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— THIS BOOK IS DUE ON THE LAST DATE STAMPED BELOW AN INITIAL FINE OF 25 CENTS WILL BE ASSESSED FOR FAILURE TO RETURN THIS BOOK ON THE DATE DUE. THE PENALTY WILL INCREASE TO 50 CENTS ON THE FOURTH DAY AND TO $1.00 ON THE SEVENTH DAY OVERDUE. MAR 3 1933 gag is w® MAR 9 1939 ** Bq CD LD .: Z6\ LD 21-50m-l,'3l YD 0685 239405