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Page 68
Now, taken nakedly, abstractly, and immediately, you see that mere
ideals are the cheapest things in life. Everybody has them in some shape
or other, personal or general, sound or mistaken, low or high; and the
most worthless sentimentalists and dreamers, drunkards, shirks and
verse-makers, who never show a grain of effort, courage, or endurance,
possibly have them on the most copious scale. Education, enlarging as it
does our horizon and perspective, is a means of multiplying our ideals,
of bringing new ones into view. And your college professor, with a
starched shirt and spectacles, would, if a stock of ideals were all
alone by itself enough to render a life significant, be the most
absolutely and deeply significant of men. Tolsto� would be completely
blind in despising him for a prig, a pedant and a parody; and all our
new insight into the divinity of muscular labor would be altogether off
the track of truth.
But such consequences as this, you instinctively feel, are erroneous.
The more ideals a man has, the more contemptible, on the whole, do you
continue to deem him, if the matter ends there for him, and if none of
the laboring man's virtues are called into action on his part,--no
courage shown, no privations undergone, no dirt or scars contracted in
the attempt to get them realized. It is quite obvious that something
more than the mere possession of ideals is required to make a life
significant in any sense that claims the spectator's admiration. Inner
joy, to be sure, it may _have_, with its ideals; but that is its own
private sentimental matter. To extort from us, outsiders as we are, with
our own ideals to look after, the tribute of our grudging recognition,
it must back its ideal visions with what the laborers have, the sterner
stuff of manly virtue; it must multiply their sentimental surface by the
dimension of the active will, if we are to have _depth_, if we are to
have anything cubical and solid in the way of character.
The significance of a human life for communicable and publicly
recognizable purposes is thus the offspring of a marriage of two
different parents, either of whom alone is barren. The ideals taken by
themselves give no reality, the virtues by themselves no novelty. And
let the orientalists and pessimists say what they will, the thing of
deepest--or, at any rate, of comparatively deepest--significance in life
does seem to be its character of _progress_, or that strange union of
reality with ideal novelty which it continues from one moment to another
to present. To recognize ideal novelty is the task of what we call
intelligence. Not every one's intelligence can tell which novelties are
ideal. For many the ideal thing will always seem to cling still to the
older more familiar good. In this case character, though not
significant totally, may be still significant pathetically. So, if we
are to choose which is the more essential factor of human character, the
fighting virtue or the intellectual breadth, we must side with Tolsto�,
and choose that simple faithfulness to his light or darkness which any
common unintellectual man can show.
* * * * *
But, with all this beating and tacking on my part, I fear you take me to
be reaching a confused result. I seem to be just taking things up and
dropping them again. First I took up Chautauqua, and dropped that; then
Tolsto� and the heroism of common toil, and dropped them; finally, I
took up ideals, and seem now almost dropping those. But please observe
in what sense it is that I drop them. It is when they pretend _singly_
to redeem life from insignificance. Culture and refinement all alone are
not enough to do so. Ideal aspirations are not enough, when uncombined
with pluck and will. But neither are pluck and will, dogged endurance
and insensibility to danger enough, when taken all alone. There must be
some sort of fusion, some chemical combination among these principles,
for a life objectively and thoroughly significant to result.
Of course, this is a somewhat vague conclusion. But in a question of
significance, of worth, like this, conclusions can never be precise. The
answer of appreciation, of sentiment, is always a more or a less, a
balance struck by sympathy, insight, and good will. But it is an answer,
all the same, a real conclusion. And, in the course of getting it, it
seems to me that our eyes have been opened to many important things.
Some of you are, perhaps, more livingly aware than you were an hour ago
of the depths of worth that lie around you, hid in alien lives. And,
when you ask how much sympathy you ought to bestow, although the amount
is, truly enough, a matter of ideal on your own part, yet in this notion
of the combination of ideals with active virtues you have a rough
standard for shaping your decision. In any case, your imagination is
extended. You divine in the world about you matter for a little more
humility on your own part, and tolerance, reverence, and love for
others; and you gain a certain inner joyfulness at the increased
importance of our common life. Such joyfulness is a religious
inspiration and an element of spiritual health, and worth more than
large amounts of that sort of technical and accurate information which
we professors are supposed to be able to impart.
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