Hi, I stumbled upon something worth sharing tonight as I was loading up my books into my boxes. While packing, of course I was distracted, (lol, when am I not?), and found something worth writing down to look back on later and to share with others.
I was loading up my antique books first, you know the ones, hardback! Get the big heavy books packed up and the rest is easy lol. Or so it seems... lol.
And I stumbled upon the book, The Marks of an Educated Man written by Albert Edward Wiggam (copywrited, 1925-1930). As all my books are of interest to me; books I've found over the years and have collected because each and every one individually has captured my interest in one way or another... so hmmmm, wonder why I would get distracted by the this title eh? Duh... I had to open it up -anywhere and read a small portion. Tee hee.
So I happened to open it up just beyond the middle of the book to page 211 which begins a new chapter (Ch XIX) subtitled, He Always Tries to Feel the Emotion He Ought to Feel ...and here's what I found so interesting that it's worth sharing:
It is amazing how a trivial incident reveals to thoughtful man how little education he gets out of even great experiences if he does not do something about them. The good impulse that we do not obey and allow to evaporate, the fine resolution that is not carried out, as Professor James insisted, is worse than an opportunity lost. It actually weakens us for the next opportunity. It gives us practice in our own errors. We are really weaker, less resolute beings than we were before. The town drunkard who "gets religion" at every revival, becomes a saint for a few weeks and then backslides, is a typical picture of the lives we all lead to a greater or less degree.
As an instance, a great many years ago I was sitting with Mrs. Wiggam under a tent erected on the campus of the University of Chicago, listening to a Sunday morning address to the summer students by President Henry Churchill King, of Oberlin. The address stirred me deeply although I do not now have the slightest idea what it was about. There was, however, just one sentence in it that I recall with perfect distinctness. And the only reason I remember it is that I acted upon it; I did something about it; I took the first opportunity that came up to try it out; in short, I incorporated it into my life. It has given me a great deal of help toward getting an education. If I record it here it may perchance give the same help to someone else. Doctor King's remark was this:
"You should always try to feel the emotion that you ought to feel."
"But," you say at once, "how am I going to manufacture the right emotion if I do not just naturally feel it? If I do not get excited over a picture or a poem; if I am jealous instead of happy over the achievement of some friend; if I do not feel religious in church; if I do not like my job, how am I going to get that way?"
I admit you cannot yank yourself up by the nape of your neck and feel an immediate rush of ennobling emotion. You cannot say, "I will feel right and moral and sympathetic and courageous and happy and energetic," and thus instantly lift yourself into the seventh heaven by your moral bootstraps. But I do maintain that you can achieve these sentiments and emotions if you cultivate the knowledge necessary to achieve them, if you learn to perceive the beauties and realities out of which all great emotion and happiness must spring. You can go a long way toward liking a disagreeable job if, instead of pitying yourself for having to work at it and thinking how much better off are those who seem to have better and softer jobs, you devote the same amount of energy to trying to discover what your job means to yourself and to others.
For example, I knew a man who hated his work as expert accountant. He was constantly thinking how fine it would be to be a lawyer or doctor and go about righting other people's troubles. But he came to the conclusion that it was too late in his life to study for these professions and he began to think that perhaps the work of an accountant was just as important to the conduct of society as that of the lawyer or doctor. So he began to read up on the work of expert accountants, their importance to our commercial life, the wide influence they exert and the cultural values of accounting as compared with those obtained from other subjects. As a result his whole life and work took on a new tone and meaning. And for the benefit of any bookkeeper who might read these lines and who feels his work is "nothing but drudgery," I cannot refrain from noting a remark, also repeated in another chapter, by Dean Carl Seashore, of Iowa University, one of our most cultivated Americans. The Dean said, "If I had my way I would give every boy and girl in the Republic a thorough course in accounting, because it is something everyone should use all his life and I think it has more cultural value in this age than Latin or Greek." Perhaps some classicists would not agree with Dean Seashore, but he speaks with a great deal of knowledge of both the science and art of education.
The difficulty is we all have eyes that see not and ears that hear not. This is chiefly because we have not trained our eyes to see nor our ears to hear the real things that bring permanent joy and satisfaction.
As an illustration of this the story is told of an American multimillionaire, who, after roaming aimlessly through one of the great art galleries of Paris said to his wife, "Well, Amanda, I guess there is nothing much here for us to see." The attendant who possessed the knowledge necessary for achieving the right emotion toward the works of beauty all about him retorted, "These pictures are not on trial, sir, but you are."
The millionaire was right--although of course this may be a distorted picture of the American millionaire--when he said there was nothing for him to see. There was not. A man cannot feel either exaltation or disgust in the presence of beauty or ugliness that he does not understand. The whole work of character education--indeed of all education--is to develop the understanding of fundamentals from which only right emotional attitudes can proceed. The truth of the old saying, that when you travel to a foreign country you see what you take to it, has its psychological basis in this fact. A man can appreciate only what he understands.
If, therefore, you do not feel rich and potent emotions in the presence of the great works of virtue and beauty that have been approved by the judgment of time you may be sure that they are not on trial but you are. And the judgment of time simply means the judgment of the men and women who possess the profoundest knowledge. We often hear of books that have been rejected by a score or more of publishers and yet afterward became famous. Of course popularity is not a proof of merit. If a book sells well it is sometimes an indication that it is a very poor book; otherwise it would not appeal to the uneducated masses. This has its exceptions of course, but I always suspect a bestseller. I fear it cannot be very profound or very accurate simply because these are the two things that repel instead of attract the great majority of people. However, we know that some works of high and permanent merit have been instantaneous triumphs. Consequently a writer whose works prove popular should not be utterly depressed.
It is true, nevertheless, that it requires greatness of spirit to appreciate greatness of spirit. It requires a trained imagination, which is usually achieved only by the arduous toil of acquiring knowledge, to attain the right emotions toward the great works of literature, art and science. If one, for example, does not feel deeply stirred in the presence of the great pictures, the great poems, the great characters in literature, one can be absolutely certain one is living a vastly lower and more restricted life than one could and should be living. These great works of the mind and spirit of man are always there, pleading with him by every appeal of art and even every ruse of artistry that he enter into their joys and exaltations. Like the serpent in the wilderness they lift themselves before all who will look with seeing eyes to inspirit them with their ministry of healing. Great works of art of all kinds always embody the impossible. They are the personification of men's ideals; and ideals are the dreams of men that cannot be possessed. But, like a perfume wafted across tropic seas from some land hidden just beyond the horizon, they forever "beckon us on to the blue beauty of life's Eden isles." And if you do not catch this perfume, if creations of the spirit do not fill your own life with a new fragrance, if they do not come to you as great new agencies of living, all you can do is to study them, to inquire and learn about them for consolation and courage, why they have made them their holy altars and kept sacred fires burning upon them throughout the generations.
But great works of art are for our rare moments, although it is perhaps our rare moments that help us most in cultivating the right attitudes toward the common things we must deal with throughout the day. And cultivating the right emotion toward common things as well as great things is the work of a lifetime. There is surely no emotion we need more than courage. If a man tells you he has never known fear he acknowledges he has no imagination. And perhaps I may say with propriety that the best way I have found to be courageous in the face of danger or difficulty is to do all I can not to give fear time to come up. If I have a fight in committee meeting, or a disagreeable task to perform such as writing a difficult letter, or dealing with a cantankerous person, I do my best to plunge in before I have time to imagine the consequences. Control of the imagination is the surest cure of fear and the surest source of courage. In a situation of personal danger, I find that if I hesitate even the bat of an eye, I am likely to get scared and run. But if I act instantly, if I can control my thoughts so as to drive my motor centers to immediate action, I literally haven't time to get frightened. If you can keep your attention fixed on courage instead of fear you can literally walk through hell and be unafraid.
If you will only try to imagine the right attitude you will be amazed how greatly it helps to create the right emotion toward drudging work and soul-racking toil--things that very few of us can entirely escape. A number of experiments have been tried on college students who were compelled to work at tasks they intensely disliked. After working up an artificial enthusiasm by saying to themselves as earnestly as possible, "My, but this is lots of fun!" "Gee, but I do like this work!" or, "I know this work is going to be a great benefit to me and to others," they have shown that these mental exercises resulted in work almost as good as the same students performed when they were really enthusiastic.
All of this is closely related to the recent developments in physiology and the newer knowledge of the interaction between the body and the emotions. As Professor Woodworth points out in his excellent little book Dynamic Psychology our very plans for using energy develop secretions for producing it. Working up an artificial enthusiasm tends to throw these secretions into the blood stream, and so stimulates the heart to greater activity and draws the blood from the portions of the body where it is not needed. It excites the liver to pour out into the blood stores of sugar which is the best fuel for bodily action, and starts other processes going that prepare us to meet the situation vigorously and easily. The blood is in some obscure way preserved from fatigue, and in a wonderful manner these secretions put the blood itself into such a condition that it will clot rapidly should our action carry us into physical contest where we receive a wound. It seems obvious from all this that the effort to feel the right emotion is eminently worth while and that even if we do not immediately feel it, but only pretend (to ourselves) that we do, the way is often paved for the right emotion to develop.
Both the psychology and physiology of the emotions are still practically unworked fields of science, but there can be no doubt that whether we are happy or unhappy in any situation or experience depends upon our attitude toward it, upon the way we feel about it. And our attitudes, provided human beings have any freedom at all, are subject to very great control. I knew a city woman whose husband took her to a small town to live. "Oh, how I hate this hole and these dull people," she said to me when she first arrived. "I simply can't stand it; I will die here." But she had the good sense to try to feel the emotion that she ought to feel. She knew she had to live there, then why not make the best of it? Precisely this same situation in a greater or less degree comes ot all of us nearly every hour of every day. And the true greatness of life is almost wholly dependent upon our habit of getting the right point of view, of seeing the inwardness of the situation and creating out of untoward circumstance the emotion of eagerness, richness and significance. And so this woman met her hard situation; she did her best to enter into the lives of the people and find out why they liked to live there and how they could find a zest for living, a sense of victories won and, in their little church on Sundays, sing a paean of duties fulfilled and of moral struggles met with the only true success--the success of simple courage. Two years afterward this woman said to me, "I love this place and its people; I hope I shall never have to leave."
The way you cultivate your feelings toward the situation you are in is the true secret of all happiness. It may create a smile in a mechanistic laboratory and yet for many people the following may be a procedure of great practical moment. I knew a man who cherished a deep hatred toward one of his neighbors. He concluded this was an unhappy way to live; so he prayed to God daily to cause him to love his neighbor instead of to hate him. He was himself surprised at how quickly and effectively God came to his aid and changed his attitude. The psychologist may have his own theory to explain this "answer to prayer," and yet sometimes in moments of national anger against a foreign country, a similar procedure might be practiced upon a nation-wide scale with equally satisfactory results.
Those of you who have read that unforgettable essay of William James, On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings, will recall the splendid passage that follows his description of his own blindness in failing to see the moral and emotional meanings and values in what had seemed to him the unmitigated squalor of a mountain squatter's cabin. This essay is one of the best things in all literature to read by the firelight when out in camp. I read it aloud during a number of evenings many years ago when on a camping trip up the Kentucky River with "Bob" and George Taylor and "Bill" Shannon,--all now educators of high rank,--and we discussed its infinite implications until, wrapped in our blankets, one by one we fell asleep. The passage runs:
Wherever a process ofl ife communicates an eagerness to him who lives it, there the life becomes genuinely significant. Sometimes the eagerness is more knit up with motor activities, sometimes with the perceptions, sometimes with the imagination, sometimes with reflective thought. But, wherever it is found, there is the zest, the tingle, the excitement of reality; and there is "importance" in the only real and positive sense in which importance every anywhere can be.*
And you will remember how James goes on to quote what he says is "the best thing I know in all Stevenson"--(and we might recall here the old adage that to quote greatly is next to writing greatly)--the passage from Stevenson's Lantern Bearers:
To miss the joy is to miss all. In the joy of the actors lies the sense of any action. That is the explanation, that the excuse. To one who has not the secret of the lanterns the scene upon the links is meaningless. And hence the haunting and truly spectral unreality of realistic books...In each we miss the personal poetry, the enchanted atmosphere that rainbow work of fancy that clothes what is naked and seems to ennoble what is base; in each, life falls dead like dough, instead of soaring away like a balloon into the colors of the sunset; each is true, inconceivable; for no man lives in the external truth amongst salts and acids, but in the warm, phantasmagoric chamber of his brain, with the painted windows and the storied wall.+
So it is with your life and mine; "To miss the joy is to miss all." There are not many of us who can live amid those outward circumstances of wealth, leisure and irresponsibility where it would appear happiness should always come easy and where life should always be a summer afternoon. Whether these are the conditions that make happiness inevitable can be gravely doubted since we see many people amid these "happy circumstances" who are not happy. The suicide rate is said to be even higher among the wealthy than among the poor. There is something about the fight against poverty that, with the brave at least, brings its own sense of victory, its own meanings and reasons for carrying on to the next hour and the next day with its possibilities of adventure. The adventure may never come but there is always teh possibility that it may come. If it is not here yet it may be lurking just around the corner. The day when this anticipation of adventure dies is the day when the poet within us perishes. For as Stevenson goes on to say in his Lantern Bearers:
It is said that a poet has died young in the breast of the most stolid. It may be contended rather that a (somewhat minor) bard in almost every case survives, and is the spice of life to its possessor...His life from without may seem but a rude mound of mud: there will be some golden chamber at the heart of it in which he dwells delighted...
There is one fable that touches very near the quick of life,--the fable of the monk who passed into the woods, heard a bird break into song, harkened for a trill or two, and found himself at his return a stranger at his convent gates; for he had been absent fifty years, and of all his comrades there survived but one to recognize him. It is not only in the woods that this enchanter carols, though perhaps he is native there. He sings in the most doleful places. The miser hears him and chuckles, and his days are moments. With no more apparatus than an evil smelling lanter, I have evoked him on the naked links. All life that is not merely mechanical is spun out of two strands,--seeking for that bird and hearing him. And it is just this that makes life so hard to value, and the delight of each so incommunicable. And it is just a knowledge of this, and a remembrance of those fortunate hours in which the bird has sung to us, that fills us with such wonder when we turn to the pages of the realist. There, to be sure, we find a picture of life insofar as it consists of mud and of old iron, cheap desires and cheap fears, that which we are ashamed to remember and that which we are careless whether we forget; but of the note of that time-devouring nightingale we hear no news...
For, to repeat, the ground of a man's joy is often hard to hit...To look at the man is but to court deception. We shall see the trunk from which he draws his nourishment; but he himself is above and abroad in the green dome of foliage hummed through by winds and nested in by nightingales.
So we see from every angle of approach, the angle of the psychologist, the poet, the philosopher, the priest, the man in the street that the emotion toward every situation in life is the thing that counts, the thing that redeems life to pageantry and mystery and miracle or that condemns it to mud and iron and ashes. We know that men can achieve right emotions because we know they have found significance, ardor, tranquility, excitement, moments redolent with singing memories, glowing with inner victories, teeming with exuberant fancies always and everywhere. Men have found these in all ages in every conceivable situation that life and circumstance have ever visited or can possibly visit upon them. We read of their attaining "hours of ineffable glory" amid the filth, damp and hunger of prison; we read of their marching to death on the battle-field, singing with gaiety of the groom coming to his bride; we read of their ponderous misery and despair on the very pinnacles of worldly power and fortune; and then we know happiness and significance are matters not of circumstance but of education, things that can be found in the heat and burden of the day as well as in the restful, joyous shadow of a rock in a desert land. The grounds for a man's joy are indeed hard to hit, but the pathway to the hidden retreat of what Stevenson calls the "time-devouring nightingale," whose song, wherever it is heard, always gives life adventure, edge and meaning, is the pathway of understanding of life's real values through education.
*From Talks to Teachers on Psychology and to Students on Some of Life's Ideals, by William James, by permission of the publishers, Henry Holt and Company.
+From The Lantern Bearers, by Robert Louis Stevenson, by permission of the publishers, Charles Scribner's Sons.
I was loading up my antique books first, you know the ones, hardback! Get the big heavy books packed up and the rest is easy lol. Or so it seems... lol.
And I stumbled upon the book, The Marks of an Educated Man written by Albert Edward Wiggam (copywrited, 1925-1930). As all my books are of interest to me; books I've found over the years and have collected because each and every one individually has captured my interest in one way or another... so hmmmm, wonder why I would get distracted by the this title eh? Duh... I had to open it up -anywhere and read a small portion. Tee hee.
So I happened to open it up just beyond the middle of the book to page 211 which begins a new chapter (Ch XIX) subtitled, He Always Tries to Feel the Emotion He Ought to Feel ...and here's what I found so interesting that it's worth sharing:
It is amazing how a trivial incident reveals to thoughtful man how little education he gets out of even great experiences if he does not do something about them. The good impulse that we do not obey and allow to evaporate, the fine resolution that is not carried out, as Professor James insisted, is worse than an opportunity lost. It actually weakens us for the next opportunity. It gives us practice in our own errors. We are really weaker, less resolute beings than we were before. The town drunkard who "gets religion" at every revival, becomes a saint for a few weeks and then backslides, is a typical picture of the lives we all lead to a greater or less degree.
As an instance, a great many years ago I was sitting with Mrs. Wiggam under a tent erected on the campus of the University of Chicago, listening to a Sunday morning address to the summer students by President Henry Churchill King, of Oberlin. The address stirred me deeply although I do not now have the slightest idea what it was about. There was, however, just one sentence in it that I recall with perfect distinctness. And the only reason I remember it is that I acted upon it; I did something about it; I took the first opportunity that came up to try it out; in short, I incorporated it into my life. It has given me a great deal of help toward getting an education. If I record it here it may perchance give the same help to someone else. Doctor King's remark was this:
"You should always try to feel the emotion that you ought to feel."
"But," you say at once, "how am I going to manufacture the right emotion if I do not just naturally feel it? If I do not get excited over a picture or a poem; if I am jealous instead of happy over the achievement of some friend; if I do not feel religious in church; if I do not like my job, how am I going to get that way?"
I admit you cannot yank yourself up by the nape of your neck and feel an immediate rush of ennobling emotion. You cannot say, "I will feel right and moral and sympathetic and courageous and happy and energetic," and thus instantly lift yourself into the seventh heaven by your moral bootstraps. But I do maintain that you can achieve these sentiments and emotions if you cultivate the knowledge necessary to achieve them, if you learn to perceive the beauties and realities out of which all great emotion and happiness must spring. You can go a long way toward liking a disagreeable job if, instead of pitying yourself for having to work at it and thinking how much better off are those who seem to have better and softer jobs, you devote the same amount of energy to trying to discover what your job means to yourself and to others.
For example, I knew a man who hated his work as expert accountant. He was constantly thinking how fine it would be to be a lawyer or doctor and go about righting other people's troubles. But he came to the conclusion that it was too late in his life to study for these professions and he began to think that perhaps the work of an accountant was just as important to the conduct of society as that of the lawyer or doctor. So he began to read up on the work of expert accountants, their importance to our commercial life, the wide influence they exert and the cultural values of accounting as compared with those obtained from other subjects. As a result his whole life and work took on a new tone and meaning. And for the benefit of any bookkeeper who might read these lines and who feels his work is "nothing but drudgery," I cannot refrain from noting a remark, also repeated in another chapter, by Dean Carl Seashore, of Iowa University, one of our most cultivated Americans. The Dean said, "If I had my way I would give every boy and girl in the Republic a thorough course in accounting, because it is something everyone should use all his life and I think it has more cultural value in this age than Latin or Greek." Perhaps some classicists would not agree with Dean Seashore, but he speaks with a great deal of knowledge of both the science and art of education.
The difficulty is we all have eyes that see not and ears that hear not. This is chiefly because we have not trained our eyes to see nor our ears to hear the real things that bring permanent joy and satisfaction.
As an illustration of this the story is told of an American multimillionaire, who, after roaming aimlessly through one of the great art galleries of Paris said to his wife, "Well, Amanda, I guess there is nothing much here for us to see." The attendant who possessed the knowledge necessary for achieving the right emotion toward the works of beauty all about him retorted, "These pictures are not on trial, sir, but you are."
The millionaire was right--although of course this may be a distorted picture of the American millionaire--when he said there was nothing for him to see. There was not. A man cannot feel either exaltation or disgust in the presence of beauty or ugliness that he does not understand. The whole work of character education--indeed of all education--is to develop the understanding of fundamentals from which only right emotional attitudes can proceed. The truth of the old saying, that when you travel to a foreign country you see what you take to it, has its psychological basis in this fact. A man can appreciate only what he understands.
If, therefore, you do not feel rich and potent emotions in the presence of the great works of virtue and beauty that have been approved by the judgment of time you may be sure that they are not on trial but you are. And the judgment of time simply means the judgment of the men and women who possess the profoundest knowledge. We often hear of books that have been rejected by a score or more of publishers and yet afterward became famous. Of course popularity is not a proof of merit. If a book sells well it is sometimes an indication that it is a very poor book; otherwise it would not appeal to the uneducated masses. This has its exceptions of course, but I always suspect a bestseller. I fear it cannot be very profound or very accurate simply because these are the two things that repel instead of attract the great majority of people. However, we know that some works of high and permanent merit have been instantaneous triumphs. Consequently a writer whose works prove popular should not be utterly depressed.
It is true, nevertheless, that it requires greatness of spirit to appreciate greatness of spirit. It requires a trained imagination, which is usually achieved only by the arduous toil of acquiring knowledge, to attain the right emotions toward the great works of literature, art and science. If one, for example, does not feel deeply stirred in the presence of the great pictures, the great poems, the great characters in literature, one can be absolutely certain one is living a vastly lower and more restricted life than one could and should be living. These great works of the mind and spirit of man are always there, pleading with him by every appeal of art and even every ruse of artistry that he enter into their joys and exaltations. Like the serpent in the wilderness they lift themselves before all who will look with seeing eyes to inspirit them with their ministry of healing. Great works of art of all kinds always embody the impossible. They are the personification of men's ideals; and ideals are the dreams of men that cannot be possessed. But, like a perfume wafted across tropic seas from some land hidden just beyond the horizon, they forever "beckon us on to the blue beauty of life's Eden isles." And if you do not catch this perfume, if creations of the spirit do not fill your own life with a new fragrance, if they do not come to you as great new agencies of living, all you can do is to study them, to inquire and learn about them for consolation and courage, why they have made them their holy altars and kept sacred fires burning upon them throughout the generations.
But great works of art are for our rare moments, although it is perhaps our rare moments that help us most in cultivating the right attitudes toward the common things we must deal with throughout the day. And cultivating the right emotion toward common things as well as great things is the work of a lifetime. There is surely no emotion we need more than courage. If a man tells you he has never known fear he acknowledges he has no imagination. And perhaps I may say with propriety that the best way I have found to be courageous in the face of danger or difficulty is to do all I can not to give fear time to come up. If I have a fight in committee meeting, or a disagreeable task to perform such as writing a difficult letter, or dealing with a cantankerous person, I do my best to plunge in before I have time to imagine the consequences. Control of the imagination is the surest cure of fear and the surest source of courage. In a situation of personal danger, I find that if I hesitate even the bat of an eye, I am likely to get scared and run. But if I act instantly, if I can control my thoughts so as to drive my motor centers to immediate action, I literally haven't time to get frightened. If you can keep your attention fixed on courage instead of fear you can literally walk through hell and be unafraid.
If you will only try to imagine the right attitude you will be amazed how greatly it helps to create the right emotion toward drudging work and soul-racking toil--things that very few of us can entirely escape. A number of experiments have been tried on college students who were compelled to work at tasks they intensely disliked. After working up an artificial enthusiasm by saying to themselves as earnestly as possible, "My, but this is lots of fun!" "Gee, but I do like this work!" or, "I know this work is going to be a great benefit to me and to others," they have shown that these mental exercises resulted in work almost as good as the same students performed when they were really enthusiastic.
All of this is closely related to the recent developments in physiology and the newer knowledge of the interaction between the body and the emotions. As Professor Woodworth points out in his excellent little book Dynamic Psychology our very plans for using energy develop secretions for producing it. Working up an artificial enthusiasm tends to throw these secretions into the blood stream, and so stimulates the heart to greater activity and draws the blood from the portions of the body where it is not needed. It excites the liver to pour out into the blood stores of sugar which is the best fuel for bodily action, and starts other processes going that prepare us to meet the situation vigorously and easily. The blood is in some obscure way preserved from fatigue, and in a wonderful manner these secretions put the blood itself into such a condition that it will clot rapidly should our action carry us into physical contest where we receive a wound. It seems obvious from all this that the effort to feel the right emotion is eminently worth while and that even if we do not immediately feel it, but only pretend (to ourselves) that we do, the way is often paved for the right emotion to develop.
Both the psychology and physiology of the emotions are still practically unworked fields of science, but there can be no doubt that whether we are happy or unhappy in any situation or experience depends upon our attitude toward it, upon the way we feel about it. And our attitudes, provided human beings have any freedom at all, are subject to very great control. I knew a city woman whose husband took her to a small town to live. "Oh, how I hate this hole and these dull people," she said to me when she first arrived. "I simply can't stand it; I will die here." But she had the good sense to try to feel the emotion that she ought to feel. She knew she had to live there, then why not make the best of it? Precisely this same situation in a greater or less degree comes ot all of us nearly every hour of every day. And the true greatness of life is almost wholly dependent upon our habit of getting the right point of view, of seeing the inwardness of the situation and creating out of untoward circumstance the emotion of eagerness, richness and significance. And so this woman met her hard situation; she did her best to enter into the lives of the people and find out why they liked to live there and how they could find a zest for living, a sense of victories won and, in their little church on Sundays, sing a paean of duties fulfilled and of moral struggles met with the only true success--the success of simple courage. Two years afterward this woman said to me, "I love this place and its people; I hope I shall never have to leave."
The way you cultivate your feelings toward the situation you are in is the true secret of all happiness. It may create a smile in a mechanistic laboratory and yet for many people the following may be a procedure of great practical moment. I knew a man who cherished a deep hatred toward one of his neighbors. He concluded this was an unhappy way to live; so he prayed to God daily to cause him to love his neighbor instead of to hate him. He was himself surprised at how quickly and effectively God came to his aid and changed his attitude. The psychologist may have his own theory to explain this "answer to prayer," and yet sometimes in moments of national anger against a foreign country, a similar procedure might be practiced upon a nation-wide scale with equally satisfactory results.
Those of you who have read that unforgettable essay of William James, On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings, will recall the splendid passage that follows his description of his own blindness in failing to see the moral and emotional meanings and values in what had seemed to him the unmitigated squalor of a mountain squatter's cabin. This essay is one of the best things in all literature to read by the firelight when out in camp. I read it aloud during a number of evenings many years ago when on a camping trip up the Kentucky River with "Bob" and George Taylor and "Bill" Shannon,--all now educators of high rank,--and we discussed its infinite implications until, wrapped in our blankets, one by one we fell asleep. The passage runs:
Wherever a process ofl ife communicates an eagerness to him who lives it, there the life becomes genuinely significant. Sometimes the eagerness is more knit up with motor activities, sometimes with the perceptions, sometimes with the imagination, sometimes with reflective thought. But, wherever it is found, there is the zest, the tingle, the excitement of reality; and there is "importance" in the only real and positive sense in which importance every anywhere can be.*
And you will remember how James goes on to quote what he says is "the best thing I know in all Stevenson"--(and we might recall here the old adage that to quote greatly is next to writing greatly)--the passage from Stevenson's Lantern Bearers:
To miss the joy is to miss all. In the joy of the actors lies the sense of any action. That is the explanation, that the excuse. To one who has not the secret of the lanterns the scene upon the links is meaningless. And hence the haunting and truly spectral unreality of realistic books...In each we miss the personal poetry, the enchanted atmosphere that rainbow work of fancy that clothes what is naked and seems to ennoble what is base; in each, life falls dead like dough, instead of soaring away like a balloon into the colors of the sunset; each is true, inconceivable; for no man lives in the external truth amongst salts and acids, but in the warm, phantasmagoric chamber of his brain, with the painted windows and the storied wall.+
So it is with your life and mine; "To miss the joy is to miss all." There are not many of us who can live amid those outward circumstances of wealth, leisure and irresponsibility where it would appear happiness should always come easy and where life should always be a summer afternoon. Whether these are the conditions that make happiness inevitable can be gravely doubted since we see many people amid these "happy circumstances" who are not happy. The suicide rate is said to be even higher among the wealthy than among the poor. There is something about the fight against poverty that, with the brave at least, brings its own sense of victory, its own meanings and reasons for carrying on to the next hour and the next day with its possibilities of adventure. The adventure may never come but there is always teh possibility that it may come. If it is not here yet it may be lurking just around the corner. The day when this anticipation of adventure dies is the day when the poet within us perishes. For as Stevenson goes on to say in his Lantern Bearers:
It is said that a poet has died young in the breast of the most stolid. It may be contended rather that a (somewhat minor) bard in almost every case survives, and is the spice of life to its possessor...His life from without may seem but a rude mound of mud: there will be some golden chamber at the heart of it in which he dwells delighted...
There is one fable that touches very near the quick of life,--the fable of the monk who passed into the woods, heard a bird break into song, harkened for a trill or two, and found himself at his return a stranger at his convent gates; for he had been absent fifty years, and of all his comrades there survived but one to recognize him. It is not only in the woods that this enchanter carols, though perhaps he is native there. He sings in the most doleful places. The miser hears him and chuckles, and his days are moments. With no more apparatus than an evil smelling lanter, I have evoked him on the naked links. All life that is not merely mechanical is spun out of two strands,--seeking for that bird and hearing him. And it is just this that makes life so hard to value, and the delight of each so incommunicable. And it is just a knowledge of this, and a remembrance of those fortunate hours in which the bird has sung to us, that fills us with such wonder when we turn to the pages of the realist. There, to be sure, we find a picture of life insofar as it consists of mud and of old iron, cheap desires and cheap fears, that which we are ashamed to remember and that which we are careless whether we forget; but of the note of that time-devouring nightingale we hear no news...
For, to repeat, the ground of a man's joy is often hard to hit...To look at the man is but to court deception. We shall see the trunk from which he draws his nourishment; but he himself is above and abroad in the green dome of foliage hummed through by winds and nested in by nightingales.
So we see from every angle of approach, the angle of the psychologist, the poet, the philosopher, the priest, the man in the street that the emotion toward every situation in life is the thing that counts, the thing that redeems life to pageantry and mystery and miracle or that condemns it to mud and iron and ashes. We know that men can achieve right emotions because we know they have found significance, ardor, tranquility, excitement, moments redolent with singing memories, glowing with inner victories, teeming with exuberant fancies always and everywhere. Men have found these in all ages in every conceivable situation that life and circumstance have ever visited or can possibly visit upon them. We read of their attaining "hours of ineffable glory" amid the filth, damp and hunger of prison; we read of their marching to death on the battle-field, singing with gaiety of the groom coming to his bride; we read of their ponderous misery and despair on the very pinnacles of worldly power and fortune; and then we know happiness and significance are matters not of circumstance but of education, things that can be found in the heat and burden of the day as well as in the restful, joyous shadow of a rock in a desert land. The grounds for a man's joy are indeed hard to hit, but the pathway to the hidden retreat of what Stevenson calls the "time-devouring nightingale," whose song, wherever it is heard, always gives life adventure, edge and meaning, is the pathway of understanding of life's real values through education.
*From Talks to Teachers on Psychology and to Students on Some of Life's Ideals, by William James, by permission of the publishers, Henry Holt and Company.
+From The Lantern Bearers, by Robert Louis Stevenson, by permission of the publishers, Charles Scribner's Sons.
