Lay Morals , livre ebook

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145 pages

English

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pubOne.info thank you for your continued support and wish to present you this new edition. THE problem of education is twofold: first to know, and then to utter. Every one who lives any semblance of an inner life thinks more nobly and profoundly than he speaks; and the best of teachers can impart only broken images of the truth which they perceive. Speech which goes from one to another between two natures, and, what is worse, between two experiences, is doubly relative. The speaker buries his meaning; it is for the hearer to dig it up again; and all speech, written or spoken, is in a dead language until it finds a willing and prepared hearer. Such, moreover, is the complexity of life, that when we condescend upon details in our advice, we may be sure we condescend on error; and the best of education is to throw out some magnanimous hints. No man was ever so poor that he could express all he has in him by words, looks, or actions; his true knowledge is eternally incommunicable, for it is a knowledge of himself; and his best wisdom comes to him by no process of the mind, but in a supreme self- dictation, which keeps varying from hour to hour in its dictates with the variation of events and circumstances

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Publié par	Pub One Info
Date de parution	23 octobre 2010
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9782819917625
Langue	English

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PART 1
LAY MORALS
CHAPTER 1
THE problem of education is twofold: first to know,and then to utter. Every one who lives any semblance of an innerlife thinks more nobly and profoundly than he speaks; and the bestof teachers can impart only broken images of the truth which theyperceive. Speech which goes from one to another between twonatures, and, what is worse, between two experiences, is doublyrelative. The speaker buries his meaning; it is for the hearer todig it up again; and all speech, written or spoken, is in a deadlanguage until it finds a willing and prepared hearer. Such,moreover, is the complexity of life, that when we condescend upondetails in our advice, we may be sure we condescend on error; andthe best of education is to throw out some magnanimous hints. Noman was ever so poor that he could express all he has in him bywords, looks, or actions; his true knowledge is eternallyincommunicable, for it is a knowledge of himself; and his bestwisdom comes to him by no process of the mind, but in a supremeself- dictation, which keeps varying from hour to hour in itsdictates with the variation of events and circumstances.
A few men of picked nature, full of faith, courage,and contempt for others, try earnestly to set forth as much as theycan grasp of this inner law; but the vast majority, when they cometo advise the young, must be content to retail certain doctrineswhich have been already retailed to them in their own youth. Everygeneration has to educate another which it has brought upon thestage. People who readily accept the responsibility of parentship,having very different matters in their eye, are apt to feel ruefulwhen that responsibility falls due. What are they to tell the childabout life and conduct, subjects on which they have themselves sofew and such confused opinions? Indeed, I do not know; the leastsaid, perhaps, the soonest mended; and yet the child keeps asking,and the parent must find some words to say in his own defence.Where does he find them? and what are they when found?
As a matter of experience, and in nine hundred andninety- nine cases out of a thousand, he will instil into his wide-eyed brat three bad things: the terror of public opinion, and,flowing from that as a fountain, the desire of wealth and applause.Besides these, or what might be deduced as corollaries from these,he will teach not much else of any effective value: some dimnotions of divinity, perhaps, and book-keeping, and how to walkthrough a quadrille.
But, you may tell me, the young people are taught tobe Christians. It may be want of penetration, but I have not yetbeen able to perceive it. As an honest man, whatever we teach, andbe it good or evil, it is not the doctrine of Christ. What hetaught (and in this he is like all other teachers worthy of thename) was not a code of rules, but a ruling spirit; not truths, buta spirit of truth; not views, but a view. What he showed us was anattitude of mind. Towards the many considerations on which conductis built, each man stands in a certain relation. He takes life on acertain principle. He has a compass in his spirit which points in acertain direction. It is the attitude, the relation, the point ofthe compass, that is the whole body and gist of what he has toteach us; in this, the details are comprehended; out of this thespecific precepts issue, and by this, and this only, can they beexplained and applied. And thus, to learn aright from any teacher,we must first of all, like a historical artist, think ourselvesinto sympathy with his position and, in the technical phrase,create his character. A historian confronted with some ambiguouspolitician, or an actor charged with a part, have but onepre-occupation; they must search all round and upon every side, andgrope for some central conception which is to explain and justifythe most extreme details; until that is found, the politician is anenigma, or perhaps a quack, and the part a tissue of fustiansentiment and big words; but once that is found, all enters into aplan, a human nature appears, the politician or the stage-king isunderstood from point to point, from end to end. This is a degreeof trouble which will be gladly taken by a very humble artist; butnot even the terror of eternal fire can teach a business man tobend his imagination to such athletic efforts. Yet without this,all is vain; until we understand the whole, we shall understandnone of the parts; and otherwise we have no more than broken imagesand scattered words; the meaning remains buried; and the languagein which our prophet speaks to us is a dead language in ourears.
Take a few of Christ's sayings and compare them withour current doctrines.
'Ye cannot,' he says, 'SERVE GOD AND MAMMON.'Cannot? And our whole system is to teach us how we can!
'THE CHILDREN OF THIS WORLD ARE WISER IN THEIRGENERATION THAN THE CHILDREN OF LIGHT.' Are they? I had been led tounderstand the reverse: that the Christian merchant, for example,prospered exceedingly in his affairs; that honesty was the bestpolicy; that an author of repute had written a conclusive treatise'How to make the best of both worlds.' Of both worlds indeed! Whicham I to believe then - Christ or the author of repute?
'TAKE NO THOUGHT FOR THE MORROW.' Ask the SuccessfulMerchant; interrogate your own heart; and you will have to admitthat this is not only a silly but an immoral position. All webelieve, all we hope, all we honour in ourselves or ourcontemporaries, stands condemned in this one sentence, or, if youtake the other view, condemns the sentence as unwise and inhumane.We are not then of the 'same mind that was in Christ.' We disagreewith Christ. Either Christ meant nothing, or else he or we must bein the wrong. Well says Thoreau, speaking of some texts from theNew Testament, and finding a strange echo of another style whichthe reader may recognise: 'Let but one of these sentences berightly read from any pulpit in the land, and there would not beleft one stone of that meeting-house upon another.'
It may be objected that these are what are called'hard sayings'; and that a man, or an education, may be verysufficiently Christian although it leave some of these sayings uponone side. But this is a very gross delusion. Although truth isdifficult to state, it is both easy and agreeable to receive, andthe mind runs out to meet it ere the phrase be done. The universe,in relation to what any man can say of it, is plain, patent andstaringly comprehensible. In itself, it is a great and travailingocean, unsounded, unvoyageable, an eternal mystery to man; or, letus say, it is a monstrous and impassable mountain, one side ofwhich, and a few near slopes and foothills, we can dimly study withthese mortal eyes. But what any man can say of it, even in hishighest utterance, must have relation to this little and plaincorner, which is no less visible to us than to him. We are lookingon the same map; it will go hard if we cannot follow thedemonstration. The longest and most abstruse flight of aphilosopher becomes clear and shallow, in the flash of a moment,when we suddenly perceive the aspect and drift of his intention.The longest argument is but a finger pointed; once we get our ownfinger rightly parallel, and we see what the man meant, whether itbe a new star or an old street-lamp. And briefly, if a saying ishard to understand, it is because we are thinking of somethingelse.
But to be a true disciple is to think of the samethings as our prophet, and to think of different things in the sameorder. To be of the same mind with another is to see all things inthe same perspective; it is not to agree in a few indifferentmatters near at hand and not much debated; it is to follow him inhis farthest flights, to see the force of his hyperboles, to standso exactly in the centre of his vision that whatever he mayexpress, your eyes will light at once on the original, thatwhatever he may see to declare, your mind will at once accept. Youdo not belong to the school of any philosopher, because you agreewith him that theft is, on the whole, objectionable, or that thesun is overhead at noon. It is by the hard sayings thatdiscipleship is tested. We are all agreed about the middling andindifferent parts of knowledge and morality; even the most soaringspirits too often take them tamely upon trust. But the man, thephilosopher or the moralist, does not stand upon these chanceadhesions; and the purpose of any system looks towards thoseextreme points where it steps valiantly beyond tradition andreturns with some covert hint of things outside. Then only can yoube certain that the words are not words of course, nor mere echoesof the past; then only are you sure that if he be indicatinganything at all, it is a star and not a street-lamp; then only doyou touch the heart of the mystery, since it was for these that theauthor wrote his book.
Now, every now and then, and indeed surprisinglyoften, Christ finds a word that transcends all common-placemorality; every now and then he quits the beaten track to pioneerthe unexpressed, and throws out a pregnant and magnanimoushyperbole; for it is only by some bold poetry of thought that mencan be strung up above the level of everyday conceptions to take abroader look upon experience or accept some higher principle ofconduct. To a man who is of the same mind that was in Christ, whostands at some centre not too far from his, and looks at the worldand conduct from some not dissimilar or, at least, not opposingattitude - or, shortly, to a man who is of Christ's philosophy -every such saying should come home with a thrill of joy andcorroboration; he should feel each one below his feet as anothersure foundation in the flux of time and chance; each should beanother proof that in the torrent of the years and generations,where doctrines and great armaments and empires are swept away andswallowed, he stands immovable, holding by the eternal stars. Butalas! at this juncture of the ages it is not so with us; on each