the inevitable fall was the vampyre that
sucked the blood from all his pleasures and left them corpses before
his eyes.

Men have always felt that the only security is to become members of a
social organization. The savagest horde has its own, its totem, clan,
or gens. But in pursuit of safety, men are apt to sacrifice freedom.
To escape the fire, they plunge into the water; but neither element is
their right abode. Society stands opposed to the individual. It
governs by rules and averages, demands conformity, restricts liberty,
dislikes personality.

Thus arises the ceaseless struggle, to and fro, over the earth,
through all history, between the social and the individual theories of
happiness. The constitution of the ideal civil society should realize
the conditions necessary for the highest personal enjoyment. But where
do we find such a constitution? Not even in theory have we reached it.
On the one side are the moral tyrants, afflicted with what Mirabeau
called the mania of governing, _la fureur de gouverner_, who would
make men happy against their will by prescribing for them what they
should eat and what they should drink, on what days they should work
and on what days play. Over against them is the camp of the
disclassed, unable to govern themselves, and, therefore, hating to be
governed by any.

Both are equally impotent to the end both profess. Nothing but a
distorted growth can result from a conformity to moral standards
brought about by external compulsion. Only what a man does or leaves
undone of his own free will develops and strengthens his nature.
Freedom makes him a man, compulsion an animated machine. Good soldiers
are not trained by fighting behind ramparts, but by exposure in the
field to the enemy. What if some perish in the fray? The success of
the day is cheaply bought by the fall of the few.

Limitations, restrictions, however, there must be, and that man alone
is truly a freeman who recognizes and respects them. Liberty is not
lawlessness; it is the ability to make the law our servant and not our
master, an ability which we must acquire through our own efforts. The
rights of men are equal, but they can enjoy them only so far as they
qualify themselves so to do. All citizens of the United States have an
equal right to pre-empt a portion of the public domain; but to secure
the land they must make certain personal efforts. So it is with all
other social advantages and conditions of happiness; men deserve them
only so far as they cultivate a capacity for them; and not equality,
but justice in their distribution, must be the final aim of every sane
social compact.

The only use of this excellent government of ours, or of any other on
the face of the earth, is――what? The preservation of your liberty and
mine. Nothing else. Never forget this. Any government is worth paying
a dollar to support, or lifting a finger to defend, only so far as it
secures to each woman and man her or his greatest possible personal
liberty. To the extent that it falls short of this or goes beyond it,
it is worthless and an enemy. The limits of a government are plain
enough, when we thus define them from the vantage-ground of individual
freedom. It should protect from external enemies and internal
dissensions, and from violence to person or property; it should
enforce justice between man and man, and woman and man; it should
extend its direct care to the weak, the immature, and the incapable;
and it should supply to all the means of self-culture, of education,
in its widest sense. Here its action should end. All else should be
left to the individual.

There is another theory of government than this. It would treat all
men as if they never come of age, or remain forever feeble-minded. It
would supply them with work, take care of their pay, dictate their
amusements, prohibit doubtful indulgences, and deliver from
temptations by removing them. Such a government would make grown-up
children, not men. It is the ideal of all priests, of most women, and
of dreamers. It has at times been partially realized, and always with
disastrous results to the strength of the individual character. I have
seen more drunken men in one week in the State of Maine, where the
sale of intoxicants is prohibited, than during three months in Italy,
where their sale is unrestricted.

The advocates of all such attacks on personal liberty――be they priests
or social dreamers――are not less opposed to free thought than to free
action. The defense of their opinions, not the discovery of truth, is
to them the purpose of research. The logical ultimatum of the one is
the stake, of the other the dynamite bomb. Both would restrict the
untrammeled and unbiased pursuit of knowledge.

Knowledge, however, is the twin brother of liberty and the provider
for the treasury of happiness. Much more than a fine phrase is the
poet’s line, that “He is a freeman, whom the truth makes free.” Not
what he is, or what he has, but what he _knows_, gives the individual
real power, and, through power, freedom and the ability to use it for
the gratification of his desires through the unrestricted employment
of his faculties.

The materials of knowledge are represented by the degree of
civilization possessed by a nation. Their distribution should be
through education――unbiased, secular, universal――co-extensive with the
demand of the governed, equal to both sexes. This is within the plain
province of government. Children cannot educate themselves, and
ignorant parents see no need of learning. Yet the period of childhood
is the golden age for instruction. It is the epoch of permanent
impressions, dear and indelible, like the initials of a loved one cut
on the bark of a young beech, remaining legible even when the solid
heart of the aged tree is decayed.

Inertia denies the possibility of improvement. Obscurantism dislikes
it. Let them pass on. Whatever a man is, there is the power for better
within him; we know not how much better. Faculties trained turn from
bad to good. What is a weed in the fields becomes a flower in the
garden. The State cannot afford to leave education to the people.
Grass grows of itself, but grain needs tillage.

How strongly this is shown in the lamentable education of women in all
civilized countries! Sedulously confined to empty accomplishments and
conventional moralities, they are everywhere found to be the chief
supporters of decaying dogmas, serfs to social opinion, frittering
away their lives in vanities which men have left centuries behind
them. Both sexes are to blame for this. Men love to rule, and they
fear the increased knowledge which freedom would bring to women; and
women are jealous of the eminence which learning gives a sister and
seek to belittle its value.

What if I refer again and again to this subject? I have too often
witnessed the exceeding unhappiness of women in all grades of society
not to have it frequently in my thoughts. They are more unhappy than
men, as I have said before, and I believe it is mainly because they
are worse educated. I know the instruction in the best schools for
girls in the United States, and to what is it directed? To two ends,
to be “good,” and to shine in society. What they should be taught is
to understand the hygiene of their own bodies, to take care of their
own money, to govern their decisions by justice and reason and not by
impulse, to occupy their thoughts with facts and not with fiction,
and, more than all, to be independent in thought and deed, and not to
allow either society or sentimentality to cast the final vote in the
direction of their actions.

Such doctrine may sound heretical; so I hasten to bring to its support
a reputable endorser in the person of a clergyman of the Church of
England, that writer who so charmingly combines the best of humor with
the best of sense, the Rev. Sydney Smith. I take it from his essay on
“Female Education,” an essay that ought to be read and pondered by
every woman in the land, the whole burden and spirit of which is
expressed in the following most pregnant sentence,――“The happiness of
woman will be increased in proportion as education gives to her the
habit and the means of _drawing her resources from herself_.”

How much better this than the following insufferable twaddle of Thomas
de Quincey: “It is more in harmony with the retiring graces of their
sexual character that they should practice a general rule of
submission to the traditional belief of their own separate Church,
even when that belief has long been notoriously challenged as
erroneous”? He is in earnest, too; and the late Poet Laureate in “In
Memoriam” said nearly the same. Blind leaders of the blind! who think
that falsehood and ignorance are going to point the way to light and
truth.

The fact is, the moral side of woman has been educated, and thus
educated, out of all proportion to her other faculties. What is not
“very stuff of the conscience” makes little or no impression on her.
The Good, the Fit, the Conventional are for her the True; which is a
grievous error, and <DW44>s her real progress.

Education is not only the foundation for happiness; it should and it
can be made a pleasure in itself. This will sound strange to those who
are principally familiar with such institutions of education as those
of the Mr. Squeers or Dr. Blimber type. But the schoolmaster has
himself been to school, and after flogging children for several
thousand years, and thereby developing a healthy hatred of books which
it is a wonder did not hurl the race back into barbarism, he has
learned from Froebel and Pestalozzi and others that it is actually
possible for a sane mind to study with pleasure if the chance is
offered. Indeed, a learned writer who has many admirers in this
country, Mr. Herbert Spencer, is able to say,――“The usual test of
political legislation――its tendency to promote happiness――is beginning
to be the test of legislation for the school and the nursery;” and
elsewhere,――“As a final test by which to judge any plan of culture
should come the question,――Does it create a pleasurable sensation in
the pupil?”

This is good counsel; but, like many good things, it is also old. Two
thousand years ago or so Plato wrote,――“In education, direct boys to
what amuses their minds.”

Security, liberty, and the means of knowledge,――these, therefore, are
the conditions of happiness which every government should, and all in
some measure do, offer the individual. For them, he is entirely
dependent on others. In whatever delusion to the contrary his
ignorance or his arrogance may plunge him, he can obtain these
inestimable benefits in no other way than through the social
organization, and he cannot therefore escape his liability for them.
If he denies it or refuses it, the consequences will be as inevitable
as they will be disastrous. He who wisely consults the conditions
which determine his own happiness will not seek in isolation or
self-sufficiency these elements, which can alone be obtained through
the co-operation of his fellow-man.

       *     *     *     *     *

Social progress is advanced far more by strengthening the weak than by
chastising the wicked.

       *     *     *     *     *

The sense of safety implies not merely absence of fear, but also
freedom of action.

       *     *     *     *     *

Justice should be the motto of the State; prudence that of the
individual.

       *     *     *     *     *

Self-recognition is a part of happiness; but the recognition by others
of what we pride ourselves upon, is another and a large part of it.

       *     *     *     *     *

Man is a social being; but the true aim of his social activity is to
learn how to be solitary.

       *     *     *     *     *

He who thinks it necessary to seek solitude for self-improvement often
finds there is still one too many persons present.

       *     *     *     *     *

The purpose of law is liberty; of obedience, independence; of
submission, emancipation.

       *     *     *     *     *

The well-being of the individual, not of the class, should be the aim
of government. It should not be “by the people for the people,” but by
the people for the person.

       *     *     *     *     *

The true moral education is that which makes every intellectual
question a matter of conscience, and every matter of conscience an
intellectual question.

       *     *     *     *     *

An explanation which demonstrates the impossibility of knowing is
about as satisfactory as one which imparts the knowledge desired. But
there are some who call everything incomprehensible which they do not
comprehend.

       *     *     *     *     *

Many children and nearly all girls are educated by equivocations and
taught truths by means of falsehoods. What have the teachers to expect
when their pupils discover this fact?

       *     *     *     *     *

There are a good many branches of education about which it is
sufficient for most to know that they exist.

       *     *     *     *     *

That moral strength is alone real which has been acquired by repeated
exposure to temptation and repeated successful resistance.

       *     *     *     *     *

We never fully acknowledge to ourselves how very human we are. We each
secretly think that there is something in us not shared by any other
man or woman.

       *     *     *     *     *

Women love too deeply to be able to judge justly.




II. _What we Owe Others: Morality, Duty, Benevolence._


The much-maligned Epicurus is reported to have delivered the oracular
utterance,――“The man who is not virtuous can never be happy;” and
poets and moralists have exhausted their ingenuity in devising
variants of the well-worn line,――“’Tis virtue only makes our bliss
below.”

Who would have supposed that philosophers should have been found――aye,
and they of high degree――who toss overboard these venerable maxims as
antiquated rubbish? Yet such is the surprising case.

The mighty Kant, tearing away the cobwebs of the dogmatic philosophy,
feared not to declare,――“There is not in the moral law the slightest
ground for a necessary connection between Morality and Happiness;” and
again,――“The goal of a perfect harmony of Desire and Duty cannot be
obtained;” while in our own day the critical Alexander Bain calmly
observes,――“Happiness and Virtue are independent aims and not
identical. The treatment of Happiness should be dissevered from that
of Ethics.”

Scarcely could the contrast of the new and the old schools of thought
be more vividly displayed than in these brief quotations. There are
some, indeed, who have even gone farther, and maintained that the
pursuit of happiness and that of virtue are not only independent, but
even incompatible aims; because, writes Dr. Despine, a French
psychologist of repute,――“Happiness is the satisfaction of desire,
while virtue consists in doing good, not to satisfy the desire of
doing it, but out of a sense of duty, and in opposition to desire.”
This statement, however, overlooks the existence of a moral sense and
the normal pleasure derived from its gratification.

Morality and the moral sense are not to be confounded. All men have a
love for the beautiful, but nowise agree as to what is beautiful; and
there is just as wide and just as impassable a gulf between the
various conceptions of morals, although, in all, the moral sense is
present.

Morality is nothing more than the conformity of the individual to the
type of the society in which he lives. It is the recognition of the
debt which he owes it for securing him the privileges of safety,
liberty, and education, as I have explained in the last chapter. Not
his own moral sense, but the society in which he is, lays down the
terms on which that debt is to be paid; and while he feels on the one
side entitled to these rights, he acknowledges, on the other, his
liability for his social duties in exchange for them.

There is, therefore, no such thing as a universal or even a general
code of morality, nor can there be. There is no act which may not
sometimes be right and sometimes be wrong. I have heard of a French
writer, who composed a work entitled “The Seven Cardinal Sins,”
showing how under certain circumstances every one of them could be
committed by a perfectly virtuous person. I have never read his book,
but I delight in his doctrine. Take the Decalogue itself, written, as
we are told, by the very finger of Divinity, and there is not a
command in it that both Christian and Jew do not break most virtuously
whenever occasion calls. “Thou shalt not kill;” and all nations spend
more annually in preparations for killing by land and sea than they do
in a generation for institutions of learning. “Thou shalt not rob;”
and Abraham Lincoln with one glorious stroke of his pen robbed the
citizens of the United States of a hundred million dollars’ worth of
valuable slaves. Truth-telling? The observation of Socrates in the
Symposium still holds good,――“In speaking of holy things or persons,
there is a general understanding that you should praise them, not that
you should tell the truth about them;” witness the discussions that
come up from time to time on the characters of “the Fathers of the
Republic” or the books of the Bible.

In every code of morals there is one law for our friends and another
for the rest of the world; our duty to our family is ever in conflict
with our duty to our neighbor; and our duty to our country is opposed
to our duty to humanity at large. A father who would treat other
children as his own would be deemed unnatural, and a statesman who
consulted the advantages of other nations would be cast out as a
traitor. This is the “dualism of morals,” and its necessary existence
destroys all possibility of a universal and inflexible code of morals.
The antagonism is not likely to decrease. The most violent
contradictions between the various views of life will be likely to be
found precisely in the highest culture; because there the individual
comes most to his own, and is least willing to sacrifice his own
rights to a society whose claims he disallows.

Men now question the right of society to demand what it does from them
in exchange for the benefits it confers upon them; and they are right.
Society itself must be brought to the test of the Moral Sense. This
faculty is that which we also call the sense of Duty, or of “the
Ought,” or Conscience. It is a judge, not a lawgiver, and it derives
its right of sitting in judgment from its ancient descent, dating back
to the time when man first gathered together in hordes or clans under
some sheltering rock for mutual aid. It is as much a part of human
nature as is the love of association, and as such its satisfaction is
as essential to happiness, but is by no means the whole of happiness,
as so many have taught. In fact, it is often enough entirely absent,
as in genuine criminals. It is now well known that these neither
experience remorse for crime nor take pleasure in well-doing, whatever
sentimentalists may say to the contrary.

The pleasure of the moral sense comes solely from the satisfaction of
itself, and not necessarily, in the least, from the practice of virtue
or benevolence or charity. The inquisitor, Torquemada, lighting the
hellfires of the Inquisition, the anarchist hurling his bomb into the
crowd, Judith yielding her maiden chastity to the embrace of
Holofernes, all enjoyed the highest pleasure of the moral sense,
because all acted in the complete conviction that they were doing
right.

The man is moral who believes he is so, and the woman is chaste who
considers herself such, no matter what their actions are. What we
think the most fiendish crimes have been perpetrated by fervent
Christians, and there are religions now numbering millions of
intelligent adherents in which the prostitution of girls is considered
a meritorious act.

When Adam Smith laid down the three requisites for individual
happiness as health, freedom from debt, and a clear conscience, he
framed a sensible prescription; but should have explained that a clear
conscience in nearly all cases means simply conformity to the standard
of our age and nation, not at all to any higher or abstract ideal. So
far from the devotion to a lofty or unusual virtue bringing happiness,
it always entails proscription, pain, and sorrow on him who advocates
it. The crowd ever cry out, “Crucify him! Crucify him!” Every one of
the noble army of leaders in ethical progress was in his own day
branded as an infidel, cursed by the Churches, and driven forth from
the enjoyments which a less developed moral sense would have permitted
him to indulge. He who rises above the law is ever against the law.

Hence it is that with perfect truth, though with a lurking satire on
the commonplaces of moral doctrine, Professor Bain writes,――“To
realize the greatest happiness from virtue we should be careful to
conform to the standard of the time and place, neither rising above
nor falling beneath it; we should make our virtues apparent and showy,
and perform them with the least sacrifice to ourselves; we should hold
our associations with duty, as well as our natural sympathies with our
fellows, only at a moderate strength.”

In certain natures the satisfaction of the moral sense yields a
happiness worth all sacrifices, just as in others the feeling of
unrestrained liberty will be gratified at the expense of everything
that the majority hold dear. Both are exceptional, and there are quite
as many who suffer nothing from a violation of the sense of duty or
from the loss of liberty.

No platitude is more erroneous than this,――“To be vicious is to be
miserable;” for were it so, we should not have the hordes of the
vicious infesting society. Far more correct is the observation of that
acute observer of life, Vauvenargues, that virtue cannot make the
vicious happy, _La vertu ne peut faire le bonheur des méchants_. He
might have added that virtue can never make the virtuous happy, for
the really virtuous man is always above the standard of his time, and
is sure to suffer in consequence from the antagonism he develops, and
from his sorrowful appreciation of the sentiment that prompts it.

The education of the moral sense has hitherto been retarded by two
popular but mistaken doctrines; the one that the moral life is “the
chief end of man;” the other that it means obedience to a code of
laws.

Again I repeat that the chief end of man is the symmetrical
development of all his powers and faculties and the enjoyment which he
will derive from their activity, and not at all the exclusive or
preponderant attention to one or the other element of his nature. His
moral sense is merely the guide of the duties he owes to others,
duties indispensable to his own life and liberty, but by no means
exhaustive of his nature; rather, merely giving him the opportunity
for the higher aim of developing himself. The moral life is but a
means to an end, and not an end in itself.

The confusion of the moral life with obedience to a moral code dates
back beyond history, and is almost as active to-day as ever, in spite
of the efforts of such teachers as Buddha and Christ to show the
falsity of it. Both proclaimed the absolute independence of the moral
sense from moral laws. Such laws are either religious, expressing
supposed duties to God, as the Jews believe that He forbade them to
eat pork, or, as they and the Christians, that He decided that one day
in seven is more sacred than the others; or they are conventional or
civil, which are merely the customs, _mores_, of the nation or
community.

Independent of all these codes, which for the most part are survivals,
and in the present day absurd, are the Benevolent Emotions, the
gratification of which to the properly developed individual
constitutes a large element of personal happiness. They arise not from
a sense of duty, because they do not have reference to what is due the
social compact, but from sympathy, acquired or inherited. The relief
of the pain of others, the administration of efficient consolation,
the diminution of the sorrows of those around us, yield to ourselves a
pleasurable satisfaction, a sense of appropriate activity, which is so
real that it is a wonder it is not more diligently cultivated. Too
many, perhaps, look for a part of their return in the gratitude of
those assisted, instead of in the pleasure of the act itself, and,
being disappointed, find the field of charity less flowery than they
anticipated. They commit the common error of placing the end of
enjoyment external to themselves instead of the means only.

       *     *     *     *     *

The only sure method to distinguish good from evil is first to learn
to discriminate true from false.

       *     *     *     *     *

A sincere lover of truth is never wholly in the wrong; chiefly because
he never claims to be wholly in the right.

       *     *     *     *     *

The finest thought I found in Chamfort’s writings――and it is
wonderfully fine, deserving to be the motto of every work on the Art
of Happiness――is this,――_Le plaisir peut_ _s’appuyer sur l’illusion,
mais le bonheur repose sur la vérité_, “Errors may yield us Pleasure,
but truth alone can give Happiness.”

       *     *     *     *     *

Only through fulfilling his duties to society can man secure from
society that which is essential to his own welfare. This is why the
inward realization of the moral law becomes a part of the Art of
Happiness.

       *     *     *     *     *

A moral act is simply one which, at the time and under the special
circumstances, is useful to the society in which it takes place. Hence
it has nothing to do with individual Motive, which is the only Mentor
recognized by the educated moral sense.

       *     *     *     *     *

The ancient Greeks believed that the laws of human society are laws of
nature, and therefore absolute. In Sophocles’ tragedy, it is no excuse
for Œdipus, when he kills his father and marries his mother, that he
does so in absolute ignorance of the relationship. His remorse and
punishment are not abated.

       *     *     *     *     *

One school of modern writers maintains that all virtues are but vices
disguised; another, that all vices are but virtues misdirected. As
these terms are entirely relative, both schools are right,――and wrong.

       *     *     *     *     *

So long as war is possible, a perfected social life is impossible; but
when Justice will not be listened to in any lower notes, she must
speak through the mouths of cannons.

       *     *     *     *     *

Peace, not happiness, is the reward of virtue.

       *     *     *     *     *

The man who professes duty as the sole guide of his life is either
hypocritical or ignorant.

       *     *     *     *     *

Weaklings and hypocrites like to extol the goodness of men; the former
to allay their own fears, the latter because it reflects flatteringly
on themselves.

       *     *     *     *     *

It is no proof that a sentiment is noble because men are willing to
die for it. More men knowingly sacrifice themselves to pleasure than
to duty.

       *     *     *     *     *

The lines of morality, observed Burke, differ from those of geometry;
they have breadth as well as length, and for that reason will not form
set and angular figures.




III. _The Practice of Business and the Enjoyment of Society._


Let us grant that the true aim of the individual is his own highest
development: he can reach it only through the ministry of his fellow
beings. Vain the effort to seek expansion or happiness apart from his
kind. The soul rusts in solitude; to be bright and keen it requires
friction with others. Alone, it starves and pines, grows misshapen and
distorted; in company, it gives and receives, assists others, and is
in turn assisted. Let us do no injustice to the balm and the blessings
of solitude; but the growth of the world is due to the blending and
the striving of mind with mind.

The word which expresses this is Association. It conveys various
degrees of intimacy, from the lowest, that of the ordinary intercourse
of Business and Society, through the increasingly closer ties of
Fellowship, Comradeship, and Friendship, up to that dearest of all,
wherein the two sexes unite to cast the rays of life into the infinite
future, Love and Marriage.

There is nothing in any of these that demands the sacrifice of the
individual. The gauge which marks the high-water line in them all is
one and the same――the maintenance of the utmost freedom of the
individual along with the utmost sympathy and accordance with the
individuality of others. As it is only through these, through
participation in all of these relations of association, that the
highest degree of personal happiness can be attained, I shall consider
each in turn very briefly, little more than hinting of those maxims
and principles which stand approved as contributing to a reasonable
success and a wise enjoyment of them.

Dealing with men is the daily business of life; but a knowledge of
human nature, even in this restricted relation, is the latest
knowledge which one acquires.

The first maxim is _to distrust_.

“All men are liars,” said the Psalmist; and there is no stronger proof
of the saying than that all men deny it. History and sermons and
sympathy combine to conceal or to modify the truth, in order that we
may walk in peace with our fellow-men. Be it so. But at least, in our
own minds, let us acknowledge facts. We are none the better ourselves
for believing others to be better than they are. “The transacting of
business,” observes Bacon, “is chiefly a commerce with fools;” my
comment upon which is, that he will be the worst fooled who thinks he
is the only wise man; of which my Lord of Verulam is said to have been
a conspicuous example.

Insincerity has no limit. If a man does not show what he is when first
you meet him, wait a year to decide. The insincere aim most to deceive
by what most they show. Concerning them, therefore, follow the Italian
maxim, believe the incredible and doubt the probable. The very pious
cashier, not the thoughtless clerk, will be the one to run away with
the money.

The second maxim is _to trust_.

Confidence in others is the corner-stone both of fortune and felicity.
It is the grateful dew which fertilizes the flowers of sincerity, of
truthfulness, and honor; and even common honesty will wither if
exposed to the scalding breath of suspicion. Reputation lives in the
minds of others, and if we know ours has no fixed abode there, but is
harbored as a doubtful and distrusted intruder, our staunchest
argument for preserving it is gone.

He who can happily combine the oil and vinegar of these two maxims in
his dealings with men, will carry with him a charm which will guard
him from the bitterest disappointments to which we are liable in the
hard contest for material aims.

Business intercourse we cannot avoid; but we seek it for other ends
than pleasure; social intercourse is that which we pursue for
enjoyment only,――or, at least, pretend to. Hence, we call it
specifically “Society;” and we distinguish it into certain fanciful
grades, as “good society,” “the best society,” and “high life.” Men
and women enter it equally, and the spirit of it is held to be apart
from, even quite the reverse of, that of business life. Many men and
all women look upon it as the field in which the chief victories of
their careers must be won and the main elements of their happiness
discovered.

Why sneer at such sentiments? The drawing-room, the only stage on
which the two sexes meet on equal terms, is the innermost sanctuary of
civilization, and the hostess is high priestess of the shrine. Its
development registers the epochs in the history of culture. Francis I
has two special claims on the praise of posterity; the one, that he
proclaimed himself honored by the friendship of Titian; the other,
that he was the first to admit women to the court society of France.
The drawing-room confers the last degree in the liberal arts. No
education is complete which has not received its finishing touches at
the hands of a refined woman; and enlightenment will first deserve its
name when her rights are everywhere as much respected and her
influence as freely acknowledged as they are now in her own parlors.

Good-will is the basis of good society. He who quits a company,
pleased, and conscious of having pleased, is its model member. There
is nothing derogatory in this. Conceal it as we may, the secret motive
of our every effort is the hope of pleasing somebody else. The
interchange of kindly courtesies and approving expressions is a
commendable pastime. He who prides himself on being “beholden to
nobody” is a pseudo-philosopher. The true philosopher enjoys society,
but is not dependent on it for his enjoyment.

Would-be superior men have inveighed against society because its
members are and must be for the most part “ordinary people,” and its
topics common-place. Really superior men prefer ordinary people,
because, as Goethe so well said, “They are more human.” Nobody was
common-place to the eye of that great master, because each represented
the species. It is certainly true that in the long run, and for “human
nature’s daily use,” ordinary people are the most agreeable. We really
should not desire high thinking in high life. People fraternize more
readily on lower levels because they are broader. Nations gather
together on plains, not on mountain tops. These are suitable for
star-gazers and eagle-hunters.

Those who dislike society are usually those who are not at ease in it,
from lack of early training. Few enjoy dancing who have learned from
an awkward master, and a lifetime is not long enough to comb the
hayseed from a farmer boy’s hair.

The one maxim for success in society is to be agreeable; and the
agreeable man is he who agrees with others. Society expects persons to
offer enjoyment and pleasure, not improvement. One should accept men
as they are and not seek to change them; it is a less task to adapt
yourself to others than them to you. One that enters a company that he
likes, is liked by it; but nothing is so justly exasperating as a show
of superiority.

The aim of society is to bring about a closer union of its members by
having them meet on planes of thought and emotion which are common to
all. The expression of discordant ideas and feelings, be they higher
or lower, is, therefore, out of place. On the other hand, a company is
harmonized, and its elements happily fused together, by some general
impression made on all at the same moment, and the enjoyment of all is
correspondingly heightened. This may be by a strain of music
appropriately introduced, by a few apt remarks on a topic of general
interest, or by the exhibition of curious or beautiful objects. The
sense of a sentiment in common is at once established, and the company
feels that each knows the other better for this property in
commonalty. The skillful hostess knows how often and by what devices
thus to promote the unity of her guests. Multiply the ties which bind
society together and you multiply the pleasure it yields and the
benefits which are derived from it.

Really good society is not selfish, nor does it encourage selfishness.
Rather it is based on a certain sacrifice of self. Those circles offer
little enjoyment where each aims at nothing but his own; amusement is
absent where no one endeavors to amuse others. Nor is it unjustly
censorious. Its judgments are generally recognized as fair, and
nothing so fortifies the moral sense as the approval of the society in
which one is accustomed to move; while the terrors of the Hereafter
are small compared to its disapproval. The stoutest minds have
acknowledged this. “Who can see worse days,” asks Bacon, “than he who
yet living doth follow at the funeral of his own reputation? I can
desire no greater place than in the front of good opinion.”

It is quite true that this power, like that of all irresponsible
autocrats, is sometimes abused to the injury of the worthy; but the
harm is slight compared to the results which are good. True, also,
that general society is a poor test of a man’s real nature. One may
possess many agreeable qualities and yet fail to be agreeable, through
lack of good taste or early training in their use under social
conditions. Or, again, though a kindly disposition makes a man
popular, it by no means follows because a man is popular that he has a
kindly disposition. We must accept society with these deficiencies,
for in spite of them all it is a potent auxiliary in the pursuit of
happiness.

Genuine kindliness of heart,――this is the sweetest trait of human
nature. Unfortunately, it is one of the rarest; so that society, which
appreciates it so highly that it cannot exist without at least its
semblance, substitutes for it――Politeness.

Though a semblance only, it is a noble counterfeit. Urbanity presages
perfected Humanity. It is the outward and visible sign of what should
be the inward and spiritual nature. It is a prophecy of the Golden Age
and is based on the Golden Rule. When some one asked Aristotle how we
should conduct ourselves toward our associates, he replied,――“We
should treat them as we wish them to treat us.”

Politeness is the only currency which costs nothing and buys much. Its
tenders are counters and yet pass as coin. Who but a fool, therefore,
would refuse to use them liberally? Such fools there are, however, and
in abundance. It is a key which has the pleasant power of both closing
the doors below and opening those above us; for there is no bar to the
unwelcome familiarity of inferiors equal to scrupulous politeness, and
no passport so sure to the esteem of our superiors in age or station.

Cheap as it is, it is too precious to be wasted, and like the free
gifts of nature, water or sunlight, there are occasions when it must
be doled out in small quantities, and at all times be dispensed with a
provident hand. Few social blunders are more painful than to display a
warmth of manner which is not reciprocated; and there are rude natures
who cannot distinguish kindliness of behavior from weakness of
purpose.

The common lien of society is Talk; and the talk must be essentially
small talk. No greater blunder could be committed than to suppose that
society wants, or ought to want, Conversation, in the dignified sense
of that term, in which an idea is introduced and expanded, a
proposition developed, or an argument stated. Nothing of the sort.
“The best conversation,” observes Mr. Malloch, “is never worth
remembering.” Perhaps he had in his mind the remark of Talleyrand, who
said that the finest converser he ever heard was his own mother, but
that he was unable to recall a single pointed or brilliant expression
she had used.

Small talk is in society what small change is in the daily affairs of
life,――you need it twenty times for your gold-piece once. It is no
such easy matter to master the art of it. To talk much and to say
little one must be very clever or a fool; and the still higher art of
putting others to their best paces, so that you act only as starter in
the race while others win the purse, asks an amount of tact which is
equaled only by the self-denial involved.

The expert in talk will aim to please and not to instruct; he will not
disturb the convictions of elderly persons who have made up their
minds; nor the self-complacency of any by a display of superiority,
especially in his judgment or reasoning powers; if he boasts, it will
be of his luck and not of his cleverness; he may compliment a woman on
her beauty, but never a rich man on his riches; he will contradict
only those who disparage themselves, and if he dips into a deep
question, he will only stir it and not settle it; he will avoid
allusions to his own ailments, but sedulously inquire about those of
others; but his chief aim will be to find out first whether the person
whom he addresses prefers to talk or to listen, and scrupulously let
him have his way.

       *     *     *     *     *

When all are of one mind, what is left to say worth hearing?

       *     *     *     *     *

Save your best thoughts for your best friends.

       *     *     *     *     *

Frivolity is the armor of good society, worn to protect it against the
violence of passions and the ennui of enthusiasms.

       *     *     *     *     *

Subservience to society is in man what “protective mimicry” is in
insects,――an unconscious tendency to imitation for the purpose of
self-preservation.

       *     *     *     *     *

Youth looks to be received in society with greater sympathy than it
finds; age will find more than it generally expects.

       *     *     *     *     *

Acquaintances rate us first at the value we put on ourselves; later at
the value we prove to them.

       *     *     *     *     *

Those who visit you, find out how you live; you must visit them to
find out how they live.

       *     *     *     *     *

Forgive if you can, but do not forget. Characters change little, and a
base action is a landmark worth remembering.

       *     *     *     *     *

A lie comes readier in society than in solitude; but for all that, it
is easier to deceive oneself than others.

       *     *     *     *     *

Only those of violent prejudices violently attack the prejudices of
others.

       *     *     *     *     *

It is a rule in polite society not to refer to three subjects――a man’s
false hair, his religion, or his politics; and for the same
reason――because neither is his own, but merely borrowed from others.

       *     *     *     *     *

Curious inconsistency! People talk willingly about their physical
ailments, but unwillingly about their moral defects; though the former
cannot be mended by discussing them, and the latter might be.

       *     *     *     *     *

Silence is often sanatory. There are subjects, thoughts, and memories
which, like certain bodily functions, cannot be avoided, but should
not be talked about.

       *     *     *     *     *

Reserve is a great help to reputation. I know a shallow scientist who
has gained a fine position mainly owing to his knack of leaving his
hearers with the impression that he knows much more than he has told.

       *     *     *     *     *

It is a noble trait to be above the temptations of fortune; but those
who care least about money are not therefore the most honest.

       *     *     *     *     *

Nothing is more interesting than self-revelation; nor more tedious
than self-publication.

       *     *     *     *     *

If you avoid disagreeable people, and cease thinking about them, for
you they will have no existence.

       *     *     *     *     *

Society is the jury impaneled to try the causes of which the law takes
no cognizance.

       *     *     *     *     *

The worst of an unfounded accusation is its foundation.

       *     *     *     *     *

Never hit at a hornet unless you are sure of killing it. Never notice
a social scandal about yourself unless you can refute it absolutely. A
weak defense is more damaging than silence.

       *     *     *     *     *

It is a much admired art to turn the weaknesses of others to our own
profit. How sublime would be the science which would direct their
strength to their own true interests!




IV. _On Fellowship, Comradeship and Friendship._


Man is slow to understand how human he is. He thinks he can measure
himself by other standards than himself, but all his circuits lead him
home again; his most positive knowledge is of himself, and by analogy
of his own kind. With a wise recognition of the limits of his own
nature he should seek happiness in the conditions of existence known
to him and especially among his own species, where alone he can find
beings whose endowments are the same, and whose affinities and
sympathies respond to his own.

Society, as I have said, is the common field of intercourse in
civilized life, and it makes for itself its own various limitations
and restrictions. Other methods of Association are based on quite
different principles, but have all been organized with the aim of
increasing happiness, and all therefore deserve the cultivation of him
who is sedulous about his own. The two motives which give them origin
are, the one, Interest; the other, Sympathy. The former I may call
Fellowships; the latter, Comradeships.

Fellowships, composed of those who _follow_ the same business, trade,
or profession, and thus have an interest in common,――this is what the
word means. They are the guilds, unions, lodges, clubs, societies,
associations, companies, which swarm so in our day, whose members are
held together by a desire of mutual assistance in making money, or
raising wages, or providing against misfortune, or maintaining
privileges, or buying cheap, or paying each other’s funeral expenses,
or in a thousand other ways advancing the interests, and thus
relieving the burdens and increasing the enjoyment, of their members.
I knew a man who belonged to over three hundred such associations, and
as he was in other respects a sensible person, he probably found a
profit in this multiplication of ties.

It is a discovery of modern times of no mean importance that after
several thousand years of open trial, government and religion and
friendship and love have all failed in relieving the misery of human
life, but that the intelligent recognition of the mutuality of
interests does not fail; and, when properly organized, may be counted
on with utmost confidence to prevent most of the disasters and to
secure most of the essential material blessings of life,――far beyond
the dreams of the most sanguine reformers of earlier generations.
There is no reason why we should have the poor always with us, except
the ignorance of men as to their own material interests or their
indifference to them; and these difficulties must in time diminish, if
not disappear. Through association for mutual aid in buying and
selling, in labor and investment, in defense and assistance, in credit
and insurance, and the like, the date is almost calculable when the
deserving poor will as a class no longer exist, and extreme indigence
will mean either idleness or crime.

The rock on which most such schemes have shattered has been that in
their blind effort at mutuality they have overlooked the prime import
of individuality――the freedom and autonomy of each member. It should
never be forgotten that the only value of any scheme of association is
the development of the individual. Any society which does not make
this its first and clearly announced purpose is doomed to a deserved
failure. There is no sentiment in such associations. They classify men
like bricks or boxes, according to the externals or accidents of their
professions or places. They pay no heed to personality beyond the one
element in it which they are formed to take cognizance of. For that
very reason they are apt to demand disproportionate sacrifices for
this, and to encroach on liberty by unjust demands on the member’s
time, labor, leisure, or money. They are liable to reach a point where
the benefits they confer are not worth the sacrifices they require.
This is the history of many labor unions in the United States, and it
is the characteristic of all the so-called socialistic schemes for
improving society. In all of them society is looked upon as paramount
to the individual, instead of the individual as paramount to society;
whereas, his development is that alone for which society has any right
to exist.

Comradeship differs from Fellowship as social does from business life.
In it there is no question of interests in common, but only of tastes
in common――a mutuality which exists often to the sad injury of
interests. Comrades are birds of a feather, who assemble because they
resemble――in accordance with the French proverb, _Qui se rassemblent,
s’assemblent_. They all like dogs, or whist, or yachts, or music, or
old books, or four-in-hands, or spectral analysis,――any of the
occupations of choice which are pursued for the pleasure they yield.

In modern life this form of Association has largely taken the place of
Friendship as it was understood by the ancients. It is better adapted
to the bustle and scurry of these days, when the busy worker has not
time to cultivate the amenities of sentiment, but desires to find
others who share his favorite tastes, and a ready-made sympathy which
he need not be at the trouble of looking after, but which is always at
hand when he wants it. This he finds in such comradeships, where each
comes because he has likings similar to the others, and is therefore
sure to be a pleasant arrival. Each thus gratifies his own taste and
increases its capacity for gratification; for tastes are like
magnets,――the more they are used the stronger becomes their power of
attraction.

The higher grades of comradeship are seen in artistic, literary, and
scientific societies, which pursue their objects for the love of the
subject, and not for commercial or other material ends. The
intellectual communion which they yield to their members is a pleasure
of a very high order, and an additional and valuable advantage which
they possess is that they bring workers in the same fields of
unselfish pursuits together, soften the asperities which ignorance of
each other’s personalities might allow to remain, and often pave the
way for warm and abiding friendships. Those men of science or artists
who hold themselves aloof from such reunions usually do so through
self-distrust or undue sensitiveness, and sin both against their own
happiness and the prosperity of their favorite employment.

Both the religious and the moral life――they are not the same――should
find their chief activity in the sphere of comradeship. It was the
beautiful ideal of George Fox that the Church of the future should be
a Society of Friends. The ideal is too lofty for human nature; but it
is quite possible and should be a daily occurrence that the members of
a church or a society united for the development of the benevolent or
religious sentiments should display as much mutual good feeling and as
warm a personal interest in the common purpose, as, say, dog-fanciers
who belong to the same kennel club.

Friendship is far rarer than Comradeship, because it is more delicate
and requires a higher type of character. Most men are incapable of it,
and therefore cannot distinguish it from a mere community of tastes.
It goes much farther, embracing the whole nature, and lifting the
relation out of the plane of interests or tastes into that of
sentiment and spiritual sympathy. No one is capable of friendship who
thinks what use he can make of it. Friendship is free trade, and knows
neither charity, robbery, nor reciprocity. It keeps neither a debit
nor a credit account, and it leaves no room for ingratitude, because
the credit of each party is unlimited.

The completest friendship is that in which the utmost sympathy is
united with the utmost independence. The differences must not be so
great as to prevent a thorough understanding, nor so small as to do
away with admiration for the personal qualities of each other, and
some desire to emulate them.

These phrases do not mean that we should look for perfection in
friends. Quite the contrary. What could be more fatiguing than
perfection? Its monotony would be unendurable. The affection for
friends is not a tribute paid to their merits. Their very faults often
endear them. We do not wish them removed. For ourselves, it may be
well to retain some of those defects which give our friends pleasure;
though this is to be taken with reserve; for, on the other hand, a
great charm in a friend is that he brings us not what we expected, but
something equally pleasant which we did not expect.

Friendship is strengthened by a certain amount of reserve. Few
persons, to use the slang of the studio, “strip well.” Every one gains
by veiling some of his parts. For the same reason we should not ask
nor desire complete confidence from a friend. There are always secrets
which it is better not to know. We may inquire the cause of his
despondency, for sympathy and aid are natural to the sentiment of
friendship; but should wait to be told the sources of his elation.

In a similar manner absence for not too long a time strengthens
friendship by allowing its value to be felt, and the imagination to
clothe the absent in some of the fanciful and beautiful garbs of the
ideal. But too prolonged a stay leaves friendship a memory rather than
a passion.

“But what!” some one will exclaim. “Are we to set about making and
keeping friends with the same attention as if we were raising
hot-house fruit?” Yes, precisely so; but if a friend is not in your
estimation worth as much as a bunch of Hamburg grapes, I assure you it
will be time wasted for you to try. When people complain that they
have no friends, inquire what efforts they have made to get and keep
them. True friendship is rare because it is rarely sought for. When
Lord Bacon wrote, “There is little friendship in the world, and least
of all between equals,” the great Chancellor unwittingly testified to
the truth of those charges of perfidy which posterity has brought
against his name. Friends must be diligently sought for, and when
found must be sedulously cherished. Dr. Johnson never said a wiser
word than when he gave the advice, directed especially to those who
are advancing in years, “to keep our friendships in constant repair.”

Such a relation of sentiment between men can scarcely be formed in
later life. As trees grow old their fibres become rigid, and their
branches cannot be interlocked to arch a bower. But, by a delightful
compensation of nature, it is precisely at this period of life that
the sweetest friendships of all are formed――those between men and
women. Some have doubted these, and I grant you most are incapable of
them; but in facts and friendships there is no such thing as gender.
There are too many beautiful examples in history to allow room for
scepticism here.

Need I count them? Need I refer to the friendship between
Chateaubriand and Madame Recamier, extending over thirty years, during
which she was the guide, consoler, and confidante of the great
statesman and author; not as a learned woman,――for that she was
not,――but as a truly sympathetic soul? Need I quote from that charming
volume of letters, the _Briefe an eine Freundin_, which testify to the
long, the loving, and the pure bond that united Wilhelm von Humboldt
to Charlotte Diede?

Or is there occasion to dwell on that instance which enshrines
elements of sweetness even beyond these, the friendship between
Michael Angelo and Vittoria Colonna? Think of the inspired and
self-centred artist, living alone with his dreams of matchless beauty,
meeting no man worthy of admittance even to the threshold of his
affections, he who could write from Rome to his nephew in Florence, “I
have no friends; I need none and wish none;” finding at last in the
noble and tender soul of this distinguished woman the sentiments and
sympathy for which he had been unconsciously longing, and which were
necessary to complete the symmetry of both his own life and hers!

       *     *     *     *     *

The burden laid on Beauty is, that it can have many lovers but no
friends.

       *     *     *     *     *

A very positive character is at first pleasing. We ourselves are
troubled by so many problems that it is a relief to think,――“Here is
one who has solved them all.” But we soon find that such characters
merely slam the door in the face of importunate inquiries.

       *     *     *     *     *

Men’s characters are polar forces; the stronger they repel some, the
stronger they attract others.

       *     *     *     *     *

The society of those who enjoy is alone enjoyable.

       *     *     *     *     *

Be select in your friends, but miscellaneous in your acquaintances.
Ask not sympathy from the latter nor assistance from the former.

       *     *     *     *     *

If you would keep friends, shun explanations.

       *     *     *     *     *

If you doubt the persistence in adversity of what is called
friendship, make friends with an impecunious debtor.

       *     *     *     *     *

Men admire women who try to please them; women admire men who, they
believe, have qualities worthy of admiration.

       *     *     *     *     *

We like those who can be useful to us, and love those to whom we can
be useful.

       *     *     *     *     *

The secret of gaining friends is to cultivate within ourselves the
capacity for friendship.

       *     *     *     *     *

New acquaintances cannot take the place of old friends; but when your
teeth wear out, an artificial denture is a vast advantage over bare
gums.

       *     *     *     *     *

Be sure that the man who boasts of a hundred friends, has none.




V. _Love, Marriage, and the Family Relation._


“It is not good that the man should be alone.” Venerable maxim! First
reflection of the Creator on the species! Standing condemnation of all
schemes of celibacy, of all orders of monks and nuns, vestals and
spiritual eunuchs!

The character of any man or woman who leads the single life is
incomplete, lacking in fullness of sympathy for certain aspects of our
common nature, not perfectly rounded to the orb of man’s whole life.
All examples, even the highest, give evidence of this. No man who has
not had a wife whom he loved can understand what love is; he who is
not a parent, can never appreciate the feelings of a father.

The fruition of life, even on the lowest terms, is impossible without
the union of the sexes. The first Napoleon, in one of his letters,
describing the essential needs of man, numbered them as three,――food,
shelter, woman. All doctrines and social theories which conflict with
this primordial law of the life of the species are unnatural, and
their tendency is lowering to the progress of the race. Maternity, not
virginity, is the holier state. Celibate orders have proved as sterile
in intellectual as in physical offspring.

Love, marriage, children, the family,――the emotions and feelings, the
affections and the ideas, which centre around these foci of human
activity are essential elements in every life which is lived to the
full measure of its powers. Nothing can take their places. Happiness
without them is not human.

The emotion of Love belongs to those whose aims are ideal, because it
is concerned with the future evolution of the species. In the
iridescent glow of this master-passion its object never seems a mere
human being, a man or a woman, but is invested with a charm unseen by
the eye, not expressed in form or color, endowed with the power of
exciting the soul to an indefinite and passionate expansion. It is the
inaudible appeal of unborn posterity for its share in the world of
Being.

Hence it is that Love is so powerfully excited by Beauty, by the
symmetry and traits which foreshadow the final physical perfection of
the race, the unconscious but unceasing struggle of organic nature
toward nobler transformations, toward the building of a tabernacle fit
to be a shrine for the activities of a higher life.

Though hundreds of volumes have been written in poetry and prose on
the subject of Love, it remains unexhausted, because it is
inexhaustible. Its seed-field is the boundless future, its message
concerns all posterity. There is something in it deeper than the
emotion of any single heart, farther reaching than any individual
effort. There is a secret about it which can never be wholly told,
which it were a profanation to try to express. Even between loving
ones, it is better not to talk much of it, nor too curiously to think
about it. When true and pure, it will be manifested without words in
ennobling the character and elevating its aims and actions.

The attraction of woman for man is her invisible presage of
motherhood. This it is which lends the nameless charm to the maiden
and the sacred dignity to the matron. Around her, centre all those
sentiments which constitute the Home, the family, and the parental
affections. These find their proper expression in Marriage.

The history of the institution of marriage is a curious narrative.
Every conceivable relation of the sexes has been established by one
community or another, and sanctioned by the moral sense of the time
and place. There have been hordes where the relations have been
communal or miscellaneous; others, where a man had many wives; others,
as in Thibet to-day, where the woman would have many husbands;
sometimes the woman selects the man, at others the man the woman, and
elsewhere the marriage is arranged by third parties; in some, marriage
is indissoluble, in others, more or less easily annulled; while in
certain religious societies in our own country the method of selective
and temporary unions has been practiced. The result of all these
experiments has been to show that the happiness of both parties is
best consulted by strictly monogamous or pairing marriages, where each
exerts a certain amount but not entire freedom of selection, and where
the lien can be canceled when it proves clearly detrimental to the
felicity of either.

Very few words will be necessary to defend the first of these three
conditions. Under whatever form we find polygamy, whether legalized,
as in Mohammedan countries, or sanctioned by religion, as among the
Mormons, or winked at by usage, as in mistress-keeping, it inevitably
results in the degradation of the woman and her subjection to the
dominion of lower impulses. To every one who believes that her
happiness demands equal attention to that of the man, all schemes of
polygamy stand condemned.

The second condition I have stated will need more defense. Especially
in our country is it unpopular to oppose the course of love. “Let me
not,” exclaims the great dramatist, “to the marriage of true minds
admit impediment.” Yet all will admit certain impediments. The laws of
many States prohibit the marriage of near of kin, of first cousins,
and of uncles with nieces, although in Germany unions of the latter
class are very common.

Immature age does legally, and should always, act as a bar to
marriage. At what period of life marriage is likely to prove most
happy is a curious question, which has never been properly studied.
The physiologist, basing his opinion on grounds of his science, would
say that the woman should be between twenty and thirty, and the man
between twenty-five and thirty-five. Dr. Johnson, regarding the
question from another point of view, made the wise observation,――“Those
who marry late are best pleased with their children, and those who
marry early with their partners.”

Apart from questions of immature age and near relationship, marriages
in the United States are generally contracted without restriction. The
young of both sexes are usually conceded full liberty to make their
own selection, the burden of the support of both being generally
assumed by the husband. The consequence is that such unions are
frequently entered upon with slight real acquaintance of each other,
the wife is wholly dependent, and the husband has a heavy load to
carry,――conditions calculated to intensify the struggle for existence
and diminish the happiness of home.

From considerable observation of family life in both countries, I
believe that the French system is superior to ours. In a French family
of the middle or upper classes, the parent who desires to marry a
daughter, for instance, takes pains to introduce and recommend young
men of suitable station. No coercion is used on either side. Only when
an affection naturally springs up is the union decided upon. A
marriage-settlement is drawn by which each of the young couple
receives a certain amount of property, wholly independent of the
control of the other. Thus they are freed from the severest pressure
of monetary anxiety, and, what is especially valuable, the wife has a
recognized place of power, and secures her rightful prestige in the
family circle. I have often observed how superior is the position of
the wife in France to what it is in this country. The reason is in the
better method of forming marriages.

A sympathetic marriage is the happiest condition of human life; but
one without sympathy is a hateful servitude. How distressing to be
obliged to live _for_ those whom we cannot bear to live _with_!

The number of unhappy marriages in the United States may be guessed
from the records of the divorce courts, which register only some of
the most unhappy. The divorces granted annually sever nearly thirty
thousand couples, and this although in many States such separation is
costly, slow, and difficult. These figures represent, therefore, but a
small fraction of the marriages which are galling the backs of one or
both of the parties concerned.

When we reflect what the true foundations of the marital relations
should be,――love, affection, sympathy,――it would appear wholly foreign
to its character that it should be made an obligatory fetter and a
continued curse by any law, civil or religious. The moral sense,
personal affection, parental feeling, and the sentiment of society,
would seem to be sufficient to preserve all those unions which should
be preserved. Their severance should be left to the option of the
parties concerned alone. Surely the happiness of the individual would
be better consulted by such an arrangement than by that which now
prevails.

Marriages, so far from being entered upon with greater recklessness,
would then be more cautiously undertaken, because their durability
would depend on mutual satisfaction. The woman would have full
equality of rights, and not be a miserable sacrifice to unjust laws,
as now she often is. It would be a step toward the ideal of the
marriage state, which is a union based on love, in which each party
has absolutely equal rights and stands pledged to equal duties, and
neither is bound to the other longer than love and duty are respected.
Neither government nor religion should put obstacles in the way of the
dissolution of marriage other than those safeguards of the interests
involved, which attend the termination of all important contracts.

Deep thinkers on the relations of life in goodly number have long
advocated these views. They have been those of John Milton, of William
von Humboldt, of John Stuart Mill. Nor is there anything in them which
an enlightened moral or religious sentiment should oppose; rather the
contrary. As Milton so well says in his Treatise on Divorce,――“Where
Love cannot be, there can be left of wedlock nothing but the empty
husk of an outside matrimony, as undelightful and unpleasing to God as
any other kind of hypocrisy.”

The object of marriage is the Family. Love claims immortality through
posterity. The hidden though ever-present purpose of the union of the
sexes is the perpetuation and evolution of the species. Any union
which avoids this object is destructive, and not creative of true
happiness. We are told of the ancient ascetic sect of the Essenes that
the sexes united in marriage, but remained chaste; and had families of
children, but gathered them from among the foundlings and homeless
orphans of the highways. Their impossible example does not merit the
praise, as it has not enlisted the imitation of, later generations.
The maternal and paternal affections, the love of family and the
pleasures derived from the ties of kindred, are enjoyments which the
properly constituted individual will never be willing to sacrifice
unless constrained thereto by mighty and exceptional conditions. The
tacit assumption of mutual aid and confidence between brothers and
sisters, and the intimacy which is fostered by even remoter degrees of
relationship, are beneficent elements of the social compact, and
contribute largely to the happiness of the individual.

The Family, as we understand it, is distinctly a product of high
civilization. In savage tribes the ties of consanguinity are quite
different. In many, for instance, the father is scarcely regarded as a
relation, blood kin being counted through the mother only. The rise of
the paternal or patriarchial form of the family appears at a higher
stage of culture; and when, as among the Etruscans and Romans, it was
coincident with a recognized equality in marriage, society advanced
with rapid strides.

Some believe that the theory of the family, as it has so long
prevailed in Europe, is inappropriate for this country, and hence that
it is disappearing among us, as unsuited to the development of our
forms of culture. Children desire their liberty earlier, and parents
are ready to comply with their requests. No ties other than material
ones are recognized as constituting a family unit. It will be for the
future to decide whether the greater personal independence thus
secured has been of more value to the happiness of the race than the
elements of affection sacrificed in obtaining it.

       *     *     *     *     *

Law is the bond of the state, love, of the family. The former rules
best by precept, the latter by example.

       *     *     *     *     *

Those marriages are ominous which transmit miseries.

       *     *     *     *     *

The family tie differs from the tie of friendship in that it binds
together interests rather than sympathies.

       *     *     *     *     *

Love, says Michael Angelo in one of his Sonnets, is the mental
impression of ideal beauty:――

  Amore e un concetta di bellezza
  Immaginata, cui sta dentro al cuore.

       *     *     *     *     *

The aims of the child centre around his maturity; those of the man
around his posterity.

       *     *     *     *     *

The generations unborn are the sovereigns of the world, and the goals
we are running for are invisible. Posthumous aims are the potent.

       *     *     *     *     *

The heart of every woman is like a page written with sympathetic ink.
It seems blank, but warm it sufficiently, and you will find a
love-letter written on it.

       *     *     *     *     *

_Cara amica_, beware of that tendency in your nature to repose utter
confidence. Learn that nought is so fragile as Faith. It is like those
delicate vases of Venetian glass which a single drop of poison is said
to shiver into atoms. Better the homely ware which will toss it out,
and fill again with wine. It is a law of reasoning that full belief is
disproved by a single event, but partial belief only by a series of
events. But what have you to do with reasoning? you who must trust
“not at all, or all in all”? and bless you for it, fated, foolish
friend.

       *     *     *     *     *

A man weeps for the lost loved one; a woman for the lost love.

       *     *     *     *     *

Love is the language in which the gods speak to man, observes Plato.
Unfortunate is he who hears it not; doubly unfortunate he who hears,
but comprehends it not.

       *     *     *     *     *

True love is love of love; not love of the pleasures of love.




PART V.

The Consolations of Affliction.




I. _The Removal of Unhappiness._


Suffer we must. No position is exempt, no foresight can avoid it.
Neither the self-abnegation of asceticism nor the visions of
superstition relieve from that law. The latter do but deceive and the
former atrophies the soul. Far better to seek in the strength of our
own minds and in the helpful sympathy of others those sources of
Consolation which will enable us to bear pain and grief and
disappointment, without allowing them to pass into ennui, gloom, and
the distaste for life. Calm reflection, clear reasoning, and the
soothing kindness of those who love us, will prepare us to meet and
bear the evils of life, without having recourse to the illusions of
credulity or the aridities of stoicism.

The mind can be trained to forecast the probable good and ill of its
career, and thus prepare itself for even the worst of fates, without
being plunged into the hopelessness of despair. We can learn to
suffer, and to find even suffering good. To a trained mind, no
deprivation is an absolute misfortune.

What is more, this very training is the best of preservatives as well
as the best of alleviatives; for by it we are prompted and enabled to
take wise measures to avoid those evils which our forethought brings
to our mind.

Consolation we all need, all must have, all should give, if we would
develop the sweeter and nobler elements of our natures. He who through
mistaken pride or stubborn distrust refuses to seek it, does but dwarf
his powers and darken his perceptions to the beauties of the world
around him. To impart and to receive the solace of sympathetic words
and kindly offices belong to the highest ministrations of friendship
and love and charity. Those characters in history around whose faces
shines brightest the aureole of glory have been those who have soothed
the sorrows and bound up the wounds of the despairing sons of men.

Fortunately, if evils are many, so are the sources of consolation. We
may seek them in ourselves, from others, or from a correct
comprehension of the laws of nature; and when these prove inadequate,
we may still win the victory, by discovering that Sorrow itself is not
an enemy but a friend, a veiled and ghostly guide, who leads us, as
the spirit of Virgil led Dante, and as only Sorrow can lead, through
the realms of gloom and woe to undreamed-of fields of serenity and
light.

Only in hint and outline shall I sketch this part of my plan. It is
too vast to attempt more. Some of the reflections which in the sadder
hours of my own life I have found of avail I shall present in detached
fragments; for the spirit in the shadow needs but a single ray to
illume its path. The moods of sorrow are many, and one suggestion may
soothe where a score of others find no application. What I offer are
suggestions only, to be expanded by the reader as he finds one or
another of them suitable to his own case.

       *     *     *     *     *

Two very consoling reflections are: First, how much of the unhappiness
of life springs from preventable causes, and next, how little of it
arises from actual evils. When we deliberately investigate, catalogue,
and analyze what we ourselves and our neighbors are distressed about,
we are inclined to say that the chief aim of human effort is not
happiness, but rather that each shall make himself as unhappy as
possible.

Look at the list! Desires and aims which are plainly inconsistent and
contradictory with each other; hopes which reason clearly shows are
doomed to disappointment, because they are unfounded or exaggerated;
anxieties which are visibly causeless or useless; mistaken estimates
of our own powers, which honest reflection would correct; envy of the
supposed better fortune of others, when often they are more unhappy
than ourselves; fears for a future which we may never reach; regret
for a past which we can never recall; open-eyed abuse or neglect of
opportunities; indulgence in passions or appetites which we know to be
harmful; needless risk or sacrifice of health or liberty or money.

Think of how much of your unhappiness has arisen from one or other of
these causes, and then take comfort in the thought how much it lies in
your power to be far happier than you are.

       *     *     *     *     *

There is an advantage in the multiplicity of miseries. One deep
vexation is often more fatal to happiness than several. It becomes a
fixed idea, monopolizes the mind, and is more dangerous to its health,
than when one is obliged “to take up arms against a sea of troubles.”
Regret not, therefore, when clouds darken all the horizon; better
this, than the single sky-specter, in whose bosom is the whirlwind,
and on whose path follows destruction.

       *     *     *     *     *

When little matters annoy you, remember that it is a proof that your
condition is a peculiarly happy one. Great sorrows leave no room for
slight irritations. The man on the rack does not feel the prick of a
pin.

       *     *     *     *     *

Tears are the medicinal waters provided by nature for healing the
sickened spirit. They are the stream which by its overflowing renews
the fertility of the wastes left arid by woe. But, like these greater
streams, their excess brings devastation.

       *     *     *     *     *

Unhappiness is sometimes only a bad habit. Weeping eyes are quick to
tears, and grief is a guest that stays on slight urging.

       *     *     *     *     *

Ill-fortune and plenty of it is the very stimulus some natures need to
bring out the best that is in them. There is a dead weight about them,
and bad luck is the only lever that will lift it. Without its <DW8>,
they would sink into lethargy and become like Chaucer’s

                “Eclympasteyre,
  That was the God of Slep’ is heire,
  That slepte, and did none other worke.”

       *     *     *     *     *

There are two inconsistencies of grief which surpass all others: the
one, when it leads us to regret that which we might have enjoyed, long
after the time when we could have enjoyed it is past; the other, when
it makes us the sadder to-day, because we enjoyed ourselves yesterday.

       *     *     *     *     *

There is something humorous in the two most popular methods of
consolation. The one is, to show you how much worse off you might have
been; the other, to remind you how much more wretched others are.

When I was a boy, I was consoled for cutting my finger by having my
attention called to the fact that I had not broken my arm; and when I
got a cinder in my eye, I was expected to feel more comfortable
because my cousin had lost his by an accident.

The general opinion evidently is that the most agreeable consolation
in sorrow is a contemplation of the greater misery of others; and the
real ground of happiness is to know that others are suffering.

       *     *     *     *     *

When a man in adversity complains of the demeanor of others toward
him, inquire of his actions toward them.

       *     *     *     *     *

Talk it over. “Pull not your hat about your brows.” Seek a sympathetic
companion and pour your sorrows into his kindly ears; not so much for
the consolation he may administer, but because sad emotions assume
their right proportions only when shown to others. In the darkened
room of the mind they loom up like giants, when in the light they may
prove to be pigmies. But hide your sorrows from the general gaze;
sometimes the effort will conceal them from your own.

       *     *     *     *     *

If we would only see it, there is a humorous side to nearly every
occurrence; and if we did see it, what a preservative from despondency
it would be!

       *     *     *     *     *

Whatever happiness we get, we believe it is our own by right; when we
miss that which we expected, we consider ourselves robbed. What
impertinence! Does any one really pretend that because he wants
something he is therefore entitled to it? Because he covets my house
has he a fee in it? Suppose we give up for a while coveting and
wanting, and settle down to doing and thinking and bearing. Perhaps
that is the best way out, after all.

       *     *     *     *     *

If you have no passions that you cannot conquer, you will have no
griefs that you cannot bear.

       *     *     *     *     *

The human body has a surprising ability to adapt its functions to the
presence of permanent injuries and chronic maladies. Physicians call
this the “tolerance of disease.” The healthy mind has a similar power
to recover its cheerfulness in the presence of an abiding grief or
after an irreparable loss.

       *     *     *     *     *

Indolence and Timidity are the jailers who rivet the fetters of
Despondency. Courage and Activity will deliver us if we choose to
summon them.

       *     *     *     *     *

As the scars of battle are, in the opinion of the pious, proofs of the
protection of Heaven, so a keen sense of past calamities testifies to
a capacity for future enjoyment.

       *     *     *     *     *

Between the leaves of the Book of Life why not press the violets, the
lilies, and the roses which we find on our path, rather than the
nettles and bitter weeds? We could then turn back its pages with
satisfaction, and live again long-since-vanished joys.

       *     *     *     *     *

There are few more accurate standards of a man’s education, in the
widest sense of the term, than the quality of the consolation he
offers.

       *     *     *     *     *

Would you learn the Universal Catholicon, the Balm for all wounds, the
Panacea for all sorrows? I will whisper it: Work――hard physical work,
arduous mental work. Try it; it will dry your tears, renew your love
of life, recall the light of hope, and exorcise the evil spirits.

       *     *     *     *     *

Strengthen the Will. If you have any earnest business in life, and are
bound to carry it through, you will have no time for moping. If you
have none, find some.

       *     *     *     *     *

Look before and after. Do not allow the present to cheat you. The
impression of the moment always claims more than it deserves, because
we have not time to modify it by other thoughts and images. A present
danger frightens us, though we may know it is infinitesimally small; a
parting brings tears, though we are aware it is for the good of all;
offensive words hurt us, though they may proceed from a contemptible
person. Hasten to evoke memories and summon hopes which will beautify
the incident, and strengthen the mind. Remember the slightness of the
peril, speak of the happy return, recall the praise you have received
from worthy lips.

       *     *     *     *     *

The honey of life can be had only at the expense of some stings in its
collection.

       *     *     *     *     *

Whatever happens, take it as a matter of course. You are not running
the world, nor born to set it right. You are not half so much the
master of your own actions as you think you are.

       *     *     *     *     *

Deal justly by yourself. Few do. They regret making that decision, or
performing the other action, or neglecting such or such an
opportunity. They reproach themselves for their hastiness or
carelessness.

What folly! far worse results might have attended a different course.
We can see but a very little way in life, and that very darkly. We can
neither forecast events, nor predict our own decisions in new
circumstances.

If we act at the time with reasonable prudence, we need never waste
later moments in self-reproach. Any other decision than the one we
adopted would likely enough have brought still more dismal
consequences.

       *     *     *     *     *

Remember that you are never deserted by all until you have deserted
yourself.

       *     *     *     *     *

Do not confound a decision with its results. The former may have been
at the time the wisest possible, although the latter were disastrous.

       *     *     *     *     *

What you consider a life-long mistake, your biographer may regard as
the most fortunate decision of your life.

       *     *     *     *     *

Grief lies in ambush. Its attack is like the spring of a lion. Its
onset is the crisis that calls for the most heroic resistance. Despair
seizes its victim in the first moments of a great sorrow.

       *     *     *     *     *

Life is like a game of whist. Luck deals the cards, but we have the
lead. We may receive a poor hand, but by playing it carefully win the
odd.

       *     *     *     *     *

Physical pain is an excellent antidote for mental pain. The hair shirt
and the scourge were positive pleasures to the ascetic, because they
distracted his thoughts from hell-fire.

       *     *     *     *     *

The incivility of others is a frequent source of keen pain to
sensitive dispositions. Socrates’ advice was to look on an impolite
person as on one deformed or repulsive in appearance; to be borne with
when necessary, and fit to excite our pity rather than our anger. When
some one asked Descartes how he met discourtesies he replied, “I try
to live so high that they cannot reach me.” The impoliteness of small
children does not hurt our feelings; we should look on the uncivil
generally with the same consciousness of our own superiority.

       *     *     *     *     *

Grieve not at the ingratitude of others, even of your children. Much
that looks like ingratitude is only forgetfulness. Again, what you
think is a favor conferred, others may regard as a right respected. To
some minds a sense of obligations received is really painful, and
their ungrateful demeanor is an effort to escape this feeling. Perhaps
you conferred the favor in a manner to induce such a feeling. When
ingratitude pains you, overhaul your books and see if you find any
debt of gratitude unpaid.

       *     *     *     *     *

Do you seek consolation for the loss of a loved one? Call to mind, not
the pleasant hours you passed together, but the kind actions, the
proofs of affection, you received from him. Thus his personality will
be idealized, and will become a sweet memory instead of a bitter
regret.

       *     *     *     *     *

I have repeatedly noticed, in my own life and in others, that the
failure of a plan led to a success in another direction far greater
than that anticipated from the original project. Two of the most
eminent surgeons in the United States became physicians only in
consequence of early failures in small business. When misfortunes
happen, therefore, they may be paving the way for great successes. Our
failure may be due to our superiority. Milton failed as a teacher of
small boys, and Dr. Marion Sims as keeper of a country store. The
Chipeways have a story of a man who could do no work, because he was
so strong that he broke every tool he took up.

       *     *     *     *     *

Are you vexed by some persistent anxiety, haunted by some ugly
thought? Learn the secret, that the only way to stop thinking of
anything is to think of something else. You cannot banish care by an
effort of the will; but you can drive it away by changing the
associations of your ideas, by engaging in some occupation which
demands your constant and close attention.

       *     *     *     *     *

Always keep in mind the uselessness of contending with the inflexible
and inevitable processes of nature; but never let them become your
masters when you can make them your servants.

       *     *     *     *     *

Resignation is the more of a virtue the less it is exercised. A
healthy tree bends before the blast, but straightens itself the moment
the wind lulls. Resignation to evils that can be avoided is indolence
or apathy.

       *     *     *     *     *

When the world seems a desert to you and life a blank, reflect whether
you have not had just such feelings before, and overlived them to
enjoy happy days and smiling seasons.

       *     *     *     *     *

Seek sympathy for your losses from a woman, for your failures from a
man. A woman will not understand why you tried, if you failed.

       *     *     *     *     *

Half of happiness is the recognition that we are happy; and half of
misery is the forgetting how many causes of happiness we have.

       *     *     *     *     *

Be sure you are more doleful than you need be. There is no liar like
low spirits. Melancholy is a sort of mental stagnation; and stagnant
pools are soon filled with foul growths.

       *     *     *     *     *

You there, you on the verge of despair, sit down, take a pen, and
write me off a list of your sorrows and misfortunes; and follow it
with a faithful inventory of what you have left on the side of
possible happiness, your faculties, your possessions, your friends and
relatives, your acquirements, your tastes, your healthful activities,
your probability of life, your reasonable expectations, not forgetting
your duties to others and the gratification their fulfillment will
give. Then I am ready to adjust the account.

       *     *     *     *     *

Plato says that nothing in human life is worth much trouble; certainly
many things give us more trouble than they are worth.

       *     *     *     *     *

How small is your grief if you measure it by the standards of the
universe! Look up at the calm and silent stars; they are billions of
miles away. Notice that piece of sandstone; fifty million years have
passed since the primeval tide washed its grains together. Is there
not something in such thoughts that makes you a little ashamed of the
preoccupation of your mind with its petty present cares?

       *     *     *     *     *

Do you reflect sometimes that you are but one of fifteen hundred
millions of human beings, fifty millions of whom die every year? Is it
worth while passing your invisibly small share of life in worrying
about trifles?

       *     *     *     *     *

The only malady all covet is the only one which is absolutely
fatal,――old age.

       *     *     *     *     *

Death is the most and the least feared of any event. Seven of my most
intimate friends committed suicide for various reasons, all good
enough in their opinions. “No passion is so weak,” remarks Bacon, “but
that a little pushed it will master the fear of death.”

       *     *     *     *     *

The visits of death seem always inopportune. Dickens tells of a visit
he paid to an Old Man’s Home. He found that, in the opinion of the
inmates, every old man died prematurely. They invariably said, “He
brought it on hisself.”

       *     *     *     *     *

He who is haunted by the dread of dying makes himself miserable for
fear he cannot make himself miserable longer.

       *     *     *     *     *

When death is natural, that is, in extreme old age, it is neither
feared nor felt. That it is so little a thing when natural, suggests
that at all times we may deem it too great.

       *     *     *     *     *

If we understood Death, we should no longer care for Life.




II. _The Inseparable Connection of Pleasure and Pain._


The hard and strange lesson that I would teach in this chapter is,
that dreams of unalloyed bliss are not merely fanciful, they are
impossible of realization under any known conditions of life; that
pleasure requires pain, joy demands sorrow, as the very condition of
its existence; and that these pairs are inseparable twins, the
presence of one being bound up in that of the other.

I here promulgate no new discovery in the science of mind, though it
has been much overlooked by physiologists, and quite put one side by
sanguine optimists in their rosy paintings of the future
perfectibility and universal happiness of the human race. More than
two thousand years ago Socrates dwelt upon this same uncanny blending
of contraries. The jailer, as we are told in the “Phædo,” of Plato,
removed the galling iron fetters from the philosopher’s ankles shortly
before the cup of hemlock was handed him; and in this brief interval
his friends gathered around him for the last farewell.

     “And Socrates, sitting on the side of the bed, bent his leg
     and rubbed it with his hand, and in doing so said,――'How
     strange a thing, my friends, is that which is called
     Pleasure! and how oddly it is connected with what is called
     Pain! Pleasure and Pain do not come to man together; but if
     a person runs after the one and catches it, he almost
     immediately catches the other too, as if they were fastened
     together at one end. I think if Æsop had noticed this he
     would have compiled a fable to this effect: That the gods
     tried to reconcile these two opposites, and not being able
     to do this, fastened their extremities together so that when
     you take hold of one it pulls after it the other. And so it
     happens to me now; there was pain in my leg when the chain
     bound it, and now comes pleasure following the pain.’”

A law of physiology, a law of the whole universe, underlies these
homely reflections of the ancient Greek.

On the one side, pleasure and pain are states of feeling totally
opposed to each other both in sensation and in physical effect,
pleasure being concomitant with an increase, pain with a decrease, of
the vital functions; and yet, on the other, there is a unity, or, at
any rate, a close analogy of action, under these contrary conditions
of mental life. Each is a stimulus to new forms of mental change and
biotic motion, though in the one instance the tendency of the new
activity is toward a higher concentration of the individual life, and,
in the other, toward its diminution or its disaggregation into other
and lower forms.

A feeling of pleasure is an exaltation of sensation in some special
set of nerves. These are stimulated to an unwonted exercise of their
functions; but they can provide this disproportionate energy only by
drafts on the general resources of the nervous system; and this must
be paid back through exhaustion, fatigue, or, perhaps, actual pain.

A sensation of pain also demands for its presence special and unusual
conditions of nervous activity, which also result in exhaustion of the
powers of sensation, but, unfortunately, much later than in conditions
of pleasure. Pain seems in some sort more our natural element, for we
can bear it much longer than pleasure in equal degree. Generalizing on
this fact, Schopenhauer reached the dismal conclusion――“The essential
elements of all Life are pain and sorrow.”

The mere cessation of pain is in itself a pleasure of considerable
degree, as in the case of Socrates relieved from the chafing of his
irons; indeed, probably some of the intensest moments of delight are
those experienced on a sudden relief from acute suffering, or during
the reaction from long privations.

It may not be quite correct to say that all pleasurable sensations are
immediately derived from or directly lead to others of a painful
character. There are some belonging to the organic life, such as the
satisfaction of the desire for food or for muscular exercise, in which
mere repose or remission is enough to repay the nervous drafts. But
how close these are to pain is visible from the acuteness of the pangs
of hunger, or the painfulness of prolonged positions of restraint.

Even exalted esthetic and intellectual pleasures, which seem to leave
no sting behind and to require no goad for their advance, constantly
make unfelt though heavy drafts on the nervous centres, the results of
which, under the various forms of cerebral and spinal exhaustion and
degeneration, physicians are obliged to take cognizance of only too
often.

So close is the analogy between the two antagonistic sensations, that
the one becomes merged into the other without our being able to mark
the dividing line between them. A moderate pain may by its active
diffusion actually bring a surplus of pleasure, as Professor Bain has
remarked; and that an acute sensation of pleasure may pass into one of
pain is matter of common observation. Thus, Pain is born of Pleasure,
Pleasure of Pain; and memory and association have a tendency to
diminish the extremes of each by recalling to the mind the sources
from which it sprang. Some physiologists, therefore, refuse to
discriminate between such inseparable feelings, and prefer to regard
them both as manifestations of the same, calling it the “Pleasure-Pain
sensation.”

In all these respects what is true of these sensations also holds good
of their analogues in the realm of emotions, as joy and sorrow, mirth
and sadness, hope and fear, and the like. Each of these exercises, and
by exercising exhausts, some fibres of the nervous system, and thus
tends to develop its contrary.

The general law which, as far as it goes, explains these facts is that
of the alternation or periodicity of the manifestations of force. This
is the fundamental law of the Universe, beyond which no analysis has
proceeded. Force, or Power, or Energy, wherever we discern it and
under every one of its exhibitions, expresses itself in undulatory or
rhythmical movements, pulsations of the primal potency, vibrations of
the central harmony, of the universe. In the rise and fall of
sensation and emotion the sequences of height and depth are as closely
related as are the proportions of the crest and trough in the waves of
the ocean, or those of the vibration of the strings of a musical
instrument.

Such considerations as these, drawn from the unalterable laws of
nature and life, show how short is the sight of those who look upon
happiness as the uninterrupted continuance of pleasurable sensations,
or would seek it in a ceaseless round of gayety. Far clearer was the
vision of Pindar when he exclaimed, with the inspiration of a
poet,――“Beneath every true pleasure hides the sense of a past pain.”
The dark background of sorrow can alone give full relief to the bright
figure of joy. Grief is a part of gladness, and that life is not
happy which has no unhappiness. So Browning, with characteristic
insight and strength, puts in the mouth of one of his intensest
characters,――“Naught is lacking to complete our bliss, but woe.”

These are not mere paradoxes and literary refinements on scientific
facts. All who have entered sympathetically into the deep and tender
emotions of the human heart have felt and seen this mysterious and
inseparable connection. It is so beautifully set forth in reference
to one of the saddest griefs of life by Leigh Hunt, that I must quote
his words. They are in his essay on the “Deaths of Little Children.”

     “Pain softens into pleasure as the darker hue of the rainbow
     melts into the brighter.… Made as we are, there are certain
     pains without which it would be difficult to conceive
     certain great and overbalancing pleasures. We may conceive
     it possible for beings to be made entirely happy; but in our
     composition, something of pain seems to be a necessary
     ingredient in order that the materials may turn to as fine
     an account as possible. The loss of children seems to be one
     of those necessary bitters thrown into the cup of humanity.
     If none at all ever took place, we should regard every
     little child as a man or a woman secured; and it will easily
     be conceived what a world of endearing cares and hopes this
     security would endanger. The very idea of infancy would lose
     continuity with us. Girls and boys would be future men and
     women, not present children. They would have attained their
     full growth in our imaginations, and might as well have been
     men and women at once. On the other hand, those who have
     lost an infant are never, as it were, without an infant
     child. They are the only persons who, in one sense, retain
     it always; and they furnish their neighbors with the same
     idea. The other children grow up to manhood or to womanhood
     and suffer all the changes of mortality. This one alone is
     rendered an immortal child. Death has arrested it with his
     kindly harshness, and blessed it into an eternal image of
     youth and innocence.

     “Of such as these are the pleasantest shapes that visit our
     fancy and our hopes; they are the ever-smiling emblems of
     joy; the prettiest pages that wait upon imagination; lastly,
     'Of these are the Kingdom of Heaven.’”

Something akin to the sweetness of these touching reflections is found
in Sir Richard Steele’s essay on “The Death of Friends,” whose stately
and gracious style seems ever treading a minuet at the court of good
Queen Anne:――

     “When we are advanced in years, there is not a more pleasing
     entertainment than to recollect the many we have parted with
     that have been dear to us.… It is necessary to revive the
     old places of grief in our memory, to lead the mind unto
     that sobriety of thought which poises the heart and makes it
     beat with due time, without being quickened by desire or
     retarded by despair from its proper and equal motion.”

Thus it is that sadness is ofttimes a necessary and the best
preparative for gladness. The blacker the shadow, the brighter is the
light that casts it. In all pleasurable feelings there must be the
alternations from exercise to remission and repose; and in proportion
as such feelings are keen, will pain take the place of simple
exhaustion. When the waves of emotion are but ripples on the surface
of life, stirred by the zephyrs of light desires, the remission will
be but a passing sense of fatigue; but when the sensitive heart is
shaken to its depths by the mighty winds of passion, then the reaction
will be not less profound, and the moments of wild joy will be repaid
to the uttermost by periods of dejection and despair. In such
temperaments there is danger of the morbid persistence of the period
of depression, and ready recourse must be had to diversion and
occupation to avoid this considerable peril.

There is a singular but comforting contrast in the influence of time
on pleasure and pain and the mental states which correspond to them.

Through repetition and habitual exercise we may become passionately
fond of what at first was painful or disgusting. Witness the use of
tobacco and all other so-called “acquired tastes.” The physician
becomes enamored of the studies of the hospital ward and the
dissecting room; persons who are at first sight repulsive become
tolerable and then companionable; studies which we take up with
dislike later on fascinate us.

How different with pleasures! Their tendency is not upward but
downward, gravitating ever toward the lower and painful strata of
sensation. Those built on a foundation of previous pain alone escape a
merely evanescent existence. How quickly facile loves are sated! Ennui
arrives never earlier than when enjoyment is gratuitous. The law,
alas, holds good even for our dearest joys; as Mrs. Browning wrote:――

                                 “Entertain
  Your best and gladdest thoughts but long enough,
  And they will all prove sad enough to sting.”

       *     *     *     *     *

Time, transmuter of all things, turns delight into disgust, and
aversion into love, but his metamorphoses constantly warn us that
permanence is related to painfulness and duration depends on
endurance.

       *     *     *     *     *

Pain is more natural to us than pleasure. We bear it better. Bad
fortune is easier sustained than good. The hour of prosperity is more
trying than that of adversity. These are commonplaces, and speak for
the universal recognition of this feature of mind.

       *     *     *     *     *

Our first language is wailing, and our most hilarious laughter brings
tears.

       *     *     *     *     *

Do you say that had the Creative Hand been yours, pain would not have
been in the world? Compel my belief in your words by seeing you
relieve all pain now in your power to relieve.

       *     *     *     *     *

The abrupt ending of any deep emotion is unpleasant, even though a sad
one. When we have been sailing in the clouds, the descent to earth is
always a shock.

       *     *     *     *     *

Any action, however trifling, assumes an immeasurable significance
when we know it is performed for the last time. It evokes the idea of
the Irrevocable and the Infinite, of Death and Destiny. Our souls hear
the distant dirge, _Vale, vale, eternumque vale_.

       *     *     *     *     *

We can always explain our merriment, but often not our melancholy.
Glee is concrete and affirmative; dejection is vague and negative; and
the negative is unlimited.

       *     *     *     *     *

The drama of life is a tragedy, for its last scene is always that of
the death of the title-role. We take the greatest interest in the
spectacle, but rarely care to remember the denouement.

       *     *     *     *     *

If you love life so much, why complain of ennui? There is nothing like
it for lengthening the hours, and thus giving you longer to live.

       *     *     *     *     *

The more pleasant the moments, the swifter they fly. Perfect happiness
would destroy Time.

       *     *     *     *     *

Many pleasures, like Barbary figs, are gathered at the cost of
bleeding fingers.




III. _The Education of Suffering._


What is suffering? What is sorrow?

Nought but the wounds in our conflict with the imperfections and
limitations of life, with the elements of death and annihilation, with
the powers of falsehood and hatred. The inappeasable thirst in the
human heart for the fullness of existence, for complete happiness,
could only be satisfied with all love and all truth, and we should
need the term of all time in which to attain them.

Pain and grief are, therefore, evident proofs of the capacity for
broader conditions of being; and at the same time they are the guides,
pointing out what to avoid and what to seek, in order to attain this
end of all desire.

This is true of all organic existence; but man alone is capable of
Sorrow, a passion allied to the most exalted moods of mind, presenting
to it the image of infinity, defining and educating his desires by the
clear exhibition of their painful limitations, and thus revealing to
his perceptions new though arduous paths, which will lead him to a
loftier evolution and broader horizons.

He finds that sorrow is an initiation into the hidden mysteries of
life. Through its draped portals he enters the Temple of Sadness,
there to learn “the elder truths, and the secrets that cannot be
spoken.” He must be bathed in the fountain of tears and be branded
with the blade of adversity before he is established in the novitiate
of the order of Our Mother of Sorrows.

Once admitted to her chosen band, he looks back without regret at his
earlier and placid joys. His sorrow lives on within him as a new and
indestructible force of character, expressing itself in added strength
of will, clearness of perception, and breadth of sympathies. It has
imparted to life another meaning, one more male and heroic, and yet
tender, such as no pleasures can suggest or beget. The years may be
paler, their flowers fewer, their grave-mounds more numerously strewn
across his pathway; over them he steps with steady tread, his eye
fixed on the work which he has learned is for him to do, asking
neither about its rewards nor its results.

This is the spirit of those teachers and lovers of their kind, who
have taken as their own the sorrows of the race; it is the spirit of
those martyrs to liberty who have fallen to free their country from
the yoke of tyrants; and of those sufferers for truth’s sake who have
been tortured and burned by the Churches rather than live by lying
recantations.

History constantly proves that the worthiest prizes of life, its
loftiest virtues, and its most ennobling ambitions, are sold only at
the price of suffering. The great world-religions, Buddhism and
Christianity, began with proclaiming this final fact of life; and to
its instinctive recognition by the experience of all mankind are due
their conquests over the faiths which held out the allurements of
material success and physical pleasure. The spirit of Christianity is
the spirit of sadness. To it the house of mourning is ever better than
the house of mirth. The Cross is the symbol of suffering; the steps
are blood-stained that mount to Calvary; anguish and death are at its
summit; for suffering and death are the signs, the admonitions, and
the entrance to the Infinite.

Art acknowledges the same inspirations as its highest. Sad emotions
attract most potently because they arise from the unplumbed depth of
the soul, and suggest its limitless dimensions. They attest the words
of the poet, that “Man’s grief is but his grandeur in disguise.” There
is always a strange attraction about scenes of suffering; the appetite
is always keen “to sup full of horrors;” our emotions are more
profoundly stirred by the spectacle of pain and anguish than by that
of any imaginable pleasure.

Therefore the works as well as the lives of great artists have been
full of sadness. The group of the Laocoon struggling in the deadly
coil of the serpent; the agony of the crucifixion; the tragedies of
love and jealousy and devotion,――these have been the chosen themes of
painters, sculptors and dramatists; chosen because they mark
graphically the struggles of our common nature with its limits,
ennobled by its ambition to leap beyond them.

Every soul knows, unconsciously and instinctively, that sorrow is the
only teacher of what is most valuable in life. It alone develops
fortitude, and therefore it commands the respect of all; it alone
teaches sympathy, and therefore it enlists the admiration of all. No
character is ripe which has not crispened under its sharp breath; none
is of finest temper but those forged by its heavy blows. The noblest
lives are sad; but those who have quaffed the severe joy of sorrow
care little for the light froth of pleasure.

The quality of high energy is developed only by affliction. Wrestling
with it, the sinews of the mind are trained. We must go forth and seek
new supports in life, when we have lost those which we loved and
depended upon. By such an effort, we reconcile ourselves to the loss,
gain a victory over fate, strengthen our minds, and reach an air of
wider freedom. The blast may beat at the gate, but all is quiet
within. There is a habit of sadness which is not gloomy, which may
share and admire the delights of life, but which is ever ready to meet
the storms of misfortune with serenity and fortitude. Such a habit of
mind lifts one above the threats and disturbances of the ceaseless
struggle for existence into the companionship of ideas and powers
which the poet rightly calls celestial:――

    “Wer nicht sein Brod mit Thränen ass,
   Wer nicht die kummervollen Nächte
     Auf seinem Lager weinend sass,
   Der kennt euch nicht, ihr himmlischen Mächte.”

There is a ministry of grief, a compensation in calamity, a remedial
property in misfortune, sweet uses in adversity, which need but to be
recognized and cherished for the sting to be blunted, and what seems
at first a grief without an element of alleviation, to become in time
the foundation of a higher happiness. How often may one exclaim with
Cleopatra, in the midst of her immeasurable losses:――

        “My desolation,
  Does begin to make a better life.”

We need occasionally some violent and painful shock to waken us from
the lethargy of pleasant custom, to break the shackles of agreeable
and enervating habit, to tear us by the roots from the soil in which
we lazily vegetate, and transplant us into fresh and richer fields.
The beautiful elements in a noble character are woven together by the
experience of afflictions, as the pearls which form the design of a
brooch are held in place by the thread of iron on which they are
strung.

The affections which are deep and pure leave behind them when they are
severed by fate a happiness which is comparable to that of their
enjoyment. Our sorrow for such is accompanied with an inexpressible
sense of consolation, the firm and sweet assurance――“’Tis better to
have loved and lost, than never to have loved at all.”

This compensation flows, from the nature of affection itself, because
it is essentially unselfish, and ever seeking objects outside the
circle of egoistic instincts. It is Love that teaches us that Joy and
Sorrow are twins; and at the same time sharply defines what are the
true objects of affection. Its sweet waters pour inexhaustible streams
of consolation for the wounds of Fate, but not for those of Fortune.
For the loss of money or rank or other mere externality it offers no
such assuagement, for it deems all such losses beneath its sovereign
notice. The solace for these must be sought in fortitude and courage
and resignation. Only of the loss of such lower means of happiness as
these is the saying of the poet true, that “A sorrow’s crown of
sorrows is remembering happier things.” Rather let us say, the only
sorrows we should not be ashamed of, are those which turn into joy.
The griefs that embitter and harden, follow loves that are lowering.

Noble sorrow is the teacher of sympathy. The sense or the memory of
our own pain awakens the desire to relieve the pain of others.
Compassion and Pity are the offspring of grief. It also teaches
tolerance, charity for the imperfections of others, and a knowledge of
the limitations and deficiencies of our common nature, without which
knowledge the successful endeavor for any of the higher aims of
existence is not possible. The sense of physical suffering has been
the guiding principle in the evolution of organic forms from the monad
up to man. His future and higher evolution, that of his spirit-powers,
will come from his mental suffering and the lessons he will draw from
it.

       *     *     *     *     *

Thus, at the end of our wide wandering in pursuit of Happiness, we
look back and see that it is absent from nothing in life, not even
from pain and sorrow; nay, that when all else has gone, when youth and
health and fortune and love have left us, when we look forward
despairingly to nought but loneliness and suffering, our very despair
may prove to be divine, “begotten by the finite upon the infinite,”
and from its depths we may draw a rapture unknown to common pleasures,
and taste the sweet waters of a bliss which is celestial.

       *     *     *     *     *

Who would wish to escape suffering himself, when suffering makes up so
large a part of the experiences of his fellow men? Who would seek by
any base flight to avoid Sorrow, when Sorrow alone can teach him the
highest meaning of Life?

       *     *     *     *     *

History is ever ready to point out how nations have been benefited by
calamities, and churches by persecutions. Why not believe that the
same rule holds good in our own lives?

       *     *     *     *     *

Think what we should miss if all went smoothly with us! Without pain,
we should not know pity; without danger, we should not develop
courage; without receiving injuries, no chance to show forgiveness;
without affliction, no opportunity for fortitude; without ingratitude,
no means of proving disinterestedness; without injustice, no occasion
for forbearance; without violence, no training in self-control.
Really, it seems that to encounter misfortunes must be the finest
fortune in life!

       *     *     *     *     *

The surgeon restores a stiffened joint or an atrophied muscle by
painful manipulations. Nothing but painful experiences will restore a
sluggish mind to activity and enjoyment.

       *     *     *     *     *

To forget even for a short time those we have loved and lost seems a
lack of fealty to them; but if their influence is ever present with us
to our good, our joy is a worthier memorial to them than would be
endless repining.

       *     *     *     *     *

The memory of a great sorrow obliterates the slight asperities of
daily life.

       *     *     *     *     *

The mingling of tears is a transfusion of spirit. A sorrow in common
is the strongest of covenants.

       *     *     *     *     *

The only complete satisfaction of the sense of living is its
sacrifice.

       *     *     *     *     *

The sweetest joys are consoled sorrows.




  INDEX.


  Abderrhaman, Sultan, 27.

  Adversity, consolations of, 253.

  Advice, slight value of, 188;
    effect of, 193.

  Afflictions, consolations of, 248.

  Age and youth compared, 34, 225;
    not synonymous with wisdom, 35;
    sorrows of, 76.

  Angelo, Michael, 78, 177, 235, 246.

  Anger, destructive to happiness, 147.

  Anthropology, its aim, 54.

  Apathy, as a calmative, 146.

  Architecture, the best, 86.

  Argument never convinces, 188.

  Aristotle, quoted, 10, 11, 13, 17, 167, 222.

  Art of happiness, the, 9, 54;
    of pleasure, 38;
    the aim of, 149;
    inspirations of, 154.

  Asceticism, the blunders of, 24, 128.

  Association required, 216.


  Bacon, Lord, quoted, 51, 85, 108, 145, 217, 221, 234, 261.

  Bain, A., quoted, 41, 148, 206, 211.

  Bentham, J., quoted, 10, 27.

  Beauty, the power of, 67;
    the ideal of, 68;
    results of, 69;
    the burden of, 236.

  Benevolent emotions, pleasures of, 213.

  Berkeley, Bishop, quoted, 126.

  “Blues,” how to relieve, 74.

  Books, what kind to read, 160.

  Brillat-Savarin, quoted, 133.

  Bronte, Charlotte, 189.

  Browning, Robert, quoted, 46, 267;
    Mrs., quoted, 270.

  Bruno, Giordano, quoted, 171, 173.

  Buddha, words of, 21, 61.

  Buddhism, aspirations of, 21;
    advice of, 143, 274.

  Burke, quoted, 215.

  Business principles, how studied, 42;
    precepts, 124, 217.


  Calculus of probabilities, the, 93, 105.

  Chagrin, the feeling of, 193.

  Chamfort, quoted, 213.

  Chance, the laws of, 92;
    the logic of, 94;
    the slaves of, 103.

  Chaucer, quoted, 252.

  Cheerfulness, how cultivated, 72.

  Chief end of man, the, 175, 212.

  Child, the mind of a, 79.

  Chinese proverb, a, 80.

  Christianity, influence on position of woman, 31;
    spirit of, 22, 275;
    aim of, 178.

  Christian fatalism, 143;
    doctrines, 172, 173.

  Church of the future, the, 179, 232.

  Civility, its value, 107, 223.

  Civilization, does not increase pleasure, 28;
    motive of higher, 29.

  Climate, its influence, 88-90.

  Clothing, purposes of, 81-83.

  Coleridge, Hartley, 105;
    S. T., 70.

  Colonna, Vittoria, 78, 235.

  Colors, their effect, 83, 90.

  Common-places admired, 192.

  Comradeship, explained, 230.

  Confidence, delights of, 218.

  Confucius, quoted, 100.

  Congenital traits, 59.

  Conscience, what it is, 209.

  Consolations of affliction, 248.

  Contentment, falsity of, 40;
    not happiness, 22, 116.

  Conversation, rules for, 223.

  Cookery, French, 136.

  Correspondence as an art, 164.

  Cosiness, the delights of, 86.

  Country, the love of, 83, 90.

  Courage, the value of, 146.

  Cowley, A., quoted, 84.

  Criminals, psychology of, 209.

  Cromwell, anecdote of, 192.

  Culture, the true end of, 40.


  D’Alembert, quoted, 46.

  Damocles, story of, 196.

  Dante, quoted, 247.

  Death, reflections on, 261, 262.

  Decalogue, the, discussed, 208.

  Decision of character, 188.

  Demonic force, the, 107.

  Depression, fits of, how cured, 75, 254.

  Descartes, quoted, 168.

  Despair, how avoided, 260.

  Despine, Dr., quoted, 207.

  Despondency, remedies for, 74, 75, 254.

  Destiny, the rule of, 102.

  Diary, benefit of keeping, 165.

  Dinner, a well-served, 135.

  Disraeli, quoted, 161.

  Divorce discussed, 243.

  Dogmatic doctrines considered, 170, 178.

  Dress, the philosophy of, 82, 91.

  Dualism, of morals, the, 209.

  Duty as related to happiness, 206, 207, 215;
    the sense of, 209.


  Eating as an art, 136.

  Economy, its uses, 122.

  Education, of woman, 33, 200;
    should be free, 199;
    the true moral, 204, 205, 212.

  Egotism, not individuality, 194.

  Emerson, R. W., 182.

  Emotions, pleasures from, 142.

  Energy, excessive, 113;
    developed by affliction, 276.

  Ennui, analysis of, 44;
    good in, 272.

  Epictetus, quoted, 19, 25, 39.

  Epicurus, quoted, 206.

  Error more agreeable than truth, 56, 167.

  “Essay on Man,” Pope’s, 54.

  Essenes, the ancient, 244.

  Esthetic emotions, the, 149.

  Ethics dissevered from happiness, 206.

  Eudæmonics, 11.

  Evidence, the study of, 43.

  Evolution, the secret of, 20;
    strange law of, 169.

  Executive ability, what it is, 42.


  Faith, abuse of, 174.

  Fame, a doubtful pleasure, 168.

  Family traits, 60;
    love of the, 244.

  Fear, prevention of, 39;
    definition of, 142, 145;
    avoidance of, 145.

  Fellowships, what they are, 228.

  Fichte, quoted, 17, 77.

  Ficinus, M., quoted, 141.

  Fifine at the fair, 46.

  Fine arts, pleasures from, 151.

  Fixed opinions, folly of, 187.

  Fontenelle, quoted, 78.

  Food-taking, as a rite, 134.

  Fox, George, 32, 232.

  Foster, John, quoted, 189.

  Friendship explained, 232;
    rules for, 233;
    of men and women, 235.

  Frivolity of old men, 80;
    its usefulness, 225.

  Fuller, Thomas, quoted, 115, 131.

  Furniture, its place in life, 83.


  Gambler, the guileless, 97.

  Gamblers, superstitions of, 98;
    true spirit of, 106.

  Games, pleasures of, 153.

  Gibbon, quoted, 27, 128.

  Goethe, quoted, 34, 102, 107, 151, 220, 276.

  Good taste, what it is, 152.

  Good and evil, how to distinguish, 213.

  Government, the use of, 198;
    theories of, 199;
    aim of, 204.

  Grief, inconsistencies of, 252.


  Habit, its tyrannical power, 48.

  Halevy, quoted, 129.

  Hamilton, Sir William, 57.

  Happiness, as the aim of life, 9;
    definitions of, 15, 77, 105, 109, 167, 168;
    the distribution of, 26;
    in relation to health, 65;
    in relation to beauty, 69;
    washwoman’s ideal of, 109;
    and success, 116;
    how related to riches, 125;
    complete, not attainable, 143;
    whence derived, 195;
    two theories of, 196;
    independent of morality, 206.

  Hatred, as an emotion, 148.

  Hazlitt, Wm., quoted, 113.

  Health in relation to happiness, 65.

  Hearing, the pleasures of, 137.

  Hedonism, 11.

  Herbert of Cherbury, quoted, 148.

  Herder, quoted, 88, 110.

  Heredity, the laws of, 59.

  Hobbes, quoted, 162.

  Holland, Sir Henry, 161.

  Home, what makes a, 83;
    the love of, 87.

  Homesickness, 87.

  Hope, definition of, 142, 145;
    in disease, 73.

  House, building a, 85.

  Humanity, the ideal of, 170.

  Humboldt, W. Von, quoted, 34, 235, 244.

  Hume, quoted, 16, 26.

  Hunt, L., quoted, 268.

  Hygiene, science of, 65.


  Ibsen’s drama, 63.

  Ideal and real, relations of, 53;
    attraction of, 67;
    aim of art, 176;
    ideal truth, 177;
    of humanity, 170.

  Ignorance, the bliss of, 56.

  Imagination, the, its cultivation, 149.

  Immortality of the soul, 174, 179.

  Incivility, how to be received, 257.

  Incompatible desires, 144, 250.

  Inconsistencies of grief, 252.

  Individual, the true aim of, 183.

  Individuality, cultivation of, 181;
    traits of, 194.

  Ingratitude, how to regard, 258.

  Insincerity has no limit, 217.

  Insurance, value of, 101.

  Intellect, pleasures derived from, 156;
    why cold, 167.

  Intense application, danger of, 113.


  Johnson, Dr., quoted, 22, 26, 46, 65, 110, 184, 234, 241.

  Joy, a cry of nature, 20;
    and sorrow are twins, 277.


  Kant, quoted, 16, 25, 141, 195, 206.

  Knowledge, the most useful, 40;
    its relation to liberty, 199.


  Labor, as a source of pleasure, 110;
    unions, their weak points, 230.

  Lamb, Chas., quoted, 162.

  Lamps, new for old, 124.

  Land, ownership of, 84.

  Leisure, its real use, 117.

  Letter-writing, 164.

  Liberty, the true, 197.

  Life, meaning of, 17, 56;
    normal duration of, 76;
    love of, 77.

  Literary clubs, 163.

  Littré, quoted, 39.

  Locke, quoted, 16.

  Logic of chance, the, 94.

  Longevity, how attained, 76.

  Love, of neighbor, 18;
    the emotion of, 67, 239;
    of money, 127;
    and marriage, 238, 246, 247.

  Love-feasts, 134.

  Luck and its laws, 92-96;
    value of, 106.


  Making a living considered, 114.

  Mal des montagnes, the, 89.

  Malaise, the seat of, 72.

  Malloch, quoted, 223.

  Man, the science of, 54;
    in art and science, 150;
    evolution of, 169;
    chief end of, 175, 212;
    very human, 228.

  Many-sidedness of character, 190.

  Marriage, effect on woman, 32;
    various forms of, 240;
    French system of, 242;
    unhappiness in, 243.

  Meditation as a pleasure, 162.

  Melancholy, causes of, 272.

  Men who outlive themselves, 77.

  Mill, J. S., quoted, 32, 158, 244.

  Milton, J., quoted, 244.

  Minor arts, the, 151.

  Mirabeau, quoted, 197.

  Misanthropy, causes of, 194.

  Mission of the species, the, 191.

  Mitchell, Weir, quoted, 80.

  Moderation, the rule of, 129.

  Money and how made, 122;
    the love of, 127, 226.

  Morality, explained, 195;
    not identical with happiness, 206;
    no general code of, 207;
    motive in, 214.

  Moral life not the highest aim, 175, 212;
    sense, distinct from morality, 209;
    pleasures of the, 209.

  Motherhood, its attraction, 240.

  Muscular sense, the, 130.

  Music, enjoyment of, 137.

  Mutuality of interests, 229.


  Nature, is equitable, 62, 80;
    the charms of, 138;
    emotions excited by, 150;
    peculiarities of, 154, 155.

  Necessity and chance, as arbiters of destiny, 58.

  Newton, Sir Isaac, 116, 184.

  Novalis, quoted, 134, 178.

  Novel reading as a narcotic, 168.


  Obstinacy, 187.

  Occupations of necessity and choice, 109.

  Odors, the power of, 132.

  Old age, its false claims, 34, 35;
    how attainable, 75, 76;
    considered, 79;
    coveted, 261.

  Opinion, its might, 186.

  Ordinary people, preferable, 220.

  Over-conscientiousness, 114.

  Over-sensitiveness, pains of, 185.


  Pain, profitless, 39;
    relations to pleasure, 16, 55, 263, 266;
    as an antidote, 257;
    more natural than pleasure, 271.

  Paley, quoted, 26.

  Pascal, quoted, 10, 45, 93, 109.

  Peace the reward of virtue, 215.

  Penn, William, quoted, 88.

  Periodicity, the law of, 48, 267.

  Perseverance, how useful, 116, 186.

  Personality, the joy of, 182.

  Personal liberty, attacks on, 199.

  Philosophies, the folly of, 142.

  Philosophy and Happiness, meanings of, 54.

  Piety and morality, 175;
    as the last passion, 180.

  Pindar, quoted, 267.

  Places, love of, 87.

  Plato, quoted, 9, 10, 19, 34, 203, 247, 261, 263.

  Platonic friendships, 235.

  Play, measure of its value, 117.

  Pleasure, definitions of, 15, 80, 264;
    and pain, how connected, 16, 55, 263, 265, 277;
    from reflection, 162.

  Pleasure-pain sensation, the, 266.

  Pleasures, relative value of, 21;
    sources of, 24.

  Plot-interest, as a pleasure, 152.

  Poetry, pleasure of reading, 161;
    of science, 177.

  Polygamy, injurious results of, 241.

  Politeness, its value, 222.

  Politics, why avoided in society, 226.

  Polycrates, story of, 97.

  Pope, quoted, 54.

  Poverty, the worst of, 127.

  Prayer, the universal, 118;
    refreshes the mind, 180.

  Property, as an incentive, 118.

  Pursuit, the emotions of, 153;
    of happiness, explained, 54;
    conclusion of, 278.

  Puzzles and riddles, pleasure of, 158.


  Quakers, the, 176, 179, 232.

  Quincy, Thomas de, quoted, 201.


  Racial characteristics, 60.

  Rasselas, quoted, 12, 110.

  Reading, as an enjoyment, 139;
    rules for, 159.

  Reason and religion, 177.

  Recamier, Madame, her friendship, 235.

  Recreations, the best, 115.

  Reflection, pleasure from, 162.

  Religion, happiness from, 169, 172;
    unhappiness from, 171, 173;
    true spirit of, 175;
    of the future, 176, 179, 232;
    why not mentioned in society, 226.

  Remorse, the pains of, 147.

  Reserve, value of, 189;
    a help to reputation, 226.

  Resignation, the virtue of, 259.

  Respectability, the revolt against, 45, 46.

  Revenge, as a pleasure, 148.

  Riches, effective and productive, 120;
    disappointments of, 126.

  Risk, the emotions of, 153.

  Room, the living, 83.

  Rothschild, Baron, opinion of, 99.

  Rousseau, quoted, 28, 84.

  Rules for happiness, why studied, 54.

  Ruskin, J., quoted, 187.


  Schopenhauer, A., quoted, 44.

  Science, the love of, 166;
    the aim of, 176;
    and religion, 177;
    of man, the, 54, 68.

  Security, how obtained, 196.

  Self-abnegation, 24.

  Self-admiration, 191.

  Self-complacency, 192.

  Self, conception of, 17;
    the lord of, 61.

  Self-conceit corrected, 186.

  Self-consciousness, 17, 20, 52.

  Self-control, 24.

  Self-distrust, appropriate, 194.

  Self-education, principles of, 36.

  Self-publication, 226.

  Self-realization, 17, 56.

  Self recognition, 204.

  Self-revelation not self-publication, 226.

  Self-reverence, 189.

  Self-sufficiency, 47.

  Senancour, de, quoted, 43.

  Seneca, quoted, 19.

  Sensation the sense of existence, 140.

  Senses, the pleasures of, 128.

  Sex, origin of, 60.

  Shakespeare, quoted, 50, 51, 62, 100, 103, 118, 121, 122, 157,
    241, 277.

  Sight, the pleasures of, 138.

  Sincerity, importance of, 189.

  Singularity, what it is, 192.

  Small-talk, its value, 224.

  Smell, the pleasures of, 132.

  Smith, Adam, quoted, 210.

  Smith, Sydney, quoted, 141, 201.

  Social organization, the, 196.

  Socialists, the dreams of, 115, 183.

  Society, the basis of good, 219;
    maxims for success in, 220;
    the aim of, 220;
    the justice of, 227.

  Socrates, quoted, 54, 86, 208, 263.

  Solitude, its uses, 204.

  Sophocles, quoted, 214.

  Sorrow, as an educator, 273, 279, 280.

  Sorrows of age, 76.

  Spencer, H., quoted, 10, 36, 202.

  Spinoza, quoted, 16, 17, 155.

  State and individual, the relations of, 48.

  Steele, quoted, 193, 269.

  Success, what it is, 116;
    from failure, 259.

  Suffering, the education of, 273.

  Suicide, easy, 261.

  Sympathy, whence to seek, 233, 236, 260.


  Table-talk, rules for, 141.

  Talleyrand, quoted, 223.

  Tasso, quoted, 70.

  Taste, the pleasures of, 133-137.

  Tears, their use, 251.

  Temperaments, the four, 71.

  Tennyson, quoted, 202, 277, 278.

  Thoreau, H., 35, 40.

  Time, its value, 124, 142;
    relation to happiness, 272.

  Tobacco, the pleasure of, 133.

  Tolerance of others, 187;
    of pain and sorrow, 254.

  Touch, the pleasures of, 131.

  Truth, the search for as a pleasure, 156, 165;
    the spirit of, 166;
    alone gives happiness, 214;
    ideal, 177;
    gives freedom, 199.


  Unhappiness, the removal of, 22, 248;
    as a habit, 252;
    in marriage, 243.

  Uniforms, the value of, 82.

  Unknown, the, 53.

  Urbanity, value of, 56.


  Variety in dress, 82;
    to be sought, 47;
    the rule of, 130.

  Vauvenargues, quoted, 211.

  Veracity a relative matter, 190.

  Virtue, its relation to happiness, 206, 211;
    and vices, relations of, 214.


  Waitz, Th., quoted, 28, 32.

  War, destructive to virtues, 215.

  Ward, L. F., quoted, 10.

  Wealth, its meaning, 119.

  Weather, how it affects us, 81, 88.

  White race, higher sensation in, 63.

  Whitman, Walt., quoted, 78, 140, 179, 182, 191, 194.

  Will, motives of the, 16;

  to strengthen, 255.

  William of Normandy, his wit, 100;
    his birth, 102.

  Woman, unfavorably placed for securing happiness, 30;
    education of, 33, 200;
    physical training of, 66;
    her clothing, 82, 91;
    intellectual pleasures of, 158;
    lack of justice, 33, 205;
    her attraction for man, 237, 240.

  Work, measure of its value, 117;
    its healthful action, 255.

  World, the, as our country, 90.


  Xavier de Maistre, 83.


  Youth not the happiest period of life, 34, 76;
    misanthropy of, 194;
    compared with age, 76, 80, 225.


  Zola, E., quoted, 109.




Transcriber’s Note:

Words and phrases in italics are surrounded by underscores, _like
this_. Dialect, obsolete and alternative spellings were left
unchanged. Obvious printing errors, such as backwards, upside
down, or partially printed letters, were corrected.

The following items were changed:

  siécle to siècle …la maladie de la siècle…
  targe to target …misses the target…
  XVI. to XVI …Louis XVI stops at…
  brook to book …the oldest prayer-book…
  Sidney to Sydney …in the words of Sydney Smith…
  Bronté to Bronte …in Charlotte Bronte’s poem…
  that to than …anguish than by that…
  inmeasurable to immeasurable …her immeasurable losses…
  Shopenhauer to Schopenhauer, in the index





End of Project Gutenberg's The Pursuit of Happiness, by Daniel G. Brinton

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