Read Ebook: The Making of a Man by Lee James W James Wideman

Font size: 10 px 15 px 20 px 25 px 30 px 35 px

Background color: BlackWhiteGrayLight GrayDark GrayDim Gray

Text color: BlackWhiteGrayLight GrayDark GrayDim Gray

Apply/Save settings

Ebook has 318 lines and 59090 words, and 7 pages

Commerce, by bringing men together under the necessities of finding food, clothing, shelter, enables them to find their intellects and what they can know, their hearts and what they can love, and their wills and what they can do.

Thus we trace the genesis of social force, with the expressions which it makes of itself, in property, literature, law, art, and religion, to mutual human relations, for the establishment of which, among men, Commerce seems to have been ordained. If men could, without trading, have found the means of subsistence, as do the foxes and the lions; then no relations in the high sense of the term would have been established among them; and like the foxes and the lions, they would have remained on the earth without progress and without history.

The sun must be making tremendous drafts upon some unseen sources of power, to be able to make, throughout the solar realm, such ample expenditures of energy without bankruptcy.

The location of the vast depositories of power, upon which he draws so liberally, we are not to inquire here. We do know that the force which builds the forest, flushes the meadows with green, braids the vines into festoons, and peoples the plant-world, comes from the sun. Wherever the materials which keep the sun's fires burning come from, they must pass up to that center before they are available for service on this globe. The stamp and superscription of the sun must be upon them before they can take the form of grass, or leaf, or bird on the earth. In this sense stand human relations between the force contained in the individual, unrelated life, and the force which takes form in the objects of civilization. The crude and inarticulate force in the individuals of the tribe, or the nomads who only touch for war or passion, must be refined through moral, political, and spiritual relations before it is ready to take the form of poem, anthem, temple, or Plato.

We wish to determine the principle in accordance with which the production and distribution of food, shelter, and clothing are to be regulated. These forms of value are embodiments of social energy, generated through relations formed above nature by intelligence and volition. In nature, then, we are not to find the law that is to regulate them.

Bees build their cells, and birds their nests, and beavers their dams, not by intelligence and will, called into existence after birth through companionship, but by what is in-wrought into the very fibers of their being irrespective of companionship. Birds, bees, and beavers have been in the world thousands of years, yet the first bird, bee, or beaver ever created had as much sense as the last. A single bee has as much sense as all the bees in the world put together. Among all lower animals each individual inherits the sense of the species. Hence the law "of the struggle for existence," resulting in "the survival of the fittest," said to be a regulating principle in the plant and animal kingdoms, is not severe, regarded with reference to the individuals which inhabit them. But to regard the operations of this law as beneficent upon the plane of human life, as does Mr. Spencer, is altogether to overlook the obligations men are under to one another, because of their mutual relations. The life of each man, it must be remembered, in so far as it is above that of the unrelated savage, is contained in the life of every other man. In so far as it is comfortable, intelligent, and free, it has been brought to him, and made over to him by his fellow-man. The law which is to determine the regulation of the elements of commerce, which are but expressions of the energy arising through mutual human relations, must be as elevated as the relations which commerce begets, and which in turn make commerce possible.

We must not go down among the tigers and the hyenas, who owe nothing but bare birth to companionship, where the principle of "the survival of the fittest in the struggle for existence" does prevail, to get the law which is to regulate the production and distribution of products possible only through companionship. Each individual, be he weak or strong, has contributed something to the social body. The strength of the one may have contributed courage, the weakness of the other may have called forth pity; but both pity and courage are virtues possible only in relation. A regulating principle that kills off the feeble ones, and drives the weak ones to the wall, may do for brutes, who owe nothing to relationships; but not for men, who owe everything to them. The attempt to regulate forms of value in accordance with the law of "the survival of the fittest in the struggle for existence" does not have sufficient regard for the contribution each individual has made, by the very fact of his existence, to make these values possible. The leading political economists of the times have come to see that the law of extreme individualism, of "every man for himself and the devil take the hindmost," must be substituted by some more beneficent principle--by some law that pays more respect to the methods by which values have been created.

The province of commerce, as an institution, is to bring men together, not merely that the boundaries of commerce may be extended and its volume increased, but that men may learn the mutual obligations they are under to one another, that their sympathy for one another may be enlarged, and that respect for one another may be engendered.

It is only in an atmosphere of mutual trust, sympathy, and respect that men can grow.

The need for bread, for protection, for raiment, prompts men to the exchange of products, that each may share into the work of all. But in the process of exchanging products, relations are established, through the influence and power of which an order of man comes the mere material comforts of life cannot supply. The significance of commerce, then, is not understood, if it is considered simply with reference to its immediate ends. These ends are met when men are supplied with the material comforts of life. Ends, however, are mediated through it of a kind different in order and degree. These we consider the essential and ultimate ends of the relations which are established through the exchange of products. What, then, is the ultimate end and object of human relations? It is man. Man come to himself, conscious of himself, in possession of himself. It is human life, enriched, perfected, completed. It is man, strong, free, holy. It is man, not lost in the social texture, nor swamped in the social organism; but, finding his individuality and his peculiar, natural, simple self through them. The marvelous fabric the social loom was set to weaving is man. The highest end of social relations is a self-conscious, self-determining man, thinking the true, willing the right, loving the good. These relations constitute the organism out of which alone he can be born into symmetrical, well rounded life.

The lower animals come from natural birth into the world entire and complete. The young eaglet is correlated to the sky before he leaves the egg. But man moves on a plane lower than the brutes, if he is not caught at birth and carried by relation to his proper place. As man is the highest product of social relations, it follows that the highest product is the ultimate product.

An apple tree may be used for fire wood, or sawn into planks, but apples are the ultimate reasons for the existence of the apple tree. Toward an apple the germ started when it burst the sod and stood a little sprig above the ground. Beyond the apple, the tree goes no further. It throws its roots into the earth and its branches into the atmosphere, and perpetually acts and reacts upon its environment, but all for the purpose of turning soil, and sunshine, and rain into apples.

As we have seen, a part of the social energy arising through mutual human relations is to be converted into language, values, literature, morality, and religion, as a part of the capital invested in a sewing machine factory goes into tools. But man is greater than language, values, literature, morality, or religion; as the sewing machine is greater than the tools by which it is made. Human relations create language, values, art, morality, and religion, that they may be used to advance and perfect the main work they were ordained to perform, "the making of a man."

When the people of a nation come to regard the elements of wealth, literature, art, or even religion, as ends to be enjoyed rather than as means to make man, they have missed the purpose of creation, and wander amid the mazes of stupidity and blindness.

As far as outward splendor and wealth were concerned, Babylon had no rival among the nations of ancient times. She was a vast and rich empire. She embraced the most fertile portion of the globe. She had a capital that eclipsed all others in magnificence. Her hanging gardens were the wonder of the world; but her people stood not upon their terraces to observe the stars, or to reach a higher civilization through the realization of the nobler ends of their being. These were used as places of revelry and sensual enjoyment. Thus the only work of art that made them famous was used to make them stupid and depraved. Of her wealth she made an end. Putting no estimate upon men, through the relations of whom her wealth was created, she found at last that among all her people she had produced no man amply endowed enough to give permanent mental setting to her civilization and her faith. Her heart throbs, whatever they were, got explained in no history, interpreted in no philosophy, and lived in no life. For knowledge of her, we are dependent upon her ruins, her pottery, her broken columns. Into oblivion has fallen all that bejeweled and pampered life that reveled in her palaces and amid her far-famed hanging gardens. Among none of her luxurious inhabitants did she develop a man to commit the keeping of her secrets and the record of her progress. Over her history has settled the stillness of the desert and the gloom of eternal night.

On the other hand, how secure is the Greece, that flowered in her great men! It was in the two centuries between 500 and 300 B. C., when she emphasized men more than the things they created, that she produced the men who have been the teachers of the human race. She has been despoiled of her art treasures, her temples have fallen, her Parthenon is in ruins; but the two hundred years of her life, which she deposited in her great men, are immortal.

No tooth of time, no war's bloody hand, no devastation of the years, can take from her the glory which she lifted and locked in the genius of her generals, her statesmen, her orators, and her philosophers. Epaminondas and Pericles still fight for her, and guard with sleepless vigilance her fair name. Plato and Aristotle still interpret her problems of destiny. Sophocles and Pindar still sing her glory. Herodotus and Thucydides still keep the record of her victories. Demosthenes and AEschines still give imperishable expression to her conceptions of form and symmetry. She deposited her riches in the spirits of her great men, and they are forever secure. No thief can steal them, no rust can corrupt them. The unfolding centuries may look in upon them and enjoy them, but they cannot arrest them. The spirits of great men, like immortal ships, sail the ocean of time, bearing the treasures of the civilizations which gave them birth. They outride the fury of all the storms, and will sail on, till

The stars grow old, The sun grows cold, And the leaves of the Judgment book unfold.

As long as Israel expended her national energy in the production of men, she had Moses, greater than the Tabernacle; David, greater than his harp; and Isaiah, greater than his song. But when the forms of her worship were emphasized beyond the spirits of her people she lost the devotion which created her church and the manhood that guided it. The men who formulated the laws that made Rome the mistress of the world, grew at a period when a Roman was the center of interest in the empire. But when her laws were stressed to the obliteration of her men, she had them still, without the ability to make more laws, or to execute the ones she had. Religion in India is emphasized more than character; hence her men are lost in a wanton and luxurious surrender to a modeless, transcendental, pure being, and she is practically without a history.

The ultimate reasons, then, for the existence of social relations, brought about among human beings by exchange of products, is not the satisfaction of hunger, or the enrichment of individuals in material wealth, but the making of men. This being so, we are able to determine the law by which the production and distribution of commercial products are to be regulated. It must be a law that does not put the emphasis on the products, but upon the men who are to be elevated through their exchange. It must not be a law leaning to extreme individualism on the one side, or to extreme socialism on the other. It must have proper respect to the individual, and to the social organism to which he is indebted for whatever of power he possesses. That law has already been formulated for us. It is this: "Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself." This is the coordination of self-love and good-will. As has been well said, this saves for us the strength of private enterprise, and individual initiative, the vigor of the self-regarding motives; yet enthrones by their side as co-equal and co-regent powers, the principle of benevolence, the obligation to promote the common weal. Self-support, self-help, self-reliance, are still cardinal virtues, but philanthropy is given co-ordinate authority with them in the commercial world. This is the law most favorable to the growth of men.

Under its benign reign, men can come to themselves. Through the operation of this law, there will be no curtailment of the volume or the extent of commerce; but the emphasis will be kept in the right place, and men will not be lost in the process of securing the elements of food and shelter. Commerce will be the means of mediating to men their higher nature. Surrounded by conditions engendered by the operation of a law like this, life will reach through relation higher and higher ranges of hope and insight. The elements of poems, symphonies, philosophies, temples, and pictures will flow in the blood.

The fierce competition we see in the commercial world to-day is the attempt to re-enact, in business life, the principle of natural selection, or "the survival of the fittest in the struggle for existence." This is the law of the jungle, but not of the social realm. This is doubtless the law among trees, determining their number, variety, and structure; for one tree gains nothing from association with other trees. This law doubtless operates in the sea, among the fish, and in the sky among the birds, for fish and birds are what they are by birth and not by association. Mr. Spencer regards the operation of this law as beneficent. It kills off the unsuccessful members of society, it drives the weak ones to the wall. Those who survive in the struggle are the fittest. The Greeks, who put Socrates to death, were, according to this so-called beneficent principle, the fittest to survive. This law is regarded as beneficent as it operates among men to control their products, upon the supposition that man is an animal and a part and parcel of nature, as are the bears and the wolves. The things which elevate men and civilize them, however, do not come from nature, but are engendered through companionship and association. Hence, from the sense of obligation men are under to one another for the best and highest things of life, the law is to be deduced which is to regulate their commerce and to determine the character of their actions. This law is, "Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself." Thus business looks to character. The discipline it insures is worth more than the money it brings. The highest product of trade is man himself. If in business such methods are practiced, if such aims are followed as destroy the man, however great the returns in money, it is a thousand fold worse than a failure. The man it was designed to make, it has destroyed.

The disposition to accumulate, which is right and praiseworthy, should always be modified by right knowledge of the uses of property, and the methods by which it is amassed. Nothing is more pitiable than for a person to have more property than he has manhood. This indicates that the stress has been on the wrong side of the wealth. Such a man is under the sad necessity of taking his significance from the money he has accumulated, rather than the noble elements of life he should have secured in the process of obtaining it. With such a man, the end of business has been lost. He has consumed the end in the means. Instead of turning the elements of trade into manhood, manhood has been lost amid the maze and chaos of things. The order of progress has been violated, and the man, instead of moving on through business cares to immortal character, turns back to the earth, and seeks to substitute the tendency to move from it, by the disposition to settle permanently upon it. The desire to get rich has grown so abnormal and perverted, that it seeks to satisfy itself by the abundance of mere things. There are a great number of mowers and reapers, engines and cotton-gins, hats and shoes, pins and buttons; but a man has been lost in the making of them. This is more than all the mowers and reapers, cotton-gins and steam engines, pins and buttons ever made are worth. It is not mete that men should be sacrificed to the beauty and perfection of machinery, or to things machinery turns out. It is not necessary either. What we gain is not worth what we give. The machinery should be so manipulated as to get the things, and at the same time secure the perfection of men through the process. It is not necessary for the painter to lose himself in his art, and sacrifice his manhood to make his vision glow on the canvas. A proper regard for the methods and uses of art will result in leaving in the living spirit a picture more perfect than any painted by the brush. John Bunyan did not lose his manhood in portraying the history of a human soul in its attempts to get from earth to heaven. While conducting his pilgrim safely through the sorrow and temptations of life, to a home in a better world, he opened the pearly gates to his own soul. His work transfigured his life, and was the means of sanctifying it. All business and all work should lift up, and not hold down; it should make free, and not enslave; it should ennoble and not degrade. It is as honorable to make shoes or anchors as to paint pictures or write books. The shoemaker should learn the secret through his work of finding the sandals of manhood for his own feet. The blacksmith should learn, through the making of anchors for the great ships, to find the anchor that is to hold his own soul to the truth, amid the storms of life.

If through trade only the material result is sought, the ends it were intended to subserve are missed. Its bulk may be large, the machinery through which it is carried on manifold and complicated, but with the emphasis on the money side of it, no manhood will be reached through it. The man side of a button machine is infinitely more important than the button side. The buttons which fall on one side may conform precisely to an approved and an exquisite pattern, but if the person who stands on the other side does not, through the process of making buttons, get a man out of himself, the whole thing is a disastrous failure. Human spirits are too valuable to be used up in making buttons. More respect is to be had to the human side of the loom than to the cloth side. The most beautiful pattern of silk ever woven loses its power to please the eye when it is remembered that the soul of a woman has been drawn into its threads and colors. The sacrifice of individual life is impressive and noble, if the object for which it is made is worthy. This kind of sacrifice is not the means of losing life, but of gaining it. But no material result to be used up in the passing season of fashion is worth such costly sacrifice.

Through forces we name capillarity, cohesion, and gravitation, matter accomplishes the purposes of thought. They are but manifestations of the power of mind working through them, to build up the mineral, vegetable, and animal kingdoms. They look beyond themselves. They work for higher ends. Thus all the industries we see in nature look to lifting and refining matter, and force high enough to serve the uses of human life. So the industries established on the plane of human life are to elevate man another step in the scale of being. Through sowing and reaping, through grinding and sawing, through spinning and weaving, through buying and selling, through building and furnishing, he is to be carried on in the march of progress.

The history of the physical universe culminates in man, finds its interpreter and its interpretation in him. Never was the thought of him absent from her movements through Pliocene, Miocene, Eocene, Cretaceous, Jurassic, Triassic, Carboniferous, Devonian, Silurian, or Cambrian ages. In all her awful cosmic emotion to reach order and form, it was the anticipation of man that moved her, for he it is at last that comes of it. So, through all the course of her tumultuous history, nature was pregnant with man. The stars which sang together in the early morning of the world, caught the inspiration which gave melody to their song from the thought of him.

Commerce, if it is to be permanent and healthy and progressive, must fall into line with the purpose nature was put upon its perilous course to subserve. Her countless forms of industry established by the law of supply and demand; her cars, rushing hither and thither all round the world; her great steamships on every sea; her great furnaces, whose chimneys lift themselves against the sky, must get their meaning and the reason for their existence from the fact that they are putting in their contribution to the making of a man. Her wheels are to fly, her spindles are to whirl, her paddles are to splash, and her hammers are to ring, making music amid it all, in anticipation of his increasing worth, his growing thought, his enlarging hope. Her countless wheels of industry will be throwing out axes, wagons, plow-stocks, hand-saws, and reapers as they fly; but these will be only so many means used to discipline the precious life committed for a while to her training. What chemical affinity did in lifting the original elements to the mineral kingdom, and what the animal did to lift the plant to the animal kingdom, so the trades and industries of commerce are to do in lifting human life from its individual, unrelated state to its social and fraternal state. The elements of commerce are to be the means to help human character out of human nature. Two kinds of raw material are to be refined. The iron in the mountain is to be turned into razor blades and caligraphs; the reeds in the swamps and the woods in the forests are to be turned into the notes of organ and piano; and in the process of refining these, man is to be disciplined in the use of himself, in the possession of himself, and in the command of himself.

"Excessive devotion to the material is the evil of our epoch; hence a certain sluggishness.

"The great problem is to restore to the human mind something of the ideal. Whence shall we draw the ideal? Wherever it is to be found. The poets, the philosophers, the thinkers, are its urns.

"The ideal is in AEschylus, in Isaiah, in Juvenal, in Alighieri, in Shakspere. Throw AEschylus, throw Isaiah, throw Juvenal, throw Dante, throw Shakspere into the deep soul of the human race.

"Pour Job, Solomon, Pindar, Ezekiel, Sophocles, Euripides, Herodotus, Theocritus, Plautus, Lucretius, Virgil, Terence, Horace, Catulus, Tacitus, Saint Paul, Saint Augustine, Tertullian, Petrarch, Pascal, Milton, Descartes, Corneille, La Fontaine, Montesquieu, Diderot, Beaumarchais, Sedaine, Andr? Chenier, Kant, Schiller--pour all these souls into man."

THE PROVISION FOR THE SOCIAL NATURE OF MAN.

Yet this limited and unlimited self; transitory, perishable, and finite on the one side; everlasting, imperishable, and infinite on the other, are bound together in the same person. The fall of the one is accompanied by the descent of the other, and the rise of the one is accompanied by the ascent of the other. Their union involves perpetual conflict, and there waits on the turn of the battle, the depression of remorse, or the exultation of triumph.

On the individual side of himself, man would take up with the present, the immediate, with that which allures the sense, and, with unholy incense, regales the imagination. On the social side of himself, he would despise the immediate, and give the casting vote in favor of the unbiased, immeasurable good. In such a being as man, conflict were inevitable. With a horizon measured by the edge of the plain where he stands on the one side, and a horizon melting into the infinite star depths on the other, it were but to be expected that a contest would arise between the larger and the lesser outlook. On the one side, he would possess the field, concentrate his attention upon its grasses and its fruits, and lose himself in its products. On the other, he would go forth to see where the stars are, to consider the sources of their light, and to travel with them along their silent paths. With a view measured by the hour that shuts him round on the one side, and with a view measured by the organic pulsations of the world on the other; the question would be, whether to give himself to the immediate pleasures of the hour; or to elongate the pendulum of his timepiece till it should embrace the ages, and regulate his life by an eternal measure. With appetites on one side, clamoring for the things in sight, and with conscience on the other, calling for harmony with things high and remote; the question would be, whether to give the consent of the will to the demand of the appetites, or to the appeal of the conscience.

Knowing the side of himself of which a man takes counsel--the individual, or the social--you are prepared to fix his grade in the scale of being. The difference between Benedict Arnold and George Washington was just this: in the case of the one the individual side was dominant; in the case of the other the social side held sway. This is the difference between the miser, despised of all, and the philanthropist, honored of all. This is the difference between the debauche and the saint, between the man who lives for his God and his race, and the man who pours himself out on his lust and his passion. If the promptings of the individual side of man's nature are to be distrusted and watched, while liberal and unstinted recognition is to be given to the social side, it is well to inquire into the meaning and office of this larger fact of his life.

Let it be granted that on the individual side of himself man has no kingdom of his own, no department of his own, no privileged class of his own, and no titled order of his own. Let this side of him be left to the naturalist, to be classed with the vertebrates, the mammals, or the primates. But what conclusion are we to reach concerning the social side of himself, that has found embodiment in that vast and complicated movement we call civilization? Through this age-long historic process man has been seeking to realize the capacities of his larger nature. Like a magnificent temple, civilization has been rising through the centuries. Its walls have silently come up from the earth, like Solomon's Temple, without clink of trowel or sound of hammer. It is built of granite, cut from the Gethsemanes of history. Leonidas and his brave three hundred at the pass of Thermopylae carved some of the blocks of this great edifice, into whose walls men have gone down as the living stones. The brave Britons, at the waters of Solway, lifted to place some of the richly foliaged pillars that stand upon its floors. William the Silent, while organizing the forces and achieving the victories of the Netherlands, was at the same time turning some of its arches and resting in place some of its architraves. The Martyrs, who went to undying fame and honor through fires of Smithfield, furnish themes for the music which resounds through its corridors. It is the triumph of the social nature of man, and stands upon the soil which has been made by the crumbling dust of all generations of brave men. Its pinnacles and towers pierce the skies, and declare to the immeasurable heights, the force, the faith, the sentiment, and the love of man. It defies the elements of disintegration and change, and around the tops of its lofty pillars there cluster the buds of eternal spring. The gigantic trunks, whose arched branches support the roof of this great structure, express themselves in never withering flowers, and, where the boughs interlace at the summit of the arches, there comes the light of heaven to color and illumine. Yet within its doors we are in no forest of stone, where thoughts of men have been chiseled into semblance with the trees. Its foundations are built of convictions, its pillars of hope, its vaulting of lofty purpose, and its windows of faith. Its cement is the blood of suffering, and its decoration the loves of heroes. It is the edifice man has built in which to house the social side of his nature. It contains and will conserve all contributions ever made to human weal.

In walking the streets of Rome, one has a strange and melancholy sense of the traditions and memories which cluster about every ruin and every spot. But around the myriad facts and forces of civilization there hang associations more pathetic still. Here we walk, not amid the ruins of the past, but amid the achievements, the victories, and the glories of the past. Achievements, victories, and glories not associated with broken columns, defaced monuments and moldering ruins, but with the laws and institutions of living men. We have here, in ten thousand embodied forms, the travails of the souls of our fathers. Their spirits live in the words we use, their consciences bind in the laws we observe, their visions bless in the pictures we see, and their devotion sanctifies in the religion we love. All the blood ever shed in sacrifice, all the eloquence that ever thrilled senates and peoples in defense of the right, all the protests ever in silence felt or in public uttered against the wrong, are here held in everlasting form.

Are we to regard civilization, the manifold and complicated sum in which man's social nature has expressed itself, as nothing more than a natural product? Are we to account for this by the same physical principles in accordance with which the bee builds his cell, the monkey hangs his bridge, and the beaver erects his dam? Does this stately projection of man's social nature mean no more than some lofty Alpine Matterhorn, pushed into the heavens by the unconscious fires in the earth's bosom? Is this only like some mighty Giants' Causeway, lifted up by the same physical forces and by the same natural processes? If this is so, why is it that when we turn away from civilization as a whole, to view it in some of its national forms, we see the spiritual ups and downs of history in such striking contrast with the uniform face which nature wears? If the radiant civilization of Greece, that filled the earth with the eloquence of thought and the melody of song, with the Republic of Plato and the Ethics of Aristotle, that clothed itself in the Parthenon of Phidias and the Iliad of Homer, was as natural among the nations as the uprising of Gibraltar among the mountains, why is it that Gibraltar still stands as the solemn sentinel of the Ocean and the Sea, while the civilization of Greece is but a memory of the past? The same sky and earth, and Mar's Hill are there. Around her classic coast there still murmurs the same heaving sea. But while ships may still sail to Gibraltar, never more can they draw up to the Piraeus of worthy representatives of Plato and Aristotle. Not again do men, with noble brows, deep eyes, and never dying thought, look into the AEgean from that memorable meeting place of the world's ships.

If the history of Israel, from the time of Abraham to the coming of John the Baptist, was but a natural product, as easy to be accounted for as the mountains round about Jerusalem; why is it that the mountains still encompass the holy city; while we find no more men like Moses, David, and Isaiah to lead, to rule, and to prophesy? There are the same Judean hills and valleys. There rapidly flows the same historic Jordan. There grow the same grapes, the figs, and olives. There are the same holy mountains. There are the same dangerous rocks in the sea at Joppa. The physical conditions that made the corn and the honey and the cattle are there; and there still are found the corn, the honey, and the cattle. But no massive man like Moses ever more climbs Sinai to get law on tables of stone, or Pisgah, to see the promised land and die. No man after God's own heart, like David, any more minds sheep, watches the stars, and writes poetry there. Never more do we find there a man like Isaiah, struggling on his knees in prayer that he may rise up to give his people the oracles of God. A shallow, degenerate and fickle people dwell amid the groves and the vines where once lived the great race which gave to men their ethics and the outlines of true religion.

If the civilization of Rome, that reached such volume and force as to make her the mistress of the world, was as natural as the rising and falling of the tides, why is it that Rome is in ruins, while the tides continue to rise and fall? With no other aid than such as is afforded by natural law and physical force, we cannot solve this problem. Where monkeys grew once, monkeys grow to-day; where lions roamed once, lions roam to-day; where figs grew once, figs grow to-day. The same physical conditions, the same configuration of soil, the same degree of climate, produce uniform natural results from age to age. These may be counted on with the certainty of a coming eclipse, conditioned on varying conjunctions of the heavenly bodies. But we must pass from the level and range of soil, sky, climate, and physical conditions, to account for the fact that a country in one period of its history produces a Pericles, and, in another, a muddy-headed numskull; in one age an aristocracy of poets, artists, statesmen, philosophers, and orators; and in another, a listless swarm of stupid and secular cumberers of the ground.

The explanation of this question is to be found in the fact that man has a dual nature, a body and a spirit, by virtue of which he is individual and social. When the center of gravity is on the social side of human nature, the fortunes of man go up; when the center of gravity is on the individual side, the fortunes of man go down. On the individual side, he is the subject of physical law. On the social side, of moral law.

That man was intended to express the force of his life through the social side of himself and in accordance with moral law, instead of through the individual side of himself and in accordance with physical law, is plain, from the fact that it is only when he gives social expression to his life that he reaches any degree of commanding and permanent influence.

The unrivaled place which the Greece of Pericles holds in history is due to the fact that he lived at a time when the emphasis was altogether on the social side of her people. The individual side was completely subordinated to the life of the whole. It is doubtless true that she pressed a right to rule too far, and stressed the citizen too much, and considered the claims of the individual too little. A proper balance is to be preserved between the individual and the social man. But it is true that in merging the life of the individual into that of the state, Greece did prepare a soil compact and rich enough to grow the most ample harvest of literature, art, poetry, philosophy, and men, the world ever saw. As soon as the emphasis passed over from the social to the individual side, the process of pulverization began, and the continuities of thought and aspiration were broken up. National unity was dissolved, and the conditions of great men and great results were no longer present.

The difference between the Greece of 300 B. C. and the Greece of to-day, is the difference between giving the national life a social and an individual expression. The Greece of 300 B. C. was a compact whole, made so by each man putting in his individual life as a contribution to the life of the state. The Greece of to-day is an aggregate of self-centered units, held together like so many potatoes in a basket, by outward force and barriers, rather than by loyalty, patriotism, fidelity, and the cling of man to man. In the Greece of 300 B. C. each man, while giving his individual life to his fellows, gathered into his own being all the life they had to give. Hence in Socrates we had a reproduction of all Greece. In Homer, all her poetic passion, and expression. In the orations of Demosthenes, all the aspirations of her heart and all her love of liberty. In the Greece of to-day, we have not the same intimacy of companionship, or the same network of relationships. Each man, thinking more of himself as individual than of himself as social, finds it no longer possible to make levies on the lives of his fellows, to think his thought, conceive his temple, deliver his oration, or write his poem. So it follows, they no longer think great thoughts, conceive great temples, deliver great orations, or write great poems. Each man, in the high sense, being a separate sand, they have a social soil as barren as a desert.

The doom of Rome, as a nation, was never sealed till the stress was removed from the social to the individual side of her people. She might have lived on among the nations, as fixed as her own eternal hills, if the temptations to self-indulgence and self-gratification had been resisted. Her downfall was not due to physical causes, but to her sins. Observance of the moral laws, which made her great, would have kept her great. When she threw her larger, social self into the fires of her individual lust and passion, she burned the foundations of her dominion, and a mighty wreck of shapeless ruins was all that was left of the once proud mistress of the world.

In the calculations of Adams, in England, and of Leverrier, in France, the perturbations of the planet Uranus were in correspondence with the planet Neptune.

On the side of himself as individual, as we have seen, man is related to the earth with all it contains to satisfy the needs of the body. We wish also to determine the nature and dimensions of the sphere to which he is related as social.

We have seen that, even within national boundaries, human life comes to be fertile in great men, great deeds, and great art, when the expression of it is social, rather than individual. With such disposition of her national life force, Greece reached an unparalleled height of grandeur and influence. But all outside of Greece were esteemed as barbarians. The barbarian hordes around her state were like so many walls, which kept the waves of national life from passing out into any world-wide sea. The limits were soon reached, then the waves receded, to be thrown back again in quick succession against the encompassing walls. Was this not in violation of the law and nature of the expression which the social side of man, by its very structure, is inclined to give of itself? Is it not, by its nature, disposed to pass out in accordance with moral laws, which have no boundaries and limits? And were not the walls they permitted their hate to build of the barbarians on the outside to arrest the outward flow of their national life, the evidence of a tacit treaty with their selfishness? Did these not, after all, bear witness to a hampered and halted surrender to the nobler side of their nature? Did they not show that the Greeks were only willing to give social expression to their national life, as far as the boundary lines of Achai? Too noble to permit the emphasis to rest on the individual side of her people, as separate members of the state, she lifted narrowness and selfishness into greater place by giving them national form.

Too great of breadth to be individually selfish, she was not great enough to be nationally unselfish. The individual sides of themselves her people sacrificed on the altars of the state to her national unity, she transmuted into contempt and hatred of other nations. Selfishness only passed from the individual to the state. Retained by the state, it worked itself back into the individuals again, when the unity of the state was disintegrated. Do we not have in the limitations which Greece attempted to put on the expression which the social nature of man would give of itself, the real secret of their downfall? If, while giving even limited social expression to her national life, Greece developed a civilization so rich, how much greater might have been her contribution to human progress had not the seeds of disintegration been sown among her people through national enmity and hate. In the two hundred years which embraced the most fertile portion of her history she laid the foundation of thought. But it was only through thought that she sought to solve the problems of life and destiny.

The social life of the Jews found only limited expression for itself. It was worked out into religious lines that were unlimited and all embracing, but this was in spite of their prejudices.

Their compact social life, the vast depth and vigor of their social vitality, the tenacity with which they clung together, made it possible for them to lay the foundation of a religion and an ethics larger than they dreamed. Their scriptures, their prophets, and their saints were not possible in a soil less socially rich.

Share on: WhatsApp @Hash Facebook Tweet