UN 
 
ULTURE AND SERVICE 
 
 AN ADDRESS DELIVERED AT THE 
 SIXTIETH ANNUAL COMMENCEMENT 
 OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN 
 BY PROFESSOR CALVIN THOMAS, '74, 
 OF COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 
 

 CULTURE AND SERVICE 
 
 ADDRESS DELIVERED AT THE SIXTIETH ANNUAL COMMENCEMENT. 
 
 BY PROFESSOR CALVIN THOMAS, '74, OF 
 
 COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 
 
 Ladies and Gentlemen:— 
 
 The day before yesterday, as it seems to me, but thirty- 
 years ago this morning, as men compute time, ! stood 
 upon this platform to address a Commencement audience, 
 as the last of fifteen speakers chosen from the graduating 
 class to enlighten the public of that day. Thus the thing 
 was done in those remote times. Like the other speakers, 
 1 had been privately drilled for my performance by Presi- 
 dent Angell. We two would enter this great hall, we two 
 alone, with no one to molest him or make him afraid, and 
 he would station himself in a critical posture at long range 
 and hear me speak my piece; and notwithstanding that 
 unfailing geniality of temper which has endeared our 
 President to thirty-four successive graduating classes, 1 
 assure you that that audience of one was the most nerve- 
 racking audience that 1 have ever spoken to from that day 
 to this. However, 1 survived, and so did he; and to-day, 
 after the swift flight of thirty years, I find myself again 
 here to address a Commencement audience, but this time 
 without the advantage of a preliminary rehearsal. The 
 President does not know what 1 am going to say, and his 
 judicious blue pencil has had no opportunity to do execu- 
 tion upon my manuscript. The more's the pity for you 
 and me. 
 
 But I have a particular reason for referring to that epi- 
 sode of ancient history, because I drew from it a bit of 
 wisdom which has been of great value to me in the inter- 
 
 239405 
 
vening years; a maxim for which I have often thanked 
 President Angell, and of which — I promise you solemnly— 
 you shall have the benefit in the ordeal now impending. 
 It was my task on that occasion to demolish Taine's 
 philosophy of art, and to do it in six minutes. 1 pleaded 
 hard for ten, but the inexorable reply was: "No; boil it 
 down. The world will never miss what you leave out!" 
 
 What 1 have to say this morning will relate to the 
 ethics of work, — a subject of immense and universal 
 interest, seeing that work is the great law of life for us 
 all. You who leave the University to-day as graduates, 
 are presumably looking forward to a life of labor. You 
 do not expect to be idlers. The vast majority, no doubt, 
 will find themselves face to face with that same interest- 
 ing dilemma that has confronted the human species since 
 the days of our arboreal ancestry, — the dilemma, work or 
 starve. And you will work. There may be some who 
 are conscious of a special talent for leisure, and who would 
 welcome a chance to exercise the gift rather frequently. 
 Still, even they do not seriously envy our so-called leisure 
 class who live to amuse themselves; for the victims of 
 perennial leisure, whether they wear the clothes of a 
 gentleman, or of a tramp, form one of the most unfortunate 
 elements of the entire population. 
 
 I think it safe to assume, moreover, that the great 
 majority of you not only expect to work, as a matter of 
 course, but are fairly cheerful over the prospect. You 
 may not feel exactly the eagerness of the hero rejoicing 
 to run a race, but you are not worrying. You are already 
 accustomed to labor in one form and another; and while 
 you may not always have found it exhilarating, it has 
 been in the main quite tolerable. You have no misgivings 
 as to your ability to make friends with what appears to 
 be the natural order of the world, and all you ask is a fair 
 chance to show what you are good for. And all that is 
 well. 
 
 But now it may be that there are some, — it would be 
 
 —2- 
 
strange if there were not some, — to whom this descriptton 
 is not fully applicable. There maybe those who are now 
 and then oppressed by the bigness and turmoil of the 
 world ; whose skies have been darkened by doubts and 
 perplexities that have occasioned sinkings of the heart; 
 who have tried with imperfect success to extort from the 
 Sphinx some clear, coherent, and reassuring answer to 
 the questions: Why am I here? To what end the toil 
 and the moil? Is it worth while? Now, to those who 
 are suffering from that distemper, work, if it be rightly 
 conceived, is the very best of remedies. 
 
 The distemper, let it be said in passing, is not a bad 
 sign, being, for certain temperaments, a part of the grow- 
 ing-pains of youth. I speak with the more assurance on 
 this point, because I myself was hit veiy hard in my 
 college days by the melancholia of adolescence. 1 lived 
 through months of profound and not very picturesque 
 misery ; and ever since then, the collegian who is unhappy 
 excites my particular interest. The other sort — the man 
 who was never unhappy, who never had any doubts or 
 perplexities, who is possessed of steady nerves and 
 unstampedable self-complacency, who has all the pushing 
 and staying qualities^he should look out for himself. 
 There is danger ahead of him. In such times as these he 
 may easily bring up at the age of fifty, if he is not careful, 
 as a mere ordinary millionaire. The choicer blessings are 
 reserved for him who is capable of unhappiness ; for if he 
 do but hold fast and fight out his little battle with the 
 goblins of pessimism, he shall win and presently emerge 
 into the serene air where abides the joy of the intellec- 
 tual life. 
 
 To what end, then, do we toil? 
 
 Now, in stating the question thus broadly, let us frankly 
 recognize at the outset that a broad answer to it is not 
 absolutely indispensable. fThe proximate incentives to 
 activity, that is the familiar, every-day motives, are quite 
 sufficient to make life interesting and enjoyable for a very 
 large part of mankind. A man works for food, and shel- 
 
 —3- 
 
ter, and raiment. He works that he may marry the woman 
 of his choice, make a home, and enter into the joys of 
 family affection. He works for wealth, power, influence, 
 distinction. If he has public spirit, he works, perhaps, 
 on philanthropic lines. He tries to better the lot of the 
 poor, to promote public enlightenment and morality. He 
 throws himself into the service of an institution, a party, 
 a reform movement, and endeavors to make his opinions 
 prevail. He labors for the advancement of knowledge, of 
 art, of righteousness. And in this multiform and ever- 
 renewed effort of self-assertion, which is life, it is not 
 absolutely necessary to carry along and make frequent 
 reference to a chart of the whole solar system. This is a 
 beneficent provision of nature to the end that our energy 
 our will to live and to do, may not become sicklied o'er 
 with the pale cast of thought. For we are not primarily 
 thinking-machines. Underneath the thinking-machine, 
 antedating it in time and exceeding it in importance, at 
 least for the generality of men, is a bundle of inherited 
 instincts, aptitudes, propensities, and of acquired habits, 
 and tendencies, which propel us along through, life with 
 very little reference to an ultimate Wherefore. \ 
 
 Nevertheless, it is precisely the problem of civilization 
 to bring these unreflecting proclivities, these non-rational 
 tendencies and passions, into subjection to the thinking 
 mind; or if not exactly that, to bring them at least into 
 harmony with a rational and comprehensive view of life. 
 And therefore we do need, after all, the larger chart. We 
 need a theory which looks backward and forward, and 
 oeeks to define our personal relation to the mighty process 
 of which we are a part. In other words, we need a 
 philosophy which shall say something more than, Go 
 ahead and ask no questions. Intelligent men and women 
 can not forever be dodging the hard problems, and saying 
 to one another, Work while 'tis called to-day. Perhaps 
 it may be better now and then not to work, but to take a 
 rest and cogitate, or go off and have some fun. It is a 
 rather shallow doctrine which was promulgated a few 
 
years ago, in the heyday of agnosticism, in that well- 
 known specious jingle: — 
 
 Our duty down here is to do, not to know; 
 
 Live as though life were happy, and life will be so. 
 
 As if work were a sort of narcotic taken to kill the pain 
 of thought! Our duty is rather to do and to know, and 
 to ffnd our happiness in doing because of a large and 
 serene faith in the goodness of life. 
 ( The goodness of life! ) That is the pivot of the whole 
 question. If life be good, then we may well work to 
 enjoy it and make it better still ; on the other hand, if it 
 be bad, that is essentially bad, and not merely bad in 
 spots, then it were the part of wisdom to follow the pre- 
 cepts of Buddha and Schopenhauer, and live as little as 
 possible. 
 
 But pray do not indulge the fear that you are now about 
 to listen to an analysis and a refutation of the pessimist's 
 argument. I have no such dismal intention. To be sure, 
 it is a good plan to face the argument, to study it. Per- 
 haps it is particularly salutary for us Americans, living, 
 as we do, in the whirl of activity, and inclined, as we are, 
 to look upon the Hustler as the perfect flower of the genus 
 homo sapiens, to retire into ourselves now and then and 
 meditate upon the form and pressure of life as they are 
 among our brethren in India, where the Hustler counts as 
 a fool ; or as they were among our own ancestry in the 
 Middle Ages, when life was regarded as an evil, or at least 
 as a tainted blessing, to be valued only as the necessary 
 preparation for a better life to come. In our love of com- 
 fort, and our hot pursuit of the temporalities, it is a whole - 
 some discipline to turn our thoughts occasionally to those 
 medieval forbears, whose aspiration for perfection led them 
 to hate the joys of this life and to spend their days in 
 subduing and crucifying the natural man. I say it is well 
 to read of these men, and anon to linger with them in the 
 spirit beneath their haunted skies ; for only thus do we 
 come to realize what our boasted heirship of the ages 
 
 —5— 
 
V 
 
 means, and what was involved when Europe, at the time 
 of the Renascence, set its face resolutely and joyously 
 toward the love of life. 
 
 But after all, pessimism and asceticism are not for us. 
 Save as sporadic manifestations, they have had their day 
 in our modern Occidental life. Poets and philosophers 
 may here and there take the misery of existence for a 
 specialty, but they make no progress in convincing us 
 that existence is really miserable. Their efforts are but 
 as refluent eddies in a great, onward-rushing, ever-deep- 
 ening, ever-widening river. Their arguments make but 
 little impression upon us, though we are susceptible to 
 their poetry. For us the acceptance of life as good has 
 become instinctive; so that the opposite attitude strikes 
 us as a morbid eccentricity, calling for special explanation 
 in bad heredity or exceptional misfortune. Put the ques- 
 tion of the goodness of life to eager childhood ; to youth 
 in the ardor of effort; to the rapturous lover, or the soldier 
 in the stern joy of conflict; raise the question in any 
 company of busy men and women, — and they will hardly 
 understand you. They will class you as a sufferer from 
 dyspepsia or as an inchoate lunatic. Our instinct, our 
 natural feeling, and finally our sciense, tell us that life is 
 good, it being the condition and the measure of all other 
 goods whatsoever. It is for us to accept this unreasoned 
 testimony, and then to feed and fortify our faith into a 
 rational' and inspiring conviction. 
 
 If we grant this postulate of the goodness of life, the 
 first corollary is that somehow or other work itself must 
 be a blessing, and ought to be a source of joy. We can 
 not regard it in the old way as a necessary evil, or as part 
 of a primeval curse connected with the fall of man from a 
 state of blessed idleness. It can not be merely the price 
 paid for good things to be enjoyed in moments of leisure. 
 If you take any such view as that, you start straight for 
 the camp of the pessimist. £oxifjvoxk_be_but the price 
 paid for goods to be enjoyed at leisure, then the price is 
 too high. We have the spectacle of a billion and more of 
 
•* A H y 
 
 human beings toiling from morn till night, — and for what? 
 For rewards which in themselves are seldom worth what 
 they cost. If work be an evil, or only a means to an end, 
 then the human race is being swindled all the time, and a 
 general strike for shorter hours and better pay would be 
 in order. If such a theory were sound, the tramp would 
 be the true philosopher. 
 
 Not so, however, if a man's work is his fun. Not so, 
 if he can bring himself to see in the motto labor ipse 
 voluptas, not a pretty paradox, nor a bit of idealistic 
 moonshine, but a solid scientific proposition and a work- 
 able scheme of life. 
 
 Once more, then, to what end do we toil? 
 
 1 purpose to speak of two ends which are pre-eminently 
 worthy of consideration, and which at first will probably 
 seem to you to conflict with each other. And then pres- 
 ently, I shall try to make it appear that these two goals 
 — culture and service, as I shall call them — lie in the same 
 direction and are in fact but different phases of the same 
 thing. 
 
 Some forty or fifty years ago Emerson declared that the 
 "word of ambition" at that time was culture. How old- 
 fashioned, how almost antiquated, the oracle now sounds! 
 To-day the word of ambition is service. Our foremost 
 citizen preaches the strenuous life, and like the man who 
 believed in original sin, he does his best to live up to his 
 conviction. And his words and his practice find ready 
 response throughout the whole hierarchy of light and 
 leading. We are all infected with the zeal of making 
 ourselves useful; and in proportion as we have come 
 under the dominion of this sentiment, the old goddess of 
 Culture has been having a hard time to keep her altar - 
 fires aglow. 1 do not mean so much that the thing is on 
 the wane as that we no longer talk about it and put it 
 forward as our "word of ambition." There seems to be 
 a feeling that culture is something that will do very well 
 for women, but is a dubious recommendation for a man. 
 It is associated in many minds with a sort of passive, 
 
contemplative, and mildly cynical estheticism. It suggests 
 books, and pictures, and music, and endless futile talk 
 about them, it connotes the perfume of roses, and a 
 dainty aversion to the sweat and smoke and dust of the 
 human conflict. 
 
 And with that of course we have no patience. How 
 can we have when we are caught in the maelstrom of the 
 strenuous life? When we are frantically hustling to get 
 rich; madly rushing about the country on business of a 
 hundred kinds, in ever-increasing anxiety about the rap- 
 idity of our transit and the comfort of our accommodations ; 
 yelling furiously at political conventions, converting, 
 reforming, fighting one another, and gathering in the 
 heathen with Krag-Jorgensens and smokeless powder? 
 Verily, to raise at such a time a still small voice on behalf 
 of culture might seem to be an unpromising enterprise. 
 
 None the less I shall take the risk; for 1 think that 
 culture, if we but understand it aright, is an excellent 
 thing, and good for everybody, without regard to sex, 
 occupation, or previous condition of lethargy. If that 
 proposition is to be made plausible, however, we can not 
 regard culture as a matter of esthetic refinement merely, 
 important as that may be. Nor can we be entirely satis 
 fied with the formulation given by the great English 
 apostle of culture, notwithstanding the winsomeness of 
 his literary method; for Matthew Arnold identified culture 
 with intellectual enlightenment. For him it meant, 
 "knowing the best that has been thought and said," so 
 as to guard against narrowness and fanaticism. It meant 
 the " reading of many books," to the end that One might 
 know which book to use and thus avoid becoming the 
 thrall of one book or one idea. It was "to let the mind 
 play freely" about a subject in the light of the world's 
 accumulated wisdom. All of which is excellent, admir- 
 able. Still, knowledge is not the whole of culture. A 
 man may read books and liberalize his mind, and at the 
 same time allow his sympathies, his will and his energy 
 to go unfed and suffer atrophy. He may become a highly 
 
 —8— 
 
enlightened cynic, good for nothing but to sit in his tub 
 of Diogenes and think thoughts as the human procession 
 moves past. He may let his mind play all about a sub- 
 ject, may get such a very broad and clear idea of it in all 
 its phases, that he does not know what to do and loses 
 the power of decision. Such a man has not the whole 
 edifice of culture, albeit he has one important pillar. 
 
 Let us then go back to the fountain-head; to the orig- 
 inal promulgation of the modern secular gospel. It is the 
 poet Goethe to whom we owe the first clear and large 
 working out, in theory and in practice, of the seemingly 
 simple, but in reality rather complex idea, that the object 
 of life is to live; to enter as fully as possible into the 
 possession, use, and enjoyment of our human inheritance. 
 This fulness of life he called culture. He did not mean 
 by it the pursuit of knowledge alone, though that was a 
 highly important part of his program. Nor did he mean 
 esthetic pleasure alone, though he laid great stress upon 
 that too. Least of all did he mean any kind of passive 
 or vegetative existence ; for he was a great worker, ancr 
 the favorite word of his ethical vocabulary was streben 
 (striving). That for which he stood, if we conceive him 
 aright, is symmetrical human nature ; in other words, the 
 active participation of the entire man— emotions, intellect, 
 will, energy, ethical sense, esthetic sense— in the busi- 
 ness of living. This business he conceived as sufficiently 
 interesting and enjoyable to be its own complete justifi- 
 cation. "Wherefore," he once inquired, "wherefore 
 this expenditure of suns, and planets, and moons, of stars, 
 and milky ways, of worlds made and making, if a fortunate 
 man is not at last to enjoy his existence?" 
 
 Fulness of life; the joyous participation of the entire 
 man in the business of living, conceived as in itself some- 
 thing noble and inspiring, — this is the simon-pure doctrine 
 of culture, which should not be confused with any of its 
 later perversions, attenuations, or sophistications. There 
 is a passage in Mr. John Morley's life of Diderot, which 1 
 desire to quote in this connection. Says Mr. Morley, in 
 speaking of his hero: 
 
 -9— 
 
"He was wholly uncorrupted by the affectation of 
 culture with which the great Goethe infected part of the 
 world a generation later. His own life was never made 
 the center of the world. Self-development and self- 
 idealization as ends in themselves would have struck 
 Diderot as effeminate drolleries. The daily and hourly 
 interrogation of experience for the sake of building up the 
 fabric of his own character, in this wise or in that, would 
 have been incomprehensible and a little odious to him in 
 theory, and impossible as a matter of practice." 
 
 Now what shall be said of this deliverance? Certainly 
 I do not wish to stand for an "effeminate drollery," nor 
 for anything which is either "odious in theory," or 
 "impossible as a matter of practice." Well, the truth is 
 that Mr. Morley, notwithstanding his distinguished ability, 
 has given in the ardor of contrast a radically wrong account 
 of Goethe's philosophy and its practical implications. 
 However, let that pass. This is not a lecture upon 
 Goethe, nor the place for a comparison of the first-rate 
 German with the second-rate, or third-rate Frenchman. 
 Let them be judged by their fruits. But there is one little 
 sentence in that passage quoted to which I wish to draw 
 particular attention, because it is vitally related to what I 
 wish to say. Mr. Morley observes, evidently with eulo- 
 gistic intent, that Diderot's "own life was never made 
 the center of the world." Is this true? I do not mean 
 whether it was true of this particular Frenchman, but 
 whether it ever was or ever can be true of any one. 
 Would it not be nearer the mark to say that his own life 
 was the center of the world for Diderot, and that the like 
 is true of Mr. Morley and of you and me and everybody — 
 saint and sinner, learned and lewd, wise and foolish? 
 Let us dwell for a moment on this matter of the self- 
 centered life. 
 
 We hear much in our day about selfishness, or self- 
 seeking, versus altruism ; of individualism versus socialism, 
 as if these words stood for opposing tendencies between 
 which it were necessary to make a choice. Our moralists 
 
 —10- 
 
preach the duty of self-sacrifice, and while they mean the 
 right thing, they somstimes seem to imply that it is a 
 man's duty to sacrifice his real self, his happiness and 
 welfare, to the demands of a mysterious but terribly 
 insistent corporation called society; as if it were somehow 
 required by the eternal power that makes for righteous- 
 ness, to be continually taking bitter pills for the good of 
 mankind at large. But this is not so. The work that we 
 do as social beings — the work that you will do in the 
 conscientious pursuit of your chosen vocations, or in the 
 furtherance of any good cause that may commend itself 
 to your judgment — does not come under the head of self- 
 sacrifice, but of self-realization; and just in proportion as 
 you do it reluctantly, and with a feeling that you are 
 really sacrificing your Self, will be apt to be ineffective 
 as social service. 
 
 It is a most interesting point of view of the new psy- 
 chology that Self, which used to be thought one and indi- 
 visible, is irTTeality a very complex and multiple affair. 
 Each one of us has many selves,~and they do not live in 
 harmony, but make war upon one another. My self is 
 
 ^ not only my body and my appetites, but it is whatever I 
 care for, think about, love, or hate ; in short, whatever is 
 
 ] a real part of my inner life. Honor and reputation are 
 more vitally a part of me than is my arm, which I may 
 leave upon a surgeon's table without feeling that my self 
 has suffered any serious hurt or diminution. Professor\ 
 William James, our most eminent American psychologist, 
 distinguishes four. selves: a material self, a social self, a 
 spiritual self, and a pure ego; and he discusses all our 
 possible activities under the head of self-seeking and 
 self-preservation. Nothing is said about self-sacrifice. 
 The word does not occur in the index to the two big vol- 
 umes. And the reason is that, scientifically speaking, 
 there is no such thing. A race of self-sacrificers would 
 soon become extinct. What is called self-sacrifice is 
 taking sides with the wider social self against the nar- 
 rower material self. When a gentleman gives his seat to 
 
 —11— 
 
a lady, he does not sacrifice himself — let us hope, — but 
 takes the part of his chivalrous social self against the old 
 Adam. He does not do the thing for her sake, but for his 
 own, though he probably has an illusion to the contrary. 
 His act makes him "feel better," feel more of a man; 
 and if it did not, he would not do it. 
 
 Now ethical merit is the progressive realization of the 
 social self; the substitution of higher, that is wider, 
 tribunals for those of petty jurisdiction. But the self is 
 the center of the world for all of us. We begin in infancy 
 with only the narrow material self. The baby is the 
 supreme egotist. Then we learn to live in the life of the 
 family, the school, the neighborhood; and to find in that 
 wider life a deeper satisfaction than in that which con- 
 cerned only our own bodies and appetites. Thus we go 
 on expanding like the wave-rings in a lake. We identify 
 ourselves with the life of the city, the state, the nation, 
 the world; with the human race and its history, with 
 science, art, education, religion. It is this progressive 
 realization of the larger self which constitutes the zest of 
 life and of work. And it is enough. We must distin- 
 guish, however, between the joy of living, and the so- 
 called pleasures of life, — with some of which one must 
 e'en do battle as best he can. 
 
 So then the important question is not the location of a 
 man's center, but the extent of his periphery. Take care 
 of Number One, is a perfectly sound maxim, only it must 
 be given the wide interpretation. He who tries to live 
 by it in the sense ordinarily carried by the words will 
 presently find that Number One is not being taken care 
 of at all, but grossly neglected, and is in consequence 
 gravitating back to the status of his simian ancestry. 
 
 But you are perhaps saying by this time, What does 
 all this practically amount to? What great difference 
 does it make whether we call our jjevotion to large en£ § 
 by one name or by another? Is it not after all a matter 
 of words? 
 
 Well, it is more than a matter of words, because that 
 —12— 
 
which I have called(culture— fulness of life for its own 
 sake, the progressive realization of the larger self — is per 
 se the very best social service that can possibly be ren- 
 dered. Nothing in the world can be more useful to society, 
 whether by that word we understand the neighborhood, 
 the state, the nation, or the world, than men and women 
 who are simply living out their lives on a high plane of 
 aspiration and endeavor. It matters not so much what 
 one's work may be. I am not here commending a doc- 
 trine which is good only for the philosopher, or the poet, 
 or for the ambitious dreamer who conceives some large 
 scheme of benefaction for his fellow-men. The quiet 
 pursuit of one's vocation, so it be not pursued in a spirit 
 of narrow selfishness, is social service of a most admirable 
 kind. It is not well to idealize the strenuous life as a life 
 of hustling, which must spell failure unless it lead to the 
 external rewards commonly called success. We can not 
 spare any of the types of noble living. There is room for 
 them all, and they are all social service. Thoreau, retir- 
 ing to the quietude of Walden Pond, and there pursuing 
 his observations and meditations, was performing a social 
 service, — and a better one than if he had gone to Boston 
 and tried to organize a public charity. That which 
 Wordsworth called the 
 
 best portion of a good man's life, 
 His little, nameless, unrememhered acts 
 Of kindness and of love, 
 
 is within the reach of everybody. And we know from 
 that immortal sonnet of the blind Milton, that sometimes 
 
 They also serve who only stand and wait. 
 
 And is it not a rather comforting thought that in simply 
 living the larger social life, in recognizing its obligations 
 and responding loyally and cheerfully to their call, we are 
 working steadily in our own interest? What better 
 inspiration can the young collegian take with him for his 
 career than the assurance that in the long run the Genius 
 of Life does in very truth build happiness and usefulness 
 
 —13- 
 
out of the same material ? Convinced of that, he will 
 not worry about success, since failure, in any large and 
 important sense of the word, is impossible. Happy in his 
 work, which is the best symbol of our human dignity, he 
 will go his cheerful way, neither groaning overmuch under 
 the burden of his social responsibility, nor losing heart 
 because things sometimes seem to go wrong, and men are 
 what they are, and life is what it is. 
 
 In particular let us not become the bondslaves of any 
 tyrannous social sentiment which assumes to treat us as 
 if we ourselves were only a means to some future social 
 end; as if our toil were for the sake of posterity; for the 
 sake of a coming man, or a common Utopia. Some of our 
 writers seem to think that the dream of the ages is going 
 to be realized in the perfect social subordination typified 
 by an ant-hill, or a bee-hive. They would have us sweat 
 for that. On the other hand, a German philosopher who 
 is just now having his day, and who died four years ago 
 in a retreat for the insane, reached the conclusion, after a 
 series of remarkable philosophical somersaults, that we are 
 here to prepare the way for an unmoral Uebermensch, or 
 Over- man, conceived as a sort of combination of Caesar 
 Borgia, Napoleon Bonaparte, and a Bengal tiger. To 
 breed this delectable creature, Nietzsche would have us 
 repudiate our whole legacy of Christian ethics, and throw 
 to the winds all our present ideas of morality, so far as 
 they are based on sympathy and respect for the feelings 
 and the rights of others. In other words, he would have 
 us go back to the jungle and begin over as "blond beasts" 
 of prey. 
 
 These two types of folly, the imbecility of extreme 
 socialism, and the madness of extreme individualism, 
 balance each other and suggest the wisdom of letting the 
 coming man take care of himself. He will do it anyway, 
 no matter how much we may worry and speculate about 
 him and try to create him in our own image. Just what 
 turn social evolution may take in the coming century, no 
 one can know. New discoveries of science, new inven- 
 
 -14— 
 
tions, may change the aspect of life and bring new prob- 
 lems, even as they have done in the century that is past. 
 The final goal we can not see ; what we can see is that 
 between a man on the one hand, and a socialistic bug or 
 the individualistic tiger, on the other, there are differences 
 well worth saving. Meanwhile it is our inning, and let 
 us play the magnificent game for all it is worth, following 
 that peerless rule laid down by the illustrious German 
 poet : — 
 
 Wide horizon, eager life, 
 Busy years of honest strife, 
 Ever seeking, ever founding, 
 Never ending, ever rounding, 
 Guarding tenderly the old, 
 Taking of the new glad hold, 
 Pure in purpose, light of heart, 
 Thus we gain at least a start. 
 
 —15— 
 
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 239405