Read Ebook: Our Eternity by Maeterlinck Maurice Teixeira De Mattos Alexander Translator

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In many ways both birds and beasts contribute to the welfare of humanity, and the observing thinker will still find many more ways in which he can aid us. All forms of life can be harnessed to the car of civilization, and far more effective work shall be done than is being done to-day. As teachers and as subjects of practical investigation, animals supply a great university which almost every man and woman can attend.

HOME READING

Carlyle says that a collection of books is a true university in these days. It might be added that often the smaller the collection the larger shall be the university.

Education derived from libraries is unsafe, for book-dissipation, as well as drunkenness, ends in debauchery. Toward the end of his long and wide-awake life Doctor Holmes advised a young correspondent to confine his reading to the Bible, Shakespeare, and a good dictionary. The list of men who have been lifted to higher regions of thought and feeling and action from reading any one of these three would be too long to be compressed within the covers of one book. Books are like two-edged swords--dangerous unless one knows how to use them; they either lead up or drag down, and we sink or rise to the level of the books we read. Every one reads, but how many read to advantage? Goethe, the greatest of all the very greatest Germans, said, "I have been learning how to read for the past fifty years, but have not yet succeeded."

Think of the many millions of dollars invested in library-buildings and the many millions more invested in the books they shelter! Think of the five hundred millions spent annually in public education, and the hundreds of millions that have been put into college buildings and college breeding! Still, from all this stupendous investment there will never come men and women who will make any more out of their learning than thousands of men and women of colonial days who knew the contents of no books other than the Bible and the almanac.

The quality of the literary attainment of those reared in a library may be higher--and perhaps not; but wider and deeper self-knowledge, self-respect, self-confidence, self-culture, self-control, are the supreme objects of all life-struggle and educational struggle. Where a man gets the educational tools with which to accomplish all this is not at all important. If an almanac can help one man to get the same life-result as another man gets from the polishing of the greatest universities in the world, the almanac is the peer of the university. Whether materials as insignificant as the almanac have been used to attain just such results, the history of our country and of several other countries can readily prove. Three books made up the library of Lincoln, the rail-splitter, of Edison and Carnegie, the telegraph operators; but no three men of the nation were ever more successful in reaching the goals they set for themselves.

When we begin to become acquainted with all the worthy men and women who trace the beginning of their worth to the careful reading of one book, it seems almost a loss to the world to have the libraries of the world so large. If they were all respectable occupants of their shelves, it might be condoned; but the copyright of millions of books is the only right, human or divine, for their existing at all. Many a country boy at the fireside during the long winter evenings has received inspiration from repeatedly reading one or two worthy books; these have spurred him on to fight his way valiantly through college, and from there to the heights in some worthy life-work.

It was no mere college education, but the sharpest home observation and strictest adherence to their instincts and their individuality that made forceful writers of Mark Twain, the Mississippi pilot; Bret Harte and William Dean Howells, the typesetters; James Whitcomb Riley, the itinerant sign-painter; Joel Chandler Harris and Eugene Field, the newspaper reporters; and Walt Whitman, the carpenter.

THOUGHTFULNESS

Any sphere of action which does not bring in to the worker an increase of thinking power is harmful, from university to street-sweeping. A machine is the only worker that can do its work well without thinking about it. All the successful men the world has ever known have been men who thought incessantly; they have been mainly self-educated in their extraordinary power to think; their success in all the various tasks which they set for themselves oftener resulted from their hard thought than from their hard work.

Defeat and failure have never overtaken the man whose head and hands were partners.

When we think without work or work without thought, we reach only half of what belong to us. A man should especially ween himself from this kind of halfness. We should be ashamed to find ourselves working without thought, as we should be ashamed to find ourselves idle in a world where there is always so much to be done and so little time allotted to each for accomplishing worthy work. The employees that are most valuable to their employers and are most valued by them are those always whose heads and hands are yoke-mates. When hands and head and heart are on the job, it is difficult to imagine what heights of success and service shall be attained. The farmer boy hoeing corn and digging potatoes will do better work in quantity and quality if he thinks about his work as hard as he hoes or digs.

Thoughtful men and women are always doubly valuable, no matter whether their work is what the world calls high-class or low-class. The streets are better swept by such a man, and the potatoes are better hoed; the floor is better scrubbed by such a woman, and the clothes are better washed. If our work does not afford us the chance to think while we are employed upon it, we owe it to ourselves and to humanity to toss it aside quickly. The lawyer, the physician, or any other professional man is no more a man in the sight of God and his country than the stone-mason who lays the foundations for their houses and raises the superstructures; and they are under no greater obligation to use their thinking powers than he is. The place we occupy in life is unimportant; the way we fill the place is everything; the stone-mason, Ben Jonson, built stone walls and houses by day, and at night built dramas and other poetry which have been surpassed only by his contemporary, Shakespeare.

Many of the greatest achievements known to history have been the work of men and women whose life-tasks were entirely different from the lines in which they became eminent; Shakespeare was an actor and one of the most successful business men of London, but he is known as the greatest poet the world has yet produced; George Eliot had charge for several years of her father's farm home, as well as the poultry and dairy, and won prizes for these at the country fair, but this did not prevent her from laying, during these seven years, the foundation which helped her to build herself into one of the greatest women known to history. Herschel's being a musician and Mary Somerville's having charge of her home and her children did not prevent both of them from doing marvelous work in astronomy. Audubon became a final authority on birds solely because while on his hunting-trips he thought more than the other hunters who accompanied him. One of the greatest merchants and capitalists in Boston began life selling handkerchiefs through the country. He became expert in flax products, and through this grew rich; he so studied kindred fibrous plants that his partners boasted that he had succeeded in marketing handkerchiefs made of twenty different fibrous plants. The most successful piano manufacturer now living was originally an employee of a steel mill that manufactured wire for making piano-strings. An every-day man gave careful thought to corn, and wrote an article for a magazine upon its value and upon the way it should be prepared for food; and this article was so worthy that it won for him a degree from a university.

Every waking moment of every man contains food for thought. If some live fuller lives every twenty-four hours than others live in a year, it is because they think faster and higher, wider and deeper, and because the discipline they get from this thought keeps them from wasting their time on trivial or worthless matter. A puddler in Youngstown, without education beyond the district school, began to think about the iron that was softened in the furnace before him, and asked questions of the older employees and the foreman; then he read upon the subject and became so capable in mining and iron manufacturing that when the Youngstown plant was sold to the great steel corporation he was the largest stockholder in forty-seven great companies manufacturing iron. Some men's hearts grow as hard as their gold while they are amassing riches; but his heart seems to have softened in proportion to the increase of his riches; his life is given to numberless good deeds, chief among which has been his endeavor to impress upon all workmen the necessity of letting both their heads and hearts assist their hands. Neither man nor boy, woman nor girl, need despair of doing great things and being great men and women, if they will constantly carry out this advice. He is really the best-educated man whose attention is primarily directed to his soul-growth, to his power of thinking, for feeling, and for noble action.

INSTINCTS AND INDIVIDUALITY

Solomon made a book of proverbs, but a book of proverbs never made Solomon. Sense without learning is a thousand times superior to learning without sense; and in the stately edifice of life, school and college are only the basement walls; wisdom and learning are not necessary companions. The great things that have conduced to the betterment of the world have been done by men who have been loyal to their individuality and true to their instincts--never by the merely learned. Too often do we find these little learned men "displaying themselves offensively and ridiculously in the haunts of bearded men," and making the angels weep by their strutting and their swelling.

We have no quarrel with the education that accomplishes all these, for it fosters the instincts and the individuality for which we are pleading. We have always believed that just this kind of education is the heritage of every American, and that the loss of such an education is the greatest calamity that can befall any one. All our life have we yearned that all might have this boon, and the best of our manhood years have been ceaseless labor and struggle to give "the weak and friendless sons of men" all of its advantages.

The test of any system of education is the kind of man it turns out. It is wisdom to measure the system by those it fails to educate rather than by those it does educate--by its tortoises rather than by its hares. The real educator is always vastly more concerned with the divinity than with the depravity of those intrusted to him; he believes firmly that the instincts and the individuality which God has given each of us are the priceless part of all our spiritual equipment--that anything we may acquire toward this end which fortifies these God-given treasures is cheap--even if bought by an entire life-service; that any acquirement that modifies these or destroys them is a triple curse and a dire menace to humanity, for individuality is the genius of Christianity and of America.

The system of education which makes light of the cultivation of the instincts, which seems to be the sole dependence of all conditions of men except the over-civilized, the system of education which is blinded to all that is implied in an educated individuality--these are the only systems with which we have any quarrel. Well-made, rather than well-filled heads are what is needed and should be demanded, without which it is impossible for any one of us to have the right conception of life, or to attain all that we were intended to be or to do. To guard and develop the instincts of the child, to preserve and fortify his individuality, is to give him sword and shield for the battle of life.

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