EVOLUTION OF A PERSONAL IDEAL.
A famous artist once painted a portrait on a unique plan. He secured a copy of every photograph of the subject from his babyhood. When the painting was finished, there appeared in it the pictures of seven people of different ages, skilfully grouped and variously employed, but all portraits of the same person, each representing a stage of growth. We shall not attempt the work of the artist, but will endeavor to furnish the brush and colors, leaving you to fill in the sketches, now and at future times, at your leisure.
A tale is told of a man who awoke one night thinking of his past and groaning in evident mental distress. To the solicitous inquiry of his guardian angel, he replied: “I am thinking about the people I used to be.” The angel, smiling, said: “I am thinking seriously about the people you are going to be”—thinking of
“The soul that has learned to break its chains,The heart grown tenderer through its pains,The mind made richer for its thought,The character remorse has wroughtTo far undreamed capacities;The will that sits a king at ease.Nay, marvel not, for I plainly seeAnd joy in the people you’re going to be.”
“The soul that has learned to break its chains,The heart grown tenderer through its pains,The mind made richer for its thought,The character remorse has wroughtTo far undreamed capacities;The will that sits a king at ease.Nay, marvel not, for I plainly seeAnd joy in the people you’re going to be.”
“The soul that has learned to break its chains,The heart grown tenderer through its pains,The mind made richer for its thought,The character remorse has wroughtTo far undreamed capacities;The will that sits a king at ease.Nay, marvel not, for I plainly seeAnd joy in the people you’re going to be.”
“The soul that has learned to break its chains,
The heart grown tenderer through its pains,
The mind made richer for its thought,
The character remorse has wrought
To far undreamed capacities;
The will that sits a king at ease.
Nay, marvel not, for I plainly see
And joy in the people you’re going to be.”
The gradual realization of higher and higher types is the general law of evolution in the organic world;it is also the process of the ideal spiritual development of the individual man. The potency of an infinitely varied and beautiful world was in the primeval mist. The potency of each higher type of being lies in the simpler form preceding. Ideally the potency of a soul of strength and beauty, of continuous development, is in the child and youth. The self of to-day is the material of possibility which should grow into the higher self of to-morrow.
Growth is not merely gain in knowledge and intellectual power. The science of education must include a vision of the entire human soul with its need of sympathy and direction, its vague dreams of possibility, its ideals half-realized. We must view the scale of feelings from the lowest animal instinct to the most refined ethical emotions, the order of their worth from the meanest vindictiveness to the highest altruism under God and duty, and note the struggle for the survival of the fittest of the impulses and motives under the guidance of reason and with the responsibility of freedom.
We see men, yet in the vigor of life, men of learning, of position, of opportunity, complacent in their attainments, fixed in ideas and methods adapted to a previous generation or a different environment, psychically prematurely old, their powers half-developed, their life work half-done. The men who reach the complete development of their powers constantly renew their youth, and march with modern events.
We see young graduates, men of power, who, through degenerate tendencies, lack of faith, lack of insight or lack of courage, remain stationary andsatisfied in the grade to which their diplomas duly testify. They have as much life and growth and are as ornamental as a painted canvas tree in a garden. A lazy indifferent man once said he would as soon be dead as alive. When asked why he did not kill himself, he could only explain that he would as soon be alive as dead.
In the established church is sometimes observed by its devotees a special season of solitude and silence for religious meditation; it is called a “retreat.” There is a German tale of an aged grandfather who, every Christmas season, spent a day alone in meditation upon the year and the years gone by, making a reckoning with himself, with his failures and his blessings, and casting a most conscientious account. On that day the noisy children were hushed by the servants—“The master is keeping his retreat”—and they went about in silent wonder and imagined he was making himself Christmas gifts in his quiet room upstairs. When he reappeared in the evening, after his day of solitude, he seemed by his quiet, gentle manners and thought-lit face to have received heaven-sent gifts.
I shall never forget the passage of Vergil which in my school days gave rise in me to a new sense of beauty in literature; nor shall I forget the unique and rich experience of the revelation. Every one has at times a new birth, a disclosure of hitherto unknown capacities and powers.
The soul must keep its retreats, not necessarily on church-anniversary days, but at epochs, at periods of dissatisfaction with the past, at stages of new insight—must have a reckoning with itself and readjust itself to life. When one reviews the panoramaof his own history, and finds it inartistic, a profitless daub, empty of the ideal or heroic, he is keeping a retreat. When a new estimate of values and possibilities appears, he has experienced a conversion, has taken a new step in the evolution of his ideal life. The revolt of the soul may be as necessary to its health and growth as the upheaval of a nation is essential to its development. It is a battle for new principles, for advance, for freedom.
Tolstoï relates a most striking reminiscence of his own life, substantially thus: It was in 1872 that the Tolstoï of to-day saw the light. Then a new insight revealed his former life as empty. It was on a beautiful spring morning with bright sun, singing birds, and humming insects. He had halted to rest his horse by a wayside cross. Some peasants passing stopped there to offer their devotions. He was touched to the depths by their simple faith, and when he took up his journey he knew that the Kingdom of God is within us. He says: “It was then, twenty-three years ago, that the Tolstoï of to-day sprang into existence.”
President Garfield, when at the head of Hiram College, once addressed his students, in a way that made a lasting impression, on the subject of “Margins.” Personal distinction, success, depend, not on the average bulk of knowledge, power, and skill, but on that margin that extends a little beyond the reach of one’s fellows, a margin gained by some extra devotion, by sacrifice and work, by ideals a little more advanced or more clearly seen.
Some recent and notable inductions of physiological psychology along the line of evolution reaffirmthat without pain there can be no happiness, that without struggle there can be no positive character, that at times punishment may be most salutary and that a deadhead in society degenerates as does a parasite in the animal kingdom. Since these views are in line with the teachings of instinct and reason, from old Plato down, we may believe that evolution as applied to the spiritual nature of man is, indeed, becoming a hopeful doctrine. We have had somewhat too much of Herbert Spencer’s pleasure theory, and pursuit of inclination, and the discipline of natural consequences, and lines of least resistance. The moral drama must be enacted on a field of conflict.
The principle of personal evolution is “ideals and action.” Mr. Gladstone’s wonderful character and great career are a pointed illustration of this fact. Even his fixed standards of conduct were a contribution to his growth and greatness. He always asked concerning a policy of state: Is it just? No unworthy motive was ever known to determine his public or his private acts. While working ever according to permanent standards of right, his was essentially a life of change and growth. Mr. Gladstone had a mind always seeking truth, and, moreover, had a rare capacity for receiving new ideas. In his history one can discover many distinct stages of development. He himself acknowledges three great “transmigrations of spirit” in his parliamentary career. He broke away from his early political traditions and, in consequence, more than once was obliged to seek new constituents who “marched with the movement of his mind.” He was ever “struggling toward the light,” and wasever a fighter. His political opponents said of him that his foot was always in the stirrup. His mind rested not by inactivity, but by “stretching itself out in another direction.” He threw himself into new and important movements for humanity with tremendous zeal and force.
Lord Macaulay pithily expresses a law of human progress: “The point which yesterday was invisible is our goal to-day, and will be our starting post to-morrow.” Maurice Maeterlinck says: “If at the moment you think or say something that is too beautiful to be true in you—if you have but endeavored to think or to say it to-day, on the morrow it will be true. We must try to be more beautiful than ourselves; we shall never distance our soul.”
In the problem of growth do not neglect Emerson’s principle of compensation. As men injure or help others, so they injure or help themselves. Punishment is the inseparable attendant of crime. Requital is swift, sure, and exact. Vice makes spiritual blindness. The real drama of life is within. Some one has said that punishment for misdeeds is not something which happens to a man, but something which happens in a man. Balzac describes a magic skin, endowed with power to measure the term of life of its possessor, which shrank with his every expressed wish. Personal worth grows or shrinks with the daily life and thought. Every one can will his own growth in strength and symmetry or can become dwarfed and degenerate. Wrong takes away from the sum of worth; virtue makes increase from the source of all good. Emerson says that even a man’s defects may be turned to good. Forinstance, if he has a disposition that fails to invite companionship, he gains habits of self-help, and thus, “like the wounded oyster, he mends his shell with pearl.”
If you would see the fulness of God’s revelation in men, look into the minds of those whose biographies are worth writing—men who in affairs of the world have shown clear thought and accurate judgment, and in spiritual things have had visions that may strengthen and confirm your feeble faith. Study the record of their words spoken at the fireside in the presence of intimate and congenial friends, when they showed glimpses of the real self. Learn in biography the history of great souls and see in them the ideal which is the ideal of the race, and, hence, your ideal. With the going out of this century some great lives have ended—lives that embodied high types of rugged, honest satire, political power, poetic thought, pure statesmanship, ethical standards, religious faith, scientific devotion. Their histories have been written, and enough is in them to stir the semiconscious indolent nature of any young man to cultivate a high personal ideal. When I left college my first investment was in a few additional good books. I advise students to buy a few of the best biographies recently published, and read them with a reverent mind.
When you see a man of marked power, you may be sure, always sure, that he has used means of growth which average people ignore, means without which his strength would never have appeared. He has been a student, perhaps of Plato, of Shakespeare, of the Bible, of science or of human nature.He has gone deeply into the character or writings of master minds in some field of knowledge or activity. If he has a truly great nature he is able to find in many a passage of Hebrew writings a power that welled up from the great hearts of the prophets of old—or a wisdom that gradually evolved with civilization through experiment, disaster, struggle, and contrition, and was corrected and formulated with rare understanding by the few great minds of history. Such writings are a very wellspring of knowledge and understanding for a young man of this or any age.
Have you read the earlier as well as the later writings of Rudyard Kipling? What a growth of power! The evolution of his ideal ever promises and realizes greater things. When recently it seemed that the riper fruits of his progress would be denied us, the keenest solicitude was everywhere manifest. It was a spontaneous tribute to the principle of ideal spiritual evolution in the individual. We now know Kipling’s secret. In his weakness and his sorrow he has already turned to a new and more ambitious undertaking and has gathered to himself all material that may enable him to pluck out from his subject the heart of its mystery, and reveal it to the world of thought and culture. It is with the magic of industry that he evolves the ideal of his life.
The following story is told of Kipling—that it is not authentic does not rob it of its use: Father and son were on a voyage. The father, suffering from seasickness, had retired to his cabin, when an officer appeared and cried: “Your son has climbed out on the foreyard, and if he lets go he’ll bedrowned; we cannot save him.” “Oh, is that all?” replied Mr. Kipling; “he won’t let go.”
Be men of to-day; the past is useful to make us wise in the present. The poet Tennyson had a wonderful influence in his generation. His influence is due not alone to his rich thought and poetic skill; he had the broad liberal view that could adapt itself to the changing world of science, philosophy, and religion, and he thus opened up the avenues of approach to all classes of thinkers. He was a man with an evolving ideal, a free, sane, healthy mind.
Poetry is not a thing of the past; it has not yet become familiar with its new themes. Kipling can sing the “Song of Steam” and write the romance of the “Day’s Work”—can find poetry in a locomotive, a bridge, a ship or an engine. Kipling is right when he makes McAndrew, the hard-headed engineer of an ocean liner, see in the vast motor mechanism an “orchestra sublime,” “singing like the morning stars,” and proclaiming: “Not unto us the praise, or man.” “From coupler-flange to spindle-guide I see Thy Hand, O God”—and this vision is always the ultimate ground of poetry. On a palace steamer between New York and the New England coast I once heard an uncultured workman exclaim: “When I watch this mighty engine, with its majestic, powerful movement, I feel that there is a God.” At first thought the sentiment was humorously illogical, but his instinct was right. The works of nature and the works of man alike suggest a divine origin—God working in nature and working through man.
If this is a divine world, then there is no claim of the commonplace, no form of daily labor, no need of the unfortunate, no problem of society or government that is not a theme of dignity and worthy of attention and helpful effort. The form of truth is an empty, useless abstraction, unless it is given a content, unless it adjusts wrongs, removes evils, improves material conditions, and strengthens growth among all classes of people to-day. The man who beautifies his lawn, plants trees, lays good walks or cleans the streets is made more conscious of the divine within him—is a better man. Spinoza regarded his skill in making lenses to be as essential a part of his life as his philosophical interest.
Every advance in civilization changes the perspective, and new views and truths appear. Within a few years we have seen in America almost an entire change of attitude regarding many essential political and social questions. Throughout the world, Christianity, by clearer interpretation of its spirit, is gaining new influence in practical fields. New problems have not the enchantment of distance; history and poetry have not thrown a halo about them; but they have the interest of present, practical, living issues. Every great man has attained his self-realization as a creative factor in the work of his own age. Take a hand in making current history.
Successful men have shown at the close of their student life only the hope of what they finally became. But they were men who knew how to cherish every helpful impulse, to learn from every experience, to profit by each fresh insight, to concentrate their powers upon single tasks, and at eachfulfilment look forward to still greater undertakings. Such minds wear the beauty of promise,
“that which setsThe budding rose above the rose full blown.”
“that which setsThe budding rose above the rose full blown.”
“that which setsThe budding rose above the rose full blown.”
“that which sets
The budding rose above the rose full blown.”
The realization of ideal promise is not merely intellectual power and practical attainment. A man may have these, and yet lack a rich mind. Sympathy, pure ideals, morality, religious sentiment belong to a complete nature. Without them one is not a fit leader or a choice companion. A wholly irreligious man is not conscious of his soul. As the years advance, with the progressive man there is more heart, more simplicity and truth, more moral and spiritual interest.
In the “Memoir of Lord Tennyson” by his son, a chapter on the “In Memoriam” throws brilliant side lights on the essential character of the great poet. One would almost take the truths there expressed as his creed, and the inner life there revealed as the consummation of a personal ideal. We note his “splendid faith in the growing purpose of the sum of life, and in the noble destiny of the individual man;” his belief that “it is the great purpose which consecrates life;” his feeling that “only under the inspiration of ideals, and with his ‘sword bathed in heaven,’ can a man combat the cynical indifference, the intellectual selfishness, the sloth of will, the utilitarian materialism of a transition age;” his faith that “the truth must be larger, purer, nobler than any mere human expression of it;” his affirmation that, if you “take away belief in the self-conscious personality of God, you take away the backbone of the world.” He believed in prayer. Inhis own words: “Prayer is like opening a sluice between the great ocean and our little channels when the great sea gathers itself together and flows in at full tide.”
Ideals do not belong to a mystical realm, to a remote age or to an indefinite future. They are not the exclusive possession of sage, saint, or poet. They belong to this day, here, to us. They belong to the professional man, as a man, as much as to the man of liberal culture.
To see the idyllic in what is familiar, to realize the heroic in ourselves, to make the lessons of greatness our own, to work with the spirit of our time are the means of growth. Every thought and every act, flowing from the conscious will, fashion the soul.
“I held it truth, with him who singsTo one clear harp in divers tones,That men may rise on stepping-stonesOf their dead selves to higher things.”
“I held it truth, with him who singsTo one clear harp in divers tones,That men may rise on stepping-stonesOf their dead selves to higher things.”
“I held it truth, with him who singsTo one clear harp in divers tones,That men may rise on stepping-stonesOf their dead selves to higher things.”
“I held it truth, with him who sings
To one clear harp in divers tones,
That men may rise on stepping-stones
Of their dead selves to higher things.”