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Page 62
If you say that this is absurd, and that we cannot be in love with
everyone at once, I merely point out to you that, as a matter of fact,
certain persons do exist with an enormous capacity for friendship and
for taking delight in other people's lives; and that such persons know
more of truth than if their hearts were not so big. The vice of ordinary
Jack and Jill affection is not its intensity, but its exclusions and its
jealousies. Leave those out, and you see that the ideal I am holding up
before you, however impracticable to-day, yet contains nothing
intrinsically absurd.
We have unquestionably a great cloud-bank of ancestral blindness
weighing down upon us, only transiently riven here and there by fitful
revelations of the truth. It is vain to hope for this state of things to
alter much. Our inner secrets must remain for the most part impenetrable
by others, for beings as essentially practical as we are are necessarily
short of sight. But, if we cannot gain much positive insight into one
another, cannot we at least use our sense of our own blindness to make
us more cautious in going over the dark places? Cannot we escape some of
those hideous ancestral intolerances and cruelties, and positive
reversals of the truth?
For the remainder of this hour I invite you to seek with me some
principle to make our tolerance less chaotic. And, as I began my
previous lecture by a personal reminiscence, I am going to ask your
indulgence for a similar bit of egotism now.
A few summers ago I spent a happy week at the famous Assembly Grounds on
the borders of Chautauqua Lake. The moment one treads that sacred
enclosure, one feels one's self in an atmosphere of success. Sobriety
and industry, intelligence and goodness, orderliness and ideality,
prosperity and cheerfulness, pervade the air. It is a serious and
studious picnic on a gigantic scale. Here you have a town of many
thousands of inhabitants, beautifully laid out in the forest and
drained, and equipped with means for satisfying all the necessary lower
and most of the superfluous higher wants of man. You have a first-class
college in full blast. You have magnificent music--a chorus of seven
hundred voices, with possibly the most perfect open-air auditorium in
the world. You have every sort of athletic exercise from sailing,
rowing, swimming, bicycling, to the ball-field and the more artificial
doings which the gymnasium affords. You have kindergartens and model
secondary schools. You have general religious services and special
club-houses for the several sects. You have perpetually running
soda-water fountains, and daily popular lectures by distinguished men.
You have the best of company, and yet no effort. You have no zymotic
diseases, no poverty, no drunkenness, no crime, no police. You have
culture, you have kindness, you have cheapness, you have equality, you
have the best fruits of what mankind has fought and bled and striven
for tinder the name of civilization for centuries. You have, in short, a
foretaste of what human society might be, were it all in the light, with
no suffering and no dark corners.
I went in curiosity for a day. I stayed for a week, held spell-bound by
the charm and ease of everything, by the middle-class paradise, without
a sin, without a victim, without a blot, without a tear.
And yet what was my own astonishment, on emerging into the dark and
wicked world again, to catch myself quite unexpectedly and involuntarily
saying: "Ouf! what a relief! Now for something primordial and savage,
even though it were as bad as an Armenian massacre, to set the balance
straight again. This order is too tame, this culture too second-rate,
this goodness too uninspiring. This human drama without a villain or a
pang; this community so refined that ice-cream soda-water is the utmost
offering it can make to the brute animal in man; this city simmering in
the tepid lakeside sun; this atrocious harmlessness of all things,--I
cannot abide with them. Let me take my chances again in the big outside
worldly wilderness with all its sins and sufferings. There are the
heights and depths, the precipices and the steep ideals, the gleams of
the awful and the infinite; and there is more hope and help a thousand
times than in this dead level and quintessence of every mediocrity."
Such was the sudden right-about-face performed for me by my lawless
fancy! There had been spread before me the realization--on a small,
sample scale of course--of all the ideals for which our civilization has
been striving: security, intelligence, humanity, and order; and here was
the instinctive hostile reaction, not of the natural man, but of a
so-called cultivated man upon such a Utopia. There seemed thus to be a
self-contradiction and paradox somewhere, which I, as a professor
drawing a full salary, was in duty bound to unravel and explain, if I
could.
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