Authors: Unknown
Then again a sense of proportion is very valuable and at times very consoling. We are all inclined to get unduly excited, unduly strained, unduly impressed with the importance of the little corner of the world in which we live, and of the little moment of time comprised between our birth and death. In this excitement and overestimation of our own importance there is nothing desirable. True, it may make us work harder, but it will not make us work better. A little work directed to a good end is better than a great deal of work directed to a bad end, though the apostles of the strenuous life seem to think otherwise. Those who care much for their work are always in danger of falling into fanaticism, which consists essentially in remembering one or two desirable things while forgetting all the rest, and in supposing that in the pursuit of these one or two any incidental harm of other sorts is of little account. Against this fanatical temper there is no better prophylactic than a large conception of the life of man and his place in the universe. This may seem a very big thing to invoke in such a connection; but apart from this particular use it is in itself a thing of great value.
It is one of the defects of modern higher education that it has become too much a training in the acquisition of certain kinds of skill, and too little an enlargement of the mind and heart by any impartial survey of the world. You become absorbed, let us say, in a political contest, and work hard for the victory of your own party. So far, so good. But it may happen in the course of the contest that some opportunity of victory presents itself which involves the use of methods calculated to increase hatred, violence and suspicion in the world. For example, you may find that the best road to victory is to insult some foreign nation. If your mental purview is limited to the present, or if you have imbibed the doctrine that what is called efficiency is the only thing that matters, you will adopt such dubious means. Through them you will be victorious in your immediate purpose, while the more distant consequences may be disastrous. If, on the other hand, you have as part of the habitual furniture of your mind the past ages of man, his slow and partial emergence out of barbarism, and the brevity of his total existence in comparison with astronomical epochs - if, I say, such thoughts have moulded your habitual feelings, you will realise that the momentary battle upon which you are engaged cannot be of such importance as to risk a backward step towards the darkness out of which we have been slowly emerging. Nay, more, if you suffer defeat in your immediate objective, you will be sustained by the same sense of its momentariness that made you unwilling to adopt degrading weapons. You will have, beyond your immediate activities, purposes that are distant and slowly unfolding, in which you are not an isolated individual but one of the great army of those who have led mankind towards a civilised existence. If you have attained to this outlook, a certain deep happiness will never leave you, whatever your personal fate may be. Life will become a communion with the great of all ages, and personal death no more than a negligible incident.
If I had the power to organise higher education as I should wish it to be, I should seek to substitute for the old orthodox religions - which appeal to few among the young, and those as a rule the least intelligent and the most obscurantist - something which is perhaps hardly to be called religion, since it is merely a focusing of attention upon well-ascertained facts. I should seek to make young people vividly aware of the past, vividly realising that the future of man will in all likelihood be immeasurably longer than his past, profoundly conscious of the minuteness of the planet upon which we live and of the fact that life on this planet is only a temporary incident; and at the same time with these facts which tend to emphasise the insignificance of the individual I should present quite another set of facts designed to impress upon the mind of the young the greatness of which the individual is capable, and the knowledge that throughout all the depths of stellar space nothing of equal value is known to us. Spinoza long ago wrote of human bondage and human freedom; his form and his language make his thought difficult of access to all but students of philosophy, but the essence of what I wish to convey differs little from what he has said.
A man who has once perceived, however temporarily and however briefly, what makes greatness of soul, can no longer be happy if he allows himself to be petty, self-seeking, troubled by trivial misfortunes, dreading what fate may have in store for him. The man capable of greatness of soul will open wide the windows of his mind, letting the winds blow freely upon it from every portion of the universe. He will see himself and life and the world as truly as our human limitations will permit; realising the brevity and minuteness of human life, he will realise also that in individual minds is concentrated whatever of value the known universe contains. And he will see that the man whose mind mirrors the world becomes in a sense as great as the world. In emancipation from the fears that beset the slave of circumstance he will experience a profound joy, and through all the vicissitudes of his outward life he will remain in the depths of his being a happy man.
Leaving these large speculations and returning to our more immediate subject, namely the value of impersonal interests, there is another consideration which makes them a great help towards happiness. Even in the most fortunate lives there are times when things go wrong. Few men except bachelors have never quarrelled with their wives; few parents have not endured grave anxiety owing to the illnesses of their children; few businessmen have avoided times of financial stress; few professional men have not known periods when failure stared them in the face. At such times a capacity to become interested in something outside the cause of anxiety is an immense boon. At such times, when in spite of anxiety there is nothing to be done at the moment, one man will play chess, another will read detective stories, a third will become absorbed in popular astronomy, a fourth will console himself by reading about the excavations at Ur of the Chaldees. Any one of these four is acting wisely, whereas the man who does nothing to distract his mind and allows his trouble to acquire a complete empire over him is acting unwisely and making himself less fit to cope with his troubles when the moment for action arrives. Very similar considerations apply to irreparable sorrows such as the death of some person deeply loved. No good is done to anyone by allowing oneself to become sunk in grief on such an occasion. Grief is unavoidable and must be expected, but everything that can be done should be done to minimise it. It is mere sentimentality to aim, as some do, at extracting the very uttermost drop of misery from misfortune. I do not of course deny that a man may be broken by sorrow, but I do say that everyman should do his utmost to escape this fate, and should seek any distraction, however trivial, provided it is not in itself harmful or degrading. Among those that I regard as harmful and degrading I include such things as drunkenness and drugs, of which the purpose is to destroy thought, at least for the time being. The proper course is not to destroy thought but to turn it into new channels, or at any rate into channels remote from the present misfortune. It is difficult to do this if life has hitherto been concentrated upon a very few interests and those few have now become suffused with sorrow. To bear misfortune well when it comes, it is wise to have cultivated in happier times a certain width of interests, so that the mind may find prepared for it some undisturbed place suggesting other associations and other emotions than those which are making the present difficult to bear.
A man of adequate vitality and zest will surmount all misfortunes by the emergence after each blow of an interest in life and the world which cannot be narrowed down so much as to make one loss fatal. To be defeated by one loss or even by several is not something to be admired as a proof of sensibility, but something to be deplored as a failure in vitality. All our affections are at the mercy of death, which may strike down those whom we love at any moment. It is therefore necessary that our lives should not have that narrow intensity which puts the whole meaning and purpose of our life at the mercy of accident. For all these reasons the man who pursues happiness wisely will aim at the possession of a number of subsidiary interests in addition to those central ones upon which his life is built.
The golden mean is an uninteresting doctrine, and I can remember when I was young rejecting it with scorn and indignation, since in those days it was heroic extremes that I admired. Truth, however, is not always interesting, and many things are believed because they are interesting; although, in fact, there is little other evidence in their favour. The golden mean is a case in point: it may be an uninteresting doctrine, but in a very great many matters it is a true one.
One respect in which it is necessary to preserve the golden mean is as regards the balance between effort and resignation. Both doctrines have had extreme advocates. The doctrine of resignation has been preached by saints and mystics; the doctrine of effort has been preached by efficiency experts and muscular Christians. Each of these opposing schools has had a part of the truth, but not the whole. I want in this chapter to try and strike the balance, and I shall begin with the case in favour of effort.
Happiness is not, except in very rare cases, something that drops into the mouth, like a ripe fruit, by the mere operation of fortunate circumstances. That is why I have called this book The Conquest of Happiness. For in a world so full of avoidable and unavoidable misfortunes, of illness and psychological tangles, of struggle and poverty and ill will, the man or woman who is to be happy must find ways of coping with the multitudinous causes of unhappiness by which each individual is assailed. In some rare cases no great effort may be required. A man of easy good nature, who inherits an ample fortune and enjoys good health together with simple tastes, may slip through life comfortably and wonder what all the fuss is about; a good-looking woman of an indolent disposition, if she happens to marry a well-to-do husband who demands no exertion from her, and if after marriage she does not mind growing fat, may equally enjoy a certain lazy comfort, provided she has good luck as regards her children. But such cases are exceptional. Most people are not rich; many people are not born good-natured; many people have uneasy passions which make a quiet and well-regulated life seem intolerably boring; health is a blessing which no one can be sure of preserving; marriage is not invariably a source of bliss. For all these reasons, happiness must be, for most men and women, an achievement rather than a gift of the gods, and in this achievement effort, both inward and outward, must play a great part. The inward effort may include the effort of necessary resignation; for the present, therefore, let us consider only outward effort.
In the case of any person, whether man or woman, who has to work for a living, the need of effort in this respect is too obvious to need emphasising. The Indian fakir, it is true, can make a living without effort by merely offering a bowl for the alms of the faithful, but in Western countries the authorities do not view with a favourable eye this method of obtaining an income. Moreover, the climate makes it less pleasant than in hotter and drier countries: in the winter-time, at any rate, few people are so lazy as to prefer idleness out of doors to work in heated rooms. Resignation alone, therefore, is not in the West one of the roads to fortune.
To a very large percentage of men in Western countries, more than a bare living is necessary to happiness, since they desire the feeling of being successful. In some occupations, such, for example as scientific research, this feeling can be obtained by men who do not earn a large income, but in the majority of occupations income has become the measure of success . At this point we touch upon a matter in regard to which an element of resignation is desirable in most cases, since in a competitive world conspicuous success is possible only for a minority.
Marriage is a matter in regard to which effort may or may not be necessary, according to circumstances. Where one sex is in the minority, as men are in England and women are in Australia, members of that sex require, as a rule, little effort in order to marry if they wish. For members of the sex which is in the majority, however, the opposite is the case. The amount of effort and thought expended in this direction by women where they are in the majority is obvious to anyone who will study the advertisements in women’s magazines. Men, where they are in a majority, frequently adopt more expeditious methods, such as skill with the revolver. This is natural, since a majority of men occurs most frequently on the border-line of civilisation. I do not know what men would do if a discriminating pestilence caused them to become a majority in England; they might have to revert to the manners of gallants in a bygone age.
The amount of effort involved in the successful rearing of children is so evident that probably no one would deny it. Countries which believe in resignation and what is mistakenly called a ‘spiritual’ view of life are countries with a high infant mortality. Medicine, hygiene, asepsis, suitable diet, are things not achieved without mundane preoccupations; they require energy and intelligence directed to the material environment. Those who think that matter is an illusion are apt to think the same of dirt, and by so thinking to cause their children to die.
Speaking more generally, one may say that some kind of power forms the normal and legitimate aim of every person whose natural desires are not atrophied. The kind of power that a man desires depends upon his predominant passions; one man desires power over the actions of men, another desires power over their thoughts, a third power over their emotions. One man desires to change the material environment, another desires the sense of power that comes from intellectual mastery. Every kind of public work involves desire for some kind of power, unless it is undertaken solely with a view to the wealth obtainable by corruption. The man who is actuated by purely altruistic suffering caused by the spectacle of human misery will, if his suffering is genuine, desire power to alleviate misery. The only man totally indifferent to power is the man totally indifferent to his fellow-men. Some form of desire for power is therefore to be accepted as part of the equipment of the kind of men out of whom a good community can be made. And every form of desire for power involves, so long as it is not thwarted, a correlative form of effort. To the mentality of the West this conclusion may seem a commonplace, but there are not a few in Western countries who coquette with what is called ‘the wisdom of the East’ just at the moment when the East is abandoning it. To them perhaps what we have been saying may appear questionable, and if so. ‘it has been worth saying.