The present chapter deals with my inner development as I believe it to have been furthered by my connection with the Society for Ethical Culture. The functions intrusted to me in this connection were, first, various forms of so-called philanthropic activity. The effects of the experience gathered in them has been described in a preceding chapter; they may be summed up in the formula: littleness in the external results achieved, consciousness of moral danger to self.
Secondly, the ministerial function of offering “edification” in public addresses to Sunday assemblies, the solemnizing of marriages, and the conducting of funeral services,—while in addition a large part of my vocational life consisted in the building up of an educational institution.16
The Public Addresses. Edification, or building up, as I understood it, involved the profoundly difficult task of supplying a working philosophy of life without traveling into the field of metaphysics, teaching the practicable counterpart of a connected system of thought concerning the problems of life,—the system being so firmly knit as to make the appropriate feelings and im59pulses more or less natural to its exponent. In my case, not having fallen heir to such a system, the task of edification became doubly difficult. It meant from the beginning unceasing self-edification, with a view to edifying others.17 Setting out with a general scheme along Kantian lines, I proceeded to fill in the outline in the course of my public teachings, with the result that the content filled in eventually disrupted the scheme, and compelled a thoroughgoing reconstruction. The Holiness conception had been my starting point. I never gave it up. I was attracted to Kant because he affirmed it. I broke with him because he does not make good his affirmation.
I began with Kantianism, which is predominantly individualistic, and I found that in dealing with the problems of the family, with the labor question, and in the attempt to reach an ideal of democracy beyond the materialistic conception of it which is at present current—I was introducing into my initial sketch elements incompatible with individualism, and necessitating formulation in social terms. And since I retained and stressed the notion of personality, I had to seek a way of interpreting the term Social spiritually, as Kant had undertaken to interpret the term individual spiritually. I certainly could not fall in with Darwinism or other evolutionary interpretations of sociality, inasmuch as they 60 all leave out the concept of inviolable personality, the indefeasible factor in my ethical thinking.
These things are here alluded to in order to emphasize the influence of the public Sunday addresses delivered by me regularly for more than forty years in stimulating, I had almost said forcing, my ethical growth. To care for anyone else enough to make his problem one’s own is ever the beginning of one’s real ethical development. To care for a group of people in the sense of being challenged to suggest to them ideas and ways of behavior that shall really be of use to them in the storm and stress of life, is the most searching incentive to self-development imaginable. It is more powerful than the desire to get truth for one’s own sake. The closet philosopher may be serious enough in his search for truth, and he may succeed in constructing a symmetrical system which at the time seems complete. Will it stand wear and tear? Will it in the bitter moments of his life hold together? If not, he has failed; but then he only is the loser, it is only his ship that has gone down. But the situation is different when a company of people venture with you on the same voyage, and trust to you as in a way their pilot.
The challenge that comes from the expectant eyes of those who are in trouble, of those whose relations to their friends or the members of their family have become tangled, the challenge that comes from the larger public towards which every public speaker has a certain ethical duty—all these challenges press home the question: are the things that you believe true, so true that you may confidently expect them to be confirmed by the experi61ence of those who in some measure depend upon you? Are they genuinely of use?
There is also another kind of challenge that in a way is even more taxing and searching: the silent appeal that comes from those who are spiritually dead, from those who are sunk in sloth or sensuality, or who waste their precious days in the pursuit of trivial, frivolous ends, and from the insensitive consciences of the self-righteous and the self-complacent. In the Bible we read that the prophet Elisha once threw himself on the body of a dead child, in order with his own life to kindle there the life that seemed extinct. In some such way in public addresses, in which it is not the word but the personality behind the word that counts, the speaker is bound to throw himself body and soul, as it were, upon those who are spiritually numbed, and to enhance the life within himself in order to stir up life in them. All of which means that the task of edifying others involves continuous efforts at self-edification.
The Solemnizing of Marriages. In solemnizing marriages I had the experience that some of those at which I had officiated ended disastrously,—there had been no real marriage at all. Though such instances were not numerous in my own experience, yet the statistics of divorce prove that the number of unfortunate marriages in this and other countries is very large, and is increasing. What are the foundations of a permanent relation such as would tend to the development of personality in and through marriage? was the question urged upon me. Here is a social tie in which two individuals, and later the offspring, are combined in the closest propinquity.62 How can an ethical theory of marriage be reached, that is, a theory dependent on the idea of the joint realization of the highest end of life by the members of the family group? This ethical theory of marriage will be set forth in a subsequent part of this volume. Here I wish again to mark the retroactive effect of the function I was called upon to exercise in the Ethical Society on the development of theory. The most incisive effect of my practical experience, however, was the being compelled to encounter the effect of frustration. How reluctant is the natural man to face this fact! How he shrinks, and puts up screens between his face and the head of Medusa! In my earliest marriage addresses I remember how I used to describe the relation as one in which each of the partners receives the cup of happiness at the hands of the other. The second time I performed the ceremony, the bride was the only child of excellent friends, whose life was completely wrapped up in their one daughter. She was a charming young girl, and the bridegroom was a fine-grained person entirely devoted to her. That marriage feast I shall never forget. A little less than a year after, the young wife having died in child-birth, I was called in to speak at her bier. Where, then, was the exchange of happiness? How suddenly had the house of bliss fallen into ruins! A similar experience that touched me even more deeply was that of a friend, the first one among my associates who believed with me in the possibility of a religious society without a dogmatic creed. The course of love in his case had not run smooth. The marriage between himself and the lovely young woman he wedded63 was the happy culmination of many trials, a haven of peace after storms. Hardly more than two years elapsed when he suddenly developed a fatal form of mental disease, and lingered for ten years in a long, slow, degrading decline. I thus became acquainted with frustration in one of its most woeful shapes. I remember how the poor young wife, during those ten years, widow in all but name, sought alleviation in various directions for her intolerable grief. Work to occupy her mind was one; caring for the needs of the poor another. I remember also how futile these devices seemed. She had lived “on the heights”; she must now descend to lower levels; she had had first best, she must now put up with second or third best. Gladly indeed would she have exchanged places with some of the poor women whom she assisted, could she have kept her husband at her side as they had theirs. It was well enough for her to try to alleviate the troubles of these people, but what were their sorrows compared to hers? And to keep the mind occupied by work, what was it at best but a temporary anodyne? When the work was over, in the still, lonely hours of the night, the storm of grief would break with all the greater violence. I had not taught these my friends a really valid spiritual conception of the purpose of marriage: I had failed in that: and when they were in need of it they did not have it to support them. They had looked on marriage as a scene of felicity; they had not been taught to make allowance for the frustration.
I had not made preparation for the palpable frustrations just mentioned, nor yet for others, for the discovery that the beloved person is faulty, that the nimbus64 of divine personality does not coincide with the character. And especially did the lack of any explicit idea of personality prove fatal in those cases where the frustration is most serious, where real or apparent incompatibilities appear, or where actual degeneration occurs, and the hope of regeneration becomes remote.
Bereavement was the second shape in which the fact of frustration most often came home to me. Hundreds of times I have spoken to people in the moment of the last leave-taking. The usual consolations, aside from those that depend on mythological beliefs, are: Submit to the inevitable; clinch your teeth and face the storms of fate. Remember the debt you owe to the living. There is work that remains for you to do. See to it that you do not by excessive grieving destroy your capacity for work. Instead of indulging in sorrow for your own loss, take upon yourself the sorrows of others. In particular it is uplifting for one who has been more severely afflicted to take upon himself the sorrow of those whose burden is lighter. Be grateful for what you have possessed. Think not so much of what you have lost, as of what you were privileged for a season to call your own. Make the virtues of those who are no longer living a force for good in your own life. Paint the portrait of your friend incessantly. Retouch it. Eliminate what was of merely transient value in him. Remember him in the light of his best qualities, and live so as to be able to endure his purified glance. Or, in the case of those whose lives were stained, seek to expiate their faults in your life. Purify and perpetuate them in this way in yourself. Memory is not a mere passive receptacle, it is65 rather a creative faculty. Let it play upon the lives that are no longer sensibly present, and thus maintain the connection with them. A friend living across the sea, whom you will never see again, may yet be a living presence for you if you continue by the aid of memory to be in communication with him. In the case of the departed, likewise, their effectual influence may remain none the less real.
These various modes of consolation have each a certain value. To the one last mentioned I attach the greatest value. Bereavement is a challenge for a fresh start in spiritual development. It should not mean putting up with the second best, but reaching out toward first best. The object to be achieved by the ethical teacher on such occasions is to help the bereaved to tie anew the threads that have been sundered, or rather to substitute a more ethereal but firmer tie for the contacts mediated by the senses. But this task of the reweaving of ties, spiritually, not sensibly, depends entirely for its success upon a spiritual conception of personality. And if this be lacking, the attempt is hopeless. Frustration itself must be recognized as partial if it is to lead beyond itself. There must be found in man that which cannot be defeated if the defeat is not to be accepted as final.
A third kind of frustration was brought home to me by the problem of specialization, as it presented itself in the course of my efforts to work out an ethical theory true to the facts of life. To discharge competently my own special function, I saw that I ought to be acquainted with the best ethical thought of the past. This meant an exhaustive study of the philosophical systems of66 which the ethical thought of the philosophers is the fruit. I ought further to be familiar with the great religions, in which so much of the ethical insight of mankind is incorporated. I ought to acquaint myself with the moral history of mankind in so far as it is accessible, including that of the primitive races. I ought to gain a survey of the variations of moral opinion that have so staggered belief in the possibility of ethical truth. I ought to master at least the general principles of the physical and biological sciences, since it is impossible that the first principles of ethics should not be related to the governing principles that obtain in other departments of knowledge. I ought in addition to master in their ethical aspect the economic and political problems of the present day, as well as the psychology of individual and social life, in order to be able to apply with some degree of competence the directives of ethics to actual conduct. There are in addition other subjects, such as jurisprudence, poetry and the fine arts, that have ultimate relation to ethics, and that may not safely be neglected. Behold, then, the problem of specialism in one of its most appalling forms. For how can any one individual hope to adequately fill out such a programme? And what I have said is but my own personal illustration of a general problem that more and more besets every reflective person in our time. And it is a problem that has direct bearings upon the question of human personality. The personality is not a detached and isolated thing. It is a center that radiates out in every possible direction, and depends for the release of its energy on the influences received in turn from all directions. On the one hand, to67 have a footing at all in reality one must be a specialist, and the fields of specialism are becoming more and more restricted. To know one thing well is the indispensable condition of the sense of mastery, yes, of self-respect. And yet it seems to be becoming increasingly clear that one cannot really master a single specialty without knowing of other specialties whatsoever is related to one’s own. Narrowness, and loss of power, and consequent decay of the special function itself, seems the one alternative. Dilettantism, the other. But again I ask, who can actually fill out such a programme? The frustration of effort thus appears, in its intellectual guise, as one more manifestation of that general fact of frustration which we meet with wherever we turn.18
On the side of character the same reflections occur. Unity in the direction of distinctiveness or uniqueness is the end and aim. But instead of unity of character, conflict of inner tendencies, ever-recurrent rupture of provisional harmonies, a duality of self or multiplicity of selves, are the facts attested by one’s inner experience. And frustration here, at the core of a man’s being, is perhaps more painful and more seemingly contradictory of the very ideal and purpose of ethical development than in any of the forms previously recorded.
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The last instance of frustration that I will mention appears in connection with the cosmic relation of our race. The thought of the death of the individual may be overcome by the idea of perpetuity in the lives of successors. The death of the human race, its eventual extinction, is capable of no such assured compensation. We are ethical beings, committed to the pursuit of an ideal end, yet the cosmic conditions are such as to make the end unattainable within the limits of a finite world. This unattainableness of the end it is true is the very ground and foundation of the supersensible interpretation of ethical experience. Yet this thought itself can only be made good by a positive interpretation of personality (of the spiritual nature), which we are yet to seek. As viewed empirically, the human generations are but accidents of nature, waves on the sea of life, passing shadows. And viewing ourselves in this manner our self-respect goes to pieces. The idea of obligation vanishes. Man’s claim to infinite worth is bitterly mocked. Unless we can reach the spiritual view of life, the frustration of purpose in the large, that is, of humanity as a whole, is final.
These then, summarily stated, are the problems with which an ethical philosophy of life has to deal.
1. How to remedy the belittlement of man, the infinitesimal insignificance of him as a creature of time and space, when compared with the immensities of the world around him—its spatial and temporal immensities. What is man in the presence of these myriads of worlds, of this unending procession of time that he should attribute to himself significance, nay, worth? Is he perhaps an infinitesimal member of an Infinite?—preserving in this way the sense of his littleness, and of the vastness that bears down upon him, and yet maintaining69 himself irrefragably at his station, as indispensable to the perfection of the whole.
2. How to discover a way of retaining the connection between man and the lower forms of life that preceded him, not doing violence to the facts which the evolutionists have brought out, and yet at the same time assuring man’s spiritual distinction? Does he perhaps possess in his ethical nature a window, so to speak, through which he can catch at least a glimpse of the ultimate reality, of the infinite life which is the real life, behind the picture screen of sea and mountain, plants and animals?
3. How to overcome the various types of frustration mentioned above: frustration on its intellectual side, or the reconciliation of specialist efficiency with breadth and relatedness; frustration on the character side.
Frustration in the social relations, as in marriage, or as in the case of defective children.
Frustration through bereavement, or the privation suffered by the going out of our life of lives with which we are inseparably connected by ethical as well as affectional ties.
Frustration in the attempt to carry out projects of social betterment; on what moral ground to assert the possible moral value of life in the slums today, and at the same time to put forth and to stimulate the most assiduous efforts to abolish the slum; on what grounds to affirm that the best life is possible under the worst conditions, and yet not to cease or for an instant relax the effort to change the conditions.
The problem of how to support and console the wretched multitudes of mankind in the interval that70 must elapse before the reform of conditions can take real effect; the problem of support and consolation in fatal sickness, on the deathbed, and in the harrowing recollection of irremediable and irrevocable wrong done to others; the problem raised by the prospective extinction, or the possible old age and degeneration before extinction of mankind—all these problems should be taken together, not one, for instance the so-called social problem, accentuated, leaving the rest out of sight. From one peg they all hang, on one cardinal idea they all depend—the idea of personality as positively defined, of the holy thing as not merely inviolable without regard to its content, but inviolable because of a certain positive content. The ascription of worth to man, in this sense, is the fundamental problem of all, and to the full discussion of this we shall turn in the constructive part of the volume which is now to follow.