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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great
+Philosophers, Volume 8, by Elbert  Hubbard
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8
+
+Author: Elbert  Hubbard
+
+Release Date: November 27, 2007 [EBook #23640]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HOMES OF THE GREAT PHILOSOPHERS ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Juliet Sutherland, Annie McGuire and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+LITTLE JOURNEYS TO THE HOMES OF THE GREAT, VOLUME 8
+
+Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Philosophers
+
+by
+
+ELBERT HUBBARD
+
+Memorial Edition
+
+New York
+
+1916.
+
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+  SOCRATES
+  SENECA
+  ARISTOTLE
+  MARCUS AURELIUS
+  IMMANUEL KANT
+  SWEDENBORG
+  SPINOZA
+  AUGUSTE COMTE
+  VOLTAIRE
+  HERBERT SPENCER
+  SCHOPENHAUER
+  HENRY D. THOREAU
+
+
+
+
+SOCRATES
+
+
+     I do not think it possible for a better man to be injured by a
+     worse.... To a good man nothing is evil, neither while living nor
+     when dead, nor are his concerns neglected by the gods.
+
+                                               --_The Republic_
+
+[Illustration: SOCRATES]
+
+
+It was four hundred seventy years before Christ that Socrates was born.
+He never wrote a book, never made a formal address, held no public
+office, wrote no letters, yet his words have come down to us sharp,
+vivid and crystalline. His face, form and features are to us
+familiar--his goggle eyes, bald head, snub nose and bow-legs! The habit
+of his life--his goings and comings, his arguments and wrangles, his
+infinite leisure, his sublime patience, his perfect faith--all these
+things are plain, lifting the man out of the commonplace and setting him
+apart.
+
+The "Memorabilia" of Xenophon and the "Dialogues" of Plato give us
+Boswellian pictures of the man.
+
+Knowing the man, we know what he would do; and knowing what he did, we
+know the man.
+
+Socrates was the son of Sophroniscus, a stonecutter, and his wife
+Phænarete. In boyhood he used to carry dinner to his father, and sitting
+by, he heard the men, in their free and easy way, discuss the plans of
+Pericles. These workmen didn't know the plans--they were only privates
+in the ranks, but they exercised their prerogatives to criticize, and
+while working to assist, did right royally disparage and condemn. Like
+sailors who love their ship, and grumble at grub and grog, yet on shore
+will allow no word of disparagement to be said, so did these Athenians
+love their city, and still condemn its rulers--they exercised the
+laborer's right to damn the man who gives him work.
+
+Little did the workmen guess--little did his father guess--that this
+pug-nosed boy, making pictures in the sand with his big toe, would also
+leave his footprints on the sands of time, and a name that would rival
+that of Phidias and Pericles!
+
+Socrates was a product of the Greek renaissance. Great men come in
+groups, like comets sent from afar. Athens was seething with thought and
+feeling: Pericles was giving his annual oration--worth thousands of
+weekly sermons--and planning his dream in marble; Phidias was cutting
+away the needless portions of the white stone of Pentelicus and
+liberating wondrous forms of beauty; Sophocles was revealing the
+possibilities of the stage; Æschylus was pointing out the way as a
+playwright; and the passion for physical beauty was everywhere an
+adjunct of religion.
+
+Prenatal influences, it seems, played their part in shaping the destiny
+of Socrates. His mother followed the profession of Sairy Gamp, and made
+her home with a score of families, as she was needed. The trained nurse
+is often untrained, and is a regular encyclopedia of esoteric family
+facts. She wipes her mouth on her apron and is at home in every room of
+the domicile from parlor to pantry. Then as now she knew the trials and
+troubles of her clients, and all domestic underground happenings
+requiring adjustment she looked after as she was "disposed."
+
+Evidently Phænarete was possessed of considerable personality, for we
+hear of her being called to Mythæia on a professional errand shortly
+before the birth of Socrates; and in a month after his birth, a similar
+call came from another direction, and the bald little philosopher was
+again taken along--from which we assume, following in the footsteps of
+Conan Doyle, that Socrates was no bottle-baby. The world should be
+grateful to Phænarete that she did not honor the Sairy Gamp precedents
+and observe the Platonic maxim, "Sandal-makers usually go barefoot": she
+gave her customers an object-lesson in well-doing as well as teaching
+them by precept. None of her clients did so well as she--even though her
+professional duties were so exacting that domesticity to her was merely
+incidental.
+
+It was only another case of the amateur distancing the professional.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+From babyhood we lose sight of Socrates until we find him working at his
+father's trade as a sculptor. Certainly he had a goodly degree of skill,
+for the "Graces" which he carved were fair and beautiful and admired by
+many. This was enough: he just wanted to reveal what he could do; and
+then to show that to have no ambition was his highest ambition, he threw
+down his tools and took off his apron for good. He was then thirty-five
+years old. Art is a jealous mistress, and demands that "thou shalt have
+no other gods before me." Socrates did not concentrate on art. His mind
+went roaming the world of philosophy, and for his imagination the
+universe was hardly large enough.
+
+I said that he deliberately threw down his tools; but possibly this was
+by request, for he had acquired a habit of engaging in much wordy
+argument and letting the work slide. He went out upon the streets to
+talk, and in the guise of a learner he got in close touch with all the
+wise men of Athens by stopping them and asking questions. In physique he
+was immensely strong--hard work had developed his muscles, plain fare
+had made him oblivious of the fact that he had a stomach, and as for
+nerves, he had none to speak of.
+
+Socrates did not marry until he was about forty. His wife was scarcely
+twenty. Of his courtship we know nothing, but sure it is Socrates did
+not go and sue for the lady's hand in the conventional way, nor seek to
+gain the consent of her parents by proving his worldly prospects. His
+apparel was costly as his purse could buy, not gaudy nor expressed in
+fancy. It consisted of the one suit that he wore, for we hear of his
+repairing beyond the walls to bathe in the stream, and of his washing
+his clothing, hanging it on the bushes and waiting for it to dry before
+going back to the city. As for shoes, he had one pair, and since he
+never once wore them, going barefoot Summer and Winter, it is presumed
+that they lasted well. One can not imagine Socrates in an opera-hat--in
+fact, he wore no hat, and he was bald. I record the fact so as to
+confound those zealous ones who badger the bald as a business, who have
+recipes concealed on their persons, and who assure us that baldness has
+its rise in headgear.
+
+Socrates belonged to the leisure class. His motto was, "Know Thyself."
+He considered himself of much more importance than any statue he could
+make, and to get acquainted with himself as being much more desirable
+than to know physical phenomena. His plan of knowing himself was to ask
+everybody questions, and in their answers he would get a true reflection
+of his own mind. His intellect would reply to theirs, and if his
+questions dissolved their answers into nothingness, the supremacy of his
+own being would be apparent; and if they proved his folly he was equally
+grateful--if he was a fool, his desire was to know it. So sincere was
+Socrates in this wish to know himself that never did he show the
+slightest impatience nor resentment when the argument was turned upon
+him.
+
+He looked upon his mind as a second party, and sat off and watched it
+work. Should it become confused or angered, it would be proof of its
+insufficiency and littleness. If Socrates ever came to know himself, he
+knew this fact: as an economic unit he was an absolute failure; but as a
+gadfly, stinging men into thinking for themselves, he was a success. A
+specialist is a deformity contrived by Nature to get the work done.
+Socrates was a thought-specialist, and the laziest man who ever lived in
+a strenuous age. The desire of his life was to live without
+desire--which is essentially the thought of Nirvana. He had the power
+never to exercise his power except in knowing himself.
+
+He accepted every fact, circumstance and experience of life, and counted
+it gain. Life to him was a precious privilege, and what were regarded as
+unpleasant experiences were as much a part of life as the pleasant ones.
+He who succeeds in evading unpleasant experiences cheats himself out of
+so much life. You know yourself by watching yourself to see what you do
+when you are thwarted, crossed, contradicted, or deprived of certain
+things supposed to be desirable. If you always get the desirable things,
+how do you know what you would do if you didn't have them? You exchange
+so much life for the thing, that's all, and thus do we see Socrates
+anticipating Emerson's Essay on Compensation.
+
+Everything is bought with a price--all things are of equal value--no one
+can cheat you, for to be cheated is a not undesirable experience, and in
+the act, if you are really filled with the thought, "Know Thyself," you
+get the compensation by increase in mental growth.
+
+However, to deliberately go in search of experience, Socrates said,
+would be a mistake, because then you would so multiply impressions that
+none would be of any avail and your life would be burned out. To clutch
+life by the throat and demand that it shall stand and deliver is to
+place yourself so out of harmony with your environment that you will get
+nothing.
+
+Above all things, we must be calm, self-centered, never anxious, and be
+always ready to accept whatever the gods may send. The world will come
+to us if we only wait. It will be seen that Socrates is at once the
+oldest and most modern of thinkers. He was the first to express the New
+Thought. A thought, to Socrates, was more of a reality than a block of
+marble--a moral principle was just as persistent as a chemical agent.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The silken-robed and perfumed Sophist was sport and game for Socrates.
+For him Socrates recognized no closed season. If Socrates ever came near
+losing his temper, it was in dealing with this Edmund Russell of Athens.
+Grant Allen used to say, "The spores of everything are everywhere, and a
+certain condition breeds a certain microbe." A period of prosperity
+always warms into life this social paragon, who lives in a darkened room
+hung with maroon drapery where incense is burned and a turbaned Hindu
+carries your card to the master, who faces the sun and exploits a
+prie-dieu when the wind blows east. Athens had these men of refined
+elegance, Rome evolved them, London has had her day, New York knows
+them, and Chicago--I trust I will not be contradicted when I say that
+Chicago understands her business! And so we find these folks who
+cultivate a pellucid passivity, a phthisicky whisper, a supercilious
+smirk, and who win our smothered admiration and give us gooseflesh by
+imparting a taupe tinge of mystery to all their acts and words, thus
+proving to the assembled guests that they are the Quality and Wisdom
+will die with them.
+
+This lingo of meaningless words and high-born phrases always set
+Socrates by the ears, and when he could corner a Sophist, he would very
+shortly prick his pretty toy balloon, until at last the tribe fled him
+as a pestilence. Socrates stood for sanity. The Sophist represented
+moonshine gone to seed, and these things, proportioned ill, drive men
+transverse.
+
+Extremes equalize themselves: the pendulum swings as far this way as it
+does that. The saponaceous Sophist who renounced the world and yet lived
+wholly in a world of sense, making vacuity pass legal tender for
+spirituality, and the priest who, mystified with a mumble of words,
+evolved a Diogenes who lived in a tub, wore regally a robe of rags, and
+once went into the temple, and cracking a louse on the altar-rail, said
+solemnly, "Thus does Diogenes sacrifice to all the gods at once!" are
+but two sides of the same shield.
+
+In Socrates was a little jollity and much wisdom pickled in the scorn of
+Fortune; but the Sophists inwardly bowed down and worshiped the fickle
+dame on idolatrous knees. Socrates won immortality because he did not
+want it, and the Sophists secured oblivion because they deserved it.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+We hear of Socrates going to Aspasia, and holding long conversations
+with her "to sharpen his mind." Aspasia did not go out in society much:
+she and Pericles lived very simply. It is worth while to remember that
+the most intellectual woman of her age was democratic enough to be on
+friendly terms with the barefoot philosopher who went about regally
+wrapped in a table-spread. Socrates did not realize the flight of time
+when making calls--he went early and stayed late. Possibly prenatal
+influences caused him often to call before breakfast and remain until
+after supper.
+
+Just imagine Pericles, Aspasia and Socrates sitting at table--with
+Walter Savage Landor behind the arras making notes! Doubtless Socrates
+and Mrs. Pericles did most of the talking, while the First Citizen of
+Athens listened and smiled indulgently now and then as his mind wandered
+to construction contracts and walking delegates. Pericles, the builder
+of a city--Pericles, first among practical men since time began, and
+Socrates, who jostles history for first place among those who have done
+nothing but talk--imagine these two eating melons together, while
+Aspasia, gentle and kind, talks of spirit being more than matter and
+love being greater than the Parthenon!
+
+Socrates is usually spoken of as regarding women with slight favor, but
+I have noticed that your genus woman-hater holds the balance true by
+really being a woman-lover. If a man is enough interested in women to
+hate them, note this: he is only searching for the right woman, the
+woman who compares favorably with the ideal woman in his own mind. He
+measures every woman by this standard, just as Ruskin compared all
+modern painters with Turner and discarded them with fitting adjectives
+as they receded from what he regarded as the perfect type. If Ruskin had
+not been much interested in painters, would he have written scathing
+criticisms about them?
+
+In several instances we hear of Socrates reminding his followers that
+they are "weak as women," and he was the first to say "woman is an
+undeveloped man." But Socrates was a great admirer of human beauty,
+whether physical or spiritual, and his abrupt way of stopping beautiful
+women on the streets and bluntly telling them they were beautiful,
+doubtless often confirmed their suspicions. And thus far he was
+pleasing, but when he went on to ask questions so as to ascertain
+whether their mental estate compared with their physical, why, that was
+slightly different. It is good to hear him say, "There is no sex in
+intellect," and also, "I have long held the opinion that the female sex
+is nothing inferior to ours, save only in strength of body and possibly
+in steadiness of judgment." And Xenophon quotes him thus: "It is more
+delightful to hear the virtue of a good woman described than if the
+painter Zeuxis were to show me the portrait of the fairest woman in the
+world."
+
+Perhaps Thackeray is right when he says, "The men who appreciate woman
+most are those who have felt the sharpness of her claws." That is to
+say, things show up best on the darkest background. If so, let us give
+Xantippe due credit. She tested the temper of the sage by railing on him
+and deluging him with Socratic propositions, not waiting for the
+answers; she often broke in with a broom upon his introspective efforts
+to know himself; if this were not enough, she dashed buckets of
+scrubbing-water over him; presents that were sent him by admiring
+friends she used as targets for her mop and wit; if he invited friends
+with faith plus to dine, she upset the table, dishes and all, before
+them--not much to their loss; she occasionally elbowed her way through a
+crowd where her husband was entertaining the listeners upon the divine
+harmonies, and would tear off his robe and lead him home by the ear. But
+these things never ruffled Socrates--he might roll his eyes in comic
+protest at the audiences as he was being led away captive, but no
+resentment was shown. He had the strength of a Hercules, but he was a
+far better non-resistant than Tolstoy, because he took his medicine with
+a wink, while Fate is obliged to hold the nose of the author of "Anna
+Karenina," who never sees the comedy of an inward struggle and an
+outward compliance, any more than does the benedict, safely entrenched
+under the bed, who shouts out, "I defy thee, I defy thee!" as did
+Mephisto when Goethe thrust him into Tophet.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The popular belief is that Xantippe, the wife of Socrates, was a shrew,
+and had she lived in New England in Cotton Mather's time would have been
+a candidate for the ducking-stool. Socrates said he married her for
+discipline. A man in East Aurora, however, has recently made it plain to
+himself that Xantippe was possessed of a great and acute intellect. She
+knew herself, and she knew her liege as he never did--he was too close
+to his subject to get the perspective. She knew that under right
+conditions his name would live as one of the world's great teachers, and
+so she set herself to supply the conditions. She deliberately sacrificed
+herself and put her character in a wrong light before the world in order
+that she might benefit the world. Most women have a goodly grain of
+ambition for themselves, and if their husbands have genius, their
+business is not to prove it, but to show that they themselves are not
+wholly commonplace.
+
+Not so Xantippe--she was quite willing to be misunderstood that her
+husband might live.
+
+What the world calls a happy marriage is not wholly good--ease is bought
+with a price. Suppose Xantippe and Socrates had settled down and lived
+in a cottage with a vine growing over the portico, and two rows of
+hollyhocks leading from the front gate to the door; a pathway of
+coal-ashes lined off with broken crockery, and inside the house all
+sweet, clean and tidy; Socrates earning six drachmas a day carving
+marble, with double pay for overtime, and he handing the pay-envelope
+over to her each Saturday night, keeping out just enough for tobacco,
+and she putting a tidy sum in the Ægean Savings-Bank every month--why,
+what then?
+
+Well, that would have been an end of Socrates. Xantippe was big enough
+to know this and so she supplied the domestic cantharides and drove him
+out upon the streets--he grew to care very little for her, not much for
+the children, nothing for his home. She drove him out into the world of
+thought, instead of allowing him to settle down and be content with her
+society.
+
+I once knew a sculptor--another sculptor--an elemental bit of nature,
+original and, better still, aboriginal. He used to sleep out under the
+stars so as to wake up in the night and see the march of the Milky Way,
+and watch the Pleiades disappear over the brink of the western horizon.
+He wore a flannel shirt, thick-soled shoes, and overalls, no hat, and
+his hair was thick and coarse as a horse's mane. This man had talent,
+and he had sublime conceptions, great dreams, and splendid aspirations.
+His soul was struggling to find expression. "Leave him alone," I said.
+"He needs time to ripen. He is a Michelangelo in embryo!"
+
+Did he ripen? Not he. He married a Wellesley girl of good family. She,
+too, had ideas about art--she painted china-buttons for shirtwaists,
+embroidered chasubles and sang "The Rosary" in a raucous Quinsigamond
+voice. The big barbarian became respectable, and the last time I saw
+him he wore a Tuxedo and was passing out platitudes and raspberry-shrub
+at a lawn-party. The Wellesley girl had tamed her bear--they were very
+happy, he assured me, and she was preparing a course of lectures for him
+which he was to give at Mrs. Jack Gardner's. A Xantippe might have saved
+him.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+A captious friend once suggested to Socrates this: "If you prize the
+female nature so highly, how does it happen that you do not instruct
+Xantippe?"--a rather indelicate proposition to put to a married man. And
+Socrates, quite unruffled, replied: "My friend, if one wants to learn
+horsemanship, does he choose a tame horse or one with mettle and a hard
+mouth? I wish to converse with all sorts of people, and I believe that
+nothing can disturb me after I grow accustomed to the tongue of
+Xantippe."
+
+Again we hear of his suggesting that his wife's scolding tongue may have
+been only the buzzing of his own waspish thoughts, and if he did not
+call forth these qualities in her they would not otherwise have
+appeared. And so, beholding her impatience and unseemliness, he would
+realize the folly of an ill temper and thus learn by antithesis to curb
+his own. Old Doctor Johnson used to have a regular menagerie of
+wrangling, jangling, quibbling, dissatisfied pensioners in his
+household; and so far as we know he never learned the truth that all
+pensioners are dissatisfied. "If I can stand things at home, I can stand
+things anywhere," he once said to Boswell, as much as to say, "If I can
+stand things at home, I can stand even you." Goldsmith referred to
+Boswell as a cur; Garrick said he thought he was a bur. Socrates had a
+similar satellite by the name of Cheropho, a dark, dirty, weazened, and
+awfully serious little man of the tribe of Buttinsky, who sat
+breathlessly trying to catch the pearls that fell from the ample mouth
+of the philosopher. Aristophanes referred to Cheropho as "Socrates'
+bat," a play-off on Minerva and her bird of night, the owl. There were
+quite a number of these "bats," and they seemed to labor under the same
+hallucination that catches the lady students of the Pundit Vivakenanda
+H. Darmapala: they think that wisdom is to be imparted by word of mouth,
+and that by listening hard and making notes one can become very wise.
+Socrates said again and again, "Character is a matter of growth and all
+I hope to do is to make you think for yourselves."
+
+That chilly exclusiveness which regards a man's house as his castle, his
+home, the one sacred spot, and all outside as the cold and cruel world,
+was not the ideal of Socrates. His family was his circle of friends, and
+these were of all classes and conditions, from the First Citizen to
+beggars on the street.
+
+He made no charge for his teaching, took up no collections, and never
+inaugurated a Correspondence School. America has produced one man who
+has been called a reincarnation of Socrates; that man was Bronson
+Alcott, who peddled clocks and forgot the flight of time whenever any
+one would listen to him expound the unities. Alcott once ran his
+wheelbarrow into a neighbor's garden and was proceeding to load his
+motor-car with cabbages, beets and potatoes. Glancing up, the
+philosopher saw the owner of the garden looking at him steadfastly over
+the wall. "Don't look at me that way," called Alcott with a touch of
+un-Socratic acerbity, "don't look at me that way--I need these things
+more than you!" and went on with the annexation.
+
+The idea that all good things are for use and belong to all who need
+them was a favorite maxim of Socrates. The furniture in his house never
+exceeded the exemption clause. Once we find him saying that Xantippe
+complained because he did not buy her a stewpan, but since there was
+nothing to put in it, he thought her protests ill-founded.
+
+The climate of Athens is about like that of Southern California--one
+does not need to bank food and fuel against the coming of Winter. Life
+can be adjusted to its simplest forms. From his fortieth to his fiftieth
+year, Socrates worked every other Thursday; then he retired from active
+life, and Xantippe took in plain sewing.
+
+Socrates was surely not a good provider, but if he had provided more for
+his family, he would have provided less for the world. The wealthy Crito
+would have turned his pockets inside out for Socrates, but Socrates had
+all he wished, and explained that as it was he had to dance at home in
+order to keep down the adipose. Aristides, who was objectionable because
+he so shaped his conduct that he was called "The Just" and got himself
+ostracized, was one of his dear friends. Antisthenes, the original
+Cynic, used to walk six miles and back every day to hear Socrates talk.
+The Cynic was a rich man, but so captivated was he with the preaching
+of Socrates that he adopted the life of simplicity and dressed in rags
+and boycotted both the barber and the bath. On one occasion Socrates
+looked sharply at a rent in the cloak of his friend and said, "Ah,
+Antisthenes, through that hole in your cloak I see your vanity!"
+
+Xenophon sat at the feet of Socrates for a score of years, and then
+wrote his recollections of him as a vindication of his character. Euclid
+of Megara was nearly eighty when he came to Socrates as a pupil, trying
+to get rid of his ill-temper and habit of ironical reply. Cebes and
+Simmias left their native country and became Greek citizens for his
+sake. Charmides, the pampered son of wealthy parents, learned pedagogics
+by being shown that, in households where there were many servants, the
+children got cheated out of their rightful education because others did
+all the work, and to deprive a child of the privilege of being useful
+was to rob him of so much life. Æschines, the ambitious son of a
+sausage-maker, was advised by Socrates to borrow money of himself on
+long time without interest, by reducing his wants. So pleased was the
+recipient with this advice, that he went to publishing Socratic
+dialogues as a business and had the felicity to fail with tidy
+liabilities.
+
+But the two men who loom largest in the life of Socrates are Alcibiades
+and Plato--characters very much unlike.
+
+Alcibiades was twenty-one years old when we find him first. He was
+considered the handsomest young man in Athens. He was aristocratic,
+proud, insolent, and needlessly rich. He had a passion for gambling,
+horse-racing, dog-fighting, and indulged in the churchly habit of doing
+that which he ought not and leaving undone that which he should have
+done. He was worse than that degenerate scion of a proud ancestry, who
+a-kneiping went with his lady friends in the Cincinnati fountain, after
+the opera, on a wager. He whipped a man who admitted he did not have a
+copy of the "Iliad" in his house; publicly destroyed the record of a
+charge against one of his friends; and when his wife applied for a
+divorce, he burst into the courtroom and vacated proceedings by carrying
+the lady off by force. At banquets he would raise a disturbance, and
+while he was being forcibly ejected from one door, his servants would
+sneak in at another and steal the silverware, which he would give away
+as charity. He also indulged in the Mark Antony trick of rushing into
+houses at night and pulling good folks out of bed by the heels, and then
+running away before they were barely awake.
+
+His introduction to Socrates came in an attempt to break up a Socratic
+prayer-meeting. Socrates succeeded in getting the roysterer to listen
+long enough to turn the laugh on him and show all concerned that the
+life of a rowdy was the life of a fool. Alcibiades had expected Socrates
+to lose his temper, but it was Alcibiades who gave way, and blurted out
+that he could not hope to beat his antagonist talking, but he would like
+to wrestle with him.
+
+Legend has it that Socrates gave the insolent young man a shock by
+instantly accepting his challenge. In the bout that followed, the
+philosopher, built like a gorilla, got a half-Nelson on his man, who was
+a little the worse for wine, and threw him so hard, jumping on his
+prostrate form with his knees, that the aristocratic hoodlum was laid up
+for a moon. Ever after Alcibiades had a thorough respect for Socrates.
+They became fast friends, and whenever the old man talked in the Agora,
+Alcibiades was on hand to keep order.
+
+When war came with Sparta and her allies in the Peloponnesus they
+enlisted, Socrates going as corporal and Alcibiades as captain. They
+occupied the same tent during the entire campaign. Socrates proved a
+fearless soldier, and walked the winter ice in bare feet, often pulling
+his belt one hole tighter in lieu of breakfast, to show the complaining
+soldiers that endurance was the thing that won battles. At the battle of
+Delium, when there was a rout, Xenophon says Socrates walked off the
+field leisurely, arm in arm with the general, explaining the nature of
+harmony.
+
+Through the influence of Socrates, the lawless Alcibiades was tamed and
+became almost a model citizen, although his head was hardly large enough
+for a philosopher.
+
+"Say what you will, you'll find it all in Plato," said Emerson. If
+Socrates had done nothing else but give bent to the mind of Plato, he
+would deserve the gratitude of the centuries. Plato is the mine to
+which all thinkers turn for treasure. When they first met, Plato was
+twenty and Socrates sixty, and for ten years, to the day of Socrates'
+death, they were together almost constantly. Plato died aged eighty-one,
+and for fifty years he had lived but to record the dialogues of
+Socrates. It was curiosity that first attracted this fine youth to the
+old man--Socrates was so uncouth that he was amusing. Plato was
+interested in politics, and like most Athenian youths, was intent on
+having a good time. However, he was no rowdy, like Alcibiades: he was
+suave, gracious, and elegant in all of his acts. He had been taught by
+the Sophists and the desire of his life was to seem, rather than to be.
+By very gentle stages, Plato began to perceive that to make an
+impression on society was not worth working for--the thing to do was to
+be yourself, and yourself at your best. And we can give no better answer
+to the problem of life than Plato gives in the words of Socrates: "It is
+better to be than to seem. To live honestly and deal justly is the meat
+of the whole matter."
+
+Plato was not a disciple--he was big enough not to ape the manners and
+eccentricities of his Master--he saw beneath the rough husk and beyond
+the grotesque outside the great controlling purpose in the life of
+Socrates. He would be himself--and himself at his best--and he would
+seek to satisfy the Voice within, rather than to try to please the
+populace. Plato still wore his purple cloak, and the elegance and grace
+of his manner were not thrown aside.
+
+Wouldn't it have been worth our while to travel miles to see these
+friends: the one old, bald, short, fat, squint-eyed, barefoot; and the
+other with all the poise of aristocratic youth--tall, courtly and
+handsome, wearing his robe with easy, regal grace! And so they have
+walked and talked adown the centuries, side by side, the most perfect
+example that can be named of that fine affection which often exists
+between teacher and scholar.
+
+Plato's "Republic," especially, gives us an insight into a very great
+and lofty character. From his tower of speculation, Plato scanned the
+future, and saw that the ideal of education was to have it continue
+through life, for none but the life of growth and development ever
+satisfies. And love itself turns to ashes of roses if not used to help
+the soul in her upward flight. It was Plato who first said, "There is no
+profit where no pleasure's ta'en." He further perceived that in the life
+of education, the sexes must move hand in hand; and he also saw that,
+while religions are many and seemingly diverse, goodness and kindness
+are forever one.
+
+His faith in the immortality of the soul was firm, but whether we are to
+live in another world or not, he said there is no higher wisdom than to
+live here and now--live our highest and best--cultivate the receptive
+mind and the hospitable heart, "partaking of all good things in
+moderation."
+
+It takes these two to make the whole. There is no virtue in poverty--no
+merit in rags--the uncouth qualities in Socrates were not a
+recommendation. Yet he was himself. But Plato made good, in his own
+character, all that Socrates lacked. Some one has said that Fitzgerald's
+Omar is two-thirds Fitzgerald and one-third Omar. In his books, Plato
+modestly puts his wisest maxims into the mouth of his master, and just
+how much Plato and how much Socrates there is in the "Dialogues," we
+will never know until we get beyond the River Styx.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Socrates was deeply attached to Athens, and he finally became the best
+known figure in the city. He criticized in his own frank, fearless way
+all the doings of the times--nothing escaped him. He was a
+self-appointed investigating committee in all affairs of state, society
+and religion. Hypocrisy, pretense, affectation and ignorance trembled at
+his approach. He was feared, despised and loved. But those who loved him
+were as one in a hundred. He became a public nuisance. The charge
+against him was just plain heresy--he had spoken disrespectfully of the
+gods and through his teaching he had defiled the youth of Athens. Ample
+warning had been given to him, and opportunity to run away was provided,
+but he stuck like a leech, asking the cost of banquets and making
+suggestions about all public affairs.
+
+He was arrested, bailed by Plato and Crito, and tried before a jury of
+five hundred citizens. Socrates insisted on managing his own case. A
+rhetorician prepared an address of explanation, and the culprit was
+given to understand that if he read this speech to his judges and said
+nothing else, it would be considered as an apology and he would be
+freed--the intent of the trial being more to teach the old man a lesson
+in minding his own business than to injure him.
+
+But Socrates replied to his well-meaning friend, "Think you I have not
+spent my whole life in preparing for this one thing?" And he handed back
+the smoothly polished manuscript with a smile. Montaigne says, "Should
+a suppliant voice have been heard out of the mouth of Socrates now;
+should that lofty virtue strike sail in the very height of its glory,
+and his rich and powerful nature be committed to flowing rhetoric as a
+defense? Never!"
+
+Socrates cross-questioned his accusers in the true Socratic style and
+showed that he had never spoken disrespectfully of the gods: he had only
+spoken disrespectfully of their absurd conception of the gods. And here
+is a thought which is well to consider even yet: The so-called "infidel"
+is often a man of great gentleness of spirit, and his disbelief is not
+in God, but in some little man's definition of God--a distinction the
+little man, being without humor, can never see.
+
+When Socrates had confounded his accusers, this time not giving them the
+satisfaction of the last word, he launched out on a general criticism of
+the city, and told where its rulers were gravely at fault. Being
+cautioned to bridle his tongue, he replied, "When your generals at
+Potidæa and Amphipolis and Delium assigned my place in the battle I
+remained there, did my work, and faced the peril, and think you that
+when Deity has assigned me my duty at this pass in life I should,
+through fear of death, evade it, and shirk my post?"
+
+This man appeared at other times, to some, as an idle loafer, but now he
+arose to a sublime height. He repeated with emphasis all he had ever
+said against their foolish superstitions, and arraigned the waste and
+futility of the idle rich. The power of the man was revealed as never
+before, and those who had intended to let him go with a fine, now
+thought it best to dispose of him. The safety of the state was
+endangered by such an agitator--the question of religion is really not
+what has sent the martyrs to the stake--it is the politician, not the
+priest, who fears the heretic.
+
+By a small majority, Socrates was found guilty and sentenced to death.
+Let Plato tell of that last hour--he has done it once for all:
+
+     When he had done speaking, Crito said, "And have you any commands
+     for us, Socrates--anything to say about your children, or any other
+     matter in which we can serve you?"
+
+     "Nothing particular," he said; "only, as I have always told you, I
+     would have you to look to your own conduct; that is a service which
+     you may always be doing to me and mine as well as to yourselves."
+     ...
+
+     "We will do our best," said Crito. "But in what way would you have
+     us bury you?"
+
+     "In any way that you like; only you must get hold of me, and take
+     care that I do not walk away from you." Then he turned to us, and
+     added with a smile: "I can not make Crito believe that I am the
+     same Socrates who has been talking and conducting the argument; he
+     fancies that I am the other Socrates whom he will soon see, a dead
+     body--and he asks, 'How shall he bury me?' And though I have spoken
+     many words in the endeavor to show that when I have drunk the
+     poison I shall leave you and go to the joys of the blessed--these
+     words of mine, with which I comforted you and myself, have had, as
+     I perceive, no effect upon Crito. And therefore I want you to be
+     surety for me now, as he was surety for me at the trial: but let
+     the promise be of another sort; for he was my surety to the judges
+     that I would remain, but you must be my surety to him that I shall
+     not remain, but go away and depart; and then he will suffer less at
+     my death, and not be grieved when he sees my body being burned. I
+     would not have him sorrow at my hard lot, or say at the
+     burial,'Thus we lay out Socrates,' or, 'Thus we follow him to the
+     grave or bury him'; for false words are not only evil in
+     themselves, but they infect the soul with evil. Be of good cheer
+     then, my dear Crito, and say that you are burying my body only, and
+     do with that as is usual, and as you think best."
+
+     When he had spoken these words, he arose and went into the
+     bath-chamber with Crito, who bid us wait; and we waited, talking
+     and thinking of the subject of discourse, and also of the greatness
+     of our sorrow; he was like a father of whom we were being bereaved,
+     and we were about to pass the rest of our lives as orphans. When he
+     had taken his bath, his children were brought to him--and the women
+     of his family also came, and he talked to them and gave them a few
+     directions in the presence of Crito; and he then dismissed them and
+     returned to us.
+
+     Now the hour of sunset was near. When he came out, he sat down with
+     us again after his bath, but not much was said. Soon the jailer,
+     who was the servant, entered and stood by him, saying: "To you,
+     Socrates, whom I know to be the noblest and gentlest and best of
+     all who ever came to this place, I will not impute the angry
+     feelings of other men, who rage and swear at me when, in obedience
+     to the authorities, I bid them drink the poison--indeed I am sure
+     that you will not be angry with me; for others, as you are aware,
+     and not I, are the guilty cause. And so fare you well, and try to
+     bear lightly what must needs be; you know my errand." Then bursting
+     into tears, he turned away, and went out.
+
+     Socrates looked at him and said, "I return your good wishes, and
+     will do as you bid." Then turning to us, he said: "How charming the
+     man is! Since I have been in prison, he has always been coming to
+     see me, and at times, he would talk to me, and was as good as could
+     be to me, and now see how generously he sorrows for me. But we must
+     do as he says, Crito; let the cup be brought."
+
+     "Not yet," said Crito; "the sun is still upon the hill-tops, and
+     many a one has taken the draft late, and after the announcement has
+     been made to him, he has eaten and drunk and indulged in sensual
+     delights; do not hasten then--there is still time."
+
+     Socrates said: "Yes, Crito, and they of whom you speak are right in
+     doing thus, but I do not think that I should gain anything by
+     drinking the poison a little later; I should be sparing and saving
+     a life which is already gone: I could only laugh at myself for
+     this. Please then to do as I say, and not to refuse me."
+
+     Crito, when he heard this, made a sign to the servant; and the
+     servant went in, and remained for some time, and then returned with
+     the jailer carrying the cup of poison. Socrates said, "You, my good
+     friend, who are experienced in these matters, shall give me
+     directions how I am to proceed." The man answered, "You have only
+     to walk about until your legs are heavy, and then to lie down, and
+     the poison will act." At the same time, he handed the cup to
+     Socrates, who, in the easiest and gentlest manner, without the
+     least fear or change of color or feature, looking at the man with
+     his eyes, Echecrates, as his manner was, took the cup and said:
+     "What do you say about making the libation out of this cup to any
+     god? May I, or not?" The man answered, "We only prepare, Socrates,
+     just so much as we deem enough." "I understand," he said. "Yet I
+     may and must pray to the gods to prosper my journey from this to
+     that other world--may this, then, which is my prayer, be granted to
+     me!" Then holding the cup to his lips, quite readily and
+     cheerfully, he drank off the poison. And hitherto most of us had
+     been able to control our sorrow; but now we saw him drinking, and
+     saw, too, that he had finished the draft, we could no longer
+     forbear, and in spite of myself, my own tears were flowing fast; so
+     that I covered my face and wept over myself, for certainly I was
+     not weeping over him, but at the thought of my own calamity in
+     having lost such a companion. Nor was I the first, for Crito, when
+     he found himself unable to restrain his tears, had got up and moved
+     away, and I followed; and at that moment, Apollodorus, who had been
+     weeping all the time, broke out into a loud cry, which made cowards
+     of us all. Socrates alone retained his calmness. "What is this
+     strange outcry?" he said, "I sent away the women mainly in order
+     that they might not offend in this way, for I have heard that a man
+     should die in peace. Be quiet, then, and have patience." When we
+     heard that, we were ashamed, and refrained our tears; and he
+     walked about until, as he said, his legs began to fail, and then he
+     lay on his back, according to directions, and the man who gave him
+     the poison, now and then looked at his feet and legs; and after a
+     while, he pressed his foot hard and asked him if he could feel; and
+     he said, "No"; and then his leg, and so upwards and upwards, and
+     showed us that he was cold and stiff. And he felt them himself, and
+     said, "When the poison reaches the heart, that will be the end." He
+     was beginning to grow cold, when he uncovered his face, for he had
+     covered himself up, and said (they were his last words), "Crito, I
+     owe a cock to Asclepius; will you remember to pay the debt?"
+
+     "The debt shall be paid," said Crito. "Is there anything else?"
+     There was no answer to this question; but in a minute or two, a
+     movement was heard, and the attendants uncovered him; his eyes were
+     set, and Crito closed his eyes and mouth.
+
+     Such was the end, Echecrates, of our friend, whom I may truly call
+     the wisest, the justest, and best of all the men whom I have ever
+     known.
+
+
+
+
+SENECA
+
+
+     If we wish to be just judges of all things, let us first persuade
+     ourselves of this: that there is not one of us without fault; no
+     man is found who can acquit himself; and he who calls himself
+     innocent does so with reference to a witness, and not to his
+     conscience.
+
+                                                --_Letters of Seneca_
+
+[Illustration: SENECA]
+
+
+True Americans and patriotic, who live in York State, often refer you to
+the life of Red Jacket as proof that "Seneca" is an Iroquois Indian
+word. The Indians, however, whom we call the Senecas never called
+themselves thus until they took to strong water and became civilized.
+Before that they were the Tsonnundawaonas. The Dutch traders, intent on
+pelts and pelf, called them the Sinnekaas, meaning the valiant or the
+beautiful. Then came that fateful day when the Reverend Peleg Spooner,
+the discoverer of the Erie Canal, journeyed to Niagara Falls, and having
+influence with the authorities at Washington, gave to towns along the
+way these names: Troy, Rome, Ithaca, Syracuse, Ilion, Manlius, Homer,
+Corfu, Palmyra, Utica, Delhi, Memphis and Marathon. He really exhausted
+Grote's "History of Greece" and Gibbon's "Rome," revealing a most
+depressing lack of humor. This classic flavor of the map of New York is
+as surprising to English tourists as was the discovery to Hendrik Hudson
+when, on sailing up the North River, he found on nearing Albany that the
+river bore the same name as himself.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In the eighteenth chapter of the Acts of the Apostles we read of Paul
+being brought before Gallio, Proconsul of Achaia. And the accusers,
+clutching the bald and bow-legged bachelor by the collar, bawl out to
+the Judge, "This fellow persuadeth men to worship God contrary to law!"
+
+And the little man is about to make reply, when Gallio says, with a
+touch of impatience: "If indeed it were a matter of wrong or of wicked
+villainy, O ye Jews, reason would that I should bear with you: but if
+they are questions about words and names and your own law, look to it
+yourselves; I am not minded to be a judge of these matters!" And the
+account concludes, "And he drove them from the judgment-seat."
+
+That is to say, he gave Saint Paul a "nolle pros." Had Gallio wished to
+be severe, he might have put the quietus on Christianity for all time,
+for Saint Paul had all there was of it stowed in his valiant head and
+heart.
+
+Gallio was the elder brother of Seneca; his right name was Annæus
+Seneca, but he changed it to Junius Gallio, in honor of a patron who had
+especially befriended him in youth.
+
+Gallio seems to have been a man of good, sturdy commonsense--he could
+distinguish between right living and a mumble of words, man-made rules,
+laws such as heresy, blasphemy, Sabbath-breaking and marrying one's
+deceased wife's sister. The Moqui Indians believe that if any one is
+allowed to have a photograph taken of himself he will dry up in a month
+and blow away. Moreover, lists of names are not wanting with memoranda
+of times and places. In America there are yet people who hotly argue as
+to what mode of baptism is correct; who talk earnestly about the "saved"
+and the "lost"; and who will tell you of the "heathen" and those who are
+"without the pale." They seem to think that the promise, "Seek and ye
+shall find, knock and it shall be opened unto you," applies only to the
+Caucasian race.
+
+In the earlier translations of Seneca there were printed various letters
+that were supposed to have passed between Saint Paul and Seneca. Later
+editors have dropped them out for lack of authenticity. But the fact
+that Saint Paul met Seneca's brother face to face, as well as the fact
+that the brother was willing to discuss right living, but had no time to
+waste on the Gemara and theological quibbles, is undisputed.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It was the proud boast of Augustus that he found Rome a place of brick
+and left it a city of marble. Commercial prosperity buys the leisure
+upon which letters flourish. We flout the businessman, but without him
+there would be no poets. Poets write for the people who have time to
+read. And out of the surplus that is left after securing food, we buy
+books. Augustus built his marble city, and he also made Vergil, Horace,
+Ovid and Livy possible.
+
+Augustus reigned forty-four years, and it was in the twenty-seventh year
+of his reign that there was born in Bethlehem of Judæa a Babe who was to
+revolutionize the calendar. The Dean of Ely subtly puts forth the
+suggestive thought that if it had not been for Augustus we might never
+have heard of Jesus. It was Augustus who made Jerusalem a Roman
+Province; and it was the economic and political policy of Augustus that
+evolved the Scribes and Pharisees; and ill-gotten gains made the
+hypocrites and publicans possible; then comes Pontius Pilate with his
+receding chin.
+
+Jesus was seventeen years old when Augustus died--Augustus never heard
+of him, and the Roman's unprophetic mind sent no searchlight into the
+future, neither did his eyes behold the Star in the East.
+
+We are all making and shaping history, and how much, none of us knows,
+any more than did Augustus.
+
+Julius Cæsar had no son to take his place, so he named his nephew,
+Augustus, his heir. Augustus was succeeded by Tiberius, his adopted
+child. Caligula, successor of Tiberius, was the son of the great Roman
+General, Germanicus. Caligula revealed his good sense by drinking life
+to its lees in a reign of four years, dying without heirs--Nature
+refusing to transmit either infamy or genius. Claudius, an uncle of
+Caligula, accepted the vacant place, as it seemed to him there was no
+one else could fill it so well. Claudius had the felicity to be married
+four times, and left several sons, but Fate had it that he should be
+followed by Nero, his stepson, who called himself "Cæsar," yet in whose
+veins there leaped not a single Cæsarean corpuscle.
+
+The guardian and tutor of Nero was Lucius Seneca, the greatest, best and
+wisest man of his time, a fact I here state in order to show the vanity
+of pedagogics. Harking back once more to Augustus, let it be known that
+but for him Seneca would probably have never left his mark upon this
+bank and shoal of time. Seneca was a Spaniard, born in Cordova, a Roman
+Province, that was made so by Augustus, under whose kindly and placating
+influence all citizens of Hispania became Roman citizens--just as, when
+California was admitted to the Union, every man in the State was
+declared a naturalized citizen of the United States, the act being
+performed for political purposes, based on the precedents of Augustus,
+and never done before nor since in America.
+
+Seneca was four years old when his father's family moved from Cordova
+to Rome; this was three years before the birth of Christ. Years pass,
+but the human heart is forever the same. The elder Seneca, Marcus
+Seneca, had ambitions--he was a great man in Cordova: he could memorize
+a list of two thousand words. These words had no relationship one to
+another, and Marcus Seneca could not put words together so as to make
+good sense, but his name was "Loisette": he had a scheme of mnemonics
+that he imparted for a consideration. He was also a teacher of
+elocution, and had compiled a yearbook of the sayings of Horace, which
+secured him a knighthood. Augustus paid his colonists pretty
+compliments, very much as England gives out brevets to Strathcona and
+other worthy Canadians, who raise troops of horse to fight England's
+battles in South Africa when duty calls.
+
+Marcus Seneca made haste to move to Rome when Augustus let down the
+bars. Rome was the center of the art-world, the home of letters, and all
+that made for beauty and excellence. There were three boys and a girl in
+the Seneca family.
+
+The elder boy, Annæus, was to become Gallio, the Roman governor, and
+have his name mentioned in the most widely circulated book the world has
+ever known; the second boy was Lucius, the subject of this sketch; the
+younger boy, Mela, was to become the father of Lucan, the poet.
+
+The sister of Seneca became the wife of the Roman Governor of Egypt. It
+was at a time when the scheming rapacity of women was so much in
+evidence that the Senate debated whether it should not forbid its
+representatives abroad to be accompanied by their wives. France has seen
+such times--England and America have glanced that way. Women, like men,
+often do not know that the big prizes gravitate where they belong;
+instead, they set traps for them, lie in wait and consider prevarication
+and duplicity better than truth. When women use their beauty, their wit
+and their pink persons in politics, trouble lies low around the corner.
+But this sister of Seneca was never seen in public unless it was at her
+husband's side; she asked no favors, and presents sent to her personally
+by provincials were politely returned. The province praised her, and
+perhaps what was better, didn't know her, and begged the Emperor to send
+them more of such excellent and virtuous women--from which we infer that
+virtue consists in minding one's own business.
+
+In making up a list of great mothers, do not leave out Helvia, mother of
+three sons and a daughter who made their mark upon the times. It is no
+small thing to be a great mother!
+
+Women of intellect were not much appreciated then, but Seneca dedicated
+his "Consolations," his best book, to his mother. The very mintage of
+his mind was for her, and again and again he tells of her insight, her
+gentle wit, and her appreciation of all that was beautiful and best in
+the world of thought. In a letter addressed to her when he was past
+forty, he says, "You never stained your face with walnut-juice nor
+rouge; you never wore gowns cut conspicuously low; your ornaments were a
+loveliness of mind and person that time could not tarnish."
+
+But the father had the knighthood, and he called his family to witness
+it at odd times and sundry.
+
+In Rome, Marcus Seneca made head as he never did in Cordova. There he
+was only Marcus Micawber: but here his memory feats won him the
+distinction that genius deserves. There is a grave question whether a
+verbal memory does not go with a very mediocre intellect, but Marcus
+said this argument was put out by a man with no memory worth mentioning.
+
+Rome was at her ripest flower--the petals were soon to loosen and
+flutter to the ground, but nobody thought so--they never do. Everywhere
+the Roman legions were victorious, and commerce sailed the seas in
+prosperous ships. Power manifests itself in conspicuous waste, and the
+habit grows until conspicuous waste imagines itself power. Conditions in
+Rome had evolved our old friend, the Sophist, the man who lived but to
+turn an epigram, to soulfully contemplate a lily, to sigh mysteriously,
+and cultivate the far-away look. These men were elocutionists who
+gesticulated in curves, and let the thought follow the attitude. They
+were not content to be themselves, but chased the airy, fairy fabric of
+a fancy and called it life.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The pretense and folly of Roman society made the Sophists possible--like
+all sects they ministered to a certain cast of mind. Over against the
+Sophists there were the Stoics, the purest, noblest and sanest of all
+ancient cults, corresponding very closely to our Quakers, before Worth
+and Wanamaker threw them a hawse and took them in tow. It is a tide of
+feeling produces a sect, not a belief: primitive Christianity was a
+revulsion from Phariseeism, and a William Penn and a wan Ann Lee form
+the antithesis of an o'ervaulting, fantastic and soulless ritual.
+
+The father of Seneca hung upon the favor of the Sophists: he taught them
+mnemonics, rhetoric and elocution, and the fact that he was a courtly
+Spaniard was in his favor--we dote on a foreign accent and relish the
+thing that comes from afar.
+
+Marcus Seneca was getting rich. He never perceived the absurdity of a
+life of make-believe; but his son, Lucius Seneca, heir to his mother's
+discerning mind, when nineteen years old forswore the Sophists, and
+sided with the unpopular Stoics, much to the chagrin of the father.
+
+Seneca--let us call him so after this--wore the simple white robe of the
+Stoics, without ornament or jewelry. He drank no wine, and ate no meat.
+Vegetarianism comes in waves, and it is interesting to see that in an
+essay on the subject, Seneca plagiarizes every argument put forth by
+Colonel Ernest Crosby, even to mentioning a butcher as an "executioner,"
+his goods as "dead corpses," and the customers as "cannibals."
+
+This kind of talk did not help the family peace, and the father spoke of
+disowning the son, if he did not cease affronting the Best Society.
+
+Soon after, the Emperor Tiberius issued an edict banishing all "strange
+sects who fasted on feast-days, and otherwise displeased the gods." This
+was a suggestion for the benefit of the Crosbyites. It is with a feeling
+of downright disappointment that we find Seneca shortly appearing in an
+embroidered robe, and making a speech wherein the moderate use of wine
+is recommended, also the flesh of animals for those who think they need
+it.
+
+This, doubtless, is the same speech we, too, would have made had we been
+there; but we want our hero to be strong, and defy even an Emperor, if
+he comes between the man and his right to eat what he wishes and wear
+what he listeth, and we blame him for not doing the things we never do.
+But Seneca was getting on in the world--he had become a lawyer, and his
+Sophist training was proving its worth. Henry Ward Beecher, in reply to
+a young man who asked him if he advised the study of elocution, said,
+"Elocution is all right, but you will have to forget it all before you
+become an orator." Seneca was shedding his elocution, and losing himself
+in his work. A successful lawsuit had brought him before the public as a
+strong advocate. He was able to think on his feet. His voice was low,
+musical and effective, and the word, "dulcis," was applied to him as it
+was to his brother, Gallio. Possibly there was something in ol' Marcus
+Micawber's pedagogic schemes, after all!
+
+In moderating his Stoic philosophy, Seneca gives us the key to his
+character: the man wanted to be gentle and kind; he wished to affront
+neither his father nor society; so he compromised--he would please and
+placate. Ease and luxury appealed to him, and yet his cool intellect
+stood off, and reviewing the proceeding pronounced it base. He succumbed
+to the strongest attraction, and attempted the feat of riding two horses
+at once.
+
+From his twentieth year, Seneca dallied with the epigram, found solace
+in a sentence, and got a sweet, subtle joy by taking a thought captive.
+Lucullus tells us of the fine intoxication of oratory, but neither opium
+nor oratory imparts a finer thrill than successfully to drive a flock of
+clauses, and round up an idea, roping it in careless grace, with what my
+lord Hamlet calls words, words, words.
+
+The early Christian Fathers spoke of him as "our Seneca." His writings
+abound in the purest philosophy--often seemingly paraphrasing Saint
+Paul--and every argument for directness of speech, simplicity, manliness
+and moderation is put forth. His writings became the rage in Rome: at
+feasts he read his essays on the Ideal Life, just as the disciples of
+Tolstoy often travel by the gorge road, and give banquets in honor of
+the man who no longer attends one; or princely paid preachers glorify
+the Man who said to His apostles, "Take neither scrip nor purse."
+
+Seneca was a combination of Delsarte and Emerson. He was as popular as
+Henry Irving, and as wise as Thomas Brackett Reed. His writings were in
+demand; when he spoke in public, crowds hung upon his words, and the
+families of the great and powerful sent him their sons, hoping he would
+impart the secret of success. The world takes a man at the estimate he
+puts upon himself. Seneca knew enough to hold himself high. Honors came
+his way, and the wealth he acquired is tokened in those five hundred
+tables, inlaid with ivory, to which at times he invited his friends to
+feast. As a lawyer, he took his pick of cases, and rarely appeared,
+except on appeal, before the Emperor. The poise of his manner, the
+surety of his argument, the gentle grace of his diction, caused him to
+be likened to Julius Cæsar.
+
+And this led straight to exile, and finally--death. To mediocrity,
+genius is unforgivable.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+There are various statements to the effect that Claudius was a mental
+defective, a sort of town fool, patronized by the nobles for their sport
+and jest. We are also told that he was made Emperor by the Pretorian
+Guards, in a spirit of rollicking bravado. Men too much abused must have
+some merit, or why should the pack bay so loudly? Possibly it is true
+that, in the youth of Claudius, his mother used to declare, when she
+wanted a strong comparison, "He is as big a fool as my son, Claudius."
+But then the mother of Wellington used exactly the same expression; and
+Byron's mother had a way of referring to the son who was to rescue her
+from oblivion, and send her name down the corridors of time, as "that
+lame brat."
+
+Claudius was a brother of the great Germanicus, and was therefore an
+uncle of Caligula. Caligula was the worst ruler that Rome ever had; and
+he was a brother of Agrippina, mother of Nero. This precious pair had a
+most noble and generous father, and their gentle mother was a fit mate
+for the great Germanicus--these things are here inserted for the
+edification of folks who take stock in that pleasant fallacy, the Law of
+Heredity, and who gleefully chase the genealogical anise-seed trail.
+
+Caligula happily passed out without an heir, and Claudius, next of kin,
+put himself in the way of the Pretorian Guard, and was declared Emperor.
+
+He was then fifty years old, a grass-widower--twice over--and on the
+lookout for a wife. He was neither wise nor great, nor was he very bad;
+he was kind--after dinner--and generous when rightly approached. Canon
+Farrar likened Claudius to King James the First, who gave us our English
+Bible. His comparison is worth quoting, not alone for the truth it
+contains, but because it is an involuntary paraphrase of the faultless
+literary style of the Roman rhetors. Says Canon Farrar: "Both were
+learned, and both were eminently unwise. Both were authors, and both
+were pedants. Both delegated their highest powers to worthless
+favorites, and both enriched these favorites with such foolish
+liberality that they remained poor themselves. Both of them, though of
+naturally good dispositions, were misled by selfishness into acts of
+cruelty; and both of them, though laborious in the discharge of duty,
+succeeded only in rendering royalty ridiculous. King James kept Sir
+Walter Raleigh, the brightest intellect of his time, in prison; and
+Claudius sent Seneca, the greatest man in his kingdom, into exile."
+
+New-made kings sweep clean. The impulses of Claudius were right and
+just, a truthful statement I here make in pleasant compliment to a
+brother author. The man was absent-minded, had much faith in others, and
+moved in the line of least resistance. Like most students and authors,
+he was decidedly littery. He secured a divorce from one wife because she
+cleaned up his room in his absence so that he could never find
+anything; and the other wife got a divorce from him because he refused
+to go out evenings and scintillate in society--but this was before he
+was made Emperor.
+
+God knows, people had their troubles then as now. To take this man who
+loved his slippers and easy-chair, and who was happy with a roll of
+papyrus, and plunge him into a seething pot of politics, not to mention
+matrimony, was refined cruelty.
+
+The matchmakers were busy, and soon Claudius was married to Messalina,
+the handsomest summer-girl in Rome.
+
+For a short time he bore up bravely, and was filled with the wish to
+benefit and bless. One of his first acts was to recall Julia and
+Agrippina from exile, they having been sent away in a fit of jealous
+anger by their brother, the infamous Caligula.
+
+Julia was beautiful and intellectual, and she had a high regard for
+Seneca.
+
+Agrippina was beautiful and infamous, and pretended that she loved
+Claudius.
+
+Both men were undone. Seneca's friendship for Julia, as far as we know,
+was of a kind that did honor to both, but they made a too conspicuous
+pair of intellects. The fear and jealousy of Claudius was aroused by his
+young and beautiful wife, who showed him that Seneca, the courtly, was
+plotting for the throne, and in this ambition Julia was a party. A
+charge of undue intimacy with Julia, the beloved niece and ward of the
+Emperor, was brought against Seneca, and he was exiled to Corsica.
+Imagine Edmund Burke sent to Saint Helena, or John Hay to the Dry
+Tortugas, and you get the idea.
+
+The sensitive nature of Seneca did not bear up under exile as we would
+have wished. Unlike Victor Hugo at Guernsey, he was alone, and
+surrounded by savages. Yet even Victor Hugo lifted up his voice in
+bitter complaint. Seneca failed to anticipate that, in spite of the
+barrenness of Corsica, it would some day produce a man who would jostle
+his Roman Cæsar for first place on history's page.
+
+At Corsica, Seneca produced some of his loftiest and best literature.
+Exile and imprisonment are such favorable conditions for letters, having
+done so much for authorship, that the wonder is the expedient has fallen
+into practical disuse. Banishment gave Seneca an opportunity to put into
+execution some of the ideas he had so long expressed concerning the
+simple life, and certain it is that the experience was not without its
+benefits, and at times the grim humor of it all came to him.
+
+Read the history of Greek ostracism, and one can almost imagine that it
+was devised by the man's friends--a sort of heroic treatment prescribed
+by a great spiritual physician. Personality repels as well as attracts:
+the people grow tired of hearing Aristides called the Just--he is
+exiled. For a few days there is a glad relief; then his friends begin to
+chant his praises--he is missed. People tell of all the noble, generous
+things he would do if he were only here.
+
+If he were only here!
+
+Petitions are circulated for his return.
+
+The law's delay ensues, and this but increases desire. Hate for the man
+has turned to pity, and pity turns to love, as starch turns to gluten.
+
+The man comes back, and is greeted with boughs and bays, with love and
+laurel. His homecoming is that of a conquering hero. If the Supreme
+Court were to issue an injunction requiring all husbands to separate
+themselves by at least a hundred miles from their wives, for several
+months in every year, it would cut down divorces ninety-five per cent,
+add greatly to domestic peace, render race-suicide impossible, and
+generally liberate millions of love vibrations that would otherwise lie
+dormant.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+As an example of female depravity, Valeria Messalina was sister in crime
+to Jezebel, Bernice, Drusilla, Salome and Herodias.
+
+Damned by a dower of beauty, with men at her feet whenever she so
+ordered, her ambition knew no limit. This type of dictatorial womanhood
+starts out by making conquests of individual men, but the conquests of
+pretty women are rarely genuine. Women hold no monopoly on duplicity,
+and there is a deep vein of hypocrisy in men that prompts their playing
+a part, and letting the woman use them. When the time is ripe, they toss
+her away as they do any other plaything, as Omar suggests the potter
+tosses the luckless pots to hell.
+
+When Julia and Agrippina were recalled, the act was done without
+consulting Messalina; and we can imagine her rage when these two women,
+as beautiful as herself, came back without her permission. Messalina had
+never found favor in the eyes of Seneca--he treated her with patronizing
+patience, as though she were a spoilt child.
+
+Now that Julia was back, Messalina hatched the plot that struck them
+both. Messalina insisted that the wealth of Seneca should be
+confiscated. Claudius at this rebelled.
+
+History is replete with instances of great men ruled by their barbers
+and coachmen. Claudius left the affairs of state to Narcissus, his
+private secretary; Polybius, his literary helper; and Pallas, his
+accountant. These men were all of lowly birth, and had all risen in the
+ranks from menial positions, and one of them at least had been sold as a
+slave, and afterward purchased his freedom. Then there was Felix, the
+ex-slave, another protege of Claudius, who trembled when Paul of Tarsus
+told him a little wholesome truth. These men were all immensely rich,
+and once, when Claudius complained of poverty, a bystander said, "You
+should go into partnership with a couple of your freedmen, and then your
+finances would be all right." The fact that Narcissus, Pallas and
+Polybius constituted the real government is nothing against them, any
+more than it is to the discredit of certain Irish refugees that they
+manage the municipal machinery of New York City--it merely proves the
+impotence of the men who have allowed the power to slip from their
+grasp, and ride as passengers when they should be at the throttle.
+
+Messalina managed her husband by alternate cajolings and threats. He was
+proud of her saucy beauty, and it was pleasing to an old man's vanity to
+think that other people thought she loved him. She bore him two sons--by
+name, Brittanicus and Germanicus. A local wit of the day said, "It was
+kind of Messalina to present her husband with these boys, otherwise he
+would never have had any claim on them."
+
+But the lines were tightening around Messalina, and she herself was
+drawing the cords. She had put favorites in high places, banished
+enemies, and ordered the execution of certain people she did not like.
+Narcissus and Pallas gave her her own way, because they knew Claudius
+must find her out for himself. They let her believe that she was the
+real power behind the throne. Her ambitions grew--she herself would be
+ruler--she gave it out that Claudius was insane. Finally she decided
+that the time was right for a "coup de grace." Claudius was absent from
+Rome, and Messalina wedded at high noon with young Silius, her lover.
+She was led to believe that the army would back her up, and proclaim her
+son, Brittanicus, Emperor, in which case, she herself and Silius would
+be the actual rulers. The wedding festivities were at their height, when
+the cry went up that Claudius had returned, and was approaching to
+demand vengeance. Narcissus, the wily, took up the shout, and
+panic-stricken, Messalina fled for safety in one way and Silius in
+another.
+
+Narcissus followed the woman, adding to her drunken fright by telling
+her that Claudius was close behind, and suggested that she kill herself
+before the wronged man should appear. A dagger was handed her, and she
+stabbed herself ineffectually in hysteric haste. The kind secretary
+then, with one plunge of his sword, completed the work so well begun.
+
+A truthful account of Messalina's death was told to Claudius while he
+was at dinner. He finished the meal without saying a word, gave a
+present to the messenger, and went about his business, asking no
+questions, and never again mentioned the matter.
+
+The fact is worthy of note that the name of Messalina is never once
+mentioned by Seneca. He pitied her vileness and villainy so much he
+could not hate her. He saw, with prophetic vision, what her end would
+be; and when her passing occurred, he was too great and lofty in spirit
+to manifest satisfaction.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Scarcely had the funeral of Messalina occurred, when there was a pretty
+scramble among the eligible to see who should solace the stricken
+widower. Among other matrimonial candidates was Agrippina, a beautiful
+widow, twenty-nine in June, rich in her own right, and with only a small
+encumbrance in the way of a ten-year-old boy, Nero by name.
+
+Agrippina was a niece of Claudius, and such marriages were considered
+unnatural; but Agrippina had subtly shown that, the deceased Emperor
+being her brother, she already had a sort of claim on the throne, and
+her marriage with Claudius would strengthen the State. Then she
+marshaled her charms past Claudius, in a phalanx and back, and so they
+were married. There was much pomp and ceremony at the wedding, and the
+high priest pronounced the magic words--I trust I use the right
+expression.
+
+Very soon after her marriage, Agrippina recalled Seneca from exile. It
+was the infamous Messalina who had disgraced him and sent him away, and
+for Agrippina, the sister of Julia, to bring him back, was regarded as a
+certificate of innocence, and a great diplomatic move for Agrippina.
+
+When Seneca returned, the whole city went out to meet him. It is not at
+all likely that Seneca had a suspicion of the true character of
+Agrippina, any more than Claudius--which sort of tends to show the
+futility of philosophy.
+
+How could Seneca read her true character when it had not really been
+formed? No one knows what he will do until he gets a good chance. It is
+unkind condition that keeps most of us where we belong.
+
+And even while the honeymoon--or should we say the harvest-moon?--was at
+full, Seneca was made the legal guardian and tutor of Nero, the son of
+the Empress, and became a member of the royal household. This was done
+in gratitude, and to make amends, if possible, for the wrong of
+banishment inflicted upon the man by scandalously linking his name with
+that of the sister of the woman who was now First Lady of the Land.
+
+Seneca was then forty-nine years of age. He had fifteen years of life
+yet before him, and was to gain much valuable experience, and get an
+insight into a side of existence he had not yet known.
+
+Agrippina was born in Cologne, which was called, in her honor, Colonia
+Agrippina, and now has been shortened to its present form. Whenever you
+buy cologne, remember where the word came from.
+
+Agrippina, from her very girlhood, had a thirst for adventure, and her
+aim was high. When fourteen, she married Domitius, a Roman noble, thirty
+years her senior. He was as worthless a rogue as ever wore out his
+physical capacity for sin in middle life, and filled his dying days with
+crimes that were only mental. He knew himself so well that when Nero was
+born he declared that the issue of such a marriage could only breed a
+being who would ruin the State--a monster with his father's vices and
+his mother's insatiable ambition.
+
+Agrippina was woman enough to hate this man with an utter detestation;
+but he was rich, and so she endured him for ten years, and then assisted
+Nature in making him food for worms.
+
+The intensity of Agrippina's nature might have been used for happy ends
+if the stream of her life had not been so early dammed and polluted. She
+loved her child with a clutching, feverish affection, and declared that
+he would some day rule Rome. This was not really such a far-away dream,
+when we remember that her brother was then Emperor and childless. Her
+thought was more for her child than for herself, and her expectation was
+that he would succeed Caligula. The persistency with which she told this
+ambition for her boy is both beautiful and pathetic. Every mother sees
+her own life projected in her child, and within certain bounds this is
+right and well.
+
+Glimpses of kindness and right intent are shown when Agrippina recalled
+Seneca, and when she became the mother of the motherless children of
+Claudius. She publicly adopted these children, and for a time gave them
+every attention and advantage that was bestowed upon her own son. Gibbon
+says for one woman to mother another woman's children is a diplomatic
+card often played, but Gibbon sometimes quibbles.
+
+Gradually the fierce desire of Agrippina's heart began to manifest
+itself. She plotted and arranged that Nero should marry Octavia, the
+daughter of Claudius. Octavia was seven years older than Nero, but the
+sooner the marriage could be brought about, the better--it would give
+her a double hold on the throne. To this end suitors for the hand of
+Octavia were disgraced by false charges, and sent off into exile, and
+the same fate came to at least three young women who stood in the way.
+
+But the one real obstacle was Claudius himself--he was sixty, and might
+be so absurd as to live to be eighty. Locusta, a famous professional
+chemist, was employed, and the deed was done by Agrippina serving the
+deadly dish herself. The servants carried Claudius off to bed, thinking
+he was merely drunk, but he was to wake no more.
+
+Burrus, the blunt and honest old soldier, Captain of the Pretorian
+Guard, sided with Agrippina; Brittanicus, the son of Claudius, was kept
+out of the way, and Nero was proclaimed Emperor.
+
+Here Seneca seems to have shown his good influence, and sent home a
+desire in the heart of Agrippina to serve her people with moderation and
+justice. She had attained her ends: her son, a youth of fifteen, was
+Emperor, and his guardian, the great and gentle Seneca, the man of her
+own choosing, was the actual ruler. She was the sister of one Emperor,
+wife of another, and now mother of a third--surely this was glory enough
+to satisfy one woman's ambition!
+
+Then there came to Rome the famed Quinquennium Neronis, when, for five
+years, peace and plenty smiled. It is a trite saying that men who can
+not manage their own finances can look after those of a nation, but
+Seneca was a businessman who proved his ability to manage his own
+private affairs and also succeeded in managing the exchequer of a
+kingdom. During his reign, gladiatorial contests were relieved of their
+savage brutality, work was given to many, education became popular, and
+people said, "The Age of Augustus has returned."
+
+But the greatest men are not the greatest teachers. Seneca's policy with
+his pupil, Nero, was one of concession.
+
+A close study of the youth of Nero reveals the same traits that outcrop
+in one-half the students at Harvard--traits ill-becoming to grown-up
+men, but not at all alarming in youth. Nero was self-willed and
+occasionally had tantrums--but a tantrum is only a little whirl-wind of
+misdirected energy. A tantrum is life plus--it is better far than
+stagnation, and usually works up into useful life, and sometimes into
+great art. We have some verses written by Nero in his seventeenth year
+that show a good Class B sophomoric touch. He danced, played in the
+theatricals, raced horses, fought dogs, twanged the harp, and exploited
+various other musical instruments. He wasn't nearly so bad as
+Alcibiades, but his mother lavished on him her maudlin love, and allowed
+the fallacy to grow in his mind concerning the divinity that doth hedge
+a king. In fact, when he asked his mother about his real father, she hid
+the truth that his father was a rogue--perhaps to shield herself, for it
+is only a very great person who can tell the truth--and led him to
+believe his paternal parent was a god, and his birth miraculous. Now,
+let such an idea get into the head of the average freshman and what will
+be the result? A woman can tell a full-grown man that he is the greatest
+thing that ever happened, and it does no special harm, for the man knows
+better than to go out on the street and proclaim it; but you tell a boy
+of eighteen such pleasing fallacies, and then have fawning courtiers
+back them up, and at the same time give the youth free access to the
+strong box, and it surely would be a miracle if he is not doubly damned,
+and quickly, too. Agrippina would not allow the blunt old Burrus to
+discipline her boy, and Seneca's plan was one of concession--he loved
+peace. He hated to thwart the boy, because he knew that it would arouse
+the ire of the mother, whose love had run away with her commonsense.
+Love is beautiful--soft, yielding, gentle love--but the common law of
+England upholds wife-beating as being justifiable and desirable on
+certain occasions.
+
+The real trouble was, the dam was out for Agrippina and Nero--there was
+no restraint for either. There was no one to teach them that the liberty
+of one man ends where the right of another begins. No more frightful
+condition for any man or woman can ever occur than this: to take away
+all responsibility.
+
+When Socrates put the chesty Alcibiades three points down, and jumped on
+his stomach with his knees, the youth had a month in bed, and after he
+got around again he possessed a most wholesome regard for his teacher.
+If Burrus and Seneca had applied Brockway methods to Agrippina and her
+saucy son, as they easily might, it would have made Rome howl with
+delight, and saved the State as well as the individuals.
+
+Julius Cæsar, like Lincoln, let everybody do as they wished, up to a
+certain point. But all realized that somewhere behind that dulcet voice
+and the gentle manner was a heart of flint and nerves of steel. No woman
+ever made Julius Cæsar dance to syncopated time, nor did a youth of
+eighteen ever successfully order him to take part in amateur theatricals
+on penalty. Julius Cæsar and Seneca were both scholars, both were
+gentlemen and gentle men: their mental attitude was much the same, but
+one had a will of adamant, and the other moved in the line of least
+resistance.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Gradually, Nero evolved a petulance and impatience toward his mother and
+his tutor, all of which was quite a natural consequence of his
+education. Every endeavor to restrain him was met with imprecations and
+curses. About then would have been a good time to apply heroic
+treatment, instead of halting fear and worshipful acquiescence.
+
+The raw stock for making a Nero is in every school, and given the
+conditions, a tyrant-culture would be easy to evolve. The endeavor to
+make Nero wed Octavia caused a revulsion to occur in his heart toward
+her and her brother Brittanicus. He feared that these two might combine
+and wrest from him the throne.
+
+Locusta, the specialist, was again sent for and Brittanicus was gathered
+to his fathers.
+
+Soon after, Nero fell into a deep infatuation for Poppæ Sabina, wife of
+Otho, the most beautiful woman in Rome. Sabina refused to accept his
+advances so long as he was tied to his mother's apron-strings--I use the
+exact phrase of Tacitus, so I trust no exceptions will be taken to the
+expression. Nero came to believe that the tagging, nagging, mushy love
+of his mother was standing in the way of his advancement. He had come to
+know that Agrippina had caused the death of Claudius, and when she
+accused him of poisoning Brittanicus, he said, "I learned the trick from
+my dear mother!" and honors were even.
+
+He knew the crafty quality of his mother's mind and grew to fear her.
+And fear and hate are one. To secure Sabina he must sacrifice Agrippina.
+
+He would be free.
+
+To poison her would not do--she was an expert in preventives.
+
+So Nero, regardless of expense, bargained with Anicetus, admiral of the
+fleet, to construct a ship so that, when certain bolts were withdrawn,
+the craft would sink and tell no tale. This was a bit of daring deviltry
+never before devised, and by turn, Nero chuckled in glee and had cold
+sweats of fear as he congratulated himself on his astuteness.
+
+The boat was built and Agrippina was enticed on board. The night of the
+excursion was calm, but the conspirators, fearing the chance might never
+come again, let go the canopy, loaded with lead, which was over the
+queen. It fell with a crash; and at the same time the bolts were
+withdrawn and the waters rushed in. Several of the servants in
+attendance were killed by the fall of the awning, but Agrippina and
+Aceronia, a lady of quality, escaped from the debris only slightly hurt.
+Aceronia, believing the ship was about to sink, called for help, saying,
+"I am Agrippina." She erred slightly in her diplomacy, for she was at
+once struck on the head with an oar and killed. This gave Agrippina a
+clew to the situation and she was silent. By a strange perversity, the
+royal scuttling patent would not work and the boat stubbornly refused to
+sink.
+
+Agrippina got safely ashore and sent word to her son that there had been
+a terrible accident, but she was safe--the intent of her letter being to
+let him know that she understood the matter perfectly, and while she
+could not admire the job, it was so bungling, yet she would forgive him
+if he would not try it again.
+
+In wild consternation, Nero sent for Burrus and Seneca. This was their
+first knowledge of the affair. They refused to act in either way, but
+Burrus intimated that Anicetus was the guilty party and should be held
+responsible.
+
+"For not completing the task?" said Nero.
+
+"Yes," said the blunt old soldier, and retired.
+
+Anicetus was notified that the blame of the whole conspiracy was on him.
+A big crime, well carried out, is its own excuse for being; but failure,
+like unto genius, is unforgivable.
+
+Anicetus was in disgrace, but only temporarily, for he towed the
+obstinate, telltale galley into deep water and sank her at dead of
+night. Then with a few faithful followers he surrounded the villa where
+Agrippina was resting, scattered her guard and confronted her with drawn
+sword.
+
+Years before, a soothsayer had told her that her son would be Emperor
+and that he would kill her. Her answer was, "Let them slay me, if he but
+reign."
+
+Now she saw that death was nigh. She did not try to escape, nor did she
+plead for mercy, but cried, "Plunge your sword through my womb, for it
+bore Nero."
+
+And Anicetus, with one blow, struck her dead.
+
+Nero returned to Naples to mourn his loss. From there he sent forth a
+lengthy message to the Senate, recounting the accidental shipwreck, and
+telling how Agrippina had plotted against his life, recounting her
+crimes in deprecatory, sophistical phrase. The document wound up by
+telling how she had tried to secure the throne for a paramour, and the
+truth coming to some o'erzealous friends of the State, they had arisen
+and taken her life. In Rome there was a strong feeling that Nero should
+not be allowed to return, but this message of explanation and promise,
+written by Seneca, downed the opposition.
+
+The Senate accepted the report, and Nero, at twenty-two, found himself
+master of the world.
+
+Yet what booted it when he was not master of himself!
+
+From this time on, the career of Seneca was one of contumely, suffering
+and disgrace. This was to endure for six years, when kindly death was
+then to set him free.
+
+The mutual, guilty knowledge of a great crime breeds loathing and
+contempt. History contains many such instances where the subject had
+knowledge of the sovereign's sins, and the sovereign found no rest until
+the man who knew was beneath the sod.
+
+Seneca knew Nero as only his Maker knew him.
+
+After the first spasm of exultation in being allowed to return to Rome,
+a jealous dread of Seneca came over the guilty monarch.
+
+Seneca hoped against hope that, now that Nero's wild oats were sown and
+the crop destroyed, all would be well. The past should be buried and
+remembrance of it sunk deep in oblivion.
+
+But Nero feared Seneca might expose his worthlessness and the
+philosopher himself take the reins. In this Nero did not know his man:
+Seneca's love was literary--political power to him was transient and not
+worth while.
+
+It became known that the apology to the Senate was the work of Seneca,
+and Nero, who wanted the world to think that all his speeches and
+addresses were his own, got it firmly fixed in his head he would not be
+happy until Seneca was out of the way. Sabina said he was no longer a
+boy, and should not be tagged and dictated to by his old teacher.
+
+Seneca, seeing what was coming, offered to give his entire property to
+the State and retire. Nero would not have it so--he feared Seneca would
+retire only to come back with an army. A cordon of spies was put around
+Seneca's house--he was practically a prisoner. Attempts were made to
+poison him, but he ate only fruit, and bread made by his wife, Paulina,
+and drank no water except from running streams.
+
+Finally a charge of conspiracy was fastened upon him, and Nero ordered
+him to die by his own hand. His wife was determined to go with him, and
+one stroke severed the veins of both.
+
+The beautiful Sabina realized her hopes--she divorced her husband, and
+married the Emperor of Rome. She died from a sudden kick given her by
+the booted foot of her liege.
+
+Three years after the death of Seneca, Nero passed hence by the same
+route, killing himself to escape the fury of the Pretorian Guard. And so
+ended the Julian line, none of whom, except the first, was a Julian.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+From the death of Augustus on to the time of Nero there was for Rome a
+steady tide of disintegration. The Emperor was the head of the Church,
+and he usually encouraged the idea that he was something different from
+common men--that his mission was from On High and that he should be
+worshiped. Gibbon, making a free translation from Seneca, says,
+"Religion was regarded by the common people as true, by the philosophers
+as false, and by the rulers as useful." And Saint Augustine, using the
+same smoothly polished style, says, in reference to a Roman Senator, "He
+worshiped what he blamed, he did what he refuted, he adored that with
+which he found fault." The sentence is Seneca's, and when he wrote it he
+doubtless had himself in mind, for in spite of his Stoic philosophy the
+life of luxury lured him, and although he sang the praises of poverty he
+charged a goodly sum for so doing, and the nobles who listened to him
+doubtless found a vicarious atonement by applauding him as he played to
+the gallery gods of their self-esteem, like rich ladies who go
+a-slumming mix in with the poor on an equality, and then hasten home to
+dress for dinner.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Seneca was one of the purest and loftiest intellects the world has ever
+known. Canon Farrar calls him "A Seeker after God," and has printed
+parallel passages from Saint Paul and Seneca which, for many, seem to
+show that the men were in communication with each other. Every ethical
+maxim of Christianity was expressed by this "noble pagan," and his
+influence was always directed toward that which he thought was right.
+His mistakes were all in the line of infirmities of the will. Voltaire
+calls him, "The father of all those who wear shovel hats," and in
+another place refers to him as an "amateur ascetic," but in this the
+author of the Philosophical Dictionary pays Seneca the indirect
+compliment of regarding him as a Christian. Renan says, "Seneca shines
+out like a great white star through a rift of clouds on a night of
+darkness." The wonder is not that Seneca at times lapsed from his high
+estate and manifested his Sophist training, but that to the day of his
+death he saw the truth with unblinking eyes and held the Ideal firmly in
+his heart.
+
+
+
+
+ARISTOTLE
+
+
+     Happiness itself is sufficient excuse. Beautiful things are right
+     and true; so beautiful actions are those pleasing to the gods. Wise
+     men have an inward sense of what is beautiful, and the highest
+     wisdom is to trust this intuition and be guided by it. The answer
+     to the last appeal of what is right lies within a man's own breast.
+     Trust thyself.
+
+                                                --_Ethics of Aristotle_
+
+[Illustration: ARISTOTLE]
+
+
+The Sublime Porte recently issued a request to the American Bible
+Society, asking that references to Macedonia be omitted from all Bibles
+circulated in Turkey or Turkish provinces. The argument of His Sublimity
+is that the Macedonian cry, "Come over and help us!" puts him and his
+people in a bad light. He ends his most courteous petition by saying,
+"The land that produced a Philip, an Alexander the Great and an
+Aristotle, and that today has citizens who are the equal of these, needs
+nothing from our dear brothers, the Americans, but to be let alone."
+
+As to the statement that Macedonia today has citizens who are the equals
+of Philip, Alexander and Aristotle, the proposition, probably, is based
+on the confession of the citizens themselves, and therefore may be
+truth. Great men are only great comparatively. It is the stupidity of
+the many that allows one man to bestride the narrow world like a
+Colossus. In the time of Alexander and Aristotle there wasn't so much
+competition as now, so perhaps what we take to be lack of humor on the
+part of the Sublime Porte may have a basis in fact.
+
+Aristotle was born Three Hundred Eighty-four B.C., at the village of
+Stagira in the mountains of Macedonia. King Amyntas used to live at
+Stagira several months in the year and hunt the wild hogs that fed on
+the acorns which grew in the gorges and valleys. Mountain climbing and
+hunting was dangerous sport, and it was well to have a surgeon attached
+to the royal party, so the father of Aristotle served in that capacity.
+No doubt, though, but the whole outfit was decidedly barbaric, even
+including the doctor's little son "Aristo," who refused to be left
+behind. The child's mother had died years before, and boys without
+mothers are apt to manage their fathers. And so Aristo was allowed to
+trot along by his father's side, carrying a formidable bow, which he
+himself had made, with a quiver of arrows at his back.
+
+Those were great times when the King came to Stagira!
+
+When the King went back to the capital everybody received presents, and
+the good doctor, by some chance, was treated best of all, and little
+Aristo came in for the finest bow that ever was, all tipped with silver
+and eagle-feathers. But the bow did not bring good luck, for soon after,
+the boy's father was caught in an avalanche of sliding stone and crushed
+to death.
+
+Aristo was taken in charge by Proxenus, a near kinsman. The lad was so
+active at climbing, so full of life and energy and good spirits, that
+when the King came the next year to Stagira, he asked for Aristo. With
+the King was his son Philip, a lad about the age of Aristo, but not so
+tall nor so active. The boys became fast friends, and once when a
+stranger saw them together he complimented the King on his fine,
+intelligent boys, and the King had to explain, "The other boy is
+mine--but I wish they both were."
+
+Aristo knew where the wild boars fed in gulches, and where the stunted
+oaks grew close and thick. Higher up in the mountains there were bears,
+which occasionally came down and made the wild pigs scamper. You could
+always tell when the bears were around, for then the little pigs would
+run out into the open. The bears had a liking for little pigs, and the
+bears had a liking for the honey in the bee-trees, too. Aristo could
+find the bee-trees better than the bears--all you had to do was to watch
+the flight of the bees as they left the clover.
+
+Then there were deer--you could see their tracks any time around the
+mountain marshes where the springs gushed forth and the watercress grew
+lush. Still higher up the mountains, beyond where bears ever traveled,
+there were mountain-sheep, and still higher up were goats. The goats
+were so wild that hardly any one but Aristo had ever seen them, but he
+knew they were there.
+
+The King was delighted to have such a lad as companion for his son, and
+insisted that he should go back to the capital with them and become a
+member of the Court.
+
+Not he--there were other ambitions. He wanted to go to Athens and study
+at the school of Plato--Plato, the pupil of the great Socrates.
+
+The King laughed--he had never heard of Plato. That a youth should
+refuse to become part of the Macedonian Court, preferring the company of
+an unknown school-master, was amusing--he laughed.
+
+The next year when the King came back to Stagira, Aristo was still
+there. "And you haven't gone to Athens yet?" said the King.
+
+"No, but I am going," was the firm reply.
+
+"We will send him," said the King to Proxenus, Aristo's guardian.
+
+And so we find Aristo, aged seventeen, tall and straight and bronzed,
+starting off for Athens, his worldly goods rolled up in a bearskin, tied
+about with thongs. There is a legend to the effect that Philip went with
+Aristo, and that for a time they were together at Plato's school. But,
+anyway, Philip did not remain long. Aristo--or Aristotle, we had better
+call him--remained with Plato just twenty years.
+
+At Plato's school Aristotle was called by the boys, "the Stagirite," a
+name that was to last him through life--and longer. In Winter he wore
+his bearskin, caught over one shoulder, for a robe, and his mountain
+grace and native beauty of mind and body must have been a joy to Plato
+from the first. Such a youth could not be overlooked.
+
+To him that hath shall be given. The pupil that wants to learn is the
+teacher's favorite--which is just as it should not be. Plato proved his
+humanity by giving his all to the young mountaineer. Plato was then a
+little over sixty years of age--about the same age that Socrates was
+when Plato became his pupil. But the years had touched Plato
+lightly--unlike Socrates, he had endured no Thracian winters in bare
+feet, neither had he lived on cold snacks picked up here and there, as
+Providence provided. Plato was a bachelor. He still wore the purple
+robe, proud, dignified, yet gentle, and his back was straight as that of
+a youth. Lowell once said, "When I hear Plato's name mentioned, I always
+think of George William Curtis--a combination of pride and intellect, a
+man's strength fused with a woman's gentleness."
+
+Plato was an aristocrat. He accepted only such pupils as he invited, or
+those that were sent by royalty. Like Franz Liszt, he charged no
+tuition, which plan, by the way, is a good scheme for getting more money
+than could otherwise be obtained, although no such selfish charge should
+be brought against either Plato or Liszt. Yet every benefit must be paid
+for, and whether you use the word fee or honorarium, matters little. I
+hear there be lecturers who accept invitations to banquets and accept an
+honorarium mysteriously placed on the mantel, when they would scorn a
+fee.
+
+Plato's Garden School, where the pupils reclined under the trees on
+marble benches, and read and talked, or listened to lectures by the
+Master, was almost an ideal place. Not the ideal for us, because we
+believe that the mental and the manual must go hand in hand. The world
+of intellect should not be separated from the world of work. It was too
+much to expect that in a time when slavery was everywhere, Plato would
+see the fallacy of having one set of men to do the thinking, and another
+do the work. We haven't got far from that yet; only free men can see the
+whole truth, and a free man is one who lives in a country where there
+are no slaves. To own slaves is to be one, and to live in a land of
+slavery is to share in the bondage--a partaker in the infamy and the
+profits.
+
+Plato and Aristotle became fast friends--comrades. With thinking men
+years do not count--only those grow old who think by proxy. Plato had no
+sons after the flesh, and the love of his heart went out to the
+Stagirite: in him he saw his own life projected.
+
+When Aristotle had turned twenty he was acquainted with all the leading
+thinkers of his time; he read constantly, wrote, studied and conversed.
+The little property his father left had come to him; the King of Macedon
+sent him presents; and he taught various pupils from wealthy
+families--finances were easy. But success did not spoil him. The
+brightest scholars do not make the greatest success in life, because
+alma mater usually catches them for teachers. Sometimes this is well,
+but more often it is not. Plato would not hear of Aristotle's leaving
+him, and so he remained, the chief ornament and practical leader of the
+school.
+
+He became rich, owned the largest private library at Athens, and was
+universally regarded as the most learned man of his time.
+
+In many ways he had surpassed Plato. He delved into natural history,
+collected plants, rocks, animals, and made studies of the practical
+workings of economic schemes. He sought to divest the Platonic teaching
+of its poetry, discarded rhetoric, and tried to get at the simple truth
+of all subjects.
+
+Toward the last of Plato's career this repudiation by Aristotle of
+poetry, rhetoric, elocution and the polite accomplishments caused a
+schism to break out in the Garden School. Plato's head was in the clouds
+at times; Aristotle's was, too, but his feet were always on the earth.
+
+When Plato died, Aristotle was his natural successor as leader of the
+school, but there was opposition to him, both on account of his sturdy,
+independent ways and because he was a foreigner.
+
+He left Athens to become a member of the Court of Hermias, a former
+pupil, now King of Atarneus.
+
+He remained here long enough to marry the niece of his patron, and
+doubtless saw himself settled for life--a kingly crown within his reach
+should his student-sovereign pass away.
+
+And the royal friend did pass away, by the dagger's route. As
+life-insurance risks I am told that Kings have to pay double premium.
+Revolution broke out, and as Aristotle was debating in his mind what
+course to pursue, a messenger with soldiers arrived from King Philip of
+Macedon, offering safe convoy, enclosing transportation, and asking that
+Aristotle come and take charge of the education of his son, Alexander,
+aged thirteen.
+
+Aristotle did not wait to parley: he accepted the invitation. Horses
+were saddled, camels packed and that night, before the moon arose, the
+cavalcade silently moved out into the desert.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The offer that had been made twenty-four years before, by Philip's
+father, was now accepted. Aristotle was forty-two years old, in the
+prime of his power. Time had tempered his passions, but not subdued his
+zest in life. He had the curious, receptive, alert and eager mind of a
+child. His intellect was at its ripest and best. He was a lover of
+animals, and all outdoor life appealed to him as it does to a growing
+boy. He was a daring horseman, and we hear of his riding off into the
+desert and sleeping on the sands, his horse untethered watching over
+him. Aristotle was the first man to make a scientific study of the
+horse, and with the help of Alexander he set up a skeleton, fastening
+the bones in place, to the mighty astonishment of the natives, who
+mistook the feat for an attempt to make a living animal; and when the
+beast was not at last saddled and bridled there were subdued chuckles of
+satisfaction among the "hoi polloi" at the failure of the scheme, and
+murmurs of "I told you so!"
+
+Eighteen hundred years were to pass before another man was to take up
+the horse as a serious scientific study; and this was Leonardo da Vinci,
+a man in many ways very much like Aristotle. The distinguishing feature
+in these men--the thing that differentiates them from other men--was the
+great outpouring sympathy with every living creature. Everything they
+saw was related to themselves--it came very close to them--they wanted
+to know more about it. This is essentially the child-mind, and the
+calamity of life is to lose it.
+
+Leonardo became interested in Aristotle's essay on the horse, and
+continued the subject further, dissecting the animal in minutest detail
+and illustrating his discoveries with painstaking drawings. His work is
+so complete and exhaustive that nobody nowadays has time to more than
+read the title-page. Leonardo's bent was natural science, and his first
+attempts at drawing were done to illustrate his books. Art was
+beautiful, of course--it brought in an income, made friends and brought
+him close to people who saw nothing unless you made a picture of it. He
+made pictures for recreation and to amuse folks, and his threat to put
+the peeping Prior into the "Last Supper," posed as Judas, revealed his
+contempt for the person to whom a picture was just a picture. The marvel
+to Leonardo was the mind that could imagine, the hand that could
+execute, and the soul that could see.
+
+And the curious part is that Leonardo lives for us through his play and
+not through his serious work. His science has been superseded, but his
+art is immortal.
+
+This expectant mental attitude, this attitude of worship, belongs to all
+great scientists. The man divines the thing first and then looks for it,
+just as the Herschels knew where the star ought to be and then patiently
+waited for it. The Bishop of London said that if Darwin had spent
+one-half as much time in reading his Bible as in studying earthworms, he
+would have really benefited the world, and saved his soul alive. To
+Walt Whitman, a hair on the back of his hand was just as curious and
+wonderful as the stars in the sky, or God's revelation to man through a
+printed book.
+
+Aristotle loved animals as a boy loves them--his house was a regular
+menagerie of pets, and into this world of life Alexander was very early
+introduced. We hear of young Alexander breaking the wild horse,
+Bucephalus, and beyond a doubt Aristotle was seated on the top rail of
+the paddock when he threw the lariat.
+
+Aristotle and his pupil had the first circus of which we know, and they
+also inaugurated the first Zoological Garden mentioned in history,
+barring Noah, of course.
+
+So much was Alexander bound up in this menagerie, and in his old teacher
+as well, that in after-life, in all of his travels, he was continually
+sending back to Aristotle specimens of every sort of bird, beast and
+fish to be found in the countries through which he traveled.
+
+When Philip was laid low by the assassin's thrust, it was Aristotle who
+backed up Alexander, aged twenty--but a man--in his prompt suppression
+of the revolution. The will that had been used to subdue man-eating
+stallions and to train wild animals, now came in to repress riot, and
+the systematic classification of things was a preparation for the
+forming of an army out of a mob. Aristotle said, "An army is a huge
+animal with a million claws--it must have only one brain, and that the
+commander's."
+
+Alexander gave credit again and again to Aristotle for those elements in
+his character that went to make up success: steadiness of purpose,
+self-reliance, systematic effort, mathematical calculation, attention to
+details, and a broad and generous policy that sees the end.
+
+When Aristotle argued with Philip, years before, that horse-breaking
+should be included in the educational curriculum of all young men, he
+evidently divined football and was endeavoring to supplant it.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I think history has been a trifle severe on Alexander. He was elected
+Captain-General of Greece, and ordered to repel the Persian invasion.
+And he did the business once for all. War is not all
+fighting--Providence is on the side of the strongest commissariat.
+Alexander had to train, arm, clothe and feed a million men, and march
+them long miles across a desert country. The real foe of a man is in his
+own heart, and the foe of an army is in its own camp--disease takes more
+prisoners than the enemy. Fever sniped more of our boys in blue than did
+the hostile Filipinos.
+
+Alexander's losses were principally from men slain in battle; from this,
+I take it that Alexander knew a deal of sanitary science, and had a
+knowledge of practical mathematics, in order to systematize that mob of
+restless, turbulent helots. We hear of Aristotle cautioning him that
+safety lies in keeping his men busy--they must not have too much time to
+think, otherwise mutiny is to be feared. Still, they must not be
+over-worked, or they will be in no condition to fight when the eventful
+time occurs. And we are amazed to see this: "Do not let your men drink
+out of stagnant pools--Athenians, city-born, know no better. And when
+you carry water on the desert marches, it should be first boiled to
+prevent its getting sour."
+
+Concerning the Jews, Alexander writes to his teacher and says, "They are
+apt to be in sullen rebellion against their governors, receiving orders
+only from their high priests, and this leads to severe measures, which
+are construed as persecution"; all of which might have been written
+yesterday by the Czar in a message to The Hague Convention.
+
+Alexander captured the East, and was taken captive by the East. Like the
+male bee that never lives to tell the tale of its wooing, he succeeded
+and died. Yet he vitalized all Asia with the seeds of Greek philosophy,
+turned back the hungry barbaric tide, and made a new map of the Eastern
+world. He built far more cities than he destroyed. He set Andrew
+Carnegie an example at Alexandria, such as the world had never up to
+that time seen. At the entrance to the harbor of the same city he
+erected a lighthouse, surpassing far the one at Minot's Ledge, or Race
+Rock. This structure endured for two centuries, and when at last wind
+and weather had their way, there was no Hopkinson Smith who could erect
+another.
+
+At Thebes, Alexander paid a compliment to letters, by destroying every
+building in the city except the house of the poet, Pindar. At Corinth,
+when the great, the wise, the noble, came to pay homage, one great man
+did not appear. In vain did Alexander look for his card among all those
+handed in at the door--Diogenes, the Philosopher, oft quoted by
+Aristotle, was not to be seen.
+
+Alexander went out to hunt him up, and found him sunning himself,
+propped up against the wall in the Public Square, busy doing nothing.
+
+The philosopher did not arise to greet the conqueror; he did not even
+offer a nod of recognition.
+
+"I am Alexander--is there not something I can do for you?" modestly
+asked the descendant of Hercules.
+
+"Just stand out from between me and the sun," replied the philosopher,
+and went on with his meditations.
+
+Alexander enjoyed the reply so much that he said to his companions, and
+afterward wrote to Aristotle, "If I were not Alexander, I would be
+Diogenes," and thus did strenuosity pay its tribute to
+self-sufficiency.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Aristotle might have assumed important affairs of State, but practical
+politics were not to his liking. "What Aristotle is in the world of
+thought I will be in the world of action," said Alexander.
+
+On all of his journeys Alexander found time to keep in touch with his
+old teacher at home; and we find the ruler of Asia voicing that old
+request, "Send me something to read," and again, "I live alone with my
+thoughts, amidst a throng of men, but without companions."
+
+Plutarch gives a copy of a letter sent by Alexander wherein Aristotle is
+chided for publishing his lecture on oratory. "Now all the world will
+know what formerly belonged to you and me alone," plaintively cries the
+young man who sighed for more worlds to conquer, and therein shows he
+was the victim of a fallacy that will never die--the idea that truth can
+be embodied in a book. When will we ever learn that inspired books
+demand inspired readers!
+
+There are no secrets. A book may stimulate thought, but it can never
+impart it.
+
+Aristotle wrote out the Laws of Oratory. "Alas!" groans Alexander,
+"everybody will turn orator now." But he was wrong, because Oratory and
+the Laws of Oratory are totally different things.
+
+A Boston man of excellent parts has just recently given out the Sixteen
+Perfective Laws of Oratory, and the Nineteen Steps in Evolution.
+
+The real truth is, there are Fifty-seven Varieties of Artistic Vagaries,
+and all are valuable to the man who evolves them--they serve him as a
+scaffolding whereby he builds thought. But woe betide Alexander and all
+rareripe Bostonians who mistake the scaffolding for the edifice.
+
+There are no Laws of Art. A man evolves first, and builds his laws
+afterward. The style is the man, and a great man, full of the spirit,
+will express himself in his own way.
+
+Bach ignored all the Laws of Harmony made before his day and set down
+new ones--and these marked his limitations, that was all. Beethoven
+upset all these, and Wagner succeeded by breaking most of Beethoven's
+rules. And now comes Grieg, and writes harmonious discords that Wagner
+said were impossible, and still it is music, for by it we are
+transported on the wings of song and uplifted to the stars.
+
+The individual soul striving for expression ignores all man-made laws.
+Truth is that which serves us best in expressing our lives. A rotting
+log is truth to a bed of violets, while sand is truth to a cactus. But
+when the violet writes a book on "Expression as I Have Found It," making
+laws for the evolution of beautiful blossoms, it leaves the Century
+Plant out of its equation, or else swears, i' faith, that a cactus is
+not a flower, and that a Night-Blooming Cereus is a disordered thought
+from a madman's brain. And when the proud and lofty cactus writes a
+book it never mentions violets, because it has never stooped to seek
+them.
+
+Art is the blossoming of the Soul.
+
+We can not make the plant blossom--all we can do is to comply with the
+conditions of growth. We can supply the sunshine, moisture and aliment,
+and God does the rest. In teaching, he only is successful who supplies
+the conditions of growth--that is all there is of the Science of
+Pedagogics, which is not a science, and if it ever becomes one, it will
+be the Science of Letting Alone, and not a scheme of interference. Just
+so long as some of the greatest men are those who have broken through
+pedagogic fancy and escaped, succeeding by breaking every rule of
+pedagogy, as Wagner discarded every Law of Harmony, there will be no
+such thing as a Science of Education.
+
+Recently I read Aristotle's Essays on Rhetoric and Oratory, and I was
+pained to see how I had been plagiarized by this man who wrote three
+hundred years before Christ. Aristotle used charts in teaching and
+indicated the mean by a straight horizontal line, and the extreme by an
+upright dash. He says: "From one extreme the mean looks extreme, and
+from another extreme the mean looks small--it all depends upon your
+point of view. Beware of jumping to conclusions, for beside the
+appearance you must look within and see from what vantage-ground you
+gain the conclusions. All truth is relative, and none can be final to a
+man six feet high, who stands on the ground, who can walk but forty
+miles at a stretch, who needs four meals a day and one-third of his time
+for sleep. A loss of sleep, or loss of a meal, or a meal too much, will
+disarrange his point of view, and change his opinions," And thus do we
+see that a belief in "eternal punishment" is a mere matter of
+indigestion.
+
+A certain bishop, we have seen, experienced a regret that Darwin
+expended so much time on earthworms; and we might also express regret
+that Aristotle did not spend more. As long as he confined himself to
+earth, he was eminently sure and right: he was really the first man who
+ever used his eyes. But when he quit the earth, and began to speculate
+about the condition of souls before they are clothed with bodies, or
+what becomes of them after they discard the body, or the nature of God,
+he shows that he knew no more than we. That is to say, he knew no more
+than the barbarians who preceded him.
+
+He attempted to grasp ideas which Herbert Spencer pigeonholes forever as
+the Unknowable; and in some of his endeavors to make plain the
+unknowable, Aristotle strains language to the breaking-point--the net
+bursts and all of his fish go free. Here is an Aristotelian proposition,
+expressed by Hegel to make lucid a thing nobody comprehends: "Essential
+being as being that meditates with itself, with itself by the negativity
+of itself, is relative to itself only as it is relative to another;
+that is, immediate only as something posited and meditated." It gives
+one a slight shock to hear him speak of headache being caused by wind on
+the brain, or powdered grasshopper-wings being a cure for gout, but when
+he calls the heart a pump that forces the blood to the extremities, we
+see that he anticipates Harvey, although more than two thousand years of
+night lie between them.
+
+Some of Aristotle reads about like this Geometrical Domestic Equation:
+
+_Definitions:_
+
+All boarding-houses are the same boarding-houses.
+
+Boarders in the same boarding-house, and on the same flat, are equal to
+one another.
+
+A single room is that which hath no parts and no magnitude.
+
+The landlady of the boarding-house is a parallelogram--that is, an
+oblong figure that can not be described, and is equal to anything.
+
+A wrangle is the disinclination to each other of two boarders that meet
+together, but are not on the same floor.
+
+All the other rooms being taken, a single room is a double room.
+
+_Postulates and Propositions:_
+
+A pie may be produced any number of times.
+
+The landlady may be reduced to her lowest terms by a series of
+propositions.
+
+A bee-line is the shortest distance between the Phalanstery and By
+Allen's.
+
+The clothes of a boarding-house bed stretched both ways will not meet.
+
+Any two meals at a boarding-house are together less than one meal at the
+Phalanstery.
+
+On the same bill and on the same side of it there should not be two
+charges for the same thing.
+
+If there be two boarders on the same floor, and the amount of the side
+of the one be equal to the amount of the side of the other, and the
+wrangle between the one boarder and the landlady be equal to the wrangle
+between the landlady and the other boarder, then shall the weekly bills
+of the two boarders be equal. For, if not, let one bill be the greater,
+then the other bill is less than it might have been, which is absurd.
+Therefore the bills are equal.
+
+_Quod erat demonstrandum._
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The business of the old philosophers was to philosophize. To
+philosophize as a business is to miss the highest philosophy. To do a
+certain amount of useful work every day, and not trouble about either
+the past or the future, is the highest wisdom. The man who drags the
+past behind him, and dives into the future, spreads the present out
+thin. Therein lies the bane of most religions. A man goes out into the
+woods to study the birds: he walks and walks and walks and sees no
+birds. But just let him sit down on a log and wait, and lo! the branches
+are full of song.
+
+Those who pursue Culture never catch up with her. Culture takes alarm at
+pursuit and avoids the stealthy pounce. Culture is a woman, and a
+certain amount of indifference wins her. Ardent wooing will not secure
+either wisdom or a woman--except in the case where a woman marries a man
+to get rid of him, and then he really does not get the woman--he only
+secures her husk. And the husks of culture are pedantry and sciolism.
+The highest philosophy of the future will consist in doing each day that
+which is most useful. Talking about it will be quite incidental and
+secondary.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+After Alexander had completed his little task of conquering the world,
+it was his intention to sit down and improve his mind. He was going back
+to Greece to complete the work Pericles had so well begun. To this end
+Aristotle had left Macedonia and established his Peripatetic School at
+Athens. Plato was exclusive, and taught in the Garden with its high
+walls. Aristotle taught in the "peripatos," or porch of the Lyceum, and
+his classes were for all who wished to attend. Socrates was really the
+first peripatetic philosopher, but he was a roustabout. Nothing
+sanctifies like death--and now Socrates had become respectable, and his
+methods were to be made legal and legitimate.
+
+Socrates discovered the principle of human liberty; he taught the rights
+of the individual, and as these threatened to interfere with the State,
+the politicians got alarmed and put him to death. Plato, much more
+cautious, wrote his "Republic," wherein everything is subordinated for
+the good of the State, and the individual is but a cog in a most
+perfectly lubricated machine. Aristotle saw that Socrates was nearer
+right than Plato--sin is the expression of individuality and is not
+wholly bad--the State is made up of individuals, and if you suppress the
+thinking-power of the individual, you will get a weak and effeminate
+body politic; there will be none to govern. The whole fabric will break
+down of its own weight. A man must have the privilege of making a fool
+of himself--within proper bounds, of course. To that end learning must
+be for all, and liberty both to listen and to teach should be the
+privilege of every man.
+
+This is a problem that Boston has before it today: Shall free speech be
+allowed on the Common? William Morris tried it in Trafalgar Square, to
+his sorrow; but in Hyde Park, if you think you have a message, London
+will let you give it. But this is not considered good form, and the
+"Best Society" listen to no speeches in the park. However, there are
+signs that Aristotle's outdoor school may come back. Phillips Brooks
+tried outdoor preaching, and if his health had not failed, he might have
+popularized it. It only wants a man who is big enough to inaugurate it.
+
+Aristotle had various helpers, and arranged to give his lectures and
+conferences daily in certain porches or promenades. These lectures
+covered the whole range of human thought--logic, rhetoric, oratory,
+physics, ethics, politics, esthetics, and physical culture. These
+outdoor talks were called exoteric, and there gradually grew up esoteric
+lessons, which were for the rich or luxurious and the dainty. And there
+being money in the esoteric lessons, these gradually took the place of
+the exoteric, and so we get the genesis of our modern private school or
+college, where we send our children to be taught great things by great
+men, for a consideration.
+
+Will the exoteric, peripatetic school come back?
+
+I think so.
+
+I believe that university education will soon be free to every boy and
+girl in America, and this without going far from home. Esoteric
+education is always more or less of a sham. Our public-school system is
+purely exoteric, only we stop too soon. We also give our teachers too
+much work and too little pay. Stop building warships, and use the money
+to double the teachers' salaries, making the profession respectable,
+raise the standard of efficiency, and the free university with the old
+Greek Lyceum will be here.
+
+America must do this--the Old World can't. We have the money, and we
+have the men and the women; all that is needed is the desire, and this
+is fast awakening.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+When Alexander died, of acute success, aged thirty-two, Aristotle's
+sustaining prop was gone. The Athenians never thought much of the
+Macedonians--not much more than Saint Paul did, he having tried to
+convert both and failed.
+
+Athens was jealous of the power of Alexander: that a provincial should
+thus rule the Mother-Country was unforgivable. It was as if a Canadian
+should make himself King of England!
+
+Everybody knew that Aristotle had been the tutor of Alexander, and that
+they were close friends. And that a Macedonian should be the chief
+school-teacher in Athens was an affront. The very greatness of the man
+was his offense: Athens had none to match him, and the world has never
+since matched him, either. How to get rid of the Macedonian philosopher
+was the question.
+
+And so our old friend, heresy, comes in again. A poem was found, written
+by Aristotle many years before, on the death of his friend, King
+Hermias, wherein Apollo was disrespectfully mentioned. It was the old
+charge against Socrates come back--the hemlock was brewing. But life was
+sweet to Aristotle; he chose discretion to valor, and fled to his
+country home at Chalcis in Euboea.
+
+The humiliation of being driven from his work, and the sudden change
+from active life to exile, undermined his strength, and he died in a
+year, aged sixty-two.
+
+In morals the world has added nothing new to the philosophy of
+Aristotle: gentleness, consideration, moderation, mutual helpfulness,
+and the principle that one man's privileges end where another man's
+rights begin--these make up the sum. And on them, all authorities agree,
+and have for twenty-five hundred years.
+
+The family relations of Aristotle were most exemplary. The unseemly
+wrangles of Philip and his wife were never repeated in the home of
+Aristotle. Yet we will have to offer this fact in the interests of
+stirpiculture: the inconstant Philip and the termagant Olympias brought
+into the world Alexander; whereas the sons of Aristotle lived their day
+and died, without making a ripple on the surface of history.
+
+As in the scientific study of the horse, no progress was made from the
+time of Aristotle to that of Leonardo, so Hegel says there was no
+advancement in philosophy from the time of Aristotle to that of Spinoza.
+
+Eusebius called Aristotle "Nature's Private Secretary."
+
+Dante spoke of him as the "Master of those who know."
+
+Sir William Hamilton said, "In the range of his powers and perceptions,
+only Leonardo can be compared with him."
+
+
+
+
+MARCUS AURELIUS
+
+
+     We are made for co-operation, like feet, like hands, like eyelids,
+     like the rows of the upper and lower teeth. To act against one
+     another then is contrary to Nature, and it is acting against one
+     another to be vexed and turn away.
+
+                                                --_The Meditations_
+
+[Illustration: MARCUS AURELIUS]
+
+
+Annius Verus was one of the great men of Rome. He had been a soldier,
+governor of provinces, judge, senator and consul. Sixty years had passed
+over his head and whitened his hair, but the lines of care that were on
+his fine face ten years before had now given way to a cherubic double
+chin, and his complexion was ruddy as a baby's. The entire atmosphere of
+the man was one of gentleness, repose and kindly good-will. Annius Verus
+was grateful to the gods, for the years had brought him much good
+fortune, and better still, knowledge. "Being old I shall know ... the
+last of life for which the first was made!"
+
+Religion isn't a thing outside of a man, taught by priests out of a
+book. Religion is in the heart of man, and its chief quality is
+resignation and a grateful spirit. Annius Verus was religious in the
+best sense, and his life was peaceful and happy.
+
+And surely Annius Verus should have been content--he was a Roman Consul,
+rich, powerful, honored by the wisest and best men in Rome, who
+considered it a privilege to come and dine at his table. His villa was
+on Mount Coelius, a suburb of Rome. The house was surrounded by a big
+stone wall enclosing a tract of about ten acres, where grew citron,
+orange and fig trees, and giant cedars of Lebanon lifted their branches
+to the clouds.
+
+At least it seemed to little Marcus, grandson of the Consul, as if they
+reached the clouds. There was a long ladder running up one of these big
+cedar trees to a platform or "crow's-nest" nearly a hundred feet from
+the ground. No boy was allowed to climb up there until he was twelve
+years old, and when Marcus was ten, time got stuck, he thought, and
+refused to budge. But this was only little Marcus' idea, for he finally
+got to be twelve years old, and then he climbed the long ladder to the
+lookout in the tree and looked down on the Eternal City that lay below
+in the valley and stretched away over the seven hills. Often the boy
+would take a book and climb up there to read; and when the good
+grandfather missed him, he knew where to look, and standing under the
+tree the old man would call: "Come down, Marcus, come down and kiss your
+old grandfather--it is lonesome down here! Come down and read to your
+grandfather who loves his little Marcus!"
+
+Such an appeal as this was irresistible, and the boy, slight, slim and
+agile, would clamber over the side of the crow's-nest and down the
+ladder to the outstretched arms.
+
+The boy's father had died when he was only three months old, and the
+grandfather had adopted the child as his heir, and brought Lucilla, the
+widowed mother, and her baby to live in his house.
+
+Years before, the Consul's wife had passed away, and Faustina, his
+daughter, became the lady of the house. Lucilla and Faustina didn't get
+along very well together--no house is big enough for two families, some
+man has said. Lucilla was gentle, gracious, spiritual, modest and
+refined; Faustina was beautiful and not without intellect, but she was
+proud, domineering and fond of admiration. But be it said to the credit
+of the good old Consul, he was able to suffuse the whole place with
+love, and even if Faustina had a tantrum now and then, it did not last
+long.
+
+There were always visitors in the household--soldiers home on furloughs,
+governors on vacations, lawyers who came to consult the wise and
+judicial Verus.
+
+One visitor of note was a man by the name of Aurelius Antoninus. He was
+about forty years old as Marcus first remembered him--tall and straight,
+with a full, dark beard, and short, curly hair touched with gray. He was
+a quiet, self-contained man, and at first little Marcus was a bit afraid
+of him. Aurelius Antoninus had been a soldier, but he showed such a
+studious mind, and was so intent on doing the right thing that he was
+made an under-secretary, then private secretary to the Emperor, and
+finally he had been sent away to govern a rebellious province, and put
+down mutiny by wise diplomacy instead of by force of arms.
+
+Aurelius Antoninus was inclined towards the Stoics, although he didn't
+talk much about it. He usually ate but two meals a day, worked with the
+servants, and wrote this in his diary, "Men are made for each other:
+even the inferior for the superior, and these for the sake of one
+another."
+
+This philosophy of the Stoics rather appealed to the widow Lucilla,
+also, and she read Zeno with Aurelius Antoninus. Verus did not object to
+it--he had been a soldier and knew the advantages of doing without
+things and of being able to make the things you needed, and of living
+simply and being plain and direct in all your acts and speech. But
+Faustina laughed at it all--to her it was preposterous that one should
+wear plain clothing and no jewelry when he could buy the costliest and
+best; and why one should eschew wine and meat and live on brown bread
+and fruit and cold water, when he could just as well have spiced and
+costly dishes--all this was clear beyond her. Various fetes and banquets
+were given by Faustina, to which the young nobles were invited. She was
+a beautiful woman and never for a moment forgot it, and by some mistake
+or accident she got herself betrothed to three men at the same time. Two
+of these fought a duel and one was killed. The third man looked on and
+hoped both would be killed, for then he could have the woman. Faustina
+got this third man to challenge the survivor, and then by one of those
+strange somersaults of fate the unexpected occurred.
+
+Faustina and Aurelius Antoninus were married.
+
+It was a most queer mismating, for the man was plain, sincere and
+honorable, and she was almost everything else. Yet she had wit and she
+had beauty, and Aurelius had been living in the desert so long he
+imagined that all women were gentle and good. The Consul was very glad
+to unite his house with so fine and excellent a man as Aurelius; Lucilla
+cried for two days and more and little Marcus cried because his mother
+did, and neither cried because Faustina had gone away.
+
+But grief is transient.
+
+In a little over a year Antoninus and Faustina came back to Rome, and
+brought with them a little girl baby, Faustina Second. Marcus was very
+much interested in this baby, and made great plans about how they would
+play together when she got older.
+
+Among other visitors at the house of the old Consul often came the
+Emperor himself. Hadrian and Verus were Spaniards and had been soldiers
+together, and now Hadrian often liked to get away from the cares of
+State, and in the evening hide himself from the office-seekers and
+flattering parasites, in the quiet villa on Mount Coelius--he liked it
+here even better than at his own wonderful gardens at Tivoli. And little
+Marcus wasn't afraid of him, either. Marcus would sit on the Emperor's
+knee and listen to tales about hunting wild boars and bears, or men as
+wild. Then they would play tag or I-spy among the bushes and trees; and
+once Marcus dared the Emperor to climb the long ladder to the lookout in
+the big cedar. Hadrian accepted the challenge and climbed to the
+crow's-nest and cut his initials in the trunk of the tree.
+
+Instead of calling the boy Marcus Verus, the Emperor gave him the name
+"Verissimus," which means "the open-eyed truthful one," and this name
+stuck to Marcus for life.
+
+Between Antoninus and Marcus there grew up a very close friendship.
+Antoninus could scale the ladder up the tall cedar, three rungs at a
+time, and come down hand over hand without putting his foot on a rest.
+
+He and Marcus built another crow's-nest thirty feet above the first.
+They drew up the lumber by ropes, and Antoninus being sinewy and strong
+climbed up first, and with thongs and nails they fixed the boards in
+place, and made a rope ladder such as sailors make, that they could pull
+up after them so no one could reach them. When the kind old Emperor came
+to the villa they showed him what they had done. He said he would not
+try to climb up now as he had a touch of rheumatism. But a light was
+fixed in the upper lookout, drawn up by a cord, so they could signal to
+the Emperor down at the palace.
+
+Then Antoninus taught Marcus to ride horseback and pick up a spear off
+the ground, with his horse at a gallop. This was great sport for the
+Consul and the Emperor, who looked on, but they did not try it then,
+but said they would later on when they were feeling just right.
+
+And beside all this Aurelius Antoninus taught Marcus to read from
+Epictetus, and told him how this hunchback slave, Epictetus, who was
+owned by a man who had been a slave himself, was one of the sweetest,
+gentlest souls who had ever lived. Together they read the Stoic-slave
+philosopher and made notes from him. And so impressed was Marcus that,
+boy though he was, he adopted the simple robe of the Stoics, slept on a
+plank, and made his life and language plain, truthful and direct.
+
+This was all rather amusing to those near him--to all except Antoninus
+and the boy's mother. The others said, "Leave him alone and he'll get
+over it."
+
+Faustina was still fond of admiration--the simple, studious ways of her
+husband were not to her liking. He was twenty years her senior, and she
+demanded gaiety as her right. Her delight was to tread the borderline of
+folly, and see how close she could come to the brink and not step off.
+Julius Cæsar's wife was put away on suspicion, but Faustina was worse
+than that! She would go down to the city to masquerades, leaving her
+little girl at home, and be gone for three days.
+
+When she returned Aurelius Antoninus spoke no word of anger or reproof.
+Her father said to her, "Beware! your husband's patience has a limit. If
+he divorces you, I shall not blame him; and even if he should kill you,
+Roman law will not punish him!"
+
+But long years after, Marcus, in looking back on those days, wrote: "His
+patience knew no limit; he treated her as a perverse child, and he once
+said to me: 'I pity and love her. I will not put her away--this were
+selfish. How can her follies injure me? We are what we are, and no one
+can harm us but ourselves. The mistakes of those near us afford us an
+opportunity for self-control--we will not imitate their errors, but
+rather strive to avoid them. In this way what might be a great
+humiliation has its benefits.'"
+
+Let no one imagine, however, that the tolerance of Antoninus was the
+soft acquiescence of weakness. After his death Marcus wrote: "Whatsoever
+excellent thing he had planned to do, he carried out with a persistency
+that nothing could divert. If he punished men, it was by allowing them
+to be led by their own folly--his foresight, wisdom and calm
+deliberation were beyond those of any man I ever knew."
+
+The studious, direct and manly ways of Marcus were not cast aside when
+he put on the toga virilis, as Faustina had predicted. In spite of the
+difference in their ages, Antoninus and Marcus mutually sustained each
+other.
+
+Little Faustina was much more like her father than her mother, and very
+early showed her preference for her father's society. Marcus was her
+playmate and taught her to ride a pony astride, just as her father had
+taught him. The three would often ride over to the village of Lorium,
+twelve miles from Rome, where Antoninus had a summer villa. At Lanuvium,
+near at hand, the Emperor spent a part of his time, and he would
+occasionally join the party and listen to Marcus recite from Cicero and
+Cæsar.
+
+When Marcus was sixteen, Hadrian appointed him prefect of festivities in
+Rome, to take the place of the regular officer, a man of years, who was
+out of the city. So well did Marcus fill the place and make up his
+report, that when they again met, the old Emperor kissed his cheek,
+calling him, "My brave Verissimus," and said, "If I had a son, I would
+want him just like you."
+
+Not long after this the Emperor was taken violently ill. He called his
+counselors about his bedside and directed that Aurelius Antoninus should
+be his successor, and that, further, Antoninus should adopt Marcus
+Verus, so that Marcus should succeed Aurelius Antoninus.
+
+Hadrian loved Marcus for his own sake, and he loved him, too, for the
+sake of the grandfather, his old soldier comrade, Annius Verus; and
+beside that he was intent on preserving the Spanish strain.
+
+In a short time Hadrian passed away, and Aurelius Antoninus was crowned
+Emperor of Rome, and Marcus Verus, aged seventeen, slim, slender and
+studious, took the name, Marcus Aurelius.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The new reign did not begin under very favorable auspices. There was a
+prejudice against the Spanish blood, and Hadrian had alienated some of
+the aristocrats by measures they considered too democratic.
+
+Aurelius Antoninus knew of these prejudices toward his predecessor and
+he boldly met them by carrying the ashes of Hadrian to the Senate,
+demanding that the dead Emperor should be enrolled among the gods. So
+earnest and convincing was his eulogy of the great man gone, that a vote
+was taken and the resolution passed without a dissenting voice. This
+gives us a slight clew to the genesis of the gods, and also reveals to
+us the character of Antoninus. He so impressed the Senate that this
+honorable body thought best to waive all matters of difference, and in
+pretty compliment they voted to bestow on the new Emperor the degree of
+"Pius." Antoninus Pius was a man born to rule--in little things,
+lenient, but firm at the right time. Faustina still had her little
+social dissipations, but as she was not allowed to mix in affairs of
+State, her pink person was not a political factor.
+
+Marcus Aurelius was only seventeen years old: his close studies had
+robbed him of a bit of the robust health a youth should have. But
+horseback-riding and daily outdoor games finally got him back into good
+condition. He was the secretary and companion of the Emperor wherever he
+went.
+
+Great responsibilities confronted these two strong men. In point of
+intellect and aspiration they were far beyond the people they
+governed--so far, indeed, that they were almost isolated. There was a
+multitude of slaves and consequently there was a feeling everywhere that
+useful work was degrading. The tendency of the slave-owner is always
+toward profligacy and conspicuous waste. To do away with slavery was out
+of the question--that was a matter of time and education--the ruler can
+never afford to get much in advance of his people. The court was
+infected with parasites in the way of informers and busybodies who knew
+no way to thrive except through intrigue. Superstitions were taught by
+hypocritical priests in order to make the people pay tithes; and
+attached to the state religion were soothsayers, fortune-tellers,
+astrologers, gamblers and many pretenders who waxed fat by ministering
+to ignorance and depravity. These were the cheerful parasites mentioned
+as "money-changers" a hundred years before, that infested the entrance
+to every temple.
+
+Many long consultations did the Emperor and his adopted son have
+concerning the best policy to pursue. They could have issued an edict
+and swept the wrongs out of existence, but they knew that folly sprouts
+from a disordered brain, and so they did not treat a symptom: the
+disease was ignorance, the symptom, superstition. For themselves they
+kept an esoteric doctrine, and for the many they did what they could.
+
+Twenty-three years of probation lay before Marcus Aurelius--years of
+study, work, and patient endeavor. He shared in all the honors of the
+Emperor and bore his part of the burden as well. Never did he thirst for
+more power--the responsibilities of the situation saddened him--there
+was so much to be done and he could do so little. Well does Dean Farrar
+call him "a seeker after God."
+
+The office of young Marcus Aurelius at first was that of Questor, which
+literally means a messenger, but the word with the Romans meant more--an
+emissary or an ambassador. When Marcus was eighteen he read to the
+Senate all speeches and messages from the Emperor; and in a few years
+more he wrote the messages as well as delivered them. And all the time
+his education was being carried along by competent instructors.
+
+One of these teachers, Fronto, has come down to us, his portrait well
+etched on history's tablets, because he saved all the letters written
+him by Marcus Aurelius; and his grandchildren published them in order to
+show the excellence of true scientific teaching. That old Fronto was a
+dear old dear, these letters do fully attest. When Marcus went away on a
+little journey, even to Lorium, he wrote a letter to Fronto telling
+about the trip--the sheep by the wayside, the dogs that herded them, the
+shower they saw coming across the Campagna, and incidentally a little
+freshman philosophy mixed in, for Fronto had cautioned his pupil always
+to write out a great thought when it came, for fear he would never have
+another. Marcus was a sprightly letter-writer, and must have been a
+quick observer, and Fronto's gentle claims that he made the man are
+worthy of consideration. As a literary exercise the daily theme,
+prompted by love, can never be improved upon. The way to learn to write
+is to write. And Pronto, who resorted to many little tricks in order to
+get his pupil to express himself, was a teacher whose name should be
+written high. The correspondence-school has many advantages--Fronto
+purposely sent his pupil away or absented himself, that the carefully
+formulated or written thought might take the place of the free and easy
+conversation. In one letter Marcus ends: "The day was perfect but for
+one thing--you were not here. But then if you were here, I would not now
+have the pleasure of writing to you, so thus is your philosophy proved:
+that all good is equalized, and love grows through separation!" This
+sounds a bit preachy, but is valuable, as it reveals the man to whom it
+is written: the person to whom we write dictates the message.
+
+Fronto's habit of giving a problem to work out was quite as good a
+teaching plan as anything we have to offer now. Thus: "An ambassador of
+Rome visiting an outlying province attended a gladiatorial contest. And
+one of the fighters being indisposed, the ambassador replied to a taunt
+by putting on a coat of mail and going into the ring to kill the lion.
+Question, was this action commendable? If so, why, and if not, why
+not?"
+
+The proposition was one that would appeal at once to a young man, and
+thus did Fronto lead his pupils to think and express.
+
+Another teacher that Marcus had was Rusticus, a blunt old farmer turned
+pedagog, who has added a word to our language. His pupils were called
+Rusticana, and later plain rustics. That Rusticus developed in Marcus a
+deal of plain, sturdy commonsense there is no doubt. Rusticus had a way
+of stripping a subject of its gloss and verbiage--going straight to the
+vital point of every issue. For the wisdom of Marcus' legal opinions
+Rusticus deserves more than passing credit.
+
+For the youth who was destined to be the next Emperor of Rome, there was
+no dearth of society if he chose to accept it. Managing mammas were on
+every corner, and kind kinsmen consented to arrange matters with this
+heiress or that. For the frivolities of society Marcus had no use--his
+hours were filled with useful work or application to his books. His
+father and Fronto we find were both constantly urging him to get out
+more in the sunshine and meet more people, and not bother too much about
+the books.
+
+How best to curtail over-application, I am told, is a problem that
+seldom faces a teacher.
+
+As for society as a matrimonial bazaar, Marcus Aurelius could not see
+that it had its use. He was afraid of it--afraid of himself, perhaps. He
+loved the little Faustina. They had been comrades together, and played
+"keep house" under the olive-trees at Lorium; and had ridden their
+ponies over the hills. Once Marcus and Faustina, on a ride across the
+country, bought a lamb out of the arms of a shepherd, and kept it until
+it grew great curling horns, and made visitors scale the wall or climb
+trees. Then three priests led it away to sacrifice, and Marcus and
+Faustina fell into each other's arms and rained tears down each other's
+backs, and refused to be comforted. What if their father was an Emperor,
+and Marcus would be some day! It would not bring back Beppo, with his
+innocent lamblike ways, and make him get down on his knees and wag his
+tail when they fed him out of a pail! Beppo always got on his knees to
+eat, and showed his love and humility before he grew his horns and
+reached the age of indiscretion; then he became awfully wicked, and it
+took three stout priests to lead him away and sacrifice him to the gods
+for his own good!
+
+But gradually the grass grew on Beppo's make-believe grave in the
+garden, and Fronto's problems filled the vacuum in their hearts. Fronto
+gave his lessons to Marcus, and Marcus gave them to Faustina--thus do we
+keep things by giving them away.
+
+But problems greater than pet sheep grown ribald and reckless were to
+confront Marcus and Faustina. They had both been betrothed to others,
+years before, and this they now resented. They talked of this much, and
+then suddenly ceased to talk of it, and each evaded mentioning it, and
+pretended they never thought of it. Then they explosively began
+again--began as suddenly to talk of it, and always when they met they
+mentioned it. Folks called them brother and sister--they were not
+brother and sister, only cousins.
+
+Finally the matter was brought to Antoninus, and he pretended that he
+had never thought about it; but in fact he had thought of little else
+for a long time. And Antoninus said that if they loved each other very
+much, and he was sure they did, why, it was the will of the gods that
+they should marry, and he never interfered with the will of the gods; so
+he kissed them both and cried a few foolish tears, a thing an Emperor
+should never do.
+
+So they were married at the country seat at Lorium, out under the
+orange-trees as was often the custom, for orange-trees are green the
+year 'round, and bear fruit and flowers at the same time, and the
+flowers are very sweet, and the fruit is both beautiful and useful--and
+these things symbol constancy and fruitfulness and good luck, and that
+is why we yet have orange-blossoms at weddings and play the "Lohengrin
+March," which is orange-trees expressed in sweet sounds.
+
+Marcus was only twenty, and Faustina could not have been over
+sixteen--we do not know her exact age. There are stories to the effect
+that the wife of Marcus Aurelius severely tried her husband's temper at
+times, but these tales seem to have arisen through a confusion of the
+two Faustinas. The elder Faustina was the one who set the merry pace in
+frivolity, and once said that any woman with a husband twenty years her
+senior must be allowed a lover or two--goodness gracious!
+
+As far as we know, the younger Faustina was a most loyal and loving
+wife, the mother of a full dozen children. Coins issued by Marcus
+Aurelius stamped with the features of his wife, and the inscription
+Concordia, Faustina and Venus Felix, attest the felicity, or "felixity,"
+of the marriage.
+
+Their oldest boy, Commodus, was very much like his grandmother,
+Faustina, and a man who knows all about the Law of Heredity tells me
+that children are much more apt to resemble their grandparents than
+their father and mother.
+
+I believe I once said that no house is big enough for two families, but
+this truth is like the Greek verb--it has many exceptions. In the same
+house with Emperor Antoninus Pius dwelt Lucilla, mother of Marcus, and
+Marcus and his wife. And they were all very happy--but life was rather
+more peaceful after the death of Faustina, the elder, which occurred a
+few years after her husband became Emperor.
+
+She could not endure prosperity.
+
+But her husband mourned her death and made a public speech in eulogy of
+her, determined that only the best should be remembered of one who had
+been the wife of an Emperor and the mother of his children. As far as
+we know, Antoninus never spoke a word concerning his wife except in
+praise, not even when she left his house to be gone for months.
+
+It was Ouida, she of the aqua-fortis ink, who said, "A woman married to
+a man as good as Antoninus must have been very miserable, for while men
+who are thoroughly bad are not lovable, yet a man who is not
+occasionally bad is unendurable." And so Ouida's heart went out in
+sympathy and condolence to the two Faustinas, who wedded the only two
+men mentioned in Roman history who were infinitely wise and good.
+
+In one of his essays, Richard Steele writes this, "No woman ever loved a
+man through life with a mighty love if the man did not occasionally
+abuse her." I give the remark for what it is worth. However, Montesquieu
+somewhere says that the chief objection to heaven is its monotony; so
+possibly there may be something in the Ouida-Steele philosophy--but of
+this I really can't say, knowing nothing about the subject, myself.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Happy is the man who has no history. The reign of Antoninus Pius was
+peaceful and prosperous. No great wars nor revulsions occurred, and the
+times made for education and excellence. Antoninus worked to conserve
+the good, and that he succeeded, Gibbon says, there is no doubt. He left
+the country in better condition than he found it, and he could have
+truthfully repeated the words of Pericles, "I have made no person wear
+crape."
+
+But there came a day when Antoninus was stricken by the hand of death.
+The captain of the guard came to him and asked for the password for the
+night. "Equanimity," replied the Emperor, and turning on his side, sank
+into sleep, to awake no more. His last word symbols the guiding impulse
+of his life. Well does Renan say: "Simple, loving, full of sweet gaiety,
+Antoninus was a philosopher without saying so, almost without knowing
+it. Marcus was a philosopher, but often consciously, and he became a
+philosopher by study and reflection, aided and encouraged by the older
+man. You can not consider the one man and leave the other out, and the
+early contention that Antoninus was, in fact, the father of Marcus has
+at least a poetic and spiritual basis in truth."
+
+There was much in Renan's suggestions. The greatest man is he who works
+his philosophy up into life--this is better than to talk about it. We
+only discuss that to which we have not attained, and the virtues we
+talk most of are those beyond us. The ideal outstrips the actual. But
+it is no discredit that a man pictures more than he realizes--such a one
+is preparing the way for others. Marcus Antoninus has been a guiding
+star--an inspiration--to untold millions.
+
+Marcus Aurelius was forty years old when he became Emperor of Rome. At
+the age of forty a man is safe, if ever: character is formed, and what
+he will do or become, can be safely presaged.
+
+More than once Rome has repudiated the man in the direct line of
+accession to the throne, and before Marcus Aurelius took the reins of
+government he asked the Senate to ratify the people's choice, and thus
+make it the choice of the gods, and this was done.
+
+As Emperor, we find Marcus endeavored to carry out the policy of his
+predecessor. He did not favor expansion, but hoped by peace and
+propitiation to cement the empire and thus work for education, harmony
+and prosperity.
+
+It is interesting to see how Marcus Aurelius in the year One Hundred
+Sixty-four was cudgeling his brains concerning problems about which we
+yet argue and grow red in the face. The Emperor was also Chief Justice,
+and questions were being constantly brought to him to decide. From him
+there was no appeal, and his decisions made the law upon which all
+lesser judges based their rulings. And curiously enough we are dealing
+most extensively in judge-made law even today.
+
+One vexed question that confronted Marcus was the lessening number of
+marriages, with a consequent increase in illegitimate births and a
+gradual dwindling of the free population. He seems to have disliked this
+word illegitimate, for he says, "All children are beautiful
+blessings--sent by the gods." But people who were legally married
+objected to this view, and said to recognize children born out of
+wedlock as entitled to all the privileges of citizenship is virtually to
+do away with legal marriage. As a compromise, Marcus decided to
+recognize all people as married who said they were married. This is
+exactly our common-law marriage as it exists in various States today.
+
+However, a man could put away his wife at will, and by recording the
+fact with the nearest pretor, the act was legalized. It will thus be
+seen that if a man could marry at will and put away his wife at will,
+there was really no marriage beyond that of nature. To meet the issue,
+and prevent fickle and unjust men from taking advantage of women, Marcus
+decided that the pretor could refuse to record the desired divorce, if
+he saw fit, and demand reasons. We then for the first time get a divorce
+trial, and on appeal to Marcus, he decided that if the man were in the
+wrong, he must still support the injured wife.
+
+Then, for the first time, we find women asking for a divorce. Now,
+nearly three-fourths of all divorces are granted to women; but at first,
+that a woman should want marital freedom caused a howl of merriment.
+Marcus was the first Roman Emperor to allow women the right of petition,
+and the privilege, too, of practising law, for Capitolanus cites various
+instances of women coming to ask for justice, and women friends coming
+with them to help plead their case, and the Emperor of Rome, leaning his
+tired head on his arm, listening for hours with great patience. We also
+hear of petitions for damages being presented for failure to keep a
+promise to marry--the action being brought against the girl's father.
+This would be thought a trifle strange, but an action against a woman
+for breach of promise is quite in order yet.
+
+Recently the Honorable Henry Ballard of Vermont won heavy damages
+against a coy and dallying heiress who had played pitch and toss with a
+good man's heart. The case was carried to the United States Supreme
+Court and judgment sustained.
+
+The question of marriage and divorce now in the United States is almost
+precisely where it was in Rome in the time of Marcus Aurelius. No two
+States have the same marriage-laws, and marriages which are illegal in
+one State may be made legal in another. Yet with us, any court of
+jurisdiction may declare any marriage illegal, or set any divorce aside.
+What makes marriage and what constitutes divorce are matters of opinion
+in the mind of the judge. We have gone a bit further than Marcus,
+though, in that we allow couples to marry if they wish, yet divorce is
+denied if both parties desire it. The fact that they want it is
+construed as proof that they should not have it. We meet the issue,
+however, by connivance of the lawyers, who are officers of the court,
+and a legal fiction is inaugurated by allowing a little bird to tell the
+judge what decision will be satisfactory to both sides. And in States or
+countries where no divorce is allowed, marriage can be annulled if you
+know how--see Ruskin versus Ruskin, Coleridge, J.
+
+Our zealous New Thought friends, who clamor to have marriage made
+difficult and divorce easy, forget that the whole question has been
+threshed over for three thousand years, and all schemes tried. The
+Romans issued marriage-licenses, but before doing so a pretor passed on
+the fitness of the candidates for each other. This was so embarrassing
+to many coy couples that they just waived formal proceedings and set up
+housekeeping. To declare these people lawbreakers, Marcus Aurelius said,
+would put half of Rome in limbo, just as, if we should technically
+enforce all laws, it would send most members of the Legislature to the
+penitentiary. So the Emperor declared de-facto marriage de jure, and for
+a short time succeeded in striking out the word illegitimate as applied
+to a person, on the ground that, in justice, no act of a parent could be
+charged up against and punished in the offspring.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Men who make laws have forever to watch most closely and dance
+attendance on Nature. Laws which fly in the face of Nature are gently
+waived or conveniently forgotten. Should Chief Justice Fuller issue an
+injunction restraining all men from coming within a quarter of a mile of
+a woman, on penalty of death, we would all place ourselves in contempt
+in an hour; and should the army try to enforce the order, we would
+smother Justice Fuller in his wool-sack and hang his effigy on a
+sour-apple tree. Law isn't worth the paper it is written on unless it
+embodies the will and natural tendencies of the governed. Where poaching
+is popular, no law can stop it. Marriage is easy, and divorce difficult,
+because this is Nature's plan. The natural law of attraction brings men
+and women together, and it is difficult to separate them. Natural things
+are easy, and artificial ones difficult. Most couples who desire freedom
+only think they do: what they really want is a vacation; but they would
+not separate for good if they could. It is hard to part--people who have
+lived together grow to need each other. They want some one to quarrel
+with.
+
+Cæsar Augustus, in his close study of character, introduced a limited
+divorce. That is, in case of a family quarrel, he ordered the couple to
+live apart for six months as a penalty. Quintilian says that usually
+before the expired time the man and woman were surreptitiously living
+together again, at which the court quietly winked, and finally this
+form of penalty had to be abandoned because it made the courts
+ridiculous.
+
+Men and women do not get married because marriage is legal, nor do they
+continue living together because divorce is difficult. They marry
+because they desire to, and they do not separate because they do not
+want to. The task that confronts the legislator is to find out what the
+people want to do, and then legalize it.
+
+In Rome, the custom of the parties divorcing themselves was prevalent,
+and the courts were called upon to ratify the act, just to give the
+matter respectability. Below a certain stratum in society, the formality
+of legal marriage and divorce was waived entirely, just as it is
+largely, now, among our colored population in the South. During the
+French Revolution, the same custom largely obtained in France. And about
+the year One Hundred Fifty in Rome there was danger that the people
+would overlook the majesty of the law entirely in their domestic
+affairs. This condition is what prompted Marcus Aurelius to recognize as
+legal the common-law marriage and say if a couple called themselves
+husband and wife, they were. And for a time, if they said they were
+divorced, they were. But as a mortgage owned by a man on his own
+property cancels the debt, and legally there is no mortgage, so if the
+people could get married at will and divorce themselves at their
+convenience, there really was no legal marriage. Thus the matter was
+argued. So Marcus adopted the plan of making marriage easy and divorce
+difficult, and this has been the policy in all civilized countries ever
+since.
+
+It is very evident, however, that Marcus Aurelius looked forward to a
+time when men and women would be wise enough, and just enough, to
+arrange their own affairs, without calling on the police to ratify
+either their friendships or their misunderstandings. He says: "Love is
+beautiful, and that a man and a woman loving each other should live
+together is the will of God, but if there comes a time when they can not
+live in peace, let them part. To have no relationship is not a disgrace;
+to have wrong relations is, for disgrace means lack of grace, discord,
+and love is harmony."
+
+Marcus Aurelius tried the plan of probationary marriages; and to offset
+this he also introduced the Augustinian plan of probationary
+divorces--that is, the interlocutory decree. This scheme has recently
+been adopted in several States in America with the avowed intent of
+preventing fraud in divorce procedure, but actually the logic of the
+situation is the same now as in the time of Marcus Aurelius--it
+postpones the final decree so as to prevent the couple from becoming the
+victims of their own rashness, and to give them an opportunity to become
+reconciled if possible.
+
+So anxious was Marcus Aurelius to decide justly with his people that he
+found himself swamped with cases of every sort and description. He tried
+to pass upon each case by its merits, regardless of law and precedent.
+Then other judges construed his decisions as law, and the lesser courts
+cited the upper ones, until Gibbon says, "There grew up such a mass of
+judge-made laws that a skilful lawyer could prove anything, and legal
+practise swung on the ability to cite similar cases and call attention
+to desired decisions."
+
+In America we are now back exactly to the same condition. A lawyer in
+New York State requires over fourteen thousand law-books if he would
+cover all the ground; and his business is to make it easy for the judge
+to dispense justice and not dispense with law. That is to say, before a
+judge can decide a case, he must be able to back up his opinion by
+precedent. Judges are not elected to deal out justice between man and
+man; they are elected to decide on points of law. Law is often a great
+disadvantage to a judge--it may hamper justice--and in America there
+must surely soon come a day when we will make a bonfire of every
+law-book in the land, and electing our judges for life, we will make the
+judiciary free. We will then require our lawyers and judges to read, and
+pass examinations on Browning's "Ring and the Book," and none other. And
+if we would follow the Aurelian suggestion of remitting all direct taxes
+to every citizen who had not been plaintiff in a lawsuit for ten years,
+we would gradually get something approaching pure justice. The people
+must be educated to decide quietly and calmly their own disputes, and
+this can be done only by placing an obvious penalty on litigation.
+Progress in the future will consist in having less law, and fulfilment
+will be reached when we have no law at all--each man governing himself,
+and being willing that his neighbor shall do the same. Trouble arises
+largely from each man regarding himself as his brother's keeper, and
+ceasing to be his friend. Marcus Aurelius, the wise judge, saw that most
+litigation is foolish and absurd--both parties are at fault, and both
+right. And to bring about the good time when men shall live in peace, he
+began earnestly to govern himself. His ideal was a state where men would
+need no governing. Hence his "Meditations," a book which Dean Farrar
+says is not inferior to the New Testament in its lofty aim and purity of
+conception.
+
+Every great book is an evolution: Marcus had been getting ready to write
+this immortal volume for nearly half a century. And now in his
+fifty-seventh year he found himself in the desert of Asia at the head of
+the army, endeavoring to put down an insurrection of various barbaric
+tribes. Later, the seat of war was shifted to the north. The enemy
+struck and retreated, and danced around him as the Boers fought the
+English in South Africa.
+
+But Marcus Aurelius had time to think, and so with no books near and all
+memoranda far away, he began to write out his best thoughts. At first he
+expressed just for his own satisfaction, but later, as the work
+progressed, we see that its value grew upon him, and it was his
+intention to put it in systematic form for posterity. And while working
+at this task, the exposures of field and camp, and the business of war,
+in which he had no heart, worked upon him so adversely that he sickened
+and died, aged fifty-nine.
+
+His body was carried back to Rome and placed by the side of that of his
+beloved adopted father, Antoninus Pius. And so he sleeps, but the
+precious legacy of the "Meditations," written during those last two
+years of travel, turmoil and strife, is ours.
+
+A few quotations seem in order:
+
+     Remember, on every occasion which leads thee to vexation, to apply
+     this principle: not that this is a misfortune, but that to bear it
+     nobly is good fortune.
+
+     Things do not touch the soul, for they are eternal, and remain
+     immovable; but our perturbations come only from the opinion which
+     is within.... The Universe is transformation; life is opinion.
+
+     To the jaundiced, honey tastes bitter; and to those bitten by mad
+     dogs, water causes fear; and to little children, the ball is a fine
+     thing. Why then am I angry? Dost thou think that a false opinion
+     has less power than the bile in the jaundiced, or the poison in him
+     who is bitten by a mad dog?
+
+     How easy it is to repel and to wipe away every impression which is
+     troublesome and unsuitable, and immediately to be in all
+     tranquillity!
+
+     All things come from the universal Ruling Power, either directly or
+     by way of consequence. And accordingly the lion's gaping jaws, and
+     that which is poisonous, and every hurtful thing, as a thorn, as
+     mud, are after-products of the grand and beautiful. Do not
+     therefore imagine that they are of another kind from that which
+     thou dost venerate, but form a just opinion of the source of all.
+
+     Pass through the rest of life like one who has entrusted to the
+     gods, with his whole soul, all that he has, making himself neither
+     the tyrant nor the slave of any man.
+
+     Never value anything as profitable to thyself which shall compel
+     thee to break thy promise, to lose thy self-respect, to hate any
+     man, to suspect, to curse, to act the hypocrite, to desire anything
+     which needs walls and curtains.
+
+     I am thankful to the gods that I was subjected to a ruler and a
+     father who was able to take away all pride from me, and to bring me
+     to the knowledge that it is possible for a man to live in a palace
+     without wanting either guards or embroidered dresses, or torches
+     and statues, and such-like show; but that it is in such a man's
+     power to bring himself very near to the fashion of a private
+     person, without being, for this reason, either meaner in thought or
+     more remiss in action, with respect to the things which must be
+     done for the public interest in a manner that befits a ruler.
+
+     What more dost thou want when thou hast done a man a service? Art
+     thou not content that thou hast done something conformable to thy
+     nature, and dost thou seek to be paid for it? Just as if the eye
+     demanded a recompense for seeing, or the feet for walking. As a
+     horse when he has run, a dog when he has traced the game, a bee
+     when it has made the honey, so a man, when he has done a good act,
+     does not call out for others to come and see, but goes on to
+     another act, as a vine goes on to produce again the grapes in
+     season.
+
+     Accustom thyself to attend carefully to what is said by another,
+     and as much as it is possible, be in the speaker's mind.
+
+     Some things are hurrying into existence, and others are hurrying
+     out of it; and of that which is coming into existence, part is
+     already extinguished. Motions and changes are continually renewing
+     the world, just as the uninterrupted course of time is always
+     renewing the infinite duration of ages.
+
+     Understand that every man is worth just so much as the things are
+     worth about which he busies himself.
+
+     Wickedness does no harm at all to the universe--it is only harmful
+     to him who has it in his power to be released from it.
+
+     Nothing is more wretched than a man who traverses everything in a
+     round, and pries into the things beneath the earth, as the poet
+     says, and seeks by conjecture what is in the minds of his
+     neighbors, without perceiving that it is sufficient to attend to
+     the deity within him, and to reverence it sincerely.
+
+     The prayers of Marcus Aurelius to the gods are for one thing
+     only--that their will be done. All else is vain, all else is
+     rebellion against the universe itself. Our form of worship should
+     be like this: Everything harmonizes with me which is harmonious to
+     thee, O Universe. Nothing for me is too early nor too late, which
+     is in due time for thee. Everything is fruit to me which thy
+     seasons bring, O Nature: from thee are all things, in thee are all
+     things, to thee all things return.
+
+     In the morning when thou risest unwillingly, let this thought be
+     present--I am rising to the work of a human being. Why, then, am I
+     dissatisfied if I am going to do the things for which I exist, and
+     for which I was brought into the world? Or have I been made for
+     this, to lie in the bedclothes and keep myself warm? But this is
+     more pleasant. Dost thou exist, then, to take thy pleasure, and not
+     for action or exertion? Dost thou not see the little plants, the
+     little birds, the ants, the spiders, the bees, working together to
+     put in order their several parts of the universe? And art thou
+     unwilling to do the work of a human being, and dost thou not make
+     haste to do that which is according to thy nature?
+
+     Judge every word and deed which are according to Nature to be fit
+     for thee, and be not diverted by the blame which follows.... But if
+     a thing is good to be done or said, do not consider it unworthy of
+     thee.
+
+     Since it is possible that thou mayest depart from life this very
+     moment, regulate every act and thought accordingly.... Death
+     certainly, and life, honor and dishonor, pain and pleasure, all
+     these things equally happen to good men and bad, being things which
+     make us neither better nor worse. Therefore they are neither good
+     nor evil.
+
+     To say all in a word, everything which belongs to the body is a
+     stream, and what belongs to the soul is a dream and vapor; and life
+     is a warfare, and a stranger's sojourn, and after fame is oblivion.
+     What, then, is that which is able to enrich a man? One thing, and
+     only one--philosophy. But this consists in keeping the guardian
+     spirit within a man free from violence and unharmed, superior to
+     pains and pleasures, doing nothing without a purpose, nor yet
+     falsely, and with hypocrisy ... accepting all that happens and all
+     that is allotted ... and finally waiting for death with a cheerful
+     mind.
+
+     If thou findest in human life anything better than justice, truth,
+     temperance, fortitude, and, in a word, than thine own soul's
+     satisfaction in the things which it enables thee to do according to
+     right reason, and in the condition that is assigned to thee without
+     thy own choice; if, I say, thou seest anything better than this,
+     turn to it with all thy soul, and enjoy that which thou hast found
+     to be the best. But ... if thou findest everything else smaller and
+     of less value than this, give place to nothing else.... Simply and
+     freely choose the better, and hold to it.
+
+     Men seek retreats for themselves, houses in the country, seashores,
+     and mountains; and thou too art wont to desire such things very
+     much. But this is altogether a mark of the most common sort of men,
+     for it is in thy power whenever thou shalt choose to retire into
+     thyself. For nowhere either with more quiet or more freedom from
+     trouble does a man retire than into his own soul, particularly when
+     he has within him such thoughts that by looking into them he is
+     immediately in perfect tranquillity--which is nothing else than the
+     good ordering of the mind.
+
+     Unhappy am I, because this has happened to me? Not so, but happy am
+     I though this has happened to me, because I continue free from
+     pain; neither crushed by the present nor fearing the future.
+
+     Be cheerful, and seek no external help, nor the tranquillity which
+     others give. A man must stand erect, not be kept erect by others.
+
+     Be like the promontory against which the waves continually break,
+     but it stands firm and tames the fury of the water around it.
+
+     It is not fit that I should give myself pain, for I have never
+     intentionally given pain even to another.
+
+
+
+
+IMMANUEL KANT
+
+
+     The canons of scientific evidence justify us neither in accepting
+     nor rejecting the ideas upon which morality and religion repose.
+     Both parties to the dispute beat the air; they worry their own
+     shadow; for they pass from Nature into the domain of speculation,
+     where their dogmatic grips find nothing to lay hold upon. The
+     shadows which they hew to pieces grow together in a moment like the
+     heroes in Valhalla, to rejoice again in bloodless battles.
+     Metaphysics can no longer claim to be the cornerstone of religion
+     and morality. But if she can not be the Atlas that bears the moral
+     world she can furnish a magic defense. Around the ideas of religion
+     she throws her bulwark of invisibility; and the sword of the
+     skeptic and the battering-ram of the materialist fall harmless on
+     vacuity.
+
+                                                --_Immanuel Kant_
+
+[Illustration: IMMANUEL KANT]
+
+
+We find that most men fit easily into types. You describe to me one
+Durham cow and you picture all Durham cows. So it is with men: they
+belong to breeds, which we politely call denominations, sects or
+parties. Tell me the man's sect, and I know his dress, his habit of
+life, his thought. His dress is the uniform of his party, and his
+thought is that which is ordered and prescribed. Dull indeed is the
+intellect which can not correctly prophesy the opinions to which this
+man will arrive on any subject.
+
+Durham cows are not exactly alike, I well know, but a trifle more length
+of leg, a variation in color, or an off-angle of the horn, and that cow
+is forever barred from exhibition as a Durham. She is fit only for beef,
+and the first butcher that makes a bid takes her, hide and horns.
+
+Members of sects do not think exactly alike, but there are well-defined
+limits of thought and action, beyond which they dare not stray lest the
+butcher bag them. In joining a sect they have given bonds to uniformity,
+and have signed their willingness to think and act like all other
+members of the sect.
+
+Herbert Spencer deals with this "jiner" propensity in man, and describes
+it as a manifestation of the herding instinct in animals. It is a
+combination for mutual protection--a social contract, each one waiving a
+part of his personality in order to secure a supposed benefit. A herd of
+cattle can stand against a pack of wolves, but a cow alone is doomed.
+
+Few men indeed can stand against the pack. Wise are the many who seek
+safety in numbers! Think of those who have stood out alone and expressed
+their individuality, and you count on your fingers God's patriots dead
+and turned to dust.
+
+The paradox of things is shown in that the entrenched many, having found
+safety in aggregation, pay their debt of homage to the bold few who
+lived their lives and paid the penalty by death.
+
+Across the disk of existence, each decade, there glide five hundred
+million souls, and disappear forever in the dim and dusk of the eternity
+that lies behind. Out of the bare handful that are remembered, we
+cherish only the memories of those who stood alone and expressed their
+honest, inmost thought. And this thought is, always and forever, the
+thought of liberty. Exile, ostracism, death, have been their fate, and
+on the smoke of martyr-fires their souls mounted to immortality.
+
+Future generations often confuse these men with Deity, the Maker of the
+Worlds. And thus do we arrive at truth by indirection, for in very fact
+these were the Sons of God, vitalized by Divinity, part and parcel of
+the Power that guides the planets on their way and holds the worlds in
+space. Upon their tombs we carve a single word: _Savior_.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Kant was sixty years old before he was known to any extent beyond his
+native town; but so fast then did his fame travel that at his death it
+was recognized that the greatest thinker of the world had passed away.
+Kant founded no school; but Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, Herde and
+Schopenhauer were all his children--and all but Schopenhauer showed
+their humanity by denouncing him, for men are prone to revile that which
+has benefited them most. Kant marks an epoch and all thinkers who came
+after him are his debtors. His philosophy has passed into the current
+coin of knowledge.
+
+Kant's lifelong researches revolve around four propositions:
+
+  1. Who am I?
+  2. What am I?
+  3. What can I do?
+  4. What can I know?
+
+The answer to Number Four is that I can not know anything. That is to
+say, the wise man is the man who knows that he does not know. And this
+disposes of Number One and Number Two, leaving only Number Three for our
+consideration. It took, however, a good many years and a vast amount of
+study and writing for Kant to thus simplify. For years he toiled with
+algebraic formulas and syllogistic theorems before he concluded that the
+best wisdom of life lies in simplification, not complexity.
+
+"What can I do?" resolves itself into, "What must I do?" And the answer
+is: You must do four things in order to retain your place as a normal
+being upon this earth: eat, work, associate with your kind, rest. Just
+four things we must do, and outside of this everything is incidental,
+accidental, irrelevant and inconsequential. Then how to eat, work,
+associate and rest wisely and best constitutes life. Every man should be
+free to work out these four equations for himself, his freedom ending
+where another man's rights begin. To these four questions we should
+bring our highest reason, our ripest experience and our best endeavor.
+As for himself we know that Kant made a schedule of life which evolved a
+sickly boy into a reasonably strong man who banished pain, sorrow and
+regret from his existence and lived a long life of deep, quiet
+satisfaction, sane to the end, watching every symptom of approaching
+dissolution with keen interest, and at the last passing into quiet
+sleep, his spirit gliding peacefully away, perhaps to answer those two
+great questions which he said were unanswerable here: "Who am I?" "What
+am I?"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Immanuel Kant was born in Seventeen Hundred Twenty-four at the City of
+Konigsberg, in the northeastern corner of Prussia. There he received his
+education; there he was a teacher for nearly half a century; and there,
+in his eightieth year, he died. He was never out of East Prussia and
+never journeyed sixty miles from his birthplace during his whole life.
+Professor Josiah Royce of Harvard, himself in the sage business, and
+perhaps the best example that America has produced of the pure type of
+philosopher, says, "Kant is the only modern thinker who in point of
+originality is worthy to be ranked with Plato and Aristotle." Like
+Emerson, Kant regarded traveling as a fool's paradise; only Emerson had
+to travel much before he found it out, while Kant gained the truth by
+staying at home. Once a lady took him for a carriage ride, and on
+learning from the footman that they were seven miles from home he was so
+displeased that he refused to utter a single orphic on the way back; and
+further, the story is that he never after entered a vehicle, and living
+for thirty years was never again so far from the lodging he called home.
+
+In his lectures on physical geography Kant would often describe
+mountains, rivers, waterfalls, volcanoes, with great animation and
+accuracy, yet he had never seen any of these. Once a friend offered to
+take him to Switzerland, so he could actually see the mountains; but he
+warmly declined, declaring that the man who was not satisfied until he
+could touch, taste and see was small, mean and quibbling as was Thomas,
+the doubting disciple. Moreover, he had samples of the strata of the
+Alps, and this was enough, which reminds us of the man who had a house
+for sale and offered to send a prospective purchaser a sample brick.
+
+Mind was the great miracle to Kant--the ability to know all about a
+thing by seeing it with your inward eye. "The Imagination hath a stage
+within the brain upon which all scenes are played," and the play to Kant
+was greater than the reality. Or, to use his own words: "Time and Space
+have no existence apart from Mind. There is no such thing as Sound
+unless there be an ear to receive the vibrations. Things and places,
+matter and substance come under the same law, and exist only as mind
+creates them."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The parents of Kant were very lowly people. His father was a day
+laborer--a leather-cutter who never achieved even to the honors and
+emoluments of a saddler. There were seven children in the family, and
+never a servant crossed the threshold. One daughter survived Immanuel,
+and in her eighty-fourth year she expressed regrets that her brother had
+proved so recreant to the teachings of his parents as practically to
+alienate him from all his relatives. One brother became a Lutheran
+minister and lived out an honored career; the others vanish and fade
+away into the mist of forgetfulness.
+
+So far as we know, all the children were strong and well except this
+one. At birth he weighed but five pounds, and his weakness was pitiable.
+He was the kind of child the Spartans used to make way with quickly, for
+the good of the State. He had a big, bulging head, thin legs, a weak
+chest, and one shoulder was so much higher than the other that it
+amounted almost to a deformity.
+
+As the years went by, the parents saw he was not big enough to work, but
+hope was not dead--they would make a preacher of him! To this end he was
+sent to the "Fredericianium," a graded school of no mean quality. The
+master of this school was a worthy clergyman by the name of Schultz, who
+was attracted to the Kant boy, it seems, on account of his insignificant
+size. It was the affection of the shepherd for the friendless ewe lamb.
+A little later the teacher began to love the boy for his big head and
+the thoughts he worked out of it. Brawn is bought with a price--young
+men who bank on it get it as legal tender. Those who have no brawn have
+to rely on brain or go without honors. Immanuel Kant began to ask his
+school-teacher questions that made the good man laugh.
+
+At sixteen Kant entered Albertina University. And there he was to remain
+his entire life--student, tutor, teacher, professor.
+
+He must have been an efficient youth, for before he was eighteen he
+realized that the best way to learn is to teach. The idea of becoming a
+clergyman was at first strong upon him; and Pastor Schultz occasionally
+sent the youth out to preach, or lead religious services in rural
+districts. This embryo preacher had a habit of placing a box behind the
+pulpit and standing on it while preaching. Then we find him reasoning
+the matter out in this way: "I stand on a box to preach so as to impress
+the people by my height or to conceal my insignificant size. This is
+pretense and a desire to carry out the idea that the preacher is bigger
+every way than common people. I talk with God in pretended prayer, and
+this looks as if I were on easy and familiar terms with Deity. Is it
+like those folks who claim to be on friendly terms with princes: If I do
+not know anything about God, why should I pretend I do?"
+
+This desire to be absolutely honest with himself gradually grew until
+he informed the Pastor that he had better secure young men for preachers
+who could impress people without standing on a box. As for himself, he
+would impress people by the size of his head, if he impressed them at
+all. Let it here be noted that Kant then weighed exactly one hundred
+pounds, and was less than five feet high. His head measured twenty-four
+inches around, and fifteen and one-half inches over "firmness" from the
+opening of the ears. To put it another way, he wore a seven-and-a-half
+hat.
+
+It is a great thing for a man to pride himself on what he is and make
+the best of it. The pride of craftsman betokens a valuable man. We
+exaggerate our worth, and this is Nature's plan to get the thing done.
+
+Kant's pride of intellect, in degree, came from his insignificant form,
+and thus do all things work together for good. But this bony little form
+was often full of pain, and he had headaches, which led a wit to say,
+"If a head like yours aches, it must be worse than to be a giraffe and
+have a sore throat."
+
+Young Kant began to realize that to have a big head, and get the right
+use from it, one must have vital power enough to feed it.
+
+The brain is the engine--the lungs and digestive apparatus the boiler.
+Thought is combustion.
+
+Young Kant, the uncouth, became possessed of an idea that made him the
+butt of many gibes and jeers. He thought that if he could breathe
+enough, he would be able to think clearly, and headaches would be gone.
+Life, he said, was a matter of breathing, and all men died from one
+cause--a shortness of breath. In order to think clearly, you must
+breathe.
+
+We believe things first and prove them later; our belief is usually
+right, when derived from experience, but the reasons we give are often
+wrong. For instance, Kant cured his physical ills by going out of doors,
+and breathing deeply and slowly with closed mouth. Gradually his health
+began to improve. But the young man, not knowing at that time much about
+physiology, wrote a paper proving that the benefit came from the fresh
+air that circulated through his brain. And of course in one sense he was
+right. He related the incident of this thesis many years after in a
+lecture, to show the result of right action and wrong reasoning.
+
+The doctors had advised Kant he must quit study, but when he took up his
+breathing fad, he renounced the doctors, and later denounced them. If he
+were going to die, he would die without the benefit of either the clergy
+or the physicians.
+
+He denied that he was sick, and at night would roll himself in his
+blankets and repeat half-aloud, "How comfortable I am, how comfortable I
+am," until he fell asleep.
+
+Near his house ran a narrow street, just a half-mile long. He walked
+this street up and back, with closed mouth, breathing deeply, waving a
+rattan cane to ward away talkative neighbors, and to keep up the
+circulation in his arms. Once and back--in a month he had increased this
+to twice and back. In a year he had come to the conclusion that to walk
+the length of that street eight times was the right and proper
+thing--that is to say, four miles in all. In other words, he had found
+out how much exercise he required--not too much or too little. At
+exactly half-past three he came out of his lodging, wearing his cocked
+hat and long, snuff-colored coat, and walked. The neighbors used to set
+their clocks by him. He walked and breathed with closed mouth, and no
+one dare accost him or walk with him. The hour was sacred and must not
+be broken in upon: it was his holy time--his time of breathing.
+
+The little street is there now--one of the sights of Konigsberg, and the
+cab-drivers point it out as the Philosopher's Walk. And Kant walked that
+little street eight times every afternoon from the day he was twenty to
+within a year of his death, when eighty years old.
+
+This walking and breathing habit physiologists now recognize as
+eminently scientific, and there is no sensible physician but will
+endorse Kant's wisdom in renouncing doctors and adopting a regimen of
+his own. The thing you believe in will probably benefit you--faith is
+hygienic.
+
+The persistency of the little man's character is shown in the breathing
+habit--he believed in himself, relied on himself, and that which
+experience commended, he did.
+
+This firmness in following his own ideas saved his life. When we think
+of one born in obscurity, living in poverty, handicapped by pain,
+weakness and deformity; never traveling; and then by sheer persistency
+and force of will rising to the first place among thinking men of his
+time, one is almost willing to accept Kant's dictum, "Mind is supreme,
+and the Universe is but the reflected thought of God."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Kant was great enough to doubt appearances and distrust popular
+conclusions. He knew that fallacies of reasoning follow fast upon
+actions--reason follows by slow freight. It is quite necessary that we
+should believe in a Supreme Power, but quite irrelevant that we should
+prove it.
+
+Truth for the most part is unpopular, and the proof of this statement
+lies in the fact that it is so seldom told. Preachers tell people what
+they wish to hear, and indeed this must be so as long as the
+congregation that hears the preaching pays for it. People will not pay
+for anything they do not like. Hence, preaching leads naturally to
+sophistication and hypocrisy, and the promise of endless bliss for
+ourselves and a hell for our enemies comes about as a matter of course.
+What men will listen to and pay for is the real science of theology.
+That is to say, the science of theology is the science of manipulating
+men. Success in theology consists in finding a fallacy that is palatable
+and then banking on it. Again and again Kant points out that a
+clergyman's advice is usually worthless, because pure truth is out of
+his province--unaccustomed, undesirable, inexpedient.
+
+And Kant thought this was true also of doctors--doctors care more about
+pleasing their patients than telling them truth. "In fact," he said, "no
+doctor with a family to support can afford to tell his patients that his
+symptoms are no token of a disease--rather uncomfortable feelings are
+proof of health, for dead men don't have them." Most of the aches,
+pains and so-called irregularities are remedial moves on the part of
+Nature to keep the man well. Kant says that doctors treat symptoms, not
+diseases, and often the treatment causes the disease; so no man can tell
+what proportion of diseases is caused by medicine and what by other
+forms of applied ignorance.
+
+As for lawyers, our little philosopher considered them, for the most
+part, sharks and wreckers. A lawyer looks over an estate, not with the
+idea of keeping it intact, but of dissolving it, and getting a part of
+it for himself. Not that men prefer to do what is wrong, but
+self-interest can always produce sufficient reasons to satisfy the
+conscience. Lawyers, being attaches of courts of justice, regard
+themselves as protectors of the people, when really they are the
+plunderers of the people, and their business is quite as much to defeat
+justice as to administer it. The evasion of law is as truly a lawyer's
+work as compliance with law. Then our philosopher explains that if law
+and justice were synonymous, this state of affairs would be most
+deplorable; but as it is, no particular harm is worked, save in the
+moral degradation of the lawyers. The connivance of lawyers tames the
+rank injustices of law; hence, to a degree, we live in a land where
+there is neither law nor justice--save such justice as can be
+appropriated by the man who is diplomat enough to do without lawyers and
+wise enough to have no property. Justice, however, to Kant is a very
+uncertain quantity, and he is rather inclined to regard the idea that
+men are able to administer justice as on a par with the assumption of
+the priest that he is dealing with God.
+
+Kant once said, "When a woman demands justice, she means revenge."
+
+A pupil here interposed, and asked the master if this was not equally
+true of men, and the answer was, "I accept the amendment--it certainly
+is true of all men I ever saw in courtrooms."
+
+"Does death end all?"
+
+"No," said Kant; "there is the litigation over the estate."
+
+Kant's constant reiteration that he had no use for doctors, lawyers and
+preachers, we can well imagine did not add to his popularity. As for his
+reasoning concerning lawyers, we can all, probably, recall a few
+jug-shaped attorneys who fill the Kant requirements--takers of
+contingent fees and stirrers-up of strife: men who watch for vessels on
+the rocks and lure with false lights the mariner to his doom. But
+matters since Kant's day have changed considerably for the better. There
+is a demand now for a lawyer who is a businessman and who will keep
+people out of trouble instead of getting them in. And we also have a few
+physicians who are big enough to tell a man there is nothing the matter
+with him, if they think so, and then charge him accordingly--in inverse
+ratio to the amount of medicine administered.
+
+And while we no longer refer to the clergyman as our spiritual adviser,
+except, perhaps, in way of pleasantry, he surely is useful as a social
+promoter.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The parents of Kant were Lutherans--punctilious and pious. They were
+descended from Scotch soldiers who had come over there two hundred years
+before and settled down after the war, just as the Hessians settled down
+and went to farming in Pennsylvania, their descendants occasionally
+becoming Daughters of the Revolution, because their grandsires fought
+with Washington.
+
+This Scotch strain gave a sturdy bias to the Kants--these Lutherans were
+really rebels, and as every one knows, there are only two ways of
+dealing with a religious Scotchman--agree with him or kill him.
+
+Most people said that Kant was supremely stubborn--he himself called it
+"firmness in the right." Once, when a couple of calumniators were
+thinking up all the bad things they could say about him, one of them
+exclaimed, "He isn't five feet high!"
+
+"Liar!" came the shrill voice of the Philosopher, who had accidentally
+overheard them, "Liar! I am exactly five feet!" And he drew himself up,
+and struck his staff proudly and defiantly on the ground.
+
+Which reminds one of the story told of Professor Josiah Royce, who once
+rang up six fares on the register when he wished to stop a Boston
+street-car. When the conductor protested, the philosopher called him
+"up-start," "curmudgeon" and "nincompoop," and showed the fallacy of his
+claim that thirty cents had been lost, since nobody had found it.
+Moreover, he offered to prove his proposition by algebraic equation, if
+one of the gentlemen present had chalk and blackboard on his person.
+
+Once Kant was looking at the flowers in a beautiful garden. But instead
+of looking through the iron pickets, he stooped over and was squinting
+through the key-hole of the lock. A student coming along asked him why
+he didn't look through the pickets and thus get a perfect view.
+
+"Go on, you fool," was the stern reply; "I am studying the law of
+optics--the unobstructed vision reveals too much--the vivid view is only
+gotten through a small aperture."
+
+All of which was believed to be a sudden inspiration in way of reply
+that came to the great professor when caught doing an absent-minded
+thing. That Kant was not above a little pious prevarication is shown by
+a story he himself tells. He was never inside of a church once during
+the last fifty years of his life. But when he became Chancellor of the
+University, one of his duties was to lead a procession to the Cathedral,
+where certain formal religious services were held. Kant tried to have
+the exercises in a hall, but failing in this, he did his duty, and
+marched like a pigmy drum-major at the head of the cavalcade.
+
+"Now he will have to go in," the scoffers said.
+
+But he didn't. Arriving at the church-door, he excused himself, pleading
+an urgent necessity, walked around to the back of the church,
+sacrificed, like Diogenes, to all the gods at once, and made off for
+home, quietly chuckling to himself at the thought of how he had
+circumvented the enemy.
+
+Every actor has just so many make-ups and no more. Usually the
+characters he assumes are variations of a single one. Steele Mackaye
+used to say, "There are only five distinct dramatic situations." The
+artist, too, has his properties. And the recognition of this truth
+caused Massillon to say, "The great preacher has but one sermon, yet out
+of this he makes many--by giving portions of it backwards, or beginning
+in the middle and working both ways, or presenting patchwork pieces,
+tinted and colored by his mood." All public speakers have canned goods
+they fall back upon when the fresh fruit of thought grows scarce.
+
+The literary man also has his puppets, pet phrases, and situations to
+his liking. Victor Hugo always catches the attention by a blind girl, a
+hunchback, a hunted convict or some mutilated and maimed unfortunate.
+
+In his lectures, Kant used to please the boys by such phrases as this,
+"I dearly love the muse, although I must admit that I have never been
+the recipient of any of her favors." This took so well that later he was
+encouraged to say, "The Old Metaphysics is positively unattractive, but
+the New Metaphysics is to me most lovely, although I can not boast that
+I have ever been honored by any of her favors."
+
+A large audience caused Kant to lose his poise--he became
+self-conscious--but in his own little lecture-room, with a dozen, or
+fifty at the most (because this was the capacity of the room), he was
+charming. He would fix his eye on a single boy, and often upon a single
+button on this boy's coat, and forgetting the immediate theme in hand,
+would ramble into an amusing and most instructive monolog of criticism
+concerning politics, pedagogy or current events. In his writing he was
+exact, heavy and complex, but in these heart-to-heart talks, Herder, who
+attended Kant's lectures for five years, says, "The man had a deal of
+nimble wit, and here Kant was at his best."
+
+So we have two different men--the man who wrote the "Critique" and the
+man who gave the lectures and clarified his thought by explaining things
+to others. It was in the lectures that he threw off this: "Men are
+creatures that can not do without their kind, yet are sure to quarrel
+when together." This took fairly well, and later he said, "Men can not
+do without men, yet they hate each other when together." And in a year
+after, comes this: "A man is miserable without a wife, and is seldom
+happy after he gets one." No doubt this caused a shout of applause from
+the students, college boys being always on the lookout for just such
+things; and coming from a very confirmed old bachelor it was peculiarly
+fetching.
+
+To say that Kant was devoid of wit, as many writers do, is not to know
+the man. About a year after the "Critique of Pure Reason" appeared, he
+wrote this: "I am obliged to the learned public for the silence with
+which it has honored my book, as this silence means a suspension of
+judgment and a wise determination not to voice a premature opinion." He
+knew perfectly well that the "learned public" had not read his book, and
+moreover, could not, intelligently, and the silence betokened simply a
+stupid lack of interest. Moreover, he knew there was no such thing as a
+learned public. Kant's remark reveals a keen wit, and it also reveals
+something more--the pique of the unappreciated author who declares he
+doesn't care what the public thinks of him, and thereby reveals the fact
+that he does.
+
+Here are a couple of remarks that could only have been made in the reign
+of Frederick the Great, and under the spell of a college lecture: "The
+statement that man is the noblest work of God was never made by anybody
+but man, and must therefore be taken 'cum grano salis.'" "We are told
+that God said He made man in His own image, but the remark was probably
+ironical."
+
+Schopenhauer says: "The chief jewel in the crown of Frederick the Great
+is Immanuel Kant. Such a man as Kant could not have held a salaried
+position under any other monarch on the globe at that time and have
+expressed the things that Kant did. A little earlier or a little later,
+and there would have been no such person as Immanuel Kant. Rulers are
+seldom big men, but if they are big enough to recognize and encourage
+big men, they deserve the gratitude of mankind!"
+
+
+
+
+SWEDENBORG
+
+
+     When a man's deeds are discovered after death, his angels, who are
+     inquisitors, look into his face, and extend their examination over
+     his whole body, beginning with the fingers of each hand. I was
+     surprised at this, and the reason was thus explained to me:
+
+     Every volition and thought of man is inscribed on his brain; for
+     volition and thought have their beginnings in the brain, thence
+     they are conveyed to the bodily members, wherein they terminate.
+     Whatever, therefore, is in the mind is in the brain, and from the
+     brain in the body, according to the order of its parts. So a man
+     writes his life in his physique, and thus the angels discover his
+     autobiography in his structure.
+
+                                      --_Swedenborg's "Spirit World"_
+
+
+[Illustration: SWEDENBORG]
+
+
+A bucolic citizen of East Aurora, on being questioned by a visitor as to
+his opinion of a certain literary man, exclaimed: "Smart? Is he smart?
+Why, Missus, he writes things nobody can understand!"
+
+This sounds like a paraphrase (but it isn't) of the old lady's remark on
+hearing Henry Ward Beecher preach. She went home and said, "I don't
+think he is so very great--I understood everything he said!"
+
+Paganini wrote musical scores for the violin, which no violinist has
+ever been able to play. Victor Herbert has recently analyzed some of
+these compositions and shown that Paganini himself could never have
+played them without using four hands and handling two bows at once. So
+far, no one can play a duet on the piano; the hand can span only so many
+keys, and the attempt of Robert Schumann to improve on Nature by
+building an artificial extension to his fingers was vetoed by paralysis
+of the members. Two bodies can not occupy the same space at the same
+time; mathematics has its limit, for you can not look out of a window
+four and a half times. The dictum of Ingersoll that all sticks and
+strings have two ends has not yet been disproved; and Herbert Spencer
+discovered, for his own satisfaction, fixed limits beyond which the
+mind can not travel. His expression, the Unknowable, reminds one of
+those old maps wherein vast sections were labeled, Terra Incognita.
+
+If we read Emanuel Swedenborg, we find that these vast stretches in the
+domain of thought which Herbert Spencer disposed of as the Unknowable
+have been traversed and minutely described. Swedenborg's books are so
+learned that even Herbert Spencer could not read them: his scores are so
+intricate, his compositions so involved, that no man can play them.
+
+The mystic who sees more than he can explain is universally regarded as
+an unsafe and unreliable person. The people who consult him go away and
+do as they please, and faith in his prophecies weaken as his opinions
+and hopes vary from theirs. We stand by the clairvoyant just as long as
+he gives us palatable things, and no longer, and nobody knows this
+better than your genus clairvoyant. When his advice is contrary to our
+desires, we pronounce him a fraud and go our way. When enterprises of
+great pith and moment are to be carried through, we give the power into
+the hands of the worldling infidel, rather than the spiritual seer.
+
+The person on intimate terms with another world seldom knows much about
+this, and when Robert Browning tells of Sludge, the Medium, he symbols
+his opinion of all mediums. A medium, if sincere, is one who has
+abandoned his intellect and turned the bark of reason rudderless,
+adrift. This is entirely apart from the very common reinforcement of
+usual psychic powers with fraud, which, beginning in self-deception,
+puts out from port without papers and sails the sea with forged letters
+of marque and reprisal.
+
+There are mediums in every city who tell us they are guided by
+Shakespeare, Dante, Milton, Luther, Tennyson or Henry Ward Beecher. So
+we are led to believe that the chief business of great men in the
+spiritual realm is to guide commonplace men in this, and cause them to
+take pen in hand.
+
+All publishers are perfectly familiar with these productions written by
+people who think they are psychic when they are only sick. And I have
+never yet seen a publisher's reader who had found anything in
+inspirational writing but words, words, words. High-sounding paraphrases
+and rolling sentences do not make literature; and so far as we know,
+only the fallible, live and loving man or woman can breathe into the
+nostrils of a literary production the breath of life. All the rest is
+only lifeless clay.
+
+That mystery enshrouds the workings of the mind, and that some people
+have remarkable mental experiences, none will deny. People who can not
+write at all in a normal mood will, under a psychic spell, produce
+high-sounding literary reverberations, or play the piano or paint a
+picture. Yet the literature is worthless, the music indifferent, and the
+picture bad; but, like Doctor Johnson's simile of the dog that walked
+on its hind legs, while the walking is never done well, we are amazed
+that it can be done at all.
+
+The astounding assumption comes in when we leap the gulf and attribute
+these peculiar rappings and all this ability of seeing around a corner
+to disembodied spirits. The people with credulity plus, however, always
+close our mouths with this, "If it isn't spirits, what in the world is
+it?" And we, crestfallen and abashed, are forced to say, "We do not
+know."
+
+The absolute worthlessness of spiritual communication comes in when we
+are told by the medium, caught in a contradiction, that spirits are
+awful liars. On this point all mediums agree: many disembodied spirits
+are much given to untruth, and the man who is a liar here will be a liar
+there.
+
+Swedenborg was so annoyed with this disposition on the part of spirits
+to prevaricate that he says, "I usually conduct my affairs regardless of
+their advice." When a spirit came to him and said, "I am the shade of
+Aristotle," Swedenborg challenged him, and the spirit acknowledged he
+was only Jimmy Smith. This is delightfully naive and surely reveals the
+man's sanity: he was deceived by neither living nor dead: he accepted or
+rejected communications as they appealed to his reason: he kept his
+literature and his hallucinations separate from his business, and never
+did a thing which did not gibe with his reason. In this way he lived to
+be eighty, earnest, yet composed, serene, steering safely clear from
+Bedlam, by making his commonsense the court of last appeal.
+
+Emerson says that the critic who will render the greatest gift to modern
+civilization is the one who will show us how to fuse the characters of
+Shakespeare and Swedenborg. One stands for intellect, the other for
+spirituality. We need both, but we tire of too much goodness, virtue
+palls on us, and if we hear only psalms sung, we will long for the clink
+of glasses and the brave choruses of unrestrained good-fellowship. A
+slap on the back may give you a thrill of delight that the touch of holy
+water on your forehead can not lend.
+
+Shakespeare hasn't much regard for concrete truth; Swedenborg is devoted
+to nothing else. Shakespeare moves jauntily, airily, easily, with
+careless indifference; Swedenborg lives earnestly, seriously, awfully.
+Shakespeare thinks that truth is only a point of view, a local issue, a
+matter of geography; Swedenborg considers it an exact science, with
+boundaries fixed and cornerstones immovable, and the business of his
+life was to map the domain.
+
+If you would know the man Shakespeare, you will find him usually in cap
+and bells. Jaques, Costard, Trinculo, Mercutio, are confessions, for
+into the mouths of these he puts his wisest maxims. Shakespeare dearly
+loved a fool, because he was one. He plays with truth as a kitten
+gambols with a ball of yarn.
+
+So Emerson would have us reconcile the holy zeal for truth and the swish
+of this bright blade of the intellect. He himself confesses that after
+reading Swedenborg he turns to Shakespeare and reads "As You Like It"
+with positive delight, because Shakespeare isn't trying to prove
+anything. The monks of the olden time read Rabelais and Saint Augustine
+with equal relish.
+
+Possibly we take these great men too seriously--literature is only
+incidental, and what any man says about anything matters little, except
+to himself. No book is of much importance; the vital thing is: What do
+you yourself think?
+
+When we read Shakespeare in a parlor class there are many things we read
+over rapidly--the teacher does not stop to discuss them. The remarks of
+Ophelia or the shepherd talk of Corin are indecent only when you stop
+and linger over them; it will not do to sculpture such things--let them
+forever remain in gaseous form. When George Francis Train picked out
+certain parts of the Bible and printed them, and was arrested for
+publishing obscene literature, the charge was proper and right. There
+are things that need not to be emphasized--they may all be a part of
+life, but in books they should be slurred over as representing simply a
+passing glimpse of nature.
+
+And so the earnest and minute arguments of Swedenborg need not give us
+headache in efforts to comprehend them. They were written for himself,
+as a scaffolding for his imagination. Don't take Jonathan Edwards too
+seriously--he means well, but we know more. We know we do not know
+anything, and he never got that far.
+
+The bracketing of the names of Shakespeare and Swedenborg is eminently
+well. They are Titans both. In the presence of such giants, small men
+seem to wither and blow away. Swedenborg was cast in heroic mold, and no
+other man since history began ever compassed in himself so much physical
+science, and with it all on his back, made such daring voyages into the
+clouds.
+
+The men who soar highest and know most about another world usually know
+little about this. No man of his time was so competent a scientist as
+Swedenborg, and no man before or since has mapped so minutely the
+Heavenly Kingdom.
+
+Shakespeare's feet were really never off the ground. His excursion in
+"The Tempest" was only in a captured balloon. Ariel and Caliban he
+secured out of an old book of fables.
+
+Shakespeare knew little about physics; economics and sociology never
+troubled him; he had small Latin and less Greek; he never traveled, and
+the history of the rocks was to him a blank.
+
+Swedenborg anticipated Darwin in a dozen ways; he knew the classic
+languages and most of the modern; he traveled everywhere; he was a
+practical economist, and the best civil engineer of his day.
+
+Shakespeare knew the human heart--where the wild storms arise and where
+the passions die--the Delectable Isles where Allah counts not the days,
+and the swamps where love turns to hate and Hell knocks on the gates of
+Heaven. Shakespeare knew humanity, but little else; Swedenborg knew
+everything else, but here he balked, for woman's love never unlocked for
+him the secrets of the human heart.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Emanuel Swedenborg was born at Stockholm, Sweden, in Sixteen Hundred
+Eighty-eight. His father was a bishop in the Lutheran Church, a
+professor in the theological seminary, a writer on various things, and
+withal a man of marked power and worth. He was a spiritualist, heard
+voices and received messages from the spirit world. It will be
+remembered that Martin Luther, in his monkish days, heard voices, and
+was in communication with both angels and devils. Many of his followers,
+knowing of his strange experiences, gave themselves up to fasts and
+vigils, and they, too, saw things. Abstain from food for two days and
+this sense of lightness and soaring is the usual result. So strong is
+example, and so prone are we to follow in the footsteps of those we
+love, that one "psychic" is sure to develop more. Little Emanuel
+Swedenborg, aged seven, saw angels, too, and when his father had a
+vision, he straightway matched it with a bigger one.
+
+Then we find the mother of the boy getting alarmed, and peremptorily
+putting her foot down and ordering her husband to cease all celestial
+excursions.
+
+Emanuel was set to work at his books and in the garden, and no more
+rappings was he to hear, nor strange white lights to see, until he was
+fifty-six years old.
+
+Sweden is the least illiterate country on the globe, and has been for
+three hundred years. Her climate is eminently fitted to produce one fine
+product--men. The winter's cold does not subdue nor suppress, but tends
+to that earnest industry which improves the passing hours. The
+Scandinavians make hay while the sun shines; but in countries where the
+sun shines all the time men make no hay. In Florida, where flowers bloom
+the whole year through, even the bees quit work and say, "What's the
+use?"
+
+Emanuel Swedenborg climbed the mountains with his father, fished in the
+fjords, collected the mosses on the rocks, and wrote out at length all
+of their amateur discoveries. The boy grew strong in body, lithe of
+limb, clear of eye--noble and manly.
+
+His affection for his parents was perfect. When fifteen he addressed to
+them letters of apostrophe, all in studied words of deference and
+curious compliment, like, say, the letters of Columbus to Ferdinand and
+Isabella. His purity of purpose was sublime, and the jewel of his soul
+was integrity.
+
+At college he easily stood at the head of his class. He reduced calculus
+to its simplest forms, and made abstractions plain. Even his tutors
+could not follow him. Once the King's actuary was called upon to verify
+some of his calculations. This brought him to the notice of the King,
+and thereafter he was always on easy and familiar terms with royalty.
+There is no hallucination in mathematics--figures do not lie, although
+mathematicians may, but this one never did.
+
+We look in vain for college pranks, and some of those absurd and
+foolish things in which young men delight. We wish he could unbend, and
+be indiscreet, or even impolite, just to show us his humanity. But no,
+he is always grave, earnest, dignified, and rebukingly handsome. The
+college "grind" with bulging forehead, round shoulders, myopic vision
+and shambling gait is well known in every college, and serves as the
+butt of innumerable practical jokes. But no one took liberties with
+Emanuel Swedenborg either in boyhood or in after-life. His countenance
+was stern, yet not forbidding; his form tall, manly and muscular, and
+his persistent mountain-climbing and outdoor prospecting and botanizing
+gave him a glow of health which the typical grubber after facts very
+seldom has.
+
+Thus we find Emanuel Swedenborg walking with stately tread through
+college, taking all the honors, looked upon by teachers and professors
+with a sort of awe, and pointed out by his fellow students in subdued
+wonder. His physical strength became a byword, yet we do not find he
+ever exercised it in contests; but it served as a protection, and
+commanded respect from all the underlings.
+
+At twenty we find him falling violently in love, the one sole
+love-affair of his lone life. Instead of going to the girl he placed the
+matter before her father, and secured from him a written warrant for the
+damsel, returnable in three years' time. This document he carried with
+him, pored over it, slept with it under his pillow. As for the girl,
+timid, sensitive, aged fifteen, she fled on his approach, and shook with
+fear if he looked at her. He made his love plain by logical formulas and
+proved his passion by geometrical permutations--by charts and diagrams.
+A seasoned widow might have broken up the icy fastness of his soul and
+melted his forbidding nature in the crucible of feeling, but this poor
+girl just wanted some one to hold her little hand and say peace to her
+fluttering heart. How could she go plump herself in his lap, pull his
+ears and tell him he was a fool? Finally, the girl's brother, seeing her
+distress, stole the precious warrant from Swedenborg's coat, tore it up,
+and Swedenborg knew his case was hopeless. He brought calculus to bear,
+and proved by the law of averages that there were just as good fish in
+the sea as ever were caught.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+At twenty-one Swedenborg graduated at the University of Upsala. He took
+the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, and was sent on a tour of the
+European capitals to complete his education. He visited Hamburg, Paris,
+Vienna and then went to London, where he remained a year. He bore
+letters from the King of Sweden that admitted him readily into the best
+society, and as far as we know he carried himself with dignity, filled
+with a zeal to know and to become.
+
+One prime object in his travel was to learn the language of the country
+that he was in, and so we hear of his writing home, "In Hamburg I speak
+only German; at Paris I talk and think in French; in London no one
+doubts but that I am an Englishman." This not only reveals the young
+man's accomplishments, but shows that sublime confidence in himself
+which never forsook him.
+
+The desire of his father was that he should enter the diplomatic service
+of the government, and the interest the King took in his welfare shows
+that the way was opening in that direction. But in the various cities
+where he traveled he merely used his consular letters to reach the men
+in each place who knew most of mathematics, anatomy, geology, astronomy
+and physics. He hunted out the thinkers and the doers, and it seems he
+had enough specific gravity of soul so he was never turned away.
+
+When big men meet for the first time, they try conclusions just as
+surely as do the patriarchs of the herds. Instantly there is a mental
+duel, before scarcely a word is spoken, and the psychic measurements
+then and there taken are usually about correct.
+
+The very silence of a superior person is impressive. And knowing this,
+we do not wonder that Swedenborg would sometimes call unannounced on men
+in high station, and forgetting his letters, would ask for an interview.
+The audacity of the request would break down the barriers, and his calm,
+quiet self-possession would do the rest. The man wanted nothing but
+knowledge. Returning home at twenty-seven, he wrote out two voluminous
+reports of his travels, one for his father and one for the King. These
+reports were so complete, so learned, so full of allusion, suggestion
+and advice, that it is probable they were never read.
+
+He was made Assessor of the School of Mines, an office which we would
+call that of Assayer, and his business was to give scientific advice as
+to the value of ores and the best ways to mine and smelt them.
+
+About this time we hear of Swedenborg writing to his brother explaining
+that he was working on the model of a boat that would navigate below the
+surface of the sea, and do great damage to the enemy; a gun that would
+discharge a thousand bullets a minute; a flying machine that would sail
+the air like a gull; a mechanical chariot that would go twenty miles an
+hour on a smooth road without horses; and a plan of mathematics which
+would quickly and simply enable us to compute and express fractions. We
+also hear of his inventing a treadmill chariot, which carried the horse
+on board the vehicle, but the horse once ran away and attained such a
+velocity in the streets of Stockholm that people declared the whole
+thing was a diabolical invention, and in deference to popular clamor
+Swedenborg discontinued his experiments along this line.
+
+One is amazed that this man in the early days of the Eighteenth Century
+should have anticipated the submarine boat, and guessed what could be
+done by the expansion of steam; prophesied a Gatling gun, and made a
+motor-car that carried the horse, working on a treadmill and propelling
+the vehicle faster than the horse could go on the ground; and if the
+inventor had had the gasoline he surely would have made an automobile.
+
+His diversity of inventive genius was finally focalized on building
+sluiceways and canals for the government, and he set Holyoke an example
+by running the water back and forth in canals and utilizing the power
+over and over again.
+
+Later he was called upon to break a blockade by transferring ships
+overland a distance of fourteen miles. This he successfully did by the
+use of a roller railway, and as a reward for the feat was duly knighted
+by the King.
+
+The one idea that he worked out in detail and gave to the world, and
+which the world has not improved upon, is our present decimal system.
+
+As the years passed, Swedenborg became rich. He lived well, but not
+lavishly. We hear of his having his private carriages and being attended
+by servants on his travels.
+
+He lectured at various universities, and on account of his close
+association with royalty, as well as on account of his own high
+character and strong personality, he was a commanding figure wherever he
+went. His life was full to the brim.
+
+And we naturally expect that a man of wealth, with all the honors
+belonging to any one person, should take on a comforting accumulation of
+adipose, and encyst himself in the conventionalities of church, state
+and society.
+
+And this was what the man himself saw in store, for at forty-six he
+wrote a book on science, setting forth his ideas and making accurate
+prophecies as to what would yet be brought about. He regrets that a
+multiplicity of duties and failing health forbid his carrying out his
+plans, and further adds, "As this is probably the last book I shall ever
+write, I desire here to make known to posterity these thoughts which so
+far as I know have never been explained before."
+
+The real fact was that at this time Swedenborg's career had not really
+begun, and if he had then died, his fame would not have extended beyond
+the country of his birth.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Mr. Poultney Bigelow, happening to be in Brighton, England, a few years
+ago, was entertained at the home of a worthy London broker. The family
+was prosperous and intelligent, but clung closely to all conventional
+and churchly lines. As happens often in English homes, the man does most
+of the thinking and sets metes and bounds to all conversation as well as
+reading. The mother refers to him as "He," and the children and servants
+look up to him and make mental obeisance when he speaks.
+
+"I hear Herbert Spencer lives in Brighton--do you ever see him?"
+ventured the guest of the hostess, in a vain reaching 'round for a topic
+of mutual interest. "Spencer--Spencer? Who is Herbert Spencer?" asked
+the good mother.
+
+But "He" caught the run of the talk and came to the rescue: "Oh, Mother,
+Spencer is nobody you are interested in--just a writer of infidelic
+books!"
+
+The next day Bigelow called on Spencer and saw upon his table a copy of
+"Science and Health," which some one had sent him. He smiled when the
+American referred to the book, and in answer to a question said: "It is
+surely interesting, and I find many pleasing maxims scattered through
+it. But we can hardly call it scientific, any more than we can call
+Swedenborg's 'Conjugal Love' scientific." And the author of "First
+Principles" showed he had read Mrs. Eddy's book, for he turned to the
+chapter on "Marriage," calling attention to the statement that marriage
+in its present status is a permitted condition--a matter of
+expediency--and children will yet be begotten by telepathic
+correspondence. "The unintelligibility of the book recommends it to many
+and accounts for its vogue. Swedenborg's immortality is largely owing to
+the same reason," and the man who once loved George Eliot smiled not
+unkindly, and the conversation drifted to other themes.
+
+This comparison of Swedenborg with Mary Baker Eddy is not straining a
+point. No one can read "Science and Health" intelligently unless his
+mind is first prepared for it by some one whose mind has been prepared
+for it by some one else. It requires a deal of explanation; and like the
+Plan of Salvation, no one would ever know anything about it if it wasn't
+elucidated by an educated person.
+
+Books strong in abstraction are a convenient rag-bag for your mental
+odds and ends. Swedenborg's philosophy is "Science and Health"
+multiplied by forty. He lays down propositions and proves them in a
+thousand pages.
+
+Yet this must be confessed: The Swedenborgians and the Christian
+Scientists as sects rank above most other denominations in point of
+intellectual worth. In speaking of the artist Thompson, Nathaniel
+Hawthorne once wrote: "This artist is a man of thought, and with no mean
+idea of art, a Swedenborgian, or, as he prefers to call it, a member of
+the New Church. I have generally found something marked in men who
+adopt that faith. He seems to me to possess truth in himself, and to aim
+at it is his artistic endeavor."
+
+Swedenborg's essay on "Conjugal Love" contains four hundred thousand
+words and divides the theme into forty parts, each of these being
+subdivided into forty more. The delights of paradise are pictured in the
+perfect mating of the right man with the right woman. In order to
+explain what perfect marriage is, Swedenborg works by the process of
+elimination and reveals every possible condition of mismating. Every
+error, mistake, crime, wrong and fallacy is shown in order to get at the
+truth. Swedenborg tells us that he got his facts from four husbands and
+four wives in the Spirit Land, and so his statements are authentic.
+Emerson disposes of Swedenborg's ideal marriage as it exists in heaven,
+as "merely an indefinite bridal-chamber," and intimates that it is the
+dream of one who had never been disillusioned by experience.
+
+In Maudsley's fine book, "Body and Mind," the statement is made that
+during Swedenborg's stay in London his life was decidedly promiscuous.
+Fortunately the innocence and ignorance of Swedenborg's speculations are
+proof in themselves that his entire life was absolutely above reproach.
+Swedenborg's bridal-chamber is the dream of a school-girl, presented by
+a scientific analyst, a man well past his grand climacteric, who
+imagined that the perpetuation of sexual "bliss" was a desirable thing.
+
+Emerson hints that there is the taint of impurity in Swedenborg's
+matrimonial excursions, for "life and nature are right, but closet
+speculations are bound to be vicious when persisted in." Max Müller's
+little book, "A Story of German Love," showing the intellectual and
+spiritual uplift that comes from the natural and spontaneous friendship
+of a good man and woman, is worth all the weighty speculations of all
+the virtuous bachelors who ever lived and raked the stagnant ponds of
+their imagination for an ideal.
+
+The love of a recluse is not God's kind--only running water is pure; the
+living love of a live man and woman absolves itself, refines, benefits,
+and blesses, though it be the love of Aucassin and Nicolete, Plutarch
+and Laura, Paola and Francesca, Abelard and Heloise, and they go to hell
+for it.
+
+From his thirty-fourth year to his forty-sixth Swedenborg wrote nothing
+for publication. He lectured, traveled, and advised the government on
+questions of engineering and finance, and in various practical ways made
+himself useful. Then it was that he decided to break the silence and
+give the world the benefit of his studies, which he does in his great
+work, "Principia." Well does Emerson say that this work, purporting to
+explain the birth of worlds, places the man side by side with Aristotle,
+Leonardo, Bacon, Selden, Copernicus and Humboldt.
+
+It is a book for giants, written by one. Although the man was a nominal
+Christian, yet to him, plainly, the Bible was only a book of fables and
+fairy-tales. The Mosaic account of Creation is simply waived, as we
+waive Jack the Giant-Killer when dealing with the question of capital
+punishment.
+
+That Darwin read Swedenborg with minute care, there is no doubt. In the
+"Principia" is a chapter on mosses wherein it is explained how the first
+vestige of lichen catches the dust particles of disintegrating rock, and
+we get the first tokens of a coming forest. Darwin never made a point
+better; and the nebular hypothesis and the origin of species are worked
+out with conjectures, fanciful flights, queer conceits, poetic
+comparisons, far-reaching analogies, and most astounding leaps of
+imagination.
+
+The man was warming to his task--this was not to be his last book--the
+heavens were opening before him, and if he went astray it was light from
+heaven that dazzled him. No one could converse with him, because there
+was none who could understand him; none could refute him, because none
+could follow his winding logic, which led to heights where the air was
+too rarefied for mortals to breathe. He speculated on magnetism,
+chemistry, astronomy, anatomy, geology and spiritism. He believed a
+thing first and then set the mighty machinery of his learning to bear to
+prove it. This is the universal method of great minds--they divine
+things first. But no other scientist the world has ever known divined
+as much as this man. He reminds us of his own motor-car, with the horse
+inside running away with the machine and none to stop the beast in its
+mad flight. To his engine there is no governor, and he revolves like the
+screw of a steamship when the waves lift the craft out of the water.
+
+There is no stimulant equal to expression. The more men write the more
+they know. Swedenborg continued to write, and following the "Principia"
+came "The Animal Kingdom," "The Economy of the Universe," and more vast
+reaches into the realm of fact and fancy. His books were published at
+his own expense, and the work was done under his own supervision at
+Antwerp, Amsterdam, Venice, Vienna, London and Paris. In all these
+cities he worked to get the benefit of their libraries and museums.
+
+Popularity was out of the question--only the learned attempted to follow
+his investigations, and these preferred to recommend his books rather
+than read them. And as for heresy, his disbelief in popular
+superstitions was so veiled in scientific formulas that it went
+unchallenged. Had he simplified truth for the masses his career would
+have been that of Erasmus. His safety lay in his unintelligibility. He
+was gracious, gentle, suave, with a calm self-confidence that routed
+every would-be antagonist.
+
+It was in his fifty-sixth year that the supreme change came over him. He
+was in London, in his room, when a great light came to him. He was
+prostrated as was Saint Paul on the road to Damascus; he lost
+consciousness, and was awakened by a reassuring voice. Christ came to
+him and talked with him face to face; he was told that he would be shown
+the inmost recesses of the Spirit World, and must write out the
+revelation for the benefit of humanity.
+
+There was no disturbance in the man's general health, although he
+continued to have visions, trances and curious dreams. He began to
+write--steadily, day by day the writings went on--but from this time
+experience was disregarded, and for him the material world slept; he
+dealt only with spiritual things, using the physical merely for analogy,
+and his geology and botany were those of the Old Testament.
+
+Returning to Stockholm he resigned his government office, broke his
+engagements with the University, repudiated all scientific studies, and
+devoted himself to his new mission--that is, writing out what the
+spirits dictated, and what he saw on his celestial journeys.
+
+That there are passages of great beauty and insight in his work, is very
+sure, and by discarding what one does not understand, and accepting what
+seems reasonable and right, a practical theology that serves and
+benefits can be built up. The value of Swedenborg lies largely in what
+you can read into him.
+
+The Swedish Protestant Church in London chose him as their bishop
+without advising with him. Gradually other scattering churches did the
+same, and after his death a well-defined cult, calling themselves
+Swedenborgians, arose and his works were ranked as holy writ and read in
+the churches, side by side with the Bible.
+
+Swedenborg died in London, March Twenty-ninth, Seventeen Hundred
+Seventy-two, aged eighty-four years. Up to the very day of his passing
+away he enjoyed good health, and was possessed of a gentle, kind and
+obliging disposition that endeared him to all he met. There is an idea
+in the minds of simple people that insanity is always accompanied by
+violence, ravings and uncouth and dangerous conduct. Dreams are a
+temporary insanity--reason sleeps and the mind roams the universe,
+uncurbed and wildly free. On awakening, for an instant we may not know
+where we are, and all things are in disorder; but gradually time,
+location, size and correspondences find their proper place and we are
+awake.
+
+Should, however, the dreams of the night continue during the day, when
+we are awake and moving about, we would say the man was insane.
+Swedenborg could become oblivious to every external thing, and dream at
+will. And to a degree his mind always dictated the dreams, at least the
+subject was of his own volition. If it was necessary to travel or
+transact business, the dreams were postponed and he lived right here on
+earth, a man of good judgment, safe reason and proper conduct.
+
+Unsoundness of mind is not necessarily folly. Across the murky clouds of
+madness shoots and gleams, at times, the deepest insight into the heart
+of things. And the fact that Swedenborg was unbalanced does not warrant
+us in rejecting all he said and taught as false and faulty. He was
+always well able to take care of himself and to manage his affairs
+successfully, even to printing the books that contain the record of his
+ravings. Follow closely the lives of great inventors, discoverers, poets
+and artists, and it will be found that the world is debtor to so-called
+madmen for many of its richest gifts. Few, indeed, are they who can
+burst the bonds of custom and condition, sail out across the unknown
+seas, and bring us records of the Enchanted Isles. And who shall say
+where originality ends and insanity begins? Swedenborg himself
+attributed his remarkable faculties to the development of a sixth sense,
+and intimates that in time all men will be so equipped. Death is as
+natural as life, and possibly insanity is a plan of Nature for sending a
+searchlight flash into the darkness of futurity. Insane or not, thinking
+men everywhere agree that Swedenborg blessed and benefited the
+race--preparing the way for the thinkers and the doers who should come
+after him.
+
+
+
+
+SPINOZA
+
+
+     Men are so made as to resent nothing more impatiently than to be
+     treated as criminal on account of opinions which they deem true,
+     and charged as guilty for simply what wakes their affection to God
+     and men. Hence, laws about opinions are aimed not at the base but
+     at the noble, and tend not to restrain the evil-minded but rather
+     to irritate the good, and can not be enforced without great peril
+     to the Government.... What evil can be imagined greater for a
+     State, than that honorable men, because they have thoughts of their
+     own and can not act a lie, are sent as culprits into exile! What
+     more baneful than that men, for no guilt or wrongdoing, but for the
+     generous largeness of their mind, should be taken for enemies and
+     led off to death, and that the torture-bed, the terror of the bad,
+     should become, to the signal shame of authority, the finest stage
+     for the public spectacle of endurance and virtue!
+
+                                                --_Benedict Spinoza_
+
+[Illustration: SPINOZA]
+
+
+The word philosophy means the love of truth: "philo," love; "soph,"
+truth; or, if you prefer, the love of that which is reasonable and
+right. Philosophy refers directly to the life of man--how shall we live
+so as to get the most out of this little Earth-Journey!
+
+Life is our heritage--we all have so much vitality at our disposal--what
+shall we do with it?
+
+Truth can be proved in just one way, and no other--that is, by living
+it. You know what is good, only by trying. Truth, for us, is that which
+brings good results--happiness or reasonable content, health, peace and
+prosperity. These things are all relative--none are final, and they are
+good only as they are mixed in right proportion with other things.
+Oxygen, we say, is life, but it is also death, for it attacks every
+living thing with pitiless persistency. Hydrogen is good, but it makes
+the very hottest fire known, and may explode if you try to confine it.
+
+Prosperity is excellent, but too much is very dangerous to most folks;
+and to seek happiness as a final aim is like loving love as a
+business--the end is desolation, death. Good health is best secured and
+retained by those who are not anxious about health. Absolute good can
+never be known, for always and forever creeps in the suspicion that if
+we had acted differently a better result might have followed.
+
+And that which is good for one is not necessarily good for another.
+
+But there are certain general rules of conduct which apply to all men,
+and to sum these up and express them in words is the business of the
+philosopher. As all men live truth, in degree, and all men express some
+truth in language, so to that extent all men are philosophers; but by
+common assent, we give the title only to the men who make other men
+think for themselves.
+
+Whistler refers to Velasquez as "a painter's painter." John Wesley said,
+"No man is worthy to be called a teacher, unless he be a teacher of
+teachers." The great writer is the one who inspires writers. And in this
+book I will not refer to a man as a philosopher unless he has inspired
+philosophers.
+
+Preachers and priests in the employ of a denomination are attorneys for
+the defense. God is not found in a theological seminary, for very seldom
+is the seminary seminal--it galvanizes the dead rather than vitalizes
+the germs of thought in the living. No man understands theology--it is
+not intended to be understood; it is merely believed. Most colleges are
+places where is taught the gentle art of sophistication; and memorizing
+the theories of great men gone passes for knowledge.
+
+Words are fluid and change their meaning with the years and according to
+the mind and mood of the hearer. A word means all you read into it, and
+nothing more. The word "soph" once had a high and honorable distinction,
+but now it is used to point a moral, and the synonym of sophomore is
+soft.
+
+Originally the sophist was a lover of truth; then he became a lover of
+words that concealed truth, and the chief end of his existence was to
+balance a feather on his nose and keep three balls in the air for the
+astonishment and admiration of the bystanders.
+
+Education is something else.
+
+Education is growth, development, life in abundance, creation.
+
+We grow only through exercise. The faculties we use become strong, and
+those we fail to use are taken away from us.
+
+This exercise of our powers through which growth is attained affords the
+finest gratification that mortals know. To think, reason, weigh, sift,
+decide and act--this is life. It means health, sanity and length of
+days. Those live longest who live most.
+
+The end of college education to the majority of students and parents is
+to secure a degree, and a degree is valuable only to the man who needs
+it. Visiting the office of the "Outlook," a weekly, religious newspaper,
+I noticed that the titles, Rev., Prof, and Dr., and the degrees, M. D.,
+D. D., LL. D., Ph. D., were carefully used by the clerks in addressing
+envelopes and wrappers. And I said to the manager, "Why this misuse of
+time and effort? The ink thus wasted should be sold and the proceeds
+given to the poor!" And the man replied, "To omit these titles and
+degrees would cost us half our subscription-list." And so I assume that
+man is a calculating animal, not a thinking one.
+
+And the point of this sermonette is that truth is not monopolized by
+universities and colleges; nor must we expect much from those who parade
+degrees and make professions. It is one thing to love truth and it is
+another thing to lust after honors.
+
+The larger life--the life of love, health, self-sufficiency, usefulness
+and expanding power--this life in abundance is often taught best out of
+the mouths of babes and sucklings. It is not esoteric, nor hidden in
+secret formulas, nor locked in languages old and strange.
+
+No one can compute how much the bulwarked learned ones have blocked the
+path of wisdom. Socrates, the barefoot philosopher, did more good than
+all the Sophists with their schools. Diogenes, who lived in a tub,
+searched in vain for an honest man, owned nothing but a blanket and a
+bowl, and threw the bowl away when he saw a boy drinking out of his
+hand, even yet makes men think, and so blesses and benefits the race.
+Jesus of Nazareth, with no place to lay his tired head, associating with
+publicans and sinners, and choosing his closest companions from among
+ignorant fishermen, still lives in the affections of millions of people,
+a molding force for good untold. Friedrich Froebel, who first preached
+the propensity to play as a pedagogic dynamo, as the tides of the sea
+could be used to turn the countless wheels of trade, is yet only
+partially accepted, but has influenced every teacher in Christendom and
+stamped his personality upon the walls of schoolrooms unnumbered. Then
+comes Richard Wagner, the political outcast, writing from exile the
+music that serves as a mine for much of our modern composing, marching
+down the centuries to the solemn chant of his "Pilgrims' Chorus";
+William Morris, Oxford graduate and uncouth workingman in blouse and
+overalls, arrested in the streets of London for haranguing crowds on
+Socialism, let go with a warning, on suspended sentence--canceled only
+by death--making his mark upon the walls of every well-furnished house
+in England or America; Jean Francois Millet, starved out in art-loving
+Paris, his pictures refused at the Salon, living next door to abject
+want in Barbizon, dubbed the "wild man of the woods," dead and turned to
+dust, his pictures commanding such sums as Paris never before paid; Walt
+Whitman, issuing his book at his own expense, publishers having refused
+it, this book excluded from the mails, as Wanamaker immortalized himself
+by serving a like sentence on Tolstoy; Walt Whitman, riding on top of a
+Broadway 'bus all day, happy in the great solitude of bustling city
+streets, sending his barbaric yawp down the ages, singing pæans to those
+who fail, chants to Death--strong deliverer--and giving courage to a
+fear-stricken world; Thoreau, declining to pay the fee of five dollars
+for his Harvard diploma "because it wasn't worth the price," later
+refusing to pay poll-tax and sent to jail, thus missing, possibly, the
+chance of finding that specimen of Victoria regia on Concord
+River--Thoreau, most virile of all the thinkers of his day, inspiring
+Emerson, the one man America could illest spare; Spinoza, the
+intellectual hermit, asking nothing, and giving everything--all these
+worked their philosophy up into life and are the type of men who jostle
+the world out of its ruts--creators all, one with Deity, sons of God,
+saviors of the race.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Washington Irving once spoke of Spain as the Paradise of Jews. But it
+must be borne in mind that he wrote the words in Granada, which was
+essentially a Moorish province. The Moors and the Jews are both Semitic
+in origin--they trace back to a common ancestry. It was the Moslem Moors
+that welcomed the Jews in both Venetia and Spain, not the Christians.
+The wealth, energy and practical business sense of the Jews recommended
+them to the grandees of Leon, Aragon and Castile. To the Jews they
+committed their exchequer, the care of their health, the setting of
+their jewels, and the fashioning of their finery. In this genial
+atmosphere many of the Jews grew great in the study of science,
+literature, history, philosophy and all that makes for mental
+betterment. They increased in numbers, in opulence and in culture. Their
+thrift and success set them apart as a mark for hate and envy.
+
+It was a period of ominous peace, of treacherous repose.
+
+A senseless and fanatical cry went up, that the Moors--the
+infidels--must be driven from Spain. The iniquities and inhuman
+barbarities visited upon the Mohammedan Moors would make a book in
+itself, but let it go at this: Ferdinand and Isabella drove the
+Mohammedans from Spain. In the struggle, the Jews were overlooked--and
+anyway, Christians do not repudiate the Old Testament, and if the Jews
+would accept Christ, why, they could remain!
+
+It looked easy to the gracious King and Queen of Spain--it was really
+generous: two religions were unnecessary, and Christianity was beautiful
+and right. If the Jews would become Catholics, all barriers would be
+removed--the Jews would be recognized as citizens and every walk of life
+would be open to them.
+
+This manifesto to the Jews is still quoted by Churchmen to show the
+excellence, tolerance, patience and love of the Spanish rulers. Turn
+your synagogues over to the Catholics--come and be one with us--we will
+all worship the one God together--come, these open arms invite--no
+distinctions--no badges--no preferences--no prejudices--come!
+
+In quoting the edict it is not generally stated that the Jews were given
+thirty days to make the change.
+
+The Jews who loved their faith fled; the weak succumbed, or pretended
+to. If a Jew wished to flee the country he could, but he must leave all
+his property behind. This caused many to remain and profess
+Christianity, only awaiting a time when their property could be turned
+into gold or jewels and be borne upon the person. This fondness for
+concrete wealth is a race instinct implanted in the Jewish mind by the
+inbred thought that possibly tomorrow he must fly.
+
+After attending service at a Catholic Church, Jews would go home and in
+secret read the Talmud and in whispers chant the Psalms of David.
+
+Laws were passed making such action a penal offense--spies were
+everywhere. No secret can be kept long, and in the Province of Seville
+over two thousand Jews were hanged or burned in a single year. When
+Ferdinand and Isabella gave Torquemada, Deza and Lucio orders to make
+good Catholics of all Jews, they had not the faintest idea what would be
+the result. Every Jew that was hurried to the stake was first stripped
+of his property.
+
+No Jew was safe, especially if he was rich--his sincerity or insincerity
+had really little to do in the matter. The prisons were full, the fagots
+crackled, the streets ran blood, and all in the name of the gentle
+Christ.
+
+Then for a time the severity relaxed, for the horror had spent itself.
+But early in the Seventeenth Century the same edicts were again put
+forth.
+
+Fortunately, priesthood had tried its mailed hand on the slow and
+sluggish Dutch, with the result that the Spaniards were driven from the
+Netherlands. Holland was the home of freedom. Amsterdam became a Mecca
+for the oppressed. The Jews flocked thither, and among others who, in
+Sixteen Hundred Thirty-one, landed on the quay was a young Jew by the
+name of Michael d'Espinoza. With him was a Moorish girl that he had
+rescued from the clutch of a Spanish grandee, in whose house she had
+been kept a prisoner.
+
+By a happy accident, this beautiful girl of seventeen had escaped from
+her tormentors and was huddling, sobbing, in an alley as the young Jew
+came hurrying by on his way to the ship that was to bear him to
+freedom. It was near day-dawn--there was no time to lose--the young man
+only knew that the girl, like himself, was in imminent peril. A small
+boat waited near--soon they were safely secreted in the hold of the
+ship. Before sundown the tide had carried the ship to sea, and Portugal
+was but a dark line on the horizon.
+
+Other refugees were on board the boat; they came from their
+hiding-places--and the second day out a refugee rabbi called a meeting
+on deck. It was a solemn service of thanksgiving and the songs of Zion
+were sung, the first time for some in many months, and only friends and
+the great, sobbing, salt sea listened.
+
+The tears of the Moorish girl were now dried--the horror of the future
+had gone with the black memories of the past. Other women, not quite so
+poor, contributed to her wardrobe, and there and then, after she had
+been accepted into the Jewish faith, she and Michael d'Espinoza, aged
+twenty-two, were married.
+
+The ship arrived at Amsterdam in safety. In a year, on November
+Twenty-fourth, Sixteen Hundred Thirty-two, in a little stone house that
+still stands on the canal bank, was born Benedict Spinoza.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Benedict Spinoza was brought up in the faith and culture of his people.
+Beyond his religious training at the synagogue, there was a Jewish High
+School at Amsterdam which he attended. This school might compare very
+favorably with our modern schools, in that it included a certain degree
+of manual training. Besides this he had received special instruction
+from several learned rabbis. In matters of true education, the Jews have
+ever been in advance of the Gentile world--they bring their children up
+to be useful. The father of Benedict was a maker of lenses for
+spectacles, and at this trade the boy was very early set to work. Again
+and again in the writings of Spinoza, we find the argument that every
+man should have a trade and earn his living with his hands, not by
+writing, speaking or philosophizing. If you can earn a living at your
+trade, you thus make your mind free.
+
+This early idea of usefulness led to a sympathy with another religious
+body, of which there were quite a number of members in Holland: the
+Mennonites. This sect was founded by Menno Simons, a Frieslander,
+contemporary of Luther; only this man swung on further from Catholicism
+than Luther and declared that a paid priesthood was what made all the
+trouble. Religion to him was a matter of individual inspiration. When an
+institution was formed, built on man's sense of relation with his Maker,
+property purchased, and paid priests employed, instantly there was a
+pollution of the well of life. It became a money-making scheme, and a
+grand clutch for place and power followed: it really ceased to be
+religion at all, so long as we define religion in its spiritual sense.
+"A priest," said Menno, "is a man who thrives on the sacred relations
+that exist between man and God, and is little better than a person who
+would live on the love-emotions of men and women."
+
+This certainly was bold language, but to be exact, it was persecution
+that forced the expression. The Catholics had placed an interdict on all
+services held by Protestant pastors, and the deprivation proved to Menno
+that paid preaching and costly churches and trappings were really not
+necessary at all. Man could go to God without them, and pray in secret.
+Spirituality is not dependent on either church or priest.
+
+The Mennonites in Holland escaped theological criticism by disclaiming
+to be a church, and calling their institution a college, and themselves
+"Collegiants."
+
+All the Mennonites asked was to be let alone. They were plain,
+unpretentious people, who worked hard, lived frugally, refused to make
+oaths, to accept civil office, or to go to war. They are a variant of
+the impulse that makes Quakers and all those peculiar people known as
+Primitive Christians, who mark the swinging of the pendulum from pride
+and pretense to simplicity and a life of modest usefulness.
+
+The sincerity, truthfulness and virtue of the Mennonites so impressed
+itself upon even the ruthless Corsican, that he made them exempt from
+conscription.
+
+Before Spinoza was twenty, he had come into acquaintanceship with these
+plain people. His relationship with the rabbis and learned men of Israel
+had given him a culture that the Mennonites did not possess; but these
+plain people, by the earnestness of their lives, showed him that the
+science of theology was not a science at all. Nobody understands
+theology: it is not meant to be understood--it is for belief. Spinoza
+compared the Mennonites, who confessed they knew nothing, but hoped
+much, to the rabbis, who pretended they knew all. His praise of the
+Mennonites, and his criticisms of the growing love for power in Judaism,
+were carried to the Jewish authorities by some young men who had come to
+him in the guise of learners. Moreover, the report was abroad that he
+was to marry a Gentile--the daughter of Van den Ende, the infidel.
+
+On order, he appeared at the synagogue, and defended his position. His
+ability in argument, his knowledge of Jewish law, his insight into the
+lessons of history, were alarming to the assembled rabbis. The young man
+was quiet, gentle, but firm. He expressed the belief that God might
+possibly have revealed Himself to other peoples beside the Jews.
+
+"Then you are not a Jew!" was the answer.
+
+"Yes, I am a Jew, and I love my faith."
+
+"But it is not all to you?"
+
+"I confess that occasionally I have found what seems to be truth
+outside of the Law."
+
+The rabbis tore their raiment in mingled rage and surprise at the young
+man's temerity.
+
+Spinoza did not withdraw from the Jewish Congregation--he was thrust
+out. Moreover, a fanatical Jew, in the warmth of his religious zeal,
+attempted to kill him. Spinoza escaped, his clothing cut through by a
+dagger-thrust, close to the heart.
+
+The curse of Israel was upon him--his own brothers and sisters refused
+him shelter, his father turned against him, and again was the icy
+unkindness of kinsmen made manifest. The tribe of Spinoza lives in
+history, saved from the fell clutch of oblivion by the man it denied
+with an oath and pushed in bitterness from its heart. Spinoza fled to
+his friends, the Mennonites, plain market-gardeners who lived a few
+miles out of the city.
+
+Spinoza had not meant to leave the Jews--the racial instinct was strong
+in him, and the pride of his people colored his character to the last.
+But the attempts to bribe him and coerce him into a following of
+fanatical law, when this law did not appeal to his commonsense, forced
+him into a position that his enemies took for innate perversity. When an
+eagle is hatched in a barnyard brood and mounts on soaring pinions
+toward the sun, it is always cursed and vilified because it does not
+remain at home and scratch in the compost. Its flight skyward is
+construed as proof of its vile nature.
+
+How can people who do not think, and can not think, and therefore have
+no thoughts to express, sympathize with one whose highest joy comes from
+the expression of his thought?
+
+Deprive a thinker of the privilege to think and you take from him his
+life. The joy of existence lies in self-expression. What if we should
+order the painter to quit his canvas, the sculptor to lay aside his
+tools, the farmer to leave the soil? Do these things, and you do no more
+than you do when you force a thinker to follow in the groove that dead
+men have furrowed. The thirst for knowledge must be slaked or the soul
+sickens and slow death follows.
+
+In Spinoza's time the literature of Greece and Rome was locked in the
+Latin language, which the Jews were forbidden to acquire. Young Spinoza
+longed to know what Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Seneca and Vergil had
+taught, but these authors were considered anathema by the rabbinical
+councils. Spinoza desired to be honest, and so asked for a special
+dispensation in his favor, as he was to be a teacher--could he study the
+Latin language?
+
+And the answer was, "Read your Joshua, first chapter and eighth verse,
+'This book of the law shall not depart out of thy mouth, but thou shalt
+meditate therein day and night.'"
+
+From this time on Spinoza was more or less under the ban, and rumors of
+his heresy were rife. It is possible, if it had not been for one
+person, that the growing desire for knowledge, the reaching out for
+better things, the dissatisfaction with his environment, might have
+passed in safety and the restless young rabbi slipped back into the
+conventional Jew. Youth always has its periods of unrest--sometimes
+more, sometimes less.
+
+Spinoza had made the acquaintance of Van den Ende, a teacher of Greek
+and Latin, an erratic, argumentative rationalist, who had his say on all
+topics of the time, and fixed his place in history by being shot as a
+revolutionary, just outside the walls of the Bastile.
+
+But at this time Van den Ende was fairly prosperous and Amsterdam was
+the freest city in Christendom.
+
+Van den Ende had a daughter, Clara Maria, a little younger than Spinoza,
+who surely was a most superior woman. She was the companion of her
+father in his studies. It speaks well for the father and it speaks well
+for the daughter that they were comrades and that his highest thought
+was expressed to her. I can conceive of no finer joy coming to a man
+than, as his hair whitens, to have a daughter who understands him at his
+best, who enters into his life, sympathizes with his ideals, ministers
+to his mental needs, who is his companion and friend. Only a great man
+ever has such a daughter. Madame De Stael, who delighted in being called
+"the daughter of Necker," was such a woman, and the splendor of her mind
+was no less her father's glory than was the fact that he was the
+greatest financier of his time.
+
+Clara Van den Ende was her father's helper and companion, and when he
+was busied in other tasks she took charge of his classes.
+
+Auerbach has written a charming story with Clara Van den Ende and
+Spinoza as a central theme. In the tale is pictured with skilful
+psychology the awakening of the sleeping soul of Spinoza as he was
+introduced from a cheerless home, devoid of art and freedom, into the
+beauties of undraped Greece and the fine atmosphere of a forum where
+nothing human was considered alien.
+
+From a love for Vergil, Cicero and Horace, to a love for each other, was
+a very natural sequence. A growing indifference for the censure of
+Judaism was quite a natural result. Auerbach would have us believe that
+no man alone ever stood out against the revilings of kinsmen and the
+stupidity of sectarians: we move in the line of least resistance and
+only a very great passion makes it possible for a man calmly to face the
+contumely of an angry world.
+
+Zangwill, in his vivid sketch, "The Maker of Lenses," makes this single
+love-episode in the life of Spinoza the controlling impulse of his life,
+probably reasoning on the premise that men who mark epochs are ever and
+always, without exception, those with the love nature strongly implanted
+in their hearts. So thoroughly does Zangwill believe in the one passion
+of Spinoza's life, that a score of years after the chief incident of it
+had transpired, he pictures the philosopher trembling at mention of the
+woman's name, coughing to conceal his agitation and clutching the
+doorpost for support. And this a man who smilingly faced a mob that
+howled for his life, and was only moved to philosophize on the nature of
+human intellect when a flying stone grazed his cheek!
+
+But the lady had ambitions--the lens-maker was penniless, and probably
+always would be--his passion was passive--he lacked the show and dash
+that made other women jealous. And so Oldenburg, a rival with love and
+jewels, won the heart that could not be won by love alone. That the lady
+soon knew she had erred did not help her case--Spinoza loved his ideal,
+and he had thought it was the woman.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Follow Zangwill's stories of the Ghetto and your heart is wrung by the
+injustice, cruelty and inhumanity visited upon the Jews by the people
+who worship a Jew as God and make daily supplications to a Jewess.
+
+But read between the lines and you will see that Israel Zangwill, child
+of the Ghetto, knows that the Peculiar People are peculiar through
+persecution, and not necessarily so through innate nature. Zangwill
+knows that no religion is pure except in its stage of persecution, and
+that Judaism, grown rich and powerful, would oppress and has oppressed.
+Martyr and persecutor shift places easily.
+
+The Jew arrives in a city at night, and in the morning takes down the
+shutters and is doing business. The Jew winds his way into the life of
+every city and becomes at once an integral part of it--a part, yet
+separate and distinct, for his social and religious life is not colored
+by his environment.
+
+Children imitate unconsciously. The golden rule is not natural to
+children: it has to be taught them. They do unto others as others have
+done unto them, and have no question as to right or wrong. We are all
+children, and have to think hard before we are conscious of any feeling
+of the brotherhood of man. As soon as the Jews relaxed in Amsterdam--got
+their breath, and felt secure--they did unto others as they had been
+done by--they persecuted.
+
+A Jew must be a Jew, and as they had been watched with suspicion in
+Spain and Portugal by the Christians, so now they watched each other for
+heresies. They compelled strictest obedience to every form and ceremony.
+To the Jew the Law forms the firmament above and the earth beneath. All
+is law to him, and his part and work in this life is obedience to law.
+
+The Jewish religion is a concrete, unbroken mass of laws. The Jew is
+bounded on the east by law; on the north by law; on the west by law; on
+the south by law. There are set rules and laws that govern his getting
+up, his going to bed, his eating, drinking, sleeping, and praying. There
+is no phase of human relationship that is not covered by the Mishna and
+Gemara. Being learned in the Law means being learned in the proper way
+to kill chickens, to dress ducks, wear your vestments, go to prayers,
+and what to say when you meet two Christians in an alley. If a Jew
+quarrels with a neighbor and goes to his Rabbi for advice, the learned
+man gets down his Talmud and finds the page. The relation of wife and
+husband, child and parent, brother and sister, lover and sweetheart, are
+covered by law, fixed, immovable. The learned men of Judah are men
+learned in the Law, not learned in the science of life, and commonsense.
+When these learned men meet they argue for six days and nights together
+as to interpretations of the Law concerning whether it is right to make
+a fire in your cook-stove on the Sabbath if a Christian is starving for
+food on your doorstep, or what will become of you if you eat pork to
+save your life.
+
+Rational Jews are those who do what they think is right, but Orthodox
+Jews are those who do what the Law prescribes. When Jesus plucked the
+ears of corn on the Sabbath day, he proved himself a Rational Jew--he
+set his own opinion higher than Law and thereby made himself an outcast.
+Jewish Law provides curdling curses for just such offenses.
+
+Plato's Republic was a scheme of life regulated absolutely by law; every
+contingency was provided for. And Plato's plan was founded on the
+hypothesis that it is the duty of wise men to do the thinking and
+regulate the conduct of those who are supposed not to be wise enough to
+think and to act for themselves. But Plato's idea lacked the "Thus saith
+the Lord," with which Moses and Aaron enforced their edicts. So Plato's
+Republic is still on paper, for no set of rules minutely regulating
+conduct has ever been enforced except as the ruler made his subjects
+believe he received his instructions direct from God.
+
+Yet all the Jewish Laws are founded with an eye to a sanitary and
+hygienic good--they are built on the basis of expediency. And that rule
+of the Gemara which provides that if you have gravy on the table, you
+can not also have butter, without sin, seems more of a move in the
+direction of economics than a matter of ethics. Laws are good for the
+people who believe that a blind obedience to a good thing is better than
+to work your way alone and find out for yourself what is best and
+right. The Jewish Law is based, like all religious codes, on the
+assumption that man by nature is vile, and really prefers wrong to
+right.
+
+The thought that all men prefer the good, and think at the moment they
+are doing what is best, no matter what they do, was first sharply and
+clearly expressed by Spinoza. Truth, he said, could only be reached
+through freedom--a man must even have the privilege of thinking wrong so
+long as his actions do not jeopardize the life and immediate safety of
+others.
+
+For a people whose every act is governed by fixed laws there can be no
+progression. Mistakes are the rungs of the ladder by which we reach the
+skies. The man who allows the dead to regulate his life, and accepts
+their thinking as final, satisfied to repeat what he is taught, remains
+forever in the lowlands. His wings are leaden.
+
+The Jews--most law-bound and priest-ridden of all peoples--are at home
+everywhere because they have no home. They mix in the life of every
+nation and remain forever separate and apart. They will run with you,
+ride with you, trade with you, but they will not eat with you nor pray
+with you. They build no Altars to the Unknown God, out of courtesy to
+visitors and guests from distant climes. Mohammedans recognize the
+divinity of Jesus, the Buddhists look upon him as one of many Christs,
+the Universalist sees good in every faith, but the Jew regards all other
+religions than his own as pestilence. If by chance, or in the line of
+business, he finds himself in a heathen temple or Christian Church, his
+Gemara orders that he shall present himself at his own temple for
+purification.
+
+Read Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy, and you behold on every page
+curses, revilings, threats and bitter scorn for all outside the pale.
+Orders by Jehovah to burn, kill and utterly destroy are frequent. And we
+must remember that every people make their god in their own image. A
+man's God is himself at his best; his devil is himself at his worst.
+
+The very expression, "The Chosen People," would be an insult to every
+man outside the pale, were it not such a petulant and childish boast
+that its serious assumption makes us smile.
+
+Well does Moses Mendelssohn, the Jew, say: "The Ghetto is an arrangement
+first contrived by Jews for keeping infidels out of a sacred precinct.
+When the infidels were strong enough they turned the tables and forbade
+the Jews to leave their Ghetto except at certain hours. For the misery,
+poverty and squalor of the Ghetto the Jew is not to blame--if he could,
+he would have the Ghetto a place of opulence, beauty and all that makes
+for the good. Every undesirable thing he would bestow on the outsider.
+In the twilight days of Jewish power, the Jew, with bigotry, arrogance
+and intolerance unsurpassed, regulated the infidels and fixed their
+goings and comings as they now do his, and he would do it again if he
+had the power. The Jew never changes--once a Jew always a Jew."
+
+This was written by a man who was not only a Jew, but a man. He was a
+Jew in pride of race--in racial instinct, but he was great enough to
+know that all men are God's children, and that to set up a fixed,
+dogmatic standard regulating every act of life has its serious
+penalties. He was a Jew so big that he knew that the cruelty and
+inhumanity visited upon the Jews by Christians was first taught to these
+Christians by Jews--it is all in the Old Testament. The villainy you
+have taught me I will execute. It shall go hard, but I will better the
+instruction.
+
+The Christians who had persecuted Jews were really orthodox Jews in
+disguise, and were actuated more by the Jewish Law expressed in the Old
+Testament, than by the life of Jesus, who placed man above the Sabbath
+and taught that the good is that which serves.
+
+And so Benedict Spinoza, the Rabbi, gentle, spiritual, kind, heir to the
+Jewish faith, learned in all the refinements of Jewish Law, knowing
+minutely the history of the race, knowing that for which the curses of
+Judaism were reserved, perceiving with unblinking eyes the absurdity and
+folly of all dogmatic belief, gradually withdrew from practising and
+following "Law," preferring his own commonsense. There were threats,
+then attempts to bribe, and again threats and finally excommunication
+and curses so terrible that if they were carried out, a man would walk
+the earth an exile--unknown by brothers and sisters, shunned by the
+mother that gave him birth, a moral leper to his father, despised,
+rejected, turned away, spit upon by every being of his kind.
+
+And here is the document:
+
+     By the sentence of the angels, by the decree of the saints, we
+     anathematize, cut off, curse, and execrate Baruch Spinoza, in the
+     presence of these sacred books with the six hundred and thirteen
+     precepts which are written therein, with the anathema wherewith
+     Joshua anathematized Jericho; with the cursing wherewith Elisha
+     cursed the children; and with all the cursings which are written in
+     the Book of the Law; cursed be he by day, and cursed by night;
+     cursed when he lieth down, and cursed when he riseth up; cursed
+     when he goeth out, and cursed when he cometh in; the Lord pardon
+     him never; the wrath and fury of the Lord burn upon this man, and
+     bring upon him all the curses which are written in the Book of the
+     Law. The Lord blot out his name under heaven. The Lord set him
+     apart for destruction from all the tribes of Israel, with all the
+     curses of the firmament which are written in the Book of the Law.
+     There shall no one speak to him, no man write to him, no man show
+     him any kindness, no man stay under the same roof with him, no man
+     come nigh him.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+When the Jewish congregation had placed its ban upon Spinoza, he dropped
+the Jewish name Baruch, for the Latin Benedictus. In this action he
+tokened his frame of mind: he was going to persist in his study of the
+Latin language, and his new name stood for peace or blessing, just as
+the other had, being essentially the same as our word benediction. The
+man's purpose was firm. To perfect himself in Latin, he began a study of
+Descartes' "Meditations," and this led to proving the Cartesian
+philosophy by a geometrical formula. In his quiet home among the simple
+Mennonites, five miles from Amsterdam, there gradually grew up around
+him a body of students to whom he read his writings. The Cartesian
+philosophy swings around the proposition that only through universal
+doubt can we at last reach truth. Spinoza soon went beyond this and made
+his plea for faith in a universal Good.
+
+Five years went by--years of work at his lenses, helping his friends in
+their farm work, and several hours daily devoted to study and writing.
+Spinoza's manuscripts were handed around by his pupils. He wrote for
+them, and in making truth plain to them he made it clear to himself. The
+Jews at Amsterdam kept track of his doings and made charges to the
+Protestant authorities to the effect that Spinoza was guilty of treason,
+and his presence a danger to the State. Spies were about, and their
+presence becoming known to the Mennonites, caused uneasiness. To
+relieve his friends of a possible unpleasant situation, the gentle
+philosopher packed up his scanty effects and moved away. He went to the
+village of Voorburg, two miles from The Hague.
+
+Here he lived for seven years, often for six months not going farther
+than three miles from home. He studied, worked and wrote, and his
+writings were sent out to his few friends who circulated them among
+friends of theirs, and in time the manuscripts came back soiled and
+dog-eared, proof that some one had read them. Persecution binds human
+hearts, and at this time there was a brotherhood of thinkers throughout
+the capitals and University towns of Europe. Spinoza's name became known
+gradually to these--they grew to look for his monthly contribution, and
+in many places when his manuscript arrived little bands of earnest
+students would meet, and the manuscript would be read and discussed. The
+interdict placed on free thought made it attractive. Spinoza became
+recognized by the esoteric few as one of the world's great thinkers,
+although the good people with whom he lived knew him only as a model
+lodger, who kept regular hours and made little trouble. Occasionally
+visitors would come from a distance and remain for hours discussing such
+abstract themes as the freedom of the will or the nature of the
+over-soul. And these visitors caused the rustic neighbors to grow
+curious, and we find Spinoza moving into the city and renting a modest
+back room. By a curious chance, his landlady, fifty years before, had
+been a servant in the household of Grotius, and once had locked that
+great man in a trunk and escorted him, right side up, across the border
+into Switzerland to escape the heresy-hunters who were looking for human
+kindling. This kind landlady, now grown old, and living largely in the
+past, saw points of resemblance between her philosophic boarder and the
+great Grotius, and soon waxed boastful to the neighbors. Spinoza noticed
+that he was being pointed out on the streets. His record had followed
+him. The Jews hated him because he was a renegade; the Christians hated
+him because he was a Jew, and both Catholics and Protestants shunned him
+when they ought not, and greeted him with howls when they should have
+let him alone.
+
+He again moved his lodgings to the suburbs of the city, where he lived
+with the family of Van der Spijck, a worthy Dutch painter who smoked his
+pipe in calm indifference to the Higher Criticism. For their quiet and
+studious lodger Van der Spijck and his wife had a profound regard. They
+did not understand him, but they believed in him. Often he would go to
+church with them and coming home would discuss the sermon with them at
+length. The Lutheran pastor who came to call on the family invited
+Spinoza to join his flock, and they calmly discussed the questions of
+baptism and regeneration by faith together; but genius only expresses
+itself to genius, and the pastor went away mystified. Van der Spijck
+did not produce great art, yet his pictures are now in demand because he
+was the kind and loyal friend of Spinoza, and his heart, not his art,
+fixes his place in history.
+
+In his sketch, Zangwill has certain of his old friends, members of the
+Van den Ende family, hunt out the philosopher in his obscure lodgings
+and pay him a social visit. Then it was that he turned pale, and
+stammeringly tried to conceal his agitation at mention of the name of
+the only woman he had ever loved.
+
+The image of that one fine flaming up of divine passion followed him to
+the day of his death. It was too sacred for him to discuss--he avoided
+women, kept out of society, and forever in his sad heart there burned a
+shrine to the ideal. And so he lived, separate and apart. A single
+little room sufficed--the work-bench where he made his lenses near the
+window, and near at hand the table covered with manuscript where he
+wrote. Renan says that when he died, aged forty-three, his passing was
+like a sigh, he had lived so quietly--so few knew him--there were no
+earthly ties to break.
+
+The worthy Van der Spijcks, plain, honest people, had invited him to go
+to church with them. He smilingly excused himself--he had thoughts he
+must write out ere they escaped. When the good man and his wife returned
+in an hour, their lodger was dead.
+
+A tablet on the house marks the spot, and but a short distance away in
+the open square sits his form in deathless bronze, pensively writing
+out an idea which we can only guess--or is it a last love-letter to the
+woman to whom he gave his heart and who pushed from her the gift?
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Spinoza had courage, yet great gentleness of disposition. His habit of
+mind was conciliatory: if strong opinions were expressed in his presence
+concerning some person or thing, he usually found some good to say of
+the person or an excuse for the thing. He was one of the most unselfish
+men in history--money was nothing to him, save as it might minister to
+his very few immediate wants or the needs of others.
+
+He smilingly refused a pension offered him by a French courtier if he
+would but dedicate a book to the King; and a legacy left him by an
+admiring student, Simon de Vries, was declined for the reason that it
+was too much and he did not wish the care of it. Later, he compromised
+with the heirs by accepting an income of one hundred and twenty-five
+dollars a year. "How unreasonable," he exclaimed, "they want me to
+accept five hundred florins a year--I told them I would take three
+hundred, but I will not be burdened by a stiver more." If he was
+financially free from the necessity of earning his living at his trade,
+he feared the quality of his thought might be diluted. You can not
+think intently and intensely all of the time. Those who try it never are
+able to dive deep nor soar high.... Good digestion demands a certain
+amount of coarse food--refined and condensed aliment alone kills. Man
+should work and busy himself with the commonplace, rest himself for his
+flight, and when the moment of transfiguration comes, make the best of
+it.
+
+All he asked was to be given the privilege to work and to think. As for
+expressing his thoughts, he made no public addresses and during his life
+only one of his books was printed. This was the "Tractatus
+Theologico-Politicus," which mentioned "Hamburg" on the title page, but
+with the author's name wisely omitted. Trite enough now are the
+propositions laid down--that God is everywhere and that man is brother
+to the tree, the rock, the flower. Emerson states the case in his
+"Over-Soul" and "Spiritual Laws" in the true, calm Spinozistic style--as
+if the gentle Jew had come back to earth and dictated his thought,
+refined, polished and smooth as one of his own little lenses, to the man
+of Concord. Benedictus Concordia, blessing and peace be with thee!
+
+But the lynx-eyed censors soon discovered this single, solitary book of
+Spinoza's, and although they failed to locate the author, Spinoza had
+the satisfaction of seeing the work placed on the Index and a general
+interdict issued against it by Christendom and Judea as well. It was
+really of some importance. It was so thoroughly in demand that it still
+circulated with false title pages. In the Lenox Library, New York, is a
+copy of the first edition, finely bound, and lettered thus: "A Treatise
+on the Sailing of Ships against the Wind," which shows the straits
+booksellers were put to in evading the censors, and also reveals a touch
+of wit that doubtless was appreciated by the Elect.
+
+His modesty, patience, kindness and freedom from all petty whim and
+prejudice set Spinoza apart as a marked man. Withal he was eminently
+religious, and the reference to him by Novalis as "the God-intoxicated
+man" seems especially applicable to one who saw God in everything.
+
+Renan said at the dedication of The Hague monument to Spinoza, "Since
+the days of Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius we have not seen a life so
+profoundly filled with the sentiment of the divine."
+
+When walking along the streets of The Hague and coarse voices called
+after him in guttural, "Kill the renegade!" he said calmly, "We must
+remember that these men are expressing the essence of their being, just
+as I express the essence of mine."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Spinoza taught that the love of God is the supreme good; that virtue is
+its own reward, and folly its own punishment; and that every one ought
+to love his neighbor and obey the civil powers.
+
+He made no enemies except by his opinions. He was infinitely patient,
+sweet in temper--had respect for all religions, and never offended by
+parading his heresies in the faces of others.
+
+Nothing but the kicks of scorn and the contumely that came to Spinoza
+could possibly have freed him to the extent he was free from Judaistic
+bonds.
+
+He had disciples who called him "Master," and who taught him nothing but
+patience in answering their difficulties.
+
+One is amazed at the hunger of the mind at the time of Spinoza. Men
+seemed to think, and dare to grasp for "New Thought" to a marvelous
+extent.
+
+Spinoza says that "evil" and "good" have no objective reality, but are
+merely relative to our feelings, and that "evil" in particular is
+nothing positive, but a privation only, or non-existence.
+
+Spinoza says that love consecrates every indifferent particular
+connected with the object of affection. Good is that which we certainly
+know to be useful to us. Evil is that which we certainly know stands in
+the way of our command of good.
+
+Good is that which helps. Bad is that which hinders our
+self-maintenance and active powers.
+
+A passage from Spinoza which well reveals his habit of thought and which
+placed the censors on his track runs as follows:
+
+     The ultimate design of the State is not to dominate men, to
+     restrain them by fear, to make them subject to the will of others,
+     but, on the contrary, to permit every one, as far as possible, to
+     live in security. That is to say, to preserve intact the natural
+     right which is his, to live without being harmed himself or doing
+     harm to others. No, I say, the design of the State is not to
+     transform men into animals or automata from reasonable beings; its
+     design is to arrange matters that citizens may develop their minds
+     and bodies in security, and to make free use of their reason. The
+     true design of the State, then, is liberty. Whoever would respect
+     the rights of the sovereign ought never to act in opposition to his
+     decrees; but each has a right to think as he pleases and to say
+     what he thinks, provided that he limits himself to speaking and to
+     teaching in the name of pure reason, and that he does not attempt,
+     in his private capacity, to introduce innovations into the State.
+     For example, a citizen demonstrates that a certain law is repugnant
+     to sound reason, and believing this, he thinks it ought to be
+     abrogated. If he submits his opinion to the judgment of the
+     sovereign, to which alone it belongs to establish and to abolish
+     laws, and if, in the meantime, he does nothing contrary to law, he
+     certainly deserves well of the State as being a good citizen.
+
+     Let us admit that it is possible to stifle liberty of men and to
+     impose on them a yoke, to the point that they dare not even
+     murmur, however feebly, without the consent of the sovereign:
+     never, it is certain, can any one hinder them from thinking
+     according to their own free will. What follows hence? It is that
+     men will think one way and speak another; that, consequently, good
+     faith, so essential a virtue to a State, becomes corrupted; that
+     adulation, so detestable, and perfidy, shall be held in honor,
+     bringing in their train a decadence of all good and sound
+     habitudes. What can be more fatal to a State than to exile, as
+     malcontents, honest citizens, simply because they do not hold the
+     opinion of the multitude, and because they are ignorant of the art
+     of dissembling! What can be more fatal to a State than to treat as
+     enemies and to put to death men who have committed no other crime
+     than that of thinking independently! Behold, then, the scaffold,
+     the dread of the bad man, which now becomes the glorious theater
+     where tolerance and virtue blaze forth in all their splendor, and
+     covers publicly with opprobrium the sovereign majesty! Assuredly,
+     there is but one thing which that spectacle can teach us, and that
+     is to imitate these noble martyrs, or, if we fear death, to become
+     the abject flatterers of the powerful. Nothing hence can be so
+     perilous as to relegate and submit to divine right things which are
+     purely speculative, and to impose laws upon opinions which are, or
+     at least ought to be, subject to discussion among men. If the right
+     of the State were limited to repressing acts, and speech were
+     allowed impunity, controversies would not turn so often into
+     seditions.
+
+
+
+
+AUGUSTE COMTE
+
+
+     In the name of the Past and of the Future, the servants of
+     Humanity--both its philosophical and its practical servants--come
+     forward to claim as their due the general direction of the world.
+     Their object is to constitute at length a real Providence in all
+     departments--moral, intellectual and material.
+
+                                                --_Auguste Comte_
+
+[Illustration: AUGUSTE COMTE]
+
+
+A little city girl asked of her country cousin, when honey was the topic
+up for discussion, "Does your papa keep a bee?"
+
+Let the statement go unchallenged, that a single bee has neither the
+disposition nor the ability to make honey.
+
+Bees accomplish nothing save as they work together, and neither do men.
+
+Great men come in groups.
+
+Six men, three living at the village of Concord, Massachusetts, and
+three at Cambridge, fifteen miles away, supplied America really all her
+literature, until Indiana suddenly loomed large on the horizon, and
+assumed the center of the stage, like the spirit of the Brocken.
+
+Five men made up the Barbizon school of painting, which has influenced
+the entire art education of the world. And that those who have been
+influenced and helped most, deny their redeemer with an oath, is a
+natural phenomenon psychologists look for and fully understand.
+
+Greece had a group of seven thinkers, in the time of Pericles, who made
+the name and fame of the city deathless.
+
+Rome had a similar group in the time of Augustus; then the world went
+to sleep, and although there were individuals, now and then, of great
+talent, their lights went out in darkness, for it takes bulk to make a
+conflagration.
+
+Florence had her group of thinkers and doers when Michelangelo and
+Leonardo lived only a few miles apart, but never met. Yet each man
+spurred the other on to do and dare, until an impetus was reached that
+sent the names of both down the centuries.
+
+Boswell gives us a group of a dozen men who made each other
+possible--often helped by hate and strengthened by scorn.
+
+The Mutual Admiration Society does not live in piping times of peace,
+where glowing good-will strews violets; often the sessions of this
+interesting aggregation are stormy and acrimonious, but one thing
+holds--the man who arises at this board must have something to say.
+Strong men, matched by destiny, set each other a pace. Criticism is full
+and free. The most interesting and the most successful social experiment
+in America owed its lease of life largely to its scheme of Public
+Criticism, a plan society at large will adopt when it puts off
+swaddling-clothes. Public Criticism is a diversion of gossip into a
+scientific channel. It is a plan of healthful, hygienic, social
+plumbing.
+
+England produced one group of thinkers that changed the complexion of
+the theological belief of Christendom--Darwin, Spencer, Wallace, Huxley
+and Mill. But this group built on the French philosophers, who were
+taught antithetically by the decaying and crumbling aristocracy of
+France. Rousseau and Voltaire loved each other and helped each other, as
+the proud Leonardo helped the humble and no less proud peasant,
+Michelangelo--by absent treatment.
+
+Victor Hugo says that when the skulls of Voltaire and Rousseau were
+taken in a sack from the Pantheon and tumbled into a common grave, a
+spark of recognition was emitted that the gravedigger did not see.
+
+Voltaire was patronized by Frederick the Great, who, though a married
+man, lived a bachelor life and forbade women his court, and protected
+Kant with the bulging forehead and independent ways. Kant lived among a
+group of thinkers he never saw, but reached out and touched finger-tips
+with them over the miles that his feet never traversed.
+
+To Kant are we indebted for Turgot, that practical and farseeing man of
+affairs told of in matchless phrase in Thomas Watson's "Story of
+France," the best book ever written in America, with possibly a few
+exceptions. Condorcet kept step with him, and Auguste Comte calls
+Condorcet his spiritual stepfather, and a wit of the time here said,
+"Then Turgot is your uncle"; and Comte replied, "I am proud of the
+honor, for if Turgot is my uncle, then indeed am I of royal blood."
+
+Auguste Comte is the one bright particular star amid that milky way of
+riotous thinkers which followed close upon the destruction of the French
+Monarchy.
+
+When Napoleon visited the grave of Rousseau, he mused in silence and
+then said, "Perhaps it might have been as well if this man had never
+lived."
+
+And Marshal Ney, standing near, said, "It reveals small gratitude for
+Napoleon Bonaparte to say so." Napoleon smiled and answered, "Possibly
+the world would be as well off if neither of us had ever lived."
+
+Auguste Comte thought that Napoleon was just as necessary in the social
+evolution as Rousseau, and that both were needed--and he himself was
+needed to make the matter plain in print.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Auguste Comte was born at Montpelier, France, in Seventeen Hundred
+Ninety-eight. His father was receiver of taxes, an office that carried
+with it much leisure and a fair income. Men of leisure seldom have time
+to think--if you want a thing done it is safest and best not to pick a
+publican. Only busy men have time to do things. The men who have good
+incomes and work little are envied only by those with a mental
+impediment.
+
+The boy Auguste owed little to his parents for his peculiar evolution,
+save as his father taught him by antithesis: the children of drunkards
+make temperance fanatics, and shiftless fathers sometimes have sons who
+are great financiers.
+
+When nine years of age, the passion to know and to become was upon
+Auguste Comte. He was small in stature, insignificant in appearance, and
+had a great appetite for facts. Comte is a fine refutation of the maxim
+that infant prodigies fall victims to arrested development.
+
+At twelve years of age he was filled with the idea that the social order
+was all wrong. To the utter astonishment of his parents and tutors, he
+argued that the world could not be bettered until mankind was taught the
+lesson that history, languages, theology and polite etiquette were not
+learning at all; and as long as educated men centered on these things,
+there was no hope for the race.
+
+The birch was brought in to disannex the boy from his foolishness, but
+this only seemed to make him cling the closer to what he was pleased to
+call his convictions.
+
+He read books that wearied the brains of grown-ups, and took a hearty
+interest in the abstruse, the obscure and the complex.
+
+At thirteen, that peculiar time when the young turn to faith, this
+perverse rareripe was so filled with doubt that it ran over and he stood
+in the slop. He offered to publicly debate the question of Freewill with
+the local curé; and on several occasions stood up in meeting and
+contradicted the preacher.
+
+His parents, thinking to divert his mind from abstractions to useful
+effort, sent him to the Polytechnic School at Paris, that excellent
+institution founded by Napoleon, which served America most nobly as a
+model for the Boston School of Technology, only the French
+"Polytechnique" was purely a government institution--a sample of the
+Twentieth Century sent for the benefit of the Nineteenth.
+
+But institutions are never much beyond the people--they can not be, for
+the people dilute everything until it is palatable. Laws that do not
+embody public opinion can never be enforced. No man who expresses
+himself is really much ahead of his time--if he is, the times snuff him
+out, and quickly.
+
+In Eighteen Hundred Fourteen, the Polytechnic School was well saturated
+with the priestly idea of education, and the attempt was made to
+produce an alumni of cultured men, rather than a race of useful ones.
+
+Revolt was rife in the ranks of the students. It is still debatable
+whether revolution and riot in colleges are actuated by a passion for
+truth or a love of excitement. Anyway, the "Techs" laid deep places to
+the effect that when a certain professor appeared at chapel, a unique
+reception would be in store for him.
+
+He appeared, and a fusillade of books, rulers and ink-wells shot at his
+learned head from every quarter of the room. Other professors appeared
+and sought to restore order. Riot followed--seats were torn up, windows
+broken, and there was much loud talk and gesticulation peculiarly
+Gallic.
+
+It was Ninety-three done in little.
+
+Instead of expelling the delinquents, the National Assembly took the
+matter in hand and simply voted to close the school.
+
+Auguste Comte went home a hero, proud as a Heidelberg student, with a
+sweeping scar on his chin and the end of his nose gone. "I have dealt
+the Old Education its deathblow," he solemnly said, mistaking a
+cane-rush for a revolution.
+
+Against the direct command of his parents, he went back to Paris. He had
+now reached the mature age of eighteen. He resolved to write out truth
+as it occurred to him, and incidentally he would gain a livelihood by
+teaching mathematics.
+
+At Paris, the mental audacity of the youth won him recognition; he
+picked up a precarious living, and was a frequenter at scientific
+lectures and discussions, and in gatherings where great themes were up
+for debate, he was always present.
+
+Benjamin Franklin was his ideal. In his notebook he wrote this:
+"Franklin at twenty-five resolved he would become great and wise. I now
+vow the same at twenty." He had five years the start!
+
+Franklin, calm, healthy, judicial, wise--the greatest man America has
+produced--worked his philosophy up into life. He did not think much
+beyond his ability to perform. To him, to think was to do. And he did
+things that to many men were miracles.
+
+Comte once said, "I would have followed the venerable Benjamin Franklin
+through the street, and kissed the hem of the homespun overcoat, made by
+Deborah." These men were very unlike. One was big, gentle, calm and
+kind; the other was small, dyspeptic, excitable and full of challenge.
+Yet the little man had times of insight and abstraction, when he tracked
+reasons further than the big, practical man could have followed them.
+
+Franklin's habit of life--the semi-ascetic quality of getting your
+gratification by doing without things--especially pleased Comte. He
+lived in a garret on two meals a day, and was happy in the thought that
+he could endure and yet think and study. The old monastic impulse was
+upon him, minus the religious features--or stay! why may not science
+become a religion? And surely science can become dogmatic, and even
+tyrannically build a hierarchy on a hypothesis no less than theology.
+
+A friend, pitying young Comte's hard lot, not knowing its sweet
+recompense, got him a position as tutor in the household of a nobleman;
+like unto the kind man who caught the sea-gulls roosting on an iceberg,
+and in pity, transferred them to the warm delights of a compost-pile in
+his barnyard.
+
+Comte held the place for three weeks and then resigned. He went back to
+the garret and sweet liberty--having had his taste of luxury, but
+miserable in it all--wondering how a gavotte or a minuet could make a
+man forget that he was living in a city where thirty thousand human
+beings were constantly only one meal beyond the sniff of starvation.
+
+At this time Comte came into close relationship with a man who was to
+have a very great influence in his life--this was Count Henri of
+Saint-Simon, usually spoken of as Saint-Simon.
+
+Saint-Simon was rich, gently proud, and fondly patronizing. He was a
+sort of scientific Mæcenas--and be it known that Mæcenas was a poet and
+philosopher of worth, and one Horace was his pupil.
+
+Saint-Simon was an excellent and learned man who wrote, lectured and
+taught on philosophic themes. He had a garden-school, modeled in degree
+after that of Plato. Saint-Simon became much interested in young Comte,
+invited him to his classes, supplied him books, clothing, and tickets to
+the opera. Part of the time Comte lived under Saint-Simon's roof, and
+did translating and copying in partial payment for his meal-ticket. The
+teacher and the pupil had a fine affection for each other. What Comte
+needed, he took from Saint-Simon as if it were his own.
+
+In writing to friends at this time, Comte praises Saint-Simon as the
+greatest man who ever lived--"a model of patience, generosity, learning
+and love--my spiritual father!" There was fifty years' difference in
+their ages, but they studied, read and rambled the realm of books
+together, with mutual pleasure and profit.
+
+The central idea of the "Positive Philosophy" is that of the three
+stages through which man passes in his evolution. This was gotten from
+Saint-Simon, and together they worked out much of the thought that Comte
+afterward carried further and incorporated in his book.
+
+But about this time, Saint-Simon, in one of his lectures, afterward
+printed, made use of some of the thoughts that Comte had expressed, as
+if they were his own--and possibly they were. There is no copyright on
+an idea, no caveat can be filed on feeling, and at the last there is no
+such thing as originality, except as a matter of form.
+
+Young Comte now proved his humanity by accusing his teacher of stealing
+his radium. A quarrel followed, in which Comte was so violent that
+Saint-Simon had to put the youth out of his house.
+
+The wrangles of Grub Street would fill volumes: both sides are always
+right, or wrong--it matters little, and is simply a point of view. But
+the rancor of it all, if seen from heaven, must serve finely to dispel
+the monotony of the place--a panacea for paradisiacal ennui.
+
+From lavish praise, Comte swung over to words of bitterness and
+accusation. Having sat at the man's table and partaken of his
+hospitality for several years, he was now guilty of the unpardonable
+offense of ridiculing and berating him.
+
+He speaks of the Saint as a "depraved quack," and says that the time he
+spent with him was worse than wasted. If Saint-Simon was the rogue and
+pretender that Comte avers, it is no certificate of Comte's insight that
+it took him four years to find it out.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In Eighteen Hundred Twenty-five Comte married. The ceremony was
+performed civilly, on a sudden impulse of what Schopenhauer would call
+"the genius of the genus." The lady was young, agreeable; and having no
+opinions of her own, was quite willing to accept his. Comte
+congratulated himself that here was virgin soil, and he laid the
+flattering unction to his soul that he could mold the lady's mind to
+match his own. She would be his helpmeet. Comte had not read Ouida, who
+once wrote that when God said, "I will make a helpmeet for him," He was
+speaking ironically.
+
+Comte had associated but very little with women--he had theories about
+them. Small men, with midget minds, know femininity much better than do
+the great ones. Traveling salesmen, with checkered vests, gauge women as
+Herbert Spencer never could.
+
+Comte's wife was pretty and she was astute--as most pretty women are.
+John Fiske, in his lecture on "Communal Life," says that astute persons
+add nothing of value to the community in which they live--their mission
+being to be the admired glass of fashion for the non-cogitabund. The
+value of astuteness is that it protects us from the astute.
+
+Samuel Johnson and his wife had their first quarrel on the way from the
+church, and Auguste Comte and his wife tiffed going down the steps from
+the notary's. Comte had no use for ecclesiastical forms, and the lady
+agreed with him until after the notary had earned his fee. Then she
+suddenly had qualms, like those peculiar ladies told of by Robert Louis
+Stevenson, who turn the Madonna's face to the wall.
+
+The couple went to Montpelier on their wedding-tour, to visit Comte's
+parents. The new wife agreed with the old folks on but one point--the
+marriage should be solemnized by a priest. Having won them on this
+point, they stood a solid phalanx against the husband; but the lady took
+exceptions to Montpelier on all other grounds--she hated it thoroughly
+and said so.
+
+Instead of molding her to his liking, Comte was being kneaded into
+animal crackers for her amusement.
+
+Then we find him writing to a friend, confessing that his hopes were
+ashes; but in his misery he grows philosophical and says, "It is all
+good, for now I am driven back to my work, and from now on my life is
+dedicated to science."
+
+No doubt the lady was as much disappointed in the venture as was the
+husband, but he, being literary, eased his grief by working it up into
+art, while her side of the story lies buried deep in silence glum.
+
+In choosing the names of philosophers for this series, no thought was
+given in the selection beyond the achievements of the men. But it now
+comes to me with a slight surprise that seven out of the twelve were
+unmarried, and probably it would have been as well--certainly for the
+wives--if the other five had remained bachelors, too. Xantippe would
+have been the gainer, even if Socrates did miss his discipline.
+
+To center on science and devote one's thought to philosophy produces a
+being more or less deformed. There is great danger in specialization:
+Nature sacrifices the man in order to get the thing done. Abstract
+thought unfits one for domestic life; for, to a degree, it separates a
+man from his kind.
+
+The proper advice to a woman about to marry a philosopher would be,
+"Don't!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The advantage of a little actual hardship in one's life is that it makes
+existence real and not merely literary. Comte was inclined to thrive on
+martyrdom. His restless, eager mind invented troubles, if there were no
+real ones, but he was wise enough to know this, as he once said: "The
+trials of life are all of one size--imaginary pains are as bad as real
+ones, and men who have no actual troubles usually conjure forth a few.
+Thus far, happily, I am not reduced to this strait."
+
+We thus see that the true essence of philosophy was there. Comte got a
+gratification by dissecting, analyzing and classifying his emotions. All
+was grist that came to his mill.
+
+When he was twenty-eight the Positive Philosophy had assumed such
+proportions in his mind that he announced a course of twelve lectures on
+the subject.
+
+He was jealous of his discoveries, and was intent on getting all the
+credit that was due him. Money he cared little for; power and reputation
+to him were the only gods worth appeasing. The thought of domestic joy
+was forever behind, but philosophy came as a solace. A prospectus was
+sent out and tickets were issued. The landlady where he boarded offered
+her parlor and her boarder, second floor back, for the benefit of
+science. Several zealous denizens of the Latin Quarter made a canvass,
+and enough tickets were sold so that the philosopher felt that at last
+the world was really at his feet.
+
+When the afternoon for the first lecture arrived, no carriages blocked
+the street, and as only about half of those who had purchased tickets
+appeared, the difficulties of the landlady and her nervous boarder were
+much lessened.
+
+There was one man at this first lecture who was profoundly impressed,
+and if we had his testimony, and none other, we might well restrain our
+smiles. That man was Alexander von Humboldt. In various passages
+Humboldt does Comte the honor of quoting from him, and in one instance
+says, "He has summed up certain phases of truth better than they have
+ever been expressed before."
+
+Little did the landlady guess that her crusty, crabbed boarder was
+firing a shot that would be heard 'round the world, and surely the
+gendarme on that particular beat never heard it--so small and
+commonplace are the beginnings of great things!
+
+Comte was so saturated with this theme--so immersed in it--that it
+consumed him like a fever. Three lectures were given, but at the third,
+without warning, the man's nerves snapped--he stopped, sat down, and the
+audience filed out perplexed, thinking they had merely seen an
+exhibition of one of the eccentricities of genius. The philosopher's
+mind was a blank, and kind friends sent him away to a hospital.
+
+It was two years before he regained his reason. The enforced rest did
+him good. Nervous Prostration is heroic treatment on the part of Nature.
+It is an intent to do for the man what he will never do for himself.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Unkind critics, hotly intent on refuting the Positive Philosophy, seized
+upon the fact of Comte's mental trouble and made much of it. "Look you!"
+said they, "the man is insane!"
+
+This is convenient, but not judicial. Comte's philosophy stands or falls
+on its own merits, and what the author did before, after, or during the
+writing of his theses matters not. Madmen are not mad all the time, and
+the fact that Sir Isaac Newton was for a time unbalanced does not lessen
+our regard for the "Principia," nor consign to limbo the law of
+gravitation. Ruskin's work is not the less thought of because the man
+had his pathetic spells of indecision. Martin Luther had visions of
+devils before he saw the truth, and Emerson's love for Longfellow need
+not be disparaged because he looked down on his still, white face and
+said, "A dear gentle soul, but I really can not remember his name."
+
+Men write on physiology, and then die, but this does not disprove the
+truth they expressed, but failed, possibly, to fully live. The great man
+always thinks further than he can travel--even the rest of us can do
+that. We can think "Chicago" in a second, but to go there takes time,
+strength and money.
+
+When Comte's mental trouble was at its height, and two men were required
+to care for him, Lamennais persuaded his wife to have their marriage
+solemnized by the Church, and this was done. This performance was such
+a violation of sanctity and decency that in after-years Comte could not
+believe it was true, until he consulted the church records. "They might
+as well have had me confirmed," said Comte, grimly. And we can well
+guess that the action did not increase his regard for either his wife or
+the Church. The trick seems quite on a par with that of the astute
+colored gentleman who anxiously asks for love-powders at the corner
+drugstore; or the good wives who purchase harmless potions from red-dyed
+rogues to place in the husband's coffee to cure him of the liquor habit.
+
+However, the incident gives a clew to the mental processes of Madame
+Comte--she would accomplish by trickery what she had failed to do by
+moral suasion, and this in the name of religion!
+
+Two years of enforced rest, and the glowing mind of the philosopher
+awoke with a start. He rubbed his eyes after his Rip-Van-Winkle sleep,
+and called for his manuscripts--he must prepare for the fourth lecture!
+
+The rest of the course was given, and in Eighteen Hundred Thirty the
+first volume of Positive Philosophy was issued.
+
+The sixth and last volume appeared in Eighteen Hundred Forty-two--twelve
+years of intense application and ceaseless work. This was the happiest
+time of Comte's life; he had the whole scheme in his head from the
+start, but he now saw it gradually taking form, and it was meeting with
+appreciation from a few earnest thinkers, at least. His services were
+in demand for occasional lectures on scientific subjects. In astronomy,
+especially, he excelled, and on this theme he was able to please a
+popular assembly.
+
+The Polytechnic School had now grown to large proportions, and the
+institution that Comte had helped to slide into dissolution now called
+him back to serve as examiner and professor.
+
+The constant misunderstandings with his wife had increased to such a
+point that both felt a separation desirable. Married people do not
+separate on slight excuse--they go because they must. That Comte thought
+much more of the lady when they were several hundred miles apart than
+when they were together, there is no doubt. He wrote to her at regular
+intervals, one-half of his income was religiously sent to her, and he
+practised the most painstaking economy in order that he might feel that
+she was provided for.
+
+One letter, especially, to his wife reveals a side of Comte's nature
+that shows he had the instinct of a true teacher. He says, "I hardly
+dare disclose the sweet and softened feeling that comes over me when I
+find a scholar whose heart is thoroughly in his work."
+
+The Positive Philosophy was taken up by John Stuart Mill, who wrote a
+fine essay on it. It was Mill who introduced the work to Harriet
+Martineau. Mr. and Mrs. Mill had intended to translate and condense the
+philosophy of Comte for English readers, but when Miss Martineau
+expressed her intention of attempting the task, they relinquished the
+idea, but backed her up in her efforts.
+
+Miss Martineau condensed the six volumes into two, and what is most
+strange, Comte thought so well of the work that he wrote a glowing
+acknowledgment of it.
+
+The Martineaus were of good old Huguenot stock, and the French language
+came easy to Harriet. For the plain people of France she had a profound
+regard, and being sort of a revolutionary by prenatal instincts, Comte's
+work from the start appealed to her. James Martineau had such a
+bristling personality--being very much like his sister Harriet--that
+when this sister wrote a review of a volume of his sermons, showing the
+fatuity and foolishness of the reasoning, and calling attention to much
+bad grammar, the good man cut her off with a shilling--"which he will
+have to borrow," said Harriet.
+
+James hugged the idea to his death that his sister had insulted his
+genius--"But I forgive her," he said, which remark proves that he
+hadn't, for if he had, he would not have thought to mention the matter.
+James Martineau was a great man, but if he had been just a little
+greater he would have taken a profound pride in a sister who was so
+sharp a shooter that she could puncture his balloon. James Martineau was
+a theologian; Harriet was a Positivist. But Positivity had a lure for
+him, and so there is a long review, penned largely with aqua fortis, on
+Miss Martineau's translation, done by her brother for the "Edinburgh
+Review," wherein Harriet is not once mentioned.
+
+When Robert Ingersoll's wife would occasionally, under great stress of
+the servant-girl problem, break over a bit, as good women will, and say
+things, Robert would remark, "Gently, my dear, gently--I fear me you
+haven't yet gotten rid of all your Christian virtues."
+
+The Reverend Doctor James Martineau never quite got rid of his Christian
+virtues, which perhaps proves that a little hate, like strychnin, is
+useful as a stimulant when properly reduced, for Doctor Martineau died
+only a few years ago, having nearly rounded out a century run.
+
+Harriet Martineau was in much doubt about how Comte would regard her
+completed work, but was greatly relieved when he gave it his unqualified
+approval. On his earnest invitation she visited him in Paris.
+Fortunately, she did not have to resort to the Herbert Spencer expedient
+of wearing ear-muffs for protection against loquacious friends. She
+liked Comte first-rate, until he began to make love to her. Then his
+stock dropped below par.
+
+Comte was always much impressed by intellectual women. His wife had
+given him a sample of the other kind, and caused him to swing out and
+idealize the woman of brains.
+
+So that, when Harriet Martineau admired the Positive Philosophy, it was
+proof sufficient to Comte of her excellence in all things. She knew
+better, and started soon for Dover.
+
+Mr. and Mrs. Mill had called on Comte a few months before, and given him
+a glimpse of the ideal--an intellectual man mated with an intellectual
+woman. But Comte didn't see that it was plain commonsense that made them
+great. Comte prided himself on his own commonsense, but the article was
+not in his equipment, else he would not have put the blame of all his
+troubles upon his wife. A man with commonsense, married to a woman who
+hasn't any, does not necessarily forfeit his own.
+
+Mr. or Mrs. Mill would have been great anywhere--singly, separately,
+together, or apart. Each was a radiant center. Weakness multiplied by
+two does not give strength, and naught times naught equals naught.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Having finished the Positive Philosophy, Comte's restless mind began to
+look around for more worlds to conquer.
+
+In the expenditure of money he was careful, and in his accounts exact;
+but the making of money and its accumulation were things that to him
+could safely be delegated to second-class minds. A haughty pride of
+intellect was his, not unmixed with that peculiar quality of the prima
+donna which causes her to cut fantastic capers and make everybody kiss
+her big toe.
+
+Comte had done one thing superbly well. England had recognized his merit
+to a degree that France had not, and to his English friends he now made
+an appeal for financial help, so he could have freedom to complete
+another great work he had in his mind. To John Stuart Mill he wrote,
+outlining in a general way his new book on a social science, to be
+called "The Positive Polity." It was, in a degree, to be a sequel to the
+Positive Philosophy.
+
+Mill communicated with Grote, the banker, known to us through his superb
+history of Greece, and with the help of George Henry Lewes and a mite
+from Herbert Spencer to show his good-will, a purse equal to about
+twelve hundred dollars was sent to Comte.
+
+Matters went along for a year, when Comte wrote a brief letter to Mill
+suggesting that it was about time for another remittance. Mill again
+appealed to Grote, and Grote, the man of affairs, wrote to his Paris
+correspondent, who ascertained that Comte, now believing he was free
+from the bread-and-butter bugaboo, was giving his services to the
+Polytechnic, gratis, and also giving lectures to the people wherever
+some one would simply pay for the hall.
+
+To advance money to a man that he might write a book showing how the
+nation should manage its finances, when the author could not look after
+his own, reminded Grote of the individual who wrote from the Debtors'
+Prison to the Secretary of the Exchequer, giving valuable advice. All
+publishers are familiar with the penniless person who writes a book on
+"How to Achieve Success," expecting to achieve success by publishing it.
+
+Grote wrote to Mill, expressing the wholesome truth that the first duty
+of every man was to make a living for himself--a fact which Mill states
+in "On Liberty." Mill hadn't the temerity to pass Grote's maxim along to
+Comte, and so sent a small contribution out of his own pocket. This was
+very much like the Indian who, feeling that his dog's tail should be
+amputated, cut it off a little at a time, so as not to hurt the animal.
+We have all done this, and got the ingratitude we deserved.
+
+Comte wrote back a most sarcastic letter, accusing Mill and Grote with
+having broken faith with him.
+
+He now treated them very much as he had Saint-Simon; and in his lectures
+seldom failed to tell in pointed phrase what a lot of money-grubbing
+barbarians inhabited the British Isles. To the credit of Mill be it
+said that he still believed in the value of the Positive Philosophy, and
+did all he could to further Comte's reputation and help the sale of his
+books.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In Eighteen Hundred Forty-five, when Comte was forty-seven years old, he
+met Madame Clothilde de Vaux. Her husband was in prison, serving a
+life-sentence for political offenses, and Comte was first attracted to
+her through pity. Soon this evolved into a violent attachment, and Comte
+began to quote her in his lectures.
+
+Comte was now most busy with his "Polity" in collaboration with Madame
+De Vaux. Her part of the work seems to have been to listen to Comte
+while he read her his amusing manuscript: and she, being a good woman
+and wise, praised the work in every part. They were together almost
+daily, and she seemed to supply him the sympathy he had all of his life
+so much craved.
+
+In one short year Madame De Vaux died, and Comte for a time was
+inconsolable. Then his sorrow found surcease in an attempt to do for her
+in prose what Dante had done for Beatrice in poetry. But the vehicle of
+Comte's thoughts creaked. The exact language of science when applied to
+a woman becomes peculiarly non-piquant and lacking in perspicacity and
+perspicuity. No woman can be summed up in an algebraic formula, and when
+a mathematician does a problem to his lady's eyebrow, he forgets
+entirely that femininity forever equals _x_. Those who can write Sonnets
+from the Portuguese may place their loves on exhibition--no others
+should. Sweets too sweet do cloy.
+
+For the rest of his life, Comte made every Wednesday afternoon sacred
+for a visit to the grave of Madame De Vaux, and three times every day,
+with the precision of a Mussulman, he retired to his room, locked the
+door, and in silence apostrophized to her spirit. Comte now continued as
+industrious as ever, but the quality of his writing lamentably declined.
+His popular lectures to the people on scientific themes were always
+good, and his work as a teacher was satisfactory, but when he endeavored
+to continue original research, then his hazards of mind lacked steady
+flight.
+
+The Positive Polity degenerated into a dogmatic scheme of government
+where the wisest should rule. The determination of who was wisest was to
+be left to the wise ones themselves, and Comte himself volunteered to be
+the first Pope.
+
+The worship of Humanity would be the only religion, and women would
+shine as the high priests. Comte thought it all out in detail, and
+arranged a complete scheme of life, and actually wished to form a
+political party and overthrow the government, founding a gynecocracy on
+the ruins. His ebbing mind could not grasp the thought that tyranny
+founded on goodness is a tyranny still, and that a despotic altruism is
+a despotism nevertheless. Slavery blocks evolution.
+
+So thus rounded out the life of Auguste Comte--beginning in childhood,
+he traversed the circle, and ended where he began.
+
+He died in his sixtieth year. M. Littre, his most famous pupil,
+touchingly looked after his wants to the last, ministered to his
+necessities, advancing money on royalties that were never due. M. Littre
+occasionally apologized for the meagerness of the returns, and was
+closely questioned and even doubted by Comte, who died unaware of the
+unflinching loyalty of a friendship that endured distrust and contumely
+without resentment. Such love and patience and loyalty as were shown by
+M. Littre redeem the race.
+
+The best certificate to the worth of Auguste Comte lies in the fact
+that, in spite of marked personal limitations and much petty
+querulousness, he profoundly influenced such men as Littre, Humboldt,
+Mill, Lewes, Grote, Spencer and Frederic Harrison.
+
+To have helped such men as these, and cheered them on their way, was no
+small achievement. Comte's sole claim for immortality lies in the
+Positive Philosophy. The word "positive," as used by Comte, is similar
+in intent to pose, poise--fixed, final. So, besides a positive present
+good, Comte believed he was stating a final truth; to-wit: that which is
+good here is good everywhere, and if there is a future life, the best
+preparation for it is to live now and here, up to your highest and best.
+Comte protested against the idea of "a preparation for a life to
+come"--now is the time, and the place is here.
+
+The essence of Positive Philosophy is that man passes through three
+mental periods--the Theological or fictitious; the Metaphysical or
+abstract; the Positive or scientific.
+
+Hence, there are three general philosophies or systems of conceptions
+concerning life and destiny.
+
+The Theological, or first system, is the necessary starting-point of the
+human intellect. The Positive, or third period, is the ultimate goal of
+every progressive, thinking man; the second period is merely a state of
+transition that bridges the gulf between the first and the third.
+
+Metaphysics holds the child by the hand until he can trust his feet--it
+is a passageway between the fictitious and the actual. Once across the
+chasm, it is no longer needed. Theology represents the child;
+Metaphysics the youth; Science the man.
+
+The evolution of the race is mirrored in the evolution of the
+individual. Look back on your own career--your first dawn of thought
+began in an inquiry, "Who made all this--how did it all happen?"
+
+And Theology comes in with a glib explanation: the fairies, dryads,
+gnomes and gods made everything, and they can do with it all as they
+please. Later, we concentrate all of these personalities in one god,
+with a devil in competition, and this for a time satisfies.
+
+Later, the thought of an arbitrary being dealing out rewards and
+punishments grows dim, for we see the regular workings of Cause and
+Effect. We begin to talk of Energy, the Divine Essence, and the Reign of
+Law. We speak, as Matthew Arnold did, of "a Power, not ourselves, that
+makes for righteousness." But Emerson believed in a power that was in
+himself that made for righteousness.
+
+Metaphysics reaches its highest stage when it affirms "All is One," or
+"All is Mind," just as Theology reaches its highest conception when it
+becomes Monotheistic--having one God and curtailing the personality of
+the devil to a mere abstraction.
+
+But this does not long satisfy, for we begin to ask, "What is this One?"
+or "What is Mind?"
+
+Then Positivity comes in and says that the highest wisdom lies in
+knowing that we do not know anything, and never can, concerning a First
+Cause. All we find is phenomena and behind phenomena, phenomena. The
+laws of Nature do not account for the origin of the laws of Nature.
+Spencer's famous chapter on the Unknowable was derived largely from
+Comte, who attempted to define the limits of human knowledge. And it is
+worth noting that the one thing which gave most offense in both Comte's
+and Spencer's works was their doctrine of the Unknowable. This, indeed,
+forms but a small part of the work of these men, and if it were all
+demolished there would still remain their doctrine of the known. The
+bitterness of Theology toward Science arises from the fact that as we
+find things out we dispense with the arbitrary god, and his business
+agent, the priest, who insists that no transaction is legal unless he
+ratifies it.
+
+Men begin by explaining everything, and the explanations given are
+always first for other people. Parents answer the child, not telling him
+the actual truth, but giving him that which will satisfy--that which he
+can mentally digest. To say, "The fairies brought it," may be all right
+until the child begins to ask who the fairies are, and wants to be shown
+one, and then we have to make the somewhat humiliating confession that
+there are no fairies.
+
+But now we perceive that this mild fabrication in reference to Santa
+Claus, and the fairies, is right and proper mental food for the child.
+His mind can not grasp the truth that some things are unknowable; and he
+is not sufficiently skilled in the things of the world to become
+interested in them--he must have a resting-place for his thought, so the
+fairy-tale comes in as an aid to the growing imagination. Only this: we
+place no penalty on disbelief in fairies, nor do we make special offers
+of reward to all who believe that fairies actually exist. Neither do we
+tell the child that people who believe in fairies are good, and that
+those who do not are wicked and perverse.
+
+Comte admits that the theological and metaphysical stages are necessary,
+but the sooner man can be graduated out of them the better. He brought
+vast research to bear in order to show the growth and death of
+theological conceptions. Hate, fear, revenge and doubt are all
+theological attributes, detrimental to man's best efforts. That moral
+ideas were an afterthought, and really form no part of theology, Comte
+emphasized at great length, and shows from much data where these ideas
+were grafted on to the original tree.
+
+And the sum of the argument is, that all progress of mind, body and
+material things has come to man through the study of Cause and Effect.
+And just in degree as he has abandoned the study of Theology as futile
+and absurd, and centered on helping himself here and now, has he
+prospered.
+
+Positivism is really a religion. The object of its worship is Humanity.
+It does not believe in a devil or any influence that works for harm, or
+in opposition to man. Man's only enemy is himself, and this is on
+account of his ignorance of this world, and his superstitious belief in
+another. Our troubles, like diseases, all come from ignorance and
+weakness, and through our ignorance are we weak and unable to adjust
+ourselves to conditions. The more we know of this world the better we
+think of it, and the better are we able to use it for our advancement.
+
+So far as we can judge, the Unknown Cause that rules the world by
+unchanging laws is a movement forward toward happiness, growth, justice,
+peace and right. Therefore, the Scientist, who perceives that all is
+good when rightly received and rightly understood, is really the priest
+or holy man--the mediator and explainer of the mysteries. As fast as we
+understand things they cease to be supernatural, for the supernatural is
+the natural not yet understood. The theological priest who believes in
+a god and a devil is the real modern infidel. Such a belief is
+fallacious, contrary to reason, and contrary to all the man of courage
+sees and knows.
+
+The real man of faith is the one who discards all thought of "how it
+first happened," and fixes his mind on the fact that he is here. The
+more he studies the conditions that surround him, the greater his faith
+in the truth that all is well.
+
+If men had turned their attention to Humanity, discarding Theology,
+using as much talent, time, money and effort to wring from the skies the
+secrets of the Unknowable, this world would now be a veritable paradise.
+It is Theology that has barred the entrance to Eden, by diverting the
+attention of men from this world to another. Heaven is Here.
+
+All religious denominations now dimly perceive the trend of the times,
+and are gradually omitting theology from their teachings and taking on
+ethics and sociology instead. A preacher is now simply Society's walking
+delegate. We are evolving theology out and sociology in. Theology has
+ever been the foe of progress and the enemy of knowledge. It has
+professed to know all and has placed a penalty on advancement. The Age
+of Enlightenment will not be here until every church has evolved into a
+schoolhouse, and every priest is a pupil as well as a teacher.
+
+
+
+
+VOLTAIRE
+
+
+     We are intelligent beings; and intelligent beings can not have been
+     formed by a blind, brute, insensible being. There is certainly some
+     difference between a clod and the ideas of Newton. Newton's
+     intelligence came from some greater Intelligence.
+
+                                        --_The Philosophical Dictionary_
+
+[Illustration: VOLTAIRE]
+
+
+The man, Francois Marie Arouet, known to us as Voltaire (which name he
+adopted in his twenty-first year), was born in Paris in Sixteen Hundred
+Ninety-four. He was the second son in a family of three children. During
+his babyhood he was very frail; in childhood sickly and weak; and
+throughout his whole life he suffered much from indigestion and
+insomnia.
+
+In all the realm of writers no man ever had a fuller and more active
+career, touching life at so many points, than Voltaire.
+
+The first requisite in a long and useful career would seem to be, have
+yourself born weak and cultivate dyspepsia, nervousness and insomnia.
+Whether or not the good die young is still a mooted question, but
+certainly the athletic often do. All those good men and true, who at
+grocery, tavern and railroad-station eat hard-boiled eggs on a wager,
+and lift barrels of flour with one hand, are carried to early graves,
+and over the grass-grown mounds that cover their dust, consumptive,
+dyspeptic and neurotic relatives, for twice or thrice a score of years,
+strew sweet myrtle, thyme and mignonette.
+
+Voltaire died of an accident--too much Four-o'Clock--cut off in his
+prime, when life for him was at its brightest and best, aged
+eighty-three.
+
+The only evidence we have that the mind of Voltaire failed at the last
+came from the Abbe Gaultier and the Curé of Saint Sulpice. These good
+men arrived with a written retraction, which they desired Voltaire to
+sign. Waiting in the anteroom of the sick-chamber they sent in word that
+they wished to enter. "Assure them of my respect," said the stricken
+man. But the holy men were not to be thus turned away, so they entered.
+They approached the bedside, and the Curé of Saint Sulpice said: "M. de
+Voltaire, your life is about to end. Do you acknowledge the divinity of
+Jesus Christ?"
+
+And the dying man stretched out a bony hand, making a gesture that they
+should depart, and murmured, "Let me die in peace."
+
+"You see," said the Curé to the Abbe, as they withdrew, "you see that he
+is out of his head!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The father of Voltaire, Francois Arouet, was a notary who looked after
+various family estates and waxed prosperous on the crumbs that fell from
+the rich man's table.
+
+He was solicitor to the Duc de Richelieu, the Sullys, and also the
+Duchesse de Saint-Simon, mother of the philosopher, Saint-Simon, who
+made the mistake of helping Auguste Comte, thus getting himself hotly
+and positively denounced by the man who formulated the "Positive
+Philosophy."
+
+Arouet belonged to the middle class and never knew that he sprang from a
+noble line until his son announced the fact. It was then too late to
+deny it.
+
+He was a devout Churchman, upright in all his affairs, respectable, took
+snuff, walked with a waddle and cultivated a double chin. M. Arouet
+pater did not marry until his mind was mature, so that he might avoid
+the danger of a mismating. He was forty, past. The second son, Francois
+fils, was ten years younger than his brother Armand, so the father was
+over fifty when our hero was born. Francois fils used to speak of
+himself as an afterthought--a sort of domestic postscript--"but," added
+he musingly, "our afterthoughts are often best."
+
+One of the most distinguished clients of M. Arouet was Ninon de Lenclos,
+who had the felicity to be made love to by three generations of
+Frenchmen. Ninon has been likened for her vivacious ways, her flashing
+intellect, and her perennial youth, to the divine Sara, who at sixty
+plays the part of Juliet with a woman of thirty for the old nurse. Ninon
+had turned her three-score and ten, and swung gracefully into the
+home-stretch, when the second son was born to M. Arouet. She was of a
+deeply religious turn of mind, for she had been loved by several
+priests, and now the Abbe de Chateauneuf was paying his devotions to
+her.
+
+Ninon was much interested in the new arrival, and going to the house of
+M. Arouet, took to bed, and sent in haste for the Abbe de Chateauneuf,
+saying she was in sore trouble. When the good man arrived, he thought it
+a matter of extreme unction, and was ushered into the room of the
+alleged invalid. Here he was duly presented with the infant that later
+was to write the "Philosophical Dictionary." It was as queer a case of
+kabojolism as history records.
+
+Doubtless the Abbe was a bit agitated at first, but finally getting his
+breath, he managed to say, "As there is a vicarious atonement, there
+must also be, on occasion, vicarious births, and this is one--God be
+praised."
+
+The child was then baptized, the good Abbe standing as godfather.
+
+There must be something, after all, in prenatal influences, for as the
+little Francois grew up he evolved the traits of Ninon de Lenclos and
+the Abbe much more than those of his father and mother.
+
+When the boy was a little over six years old the mother died. Of her we
+know absolutely nothing. In her son's writings he refers to her but
+once, wherein he has her say that "Boileau was a clever book, but a
+silly man."
+
+The education of the youngster seemed largely to have been left to the
+Abbe, his godfather, who very early taught him to recite the "Mosiad," a
+metrical effusion wherein the mistakes of Moses were related in churchly
+Latin, done first for the divertisement of sundry pious monks in idle
+hours.
+
+At ten years of age Francois was sent to the College of Louis-le-Grand,
+a Jesuit school where the minds of youth were molded in things sacred
+and secular.
+
+In only one thing did the boy really excel, and that was in the matter
+of making rhymes. The Abbe Chateauneuf had taught him the trick before
+he could speak plainly, and Ninon had been so pleased with the wee poet
+that she left him two thousand francs in her will for the purchase of
+books. As Ninon insisted on living to be ninety, Voltaire discounted the
+legacy and got it cashed on dedicating a sonnet to the divine Ninon. In
+this sonnet Voltaire suggests that a life of virtue conduces largely to
+longevity, as witness the incomparable Ninon de Lenclos, to which
+sentiment Ninon filed no exceptions.
+
+In one of the school debates young Francois presented his argument in
+rhyme, and evidently ran in some choice passages from the "Mosiad," for
+Father le Jay, according to Condorcet, left his official chair, and
+rushing down the aisle, grabbed the boy by the collar, and shaking him,
+said, "Unhappy boy! you will one day be the standard-bearer of deism in
+France!"--a prophecy, possibly, made after its fulfilment.
+
+Young Francois remained at the college until he was seventeen years old.
+From letters sent by him while there, it is evident that the chief
+characteristic of his mind was already a contempt for the clergy. Of two
+of his colleagues who were preparing for the priesthood, he says, "They
+had reflected on the dangers of a world of the charms of which they were
+ignorant; and on the pleasures of a religious life of which they knew
+not the disagreeableness." Already we see he was getting handy in
+polishing a sentence with the emery of his wit. Continuing, he says: "In
+a quarter of an hour they ran over all the Orders, and each seemed so
+attractive that they could not decide. In which predicament they might
+have been left like the ass, which died of starvation between two
+bundles of hay, not knowing which to choose. However, they decided to
+leave the matter to Providence, and let the dice decide. So one became a
+Carmelite and the other a Jesuit."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Arouet, at first intent on having his son become a priest, now fell back
+on the law as second choice. The young man was therefore duly articled
+with a firm of advocates and sent to hear lectures on jurisprudence. But
+his godfather introduced him into the Society of the Temple, a group of
+wits, of all ages, who could take snuff and throw off an epigram on any
+subject. The bright young man, flashing, dashing and daring, made
+friends at once through his skill in writing scurrilous verse upon any
+one whose name might be mentioned. This habit had been begun in college,
+where it was much applauded by the underlings, who delighted to see
+their unpopular teachers done to a turn. The scribbling habit is a
+variant of that peculiar propensity which finds form in drawing a
+portrait on the blackboard before the teacher gets around in the
+morning. If the teacher does not happen to love art for art's sake,
+there may be trouble; but verses are safer, for they circulate secretly
+and are copied and quoted anonymously.
+
+The thing we do best in life is that which we play at most in youth.
+
+Ridicule was this man's weapon. For the benefit of the Society of the
+Temple he paid his respects to the sham piety and politics of
+Versailles. He had been educated by priests, and his father was a
+politician feeding at the public trough. The young man knew the faults
+and foibles of both priest and politician, and his keen wit told truths
+about the court that were so well expressed the wastebasket did not
+capture them. One of these effusions was printed, anonymously, of
+course, but a copy coming into the hands of M. Arouet, the old gentleman
+recognized the literary style and became alarmed. He must get the young
+man out of Paris--the Bastile yawned for poets like this!
+
+A brother of the Abbe de Chateauneuf was Ambassador at The Hague, and
+the great man, being importuned, consented to take the youth as clerk.
+
+Life at The Hague afforded the embryo poet an opportunity to meet many
+distinguished people.
+
+In Francois there was none of the bourgeois--he associated only with
+nobility--and as he had an aristocracy of the intellect, which served
+him quite as well as a peerage, he was everywhere received. In his
+manner there was nothing apologetic--he took everything as his divine
+right.
+
+In this brilliant little coterie at The Hague was one Madame Dunoyer, a
+writer of court gossip and a social promoter of ability, separated from
+her husband for her husband's good. Francois crossed swords with her in
+an encounter of wit, was worsted, but got even by making love to her;
+and later he made love to her daughter, a beautiful girl of about his
+own age.
+
+The air became surcharged with gossip. There was danger of an explosion
+any moment. Madame Dunoyer gave it out that the brilliant subaltern was
+to marry the girl. The Madame was going to capture the youth, either
+with her own charms or those of her daughter--or combined. Rumblings
+were heard on the horizon. The Ambassador, fearing entanglement, bundled
+young Arouet back to Paris, with a testimonial as to his character,
+quite unnecessary. A denial without an accusation is equal to a plea of
+guilty; and that the young man had made the mistake of making violent
+love to the mother and daughter at the same time there is no doubt. The
+mother had accused him and he said things back; he even had shown the
+atrocious bad taste of references in rhyme to the mutual interchange of
+confidences that the mother and daughter might enjoy. The Ambassador had
+acted none too soon.
+
+The father was frantic with alarm--the boy had disgraced him, and even
+his own position seemed to be threatened when some wit adroitly accused
+the parent of writing the doggerel for his son.
+
+M. Arouet denied it with an oath--while the son refused to explain, or
+to say anything beyond that he loved his father, thus carrying out the
+idea that the stupid old notary was really a wit in disguise, masking
+his intellect by a seeming dulness. No more biting irony was ever put
+out by Voltaire than this, and the pathos of it lies in the fact that
+the father was quite unable to appreciate the quip.
+
+It was a sample of filial humor much more subtle than that indulged in
+by Charles Dickens, who pilloried his parents in print, one as Mr.
+Micawber and the other as Mrs. Nickleby. Dickens told the truth and
+painted it large, but Francois Arouet dealt in indiscreet fallacy when
+he endeavored to give his father a reputation for raillery.
+
+A peculiarly offensive poem, appearing about this time, with the Regent
+and his daughter, the Duchesse de Berri, for a central theme, a rescript
+was issued which indirectly testified to the poetic skill of young
+Arouet. He was exiled to a point three hundred miles from Paris and
+forbidden to come nearer on penalty, like unto the injunction issued by
+Prince Henry against the blameless Falstaff. Rumor said that the father
+had something to do with the matter.
+
+But the exile was not for long. The young poet wrote a most adulatory
+composition to the Regent, setting forth his innocence. The Regent was a
+mild and amiable man and much desired peace with all his
+subjects--especially those who dipped their quills in gall. He was
+melted by the rhyme that made him out such a paragon of virtue, and made
+haste to issue a pardon.
+
+The elder Arouet now proved that he was not wholly without humor, for he
+wrote to a friend, "The exile of my dear son distressed me much less
+than does this precipitate recall."
+
+In order to protect himself the father now refused a home to the son,
+and Francois became a lodger at a boarding-house. He wrote plays and
+acted in them, penned much bad poetry, went in good society and had a
+very rouge time. Up to this period he knew little Latin and less Greek,
+but now he had an opportunity to furbish up on both. He found himself an
+inmate of the Bastile, on the charge of expressing his congratulations
+to the people of France on the passing of Louis the Fourteenth. In
+America libel only applies to live men, but the world had not then
+gotten this far along.
+
+In the prison it was provided that Sieur Arouet fils should not be
+allowed pens and paper on account of his misuse of these good things
+when outside. He was given copies of Homer, however, in Greek and Latin,
+and he set himself at work, with several of the other prisoners, to
+perfect himself in these languages. We have glimpses of his dining with
+the governor of the prison, and even organizing theatrical performances,
+and he was finally allowed writing materials on promise that he would
+not do anything worse than translate the Bible, so altogether he was
+very well treated.
+
+In fact, he himself referred to this year spent in prison as "a pious
+retreat, that I might meditate, and chasten my soul in quiet thought."
+
+He was only twenty-one, and yet he had set Paris by the ears, and his
+name was known throughout France. "I am as well known as the Regent and
+will be remembered longer," he wrote--a statement and a prophecy that
+then seemed very egotistical, but which time has fully justified.
+
+It was in prison that he decided to change his name to Voltaire, a
+fanciful word of his own coining. His pretended reason for the change
+was that he might begin life anew and escape the disgrace he had
+undergone of being in prison. There is reason to believe, however, that
+he was rather proud of being "detained," it was proof of his power--he
+was dangerous outside. But his family had practically cast him off--he
+owed nothing to them--and the change of name fostered a mysterious noble
+birth, an idea that he allowed to gain currency without contradiction.
+Moliere had changed his name from Poquolin--and was he not really
+following in Moliere's footsteps, even to suffering disgrace and public
+odium?
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The play of "Oedipe" was presented by Voltaire at the Theater
+Francaise, November Eighteenth, Seventeen Hundred Eighteen. This play
+was written before the author's sojourn in prison, but there he had
+sandpapered its passages, and hand-polished the epigrams.
+
+It was rehearsed at length with the help of the "guests" at the Bastile,
+and once Voltaire wrote a note of appreciation to the Prefect of Police,
+thanking him for his thoughtfulness in sending such excellent and
+pure-minded people to help him in his work.
+
+These things had been managed so they discreetly leaked out, and the
+cafes echoed with the name of Voltaire.
+
+Very soon after his release the play was presented to a crowded house.
+It was a success from the start, for into its lines the audience was
+allowed to read many veiled allusions to Paris public characters. It ran
+for forty-five nights, and was the furore. On one occasion when interest
+seemed to lag, Voltaire, on a sudden inspiration, dressed up as a
+bumpkin page, and attended the Pontiff, carrying his train, playing
+various and sundry sly pranks in pantomime, a la Francis Wilson.
+
+In one of the boxes sat a famous beauty, the Duchesse de Villars. "Who
+is this strange person who is intent upon spoiling the play?" she asked.
+On being told that he was the author of the drama, her censure turned to
+approbation and she sent for the young man. His appearance in her box
+was duly noted. The Regent and his daughter, the Duchesse de Berri,
+could not resist the temptation to attend the play, and see how much
+they were satirized. Voltaire did his little train-bearing act for their
+benefit, with a few extra grimaces, which pleased them very much, and
+seeing his opportunity, wrote a gracious letter of thanks to His
+Highness for having deigned to visit his play, winding up with thanks
+for the years in the Bastile where, "God wot, all of my evil
+inclinations were duly chastened and corrected."
+
+It had the desired effect--each side feared the other. The Regent wanted
+the ready writers on his side, and the playwright who was opposed by the
+party in power could not hope for success. The Regent sent a present of
+a thousand crowns to Voltaire and also fixed on him a pension of twelve
+hundred livres a year. At once every passage in the play that could be
+construed as bearing on royalty was revised into words of adulation, and
+all went merry as a marriage-bell. Financially the play was a success,
+and better yet was the pension and the good-will of the young King and
+his Regent.
+
+Thus at twenty-two did Voltaire have the world at his feet.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+When Voltaire was twenty-four, his father died. The will provided that
+the property should be equally divided between his three children, but
+it was stipulated that the second son should not come into possession of
+his share until he was thirty-five, and not then unless he was able to
+show the Master in Chancery that he was capable of wisely managing his
+own affairs.
+
+This doubt of the father concerning the son's financial ability has
+often been commented upon ironically, in view of the pronounced thrift
+shown by Voltaire in later life.
+
+But who shall say whether the father by that provision in his will did
+not drive home a stern lesson in economy? Commodore Vanderbilt had so
+much distrust of his son William's capacity for business that he exiled
+him to a Long Island farm, on an allowance. Years after, when William
+had shown his ability to outstrip his father, he rebuked a critic who
+volunteered a suggestion to the effect that the father had erred in the
+boy problem. Said William, "My father was right in this, as in most
+other things--I was a fool, and he knew it."
+
+Voltaire's vacation of a year in the Bastile had done him much good.
+Then the will of his father, with its cautious provisions, tended to
+sober the youth to a point where he was docile enough for society's
+needs.
+
+A good deal of ballast in way of trouble was necessary to hold this man
+down.
+
+Marriage might have tamed him. Bachelors are of two kinds--those who are
+innocent of women, and those who know women too well. The second class,
+I am told, outnumbers the first as ten to one.
+
+Voltaire had been a favorite of various women--usually married ladies,
+and those older than himself. He had plagiarized Franklin, saying, fifty
+years before the American put out his famous advice, "If you must fall
+in love, why, fall in love with a woman much older than yourself, or at
+least a homely one--for only such are grateful."
+
+In answer to a man who said divorce and marriage were instituted at the
+same time, Voltaire said: "This is a mistake: there is at least three
+days' difference. Men sometimes quarrel with their wives at the end of
+three days, beat them in a week and divorce them at the end of a month."
+
+Voltaire was small and slight in stature, but his bubbling wit and
+graceful presence more than made amends for any deficiency in way of
+form and feature. Had he desired, he might have taken his pick among the
+young women of nobility, but we see the caution of his nature in
+limiting his love-affairs to plain women, securely married. "Gossip
+isn't busy with the plain women--that is why I like you," he once said
+to Madame de Bernieres. What the Madame's reply was, we do not know, but
+probably she was not displeased. If a woman knows she is loved, it
+matters little what you say to her. Compliments by the right oblique
+are construed into lavish praise when expressed in the right tone of
+voice by the right person.
+
+The Regent had allowed Voltaire another pension of two thousand francs,
+at the same time intimating that he hoped the writer's income was
+sufficient so he could now tell the truth. Voltaire took the hint, so
+subtly veiled, to the effect that if he again affronted royalty by
+unkind criticisms, his entire pension would be canceled.
+
+From this time on to the end of his life, he was full of lavish praise
+for royalty. He was needlessly loyal, and dedicated poems and pamphlets
+to nobility, right and left, in a way that would have caused a smile
+were not nobility so hopelessly bound in three-quarters pachyderm. He
+also wrote religious poems, protesting his love for the Church. And here
+seems a good place to say that Voltaire was a member of the Catholic
+Church to his death. Many of his worst attacks on the priesthood were
+put in way of defense for outrageous actions which he enumerated in
+detail. He kept people guessing as to what he meant and what he would do
+next.
+
+Immediately after the death of President McKinley there was a fine
+scramble among the editors of certain saffron sheets--to get in line and
+shake their ulsters free from all taint of anarchy. Some writers, in
+order to divert suspicion from themselves, hotly denounced other men as
+anarchists.
+
+Throughout his life Voltaire had spasms of repentance, prompted by
+caution, possibly, when he warmly denounced atheists, and swore, i'
+faith, that one object of his life was to purify the Church and cleanse
+it of its secret faults.
+
+In his twenty-sixth year, when he was trying hard to be good, he got
+into a personal altercation with the Chevalier de Rohan, an
+insignificant man bearing a proud name. The Chevalier's wit was no match
+for the other's rapier-like tongue, but he had a way of his own in which
+to get even. He had his servants waylay the luckless poet and chastise
+him soundly with rattans.
+
+Voltaire was furious; he tried to get the courts to take it up, but the
+prevailing idea was that he had gotten what he deserved, and the fact
+that the whole affair occurred after dark and the Chevalier did not do
+the beating in person, made conviction impossible.
+
+But Voltaire now quit the anapest and dactyl and devoted his best hours
+to taking fencing lessons. His firm intent was to baptize the soil with
+Rohan's blood. Voltaire was of enough importance so the secret police
+knew of all his doings. Suddenly he found himself taking a post-graduate
+course in the Bastile. I am not sure that the fiery little man was
+entirely displeased with the procedure. It proved to the world that he
+was a dangerous character, and it also gave him a respite from the
+tyranny of the fencing-master, and allowed him to turn to his first,
+last and only love--literature. In Voltaire's cosmos was a good deal of
+the Bob Acres quality.
+
+There were plenty of reasons for locking him up--heresy and treason have
+ever been first cousins--and pamphlets lampooning Churchmen high in
+office were laid at his door. No doubt some of the anonymous literature
+was not his--"I would have done the thing better or not at all," he once
+said in reference to a scurrilous brochure. The real fact was, that that
+particular pamphlet was done by a disciple, and if Voltaire's writings
+were vile, then was his offense doubled in that he vitalized a ravenous
+brood of scribblers. They played Caliban to his Setebos.
+
+Voltaire's most offensive contributions were always attributed by him to
+this bishop or that, and to various dignitaries who had no existence
+save in the figment of his own fertile pigment.
+
+He once carried on a controversy between the Bishop of Berlin and the
+Archbishop of Paris, each man thundering against the other with a
+monthly pamphlet wherein each one gored the other without mercy, and
+revealed the senselessness of the other's religion. They flung the
+literary stinkpot with great accuracy. "The other man's superstition is
+always ridiculous to us--our own is sacred," said Voltaire, and so he
+allowed his controversialists to fight it out for his own quiet joy, and
+the edification of the onlookers.
+
+Then his plan of printing an alleged sermon, giving some unknown prelate
+due credit on the title-page, starting in with a pious text and a page
+of trite nothings and gradually drifting off into ridicule of the things
+he had started in to defend--all this gives a comic tinge to his wail
+that "some evil-minded person is attributing things to me I never
+wrote," If an occasional sly Churchman got after him with his own
+weapon, writing things in his style more hazardous than he dare express,
+surely he should not have complained.
+
+But this was a fact--the enemy could not follow him long with a literary
+fusillade--they hadn't the mental ammunition.
+
+Well has Voltaire been called "the father of all those who wear
+shovel-hats."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+A few months in the Bastile, and Voltaire's indeterminate sentence was
+commuted to exile. He was allowed to leave his country for his country's
+good. Early in the year Seventeen Hundred Twenty-six he landed in
+England, evidently knowing nobody there except one merchant, a man of no
+special prominence.
+
+Voltaire belonged to the nobility by divine right--as much as did
+Disraeli. Both had an inward contempt for titles, but they knew the
+hearts of the owners so well that they simply played a game of chess,
+and the "men" they moved were live knights, bishops, kings and queens,
+with rollers under the castles. The pawns they pushed here and there
+were the literary puppets of the time.
+
+The first thing Voltaire had to master in England was the language, and
+this he did passably inside of three months. He took Grub Street by
+storm; dawdled at Dodsley's; met Dean Swift, and these worthies
+respected each other's wit so much that they simply took snuff, grimaced
+and let it go at that; Pope came in for a visit, and the French poet
+crossed Twickenham ferry and offered a handmade sonnet in admiration of
+the "Essay on Man," which he had probably never read. Gay gave Voltaire
+"The Beggar's Opera," in private, and together they called on Congreve,
+who interrupted the Frenchman's flow of flattery long enough to say that
+he wished to be looked on as a gentleman, not a poet. And Voltaire
+replied that there were many gentlemen but few poets, and if Congreve
+had had the misfortune to be simply a gentleman he would not have
+troubled to call on him at all. Congreve, who really regarded himself as
+the peer of Shakespeare, was won, and sent Voltaire on his way with
+letters to Horace Walpole of Strawberry Hill. Thomson, who lived at
+Hammersmith, and wrote his "Seasons" in a "public" next door to
+Kelmscott, corrected and revised some of Voltaire's attempts at English
+poetry. Young evolved some of his "Night Thoughts" while on a visit with
+Voltaire at Bubb Dodington's.
+
+A call on the Duchess of Marlborough led to a dinner at Lord
+Chesterfield's. Next he met Queen Caroline and assured her that she
+spoke French like a Parisian. King George the Second quite liked
+Voltaire, because Voltaire quite liked Lady Sandon, his mistress. Only a
+Frenchman could have successfully paid court to the King, Queen and Lady
+Sandon at the same time, as Voltaire did. His great epic poem,
+"Henriade," that he had been sandpapering for ten years, was now
+published, dedicated to the Queen. The King headed the subscription-list
+with more copies than he needed, at five guineas each, on agreement.
+Voltaire afterward said that he would not be expected to read the poem.
+The Queen's good offices were utilized--she became for the time a royal
+book-agent, and her signature and the author's adorned all deluxe
+copies. A suggestion from the Queen was equal to an order, and the
+edition was soon worked off.
+
+Voltaire now spent three years in England. He had written his "Life of
+Charles the Twelfth," several plays, an "English Note-Book," and best of
+all, had gotten together a thousand pounds good money as proceeds of
+"Henriade," a stiff and stilted piece of pedantic bombast, written with
+sweat and lamp-smoke.
+
+The "Letters on the English" were published a few years later in Paris
+with good results, considering it was only a by-product. It is a deal
+better-natured than Dickens' "American Note-Book," and had more humor
+than Emerson's "English Traits." Among other things quite Voltairesque
+in the "Letters" is this: "The Anglican Church has retained many of the
+good old Catholic customs--not the least of which is the collection of
+tithes with great regularity."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The priestly habit of Voltaire's life manifested itself even to the
+sharp collecting from the world all that the world owed him.
+
+The snug little sum he had secured in England would have shown his
+ability, but there was something better in store, awaiting his return to
+France. It seems the Controller of Finance had organized a lottery to
+help pay the interest on the public debt. A considerable sum of money
+had been realized, but there was still a large number of tickets unsold,
+and the drawing was soon to take place. Voltaire knew the officials who
+had the matter in charge and they knew him. He organized a syndicate
+that would take all tickets there were left, on guarantee that among the
+tickets purchased would be the one that called for the principal prize
+of forty thousand pounds. Just how it was known in advance what ticket
+would win must be left to those good people who understand these little
+things in detail. In any event, Voltaire put in every sou he had--and
+his little fortune was then a matter of about ten thousand dollars.
+Several of his friends contributed a like sum.
+
+The drawing took place, and the prize of forty thousand pounds was
+theirs. It is said that Voltaire took twenty-five thousand pounds as his
+share--the whole scheme was his anyway--and his friends were quite
+satisfied with having doubled their money in a fortnight.
+
+Immediately on securing this money, Voltaire presented himself at the
+office of the President of Accounts, and asked for the legacy left him
+by his father. As proof of his financial ability, and as a guarantee of
+good faith, he opened a hand-satchel and piled on the President's table
+a small mountain of gold and bank-notes. The first question of the
+astonished official was, "Will M. de Voltaire have the supreme goodness
+to explain where he stole all this money?"
+
+This was soon followed by an apology, as the visitor explained the
+reason of his visit.
+
+The father's legacy amounted to nearly four thousand pounds, and this
+was at once paid over to Voltaire with a flattering letter expressing
+perfect faith in his ability to manage his own finances.
+
+There is a popular opinion that Voltaire made considerable money by his
+pen, but the fact is, that at no period of his life did literature
+contribute in but a very scanty way to his prosperity.
+
+After the lottery scheme, Voltaire embarked in grain speculations,
+importing wheat from Barbary for French consumption. In this he made a
+fair profit, but when war broke out between Italy and France, he entered
+into an arrangement with Duverney, who had the army commissariat in his
+hands, to provision the troops. It was not much of a war, but it lasted
+long enough, as most wars do, for a few contractors to make much moneys.
+The war spirit is usually fanned by financiers, Kuhn, Loeb and Company
+giving the ultimatum.
+
+Voltaire cleared about twenty thousand pounds out of his provision
+contract.
+
+Thus we find this thrifty poet at forty with a fortune equal to a
+half-million dollars. This money he loaned out in a way of his own--a
+way as original as his literary style. His knowledge of the upper
+circles again served him well. Among the proud scions of nobility there
+were always a few who, through gambling proclivities, and other royal
+qualities, were much in need of funds. Voltaire picked the men who had
+only a life interest in their estates, and made them loans, secured by
+the rentals. The loans were to be paid back in annuities as long as both
+men lived.
+
+All insurance is a species of gambling--the company offers to make you a
+bet that your house will burn within a year.
+
+In life-insurance, the company's expert looks you over, and if your
+waist measurement is not too great for your height, a bargain is entered
+into wherein you agree to pay so much now, and so much every year as
+long as you live, in consideration that the company will pay your heirs
+so much at your death.
+
+The chief value of life-insurance lies in the fact that it insures a man
+against his own indiscretion, a thing supposedly under his own
+control--but which never is. Voltaire's scheme banked on the man's
+weakness, and laid his indiscretion open before the world. It was
+life-insurance turned wrong side out, and could only have been devised
+and carried out by a man of courage with an actuary's bias for
+mathematics.
+
+Instead of agreeing to pay the man so much at death, Voltaire paid him
+the whole sum in advance, and the man agreed to pay, say, ten per cent
+interest until either the lender or the borrower died. No principal was
+to be paid, and on the death of either party, the whole debt was
+canceled.
+
+Voltaire picked only men younger than himself. It was a tempting offer
+to the borrower, for Voltaire looked like a consumptive, and it is said
+that on occasion he evolved a wheezy cough that helped close the deal.
+The whole scheme, for Voltaire, was immensely successful. On some of the
+risks he collected his yearly ten per cent for over forty years, or
+until his death.
+
+On Voltaire's loan of sixteen hundred pounds to the Marquis du Chatelet,
+however, it is known that he collected nothing either in way of
+principal or interest. This was as strange a piece of financiering as
+was ever consummated; and the inside history of the matter, with its
+peculiar psychology, has never been written. The only two persons who
+could have told that story in its completeness were Voltaire and the
+Madame du Chatelet, and neither ever did.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Madame du Chatelet--the divine Emilie--was twenty-seven and Voltaire was
+thirty-nine when they first met.
+
+He was living in obscure lodgings in Paris for prudential reasons, the
+executioner having just burned, in the public street, all the copies of
+his last book that could be found.
+
+The Madame called on him to express her sympathy--and congratulations.
+She had written a book, but it had not been burned--not even read! She
+was tall, thin, angular, far from handsome, but had beaming eyes and a
+face that tokened intellect. And best of all, her voice was low, finely
+modulated, and was not exercised more than was meet.
+
+She leaned her chin upon her hand and looked at him.
+
+She had met Voltaire when she was a child--at least she said so, and he,
+being a gentleman, remembered perfectly. She read to him a little
+manuscript she had just dashed off. It was deep, profound and full of
+reasons--that is the way learned women write--they write like professors
+of rhetoric. Really great men write lightly, suggestively, and with a
+certain amount of indifference, dash, froth and foam. When women evolve
+literary foam, it is the sweet, cloying, fixed foam of the charlotte
+russe--not the bubbling, effervescent Voltaire article.
+
+Could M. de Voltaire suggest a way in which her manuscript might be
+lightened up so the public executioner would deign to notice it?
+
+M. de Voltaire responded by reading to her a little thing of his own.
+
+The next day she called again.
+
+Some say that Madame called on Voltaire to secure a loan on her
+husband's estate at Civey. No matter--she got the loan.
+
+Doubtless she did not know where she was going--none of us do. We are
+all sailing under sealed orders.
+
+The Madame had been married eight years. She was versed in Latin and
+knew Italian literature. She was educated; Voltaire was not. She offered
+to teach him Italian if he would give her lessons in English.
+
+They read to each other things they had recently written. When men and
+women read to each other and mingle their emotions, the danger-line is
+being reached. Literary people of the opposite sex do not really love
+each other. All they desire is to read their manuscript aloud to a
+receptive listener.
+
+Thus are the literary germs vitalized--by giving our thoughts to another
+we really make them our own. Only well-sexed people produce
+literature--poetry is the pollen of the mind. Meter, rhythm, lilt and
+style are stamen, pistil and stalk swaying in the warm breeze of
+springtime.
+
+An order for arrest was out for Voltaire. Pamphlets which he had been
+refused permission to publish in Paris were printed at Rouen and were
+setting all Paris by the ears.
+
+With Madame du Chatelet he fled to Civey, where was the tumbledown
+chateau of the Marquis--the Madame's complaisant husband. Voltaire
+advanced the Marquis sixteen hundred pounds to put the place in order,
+and then on his own account fitted up two sumptuous apartments, one for
+himself and one for Madame. The Marquis went away with his regiment, and
+occasionally came back and lounged about the chateau. But Voltaire was
+the real master of the place.
+
+Voltaire was neither domestic nor rural in his tastes, but the Du
+Chatelet seemed to fill his cup to the brim, and made him enjoy what
+otherwise would have been exile. He wrote incessantly--poems, essays,
+plays--and fired pamphlets at a world of fools.
+
+All that he wrote during the day he read to Madame at night. One of her
+maids has given us a vivid little picture of how Voltaire, at exactly
+eleven o'clock each night, would come out of hiding, and entering the
+Madame's room, would partake of the dainty supper that was always
+prepared for him. The divine Emilie had the French habit of receiving
+her visitors in bed, and as her hours were much more regular than
+Voltaire's, she usually enjoyed a nap before he entered. After his
+supper he would read aloud to her all he had written since they last
+met. If the piece was dramatic he would act it out with roll of r's,
+striding walk, grimace and gesticulations gracefully done, for the man
+was an actor of rare talent.
+
+Emerson says, "Let a man do a thing incomparably well, and the world
+will make a path to his door, though he live in a forest." There was no
+lack of society at Civey--the writers, poets and philosophers found
+their way there. Voltaire fitted up a little private theater, where his
+plays were given, and concerts and lectures held from time to time.
+
+The divine Emilie's forte was science and mathematics--and on these
+themes she wrote much, competing for prizes and winning the recognition
+of various learned societies. It will be seen that the man and the woman
+were not in competition with each other, which, perhaps, accounts, in
+degree, for their firm friendship.
+
+Yet they did quarrel, too, as true lovers will, I am told. But their
+quarreling was all done in English, so the servants and His Inertia, the
+Marquis, did not know the purpose of it. It is probable that the
+accounts of their misunderstandings are considerably exaggerated, as the
+rehearsal of a tragedy by this pair of histrions would be taken by the
+servants for a sure-enough fight.
+
+And they were always acting--often beginning breakfast with a "stunt."
+The Madame sang well, and her little impromptu arias pleased her thin
+little lover immensely and he would improvise and answer in kind, and
+then take the part of an audience and applaud, calling loudly, "Bravo!
+Bravo!"
+
+Mornings they would ride horseback through the winding woods, or else
+hunt for geological and botanical specimens. About all of Voltaire's
+science he got from the lady and this was true of languages as well.
+
+To a nervous, irritable and intense thinker a certain amount of solitude
+seems necessary. Voltaire occasionally grew weary of the delicious quiet
+of Civey, and the indictment against him having been quashed, he would
+go away to Paris or elsewhere. On these trips if he did not take Madame
+along she would grow furious, then lacrimose and finally
+submissive--with a weepy protest. If he failed to write her daily she
+grew hysterical. Two winters they spent together in Paris and another at
+Brussels.
+
+A lawsuit involving the estate of the Marquis du Chatelet, that had been
+in the courts for eighty years, was pushed to a successful issue by
+Voltaire and Madame. Four hundred fifty thousand dollars were secured,
+but of this Voltaire, strangely enough, took nothing.
+
+That the bond between Emilie and Voltaire was very firm is shown by the
+fact that, after they had been together ten years, he declined to leave
+her to accept an invitation to visit Frederick the Great at Berlin.
+Frederick was a married man, but his was a strictly bachelor court--for
+prudential reasons. Frederick and Emilie had carried on a spirited
+correspondence, but this was as close as he cared for her to come to
+him. All of his communications with females were limited to letters,
+and Voltaire once said that that was the reason he was called Frederick
+the Great.
+
+Madame du Chatelet died when she was forty-two; Voltaire was fifty-five.
+For fifteen years this strange and most romantic friendship had
+continued, and to a degree it had worn itself out. Toward the last the
+lady had been exacting and dictatorial, and thinking that Voltaire had
+slighted her by not taking her more into his confidence, she had
+accepted another lover, a man ten years her junior. If she had thought
+to make Voltaire jealous, she had reckoned without her host--he was
+relieved to find her fierce supervision relaxed.
+
+When she passed away he worked his woe up into a pretty panegyric,
+closed up his affairs at Civey, and left there forever.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+So far as the government was concerned, Voltaire seems to have passed
+his days in accepting rewards and receiving punishments. Interdict,
+exile, ostracism were followed by honors, pension and office.
+
+His one lasting love was the drama. About every two years a swirl of
+excitement was caused at Paris by the announcement of a new play by
+Voltaire. These plays seemed to appeal mostly to the nobility, the
+clergy and those in public office. And the object in every instance was
+to get even with somebody, and place some one in a ridiculous light.
+Innocent historical dramas were passed by the censor, and afterward it
+was found that in them some local bigwig was flayed without mercy. Then
+the play had to be withdrawn, and all printed copies were burned in
+public, and Voltaire would flee to Brussels or Geneva to escape summary
+punishment.
+
+However, he never fooled all of the people all of the time. There was
+always a goodly number of dignitaries who richly enjoyed the drubbing he
+gave the other fellow, and these would gloat in inward glee over the
+Voltaire ribaldry until it came their turn. Then the other side would
+laugh. The fact is, Voltaire always represented a constituency,
+otherwise his punishment might have been genuine, instead of forty
+lashes with a feather, well laid on.
+
+About the time Madame du Chatelet passed away, Voltaire seemed to be
+enjoying a period of kingly favor. He had been made a Knight of the
+Bedchamber and also Historiographer of France. The chief duty of the
+first office consisted in signing the monthly voucher for salary, and
+the other was about the same as Poet Laureate--with salary in inverse
+ratio to responsibility. It was considered, however, that the holder of
+these offices was one of the King's family, and therefore was bound to
+indulge in no unseemly antics.
+
+On June Twenty-sixth, Seventeen Hundred Fifty, Voltaire applied to the
+King in person for permission to visit Frederick of Prussia.
+
+Tradition has it that the King replied promptly, "You may go--the sooner
+the better--and you may remain as long as you choose."
+
+Voltaire pocketed the veiled acerbity without a word, and bowing himself
+out, made hot haste to pack up and be on his way before an order
+rescinding the permission was issued.
+
+Frederick was a freethinker, a scientist, a poet, and a wit well worthy
+of the companionship of Voltaire. In fact, they were very much alike.
+Both had the dual qualities of being intensely practical and yet
+iconoclastic. Both were witty, affable, seemingly indifferent and
+careless, but yet always with an eye on the main chance. Each was small,
+thin and bony, but both had the intellect of the lean and hungry Cassius
+that looked quite through the deeds of man.
+
+Frederick received Voltaire with royal honors. Princes, ministers of
+state, grandees and generals high in office, knelt on one knee as he
+passed. Frederick tried to make it appear that France had failed to
+appreciate her greatest philosopher, and so he had come to Prussia--the
+home of letters. His pension was fixed at twenty thousand francs a year,
+he was given the Golden Key of Chamberlain, and the Grand Cross of the
+Order of Merit. He was a member of the King's household, and was the
+nearest and dearest friend of the royal person.
+
+Frederick thought he had bound the great man to him for life.
+
+Personality repels as well as attracts. Voltaire's viper-like pen was
+never idle. He wrote little plays for the court, and these were
+presented with much eclat, the author superintending their presentation,
+and considerately taking minor parts himself, so as to divide the
+honors. But amateur theatricals stand for heart-burnings and jealousy.
+The German poets were scored, other writers ridiculed, and big
+scientists came in for their share of pen-pricking.
+
+Voltaire corrected the King's manuscript and taught him the secret of
+literary style. Then they fell into a controversy, done in Caslon
+old-style, thundering against each other's theories in pamphlets across
+seas of misundertandings. Neither side publicly avowed the authorship,
+but nobody was deceived. The King and Voltaire met daily at meals, and
+carefully avoided the topics they were fighting out in print.
+
+Voltaire was rich and all of his wants were supplied, but he entered the
+financial lists, and taking advantage of his inside knowledge,
+speculated in scrip and got into a disgraceful lawsuit over the proceeds
+with a man he should never have known. Frederick was annoyed--then
+disturbed. He personally chided Voltaire for his folly in mixing with
+the King's enemies.
+
+Voltaire had tired of the benevolent assimilation--he craved freedom. A
+friend who loves you, if he spies upon your every action, will become
+intolerable. Voltaire intimated to Frederick that he would like to go.
+
+But Frederick had a great admiration for the man--he considered Voltaire
+the greatest living thinker, and to have such a one in the court would
+help give the place an atmosphere of learning. He recognized that there
+were two Voltaires--one covetous, quibbling, spiteful and greedy; and
+the other the peerless poet and philosopher--the man who hated shams and
+pretense, and had made a brave fight for liberty; the charming
+companion, the gracious friend. Frederick was philosopher enough to
+realize that he could not have the one without the other--if he had the
+angel he must also tolerate the demon. This he would do--he must have
+his Voltaire, and so he refused the passports asked for, and sought to
+interest his literary lion in new projects. Finally, court life became
+intolerable to Voltaire, as life is to anybody when he realizes that he
+is being detained against his will. Voltaire packed his effects,
+secured a four-horse carriage, and with his secretary, departed by
+night, without leaving orders where his mail should be forwarded.
+
+When Frederick found that his singing bird had flown, he was furious.
+Fear had much to do with the matter, for Voltaire had taken various
+manuscripts written by the King, wherein potentates in high places were
+severely scored. The first thought of Frederick evidently was that
+Voltaire had really been a spy in the employ of the French government.
+He sent messengers after him in hot haste--the fugitive was overtaken,
+and arrested. His luggage was searched, and after being detained at
+Frankfort for three weeks he was allowed to depart for pastures new.
+
+The news of his flight, arrest and disgrace became the gossip of every
+court of Christendom. Who was disgraced more by the arrest--Voltaire or
+Frederick--the world has not yet decided. Carlyle deals with the subject
+in detail in his "Life of Frederick," and exonerates the King. But Taine
+says Carlyle wrote neither history nor poetry, and certainly we do not
+consider the sage of Cheyne Row an impartial judge.
+
+Voltaire took time to cool, and then wrote a history of the affair which
+is published in his "My Private Life," that is one of the most delicious
+pieces of humor ever written. That he should have looked forward to life
+at the Prussian Court as the ideal, and then after bravely enduring it
+for three years, make his escape by night, was only a huge joke.
+Nothing else could have been expected, he says. Men of fifty should know
+that environment does not make heaven, and people who expect other
+people to make paradise for them are forever doomed to wander without
+the walls.
+
+Voltaire acknowledges that he got better treatment than he deserved, and
+makes no apology for working the whole affair up into good copy. The
+final proof that Voltaire was a true philosopher is that he was able to
+laugh at himself.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+When Voltaire left Prussia, it was voluntary exile. Paris was
+forbidden--all of France was for him unsafe; England he had hopelessly
+offended. By slow stages he made his way to Switzerland. But on the way
+there his courage failed him and he wrote back to Frederick, suggesting
+reconciliation. But Frederick promptly reminded him that he had
+repeatedly broken promises by writing about Frederick's personal
+friends, and "Voltaire and Frederick had better keep apart, that their
+love for each other might not grow cold"--a subtle bit of sarcasm.
+
+At Geneva, where Calvin had instituted a little tyranny of his own,
+Voltaire was made welcome. Nominally no Catholics were allowed in
+Geneva, and when Voltaire wrote to the authorities, explaining that he
+was a good Catholic, the matter was taken as a great joke. He bought a
+beautiful little farm a few miles away, on the banks of the river Rhone,
+overlooking the city of Geneva and the lake. It was an ideal spot, and
+rightly he called it "Delices." Here he was going to end his days amid
+flowers and birds and books and bees, an onlooker and possibly a
+commentator on the times, but not a doer. His days of work were over. Of
+the world of strife he had had enough--thus he wrote to Frederick.
+
+Visitors of a literary turn of mind at Geneva began to come his way. He
+established an inn, and later built a theater out of the ruins of an old
+church that he had bought and dismantled. "This is what I am going to
+do with all the churches in France," he explained with a smile.
+
+His pen was never idle. He wrote plays that were presented at his own
+little theater, and on such occasions he would send word to his Geneva
+friends not to come, as they could not be accommodated. Of course they
+came.
+
+He wrote a history of Peter the Great, and this brought him into
+communication with Queen Catherine of Russia, with whom he carried on
+quite an animated correspondence. This worthy widow invited him to Saint
+Petersburg, and he slyly wrote to Frederick for advice as to whether he
+should go or not. It is said that Frederick advised him to go, pay court
+to the Queen, marry her, seize the throne, and get his head cut off for
+his pains, thus achieving immortality and benefiting the world at one
+stroke.
+
+Voltaire had no intention of going to Saint Petersburg; he had created a
+little Court of Letters, of which he himself was the Czar, and for the
+first time in his life he was experiencing a degree of genuine content.
+His flowers, bees, manuscripts and theater filled every moment of the
+day from six in the morning until ten at night. He had arrived in
+Switzerland broken in health, with mind dazed, his frail body undone.
+There at the little farm at Delices, overlooking the lake, health came
+back and youth seemed to return to this man of three-score.
+
+Some of the nobility in Paris, to whom he had loaned money, took
+advantage of his exile to withhold payments, but Voltaire secured an
+agent to look after his affairs, so his losses were not great.
+
+He bought the tumbledown chateau of Tournay, near at hand, which carried
+with it the right to call himself Count Tournay. Frederick, with mock
+respect, so addressed his letters.
+
+His next financial venture, begun when he was sixty-eight, might well
+have tested the strength of a much younger man. A few miles from Geneva,
+at Ferney, just over the border from Switzerland, Voltaire had bought a
+large tract of waste land, intending to use it for pasturage. Here he
+built a cottage and lived a part of the time when visitors were too
+persistent at Delices. Ferney was on French soil, Delices in
+Switzerland. Voltaire had criticized the Protestants of Geneva, and
+given it as his opinion that a Calvinistic tyranny was in no wise
+preferable to one built on Catholicism. Some then said, "This man is
+really what he professes--a Catholic." There had also been a
+demonstration to drive him out of Switzerland, since it was pretty well
+known that Voltaire's crowds of visitors were neither Catholic nor
+Protestant. "Delices is infidelic," was the cry, and this doubtless had
+something to do with Voltaire's establishing himself at Ferney. If
+Protestant Switzerland drove this Catholic over to France, why, Catholic
+France would not molest him.
+
+Every country, no matter how tyrannical its government, prides itself on
+being the home of the exile, just as every man thinks of himself as
+being sincere and without prejudice.
+
+It is now believed that Voltaire had much to do with inciting the civil
+riots in Geneva against the Catholics. He had circulated pamphlets
+purporting to be written by a Catholic, upholding the Pope, and
+ridiculing most unmercifully the pretenses of Protestantism, declaring
+it a compromise with the devil, made up of the scum of the Catholic
+Church. This pamphlet declared Calvin a monster, and arraigned him for
+burning Servetus, and hinted that all Calvinists would soon be paid back
+in their own coin. No one else could have penned this vitriolic pamphlet
+but Voltaire--he knew both sides. But since Geneva regarded Voltaire as
+an infidel, it never occurred to the authorities that he would take up
+the cudgel of the Catholic Church that had burned his books. The real
+fact was, the pamphlet wasn't a defense of Catholicism--it was only a
+drubbing of Calvinism, and the wit was too subtle for the Presbyterians
+to digest.
+
+Very soon another pamphlet appeared, answering the first. It arraigned
+the Catholics in scathing phrase, suggested that they were getting ready
+to burn the city--hinted at a repetition of Saint Bartholomew, and
+declared the order had gone forth from Rome to scourge and kill. It was
+as choice an A.P.A. document as was ever issued by a relentless joker.
+The result was that the workers in the watch-factory and silk-mills who
+were Catholics found themselves ostracized by the Protestant workmen. I
+do not find that the authorities drove the Catholics out of Geneva, it
+was simply a species of labor trouble--Protestants would not work with
+Catholics.
+
+At this juncture Voltaire comes in, and invites all persecuted Catholic
+watch-workers and silk-weavers to move to Ferney. Here Voltaire laid out
+a town--erected houses, factories, churches and schools. In two years he
+had built up a town of twelve hundred people, and had a watch-factory
+and silk-mill in full and paying operation.
+
+The problem of every manufacturer is to sell his wares--Voltaire knew
+how to release purse-strings of friends and enemies alike. He sent
+watches to all of his enemies in Paris, bishops, priests and potentates,
+explaining that he had quit literature forever, and was now engaged in
+helping struggling, exiled Catholics to get an honest living--he was
+doing penance as foreman of a watch-factory--would the Most Reverend not
+help in this worthy work? Money flowed in on Ferney--Frederick ordered a
+consignment of watches, Queen Catherine did the same, and the Bishop of
+Paris sent his blessing and an order for enough silk to keep Voltaire's
+factory going for six months.
+
+Voltaire really got the pick of the workmen of Geneva--the goods made
+were of the best, and while at first Catholics only were employed, yet
+in five years Ferney was quite as much Protestant as Catholic. Voltaire
+respected the religious beliefs of his workmen, and there was liberty
+for all. He paid better wages and treated his workers better than they
+had ever been treated in Geneva. Voltaire built houses for his people
+and allowed them to pay him in monthly instalments. And not only did he
+himself make much money out of his Ferney investment, but he established
+the town upon such a safe financial basis that its prosperity endures
+even unto this day.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It was at Ferney, in his old age, that Voltaire first made open war upon
+"revealed religion." All religions that professed a miraculous origin
+were to him baneful in the extreme, the foes of light and progress, the
+enemies of mankind. He did not perceive, as modern psychology does, that
+the period of supernaturalism is the childhood of the mind. Myths and
+fairy-tales are not of themselves base--the injury lies with the men who
+seek to profit by these things, and build up a tyranny founded on
+innocence and ignorance--seeking to perpetuate these things, issuing
+threats against growth, and offers of reward to all who stand still.
+
+Voltaire called superstition "The Infamy," and he summoned the thinkers
+of the world to crush it beneath a heel of scorn. Letters, pamphlets,
+plays, essays, were sent out in various languages, by his own
+printing-presses. The wit of the man--his scathing mockery--were weapons
+no one could wield in reply. The priests and preachers did not answer
+him--they could not--they only grew purple with wrath and hissed.
+
+Says Victor Hugo, "Jesus wept; Voltaire smiled." To which Bernard Shaw
+has recently rejoined, "Jesus wept; Voltaire smiled; William Morris
+worked."
+
+From the prosperity, peace and security of Ferney, Voltaire pointed a
+bony finger at every hypocrite in Christendom, and laughed his mocking
+smile. The man expressed himself, and happiness lies in that and
+nothing else. Misery comes from lack of full, free self-expression, and
+from nothing else. The man who fights for freedom fights for the right
+of self-expression for himself and others--and immortality lies in
+nothing else.
+
+There is no fight worth making--no struggle worth the while--save the
+struggle for freedom.
+
+No name is honored among men--no name lives--save the name of the man
+who worked for liberty and light--who has fought freedom's fight.
+
+Run the list in your mind of the names that are immortal, and you will
+recall only those of men who have widened the horizon for other men, and
+that select number who are remembered in infamy because they linked
+their names with greatness by doubting, denying, betraying and
+persecuting it--deathless through disgrace.
+
+Voltaire sided with the weak, the defenseless, the fallen. He demanded
+that men should not be hounded for their belief, that they should not be
+arrested without cause and without knowing why, and without letting
+their friends know why. We realize his faults, we know his imperfections
+and limitations, yet, through his influence, life throughout the world
+became safer, liberty dearer, freedom a more sacred thing. His words
+were a battery that eventually razed the walls of the Bastile, and best
+of all, freed countless millions from theological superstition, that
+Bastile of the brain.
+
+
+
+
+HERBERT SPENCER
+
+
+     What knowledge is of most worth? The uniform reply is: Science.
+     This is the verdict on all counts. For direct self-preservation, or
+     the maintenance of life and health, the all-important knowledge
+     is--science. For that indirect self-preservation which we call
+     gaining a livelihood, the knowledge of greatest value is--science.
+     For the discharge of parental functions, the proper guidance is to
+     be found only in science. For the interpretation of national life,
+     past and present, without which the citizen can not rightly
+     regulate his conduct, the indispensable key is--science. Alike for
+     the most perfect production and present enjoyment of art in all its
+     forms, the needful preparation is still--science. And for purposes
+     of discipline--intellectual, moral, religious--the most efficient
+     study is, once more--science.
+
+                                                --_Essay on Education_
+
+[Illustration: HERBERT SPENCER]
+
+
+In Derby, England, April Twenty-seventh, Eighteen Hundred Twenty,
+Herbert Spencer, the only child of his parents, was born. His mother
+died in his childhood, so he really never had any vivid recollection of
+her, but hearsay, fused with memory and ideality, vitalized all. And
+thus to him, to the day of his death, his mother stood for gentleness,
+patience, tenderness, intuitive insight, and a love that never grew
+faint. Man makes his mother in his own image.
+
+Herbert Spencer's father was a school-teacher, and in very moderate
+circumstances. Little Herbert could not remember when he did not go to
+school, and yet as a real scholar, he never went to school at all. The
+family lived over the schoolroom, and while the youngster yet wore
+dresses his father would hold him in his arms, and carry him around the
+room as he instructed his classes. William George Spencer was both
+father and mother to Herbert, and used to sing to him lullabies as the
+sun went down.
+
+After school there were always walks afield, and in the evening the
+brother of the school-master would call, and then there was much
+argument as to Why and What, Whence and Whither.
+
+People talk gossip, we are told, for lack of a worthy theme. These two
+Spencers--one a school-master and the other a clergyman--found the time
+too short for their discussions. In their walks and talks they were
+always examining, comparing, classifying, selecting, speculating.
+Flowers, plants, bugs, beetles, birds, trees, weeds, earth and rocks
+were scrutinized and analyzed.
+
+Where did it come from? How did it get here?
+
+I am told that lions never send their cubs away to be educated by a
+cubless lioness and an emasculated lion. The lion learns by first
+playing at the thing and then doing it.
+
+A motherless boy, brought up by an indulgent father, one might prophesy,
+would be sure to rule the father and be spoiled himself through omission
+of the rod. But in the boy problem all signs fail. The father taught by
+exciting curiosity and animating his pupils to work out problems and
+make discoveries--keeping his discipline well out of sight. How well the
+plan worked is revealed in the life of Herbert Spencer himself; and his
+book, "Education," is based on the ideas evolved by his father, to whom
+he gives much credit. No man ever had so divine a right to compile a
+book on education as Herbert Spencer, for he proved in his own life
+every principle he laid down.
+
+On all excursions Herbert was taken along--because he couldn't be left
+at home, you know. He listened to the conversations and learned by
+hearing the older pupils recite.
+
+All out-of-doors was fairyland to him--a curiosity-shop filled with
+wonderful things--over your head, under your feet, all around was
+life--action, pulsing life, everything in motion--going somewhere,
+evolving into something else.
+
+This habit of observation, adoration and wonder--filled with pleasurable
+emotions and recollections from the first--lasted the man through life,
+and allowed him, even with a frail constitution, to round out a long
+period of severe mental work, with never a tendency to die at the top.
+
+Herbert Spencer never wrote a thing more true than this: "The man to
+whom in boyhood information came in dreary tasks, along with threats of
+punishment, is unlikely to be a student in after-years; while those to
+whom it came in natural forms, at the proper times, and who remember its
+facts as not only interesting in themselves, but as a long series of
+gratifying successes, are likely to continue through life that
+self-instruction begun in youth."
+
+When thirteen years old Herbert went to live with his uncle, the
+Reverend Thomas Spencer, at Bath. Here the same methods of education
+were continued that had been begun at home--conversation, history in the
+form of story-telling, walks and talks, and mathematical calculations
+carried out as pleasing puzzles. In mathematics the boy made rapid
+progress, but the faculty of observation was the dominant one. Every
+phase of cloud and sky, of water and earth, rock and mountain, bird and
+bush, plant and tree, was curious to him. He kept a journal of his
+observations, which had the double advantage of deepening his
+impressions by recounting them, and second, it taught him the use of
+language.
+
+The best way to learn to write is to write. Herbert Spencer never
+studied grammar until he had learned to write. He took his grammar at
+sixty, which is a good age to begin this interesting study, as by that
+time you have largely lost your capacity to sin. Men who swim
+exceedingly well are not those who have taken courses in the theory of
+swimming at natatoriums from professors of the amphibian art--they were
+boys who just jumped in. Correspondence-schools for the taming of
+broncos are as naught; and treatises on the gentle art of wooing are of
+no avail--follow Nature's lead. Grammar is the appendenda vermiformis of
+pedagogics: it is as useless as the letter q in the alphabet, or as the
+proverbial two tails to a cat, which no cat ever had, and the finest cat
+in the world, the Manx cat, has no tail at all.
+
+"The literary style of most university men is commonplace, when not
+positively bad," wrote Herbert Spencer in his old age. "Educated
+Englishmen all write alike," said Taine. That is to say, they have no
+literary style, for style is character, individuality--the style is the
+man. And grammar tends to obliterate all individuality. No study is so
+irksome to everybody, except to the sciolists who teach it, as grammar.
+It remains forever a bad taste in the mouth of the man of ideas, and has
+weaned bright minds innumerable from all desire to express themselves
+through the written word. Grammar is the etiquette of words, and the man
+who does not know how to properly salute his grandmother on the street
+until he has consulted a book, is always so troubled about his tenses
+that his fancies break through language and escape.
+
+Orators who keep their thoughts upon the proper way to gesticulate in
+curves impress nobody. If poor grammar were a sin against decency, or an
+attempt to poison the minds of the people, it might be wise enough to
+hire men to protect the well of English from defilement. But a
+stationary language is a dead one--moving water only is pure--and the
+well that is not fed by springs is a breeding-place for disease. Let men
+express themselves in their own way, and if they express themselves
+poorly, look you, their punishment shall be that no one will read them.
+Oblivion, with her smother-blanket, waits for the writer who has nothing
+to say and says it faultlessly. In the making of hare-soup, I am told
+the first requisite is to catch your hare. The literary scullion who has
+anything to offer a hungry world will doubtless find a way to fricassee
+it.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+When seventeen, Herbert Spencer was apprenticed to a surveyor on the
+London and Birmingham Railway. The pay was meager--board and keep and
+five pounds for the first year, with ten pounds the second year "if he
+deserved it." However, school-teachers and clergymen are used to small
+reward, and to make a living for one's self was no small matter to the
+Spencers. The youth who has gotten his physical growth should earn his
+own living, this as a necessary factor in his further mental evolution.
+
+Neither William George Spencer, Herbert's father, nor Thomas, his uncle,
+seemed ever to anticipate that they were helping to develop the greatest
+thinker of his time. They themselves were obscure men, and quite happy
+therein, and if young Herbert could attain to a fair degree of physical
+health, make his living as an honest surveyor or as a teacher of
+mathematics, it would be all one could reasonably hope for. And thus
+they lived out the measure of their days, and passed away unaware that
+this boy they claimed in partnership was to be the maker of an epoch.
+
+Young Spencer began his surveying work by carrying a flag, and soon he
+was advanced to "chainman." His skill in mathematics made his services
+valuable, and his willingness to sit up nights and work out the
+measurements of the day, so pleased his employer that the letter of the
+contract was waived and he was paid ten pounds for his first year's
+work, instead of five. He invented shorter methods for bridges and
+culverts, and I believe was the first engineer to build a cantilever
+railroad-bridge in England.
+
+When he was twenty-one he had so thoroughly mastered the work that his
+employers offered to place him in charge of a construction-gang at a
+salary of two hundred pounds a year, which was then considered high pay.
+He, however, loved liberty more than money, and his tastes were in the
+direction of invention and science, rather than in working out an
+immediate practical success for himself.
+
+He returned home and invented a scheme for making type; and had another
+plan for watchmaking, which he illustrated with painstaking designs.
+Half of his time was spent in the fields, and he made a large botanical
+collection--indexing it carefully, with many notes and comments.
+
+He also wrote articles for the "Civil Engineers' and Artisans' Journal."
+For these he received no pay, but the acceptance of manuscript gives a
+great glow to a writer's cosmos: young Spencer was encouraged in the
+belief that he had something to offer the public. But his father and
+kinsmen saw only failure in these days of dawdling; and the money being
+gone, Herbert Spencer, aged twenty-two, went up to London to try to get
+a renewal of the offer from his old employer.
+
+But things had changed--chances gone are gone forever, and he was told
+that opportunity knocks but once at each man's door. Sadly he returned
+home--not disappointed in himself, but depressed that he should
+disappoint others. His inventions languished--nobody was interested in
+them.
+
+To get a living was the problem, and writing seemed the only way. And so
+he prepared a series of articles for "The Non-Conformist," and there was
+enough non-conformity in them so he was paid a small sum for his work.
+It proved this, though--he could get a living by his pen.
+
+In these "Non-Conformist" articles, Spencer put forth a daring statement
+concerning the evolution of the soldier, that straightway made him a few
+enemies, and gave his clerical uncle gooseflesh. His hypothesis was
+this: When man first evolved out of the Stone Age, and began to live in
+villages, the oldest and wisest individual was regarded as patriarch or
+chief. This chief appointed certain men to punish wrongdoers and keep
+order. But there were always a few who would not work and who, through
+their violence and contumacious spirit, were finally driven from the
+camp. Or more likely they fled to escape punishment--which is the same
+thing--for they were outcasts. These men found refuge in the mountain
+fastnesses and congregated for two reasons--one, so they could avoid
+capture, and the other so they could swoop down and "secure their own."
+Robbery and commerce came hand in hand, and piracy is almost as natural
+as production.
+
+Finally, the robbers became such a problem to industry that terms were
+made with them. Their tribute took the form of a tax, and to make sure
+that this tax was paid, the robbers protected the people against other
+robbers. And then, for the first time, the world saw a standing army. An
+army has two purposes--to protect the people, and to collect the tax for
+protecting the people.
+
+At the headquarters of this army grew up a court, and all the
+magnificent splendor of a capitol centered around the captains. In fact,
+the word "capitol" means the home of the captain.
+
+Herbert Spencer did not say that a soldier was a respectable brigand,
+and that a lawyer is a man who protects us from lawyers, but he came so
+close to it that his immediate friends begged him to moderate his
+expressions for his own safety.
+
+Spencer also at the same time traced the evolution of the priest. He
+showed how the "holy man" was one frenzied with religious ecstasy, who
+went away and lived in a cave. Occasionally this man came back to beg,
+to preach and to do good. In order to succeed in his begging, he
+revealed his peculiar psychic powers, and then reinforced these with
+claims of supernatural abilities. These claims were not exactly founded
+upon truth, but once put forth were in time believed by those who
+advanced them.
+
+This priest, who claimed to have influence with the power of the
+Unseen, found early favor with the soldier--and the soldier and the
+priest naturally joined hands. The soldier protected the priest and the
+priest absolved the soldier. One dictated man's place in this world--the
+other in the next.
+
+The calm way in which Herbert Spencer reasoned these things out, and his
+high literary style, which made him unintelligible to all those whose
+minds were not of scientific bent, and his emphatic statement that what
+is, is right, and all the steps in man's development mean a mounting to
+better things, saved him from the severe treatment that greeted, say,
+Charles Bradlaugh, who translated the higher criticisms for the hoi
+polloi.
+
+Spencer's first essays on "The Proper Sphere of Government," done in his
+early twenties for "The Non-Conformist" and "The Economist," outlined
+his occupation for life--he was to be a writer. He became assistant
+editor of the "Westminster Review," and contributed to various literary
+and scientific journals.
+
+These essays, enlarged, rewritten and revised, finally emerged in
+Eighteen Hundred Fifty-one in the form of "Social Statics, or the
+Conditions Essential to Human Happiness."
+
+This book, so bold in its radical suggestions, now almost universally
+admitted, was printed at the author's expense--a fact that should put a
+quietus for all time upon all those indelicate and sarcastic allusions
+concerning "when the author prints." There was an edition of seven
+hundred fifty copies of the book, and it took every shilling the young
+man had saved, and a few borrowed pounds as well, to pay the bill.
+
+The book made no splash in the literary sea--nobody read it except a
+dozen good people who did so as a matter of friendship.
+
+After six years there were still five hundred copies left, and the
+author wrote this slightly ironical line: "I am glad the public is
+taking plenty of time to fully digest my work before passing judgment
+upon it. Of all things, hasty criticisms are to be regretted."
+
+Yet there was one person who read Herbert Spencer's first book with
+close consideration and profound sympathy. This was a young woman, the
+same age as Spencer, who had come up to London from the country to make
+her fortune. Her name was Mary Ann Evans.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In "Notes and Comments," Spencer's last book, published two years before
+his death, are several quotations and allusions to George Eliot. No
+other woman is mentioned in the volume.
+
+Herbert Spencer and Mary Ann Evans first met at the house of the editor
+of the "Westminster Review" about the year Eighteen Hundred Fifty-one.
+Their tastes, aptitudes and inclinations were much the same. They were
+born the same year; both were brought up in the country; both were
+naturalists by inclination, and scientists because they could not help
+it. "Social Statics" made a profound impression on George Eliot, and she
+protested to the last that it was the best book the author ever wrote.
+He had read her "Essay on Spinoza," and remembered it so well that he
+repeated a page of it the first time they met. They loved the same
+things, and united, too, in their dislikes. Both were democrats, and the
+cards, curds and custards of society were to them as naught. In a few
+months after the first meeting, George Eliot wrote to a friend in
+Warwickshire: "The bright side of my life, after the affection for my
+old friends, is the new and delightful friendship which I have found in
+Herbert Spencer. We see each other every day, and in everything we enjoy
+a delightful comradeship. If it were not for him my life would be
+singularly arid."
+
+The Synthetic Philosophy was taking form in Spencer's mind, and
+together they threshed out the straw and garnered the grain. She was
+getting to be a necessity to Spencer--and he saw no reason why the
+beautiful friendship should not continue just this way for years and
+years. Both were literary grubbers and lived in boarding-houses of the
+Class B variety.
+
+And here George Henry Lewes appeared upon the scene. Legend says that
+Spencer introduced Lewes to Miss Evans, and both Miss Evans and Mr.
+Spencer were a bit in awe of him, for he was a literary success, and
+they were willing to be. Lewes had written at this time sixteen
+books--novels, essays, scientific treatises, poems, and a drama. He
+spoke five languages, had studied medicine, theology, and had been a
+lecturer and actor. He was small, had red hair, combed his whiskers by
+the right oblique, and wore a yellow necktie. Thackeray says he was the
+most learned and versatile man he ever knew, "and if I should see him in
+Piccadilly, perched on a white elephant, I would not be in the least
+surprised."
+
+None of the various ventures of Lewes had paid very well, but he had
+great hopes, and money enough to ride in a cab. He gave advice, and
+radiated good-cheer wherever he went.
+
+In Eighteen Hundred Fifty-four Lewes and Miss Evans disappeared from
+London, having gone to Germany, leaving letters behind, stating that
+thenceforward they wished to be considered as man and wife. Lewes was
+in his fortieth year, and slightly bald; George Eliot was thirty-six,
+and there were silver threads among the gold.
+
+They had taken the philosophy of "Social Statics" in dead earnest.
+
+Herbert Spencer lost appetite, ceased work, roamed through the park
+aimlessly, and finally fell into a fit of sickness--"night air, and too
+close confinement to mental tasks," the doctor said.
+
+Spencer was not a marrying man--he was wedded to science, yet he craved
+the companionship of the female mind. Had he and Miss Evans married, he
+would doubtless have continued his work just the same. He would have
+absorbed her into his being--they would have lived in a garret, and
+possibly we might have had a better Synthetic Philosophy, if that were
+possible.
+
+But we would have had no "Adam Bede" nor "Mill on the Floss."
+
+We often see mention, by the ready writers, of "mental equals" and
+"perfect mates," but in all business partnerships, one man is the court
+of last appeal by popular acclaim. If power is absolutely equal, the
+engine stops on the center. Twins may look exactly alike, but one is the
+spokesman. In all literary collaboration, one does the work and the
+other looks on.
+
+When George Henry Lewes took Mary Ann Evans as his wife, that was the
+last of Lewes. He became her inspiration, secretary, protector, friend
+and slave. And this was all beautiful and right.
+
+I believe it was Augustine Birrell who said, "George Henry Lewes was the
+busy drone to a queen bee." It probably is well that Mr. Spencer and
+Miss Evans did not marry--they were too much alike--they might have
+gotten into competition with each other.
+
+George Eliot had a poise and dignity in her character that kept the
+versatile Lewes just where he belonged; and at the same time she lived
+her own life and preserved in ascending degree the strong and simple
+beauties of her character. Truly was George Eliot "a citizen of the
+sacred city of fine minds--the Jerusalem of Celestial Art." Lewes was
+the tug that puffed and steamed and brought the majestic steamship into
+port.
+
+For one book George Eliot received a sum equal to forty thousand
+dollars, and her income after "Adam Bede" was published was never less
+than ten thousand dollars a year.
+
+Spencer lived out his days in the boarding-house, and until after he was
+seventy, had not reached a point where absolute economy was not in
+order.
+
+Spencer faced the Universe alone, and tried to solve its mysteries. Not
+only did he live alone, with no close confidants or friends, but when he
+died he left not a single living relative nearer than the fourth
+generation. With him died the name.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The leading note in "Social Statics" is a plea for the liberty of the
+individual. That government is best which governs least. The liberty of
+each, limited only by the liberty of all, is the rule to which society
+must conform in order to attain the highest development. Governments
+have no business to scrutinize the life and belief of the individual.
+Interference should only come where one man interferes with the
+liberties of another.
+
+Liberty of action is the first requisite to progress, and the prime
+essential in human happiness. It is better that men have wrong opinions
+than no opinions--through our blunders we reach the light.
+
+Government is for man, and not man for government. Men wish to do what
+is best for themselves, and eventually they will, if let alone, but they
+can only grow through constant practise and frequent mistakes. Plato's
+plan for an ideal republic provided rules and laws for the guidance of
+the individual. In the Mosaic Laws it is the same: every circumstance
+and complication of life is thought out, and the law tells the
+individual what he shall do, and what he shall not do. That is to say, a
+few men were to do the thinking for the many. And the argument that
+plain people should not be allowed to think for themselves, since the
+wise know better what is for their good, is exactly the argument used by
+slaveholders: that they can take better care of the man than the man can
+of himself.
+
+There is a certain plausibility and truth in this proposition. It is all
+a point of view.
+
+But to Herbert Spencer there was little difference between enslavement
+of the mind and enslavement of the body. Both were essentially wrong in
+this--they interfered with Nature's law of evolution, and anything
+contrary to Nature must pay the penalty of pain and death. All forms of
+enslavement react upon the slaveholder, and a society founded on force
+can not evolve--and not to evolve is to die. The wellsprings of Nature
+must not be dammed--and in fact can not be dammed but for a day.
+Overflow, revolution and violence are sure to follow. This is the
+general law; and so give the man liberty. One man's rights end only
+where another man's begin.
+
+The idea of evolution, as opposed to a complete creation, was in the
+mind of Spencer as early as Eighteen Hundred Forty-eight. In that year
+he said, "Creation still goes forward, and to what supreme heights man
+may yet attain no one can say."
+
+By a sort of general misapprehension, Darwin is usually given credit for
+the discovery and elucidation of the Law of Evolution, but the "Origin
+of Species" did not appear until Eighteen Hundred Fifty-nine, and both
+Spencer and Alfred Russel Wallace had stated, years before, that the
+theological dogma of a complete creation had not a scintilla of proof
+from the world of nature and science, while there was much general
+proof that the animal and vegetable kingdom had evolved from lower
+forms, and was still ascending.
+
+The usual idea of the clergy of Christendom was that if the account of
+creation given by Moses were admitted to be untrue, then the Bible in
+all its parts would be declared untrue, and religion would go by the
+board. Now that the theory of evolution is everywhere accepted, even in
+the churches, we see how groundless were the fears. All that is
+beautiful and best we still have in religion in a degree never before
+known.
+
+In an essay on "Manners and Fashion," published in the "Westminster
+Review" of Eighteen Hundred Fifty-four, Herbert Spencer says: "Forms,
+ceremonies and even beliefs are cast aside only when they become
+hindrances--only when some finer and better plan has been formed; and
+they bequeath to us all the good that was in them. The abolition of
+tyrannical laws has left the administration of justice not only
+unimpaired, but purified. Dead and buried creeds have not carried down
+with them the essential morality they contained, which still exists,
+uncontaminated by the sloughs of superstition. And all that there is of
+justice, kindness and beauty embodied in our cumbrous forms will live
+perennially, when the forms themselves have been repudiated and
+forgotten."
+
+In the year Eighteen Hundred Fifty-five, Spencer issued his "Principles
+of Psychology," showing that the doctrine of evolution was then with him
+a fixed fact. The struggle was on, and from now forward his life was
+enlisted to viewing this theory from every side, anticipating every
+possible objection to it, and restating the case in its relation to
+every phase of life and nature.
+
+Spencer's income was small, but his wants were few, and a single room in
+a boarding-house sufficed for both workshop and sleeping-room. To a
+degree, he now largely ceased original investigations and made use of
+the work of others. His intuitive mind, long trained in analytical
+research, was able to sift the false from the true, the trite from the
+peculiar, the exceptional from the normal.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The year Eighteen Hundred Sixty should be marked on history's page with
+a silver star, for it was in that year that Herbert Spencer issued his
+famous prospectus setting forth that he was engaged in formulating a
+system of philosophy which he proposed to issue in periodical parts to
+subscribers. He then followed with an outline of the ground he intended
+to cover. Ten volumes would be issued, and he proposed to take twenty
+years to complete the task.
+
+The entire Synthetic Philosophy was then in his mind and he knew what he
+wanted to do. The courage and faith of the man were dauntless. Michael
+Rossetti once said, "Spencer, Darwin, Huxley, Tyndall and Wallace owe
+nothing to the universities of England, except for the scorn and
+opposition that have been offered them." But patriotic Americans and
+true are glad to remember that it was Professor E. L. Youmans of Yale
+who made it possible for Spencer to carry out his great plan. Five years
+after the prospectus was issued, Spencer was again penniless and was
+thinking seriously of abandoning the project. Youmans heard of this and
+reissued the prospectus, and sent it out among the thinking men of the
+world, asking them to subscribe. The announcement was then followed up
+by letters, and Youmans forced the issue until the sum of seven thousand
+dollars was raised. This he took over to Europe in person and presented
+to Spencer, with a gold watch and a box of cigars. Youmans found
+Spencer at his boarding-house, and together they wandered out in the
+park, where Youmans presented the philosopher the box of cigars. The
+great man took out one, cut it in three parts and proceeded to smoke
+one, then Youmans handed him the gold watch and the draft for the money.
+
+Spencer took the gifts of the watch and cigars and was much moved, but
+when it was followed by the draft for seven thousand dollars, he merely
+gasped and said: "Wonderful! Magnificent! Magnificent! Wonderful!" and
+smoked his third of a cigar in silence. And when he spoke, it was to
+say: "I think I will have to revise what I wrote in 'First Principles'
+on the matter of divine providence."
+
+Those who have read Spencer's will must remember that this watch,
+presented to him by his American friends, is given a special paragraph.
+
+Spencer once said to Huxley, "From the day I first carried that watch,
+every good thing I needed has been brought and laid at my feet."
+
+"If I have succeeded in my art, it is simply because I have been well
+sustained," said Henry Irving in one of his modest, flattering, yet
+charming little speeches.
+
+Sir Henry might have gone on and said that no man succeeds unless well
+sustained, and happy is that man who has radioactivity of spirit enough
+to attract to him loving and loyal helpers who scintillate his rays.
+
+The average individual does not know very much about Edward L. Youmans,
+but no man ever did greater work in popularizing nature study in
+America. And if for nothing else, let his name be deathless for two
+things: he inspired John Burroughs with the thirst to see and know--and
+then to write--and he introduced Herbert Spencer to the world. It is
+easy to say that Burroughs was peeping his shell when Youmans discovered
+him, and that Spencer would have found a way in any event. We simply do
+not know what would have happened if something else occurred, or hadn't.
+
+Youmans was born in a New York State country village, and very early
+discovered for himself that the world was full of curious and wonderful
+things, just as most children do. He became a district school-teacher,
+and so far as we know, was the very first man to publicly advocate
+nature study as a distinctive means of child-growth. He taught his
+children to observe; then he gave lectures on elementary botany; he
+studied and he wrote, and he worked at the microscope.
+
+And he became blind.
+
+Did the closest observer on the continent cease work and grow
+discouraged when sight failed? Not he.
+
+He no more quit work than did Beethoven cease composing music when he no
+longer was able to hear it.
+
+We hear with the imagination, and we see with the soul. Youmans' sister,
+Eliza Anne, became his guide and amanuensis; he saw the things through
+her eyes and inspected the wonders with his finger-tips.
+
+He became professor of Physics and Natural History at Yale, and when the
+New England Lecture Lyceum was at its height, he rivaled Phillips,
+Emerson and Beecher as a popular attraction. He made science a pleasure
+to plain people, and started Starr King off on that tangent of putting
+knowledge in fairylike and acceptable form. Youmans' lecture on "The
+Chemistry of a Sunbeam" is one of the unforgettable things of a
+generation past, so full of animation and rare, radiant spirit of
+good-cheer was the man. He founded the "Popular Science Monthly," wrote
+a dozen books on science, and several of these are now used in most of
+the colleges and advanced schools of America and England.
+
+The man had a head for business--he became rich.
+
+It was about the year Eighteen Hundred Fifty-six that Youmans was in
+England on a business errand, introducing his books in the English
+schools, that he first met Herbert Spencer, having been attracted to him
+through a chance copy of "Social Statics" that his sister had read to
+him. Youmans saw that Spencer was going right to the heart of things in
+a way he himself could not. The men became friends, and of all Youmans'
+wonderful discoveries, he considered Herbert Spencer the greatest.
+
+"Sir Humphry Davy discovered, and possibly evolved, Michael Faraday; but
+I didn't evolve Herbert Spencer, any more than Balboa evolved the
+Pacific Ocean," said Youmans at a dinner given to Herbert Spencer when
+he visited New York in Eighteen Hundred Eighty-one. The name of Youmans
+is not in the Hall of Fame as one of the world's great men, but as
+naturalist, teacher, writer, lecturer and practical man of affairs, he
+reflects credit on his Maker. The light went out of his eyes, but it
+never went out of his soul.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In making payment to a publishing-house for sixty volumes of an American
+historical work, Speaker Cannon recently made this endorsement on the
+back of the check:
+
+"This check is in full payment, both legal and moral, for sixty volumes
+of books. The books are not worth a damn--and are dear at that. We are
+never too old to learn, but the way your gentlemanly agent came it over
+your Uncle Joseph, is worth the full amount."
+
+When Speaker Cannon says the books are not worth a damn, he does not
+necessarily state a fact about the books: he merely states a fact about
+himself--that is, he gives his opinion. The value of the books is still
+undetermined.
+
+The Speaker's discontent with the books seems to have arisen from the
+one fact that he had to pay for them.
+
+This condition is a classic one, and the world long ago has conceded to
+the man who pays, the privilege of protest. When Herbert Spencer issued
+that world-famous prospectus, announcing his intention to publish ten
+volumes setting forth his Synthetic Philosophy, it was one of the most
+daring things ever done in the realm of thought. Spencer was forty, and
+he was penniless and obscure. He had issued two books at his own
+expense, and it had taken twelve years to dispose of seven hundred fifty
+copies of one, and most of the edition of the other was still on hand.
+Edward L. Youmans had such faith in Spencer that he sent out the
+prospectus, and followed it up with letters and personal solicitations,
+until seven thousand dollars was subscribed, and Herbert Spencer,
+relieved from the uncertainties of finance, was free to think and write.
+
+Among other subscribers secured by Youmans, was the Reverend Doctor
+Jowett of Balliol. Spencer's books were issued in periodical parts.
+After paying for three years, Jowett sent a check to the publishers for
+the full amount of the subscription, saying, in an accompanying note:
+"To save myself the bother of periodical payments for Mr. Spencer's
+books, I herewith hand you check covering the full amount of my
+subscription. I feel that I have already had full returns, for, while
+the books are absolutely valueless, save as showing the industry of an
+uneducated and indiscreet person, yet the experience that has come to me
+in this transaction is not without its benefits."
+
+This is the Oxford way of expressing the Illinois formula, "Your books
+are not worth a damn--and are dear at that."
+
+But the curious part of this transaction is that, after the death of
+Doctor Jowett, his library was sold at auction, and his set of the
+Synthetic Philosophy brought an advance of eight times its original
+cost.
+
+Truly my Lord Hamlet doth say:
+
+  Rashly,
+  And prais'd be rashness for it--let us know,
+  Our indiscretion sometimes serves us well,
+  When our deep plots do fail.
+
+No one man's opinion concerning any book, or any man, is final. Speaker
+Cannon is admired by one set of men and detested by others--all of equal
+intelligence, although on this point the Speaker might possibly file an
+exception.
+
+Books are condemned offhand, or regarded as Bibles--it all depends upon
+your point of view. Speaker Cannon may be right in his estimate of the
+newly annexed sixty volumes of history that now grace his
+library-shelves in Danville, proudly shown to constituents, or he may be
+wrong; but anyway, Cannon's judgment about books is probably worth no
+more than was the Reverend Doctor Jowett's. Gladstone spoke of Jowett as
+that "saintly character"; and Disraeli called him "the bear of
+Balliol--erratic, obtuse and perverse." But Jowett, Gladstone and
+Disraeli all united in this: they had supreme contempt for the work of
+Herbert Spencer; while the Honorable Joseph Cannon is neutral, but
+inclined to be generous, having recently in a speech quoted from the
+"Faerie Queene," which he declared was the best thing Herbert Spencer
+had written, even if it was not fully up to date.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+All during his life, Spencer was subject to attacks of indigestion and
+insomnia. That these bad spells were "a disease of the imagination" made
+them no less real. His isolation and lack of social ties gave him time
+to feel his pulse and lie in wait for sleepless nights.
+
+With the old ladies of his boarding-house, he was on friendly terms, and
+his commonplace talk with them never gave them a guess concerning the
+worldwide character of his work. Very seldom did he refer to what he was
+doing and thinking--and then only among his most intimate friends.
+Huxley was his nearest confidant; and a recent writer, who knew him
+closely in a business way for many years, says that only with Huxley did
+he throw off his reserve and enter the social lists with abandon.
+
+No one could meet Spencer, even in the most casual way, without being
+impressed with the fact that he was in the presence of a most superior
+person. The man was tall and gaunt, self-contained--a little aloof--he
+asked for nothing, and realized his own worth. He commanded respect
+because he respected himself--there was neither abnegation, apology nor
+abasement in his manner. Once I saw him walking in the Strand, and I
+noticed that the pedestrians instinctively made way, although probably
+not one out of a thousand had any idea who he was. No one ever affronted
+him, nor spoke disrespectfully to his face; if unkind things were said
+of the man and his work, it was in print and at a distance.
+
+His standard of life was high--his sense of justice firm; with pretense
+and hypocrisy he had little patience, while for the criminal he had a
+profound pity.
+
+Music was to him a relaxation and a rest. He knew the science of
+composition, and was familiar in detail with the best work of the great
+composers.
+
+In order to preserve the quiet of his thoughts in the boarding-house, he
+devised a pair of ear-muffs which fitted on his head with a spring.
+
+If the conversation took a turn in which he had no interest, he would
+excuse himself to his nearest neighbor and put on his ear-muffs. The
+plan worked so well that he carried them with him wherever he went, and
+occasionally at lectures or concerts, when he would grow more interested
+in his thoughts than in the performance, he would adjust his patent.
+
+So well pleased was he with his experiment that he had a dozen pairs of
+the ear-muffs made one Christmas and gave them to friends, but it is
+hardly probable they had the hardihood to carry them to a Four-o'Clock.
+Seldom, indeed, is there a man who prizes his thoughts more than a
+polite appearance.
+
+In an address before the London Medical Society, in Eighteen Hundred
+Seventy-one, Spencer said, "The man who does not believe in devils
+during his life, will probably never be visited by devils on his
+deathbed." Herbert Spencer died December Eighth, Nineteen Hundred
+Three, in his eighty-fourth year. Up to within two days of his death,
+his mind was clear, active and alert, and he worked at his books with
+pleasure and animation--revising, correcting and amending. He never lost
+the calm serenity of life. He sank gradually into sleep and passed
+painlessly away. And thus was gracefully rounded out the greatest life
+of its age--The Age of Herbert Spencer.
+
+He left no request as to where he should be buried, but the thinking
+people who recognized his genius considered Westminster Abbey the
+fitting place--an honor to England's Valhalla. The Church of England
+denied him a place there before it was asked, and the hallowed precincts
+which shelter the remains of Queen Anne's cook and John Broughton the
+pugilist are not for Herbert Spencer. His dust does not rest in
+consecrated ground.
+
+Herbert Spencer had no titles nor degrees--he belonged to no sect,
+party, nor society. Practically, he had no recognition in England until
+after he was sixty years of age. America first saw his star in the east,
+and long before the first edition of "Social Statics" had been sold, we
+waived the matter of copyright and were issuing the book here. On
+receiving a volume of the pirated edition, the author paraphrased
+Byron's famous mot, and grimly said, "Now, Barabbas was an American."
+
+However, Spencer was really pleased to think that America should steal
+his book; we wanted it--the English didn't. It took him twelve years to
+dispose of the seven hundred fifty volumes, and most of these were given
+away as inscribed copies. They lasted about as long as Walt Whitman's
+first edition of "Leaves of Grass," although Whitman had the assistance
+of the Attorney-General of Massachusetts in advertising his remarkable
+volume.
+
+Henry Thoreau's first book fared better, for when the house burned where
+the remnant of four hundred copies lingered long, he wrote to a friend,
+"Thank God, the edition is exhausted."
+
+England recognized the worth of Thoreau and Whitman long before America
+did; and so, perhaps, it was meet that we should do as much for Spencer,
+Ruskin and Carlyle.
+
+One of the most valuable of the many great thoughts evolved by Spencer
+was on the "Art of Mentation," or brain-building. You can not afford to
+fix your mind on devils or hell, or on any other form of fear, hate and
+revenge. Of course, hell is for others, and the devils we believe in are
+not for ourselves. But the thoughts of these things are registered in
+the brain, and the hell we create for others, we ourselves eventually
+fall into; and the devils we conjure forth, return and become our
+inseparable companions. That is to say, all thought and all work--all
+effort--are for the doer primarily, and as a man thinketh in his heart,
+so is he. This sounds like the language of metaphysics, which Kant said
+was the science of disordered moonshine. But Herbert Spencer's work was
+all a matter of analytical demonstration. And while the word
+"materialist" was everywhere applied to him, and he did not resent it,
+yet he was one of the most spiritual of men. A meta-physician is one who
+proves ten times as much as he believes; a scientist is one who believes
+ten times as much as he can prove. Science speaks with lowered voice.
+Before Spencer's time, German scientists had discovered that the cell
+was the anatomical unit of life, but it was for Spencer to show that it
+was also the psychologic or spiritual unit. New thoughts mean new
+brain-cells, and every new experience or emotion is building and
+strengthening a certain area of brain-tissue. We grow only through
+exercise, and all expression is exercise. The faculties we use grow
+strong, and those not used, atrophy and wither away. This is no less
+true, said Spencer, in the material brain than in the material muscle. A
+new thought causes a new structural enregistration. If it is the
+repetition of thought, the cells holding that thought are exercised and
+trained, and finally they act automatically, and repeated thought
+becomes habit, and exercised habit becomes character--and character is
+the man. It thus is plain that no man can afford to entertain the
+thought of fear, hate and revenge--and their concomitants, devils and
+hell--because he is enregistering these things physically in his being.
+These physical cells, as science has shown, are transmitted to
+offspring; and thus through continued mind-activity and consequent
+brain-cell building, a race with fixed characteristics is evolved.
+Pleasant memories and good thoughts must be exercised, and these in time
+will replace evil memories, so that the cells containing negative
+characteristics will atrophy and die. And when Herbert Spencer says that
+the process of doing away with evil is not through punishment, threat or
+injunction, but simply through a change of activities--thus allowing the
+bad to die through disuse--he states a truth that is even now coloring
+our whole fabric of pedagogics and penology. I couple these two words
+advisedly, for fifty years ago, pedagogics was a form of penology--the
+boarding-school with its mentors, scheme of fines, repressions and
+disgrace! And now we have lifted penology into the realm of pedagogics.
+I doubt me much whether the present penitentiary is a more unhappy place
+than a boys' English boarding-school was in the time of Squeers.
+
+All of our progress has come from replacing bad activities with the
+good. Bad people we now believe are good folks who have misdirected
+their energies; and we all believe a deal more in the goodness of the
+bad than the badness of the good, with the result that "total depravity"
+and "endless punishment" have been shamed out of every pulpit where
+sane men preach. No devils danced on the footboard of Herbert Spencer's
+bed, because there were no devil-cells in his brain.
+
+Another great discovery of Herbert Spencer's was that the emotions
+control the secretions. And the quality of the secretions determines the
+chemical changes which constitute all cellular growth. Thus, cheerful,
+happy emotions are similar to sunshine--they stand for health and
+harmony, and as such, are constructive. Good-will is sanitary; kindness
+is hygienic; friendship works for health. These happy emotions secrete a
+quality in the blood called anabolism, which is essentially vitalizing
+and life-producing.
+
+On the other hand, fear, hate, and all forms of unkindness evolve a
+toxin, katabolism, which tends to clog circulation, disturb digestion,
+congest the secretions and stupefy the senses; and it tends to the
+dissolution and destruction of life. All that saddens, embitters and
+disappoints produces this chemical change that makes for death. "A
+poison," said Spencer, "is only a concentrated form of hate."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Spencer's discoveries in electricity have been most valuable, and it was
+by building on his suggestions and seeing with his prophetic eye that
+the Crookes Tube, the Roentgen Ray, and the discovery of radium have
+become possible.
+
+The distinguishing feature of radium is its radioactivity, brought about
+through its affinity for electricity. It absorbs electricity from the
+atmosphere and gives it off spontaneously in the form of light and heat
+without appreciable loss of form or substance. Every good thing in life
+is dual, and through this natural and spontaneous marriage of radium and
+electricity, we get very close to the secret of life. As the sun is the
+giver of life and death, so by the use of the salts of radium have
+scientists vitalized certain forms of cell-life into growth and
+activity, and by the same token, and the use of the radium-ray, do they
+destroy the germs of disease.
+
+By his prophetic vision, Spencer saw years ago that we would yet be able
+to eliminate and refine the substances of earth until we found the
+element that would combine spontaneously with electricity, and radiate
+life and heat. Among the very last letters dictated by Spencer, only a
+few days before his death, was one to Madame Curie congratulating her on
+her discovery of radium, and urging her not to relax in her further
+efforts to seek out the secret of life. "My only regret is," wrote the
+great man, "that I will not be here to rejoice with you in the fulness
+of your success." Thus to the last did he preserve the eager, curious
+and receptive heart of youth, and prove to the scientific world his
+theory that brain-cells, properly exercised, are the last organs of the
+body to lose their functions.
+
+
+
+
+SCHOPENHAUER
+
+
+     Wherever one goes one immediately comes upon this incorrigible mob
+     of humanity. It exists everywhere in legions; crowding, soiling
+     everything, like flies in summer. Hence the numberless bad books,
+     those rank weeds of literature which extract nourishment from the
+     corn and choke it. They monopolize the time, money and attention
+     which really belong to good books and their noble aims; they are
+     written merely with a view to making money or procuring places.
+     They are not only useless, but they do positive harm. Nine-tenths
+     of the whole of our present literature aims solely at taking a few
+     shillings out of the public's pocket, and to accomplish this,
+     author, publisher and reviewer have joined forces.
+
+                                                --_Schopenhauer_
+
+[Illustration: SCHOPENHAUER]
+
+
+The philosophy we evolve is determined by what we are; just as a nation
+passes laws legalizing the things it wishes to do. "Where the artist is,
+there you will find art," said Whistler. We will not get the Ideal
+Commonwealth until we get Ideal People; and we will not get an ideal
+philosophy until we get an ideal philosopher. Place the mentally and
+morally slipshod in ideal surroundings and they will quickly evolve a
+slum, just as did John Shakespeare, when at Stratford he was fined two
+pounds ten for maintaining a sequinarium. All we can say for John is
+that he was the author of a fine boy, who resembled his mother much more
+than he did his father. This seems to prove Schopenhauer's remark
+concerning a divine sonship: "Paternity is a cheap office, anyway,
+accomplished without cost, care or risk, and of it no one should boast.
+A divine motherhood is the only thing that is really sacred."
+
+It isn't his philosophy that makes a man--man makes his philosophy, and
+he makes it in his own image. Living in a world of strife, where the
+most savage beast that roams the earth is man, the Philosophy of
+Pessimism has its place.
+
+Schopenhauer proved himself a true philosopher when he said: "All we
+see in the world is a projection from our own minds. I may see one
+thing, you another; and according to the test of a third party we are
+both wrong, for he sees something else. So we are all wrong, yet all are
+right."
+
+He was quite willing to admit that he had a well-defined moral squint
+and a touch of mental strabismus; but he revealed his humanity by
+blaming his limitations on his parents, and charging up his faults and
+foibles to other people.
+
+It is possible that Carlyle's famous remark about the people who daily
+cross London Bridge was inspired by Schopenhauer, who, when asked what
+kind of people the Berliners were, replied, "Mostly fools!"
+
+"I believe," ventured the interrogator--"I believe, Herr Schopenhauer,
+that you yourself live at Berlin?"
+
+"I do," was the response, "and I feel very much at home there."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Heinrich Schopenhauer, the father of Arthur Schopenhauer, was a banker
+and shipping merchant of the city of Danzig, Germany. He was a
+successful man, and, like all successful men, he was an egotist. Before
+the world will believe in you, you must believe in yourself. And another
+necessary element in success is that you must exaggerate your own
+importance, and the importance of your work. Self-esteem will not alone
+make you successful, but without a goodly jigger of self-esteem, success
+will forever dally and dance just beyond your reach. The humble men who
+have succeeded in impressing themselves upon the world have all taken
+much pride in their humility.
+
+Heinrich Schopenhauer was a proud man--as proud as the Merchant of
+Venice--and in his veins there ran a strain of the blue blood of the
+Castilian Jew. Too much success is most unfortunate. Heinrich
+Schopenhauer was proud, unbending, harsh, arbitrary, wore a full beard
+and a withering smile, and looked upon musicians, painters, sculptors
+and writers as court clowns, to be trusted only as far as you could
+fling Taurus by the tail. All good bookkeepers have, even yet, this
+pitying contempt for those whose chief assets are ideas--the legal
+tender of the spirit. The Alameda smile is the smile of scorn worn by
+the bookkeepers who prepare the balance-sheets for the great merchants
+of San Francisco. Alameda is young, but the Alameda smile is classic.
+
+When Heinrich Schopenhauer was forty he married a beautiful girl of
+twenty. She had ideas about art and poetry, and was passing through her
+Byronic stage, before Byron did, and taking it rather hard, when her
+parents gave her in troth to Heinrich Schopenhauer, the rich merchant.
+It was regarded as a great catch.
+
+I wish that I could say that Heinrich and Johanna were happy ever after,
+but in view of the well-known facts put forth by their firstborn child,
+I can not do it.
+
+Before marriage the woman has her way: let her make the most of her
+power--she'll not keep it long! Shortly after their marriage Heinrich
+saw symptoms of the art instinct creeping in, and players on sweet
+zither-strings, who occasionally called, compelled him to take measures.
+He bought a country seat, four miles from the city, on an inaccessible
+road, and sent his bride thither. Here he visited her only on Saturdays
+and Sundays, and her callers were the good folk he chose to bring with
+him.
+
+Marital peace is only possible where women are properly
+suppressed--lumity dee!
+
+It was under these conditions that Arthur Schopenhauer was born, on
+February Twenty-second--in deference to our George Washington--Seventeen
+Hundred Eighty-eight.
+
+The chief quality that Schopenhauer inherited from his father was the
+Alameda smile--and this smile of contempt was for all those who did not
+think as he did. The mother never professed to have any love for her
+husband, or the child either, and the child never professed to have any
+love for his mother. He once wrote this: "I was an unwelcome child, born
+of a mother in rebellion--she never wanted me, and I reciprocate the
+sentiment."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In that troublous year of Seventeen Hundred Ninety-three, the Free City
+of Danzig fell under the sway of Prussia.
+
+Heinrich Schopenhauer, who loved freedom, jealous of his privileges,
+fearful of his rights, immediately packed up his effects, sold out his
+property--at great loss--and moved to the Free City of Hamburg.
+
+That his fears for the future were quite groundless, as most fears are,
+is a fact relevant but not consequent.
+
+Johanna was vivacious and eminently social. She spoke French, German,
+English and Italian. She played the harp, sang, wrote poetry and acted
+in dramas of her own composition. Around her there always clustered a
+goodly group of men with long hair, dreamy eyes and pointed beards, who
+soared high, dived deep, but seldom paid cash. This is the paradise to
+which most women wish to attain: to be followed by a concourse of
+artistic archangels--what nobler ambition! And let the great biological
+and historical fact here be written down--that there are no female
+angels.
+
+Heinrich did not settle down in Hamburg and go into business, as he
+expected. He and his wife and boy traveled much--through England,
+France, Germany and Switzerland.
+
+This man and his wife were trying to get away from themselves. Long
+years after, their son wrote, "When people die and wake up in hell they
+will probably be surprised to find that they are just such beings as
+they were when they were on earth."
+
+For a year the lad was left at school with a clergyman at Wimbledon, in
+England. The strict religious discipline to which he was there subjected
+seemed to have had much to do with forming in him a fierce hatred of
+English orthodoxy; but he learned the language and became familiar with
+the great names in English literature. The King Arthur stories pleased
+him, and he always took a peculiar satisfaction in the fact that the
+name Arthur was the same in English, German and French. He was a
+prenatal cosmopolitan.
+
+Boarding-schools are a great scheme for getting the children out of the
+way--it throws the responsibility upon some one else. When nine years of
+age, Arthur was placed in a French boarding-school, remaining for two
+years. There he learned to speak French so fluently that when he
+returned to Hamburg and tried to talk to his mother in German, his
+broken speech threw that excellent woman into fits of laughter.
+
+When the mature man of affairs takes a young girl to wife, he expects to
+mold her to his nature, but he reckons without his host. Heinrich
+Schopenhauer's opposition to his wife's wishes was not strong enough to
+crush her--it simply developed in her a deal of wilful, dogged strength.
+
+One winter day in Eighteen Hundred Four the body of Heinrich
+Schopenhauer was found in the canal at Hamburg.
+
+Arthur was then sixteen years of age--old for his years, traveled,
+clever--strong in body and robust in health.
+
+In wandering with his parents, he had met Goethe, Wieland, Madame De
+Stael, Lord Nelson and Lady Hamilton, and many other distinguished
+people, for his mother was a famous lion-hunter, and wherever they went,
+the great ones were tracked to their lairs. But however much Madame
+Schopenhauer indulged in hero-worship, she had no expectations or
+ambitions for her son. She apprenticed him as a clerk and did her utmost
+to immerse him in commerce. What she desired was freedom for herself,
+and the popular plan to gain freedom is to enslave others. Madame
+Schopenhauer moved to Weimar and opened there a sort of literary salon.
+She wrote verses, novels, essays, and her home became the center of a
+certain artistic group. The fortune her husband had left was equal to
+about forty thousand dollars, one-third of which was to go to Arthur
+when he was twenty-one. The mother had the handling of it all until that
+time, and as the funds were well invested, her income was equal to about
+two thousand dollars a year.
+
+A handsome widow, under forty, with no encumbrances to speak of, and a
+fair income, is very fortunately situated. Indeed, a great writer has
+recently written an essay showing that widows, discreetly bereaved, are
+the happiest creatures on earth.
+
+Young Schopenhauer, at his desk in Hamburg, grieved over the death of
+his father. That which is lost becomes valuable--bereavement softens the
+heart. The only tenderness that is revealed in the writings of
+Schopenhauer refers to his father. He affirms the sterling honesty of
+the man, and lauds the merchant who boldly states that he is in business
+to make money, and compares him with the philosophers who clutch for
+power and fame and yet pretend they are working for humanity. When
+Schopenhauer was past sixty, he dedicated his complete works to the
+memory of his father. As nothing purifies like fire, so does nothing
+sanctify like death--the love we lose is the only love we keep.
+
+Mathematics, bills and balance-sheets were odious to young Schopenhauer.
+He reverenced the memory of his father, but his mother had endowed him
+with a strong impulse for expression. He wrote little essays on the
+backs of envelopes, philosophized over his bills, sneaked out of the
+countingroom the back way to attend the afternoon lectures by the great
+Doctor Gall, and finally, boldly followed his mother to Weimar, that he
+might bask in the shadow of the mighty Goethe. It was shortly after this
+that he sat in a niche of Goethe's library, musing, sad and solitary,
+while a gay throng chattered by. Some young women, seeing him there,
+laughed, and one asked, "Is it alive?" And Goethe, overhearing the
+pleasantry, rebuked it by saying, "Do not smile at that youth--he will
+yet eclipse us all."
+
+At Weimar there was no greeting for Schopenhauer from his mother--she
+welcomed all but her son. Unfortunately for her, she put herself on
+record by writing him letters. Scathing letters are all right, but they
+should be directed and stamped, then burned just before they are trusted
+to the mails. To record unkindness is tragedy, for the unkind word lives
+long after the event that caused it is forgotten. Here is one letter
+written by Madame Schopenhauer that this methodical son saved for
+posterity:
+
+
+     _My Dear Son:_
+
+     I have always told you it is difficult to live with you. The more I
+     get to know you, the more I feel this difficulty increase. I will
+     not hide it from you: as long as you are what you are, I would
+     rather bring any sacrifice than consent to be near you. I do not
+     undervalue your good points, and that which repels me does not lie
+     in your heart; it is in your outer, not your inner being; in your
+     ideas, your judgment, your habits; in a word, there is nothing
+     concerning the outer world in which we agree. Your ill-humor, your
+     complaints of things inevitable, your sullen looks, the
+     extraordinary opinions you utter, like oracles, none may presume to
+     contradict; all this depresses me and troubles me, without helping
+     you. Your eternal quibbles, your laments over the stupid world and
+     human misery, give me bad nights and unpleasant dreams....
+
+                                              Your Dear Mother, etc.,
+                                                  _Johanna Schopenhauer_
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The young man took lodgings at Weimar, at a goodly distance from his
+mother. Goethe held out a friendly hand, as he did to Mendelssohn, and
+all bright young men. They talked much, and Goethe read to Arthur his
+essay on the theory of colors (for Wolfgang Goethe was human and dearly
+loved the sound of his own voice). The reasoning so impressed the youth
+that he devised a chromatic theory of his own--almost as peculiar.
+Theories are for the theorizer, so all theories are useful.
+
+At the earnest importunity of his mother, who starved him to it, Arthur
+went back to his clerkship, but soon returned and made terms, agreeing
+not to call on his mother, in consideration of a pound a week. He took
+lessons in Greek and Latin of a retired professor, attended lectures,
+fell in love with an actress--vowed he would marry her, but, luckily for
+her, he didn't.
+
+When he was twenty-one, his mother turned over to him his patrimony,
+amounting to about fourteen thousand dollars; and suggested that he
+leave Weimar and make his fortune elsewhere--the world was wide.
+
+His money was invested so it brought him an income of seven hundred
+dollars a year. And here seems a good place to say that Schopenhauer's
+income was never over a thousand dollars a year until after he was
+fifty-six years of age. Although he could not make money, yet he had
+inherited from his father an ability to care for it. Throughout his life
+he kept exact books of account, never ran in debt, and never allowed
+his expenditures to outrun his income, thus complying with Charles
+Dickens' recipe for happiness.
+
+In still another way he revealed that he could apply philosophy to daily
+life: he exercised regularly in the open air, took long walks, was
+absurdly exact about his cold baths, and like Kant, served the neighbors
+as a chronometer, so they set their clocks at three when they saw him
+going forth for a walk. And in the interests of truth, we will have to
+make the embarrassing admission that the great Apostle of Pessimism was
+neither a dyspeptic nor an invalid--if he was ever aware that he had a
+stomach we do not hear of it.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The life of Schopenhauer is the life of a recluse--a visionary--a hermit
+who lost himself amid the maze of city streets, and moved solitary in
+the throng. Berlin, Dresden, Hamburg, Gottingen, Frankfort, engaged him,
+and from one to the other he turned, looking for the rest he never
+found, and which he knew he would never find, so in the vain search
+there was no disappointment. He was always happiest when most miserable,
+for then were his theories proved.
+
+A single room in a lodging-house sufficed, and this room always had the
+appearance of being occupied by a transient. He had few books,
+accumulated no belongings in way of domestic ballast, persistently
+giving away things that were presented to him, satisfied if he had a
+chair, a bed, and a table upon which to write; getting his own
+breakfast, dining at the table d'hote of the nearest inn, with supper at
+a "Gast-Haus"--so passed his days. He had no intimate friends, and his
+chief dissipation was playing the flute. His black poodle, named "Homo"
+in a subtle mood of irony, accompanied him everywhere, and on this dog
+he lavished what he was pleased to call his love. He anticipated Rip Van
+Winkle concerning dogs and women, and when Homo died, he bought another
+dog that looked exactly like the first, and was just as good.
+
+In a few instances Schopenhauer read his essays in public as lectures,
+but his ideas were keyed to concert pitch and were too pronounced for
+average audiences. He was offered a professorship at Gottingen and also
+at Heidelberg, if he would "tone things down," but he scornfully
+declined the proposition, and said, "The Universities must grow to my
+level before I can talk to them." By his caustic criticisms of
+contemporaries he became both feared and shunned, and no doubt he found
+a certain satisfaction in the fact that the so-called learned men of his
+time would neither listen to his lectures, read his books, nor abide his
+presence. He had made himself felt in any event. "Blessed are ye when
+men shall revile you," is the sweet consolation of all persecuted
+persons--and persecution is only the natural resentment towards those
+who have too much ego in their cosmos.
+
+His opinions concerning love and marriage need not be taken too
+seriously. Ideas are the results of temperaments and moods. When a man
+amplifies on the woman question he describes the women he knows best,
+and more especially the particular She who is in his head. Literature is
+only autobiography, more or less discreetly veiled. Schopenhauer hated
+his mother to the day of her death, and although during the last
+twenty-four years of her life he never once saw her, her image could at
+any time be quickly and vividly thrown upon the screen. The women a
+strong man has known are never forgotten--here is where time does not
+tarnish, nor the days grow dim.
+
+Between his twenty-eighth and fortieth years, Schopenhauer had wandered
+through Italy--spent months at Venice, and dawdled away the days at Rome
+and Florence. He had dipped deep into life--and the wrong kind of life.
+And his experiences had confirmed his suspicions--it was all bitter--he
+was not disappointed.
+
+Until Schopenhauer was past thirty he was known as the son of Johanna
+Schopenhauer. And when he once told her that posterity would never
+remember her except as the mother of her son, she reciprocated by
+congratulating him that his books could always be had cheap in the first
+editions.
+
+He retorted, "Mamma Dear, my books will be read when butchers are using
+yours for wrapping up meat." In some ways this precious pair were very
+much alike.
+
+It is very probable that Schopenhauer's mother was not so base as he
+thought; and when he declared, "Woman's morality is only a kind of
+prudence," he might have said the same of his own. He stood aloof from
+life and said things about it. He had no wife, no child, no business, no
+home--he dared not venture boldly into the tide of existence--he stood
+forever on the bank, and watched the current carrying its flotsam and
+jetsam to the hungry sea.
+
+In his love for the memory of his father, and in his tender care for his
+dog, we get a glimpse of depths that were never sounded. One side of his
+nature was never developed. And the words of the undeveloped man are
+worth what they are worth.
+
+Schopenhauer once said to Wieland, "Life is a ticklish business--I
+propose to spend my time looking at it." This he did, viewing existence
+from every angle, and writing out his thoughts in terse, epigrammatic
+language.
+
+Among all the German writers on philosophy, the only one who had a
+distinct literary style is Schopenhauer. Form was quite as much to him
+as matter--and in this he showed rare wisdom; although I am told that
+the writers who have no literary style are the only ones who despise it.
+Dishes to be palatable must be rightly served: appetite--literary,
+gastronomic or sexual--is largely a matter of imagination.
+
+Schopenhauer need not be regarded as final. The chief virtue of the man
+lies in the fact that he makes us think, and thus are we his debtors.
+
+In this summary of Schopenhauer's philosophy I have had the valuable
+assistance of my friend and fellow-worker in the Roycroft Shop, George
+Pannebakker, a kinsman and enthusiastic admirer of the great Prophet of
+Pessimism.
+
+In talking to Mr. Pannebakker, I am inclined to exclaim, "Thou almost
+persuadest me to be a pessimist!" It is unfortunate that our English
+tongue contains no word that stands somewhere between pessimism and
+optimism--that symbols a judicial cast of mind which sees the Truth
+without blinking and accepts it without complaint. The word Pessimist
+was first flung in contempt at those who dared to express unpalatable
+truth. It is now accepted by a large number of intellectuals, and if to
+be a pessimist is to have insight, wit, calm courage, patience,
+persistency, and a disposition that accepts all Fate sends and makes the
+best of it, then pity 'tis we haven't more.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The root of existence, the inmost kernel of all being, the original
+vitalizing power, the fundamental reality of the universe, is, according
+to Schopenhauer, "WILL." What is Will? Will, in the usual sense, is the
+faculty of our mind by which we decide to do or not to do. Will is the
+power to choose. In Schopenhauer's philosophy, Will is something less as
+we know will, and something more than force. Will, connected with
+consciousness, as peculiar to man, is, in a less developed form, the
+real essence of all matter, of all things, organic or inorganic. Will is
+the blind, irresistible striving for existence; the unconscious
+organizing power, the omnipotent creative force of Nature, pervading the
+whole limitless universe; the endeavor to be, to evolve, to expand.
+
+The whole world of phenomena is the objectivation or apparition of Will.
+
+Will, the same force which slumbers in the stone as inert gravity, forms
+the crystals with such wonderful regularity.
+
+Will impels a piece of iron to move with ardent desire toward the
+magnet. Will causes the magnet to point with unfailing constancy to the
+north. Will causes the embryo to cling as a parasite and feed on the
+body of the mother. Will causes the mother's breast to fill that her
+babe may be fed. Will fills the mother-heart with love that the young
+may be cared for.
+
+The same force urges the tender germ of the plant to break through the
+hard crust of the earth and, stretching toward the light, to enfold
+itself in the proud crown of the palm-tree. Will sharpens the beak of
+the eagle and the tooth of the tiger and, finally, reaches its highest
+grade of objectivation in the human brain. Want, the struggle for
+existence, the necessity of procuring and selecting sufficient food for
+the preservation of the individual and the species, has at last
+developed a suitable tool, the brain, and its function, the intellect.
+With the intellect appear consciousness and a realm of rational life
+full of yearning and desires, pleasures and pain, hatred and love.
+Brothers slay their brothers, conquerors trample down the races of the
+earth, and tyrants are forging chains for the nations.
+
+There is violence and fear, vexation and trouble. Unrest is the mark of
+existence, and onward we are swept in the hurrying whirlpool of change.
+This manifold restless motion is produced and kept up by the agency of
+two single impulses--hunger and the sexual instinct. These are the chief
+agents of the Lord of the Universe--the Will--and set in motion so
+strange and varied a scene.
+
+The Will-to-Live is at the bottom of all love-affairs. Every kind of
+love springs entirely from the instinct of sex.
+
+Love is under bonds to secure the existence of the human race in future
+times. The real aim of the whole of love's romance, although the persons
+concerned are unconscious of the fact, is that a particular being may
+come into the world.
+
+It is the Will-to-Live, presenting itself in the whole species, which so
+forcibly and exclusively attracts two individuals of different sex
+towards each other.
+
+This yearning and this pain do not arise from the needs of an ephemeral
+individual, but are, on the contrary, the sigh of the Spirit of the
+Species.
+
+Since life is essentially suffering, the propagation of the species is
+an evil--the feeling of shame proves it.
+
+In his "Metaphysics of Love," Schopenhauer says: "We see a pair of
+lovers exchanging longing glances--yet why so secretly, timidly and
+stealthily? Because these lovers are traitors secretly striving to
+perpetuate all the misery and turmoil that otherwise would come to a
+timely end."
+
+Will, as the source of life, is the origin of all evil.
+
+Having awakened to life from the night of unconsciousness, the
+individual finds itself in an endless and boundless world, striving,
+suffering, erring; and, as though passing through an ominous dream, it
+hurries back to the old unconsciousness. Until then, however, its
+desires are boundless, and every satisfied wish begets a new one.
+So-called pleasures are only a mode of temporary relief. Pain soon
+returns in the form of satiety. Life is a more or less violent
+oscillation between pain and ennui. The latter, like a bird of prey,
+hovers over us, ready to swoop down wherever it sees a life secure from
+need.
+
+The enjoyment of art, as the disinterested cognition devoid of Will, can
+afford an interval of rest from the drudgery of Will service. But
+esthetic beatitude can be obtained only by a few; it is not for the hoi
+polloi. And then, art can give only a transient consolation.
+
+Everything in life indicates that earthly happiness is destined to be
+frustrated or to be recognized as an illusion. Life proves a continuous
+deception, in great as well as in small matters. If it makes a promise,
+it does not keep it, unless to show that the coveted object was little
+desirable.
+
+Life is a business that does not pay expenses.
+
+Misery and pain form the essential feature of existence.
+
+Life is hell, and happy is that man who is able to procure for himself
+an asbestos overcoat and a fire-proof room.
+
+Looking at the turmoil of life, we find all occupied with its want and
+misery, exerting all their strength in order to satisfy its endless
+needs and avert manifold suffering, without daring to expect anything
+else in return than merely the preservation of this tormented individual
+existence, full of want and misery, toil and moil, strife and struggle,
+sorrow and trouble, anguish and fear--from the cradle to the grave.
+
+Existence, when summed up, has an enormous surplus of pain over
+pleasure.
+
+You complain that this philosophy is comfortless! But Schopenhauer sees
+life through Schopenhauer's eyes, and tells the truth about it as he
+sees it. He does not care for your likes and dislikes. If you want to
+hear soft platitudes, he advises you to go to a non-conformist
+church--read the newspapers, go somewhere else, but not to the
+philosopher who cares only for Truth.
+
+Although Schopenhauer's picture of the world is gloomy and somber, there
+is nothing weak or cowardly in his writings, and the extent to which he
+is read, proves he is not depressing. Since a happy life is impossible,
+he says the highest that a man can attain to is the fate of a hero.
+
+A man must take misfortune quietly, because he knows that very many
+dreadful things may happen in the course of life. He must look upon the
+trouble of the moment as only a very small part of that which will
+probably come.
+
+We must not expect very much from life, but learn to accommodate
+ourselves to a world where all is relative and no perfect state exists.
+
+Let us look misfortune in the face and meet it with courage and
+calmness!
+
+Fate is cruel and men are miserable. Life is synonymous with suffering;
+positive happiness a fata morgana, an illusion.
+
+Only negative happiness, the cessation of suffering, is possible, and
+can be obtained by the annihilation of the Will-to-Live.
+
+But it is not suicide that can deliver us from the pains of existence.
+
+Suicide, according to Schopenhauer, frustrates the attainment of the
+highest moral aim by the fact that, for a real release from this world
+of misery, it substitutes one that is merely apparent. For death merely
+destroys the phenomenon, that is, the body, and never my inmost being,
+or the universal Will.
+
+Suicide can deliver me merely from my phenomenal existence, and not from
+my real self, which can not die.
+
+How, then, can man be released from this life of misery and pain? Where
+is the road that leads to Salvation?
+
+Slow and weary is the way of redemption.
+
+The deliverance from life and its sufferings is the freedom of the
+intellect from its creator and despot, the Will.
+
+The intellect, freed from the bondage of the Will, sees through the veil
+of selfhood into the unity of all being, and finds that he who has done
+wrong to another has done wrong to his own self. For selfhood--the
+asserting of the Ego--is the root of all evil.
+
+Covetousness and sensuality are the causes of misery.
+
+Sympathy is the basis of all true morality, and only through
+renunciation, through self-sacrifice, and universal benevolence, can
+salvation be obtained.
+
+He who has recognized that existence is evil, that life is vanity, and
+self an illusion, has obtained true knowledge, which is the reflection
+of reality. He is in possession of the highest wisdom, which is not
+merely theoretical, but also practical perfection; it is the ultimate
+true cognition of all things in mass and in detail, which has so
+penetrated man's being that it appears as the guide of all his actions.
+It illumines his head, warms his heart, leads his hand. We take the
+sting out of life by accepting it as it is. "Drink ye all of it."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Arthur Schopenhauer very early in life contracted a bad habit of telling
+the truth. He stated the thing absolutely as he saw it. He spared no
+one's feelings, and conciliation was not in his bright lexicon of words.
+If any belief or any institution was in his way, the pilot in charge of
+the craft had better put his prow hard a' port--Schopenhauer swerved for
+nobody.
+
+Should every one deal in plain speaking on all occasions, the philosophy
+of Ali Baba--that this earth is hell, and we are now suffering for sins
+committed in a former incarnation--would be fully proved. Our friends
+are the pleasant hypocrites who sustain our illusions. Society is made
+possible only through a vast web of delicate evasions, polite
+subterfuges, and agreeable falsehoods. The word person comes from
+"persona," which means a mask. The reference is to one who plays a
+part--assumes a role. The naked truth is not pleasant to look upon, and
+that is the reason it is so seldom put upon parade.
+
+The man Schopenhauer would be intolerable, but the writer Schopenhauer
+is gaining ground in inverse ratio to the square of the distance we are
+from him. "Where shall we bury you?" a friend asked him a few days
+before his death.
+
+"Oh, anywhere--posterity will find me!" was the answer. And so on the
+modest stone that marks his resting-place at Frankfort, are engraved the
+two words, ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER, and nothing more. The world will not
+soon forget the pessimist who had such undying optimism--such
+unquenchable faith--that he knew the world would make a path to his
+tomb.
+
+Schopenhauer was the only prominent writer that ever lived who
+persistently affirmed that life is an evil--existence a curse. Yet every
+man who has ever lived has at times thought so; but to proclaim the
+thought--or even entertain it long--would stagger sanity, befog the
+intellect and make mind lose its way.
+
+And yet we prize Schopenhauer the more for having said the thing that we
+secretly thought; in some subtle way we get a satisfaction out of his
+statement, and at the same time, we perceive the man was wrong.
+
+The man who can vivisect an emotion, and lay bare a heart-beat in print,
+knows a subtle joy. The misery that can explain itself is not all
+misery. Complete misery is dumb; and pain that is all pain is quickly
+transformed into insensibility. Schopenhauer's life was quite as happy
+as that of many men who persistently depress us by requesting us to
+"cheer up." Schopenhauer says, "Don't try to cheer up--the worst is yet
+to come." And we can not refrain a smile. A mother once called to her
+little boy to come into the house. And the boy answered, "I won't do
+it!" And the mother replied, "Stay out then!" And very soon the child
+came in.
+
+Truth is only a point of view, and when a man tells us what he sees, we
+swiftly take into consideration who and what the man is. Everybody does
+this, unconsciously. It depends upon who says it! The garrulous man who
+habitually overstates--painting things large--does not deceive anybody,
+and is quite as good a companion as the painstaking, exact man who is
+always setting us straight on our statistics. One man we take gross and
+the other net. The liar gross is all right, but the liar net is very
+bad.
+
+Schopenhauer was a talkative, whimsical and sensitive personality, with
+a fine assortment of harmless superstitions of his own manufacture. He
+was vain, frivolous, self-absorbed, but he had an eye for the subtleties
+of existence that quite escape the average individual. He lived in a
+world of mind--alert, active, receptive mind--with a rapid-fire gun in
+way of a caustic, biting, scathing vocabulary at his command.
+
+The test of every literary work is time. The trite, the commonplace, and
+the irrelevant die and turn to dust. The vital lives. Schopenhauer began
+writing in his youth. Neglect, indifference and contempt were his
+portion until he was over fifty years of age. His passion for truth was
+so repelling that the Mutual Admiration Society refused to record his
+name even on its waiting-list. He was of that elect few who early in
+life succeed in ridding themselves of the friendship of the many. His
+enemies discovered him first, and gave him to the world, and after they
+had launched his fame with their charges of plagiarism, pretense,
+bombast, insincerity and fraud, he has never been out of the limelight,
+and in favor he has steadily grown.
+
+No man was ever more thoroughly denounced than Schopenhauer, but even
+his most rabid foe never accused him of buying his way into popular
+favor, or bribing the judges who sit on the bookcase.
+
+We admire the man because he is such a sublime egotist--he is so
+fearfully honest. We love him because he is so often wrong in his
+conclusions: he gives us the joy of putting him straight.
+
+Schopenhauer's writing is never the product of a tired pen and ink
+unstirred by the spirit. With him we lose our self-consciousness.
+
+And the man who can make other men forget themselves has conferred upon
+the world a priceless boon. Introspection is insanity--to open the
+windows and look out is health.
+
+
+
+
+HENRY D. THOREAU
+
+
+  Seeing how all the world's ways came to nought,
+    And how Death's one decree merged all degrees,
+    He chose to pass his time with birds and trees,
+    Reduced his life to sane necessities:
+  Plain meat and drink and sleep and noble thought.
+    And the plump kine which waded to the knees
+    Through the lush grass, knowing the luxuries
+    Of succulent mouthfuls, had our gold-disease
+  As much as he, who only Nature sought.
+
+  Who gives up much the gods give more in turn:
+    The music of the spheres for dross of gold;
+  For o'er-officious cares, flame-songs that burn
+    Their pathway through the years and never old.
+  And he who shunned vain cares and vainer strife
+    Found an eternity in one short life.
+
+[Illustration: HENRY THOREAU]
+
+
+As a rule, the man who can do all things equally well is a very mediocre
+individual. Those who stand out before a groping world as beacon-lights
+were men of great faults and unequal performances. It is quite needless
+to add that they do not live on account of their faults or
+imperfections, but in spite of them.
+
+Henry David Thoreau's place in the common heart of humanity grows firmer
+and more secure as the seasons pass; his life proves for us again the
+paradoxical fact that the only men who really succeed are those who
+fail.
+
+Thoreau's obscurity, his poverty, his lack of public recognition in
+life, either as a writer or lecturer, his rejection as a lover, his
+failure in business, and his early death, form a combination of
+calamities that make him as immortal as a martyr. Especially does an
+early death sanctify all and make the record complete, but the death of
+a naturalist while right at the height of his ability to see and
+enjoy--death from tuberculosis of a man who lived most of the time in
+the open air--these things array us on the side of the man 'gainst
+unkind Fate, and cement our sympathy and love.
+
+Nature's care forever is for the species, and the individual is
+sacrificed without ruth that the race may live and progress. This dumb
+indifference of Nature to the individual--this apparent contempt for the
+man--seems to prove that the individual is only a phenomenon. Man is
+merely a manifestation, a symptom, a symbol, and his quick passing
+proves that he isn't the Thing. Nature does not care for him--she
+produces a million beings in order to get one who has thoughts--all are
+swept into the dustpan of oblivion but the one who thinks; he alone
+lives, embalmed in the memories of generations unborn.
+
+One of the most insistent errors ever put out was that statement of
+Rousseau, paraphrased in part by T. Jefferson, that all men are born
+free and equal. No man was ever born free, and none are equal, and would
+not remain so an hour, even if Jove, through caprice, should make them
+so.
+
+The Thoreau race is dead. In Sleepy Hollow Cemetery at Concord there is
+a monument marking a row of mounds where a half-dozen Thoreaus rest. The
+inscriptions are all of one size, but the name of one alone lives, and
+he lives because he had thoughts and expressed them. If any of the tribe
+of Thoreau gets into Elysium, it will be by tagging close to the only
+man among them who glorified his Maker by using his reason.
+
+Nothing should be claimed as truth that can not be demonstrated, but as
+a hypothesis (borrowed from Henry Thoreau) I give you this: Man is only
+the tool or vehicle--Mind alone is immortal--Thought is the Thing.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Heredity does not account for the evolution of Henry Thoreau. His father
+was of French descent--a plain, stolid, little man who settled in
+Concord with his parents when a child; later he tried business in
+Boston, but the march of commerce resolved itself into a double-quick,
+and John Thoreau dropped out of line, and turned to the country village
+of Concord, where he hoped that between making lead-pencils and
+gardening he might secure a living.
+
+He moved better than he knew.
+
+John Thoreau's wife was Cynthia Dunbar, a tall and handsome woman, with
+a ready tongue and nimble wit. Her attentions were largely occupied in
+looking after the affairs of the neighbors, and as the years went by her
+voice took on the good old metallic twang of the person who discusses
+people, not principles.
+
+Henry Thoreau was the third child in the family of seven. He was born in
+an old house on the Virginia Road, Concord, about a mile and a half from
+the village. This house was the home of Mrs. Thoreau's mother, but the
+Thoreaus had taken refuge there, temporarily, to escape a financial
+blizzard which seems to have hit no one else but themselves.
+
+John Thoreau was assisted in the pencil-making by the whole family. The
+Thoreaus used to sell their pencils down at Cambridge, fifteen miles
+away, and Harvard professors, for the most part, used the Concord
+article in jotting down their sublime thoughts. At ten years of age,
+Thoreau had a furtive eye on Harvard, directed thither, they say, by his
+mother. All the best people in Concord, who had sons, sent them to
+Harvard--why shouldn't the Thoreaus? The spirit of emulation and family
+pride were at work.
+
+Henry was educated principally because he wasn't very strong, nor was he
+on good terms with work, and these are classic reasons for imparting
+classical education to youth, aspiring or otherwise.
+
+The Concord Academy prepared Henry for college, and when he was sixteen,
+he trudged off to Cambridge and was duly entered in the Harvard Class of
+Eighteen Hundred Thirty-seven. At Harvard, his cosmos seemed to be of
+such a slaty gray that no one said, "Go to--we will observe this youth
+and write anecdotes about him, for he is going to be a great man." The
+very few in his class who remembered him wrote their reminiscences long
+years afterward, with memories refreshed by magazine accounts written by
+pious pilgrims from Michigan.
+
+In college pranks and popular amusements he took no part, neither was he
+a "grind," for he impressed himself on no teacher or professor so that
+they opened their mouths and made prophecies.
+
+Once safely through college, and standing on the threshold (I trust I
+use the right expression), Henry Thoreau refused to accept his diploma
+and pay five dollars for it--he said it wasn't worth the money.
+
+In his "Walden," Thoreau expresses his opinion of college training this
+way: "If I wished a boy to know something about the arts and sciences I
+would not pursue the common course, which is merely to send him into the
+neighborhood of some professor, where everything is professed and
+practised but the art of life. To my astonishment, I was informed when I
+left college that I had studied navigation! Why, if I had taken one turn
+down the harbor I would have known more about it."
+
+It is well to remember, however, that Thoreau had no ambitions to become
+a navigator. His mission was simply to paddle his own canoe on Walden
+Pond and Concord River. The men who really launched him on his voyage of
+discovery were Ellery Channing and Ralph Waldo Emerson--both Harvard
+men. Had he not been a college man, it is quite probable he would never
+have caught the speaker's eye. His efforts in working his way through
+college, assisted by his poverty-stricken parents, proved his quality.
+And as for his life in a shanty on the shores of Walden Pond, the
+occurrence is too commonplace to mention, were it not for the fact that
+the solitary occupant of the shanty was a Harvard graduate who used no
+tobacco.
+
+Harvard prepares a youth for life--but here is a man who, having
+prepared for life, deliberately turns his back on life and lives in the
+woods.
+
+A genuine woodsman is no curiosity, but a civilized woodsman is. The
+tendency of colleges is to turn men from Nature to books; from bonfires
+to stoves, steam-heat and cash-registers; but Thoreau, by reversing all
+rules, suddenly found himself, and others, explaining his position in
+print.
+
+Harvard supplied him the alternating current; he influenced the people
+in his environment, and he was influenced by his environment.
+
+But without Harvard there would have been no Thoreau. Having earned his
+diploma, he had the privilege of declining it; and having gone to
+college, it was his right to affirm the emptiness of the classics. Only
+the man with a goodly bank-balance can wear rags with impunity.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+John Thoreau made his lead-pencils and peddled them out, and we hear of
+his saying, "Pencils, I fear, are going out of fashion--people are
+buying nothing but these miserable new-fangled steel pens." When called
+upon to surrender, Paul Jones replied, "We haven't yet begun to fight."
+The truth was, the people had not really begun to use pencils. Pencils
+weren't going out of fashion, but John Thoreau was. The poor man moved
+here and there, evicted by rapacious landlords and taken in by his
+relatives, who didn't care whether he was a stranger or not. If he owed
+them ten dollars, they took fifty dollars' worth of pencils and called
+it square.
+
+Then they undersold John one-half, and he said times were scarce.
+
+This, it need not be explained, was in Massachusetts.
+
+A hundred years ago, these men who whittled useful things out of wood
+during the long winter days were everywhere in New England. The sons of
+these men invented machines to make the same things, and thus were
+started the New England manufactories. It was brains against hands,
+cleverness against skill, initiative against plodding industry. And the
+man who can tell of the sorrow and suffering of all those industrious
+sparrows that were caught and wound around flying shuttles, or stamped
+beneath the swift presses of invention, hadn't yet been born. God
+doesn't seem to care for sparrows--three-fourths of all that are hatched
+die in the nest or fall fluttering to the ground and perish, Grant
+Allen says.
+
+Comparatively few persons can adjust themselves happily to new
+conditions: the rest are pushed and broken and bent--and die.
+
+When Dixon and Faber invented machines that could be fed automatically,
+and turn out more pencils in a day than John Thoreau could in a year,
+John was out of the game.
+
+John had brought up his children to work, and Henry became an expert
+pencil-maker. Henry, we say, should have found employment with Faber and
+Company, as foreman, or else evaded their patents and made a
+pencil-machine of his own. Instead, however, he settled down and made
+pencils just like his father used to make, and in the same way. He
+peddled out a few to his friends, but his business instinct was shown in
+that he himself tells how one year he made a thousand dollars' worth of
+pencils, but was obliged to sacrifice them all to cancel a debt of one
+hundred dollars.
+
+And yet there are people who declare that genius is not transmissible.
+
+John Thoreau failed at pencil-making, but Henry Thoreau failed because
+he played the flute morning, noon and night, and went singing the
+immunity of Pan. He fished, and tramped the woods and fields, looking,
+listening, dreaming and thinking.
+
+At Keswick, where the water comes down at Lodore, there is a
+pencil-factory that has been there since the days of William the
+Conqueror. The wife of Coleridge used to work there and get money that
+supported her philosopher-husband and their children. Southey lived
+near, and became Poet Laureate of England through the right exercise of
+Keswick pencils; Wordsworth lived only a few miles away, and once he
+brought over Charles and Mary Lamb, and bought pencils for both, with
+their names stamped on them. The good old man who now keeps the
+pencil-factory explained these things to me, and also explained the
+direct relationship of good lead-pencils to literature, but I do not
+remember what it was.
+
+If Henry Thoreau had held on a few years, until the pilgrims began to
+arrive at Concord, he could have gotten rich selling souvenir pencils.
+But he just dozed and dreamed and tramped and philosophized; and when he
+wrote he used an eagle's quill, with ink he himself distilled from
+elderberries, and at first, birch-bark sufficed for paper. "Wild men and
+wild things are the only ones that have life in abundance," he used to
+say.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Brook Farm was a serious, sober experiment inaugurated by the Reverend
+George Ripley with intent to live the ideal life--the life of useful
+effort, direct honesty, simplicity and high thinking.
+
+But Thoreau could not be induced to join the community--he thought too
+much of his liberty to entrust it to a committee. He was interested in
+the experiment, but not enough to visit the experimenters. Emerson
+looked in on them, remained one night, and went back home to continue
+his essay on Idealism.
+
+Hawthorne remained long enough to get material for his "Blithedale
+Romance." Margaret Fuller secured good copy and the cordial and lifelong
+dislike of Hawthorne, all through misprized love, alas! George William
+Curtis and Charles Dana graduated out of Brook Farm, and went down to
+New York to make goodly successes in the great game of life.
+
+At Brook Farm they succeeded in the high thinking all right, but the
+entrepreneur is quite as necessary as the poet--and a little more so.
+Brook Farm had no business head, and things unfit fall into natural
+dissolution. But the enterprise did not fail, any more than a rotting
+log fails when it nourishes a bank of violets. The net results of Brook
+Farm's high thinking have passed into the world's treasury, smelted
+largely by Emerson and Thoreau, who were not there.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Immanuel Kant has been called the father of modern Transcendentalists:
+but Socrates and his pupil Plato, so far as we know, were the first of
+the race.
+
+Neither buzzing bluebottles nor the fall of dynasties disturbed them.
+"The soul is everything," said Plato. "The soul knows all things," says
+Emerson.
+
+In every century a few men have lived who knew the value of plain living
+and high thinking, and very often the men who reversed the maxim have
+passed them the hemlock.
+
+All those sects known as Primitive Christians represent variations of
+the idea--Quakers, Mennonites, Communists, Shakers and Dunkards!
+
+A Transcendentalist is a Dukhobortsi with a college education. A Quaker
+with an artistic bias becomes a Preraphaelite, and lo! we have News from
+Nowhere, a Dream of John Ball, Merton Abbey, Kelmscott, and half a world
+is touched and tinted by the simplicity, sterling honesty and
+genuineness of one man.
+
+George Ripley, Bronson Alcott, and Ralph Waldo Emerson evolved New
+England Transcendentalism, and very early Henry Thoreau added a few bars
+of harmonious discords to the symphony. Horace Greeley once contended in
+a "Tribune" editorial that Sam Staples, the bum bailiff who locked
+Thoreau behind the bars, was an important factor in the New England
+renaissance, and as such should be immortalized by a statue made of
+punk, set up on Boston Common for the delectation of bean-eaters. I fear
+me Horace was a joker.
+
+California quail are quite different from the quail of New York State,
+and naturalists tell us that this is caused by a difference in
+environment--quail being a product of soil and climate.
+
+And man is a product of soil and climate--for only in a certain soil can
+you produce a certain type of man. As a whole, this world is better
+adapted for the production of fish than genius--most of the really good
+climate falls on the sea. Christian Scientists are Transcendentalists
+whose distinguishing point is that they secrete millinery--California
+quail with rainbow tints and topknots, Balboaic instincts well defined.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Let this fact stand: it was Emerson who made Concord. He saw it
+first--he was on the ground, and the place was his by right of
+discovery, the title strengthened by the fact that four of his ancestors
+had been Concord clergymen, and the most excellent and venerable Doctor
+Ripley, a near kinsman.
+
+Concord and Emerson, as early as Eighteen Hundred Forty, when Emerson
+was thirty-seven years old, were synonymous. He had defied the
+traditions of Harvard, been excommunicated by his Alma Mater, published
+his pantheistic Essay on Nature, and his thin little books and sermons
+had been placed on the Boston Theological Index Expurgatorius.
+
+Through it all he had remained gentle, smiling, sympathetic,
+unresentful.
+
+The world can never spare the man who does his work and holds his peace.
+Emerson was being lifted up, and souls were being drawn unto him.
+
+In Eighteen Hundred Forty, Bronson Alcott, the American Socrates, with
+his interesting family, moved to Concord, drawn thither by the magnet of
+Emerson's personality. Louisa wore short dresses, and used to pick wild
+blackberries and sell them to the Emersons and get goodly reward in
+silver, and kindly smiles, and pats on her brown head by the hand that
+wrote "Compensation."
+
+Alcott was a great, honest, sincere soul, and a true anarch, for he
+took his own wherever he saw it. He used to run his wheelbarrow into
+Emerson's garden and load it up with potatoes, cabbages or turnips, and
+once in response to a hint that the vegetables were private property,
+the old man somewhat petulantly exclaimed, "I need them!--I need them!"
+
+And that was all: anything that any man needed was his by divine right.
+And the consistency of Alcott's philosophy was shown in that he never
+took anything or any more than he needed, and if he had something that
+you needed, you were certainly welcome to it. If Alcott helped himself
+to the thrifty Emerson's vegetables, both Emerson and Thoreau helped
+themselves to Alcott's ideas.
+
+Once a wagonload of wood broke down in front of Alcott's house, and the
+farmer unhitched his horses and went on to the village to procure a new
+wheel. Before he got back, Alcott had carried every stick of the
+combustibles into his own wood-shed. "Providence remembers us!" he said.
+His faith was sublime.
+
+When all the world reaches the Alcott stage, there will be no need of
+soldiers, policemen, night-watchmen, or bolts, bars and locks.
+
+In Eighteen Hundred Forty, Nathaniel Hawthorne came to Concord from
+Salem, where he had resigned his clerkship in the custom-house, that he
+might devote all his time to literature. He moved into the Old Manse,
+which had just been vacated by Doctor Ripley, who had gone
+a-Brook-Farming--the Old Manse where Emerson himself once lived.
+Elizabeth Peabody, the talented sister of Hawthorne's wife, lived at a
+convenient distance, and to her Hawthorne read most of his manuscript,
+for I need not explain that literature is not literature until it is
+read aloud and reflected back by a sympathetic, discerning mind.
+Literature is a collaboration between the reader and the listener.
+
+Margaret Fuller, with her tragic life-story still unwound, lived hard
+by, and Hawthorne had already worked her up into copy as "Zenobia."
+Margaret's sister Ellen had married Ellery Channing, the closest,
+warmest friend that Henry Thoreau ever knew. The gossips arranged a
+doublewedding, with Henry and Margaret as the other principals; but when
+interviewed on the theme, Henry had merely shaken his head and said, "In
+the first place, Margaret Fuller is not fool enough to marry me; and
+second, I am not fool enough to marry her."
+
+An Irishman who saw Thoreau in the field making a minute in his notebook
+took it for granted that he was casting up his wages, and inquired what
+they came to. It was a peculiar farmhand who cared more for ideas than
+for wages.
+
+George William Curtis was also a farmhand out on the Lowell Road, but
+came into town Saturday evenings--taking a swim in the river on the
+way--to attend the philosophical conferences at Emerson's house, and
+then went off and made gentle fun of them.
+
+Little Doctor Holmes occasionally drove out from Boston to Concord in a
+one-horse chaise; James Russell Lowell had walked over from Cambridge;
+and Longfellow had invited all hands to a birthday fete on his lawn at
+Cambridge, but Thoreau had declined for himself, saying he had to look
+after his pond-lilies and the field-mice on Bedford flats.
+
+Thoreau, at this time, was a member of Emerson's household, and in a
+letter Emerson says, "He has his board for what labor he chooses to do;
+he is a great benefactor and physician to me, for he is an indefatigable
+and skilful laborer, besides being a scholar and a poet, and as full of
+promise as a young apple-tree."
+
+And again, in a letter to Carlyle: "One reader and friend of yours
+dwells in my household, Henry Thoreau, a poet whom you may one day be
+proud of--a noble, manly youth, full of melodies and invention. We work
+together day by day in my garden, and I grow well and strong."
+
+To work and talk is the true way to acquire an education. All of our
+best things are done incidentally--not in cold blood. Hawthorne says in
+his Journal that most of Emerson's and Thoreau's farming was done
+leaning on the hoe-handles, while Alcott sat on the fence and explained
+the Whyness of the Wherefore.
+
+But we must remember that in Hawthorne's ink-bottle there was a goodly
+dash of tincture of iron. In his Journal of September First, Eighteen
+Hundred Forty-two, he writes: "Mr. Thoreau dined with us yesterday. He
+is a singular character--a young man with much of wild, original nature
+still remaining in him; and so far as he is sophisticated, it is in a
+way and method of his own. He is as ugly as sin, long-nosed,
+queer-mouthed, and with uncouth and somewhat rustic ways, though his
+courteous manner corresponds very well with such an exterior. But his
+ugliness is of an honest character and really becomes him better than
+beauty." Little did Hawthorne's guests imagine they were being basted,
+roasted, or fricasseed for the edification of posterity.
+
+Prosperity at this time had just begun to smile on Hawthorne, and among
+other extravagances in which he indulged was a boat, bought from
+Thoreau--made by the hands of this expert Yankee whittler. Hawthorne
+quotes a little transcendental advice given to him by the maker of the
+boat: "In paddling a canoe, all you have to do is to will that your boat
+shall go in any particular direction, and she will immediately take the
+course, as if imbued with the spirit of the steersman." Hawthorne then
+adds this sober postscript: "It may be so with you, but it is certainly
+not so with me."
+
+Admiration for Thoreau gradually grew very strong with Hawthorne, and he
+quotes Emerson, who called Thoreau "the young god Pan." And this lends
+much semblance to the statement that Thoreau served Hawthorne as a model
+for Donatello, the mysterious wood-sprite in the "Marble Faun."
+
+As to the transformation of Thoreau himself, one of his classmates
+records this:
+
+     Meeting Mr. Emerson one day, I inquired if he saw much of my
+     classmate, Henry D. Thoreau, who was then living in Concord. "Of
+     Thoreau?" replied Mr. Emerson, his face lighting up with a smile of
+     enthusiasm. "Oh, yes, we could not do without him. When Carlyle
+     comes to America, I expect to introduce Thoreau to him as the man
+     of Concord," and I was greatly surprised at these words. They set
+     an estimate on Thoreau which seemed to be extravagant.... Not long
+     after I happened to meet Thoreau in Mr. Emerson's study at
+     Concord--the first time we had come together after leaving college.
+     I was quite startled by the transformation that had taken place in
+     him. His short figure and general cast of countenance were, of
+     course, unchanged; but in his manners, in the tones of his voice,
+     in his modes of expression, even in the hesitations and pauses of
+     his speech, he had become the counterpart of Mr. Emerson. Thoreau's
+     college voice bore no resemblance to Mr. Emerson's, and was so
+     familiar to my ear that I could have readily identified him by it
+     in the dark. I was so much struck by the change that I took the
+     opportunity, as they sat near together talking, of listening with
+     closed eyes, and I was unable to determine with certainty which was
+     speaking. I do not know to what subtle influences to ascribe it,
+     but after conversing with Mr. Emerson for even a brief time, I
+     always found myself able and inclined to adopt his voice and manner
+     of speaking.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Thoreau had tried schoolteaching, but he had to give up his position
+because he would not exercise the birch and ferule. "If the scholars
+once find out the teacher is not goin' to sting 'em up when they need
+it, that is an end to the skule," said one of the directors, and he spat
+violently at a fly, ten feet away. The others agreeing with him, Thoreau
+was asked to resign.
+
+William Emerson, a brother of Ralph Waldo's, a prosperous New York
+merchant, had lured Ralph Waldo's hired man away from him and taken him
+down to Staten Island, New York. Here Thoreau acted as private tutor,
+and imparted the mysteries of woodcraft to boys who cared more for
+marbles.
+
+Staten Island was about two hundred miles too far from Concord to suit
+Thoreau.
+
+His loneliness in New York City made Concord and the pine-trees of
+Walden woods seem paradise enow. There is no heart desolation equal to
+that which can come to one in a throng.
+
+Margaret Fuller was now in New York City, working for Greeley on the
+editorial staff of the "Tribune." Greeley was so much pleased with
+Thoreau that he offered to set him to work as reporter, for Greeley had
+guessed the truth that the best city reporters are country boys. They
+observe and hear--all is curious and wonderful to them: by and by they
+will become blase--sophisticated--that is, blind and deaf.
+
+Greeley was a great talker, and he had a way of getting others to talk
+also. He got Thoreau to talking about communal life and life in the
+woods, and then Horace worked Henry's words up into copy--for that is
+the way all good newspaper-writers evolve their original ideas.
+
+Thoreau was amazed to pick up a number of the daily "Tribune" and find
+his conversation of the day before, with Greeley, skilfully transformed
+into a leader.
+
+Fourierism had been the theme--the Phalanstery versus Individual
+Housekeeping. Greeley had prophesied that the phalanstery, with one
+kitchen for forty families, instead of forty kitchens for forty
+families, would soon come about. Greeley's prophetic vision did not
+quite anticipate the modern apartment-house, which perhaps is a
+transitional expedient, moving toward the phalanstery, but he quoted
+Thoreau by saying, "A woman enslaved by her housekeeping is just as much
+a chattel as if owned by a man."
+
+This was in Eighteen Hundred Forty-five, and Thoreau was now
+twenty-eight years of age. He was homesick for the dim pine-woods with
+their ceaseless lullaby, the winding and placid river, and the great,
+massive, sullen, self-sufficient boulders of Concord.
+
+He was resolved to follow the example of Brook Farm, and start a
+community of his own in opposition. His community would be on the shores
+of Walden Pond, and the only member of the genus homo who would be
+eligible to membership would be himself; the other members would be the
+birds and squirrels and bees, and the trees would make up the rest.
+Brook Farm was a retreat for transcendentalists--a place to meditate,
+dream and work--a place where one could exist close to Nature, and live
+a simple, hardy and healthful life.
+
+Thoreau's retreat would be the same, with the disadvantage of personal
+contact eliminated.
+
+It was in March, Eighteen Hundred Forty-five, that Thoreau began
+building his shanty. The spot was in a dense woods, on a hillside that
+gently sloped down to the clear, cold, deep water of Walden Pond. The
+land belonged to Emerson, who obligingly gave Thoreau the use of it,
+rent free, with no conditions. Alcott helped in the carpenter work, and
+discussed betimes of the Wherefore, and when it came to the raising, a
+couple of neighboring farmers were hailed and pressed into service. The
+cabin was twelve by fifteen, and cost--furnished--the sum of
+twenty-eight dollars, good money, not counting labor, which Thoreau did
+not calculate as worth anything, since he had had the fun of the
+thing--something for which men often pay high.
+
+The furniture consisted of a table, a chair, and a bed, all made by the
+owner. For bedclothes and dishes the Emerson household was put under
+contribution. On the door was a latch, but no lock.
+
+And Thoreau looked upon his work and pronounced it good.
+
+Stripped of the fact that a man of culture and education built the
+shanty and lived in it, the incident is scarcely worth noting. Boys
+passing through the shanty stage, all build shanties, and forage through
+their mothers' pantries for provender, which they carry off to their
+robbers' roost. Thoreau was an example of shanty-arrested development.
+
+But as the import of every sentence depends upon who wrote it, and the
+worth of advice hinges upon who gave it, so does the value of every act
+depend upon who did it. Thus when a man, who was in degree an
+inspiration of Emerson, takes to the woods, it is worth our while to
+follow him afield and see what he does.
+
+Thoreau set to work to clean up two acres of blackberry brambles for a
+garden-patch. He did not work except when he felt like it. His plan was
+to go to bed at dusk, with window and door open, and get up at five
+o'clock in the morning. After a plunge in the lake he would dress and
+prepare his simple breakfast. Then he would work in his garden, or if
+the mood struck him, he would sit in the door of his shanty and
+meditate, or else write. In the arrangement of his home he followed no
+system or rule, merely allowing the passing inclination to lead.
+
+His provisions were gotten of friends in the village, and were paid for
+in labor. It was part of Thoreau's philosophy that to accept something
+for nothing was theft, and that the giving or acceptance of presents
+was immoral. For all he received he conscientiously gave an equivalent
+in labor; and as for ideas, he always considered himself a learner; if
+he had thoughts they belonged to anybody who could annex them. And that
+Emerson and Horace Greeley were alike in their capacity to absorb,
+digest and regurgitate, is everywhere acknowledged. To paraphrase
+Emerson's famous remark concerning Plato: Say what you will, you will
+find everything mentioned by Emerson hinted at somewhere in Thoreau. The
+younger man had as much mind as the elder, but he lacked the capacity
+for patient effort that works steadily, persistently, and weighs, sifts,
+decides, classifies and arranges. The voice was the voice of Jacob, but
+the hand was the hand of Esau. That is to say, Thoreau lacked business
+instinct. During the Winter at Walden Pond, all the work Thoreau had to
+do was to gather firewood. There was plenty of time to think and write,
+and here the better part of "Walden" and "A Week on the Concord and
+Merrimac Rivers" were written. He had no neighbors, no pets, no
+domesticated animals--only the squirrels on the roof, a woodchuck under
+the floor, the scolding blue jays in the pines overhead, the wild ducks
+on the pond, and the hooting owls that sat on the ridgepole at night.
+
+Thoreau loved solitude more because he prized society--the society of
+simple men who could talk and tell things. Thoreau was no hermit--at
+least twice a week he would go to the village and meander along the
+street, gossiping with all or any. Often he would accept invitations to
+supper, but on principle refused all invitations to remain overnight, no
+matter what the weather. Indeed, as Hawthorne hints, there is a trace of
+the theatrical in the man who leaves a warm fireside at nine or ten
+o'clock at night and trudges off through the darkness, storm and sleet,
+feeling his way through the blackness of the woods to a cold and
+cheerless shanty which he with unconscious humor calls home. Hawthorne
+hints that Thoreau was a delightful poseur--he posed so naturally that
+he deceived even himself. On one particular visit to the village,
+however, he did not go back home for the night. It seems that he had
+been called upon by the local taxgatherer for his poll-tax, a matter of
+a dollar and a quarter. Thoreau argued the question at length, and among
+other things, said, "I will not give money to buy a musket, and hire a
+man to use this musket to shoot another." And also, "The best government
+is not that which governs least, but that which governs not at all."
+
+"But what shall I do?" said the patient publican.
+
+"Resign," said the philosopher.
+
+Thoreau seemed to forget that officeholders seldom die and never resign.
+In the argument the publican was worsted, but he was not without
+resource. He went back to town and told the other officials what had
+happened. Their dignity was at stake. Alcott had been guilty of a like
+defiance some time before, and now it was the belief that he was putting
+the younger man up to insurrection.
+
+The next time Thoreau came over to the village for his mail he was
+arrested and lodged in the local bastile.
+
+Emerson, hearing of the trouble, hastened to the jail, and reaching the
+presence of the prisoner asked sternly, "Henry, why are you here?"
+
+And the answer was, "Waldo, why are you not here?" Emerson had no use
+for such finespun theories of duty, and the matter was too near home for
+a joke, so he turned away and let the culprit spend the night in limbo.
+The next morning Thoreau was released, the tax having been paid by some
+unknown person--Emerson, undoubtedly. This was a tame enough ending to
+what was rather an interesting affair--the hope of the best citizens
+being that Thoreau would get a goodly sentence for vagrancy. The
+townfolk looked upon Thoreau and Alcott with suspicious eyes. They both
+came in for much well-deserved censure, and Emerson did not go
+unsmirched, since he was guilty of harboring and encouraging these
+ne'er-do-wells.
+
+Thoreau's cabin-life continued for two Summers and Winters. He had
+proved that two hours' manual work each day was sufficient to keep a
+man--twenty cents a day would suffice.
+
+The last year in the woods he had many callers: Agassiz had been to see
+him, Emerson had often called, Ellery Channing was a frequent visitor,
+and picnickers were constant. Lowell had made a few cutting remarks to
+the effect that "as compared with shanty-life, the tub of Diogenes was
+preferable, as it had a much sounder bottom," and Hawthorne had written
+of "the beauties of conspicuous solitude."
+
+Thoreau felt that he was attracting too much attention, and that perhaps
+Hawthorne was right: a recluse who holds receptions is becoming the
+thing he pretends to despise. Besides that, there was plenty of
+precedent for quitting--Brook Farm had gone by the board, and was but a
+memory.
+
+Thoreau's shanty was turned over to a utilitarian Scotchman with red
+hair. Later the immortal shanty was a useful granary. Thoreau went back
+to the village to live in a garret and work at odd jobs of boat-building
+and gardening.
+
+Now only a pile of boulders marks the place where the cabin stood. For
+some years, each visitor to the spot threw a stone upon the heap, but
+recently the proposition has been reversed, and each visitor takes a
+stone away, which reveals not a reversal in the sentiment toward the
+memory of Thoreau, but a change in the quality of the Concord pilgrim.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Thoreau's early death was the direct result of his reckless lack of
+common prudence. That which made him live, in a literary way, curtailed
+his years. The man was improperly and imperfectly nourished, physically.
+Men who live alone do not cook any more than they have to: men and
+women, both, cook for emulation. That is to say, we work for each other,
+and we succeed only as we help each other.
+
+Thoreau was such a pronounced individualist that he cared for no one but
+himself, and he cared for himself not at all. It is wife, children and
+home that teach a man prudence, and make him bank against the storm. "At
+Walden no one bothered me but the State," said Thoreau. If Thoreau had
+had a family and treated his household as he treated himself, that
+scorned thing, the State, would have stepped in and sent him to the
+workhouse, and his children to the Home for the Friendless.
+
+If he had treated dumb animals as he treated himself, the Society for
+the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals would have interfered. The absence
+of social ties and of all responsibilities fixed in his peculiar
+temperament an indifference to hunger, heat, cold, wet, damp, and all
+bodily discomfort that classes the man with the flagellants. He tells of
+whole days when he ate nothing but berries and drank only cold water;
+and at other times of how he walked all day in a soaking rain and went
+to bed at night, supperless, under a pine-tree. Emerson records the fact
+that on long tramps Thoreau would carry only a chunk of plum-cake for
+food, because it was rich and contained condensed nutriment.
+
+The question is sometimes asked, "How can one eat his cake and keep it
+too?" but this does not refer to plum-cake.
+
+A few years of plum-cake, cold mince-pie and continual wet feet will put
+the petard under even the stoutest constitution.
+
+During his shanty-life Thoreau was imperfectly nourished, and for the
+victim of malassimilation, tuberculosis hunts and needs no spyglass.
+
+It is absurd for a man to make a god of his digestive apparatus, but it
+is just as bad to forget that the belly is as much the gift of God as
+the brain.
+
+In childhood, Thoreau was frail and weak. Outdoor life gradually
+developed on his slight frame a splendid strength and a power to do and
+endure. He could outrun, outrow, outwalk any of his townsmen. In him
+developed the confidence of the athlete--the confidence of the athlete
+who dies young. Thoreau was an athlete, and he died as the athlete
+dieth. Irregular diet and continued exposure did their work--the vital
+powers became reduced, the man "caught cold," bronchitis followed, and
+the tuberculæ laughed.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+During Thoreau's life he published but two volumes, and these met with
+scanty sale. Since his death ten volumes have been issued from his
+manuscripts and letters, and his fame has steadily increased.
+
+Boston had no recognition for Thoreau as long as he was alive. Among the
+most popular writers of the time, feted and feasted, invited and
+exalted, were George S. Hillard, N. P. Willis, Caroline Kirkland, George
+W. Green, Parke Godwin and Charles F. Briggs. These writers, who had the
+run of the magazines, would have smiled in derision if told that the
+name and fame of uncouth Thoreau would outlive them all. They wrote for
+the people who bought their books, but Thoreau dedicated his work to
+time. He wrote what he thought, but they wrote what they thought other
+people thought.
+
+In the publication of "The Dial," Thoreau took a hearty interest, and
+was a frequent contributor. The official organ of the
+transcendentalists, however, paid no honorariums--it was both sincere
+and serious, and died in due time of too much dignity. The "Atlantic
+Monthly" accepted one article by Thoreau, and paid for it, but as James
+Russell Lowell, the editor, used his blue pencil a trifle, without first
+consulting the author, he never got an opportunity to do so again.
+
+Horace Greeley had interested himself in Thoreau's writings and gotten
+several articles accepted by Graham's and also Putnam's Magazine. "The
+Week" had been published on the author's guaranty that enough copies
+would be sold the first year to cover the cost. After four years, of the
+edition of one thousand copies only three hundred were disposed of, and
+these were mostly given away. To pay the publisher for the expense
+incurred, Thoreau buckled down and worked hard at surveying for a year.
+
+The only man he ever knew, of whom he stood a little in awe, was Walt
+Whitman. In a letter to Blake he says:
+
+     Nineteenth November, Eighteen Hundred Fifty-six.--Alcott has been
+     here, and last Sunday I went with him to Greeley's farm, thirty-six
+     miles north of New York. The next day Alcott and I heard Beecher
+     preach; and what was more, we visited Whitman the next morning, and
+     we were much interested and provoked. He is apparently the greatest
+     democrat the world has seen, kings and aristocracy go by the board
+     at once, as they have long deserved to. A remarkably strong though
+     coarse nature, of a sweet disposition, and much prized by his
+     friends. Though peculiar and rough in his exterior, he is
+     essentially a gentleman. I am still somewhat in a quandary about
+     him--feel that he is essentially strange to me, at any rate; but I
+     am surprised by the sight of him. He is very broad, but, as I have
+     said, not fine.
+
+     Seventh December, Eighteen Hundred Fifty-six.--That Walt Whitman,
+     of whom I wrote you, is the most interesting fact to me at present.
+     I have just read his second edition (which he gave me), and it has
+     done me more good than any reading for a long time. Perhaps I
+     remember best the poem of "Walt Whitman an American" and the
+     "Sundown" poem. There are two or three pieces in the book which are
+     disagreeable, to say the least, simply sensual.... As for its
+     sensuality--and it may turn out to be less sensual than it
+     appears--I do not so much wish that those parts were not written,
+     as that men and women were so pure that they could read them
+     without harm.
+
+     On the whole, it sounds to me very brave and American, after
+     whatever deductions. I do not believe that all the sermons, so
+     called, that have been preached in this land, put together, are
+     equal to it for preaching. We ought greatly to rejoice in him. He
+     occasionally suggests something a little more than human. You can't
+     confound him with the other inhabitants of Brooklyn. How they must
+     shudder when they read him!
+
+     To be sure, I sometimes feel a little imposed on. By his heartiness
+     and broad generalities he puts me into a liberal frame of mind,
+     prepared to see wonders--as it were, sets me upon a hill or in the
+     midst of a plain--stirs me well up, and then--throws in a thousand
+     of brick. Though rude and sometimes ineffectual, it is a great
+     primitive poem, an alarum or trumpet-note ringing through the
+     American camp. Wonderfully like the Orientals, too, considering
+     that, when I asked him if he had read them, he answered, "No; tell
+     me about them."
+
+     Since I have seen him, I find that I am not disturbed by any brag
+     or egoism in his book. He may turn out the least of a braggart of
+     all, having a better right to be confident. Walt is a great fellow.
+
+A lady once asked John Burroughs this question: "What would become of
+this world if everybody in it patterned after Henry Thoreau?" And Ol'
+John replied, "It would be much improved."
+
+But your Uncle John is a humorist--he knows that Henry Ward Beecher was
+right when he said, "God never made but one Thoreau--that was enough,
+but we are grateful for the one."
+
+Thoreau was a poet-naturalist, and the lesson he taught us is that this
+is the most beautiful world to know anything about, and there are enough
+curious and wonderful things right under our feet, and over our heads,
+and all around us, to amuse, divert, interest and instruct us for a
+lifetime. We need only a little.
+
+Use your eyes!
+
+"How do you manage to find so many Indian relics?" a friend asked
+Thoreau. "Just like this," he replied, and stooping over, he picked up
+an arrowhead under the friend's foot. At dinner once at a neighbor's he
+was asked what dish he preferred, and his answer was, "The nearest." To
+him, everything was good--he uttered no complaints and made no demands.
+
+When asked by a clergyman why he did not go to church, he said, "It is
+the rafters--I can't stand them--when I look up, I want to gaze straight
+into the blue sky." Then he turned the tables and asked the interrogator
+a question: "Did you ever happen, accidentally, to say anything while
+you were preaching?" Yet preachers of brains were always attracted to
+him: Harrison Blake, to whom he wrote more letters than to any one
+else, was a Congregational preacher. And when Horace Greeley took
+Thoreau to Plymouth Church, Beecher invited him to sit on the platform
+and quoted him as one who saw God in autumn's every burning bush.
+
+The wit of the man--his direct speech, and all of his beautiful
+indifference for the good opinion of those whom others follow after and
+lie in wait for--was sublime. Meanness, hypocrisy, secrecy and
+subterfuge had no place in Thoreau's nature.
+
+He wanted nothing--nothing but liberty--he did not even ask for your
+applause or approval. When walking on country roads, laborers would hail
+him and ask for tobacco--seeing in him only one of their own kind.
+Farmers would stop and gossip with him about the weather. Children ran
+to him on the village streets and would cling to his hands and clutch
+his coat, and ask where the berries grew, or the first spring flowers
+were to be found. With children he was particularly patient and kind.
+With them he would converse as freely as did George Francis Train with
+the children in Madison Square. The children recognized in him something
+very much akin to themselves--he would play upon his flute for them and
+whittle out toy boats, regardless of the flight of time.
+
+Imbeciles and mental defectives from the almshouse used occasionally to
+wander over to his cabin in the woods, and he would treat them with
+gentle consideration, and accompany them back home.
+
+His lack of worldly prudence, Blake thought, tokened a courage which
+under certain conditions would have made him as formidable as John
+Brown. Blake tells this: Once on a lonely road, two miles from Concord,
+two loafers stopped a girl who was picking berries, and began to bother
+her. Thoreau just then happened along, and seeing the young woman's
+distress, he collared the rogues and marched them into the village,
+turning them over to that redoubtable transcendentalist, Sam Staples,
+who locked them up. Thoreau's hook nose and features could be
+transformed in rare instances into a look of command that no man dare
+question--it was the look of the fatalist--the benign fanatic--the look
+of Marat--the look of a man who has nothing but his life to lose, and
+places small store on that. "A little more ambition, and a trifle less
+sympathy, and the world would have had a Cæsar to deal with," says
+Blake.
+
+Cowardice is only caution carried to an extreme. Thoreau exercised no
+prudence in making money, securing fame, preserving his health, holding
+his friends or making new ones. This Spartan-like quality, that counts
+not the cost, is essentially heroic.
+
+But Thoreau was not given to strife; for the most part, he was
+non-resistant. The chief thing he prized was equanimity, and this you
+can not secure through struggle and strife. His game was all captured
+with the spyglass, or carried home in his botanists' drum. For worldly
+wealth and what we call progress, he had small appreciation--this marks
+his limitations. But his reasons are surely good literature:
+
+     They make a great ado nowadays about hard times; but I think that
+     the community generally, ministers and all, take a wrong view of
+     the matter. This general failure, both private and public, is
+     rather occasion for rejoicing, as reminding us whom we have at the
+     helm--that justice is always done. If our merchants did not most of
+     them fail, and the banks too, my faith in the old laws of the world
+     would be staggered. The statement that ninety-six in a hundred
+     doing such business surely break down, is perhaps the sweetest fact
+     that statistics have revealed--exhilarating as the fragrance of the
+     flowers in the Spring. Does it not say somewhere, "The Lord
+     reigneth, let the earth rejoice"? If thousands are thrown out of
+     employment, it suggests that they were not well employed. Why don't
+     they take the hint? It is not enough to be industrious; so are the
+     ants. What are you industrious about?
+
+     The merchants and company have long laughed at transcendentalism,
+     higher law, etc., crying, "None of your moonshine," as if they were
+     anchored to something not only definite, but sure and permanent. If
+     there were any institution which was presumed to rest on a solid
+     and secure basis, and more than any other, represented this boasted
+     commonsense, prudence, and practical talent, it was the bank; and
+     now these very banks are found to be mere reeds shaken by the wind.
+
+     Scarcely one in the land has kept its promise. Not merely the Brook
+     Farm and Fourierite communities, but now the community generally
+     has failed. But there is the moonshine still, serene, beneficent
+     and unchanged.
+
+Thoreau was no pessimist. He complained neither of men nor of
+destiny--he felt that he was getting out of life all that was his due.
+His remarks might be sharp and his words sarcastic, but in them there
+was no bitterness. He made life for none more difficult--he added to no
+one's burdens. Sympathy with Nature, pride, buoyancy, self-sufficiency,
+were his prevailing traits. The habit of his mind was hopeful.
+
+His wit and good-nature were his to the last, and when asked if he had
+made his peace with God, he replied, "I have never quarreled with Him."
+
+He died, aged forty-four, in the modest home of his mother. The village
+school was dismissed that the scholars might attend the funeral, and
+three hundred children walked in the procession to Sleepy Hollow.
+Emerson made an address at the grave; Alcott read selections from
+Thoreau's own writings; and Louisa Alcott read this poem, composed for
+the occasion:
+
+  We sighing said, "Our Pan is dead;
+    His pipe hangs mute beside the river,
+    Around it wistful sunbeams quiver,
+  But Music's airy voice is fled.
+  Spring mourns as for untimely frost:
+    The bluebird chants a requiem;
+    The willow-blossom waits for him;--
+  The Genius of the wood is lost."
+
+  Then from the flute, untouched by hands,
+    There came a low, harmonious breath:
+    "For such as he there is no death;
+  His life the eternal life commands;
+  Above man's aims his nature rose.
+    The wisdom of a just content
+    Made one small spot a continent,
+  And turned to poetry life's prose.
+
+  "To him no vain regrets belong,
+    Whose soul, that finer instrument,
+    Gave to the world no poor lament,
+  But wood-notes ever sweet and strong.
+  O lonely friend! he still will be
+    A potent presence, though unseen--
+    Steadfast, sagacious, and serene;
+  Seek not for him--he is with thee."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+SO HERE ENDETH "LITTLE JOURNEYS TO THE HOMES OF GREAT PHILOSOPHERS,"
+BEING VOLUME EIGHT OF THE SERIES, AS WRITTEN BY ELBERT HUBBARD; EDITED
+AND ARRANGED BY FRED BANN; BORDERS AND INITIALS BY ROYCROFT ARTISTS, AND
+PRODUCED BY THE ROYCROFTERS, AT THEIR SHOPS, WHICH ARE IN EAST AURORA,
+ERIE COUNTY, NEW YORK, MCMXXII.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Little Journeys to the Homes of the
+Great Philosophers, Volume 8, by Elbert  Hubbard
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HOMES OF THE GREAT PHILOSOPHERS ***
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+<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
+  <head>
+    <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=iso-8859-1" />
+    <title>
+      The Project Gutenberg eBook of Little Journeys To The Homes Of The Great, Volume 8 (of 14), by Elbert Hubbard.
+    </title>
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+<pre>
+
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great
+Philosophers, Volume 8, by Elbert  Hubbard
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8
+
+Author: Elbert  Hubbard
+
+Release Date: November 27, 2007 [EBook #23640]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HOMES OF THE GREAT PHILOSOPHERS ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Juliet Sutherland, Annie McGuire and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<h3>Little Journeys To the Homes of the Great, Volume 8</h3>
+
+<h1>Little Journeys to the Homes<br />
+    of Great Philosophers</h1>
+
+<h3>by</h3>
+
+<h2>Elbert Hubbard</h2>
+
+<h3>Memorial Edition</h3>
+
+<h3>New York</h3>
+
+<h3>1916.</h3>
+
+
+
+
+<hr class="full" />
+<h2><a name="CONTENTS" id="CONTENTS"></a>CONTENTS</h2>
+
+<p>
+<a href="#SOCRATES"><b>SOCRATES</b></a><br />
+<a href="#SENECA"><b>SENECA</b></a><br />
+<a href="#ARISTOTLE"><b>ARISTOTLE</b></a><br />
+<a href="#MARCUS_AURELIUS"><b>MARCUS AURELIUS</b></a><br />
+<a href="#IMMANUEL_KANT"><b>IMMANUEL KANT</b></a><br />
+<a href="#SWEDENBORG"><b>SWEDENBORG</b></a><br />
+<a href="#SPINOZA"><b>SPINOZA</b></a><br />
+<a href="#AUGUSTE_COMTE"><b>AUGUSTE COMTE</b></a><br />
+<a href="#VOLTAIRE"><b>VOLTAIRE</b></a><br />
+<a href="#HERBERT_SPENCER"><b>HERBERT SPENCER</b></a><br />
+<a href="#SCHOPENHAUER"><b>SCHOPENHAUER</b></a><br />
+<a href="#HENRY_D_THOREAU"><b>HENRY D. THOREAU</b></a><br />
+</p>
+
+
+
+
+<hr class="full" />
+<h2><a name="SOCRATES" id="SOCRATES"></a>SOCRATES<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_9" id="VIII_Page_9">[Pg 9]</a></span></h2>
+
+
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>I do not think it possible for a better man to be injured by a
+worse.... To a good man nothing is evil, neither while living nor
+when dead, nor are his concerns neglected by the gods.</p></div>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 25em;"><i>&mdash;The Republic</i></span><br />
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_10" id="VIII_Page_10">[Pg 10]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<div class="center">
+    <a id="image0453-1"></a>
+    <img src="images/0453-1.jpg" width="285" height="400"
+       alt=""
+       title="" />
+
+   <p class="center">SOCRATES</p>
+</div>
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_11" id="VIII_Page_11">[Pg 11]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>It was four hundred seventy years before Christ that Socrates was born.
+He never wrote a book, never made a formal address, held no public
+office, wrote no letters, yet his words have come down to us sharp,
+vivid and crystalline. His face, form and features are to us
+familiar&mdash;his goggle eyes, bald head, snub nose and bow-legs! The habit
+of his life&mdash;his goings and comings, his arguments and wrangles, his
+infinite leisure, his sublime patience, his perfect faith&mdash;all these
+things are plain, lifting the man out of the commonplace and setting him
+apart.</p>
+
+<p>The "Memorabilia" of Xenophon and the "Dialogues" of Plato give us
+Boswellian pictures of the man.</p>
+
+<p>Knowing the man, we know what he would do; and knowing what he did, we
+know the man.</p>
+
+<p>Socrates was the son of Sophroniscus, a stonecutter, and his wife
+Ph&aelig;narete. In boyhood he used to carry dinner to his father, and sitting
+by, he heard the men, in their free and easy way, discuss the plans of
+Pericles. These workmen didn't know the plans&mdash;they were only privates
+in the ranks, but they exercised their prerogatives to criticize, and
+while working to assist, did right royally disparage and condemn. Like
+sailors who love<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_12" id="VIII_Page_12">[Pg 12]</a></span> their ship, and grumble at grub and grog, yet on shore
+will allow no word of disparagement to be said, so did these Athenians
+love their city, and still condemn its rulers&mdash;they exercised the
+laborer's right to damn the man who gives him work.</p>
+
+<p>Little did the workmen guess&mdash;little did his father guess&mdash;that this
+pug-nosed boy, making pictures in the sand with his big toe, would also
+leave his footprints on the sands of time, and a name that would rival
+that of Phidias and Pericles!</p>
+
+<p>Socrates was a product of the Greek renaissance. Great men come in
+groups, like comets sent from afar. Athens was seething with thought and
+feeling: Pericles was giving his annual oration&mdash;worth thousands of
+weekly sermons&mdash;and planning his dream in marble; Phidias was cutting
+away the needless portions of the white stone of Pentelicus and
+liberating wondrous forms of beauty; Sophocles was revealing the
+possibilities of the stage; &AElig;schylus was pointing out the way as a
+playwright; and the passion for physical beauty was everywhere an
+adjunct of religion.</p>
+
+<p>Prenatal influences, it seems, played their part in shaping the destiny
+of Socrates. His mother followed the profession of Sairy Gamp, and made
+her home with a score of families, as she was needed. The trained nurse
+is often untrained, and is a regular encyclopedia of esoteric family
+facts. She wipes her mouth on her apron and is at home in every room of
+the domicile from<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_13" id="VIII_Page_13">[Pg 13]</a></span> parlor to pantry. Then as now she knew the trials and
+troubles of her clients, and all domestic underground happenings
+requiring adjustment she looked after as she was "disposed."</p>
+
+<p>Evidently Ph&aelig;narete was possessed of considerable personality, for we
+hear of her being called to Myth&aelig;ia on a professional errand shortly
+before the birth of Socrates; and in a month after his birth, a similar
+call came from another direction, and the bald little philosopher was
+again taken along&mdash;from which we assume, following in the footsteps of
+Conan Doyle, that Socrates was no bottle-baby. The world should be
+grateful to Ph&aelig;narete that she did not honor the Sairy Gamp precedents
+and observe the Platonic maxim, "Sandal-makers usually go barefoot": she
+gave her customers an object-lesson in well-doing as well as teaching
+them by precept. None of her clients did so well as she&mdash;even though her
+professional duties were so exacting that domesticity to her was merely
+incidental.</p>
+
+<p>It was only another case of the amateur distancing the professional.<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_14" id="VIII_Page_14">[Pg 14]</a></span></p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>From babyhood we lose sight of Socrates until we find him working at his
+father's trade as a sculptor. Certainly he had a goodly degree of skill,
+for the "Graces" which he carved were fair and beautiful and admired by
+many. This was enough: he just wanted to reveal what he could do; and
+then to show that to have no ambition was his highest ambition, he threw
+down his tools and took off his apron for good. He was then thirty-five
+years old. Art is a jealous mistress, and demands that "thou shalt have
+no other gods before me." Socrates did not concentrate on art. His mind
+went roaming the world of philosophy, and for his imagination the
+universe was hardly large enough.</p>
+
+<p>I said that he deliberately threw down his tools; but possibly this was
+by request, for he had acquired a habit of engaging in much wordy
+argument and letting the work slide. He went out upon the streets to
+talk, and in the guise of a learner he got in close touch with all the
+wise men of Athens by stopping them and asking questions. In physique he
+was immensely strong&mdash;hard work had developed his muscles, plain fare
+had made him oblivious of the fact that he had a stomach, and as for
+nerves, he had none to speak of.</p>
+
+<p>Socrates did not marry until he was about forty. His wife was scarcely
+twenty. Of his courtship we know nothing, but sure it is Socrates did
+not go and sue for the lady's hand in the conventional way, nor seek to<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_15" id="VIII_Page_15">[Pg 15]</a></span>
+gain the consent of her parents by proving his worldly prospects. His
+apparel was costly as his purse could buy, not gaudy nor expressed in
+fancy. It consisted of the one suit that he wore, for we hear of his
+repairing beyond the walls to bathe in the stream, and of his washing
+his clothing, hanging it on the bushes and waiting for it to dry before
+going back to the city. As for shoes, he had one pair, and since he
+never once wore them, going barefoot Summer and Winter, it is presumed
+that they lasted well. One can not imagine Socrates in an opera-hat&mdash;in
+fact, he wore no hat, and he was bald. I record the fact so as to
+confound those zealous ones who badger the bald as a business, who have
+recipes concealed on their persons, and who assure us that baldness has
+its rise in headgear.</p>
+
+<p>Socrates belonged to the leisure class. His motto was, "Know Thyself."
+He considered himself of much more importance than any statue he could
+make, and to get acquainted with himself as being much more desirable
+than to know physical phenomena. His plan of knowing himself was to ask
+everybody questions, and in their answers he would get a true reflection
+of his own mind. His intellect would reply to theirs, and if his
+questions dissolved their answers into nothingness, the supremacy of his
+own being would be apparent; and if they proved his folly he was equally
+grateful&mdash;if he was a fool, his desire was to know it. So sincere was
+Socrates in this wish to know himself that never did he<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_16" id="VIII_Page_16">[Pg 16]</a></span> show the
+slightest impatience nor resentment when the argument was turned upon
+him.</p>
+
+<p>He looked upon his mind as a second party, and sat off and watched it
+work. Should it become confused or angered, it would be proof of its
+insufficiency and littleness. If Socrates ever came to know himself, he
+knew this fact: as an economic unit he was an absolute failure; but as a
+gadfly, stinging men into thinking for themselves, he was a success. A
+specialist is a deformity contrived by Nature to get the work done.
+Socrates was a thought-specialist, and the laziest man who ever lived in
+a strenuous age. The desire of his life was to live without
+desire&mdash;which is essentially the thought of Nirvana. He had the power
+never to exercise his power except in knowing himself.</p>
+
+<p>He accepted every fact, circumstance and experience of life, and counted
+it gain. Life to him was a precious privilege, and what were regarded as
+unpleasant experiences were as much a part of life as the pleasant ones.
+He who succeeds in evading unpleasant experiences cheats himself out of
+so much life. You know yourself by watching yourself to see what you do
+when you are thwarted, crossed, contradicted, or deprived of certain
+things supposed to be desirable. If you always get the desirable things,
+how do you know what you would do if you didn't have them? You exchange
+so much life for the thing, that's all, and thus do we see Socrates
+anticipating Emerson's Essay on Compensation.<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_17" id="VIII_Page_17">[Pg 17]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Everything is bought with a price&mdash;all things are of equal value&mdash;no one
+can cheat you, for to be cheated is a not undesirable experience, and in
+the act, if you are really filled with the thought, "Know Thyself," you
+get the compensation by increase in mental growth.</p>
+
+<p>However, to deliberately go in search of experience, Socrates said,
+would be a mistake, because then you would so multiply impressions that
+none would be of any avail and your life would be burned out. To clutch
+life by the throat and demand that it shall stand and deliver is to
+place yourself so out of harmony with your environment that you will get
+nothing.</p>
+
+<p>Above all things, we must be calm, self-centered, never anxious, and be
+always ready to accept whatever the gods may send. The world will come
+to us if we only wait. It will be seen that Socrates is at once the
+oldest and most modern of thinkers. He was the first to express the New
+Thought. A thought, to Socrates, was more of a reality than a block of
+marble&mdash;a moral principle was just as persistent as a chemical agent.<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_18" id="VIII_Page_18">[Pg 18]</a></span></p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>The silken-robed and perfumed Sophist was sport and game for Socrates.
+For him Socrates recognized no closed season. If Socrates ever came near
+losing his temper, it was in dealing with this Edmund Russell of Athens.
+Grant Allen used to say, "The spores of everything are everywhere, and a
+certain condition breeds a certain microbe." A period of prosperity
+always warms into life this social paragon, who lives in a darkened room
+hung with maroon drapery where incense is burned and a turbaned Hindu
+carries your card to the master, who faces the sun and exploits a
+prie-dieu when the wind blows east. Athens had these men of refined
+elegance, Rome evolved them, London has had her day, New York knows
+them, and Chicago&mdash;I trust I will not be contradicted when I say that
+Chicago understands her business! And so we find these folks who
+cultivate a pellucid passivity, a phthisicky whisper, a supercilious
+smirk, and who win our smothered admiration and give us gooseflesh by
+imparting a taupe tinge of mystery to all their acts and words, thus
+proving to the assembled guests that they are the Quality and Wisdom
+will die with them.</p>
+
+<p>This lingo of meaningless words and high-born phrases always set
+Socrates by the ears, and when he could corner a Sophist, he would very
+shortly prick his pretty toy balloon, until at last the tribe fled him
+as a pestilence. Socrates stood for sanity. The Sophist represented
+moonshine gone to seed, and these things,<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_19" id="VIII_Page_19">[Pg 19]</a></span> proportioned ill, drive men
+transverse.</p>
+
+<p>Extremes equalize themselves: the pendulum swings as far this way as it
+does that. The saponaceous Sophist who renounced the world and yet lived
+wholly in a world of sense, making vacuity pass legal tender for
+spirituality, and the priest who, mystified with a mumble of words,
+evolved a Diogenes who lived in a tub, wore regally a robe of rags, and
+once went into the temple, and cracking a louse on the altar-rail, said
+solemnly, "Thus does Diogenes sacrifice to all the gods at once!" are
+but two sides of the same shield.</p>
+
+<p>In Socrates was a little jollity and much wisdom pickled in the scorn of
+Fortune; but the Sophists inwardly bowed down and worshiped the fickle
+dame on idolatrous knees. Socrates won immortality because he did not
+want it, and the Sophists secured oblivion because they deserved it.<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_20" id="VIII_Page_20">[Pg 20]</a></span></p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>We hear of Socrates going to Aspasia, and holding long conversations
+with her "to sharpen his mind." Aspasia did not go out in society much:
+she and Pericles lived very simply. It is worth while to remember that
+the most intellectual woman of her age was democratic enough to be on
+friendly terms with the barefoot philosopher who went about regally
+wrapped in a table-spread. Socrates did not realize the flight of time
+when making calls&mdash;he went early and stayed late. Possibly prenatal
+influences caused him often to call before breakfast and remain until
+after supper.</p>
+
+<p>Just imagine Pericles, Aspasia and Socrates sitting at table&mdash;with
+Walter Savage Landor behind the arras making notes! Doubtless Socrates
+and Mrs. Pericles did most of the talking, while the First Citizen of
+Athens listened and smiled indulgently now and then as his mind wandered
+to construction contracts and walking delegates. Pericles, the builder
+of a city&mdash;Pericles, first among practical men since time began, and
+Socrates, who jostles history for first place among those who have done
+nothing but talk&mdash;imagine these two eating melons together, while
+Aspasia, gentle and kind, talks of spirit being more than matter and
+love being greater than the Parthenon!</p>
+
+<p>Socrates is usually spoken of as regarding women with slight favor, but
+I have noticed that your genus woman-hater holds the balance true by
+really being a woman-lover.<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_21" id="VIII_Page_21">[Pg 21]</a></span> If a man is enough interested in women to
+hate them, note this: he is only searching for the right woman, the
+woman who compares favorably with the ideal woman in his own mind. He
+measures every woman by this standard, just as Ruskin compared all
+modern painters with Turner and discarded them with fitting adjectives
+as they receded from what he regarded as the perfect type. If Ruskin had
+not been much interested in painters, would he have written scathing
+criticisms about them?</p>
+
+<p>In several instances we hear of Socrates reminding his followers that
+they are "weak as women," and he was the first to say "woman is an
+undeveloped man." But Socrates was a great admirer of human beauty,
+whether physical or spiritual, and his abrupt way of stopping beautiful
+women on the streets and bluntly telling them they were beautiful,
+doubtless often confirmed their suspicions. And thus far he was
+pleasing, but when he went on to ask questions so as to ascertain
+whether their mental estate compared with their physical, why, that was
+slightly different. It is good to hear him say, "There is no sex in
+intellect," and also, "I have long held the opinion that the female sex
+is nothing inferior to ours, save only in strength of body and possibly
+in steadiness of judgment." And Xenophon quotes him thus: "It is more
+delightful to hear the virtue of a good woman described than if the
+painter Zeuxis were to show me the portrait of the fairest woman in the<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_22" id="VIII_Page_22">[Pg 22]</a></span>
+world."</p>
+
+<p>Perhaps Thackeray is right when he says, "The men who appreciate woman
+most are those who have felt the sharpness of her claws." That is to
+say, things show up best on the darkest background. If so, let us give
+Xantippe due credit. She tested the temper of the sage by railing on him
+and deluging him with Socratic propositions, not waiting for the
+answers; she often broke in with a broom upon his introspective efforts
+to know himself; if this were not enough, she dashed buckets of
+scrubbing-water over him; presents that were sent him by admiring
+friends she used as targets for her mop and wit; if he invited friends
+with faith plus to dine, she upset the table, dishes and all, before
+them&mdash;not much to their loss; she occasionally elbowed her way through a
+crowd where her husband was entertaining the listeners upon the divine
+harmonies, and would tear off his robe and lead him home by the ear. But
+these things never ruffled Socrates&mdash;he might roll his eyes in comic
+protest at the audiences as he was being led away captive, but no
+resentment was shown. He had the strength of a Hercules, but he was a
+far better non-resistant than Tolstoy, because he took his medicine with
+a wink, while Fate is obliged to hold the nose of the author of "Anna
+Karenina," who never sees the comedy of an inward struggle and an
+outward compliance, any more than does the benedict, safely entrenched
+under the bed, who shouts out, "I defy thee, I defy thee!" as did
+Mephisto when Goethe thrust him into Tophet.<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_23" id="VIII_Page_23">[Pg 23]</a></span></p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>The popular belief is that Xantippe, the wife of Socrates, was a shrew,
+and had she lived in New England in Cotton Mather's time would have been
+a candidate for the ducking-stool. Socrates said he married her for
+discipline. A man in East Aurora, however, has recently made it plain to
+himself that Xantippe was possessed of a great and acute intellect. She
+knew herself, and she knew her liege as he never did&mdash;he was too close
+to his subject to get the perspective. She knew that under right
+conditions his name would live as one of the world's great teachers, and
+so she set herself to supply the conditions. She deliberately sacrificed
+herself and put her character in a wrong light before the world in order
+that she might benefit the world. Most women have a goodly grain of
+ambition for themselves, and if their husbands have genius, their
+business is not to prove it, but to show that they themselves are not
+wholly commonplace.</p>
+
+<p>Not so Xantippe&mdash;she was quite willing to be misunderstood that her
+husband might live.</p>
+
+<p>What the world calls a happy marriage is not wholly good&mdash;ease is bought
+with a price. Suppose Xantippe and Socrates had settled down and lived
+in a cottage with a vine growing over the portico, and two rows of
+hollyhocks leading from the front gate to the door; a pathway of
+coal-ashes lined off with broken crockery, and inside the house all
+sweet, clean and tidy; Socrates earning six drachmas a day carving
+marble, with double<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_24" id="VIII_Page_24">[Pg 24]</a></span> pay for overtime, and he handing the pay-envelope
+over to her each Saturday night, keeping out just enough for tobacco,
+and she putting a tidy sum in the &AElig;gean Savings-Bank every month&mdash;why,
+what then?</p>
+
+<p>Well, that would have been an end of Socrates. Xantippe was big enough
+to know this and so she supplied the domestic cantharides and drove him
+out upon the streets&mdash;he grew to care very little for her, not much for
+the children, nothing for his home. She drove him out into the world of
+thought, instead of allowing him to settle down and be content with her
+society.</p>
+
+<p>I once knew a sculptor&mdash;another sculptor&mdash;an elemental bit of nature,
+original and, better still, aboriginal. He used to sleep out under the
+stars so as to wake up in the night and see the march of the Milky Way,
+and watch the Pleiades disappear over the brink of the western horizon.
+He wore a flannel shirt, thick-soled shoes, and overalls, no hat, and
+his hair was thick and coarse as a horse's mane. This man had talent,
+and he had sublime conceptions, great dreams, and splendid aspirations.
+His soul was struggling to find expression. "Leave him alone," I said.
+"He needs time to ripen. He is a Michelangelo in embryo!"</p>
+
+<p>Did he ripen? Not he. He married a Wellesley girl of good family. She,
+too, had ideas about art&mdash;she painted china-buttons for shirtwaists,
+embroidered chasubles and sang "The Rosary" in a raucous Quinsigamond
+voice. The big barbarian became respectable, and the<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_25" id="VIII_Page_25">[Pg 25]</a></span> last time I saw
+him he wore a Tuxedo and was passing out platitudes and raspberry-shrub
+at a lawn-party. The Wellesley girl had tamed her bear&mdash;they were very
+happy, he assured me, and she was preparing a course of lectures for him
+which he was to give at Mrs. Jack Gardner's. A Xantippe might have saved
+him.<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_26" id="VIII_Page_26">[Pg 26]</a></span></p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>A captious friend once suggested to Socrates this: "If you prize the
+female nature so highly, how does it happen that you do not instruct
+Xantippe?"&mdash;a rather indelicate proposition to put to a married man. And
+Socrates, quite unruffled, replied: "My friend, if one wants to learn
+horsemanship, does he choose a tame horse or one with mettle and a hard
+mouth? I wish to converse with all sorts of people, and I believe that
+nothing can disturb me after I grow accustomed to the tongue of
+Xantippe."</p>
+
+<p>Again we hear of his suggesting that his wife's scolding tongue may have
+been only the buzzing of his own waspish thoughts, and if he did not
+call forth these qualities in her they would not otherwise have
+appeared. And so, beholding her impatience and unseemliness, he would
+realize the folly of an ill temper and thus learn by antithesis to curb
+his own. Old Doctor Johnson used to have a regular menagerie of
+wrangling, jangling, quibbling, dissatisfied pensioners in his
+household; and so far as we know he never learned the truth that all
+pensioners are dissatisfied. "If I can stand things at home, I can stand
+things anywhere," he once said to Boswell, as much as to say, "If I can
+stand things at home, I can stand even you." Goldsmith referred to
+Boswell as a cur; Garrick said he thought he was a bur. Socrates had a
+similar satellite by the name of Cheropho, a dark, dirty, weazened, and
+awfully serious little man of the tribe of Buttinsky, who sat
+breathlessly trying to catch<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_27" id="VIII_Page_27">[Pg 27]</a></span> the pearls that fell from the ample mouth
+of the philosopher. Aristophanes referred to Cheropho as "Socrates'
+bat," a play-off on Minerva and her bird of night, the owl. There were
+quite a number of these "bats," and they seemed to labor under the same
+hallucination that catches the lady students of the Pundit Vivakenanda
+H. Darmapala: they think that wisdom is to be imparted by word of mouth,
+and that by listening hard and making notes one can become very wise.
+Socrates said again and again, "Character is a matter of growth and all
+I hope to do is to make you think for yourselves."</p>
+
+<p>That chilly exclusiveness which regards a man's house as his castle, his
+home, the one sacred spot, and all outside as the cold and cruel world,
+was not the ideal of Socrates. His family was his circle of friends, and
+these were of all classes and conditions, from the First Citizen to
+beggars on the street.</p>
+
+<p>He made no charge for his teaching, took up no collections, and never
+inaugurated a Correspondence School. America has produced one man who
+has been called a reincarnation of Socrates; that man was Bronson
+Alcott, who peddled clocks and forgot the flight of time whenever any
+one would listen to him expound the unities. Alcott once ran his
+wheelbarrow into a neighbor's garden and was proceeding to load his
+motor-car with cabbages, beets and potatoes. Glancing up, the
+philosopher saw the owner of the garden looking at him steadfastly over
+the wall. "Don't look at me that way,"<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_28" id="VIII_Page_28">[Pg 28]</a></span> called Alcott with a touch of
+un-Socratic acerbity, "don't look at me that way&mdash;I need these things
+more than you!" and went on with the annexation.</p>
+
+<p>The idea that all good things are for use and belong to all who need
+them was a favorite maxim of Socrates. The furniture in his house never
+exceeded the exemption clause. Once we find him saying that Xantippe
+complained because he did not buy her a stewpan, but since there was
+nothing to put in it, he thought her protests ill-founded.</p>
+
+<p>The climate of Athens is about like that of Southern California&mdash;one
+does not need to bank food and fuel against the coming of Winter. Life
+can be adjusted to its simplest forms. From his fortieth to his fiftieth
+year, Socrates worked every other Thursday; then he retired from active
+life, and Xantippe took in plain sewing.</p>
+
+<p>Socrates was surely not a good provider, but if he had provided more for
+his family, he would have provided less for the world. The wealthy Crito
+would have turned his pockets inside out for Socrates, but Socrates had
+all he wished, and explained that as it was he had to dance at home in
+order to keep down the adipose. Aristides, who was objectionable because
+he so shaped his conduct that he was called "The Just" and got himself
+ostracized, was one of his dear friends. Antisthenes, the original
+Cynic, used to walk six miles and back every day to hear Socrates talk.
+The Cynic was a rich man, but so captivated was he with the preaching<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_29" id="VIII_Page_29">[Pg 29]</a></span>
+of Socrates that he adopted the life of simplicity and dressed in rags
+and boycotted both the barber and the bath. On one occasion Socrates
+looked sharply at a rent in the cloak of his friend and said, "Ah,
+Antisthenes, through that hole in your cloak I see your vanity!"</p>
+
+<p>Xenophon sat at the feet of Socrates for a score of years, and then
+wrote his recollections of him as a vindication of his character. Euclid
+of Megara was nearly eighty when he came to Socrates as a pupil, trying
+to get rid of his ill-temper and habit of ironical reply. Cebes and
+Simmias left their native country and became Greek citizens for his
+sake. Charmides, the pampered son of wealthy parents, learned pedagogics
+by being shown that, in households where there were many servants, the
+children got cheated out of their rightful education because others did
+all the work, and to deprive a child of the privilege of being useful
+was to rob him of so much life. &AElig;schines, the ambitious son of a
+sausage-maker, was advised by Socrates to borrow money of himself on
+long time without interest, by reducing his wants. So pleased was the
+recipient with this advice, that he went to publishing Socratic
+dialogues as a business and had the felicity to fail with tidy
+liabilities.</p>
+
+<p>But the two men who loom largest in the life of Socrates are Alcibiades
+and Plato&mdash;characters very much unlike.</p>
+
+<p>Alcibiades was twenty-one years old when we find him first. He was
+considered the handsomest young man in Athens. He was aristocratic,
+proud, insolent,<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_30" id="VIII_Page_30">[Pg 30]</a></span> and needlessly rich. He had a passion for gambling,
+horse-racing, dog-fighting, and indulged in the churchly habit of doing
+that which he ought not and leaving undone that which he should have
+done. He was worse than that degenerate scion of a proud ancestry, who
+a-kneiping went with his lady friends in the Cincinnati fountain, after
+the opera, on a wager. He whipped a man who admitted he did not have a
+copy of the "Iliad" in his house; publicly destroyed the record of a
+charge against one of his friends; and when his wife applied for a
+divorce, he burst into the courtroom and vacated proceedings by carrying
+the lady off by force. At banquets he would raise a disturbance, and
+while he was being forcibly ejected from one door, his servants would
+sneak in at another and steal the silverware, which he would give away
+as charity. He also indulged in the Mark Antony trick of rushing into
+houses at night and pulling good folks out of bed by the heels, and then
+running away before they were barely awake.</p>
+
+<p>His introduction to Socrates came in an attempt to break up a Socratic
+prayer-meeting. Socrates succeeded in getting the roysterer to listen
+long enough to turn the laugh on him and show all concerned that the
+life of a rowdy was the life of a fool. Alcibiades had expected Socrates
+to lose his temper, but it was Alcibiades who gave way, and blurted out
+that he could not hope to beat his antagonist talking, but he would like
+to wrestle with him.<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_31" id="VIII_Page_31">[Pg 31]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Legend has it that Socrates gave the insolent young man a shock by
+instantly accepting his challenge. In the bout that followed, the
+philosopher, built like a gorilla, got a half-Nelson on his man, who was
+a little the worse for wine, and threw him so hard, jumping on his
+prostrate form with his knees, that the aristocratic hoodlum was laid up
+for a moon. Ever after Alcibiades had a thorough respect for Socrates.
+They became fast friends, and whenever the old man talked in the Agora,
+Alcibiades was on hand to keep order.</p>
+
+<p>When war came with Sparta and her allies in the Peloponnesus they
+enlisted, Socrates going as corporal and Alcibiades as captain. They
+occupied the same tent during the entire campaign. Socrates proved a
+fearless soldier, and walked the winter ice in bare feet, often pulling
+his belt one hole tighter in lieu of breakfast, to show the complaining
+soldiers that endurance was the thing that won battles. At the battle of
+Delium, when there was a rout, Xenophon says Socrates walked off the
+field leisurely, arm in arm with the general, explaining the nature of
+harmony.</p>
+
+<p>Through the influence of Socrates, the lawless Alcibiades was tamed and
+became almost a model citizen, although his head was hardly large enough
+for a philosopher.</p>
+
+<p>"Say what you will, you'll find it all in Plato," said Emerson. If
+Socrates had done nothing else but give bent to the mind of Plato, he
+would deserve the<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_32" id="VIII_Page_32">[Pg 32]</a></span> gratitude of the centuries. Plato is the mine to
+which all thinkers turn for treasure. When they first met, Plato was
+twenty and Socrates sixty, and for ten years, to the day of Socrates'
+death, they were together almost constantly. Plato died aged eighty-one,
+and for fifty years he had lived but to record the dialogues of
+Socrates. It was curiosity that first attracted this fine youth to the
+old man&mdash;Socrates was so uncouth that he was amusing. Plato was
+interested in politics, and like most Athenian youths, was intent on
+having a good time. However, he was no rowdy, like Alcibiades: he was
+suave, gracious, and elegant in all of his acts. He had been taught by
+the Sophists and the desire of his life was to seem, rather than to be.
+By very gentle stages, Plato began to perceive that to make an
+impression on society was not worth working for&mdash;the thing to do was to
+be yourself, and yourself at your best. And we can give no better answer
+to the problem of life than Plato gives in the words of Socrates: "It is
+better to be than to seem. To live honestly and deal justly is the meat
+of the whole matter."</p>
+
+<p>Plato was not a disciple&mdash;he was big enough not to ape the manners and
+eccentricities of his Master&mdash;he saw beneath the rough husk and beyond
+the grotesque outside the great controlling purpose in the life of
+Socrates. He would be himself&mdash;and himself at his best&mdash;and he would
+seek to satisfy the Voice within, rather than to try to please the
+populace. Plato still wore his purple<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_33" id="VIII_Page_33">[Pg 33]</a></span> cloak, and the elegance and grace
+of his manner were not thrown aside.</p>
+
+<p>Wouldn't it have been worth our while to travel miles to see these
+friends: the one old, bald, short, fat, squint-eyed, barefoot; and the
+other with all the poise of aristocratic youth&mdash;tall, courtly and
+handsome, wearing his robe with easy, regal grace! And so they have
+walked and talked adown the centuries, side by side, the most perfect
+example that can be named of that fine affection which often exists
+between teacher and scholar.</p>
+
+<p>Plato's "Republic," especially, gives us an insight into a very great
+and lofty character. From his tower of speculation, Plato scanned the
+future, and saw that the ideal of education was to have it continue
+through life, for none but the life of growth and development ever
+satisfies. And love itself turns to ashes of roses if not used to help
+the soul in her upward flight. It was Plato who first said, "There is no
+profit where no pleasure's ta'en." He further perceived that in the life
+of education, the sexes must move hand in hand; and he also saw that,
+while religions are many and seemingly diverse, goodness and kindness
+are forever one.</p>
+
+<p>His faith in the immortality of the soul was firm, but whether we are to
+live in another world or not, he said there is no higher wisdom than to
+live here and now&mdash;live our highest and best&mdash;cultivate the receptive
+mind and the hospitable heart, "partaking of all good things in
+moderation."<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_34" id="VIII_Page_34">[Pg 34]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>It takes these two to make the whole. There is no virtue in poverty&mdash;no
+merit in rags&mdash;the uncouth qualities in Socrates were not a
+recommendation. Yet he was himself. But Plato made good, in his own
+character, all that Socrates lacked. Some one has said that Fitzgerald's
+Omar is two-thirds Fitzgerald and one-third Omar. In his books, Plato
+modestly puts his wisest maxims into the mouth of his master, and just
+how much Plato and how much Socrates there is in the "Dialogues," we
+will never know until we get beyond the River Styx.<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_35" id="VIII_Page_35">[Pg 35]</a></span></p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>Socrates was deeply attached to Athens, and he finally became the best
+known figure in the city. He criticized in his own frank, fearless way
+all the doings of the times&mdash;nothing escaped him. He was a
+self-appointed investigating committee in all affairs of state, society
+and religion. Hypocrisy, pretense, affectation and ignorance trembled at
+his approach. He was feared, despised and loved. But those who loved him
+were as one in a hundred. He became a public nuisance. The charge
+against him was just plain heresy&mdash;he had spoken disrespectfully of the
+gods and through his teaching he had defiled the youth of Athens. Ample
+warning had been given to him, and opportunity to run away was provided,
+but he stuck like a leech, asking the cost of banquets and making
+suggestions about all public affairs.</p>
+
+<p>He was arrested, bailed by Plato and Crito, and tried before a jury of
+five hundred citizens. Socrates insisted on managing his own case. A
+rhetorician prepared an address of explanation, and the culprit was
+given to understand that if he read this speech to his judges and said
+nothing else, it would be considered as an apology and he would be
+freed&mdash;the intent of the trial being more to teach the old man a lesson
+in minding his own business than to injure him.</p>
+
+<p>But Socrates replied to his well-meaning friend, "Think you I have not
+spent my whole life in preparing for this one thing?" And he handed back
+the smoothly polished<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_36" id="VIII_Page_36">[Pg 36]</a></span> manuscript with a smile. Montaigne says, "Should
+a suppliant voice have been heard out of the mouth of Socrates now;
+should that lofty virtue strike sail in the very height of its glory,
+and his rich and powerful nature be committed to flowing rhetoric as a
+defense? Never!"</p>
+
+<p>Socrates cross-questioned his accusers in the true Socratic style and
+showed that he had never spoken disrespectfully of the gods: he had only
+spoken disrespectfully of their absurd conception of the gods. And here
+is a thought which is well to consider even yet: The so-called "infidel"
+is often a man of great gentleness of spirit, and his disbelief is not
+in God, but in some little man's definition of God&mdash;a distinction the
+little man, being without humor, can never see.</p>
+
+<p>When Socrates had confounded his accusers, this time not giving them the
+satisfaction of the last word, he launched out on a general criticism of
+the city, and told where its rulers were gravely at fault. Being
+cautioned to bridle his tongue, he replied, "When your generals at
+Potid&aelig;a and Amphipolis and Delium assigned my place in the battle I
+remained there, did my work, and faced the peril, and think you that
+when Deity has assigned me my duty at this pass in life I should,
+through fear of death, evade it, and shirk my post?"</p>
+
+<p>This man appeared at other times, to some, as an idle loafer, but now he
+arose to a sublime height. He repeated with emphasis all he had ever
+said against their foolish superstitions, and arraigned the waste and
+futility of<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_37" id="VIII_Page_37">[Pg 37]</a></span> the idle rich. The power of the man was revealed as never
+before, and those who had intended to let him go with a fine, now
+thought it best to dispose of him. The safety of the state was
+endangered by such an agitator&mdash;the question of religion is really not
+what has sent the martyrs to the stake&mdash;it is the politician, not the
+priest, who fears the heretic.</p>
+
+<p>By a small majority, Socrates was found guilty and sentenced to death.
+Let Plato tell of that last hour&mdash;he has done it once for all:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>When he had done speaking, Crito said, "And have you any commands
+for us, Socrates&mdash;anything to say about your children, or any other
+matter in which we can serve you?"</p>
+
+<p>"Nothing particular," he said; "only, as I have always told you, I
+would have you to look to your own conduct; that is a service which
+you may always be doing to me and mine as well as to yourselves."...</p>
+
+<p>"We will do our best," said Crito. "But in what way would you have
+us bury you?"</p>
+
+<p>"In any way that you like; only you must get hold of me, and take
+care that I do not walk away from you." Then he turned to us, and
+added with a smile: "I can not make Crito believe that I am the
+same Socrates who has been talking and conducting the argument; he
+fancies that I am the other Socrates whom he will soon see, a dead
+body&mdash;and he asks, 'How shall he bury me?' And though I have spoken
+many words in the endeavor to show that when I have drunk the
+poison I shall leave you and go to the joys of the blessed&mdash;these
+words of<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_38" id="VIII_Page_38">[Pg 38]</a></span> mine, with which I comforted you and myself, have had, as
+I perceive, no effect upon Crito. And therefore I want you to be
+surety for me now, as he was surety for me at the trial: but let
+the promise be of another sort; for he was my surety to the judges
+that I would remain, but you must be my surety to him that I shall
+not remain, but go away and depart; and then he will suffer less at
+my death, and not be grieved when he sees my body being burned. I
+would not have him sorrow at my hard lot, or say at the
+burial,'Thus we lay out Socrates,' or, 'Thus we follow him to the
+grave or bury him'; for false words are not only evil in
+themselves, but they infect the soul with evil. Be of good cheer
+then, my dear Crito, and say that you are burying my body only, and
+do with that as is usual, and as you think best."</p>
+
+<p>When he had spoken these words, he arose and went into the
+bath-chamber with Crito, who bid us wait; and we waited, talking
+and thinking of the subject of discourse, and also of the greatness
+of our sorrow; he was like a father of whom we were being bereaved,
+and we were about to pass the rest of our lives as orphans. When he
+had taken his bath, his children were brought to him&mdash;and the women
+of his family also came, and he talked to them and gave them a few
+directions in the presence of Crito; and he then dismissed them and
+returned to us.</p>
+
+<p>Now the hour of sunset was near. When he came out, he sat down with
+us again after his bath, but not much was said. Soon the jailer,
+who was the servant, entered and stood by him, saying: "To you,
+Socrates, whom I know to be the noblest and gentlest and best of
+all who<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_39" id="VIII_Page_39">[Pg 39]</a></span> ever came to this place, I will not impute the angry
+feelings of other men, who rage and swear at me when, in obedience
+to the authorities, I bid them drink the poison&mdash;indeed I am sure
+that you will not be angry with me; for others, as you are aware,
+and not I, are the guilty cause. And so fare you well, and try to
+bear lightly what must needs be; you know my errand." Then bursting
+into tears, he turned away, and went out.</p>
+
+<p>Socrates looked at him and said, "I return your good wishes, and
+will do as you bid." Then turning to us, he said: "How charming the
+man is! Since I have been in prison, he has always been coming to
+see me, and at times, he would talk to me, and was as good as could
+be to me, and now see how generously he sorrows for me. But we must
+do as he says, Crito; let the cup be brought."</p>
+
+<p>"Not yet," said Crito; "the sun is still upon the hill-tops, and
+many a one has taken the draft late, and after the announcement has
+been made to him, he has eaten and drunk and indulged in sensual
+delights; do not hasten then&mdash;there is still time."</p>
+
+<p>Socrates said: "Yes, Crito, and they of whom you speak are right in
+doing thus, but I do not think that I should gain anything by
+drinking the poison a little later; I should be sparing and saving
+a life which is already gone: I could only laugh at myself for
+this. Please then to do as I say, and not to refuse me."</p>
+
+<p>Crito, when he heard this, made a sign to the servant; and the
+servant went in, and remained for some time, and then returned with
+the jailer carrying the cup of poison. Socrates said, "You, my good
+friend, who are experienced in these matters, shall give me
+directions<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_40" id="VIII_Page_40">[Pg 40]</a></span> how I am to proceed." The man answered, "You have only
+to walk about until your legs are heavy, and then to lie down, and
+the poison will act." At the same time, he handed the cup to
+Socrates, who, in the easiest and gentlest manner, without the
+least fear or change of color or feature, looking at the man with
+his eyes, Echecrates, as his manner was, took the cup and said:
+"What do you say about making the libation out of this cup to any
+god? May I, or not?" The man answered, "We only prepare, Socrates,
+just so much as we deem enough." "I understand," he said. "Yet I
+may and must pray to the gods to prosper my journey from this to
+that other world&mdash;may this, then, which is my prayer, be granted to
+me!" Then holding the cup to his lips, quite readily and
+cheerfully, he drank off the poison. And hitherto most of us had
+been able to control our sorrow; but now we saw him drinking, and
+saw, too, that he had finished the draft, we could no longer
+forbear, and in spite of myself, my own tears were flowing fast; so
+that I covered my face and wept over myself, for certainly I was
+not weeping over him, but at the thought of my own calamity in
+having lost such a companion. Nor was I the first, for Crito, when
+he found himself unable to restrain his tears, had got up and moved
+away, and I followed; and at that moment, Apollodorus, who had been
+weeping all the time, broke out into a loud cry, which made cowards
+of us all. Socrates alone retained his calmness. "What is this
+strange outcry?" he said, "I sent away the women mainly in order
+that they might not offend in this way, for I have heard that a man
+should die in peace. Be quiet, then, and have patience." When we
+heard that, we were ashamed, and refrained<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_41" id="VIII_Page_41">[Pg 41]</a></span> our tears; and he
+walked about until, as he said, his legs began to fail, and then he
+lay on his back, according to directions, and the man who gave him
+the poison, now and then looked at his feet and legs; and after a
+while, he pressed his foot hard and asked him if he could feel; and
+he said, "No"; and then his leg, and so upwards and upwards, and
+showed us that he was cold and stiff. And he felt them himself, and
+said, "When the poison reaches the heart, that will be the end." He
+was beginning to grow cold, when he uncovered his face, for he had
+covered himself up, and said (they were his last words), "Crito, I
+owe a cock to Asclepius; will you remember to pay the debt?"</p>
+
+<p>"The debt shall be paid," said Crito. "Is there anything else?" There
+was no answer to this question; but in a minute or two, a movement was
+heard, and the attendants uncovered him; his eyes were set, and Crito
+closed his eyes and mouth.</p>
+
+<p>Such was the end, Echecrates, of our friend, whom I may truly call
+the wisest, the justest, and best of all the men whom I have ever
+known.</p></div>
+
+
+
+<hr class="full" />
+<h2><a name="SENECA" id="SENECA"></a>SENECA<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_42" id="VIII_Page_42">[Pg 42]</a></span></h2>
+
+
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>If we wish to be just judges of all things, let us first persuade<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_43" id="VIII_Page_43">[Pg 43]</a></span>
+ourselves of this: that there is not one of us without fault; no
+man is found who can acquit himself; and he who calls himself
+innocent does so with reference to a witness, and not to his
+conscience.</p></div>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 25em;">&mdash;<i>Letters of Seneca</i></span><br />
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_44" id="VIII_Page_44">[Pg 44]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="center">
+    <a id="image0454-1"></a>
+    <img src="images/0454-1.jpg" width="259" height="400"
+       alt=""
+       title="" />
+
+   <p class="center">SENECA</p>
+</div>
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_45" id="VIII_Page_45">[Pg 45]</a></span></p>
+
+
+<p>True Americans and patriotic, who live in York State, often refer you to
+the life of Red Jacket as proof that "Seneca" is an Iroquois Indian
+word. The Indians, however, whom we call the Senecas never called
+themselves thus until they took to strong water and became civilized.
+Before that they were the Tsonnundawaonas. The Dutch traders, intent on
+pelts and pelf, called them the Sinnekaas, meaning the valiant or the
+beautiful. Then came that fateful day when the Reverend Peleg Spooner,
+the discoverer of the Erie Canal, journeyed to Niagara Falls, and having
+influence with the authorities at Washington, gave to towns along the
+way these names: Troy, Rome, Ithaca, Syracuse, Ilion, Manlius, Homer,
+Corfu, Palmyra, Utica, Delhi, Memphis and Marathon. He really exhausted
+Grote's "History of Greece" and Gibbon's "Rome," revealing a most
+depressing lack of humor. This classic flavor of the map of New York is
+as surprising to English tourists as was the discovery to Hendrik Hudson
+when, on sailing up the North River, he found on nearing Albany that the
+river bore the same name as himself.<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_46" id="VIII_Page_46">[Pg 46]</a></span></p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>In the eighteenth chapter of the Acts of the Apostles we read of Paul
+being brought before Gallio, Proconsul of Achaia. And the accusers,
+clutching the bald and bow-legged bachelor by the collar, bawl out to
+the Judge, "This fellow persuadeth men to worship God contrary to law!"</p>
+
+<p>And the little man is about to make reply, when Gallio says, with a
+touch of impatience: "If indeed it were a matter of wrong or of wicked
+villainy, O ye Jews, reason would that I should bear with you: but if
+they are questions about words and names and your own law, look to it
+yourselves; I am not minded to be a judge of these matters!" And the
+account concludes, "And he drove them from the judgment-seat."</p>
+
+<p>That is to say, he gave Saint Paul a "nolle pros." Had Gallio wished to
+be severe, he might have put the quietus on Christianity for all time,
+for Saint Paul had all there was of it stowed in his valiant head and
+heart.</p>
+
+<p>Gallio was the elder brother of Seneca; his right name was Ann&aelig;us
+Seneca, but he changed it to Junius Gallio, in honor of a patron who had
+especially befriended him in youth.</p>
+
+<p>Gallio seems to have been a man of good, sturdy commonsense&mdash;he could
+distinguish between right living and a mumble of words, man-made rules,
+laws such as heresy, blasphemy, Sabbath-breaking and marrying one's
+deceased wife's sister. The Moqui Indians believe that if any one is
+allowed to have a photograph taken<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_47" id="VIII_Page_47">[Pg 47]</a></span> of himself he will dry up in a month
+and blow away. Moreover, lists of names are not wanting with memoranda
+of times and places. In America there are yet people who hotly argue as
+to what mode of baptism is correct; who talk earnestly about the "saved"
+and the "lost"; and who will tell you of the "heathen" and those who are
+"without the pale." They seem to think that the promise, "Seek and ye
+shall find, knock and it shall be opened unto you," applies only to the
+Caucasian race.</p>
+
+<p>In the earlier translations of Seneca there were printed various letters
+that were supposed to have passed between Saint Paul and Seneca. Later
+editors have dropped them out for lack of authenticity. But the fact
+that Saint Paul met Seneca's brother face to face, as well as the fact
+that the brother was willing to discuss right living, but had no time to
+waste on the Gemara and theological quibbles, is undisputed.<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_48" id="VIII_Page_48">[Pg 48]</a></span></p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>It was the proud boast of Augustus that he found Rome a place of brick
+and left it a city of marble. Commercial prosperity buys the leisure
+upon which letters flourish. We flout the businessman, but without him
+there would be no poets. Poets write for the people who have time to
+read. And out of the surplus that is left after securing food, we buy
+books. Augustus built his marble city, and he also made Vergil, Horace,
+Ovid and Livy possible.</p>
+
+<p>Augustus reigned forty-four years, and it was in the twenty-seventh year
+of his reign that there was born in Bethlehem of Jud&aelig;a a Babe who was to
+revolutionize the calendar. The Dean of Ely subtly puts forth the
+suggestive thought that if it had not been for Augustus we might never
+have heard of Jesus. It was Augustus who made Jerusalem a Roman
+Province; and it was the economic and political policy of Augustus that
+evolved the Scribes and Pharisees; and ill-gotten gains made the
+hypocrites and publicans possible; then comes Pontius Pilate with his
+receding chin.</p>
+
+<p>Jesus was seventeen years old when Augustus died&mdash;Augustus never heard
+of him, and the Roman's unprophetic mind sent no searchlight into the
+future, neither did his eyes behold the Star in the East.</p>
+
+<p>We are all making and shaping history, and how much, none of us knows,
+any more than did Augustus.</p>
+
+<p>Julius C&aelig;sar had no son to take his place, so he named his nephew,
+Augustus, his heir. Augustus was succeeded<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_49" id="VIII_Page_49">[Pg 49]</a></span> by Tiberius, his adopted
+child. Caligula, successor of Tiberius, was the son of the great Roman
+General, Germanicus. Caligula revealed his good sense by drinking life
+to its lees in a reign of four years, dying without heirs&mdash;Nature
+refusing to transmit either infamy or genius. Claudius, an uncle of
+Caligula, accepted the vacant place, as it seemed to him there was no
+one else could fill it so well. Claudius had the felicity to be married
+four times, and left several sons, but Fate had it that he should be
+followed by Nero, his stepson, who called himself "C&aelig;sar," yet in whose
+veins there leaped not a single C&aelig;sarean corpuscle.</p>
+
+<p>The guardian and tutor of Nero was Lucius Seneca, the greatest, best and
+wisest man of his time, a fact I here state in order to show the vanity
+of pedagogics. Harking back once more to Augustus, let it be known that
+but for him Seneca would probably have never left his mark upon this
+bank and shoal of time. Seneca was a Spaniard, born in Cordova, a Roman
+Province, that was made so by Augustus, under whose kindly and placating
+influence all citizens of Hispania became Roman citizens&mdash;just as, when
+California was admitted to the Union, every man in the State was
+declared a naturalized citizen of the United States, the act being
+performed for political purposes, based on the precedents of Augustus,
+and never done before nor since in America.</p>
+
+<p>Seneca was four years old when his father's family<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_50" id="VIII_Page_50">[Pg 50]</a></span> moved from Cordova
+to Rome; this was three years before the birth of Christ. Years pass,
+but the human heart is forever the same. The elder Seneca, Marcus
+Seneca, had ambitions&mdash;he was a great man in Cordova: he could memorize
+a list of two thousand words. These words had no relationship one to
+another, and Marcus Seneca could not put words together so as to make
+good sense, but his name was "Loisette": he had a scheme of mnemonics
+that he imparted for a consideration. He was also a teacher of
+elocution, and had compiled a yearbook of the sayings of Horace, which
+secured him a knighthood. Augustus paid his colonists pretty
+compliments, very much as England gives out brevets to Strathcona and
+other worthy Canadians, who raise troops of horse to fight England's
+battles in South Africa when duty calls.</p>
+
+<p>Marcus Seneca made haste to move to Rome when Augustus let down the
+bars. Rome was the center of the art-world, the home of letters, and all
+that made for beauty and excellence. There were three boys and a girl in
+the Seneca family.</p>
+
+<p>The elder boy, Ann&aelig;us, was to become Gallio, the Roman governor, and
+have his name mentioned in the most widely circulated book the world has
+ever known; the second boy was Lucius, the subject of this sketch; the
+younger boy, Mela, was to become the father of Lucan, the poet.</p>
+
+<p>The sister of Seneca became the wife of the Roman Governor of Egypt. It
+was at a time when the scheming<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_51" id="VIII_Page_51">[Pg 51]</a></span> rapacity of women was so much in
+evidence that the Senate debated whether it should not forbid its
+representatives abroad to be accompanied by their wives. France has seen
+such times&mdash;England and America have glanced that way. Women, like men,
+often do not know that the big prizes gravitate where they belong;
+instead, they set traps for them, lie in wait and consider prevarication
+and duplicity better than truth. When women use their beauty, their wit
+and their pink persons in politics, trouble lies low around the corner.
+But this sister of Seneca was never seen in public unless it was at her
+husband's side; she asked no favors, and presents sent to her personally
+by provincials were politely returned. The province praised her, and
+perhaps what was better, didn't know her, and begged the Emperor to send
+them more of such excellent and virtuous women&mdash;from which we infer that
+virtue consists in minding one's own business.</p>
+
+<p>In making up a list of great mothers, do not leave out Helvia, mother of
+three sons and a daughter who made their mark upon the times. It is no
+small thing to be a great mother!</p>
+
+<p>Women of intellect were not much appreciated then, but Seneca dedicated
+his "Consolations," his best book, to his mother. The very mintage of
+his mind was for her, and again and again he tells of her insight, her
+gentle wit, and her appreciation of all that was beautiful and best in
+the world of thought. In a letter<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_52" id="VIII_Page_52">[Pg 52]</a></span> addressed to her when he was past
+forty, he says, "You never stained your face with walnut-juice nor
+rouge; you never wore gowns cut conspicuously low; your ornaments were a
+loveliness of mind and person that time could not tarnish."</p>
+
+<p>But the father had the knighthood, and he called his family to witness
+it at odd times and sundry.</p>
+
+<p>In Rome, Marcus Seneca made head as he never did in Cordova. There he
+was only Marcus Micawber: but here his memory feats won him the
+distinction that genius deserves. There is a grave question whether a
+verbal memory does not go with a very mediocre intellect, but Marcus
+said this argument was put out by a man with no memory worth mentioning.</p>
+
+<p>Rome was at her ripest flower&mdash;the petals were soon to loosen and
+flutter to the ground, but nobody thought so&mdash;they never do. Everywhere
+the Roman legions were victorious, and commerce sailed the seas in
+prosperous ships. Power manifests itself in conspicuous waste, and the
+habit grows until conspicuous waste imagines itself power. Conditions in
+Rome had evolved our old friend, the Sophist, the man who lived but to
+turn an epigram, to soulfully contemplate a lily, to sigh mysteriously,
+and cultivate the far-away look. These men were elocutionists who
+gesticulated in curves, and let the thought follow the attitude. They
+were not content to be themselves, but chased the airy, fairy fabric of
+a fancy and called it life.<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_53" id="VIII_Page_53">[Pg 53]</a></span></p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>The pretense and folly of Roman society made the Sophists possible&mdash;like
+all sects they ministered to a certain cast of mind. Over against the
+Sophists there were the Stoics, the purest, noblest and sanest of all
+ancient cults, corresponding very closely to our Quakers, before Worth
+and Wanamaker threw them a hawse and took them in tow. It is a tide of
+feeling produces a sect, not a belief: primitive Christianity was a
+revulsion from Phariseeism, and a William Penn and a wan Ann Lee form
+the antithesis of an o'ervaulting, fantastic and soulless ritual.</p>
+
+<p>The father of Seneca hung upon the favor of the Sophists: he taught them
+mnemonics, rhetoric and elocution, and the fact that he was a courtly
+Spaniard was in his favor&mdash;we dote on a foreign accent and relish the
+thing that comes from afar.</p>
+
+<p>Marcus Seneca was getting rich. He never perceived the absurdity of a
+life of make-believe; but his son, Lucius Seneca, heir to his mother's
+discerning mind, when nineteen years old forswore the Sophists, and
+sided with the unpopular Stoics, much to the chagrin of the father.</p>
+
+<p>Seneca&mdash;let us call him so after this&mdash;wore the simple white robe of the
+Stoics, without ornament or jewelry. He drank no wine, and ate no meat.
+Vegetarianism comes in waves, and it is interesting to see that in an
+essay on the subject, Seneca plagiarizes every argument put forth by
+Colonel Ernest Crosby, even to mentioning a butcher as an "executioner,"
+his goods as<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_54" id="VIII_Page_54">[Pg 54]</a></span> "dead corpses," and the customers as "cannibals."</p>
+
+<p>This kind of talk did not help the family peace, and the father spoke of
+disowning the son, if he did not cease affronting the Best Society.</p>
+
+<p>Soon after, the Emperor Tiberius issued an edict banishing all "strange
+sects who fasted on feast-days, and otherwise displeased the gods." This
+was a suggestion for the benefit of the Crosbyites. It is with a feeling
+of downright disappointment that we find Seneca shortly appearing in an
+embroidered robe, and making a speech wherein the moderate use of wine
+is recommended, also the flesh of animals for those who think they need
+it.</p>
+
+<p>This, doubtless, is the same speech we, too, would have made had we been
+there; but we want our hero to be strong, and defy even an Emperor, if
+he comes between the man and his right to eat what he wishes and wear
+what he listeth, and we blame him for not doing the things we never do.
+But Seneca was getting on in the world&mdash;he had become a lawyer, and his
+Sophist training was proving its worth. Henry Ward Beecher, in reply to
+a young man who asked him if he advised the study of elocution, said,
+"Elocution is all right, but you will have to forget it all before you
+become an orator." Seneca was shedding his elocution, and losing himself
+in his work. A successful lawsuit had brought him before the public as a
+strong advocate. He was able to think on his feet. His voice was low,
+musical and effective, and the word, "dulcis," was<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_55" id="VIII_Page_55">[Pg 55]</a></span> applied to him as it
+was to his brother, Gallio. Possibly there was something in ol' Marcus
+Micawber's pedagogic schemes, after all!</p>
+
+<p>In moderating his Stoic philosophy, Seneca gives us the key to his
+character: the man wanted to be gentle and kind; he wished to affront
+neither his father nor society; so he compromised&mdash;he would please and
+placate. Ease and luxury appealed to him, and yet his cool intellect
+stood off, and reviewing the proceeding pronounced it base. He succumbed
+to the strongest attraction, and attempted the feat of riding two horses
+at once.</p>
+
+<p>From his twentieth year, Seneca dallied with the epigram, found solace
+in a sentence, and got a sweet, subtle joy by taking a thought captive.
+Lucullus tells us of the fine intoxication of oratory, but neither opium
+nor oratory imparts a finer thrill than successfully to drive a flock of
+clauses, and round up an idea, roping it in careless grace, with what my
+lord Hamlet calls words, words, words.</p>
+
+<p>The early Christian Fathers spoke of him as "our Seneca." His writings
+abound in the purest philosophy&mdash;often seemingly paraphrasing Saint
+Paul&mdash;and every argument for directness of speech, simplicity, manliness
+and moderation is put forth. His writings became the rage in Rome: at
+feasts he read his essays on the Ideal Life, just as the disciples of
+Tolstoy often travel by the gorge road, and give banquets in honor of
+the<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_56" id="VIII_Page_56">[Pg 56]</a></span> man who no longer attends one; or princely paid preachers glorify
+the Man who said to His apostles, "Take neither scrip nor purse."</p>
+
+<p>Seneca was a combination of Delsarte and Emerson. He was as popular as
+Henry Irving, and as wise as Thomas Brackett Reed. His writings were in
+demand; when he spoke in public, crowds hung upon his words, and the
+families of the great and powerful sent him their sons, hoping he would
+impart the secret of success. The world takes a man at the estimate he
+puts upon himself. Seneca knew enough to hold himself high. Honors came
+his way, and the wealth he acquired is tokened in those five hundred
+tables, inlaid with ivory, to which at times he invited his friends to
+feast. As a lawyer, he took his pick of cases, and rarely appeared,
+except on appeal, before the Emperor. The poise of his manner, the
+surety of his argument, the gentle grace of his diction, caused him to
+be likened to Julius C&aelig;sar.</p>
+
+<p>And this led straight to exile, and finally&mdash;death. To mediocrity,
+genius is unforgivable.<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_57" id="VIII_Page_57">[Pg 57]</a></span></p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>There are various statements to the effect that Claudius was a mental
+defective, a sort of town fool, patronized by the nobles for their sport
+and jest. We are also told that he was made Emperor by the Pretorian
+Guards, in a spirit of rollicking bravado. Men too much abused must have
+some merit, or why should the pack bay so loudly? Possibly it is true
+that, in the youth of Claudius, his mother used to declare, when she
+wanted a strong comparison, "He is as big a fool as my son, Claudius."
+But then the mother of Wellington used exactly the same expression; and
+Byron's mother had a way of referring to the son who was to rescue her
+from oblivion, and send her name down the corridors of time, as "that
+lame brat."</p>
+
+<p>Claudius was a brother of the great Germanicus, and was therefore an
+uncle of Caligula. Caligula was the worst ruler that Rome ever had; and
+he was a brother of Agrippina, mother of Nero. This precious pair had a
+most noble and generous father, and their gentle mother was a fit mate
+for the great Germanicus&mdash;these things are here inserted for the
+edification of folks who take stock in that pleasant fallacy, the Law of
+Heredity, and who gleefully chase the genealogical anise-seed trail.</p>
+
+<p>Caligula happily passed out without an heir, and Claudius, next of kin,
+put himself in the way of the Pretorian Guard, and was declared Emperor.</p>
+
+<p>He was then fifty years old, a grass-widower&mdash;twice<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_58" id="VIII_Page_58">[Pg 58]</a></span> over&mdash;and on the
+lookout for a wife. He was neither wise nor great, nor was he very bad;
+he was kind&mdash;after dinner&mdash;and generous when rightly approached. Canon
+Farrar likened Claudius to King James the First, who gave us our English
+Bible. His comparison is worth quoting, not alone for the truth it
+contains, but because it is an involuntary paraphrase of the faultless
+literary style of the Roman rhetors. Says Canon Farrar: "Both were
+learned, and both were eminently unwise. Both were authors, and both
+were pedants. Both delegated their highest powers to worthless
+favorites, and both enriched these favorites with such foolish
+liberality that they remained poor themselves. Both of them, though of
+naturally good dispositions, were misled by selfishness into acts of
+cruelty; and both of them, though laborious in the discharge of duty,
+succeeded only in rendering royalty ridiculous. King James kept Sir
+Walter Raleigh, the brightest intellect of his time, in prison; and
+Claudius sent Seneca, the greatest man in his kingdom, into exile."</p>
+
+<p>New-made kings sweep clean. The impulses of Claudius were right and
+just, a truthful statement I here make in pleasant compliment to a
+brother author. The man was absent-minded, had much faith in others, and
+moved in the line of least resistance. Like most students and authors,
+he was decidedly littery. He secured a divorce from one wife because she
+cleaned up his room in his absence so that he could never find<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_59" id="VIII_Page_59">[Pg 59]</a></span>
+anything; and the other wife got a divorce from him because he refused
+to go out evenings and scintillate in society&mdash;but this was before he
+was made Emperor.</p>
+
+<p>God knows, people had their troubles then as now. To take this man who
+loved his slippers and easy-chair, and who was happy with a roll of
+papyrus, and plunge him into a seething pot of politics, not to mention
+matrimony, was refined cruelty.</p>
+
+<p>The matchmakers were busy, and soon Claudius was married to Messalina,
+the handsomest summer-girl in Rome.</p>
+
+<p>For a short time he bore up bravely, and was filled with the wish to
+benefit and bless. One of his first acts was to recall Julia and
+Agrippina from exile, they having been sent away in a fit of jealous
+anger by their brother, the infamous Caligula.</p>
+
+<p>Julia was beautiful and intellectual, and she had a high regard for
+Seneca.</p>
+
+<p>Agrippina was beautiful and infamous, and pretended that she loved
+Claudius.</p>
+
+<p>Both men were undone. Seneca's friendship for Julia, as far as we know,
+was of a kind that did honor to both, but they made a too conspicuous
+pair of intellects. The fear and jealousy of Claudius was aroused by his
+young and beautiful wife, who showed him that Seneca, the courtly, was
+plotting for the throne, and in this ambition Julia was a party. A
+charge of undue intimacy with Julia, the beloved niece and ward of the
+Emperor, was brought against Seneca, and he was<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_60" id="VIII_Page_60">[Pg 60]</a></span> exiled to Corsica.
+Imagine Edmund Burke sent to Saint Helena, or John Hay to the Dry
+Tortugas, and you get the idea.</p>
+
+<p>The sensitive nature of Seneca did not bear up under exile as we would
+have wished. Unlike Victor Hugo at Guernsey, he was alone, and
+surrounded by savages. Yet even Victor Hugo lifted up his voice in
+bitter complaint. Seneca failed to anticipate that, in spite of the
+barrenness of Corsica, it would some day produce a man who would jostle
+his Roman C&aelig;sar for first place on history's page.</p>
+
+<p>At Corsica, Seneca produced some of his loftiest and best literature.
+Exile and imprisonment are such favorable conditions for letters, having
+done so much for authorship, that the wonder is the expedient has fallen
+into practical disuse. Banishment gave Seneca an opportunity to put into
+execution some of the ideas he had so long expressed concerning the
+simple life, and certain it is that the experience was not without its
+benefits, and at times the grim humor of it all came to him.</p>
+
+<p>Read the history of Greek ostracism, and one can almost imagine that it
+was devised by the man's friends&mdash;a sort of heroic treatment prescribed
+by a great spiritual physician. Personality repels as well as attracts:
+the people grow tired of hearing Aristides called the Just&mdash;he is
+exiled. For a few days there is a glad relief; then his friends begin to
+chant his praises&mdash;he<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_61" id="VIII_Page_61">[Pg 61]</a></span> is missed. People tell of all the noble, generous
+things he would do if he were only here.</p>
+
+<p>If he were only here!</p>
+
+<p>Petitions are circulated for his return.</p>
+
+<p>The law's delay ensues, and this but increases desire. Hate for the man
+has turned to pity, and pity turns to love, as starch turns to gluten.</p>
+
+<p>The man comes back, and is greeted with boughs and bays, with love and
+laurel. His homecoming is that of a conquering hero. If the Supreme
+Court were to issue an injunction requiring all husbands to separate
+themselves by at least a hundred miles from their wives, for several
+months in every year, it would cut down divorces ninety-five per cent,
+add greatly to domestic peace, render race-suicide impossible, and
+generally liberate millions of love vibrations that would otherwise lie
+dormant.<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_62" id="VIII_Page_62">[Pg 62]</a></span></p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>As an example of female depravity, Valeria Messalina was sister in crime
+to Jezebel, Bernice, Drusilla, Salome and Herodias.</p>
+
+<p>Damned by a dower of beauty, with men at her feet whenever she so
+ordered, her ambition knew no limit. This type of dictatorial womanhood
+starts out by making conquests of individual men, but the conquests of
+pretty women are rarely genuine. Women hold no monopoly on duplicity,
+and there is a deep vein of hypocrisy in men that prompts their playing
+a part, and letting the woman use them. When the time is ripe, they toss
+her away as they do any other plaything, as Omar suggests the potter
+tosses the luckless pots to hell.</p>
+
+<p>When Julia and Agrippina were recalled, the act was done without
+consulting Messalina; and we can imagine her rage when these two women,
+as beautiful as herself, came back without her permission. Messalina had
+never found favor in the eyes of Seneca&mdash;he treated her with patronizing
+patience, as though she were a spoilt child.</p>
+
+<p>Now that Julia was back, Messalina hatched the plot that struck them
+both. Messalina insisted that the wealth of Seneca should be
+confiscated. Claudius at this rebelled.</p>
+
+<p>History is replete with instances of great men ruled by their barbers
+and coachmen. Claudius left the affairs of state to Narcissus, his
+private secretary; Polybius, his<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_63" id="VIII_Page_63">[Pg 63]</a></span> literary helper; and Pallas, his
+accountant. These men were all of lowly birth, and had all risen in the
+ranks from menial positions, and one of them at least had been sold as a
+slave, and afterward purchased his freedom. Then there was Felix, the
+ex-slave, another protege of Claudius, who trembled when Paul of Tarsus
+told him a little wholesome truth. These men were all immensely rich,
+and once, when Claudius complained of poverty, a bystander said, "You
+should go into partnership with a couple of your freedmen, and then your
+finances would be all right." The fact that Narcissus, Pallas and
+Polybius constituted the real government is nothing against them, any
+more than it is to the discredit of certain Irish refugees that they
+manage the municipal machinery of New York City&mdash;it merely proves the
+impotence of the men who have allowed the power to slip from their
+grasp, and ride as passengers when they should be at the throttle.</p>
+
+<p>Messalina managed her husband by alternate cajolings and threats. He was
+proud of her saucy beauty, and it was pleasing to an old man's vanity to
+think that other people thought she loved him. She bore him two sons&mdash;by
+name, Brittanicus and Germanicus. A local wit of the day said, "It was
+kind of Messalina to present her husband with these boys, otherwise he
+would never have had any claim on them."</p>
+
+<p>But the lines were tightening around Messalina, and she herself was
+drawing the cords. She had put favorites<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_64" id="VIII_Page_64">[Pg 64]</a></span> in high places, banished
+enemies, and ordered the execution of certain people she did not like.
+Narcissus and Pallas gave her her own way, because they knew Claudius
+must find her out for himself. They let her believe that she was the
+real power behind the throne. Her ambitions grew&mdash;she herself would be
+ruler&mdash;she gave it out that Claudius was insane. Finally she decided
+that the time was right for a "coup de grace." Claudius was absent from
+Rome, and Messalina wedded at high noon with young Silius, her lover.
+She was led to believe that the army would back her up, and proclaim her
+son, Brittanicus, Emperor, in which case, she herself and Silius would
+be the actual rulers. The wedding festivities were at their height, when
+the cry went up that Claudius had returned, and was approaching to
+demand vengeance. Narcissus, the wily, took up the shout, and
+panic-stricken, Messalina fled for safety in one way and Silius in
+another.</p>
+
+<p>Narcissus followed the woman, adding to her drunken fright by telling
+her that Claudius was close behind, and suggested that she kill herself
+before the wronged man should appear. A dagger was handed her, and she
+stabbed herself ineffectually in hysteric haste. The kind secretary
+then, with one plunge of his sword, completed the work so well begun.</p>
+
+<p>A truthful account of Messalina's death was told to Claudius while he
+was at dinner. He finished the meal without saying a word, gave a
+present to the messenger,<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_65" id="VIII_Page_65">[Pg 65]</a></span> and went about his business, asking no
+questions, and never again mentioned the matter.</p>
+
+<p>The fact is worthy of note that the name of Messalina is never once
+mentioned by Seneca. He pitied her vileness and villainy so much he
+could not hate her. He saw, with prophetic vision, what her end would
+be; and when her passing occurred, he was too great and lofty in spirit
+to manifest satisfaction.<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_66" id="VIII_Page_66">[Pg 66]</a></span></p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>Scarcely had the funeral of Messalina occurred, when there was a pretty
+scramble among the eligible to see who should solace the stricken
+widower. Among other matrimonial candidates was Agrippina, a beautiful
+widow, twenty-nine in June, rich in her own right, and with only a small
+encumbrance in the way of a ten-year-old boy, Nero by name.</p>
+
+<p>Agrippina was a niece of Claudius, and such marriages were considered
+unnatural; but Agrippina had subtly shown that, the deceased Emperor
+being her brother, she already had a sort of claim on the throne, and
+her marriage with Claudius would strengthen the State. Then she
+marshaled her charms past Claudius, in a phalanx and back, and so they
+were married. There was much pomp and ceremony at the wedding, and the
+high priest pronounced the magic words&mdash;I trust I use the right
+expression.</p>
+
+<p>Very soon after her marriage, Agrippina recalled Seneca from exile. It
+was the infamous Messalina who had disgraced him and sent him away, and
+for Agrippina, the sister of Julia, to bring him back, was regarded as a
+certificate of innocence, and a great diplomatic move for Agrippina.</p>
+
+<p>When Seneca returned, the whole city went out to meet him. It is not at
+all likely that Seneca had a suspicion of the true character of
+Agrippina, any more than Claudius&mdash;which sort of tends to show the
+futility of philosophy.<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_67" id="VIII_Page_67">[Pg 67]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>How could Seneca read her true character when it had not really been
+formed? No one knows what he will do until he gets a good chance. It is
+unkind condition that keeps most of us where we belong.</p>
+
+<p>And even while the honeymoon&mdash;or should we say the harvest-moon?&mdash;was at
+full, Seneca was made the legal guardian and tutor of Nero, the son of
+the Empress, and became a member of the royal household. This was done
+in gratitude, and to make amends, if possible, for the wrong of
+banishment inflicted upon the man by scandalously linking his name with
+that of the sister of the woman who was now First Lady of the Land.</p>
+
+<p>Seneca was then forty-nine years of age. He had fifteen years of life
+yet before him, and was to gain much valuable experience, and get an
+insight into a side of existence he had not yet known.</p>
+
+<p>Agrippina was born in Cologne, which was called, in her honor, Colonia
+Agrippina, and now has been shortened to its present form. Whenever you
+buy cologne, remember where the word came from.</p>
+
+<p>Agrippina, from her very girlhood, had a thirst for adventure, and her
+aim was high. When fourteen, she married Domitius, a Roman noble, thirty
+years her senior. He was as worthless a rogue as ever wore out his
+physical capacity for sin in middle life, and filled his dying days with
+crimes that were only mental. He knew himself so well that when Nero was
+born he<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_68" id="VIII_Page_68">[Pg 68]</a></span> declared that the issue of such a marriage could only breed a
+being who would ruin the State&mdash;a monster with his father's vices and
+his mother's insatiable ambition.</p>
+
+<p>Agrippina was woman enough to hate this man with an utter detestation;
+but he was rich, and so she endured him for ten years, and then assisted
+Nature in making him food for worms.</p>
+
+<p>The intensity of Agrippina's nature might have been used for happy ends
+if the stream of her life had not been so early dammed and polluted. She
+loved her child with a clutching, feverish affection, and declared that
+he would some day rule Rome. This was not really such a far-away dream,
+when we remember that her brother was then Emperor and childless. Her
+thought was more for her child than for herself, and her expectation was
+that he would succeed Caligula. The persistency with which she told this
+ambition for her boy is both beautiful and pathetic. Every mother sees
+her own life projected in her child, and within certain bounds this is
+right and well.</p>
+
+<p>Glimpses of kindness and right intent are shown when Agrippina recalled
+Seneca, and when she became the mother of the motherless children of
+Claudius. She publicly adopted these children, and for a time gave them
+every attention and advantage that was bestowed upon her own son. Gibbon
+says for one woman to mother another woman's children is a diplomatic
+card<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_69" id="VIII_Page_69">[Pg 69]</a></span> often played, but Gibbon sometimes quibbles.</p>
+
+<p>Gradually the fierce desire of Agrippina's heart began to manifest
+itself. She plotted and arranged that Nero should marry Octavia, the
+daughter of Claudius. Octavia was seven years older than Nero, but the
+sooner the marriage could be brought about, the better&mdash;it would give
+her a double hold on the throne. To this end suitors for the hand of
+Octavia were disgraced by false charges, and sent off into exile, and
+the same fate came to at least three young women who stood in the way.</p>
+
+<p>But the one real obstacle was Claudius himself&mdash;he was sixty, and might
+be so absurd as to live to be eighty. Locusta, a famous professional
+chemist, was employed, and the deed was done by Agrippina serving the
+deadly dish herself. The servants carried Claudius off to bed, thinking
+he was merely drunk, but he was to wake no more.</p>
+
+<p>Burrus, the blunt and honest old soldier, Captain of the Pretorian
+Guard, sided with Agrippina; Brittanicus, the son of Claudius, was kept
+out of the way, and Nero was proclaimed Emperor.</p>
+
+<p>Here Seneca seems to have shown his good influence, and sent home a
+desire in the heart of Agrippina to serve her people with moderation and
+justice. She had attained her ends: her son, a youth of fifteen, was
+Emperor, and his guardian, the great and gentle Seneca, the man of her
+own choosing, was the actual ruler. She<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_70" id="VIII_Page_70">[Pg 70]</a></span> was the sister of one Emperor,
+wife of another, and now mother of a third&mdash;surely this was glory enough
+to satisfy one woman's ambition!</p>
+
+<p>Then there came to Rome the famed Quinquennium Neronis, when, for five
+years, peace and plenty smiled. It is a trite saying that men who can
+not manage their own finances can look after those of a nation, but
+Seneca was a businessman who proved his ability to manage his own
+private affairs and also succeeded in managing the exchequer of a
+kingdom. During his reign, gladiatorial contests were relieved of their
+savage brutality, work was given to many, education became popular, and
+people said, "The Age of Augustus has returned."</p>
+
+<p>But the greatest men are not the greatest teachers. Seneca's policy with
+his pupil, Nero, was one of concession.</p>
+
+<p>A close study of the youth of Nero reveals the same traits that outcrop
+in one-half the students at Harvard&mdash;traits ill-becoming to grown-up
+men, but not at all alarming in youth. Nero was self-willed and
+occasionally had tantrums&mdash;but a tantrum is only a little whirl-wind of
+misdirected energy. A tantrum is life plus&mdash;it is better far than
+stagnation, and usually works up into useful life, and sometimes into
+great art. We have some verses written by Nero in his seventeenth year
+that show a good Class B sophomoric touch. He danced, played in the
+theatricals, raced horses, fought dogs,<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_71" id="VIII_Page_71">[Pg 71]</a></span> twanged the harp, and exploited
+various other musical instruments. He wasn't nearly so bad as
+Alcibiades, but his mother lavished on him her maudlin love, and allowed
+the fallacy to grow in his mind concerning the divinity that doth hedge
+a king. In fact, when he asked his mother about his real father, she hid
+the truth that his father was a rogue&mdash;perhaps to shield herself, for it
+is only a very great person who can tell the truth&mdash;and led him to
+believe his paternal parent was a god, and his birth miraculous. Now,
+let such an idea get into the head of the average freshman and what will
+be the result? A woman can tell a full-grown man that he is the greatest
+thing that ever happened, and it does no special harm, for the man knows
+better than to go out on the street and proclaim it; but you tell a boy
+of eighteen such pleasing fallacies, and then have fawning courtiers
+back them up, and at the same time give the youth free access to the
+strong box, and it surely would be a miracle if he is not doubly damned,
+and quickly, too. Agrippina would not allow the blunt old Burrus to
+discipline her boy, and Seneca's plan was one of concession&mdash;he loved
+peace. He hated to thwart the boy, because he knew that it would arouse
+the ire of the mother, whose love had run away with her commonsense.
+Love is beautiful&mdash;soft, yielding, gentle love&mdash;but the common law of
+England upholds wife-beating as being justifiable and desirable on
+certain occasions.</p>
+
+<p>The real trouble was, the dam was out for Agrippina<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_72" id="VIII_Page_72">[Pg 72]</a></span> and Nero&mdash;there was
+no restraint for either. There was no one to teach them that the liberty
+of one man ends where the right of another begins. No more frightful
+condition for any man or woman can ever occur than this: to take away
+all responsibility.</p>
+
+<p>When Socrates put the chesty Alcibiades three points down, and jumped on
+his stomach with his knees, the youth had a month in bed, and after he
+got around again he possessed a most wholesome regard for his teacher.
+If Burrus and Seneca had applied Brockway methods to Agrippina and her
+saucy son, as they easily might, it would have made Rome howl with
+delight, and saved the State as well as the individuals.</p>
+
+<p>Julius C&aelig;sar, like Lincoln, let everybody do as they wished, up to a
+certain point. But all realized that somewhere behind that dulcet voice
+and the gentle manner was a heart of flint and nerves of steel. No woman
+ever made Julius C&aelig;sar dance to syncopated time, nor did a youth of
+eighteen ever successfully order him to take part in amateur theatricals
+on penalty. Julius C&aelig;sar and Seneca were both scholars, both were
+gentlemen and gentle men: their mental attitude was much the same, but
+one had a will of adamant, and the other moved in the line of least
+resistance.<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_73" id="VIII_Page_73">[Pg 73]</a></span></p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>Gradually, Nero evolved a petulance and impatience toward his mother and
+his tutor, all of which was quite a natural consequence of his
+education. Every endeavor to restrain him was met with imprecations and
+curses. About then would have been a good time to apply heroic
+treatment, instead of halting fear and worshipful acquiescence.</p>
+
+<p>The raw stock for making a Nero is in every school, and given the
+conditions, a tyrant-culture would be easy to evolve. The endeavor to
+make Nero wed Octavia caused a revulsion to occur in his heart toward
+her and her brother Brittanicus. He feared that these two might combine
+and wrest from him the throne.</p>
+
+<p>Locusta, the specialist, was again sent for and Brittanicus was gathered
+to his fathers.</p>
+
+<p>Soon after, Nero fell into a deep infatuation for Popp&aelig; Sabina, wife of
+Otho, the most beautiful woman in Rome. Sabina refused to accept his
+advances so long as he was tied to his mother's apron-strings&mdash;I use the
+exact phrase of Tacitus, so I trust no exceptions will be taken to the
+expression. Nero came to believe that the tagging, nagging, mushy love
+of his mother was standing in the way of his advancement. He had come to
+know that Agrippina had caused the death of Claudius, and when she
+accused him of poisoning Brittanicus, he said, "I learned the trick from
+my dear mother!" and honors were even.</p>
+
+<p>He knew the crafty quality of his mother's mind and<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_74" id="VIII_Page_74">[Pg 74]</a></span> grew to fear her.
+And fear and hate are one. To secure Sabina he must sacrifice Agrippina.</p>
+
+<p>He would be free.</p>
+
+<p>To poison her would not do&mdash;she was an expert in preventives.</p>
+
+<p>So Nero, regardless of expense, bargained with Anicetus, admiral of the
+fleet, to construct a ship so that, when certain bolts were withdrawn,
+the craft would sink and tell no tale. This was a bit of daring deviltry
+never before devised, and by turn, Nero chuckled in glee and had cold
+sweats of fear as he congratulated himself on his astuteness.</p>
+
+<p>The boat was built and Agrippina was enticed on board. The night of the
+excursion was calm, but the conspirators, fearing the chance might never
+come again, let go the canopy, loaded with lead, which was over the
+queen. It fell with a crash; and at the same time the bolts were
+withdrawn and the waters rushed in. Several of the servants in
+attendance were killed by the fall of the awning, but Agrippina and
+Aceronia, a lady of quality, escaped from the debris only slightly hurt.
+Aceronia, believing the ship was about to sink, called for help, saying,
+"I am Agrippina." She erred slightly in her diplomacy, for she was at
+once struck on the head with an oar and killed. This gave Agrippina a
+clew to the situation and she was silent. By a strange perversity, the
+royal scuttling patent would not work and the boat stubbornly refused to
+sink.<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_75" id="VIII_Page_75">[Pg 75]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Agrippina got safely ashore and sent word to her son that there had been
+a terrible accident, but she was safe&mdash;the intent of her letter being to
+let him know that she understood the matter perfectly, and while she
+could not admire the job, it was so bungling, yet she would forgive him
+if he would not try it again.</p>
+
+<p>In wild consternation, Nero sent for Burrus and Seneca. This was their
+first knowledge of the affair. They refused to act in either way, but
+Burrus intimated that Anicetus was the guilty party and should be held
+responsible.</p>
+
+<p>"For not completing the task?" said Nero.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," said the blunt old soldier, and retired.</p>
+
+<p>Anicetus was notified that the blame of the whole conspiracy was on him.
+A big crime, well carried out, is its own excuse for being; but failure,
+like unto genius, is unforgivable.</p>
+
+<p>Anicetus was in disgrace, but only temporarily, for he towed the
+obstinate, telltale galley into deep water and sank her at dead of
+night. Then with a few faithful followers he surrounded the villa where
+Agrippina was resting, scattered her guard and confronted her with drawn
+sword.</p>
+
+<p>Years before, a soothsayer had told her that her son would be Emperor
+and that he would kill her. Her answer was, "Let them slay me, if he but
+reign."</p>
+
+<p>Now she saw that death was nigh. She did not try to escape, nor did she
+plead for mercy, but cried,<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_76" id="VIII_Page_76">[Pg 76]</a></span> "Plunge your sword through my womb,
+for it bore Nero."</p>
+
+<p>And Anicetus, with one blow, struck her dead.</p>
+
+<p>Nero returned to Naples to mourn his loss. From there he sent forth a
+lengthy message to the Senate, recounting the accidental shipwreck, and
+telling how Agrippina had plotted against his life, recounting her
+crimes in deprecatory, sophistical phrase. The document wound up by
+telling how she had tried to secure the throne for a paramour, and the
+truth coming to some o'erzealous friends of the State, they had arisen
+and taken her life. In Rome there was a strong feeling that Nero should
+not be allowed to return, but this message of explanation and promise,
+written by Seneca, downed the opposition.</p>
+
+<p>The Senate accepted the report, and Nero, at twenty-two, found himself
+master of the world.</p>
+
+<p>Yet what booted it when he was not master of himself!</p>
+
+<p>From this time on, the career of Seneca was one of contumely, suffering
+and disgrace. This was to endure for six years, when kindly death was
+then to set him free.</p>
+
+<p>The mutual, guilty knowledge of a great crime breeds loathing and
+contempt. History contains many such instances where the subject had
+knowledge of the sovereign's sins, and the sovereign found no rest until
+the man who knew was beneath the sod.</p>
+
+<p>Seneca knew Nero as only his Maker knew him.<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_77" id="VIII_Page_77">[Pg 77]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>After the first spasm of exultation in being allowed to return to Rome,
+a jealous dread of Seneca came over the guilty monarch.</p>
+
+<p>Seneca hoped against hope that, now that Nero's wild oats were sown and
+the crop destroyed, all would be well. The past should be buried and
+remembrance of it sunk deep in oblivion.</p>
+
+<p>But Nero feared Seneca might expose his worthlessness and the
+philosopher himself take the reins. In this Nero did not know his man:
+Seneca's love was literary&mdash;political power to him was transient and not
+worth while.</p>
+
+<p>It became known that the apology to the Senate was the work of Seneca,
+and Nero, who wanted the world to think that all his speeches and
+addresses were his own, got it firmly fixed in his head he would not be
+happy until Seneca was out of the way. Sabina said he was no longer a
+boy, and should not be tagged and dictated to by his old teacher.</p>
+
+<p>Seneca, seeing what was coming, offered to give his entire property to
+the State and retire. Nero would not have it so&mdash;he feared Seneca would
+retire only to come back with an army. A cordon of spies was put around
+Seneca's house&mdash;he was practically a prisoner. Attempts were made to
+poison him, but he ate only fruit, and bread made by his wife, Paulina,
+and drank no water except from running streams.</p>
+
+<p>Finally a charge of conspiracy was fastened upon him,<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_78" id="VIII_Page_78">[Pg 78]</a></span> and Nero ordered
+him to die by his own hand. His wife was determined to go with him, and
+one stroke severed the veins of both.</p>
+
+<p>The beautiful Sabina realized her hopes&mdash;she divorced her husband, and
+married the Emperor of Rome. She died from a sudden kick given her by
+the booted foot of her liege.</p>
+
+<p>Three years after the death of Seneca, Nero passed hence by the same
+route, killing himself to escape the fury of the Pretorian Guard. And so
+ended the Julian line, none of whom, except the first, was a Julian.<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_79" id="VIII_Page_79">[Pg 79]</a></span></p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>From the death of Augustus on to the time of Nero there was for Rome a
+steady tide of disintegration. The Emperor was the head of the Church,
+and he usually encouraged the idea that he was something different from
+common men&mdash;that his mission was from On High and that he should be
+worshiped. Gibbon, making a free translation from Seneca, says,
+"Religion was regarded by the common people as true, by the philosophers
+as false, and by the rulers as useful." And Saint Augustine, using the
+same smoothly polished style, says, in reference to a Roman Senator, "He
+worshiped what he blamed, he did what he refuted, he adored that with
+which he found fault." The sentence is Seneca's, and when he wrote it he
+doubtless had himself in mind, for in spite of his Stoic philosophy the
+life of luxury lured him, and although he sang the praises of poverty he
+charged a goodly sum for so doing, and the nobles who listened to him
+doubtless found a vicarious atonement by applauding him as he played to
+the gallery gods of their self-esteem, like rich ladies who go
+a-slumming mix in with the poor on an equality, and then hasten home to
+dress for dinner.<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_80" id="VIII_Page_80">[Pg 80]</a></span></p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>Seneca was one of the purest and loftiest intellects the world has ever
+known. Canon Farrar calls him "A Seeker after God," and has printed
+parallel passages from Saint Paul and Seneca which, for many, seem to
+show that the men were in communication with each other. Every ethical
+maxim of Christianity was expressed by this "noble pagan," and his
+influence was always directed toward that which he thought was right.
+His mistakes were all in the line of infirmities of the will. Voltaire
+calls him, "The father of all those who wear shovel hats," and in
+another place refers to him as an "amateur ascetic," but in this the
+author of the Philosophical Dictionary pays Seneca the indirect
+compliment of regarding him as a Christian. Renan says, "Seneca shines
+out like a great white star through a rift of clouds on a night of
+darkness." The wonder is not that Seneca at times lapsed from his high
+estate and manifested his Sophist training, but that to the day of his
+death he saw the truth with unblinking eyes and held the Ideal firmly in
+his heart.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr class="full" />
+<h2><a name="ARISTOTLE" id="ARISTOTLE"></a>ARISTOTLE<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_81" id="VIII_Page_81">[Pg 81]</a></span></h2>
+
+
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Happiness itself is sufficient excuse. Beautiful things are right
+and true; so beautiful actions are those pleasing to the gods. Wise
+men have an inward sense of what is beautiful, and the highest
+wisdom is to trust this intuition and be guided by it. The answer
+to the last appeal of what is right lies within a man's own breast.
+Trust thyself.</p></div>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 25em;">&mdash;<i>Ethics of Aristotle</i></span><br />
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_82" id="VIII_Page_82">[Pg 82]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="center">
+    <a id="image0455-1"></a>
+    <img src="images/0455-1.jpg" width="253" height="400"
+       alt=""
+       title="" />
+
+   <p class="center">ARISTOTLE</p>
+</div>
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_83" id="VIII_Page_83">[Pg 83]</a></span></p>
+
+
+<p>The Sublime Porte recently issued a request to the American Bible
+Society, asking that references to Macedonia be omitted from all Bibles
+circulated in Turkey or Turkish provinces. The argument of His Sublimity
+is that the Macedonian cry, "Come over and help us!" puts him and his
+people in a bad light. He ends his most courteous petition by saying,
+"The land that produced a Philip, an Alexander the Great and an
+Aristotle, and that today has citizens who are the equal of these, needs
+nothing from our dear brothers, the Americans, but to be let alone."</p>
+
+<p>As to the statement that Macedonia today has citizens who are the equals
+of Philip, Alexander and Aristotle, the proposition, probably, is based
+on the confession of the citizens themselves, and therefore may be
+truth. Great men are only great comparatively. It is the stupidity of
+the many that allows one man to bestride the narrow world like a
+Colossus. In the time of Alexander and Aristotle there wasn't so much
+competition as now, so perhaps what we take to be lack of humor on the
+part of the Sublime Porte may have a basis in fact.</p>
+
+<p>Aristotle was born Three Hundred Eighty-four B.C.,<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_84" id="VIII_Page_84">[Pg 84]</a></span> at the village of
+Stagira in the mountains of Macedonia. King Amyntas used to live at
+Stagira several months in the year and hunt the wild hogs that fed on
+the acorns which grew in the gorges and valleys. Mountain climbing and
+hunting was dangerous sport, and it was well to have a surgeon attached
+to the royal party, so the father of Aristotle served in that capacity.
+No doubt, though, but the whole outfit was decidedly barbaric, even
+including the doctor's little son "Aristo," who refused to be left
+behind. The child's mother had died years before, and boys without
+mothers are apt to manage their fathers. And so Aristo was allowed to
+trot along by his father's side, carrying a formidable bow, which he
+himself had made, with a quiver of arrows at his back.</p>
+
+<p>Those were great times when the King came to Stagira!</p>
+
+<p>When the King went back to the capital everybody received presents, and
+the good doctor, by some chance, was treated best of all, and little
+Aristo came in for the finest bow that ever was, all tipped with silver
+and eagle-feathers. But the bow did not bring good luck, for soon after,
+the boy's father was caught in an avalanche of sliding stone and crushed
+to death.</p>
+
+<p>Aristo was taken in charge by Proxenus, a near kinsman. The lad was so
+active at climbing, so full of life and energy and good spirits, that
+when the King came the next year to Stagira, he asked for Aristo. With
+the King was his son Philip, a lad about the age of Aristo,<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_85" id="VIII_Page_85">[Pg 85]</a></span> but not so
+tall nor so active. The boys became fast friends, and once when a
+stranger saw them together he complimented the King on his fine,
+intelligent boys, and the King had to explain, "The other boy is
+mine&mdash;but I wish they both were."</p>
+
+<p>Aristo knew where the wild boars fed in gulches, and where the stunted
+oaks grew close and thick. Higher up in the mountains there were bears,
+which occasionally came down and made the wild pigs scamper. You could
+always tell when the bears were around, for then the little pigs would
+run out into the open. The bears had a liking for little pigs, and the
+bears had a liking for the honey in the bee-trees, too. Aristo could
+find the bee-trees better than the bears&mdash;all you had to do was to watch
+the flight of the bees as they left the clover.</p>
+
+<p>Then there were deer&mdash;you could see their tracks any time around the
+mountain marshes where the springs gushed forth and the watercress grew
+lush. Still higher up the mountains, beyond where bears ever traveled,
+there were mountain-sheep, and still higher up were goats. The goats
+were so wild that hardly any one but Aristo had ever seen them, but he
+knew they were there.</p>
+
+<p>The King was delighted to have such a lad as companion for his son, and
+insisted that he should go back to the capital with them and become a
+member of the Court.</p>
+
+<p>Not he&mdash;there were other ambitions. He wanted to go<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_86" id="VIII_Page_86">[Pg 86]</a></span> to Athens and study
+at the school of Plato&mdash;Plato, the pupil of the great Socrates.</p>
+
+<p>The King laughed&mdash;he had never heard of Plato. That a youth should
+refuse to become part of the Macedonian Court, preferring the company of
+an unknown school-master, was amusing&mdash;he laughed.</p>
+
+<p>The next year when the King came back to Stagira, Aristo was still
+there. "And you haven't gone to Athens yet?" said the King.</p>
+
+<p>"No, but I am going," was the firm reply.</p>
+
+<p>"We will send him," said the King to Proxenus, Aristo's guardian.</p>
+
+<p>And so we find Aristo, aged seventeen, tall and straight and bronzed,
+starting off for Athens, his worldly goods rolled up in a bearskin, tied
+about with thongs. There is a legend to the effect that Philip went with
+Aristo, and that for a time they were together at Plato's school. But,
+anyway, Philip did not remain long. Aristo&mdash;or Aristotle, we had better
+call him&mdash;remained with Plato just twenty years.</p>
+
+<p>At Plato's school Aristotle was called by the boys, "the Stagirite," a
+name that was to last him through life&mdash;and longer. In Winter he wore
+his bearskin, caught over one shoulder, for a robe, and his mountain
+grace and native beauty of mind and body must have been a joy to Plato
+from the first. Such a youth could not be overlooked.</p>
+
+<p>To him that hath shall be given. The pupil that wants to<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_87" id="VIII_Page_87">[Pg 87]</a></span> learn is the
+teacher's favorite&mdash;which is just as it should not be. Plato proved his
+humanity by giving his all to the young mountaineer. Plato was then a
+little over sixty years of age&mdash;about the same age that Socrates was
+when Plato became his pupil. But the years had touched Plato
+lightly&mdash;unlike Socrates, he had endured no Thracian winters in bare
+feet, neither had he lived on cold snacks picked up here and there, as
+Providence provided. Plato was a bachelor. He still wore the purple
+robe, proud, dignified, yet gentle, and his back was straight as that of
+a youth. Lowell once said, "When I hear Plato's name mentioned, I always
+think of George William Curtis&mdash;a combination of pride and intellect, a
+man's strength fused with a woman's gentleness."</p>
+
+<p>Plato was an aristocrat. He accepted only such pupils as he invited, or
+those that were sent by royalty. Like Franz Liszt, he charged no
+tuition, which plan, by the way, is a good scheme for getting more money
+than could otherwise be obtained, although no such selfish charge should
+be brought against either Plato or Liszt. Yet every benefit must be paid
+for, and whether you use the word fee or honorarium, matters little. I
+hear there be lecturers who accept invitations to banquets and accept an
+honorarium mysteriously placed on the mantel, when they would scorn a
+fee.</p>
+
+<p>Plato's Garden School, where the pupils reclined under the trees on
+marble benches, and read and talked, or<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_88" id="VIII_Page_88">[Pg 88]</a></span> listened to lectures by the
+Master, was almost an ideal place. Not the ideal for us, because we
+believe that the mental and the manual must go hand in hand. The world
+of intellect should not be separated from the world of work. It was too
+much to expect that in a time when slavery was everywhere, Plato would
+see the fallacy of having one set of men to do the thinking, and another
+do the work. We haven't got far from that yet; only free men can see the
+whole truth, and a free man is one who lives in a country where there
+are no slaves. To own slaves is to be one, and to live in a land of
+slavery is to share in the bondage&mdash;a partaker in the infamy and the
+profits.</p>
+
+<p>Plato and Aristotle became fast friends&mdash;comrades. With thinking men
+years do not count&mdash;only those grow old who think by proxy. Plato had no
+sons after the flesh, and the love of his heart went out to the
+Stagirite: in him he saw his own life projected.</p>
+
+<p>When Aristotle had turned twenty he was acquainted with all the leading
+thinkers of his time; he read constantly, wrote, studied and conversed.
+The little property his father left had come to him; the King of Macedon
+sent him presents; and he taught various pupils from wealthy
+families&mdash;finances were easy. But success did not spoil him. The
+brightest scholars do not make the greatest success in life, because
+alma mater usually catches them for teachers. Sometimes this is well,
+but more often it is not. Plato would not hear of Aristotle's<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_89" id="VIII_Page_89">[Pg 89]</a></span> leaving
+him, and so he remained, the chief ornament and practical leader of the
+school.</p>
+
+<p>He became rich, owned the largest private library at Athens, and was
+universally regarded as the most learned man of his time.</p>
+
+<p>In many ways he had surpassed Plato. He delved into natural history,
+collected plants, rocks, animals, and made studies of the practical
+workings of economic schemes. He sought to divest the Platonic teaching
+of its poetry, discarded rhetoric, and tried to get at the simple truth
+of all subjects.</p>
+
+<p>Toward the last of Plato's career this repudiation by Aristotle of
+poetry, rhetoric, elocution and the polite accomplishments caused a
+schism to break out in the Garden School. Plato's head was in the clouds
+at times; Aristotle's was, too, but his feet were always on the earth.</p>
+
+<p>When Plato died, Aristotle was his natural successor as leader of the
+school, but there was opposition to him, both on account of his sturdy,
+independent ways and because he was a foreigner.</p>
+
+<p>He left Athens to become a member of the Court of Hermias, a former
+pupil, now King of Atarneus.</p>
+
+<p>He remained here long enough to marry the niece of his patron, and
+doubtless saw himself settled for life&mdash;a kingly crown within his reach
+should his student-sovereign pass away.</p>
+
+<p>And the royal friend did pass away, by the dagger's<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_90" id="VIII_Page_90">[Pg 90]</a></span> route. As
+life-insurance risks I am told that Kings have to pay double premium.
+Revolution broke out, and as Aristotle was debating in his mind what
+course to pursue, a messenger with soldiers arrived from King Philip of
+Macedon, offering safe convoy, enclosing transportation, and asking that
+Aristotle come and take charge of the education of his son, Alexander,
+aged thirteen.</p>
+
+<p>Aristotle did not wait to parley: he accepted the invitation. Horses
+were saddled, camels packed and that night, before the moon arose, the
+cavalcade silently moved out into the desert.<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_91" id="VIII_Page_91">[Pg 91]</a></span></p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>The offer that had been made twenty-four years before, by Philip's
+father, was now accepted. Aristotle was forty-two years old, in the
+prime of his power. Time had tempered his passions, but not subdued his
+zest in life. He had the curious, receptive, alert and eager mind of a
+child. His intellect was at its ripest and best. He was a lover of
+animals, and all outdoor life appealed to him as it does to a growing
+boy. He was a daring horseman, and we hear of his riding off into the
+desert and sleeping on the sands, his horse untethered watching over
+him. Aristotle was the first man to make a scientific study of the
+horse, and with the help of Alexander he set up a skeleton, fastening
+the bones in place, to the mighty astonishment of the natives, who
+mistook the feat for an attempt to make a living animal; and when the
+beast was not at last saddled and bridled there were subdued chuckles of
+satisfaction among the "hoi polloi" at the failure of the scheme, and
+murmurs of "I told you so!"</p>
+
+<p>Eighteen hundred years were to pass before another man was to take up
+the horse as a serious scientific study; and this was Leonardo da Vinci,
+a man in many ways very much like Aristotle. The distinguishing feature
+in these men&mdash;the thing that differentiates them from other men&mdash;was the
+great outpouring sympathy with every living creature. Everything they
+saw was related to themselves&mdash;it came very close to them&mdash;they wanted
+to know more about it. This is essentially<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_92" id="VIII_Page_92">[Pg 92]</a></span> the child-mind, and the
+calamity of life is to lose it.</p>
+
+<p>Leonardo became interested in Aristotle's essay on the horse, and
+continued the subject further, dissecting the animal in minutest detail
+and illustrating his discoveries with painstaking drawings. His work is
+so complete and exhaustive that nobody nowadays has time to more than
+read the title-page. Leonardo's bent was natural science, and his first
+attempts at drawing were done to illustrate his books. Art was
+beautiful, of course&mdash;it brought in an income, made friends and brought
+him close to people who saw nothing unless you made a picture of it. He
+made pictures for recreation and to amuse folks, and his threat to put
+the peeping Prior into the "Last Supper," posed as Judas, revealed his
+contempt for the person to whom a picture was just a picture. The marvel
+to Leonardo was the mind that could imagine, the hand that could
+execute, and the soul that could see.</p>
+
+<p>And the curious part is that Leonardo lives for us through his play and
+not through his serious work. His science has been superseded, but his
+art is immortal.</p>
+
+<p>This expectant mental attitude, this attitude of worship, belongs to all
+great scientists. The man divines the thing first and then looks for it,
+just as the Herschels knew where the star ought to be and then patiently
+waited for it. The Bishop of London said that if Darwin had spent
+one-half as much time in reading his Bible as in studying earthworms, he
+would have really<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_93" id="VIII_Page_93">[Pg 93]</a></span> benefited the world, and saved his soul alive. To
+Walt Whitman, a hair on the back of his hand was just as curious and
+wonderful as the stars in the sky, or God's revelation to man through a
+printed book.</p>
+
+<p>Aristotle loved animals as a boy loves them&mdash;his house was a regular
+menagerie of pets, and into this world of life Alexander was very early
+introduced. We hear of young Alexander breaking the wild horse,
+Bucephalus, and beyond a doubt Aristotle was seated on the top rail of
+the paddock when he threw the lariat.</p>
+
+<p>Aristotle and his pupil had the first circus of which we know, and they
+also inaugurated the first Zoological Garden mentioned in history,
+barring Noah, of course.</p>
+
+<p>So much was Alexander bound up in this menagerie, and in his old teacher
+as well, that in after-life, in all of his travels, he was continually
+sending back to Aristotle specimens of every sort of bird, beast and
+fish to be found in the countries through which he traveled.</p>
+
+<p>When Philip was laid low by the assassin's thrust, it was Aristotle who
+backed up Alexander, aged twenty&mdash;but a man&mdash;in his prompt suppression
+of the revolution. The will that had been used to subdue man-eating
+stallions and to train wild animals, now came in to repress riot, and
+the systematic classification of things was a preparation for the
+forming of an army out of a mob. Aristotle said, "An army is a huge
+animal with a million claws&mdash;it must have only one brain, and that the
+commander's."<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_94" id="VIII_Page_94">[Pg 94]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Alexander gave credit again and again to Aristotle for those elements in
+his character that went to make up success: steadiness of purpose,
+self-reliance, systematic effort, mathematical calculation, attention to
+details, and a broad and generous policy that sees the end.</p>
+
+<p>When Aristotle argued with Philip, years before, that horse-breaking
+should be included in the educational curriculum of all young men, he
+evidently divined football and was endeavoring to supplant it.<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_95" id="VIII_Page_95">[Pg 95]</a></span></p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>I think history has been a trifle severe on Alexander. He was elected
+Captain-General of Greece, and ordered to repel the Persian invasion.
+And he did the business once for all. War is not all
+fighting&mdash;Providence is on the side of the strongest commissariat.
+Alexander had to train, arm, clothe and feed a million men, and march
+them long miles across a desert country. The real foe of a man is in his
+own heart, and the foe of an army is in its own camp&mdash;disease takes more
+prisoners than the enemy. Fever sniped more of our boys in blue than did
+the hostile Filipinos.</p>
+
+<p>Alexander's losses were principally from men slain in battle; from this,
+I take it that Alexander knew a deal of sanitary science, and had a
+knowledge of practical mathematics, in order to systematize that mob of
+restless, turbulent helots. We hear of Aristotle cautioning him that
+safety lies in keeping his men busy&mdash;they must not have too much time to
+think, otherwise mutiny is to be feared. Still, they must not be
+over-worked, or they will be in no condition to fight when the eventful
+time occurs. And we are amazed to see this: "Do not let your men drink
+out of stagnant pools&mdash;Athenians, city-born, know no better. And when
+you carry water on the desert marches, it should be first boiled to
+prevent its getting sour."</p>
+
+<p>Concerning the Jews, Alexander writes to his teacher and says, "They are
+apt to be in sullen rebellion<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_96" id="VIII_Page_96">[Pg 96]</a></span> against their governors, receiving orders
+only from their high priests, and this leads to severe measures, which
+are construed as persecution"; all of which might have been written
+yesterday by the Czar in a message to The Hague Convention.</p>
+
+<p>Alexander captured the East, and was taken captive by the East. Like the
+male bee that never lives to tell the tale of its wooing, he succeeded
+and died. Yet he vitalized all Asia with the seeds of Greek philosophy,
+turned back the hungry barbaric tide, and made a new map of the Eastern
+world. He built far more cities than he destroyed. He set Andrew
+Carnegie an example at Alexandria, such as the world had never up to
+that time seen. At the entrance to the harbor of the same city he
+erected a lighthouse, surpassing far the one at Minot's Ledge, or Race
+Rock. This structure endured for two centuries, and when at last wind
+and weather had their way, there was no Hopkinson Smith who could erect
+another.</p>
+
+<p>At Thebes, Alexander paid a compliment to letters, by destroying every
+building in the city except the house of the poet, Pindar. At Corinth,
+when the great, the wise, the noble, came to pay homage, one great man
+did not appear. In vain did Alexander look for his card among all those
+handed in at the door&mdash;Diogenes, the Philosopher, oft quoted by
+Aristotle, was not to be seen.</p>
+
+<p>Alexander went out to hunt him up, and found him sunning himself,
+propped up against the wall in the<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_97" id="VIII_Page_97">[Pg 97]</a></span> Public Square, busy doing nothing.</p>
+
+<p>The philosopher did not arise to greet the conqueror; he did not even
+offer a nod of recognition.</p>
+
+<p>"I am Alexander&mdash;is there not something I can do for you?" modestly
+asked the descendant of Hercules.</p>
+
+<p>"Just stand out from between me and the sun," replied the philosopher,
+and went on with his meditations.</p>
+
+<p>Alexander enjoyed the reply so much that he said to his companions, and
+afterward wrote to Aristotle, "If I were not Alexander, I would be
+Diogenes," and thus did strenuosity pay its tribute to
+self-sufficiency.<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_98" id="VIII_Page_98">[Pg 98]</a></span></p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>Aristotle might have assumed important affairs of State, but practical
+politics were not to his liking. "What Aristotle is in the world of
+thought I will be in the world of action," said Alexander.</p>
+
+<p>On all of his journeys Alexander found time to keep in touch with his
+old teacher at home; and we find the ruler of Asia voicing that old
+request, "Send me something to read," and again, "I live alone with my
+thoughts, amidst a throng of men, but without companions."</p>
+
+<p>Plutarch gives a copy of a letter sent by Alexander wherein Aristotle is
+chided for publishing his lecture on oratory. "Now all the world will
+know what formerly belonged to you and me alone," plaintively cries the
+young man who sighed for more worlds to conquer, and therein shows he
+was the victim of a fallacy that will never die&mdash;the idea that truth can
+be embodied in a book. When will we ever learn that inspired books
+demand inspired readers!</p>
+
+<p>There are no secrets. A book may stimulate thought, but it can never
+impart it.</p>
+
+<p>Aristotle wrote out the Laws of Oratory. "Alas!" groans Alexander,
+"everybody will turn orator now." But he was wrong, because Oratory and
+the Laws of Oratory are totally different things.</p>
+
+<p>A Boston man of excellent parts has just recently given out the Sixteen
+Perfective Laws of Oratory, and the<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_99" id="VIII_Page_99">[Pg 99]</a></span> Nineteen Steps in Evolution.</p>
+
+<p>The real truth is, there are Fifty-seven Varieties of Artistic Vagaries,
+and all are valuable to the man who evolves them&mdash;they serve him as a
+scaffolding whereby he builds thought. But woe betide Alexander and all
+rareripe Bostonians who mistake the scaffolding for the edifice.</p>
+
+<p>There are no Laws of Art. A man evolves first, and builds his laws
+afterward. The style is the man, and a great man, full of the spirit,
+will express himself in his own way.</p>
+
+<p>Bach ignored all the Laws of Harmony made before his day and set down
+new ones&mdash;and these marked his limitations, that was all. Beethoven
+upset all these, and Wagner succeeded by breaking most of Beethoven's
+rules. And now comes Grieg, and writes harmonious discords that Wagner
+said were impossible, and still it is music, for by it we are
+transported on the wings of song and uplifted to the stars.</p>
+
+<p>The individual soul striving for expression ignores all man-made laws.
+Truth is that which serves us best in expressing our lives. A rotting
+log is truth to a bed of violets, while sand is truth to a cactus. But
+when the violet writes a book on "Expression as I Have Found It," making
+laws for the evolution of beautiful blossoms, it leaves the Century
+Plant out of its equation, or else swears, i' faith, that a cactus is
+not a flower, and that a Night-Blooming Cereus is a disordered thought
+from a madman's brain. And when the proud and lofty<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_100" id="VIII_Page_100">[Pg 100]</a></span> cactus writes a
+book it never mentions violets, because it has never stooped to seek
+them.</p>
+
+<p>Art is the blossoming of the Soul.</p>
+
+<p>We can not make the plant blossom&mdash;all we can do is to comply with the
+conditions of growth. We can supply the sunshine, moisture and aliment,
+and God does the rest. In teaching, he only is successful who supplies
+the conditions of growth&mdash;that is all there is of the Science of
+Pedagogics, which is not a science, and if it ever becomes one, it will
+be the Science of Letting Alone, and not a scheme of interference. Just
+so long as some of the greatest men are those who have broken through
+pedagogic fancy and escaped, succeeding by breaking every rule of
+pedagogy, as Wagner discarded every Law of Harmony, there will be no
+such thing as a Science of Education.</p>
+
+<p>Recently I read Aristotle's Essays on Rhetoric and Oratory, and I was
+pained to see how I had been plagiarized by this man who wrote three
+hundred years before Christ. Aristotle used charts in teaching and
+indicated the mean by a straight horizontal line, and the extreme by an
+upright dash. He says: "From one extreme the mean looks extreme, and
+from another extreme the mean looks small&mdash;it all depends upon your
+point of view. Beware of jumping to conclusions, for beside the
+appearance you must look within and see from what vantage-ground you
+gain the conclusions. All truth is relative, and none can be final to a
+man six<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_101" id="VIII_Page_101">[Pg 101]</a></span> feet high, who stands on the ground, who can walk but forty
+miles at a stretch, who needs four meals a day and one-third of his time
+for sleep. A loss of sleep, or loss of a meal, or a meal too much, will
+disarrange his point of view, and change his opinions," And thus do we
+see that a belief in "eternal punishment" is a mere matter of
+indigestion.</p>
+
+<p>A certain bishop, we have seen, experienced a regret that Darwin
+expended so much time on earthworms; and we might also express regret
+that Aristotle did not spend more. As long as he confined himself to
+earth, he was eminently sure and right: he was really the first man who
+ever used his eyes. But when he quit the earth, and began to speculate
+about the condition of souls before they are clothed with bodies, or
+what becomes of them after they discard the body, or the nature of God,
+he shows that he knew no more than we. That is to say, he knew no more
+than the barbarians who preceded him.</p>
+
+<p>He attempted to grasp ideas which Herbert Spencer pigeonholes forever as
+the Unknowable; and in some of his endeavors to make plain the
+unknowable, Aristotle strains language to the breaking-point&mdash;the net
+bursts and all of his fish go free. Here is an Aristotelian proposition,
+expressed by Hegel to make lucid a thing nobody comprehends: "Essential
+being as being that meditates with itself, with itself by the negativity
+of itself, is relative to itself only as it is relative to another;<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_102" id="VIII_Page_102">[Pg 102]</a></span>
+that is, immediate only as something posited and meditated." It gives
+one a slight shock to hear him speak of headache being caused by wind on
+the brain, or powdered grasshopper-wings being a cure for gout, but when
+he calls the heart a pump that forces the blood to the extremities, we
+see that he anticipates Harvey, although more than two thousand years of
+night lie between them.</p>
+
+<p>Some of Aristotle reads about like this Geometrical Domestic Equation:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+<p><i>Definitions:</i></p>
+
+    <p>All boarding-houses are the same boarding-houses.</p>
+
+    <p>Boarders in the same boarding-house, and on the same flat, are equal
+    to one another.</p>
+
+    <p>A single room is that which hath no parts and no magnitude.</p>
+
+    <p>The landlady of the boarding-house is a parallelogram&mdash;that is,
+    an oblong figure that can not be described, and is equal to
+    anything.</p>
+
+    <p>A wrangle is the disinclination to each other of two boarders that
+    meet together, but are not on the same floor.</p>
+
+    <p>All the other rooms being taken, a single room is a double room.</p>
+
+    <p><i>Postulates and Propositions:</i></p>
+
+    <p>A pie may be produced any number of times.</p>
+
+    <p>The landlady may be reduced to her lowest terms by a series of
+    propositions.<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_103" id="VIII_Page_103">[Pg 103]</a></span></p>
+
+    <p>A bee-line is the shortest distance between the Phalanstery and By
+    Allen's.</p>
+
+    <p>The clothes of a boarding-house bed stretched both ways will not
+    meet.</p>
+
+    <p>Any two meals at a boarding-house are together less than one meal at
+    the Phalanstery.</p>
+
+    <p>On the same bill and on the same side of it there should not be two
+    charges for the same thing.</p>
+
+    <p>If there be two boarders on the same floor, and the amount of the
+    side of the one be equal to the amount of the side of the other, and
+    the wrangle between the one boarder and the landlady be equal to the
+    wrangle between the landlady and the other boarder, then shall the
+    weekly bills of the two boarders be equal. For, if not, let one bill
+    be the greater, then the other bill is less than it might have been,
+    which is absurd. Therefore the bills are equal.</p>
+
+    <p><i>Quod erat demonstrandum.</i><span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_104" id="VIII_Page_104">[Pg 104]</a></span></p>
+</div>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>The business of the old philosophers was to philosophize. To
+philosophize as a business is to miss the highest philosophy. To do a
+certain amount of useful work every day, and not trouble about either
+the past or the future, is the highest wisdom. The man who drags the
+past behind him, and dives into the future, spreads the present out
+thin. Therein lies the bane of most religions. A man goes out into the
+woods to study the birds: he walks and walks and walks and sees no
+birds. But just let him sit down on a log and wait, and lo! the branches
+are full of song.</p>
+
+<p>Those who pursue Culture never catch up with her. Culture takes alarm at
+pursuit and avoids the stealthy pounce. Culture is a woman, and a
+certain amount of indifference wins her. Ardent wooing will not secure
+either wisdom or a woman&mdash;except in the case where a woman marries a man
+to get rid of him, and then he really does not get the woman&mdash;he only
+secures her husk. And the husks of culture are pedantry and sciolism.
+The highest philosophy of the future will consist in doing each day that
+which is most useful. Talking about it will be quite incidental and
+secondary.<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_105" id="VIII_Page_105">[Pg 105]</a></span></p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>After Alexander had completed his little task of conquering the world,
+it was his intention to sit down and improve his mind. He was going back
+to Greece to complete the work Pericles had so well begun. To this end
+Aristotle had left Macedonia and established his Peripatetic School at
+Athens. Plato was exclusive, and taught in the Garden with its high
+walls. Aristotle taught in the "peripatos," or porch of the Lyceum, and
+his classes were for all who wished to attend. Socrates was really the
+first peripatetic philosopher, but he was a roustabout. Nothing
+sanctifies like death&mdash;and now Socrates had become respectable, and his
+methods were to be made legal and legitimate.</p>
+
+<p>Socrates discovered the principle of human liberty; he taught the rights
+of the individual, and as these threatened to interfere with the State,
+the politicians got alarmed and put him to death. Plato, much more
+cautious, wrote his "Republic," wherein everything is subordinated for
+the good of the State, and the individual is but a cog in a most
+perfectly lubricated machine. Aristotle saw that Socrates was nearer
+right than Plato&mdash;sin is the expression of individuality and is not
+wholly bad&mdash;the State is made up of individuals, and if you suppress the
+thinking-power of the individual, you will get a weak and effeminate
+body politic; there will be none to govern. The whole fabric will break
+down of its own weight. A man must have the privilege of making a fool
+of himself&mdash;within proper bounds, of<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_106" id="VIII_Page_106">[Pg 106]</a></span> course. To that end learning must
+be for all, and liberty both to listen and to teach should be the
+privilege of every man.</p>
+
+<p>This is a problem that Boston has before it today: Shall free speech be
+allowed on the Common? William Morris tried it in Trafalgar Square, to
+his sorrow; but in Hyde Park, if you think you have a message, London
+will let you give it. But this is not considered good form, and the
+"Best Society" listen to no speeches in the park. However, there are
+signs that Aristotle's outdoor school may come back. Phillips Brooks
+tried outdoor preaching, and if his health had not failed, he might have
+popularized it. It only wants a man who is big enough to inaugurate it.</p>
+
+<p>Aristotle had various helpers, and arranged to give his lectures and
+conferences daily in certain porches or promenades. These lectures
+covered the whole range of human thought&mdash;logic, rhetoric, oratory,
+physics, ethics, politics, esthetics, and physical culture. These
+outdoor talks were called exoteric, and there gradually grew up esoteric
+lessons, which were for the rich or luxurious and the dainty. And there
+being money in the esoteric lessons, these gradually took the place of
+the exoteric, and so we get the genesis of our modern private school or
+college, where we send our children to be taught great things by great
+men, for a consideration.</p>
+
+<p>Will the exoteric, peripatetic school come back?</p>
+
+<p>I think so.<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_107" id="VIII_Page_107">[Pg 107]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>I believe that university education will soon be free to every boy and
+girl in America, and this without going far from home. Esoteric
+education is always more or less of a sham. Our public-school system is
+purely exoteric, only we stop too soon. We also give our teachers too
+much work and too little pay. Stop building warships, and use the money
+to double the teachers' salaries, making the profession respectable,
+raise the standard of efficiency, and the free university with the old
+Greek Lyceum will be here.</p>
+
+<p>America must do this&mdash;the Old World can't. We have the money, and we
+have the men and the women; all that is needed is the desire, and this
+is fast awakening.<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_108" id="VIII_Page_108">[Pg 108]</a></span></p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>When Alexander died, of acute success, aged thirty-two, Aristotle's
+sustaining prop was gone. The Athenians never thought much of the
+Macedonians&mdash;not much more than Saint Paul did, he having tried to
+convert both and failed.</p>
+
+<p>Athens was jealous of the power of Alexander: that a provincial should
+thus rule the Mother-Country was unforgivable. It was as if a Canadian
+should make himself King of England!</p>
+
+<p>Everybody knew that Aristotle had been the tutor of Alexander, and that
+they were close friends. And that a Macedonian should be the chief
+school-teacher in Athens was an affront. The very greatness of the man
+was his offense: Athens had none to match him, and the world has never
+since matched him, either. How to get rid of the Macedonian philosopher
+was the question.</p>
+
+<p>And so our old friend, heresy, comes in again. A poem was found, written
+by Aristotle many years before, on the death of his friend, King
+Hermias, wherein Apollo was disrespectfully mentioned. It was the old
+charge against Socrates come back&mdash;the hemlock was brewing. But life was
+sweet to Aristotle; he chose discretion to valor, and fled to his
+country home at Chalcis in Eub&oelig;a.</p>
+
+<p>The humiliation of being driven from his work, and the sudden change
+from active life to exile, undermined his strength, and he died in a
+year, aged sixty-two.<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_109" id="VIII_Page_109">[Pg 109]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>In morals the world has added nothing new to the philosophy of
+Aristotle: gentleness, consideration, moderation, mutual helpfulness,
+and the principle that one man's privileges end where another man's
+rights begin&mdash;these make up the sum. And on them, all authorities agree,
+and have for twenty-five hundred years.</p>
+
+<p>The family relations of Aristotle were most exemplary. The unseemly
+wrangles of Philip and his wife were never repeated in the home of
+Aristotle. Yet we will have to offer this fact in the interests of
+stirpiculture: the inconstant Philip and the termagant Olympias brought
+into the world Alexander; whereas the sons of Aristotle lived their day
+and died, without making a ripple on the surface of history.</p>
+
+<p>As in the scientific study of the horse, no progress was made from the
+time of Aristotle to that of Leonardo, so Hegel says there was no
+advancement in philosophy from the time of Aristotle to that of Spinoza.</p>
+
+<p>Eusebius called Aristotle "Nature's Private Secretary."</p>
+
+<p>Dante spoke of him as the "Master of those who know."</p>
+
+<p>Sir William Hamilton said, "In the range of his powers and perceptions,
+only Leonardo can be compared with him."</p>
+
+
+
+<hr class="full" />
+<h2><a name="MARCUS_AURELIUS" id="MARCUS_AURELIUS"></a>MARCUS AURELIUS<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_110" id="VIII_Page_110">[Pg 110]</a></span></h2>
+
+
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>We are made for co-operation, like feet, like hands, like eyelids,<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_111" id="VIII_Page_111">[Pg 111]</a></span>
+like the rows of the upper and lower teeth. To act against one
+another then is contrary to Nature, and it is acting against one
+another to be vexed and turn away.</p></div>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 25em;">&mdash;<i>The Meditations</i></span><br />
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_112" id="VIII_Page_112">[Pg 112]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="center">
+    <a id="image0456-1"></a>
+    <img src="images/0456-1.jpg" width="271" height="400"
+       alt=""
+       title="" />
+
+   <p class="center">MARCUS AURELIUS</p>
+</div>
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_113" id="VIII_Page_113">[Pg 113]</a></span></p>
+
+
+<p>Annius Verus was one of the great men of Rome. He had been a soldier,
+governor of provinces, judge, senator and consul. Sixty years had passed
+over his head and whitened his hair, but the lines of care that were on
+his fine face ten years before had now given way to a cherubic double
+chin, and his complexion was ruddy as a baby's. The entire atmosphere of
+the man was one of gentleness, repose and kindly good-will. Annius Verus
+was grateful to the gods, for the years had brought him much good
+fortune, and better still, knowledge. "Being old I shall know ... the
+last of life for which the first was made!"</p>
+
+<p>Religion isn't a thing outside of a man, taught by priests out of a
+book. Religion is in the heart of man, and its chief quality is
+resignation and a grateful spirit. Annius Verus was religious in the
+best sense, and his life was peaceful and happy.</p>
+
+<p>And surely Annius Verus should have been content&mdash;he was a Roman Consul,
+rich, powerful, honored by the wisest and best men in Rome, who
+considered it a privilege to come and dine at his table. His villa was
+on Mount C&oelig;lius, a suburb of Rome. The house was surrounded by a big
+stone wall enclosing a tract of about<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_114" id="VIII_Page_114">[Pg 114]</a></span> ten acres, where grew citron,
+orange and fig trees, and giant cedars of Lebanon lifted their branches
+to the clouds.</p>
+
+<p>At least it seemed to little Marcus, grandson of the Consul, as if they
+reached the clouds. There was a long ladder running up one of these big
+cedar trees to a platform or "crow's-nest" nearly a hundred feet from
+the ground. No boy was allowed to climb up there until he was twelve
+years old, and when Marcus was ten, time got stuck, he thought, and
+refused to budge. But this was only little Marcus' idea, for he finally
+got to be twelve years old, and then he climbed the long ladder to the
+lookout in the tree and looked down on the Eternal City that lay below
+in the valley and stretched away over the seven hills. Often the boy
+would take a book and climb up there to read; and when the good
+grandfather missed him, he knew where to look, and standing under the
+tree the old man would call: "Come down, Marcus, come down and kiss your
+old grandfather&mdash;it is lonesome down here! Come down and read to your
+grandfather who loves his little Marcus!"</p>
+
+<p>Such an appeal as this was irresistible, and the boy, slight, slim and
+agile, would clamber over the side of the crow's-nest and down the
+ladder to the outstretched arms.</p>
+
+<p>The boy's father had died when he was only three months old, and the
+grandfather had adopted the child<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_115" id="VIII_Page_115">[Pg 115]</a></span> as his heir, and brought Lucilla, the
+widowed mother, and her baby to live in his house.</p>
+
+<p>Years before, the Consul's wife had passed away, and Faustina, his
+daughter, became the lady of the house. Lucilla and Faustina didn't get
+along very well together&mdash;no house is big enough for two families, some
+man has said. Lucilla was gentle, gracious, spiritual, modest and
+refined; Faustina was beautiful and not without intellect, but she was
+proud, domineering and fond of admiration. But be it said to the credit
+of the good old Consul, he was able to suffuse the whole place with
+love, and even if Faustina had a tantrum now and then, it did not last
+long.</p>
+
+<p>There were always visitors in the household&mdash;soldiers home on furloughs,
+governors on vacations, lawyers who came to consult the wise and
+judicial Verus.</p>
+
+<p>One visitor of note was a man by the name of Aurelius Antoninus. He was
+about forty years old as Marcus first remembered him&mdash;tall and straight,
+with a full, dark beard, and short, curly hair touched with gray. He was
+a quiet, self-contained man, and at first little Marcus was a bit afraid
+of him. Aurelius Antoninus had been a soldier, but he showed such a
+studious mind, and was so intent on doing the right thing that he was
+made an under-secretary, then private secretary to the Emperor, and
+finally he had been sent away to govern a rebellious province, and put
+down mutiny by wise diplomacy instead of by force of arms.<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_116" id="VIII_Page_116">[Pg 116]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Aurelius Antoninus was inclined towards the Stoics, although he didn't
+talk much about it. He usually ate but two meals a day, worked with the
+servants, and wrote this in his diary, "Men are made for each other:
+even the inferior for the superior, and these for the sake of one
+another."</p>
+
+<p>This philosophy of the Stoics rather appealed to the widow Lucilla,
+also, and she read Zeno with Aurelius Antoninus. Verus did not object to
+it&mdash;he had been a soldier and knew the advantages of doing without
+things and of being able to make the things you needed, and of living
+simply and being plain and direct in all your acts and speech. But
+Faustina laughed at it all&mdash;to her it was preposterous that one should
+wear plain clothing and no jewelry when he could buy the costliest and
+best; and why one should eschew wine and meat and live on brown bread
+and fruit and cold water, when he could just as well have spiced and
+costly dishes&mdash;all this was clear beyond her. Various fetes and banquets
+were given by Faustina, to which the young nobles were invited. She was
+a beautiful woman and never for a moment forgot it, and by some mistake
+or accident she got herself betrothed to three men at the same time. Two
+of these fought a duel and one was killed. The third man looked on and
+hoped both would be killed, for then he could have the woman. Faustina
+got this third man to challenge the survivor, and then by one of those
+strange somersaults of fate the unexpected<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_117" id="VIII_Page_117">[Pg 117]</a></span> occurred.</p>
+
+<p>Faustina and Aurelius Antoninus were married.</p>
+
+<p>It was a most queer mismating, for the man was plain, sincere and
+honorable, and she was almost everything else. Yet she had wit and she
+had beauty, and Aurelius had been living in the desert so long he
+imagined that all women were gentle and good. The Consul was very glad
+to unite his house with so fine and excellent a man as Aurelius; Lucilla
+cried for two days and more and little Marcus cried because his mother
+did, and neither cried because Faustina had gone away.</p>
+
+<p>But grief is transient.</p>
+
+<p>In a little over a year Antoninus and Faustina came back to Rome, and
+brought with them a little girl baby, Faustina Second. Marcus was very
+much interested in this baby, and made great plans about how they would
+play together when she got older.</p>
+
+<p>Among other visitors at the house of the old Consul often came the
+Emperor himself. Hadrian and Verus were Spaniards and had been soldiers
+together, and now Hadrian often liked to get away from the cares of
+State, and in the evening hide himself from the office-seekers and
+flattering parasites, in the quiet villa on Mount C&oelig;lius&mdash;he liked it
+here even better than at his own wonderful gardens at Tivoli. And little
+Marcus wasn't afraid of him, either. Marcus would sit on the Emperor's
+knee and listen to tales about hunting wild boars and bears, or men as
+wild. Then they would play<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_118" id="VIII_Page_118">[Pg 118]</a></span> tag or I-spy among the bushes and trees; and
+once Marcus dared the Emperor to climb the long ladder to the lookout in
+the big cedar. Hadrian accepted the challenge and climbed to the
+crow's-nest and cut his initials in the trunk of the tree.</p>
+
+<p>Instead of calling the boy Marcus Verus, the Emperor gave him the name
+"Verissimus," which means "the open-eyed truthful one," and this name
+stuck to Marcus for life.</p>
+
+<p>Between Antoninus and Marcus there grew up a very close friendship.
+Antoninus could scale the ladder up the tall cedar, three rungs at a
+time, and come down hand over hand without putting his foot on a rest.</p>
+
+<p>He and Marcus built another crow's-nest thirty feet above the first.
+They drew up the lumber by ropes, and Antoninus being sinewy and strong
+climbed up first, and with thongs and nails they fixed the boards in
+place, and made a rope ladder such as sailors make, that they could pull
+up after them so no one could reach them. When the kind old Emperor came
+to the villa they showed him what they had done. He said he would not
+try to climb up now as he had a touch of rheumatism. But a light was
+fixed in the upper lookout, drawn up by a cord, so they could signal to
+the Emperor down at the palace.</p>
+
+<p>Then Antoninus taught Marcus to ride horseback and pick up a spear off
+the ground, with his horse at a gallop. This was great sport for the
+Consul and the Emperor,<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_119" id="VIII_Page_119">[Pg 119]</a></span> who looked on, but they did not try it then,
+but said they would later on when they were feeling just right.</p>
+
+<p>And beside all this Aurelius Antoninus taught Marcus to read from
+Epictetus, and told him how this hunchback slave, Epictetus, who was
+owned by a man who had been a slave himself, was one of the sweetest,
+gentlest souls who had ever lived. Together they read the Stoic-slave
+philosopher and made notes from him. And so impressed was Marcus that,
+boy though he was, he adopted the simple robe of the Stoics, slept on a
+plank, and made his life and language plain, truthful and direct.</p>
+
+<p>This was all rather amusing to those near him&mdash;to all except Antoninus
+and the boy's mother. The others said, "Leave him alone and he'll get
+over it."</p>
+
+<p>Faustina was still fond of admiration&mdash;the simple, studious ways of her
+husband were not to her liking. He was twenty years her senior, and she
+demanded gaiety as her right. Her delight was to tread the borderline of
+folly, and see how close she could come to the brink and not step off.
+Julius C&aelig;sar's wife was put away on suspicion, but Faustina was worse
+than that! She would go down to the city to masquerades, leaving her
+little girl at home, and be gone for three days.</p>
+
+<p>When she returned Aurelius Antoninus spoke no word of anger or reproof.
+Her father said to her, "Beware! your husband's patience has a limit. If
+he divorces you, I shall not blame him; and even if he should kill you,<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_120" id="VIII_Page_120">[Pg 120]</a></span>
+Roman law will not punish him!"</p>
+
+<p>But long years after, Marcus, in looking back on those days, wrote: "His
+patience knew no limit; he treated her as a perverse child, and he once
+said to me: 'I pity and love her. I will not put her away&mdash;this were
+selfish. How can her follies injure me? We are what we are, and no one
+can harm us but ourselves. The mistakes of those near us afford us an
+opportunity for self-control&mdash;we will not imitate their errors, but
+rather strive to avoid them. In this way what might be a great
+humiliation has its benefits.'"</p>
+
+<p>Let no one imagine, however, that the tolerance of Antoninus was the
+soft acquiescence of weakness. After his death Marcus wrote: "Whatsoever
+excellent thing he had planned to do, he carried out with a persistency
+that nothing could divert. If he punished men, it was by allowing them
+to be led by their own folly&mdash;his foresight, wisdom and calm
+deliberation were beyond those of any man I ever knew."</p>
+
+<p>The studious, direct and manly ways of Marcus were not cast aside when
+he put on the toga virilis, as Faustina had predicted. In spite of the
+difference in their ages, Antoninus and Marcus mutually sustained each
+other.</p>
+
+<p>Little Faustina was much more like her father than her mother, and very
+early showed her preference for her father's society. Marcus was her
+playmate and taught her to ride a pony astride, just as her father had<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_121" id="VIII_Page_121">[Pg 121]</a></span>
+taught him. The three would often ride over to the village of Lorium,
+twelve miles from Rome, where Antoninus had a summer villa. At Lanuvium,
+near at hand, the Emperor spent a part of his time, and he would
+occasionally join the party and listen to Marcus recite from Cicero and
+C&aelig;sar.</p>
+
+<p>When Marcus was sixteen, Hadrian appointed him prefect of festivities in
+Rome, to take the place of the regular officer, a man of years, who was
+out of the city. So well did Marcus fill the place and make up his
+report, that when they again met, the old Emperor kissed his cheek,
+calling him, "My brave Verissimus," and said, "If I had a son, I would
+want him just like you."</p>
+
+<p>Not long after this the Emperor was taken violently ill. He called his
+counselors about his bedside and directed that Aurelius Antoninus should
+be his successor, and that, further, Antoninus should adopt Marcus
+Verus, so that Marcus should succeed Aurelius Antoninus.</p>
+
+<p>Hadrian loved Marcus for his own sake, and he loved him, too, for the
+sake of the grandfather, his old soldier comrade, Annius Verus; and
+beside that he was intent on preserving the Spanish strain.</p>
+
+<p>In a short time Hadrian passed away, and Aurelius Antoninus was crowned
+Emperor of Rome, and Marcus Verus, aged seventeen, slim, slender and
+studious, took the name, Marcus Aurelius.<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_122" id="VIII_Page_122">[Pg 122]</a></span></p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>The new reign did not begin under very favorable auspices. There was a
+prejudice against the Spanish blood, and Hadrian had alienated some of
+the aristocrats by measures they considered too democratic.</p>
+
+<p>Aurelius Antoninus knew of these prejudices toward his predecessor and
+he boldly met them by carrying the ashes of Hadrian to the Senate,
+demanding that the dead Emperor should be enrolled among the gods. So
+earnest and convincing was his eulogy of the great man gone, that a vote
+was taken and the resolution passed without a dissenting voice. This
+gives us a slight clew to the genesis of the gods, and also reveals to
+us the character of Antoninus. He so impressed the Senate that this
+honorable body thought best to waive all matters of difference, and in
+pretty compliment they voted to bestow on the new Emperor the degree of
+"Pius." Antoninus Pius was a man born to rule&mdash;in little things,
+lenient, but firm at the right time. Faustina still had her little
+social dissipations, but as she was not allowed to mix in affairs of
+State, her pink person was not a political factor.</p>
+
+<p>Marcus Aurelius was only seventeen years old: his close studies had
+robbed him of a bit of the robust health a youth should have. But
+horseback-riding and daily outdoor games finally got him back into good
+condition. He was the secretary and companion of the Emperor wherever he
+went.<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_123" id="VIII_Page_123">[Pg 123]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Great responsibilities confronted these two strong men. In point of
+intellect and aspiration they were far beyond the people they
+governed&mdash;so far, indeed, that they were almost isolated. There was a
+multitude of slaves and consequently there was a feeling everywhere that
+useful work was degrading. The tendency of the slave-owner is always
+toward profligacy and conspicuous waste. To do away with slavery was out
+of the question&mdash;that was a matter of time and education&mdash;the ruler can
+never afford to get much in advance of his people. The court was
+infected with parasites in the way of informers and busybodies who knew
+no way to thrive except through intrigue. Superstitions were taught by
+hypocritical priests in order to make the people pay tithes; and
+attached to the state religion were soothsayers, fortune-tellers,
+astrologers, gamblers and many pretenders who waxed fat by ministering
+to ignorance and depravity. These were the cheerful parasites mentioned
+as "money-changers" a hundred years before, that infested the entrance
+to every temple.</p>
+
+<p>Many long consultations did the Emperor and his adopted son have
+concerning the best policy to pursue. They could have issued an edict
+and swept the wrongs out of existence, but they knew that folly sprouts
+from a disordered brain, and so they did not treat a symptom: the
+disease was ignorance, the symptom, superstition. For themselves they
+kept an esoteric doctrine, and for the many they did what they could.<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_124" id="VIII_Page_124">[Pg 124]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Twenty-three years of probation lay before Marcus Aurelius&mdash;years of
+study, work, and patient endeavor. He shared in all the honors of the
+Emperor and bore his part of the burden as well. Never did he thirst for
+more power&mdash;the responsibilities of the situation saddened him&mdash;there
+was so much to be done and he could do so little. Well does Dean Farrar
+call him "a seeker after God."</p>
+
+<p>The office of young Marcus Aurelius at first was that of Questor, which
+literally means a messenger, but the word with the Romans meant more&mdash;an
+emissary or an ambassador. When Marcus was eighteen he read to the
+Senate all speeches and messages from the Emperor; and in a few years
+more he wrote the messages as well as delivered them. And all the time
+his education was being carried along by competent instructors.</p>
+
+<p>One of these teachers, Fronto, has come down to us, his portrait well
+etched on history's tablets, because he saved all the letters written
+him by Marcus Aurelius; and his grandchildren published them in order to
+show the excellence of true scientific teaching. That old Fronto was a
+dear old dear, these letters do fully attest. When Marcus went away on a
+little journey, even to Lorium, he wrote a letter to Fronto telling
+about the trip&mdash;the sheep by the wayside, the dogs that herded them, the
+shower they saw coming across the Campagna, and incidentally a little
+freshman philosophy mixed in, for Fronto had cautioned his pupil<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_125" id="VIII_Page_125">[Pg 125]</a></span> always
+to write out a great thought when it came, for fear he would never have
+another. Marcus was a sprightly letter-writer, and must have been a
+quick observer, and Fronto's gentle claims that he made the man are
+worthy of consideration. As a literary exercise the daily theme,
+prompted by love, can never be improved upon. The way to learn to write
+is to write. And Pronto, who resorted to many little tricks in order to
+get his pupil to express himself, was a teacher whose name should be
+written high. The correspondence-school has many advantages&mdash;Fronto
+purposely sent his pupil away or absented himself, that the carefully
+formulated or written thought might take the place of the free and easy
+conversation. In one letter Marcus ends: "The day was perfect but for
+one thing&mdash;you were not here. But then if you were here, I would not now
+have the pleasure of writing to you, so thus is your philosophy proved:
+that all good is equalized, and love grows through separation!" This
+sounds a bit preachy, but is valuable, as it reveals the man to whom it
+is written: the person to whom we write dictates the message.</p>
+
+<p>Fronto's habit of giving a problem to work out was quite as good a
+teaching plan as anything we have to offer now. Thus: "An ambassador of
+Rome visiting an outlying province attended a gladiatorial contest. And
+one of the fighters being indisposed, the ambassador replied to a taunt
+by putting on a coat of mail and going into the ring to kill the lion.
+Question, was this<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_126" id="VIII_Page_126">[Pg 126]</a></span> action commendable? If so, why, and if not, why
+not?"</p>
+
+<p>The proposition was one that would appeal at once to a young man, and
+thus did Fronto lead his pupils to think and express.</p>
+
+<p>Another teacher that Marcus had was Rusticus, a blunt old farmer turned
+pedagog, who has added a word to our language. His pupils were called
+Rusticana, and later plain rustics. That Rusticus developed in Marcus a
+deal of plain, sturdy commonsense there is no doubt. Rusticus had a way
+of stripping a subject of its gloss and verbiage&mdash;going straight to the
+vital point of every issue. For the wisdom of Marcus' legal opinions
+Rusticus deserves more than passing credit.</p>
+
+<p>For the youth who was destined to be the next Emperor of Rome, there was
+no dearth of society if he chose to accept it. Managing mammas were on
+every corner, and kind kinsmen consented to arrange matters with this
+heiress or that. For the frivolities of society Marcus had no use&mdash;his
+hours were filled with useful work or application to his books. His
+father and Fronto we find were both constantly urging him to get out
+more in the sunshine and meet more people, and not bother too much about
+the books.</p>
+
+<p>How best to curtail over-application, I am told, is a problem that
+seldom faces a teacher.</p>
+
+<p>As for society as a matrimonial bazaar, Marcus Aurelius could not see
+that it had its use. He was afraid of it&mdash;afraid of himself, perhaps. He
+loved the little Faustina.<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_127" id="VIII_Page_127">[Pg 127]</a></span> They had been comrades together, and played
+"keep house" under the olive-trees at Lorium; and had ridden their
+ponies over the hills. Once Marcus and Faustina, on a ride across the
+country, bought a lamb out of the arms of a shepherd, and kept it until
+it grew great curling horns, and made visitors scale the wall or climb
+trees. Then three priests led it away to sacrifice, and Marcus and
+Faustina fell into each other's arms and rained tears down each other's
+backs, and refused to be comforted. What if their father was an Emperor,
+and Marcus would be some day! It would not bring back Beppo, with his
+innocent lamblike ways, and make him get down on his knees and wag his
+tail when they fed him out of a pail! Beppo always got on his knees to
+eat, and showed his love and humility before he grew his horns and
+reached the age of indiscretion; then he became awfully wicked, and it
+took three stout priests to lead him away and sacrifice him to the gods
+for his own good!</p>
+
+<p>But gradually the grass grew on Beppo's make-believe grave in the
+garden, and Fronto's problems filled the vacuum in their hearts. Fronto
+gave his lessons to Marcus, and Marcus gave them to Faustina&mdash;thus do we
+keep things by giving them away.</p>
+
+<p>But problems greater than pet sheep grown ribald and reckless were to
+confront Marcus and Faustina. They had both been betrothed to others,
+years before, and this they now resented. They talked of this much, and<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_128" id="VIII_Page_128">[Pg 128]</a></span>
+then suddenly ceased to talk of it, and each evaded mentioning it, and
+pretended they never thought of it. Then they explosively began
+again&mdash;began as suddenly to talk of it, and always when they met they
+mentioned it. Folks called them brother and sister&mdash;they were not
+brother and sister, only cousins.</p>
+
+<p>Finally the matter was brought to Antoninus, and he pretended that he
+had never thought about it; but in fact he had thought of little else
+for a long time. And Antoninus said that if they loved each other very
+much, and he was sure they did, why, it was the will of the gods that
+they should marry, and he never interfered with the will of the gods; so
+he kissed them both and cried a few foolish tears, a thing an Emperor
+should never do.</p>
+
+<p>So they were married at the country seat at Lorium, out under the
+orange-trees as was often the custom, for orange-trees are green the
+year 'round, and bear fruit and flowers at the same time, and the
+flowers are very sweet, and the fruit is both beautiful and useful&mdash;and
+these things symbol constancy and fruitfulness and good luck, and that
+is why we yet have orange-blossoms at weddings and play the "Lohengrin
+March," which is orange-trees expressed in sweet sounds.</p>
+
+<p>Marcus was only twenty, and Faustina could not have been over
+sixteen&mdash;we do not know her exact age. There are stories to the effect
+that the wife of Marcus Aurelius severely tried her husband's temper at
+times,<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_129" id="VIII_Page_129">[Pg 129]</a></span> but these tales seem to have arisen through a confusion of the
+two Faustinas. The elder Faustina was the one who set the merry pace in
+frivolity, and once said that any woman with a husband twenty years her
+senior must be allowed a lover or two&mdash;goodness gracious!</p>
+
+<p>As far as we know, the younger Faustina was a most loyal and loving
+wife, the mother of a full dozen children. Coins issued by Marcus
+Aurelius stamped with the features of his wife, and the inscription
+Concordia, Faustina and Venus Felix, attest the felicity, or "felixity,"
+of the marriage.</p>
+
+<p>Their oldest boy, Commodus, was very much like his grandmother,
+Faustina, and a man who knows all about the Law of Heredity tells me
+that children are much more apt to resemble their grandparents than
+their father and mother.</p>
+
+<p>I believe I once said that no house is big enough for two families, but
+this truth is like the Greek verb&mdash;it has many exceptions. In the same
+house with Emperor Antoninus Pius dwelt Lucilla, mother of Marcus, and
+Marcus and his wife. And they were all very happy&mdash;but life was rather
+more peaceful after the death of Faustina, the elder, which occurred a
+few years after her husband became Emperor.</p>
+
+<p>She could not endure prosperity.</p>
+
+<p>But her husband mourned her death and made a public speech in eulogy of
+her, determined that only the best should be remembered of one who had
+been the wife of<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_130" id="VIII_Page_130">[Pg 130]</a></span> an Emperor and the mother of his children. As far as
+we know, Antoninus never spoke a word concerning his wife except in
+praise, not even when she left his house to be gone for months.</p>
+
+<p>It was Ouida, she of the aqua-fortis ink, who said, "A woman married to
+a man as good as Antoninus must have been very miserable, for while men
+who are thoroughly bad are not lovable, yet a man who is not
+occasionally bad is unendurable." And so Ouida's heart went out in
+sympathy and condolence to the two Faustinas, who wedded the only two
+men mentioned in Roman history who were infinitely wise and good.</p>
+
+<p>In one of his essays, Richard Steele writes this, "No woman ever loved a
+man through life with a mighty love if the man did not occasionally
+abuse her." I give the remark for what it is worth. However, Montesquieu
+somewhere says that the chief objection to heaven is its monotony; so
+possibly there may be something in the Ouida-Steele philosophy&mdash;but of
+this I really can't say, knowing nothing about the subject, myself.<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_131" id="VIII_Page_131">[Pg 131]</a></span></p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>Happy is the man who has no history. The reign of Antoninus Pius was
+peaceful and prosperous. No great wars nor revulsions occurred, and the
+times made for education and excellence. Antoninus worked to conserve
+the good, and that he succeeded, Gibbon says, there is no doubt. He left
+the country in better condition than he found it, and he could have
+truthfully repeated the words of Pericles, "I have made no person wear
+crape."</p>
+
+<p>But there came a day when Antoninus was stricken by the hand of death.
+The captain of the guard came to him and asked for the password for the
+night. "Equanimity," replied the Emperor, and turning on his side, sank
+into sleep, to awake no more. His last word symbols the guiding impulse
+of his life. Well does Renan say: "Simple, loving, full of sweet gaiety,
+Antoninus was a philosopher without saying so, almost without knowing
+it. Marcus was a philosopher, but often consciously, and he became a
+philosopher by study and reflection, aided and encouraged by the older
+man. You can not consider the one man and leave the other out, and the
+early contention that Antoninus was, in fact, the father of Marcus has
+at least a poetic and spiritual basis in truth."</p>
+
+<p>There was much in Renan's suggestions. The greatest man is he who works
+his philosophy up into life&mdash;this is better than to talk about it. We
+only discuss that to which we have not attained, and the virtues we
+talk<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_132" id="VIII_Page_132">[Pg 132]</a></span> most of are those beyond us. The ideal outstrips the actual. But
+it is no discredit that a man pictures more than he realizes&mdash;such a one
+is preparing the way for others. Marcus Antoninus has been a guiding
+star&mdash;an inspiration&mdash;to untold millions.</p>
+
+<p>Marcus Aurelius was forty years old when he became Emperor of Rome. At
+the age of forty a man is safe, if ever: character is formed, and what
+he will do or become, can be safely presaged.</p>
+
+<p>More than once Rome has repudiated the man in the direct line of
+accession to the throne, and before Marcus Aurelius took the reins of
+government he asked the Senate to ratify the people's choice, and thus
+make it the choice of the gods, and this was done.</p>
+
+<p>As Emperor, we find Marcus endeavored to carry out the policy of his
+predecessor. He did not favor expansion, but hoped by peace and
+propitiation to cement the empire and thus work for education, harmony
+and prosperity.</p>
+
+<p>It is interesting to see how Marcus Aurelius in the year One Hundred
+Sixty-four was cudgeling his brains concerning problems about which we
+yet argue and grow red in the face. The Emperor was also Chief Justice,
+and questions were being constantly brought to him to decide. From him
+there was no appeal, and his decisions made the law upon which all
+lesser judges based their rulings. And curiously enough we are dealing
+most extensively in judge-made law even today.<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_133" id="VIII_Page_133">[Pg 133]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>One vexed question that confronted Marcus was the lessening number of
+marriages, with a consequent increase in illegitimate births and a
+gradual dwindling of the free population. He seems to have disliked this
+word illegitimate, for he says, "All children are beautiful
+blessings&mdash;sent by the gods." But people who were legally married
+objected to this view, and said to recognize children born out of
+wedlock as entitled to all the privileges of citizenship is virtually to
+do away with legal marriage. As a compromise, Marcus decided to
+recognize all people as married who said they were married. This is
+exactly our common-law marriage as it exists in various States today.</p>
+
+<p>However, a man could put away his wife at will, and by recording the
+fact with the nearest pretor, the act was legalized. It will thus be
+seen that if a man could marry at will and put away his wife at will,
+there was really no marriage beyond that of nature. To meet the issue,
+and prevent fickle and unjust men from taking advantage of women, Marcus
+decided that the pretor could refuse to record the desired divorce, if
+he saw fit, and demand reasons. We then for the first time get a divorce
+trial, and on appeal to Marcus, he decided that if the man were in the
+wrong, he must still support the injured wife.</p>
+
+<p>Then, for the first time, we find women asking for a divorce. Now,
+nearly three-fourths of all divorces are granted to women; but at first,
+that a woman should<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_134" id="VIII_Page_134">[Pg 134]</a></span> want marital freedom caused a howl of merriment.
+Marcus was the first Roman Emperor to allow women the right of petition,
+and the privilege, too, of practising law, for Capitolanus cites various
+instances of women coming to ask for justice, and women friends coming
+with them to help plead their case, and the Emperor of Rome, leaning his
+tired head on his arm, listening for hours with great patience. We also
+hear of petitions for damages being presented for failure to keep a
+promise to marry&mdash;the action being brought against the girl's father.
+This would be thought a trifle strange, but an action against a woman
+for breach of promise is quite in order yet.</p>
+
+<p>Recently the Honorable Henry Ballard of Vermont won heavy damages
+against a coy and dallying heiress who had played pitch and toss with a
+good man's heart. The case was carried to the United States Supreme
+Court and judgment sustained.</p>
+
+<p>The question of marriage and divorce now in the United States is almost
+precisely where it was in Rome in the time of Marcus Aurelius. No two
+States have the same marriage-laws, and marriages which are illegal in
+one State may be made legal in another. Yet with us, any court of
+jurisdiction may declare any marriage illegal, or set any divorce aside.
+What makes marriage and what constitutes divorce are matters of opinion
+in the mind of the judge. We have gone a bit further than Marcus,
+though, in that we allow couples to marry if they wish, yet divorce is
+denied if both<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_135" id="VIII_Page_135">[Pg 135]</a></span> parties desire it. The fact that they want it is
+construed as proof that they should not have it. We meet the issue,
+however, by connivance of the lawyers, who are officers of the court,
+and a legal fiction is inaugurated by allowing a little bird to tell the
+judge what decision will be satisfactory to both sides. And in States or
+countries where no divorce is allowed, marriage can be annulled if you
+know how&mdash;see Ruskin versus Ruskin, Coleridge, J.</p>
+
+<p>Our zealous New Thought friends, who clamor to have marriage made
+difficult and divorce easy, forget that the whole question has been
+threshed over for three thousand years, and all schemes tried. The
+Romans issued marriage-licenses, but before doing so a pretor passed on
+the fitness of the candidates for each other. This was so embarrassing
+to many coy couples that they just waived formal proceedings and set up
+housekeeping. To declare these people lawbreakers, Marcus Aurelius said,
+would put half of Rome in limbo, just as, if we should technically
+enforce all laws, it would send most members of the Legislature to the
+penitentiary. So the Emperor declared de-facto marriage de jure, and for
+a short time succeeded in striking out the word illegitimate as applied
+to a person, on the ground that, in justice, no act of a parent could be
+charged up against and punished in the offspring.<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_136" id="VIII_Page_136">[Pg 136]</a></span></p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>Men who make laws have forever to watch most closely and dance
+attendance on Nature. Laws which fly in the face of Nature are gently
+waived or conveniently forgotten. Should Chief Justice Fuller issue an
+injunction restraining all men from coming within a quarter of a mile of
+a woman, on penalty of death, we would all place ourselves in contempt
+in an hour; and should the army try to enforce the order, we would
+smother Justice Fuller in his wool-sack and hang his effigy on a
+sour-apple tree. Law isn't worth the paper it is written on unless it
+embodies the will and natural tendencies of the governed. Where poaching
+is popular, no law can stop it. Marriage is easy, and divorce difficult,
+because this is Nature's plan. The natural law of attraction brings men
+and women together, and it is difficult to separate them. Natural things
+are easy, and artificial ones difficult. Most couples who desire freedom
+only think they do: what they really want is a vacation; but they would
+not separate for good if they could. It is hard to part&mdash;people who have
+lived together grow to need each other. They want some one to quarrel
+with.</p>
+
+<p>C&aelig;sar Augustus, in his close study of character, introduced a limited
+divorce. That is, in case of a family quarrel, he ordered the couple to
+live apart for six months as a penalty. Quintilian says that usually
+before the expired time the man and woman were surreptitiously living
+together again, at which the court quietly<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_137" id="VIII_Page_137">[Pg 137]</a></span> winked, and finally this
+form of penalty had to be abandoned because it made the courts
+ridiculous.</p>
+
+<p>Men and women do not get married because marriage is legal, nor do they
+continue living together because divorce is difficult. They marry
+because they desire to, and they do not separate because they do not
+want to. The task that confronts the legislator is to find out what the
+people want to do, and then legalize it.</p>
+
+<p>In Rome, the custom of the parties divorcing themselves was prevalent,
+and the courts were called upon to ratify the act, just to give the
+matter respectability. Below a certain stratum in society, the formality
+of legal marriage and divorce was waived entirely, just as it is
+largely, now, among our colored population in the South. During the
+French Revolution, the same custom largely obtained in France. And about
+the year One Hundred Fifty in Rome there was danger that the people
+would overlook the majesty of the law entirely in their domestic
+affairs. This condition is what prompted Marcus Aurelius to recognize as
+legal the common-law marriage and say if a couple called themselves
+husband and wife, they were. And for a time, if they said they were
+divorced, they were. But as a mortgage owned by a man on his own
+property cancels the debt, and legally there is no mortgage, so if the
+people could get married at will and divorce themselves at their
+convenience, there really was no legal marriage. Thus the matter was
+argued. So Marcus adopted the plan of making marriage<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_138" id="VIII_Page_138">[Pg 138]</a></span> easy and divorce
+difficult, and this has been the policy in all civilized countries ever
+since.</p>
+
+<p>It is very evident, however, that Marcus Aurelius looked forward to a
+time when men and women would be wise enough, and just enough, to
+arrange their own affairs, without calling on the police to ratify
+either their friendships or their misunderstandings. He says: "Love is
+beautiful, and that a man and a woman loving each other should live
+together is the will of God, but if there comes a time when they can not
+live in peace, let them part. To have no relationship is not a disgrace;
+to have wrong relations is, for disgrace means lack of grace, discord,
+and love is harmony."</p>
+
+<p>Marcus Aurelius tried the plan of probationary marriages; and to offset
+this he also introduced the Augustinian plan of probationary
+divorces&mdash;that is, the interlocutory decree. This scheme has recently
+been adopted in several States in America with the avowed intent of
+preventing fraud in divorce procedure, but actually the logic of the
+situation is the same now as in the time of Marcus Aurelius&mdash;it
+postpones the final decree so as to prevent the couple from becoming the
+victims of their own rashness, and to give them an opportunity to become
+reconciled if possible.</p>
+
+<p>So anxious was Marcus Aurelius to decide justly with his people that he
+found himself swamped with cases of every sort and description. He tried
+to pass upon each case by its merits, regardless of law and precedent.
+Then other judges construed his decisions as<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_139" id="VIII_Page_139">[Pg 139]</a></span> law, and the lesser courts
+cited the upper ones, until Gibbon says, "There grew up such a mass of
+judge-made laws that a skilful lawyer could prove anything, and legal
+practise swung on the ability to cite similar cases and call attention
+to desired decisions."</p>
+
+<p>In America we are now back exactly to the same condition. A lawyer in
+New York State requires over fourteen thousand law-books if he would
+cover all the ground; and his business is to make it easy for the judge
+to dispense justice and not dispense with law. That is to say, before a
+judge can decide a case, he must be able to back up his opinion by
+precedent. Judges are not elected to deal out justice between man and
+man; they are elected to decide on points of law. Law is often a great
+disadvantage to a judge&mdash;it may hamper justice&mdash;and in America there
+must surely soon come a day when we will make a bonfire of every
+law-book in the land, and electing our judges for life, we will make the
+judiciary free. We will then require our lawyers and judges to read, and
+pass examinations on Browning's "Ring and the Book," and none other. And
+if we would follow the Aurelian suggestion of remitting all direct taxes
+to every citizen who had not been plaintiff in a lawsuit for ten years,
+we would gradually get something approaching pure justice. The people
+must be educated to decide quietly and calmly their own disputes, and
+this can be done only by placing an obvious penalty on litigation.
+Progress in the future will consist<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_140" id="VIII_Page_140">[Pg 140]</a></span> in having less law, and fulfilment
+will be reached when we have no law at all&mdash;each man governing himself,
+and being willing that his neighbor shall do the same. Trouble arises
+largely from each man regarding himself as his brother's keeper, and
+ceasing to be his friend. Marcus Aurelius, the wise judge, saw that most
+litigation is foolish and absurd&mdash;both parties are at fault, and both
+right. And to bring about the good time when men shall live in peace, he
+began earnestly to govern himself. His ideal was a state where men would
+need no governing. Hence his "Meditations," a book which Dean Farrar
+says is not inferior to the New Testament in its lofty aim and purity of
+conception.</p>
+
+<p>Every great book is an evolution: Marcus had been getting ready to write
+this immortal volume for nearly half a century. And now in his
+fifty-seventh year he found himself in the desert of Asia at the head of
+the army, endeavoring to put down an insurrection of various barbaric
+tribes. Later, the seat of war was shifted to the north. The enemy
+struck and retreated, and danced around him as the Boers fought the
+English in South Africa.</p>
+
+<p>But Marcus Aurelius had time to think, and so with no books near and all
+memoranda far away, he began to write out his best thoughts. At first he
+expressed just for his own satisfaction, but later, as the work
+progressed, we see that its value grew upon him, and it was his
+intention to put it in systematic form for<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_141" id="VIII_Page_141">[Pg 141]</a></span> posterity. And while working
+at this task, the exposures of field and camp, and the business of war,
+in which he had no heart, worked upon him so adversely that he sickened
+and died, aged fifty-nine.</p>
+
+<p>His body was carried back to Rome and placed by the side of that of his
+beloved adopted father, Antoninus Pius. And so he sleeps, but the
+precious legacy of the "Meditations," written during those last two
+years of travel, turmoil and strife, is ours.</p>
+
+<p>A few quotations seem in order:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Remember, on every occasion which leads thee to vexation, to apply
+this principle: not that this is a misfortune, but that to bear it
+nobly is good fortune.</p>
+
+<p>Things do not touch the soul, for they are eternal, and remain
+immovable; but our perturbations come only from the opinion which
+is within.... The Universe is transformation; life is opinion.</p>
+
+<p>To the jaundiced, honey tastes bitter; and to those bitten by mad
+dogs, water causes fear; and to little children, the ball is a fine
+thing. Why then am I angry? Dost thou think that a false opinion
+has less power than the bile in the jaundiced, or the poison in him
+who is bitten by a mad dog?</p>
+
+<p>How easy it is to repel and to wipe away every impression which is
+troublesome and unsuitable, and immediately to be in all
+tranquillity!</p>
+
+<p>All things come from the universal Ruling Power, either directly or
+by way of consequence. And accordingly<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_142" id="VIII_Page_142">[Pg 142]</a></span> the lion's gaping jaws, and
+that which is poisonous, and every hurtful thing, as a thorn, as
+mud, are after-products of the grand and beautiful. Do not
+therefore imagine that they are of another kind from that which
+thou dost venerate, but form a just opinion of the source of all.</p>
+
+<p>Pass through the rest of life like one who has entrusted to the
+gods, with his whole soul, all that he has, making himself neither
+the tyrant nor the slave of any man.</p>
+
+<p>Never value anything as profitable to thyself which shall compel
+thee to break thy promise, to lose thy self-respect, to hate any
+man, to suspect, to curse, to act the hypocrite, to desire anything
+which needs walls and curtains.</p>
+
+<p>I am thankful to the gods that I was subjected to a ruler and a
+father who was able to take away all pride from me, and to bring me
+to the knowledge that it is possible for a man to live in a palace
+without wanting either guards or embroidered dresses, or torches
+and statues, and such-like show; but that it is in such a man's
+power to bring himself very near to the fashion of a private
+person, without being, for this reason, either meaner in thought or
+more remiss in action, with respect to the things which must be
+done for the public interest in a manner that befits a ruler.</p>
+
+<p>What more dost thou want when thou hast done a man a service? Art
+thou not content that thou hast done something conformable to thy
+nature, and dost thou seek to be paid for it? Just as if the eye
+demanded a recompense for seeing, or the feet for walking. As a<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_143" id="VIII_Page_143">[Pg 143]</a></span>
+horse when he has run, a dog when he has traced the game, a bee
+when it has made the honey, so a man, when he has done a good act,
+does not call out for others to come and see, but goes on to
+another act, as a vine goes on to produce again the grapes in
+season.</p>
+
+<p>Accustom thyself to attend carefully to what is said by another,
+and as much as it is possible, be in the speaker's mind.</p>
+
+<p>Some things are hurrying into existence, and others are hurrying
+out of it; and of that which is coming into existence, part is
+already extinguished. Motions and changes are continually renewing
+the world, just as the uninterrupted course of time is always
+renewing the infinite duration of ages.</p>
+
+<p>Understand that every man is worth just so much as the things are
+worth about which he busies himself.</p>
+
+<p>Wickedness does no harm at all to the universe&mdash;it is only harmful
+to him who has it in his power to be released from it.</p>
+
+<p>Nothing is more wretched than a man who traverses everything in a
+round, and pries into the things beneath the earth, as the poet
+says, and seeks by conjecture what is in the minds of his
+neighbors, without perceiving that it is sufficient to attend to
+the deity within him, and to reverence it sincerely.</p>
+
+<p>The prayers of Marcus Aurelius to the gods are for one thing
+only&mdash;that their will be done. All else is vain, all else is
+rebellion against the universe itself. Our form of<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_144" id="VIII_Page_144">[Pg 144]</a></span> worship should
+be like this: Everything harmonizes with me which is harmonious to
+thee, O Universe. Nothing for me is too early nor too late, which
+is in due time for thee. Everything is fruit to me which thy
+seasons bring, O Nature: from thee are all things, in thee are all
+things, to thee all things return.</p>
+
+<p>In the morning when thou risest unwillingly, let this thought be
+present&mdash;I am rising to the work of a human being. Why, then, am I
+dissatisfied if I am going to do the things for which I exist, and
+for which I was brought into the world? Or have I been made for
+this, to lie in the bedclothes and keep myself warm? But this is
+more pleasant. Dost thou exist, then, to take thy pleasure, and not
+for action or exertion? Dost thou not see the little plants, the
+little birds, the ants, the spiders, the bees, working together to
+put in order their several parts of the universe? And art thou
+unwilling to do the work of a human being, and dost thou not make
+haste to do that which is according to thy nature?</p>
+
+<p>Judge every word and deed which are according to Nature to be fit
+for thee, and be not diverted by the blame which follows.... But if
+a thing is good to be done or said, do not consider it unworthy of
+thee.</p>
+
+<p>Since it is possible that thou mayest depart from life this very
+moment, regulate every act and thought accordingly.... Death
+certainly, and life, honor and dishonor, pain and pleasure, all
+these things equally happen to good men and bad, being things which
+make us neither better nor worse. Therefore they are neither good
+nor evil.<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_145" id="VIII_Page_145">[Pg 145]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>To say all in a word, everything which belongs to the body is a
+stream, and what belongs to the soul is a dream and vapor; and life
+is a warfare, and a stranger's sojourn, and after fame is oblivion.
+What, then, is that which is able to enrich a man? One thing, and
+only one&mdash;philosophy. But this consists in keeping the guardian
+spirit within a man free from violence and unharmed, superior to
+pains and pleasures, doing nothing without a purpose, nor yet
+falsely, and with hypocrisy ... accepting all that happens and all
+that is allotted ... and finally waiting for death with a cheerful
+mind.</p>
+
+<p>If thou findest in human life anything better than justice, truth,
+temperance, fortitude, and, in a word, than thine own soul's
+satisfaction in the things which it enables thee to do according to
+right reason, and in the condition that is assigned to thee without
+thy own choice; if, I say, thou seest anything better than this,
+turn to it with all thy soul, and enjoy that which thou hast found
+to be the best. But ... if thou findest everything else smaller and
+of less value than this, give place to nothing else.... Simply and
+freely choose the better, and hold to it.</p>
+
+<p>Men seek retreats for themselves, houses in the country, seashores,
+and mountains; and thou too art wont to desire such things very
+much. But this is altogether a mark of the most common sort of men,
+for it is in thy power whenever thou shalt choose to retire into
+thyself. For nowhere either with more quiet or more freedom from
+trouble does a man retire than into his own soul, particularly when
+he has within him such thoughts that<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_146" id="VIII_Page_146">[Pg 146]</a></span> by looking into them he is
+immediately in perfect tranquillity&mdash;which is nothing else than the
+good ordering of the mind.</p>
+
+<p>Unhappy am I, because this has happened to me? Not so, but happy am
+I though this has happened to me, because I continue free from
+pain; neither crushed by the present nor fearing the future.</p>
+
+<p>Be cheerful, and seek no external help, nor the tranquillity which
+others give. A man must stand erect, not be kept erect by others.</p>
+
+<p>Be like the promontory against which the waves continually break,
+but it stands firm and tames the fury of the water around it.</p>
+
+<p>It is not fit that I should give myself pain, for I have never
+intentionally given pain even to another.</p></div>
+
+
+
+<hr class="full" />
+<h2><a name="IMMANUEL_KANT" id="IMMANUEL_KANT"></a>IMMANUEL KANT<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_147" id="VIII_Page_147">[Pg 147]</a></span></h2>
+
+
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>The canons of scientific evidence justify us neither in accepting
+nor rejecting the ideas upon which morality and religion repose.
+Both parties to the dispute beat the air; they worry their own
+shadow; for they pass from Nature into the domain of speculation,
+where their dogmatic grips find nothing to lay hold upon. The
+shadows which they hew to pieces grow together in a moment like the
+heroes in Valhalla, to rejoice again in bloodless battles.
+Metaphysics can no longer claim to be the cornerstone of religion
+and morality. But if she can not be the Atlas that bears the moral
+world she can furnish a magic defense. Around the ideas of religion
+she throws her bulwark of invisibility; and the sword of the
+skeptic and the battering-ram of the materialist fall harmless on
+vacuity.</p></div>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 25em;">&mdash;<i>Immanuel Kant</i></span><br />
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_148" id="VIII_Page_148">[Pg 148]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="center">
+    <a id="image0457-1"></a>
+    <img src="images/0457-1.jpg" width="269" height="400"
+       alt=""
+       title="" />
+
+   <p class="center">IMMANUEL KANT</p>
+</div>
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_149" id="VIII_Page_149">[Pg 149]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<p>We find that most men fit easily into types. You describe to me one
+Durham cow and you picture all Durham cows. So it is with men: they
+belong to breeds, which we politely call denominations, sects or
+parties. Tell me the man's sect, and I know his dress, his habit of
+life, his thought. His dress is the uniform of his party, and his
+thought is that which is ordered and prescribed. Dull indeed is the
+intellect which can not correctly prophesy the opinions to which this
+man will arrive on any subject.</p>
+
+<p>Durham cows are not exactly alike, I well know, but a trifle more length
+of leg, a variation in color, or an off-angle of the horn, and that cow
+is forever barred from exhibition as a Durham. She is fit only for beef,
+and the first butcher that makes a bid takes her, hide and horns.</p>
+
+<p>Members of sects do not think exactly alike, but there are well-defined
+limits of thought and action, beyond which they dare not stray lest the
+butcher bag them. In joining a sect they have given bonds to uniformity,
+and have signed their willingness to think and act like all other
+members of the sect.</p>
+
+<p>Herbert Spencer deals with this "jiner" propensity in man, and describes
+it as a manifestation of the herding<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_150" id="VIII_Page_150">[Pg 150]</a></span> instinct in animals. It is a
+combination for mutual protection&mdash;a social contract, each one waiving a
+part of his personality in order to secure a supposed benefit. A herd of
+cattle can stand against a pack of wolves, but a cow alone is doomed.</p>
+
+<p>Few men indeed can stand against the pack. Wise are the many who seek
+safety in numbers! Think of those who have stood out alone and expressed
+their individuality, and you count on your fingers God's patriots dead
+and turned to dust.</p>
+
+<p>The paradox of things is shown in that the entrenched many, having found
+safety in aggregation, pay their debt of homage to the bold few who
+lived their lives and paid the penalty by death.</p>
+
+<p>Across the disk of existence, each decade, there glide five hundred
+million souls, and disappear forever in the dim and dusk of the eternity
+that lies behind. Out of the bare handful that are remembered, we
+cherish only the memories of those who stood alone and expressed their
+honest, inmost thought. And this thought is, always and forever, the
+thought of liberty. Exile, ostracism, death, have been their fate, and
+on the smoke of martyr-fires their souls mounted to immortality.</p>
+
+<p>Future generations often confuse these men with Deity, the Maker of the
+Worlds. And thus do we arrive at truth by indirection, for in very fact
+these were the Sons of God, vitalized by Divinity, part and parcel of<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_151" id="VIII_Page_151">[Pg 151]</a></span>
+the Power that guides the planets on their way and holds the worlds in
+space. Upon their tombs we carve a single word: <i>Savior</i>.<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_152" id="VIII_Page_152">[Pg 152]</a></span></p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>Kant was sixty years old before he was known to any extent beyond his
+native town; but so fast then did his fame travel that at his death it
+was recognized that the greatest thinker of the world had passed away.
+Kant founded no school; but Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, Herde and
+Schopenhauer were all his children&mdash;and all but Schopenhauer showed
+their humanity by denouncing him, for men are prone to revile that which
+has benefited them most. Kant marks an epoch and all thinkers who came
+after him are his debtors. His philosophy has passed into the current
+coin of knowledge.</p>
+
+<p>Kant's lifelong researches revolve around four propositions:</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">1. Who am I?</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">2. What am I?</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">3. What can I do?</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">4. What can I know?</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>The answer to Number Four is that I can not know anything. That is to
+say, the wise man is the man who knows that he does not know. And this
+disposes of Number One and Number Two, leaving only Number Three for our
+consideration. It took, however, a good many years and a vast amount of
+study and writing for Kant to thus simplify. For years he toiled with
+algebraic formulas and syllogistic theorems before he concluded that the
+best wisdom of life lies in simplification, not complexity.<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_153" id="VIII_Page_153">[Pg 153]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"What can I do?" resolves itself into, "What must I do?" And the answer
+is: You must do four things in order to retain your place as a normal
+being upon this earth: eat, work, associate with your kind, rest. Just
+four things we must do, and outside of this everything is incidental,
+accidental, irrelevant and inconsequential. Then how to eat, work,
+associate and rest wisely and best constitutes life. Every man should be
+free to work out these four equations for himself, his freedom ending
+where another man's rights begin. To these four questions we should
+bring our highest reason, our ripest experience and our best endeavor.
+As for himself we know that Kant made a schedule of life which evolved a
+sickly boy into a reasonably strong man who banished pain, sorrow and
+regret from his existence and lived a long life of deep, quiet
+satisfaction, sane to the end, watching every symptom of approaching
+dissolution with keen interest, and at the last passing into quiet
+sleep, his spirit gliding peacefully away, perhaps to answer those two
+great questions which he said were unanswerable here: "Who am I?" "What
+am I?"<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_154" id="VIII_Page_154">[Pg 154]</a></span></p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>Immanuel Kant was born in Seventeen Hundred Twenty-four at the City of
+Konigsberg, in the northeastern corner of Prussia. There he received his
+education; there he was a teacher for nearly half a century; and there,
+in his eightieth year, he died. He was never out of East Prussia and
+never journeyed sixty miles from his birthplace during his whole life.
+Professor Josiah Royce of Harvard, himself in the sage business, and
+perhaps the best example that America has produced of the pure type of
+philosopher, says, "Kant is the only modern thinker who in point of
+originality is worthy to be ranked with Plato and Aristotle." Like
+Emerson, Kant regarded traveling as a fool's paradise; only Emerson had
+to travel much before he found it out, while Kant gained the truth by
+staying at home. Once a lady took him for a carriage ride, and on
+learning from the footman that they were seven miles from home he was so
+displeased that he refused to utter a single orphic on the way back; and
+further, the story is that he never after entered a vehicle, and living
+for thirty years was never again so far from the lodging he called home.</p>
+
+<p>In his lectures on physical geography Kant would often describe
+mountains, rivers, waterfalls, volcanoes, with great animation and
+accuracy, yet he had never seen any of these. Once a friend offered to
+take him to Switzerland, so he could actually see the mountains; but he
+warmly declined, declaring that the man who<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_155" id="VIII_Page_155">[Pg 155]</a></span> was not satisfied until he
+could touch, taste and see was small, mean and quibbling as was Thomas,
+the doubting disciple. Moreover, he had samples of the strata of the
+Alps, and this was enough, which reminds us of the man who had a house
+for sale and offered to send a prospective purchaser a sample brick.</p>
+
+<p>Mind was the great miracle to Kant&mdash;the ability to know all about a
+thing by seeing it with your inward eye. "The Imagination hath a stage
+within the brain upon which all scenes are played," and the play to Kant
+was greater than the reality. Or, to use his own words: "Time and Space
+have no existence apart from Mind. There is no such thing as Sound
+unless there be an ear to receive the vibrations. Things and places,
+matter and substance come under the same law, and exist only as mind
+creates them."<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_156" id="VIII_Page_156">[Pg 156]</a></span></p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>The parents of Kant were very lowly people. His father was a day
+laborer&mdash;a leather-cutter who never achieved even to the honors and
+emoluments of a saddler. There were seven children in the family, and
+never a servant crossed the threshold. One daughter survived Immanuel,
+and in her eighty-fourth year she expressed regrets that her brother had
+proved so recreant to the teachings of his parents as practically to
+alienate him from all his relatives. One brother became a Lutheran
+minister and lived out an honored career; the others vanish and fade
+away into the mist of forgetfulness.</p>
+
+<p>So far as we know, all the children were strong and well except this
+one. At birth he weighed but five pounds, and his weakness was pitiable.
+He was the kind of child the Spartans used to make way with quickly, for
+the good of the State. He had a big, bulging head, thin legs, a weak
+chest, and one shoulder was so much higher than the other that it
+amounted almost to a deformity.</p>
+
+<p>As the years went by, the parents saw he was not big enough to work, but
+hope was not dead&mdash;they would make a preacher of him! To this end he was
+sent to the "Fredericianium," a graded school of no mean quality. The
+master of this school was a worthy clergyman by the name of Schultz, who
+was attracted to the Kant boy, it seems, on account of his insignificant
+size. It was the affection of the shepherd for the friendless<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_157" id="VIII_Page_157">[Pg 157]</a></span> ewe lamb.
+A little later the teacher began to love the boy for his big head and
+the thoughts he worked out of it. Brawn is bought with a price&mdash;young
+men who bank on it get it as legal tender. Those who have no brawn have
+to rely on brain or go without honors. Immanuel Kant began to ask his
+school-teacher questions that made the good man laugh.</p>
+
+<p>At sixteen Kant entered Albertina University. And there he was to remain
+his entire life&mdash;student, tutor, teacher, professor.</p>
+
+<p>He must have been an efficient youth, for before he was eighteen he
+realized that the best way to learn is to teach. The idea of becoming a
+clergyman was at first strong upon him; and Pastor Schultz occasionally
+sent the youth out to preach, or lead religious services in rural
+districts. This embryo preacher had a habit of placing a box behind the
+pulpit and standing on it while preaching. Then we find him reasoning
+the matter out in this way: "I stand on a box to preach so as to impress
+the people by my height or to conceal my insignificant size. This is
+pretense and a desire to carry out the idea that the preacher is bigger
+every way than common people. I talk with God in pretended prayer, and
+this looks as if I were on easy and familiar terms with Deity. Is it
+like those folks who claim to be on friendly terms with princes: If I do
+not know anything about God, why should I pretend I do?"</p>
+
+<p>This desire to be absolutely honest with himself<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_158" id="VIII_Page_158">[Pg 158]</a></span> gradually grew until
+he informed the Pastor that he had better secure young men for preachers
+who could impress people without standing on a box. As for himself, he
+would impress people by the size of his head, if he impressed them at
+all. Let it here be noted that Kant then weighed exactly one hundred
+pounds, and was less than five feet high. His head measured twenty-four
+inches around, and fifteen and one-half inches over "firmness" from the
+opening of the ears. To put it another way, he wore a seven-and-a-half
+hat.</p>
+
+<p>It is a great thing for a man to pride himself on what he is and make
+the best of it. The pride of craftsman betokens a valuable man. We
+exaggerate our worth, and this is Nature's plan to get the thing done.</p>
+
+<p>Kant's pride of intellect, in degree, came from his insignificant form,
+and thus do all things work together for good. But this bony little form
+was often full of pain, and he had headaches, which led a wit to say,
+"If a head like yours aches, it must be worse than to be a giraffe and
+have a sore throat."</p>
+
+<p>Young Kant began to realize that to have a big head, and get the right
+use from it, one must have vital power enough to feed it.</p>
+
+<p>The brain is the engine&mdash;the lungs and digestive apparatus the boiler.
+Thought is combustion.</p>
+
+<p>Young Kant, the uncouth, became possessed of an idea that made him the
+butt of many gibes and jeers. He thought that if he could breathe
+enough, he would be<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_159" id="VIII_Page_159">[Pg 159]</a></span> able to think clearly, and headaches would be gone.
+Life, he said, was a matter of breathing, and all men died from one
+cause&mdash;a shortness of breath. In order to think clearly, you must
+breathe.</p>
+
+<p>We believe things first and prove them later; our belief is usually
+right, when derived from experience, but the reasons we give are often
+wrong. For instance, Kant cured his physical ills by going out of doors,
+and breathing deeply and slowly with closed mouth. Gradually his health
+began to improve. But the young man, not knowing at that time much about
+physiology, wrote a paper proving that the benefit came from the fresh
+air that circulated through his brain. And of course in one sense he was
+right. He related the incident of this thesis many years after in a
+lecture, to show the result of right action and wrong reasoning.</p>
+
+<p>The doctors had advised Kant he must quit study, but when he took up his
+breathing fad, he renounced the doctors, and later denounced them. If he
+were going to die, he would die without the benefit of either the clergy
+or the physicians.</p>
+
+<p>He denied that he was sick, and at night would roll himself in his
+blankets and repeat half-aloud, "How comfortable I am, how comfortable I
+am," until he fell asleep.</p>
+
+<p>Near his house ran a narrow street, just a half-mile long. He walked
+this street up and back, with closed mouth, breathing deeply, waving a
+rattan cane to ward<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_160" id="VIII_Page_160">[Pg 160]</a></span> away talkative neighbors, and to keep up the
+circulation in his arms. Once and back&mdash;in a month he had increased this
+to twice and back. In a year he had come to the conclusion that to walk
+the length of that street eight times was the right and proper
+thing&mdash;that is to say, four miles in all. In other words, he had found
+out how much exercise he required&mdash;not too much or too little. At
+exactly half-past three he came out of his lodging, wearing his cocked
+hat and long, snuff-colored coat, and walked. The neighbors used to set
+their clocks by him. He walked and breathed with closed mouth, and no
+one dare accost him or walk with him. The hour was sacred and must not
+be broken in upon: it was his holy time&mdash;his time of breathing.</p>
+
+<p>The little street is there now&mdash;one of the sights of Konigsberg, and the
+cab-drivers point it out as the Philosopher's Walk. And Kant walked that
+little street eight times every afternoon from the day he was twenty to
+within a year of his death, when eighty years old.</p>
+
+<p>This walking and breathing habit physiologists now recognize as
+eminently scientific, and there is no sensible physician but will
+endorse Kant's wisdom in renouncing doctors and adopting a regimen of
+his own. The thing you believe in will probably benefit you&mdash;faith is
+hygienic.</p>
+
+<p>The persistency of the little man's character is shown in the breathing
+habit&mdash;he believed in himself, relied on himself, and that which
+experience commended,<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_161" id="VIII_Page_161">[Pg 161]</a></span> he did.</p>
+
+<p>This firmness in following his own ideas saved his life. When we think
+of one born in obscurity, living in poverty, handicapped by pain,
+weakness and deformity; never traveling; and then by sheer persistency
+and force of will rising to the first place among thinking men of his
+time, one is almost willing to accept Kant's dictum, "Mind is supreme,
+and the Universe is but the reflected thought of God."<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_162" id="VIII_Page_162">[Pg 162]</a></span></p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>Kant was great enough to doubt appearances and distrust popular
+conclusions. He knew that fallacies of reasoning follow fast upon
+actions&mdash;reason follows by slow freight. It is quite necessary that we
+should believe in a Supreme Power, but quite irrelevant that we should
+prove it.</p>
+
+<p>Truth for the most part is unpopular, and the proof of this statement
+lies in the fact that it is so seldom told. Preachers tell people what
+they wish to hear, and indeed this must be so as long as the
+congregation that hears the preaching pays for it. People will not pay
+for anything they do not like. Hence, preaching leads naturally to
+sophistication and hypocrisy, and the promise of endless bliss for
+ourselves and a hell for our enemies comes about as a matter of course.
+What men will listen to and pay for is the real science of theology.
+That is to say, the science of theology is the science of manipulating
+men. Success in theology consists in finding a fallacy that is palatable
+and then banking on it. Again and again Kant points out that a
+clergyman's advice is usually worthless, because pure truth is out of
+his province&mdash;unaccustomed, undesirable, inexpedient.</p>
+
+<p>And Kant thought this was true also of doctors&mdash;doctors care more about
+pleasing their patients than telling them truth. "In fact," he said, "no
+doctor with a family to support can afford to tell his patients that his
+symptoms are no token of a disease&mdash;rather uncomfortable feelings are
+proof of health, for dead men don't<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_163" id="VIII_Page_163">[Pg 163]</a></span> have them." Most of the aches,
+pains and so-called irregularities are remedial moves on the part of
+Nature to keep the man well. Kant says that doctors treat symptoms, not
+diseases, and often the treatment causes the disease; so no man can tell
+what proportion of diseases is caused by medicine and what by other
+forms of applied ignorance.</p>
+
+<p>As for lawyers, our little philosopher considered them, for the most
+part, sharks and wreckers. A lawyer looks over an estate, not with the
+idea of keeping it intact, but of dissolving it, and getting a part of
+it for himself. Not that men prefer to do what is wrong, but
+self-interest can always produce sufficient reasons to satisfy the
+conscience. Lawyers, being attaches of courts of justice, regard
+themselves as protectors of the people, when really they are the
+plunderers of the people, and their business is quite as much to defeat
+justice as to administer it. The evasion of law is as truly a lawyer's
+work as compliance with law. Then our philosopher explains that if law
+and justice were synonymous, this state of affairs would be most
+deplorable; but as it is, no particular harm is worked, save in the
+moral degradation of the lawyers. The connivance of lawyers tames the
+rank injustices of law; hence, to a degree, we live in a land where
+there is neither law nor justice&mdash;save such justice as can be
+appropriated by the man who is diplomat enough to do without lawyers and
+wise enough to have no property. Justice, however, to Kant is a very<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_164" id="VIII_Page_164">[Pg 164]</a></span>
+uncertain quantity, and he is rather inclined to regard the idea that
+men are able to administer justice as on a par with the assumption of
+the priest that he is dealing with God.</p>
+
+<p>Kant once said, "When a woman demands justice, she means revenge."</p>
+
+<p>A pupil here interposed, and asked the master if this was not equally
+true of men, and the answer was, "I accept the amendment&mdash;it certainly
+is true of all men I ever saw in courtrooms."</p>
+
+<p>"Does death end all?"</p>
+
+<p>"No," said Kant; "there is the litigation over the estate."</p>
+
+<p>Kant's constant reiteration that he had no use for doctors, lawyers and
+preachers, we can well imagine did not add to his popularity. As for his
+reasoning concerning lawyers, we can all, probably, recall a few
+jug-shaped attorneys who fill the Kant requirements&mdash;takers of
+contingent fees and stirrers-up of strife: men who watch for vessels on
+the rocks and lure with false lights the mariner to his doom. But
+matters since Kant's day have changed considerably for the better. There
+is a demand now for a lawyer who is a businessman and who will keep
+people out of trouble instead of getting them in. And we also have a few
+physicians who are big enough to tell a man there is nothing the matter
+with him, if they think so, and then charge him accordingly&mdash;in inverse
+ratio to the amount of medicine administered.<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_165" id="VIII_Page_165">[Pg 165]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>And while we no longer refer to the clergyman as our spiritual adviser,
+except, perhaps, in way of pleasantry, he surely is useful as a social
+promoter.<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_166" id="VIII_Page_166">[Pg 166]</a></span></p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>The parents of Kant were Lutherans&mdash;punctilious and pious. They were
+descended from Scotch soldiers who had come over there two hundred years
+before and settled down after the war, just as the Hessians settled down
+and went to farming in Pennsylvania, their descendants occasionally
+becoming Daughters of the Revolution, because their grandsires fought
+with Washington.</p>
+
+<p>This Scotch strain gave a sturdy bias to the Kants&mdash;these Lutherans were
+really rebels, and as every one knows, there are only two ways of
+dealing with a religious Scotchman&mdash;agree with him or kill him.</p>
+
+<p>Most people said that Kant was supremely stubborn&mdash;he himself called it
+"firmness in the right." Once, when a couple of calumniators were
+thinking up all the bad things they could say about him, one of them
+exclaimed, "He isn't five feet high!"</p>
+
+<p>"Liar!" came the shrill voice of the Philosopher, who had accidentally
+overheard them, "Liar! I am exactly five feet!" And he drew himself up,
+and struck his staff proudly and defiantly on the ground.</p>
+
+<p>Which reminds one of the story told of Professor Josiah Royce, who once
+rang up six fares on the register when he wished to stop a Boston
+street-car. When the conductor protested, the philosopher called him
+"up-start," "curmudgeon" and "nincompoop," and showed the fallacy of his
+claim that thirty cents had been lost, since nobody had found it.
+Moreover, he offered to prove<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_167" id="VIII_Page_167">[Pg 167]</a></span> his proposition by algebraic equation, if
+one of the gentlemen present had chalk and blackboard on his person.</p>
+
+<p>Once Kant was looking at the flowers in a beautiful garden. But instead
+of looking through the iron pickets, he stooped over and was squinting
+through the key-hole of the lock. A student coming along asked him why
+he didn't look through the pickets and thus get a perfect view.</p>
+
+<p>"Go on, you fool," was the stern reply; "I am studying the law of
+optics&mdash;the unobstructed vision reveals too much&mdash;the vivid view is only
+gotten through a small aperture."</p>
+
+<p>All of which was believed to be a sudden inspiration in way of reply
+that came to the great professor when caught doing an absent-minded
+thing. That Kant was not above a little pious prevarication is shown by
+a story he himself tells. He was never inside of a church once during
+the last fifty years of his life. But when he became Chancellor of the
+University, one of his duties was to lead a procession to the Cathedral,
+where certain formal religious services were held. Kant tried to have
+the exercises in a hall, but failing in this, he did his duty, and
+marched like a pigmy drum-major at the head of the cavalcade.</p>
+
+<p>"Now he will have to go in," the scoffers said.</p>
+
+<p>But he didn't. Arriving at the church-door, he excused himself, pleading
+an urgent necessity, walked around to the back of the church,
+sacrificed, like Diogenes, to<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_168" id="VIII_Page_168">[Pg 168]</a></span> all the gods at once, and made off for
+home, quietly chuckling to himself at the thought of how he had
+circumvented the enemy.</p>
+
+<p>Every actor has just so many make-ups and no more. Usually the
+characters he assumes are variations of a single one. Steele Mackaye
+used to say, "There are only five distinct dramatic situations." The
+artist, too, has his properties. And the recognition of this truth
+caused Massillon to say, "The great preacher has but one sermon, yet out
+of this he makes many&mdash;by giving portions of it backwards, or beginning
+in the middle and working both ways, or presenting patchwork pieces,
+tinted and colored by his mood." All public speakers have canned goods
+they fall back upon when the fresh fruit of thought grows scarce.</p>
+
+<p>The literary man also has his puppets, pet phrases, and situations to
+his liking. Victor Hugo always catches the attention by a blind girl, a
+hunchback, a hunted convict or some mutilated and maimed unfortunate.</p>
+
+<p>In his lectures, Kant used to please the boys by such phrases as this,
+"I dearly love the muse, although I must admit that I have never been
+the recipient of any of her favors." This took so well that later he was
+encouraged to say, "The Old Metaphysics is positively unattractive, but
+the New Metaphysics is to me most lovely, although I can not boast that
+I have ever been honored by any of her favors."</p>
+
+<p>A large audience caused Kant to lose his poise&mdash;he became
+self-conscious&mdash;but<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_169" id="VIII_Page_169">[Pg 169]</a></span> in his own little lecture-room, with a dozen, or
+fifty at the most (because this was the capacity of the room), he was
+charming. He would fix his eye on a single boy, and often upon a single
+button on this boy's coat, and forgetting the immediate theme in hand,
+would ramble into an amusing and most instructive monolog of criticism
+concerning politics, pedagogy or current events. In his writing he was
+exact, heavy and complex, but in these heart-to-heart talks, Herder, who
+attended Kant's lectures for five years, says, "The man had a deal of
+nimble wit, and here Kant was at his best."</p>
+
+<p>So we have two different men&mdash;the man who wrote the "Critique" and the
+man who gave the lectures and clarified his thought by explaining things
+to others. It was in the lectures that he threw off this: "Men are
+creatures that can not do without their kind, yet are sure to quarrel
+when together." This took fairly well, and later he said, "Men can not
+do without men, yet they hate each other when together." And in a year
+after, comes this: "A man is miserable without a wife, and is seldom
+happy after he gets one." No doubt this caused a shout of applause from
+the students, college boys being always on the lookout for just such
+things; and coming from a very confirmed old bachelor it was peculiarly
+fetching.</p>
+
+<p>To say that Kant was devoid of wit, as many writers do, is not to know
+the man. About a year after the "Critique of Pure Reason" appeared, he
+wrote this:<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_170" id="VIII_Page_170">[Pg 170]</a></span> "I am obliged to the learned public for the silence with
+which it has honored my book, as this silence means a suspension of
+judgment and a wise determination not to voice a premature opinion." He
+knew perfectly well that the "learned public" had not read his book, and
+moreover, could not, intelligently, and the silence betokened simply a
+stupid lack of interest. Moreover, he knew there was no such thing as a
+learned public. Kant's remark reveals a keen wit, and it also reveals
+something more&mdash;the pique of the unappreciated author who declares he
+doesn't care what the public thinks of him, and thereby reveals the fact
+that he does.</p>
+
+<p>Here are a couple of remarks that could only have been made in the reign
+of Frederick the Great, and under the spell of a college lecture: "The
+statement that man is the noblest work of God was never made by anybody
+but man, and must therefore be taken 'cum grano salis.'" "We are told
+that God said He made man in His own image, but the remark was probably
+ironical."</p>
+
+<p>Schopenhauer says: "The chief jewel in the crown of Frederick the Great
+is Immanuel Kant. Such a man as Kant could not have held a salaried
+position under any other monarch on the globe at that time and have
+expressed the things that Kant did. A little earlier or a little later,
+and there would have been no such person as Immanuel Kant. Rulers are
+seldom big men, but if they are big enough to recognize and encourage
+big men, they deserve the gratitude of mankind!"</p>
+
+
+
+<hr class="full" />
+<h2><a name="SWEDENBORG" id="SWEDENBORG"></a>SWEDENBORG<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_171" id="VIII_Page_171">[Pg 171]</a></span></h2>
+
+
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>When a man's deeds are discovered after death, his angels, who are
+inquisitors, look into his face, and extend their examination over
+his whole body, beginning with the fingers of each hand. I was
+surprised at this, and the reason was thus explained to me:</p>
+
+<p>Every volition and thought of man is inscribed on his brain; for
+volition and thought have their beginnings in the brain, thence
+they are conveyed to the bodily members, wherein they terminate.
+Whatever, therefore, is in the mind is in the brain, and from the
+brain in the body, according to the order of its parts. So a man
+writes his life in his physique, and thus the angels discover his
+autobiography in his structure.</p></div>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 25em;">&mdash;<i>Swedenborg's "Spirit World"</i></span><br />
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_172" id="VIII_Page_172">[Pg 172]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="center">
+    <a id="image0458-1"></a>
+    <img src="images/0458-1.jpg" width="292" height="400"
+       alt=""
+       title="" />
+
+   <p class="center">SWEDENBORG</p>
+</div>
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_173" id="VIII_Page_173">[Pg 173]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<p>A bucolic citizen of East Aurora, on being questioned by a visitor as to
+his opinion of a certain literary man, exclaimed: "Smart? Is he smart?
+Why, Missus, he writes things nobody can understand!"</p>
+
+<p>This sounds like a paraphrase (but it isn't) of the old lady's remark on
+hearing Henry Ward Beecher preach. She went home and said, "I don't
+think he is so very great&mdash;I understood everything he said!"</p>
+
+<p>Paganini wrote musical scores for the violin, which no violinist has
+ever been able to play. Victor Herbert has recently analyzed some of
+these compositions and shown that Paganini himself could never have
+played them without using four hands and handling two bows at once. So
+far, no one can play a duet on the piano; the hand can span only so many
+keys, and the attempt of Robert Schumann to improve on Nature by
+building an artificial extension to his fingers was vetoed by paralysis
+of the members. Two bodies can not occupy the same space at the same
+time; mathematics has its limit, for you can not look out of a window
+four and a half times. The dictum of Ingersoll that all sticks and
+strings have two ends has not yet been disproved; and Herbert Spencer
+discovered, for his own satisfaction,<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_174" id="VIII_Page_174">[Pg 174]</a></span> fixed limits beyond which the
+mind can not travel. His expression, the Unknowable, reminds one of
+those old maps wherein vast sections were labeled, Terra Incognita.</p>
+
+<p>If we read Emanuel Swedenborg, we find that these vast stretches in the
+domain of thought which Herbert Spencer disposed of as the Unknowable
+have been traversed and minutely described. Swedenborg's books are so
+learned that even Herbert Spencer could not read them: his scores are so
+intricate, his compositions so involved, that no man can play them.</p>
+
+<p>The mystic who sees more than he can explain is universally regarded as
+an unsafe and unreliable person. The people who consult him go away and
+do as they please, and faith in his prophecies weaken as his opinions
+and hopes vary from theirs. We stand by the clairvoyant just as long as
+he gives us palatable things, and no longer, and nobody knows this
+better than your genus clairvoyant. When his advice is contrary to our
+desires, we pronounce him a fraud and go our way. When enterprises of
+great pith and moment are to be carried through, we give the power into
+the hands of the worldling infidel, rather than the spiritual seer.</p>
+
+<p>The person on intimate terms with another world seldom knows much about
+this, and when Robert Browning tells of Sludge, the Medium, he symbols
+his opinion of all mediums. A medium, if sincere, is one who has
+abandoned his intellect and turned the bark of<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_175" id="VIII_Page_175">[Pg 175]</a></span> reason rudderless,
+adrift. This is entirely apart from the very common reinforcement of
+usual psychic powers with fraud, which, beginning in self-deception,
+puts out from port without papers and sails the sea with forged letters
+of marque and reprisal.</p>
+
+<p>There are mediums in every city who tell us they are guided by
+Shakespeare, Dante, Milton, Luther, Tennyson or Henry Ward Beecher. So
+we are led to believe that the chief business of great men in the
+spiritual realm is to guide commonplace men in this, and cause them to
+take pen in hand.</p>
+
+<p>All publishers are perfectly familiar with these productions written by
+people who think they are psychic when they are only sick. And I have
+never yet seen a publisher's reader who had found anything in
+inspirational writing but words, words, words. High-sounding paraphrases
+and rolling sentences do not make literature; and so far as we know,
+only the fallible, live and loving man or woman can breathe into the
+nostrils of a literary production the breath of life. All the rest is
+only lifeless clay.</p>
+
+<p>That mystery enshrouds the workings of the mind, and that some people
+have remarkable mental experiences, none will deny. People who can not
+write at all in a normal mood will, under a psychic spell, produce
+high-sounding literary reverberations, or play the piano or paint a
+picture. Yet the literature is worthless, the music indifferent, and the
+picture bad; but, like Doctor<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_176" id="VIII_Page_176">[Pg 176]</a></span> Johnson's simile of the dog that walked
+on its hind legs, while the walking is never done well, we are amazed
+that it can be done at all.</p>
+
+<p>The astounding assumption comes in when we leap the gulf and attribute
+these peculiar rappings and all this ability of seeing around a corner
+to disembodied spirits. The people with credulity plus, however, always
+close our mouths with this, "If it isn't spirits, what in the world is
+it?" And we, crestfallen and abashed, are forced to say, "We do not
+know."</p>
+
+<p>The absolute worthlessness of spiritual communication comes in when we
+are told by the medium, caught in a contradiction, that spirits are
+awful liars. On this point all mediums agree: many disembodied spirits
+are much given to untruth, and the man who is a liar here will be a liar
+there.</p>
+
+<p>Swedenborg was so annoyed with this disposition on the part of spirits
+to prevaricate that he says, "I usually conduct my affairs regardless of
+their advice." When a spirit came to him and said, "I am the shade of
+Aristotle," Swedenborg challenged him, and the spirit acknowledged he
+was only Jimmy Smith. This is delightfully naive and surely reveals the
+man's sanity: he was deceived by neither living nor dead: he accepted or
+rejected communications as they appealed to his reason: he kept his
+literature and his hallucinations separate from his business, and never
+did a thing which did not gibe with his reason. In this way he lived<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_177" id="VIII_Page_177">[Pg 177]</a></span> to
+be eighty, earnest, yet composed, serene, steering safely clear from
+Bedlam, by making his commonsense the court of last appeal.</p>
+
+<p>Emerson says that the critic who will render the greatest gift to modern
+civilization is the one who will show us how to fuse the characters of
+Shakespeare and Swedenborg. One stands for intellect, the other for
+spirituality. We need both, but we tire of too much goodness, virtue
+palls on us, and if we hear only psalms sung, we will long for the clink
+of glasses and the brave choruses of unrestrained good-fellowship. A
+slap on the back may give you a thrill of delight that the touch of holy
+water on your forehead can not lend.</p>
+
+<p>Shakespeare hasn't much regard for concrete truth; Swedenborg is devoted
+to nothing else. Shakespeare moves jauntily, airily, easily, with
+careless indifference; Swedenborg lives earnestly, seriously, awfully.
+Shakespeare thinks that truth is only a point of view, a local issue, a
+matter of geography; Swedenborg considers it an exact science, with
+boundaries fixed and cornerstones immovable, and the business of his
+life was to map the domain.</p>
+
+<p>If you would know the man Shakespeare, you will find him usually in cap
+and bells. Jaques, Costard, Trinculo, Mercutio, are confessions, for
+into the mouths of these he puts his wisest maxims. Shakespeare dearly
+loved a fool, because he was one. He plays with truth as a kitten
+gambols with a ball of yarn.<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_178" id="VIII_Page_178">[Pg 178]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>So Emerson would have us reconcile the holy zeal for truth and the swish
+of this bright blade of the intellect. He himself confesses that after
+reading Swedenborg he turns to Shakespeare and reads "As You Like It"
+with positive delight, because Shakespeare isn't trying to prove
+anything. The monks of the olden time read Rabelais and Saint Augustine
+with equal relish.</p>
+
+<p>Possibly we take these great men too seriously&mdash;literature is only
+incidental, and what any man says about anything matters little, except
+to himself. No book is of much importance; the vital thing is: What do
+you yourself think?</p>
+
+<p>When we read Shakespeare in a parlor class there are many things we read
+over rapidly&mdash;the teacher does not stop to discuss them. The remarks of
+Ophelia or the shepherd talk of Corin are indecent only when you stop
+and linger over them; it will not do to sculpture such things&mdash;let them
+forever remain in gaseous form. When George Francis Train picked out
+certain parts of the Bible and printed them, and was arrested for
+publishing obscene literature, the charge was proper and right. There
+are things that need not to be emphasized&mdash;they may all be a part of
+life, but in books they should be slurred over as representing simply a
+passing glimpse of nature.</p>
+
+<p>And so the earnest and minute arguments of Swedenborg need not give us
+headache in efforts to comprehend them. They were written for himself,
+as a scaffolding<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_179" id="VIII_Page_179">[Pg 179]</a></span> for his imagination. Don't take Jonathan Edwards too
+seriously&mdash;he means well, but we know more. We know we do not know
+anything, and he never got that far.</p>
+
+<p>The bracketing of the names of Shakespeare and Swedenborg is eminently
+well. They are Titans both. In the presence of such giants, small men
+seem to wither and blow away. Swedenborg was cast in heroic mold, and no
+other man since history began ever compassed in himself so much physical
+science, and with it all on his back, made such daring voyages into the
+clouds.</p>
+
+<p>The men who soar highest and know most about another world usually know
+little about this. No man of his time was so competent a scientist as
+Swedenborg, and no man before or since has mapped so minutely the
+Heavenly Kingdom.</p>
+
+<p>Shakespeare's feet were really never off the ground. His excursion in
+"The Tempest" was only in a captured balloon. Ariel and Caliban he
+secured out of an old book of fables.</p>
+
+<p>Shakespeare knew little about physics; economics and sociology never
+troubled him; he had small Latin and less Greek; he never traveled, and
+the history of the rocks was to him a blank.</p>
+
+<p>Swedenborg anticipated Darwin in a dozen ways; he knew the classic
+languages and most of the modern; he traveled everywhere; he was a
+practical economist, and the best civil engineer of his day.<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_180" id="VIII_Page_180">[Pg 180]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Shakespeare knew the human heart&mdash;where the wild storms arise and where
+the passions die&mdash;the Delectable Isles where Allah counts not the days,
+and the swamps where love turns to hate and Hell knocks on the gates of
+Heaven. Shakespeare knew humanity, but little else; Swedenborg knew
+everything else, but here he balked, for woman's love never unlocked for
+him the secrets of the human heart.<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_181" id="VIII_Page_181">[Pg 181]</a></span></p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>Emanuel Swedenborg was born at Stockholm, Sweden, in Sixteen Hundred
+Eighty-eight. His father was a bishop in the Lutheran Church, a
+professor in the theological seminary, a writer on various things, and
+withal a man of marked power and worth. He was a spiritualist, heard
+voices and received messages from the spirit world. It will be
+remembered that Martin Luther, in his monkish days, heard voices, and
+was in communication with both angels and devils. Many of his followers,
+knowing of his strange experiences, gave themselves up to fasts and
+vigils, and they, too, saw things. Abstain from food for two days and
+this sense of lightness and soaring is the usual result. So strong is
+example, and so prone are we to follow in the footsteps of those we
+love, that one "psychic" is sure to develop more. Little Emanuel
+Swedenborg, aged seven, saw angels, too, and when his father had a
+vision, he straightway matched it with a bigger one.</p>
+
+<p>Then we find the mother of the boy getting alarmed, and peremptorily
+putting her foot down and ordering her husband to cease all celestial
+excursions.</p>
+
+<p>Emanuel was set to work at his books and in the garden, and no more
+rappings was he to hear, nor strange white lights to see, until he was
+fifty-six years old.</p>
+
+<p>Sweden is the least illiterate country on the globe, and has been for
+three hundred years. Her climate is eminently fitted to produce one fine
+product&mdash;men. The<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_182" id="VIII_Page_182">[Pg 182]</a></span> winter's cold does not subdue nor suppress, but tends
+to that earnest industry which improves the passing hours. The
+Scandinavians make hay while the sun shines; but in countries where the
+sun shines all the time men make no hay. In Florida, where flowers bloom
+the whole year through, even the bees quit work and say, "What's the
+use?"</p>
+
+<p>Emanuel Swedenborg climbed the mountains with his father, fished in the
+fjords, collected the mosses on the rocks, and wrote out at length all
+of their amateur discoveries. The boy grew strong in body, lithe of
+limb, clear of eye&mdash;noble and manly.</p>
+
+<p>His affection for his parents was perfect. When fifteen he addressed to
+them letters of apostrophe, all in studied words of deference and
+curious compliment, like, say, the letters of Columbus to Ferdinand and
+Isabella. His purity of purpose was sublime, and the jewel of his soul
+was integrity.</p>
+
+<p>At college he easily stood at the head of his class. He reduced calculus
+to its simplest forms, and made abstractions plain. Even his tutors
+could not follow him. Once the King's actuary was called upon to verify
+some of his calculations. This brought him to the notice of the King,
+and thereafter he was always on easy and familiar terms with royalty.
+There is no hallucination in mathematics&mdash;figures do not lie, although
+mathematicians may, but this one never did.</p>
+
+<p>We look in vain for college pranks, and some of those<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_183" id="VIII_Page_183">[Pg 183]</a></span> absurd and
+foolish things in which young men delight. We wish he could unbend, and
+be indiscreet, or even impolite, just to show us his humanity. But no,
+he is always grave, earnest, dignified, and rebukingly handsome. The
+college "grind" with bulging forehead, round shoulders, myopic vision
+and shambling gait is well known in every college, and serves as the
+butt of innumerable practical jokes. But no one took liberties with
+Emanuel Swedenborg either in boyhood or in after-life. His countenance
+was stern, yet not forbidding; his form tall, manly and muscular, and
+his persistent mountain-climbing and outdoor prospecting and botanizing
+gave him a glow of health which the typical grubber after facts very
+seldom has.</p>
+
+<p>Thus we find Emanuel Swedenborg walking with stately tread through
+college, taking all the honors, looked upon by teachers and professors
+with a sort of awe, and pointed out by his fellow students in subdued
+wonder. His physical strength became a byword, yet we do not find he
+ever exercised it in contests; but it served as a protection, and
+commanded respect from all the underlings.</p>
+
+<p>At twenty we find him falling violently in love, the one sole
+love-affair of his lone life. Instead of going to the girl he placed the
+matter before her father, and secured from him a written warrant for the
+damsel, returnable in three years' time. This document he carried with
+him, pored over it, slept with it under his pillow. As<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_184" id="VIII_Page_184">[Pg 184]</a></span> for the girl,
+timid, sensitive, aged fifteen, she fled on his approach, and shook with
+fear if he looked at her. He made his love plain by logical formulas and
+proved his passion by geometrical permutations&mdash;by charts and diagrams.
+A seasoned widow might have broken up the icy fastness of his soul and
+melted his forbidding nature in the crucible of feeling, but this poor
+girl just wanted some one to hold her little hand and say peace to her
+fluttering heart. How could she go plump herself in his lap, pull his
+ears and tell him he was a fool? Finally, the girl's brother, seeing her
+distress, stole the precious warrant from Swedenborg's coat, tore it up,
+and Swedenborg knew his case was hopeless. He brought calculus to bear,
+and proved by the law of averages that there were just as good fish in
+the sea as ever were caught.<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_185" id="VIII_Page_185">[Pg 185]</a></span></p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>At twenty-one Swedenborg graduated at the University of Upsala. He took
+the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, and was sent on a tour of the
+European capitals to complete his education. He visited Hamburg, Paris,
+Vienna and then went to London, where he remained a year. He bore
+letters from the King of Sweden that admitted him readily into the best
+society, and as far as we know he carried himself with dignity, filled
+with a zeal to know and to become.</p>
+
+<p>One prime object in his travel was to learn the language of the country
+that he was in, and so we hear of his writing home, "In Hamburg I speak
+only German; at Paris I talk and think in French; in London no one
+doubts but that I am an Englishman." This not only reveals the young
+man's accomplishments, but shows that sublime confidence in himself
+which never forsook him.</p>
+
+<p>The desire of his father was that he should enter the diplomatic service
+of the government, and the interest the King took in his welfare shows
+that the way was opening in that direction. But in the various cities
+where he traveled he merely used his consular letters to reach the men
+in each place who knew most of mathematics, anatomy, geology, astronomy
+and physics. He hunted out the thinkers and the doers, and it seems he
+had enough specific gravity of soul so he was never turned away.<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_186" id="VIII_Page_186">[Pg 186]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>When big men meet for the first time, they try conclusions just as
+surely as do the patriarchs of the herds. Instantly there is a mental
+duel, before scarcely a word is spoken, and the psychic measurements
+then and there taken are usually about correct.</p>
+
+<p>The very silence of a superior person is impressive. And knowing this,
+we do not wonder that Swedenborg would sometimes call unannounced on men
+in high station, and forgetting his letters, would ask for an interview.
+The audacity of the request would break down the barriers, and his calm,
+quiet self-possession would do the rest. The man wanted nothing but
+knowledge. Returning home at twenty-seven, he wrote out two voluminous
+reports of his travels, one for his father and one for the King. These
+reports were so complete, so learned, so full of allusion, suggestion
+and advice, that it is probable they were never read.</p>
+
+<p>He was made Assessor of the School of Mines, an office which we would
+call that of Assayer, and his business was to give scientific advice as
+to the value of ores and the best ways to mine and smelt them.</p>
+
+<p>About this time we hear of Swedenborg writing to his brother explaining
+that he was working on the model of a boat that would navigate below the
+surface of the sea, and do great damage to the enemy; a gun that would
+discharge a thousand bullets a minute; a flying machine that would sail
+the air like a gull; a mechanical chariot that would go twenty miles an
+hour on a smooth road<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_187" id="VIII_Page_187">[Pg 187]</a></span> without horses; and a plan of mathematics which
+would quickly and simply enable us to compute and express fractions. We
+also hear of his inventing a treadmill chariot, which carried the horse
+on board the vehicle, but the horse once ran away and attained such a
+velocity in the streets of Stockholm that people declared the whole
+thing was a diabolical invention, and in deference to popular clamor
+Swedenborg discontinued his experiments along this line.</p>
+
+<p>One is amazed that this man in the early days of the Eighteenth Century
+should have anticipated the submarine boat, and guessed what could be
+done by the expansion of steam; prophesied a Gatling gun, and made a
+motor-car that carried the horse, working on a treadmill and propelling
+the vehicle faster than the horse could go on the ground; and if the
+inventor had had the gasoline he surely would have made an automobile.</p>
+
+<p>His diversity of inventive genius was finally focalized on building
+sluiceways and canals for the government, and he set Holyoke an example
+by running the water back and forth in canals and utilizing the power
+over and over again.</p>
+
+<p>Later he was called upon to break a blockade by transferring ships
+overland a distance of fourteen miles. This he successfully did by the
+use of a roller railway, and as a reward for the feat was duly knighted
+by the King.<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_188" id="VIII_Page_188">[Pg 188]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The one idea that he worked out in detail and gave to the world, and
+which the world has not improved upon, is our present decimal system.</p>
+
+<p>As the years passed, Swedenborg became rich. He lived well, but not
+lavishly. We hear of his having his private carriages and being attended
+by servants on his travels.</p>
+
+<p>He lectured at various universities, and on account of his close
+association with royalty, as well as on account of his own high
+character and strong personality, he was a commanding figure wherever he
+went. His life was full to the brim.</p>
+
+<p>And we naturally expect that a man of wealth, with all the honors
+belonging to any one person, should take on a comforting accumulation of
+adipose, and encyst himself in the conventionalities of church, state
+and society.</p>
+
+<p>And this was what the man himself saw in store, for at forty-six he
+wrote a book on science, setting forth his ideas and making accurate
+prophecies as to what would yet be brought about. He regrets that a
+multiplicity of duties and failing health forbid his carrying out his
+plans, and further adds, "As this is probably the last book I shall ever
+write, I desire here to make known to posterity these thoughts which so
+far as I know have never been explained before."</p>
+
+<p>The real fact was that at this time Swedenborg's career had not really
+begun, and if he had then died, his fame would not have extended beyond
+the country of his birth.<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_189" id="VIII_Page_189">[Pg 189]</a></span></p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>Mr. Poultney Bigelow, happening to be in Brighton, England, a few years
+ago, was entertained at the home of a worthy London broker. The family
+was prosperous and intelligent, but clung closely to all conventional
+and churchly lines. As happens often in English homes, the man does most
+of the thinking and sets metes and bounds to all conversation as well as
+reading. The mother refers to him as "He," and the children and servants
+look up to him and make mental obeisance when he speaks.</p>
+
+<p>"I hear Herbert Spencer lives in Brighton&mdash;do you ever see him?"
+ventured the guest of the hostess, in a vain reaching 'round for a topic
+of mutual interest. "Spencer&mdash;Spencer? Who is Herbert Spencer?" asked
+the good mother.</p>
+
+<p>But "He" caught the run of the talk and came to the rescue: "Oh, Mother,
+Spencer is nobody you are interested in&mdash;just a writer of infidelic
+books!"</p>
+
+<p>The next day Bigelow called on Spencer and saw upon his table a copy of
+"Science and Health," which some one had sent him. He smiled when the
+American referred to the book, and in answer to a question said: "It is
+surely interesting, and I find many pleasing maxims scattered through
+it. But we can hardly call it scientific, any more than we can call
+Swedenborg's 'Conjugal Love' scientific." And the author of "First
+Principles" showed he had read Mrs. Eddy's book, for he turned to the
+chapter on "Marriage," calling<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_190" id="VIII_Page_190">[Pg 190]</a></span> attention to the statement that marriage
+in its present status is a permitted condition&mdash;a matter of
+expediency&mdash;and children will yet be begotten by telepathic
+correspondence. "The unintelligibility of the book recommends it to many
+and accounts for its vogue. Swedenborg's immortality is largely owing to
+the same reason," and the man who once loved George Eliot smiled not
+unkindly, and the conversation drifted to other themes.</p>
+
+<p>This comparison of Swedenborg with Mary Baker Eddy is not straining a
+point. No one can read "Science and Health" intelligently unless his
+mind is first prepared for it by some one whose mind has been prepared
+for it by some one else. It requires a deal of explanation; and like the
+Plan of Salvation, no one would ever know anything about it if it wasn't
+elucidated by an educated person.</p>
+
+<p>Books strong in abstraction are a convenient rag-bag for your mental
+odds and ends. Swedenborg's philosophy is "Science and Health"
+multiplied by forty. He lays down propositions and proves them in a
+thousand pages.</p>
+
+<p>Yet this must be confessed: The Swedenborgians and the Christian
+Scientists as sects rank above most other denominations in point of
+intellectual worth. In speaking of the artist Thompson, Nathaniel
+Hawthorne once wrote: "This artist is a man of thought, and with no mean
+idea of art, a Swedenborgian, or, as he prefers to call it, a member of
+the New Church. I have generally<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_191" id="VIII_Page_191">[Pg 191]</a></span> found something marked in men who
+adopt that faith. He seems to me to possess truth in himself, and to aim
+at it is his artistic endeavor."</p>
+
+<p>Swedenborg's essay on "Conjugal Love" contains four hundred thousand
+words and divides the theme into forty parts, each of these being
+subdivided into forty more. The delights of paradise are pictured in the
+perfect mating of the right man with the right woman. In order to
+explain what perfect marriage is, Swedenborg works by the process of
+elimination and reveals every possible condition of mismating. Every
+error, mistake, crime, wrong and fallacy is shown in order to get at the
+truth. Swedenborg tells us that he got his facts from four husbands and
+four wives in the Spirit Land, and so his statements are authentic.
+Emerson disposes of Swedenborg's ideal marriage as it exists in heaven,
+as "merely an indefinite bridal-chamber," and intimates that it is the
+dream of one who had never been disillusioned by experience.</p>
+
+<p>In Maudsley's fine book, "Body and Mind," the statement is made that
+during Swedenborg's stay in London his life was decidedly promiscuous.
+Fortunately the innocence and ignorance of Swedenborg's speculations are
+proof in themselves that his entire life was absolutely above reproach.
+Swedenborg's bridal-chamber is the dream of a school-girl, presented by
+a scientific analyst, a man well past his grand climacteric, who
+imagined that the perpetuation of sexual "bliss" was<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_192" id="VIII_Page_192">[Pg 192]</a></span> a desirable thing.</p>
+
+<p>Emerson hints that there is the taint of impurity in Swedenborg's
+matrimonial excursions, for "life and nature are right, but closet
+speculations are bound to be vicious when persisted in." Max M&uuml;ller's
+little book, "A Story of German Love," showing the intellectual and
+spiritual uplift that comes from the natural and spontaneous friendship
+of a good man and woman, is worth all the weighty speculations of all
+the virtuous bachelors who ever lived and raked the stagnant ponds of
+their imagination for an ideal.</p>
+
+<p>The love of a recluse is not God's kind&mdash;only running water is pure; the
+living love of a live man and woman absolves itself, refines, benefits,
+and blesses, though it be the love of Aucassin and Nicolete, Plutarch
+and Laura, Paola and Francesca, Abelard and Heloise, and they go to hell
+for it.</p>
+
+<p>From his thirty-fourth year to his forty-sixth Swedenborg wrote nothing
+for publication. He lectured, traveled, and advised the government on
+questions of engineering and finance, and in various practical ways made
+himself useful. Then it was that he decided to break the silence and
+give the world the benefit of his studies, which he does in his great
+work, "Principia." Well does Emerson say that this work, purporting to
+explain the birth of worlds, places the man side by side with Aristotle,
+Leonardo, Bacon, Selden, Copernicus and Humboldt.</p>
+
+<p>It is a book for giants, written by one. Although the<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_193" id="VIII_Page_193">[Pg 193]</a></span> man was a nominal
+Christian, yet to him, plainly, the Bible was only a book of fables and
+fairy-tales. The Mosaic account of Creation is simply waived, as we
+waive Jack the Giant-Killer when dealing with the question of capital
+punishment.</p>
+
+<p>That Darwin read Swedenborg with minute care, there is no doubt. In the
+"Principia" is a chapter on mosses wherein it is explained how the first
+vestige of lichen catches the dust particles of disintegrating rock, and
+we get the first tokens of a coming forest. Darwin never made a point
+better; and the nebular hypothesis and the origin of species are worked
+out with conjectures, fanciful flights, queer conceits, poetic
+comparisons, far-reaching analogies, and most astounding leaps of
+imagination.</p>
+
+<p>The man was warming to his task&mdash;this was not to be his last book&mdash;the
+heavens were opening before him, and if he went astray it was light from
+heaven that dazzled him. No one could converse with him, because there
+was none who could understand him; none could refute him, because none
+could follow his winding logic, which led to heights where the air was
+too rarefied for mortals to breathe. He speculated on magnetism,
+chemistry, astronomy, anatomy, geology and spiritism. He believed a
+thing first and then set the mighty machinery of his learning to bear to
+prove it. This is the universal method of great minds&mdash;they divine
+things first. But no other scientist the world has ever<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_194" id="VIII_Page_194">[Pg 194]</a></span> known divined
+as much as this man. He reminds us of his own motor-car, with the horse
+inside running away with the machine and none to stop the beast in its
+mad flight. To his engine there is no governor, and he revolves like the
+screw of a steamship when the waves lift the craft out of the water.</p>
+
+<p>There is no stimulant equal to expression. The more men write the more
+they know. Swedenborg continued to write, and following the "Principia"
+came "The Animal Kingdom," "The Economy of the Universe," and more vast
+reaches into the realm of fact and fancy. His books were published at
+his own expense, and the work was done under his own supervision at
+Antwerp, Amsterdam, Venice, Vienna, London and Paris. In all these
+cities he worked to get the benefit of their libraries and museums.</p>
+
+<p>Popularity was out of the question&mdash;only the learned attempted to follow
+his investigations, and these preferred to recommend his books rather
+than read them. And as for heresy, his disbelief in popular
+superstitions was so veiled in scientific formulas that it went
+unchallenged. Had he simplified truth for the masses his career would
+have been that of Erasmus. His safety lay in his unintelligibility. He
+was gracious, gentle, suave, with a calm self-confidence that routed
+every would-be antagonist.</p>
+
+<p>It was in his fifty-sixth year that the supreme change came over him. He
+was in London, in his room, when<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_195" id="VIII_Page_195">[Pg 195]</a></span> a great light came to him. He was
+prostrated as was Saint Paul on the road to Damascus; he lost
+consciousness, and was awakened by a reassuring voice. Christ came to
+him and talked with him face to face; he was told that he would be shown
+the inmost recesses of the Spirit World, and must write out the
+revelation for the benefit of humanity.</p>
+
+<p>There was no disturbance in the man's general health, although he
+continued to have visions, trances and curious dreams. He began to
+write&mdash;steadily, day by day the writings went on&mdash;but from this time
+experience was disregarded, and for him the material world slept; he
+dealt only with spiritual things, using the physical merely for analogy,
+and his geology and botany were those of the Old Testament.</p>
+
+<p>Returning to Stockholm he resigned his government office, broke his
+engagements with the University, repudiated all scientific studies, and
+devoted himself to his new mission&mdash;that is, writing out what the
+spirits dictated, and what he saw on his celestial journeys.</p>
+
+<p>That there are passages of great beauty and insight in his work, is very
+sure, and by discarding what one does not understand, and accepting what
+seems reasonable and right, a practical theology that serves and
+benefits can be built up. The value of Swedenborg lies largely in what
+you can read into him.</p>
+
+<p>The Swedish Protestant Church in London chose him as their bishop
+without advising with him. Gradually<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_196" id="VIII_Page_196">[Pg 196]</a></span> other scattering churches did the
+same, and after his death a well-defined cult, calling themselves
+Swedenborgians, arose and his works were ranked as holy writ and read in
+the churches, side by side with the Bible.</p>
+
+<p>Swedenborg died in London, March Twenty-ninth, Seventeen Hundred
+Seventy-two, aged eighty-four years. Up to the very day of his passing
+away he enjoyed good health, and was possessed of a gentle, kind and
+obliging disposition that endeared him to all he met. There is an idea
+in the minds of simple people that insanity is always accompanied by
+violence, ravings and uncouth and dangerous conduct. Dreams are a
+temporary insanity&mdash;reason sleeps and the mind roams the universe,
+uncurbed and wildly free. On awakening, for an instant we may not know
+where we are, and all things are in disorder; but gradually time,
+location, size and correspondences find their proper place and we are
+awake.</p>
+
+<p>Should, however, the dreams of the night continue during the day, when
+we are awake and moving about, we would say the man was insane.
+Swedenborg could become oblivious to every external thing, and dream at
+will. And to a degree his mind always dictated the dreams, at least the
+subject was of his own volition. If it was necessary to travel or
+transact business, the dreams were postponed and he lived right here on
+earth, a man of good judgment, safe reason and proper<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_197" id="VIII_Page_197">[Pg 197]</a></span> conduct.</p>
+
+<p>Unsoundness of mind is not necessarily folly. Across the murky clouds of
+madness shoots and gleams, at times, the deepest insight into the heart
+of things. And the fact that Swedenborg was unbalanced does not warrant
+us in rejecting all he said and taught as false and faulty. He was
+always well able to take care of himself and to manage his affairs
+successfully, even to printing the books that contain the record of his
+ravings. Follow closely the lives of great inventors, discoverers, poets
+and artists, and it will be found that the world is debtor to so-called
+madmen for many of its richest gifts. Few, indeed, are they who can
+burst the bonds of custom and condition, sail out across the unknown
+seas, and bring us records of the Enchanted Isles. And who shall say
+where originality ends and insanity begins? Swedenborg himself
+attributed his remarkable faculties to the development of a sixth sense,
+and intimates that in time all men will be so equipped. Death is as
+natural as life, and possibly insanity is a plan of Nature for sending a
+searchlight flash into the darkness of futurity. Insane or not, thinking
+men everywhere agree that Swedenborg blessed and benefited the
+race&mdash;preparing the way for the thinkers and the doers who should come
+after him.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr class="full" />
+<h2><a name="SPINOZA" id="SPINOZA"></a>SPINOZA<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_198" id="VIII_Page_198">[Pg 198]</a></span></h2>
+
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Men are so made as to resent nothing more impatiently than to be<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_199" id="VIII_Page_199">[Pg 199]</a></span>
+treated as criminal on account of opinions which they deem true,
+and charged as guilty for simply what wakes their affection to God
+and men. Hence, laws about opinions are aimed not at the base but
+at the noble, and tend not to restrain the evil-minded but rather
+to irritate the good, and can not be enforced without great peril
+to the Government.... What evil can be imagined greater for a
+State, than that honorable men, because they have thoughts of their
+own and can not act a lie, are sent as culprits into exile! What
+more baneful than that men, for no guilt or wrongdoing, but for the
+generous largeness of their mind, should be taken for enemies and
+led off to death, and that the torture-bed, the terror of the bad,
+should become, to the signal shame of authority, the finest stage
+for the public spectacle of endurance and virtue!</p></div>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 25em;">&mdash;<i>Benedict Spinoza</i></span><br />
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_200" id="VIII_Page_200">[Pg 200]</a></span></p>
+
+
+<div class="center">
+    <a id="image0459-1"></a>
+    <img src="images/0459-1.jpg" width="280" height="400"
+       alt=""
+       title="" />
+
+   <p class="center">SPINOZA</p>
+</div>
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_201" id="VIII_Page_201">[Pg 201]</a></span></p>
+
+
+<p>The word philosophy means the love of truth: "philo," love; "soph,"
+truth; or, if you prefer, the love of that which is reasonable and
+right. Philosophy refers directly to the life of man&mdash;how shall we live
+so as to get the most out of this little Earth-Journey!</p>
+
+<p>Life is our heritage&mdash;we all have so much vitality at our disposal&mdash;what
+shall we do with it?</p>
+
+<p>Truth can be proved in just one way, and no other&mdash;that is, by living
+it. You know what is good, only by trying. Truth, for us, is that which
+brings good results&mdash;happiness or reasonable content, health, peace and
+prosperity. These things are all relative&mdash;none are final, and they are
+good only as they are mixed in right proportion with other things.
+Oxygen, we say, is life, but it is also death, for it attacks every
+living thing with pitiless persistency. Hydrogen is good, but it makes
+the very hottest fire known, and may explode if you try to confine it.</p>
+
+<p>Prosperity is excellent, but too much is very dangerous to most folks;
+and to seek happiness as a final aim is like loving love as a
+business&mdash;the end is desolation, death. Good health is best secured and
+retained by those who are not anxious about health. Absolute good can
+never be known, for always and forever creeps in the<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_202" id="VIII_Page_202">[Pg 202]</a></span> suspicion that if
+we had acted differently a better result might have followed.</p>
+
+<p>And that which is good for one is not necessarily good for another.</p>
+
+<p>But there are certain general rules of conduct which apply to all men,
+and to sum these up and express them in words is the business of the
+philosopher. As all men live truth, in degree, and all men express some
+truth in language, so to that extent all men are philosophers; but by
+common assent, we give the title only to the men who make other men
+think for themselves.</p>
+
+<p>Whistler refers to Velasquez as "a painter's painter." John Wesley said,
+"No man is worthy to be called a teacher, unless he be a teacher of
+teachers." The great writer is the one who inspires writers. And in this
+book I will not refer to a man as a philosopher unless he has inspired
+philosophers.</p>
+
+<p>Preachers and priests in the employ of a denomination are attorneys for
+the defense. God is not found in a theological seminary, for very seldom
+is the seminary seminal&mdash;it galvanizes the dead rather than vitalizes
+the germs of thought in the living. No man understands theology&mdash;it is
+not intended to be understood; it is merely believed. Most colleges are
+places where is taught the gentle art of sophistication; and memorizing
+the theories of great men gone passes for knowledge.</p>
+
+<p>Words are fluid and change their meaning with the years and according to
+the mind and mood of the<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_203" id="VIII_Page_203">[Pg 203]</a></span> hearer. A word means all you read into it, and
+nothing more. The word "soph" once had a high and honorable distinction,
+but now it is used to point a moral, and the synonym of sophomore is
+soft.</p>
+
+<p>Originally the sophist was a lover of truth; then he became a lover of
+words that concealed truth, and the chief end of his existence was to
+balance a feather on his nose and keep three balls in the air for the
+astonishment and admiration of the bystanders.</p>
+
+<p>Education is something else.</p>
+
+<p>Education is growth, development, life in abundance, creation.</p>
+
+<p>We grow only through exercise. The faculties we use become strong, and
+those we fail to use are taken away from us.</p>
+
+<p>This exercise of our powers through which growth is attained affords the
+finest gratification that mortals know. To think, reason, weigh, sift,
+decide and act&mdash;this is life. It means health, sanity and length of
+days. Those live longest who live most.</p>
+
+<p>The end of college education to the majority of students and parents is
+to secure a degree, and a degree is valuable only to the man who needs
+it. Visiting the office of the "Outlook," a weekly, religious newspaper,
+I noticed that the titles, Rev., Prof, and Dr., and the degrees, M.&nbsp;D.,
+D.&nbsp;D., LL.&nbsp;D., Ph.&nbsp;D., were carefully used by the clerks in addressing
+envelopes and wrappers. And I said to the manager, "Why this misuse of
+time<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_204" id="VIII_Page_204">[Pg 204]</a></span> and effort? The ink thus wasted should be sold and the proceeds
+given to the poor!" And the man replied, "To omit these titles and
+degrees would cost us half our subscription-list." And so I assume that
+man is a calculating animal, not a thinking one.</p>
+
+<p>And the point of this sermonette is that truth is not monopolized by
+universities and colleges; nor must we expect much from those who parade
+degrees and make professions. It is one thing to love truth and it is
+another thing to lust after honors.</p>
+
+<p>The larger life&mdash;the life of love, health, self-sufficiency, usefulness
+and expanding power&mdash;this life in abundance is often taught best out of
+the mouths of babes and sucklings. It is not esoteric, nor hidden in
+secret formulas, nor locked in languages old and strange.</p>
+
+<p>No one can compute how much the bulwarked learned ones have blocked the
+path of wisdom. Socrates, the barefoot philosopher, did more good than
+all the Sophists with their schools. Diogenes, who lived in a tub,
+searched in vain for an honest man, owned nothing but a blanket and a
+bowl, and threw the bowl away when he saw a boy drinking out of his
+hand, even yet makes men think, and so blesses and benefits the race.
+Jesus of Nazareth, with no place to lay his tired head, associating with
+publicans and sinners, and choosing his closest companions from among
+ignorant fishermen, still lives in the affections of millions of people,
+a molding force for good untold. Friedrich Froebel, who<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_205" id="VIII_Page_205">[Pg 205]</a></span> first preached
+the propensity to play as a pedagogic dynamo, as the tides of the sea
+could be used to turn the countless wheels of trade, is yet only
+partially accepted, but has influenced every teacher in Christendom and
+stamped his personality upon the walls of schoolrooms unnumbered. Then
+comes Richard Wagner, the political outcast, writing from exile the
+music that serves as a mine for much of our modern composing, marching
+down the centuries to the solemn chant of his "Pilgrims' Chorus";
+William Morris, Oxford graduate and uncouth workingman in blouse and
+overalls, arrested in the streets of London for haranguing crowds on
+Socialism, let go with a warning, on suspended sentence&mdash;canceled only
+by death&mdash;making his mark upon the walls of every well-furnished house
+in England or America; Jean Francois Millet, starved out in art-loving
+Paris, his pictures refused at the Salon, living next door to abject
+want in Barbizon, dubbed the "wild man of the woods," dead and turned to
+dust, his pictures commanding such sums as Paris never before paid; Walt
+Whitman, issuing his book at his own expense, publishers having refused
+it, this book excluded from the mails, as Wanamaker immortalized himself
+by serving a like sentence on Tolstoy; Walt Whitman, riding on top of a
+Broadway 'bus all day, happy in the great solitude of bustling city
+streets, sending his barbaric yawp down the ages, singing p&aelig;ans to those
+who fail, chants to Death&mdash;strong deliverer&mdash;and giving<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_206" id="VIII_Page_206">[Pg 206]</a></span> courage to a
+fear-stricken world; Thoreau, declining to pay the fee of five dollars
+for his Harvard diploma "because it wasn't worth the price," later
+refusing to pay poll-tax and sent to jail, thus missing, possibly, the
+chance of finding that specimen of Victoria regia on Concord
+River&mdash;Thoreau, most virile of all the thinkers of his day, inspiring
+Emerson, the one man America could illest spare; Spinoza, the
+intellectual hermit, asking nothing, and giving everything&mdash;all these
+worked their philosophy up into life and are the type of men who jostle
+the world out of its ruts&mdash;creators all, one with Deity, sons of God,
+saviors of the race.<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_207" id="VIII_Page_207">[Pg 207]</a></span></p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>Washington Irving once spoke of Spain as the Paradise of Jews. But it
+must be borne in mind that he wrote the words in Granada, which was
+essentially a Moorish province. The Moors and the Jews are both Semitic
+in origin&mdash;they trace back to a common ancestry. It was the Moslem Moors
+that welcomed the Jews in both Venetia and Spain, not the Christians.
+The wealth, energy and practical business sense of the Jews recommended
+them to the grandees of Leon, Aragon and Castile. To the Jews they
+committed their exchequer, the care of their health, the setting of
+their jewels, and the fashioning of their finery. In this genial
+atmosphere many of the Jews grew great in the study of science,
+literature, history, philosophy and all that makes for mental
+betterment. They increased in numbers, in opulence and in culture. Their
+thrift and success set them apart as a mark for hate and envy.</p>
+
+<p>It was a period of ominous peace, of treacherous repose.</p>
+
+<p>A senseless and fanatical cry went up, that the Moors&mdash;the
+infidels&mdash;must be driven from Spain. The iniquities and inhuman
+barbarities visited upon the Mohammedan Moors would make a book in
+itself, but let it go at this: Ferdinand and Isabella drove the
+Mohammedans from Spain. In the struggle, the Jews were overlooked&mdash;and
+anyway, Christians do not repudiate the Old Testament, and if the Jews
+would accept Christ, why, they could remain!<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_208" id="VIII_Page_208">[Pg 208]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>It looked easy to the gracious King and Queen of Spain&mdash;it was really
+generous: two religions were unnecessary, and Christianity was beautiful
+and right. If the Jews would become Catholics, all barriers would be
+removed&mdash;the Jews would be recognized as citizens and every walk of life
+would be open to them.</p>
+
+<p>This manifesto to the Jews is still quoted by Churchmen to show the
+excellence, tolerance, patience and love of the Spanish rulers. Turn
+your synagogues over to the Catholics&mdash;come and be one with us&mdash;we will
+all worship the one God together&mdash;come, these open arms invite&mdash;no
+distinctions&mdash;no badges&mdash;no preferences&mdash;no prejudices&mdash;come!</p>
+
+<p>In quoting the edict it is not generally stated that the Jews were given
+thirty days to make the change.</p>
+
+<p>The Jews who loved their faith fled; the weak succumbed, or pretended
+to. If a Jew wished to flee the country he could, but he must leave all
+his property behind. This caused many to remain and profess
+Christianity, only awaiting a time when their property could be turned
+into gold or jewels and be borne upon the person. This fondness for
+concrete wealth is a race instinct implanted in the Jewish mind by the
+inbred thought that possibly tomorrow he must fly.</p>
+
+<p>After attending service at a Catholic Church, Jews would go home and in
+secret read the Talmud and in whispers chant the Psalms of David.</p>
+
+<p>Laws were passed making such action a penal offense&mdash;spies<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_209" id="VIII_Page_209">[Pg 209]</a></span> were
+everywhere. No secret can be kept long, and in the Province of Seville
+over two thousand Jews were hanged or burned in a single year. When
+Ferdinand and Isabella gave Torquemada, Deza and Lucio orders to make
+good Catholics of all Jews, they had not the faintest idea what would be
+the result. Every Jew that was hurried to the stake was first stripped
+of his property.</p>
+
+<p>No Jew was safe, especially if he was rich&mdash;his sincerity or insincerity
+had really little to do in the matter. The prisons were full, the fagots
+crackled, the streets ran blood, and all in the name of the gentle
+Christ.</p>
+
+<p>Then for a time the severity relaxed, for the horror had spent itself.
+But early in the Seventeenth Century the same edicts were again put
+forth.</p>
+
+<p>Fortunately, priesthood had tried its mailed hand on the slow and
+sluggish Dutch, with the result that the Spaniards were driven from the
+Netherlands. Holland was the home of freedom. Amsterdam became a Mecca
+for the oppressed. The Jews flocked thither, and among others who, in
+Sixteen Hundred Thirty-one, landed on the quay was a young Jew by the
+name of Michael d'Espinoza. With him was a Moorish girl that he had
+rescued from the clutch of a Spanish grandee, in whose house she had
+been kept a prisoner.</p>
+
+<p>By a happy accident, this beautiful girl of seventeen had escaped from
+her tormentors and was huddling, sobbing, in an alley as the young Jew
+came hurrying by<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_210" id="VIII_Page_210">[Pg 210]</a></span> on his way to the ship that was to bear him to
+freedom. It was near day-dawn&mdash;there was no time to lose&mdash;the young man
+only knew that the girl, like himself, was in imminent peril. A small
+boat waited near&mdash;soon they were safely secreted in the hold of the
+ship. Before sundown the tide had carried the ship to sea, and Portugal
+was but a dark line on the horizon.</p>
+
+<p>Other refugees were on board the boat; they came from their
+hiding-places&mdash;and the second day out a refugee rabbi called a meeting
+on deck. It was a solemn service of thanksgiving and the songs of Zion
+were sung, the first time for some in many months, and only friends and
+the great, sobbing, salt sea listened.</p>
+
+<p>The tears of the Moorish girl were now dried&mdash;the horror of the future
+had gone with the black memories of the past. Other women, not quite so
+poor, contributed to her wardrobe, and there and then, after she had
+been accepted into the Jewish faith, she and Michael d'Espinoza, aged
+twenty-two, were married.</p>
+
+<p>The ship arrived at Amsterdam in safety. In a year, on November
+Twenty-fourth, Sixteen Hundred Thirty-two, in a little stone house that
+still stands on the canal bank, was born Benedict Spinoza.<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_211" id="VIII_Page_211">[Pg 211]</a></span></p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>Benedict Spinoza was brought up in the faith and culture of his people.
+Beyond his religious training at the synagogue, there was a Jewish High
+School at Amsterdam which he attended. This school might compare very
+favorably with our modern schools, in that it included a certain degree
+of manual training. Besides this he had received special instruction
+from several learned rabbis. In matters of true education, the Jews have
+ever been in advance of the Gentile world&mdash;they bring their children up
+to be useful. The father of Benedict was a maker of lenses for
+spectacles, and at this trade the boy was very early set to work. Again
+and again in the writings of Spinoza, we find the argument that every
+man should have a trade and earn his living with his hands, not by
+writing, speaking or philosophizing. If you can earn a living at your
+trade, you thus make your mind free.</p>
+
+<p>This early idea of usefulness led to a sympathy with another religious
+body, of which there were quite a number of members in Holland: the
+Mennonites. This sect was founded by Menno Simons, a Frieslander,
+contemporary of Luther; only this man swung on further from Catholicism
+than Luther and declared that a paid priesthood was what made all the
+trouble. Religion to him was a matter of individual inspiration. When an
+institution was formed, built on man's sense of relation with his Maker,
+property purchased, and paid priests employed, instantly there was a
+pollution of the well<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_212" id="VIII_Page_212">[Pg 212]</a></span> of life. It became a money-making scheme, and a
+grand clutch for place and power followed: it really ceased to be
+religion at all, so long as we define religion in its spiritual sense.
+"A priest," said Menno, "is a man who thrives on the sacred relations
+that exist between man and God, and is little better than a person who
+would live on the love-emotions of men and women."</p>
+
+<p>This certainly was bold language, but to be exact, it was persecution
+that forced the expression. The Catholics had placed an interdict on all
+services held by Protestant pastors, and the deprivation proved to Menno
+that paid preaching and costly churches and trappings were really not
+necessary at all. Man could go to God without them, and pray in secret.
+Spirituality is not dependent on either church or priest.</p>
+
+<p>The Mennonites in Holland escaped theological criticism by disclaiming
+to be a church, and calling their institution a college, and themselves
+"Collegiants."</p>
+
+<p>All the Mennonites asked was to be let alone. They were plain,
+unpretentious people, who worked hard, lived frugally, refused to make
+oaths, to accept civil office, or to go to war. They are a variant of
+the impulse that makes Quakers and all those peculiar people known as
+Primitive Christians, who mark the swinging of the pendulum from pride
+and pretense to simplicity and a life of modest usefulness.</p>
+
+<p>The sincerity, truthfulness and virtue of the Mennonites so impressed
+itself upon even the ruthless Corsican,<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_213" id="VIII_Page_213">[Pg 213]</a></span> that he made them exempt from
+conscription.</p>
+
+<p>Before Spinoza was twenty, he had come into acquaintanceship with these
+plain people. His relationship with the rabbis and learned men of Israel
+had given him a culture that the Mennonites did not possess; but these
+plain people, by the earnestness of their lives, showed him that the
+science of theology was not a science at all. Nobody understands
+theology: it is not meant to be understood&mdash;it is for belief. Spinoza
+compared the Mennonites, who confessed they knew nothing, but hoped
+much, to the rabbis, who pretended they knew all. His praise of the
+Mennonites, and his criticisms of the growing love for power in Judaism,
+were carried to the Jewish authorities by some young men who had come to
+him in the guise of learners. Moreover, the report was abroad that he
+was to marry a Gentile&mdash;the daughter of Van den Ende, the infidel.</p>
+
+<p>On order, he appeared at the synagogue, and defended his position. His
+ability in argument, his knowledge of Jewish law, his insight into the
+lessons of history, were alarming to the assembled rabbis. The young man
+was quiet, gentle, but firm. He expressed the belief that God might
+possibly have revealed Himself to other peoples beside the Jews.</p>
+
+<p>"Then you are not a Jew!" was the answer.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, I am a Jew, and I love my faith."</p>
+
+<p>"But it is not all to you?"</p>
+
+<p>"I confess that occasionally I have found what seems<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_214" id="VIII_Page_214">[Pg 214]</a></span> to be truth
+outside of the Law."</p>
+
+<p>The rabbis tore their raiment in mingled rage and surprise at the young
+man's temerity.</p>
+
+<p>Spinoza did not withdraw from the Jewish Congregation&mdash;he was thrust
+out. Moreover, a fanatical Jew, in the warmth of his religious zeal,
+attempted to kill him. Spinoza escaped, his clothing cut through by a
+dagger-thrust, close to the heart.</p>
+
+<p>The curse of Israel was upon him&mdash;his own brothers and sisters refused
+him shelter, his father turned against him, and again was the icy
+unkindness of kinsmen made manifest. The tribe of Spinoza lives in
+history, saved from the fell clutch of oblivion by the man it denied
+with an oath and pushed in bitterness from its heart. Spinoza fled to
+his friends, the Mennonites, plain market-gardeners who lived a few
+miles out of the city.</p>
+
+<p>Spinoza had not meant to leave the Jews&mdash;the racial instinct was strong
+in him, and the pride of his people colored his character to the last.
+But the attempts to bribe him and coerce him into a following of
+fanatical law, when this law did not appeal to his commonsense, forced
+him into a position that his enemies took for innate perversity. When an
+eagle is hatched in a barnyard brood and mounts on soaring pinions
+toward the sun, it is always cursed and vilified because it does not
+remain at home and scratch in the compost. Its flight skyward is
+construed as proof of its vile nature.<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_215" id="VIII_Page_215">[Pg 215]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>How can people who do not think, and can not think, and therefore have
+no thoughts to express, sympathize with one whose highest joy comes from
+the expression of his thought?</p>
+
+<p>Deprive a thinker of the privilege to think and you take from him his
+life. The joy of existence lies in self-expression. What if we should
+order the painter to quit his canvas, the sculptor to lay aside his
+tools, the farmer to leave the soil? Do these things, and you do no more
+than you do when you force a thinker to follow in the groove that dead
+men have furrowed. The thirst for knowledge must be slaked or the soul
+sickens and slow death follows.</p>
+
+<p>In Spinoza's time the literature of Greece and Rome was locked in the
+Latin language, which the Jews were forbidden to acquire. Young Spinoza
+longed to know what Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Seneca and Vergil had
+taught, but these authors were considered anathema by the rabbinical
+councils. Spinoza desired to be honest, and so asked for a special
+dispensation in his favor, as he was to be a teacher&mdash;could he study the
+Latin language?</p>
+
+<p>And the answer was, "Read your Joshua, first chapter and eighth verse,
+'This book of the law shall not depart out of thy mouth, but thou shalt
+meditate therein day and night.'"</p>
+
+<p>From this time on Spinoza was more or less under the ban, and rumors of
+his heresy were rife. It is possible,<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_216" id="VIII_Page_216">[Pg 216]</a></span> if it had not been for one
+person, that the growing desire for knowledge, the reaching out for
+better things, the dissatisfaction with his environment, might have
+passed in safety and the restless young rabbi slipped back into the
+conventional Jew. Youth always has its periods of unrest&mdash;sometimes
+more, sometimes less.</p>
+
+<p>Spinoza had made the acquaintance of Van den Ende, a teacher of Greek
+and Latin, an erratic, argumentative rationalist, who had his say on all
+topics of the time, and fixed his place in history by being shot as a
+revolutionary, just outside the walls of the Bastile.</p>
+
+<p>But at this time Van den Ende was fairly prosperous and Amsterdam was
+the freest city in Christendom.</p>
+
+<p>Van den Ende had a daughter, Clara Maria, a little younger than Spinoza,
+who surely was a most superior woman. She was the companion of her
+father in his studies. It speaks well for the father and it speaks well
+for the daughter that they were comrades and that his highest thought
+was expressed to her. I can conceive of no finer joy coming to a man
+than, as his hair whitens, to have a daughter who understands him at his
+best, who enters into his life, sympathizes with his ideals, ministers
+to his mental needs, who is his companion and friend. Only a great man
+ever has such a daughter. Madame De Stael, who delighted in being called
+"the daughter of Necker," was such a woman, and the splendor of her mind
+was no less her father's glory than was the fact that he was the
+greatest financier<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_217" id="VIII_Page_217">[Pg 217]</a></span> of his time.</p>
+
+<p>Clara Van den Ende was her father's helper and companion, and when he
+was busied in other tasks she took charge of his classes.</p>
+
+<p>Auerbach has written a charming story with Clara Van den Ende and
+Spinoza as a central theme. In the tale is pictured with skilful
+psychology the awakening of the sleeping soul of Spinoza as he was
+introduced from a cheerless home, devoid of art and freedom, into the
+beauties of undraped Greece and the fine atmosphere of a forum where
+nothing human was considered alien.</p>
+
+<p>From a love for Vergil, Cicero and Horace, to a love for each other, was
+a very natural sequence. A growing indifference for the censure of
+Judaism was quite a natural result. Auerbach would have us believe that
+no man alone ever stood out against the revilings of kinsmen and the
+stupidity of sectarians: we move in the line of least resistance and
+only a very great passion makes it possible for a man calmly to face the
+contumely of an angry world.</p>
+
+<p>Zangwill, in his vivid sketch, "The Maker of Lenses," makes this single
+love-episode in the life of Spinoza the controlling impulse of his life,
+probably reasoning on the premise that men who mark epochs are ever and
+always, without exception, those with the love nature strongly implanted
+in their hearts. So thoroughly does Zangwill believe in the one passion
+of Spinoza's life, that a score of years after the chief incident of it
+had transpired, he pictures the philosopher trembling<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_218" id="VIII_Page_218">[Pg 218]</a></span> at mention of the
+woman's name, coughing to conceal his agitation and clutching the
+doorpost for support. And this a man who smilingly faced a mob that
+howled for his life, and was only moved to philosophize on the nature of
+human intellect when a flying stone grazed his cheek!</p>
+
+<p>But the lady had ambitions&mdash;the lens-maker was penniless, and probably
+always would be&mdash;his passion was passive&mdash;he lacked the show and dash
+that made other women jealous. And so Oldenburg, a rival with love and
+jewels, won the heart that could not be won by love alone. That the lady
+soon knew she had erred did not help her case&mdash;Spinoza loved his ideal,
+and he had thought it was the woman.<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_219" id="VIII_Page_219">[Pg 219]</a></span></p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>Follow Zangwill's stories of the Ghetto and your heart is wrung by the
+injustice, cruelty and inhumanity visited upon the Jews by the people
+who worship a Jew as God and make daily supplications to a Jewess.</p>
+
+<p>But read between the lines and you will see that Israel Zangwill, child
+of the Ghetto, knows that the Peculiar People are peculiar through
+persecution, and not necessarily so through innate nature. Zangwill
+knows that no religion is pure except in its stage of persecution, and
+that Judaism, grown rich and powerful, would oppress and has oppressed.
+Martyr and persecutor shift places easily.</p>
+
+<p>The Jew arrives in a city at night, and in the morning takes down the
+shutters and is doing business. The Jew winds his way into the life of
+every city and becomes at once an integral part of it&mdash;a part, yet
+separate and distinct, for his social and religious life is not colored
+by his environment.</p>
+
+<p>Children imitate unconsciously. The golden rule is not natural to
+children: it has to be taught them. They do unto others as others have
+done unto them, and have no question as to right or wrong. We are all
+children, and have to think hard before we are conscious of any feeling
+of the brotherhood of man. As soon as the Jews relaxed in Amsterdam&mdash;got
+their breath, and felt secure&mdash;they did unto others as they had been
+done by&mdash;they persecuted.</p>
+
+<p>A Jew must be a Jew, and as they had been watched<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_220" id="VIII_Page_220">[Pg 220]</a></span> with suspicion in
+Spain and Portugal by the Christians, so now they watched each other for
+heresies. They compelled strictest obedience to every form and ceremony.
+To the Jew the Law forms the firmament above and the earth beneath. All
+is law to him, and his part and work in this life is obedience to law.</p>
+
+<p>The Jewish religion is a concrete, unbroken mass of laws. The Jew is
+bounded on the east by law; on the north by law; on the west by law; on
+the south by law. There are set rules and laws that govern his getting
+up, his going to bed, his eating, drinking, sleeping, and praying. There
+is no phase of human relationship that is not covered by the Mishna and
+Gemara. Being learned in the Law means being learned in the proper way
+to kill chickens, to dress ducks, wear your vestments, go to prayers,
+and what to say when you meet two Christians in an alley. If a Jew
+quarrels with a neighbor and goes to his Rabbi for advice, the learned
+man gets down his Talmud and finds the page. The relation of wife and
+husband, child and parent, brother and sister, lover and sweetheart, are
+covered by law, fixed, immovable. The learned men of Judah are men
+learned in the Law, not learned in the science of life, and commonsense.
+When these learned men meet they argue for six days and nights together
+as to interpretations of the Law concerning whether it is right to make
+a fire in your cook-stove on the Sabbath if a Christian is starving for
+food on your doorstep, or what<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_221" id="VIII_Page_221">[Pg 221]</a></span> will become of you if you eat pork to
+save your life.</p>
+
+<p>Rational Jews are those who do what they think is right, but Orthodox
+Jews are those who do what the Law prescribes. When Jesus plucked the
+ears of corn on the Sabbath day, he proved himself a Rational Jew&mdash;he
+set his own opinion higher than Law and thereby made himself an outcast.
+Jewish Law provides curdling curses for just such offenses.</p>
+
+<p>Plato's Republic was a scheme of life regulated absolutely by law; every
+contingency was provided for. And Plato's plan was founded on the
+hypothesis that it is the duty of wise men to do the thinking and
+regulate the conduct of those who are supposed not to be wise enough to
+think and to act for themselves. But Plato's idea lacked the "Thus saith
+the Lord," with which Moses and Aaron enforced their edicts. So Plato's
+Republic is still on paper, for no set of rules minutely regulating
+conduct has ever been enforced except as the ruler made his subjects
+believe he received his instructions direct from God.</p>
+
+<p>Yet all the Jewish Laws are founded with an eye to a sanitary and
+hygienic good&mdash;they are built on the basis of expediency. And that rule
+of the Gemara which provides that if you have gravy on the table, you
+can not also have butter, without sin, seems more of a move in the
+direction of economics than a matter of ethics. Laws are good for the
+people who believe that a blind obedience to a good thing is better than
+to work your way<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_222" id="VIII_Page_222">[Pg 222]</a></span> alone and find out for yourself what is best and
+right. The Jewish Law is based, like all religious codes, on the
+assumption that man by nature is vile, and really prefers wrong to
+right.</p>
+
+<p>The thought that all men prefer the good, and think at the moment they
+are doing what is best, no matter what they do, was first sharply and
+clearly expressed by Spinoza. Truth, he said, could only be reached
+through freedom&mdash;a man must even have the privilege of thinking wrong so
+long as his actions do not jeopardize the life and immediate safety of
+others.</p>
+
+<p>For a people whose every act is governed by fixed laws there can be no
+progression. Mistakes are the rungs of the ladder by which we reach the
+skies. The man who allows the dead to regulate his life, and accepts
+their thinking as final, satisfied to repeat what he is taught, remains
+forever in the lowlands. His wings are leaden.</p>
+
+<p>The Jews&mdash;most law-bound and priest-ridden of all peoples&mdash;are at home
+everywhere because they have no home. They mix in the life of every
+nation and remain forever separate and apart. They will run with you,
+ride with you, trade with you, but they will not eat with you nor pray
+with you. They build no Altars to the Unknown God, out of courtesy to
+visitors and guests from distant climes. Mohammedans recognize the
+divinity of Jesus, the Buddhists look upon him as one of many Christs,
+the Universalist sees good in every faith, but the Jew regards all other
+religions than<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_223" id="VIII_Page_223">[Pg 223]</a></span> his own as pestilence. If by chance, or in the line of
+business, he finds himself in a heathen temple or Christian Church, his
+Gemara orders that he shall present himself at his own temple for
+purification.</p>
+
+<p>Read Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy, and you behold on every page
+curses, revilings, threats and bitter scorn for all outside the pale.
+Orders by Jehovah to burn, kill and utterly destroy are frequent. And we
+must remember that every people make their god in their own image. A
+man's God is himself at his best; his devil is himself at his worst.</p>
+
+<p>The very expression, "The Chosen People," would be an insult to every
+man outside the pale, were it not such a petulant and childish boast
+that its serious assumption makes us smile.</p>
+
+<p>Well does Moses Mendelssohn, the Jew, say: "The Ghetto is an arrangement
+first contrived by Jews for keeping infidels out of a sacred precinct.
+When the infidels were strong enough they turned the tables and forbade
+the Jews to leave their Ghetto except at certain hours. For the misery,
+poverty and squalor of the Ghetto the Jew is not to blame&mdash;if he could,
+he would have the Ghetto a place of opulence, beauty and all that makes
+for the good. Every undesirable thing he would bestow on the outsider.
+In the twilight days of Jewish power, the Jew, with bigotry, arrogance
+and intolerance unsurpassed, regulated the infidels and fixed their
+goings and comings as they now do his, and he would<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_224" id="VIII_Page_224">[Pg 224]</a></span> do it again if he
+had the power. The Jew never changes&mdash;once a Jew always a Jew."</p>
+
+<p>This was written by a man who was not only a Jew, but a man. He was a
+Jew in pride of race&mdash;in racial instinct, but he was great enough to
+know that all men are God's children, and that to set up a fixed,
+dogmatic standard regulating every act of life has its serious
+penalties. He was a Jew so big that he knew that the cruelty and
+inhumanity visited upon the Jews by Christians was first taught to these
+Christians by Jews&mdash;it is all in the Old Testament. The villainy you
+have taught me I will execute. It shall go hard, but I will better the
+instruction.</p>
+
+<p>The Christians who had persecuted Jews were really orthodox Jews in
+disguise, and were actuated more by the Jewish Law expressed in the Old
+Testament, than by the life of Jesus, who placed man above the Sabbath
+and taught that the good is that which serves.</p>
+
+<p>And so Benedict Spinoza, the Rabbi, gentle, spiritual, kind, heir to the
+Jewish faith, learned in all the refinements of Jewish Law, knowing
+minutely the history of the race, knowing that for which the curses of
+Judaism were reserved, perceiving with unblinking eyes the absurdity and
+folly of all dogmatic belief, gradually withdrew from practising and
+following "Law," preferring his own commonsense. There were threats,
+then attempts to bribe, and again threats and finally excommunication
+and curses so terrible that if they were<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_225" id="VIII_Page_225">[Pg 225]</a></span> carried out, a man would walk
+the earth an exile&mdash;unknown by brothers and sisters, shunned by the
+mother that gave him birth, a moral leper to his father, despised,
+rejected, turned away, spit upon by every being of his kind.</p>
+
+<p>And here is the document:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>By the sentence of the angels, by the decree of the saints, we
+anathematize, cut off, curse, and execrate Baruch Spinoza, in the
+presence of these sacred books with the six hundred and thirteen
+precepts which are written therein, with the anathema wherewith
+Joshua anathematized Jericho; with the cursing wherewith Elisha
+cursed the children; and with all the cursings which are written in
+the Book of the Law; cursed be he by day, and cursed by night;
+cursed when he lieth down, and cursed when he riseth up; cursed
+when he goeth out, and cursed when he cometh in; the Lord pardon
+him never; the wrath and fury of the Lord burn upon this man, and
+bring upon him all the curses which are written in the Book of the
+Law. The Lord blot out his name under heaven. The Lord set him
+apart for destruction from all the tribes of Israel, with all the
+curses of the firmament which are written in the Book of the Law.
+There shall no one speak to him, no man write to him, no man show
+him any kindness, no man stay under the same roof with him, no man
+come nigh him.</p></div><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_226" id="VIII_Page_226">[Pg 226]</a></span></p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>When the Jewish congregation had placed its ban upon Spinoza, he dropped
+the Jewish name Baruch, for the Latin Benedictus. In this action he
+tokened his frame of mind: he was going to persist in his study of the
+Latin language, and his new name stood for peace or blessing, just as
+the other had, being essentially the same as our word benediction. The
+man's purpose was firm. To perfect himself in Latin, he began a study of
+Descartes' "Meditations," and this led to proving the Cartesian
+philosophy by a geometrical formula. In his quiet home among the simple
+Mennonites, five miles from Amsterdam, there gradually grew up around
+him a body of students to whom he read his writings. The Cartesian
+philosophy swings around the proposition that only through universal
+doubt can we at last reach truth. Spinoza soon went beyond this and made
+his plea for faith in a universal Good.</p>
+
+<p>Five years went by&mdash;years of work at his lenses, helping his friends in
+their farm work, and several hours daily devoted to study and writing.
+Spinoza's manuscripts were handed around by his pupils. He wrote for
+them, and in making truth plain to them he made it clear to himself. The
+Jews at Amsterdam kept track of his doings and made charges to the
+Protestant authorities to the effect that Spinoza was guilty of treason,
+and his presence a danger to the State. Spies were about, and their
+presence becoming known to the<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_227" id="VIII_Page_227">[Pg 227]</a></span> Mennonites, caused uneasiness. To
+relieve his friends of a possible unpleasant situation, the gentle
+philosopher packed up his scanty effects and moved away. He went to the
+village of Voorburg, two miles from The Hague.</p>
+
+<p>Here he lived for seven years, often for six months not going farther
+than three miles from home. He studied, worked and wrote, and his
+writings were sent out to his few friends who circulated them among
+friends of theirs, and in time the manuscripts came back soiled and
+dog-eared, proof that some one had read them. Persecution binds human
+hearts, and at this time there was a brotherhood of thinkers throughout
+the capitals and University towns of Europe. Spinoza's name became known
+gradually to these&mdash;they grew to look for his monthly contribution, and
+in many places when his manuscript arrived little bands of earnest
+students would meet, and the manuscript would be read and discussed. The
+interdict placed on free thought made it attractive. Spinoza became
+recognized by the esoteric few as one of the world's great thinkers,
+although the good people with whom he lived knew him only as a model
+lodger, who kept regular hours and made little trouble. Occasionally
+visitors would come from a distance and remain for hours discussing such
+abstract themes as the freedom of the will or the nature of the
+over-soul. And these visitors caused the rustic neighbors to grow
+curious, and we find Spinoza moving into the city and renting a modest
+back room. By a<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_228" id="VIII_Page_228">[Pg 228]</a></span> curious chance, his landlady, fifty years before, had
+been a servant in the household of Grotius, and once had locked that
+great man in a trunk and escorted him, right side up, across the border
+into Switzerland to escape the heresy-hunters who were looking for human
+kindling. This kind landlady, now grown old, and living largely in the
+past, saw points of resemblance between her philosophic boarder and the
+great Grotius, and soon waxed boastful to the neighbors. Spinoza noticed
+that he was being pointed out on the streets. His record had followed
+him. The Jews hated him because he was a renegade; the Christians hated
+him because he was a Jew, and both Catholics and Protestants shunned him
+when they ought not, and greeted him with howls when they should have
+let him alone.</p>
+
+<p>He again moved his lodgings to the suburbs of the city, where he lived
+with the family of Van der Spijck, a worthy Dutch painter who smoked his
+pipe in calm indifference to the Higher Criticism. For their quiet and
+studious lodger Van der Spijck and his wife had a profound regard. They
+did not understand him, but they believed in him. Often he would go to
+church with them and coming home would discuss the sermon with them at
+length. The Lutheran pastor who came to call on the family invited
+Spinoza to join his flock, and they calmly discussed the questions of
+baptism and regeneration by faith together; but genius only expresses
+itself to genius, and the pastor went away mystified. Van<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_229" id="VIII_Page_229">[Pg 229]</a></span> der Spijck
+did not produce great art, yet his pictures are now in demand because he
+was the kind and loyal friend of Spinoza, and his heart, not his art,
+fixes his place in history.</p>
+
+<p>In his sketch, Zangwill has certain of his old friends, members of the
+Van den Ende family, hunt out the philosopher in his obscure lodgings
+and pay him a social visit. Then it was that he turned pale, and
+stammeringly tried to conceal his agitation at mention of the name of
+the only woman he had ever loved.</p>
+
+<p>The image of that one fine flaming up of divine passion followed him to
+the day of his death. It was too sacred for him to discuss&mdash;he avoided
+women, kept out of society, and forever in his sad heart there burned a
+shrine to the ideal. And so he lived, separate and apart. A single
+little room sufficed&mdash;the work-bench where he made his lenses near the
+window, and near at hand the table covered with manuscript where he
+wrote. Renan says that when he died, aged forty-three, his passing was
+like a sigh, he had lived so quietly&mdash;so few knew him&mdash;there were no
+earthly ties to break.</p>
+
+<p>The worthy Van der Spijcks, plain, honest people, had invited him to go
+to church with them. He smilingly excused himself&mdash;he had thoughts he
+must write out ere they escaped. When the good man and his wife returned
+in an hour, their lodger was dead.</p>
+
+<p>A tablet on the house marks the spot, and but a short distance away in
+the open square sits his form in<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_230" id="VIII_Page_230">[Pg 230]</a></span> deathless bronze, pensively writing
+out an idea which we can only guess&mdash;or is it a last love-letter to the
+woman to whom he gave his heart and who pushed from her the gift?<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_231" id="VIII_Page_231">[Pg 231]</a></span></p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>Spinoza had courage, yet great gentleness of disposition. His habit of
+mind was conciliatory: if strong opinions were expressed in his presence
+concerning some person or thing, he usually found some good to say of
+the person or an excuse for the thing. He was one of the most unselfish
+men in history&mdash;money was nothing to him, save as it might minister to
+his very few immediate wants or the needs of others.</p>
+
+<p>He smilingly refused a pension offered him by a French courtier if he
+would but dedicate a book to the King; and a legacy left him by an
+admiring student, Simon de Vries, was declined for the reason that it
+was too much and he did not wish the care of it. Later, he compromised
+with the heirs by accepting an income of one hundred and twenty-five
+dollars a year. "How unreasonable," he exclaimed, "they want me to
+accept five hundred florins a year&mdash;I told them I would take three
+hundred, but I will not be burdened by a stiver more." If he was
+financially free from the necessity of earning his living at his trade,
+he feared the quality of his thought might be diluted. You can not
+think intently and intensely all of the time. Those who try it never are
+able to dive deep nor soar high.... Good digestion demands a certain
+amount of coarse food&mdash;refined and condensed aliment alone kills. Man
+should work and busy himself with the commonplace, rest himself for his
+flight, and when the moment of transfiguration<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_232" id="VIII_Page_232">[Pg 232]</a></span> comes, make the best of
+it.</p>
+
+<p>All he asked was to be given the privilege to work and to think. As for
+expressing his thoughts, he made no public addresses and during his life
+only one of his books was printed. This was the "Tractatus
+Theologico-Politicus," which mentioned "Hamburg" on the title page, but
+with the author's name wisely omitted. Trite enough now are the
+propositions laid down&mdash;that God is everywhere and that man is brother
+to the tree, the rock, the flower. Emerson states the case in his
+"Over-Soul" and "Spiritual Laws" in the true, calm Spinozistic style&mdash;as
+if the gentle Jew had come back to earth and dictated his thought,
+refined, polished and smooth as one of his own little lenses, to the man
+of Concord. Benedictus Concordia, blessing and peace be with thee!</p>
+
+<p>But the lynx-eyed censors soon discovered this single, solitary book of
+Spinoza's, and although they failed to locate the author, Spinoza had
+the satisfaction of seeing the work placed on the Index and a general
+interdict issued against it by Christendom and Judea as well. It was
+really of some importance. It was so thoroughly in demand that it still
+circulated with false title pages. In the Lenox Library, New York, is a
+copy of the first edition, finely bound, and lettered thus: "A Treatise
+on the Sailing of Ships against the Wind," which shows the straits
+booksellers were put to in evading the censors, and also reveals a touch
+of wit that doubtless was appreciated by the Elect.<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_233" id="VIII_Page_233">[Pg 233]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>His modesty, patience, kindness and freedom from all petty whim and
+prejudice set Spinoza apart as a marked man. Withal he was eminently
+religious, and the reference to him by Novalis as "the God-intoxicated
+man" seems especially applicable to one who saw God in everything.</p>
+
+<p>Renan said at the dedication of The Hague monument to Spinoza, "Since
+the days of Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius we have not seen a life so
+profoundly filled with the sentiment of the divine."</p>
+
+<p>When walking along the streets of The Hague and coarse voices called
+after him in guttural, "Kill the renegade!" he said calmly, "We must
+remember that these men are expressing the essence of their being, just
+as I express the essence of mine."<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_234" id="VIII_Page_234">[Pg 234]</a></span></p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>Spinoza taught that the love of God is the supreme good; that virtue is
+its own reward, and folly its own punishment; and that every one ought
+to love his neighbor and obey the civil powers.</p>
+
+<p>He made no enemies except by his opinions. He was infinitely patient,
+sweet in temper&mdash;had respect for all religions, and never offended by
+parading his heresies in the faces of others.</p>
+
+<p>Nothing but the kicks of scorn and the contumely that came to Spinoza
+could possibly have freed him to the extent he was free from Judaistic
+bonds.</p>
+
+<p>He had disciples who called him "Master," and who taught him nothing but
+patience in answering their difficulties.</p>
+
+<p>One is amazed at the hunger of the mind at the time of Spinoza. Men
+seemed to think, and dare to grasp for "New Thought" to a marvelous
+extent.</p>
+
+<p>Spinoza says that "evil" and "good" have no objective reality, but are
+merely relative to our feelings, and that "evil" in particular is
+nothing positive, but a privation only, or non-existence.</p>
+
+<p>Spinoza says that love consecrates every indifferent particular
+connected with the object of affection. Good is that which we certainly
+know to be useful to us. Evil is that which we certainly know stands in
+the way of our command of good.</p>
+
+<p>Good is that which helps. Bad is that which hinders<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_235" id="VIII_Page_235">[Pg 235]</a></span> our
+self-maintenance and active powers.</p>
+
+<p>A passage from Spinoza which well reveals his habit of thought and which
+placed the censors on his track runs as follows:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>The ultimate design of the State is not to dominate men, to
+restrain them by fear, to make them subject to the will of others,
+but, on the contrary, to permit every one, as far as possible, to
+live in security. That is to say, to preserve intact the natural
+right which is his, to live without being harmed himself or doing
+harm to others. No, I say, the design of the State is not to
+transform men into animals or automata from reasonable beings; its
+design is to arrange matters that citizens may develop their minds
+and bodies in security, and to make free use of their reason. The
+true design of the State, then, is liberty. Whoever would respect
+the rights of the sovereign ought never to act in opposition to his
+decrees; but each has a right to think as he pleases and to say
+what he thinks, provided that he limits himself to speaking and to
+teaching in the name of pure reason, and that he does not attempt,
+in his private capacity, to introduce innovations into the State.
+For example, a citizen demonstrates that a certain law is repugnant
+to sound reason, and believing this, he thinks it ought to be
+abrogated. If he submits his opinion to the judgment of the
+sovereign, to which alone it belongs to establish and to abolish
+laws, and if, in the meantime, he does nothing contrary to law, he
+certainly deserves well of the State as being a good citizen.</p>
+
+<p>Let us admit that it is possible to stifle liberty of men and to
+impose on them a yoke, to the point that they<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_236" id="VIII_Page_236">[Pg 236]</a></span> dare not even
+murmur, however feebly, without the consent of the sovereign:
+never, it is certain, can any one hinder them from thinking
+according to their own free will. What follows hence? It is that
+men will think one way and speak another; that, consequently, good
+faith, so essential a virtue to a State, becomes corrupted; that
+adulation, so detestable, and perfidy, shall be held in honor,
+bringing in their train a decadence of all good and sound
+habitudes. What can be more fatal to a State than to exile, as
+malcontents, honest citizens, simply because they do not hold the
+opinion of the multitude, and because they are ignorant of the art
+of dissembling! What can be more fatal to a State than to treat as
+enemies and to put to death men who have committed no other crime
+than that of thinking independently! Behold, then, the scaffold,
+the dread of the bad man, which now becomes the glorious theater
+where tolerance and virtue blaze forth in all their splendor, and
+covers publicly with opprobrium the sovereign majesty! Assuredly,
+there is but one thing which that spectacle can teach us, and that
+is to imitate these noble martyrs, or, if we fear death, to become
+the abject flatterers of the powerful. Nothing hence can be so
+perilous as to relegate and submit to divine right things which are
+purely speculative, and to impose laws upon opinions which are, or
+at least ought to be, subject to discussion among men. If the right
+of the State were limited to repressing acts, and speech were
+allowed impunity, controversies would not turn so often into
+seditions.</p></div>
+
+
+
+<hr class="full" />
+<h2><a name="AUGUSTE_COMTE" id="AUGUSTE_COMTE"></a>AUGUSTE COMTE<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_237" id="VIII_Page_237">[Pg 237]</a></span></h2>
+
+
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>In the name of the Past and of the Future, the servants of
+Humanity&mdash;both its philosophical and its practical servants&mdash;come
+forward to claim as their due the general direction of the world.
+Their object is to constitute at length a real Providence in all
+departments&mdash;moral, intellectual and material.</p></div>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 25em;">&mdash;<i>Auguste Comte</i></span><br />
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_238" id="VIII_Page_238">[Pg 238]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="center">
+    <a id="image0460-1"></a>
+    <img src="images/0460-1.jpg" width="273" height="400"
+       alt=""
+       title="" />
+
+   <p class="center">AUGUSTE COMTE</p>
+</div>
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_239" id="VIII_Page_239">[Pg 239]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<p>A little city girl asked of her country cousin, when honey was the topic
+up for discussion, "Does your papa keep a bee?"</p>
+
+<p>Let the statement go unchallenged, that a single bee has neither the
+disposition nor the ability to make honey.</p>
+
+<p>Bees accomplish nothing save as they work together, and neither do men.</p>
+
+<p>Great men come in groups.</p>
+
+<p>Six men, three living at the village of Concord, Massachusetts, and
+three at Cambridge, fifteen miles away, supplied America really all her
+literature, until Indiana suddenly loomed large on the horizon, and
+assumed the center of the stage, like the spirit of the Brocken.</p>
+
+<p>Five men made up the Barbizon school of painting, which has influenced
+the entire art education of the world. And that those who have been
+influenced and helped most, deny their redeemer with an oath, is a
+natural phenomenon psychologists look for and fully understand.</p>
+
+<p>Greece had a group of seven thinkers, in the time of Pericles, who made
+the name and fame of the city deathless.</p>
+
+<p>Rome had a similar group in the time of Augustus; then<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_240" id="VIII_Page_240">[Pg 240]</a></span> the world went
+to sleep, and although there were individuals, now and then, of great
+talent, their lights went out in darkness, for it takes bulk to make a
+conflagration.</p>
+
+<p>Florence had her group of thinkers and doers when Michelangelo and
+Leonardo lived only a few miles apart, but never met. Yet each man
+spurred the other on to do and dare, until an impetus was reached that
+sent the names of both down the centuries.</p>
+
+<p>Boswell gives us a group of a dozen men who made each other
+possible&mdash;often helped by hate and strengthened by scorn.</p>
+
+<p>The Mutual Admiration Society does not live in piping times of peace,
+where glowing good-will strews violets; often the sessions of this
+interesting aggregation are stormy and acrimonious, but one thing
+holds&mdash;the man who arises at this board must have something to say.
+Strong men, matched by destiny, set each other a pace. Criticism is full
+and free. The most interesting and the most successful social experiment
+in America owed its lease of life largely to its scheme of Public
+Criticism, a plan society at large will adopt when it puts off
+swaddling-clothes. Public Criticism is a diversion of gossip into a
+scientific channel. It is a plan of healthful, hygienic, social
+plumbing.</p>
+
+<p>England produced one group of thinkers that changed the complexion of
+the theological belief of Christendom&mdash;Darwin, Spencer, Wallace, Huxley
+and Mill. But this group built on the French philosophers, who were<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_241" id="VIII_Page_241">[Pg 241]</a></span>
+taught antithetically by the decaying and crumbling aristocracy of
+France. Rousseau and Voltaire loved each other and helped each other, as
+the proud Leonardo helped the humble and no less proud peasant,
+Michelangelo&mdash;by absent treatment.</p>
+
+<p>Victor Hugo says that when the skulls of Voltaire and Rousseau were
+taken in a sack from the Pantheon and tumbled into a common grave, a
+spark of recognition was emitted that the gravedigger did not see.</p>
+
+<p>Voltaire was patronized by Frederick the Great, who, though a married
+man, lived a bachelor life and forbade women his court, and protected
+Kant with the bulging forehead and independent ways. Kant lived among a
+group of thinkers he never saw, but reached out and touched finger-tips
+with them over the miles that his feet never traversed.</p>
+
+<p>To Kant are we indebted for Turgot, that practical and farseeing man of
+affairs told of in matchless phrase in Thomas Watson's "Story of
+France," the best book ever written in America, with possibly a few
+exceptions. Condorcet kept step with him, and Auguste Comte calls
+Condorcet his spiritual stepfather, and a wit of the time here said,
+"Then Turgot is your uncle"; and Comte replied, "I am proud of the
+honor, for if Turgot is my uncle, then indeed am I of royal blood."</p>
+
+<p>Auguste Comte is the one bright particular star amid that milky way of
+riotous thinkers which followed close upon the destruction of the French
+Monarchy.<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_242" id="VIII_Page_242">[Pg 242]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>When Napoleon visited the grave of Rousseau, he mused in silence and
+then said, "Perhaps it might have been as well if this man had never
+lived."</p>
+
+<p>And Marshal Ney, standing near, said, "It reveals small gratitude for
+Napoleon Bonaparte to say so." Napoleon smiled and answered, "Possibly
+the world would be as well off if neither of us had ever lived."</p>
+
+<p>Auguste Comte thought that Napoleon was just as necessary in the social
+evolution as Rousseau, and that both were needed&mdash;and he himself was
+needed to make the matter plain in print.<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_243" id="VIII_Page_243">[Pg 243]</a></span></p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>Auguste Comte was born at Montpelier, France, in Seventeen Hundred
+Ninety-eight. His father was receiver of taxes, an office that carried
+with it much leisure and a fair income. Men of leisure seldom have time
+to think&mdash;if you want a thing done it is safest and best not to pick a
+publican. Only busy men have time to do things. The men who have good
+incomes and work little are envied only by those with a mental
+impediment.</p>
+
+<p>The boy Auguste owed little to his parents for his peculiar evolution,
+save as his father taught him by antithesis: the children of drunkards
+make temperance fanatics, and shiftless fathers sometimes have sons who
+are great financiers.</p>
+
+<p>When nine years of age, the passion to know and to become was upon
+Auguste Comte. He was small in stature, insignificant in appearance, and
+had a great appetite for facts. Comte is a fine refutation of the maxim
+that infant prodigies fall victims to arrested development.</p>
+
+<p>At twelve years of age he was filled with the idea that the social order
+was all wrong. To the utter astonishment of his parents and tutors, he
+argued that the world could not be bettered until mankind was taught the
+lesson that history, languages, theology and polite etiquette were not
+learning at all; and as long as educated men centered on these things,
+there was no hope for the race.<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_244" id="VIII_Page_244">[Pg 244]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The birch was brought in to disannex the boy from his foolishness, but
+this only seemed to make him cling the closer to what he was pleased to
+call his convictions.</p>
+
+<p>He read books that wearied the brains of grown-ups, and took a hearty
+interest in the abstruse, the obscure and the complex.</p>
+
+<p>At thirteen, that peculiar time when the young turn to faith, this
+perverse rareripe was so filled with doubt that it ran over and he stood
+in the slop. He offered to publicly debate the question of Freewill with
+the local cur&eacute;; and on several occasions stood up in meeting and
+contradicted the preacher.</p>
+
+<p>His parents, thinking to divert his mind from abstractions to useful
+effort, sent him to the Polytechnic School at Paris, that excellent
+institution founded by Napoleon, which served America most nobly as a
+model for the Boston School of Technology, only the French
+"Polytechnique" was purely a government institution&mdash;a sample of the
+Twentieth Century sent for the benefit of the Nineteenth.</p>
+
+<p>But institutions are never much beyond the people&mdash;they can not be, for
+the people dilute everything until it is palatable. Laws that do not
+embody public opinion can never be enforced. No man who expresses
+himself is really much ahead of his time&mdash;if he is, the times snuff him
+out, and quickly.</p>
+
+<p>In Eighteen Hundred Fourteen, the Polytechnic School was well saturated
+with the priestly idea of education,<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_245" id="VIII_Page_245">[Pg 245]</a></span> and the attempt was made to
+produce an alumni of cultured men, rather than a race of useful ones.</p>
+
+<p>Revolt was rife in the ranks of the students. It is still debatable
+whether revolution and riot in colleges are actuated by a passion for
+truth or a love of excitement. Anyway, the "Techs" laid deep places to
+the effect that when a certain professor appeared at chapel, a unique
+reception would be in store for him.</p>
+
+<p>He appeared, and a fusillade of books, rulers and ink-wells shot at his
+learned head from every quarter of the room. Other professors appeared
+and sought to restore order. Riot followed&mdash;seats were torn up, windows
+broken, and there was much loud talk and gesticulation peculiarly
+Gallic.</p>
+
+<p>It was Ninety-three done in little.</p>
+
+<p>Instead of expelling the delinquents, the National Assembly took the
+matter in hand and simply voted to close the school.</p>
+
+<p>Auguste Comte went home a hero, proud as a Heidelberg student, with a
+sweeping scar on his chin and the end of his nose gone. "I have dealt
+the Old Education its deathblow," he solemnly said, mistaking a
+cane-rush for a revolution.</p>
+
+<p>Against the direct command of his parents, he went back to Paris. He had
+now reached the mature age of eighteen. He resolved to write out truth
+as it occurred to him, and incidentally he would gain a livelihood by
+teaching mathematics.<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_246" id="VIII_Page_246">[Pg 246]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>At Paris, the mental audacity of the youth won him recognition; he
+picked up a precarious living, and was a frequenter at scientific
+lectures and discussions, and in gatherings where great themes were up
+for debate, he was always present.</p>
+
+<p>Benjamin Franklin was his ideal. In his notebook he wrote this:
+"Franklin at twenty-five resolved he would become great and wise. I now
+vow the same at twenty." He had five years the start!</p>
+
+<p>Franklin, calm, healthy, judicial, wise&mdash;the greatest man America has
+produced&mdash;worked his philosophy up into life. He did not think much
+beyond his ability to perform. To him, to think was to do. And he did
+things that to many men were miracles.</p>
+
+<p>Comte once said, "I would have followed the venerable Benjamin Franklin
+through the street, and kissed the hem of the homespun overcoat, made by
+Deborah." These men were very unlike. One was big, gentle, calm and
+kind; the other was small, dyspeptic, excitable and full of challenge.
+Yet the little man had times of insight and abstraction, when he tracked
+reasons further than the big, practical man could have followed them.</p>
+
+<p>Franklin's habit of life&mdash;the semi-ascetic quality of getting your
+gratification by doing without things&mdash;especially pleased Comte. He
+lived in a garret on two meals a day, and was happy in the thought that
+he could endure and yet think and study. The old monastic impulse was
+upon him, minus the religious features&mdash;or stay!<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_247" id="VIII_Page_247">[Pg 247]</a></span> why may not science
+become a religion? And surely science can become dogmatic, and even
+tyrannically build a hierarchy on a hypothesis no less than theology.</p>
+
+<p>A friend, pitying young Comte's hard lot, not knowing its sweet
+recompense, got him a position as tutor in the household of a nobleman;
+like unto the kind man who caught the sea-gulls roosting on an iceberg,
+and in pity, transferred them to the warm delights of a compost-pile in
+his barnyard.</p>
+
+<p>Comte held the place for three weeks and then resigned. He went back to
+the garret and sweet liberty&mdash;having had his taste of luxury, but
+miserable in it all&mdash;wondering how a gavotte or a minuet could make a
+man forget that he was living in a city where thirty thousand human
+beings were constantly only one meal beyond the sniff of starvation.</p>
+
+<p>At this time Comte came into close relationship with a man who was to
+have a very great influence in his life&mdash;this was Count Henri of
+Saint-Simon, usually spoken of as Saint-Simon.</p>
+
+<p>Saint-Simon was rich, gently proud, and fondly patronizing. He was a
+sort of scientific M&aelig;cenas&mdash;and be it known that M&aelig;cenas was a poet and
+philosopher of worth, and one Horace was his pupil.</p>
+
+<p>Saint-Simon was an excellent and learned man who wrote, lectured and
+taught on philosophic themes. He had a garden-school, modeled in degree
+after that of<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_248" id="VIII_Page_248">[Pg 248]</a></span> Plato. Saint-Simon became much interested in young Comte,
+invited him to his classes, supplied him books, clothing, and tickets to
+the opera. Part of the time Comte lived under Saint-Simon's roof, and
+did translating and copying in partial payment for his meal-ticket. The
+teacher and the pupil had a fine affection for each other. What Comte
+needed, he took from Saint-Simon as if it were his own.</p>
+
+<p>In writing to friends at this time, Comte praises Saint-Simon as the
+greatest man who ever lived&mdash;"a model of patience, generosity, learning
+and love&mdash;my spiritual father!" There was fifty years' difference in
+their ages, but they studied, read and rambled the realm of books
+together, with mutual pleasure and profit.</p>
+
+<p>The central idea of the "Positive Philosophy" is that of the three
+stages through which man passes in his evolution. This was gotten from
+Saint-Simon, and together they worked out much of the thought that Comte
+afterward carried further and incorporated in his book.</p>
+
+<p>But about this time, Saint-Simon, in one of his lectures, afterward
+printed, made use of some of the thoughts that Comte had expressed, as
+if they were his own&mdash;and possibly they were. There is no copyright on
+an idea, no caveat can be filed on feeling, and at the last there is no
+such thing as originality, except as a matter of form.</p>
+
+<p>Young Comte now proved his humanity by accusing<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_249" id="VIII_Page_249">[Pg 249]</a></span> his teacher of stealing
+his radium. A quarrel followed, in which Comte was so violent that
+Saint-Simon had to put the youth out of his house.</p>
+
+<p>The wrangles of Grub Street would fill volumes: both sides are always
+right, or wrong&mdash;it matters little, and is simply a point of view. But
+the rancor of it all, if seen from heaven, must serve finely to dispel
+the monotony of the place&mdash;a panacea for paradisiacal ennui.</p>
+
+<p>From lavish praise, Comte swung over to words of bitterness and
+accusation. Having sat at the man's table and partaken of his
+hospitality for several years, he was now guilty of the unpardonable
+offense of ridiculing and berating him.</p>
+
+<p>He speaks of the Saint as a "depraved quack," and says that the time he
+spent with him was worse than wasted. If Saint-Simon was the rogue and
+pretender that Comte avers, it is no certificate of Comte's insight that
+it took him four years to find it out.<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_250" id="VIII_Page_250">[Pg 250]</a></span></p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>In Eighteen Hundred Twenty-five Comte married. The ceremony was
+performed civilly, on a sudden impulse of what Schopenhauer would call
+"the genius of the genus." The lady was young, agreeable; and having no
+opinions of her own, was quite willing to accept his. Comte
+congratulated himself that here was virgin soil, and he laid the
+flattering unction to his soul that he could mold the lady's mind to
+match his own. She would be his helpmeet. Comte had not read Ouida, who
+once wrote that when God said, "I will make a helpmeet for him," He was
+speaking ironically.</p>
+
+<p>Comte had associated but very little with women&mdash;he had theories about
+them. Small men, with midget minds, know femininity much better than do
+the great ones. Traveling salesmen, with checkered vests, gauge women as
+Herbert Spencer never could.</p>
+
+<p>Comte's wife was pretty and she was astute&mdash;as most pretty women are.
+John Fiske, in his lecture on "Communal Life," says that astute persons
+add nothing of value to the community in which they live&mdash;their mission
+being to be the admired glass of fashion for the non-cogitabund. The
+value of astuteness is that it protects us from the astute.</p>
+
+<p>Samuel Johnson and his wife had their first quarrel on the way from the
+church, and Auguste Comte and his wife tiffed going down the steps from
+the notary's. Comte had no use for ecclesiastical forms, and the lady<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_251" id="VIII_Page_251">[Pg 251]</a></span>
+agreed with him until after the notary had earned his fee. Then she
+suddenly had qualms, like those peculiar ladies told of by Robert Louis
+Stevenson, who turn the Madonna's face to the wall.</p>
+
+<p>The couple went to Montpelier on their wedding-tour, to visit Comte's
+parents. The new wife agreed with the old folks on but one point&mdash;the
+marriage should be solemnized by a priest. Having won them on this
+point, they stood a solid phalanx against the husband; but the lady took
+exceptions to Montpelier on all other grounds&mdash;she hated it thoroughly
+and said so.</p>
+
+<p>Instead of molding her to his liking, Comte was being kneaded into
+animal crackers for her amusement.</p>
+
+<p>Then we find him writing to a friend, confessing that his hopes were
+ashes; but in his misery he grows philosophical and says, "It is all
+good, for now I am driven back to my work, and from now on my life is
+dedicated to science."</p>
+
+<p>No doubt the lady was as much disappointed in the venture as was the
+husband, but he, being literary, eased his grief by working it up into
+art, while her side of the story lies buried deep in silence glum.</p>
+
+<p>In choosing the names of philosophers for this series, no thought was
+given in the selection beyond the achievements of the men. But it now
+comes to me with a slight surprise that seven out of the twelve were
+unmarried, and probably it would have been as well&mdash;certainly for the
+wives&mdash;if the other five had<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_252" id="VIII_Page_252">[Pg 252]</a></span> remained bachelors, too. Xantippe would
+have been the gainer, even if Socrates did miss his discipline.</p>
+
+<p>To center on science and devote one's thought to philosophy produces a
+being more or less deformed. There is great danger in specialization:
+Nature sacrifices the man in order to get the thing done. Abstract
+thought unfits one for domestic life; for, to a degree, it separates a
+man from his kind.</p>
+
+<p>The proper advice to a woman about to marry a philosopher would be,
+"Don't!"<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_253" id="VIII_Page_253">[Pg 253]</a></span></p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>The advantage of a little actual hardship in one's life is that it makes
+existence real and not merely literary. Comte was inclined to thrive on
+martyrdom. His restless, eager mind invented troubles, if there were no
+real ones, but he was wise enough to know this, as he once said: "The
+trials of life are all of one size&mdash;imaginary pains are as bad as real
+ones, and men who have no actual troubles usually conjure forth a few.
+Thus far, happily, I am not reduced to this strait."</p>
+
+<p>We thus see that the true essence of philosophy was there. Comte got a
+gratification by dissecting, analyzing and classifying his emotions. All
+was grist that came to his mill.</p>
+
+<p>When he was twenty-eight the Positive Philosophy had assumed such
+proportions in his mind that he announced a course of twelve lectures on
+the subject.</p>
+
+<p>He was jealous of his discoveries, and was intent on getting all the
+credit that was due him. Money he cared little for; power and reputation
+to him were the only gods worth appeasing. The thought of domestic joy
+was forever behind, but philosophy came as a solace. A prospectus was
+sent out and tickets were issued. The landlady where he boarded offered
+her parlor and her boarder, second floor back, for the benefit of
+science. Several zealous denizens of the Latin Quarter made a canvass,
+and enough tickets were sold so that the philosopher felt that at last
+the world was really at his feet.</p>
+
+<p>When the afternoon for the first lecture arrived, no<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_254" id="VIII_Page_254">[Pg 254]</a></span> carriages blocked
+the street, and as only about half of those who had purchased tickets
+appeared, the difficulties of the landlady and her nervous boarder were
+much lessened.</p>
+
+<p>There was one man at this first lecture who was profoundly impressed,
+and if we had his testimony, and none other, we might well restrain our
+smiles. That man was Alexander von Humboldt. In various passages
+Humboldt does Comte the honor of quoting from him, and in one instance
+says, "He has summed up certain phases of truth better than they have
+ever been expressed before."</p>
+
+<p>Little did the landlady guess that her crusty, crabbed boarder was
+firing a shot that would be heard 'round the world, and surely the
+gendarme on that particular beat never heard it&mdash;so small and
+commonplace are the beginnings of great things!</p>
+
+<p>Comte was so saturated with this theme&mdash;so immersed in it&mdash;that it
+consumed him like a fever. Three lectures were given, but at the third,
+without warning, the man's nerves snapped&mdash;he stopped, sat down, and the
+audience filed out perplexed, thinking they had merely seen an
+exhibition of one of the eccentricities of genius. The philosopher's
+mind was a blank, and kind friends sent him away to a hospital.</p>
+
+<p>It was two years before he regained his reason. The enforced rest did
+him good. Nervous Prostration is heroic treatment on the part of Nature.
+It is an intent to do for the man what he will never do for himself.<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_255" id="VIII_Page_255">[Pg 255]</a></span></p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>Unkind critics, hotly intent on refuting the Positive Philosophy, seized
+upon the fact of Comte's mental trouble and made much of it. "Look you!"
+said they, "the man is insane!"</p>
+
+<p>This is convenient, but not judicial. Comte's philosophy stands or falls
+on its own merits, and what the author did before, after, or during the
+writing of his theses matters not. Madmen are not mad all the time, and
+the fact that Sir Isaac Newton was for a time unbalanced does not lessen
+our regard for the "Principia," nor consign to limbo the law of
+gravitation. Ruskin's work is not the less thought of because the man
+had his pathetic spells of indecision. Martin Luther had visions of
+devils before he saw the truth, and Emerson's love for Longfellow need
+not be disparaged because he looked down on his still, white face and
+said, "A dear gentle soul, but I really can not remember his name."</p>
+
+<p>Men write on physiology, and then die, but this does not disprove the
+truth they expressed, but failed, possibly, to fully live. The great man
+always thinks further than he can travel&mdash;even the rest of us can do
+that. We can think "Chicago" in a second, but to go there takes time,
+strength and money.</p>
+
+<p>When Comte's mental trouble was at its height, and two men were required
+to care for him, Lamennais persuaded his wife to have their marriage
+solemnized by the Church, and this was done. This performance<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_256" id="VIII_Page_256">[Pg 256]</a></span> was such
+a violation of sanctity and decency that in after-years Comte could not
+believe it was true, until he consulted the church records. "They might
+as well have had me confirmed," said Comte, grimly. And we can well
+guess that the action did not increase his regard for either his wife or
+the Church. The trick seems quite on a par with that of the astute
+colored gentleman who anxiously asks for love-powders at the corner
+drugstore; or the good wives who purchase harmless potions from red-dyed
+rogues to place in the husband's coffee to cure him of the liquor habit.</p>
+
+<p>However, the incident gives a clew to the mental processes of Madame
+Comte&mdash;she would accomplish by trickery what she had failed to do by
+moral suasion, and this in the name of religion!</p>
+
+<p>Two years of enforced rest, and the glowing mind of the philosopher
+awoke with a start. He rubbed his eyes after his Rip-Van-Winkle sleep,
+and called for his manuscripts&mdash;he must prepare for the fourth lecture!</p>
+
+<p>The rest of the course was given, and in Eighteen Hundred Thirty the
+first volume of Positive Philosophy was issued.</p>
+
+<p>The sixth and last volume appeared in Eighteen Hundred Forty-two&mdash;twelve
+years of intense application and ceaseless work. This was the happiest
+time of Comte's life; he had the whole scheme in his head from the
+start, but he now saw it gradually taking form, and it was meeting with
+appreciation from a few earnest<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_257" id="VIII_Page_257">[Pg 257]</a></span> thinkers, at least. His services were
+in demand for occasional lectures on scientific subjects. In astronomy,
+especially, he excelled, and on this theme he was able to please a
+popular assembly.</p>
+
+<p>The Polytechnic School had now grown to large proportions, and the
+institution that Comte had helped to slide into dissolution now called
+him back to serve as examiner and professor.</p>
+
+<p>The constant misunderstandings with his wife had increased to such a
+point that both felt a separation desirable. Married people do not
+separate on slight excuse&mdash;they go because they must. That Comte thought
+much more of the lady when they were several hundred miles apart than
+when they were together, there is no doubt. He wrote to her at regular
+intervals, one-half of his income was religiously sent to her, and he
+practised the most painstaking economy in order that he might feel that
+she was provided for.</p>
+
+<p>One letter, especially, to his wife reveals a side of Comte's nature
+that shows he had the instinct of a true teacher. He says, "I hardly
+dare disclose the sweet and softened feeling that comes over me when I
+find a scholar whose heart is thoroughly in his work."</p>
+
+<p>The Positive Philosophy was taken up by John Stuart Mill, who wrote a
+fine essay on it. It was Mill who introduced the work to Harriet
+Martineau. Mr. and Mrs. Mill had intended to translate and condense the
+philosophy of Comte for English readers, but when<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_258" id="VIII_Page_258">[Pg 258]</a></span> Miss Martineau
+expressed her intention of attempting the task, they relinquished the
+idea, but backed her up in her efforts.</p>
+
+<p>Miss Martineau condensed the six volumes into two, and what is most
+strange, Comte thought so well of the work that he wrote a glowing
+acknowledgment of it.</p>
+
+<p>The Martineaus were of good old Huguenot stock, and the French language
+came easy to Harriet. For the plain people of France she had a profound
+regard, and being sort of a revolutionary by prenatal instincts, Comte's
+work from the start appealed to her. James Martineau had such a
+bristling personality&mdash;being very much like his sister Harriet&mdash;that
+when this sister wrote a review of a volume of his sermons, showing the
+fatuity and foolishness of the reasoning, and calling attention to much
+bad grammar, the good man cut her off with a shilling&mdash;"which he will
+have to borrow," said Harriet.</p>
+
+<p>James hugged the idea to his death that his sister had insulted his
+genius&mdash;"But I forgive her," he said, which remark proves that he
+hadn't, for if he had, he would not have thought to mention the matter.
+James Martineau was a great man, but if he had been just a little
+greater he would have taken a profound pride in a sister who was so
+sharp a shooter that she could puncture his balloon. James Martineau was
+a theologian; Harriet was a Positivist. But Positivity had a lure for
+him, and so there is a long review, penned<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_259" id="VIII_Page_259">[Pg 259]</a></span> largely with aqua fortis, on
+Miss Martineau's translation, done by her brother for the "Edinburgh
+Review," wherein Harriet is not once mentioned.</p>
+
+<p>When Robert Ingersoll's wife would occasionally, under great stress of
+the servant-girl problem, break over a bit, as good women will, and say
+things, Robert would remark, "Gently, my dear, gently&mdash;I fear me you
+haven't yet gotten rid of all your Christian virtues."</p>
+
+<p>The Reverend Doctor James Martineau never quite got rid of his Christian
+virtues, which perhaps proves that a little hate, like strychnin, is
+useful as a stimulant when properly reduced, for Doctor Martineau died
+only a few years ago, having nearly rounded out a century run.</p>
+
+<p>Harriet Martineau was in much doubt about how Comte would regard her
+completed work, but was greatly relieved when he gave it his unqualified
+approval. On his earnest invitation she visited him in Paris.
+Fortunately, she did not have to resort to the Herbert Spencer expedient
+of wearing ear-muffs for protection against loquacious friends. She
+liked Comte first-rate, until he began to make love to her. Then his
+stock dropped below par.</p>
+
+<p>Comte was always much impressed by intellectual women. His wife had
+given him a sample of the other kind, and caused him to swing out and
+idealize the woman of brains.</p>
+
+<p>So that, when Harriet Martineau admired the Positive<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_260" id="VIII_Page_260">[Pg 260]</a></span> Philosophy, it was
+proof sufficient to Comte of her excellence in all things. She knew
+better, and started soon for Dover.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. and Mrs. Mill had called on Comte a few months before, and given him
+a glimpse of the ideal&mdash;an intellectual man mated with an intellectual
+woman. But Comte didn't see that it was plain commonsense that made them
+great. Comte prided himself on his own commonsense, but the article was
+not in his equipment, else he would not have put the blame of all his
+troubles upon his wife. A man with commonsense, married to a woman who
+hasn't any, does not necessarily forfeit his own.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. or Mrs. Mill would have been great anywhere&mdash;singly, separately,
+together, or apart. Each was a radiant center. Weakness multiplied by
+two does not give strength, and naught times naught equals naught.<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_261" id="VIII_Page_261">[Pg 261]</a></span></p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>Having finished the Positive Philosophy, Comte's restless mind began to
+look around for more worlds to conquer.</p>
+
+<p>In the expenditure of money he was careful, and in his accounts exact;
+but the making of money and its accumulation were things that to him
+could safely be delegated to second-class minds. A haughty pride of
+intellect was his, not unmixed with that peculiar quality of the prima
+donna which causes her to cut fantastic capers and make everybody kiss
+her big toe.</p>
+
+<p>Comte had done one thing superbly well. England had recognized his merit
+to a degree that France had not, and to his English friends he now made
+an appeal for financial help, so he could have freedom to complete
+another great work he had in his mind. To John Stuart Mill he wrote,
+outlining in a general way his new book on a social science, to be
+called "The Positive Polity." It was, in a degree, to be a sequel to the
+Positive Philosophy.</p>
+
+<p>Mill communicated with Grote, the banker, known to us through his superb
+history of Greece, and with the help of George Henry Lewes and a mite
+from Herbert Spencer to show his good-will, a purse equal to about
+twelve hundred dollars was sent to Comte.</p>
+
+<p>Matters went along for a year, when Comte wrote a brief letter to Mill
+suggesting that it was about time for another remittance. Mill again
+appealed to Grote, and Grote, the man of affairs, wrote to his Paris<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_262" id="VIII_Page_262">[Pg 262]</a></span>
+correspondent, who ascertained that Comte, now believing he was free
+from the bread-and-butter bugaboo, was giving his services to the
+Polytechnic, gratis, and also giving lectures to the people wherever
+some one would simply pay for the hall.</p>
+
+<p>To advance money to a man that he might write a book showing how the
+nation should manage its finances, when the author could not look after
+his own, reminded Grote of the individual who wrote from the Debtors'
+Prison to the Secretary of the Exchequer, giving valuable advice. All
+publishers are familiar with the penniless person who writes a book on
+"How to Achieve Success," expecting to achieve success by publishing it.</p>
+
+<p>Grote wrote to Mill, expressing the wholesome truth that the first duty
+of every man was to make a living for himself&mdash;a fact which Mill states
+in "On Liberty." Mill hadn't the temerity to pass Grote's maxim along to
+Comte, and so sent a small contribution out of his own pocket. This was
+very much like the Indian who, feeling that his dog's tail should be
+amputated, cut it off a little at a time, so as not to hurt the animal.
+We have all done this, and got the ingratitude we deserved.</p>
+
+<p>Comte wrote back a most sarcastic letter, accusing Mill and Grote with
+having broken faith with him.</p>
+
+<p>He now treated them very much as he had Saint-Simon; and in his lectures
+seldom failed to tell in pointed phrase what a lot of money-grubbing
+barbarians<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_263" id="VIII_Page_263">[Pg 263]</a></span> inhabited the British Isles. To the credit of Mill be it
+said that he still believed in the value of the Positive Philosophy, and
+did all he could to further Comte's reputation and help the sale of his
+books.<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_264" id="VIII_Page_264">[Pg 264]</a></span></p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>In Eighteen Hundred Forty-five, when Comte was forty-seven years old, he
+met Madame Clothilde de Vaux. Her husband was in prison, serving a
+life-sentence for political offenses, and Comte was first attracted to
+her through pity. Soon this evolved into a violent attachment, and Comte
+began to quote her in his lectures.</p>
+
+<p>Comte was now most busy with his "Polity" in collaboration with Madame
+De Vaux. Her part of the work seems to have been to listen to Comte
+while he read her his amusing manuscript: and she, being a good woman
+and wise, praised the work in every part. They were together almost
+daily, and she seemed to supply him the sympathy he had all of his life
+so much craved.</p>
+
+<p>In one short year Madame De Vaux died, and Comte for a time was
+inconsolable. Then his sorrow found surcease in an attempt to do for her
+in prose what Dante had done for Beatrice in poetry. But the vehicle of
+Comte's thoughts creaked. The exact language of science when applied to
+a woman becomes peculiarly non-piquant and lacking in perspicacity and
+perspicuity. No woman can be summed up in an algebraic formula, and when
+a mathematician does a problem to his lady's eyebrow, he forgets
+entirely that femininity forever equals <i>x</i>. Those who can write Sonnets
+from the Portuguese may place their loves on exhibition&mdash;no others
+should. Sweets too sweet do cloy.</p>
+
+<p>For the rest of his life, Comte made every Wednesday<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_265" id="VIII_Page_265">[Pg 265]</a></span> afternoon sacred
+for a visit to the grave of Madame De Vaux, and three times every day,
+with the precision of a Mussulman, he retired to his room, locked the
+door, and in silence apostrophized to her spirit. Comte now continued as
+industrious as ever, but the quality of his writing lamentably declined.
+His popular lectures to the people on scientific themes were always
+good, and his work as a teacher was satisfactory, but when he endeavored
+to continue original research, then his hazards of mind lacked steady
+flight.</p>
+
+<p>The Positive Polity degenerated into a dogmatic scheme of government
+where the wisest should rule. The determination of who was wisest was to
+be left to the wise ones themselves, and Comte himself volunteered to be
+the first Pope.</p>
+
+<p>The worship of Humanity would be the only religion, and women would
+shine as the high priests. Comte thought it all out in detail, and
+arranged a complete scheme of life, and actually wished to form a
+political party and overthrow the government, founding a gynecocracy on
+the ruins. His ebbing mind could not grasp the thought that tyranny
+founded on goodness is a tyranny still, and that a despotic altruism is
+a despotism nevertheless. Slavery blocks evolution.</p>
+
+<p>So thus rounded out the life of Auguste Comte&mdash;beginning in childhood,
+he traversed the circle, and ended where he began.</p>
+
+<p>He died in his sixtieth year. M. Littre, his most famous<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_266" id="VIII_Page_266">[Pg 266]</a></span> pupil,
+touchingly looked after his wants to the last, ministered to his
+necessities, advancing money on royalties that were never due. M. Littre
+occasionally apologized for the meagerness of the returns, and was
+closely questioned and even doubted by Comte, who died unaware of the
+unflinching loyalty of a friendship that endured distrust and contumely
+without resentment. Such love and patience and loyalty as were shown by
+M. Littre redeem the race.</p>
+
+<p>The best certificate to the worth of Auguste Comte lies in the fact
+that, in spite of marked personal limitations and much petty
+querulousness, he profoundly influenced such men as Littre, Humboldt,
+Mill, Lewes, Grote, Spencer and Frederic Harrison.</p>
+
+<p>To have helped such men as these, and cheered them on their way, was no
+small achievement. Comte's sole claim for immortality lies in the
+Positive Philosophy. The word "positive," as used by Comte, is similar
+in intent to pose, poise&mdash;fixed, final. So, besides a positive present
+good, Comte believed he was stating a final truth; to-wit: that which is
+good here is good everywhere, and if there is a future life, the best
+preparation for it is to live now and here, up to your highest and best.
+Comte protested against the idea of "a preparation for a life to
+come"&mdash;now is the time, and the place is here.</p>
+
+<p>The essence of Positive Philosophy is that man passes through three
+mental periods&mdash;the Theological or<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_267" id="VIII_Page_267">[Pg 267]</a></span> fictitious; the Metaphysical or
+abstract; the Positive or scientific.</p>
+
+<p>Hence, there are three general philosophies or systems of conceptions
+concerning life and destiny.</p>
+
+<p>The Theological, or first system, is the necessary starting-point of the
+human intellect. The Positive, or third period, is the ultimate goal of
+every progressive, thinking man; the second period is merely a state of
+transition that bridges the gulf between the first and the third.</p>
+
+<p>Metaphysics holds the child by the hand until he can trust his feet&mdash;it
+is a passageway between the fictitious and the actual. Once across the
+chasm, it is no longer needed. Theology represents the child;
+Metaphysics the youth; Science the man.</p>
+
+<p>The evolution of the race is mirrored in the evolution of the
+individual. Look back on your own career&mdash;your first dawn of thought
+began in an inquiry, "Who made all this&mdash;how did it all happen?"</p>
+
+<p>And Theology comes in with a glib explanation: the fairies, dryads,
+gnomes and gods made everything, and they can do with it all as they
+please. Later, we concentrate all of these personalities in one god,
+with a devil in competition, and this for a time satisfies.</p>
+
+<p>Later, the thought of an arbitrary being dealing out rewards and
+punishments grows dim, for we see the regular workings of Cause and
+Effect. We begin to talk of Energy, the Divine Essence, and the Reign of
+Law. We speak, as Matthew Arnold did, of "a Power, not<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_268" id="VIII_Page_268">[Pg 268]</a></span> ourselves, that
+makes for righteousness." But Emerson believed in a power that was in
+himself that made for righteousness.</p>
+
+<p>Metaphysics reaches its highest stage when it affirms "All is One," or
+"All is Mind," just as Theology reaches its highest conception when it
+becomes Monotheistic&mdash;having one God and curtailing the personality of
+the devil to a mere abstraction.</p>
+
+<p>But this does not long satisfy, for we begin to ask, "What is this One?"
+or "What is Mind?"</p>
+
+<p>Then Positivity comes in and says that the highest wisdom lies in
+knowing that we do not know anything, and never can, concerning a First
+Cause. All we find is phenomena and behind phenomena, phenomena. The
+laws of Nature do not account for the origin of the laws of Nature.
+Spencer's famous chapter on the Unknowable was derived largely from
+Comte, who attempted to define the limits of human knowledge. And it is
+worth noting that the one thing which gave most offense in both Comte's
+and Spencer's works was their doctrine of the Unknowable. This, indeed,
+forms but a small part of the work of these men, and if it were all
+demolished there would still remain their doctrine of the known. The
+bitterness of Theology toward Science arises from the fact that as we
+find things out we dispense with the arbitrary god, and his business
+agent, the priest, who insists that no transaction is legal unless he
+ratifies it.<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_269" id="VIII_Page_269">[Pg 269]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Men begin by explaining everything, and the explanations given are
+always first for other people. Parents answer the child, not telling him
+the actual truth, but giving him that which will satisfy&mdash;that which he
+can mentally digest. To say, "The fairies brought it," may be all right
+until the child begins to ask who the fairies are, and wants to be shown
+one, and then we have to make the somewhat humiliating confession that
+there are no fairies.</p>
+
+<p>But now we perceive that this mild fabrication in reference to Santa
+Claus, and the fairies, is right and proper mental food for the child.
+His mind can not grasp the truth that some things are unknowable; and he
+is not sufficiently skilled in the things of the world to become
+interested in them&mdash;he must have a resting-place for his thought, so the
+fairy-tale comes in as an aid to the growing imagination. Only this: we
+place no penalty on disbelief in fairies, nor do we make special offers
+of reward to all who believe that fairies actually exist. Neither do we
+tell the child that people who believe in fairies are good, and that
+those who do not are wicked and perverse.</p>
+
+<p>Comte admits that the theological and metaphysical stages are necessary,
+but the sooner man can be graduated out of them the better. He brought
+vast research to bear in order to show the growth and death of
+theological conceptions. Hate, fear, revenge and doubt are all
+theological attributes, detrimental to man's best<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_270" id="VIII_Page_270">[Pg 270]</a></span> efforts. That moral
+ideas were an afterthought, and really form no part of theology, Comte
+emphasized at great length, and shows from much data where these ideas
+were grafted on to the original tree.</p>
+
+<p>And the sum of the argument is, that all progress of mind, body and
+material things has come to man through the study of Cause and Effect.
+And just in degree as he has abandoned the study of Theology as futile
+and absurd, and centered on helping himself here and now, has he
+prospered.</p>
+
+<p>Positivism is really a religion. The object of its worship is Humanity.
+It does not believe in a devil or any influence that works for harm, or
+in opposition to man. Man's only enemy is himself, and this is on
+account of his ignorance of this world, and his superstitious belief in
+another. Our troubles, like diseases, all come from ignorance and
+weakness, and through our ignorance are we weak and unable to adjust
+ourselves to conditions. The more we know of this world the better we
+think of it, and the better are we able to use it for our advancement.</p>
+
+<p>So far as we can judge, the Unknown Cause that rules the world by
+unchanging laws is a movement forward toward happiness, growth, justice,
+peace and right. Therefore, the Scientist, who perceives that all is
+good when rightly received and rightly understood, is really the priest
+or holy man&mdash;the mediator and explainer of the mysteries. As fast as we
+understand things they cease to be supernatural, for the supernatural is
+the<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_271" id="VIII_Page_271">[Pg 271]</a></span> natural not yet understood. The theological priest who believes in
+a god and a devil is the real modern infidel. Such a belief is
+fallacious, contrary to reason, and contrary to all the man of courage
+sees and knows.</p>
+
+<p>The real man of faith is the one who discards all thought of "how it
+first happened," and fixes his mind on the fact that he is here. The
+more he studies the conditions that surround him, the greater his faith
+in the truth that all is well.</p>
+
+<p>If men had turned their attention to Humanity, discarding Theology,
+using as much talent, time, money and effort to wring from the skies the
+secrets of the Unknowable, this world would now be a veritable paradise.
+It is Theology that has barred the entrance to Eden, by diverting the
+attention of men from this world to another. Heaven is Here.</p>
+
+<p>All religious denominations now dimly perceive the trend of the times,
+and are gradually omitting theology from their teachings and taking on
+ethics and sociology instead. A preacher is now simply Society's walking
+delegate. We are evolving theology out and sociology in. Theology has
+ever been the foe of progress and the enemy of knowledge. It has
+professed to know all and has placed a penalty on advancement. The Age
+of Enlightenment will not be here until every church has evolved into a
+schoolhouse, and every priest is a pupil as well as a teacher.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr class="full" />
+<h2><a name="VOLTAIRE" id="VOLTAIRE"></a>VOLTAIRE<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_272" id="VIII_Page_272">[Pg 272]</a></span></h2>
+
+
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>We are intelligent beings; and intelligent beings can not have been<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_273" id="VIII_Page_273">[Pg 273]</a></span>
+formed by a blind, brute, insensible being. There is certainly some
+difference between a clod and the ideas of Newton. Newton's
+intelligence came from some greater Intelligence.</p></div>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 25em;">&mdash;<i>The Philosophical Dictionary</i></span><br />
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_274" id="VIII_Page_274">[Pg 274]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="center">
+    <a id="image0461-1"></a>
+    <img src="images/0461-1.jpg" width="256" height="400"
+       alt=""
+       title="" />
+
+   <p class="center">VOLTAIRE</p>
+</div>
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_275" id="VIII_Page_275">[Pg 275]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<p>The man, Francois Marie Arouet, known to us as Voltaire (which name he
+adopted in his twenty-first year), was born in Paris in Sixteen Hundred
+Ninety-four. He was the second son in a family of three children. During
+his babyhood he was very frail; in childhood sickly and weak; and
+throughout his whole life he suffered much from indigestion and
+insomnia.</p>
+
+<p>In all the realm of writers no man ever had a fuller and more active
+career, touching life at so many points, than Voltaire.</p>
+
+<p>The first requisite in a long and useful career would seem to be, have
+yourself born weak and cultivate dyspepsia, nervousness and insomnia.
+Whether or not the good die young is still a mooted question, but
+certainly the athletic often do. All those good men and true, who at
+grocery, tavern and railroad-station eat hard-boiled eggs on a wager,
+and lift barrels of flour with one hand, are carried to early graves,
+and over the grass-grown mounds that cover their dust, consumptive,
+dyspeptic and neurotic relatives, for twice or thrice a score of years,
+strew sweet myrtle, thyme and mignonette.</p>
+
+<p>Voltaire died of an accident&mdash;too much Four-o'Clock&mdash;cut<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_276" id="VIII_Page_276">[Pg 276]</a></span> off in his
+prime, when life for him was at its brightest and best, aged
+eighty-three.</p>
+
+<p>The only evidence we have that the mind of Voltaire failed at the last
+came from the Abbe Gaultier and the Cur&eacute; of Saint Sulpice. These good
+men arrived with a written retraction, which they desired Voltaire to
+sign. Waiting in the anteroom of the sick-chamber they sent in word that
+they wished to enter. "Assure them of my respect," said the stricken
+man. But the holy men were not to be thus turned away, so they entered.
+They approached the bedside, and the Cur&eacute; of Saint Sulpice said: "M. de
+Voltaire, your life is about to end. Do you acknowledge the divinity of
+Jesus Christ?"</p>
+
+<p>And the dying man stretched out a bony hand, making a gesture that they
+should depart, and murmured, "Let me die in peace."</p>
+
+<p>"You see," said the Cur&eacute; to the Abbe, as they withdrew, "you see that he
+is out of his head!"<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_277" id="VIII_Page_277">[Pg 277]</a></span></p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>The father of Voltaire, Francois Arouet, was a notary who looked after
+various family estates and waxed prosperous on the crumbs that fell from
+the rich man's table.</p>
+
+<p>He was solicitor to the Duc de Richelieu, the Sullys, and also the
+Duchesse de Saint-Simon, mother of the philosopher, Saint-Simon, who
+made the mistake of helping Auguste Comte, thus getting himself hotly
+and positively denounced by the man who formulated the "Positive
+Philosophy."</p>
+
+<p>Arouet belonged to the middle class and never knew that he sprang from a
+noble line until his son announced the fact. It was then too late to
+deny it.</p>
+
+<p>He was a devout Churchman, upright in all his affairs, respectable, took
+snuff, walked with a waddle and cultivated a double chin. M. Arouet
+pater did not marry until his mind was mature, so that he might avoid
+the danger of a mismating. He was forty, past. The second son, Francois
+fils, was ten years younger than his brother Armand, so the father was
+over fifty when our hero was born. Francois fils used to speak of
+himself as an afterthought&mdash;a sort of domestic postscript&mdash;"but," added
+he musingly, "our afterthoughts are often best."</p>
+
+<p>One of the most distinguished clients of M. Arouet was Ninon de Lenclos,
+who had the felicity to be made love to by three generations of
+Frenchmen. Ninon has been likened for her vivacious ways, her flashing<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_278" id="VIII_Page_278">[Pg 278]</a></span>
+intellect, and her perennial youth, to the divine Sara, who at sixty
+plays the part of Juliet with a woman of thirty for the old nurse. Ninon
+had turned her three-score and ten, and swung gracefully into the
+home-stretch, when the second son was born to M. Arouet. She was of a
+deeply religious turn of mind, for she had been loved by several
+priests, and now the Abbe de Chateauneuf was paying his devotions to
+her.</p>
+
+<p>Ninon was much interested in the new arrival, and going to the house of
+M. Arouet, took to bed, and sent in haste for the Abbe de Chateauneuf,
+saying she was in sore trouble. When the good man arrived, he thought it
+a matter of extreme unction, and was ushered into the room of the
+alleged invalid. Here he was duly presented with the infant that later
+was to write the "Philosophical Dictionary." It was as queer a case of
+kabojolism as history records.</p>
+
+<p>Doubtless the Abbe was a bit agitated at first, but finally getting his
+breath, he managed to say, "As there is a vicarious atonement, there
+must also be, on occasion, vicarious births, and this is one&mdash;God be
+praised."</p>
+
+<p>The child was then baptized, the good Abbe standing as godfather.</p>
+
+<p>There must be something, after all, in prenatal influences, for as the
+little Francois grew up he evolved the traits of Ninon de Lenclos and
+the Abbe much more than those of his father and mother.</p>
+
+<p>When the boy was a little over six years old the mother<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_279" id="VIII_Page_279">[Pg 279]</a></span> died. Of her we
+know absolutely nothing. In her son's writings he refers to her but
+once, wherein he has her say that "Boileau was a clever book, but a
+silly man."</p>
+
+<p>The education of the youngster seemed largely to have been left to the
+Abbe, his godfather, who very early taught him to recite the "Mosiad," a
+metrical effusion wherein the mistakes of Moses were related in churchly
+Latin, done first for the divertisement of sundry pious monks in idle
+hours.</p>
+
+<p>At ten years of age Francois was sent to the College of Louis-le-Grand,
+a Jesuit school where the minds of youth were molded in things sacred
+and secular.</p>
+
+<p>In only one thing did the boy really excel, and that was in the matter
+of making rhymes. The Abbe Chateauneuf had taught him the trick before
+he could speak plainly, and Ninon had been so pleased with the wee poet
+that she left him two thousand francs in her will for the purchase of
+books. As Ninon insisted on living to be ninety, Voltaire discounted the
+legacy and got it cashed on dedicating a sonnet to the divine Ninon. In
+this sonnet Voltaire suggests that a life of virtue conduces largely to
+longevity, as witness the incomparable Ninon de Lenclos, to which
+sentiment Ninon filed no exceptions.</p>
+
+<p>In one of the school debates young Francois presented his argument in
+rhyme, and evidently ran in some choice passages from the "Mosiad," for
+Father le Jay, according to Condorcet, left his official chair, and<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_280" id="VIII_Page_280">[Pg 280]</a></span>
+rushing down the aisle, grabbed the boy by the collar, and shaking him,
+said, "Unhappy boy! you will one day be the standard-bearer of deism in
+France!"&mdash;a prophecy, possibly, made after its fulfilment.</p>
+
+<p>Young Francois remained at the college until he was seventeen years old.
+From letters sent by him while there, it is evident that the chief
+characteristic of his mind was already a contempt for the clergy. Of two
+of his colleagues who were preparing for the priesthood, he says, "They
+had reflected on the dangers of a world of the charms of which they were
+ignorant; and on the pleasures of a religious life of which they knew
+not the disagreeableness." Already we see he was getting handy in
+polishing a sentence with the emery of his wit. Continuing, he says: "In
+a quarter of an hour they ran over all the Orders, and each seemed so
+attractive that they could not decide. In which predicament they might
+have been left like the ass, which died of starvation between two
+bundles of hay, not knowing which to choose. However, they decided to
+leave the matter to Providence, and let the dice decide. So one became a
+Carmelite and the other a Jesuit."<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_281" id="VIII_Page_281">[Pg 281]</a></span></p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>Arouet, at first intent on having his son become a priest, now fell back
+on the law as second choice. The young man was therefore duly articled
+with a firm of advocates and sent to hear lectures on jurisprudence. But
+his godfather introduced him into the Society of the Temple, a group of
+wits, of all ages, who could take snuff and throw off an epigram on any
+subject. The bright young man, flashing, dashing and daring, made
+friends at once through his skill in writing scurrilous verse upon any
+one whose name might be mentioned. This habit had been begun in college,
+where it was much applauded by the underlings, who delighted to see
+their unpopular teachers done to a turn. The scribbling habit is a
+variant of that peculiar propensity which finds form in drawing a
+portrait on the blackboard before the teacher gets around in the
+morning. If the teacher does not happen to love art for art's sake,
+there may be trouble; but verses are safer, for they circulate secretly
+and are copied and quoted anonymously.</p>
+
+<p>The thing we do best in life is that which we play at most in youth.</p>
+
+<p>Ridicule was this man's weapon. For the benefit of the Society of the
+Temple he paid his respects to the sham piety and politics of
+Versailles. He had been educated by priests, and his father was a
+politician feeding at the public trough. The young man knew the faults
+and foibles of both priest and politician, and his<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_282" id="VIII_Page_282">[Pg 282]</a></span> keen wit told truths
+about the court that were so well expressed the wastebasket did not
+capture them. One of these effusions was printed, anonymously, of
+course, but a copy coming into the hands of M. Arouet, the old gentleman
+recognized the literary style and became alarmed. He must get the young
+man out of Paris&mdash;the Bastile yawned for poets like this!</p>
+
+<p>A brother of the Abbe de Chateauneuf was Ambassador at The Hague, and
+the great man, being importuned, consented to take the youth as clerk.</p>
+
+<p>Life at The Hague afforded the embryo poet an opportunity to meet many
+distinguished people.</p>
+
+<p>In Francois there was none of the bourgeois&mdash;he associated only with
+nobility&mdash;and as he had an aristocracy of the intellect, which served
+him quite as well as a peerage, he was everywhere received. In his
+manner there was nothing apologetic&mdash;he took everything as his divine
+right.</p>
+
+<p>In this brilliant little coterie at The Hague was one Madame Dunoyer, a
+writer of court gossip and a social promoter of ability, separated from
+her husband for her husband's good. Francois crossed swords with her in
+an encounter of wit, was worsted, but got even by making love to her;
+and later he made love to her daughter, a beautiful girl of about his
+own age.</p>
+
+<p>The air became surcharged with gossip. There was danger of an explosion
+any moment. Madame Dunoyer gave it out that the brilliant subaltern was
+to marry<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_283" id="VIII_Page_283">[Pg 283]</a></span> the girl. The Madame was going to capture the youth, either
+with her own charms or those of her daughter&mdash;or combined. Rumblings
+were heard on the horizon. The Ambassador, fearing entanglement, bundled
+young Arouet back to Paris, with a testimonial as to his character,
+quite unnecessary. A denial without an accusation is equal to a plea of
+guilty; and that the young man had made the mistake of making violent
+love to the mother and daughter at the same time there is no doubt. The
+mother had accused him and he said things back; he even had shown the
+atrocious bad taste of references in rhyme to the mutual interchange of
+confidences that the mother and daughter might enjoy. The Ambassador had
+acted none too soon.</p>
+
+<p>The father was frantic with alarm&mdash;the boy had disgraced him, and even
+his own position seemed to be threatened when some wit adroitly accused
+the parent of writing the doggerel for his son.</p>
+
+<p>M. Arouet denied it with an oath&mdash;while the son refused to explain, or
+to say anything beyond that he loved his father, thus carrying out the
+idea that the stupid old notary was really a wit in disguise, masking
+his intellect by a seeming dulness. No more biting irony was ever put
+out by Voltaire than this, and the pathos of it lies in the fact that
+the father was quite unable to appreciate the quip.</p>
+
+<p>It was a sample of filial humor much more subtle than that indulged in
+by Charles Dickens, who pilloried his<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_284" id="VIII_Page_284">[Pg 284]</a></span> parents in print, one as Mr.
+Micawber and the other as Mrs. Nickleby. Dickens told the truth and
+painted it large, but Francois Arouet dealt in indiscreet fallacy when
+he endeavored to give his father a reputation for raillery.</p>
+
+<p>A peculiarly offensive poem, appearing about this time, with the Regent
+and his daughter, the Duchesse de Berri, for a central theme, a rescript
+was issued which indirectly testified to the poetic skill of young
+Arouet. He was exiled to a point three hundred miles from Paris and
+forbidden to come nearer on penalty, like unto the injunction issued by
+Prince Henry against the blameless Falstaff. Rumor said that the father
+had something to do with the matter.</p>
+
+<p>But the exile was not for long. The young poet wrote a most adulatory
+composition to the Regent, setting forth his innocence. The Regent was a
+mild and amiable man and much desired peace with all his
+subjects&mdash;especially those who dipped their quills in gall. He was
+melted by the rhyme that made him out such a paragon of virtue, and made
+haste to issue a pardon.</p>
+
+<p>The elder Arouet now proved that he was not wholly without humor, for he
+wrote to a friend, "The exile of my dear son distressed me much less
+than does this precipitate recall."</p>
+
+<p>In order to protect himself the father now refused a home to the son,
+and Francois became a lodger at a boarding-house. He wrote plays and
+acted in them,<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_285" id="VIII_Page_285">[Pg 285]</a></span> penned much bad poetry, went in good society and had a
+very rouge time. Up to this period he knew little Latin and less Greek,
+but now he had an opportunity to furbish up on both. He found himself an
+inmate of the Bastile, on the charge of expressing his congratulations
+to the people of France on the passing of Louis the Fourteenth. In
+America libel only applies to live men, but the world had not then
+gotten this far along.</p>
+
+<p>In the prison it was provided that Sieur Arouet fils should not be
+allowed pens and paper on account of his misuse of these good things
+when outside. He was given copies of Homer, however, in Greek and Latin,
+and he set himself at work, with several of the other prisoners, to
+perfect himself in these languages. We have glimpses of his dining with
+the governor of the prison, and even organizing theatrical performances,
+and he was finally allowed writing materials on promise that he would
+not do anything worse than translate the Bible, so altogether he was
+very well treated.</p>
+
+<p>In fact, he himself referred to this year spent in prison as "a pious
+retreat, that I might meditate, and chasten my soul in quiet thought."</p>
+
+<p>He was only twenty-one, and yet he had set Paris by the ears, and his
+name was known throughout France. "I am as well known as the Regent and
+will be remembered longer," he wrote&mdash;a statement and a prophecy that
+then seemed very egotistical, but which time has fully justified.<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_286" id="VIII_Page_286">[Pg 286]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>It was in prison that he decided to change his name to Voltaire, a
+fanciful word of his own coining. His pretended reason for the change
+was that he might begin life anew and escape the disgrace he had
+undergone of being in prison. There is reason to believe, however, that
+he was rather proud of being "detained," it was proof of his power&mdash;he
+was dangerous outside. But his family had practically cast him off&mdash;he
+owed nothing to them&mdash;and the change of name fostered a mysterious noble
+birth, an idea that he allowed to gain currency without contradiction.
+Moliere had changed his name from Poquolin&mdash;and was he not really
+following in Moliere's footsteps, even to suffering disgrace and public
+odium?<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_287" id="VIII_Page_287">[Pg 287]</a></span></p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>The play of "&OElig;dipe" was presented by Voltaire at the Theater
+Francaise, November Eighteenth, Seventeen Hundred Eighteen. This play
+was written before the author's sojourn in prison, but there he had
+sandpapered its passages, and hand-polished the epigrams.</p>
+
+<p>It was rehearsed at length with the help of the "guests" at the Bastile,
+and once Voltaire wrote a note of appreciation to the Prefect of Police,
+thanking him for his thoughtfulness in sending such excellent and
+pure-minded people to help him in his work.</p>
+
+<p>These things had been managed so they discreetly leaked out, and the
+cafes echoed with the name of Voltaire.</p>
+
+<p>Very soon after his release the play was presented to a crowded house.
+It was a success from the start, for into its lines the audience was
+allowed to read many veiled allusions to Paris public characters. It ran
+for forty-five nights, and was the furore. On one occasion when interest
+seemed to lag, Voltaire, on a sudden inspiration, dressed up as a
+bumpkin page, and attended the Pontiff, carrying his train, playing
+various and sundry sly pranks in pantomime, a la Francis Wilson.</p>
+
+<p>In one of the boxes sat a famous beauty, the Duchesse de Villars. "Who
+is this strange person who is intent upon spoiling the play?" she asked.
+On being told that he was the author of the drama, her censure turned to
+approbation and she sent for the young man.<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_288" id="VIII_Page_288">[Pg 288]</a></span> His appearance in her box
+was duly noted. The Regent and his daughter, the Duchesse de Berri,
+could not resist the temptation to attend the play, and see how much
+they were satirized. Voltaire did his little train-bearing act for their
+benefit, with a few extra grimaces, which pleased them very much, and
+seeing his opportunity, wrote a gracious letter of thanks to His
+Highness for having deigned to visit his play, winding up with thanks
+for the years in the Bastile where, "God wot, all of my evil
+inclinations were duly chastened and corrected."</p>
+
+<p>It had the desired effect&mdash;each side feared the other. The Regent wanted
+the ready writers on his side, and the playwright who was opposed by the
+party in power could not hope for success. The Regent sent a present of
+a thousand crowns to Voltaire and also fixed on him a pension of twelve
+hundred livres a year. At once every passage in the play that could be
+construed as bearing on royalty was revised into words of adulation, and
+all went merry as a marriage-bell. Financially the play was a success,
+and better yet was the pension and the good-will of the young King and
+his Regent.</p>
+
+<p>Thus at twenty-two did Voltaire have the world at his feet.<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_289" id="VIII_Page_289">[Pg 289]</a></span></p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>When Voltaire was twenty-four, his father died. The will provided that
+the property should be equally divided between his three children, but
+it was stipulated that the second son should not come into possession of
+his share until he was thirty-five, and not then unless he was able to
+show the Master in Chancery that he was capable of wisely managing his
+own affairs.</p>
+
+<p>This doubt of the father concerning the son's financial ability has
+often been commented upon ironically, in view of the pronounced thrift
+shown by Voltaire in later life.</p>
+
+<p>But who shall say whether the father by that provision in his will did
+not drive home a stern lesson in economy? Commodore Vanderbilt had so
+much distrust of his son William's capacity for business that he exiled
+him to a Long Island farm, on an allowance. Years after, when William
+had shown his ability to outstrip his father, he rebuked a critic who
+volunteered a suggestion to the effect that the father had erred in the
+boy problem. Said William, "My father was right in this, as in most
+other things&mdash;I was a fool, and he knew it."</p>
+
+<p>Voltaire's vacation of a year in the Bastile had done him much good.
+Then the will of his father, with its cautious provisions, tended to
+sober the youth to a point where he was docile enough for society's
+needs.</p>
+
+<p>A good deal of ballast in way of trouble was necessary<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_290" id="VIII_Page_290">[Pg 290]</a></span> to hold this man
+down.</p>
+
+<p>Marriage might have tamed him. Bachelors are of two kinds&mdash;those who are
+innocent of women, and those who know women too well. The second class,
+I am told, outnumbers the first as ten to one.</p>
+
+<p>Voltaire had been a favorite of various women&mdash;usually married ladies,
+and those older than himself. He had plagiarized Franklin, saying, fifty
+years before the American put out his famous advice, "If you must fall
+in love, why, fall in love with a woman much older than yourself, or at
+least a homely one&mdash;for only such are grateful."</p>
+
+<p>In answer to a man who said divorce and marriage were instituted at the
+same time, Voltaire said: "This is a mistake: there is at least three
+days' difference. Men sometimes quarrel with their wives at the end of
+three days, beat them in a week and divorce them at the end of a month."</p>
+
+<p>Voltaire was small and slight in stature, but his bubbling wit and
+graceful presence more than made amends for any deficiency in way of
+form and feature. Had he desired, he might have taken his pick among the
+young women of nobility, but we see the caution of his nature in
+limiting his love-affairs to plain women, securely married. "Gossip
+isn't busy with the plain women&mdash;that is why I like you," he once said
+to Madame de Bernieres. What the Madame's reply was, we do not know, but
+probably she was not displeased. If a woman knows she is loved, it
+matters little what<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_291" id="VIII_Page_291">[Pg 291]</a></span> you say to her. Compliments by the right oblique
+are construed into lavish praise when expressed in the right tone of
+voice by the right person.</p>
+
+<p>The Regent had allowed Voltaire another pension of two thousand francs,
+at the same time intimating that he hoped the writer's income was
+sufficient so he could now tell the truth. Voltaire took the hint, so
+subtly veiled, to the effect that if he again affronted royalty by
+unkind criticisms, his entire pension would be canceled.</p>
+
+<p>From this time on to the end of his life, he was full of lavish praise
+for royalty. He was needlessly loyal, and dedicated poems and pamphlets
+to nobility, right and left, in a way that would have caused a smile
+were not nobility so hopelessly bound in three-quarters pachyderm. He
+also wrote religious poems, protesting his love for the Church. And here
+seems a good place to say that Voltaire was a member of the Catholic
+Church to his death. Many of his worst attacks on the priesthood were
+put in way of defense for outrageous actions which he enumerated in
+detail. He kept people guessing as to what he meant and what he would do
+next.</p>
+
+<p>Immediately after the death of President McKinley there was a fine
+scramble among the editors of certain saffron sheets&mdash;to get in line and
+shake their ulsters free from all taint of anarchy. Some writers, in
+order to divert suspicion from themselves, hotly denounced other men as
+anarchists.<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_292" id="VIII_Page_292">[Pg 292]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Throughout his life Voltaire had spasms of repentance, prompted by
+caution, possibly, when he warmly denounced atheists, and swore, i'
+faith, that one object of his life was to purify the Church and cleanse
+it of its secret faults.</p>
+
+<p>In his twenty-sixth year, when he was trying hard to be good, he got
+into a personal altercation with the Chevalier de Rohan, an
+insignificant man bearing a proud name. The Chevalier's wit was no match
+for the other's rapier-like tongue, but he had a way of his own in which
+to get even. He had his servants waylay the luckless poet and chastise
+him soundly with rattans.</p>
+
+<p>Voltaire was furious; he tried to get the courts to take it up, but the
+prevailing idea was that he had gotten what he deserved, and the fact
+that the whole affair occurred after dark and the Chevalier did not do
+the beating in person, made conviction impossible.</p>
+
+<p>But Voltaire now quit the anapest and dactyl and devoted his best hours
+to taking fencing lessons. His firm intent was to baptize the soil with
+Rohan's blood. Voltaire was of enough importance so the secret police
+knew of all his doings. Suddenly he found himself taking a post-graduate
+course in the Bastile. I am not sure that the fiery little man was
+entirely displeased with the procedure. It proved to the world that he
+was a dangerous character, and it also gave him a respite from the
+tyranny of the fencing-master, and allowed<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_293" id="VIII_Page_293">[Pg 293]</a></span> him to turn to his first,
+last and only love&mdash;literature. In Voltaire's cosmos was a good deal of
+the Bob Acres quality.</p>
+
+<p>There were plenty of reasons for locking him up&mdash;heresy and treason have
+ever been first cousins&mdash;and pamphlets lampooning Churchmen high in
+office were laid at his door. No doubt some of the anonymous literature
+was not his&mdash;"I would have done the thing better or not at all," he once
+said in reference to a scurrilous brochure. The real fact was, that that
+particular pamphlet was done by a disciple, and if Voltaire's writings
+were vile, then was his offense doubled in that he vitalized a ravenous
+brood of scribblers. They played Caliban to his Setebos.</p>
+
+<p>Voltaire's most offensive contributions were always attributed by him to
+this bishop or that, and to various dignitaries who had no existence
+save in the figment of his own fertile pigment.</p>
+
+<p>He once carried on a controversy between the Bishop of Berlin and the
+Archbishop of Paris, each man thundering against the other with a
+monthly pamphlet wherein each one gored the other without mercy, and
+revealed the senselessness of the other's religion. They flung the
+literary stinkpot with great accuracy. "The other man's superstition is
+always ridiculous to us&mdash;our own is sacred," said Voltaire, and so he
+allowed his controversialists to fight it out for his own quiet joy, and
+the edification of the onlookers.<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_294" id="VIII_Page_294">[Pg 294]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Then his plan of printing an alleged sermon, giving some unknown prelate
+due credit on the title-page, starting in with a pious text and a page
+of trite nothings and gradually drifting off into ridicule of the things
+he had started in to defend&mdash;all this gives a comic tinge to his wail
+that "some evil-minded person is attributing things to me I never
+wrote," If an occasional sly Churchman got after him with his own
+weapon, writing things in his style more hazardous than he dare express,
+surely he should not have complained.</p>
+
+<p>But this was a fact&mdash;the enemy could not follow him long with a literary
+fusillade&mdash;they hadn't the mental ammunition.</p>
+
+<p>Well has Voltaire been called "the father of all those who wear
+shovel-hats."<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_295" id="VIII_Page_295">[Pg 295]</a></span></p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>A few months in the Bastile, and Voltaire's indeterminate sentence was
+commuted to exile. He was allowed to leave his country for his country's
+good. Early in the year Seventeen Hundred Twenty-six he landed in
+England, evidently knowing nobody there except one merchant, a man of no
+special prominence.</p>
+
+<p>Voltaire belonged to the nobility by divine right&mdash;as much as did
+Disraeli. Both had an inward contempt for titles, but they knew the
+hearts of the owners so well that they simply played a game of chess,
+and the "men" they moved were live knights, bishops, kings and queens,
+with rollers under the castles. The pawns they pushed here and there
+were the literary puppets of the time.</p>
+
+<p>The first thing Voltaire had to master in England was the language, and
+this he did passably inside of three months. He took Grub Street by
+storm; dawdled at Dodsley's; met Dean Swift, and these worthies
+respected each other's wit so much that they simply took snuff, grimaced
+and let it go at that; Pope came in for a visit, and the French poet
+crossed Twickenham ferry and offered a handmade sonnet in admiration of
+the "Essay on Man," which he had probably never read. Gay gave Voltaire
+"The Beggar's Opera," in private, and together they called on Congreve,
+who interrupted the Frenchman's flow of flattery long enough to say that
+he wished to be looked on as a gentleman, not a<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_296" id="VIII_Page_296">[Pg 296]</a></span> poet. And Voltaire
+replied that there were many gentlemen but few poets, and if Congreve
+had had the misfortune to be simply a gentleman he would not have
+troubled to call on him at all. Congreve, who really regarded himself as
+the peer of Shakespeare, was won, and sent Voltaire on his way with
+letters to Horace Walpole of Strawberry Hill. Thomson, who lived at
+Hammersmith, and wrote his "Seasons" in a "public" next door to
+Kelmscott, corrected and revised some of Voltaire's attempts at English
+poetry. Young evolved some of his "Night Thoughts" while on a visit with
+Voltaire at Bubb Dodington's.</p>
+
+<p>A call on the Duchess of Marlborough led to a dinner at Lord
+Chesterfield's. Next he met Queen Caroline and assured her that she
+spoke French like a Parisian. King George the Second quite liked
+Voltaire, because Voltaire quite liked Lady Sandon, his mistress. Only a
+Frenchman could have successfully paid court to the King, Queen and Lady
+Sandon at the same time, as Voltaire did. His great epic poem,
+"Henriade," that he had been sandpapering for ten years, was now
+published, dedicated to the Queen. The King headed the subscription-list
+with more copies than he needed, at five guineas each, on agreement.
+Voltaire afterward said that he would not be expected to read the poem.
+The Queen's good offices were utilized&mdash;she became for the time a royal
+book-agent, and her signature and the author's adorned all deluxe
+copies. A suggestion from<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_297" id="VIII_Page_297">[Pg 297]</a></span> the Queen was equal to an order, and the
+edition was soon worked off.</p>
+
+<p>Voltaire now spent three years in England. He had written his "Life of
+Charles the Twelfth," several plays, an "English Note-Book," and best of
+all, had gotten together a thousand pounds good money as proceeds of
+"Henriade," a stiff and stilted piece of pedantic bombast, written with
+sweat and lamp-smoke.</p>
+
+<p>The "Letters on the English" were published a few years later in Paris
+with good results, considering it was only a by-product. It is a deal
+better-natured than Dickens' "American Note-Book," and had more humor
+than Emerson's "English Traits." Among other things quite Voltairesque
+in the "Letters" is this: "The Anglican Church has retained many of the
+good old Catholic customs&mdash;not the least of which is the collection of
+tithes with great regularity."<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_298" id="VIII_Page_298">[Pg 298]</a></span></p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>The priestly habit of Voltaire's life manifested itself even to the
+sharp collecting from the world all that the world owed him.</p>
+
+<p>The snug little sum he had secured in England would have shown his
+ability, but there was something better in store, awaiting his return to
+France. It seems the Controller of Finance had organized a lottery to
+help pay the interest on the public debt. A considerable sum of money
+had been realized, but there was still a large number of tickets unsold,
+and the drawing was soon to take place. Voltaire knew the officials who
+had the matter in charge and they knew him. He organized a syndicate
+that would take all tickets there were left, on guarantee that among the
+tickets purchased would be the one that called for the principal prize
+of forty thousand pounds. Just how it was known in advance what ticket
+would win must be left to those good people who understand these little
+things in detail. In any event, Voltaire put in every sou he had&mdash;and
+his little fortune was then a matter of about ten thousand dollars.
+Several of his friends contributed a like sum.</p>
+
+<p>The drawing took place, and the prize of forty thousand pounds was
+theirs. It is said that Voltaire took twenty-five thousand pounds as his
+share&mdash;the whole scheme was his anyway&mdash;and his friends were quite
+satisfied with having doubled their money in a fortnight.</p>
+
+<p>Immediately on securing this money, Voltaire presented himself at the
+office of the President of Accounts,<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_299" id="VIII_Page_299">[Pg 299]</a></span> and asked for the legacy left him
+by his father. As proof of his financial ability, and as a guarantee of
+good faith, he opened a hand-satchel and piled on the President's table
+a small mountain of gold and bank-notes. The first question of the
+astonished official was, "Will M. de Voltaire have the supreme goodness
+to explain where he stole all this money?"</p>
+
+<p>This was soon followed by an apology, as the visitor explained the
+reason of his visit.</p>
+
+<p>The father's legacy amounted to nearly four thousand pounds, and this
+was at once paid over to Voltaire with a flattering letter expressing
+perfect faith in his ability to manage his own finances.</p>
+
+<p>There is a popular opinion that Voltaire made considerable money by his
+pen, but the fact is, that at no period of his life did literature
+contribute in but a very scanty way to his prosperity.</p>
+
+<p>After the lottery scheme, Voltaire embarked in grain speculations,
+importing wheat from Barbary for French consumption. In this he made a
+fair profit, but when war broke out between Italy and France, he entered
+into an arrangement with Duverney, who had the army commissariat in his
+hands, to provision the troops. It was not much of a war, but it lasted
+long enough, as most wars do, for a few contractors to make much moneys.
+The war spirit is usually fanned by financiers, Kuhn, Loeb and Company
+giving the ultimatum.<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_300" id="VIII_Page_300">[Pg 300]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Voltaire cleared about twenty thousand pounds out of his provision
+contract.</p>
+
+<p>Thus we find this thrifty poet at forty with a fortune equal to a
+half-million dollars. This money he loaned out in a way of his own&mdash;a
+way as original as his literary style. His knowledge of the upper
+circles again served him well. Among the proud scions of nobility there
+were always a few who, through gambling proclivities, and other royal
+qualities, were much in need of funds. Voltaire picked the men who had
+only a life interest in their estates, and made them loans, secured by
+the rentals. The loans were to be paid back in annuities as long as both
+men lived.</p>
+
+<p>All insurance is a species of gambling&mdash;the company offers to make you a
+bet that your house will burn within a year.</p>
+
+<p>In life-insurance, the company's expert looks you over, and if your
+waist measurement is not too great for your height, a bargain is entered
+into wherein you agree to pay so much now, and so much every year as
+long as you live, in consideration that the company will pay your heirs
+so much at your death.</p>
+
+<p>The chief value of life-insurance lies in the fact that it insures a man
+against his own indiscretion, a thing supposedly under his own
+control&mdash;but which never is. Voltaire's scheme banked on the man's
+weakness, and laid his indiscretion open before the world. It was
+life-insurance turned wrong side out, and could only<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_301" id="VIII_Page_301">[Pg 301]</a></span> have been devised
+and carried out by a man of courage with an actuary's bias for
+mathematics.</p>
+
+<p>Instead of agreeing to pay the man so much at death, Voltaire paid him
+the whole sum in advance, and the man agreed to pay, say, ten per cent
+interest until either the lender or the borrower died. No principal was
+to be paid, and on the death of either party, the whole debt was
+canceled.</p>
+
+<p>Voltaire picked only men younger than himself. It was a tempting offer
+to the borrower, for Voltaire looked like a consumptive, and it is said
+that on occasion he evolved a wheezy cough that helped close the deal.
+The whole scheme, for Voltaire, was immensely successful. On some of the
+risks he collected his yearly ten per cent for over forty years, or
+until his death.</p>
+
+<p>On Voltaire's loan of sixteen hundred pounds to the Marquis du Chatelet,
+however, it is known that he collected nothing either in way of
+principal or interest. This was as strange a piece of financiering as
+was ever consummated; and the inside history of the matter, with its
+peculiar psychology, has never been written. The only two persons who
+could have told that story in its completeness were Voltaire and the
+Madame du Chatelet, and neither ever did.<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_302" id="VIII_Page_302">[Pg 302]</a></span></p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>Madame du Chatelet&mdash;the divine Emilie&mdash;was twenty-seven and Voltaire was
+thirty-nine when they first met.</p>
+
+<p>He was living in obscure lodgings in Paris for prudential reasons, the
+executioner having just burned, in the public street, all the copies of
+his last book that could be found.</p>
+
+<p>The Madame called on him to express her sympathy&mdash;and congratulations.
+She had written a book, but it had not been burned&mdash;not even read! She
+was tall, thin, angular, far from handsome, but had beaming eyes and a
+face that tokened intellect. And best of all, her voice was low, finely
+modulated, and was not exercised more than was meet.</p>
+
+<p>She leaned her chin upon her hand and looked at him.</p>
+
+<p>She had met Voltaire when she was a child&mdash;at least she said so, and he,
+being a gentleman, remembered perfectly. She read to him a little
+manuscript she had just dashed off. It was deep, profound and full of
+reasons&mdash;that is the way learned women write&mdash;they write like professors
+of rhetoric. Really great men write lightly, suggestively, and with a
+certain amount of indifference, dash, froth and foam. When women evolve
+literary foam, it is the sweet, cloying, fixed foam of the charlotte
+russe&mdash;not the bubbling, effervescent Voltaire article.</p>
+
+<p>Could M. de Voltaire suggest a way in which her manuscript might be
+lightened up so the public<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_303" id="VIII_Page_303">[Pg 303]</a></span> executioner would deign to notice it?</p>
+
+<p>M. de Voltaire responded by reading to her a little thing of his own.</p>
+
+<p>The next day she called again.</p>
+
+<p>Some say that Madame called on Voltaire to secure a loan on her
+husband's estate at Civey. No matter&mdash;she got the loan.</p>
+
+<p>Doubtless she did not know where she was going&mdash;none of us do. We are
+all sailing under sealed orders.</p>
+
+<p>The Madame had been married eight years. She was versed in Latin and
+knew Italian literature. She was educated; Voltaire was not. She offered
+to teach him Italian if he would give her lessons in English.</p>
+
+<p>They read to each other things they had recently written. When men and
+women read to each other and mingle their emotions, the danger-line is
+being reached. Literary people of the opposite sex do not really love
+each other. All they desire is to read their manuscript aloud to a
+receptive listener.</p>
+
+<p>Thus are the literary germs vitalized&mdash;by giving our thoughts to another
+we really make them our own. Only well-sexed people produce
+literature&mdash;poetry is the pollen of the mind. Meter, rhythm, lilt and
+style are stamen, pistil and stalk swaying in the warm breeze of
+springtime.</p>
+
+<p>An order for arrest was out for Voltaire. Pamphlets which he had been
+refused permission to publish in Paris were printed at Rouen and were
+setting all Paris by the ears.<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_304" id="VIII_Page_304">[Pg 304]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>With Madame du Chatelet he fled to Civey, where was the tumbledown
+chateau of the Marquis&mdash;the Madame's complaisant husband. Voltaire
+advanced the Marquis sixteen hundred pounds to put the place in order,
+and then on his own account fitted up two sumptuous apartments, one for
+himself and one for Madame. The Marquis went away with his regiment, and
+occasionally came back and lounged about the chateau. But Voltaire was
+the real master of the place.</p>
+
+<p>Voltaire was neither domestic nor rural in his tastes, but the Du
+Chatelet seemed to fill his cup to the brim, and made him enjoy what
+otherwise would have been exile. He wrote incessantly&mdash;poems, essays,
+plays&mdash;and fired pamphlets at a world of fools.</p>
+
+<p>All that he wrote during the day he read to Madame at night. One of her
+maids has given us a vivid little picture of how Voltaire, at exactly
+eleven o'clock each night, would come out of hiding, and entering the
+Madame's room, would partake of the dainty supper that was always
+prepared for him. The divine Emilie had the French habit of receiving
+her visitors in bed, and as her hours were much more regular than
+Voltaire's, she usually enjoyed a nap before he entered. After his
+supper he would read aloud to her all he had written since they last
+met. If the piece was dramatic he would act it out with roll of r's,
+striding walk, grimace and gesticulations gracefully done, for the man
+was an actor of rare talent.<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_305" id="VIII_Page_305">[Pg 305]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Emerson says, "Let a man do a thing incomparably well, and the world
+will make a path to his door, though he live in a forest." There was no
+lack of society at Civey&mdash;the writers, poets and philosophers found
+their way there. Voltaire fitted up a little private theater, where his
+plays were given, and concerts and lectures held from time to time.</p>
+
+<p>The divine Emilie's forte was science and mathematics&mdash;and on these
+themes she wrote much, competing for prizes and winning the recognition
+of various learned societies. It will be seen that the man and the woman
+were not in competition with each other, which, perhaps, accounts, in
+degree, for their firm friendship.</p>
+
+<p>Yet they did quarrel, too, as true lovers will, I am told. But their
+quarreling was all done in English, so the servants and His Inertia, the
+Marquis, did not know the purpose of it. It is probable that the
+accounts of their misunderstandings are considerably exaggerated, as the
+rehearsal of a tragedy by this pair of histrions would be taken by the
+servants for a sure-enough fight.</p>
+
+<p>And they were always acting&mdash;often beginning breakfast with a "stunt."
+The Madame sang well, and her little impromptu arias pleased her thin
+little lover immensely and he would improvise and answer in kind, and
+then take the part of an audience and applaud, calling loudly, "Bravo!
+Bravo!"</p>
+
+<p>Mornings they would ride horseback through the<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_306" id="VIII_Page_306">[Pg 306]</a></span> winding woods, or else
+hunt for geological and botanical specimens. About all of Voltaire's
+science he got from the lady and this was true of languages as well.</p>
+
+<p>To a nervous, irritable and intense thinker a certain amount of solitude
+seems necessary. Voltaire occasionally grew weary of the delicious quiet
+of Civey, and the indictment against him having been quashed, he would
+go away to Paris or elsewhere. On these trips if he did not take Madame
+along she would grow furious, then lacrimose and finally
+submissive&mdash;with a weepy protest. If he failed to write her daily she
+grew hysterical. Two winters they spent together in Paris and another at
+Brussels.</p>
+
+<p>A lawsuit involving the estate of the Marquis du Chatelet, that had been
+in the courts for eighty years, was pushed to a successful issue by
+Voltaire and Madame. Four hundred fifty thousand dollars were secured,
+but of this Voltaire, strangely enough, took nothing.</p>
+
+<p>That the bond between Emilie and Voltaire was very firm is shown by the
+fact that, after they had been together ten years, he declined to leave
+her to accept an invitation to visit Frederick the Great at Berlin.
+Frederick was a married man, but his was a strictly bachelor court&mdash;for
+prudential reasons. Frederick and Emilie had carried on a spirited
+correspondence, but this was as close as he cared for her to come to
+him. All of his communications with females were limited<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_307" id="VIII_Page_307">[Pg 307]</a></span> to letters,
+and Voltaire once said that that was the reason he was called Frederick
+the Great.</p>
+
+<p>Madame du Chatelet died when she was forty-two; Voltaire was fifty-five.
+For fifteen years this strange and most romantic friendship had
+continued, and to a degree it had worn itself out. Toward the last the
+lady had been exacting and dictatorial, and thinking that Voltaire had
+slighted her by not taking her more into his confidence, she had
+accepted another lover, a man ten years her junior. If she had thought
+to make Voltaire jealous, she had reckoned without her host&mdash;he was
+relieved to find her fierce supervision relaxed.</p>
+
+<p>When she passed away he worked his woe up into a pretty panegyric,
+closed up his affairs at Civey, and left there forever.<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_308" id="VIII_Page_308">[Pg 308]</a></span></p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>So far as the government was concerned, Voltaire seems to have passed
+his days in accepting rewards and receiving punishments. Interdict,
+exile, ostracism were followed by honors, pension and office.</p>
+
+<p>His one lasting love was the drama. About every two years a swirl of
+excitement was caused at Paris by the announcement of a new play by
+Voltaire. These plays seemed to appeal mostly to the nobility, the
+clergy and those in public office. And the object in every instance was
+to get even with somebody, and place some one in a ridiculous light.
+Innocent historical dramas were passed by the censor, and afterward it
+was found that in them some local bigwig was flayed without mercy. Then
+the play had to be withdrawn, and all printed copies were burned in
+public, and Voltaire would flee to Brussels or Geneva to escape summary
+punishment.</p>
+
+<p>However, he never fooled all of the people all of the time. There was
+always a goodly number of dignitaries who richly enjoyed the drubbing he
+gave the other fellow, and these would gloat in inward glee over the
+Voltaire ribaldry until it came their turn. Then the other side would
+laugh. The fact is, Voltaire always represented a constituency,
+otherwise his punishment might have been genuine, instead of forty
+lashes with a feather, well laid on.</p>
+
+<p>About the time Madame du Chatelet passed away, Voltaire seemed to be
+enjoying a period of kingly favor.<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_309" id="VIII_Page_309">[Pg 309]</a></span> He had been made a Knight of the
+Bedchamber and also Historiographer of France. The chief duty of the
+first office consisted in signing the monthly voucher for salary, and
+the other was about the same as Poet Laureate&mdash;with salary in inverse
+ratio to responsibility. It was considered, however, that the holder of
+these offices was one of the King's family, and therefore was bound to
+indulge in no unseemly antics.</p>
+
+<p>On June Twenty-sixth, Seventeen Hundred Fifty, Voltaire applied to the
+King in person for permission to visit Frederick of Prussia.</p>
+
+<p>Tradition has it that the King replied promptly, "You may go&mdash;the sooner
+the better&mdash;and you may remain as long as you choose."</p>
+
+<p>Voltaire pocketed the veiled acerbity without a word, and bowing himself
+out, made hot haste to pack up and be on his way before an order
+rescinding the permission was issued.</p>
+
+<p>Frederick was a freethinker, a scientist, a poet, and a wit well worthy
+of the companionship of Voltaire. In fact, they were very much alike.
+Both had the dual qualities of being intensely practical and yet
+iconoclastic. Both were witty, affable, seemingly indifferent and
+careless, but yet always with an eye on the main chance. Each was small,
+thin and bony, but both had the intellect of the lean and hungry Cassius
+that looked quite through the deeds of man.</p>
+
+<p>Frederick received Voltaire with royal honors. Princes,<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_310" id="VIII_Page_310">[Pg 310]</a></span> ministers of
+state, grandees and generals high in office, knelt on one knee as he
+passed. Frederick tried to make it appear that France had failed to
+appreciate her greatest philosopher, and so he had come to Prussia&mdash;the
+home of letters. His pension was fixed at twenty thousand francs a year,
+he was given the Golden Key of Chamberlain, and the Grand Cross of the
+Order of Merit. He was a member of the King's household, and was the
+nearest and dearest friend of the royal person.</p>
+
+<p>Frederick thought he had bound the great man to him for life.</p>
+
+<p>Personality repels as well as attracts. Voltaire's viper-like pen was
+never idle. He wrote little plays for the court, and these were
+presented with much eclat, the author superintending their presentation,
+and considerately taking minor parts himself, so as to divide the
+honors. But amateur theatricals stand for heart-burnings and jealousy.
+The German poets were scored, other writers ridiculed, and big
+scientists came in for their share of pen-pricking.</p>
+
+<p>Voltaire corrected the King's manuscript and taught him the secret of
+literary style. Then they fell into a controversy, done in Caslon
+old-style, thundering against each other's theories in pamphlets across
+seas of misundertandings. Neither side publicly avowed the authorship,
+but nobody was deceived. The King and Voltaire met daily at meals, and
+carefully avoided the topics they were fighting out in print.<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_311" id="VIII_Page_311">[Pg 311]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Voltaire was rich and all of his wants were supplied, but he entered the
+financial lists, and taking advantage of his inside knowledge,
+speculated in scrip and got into a disgraceful lawsuit over the proceeds
+with a man he should never have known. Frederick was annoyed&mdash;then
+disturbed. He personally chided Voltaire for his folly in mixing with
+the King's enemies.</p>
+
+<p>Voltaire had tired of the benevolent assimilation&mdash;he craved freedom. A
+friend who loves you, if he spies upon your every action, will become
+intolerable. Voltaire intimated to Frederick that he would like to go.</p>
+
+<p>But Frederick had a great admiration for the man&mdash;he considered Voltaire
+the greatest living thinker, and to have such a one in the court would
+help give the place an atmosphere of learning. He recognized that there
+were two Voltaires&mdash;one covetous, quibbling, spiteful and greedy; and
+the other the peerless poet and philosopher&mdash;the man who hated shams and
+pretense, and had made a brave fight for liberty; the charming
+companion, the gracious friend. Frederick was philosopher enough to
+realize that he could not have the one without the other&mdash;if he had the
+angel he must also tolerate the demon. This he would do&mdash;he must have
+his Voltaire, and so he refused the passports asked for, and sought to
+interest his literary lion in new projects. Finally, court life became
+intolerable to Voltaire, as life is to anybody when he realizes that he
+is being detained against his will. Voltaire packed his effects,<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_312" id="VIII_Page_312">[Pg 312]</a></span>
+secured a four-horse carriage, and with his secretary, departed by
+night, without leaving orders where his mail should be forwarded.</p>
+
+<p>When Frederick found that his singing bird had flown, he was furious.
+Fear had much to do with the matter, for Voltaire had taken various
+manuscripts written by the King, wherein potentates in high places were
+severely scored. The first thought of Frederick evidently was that
+Voltaire had really been a spy in the employ of the French government.
+He sent messengers after him in hot haste&mdash;the fugitive was overtaken,
+and arrested. His luggage was searched, and after being detained at
+Frankfort for three weeks he was allowed to depart for pastures new.</p>
+
+<p>The news of his flight, arrest and disgrace became the gossip of every
+court of Christendom. Who was disgraced more by the arrest&mdash;Voltaire or
+Frederick&mdash;the world has not yet decided. Carlyle deals with the subject
+in detail in his "Life of Frederick," and exonerates the King. But Taine
+says Carlyle wrote neither history nor poetry, and certainly we do not
+consider the sage of Cheyne Row an impartial judge.</p>
+
+<p>Voltaire took time to cool, and then wrote a history of the affair which
+is published in his "My Private Life," that is one of the most delicious
+pieces of humor ever written. That he should have looked forward to life
+at the Prussian Court as the ideal, and then after bravely enduring it
+for three years, make his escape by night,<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_313" id="VIII_Page_313">[Pg 313]</a></span> was only a huge joke.
+Nothing else could have been expected, he says. Men of fifty should know
+that environment does not make heaven, and people who expect other
+people to make paradise for them are forever doomed to wander without
+the walls.</p>
+
+<p>Voltaire acknowledges that he got better treatment than he deserved, and
+makes no apology for working the whole affair up into good copy. The
+final proof that Voltaire was a true philosopher is that he was able to
+laugh at himself.<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_314" id="VIII_Page_314">[Pg 314]</a></span></p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>When Voltaire left Prussia, it was voluntary exile. Paris was
+forbidden&mdash;all of France was for him unsafe; England he had hopelessly
+offended. By slow stages he made his way to Switzerland. But on the way
+there his courage failed him and he wrote back to Frederick, suggesting
+reconciliation. But Frederick promptly reminded him that he had
+repeatedly broken promises by writing about Frederick's personal
+friends, and "Voltaire and Frederick had better keep apart, that their
+love for each other might not grow cold"&mdash;a subtle bit of sarcasm.</p>
+
+<p>At Geneva, where Calvin had instituted a little tyranny of his own,
+Voltaire was made welcome. Nominally no Catholics were allowed in
+Geneva, and when Voltaire wrote to the authorities, explaining that he
+was a good Catholic, the matter was taken as a great joke. He bought a
+beautiful little farm a few miles away, on the banks of the river Rhone,
+overlooking the city of Geneva and the lake. It was an ideal spot, and
+rightly he called it "Delices." Here he was going to end his days amid
+flowers and birds and books and bees, an onlooker and possibly a
+commentator on the times, but not a doer. His days of work were over. Of
+the world of strife he had had enough&mdash;thus he wrote to Frederick.</p>
+
+<p>Visitors of a literary turn of mind at Geneva began to come his way. He
+established an inn, and later built a theater out of the ruins of an old
+church that he had bought and dismantled. "This is what I am going to<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_315" id="VIII_Page_315">[Pg 315]</a></span>
+do with all the churches in France," he explained with a smile.</p>
+
+<p>His pen was never idle. He wrote plays that were presented at his own
+little theater, and on such occasions he would send word to his Geneva
+friends not to come, as they could not be accommodated. Of course they
+came.</p>
+
+<p>He wrote a history of Peter the Great, and this brought him into
+communication with Queen Catherine of Russia, with whom he carried on
+quite an animated correspondence. This worthy widow invited him to Saint
+Petersburg, and he slyly wrote to Frederick for advice as to whether he
+should go or not. It is said that Frederick advised him to go, pay court
+to the Queen, marry her, seize the throne, and get his head cut off for
+his pains, thus achieving immortality and benefiting the world at one
+stroke.</p>
+
+<p>Voltaire had no intention of going to Saint Petersburg; he had created a
+little Court of Letters, of which he himself was the Czar, and for the
+first time in his life he was experiencing a degree of genuine content.
+His flowers, bees, manuscripts and theater filled every moment of the
+day from six in the morning until ten at night. He had arrived in
+Switzerland broken in health, with mind dazed, his frail body undone.
+There at the little farm at Delices, overlooking the lake, health came
+back and youth seemed to return to this man of three-score.<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_316" id="VIII_Page_316">[Pg 316]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Some of the nobility in Paris, to whom he had loaned money, took
+advantage of his exile to withhold payments, but Voltaire secured an
+agent to look after his affairs, so his losses were not great.</p>
+
+<p>He bought the tumbledown chateau of Tournay, near at hand, which carried
+with it the right to call himself Count Tournay. Frederick, with mock
+respect, so addressed his letters.</p>
+
+<p>His next financial venture, begun when he was sixty-eight, might well
+have tested the strength of a much younger man. A few miles from Geneva,
+at Ferney, just over the border from Switzerland, Voltaire had bought a
+large tract of waste land, intending to use it for pasturage. Here he
+built a cottage and lived a part of the time when visitors were too
+persistent at Delices. Ferney was on French soil, Delices in
+Switzerland. Voltaire had criticized the Protestants of Geneva, and
+given it as his opinion that a Calvinistic tyranny was in no wise
+preferable to one built on Catholicism. Some then said, "This man is
+really what he professes&mdash;a Catholic." There had also been a
+demonstration to drive him out of Switzerland, since it was pretty well
+known that Voltaire's crowds of visitors were neither Catholic nor
+Protestant. "Delices is infidelic," was the cry, and this doubtless had
+something to do with Voltaire's establishing himself at Ferney. If
+Protestant Switzerland drove this Catholic over to France, why, Catholic
+France would not molest him.<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_317" id="VIII_Page_317">[Pg 317]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Every country, no matter how tyrannical its government, prides itself on
+being the home of the exile, just as every man thinks of himself as
+being sincere and without prejudice.</p>
+
+<p>It is now believed that Voltaire had much to do with inciting the civil
+riots in Geneva against the Catholics. He had circulated pamphlets
+purporting to be written by a Catholic, upholding the Pope, and
+ridiculing most unmercifully the pretenses of Protestantism, declaring
+it a compromise with the devil, made up of the scum of the Catholic
+Church. This pamphlet declared Calvin a monster, and arraigned him for
+burning Servetus, and hinted that all Calvinists would soon be paid back
+in their own coin. No one else could have penned this vitriolic pamphlet
+but Voltaire&mdash;he knew both sides. But since Geneva regarded Voltaire as
+an infidel, it never occurred to the authorities that he would take up
+the cudgel of the Catholic Church that had burned his books. The real
+fact was, the pamphlet wasn't a defense of Catholicism&mdash;it was only a
+drubbing of Calvinism, and the wit was too subtle for the Presbyterians
+to digest.</p>
+
+<p>Very soon another pamphlet appeared, answering the first. It arraigned
+the Catholics in scathing phrase, suggested that they were getting ready
+to burn the city&mdash;hinted at a repetition of Saint Bartholomew, and
+declared the order had gone forth from Rome to scourge and kill. It was
+as choice an A.P.A. document as was<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_318" id="VIII_Page_318">[Pg 318]</a></span> ever issued by a relentless joker.
+The result was that the workers in the watch-factory and silk-mills who
+were Catholics found themselves ostracized by the Protestant workmen. I
+do not find that the authorities drove the Catholics out of Geneva, it
+was simply a species of labor trouble&mdash;Protestants would not work with
+Catholics.</p>
+
+<p>At this juncture Voltaire comes in, and invites all persecuted Catholic
+watch-workers and silk-weavers to move to Ferney. Here Voltaire laid out
+a town&mdash;erected houses, factories, churches and schools. In two years he
+had built up a town of twelve hundred people, and had a watch-factory
+and silk-mill in full and paying operation.</p>
+
+<p>The problem of every manufacturer is to sell his wares&mdash;Voltaire knew
+how to release purse-strings of friends and enemies alike. He sent
+watches to all of his enemies in Paris, bishops, priests and potentates,
+explaining that he had quit literature forever, and was now engaged in
+helping struggling, exiled Catholics to get an honest living&mdash;he was
+doing penance as foreman of a watch-factory&mdash;would the Most Reverend not
+help in this worthy work? Money flowed in on Ferney&mdash;Frederick ordered a
+consignment of watches, Queen Catherine did the same, and the Bishop of
+Paris sent his blessing and an order for enough silk to keep Voltaire's
+factory going for six months.</p>
+
+<p>Voltaire really got the pick of the workmen of Geneva&mdash;the<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_319" id="VIII_Page_319">[Pg 319]</a></span> goods made
+were of the best, and while at first Catholics only were employed, yet
+in five years Ferney was quite as much Protestant as Catholic. Voltaire
+respected the religious beliefs of his workmen, and there was liberty
+for all. He paid better wages and treated his workers better than they
+had ever been treated in Geneva. Voltaire built houses for his people
+and allowed them to pay him in monthly instalments. And not only did he
+himself make much money out of his Ferney investment, but he established
+the town upon such a safe financial basis that its prosperity endures
+even unto this day.<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_320" id="VIII_Page_320">[Pg 320]</a></span></p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>It was at Ferney, in his old age, that Voltaire first made open war upon
+"revealed religion." All religions that professed a miraculous origin
+were to him baneful in the extreme, the foes of light and progress, the
+enemies of mankind. He did not perceive, as modern psychology does, that
+the period of supernaturalism is the childhood of the mind. Myths and
+fairy-tales are not of themselves base&mdash;the injury lies with the men who
+seek to profit by these things, and build up a tyranny founded on
+innocence and ignorance&mdash;seeking to perpetuate these things, issuing
+threats against growth, and offers of reward to all who stand still.</p>
+
+<p>Voltaire called superstition "The Infamy," and he summoned the thinkers
+of the world to crush it beneath a heel of scorn. Letters, pamphlets,
+plays, essays, were sent out in various languages, by his own
+printing-presses. The wit of the man&mdash;his scathing mockery&mdash;were weapons
+no one could wield in reply. The priests and preachers did not answer
+him&mdash;they could not&mdash;they only grew purple with wrath and hissed.</p>
+
+<p>Says Victor Hugo, "Jesus wept; Voltaire smiled." To which Bernard Shaw
+has recently rejoined, "Jesus wept; Voltaire smiled; William Morris
+worked."</p>
+
+<p>From the prosperity, peace and security of Ferney, Voltaire pointed a
+bony finger at every hypocrite in Christendom, and laughed his mocking
+smile. The man expressed himself, and happiness lies in that and<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_321" id="VIII_Page_321">[Pg 321]</a></span>
+nothing else. Misery comes from lack of full, free self-expression, and
+from nothing else. The man who fights for freedom fights for the right
+of self-expression for himself and others&mdash;and immortality lies in
+nothing else.</p>
+
+<p>There is no fight worth making&mdash;no struggle worth the while&mdash;save the
+struggle for freedom.</p>
+
+<p>No name is honored among men&mdash;no name lives&mdash;save the name of the man
+who worked for liberty and light&mdash;who has fought freedom's fight.</p>
+
+<p>Run the list in your mind of the names that are immortal, and you will
+recall only those of men who have widened the horizon for other men, and
+that select number who are remembered in infamy because they linked
+their names with greatness by doubting, denying, betraying and
+persecuting it&mdash;deathless through disgrace.</p>
+
+<p>Voltaire sided with the weak, the defenseless, the fallen. He demanded
+that men should not be hounded for their belief, that they should not be
+arrested without cause and without knowing why, and without letting
+their friends know why. We realize his faults, we know his imperfections
+and limitations, yet, through his influence, life throughout the world
+became safer, liberty dearer, freedom a more sacred thing. His words
+were a battery that eventually razed the walls of the Bastile, and best
+of all, freed countless millions from theological superstition, that
+Bastile of the brain.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr class="full" />
+<h2><a name="HERBERT_SPENCER" id="HERBERT_SPENCER"></a>HERBERT SPENCER<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_322" id="VIII_Page_322">[Pg 322]</a></span></h2>
+
+
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>What knowledge is of most worth? The uniform reply is: Science.<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_323" id="VIII_Page_323">[Pg 323]</a></span>
+This is the verdict on all counts. For direct self-preservation, or
+the maintenance of life and health, the all-important knowledge
+is&mdash;science. For that indirect self-preservation which we call
+gaining a livelihood, the knowledge of greatest value is&mdash;science.
+For the discharge of parental functions, the proper guidance is to
+be found only in science. For the interpretation of national life,
+past and present, without which the citizen can not rightly
+regulate his conduct, the indispensable key is&mdash;science. Alike for
+the most perfect production and present enjoyment of art in all its
+forms, the needful preparation is still&mdash;science. And for purposes
+of discipline&mdash;intellectual, moral, religious&mdash;the most efficient
+study is, once more&mdash;science.</p></div>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 25em;">&mdash;<i>Essay on Education</i></span><br />
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_324" id="VIII_Page_324">[Pg 324]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="center">
+    <a id="image0462-1"></a>
+    <img src="images/0462-1.jpg" width="273" height="400"
+       alt=""
+       title="" />
+
+   <p class="center">HERBERT SPENCER</p>
+</div>
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_325" id="VIII_Page_325">[Pg 325]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<p>In Derby, England, April Twenty-seventh, Eighteen Hundred Twenty,
+Herbert Spencer, the only child of his parents, was born. His mother
+died in his childhood, so he really never had any vivid recollection of
+her, but hearsay, fused with memory and ideality, vitalized all. And
+thus to him, to the day of his death, his mother stood for gentleness,
+patience, tenderness, intuitive insight, and a love that never grew
+faint. Man makes his mother in his own image.</p>
+
+<p>Herbert Spencer's father was a school-teacher, and in very moderate
+circumstances. Little Herbert could not remember when he did not go to
+school, and yet as a real scholar, he never went to school at all. The
+family lived over the schoolroom, and while the youngster yet wore
+dresses his father would hold him in his arms, and carry him around the
+room as he instructed his classes. William George Spencer was both
+father and mother to Herbert, and used to sing to him lullabies as the
+sun went down.</p>
+
+<p>After school there were always walks afield, and in the evening the
+brother of the school-master would call, and then there was much
+argument as to Why and What, Whence and Whither.<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_326" id="VIII_Page_326">[Pg 326]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>People talk gossip, we are told, for lack of a worthy theme. These two
+Spencers&mdash;one a school-master and the other a clergyman&mdash;found the time
+too short for their discussions. In their walks and talks they were
+always examining, comparing, classifying, selecting, speculating.
+Flowers, plants, bugs, beetles, birds, trees, weeds, earth and rocks
+were scrutinized and analyzed.</p>
+
+<p>Where did it come from? How did it get here?</p>
+
+<p>I am told that lions never send their cubs away to be educated by a
+cubless lioness and an emasculated lion. The lion learns by first
+playing at the thing and then doing it.</p>
+
+<p>A motherless boy, brought up by an indulgent father, one might prophesy,
+would be sure to rule the father and be spoiled himself through omission
+of the rod. But in the boy problem all signs fail. The father taught by
+exciting curiosity and animating his pupils to work out problems and
+make discoveries&mdash;keeping his discipline well out of sight. How well the
+plan worked is revealed in the life of Herbert Spencer himself; and his
+book, "Education," is based on the ideas evolved by his father, to whom
+he gives much credit. No man ever had so divine a right to compile a
+book on education as Herbert Spencer, for he proved in his own life
+every principle he laid down.</p>
+
+<p>On all excursions Herbert was taken along&mdash;because he couldn't be left
+at home, you know. He listened to the conversations and learned by
+hearing the older<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_327" id="VIII_Page_327">[Pg 327]</a></span> pupils recite.</p>
+
+<p>All out-of-doors was fairyland to him&mdash;a curiosity-shop filled with
+wonderful things&mdash;over your head, under your feet, all around was
+life&mdash;action, pulsing life, everything in motion&mdash;going somewhere,
+evolving into something else.</p>
+
+<p>This habit of observation, adoration and wonder&mdash;filled with pleasurable
+emotions and recollections from the first&mdash;lasted the man through life,
+and allowed him, even with a frail constitution, to round out a long
+period of severe mental work, with never a tendency to die at the top.</p>
+
+<p>Herbert Spencer never wrote a thing more true than this: "The man to
+whom in boyhood information came in dreary tasks, along with threats of
+punishment, is unlikely to be a student in after-years; while those to
+whom it came in natural forms, at the proper times, and who remember its
+facts as not only interesting in themselves, but as a long series of
+gratifying successes, are likely to continue through life that
+self-instruction begun in youth."</p>
+
+<p>When thirteen years old Herbert went to live with his uncle, the
+Reverend Thomas Spencer, at Bath. Here the same methods of education
+were continued that had been begun at home&mdash;conversation, history in the
+form of story-telling, walks and talks, and mathematical calculations
+carried out as pleasing puzzles. In mathematics the boy made rapid
+progress, but the faculty of observation was the dominant one. Every
+phase of<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_328" id="VIII_Page_328">[Pg 328]</a></span> cloud and sky, of water and earth, rock and mountain, bird and
+bush, plant and tree, was curious to him. He kept a journal of his
+observations, which had the double advantage of deepening his
+impressions by recounting them, and second, it taught him the use of
+language.</p>
+
+<p>The best way to learn to write is to write. Herbert Spencer never
+studied grammar until he had learned to write. He took his grammar at
+sixty, which is a good age to begin this interesting study, as by that
+time you have largely lost your capacity to sin. Men who swim
+exceedingly well are not those who have taken courses in the theory of
+swimming at natatoriums from professors of the amphibian art&mdash;they were
+boys who just jumped in. Correspondence-schools for the taming of
+broncos are as naught; and treatises on the gentle art of wooing are of
+no avail&mdash;follow Nature's lead. Grammar is the appendenda vermiformis of
+pedagogics: it is as useless as the letter q in the alphabet, or as the
+proverbial two tails to a cat, which no cat ever had, and the finest cat
+in the world, the Manx cat, has no tail at all.</p>
+
+<p>"The literary style of most university men is commonplace, when not
+positively bad," wrote Herbert Spencer in his old age. "Educated
+Englishmen all write alike," said Taine. That is to say, they have no
+literary style, for style is character, individuality&mdash;the style is the
+man. And grammar tends to obliterate all individuality. No study is so
+irksome to everybody, except to<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_329" id="VIII_Page_329">[Pg 329]</a></span> the sciolists who teach it, as grammar.
+It remains forever a bad taste in the mouth of the man of ideas, and has
+weaned bright minds innumerable from all desire to express themselves
+through the written word. Grammar is the etiquette of words, and the man
+who does not know how to properly salute his grandmother on the street
+until he has consulted a book, is always so troubled about his tenses
+that his fancies break through language and escape.</p>
+
+<p>Orators who keep their thoughts upon the proper way to gesticulate in
+curves impress nobody. If poor grammar were a sin against decency, or an
+attempt to poison the minds of the people, it might be wise enough to
+hire men to protect the well of English from defilement. But a
+stationary language is a dead one&mdash;moving water only is pure&mdash;and the
+well that is not fed by springs is a breeding-place for disease. Let men
+express themselves in their own way, and if they express themselves
+poorly, look you, their punishment shall be that no one will read them.
+Oblivion, with her smother-blanket, waits for the writer who has nothing
+to say and says it faultlessly. In the making of hare-soup, I am told
+the first requisite is to catch your hare. The literary scullion who has
+anything to offer a hungry world will doubtless find a way to fricassee
+it.<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_330" id="VIII_Page_330">[Pg 330]</a></span></p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>When seventeen, Herbert Spencer was apprenticed to a surveyor on the
+London and Birmingham Railway. The pay was meager&mdash;board and keep and
+five pounds for the first year, with ten pounds the second year "if he
+deserved it." However, school-teachers and clergymen are used to small
+reward, and to make a living for one's self was no small matter to the
+Spencers. The youth who has gotten his physical growth should earn his
+own living, this as a necessary factor in his further mental evolution.</p>
+
+<p>Neither William George Spencer, Herbert's father, nor Thomas, his uncle,
+seemed ever to anticipate that they were helping to develop the greatest
+thinker of his time. They themselves were obscure men, and quite happy
+therein, and if young Herbert could attain to a fair degree of physical
+health, make his living as an honest surveyor or as a teacher of
+mathematics, it would be all one could reasonably hope for. And thus
+they lived out the measure of their days, and passed away unaware that
+this boy they claimed in partnership was to be the maker of an epoch.</p>
+
+<p>Young Spencer began his surveying work by carrying a flag, and soon he
+was advanced to "chainman." His skill in mathematics made his services
+valuable, and his willingness to sit up nights and work out the
+measurements of the day, so pleased his employer that the letter of the
+contract was waived and he was paid ten<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_331" id="VIII_Page_331">[Pg 331]</a></span> pounds for his first year's
+work, instead of five. He invented shorter methods for bridges and
+culverts, and I believe was the first engineer to build a cantilever
+railroad-bridge in England.</p>
+
+<p>When he was twenty-one he had so thoroughly mastered the work that his
+employers offered to place him in charge of a construction-gang at a
+salary of two hundred pounds a year, which was then considered high pay.
+He, however, loved liberty more than money, and his tastes were in the
+direction of invention and science, rather than in working out an
+immediate practical success for himself.</p>
+
+<p>He returned home and invented a scheme for making type; and had another
+plan for watchmaking, which he illustrated with painstaking designs.
+Half of his time was spent in the fields, and he made a large botanical
+collection&mdash;indexing it carefully, with many notes and comments.</p>
+
+<p>He also wrote articles for the "Civil Engineers' and Artisans' Journal."
+For these he received no pay, but the acceptance of manuscript gives a
+great glow to a writer's cosmos: young Spencer was encouraged in the
+belief that he had something to offer the public. But his father and
+kinsmen saw only failure in these days of dawdling; and the money being
+gone, Herbert Spencer, aged twenty-two, went up to London to try to get
+a renewal of the offer from his old employer.</p>
+
+<p>But things had changed&mdash;chances gone are gone<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_332" id="VIII_Page_332">[Pg 332]</a></span> forever, and he was told
+that opportunity knocks but once at each man's door. Sadly he returned
+home&mdash;not disappointed in himself, but depressed that he should
+disappoint others. His inventions languished&mdash;nobody was interested in
+them.</p>
+
+<p>To get a living was the problem, and writing seemed the only way. And so
+he prepared a series of articles for "The Non-Conformist," and there was
+enough non-conformity in them so he was paid a small sum for his work.
+It proved this, though&mdash;he could get a living by his pen.</p>
+
+<p>In these "Non-Conformist" articles, Spencer put forth a daring statement
+concerning the evolution of the soldier, that straightway made him a few
+enemies, and gave his clerical uncle gooseflesh. His hypothesis was
+this: When man first evolved out of the Stone Age, and began to live in
+villages, the oldest and wisest individual was regarded as patriarch or
+chief. This chief appointed certain men to punish wrongdoers and keep
+order. But there were always a few who would not work and who, through
+their violence and contumacious spirit, were finally driven from the
+camp. Or more likely they fled to escape punishment&mdash;which is the same
+thing&mdash;for they were outcasts. These men found refuge in the mountain
+fastnesses and congregated for two reasons&mdash;one, so they could avoid
+capture, and the other so they could swoop down and "secure their own."
+Robbery and commerce came hand in hand, and<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_333" id="VIII_Page_333">[Pg 333]</a></span> piracy is almost as natural
+as production.</p>
+
+<p>Finally, the robbers became such a problem to industry that terms were
+made with them. Their tribute took the form of a tax, and to make sure
+that this tax was paid, the robbers protected the people against other
+robbers. And then, for the first time, the world saw a standing army. An
+army has two purposes&mdash;to protect the people, and to collect the tax for
+protecting the people.</p>
+
+<p>At the headquarters of this army grew up a court, and all the
+magnificent splendor of a capitol centered around the captains. In fact,
+the word "capitol" means the home of the captain.</p>
+
+<p>Herbert Spencer did not say that a soldier was a respectable brigand,
+and that a lawyer is a man who protects us from lawyers, but he came so
+close to it that his immediate friends begged him to moderate his
+expressions for his own safety.</p>
+
+<p>Spencer also at the same time traced the evolution of the priest. He
+showed how the "holy man" was one frenzied with religious ecstasy, who
+went away and lived in a cave. Occasionally this man came back to beg,
+to preach and to do good. In order to succeed in his begging, he
+revealed his peculiar psychic powers, and then reinforced these with
+claims of supernatural abilities. These claims were not exactly founded
+upon truth, but once put forth were in time believed by those who
+advanced them.</p>
+
+<p>This priest, who claimed to have influence with the<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_334" id="VIII_Page_334">[Pg 334]</a></span> power of the
+Unseen, found early favor with the soldier&mdash;and the soldier and the
+priest naturally joined hands. The soldier protected the priest and the
+priest absolved the soldier. One dictated man's place in this world&mdash;the
+other in the next.</p>
+
+<p>The calm way in which Herbert Spencer reasoned these things out, and his
+high literary style, which made him unintelligible to all those whose
+minds were not of scientific bent, and his emphatic statement that what
+is, is right, and all the steps in man's development mean a mounting to
+better things, saved him from the severe treatment that greeted, say,
+Charles Bradlaugh, who translated the higher criticisms for the hoi
+polloi.</p>
+
+<p>Spencer's first essays on "The Proper Sphere of Government," done in his
+early twenties for "The Non-Conformist" and "The Economist," outlined
+his occupation for life&mdash;he was to be a writer. He became assistant
+editor of the "Westminster Review," and contributed to various literary
+and scientific journals.</p>
+
+<p>These essays, enlarged, rewritten and revised, finally emerged in
+Eighteen Hundred Fifty-one in the form of "Social Statics, or the
+Conditions Essential to Human Happiness."</p>
+
+<p>This book, so bold in its radical suggestions, now almost universally
+admitted, was printed at the author's expense&mdash;a fact that should put a
+quietus for all time upon all those indelicate and sarcastic allusions
+concerning "when the author prints." There was an<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_335" id="VIII_Page_335">[Pg 335]</a></span> edition of seven
+hundred fifty copies of the book, and it took every shilling the young
+man had saved, and a few borrowed pounds as well, to pay the bill.</p>
+
+<p>The book made no splash in the literary sea&mdash;nobody read it except a
+dozen good people who did so as a matter of friendship.</p>
+
+<p>After six years there were still five hundred copies left, and the
+author wrote this slightly ironical line: "I am glad the public is
+taking plenty of time to fully digest my work before passing judgment
+upon it. Of all things, hasty criticisms are to be regretted."</p>
+
+<p>Yet there was one person who read Herbert Spencer's first book with
+close consideration and profound sympathy. This was a young woman, the
+same age as Spencer, who had come up to London from the country to make
+her fortune. Her name was Mary Ann Evans.<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_336" id="VIII_Page_336">[Pg 336]</a></span></p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>In "Notes and Comments," Spencer's last book, published two years before
+his death, are several quotations and allusions to George Eliot. No
+other woman is mentioned in the volume.</p>
+
+<p>Herbert Spencer and Mary Ann Evans first met at the house of the editor
+of the "Westminster Review" about the year Eighteen Hundred Fifty-one.
+Their tastes, aptitudes and inclinations were much the same. They were
+born the same year; both were brought up in the country; both were
+naturalists by inclination, and scientists because they could not help
+it. "Social Statics" made a profound impression on George Eliot, and she
+protested to the last that it was the best book the author ever wrote.
+He had read her "Essay on Spinoza," and remembered it so well that he
+repeated a page of it the first time they met. They loved the same
+things, and united, too, in their dislikes. Both were democrats, and the
+cards, curds and custards of society were to them as naught. In a few
+months after the first meeting, George Eliot wrote to a friend in
+Warwickshire: "The bright side of my life, after the affection for my
+old friends, is the new and delightful friendship which I have found in
+Herbert Spencer. We see each other every day, and in everything we enjoy
+a delightful comradeship. If it were not for him my life would be
+singularly arid."</p>
+
+<p>The Synthetic Philosophy was taking form in Spencer's<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_337" id="VIII_Page_337">[Pg 337]</a></span> mind, and
+together they threshed out the straw and garnered the grain. She was
+getting to be a necessity to Spencer&mdash;and he saw no reason why the
+beautiful friendship should not continue just this way for years and
+years. Both were literary grubbers and lived in boarding-houses of the
+Class B variety.</p>
+
+<p>And here George Henry Lewes appeared upon the scene. Legend says that
+Spencer introduced Lewes to Miss Evans, and both Miss Evans and Mr.
+Spencer were a bit in awe of him, for he was a literary success, and
+they were willing to be. Lewes had written at this time sixteen
+books&mdash;novels, essays, scientific treatises, poems, and a drama. He
+spoke five languages, had studied medicine, theology, and had been a
+lecturer and actor. He was small, had red hair, combed his whiskers by
+the right oblique, and wore a yellow necktie. Thackeray says he was the
+most learned and versatile man he ever knew, "and if I should see him in
+Piccadilly, perched on a white elephant, I would not be in the least
+surprised."</p>
+
+<p>None of the various ventures of Lewes had paid very well, but he had
+great hopes, and money enough to ride in a cab. He gave advice, and
+radiated good-cheer wherever he went.</p>
+
+<p>In Eighteen Hundred Fifty-four Lewes and Miss Evans disappeared from
+London, having gone to Germany, leaving letters behind, stating that
+thenceforward they wished to be considered as man and wife. Lewes was
+in<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_338" id="VIII_Page_338">[Pg 338]</a></span> his fortieth year, and slightly bald; George Eliot was thirty-six,
+and there were silver threads among the gold.</p>
+
+<p>They had taken the philosophy of "Social Statics" in dead earnest.</p>
+
+<p>Herbert Spencer lost appetite, ceased work, roamed through the park
+aimlessly, and finally fell into a fit of sickness&mdash;"night air, and too
+close confinement to mental tasks," the doctor said.</p>
+
+<p>Spencer was not a marrying man&mdash;he was wedded to science, yet he craved
+the companionship of the female mind. Had he and Miss Evans married, he
+would doubtless have continued his work just the same. He would have
+absorbed her into his being&mdash;they would have lived in a garret, and
+possibly we might have had a better Synthetic Philosophy, if that were
+possible.</p>
+
+<p>But we would have had no "Adam Bede" nor "Mill on the Floss."</p>
+
+<p>We often see mention, by the ready writers, of "mental equals" and
+"perfect mates," but in all business partnerships, one man is the court
+of last appeal by popular acclaim. If power is absolutely equal, the
+engine stops on the center. Twins may look exactly alike, but one is the
+spokesman. In all literary collaboration, one does the work and the
+other looks on.</p>
+
+<p>When George Henry Lewes took Mary Ann Evans as his wife, that was the
+last of Lewes. He became her inspiration, secretary, protector, friend
+and slave. And this was all beautiful and right.<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_339" id="VIII_Page_339">[Pg 339]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>I believe it was Augustine Birrell who said, "George Henry Lewes was the
+busy drone to a queen bee." It probably is well that Mr. Spencer and
+Miss Evans did not marry&mdash;they were too much alike&mdash;they might have
+gotten into competition with each other.</p>
+
+<p>George Eliot had a poise and dignity in her character that kept the
+versatile Lewes just where he belonged; and at the same time she lived
+her own life and preserved in ascending degree the strong and simple
+beauties of her character. Truly was George Eliot "a citizen of the
+sacred city of fine minds&mdash;the Jerusalem of Celestial Art." Lewes was
+the tug that puffed and steamed and brought the majestic steamship into
+port.</p>
+
+<p>For one book George Eliot received a sum equal to forty thousand
+dollars, and her income after "Adam Bede" was published was never less
+than ten thousand dollars a year.</p>
+
+<p>Spencer lived out his days in the boarding-house, and until after he was
+seventy, had not reached a point where absolute economy was not in
+order.</p>
+
+<p>Spencer faced the Universe alone, and tried to solve its mysteries. Not
+only did he live alone, with no close confidants or friends, but when he
+died he left not a single living relative nearer than the fourth
+generation. With him died the name.<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_340" id="VIII_Page_340">[Pg 340]</a></span></p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>The leading note in "Social Statics" is a plea for the liberty of the
+individual. That government is best which governs least. The liberty of
+each, limited only by the liberty of all, is the rule to which society
+must conform in order to attain the highest development. Governments
+have no business to scrutinize the life and belief of the individual.
+Interference should only come where one man interferes with the
+liberties of another.</p>
+
+<p>Liberty of action is the first requisite to progress, and the prime
+essential in human happiness. It is better that men have wrong opinions
+than no opinions&mdash;through our blunders we reach the light.</p>
+
+<p>Government is for man, and not man for government. Men wish to do what
+is best for themselves, and eventually they will, if let alone, but they
+can only grow through constant practise and frequent mistakes. Plato's
+plan for an ideal republic provided rules and laws for the guidance of
+the individual. In the Mosaic Laws it is the same: every circumstance
+and complication of life is thought out, and the law tells the
+individual what he shall do, and what he shall not do. That is to say, a
+few men were to do the thinking for the many. And the argument that
+plain people should not be allowed to think for themselves, since the
+wise know better what is for their good, is exactly the argument used by
+slaveholders: that they can take better care of the man than the man can
+of himself.<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_341" id="VIII_Page_341">[Pg 341]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>There is a certain plausibility and truth in this proposition. It is all
+a point of view.</p>
+
+<p>But to Herbert Spencer there was little difference between enslavement
+of the mind and enslavement of the body. Both were essentially wrong in
+this&mdash;they interfered with Nature's law of evolution, and anything
+contrary to Nature must pay the penalty of pain and death. All forms of
+enslavement react upon the slaveholder, and a society founded on force
+can not evolve&mdash;and not to evolve is to die. The wellsprings of Nature
+must not be dammed&mdash;and in fact can not be dammed but for a day.
+Overflow, revolution and violence are sure to follow. This is the
+general law; and so give the man liberty. One man's rights end only
+where another man's begin.</p>
+
+<p>The idea of evolution, as opposed to a complete creation, was in the
+mind of Spencer as early as Eighteen Hundred Forty-eight. In that year
+he said, "Creation still goes forward, and to what supreme heights man
+may yet attain no one can say."</p>
+
+<p>By a sort of general misapprehension, Darwin is usually given credit for
+the discovery and elucidation of the Law of Evolution, but the "Origin
+of Species" did not appear until Eighteen Hundred Fifty-nine, and both
+Spencer and Alfred Russel Wallace had stated, years before, that the
+theological dogma of a complete creation had not a scintilla of proof
+from the world of nature and science, while there was much general
+proof<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_342" id="VIII_Page_342">[Pg 342]</a></span> that the animal and vegetable kingdom had evolved from lower
+forms, and was still ascending.</p>
+
+<p>The usual idea of the clergy of Christendom was that if the account of
+creation given by Moses were admitted to be untrue, then the Bible in
+all its parts would be declared untrue, and religion would go by the
+board. Now that the theory of evolution is everywhere accepted, even in
+the churches, we see how groundless were the fears. All that is
+beautiful and best we still have in religion in a degree never before
+known.</p>
+
+<p>In an essay on "Manners and Fashion," published in the "Westminster
+Review" of Eighteen Hundred Fifty-four, Herbert Spencer says: "Forms,
+ceremonies and even beliefs are cast aside only when they become
+hindrances&mdash;only when some finer and better plan has been formed; and
+they bequeath to us all the good that was in them. The abolition of
+tyrannical laws has left the administration of justice not only
+unimpaired, but purified. Dead and buried creeds have not carried down
+with them the essential morality they contained, which still exists,
+uncontaminated by the sloughs of superstition. And all that there is of
+justice, kindness and beauty embodied in our cumbrous forms will live
+perennially, when the forms themselves have been repudiated and
+forgotten."</p>
+
+<p>In the year Eighteen Hundred Fifty-five, Spencer issued his "Principles
+of Psychology," showing that the doctrine of evolution was then with him
+a fixed fact. The<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_343" id="VIII_Page_343">[Pg 343]</a></span> struggle was on, and from now forward his life was
+enlisted to viewing this theory from every side, anticipating every
+possible objection to it, and restating the case in its relation to
+every phase of life and nature.</p>
+
+<p>Spencer's income was small, but his wants were few, and a single room in
+a boarding-house sufficed for both workshop and sleeping-room. To a
+degree, he now largely ceased original investigations and made use of
+the work of others. His intuitive mind, long trained in analytical
+research, was able to sift the false from the true, the trite from the
+peculiar, the exceptional from the normal.<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_344" id="VIII_Page_344">[Pg 344]</a></span></p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>The year Eighteen Hundred Sixty should be marked on history's page with
+a silver star, for it was in that year that Herbert Spencer issued his
+famous prospectus setting forth that he was engaged in formulating a
+system of philosophy which he proposed to issue in periodical parts to
+subscribers. He then followed with an outline of the ground he intended
+to cover. Ten volumes would be issued, and he proposed to take twenty
+years to complete the task.</p>
+
+<p>The entire Synthetic Philosophy was then in his mind and he knew what he
+wanted to do. The courage and faith of the man were dauntless. Michael
+Rossetti once said, "Spencer, Darwin, Huxley, Tyndall and Wallace owe
+nothing to the universities of England, except for the scorn and
+opposition that have been offered them." But patriotic Americans and
+true are glad to remember that it was Professor E. L. Youmans of Yale
+who made it possible for Spencer to carry out his great plan. Five years
+after the prospectus was issued, Spencer was again penniless and was
+thinking seriously of abandoning the project. Youmans heard of this and
+reissued the prospectus, and sent it out among the thinking men of the
+world, asking them to subscribe. The announcement was then followed up
+by letters, and Youmans forced the issue until the sum of seven thousand
+dollars was raised. This he took over to Europe in person and presented
+to Spencer,<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_345" id="VIII_Page_345">[Pg 345]</a></span> with a gold watch and a box of cigars. Youmans found
+Spencer at his boarding-house, and together they wandered out in the
+park, where Youmans presented the philosopher the box of cigars. The
+great man took out one, cut it in three parts and proceeded to smoke
+one, then Youmans handed him the gold watch and the draft for the money.</p>
+
+<p>Spencer took the gifts of the watch and cigars and was much moved, but
+when it was followed by the draft for seven thousand dollars, he merely
+gasped and said: "Wonderful! Magnificent! Magnificent! Wonderful!" and
+smoked his third of a cigar in silence. And when he spoke, it was to
+say: "I think I will have to revise what I wrote in 'First Principles'
+on the matter of divine providence."</p>
+
+<p>Those who have read Spencer's will must remember that this watch,
+presented to him by his American friends, is given a special paragraph.</p>
+
+<p>Spencer once said to Huxley, "From the day I first carried that watch,
+every good thing I needed has been brought and laid at my feet."</p>
+
+<p>"If I have succeeded in my art, it is simply because I have been well
+sustained," said Henry Irving in one of his modest, flattering, yet
+charming little speeches.</p>
+
+<p>Sir Henry might have gone on and said that no man succeeds unless well
+sustained, and happy is that man who has radioactivity of spirit enough
+to attract to him loving and loyal helpers who scintillate his rays.<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_346" id="VIII_Page_346">[Pg 346]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The average individual does not know very much about Edward L. Youmans,
+but no man ever did greater work in popularizing nature study in
+America. And if for nothing else, let his name be deathless for two
+things: he inspired John Burroughs with the thirst to see and know&mdash;and
+then to write&mdash;and he introduced Herbert Spencer to the world. It is
+easy to say that Burroughs was peeping his shell when Youmans discovered
+him, and that Spencer would have found a way in any event. We simply do
+not know what would have happened if something else occurred, or hadn't.</p>
+
+<p>Youmans was born in a New York State country village, and very early
+discovered for himself that the world was full of curious and wonderful
+things, just as most children do. He became a district school-teacher,
+and so far as we know, was the very first man to publicly advocate
+nature study as a distinctive means of child-growth. He taught his
+children to observe; then he gave lectures on elementary botany; he
+studied and he wrote, and he worked at the microscope.</p>
+
+<p>And he became blind.</p>
+
+<p>Did the closest observer on the continent cease work and grow
+discouraged when sight failed? Not he.</p>
+
+<p>He no more quit work than did Beethoven cease composing music when he no
+longer was able to hear it.</p>
+
+<p>We hear with the imagination, and we see with the soul. Youmans' sister,
+Eliza Anne, became his guide and amanuensis; he saw the things through
+her<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_347" id="VIII_Page_347">[Pg 347]</a></span> eyes and inspected the wonders with his finger-tips.</p>
+
+<p>He became professor of Physics and Natural History at Yale, and when the
+New England Lecture Lyceum was at its height, he rivaled Phillips,
+Emerson and Beecher as a popular attraction. He made science a pleasure
+to plain people, and started Starr King off on that tangent of putting
+knowledge in fairylike and acceptable form. Youmans' lecture on "The
+Chemistry of a Sunbeam" is one of the unforgettable things of a
+generation past, so full of animation and rare, radiant spirit of
+good-cheer was the man. He founded the "Popular Science Monthly," wrote
+a dozen books on science, and several of these are now used in most of
+the colleges and advanced schools of America and England.</p>
+
+<p>The man had a head for business&mdash;he became rich.</p>
+
+<p>It was about the year Eighteen Hundred Fifty-six that Youmans was in
+England on a business errand, introducing his books in the English
+schools, that he first met Herbert Spencer, having been attracted to him
+through a chance copy of "Social Statics" that his sister had read to
+him. Youmans saw that Spencer was going right to the heart of things in
+a way he himself could not. The men became friends, and of all Youmans'
+wonderful discoveries, he considered Herbert Spencer the greatest.</p>
+
+<p>"Sir Humphry Davy discovered, and possibly evolved, Michael Faraday; but
+I didn't evolve Herbert Spencer,<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_348" id="VIII_Page_348">[Pg 348]</a></span> any more than Balboa evolved the
+Pacific Ocean," said Youmans at a dinner given to Herbert Spencer when
+he visited New York in Eighteen Hundred Eighty-one. The name of Youmans
+is not in the Hall of Fame as one of the world's great men, but as
+naturalist, teacher, writer, lecturer and practical man of affairs, he
+reflects credit on his Maker. The light went out of his eyes, but it
+never went out of his soul.<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_349" id="VIII_Page_349">[Pg 349]</a></span></p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>In making payment to a publishing-house for sixty volumes of an American
+historical work, Speaker Cannon recently made this endorsement on the
+back of the check:</p>
+
+<p>"This check is in full payment, both legal and moral, for sixty volumes
+of books. The books are not worth a damn&mdash;and are dear at that. We are
+never too old to learn, but the way your gentlemanly agent came it over
+your Uncle Joseph, is worth the full amount."</p>
+
+<p>When Speaker Cannon says the books are not worth a damn, he does not
+necessarily state a fact about the books: he merely states a fact about
+himself&mdash;that is, he gives his opinion. The value of the books is still
+undetermined.</p>
+
+<p>The Speaker's discontent with the books seems to have arisen from the
+one fact that he had to pay for them.</p>
+
+<p>This condition is a classic one, and the world long ago has conceded to
+the man who pays, the privilege of protest. When Herbert Spencer issued
+that world-famous prospectus, announcing his intention to publish ten
+volumes setting forth his Synthetic Philosophy, it was one of the most
+daring things ever done in the realm of thought. Spencer was forty, and
+he was penniless and obscure. He had issued two books at his own
+expense, and it had taken twelve years to dispose of seven hundred fifty
+copies of one, and most of the edition of the other was still on hand.
+Edward L. Youmans had such faith in Spencer that he sent out the
+prospectus, and followed<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_350" id="VIII_Page_350">[Pg 350]</a></span> it up with letters and personal solicitations,
+until seven thousand dollars was subscribed, and Herbert Spencer,
+relieved from the uncertainties of finance, was free to think and write.</p>
+
+<p>Among other subscribers secured by Youmans, was the Reverend Doctor
+Jowett of Balliol. Spencer's books were issued in periodical parts.
+After paying for three years, Jowett sent a check to the publishers for
+the full amount of the subscription, saying, in an accompanying note:
+"To save myself the bother of periodical payments for Mr. Spencer's
+books, I herewith hand you check covering the full amount of my
+subscription. I feel that I have already had full returns, for, while
+the books are absolutely valueless, save as showing the industry of an
+uneducated and indiscreet person, yet the experience that has come to me
+in this transaction is not without its benefits."</p>
+
+<p>This is the Oxford way of expressing the Illinois formula, "Your books
+are not worth a damn&mdash;and are dear at that."</p>
+
+<p>But the curious part of this transaction is that, after the death of
+Doctor Jowett, his library was sold at auction, and his set of the
+Synthetic Philosophy brought an advance of eight times its original
+cost.</p>
+
+<p>Truly my Lord Hamlet doth say:</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">Rashly,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">And prais'd be rashness for it&mdash;let us know,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">Our indiscretion sometimes serves us well,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">When our deep plots do fail.</span><br />
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_351" id="VIII_Page_351">[Pg 351]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>No one man's opinion concerning any book, or any man, is final. Speaker
+Cannon is admired by one set of men and detested by others&mdash;all of equal
+intelligence, although on this point the Speaker might possibly file an
+exception.</p>
+
+<p>Books are condemned offhand, or regarded as Bibles&mdash;it all depends upon
+your point of view. Speaker Cannon may be right in his estimate of the
+newly annexed sixty volumes of history that now grace his
+library-shelves in Danville, proudly shown to constituents, or he may be
+wrong; but anyway, Cannon's judgment about books is probably worth no
+more than was the Reverend Doctor Jowett's. Gladstone spoke of Jowett as
+that "saintly character"; and Disraeli called him "the bear of
+Balliol&mdash;erratic, obtuse and perverse." But Jowett, Gladstone and
+Disraeli all united in this: they had supreme contempt for the work of
+Herbert Spencer; while the Honorable Joseph Cannon is neutral, but
+inclined to be generous, having recently in a speech quoted from the
+"Faerie Queene," which he declared was the best thing Herbert Spencer
+had written, even if it was not fully up to date.<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_352" id="VIII_Page_352">[Pg 352]</a></span></p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>All during his life, Spencer was subject to attacks of indigestion and
+insomnia. That these bad spells were "a disease of the imagination" made
+them no less real. His isolation and lack of social ties gave him time
+to feel his pulse and lie in wait for sleepless nights.</p>
+
+<p>With the old ladies of his boarding-house, he was on friendly terms, and
+his commonplace talk with them never gave them a guess concerning the
+worldwide character of his work. Very seldom did he refer to what he was
+doing and thinking&mdash;and then only among his most intimate friends.
+Huxley was his nearest confidant; and a recent writer, who knew him
+closely in a business way for many years, says that only with Huxley did
+he throw off his reserve and enter the social lists with abandon.</p>
+
+<p>No one could meet Spencer, even in the most casual way, without being
+impressed with the fact that he was in the presence of a most superior
+person. The man was tall and gaunt, self-contained&mdash;a little aloof&mdash;he
+asked for nothing, and realized his own worth. He commanded respect
+because he respected himself&mdash;there was neither abnegation, apology nor
+abasement in his manner. Once I saw him walking in the Strand, and I
+noticed that the pedestrians instinctively made way, although probably
+not one out of a thousand had any idea who he was. No one ever affronted
+him, nor spoke disrespectfully to his face; if unkind things were<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_353" id="VIII_Page_353">[Pg 353]</a></span> said
+of the man and his work, it was in print and at a distance.</p>
+
+<p>His standard of life was high&mdash;his sense of justice firm; with pretense
+and hypocrisy he had little patience, while for the criminal he had a
+profound pity.</p>
+
+<p>Music was to him a relaxation and a rest. He knew the science of
+composition, and was familiar in detail with the best work of the great
+composers.</p>
+
+<p>In order to preserve the quiet of his thoughts in the boarding-house, he
+devised a pair of ear-muffs which fitted on his head with a spring.</p>
+
+<p>If the conversation took a turn in which he had no interest, he would
+excuse himself to his nearest neighbor and put on his ear-muffs. The
+plan worked so well that he carried them with him wherever he went, and
+occasionally at lectures or concerts, when he would grow more interested
+in his thoughts than in the performance, he would adjust his patent.</p>
+
+<p>So well pleased was he with his experiment that he had a dozen pairs of
+the ear-muffs made one Christmas and gave them to friends, but it is
+hardly probable they had the hardihood to carry them to a Four-o'Clock.
+Seldom, indeed, is there a man who prizes his thoughts more than a
+polite appearance.</p>
+
+<p>In an address before the London Medical Society, in Eighteen Hundred
+Seventy-one, Spencer said, "The man who does not believe in devils
+during his life, will probably never be visited by devils on his
+deathbed."<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_354" id="VIII_Page_354">[Pg 354]</a></span> Herbert Spencer died December Eighth, Nineteen Hundred
+Three, in his eighty-fourth year. Up to within two days of his death,
+his mind was clear, active and alert, and he worked at his books with
+pleasure and animation&mdash;revising, correcting and amending. He never lost
+the calm serenity of life. He sank gradually into sleep and passed
+painlessly away. And thus was gracefully rounded out the greatest life
+of its age&mdash;The Age of Herbert Spencer.</p>
+
+<p>He left no request as to where he should be buried, but the thinking
+people who recognized his genius considered Westminster Abbey the
+fitting place&mdash;an honor to England's Valhalla. The Church of England
+denied him a place there before it was asked, and the hallowed precincts
+which shelter the remains of Queen Anne's cook and John Broughton the
+pugilist are not for Herbert Spencer. His dust does not rest in
+consecrated ground.</p>
+
+<p>Herbert Spencer had no titles nor degrees&mdash;he belonged to no sect,
+party, nor society. Practically, he had no recognition in England until
+after he was sixty years of age. America first saw his star in the east,
+and long before the first edition of "Social Statics" had been sold, we
+waived the matter of copyright and were issuing the book here. On
+receiving a volume of the pirated edition, the author paraphrased
+Byron's famous mot, and grimly said, "Now, Barabbas was an American."<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_355" id="VIII_Page_355">[Pg 355]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>However, Spencer was really pleased to think that America should steal
+his book; we wanted it&mdash;the English didn't. It took him twelve years to
+dispose of the seven hundred fifty volumes, and most of these were given
+away as inscribed copies. They lasted about as long as Walt Whitman's
+first edition of "Leaves of Grass," although Whitman had the assistance
+of the Attorney-General of Massachusetts in advertising his remarkable
+volume.</p>
+
+<p>Henry Thoreau's first book fared better, for when the house burned where
+the remnant of four hundred copies lingered long, he wrote to a friend,
+"Thank God, the edition is exhausted."</p>
+
+<p>England recognized the worth of Thoreau and Whitman long before America
+did; and so, perhaps, it was meet that we should do as much for Spencer,
+Ruskin and Carlyle.</p>
+
+<p>One of the most valuable of the many great thoughts evolved by Spencer
+was on the "Art of Mentation," or brain-building. You can not afford to
+fix your mind on devils or hell, or on any other form of fear, hate and
+revenge. Of course, hell is for others, and the devils we believe in are
+not for ourselves. But the thoughts of these things are registered in
+the brain, and the hell we create for others, we ourselves eventually
+fall into; and the devils we conjure forth, return and become our
+inseparable companions. That is to say, all thought and all work&mdash;all
+effort&mdash;are for the doer primarily,<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_356" id="VIII_Page_356">[Pg 356]</a></span> and as a man thinketh in his heart,
+so is he. This sounds like the language of metaphysics, which Kant said
+was the science of disordered moonshine. But Herbert Spencer's work was
+all a matter of analytical demonstration. And while the word
+"materialist" was everywhere applied to him, and he did not resent it,
+yet he was one of the most spiritual of men. A meta-physician is one who
+proves ten times as much as he believes; a scientist is one who believes
+ten times as much as he can prove. Science speaks with lowered voice.
+Before Spencer's time, German scientists had discovered that the cell
+was the anatomical unit of life, but it was for Spencer to show that it
+was also the psychologic or spiritual unit. New thoughts mean new
+brain-cells, and every new experience or emotion is building and
+strengthening a certain area of brain-tissue. We grow only through
+exercise, and all expression is exercise. The faculties we use grow
+strong, and those not used, atrophy and wither away. This is no less
+true, said Spencer, in the material brain than in the material muscle. A
+new thought causes a new structural enregistration. If it is the
+repetition of thought, the cells holding that thought are exercised and
+trained, and finally they act automatically, and repeated thought
+becomes habit, and exercised habit becomes character&mdash;and character is
+the man. It thus is plain that no man can afford to entertain the
+thought of fear, hate and revenge&mdash;and their concomitants,<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_357" id="VIII_Page_357">[Pg 357]</a></span> devils and
+hell&mdash;because he is enregistering these things physically in his being.
+These physical cells, as science has shown, are transmitted to
+offspring; and thus through continued mind-activity and consequent
+brain-cell building, a race with fixed characteristics is evolved.
+Pleasant memories and good thoughts must be exercised, and these in time
+will replace evil memories, so that the cells containing negative
+characteristics will atrophy and die. And when Herbert Spencer says that
+the process of doing away with evil is not through punishment, threat or
+injunction, but simply through a change of activities&mdash;thus allowing the
+bad to die through disuse&mdash;he states a truth that is even now coloring
+our whole fabric of pedagogics and penology. I couple these two words
+advisedly, for fifty years ago, pedagogics was a form of penology&mdash;the
+boarding-school with its mentors, scheme of fines, repressions and
+disgrace! And now we have lifted penology into the realm of pedagogics.
+I doubt me much whether the present penitentiary is a more unhappy place
+than a boys' English boarding-school was in the time of Squeers.</p>
+
+<p>All of our progress has come from replacing bad activities with the
+good. Bad people we now believe are good folks who have misdirected
+their energies; and we all believe a deal more in the goodness of the
+bad than the badness of the good, with the result that "total depravity"
+and "endless punishment" have been shamed<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_358" id="VIII_Page_358">[Pg 358]</a></span> out of every pulpit where
+sane men preach. No devils danced on the footboard of Herbert Spencer's
+bed, because there were no devil-cells in his brain.</p>
+
+<p>Another great discovery of Herbert Spencer's was that the emotions
+control the secretions. And the quality of the secretions determines the
+chemical changes which constitute all cellular growth. Thus, cheerful,
+happy emotions are similar to sunshine&mdash;they stand for health and
+harmony, and as such, are constructive. Good-will is sanitary; kindness
+is hygienic; friendship works for health. These happy emotions secrete a
+quality in the blood called anabolism, which is essentially vitalizing
+and life-producing.</p>
+
+<p>On the other hand, fear, hate, and all forms of unkindness evolve a
+toxin, katabolism, which tends to clog circulation, disturb digestion,
+congest the secretions and stupefy the senses; and it tends to the
+dissolution and destruction of life. All that saddens, embitters and
+disappoints produces this chemical change that makes for death. "A
+poison," said Spencer, "is only a concentrated form of hate."<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_359" id="VIII_Page_359">[Pg 359]</a></span></p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>Spencer's discoveries in electricity have been most valuable, and it was
+by building on his suggestions and seeing with his prophetic eye that
+the Crookes Tube, the Roentgen Ray, and the discovery of radium have
+become possible.</p>
+
+<p>The distinguishing feature of radium is its radioactivity, brought about
+through its affinity for electricity. It absorbs electricity from the
+atmosphere and gives it off spontaneously in the form of light and heat
+without appreciable loss of form or substance. Every good thing in life
+is dual, and through this natural and spontaneous marriage of radium and
+electricity, we get very close to the secret of life. As the sun is the
+giver of life and death, so by the use of the salts of radium have
+scientists vitalized certain forms of cell-life into growth and
+activity, and by the same token, and the use of the radium-ray, do they
+destroy the germs of disease.</p>
+
+<p>By his prophetic vision, Spencer saw years ago that we would yet be able
+to eliminate and refine the substances of earth until we found the
+element that would combine spontaneously with electricity, and radiate
+life and heat. Among the very last letters dictated by Spencer, only a
+few days before his death, was one to Madame Curie congratulating her on
+her discovery of radium, and urging her not to relax in her further
+efforts to seek out the secret of life. "My only regret is," wrote the
+great man, "that I will not be here to<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_360" id="VIII_Page_360">[Pg 360]</a></span> rejoice with you in the fulness
+of your success." Thus to the last did he preserve the eager, curious
+and receptive heart of youth, and prove to the scientific world his
+theory that brain-cells, properly exercised, are the last organs of the
+body to lose their functions.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr class="full" />
+<h2><a name="SCHOPENHAUER" id="SCHOPENHAUER"></a>SCHOPENHAUER<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_361" id="VIII_Page_361">[Pg 361]</a></span></h2>
+
+
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Wherever one goes one immediately comes upon this incorrigible mob
+of humanity. It exists everywhere in legions; crowding, soiling
+everything, like flies in summer. Hence the numberless bad books,
+those rank weeds of literature which extract nourishment from the
+corn and choke it. They monopolize the time, money and attention
+which really belong to good books and their noble aims; they are
+written merely with a view to making money or procuring places.
+They are not only useless, but they do positive harm. Nine-tenths
+of the whole of our present literature aims solely at taking a few
+shillings out of the public's pocket, and to accomplish this,
+author, publisher and reviewer have joined forces.</p></div>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 25em;">&mdash;<i>Schopenhauer</i></span><br />
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_362" id="VIII_Page_362">[Pg 362]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="center">
+    <a id="image0463-1"></a>
+    <img src="images/0463-1.jpg" width="293" height="400"
+       alt=""
+       title="" />
+
+   <p class="center">SCHOPENHAUER</p>
+</div>
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_363" id="VIII_Page_363">[Pg 363]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<p>The philosophy we evolve is determined by what we are; just as a nation
+passes laws legalizing the things it wishes to do. "Where the artist is,
+there you will find art," said Whistler. We will not get the Ideal
+Commonwealth until we get Ideal People; and we will not get an ideal
+philosophy until we get an ideal philosopher. Place the mentally and
+morally slipshod in ideal surroundings and they will quickly evolve a
+slum, just as did John Shakespeare, when at Stratford he was fined two
+pounds ten for maintaining a sequinarium. All we can say for John is
+that he was the author of a fine boy, who resembled his mother much more
+than he did his father. This seems to prove Schopenhauer's remark
+concerning a divine sonship: "Paternity is a cheap office, anyway,
+accomplished without cost, care or risk, and of it no one should boast.
+A divine motherhood is the only thing that is really sacred."</p>
+
+<p>It isn't his philosophy that makes a man&mdash;man makes his philosophy, and
+he makes it in his own image. Living in a world of strife, where the
+most savage beast that roams the earth is man, the Philosophy of
+Pessimism has its place.</p>
+
+<p>Schopenhauer proved himself a true philosopher when<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_364" id="VIII_Page_364">[Pg 364]</a></span> he said: "All we
+see in the world is a projection from our own minds. I may see one
+thing, you another; and according to the test of a third party we are
+both wrong, for he sees something else. So we are all wrong, yet all are
+right."</p>
+
+<p>He was quite willing to admit that he had a well-defined moral squint
+and a touch of mental strabismus; but he revealed his humanity by
+blaming his limitations on his parents, and charging up his faults and
+foibles to other people.</p>
+
+<p>It is possible that Carlyle's famous remark about the people who daily
+cross London Bridge was inspired by Schopenhauer, who, when asked what
+kind of people the Berliners were, replied, "Mostly fools!"</p>
+
+<p>"I believe," ventured the interrogator&mdash;"I believe, Herr Schopenhauer,
+that you yourself live at Berlin?"</p>
+
+<p>"I do," was the response, "and I feel very much at home there."<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_365" id="VIII_Page_365">[Pg 365]</a></span></p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>Heinrich Schopenhauer, the father of Arthur Schopenhauer, was a banker
+and shipping merchant of the city of Danzig, Germany. He was a
+successful man, and, like all successful men, he was an egotist. Before
+the world will believe in you, you must believe in yourself. And another
+necessary element in success is that you must exaggerate your own
+importance, and the importance of your work. Self-esteem will not alone
+make you successful, but without a goodly jigger of self-esteem, success
+will forever dally and dance just beyond your reach. The humble men who
+have succeeded in impressing themselves upon the world have all taken
+much pride in their humility.</p>
+
+<p>Heinrich Schopenhauer was a proud man&mdash;as proud as the Merchant of
+Venice&mdash;and in his veins there ran a strain of the blue blood of the
+Castilian Jew. Too much success is most unfortunate. Heinrich
+Schopenhauer was proud, unbending, harsh, arbitrary, wore a full beard
+and a withering smile, and looked upon musicians, painters, sculptors
+and writers as court clowns, to be trusted only as far as you could
+fling Taurus by the tail. All good bookkeepers have, even yet, this
+pitying contempt for those whose chief assets are ideas&mdash;the legal
+tender of the spirit. The Alameda smile is the smile of scorn worn by
+the bookkeepers who prepare the balance-sheets for the great merchants
+of San Francisco. Alameda is young, but the Alameda smile<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_366" id="VIII_Page_366">[Pg 366]</a></span> is classic.</p>
+
+<p>When Heinrich Schopenhauer was forty he married a beautiful girl of
+twenty. She had ideas about art and poetry, and was passing through her
+Byronic stage, before Byron did, and taking it rather hard, when her
+parents gave her in troth to Heinrich Schopenhauer, the rich merchant.
+It was regarded as a great catch.</p>
+
+<p>I wish that I could say that Heinrich and Johanna were happy ever after,
+but in view of the well-known facts put forth by their firstborn child,
+I can not do it.</p>
+
+<p>Before marriage the woman has her way: let her make the most of her
+power&mdash;she'll not keep it long! Shortly after their marriage Heinrich
+saw symptoms of the art instinct creeping in, and players on sweet
+zither-strings, who occasionally called, compelled him to take measures.
+He bought a country seat, four miles from the city, on an inaccessible
+road, and sent his bride thither. Here he visited her only on Saturdays
+and Sundays, and her callers were the good folk he chose to bring with
+him.</p>
+
+<p>Marital peace is only possible where women are properly
+suppressed&mdash;lumity dee!</p>
+
+<p>It was under these conditions that Arthur Schopenhauer was born, on
+February Twenty-second&mdash;in deference to our George Washington&mdash;Seventeen
+Hundred Eighty-eight.</p>
+
+<p>The chief quality that Schopenhauer inherited from his father was the
+Alameda smile&mdash;and this smile of contempt was for all those who did not
+think as he did.<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_367" id="VIII_Page_367">[Pg 367]</a></span> The mother never professed to have any love for her
+husband, or the child either, and the child never professed to have any
+love for his mother. He once wrote this: "I was an unwelcome child, born
+of a mother in rebellion&mdash;she never wanted me, and I reciprocate the
+sentiment."<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_368" id="VIII_Page_368">[Pg 368]</a></span></p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>In that troublous year of Seventeen Hundred Ninety-three, the Free City
+of Danzig fell under the sway of Prussia.</p>
+
+<p>Heinrich Schopenhauer, who loved freedom, jealous of his privileges,
+fearful of his rights, immediately packed up his effects, sold out his
+property&mdash;at great loss&mdash;and moved to the Free City of Hamburg.</p>
+
+<p>That his fears for the future were quite groundless, as most fears are,
+is a fact relevant but not consequent.</p>
+
+<p>Johanna was vivacious and eminently social. She spoke French, German,
+English and Italian. She played the harp, sang, wrote poetry and acted
+in dramas of her own composition. Around her there always clustered a
+goodly group of men with long hair, dreamy eyes and pointed beards, who
+soared high, dived deep, but seldom paid cash. This is the paradise to
+which most women wish to attain: to be followed by a concourse of
+artistic archangels&mdash;what nobler ambition! And let the great biological
+and historical fact here be written down&mdash;that there are no female
+angels.</p>
+
+<p>Heinrich did not settle down in Hamburg and go into business, as he
+expected. He and his wife and boy traveled much&mdash;through England,
+France, Germany and Switzerland.</p>
+
+<p>This man and his wife were trying to get away from themselves. Long
+years after, their son wrote, "When people die and wake up in hell they
+will probably be surprised to find that they are just such beings as
+they<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_369" id="VIII_Page_369">[Pg 369]</a></span> were when they were on earth."</p>
+
+<p>For a year the lad was left at school with a clergyman at Wimbledon, in
+England. The strict religious discipline to which he was there subjected
+seemed to have had much to do with forming in him a fierce hatred of
+English orthodoxy; but he learned the language and became familiar with
+the great names in English literature. The King Arthur stories pleased
+him, and he always took a peculiar satisfaction in the fact that the
+name Arthur was the same in English, German and French. He was a
+prenatal cosmopolitan.</p>
+
+<p>Boarding-schools are a great scheme for getting the children out of the
+way&mdash;it throws the responsibility upon some one else. When nine years of
+age, Arthur was placed in a French boarding-school, remaining for two
+years. There he learned to speak French so fluently that when he
+returned to Hamburg and tried to talk to his mother in German, his
+broken speech threw that excellent woman into fits of laughter.</p>
+
+<p>When the mature man of affairs takes a young girl to wife, he expects to
+mold her to his nature, but he reckons without his host. Heinrich
+Schopenhauer's opposition to his wife's wishes was not strong enough to
+crush her&mdash;it simply developed in her a deal of wilful, dogged strength.</p>
+
+<p>One winter day in Eighteen Hundred Four the body of Heinrich
+Schopenhauer was found in the canal at Hamburg.<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_370" id="VIII_Page_370">[Pg 370]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Arthur was then sixteen years of age&mdash;old for his years, traveled,
+clever&mdash;strong in body and robust in health.</p>
+
+<p>In wandering with his parents, he had met Goethe, Wieland, Madame De
+Stael, Lord Nelson and Lady Hamilton, and many other distinguished
+people, for his mother was a famous lion-hunter, and wherever they went,
+the great ones were tracked to their lairs. But however much Madame
+Schopenhauer indulged in hero-worship, she had no expectations or
+ambitions for her son. She apprenticed him as a clerk and did her utmost
+to immerse him in commerce. What she desired was freedom for herself,
+and the popular plan to gain freedom is to enslave others. Madame
+Schopenhauer moved to Weimar and opened there a sort of literary salon.
+She wrote verses, novels, essays, and her home became the center of a
+certain artistic group. The fortune her husband had left was equal to
+about forty thousand dollars, one-third of which was to go to Arthur
+when he was twenty-one. The mother had the handling of it all until that
+time, and as the funds were well invested, her income was equal to about
+two thousand dollars a year.</p>
+
+<p>A handsome widow, under forty, with no encumbrances to speak of, and a
+fair income, is very fortunately situated. Indeed, a great writer has
+recently written an essay showing that widows, discreetly bereaved, are
+the happiest creatures on earth.</p>
+
+<p>Young Schopenhauer, at his desk in Hamburg, grieved<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_371" id="VIII_Page_371">[Pg 371]</a></span> over the death of
+his father. That which is lost becomes valuable&mdash;bereavement softens the
+heart. The only tenderness that is revealed in the writings of
+Schopenhauer refers to his father. He affirms the sterling honesty of
+the man, and lauds the merchant who boldly states that he is in business
+to make money, and compares him with the philosophers who clutch for
+power and fame and yet pretend they are working for humanity. When
+Schopenhauer was past sixty, he dedicated his complete works to the
+memory of his father. As nothing purifies like fire, so does nothing
+sanctify like death&mdash;the love we lose is the only love we keep.</p>
+
+<p>Mathematics, bills and balance-sheets were odious to young Schopenhauer.
+He reverenced the memory of his father, but his mother had endowed him
+with a strong impulse for expression. He wrote little essays on the
+backs of envelopes, philosophized over his bills, sneaked out of the
+countingroom the back way to attend the afternoon lectures by the great
+Doctor Gall, and finally, boldly followed his mother to Weimar, that he
+might bask in the shadow of the mighty Goethe. It was shortly after this
+that he sat in a niche of Goethe's library, musing, sad and solitary,
+while a gay throng chattered by. Some young women, seeing him there,
+laughed, and one asked, "Is it alive?" And Goethe, overhearing the
+pleasantry, rebuked it by saying, "Do not smile at that youth&mdash;he will
+yet eclipse us all."</p>
+
+<p>At Weimar there was no greeting for Schopenhauer<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_372" id="VIII_Page_372">[Pg 372]</a></span> from his mother&mdash;she
+welcomed all but her son. Unfortunately for her, she put herself on
+record by writing him letters. Scathing letters are all right, but they
+should be directed and stamped, then burned just before they are trusted
+to the mails. To record unkindness is tragedy, for the unkind word lives
+long after the event that caused it is forgotten. Here is one letter
+written by Madame Schopenhauer that this methodical son saved for
+posterity:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+<p>
+<i>My Dear Son:</i><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>I have always told you it is difficult to live with you. The more I
+get to know you, the more I feel this difficulty increase. I will
+not hide it from you: as long as you are what you are, I would
+rather bring any sacrifice than consent to be near you. I do not
+undervalue your good points, and that which repels me does not lie
+in your heart; it is in your outer, not your inner being; in your
+ideas, your judgment, your habits; in a word, there is nothing
+concerning the outer world in which we agree. Your ill-humor, your
+complaints of things inevitable, your sullen looks, the
+extraordinary opinions you utter, like oracles, none may presume to
+contradict; all this depresses me and troubles me, without helping
+you. Your eternal quibbles, your laments over the stupid world and
+human misery, give me bad nights and unpleasant dreams....</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="right">Your Dear Mother, etc.,</span><br />
+<span class="right2"><i>Johanna Schopenhauer</i></span><br />
+</p></div><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_373" id="VIII_Page_373">[Pg 373]</a></span></p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+<p>The young man took lodgings at Weimar, at a goodly distance from his
+mother. Goethe held out a friendly hand, as he did to Mendelssohn, and
+all bright young men. They talked much, and Goethe read to Arthur his
+essay on the theory of colors (for Wolfgang Goethe was human and dearly
+loved the sound of his own voice). The reasoning so impressed the youth
+that he devised a chromatic theory of his own&mdash;almost as peculiar.
+Theories are for the theorizer, so all theories are useful.</p>
+
+<p>At the earnest importunity of his mother, who starved him to it, Arthur
+went back to his clerkship, but soon returned and made terms, agreeing
+not to call on his mother, in consideration of a pound a week. He took
+lessons in Greek and Latin of a retired professor, attended lectures,
+fell in love with an actress&mdash;vowed he would marry her, but, luckily for
+her, he didn't.</p>
+
+<p>When he was twenty-one, his mother turned over to him his patrimony,
+amounting to about fourteen thousand dollars; and suggested that he
+leave Weimar and make his fortune elsewhere&mdash;the world was wide.</p>
+
+<p>His money was invested so it brought him an income of seven hundred
+dollars a year. And here seems a good place to say that Schopenhauer's
+income was never over a thousand dollars a year until after he was
+fifty-six years of age. Although he could not make money, yet he had
+inherited from his father an ability to care for it. Throughout his life
+he kept exact books<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_374" id="VIII_Page_374">[Pg 374]</a></span> of account, never ran in debt, and never allowed
+his expenditures to outrun his income, thus complying with Charles
+Dickens' recipe for happiness.</p>
+
+<p>In still another way he revealed that he could apply philosophy to daily
+life: he exercised regularly in the open air, took long walks, was
+absurdly exact about his cold baths, and like Kant, served the neighbors
+as a chronometer, so they set their clocks at three when they saw him
+going forth for a walk. And in the interests of truth, we will have to
+make the embarrassing admission that the great Apostle of Pessimism was
+neither a dyspeptic nor an invalid&mdash;if he was ever aware that he had a
+stomach we do not hear of it.<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_375" id="VIII_Page_375">[Pg 375]</a></span></p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>The life of Schopenhauer is the life of a recluse&mdash;a visionary&mdash;a hermit
+who lost himself amid the maze of city streets, and moved solitary in
+the throng. Berlin, Dresden, Hamburg, Gottingen, Frankfort, engaged him,
+and from one to the other he turned, looking for the rest he never
+found, and which he knew he would never find, so in the vain search
+there was no disappointment. He was always happiest when most miserable,
+for then were his theories proved.</p>
+
+<p>A single room in a lodging-house sufficed, and this room always had the
+appearance of being occupied by a transient. He had few books,
+accumulated no belongings in way of domestic ballast, persistently
+giving away things that were presented to him, satisfied if he had a
+chair, a bed, and a table upon which to write; getting his own
+breakfast, dining at the table d'hote of the nearest inn, with supper at
+a "Gast-Haus"&mdash;so passed his days. He had no intimate friends, and his
+chief dissipation was playing the flute. His black poodle, named "Homo"
+in a subtle mood of irony, accompanied him everywhere, and on this dog
+he lavished what he was pleased to call his love. He anticipated Rip Van
+Winkle concerning dogs and women, and when Homo died, he bought another
+dog that looked exactly like the first, and was just as good.</p>
+
+<p>In a few instances Schopenhauer read his essays in public as lectures,
+but his ideas were keyed to concert pitch and were too pronounced for
+average audiences.<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_376" id="VIII_Page_376">[Pg 376]</a></span> He was offered a professorship at Gottingen and also
+at Heidelberg, if he would "tone things down," but he scornfully
+declined the proposition, and said, "The Universities must grow to my
+level before I can talk to them." By his caustic criticisms of
+contemporaries he became both feared and shunned, and no doubt he found
+a certain satisfaction in the fact that the so-called learned men of his
+time would neither listen to his lectures, read his books, nor abide his
+presence. He had made himself felt in any event. "Blessed are ye when
+men shall revile you," is the sweet consolation of all persecuted
+persons&mdash;and persecution is only the natural resentment towards those
+who have too much ego in their cosmos.</p>
+
+<p>His opinions concerning love and marriage need not be taken too
+seriously. Ideas are the results of temperaments and moods. When a man
+amplifies on the woman question he describes the women he knows best,
+and more especially the particular She who is in his head. Literature is
+only autobiography, more or less discreetly veiled. Schopenhauer hated
+his mother to the day of her death, and although during the last
+twenty-four years of her life he never once saw her, her image could at
+any time be quickly and vividly thrown upon the screen. The women a
+strong man has known are never forgotten&mdash;here is where time does not
+tarnish, nor the days grow dim.</p>
+
+<p>Between his twenty-eighth and fortieth years, Schopenhauer<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_377" id="VIII_Page_377">[Pg 377]</a></span> had wandered
+through Italy&mdash;spent months at Venice, and dawdled away the days at Rome
+and Florence. He had dipped deep into life&mdash;and the wrong kind of life.
+And his experiences had confirmed his suspicions&mdash;it was all bitter&mdash;he
+was not disappointed.</p>
+
+<p>Until Schopenhauer was past thirty he was known as the son of Johanna
+Schopenhauer. And when he once told her that posterity would never
+remember her except as the mother of her son, she reciprocated by
+congratulating him that his books could always be had cheap in the first
+editions.</p>
+
+<p>He retorted, "Mamma Dear, my books will be read when butchers are using
+yours for wrapping up meat." In some ways this precious pair were very
+much alike.</p>
+
+<p>It is very probable that Schopenhauer's mother was not so base as he
+thought; and when he declared, "Woman's morality is only a kind of
+prudence," he might have said the same of his own. He stood aloof from
+life and said things about it. He had no wife, no child, no business, no
+home&mdash;he dared not venture boldly into the tide of existence&mdash;he stood
+forever on the bank, and watched the current carrying its flotsam and
+jetsam to the hungry sea.</p>
+
+<p>In his love for the memory of his father, and in his tender care for his
+dog, we get a glimpse of depths that were never sounded. One side of his
+nature was never developed. And the words of the undeveloped man are
+worth what they are worth.<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_378" id="VIII_Page_378">[Pg 378]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Schopenhauer once said to Wieland, "Life is a ticklish business&mdash;I
+propose to spend my time looking at it." This he did, viewing existence
+from every angle, and writing out his thoughts in terse, epigrammatic
+language.</p>
+
+<p>Among all the German writers on philosophy, the only one who had a
+distinct literary style is Schopenhauer. Form was quite as much to him
+as matter&mdash;and in this he showed rare wisdom; although I am told that
+the writers who have no literary style are the only ones who despise it.
+Dishes to be palatable must be rightly served: appetite&mdash;literary,
+gastronomic or sexual&mdash;is largely a matter of imagination.</p>
+
+<p>Schopenhauer need not be regarded as final. The chief virtue of the man
+lies in the fact that he makes us think, and thus are we his debtors.</p>
+
+<p>In this summary of Schopenhauer's philosophy I have had the valuable
+assistance of my friend and fellow-worker in the Roycroft Shop, George
+Pannebakker, a kinsman and enthusiastic admirer of the great Prophet of
+Pessimism.</p>
+
+<p>In talking to Mr. Pannebakker, I am inclined to exclaim, "Thou almost
+persuadest me to be a pessimist!" It is unfortunate that our English
+tongue contains no word that stands somewhere between pessimism and
+optimism&mdash;that symbols a judicial cast of mind which sees the Truth
+without blinking and accepts it without complaint. The word Pessimist
+was first flung<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_379" id="VIII_Page_379">[Pg 379]</a></span> in contempt at those who dared to express unpalatable
+truth. It is now accepted by a large number of intellectuals, and if to
+be a pessimist is to have insight, wit, calm courage, patience,
+persistency, and a disposition that accepts all Fate sends and makes the
+best of it, then pity 'tis we haven't more.<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_380" id="VIII_Page_380">[Pg 380]</a></span></p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>The root of existence, the inmost kernel of all being, the original
+vitalizing power, the fundamental reality of the universe, is, according
+to Schopenhauer, "WILL." What is Will? Will, in the usual sense, is the
+faculty of our mind by which we decide to do or not to do. Will is the
+power to choose. In Schopenhauer's philosophy, Will is something less as
+we know will, and something more than force. Will, connected with
+consciousness, as peculiar to man, is, in a less developed form, the
+real essence of all matter, of all things, organic or inorganic. Will is
+the blind, irresistible striving for existence; the unconscious
+organizing power, the omnipotent creative force of Nature, pervading the
+whole limitless universe; the endeavor to be, to evolve, to expand.</p>
+
+<p>The whole world of phenomena is the objectivation or apparition of Will.</p>
+
+<p>Will, the same force which slumbers in the stone as inert gravity, forms
+the crystals with such wonderful regularity.</p>
+
+<p>Will impels a piece of iron to move with ardent desire toward the
+magnet. Will causes the magnet to point with unfailing constancy to the
+north. Will causes the embryo to cling as a parasite and feed on the
+body of the mother. Will causes the mother's breast to fill that her
+babe may be fed. Will fills the mother-heart with love that the young
+may be cared for.</p>
+
+<p>The same force urges the tender germ of the plant to<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_381" id="VIII_Page_381">[Pg 381]</a></span> break through the
+hard crust of the earth and, stretching toward the light, to enfold
+itself in the proud crown of the palm-tree. Will sharpens the beak of
+the eagle and the tooth of the tiger and, finally, reaches its highest
+grade of objectivation in the human brain. Want, the struggle for
+existence, the necessity of procuring and selecting sufficient food for
+the preservation of the individual and the species, has at last
+developed a suitable tool, the brain, and its function, the intellect.
+With the intellect appear consciousness and a realm of rational life
+full of yearning and desires, pleasures and pain, hatred and love.
+Brothers slay their brothers, conquerors trample down the races of the
+earth, and tyrants are forging chains for the nations.</p>
+
+<p>There is violence and fear, vexation and trouble. Unrest is the mark of
+existence, and onward we are swept in the hurrying whirlpool of change.
+This manifold restless motion is produced and kept up by the agency of
+two single impulses&mdash;hunger and the sexual instinct. These are the chief
+agents of the Lord of the Universe&mdash;the Will&mdash;and set in motion so
+strange and varied a scene.</p>
+
+<p>The Will-to-Live is at the bottom of all love-affairs. Every kind of
+love springs entirely from the instinct of sex.</p>
+
+<p>Love is under bonds to secure the existence of the human race in future
+times. The real aim of the whole of love's romance, although the persons
+concerned<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_382" id="VIII_Page_382">[Pg 382]</a></span> are unconscious of the fact, is that a particular being may
+come into the world.</p>
+
+<p>It is the Will-to-Live, presenting itself in the whole species, which so
+forcibly and exclusively attracts two individuals of different sex
+towards each other.</p>
+
+<p>This yearning and this pain do not arise from the needs of an ephemeral
+individual, but are, on the contrary, the sigh of the Spirit of the
+Species.</p>
+
+<p>Since life is essentially suffering, the propagation of the species is
+an evil&mdash;the feeling of shame proves it.</p>
+
+<p>In his "Metaphysics of Love," Schopenhauer says: "We see a pair of
+lovers exchanging longing glances&mdash;yet why so secretly, timidly and
+stealthily? Because these lovers are traitors secretly striving to
+perpetuate all the misery and turmoil that otherwise would come to a
+timely end."</p>
+
+<p>Will, as the source of life, is the origin of all evil.</p>
+
+<p>Having awakened to life from the night of unconsciousness, the
+individual finds itself in an endless and boundless world, striving,
+suffering, erring; and, as though passing through an ominous dream, it
+hurries back to the old unconsciousness. Until then, however, its
+desires are boundless, and every satisfied wish begets a new one.
+So-called pleasures are only a mode of temporary relief. Pain soon
+returns in the form of satiety. Life is a more or less violent
+oscillation between pain and ennui. The latter, like a bird of prey,
+hovers over us, ready to swoop down wherever it sees a life<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_383" id="VIII_Page_383">[Pg 383]</a></span> secure from
+need.</p>
+
+<p>The enjoyment of art, as the disinterested cognition devoid of Will, can
+afford an interval of rest from the drudgery of Will service. But
+esthetic beatitude can be obtained only by a few; it is not for the hoi
+polloi. And then, art can give only a transient consolation.</p>
+
+<p>Everything in life indicates that earthly happiness is destined to be
+frustrated or to be recognized as an illusion. Life proves a continuous
+deception, in great as well as in small matters. If it makes a promise,
+it does not keep it, unless to show that the coveted object was little
+desirable.</p>
+
+<p>Life is a business that does not pay expenses.</p>
+
+<p>Misery and pain form the essential feature of existence.</p>
+
+<p>Life is hell, and happy is that man who is able to procure for himself
+an asbestos overcoat and a fire-proof room.</p>
+
+<p>Looking at the turmoil of life, we find all occupied with its want and
+misery, exerting all their strength in order to satisfy its endless
+needs and avert manifold suffering, without daring to expect anything
+else in return than merely the preservation of this tormented individual
+existence, full of want and misery, toil and moil, strife and struggle,
+sorrow and trouble, anguish and fear&mdash;from the cradle to the grave.</p>
+
+<p>Existence, when summed up, has an enormous surplus of pain over
+pleasure.</p>
+
+<p>You complain that this philosophy is comfortless! But<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_384" id="VIII_Page_384">[Pg 384]</a></span> Schopenhauer sees
+life through Schopenhauer's eyes, and tells the truth about it as he
+sees it. He does not care for your likes and dislikes. If you want to
+hear soft platitudes, he advises you to go to a non-conformist
+church&mdash;read the newspapers, go somewhere else, but not to the
+philosopher who cares only for Truth.</p>
+
+<p>Although Schopenhauer's picture of the world is gloomy and somber, there
+is nothing weak or cowardly in his writings, and the extent to which he
+is read, proves he is not depressing. Since a happy life is impossible,
+he says the highest that a man can attain to is the fate of a hero.</p>
+
+<p>A man must take misfortune quietly, because he knows that very many
+dreadful things may happen in the course of life. He must look upon the
+trouble of the moment as only a very small part of that which will
+probably come.</p>
+
+<p>We must not expect very much from life, but learn to accommodate
+ourselves to a world where all is relative and no perfect state exists.</p>
+
+<p>Let us look misfortune in the face and meet it with courage and
+calmness!</p>
+
+<p>Fate is cruel and men are miserable. Life is synonymous with suffering;
+positive happiness a fata morgana, an illusion.</p>
+
+<p>Only negative happiness, the cessation of suffering, is possible, and
+can be obtained by the annihilation of the Will-to-Live.<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_385" id="VIII_Page_385">[Pg 385]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>But it is not suicide that can deliver us from the pains of existence.</p>
+
+<p>Suicide, according to Schopenhauer, frustrates the attainment of the
+highest moral aim by the fact that, for a real release from this world
+of misery, it substitutes one that is merely apparent. For death merely
+destroys the phenomenon, that is, the body, and never my inmost being,
+or the universal Will.</p>
+
+<p>Suicide can deliver me merely from my phenomenal existence, and not from
+my real self, which can not die.</p>
+
+<p>How, then, can man be released from this life of misery and pain? Where
+is the road that leads to Salvation?</p>
+
+<p>Slow and weary is the way of redemption.</p>
+
+<p>The deliverance from life and its sufferings is the freedom of the
+intellect from its creator and despot, the Will.</p>
+
+<p>The intellect, freed from the bondage of the Will, sees through the veil
+of selfhood into the unity of all being, and finds that he who has done
+wrong to another has done wrong to his own self. For selfhood&mdash;the
+asserting of the Ego&mdash;is the root of all evil.</p>
+
+<p>Covetousness and sensuality are the causes of misery.</p>
+
+<p>Sympathy is the basis of all true morality, and only through
+renunciation, through self-sacrifice, and universal benevolence, can
+salvation be obtained.</p>
+
+<p>He who has recognized that existence is evil, that life is vanity, and
+self an illusion, has obtained true knowledge,<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_386" id="VIII_Page_386">[Pg 386]</a></span> which is the reflection
+of reality. He is in possession of the highest wisdom, which is not
+merely theoretical, but also practical perfection; it is the ultimate
+true cognition of all things in mass and in detail, which has so
+penetrated man's being that it appears as the guide of all his actions.
+It illumines his head, warms his heart, leads his hand. We take the
+sting out of life by accepting it as it is. "Drink ye all of it."<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_387" id="VIII_Page_387">[Pg 387]</a></span></p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>Arthur Schopenhauer very early in life contracted a bad habit of telling
+the truth. He stated the thing absolutely as he saw it. He spared no
+one's feelings, and conciliation was not in his bright lexicon of words.
+If any belief or any institution was in his way, the pilot in charge of
+the craft had better put his prow hard a' port&mdash;Schopenhauer swerved for
+nobody.</p>
+
+<p>Should every one deal in plain speaking on all occasions, the philosophy
+of Ali Baba&mdash;that this earth is hell, and we are now suffering for sins
+committed in a former incarnation&mdash;would be fully proved. Our friends
+are the pleasant hypocrites who sustain our illusions. Society is made
+possible only through a vast web of delicate evasions, polite
+subterfuges, and agreeable falsehoods. The word person comes from
+"persona," which means a mask. The reference is to one who plays a
+part&mdash;assumes a role. The naked truth is not pleasant to look upon, and
+that is the reason it is so seldom put upon parade.</p>
+
+<p>The man Schopenhauer would be intolerable, but the writer Schopenhauer
+is gaining ground in inverse ratio to the square of the distance we are
+from him. "Where shall we bury you?" a friend asked him a few days
+before his death.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, anywhere&mdash;posterity will find me!" was the answer. And so on the
+modest stone that marks his resting-place at Frankfort, are engraved the
+two words,<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_388" id="VIII_Page_388">[Pg 388]</a></span> ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER, and nothing more. The world will not
+soon forget the pessimist who had such undying optimism&mdash;such
+unquenchable faith&mdash;that he knew the world would make a path to his
+tomb.</p>
+
+<p>Schopenhauer was the only prominent writer that ever lived who
+persistently affirmed that life is an evil&mdash;existence a curse. Yet every
+man who has ever lived has at times thought so; but to proclaim the
+thought&mdash;or even entertain it long&mdash;would stagger sanity, befog the
+intellect and make mind lose its way.</p>
+
+<p>And yet we prize Schopenhauer the more for having said the thing that we
+secretly thought; in some subtle way we get a satisfaction out of his
+statement, and at the same time, we perceive the man was wrong.</p>
+
+<p>The man who can vivisect an emotion, and lay bare a heart-beat in print,
+knows a subtle joy. The misery that can explain itself is not all
+misery. Complete misery is dumb; and pain that is all pain is quickly
+transformed into insensibility. Schopenhauer's life was quite as happy
+as that of many men who persistently depress us by requesting us to
+"cheer up." Schopenhauer says, "Don't try to cheer up&mdash;the worst is yet
+to come." And we can not refrain a smile. A mother once called to her
+little boy to come into the house. And the boy answered, "I won't do
+it!" And the mother replied, "Stay out then!" And very soon the child
+came in.</p>
+
+<p>Truth is only a point of view, and when a man tells us what he sees, we
+swiftly take into consideration who<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_389" id="VIII_Page_389">[Pg 389]</a></span> and what the man is. Everybody does
+this, unconsciously. It depends upon who says it! The garrulous man who
+habitually overstates&mdash;painting things large&mdash;does not deceive anybody,
+and is quite as good a companion as the painstaking, exact man who is
+always setting us straight on our statistics. One man we take gross and
+the other net. The liar gross is all right, but the liar net is very
+bad.</p>
+
+<p>Schopenhauer was a talkative, whimsical and sensitive personality, with
+a fine assortment of harmless superstitions of his own manufacture. He
+was vain, frivolous, self-absorbed, but he had an eye for the subtleties
+of existence that quite escape the average individual. He lived in a
+world of mind&mdash;alert, active, receptive mind&mdash;with a rapid-fire gun in
+way of a caustic, biting, scathing vocabulary at his command.</p>
+
+<p>The test of every literary work is time. The trite, the commonplace, and
+the irrelevant die and turn to dust. The vital lives. Schopenhauer began
+writing in his youth. Neglect, indifference and contempt were his
+portion until he was over fifty years of age. His passion for truth was
+so repelling that the Mutual Admiration Society refused to record his
+name even on its waiting-list. He was of that elect few who early in
+life succeed in ridding themselves of the friendship of the many. His
+enemies discovered him first, and gave him to the world, and after they
+had launched his fame with their charges of plagiarism, pretense,
+bombast, insincerity<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_390" id="VIII_Page_390">[Pg 390]</a></span> and fraud, he has never been out of the limelight,
+and in favor he has steadily grown.</p>
+
+<p>No man was ever more thoroughly denounced than Schopenhauer, but even
+his most rabid foe never accused him of buying his way into popular
+favor, or bribing the judges who sit on the bookcase.</p>
+
+<p>We admire the man because he is such a sublime egotist&mdash;he is so
+fearfully honest. We love him because he is so often wrong in his
+conclusions: he gives us the joy of putting him straight.</p>
+
+<p>Schopenhauer's writing is never the product of a tired pen and ink
+unstirred by the spirit. With him we lose our self-consciousness.</p>
+
+<p>And the man who can make other men forget themselves has conferred upon
+the world a priceless boon. Introspection is insanity&mdash;to open the
+windows and look out is health.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr class="full" />
+<h2><a name="HENRY_D_THOREAU" id="HENRY_D_THOREAU"></a>HENRY D. THOREAU<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_391" id="VIII_Page_391">[Pg 391]</a></span></h2>
+
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">Seeing how all the world's ways came to nought,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 3em;">And how Death's one decree merged all degrees,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 3em;">He chose to pass his time with birds and trees,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 3em;">Reduced his life to sane necessities:</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">Plain meat and drink and sleep and noble thought.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 3em;">And the plump kine which waded to the knees</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 3em;">Through the lush grass, knowing the luxuries</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 3em;">Of succulent mouthfuls, had our gold-disease</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">As much as he, who only Nature sought.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">Who gives up much the gods give more in turn:</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 3em;">The music of the spheres for dross of gold;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">For o'er-officious cares, flame-songs that burn</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 3em;">Their pathway through the years and never old.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">And he who shunned vain cares and vainer strife</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 3em;">Found an eternity in one short life.</span><br />
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_392" id="VIII_Page_392">[Pg 392]</a></span>
+</p>
+
+<div class="center">
+    <a id="image0464-1"></a>
+    <img src="images/0464-1.jpg" width="228" height="400"
+       alt=""
+       title="" />
+
+   <p class="center">HENRY THOREAU</p>
+</div>
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_393" id="VIII_Page_393">[Pg 393]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<p>As a rule, the man who can do all things equally well is a very mediocre
+individual. Those who stand out before a groping world as beacon-lights
+were men of great faults and unequal performances. It is quite needless
+to add that they do not live on account of their faults or
+imperfections, but in spite of them.</p>
+
+<p>Henry David Thoreau's place in the common heart of humanity grows firmer
+and more secure as the seasons pass; his life proves for us again the
+paradoxical fact that the only men who really succeed are those who
+fail.</p>
+
+<p>Thoreau's obscurity, his poverty, his lack of public recognition in
+life, either as a writer or lecturer, his rejection as a lover, his
+failure in business, and his early death, form a combination of
+calamities that make him as immortal as a martyr. Especially does an
+early death sanctify all and make the record complete, but the death of
+a naturalist while right at the height of his ability to see and
+enjoy&mdash;death from tuberculosis of a man who lived most of the time in
+the open air&mdash;these things array us on the side of the man 'gainst
+unkind Fate, and cement our sympathy and love.</p>
+
+<p>Nature's care forever is for the species, and the individual is
+sacrificed without ruth that the race may<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_394" id="VIII_Page_394">[Pg 394]</a></span> live and progress. This dumb
+indifference of Nature to the individual&mdash;this apparent contempt for the
+man&mdash;seems to prove that the individual is only a phenomenon. Man is
+merely a manifestation, a symptom, a symbol, and his quick passing
+proves that he isn't the Thing. Nature does not care for him&mdash;she
+produces a million beings in order to get one who has thoughts&mdash;all are
+swept into the dustpan of oblivion but the one who thinks; he alone
+lives, embalmed in the memories of generations unborn.</p>
+
+<p>One of the most insistent errors ever put out was that statement of
+Rousseau, paraphrased in part by T. Jefferson, that all men are born
+free and equal. No man was ever born free, and none are equal, and would
+not remain so an hour, even if Jove, through caprice, should make them
+so.</p>
+
+<p>The Thoreau race is dead. In Sleepy Hollow Cemetery at Concord there is
+a monument marking a row of mounds where a half-dozen Thoreaus rest. The
+inscriptions are all of one size, but the name of one alone lives, and
+he lives because he had thoughts and expressed them. If any of the tribe
+of Thoreau gets into Elysium, it will be by tagging close to the only
+man among them who glorified his Maker by using his reason.</p>
+
+<p>Nothing should be claimed as truth that can not be demonstrated, but as
+a hypothesis (borrowed from Henry Thoreau) I give you this: Man is only
+the tool or vehicle&mdash;Mind alone is immortal&mdash;Thought is the Thing.<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_395" id="VIII_Page_395">[Pg 395]</a></span></p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>Heredity does not account for the evolution of Henry Thoreau. His father
+was of French descent&mdash;a plain, stolid, little man who settled in
+Concord with his parents when a child; later he tried business in
+Boston, but the march of commerce resolved itself into a double-quick,
+and John Thoreau dropped out of line, and turned to the country village
+of Concord, where he hoped that between making lead-pencils and
+gardening he might secure a living.</p>
+
+<p>He moved better than he knew.</p>
+
+<p>John Thoreau's wife was Cynthia Dunbar, a tall and handsome woman, with
+a ready tongue and nimble wit. Her attentions were largely occupied in
+looking after the affairs of the neighbors, and as the years went by her
+voice took on the good old metallic twang of the person who discusses
+people, not principles.</p>
+
+<p>Henry Thoreau was the third child in the family of seven. He was born in
+an old house on the Virginia Road, Concord, about a mile and a half from
+the village. This house was the home of Mrs. Thoreau's mother, but the
+Thoreaus had taken refuge there, temporarily, to escape a financial
+blizzard which seems to have hit no one else but themselves.</p>
+
+<p>John Thoreau was assisted in the pencil-making by the whole family. The
+Thoreaus used to sell their pencils down at Cambridge, fifteen miles
+away, and Harvard professors, for the most part, used the Concord
+article in jotting down their sublime thoughts. At<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_396" id="VIII_Page_396">[Pg 396]</a></span> ten years of age,
+Thoreau had a furtive eye on Harvard, directed thither, they say, by his
+mother. All the best people in Concord, who had sons, sent them to
+Harvard&mdash;why shouldn't the Thoreaus? The spirit of emulation and family
+pride were at work.</p>
+
+<p>Henry was educated principally because he wasn't very strong, nor was he
+on good terms with work, and these are classic reasons for imparting
+classical education to youth, aspiring or otherwise.</p>
+
+<p>The Concord Academy prepared Henry for college, and when he was sixteen,
+he trudged off to Cambridge and was duly entered in the Harvard Class of
+Eighteen Hundred Thirty-seven. At Harvard, his cosmos seemed to be of
+such a slaty gray that no one said, "Go to&mdash;we will observe this youth
+and write anecdotes about him, for he is going to be a great man." The
+very few in his class who remembered him wrote their reminiscences long
+years afterward, with memories refreshed by magazine accounts written by
+pious pilgrims from Michigan.</p>
+
+<p>In college pranks and popular amusements he took no part, neither was he
+a "grind," for he impressed himself on no teacher or professor so that
+they opened their mouths and made prophecies.</p>
+
+<p>Once safely through college, and standing on the threshold (I trust I
+use the right expression), Henry Thoreau refused to accept his diploma
+and pay five dollars for it&mdash;he said it wasn't worth the money.<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_397" id="VIII_Page_397">[Pg 397]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>In his "Walden," Thoreau expresses his opinion of college training this
+way: "If I wished a boy to know something about the arts and sciences I
+would not pursue the common course, which is merely to send him into the
+neighborhood of some professor, where everything is professed and
+practised but the art of life. To my astonishment, I was informed when I
+left college that I had studied navigation! Why, if I had taken one turn
+down the harbor I would have known more about it."</p>
+
+<p>It is well to remember, however, that Thoreau had no ambitions to become
+a navigator. His mission was simply to paddle his own canoe on Walden
+Pond and Concord River. The men who really launched him on his voyage of
+discovery were Ellery Channing and Ralph Waldo Emerson&mdash;both Harvard
+men. Had he not been a college man, it is quite probable he would never
+have caught the speaker's eye. His efforts in working his way through
+college, assisted by his poverty-stricken parents, proved his quality.
+And as for his life in a shanty on the shores of Walden Pond, the
+occurrence is too commonplace to mention, were it not for the fact that
+the solitary occupant of the shanty was a Harvard graduate who used no
+tobacco.</p>
+
+<p>Harvard prepares a youth for life&mdash;but here is a man who, having
+prepared for life, deliberately turns his back on life and lives in the
+woods.</p>
+
+<p>A genuine woodsman is no curiosity, but a civilized<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_398" id="VIII_Page_398">[Pg 398]</a></span> woodsman is. The
+tendency of colleges is to turn men from Nature to books; from bonfires
+to stoves, steam-heat and cash-registers; but Thoreau, by reversing all
+rules, suddenly found himself, and others, explaining his position in
+print.</p>
+
+<p>Harvard supplied him the alternating current; he influenced the people
+in his environment, and he was influenced by his environment.</p>
+
+<p>But without Harvard there would have been no Thoreau. Having earned his
+diploma, he had the privilege of declining it; and having gone to
+college, it was his right to affirm the emptiness of the classics. Only
+the man with a goodly bank-balance can wear rags with impunity.<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_399" id="VIII_Page_399">[Pg 399]</a></span></p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>John Thoreau made his lead-pencils and peddled them out, and we hear of
+his saying, "Pencils, I fear, are going out of fashion&mdash;people are
+buying nothing but these miserable new-fangled steel pens." When called
+upon to surrender, Paul Jones replied, "We haven't yet begun to fight."
+The truth was, the people had not really begun to use pencils. Pencils
+weren't going out of fashion, but John Thoreau was. The poor man moved
+here and there, evicted by rapacious landlords and taken in by his
+relatives, who didn't care whether he was a stranger or not. If he owed
+them ten dollars, they took fifty dollars' worth of pencils and called
+it square.</p>
+
+<p>Then they undersold John one-half, and he said times were scarce.</p>
+
+<p>This, it need not be explained, was in Massachusetts.</p>
+
+<p>A hundred years ago, these men who whittled useful things out of wood
+during the long winter days were everywhere in New England. The sons of
+these men invented machines to make the same things, and thus were
+started the New England manufactories. It was brains against hands,
+cleverness against skill, initiative against plodding industry. And the
+man who can tell of the sorrow and suffering of all those industrious
+sparrows that were caught and wound around flying shuttles, or stamped
+beneath the swift presses of invention, hadn't yet been born. God
+doesn't seem to care for sparrows&mdash;three-fourths of all that are hatched
+die<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_400" id="VIII_Page_400">[Pg 400]</a></span> in the nest or fall fluttering to the ground and perish, Grant
+Allen says.</p>
+
+<p>Comparatively few persons can adjust themselves happily to new
+conditions: the rest are pushed and broken and bent&mdash;and die.</p>
+
+<p>When Dixon and Faber invented machines that could be fed automatically,
+and turn out more pencils in a day than John Thoreau could in a year,
+John was out of the game.</p>
+
+<p>John had brought up his children to work, and Henry became an expert
+pencil-maker. Henry, we say, should have found employment with Faber and
+Company, as foreman, or else evaded their patents and made a
+pencil-machine of his own. Instead, however, he settled down and made
+pencils just like his father used to make, and in the same way. He
+peddled out a few to his friends, but his business instinct was shown in
+that he himself tells how one year he made a thousand dollars' worth of
+pencils, but was obliged to sacrifice them all to cancel a debt of one
+hundred dollars.</p>
+
+<p>And yet there are people who declare that genius is not transmissible.</p>
+
+<p>John Thoreau failed at pencil-making, but Henry Thoreau failed because
+he played the flute morning, noon and night, and went singing the
+immunity of Pan. He fished, and tramped the woods and fields, looking,
+listening, dreaming and thinking.</p>
+
+<p>At Keswick, where the water comes down at Lodore,<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_401" id="VIII_Page_401">[Pg 401]</a></span> there is a
+pencil-factory that has been there since the days of William the
+Conqueror. The wife of Coleridge used to work there and get money that
+supported her philosopher-husband and their children. Southey lived
+near, and became Poet Laureate of England through the right exercise of
+Keswick pencils; Wordsworth lived only a few miles away, and once he
+brought over Charles and Mary Lamb, and bought pencils for both, with
+their names stamped on them. The good old man who now keeps the
+pencil-factory explained these things to me, and also explained the
+direct relationship of good lead-pencils to literature, but I do not
+remember what it was.</p>
+
+<p>If Henry Thoreau had held on a few years, until the pilgrims began to
+arrive at Concord, he could have gotten rich selling souvenir pencils.
+But he just dozed and dreamed and tramped and philosophized; and when he
+wrote he used an eagle's quill, with ink he himself distilled from
+elderberries, and at first, birch-bark sufficed for paper. "Wild men and
+wild things are the only ones that have life in abundance," he used to
+say.<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_402" id="VIII_Page_402">[Pg 402]</a></span></p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>Brook Farm was a serious, sober experiment inaugurated by the Reverend
+George Ripley with intent to live the ideal life&mdash;the life of useful
+effort, direct honesty, simplicity and high thinking.</p>
+
+<p>But Thoreau could not be induced to join the community&mdash;he thought too
+much of his liberty to entrust it to a committee. He was interested in
+the experiment, but not enough to visit the experimenters. Emerson
+looked in on them, remained one night, and went back home to continue
+his essay on Idealism.</p>
+
+<p>Hawthorne remained long enough to get material for his "Blithedale
+Romance." Margaret Fuller secured good copy and the cordial and lifelong
+dislike of Hawthorne, all through misprized love, alas! George William
+Curtis and Charles Dana graduated out of Brook Farm, and went down to
+New York to make goodly successes in the great game of life.</p>
+
+<p>At Brook Farm they succeeded in the high thinking all right, but the
+entrepreneur is quite as necessary as the poet&mdash;and a little more so.
+Brook Farm had no business head, and things unfit fall into natural
+dissolution. But the enterprise did not fail, any more than a rotting
+log fails when it nourishes a bank of violets. The net results of Brook
+Farm's high thinking have passed into the world's treasury, smelted
+largely by Emerson and Thoreau, who were not there.<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_403" id="VIII_Page_403">[Pg 403]</a></span></p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>Immanuel Kant has been called the father of modern Transcendentalists:
+but Socrates and his pupil Plato, so far as we know, were the first of
+the race.</p>
+
+<p>Neither buzzing bluebottles nor the fall of dynasties disturbed them.
+"The soul is everything," said Plato. "The soul knows all things," says
+Emerson.</p>
+
+<p>In every century a few men have lived who knew the value of plain living
+and high thinking, and very often the men who reversed the maxim have
+passed them the hemlock.</p>
+
+<p>All those sects known as Primitive Christians represent variations of
+the idea&mdash;Quakers, Mennonites, Communists, Shakers and Dunkards!</p>
+
+<p>A Transcendentalist is a Dukhobortsi with a college education. A Quaker
+with an artistic bias becomes a Preraphaelite, and lo! we have News from
+Nowhere, a Dream of John Ball, Merton Abbey, Kelmscott, and half a world
+is touched and tinted by the simplicity, sterling honesty and
+genuineness of one man.</p>
+
+<p>George Ripley, Bronson Alcott, and Ralph Waldo Emerson evolved New
+England Transcendentalism, and very early Henry Thoreau added a few bars
+of harmonious discords to the symphony. Horace Greeley once contended in
+a "Tribune" editorial that Sam Staples, the bum bailiff who locked
+Thoreau behind the bars, was an important factor in the New England
+renaissance, and as such should be immortalized by a statue made<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_404" id="VIII_Page_404">[Pg 404]</a></span> of
+punk, set up on Boston Common for the delectation of bean-eaters. I fear
+me Horace was a joker.</p>
+
+<p>California quail are quite different from the quail of New York State,
+and naturalists tell us that this is caused by a difference in
+environment&mdash;quail being a product of soil and climate.</p>
+
+<p>And man is a product of soil and climate&mdash;for only in a certain soil can
+you produce a certain type of man. As a whole, this world is better
+adapted for the production of fish than genius&mdash;most of the really good
+climate falls on the sea. Christian Scientists are Transcendentalists
+whose distinguishing point is that they secrete millinery&mdash;California
+quail with rainbow tints and topknots, Balboaic instincts well defined.<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_405" id="VIII_Page_405">[Pg 405]</a></span></p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>Let this fact stand: it was Emerson who made Concord. He saw it
+first&mdash;he was on the ground, and the place was his by right of
+discovery, the title strengthened by the fact that four of his ancestors
+had been Concord clergymen, and the most excellent and venerable Doctor
+Ripley, a near kinsman.</p>
+
+<p>Concord and Emerson, as early as Eighteen Hundred Forty, when Emerson
+was thirty-seven years old, were synonymous. He had defied the
+traditions of Harvard, been excommunicated by his Alma Mater, published
+his pantheistic Essay on Nature, and his thin little books and sermons
+had been placed on the Boston Theological Index Expurgatorius.</p>
+
+<p>Through it all he had remained gentle, smiling, sympathetic,
+unresentful.</p>
+
+<p>The world can never spare the man who does his work and holds his peace.
+Emerson was being lifted up, and souls were being drawn unto him.</p>
+
+<p>In Eighteen Hundred Forty, Bronson Alcott, the American Socrates, with
+his interesting family, moved to Concord, drawn thither by the magnet of
+Emerson's personality. Louisa wore short dresses, and used to pick wild
+blackberries and sell them to the Emersons and get goodly reward in
+silver, and kindly smiles, and pats on her brown head by the hand that
+wrote "Compensation."</p>
+
+<p>Alcott was a great, honest, sincere soul, and a true<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_406" id="VIII_Page_406">[Pg 406]</a></span> anarch, for he
+took his own wherever he saw it. He used to run his wheelbarrow into
+Emerson's garden and load it up with potatoes, cabbages or turnips, and
+once in response to a hint that the vegetables were private property,
+the old man somewhat petulantly exclaimed, "I need them!&mdash;I need them!"</p>
+
+<p>And that was all: anything that any man needed was his by divine right.
+And the consistency of Alcott's philosophy was shown in that he never
+took anything or any more than he needed, and if he had something that
+you needed, you were certainly welcome to it. If Alcott helped himself
+to the thrifty Emerson's vegetables, both Emerson and Thoreau helped
+themselves to Alcott's ideas.</p>
+
+<p>Once a wagonload of wood broke down in front of Alcott's house, and the
+farmer unhitched his horses and went on to the village to procure a new
+wheel. Before he got back, Alcott had carried every stick of the
+combustibles into his own wood-shed. "Providence remembers us!" he said.
+His faith was sublime.</p>
+
+<p>When all the world reaches the Alcott stage, there will be no need of
+soldiers, policemen, night-watchmen, or bolts, bars and locks.</p>
+
+<p>In Eighteen Hundred Forty, Nathaniel Hawthorne came to Concord from
+Salem, where he had resigned his clerkship in the custom-house, that he
+might devote all his time to literature. He moved into the Old Manse,
+which had just been vacated by Doctor Ripley, who had gone<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_407" id="VIII_Page_407">[Pg 407]</a></span>
+a-Brook-Farming&mdash;the Old Manse where Emerson himself once lived.
+Elizabeth Peabody, the talented sister of Hawthorne's wife, lived at a
+convenient distance, and to her Hawthorne read most of his manuscript,
+for I need not explain that literature is not literature until it is
+read aloud and reflected back by a sympathetic, discerning mind.
+Literature is a collaboration between the reader and the listener.</p>
+
+<p>Margaret Fuller, with her tragic life-story still unwound, lived hard
+by, and Hawthorne had already worked her up into copy as "Zenobia."
+Margaret's sister Ellen had married Ellery Channing, the closest,
+warmest friend that Henry Thoreau ever knew. The gossips arranged a
+doublewedding, with Henry and Margaret as the other principals; but when
+interviewed on the theme, Henry had merely shaken his head and said, "In
+the first place, Margaret Fuller is not fool enough to marry me; and
+second, I am not fool enough to marry her."</p>
+
+<p>An Irishman who saw Thoreau in the field making a minute in his notebook
+took it for granted that he was casting up his wages, and inquired what
+they came to. It was a peculiar farmhand who cared more for ideas than
+for wages.</p>
+
+<p>George William Curtis was also a farmhand out on the Lowell Road, but
+came into town Saturday evenings&mdash;taking a swim in the river on the
+way&mdash;to attend the philosophical conferences at Emerson's house, and
+then went off and made gentle fun of them.<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_408" id="VIII_Page_408">[Pg 408]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Little Doctor Holmes occasionally drove out from Boston to Concord in a
+one-horse chaise; James Russell Lowell had walked over from Cambridge;
+and Longfellow had invited all hands to a birthday fete on his lawn at
+Cambridge, but Thoreau had declined for himself, saying he had to look
+after his pond-lilies and the field-mice on Bedford flats.</p>
+
+<p>Thoreau, at this time, was a member of Emerson's household, and in a
+letter Emerson says, "He has his board for what labor he chooses to do;
+he is a great benefactor and physician to me, for he is an indefatigable
+and skilful laborer, besides being a scholar and a poet, and as full of
+promise as a young apple-tree."</p>
+
+<p>And again, in a letter to Carlyle: "One reader and friend of yours
+dwells in my household, Henry Thoreau, a poet whom you may one day be
+proud of&mdash;a noble, manly youth, full of melodies and invention. We work
+together day by day in my garden, and I grow well and strong."</p>
+
+<p>To work and talk is the true way to acquire an education. All of our
+best things are done incidentally&mdash;not in cold blood. Hawthorne says in
+his Journal that most of Emerson's and Thoreau's farming was done
+leaning on the hoe-handles, while Alcott sat on the fence and explained
+the Whyness of the Wherefore.</p>
+
+<p>But we must remember that in Hawthorne's ink-bottle there was a goodly
+dash of tincture of iron. In his Journal of September First, Eighteen
+Hundred Forty-two,<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_409" id="VIII_Page_409">[Pg 409]</a></span> he writes: "Mr. Thoreau dined with us yesterday. He
+is a singular character&mdash;a young man with much of wild, original nature
+still remaining in him; and so far as he is sophisticated, it is in a
+way and method of his own. He is as ugly as sin, long-nosed,
+queer-mouthed, and with uncouth and somewhat rustic ways, though his
+courteous manner corresponds very well with such an exterior. But his
+ugliness is of an honest character and really becomes him better than
+beauty." Little did Hawthorne's guests imagine they were being basted,
+roasted, or fricasseed for the edification of posterity.</p>
+
+<p>Prosperity at this time had just begun to smile on Hawthorne, and among
+other extravagances in which he indulged was a boat, bought from
+Thoreau&mdash;made by the hands of this expert Yankee whittler. Hawthorne
+quotes a little transcendental advice given to him by the maker of the
+boat: "In paddling a canoe, all you have to do is to will that your boat
+shall go in any particular direction, and she will immediately take the
+course, as if imbued with the spirit of the steersman." Hawthorne then
+adds this sober postscript: "It may be so with you, but it is certainly
+not so with me."</p>
+
+<p>Admiration for Thoreau gradually grew very strong with Hawthorne, and he
+quotes Emerson, who called Thoreau "the young god Pan." And this lends
+much semblance to the statement that Thoreau served Hawthorne as a model
+for Donatello, the mysterious wood-sprite in the "Marble Faun."<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_410" id="VIII_Page_410">[Pg 410]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>As to the transformation of Thoreau himself, one of his classmates
+records this:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Meeting Mr. Emerson one day, I inquired if he saw much of my
+classmate, Henry D. Thoreau, who was then living in Concord. "Of
+Thoreau?" replied Mr. Emerson, his face lighting up with a smile of
+enthusiasm. "Oh, yes, we could not do without him. When Carlyle
+comes to America, I expect to introduce Thoreau to him as the man
+of Concord," and I was greatly surprised at these words. They set
+an estimate on Thoreau which seemed to be extravagant.... Not long
+after I happened to meet Thoreau in Mr. Emerson's study at
+Concord&mdash;the first time we had come together after leaving college.
+I was quite startled by the transformation that had taken place in
+him. His short figure and general cast of countenance were, of
+course, unchanged; but in his manners, in the tones of his voice,
+in his modes of expression, even in the hesitations and pauses of
+his speech, he had become the counterpart of Mr. Emerson. Thoreau's
+college voice bore no resemblance to Mr. Emerson's, and was so
+familiar to my ear that I could have readily identified him by it
+in the dark. I was so much struck by the change that I took the
+opportunity, as they sat near together talking, of listening with
+closed eyes, and I was unable to determine with certainty which was
+speaking. I do not know to what subtle influences to ascribe it,
+but after conversing with Mr. Emerson for even a brief time, I
+always found myself able and inclined to adopt his voice and manner
+of speaking.</p></div><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_411" id="VIII_Page_411">[Pg 411]</a></span></p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+<p>Thoreau had tried schoolteaching, but he had to give up his position
+because he would not exercise the birch and ferule. "If the scholars
+once find out the teacher is not goin' to sting 'em up when they need
+it, that is an end to the skule," said one of the directors, and he spat
+violently at a fly, ten feet away. The others agreeing with him, Thoreau
+was asked to resign.</p>
+
+<p>William Emerson, a brother of Ralph Waldo's, a prosperous New York
+merchant, had lured Ralph Waldo's hired man away from him and taken him
+down to Staten Island, New York. Here Thoreau acted as private tutor,
+and imparted the mysteries of woodcraft to boys who cared more for
+marbles.</p>
+
+<p>Staten Island was about two hundred miles too far from Concord to suit
+Thoreau.</p>
+
+<p>His loneliness in New York City made Concord and the pine-trees of
+Walden woods seem paradise enow. There is no heart desolation equal to
+that which can come to one in a throng.</p>
+
+<p>Margaret Fuller was now in New York City, working for Greeley on the
+editorial staff of the "Tribune." Greeley was so much pleased with
+Thoreau that he offered to set him to work as reporter, for Greeley had
+guessed the truth that the best city reporters are country boys. They
+observe and hear&mdash;all is curious and wonderful to them: by and by they
+will become blase&mdash;sophisticated&mdash;that is, blind and deaf.<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_412" id="VIII_Page_412">[Pg 412]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Greeley was a great talker, and he had a way of getting others to talk
+also. He got Thoreau to talking about communal life and life in the
+woods, and then Horace worked Henry's words up into copy&mdash;for that is
+the way all good newspaper-writers evolve their original ideas.</p>
+
+<p>Thoreau was amazed to pick up a number of the daily "Tribune" and find
+his conversation of the day before, with Greeley, skilfully transformed
+into a leader.</p>
+
+<p>Fourierism had been the theme&mdash;the Phalanstery versus Individual
+Housekeeping. Greeley had prophesied that the phalanstery, with one
+kitchen for forty families, instead of forty kitchens for forty
+families, would soon come about. Greeley's prophetic vision did not
+quite anticipate the modern apartment-house, which perhaps is a
+transitional expedient, moving toward the phalanstery, but he quoted
+Thoreau by saying, "A woman enslaved by her housekeeping is just as much
+a chattel as if owned by a man."</p>
+
+<p>This was in Eighteen Hundred Forty-five, and Thoreau was now
+twenty-eight years of age. He was homesick for the dim pine-woods with
+their ceaseless lullaby, the winding and placid river, and the great,
+massive, sullen, self-sufficient boulders of Concord.</p>
+
+<p>He was resolved to follow the example of Brook Farm, and start a
+community of his own in opposition. His community would be on the shores
+of Walden Pond, and the only member of the genus homo who would<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_413" id="VIII_Page_413">[Pg 413]</a></span> be
+eligible to membership would be himself; the other members would be the
+birds and squirrels and bees, and the trees would make up the rest.
+Brook Farm was a retreat for transcendentalists&mdash;a place to meditate,
+dream and work&mdash;a place where one could exist close to Nature, and live
+a simple, hardy and healthful life.</p>
+
+<p>Thoreau's retreat would be the same, with the disadvantage of personal
+contact eliminated.</p>
+
+<p>It was in March, Eighteen Hundred Forty-five, that Thoreau began
+building his shanty. The spot was in a dense woods, on a hillside that
+gently sloped down to the clear, cold, deep water of Walden Pond. The
+land belonged to Emerson, who obligingly gave Thoreau the use of it,
+rent free, with no conditions. Alcott helped in the carpenter work, and
+discussed betimes of the Wherefore, and when it came to the raising, a
+couple of neighboring farmers were hailed and pressed into service. The
+cabin was twelve by fifteen, and cost&mdash;furnished&mdash;the sum of
+twenty-eight dollars, good money, not counting labor, which Thoreau did
+not calculate as worth anything, since he had had the fun of the
+thing&mdash;something for which men often pay high.</p>
+
+<p>The furniture consisted of a table, a chair, and a bed, all made by the
+owner. For bedclothes and dishes the Emerson household was put under
+contribution. On the door was a latch, but no lock.</p>
+
+<p>And Thoreau looked upon his work and pronounced it good.<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_414" id="VIII_Page_414">[Pg 414]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Stripped of the fact that a man of culture and education built the
+shanty and lived in it, the incident is scarcely worth noting. Boys
+passing through the shanty stage, all build shanties, and forage through
+their mothers' pantries for provender, which they carry off to their
+robbers' roost. Thoreau was an example of shanty-arrested development.</p>
+
+<p>But as the import of every sentence depends upon who wrote it, and the
+worth of advice hinges upon who gave it, so does the value of every act
+depend upon who did it. Thus when a man, who was in degree an
+inspiration of Emerson, takes to the woods, it is worth our while to
+follow him afield and see what he does.</p>
+
+<p>Thoreau set to work to clean up two acres of blackberry brambles for a
+garden-patch. He did not work except when he felt like it. His plan was
+to go to bed at dusk, with window and door open, and get up at five
+o'clock in the morning. After a plunge in the lake he would dress and
+prepare his simple breakfast. Then he would work in his garden, or if
+the mood struck him, he would sit in the door of his shanty and
+meditate, or else write. In the arrangement of his home he followed no
+system or rule, merely allowing the passing inclination to lead.</p>
+
+<p>His provisions were gotten of friends in the village, and were paid for
+in labor. It was part of Thoreau's philosophy that to accept something
+for nothing was theft, and that the giving or acceptance of presents<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_415" id="VIII_Page_415">[Pg 415]</a></span>
+was immoral. For all he received he conscientiously gave an equivalent
+in labor; and as for ideas, he always considered himself a learner; if
+he had thoughts they belonged to anybody who could annex them. And that
+Emerson and Horace Greeley were alike in their capacity to absorb,
+digest and regurgitate, is everywhere acknowledged. To paraphrase
+Emerson's famous remark concerning Plato: Say what you will, you will
+find everything mentioned by Emerson hinted at somewhere in Thoreau. The
+younger man had as much mind as the elder, but he lacked the capacity
+for patient effort that works steadily, persistently, and weighs, sifts,
+decides, classifies and arranges. The voice was the voice of Jacob, but
+the hand was the hand of Esau. That is to say, Thoreau lacked business
+instinct. During the Winter at Walden Pond, all the work Thoreau had to
+do was to gather firewood. There was plenty of time to think and write,
+and here the better part of "Walden" and "A Week on the Concord and
+Merrimac Rivers" were written. He had no neighbors, no pets, no
+domesticated animals&mdash;only the squirrels on the roof, a woodchuck under
+the floor, the scolding blue jays in the pines overhead, the wild ducks
+on the pond, and the hooting owls that sat on the ridgepole at night.</p>
+
+<p>Thoreau loved solitude more because he prized society&mdash;the society of
+simple men who could talk and tell things. Thoreau was no hermit&mdash;at
+least twice a week<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_416" id="VIII_Page_416">[Pg 416]</a></span> he would go to the village and meander along the
+street, gossiping with all or any. Often he would accept invitations to
+supper, but on principle refused all invitations to remain overnight, no
+matter what the weather. Indeed, as Hawthorne hints, there is a trace of
+the theatrical in the man who leaves a warm fireside at nine or ten
+o'clock at night and trudges off through the darkness, storm and sleet,
+feeling his way through the blackness of the woods to a cold and
+cheerless shanty which he with unconscious humor calls home. Hawthorne
+hints that Thoreau was a delightful poseur&mdash;he posed so naturally that
+he deceived even himself. On one particular visit to the village,
+however, he did not go back home for the night. It seems that he had
+been called upon by the local taxgatherer for his poll-tax, a matter of
+a dollar and a quarter. Thoreau argued the question at length, and among
+other things, said, "I will not give money to buy a musket, and hire a
+man to use this musket to shoot another." And also, "The best government
+is not that which governs least, but that which governs not at all."</p>
+
+<p>"But what shall I do?" said the patient publican.</p>
+
+<p>"Resign," said the philosopher.</p>
+
+<p>Thoreau seemed to forget that officeholders seldom die and never resign.
+In the argument the publican was worsted, but he was not without
+resource. He went back to town and told the other officials what had
+happened. Their dignity was at stake. Alcott had been<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_417" id="VIII_Page_417">[Pg 417]</a></span> guilty of a like
+defiance some time before, and now it was the belief that he was putting
+the younger man up to insurrection.</p>
+
+<p>The next time Thoreau came over to the village for his mail he was
+arrested and lodged in the local bastile.</p>
+
+<p>Emerson, hearing of the trouble, hastened to the jail, and reaching the
+presence of the prisoner asked sternly, "Henry, why are you here?"</p>
+
+<p>And the answer was, "Waldo, why are you not here?" Emerson had no use
+for such finespun theories of duty, and the matter was too near home for
+a joke, so he turned away and let the culprit spend the night in limbo.
+The next morning Thoreau was released, the tax having been paid by some
+unknown person&mdash;Emerson, undoubtedly. This was a tame enough ending to
+what was rather an interesting affair&mdash;the hope of the best citizens
+being that Thoreau would get a goodly sentence for vagrancy. The
+townfolk looked upon Thoreau and Alcott with suspicious eyes. They both
+came in for much well-deserved censure, and Emerson did not go
+unsmirched, since he was guilty of harboring and encouraging these
+ne'er-do-wells.</p>
+
+<p>Thoreau's cabin-life continued for two Summers and Winters. He had
+proved that two hours' manual work each day was sufficient to keep a
+man&mdash;twenty cents a day would suffice.</p>
+
+<p>The last year in the woods he had many callers: Agassiz had been to see
+him, Emerson had often called,<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_418" id="VIII_Page_418">[Pg 418]</a></span> Ellery Channing was a frequent visitor,
+and picnickers were constant. Lowell had made a few cutting remarks to
+the effect that "as compared with shanty-life, the tub of Diogenes was
+preferable, as it had a much sounder bottom," and Hawthorne had written
+of "the beauties of conspicuous solitude."</p>
+
+<p>Thoreau felt that he was attracting too much attention, and that perhaps
+Hawthorne was right: a recluse who holds receptions is becoming the
+thing he pretends to despise. Besides that, there was plenty of
+precedent for quitting&mdash;Brook Farm had gone by the board, and was but a
+memory.</p>
+
+<p>Thoreau's shanty was turned over to a utilitarian Scotchman with red
+hair. Later the immortal shanty was a useful granary. Thoreau went back
+to the village to live in a garret and work at odd jobs of boat-building
+and gardening.</p>
+
+<p>Now only a pile of boulders marks the place where the cabin stood. For
+some years, each visitor to the spot threw a stone upon the heap, but
+recently the proposition has been reversed, and each visitor takes a
+stone away, which reveals not a reversal in the sentiment toward the
+memory of Thoreau, but a change in the quality of the Concord pilgrim.<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_419" id="VIII_Page_419">[Pg 419]</a></span></p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>Thoreau's early death was the direct result of his reckless lack of
+common prudence. That which made him live, in a literary way, curtailed
+his years. The man was improperly and imperfectly nourished, physically.
+Men who live alone do not cook any more than they have to: men and
+women, both, cook for emulation. That is to say, we work for each other,
+and we succeed only as we help each other.</p>
+
+<p>Thoreau was such a pronounced individualist that he cared for no one but
+himself, and he cared for himself not at all. It is wife, children and
+home that teach a man prudence, and make him bank against the storm. "At
+Walden no one bothered me but the State," said Thoreau. If Thoreau had
+had a family and treated his household as he treated himself, that
+scorned thing, the State, would have stepped in and sent him to the
+workhouse, and his children to the Home for the Friendless.</p>
+
+<p>If he had treated dumb animals as he treated himself, the Society for
+the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals would have interfered. The absence
+of social ties and of all responsibilities fixed in his peculiar
+temperament an indifference to hunger, heat, cold, wet, damp, and all
+bodily discomfort that classes the man with the flagellants. He tells of
+whole days when he ate nothing but berries and drank only cold water;
+and at other times of how he walked all day in a soaking<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_420" id="VIII_Page_420">[Pg 420]</a></span> rain and went
+to bed at night, supperless, under a pine-tree. Emerson records the fact
+that on long tramps Thoreau would carry only a chunk of plum-cake for
+food, because it was rich and contained condensed nutriment.</p>
+
+<p>The question is sometimes asked, "How can one eat his cake and keep it
+too?" but this does not refer to plum-cake.</p>
+
+<p>A few years of plum-cake, cold mince-pie and continual wet feet will put
+the petard under even the stoutest constitution.</p>
+
+<p>During his shanty-life Thoreau was imperfectly nourished, and for the
+victim of malassimilation, tuberculosis hunts and needs no spyglass.</p>
+
+<p>It is absurd for a man to make a god of his digestive apparatus, but it
+is just as bad to forget that the belly is as much the gift of God as
+the brain.</p>
+
+<p>In childhood, Thoreau was frail and weak. Outdoor life gradually
+developed on his slight frame a splendid strength and a power to do and
+endure. He could outrun, outrow, outwalk any of his townsmen. In him
+developed the confidence of the athlete&mdash;the confidence of the athlete
+who dies young. Thoreau was an athlete, and he died as the athlete
+dieth. Irregular diet and continued exposure did their work&mdash;the vital
+powers became reduced, the man "caught cold," bronchitis followed, and
+the tubercul&aelig; laughed.<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_421" id="VIII_Page_421">[Pg 421]</a></span></p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>During Thoreau's life he published but two volumes, and these met with
+scanty sale. Since his death ten volumes have been issued from his
+manuscripts and letters, and his fame has steadily increased.</p>
+
+<p>Boston had no recognition for Thoreau as long as he was alive. Among the
+most popular writers of the time, feted and feasted, invited and
+exalted, were George S. Hillard, N. P. Willis, Caroline Kirkland, George
+W. Green, Parke Godwin and Charles F. Briggs. These writers, who had the
+run of the magazines, would have smiled in derision if told that the
+name and fame of uncouth Thoreau would outlive them all. They wrote for
+the people who bought their books, but Thoreau dedicated his work to
+time. He wrote what he thought, but they wrote what they thought other
+people thought.</p>
+
+<p>In the publication of "The Dial," Thoreau took a hearty interest, and
+was a frequent contributor. The official organ of the
+transcendentalists, however, paid no honorariums&mdash;it was both sincere
+and serious, and died in due time of too much dignity. The "Atlantic
+Monthly" accepted one article by Thoreau, and paid for it, but as James
+Russell Lowell, the editor, used his blue pencil a trifle, without first
+consulting the author, he never got an opportunity to do so again.</p>
+
+<p>Horace Greeley had interested himself in Thoreau's writings and gotten
+several articles accepted by<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_422" id="VIII_Page_422">[Pg 422]</a></span> Graham's and also Putnam's Magazine. "The
+Week" had been published on the author's guaranty that enough copies
+would be sold the first year to cover the cost. After four years, of the
+edition of one thousand copies only three hundred were disposed of, and
+these were mostly given away. To pay the publisher for the expense
+incurred, Thoreau buckled down and worked hard at surveying for a year.</p>
+
+<p>The only man he ever knew, of whom he stood a little in awe, was Walt
+Whitman. In a letter to Blake he says:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Nineteenth November, Eighteen Hundred Fifty-six.&mdash;Alcott has been
+here, and last Sunday I went with him to Greeley's farm, thirty-six
+miles north of New York. The next day Alcott and I heard Beecher
+preach; and what was more, we visited Whitman the next morning, and
+we were much interested and provoked. He is apparently the greatest
+democrat the world has seen, kings and aristocracy go by the board
+at once, as they have long deserved to. A remarkably strong though
+coarse nature, of a sweet disposition, and much prized by his
+friends. Though peculiar and rough in his exterior, he is
+essentially a gentleman. I am still somewhat in a quandary about
+him&mdash;feel that he is essentially strange to me, at any rate; but I
+am surprised by the sight of him. He is very broad, but, as I have
+said, not fine.</p>
+
+<p>Seventh December, Eighteen Hundred Fifty-six.&mdash;That Walt Whitman,
+of whom I wrote you, is the most interesting fact to me at present.
+I have just read his second edition (which he gave me), and it has
+done me more good than any reading for a long time. Perhaps I<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_423" id="VIII_Page_423">[Pg 423]</a></span>
+remember best the poem of "Walt Whitman an American" and the
+"Sundown" poem. There are two or three pieces in the book which are
+disagreeable, to say the least, simply sensual.... As for its
+sensuality&mdash;and it may turn out to be less sensual than it
+appears&mdash;I do not so much wish that those parts were not written,
+as that men and women were so pure that they could read them
+without harm.</p>
+
+<p>On the whole, it sounds to me very brave and American, after
+whatever deductions. I do not believe that all the sermons, so
+called, that have been preached in this land, put together, are
+equal to it for preaching. We ought greatly to rejoice in him. He
+occasionally suggests something a little more than human. You can't
+confound him with the other inhabitants of Brooklyn. How they must
+shudder when they read him!</p>
+
+<p>To be sure, I sometimes feel a little imposed on. By his heartiness
+and broad generalities he puts me into a liberal frame of mind,
+prepared to see wonders&mdash;as it were, sets me upon a hill or in the
+midst of a plain&mdash;stirs me well up, and then&mdash;throws in a thousand
+of brick. Though rude and sometimes ineffectual, it is a great
+primitive poem, an alarum or trumpet-note ringing through the
+American camp. Wonderfully like the Orientals, too, considering
+that, when I asked him if he had read them, he answered, "No; tell
+me about them."</p>
+
+<p>Since I have seen him, I find that I am not disturbed by any brag
+or egoism in his book. He may turn out the least of a braggart of
+all, having a better right to be confident. Walt is a great fellow.</p></div>
+
+<p>A lady once asked John Burroughs this question: "What would become of
+this world if everybody in it<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_424" id="VIII_Page_424">[Pg 424]</a></span> patterned after Henry Thoreau?" And Ol'
+John replied, "It would be much improved."</p>
+
+<p>But your Uncle John is a humorist&mdash;he knows that Henry Ward Beecher was
+right when he said, "God never made but one Thoreau&mdash;that was enough,
+but we are grateful for the one."</p>
+
+<p>Thoreau was a poet-naturalist, and the lesson he taught us is that this
+is the most beautiful world to know anything about, and there are enough
+curious and wonderful things right under our feet, and over our heads,
+and all around us, to amuse, divert, interest and instruct us for a
+lifetime. We need only a little.</p>
+
+<p>Use your eyes!</p>
+
+<p>"How do you manage to find so many Indian relics?" a friend asked
+Thoreau. "Just like this," he replied, and stooping over, he picked up
+an arrowhead under the friend's foot. At dinner once at a neighbor's he
+was asked what dish he preferred, and his answer was, "The nearest." To
+him, everything was good&mdash;he uttered no complaints and made no demands.</p>
+
+<p>When asked by a clergyman why he did not go to church, he said, "It is
+the rafters&mdash;I can't stand them&mdash;when I look up, I want to gaze straight
+into the blue sky." Then he turned the tables and asked the interrogator
+a question: "Did you ever happen, accidentally, to say anything while
+you were preaching?" Yet preachers of brains were always attracted to
+him: Harrison Blake, to whom he wrote more letters than<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_425" id="VIII_Page_425">[Pg 425]</a></span> to any one
+else, was a Congregational preacher. And when Horace Greeley took
+Thoreau to Plymouth Church, Beecher invited him to sit on the platform
+and quoted him as one who saw God in autumn's every burning bush.</p>
+
+<p>The wit of the man&mdash;his direct speech, and all of his beautiful
+indifference for the good opinion of those whom others follow after and
+lie in wait for&mdash;was sublime. Meanness, hypocrisy, secrecy and
+subterfuge had no place in Thoreau's nature.</p>
+
+<p>He wanted nothing&mdash;nothing but liberty&mdash;he did not even ask for your
+applause or approval. When walking on country roads, laborers would hail
+him and ask for tobacco&mdash;seeing in him only one of their own kind.
+Farmers would stop and gossip with him about the weather. Children ran
+to him on the village streets and would cling to his hands and clutch
+his coat, and ask where the berries grew, or the first spring flowers
+were to be found. With children he was particularly patient and kind.
+With them he would converse as freely as did George Francis Train with
+the children in Madison Square. The children recognized in him something
+very much akin to themselves&mdash;he would play upon his flute for them and
+whittle out toy boats, regardless of the flight of time.</p>
+
+<p>Imbeciles and mental defectives from the almshouse used occasionally to
+wander over to his cabin in the woods, and he would treat them with
+gentle consideration, and<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_426" id="VIII_Page_426">[Pg 426]</a></span> accompany them back home.</p>
+
+<p>His lack of worldly prudence, Blake thought, tokened a courage which
+under certain conditions would have made him as formidable as John
+Brown. Blake tells this: Once on a lonely road, two miles from Concord,
+two loafers stopped a girl who was picking berries, and began to bother
+her. Thoreau just then happened along, and seeing the young woman's
+distress, he collared the rogues and marched them into the village,
+turning them over to that redoubtable transcendentalist, Sam Staples,
+who locked them up. Thoreau's hook nose and features could be
+transformed in rare instances into a look of command that no man dare
+question&mdash;it was the look of the fatalist&mdash;the benign fanatic&mdash;the look
+of Marat&mdash;the look of a man who has nothing but his life to lose, and
+places small store on that. "A little more ambition, and a trifle less
+sympathy, and the world would have had a C&aelig;sar to deal with," says
+Blake.</p>
+
+<p>Cowardice is only caution carried to an extreme. Thoreau exercised no
+prudence in making money, securing fame, preserving his health, holding
+his friends or making new ones. This Spartan-like quality, that counts
+not the cost, is essentially heroic.</p>
+
+<p>But Thoreau was not given to strife; for the most part, he was
+non-resistant. The chief thing he prized was equanimity, and this you
+can not secure through struggle and strife. His game was all captured
+with the spyglass, or carried home in his botanists' drum. For<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_427" id="VIII_Page_427">[Pg 427]</a></span> worldly
+wealth and what we call progress, he had small appreciation&mdash;this marks
+his limitations. But his reasons are surely good literature:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>They make a great ado nowadays about hard times; but I think that
+the community generally, ministers and all, take a wrong view of
+the matter. This general failure, both private and public, is
+rather occasion for rejoicing, as reminding us whom we have at the
+helm&mdash;that justice is always done. If our merchants did not most of
+them fail, and the banks too, my faith in the old laws of the world
+would be staggered. The statement that ninety-six in a hundred
+doing such business surely break down, is perhaps the sweetest fact
+that statistics have revealed&mdash;exhilarating as the fragrance of the
+flowers in the Spring. Does it not say somewhere, "The Lord
+reigneth, let the earth rejoice"? If thousands are thrown out of
+employment, it suggests that they were not well employed. Why don't
+they take the hint? It is not enough to be industrious; so are the
+ants. What are you industrious about?</p>
+
+<p>The merchants and company have long laughed at transcendentalism,
+higher law, etc., crying, "None of your moonshine," as if they were
+anchored to something not only definite, but sure and permanent. If
+there were any institution which was presumed to rest on a solid
+and secure basis, and more than any other, represented this boasted
+commonsense, prudence, and practical talent, it was the bank; and
+now these very banks are found to be mere reeds shaken by the wind.</p>
+
+<p>Scarcely one in the land has kept its promise. Not merely the Brook
+Farm and Fourierite communities,<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_428" id="VIII_Page_428">[Pg 428]</a></span> but now the community generally
+has failed. But there is the moonshine still, serene, beneficent
+and unchanged.</p></div>
+
+<p>Thoreau was no pessimist. He complained neither of men nor of
+destiny&mdash;he felt that he was getting out of life all that was his due.
+His remarks might be sharp and his words sarcastic, but in them there
+was no bitterness. He made life for none more difficult&mdash;he added to no
+one's burdens. Sympathy with Nature, pride, buoyancy, self-sufficiency,
+were his prevailing traits. The habit of his mind was hopeful.</p>
+
+<p>His wit and good-nature were his to the last, and when asked if he had
+made his peace with God, he replied, "I have never quarreled with Him."</p>
+
+<p>He died, aged forty-four, in the modest home of his mother. The village
+school was dismissed that the scholars might attend the funeral, and
+three hundred children walked in the procession to Sleepy Hollow.
+Emerson made an address at the grave; Alcott read selections from
+Thoreau's own writings; and Louisa Alcott read this poem, composed for
+the occasion:</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">We sighing said, "Our Pan is dead;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 3em;">His pipe hangs mute beside the river,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 3em;">Around it wistful sunbeams quiver,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">But Music's airy voice is fled.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">Spring mourns as for untimely frost:</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 3em;">The bluebird chants a requiem;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 3em;">The willow-blossom waits for him;&mdash;</span><br />
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_429" id="VIII_Page_429">[Pg 429]</a></span><span style="margin-left: 2em;">The Genius of the wood is lost."</span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">Then from the flute, untouched by hands,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 3em;">There came a low, harmonious breath:</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 3em;">"For such as he there is no death;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">His life the eternal life commands;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">Above man's aims his nature rose.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 3em;">The wisdom of a just content</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 3em;">Made one small spot a continent,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">And turned to poetry life's prose.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">"To him no vain regrets belong,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 3em;">Whose soul, that finer instrument,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 3em;">Gave to the world no poor lament,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">But wood-notes ever sweet and strong.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">O lonely friend! he still will be</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 3em;">A potent presence, though unseen&mdash;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 3em;">Steadfast, sagacious, and serene;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">Seek not for him&mdash;he is with thee."</span><br />
+</p>
+
+
+<hr class="full" />
+
+
+<p>SO HERE ENDETH "LITTLE JOURNEYS TO THE HOMES OF GREAT PHILOSOPHERS,<span class='pagenum'><a name="VIII_Page_430" id="VIII_Page_430">[Pg 430]</a></span>
+BEING VOLUME EIGHT OF THE SERIES, AS WRITTEN BY ELBERT HUBBARD; EDITED
+AND ARRANGED BY FRED BANN; BORDERS AND INITIALS BY ROYCROFT ARTISTS, AND
+PRODUCED BY THE ROYCROFTERS, AT THEIR SHOPS, WHICH ARE IN EAST AURORA,
+ERIE COUNTY, NEW YORK, MCMXXII.</p>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Little Journeys to the Homes of the
+Great Philosophers, Volume 8, by Elbert  Hubbard
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great
+Philosophers, Volume 8, by Elbert  Hubbard
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8
+
+Author: Elbert  Hubbard
+
+Release Date: November 27, 2007 [EBook #23640]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HOMES OF THE GREAT PHILOSOPHERS ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Juliet Sutherland, Annie McGuire and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
+
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+
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+
+
+
+LITTLE JOURNEYS TO THE HOMES OF THE GREAT, VOLUME 8
+
+Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Philosophers
+
+by
+
+ELBERT HUBBARD
+
+Memorial Edition
+
+New York
+
+1916.
+
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+  SOCRATES
+  SENECA
+  ARISTOTLE
+  MARCUS AURELIUS
+  IMMANUEL KANT
+  SWEDENBORG
+  SPINOZA
+  AUGUSTE COMTE
+  VOLTAIRE
+  HERBERT SPENCER
+  SCHOPENHAUER
+  HENRY D. THOREAU
+
+
+
+
+SOCRATES
+
+
+     I do not think it possible for a better man to be injured by a
+     worse.... To a good man nothing is evil, neither while living nor
+     when dead, nor are his concerns neglected by the gods.
+
+                                               --_The Republic_
+
+[Illustration: SOCRATES]
+
+
+It was four hundred seventy years before Christ that Socrates was born.
+He never wrote a book, never made a formal address, held no public
+office, wrote no letters, yet his words have come down to us sharp,
+vivid and crystalline. His face, form and features are to us
+familiar--his goggle eyes, bald head, snub nose and bow-legs! The habit
+of his life--his goings and comings, his arguments and wrangles, his
+infinite leisure, his sublime patience, his perfect faith--all these
+things are plain, lifting the man out of the commonplace and setting him
+apart.
+
+The "Memorabilia" of Xenophon and the "Dialogues" of Plato give us
+Boswellian pictures of the man.
+
+Knowing the man, we know what he would do; and knowing what he did, we
+know the man.
+
+Socrates was the son of Sophroniscus, a stonecutter, and his wife
+Phaenarete. In boyhood he used to carry dinner to his father, and sitting
+by, he heard the men, in their free and easy way, discuss the plans of
+Pericles. These workmen didn't know the plans--they were only privates
+in the ranks, but they exercised their prerogatives to criticize, and
+while working to assist, did right royally disparage and condemn. Like
+sailors who love their ship, and grumble at grub and grog, yet on shore
+will allow no word of disparagement to be said, so did these Athenians
+love their city, and still condemn its rulers--they exercised the
+laborer's right to damn the man who gives him work.
+
+Little did the workmen guess--little did his father guess--that this
+pug-nosed boy, making pictures in the sand with his big toe, would also
+leave his footprints on the sands of time, and a name that would rival
+that of Phidias and Pericles!
+
+Socrates was a product of the Greek renaissance. Great men come in
+groups, like comets sent from afar. Athens was seething with thought and
+feeling: Pericles was giving his annual oration--worth thousands of
+weekly sermons--and planning his dream in marble; Phidias was cutting
+away the needless portions of the white stone of Pentelicus and
+liberating wondrous forms of beauty; Sophocles was revealing the
+possibilities of the stage; AEschylus was pointing out the way as a
+playwright; and the passion for physical beauty was everywhere an
+adjunct of religion.
+
+Prenatal influences, it seems, played their part in shaping the destiny
+of Socrates. His mother followed the profession of Sairy Gamp, and made
+her home with a score of families, as she was needed. The trained nurse
+is often untrained, and is a regular encyclopedia of esoteric family
+facts. She wipes her mouth on her apron and is at home in every room of
+the domicile from parlor to pantry. Then as now she knew the trials and
+troubles of her clients, and all domestic underground happenings
+requiring adjustment she looked after as she was "disposed."
+
+Evidently Phaenarete was possessed of considerable personality, for we
+hear of her being called to Mythaeia on a professional errand shortly
+before the birth of Socrates; and in a month after his birth, a similar
+call came from another direction, and the bald little philosopher was
+again taken along--from which we assume, following in the footsteps of
+Conan Doyle, that Socrates was no bottle-baby. The world should be
+grateful to Phaenarete that she did not honor the Sairy Gamp precedents
+and observe the Platonic maxim, "Sandal-makers usually go barefoot": she
+gave her customers an object-lesson in well-doing as well as teaching
+them by precept. None of her clients did so well as she--even though her
+professional duties were so exacting that domesticity to her was merely
+incidental.
+
+It was only another case of the amateur distancing the professional.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+From babyhood we lose sight of Socrates until we find him working at his
+father's trade as a sculptor. Certainly he had a goodly degree of skill,
+for the "Graces" which he carved were fair and beautiful and admired by
+many. This was enough: he just wanted to reveal what he could do; and
+then to show that to have no ambition was his highest ambition, he threw
+down his tools and took off his apron for good. He was then thirty-five
+years old. Art is a jealous mistress, and demands that "thou shalt have
+no other gods before me." Socrates did not concentrate on art. His mind
+went roaming the world of philosophy, and for his imagination the
+universe was hardly large enough.
+
+I said that he deliberately threw down his tools; but possibly this was
+by request, for he had acquired a habit of engaging in much wordy
+argument and letting the work slide. He went out upon the streets to
+talk, and in the guise of a learner he got in close touch with all the
+wise men of Athens by stopping them and asking questions. In physique he
+was immensely strong--hard work had developed his muscles, plain fare
+had made him oblivious of the fact that he had a stomach, and as for
+nerves, he had none to speak of.
+
+Socrates did not marry until he was about forty. His wife was scarcely
+twenty. Of his courtship we know nothing, but sure it is Socrates did
+not go and sue for the lady's hand in the conventional way, nor seek to
+gain the consent of her parents by proving his worldly prospects. His
+apparel was costly as his purse could buy, not gaudy nor expressed in
+fancy. It consisted of the one suit that he wore, for we hear of his
+repairing beyond the walls to bathe in the stream, and of his washing
+his clothing, hanging it on the bushes and waiting for it to dry before
+going back to the city. As for shoes, he had one pair, and since he
+never once wore them, going barefoot Summer and Winter, it is presumed
+that they lasted well. One can not imagine Socrates in an opera-hat--in
+fact, he wore no hat, and he was bald. I record the fact so as to
+confound those zealous ones who badger the bald as a business, who have
+recipes concealed on their persons, and who assure us that baldness has
+its rise in headgear.
+
+Socrates belonged to the leisure class. His motto was, "Know Thyself."
+He considered himself of much more importance than any statue he could
+make, and to get acquainted with himself as being much more desirable
+than to know physical phenomena. His plan of knowing himself was to ask
+everybody questions, and in their answers he would get a true reflection
+of his own mind. His intellect would reply to theirs, and if his
+questions dissolved their answers into nothingness, the supremacy of his
+own being would be apparent; and if they proved his folly he was equally
+grateful--if he was a fool, his desire was to know it. So sincere was
+Socrates in this wish to know himself that never did he show the
+slightest impatience nor resentment when the argument was turned upon
+him.
+
+He looked upon his mind as a second party, and sat off and watched it
+work. Should it become confused or angered, it would be proof of its
+insufficiency and littleness. If Socrates ever came to know himself, he
+knew this fact: as an economic unit he was an absolute failure; but as a
+gadfly, stinging men into thinking for themselves, he was a success. A
+specialist is a deformity contrived by Nature to get the work done.
+Socrates was a thought-specialist, and the laziest man who ever lived in
+a strenuous age. The desire of his life was to live without
+desire--which is essentially the thought of Nirvana. He had the power
+never to exercise his power except in knowing himself.
+
+He accepted every fact, circumstance and experience of life, and counted
+it gain. Life to him was a precious privilege, and what were regarded as
+unpleasant experiences were as much a part of life as the pleasant ones.
+He who succeeds in evading unpleasant experiences cheats himself out of
+so much life. You know yourself by watching yourself to see what you do
+when you are thwarted, crossed, contradicted, or deprived of certain
+things supposed to be desirable. If you always get the desirable things,
+how do you know what you would do if you didn't have them? You exchange
+so much life for the thing, that's all, and thus do we see Socrates
+anticipating Emerson's Essay on Compensation.
+
+Everything is bought with a price--all things are of equal value--no one
+can cheat you, for to be cheated is a not undesirable experience, and in
+the act, if you are really filled with the thought, "Know Thyself," you
+get the compensation by increase in mental growth.
+
+However, to deliberately go in search of experience, Socrates said,
+would be a mistake, because then you would so multiply impressions that
+none would be of any avail and your life would be burned out. To clutch
+life by the throat and demand that it shall stand and deliver is to
+place yourself so out of harmony with your environment that you will get
+nothing.
+
+Above all things, we must be calm, self-centered, never anxious, and be
+always ready to accept whatever the gods may send. The world will come
+to us if we only wait. It will be seen that Socrates is at once the
+oldest and most modern of thinkers. He was the first to express the New
+Thought. A thought, to Socrates, was more of a reality than a block of
+marble--a moral principle was just as persistent as a chemical agent.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The silken-robed and perfumed Sophist was sport and game for Socrates.
+For him Socrates recognized no closed season. If Socrates ever came near
+losing his temper, it was in dealing with this Edmund Russell of Athens.
+Grant Allen used to say, "The spores of everything are everywhere, and a
+certain condition breeds a certain microbe." A period of prosperity
+always warms into life this social paragon, who lives in a darkened room
+hung with maroon drapery where incense is burned and a turbaned Hindu
+carries your card to the master, who faces the sun and exploits a
+prie-dieu when the wind blows east. Athens had these men of refined
+elegance, Rome evolved them, London has had her day, New York knows
+them, and Chicago--I trust I will not be contradicted when I say that
+Chicago understands her business! And so we find these folks who
+cultivate a pellucid passivity, a phthisicky whisper, a supercilious
+smirk, and who win our smothered admiration and give us gooseflesh by
+imparting a taupe tinge of mystery to all their acts and words, thus
+proving to the assembled guests that they are the Quality and Wisdom
+will die with them.
+
+This lingo of meaningless words and high-born phrases always set
+Socrates by the ears, and when he could corner a Sophist, he would very
+shortly prick his pretty toy balloon, until at last the tribe fled him
+as a pestilence. Socrates stood for sanity. The Sophist represented
+moonshine gone to seed, and these things, proportioned ill, drive men
+transverse.
+
+Extremes equalize themselves: the pendulum swings as far this way as it
+does that. The saponaceous Sophist who renounced the world and yet lived
+wholly in a world of sense, making vacuity pass legal tender for
+spirituality, and the priest who, mystified with a mumble of words,
+evolved a Diogenes who lived in a tub, wore regally a robe of rags, and
+once went into the temple, and cracking a louse on the altar-rail, said
+solemnly, "Thus does Diogenes sacrifice to all the gods at once!" are
+but two sides of the same shield.
+
+In Socrates was a little jollity and much wisdom pickled in the scorn of
+Fortune; but the Sophists inwardly bowed down and worshiped the fickle
+dame on idolatrous knees. Socrates won immortality because he did not
+want it, and the Sophists secured oblivion because they deserved it.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+We hear of Socrates going to Aspasia, and holding long conversations
+with her "to sharpen his mind." Aspasia did not go out in society much:
+she and Pericles lived very simply. It is worth while to remember that
+the most intellectual woman of her age was democratic enough to be on
+friendly terms with the barefoot philosopher who went about regally
+wrapped in a table-spread. Socrates did not realize the flight of time
+when making calls--he went early and stayed late. Possibly prenatal
+influences caused him often to call before breakfast and remain until
+after supper.
+
+Just imagine Pericles, Aspasia and Socrates sitting at table--with
+Walter Savage Landor behind the arras making notes! Doubtless Socrates
+and Mrs. Pericles did most of the talking, while the First Citizen of
+Athens listened and smiled indulgently now and then as his mind wandered
+to construction contracts and walking delegates. Pericles, the builder
+of a city--Pericles, first among practical men since time began, and
+Socrates, who jostles history for first place among those who have done
+nothing but talk--imagine these two eating melons together, while
+Aspasia, gentle and kind, talks of spirit being more than matter and
+love being greater than the Parthenon!
+
+Socrates is usually spoken of as regarding women with slight favor, but
+I have noticed that your genus woman-hater holds the balance true by
+really being a woman-lover. If a man is enough interested in women to
+hate them, note this: he is only searching for the right woman, the
+woman who compares favorably with the ideal woman in his own mind. He
+measures every woman by this standard, just as Ruskin compared all
+modern painters with Turner and discarded them with fitting adjectives
+as they receded from what he regarded as the perfect type. If Ruskin had
+not been much interested in painters, would he have written scathing
+criticisms about them?
+
+In several instances we hear of Socrates reminding his followers that
+they are "weak as women," and he was the first to say "woman is an
+undeveloped man." But Socrates was a great admirer of human beauty,
+whether physical or spiritual, and his abrupt way of stopping beautiful
+women on the streets and bluntly telling them they were beautiful,
+doubtless often confirmed their suspicions. And thus far he was
+pleasing, but when he went on to ask questions so as to ascertain
+whether their mental estate compared with their physical, why, that was
+slightly different. It is good to hear him say, "There is no sex in
+intellect," and also, "I have long held the opinion that the female sex
+is nothing inferior to ours, save only in strength of body and possibly
+in steadiness of judgment." And Xenophon quotes him thus: "It is more
+delightful to hear the virtue of a good woman described than if the
+painter Zeuxis were to show me the portrait of the fairest woman in the
+world."
+
+Perhaps Thackeray is right when he says, "The men who appreciate woman
+most are those who have felt the sharpness of her claws." That is to
+say, things show up best on the darkest background. If so, let us give
+Xantippe due credit. She tested the temper of the sage by railing on him
+and deluging him with Socratic propositions, not waiting for the
+answers; she often broke in with a broom upon his introspective efforts
+to know himself; if this were not enough, she dashed buckets of
+scrubbing-water over him; presents that were sent him by admiring
+friends she used as targets for her mop and wit; if he invited friends
+with faith plus to dine, she upset the table, dishes and all, before
+them--not much to their loss; she occasionally elbowed her way through a
+crowd where her husband was entertaining the listeners upon the divine
+harmonies, and would tear off his robe and lead him home by the ear. But
+these things never ruffled Socrates--he might roll his eyes in comic
+protest at the audiences as he was being led away captive, but no
+resentment was shown. He had the strength of a Hercules, but he was a
+far better non-resistant than Tolstoy, because he took his medicine with
+a wink, while Fate is obliged to hold the nose of the author of "Anna
+Karenina," who never sees the comedy of an inward struggle and an
+outward compliance, any more than does the benedict, safely entrenched
+under the bed, who shouts out, "I defy thee, I defy thee!" as did
+Mephisto when Goethe thrust him into Tophet.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The popular belief is that Xantippe, the wife of Socrates, was a shrew,
+and had she lived in New England in Cotton Mather's time would have been
+a candidate for the ducking-stool. Socrates said he married her for
+discipline. A man in East Aurora, however, has recently made it plain to
+himself that Xantippe was possessed of a great and acute intellect. She
+knew herself, and she knew her liege as he never did--he was too close
+to his subject to get the perspective. She knew that under right
+conditions his name would live as one of the world's great teachers, and
+so she set herself to supply the conditions. She deliberately sacrificed
+herself and put her character in a wrong light before the world in order
+that she might benefit the world. Most women have a goodly grain of
+ambition for themselves, and if their husbands have genius, their
+business is not to prove it, but to show that they themselves are not
+wholly commonplace.
+
+Not so Xantippe--she was quite willing to be misunderstood that her
+husband might live.
+
+What the world calls a happy marriage is not wholly good--ease is bought
+with a price. Suppose Xantippe and Socrates had settled down and lived
+in a cottage with a vine growing over the portico, and two rows of
+hollyhocks leading from the front gate to the door; a pathway of
+coal-ashes lined off with broken crockery, and inside the house all
+sweet, clean and tidy; Socrates earning six drachmas a day carving
+marble, with double pay for overtime, and he handing the pay-envelope
+over to her each Saturday night, keeping out just enough for tobacco,
+and she putting a tidy sum in the AEgean Savings-Bank every month--why,
+what then?
+
+Well, that would have been an end of Socrates. Xantippe was big enough
+to know this and so she supplied the domestic cantharides and drove him
+out upon the streets--he grew to care very little for her, not much for
+the children, nothing for his home. She drove him out into the world of
+thought, instead of allowing him to settle down and be content with her
+society.
+
+I once knew a sculptor--another sculptor--an elemental bit of nature,
+original and, better still, aboriginal. He used to sleep out under the
+stars so as to wake up in the night and see the march of the Milky Way,
+and watch the Pleiades disappear over the brink of the western horizon.
+He wore a flannel shirt, thick-soled shoes, and overalls, no hat, and
+his hair was thick and coarse as a horse's mane. This man had talent,
+and he had sublime conceptions, great dreams, and splendid aspirations.
+His soul was struggling to find expression. "Leave him alone," I said.
+"He needs time to ripen. He is a Michelangelo in embryo!"
+
+Did he ripen? Not he. He married a Wellesley girl of good family. She,
+too, had ideas about art--she painted china-buttons for shirtwaists,
+embroidered chasubles and sang "The Rosary" in a raucous Quinsigamond
+voice. The big barbarian became respectable, and the last time I saw
+him he wore a Tuxedo and was passing out platitudes and raspberry-shrub
+at a lawn-party. The Wellesley girl had tamed her bear--they were very
+happy, he assured me, and she was preparing a course of lectures for him
+which he was to give at Mrs. Jack Gardner's. A Xantippe might have saved
+him.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+A captious friend once suggested to Socrates this: "If you prize the
+female nature so highly, how does it happen that you do not instruct
+Xantippe?"--a rather indelicate proposition to put to a married man. And
+Socrates, quite unruffled, replied: "My friend, if one wants to learn
+horsemanship, does he choose a tame horse or one with mettle and a hard
+mouth? I wish to converse with all sorts of people, and I believe that
+nothing can disturb me after I grow accustomed to the tongue of
+Xantippe."
+
+Again we hear of his suggesting that his wife's scolding tongue may have
+been only the buzzing of his own waspish thoughts, and if he did not
+call forth these qualities in her they would not otherwise have
+appeared. And so, beholding her impatience and unseemliness, he would
+realize the folly of an ill temper and thus learn by antithesis to curb
+his own. Old Doctor Johnson used to have a regular menagerie of
+wrangling, jangling, quibbling, dissatisfied pensioners in his
+household; and so far as we know he never learned the truth that all
+pensioners are dissatisfied. "If I can stand things at home, I can stand
+things anywhere," he once said to Boswell, as much as to say, "If I can
+stand things at home, I can stand even you." Goldsmith referred to
+Boswell as a cur; Garrick said he thought he was a bur. Socrates had a
+similar satellite by the name of Cheropho, a dark, dirty, weazened, and
+awfully serious little man of the tribe of Buttinsky, who sat
+breathlessly trying to catch the pearls that fell from the ample mouth
+of the philosopher. Aristophanes referred to Cheropho as "Socrates'
+bat," a play-off on Minerva and her bird of night, the owl. There were
+quite a number of these "bats," and they seemed to labor under the same
+hallucination that catches the lady students of the Pundit Vivakenanda
+H. Darmapala: they think that wisdom is to be imparted by word of mouth,
+and that by listening hard and making notes one can become very wise.
+Socrates said again and again, "Character is a matter of growth and all
+I hope to do is to make you think for yourselves."
+
+That chilly exclusiveness which regards a man's house as his castle, his
+home, the one sacred spot, and all outside as the cold and cruel world,
+was not the ideal of Socrates. His family was his circle of friends, and
+these were of all classes and conditions, from the First Citizen to
+beggars on the street.
+
+He made no charge for his teaching, took up no collections, and never
+inaugurated a Correspondence School. America has produced one man who
+has been called a reincarnation of Socrates; that man was Bronson
+Alcott, who peddled clocks and forgot the flight of time whenever any
+one would listen to him expound the unities. Alcott once ran his
+wheelbarrow into a neighbor's garden and was proceeding to load his
+motor-car with cabbages, beets and potatoes. Glancing up, the
+philosopher saw the owner of the garden looking at him steadfastly over
+the wall. "Don't look at me that way," called Alcott with a touch of
+un-Socratic acerbity, "don't look at me that way--I need these things
+more than you!" and went on with the annexation.
+
+The idea that all good things are for use and belong to all who need
+them was a favorite maxim of Socrates. The furniture in his house never
+exceeded the exemption clause. Once we find him saying that Xantippe
+complained because he did not buy her a stewpan, but since there was
+nothing to put in it, he thought her protests ill-founded.
+
+The climate of Athens is about like that of Southern California--one
+does not need to bank food and fuel against the coming of Winter. Life
+can be adjusted to its simplest forms. From his fortieth to his fiftieth
+year, Socrates worked every other Thursday; then he retired from active
+life, and Xantippe took in plain sewing.
+
+Socrates was surely not a good provider, but if he had provided more for
+his family, he would have provided less for the world. The wealthy Crito
+would have turned his pockets inside out for Socrates, but Socrates had
+all he wished, and explained that as it was he had to dance at home in
+order to keep down the adipose. Aristides, who was objectionable because
+he so shaped his conduct that he was called "The Just" and got himself
+ostracized, was one of his dear friends. Antisthenes, the original
+Cynic, used to walk six miles and back every day to hear Socrates talk.
+The Cynic was a rich man, but so captivated was he with the preaching
+of Socrates that he adopted the life of simplicity and dressed in rags
+and boycotted both the barber and the bath. On one occasion Socrates
+looked sharply at a rent in the cloak of his friend and said, "Ah,
+Antisthenes, through that hole in your cloak I see your vanity!"
+
+Xenophon sat at the feet of Socrates for a score of years, and then
+wrote his recollections of him as a vindication of his character. Euclid
+of Megara was nearly eighty when he came to Socrates as a pupil, trying
+to get rid of his ill-temper and habit of ironical reply. Cebes and
+Simmias left their native country and became Greek citizens for his
+sake. Charmides, the pampered son of wealthy parents, learned pedagogics
+by being shown that, in households where there were many servants, the
+children got cheated out of their rightful education because others did
+all the work, and to deprive a child of the privilege of being useful
+was to rob him of so much life. AEschines, the ambitious son of a
+sausage-maker, was advised by Socrates to borrow money of himself on
+long time without interest, by reducing his wants. So pleased was the
+recipient with this advice, that he went to publishing Socratic
+dialogues as a business and had the felicity to fail with tidy
+liabilities.
+
+But the two men who loom largest in the life of Socrates are Alcibiades
+and Plato--characters very much unlike.
+
+Alcibiades was twenty-one years old when we find him first. He was
+considered the handsomest young man in Athens. He was aristocratic,
+proud, insolent, and needlessly rich. He had a passion for gambling,
+horse-racing, dog-fighting, and indulged in the churchly habit of doing
+that which he ought not and leaving undone that which he should have
+done. He was worse than that degenerate scion of a proud ancestry, who
+a-kneiping went with his lady friends in the Cincinnati fountain, after
+the opera, on a wager. He whipped a man who admitted he did not have a
+copy of the "Iliad" in his house; publicly destroyed the record of a
+charge against one of his friends; and when his wife applied for a
+divorce, he burst into the courtroom and vacated proceedings by carrying
+the lady off by force. At banquets he would raise a disturbance, and
+while he was being forcibly ejected from one door, his servants would
+sneak in at another and steal the silverware, which he would give away
+as charity. He also indulged in the Mark Antony trick of rushing into
+houses at night and pulling good folks out of bed by the heels, and then
+running away before they were barely awake.
+
+His introduction to Socrates came in an attempt to break up a Socratic
+prayer-meeting. Socrates succeeded in getting the roysterer to listen
+long enough to turn the laugh on him and show all concerned that the
+life of a rowdy was the life of a fool. Alcibiades had expected Socrates
+to lose his temper, but it was Alcibiades who gave way, and blurted out
+that he could not hope to beat his antagonist talking, but he would like
+to wrestle with him.
+
+Legend has it that Socrates gave the insolent young man a shock by
+instantly accepting his challenge. In the bout that followed, the
+philosopher, built like a gorilla, got a half-Nelson on his man, who was
+a little the worse for wine, and threw him so hard, jumping on his
+prostrate form with his knees, that the aristocratic hoodlum was laid up
+for a moon. Ever after Alcibiades had a thorough respect for Socrates.
+They became fast friends, and whenever the old man talked in the Agora,
+Alcibiades was on hand to keep order.
+
+When war came with Sparta and her allies in the Peloponnesus they
+enlisted, Socrates going as corporal and Alcibiades as captain. They
+occupied the same tent during the entire campaign. Socrates proved a
+fearless soldier, and walked the winter ice in bare feet, often pulling
+his belt one hole tighter in lieu of breakfast, to show the complaining
+soldiers that endurance was the thing that won battles. At the battle of
+Delium, when there was a rout, Xenophon says Socrates walked off the
+field leisurely, arm in arm with the general, explaining the nature of
+harmony.
+
+Through the influence of Socrates, the lawless Alcibiades was tamed and
+became almost a model citizen, although his head was hardly large enough
+for a philosopher.
+
+"Say what you will, you'll find it all in Plato," said Emerson. If
+Socrates had done nothing else but give bent to the mind of Plato, he
+would deserve the gratitude of the centuries. Plato is the mine to
+which all thinkers turn for treasure. When they first met, Plato was
+twenty and Socrates sixty, and for ten years, to the day of Socrates'
+death, they were together almost constantly. Plato died aged eighty-one,
+and for fifty years he had lived but to record the dialogues of
+Socrates. It was curiosity that first attracted this fine youth to the
+old man--Socrates was so uncouth that he was amusing. Plato was
+interested in politics, and like most Athenian youths, was intent on
+having a good time. However, he was no rowdy, like Alcibiades: he was
+suave, gracious, and elegant in all of his acts. He had been taught by
+the Sophists and the desire of his life was to seem, rather than to be.
+By very gentle stages, Plato began to perceive that to make an
+impression on society was not worth working for--the thing to do was to
+be yourself, and yourself at your best. And we can give no better answer
+to the problem of life than Plato gives in the words of Socrates: "It is
+better to be than to seem. To live honestly and deal justly is the meat
+of the whole matter."
+
+Plato was not a disciple--he was big enough not to ape the manners and
+eccentricities of his Master--he saw beneath the rough husk and beyond
+the grotesque outside the great controlling purpose in the life of
+Socrates. He would be himself--and himself at his best--and he would
+seek to satisfy the Voice within, rather than to try to please the
+populace. Plato still wore his purple cloak, and the elegance and grace
+of his manner were not thrown aside.
+
+Wouldn't it have been worth our while to travel miles to see these
+friends: the one old, bald, short, fat, squint-eyed, barefoot; and the
+other with all the poise of aristocratic youth--tall, courtly and
+handsome, wearing his robe with easy, regal grace! And so they have
+walked and talked adown the centuries, side by side, the most perfect
+example that can be named of that fine affection which often exists
+between teacher and scholar.
+
+Plato's "Republic," especially, gives us an insight into a very great
+and lofty character. From his tower of speculation, Plato scanned the
+future, and saw that the ideal of education was to have it continue
+through life, for none but the life of growth and development ever
+satisfies. And love itself turns to ashes of roses if not used to help
+the soul in her upward flight. It was Plato who first said, "There is no
+profit where no pleasure's ta'en." He further perceived that in the life
+of education, the sexes must move hand in hand; and he also saw that,
+while religions are many and seemingly diverse, goodness and kindness
+are forever one.
+
+His faith in the immortality of the soul was firm, but whether we are to
+live in another world or not, he said there is no higher wisdom than to
+live here and now--live our highest and best--cultivate the receptive
+mind and the hospitable heart, "partaking of all good things in
+moderation."
+
+It takes these two to make the whole. There is no virtue in poverty--no
+merit in rags--the uncouth qualities in Socrates were not a
+recommendation. Yet he was himself. But Plato made good, in his own
+character, all that Socrates lacked. Some one has said that Fitzgerald's
+Omar is two-thirds Fitzgerald and one-third Omar. In his books, Plato
+modestly puts his wisest maxims into the mouth of his master, and just
+how much Plato and how much Socrates there is in the "Dialogues," we
+will never know until we get beyond the River Styx.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Socrates was deeply attached to Athens, and he finally became the best
+known figure in the city. He criticized in his own frank, fearless way
+all the doings of the times--nothing escaped him. He was a
+self-appointed investigating committee in all affairs of state, society
+and religion. Hypocrisy, pretense, affectation and ignorance trembled at
+his approach. He was feared, despised and loved. But those who loved him
+were as one in a hundred. He became a public nuisance. The charge
+against him was just plain heresy--he had spoken disrespectfully of the
+gods and through his teaching he had defiled the youth of Athens. Ample
+warning had been given to him, and opportunity to run away was provided,
+but he stuck like a leech, asking the cost of banquets and making
+suggestions about all public affairs.
+
+He was arrested, bailed by Plato and Crito, and tried before a jury of
+five hundred citizens. Socrates insisted on managing his own case. A
+rhetorician prepared an address of explanation, and the culprit was
+given to understand that if he read this speech to his judges and said
+nothing else, it would be considered as an apology and he would be
+freed--the intent of the trial being more to teach the old man a lesson
+in minding his own business than to injure him.
+
+But Socrates replied to his well-meaning friend, "Think you I have not
+spent my whole life in preparing for this one thing?" And he handed back
+the smoothly polished manuscript with a smile. Montaigne says, "Should
+a suppliant voice have been heard out of the mouth of Socrates now;
+should that lofty virtue strike sail in the very height of its glory,
+and his rich and powerful nature be committed to flowing rhetoric as a
+defense? Never!"
+
+Socrates cross-questioned his accusers in the true Socratic style and
+showed that he had never spoken disrespectfully of the gods: he had only
+spoken disrespectfully of their absurd conception of the gods. And here
+is a thought which is well to consider even yet: The so-called "infidel"
+is often a man of great gentleness of spirit, and his disbelief is not
+in God, but in some little man's definition of God--a distinction the
+little man, being without humor, can never see.
+
+When Socrates had confounded his accusers, this time not giving them the
+satisfaction of the last word, he launched out on a general criticism of
+the city, and told where its rulers were gravely at fault. Being
+cautioned to bridle his tongue, he replied, "When your generals at
+Potidaea and Amphipolis and Delium assigned my place in the battle I
+remained there, did my work, and faced the peril, and think you that
+when Deity has assigned me my duty at this pass in life I should,
+through fear of death, evade it, and shirk my post?"
+
+This man appeared at other times, to some, as an idle loafer, but now he
+arose to a sublime height. He repeated with emphasis all he had ever
+said against their foolish superstitions, and arraigned the waste and
+futility of the idle rich. The power of the man was revealed as never
+before, and those who had intended to let him go with a fine, now
+thought it best to dispose of him. The safety of the state was
+endangered by such an agitator--the question of religion is really not
+what has sent the martyrs to the stake--it is the politician, not the
+priest, who fears the heretic.
+
+By a small majority, Socrates was found guilty and sentenced to death.
+Let Plato tell of that last hour--he has done it once for all:
+
+     When he had done speaking, Crito said, "And have you any commands
+     for us, Socrates--anything to say about your children, or any other
+     matter in which we can serve you?"
+
+     "Nothing particular," he said; "only, as I have always told you, I
+     would have you to look to your own conduct; that is a service which
+     you may always be doing to me and mine as well as to yourselves."
+     ...
+
+     "We will do our best," said Crito. "But in what way would you have
+     us bury you?"
+
+     "In any way that you like; only you must get hold of me, and take
+     care that I do not walk away from you." Then he turned to us, and
+     added with a smile: "I can not make Crito believe that I am the
+     same Socrates who has been talking and conducting the argument; he
+     fancies that I am the other Socrates whom he will soon see, a dead
+     body--and he asks, 'How shall he bury me?' And though I have spoken
+     many words in the endeavor to show that when I have drunk the
+     poison I shall leave you and go to the joys of the blessed--these
+     words of mine, with which I comforted you and myself, have had, as
+     I perceive, no effect upon Crito. And therefore I want you to be
+     surety for me now, as he was surety for me at the trial: but let
+     the promise be of another sort; for he was my surety to the judges
+     that I would remain, but you must be my surety to him that I shall
+     not remain, but go away and depart; and then he will suffer less at
+     my death, and not be grieved when he sees my body being burned. I
+     would not have him sorrow at my hard lot, or say at the
+     burial,'Thus we lay out Socrates,' or, 'Thus we follow him to the
+     grave or bury him'; for false words are not only evil in
+     themselves, but they infect the soul with evil. Be of good cheer
+     then, my dear Crito, and say that you are burying my body only, and
+     do with that as is usual, and as you think best."
+
+     When he had spoken these words, he arose and went into the
+     bath-chamber with Crito, who bid us wait; and we waited, talking
+     and thinking of the subject of discourse, and also of the greatness
+     of our sorrow; he was like a father of whom we were being bereaved,
+     and we were about to pass the rest of our lives as orphans. When he
+     had taken his bath, his children were brought to him--and the women
+     of his family also came, and he talked to them and gave them a few
+     directions in the presence of Crito; and he then dismissed them and
+     returned to us.
+
+     Now the hour of sunset was near. When he came out, he sat down with
+     us again after his bath, but not much was said. Soon the jailer,
+     who was the servant, entered and stood by him, saying: "To you,
+     Socrates, whom I know to be the noblest and gentlest and best of
+     all who ever came to this place, I will not impute the angry
+     feelings of other men, who rage and swear at me when, in obedience
+     to the authorities, I bid them drink the poison--indeed I am sure
+     that you will not be angry with me; for others, as you are aware,
+     and not I, are the guilty cause. And so fare you well, and try to
+     bear lightly what must needs be; you know my errand." Then bursting
+     into tears, he turned away, and went out.
+
+     Socrates looked at him and said, "I return your good wishes, and
+     will do as you bid." Then turning to us, he said: "How charming the
+     man is! Since I have been in prison, he has always been coming to
+     see me, and at times, he would talk to me, and was as good as could
+     be to me, and now see how generously he sorrows for me. But we must
+     do as he says, Crito; let the cup be brought."
+
+     "Not yet," said Crito; "the sun is still upon the hill-tops, and
+     many a one has taken the draft late, and after the announcement has
+     been made to him, he has eaten and drunk and indulged in sensual
+     delights; do not hasten then--there is still time."
+
+     Socrates said: "Yes, Crito, and they of whom you speak are right in
+     doing thus, but I do not think that I should gain anything by
+     drinking the poison a little later; I should be sparing and saving
+     a life which is already gone: I could only laugh at myself for
+     this. Please then to do as I say, and not to refuse me."
+
+     Crito, when he heard this, made a sign to the servant; and the
+     servant went in, and remained for some time, and then returned with
+     the jailer carrying the cup of poison. Socrates said, "You, my good
+     friend, who are experienced in these matters, shall give me
+     directions how I am to proceed." The man answered, "You have only
+     to walk about until your legs are heavy, and then to lie down, and
+     the poison will act." At the same time, he handed the cup to
+     Socrates, who, in the easiest and gentlest manner, without the
+     least fear or change of color or feature, looking at the man with
+     his eyes, Echecrates, as his manner was, took the cup and said:
+     "What do you say about making the libation out of this cup to any
+     god? May I, or not?" The man answered, "We only prepare, Socrates,
+     just so much as we deem enough." "I understand," he said. "Yet I
+     may and must pray to the gods to prosper my journey from this to
+     that other world--may this, then, which is my prayer, be granted to
+     me!" Then holding the cup to his lips, quite readily and
+     cheerfully, he drank off the poison. And hitherto most of us had
+     been able to control our sorrow; but now we saw him drinking, and
+     saw, too, that he had finished the draft, we could no longer
+     forbear, and in spite of myself, my own tears were flowing fast; so
+     that I covered my face and wept over myself, for certainly I was
+     not weeping over him, but at the thought of my own calamity in
+     having lost such a companion. Nor was I the first, for Crito, when
+     he found himself unable to restrain his tears, had got up and moved
+     away, and I followed; and at that moment, Apollodorus, who had been
+     weeping all the time, broke out into a loud cry, which made cowards
+     of us all. Socrates alone retained his calmness. "What is this
+     strange outcry?" he said, "I sent away the women mainly in order
+     that they might not offend in this way, for I have heard that a man
+     should die in peace. Be quiet, then, and have patience." When we
+     heard that, we were ashamed, and refrained our tears; and he
+     walked about until, as he said, his legs began to fail, and then he
+     lay on his back, according to directions, and the man who gave him
+     the poison, now and then looked at his feet and legs; and after a
+     while, he pressed his foot hard and asked him if he could feel; and
+     he said, "No"; and then his leg, and so upwards and upwards, and
+     showed us that he was cold and stiff. And he felt them himself, and
+     said, "When the poison reaches the heart, that will be the end." He
+     was beginning to grow cold, when he uncovered his face, for he had
+     covered himself up, and said (they were his last words), "Crito, I
+     owe a cock to Asclepius; will you remember to pay the debt?"
+
+     "The debt shall be paid," said Crito. "Is there anything else?"
+     There was no answer to this question; but in a minute or two, a
+     movement was heard, and the attendants uncovered him; his eyes were
+     set, and Crito closed his eyes and mouth.
+
+     Such was the end, Echecrates, of our friend, whom I may truly call
+     the wisest, the justest, and best of all the men whom I have ever
+     known.
+
+
+
+
+SENECA
+
+
+     If we wish to be just judges of all things, let us first persuade
+     ourselves of this: that there is not one of us without fault; no
+     man is found who can acquit himself; and he who calls himself
+     innocent does so with reference to a witness, and not to his
+     conscience.
+
+                                                --_Letters of Seneca_
+
+[Illustration: SENECA]
+
+
+True Americans and patriotic, who live in York State, often refer you to
+the life of Red Jacket as proof that "Seneca" is an Iroquois Indian
+word. The Indians, however, whom we call the Senecas never called
+themselves thus until they took to strong water and became civilized.
+Before that they were the Tsonnundawaonas. The Dutch traders, intent on
+pelts and pelf, called them the Sinnekaas, meaning the valiant or the
+beautiful. Then came that fateful day when the Reverend Peleg Spooner,
+the discoverer of the Erie Canal, journeyed to Niagara Falls, and having
+influence with the authorities at Washington, gave to towns along the
+way these names: Troy, Rome, Ithaca, Syracuse, Ilion, Manlius, Homer,
+Corfu, Palmyra, Utica, Delhi, Memphis and Marathon. He really exhausted
+Grote's "History of Greece" and Gibbon's "Rome," revealing a most
+depressing lack of humor. This classic flavor of the map of New York is
+as surprising to English tourists as was the discovery to Hendrik Hudson
+when, on sailing up the North River, he found on nearing Albany that the
+river bore the same name as himself.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In the eighteenth chapter of the Acts of the Apostles we read of Paul
+being brought before Gallio, Proconsul of Achaia. And the accusers,
+clutching the bald and bow-legged bachelor by the collar, bawl out to
+the Judge, "This fellow persuadeth men to worship God contrary to law!"
+
+And the little man is about to make reply, when Gallio says, with a
+touch of impatience: "If indeed it were a matter of wrong or of wicked
+villainy, O ye Jews, reason would that I should bear with you: but if
+they are questions about words and names and your own law, look to it
+yourselves; I am not minded to be a judge of these matters!" And the
+account concludes, "And he drove them from the judgment-seat."
+
+That is to say, he gave Saint Paul a "nolle pros." Had Gallio wished to
+be severe, he might have put the quietus on Christianity for all time,
+for Saint Paul had all there was of it stowed in his valiant head and
+heart.
+
+Gallio was the elder brother of Seneca; his right name was Annaeus
+Seneca, but he changed it to Junius Gallio, in honor of a patron who had
+especially befriended him in youth.
+
+Gallio seems to have been a man of good, sturdy commonsense--he could
+distinguish between right living and a mumble of words, man-made rules,
+laws such as heresy, blasphemy, Sabbath-breaking and marrying one's
+deceased wife's sister. The Moqui Indians believe that if any one is
+allowed to have a photograph taken of himself he will dry up in a month
+and blow away. Moreover, lists of names are not wanting with memoranda
+of times and places. In America there are yet people who hotly argue as
+to what mode of baptism is correct; who talk earnestly about the "saved"
+and the "lost"; and who will tell you of the "heathen" and those who are
+"without the pale." They seem to think that the promise, "Seek and ye
+shall find, knock and it shall be opened unto you," applies only to the
+Caucasian race.
+
+In the earlier translations of Seneca there were printed various letters
+that were supposed to have passed between Saint Paul and Seneca. Later
+editors have dropped them out for lack of authenticity. But the fact
+that Saint Paul met Seneca's brother face to face, as well as the fact
+that the brother was willing to discuss right living, but had no time to
+waste on the Gemara and theological quibbles, is undisputed.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It was the proud boast of Augustus that he found Rome a place of brick
+and left it a city of marble. Commercial prosperity buys the leisure
+upon which letters flourish. We flout the businessman, but without him
+there would be no poets. Poets write for the people who have time to
+read. And out of the surplus that is left after securing food, we buy
+books. Augustus built his marble city, and he also made Vergil, Horace,
+Ovid and Livy possible.
+
+Augustus reigned forty-four years, and it was in the twenty-seventh year
+of his reign that there was born in Bethlehem of Judaea a Babe who was to
+revolutionize the calendar. The Dean of Ely subtly puts forth the
+suggestive thought that if it had not been for Augustus we might never
+have heard of Jesus. It was Augustus who made Jerusalem a Roman
+Province; and it was the economic and political policy of Augustus that
+evolved the Scribes and Pharisees; and ill-gotten gains made the
+hypocrites and publicans possible; then comes Pontius Pilate with his
+receding chin.
+
+Jesus was seventeen years old when Augustus died--Augustus never heard
+of him, and the Roman's unprophetic mind sent no searchlight into the
+future, neither did his eyes behold the Star in the East.
+
+We are all making and shaping history, and how much, none of us knows,
+any more than did Augustus.
+
+Julius Caesar had no son to take his place, so he named his nephew,
+Augustus, his heir. Augustus was succeeded by Tiberius, his adopted
+child. Caligula, successor of Tiberius, was the son of the great Roman
+General, Germanicus. Caligula revealed his good sense by drinking life
+to its lees in a reign of four years, dying without heirs--Nature
+refusing to transmit either infamy or genius. Claudius, an uncle of
+Caligula, accepted the vacant place, as it seemed to him there was no
+one else could fill it so well. Claudius had the felicity to be married
+four times, and left several sons, but Fate had it that he should be
+followed by Nero, his stepson, who called himself "Caesar," yet in whose
+veins there leaped not a single Caesarean corpuscle.
+
+The guardian and tutor of Nero was Lucius Seneca, the greatest, best and
+wisest man of his time, a fact I here state in order to show the vanity
+of pedagogics. Harking back once more to Augustus, let it be known that
+but for him Seneca would probably have never left his mark upon this
+bank and shoal of time. Seneca was a Spaniard, born in Cordova, a Roman
+Province, that was made so by Augustus, under whose kindly and placating
+influence all citizens of Hispania became Roman citizens--just as, when
+California was admitted to the Union, every man in the State was
+declared a naturalized citizen of the United States, the act being
+performed for political purposes, based on the precedents of Augustus,
+and never done before nor since in America.
+
+Seneca was four years old when his father's family moved from Cordova
+to Rome; this was three years before the birth of Christ. Years pass,
+but the human heart is forever the same. The elder Seneca, Marcus
+Seneca, had ambitions--he was a great man in Cordova: he could memorize
+a list of two thousand words. These words had no relationship one to
+another, and Marcus Seneca could not put words together so as to make
+good sense, but his name was "Loisette": he had a scheme of mnemonics
+that he imparted for a consideration. He was also a teacher of
+elocution, and had compiled a yearbook of the sayings of Horace, which
+secured him a knighthood. Augustus paid his colonists pretty
+compliments, very much as England gives out brevets to Strathcona and
+other worthy Canadians, who raise troops of horse to fight England's
+battles in South Africa when duty calls.
+
+Marcus Seneca made haste to move to Rome when Augustus let down the
+bars. Rome was the center of the art-world, the home of letters, and all
+that made for beauty and excellence. There were three boys and a girl in
+the Seneca family.
+
+The elder boy, Annaeus, was to become Gallio, the Roman governor, and
+have his name mentioned in the most widely circulated book the world has
+ever known; the second boy was Lucius, the subject of this sketch; the
+younger boy, Mela, was to become the father of Lucan, the poet.
+
+The sister of Seneca became the wife of the Roman Governor of Egypt. It
+was at a time when the scheming rapacity of women was so much in
+evidence that the Senate debated whether it should not forbid its
+representatives abroad to be accompanied by their wives. France has seen
+such times--England and America have glanced that way. Women, like men,
+often do not know that the big prizes gravitate where they belong;
+instead, they set traps for them, lie in wait and consider prevarication
+and duplicity better than truth. When women use their beauty, their wit
+and their pink persons in politics, trouble lies low around the corner.
+But this sister of Seneca was never seen in public unless it was at her
+husband's side; she asked no favors, and presents sent to her personally
+by provincials were politely returned. The province praised her, and
+perhaps what was better, didn't know her, and begged the Emperor to send
+them more of such excellent and virtuous women--from which we infer that
+virtue consists in minding one's own business.
+
+In making up a list of great mothers, do not leave out Helvia, mother of
+three sons and a daughter who made their mark upon the times. It is no
+small thing to be a great mother!
+
+Women of intellect were not much appreciated then, but Seneca dedicated
+his "Consolations," his best book, to his mother. The very mintage of
+his mind was for her, and again and again he tells of her insight, her
+gentle wit, and her appreciation of all that was beautiful and best in
+the world of thought. In a letter addressed to her when he was past
+forty, he says, "You never stained your face with walnut-juice nor
+rouge; you never wore gowns cut conspicuously low; your ornaments were a
+loveliness of mind and person that time could not tarnish."
+
+But the father had the knighthood, and he called his family to witness
+it at odd times and sundry.
+
+In Rome, Marcus Seneca made head as he never did in Cordova. There he
+was only Marcus Micawber: but here his memory feats won him the
+distinction that genius deserves. There is a grave question whether a
+verbal memory does not go with a very mediocre intellect, but Marcus
+said this argument was put out by a man with no memory worth mentioning.
+
+Rome was at her ripest flower--the petals were soon to loosen and
+flutter to the ground, but nobody thought so--they never do. Everywhere
+the Roman legions were victorious, and commerce sailed the seas in
+prosperous ships. Power manifests itself in conspicuous waste, and the
+habit grows until conspicuous waste imagines itself power. Conditions in
+Rome had evolved our old friend, the Sophist, the man who lived but to
+turn an epigram, to soulfully contemplate a lily, to sigh mysteriously,
+and cultivate the far-away look. These men were elocutionists who
+gesticulated in curves, and let the thought follow the attitude. They
+were not content to be themselves, but chased the airy, fairy fabric of
+a fancy and called it life.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The pretense and folly of Roman society made the Sophists possible--like
+all sects they ministered to a certain cast of mind. Over against the
+Sophists there were the Stoics, the purest, noblest and sanest of all
+ancient cults, corresponding very closely to our Quakers, before Worth
+and Wanamaker threw them a hawse and took them in tow. It is a tide of
+feeling produces a sect, not a belief: primitive Christianity was a
+revulsion from Phariseeism, and a William Penn and a wan Ann Lee form
+the antithesis of an o'ervaulting, fantastic and soulless ritual.
+
+The father of Seneca hung upon the favor of the Sophists: he taught them
+mnemonics, rhetoric and elocution, and the fact that he was a courtly
+Spaniard was in his favor--we dote on a foreign accent and relish the
+thing that comes from afar.
+
+Marcus Seneca was getting rich. He never perceived the absurdity of a
+life of make-believe; but his son, Lucius Seneca, heir to his mother's
+discerning mind, when nineteen years old forswore the Sophists, and
+sided with the unpopular Stoics, much to the chagrin of the father.
+
+Seneca--let us call him so after this--wore the simple white robe of the
+Stoics, without ornament or jewelry. He drank no wine, and ate no meat.
+Vegetarianism comes in waves, and it is interesting to see that in an
+essay on the subject, Seneca plagiarizes every argument put forth by
+Colonel Ernest Crosby, even to mentioning a butcher as an "executioner,"
+his goods as "dead corpses," and the customers as "cannibals."
+
+This kind of talk did not help the family peace, and the father spoke of
+disowning the son, if he did not cease affronting the Best Society.
+
+Soon after, the Emperor Tiberius issued an edict banishing all "strange
+sects who fasted on feast-days, and otherwise displeased the gods." This
+was a suggestion for the benefit of the Crosbyites. It is with a feeling
+of downright disappointment that we find Seneca shortly appearing in an
+embroidered robe, and making a speech wherein the moderate use of wine
+is recommended, also the flesh of animals for those who think they need
+it.
+
+This, doubtless, is the same speech we, too, would have made had we been
+there; but we want our hero to be strong, and defy even an Emperor, if
+he comes between the man and his right to eat what he wishes and wear
+what he listeth, and we blame him for not doing the things we never do.
+But Seneca was getting on in the world--he had become a lawyer, and his
+Sophist training was proving its worth. Henry Ward Beecher, in reply to
+a young man who asked him if he advised the study of elocution, said,
+"Elocution is all right, but you will have to forget it all before you
+become an orator." Seneca was shedding his elocution, and losing himself
+in his work. A successful lawsuit had brought him before the public as a
+strong advocate. He was able to think on his feet. His voice was low,
+musical and effective, and the word, "dulcis," was applied to him as it
+was to his brother, Gallio. Possibly there was something in ol' Marcus
+Micawber's pedagogic schemes, after all!
+
+In moderating his Stoic philosophy, Seneca gives us the key to his
+character: the man wanted to be gentle and kind; he wished to affront
+neither his father nor society; so he compromised--he would please and
+placate. Ease and luxury appealed to him, and yet his cool intellect
+stood off, and reviewing the proceeding pronounced it base. He succumbed
+to the strongest attraction, and attempted the feat of riding two horses
+at once.
+
+From his twentieth year, Seneca dallied with the epigram, found solace
+in a sentence, and got a sweet, subtle joy by taking a thought captive.
+Lucullus tells us of the fine intoxication of oratory, but neither opium
+nor oratory imparts a finer thrill than successfully to drive a flock of
+clauses, and round up an idea, roping it in careless grace, with what my
+lord Hamlet calls words, words, words.
+
+The early Christian Fathers spoke of him as "our Seneca." His writings
+abound in the purest philosophy--often seemingly paraphrasing Saint
+Paul--and every argument for directness of speech, simplicity, manliness
+and moderation is put forth. His writings became the rage in Rome: at
+feasts he read his essays on the Ideal Life, just as the disciples of
+Tolstoy often travel by the gorge road, and give banquets in honor of
+the man who no longer attends one; or princely paid preachers glorify
+the Man who said to His apostles, "Take neither scrip nor purse."
+
+Seneca was a combination of Delsarte and Emerson. He was as popular as
+Henry Irving, and as wise as Thomas Brackett Reed. His writings were in
+demand; when he spoke in public, crowds hung upon his words, and the
+families of the great and powerful sent him their sons, hoping he would
+impart the secret of success. The world takes a man at the estimate he
+puts upon himself. Seneca knew enough to hold himself high. Honors came
+his way, and the wealth he acquired is tokened in those five hundred
+tables, inlaid with ivory, to which at times he invited his friends to
+feast. As a lawyer, he took his pick of cases, and rarely appeared,
+except on appeal, before the Emperor. The poise of his manner, the
+surety of his argument, the gentle grace of his diction, caused him to
+be likened to Julius Caesar.
+
+And this led straight to exile, and finally--death. To mediocrity,
+genius is unforgivable.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+There are various statements to the effect that Claudius was a mental
+defective, a sort of town fool, patronized by the nobles for their sport
+and jest. We are also told that he was made Emperor by the Pretorian
+Guards, in a spirit of rollicking bravado. Men too much abused must have
+some merit, or why should the pack bay so loudly? Possibly it is true
+that, in the youth of Claudius, his mother used to declare, when she
+wanted a strong comparison, "He is as big a fool as my son, Claudius."
+But then the mother of Wellington used exactly the same expression; and
+Byron's mother had a way of referring to the son who was to rescue her
+from oblivion, and send her name down the corridors of time, as "that
+lame brat."
+
+Claudius was a brother of the great Germanicus, and was therefore an
+uncle of Caligula. Caligula was the worst ruler that Rome ever had; and
+he was a brother of Agrippina, mother of Nero. This precious pair had a
+most noble and generous father, and their gentle mother was a fit mate
+for the great Germanicus--these things are here inserted for the
+edification of folks who take stock in that pleasant fallacy, the Law of
+Heredity, and who gleefully chase the genealogical anise-seed trail.
+
+Caligula happily passed out without an heir, and Claudius, next of kin,
+put himself in the way of the Pretorian Guard, and was declared Emperor.
+
+He was then fifty years old, a grass-widower--twice over--and on the
+lookout for a wife. He was neither wise nor great, nor was he very bad;
+he was kind--after dinner--and generous when rightly approached. Canon
+Farrar likened Claudius to King James the First, who gave us our English
+Bible. His comparison is worth quoting, not alone for the truth it
+contains, but because it is an involuntary paraphrase of the faultless
+literary style of the Roman rhetors. Says Canon Farrar: "Both were
+learned, and both were eminently unwise. Both were authors, and both
+were pedants. Both delegated their highest powers to worthless
+favorites, and both enriched these favorites with such foolish
+liberality that they remained poor themselves. Both of them, though of
+naturally good dispositions, were misled by selfishness into acts of
+cruelty; and both of them, though laborious in the discharge of duty,
+succeeded only in rendering royalty ridiculous. King James kept Sir
+Walter Raleigh, the brightest intellect of his time, in prison; and
+Claudius sent Seneca, the greatest man in his kingdom, into exile."
+
+New-made kings sweep clean. The impulses of Claudius were right and
+just, a truthful statement I here make in pleasant compliment to a
+brother author. The man was absent-minded, had much faith in others, and
+moved in the line of least resistance. Like most students and authors,
+he was decidedly littery. He secured a divorce from one wife because she
+cleaned up his room in his absence so that he could never find
+anything; and the other wife got a divorce from him because he refused
+to go out evenings and scintillate in society--but this was before he
+was made Emperor.
+
+God knows, people had their troubles then as now. To take this man who
+loved his slippers and easy-chair, and who was happy with a roll of
+papyrus, and plunge him into a seething pot of politics, not to mention
+matrimony, was refined cruelty.
+
+The matchmakers were busy, and soon Claudius was married to Messalina,
+the handsomest summer-girl in Rome.
+
+For a short time he bore up bravely, and was filled with the wish to
+benefit and bless. One of his first acts was to recall Julia and
+Agrippina from exile, they having been sent away in a fit of jealous
+anger by their brother, the infamous Caligula.
+
+Julia was beautiful and intellectual, and she had a high regard for
+Seneca.
+
+Agrippina was beautiful and infamous, and pretended that she loved
+Claudius.
+
+Both men were undone. Seneca's friendship for Julia, as far as we know,
+was of a kind that did honor to both, but they made a too conspicuous
+pair of intellects. The fear and jealousy of Claudius was aroused by his
+young and beautiful wife, who showed him that Seneca, the courtly, was
+plotting for the throne, and in this ambition Julia was a party. A
+charge of undue intimacy with Julia, the beloved niece and ward of the
+Emperor, was brought against Seneca, and he was exiled to Corsica.
+Imagine Edmund Burke sent to Saint Helena, or John Hay to the Dry
+Tortugas, and you get the idea.
+
+The sensitive nature of Seneca did not bear up under exile as we would
+have wished. Unlike Victor Hugo at Guernsey, he was alone, and
+surrounded by savages. Yet even Victor Hugo lifted up his voice in
+bitter complaint. Seneca failed to anticipate that, in spite of the
+barrenness of Corsica, it would some day produce a man who would jostle
+his Roman Caesar for first place on history's page.
+
+At Corsica, Seneca produced some of his loftiest and best literature.
+Exile and imprisonment are such favorable conditions for letters, having
+done so much for authorship, that the wonder is the expedient has fallen
+into practical disuse. Banishment gave Seneca an opportunity to put into
+execution some of the ideas he had so long expressed concerning the
+simple life, and certain it is that the experience was not without its
+benefits, and at times the grim humor of it all came to him.
+
+Read the history of Greek ostracism, and one can almost imagine that it
+was devised by the man's friends--a sort of heroic treatment prescribed
+by a great spiritual physician. Personality repels as well as attracts:
+the people grow tired of hearing Aristides called the Just--he is
+exiled. For a few days there is a glad relief; then his friends begin to
+chant his praises--he is missed. People tell of all the noble, generous
+things he would do if he were only here.
+
+If he were only here!
+
+Petitions are circulated for his return.
+
+The law's delay ensues, and this but increases desire. Hate for the man
+has turned to pity, and pity turns to love, as starch turns to gluten.
+
+The man comes back, and is greeted with boughs and bays, with love and
+laurel. His homecoming is that of a conquering hero. If the Supreme
+Court were to issue an injunction requiring all husbands to separate
+themselves by at least a hundred miles from their wives, for several
+months in every year, it would cut down divorces ninety-five per cent,
+add greatly to domestic peace, render race-suicide impossible, and
+generally liberate millions of love vibrations that would otherwise lie
+dormant.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+As an example of female depravity, Valeria Messalina was sister in crime
+to Jezebel, Bernice, Drusilla, Salome and Herodias.
+
+Damned by a dower of beauty, with men at her feet whenever she so
+ordered, her ambition knew no limit. This type of dictatorial womanhood
+starts out by making conquests of individual men, but the conquests of
+pretty women are rarely genuine. Women hold no monopoly on duplicity,
+and there is a deep vein of hypocrisy in men that prompts their playing
+a part, and letting the woman use them. When the time is ripe, they toss
+her away as they do any other plaything, as Omar suggests the potter
+tosses the luckless pots to hell.
+
+When Julia and Agrippina were recalled, the act was done without
+consulting Messalina; and we can imagine her rage when these two women,
+as beautiful as herself, came back without her permission. Messalina had
+never found favor in the eyes of Seneca--he treated her with patronizing
+patience, as though she were a spoilt child.
+
+Now that Julia was back, Messalina hatched the plot that struck them
+both. Messalina insisted that the wealth of Seneca should be
+confiscated. Claudius at this rebelled.
+
+History is replete with instances of great men ruled by their barbers
+and coachmen. Claudius left the affairs of state to Narcissus, his
+private secretary; Polybius, his literary helper; and Pallas, his
+accountant. These men were all of lowly birth, and had all risen in the
+ranks from menial positions, and one of them at least had been sold as a
+slave, and afterward purchased his freedom. Then there was Felix, the
+ex-slave, another protege of Claudius, who trembled when Paul of Tarsus
+told him a little wholesome truth. These men were all immensely rich,
+and once, when Claudius complained of poverty, a bystander said, "You
+should go into partnership with a couple of your freedmen, and then your
+finances would be all right." The fact that Narcissus, Pallas and
+Polybius constituted the real government is nothing against them, any
+more than it is to the discredit of certain Irish refugees that they
+manage the municipal machinery of New York City--it merely proves the
+impotence of the men who have allowed the power to slip from their
+grasp, and ride as passengers when they should be at the throttle.
+
+Messalina managed her husband by alternate cajolings and threats. He was
+proud of her saucy beauty, and it was pleasing to an old man's vanity to
+think that other people thought she loved him. She bore him two sons--by
+name, Brittanicus and Germanicus. A local wit of the day said, "It was
+kind of Messalina to present her husband with these boys, otherwise he
+would never have had any claim on them."
+
+But the lines were tightening around Messalina, and she herself was
+drawing the cords. She had put favorites in high places, banished
+enemies, and ordered the execution of certain people she did not like.
+Narcissus and Pallas gave her her own way, because they knew Claudius
+must find her out for himself. They let her believe that she was the
+real power behind the throne. Her ambitions grew--she herself would be
+ruler--she gave it out that Claudius was insane. Finally she decided
+that the time was right for a "coup de grace." Claudius was absent from
+Rome, and Messalina wedded at high noon with young Silius, her lover.
+She was led to believe that the army would back her up, and proclaim her
+son, Brittanicus, Emperor, in which case, she herself and Silius would
+be the actual rulers. The wedding festivities were at their height, when
+the cry went up that Claudius had returned, and was approaching to
+demand vengeance. Narcissus, the wily, took up the shout, and
+panic-stricken, Messalina fled for safety in one way and Silius in
+another.
+
+Narcissus followed the woman, adding to her drunken fright by telling
+her that Claudius was close behind, and suggested that she kill herself
+before the wronged man should appear. A dagger was handed her, and she
+stabbed herself ineffectually in hysteric haste. The kind secretary
+then, with one plunge of his sword, completed the work so well begun.
+
+A truthful account of Messalina's death was told to Claudius while he
+was at dinner. He finished the meal without saying a word, gave a
+present to the messenger, and went about his business, asking no
+questions, and never again mentioned the matter.
+
+The fact is worthy of note that the name of Messalina is never once
+mentioned by Seneca. He pitied her vileness and villainy so much he
+could not hate her. He saw, with prophetic vision, what her end would
+be; and when her passing occurred, he was too great and lofty in spirit
+to manifest satisfaction.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Scarcely had the funeral of Messalina occurred, when there was a pretty
+scramble among the eligible to see who should solace the stricken
+widower. Among other matrimonial candidates was Agrippina, a beautiful
+widow, twenty-nine in June, rich in her own right, and with only a small
+encumbrance in the way of a ten-year-old boy, Nero by name.
+
+Agrippina was a niece of Claudius, and such marriages were considered
+unnatural; but Agrippina had subtly shown that, the deceased Emperor
+being her brother, she already had a sort of claim on the throne, and
+her marriage with Claudius would strengthen the State. Then she
+marshaled her charms past Claudius, in a phalanx and back, and so they
+were married. There was much pomp and ceremony at the wedding, and the
+high priest pronounced the magic words--I trust I use the right
+expression.
+
+Very soon after her marriage, Agrippina recalled Seneca from exile. It
+was the infamous Messalina who had disgraced him and sent him away, and
+for Agrippina, the sister of Julia, to bring him back, was regarded as a
+certificate of innocence, and a great diplomatic move for Agrippina.
+
+When Seneca returned, the whole city went out to meet him. It is not at
+all likely that Seneca had a suspicion of the true character of
+Agrippina, any more than Claudius--which sort of tends to show the
+futility of philosophy.
+
+How could Seneca read her true character when it had not really been
+formed? No one knows what he will do until he gets a good chance. It is
+unkind condition that keeps most of us where we belong.
+
+And even while the honeymoon--or should we say the harvest-moon?--was at
+full, Seneca was made the legal guardian and tutor of Nero, the son of
+the Empress, and became a member of the royal household. This was done
+in gratitude, and to make amends, if possible, for the wrong of
+banishment inflicted upon the man by scandalously linking his name with
+that of the sister of the woman who was now First Lady of the Land.
+
+Seneca was then forty-nine years of age. He had fifteen years of life
+yet before him, and was to gain much valuable experience, and get an
+insight into a side of existence he had not yet known.
+
+Agrippina was born in Cologne, which was called, in her honor, Colonia
+Agrippina, and now has been shortened to its present form. Whenever you
+buy cologne, remember where the word came from.
+
+Agrippina, from her very girlhood, had a thirst for adventure, and her
+aim was high. When fourteen, she married Domitius, a Roman noble, thirty
+years her senior. He was as worthless a rogue as ever wore out his
+physical capacity for sin in middle life, and filled his dying days with
+crimes that were only mental. He knew himself so well that when Nero was
+born he declared that the issue of such a marriage could only breed a
+being who would ruin the State--a monster with his father's vices and
+his mother's insatiable ambition.
+
+Agrippina was woman enough to hate this man with an utter detestation;
+but he was rich, and so she endured him for ten years, and then assisted
+Nature in making him food for worms.
+
+The intensity of Agrippina's nature might have been used for happy ends
+if the stream of her life had not been so early dammed and polluted. She
+loved her child with a clutching, feverish affection, and declared that
+he would some day rule Rome. This was not really such a far-away dream,
+when we remember that her brother was then Emperor and childless. Her
+thought was more for her child than for herself, and her expectation was
+that he would succeed Caligula. The persistency with which she told this
+ambition for her boy is both beautiful and pathetic. Every mother sees
+her own life projected in her child, and within certain bounds this is
+right and well.
+
+Glimpses of kindness and right intent are shown when Agrippina recalled
+Seneca, and when she became the mother of the motherless children of
+Claudius. She publicly adopted these children, and for a time gave them
+every attention and advantage that was bestowed upon her own son. Gibbon
+says for one woman to mother another woman's children is a diplomatic
+card often played, but Gibbon sometimes quibbles.
+
+Gradually the fierce desire of Agrippina's heart began to manifest
+itself. She plotted and arranged that Nero should marry Octavia, the
+daughter of Claudius. Octavia was seven years older than Nero, but the
+sooner the marriage could be brought about, the better--it would give
+her a double hold on the throne. To this end suitors for the hand of
+Octavia were disgraced by false charges, and sent off into exile, and
+the same fate came to at least three young women who stood in the way.
+
+But the one real obstacle was Claudius himself--he was sixty, and might
+be so absurd as to live to be eighty. Locusta, a famous professional
+chemist, was employed, and the deed was done by Agrippina serving the
+deadly dish herself. The servants carried Claudius off to bed, thinking
+he was merely drunk, but he was to wake no more.
+
+Burrus, the blunt and honest old soldier, Captain of the Pretorian
+Guard, sided with Agrippina; Brittanicus, the son of Claudius, was kept
+out of the way, and Nero was proclaimed Emperor.
+
+Here Seneca seems to have shown his good influence, and sent home a
+desire in the heart of Agrippina to serve her people with moderation and
+justice. She had attained her ends: her son, a youth of fifteen, was
+Emperor, and his guardian, the great and gentle Seneca, the man of her
+own choosing, was the actual ruler. She was the sister of one Emperor,
+wife of another, and now mother of a third--surely this was glory enough
+to satisfy one woman's ambition!
+
+Then there came to Rome the famed Quinquennium Neronis, when, for five
+years, peace and plenty smiled. It is a trite saying that men who can
+not manage their own finances can look after those of a nation, but
+Seneca was a businessman who proved his ability to manage his own
+private affairs and also succeeded in managing the exchequer of a
+kingdom. During his reign, gladiatorial contests were relieved of their
+savage brutality, work was given to many, education became popular, and
+people said, "The Age of Augustus has returned."
+
+But the greatest men are not the greatest teachers. Seneca's policy with
+his pupil, Nero, was one of concession.
+
+A close study of the youth of Nero reveals the same traits that outcrop
+in one-half the students at Harvard--traits ill-becoming to grown-up
+men, but not at all alarming in youth. Nero was self-willed and
+occasionally had tantrums--but a tantrum is only a little whirl-wind of
+misdirected energy. A tantrum is life plus--it is better far than
+stagnation, and usually works up into useful life, and sometimes into
+great art. We have some verses written by Nero in his seventeenth year
+that show a good Class B sophomoric touch. He danced, played in the
+theatricals, raced horses, fought dogs, twanged the harp, and exploited
+various other musical instruments. He wasn't nearly so bad as
+Alcibiades, but his mother lavished on him her maudlin love, and allowed
+the fallacy to grow in his mind concerning the divinity that doth hedge
+a king. In fact, when he asked his mother about his real father, she hid
+the truth that his father was a rogue--perhaps to shield herself, for it
+is only a very great person who can tell the truth--and led him to
+believe his paternal parent was a god, and his birth miraculous. Now,
+let such an idea get into the head of the average freshman and what will
+be the result? A woman can tell a full-grown man that he is the greatest
+thing that ever happened, and it does no special harm, for the man knows
+better than to go out on the street and proclaim it; but you tell a boy
+of eighteen such pleasing fallacies, and then have fawning courtiers
+back them up, and at the same time give the youth free access to the
+strong box, and it surely would be a miracle if he is not doubly damned,
+and quickly, too. Agrippina would not allow the blunt old Burrus to
+discipline her boy, and Seneca's plan was one of concession--he loved
+peace. He hated to thwart the boy, because he knew that it would arouse
+the ire of the mother, whose love had run away with her commonsense.
+Love is beautiful--soft, yielding, gentle love--but the common law of
+England upholds wife-beating as being justifiable and desirable on
+certain occasions.
+
+The real trouble was, the dam was out for Agrippina and Nero--there was
+no restraint for either. There was no one to teach them that the liberty
+of one man ends where the right of another begins. No more frightful
+condition for any man or woman can ever occur than this: to take away
+all responsibility.
+
+When Socrates put the chesty Alcibiades three points down, and jumped on
+his stomach with his knees, the youth had a month in bed, and after he
+got around again he possessed a most wholesome regard for his teacher.
+If Burrus and Seneca had applied Brockway methods to Agrippina and her
+saucy son, as they easily might, it would have made Rome howl with
+delight, and saved the State as well as the individuals.
+
+Julius Caesar, like Lincoln, let everybody do as they wished, up to a
+certain point. But all realized that somewhere behind that dulcet voice
+and the gentle manner was a heart of flint and nerves of steel. No woman
+ever made Julius Caesar dance to syncopated time, nor did a youth of
+eighteen ever successfully order him to take part in amateur theatricals
+on penalty. Julius Caesar and Seneca were both scholars, both were
+gentlemen and gentle men: their mental attitude was much the same, but
+one had a will of adamant, and the other moved in the line of least
+resistance.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Gradually, Nero evolved a petulance and impatience toward his mother and
+his tutor, all of which was quite a natural consequence of his
+education. Every endeavor to restrain him was met with imprecations and
+curses. About then would have been a good time to apply heroic
+treatment, instead of halting fear and worshipful acquiescence.
+
+The raw stock for making a Nero is in every school, and given the
+conditions, a tyrant-culture would be easy to evolve. The endeavor to
+make Nero wed Octavia caused a revulsion to occur in his heart toward
+her and her brother Brittanicus. He feared that these two might combine
+and wrest from him the throne.
+
+Locusta, the specialist, was again sent for and Brittanicus was gathered
+to his fathers.
+
+Soon after, Nero fell into a deep infatuation for Poppae Sabina, wife of
+Otho, the most beautiful woman in Rome. Sabina refused to accept his
+advances so long as he was tied to his mother's apron-strings--I use the
+exact phrase of Tacitus, so I trust no exceptions will be taken to the
+expression. Nero came to believe that the tagging, nagging, mushy love
+of his mother was standing in the way of his advancement. He had come to
+know that Agrippina had caused the death of Claudius, and when she
+accused him of poisoning Brittanicus, he said, "I learned the trick from
+my dear mother!" and honors were even.
+
+He knew the crafty quality of his mother's mind and grew to fear her.
+And fear and hate are one. To secure Sabina he must sacrifice Agrippina.
+
+He would be free.
+
+To poison her would not do--she was an expert in preventives.
+
+So Nero, regardless of expense, bargained with Anicetus, admiral of the
+fleet, to construct a ship so that, when certain bolts were withdrawn,
+the craft would sink and tell no tale. This was a bit of daring deviltry
+never before devised, and by turn, Nero chuckled in glee and had cold
+sweats of fear as he congratulated himself on his astuteness.
+
+The boat was built and Agrippina was enticed on board. The night of the
+excursion was calm, but the conspirators, fearing the chance might never
+come again, let go the canopy, loaded with lead, which was over the
+queen. It fell with a crash; and at the same time the bolts were
+withdrawn and the waters rushed in. Several of the servants in
+attendance were killed by the fall of the awning, but Agrippina and
+Aceronia, a lady of quality, escaped from the debris only slightly hurt.
+Aceronia, believing the ship was about to sink, called for help, saying,
+"I am Agrippina." She erred slightly in her diplomacy, for she was at
+once struck on the head with an oar and killed. This gave Agrippina a
+clew to the situation and she was silent. By a strange perversity, the
+royal scuttling patent would not work and the boat stubbornly refused to
+sink.
+
+Agrippina got safely ashore and sent word to her son that there had been
+a terrible accident, but she was safe--the intent of her letter being to
+let him know that she understood the matter perfectly, and while she
+could not admire the job, it was so bungling, yet she would forgive him
+if he would not try it again.
+
+In wild consternation, Nero sent for Burrus and Seneca. This was their
+first knowledge of the affair. They refused to act in either way, but
+Burrus intimated that Anicetus was the guilty party and should be held
+responsible.
+
+"For not completing the task?" said Nero.
+
+"Yes," said the blunt old soldier, and retired.
+
+Anicetus was notified that the blame of the whole conspiracy was on him.
+A big crime, well carried out, is its own excuse for being; but failure,
+like unto genius, is unforgivable.
+
+Anicetus was in disgrace, but only temporarily, for he towed the
+obstinate, telltale galley into deep water and sank her at dead of
+night. Then with a few faithful followers he surrounded the villa where
+Agrippina was resting, scattered her guard and confronted her with drawn
+sword.
+
+Years before, a soothsayer had told her that her son would be Emperor
+and that he would kill her. Her answer was, "Let them slay me, if he but
+reign."
+
+Now she saw that death was nigh. She did not try to escape, nor did she
+plead for mercy, but cried, "Plunge your sword through my womb, for it
+bore Nero."
+
+And Anicetus, with one blow, struck her dead.
+
+Nero returned to Naples to mourn his loss. From there he sent forth a
+lengthy message to the Senate, recounting the accidental shipwreck, and
+telling how Agrippina had plotted against his life, recounting her
+crimes in deprecatory, sophistical phrase. The document wound up by
+telling how she had tried to secure the throne for a paramour, and the
+truth coming to some o'erzealous friends of the State, they had arisen
+and taken her life. In Rome there was a strong feeling that Nero should
+not be allowed to return, but this message of explanation and promise,
+written by Seneca, downed the opposition.
+
+The Senate accepted the report, and Nero, at twenty-two, found himself
+master of the world.
+
+Yet what booted it when he was not master of himself!
+
+From this time on, the career of Seneca was one of contumely, suffering
+and disgrace. This was to endure for six years, when kindly death was
+then to set him free.
+
+The mutual, guilty knowledge of a great crime breeds loathing and
+contempt. History contains many such instances where the subject had
+knowledge of the sovereign's sins, and the sovereign found no rest until
+the man who knew was beneath the sod.
+
+Seneca knew Nero as only his Maker knew him.
+
+After the first spasm of exultation in being allowed to return to Rome,
+a jealous dread of Seneca came over the guilty monarch.
+
+Seneca hoped against hope that, now that Nero's wild oats were sown and
+the crop destroyed, all would be well. The past should be buried and
+remembrance of it sunk deep in oblivion.
+
+But Nero feared Seneca might expose his worthlessness and the
+philosopher himself take the reins. In this Nero did not know his man:
+Seneca's love was literary--political power to him was transient and not
+worth while.
+
+It became known that the apology to the Senate was the work of Seneca,
+and Nero, who wanted the world to think that all his speeches and
+addresses were his own, got it firmly fixed in his head he would not be
+happy until Seneca was out of the way. Sabina said he was no longer a
+boy, and should not be tagged and dictated to by his old teacher.
+
+Seneca, seeing what was coming, offered to give his entire property to
+the State and retire. Nero would not have it so--he feared Seneca would
+retire only to come back with an army. A cordon of spies was put around
+Seneca's house--he was practically a prisoner. Attempts were made to
+poison him, but he ate only fruit, and bread made by his wife, Paulina,
+and drank no water except from running streams.
+
+Finally a charge of conspiracy was fastened upon him, and Nero ordered
+him to die by his own hand. His wife was determined to go with him, and
+one stroke severed the veins of both.
+
+The beautiful Sabina realized her hopes--she divorced her husband, and
+married the Emperor of Rome. She died from a sudden kick given her by
+the booted foot of her liege.
+
+Three years after the death of Seneca, Nero passed hence by the same
+route, killing himself to escape the fury of the Pretorian Guard. And so
+ended the Julian line, none of whom, except the first, was a Julian.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+From the death of Augustus on to the time of Nero there was for Rome a
+steady tide of disintegration. The Emperor was the head of the Church,
+and he usually encouraged the idea that he was something different from
+common men--that his mission was from On High and that he should be
+worshiped. Gibbon, making a free translation from Seneca, says,
+"Religion was regarded by the common people as true, by the philosophers
+as false, and by the rulers as useful." And Saint Augustine, using the
+same smoothly polished style, says, in reference to a Roman Senator, "He
+worshiped what he blamed, he did what he refuted, he adored that with
+which he found fault." The sentence is Seneca's, and when he wrote it he
+doubtless had himself in mind, for in spite of his Stoic philosophy the
+life of luxury lured him, and although he sang the praises of poverty he
+charged a goodly sum for so doing, and the nobles who listened to him
+doubtless found a vicarious atonement by applauding him as he played to
+the gallery gods of their self-esteem, like rich ladies who go
+a-slumming mix in with the poor on an equality, and then hasten home to
+dress for dinner.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Seneca was one of the purest and loftiest intellects the world has ever
+known. Canon Farrar calls him "A Seeker after God," and has printed
+parallel passages from Saint Paul and Seneca which, for many, seem to
+show that the men were in communication with each other. Every ethical
+maxim of Christianity was expressed by this "noble pagan," and his
+influence was always directed toward that which he thought was right.
+His mistakes were all in the line of infirmities of the will. Voltaire
+calls him, "The father of all those who wear shovel hats," and in
+another place refers to him as an "amateur ascetic," but in this the
+author of the Philosophical Dictionary pays Seneca the indirect
+compliment of regarding him as a Christian. Renan says, "Seneca shines
+out like a great white star through a rift of clouds on a night of
+darkness." The wonder is not that Seneca at times lapsed from his high
+estate and manifested his Sophist training, but that to the day of his
+death he saw the truth with unblinking eyes and held the Ideal firmly in
+his heart.
+
+
+
+
+ARISTOTLE
+
+
+     Happiness itself is sufficient excuse. Beautiful things are right
+     and true; so beautiful actions are those pleasing to the gods. Wise
+     men have an inward sense of what is beautiful, and the highest
+     wisdom is to trust this intuition and be guided by it. The answer
+     to the last appeal of what is right lies within a man's own breast.
+     Trust thyself.
+
+                                                --_Ethics of Aristotle_
+
+[Illustration: ARISTOTLE]
+
+
+The Sublime Porte recently issued a request to the American Bible
+Society, asking that references to Macedonia be omitted from all Bibles
+circulated in Turkey or Turkish provinces. The argument of His Sublimity
+is that the Macedonian cry, "Come over and help us!" puts him and his
+people in a bad light. He ends his most courteous petition by saying,
+"The land that produced a Philip, an Alexander the Great and an
+Aristotle, and that today has citizens who are the equal of these, needs
+nothing from our dear brothers, the Americans, but to be let alone."
+
+As to the statement that Macedonia today has citizens who are the equals
+of Philip, Alexander and Aristotle, the proposition, probably, is based
+on the confession of the citizens themselves, and therefore may be
+truth. Great men are only great comparatively. It is the stupidity of
+the many that allows one man to bestride the narrow world like a
+Colossus. In the time of Alexander and Aristotle there wasn't so much
+competition as now, so perhaps what we take to be lack of humor on the
+part of the Sublime Porte may have a basis in fact.
+
+Aristotle was born Three Hundred Eighty-four B.C., at the village of
+Stagira in the mountains of Macedonia. King Amyntas used to live at
+Stagira several months in the year and hunt the wild hogs that fed on
+the acorns which grew in the gorges and valleys. Mountain climbing and
+hunting was dangerous sport, and it was well to have a surgeon attached
+to the royal party, so the father of Aristotle served in that capacity.
+No doubt, though, but the whole outfit was decidedly barbaric, even
+including the doctor's little son "Aristo," who refused to be left
+behind. The child's mother had died years before, and boys without
+mothers are apt to manage their fathers. And so Aristo was allowed to
+trot along by his father's side, carrying a formidable bow, which he
+himself had made, with a quiver of arrows at his back.
+
+Those were great times when the King came to Stagira!
+
+When the King went back to the capital everybody received presents, and
+the good doctor, by some chance, was treated best of all, and little
+Aristo came in for the finest bow that ever was, all tipped with silver
+and eagle-feathers. But the bow did not bring good luck, for soon after,
+the boy's father was caught in an avalanche of sliding stone and crushed
+to death.
+
+Aristo was taken in charge by Proxenus, a near kinsman. The lad was so
+active at climbing, so full of life and energy and good spirits, that
+when the King came the next year to Stagira, he asked for Aristo. With
+the King was his son Philip, a lad about the age of Aristo, but not so
+tall nor so active. The boys became fast friends, and once when a
+stranger saw them together he complimented the King on his fine,
+intelligent boys, and the King had to explain, "The other boy is
+mine--but I wish they both were."
+
+Aristo knew where the wild boars fed in gulches, and where the stunted
+oaks grew close and thick. Higher up in the mountains there were bears,
+which occasionally came down and made the wild pigs scamper. You could
+always tell when the bears were around, for then the little pigs would
+run out into the open. The bears had a liking for little pigs, and the
+bears had a liking for the honey in the bee-trees, too. Aristo could
+find the bee-trees better than the bears--all you had to do was to watch
+the flight of the bees as they left the clover.
+
+Then there were deer--you could see their tracks any time around the
+mountain marshes where the springs gushed forth and the watercress grew
+lush. Still higher up the mountains, beyond where bears ever traveled,
+there were mountain-sheep, and still higher up were goats. The goats
+were so wild that hardly any one but Aristo had ever seen them, but he
+knew they were there.
+
+The King was delighted to have such a lad as companion for his son, and
+insisted that he should go back to the capital with them and become a
+member of the Court.
+
+Not he--there were other ambitions. He wanted to go to Athens and study
+at the school of Plato--Plato, the pupil of the great Socrates.
+
+The King laughed--he had never heard of Plato. That a youth should
+refuse to become part of the Macedonian Court, preferring the company of
+an unknown school-master, was amusing--he laughed.
+
+The next year when the King came back to Stagira, Aristo was still
+there. "And you haven't gone to Athens yet?" said the King.
+
+"No, but I am going," was the firm reply.
+
+"We will send him," said the King to Proxenus, Aristo's guardian.
+
+And so we find Aristo, aged seventeen, tall and straight and bronzed,
+starting off for Athens, his worldly goods rolled up in a bearskin, tied
+about with thongs. There is a legend to the effect that Philip went with
+Aristo, and that for a time they were together at Plato's school. But,
+anyway, Philip did not remain long. Aristo--or Aristotle, we had better
+call him--remained with Plato just twenty years.
+
+At Plato's school Aristotle was called by the boys, "the Stagirite," a
+name that was to last him through life--and longer. In Winter he wore
+his bearskin, caught over one shoulder, for a robe, and his mountain
+grace and native beauty of mind and body must have been a joy to Plato
+from the first. Such a youth could not be overlooked.
+
+To him that hath shall be given. The pupil that wants to learn is the
+teacher's favorite--which is just as it should not be. Plato proved his
+humanity by giving his all to the young mountaineer. Plato was then a
+little over sixty years of age--about the same age that Socrates was
+when Plato became his pupil. But the years had touched Plato
+lightly--unlike Socrates, he had endured no Thracian winters in bare
+feet, neither had he lived on cold snacks picked up here and there, as
+Providence provided. Plato was a bachelor. He still wore the purple
+robe, proud, dignified, yet gentle, and his back was straight as that of
+a youth. Lowell once said, "When I hear Plato's name mentioned, I always
+think of George William Curtis--a combination of pride and intellect, a
+man's strength fused with a woman's gentleness."
+
+Plato was an aristocrat. He accepted only such pupils as he invited, or
+those that were sent by royalty. Like Franz Liszt, he charged no
+tuition, which plan, by the way, is a good scheme for getting more money
+than could otherwise be obtained, although no such selfish charge should
+be brought against either Plato or Liszt. Yet every benefit must be paid
+for, and whether you use the word fee or honorarium, matters little. I
+hear there be lecturers who accept invitations to banquets and accept an
+honorarium mysteriously placed on the mantel, when they would scorn a
+fee.
+
+Plato's Garden School, where the pupils reclined under the trees on
+marble benches, and read and talked, or listened to lectures by the
+Master, was almost an ideal place. Not the ideal for us, because we
+believe that the mental and the manual must go hand in hand. The world
+of intellect should not be separated from the world of work. It was too
+much to expect that in a time when slavery was everywhere, Plato would
+see the fallacy of having one set of men to do the thinking, and another
+do the work. We haven't got far from that yet; only free men can see the
+whole truth, and a free man is one who lives in a country where there
+are no slaves. To own slaves is to be one, and to live in a land of
+slavery is to share in the bondage--a partaker in the infamy and the
+profits.
+
+Plato and Aristotle became fast friends--comrades. With thinking men
+years do not count--only those grow old who think by proxy. Plato had no
+sons after the flesh, and the love of his heart went out to the
+Stagirite: in him he saw his own life projected.
+
+When Aristotle had turned twenty he was acquainted with all the leading
+thinkers of his time; he read constantly, wrote, studied and conversed.
+The little property his father left had come to him; the King of Macedon
+sent him presents; and he taught various pupils from wealthy
+families--finances were easy. But success did not spoil him. The
+brightest scholars do not make the greatest success in life, because
+alma mater usually catches them for teachers. Sometimes this is well,
+but more often it is not. Plato would not hear of Aristotle's leaving
+him, and so he remained, the chief ornament and practical leader of the
+school.
+
+He became rich, owned the largest private library at Athens, and was
+universally regarded as the most learned man of his time.
+
+In many ways he had surpassed Plato. He delved into natural history,
+collected plants, rocks, animals, and made studies of the practical
+workings of economic schemes. He sought to divest the Platonic teaching
+of its poetry, discarded rhetoric, and tried to get at the simple truth
+of all subjects.
+
+Toward the last of Plato's career this repudiation by Aristotle of
+poetry, rhetoric, elocution and the polite accomplishments caused a
+schism to break out in the Garden School. Plato's head was in the clouds
+at times; Aristotle's was, too, but his feet were always on the earth.
+
+When Plato died, Aristotle was his natural successor as leader of the
+school, but there was opposition to him, both on account of his sturdy,
+independent ways and because he was a foreigner.
+
+He left Athens to become a member of the Court of Hermias, a former
+pupil, now King of Atarneus.
+
+He remained here long enough to marry the niece of his patron, and
+doubtless saw himself settled for life--a kingly crown within his reach
+should his student-sovereign pass away.
+
+And the royal friend did pass away, by the dagger's route. As
+life-insurance risks I am told that Kings have to pay double premium.
+Revolution broke out, and as Aristotle was debating in his mind what
+course to pursue, a messenger with soldiers arrived from King Philip of
+Macedon, offering safe convoy, enclosing transportation, and asking that
+Aristotle come and take charge of the education of his son, Alexander,
+aged thirteen.
+
+Aristotle did not wait to parley: he accepted the invitation. Horses
+were saddled, camels packed and that night, before the moon arose, the
+cavalcade silently moved out into the desert.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The offer that had been made twenty-four years before, by Philip's
+father, was now accepted. Aristotle was forty-two years old, in the
+prime of his power. Time had tempered his passions, but not subdued his
+zest in life. He had the curious, receptive, alert and eager mind of a
+child. His intellect was at its ripest and best. He was a lover of
+animals, and all outdoor life appealed to him as it does to a growing
+boy. He was a daring horseman, and we hear of his riding off into the
+desert and sleeping on the sands, his horse untethered watching over
+him. Aristotle was the first man to make a scientific study of the
+horse, and with the help of Alexander he set up a skeleton, fastening
+the bones in place, to the mighty astonishment of the natives, who
+mistook the feat for an attempt to make a living animal; and when the
+beast was not at last saddled and bridled there were subdued chuckles of
+satisfaction among the "hoi polloi" at the failure of the scheme, and
+murmurs of "I told you so!"
+
+Eighteen hundred years were to pass before another man was to take up
+the horse as a serious scientific study; and this was Leonardo da Vinci,
+a man in many ways very much like Aristotle. The distinguishing feature
+in these men--the thing that differentiates them from other men--was the
+great outpouring sympathy with every living creature. Everything they
+saw was related to themselves--it came very close to them--they wanted
+to know more about it. This is essentially the child-mind, and the
+calamity of life is to lose it.
+
+Leonardo became interested in Aristotle's essay on the horse, and
+continued the subject further, dissecting the animal in minutest detail
+and illustrating his discoveries with painstaking drawings. His work is
+so complete and exhaustive that nobody nowadays has time to more than
+read the title-page. Leonardo's bent was natural science, and his first
+attempts at drawing were done to illustrate his books. Art was
+beautiful, of course--it brought in an income, made friends and brought
+him close to people who saw nothing unless you made a picture of it. He
+made pictures for recreation and to amuse folks, and his threat to put
+the peeping Prior into the "Last Supper," posed as Judas, revealed his
+contempt for the person to whom a picture was just a picture. The marvel
+to Leonardo was the mind that could imagine, the hand that could
+execute, and the soul that could see.
+
+And the curious part is that Leonardo lives for us through his play and
+not through his serious work. His science has been superseded, but his
+art is immortal.
+
+This expectant mental attitude, this attitude of worship, belongs to all
+great scientists. The man divines the thing first and then looks for it,
+just as the Herschels knew where the star ought to be and then patiently
+waited for it. The Bishop of London said that if Darwin had spent
+one-half as much time in reading his Bible as in studying earthworms, he
+would have really benefited the world, and saved his soul alive. To
+Walt Whitman, a hair on the back of his hand was just as curious and
+wonderful as the stars in the sky, or God's revelation to man through a
+printed book.
+
+Aristotle loved animals as a boy loves them--his house was a regular
+menagerie of pets, and into this world of life Alexander was very early
+introduced. We hear of young Alexander breaking the wild horse,
+Bucephalus, and beyond a doubt Aristotle was seated on the top rail of
+the paddock when he threw the lariat.
+
+Aristotle and his pupil had the first circus of which we know, and they
+also inaugurated the first Zoological Garden mentioned in history,
+barring Noah, of course.
+
+So much was Alexander bound up in this menagerie, and in his old teacher
+as well, that in after-life, in all of his travels, he was continually
+sending back to Aristotle specimens of every sort of bird, beast and
+fish to be found in the countries through which he traveled.
+
+When Philip was laid low by the assassin's thrust, it was Aristotle who
+backed up Alexander, aged twenty--but a man--in his prompt suppression
+of the revolution. The will that had been used to subdue man-eating
+stallions and to train wild animals, now came in to repress riot, and
+the systematic classification of things was a preparation for the
+forming of an army out of a mob. Aristotle said, "An army is a huge
+animal with a million claws--it must have only one brain, and that the
+commander's."
+
+Alexander gave credit again and again to Aristotle for those elements in
+his character that went to make up success: steadiness of purpose,
+self-reliance, systematic effort, mathematical calculation, attention to
+details, and a broad and generous policy that sees the end.
+
+When Aristotle argued with Philip, years before, that horse-breaking
+should be included in the educational curriculum of all young men, he
+evidently divined football and was endeavoring to supplant it.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I think history has been a trifle severe on Alexander. He was elected
+Captain-General of Greece, and ordered to repel the Persian invasion.
+And he did the business once for all. War is not all
+fighting--Providence is on the side of the strongest commissariat.
+Alexander had to train, arm, clothe and feed a million men, and march
+them long miles across a desert country. The real foe of a man is in his
+own heart, and the foe of an army is in its own camp--disease takes more
+prisoners than the enemy. Fever sniped more of our boys in blue than did
+the hostile Filipinos.
+
+Alexander's losses were principally from men slain in battle; from this,
+I take it that Alexander knew a deal of sanitary science, and had a
+knowledge of practical mathematics, in order to systematize that mob of
+restless, turbulent helots. We hear of Aristotle cautioning him that
+safety lies in keeping his men busy--they must not have too much time to
+think, otherwise mutiny is to be feared. Still, they must not be
+over-worked, or they will be in no condition to fight when the eventful
+time occurs. And we are amazed to see this: "Do not let your men drink
+out of stagnant pools--Athenians, city-born, know no better. And when
+you carry water on the desert marches, it should be first boiled to
+prevent its getting sour."
+
+Concerning the Jews, Alexander writes to his teacher and says, "They are
+apt to be in sullen rebellion against their governors, receiving orders
+only from their high priests, and this leads to severe measures, which
+are construed as persecution"; all of which might have been written
+yesterday by the Czar in a message to The Hague Convention.
+
+Alexander captured the East, and was taken captive by the East. Like the
+male bee that never lives to tell the tale of its wooing, he succeeded
+and died. Yet he vitalized all Asia with the seeds of Greek philosophy,
+turned back the hungry barbaric tide, and made a new map of the Eastern
+world. He built far more cities than he destroyed. He set Andrew
+Carnegie an example at Alexandria, such as the world had never up to
+that time seen. At the entrance to the harbor of the same city he
+erected a lighthouse, surpassing far the one at Minot's Ledge, or Race
+Rock. This structure endured for two centuries, and when at last wind
+and weather had their way, there was no Hopkinson Smith who could erect
+another.
+
+At Thebes, Alexander paid a compliment to letters, by destroying every
+building in the city except the house of the poet, Pindar. At Corinth,
+when the great, the wise, the noble, came to pay homage, one great man
+did not appear. In vain did Alexander look for his card among all those
+handed in at the door--Diogenes, the Philosopher, oft quoted by
+Aristotle, was not to be seen.
+
+Alexander went out to hunt him up, and found him sunning himself,
+propped up against the wall in the Public Square, busy doing nothing.
+
+The philosopher did not arise to greet the conqueror; he did not even
+offer a nod of recognition.
+
+"I am Alexander--is there not something I can do for you?" modestly
+asked the descendant of Hercules.
+
+"Just stand out from between me and the sun," replied the philosopher,
+and went on with his meditations.
+
+Alexander enjoyed the reply so much that he said to his companions, and
+afterward wrote to Aristotle, "If I were not Alexander, I would be
+Diogenes," and thus did strenuosity pay its tribute to
+self-sufficiency.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Aristotle might have assumed important affairs of State, but practical
+politics were not to his liking. "What Aristotle is in the world of
+thought I will be in the world of action," said Alexander.
+
+On all of his journeys Alexander found time to keep in touch with his
+old teacher at home; and we find the ruler of Asia voicing that old
+request, "Send me something to read," and again, "I live alone with my
+thoughts, amidst a throng of men, but without companions."
+
+Plutarch gives a copy of a letter sent by Alexander wherein Aristotle is
+chided for publishing his lecture on oratory. "Now all the world will
+know what formerly belonged to you and me alone," plaintively cries the
+young man who sighed for more worlds to conquer, and therein shows he
+was the victim of a fallacy that will never die--the idea that truth can
+be embodied in a book. When will we ever learn that inspired books
+demand inspired readers!
+
+There are no secrets. A book may stimulate thought, but it can never
+impart it.
+
+Aristotle wrote out the Laws of Oratory. "Alas!" groans Alexander,
+"everybody will turn orator now." But he was wrong, because Oratory and
+the Laws of Oratory are totally different things.
+
+A Boston man of excellent parts has just recently given out the Sixteen
+Perfective Laws of Oratory, and the Nineteen Steps in Evolution.
+
+The real truth is, there are Fifty-seven Varieties of Artistic Vagaries,
+and all are valuable to the man who evolves them--they serve him as a
+scaffolding whereby he builds thought. But woe betide Alexander and all
+rareripe Bostonians who mistake the scaffolding for the edifice.
+
+There are no Laws of Art. A man evolves first, and builds his laws
+afterward. The style is the man, and a great man, full of the spirit,
+will express himself in his own way.
+
+Bach ignored all the Laws of Harmony made before his day and set down
+new ones--and these marked his limitations, that was all. Beethoven
+upset all these, and Wagner succeeded by breaking most of Beethoven's
+rules. And now comes Grieg, and writes harmonious discords that Wagner
+said were impossible, and still it is music, for by it we are
+transported on the wings of song and uplifted to the stars.
+
+The individual soul striving for expression ignores all man-made laws.
+Truth is that which serves us best in expressing our lives. A rotting
+log is truth to a bed of violets, while sand is truth to a cactus. But
+when the violet writes a book on "Expression as I Have Found It," making
+laws for the evolution of beautiful blossoms, it leaves the Century
+Plant out of its equation, or else swears, i' faith, that a cactus is
+not a flower, and that a Night-Blooming Cereus is a disordered thought
+from a madman's brain. And when the proud and lofty cactus writes a
+book it never mentions violets, because it has never stooped to seek
+them.
+
+Art is the blossoming of the Soul.
+
+We can not make the plant blossom--all we can do is to comply with the
+conditions of growth. We can supply the sunshine, moisture and aliment,
+and God does the rest. In teaching, he only is successful who supplies
+the conditions of growth--that is all there is of the Science of
+Pedagogics, which is not a science, and if it ever becomes one, it will
+be the Science of Letting Alone, and not a scheme of interference. Just
+so long as some of the greatest men are those who have broken through
+pedagogic fancy and escaped, succeeding by breaking every rule of
+pedagogy, as Wagner discarded every Law of Harmony, there will be no
+such thing as a Science of Education.
+
+Recently I read Aristotle's Essays on Rhetoric and Oratory, and I was
+pained to see how I had been plagiarized by this man who wrote three
+hundred years before Christ. Aristotle used charts in teaching and
+indicated the mean by a straight horizontal line, and the extreme by an
+upright dash. He says: "From one extreme the mean looks extreme, and
+from another extreme the mean looks small--it all depends upon your
+point of view. Beware of jumping to conclusions, for beside the
+appearance you must look within and see from what vantage-ground you
+gain the conclusions. All truth is relative, and none can be final to a
+man six feet high, who stands on the ground, who can walk but forty
+miles at a stretch, who needs four meals a day and one-third of his time
+for sleep. A loss of sleep, or loss of a meal, or a meal too much, will
+disarrange his point of view, and change his opinions," And thus do we
+see that a belief in "eternal punishment" is a mere matter of
+indigestion.
+
+A certain bishop, we have seen, experienced a regret that Darwin
+expended so much time on earthworms; and we might also express regret
+that Aristotle did not spend more. As long as he confined himself to
+earth, he was eminently sure and right: he was really the first man who
+ever used his eyes. But when he quit the earth, and began to speculate
+about the condition of souls before they are clothed with bodies, or
+what becomes of them after they discard the body, or the nature of God,
+he shows that he knew no more than we. That is to say, he knew no more
+than the barbarians who preceded him.
+
+He attempted to grasp ideas which Herbert Spencer pigeonholes forever as
+the Unknowable; and in some of his endeavors to make plain the
+unknowable, Aristotle strains language to the breaking-point--the net
+bursts and all of his fish go free. Here is an Aristotelian proposition,
+expressed by Hegel to make lucid a thing nobody comprehends: "Essential
+being as being that meditates with itself, with itself by the negativity
+of itself, is relative to itself only as it is relative to another;
+that is, immediate only as something posited and meditated." It gives
+one a slight shock to hear him speak of headache being caused by wind on
+the brain, or powdered grasshopper-wings being a cure for gout, but when
+he calls the heart a pump that forces the blood to the extremities, we
+see that he anticipates Harvey, although more than two thousand years of
+night lie between them.
+
+Some of Aristotle reads about like this Geometrical Domestic Equation:
+
+_Definitions:_
+
+All boarding-houses are the same boarding-houses.
+
+Boarders in the same boarding-house, and on the same flat, are equal to
+one another.
+
+A single room is that which hath no parts and no magnitude.
+
+The landlady of the boarding-house is a parallelogram--that is, an
+oblong figure that can not be described, and is equal to anything.
+
+A wrangle is the disinclination to each other of two boarders that meet
+together, but are not on the same floor.
+
+All the other rooms being taken, a single room is a double room.
+
+_Postulates and Propositions:_
+
+A pie may be produced any number of times.
+
+The landlady may be reduced to her lowest terms by a series of
+propositions.
+
+A bee-line is the shortest distance between the Phalanstery and By
+Allen's.
+
+The clothes of a boarding-house bed stretched both ways will not meet.
+
+Any two meals at a boarding-house are together less than one meal at the
+Phalanstery.
+
+On the same bill and on the same side of it there should not be two
+charges for the same thing.
+
+If there be two boarders on the same floor, and the amount of the side
+of the one be equal to the amount of the side of the other, and the
+wrangle between the one boarder and the landlady be equal to the wrangle
+between the landlady and the other boarder, then shall the weekly bills
+of the two boarders be equal. For, if not, let one bill be the greater,
+then the other bill is less than it might have been, which is absurd.
+Therefore the bills are equal.
+
+_Quod erat demonstrandum._
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The business of the old philosophers was to philosophize. To
+philosophize as a business is to miss the highest philosophy. To do a
+certain amount of useful work every day, and not trouble about either
+the past or the future, is the highest wisdom. The man who drags the
+past behind him, and dives into the future, spreads the present out
+thin. Therein lies the bane of most religions. A man goes out into the
+woods to study the birds: he walks and walks and walks and sees no
+birds. But just let him sit down on a log and wait, and lo! the branches
+are full of song.
+
+Those who pursue Culture never catch up with her. Culture takes alarm at
+pursuit and avoids the stealthy pounce. Culture is a woman, and a
+certain amount of indifference wins her. Ardent wooing will not secure
+either wisdom or a woman--except in the case where a woman marries a man
+to get rid of him, and then he really does not get the woman--he only
+secures her husk. And the husks of culture are pedantry and sciolism.
+The highest philosophy of the future will consist in doing each day that
+which is most useful. Talking about it will be quite incidental and
+secondary.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+After Alexander had completed his little task of conquering the world,
+it was his intention to sit down and improve his mind. He was going back
+to Greece to complete the work Pericles had so well begun. To this end
+Aristotle had left Macedonia and established his Peripatetic School at
+Athens. Plato was exclusive, and taught in the Garden with its high
+walls. Aristotle taught in the "peripatos," or porch of the Lyceum, and
+his classes were for all who wished to attend. Socrates was really the
+first peripatetic philosopher, but he was a roustabout. Nothing
+sanctifies like death--and now Socrates had become respectable, and his
+methods were to be made legal and legitimate.
+
+Socrates discovered the principle of human liberty; he taught the rights
+of the individual, and as these threatened to interfere with the State,
+the politicians got alarmed and put him to death. Plato, much more
+cautious, wrote his "Republic," wherein everything is subordinated for
+the good of the State, and the individual is but a cog in a most
+perfectly lubricated machine. Aristotle saw that Socrates was nearer
+right than Plato--sin is the expression of individuality and is not
+wholly bad--the State is made up of individuals, and if you suppress the
+thinking-power of the individual, you will get a weak and effeminate
+body politic; there will be none to govern. The whole fabric will break
+down of its own weight. A man must have the privilege of making a fool
+of himself--within proper bounds, of course. To that end learning must
+be for all, and liberty both to listen and to teach should be the
+privilege of every man.
+
+This is a problem that Boston has before it today: Shall free speech be
+allowed on the Common? William Morris tried it in Trafalgar Square, to
+his sorrow; but in Hyde Park, if you think you have a message, London
+will let you give it. But this is not considered good form, and the
+"Best Society" listen to no speeches in the park. However, there are
+signs that Aristotle's outdoor school may come back. Phillips Brooks
+tried outdoor preaching, and if his health had not failed, he might have
+popularized it. It only wants a man who is big enough to inaugurate it.
+
+Aristotle had various helpers, and arranged to give his lectures and
+conferences daily in certain porches or promenades. These lectures
+covered the whole range of human thought--logic, rhetoric, oratory,
+physics, ethics, politics, esthetics, and physical culture. These
+outdoor talks were called exoteric, and there gradually grew up esoteric
+lessons, which were for the rich or luxurious and the dainty. And there
+being money in the esoteric lessons, these gradually took the place of
+the exoteric, and so we get the genesis of our modern private school or
+college, where we send our children to be taught great things by great
+men, for a consideration.
+
+Will the exoteric, peripatetic school come back?
+
+I think so.
+
+I believe that university education will soon be free to every boy and
+girl in America, and this without going far from home. Esoteric
+education is always more or less of a sham. Our public-school system is
+purely exoteric, only we stop too soon. We also give our teachers too
+much work and too little pay. Stop building warships, and use the money
+to double the teachers' salaries, making the profession respectable,
+raise the standard of efficiency, and the free university with the old
+Greek Lyceum will be here.
+
+America must do this--the Old World can't. We have the money, and we
+have the men and the women; all that is needed is the desire, and this
+is fast awakening.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+When Alexander died, of acute success, aged thirty-two, Aristotle's
+sustaining prop was gone. The Athenians never thought much of the
+Macedonians--not much more than Saint Paul did, he having tried to
+convert both and failed.
+
+Athens was jealous of the power of Alexander: that a provincial should
+thus rule the Mother-Country was unforgivable. It was as if a Canadian
+should make himself King of England!
+
+Everybody knew that Aristotle had been the tutor of Alexander, and that
+they were close friends. And that a Macedonian should be the chief
+school-teacher in Athens was an affront. The very greatness of the man
+was his offense: Athens had none to match him, and the world has never
+since matched him, either. How to get rid of the Macedonian philosopher
+was the question.
+
+And so our old friend, heresy, comes in again. A poem was found, written
+by Aristotle many years before, on the death of his friend, King
+Hermias, wherein Apollo was disrespectfully mentioned. It was the old
+charge against Socrates come back--the hemlock was brewing. But life was
+sweet to Aristotle; he chose discretion to valor, and fled to his
+country home at Chalcis in Euboea.
+
+The humiliation of being driven from his work, and the sudden change
+from active life to exile, undermined his strength, and he died in a
+year, aged sixty-two.
+
+In morals the world has added nothing new to the philosophy of
+Aristotle: gentleness, consideration, moderation, mutual helpfulness,
+and the principle that one man's privileges end where another man's
+rights begin--these make up the sum. And on them, all authorities agree,
+and have for twenty-five hundred years.
+
+The family relations of Aristotle were most exemplary. The unseemly
+wrangles of Philip and his wife were never repeated in the home of
+Aristotle. Yet we will have to offer this fact in the interests of
+stirpiculture: the inconstant Philip and the termagant Olympias brought
+into the world Alexander; whereas the sons of Aristotle lived their day
+and died, without making a ripple on the surface of history.
+
+As in the scientific study of the horse, no progress was made from the
+time of Aristotle to that of Leonardo, so Hegel says there was no
+advancement in philosophy from the time of Aristotle to that of Spinoza.
+
+Eusebius called Aristotle "Nature's Private Secretary."
+
+Dante spoke of him as the "Master of those who know."
+
+Sir William Hamilton said, "In the range of his powers and perceptions,
+only Leonardo can be compared with him."
+
+
+
+
+MARCUS AURELIUS
+
+
+     We are made for co-operation, like feet, like hands, like eyelids,
+     like the rows of the upper and lower teeth. To act against one
+     another then is contrary to Nature, and it is acting against one
+     another to be vexed and turn away.
+
+                                                --_The Meditations_
+
+[Illustration: MARCUS AURELIUS]
+
+
+Annius Verus was one of the great men of Rome. He had been a soldier,
+governor of provinces, judge, senator and consul. Sixty years had passed
+over his head and whitened his hair, but the lines of care that were on
+his fine face ten years before had now given way to a cherubic double
+chin, and his complexion was ruddy as a baby's. The entire atmosphere of
+the man was one of gentleness, repose and kindly good-will. Annius Verus
+was grateful to the gods, for the years had brought him much good
+fortune, and better still, knowledge. "Being old I shall know ... the
+last of life for which the first was made!"
+
+Religion isn't a thing outside of a man, taught by priests out of a
+book. Religion is in the heart of man, and its chief quality is
+resignation and a grateful spirit. Annius Verus was religious in the
+best sense, and his life was peaceful and happy.
+
+And surely Annius Verus should have been content--he was a Roman Consul,
+rich, powerful, honored by the wisest and best men in Rome, who
+considered it a privilege to come and dine at his table. His villa was
+on Mount Coelius, a suburb of Rome. The house was surrounded by a big
+stone wall enclosing a tract of about ten acres, where grew citron,
+orange and fig trees, and giant cedars of Lebanon lifted their branches
+to the clouds.
+
+At least it seemed to little Marcus, grandson of the Consul, as if they
+reached the clouds. There was a long ladder running up one of these big
+cedar trees to a platform or "crow's-nest" nearly a hundred feet from
+the ground. No boy was allowed to climb up there until he was twelve
+years old, and when Marcus was ten, time got stuck, he thought, and
+refused to budge. But this was only little Marcus' idea, for he finally
+got to be twelve years old, and then he climbed the long ladder to the
+lookout in the tree and looked down on the Eternal City that lay below
+in the valley and stretched away over the seven hills. Often the boy
+would take a book and climb up there to read; and when the good
+grandfather missed him, he knew where to look, and standing under the
+tree the old man would call: "Come down, Marcus, come down and kiss your
+old grandfather--it is lonesome down here! Come down and read to your
+grandfather who loves his little Marcus!"
+
+Such an appeal as this was irresistible, and the boy, slight, slim and
+agile, would clamber over the side of the crow's-nest and down the
+ladder to the outstretched arms.
+
+The boy's father had died when he was only three months old, and the
+grandfather had adopted the child as his heir, and brought Lucilla, the
+widowed mother, and her baby to live in his house.
+
+Years before, the Consul's wife had passed away, and Faustina, his
+daughter, became the lady of the house. Lucilla and Faustina didn't get
+along very well together--no house is big enough for two families, some
+man has said. Lucilla was gentle, gracious, spiritual, modest and
+refined; Faustina was beautiful and not without intellect, but she was
+proud, domineering and fond of admiration. But be it said to the credit
+of the good old Consul, he was able to suffuse the whole place with
+love, and even if Faustina had a tantrum now and then, it did not last
+long.
+
+There were always visitors in the household--soldiers home on furloughs,
+governors on vacations, lawyers who came to consult the wise and
+judicial Verus.
+
+One visitor of note was a man by the name of Aurelius Antoninus. He was
+about forty years old as Marcus first remembered him--tall and straight,
+with a full, dark beard, and short, curly hair touched with gray. He was
+a quiet, self-contained man, and at first little Marcus was a bit afraid
+of him. Aurelius Antoninus had been a soldier, but he showed such a
+studious mind, and was so intent on doing the right thing that he was
+made an under-secretary, then private secretary to the Emperor, and
+finally he had been sent away to govern a rebellious province, and put
+down mutiny by wise diplomacy instead of by force of arms.
+
+Aurelius Antoninus was inclined towards the Stoics, although he didn't
+talk much about it. He usually ate but two meals a day, worked with the
+servants, and wrote this in his diary, "Men are made for each other:
+even the inferior for the superior, and these for the sake of one
+another."
+
+This philosophy of the Stoics rather appealed to the widow Lucilla,
+also, and she read Zeno with Aurelius Antoninus. Verus did not object to
+it--he had been a soldier and knew the advantages of doing without
+things and of being able to make the things you needed, and of living
+simply and being plain and direct in all your acts and speech. But
+Faustina laughed at it all--to her it was preposterous that one should
+wear plain clothing and no jewelry when he could buy the costliest and
+best; and why one should eschew wine and meat and live on brown bread
+and fruit and cold water, when he could just as well have spiced and
+costly dishes--all this was clear beyond her. Various fetes and banquets
+were given by Faustina, to which the young nobles were invited. She was
+a beautiful woman and never for a moment forgot it, and by some mistake
+or accident she got herself betrothed to three men at the same time. Two
+of these fought a duel and one was killed. The third man looked on and
+hoped both would be killed, for then he could have the woman. Faustina
+got this third man to challenge the survivor, and then by one of those
+strange somersaults of fate the unexpected occurred.
+
+Faustina and Aurelius Antoninus were married.
+
+It was a most queer mismating, for the man was plain, sincere and
+honorable, and she was almost everything else. Yet she had wit and she
+had beauty, and Aurelius had been living in the desert so long he
+imagined that all women were gentle and good. The Consul was very glad
+to unite his house with so fine and excellent a man as Aurelius; Lucilla
+cried for two days and more and little Marcus cried because his mother
+did, and neither cried because Faustina had gone away.
+
+But grief is transient.
+
+In a little over a year Antoninus and Faustina came back to Rome, and
+brought with them a little girl baby, Faustina Second. Marcus was very
+much interested in this baby, and made great plans about how they would
+play together when she got older.
+
+Among other visitors at the house of the old Consul often came the
+Emperor himself. Hadrian and Verus were Spaniards and had been soldiers
+together, and now Hadrian often liked to get away from the cares of
+State, and in the evening hide himself from the office-seekers and
+flattering parasites, in the quiet villa on Mount Coelius--he liked it
+here even better than at his own wonderful gardens at Tivoli. And little
+Marcus wasn't afraid of him, either. Marcus would sit on the Emperor's
+knee and listen to tales about hunting wild boars and bears, or men as
+wild. Then they would play tag or I-spy among the bushes and trees; and
+once Marcus dared the Emperor to climb the long ladder to the lookout in
+the big cedar. Hadrian accepted the challenge and climbed to the
+crow's-nest and cut his initials in the trunk of the tree.
+
+Instead of calling the boy Marcus Verus, the Emperor gave him the name
+"Verissimus," which means "the open-eyed truthful one," and this name
+stuck to Marcus for life.
+
+Between Antoninus and Marcus there grew up a very close friendship.
+Antoninus could scale the ladder up the tall cedar, three rungs at a
+time, and come down hand over hand without putting his foot on a rest.
+
+He and Marcus built another crow's-nest thirty feet above the first.
+They drew up the lumber by ropes, and Antoninus being sinewy and strong
+climbed up first, and with thongs and nails they fixed the boards in
+place, and made a rope ladder such as sailors make, that they could pull
+up after them so no one could reach them. When the kind old Emperor came
+to the villa they showed him what they had done. He said he would not
+try to climb up now as he had a touch of rheumatism. But a light was
+fixed in the upper lookout, drawn up by a cord, so they could signal to
+the Emperor down at the palace.
+
+Then Antoninus taught Marcus to ride horseback and pick up a spear off
+the ground, with his horse at a gallop. This was great sport for the
+Consul and the Emperor, who looked on, but they did not try it then,
+but said they would later on when they were feeling just right.
+
+And beside all this Aurelius Antoninus taught Marcus to read from
+Epictetus, and told him how this hunchback slave, Epictetus, who was
+owned by a man who had been a slave himself, was one of the sweetest,
+gentlest souls who had ever lived. Together they read the Stoic-slave
+philosopher and made notes from him. And so impressed was Marcus that,
+boy though he was, he adopted the simple robe of the Stoics, slept on a
+plank, and made his life and language plain, truthful and direct.
+
+This was all rather amusing to those near him--to all except Antoninus
+and the boy's mother. The others said, "Leave him alone and he'll get
+over it."
+
+Faustina was still fond of admiration--the simple, studious ways of her
+husband were not to her liking. He was twenty years her senior, and she
+demanded gaiety as her right. Her delight was to tread the borderline of
+folly, and see how close she could come to the brink and not step off.
+Julius Caesar's wife was put away on suspicion, but Faustina was worse
+than that! She would go down to the city to masquerades, leaving her
+little girl at home, and be gone for three days.
+
+When she returned Aurelius Antoninus spoke no word of anger or reproof.
+Her father said to her, "Beware! your husband's patience has a limit. If
+he divorces you, I shall not blame him; and even if he should kill you,
+Roman law will not punish him!"
+
+But long years after, Marcus, in looking back on those days, wrote: "His
+patience knew no limit; he treated her as a perverse child, and he once
+said to me: 'I pity and love her. I will not put her away--this were
+selfish. How can her follies injure me? We are what we are, and no one
+can harm us but ourselves. The mistakes of those near us afford us an
+opportunity for self-control--we will not imitate their errors, but
+rather strive to avoid them. In this way what might be a great
+humiliation has its benefits.'"
+
+Let no one imagine, however, that the tolerance of Antoninus was the
+soft acquiescence of weakness. After his death Marcus wrote: "Whatsoever
+excellent thing he had planned to do, he carried out with a persistency
+that nothing could divert. If he punished men, it was by allowing them
+to be led by their own folly--his foresight, wisdom and calm
+deliberation were beyond those of any man I ever knew."
+
+The studious, direct and manly ways of Marcus were not cast aside when
+he put on the toga virilis, as Faustina had predicted. In spite of the
+difference in their ages, Antoninus and Marcus mutually sustained each
+other.
+
+Little Faustina was much more like her father than her mother, and very
+early showed her preference for her father's society. Marcus was her
+playmate and taught her to ride a pony astride, just as her father had
+taught him. The three would often ride over to the village of Lorium,
+twelve miles from Rome, where Antoninus had a summer villa. At Lanuvium,
+near at hand, the Emperor spent a part of his time, and he would
+occasionally join the party and listen to Marcus recite from Cicero and
+Caesar.
+
+When Marcus was sixteen, Hadrian appointed him prefect of festivities in
+Rome, to take the place of the regular officer, a man of years, who was
+out of the city. So well did Marcus fill the place and make up his
+report, that when they again met, the old Emperor kissed his cheek,
+calling him, "My brave Verissimus," and said, "If I had a son, I would
+want him just like you."
+
+Not long after this the Emperor was taken violently ill. He called his
+counselors about his bedside and directed that Aurelius Antoninus should
+be his successor, and that, further, Antoninus should adopt Marcus
+Verus, so that Marcus should succeed Aurelius Antoninus.
+
+Hadrian loved Marcus for his own sake, and he loved him, too, for the
+sake of the grandfather, his old soldier comrade, Annius Verus; and
+beside that he was intent on preserving the Spanish strain.
+
+In a short time Hadrian passed away, and Aurelius Antoninus was crowned
+Emperor of Rome, and Marcus Verus, aged seventeen, slim, slender and
+studious, took the name, Marcus Aurelius.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The new reign did not begin under very favorable auspices. There was a
+prejudice against the Spanish blood, and Hadrian had alienated some of
+the aristocrats by measures they considered too democratic.
+
+Aurelius Antoninus knew of these prejudices toward his predecessor and
+he boldly met them by carrying the ashes of Hadrian to the Senate,
+demanding that the dead Emperor should be enrolled among the gods. So
+earnest and convincing was his eulogy of the great man gone, that a vote
+was taken and the resolution passed without a dissenting voice. This
+gives us a slight clew to the genesis of the gods, and also reveals to
+us the character of Antoninus. He so impressed the Senate that this
+honorable body thought best to waive all matters of difference, and in
+pretty compliment they voted to bestow on the new Emperor the degree of
+"Pius." Antoninus Pius was a man born to rule--in little things,
+lenient, but firm at the right time. Faustina still had her little
+social dissipations, but as she was not allowed to mix in affairs of
+State, her pink person was not a political factor.
+
+Marcus Aurelius was only seventeen years old: his close studies had
+robbed him of a bit of the robust health a youth should have. But
+horseback-riding and daily outdoor games finally got him back into good
+condition. He was the secretary and companion of the Emperor wherever he
+went.
+
+Great responsibilities confronted these two strong men. In point of
+intellect and aspiration they were far beyond the people they
+governed--so far, indeed, that they were almost isolated. There was a
+multitude of slaves and consequently there was a feeling everywhere that
+useful work was degrading. The tendency of the slave-owner is always
+toward profligacy and conspicuous waste. To do away with slavery was out
+of the question--that was a matter of time and education--the ruler can
+never afford to get much in advance of his people. The court was
+infected with parasites in the way of informers and busybodies who knew
+no way to thrive except through intrigue. Superstitions were taught by
+hypocritical priests in order to make the people pay tithes; and
+attached to the state religion were soothsayers, fortune-tellers,
+astrologers, gamblers and many pretenders who waxed fat by ministering
+to ignorance and depravity. These were the cheerful parasites mentioned
+as "money-changers" a hundred years before, that infested the entrance
+to every temple.
+
+Many long consultations did the Emperor and his adopted son have
+concerning the best policy to pursue. They could have issued an edict
+and swept the wrongs out of existence, but they knew that folly sprouts
+from a disordered brain, and so they did not treat a symptom: the
+disease was ignorance, the symptom, superstition. For themselves they
+kept an esoteric doctrine, and for the many they did what they could.
+
+Twenty-three years of probation lay before Marcus Aurelius--years of
+study, work, and patient endeavor. He shared in all the honors of the
+Emperor and bore his part of the burden as well. Never did he thirst for
+more power--the responsibilities of the situation saddened him--there
+was so much to be done and he could do so little. Well does Dean Farrar
+call him "a seeker after God."
+
+The office of young Marcus Aurelius at first was that of Questor, which
+literally means a messenger, but the word with the Romans meant more--an
+emissary or an ambassador. When Marcus was eighteen he read to the
+Senate all speeches and messages from the Emperor; and in a few years
+more he wrote the messages as well as delivered them. And all the time
+his education was being carried along by competent instructors.
+
+One of these teachers, Fronto, has come down to us, his portrait well
+etched on history's tablets, because he saved all the letters written
+him by Marcus Aurelius; and his grandchildren published them in order to
+show the excellence of true scientific teaching. That old Fronto was a
+dear old dear, these letters do fully attest. When Marcus went away on a
+little journey, even to Lorium, he wrote a letter to Fronto telling
+about the trip--the sheep by the wayside, the dogs that herded them, the
+shower they saw coming across the Campagna, and incidentally a little
+freshman philosophy mixed in, for Fronto had cautioned his pupil always
+to write out a great thought when it came, for fear he would never have
+another. Marcus was a sprightly letter-writer, and must have been a
+quick observer, and Fronto's gentle claims that he made the man are
+worthy of consideration. As a literary exercise the daily theme,
+prompted by love, can never be improved upon. The way to learn to write
+is to write. And Pronto, who resorted to many little tricks in order to
+get his pupil to express himself, was a teacher whose name should be
+written high. The correspondence-school has many advantages--Fronto
+purposely sent his pupil away or absented himself, that the carefully
+formulated or written thought might take the place of the free and easy
+conversation. In one letter Marcus ends: "The day was perfect but for
+one thing--you were not here. But then if you were here, I would not now
+have the pleasure of writing to you, so thus is your philosophy proved:
+that all good is equalized, and love grows through separation!" This
+sounds a bit preachy, but is valuable, as it reveals the man to whom it
+is written: the person to whom we write dictates the message.
+
+Fronto's habit of giving a problem to work out was quite as good a
+teaching plan as anything we have to offer now. Thus: "An ambassador of
+Rome visiting an outlying province attended a gladiatorial contest. And
+one of the fighters being indisposed, the ambassador replied to a taunt
+by putting on a coat of mail and going into the ring to kill the lion.
+Question, was this action commendable? If so, why, and if not, why
+not?"
+
+The proposition was one that would appeal at once to a young man, and
+thus did Fronto lead his pupils to think and express.
+
+Another teacher that Marcus had was Rusticus, a blunt old farmer turned
+pedagog, who has added a word to our language. His pupils were called
+Rusticana, and later plain rustics. That Rusticus developed in Marcus a
+deal of plain, sturdy commonsense there is no doubt. Rusticus had a way
+of stripping a subject of its gloss and verbiage--going straight to the
+vital point of every issue. For the wisdom of Marcus' legal opinions
+Rusticus deserves more than passing credit.
+
+For the youth who was destined to be the next Emperor of Rome, there was
+no dearth of society if he chose to accept it. Managing mammas were on
+every corner, and kind kinsmen consented to arrange matters with this
+heiress or that. For the frivolities of society Marcus had no use--his
+hours were filled with useful work or application to his books. His
+father and Fronto we find were both constantly urging him to get out
+more in the sunshine and meet more people, and not bother too much about
+the books.
+
+How best to curtail over-application, I am told, is a problem that
+seldom faces a teacher.
+
+As for society as a matrimonial bazaar, Marcus Aurelius could not see
+that it had its use. He was afraid of it--afraid of himself, perhaps. He
+loved the little Faustina. They had been comrades together, and played
+"keep house" under the olive-trees at Lorium; and had ridden their
+ponies over the hills. Once Marcus and Faustina, on a ride across the
+country, bought a lamb out of the arms of a shepherd, and kept it until
+it grew great curling horns, and made visitors scale the wall or climb
+trees. Then three priests led it away to sacrifice, and Marcus and
+Faustina fell into each other's arms and rained tears down each other's
+backs, and refused to be comforted. What if their father was an Emperor,
+and Marcus would be some day! It would not bring back Beppo, with his
+innocent lamblike ways, and make him get down on his knees and wag his
+tail when they fed him out of a pail! Beppo always got on his knees to
+eat, and showed his love and humility before he grew his horns and
+reached the age of indiscretion; then he became awfully wicked, and it
+took three stout priests to lead him away and sacrifice him to the gods
+for his own good!
+
+But gradually the grass grew on Beppo's make-believe grave in the
+garden, and Fronto's problems filled the vacuum in their hearts. Fronto
+gave his lessons to Marcus, and Marcus gave them to Faustina--thus do we
+keep things by giving them away.
+
+But problems greater than pet sheep grown ribald and reckless were to
+confront Marcus and Faustina. They had both been betrothed to others,
+years before, and this they now resented. They talked of this much, and
+then suddenly ceased to talk of it, and each evaded mentioning it, and
+pretended they never thought of it. Then they explosively began
+again--began as suddenly to talk of it, and always when they met they
+mentioned it. Folks called them brother and sister--they were not
+brother and sister, only cousins.
+
+Finally the matter was brought to Antoninus, and he pretended that he
+had never thought about it; but in fact he had thought of little else
+for a long time. And Antoninus said that if they loved each other very
+much, and he was sure they did, why, it was the will of the gods that
+they should marry, and he never interfered with the will of the gods; so
+he kissed them both and cried a few foolish tears, a thing an Emperor
+should never do.
+
+So they were married at the country seat at Lorium, out under the
+orange-trees as was often the custom, for orange-trees are green the
+year 'round, and bear fruit and flowers at the same time, and the
+flowers are very sweet, and the fruit is both beautiful and useful--and
+these things symbol constancy and fruitfulness and good luck, and that
+is why we yet have orange-blossoms at weddings and play the "Lohengrin
+March," which is orange-trees expressed in sweet sounds.
+
+Marcus was only twenty, and Faustina could not have been over
+sixteen--we do not know her exact age. There are stories to the effect
+that the wife of Marcus Aurelius severely tried her husband's temper at
+times, but these tales seem to have arisen through a confusion of the
+two Faustinas. The elder Faustina was the one who set the merry pace in
+frivolity, and once said that any woman with a husband twenty years her
+senior must be allowed a lover or two--goodness gracious!
+
+As far as we know, the younger Faustina was a most loyal and loving
+wife, the mother of a full dozen children. Coins issued by Marcus
+Aurelius stamped with the features of his wife, and the inscription
+Concordia, Faustina and Venus Felix, attest the felicity, or "felixity,"
+of the marriage.
+
+Their oldest boy, Commodus, was very much like his grandmother,
+Faustina, and a man who knows all about the Law of Heredity tells me
+that children are much more apt to resemble their grandparents than
+their father and mother.
+
+I believe I once said that no house is big enough for two families, but
+this truth is like the Greek verb--it has many exceptions. In the same
+house with Emperor Antoninus Pius dwelt Lucilla, mother of Marcus, and
+Marcus and his wife. And they were all very happy--but life was rather
+more peaceful after the death of Faustina, the elder, which occurred a
+few years after her husband became Emperor.
+
+She could not endure prosperity.
+
+But her husband mourned her death and made a public speech in eulogy of
+her, determined that only the best should be remembered of one who had
+been the wife of an Emperor and the mother of his children. As far as
+we know, Antoninus never spoke a word concerning his wife except in
+praise, not even when she left his house to be gone for months.
+
+It was Ouida, she of the aqua-fortis ink, who said, "A woman married to
+a man as good as Antoninus must have been very miserable, for while men
+who are thoroughly bad are not lovable, yet a man who is not
+occasionally bad is unendurable." And so Ouida's heart went out in
+sympathy and condolence to the two Faustinas, who wedded the only two
+men mentioned in Roman history who were infinitely wise and good.
+
+In one of his essays, Richard Steele writes this, "No woman ever loved a
+man through life with a mighty love if the man did not occasionally
+abuse her." I give the remark for what it is worth. However, Montesquieu
+somewhere says that the chief objection to heaven is its monotony; so
+possibly there may be something in the Ouida-Steele philosophy--but of
+this I really can't say, knowing nothing about the subject, myself.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Happy is the man who has no history. The reign of Antoninus Pius was
+peaceful and prosperous. No great wars nor revulsions occurred, and the
+times made for education and excellence. Antoninus worked to conserve
+the good, and that he succeeded, Gibbon says, there is no doubt. He left
+the country in better condition than he found it, and he could have
+truthfully repeated the words of Pericles, "I have made no person wear
+crape."
+
+But there came a day when Antoninus was stricken by the hand of death.
+The captain of the guard came to him and asked for the password for the
+night. "Equanimity," replied the Emperor, and turning on his side, sank
+into sleep, to awake no more. His last word symbols the guiding impulse
+of his life. Well does Renan say: "Simple, loving, full of sweet gaiety,
+Antoninus was a philosopher without saying so, almost without knowing
+it. Marcus was a philosopher, but often consciously, and he became a
+philosopher by study and reflection, aided and encouraged by the older
+man. You can not consider the one man and leave the other out, and the
+early contention that Antoninus was, in fact, the father of Marcus has
+at least a poetic and spiritual basis in truth."
+
+There was much in Renan's suggestions. The greatest man is he who works
+his philosophy up into life--this is better than to talk about it. We
+only discuss that to which we have not attained, and the virtues we
+talk most of are those beyond us. The ideal outstrips the actual. But
+it is no discredit that a man pictures more than he realizes--such a one
+is preparing the way for others. Marcus Antoninus has been a guiding
+star--an inspiration--to untold millions.
+
+Marcus Aurelius was forty years old when he became Emperor of Rome. At
+the age of forty a man is safe, if ever: character is formed, and what
+he will do or become, can be safely presaged.
+
+More than once Rome has repudiated the man in the direct line of
+accession to the throne, and before Marcus Aurelius took the reins of
+government he asked the Senate to ratify the people's choice, and thus
+make it the choice of the gods, and this was done.
+
+As Emperor, we find Marcus endeavored to carry out the policy of his
+predecessor. He did not favor expansion, but hoped by peace and
+propitiation to cement the empire and thus work for education, harmony
+and prosperity.
+
+It is interesting to see how Marcus Aurelius in the year One Hundred
+Sixty-four was cudgeling his brains concerning problems about which we
+yet argue and grow red in the face. The Emperor was also Chief Justice,
+and questions were being constantly brought to him to decide. From him
+there was no appeal, and his decisions made the law upon which all
+lesser judges based their rulings. And curiously enough we are dealing
+most extensively in judge-made law even today.
+
+One vexed question that confronted Marcus was the lessening number of
+marriages, with a consequent increase in illegitimate births and a
+gradual dwindling of the free population. He seems to have disliked this
+word illegitimate, for he says, "All children are beautiful
+blessings--sent by the gods." But people who were legally married
+objected to this view, and said to recognize children born out of
+wedlock as entitled to all the privileges of citizenship is virtually to
+do away with legal marriage. As a compromise, Marcus decided to
+recognize all people as married who said they were married. This is
+exactly our common-law marriage as it exists in various States today.
+
+However, a man could put away his wife at will, and by recording the
+fact with the nearest pretor, the act was legalized. It will thus be
+seen that if a man could marry at will and put away his wife at will,
+there was really no marriage beyond that of nature. To meet the issue,
+and prevent fickle and unjust men from taking advantage of women, Marcus
+decided that the pretor could refuse to record the desired divorce, if
+he saw fit, and demand reasons. We then for the first time get a divorce
+trial, and on appeal to Marcus, he decided that if the man were in the
+wrong, he must still support the injured wife.
+
+Then, for the first time, we find women asking for a divorce. Now,
+nearly three-fourths of all divorces are granted to women; but at first,
+that a woman should want marital freedom caused a howl of merriment.
+Marcus was the first Roman Emperor to allow women the right of petition,
+and the privilege, too, of practising law, for Capitolanus cites various
+instances of women coming to ask for justice, and women friends coming
+with them to help plead their case, and the Emperor of Rome, leaning his
+tired head on his arm, listening for hours with great patience. We also
+hear of petitions for damages being presented for failure to keep a
+promise to marry--the action being brought against the girl's father.
+This would be thought a trifle strange, but an action against a woman
+for breach of promise is quite in order yet.
+
+Recently the Honorable Henry Ballard of Vermont won heavy damages
+against a coy and dallying heiress who had played pitch and toss with a
+good man's heart. The case was carried to the United States Supreme
+Court and judgment sustained.
+
+The question of marriage and divorce now in the United States is almost
+precisely where it was in Rome in the time of Marcus Aurelius. No two
+States have the same marriage-laws, and marriages which are illegal in
+one State may be made legal in another. Yet with us, any court of
+jurisdiction may declare any marriage illegal, or set any divorce aside.
+What makes marriage and what constitutes divorce are matters of opinion
+in the mind of the judge. We have gone a bit further than Marcus,
+though, in that we allow couples to marry if they wish, yet divorce is
+denied if both parties desire it. The fact that they want it is
+construed as proof that they should not have it. We meet the issue,
+however, by connivance of the lawyers, who are officers of the court,
+and a legal fiction is inaugurated by allowing a little bird to tell the
+judge what decision will be satisfactory to both sides. And in States or
+countries where no divorce is allowed, marriage can be annulled if you
+know how--see Ruskin versus Ruskin, Coleridge, J.
+
+Our zealous New Thought friends, who clamor to have marriage made
+difficult and divorce easy, forget that the whole question has been
+threshed over for three thousand years, and all schemes tried. The
+Romans issued marriage-licenses, but before doing so a pretor passed on
+the fitness of the candidates for each other. This was so embarrassing
+to many coy couples that they just waived formal proceedings and set up
+housekeeping. To declare these people lawbreakers, Marcus Aurelius said,
+would put half of Rome in limbo, just as, if we should technically
+enforce all laws, it would send most members of the Legislature to the
+penitentiary. So the Emperor declared de-facto marriage de jure, and for
+a short time succeeded in striking out the word illegitimate as applied
+to a person, on the ground that, in justice, no act of a parent could be
+charged up against and punished in the offspring.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Men who make laws have forever to watch most closely and dance
+attendance on Nature. Laws which fly in the face of Nature are gently
+waived or conveniently forgotten. Should Chief Justice Fuller issue an
+injunction restraining all men from coming within a quarter of a mile of
+a woman, on penalty of death, we would all place ourselves in contempt
+in an hour; and should the army try to enforce the order, we would
+smother Justice Fuller in his wool-sack and hang his effigy on a
+sour-apple tree. Law isn't worth the paper it is written on unless it
+embodies the will and natural tendencies of the governed. Where poaching
+is popular, no law can stop it. Marriage is easy, and divorce difficult,
+because this is Nature's plan. The natural law of attraction brings men
+and women together, and it is difficult to separate them. Natural things
+are easy, and artificial ones difficult. Most couples who desire freedom
+only think they do: what they really want is a vacation; but they would
+not separate for good if they could. It is hard to part--people who have
+lived together grow to need each other. They want some one to quarrel
+with.
+
+Caesar Augustus, in his close study of character, introduced a limited
+divorce. That is, in case of a family quarrel, he ordered the couple to
+live apart for six months as a penalty. Quintilian says that usually
+before the expired time the man and woman were surreptitiously living
+together again, at which the court quietly winked, and finally this
+form of penalty had to be abandoned because it made the courts
+ridiculous.
+
+Men and women do not get married because marriage is legal, nor do they
+continue living together because divorce is difficult. They marry
+because they desire to, and they do not separate because they do not
+want to. The task that confronts the legislator is to find out what the
+people want to do, and then legalize it.
+
+In Rome, the custom of the parties divorcing themselves was prevalent,
+and the courts were called upon to ratify the act, just to give the
+matter respectability. Below a certain stratum in society, the formality
+of legal marriage and divorce was waived entirely, just as it is
+largely, now, among our colored population in the South. During the
+French Revolution, the same custom largely obtained in France. And about
+the year One Hundred Fifty in Rome there was danger that the people
+would overlook the majesty of the law entirely in their domestic
+affairs. This condition is what prompted Marcus Aurelius to recognize as
+legal the common-law marriage and say if a couple called themselves
+husband and wife, they were. And for a time, if they said they were
+divorced, they were. But as a mortgage owned by a man on his own
+property cancels the debt, and legally there is no mortgage, so if the
+people could get married at will and divorce themselves at their
+convenience, there really was no legal marriage. Thus the matter was
+argued. So Marcus adopted the plan of making marriage easy and divorce
+difficult, and this has been the policy in all civilized countries ever
+since.
+
+It is very evident, however, that Marcus Aurelius looked forward to a
+time when men and women would be wise enough, and just enough, to
+arrange their own affairs, without calling on the police to ratify
+either their friendships or their misunderstandings. He says: "Love is
+beautiful, and that a man and a woman loving each other should live
+together is the will of God, but if there comes a time when they can not
+live in peace, let them part. To have no relationship is not a disgrace;
+to have wrong relations is, for disgrace means lack of grace, discord,
+and love is harmony."
+
+Marcus Aurelius tried the plan of probationary marriages; and to offset
+this he also introduced the Augustinian plan of probationary
+divorces--that is, the interlocutory decree. This scheme has recently
+been adopted in several States in America with the avowed intent of
+preventing fraud in divorce procedure, but actually the logic of the
+situation is the same now as in the time of Marcus Aurelius--it
+postpones the final decree so as to prevent the couple from becoming the
+victims of their own rashness, and to give them an opportunity to become
+reconciled if possible.
+
+So anxious was Marcus Aurelius to decide justly with his people that he
+found himself swamped with cases of every sort and description. He tried
+to pass upon each case by its merits, regardless of law and precedent.
+Then other judges construed his decisions as law, and the lesser courts
+cited the upper ones, until Gibbon says, "There grew up such a mass of
+judge-made laws that a skilful lawyer could prove anything, and legal
+practise swung on the ability to cite similar cases and call attention
+to desired decisions."
+
+In America we are now back exactly to the same condition. A lawyer in
+New York State requires over fourteen thousand law-books if he would
+cover all the ground; and his business is to make it easy for the judge
+to dispense justice and not dispense with law. That is to say, before a
+judge can decide a case, he must be able to back up his opinion by
+precedent. Judges are not elected to deal out justice between man and
+man; they are elected to decide on points of law. Law is often a great
+disadvantage to a judge--it may hamper justice--and in America there
+must surely soon come a day when we will make a bonfire of every
+law-book in the land, and electing our judges for life, we will make the
+judiciary free. We will then require our lawyers and judges to read, and
+pass examinations on Browning's "Ring and the Book," and none other. And
+if we would follow the Aurelian suggestion of remitting all direct taxes
+to every citizen who had not been plaintiff in a lawsuit for ten years,
+we would gradually get something approaching pure justice. The people
+must be educated to decide quietly and calmly their own disputes, and
+this can be done only by placing an obvious penalty on litigation.
+Progress in the future will consist in having less law, and fulfilment
+will be reached when we have no law at all--each man governing himself,
+and being willing that his neighbor shall do the same. Trouble arises
+largely from each man regarding himself as his brother's keeper, and
+ceasing to be his friend. Marcus Aurelius, the wise judge, saw that most
+litigation is foolish and absurd--both parties are at fault, and both
+right. And to bring about the good time when men shall live in peace, he
+began earnestly to govern himself. His ideal was a state where men would
+need no governing. Hence his "Meditations," a book which Dean Farrar
+says is not inferior to the New Testament in its lofty aim and purity of
+conception.
+
+Every great book is an evolution: Marcus had been getting ready to write
+this immortal volume for nearly half a century. And now in his
+fifty-seventh year he found himself in the desert of Asia at the head of
+the army, endeavoring to put down an insurrection of various barbaric
+tribes. Later, the seat of war was shifted to the north. The enemy
+struck and retreated, and danced around him as the Boers fought the
+English in South Africa.
+
+But Marcus Aurelius had time to think, and so with no books near and all
+memoranda far away, he began to write out his best thoughts. At first he
+expressed just for his own satisfaction, but later, as the work
+progressed, we see that its value grew upon him, and it was his
+intention to put it in systematic form for posterity. And while working
+at this task, the exposures of field and camp, and the business of war,
+in which he had no heart, worked upon him so adversely that he sickened
+and died, aged fifty-nine.
+
+His body was carried back to Rome and placed by the side of that of his
+beloved adopted father, Antoninus Pius. And so he sleeps, but the
+precious legacy of the "Meditations," written during those last two
+years of travel, turmoil and strife, is ours.
+
+A few quotations seem in order:
+
+     Remember, on every occasion which leads thee to vexation, to apply
+     this principle: not that this is a misfortune, but that to bear it
+     nobly is good fortune.
+
+     Things do not touch the soul, for they are eternal, and remain
+     immovable; but our perturbations come only from the opinion which
+     is within.... The Universe is transformation; life is opinion.
+
+     To the jaundiced, honey tastes bitter; and to those bitten by mad
+     dogs, water causes fear; and to little children, the ball is a fine
+     thing. Why then am I angry? Dost thou think that a false opinion
+     has less power than the bile in the jaundiced, or the poison in him
+     who is bitten by a mad dog?
+
+     How easy it is to repel and to wipe away every impression which is
+     troublesome and unsuitable, and immediately to be in all
+     tranquillity!
+
+     All things come from the universal Ruling Power, either directly or
+     by way of consequence. And accordingly the lion's gaping jaws, and
+     that which is poisonous, and every hurtful thing, as a thorn, as
+     mud, are after-products of the grand and beautiful. Do not
+     therefore imagine that they are of another kind from that which
+     thou dost venerate, but form a just opinion of the source of all.
+
+     Pass through the rest of life like one who has entrusted to the
+     gods, with his whole soul, all that he has, making himself neither
+     the tyrant nor the slave of any man.
+
+     Never value anything as profitable to thyself which shall compel
+     thee to break thy promise, to lose thy self-respect, to hate any
+     man, to suspect, to curse, to act the hypocrite, to desire anything
+     which needs walls and curtains.
+
+     I am thankful to the gods that I was subjected to a ruler and a
+     father who was able to take away all pride from me, and to bring me
+     to the knowledge that it is possible for a man to live in a palace
+     without wanting either guards or embroidered dresses, or torches
+     and statues, and such-like show; but that it is in such a man's
+     power to bring himself very near to the fashion of a private
+     person, without being, for this reason, either meaner in thought or
+     more remiss in action, with respect to the things which must be
+     done for the public interest in a manner that befits a ruler.
+
+     What more dost thou want when thou hast done a man a service? Art
+     thou not content that thou hast done something conformable to thy
+     nature, and dost thou seek to be paid for it? Just as if the eye
+     demanded a recompense for seeing, or the feet for walking. As a
+     horse when he has run, a dog when he has traced the game, a bee
+     when it has made the honey, so a man, when he has done a good act,
+     does not call out for others to come and see, but goes on to
+     another act, as a vine goes on to produce again the grapes in
+     season.
+
+     Accustom thyself to attend carefully to what is said by another,
+     and as much as it is possible, be in the speaker's mind.
+
+     Some things are hurrying into existence, and others are hurrying
+     out of it; and of that which is coming into existence, part is
+     already extinguished. Motions and changes are continually renewing
+     the world, just as the uninterrupted course of time is always
+     renewing the infinite duration of ages.
+
+     Understand that every man is worth just so much as the things are
+     worth about which he busies himself.
+
+     Wickedness does no harm at all to the universe--it is only harmful
+     to him who has it in his power to be released from it.
+
+     Nothing is more wretched than a man who traverses everything in a
+     round, and pries into the things beneath the earth, as the poet
+     says, and seeks by conjecture what is in the minds of his
+     neighbors, without perceiving that it is sufficient to attend to
+     the deity within him, and to reverence it sincerely.
+
+     The prayers of Marcus Aurelius to the gods are for one thing
+     only--that their will be done. All else is vain, all else is
+     rebellion against the universe itself. Our form of worship should
+     be like this: Everything harmonizes with me which is harmonious to
+     thee, O Universe. Nothing for me is too early nor too late, which
+     is in due time for thee. Everything is fruit to me which thy
+     seasons bring, O Nature: from thee are all things, in thee are all
+     things, to thee all things return.
+
+     In the morning when thou risest unwillingly, let this thought be
+     present--I am rising to the work of a human being. Why, then, am I
+     dissatisfied if I am going to do the things for which I exist, and
+     for which I was brought into the world? Or have I been made for
+     this, to lie in the bedclothes and keep myself warm? But this is
+     more pleasant. Dost thou exist, then, to take thy pleasure, and not
+     for action or exertion? Dost thou not see the little plants, the
+     little birds, the ants, the spiders, the bees, working together to
+     put in order their several parts of the universe? And art thou
+     unwilling to do the work of a human being, and dost thou not make
+     haste to do that which is according to thy nature?
+
+     Judge every word and deed which are according to Nature to be fit
+     for thee, and be not diverted by the blame which follows.... But if
+     a thing is good to be done or said, do not consider it unworthy of
+     thee.
+
+     Since it is possible that thou mayest depart from life this very
+     moment, regulate every act and thought accordingly.... Death
+     certainly, and life, honor and dishonor, pain and pleasure, all
+     these things equally happen to good men and bad, being things which
+     make us neither better nor worse. Therefore they are neither good
+     nor evil.
+
+     To say all in a word, everything which belongs to the body is a
+     stream, and what belongs to the soul is a dream and vapor; and life
+     is a warfare, and a stranger's sojourn, and after fame is oblivion.
+     What, then, is that which is able to enrich a man? One thing, and
+     only one--philosophy. But this consists in keeping the guardian
+     spirit within a man free from violence and unharmed, superior to
+     pains and pleasures, doing nothing without a purpose, nor yet
+     falsely, and with hypocrisy ... accepting all that happens and all
+     that is allotted ... and finally waiting for death with a cheerful
+     mind.
+
+     If thou findest in human life anything better than justice, truth,
+     temperance, fortitude, and, in a word, than thine own soul's
+     satisfaction in the things which it enables thee to do according to
+     right reason, and in the condition that is assigned to thee without
+     thy own choice; if, I say, thou seest anything better than this,
+     turn to it with all thy soul, and enjoy that which thou hast found
+     to be the best. But ... if thou findest everything else smaller and
+     of less value than this, give place to nothing else.... Simply and
+     freely choose the better, and hold to it.
+
+     Men seek retreats for themselves, houses in the country, seashores,
+     and mountains; and thou too art wont to desire such things very
+     much. But this is altogether a mark of the most common sort of men,
+     for it is in thy power whenever thou shalt choose to retire into
+     thyself. For nowhere either with more quiet or more freedom from
+     trouble does a man retire than into his own soul, particularly when
+     he has within him such thoughts that by looking into them he is
+     immediately in perfect tranquillity--which is nothing else than the
+     good ordering of the mind.
+
+     Unhappy am I, because this has happened to me? Not so, but happy am
+     I though this has happened to me, because I continue free from
+     pain; neither crushed by the present nor fearing the future.
+
+     Be cheerful, and seek no external help, nor the tranquillity which
+     others give. A man must stand erect, not be kept erect by others.
+
+     Be like the promontory against which the waves continually break,
+     but it stands firm and tames the fury of the water around it.
+
+     It is not fit that I should give myself pain, for I have never
+     intentionally given pain even to another.
+
+
+
+
+IMMANUEL KANT
+
+
+     The canons of scientific evidence justify us neither in accepting
+     nor rejecting the ideas upon which morality and religion repose.
+     Both parties to the dispute beat the air; they worry their own
+     shadow; for they pass from Nature into the domain of speculation,
+     where their dogmatic grips find nothing to lay hold upon. The
+     shadows which they hew to pieces grow together in a moment like the
+     heroes in Valhalla, to rejoice again in bloodless battles.
+     Metaphysics can no longer claim to be the cornerstone of religion
+     and morality. But if she can not be the Atlas that bears the moral
+     world she can furnish a magic defense. Around the ideas of religion
+     she throws her bulwark of invisibility; and the sword of the
+     skeptic and the battering-ram of the materialist fall harmless on
+     vacuity.
+
+                                                --_Immanuel Kant_
+
+[Illustration: IMMANUEL KANT]
+
+
+We find that most men fit easily into types. You describe to me one
+Durham cow and you picture all Durham cows. So it is with men: they
+belong to breeds, which we politely call denominations, sects or
+parties. Tell me the man's sect, and I know his dress, his habit of
+life, his thought. His dress is the uniform of his party, and his
+thought is that which is ordered and prescribed. Dull indeed is the
+intellect which can not correctly prophesy the opinions to which this
+man will arrive on any subject.
+
+Durham cows are not exactly alike, I well know, but a trifle more length
+of leg, a variation in color, or an off-angle of the horn, and that cow
+is forever barred from exhibition as a Durham. She is fit only for beef,
+and the first butcher that makes a bid takes her, hide and horns.
+
+Members of sects do not think exactly alike, but there are well-defined
+limits of thought and action, beyond which they dare not stray lest the
+butcher bag them. In joining a sect they have given bonds to uniformity,
+and have signed their willingness to think and act like all other
+members of the sect.
+
+Herbert Spencer deals with this "jiner" propensity in man, and describes
+it as a manifestation of the herding instinct in animals. It is a
+combination for mutual protection--a social contract, each one waiving a
+part of his personality in order to secure a supposed benefit. A herd of
+cattle can stand against a pack of wolves, but a cow alone is doomed.
+
+Few men indeed can stand against the pack. Wise are the many who seek
+safety in numbers! Think of those who have stood out alone and expressed
+their individuality, and you count on your fingers God's patriots dead
+and turned to dust.
+
+The paradox of things is shown in that the entrenched many, having found
+safety in aggregation, pay their debt of homage to the bold few who
+lived their lives and paid the penalty by death.
+
+Across the disk of existence, each decade, there glide five hundred
+million souls, and disappear forever in the dim and dusk of the eternity
+that lies behind. Out of the bare handful that are remembered, we
+cherish only the memories of those who stood alone and expressed their
+honest, inmost thought. And this thought is, always and forever, the
+thought of liberty. Exile, ostracism, death, have been their fate, and
+on the smoke of martyr-fires their souls mounted to immortality.
+
+Future generations often confuse these men with Deity, the Maker of the
+Worlds. And thus do we arrive at truth by indirection, for in very fact
+these were the Sons of God, vitalized by Divinity, part and parcel of
+the Power that guides the planets on their way and holds the worlds in
+space. Upon their tombs we carve a single word: _Savior_.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Kant was sixty years old before he was known to any extent beyond his
+native town; but so fast then did his fame travel that at his death it
+was recognized that the greatest thinker of the world had passed away.
+Kant founded no school; but Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, Herde and
+Schopenhauer were all his children--and all but Schopenhauer showed
+their humanity by denouncing him, for men are prone to revile that which
+has benefited them most. Kant marks an epoch and all thinkers who came
+after him are his debtors. His philosophy has passed into the current
+coin of knowledge.
+
+Kant's lifelong researches revolve around four propositions:
+
+  1. Who am I?
+  2. What am I?
+  3. What can I do?
+  4. What can I know?
+
+The answer to Number Four is that I can not know anything. That is to
+say, the wise man is the man who knows that he does not know. And this
+disposes of Number One and Number Two, leaving only Number Three for our
+consideration. It took, however, a good many years and a vast amount of
+study and writing for Kant to thus simplify. For years he toiled with
+algebraic formulas and syllogistic theorems before he concluded that the
+best wisdom of life lies in simplification, not complexity.
+
+"What can I do?" resolves itself into, "What must I do?" And the answer
+is: You must do four things in order to retain your place as a normal
+being upon this earth: eat, work, associate with your kind, rest. Just
+four things we must do, and outside of this everything is incidental,
+accidental, irrelevant and inconsequential. Then how to eat, work,
+associate and rest wisely and best constitutes life. Every man should be
+free to work out these four equations for himself, his freedom ending
+where another man's rights begin. To these four questions we should
+bring our highest reason, our ripest experience and our best endeavor.
+As for himself we know that Kant made a schedule of life which evolved a
+sickly boy into a reasonably strong man who banished pain, sorrow and
+regret from his existence and lived a long life of deep, quiet
+satisfaction, sane to the end, watching every symptom of approaching
+dissolution with keen interest, and at the last passing into quiet
+sleep, his spirit gliding peacefully away, perhaps to answer those two
+great questions which he said were unanswerable here: "Who am I?" "What
+am I?"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Immanuel Kant was born in Seventeen Hundred Twenty-four at the City of
+Konigsberg, in the northeastern corner of Prussia. There he received his
+education; there he was a teacher for nearly half a century; and there,
+in his eightieth year, he died. He was never out of East Prussia and
+never journeyed sixty miles from his birthplace during his whole life.
+Professor Josiah Royce of Harvard, himself in the sage business, and
+perhaps the best example that America has produced of the pure type of
+philosopher, says, "Kant is the only modern thinker who in point of
+originality is worthy to be ranked with Plato and Aristotle." Like
+Emerson, Kant regarded traveling as a fool's paradise; only Emerson had
+to travel much before he found it out, while Kant gained the truth by
+staying at home. Once a lady took him for a carriage ride, and on
+learning from the footman that they were seven miles from home he was so
+displeased that he refused to utter a single orphic on the way back; and
+further, the story is that he never after entered a vehicle, and living
+for thirty years was never again so far from the lodging he called home.
+
+In his lectures on physical geography Kant would often describe
+mountains, rivers, waterfalls, volcanoes, with great animation and
+accuracy, yet he had never seen any of these. Once a friend offered to
+take him to Switzerland, so he could actually see the mountains; but he
+warmly declined, declaring that the man who was not satisfied until he
+could touch, taste and see was small, mean and quibbling as was Thomas,
+the doubting disciple. Moreover, he had samples of the strata of the
+Alps, and this was enough, which reminds us of the man who had a house
+for sale and offered to send a prospective purchaser a sample brick.
+
+Mind was the great miracle to Kant--the ability to know all about a
+thing by seeing it with your inward eye. "The Imagination hath a stage
+within the brain upon which all scenes are played," and the play to Kant
+was greater than the reality. Or, to use his own words: "Time and Space
+have no existence apart from Mind. There is no such thing as Sound
+unless there be an ear to receive the vibrations. Things and places,
+matter and substance come under the same law, and exist only as mind
+creates them."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The parents of Kant were very lowly people. His father was a day
+laborer--a leather-cutter who never achieved even to the honors and
+emoluments of a saddler. There were seven children in the family, and
+never a servant crossed the threshold. One daughter survived Immanuel,
+and in her eighty-fourth year she expressed regrets that her brother had
+proved so recreant to the teachings of his parents as practically to
+alienate him from all his relatives. One brother became a Lutheran
+minister and lived out an honored career; the others vanish and fade
+away into the mist of forgetfulness.
+
+So far as we know, all the children were strong and well except this
+one. At birth he weighed but five pounds, and his weakness was pitiable.
+He was the kind of child the Spartans used to make way with quickly, for
+the good of the State. He had a big, bulging head, thin legs, a weak
+chest, and one shoulder was so much higher than the other that it
+amounted almost to a deformity.
+
+As the years went by, the parents saw he was not big enough to work, but
+hope was not dead--they would make a preacher of him! To this end he was
+sent to the "Fredericianium," a graded school of no mean quality. The
+master of this school was a worthy clergyman by the name of Schultz, who
+was attracted to the Kant boy, it seems, on account of his insignificant
+size. It was the affection of the shepherd for the friendless ewe lamb.
+A little later the teacher began to love the boy for his big head and
+the thoughts he worked out of it. Brawn is bought with a price--young
+men who bank on it get it as legal tender. Those who have no brawn have
+to rely on brain or go without honors. Immanuel Kant began to ask his
+school-teacher questions that made the good man laugh.
+
+At sixteen Kant entered Albertina University. And there he was to remain
+his entire life--student, tutor, teacher, professor.
+
+He must have been an efficient youth, for before he was eighteen he
+realized that the best way to learn is to teach. The idea of becoming a
+clergyman was at first strong upon him; and Pastor Schultz occasionally
+sent the youth out to preach, or lead religious services in rural
+districts. This embryo preacher had a habit of placing a box behind the
+pulpit and standing on it while preaching. Then we find him reasoning
+the matter out in this way: "I stand on a box to preach so as to impress
+the people by my height or to conceal my insignificant size. This is
+pretense and a desire to carry out the idea that the preacher is bigger
+every way than common people. I talk with God in pretended prayer, and
+this looks as if I were on easy and familiar terms with Deity. Is it
+like those folks who claim to be on friendly terms with princes: If I do
+not know anything about God, why should I pretend I do?"
+
+This desire to be absolutely honest with himself gradually grew until
+he informed the Pastor that he had better secure young men for preachers
+who could impress people without standing on a box. As for himself, he
+would impress people by the size of his head, if he impressed them at
+all. Let it here be noted that Kant then weighed exactly one hundred
+pounds, and was less than five feet high. His head measured twenty-four
+inches around, and fifteen and one-half inches over "firmness" from the
+opening of the ears. To put it another way, he wore a seven-and-a-half
+hat.
+
+It is a great thing for a man to pride himself on what he is and make
+the best of it. The pride of craftsman betokens a valuable man. We
+exaggerate our worth, and this is Nature's plan to get the thing done.
+
+Kant's pride of intellect, in degree, came from his insignificant form,
+and thus do all things work together for good. But this bony little form
+was often full of pain, and he had headaches, which led a wit to say,
+"If a head like yours aches, it must be worse than to be a giraffe and
+have a sore throat."
+
+Young Kant began to realize that to have a big head, and get the right
+use from it, one must have vital power enough to feed it.
+
+The brain is the engine--the lungs and digestive apparatus the boiler.
+Thought is combustion.
+
+Young Kant, the uncouth, became possessed of an idea that made him the
+butt of many gibes and jeers. He thought that if he could breathe
+enough, he would be able to think clearly, and headaches would be gone.
+Life, he said, was a matter of breathing, and all men died from one
+cause--a shortness of breath. In order to think clearly, you must
+breathe.
+
+We believe things first and prove them later; our belief is usually
+right, when derived from experience, but the reasons we give are often
+wrong. For instance, Kant cured his physical ills by going out of doors,
+and breathing deeply and slowly with closed mouth. Gradually his health
+began to improve. But the young man, not knowing at that time much about
+physiology, wrote a paper proving that the benefit came from the fresh
+air that circulated through his brain. And of course in one sense he was
+right. He related the incident of this thesis many years after in a
+lecture, to show the result of right action and wrong reasoning.
+
+The doctors had advised Kant he must quit study, but when he took up his
+breathing fad, he renounced the doctors, and later denounced them. If he
+were going to die, he would die without the benefit of either the clergy
+or the physicians.
+
+He denied that he was sick, and at night would roll himself in his
+blankets and repeat half-aloud, "How comfortable I am, how comfortable I
+am," until he fell asleep.
+
+Near his house ran a narrow street, just a half-mile long. He walked
+this street up and back, with closed mouth, breathing deeply, waving a
+rattan cane to ward away talkative neighbors, and to keep up the
+circulation in his arms. Once and back--in a month he had increased this
+to twice and back. In a year he had come to the conclusion that to walk
+the length of that street eight times was the right and proper
+thing--that is to say, four miles in all. In other words, he had found
+out how much exercise he required--not too much or too little. At
+exactly half-past three he came out of his lodging, wearing his cocked
+hat and long, snuff-colored coat, and walked. The neighbors used to set
+their clocks by him. He walked and breathed with closed mouth, and no
+one dare accost him or walk with him. The hour was sacred and must not
+be broken in upon: it was his holy time--his time of breathing.
+
+The little street is there now--one of the sights of Konigsberg, and the
+cab-drivers point it out as the Philosopher's Walk. And Kant walked that
+little street eight times every afternoon from the day he was twenty to
+within a year of his death, when eighty years old.
+
+This walking and breathing habit physiologists now recognize as
+eminently scientific, and there is no sensible physician but will
+endorse Kant's wisdom in renouncing doctors and adopting a regimen of
+his own. The thing you believe in will probably benefit you--faith is
+hygienic.
+
+The persistency of the little man's character is shown in the breathing
+habit--he believed in himself, relied on himself, and that which
+experience commended, he did.
+
+This firmness in following his own ideas saved his life. When we think
+of one born in obscurity, living in poverty, handicapped by pain,
+weakness and deformity; never traveling; and then by sheer persistency
+and force of will rising to the first place among thinking men of his
+time, one is almost willing to accept Kant's dictum, "Mind is supreme,
+and the Universe is but the reflected thought of God."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Kant was great enough to doubt appearances and distrust popular
+conclusions. He knew that fallacies of reasoning follow fast upon
+actions--reason follows by slow freight. It is quite necessary that we
+should believe in a Supreme Power, but quite irrelevant that we should
+prove it.
+
+Truth for the most part is unpopular, and the proof of this statement
+lies in the fact that it is so seldom told. Preachers tell people what
+they wish to hear, and indeed this must be so as long as the
+congregation that hears the preaching pays for it. People will not pay
+for anything they do not like. Hence, preaching leads naturally to
+sophistication and hypocrisy, and the promise of endless bliss for
+ourselves and a hell for our enemies comes about as a matter of course.
+What men will listen to and pay for is the real science of theology.
+That is to say, the science of theology is the science of manipulating
+men. Success in theology consists in finding a fallacy that is palatable
+and then banking on it. Again and again Kant points out that a
+clergyman's advice is usually worthless, because pure truth is out of
+his province--unaccustomed, undesirable, inexpedient.
+
+And Kant thought this was true also of doctors--doctors care more about
+pleasing their patients than telling them truth. "In fact," he said, "no
+doctor with a family to support can afford to tell his patients that his
+symptoms are no token of a disease--rather uncomfortable feelings are
+proof of health, for dead men don't have them." Most of the aches,
+pains and so-called irregularities are remedial moves on the part of
+Nature to keep the man well. Kant says that doctors treat symptoms, not
+diseases, and often the treatment causes the disease; so no man can tell
+what proportion of diseases is caused by medicine and what by other
+forms of applied ignorance.
+
+As for lawyers, our little philosopher considered them, for the most
+part, sharks and wreckers. A lawyer looks over an estate, not with the
+idea of keeping it intact, but of dissolving it, and getting a part of
+it for himself. Not that men prefer to do what is wrong, but
+self-interest can always produce sufficient reasons to satisfy the
+conscience. Lawyers, being attaches of courts of justice, regard
+themselves as protectors of the people, when really they are the
+plunderers of the people, and their business is quite as much to defeat
+justice as to administer it. The evasion of law is as truly a lawyer's
+work as compliance with law. Then our philosopher explains that if law
+and justice were synonymous, this state of affairs would be most
+deplorable; but as it is, no particular harm is worked, save in the
+moral degradation of the lawyers. The connivance of lawyers tames the
+rank injustices of law; hence, to a degree, we live in a land where
+there is neither law nor justice--save such justice as can be
+appropriated by the man who is diplomat enough to do without lawyers and
+wise enough to have no property. Justice, however, to Kant is a very
+uncertain quantity, and he is rather inclined to regard the idea that
+men are able to administer justice as on a par with the assumption of
+the priest that he is dealing with God.
+
+Kant once said, "When a woman demands justice, she means revenge."
+
+A pupil here interposed, and asked the master if this was not equally
+true of men, and the answer was, "I accept the amendment--it certainly
+is true of all men I ever saw in courtrooms."
+
+"Does death end all?"
+
+"No," said Kant; "there is the litigation over the estate."
+
+Kant's constant reiteration that he had no use for doctors, lawyers and
+preachers, we can well imagine did not add to his popularity. As for his
+reasoning concerning lawyers, we can all, probably, recall a few
+jug-shaped attorneys who fill the Kant requirements--takers of
+contingent fees and stirrers-up of strife: men who watch for vessels on
+the rocks and lure with false lights the mariner to his doom. But
+matters since Kant's day have changed considerably for the better. There
+is a demand now for a lawyer who is a businessman and who will keep
+people out of trouble instead of getting them in. And we also have a few
+physicians who are big enough to tell a man there is nothing the matter
+with him, if they think so, and then charge him accordingly--in inverse
+ratio to the amount of medicine administered.
+
+And while we no longer refer to the clergyman as our spiritual adviser,
+except, perhaps, in way of pleasantry, he surely is useful as a social
+promoter.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The parents of Kant were Lutherans--punctilious and pious. They were
+descended from Scotch soldiers who had come over there two hundred years
+before and settled down after the war, just as the Hessians settled down
+and went to farming in Pennsylvania, their descendants occasionally
+becoming Daughters of the Revolution, because their grandsires fought
+with Washington.
+
+This Scotch strain gave a sturdy bias to the Kants--these Lutherans were
+really rebels, and as every one knows, there are only two ways of
+dealing with a religious Scotchman--agree with him or kill him.
+
+Most people said that Kant was supremely stubborn--he himself called it
+"firmness in the right." Once, when a couple of calumniators were
+thinking up all the bad things they could say about him, one of them
+exclaimed, "He isn't five feet high!"
+
+"Liar!" came the shrill voice of the Philosopher, who had accidentally
+overheard them, "Liar! I am exactly five feet!" And he drew himself up,
+and struck his staff proudly and defiantly on the ground.
+
+Which reminds one of the story told of Professor Josiah Royce, who once
+rang up six fares on the register when he wished to stop a Boston
+street-car. When the conductor protested, the philosopher called him
+"up-start," "curmudgeon" and "nincompoop," and showed the fallacy of his
+claim that thirty cents had been lost, since nobody had found it.
+Moreover, he offered to prove his proposition by algebraic equation, if
+one of the gentlemen present had chalk and blackboard on his person.
+
+Once Kant was looking at the flowers in a beautiful garden. But instead
+of looking through the iron pickets, he stooped over and was squinting
+through the key-hole of the lock. A student coming along asked him why
+he didn't look through the pickets and thus get a perfect view.
+
+"Go on, you fool," was the stern reply; "I am studying the law of
+optics--the unobstructed vision reveals too much--the vivid view is only
+gotten through a small aperture."
+
+All of which was believed to be a sudden inspiration in way of reply
+that came to the great professor when caught doing an absent-minded
+thing. That Kant was not above a little pious prevarication is shown by
+a story he himself tells. He was never inside of a church once during
+the last fifty years of his life. But when he became Chancellor of the
+University, one of his duties was to lead a procession to the Cathedral,
+where certain formal religious services were held. Kant tried to have
+the exercises in a hall, but failing in this, he did his duty, and
+marched like a pigmy drum-major at the head of the cavalcade.
+
+"Now he will have to go in," the scoffers said.
+
+But he didn't. Arriving at the church-door, he excused himself, pleading
+an urgent necessity, walked around to the back of the church,
+sacrificed, like Diogenes, to all the gods at once, and made off for
+home, quietly chuckling to himself at the thought of how he had
+circumvented the enemy.
+
+Every actor has just so many make-ups and no more. Usually the
+characters he assumes are variations of a single one. Steele Mackaye
+used to say, "There are only five distinct dramatic situations." The
+artist, too, has his properties. And the recognition of this truth
+caused Massillon to say, "The great preacher has but one sermon, yet out
+of this he makes many--by giving portions of it backwards, or beginning
+in the middle and working both ways, or presenting patchwork pieces,
+tinted and colored by his mood." All public speakers have canned goods
+they fall back upon when the fresh fruit of thought grows scarce.
+
+The literary man also has his puppets, pet phrases, and situations to
+his liking. Victor Hugo always catches the attention by a blind girl, a
+hunchback, a hunted convict or some mutilated and maimed unfortunate.
+
+In his lectures, Kant used to please the boys by such phrases as this,
+"I dearly love the muse, although I must admit that I have never been
+the recipient of any of her favors." This took so well that later he was
+encouraged to say, "The Old Metaphysics is positively unattractive, but
+the New Metaphysics is to me most lovely, although I can not boast that
+I have ever been honored by any of her favors."
+
+A large audience caused Kant to lose his poise--he became
+self-conscious--but in his own little lecture-room, with a dozen, or
+fifty at the most (because this was the capacity of the room), he was
+charming. He would fix his eye on a single boy, and often upon a single
+button on this boy's coat, and forgetting the immediate theme in hand,
+would ramble into an amusing and most instructive monolog of criticism
+concerning politics, pedagogy or current events. In his writing he was
+exact, heavy and complex, but in these heart-to-heart talks, Herder, who
+attended Kant's lectures for five years, says, "The man had a deal of
+nimble wit, and here Kant was at his best."
+
+So we have two different men--the man who wrote the "Critique" and the
+man who gave the lectures and clarified his thought by explaining things
+to others. It was in the lectures that he threw off this: "Men are
+creatures that can not do without their kind, yet are sure to quarrel
+when together." This took fairly well, and later he said, "Men can not
+do without men, yet they hate each other when together." And in a year
+after, comes this: "A man is miserable without a wife, and is seldom
+happy after he gets one." No doubt this caused a shout of applause from
+the students, college boys being always on the lookout for just such
+things; and coming from a very confirmed old bachelor it was peculiarly
+fetching.
+
+To say that Kant was devoid of wit, as many writers do, is not to know
+the man. About a year after the "Critique of Pure Reason" appeared, he
+wrote this: "I am obliged to the learned public for the silence with
+which it has honored my book, as this silence means a suspension of
+judgment and a wise determination not to voice a premature opinion." He
+knew perfectly well that the "learned public" had not read his book, and
+moreover, could not, intelligently, and the silence betokened simply a
+stupid lack of interest. Moreover, he knew there was no such thing as a
+learned public. Kant's remark reveals a keen wit, and it also reveals
+something more--the pique of the unappreciated author who declares he
+doesn't care what the public thinks of him, and thereby reveals the fact
+that he does.
+
+Here are a couple of remarks that could only have been made in the reign
+of Frederick the Great, and under the spell of a college lecture: "The
+statement that man is the noblest work of God was never made by anybody
+but man, and must therefore be taken 'cum grano salis.'" "We are told
+that God said He made man in His own image, but the remark was probably
+ironical."
+
+Schopenhauer says: "The chief jewel in the crown of Frederick the Great
+is Immanuel Kant. Such a man as Kant could not have held a salaried
+position under any other monarch on the globe at that time and have
+expressed the things that Kant did. A little earlier or a little later,
+and there would have been no such person as Immanuel Kant. Rulers are
+seldom big men, but if they are big enough to recognize and encourage
+big men, they deserve the gratitude of mankind!"
+
+
+
+
+SWEDENBORG
+
+
+     When a man's deeds are discovered after death, his angels, who are
+     inquisitors, look into his face, and extend their examination over
+     his whole body, beginning with the fingers of each hand. I was
+     surprised at this, and the reason was thus explained to me:
+
+     Every volition and thought of man is inscribed on his brain; for
+     volition and thought have their beginnings in the brain, thence
+     they are conveyed to the bodily members, wherein they terminate.
+     Whatever, therefore, is in the mind is in the brain, and from the
+     brain in the body, according to the order of its parts. So a man
+     writes his life in his physique, and thus the angels discover his
+     autobiography in his structure.
+
+                                      --_Swedenborg's "Spirit World"_
+
+
+[Illustration: SWEDENBORG]
+
+
+A bucolic citizen of East Aurora, on being questioned by a visitor as to
+his opinion of a certain literary man, exclaimed: "Smart? Is he smart?
+Why, Missus, he writes things nobody can understand!"
+
+This sounds like a paraphrase (but it isn't) of the old lady's remark on
+hearing Henry Ward Beecher preach. She went home and said, "I don't
+think he is so very great--I understood everything he said!"
+
+Paganini wrote musical scores for the violin, which no violinist has
+ever been able to play. Victor Herbert has recently analyzed some of
+these compositions and shown that Paganini himself could never have
+played them without using four hands and handling two bows at once. So
+far, no one can play a duet on the piano; the hand can span only so many
+keys, and the attempt of Robert Schumann to improve on Nature by
+building an artificial extension to his fingers was vetoed by paralysis
+of the members. Two bodies can not occupy the same space at the same
+time; mathematics has its limit, for you can not look out of a window
+four and a half times. The dictum of Ingersoll that all sticks and
+strings have two ends has not yet been disproved; and Herbert Spencer
+discovered, for his own satisfaction, fixed limits beyond which the
+mind can not travel. His expression, the Unknowable, reminds one of
+those old maps wherein vast sections were labeled, Terra Incognita.
+
+If we read Emanuel Swedenborg, we find that these vast stretches in the
+domain of thought which Herbert Spencer disposed of as the Unknowable
+have been traversed and minutely described. Swedenborg's books are so
+learned that even Herbert Spencer could not read them: his scores are so
+intricate, his compositions so involved, that no man can play them.
+
+The mystic who sees more than he can explain is universally regarded as
+an unsafe and unreliable person. The people who consult him go away and
+do as they please, and faith in his prophecies weaken as his opinions
+and hopes vary from theirs. We stand by the clairvoyant just as long as
+he gives us palatable things, and no longer, and nobody knows this
+better than your genus clairvoyant. When his advice is contrary to our
+desires, we pronounce him a fraud and go our way. When enterprises of
+great pith and moment are to be carried through, we give the power into
+the hands of the worldling infidel, rather than the spiritual seer.
+
+The person on intimate terms with another world seldom knows much about
+this, and when Robert Browning tells of Sludge, the Medium, he symbols
+his opinion of all mediums. A medium, if sincere, is one who has
+abandoned his intellect and turned the bark of reason rudderless,
+adrift. This is entirely apart from the very common reinforcement of
+usual psychic powers with fraud, which, beginning in self-deception,
+puts out from port without papers and sails the sea with forged letters
+of marque and reprisal.
+
+There are mediums in every city who tell us they are guided by
+Shakespeare, Dante, Milton, Luther, Tennyson or Henry Ward Beecher. So
+we are led to believe that the chief business of great men in the
+spiritual realm is to guide commonplace men in this, and cause them to
+take pen in hand.
+
+All publishers are perfectly familiar with these productions written by
+people who think they are psychic when they are only sick. And I have
+never yet seen a publisher's reader who had found anything in
+inspirational writing but words, words, words. High-sounding paraphrases
+and rolling sentences do not make literature; and so far as we know,
+only the fallible, live and loving man or woman can breathe into the
+nostrils of a literary production the breath of life. All the rest is
+only lifeless clay.
+
+That mystery enshrouds the workings of the mind, and that some people
+have remarkable mental experiences, none will deny. People who can not
+write at all in a normal mood will, under a psychic spell, produce
+high-sounding literary reverberations, or play the piano or paint a
+picture. Yet the literature is worthless, the music indifferent, and the
+picture bad; but, like Doctor Johnson's simile of the dog that walked
+on its hind legs, while the walking is never done well, we are amazed
+that it can be done at all.
+
+The astounding assumption comes in when we leap the gulf and attribute
+these peculiar rappings and all this ability of seeing around a corner
+to disembodied spirits. The people with credulity plus, however, always
+close our mouths with this, "If it isn't spirits, what in the world is
+it?" And we, crestfallen and abashed, are forced to say, "We do not
+know."
+
+The absolute worthlessness of spiritual communication comes in when we
+are told by the medium, caught in a contradiction, that spirits are
+awful liars. On this point all mediums agree: many disembodied spirits
+are much given to untruth, and the man who is a liar here will be a liar
+there.
+
+Swedenborg was so annoyed with this disposition on the part of spirits
+to prevaricate that he says, "I usually conduct my affairs regardless of
+their advice." When a spirit came to him and said, "I am the shade of
+Aristotle," Swedenborg challenged him, and the spirit acknowledged he
+was only Jimmy Smith. This is delightfully naive and surely reveals the
+man's sanity: he was deceived by neither living nor dead: he accepted or
+rejected communications as they appealed to his reason: he kept his
+literature and his hallucinations separate from his business, and never
+did a thing which did not gibe with his reason. In this way he lived to
+be eighty, earnest, yet composed, serene, steering safely clear from
+Bedlam, by making his commonsense the court of last appeal.
+
+Emerson says that the critic who will render the greatest gift to modern
+civilization is the one who will show us how to fuse the characters of
+Shakespeare and Swedenborg. One stands for intellect, the other for
+spirituality. We need both, but we tire of too much goodness, virtue
+palls on us, and if we hear only psalms sung, we will long for the clink
+of glasses and the brave choruses of unrestrained good-fellowship. A
+slap on the back may give you a thrill of delight that the touch of holy
+water on your forehead can not lend.
+
+Shakespeare hasn't much regard for concrete truth; Swedenborg is devoted
+to nothing else. Shakespeare moves jauntily, airily, easily, with
+careless indifference; Swedenborg lives earnestly, seriously, awfully.
+Shakespeare thinks that truth is only a point of view, a local issue, a
+matter of geography; Swedenborg considers it an exact science, with
+boundaries fixed and cornerstones immovable, and the business of his
+life was to map the domain.
+
+If you would know the man Shakespeare, you will find him usually in cap
+and bells. Jaques, Costard, Trinculo, Mercutio, are confessions, for
+into the mouths of these he puts his wisest maxims. Shakespeare dearly
+loved a fool, because he was one. He plays with truth as a kitten
+gambols with a ball of yarn.
+
+So Emerson would have us reconcile the holy zeal for truth and the swish
+of this bright blade of the intellect. He himself confesses that after
+reading Swedenborg he turns to Shakespeare and reads "As You Like It"
+with positive delight, because Shakespeare isn't trying to prove
+anything. The monks of the olden time read Rabelais and Saint Augustine
+with equal relish.
+
+Possibly we take these great men too seriously--literature is only
+incidental, and what any man says about anything matters little, except
+to himself. No book is of much importance; the vital thing is: What do
+you yourself think?
+
+When we read Shakespeare in a parlor class there are many things we read
+over rapidly--the teacher does not stop to discuss them. The remarks of
+Ophelia or the shepherd talk of Corin are indecent only when you stop
+and linger over them; it will not do to sculpture such things--let them
+forever remain in gaseous form. When George Francis Train picked out
+certain parts of the Bible and printed them, and was arrested for
+publishing obscene literature, the charge was proper and right. There
+are things that need not to be emphasized--they may all be a part of
+life, but in books they should be slurred over as representing simply a
+passing glimpse of nature.
+
+And so the earnest and minute arguments of Swedenborg need not give us
+headache in efforts to comprehend them. They were written for himself,
+as a scaffolding for his imagination. Don't take Jonathan Edwards too
+seriously--he means well, but we know more. We know we do not know
+anything, and he never got that far.
+
+The bracketing of the names of Shakespeare and Swedenborg is eminently
+well. They are Titans both. In the presence of such giants, small men
+seem to wither and blow away. Swedenborg was cast in heroic mold, and no
+other man since history began ever compassed in himself so much physical
+science, and with it all on his back, made such daring voyages into the
+clouds.
+
+The men who soar highest and know most about another world usually know
+little about this. No man of his time was so competent a scientist as
+Swedenborg, and no man before or since has mapped so minutely the
+Heavenly Kingdom.
+
+Shakespeare's feet were really never off the ground. His excursion in
+"The Tempest" was only in a captured balloon. Ariel and Caliban he
+secured out of an old book of fables.
+
+Shakespeare knew little about physics; economics and sociology never
+troubled him; he had small Latin and less Greek; he never traveled, and
+the history of the rocks was to him a blank.
+
+Swedenborg anticipated Darwin in a dozen ways; he knew the classic
+languages and most of the modern; he traveled everywhere; he was a
+practical economist, and the best civil engineer of his day.
+
+Shakespeare knew the human heart--where the wild storms arise and where
+the passions die--the Delectable Isles where Allah counts not the days,
+and the swamps where love turns to hate and Hell knocks on the gates of
+Heaven. Shakespeare knew humanity, but little else; Swedenborg knew
+everything else, but here he balked, for woman's love never unlocked for
+him the secrets of the human heart.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Emanuel Swedenborg was born at Stockholm, Sweden, in Sixteen Hundred
+Eighty-eight. His father was a bishop in the Lutheran Church, a
+professor in the theological seminary, a writer on various things, and
+withal a man of marked power and worth. He was a spiritualist, heard
+voices and received messages from the spirit world. It will be
+remembered that Martin Luther, in his monkish days, heard voices, and
+was in communication with both angels and devils. Many of his followers,
+knowing of his strange experiences, gave themselves up to fasts and
+vigils, and they, too, saw things. Abstain from food for two days and
+this sense of lightness and soaring is the usual result. So strong is
+example, and so prone are we to follow in the footsteps of those we
+love, that one "psychic" is sure to develop more. Little Emanuel
+Swedenborg, aged seven, saw angels, too, and when his father had a
+vision, he straightway matched it with a bigger one.
+
+Then we find the mother of the boy getting alarmed, and peremptorily
+putting her foot down and ordering her husband to cease all celestial
+excursions.
+
+Emanuel was set to work at his books and in the garden, and no more
+rappings was he to hear, nor strange white lights to see, until he was
+fifty-six years old.
+
+Sweden is the least illiterate country on the globe, and has been for
+three hundred years. Her climate is eminently fitted to produce one fine
+product--men. The winter's cold does not subdue nor suppress, but tends
+to that earnest industry which improves the passing hours. The
+Scandinavians make hay while the sun shines; but in countries where the
+sun shines all the time men make no hay. In Florida, where flowers bloom
+the whole year through, even the bees quit work and say, "What's the
+use?"
+
+Emanuel Swedenborg climbed the mountains with his father, fished in the
+fjords, collected the mosses on the rocks, and wrote out at length all
+of their amateur discoveries. The boy grew strong in body, lithe of
+limb, clear of eye--noble and manly.
+
+His affection for his parents was perfect. When fifteen he addressed to
+them letters of apostrophe, all in studied words of deference and
+curious compliment, like, say, the letters of Columbus to Ferdinand and
+Isabella. His purity of purpose was sublime, and the jewel of his soul
+was integrity.
+
+At college he easily stood at the head of his class. He reduced calculus
+to its simplest forms, and made abstractions plain. Even his tutors
+could not follow him. Once the King's actuary was called upon to verify
+some of his calculations. This brought him to the notice of the King,
+and thereafter he was always on easy and familiar terms with royalty.
+There is no hallucination in mathematics--figures do not lie, although
+mathematicians may, but this one never did.
+
+We look in vain for college pranks, and some of those absurd and
+foolish things in which young men delight. We wish he could unbend, and
+be indiscreet, or even impolite, just to show us his humanity. But no,
+he is always grave, earnest, dignified, and rebukingly handsome. The
+college "grind" with bulging forehead, round shoulders, myopic vision
+and shambling gait is well known in every college, and serves as the
+butt of innumerable practical jokes. But no one took liberties with
+Emanuel Swedenborg either in boyhood or in after-life. His countenance
+was stern, yet not forbidding; his form tall, manly and muscular, and
+his persistent mountain-climbing and outdoor prospecting and botanizing
+gave him a glow of health which the typical grubber after facts very
+seldom has.
+
+Thus we find Emanuel Swedenborg walking with stately tread through
+college, taking all the honors, looked upon by teachers and professors
+with a sort of awe, and pointed out by his fellow students in subdued
+wonder. His physical strength became a byword, yet we do not find he
+ever exercised it in contests; but it served as a protection, and
+commanded respect from all the underlings.
+
+At twenty we find him falling violently in love, the one sole
+love-affair of his lone life. Instead of going to the girl he placed the
+matter before her father, and secured from him a written warrant for the
+damsel, returnable in three years' time. This document he carried with
+him, pored over it, slept with it under his pillow. As for the girl,
+timid, sensitive, aged fifteen, she fled on his approach, and shook with
+fear if he looked at her. He made his love plain by logical formulas and
+proved his passion by geometrical permutations--by charts and diagrams.
+A seasoned widow might have broken up the icy fastness of his soul and
+melted his forbidding nature in the crucible of feeling, but this poor
+girl just wanted some one to hold her little hand and say peace to her
+fluttering heart. How could she go plump herself in his lap, pull his
+ears and tell him he was a fool? Finally, the girl's brother, seeing her
+distress, stole the precious warrant from Swedenborg's coat, tore it up,
+and Swedenborg knew his case was hopeless. He brought calculus to bear,
+and proved by the law of averages that there were just as good fish in
+the sea as ever were caught.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+At twenty-one Swedenborg graduated at the University of Upsala. He took
+the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, and was sent on a tour of the
+European capitals to complete his education. He visited Hamburg, Paris,
+Vienna and then went to London, where he remained a year. He bore
+letters from the King of Sweden that admitted him readily into the best
+society, and as far as we know he carried himself with dignity, filled
+with a zeal to know and to become.
+
+One prime object in his travel was to learn the language of the country
+that he was in, and so we hear of his writing home, "In Hamburg I speak
+only German; at Paris I talk and think in French; in London no one
+doubts but that I am an Englishman." This not only reveals the young
+man's accomplishments, but shows that sublime confidence in himself
+which never forsook him.
+
+The desire of his father was that he should enter the diplomatic service
+of the government, and the interest the King took in his welfare shows
+that the way was opening in that direction. But in the various cities
+where he traveled he merely used his consular letters to reach the men
+in each place who knew most of mathematics, anatomy, geology, astronomy
+and physics. He hunted out the thinkers and the doers, and it seems he
+had enough specific gravity of soul so he was never turned away.
+
+When big men meet for the first time, they try conclusions just as
+surely as do the patriarchs of the herds. Instantly there is a mental
+duel, before scarcely a word is spoken, and the psychic measurements
+then and there taken are usually about correct.
+
+The very silence of a superior person is impressive. And knowing this,
+we do not wonder that Swedenborg would sometimes call unannounced on men
+in high station, and forgetting his letters, would ask for an interview.
+The audacity of the request would break down the barriers, and his calm,
+quiet self-possession would do the rest. The man wanted nothing but
+knowledge. Returning home at twenty-seven, he wrote out two voluminous
+reports of his travels, one for his father and one for the King. These
+reports were so complete, so learned, so full of allusion, suggestion
+and advice, that it is probable they were never read.
+
+He was made Assessor of the School of Mines, an office which we would
+call that of Assayer, and his business was to give scientific advice as
+to the value of ores and the best ways to mine and smelt them.
+
+About this time we hear of Swedenborg writing to his brother explaining
+that he was working on the model of a boat that would navigate below the
+surface of the sea, and do great damage to the enemy; a gun that would
+discharge a thousand bullets a minute; a flying machine that would sail
+the air like a gull; a mechanical chariot that would go twenty miles an
+hour on a smooth road without horses; and a plan of mathematics which
+would quickly and simply enable us to compute and express fractions. We
+also hear of his inventing a treadmill chariot, which carried the horse
+on board the vehicle, but the horse once ran away and attained such a
+velocity in the streets of Stockholm that people declared the whole
+thing was a diabolical invention, and in deference to popular clamor
+Swedenborg discontinued his experiments along this line.
+
+One is amazed that this man in the early days of the Eighteenth Century
+should have anticipated the submarine boat, and guessed what could be
+done by the expansion of steam; prophesied a Gatling gun, and made a
+motor-car that carried the horse, working on a treadmill and propelling
+the vehicle faster than the horse could go on the ground; and if the
+inventor had had the gasoline he surely would have made an automobile.
+
+His diversity of inventive genius was finally focalized on building
+sluiceways and canals for the government, and he set Holyoke an example
+by running the water back and forth in canals and utilizing the power
+over and over again.
+
+Later he was called upon to break a blockade by transferring ships
+overland a distance of fourteen miles. This he successfully did by the
+use of a roller railway, and as a reward for the feat was duly knighted
+by the King.
+
+The one idea that he worked out in detail and gave to the world, and
+which the world has not improved upon, is our present decimal system.
+
+As the years passed, Swedenborg became rich. He lived well, but not
+lavishly. We hear of his having his private carriages and being attended
+by servants on his travels.
+
+He lectured at various universities, and on account of his close
+association with royalty, as well as on account of his own high
+character and strong personality, he was a commanding figure wherever he
+went. His life was full to the brim.
+
+And we naturally expect that a man of wealth, with all the honors
+belonging to any one person, should take on a comforting accumulation of
+adipose, and encyst himself in the conventionalities of church, state
+and society.
+
+And this was what the man himself saw in store, for at forty-six he
+wrote a book on science, setting forth his ideas and making accurate
+prophecies as to what would yet be brought about. He regrets that a
+multiplicity of duties and failing health forbid his carrying out his
+plans, and further adds, "As this is probably the last book I shall ever
+write, I desire here to make known to posterity these thoughts which so
+far as I know have never been explained before."
+
+The real fact was that at this time Swedenborg's career had not really
+begun, and if he had then died, his fame would not have extended beyond
+the country of his birth.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Mr. Poultney Bigelow, happening to be in Brighton, England, a few years
+ago, was entertained at the home of a worthy London broker. The family
+was prosperous and intelligent, but clung closely to all conventional
+and churchly lines. As happens often in English homes, the man does most
+of the thinking and sets metes and bounds to all conversation as well as
+reading. The mother refers to him as "He," and the children and servants
+look up to him and make mental obeisance when he speaks.
+
+"I hear Herbert Spencer lives in Brighton--do you ever see him?"
+ventured the guest of the hostess, in a vain reaching 'round for a topic
+of mutual interest. "Spencer--Spencer? Who is Herbert Spencer?" asked
+the good mother.
+
+But "He" caught the run of the talk and came to the rescue: "Oh, Mother,
+Spencer is nobody you are interested in--just a writer of infidelic
+books!"
+
+The next day Bigelow called on Spencer and saw upon his table a copy of
+"Science and Health," which some one had sent him. He smiled when the
+American referred to the book, and in answer to a question said: "It is
+surely interesting, and I find many pleasing maxims scattered through
+it. But we can hardly call it scientific, any more than we can call
+Swedenborg's 'Conjugal Love' scientific." And the author of "First
+Principles" showed he had read Mrs. Eddy's book, for he turned to the
+chapter on "Marriage," calling attention to the statement that marriage
+in its present status is a permitted condition--a matter of
+expediency--and children will yet be begotten by telepathic
+correspondence. "The unintelligibility of the book recommends it to many
+and accounts for its vogue. Swedenborg's immortality is largely owing to
+the same reason," and the man who once loved George Eliot smiled not
+unkindly, and the conversation drifted to other themes.
+
+This comparison of Swedenborg with Mary Baker Eddy is not straining a
+point. No one can read "Science and Health" intelligently unless his
+mind is first prepared for it by some one whose mind has been prepared
+for it by some one else. It requires a deal of explanation; and like the
+Plan of Salvation, no one would ever know anything about it if it wasn't
+elucidated by an educated person.
+
+Books strong in abstraction are a convenient rag-bag for your mental
+odds and ends. Swedenborg's philosophy is "Science and Health"
+multiplied by forty. He lays down propositions and proves them in a
+thousand pages.
+
+Yet this must be confessed: The Swedenborgians and the Christian
+Scientists as sects rank above most other denominations in point of
+intellectual worth. In speaking of the artist Thompson, Nathaniel
+Hawthorne once wrote: "This artist is a man of thought, and with no mean
+idea of art, a Swedenborgian, or, as he prefers to call it, a member of
+the New Church. I have generally found something marked in men who
+adopt that faith. He seems to me to possess truth in himself, and to aim
+at it is his artistic endeavor."
+
+Swedenborg's essay on "Conjugal Love" contains four hundred thousand
+words and divides the theme into forty parts, each of these being
+subdivided into forty more. The delights of paradise are pictured in the
+perfect mating of the right man with the right woman. In order to
+explain what perfect marriage is, Swedenborg works by the process of
+elimination and reveals every possible condition of mismating. Every
+error, mistake, crime, wrong and fallacy is shown in order to get at the
+truth. Swedenborg tells us that he got his facts from four husbands and
+four wives in the Spirit Land, and so his statements are authentic.
+Emerson disposes of Swedenborg's ideal marriage as it exists in heaven,
+as "merely an indefinite bridal-chamber," and intimates that it is the
+dream of one who had never been disillusioned by experience.
+
+In Maudsley's fine book, "Body and Mind," the statement is made that
+during Swedenborg's stay in London his life was decidedly promiscuous.
+Fortunately the innocence and ignorance of Swedenborg's speculations are
+proof in themselves that his entire life was absolutely above reproach.
+Swedenborg's bridal-chamber is the dream of a school-girl, presented by
+a scientific analyst, a man well past his grand climacteric, who
+imagined that the perpetuation of sexual "bliss" was a desirable thing.
+
+Emerson hints that there is the taint of impurity in Swedenborg's
+matrimonial excursions, for "life and nature are right, but closet
+speculations are bound to be vicious when persisted in." Max Mueller's
+little book, "A Story of German Love," showing the intellectual and
+spiritual uplift that comes from the natural and spontaneous friendship
+of a good man and woman, is worth all the weighty speculations of all
+the virtuous bachelors who ever lived and raked the stagnant ponds of
+their imagination for an ideal.
+
+The love of a recluse is not God's kind--only running water is pure; the
+living love of a live man and woman absolves itself, refines, benefits,
+and blesses, though it be the love of Aucassin and Nicolete, Plutarch
+and Laura, Paola and Francesca, Abelard and Heloise, and they go to hell
+for it.
+
+From his thirty-fourth year to his forty-sixth Swedenborg wrote nothing
+for publication. He lectured, traveled, and advised the government on
+questions of engineering and finance, and in various practical ways made
+himself useful. Then it was that he decided to break the silence and
+give the world the benefit of his studies, which he does in his great
+work, "Principia." Well does Emerson say that this work, purporting to
+explain the birth of worlds, places the man side by side with Aristotle,
+Leonardo, Bacon, Selden, Copernicus and Humboldt.
+
+It is a book for giants, written by one. Although the man was a nominal
+Christian, yet to him, plainly, the Bible was only a book of fables and
+fairy-tales. The Mosaic account of Creation is simply waived, as we
+waive Jack the Giant-Killer when dealing with the question of capital
+punishment.
+
+That Darwin read Swedenborg with minute care, there is no doubt. In the
+"Principia" is a chapter on mosses wherein it is explained how the first
+vestige of lichen catches the dust particles of disintegrating rock, and
+we get the first tokens of a coming forest. Darwin never made a point
+better; and the nebular hypothesis and the origin of species are worked
+out with conjectures, fanciful flights, queer conceits, poetic
+comparisons, far-reaching analogies, and most astounding leaps of
+imagination.
+
+The man was warming to his task--this was not to be his last book--the
+heavens were opening before him, and if he went astray it was light from
+heaven that dazzled him. No one could converse with him, because there
+was none who could understand him; none could refute him, because none
+could follow his winding logic, which led to heights where the air was
+too rarefied for mortals to breathe. He speculated on magnetism,
+chemistry, astronomy, anatomy, geology and spiritism. He believed a
+thing first and then set the mighty machinery of his learning to bear to
+prove it. This is the universal method of great minds--they divine
+things first. But no other scientist the world has ever known divined
+as much as this man. He reminds us of his own motor-car, with the horse
+inside running away with the machine and none to stop the beast in its
+mad flight. To his engine there is no governor, and he revolves like the
+screw of a steamship when the waves lift the craft out of the water.
+
+There is no stimulant equal to expression. The more men write the more
+they know. Swedenborg continued to write, and following the "Principia"
+came "The Animal Kingdom," "The Economy of the Universe," and more vast
+reaches into the realm of fact and fancy. His books were published at
+his own expense, and the work was done under his own supervision at
+Antwerp, Amsterdam, Venice, Vienna, London and Paris. In all these
+cities he worked to get the benefit of their libraries and museums.
+
+Popularity was out of the question--only the learned attempted to follow
+his investigations, and these preferred to recommend his books rather
+than read them. And as for heresy, his disbelief in popular
+superstitions was so veiled in scientific formulas that it went
+unchallenged. Had he simplified truth for the masses his career would
+have been that of Erasmus. His safety lay in his unintelligibility. He
+was gracious, gentle, suave, with a calm self-confidence that routed
+every would-be antagonist.
+
+It was in his fifty-sixth year that the supreme change came over him. He
+was in London, in his room, when a great light came to him. He was
+prostrated as was Saint Paul on the road to Damascus; he lost
+consciousness, and was awakened by a reassuring voice. Christ came to
+him and talked with him face to face; he was told that he would be shown
+the inmost recesses of the Spirit World, and must write out the
+revelation for the benefit of humanity.
+
+There was no disturbance in the man's general health, although he
+continued to have visions, trances and curious dreams. He began to
+write--steadily, day by day the writings went on--but from this time
+experience was disregarded, and for him the material world slept; he
+dealt only with spiritual things, using the physical merely for analogy,
+and his geology and botany were those of the Old Testament.
+
+Returning to Stockholm he resigned his government office, broke his
+engagements with the University, repudiated all scientific studies, and
+devoted himself to his new mission--that is, writing out what the
+spirits dictated, and what he saw on his celestial journeys.
+
+That there are passages of great beauty and insight in his work, is very
+sure, and by discarding what one does not understand, and accepting what
+seems reasonable and right, a practical theology that serves and
+benefits can be built up. The value of Swedenborg lies largely in what
+you can read into him.
+
+The Swedish Protestant Church in London chose him as their bishop
+without advising with him. Gradually other scattering churches did the
+same, and after his death a well-defined cult, calling themselves
+Swedenborgians, arose and his works were ranked as holy writ and read in
+the churches, side by side with the Bible.
+
+Swedenborg died in London, March Twenty-ninth, Seventeen Hundred
+Seventy-two, aged eighty-four years. Up to the very day of his passing
+away he enjoyed good health, and was possessed of a gentle, kind and
+obliging disposition that endeared him to all he met. There is an idea
+in the minds of simple people that insanity is always accompanied by
+violence, ravings and uncouth and dangerous conduct. Dreams are a
+temporary insanity--reason sleeps and the mind roams the universe,
+uncurbed and wildly free. On awakening, for an instant we may not know
+where we are, and all things are in disorder; but gradually time,
+location, size and correspondences find their proper place and we are
+awake.
+
+Should, however, the dreams of the night continue during the day, when
+we are awake and moving about, we would say the man was insane.
+Swedenborg could become oblivious to every external thing, and dream at
+will. And to a degree his mind always dictated the dreams, at least the
+subject was of his own volition. If it was necessary to travel or
+transact business, the dreams were postponed and he lived right here on
+earth, a man of good judgment, safe reason and proper conduct.
+
+Unsoundness of mind is not necessarily folly. Across the murky clouds of
+madness shoots and gleams, at times, the deepest insight into the heart
+of things. And the fact that Swedenborg was unbalanced does not warrant
+us in rejecting all he said and taught as false and faulty. He was
+always well able to take care of himself and to manage his affairs
+successfully, even to printing the books that contain the record of his
+ravings. Follow closely the lives of great inventors, discoverers, poets
+and artists, and it will be found that the world is debtor to so-called
+madmen for many of its richest gifts. Few, indeed, are they who can
+burst the bonds of custom and condition, sail out across the unknown
+seas, and bring us records of the Enchanted Isles. And who shall say
+where originality ends and insanity begins? Swedenborg himself
+attributed his remarkable faculties to the development of a sixth sense,
+and intimates that in time all men will be so equipped. Death is as
+natural as life, and possibly insanity is a plan of Nature for sending a
+searchlight flash into the darkness of futurity. Insane or not, thinking
+men everywhere agree that Swedenborg blessed and benefited the
+race--preparing the way for the thinkers and the doers who should come
+after him.
+
+
+
+
+SPINOZA
+
+
+     Men are so made as to resent nothing more impatiently than to be
+     treated as criminal on account of opinions which they deem true,
+     and charged as guilty for simply what wakes their affection to God
+     and men. Hence, laws about opinions are aimed not at the base but
+     at the noble, and tend not to restrain the evil-minded but rather
+     to irritate the good, and can not be enforced without great peril
+     to the Government.... What evil can be imagined greater for a
+     State, than that honorable men, because they have thoughts of their
+     own and can not act a lie, are sent as culprits into exile! What
+     more baneful than that men, for no guilt or wrongdoing, but for the
+     generous largeness of their mind, should be taken for enemies and
+     led off to death, and that the torture-bed, the terror of the bad,
+     should become, to the signal shame of authority, the finest stage
+     for the public spectacle of endurance and virtue!
+
+                                                --_Benedict Spinoza_
+
+[Illustration: SPINOZA]
+
+
+The word philosophy means the love of truth: "philo," love; "soph,"
+truth; or, if you prefer, the love of that which is reasonable and
+right. Philosophy refers directly to the life of man--how shall we live
+so as to get the most out of this little Earth-Journey!
+
+Life is our heritage--we all have so much vitality at our disposal--what
+shall we do with it?
+
+Truth can be proved in just one way, and no other--that is, by living
+it. You know what is good, only by trying. Truth, for us, is that which
+brings good results--happiness or reasonable content, health, peace and
+prosperity. These things are all relative--none are final, and they are
+good only as they are mixed in right proportion with other things.
+Oxygen, we say, is life, but it is also death, for it attacks every
+living thing with pitiless persistency. Hydrogen is good, but it makes
+the very hottest fire known, and may explode if you try to confine it.
+
+Prosperity is excellent, but too much is very dangerous to most folks;
+and to seek happiness as a final aim is like loving love as a
+business--the end is desolation, death. Good health is best secured and
+retained by those who are not anxious about health. Absolute good can
+never be known, for always and forever creeps in the suspicion that if
+we had acted differently a better result might have followed.
+
+And that which is good for one is not necessarily good for another.
+
+But there are certain general rules of conduct which apply to all men,
+and to sum these up and express them in words is the business of the
+philosopher. As all men live truth, in degree, and all men express some
+truth in language, so to that extent all men are philosophers; but by
+common assent, we give the title only to the men who make other men
+think for themselves.
+
+Whistler refers to Velasquez as "a painter's painter." John Wesley said,
+"No man is worthy to be called a teacher, unless he be a teacher of
+teachers." The great writer is the one who inspires writers. And in this
+book I will not refer to a man as a philosopher unless he has inspired
+philosophers.
+
+Preachers and priests in the employ of a denomination are attorneys for
+the defense. God is not found in a theological seminary, for very seldom
+is the seminary seminal--it galvanizes the dead rather than vitalizes
+the germs of thought in the living. No man understands theology--it is
+not intended to be understood; it is merely believed. Most colleges are
+places where is taught the gentle art of sophistication; and memorizing
+the theories of great men gone passes for knowledge.
+
+Words are fluid and change their meaning with the years and according to
+the mind and mood of the hearer. A word means all you read into it, and
+nothing more. The word "soph" once had a high and honorable distinction,
+but now it is used to point a moral, and the synonym of sophomore is
+soft.
+
+Originally the sophist was a lover of truth; then he became a lover of
+words that concealed truth, and the chief end of his existence was to
+balance a feather on his nose and keep three balls in the air for the
+astonishment and admiration of the bystanders.
+
+Education is something else.
+
+Education is growth, development, life in abundance, creation.
+
+We grow only through exercise. The faculties we use become strong, and
+those we fail to use are taken away from us.
+
+This exercise of our powers through which growth is attained affords the
+finest gratification that mortals know. To think, reason, weigh, sift,
+decide and act--this is life. It means health, sanity and length of
+days. Those live longest who live most.
+
+The end of college education to the majority of students and parents is
+to secure a degree, and a degree is valuable only to the man who needs
+it. Visiting the office of the "Outlook," a weekly, religious newspaper,
+I noticed that the titles, Rev., Prof, and Dr., and the degrees, M. D.,
+D. D., LL. D., Ph. D., were carefully used by the clerks in addressing
+envelopes and wrappers. And I said to the manager, "Why this misuse of
+time and effort? The ink thus wasted should be sold and the proceeds
+given to the poor!" And the man replied, "To omit these titles and
+degrees would cost us half our subscription-list." And so I assume that
+man is a calculating animal, not a thinking one.
+
+And the point of this sermonette is that truth is not monopolized by
+universities and colleges; nor must we expect much from those who parade
+degrees and make professions. It is one thing to love truth and it is
+another thing to lust after honors.
+
+The larger life--the life of love, health, self-sufficiency, usefulness
+and expanding power--this life in abundance is often taught best out of
+the mouths of babes and sucklings. It is not esoteric, nor hidden in
+secret formulas, nor locked in languages old and strange.
+
+No one can compute how much the bulwarked learned ones have blocked the
+path of wisdom. Socrates, the barefoot philosopher, did more good than
+all the Sophists with their schools. Diogenes, who lived in a tub,
+searched in vain for an honest man, owned nothing but a blanket and a
+bowl, and threw the bowl away when he saw a boy drinking out of his
+hand, even yet makes men think, and so blesses and benefits the race.
+Jesus of Nazareth, with no place to lay his tired head, associating with
+publicans and sinners, and choosing his closest companions from among
+ignorant fishermen, still lives in the affections of millions of people,
+a molding force for good untold. Friedrich Froebel, who first preached
+the propensity to play as a pedagogic dynamo, as the tides of the sea
+could be used to turn the countless wheels of trade, is yet only
+partially accepted, but has influenced every teacher in Christendom and
+stamped his personality upon the walls of schoolrooms unnumbered. Then
+comes Richard Wagner, the political outcast, writing from exile the
+music that serves as a mine for much of our modern composing, marching
+down the centuries to the solemn chant of his "Pilgrims' Chorus";
+William Morris, Oxford graduate and uncouth workingman in blouse and
+overalls, arrested in the streets of London for haranguing crowds on
+Socialism, let go with a warning, on suspended sentence--canceled only
+by death--making his mark upon the walls of every well-furnished house
+in England or America; Jean Francois Millet, starved out in art-loving
+Paris, his pictures refused at the Salon, living next door to abject
+want in Barbizon, dubbed the "wild man of the woods," dead and turned to
+dust, his pictures commanding such sums as Paris never before paid; Walt
+Whitman, issuing his book at his own expense, publishers having refused
+it, this book excluded from the mails, as Wanamaker immortalized himself
+by serving a like sentence on Tolstoy; Walt Whitman, riding on top of a
+Broadway 'bus all day, happy in the great solitude of bustling city
+streets, sending his barbaric yawp down the ages, singing paeans to those
+who fail, chants to Death--strong deliverer--and giving courage to a
+fear-stricken world; Thoreau, declining to pay the fee of five dollars
+for his Harvard diploma "because it wasn't worth the price," later
+refusing to pay poll-tax and sent to jail, thus missing, possibly, the
+chance of finding that specimen of Victoria regia on Concord
+River--Thoreau, most virile of all the thinkers of his day, inspiring
+Emerson, the one man America could illest spare; Spinoza, the
+intellectual hermit, asking nothing, and giving everything--all these
+worked their philosophy up into life and are the type of men who jostle
+the world out of its ruts--creators all, one with Deity, sons of God,
+saviors of the race.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Washington Irving once spoke of Spain as the Paradise of Jews. But it
+must be borne in mind that he wrote the words in Granada, which was
+essentially a Moorish province. The Moors and the Jews are both Semitic
+in origin--they trace back to a common ancestry. It was the Moslem Moors
+that welcomed the Jews in both Venetia and Spain, not the Christians.
+The wealth, energy and practical business sense of the Jews recommended
+them to the grandees of Leon, Aragon and Castile. To the Jews they
+committed their exchequer, the care of their health, the setting of
+their jewels, and the fashioning of their finery. In this genial
+atmosphere many of the Jews grew great in the study of science,
+literature, history, philosophy and all that makes for mental
+betterment. They increased in numbers, in opulence and in culture. Their
+thrift and success set them apart as a mark for hate and envy.
+
+It was a period of ominous peace, of treacherous repose.
+
+A senseless and fanatical cry went up, that the Moors--the
+infidels--must be driven from Spain. The iniquities and inhuman
+barbarities visited upon the Mohammedan Moors would make a book in
+itself, but let it go at this: Ferdinand and Isabella drove the
+Mohammedans from Spain. In the struggle, the Jews were overlooked--and
+anyway, Christians do not repudiate the Old Testament, and if the Jews
+would accept Christ, why, they could remain!
+
+It looked easy to the gracious King and Queen of Spain--it was really
+generous: two religions were unnecessary, and Christianity was beautiful
+and right. If the Jews would become Catholics, all barriers would be
+removed--the Jews would be recognized as citizens and every walk of life
+would be open to them.
+
+This manifesto to the Jews is still quoted by Churchmen to show the
+excellence, tolerance, patience and love of the Spanish rulers. Turn
+your synagogues over to the Catholics--come and be one with us--we will
+all worship the one God together--come, these open arms invite--no
+distinctions--no badges--no preferences--no prejudices--come!
+
+In quoting the edict it is not generally stated that the Jews were given
+thirty days to make the change.
+
+The Jews who loved their faith fled; the weak succumbed, or pretended
+to. If a Jew wished to flee the country he could, but he must leave all
+his property behind. This caused many to remain and profess
+Christianity, only awaiting a time when their property could be turned
+into gold or jewels and be borne upon the person. This fondness for
+concrete wealth is a race instinct implanted in the Jewish mind by the
+inbred thought that possibly tomorrow he must fly.
+
+After attending service at a Catholic Church, Jews would go home and in
+secret read the Talmud and in whispers chant the Psalms of David.
+
+Laws were passed making such action a penal offense--spies were
+everywhere. No secret can be kept long, and in the Province of Seville
+over two thousand Jews were hanged or burned in a single year. When
+Ferdinand and Isabella gave Torquemada, Deza and Lucio orders to make
+good Catholics of all Jews, they had not the faintest idea what would be
+the result. Every Jew that was hurried to the stake was first stripped
+of his property.
+
+No Jew was safe, especially if he was rich--his sincerity or insincerity
+had really little to do in the matter. The prisons were full, the fagots
+crackled, the streets ran blood, and all in the name of the gentle
+Christ.
+
+Then for a time the severity relaxed, for the horror had spent itself.
+But early in the Seventeenth Century the same edicts were again put
+forth.
+
+Fortunately, priesthood had tried its mailed hand on the slow and
+sluggish Dutch, with the result that the Spaniards were driven from the
+Netherlands. Holland was the home of freedom. Amsterdam became a Mecca
+for the oppressed. The Jews flocked thither, and among others who, in
+Sixteen Hundred Thirty-one, landed on the quay was a young Jew by the
+name of Michael d'Espinoza. With him was a Moorish girl that he had
+rescued from the clutch of a Spanish grandee, in whose house she had
+been kept a prisoner.
+
+By a happy accident, this beautiful girl of seventeen had escaped from
+her tormentors and was huddling, sobbing, in an alley as the young Jew
+came hurrying by on his way to the ship that was to bear him to
+freedom. It was near day-dawn--there was no time to lose--the young man
+only knew that the girl, like himself, was in imminent peril. A small
+boat waited near--soon they were safely secreted in the hold of the
+ship. Before sundown the tide had carried the ship to sea, and Portugal
+was but a dark line on the horizon.
+
+Other refugees were on board the boat; they came from their
+hiding-places--and the second day out a refugee rabbi called a meeting
+on deck. It was a solemn service of thanksgiving and the songs of Zion
+were sung, the first time for some in many months, and only friends and
+the great, sobbing, salt sea listened.
+
+The tears of the Moorish girl were now dried--the horror of the future
+had gone with the black memories of the past. Other women, not quite so
+poor, contributed to her wardrobe, and there and then, after she had
+been accepted into the Jewish faith, she and Michael d'Espinoza, aged
+twenty-two, were married.
+
+The ship arrived at Amsterdam in safety. In a year, on November
+Twenty-fourth, Sixteen Hundred Thirty-two, in a little stone house that
+still stands on the canal bank, was born Benedict Spinoza.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Benedict Spinoza was brought up in the faith and culture of his people.
+Beyond his religious training at the synagogue, there was a Jewish High
+School at Amsterdam which he attended. This school might compare very
+favorably with our modern schools, in that it included a certain degree
+of manual training. Besides this he had received special instruction
+from several learned rabbis. In matters of true education, the Jews have
+ever been in advance of the Gentile world--they bring their children up
+to be useful. The father of Benedict was a maker of lenses for
+spectacles, and at this trade the boy was very early set to work. Again
+and again in the writings of Spinoza, we find the argument that every
+man should have a trade and earn his living with his hands, not by
+writing, speaking or philosophizing. If you can earn a living at your
+trade, you thus make your mind free.
+
+This early idea of usefulness led to a sympathy with another religious
+body, of which there were quite a number of members in Holland: the
+Mennonites. This sect was founded by Menno Simons, a Frieslander,
+contemporary of Luther; only this man swung on further from Catholicism
+than Luther and declared that a paid priesthood was what made all the
+trouble. Religion to him was a matter of individual inspiration. When an
+institution was formed, built on man's sense of relation with his Maker,
+property purchased, and paid priests employed, instantly there was a
+pollution of the well of life. It became a money-making scheme, and a
+grand clutch for place and power followed: it really ceased to be
+religion at all, so long as we define religion in its spiritual sense.
+"A priest," said Menno, "is a man who thrives on the sacred relations
+that exist between man and God, and is little better than a person who
+would live on the love-emotions of men and women."
+
+This certainly was bold language, but to be exact, it was persecution
+that forced the expression. The Catholics had placed an interdict on all
+services held by Protestant pastors, and the deprivation proved to Menno
+that paid preaching and costly churches and trappings were really not
+necessary at all. Man could go to God without them, and pray in secret.
+Spirituality is not dependent on either church or priest.
+
+The Mennonites in Holland escaped theological criticism by disclaiming
+to be a church, and calling their institution a college, and themselves
+"Collegiants."
+
+All the Mennonites asked was to be let alone. They were plain,
+unpretentious people, who worked hard, lived frugally, refused to make
+oaths, to accept civil office, or to go to war. They are a variant of
+the impulse that makes Quakers and all those peculiar people known as
+Primitive Christians, who mark the swinging of the pendulum from pride
+and pretense to simplicity and a life of modest usefulness.
+
+The sincerity, truthfulness and virtue of the Mennonites so impressed
+itself upon even the ruthless Corsican, that he made them exempt from
+conscription.
+
+Before Spinoza was twenty, he had come into acquaintanceship with these
+plain people. His relationship with the rabbis and learned men of Israel
+had given him a culture that the Mennonites did not possess; but these
+plain people, by the earnestness of their lives, showed him that the
+science of theology was not a science at all. Nobody understands
+theology: it is not meant to be understood--it is for belief. Spinoza
+compared the Mennonites, who confessed they knew nothing, but hoped
+much, to the rabbis, who pretended they knew all. His praise of the
+Mennonites, and his criticisms of the growing love for power in Judaism,
+were carried to the Jewish authorities by some young men who had come to
+him in the guise of learners. Moreover, the report was abroad that he
+was to marry a Gentile--the daughter of Van den Ende, the infidel.
+
+On order, he appeared at the synagogue, and defended his position. His
+ability in argument, his knowledge of Jewish law, his insight into the
+lessons of history, were alarming to the assembled rabbis. The young man
+was quiet, gentle, but firm. He expressed the belief that God might
+possibly have revealed Himself to other peoples beside the Jews.
+
+"Then you are not a Jew!" was the answer.
+
+"Yes, I am a Jew, and I love my faith."
+
+"But it is not all to you?"
+
+"I confess that occasionally I have found what seems to be truth
+outside of the Law."
+
+The rabbis tore their raiment in mingled rage and surprise at the young
+man's temerity.
+
+Spinoza did not withdraw from the Jewish Congregation--he was thrust
+out. Moreover, a fanatical Jew, in the warmth of his religious zeal,
+attempted to kill him. Spinoza escaped, his clothing cut through by a
+dagger-thrust, close to the heart.
+
+The curse of Israel was upon him--his own brothers and sisters refused
+him shelter, his father turned against him, and again was the icy
+unkindness of kinsmen made manifest. The tribe of Spinoza lives in
+history, saved from the fell clutch of oblivion by the man it denied
+with an oath and pushed in bitterness from its heart. Spinoza fled to
+his friends, the Mennonites, plain market-gardeners who lived a few
+miles out of the city.
+
+Spinoza had not meant to leave the Jews--the racial instinct was strong
+in him, and the pride of his people colored his character to the last.
+But the attempts to bribe him and coerce him into a following of
+fanatical law, when this law did not appeal to his commonsense, forced
+him into a position that his enemies took for innate perversity. When an
+eagle is hatched in a barnyard brood and mounts on soaring pinions
+toward the sun, it is always cursed and vilified because it does not
+remain at home and scratch in the compost. Its flight skyward is
+construed as proof of its vile nature.
+
+How can people who do not think, and can not think, and therefore have
+no thoughts to express, sympathize with one whose highest joy comes from
+the expression of his thought?
+
+Deprive a thinker of the privilege to think and you take from him his
+life. The joy of existence lies in self-expression. What if we should
+order the painter to quit his canvas, the sculptor to lay aside his
+tools, the farmer to leave the soil? Do these things, and you do no more
+than you do when you force a thinker to follow in the groove that dead
+men have furrowed. The thirst for knowledge must be slaked or the soul
+sickens and slow death follows.
+
+In Spinoza's time the literature of Greece and Rome was locked in the
+Latin language, which the Jews were forbidden to acquire. Young Spinoza
+longed to know what Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Seneca and Vergil had
+taught, but these authors were considered anathema by the rabbinical
+councils. Spinoza desired to be honest, and so asked for a special
+dispensation in his favor, as he was to be a teacher--could he study the
+Latin language?
+
+And the answer was, "Read your Joshua, first chapter and eighth verse,
+'This book of the law shall not depart out of thy mouth, but thou shalt
+meditate therein day and night.'"
+
+From this time on Spinoza was more or less under the ban, and rumors of
+his heresy were rife. It is possible, if it had not been for one
+person, that the growing desire for knowledge, the reaching out for
+better things, the dissatisfaction with his environment, might have
+passed in safety and the restless young rabbi slipped back into the
+conventional Jew. Youth always has its periods of unrest--sometimes
+more, sometimes less.
+
+Spinoza had made the acquaintance of Van den Ende, a teacher of Greek
+and Latin, an erratic, argumentative rationalist, who had his say on all
+topics of the time, and fixed his place in history by being shot as a
+revolutionary, just outside the walls of the Bastile.
+
+But at this time Van den Ende was fairly prosperous and Amsterdam was
+the freest city in Christendom.
+
+Van den Ende had a daughter, Clara Maria, a little younger than Spinoza,
+who surely was a most superior woman. She was the companion of her
+father in his studies. It speaks well for the father and it speaks well
+for the daughter that they were comrades and that his highest thought
+was expressed to her. I can conceive of no finer joy coming to a man
+than, as his hair whitens, to have a daughter who understands him at his
+best, who enters into his life, sympathizes with his ideals, ministers
+to his mental needs, who is his companion and friend. Only a great man
+ever has such a daughter. Madame De Stael, who delighted in being called
+"the daughter of Necker," was such a woman, and the splendor of her mind
+was no less her father's glory than was the fact that he was the
+greatest financier of his time.
+
+Clara Van den Ende was her father's helper and companion, and when he
+was busied in other tasks she took charge of his classes.
+
+Auerbach has written a charming story with Clara Van den Ende and
+Spinoza as a central theme. In the tale is pictured with skilful
+psychology the awakening of the sleeping soul of Spinoza as he was
+introduced from a cheerless home, devoid of art and freedom, into the
+beauties of undraped Greece and the fine atmosphere of a forum where
+nothing human was considered alien.
+
+From a love for Vergil, Cicero and Horace, to a love for each other, was
+a very natural sequence. A growing indifference for the censure of
+Judaism was quite a natural result. Auerbach would have us believe that
+no man alone ever stood out against the revilings of kinsmen and the
+stupidity of sectarians: we move in the line of least resistance and
+only a very great passion makes it possible for a man calmly to face the
+contumely of an angry world.
+
+Zangwill, in his vivid sketch, "The Maker of Lenses," makes this single
+love-episode in the life of Spinoza the controlling impulse of his life,
+probably reasoning on the premise that men who mark epochs are ever and
+always, without exception, those with the love nature strongly implanted
+in their hearts. So thoroughly does Zangwill believe in the one passion
+of Spinoza's life, that a score of years after the chief incident of it
+had transpired, he pictures the philosopher trembling at mention of the
+woman's name, coughing to conceal his agitation and clutching the
+doorpost for support. And this a man who smilingly faced a mob that
+howled for his life, and was only moved to philosophize on the nature of
+human intellect when a flying stone grazed his cheek!
+
+But the lady had ambitions--the lens-maker was penniless, and probably
+always would be--his passion was passive--he lacked the show and dash
+that made other women jealous. And so Oldenburg, a rival with love and
+jewels, won the heart that could not be won by love alone. That the lady
+soon knew she had erred did not help her case--Spinoza loved his ideal,
+and he had thought it was the woman.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Follow Zangwill's stories of the Ghetto and your heart is wrung by the
+injustice, cruelty and inhumanity visited upon the Jews by the people
+who worship a Jew as God and make daily supplications to a Jewess.
+
+But read between the lines and you will see that Israel Zangwill, child
+of the Ghetto, knows that the Peculiar People are peculiar through
+persecution, and not necessarily so through innate nature. Zangwill
+knows that no religion is pure except in its stage of persecution, and
+that Judaism, grown rich and powerful, would oppress and has oppressed.
+Martyr and persecutor shift places easily.
+
+The Jew arrives in a city at night, and in the morning takes down the
+shutters and is doing business. The Jew winds his way into the life of
+every city and becomes at once an integral part of it--a part, yet
+separate and distinct, for his social and religious life is not colored
+by his environment.
+
+Children imitate unconsciously. The golden rule is not natural to
+children: it has to be taught them. They do unto others as others have
+done unto them, and have no question as to right or wrong. We are all
+children, and have to think hard before we are conscious of any feeling
+of the brotherhood of man. As soon as the Jews relaxed in Amsterdam--got
+their breath, and felt secure--they did unto others as they had been
+done by--they persecuted.
+
+A Jew must be a Jew, and as they had been watched with suspicion in
+Spain and Portugal by the Christians, so now they watched each other for
+heresies. They compelled strictest obedience to every form and ceremony.
+To the Jew the Law forms the firmament above and the earth beneath. All
+is law to him, and his part and work in this life is obedience to law.
+
+The Jewish religion is a concrete, unbroken mass of laws. The Jew is
+bounded on the east by law; on the north by law; on the west by law; on
+the south by law. There are set rules and laws that govern his getting
+up, his going to bed, his eating, drinking, sleeping, and praying. There
+is no phase of human relationship that is not covered by the Mishna and
+Gemara. Being learned in the Law means being learned in the proper way
+to kill chickens, to dress ducks, wear your vestments, go to prayers,
+and what to say when you meet two Christians in an alley. If a Jew
+quarrels with a neighbor and goes to his Rabbi for advice, the learned
+man gets down his Talmud and finds the page. The relation of wife and
+husband, child and parent, brother and sister, lover and sweetheart, are
+covered by law, fixed, immovable. The learned men of Judah are men
+learned in the Law, not learned in the science of life, and commonsense.
+When these learned men meet they argue for six days and nights together
+as to interpretations of the Law concerning whether it is right to make
+a fire in your cook-stove on the Sabbath if a Christian is starving for
+food on your doorstep, or what will become of you if you eat pork to
+save your life.
+
+Rational Jews are those who do what they think is right, but Orthodox
+Jews are those who do what the Law prescribes. When Jesus plucked the
+ears of corn on the Sabbath day, he proved himself a Rational Jew--he
+set his own opinion higher than Law and thereby made himself an outcast.
+Jewish Law provides curdling curses for just such offenses.
+
+Plato's Republic was a scheme of life regulated absolutely by law; every
+contingency was provided for. And Plato's plan was founded on the
+hypothesis that it is the duty of wise men to do the thinking and
+regulate the conduct of those who are supposed not to be wise enough to
+think and to act for themselves. But Plato's idea lacked the "Thus saith
+the Lord," with which Moses and Aaron enforced their edicts. So Plato's
+Republic is still on paper, for no set of rules minutely regulating
+conduct has ever been enforced except as the ruler made his subjects
+believe he received his instructions direct from God.
+
+Yet all the Jewish Laws are founded with an eye to a sanitary and
+hygienic good--they are built on the basis of expediency. And that rule
+of the Gemara which provides that if you have gravy on the table, you
+can not also have butter, without sin, seems more of a move in the
+direction of economics than a matter of ethics. Laws are good for the
+people who believe that a blind obedience to a good thing is better than
+to work your way alone and find out for yourself what is best and
+right. The Jewish Law is based, like all religious codes, on the
+assumption that man by nature is vile, and really prefers wrong to
+right.
+
+The thought that all men prefer the good, and think at the moment they
+are doing what is best, no matter what they do, was first sharply and
+clearly expressed by Spinoza. Truth, he said, could only be reached
+through freedom--a man must even have the privilege of thinking wrong so
+long as his actions do not jeopardize the life and immediate safety of
+others.
+
+For a people whose every act is governed by fixed laws there can be no
+progression. Mistakes are the rungs of the ladder by which we reach the
+skies. The man who allows the dead to regulate his life, and accepts
+their thinking as final, satisfied to repeat what he is taught, remains
+forever in the lowlands. His wings are leaden.
+
+The Jews--most law-bound and priest-ridden of all peoples--are at home
+everywhere because they have no home. They mix in the life of every
+nation and remain forever separate and apart. They will run with you,
+ride with you, trade with you, but they will not eat with you nor pray
+with you. They build no Altars to the Unknown God, out of courtesy to
+visitors and guests from distant climes. Mohammedans recognize the
+divinity of Jesus, the Buddhists look upon him as one of many Christs,
+the Universalist sees good in every faith, but the Jew regards all other
+religions than his own as pestilence. If by chance, or in the line of
+business, he finds himself in a heathen temple or Christian Church, his
+Gemara orders that he shall present himself at his own temple for
+purification.
+
+Read Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy, and you behold on every page
+curses, revilings, threats and bitter scorn for all outside the pale.
+Orders by Jehovah to burn, kill and utterly destroy are frequent. And we
+must remember that every people make their god in their own image. A
+man's God is himself at his best; his devil is himself at his worst.
+
+The very expression, "The Chosen People," would be an insult to every
+man outside the pale, were it not such a petulant and childish boast
+that its serious assumption makes us smile.
+
+Well does Moses Mendelssohn, the Jew, say: "The Ghetto is an arrangement
+first contrived by Jews for keeping infidels out of a sacred precinct.
+When the infidels were strong enough they turned the tables and forbade
+the Jews to leave their Ghetto except at certain hours. For the misery,
+poverty and squalor of the Ghetto the Jew is not to blame--if he could,
+he would have the Ghetto a place of opulence, beauty and all that makes
+for the good. Every undesirable thing he would bestow on the outsider.
+In the twilight days of Jewish power, the Jew, with bigotry, arrogance
+and intolerance unsurpassed, regulated the infidels and fixed their
+goings and comings as they now do his, and he would do it again if he
+had the power. The Jew never changes--once a Jew always a Jew."
+
+This was written by a man who was not only a Jew, but a man. He was a
+Jew in pride of race--in racial instinct, but he was great enough to
+know that all men are God's children, and that to set up a fixed,
+dogmatic standard regulating every act of life has its serious
+penalties. He was a Jew so big that he knew that the cruelty and
+inhumanity visited upon the Jews by Christians was first taught to these
+Christians by Jews--it is all in the Old Testament. The villainy you
+have taught me I will execute. It shall go hard, but I will better the
+instruction.
+
+The Christians who had persecuted Jews were really orthodox Jews in
+disguise, and were actuated more by the Jewish Law expressed in the Old
+Testament, than by the life of Jesus, who placed man above the Sabbath
+and taught that the good is that which serves.
+
+And so Benedict Spinoza, the Rabbi, gentle, spiritual, kind, heir to the
+Jewish faith, learned in all the refinements of Jewish Law, knowing
+minutely the history of the race, knowing that for which the curses of
+Judaism were reserved, perceiving with unblinking eyes the absurdity and
+folly of all dogmatic belief, gradually withdrew from practising and
+following "Law," preferring his own commonsense. There were threats,
+then attempts to bribe, and again threats and finally excommunication
+and curses so terrible that if they were carried out, a man would walk
+the earth an exile--unknown by brothers and sisters, shunned by the
+mother that gave him birth, a moral leper to his father, despised,
+rejected, turned away, spit upon by every being of his kind.
+
+And here is the document:
+
+     By the sentence of the angels, by the decree of the saints, we
+     anathematize, cut off, curse, and execrate Baruch Spinoza, in the
+     presence of these sacred books with the six hundred and thirteen
+     precepts which are written therein, with the anathema wherewith
+     Joshua anathematized Jericho; with the cursing wherewith Elisha
+     cursed the children; and with all the cursings which are written in
+     the Book of the Law; cursed be he by day, and cursed by night;
+     cursed when he lieth down, and cursed when he riseth up; cursed
+     when he goeth out, and cursed when he cometh in; the Lord pardon
+     him never; the wrath and fury of the Lord burn upon this man, and
+     bring upon him all the curses which are written in the Book of the
+     Law. The Lord blot out his name under heaven. The Lord set him
+     apart for destruction from all the tribes of Israel, with all the
+     curses of the firmament which are written in the Book of the Law.
+     There shall no one speak to him, no man write to him, no man show
+     him any kindness, no man stay under the same roof with him, no man
+     come nigh him.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+When the Jewish congregation had placed its ban upon Spinoza, he dropped
+the Jewish name Baruch, for the Latin Benedictus. In this action he
+tokened his frame of mind: he was going to persist in his study of the
+Latin language, and his new name stood for peace or blessing, just as
+the other had, being essentially the same as our word benediction. The
+man's purpose was firm. To perfect himself in Latin, he began a study of
+Descartes' "Meditations," and this led to proving the Cartesian
+philosophy by a geometrical formula. In his quiet home among the simple
+Mennonites, five miles from Amsterdam, there gradually grew up around
+him a body of students to whom he read his writings. The Cartesian
+philosophy swings around the proposition that only through universal
+doubt can we at last reach truth. Spinoza soon went beyond this and made
+his plea for faith in a universal Good.
+
+Five years went by--years of work at his lenses, helping his friends in
+their farm work, and several hours daily devoted to study and writing.
+Spinoza's manuscripts were handed around by his pupils. He wrote for
+them, and in making truth plain to them he made it clear to himself. The
+Jews at Amsterdam kept track of his doings and made charges to the
+Protestant authorities to the effect that Spinoza was guilty of treason,
+and his presence a danger to the State. Spies were about, and their
+presence becoming known to the Mennonites, caused uneasiness. To
+relieve his friends of a possible unpleasant situation, the gentle
+philosopher packed up his scanty effects and moved away. He went to the
+village of Voorburg, two miles from The Hague.
+
+Here he lived for seven years, often for six months not going farther
+than three miles from home. He studied, worked and wrote, and his
+writings were sent out to his few friends who circulated them among
+friends of theirs, and in time the manuscripts came back soiled and
+dog-eared, proof that some one had read them. Persecution binds human
+hearts, and at this time there was a brotherhood of thinkers throughout
+the capitals and University towns of Europe. Spinoza's name became known
+gradually to these--they grew to look for his monthly contribution, and
+in many places when his manuscript arrived little bands of earnest
+students would meet, and the manuscript would be read and discussed. The
+interdict placed on free thought made it attractive. Spinoza became
+recognized by the esoteric few as one of the world's great thinkers,
+although the good people with whom he lived knew him only as a model
+lodger, who kept regular hours and made little trouble. Occasionally
+visitors would come from a distance and remain for hours discussing such
+abstract themes as the freedom of the will or the nature of the
+over-soul. And these visitors caused the rustic neighbors to grow
+curious, and we find Spinoza moving into the city and renting a modest
+back room. By a curious chance, his landlady, fifty years before, had
+been a servant in the household of Grotius, and once had locked that
+great man in a trunk and escorted him, right side up, across the border
+into Switzerland to escape the heresy-hunters who were looking for human
+kindling. This kind landlady, now grown old, and living largely in the
+past, saw points of resemblance between her philosophic boarder and the
+great Grotius, and soon waxed boastful to the neighbors. Spinoza noticed
+that he was being pointed out on the streets. His record had followed
+him. The Jews hated him because he was a renegade; the Christians hated
+him because he was a Jew, and both Catholics and Protestants shunned him
+when they ought not, and greeted him with howls when they should have
+let him alone.
+
+He again moved his lodgings to the suburbs of the city, where he lived
+with the family of Van der Spijck, a worthy Dutch painter who smoked his
+pipe in calm indifference to the Higher Criticism. For their quiet and
+studious lodger Van der Spijck and his wife had a profound regard. They
+did not understand him, but they believed in him. Often he would go to
+church with them and coming home would discuss the sermon with them at
+length. The Lutheran pastor who came to call on the family invited
+Spinoza to join his flock, and they calmly discussed the questions of
+baptism and regeneration by faith together; but genius only expresses
+itself to genius, and the pastor went away mystified. Van der Spijck
+did not produce great art, yet his pictures are now in demand because he
+was the kind and loyal friend of Spinoza, and his heart, not his art,
+fixes his place in history.
+
+In his sketch, Zangwill has certain of his old friends, members of the
+Van den Ende family, hunt out the philosopher in his obscure lodgings
+and pay him a social visit. Then it was that he turned pale, and
+stammeringly tried to conceal his agitation at mention of the name of
+the only woman he had ever loved.
+
+The image of that one fine flaming up of divine passion followed him to
+the day of his death. It was too sacred for him to discuss--he avoided
+women, kept out of society, and forever in his sad heart there burned a
+shrine to the ideal. And so he lived, separate and apart. A single
+little room sufficed--the work-bench where he made his lenses near the
+window, and near at hand the table covered with manuscript where he
+wrote. Renan says that when he died, aged forty-three, his passing was
+like a sigh, he had lived so quietly--so few knew him--there were no
+earthly ties to break.
+
+The worthy Van der Spijcks, plain, honest people, had invited him to go
+to church with them. He smilingly excused himself--he had thoughts he
+must write out ere they escaped. When the good man and his wife returned
+in an hour, their lodger was dead.
+
+A tablet on the house marks the spot, and but a short distance away in
+the open square sits his form in deathless bronze, pensively writing
+out an idea which we can only guess--or is it a last love-letter to the
+woman to whom he gave his heart and who pushed from her the gift?
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Spinoza had courage, yet great gentleness of disposition. His habit of
+mind was conciliatory: if strong opinions were expressed in his presence
+concerning some person or thing, he usually found some good to say of
+the person or an excuse for the thing. He was one of the most unselfish
+men in history--money was nothing to him, save as it might minister to
+his very few immediate wants or the needs of others.
+
+He smilingly refused a pension offered him by a French courtier if he
+would but dedicate a book to the King; and a legacy left him by an
+admiring student, Simon de Vries, was declined for the reason that it
+was too much and he did not wish the care of it. Later, he compromised
+with the heirs by accepting an income of one hundred and twenty-five
+dollars a year. "How unreasonable," he exclaimed, "they want me to
+accept five hundred florins a year--I told them I would take three
+hundred, but I will not be burdened by a stiver more." If he was
+financially free from the necessity of earning his living at his trade,
+he feared the quality of his thought might be diluted. You can not
+think intently and intensely all of the time. Those who try it never are
+able to dive deep nor soar high.... Good digestion demands a certain
+amount of coarse food--refined and condensed aliment alone kills. Man
+should work and busy himself with the commonplace, rest himself for his
+flight, and when the moment of transfiguration comes, make the best of
+it.
+
+All he asked was to be given the privilege to work and to think. As for
+expressing his thoughts, he made no public addresses and during his life
+only one of his books was printed. This was the "Tractatus
+Theologico-Politicus," which mentioned "Hamburg" on the title page, but
+with the author's name wisely omitted. Trite enough now are the
+propositions laid down--that God is everywhere and that man is brother
+to the tree, the rock, the flower. Emerson states the case in his
+"Over-Soul" and "Spiritual Laws" in the true, calm Spinozistic style--as
+if the gentle Jew had come back to earth and dictated his thought,
+refined, polished and smooth as one of his own little lenses, to the man
+of Concord. Benedictus Concordia, blessing and peace be with thee!
+
+But the lynx-eyed censors soon discovered this single, solitary book of
+Spinoza's, and although they failed to locate the author, Spinoza had
+the satisfaction of seeing the work placed on the Index and a general
+interdict issued against it by Christendom and Judea as well. It was
+really of some importance. It was so thoroughly in demand that it still
+circulated with false title pages. In the Lenox Library, New York, is a
+copy of the first edition, finely bound, and lettered thus: "A Treatise
+on the Sailing of Ships against the Wind," which shows the straits
+booksellers were put to in evading the censors, and also reveals a touch
+of wit that doubtless was appreciated by the Elect.
+
+His modesty, patience, kindness and freedom from all petty whim and
+prejudice set Spinoza apart as a marked man. Withal he was eminently
+religious, and the reference to him by Novalis as "the God-intoxicated
+man" seems especially applicable to one who saw God in everything.
+
+Renan said at the dedication of The Hague monument to Spinoza, "Since
+the days of Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius we have not seen a life so
+profoundly filled with the sentiment of the divine."
+
+When walking along the streets of The Hague and coarse voices called
+after him in guttural, "Kill the renegade!" he said calmly, "We must
+remember that these men are expressing the essence of their being, just
+as I express the essence of mine."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Spinoza taught that the love of God is the supreme good; that virtue is
+its own reward, and folly its own punishment; and that every one ought
+to love his neighbor and obey the civil powers.
+
+He made no enemies except by his opinions. He was infinitely patient,
+sweet in temper--had respect for all religions, and never offended by
+parading his heresies in the faces of others.
+
+Nothing but the kicks of scorn and the contumely that came to Spinoza
+could possibly have freed him to the extent he was free from Judaistic
+bonds.
+
+He had disciples who called him "Master," and who taught him nothing but
+patience in answering their difficulties.
+
+One is amazed at the hunger of the mind at the time of Spinoza. Men
+seemed to think, and dare to grasp for "New Thought" to a marvelous
+extent.
+
+Spinoza says that "evil" and "good" have no objective reality, but are
+merely relative to our feelings, and that "evil" in particular is
+nothing positive, but a privation only, or non-existence.
+
+Spinoza says that love consecrates every indifferent particular
+connected with the object of affection. Good is that which we certainly
+know to be useful to us. Evil is that which we certainly know stands in
+the way of our command of good.
+
+Good is that which helps. Bad is that which hinders our
+self-maintenance and active powers.
+
+A passage from Spinoza which well reveals his habit of thought and which
+placed the censors on his track runs as follows:
+
+     The ultimate design of the State is not to dominate men, to
+     restrain them by fear, to make them subject to the will of others,
+     but, on the contrary, to permit every one, as far as possible, to
+     live in security. That is to say, to preserve intact the natural
+     right which is his, to live without being harmed himself or doing
+     harm to others. No, I say, the design of the State is not to
+     transform men into animals or automata from reasonable beings; its
+     design is to arrange matters that citizens may develop their minds
+     and bodies in security, and to make free use of their reason. The
+     true design of the State, then, is liberty. Whoever would respect
+     the rights of the sovereign ought never to act in opposition to his
+     decrees; but each has a right to think as he pleases and to say
+     what he thinks, provided that he limits himself to speaking and to
+     teaching in the name of pure reason, and that he does not attempt,
+     in his private capacity, to introduce innovations into the State.
+     For example, a citizen demonstrates that a certain law is repugnant
+     to sound reason, and believing this, he thinks it ought to be
+     abrogated. If he submits his opinion to the judgment of the
+     sovereign, to which alone it belongs to establish and to abolish
+     laws, and if, in the meantime, he does nothing contrary to law, he
+     certainly deserves well of the State as being a good citizen.
+
+     Let us admit that it is possible to stifle liberty of men and to
+     impose on them a yoke, to the point that they dare not even
+     murmur, however feebly, without the consent of the sovereign:
+     never, it is certain, can any one hinder them from thinking
+     according to their own free will. What follows hence? It is that
+     men will think one way and speak another; that, consequently, good
+     faith, so essential a virtue to a State, becomes corrupted; that
+     adulation, so detestable, and perfidy, shall be held in honor,
+     bringing in their train a decadence of all good and sound
+     habitudes. What can be more fatal to a State than to exile, as
+     malcontents, honest citizens, simply because they do not hold the
+     opinion of the multitude, and because they are ignorant of the art
+     of dissembling! What can be more fatal to a State than to treat as
+     enemies and to put to death men who have committed no other crime
+     than that of thinking independently! Behold, then, the scaffold,
+     the dread of the bad man, which now becomes the glorious theater
+     where tolerance and virtue blaze forth in all their splendor, and
+     covers publicly with opprobrium the sovereign majesty! Assuredly,
+     there is but one thing which that spectacle can teach us, and that
+     is to imitate these noble martyrs, or, if we fear death, to become
+     the abject flatterers of the powerful. Nothing hence can be so
+     perilous as to relegate and submit to divine right things which are
+     purely speculative, and to impose laws upon opinions which are, or
+     at least ought to be, subject to discussion among men. If the right
+     of the State were limited to repressing acts, and speech were
+     allowed impunity, controversies would not turn so often into
+     seditions.
+
+
+
+
+AUGUSTE COMTE
+
+
+     In the name of the Past and of the Future, the servants of
+     Humanity--both its philosophical and its practical servants--come
+     forward to claim as their due the general direction of the world.
+     Their object is to constitute at length a real Providence in all
+     departments--moral, intellectual and material.
+
+                                                --_Auguste Comte_
+
+[Illustration: AUGUSTE COMTE]
+
+
+A little city girl asked of her country cousin, when honey was the topic
+up for discussion, "Does your papa keep a bee?"
+
+Let the statement go unchallenged, that a single bee has neither the
+disposition nor the ability to make honey.
+
+Bees accomplish nothing save as they work together, and neither do men.
+
+Great men come in groups.
+
+Six men, three living at the village of Concord, Massachusetts, and
+three at Cambridge, fifteen miles away, supplied America really all her
+literature, until Indiana suddenly loomed large on the horizon, and
+assumed the center of the stage, like the spirit of the Brocken.
+
+Five men made up the Barbizon school of painting, which has influenced
+the entire art education of the world. And that those who have been
+influenced and helped most, deny their redeemer with an oath, is a
+natural phenomenon psychologists look for and fully understand.
+
+Greece had a group of seven thinkers, in the time of Pericles, who made
+the name and fame of the city deathless.
+
+Rome had a similar group in the time of Augustus; then the world went
+to sleep, and although there were individuals, now and then, of great
+talent, their lights went out in darkness, for it takes bulk to make a
+conflagration.
+
+Florence had her group of thinkers and doers when Michelangelo and
+Leonardo lived only a few miles apart, but never met. Yet each man
+spurred the other on to do and dare, until an impetus was reached that
+sent the names of both down the centuries.
+
+Boswell gives us a group of a dozen men who made each other
+possible--often helped by hate and strengthened by scorn.
+
+The Mutual Admiration Society does not live in piping times of peace,
+where glowing good-will strews violets; often the sessions of this
+interesting aggregation are stormy and acrimonious, but one thing
+holds--the man who arises at this board must have something to say.
+Strong men, matched by destiny, set each other a pace. Criticism is full
+and free. The most interesting and the most successful social experiment
+in America owed its lease of life largely to its scheme of Public
+Criticism, a plan society at large will adopt when it puts off
+swaddling-clothes. Public Criticism is a diversion of gossip into a
+scientific channel. It is a plan of healthful, hygienic, social
+plumbing.
+
+England produced one group of thinkers that changed the complexion of
+the theological belief of Christendom--Darwin, Spencer, Wallace, Huxley
+and Mill. But this group built on the French philosophers, who were
+taught antithetically by the decaying and crumbling aristocracy of
+France. Rousseau and Voltaire loved each other and helped each other, as
+the proud Leonardo helped the humble and no less proud peasant,
+Michelangelo--by absent treatment.
+
+Victor Hugo says that when the skulls of Voltaire and Rousseau were
+taken in a sack from the Pantheon and tumbled into a common grave, a
+spark of recognition was emitted that the gravedigger did not see.
+
+Voltaire was patronized by Frederick the Great, who, though a married
+man, lived a bachelor life and forbade women his court, and protected
+Kant with the bulging forehead and independent ways. Kant lived among a
+group of thinkers he never saw, but reached out and touched finger-tips
+with them over the miles that his feet never traversed.
+
+To Kant are we indebted for Turgot, that practical and farseeing man of
+affairs told of in matchless phrase in Thomas Watson's "Story of
+France," the best book ever written in America, with possibly a few
+exceptions. Condorcet kept step with him, and Auguste Comte calls
+Condorcet his spiritual stepfather, and a wit of the time here said,
+"Then Turgot is your uncle"; and Comte replied, "I am proud of the
+honor, for if Turgot is my uncle, then indeed am I of royal blood."
+
+Auguste Comte is the one bright particular star amid that milky way of
+riotous thinkers which followed close upon the destruction of the French
+Monarchy.
+
+When Napoleon visited the grave of Rousseau, he mused in silence and
+then said, "Perhaps it might have been as well if this man had never
+lived."
+
+And Marshal Ney, standing near, said, "It reveals small gratitude for
+Napoleon Bonaparte to say so." Napoleon smiled and answered, "Possibly
+the world would be as well off if neither of us had ever lived."
+
+Auguste Comte thought that Napoleon was just as necessary in the social
+evolution as Rousseau, and that both were needed--and he himself was
+needed to make the matter plain in print.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Auguste Comte was born at Montpelier, France, in Seventeen Hundred
+Ninety-eight. His father was receiver of taxes, an office that carried
+with it much leisure and a fair income. Men of leisure seldom have time
+to think--if you want a thing done it is safest and best not to pick a
+publican. Only busy men have time to do things. The men who have good
+incomes and work little are envied only by those with a mental
+impediment.
+
+The boy Auguste owed little to his parents for his peculiar evolution,
+save as his father taught him by antithesis: the children of drunkards
+make temperance fanatics, and shiftless fathers sometimes have sons who
+are great financiers.
+
+When nine years of age, the passion to know and to become was upon
+Auguste Comte. He was small in stature, insignificant in appearance, and
+had a great appetite for facts. Comte is a fine refutation of the maxim
+that infant prodigies fall victims to arrested development.
+
+At twelve years of age he was filled with the idea that the social order
+was all wrong. To the utter astonishment of his parents and tutors, he
+argued that the world could not be bettered until mankind was taught the
+lesson that history, languages, theology and polite etiquette were not
+learning at all; and as long as educated men centered on these things,
+there was no hope for the race.
+
+The birch was brought in to disannex the boy from his foolishness, but
+this only seemed to make him cling the closer to what he was pleased to
+call his convictions.
+
+He read books that wearied the brains of grown-ups, and took a hearty
+interest in the abstruse, the obscure and the complex.
+
+At thirteen, that peculiar time when the young turn to faith, this
+perverse rareripe was so filled with doubt that it ran over and he stood
+in the slop. He offered to publicly debate the question of Freewill with
+the local cure; and on several occasions stood up in meeting and
+contradicted the preacher.
+
+His parents, thinking to divert his mind from abstractions to useful
+effort, sent him to the Polytechnic School at Paris, that excellent
+institution founded by Napoleon, which served America most nobly as a
+model for the Boston School of Technology, only the French
+"Polytechnique" was purely a government institution--a sample of the
+Twentieth Century sent for the benefit of the Nineteenth.
+
+But institutions are never much beyond the people--they can not be, for
+the people dilute everything until it is palatable. Laws that do not
+embody public opinion can never be enforced. No man who expresses
+himself is really much ahead of his time--if he is, the times snuff him
+out, and quickly.
+
+In Eighteen Hundred Fourteen, the Polytechnic School was well saturated
+with the priestly idea of education, and the attempt was made to
+produce an alumni of cultured men, rather than a race of useful ones.
+
+Revolt was rife in the ranks of the students. It is still debatable
+whether revolution and riot in colleges are actuated by a passion for
+truth or a love of excitement. Anyway, the "Techs" laid deep places to
+the effect that when a certain professor appeared at chapel, a unique
+reception would be in store for him.
+
+He appeared, and a fusillade of books, rulers and ink-wells shot at his
+learned head from every quarter of the room. Other professors appeared
+and sought to restore order. Riot followed--seats were torn up, windows
+broken, and there was much loud talk and gesticulation peculiarly
+Gallic.
+
+It was Ninety-three done in little.
+
+Instead of expelling the delinquents, the National Assembly took the
+matter in hand and simply voted to close the school.
+
+Auguste Comte went home a hero, proud as a Heidelberg student, with a
+sweeping scar on his chin and the end of his nose gone. "I have dealt
+the Old Education its deathblow," he solemnly said, mistaking a
+cane-rush for a revolution.
+
+Against the direct command of his parents, he went back to Paris. He had
+now reached the mature age of eighteen. He resolved to write out truth
+as it occurred to him, and incidentally he would gain a livelihood by
+teaching mathematics.
+
+At Paris, the mental audacity of the youth won him recognition; he
+picked up a precarious living, and was a frequenter at scientific
+lectures and discussions, and in gatherings where great themes were up
+for debate, he was always present.
+
+Benjamin Franklin was his ideal. In his notebook he wrote this:
+"Franklin at twenty-five resolved he would become great and wise. I now
+vow the same at twenty." He had five years the start!
+
+Franklin, calm, healthy, judicial, wise--the greatest man America has
+produced--worked his philosophy up into life. He did not think much
+beyond his ability to perform. To him, to think was to do. And he did
+things that to many men were miracles.
+
+Comte once said, "I would have followed the venerable Benjamin Franklin
+through the street, and kissed the hem of the homespun overcoat, made by
+Deborah." These men were very unlike. One was big, gentle, calm and
+kind; the other was small, dyspeptic, excitable and full of challenge.
+Yet the little man had times of insight and abstraction, when he tracked
+reasons further than the big, practical man could have followed them.
+
+Franklin's habit of life--the semi-ascetic quality of getting your
+gratification by doing without things--especially pleased Comte. He
+lived in a garret on two meals a day, and was happy in the thought that
+he could endure and yet think and study. The old monastic impulse was
+upon him, minus the religious features--or stay! why may not science
+become a religion? And surely science can become dogmatic, and even
+tyrannically build a hierarchy on a hypothesis no less than theology.
+
+A friend, pitying young Comte's hard lot, not knowing its sweet
+recompense, got him a position as tutor in the household of a nobleman;
+like unto the kind man who caught the sea-gulls roosting on an iceberg,
+and in pity, transferred them to the warm delights of a compost-pile in
+his barnyard.
+
+Comte held the place for three weeks and then resigned. He went back to
+the garret and sweet liberty--having had his taste of luxury, but
+miserable in it all--wondering how a gavotte or a minuet could make a
+man forget that he was living in a city where thirty thousand human
+beings were constantly only one meal beyond the sniff of starvation.
+
+At this time Comte came into close relationship with a man who was to
+have a very great influence in his life--this was Count Henri of
+Saint-Simon, usually spoken of as Saint-Simon.
+
+Saint-Simon was rich, gently proud, and fondly patronizing. He was a
+sort of scientific Maecenas--and be it known that Maecenas was a poet and
+philosopher of worth, and one Horace was his pupil.
+
+Saint-Simon was an excellent and learned man who wrote, lectured and
+taught on philosophic themes. He had a garden-school, modeled in degree
+after that of Plato. Saint-Simon became much interested in young Comte,
+invited him to his classes, supplied him books, clothing, and tickets to
+the opera. Part of the time Comte lived under Saint-Simon's roof, and
+did translating and copying in partial payment for his meal-ticket. The
+teacher and the pupil had a fine affection for each other. What Comte
+needed, he took from Saint-Simon as if it were his own.
+
+In writing to friends at this time, Comte praises Saint-Simon as the
+greatest man who ever lived--"a model of patience, generosity, learning
+and love--my spiritual father!" There was fifty years' difference in
+their ages, but they studied, read and rambled the realm of books
+together, with mutual pleasure and profit.
+
+The central idea of the "Positive Philosophy" is that of the three
+stages through which man passes in his evolution. This was gotten from
+Saint-Simon, and together they worked out much of the thought that Comte
+afterward carried further and incorporated in his book.
+
+But about this time, Saint-Simon, in one of his lectures, afterward
+printed, made use of some of the thoughts that Comte had expressed, as
+if they were his own--and possibly they were. There is no copyright on
+an idea, no caveat can be filed on feeling, and at the last there is no
+such thing as originality, except as a matter of form.
+
+Young Comte now proved his humanity by accusing his teacher of stealing
+his radium. A quarrel followed, in which Comte was so violent that
+Saint-Simon had to put the youth out of his house.
+
+The wrangles of Grub Street would fill volumes: both sides are always
+right, or wrong--it matters little, and is simply a point of view. But
+the rancor of it all, if seen from heaven, must serve finely to dispel
+the monotony of the place--a panacea for paradisiacal ennui.
+
+From lavish praise, Comte swung over to words of bitterness and
+accusation. Having sat at the man's table and partaken of his
+hospitality for several years, he was now guilty of the unpardonable
+offense of ridiculing and berating him.
+
+He speaks of the Saint as a "depraved quack," and says that the time he
+spent with him was worse than wasted. If Saint-Simon was the rogue and
+pretender that Comte avers, it is no certificate of Comte's insight that
+it took him four years to find it out.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In Eighteen Hundred Twenty-five Comte married. The ceremony was
+performed civilly, on a sudden impulse of what Schopenhauer would call
+"the genius of the genus." The lady was young, agreeable; and having no
+opinions of her own, was quite willing to accept his. Comte
+congratulated himself that here was virgin soil, and he laid the
+flattering unction to his soul that he could mold the lady's mind to
+match his own. She would be his helpmeet. Comte had not read Ouida, who
+once wrote that when God said, "I will make a helpmeet for him," He was
+speaking ironically.
+
+Comte had associated but very little with women--he had theories about
+them. Small men, with midget minds, know femininity much better than do
+the great ones. Traveling salesmen, with checkered vests, gauge women as
+Herbert Spencer never could.
+
+Comte's wife was pretty and she was astute--as most pretty women are.
+John Fiske, in his lecture on "Communal Life," says that astute persons
+add nothing of value to the community in which they live--their mission
+being to be the admired glass of fashion for the non-cogitabund. The
+value of astuteness is that it protects us from the astute.
+
+Samuel Johnson and his wife had their first quarrel on the way from the
+church, and Auguste Comte and his wife tiffed going down the steps from
+the notary's. Comte had no use for ecclesiastical forms, and the lady
+agreed with him until after the notary had earned his fee. Then she
+suddenly had qualms, like those peculiar ladies told of by Robert Louis
+Stevenson, who turn the Madonna's face to the wall.
+
+The couple went to Montpelier on their wedding-tour, to visit Comte's
+parents. The new wife agreed with the old folks on but one point--the
+marriage should be solemnized by a priest. Having won them on this
+point, they stood a solid phalanx against the husband; but the lady took
+exceptions to Montpelier on all other grounds--she hated it thoroughly
+and said so.
+
+Instead of molding her to his liking, Comte was being kneaded into
+animal crackers for her amusement.
+
+Then we find him writing to a friend, confessing that his hopes were
+ashes; but in his misery he grows philosophical and says, "It is all
+good, for now I am driven back to my work, and from now on my life is
+dedicated to science."
+
+No doubt the lady was as much disappointed in the venture as was the
+husband, but he, being literary, eased his grief by working it up into
+art, while her side of the story lies buried deep in silence glum.
+
+In choosing the names of philosophers for this series, no thought was
+given in the selection beyond the achievements of the men. But it now
+comes to me with a slight surprise that seven out of the twelve were
+unmarried, and probably it would have been as well--certainly for the
+wives--if the other five had remained bachelors, too. Xantippe would
+have been the gainer, even if Socrates did miss his discipline.
+
+To center on science and devote one's thought to philosophy produces a
+being more or less deformed. There is great danger in specialization:
+Nature sacrifices the man in order to get the thing done. Abstract
+thought unfits one for domestic life; for, to a degree, it separates a
+man from his kind.
+
+The proper advice to a woman about to marry a philosopher would be,
+"Don't!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The advantage of a little actual hardship in one's life is that it makes
+existence real and not merely literary. Comte was inclined to thrive on
+martyrdom. His restless, eager mind invented troubles, if there were no
+real ones, but he was wise enough to know this, as he once said: "The
+trials of life are all of one size--imaginary pains are as bad as real
+ones, and men who have no actual troubles usually conjure forth a few.
+Thus far, happily, I am not reduced to this strait."
+
+We thus see that the true essence of philosophy was there. Comte got a
+gratification by dissecting, analyzing and classifying his emotions. All
+was grist that came to his mill.
+
+When he was twenty-eight the Positive Philosophy had assumed such
+proportions in his mind that he announced a course of twelve lectures on
+the subject.
+
+He was jealous of his discoveries, and was intent on getting all the
+credit that was due him. Money he cared little for; power and reputation
+to him were the only gods worth appeasing. The thought of domestic joy
+was forever behind, but philosophy came as a solace. A prospectus was
+sent out and tickets were issued. The landlady where he boarded offered
+her parlor and her boarder, second floor back, for the benefit of
+science. Several zealous denizens of the Latin Quarter made a canvass,
+and enough tickets were sold so that the philosopher felt that at last
+the world was really at his feet.
+
+When the afternoon for the first lecture arrived, no carriages blocked
+the street, and as only about half of those who had purchased tickets
+appeared, the difficulties of the landlady and her nervous boarder were
+much lessened.
+
+There was one man at this first lecture who was profoundly impressed,
+and if we had his testimony, and none other, we might well restrain our
+smiles. That man was Alexander von Humboldt. In various passages
+Humboldt does Comte the honor of quoting from him, and in one instance
+says, "He has summed up certain phases of truth better than they have
+ever been expressed before."
+
+Little did the landlady guess that her crusty, crabbed boarder was
+firing a shot that would be heard 'round the world, and surely the
+gendarme on that particular beat never heard it--so small and
+commonplace are the beginnings of great things!
+
+Comte was so saturated with this theme--so immersed in it--that it
+consumed him like a fever. Three lectures were given, but at the third,
+without warning, the man's nerves snapped--he stopped, sat down, and the
+audience filed out perplexed, thinking they had merely seen an
+exhibition of one of the eccentricities of genius. The philosopher's
+mind was a blank, and kind friends sent him away to a hospital.
+
+It was two years before he regained his reason. The enforced rest did
+him good. Nervous Prostration is heroic treatment on the part of Nature.
+It is an intent to do for the man what he will never do for himself.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Unkind critics, hotly intent on refuting the Positive Philosophy, seized
+upon the fact of Comte's mental trouble and made much of it. "Look you!"
+said they, "the man is insane!"
+
+This is convenient, but not judicial. Comte's philosophy stands or falls
+on its own merits, and what the author did before, after, or during the
+writing of his theses matters not. Madmen are not mad all the time, and
+the fact that Sir Isaac Newton was for a time unbalanced does not lessen
+our regard for the "Principia," nor consign to limbo the law of
+gravitation. Ruskin's work is not the less thought of because the man
+had his pathetic spells of indecision. Martin Luther had visions of
+devils before he saw the truth, and Emerson's love for Longfellow need
+not be disparaged because he looked down on his still, white face and
+said, "A dear gentle soul, but I really can not remember his name."
+
+Men write on physiology, and then die, but this does not disprove the
+truth they expressed, but failed, possibly, to fully live. The great man
+always thinks further than he can travel--even the rest of us can do
+that. We can think "Chicago" in a second, but to go there takes time,
+strength and money.
+
+When Comte's mental trouble was at its height, and two men were required
+to care for him, Lamennais persuaded his wife to have their marriage
+solemnized by the Church, and this was done. This performance was such
+a violation of sanctity and decency that in after-years Comte could not
+believe it was true, until he consulted the church records. "They might
+as well have had me confirmed," said Comte, grimly. And we can well
+guess that the action did not increase his regard for either his wife or
+the Church. The trick seems quite on a par with that of the astute
+colored gentleman who anxiously asks for love-powders at the corner
+drugstore; or the good wives who purchase harmless potions from red-dyed
+rogues to place in the husband's coffee to cure him of the liquor habit.
+
+However, the incident gives a clew to the mental processes of Madame
+Comte--she would accomplish by trickery what she had failed to do by
+moral suasion, and this in the name of religion!
+
+Two years of enforced rest, and the glowing mind of the philosopher
+awoke with a start. He rubbed his eyes after his Rip-Van-Winkle sleep,
+and called for his manuscripts--he must prepare for the fourth lecture!
+
+The rest of the course was given, and in Eighteen Hundred Thirty the
+first volume of Positive Philosophy was issued.
+
+The sixth and last volume appeared in Eighteen Hundred Forty-two--twelve
+years of intense application and ceaseless work. This was the happiest
+time of Comte's life; he had the whole scheme in his head from the
+start, but he now saw it gradually taking form, and it was meeting with
+appreciation from a few earnest thinkers, at least. His services were
+in demand for occasional lectures on scientific subjects. In astronomy,
+especially, he excelled, and on this theme he was able to please a
+popular assembly.
+
+The Polytechnic School had now grown to large proportions, and the
+institution that Comte had helped to slide into dissolution now called
+him back to serve as examiner and professor.
+
+The constant misunderstandings with his wife had increased to such a
+point that both felt a separation desirable. Married people do not
+separate on slight excuse--they go because they must. That Comte thought
+much more of the lady when they were several hundred miles apart than
+when they were together, there is no doubt. He wrote to her at regular
+intervals, one-half of his income was religiously sent to her, and he
+practised the most painstaking economy in order that he might feel that
+she was provided for.
+
+One letter, especially, to his wife reveals a side of Comte's nature
+that shows he had the instinct of a true teacher. He says, "I hardly
+dare disclose the sweet and softened feeling that comes over me when I
+find a scholar whose heart is thoroughly in his work."
+
+The Positive Philosophy was taken up by John Stuart Mill, who wrote a
+fine essay on it. It was Mill who introduced the work to Harriet
+Martineau. Mr. and Mrs. Mill had intended to translate and condense the
+philosophy of Comte for English readers, but when Miss Martineau
+expressed her intention of attempting the task, they relinquished the
+idea, but backed her up in her efforts.
+
+Miss Martineau condensed the six volumes into two, and what is most
+strange, Comte thought so well of the work that he wrote a glowing
+acknowledgment of it.
+
+The Martineaus were of good old Huguenot stock, and the French language
+came easy to Harriet. For the plain people of France she had a profound
+regard, and being sort of a revolutionary by prenatal instincts, Comte's
+work from the start appealed to her. James Martineau had such a
+bristling personality--being very much like his sister Harriet--that
+when this sister wrote a review of a volume of his sermons, showing the
+fatuity and foolishness of the reasoning, and calling attention to much
+bad grammar, the good man cut her off with a shilling--"which he will
+have to borrow," said Harriet.
+
+James hugged the idea to his death that his sister had insulted his
+genius--"But I forgive her," he said, which remark proves that he
+hadn't, for if he had, he would not have thought to mention the matter.
+James Martineau was a great man, but if he had been just a little
+greater he would have taken a profound pride in a sister who was so
+sharp a shooter that she could puncture his balloon. James Martineau was
+a theologian; Harriet was a Positivist. But Positivity had a lure for
+him, and so there is a long review, penned largely with aqua fortis, on
+Miss Martineau's translation, done by her brother for the "Edinburgh
+Review," wherein Harriet is not once mentioned.
+
+When Robert Ingersoll's wife would occasionally, under great stress of
+the servant-girl problem, break over a bit, as good women will, and say
+things, Robert would remark, "Gently, my dear, gently--I fear me you
+haven't yet gotten rid of all your Christian virtues."
+
+The Reverend Doctor James Martineau never quite got rid of his Christian
+virtues, which perhaps proves that a little hate, like strychnin, is
+useful as a stimulant when properly reduced, for Doctor Martineau died
+only a few years ago, having nearly rounded out a century run.
+
+Harriet Martineau was in much doubt about how Comte would regard her
+completed work, but was greatly relieved when he gave it his unqualified
+approval. On his earnest invitation she visited him in Paris.
+Fortunately, she did not have to resort to the Herbert Spencer expedient
+of wearing ear-muffs for protection against loquacious friends. She
+liked Comte first-rate, until he began to make love to her. Then his
+stock dropped below par.
+
+Comte was always much impressed by intellectual women. His wife had
+given him a sample of the other kind, and caused him to swing out and
+idealize the woman of brains.
+
+So that, when Harriet Martineau admired the Positive Philosophy, it was
+proof sufficient to Comte of her excellence in all things. She knew
+better, and started soon for Dover.
+
+Mr. and Mrs. Mill had called on Comte a few months before, and given him
+a glimpse of the ideal--an intellectual man mated with an intellectual
+woman. But Comte didn't see that it was plain commonsense that made them
+great. Comte prided himself on his own commonsense, but the article was
+not in his equipment, else he would not have put the blame of all his
+troubles upon his wife. A man with commonsense, married to a woman who
+hasn't any, does not necessarily forfeit his own.
+
+Mr. or Mrs. Mill would have been great anywhere--singly, separately,
+together, or apart. Each was a radiant center. Weakness multiplied by
+two does not give strength, and naught times naught equals naught.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Having finished the Positive Philosophy, Comte's restless mind began to
+look around for more worlds to conquer.
+
+In the expenditure of money he was careful, and in his accounts exact;
+but the making of money and its accumulation were things that to him
+could safely be delegated to second-class minds. A haughty pride of
+intellect was his, not unmixed with that peculiar quality of the prima
+donna which causes her to cut fantastic capers and make everybody kiss
+her big toe.
+
+Comte had done one thing superbly well. England had recognized his merit
+to a degree that France had not, and to his English friends he now made
+an appeal for financial help, so he could have freedom to complete
+another great work he had in his mind. To John Stuart Mill he wrote,
+outlining in a general way his new book on a social science, to be
+called "The Positive Polity." It was, in a degree, to be a sequel to the
+Positive Philosophy.
+
+Mill communicated with Grote, the banker, known to us through his superb
+history of Greece, and with the help of George Henry Lewes and a mite
+from Herbert Spencer to show his good-will, a purse equal to about
+twelve hundred dollars was sent to Comte.
+
+Matters went along for a year, when Comte wrote a brief letter to Mill
+suggesting that it was about time for another remittance. Mill again
+appealed to Grote, and Grote, the man of affairs, wrote to his Paris
+correspondent, who ascertained that Comte, now believing he was free
+from the bread-and-butter bugaboo, was giving his services to the
+Polytechnic, gratis, and also giving lectures to the people wherever
+some one would simply pay for the hall.
+
+To advance money to a man that he might write a book showing how the
+nation should manage its finances, when the author could not look after
+his own, reminded Grote of the individual who wrote from the Debtors'
+Prison to the Secretary of the Exchequer, giving valuable advice. All
+publishers are familiar with the penniless person who writes a book on
+"How to Achieve Success," expecting to achieve success by publishing it.
+
+Grote wrote to Mill, expressing the wholesome truth that the first duty
+of every man was to make a living for himself--a fact which Mill states
+in "On Liberty." Mill hadn't the temerity to pass Grote's maxim along to
+Comte, and so sent a small contribution out of his own pocket. This was
+very much like the Indian who, feeling that his dog's tail should be
+amputated, cut it off a little at a time, so as not to hurt the animal.
+We have all done this, and got the ingratitude we deserved.
+
+Comte wrote back a most sarcastic letter, accusing Mill and Grote with
+having broken faith with him.
+
+He now treated them very much as he had Saint-Simon; and in his lectures
+seldom failed to tell in pointed phrase what a lot of money-grubbing
+barbarians inhabited the British Isles. To the credit of Mill be it
+said that he still believed in the value of the Positive Philosophy, and
+did all he could to further Comte's reputation and help the sale of his
+books.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In Eighteen Hundred Forty-five, when Comte was forty-seven years old, he
+met Madame Clothilde de Vaux. Her husband was in prison, serving a
+life-sentence for political offenses, and Comte was first attracted to
+her through pity. Soon this evolved into a violent attachment, and Comte
+began to quote her in his lectures.
+
+Comte was now most busy with his "Polity" in collaboration with Madame
+De Vaux. Her part of the work seems to have been to listen to Comte
+while he read her his amusing manuscript: and she, being a good woman
+and wise, praised the work in every part. They were together almost
+daily, and she seemed to supply him the sympathy he had all of his life
+so much craved.
+
+In one short year Madame De Vaux died, and Comte for a time was
+inconsolable. Then his sorrow found surcease in an attempt to do for her
+in prose what Dante had done for Beatrice in poetry. But the vehicle of
+Comte's thoughts creaked. The exact language of science when applied to
+a woman becomes peculiarly non-piquant and lacking in perspicacity and
+perspicuity. No woman can be summed up in an algebraic formula, and when
+a mathematician does a problem to his lady's eyebrow, he forgets
+entirely that femininity forever equals _x_. Those who can write Sonnets
+from the Portuguese may place their loves on exhibition--no others
+should. Sweets too sweet do cloy.
+
+For the rest of his life, Comte made every Wednesday afternoon sacred
+for a visit to the grave of Madame De Vaux, and three times every day,
+with the precision of a Mussulman, he retired to his room, locked the
+door, and in silence apostrophized to her spirit. Comte now continued as
+industrious as ever, but the quality of his writing lamentably declined.
+His popular lectures to the people on scientific themes were always
+good, and his work as a teacher was satisfactory, but when he endeavored
+to continue original research, then his hazards of mind lacked steady
+flight.
+
+The Positive Polity degenerated into a dogmatic scheme of government
+where the wisest should rule. The determination of who was wisest was to
+be left to the wise ones themselves, and Comte himself volunteered to be
+the first Pope.
+
+The worship of Humanity would be the only religion, and women would
+shine as the high priests. Comte thought it all out in detail, and
+arranged a complete scheme of life, and actually wished to form a
+political party and overthrow the government, founding a gynecocracy on
+the ruins. His ebbing mind could not grasp the thought that tyranny
+founded on goodness is a tyranny still, and that a despotic altruism is
+a despotism nevertheless. Slavery blocks evolution.
+
+So thus rounded out the life of Auguste Comte--beginning in childhood,
+he traversed the circle, and ended where he began.
+
+He died in his sixtieth year. M. Littre, his most famous pupil,
+touchingly looked after his wants to the last, ministered to his
+necessities, advancing money on royalties that were never due. M. Littre
+occasionally apologized for the meagerness of the returns, and was
+closely questioned and even doubted by Comte, who died unaware of the
+unflinching loyalty of a friendship that endured distrust and contumely
+without resentment. Such love and patience and loyalty as were shown by
+M. Littre redeem the race.
+
+The best certificate to the worth of Auguste Comte lies in the fact
+that, in spite of marked personal limitations and much petty
+querulousness, he profoundly influenced such men as Littre, Humboldt,
+Mill, Lewes, Grote, Spencer and Frederic Harrison.
+
+To have helped such men as these, and cheered them on their way, was no
+small achievement. Comte's sole claim for immortality lies in the
+Positive Philosophy. The word "positive," as used by Comte, is similar
+in intent to pose, poise--fixed, final. So, besides a positive present
+good, Comte believed he was stating a final truth; to-wit: that which is
+good here is good everywhere, and if there is a future life, the best
+preparation for it is to live now and here, up to your highest and best.
+Comte protested against the idea of "a preparation for a life to
+come"--now is the time, and the place is here.
+
+The essence of Positive Philosophy is that man passes through three
+mental periods--the Theological or fictitious; the Metaphysical or
+abstract; the Positive or scientific.
+
+Hence, there are three general philosophies or systems of conceptions
+concerning life and destiny.
+
+The Theological, or first system, is the necessary starting-point of the
+human intellect. The Positive, or third period, is the ultimate goal of
+every progressive, thinking man; the second period is merely a state of
+transition that bridges the gulf between the first and the third.
+
+Metaphysics holds the child by the hand until he can trust his feet--it
+is a passageway between the fictitious and the actual. Once across the
+chasm, it is no longer needed. Theology represents the child;
+Metaphysics the youth; Science the man.
+
+The evolution of the race is mirrored in the evolution of the
+individual. Look back on your own career--your first dawn of thought
+began in an inquiry, "Who made all this--how did it all happen?"
+
+And Theology comes in with a glib explanation: the fairies, dryads,
+gnomes and gods made everything, and they can do with it all as they
+please. Later, we concentrate all of these personalities in one god,
+with a devil in competition, and this for a time satisfies.
+
+Later, the thought of an arbitrary being dealing out rewards and
+punishments grows dim, for we see the regular workings of Cause and
+Effect. We begin to talk of Energy, the Divine Essence, and the Reign of
+Law. We speak, as Matthew Arnold did, of "a Power, not ourselves, that
+makes for righteousness." But Emerson believed in a power that was in
+himself that made for righteousness.
+
+Metaphysics reaches its highest stage when it affirms "All is One," or
+"All is Mind," just as Theology reaches its highest conception when it
+becomes Monotheistic--having one God and curtailing the personality of
+the devil to a mere abstraction.
+
+But this does not long satisfy, for we begin to ask, "What is this One?"
+or "What is Mind?"
+
+Then Positivity comes in and says that the highest wisdom lies in
+knowing that we do not know anything, and never can, concerning a First
+Cause. All we find is phenomena and behind phenomena, phenomena. The
+laws of Nature do not account for the origin of the laws of Nature.
+Spencer's famous chapter on the Unknowable was derived largely from
+Comte, who attempted to define the limits of human knowledge. And it is
+worth noting that the one thing which gave most offense in both Comte's
+and Spencer's works was their doctrine of the Unknowable. This, indeed,
+forms but a small part of the work of these men, and if it were all
+demolished there would still remain their doctrine of the known. The
+bitterness of Theology toward Science arises from the fact that as we
+find things out we dispense with the arbitrary god, and his business
+agent, the priest, who insists that no transaction is legal unless he
+ratifies it.
+
+Men begin by explaining everything, and the explanations given are
+always first for other people. Parents answer the child, not telling him
+the actual truth, but giving him that which will satisfy--that which he
+can mentally digest. To say, "The fairies brought it," may be all right
+until the child begins to ask who the fairies are, and wants to be shown
+one, and then we have to make the somewhat humiliating confession that
+there are no fairies.
+
+But now we perceive that this mild fabrication in reference to Santa
+Claus, and the fairies, is right and proper mental food for the child.
+His mind can not grasp the truth that some things are unknowable; and he
+is not sufficiently skilled in the things of the world to become
+interested in them--he must have a resting-place for his thought, so the
+fairy-tale comes in as an aid to the growing imagination. Only this: we
+place no penalty on disbelief in fairies, nor do we make special offers
+of reward to all who believe that fairies actually exist. Neither do we
+tell the child that people who believe in fairies are good, and that
+those who do not are wicked and perverse.
+
+Comte admits that the theological and metaphysical stages are necessary,
+but the sooner man can be graduated out of them the better. He brought
+vast research to bear in order to show the growth and death of
+theological conceptions. Hate, fear, revenge and doubt are all
+theological attributes, detrimental to man's best efforts. That moral
+ideas were an afterthought, and really form no part of theology, Comte
+emphasized at great length, and shows from much data where these ideas
+were grafted on to the original tree.
+
+And the sum of the argument is, that all progress of mind, body and
+material things has come to man through the study of Cause and Effect.
+And just in degree as he has abandoned the study of Theology as futile
+and absurd, and centered on helping himself here and now, has he
+prospered.
+
+Positivism is really a religion. The object of its worship is Humanity.
+It does not believe in a devil or any influence that works for harm, or
+in opposition to man. Man's only enemy is himself, and this is on
+account of his ignorance of this world, and his superstitious belief in
+another. Our troubles, like diseases, all come from ignorance and
+weakness, and through our ignorance are we weak and unable to adjust
+ourselves to conditions. The more we know of this world the better we
+think of it, and the better are we able to use it for our advancement.
+
+So far as we can judge, the Unknown Cause that rules the world by
+unchanging laws is a movement forward toward happiness, growth, justice,
+peace and right. Therefore, the Scientist, who perceives that all is
+good when rightly received and rightly understood, is really the priest
+or holy man--the mediator and explainer of the mysteries. As fast as we
+understand things they cease to be supernatural, for the supernatural is
+the natural not yet understood. The theological priest who believes in
+a god and a devil is the real modern infidel. Such a belief is
+fallacious, contrary to reason, and contrary to all the man of courage
+sees and knows.
+
+The real man of faith is the one who discards all thought of "how it
+first happened," and fixes his mind on the fact that he is here. The
+more he studies the conditions that surround him, the greater his faith
+in the truth that all is well.
+
+If men had turned their attention to Humanity, discarding Theology,
+using as much talent, time, money and effort to wring from the skies the
+secrets of the Unknowable, this world would now be a veritable paradise.
+It is Theology that has barred the entrance to Eden, by diverting the
+attention of men from this world to another. Heaven is Here.
+
+All religious denominations now dimly perceive the trend of the times,
+and are gradually omitting theology from their teachings and taking on
+ethics and sociology instead. A preacher is now simply Society's walking
+delegate. We are evolving theology out and sociology in. Theology has
+ever been the foe of progress and the enemy of knowledge. It has
+professed to know all and has placed a penalty on advancement. The Age
+of Enlightenment will not be here until every church has evolved into a
+schoolhouse, and every priest is a pupil as well as a teacher.
+
+
+
+
+VOLTAIRE
+
+
+     We are intelligent beings; and intelligent beings can not have been
+     formed by a blind, brute, insensible being. There is certainly some
+     difference between a clod and the ideas of Newton. Newton's
+     intelligence came from some greater Intelligence.
+
+                                        --_The Philosophical Dictionary_
+
+[Illustration: VOLTAIRE]
+
+
+The man, Francois Marie Arouet, known to us as Voltaire (which name he
+adopted in his twenty-first year), was born in Paris in Sixteen Hundred
+Ninety-four. He was the second son in a family of three children. During
+his babyhood he was very frail; in childhood sickly and weak; and
+throughout his whole life he suffered much from indigestion and
+insomnia.
+
+In all the realm of writers no man ever had a fuller and more active
+career, touching life at so many points, than Voltaire.
+
+The first requisite in a long and useful career would seem to be, have
+yourself born weak and cultivate dyspepsia, nervousness and insomnia.
+Whether or not the good die young is still a mooted question, but
+certainly the athletic often do. All those good men and true, who at
+grocery, tavern and railroad-station eat hard-boiled eggs on a wager,
+and lift barrels of flour with one hand, are carried to early graves,
+and over the grass-grown mounds that cover their dust, consumptive,
+dyspeptic and neurotic relatives, for twice or thrice a score of years,
+strew sweet myrtle, thyme and mignonette.
+
+Voltaire died of an accident--too much Four-o'Clock--cut off in his
+prime, when life for him was at its brightest and best, aged
+eighty-three.
+
+The only evidence we have that the mind of Voltaire failed at the last
+came from the Abbe Gaultier and the Cure of Saint Sulpice. These good
+men arrived with a written retraction, which they desired Voltaire to
+sign. Waiting in the anteroom of the sick-chamber they sent in word that
+they wished to enter. "Assure them of my respect," said the stricken
+man. But the holy men were not to be thus turned away, so they entered.
+They approached the bedside, and the Cure of Saint Sulpice said: "M. de
+Voltaire, your life is about to end. Do you acknowledge the divinity of
+Jesus Christ?"
+
+And the dying man stretched out a bony hand, making a gesture that they
+should depart, and murmured, "Let me die in peace."
+
+"You see," said the Cure to the Abbe, as they withdrew, "you see that he
+is out of his head!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The father of Voltaire, Francois Arouet, was a notary who looked after
+various family estates and waxed prosperous on the crumbs that fell from
+the rich man's table.
+
+He was solicitor to the Duc de Richelieu, the Sullys, and also the
+Duchesse de Saint-Simon, mother of the philosopher, Saint-Simon, who
+made the mistake of helping Auguste Comte, thus getting himself hotly
+and positively denounced by the man who formulated the "Positive
+Philosophy."
+
+Arouet belonged to the middle class and never knew that he sprang from a
+noble line until his son announced the fact. It was then too late to
+deny it.
+
+He was a devout Churchman, upright in all his affairs, respectable, took
+snuff, walked with a waddle and cultivated a double chin. M. Arouet
+pater did not marry until his mind was mature, so that he might avoid
+the danger of a mismating. He was forty, past. The second son, Francois
+fils, was ten years younger than his brother Armand, so the father was
+over fifty when our hero was born. Francois fils used to speak of
+himself as an afterthought--a sort of domestic postscript--"but," added
+he musingly, "our afterthoughts are often best."
+
+One of the most distinguished clients of M. Arouet was Ninon de Lenclos,
+who had the felicity to be made love to by three generations of
+Frenchmen. Ninon has been likened for her vivacious ways, her flashing
+intellect, and her perennial youth, to the divine Sara, who at sixty
+plays the part of Juliet with a woman of thirty for the old nurse. Ninon
+had turned her three-score and ten, and swung gracefully into the
+home-stretch, when the second son was born to M. Arouet. She was of a
+deeply religious turn of mind, for she had been loved by several
+priests, and now the Abbe de Chateauneuf was paying his devotions to
+her.
+
+Ninon was much interested in the new arrival, and going to the house of
+M. Arouet, took to bed, and sent in haste for the Abbe de Chateauneuf,
+saying she was in sore trouble. When the good man arrived, he thought it
+a matter of extreme unction, and was ushered into the room of the
+alleged invalid. Here he was duly presented with the infant that later
+was to write the "Philosophical Dictionary." It was as queer a case of
+kabojolism as history records.
+
+Doubtless the Abbe was a bit agitated at first, but finally getting his
+breath, he managed to say, "As there is a vicarious atonement, there
+must also be, on occasion, vicarious births, and this is one--God be
+praised."
+
+The child was then baptized, the good Abbe standing as godfather.
+
+There must be something, after all, in prenatal influences, for as the
+little Francois grew up he evolved the traits of Ninon de Lenclos and
+the Abbe much more than those of his father and mother.
+
+When the boy was a little over six years old the mother died. Of her we
+know absolutely nothing. In her son's writings he refers to her but
+once, wherein he has her say that "Boileau was a clever book, but a
+silly man."
+
+The education of the youngster seemed largely to have been left to the
+Abbe, his godfather, who very early taught him to recite the "Mosiad," a
+metrical effusion wherein the mistakes of Moses were related in churchly
+Latin, done first for the divertisement of sundry pious monks in idle
+hours.
+
+At ten years of age Francois was sent to the College of Louis-le-Grand,
+a Jesuit school where the minds of youth were molded in things sacred
+and secular.
+
+In only one thing did the boy really excel, and that was in the matter
+of making rhymes. The Abbe Chateauneuf had taught him the trick before
+he could speak plainly, and Ninon had been so pleased with the wee poet
+that she left him two thousand francs in her will for the purchase of
+books. As Ninon insisted on living to be ninety, Voltaire discounted the
+legacy and got it cashed on dedicating a sonnet to the divine Ninon. In
+this sonnet Voltaire suggests that a life of virtue conduces largely to
+longevity, as witness the incomparable Ninon de Lenclos, to which
+sentiment Ninon filed no exceptions.
+
+In one of the school debates young Francois presented his argument in
+rhyme, and evidently ran in some choice passages from the "Mosiad," for
+Father le Jay, according to Condorcet, left his official chair, and
+rushing down the aisle, grabbed the boy by the collar, and shaking him,
+said, "Unhappy boy! you will one day be the standard-bearer of deism in
+France!"--a prophecy, possibly, made after its fulfilment.
+
+Young Francois remained at the college until he was seventeen years old.
+From letters sent by him while there, it is evident that the chief
+characteristic of his mind was already a contempt for the clergy. Of two
+of his colleagues who were preparing for the priesthood, he says, "They
+had reflected on the dangers of a world of the charms of which they were
+ignorant; and on the pleasures of a religious life of which they knew
+not the disagreeableness." Already we see he was getting handy in
+polishing a sentence with the emery of his wit. Continuing, he says: "In
+a quarter of an hour they ran over all the Orders, and each seemed so
+attractive that they could not decide. In which predicament they might
+have been left like the ass, which died of starvation between two
+bundles of hay, not knowing which to choose. However, they decided to
+leave the matter to Providence, and let the dice decide. So one became a
+Carmelite and the other a Jesuit."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Arouet, at first intent on having his son become a priest, now fell back
+on the law as second choice. The young man was therefore duly articled
+with a firm of advocates and sent to hear lectures on jurisprudence. But
+his godfather introduced him into the Society of the Temple, a group of
+wits, of all ages, who could take snuff and throw off an epigram on any
+subject. The bright young man, flashing, dashing and daring, made
+friends at once through his skill in writing scurrilous verse upon any
+one whose name might be mentioned. This habit had been begun in college,
+where it was much applauded by the underlings, who delighted to see
+their unpopular teachers done to a turn. The scribbling habit is a
+variant of that peculiar propensity which finds form in drawing a
+portrait on the blackboard before the teacher gets around in the
+morning. If the teacher does not happen to love art for art's sake,
+there may be trouble; but verses are safer, for they circulate secretly
+and are copied and quoted anonymously.
+
+The thing we do best in life is that which we play at most in youth.
+
+Ridicule was this man's weapon. For the benefit of the Society of the
+Temple he paid his respects to the sham piety and politics of
+Versailles. He had been educated by priests, and his father was a
+politician feeding at the public trough. The young man knew the faults
+and foibles of both priest and politician, and his keen wit told truths
+about the court that were so well expressed the wastebasket did not
+capture them. One of these effusions was printed, anonymously, of
+course, but a copy coming into the hands of M. Arouet, the old gentleman
+recognized the literary style and became alarmed. He must get the young
+man out of Paris--the Bastile yawned for poets like this!
+
+A brother of the Abbe de Chateauneuf was Ambassador at The Hague, and
+the great man, being importuned, consented to take the youth as clerk.
+
+Life at The Hague afforded the embryo poet an opportunity to meet many
+distinguished people.
+
+In Francois there was none of the bourgeois--he associated only with
+nobility--and as he had an aristocracy of the intellect, which served
+him quite as well as a peerage, he was everywhere received. In his
+manner there was nothing apologetic--he took everything as his divine
+right.
+
+In this brilliant little coterie at The Hague was one Madame Dunoyer, a
+writer of court gossip and a social promoter of ability, separated from
+her husband for her husband's good. Francois crossed swords with her in
+an encounter of wit, was worsted, but got even by making love to her;
+and later he made love to her daughter, a beautiful girl of about his
+own age.
+
+The air became surcharged with gossip. There was danger of an explosion
+any moment. Madame Dunoyer gave it out that the brilliant subaltern was
+to marry the girl. The Madame was going to capture the youth, either
+with her own charms or those of her daughter--or combined. Rumblings
+were heard on the horizon. The Ambassador, fearing entanglement, bundled
+young Arouet back to Paris, with a testimonial as to his character,
+quite unnecessary. A denial without an accusation is equal to a plea of
+guilty; and that the young man had made the mistake of making violent
+love to the mother and daughter at the same time there is no doubt. The
+mother had accused him and he said things back; he even had shown the
+atrocious bad taste of references in rhyme to the mutual interchange of
+confidences that the mother and daughter might enjoy. The Ambassador had
+acted none too soon.
+
+The father was frantic with alarm--the boy had disgraced him, and even
+his own position seemed to be threatened when some wit adroitly accused
+the parent of writing the doggerel for his son.
+
+M. Arouet denied it with an oath--while the son refused to explain, or
+to say anything beyond that he loved his father, thus carrying out the
+idea that the stupid old notary was really a wit in disguise, masking
+his intellect by a seeming dulness. No more biting irony was ever put
+out by Voltaire than this, and the pathos of it lies in the fact that
+the father was quite unable to appreciate the quip.
+
+It was a sample of filial humor much more subtle than that indulged in
+by Charles Dickens, who pilloried his parents in print, one as Mr.
+Micawber and the other as Mrs. Nickleby. Dickens told the truth and
+painted it large, but Francois Arouet dealt in indiscreet fallacy when
+he endeavored to give his father a reputation for raillery.
+
+A peculiarly offensive poem, appearing about this time, with the Regent
+and his daughter, the Duchesse de Berri, for a central theme, a rescript
+was issued which indirectly testified to the poetic skill of young
+Arouet. He was exiled to a point three hundred miles from Paris and
+forbidden to come nearer on penalty, like unto the injunction issued by
+Prince Henry against the blameless Falstaff. Rumor said that the father
+had something to do with the matter.
+
+But the exile was not for long. The young poet wrote a most adulatory
+composition to the Regent, setting forth his innocence. The Regent was a
+mild and amiable man and much desired peace with all his
+subjects--especially those who dipped their quills in gall. He was
+melted by the rhyme that made him out such a paragon of virtue, and made
+haste to issue a pardon.
+
+The elder Arouet now proved that he was not wholly without humor, for he
+wrote to a friend, "The exile of my dear son distressed me much less
+than does this precipitate recall."
+
+In order to protect himself the father now refused a home to the son,
+and Francois became a lodger at a boarding-house. He wrote plays and
+acted in them, penned much bad poetry, went in good society and had a
+very rouge time. Up to this period he knew little Latin and less Greek,
+but now he had an opportunity to furbish up on both. He found himself an
+inmate of the Bastile, on the charge of expressing his congratulations
+to the people of France on the passing of Louis the Fourteenth. In
+America libel only applies to live men, but the world had not then
+gotten this far along.
+
+In the prison it was provided that Sieur Arouet fils should not be
+allowed pens and paper on account of his misuse of these good things
+when outside. He was given copies of Homer, however, in Greek and Latin,
+and he set himself at work, with several of the other prisoners, to
+perfect himself in these languages. We have glimpses of his dining with
+the governor of the prison, and even organizing theatrical performances,
+and he was finally allowed writing materials on promise that he would
+not do anything worse than translate the Bible, so altogether he was
+very well treated.
+
+In fact, he himself referred to this year spent in prison as "a pious
+retreat, that I might meditate, and chasten my soul in quiet thought."
+
+He was only twenty-one, and yet he had set Paris by the ears, and his
+name was known throughout France. "I am as well known as the Regent and
+will be remembered longer," he wrote--a statement and a prophecy that
+then seemed very egotistical, but which time has fully justified.
+
+It was in prison that he decided to change his name to Voltaire, a
+fanciful word of his own coining. His pretended reason for the change
+was that he might begin life anew and escape the disgrace he had
+undergone of being in prison. There is reason to believe, however, that
+he was rather proud of being "detained," it was proof of his power--he
+was dangerous outside. But his family had practically cast him off--he
+owed nothing to them--and the change of name fostered a mysterious noble
+birth, an idea that he allowed to gain currency without contradiction.
+Moliere had changed his name from Poquolin--and was he not really
+following in Moliere's footsteps, even to suffering disgrace and public
+odium?
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The play of "Oedipe" was presented by Voltaire at the Theater
+Francaise, November Eighteenth, Seventeen Hundred Eighteen. This play
+was written before the author's sojourn in prison, but there he had
+sandpapered its passages, and hand-polished the epigrams.
+
+It was rehearsed at length with the help of the "guests" at the Bastile,
+and once Voltaire wrote a note of appreciation to the Prefect of Police,
+thanking him for his thoughtfulness in sending such excellent and
+pure-minded people to help him in his work.
+
+These things had been managed so they discreetly leaked out, and the
+cafes echoed with the name of Voltaire.
+
+Very soon after his release the play was presented to a crowded house.
+It was a success from the start, for into its lines the audience was
+allowed to read many veiled allusions to Paris public characters. It ran
+for forty-five nights, and was the furore. On one occasion when interest
+seemed to lag, Voltaire, on a sudden inspiration, dressed up as a
+bumpkin page, and attended the Pontiff, carrying his train, playing
+various and sundry sly pranks in pantomime, a la Francis Wilson.
+
+In one of the boxes sat a famous beauty, the Duchesse de Villars. "Who
+is this strange person who is intent upon spoiling the play?" she asked.
+On being told that he was the author of the drama, her censure turned to
+approbation and she sent for the young man. His appearance in her box
+was duly noted. The Regent and his daughter, the Duchesse de Berri,
+could not resist the temptation to attend the play, and see how much
+they were satirized. Voltaire did his little train-bearing act for their
+benefit, with a few extra grimaces, which pleased them very much, and
+seeing his opportunity, wrote a gracious letter of thanks to His
+Highness for having deigned to visit his play, winding up with thanks
+for the years in the Bastile where, "God wot, all of my evil
+inclinations were duly chastened and corrected."
+
+It had the desired effect--each side feared the other. The Regent wanted
+the ready writers on his side, and the playwright who was opposed by the
+party in power could not hope for success. The Regent sent a present of
+a thousand crowns to Voltaire and also fixed on him a pension of twelve
+hundred livres a year. At once every passage in the play that could be
+construed as bearing on royalty was revised into words of adulation, and
+all went merry as a marriage-bell. Financially the play was a success,
+and better yet was the pension and the good-will of the young King and
+his Regent.
+
+Thus at twenty-two did Voltaire have the world at his feet.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+When Voltaire was twenty-four, his father died. The will provided that
+the property should be equally divided between his three children, but
+it was stipulated that the second son should not come into possession of
+his share until he was thirty-five, and not then unless he was able to
+show the Master in Chancery that he was capable of wisely managing his
+own affairs.
+
+This doubt of the father concerning the son's financial ability has
+often been commented upon ironically, in view of the pronounced thrift
+shown by Voltaire in later life.
+
+But who shall say whether the father by that provision in his will did
+not drive home a stern lesson in economy? Commodore Vanderbilt had so
+much distrust of his son William's capacity for business that he exiled
+him to a Long Island farm, on an allowance. Years after, when William
+had shown his ability to outstrip his father, he rebuked a critic who
+volunteered a suggestion to the effect that the father had erred in the
+boy problem. Said William, "My father was right in this, as in most
+other things--I was a fool, and he knew it."
+
+Voltaire's vacation of a year in the Bastile had done him much good.
+Then the will of his father, with its cautious provisions, tended to
+sober the youth to a point where he was docile enough for society's
+needs.
+
+A good deal of ballast in way of trouble was necessary to hold this man
+down.
+
+Marriage might have tamed him. Bachelors are of two kinds--those who are
+innocent of women, and those who know women too well. The second class,
+I am told, outnumbers the first as ten to one.
+
+Voltaire had been a favorite of various women--usually married ladies,
+and those older than himself. He had plagiarized Franklin, saying, fifty
+years before the American put out his famous advice, "If you must fall
+in love, why, fall in love with a woman much older than yourself, or at
+least a homely one--for only such are grateful."
+
+In answer to a man who said divorce and marriage were instituted at the
+same time, Voltaire said: "This is a mistake: there is at least three
+days' difference. Men sometimes quarrel with their wives at the end of
+three days, beat them in a week and divorce them at the end of a month."
+
+Voltaire was small and slight in stature, but his bubbling wit and
+graceful presence more than made amends for any deficiency in way of
+form and feature. Had he desired, he might have taken his pick among the
+young women of nobility, but we see the caution of his nature in
+limiting his love-affairs to plain women, securely married. "Gossip
+isn't busy with the plain women--that is why I like you," he once said
+to Madame de Bernieres. What the Madame's reply was, we do not know, but
+probably she was not displeased. If a woman knows she is loved, it
+matters little what you say to her. Compliments by the right oblique
+are construed into lavish praise when expressed in the right tone of
+voice by the right person.
+
+The Regent had allowed Voltaire another pension of two thousand francs,
+at the same time intimating that he hoped the writer's income was
+sufficient so he could now tell the truth. Voltaire took the hint, so
+subtly veiled, to the effect that if he again affronted royalty by
+unkind criticisms, his entire pension would be canceled.
+
+From this time on to the end of his life, he was full of lavish praise
+for royalty. He was needlessly loyal, and dedicated poems and pamphlets
+to nobility, right and left, in a way that would have caused a smile
+were not nobility so hopelessly bound in three-quarters pachyderm. He
+also wrote religious poems, protesting his love for the Church. And here
+seems a good place to say that Voltaire was a member of the Catholic
+Church to his death. Many of his worst attacks on the priesthood were
+put in way of defense for outrageous actions which he enumerated in
+detail. He kept people guessing as to what he meant and what he would do
+next.
+
+Immediately after the death of President McKinley there was a fine
+scramble among the editors of certain saffron sheets--to get in line and
+shake their ulsters free from all taint of anarchy. Some writers, in
+order to divert suspicion from themselves, hotly denounced other men as
+anarchists.
+
+Throughout his life Voltaire had spasms of repentance, prompted by
+caution, possibly, when he warmly denounced atheists, and swore, i'
+faith, that one object of his life was to purify the Church and cleanse
+it of its secret faults.
+
+In his twenty-sixth year, when he was trying hard to be good, he got
+into a personal altercation with the Chevalier de Rohan, an
+insignificant man bearing a proud name. The Chevalier's wit was no match
+for the other's rapier-like tongue, but he had a way of his own in which
+to get even. He had his servants waylay the luckless poet and chastise
+him soundly with rattans.
+
+Voltaire was furious; he tried to get the courts to take it up, but the
+prevailing idea was that he had gotten what he deserved, and the fact
+that the whole affair occurred after dark and the Chevalier did not do
+the beating in person, made conviction impossible.
+
+But Voltaire now quit the anapest and dactyl and devoted his best hours
+to taking fencing lessons. His firm intent was to baptize the soil with
+Rohan's blood. Voltaire was of enough importance so the secret police
+knew of all his doings. Suddenly he found himself taking a post-graduate
+course in the Bastile. I am not sure that the fiery little man was
+entirely displeased with the procedure. It proved to the world that he
+was a dangerous character, and it also gave him a respite from the
+tyranny of the fencing-master, and allowed him to turn to his first,
+last and only love--literature. In Voltaire's cosmos was a good deal of
+the Bob Acres quality.
+
+There were plenty of reasons for locking him up--heresy and treason have
+ever been first cousins--and pamphlets lampooning Churchmen high in
+office were laid at his door. No doubt some of the anonymous literature
+was not his--"I would have done the thing better or not at all," he once
+said in reference to a scurrilous brochure. The real fact was, that that
+particular pamphlet was done by a disciple, and if Voltaire's writings
+were vile, then was his offense doubled in that he vitalized a ravenous
+brood of scribblers. They played Caliban to his Setebos.
+
+Voltaire's most offensive contributions were always attributed by him to
+this bishop or that, and to various dignitaries who had no existence
+save in the figment of his own fertile pigment.
+
+He once carried on a controversy between the Bishop of Berlin and the
+Archbishop of Paris, each man thundering against the other with a
+monthly pamphlet wherein each one gored the other without mercy, and
+revealed the senselessness of the other's religion. They flung the
+literary stinkpot with great accuracy. "The other man's superstition is
+always ridiculous to us--our own is sacred," said Voltaire, and so he
+allowed his controversialists to fight it out for his own quiet joy, and
+the edification of the onlookers.
+
+Then his plan of printing an alleged sermon, giving some unknown prelate
+due credit on the title-page, starting in with a pious text and a page
+of trite nothings and gradually drifting off into ridicule of the things
+he had started in to defend--all this gives a comic tinge to his wail
+that "some evil-minded person is attributing things to me I never
+wrote," If an occasional sly Churchman got after him with his own
+weapon, writing things in his style more hazardous than he dare express,
+surely he should not have complained.
+
+But this was a fact--the enemy could not follow him long with a literary
+fusillade--they hadn't the mental ammunition.
+
+Well has Voltaire been called "the father of all those who wear
+shovel-hats."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+A few months in the Bastile, and Voltaire's indeterminate sentence was
+commuted to exile. He was allowed to leave his country for his country's
+good. Early in the year Seventeen Hundred Twenty-six he landed in
+England, evidently knowing nobody there except one merchant, a man of no
+special prominence.
+
+Voltaire belonged to the nobility by divine right--as much as did
+Disraeli. Both had an inward contempt for titles, but they knew the
+hearts of the owners so well that they simply played a game of chess,
+and the "men" they moved were live knights, bishops, kings and queens,
+with rollers under the castles. The pawns they pushed here and there
+were the literary puppets of the time.
+
+The first thing Voltaire had to master in England was the language, and
+this he did passably inside of three months. He took Grub Street by
+storm; dawdled at Dodsley's; met Dean Swift, and these worthies
+respected each other's wit so much that they simply took snuff, grimaced
+and let it go at that; Pope came in for a visit, and the French poet
+crossed Twickenham ferry and offered a handmade sonnet in admiration of
+the "Essay on Man," which he had probably never read. Gay gave Voltaire
+"The Beggar's Opera," in private, and together they called on Congreve,
+who interrupted the Frenchman's flow of flattery long enough to say that
+he wished to be looked on as a gentleman, not a poet. And Voltaire
+replied that there were many gentlemen but few poets, and if Congreve
+had had the misfortune to be simply a gentleman he would not have
+troubled to call on him at all. Congreve, who really regarded himself as
+the peer of Shakespeare, was won, and sent Voltaire on his way with
+letters to Horace Walpole of Strawberry Hill. Thomson, who lived at
+Hammersmith, and wrote his "Seasons" in a "public" next door to
+Kelmscott, corrected and revised some of Voltaire's attempts at English
+poetry. Young evolved some of his "Night Thoughts" while on a visit with
+Voltaire at Bubb Dodington's.
+
+A call on the Duchess of Marlborough led to a dinner at Lord
+Chesterfield's. Next he met Queen Caroline and assured her that she
+spoke French like a Parisian. King George the Second quite liked
+Voltaire, because Voltaire quite liked Lady Sandon, his mistress. Only a
+Frenchman could have successfully paid court to the King, Queen and Lady
+Sandon at the same time, as Voltaire did. His great epic poem,
+"Henriade," that he had been sandpapering for ten years, was now
+published, dedicated to the Queen. The King headed the subscription-list
+with more copies than he needed, at five guineas each, on agreement.
+Voltaire afterward said that he would not be expected to read the poem.
+The Queen's good offices were utilized--she became for the time a royal
+book-agent, and her signature and the author's adorned all deluxe
+copies. A suggestion from the Queen was equal to an order, and the
+edition was soon worked off.
+
+Voltaire now spent three years in England. He had written his "Life of
+Charles the Twelfth," several plays, an "English Note-Book," and best of
+all, had gotten together a thousand pounds good money as proceeds of
+"Henriade," a stiff and stilted piece of pedantic bombast, written with
+sweat and lamp-smoke.
+
+The "Letters on the English" were published a few years later in Paris
+with good results, considering it was only a by-product. It is a deal
+better-natured than Dickens' "American Note-Book," and had more humor
+than Emerson's "English Traits." Among other things quite Voltairesque
+in the "Letters" is this: "The Anglican Church has retained many of the
+good old Catholic customs--not the least of which is the collection of
+tithes with great regularity."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The priestly habit of Voltaire's life manifested itself even to the
+sharp collecting from the world all that the world owed him.
+
+The snug little sum he had secured in England would have shown his
+ability, but there was something better in store, awaiting his return to
+France. It seems the Controller of Finance had organized a lottery to
+help pay the interest on the public debt. A considerable sum of money
+had been realized, but there was still a large number of tickets unsold,
+and the drawing was soon to take place. Voltaire knew the officials who
+had the matter in charge and they knew him. He organized a syndicate
+that would take all tickets there were left, on guarantee that among the
+tickets purchased would be the one that called for the principal prize
+of forty thousand pounds. Just how it was known in advance what ticket
+would win must be left to those good people who understand these little
+things in detail. In any event, Voltaire put in every sou he had--and
+his little fortune was then a matter of about ten thousand dollars.
+Several of his friends contributed a like sum.
+
+The drawing took place, and the prize of forty thousand pounds was
+theirs. It is said that Voltaire took twenty-five thousand pounds as his
+share--the whole scheme was his anyway--and his friends were quite
+satisfied with having doubled their money in a fortnight.
+
+Immediately on securing this money, Voltaire presented himself at the
+office of the President of Accounts, and asked for the legacy left him
+by his father. As proof of his financial ability, and as a guarantee of
+good faith, he opened a hand-satchel and piled on the President's table
+a small mountain of gold and bank-notes. The first question of the
+astonished official was, "Will M. de Voltaire have the supreme goodness
+to explain where he stole all this money?"
+
+This was soon followed by an apology, as the visitor explained the
+reason of his visit.
+
+The father's legacy amounted to nearly four thousand pounds, and this
+was at once paid over to Voltaire with a flattering letter expressing
+perfect faith in his ability to manage his own finances.
+
+There is a popular opinion that Voltaire made considerable money by his
+pen, but the fact is, that at no period of his life did literature
+contribute in but a very scanty way to his prosperity.
+
+After the lottery scheme, Voltaire embarked in grain speculations,
+importing wheat from Barbary for French consumption. In this he made a
+fair profit, but when war broke out between Italy and France, he entered
+into an arrangement with Duverney, who had the army commissariat in his
+hands, to provision the troops. It was not much of a war, but it lasted
+long enough, as most wars do, for a few contractors to make much moneys.
+The war spirit is usually fanned by financiers, Kuhn, Loeb and Company
+giving the ultimatum.
+
+Voltaire cleared about twenty thousand pounds out of his provision
+contract.
+
+Thus we find this thrifty poet at forty with a fortune equal to a
+half-million dollars. This money he loaned out in a way of his own--a
+way as original as his literary style. His knowledge of the upper
+circles again served him well. Among the proud scions of nobility there
+were always a few who, through gambling proclivities, and other royal
+qualities, were much in need of funds. Voltaire picked the men who had
+only a life interest in their estates, and made them loans, secured by
+the rentals. The loans were to be paid back in annuities as long as both
+men lived.
+
+All insurance is a species of gambling--the company offers to make you a
+bet that your house will burn within a year.
+
+In life-insurance, the company's expert looks you over, and if your
+waist measurement is not too great for your height, a bargain is entered
+into wherein you agree to pay so much now, and so much every year as
+long as you live, in consideration that the company will pay your heirs
+so much at your death.
+
+The chief value of life-insurance lies in the fact that it insures a man
+against his own indiscretion, a thing supposedly under his own
+control--but which never is. Voltaire's scheme banked on the man's
+weakness, and laid his indiscretion open before the world. It was
+life-insurance turned wrong side out, and could only have been devised
+and carried out by a man of courage with an actuary's bias for
+mathematics.
+
+Instead of agreeing to pay the man so much at death, Voltaire paid him
+the whole sum in advance, and the man agreed to pay, say, ten per cent
+interest until either the lender or the borrower died. No principal was
+to be paid, and on the death of either party, the whole debt was
+canceled.
+
+Voltaire picked only men younger than himself. It was a tempting offer
+to the borrower, for Voltaire looked like a consumptive, and it is said
+that on occasion he evolved a wheezy cough that helped close the deal.
+The whole scheme, for Voltaire, was immensely successful. On some of the
+risks he collected his yearly ten per cent for over forty years, or
+until his death.
+
+On Voltaire's loan of sixteen hundred pounds to the Marquis du Chatelet,
+however, it is known that he collected nothing either in way of
+principal or interest. This was as strange a piece of financiering as
+was ever consummated; and the inside history of the matter, with its
+peculiar psychology, has never been written. The only two persons who
+could have told that story in its completeness were Voltaire and the
+Madame du Chatelet, and neither ever did.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Madame du Chatelet--the divine Emilie--was twenty-seven and Voltaire was
+thirty-nine when they first met.
+
+He was living in obscure lodgings in Paris for prudential reasons, the
+executioner having just burned, in the public street, all the copies of
+his last book that could be found.
+
+The Madame called on him to express her sympathy--and congratulations.
+She had written a book, but it had not been burned--not even read! She
+was tall, thin, angular, far from handsome, but had beaming eyes and a
+face that tokened intellect. And best of all, her voice was low, finely
+modulated, and was not exercised more than was meet.
+
+She leaned her chin upon her hand and looked at him.
+
+She had met Voltaire when she was a child--at least she said so, and he,
+being a gentleman, remembered perfectly. She read to him a little
+manuscript she had just dashed off. It was deep, profound and full of
+reasons--that is the way learned women write--they write like professors
+of rhetoric. Really great men write lightly, suggestively, and with a
+certain amount of indifference, dash, froth and foam. When women evolve
+literary foam, it is the sweet, cloying, fixed foam of the charlotte
+russe--not the bubbling, effervescent Voltaire article.
+
+Could M. de Voltaire suggest a way in which her manuscript might be
+lightened up so the public executioner would deign to notice it?
+
+M. de Voltaire responded by reading to her a little thing of his own.
+
+The next day she called again.
+
+Some say that Madame called on Voltaire to secure a loan on her
+husband's estate at Civey. No matter--she got the loan.
+
+Doubtless she did not know where she was going--none of us do. We are
+all sailing under sealed orders.
+
+The Madame had been married eight years. She was versed in Latin and
+knew Italian literature. She was educated; Voltaire was not. She offered
+to teach him Italian if he would give her lessons in English.
+
+They read to each other things they had recently written. When men and
+women read to each other and mingle their emotions, the danger-line is
+being reached. Literary people of the opposite sex do not really love
+each other. All they desire is to read their manuscript aloud to a
+receptive listener.
+
+Thus are the literary germs vitalized--by giving our thoughts to another
+we really make them our own. Only well-sexed people produce
+literature--poetry is the pollen of the mind. Meter, rhythm, lilt and
+style are stamen, pistil and stalk swaying in the warm breeze of
+springtime.
+
+An order for arrest was out for Voltaire. Pamphlets which he had been
+refused permission to publish in Paris were printed at Rouen and were
+setting all Paris by the ears.
+
+With Madame du Chatelet he fled to Civey, where was the tumbledown
+chateau of the Marquis--the Madame's complaisant husband. Voltaire
+advanced the Marquis sixteen hundred pounds to put the place in order,
+and then on his own account fitted up two sumptuous apartments, one for
+himself and one for Madame. The Marquis went away with his regiment, and
+occasionally came back and lounged about the chateau. But Voltaire was
+the real master of the place.
+
+Voltaire was neither domestic nor rural in his tastes, but the Du
+Chatelet seemed to fill his cup to the brim, and made him enjoy what
+otherwise would have been exile. He wrote incessantly--poems, essays,
+plays--and fired pamphlets at a world of fools.
+
+All that he wrote during the day he read to Madame at night. One of her
+maids has given us a vivid little picture of how Voltaire, at exactly
+eleven o'clock each night, would come out of hiding, and entering the
+Madame's room, would partake of the dainty supper that was always
+prepared for him. The divine Emilie had the French habit of receiving
+her visitors in bed, and as her hours were much more regular than
+Voltaire's, she usually enjoyed a nap before he entered. After his
+supper he would read aloud to her all he had written since they last
+met. If the piece was dramatic he would act it out with roll of r's,
+striding walk, grimace and gesticulations gracefully done, for the man
+was an actor of rare talent.
+
+Emerson says, "Let a man do a thing incomparably well, and the world
+will make a path to his door, though he live in a forest." There was no
+lack of society at Civey--the writers, poets and philosophers found
+their way there. Voltaire fitted up a little private theater, where his
+plays were given, and concerts and lectures held from time to time.
+
+The divine Emilie's forte was science and mathematics--and on these
+themes she wrote much, competing for prizes and winning the recognition
+of various learned societies. It will be seen that the man and the woman
+were not in competition with each other, which, perhaps, accounts, in
+degree, for their firm friendship.
+
+Yet they did quarrel, too, as true lovers will, I am told. But their
+quarreling was all done in English, so the servants and His Inertia, the
+Marquis, did not know the purpose of it. It is probable that the
+accounts of their misunderstandings are considerably exaggerated, as the
+rehearsal of a tragedy by this pair of histrions would be taken by the
+servants for a sure-enough fight.
+
+And they were always acting--often beginning breakfast with a "stunt."
+The Madame sang well, and her little impromptu arias pleased her thin
+little lover immensely and he would improvise and answer in kind, and
+then take the part of an audience and applaud, calling loudly, "Bravo!
+Bravo!"
+
+Mornings they would ride horseback through the winding woods, or else
+hunt for geological and botanical specimens. About all of Voltaire's
+science he got from the lady and this was true of languages as well.
+
+To a nervous, irritable and intense thinker a certain amount of solitude
+seems necessary. Voltaire occasionally grew weary of the delicious quiet
+of Civey, and the indictment against him having been quashed, he would
+go away to Paris or elsewhere. On these trips if he did not take Madame
+along she would grow furious, then lacrimose and finally
+submissive--with a weepy protest. If he failed to write her daily she
+grew hysterical. Two winters they spent together in Paris and another at
+Brussels.
+
+A lawsuit involving the estate of the Marquis du Chatelet, that had been
+in the courts for eighty years, was pushed to a successful issue by
+Voltaire and Madame. Four hundred fifty thousand dollars were secured,
+but of this Voltaire, strangely enough, took nothing.
+
+That the bond between Emilie and Voltaire was very firm is shown by the
+fact that, after they had been together ten years, he declined to leave
+her to accept an invitation to visit Frederick the Great at Berlin.
+Frederick was a married man, but his was a strictly bachelor court--for
+prudential reasons. Frederick and Emilie had carried on a spirited
+correspondence, but this was as close as he cared for her to come to
+him. All of his communications with females were limited to letters,
+and Voltaire once said that that was the reason he was called Frederick
+the Great.
+
+Madame du Chatelet died when she was forty-two; Voltaire was fifty-five.
+For fifteen years this strange and most romantic friendship had
+continued, and to a degree it had worn itself out. Toward the last the
+lady had been exacting and dictatorial, and thinking that Voltaire had
+slighted her by not taking her more into his confidence, she had
+accepted another lover, a man ten years her junior. If she had thought
+to make Voltaire jealous, she had reckoned without her host--he was
+relieved to find her fierce supervision relaxed.
+
+When she passed away he worked his woe up into a pretty panegyric,
+closed up his affairs at Civey, and left there forever.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+So far as the government was concerned, Voltaire seems to have passed
+his days in accepting rewards and receiving punishments. Interdict,
+exile, ostracism were followed by honors, pension and office.
+
+His one lasting love was the drama. About every two years a swirl of
+excitement was caused at Paris by the announcement of a new play by
+Voltaire. These plays seemed to appeal mostly to the nobility, the
+clergy and those in public office. And the object in every instance was
+to get even with somebody, and place some one in a ridiculous light.
+Innocent historical dramas were passed by the censor, and afterward it
+was found that in them some local bigwig was flayed without mercy. Then
+the play had to be withdrawn, and all printed copies were burned in
+public, and Voltaire would flee to Brussels or Geneva to escape summary
+punishment.
+
+However, he never fooled all of the people all of the time. There was
+always a goodly number of dignitaries who richly enjoyed the drubbing he
+gave the other fellow, and these would gloat in inward glee over the
+Voltaire ribaldry until it came their turn. Then the other side would
+laugh. The fact is, Voltaire always represented a constituency,
+otherwise his punishment might have been genuine, instead of forty
+lashes with a feather, well laid on.
+
+About the time Madame du Chatelet passed away, Voltaire seemed to be
+enjoying a period of kingly favor. He had been made a Knight of the
+Bedchamber and also Historiographer of France. The chief duty of the
+first office consisted in signing the monthly voucher for salary, and
+the other was about the same as Poet Laureate--with salary in inverse
+ratio to responsibility. It was considered, however, that the holder of
+these offices was one of the King's family, and therefore was bound to
+indulge in no unseemly antics.
+
+On June Twenty-sixth, Seventeen Hundred Fifty, Voltaire applied to the
+King in person for permission to visit Frederick of Prussia.
+
+Tradition has it that the King replied promptly, "You may go--the sooner
+the better--and you may remain as long as you choose."
+
+Voltaire pocketed the veiled acerbity without a word, and bowing himself
+out, made hot haste to pack up and be on his way before an order
+rescinding the permission was issued.
+
+Frederick was a freethinker, a scientist, a poet, and a wit well worthy
+of the companionship of Voltaire. In fact, they were very much alike.
+Both had the dual qualities of being intensely practical and yet
+iconoclastic. Both were witty, affable, seemingly indifferent and
+careless, but yet always with an eye on the main chance. Each was small,
+thin and bony, but both had the intellect of the lean and hungry Cassius
+that looked quite through the deeds of man.
+
+Frederick received Voltaire with royal honors. Princes, ministers of
+state, grandees and generals high in office, knelt on one knee as he
+passed. Frederick tried to make it appear that France had failed to
+appreciate her greatest philosopher, and so he had come to Prussia--the
+home of letters. His pension was fixed at twenty thousand francs a year,
+he was given the Golden Key of Chamberlain, and the Grand Cross of the
+Order of Merit. He was a member of the King's household, and was the
+nearest and dearest friend of the royal person.
+
+Frederick thought he had bound the great man to him for life.
+
+Personality repels as well as attracts. Voltaire's viper-like pen was
+never idle. He wrote little plays for the court, and these were
+presented with much eclat, the author superintending their presentation,
+and considerately taking minor parts himself, so as to divide the
+honors. But amateur theatricals stand for heart-burnings and jealousy.
+The German poets were scored, other writers ridiculed, and big
+scientists came in for their share of pen-pricking.
+
+Voltaire corrected the King's manuscript and taught him the secret of
+literary style. Then they fell into a controversy, done in Caslon
+old-style, thundering against each other's theories in pamphlets across
+seas of misundertandings. Neither side publicly avowed the authorship,
+but nobody was deceived. The King and Voltaire met daily at meals, and
+carefully avoided the topics they were fighting out in print.
+
+Voltaire was rich and all of his wants were supplied, but he entered the
+financial lists, and taking advantage of his inside knowledge,
+speculated in scrip and got into a disgraceful lawsuit over the proceeds
+with a man he should never have known. Frederick was annoyed--then
+disturbed. He personally chided Voltaire for his folly in mixing with
+the King's enemies.
+
+Voltaire had tired of the benevolent assimilation--he craved freedom. A
+friend who loves you, if he spies upon your every action, will become
+intolerable. Voltaire intimated to Frederick that he would like to go.
+
+But Frederick had a great admiration for the man--he considered Voltaire
+the greatest living thinker, and to have such a one in the court would
+help give the place an atmosphere of learning. He recognized that there
+were two Voltaires--one covetous, quibbling, spiteful and greedy; and
+the other the peerless poet and philosopher--the man who hated shams and
+pretense, and had made a brave fight for liberty; the charming
+companion, the gracious friend. Frederick was philosopher enough to
+realize that he could not have the one without the other--if he had the
+angel he must also tolerate the demon. This he would do--he must have
+his Voltaire, and so he refused the passports asked for, and sought to
+interest his literary lion in new projects. Finally, court life became
+intolerable to Voltaire, as life is to anybody when he realizes that he
+is being detained against his will. Voltaire packed his effects,
+secured a four-horse carriage, and with his secretary, departed by
+night, without leaving orders where his mail should be forwarded.
+
+When Frederick found that his singing bird had flown, he was furious.
+Fear had much to do with the matter, for Voltaire had taken various
+manuscripts written by the King, wherein potentates in high places were
+severely scored. The first thought of Frederick evidently was that
+Voltaire had really been a spy in the employ of the French government.
+He sent messengers after him in hot haste--the fugitive was overtaken,
+and arrested. His luggage was searched, and after being detained at
+Frankfort for three weeks he was allowed to depart for pastures new.
+
+The news of his flight, arrest and disgrace became the gossip of every
+court of Christendom. Who was disgraced more by the arrest--Voltaire or
+Frederick--the world has not yet decided. Carlyle deals with the subject
+in detail in his "Life of Frederick," and exonerates the King. But Taine
+says Carlyle wrote neither history nor poetry, and certainly we do not
+consider the sage of Cheyne Row an impartial judge.
+
+Voltaire took time to cool, and then wrote a history of the affair which
+is published in his "My Private Life," that is one of the most delicious
+pieces of humor ever written. That he should have looked forward to life
+at the Prussian Court as the ideal, and then after bravely enduring it
+for three years, make his escape by night, was only a huge joke.
+Nothing else could have been expected, he says. Men of fifty should know
+that environment does not make heaven, and people who expect other
+people to make paradise for them are forever doomed to wander without
+the walls.
+
+Voltaire acknowledges that he got better treatment than he deserved, and
+makes no apology for working the whole affair up into good copy. The
+final proof that Voltaire was a true philosopher is that he was able to
+laugh at himself.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+When Voltaire left Prussia, it was voluntary exile. Paris was
+forbidden--all of France was for him unsafe; England he had hopelessly
+offended. By slow stages he made his way to Switzerland. But on the way
+there his courage failed him and he wrote back to Frederick, suggesting
+reconciliation. But Frederick promptly reminded him that he had
+repeatedly broken promises by writing about Frederick's personal
+friends, and "Voltaire and Frederick had better keep apart, that their
+love for each other might not grow cold"--a subtle bit of sarcasm.
+
+At Geneva, where Calvin had instituted a little tyranny of his own,
+Voltaire was made welcome. Nominally no Catholics were allowed in
+Geneva, and when Voltaire wrote to the authorities, explaining that he
+was a good Catholic, the matter was taken as a great joke. He bought a
+beautiful little farm a few miles away, on the banks of the river Rhone,
+overlooking the city of Geneva and the lake. It was an ideal spot, and
+rightly he called it "Delices." Here he was going to end his days amid
+flowers and birds and books and bees, an onlooker and possibly a
+commentator on the times, but not a doer. His days of work were over. Of
+the world of strife he had had enough--thus he wrote to Frederick.
+
+Visitors of a literary turn of mind at Geneva began to come his way. He
+established an inn, and later built a theater out of the ruins of an old
+church that he had bought and dismantled. "This is what I am going to
+do with all the churches in France," he explained with a smile.
+
+His pen was never idle. He wrote plays that were presented at his own
+little theater, and on such occasions he would send word to his Geneva
+friends not to come, as they could not be accommodated. Of course they
+came.
+
+He wrote a history of Peter the Great, and this brought him into
+communication with Queen Catherine of Russia, with whom he carried on
+quite an animated correspondence. This worthy widow invited him to Saint
+Petersburg, and he slyly wrote to Frederick for advice as to whether he
+should go or not. It is said that Frederick advised him to go, pay court
+to the Queen, marry her, seize the throne, and get his head cut off for
+his pains, thus achieving immortality and benefiting the world at one
+stroke.
+
+Voltaire had no intention of going to Saint Petersburg; he had created a
+little Court of Letters, of which he himself was the Czar, and for the
+first time in his life he was experiencing a degree of genuine content.
+His flowers, bees, manuscripts and theater filled every moment of the
+day from six in the morning until ten at night. He had arrived in
+Switzerland broken in health, with mind dazed, his frail body undone.
+There at the little farm at Delices, overlooking the lake, health came
+back and youth seemed to return to this man of three-score.
+
+Some of the nobility in Paris, to whom he had loaned money, took
+advantage of his exile to withhold payments, but Voltaire secured an
+agent to look after his affairs, so his losses were not great.
+
+He bought the tumbledown chateau of Tournay, near at hand, which carried
+with it the right to call himself Count Tournay. Frederick, with mock
+respect, so addressed his letters.
+
+His next financial venture, begun when he was sixty-eight, might well
+have tested the strength of a much younger man. A few miles from Geneva,
+at Ferney, just over the border from Switzerland, Voltaire had bought a
+large tract of waste land, intending to use it for pasturage. Here he
+built a cottage and lived a part of the time when visitors were too
+persistent at Delices. Ferney was on French soil, Delices in
+Switzerland. Voltaire had criticized the Protestants of Geneva, and
+given it as his opinion that a Calvinistic tyranny was in no wise
+preferable to one built on Catholicism. Some then said, "This man is
+really what he professes--a Catholic." There had also been a
+demonstration to drive him out of Switzerland, since it was pretty well
+known that Voltaire's crowds of visitors were neither Catholic nor
+Protestant. "Delices is infidelic," was the cry, and this doubtless had
+something to do with Voltaire's establishing himself at Ferney. If
+Protestant Switzerland drove this Catholic over to France, why, Catholic
+France would not molest him.
+
+Every country, no matter how tyrannical its government, prides itself on
+being the home of the exile, just as every man thinks of himself as
+being sincere and without prejudice.
+
+It is now believed that Voltaire had much to do with inciting the civil
+riots in Geneva against the Catholics. He had circulated pamphlets
+purporting to be written by a Catholic, upholding the Pope, and
+ridiculing most unmercifully the pretenses of Protestantism, declaring
+it a compromise with the devil, made up of the scum of the Catholic
+Church. This pamphlet declared Calvin a monster, and arraigned him for
+burning Servetus, and hinted that all Calvinists would soon be paid back
+in their own coin. No one else could have penned this vitriolic pamphlet
+but Voltaire--he knew both sides. But since Geneva regarded Voltaire as
+an infidel, it never occurred to the authorities that he would take up
+the cudgel of the Catholic Church that had burned his books. The real
+fact was, the pamphlet wasn't a defense of Catholicism--it was only a
+drubbing of Calvinism, and the wit was too subtle for the Presbyterians
+to digest.
+
+Very soon another pamphlet appeared, answering the first. It arraigned
+the Catholics in scathing phrase, suggested that they were getting ready
+to burn the city--hinted at a repetition of Saint Bartholomew, and
+declared the order had gone forth from Rome to scourge and kill. It was
+as choice an A.P.A. document as was ever issued by a relentless joker.
+The result was that the workers in the watch-factory and silk-mills who
+were Catholics found themselves ostracized by the Protestant workmen. I
+do not find that the authorities drove the Catholics out of Geneva, it
+was simply a species of labor trouble--Protestants would not work with
+Catholics.
+
+At this juncture Voltaire comes in, and invites all persecuted Catholic
+watch-workers and silk-weavers to move to Ferney. Here Voltaire laid out
+a town--erected houses, factories, churches and schools. In two years he
+had built up a town of twelve hundred people, and had a watch-factory
+and silk-mill in full and paying operation.
+
+The problem of every manufacturer is to sell his wares--Voltaire knew
+how to release purse-strings of friends and enemies alike. He sent
+watches to all of his enemies in Paris, bishops, priests and potentates,
+explaining that he had quit literature forever, and was now engaged in
+helping struggling, exiled Catholics to get an honest living--he was
+doing penance as foreman of a watch-factory--would the Most Reverend not
+help in this worthy work? Money flowed in on Ferney--Frederick ordered a
+consignment of watches, Queen Catherine did the same, and the Bishop of
+Paris sent his blessing and an order for enough silk to keep Voltaire's
+factory going for six months.
+
+Voltaire really got the pick of the workmen of Geneva--the goods made
+were of the best, and while at first Catholics only were employed, yet
+in five years Ferney was quite as much Protestant as Catholic. Voltaire
+respected the religious beliefs of his workmen, and there was liberty
+for all. He paid better wages and treated his workers better than they
+had ever been treated in Geneva. Voltaire built houses for his people
+and allowed them to pay him in monthly instalments. And not only did he
+himself make much money out of his Ferney investment, but he established
+the town upon such a safe financial basis that its prosperity endures
+even unto this day.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It was at Ferney, in his old age, that Voltaire first made open war upon
+"revealed religion." All religions that professed a miraculous origin
+were to him baneful in the extreme, the foes of light and progress, the
+enemies of mankind. He did not perceive, as modern psychology does, that
+the period of supernaturalism is the childhood of the mind. Myths and
+fairy-tales are not of themselves base--the injury lies with the men who
+seek to profit by these things, and build up a tyranny founded on
+innocence and ignorance--seeking to perpetuate these things, issuing
+threats against growth, and offers of reward to all who stand still.
+
+Voltaire called superstition "The Infamy," and he summoned the thinkers
+of the world to crush it beneath a heel of scorn. Letters, pamphlets,
+plays, essays, were sent out in various languages, by his own
+printing-presses. The wit of the man--his scathing mockery--were weapons
+no one could wield in reply. The priests and preachers did not answer
+him--they could not--they only grew purple with wrath and hissed.
+
+Says Victor Hugo, "Jesus wept; Voltaire smiled." To which Bernard Shaw
+has recently rejoined, "Jesus wept; Voltaire smiled; William Morris
+worked."
+
+From the prosperity, peace and security of Ferney, Voltaire pointed a
+bony finger at every hypocrite in Christendom, and laughed his mocking
+smile. The man expressed himself, and happiness lies in that and
+nothing else. Misery comes from lack of full, free self-expression, and
+from nothing else. The man who fights for freedom fights for the right
+of self-expression for himself and others--and immortality lies in
+nothing else.
+
+There is no fight worth making--no struggle worth the while--save the
+struggle for freedom.
+
+No name is honored among men--no name lives--save the name of the man
+who worked for liberty and light--who has fought freedom's fight.
+
+Run the list in your mind of the names that are immortal, and you will
+recall only those of men who have widened the horizon for other men, and
+that select number who are remembered in infamy because they linked
+their names with greatness by doubting, denying, betraying and
+persecuting it--deathless through disgrace.
+
+Voltaire sided with the weak, the defenseless, the fallen. He demanded
+that men should not be hounded for their belief, that they should not be
+arrested without cause and without knowing why, and without letting
+their friends know why. We realize his faults, we know his imperfections
+and limitations, yet, through his influence, life throughout the world
+became safer, liberty dearer, freedom a more sacred thing. His words
+were a battery that eventually razed the walls of the Bastile, and best
+of all, freed countless millions from theological superstition, that
+Bastile of the brain.
+
+
+
+
+HERBERT SPENCER
+
+
+     What knowledge is of most worth? The uniform reply is: Science.
+     This is the verdict on all counts. For direct self-preservation, or
+     the maintenance of life and health, the all-important knowledge
+     is--science. For that indirect self-preservation which we call
+     gaining a livelihood, the knowledge of greatest value is--science.
+     For the discharge of parental functions, the proper guidance is to
+     be found only in science. For the interpretation of national life,
+     past and present, without which the citizen can not rightly
+     regulate his conduct, the indispensable key is--science. Alike for
+     the most perfect production and present enjoyment of art in all its
+     forms, the needful preparation is still--science. And for purposes
+     of discipline--intellectual, moral, religious--the most efficient
+     study is, once more--science.
+
+                                                --_Essay on Education_
+
+[Illustration: HERBERT SPENCER]
+
+
+In Derby, England, April Twenty-seventh, Eighteen Hundred Twenty,
+Herbert Spencer, the only child of his parents, was born. His mother
+died in his childhood, so he really never had any vivid recollection of
+her, but hearsay, fused with memory and ideality, vitalized all. And
+thus to him, to the day of his death, his mother stood for gentleness,
+patience, tenderness, intuitive insight, and a love that never grew
+faint. Man makes his mother in his own image.
+
+Herbert Spencer's father was a school-teacher, and in very moderate
+circumstances. Little Herbert could not remember when he did not go to
+school, and yet as a real scholar, he never went to school at all. The
+family lived over the schoolroom, and while the youngster yet wore
+dresses his father would hold him in his arms, and carry him around the
+room as he instructed his classes. William George Spencer was both
+father and mother to Herbert, and used to sing to him lullabies as the
+sun went down.
+
+After school there were always walks afield, and in the evening the
+brother of the school-master would call, and then there was much
+argument as to Why and What, Whence and Whither.
+
+People talk gossip, we are told, for lack of a worthy theme. These two
+Spencers--one a school-master and the other a clergyman--found the time
+too short for their discussions. In their walks and talks they were
+always examining, comparing, classifying, selecting, speculating.
+Flowers, plants, bugs, beetles, birds, trees, weeds, earth and rocks
+were scrutinized and analyzed.
+
+Where did it come from? How did it get here?
+
+I am told that lions never send their cubs away to be educated by a
+cubless lioness and an emasculated lion. The lion learns by first
+playing at the thing and then doing it.
+
+A motherless boy, brought up by an indulgent father, one might prophesy,
+would be sure to rule the father and be spoiled himself through omission
+of the rod. But in the boy problem all signs fail. The father taught by
+exciting curiosity and animating his pupils to work out problems and
+make discoveries--keeping his discipline well out of sight. How well the
+plan worked is revealed in the life of Herbert Spencer himself; and his
+book, "Education," is based on the ideas evolved by his father, to whom
+he gives much credit. No man ever had so divine a right to compile a
+book on education as Herbert Spencer, for he proved in his own life
+every principle he laid down.
+
+On all excursions Herbert was taken along--because he couldn't be left
+at home, you know. He listened to the conversations and learned by
+hearing the older pupils recite.
+
+All out-of-doors was fairyland to him--a curiosity-shop filled with
+wonderful things--over your head, under your feet, all around was
+life--action, pulsing life, everything in motion--going somewhere,
+evolving into something else.
+
+This habit of observation, adoration and wonder--filled with pleasurable
+emotions and recollections from the first--lasted the man through life,
+and allowed him, even with a frail constitution, to round out a long
+period of severe mental work, with never a tendency to die at the top.
+
+Herbert Spencer never wrote a thing more true than this: "The man to
+whom in boyhood information came in dreary tasks, along with threats of
+punishment, is unlikely to be a student in after-years; while those to
+whom it came in natural forms, at the proper times, and who remember its
+facts as not only interesting in themselves, but as a long series of
+gratifying successes, are likely to continue through life that
+self-instruction begun in youth."
+
+When thirteen years old Herbert went to live with his uncle, the
+Reverend Thomas Spencer, at Bath. Here the same methods of education
+were continued that had been begun at home--conversation, history in the
+form of story-telling, walks and talks, and mathematical calculations
+carried out as pleasing puzzles. In mathematics the boy made rapid
+progress, but the faculty of observation was the dominant one. Every
+phase of cloud and sky, of water and earth, rock and mountain, bird and
+bush, plant and tree, was curious to him. He kept a journal of his
+observations, which had the double advantage of deepening his
+impressions by recounting them, and second, it taught him the use of
+language.
+
+The best way to learn to write is to write. Herbert Spencer never
+studied grammar until he had learned to write. He took his grammar at
+sixty, which is a good age to begin this interesting study, as by that
+time you have largely lost your capacity to sin. Men who swim
+exceedingly well are not those who have taken courses in the theory of
+swimming at natatoriums from professors of the amphibian art--they were
+boys who just jumped in. Correspondence-schools for the taming of
+broncos are as naught; and treatises on the gentle art of wooing are of
+no avail--follow Nature's lead. Grammar is the appendenda vermiformis of
+pedagogics: it is as useless as the letter q in the alphabet, or as the
+proverbial two tails to a cat, which no cat ever had, and the finest cat
+in the world, the Manx cat, has no tail at all.
+
+"The literary style of most university men is commonplace, when not
+positively bad," wrote Herbert Spencer in his old age. "Educated
+Englishmen all write alike," said Taine. That is to say, they have no
+literary style, for style is character, individuality--the style is the
+man. And grammar tends to obliterate all individuality. No study is so
+irksome to everybody, except to the sciolists who teach it, as grammar.
+It remains forever a bad taste in the mouth of the man of ideas, and has
+weaned bright minds innumerable from all desire to express themselves
+through the written word. Grammar is the etiquette of words, and the man
+who does not know how to properly salute his grandmother on the street
+until he has consulted a book, is always so troubled about his tenses
+that his fancies break through language and escape.
+
+Orators who keep their thoughts upon the proper way to gesticulate in
+curves impress nobody. If poor grammar were a sin against decency, or an
+attempt to poison the minds of the people, it might be wise enough to
+hire men to protect the well of English from defilement. But a
+stationary language is a dead one--moving water only is pure--and the
+well that is not fed by springs is a breeding-place for disease. Let men
+express themselves in their own way, and if they express themselves
+poorly, look you, their punishment shall be that no one will read them.
+Oblivion, with her smother-blanket, waits for the writer who has nothing
+to say and says it faultlessly. In the making of hare-soup, I am told
+the first requisite is to catch your hare. The literary scullion who has
+anything to offer a hungry world will doubtless find a way to fricassee
+it.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+When seventeen, Herbert Spencer was apprenticed to a surveyor on the
+London and Birmingham Railway. The pay was meager--board and keep and
+five pounds for the first year, with ten pounds the second year "if he
+deserved it." However, school-teachers and clergymen are used to small
+reward, and to make a living for one's self was no small matter to the
+Spencers. The youth who has gotten his physical growth should earn his
+own living, this as a necessary factor in his further mental evolution.
+
+Neither William George Spencer, Herbert's father, nor Thomas, his uncle,
+seemed ever to anticipate that they were helping to develop the greatest
+thinker of his time. They themselves were obscure men, and quite happy
+therein, and if young Herbert could attain to a fair degree of physical
+health, make his living as an honest surveyor or as a teacher of
+mathematics, it would be all one could reasonably hope for. And thus
+they lived out the measure of their days, and passed away unaware that
+this boy they claimed in partnership was to be the maker of an epoch.
+
+Young Spencer began his surveying work by carrying a flag, and soon he
+was advanced to "chainman." His skill in mathematics made his services
+valuable, and his willingness to sit up nights and work out the
+measurements of the day, so pleased his employer that the letter of the
+contract was waived and he was paid ten pounds for his first year's
+work, instead of five. He invented shorter methods for bridges and
+culverts, and I believe was the first engineer to build a cantilever
+railroad-bridge in England.
+
+When he was twenty-one he had so thoroughly mastered the work that his
+employers offered to place him in charge of a construction-gang at a
+salary of two hundred pounds a year, which was then considered high pay.
+He, however, loved liberty more than money, and his tastes were in the
+direction of invention and science, rather than in working out an
+immediate practical success for himself.
+
+He returned home and invented a scheme for making type; and had another
+plan for watchmaking, which he illustrated with painstaking designs.
+Half of his time was spent in the fields, and he made a large botanical
+collection--indexing it carefully, with many notes and comments.
+
+He also wrote articles for the "Civil Engineers' and Artisans' Journal."
+For these he received no pay, but the acceptance of manuscript gives a
+great glow to a writer's cosmos: young Spencer was encouraged in the
+belief that he had something to offer the public. But his father and
+kinsmen saw only failure in these days of dawdling; and the money being
+gone, Herbert Spencer, aged twenty-two, went up to London to try to get
+a renewal of the offer from his old employer.
+
+But things had changed--chances gone are gone forever, and he was told
+that opportunity knocks but once at each man's door. Sadly he returned
+home--not disappointed in himself, but depressed that he should
+disappoint others. His inventions languished--nobody was interested in
+them.
+
+To get a living was the problem, and writing seemed the only way. And so
+he prepared a series of articles for "The Non-Conformist," and there was
+enough non-conformity in them so he was paid a small sum for his work.
+It proved this, though--he could get a living by his pen.
+
+In these "Non-Conformist" articles, Spencer put forth a daring statement
+concerning the evolution of the soldier, that straightway made him a few
+enemies, and gave his clerical uncle gooseflesh. His hypothesis was
+this: When man first evolved out of the Stone Age, and began to live in
+villages, the oldest and wisest individual was regarded as patriarch or
+chief. This chief appointed certain men to punish wrongdoers and keep
+order. But there were always a few who would not work and who, through
+their violence and contumacious spirit, were finally driven from the
+camp. Or more likely they fled to escape punishment--which is the same
+thing--for they were outcasts. These men found refuge in the mountain
+fastnesses and congregated for two reasons--one, so they could avoid
+capture, and the other so they could swoop down and "secure their own."
+Robbery and commerce came hand in hand, and piracy is almost as natural
+as production.
+
+Finally, the robbers became such a problem to industry that terms were
+made with them. Their tribute took the form of a tax, and to make sure
+that this tax was paid, the robbers protected the people against other
+robbers. And then, for the first time, the world saw a standing army. An
+army has two purposes--to protect the people, and to collect the tax for
+protecting the people.
+
+At the headquarters of this army grew up a court, and all the
+magnificent splendor of a capitol centered around the captains. In fact,
+the word "capitol" means the home of the captain.
+
+Herbert Spencer did not say that a soldier was a respectable brigand,
+and that a lawyer is a man who protects us from lawyers, but he came so
+close to it that his immediate friends begged him to moderate his
+expressions for his own safety.
+
+Spencer also at the same time traced the evolution of the priest. He
+showed how the "holy man" was one frenzied with religious ecstasy, who
+went away and lived in a cave. Occasionally this man came back to beg,
+to preach and to do good. In order to succeed in his begging, he
+revealed his peculiar psychic powers, and then reinforced these with
+claims of supernatural abilities. These claims were not exactly founded
+upon truth, but once put forth were in time believed by those who
+advanced them.
+
+This priest, who claimed to have influence with the power of the
+Unseen, found early favor with the soldier--and the soldier and the
+priest naturally joined hands. The soldier protected the priest and the
+priest absolved the soldier. One dictated man's place in this world--the
+other in the next.
+
+The calm way in which Herbert Spencer reasoned these things out, and his
+high literary style, which made him unintelligible to all those whose
+minds were not of scientific bent, and his emphatic statement that what
+is, is right, and all the steps in man's development mean a mounting to
+better things, saved him from the severe treatment that greeted, say,
+Charles Bradlaugh, who translated the higher criticisms for the hoi
+polloi.
+
+Spencer's first essays on "The Proper Sphere of Government," done in his
+early twenties for "The Non-Conformist" and "The Economist," outlined
+his occupation for life--he was to be a writer. He became assistant
+editor of the "Westminster Review," and contributed to various literary
+and scientific journals.
+
+These essays, enlarged, rewritten and revised, finally emerged in
+Eighteen Hundred Fifty-one in the form of "Social Statics, or the
+Conditions Essential to Human Happiness."
+
+This book, so bold in its radical suggestions, now almost universally
+admitted, was printed at the author's expense--a fact that should put a
+quietus for all time upon all those indelicate and sarcastic allusions
+concerning "when the author prints." There was an edition of seven
+hundred fifty copies of the book, and it took every shilling the young
+man had saved, and a few borrowed pounds as well, to pay the bill.
+
+The book made no splash in the literary sea--nobody read it except a
+dozen good people who did so as a matter of friendship.
+
+After six years there were still five hundred copies left, and the
+author wrote this slightly ironical line: "I am glad the public is
+taking plenty of time to fully digest my work before passing judgment
+upon it. Of all things, hasty criticisms are to be regretted."
+
+Yet there was one person who read Herbert Spencer's first book with
+close consideration and profound sympathy. This was a young woman, the
+same age as Spencer, who had come up to London from the country to make
+her fortune. Her name was Mary Ann Evans.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In "Notes and Comments," Spencer's last book, published two years before
+his death, are several quotations and allusions to George Eliot. No
+other woman is mentioned in the volume.
+
+Herbert Spencer and Mary Ann Evans first met at the house of the editor
+of the "Westminster Review" about the year Eighteen Hundred Fifty-one.
+Their tastes, aptitudes and inclinations were much the same. They were
+born the same year; both were brought up in the country; both were
+naturalists by inclination, and scientists because they could not help
+it. "Social Statics" made a profound impression on George Eliot, and she
+protested to the last that it was the best book the author ever wrote.
+He had read her "Essay on Spinoza," and remembered it so well that he
+repeated a page of it the first time they met. They loved the same
+things, and united, too, in their dislikes. Both were democrats, and the
+cards, curds and custards of society were to them as naught. In a few
+months after the first meeting, George Eliot wrote to a friend in
+Warwickshire: "The bright side of my life, after the affection for my
+old friends, is the new and delightful friendship which I have found in
+Herbert Spencer. We see each other every day, and in everything we enjoy
+a delightful comradeship. If it were not for him my life would be
+singularly arid."
+
+The Synthetic Philosophy was taking form in Spencer's mind, and
+together they threshed out the straw and garnered the grain. She was
+getting to be a necessity to Spencer--and he saw no reason why the
+beautiful friendship should not continue just this way for years and
+years. Both were literary grubbers and lived in boarding-houses of the
+Class B variety.
+
+And here George Henry Lewes appeared upon the scene. Legend says that
+Spencer introduced Lewes to Miss Evans, and both Miss Evans and Mr.
+Spencer were a bit in awe of him, for he was a literary success, and
+they were willing to be. Lewes had written at this time sixteen
+books--novels, essays, scientific treatises, poems, and a drama. He
+spoke five languages, had studied medicine, theology, and had been a
+lecturer and actor. He was small, had red hair, combed his whiskers by
+the right oblique, and wore a yellow necktie. Thackeray says he was the
+most learned and versatile man he ever knew, "and if I should see him in
+Piccadilly, perched on a white elephant, I would not be in the least
+surprised."
+
+None of the various ventures of Lewes had paid very well, but he had
+great hopes, and money enough to ride in a cab. He gave advice, and
+radiated good-cheer wherever he went.
+
+In Eighteen Hundred Fifty-four Lewes and Miss Evans disappeared from
+London, having gone to Germany, leaving letters behind, stating that
+thenceforward they wished to be considered as man and wife. Lewes was
+in his fortieth year, and slightly bald; George Eliot was thirty-six,
+and there were silver threads among the gold.
+
+They had taken the philosophy of "Social Statics" in dead earnest.
+
+Herbert Spencer lost appetite, ceased work, roamed through the park
+aimlessly, and finally fell into a fit of sickness--"night air, and too
+close confinement to mental tasks," the doctor said.
+
+Spencer was not a marrying man--he was wedded to science, yet he craved
+the companionship of the female mind. Had he and Miss Evans married, he
+would doubtless have continued his work just the same. He would have
+absorbed her into his being--they would have lived in a garret, and
+possibly we might have had a better Synthetic Philosophy, if that were
+possible.
+
+But we would have had no "Adam Bede" nor "Mill on the Floss."
+
+We often see mention, by the ready writers, of "mental equals" and
+"perfect mates," but in all business partnerships, one man is the court
+of last appeal by popular acclaim. If power is absolutely equal, the
+engine stops on the center. Twins may look exactly alike, but one is the
+spokesman. In all literary collaboration, one does the work and the
+other looks on.
+
+When George Henry Lewes took Mary Ann Evans as his wife, that was the
+last of Lewes. He became her inspiration, secretary, protector, friend
+and slave. And this was all beautiful and right.
+
+I believe it was Augustine Birrell who said, "George Henry Lewes was the
+busy drone to a queen bee." It probably is well that Mr. Spencer and
+Miss Evans did not marry--they were too much alike--they might have
+gotten into competition with each other.
+
+George Eliot had a poise and dignity in her character that kept the
+versatile Lewes just where he belonged; and at the same time she lived
+her own life and preserved in ascending degree the strong and simple
+beauties of her character. Truly was George Eliot "a citizen of the
+sacred city of fine minds--the Jerusalem of Celestial Art." Lewes was
+the tug that puffed and steamed and brought the majestic steamship into
+port.
+
+For one book George Eliot received a sum equal to forty thousand
+dollars, and her income after "Adam Bede" was published was never less
+than ten thousand dollars a year.
+
+Spencer lived out his days in the boarding-house, and until after he was
+seventy, had not reached a point where absolute economy was not in
+order.
+
+Spencer faced the Universe alone, and tried to solve its mysteries. Not
+only did he live alone, with no close confidants or friends, but when he
+died he left not a single living relative nearer than the fourth
+generation. With him died the name.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The leading note in "Social Statics" is a plea for the liberty of the
+individual. That government is best which governs least. The liberty of
+each, limited only by the liberty of all, is the rule to which society
+must conform in order to attain the highest development. Governments
+have no business to scrutinize the life and belief of the individual.
+Interference should only come where one man interferes with the
+liberties of another.
+
+Liberty of action is the first requisite to progress, and the prime
+essential in human happiness. It is better that men have wrong opinions
+than no opinions--through our blunders we reach the light.
+
+Government is for man, and not man for government. Men wish to do what
+is best for themselves, and eventually they will, if let alone, but they
+can only grow through constant practise and frequent mistakes. Plato's
+plan for an ideal republic provided rules and laws for the guidance of
+the individual. In the Mosaic Laws it is the same: every circumstance
+and complication of life is thought out, and the law tells the
+individual what he shall do, and what he shall not do. That is to say, a
+few men were to do the thinking for the many. And the argument that
+plain people should not be allowed to think for themselves, since the
+wise know better what is for their good, is exactly the argument used by
+slaveholders: that they can take better care of the man than the man can
+of himself.
+
+There is a certain plausibility and truth in this proposition. It is all
+a point of view.
+
+But to Herbert Spencer there was little difference between enslavement
+of the mind and enslavement of the body. Both were essentially wrong in
+this--they interfered with Nature's law of evolution, and anything
+contrary to Nature must pay the penalty of pain and death. All forms of
+enslavement react upon the slaveholder, and a society founded on force
+can not evolve--and not to evolve is to die. The wellsprings of Nature
+must not be dammed--and in fact can not be dammed but for a day.
+Overflow, revolution and violence are sure to follow. This is the
+general law; and so give the man liberty. One man's rights end only
+where another man's begin.
+
+The idea of evolution, as opposed to a complete creation, was in the
+mind of Spencer as early as Eighteen Hundred Forty-eight. In that year
+he said, "Creation still goes forward, and to what supreme heights man
+may yet attain no one can say."
+
+By a sort of general misapprehension, Darwin is usually given credit for
+the discovery and elucidation of the Law of Evolution, but the "Origin
+of Species" did not appear until Eighteen Hundred Fifty-nine, and both
+Spencer and Alfred Russel Wallace had stated, years before, that the
+theological dogma of a complete creation had not a scintilla of proof
+from the world of nature and science, while there was much general
+proof that the animal and vegetable kingdom had evolved from lower
+forms, and was still ascending.
+
+The usual idea of the clergy of Christendom was that if the account of
+creation given by Moses were admitted to be untrue, then the Bible in
+all its parts would be declared untrue, and religion would go by the
+board. Now that the theory of evolution is everywhere accepted, even in
+the churches, we see how groundless were the fears. All that is
+beautiful and best we still have in religion in a degree never before
+known.
+
+In an essay on "Manners and Fashion," published in the "Westminster
+Review" of Eighteen Hundred Fifty-four, Herbert Spencer says: "Forms,
+ceremonies and even beliefs are cast aside only when they become
+hindrances--only when some finer and better plan has been formed; and
+they bequeath to us all the good that was in them. The abolition of
+tyrannical laws has left the administration of justice not only
+unimpaired, but purified. Dead and buried creeds have not carried down
+with them the essential morality they contained, which still exists,
+uncontaminated by the sloughs of superstition. And all that there is of
+justice, kindness and beauty embodied in our cumbrous forms will live
+perennially, when the forms themselves have been repudiated and
+forgotten."
+
+In the year Eighteen Hundred Fifty-five, Spencer issued his "Principles
+of Psychology," showing that the doctrine of evolution was then with him
+a fixed fact. The struggle was on, and from now forward his life was
+enlisted to viewing this theory from every side, anticipating every
+possible objection to it, and restating the case in its relation to
+every phase of life and nature.
+
+Spencer's income was small, but his wants were few, and a single room in
+a boarding-house sufficed for both workshop and sleeping-room. To a
+degree, he now largely ceased original investigations and made use of
+the work of others. His intuitive mind, long trained in analytical
+research, was able to sift the false from the true, the trite from the
+peculiar, the exceptional from the normal.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The year Eighteen Hundred Sixty should be marked on history's page with
+a silver star, for it was in that year that Herbert Spencer issued his
+famous prospectus setting forth that he was engaged in formulating a
+system of philosophy which he proposed to issue in periodical parts to
+subscribers. He then followed with an outline of the ground he intended
+to cover. Ten volumes would be issued, and he proposed to take twenty
+years to complete the task.
+
+The entire Synthetic Philosophy was then in his mind and he knew what he
+wanted to do. The courage and faith of the man were dauntless. Michael
+Rossetti once said, "Spencer, Darwin, Huxley, Tyndall and Wallace owe
+nothing to the universities of England, except for the scorn and
+opposition that have been offered them." But patriotic Americans and
+true are glad to remember that it was Professor E. L. Youmans of Yale
+who made it possible for Spencer to carry out his great plan. Five years
+after the prospectus was issued, Spencer was again penniless and was
+thinking seriously of abandoning the project. Youmans heard of this and
+reissued the prospectus, and sent it out among the thinking men of the
+world, asking them to subscribe. The announcement was then followed up
+by letters, and Youmans forced the issue until the sum of seven thousand
+dollars was raised. This he took over to Europe in person and presented
+to Spencer, with a gold watch and a box of cigars. Youmans found
+Spencer at his boarding-house, and together they wandered out in the
+park, where Youmans presented the philosopher the box of cigars. The
+great man took out one, cut it in three parts and proceeded to smoke
+one, then Youmans handed him the gold watch and the draft for the money.
+
+Spencer took the gifts of the watch and cigars and was much moved, but
+when it was followed by the draft for seven thousand dollars, he merely
+gasped and said: "Wonderful! Magnificent! Magnificent! Wonderful!" and
+smoked his third of a cigar in silence. And when he spoke, it was to
+say: "I think I will have to revise what I wrote in 'First Principles'
+on the matter of divine providence."
+
+Those who have read Spencer's will must remember that this watch,
+presented to him by his American friends, is given a special paragraph.
+
+Spencer once said to Huxley, "From the day I first carried that watch,
+every good thing I needed has been brought and laid at my feet."
+
+"If I have succeeded in my art, it is simply because I have been well
+sustained," said Henry Irving in one of his modest, flattering, yet
+charming little speeches.
+
+Sir Henry might have gone on and said that no man succeeds unless well
+sustained, and happy is that man who has radioactivity of spirit enough
+to attract to him loving and loyal helpers who scintillate his rays.
+
+The average individual does not know very much about Edward L. Youmans,
+but no man ever did greater work in popularizing nature study in
+America. And if for nothing else, let his name be deathless for two
+things: he inspired John Burroughs with the thirst to see and know--and
+then to write--and he introduced Herbert Spencer to the world. It is
+easy to say that Burroughs was peeping his shell when Youmans discovered
+him, and that Spencer would have found a way in any event. We simply do
+not know what would have happened if something else occurred, or hadn't.
+
+Youmans was born in a New York State country village, and very early
+discovered for himself that the world was full of curious and wonderful
+things, just as most children do. He became a district school-teacher,
+and so far as we know, was the very first man to publicly advocate
+nature study as a distinctive means of child-growth. He taught his
+children to observe; then he gave lectures on elementary botany; he
+studied and he wrote, and he worked at the microscope.
+
+And he became blind.
+
+Did the closest observer on the continent cease work and grow
+discouraged when sight failed? Not he.
+
+He no more quit work than did Beethoven cease composing music when he no
+longer was able to hear it.
+
+We hear with the imagination, and we see with the soul. Youmans' sister,
+Eliza Anne, became his guide and amanuensis; he saw the things through
+her eyes and inspected the wonders with his finger-tips.
+
+He became professor of Physics and Natural History at Yale, and when the
+New England Lecture Lyceum was at its height, he rivaled Phillips,
+Emerson and Beecher as a popular attraction. He made science a pleasure
+to plain people, and started Starr King off on that tangent of putting
+knowledge in fairylike and acceptable form. Youmans' lecture on "The
+Chemistry of a Sunbeam" is one of the unforgettable things of a
+generation past, so full of animation and rare, radiant spirit of
+good-cheer was the man. He founded the "Popular Science Monthly," wrote
+a dozen books on science, and several of these are now used in most of
+the colleges and advanced schools of America and England.
+
+The man had a head for business--he became rich.
+
+It was about the year Eighteen Hundred Fifty-six that Youmans was in
+England on a business errand, introducing his books in the English
+schools, that he first met Herbert Spencer, having been attracted to him
+through a chance copy of "Social Statics" that his sister had read to
+him. Youmans saw that Spencer was going right to the heart of things in
+a way he himself could not. The men became friends, and of all Youmans'
+wonderful discoveries, he considered Herbert Spencer the greatest.
+
+"Sir Humphry Davy discovered, and possibly evolved, Michael Faraday; but
+I didn't evolve Herbert Spencer, any more than Balboa evolved the
+Pacific Ocean," said Youmans at a dinner given to Herbert Spencer when
+he visited New York in Eighteen Hundred Eighty-one. The name of Youmans
+is not in the Hall of Fame as one of the world's great men, but as
+naturalist, teacher, writer, lecturer and practical man of affairs, he
+reflects credit on his Maker. The light went out of his eyes, but it
+never went out of his soul.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In making payment to a publishing-house for sixty volumes of an American
+historical work, Speaker Cannon recently made this endorsement on the
+back of the check:
+
+"This check is in full payment, both legal and moral, for sixty volumes
+of books. The books are not worth a damn--and are dear at that. We are
+never too old to learn, but the way your gentlemanly agent came it over
+your Uncle Joseph, is worth the full amount."
+
+When Speaker Cannon says the books are not worth a damn, he does not
+necessarily state a fact about the books: he merely states a fact about
+himself--that is, he gives his opinion. The value of the books is still
+undetermined.
+
+The Speaker's discontent with the books seems to have arisen from the
+one fact that he had to pay for them.
+
+This condition is a classic one, and the world long ago has conceded to
+the man who pays, the privilege of protest. When Herbert Spencer issued
+that world-famous prospectus, announcing his intention to publish ten
+volumes setting forth his Synthetic Philosophy, it was one of the most
+daring things ever done in the realm of thought. Spencer was forty, and
+he was penniless and obscure. He had issued two books at his own
+expense, and it had taken twelve years to dispose of seven hundred fifty
+copies of one, and most of the edition of the other was still on hand.
+Edward L. Youmans had such faith in Spencer that he sent out the
+prospectus, and followed it up with letters and personal solicitations,
+until seven thousand dollars was subscribed, and Herbert Spencer,
+relieved from the uncertainties of finance, was free to think and write.
+
+Among other subscribers secured by Youmans, was the Reverend Doctor
+Jowett of Balliol. Spencer's books were issued in periodical parts.
+After paying for three years, Jowett sent a check to the publishers for
+the full amount of the subscription, saying, in an accompanying note:
+"To save myself the bother of periodical payments for Mr. Spencer's
+books, I herewith hand you check covering the full amount of my
+subscription. I feel that I have already had full returns, for, while
+the books are absolutely valueless, save as showing the industry of an
+uneducated and indiscreet person, yet the experience that has come to me
+in this transaction is not without its benefits."
+
+This is the Oxford way of expressing the Illinois formula, "Your books
+are not worth a damn--and are dear at that."
+
+But the curious part of this transaction is that, after the death of
+Doctor Jowett, his library was sold at auction, and his set of the
+Synthetic Philosophy brought an advance of eight times its original
+cost.
+
+Truly my Lord Hamlet doth say:
+
+  Rashly,
+  And prais'd be rashness for it--let us know,
+  Our indiscretion sometimes serves us well,
+  When our deep plots do fail.
+
+No one man's opinion concerning any book, or any man, is final. Speaker
+Cannon is admired by one set of men and detested by others--all of equal
+intelligence, although on this point the Speaker might possibly file an
+exception.
+
+Books are condemned offhand, or regarded as Bibles--it all depends upon
+your point of view. Speaker Cannon may be right in his estimate of the
+newly annexed sixty volumes of history that now grace his
+library-shelves in Danville, proudly shown to constituents, or he may be
+wrong; but anyway, Cannon's judgment about books is probably worth no
+more than was the Reverend Doctor Jowett's. Gladstone spoke of Jowett as
+that "saintly character"; and Disraeli called him "the bear of
+Balliol--erratic, obtuse and perverse." But Jowett, Gladstone and
+Disraeli all united in this: they had supreme contempt for the work of
+Herbert Spencer; while the Honorable Joseph Cannon is neutral, but
+inclined to be generous, having recently in a speech quoted from the
+"Faerie Queene," which he declared was the best thing Herbert Spencer
+had written, even if it was not fully up to date.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+All during his life, Spencer was subject to attacks of indigestion and
+insomnia. That these bad spells were "a disease of the imagination" made
+them no less real. His isolation and lack of social ties gave him time
+to feel his pulse and lie in wait for sleepless nights.
+
+With the old ladies of his boarding-house, he was on friendly terms, and
+his commonplace talk with them never gave them a guess concerning the
+worldwide character of his work. Very seldom did he refer to what he was
+doing and thinking--and then only among his most intimate friends.
+Huxley was his nearest confidant; and a recent writer, who knew him
+closely in a business way for many years, says that only with Huxley did
+he throw off his reserve and enter the social lists with abandon.
+
+No one could meet Spencer, even in the most casual way, without being
+impressed with the fact that he was in the presence of a most superior
+person. The man was tall and gaunt, self-contained--a little aloof--he
+asked for nothing, and realized his own worth. He commanded respect
+because he respected himself--there was neither abnegation, apology nor
+abasement in his manner. Once I saw him walking in the Strand, and I
+noticed that the pedestrians instinctively made way, although probably
+not one out of a thousand had any idea who he was. No one ever affronted
+him, nor spoke disrespectfully to his face; if unkind things were said
+of the man and his work, it was in print and at a distance.
+
+His standard of life was high--his sense of justice firm; with pretense
+and hypocrisy he had little patience, while for the criminal he had a
+profound pity.
+
+Music was to him a relaxation and a rest. He knew the science of
+composition, and was familiar in detail with the best work of the great
+composers.
+
+In order to preserve the quiet of his thoughts in the boarding-house, he
+devised a pair of ear-muffs which fitted on his head with a spring.
+
+If the conversation took a turn in which he had no interest, he would
+excuse himself to his nearest neighbor and put on his ear-muffs. The
+plan worked so well that he carried them with him wherever he went, and
+occasionally at lectures or concerts, when he would grow more interested
+in his thoughts than in the performance, he would adjust his patent.
+
+So well pleased was he with his experiment that he had a dozen pairs of
+the ear-muffs made one Christmas and gave them to friends, but it is
+hardly probable they had the hardihood to carry them to a Four-o'Clock.
+Seldom, indeed, is there a man who prizes his thoughts more than a
+polite appearance.
+
+In an address before the London Medical Society, in Eighteen Hundred
+Seventy-one, Spencer said, "The man who does not believe in devils
+during his life, will probably never be visited by devils on his
+deathbed." Herbert Spencer died December Eighth, Nineteen Hundred
+Three, in his eighty-fourth year. Up to within two days of his death,
+his mind was clear, active and alert, and he worked at his books with
+pleasure and animation--revising, correcting and amending. He never lost
+the calm serenity of life. He sank gradually into sleep and passed
+painlessly away. And thus was gracefully rounded out the greatest life
+of its age--The Age of Herbert Spencer.
+
+He left no request as to where he should be buried, but the thinking
+people who recognized his genius considered Westminster Abbey the
+fitting place--an honor to England's Valhalla. The Church of England
+denied him a place there before it was asked, and the hallowed precincts
+which shelter the remains of Queen Anne's cook and John Broughton the
+pugilist are not for Herbert Spencer. His dust does not rest in
+consecrated ground.
+
+Herbert Spencer had no titles nor degrees--he belonged to no sect,
+party, nor society. Practically, he had no recognition in England until
+after he was sixty years of age. America first saw his star in the east,
+and long before the first edition of "Social Statics" had been sold, we
+waived the matter of copyright and were issuing the book here. On
+receiving a volume of the pirated edition, the author paraphrased
+Byron's famous mot, and grimly said, "Now, Barabbas was an American."
+
+However, Spencer was really pleased to think that America should steal
+his book; we wanted it--the English didn't. It took him twelve years to
+dispose of the seven hundred fifty volumes, and most of these were given
+away as inscribed copies. They lasted about as long as Walt Whitman's
+first edition of "Leaves of Grass," although Whitman had the assistance
+of the Attorney-General of Massachusetts in advertising his remarkable
+volume.
+
+Henry Thoreau's first book fared better, for when the house burned where
+the remnant of four hundred copies lingered long, he wrote to a friend,
+"Thank God, the edition is exhausted."
+
+England recognized the worth of Thoreau and Whitman long before America
+did; and so, perhaps, it was meet that we should do as much for Spencer,
+Ruskin and Carlyle.
+
+One of the most valuable of the many great thoughts evolved by Spencer
+was on the "Art of Mentation," or brain-building. You can not afford to
+fix your mind on devils or hell, or on any other form of fear, hate and
+revenge. Of course, hell is for others, and the devils we believe in are
+not for ourselves. But the thoughts of these things are registered in
+the brain, and the hell we create for others, we ourselves eventually
+fall into; and the devils we conjure forth, return and become our
+inseparable companions. That is to say, all thought and all work--all
+effort--are for the doer primarily, and as a man thinketh in his heart,
+so is he. This sounds like the language of metaphysics, which Kant said
+was the science of disordered moonshine. But Herbert Spencer's work was
+all a matter of analytical demonstration. And while the word
+"materialist" was everywhere applied to him, and he did not resent it,
+yet he was one of the most spiritual of men. A meta-physician is one who
+proves ten times as much as he believes; a scientist is one who believes
+ten times as much as he can prove. Science speaks with lowered voice.
+Before Spencer's time, German scientists had discovered that the cell
+was the anatomical unit of life, but it was for Spencer to show that it
+was also the psychologic or spiritual unit. New thoughts mean new
+brain-cells, and every new experience or emotion is building and
+strengthening a certain area of brain-tissue. We grow only through
+exercise, and all expression is exercise. The faculties we use grow
+strong, and those not used, atrophy and wither away. This is no less
+true, said Spencer, in the material brain than in the material muscle. A
+new thought causes a new structural enregistration. If it is the
+repetition of thought, the cells holding that thought are exercised and
+trained, and finally they act automatically, and repeated thought
+becomes habit, and exercised habit becomes character--and character is
+the man. It thus is plain that no man can afford to entertain the
+thought of fear, hate and revenge--and their concomitants, devils and
+hell--because he is enregistering these things physically in his being.
+These physical cells, as science has shown, are transmitted to
+offspring; and thus through continued mind-activity and consequent
+brain-cell building, a race with fixed characteristics is evolved.
+Pleasant memories and good thoughts must be exercised, and these in time
+will replace evil memories, so that the cells containing negative
+characteristics will atrophy and die. And when Herbert Spencer says that
+the process of doing away with evil is not through punishment, threat or
+injunction, but simply through a change of activities--thus allowing the
+bad to die through disuse--he states a truth that is even now coloring
+our whole fabric of pedagogics and penology. I couple these two words
+advisedly, for fifty years ago, pedagogics was a form of penology--the
+boarding-school with its mentors, scheme of fines, repressions and
+disgrace! And now we have lifted penology into the realm of pedagogics.
+I doubt me much whether the present penitentiary is a more unhappy place
+than a boys' English boarding-school was in the time of Squeers.
+
+All of our progress has come from replacing bad activities with the
+good. Bad people we now believe are good folks who have misdirected
+their energies; and we all believe a deal more in the goodness of the
+bad than the badness of the good, with the result that "total depravity"
+and "endless punishment" have been shamed out of every pulpit where
+sane men preach. No devils danced on the footboard of Herbert Spencer's
+bed, because there were no devil-cells in his brain.
+
+Another great discovery of Herbert Spencer's was that the emotions
+control the secretions. And the quality of the secretions determines the
+chemical changes which constitute all cellular growth. Thus, cheerful,
+happy emotions are similar to sunshine--they stand for health and
+harmony, and as such, are constructive. Good-will is sanitary; kindness
+is hygienic; friendship works for health. These happy emotions secrete a
+quality in the blood called anabolism, which is essentially vitalizing
+and life-producing.
+
+On the other hand, fear, hate, and all forms of unkindness evolve a
+toxin, katabolism, which tends to clog circulation, disturb digestion,
+congest the secretions and stupefy the senses; and it tends to the
+dissolution and destruction of life. All that saddens, embitters and
+disappoints produces this chemical change that makes for death. "A
+poison," said Spencer, "is only a concentrated form of hate."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Spencer's discoveries in electricity have been most valuable, and it was
+by building on his suggestions and seeing with his prophetic eye that
+the Crookes Tube, the Roentgen Ray, and the discovery of radium have
+become possible.
+
+The distinguishing feature of radium is its radioactivity, brought about
+through its affinity for electricity. It absorbs electricity from the
+atmosphere and gives it off spontaneously in the form of light and heat
+without appreciable loss of form or substance. Every good thing in life
+is dual, and through this natural and spontaneous marriage of radium and
+electricity, we get very close to the secret of life. As the sun is the
+giver of life and death, so by the use of the salts of radium have
+scientists vitalized certain forms of cell-life into growth and
+activity, and by the same token, and the use of the radium-ray, do they
+destroy the germs of disease.
+
+By his prophetic vision, Spencer saw years ago that we would yet be able
+to eliminate and refine the substances of earth until we found the
+element that would combine spontaneously with electricity, and radiate
+life and heat. Among the very last letters dictated by Spencer, only a
+few days before his death, was one to Madame Curie congratulating her on
+her discovery of radium, and urging her not to relax in her further
+efforts to seek out the secret of life. "My only regret is," wrote the
+great man, "that I will not be here to rejoice with you in the fulness
+of your success." Thus to the last did he preserve the eager, curious
+and receptive heart of youth, and prove to the scientific world his
+theory that brain-cells, properly exercised, are the last organs of the
+body to lose their functions.
+
+
+
+
+SCHOPENHAUER
+
+
+     Wherever one goes one immediately comes upon this incorrigible mob
+     of humanity. It exists everywhere in legions; crowding, soiling
+     everything, like flies in summer. Hence the numberless bad books,
+     those rank weeds of literature which extract nourishment from the
+     corn and choke it. They monopolize the time, money and attention
+     which really belong to good books and their noble aims; they are
+     written merely with a view to making money or procuring places.
+     They are not only useless, but they do positive harm. Nine-tenths
+     of the whole of our present literature aims solely at taking a few
+     shillings out of the public's pocket, and to accomplish this,
+     author, publisher and reviewer have joined forces.
+
+                                                --_Schopenhauer_
+
+[Illustration: SCHOPENHAUER]
+
+
+The philosophy we evolve is determined by what we are; just as a nation
+passes laws legalizing the things it wishes to do. "Where the artist is,
+there you will find art," said Whistler. We will not get the Ideal
+Commonwealth until we get Ideal People; and we will not get an ideal
+philosophy until we get an ideal philosopher. Place the mentally and
+morally slipshod in ideal surroundings and they will quickly evolve a
+slum, just as did John Shakespeare, when at Stratford he was fined two
+pounds ten for maintaining a sequinarium. All we can say for John is
+that he was the author of a fine boy, who resembled his mother much more
+than he did his father. This seems to prove Schopenhauer's remark
+concerning a divine sonship: "Paternity is a cheap office, anyway,
+accomplished without cost, care or risk, and of it no one should boast.
+A divine motherhood is the only thing that is really sacred."
+
+It isn't his philosophy that makes a man--man makes his philosophy, and
+he makes it in his own image. Living in a world of strife, where the
+most savage beast that roams the earth is man, the Philosophy of
+Pessimism has its place.
+
+Schopenhauer proved himself a true philosopher when he said: "All we
+see in the world is a projection from our own minds. I may see one
+thing, you another; and according to the test of a third party we are
+both wrong, for he sees something else. So we are all wrong, yet all are
+right."
+
+He was quite willing to admit that he had a well-defined moral squint
+and a touch of mental strabismus; but he revealed his humanity by
+blaming his limitations on his parents, and charging up his faults and
+foibles to other people.
+
+It is possible that Carlyle's famous remark about the people who daily
+cross London Bridge was inspired by Schopenhauer, who, when asked what
+kind of people the Berliners were, replied, "Mostly fools!"
+
+"I believe," ventured the interrogator--"I believe, Herr Schopenhauer,
+that you yourself live at Berlin?"
+
+"I do," was the response, "and I feel very much at home there."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Heinrich Schopenhauer, the father of Arthur Schopenhauer, was a banker
+and shipping merchant of the city of Danzig, Germany. He was a
+successful man, and, like all successful men, he was an egotist. Before
+the world will believe in you, you must believe in yourself. And another
+necessary element in success is that you must exaggerate your own
+importance, and the importance of your work. Self-esteem will not alone
+make you successful, but without a goodly jigger of self-esteem, success
+will forever dally and dance just beyond your reach. The humble men who
+have succeeded in impressing themselves upon the world have all taken
+much pride in their humility.
+
+Heinrich Schopenhauer was a proud man--as proud as the Merchant of
+Venice--and in his veins there ran a strain of the blue blood of the
+Castilian Jew. Too much success is most unfortunate. Heinrich
+Schopenhauer was proud, unbending, harsh, arbitrary, wore a full beard
+and a withering smile, and looked upon musicians, painters, sculptors
+and writers as court clowns, to be trusted only as far as you could
+fling Taurus by the tail. All good bookkeepers have, even yet, this
+pitying contempt for those whose chief assets are ideas--the legal
+tender of the spirit. The Alameda smile is the smile of scorn worn by
+the bookkeepers who prepare the balance-sheets for the great merchants
+of San Francisco. Alameda is young, but the Alameda smile is classic.
+
+When Heinrich Schopenhauer was forty he married a beautiful girl of
+twenty. She had ideas about art and poetry, and was passing through her
+Byronic stage, before Byron did, and taking it rather hard, when her
+parents gave her in troth to Heinrich Schopenhauer, the rich merchant.
+It was regarded as a great catch.
+
+I wish that I could say that Heinrich and Johanna were happy ever after,
+but in view of the well-known facts put forth by their firstborn child,
+I can not do it.
+
+Before marriage the woman has her way: let her make the most of her
+power--she'll not keep it long! Shortly after their marriage Heinrich
+saw symptoms of the art instinct creeping in, and players on sweet
+zither-strings, who occasionally called, compelled him to take measures.
+He bought a country seat, four miles from the city, on an inaccessible
+road, and sent his bride thither. Here he visited her only on Saturdays
+and Sundays, and her callers were the good folk he chose to bring with
+him.
+
+Marital peace is only possible where women are properly
+suppressed--lumity dee!
+
+It was under these conditions that Arthur Schopenhauer was born, on
+February Twenty-second--in deference to our George Washington--Seventeen
+Hundred Eighty-eight.
+
+The chief quality that Schopenhauer inherited from his father was the
+Alameda smile--and this smile of contempt was for all those who did not
+think as he did. The mother never professed to have any love for her
+husband, or the child either, and the child never professed to have any
+love for his mother. He once wrote this: "I was an unwelcome child, born
+of a mother in rebellion--she never wanted me, and I reciprocate the
+sentiment."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In that troublous year of Seventeen Hundred Ninety-three, the Free City
+of Danzig fell under the sway of Prussia.
+
+Heinrich Schopenhauer, who loved freedom, jealous of his privileges,
+fearful of his rights, immediately packed up his effects, sold out his
+property--at great loss--and moved to the Free City of Hamburg.
+
+That his fears for the future were quite groundless, as most fears are,
+is a fact relevant but not consequent.
+
+Johanna was vivacious and eminently social. She spoke French, German,
+English and Italian. She played the harp, sang, wrote poetry and acted
+in dramas of her own composition. Around her there always clustered a
+goodly group of men with long hair, dreamy eyes and pointed beards, who
+soared high, dived deep, but seldom paid cash. This is the paradise to
+which most women wish to attain: to be followed by a concourse of
+artistic archangels--what nobler ambition! And let the great biological
+and historical fact here be written down--that there are no female
+angels.
+
+Heinrich did not settle down in Hamburg and go into business, as he
+expected. He and his wife and boy traveled much--through England,
+France, Germany and Switzerland.
+
+This man and his wife were trying to get away from themselves. Long
+years after, their son wrote, "When people die and wake up in hell they
+will probably be surprised to find that they are just such beings as
+they were when they were on earth."
+
+For a year the lad was left at school with a clergyman at Wimbledon, in
+England. The strict religious discipline to which he was there subjected
+seemed to have had much to do with forming in him a fierce hatred of
+English orthodoxy; but he learned the language and became familiar with
+the great names in English literature. The King Arthur stories pleased
+him, and he always took a peculiar satisfaction in the fact that the
+name Arthur was the same in English, German and French. He was a
+prenatal cosmopolitan.
+
+Boarding-schools are a great scheme for getting the children out of the
+way--it throws the responsibility upon some one else. When nine years of
+age, Arthur was placed in a French boarding-school, remaining for two
+years. There he learned to speak French so fluently that when he
+returned to Hamburg and tried to talk to his mother in German, his
+broken speech threw that excellent woman into fits of laughter.
+
+When the mature man of affairs takes a young girl to wife, he expects to
+mold her to his nature, but he reckons without his host. Heinrich
+Schopenhauer's opposition to his wife's wishes was not strong enough to
+crush her--it simply developed in her a deal of wilful, dogged strength.
+
+One winter day in Eighteen Hundred Four the body of Heinrich
+Schopenhauer was found in the canal at Hamburg.
+
+Arthur was then sixteen years of age--old for his years, traveled,
+clever--strong in body and robust in health.
+
+In wandering with his parents, he had met Goethe, Wieland, Madame De
+Stael, Lord Nelson and Lady Hamilton, and many other distinguished
+people, for his mother was a famous lion-hunter, and wherever they went,
+the great ones were tracked to their lairs. But however much Madame
+Schopenhauer indulged in hero-worship, she had no expectations or
+ambitions for her son. She apprenticed him as a clerk and did her utmost
+to immerse him in commerce. What she desired was freedom for herself,
+and the popular plan to gain freedom is to enslave others. Madame
+Schopenhauer moved to Weimar and opened there a sort of literary salon.
+She wrote verses, novels, essays, and her home became the center of a
+certain artistic group. The fortune her husband had left was equal to
+about forty thousand dollars, one-third of which was to go to Arthur
+when he was twenty-one. The mother had the handling of it all until that
+time, and as the funds were well invested, her income was equal to about
+two thousand dollars a year.
+
+A handsome widow, under forty, with no encumbrances to speak of, and a
+fair income, is very fortunately situated. Indeed, a great writer has
+recently written an essay showing that widows, discreetly bereaved, are
+the happiest creatures on earth.
+
+Young Schopenhauer, at his desk in Hamburg, grieved over the death of
+his father. That which is lost becomes valuable--bereavement softens the
+heart. The only tenderness that is revealed in the writings of
+Schopenhauer refers to his father. He affirms the sterling honesty of
+the man, and lauds the merchant who boldly states that he is in business
+to make money, and compares him with the philosophers who clutch for
+power and fame and yet pretend they are working for humanity. When
+Schopenhauer was past sixty, he dedicated his complete works to the
+memory of his father. As nothing purifies like fire, so does nothing
+sanctify like death--the love we lose is the only love we keep.
+
+Mathematics, bills and balance-sheets were odious to young Schopenhauer.
+He reverenced the memory of his father, but his mother had endowed him
+with a strong impulse for expression. He wrote little essays on the
+backs of envelopes, philosophized over his bills, sneaked out of the
+countingroom the back way to attend the afternoon lectures by the great
+Doctor Gall, and finally, boldly followed his mother to Weimar, that he
+might bask in the shadow of the mighty Goethe. It was shortly after this
+that he sat in a niche of Goethe's library, musing, sad and solitary,
+while a gay throng chattered by. Some young women, seeing him there,
+laughed, and one asked, "Is it alive?" And Goethe, overhearing the
+pleasantry, rebuked it by saying, "Do not smile at that youth--he will
+yet eclipse us all."
+
+At Weimar there was no greeting for Schopenhauer from his mother--she
+welcomed all but her son. Unfortunately for her, she put herself on
+record by writing him letters. Scathing letters are all right, but they
+should be directed and stamped, then burned just before they are trusted
+to the mails. To record unkindness is tragedy, for the unkind word lives
+long after the event that caused it is forgotten. Here is one letter
+written by Madame Schopenhauer that this methodical son saved for
+posterity:
+
+
+     _My Dear Son:_
+
+     I have always told you it is difficult to live with you. The more I
+     get to know you, the more I feel this difficulty increase. I will
+     not hide it from you: as long as you are what you are, I would
+     rather bring any sacrifice than consent to be near you. I do not
+     undervalue your good points, and that which repels me does not lie
+     in your heart; it is in your outer, not your inner being; in your
+     ideas, your judgment, your habits; in a word, there is nothing
+     concerning the outer world in which we agree. Your ill-humor, your
+     complaints of things inevitable, your sullen looks, the
+     extraordinary opinions you utter, like oracles, none may presume to
+     contradict; all this depresses me and troubles me, without helping
+     you. Your eternal quibbles, your laments over the stupid world and
+     human misery, give me bad nights and unpleasant dreams....
+
+                                              Your Dear Mother, etc.,
+                                                  _Johanna Schopenhauer_
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The young man took lodgings at Weimar, at a goodly distance from his
+mother. Goethe held out a friendly hand, as he did to Mendelssohn, and
+all bright young men. They talked much, and Goethe read to Arthur his
+essay on the theory of colors (for Wolfgang Goethe was human and dearly
+loved the sound of his own voice). The reasoning so impressed the youth
+that he devised a chromatic theory of his own--almost as peculiar.
+Theories are for the theorizer, so all theories are useful.
+
+At the earnest importunity of his mother, who starved him to it, Arthur
+went back to his clerkship, but soon returned and made terms, agreeing
+not to call on his mother, in consideration of a pound a week. He took
+lessons in Greek and Latin of a retired professor, attended lectures,
+fell in love with an actress--vowed he would marry her, but, luckily for
+her, he didn't.
+
+When he was twenty-one, his mother turned over to him his patrimony,
+amounting to about fourteen thousand dollars; and suggested that he
+leave Weimar and make his fortune elsewhere--the world was wide.
+
+His money was invested so it brought him an income of seven hundred
+dollars a year. And here seems a good place to say that Schopenhauer's
+income was never over a thousand dollars a year until after he was
+fifty-six years of age. Although he could not make money, yet he had
+inherited from his father an ability to care for it. Throughout his life
+he kept exact books of account, never ran in debt, and never allowed
+his expenditures to outrun his income, thus complying with Charles
+Dickens' recipe for happiness.
+
+In still another way he revealed that he could apply philosophy to daily
+life: he exercised regularly in the open air, took long walks, was
+absurdly exact about his cold baths, and like Kant, served the neighbors
+as a chronometer, so they set their clocks at three when they saw him
+going forth for a walk. And in the interests of truth, we will have to
+make the embarrassing admission that the great Apostle of Pessimism was
+neither a dyspeptic nor an invalid--if he was ever aware that he had a
+stomach we do not hear of it.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The life of Schopenhauer is the life of a recluse--a visionary--a hermit
+who lost himself amid the maze of city streets, and moved solitary in
+the throng. Berlin, Dresden, Hamburg, Gottingen, Frankfort, engaged him,
+and from one to the other he turned, looking for the rest he never
+found, and which he knew he would never find, so in the vain search
+there was no disappointment. He was always happiest when most miserable,
+for then were his theories proved.
+
+A single room in a lodging-house sufficed, and this room always had the
+appearance of being occupied by a transient. He had few books,
+accumulated no belongings in way of domestic ballast, persistently
+giving away things that were presented to him, satisfied if he had a
+chair, a bed, and a table upon which to write; getting his own
+breakfast, dining at the table d'hote of the nearest inn, with supper at
+a "Gast-Haus"--so passed his days. He had no intimate friends, and his
+chief dissipation was playing the flute. His black poodle, named "Homo"
+in a subtle mood of irony, accompanied him everywhere, and on this dog
+he lavished what he was pleased to call his love. He anticipated Rip Van
+Winkle concerning dogs and women, and when Homo died, he bought another
+dog that looked exactly like the first, and was just as good.
+
+In a few instances Schopenhauer read his essays in public as lectures,
+but his ideas were keyed to concert pitch and were too pronounced for
+average audiences. He was offered a professorship at Gottingen and also
+at Heidelberg, if he would "tone things down," but he scornfully
+declined the proposition, and said, "The Universities must grow to my
+level before I can talk to them." By his caustic criticisms of
+contemporaries he became both feared and shunned, and no doubt he found
+a certain satisfaction in the fact that the so-called learned men of his
+time would neither listen to his lectures, read his books, nor abide his
+presence. He had made himself felt in any event. "Blessed are ye when
+men shall revile you," is the sweet consolation of all persecuted
+persons--and persecution is only the natural resentment towards those
+who have too much ego in their cosmos.
+
+His opinions concerning love and marriage need not be taken too
+seriously. Ideas are the results of temperaments and moods. When a man
+amplifies on the woman question he describes the women he knows best,
+and more especially the particular She who is in his head. Literature is
+only autobiography, more or less discreetly veiled. Schopenhauer hated
+his mother to the day of her death, and although during the last
+twenty-four years of her life he never once saw her, her image could at
+any time be quickly and vividly thrown upon the screen. The women a
+strong man has known are never forgotten--here is where time does not
+tarnish, nor the days grow dim.
+
+Between his twenty-eighth and fortieth years, Schopenhauer had wandered
+through Italy--spent months at Venice, and dawdled away the days at Rome
+and Florence. He had dipped deep into life--and the wrong kind of life.
+And his experiences had confirmed his suspicions--it was all bitter--he
+was not disappointed.
+
+Until Schopenhauer was past thirty he was known as the son of Johanna
+Schopenhauer. And when he once told her that posterity would never
+remember her except as the mother of her son, she reciprocated by
+congratulating him that his books could always be had cheap in the first
+editions.
+
+He retorted, "Mamma Dear, my books will be read when butchers are using
+yours for wrapping up meat." In some ways this precious pair were very
+much alike.
+
+It is very probable that Schopenhauer's mother was not so base as he
+thought; and when he declared, "Woman's morality is only a kind of
+prudence," he might have said the same of his own. He stood aloof from
+life and said things about it. He had no wife, no child, no business, no
+home--he dared not venture boldly into the tide of existence--he stood
+forever on the bank, and watched the current carrying its flotsam and
+jetsam to the hungry sea.
+
+In his love for the memory of his father, and in his tender care for his
+dog, we get a glimpse of depths that were never sounded. One side of his
+nature was never developed. And the words of the undeveloped man are
+worth what they are worth.
+
+Schopenhauer once said to Wieland, "Life is a ticklish business--I
+propose to spend my time looking at it." This he did, viewing existence
+from every angle, and writing out his thoughts in terse, epigrammatic
+language.
+
+Among all the German writers on philosophy, the only one who had a
+distinct literary style is Schopenhauer. Form was quite as much to him
+as matter--and in this he showed rare wisdom; although I am told that
+the writers who have no literary style are the only ones who despise it.
+Dishes to be palatable must be rightly served: appetite--literary,
+gastronomic or sexual--is largely a matter of imagination.
+
+Schopenhauer need not be regarded as final. The chief virtue of the man
+lies in the fact that he makes us think, and thus are we his debtors.
+
+In this summary of Schopenhauer's philosophy I have had the valuable
+assistance of my friend and fellow-worker in the Roycroft Shop, George
+Pannebakker, a kinsman and enthusiastic admirer of the great Prophet of
+Pessimism.
+
+In talking to Mr. Pannebakker, I am inclined to exclaim, "Thou almost
+persuadest me to be a pessimist!" It is unfortunate that our English
+tongue contains no word that stands somewhere between pessimism and
+optimism--that symbols a judicial cast of mind which sees the Truth
+without blinking and accepts it without complaint. The word Pessimist
+was first flung in contempt at those who dared to express unpalatable
+truth. It is now accepted by a large number of intellectuals, and if to
+be a pessimist is to have insight, wit, calm courage, patience,
+persistency, and a disposition that accepts all Fate sends and makes the
+best of it, then pity 'tis we haven't more.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The root of existence, the inmost kernel of all being, the original
+vitalizing power, the fundamental reality of the universe, is, according
+to Schopenhauer, "WILL." What is Will? Will, in the usual sense, is the
+faculty of our mind by which we decide to do or not to do. Will is the
+power to choose. In Schopenhauer's philosophy, Will is something less as
+we know will, and something more than force. Will, connected with
+consciousness, as peculiar to man, is, in a less developed form, the
+real essence of all matter, of all things, organic or inorganic. Will is
+the blind, irresistible striving for existence; the unconscious
+organizing power, the omnipotent creative force of Nature, pervading the
+whole limitless universe; the endeavor to be, to evolve, to expand.
+
+The whole world of phenomena is the objectivation or apparition of Will.
+
+Will, the same force which slumbers in the stone as inert gravity, forms
+the crystals with such wonderful regularity.
+
+Will impels a piece of iron to move with ardent desire toward the
+magnet. Will causes the magnet to point with unfailing constancy to the
+north. Will causes the embryo to cling as a parasite and feed on the
+body of the mother. Will causes the mother's breast to fill that her
+babe may be fed. Will fills the mother-heart with love that the young
+may be cared for.
+
+The same force urges the tender germ of the plant to break through the
+hard crust of the earth and, stretching toward the light, to enfold
+itself in the proud crown of the palm-tree. Will sharpens the beak of
+the eagle and the tooth of the tiger and, finally, reaches its highest
+grade of objectivation in the human brain. Want, the struggle for
+existence, the necessity of procuring and selecting sufficient food for
+the preservation of the individual and the species, has at last
+developed a suitable tool, the brain, and its function, the intellect.
+With the intellect appear consciousness and a realm of rational life
+full of yearning and desires, pleasures and pain, hatred and love.
+Brothers slay their brothers, conquerors trample down the races of the
+earth, and tyrants are forging chains for the nations.
+
+There is violence and fear, vexation and trouble. Unrest is the mark of
+existence, and onward we are swept in the hurrying whirlpool of change.
+This manifold restless motion is produced and kept up by the agency of
+two single impulses--hunger and the sexual instinct. These are the chief
+agents of the Lord of the Universe--the Will--and set in motion so
+strange and varied a scene.
+
+The Will-to-Live is at the bottom of all love-affairs. Every kind of
+love springs entirely from the instinct of sex.
+
+Love is under bonds to secure the existence of the human race in future
+times. The real aim of the whole of love's romance, although the persons
+concerned are unconscious of the fact, is that a particular being may
+come into the world.
+
+It is the Will-to-Live, presenting itself in the whole species, which so
+forcibly and exclusively attracts two individuals of different sex
+towards each other.
+
+This yearning and this pain do not arise from the needs of an ephemeral
+individual, but are, on the contrary, the sigh of the Spirit of the
+Species.
+
+Since life is essentially suffering, the propagation of the species is
+an evil--the feeling of shame proves it.
+
+In his "Metaphysics of Love," Schopenhauer says: "We see a pair of
+lovers exchanging longing glances--yet why so secretly, timidly and
+stealthily? Because these lovers are traitors secretly striving to
+perpetuate all the misery and turmoil that otherwise would come to a
+timely end."
+
+Will, as the source of life, is the origin of all evil.
+
+Having awakened to life from the night of unconsciousness, the
+individual finds itself in an endless and boundless world, striving,
+suffering, erring; and, as though passing through an ominous dream, it
+hurries back to the old unconsciousness. Until then, however, its
+desires are boundless, and every satisfied wish begets a new one.
+So-called pleasures are only a mode of temporary relief. Pain soon
+returns in the form of satiety. Life is a more or less violent
+oscillation between pain and ennui. The latter, like a bird of prey,
+hovers over us, ready to swoop down wherever it sees a life secure from
+need.
+
+The enjoyment of art, as the disinterested cognition devoid of Will, can
+afford an interval of rest from the drudgery of Will service. But
+esthetic beatitude can be obtained only by a few; it is not for the hoi
+polloi. And then, art can give only a transient consolation.
+
+Everything in life indicates that earthly happiness is destined to be
+frustrated or to be recognized as an illusion. Life proves a continuous
+deception, in great as well as in small matters. If it makes a promise,
+it does not keep it, unless to show that the coveted object was little
+desirable.
+
+Life is a business that does not pay expenses.
+
+Misery and pain form the essential feature of existence.
+
+Life is hell, and happy is that man who is able to procure for himself
+an asbestos overcoat and a fire-proof room.
+
+Looking at the turmoil of life, we find all occupied with its want and
+misery, exerting all their strength in order to satisfy its endless
+needs and avert manifold suffering, without daring to expect anything
+else in return than merely the preservation of this tormented individual
+existence, full of want and misery, toil and moil, strife and struggle,
+sorrow and trouble, anguish and fear--from the cradle to the grave.
+
+Existence, when summed up, has an enormous surplus of pain over
+pleasure.
+
+You complain that this philosophy is comfortless! But Schopenhauer sees
+life through Schopenhauer's eyes, and tells the truth about it as he
+sees it. He does not care for your likes and dislikes. If you want to
+hear soft platitudes, he advises you to go to a non-conformist
+church--read the newspapers, go somewhere else, but not to the
+philosopher who cares only for Truth.
+
+Although Schopenhauer's picture of the world is gloomy and somber, there
+is nothing weak or cowardly in his writings, and the extent to which he
+is read, proves he is not depressing. Since a happy life is impossible,
+he says the highest that a man can attain to is the fate of a hero.
+
+A man must take misfortune quietly, because he knows that very many
+dreadful things may happen in the course of life. He must look upon the
+trouble of the moment as only a very small part of that which will
+probably come.
+
+We must not expect very much from life, but learn to accommodate
+ourselves to a world where all is relative and no perfect state exists.
+
+Let us look misfortune in the face and meet it with courage and
+calmness!
+
+Fate is cruel and men are miserable. Life is synonymous with suffering;
+positive happiness a fata morgana, an illusion.
+
+Only negative happiness, the cessation of suffering, is possible, and
+can be obtained by the annihilation of the Will-to-Live.
+
+But it is not suicide that can deliver us from the pains of existence.
+
+Suicide, according to Schopenhauer, frustrates the attainment of the
+highest moral aim by the fact that, for a real release from this world
+of misery, it substitutes one that is merely apparent. For death merely
+destroys the phenomenon, that is, the body, and never my inmost being,
+or the universal Will.
+
+Suicide can deliver me merely from my phenomenal existence, and not from
+my real self, which can not die.
+
+How, then, can man be released from this life of misery and pain? Where
+is the road that leads to Salvation?
+
+Slow and weary is the way of redemption.
+
+The deliverance from life and its sufferings is the freedom of the
+intellect from its creator and despot, the Will.
+
+The intellect, freed from the bondage of the Will, sees through the veil
+of selfhood into the unity of all being, and finds that he who has done
+wrong to another has done wrong to his own self. For selfhood--the
+asserting of the Ego--is the root of all evil.
+
+Covetousness and sensuality are the causes of misery.
+
+Sympathy is the basis of all true morality, and only through
+renunciation, through self-sacrifice, and universal benevolence, can
+salvation be obtained.
+
+He who has recognized that existence is evil, that life is vanity, and
+self an illusion, has obtained true knowledge, which is the reflection
+of reality. He is in possession of the highest wisdom, which is not
+merely theoretical, but also practical perfection; it is the ultimate
+true cognition of all things in mass and in detail, which has so
+penetrated man's being that it appears as the guide of all his actions.
+It illumines his head, warms his heart, leads his hand. We take the
+sting out of life by accepting it as it is. "Drink ye all of it."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Arthur Schopenhauer very early in life contracted a bad habit of telling
+the truth. He stated the thing absolutely as he saw it. He spared no
+one's feelings, and conciliation was not in his bright lexicon of words.
+If any belief or any institution was in his way, the pilot in charge of
+the craft had better put his prow hard a' port--Schopenhauer swerved for
+nobody.
+
+Should every one deal in plain speaking on all occasions, the philosophy
+of Ali Baba--that this earth is hell, and we are now suffering for sins
+committed in a former incarnation--would be fully proved. Our friends
+are the pleasant hypocrites who sustain our illusions. Society is made
+possible only through a vast web of delicate evasions, polite
+subterfuges, and agreeable falsehoods. The word person comes from
+"persona," which means a mask. The reference is to one who plays a
+part--assumes a role. The naked truth is not pleasant to look upon, and
+that is the reason it is so seldom put upon parade.
+
+The man Schopenhauer would be intolerable, but the writer Schopenhauer
+is gaining ground in inverse ratio to the square of the distance we are
+from him. "Where shall we bury you?" a friend asked him a few days
+before his death.
+
+"Oh, anywhere--posterity will find me!" was the answer. And so on the
+modest stone that marks his resting-place at Frankfort, are engraved the
+two words, ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER, and nothing more. The world will not
+soon forget the pessimist who had such undying optimism--such
+unquenchable faith--that he knew the world would make a path to his
+tomb.
+
+Schopenhauer was the only prominent writer that ever lived who
+persistently affirmed that life is an evil--existence a curse. Yet every
+man who has ever lived has at times thought so; but to proclaim the
+thought--or even entertain it long--would stagger sanity, befog the
+intellect and make mind lose its way.
+
+And yet we prize Schopenhauer the more for having said the thing that we
+secretly thought; in some subtle way we get a satisfaction out of his
+statement, and at the same time, we perceive the man was wrong.
+
+The man who can vivisect an emotion, and lay bare a heart-beat in print,
+knows a subtle joy. The misery that can explain itself is not all
+misery. Complete misery is dumb; and pain that is all pain is quickly
+transformed into insensibility. Schopenhauer's life was quite as happy
+as that of many men who persistently depress us by requesting us to
+"cheer up." Schopenhauer says, "Don't try to cheer up--the worst is yet
+to come." And we can not refrain a smile. A mother once called to her
+little boy to come into the house. And the boy answered, "I won't do
+it!" And the mother replied, "Stay out then!" And very soon the child
+came in.
+
+Truth is only a point of view, and when a man tells us what he sees, we
+swiftly take into consideration who and what the man is. Everybody does
+this, unconsciously. It depends upon who says it! The garrulous man who
+habitually overstates--painting things large--does not deceive anybody,
+and is quite as good a companion as the painstaking, exact man who is
+always setting us straight on our statistics. One man we take gross and
+the other net. The liar gross is all right, but the liar net is very
+bad.
+
+Schopenhauer was a talkative, whimsical and sensitive personality, with
+a fine assortment of harmless superstitions of his own manufacture. He
+was vain, frivolous, self-absorbed, but he had an eye for the subtleties
+of existence that quite escape the average individual. He lived in a
+world of mind--alert, active, receptive mind--with a rapid-fire gun in
+way of a caustic, biting, scathing vocabulary at his command.
+
+The test of every literary work is time. The trite, the commonplace, and
+the irrelevant die and turn to dust. The vital lives. Schopenhauer began
+writing in his youth. Neglect, indifference and contempt were his
+portion until he was over fifty years of age. His passion for truth was
+so repelling that the Mutual Admiration Society refused to record his
+name even on its waiting-list. He was of that elect few who early in
+life succeed in ridding themselves of the friendship of the many. His
+enemies discovered him first, and gave him to the world, and after they
+had launched his fame with their charges of plagiarism, pretense,
+bombast, insincerity and fraud, he has never been out of the limelight,
+and in favor he has steadily grown.
+
+No man was ever more thoroughly denounced than Schopenhauer, but even
+his most rabid foe never accused him of buying his way into popular
+favor, or bribing the judges who sit on the bookcase.
+
+We admire the man because he is such a sublime egotist--he is so
+fearfully honest. We love him because he is so often wrong in his
+conclusions: he gives us the joy of putting him straight.
+
+Schopenhauer's writing is never the product of a tired pen and ink
+unstirred by the spirit. With him we lose our self-consciousness.
+
+And the man who can make other men forget themselves has conferred upon
+the world a priceless boon. Introspection is insanity--to open the
+windows and look out is health.
+
+
+
+
+HENRY D. THOREAU
+
+
+  Seeing how all the world's ways came to nought,
+    And how Death's one decree merged all degrees,
+    He chose to pass his time with birds and trees,
+    Reduced his life to sane necessities:
+  Plain meat and drink and sleep and noble thought.
+    And the plump kine which waded to the knees
+    Through the lush grass, knowing the luxuries
+    Of succulent mouthfuls, had our gold-disease
+  As much as he, who only Nature sought.
+
+  Who gives up much the gods give more in turn:
+    The music of the spheres for dross of gold;
+  For o'er-officious cares, flame-songs that burn
+    Their pathway through the years and never old.
+  And he who shunned vain cares and vainer strife
+    Found an eternity in one short life.
+
+[Illustration: HENRY THOREAU]
+
+
+As a rule, the man who can do all things equally well is a very mediocre
+individual. Those who stand out before a groping world as beacon-lights
+were men of great faults and unequal performances. It is quite needless
+to add that they do not live on account of their faults or
+imperfections, but in spite of them.
+
+Henry David Thoreau's place in the common heart of humanity grows firmer
+and more secure as the seasons pass; his life proves for us again the
+paradoxical fact that the only men who really succeed are those who
+fail.
+
+Thoreau's obscurity, his poverty, his lack of public recognition in
+life, either as a writer or lecturer, his rejection as a lover, his
+failure in business, and his early death, form a combination of
+calamities that make him as immortal as a martyr. Especially does an
+early death sanctify all and make the record complete, but the death of
+a naturalist while right at the height of his ability to see and
+enjoy--death from tuberculosis of a man who lived most of the time in
+the open air--these things array us on the side of the man 'gainst
+unkind Fate, and cement our sympathy and love.
+
+Nature's care forever is for the species, and the individual is
+sacrificed without ruth that the race may live and progress. This dumb
+indifference of Nature to the individual--this apparent contempt for the
+man--seems to prove that the individual is only a phenomenon. Man is
+merely a manifestation, a symptom, a symbol, and his quick passing
+proves that he isn't the Thing. Nature does not care for him--she
+produces a million beings in order to get one who has thoughts--all are
+swept into the dustpan of oblivion but the one who thinks; he alone
+lives, embalmed in the memories of generations unborn.
+
+One of the most insistent errors ever put out was that statement of
+Rousseau, paraphrased in part by T. Jefferson, that all men are born
+free and equal. No man was ever born free, and none are equal, and would
+not remain so an hour, even if Jove, through caprice, should make them
+so.
+
+The Thoreau race is dead. In Sleepy Hollow Cemetery at Concord there is
+a monument marking a row of mounds where a half-dozen Thoreaus rest. The
+inscriptions are all of one size, but the name of one alone lives, and
+he lives because he had thoughts and expressed them. If any of the tribe
+of Thoreau gets into Elysium, it will be by tagging close to the only
+man among them who glorified his Maker by using his reason.
+
+Nothing should be claimed as truth that can not be demonstrated, but as
+a hypothesis (borrowed from Henry Thoreau) I give you this: Man is only
+the tool or vehicle--Mind alone is immortal--Thought is the Thing.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Heredity does not account for the evolution of Henry Thoreau. His father
+was of French descent--a plain, stolid, little man who settled in
+Concord with his parents when a child; later he tried business in
+Boston, but the march of commerce resolved itself into a double-quick,
+and John Thoreau dropped out of line, and turned to the country village
+of Concord, where he hoped that between making lead-pencils and
+gardening he might secure a living.
+
+He moved better than he knew.
+
+John Thoreau's wife was Cynthia Dunbar, a tall and handsome woman, with
+a ready tongue and nimble wit. Her attentions were largely occupied in
+looking after the affairs of the neighbors, and as the years went by her
+voice took on the good old metallic twang of the person who discusses
+people, not principles.
+
+Henry Thoreau was the third child in the family of seven. He was born in
+an old house on the Virginia Road, Concord, about a mile and a half from
+the village. This house was the home of Mrs. Thoreau's mother, but the
+Thoreaus had taken refuge there, temporarily, to escape a financial
+blizzard which seems to have hit no one else but themselves.
+
+John Thoreau was assisted in the pencil-making by the whole family. The
+Thoreaus used to sell their pencils down at Cambridge, fifteen miles
+away, and Harvard professors, for the most part, used the Concord
+article in jotting down their sublime thoughts. At ten years of age,
+Thoreau had a furtive eye on Harvard, directed thither, they say, by his
+mother. All the best people in Concord, who had sons, sent them to
+Harvard--why shouldn't the Thoreaus? The spirit of emulation and family
+pride were at work.
+
+Henry was educated principally because he wasn't very strong, nor was he
+on good terms with work, and these are classic reasons for imparting
+classical education to youth, aspiring or otherwise.
+
+The Concord Academy prepared Henry for college, and when he was sixteen,
+he trudged off to Cambridge and was duly entered in the Harvard Class of
+Eighteen Hundred Thirty-seven. At Harvard, his cosmos seemed to be of
+such a slaty gray that no one said, "Go to--we will observe this youth
+and write anecdotes about him, for he is going to be a great man." The
+very few in his class who remembered him wrote their reminiscences long
+years afterward, with memories refreshed by magazine accounts written by
+pious pilgrims from Michigan.
+
+In college pranks and popular amusements he took no part, neither was he
+a "grind," for he impressed himself on no teacher or professor so that
+they opened their mouths and made prophecies.
+
+Once safely through college, and standing on the threshold (I trust I
+use the right expression), Henry Thoreau refused to accept his diploma
+and pay five dollars for it--he said it wasn't worth the money.
+
+In his "Walden," Thoreau expresses his opinion of college training this
+way: "If I wished a boy to know something about the arts and sciences I
+would not pursue the common course, which is merely to send him into the
+neighborhood of some professor, where everything is professed and
+practised but the art of life. To my astonishment, I was informed when I
+left college that I had studied navigation! Why, if I had taken one turn
+down the harbor I would have known more about it."
+
+It is well to remember, however, that Thoreau had no ambitions to become
+a navigator. His mission was simply to paddle his own canoe on Walden
+Pond and Concord River. The men who really launched him on his voyage of
+discovery were Ellery Channing and Ralph Waldo Emerson--both Harvard
+men. Had he not been a college man, it is quite probable he would never
+have caught the speaker's eye. His efforts in working his way through
+college, assisted by his poverty-stricken parents, proved his quality.
+And as for his life in a shanty on the shores of Walden Pond, the
+occurrence is too commonplace to mention, were it not for the fact that
+the solitary occupant of the shanty was a Harvard graduate who used no
+tobacco.
+
+Harvard prepares a youth for life--but here is a man who, having
+prepared for life, deliberately turns his back on life and lives in the
+woods.
+
+A genuine woodsman is no curiosity, but a civilized woodsman is. The
+tendency of colleges is to turn men from Nature to books; from bonfires
+to stoves, steam-heat and cash-registers; but Thoreau, by reversing all
+rules, suddenly found himself, and others, explaining his position in
+print.
+
+Harvard supplied him the alternating current; he influenced the people
+in his environment, and he was influenced by his environment.
+
+But without Harvard there would have been no Thoreau. Having earned his
+diploma, he had the privilege of declining it; and having gone to
+college, it was his right to affirm the emptiness of the classics. Only
+the man with a goodly bank-balance can wear rags with impunity.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+John Thoreau made his lead-pencils and peddled them out, and we hear of
+his saying, "Pencils, I fear, are going out of fashion--people are
+buying nothing but these miserable new-fangled steel pens." When called
+upon to surrender, Paul Jones replied, "We haven't yet begun to fight."
+The truth was, the people had not really begun to use pencils. Pencils
+weren't going out of fashion, but John Thoreau was. The poor man moved
+here and there, evicted by rapacious landlords and taken in by his
+relatives, who didn't care whether he was a stranger or not. If he owed
+them ten dollars, they took fifty dollars' worth of pencils and called
+it square.
+
+Then they undersold John one-half, and he said times were scarce.
+
+This, it need not be explained, was in Massachusetts.
+
+A hundred years ago, these men who whittled useful things out of wood
+during the long winter days were everywhere in New England. The sons of
+these men invented machines to make the same things, and thus were
+started the New England manufactories. It was brains against hands,
+cleverness against skill, initiative against plodding industry. And the
+man who can tell of the sorrow and suffering of all those industrious
+sparrows that were caught and wound around flying shuttles, or stamped
+beneath the swift presses of invention, hadn't yet been born. God
+doesn't seem to care for sparrows--three-fourths of all that are hatched
+die in the nest or fall fluttering to the ground and perish, Grant
+Allen says.
+
+Comparatively few persons can adjust themselves happily to new
+conditions: the rest are pushed and broken and bent--and die.
+
+When Dixon and Faber invented machines that could be fed automatically,
+and turn out more pencils in a day than John Thoreau could in a year,
+John was out of the game.
+
+John had brought up his children to work, and Henry became an expert
+pencil-maker. Henry, we say, should have found employment with Faber and
+Company, as foreman, or else evaded their patents and made a
+pencil-machine of his own. Instead, however, he settled down and made
+pencils just like his father used to make, and in the same way. He
+peddled out a few to his friends, but his business instinct was shown in
+that he himself tells how one year he made a thousand dollars' worth of
+pencils, but was obliged to sacrifice them all to cancel a debt of one
+hundred dollars.
+
+And yet there are people who declare that genius is not transmissible.
+
+John Thoreau failed at pencil-making, but Henry Thoreau failed because
+he played the flute morning, noon and night, and went singing the
+immunity of Pan. He fished, and tramped the woods and fields, looking,
+listening, dreaming and thinking.
+
+At Keswick, where the water comes down at Lodore, there is a
+pencil-factory that has been there since the days of William the
+Conqueror. The wife of Coleridge used to work there and get money that
+supported her philosopher-husband and their children. Southey lived
+near, and became Poet Laureate of England through the right exercise of
+Keswick pencils; Wordsworth lived only a few miles away, and once he
+brought over Charles and Mary Lamb, and bought pencils for both, with
+their names stamped on them. The good old man who now keeps the
+pencil-factory explained these things to me, and also explained the
+direct relationship of good lead-pencils to literature, but I do not
+remember what it was.
+
+If Henry Thoreau had held on a few years, until the pilgrims began to
+arrive at Concord, he could have gotten rich selling souvenir pencils.
+But he just dozed and dreamed and tramped and philosophized; and when he
+wrote he used an eagle's quill, with ink he himself distilled from
+elderberries, and at first, birch-bark sufficed for paper. "Wild men and
+wild things are the only ones that have life in abundance," he used to
+say.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Brook Farm was a serious, sober experiment inaugurated by the Reverend
+George Ripley with intent to live the ideal life--the life of useful
+effort, direct honesty, simplicity and high thinking.
+
+But Thoreau could not be induced to join the community--he thought too
+much of his liberty to entrust it to a committee. He was interested in
+the experiment, but not enough to visit the experimenters. Emerson
+looked in on them, remained one night, and went back home to continue
+his essay on Idealism.
+
+Hawthorne remained long enough to get material for his "Blithedale
+Romance." Margaret Fuller secured good copy and the cordial and lifelong
+dislike of Hawthorne, all through misprized love, alas! George William
+Curtis and Charles Dana graduated out of Brook Farm, and went down to
+New York to make goodly successes in the great game of life.
+
+At Brook Farm they succeeded in the high thinking all right, but the
+entrepreneur is quite as necessary as the poet--and a little more so.
+Brook Farm had no business head, and things unfit fall into natural
+dissolution. But the enterprise did not fail, any more than a rotting
+log fails when it nourishes a bank of violets. The net results of Brook
+Farm's high thinking have passed into the world's treasury, smelted
+largely by Emerson and Thoreau, who were not there.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Immanuel Kant has been called the father of modern Transcendentalists:
+but Socrates and his pupil Plato, so far as we know, were the first of
+the race.
+
+Neither buzzing bluebottles nor the fall of dynasties disturbed them.
+"The soul is everything," said Plato. "The soul knows all things," says
+Emerson.
+
+In every century a few men have lived who knew the value of plain living
+and high thinking, and very often the men who reversed the maxim have
+passed them the hemlock.
+
+All those sects known as Primitive Christians represent variations of
+the idea--Quakers, Mennonites, Communists, Shakers and Dunkards!
+
+A Transcendentalist is a Dukhobortsi with a college education. A Quaker
+with an artistic bias becomes a Preraphaelite, and lo! we have News from
+Nowhere, a Dream of John Ball, Merton Abbey, Kelmscott, and half a world
+is touched and tinted by the simplicity, sterling honesty and
+genuineness of one man.
+
+George Ripley, Bronson Alcott, and Ralph Waldo Emerson evolved New
+England Transcendentalism, and very early Henry Thoreau added a few bars
+of harmonious discords to the symphony. Horace Greeley once contended in
+a "Tribune" editorial that Sam Staples, the bum bailiff who locked
+Thoreau behind the bars, was an important factor in the New England
+renaissance, and as such should be immortalized by a statue made of
+punk, set up on Boston Common for the delectation of bean-eaters. I fear
+me Horace was a joker.
+
+California quail are quite different from the quail of New York State,
+and naturalists tell us that this is caused by a difference in
+environment--quail being a product of soil and climate.
+
+And man is a product of soil and climate--for only in a certain soil can
+you produce a certain type of man. As a whole, this world is better
+adapted for the production of fish than genius--most of the really good
+climate falls on the sea. Christian Scientists are Transcendentalists
+whose distinguishing point is that they secrete millinery--California
+quail with rainbow tints and topknots, Balboaic instincts well defined.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Let this fact stand: it was Emerson who made Concord. He saw it
+first--he was on the ground, and the place was his by right of
+discovery, the title strengthened by the fact that four of his ancestors
+had been Concord clergymen, and the most excellent and venerable Doctor
+Ripley, a near kinsman.
+
+Concord and Emerson, as early as Eighteen Hundred Forty, when Emerson
+was thirty-seven years old, were synonymous. He had defied the
+traditions of Harvard, been excommunicated by his Alma Mater, published
+his pantheistic Essay on Nature, and his thin little books and sermons
+had been placed on the Boston Theological Index Expurgatorius.
+
+Through it all he had remained gentle, smiling, sympathetic,
+unresentful.
+
+The world can never spare the man who does his work and holds his peace.
+Emerson was being lifted up, and souls were being drawn unto him.
+
+In Eighteen Hundred Forty, Bronson Alcott, the American Socrates, with
+his interesting family, moved to Concord, drawn thither by the magnet of
+Emerson's personality. Louisa wore short dresses, and used to pick wild
+blackberries and sell them to the Emersons and get goodly reward in
+silver, and kindly smiles, and pats on her brown head by the hand that
+wrote "Compensation."
+
+Alcott was a great, honest, sincere soul, and a true anarch, for he
+took his own wherever he saw it. He used to run his wheelbarrow into
+Emerson's garden and load it up with potatoes, cabbages or turnips, and
+once in response to a hint that the vegetables were private property,
+the old man somewhat petulantly exclaimed, "I need them!--I need them!"
+
+And that was all: anything that any man needed was his by divine right.
+And the consistency of Alcott's philosophy was shown in that he never
+took anything or any more than he needed, and if he had something that
+you needed, you were certainly welcome to it. If Alcott helped himself
+to the thrifty Emerson's vegetables, both Emerson and Thoreau helped
+themselves to Alcott's ideas.
+
+Once a wagonload of wood broke down in front of Alcott's house, and the
+farmer unhitched his horses and went on to the village to procure a new
+wheel. Before he got back, Alcott had carried every stick of the
+combustibles into his own wood-shed. "Providence remembers us!" he said.
+His faith was sublime.
+
+When all the world reaches the Alcott stage, there will be no need of
+soldiers, policemen, night-watchmen, or bolts, bars and locks.
+
+In Eighteen Hundred Forty, Nathaniel Hawthorne came to Concord from
+Salem, where he had resigned his clerkship in the custom-house, that he
+might devote all his time to literature. He moved into the Old Manse,
+which had just been vacated by Doctor Ripley, who had gone
+a-Brook-Farming--the Old Manse where Emerson himself once lived.
+Elizabeth Peabody, the talented sister of Hawthorne's wife, lived at a
+convenient distance, and to her Hawthorne read most of his manuscript,
+for I need not explain that literature is not literature until it is
+read aloud and reflected back by a sympathetic, discerning mind.
+Literature is a collaboration between the reader and the listener.
+
+Margaret Fuller, with her tragic life-story still unwound, lived hard
+by, and Hawthorne had already worked her up into copy as "Zenobia."
+Margaret's sister Ellen had married Ellery Channing, the closest,
+warmest friend that Henry Thoreau ever knew. The gossips arranged a
+doublewedding, with Henry and Margaret as the other principals; but when
+interviewed on the theme, Henry had merely shaken his head and said, "In
+the first place, Margaret Fuller is not fool enough to marry me; and
+second, I am not fool enough to marry her."
+
+An Irishman who saw Thoreau in the field making a minute in his notebook
+took it for granted that he was casting up his wages, and inquired what
+they came to. It was a peculiar farmhand who cared more for ideas than
+for wages.
+
+George William Curtis was also a farmhand out on the Lowell Road, but
+came into town Saturday evenings--taking a swim in the river on the
+way--to attend the philosophical conferences at Emerson's house, and
+then went off and made gentle fun of them.
+
+Little Doctor Holmes occasionally drove out from Boston to Concord in a
+one-horse chaise; James Russell Lowell had walked over from Cambridge;
+and Longfellow had invited all hands to a birthday fete on his lawn at
+Cambridge, but Thoreau had declined for himself, saying he had to look
+after his pond-lilies and the field-mice on Bedford flats.
+
+Thoreau, at this time, was a member of Emerson's household, and in a
+letter Emerson says, "He has his board for what labor he chooses to do;
+he is a great benefactor and physician to me, for he is an indefatigable
+and skilful laborer, besides being a scholar and a poet, and as full of
+promise as a young apple-tree."
+
+And again, in a letter to Carlyle: "One reader and friend of yours
+dwells in my household, Henry Thoreau, a poet whom you may one day be
+proud of--a noble, manly youth, full of melodies and invention. We work
+together day by day in my garden, and I grow well and strong."
+
+To work and talk is the true way to acquire an education. All of our
+best things are done incidentally--not in cold blood. Hawthorne says in
+his Journal that most of Emerson's and Thoreau's farming was done
+leaning on the hoe-handles, while Alcott sat on the fence and explained
+the Whyness of the Wherefore.
+
+But we must remember that in Hawthorne's ink-bottle there was a goodly
+dash of tincture of iron. In his Journal of September First, Eighteen
+Hundred Forty-two, he writes: "Mr. Thoreau dined with us yesterday. He
+is a singular character--a young man with much of wild, original nature
+still remaining in him; and so far as he is sophisticated, it is in a
+way and method of his own. He is as ugly as sin, long-nosed,
+queer-mouthed, and with uncouth and somewhat rustic ways, though his
+courteous manner corresponds very well with such an exterior. But his
+ugliness is of an honest character and really becomes him better than
+beauty." Little did Hawthorne's guests imagine they were being basted,
+roasted, or fricasseed for the edification of posterity.
+
+Prosperity at this time had just begun to smile on Hawthorne, and among
+other extravagances in which he indulged was a boat, bought from
+Thoreau--made by the hands of this expert Yankee whittler. Hawthorne
+quotes a little transcendental advice given to him by the maker of the
+boat: "In paddling a canoe, all you have to do is to will that your boat
+shall go in any particular direction, and she will immediately take the
+course, as if imbued with the spirit of the steersman." Hawthorne then
+adds this sober postscript: "It may be so with you, but it is certainly
+not so with me."
+
+Admiration for Thoreau gradually grew very strong with Hawthorne, and he
+quotes Emerson, who called Thoreau "the young god Pan." And this lends
+much semblance to the statement that Thoreau served Hawthorne as a model
+for Donatello, the mysterious wood-sprite in the "Marble Faun."
+
+As to the transformation of Thoreau himself, one of his classmates
+records this:
+
+     Meeting Mr. Emerson one day, I inquired if he saw much of my
+     classmate, Henry D. Thoreau, who was then living in Concord. "Of
+     Thoreau?" replied Mr. Emerson, his face lighting up with a smile of
+     enthusiasm. "Oh, yes, we could not do without him. When Carlyle
+     comes to America, I expect to introduce Thoreau to him as the man
+     of Concord," and I was greatly surprised at these words. They set
+     an estimate on Thoreau which seemed to be extravagant.... Not long
+     after I happened to meet Thoreau in Mr. Emerson's study at
+     Concord--the first time we had come together after leaving college.
+     I was quite startled by the transformation that had taken place in
+     him. His short figure and general cast of countenance were, of
+     course, unchanged; but in his manners, in the tones of his voice,
+     in his modes of expression, even in the hesitations and pauses of
+     his speech, he had become the counterpart of Mr. Emerson. Thoreau's
+     college voice bore no resemblance to Mr. Emerson's, and was so
+     familiar to my ear that I could have readily identified him by it
+     in the dark. I was so much struck by the change that I took the
+     opportunity, as they sat near together talking, of listening with
+     closed eyes, and I was unable to determine with certainty which was
+     speaking. I do not know to what subtle influences to ascribe it,
+     but after conversing with Mr. Emerson for even a brief time, I
+     always found myself able and inclined to adopt his voice and manner
+     of speaking.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Thoreau had tried schoolteaching, but he had to give up his position
+because he would not exercise the birch and ferule. "If the scholars
+once find out the teacher is not goin' to sting 'em up when they need
+it, that is an end to the skule," said one of the directors, and he spat
+violently at a fly, ten feet away. The others agreeing with him, Thoreau
+was asked to resign.
+
+William Emerson, a brother of Ralph Waldo's, a prosperous New York
+merchant, had lured Ralph Waldo's hired man away from him and taken him
+down to Staten Island, New York. Here Thoreau acted as private tutor,
+and imparted the mysteries of woodcraft to boys who cared more for
+marbles.
+
+Staten Island was about two hundred miles too far from Concord to suit
+Thoreau.
+
+His loneliness in New York City made Concord and the pine-trees of
+Walden woods seem paradise enow. There is no heart desolation equal to
+that which can come to one in a throng.
+
+Margaret Fuller was now in New York City, working for Greeley on the
+editorial staff of the "Tribune." Greeley was so much pleased with
+Thoreau that he offered to set him to work as reporter, for Greeley had
+guessed the truth that the best city reporters are country boys. They
+observe and hear--all is curious and wonderful to them: by and by they
+will become blase--sophisticated--that is, blind and deaf.
+
+Greeley was a great talker, and he had a way of getting others to talk
+also. He got Thoreau to talking about communal life and life in the
+woods, and then Horace worked Henry's words up into copy--for that is
+the way all good newspaper-writers evolve their original ideas.
+
+Thoreau was amazed to pick up a number of the daily "Tribune" and find
+his conversation of the day before, with Greeley, skilfully transformed
+into a leader.
+
+Fourierism had been the theme--the Phalanstery versus Individual
+Housekeeping. Greeley had prophesied that the phalanstery, with one
+kitchen for forty families, instead of forty kitchens for forty
+families, would soon come about. Greeley's prophetic vision did not
+quite anticipate the modern apartment-house, which perhaps is a
+transitional expedient, moving toward the phalanstery, but he quoted
+Thoreau by saying, "A woman enslaved by her housekeeping is just as much
+a chattel as if owned by a man."
+
+This was in Eighteen Hundred Forty-five, and Thoreau was now
+twenty-eight years of age. He was homesick for the dim pine-woods with
+their ceaseless lullaby, the winding and placid river, and the great,
+massive, sullen, self-sufficient boulders of Concord.
+
+He was resolved to follow the example of Brook Farm, and start a
+community of his own in opposition. His community would be on the shores
+of Walden Pond, and the only member of the genus homo who would be
+eligible to membership would be himself; the other members would be the
+birds and squirrels and bees, and the trees would make up the rest.
+Brook Farm was a retreat for transcendentalists--a place to meditate,
+dream and work--a place where one could exist close to Nature, and live
+a simple, hardy and healthful life.
+
+Thoreau's retreat would be the same, with the disadvantage of personal
+contact eliminated.
+
+It was in March, Eighteen Hundred Forty-five, that Thoreau began
+building his shanty. The spot was in a dense woods, on a hillside that
+gently sloped down to the clear, cold, deep water of Walden Pond. The
+land belonged to Emerson, who obligingly gave Thoreau the use of it,
+rent free, with no conditions. Alcott helped in the carpenter work, and
+discussed betimes of the Wherefore, and when it came to the raising, a
+couple of neighboring farmers were hailed and pressed into service. The
+cabin was twelve by fifteen, and cost--furnished--the sum of
+twenty-eight dollars, good money, not counting labor, which Thoreau did
+not calculate as worth anything, since he had had the fun of the
+thing--something for which men often pay high.
+
+The furniture consisted of a table, a chair, and a bed, all made by the
+owner. For bedclothes and dishes the Emerson household was put under
+contribution. On the door was a latch, but no lock.
+
+And Thoreau looked upon his work and pronounced it good.
+
+Stripped of the fact that a man of culture and education built the
+shanty and lived in it, the incident is scarcely worth noting. Boys
+passing through the shanty stage, all build shanties, and forage through
+their mothers' pantries for provender, which they carry off to their
+robbers' roost. Thoreau was an example of shanty-arrested development.
+
+But as the import of every sentence depends upon who wrote it, and the
+worth of advice hinges upon who gave it, so does the value of every act
+depend upon who did it. Thus when a man, who was in degree an
+inspiration of Emerson, takes to the woods, it is worth our while to
+follow him afield and see what he does.
+
+Thoreau set to work to clean up two acres of blackberry brambles for a
+garden-patch. He did not work except when he felt like it. His plan was
+to go to bed at dusk, with window and door open, and get up at five
+o'clock in the morning. After a plunge in the lake he would dress and
+prepare his simple breakfast. Then he would work in his garden, or if
+the mood struck him, he would sit in the door of his shanty and
+meditate, or else write. In the arrangement of his home he followed no
+system or rule, merely allowing the passing inclination to lead.
+
+His provisions were gotten of friends in the village, and were paid for
+in labor. It was part of Thoreau's philosophy that to accept something
+for nothing was theft, and that the giving or acceptance of presents
+was immoral. For all he received he conscientiously gave an equivalent
+in labor; and as for ideas, he always considered himself a learner; if
+he had thoughts they belonged to anybody who could annex them. And that
+Emerson and Horace Greeley were alike in their capacity to absorb,
+digest and regurgitate, is everywhere acknowledged. To paraphrase
+Emerson's famous remark concerning Plato: Say what you will, you will
+find everything mentioned by Emerson hinted at somewhere in Thoreau. The
+younger man had as much mind as the elder, but he lacked the capacity
+for patient effort that works steadily, persistently, and weighs, sifts,
+decides, classifies and arranges. The voice was the voice of Jacob, but
+the hand was the hand of Esau. That is to say, Thoreau lacked business
+instinct. During the Winter at Walden Pond, all the work Thoreau had to
+do was to gather firewood. There was plenty of time to think and write,
+and here the better part of "Walden" and "A Week on the Concord and
+Merrimac Rivers" were written. He had no neighbors, no pets, no
+domesticated animals--only the squirrels on the roof, a woodchuck under
+the floor, the scolding blue jays in the pines overhead, the wild ducks
+on the pond, and the hooting owls that sat on the ridgepole at night.
+
+Thoreau loved solitude more because he prized society--the society of
+simple men who could talk and tell things. Thoreau was no hermit--at
+least twice a week he would go to the village and meander along the
+street, gossiping with all or any. Often he would accept invitations to
+supper, but on principle refused all invitations to remain overnight, no
+matter what the weather. Indeed, as Hawthorne hints, there is a trace of
+the theatrical in the man who leaves a warm fireside at nine or ten
+o'clock at night and trudges off through the darkness, storm and sleet,
+feeling his way through the blackness of the woods to a cold and
+cheerless shanty which he with unconscious humor calls home. Hawthorne
+hints that Thoreau was a delightful poseur--he posed so naturally that
+he deceived even himself. On one particular visit to the village,
+however, he did not go back home for the night. It seems that he had
+been called upon by the local taxgatherer for his poll-tax, a matter of
+a dollar and a quarter. Thoreau argued the question at length, and among
+other things, said, "I will not give money to buy a musket, and hire a
+man to use this musket to shoot another." And also, "The best government
+is not that which governs least, but that which governs not at all."
+
+"But what shall I do?" said the patient publican.
+
+"Resign," said the philosopher.
+
+Thoreau seemed to forget that officeholders seldom die and never resign.
+In the argument the publican was worsted, but he was not without
+resource. He went back to town and told the other officials what had
+happened. Their dignity was at stake. Alcott had been guilty of a like
+defiance some time before, and now it was the belief that he was putting
+the younger man up to insurrection.
+
+The next time Thoreau came over to the village for his mail he was
+arrested and lodged in the local bastile.
+
+Emerson, hearing of the trouble, hastened to the jail, and reaching the
+presence of the prisoner asked sternly, "Henry, why are you here?"
+
+And the answer was, "Waldo, why are you not here?" Emerson had no use
+for such finespun theories of duty, and the matter was too near home for
+a joke, so he turned away and let the culprit spend the night in limbo.
+The next morning Thoreau was released, the tax having been paid by some
+unknown person--Emerson, undoubtedly. This was a tame enough ending to
+what was rather an interesting affair--the hope of the best citizens
+being that Thoreau would get a goodly sentence for vagrancy. The
+townfolk looked upon Thoreau and Alcott with suspicious eyes. They both
+came in for much well-deserved censure, and Emerson did not go
+unsmirched, since he was guilty of harboring and encouraging these
+ne'er-do-wells.
+
+Thoreau's cabin-life continued for two Summers and Winters. He had
+proved that two hours' manual work each day was sufficient to keep a
+man--twenty cents a day would suffice.
+
+The last year in the woods he had many callers: Agassiz had been to see
+him, Emerson had often called, Ellery Channing was a frequent visitor,
+and picnickers were constant. Lowell had made a few cutting remarks to
+the effect that "as compared with shanty-life, the tub of Diogenes was
+preferable, as it had a much sounder bottom," and Hawthorne had written
+of "the beauties of conspicuous solitude."
+
+Thoreau felt that he was attracting too much attention, and that perhaps
+Hawthorne was right: a recluse who holds receptions is becoming the
+thing he pretends to despise. Besides that, there was plenty of
+precedent for quitting--Brook Farm had gone by the board, and was but a
+memory.
+
+Thoreau's shanty was turned over to a utilitarian Scotchman with red
+hair. Later the immortal shanty was a useful granary. Thoreau went back
+to the village to live in a garret and work at odd jobs of boat-building
+and gardening.
+
+Now only a pile of boulders marks the place where the cabin stood. For
+some years, each visitor to the spot threw a stone upon the heap, but
+recently the proposition has been reversed, and each visitor takes a
+stone away, which reveals not a reversal in the sentiment toward the
+memory of Thoreau, but a change in the quality of the Concord pilgrim.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Thoreau's early death was the direct result of his reckless lack of
+common prudence. That which made him live, in a literary way, curtailed
+his years. The man was improperly and imperfectly nourished, physically.
+Men who live alone do not cook any more than they have to: men and
+women, both, cook for emulation. That is to say, we work for each other,
+and we succeed only as we help each other.
+
+Thoreau was such a pronounced individualist that he cared for no one but
+himself, and he cared for himself not at all. It is wife, children and
+home that teach a man prudence, and make him bank against the storm. "At
+Walden no one bothered me but the State," said Thoreau. If Thoreau had
+had a family and treated his household as he treated himself, that
+scorned thing, the State, would have stepped in and sent him to the
+workhouse, and his children to the Home for the Friendless.
+
+If he had treated dumb animals as he treated himself, the Society for
+the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals would have interfered. The absence
+of social ties and of all responsibilities fixed in his peculiar
+temperament an indifference to hunger, heat, cold, wet, damp, and all
+bodily discomfort that classes the man with the flagellants. He tells of
+whole days when he ate nothing but berries and drank only cold water;
+and at other times of how he walked all day in a soaking rain and went
+to bed at night, supperless, under a pine-tree. Emerson records the fact
+that on long tramps Thoreau would carry only a chunk of plum-cake for
+food, because it was rich and contained condensed nutriment.
+
+The question is sometimes asked, "How can one eat his cake and keep it
+too?" but this does not refer to plum-cake.
+
+A few years of plum-cake, cold mince-pie and continual wet feet will put
+the petard under even the stoutest constitution.
+
+During his shanty-life Thoreau was imperfectly nourished, and for the
+victim of malassimilation, tuberculosis hunts and needs no spyglass.
+
+It is absurd for a man to make a god of his digestive apparatus, but it
+is just as bad to forget that the belly is as much the gift of God as
+the brain.
+
+In childhood, Thoreau was frail and weak. Outdoor life gradually
+developed on his slight frame a splendid strength and a power to do and
+endure. He could outrun, outrow, outwalk any of his townsmen. In him
+developed the confidence of the athlete--the confidence of the athlete
+who dies young. Thoreau was an athlete, and he died as the athlete
+dieth. Irregular diet and continued exposure did their work--the vital
+powers became reduced, the man "caught cold," bronchitis followed, and
+the tuberculae laughed.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+During Thoreau's life he published but two volumes, and these met with
+scanty sale. Since his death ten volumes have been issued from his
+manuscripts and letters, and his fame has steadily increased.
+
+Boston had no recognition for Thoreau as long as he was alive. Among the
+most popular writers of the time, feted and feasted, invited and
+exalted, were George S. Hillard, N. P. Willis, Caroline Kirkland, George
+W. Green, Parke Godwin and Charles F. Briggs. These writers, who had the
+run of the magazines, would have smiled in derision if told that the
+name and fame of uncouth Thoreau would outlive them all. They wrote for
+the people who bought their books, but Thoreau dedicated his work to
+time. He wrote what he thought, but they wrote what they thought other
+people thought.
+
+In the publication of "The Dial," Thoreau took a hearty interest, and
+was a frequent contributor. The official organ of the
+transcendentalists, however, paid no honorariums--it was both sincere
+and serious, and died in due time of too much dignity. The "Atlantic
+Monthly" accepted one article by Thoreau, and paid for it, but as James
+Russell Lowell, the editor, used his blue pencil a trifle, without first
+consulting the author, he never got an opportunity to do so again.
+
+Horace Greeley had interested himself in Thoreau's writings and gotten
+several articles accepted by Graham's and also Putnam's Magazine. "The
+Week" had been published on the author's guaranty that enough copies
+would be sold the first year to cover the cost. After four years, of the
+edition of one thousand copies only three hundred were disposed of, and
+these were mostly given away. To pay the publisher for the expense
+incurred, Thoreau buckled down and worked hard at surveying for a year.
+
+The only man he ever knew, of whom he stood a little in awe, was Walt
+Whitman. In a letter to Blake he says:
+
+     Nineteenth November, Eighteen Hundred Fifty-six.--Alcott has been
+     here, and last Sunday I went with him to Greeley's farm, thirty-six
+     miles north of New York. The next day Alcott and I heard Beecher
+     preach; and what was more, we visited Whitman the next morning, and
+     we were much interested and provoked. He is apparently the greatest
+     democrat the world has seen, kings and aristocracy go by the board
+     at once, as they have long deserved to. A remarkably strong though
+     coarse nature, of a sweet disposition, and much prized by his
+     friends. Though peculiar and rough in his exterior, he is
+     essentially a gentleman. I am still somewhat in a quandary about
+     him--feel that he is essentially strange to me, at any rate; but I
+     am surprised by the sight of him. He is very broad, but, as I have
+     said, not fine.
+
+     Seventh December, Eighteen Hundred Fifty-six.--That Walt Whitman,
+     of whom I wrote you, is the most interesting fact to me at present.
+     I have just read his second edition (which he gave me), and it has
+     done me more good than any reading for a long time. Perhaps I
+     remember best the poem of "Walt Whitman an American" and the
+     "Sundown" poem. There are two or three pieces in the book which are
+     disagreeable, to say the least, simply sensual.... As for its
+     sensuality--and it may turn out to be less sensual than it
+     appears--I do not so much wish that those parts were not written,
+     as that men and women were so pure that they could read them
+     without harm.
+
+     On the whole, it sounds to me very brave and American, after
+     whatever deductions. I do not believe that all the sermons, so
+     called, that have been preached in this land, put together, are
+     equal to it for preaching. We ought greatly to rejoice in him. He
+     occasionally suggests something a little more than human. You can't
+     confound him with the other inhabitants of Brooklyn. How they must
+     shudder when they read him!
+
+     To be sure, I sometimes feel a little imposed on. By his heartiness
+     and broad generalities he puts me into a liberal frame of mind,
+     prepared to see wonders--as it were, sets me upon a hill or in the
+     midst of a plain--stirs me well up, and then--throws in a thousand
+     of brick. Though rude and sometimes ineffectual, it is a great
+     primitive poem, an alarum or trumpet-note ringing through the
+     American camp. Wonderfully like the Orientals, too, considering
+     that, when I asked him if he had read them, he answered, "No; tell
+     me about them."
+
+     Since I have seen him, I find that I am not disturbed by any brag
+     or egoism in his book. He may turn out the least of a braggart of
+     all, having a better right to be confident. Walt is a great fellow.
+
+A lady once asked John Burroughs this question: "What would become of
+this world if everybody in it patterned after Henry Thoreau?" And Ol'
+John replied, "It would be much improved."
+
+But your Uncle John is a humorist--he knows that Henry Ward Beecher was
+right when he said, "God never made but one Thoreau--that was enough,
+but we are grateful for the one."
+
+Thoreau was a poet-naturalist, and the lesson he taught us is that this
+is the most beautiful world to know anything about, and there are enough
+curious and wonderful things right under our feet, and over our heads,
+and all around us, to amuse, divert, interest and instruct us for a
+lifetime. We need only a little.
+
+Use your eyes!
+
+"How do you manage to find so many Indian relics?" a friend asked
+Thoreau. "Just like this," he replied, and stooping over, he picked up
+an arrowhead under the friend's foot. At dinner once at a neighbor's he
+was asked what dish he preferred, and his answer was, "The nearest." To
+him, everything was good--he uttered no complaints and made no demands.
+
+When asked by a clergyman why he did not go to church, he said, "It is
+the rafters--I can't stand them--when I look up, I want to gaze straight
+into the blue sky." Then he turned the tables and asked the interrogator
+a question: "Did you ever happen, accidentally, to say anything while
+you were preaching?" Yet preachers of brains were always attracted to
+him: Harrison Blake, to whom he wrote more letters than to any one
+else, was a Congregational preacher. And when Horace Greeley took
+Thoreau to Plymouth Church, Beecher invited him to sit on the platform
+and quoted him as one who saw God in autumn's every burning bush.
+
+The wit of the man--his direct speech, and all of his beautiful
+indifference for the good opinion of those whom others follow after and
+lie in wait for--was sublime. Meanness, hypocrisy, secrecy and
+subterfuge had no place in Thoreau's nature.
+
+He wanted nothing--nothing but liberty--he did not even ask for your
+applause or approval. When walking on country roads, laborers would hail
+him and ask for tobacco--seeing in him only one of their own kind.
+Farmers would stop and gossip with him about the weather. Children ran
+to him on the village streets and would cling to his hands and clutch
+his coat, and ask where the berries grew, or the first spring flowers
+were to be found. With children he was particularly patient and kind.
+With them he would converse as freely as did George Francis Train with
+the children in Madison Square. The children recognized in him something
+very much akin to themselves--he would play upon his flute for them and
+whittle out toy boats, regardless of the flight of time.
+
+Imbeciles and mental defectives from the almshouse used occasionally to
+wander over to his cabin in the woods, and he would treat them with
+gentle consideration, and accompany them back home.
+
+His lack of worldly prudence, Blake thought, tokened a courage which
+under certain conditions would have made him as formidable as John
+Brown. Blake tells this: Once on a lonely road, two miles from Concord,
+two loafers stopped a girl who was picking berries, and began to bother
+her. Thoreau just then happened along, and seeing the young woman's
+distress, he collared the rogues and marched them into the village,
+turning them over to that redoubtable transcendentalist, Sam Staples,
+who locked them up. Thoreau's hook nose and features could be
+transformed in rare instances into a look of command that no man dare
+question--it was the look of the fatalist--the benign fanatic--the look
+of Marat--the look of a man who has nothing but his life to lose, and
+places small store on that. "A little more ambition, and a trifle less
+sympathy, and the world would have had a Caesar to deal with," says
+Blake.
+
+Cowardice is only caution carried to an extreme. Thoreau exercised no
+prudence in making money, securing fame, preserving his health, holding
+his friends or making new ones. This Spartan-like quality, that counts
+not the cost, is essentially heroic.
+
+But Thoreau was not given to strife; for the most part, he was
+non-resistant. The chief thing he prized was equanimity, and this you
+can not secure through struggle and strife. His game was all captured
+with the spyglass, or carried home in his botanists' drum. For worldly
+wealth and what we call progress, he had small appreciation--this marks
+his limitations. But his reasons are surely good literature:
+
+     They make a great ado nowadays about hard times; but I think that
+     the community generally, ministers and all, take a wrong view of
+     the matter. This general failure, both private and public, is
+     rather occasion for rejoicing, as reminding us whom we have at the
+     helm--that justice is always done. If our merchants did not most of
+     them fail, and the banks too, my faith in the old laws of the world
+     would be staggered. The statement that ninety-six in a hundred
+     doing such business surely break down, is perhaps the sweetest fact
+     that statistics have revealed--exhilarating as the fragrance of the
+     flowers in the Spring. Does it not say somewhere, "The Lord
+     reigneth, let the earth rejoice"? If thousands are thrown out of
+     employment, it suggests that they were not well employed. Why don't
+     they take the hint? It is not enough to be industrious; so are the
+     ants. What are you industrious about?
+
+     The merchants and company have long laughed at transcendentalism,
+     higher law, etc., crying, "None of your moonshine," as if they were
+     anchored to something not only definite, but sure and permanent. If
+     there were any institution which was presumed to rest on a solid
+     and secure basis, and more than any other, represented this boasted
+     commonsense, prudence, and practical talent, it was the bank; and
+     now these very banks are found to be mere reeds shaken by the wind.
+
+     Scarcely one in the land has kept its promise. Not merely the Brook
+     Farm and Fourierite communities, but now the community generally
+     has failed. But there is the moonshine still, serene, beneficent
+     and unchanged.
+
+Thoreau was no pessimist. He complained neither of men nor of
+destiny--he felt that he was getting out of life all that was his due.
+His remarks might be sharp and his words sarcastic, but in them there
+was no bitterness. He made life for none more difficult--he added to no
+one's burdens. Sympathy with Nature, pride, buoyancy, self-sufficiency,
+were his prevailing traits. The habit of his mind was hopeful.
+
+His wit and good-nature were his to the last, and when asked if he had
+made his peace with God, he replied, "I have never quarreled with Him."
+
+He died, aged forty-four, in the modest home of his mother. The village
+school was dismissed that the scholars might attend the funeral, and
+three hundred children walked in the procession to Sleepy Hollow.
+Emerson made an address at the grave; Alcott read selections from
+Thoreau's own writings; and Louisa Alcott read this poem, composed for
+the occasion:
+
+  We sighing said, "Our Pan is dead;
+    His pipe hangs mute beside the river,
+    Around it wistful sunbeams quiver,
+  But Music's airy voice is fled.
+  Spring mourns as for untimely frost:
+    The bluebird chants a requiem;
+    The willow-blossom waits for him;--
+  The Genius of the wood is lost."
+
+  Then from the flute, untouched by hands,
+    There came a low, harmonious breath:
+    "For such as he there is no death;
+  His life the eternal life commands;
+  Above man's aims his nature rose.
+    The wisdom of a just content
+    Made one small spot a continent,
+  And turned to poetry life's prose.
+
+  "To him no vain regrets belong,
+    Whose soul, that finer instrument,
+    Gave to the world no poor lament,
+  But wood-notes ever sweet and strong.
+  O lonely friend! he still will be
+    A potent presence, though unseen--
+    Steadfast, sagacious, and serene;
+  Seek not for him--he is with thee."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+SO HERE ENDETH "LITTLE JOURNEYS TO THE HOMES OF GREAT PHILOSOPHERS,"
+BEING VOLUME EIGHT OF THE SERIES, AS WRITTEN BY ELBERT HUBBARD; EDITED
+AND ARRANGED BY FRED BANN; BORDERS AND INITIALS BY ROYCROFT ARTISTS, AND
+PRODUCED BY THE ROYCROFTERS, AT THEIR SHOPS, WHICH ARE IN EAST AURORA,
+ERIE COUNTY, NEW YORK, MCMXXII.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Little Journeys to the Homes of the
+Great Philosophers, Volume 8, by Elbert  Hubbard
+
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