By 
 
 John Bascom 
 
 Author of "Social Theory," "Growth of Nationality in the 
 
 United States," "An Historical Interpretation 
 
 of Philosophy," etc. 
 
 G. P. Putnam's Sons 
 
 New York and London 
 
 Cbe fmicfcerbocfcer press 
 
 1913
 
 COPYRIGHT, 1913 
 
 BY 
 F. BASCOM 
 
 Tlbc Knickerbocker prew, ew JJorfe
 
 SRLF 
 URL 
 
 5144145 
 
 PREFACE 
 
 ""THIS brief volume is so far of the nature of per- 
 sonal memorabilia, that I do not care to 
 introduce it to the public except through an obvi- 
 ously open door. I leave it, therefore, to others to 
 give or withhold as circumstances may make way 
 for it. Clinging to my convictions with that te- 
 nacity which belongs to every healthy mind, I do 
 not doubt that there are many truths in my pub- 
 lished works of which the world is finding or will 
 find, the need. I am by no means as certain, 
 however, that these principles will be consciously 
 derived from this source. The truths themselves 
 lie on the horizon of many minds, and are ready to 
 find entrance, sooner or later, at many points. So 
 far as my writings shall contribute to this result, 
 they are as likely to do it indirectly, through the 
 medium of more persuasive presentations, as di- 
 rectly, by their own force. If no wide interest 
 shall attach to the work already done, then these 
 further and more individual experiences would 
 make their way with difficulty and impropriety.
 
 iv Preface 
 
 They may, in that case, as well be added to those 
 dreamy reminiscences and speculative visions 
 which furnish the familiar occupants of the spiri- 
 tual and secluded household of a single man. 
 It is enough to have lived by means of them, 
 though the record of life, like the impressions of 
 most lives, be left under the lock and key of actual 
 events, and miss that reflection in words we so 
 often prize more highly than the thing itself. If, 
 however, any principle of philosophy, any law of 
 action, shall have gained clear impulse by my 
 efforts, then these acquisitions of experience, these 
 lessons in the school of life, dropping their purely 
 personal significance, may enter on a somewhat 
 wider service than that which they have already 
 accomplished. Such a sketch may aid those in- 
 terested in it in a more deft and pleasurable hand- 
 ling of their own powers, and, like a working plan 
 in architecture, yield all the more to the mind be- 
 cause they yield so little to the eye. 
 
 J. B.
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER PAGE 
 
 I. EVENTS ... i 
 
 II. HEALTH ... -75 
 
 III. RECREATIONS ... -87 
 
 IV. PERSONS ... 98 
 V. FORMS OF WORK . . - 136 
 
 VI. WRITINGS . . 155 
 
 VII. THE FORMULA OF PERSONAL LIFE . 182 
 
 VIII. THE FORMULA OF SOCIAL LIFE . . 194 
 
 IX. RELIGION .... .202 
 
 A PARTIAL LIST OF ADDRESSES AND 
 PUBLISHED WRITINGS BY JOHN 
 
 BASCOM . .212
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 FJOPULAR interest in biography arises chiefly 
 * from the fascination of stirring events. This 
 is the pleasure of the senses, the pleasure of boys, 
 the pleasure of men still in possession of their boy- 
 ish estate of lively sensibilities. No biographies 
 are worth writing on this basis whose heroes have 
 not considerably overpassed the familiar bounds 
 of action, either in the variety or intensity or im- 
 portance of the events narrated. A more thought- 
 ful interest attaches to biography as a personal 
 experience, a spiritual picture, a rendering of a 
 nobler phase of life in its intellectually significant 
 features. The reflective satisfaction which man 
 takes in man, his delight in any enlargement of 
 the area of human activity as a part of his own 
 possessions, are appealed to, when he is made par- 
 taker in new and vigorous experiences. Here, 
 however, the interesting biography must be the 
 record of one of unusual force and freshness of 
 life. It must give, in some direction, a positive 
 
 expansion to our intellectual outlook. 
 
 vii
 
 viii Introduction 
 
 There is, I think, another set of lessons worth 
 bestowing, though without the fascination of 
 thrilling events, or without the light of rare powers. 
 They are those of a life ordinary in its outward 
 form, but thoughtfully built up in its inner sub- 
 stance. The things learned by me in living are 
 of this order. They derive this value from the 
 analytical character of my life, and must appeal 
 for sympathy to those who are exercising a like 
 close scrutiny of the spiritual terms of being. 
 
 My life has been unusually rational. This as- 
 sertion does not imply that it has escaped errors 
 and failures and faults ; it means that the habit has 
 been cultivated with great constancy of raising 
 the intellectual and social questions incident to 
 the progress of events, and giving them as definite 
 and just an answer as possible. A doubt in be- 
 lief or a difficulty in conduct has always been a 
 very nettlesome term in my inner life, till the 
 ground of that doubt, or the measure of that diffi- 
 culty, had been clearly disclosed. My mind, of 
 native tendency and confirmed purpose, has been 
 an untiring critic of its own processes, and the 
 processes of the spiritual world about it. Unless 
 criticism extends to the very circumference of our 
 experience, it cannot long retain its insight at the 
 center. This is the reason why I think it may be
 
 Introduction ix 
 
 worth while to make a presentation of the things 
 learned in living. They have been thoughtfully 
 acquired, and may, therefore, quicken thought 
 in others. 
 
 That this assertion of rationality may be as 
 significant as it ought to be, the scope of reason 
 itself must be apprehended. It stands for the col- 
 lective action of all the powers of knowing, that 
 wide gathering of facts and search into their re- 
 lations which become unto us wisdom. The wealth 
 of wisdom cannot be won otherwise than by the 
 combined action of our thoughtful, emotional, and 
 executive powers. This is especially true in the 
 region of social and spiritual inquiry. As the 
 facts of the physical world disclose themselves in 
 color and sound, in a panorama rich to the eye, 
 and a rehearsal seductive to the ear, so the truths 
 of spiritual life uncover themselves in a great di- 
 versity of feelings, and can only be arrived at by 
 one whose emotions respond quickly, by one whose 
 insight is immediate, and whose soul is mobile 
 under the spiritual movement of the word. One 
 misses the truth as frequently by lacking the sen- 
 sibilities which reflect the facts which contain it, 
 as by wanting the wit to analyze those facts. 
 
 Results in knowledge must depend, therefore, 
 very much on character and conduct. Action, and
 
 x Introduction 
 
 action only, carries us fully to the moral centers of 
 life, the marts at which living experiences are in- 
 terchanged. Action alone makes us deeply inter- 
 ested partakers in the traffic of ideas that are 
 to be put to the instant test of use in our daily 
 undertakings. A life, therefore, that is struggling 
 to be rational, is also striving to extend itself to 
 the full limits of its capacity, as an essential con- 
 dition of that immediate and vivid rendering of 
 truth which is alone wisdom. However much 
 there may be of reflection in reason, there is equally 
 much of action in it ; especially in its higher, more 
 spiritual, range. The mirror we hold up to the 
 spiritual world wherein we discover and trace the 
 least suggestion of change, is that of the emotions, 
 and the emotions, like a lake that lies between a 
 river, on the one hand, and its fountains, on the 
 other, is kept pure by the inflow of thought and the 
 outflow of action. A purified heart is the great 
 organ of correct opinion in the spiritual world. 
 
 Reason is equally opposed to dogma and to mys- 
 ticism. Dogmatism is insisting on final statements 
 of a truth, which escapes exact measurement ; mys- 
 ticism is the loss of truth, save as emotional im- 
 pression, in the obscurity which surrounds it. The 
 dogmatic statement has no photosphere, the mys- 
 tic statement loses its very center in a diffused,
 
 Introduction xi 
 
 luminous vapor. Reason is impatient alike of 
 absolute definition and no definition, of dogma- 
 tism and mysticism, as giving the one too much, 
 and the other too little, for growth ; as impoverish- 
 ing the mind either by taking from it its proper 
 work of enlarging inquiry, or making that work 
 futile by impalpable results. Reason loves to tent 
 itself in the fruitful fields of thought, waiting on 
 all the progress of the spiritual seasons for a grow- 
 ing revelation of the productive powers in the 
 world of ideas. And these fruitful fields are those 
 of things, events, actions. 
 
 While all men have access to reason, and are 
 more or less ruled by it, few commit themselves to 
 it with childlike trustfulness and manly strength. 
 The tractable temper has been enforced upon them 
 especially by religionists, but it has been forgotten 
 that the reasonable temper lies deeper than the 
 teachable one; and that instruction which is not 
 addressed to an earnest spirit of inquiry can do 
 very little to awaken the mind, strengthen the 
 spirit, and give inner terms of manhood. One 
 must, indeed, be taught, but his instruction con- 
 sists far more in the quiet digestion of the truth 
 than in its docile reception. To unite perfectly 
 the inner force of truth to its outer form is the 
 highest attainment in living as a fine art. The
 
 xii Introduction 
 
 mistake which man is constantly making in pursu- 
 ing this art an error which vexes all art is a cold 
 inculcation of rules; a showy, spectacular pro- 
 cession of actions which contain within themselves 
 but little of the ripeness of wisdom and love. 
 
 It is neither kindly nor correct to bring a railing 
 accusation against men. The collective growth of 
 society is such, from the nature of the case, as to 
 obscure, to confuse, and for long periods to inter- 
 rupt, the action of reason. The mind of man is 
 only in the process of clarification, and where 
 action is the most rapid the waters are most turbid. 
 
 Society, well ordered and perfect, will be lumin- 
 ous through and through. It will receive and 
 transmit wisdom in its habitual pulsations of 
 thought, as a transparent body passes on the light. 
 The complete lens is homogeneous, both in the 
 interfusion of material and in its congelation. It 
 is able to receive and to redirect the light with no 
 disturbance of it within itself. Society is the 
 proper medium of reason, with its pure vision and 
 its infinite play of colors; but society is the most 
 composite possible product of physical and of 
 spiritual things, of error and truth, of unfit and fit 
 feelings, perverted and corrected impulses. Light, 
 the light of reason, though always at work on the 
 cloudy and opaque mass, does not penetrate it
 
 Introduction xiii 
 
 deeply, or rearrange it rapidly in obedience to its 
 own divine energies. 
 
 The interlacing of the organic with the spiritual, 
 the"unconscious with the conscious, of actions with 
 ideas, while it defines and holds firm this move- 
 ment, greatly delays it, and, for the moment, 
 obscures it. Reason is always laying down a de- 
 posit of new adaptations in the bodies of men, in 
 their economic and social relations, and in those 
 spontaneous feelings which supply the ordinary, 
 automatic working forces of life. Some are willing 
 to look to the "social tissue" as the seat of the 
 moral energies of society. It is rather that on 
 which the moral force expends itself, that with 
 which it is on terms of constant contention as still 
 the realm of unreason among men, the opaque 
 material whose opacity is to be driven from it by 
 the growing heat and light of truth. It is just in 
 this region of contention, the region of the false and 
 the true, the partial and the complete, of com- 
 mingled darkness and light, that the moral impulse 
 is fulfilled, and moral victories achieved. Pene- 
 tration, devotion, skill are all occupied in carrying 
 construction into every portion of the social realm ; 
 a law of life into the material of life. 
 
 The real power of religion lies just here. It 
 should give us ideas clear enough, vigorous enough,
 
 xiv Introduction 
 
 broad enough, to pierce with electric energy this 
 region of chaotic and creative strife, both for ends 
 of revelation and reformation, both for disclosing 
 what is and what, in the infinite reach of the divine 
 mind, ought to be. Religious ideas are the true 
 solvents of social questions, simply because these 
 ideas penetrate to the deepest foundations of moral 
 order in the universe, are the inner light of laws as 
 they work their way luminously through all the 
 spiritual material with which we have to deal. 
 
 Reason is put to comparatively little strain ex- 
 cept in this social, religious field, where it encoun- 
 ters all the warping powers of the past, the blind 
 inertia and blind momentum of the present, full of 
 tremendous energies only partially subjected to it- 
 self. What a man learns in society is what he 
 learns in the spiritual world. When a man brings 
 conviction to the fiery ordeal of experience, he will 
 find his mind productive in thought, his heart 
 fruitful of feeling, and his head full of work. Here 
 theory and fact, force and form, divine impulse and 
 human inertia, are at play in that wonderful work- 
 shop in which the reason of man, the reason of God, 
 master the material world, and make of it the 
 Kingdom of Heaven. 
 
 Here is an empiricism we can never dispense 
 with. It is not an empiricism which allows the
 
 Introduction xv 
 
 meaning of things to drop out of them, the kernel 
 to escape us and leave nothing but the shell, but 
 one that, reversing this tendency, struggles to 
 find the divine idea in the events, to unite them in 
 new and higher harmonies, and to carry perfectly 
 forward the creative energy. This is the high, 
 unfailing act of holiness. Whatever I have learned 
 in life, has been along this line; and though the 
 flashes of light may be inconsiderable, the darkness 
 yet lies so heavily upon us as to leave them not al- 
 together inconspicuous. For this reason and no 
 other should I venture to speak of the things 
 learned by living. A life that in any good degree 
 rests on a rational basis, has an interest, not be- 
 cause of unusual events or unusual powers, but 
 because of usual events and usual powers; because 
 it touches closely the very problem which falls to 
 every one of us to work out, the ministration of 
 the world to us and our ministration to it that 
 evolution within us and without us by which the 
 sun of righteousness takes position in the center 
 of our spiritual system.
 
 Things Learned by Living 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 EVENTS 
 
 PHE events out of which my experiences have 
 grown have been very simple, and will justify 
 but the briefest mention. I was born in Genoa, 
 Cayuga County, New York, May I, 1827. Our 
 house was on the old stage route between Ithaca 
 and Auburn by the way of Lansingville. It was 
 the last place in the town and county as they joined 
 Tompkins County and the town of Lansing, lying 
 to the south. A small frame house of three rooms 
 and an attic, with twenty acres attached, consti- 
 tuted a homestead that had little to gratify taste 
 or to reward labor. A scanty subsistence was the 
 most it promised, or that we were able to secure. 
 That portion of the State, though not uninterest- 
 ing, makes no very strong appeal to the imagination 
 of a child. A series of long and narrow lakes alter-
 
 2 Things Learned by Living 
 
 nate with broad ridges of a gently swelling outline. 
 The lakes are soon lost to the view, as one recedes 
 from them, and the landscape takes on the monot- 
 ony of a comparatively level country. There is 
 very little waste land left to the loving touch of 
 nature; and careless husbandry had, in my youth, 
 everywhere despoiled the view of its first freshness 
 without bringing to it the beauty of adequate 
 tillage. There are forlorn periods in the history 
 of a new country in which nature has been lost and 
 art certainly has not been found. The first con- 
 tact of the world with men seems to bring only in- 
 jury and offence. 
 
 By far the most striking features of the region are 
 its narrow ravines, which are often cut to a great 
 depth by the descent of the streams to the lakes. 
 Their close recesses, hidden by the foliage of the 
 banks, have a voice and presence of their own in 
 delightful cascades. The shores of the upper 
 Cayuga and Seneca rise rapidly, and the creeks, in 
 reaching the level of the lakes, frequently fall into 
 the shadow of abrupt banks two, three, or four 
 hundred feet high. These spots of real beauty 
 and unexpected romance, were at too great a 
 distance from the home of my childhood to be 
 visited by me. The only view that our house, 
 five miles from the lake, possessed, was that of the
 
 Events 3 
 
 sloping fields that descend to Salmon Creek, not 
 bending abruptly until they nearly reach it. This 
 creek has been a factor of considerable force, in 
 the formation of the country and the slope of land 
 for many miles is governed by it. Our home was 
 on the western descent, a mile from the creek, and 
 commanded an extensive view of the eastern 
 decline. 
 
 Though I have always been very susceptible to 
 every appeal of nature, I can hardly say, from 
 any testimony of memory, that this broad presen- 
 tation of checkered field and forest made any dis- 
 tinct impression on me. I only recollect that the 
 final rapid descent to the creek and its deep valley 
 were a region of mystery and awe, the Ultima Thule 
 of my narrow world. The immense magnitude of 
 things to the mind of the child is the most signifi- 
 cant fact in that period of life, and one most readily 
 and unfortunately forgotten by men and women 
 in their treatment of children. These first experi- 
 ences are made up of strong impressions and vivid 
 feelings, very inadequately measured or corrected 
 by thought. They occupy the entire mind with 
 overshadowing power, and they can only be lifted 
 into joy, or ordered in tranquil pleasure, by virtue 
 of that still greater potency which belongs to the 
 living presence of older persons. The child as
 
 4 Things Learned by Living 
 
 much needs shelter from its own conceptions under 
 the quiet correction of the parent, as he does from 
 physical dangers by the parent's strong hand. 
 The feelings of childhood are like clouds and mists 
 under wind; all the possibilities of speedy change 
 belong to them. They may be massed at once 
 in overwhelming force, or may be scattered into 
 thin air by invisible causes. 
 
 The early years of my life are not marked in 
 their traces on memory by any coherent record of 
 events. Simple pictures, here and there, stamped 
 with strange indelibility on the imagination for no 
 known reason, give the waymarks of the journey. 
 These isolated scraps of history, with no significance 
 in themselves, remain like traces of fern leaves on 
 the rock, a suggestive though accidental record of 
 the years gone by. The susceptibility of child- 
 hood gives a clear-cut impression, and some favor- 
 ing chance repeats it, until it comes to be our last 
 and cherished hold on the things which are other- 
 wise lost. 
 
 The nine years that I spent at this first staging 
 point have left only stray, loose leaves, which give 
 no history. I recall the winning smile of one 
 woman let me preserve her name, Henrietta 
 Crocker my teacher in the district school, and 
 equally distinctly I remember standing by the
 
 Events 5 
 
 hearth of the clumsy, old-fashioned stove while 
 another teacher whose name I let perish stiff- 
 ened and toughened his supple whips in the hot 
 embers, and so got a position from which he pro- 
 posed to struggle with, to herd, and to drive upward 
 the teeming moral impulses in the boy world to 
 which I belonged. His well meant labors were 
 imperceptible. 
 
 My father was the son of Rev. Aaron Bascom, 
 a minister quite of the old Puritanic type, and the 
 center of social and religious life for many years 
 in the town of Chester, Massachusetts. The elms 
 he planted still flourish in front of the old parson- 
 age, though change and decay have passed rapidly 
 upon all the families and social conditions with 
 which he was familiar. Population, flowing valley- 
 ward and westward from these mountain towns, 
 has left them melancholy shadows of their former 
 selves. Nature is taking them back to her grand 
 hospitable arms. Two Samuel Bascoms of Warren 
 and three Thomas Bascoms of Northampton, bear 
 the race back to 1634, when the older Thomas came 
 over from England, settling first in Dorchester, 
 and later in Northampton. The professional pre- 
 dilection of the family has been the ministry ; and 
 a staunch Congregational faith has belonged to 
 most of its members.
 
 6 Things Learned by Living 
 
 My father and two of his brothers were educated 
 at Williams College. Graduating at Andover Sem- 
 inary, my father became a home missionary, first 
 in Pennsylvania, and afterward, during a series of 
 years, at Lansingville. The old church in which 
 he preached, with its high pulpit and lofty galleries, 
 was to me a very solemn and impressive monument 
 of ecclesiastical art, its austere presence strength- 
 ened by that imperiousness of duty which so often 
 overbore the comfort of my childhood, as, hidden 
 behind the backs of the tall pews, I sat swinging 
 my short legs in the air. This religious society, 
 which became large and strong, has been utterly 
 scattered again between new centers of population. 
 The church itself has long since .disappeared, and 
 pastor and parishioners sleep in the churchyard in 
 the rear of the old site, silent sentinels of the silent 
 years that have given way so serenely to new times, 
 both better and worse than they. 
 
 My father died in 1828, at the early age of 
 43 years. There is no trace of him, even the 
 feeblest, in my memory. He seems to have 
 been a man of moderate ability, with much 
 warmth of feeling and signal devotion to his work. 
 Persons who listened to his preaching spoke ten- 
 derly of him after he had been dead many years. 
 He was more than once compelled to spend the
 
 Events 7 
 
 winter at the south. On one of these trips he re- 
 buked a landlord, with whom he was stopping, 
 for profanity. He did it so gently that no offense 
 was given. The landlord the next morning took 
 him to the stable, showed him a colt of great 
 promise, and said that he should name it, in recog- 
 nition of the timely reproof, John Bascom. It 
 became, with so gracious a start, a famous horse, 
 and won many a hard heat in the frequent contests 
 between the north and the south. 
 
 My mother was a Woodbridge, the daughter of 
 Major Theodore Woodbridge, who served during 
 the entire war of the Revolution. The Rev. John 
 Woodbridge was a clergyman at Stanton,Wiltshire, 
 England. His son, also the Rev. John Wood- 
 bridge, came to America in 1635, and founded the 
 family in this country. He settled in Newbury, 
 Massachusetts. Cotton Mather bears testimony 
 to the father that he was "so able and faithful as 
 to obtain high esteem among those that at all 
 knew the invaluable worth of such a minister." 
 Thirty-eight of his descendants in this country 
 followed the same profession, and some of them 
 have attained unusual success in it. The Rev. 
 Timothy Woodbridge, the son of the second John 
 Woodbridge, settled in Hartford, Connecticut. 
 He was one of the ten "prominent ministers named
 
 8 Things Learned by Living 
 
 as trustees by the General Assembly of Connecti- 
 cut to found Yale College." Rev. Ashbel Wood- 
 bridge, son of Timothy Woodbridge and father of 
 Major Theodore Woodbridge, established himself 
 in Glastonbury, Connecticut. Theodore Wood- 
 bridge, after the close of the Revolutionary War, 
 removed to northern Pennsylvania, at that time 
 a wild region, enclosed in the savagery of unbroken 
 forests. 
 
 My mother was called by her marriage to meet 
 a life of deprivation and hardship. A salary of 
 four hundred dollars, paid irregularly and slowly, 
 gave narrow footing to a growing household, pressed 
 in its resources by the ill health of my father. 
 At his death, this income disappearing, it became 
 an urgent and constant question how four children, 
 ranging from one to twelve, could be fed, clothed, 
 and educated. For a time the work was done 
 somewhat scantily. Some years after the death 
 of my father, my mother received two or three 
 thousand dollars by inheritance, and this long 
 remained the only visible kernel of our fortune. 
 
 My mother was a devout woman, with a rigid, 
 conventional creed. She fed her own spiritual 
 life daily on Scott's Commentaries. The orthodox 
 commentator magnifies the inspiration of the 
 Bible, and easily remains himself destitute of in-
 
 Events 9 
 
 spiration. A supersensuous faith often leaves the 
 mind, in its contact with daily events, to take 
 things much as others take them. The stream 
 that breaks from the canyon spreads at once, in 
 superficial channels, over the gravelly plain. There 
 are thus sudden shiftings, not to say incongruities 
 of character, as the mind passes from the heavy 
 shadow of religious truth into very commonplace 
 and shallow social experiences. It requires very 
 unusual intellectual and spiritual vigor to move 
 backward and forward across this dividing line 
 with no loss of fitness. I was impressed with this 
 fact from my boyhood, and experienced much 
 difficulty in understanding the jar of the transition. 
 The two phases of life stood apart from each other, 
 the one in its strained and awful quality, the other 
 in its homely and uninspired details. I think my 
 mother passed and repassed the boundary with no 
 sense of incongruity, but she was never able to 
 lead us children so easily over it. But a perverse 
 theory had a solution of this fact in the depravity 
 of the natural heart, and the two kinds of hearts 
 remained an enigma with us, in whose solution 
 we made but little progress. 
 
 My mother had much tenderness in her nature. 
 She coveted, and well deserved more affection 
 than she was able to win, The paths of affection,
 
 io Things Learned by Living 
 
 especially for sensitive children, must be made 
 flowery and fragrant. They are easily startled by 
 those in the pursuit of their love, and do not read- 
 ily put in place of their own dreamy and extreme 
 impressions a correct valuation of the plain facts 
 about them. It is with the spiritual shadows of 
 these facts that they deal more than with the 
 facts themselves; and these shadows shrink and 
 lengthen in an astonishing way, and in a way quite 
 hidden from those older persons who have ceased to 
 observe the play of light in morning hours those 
 hours of facile change. Love is the fine art of the 
 soul, a thing, therefore, not of substance only but 
 of form also. It is a pity that this fine art should 
 lose delicacy of manipulation by virtue of the 
 coarse texture of faith; as the hand is crippled in 
 its cunning by a glove. 
 
 In spite of all the goodness of my mother, I 
 never found my way into her thoughts as a spiritual 
 resting-place; nor she, into mine as a fresh nook 
 in a world growing old. This loss of spiritual son- 
 ship is a profound regret, and one renewed in al- 
 most every generation. "Suffer little children to 
 come unto me" is a command which few parents 
 apprehend; still fewer are able to so open the en- 
 closure of authority as to give a winning invitation 
 to the quiet and seclusion within. Each spirit,
 
 Events 1 1 
 
 and the more as it is sensitive and timid, in spite 
 of all the laws of descent, seems to be born into a 
 spiritual solitude, and one that can be broken only 
 by the most quiet and sympathetic approaches. 
 Unlikeness in this inner realm is even more re- 
 pellent than violence in the physical world. Par- 
 entage of the spirit is rare; perhaps it should be so, 
 that the separation of spirits may be sufficient to 
 give independent conditions of personal life. Par- 
 ents float away from the sensuous, imaginative 
 region of childhood, into that of facts, facts to be 
 considered narrowly and reasons to be rendered 
 cautiously, and so they lose contact and mastery 
 in the magical domain of dreams. 
 
 The steam and smoke, which burst from the 
 funnel of a steam engine, interpenetrate each other, 
 are full of the same elastic forces, and circle upward 
 in chaplets instinct with motion. Quickly the 
 white steam is absorbed, and only a few dark traces 
 of smoke remain. The more subtle element is 
 lost, leaving its companion to linger on in dull 
 decadence. In life, the smoke of combustion, the 
 feelings of self-interest, usurp the field, losing sym- 
 pathy with the volatile sentiments of childhood. 
 Children are ours that, renewing life in each gen- 
 eration, we may escape this barrenness; we are 
 theirs that we may sober these fancies without
 
 12 Things Learned by Living 
 
 abating them, and may assign these energies a 
 service before they are lost in air. 
 
 Trace as we may the spiritual descent of the 
 world from parent to child, we have occasion to 
 be equally impressed with the direct way in which 
 the world deals with every fresh soul. The manner 
 in which it shuts it in from those about it, and the 
 new things it plants and nourishes in these retreats 
 which no man enters save by the most free and 
 cordial admission. What wishes of men or ways 
 of the world are there from which the child cannot 
 hide himself, lengthening immeasurably the paths 
 of approach, by his own personal quality. Repul- 
 sions of a subtle and invincible order play a part 
 quite as important as attractions in the close con- 
 tact of early life. 
 
 In our search after a wise treatment of child- 
 hood, we are not to overlook the pushing impulses 
 which this training involves. The adult brings 
 his adult qualities to the child, and they subserve 
 this purpose, that the child is constantly carried 
 beyond himself. He does not loiter in the way, 
 identifying life with the sportive indulgences of 
 the period to which he belongs. The future, per- 
 sonified in the father, takes him by the hand and 
 half leads, half drags him onward. Just now, by 
 our more sympathetic methods, we are holding in
 
 Events 13 
 
 check this propulsion, willing that childhood should 
 pursue pleasant things, and should linger among 
 them with something of childhood's indifference 
 to progress. But the growing process is always a 
 pushing one, always a consumption of the present 
 in behalf of the future. A sense of gentle, yet 
 constraining power is a supreme one. The mo- 
 mentum of life must pervade us, the flow of life 
 inspire us. The perfection of the movement lies 
 in the very fact that each stage in it is a ready tran- 
 sition to a higher one. Nature provides for this 
 partial displacement of immediate interests by 
 remote future ones in uniting the child closely to 
 the parent, and in carrying it along on the strong 
 current of the urgent incentives, perchance the 
 bitter necessities, which make up the stream of 
 later events. 
 
 The household is not to be constituted for the 
 child, any more than in disregard of the child. It 
 is to be that vigorous, composite thing whose dom- 
 inant interests, wisely chosen, are shaped by all, 
 are shaped to all, and are pursued by all. Interests 
 thus made stern and commanding, while they con- 
 cede many indulgences, claim also many conces- 
 sions. The household, in its manifold relations, 
 its large receiving and giving in society, offers a 
 much more thorough and far wiser training than do
 
 14 Things Learned by Living 
 
 the simple devices of affection, bending themselves 
 only too quickly to the imaginary and to the real 
 wants of childhood. The most pliant vine calls 
 for corresponding rigidity in that which supports 
 it. Childhood is not the entire law even to child- 
 hood, much less to the successive generations which 
 unite to make the household. Simplification, ten- 
 derness, concession in the face of interests intrin- 
 sically obscure, exacting, and difficult, have their 
 evils as certainly as do their opposites. Object- 
 lessons; an easy hopping from thing to thing in the 
 concrete, instead of a strong spreading of wings 
 in the abstract; a reduction of duties by the soft 
 concessions of love; a carrying of the loads of life 
 on the shoulders of parents and teachers, as if our 
 pilgrimage were made up of two parts utterly un- 
 like, one in which we are served and one in which 
 we are servants; these methods are not suffering 
 little children to come unto us, but are obediently 
 coming unto them. 
 
 These considerations give us a hasty and partial 
 and only a partial vindication of the Puritanic 
 discipline of the household familiar to my child- 
 hood. Instruction was no flitting from picture to 
 picture, like the flight of a butterfly from flower to 
 flower, until the child leaves off these agreeable sim- 
 plifications with the sluggishness of one who has
 
 Events 15 
 
 sauntered in the warm sunshine. Books were few, 
 dry, and devout ; and when the imagination found 
 unexpected entrance into any one of them, as into 
 Pilgrim's Progress, the child returned to it again 
 and again, as to a mystic forest whose recesses 
 were never fully explored, and whose blossoms were 
 never all plucked. The Shorter Catechism opened 
 with the kindly concession of a few pictures and 
 a few rhymes, but neither were forgetful of their 
 solemn mission. 
 
 " Xerxes the Great did die, 
 And so must you and I." 
 
 The ease with which childhood shirks an undue 
 burden of rebuke, or admonition, or instruction, is 
 a part of its elasticity of growth. Xerxes' fate was 
 interesting, but too far off to cast any distinct 
 shadow on the path of a boy full of life. It might 
 deepen one already there, it could not create one. 
 Death is to fresh, ardent life what God has made it 
 to be, no more than is the unseen boundary of dark- 
 ness to daylight. In Pilgrim's Progress, the fight 
 of Christian and Apollyon was to me the kernel 
 of the story, while the religious enforcements were 
 the prickly burrs, not to be too much handled, if 
 one understood the case. 
 
 If the eager election of childhood leaves much
 
 1 6 Things Learned by Living 
 
 good behind it, it also leaves much evil. The ad- 
 ventures of war, and even those of piracy and crime 
 on which I stumbled, stood with me simply for 
 achievement, in a much more innocent and harm- 
 less way than would have been thought possible. 
 Even the serpent may sometimes delay to sting 
 the playful child. 
 
 Often at the close of a summer Sabbath I sat on 
 the ground, while my mother milked, and learned 
 from her lips the catechism, till I could find my way 
 along its rugged path of words, deep, solemn, im- 
 penetrable. I cannot feel that that work was 
 vain, though my understanding has returned in 
 late years to this road of doctrine only to reduce it 
 to quite another gradient. I hardly know how the 
 same amount of inexhaustible impression could 
 have been secured more quickly and more effi- 
 ciently. Those ideas which, at best, only glimmer 
 before the mind and are constantly losing them- 
 selves in mist and darkness, play the same part 
 in the spiritual imagination as do bold, rugged, in- 
 accessible mountains in the landscape. The 
 world is wholly different because of them. Its 
 magnitude and mystery are indefinitely increased. 
 The vague, changeable sense of cogency, which 
 plays so important a part in the mental history of 
 a sensitive child, owes much to them. Those
 
 Events 17 
 
 mountain heights of truth, expressions of the 
 divine being and barriers of the divine law, 
 to which the hand of the parent was so con- 
 stantly and so reverently pointing; those depths 
 of darkness in the human heart, to which fearful 
 reference was so frequently made, gave the spirit- 
 ual world dimensions not otherwise attainable. 
 The difficulty with these doctrines is less in child- 
 hood, when they abide so largely in the clouds and 
 reveal themselves only now and then in flashes of 
 light and peals of thunder, than in later years, 
 when commonplace overtakes them and they be- 
 come mysteries, nominally held but neither felt 
 nor understood. They are, then, in the field of 
 thought, barren, rocky spots to which the tillage 
 of life does not extend. Truth that is to be con- 
 tinuously constructive in one's experience, must 
 open itself more and more before the eye. The 
 knowledge which is still enclosed in mystery must 
 make itself increasingly felt by a vigorous effort 
 to penetrate it. I should hardly wish to have 
 moved, as a child, among less imperious ideas, or 
 conceptions less full of impressional powers. The 
 vital element in these religious beliefs is the faith 
 of the parent. This gives to the child the sense 
 of reality and of direction, which is the first requi- 
 site of spiritual growth. Increasing intelligibility
 
 1 8 Things Learned by Living 
 
 is a later demand in sustaining the movement thus 
 initiated. 
 
 What childhood needs is to be nourished by a 
 life larger and deeper than its own, that it may not 
 dwindle away. Puritanism owed its powerful 
 nature to the awe, reverence, profound feeling 
 that inspired it. A superficial soil cannot feed 
 sturdy plants. We are most like little children, 
 nearest to them and nearest to the Kingdom of 
 Heaven, when most impressed with the immeasur- 
 able mystery of the world about us. This feeling 
 should be the center of household life as it is of 
 all rational life ; and the more so as the household 
 brings so many homely duties, so many well-beaten 
 paths, which can alone be made interesting by 
 leading outward into a larger world and by return- 
 ing inward into a clear spiritual presence. So 
 light and darkness struggle together, and chaos in 
 our thoughts passes into creation. Diverse periods 
 and phases of development are united in the true 
 household under the ruling idea of spiritual life, 
 as master and disciple work together in the studio 
 under the dominant desire for the beautiful. 
 
 Four things concurred in my childhood which 
 are each thought to involve some special danger. 
 I was the son of a minister, the youngest child, 
 the only son, and the son of a widow. The last
 
 Events * 19 
 
 three relations owe whatever hazard there is in 
 them to indulgence. The unavoidable hardships 
 of my early life and the firm will of my mother 
 brushed these risks readily aside. The danger 
 which belongs to the first fact seems to be due 
 chiefly to the unusual cogency of motive which 
 falls to the household of a minister. The mind of 
 youth, seeking freedom and seeking it in the degree 
 of its activity, feels any severe restraint put upon 
 it resentfully, and if this feeling is strong enough 
 to call out a determined reaction, character loses 
 inward poise and may easily become wayward and 
 vicious. The spirit instinctively claims liberty, 
 as the only just condition under which it can enter- 
 tain the demands of duty. Living things must 
 be cultivated according to the laws of their own 
 lives. Conditions of growth must be conditions 
 that invite healthy activity, and do not press the 
 powers beyond their own pace. Urgent motives, 
 rigorous restraints, prevent the mind and heart 
 from properly apprehending and freely obeying 
 the incentives nearest them, and so induce a stolid 
 or a passionate mood. The soul is driven, like 
 a ship under stress of weather, from its own course, 
 and spends its energy in beating against the wind. 
 It thus frequently happens that the pressure, 
 which a devout parent brings to bear upon a son,
 
 20 Things Learned by Living 
 
 tends to results exactly opposite to those sought 
 for. The independent impulses, which are the 
 substance of manhood, which germinate early, if 
 not prematurely, in boyhood, are enlisted on the 
 wrong side, and in this first conflict for the con- 
 ditions of a personal life, the very law of that life 
 is lost sight of, and even trampled under foot. The 
 influence of my mother over me for good was 
 always somewhat weakened by the sense of author- 
 ity, and by the stern, unyielding assertion, not 
 only beyond contradiction but beyond inquiry, 
 which attended on each tenet of faith. When 
 there is no alternative present, when acceptance 
 and obedience are all that are offered the mind, it 
 readily entertains an inescapable reluctance to 
 this surrender at discretion. Inquiry, deliberation, 
 are its normal functions, and the exercise of them 
 softens the way to spiritual life The truth one 
 has discerned for himself, one finds more easy to 
 obey. When the initiatory steps of mental activ- 
 ity are swept away, the child has no relish, no 
 awakened appetite for later ones. The tender 
 life, never more tender, is burned out of the child 
 by the too clear light and unshaded heat of the 
 parental mind, precisely as young plants perish, or 
 are "drawn" into unseemly growth, in a hotbed 
 when the sunlight is not tempered to their wants.
 
 Events 21 
 
 In my own case, two unfortunate results fol- 
 lowed. A natural disposition to reticence on all 
 personal religious topics was deepened. Later, 
 also, when I began to find my own lines of action, 
 I was disposed to push to one side the profession 
 of the ministry, which parental wishes and family 
 affiliations had only too plainly indicated to me as 
 my proper pursuit. A desire to choose, stood in 
 the way of choosing the right thing. 
 
 An easy solution of a restive will in a boy is 
 natural depravity. I believe it to be rather an 
 early, eager, divine assertion of the rights, duties, 
 and pleasures of manly choice. The strength of 
 this assertion often measures the incipient powers 
 of the soul. It is the reconciliation of this sense 
 of freedom with that of law, a reconciliation no- 
 where of more urgency than in connection with per- 
 sonal, spiritual life, which constitutes the true secret 
 of all skillful training. Law must partake in the 
 mind of the child of the nature of universal and 
 eternal truth. It cannot, therefore, find constant 
 and exclusive presentation in the changeable will 
 of the parent, a will ever running, with only partial 
 correctness, before the child in all the departments 
 of thought and action. That will itself needs to 
 justify itself by resting, and seeming to rest on a 
 far more profound and immovable basis. While,
 
 22 Things Learned by Living 
 
 therefore, parental will may and must stand out 
 boldly, in some of its more instant applications, 
 it should, for that very reason, withhold itself from 
 the deeper claims of righteousness. Parental 
 authority, like the foot-hills of a mountain range, 
 should push only here and there into the fore- 
 ground, and forever rest back on immense, unex- 
 plored, awe-inspiring heights. The mystery of this 
 more remote, moral region, which the sensitive 
 child can from the outset be made to apprehend, 
 will do far more in inspiring awe, in compelling 
 the mind to feel that exploration and enlargement 
 are the secrets of life, than any system whatsoever 
 of well-defined doctrines. 
 
 In my college work, I have been in constant and 
 close contact with young men, for ends of control 
 and guidance, at the very time when their vigorous 
 spirits, full of bursting buds, were looking about 
 them for the proper field of their powers. As a 
 young man, I was a somewhat earnest advocate 
 of stringent discipline. High fences, close at hand, 
 seemed good for the garden. I was less aware of 
 their cold shadows, I was wont to fret under the 
 uncertain and hesitating movement of Dr. 'Hopkins. 
 Later, as president, I found young men in my own 
 faculty full of this same disposition, when it was 
 passing away in me. I was tempted to ask my-
 
 Events 23 
 
 self if this question of discipline was simply one of 
 age? Do rigidity and severity mean merely the 
 domineering disposition of youth, asserting itself 
 against the same tendency in those only a little 
 younger than themselves? Do leniency and pa- 
 tience stand for nothing but the more sluggish blood 
 of increasing age? These physical changes tell a por- 
 tion of the story ; they do not tell the whole story. 
 Age, reached along a path of thoughful activity, 
 makes us wiser in our spiritual method. We see 
 more comprehensively the very narrow limitations 
 which accompany all physical force, and all re- 
 straint which smacks of it. We recognize the neces- 
 sity of holding ourselves somewhat aloof from those 
 we would influence. Our advice should not be 
 minute, our counsel should not be absolute, our 
 good- will should not be teasing. We learn to give 
 plenty of liberty, and not to apply restraints until 
 the convictions of those subject to them are with 
 us ; until they are moral germs planted in a moral 
 soil. The barriers we set up are not many, nor 
 close at hand, nor of obscure propriety. There is 
 left within them large areas for individual discre- 
 tion. Truth is offered as something which invites 
 consideration. The young man is not compelled 
 to choose between his own and another man's 
 activity, but is made to feel that he finds no true
 
 24 Things Learned by Living 
 
 use of his liberty save in an inquiry which wisely 
 directs his own steps. 
 
 This method, it is true, calls for great composure 
 of thought and restfulness of mood on the part of 
 those who employ it, but a composure and rest- 
 fulness at a far remove from indifference or from 
 the languor of old age. I feel sure that this disci- 
 pline, if it can have time enough, can be applied 
 quietly enough, with no sudden flings of passion, 
 is certain to succeed. There may be some lament- 
 able failures, equally will there be under the ad- 
 verse method, but all successes will be most 
 complete and admirable. Such nurture, rightly 
 apprehended, is nothing more than giving silent, 
 differential heed to the will of God, as expressed 
 in the lives and lines of action he is sustaining. 
 
 This question of nurture is, in the household, in 
 the school, in the state, and in the ultimate fitness 
 of the world to our wants a supreme one. The 
 reports of the reformatory discipline at Elmira, 
 where the most refractory material was subjected 
 to moral forces, are exceedingly instructive. Much 
 the larger percentage of the prisoners who were 
 benefited by it began at once to respond to the 
 steady application of mild motives to improve- 
 ment. Growth is regular and by slow, continuous 
 stages. Those, on the other hand, who are not
 
 Events 25 
 
 helped, are wayward in their impulses, lapsing 
 suddenly from good attainment into an utter dis- 
 regard of order. The mind's acquiescence in law 
 is won in the presence of the law itself, and by 
 its gentle, genial pressure. The man reaches self- 
 government by easy achievements of government, 
 suited to his strength. 
 
 Here seems to me at least the secret of the divine 
 method in the world. The slow moving ages 
 travel on so deliberately in the spiritual realm 
 simply that the slight increments of spiritual life 
 may all be made securely, be fortified within them- 
 selves, and extended through all the relations of 
 society that are to give them adequate nourish- 
 ment and permanent support. The conscious 
 processes of growth, no more than the unconscious 
 ones can dispense with their manifold- dependen- 
 cies, their attainments of infinite complexity, and 
 can make a sudden leap into life. When religious 
 instruction intensifies its motives, and sets the 
 spiritual horizon ablaze with alarms, character 
 becomes fitful, and in many ways untrustworthy. 
 Fullness, safety, symmetry are wanting. 
 
 I have felt through my entire life this need of 
 aloofness in personal conversation on religious 
 topics. This feeling has, at times, brought to me 
 a good deal of self-censure, as if it were the product
 
 26 Things Learned by Living 
 
 of unbelief or indifference on my part. These may 
 be the occasion of reticence, but there is a privacy 
 of our religious life into which no man may force 
 himself without rudeness. Each man must stand 
 at the door of his own house, or his own chamber, 
 to ask his neighbor in, if the neighbor is to enter 
 freely and enjoyably. On the platform or in the 
 pulpit, I have felt it right to say, and have had 
 a predominant disposition to say the bold, search- 
 ing truth. The platform and the pulpit cannot 
 otherwise accomplish their purpose. In daily 
 intercourse, my feeling has been, what right have 
 I, uninvited, to crowd my personal convictions, 
 my spiritual presence, on another. In these closer 
 relations, everything must be ordered with the 
 deference, delicacy, and hesitancy of personal rela- 
 tions. When one has shut the door into one's own 
 mind, it must remain shut till one chooses to open 
 it again. If this be not so, why the absolute 
 seclusion of every spirit within itself; the slow- 
 ness with which it finds its way out, even when it 
 wishes to make itself known; the unexpected jars, 
 discomforts, and sudden revulsions it suffers in this 
 very process of communication? The most im- 
 penetrable region, the most complete retirement, 
 are those of individual, spiritual life. If there is 
 any absolute reservation to himself on the part of
 
 Events 27 
 
 God, it is that of the love of the souls he draws to 
 himself. 
 
 Even in the pulpit, when urgent truth has been 
 pressed home, there should follow that calm and 
 quiet which make assimilation possible. A spirit 
 that is storm-shaken under perpetual shocks of 
 truth must become either insensate, or subject to 
 dangerous throes of passion. Oh, for the ways of 
 God ! whose rains so fall that they feed the violets, 
 whose winds so blow that they strengthen the 
 oaks. 
 
 So far as there is truth, and there is some truth, 
 in the sentiment that secular and political dis- 
 cussions are misplaced in the pulpit, it arises at 
 this very point, the feeling that one is not to be 
 tyrannized over by the convictions of others ; that 
 words of duty must lay aside the accent of author- 
 ity when they are on another man's lips ; and appeal 
 convincingly and persuasively to the persons 
 addressed. When, therefore, aloofness is impos- 
 sible because of a too ardent temper, the processes 
 of sound thought become impracticable. The 
 sense of absolute rightfulness, which has attended 
 on the doctrine of inspiration, has been obstructive 
 in a living interplay of thought between those 
 speaking and those spoken to. 
 
 Three sisters, all older than myself, offered to
 
 28 Things Learned by Living 
 
 me, next to my mother, the first and dearest 
 images of womanhood. I owe much to women. 
 One must always owe much to them in his higher 
 fortunes. The terms on which we stand with 
 women must go far to settle our footing with that 
 which is purest, most spiritual, most of the nature 
 of divine life. There is extraordinary folly in 
 pushing women aside in counsel, and in returning 
 to them in affection only. Love sinks at once, 
 under such a sentiment, from its celestial level to 
 a distinctly terrestrial one, where its consolations 
 are of the most limited and fluctuating order. The 
 one weakness in Goethe is his sensuousness. He 
 cannot hold fast at any spiritual elevation, but 
 comes tumbling down into a lower stratum of 
 passionate illusions and false lights. 
 
 This relation of the sexes is wrong on the ground 
 of simple wisdom. Men preeminently lack, in deal- 
 ing with themselves, in dealing with one another, 
 the insight of large and varied affections. They 
 expect in their own lives, from ambitious efforts 
 of many kinds, a good these can never confer. 
 They think themselves most completely right, 
 when they are most thoroughly wrong. Their 
 wisdom avails them along the way, but comes to 
 nothing at the very end. We are deceived most 
 frequently by the complexity of our affairs. We
 
 Events 29 
 
 have a passion for management and think our- 
 selves prosperous until we close our labors. We 
 are then left to the irremediable poverty of an 
 inadequate end. Our successes betray us, and 
 for this treachery we find no redress. We have 
 wrought out the problem of life in symbolical 
 characters, and only the symbols of good, not the 
 very good itself, are left us, the fruit of our solution. 
 The womanly mind has the free entry to life far 
 more than the masculine mind ; because by virtue 
 of the wisdom of the affections, it lays more direct 
 hold on substantial, spiritual possessions. The 
 lichen seems to draw something from the very rock ; 
 at all events it finds a footing there which enables 
 it to feed on the winds. How have some women 
 clung to some men, and achieved a wealth of 
 spiritual being where nothing was granted them 
 but a most flinty point of attachment ! Most men 
 wither off-hand under such conditions. 
 
 Men are unwise in dealing with men. They 
 expect more from force and fear, even from justice 
 and just laws, than are in them. They lay down 
 bounds of action judiciously; they fence in the 
 grounds to be cultivated with a barrier high and 
 strong; and then expect that the much more deli- 
 cate processes of production will call for only 
 secondary attention. They have not at their
 
 3Q Things Learned by Living 
 
 command the sunshine and showers which alone 
 bring life to living things. They expect that 
 nurture and education, treated in a method rela- 
 tively indifferent to spiritual temper, with the 
 slightest possible trace of pure love, will, none the 
 less, beget righteousness. Mechanical elements 
 have an advantage with them because they them- 
 selves are so mechanical and have so searching an 
 eye for routine. 
 
 Young men in discipline grasp quickly at pun- 
 ishment, as offering the most cogent motives, and 
 the motives nearest at hand. It is an error of 
 feeling. They are not sufficiently alive to the 
 evil temper, the distorting passion, the disturbed 
 vision through the entire realm of motives, the 
 check and displacement of the affections involved 
 in punishment, when pushed into the foreground, 
 and made the moral atmosphere of the soul. The 
 average male mind entertains stupid contempt for 
 the sentiments and incentives of women. The 
 truth is the moral world, the one preeminent world 
 with which we have to deal, the one world in which 
 knowledge becomes wisdom, is a world whose ulti- 
 mate terms are feelings. These furnish the final 
 forces in conduct, and in their wide and varied 
 combination with what is, and what is not, wisdom. 
 No man can be wise, who has not delicate, varied,
 
 Events 31 
 
 and well-disciplined sensibilities, since these are 
 the factors with which he has to deal in all true 
 guidance. The hard-working, tough-handed, nar- 
 row-hearted man of few and meager thoughts, 
 who thinks, full of his self-imposed and painful 
 drudgery, that if he should blow out his tallow 
 dip the world would be in darkness, is really, with 
 all his practicality, his dollar-and-dime wisdom, 
 among the less wise of beings, with instincts pecu- 
 liarly perverted and self-torturing. The womanly 
 tenderness and refinement, which he holds so 
 lightly, have a movement and an authority in the 
 spiritual world which he cannot conceive. We 
 bring a straight-edge to the things about us, and 
 so pronounce on their adequacy; but we have 
 allowed this standard itself, in our domestic life, 
 to suffer the warp and distortion of time, until it is 
 rather a record of past injuries than a correction 
 of present fault. 
 
 Take any of the complex questions of the day; 
 female suffrage, for instance. How wholly are 
 our opinions the deposits of our feelings, the slow 
 concretion of sentiments no one of which has been 
 duly challenged. Women are granted a limited 
 form of suffrage. There follow, perchance, a few 
 improprieties, a little awkwardness or ill-temper 
 or bad taste in the performance of the new duties.
 
 32 Things Learned by Living 
 
 How quickly comes the sweeping verdict against 
 all such progress as vexatious and false. The 
 barrenness of the heart thus becomes the barren- 
 ness of the head. The slow fructification of the 
 good seed, the steady smothering of tares by the 
 wheat, the golden harvest of remote months, are all 
 hidden by a mere mote of feeling that is floating 
 before the eye. The man cannot think, cannot see, 
 cannot be wise, because he has not covered, with 
 abundant sensibilities, with living tissue, the 
 relations from which alone the instrument of wis- 
 dom is to be drawn. A Professor Huxley is asked 
 what he thinks of the philanthropic schemes of a 
 General Booth. He makes answer, he is compelled 
 to make answer, from the emotional resources of 
 agnosticism, an agnosticism that is altogether alien 
 to the spiritual world as we find it and must deal 
 with it. 
 
 Or the proud, practical mind pride towers by 
 narrowing in the base of thought pronounces 
 prohibition a factious, infatuate effort. Why? 
 Because of the limited range of feeling, the immedi- 
 ate predominence of local temperature. The 
 appetites, the economic and political interests 
 involved are understood; but the ever returning 
 griefs of the household, the blight and mildew of 
 the affections, the moral ties of society forever
 
 Events 33 
 
 broken, the steady thrusting back of the Kingdom 
 of Heaven, these are not understood, and these 
 constitute the spiritual problem. The man has 
 a cunning restraint in threading narrow and ob- 
 scure paths, but knows not how to walk straight 
 forward when given the highway of truth. One 
 can know nothing well in the spiritual world with- 
 out delicacy and scope of feeling, for all its terms 
 are emotional. As light reveals objects to us by 
 dissolving itself, as it flows over every changeable 
 surface into an infinite variety of colors, so the 
 affections open to us the spiritual world by an in- 
 stant response to its ever variable terms. Love, 
 the comprehensive, generic sentiment, is the light 
 which discloses to us all emotional realities. 
 
 Men need women in counsel because, with a 
 keener sensibility, they uncover the very things 
 to be dealt with ; because they break down those 
 hard, determinate lines of thought, which are 
 simply the ruts of minds heavily laden with secular 
 affairs. We cannot give conditions of growth, 
 institute a discipline creative of affections, with- 
 out the mastery of the affections ; we cannot sub- 
 stitute the elastic clasp of love for the iron grip 
 of force, till love opens our eyes and unseals our 
 hearts. Men often despise women because of their 
 superior sensitiveness to religious truth, as if this
 
 34 Things Learned by Living 
 
 indicated poverty of mind as much at least as 
 wealth of heart; as if the heart were an inferior 
 organ among the instruments of wisdom. We 
 weary of this dull chuckle of the greedy spirit that 
 knows when it cheats another, but knows not 
 when it cheats itself. 
 
 But is not the practical, practical? Have not 
 men the mastery they seem to have? Yes, but 
 this mastery pertains to the preliminaries of life, 
 not to life itself. All true help is divine, and it is 
 divine in the degree in which it awakens penetra- 
 tive, peaceful, pervasive sentiment; and gives the 
 mind the mastery of the world by giving it the 
 mastery of itself. If we put our means into founda- 
 tions so lavishly that we are not able to build upon 
 them, then that which seemed to be wisdom sud- 
 denly becomes folly. 
 
 The practicality of persons narrowly emotional 
 is like that of those who build railroads. They 
 dig and load and dump and produce a variety of 
 changes; changes not small in themselves, but 
 very trifling when compared, either as physical 
 or spiritual facts, with those obscure changes which 
 steal silently over the landscape, when, by sun- 
 shine and shower, it stands in reciprocal activity 
 with the heavens above it. I owe much to women 
 as giving contact through a wider circumference
 
 Events 35 
 
 with the emotional, the human world. I have 
 not been left to traffic for spiritual possessions with 
 uncurrent coin. 
 
 My three sisters were very different in character. 
 I have not been able to see in either of the house- 
 holds most familiar to me, my own and my father's 
 household, any laws of descent at all rigid in their 
 application. Concede the physical effects of phys- 
 ical inheritance, facts of so much power and prom- 
 ise, concede the force of similar circumstance 
 and of the moral transmission of the family, and 
 we have sufficient causes to explain agreements 
 with little or no reference to intellectual descent. 
 There remain very stubborn diversities of spiritual 
 constitution not readily to be referred to ancestry. 
 Vague suggestions of this and that dependence are 
 easy enough, but they gain color from opinions, 
 rather than prove them. Children will grow up 
 under physical and moral descent, under active 
 formative energies, and greatly modify, or steadily 
 overcome what we should regard as an overpower- 
 ing mass of impressions. There remains a secret 
 of intellectual life, a stubborn type in the spirit 
 itself, which our laws of inheritance envelop, but 
 do not control. 
 
 My older sister was timid, affectionate, devout, 
 and rigidly orthodox. The first and last of these
 
 36 Things Learned by Living 
 
 qualities readily affiliate. The distrustful mind 
 clings tenaciously to the support nearest it, and 
 finds its activity in strengthening, not in criticizing 
 its faith. She was plain in person and negligent 
 of the minor code of taste, which refines the art 
 of living, but easily renders it superficial and bur- 
 densome. The religious spirit more readily sees 
 .the earlier separation between elegance and de- 
 votion than their later union in perfect charac- 
 ter. Plain personal appearance exerts the same 
 influence. It does not offer that immediate 
 power over others which helps to form a habit of 
 circumspection . 
 
 My second sister was imposing in appearance, 
 indomitable in will, and possessed of unlimited 
 ambitions. Conscientiousness was pressed into 
 the background of these more imperious tendencies 
 and asserted itself at the close of a comparatively 
 brief life as pronounced pietism. Vigorous con- 
 flicts within the soul itself naturally lead to extreme 
 repression. My mother united a somewhat un- 
 bending will an unbending will often means noth- 
 ing more than the stubbornness of primitive 
 tendencies to very humble expectations for her- 
 self and her children. The unflinching courage of 
 my sister Mary, stood the entire family in good 
 part. Extreme poverty, remoteness from relatives,
 
 Events 37 
 
 an obscure community with the narrowest condi- 
 tions of education, were not circumstances which 
 ordinary energy could overcome. My sister broke 
 through them for herself and for each one of us in 
 succession. All my sisters were earnest, home 
 students. They made the largest use of the least 
 opportunity The open fire cast its flickering 
 light on the obscure page for them as it has done, 
 with the wisest natural selection, for many another. 
 Mary secured admission to Troy Female Semi- 
 nary, under the charge of Mrs. Emma Willard. 
 With a very wise and considerate policy, Mrs. 
 Willard frequently accepted pupils who paid their 
 bills as teachers, after their work in the seminary 
 was completed. The South, at that time, made 
 a large demand for teachers, and this demand the 
 seminary helped to meet. Mary was very success- 
 ful, and my other sisters followed, both as pupils 
 in the seminary and as teachers in the South. My 
 oldest sister spent most of her life in the South, 
 readily affiliating with its religious tension and 
 social laxity. As a lad, I received a very exagger- 
 ated impression of the imperative quality of South- 
 ern gentlemen from the descriptions of my sisters. 
 In the luxuriant growth of a child's fancy, hewn 
 stone and unhewn are soon covered with leaves and 
 the whisper of life runs along the most rugged wall.
 
 38 Things Learned by Living 
 
 When, having suffered the heavy losses of insuf- 
 ficient home instruction, I was ready to seek better 
 opportunities abroad, the way was quite open to 
 me. My sister Mary had become principal of the 
 female department of the flourishing and influen- 
 tial Academy at Homer, and my other sisters were 
 prepared to unite in meeting the expenses of my 
 transfer thither. 
 
 Homer Academy was an excellent example of a 
 school conferring a popular education, and receiv- 
 ing a cordial support through a wide constituency. 
 Here under the immediate encouragement and 
 direction of my sister, I spent two terms in prepara- 
 tion for college. Sister Mary was a truly providen- 
 tial leader to our household, and she brought us 
 all bravely through the wilderness. Wealth and 
 opportunity often do less for others than poverty 
 and restriction did for us. 
 
 My third sister, Cornelia, was nearest me in 
 years and in sympathies. She united a real enthu- 
 siasm for knowledge with boldness of thought 
 with a desire to extract from truth its life-giving 
 quality. While her religious sentiments were as 
 earnest as those of sister Harriet, they were much 
 more free, the lines of constraint lay with her in 
 conduct and in character, not in belief. Her intel- 
 lectual enthusiasm early outran her physical
 
 Events 39 
 
 strength, and left her a confirmed invalid, whose 
 powers of work were very closely hemmed in. Cut 
 off from occupying positions of responsibility, she 
 undertook the very self-denying labor of training 
 the waifs of society. She adopted a small number 
 of them into her household, and accepted the entire 
 charge of them. She struggled with limited suc- 
 cess against the stubborn evils of vicious descent, 
 and was satisfied if not quite all the seed fell by the 
 wayside. She managed a very narrow income 
 with much thrift and self-denial, and gave an 
 example of piety, known and read of very few, but 
 very perfect and refining within itself. 
 
 When I was nine years of age, we removed a 
 bold step for my mother from our home in the 
 country, with its exceedingly restricted oppor- 
 tunities of every sort, to the small neighboring 
 village of Ludlowville. Ludlowville is situated 
 about a mile from the mouth of Salmon Creek, 
 emptying into Cayuga Lake. The banks are 
 abrupt, and the valley narrow. Nothing is seen 
 of the small hamlet huddled in the hollow, till you 
 are close upon it. Then the top of the spire of the 
 church is the first object visible. The stream varies 
 from a torrent in spring and summer freshets to a 
 rivulet scarcely sufficient, in dry months, to drive 
 the village mill. The stream makes a perpen-
 
 40 Things Learned by Living 
 
 dicular fall of fifty feet at the village, and in moods 
 of energy fills the valley, like a brimming cup, 
 with the roar of its waters. The raucous voice of 
 the stream, the wildness of the adjacent banks 
 take possession of ear and eye, and awaken the 
 spirit to their own freedom. Above the fall, it 
 pours over a bed of limestone, sculptured into 
 many narrow channels and grotesque basins. The 
 shale supporting this ledge has fallen away beneath 
 and opened a wide cavern veiled, at high water, to 
 its full breadth by the impetuous stream, a narrow 
 rehearsal of those sublime forces, which appear 
 in Niagara. The village, picturesque in situation, 
 gave ample opportunity to the best sports of boy- 
 hood swimming, skating, and coasting. On the 
 shores of the lake and in adjoining ravines, there 
 was mystery enough to feed the imagination, and 
 to keep vigorous the intellectual pulse. 
 
 In this village, I spent eight years, prior to the 
 more formal commencement of my education. 
 A district school, with the barbarous and absurd 
 government of those rude times, and an occasional 
 snatch of what was, in most undemocratic phrase, 
 termed a select school were all the instruction the 
 place offered. The citizens of the village seemed 
 to me a strongly marked group. That there were 
 giants in those days is the concise rendering of the
 
 Events 41 
 
 early history of nations and persons. The stand- 
 ards of the boy are so wholly relative, that little 
 things make the impression of large ones. Thus 
 the lives of men are equalized in the only experi- 
 ence of any moment, that of inner impressions. 
 Those who stand about a campfire are projected 
 in portentous dimensions on the darkness behind 
 them, and those who surround a child fill his hori- 
 zon with a majestic or a monstrous or a mysterious 
 presence. 
 
 One man especially, Benjamin Joy, added noble 
 purposes to unusual gifts, and stood in the fore- 
 ground of my open-eyed reverence. He was an 
 earnest reformer in the anti-slavery agitation, 
 the flow of run-away slaves was then drifting by 
 us and indefatigable in preaching temperance. 
 He was an effective speaker, an excellent story- 
 teller, and with features and scalp so movable as 
 to make his face the very seat of the droll spirit 
 of fun. The facetious mood and the flexible 
 expression are often the inner and outer endow- 
 ment of one self-consistent temper. His general 
 sportive play always settled back into the truly 
 productive power of good- will. He gathered us 
 boys into a dramatic company, and took us to 
 neighboring villages to capture an audience for 
 his own more strenuous speech. He was a devout
 
 42 Things Learned by Living 
 
 man and filled out well the divine description, go- 
 ing about doing good . His barn j oined our garden ; 
 he used it as a devotional closet, and I frequently 
 heard, with indescribable awe, the voice of earnest 
 prayer. Goodness of this order has a grand pres- 
 ence to the impressionable feelings of childhood. 
 Benjamin Joy should stand high among those 
 worthies who, in an obscure region, diffuse and 
 transmit the spiritual treasures of the race, and 
 are a burnished link in the great chain of social life. 
 
 I remember, however, that some incongruities 
 of character, even then, startled me. I was always 
 tenderly disposed toward animals and never 
 inflicted pain except in sudden anger. I was aston- 
 ished at the heat with which he flung stones, and 
 at the unconscionable size of the stones he flung 
 at hogs to be driven from his orchard. He did 
 not walk with the brute creation with quite the 
 same gentleness with which he walked with men. 
 His life had not reached in all parts its proper 
 circumference. 
 
 The boys of a village are only half domesticated 
 animals, and, coming among them with the inex- 
 perience of a country lad, I had a good many 
 uncomfortable lessons to learn. I had a fear of 
 them as of strange dogs that were sure to bark, and 
 might very easily bite. Though possessed of inde-
 
 Events 43 
 
 pendent and uncompromising moral convictions, 
 I have always been exceedingly shy, and have 
 suffered deeply from every form of personal colli- 
 sion. This combination, trying as it is, seems to 
 be well-nigh inevitable, and, in its wider relations 
 most fortunate. A coarse, domineering moral 
 temper ceases to be moral. Sensitiveness, the 
 power of extended sympathy, is a first condition 
 of a truly just and comprehensive spiritual experi- 
 ence. Yet many of the events of life must render 
 any delicacy of fiber painful to us. The sufferings 
 in the life of Christ were occasioned by the tender 
 sensibilities he brought to its rude shocks. 
 
 The intercourse of rough boys has very little 
 moral element in it, and is a most uncomfortable 
 school for a sensitive spirit. One dislikes almost 
 equally to shelter a child from it and to expose him 
 to it. Exposure, accompanied with retiring and 
 sympathetic oversight, seems to be the safer of the 
 two methods. If one is to help childhood in its 
 trials, he must share appreciatively the moods of 
 childhood, its wide sense of danger, its sentiments 
 of honor, and the great force with it of the social 
 feelings which surround it. To pooh-pooh all 
 these impressions alike is to drive the sensitive, 
 secretive mind quickly back into itself, and to 
 render aid impossible.
 
 44 Things Learned by Living 
 
 I suffered somewhat from the vicious vulgarity 
 of village boys, but should have escaped all ma- 
 terial injury, if contact had been confined to the 
 school and playground. Noxious heat arises from 
 too close and secluded intercourse. The wider 
 relations of the community are more wholesome, 
 all things considered than the narrower connections 
 of coteries. It is easier, under the influence of a 
 good home, to shake off vulgarity in the training 
 of a child, than, in an experience seduously sepa- 
 rated from that of the many, to escape from the 
 pride and selfishness which these conditions tend 
 to foster. Moreover, vulgarity is by no means so 
 secret, pervasive, and consuming a sin as is personal 
 and social pride. It is the sins congenial to our 
 circumstances that we are especially to fear. 
 
 More sensitive than my associates, I suffered 
 often in the rude jostle of our sports. On one 
 occasion, and on one only, did I resist aggression 
 with violence. This fray I justified to myself, 
 and entered into deliberately. A passionate and 
 overbearing playmate had abused me in the pres- 
 ence of other boys, and, retiring to the defense of 
 his own yard, had thrown stones at me. This was 
 so unprovoked a declaration of war that I felt that 
 peace could be had only by conquering it. Find- 
 ing him alone on the following day, I demanded
 
 Events 45 
 
 satisfaction. He was unrelenting in temper and 
 not averse to a quarrel, so that the claim issued 
 at once in a close grapple. We were about equal 
 in strength, but here all parity ceased. He was 
 versed in conflict and unscrupulous in method, 
 while I was without experience and fearful, even in 
 anger, of inflicting injury. The result was that he 
 left the traces of his nails all over my face. When 
 the fight was the hottest, his mother appeared on 
 the field, and, much to my advantage, put an end 
 to it. I had inflicted no injury and bore away on 
 my features a conspicuous diagram of the battle, 
 a most disagreeable tell-tale for weeks to come. 
 As I have found many a time since, public impres- 
 sion is of more immediate moment than abstract 
 justice. Justice is frequently that slow tortoise 
 whose victories come so late, if they come at all, 
 that the circumstances which they should have 
 illuminated have passed away. It is difficult to 
 feed even on the sense of rightfulness, when the 
 feast is all one's own. How to carry home that 
 face to a Puritanical household of women, who not 
 only could not understand why I should quarrel, 
 but could not even conceive why I should think 
 it necessary to quarrel, was a very uncomfortable 
 problem. I hung around until dark and then pre- 
 sented myself with such apparent shame as to
 
 46 Things Learned by Living 
 
 condemn a much better cause. I had not, however, 
 duly considered one feeling which made in my 
 favor. The motherly tenderness, which my appear- 
 ance aroused, helped to call out indignation against 
 my enemy and so to cover my fault. A balance 
 of feelings not infrequently accomplishes what 
 might better be secured by a balance of judgment. 
 It is fortunate that there are so many things which 
 in part supply the place of thoughtfulness. 
 
 At the age of seventeen, I went to Homer, which 
 seemed to me a place of most imposing appearance 
 and inexhaustible opportunities. The two terms 
 I spent there were devoted unreservedly to hard 
 study. It ought to be recorded that a room, board, 
 fuel, lights, and washing could then be obtained, 
 under good conditions, for $1.25 per week. Here 
 was an easy road into the kingdom of knowledge. 
 I was desirous to go to Yale. I was urged to go to 
 Hamilton, and the question was compromised by 
 sending me to Williams, the college of my father 
 and uncles. 
 
 The four years I spent in college were years of 
 almost unalloyed pleasure. They would be so 
 in the retrospect, if I could add to them the feeling 
 of having done profitable work. This deficiency 
 I was not well aware of at the time. It lay not in 
 myself nor in my companions, but in the very
 
 Events 47 
 
 ordinary instruction provided. I very much 
 needed the insight and guidance of a superior 
 teacher in language and literature, and these were 
 missed in my college days almost utterly. All 
 that depended for its value on the unfolding of 
 thought, I mastered readily, but in that which 
 turned on a quick preception of secondary relations 
 and a lively sensibility concerning them, I should 
 have profited greatly by the adequate lead of a 
 cultivated mind. A negligent attention to words, 
 and a feeble memory of them made the study of 
 language difficult and distasteful to me, and this 
 disinclination was not overcome, as it readily might 
 have been, by opening up those large, subtle, and 
 vital relations of which language and literature are 
 so full. I was left to toil, memoriter, with the 
 mere mechanism of speech, often mortified by the 
 clumsy touch with which I handled words. I 
 was a good scholar in college, and should have 
 easily been a preeminent one had it not been for 
 this natural deficiency, which my instruction had 
 done so little to overcome. The skillful teacher 
 should put the pupil on horseback by giving him, in 
 every department, the best use of his best powers. 
 With a single exception, the instructors in my col- 
 lege life were little more than the driven stakes 
 to which we were tethered; they defined the cir-
 
 48 Things Learned by Living 
 
 cult of our range, but did nothing to expand or to 
 enrich it. 
 
 Yet those years were profitable as well as pleas- 
 urable. Undisturbed opportunity and sturdy 
 companionship cannot fail of important results. 
 My college class was a large one, with the variety 
 of character, energy, and confidence that usually 
 accompanies numbers. There were among them 
 men of fine ability and men of very narrow abil- 
 ity, those of earnest and honorable incentives, and 
 those of mean and personal ends. The numerical 
 strength of the class carried it to the front in all 
 college conflicts, and so helped to extend and to in- 
 tensify the experience of its members. While the 
 class fell apart within itself under personal prefer- 
 ences, it stood well together in all aggressive 
 action. College classes that are large enough to 
 give wide diversity of characters and experiences, 
 and yet not so large as to break up the unity of 
 action, which belongs to a body of young men well 
 known to one another and affected by common 
 interests, offer the most sympathetic and stimu- 
 lating discipline. Colleges of a moderate size are 
 not likely to furnish as great a variety of talent 
 in instructors as larger ones, but they give terms 
 of personal contact, of Antellectual and social life 
 superior to those given by institutions that are
 
 Events 49 
 
 redissolved, by virtue of their very dimensions, 
 into bands and cliques, separation of pursuits and 
 diversity of interests. 
 
 College life is delightful in the freedom it allows 
 one to exercise, under personal tastes, in the choice 
 of associates. Young men hold one another to 
 very light obligations, as regard the formal duties 
 of social intercourse. A complete suspension of 
 social relations may exist among classmates with- 
 out offence, and the feelings are left to their own 
 spontaneous affiliations. This connection may not 
 be a good preparation for the many just, but some- 
 what irksome claims that society may later lay 
 upon one, but it is none the less full of pleasure, 
 under the warm, attractive, and resistful impulses 
 of young manhood. If personal intercourse is not 
 a free concession of life to life, whatever may be 
 true of it from the point of duty, it is not worth the 
 maintenance as a matter of pleasure. An habitual 
 sacrifice of oneself to society degrades society 
 and oneself alike. Pleasure cannot be robbed of 
 spontaneity. 
 
 College classmates are apt to feel that they know 
 one another perfectly, and that the coming years 
 will have no further disclosures to make. This 
 opinion is not fully justified by the facts. Develop- 
 ment with a few men is steady acceleration, with
 
 50 Things Learned by Living 
 
 others it is slow retardation. Circumstances 
 which are sufficient to repress some, only stimulate 
 others, and so the later stages of the race show 
 intervals not promised at the outset. College 
 predictions, in my own class, have neither been 
 wholly fulfilled nor altogether belied. Some men, 
 of a choice spirit, have hardly more than plodded 
 along, and some men, with good fortune, have 
 fallen into the current of the stream and unexpect- 
 edly profited by it. 
 
 A college course, by its enjoyments, its ambi- 
 tions, and its attainments, isolates young men un- 
 fortunately. Large life is drawn from the great 
 reservoirs of life. Navigation is on the ocean. On 
 the human side, much and many impulses are left 
 behind by going to college. There is often consid- 
 erable loss and limitation at the end in restoring 
 these wider connections. Coeducation, among 
 other advantages, has this also ; the field of knowl- 
 edge, which is the highest of all, the most open of 
 all, with the least restriction to those who can move 
 in it, is no longer identified, in the scornful mind 
 of the young man, with sex, or with any narrow 
 outcome of conventional sentiment. There is a 
 certain fascination in the separation and irresponsi- 
 bility of college life, but we cannot advantageously 
 sacrifice to it any of those kneading forces by which
 
 Events 51 
 
 the community ultimately secures wholesome 
 character. 
 
 The year that followed my college course was 
 spent in teaching in Hoosick Falls. It was a year 
 of great depression. The unrestrained intercourse 
 of college had passed by, like a delightful dream. 
 New connections, more difficult to establish and 
 less immediately pleasurable, were to be formed. 
 I had dropped out of the region of enjoyments into 
 that of duties with a fall so sudden as to be wound- 
 ing. Neither had I learned how to temper my 
 scholastic ambitions'to'my changed circumstances. 
 I strove to add to my exacting school work private 
 study, and I had not the nervous elasticity to 
 bear the double strain. The door into the spiritual 
 kingdom is one of wood and iron and brass, at 
 least on the outside, and it is largely a question 
 of physical strength whether we shall be able to 
 swing it. 
 
 My class was graduated in '49. Having taught 
 a year, I went to Rochester to study law. My 
 desire to take up this profession arose from 
 several feelings, none of them very strong or just 
 within themselves. I was a little impatient of 
 being sent into the ministry by a social sentiment 
 outside of my own choices. I had a predilection 
 for the dialectics of the law, and figured it in my
 
 52 Things Learned by Living 
 
 imagination as an arena in which the weapons of 
 truth were freely employed. My religious opin- 
 ions were slowly undergoing change, and this 
 tended to obscure for me the aims of the ministry 
 and to relax its claims. 
 
 I spent eight months in a law office. The 
 pleasure and profit of the study were all that I 
 anticipated, but what I saw of the practice con- 
 vinced me that it involved a constant struggle 
 with perverse tendencies not simply beyond itself 
 but within itself, and that not many found it a 
 school of spiritual sentiments. A few robust 
 virtues it may easily nourish, though by no means 
 with certainty, but the finer moral sensibilities 
 must be won very much in spite of it. The con- 
 ventionalisms of law are of an unyielding order, 
 and very earth-born. He who forgets the services 
 they have rendered and are rendering is much at 
 fault; he who expects that society will ascend by 
 means of them into a truly spiritual region is still 
 more in error. Law is a brake on the wheels rather 
 than steam in the engine. The moral conflicts of 
 the law are not the best, because they are indirect, 
 perplexed, mixed with personal interests, and 
 often futile. My nature called me to crucifixion, 
 but the law would have been to me crucifixion by 
 a rabble of bad boys.
 
 Events 53 
 
 Feeling that my higher impulses were not likely 
 to be met most directly by the law, I turned my 
 attention, toward the close of the year, to Hebrew, 
 and the year following entered the Middle class 
 in the Theological Seminary at Auburn. I was 
 drawn thither by the presence of Dr. Laurens 
 Hickok. Seminary life is still more delightful than 
 college life. The impulse is purer and the har- 
 mony more complete. If a taste for critical and 
 speculative study is brought to the seminary, and 
 freedom is found in its exercise ; if incentives draw 
 after them both mind and heart, nothing can 
 exceed the pleasure of its explorations and the 
 vista of hope they lay open. Grant these investi- 
 gations to be less secure than the investigation of 
 things, they are more congenial to the spirit and 
 may well be, if ordered with thoroughness and 
 sobriety of thought, a better measure of its powers 
 and a better expression of its nature. The erec- 
 tion of the sensuous above the spiritual is no more 
 stimulating in study than in life. If we scale pre- 
 cipitous peaks we need corresponding elasticity and 
 firmness of foot, but nowhere else does the whole 
 man so abide in strength, in enthusiasm, and in 
 sympathy with the upward lift of all about him. 
 If conviction is ultimately grounded in itself, as 
 empiricism is willing to grant, nowhere does the
 
 54 Things Learned by Living 
 
 mind so feel the foundations of truth that lie under 
 it as in spiritual insight. 
 
 I was invited to a tutorship in Williams Col- 
 lege in 1852. This position I occupied for a 
 portion of two years, returning to the seminary, 
 this time Andover, for my third year in 1854. 
 My tutorship was a hard, though not unsuccess- 
 ful, experience. It was still the custom to badger 
 tutors, and to make them as uncomfortable as 
 circumstances would allow. The rewards of well- 
 doing were neither very near nor very manifest. 
 That, however, which was most vexatious to me 
 was that I had been so poorly taught in languages 
 that I could not at once give instruction satis- 
 factory to my own mind. This difficulty was in- 
 creased by the slow failure of my eyes, which began 
 in the first year of my tutorship. I can only, 
 therefore, cherish the unsatisfactory hope that I 
 was able to do somewhat more for others than 
 others had done for me. The side lights are 
 innumerable in language and literature. Nothing 
 but wide scholarship can save one from occasional 
 error. The only remedy for a mistake before a 
 college class is its frank and full correction, and 
 this is a humiliating experience to a sensitive man. 
 I was compelled to undergo a good deal of distaste- 
 ful drudgery to escape it. It is a pity that slovenly
 
 Events 55 
 
 instruction should rob the pupil so unnecessarily 
 of the easy and alert accuracy of genuine culture. 
 I was married in 1852 to Abbie Burt. This 
 was a brief relation whose promises were unful- 
 filled. She died in 1854. The door of vision 
 was hardly opened before it was closed again, and 
 the mind was left with a few fugitive pictures 
 of a very detached experience. In 1856, I was 
 married to Emma Curtiss. This connection has 
 ripened through many years into ever increasing 
 happiness. The possibilities of good cluster at no 
 point so thickly as about the marriage relation, 
 yet nowhere are m6re wisdom, reserve, and delicacy 
 of hand required in securing them. The nature 
 of our spiritual life is especially disclosed in this 
 connection, and in the connections which spring 
 from it. Among the sad and clumsy things in 
 human experience, none are more sad and clumsy 
 than the perverse moods with which we, at this 
 point, balk the grace of heaven and our own 
 pleasure. We expect great things with no real 
 power to receive them. This relation touches so 
 many high things that it must come fully under 
 the divine law of sacrifice. We must win life by 
 yielding it. The family is a constant and living 
 parable in which are rehearsed the dependencies 
 of the Kingdom of God.
 
 56 Things Learned by Living 
 
 Trifles, discrepancies, annoyances necessarily 
 make up a considerable portion of so large a whole 
 as married life, and it is from an increase of these 
 irritations that persons of sober intentions have 
 most to apprehend. Even our own foibles are not 
 agreeable when offered in the reverse, and the foibles 
 of others admit of indefinite nervous aggravation. 
 The idiosyncrasies of character, speech, and man- 
 ners are so many ; defects in the web of inheritance 
 so numerous, that no two lives can run exactly 
 parallel with each other. The secret of growing 
 affection is found in keeping little things little, 
 and so winning the patience to bear them. One 
 may well labor to discover and to correct his own 
 disagreeable traits, and, if he is much in earnest, 
 he will soon understand how invincible those 
 secondary habits are which lie one side of the 
 voluntary life ; but he enters on a very ungrateful 
 and unsuccessful task who strives to fill this office 
 of a minute monitor for others. It is much easier 
 to bear the trifles which annoy us in a companion 
 than it is for a companion to alter these spon- 
 taneous expressions of character. This involves 
 such a search into the fountains of action as is 
 very like to roil all its waters. There is no end 
 to the irritation, which attends on correction in 
 secondary things. True wisdom lies in the pursuit
 
 Events 57 
 
 of primary things and in controlling their incidents 
 and accidents, so far as they are capable of control, 
 through those leading efforts which sustain the 
 mind by their own magnitude. I am conscious 
 of many ungracious and unskillful ways of keeping 
 step with others, but an easy asking and rendering 
 of pardon makes, in all minor offences, more for 
 union than the offense makes for separation. The 
 last is an appeal to our nervous irritability, the 
 first to our moral sense. The aggregate of friction 
 in married life is often incomparably greater than 
 anywhere else, but so also are the correctives. 
 Exercise produces skill and ease, not coarseness, 
 in the hand familiar with it. 
 
 The enjoyments, which spring up like flowers, 
 along the ways of household fellowship, many of 
 them obscured by familiarity but many of them 
 breaking the soil with the force of a revelation, 
 constitute a continuous sedative to irritable moods, 
 a pervasive peace into which the mind relapses 
 from its intense ones. We have no occasion to 
 pluck these flowers, they wither so quickly and the 
 path is everywhere so fruitful of them. They are 
 like the cherubs, which crowd the sky of a Madonna. 
 Little notice falls to any one of them they are so 
 many. The medicinal herbs of wisdom we gather 
 and carry with us, often with a very obscure pur-
 
 58 Things Learned by Living 
 
 pose, but the flowers that feed our lives in their 
 passage we leave where they grow. The pleasures 
 we are enjoying gain a sweet lingering echo back- 
 ward by the pleasures we have already enjoyed. 
 Our better delights catch the throb of immortality, 
 so many strings are strung to them. 
 
 When I left Andover, I had no use of my eyes, 
 and had not had for nearly two years. I accepted, 
 therefore, with fear and hesitancy, an invitation 
 to a professorship at Williams. I occupied the 
 position of professor of rhetoric for nineteen years, 
 including an interval of one year, most of which 
 was spent abroad. The work connected with 
 this position was exacting, as it included the 
 criticism of all the writing, and most of the speak- 
 ing of the college. It was partially distasteful to 
 me, as I was not interested in oratory, nor did 
 I particularly enjoy rhetoric. I introduced as 
 much philosophy as possible into my instruction, 
 and went conscientiously through the drudgery 
 of the remainder. I introduced the study of 
 English literature and aesthetics, both of which 
 helped to widen the rhetoric. English literature 
 was rarely taught, even in colleges, at that time; 
 nor did I at first find it popular with the students. 
 As a chronological record it failed to interest them. 
 Not until I had gone over the ground repeatedly
 
 Events 59 
 
 was I able to make it a coherent, rational experi- 
 ence; or successfully to introduce the pupil to 
 its great masters. 
 
 College instruction improved rapidly in these 
 nineteen years in variety, in insight, and in method, 
 but not so rapidly as it has during the intervening 
 years. The college professor then acquired his 
 power in his work, he now acquires it in anticipa- 
 tion of his work. All gains have their compensa- 
 tions. The specialization of educational work, 
 with its fullness, accuracy, and observation, is often 
 attended with narrowness of mental vision, and 
 even with a disposition to disparage the things 
 not known. A survey of the entire field of 
 knowledge is worth more for manhood and the 
 practical uses of most men than an accurate knowl- 
 edge of a small portion of that field. Breadth 
 and scope are not to be advantageously sacrificed 
 for the details of particular departments. A col- 
 lege aims at general education. It does its work 
 best when it insists on a comprehensive survey, 
 and adds to this the opportunity for close and 
 careful work in one or another branch of inquiry. 
 The mind thus escapes both the vagueness of 
 general ideas and the narrowness of special facts. 
 It sees the process by which the theory of thought 
 is filled out, and by which it is filled in with the
 
 60 Things Learned by Living 
 
 subject matter of thought. The effort I made to 
 give intellectual expansion to my work is seen in 
 the books I then wrote in aid of it Philosophy of 
 Rhetoric, Science of Beauty, Philosophy of English 
 Literature. 
 
 My instruction in Williams was successful, with 
 the possible exception of oratory. In this I re- 
 ceived more or less aid, and was constantly hop- 
 ing, though to no purpose, to escape the work 
 altogether. 
 
 In 1874, I was invited to take the presidency of 
 the University of Wisconsin. As I despaired of 
 a favorable change of work at Williams, and found 
 that my growing freedom of religious thought was 
 making my presence less agreeable to the college, 
 I accepted the invitation. I took to myself a 
 daily recitation in philosophy, ethics, and kindred 
 branches, and my instruction became, henceforth, 
 very enjoyable to me. I was able, by means of it, 
 to strengthen my hold on the students and greatly 
 to enlarge my work in their behalf. The students 
 in western institutions were, at that time, less 
 well prepared for their college course than eastern 
 students, but were far more uniformly interested 
 in it. They had little of that traditional temper, 
 which leads a college class silently to antagonize 
 a teacher, to become cynical critics of the least
 
 Events 61 
 
 slip on his part, to repress any manifestation of 
 enthusiasm in class work, and to accept with 
 coldness any additional labor. The wisdom of 
 instruction lies very much in knowing what and 
 how much to require, but a fortunate solution of 
 this difficult question is less likely to be reached 
 when students constitute themselves the pre- 
 scriptive guardians of old measurements and fa- 
 miliar tasks. Freedom and frankness are more 
 common in the west than in the east. My ex- 
 perience as a teacher in the University of Wis- 
 consin left little to be desired. We enjoyed 
 together the free range of our topic. 
 
 The discipline of the students fell largely into 
 my hands. There was a vulgarity in practical 
 jokes and a stubborn discourtesy in the earlier 
 years of my presidency, which, without amounting 
 to ugliness, were very trying. I succeeded in 
 slowly overcoming these evils almost wholly, and 
 in establishing a discipline which was effective 
 without being conspicuous. The criticism which 
 the management of the University encountered 
 was that there was no government. But as the 
 candid were compelled to admit that the general 
 bearing of the students was circumspect, the 
 censure itself became praise. This result was 
 reached by a continuous, but restrained appeal
 
 62 Things Learned by Living 
 
 to the moral sense of the students, accompanied 
 with a concession of the liberty of action which is 
 necessary to give that sense full play. There was 
 no surveillance, no assumption of a mischievous 
 disposition as the prevailing temper. Care was 
 taken to remove all temptations to wrong doing, 
 and any results of willful injury were quietly and 
 immediately effaced. The eclat of misdeeds was 
 made as slight as possible, and discipline proceeded 
 with as little observation as possible. The offender 
 and the offense were remanded to the rear; and 
 if the evil was obdurate, the ill-disposed student 
 was quickly dismissed. The terms of intercourse 
 in matters of discipline were perfectly open and 
 frank. The student was at liberty to say all that 
 he chose in justification of his action, or in condem- 
 nation of the conditions under which he had been 
 placed. The offense was judged on its merits, 
 the state of mind of the offender being the most 
 essential item in the verdict. There was no ap- 
 pearance of knowing more about the facts than 
 was known, and no effort to secure any exposure 
 of students by one another. Great importance was 
 attached to frankness, and the severest censure 
 visited on falsehood. While a deserved rebuke 
 was unsparing, the mitigations of the offense per- 
 sonal to the offender were freely allowed. Friction
 
 Events 63 
 
 was reduced to a minimum, no threats were made, 
 and much care was exercised not to be caught in 
 an untenable position, nor to be found attempting 
 the impossible. If an error was committed in 
 management, in command or in censure, a short 
 corner was turned at once and openly. The only 
 infallible thing in the discipline was that the 
 student should be sure of candid and genuine treat- 
 ment; that the remedy should not aggravate the 
 disease. 
 
 A clear and restrained idea of the purpose of 
 college punishments is essential to their entire 
 success. The misdeed of the student has a double 
 bearing, as a personal fault and as interfering with 
 the work of the institution. The last evil is the 
 one to be explicitly brought into the foreground, 
 and to be checked, if need be, by punishment. The 
 student more readily sees this phase of his wrong, 
 admits the need of a remedy, and, is compelled to 
 allow that in its application, his personal liberty 
 is not unwarrantably set aside. Personal training 
 and abstract right are too remote from the neces- 
 sarily feeble government of our higher educational 
 institutions to become primary objects. The 
 purely moral problem will be handled more success- 
 fully as an incident to a well-ordered community 
 than when treated by itself. The entire field of
 
 64 Things Learned by Living 
 
 moral influence is thus preserved on its own pure 
 and proper basis. The instructor is able to main- 
 tain terms of counsel and kindly persuasion. Pun- 
 ishments and preachments are kept apart. The 
 punishment does not destroy the good temper of 
 the preachment, nor the preachment waste itself 
 on the passion incident to the punishment. 
 
 Next to personal influence but next by a wide 
 interval the best college discipline is a guillotine 
 government, administered in an exact, mechanical 
 way. A few well-defined offenses, followed at once 
 with precise consequences, put the pupil on a very 
 intelligible, if not a very stimulating basis. The 
 most perplexed, perplexing, and exasperating dis- 
 cipline is that of a college faculty, administered 
 by deliberation. It lacks continuity, harmony, and 
 personal insight, and reaches its goal, if it reaches 
 it at all, by the merest good fortune. 
 
 The University of Wisconsin, in common with 
 western institutions, is co-educational. The dis- 
 cipline is not much altered by this fact, nor rendered 
 more difficult by it. It rarely happened that this 
 feature was involved in the government of the 
 University. It brings the need of an additional 
 and bolder emphasis on the principles of personal 
 liberty and of personal responsibility, but it, at 
 the same time, surrounds and sustains them by
 
 Events 65 
 
 more obvious and urgent motives. College tradi- 
 tions, which are mostly on the side of mischief, 
 mostly refractory to a growing moral sense, are less 
 numerous in the west than in the east; and this 
 more independent and placable state of thought 
 is aided by co-education. I have no doubt that 
 the progress of years will disclose a definite superi- 
 ority in the social condition of the western states 
 due to this wise policy of giving their sons and 
 daughters the best training under moral conditions 
 wide enough to enable them to share it in common. 
 There is in this method a largeness of experience, 
 a breadth of social horizon, to be gotten in no other 
 way. In the fourteen classes I taught in Wisconsin 
 one hundred and sixty-one women were graduated. 
 They were fitted to exert, and are exerting a 
 powerful and peculiarly beneficent social influence. 
 The University, in the years that I was con- 
 nected with it, shook off its preparatory work, 
 greatly improved the quality and increased the 
 variety of its instruction, and fairly planted itself 
 on a university basis. A transition to graduate 
 work is a slow and difficult one, and can be more 
 successfully accomplished in distinct institutions 
 than in those the great bulk of whose work must 
 remain with undergraduates. The appliances 
 and methods of one form of study are so much in
 
 66 Things Learned by Living 
 
 advance of those of the other, that they each pros- 
 per better by exclusion than inclusion. Our educa- 
 tional institutions suffer from an ambition which 
 strives to raise them above their place in the series 
 rather than to perfect them in their own place. 
 
 The east much underestimates the west, and 
 the west is needlessly sensitive to this disparage- 
 ment. The instruction in the University of 
 Wisconsin is not easily surpassed anywhere in 
 some departments, and, as a whole, certainly 
 reaches the average of good collegiate training. 
 Science is in advance of literature and philosophy. 
 This result is consonant with the sentiment of 
 the community. An active, busy community 
 affiliates with science ; one of leisure with literature 
 and art; and one of spiritual impulses with phil- 
 osophy, as holding the secrets of life. I had diffi- 
 culty in retaining any psychology or ethics in 
 the more practical courses of the University. 
 An engineer was thought sufficiently furnished 
 for his calling without the least exact knowledge 
 of his own mental constitution. An extended 
 mastery of the secondary laws of physics was re- 
 garded as of more moment than the comprehension 
 of the primary laws of mind. Such a conviction 
 is not sound even under the most limited definition 
 of success.
 
 Events 67 
 
 There was one direction in which the results in 
 the University of Wisconsin were disappointing. 
 I had supposed that extended and practical in- 
 struction in science would favor that general 
 survey of the field and interest in it which are all 
 that the classical and professional student may 
 hope to attain. The result was quite the reverse. 
 Special students gave tone to each department. 
 The students from other departments were rela- 
 tively interlopers. Frequently the professors of 
 special subjects had neither the feeling nor the 
 skill involved in a concise and impressive presenta- 
 tion of general principles. Their thoughts were 
 preoccupied with special processes and remote 
 inquiries. It frequently happened that the class- 
 ical student went through his scientific instruction 
 uninterested and unstimulated. He felt that he 
 had been dealing with that which did not much 
 concern him, and which he was not expected to 
 master. 
 
 Scientific work carried on extendedly, side by side 
 with other branches, tends to overshadow them 
 by the much greater expenditure it demands, and 
 by its captivating array of the appliances of 
 knowledge. Students are apt to feel that the 
 value of a department is reflected in its costliness, 
 while the ruling authorities fall at once into
 
 68 Things Learned by Living 
 
 this error. It requires real genius to sustain lit- 
 erary, classical, and philosophical instruction at 
 their true estimate in connection with the more 
 sensuous appeals of science. The just equilibrium 
 of a university in the end so essential for science 
 itself is not easily maintained. 
 
 The most uncomfortable feature in state uni- 
 versities is likely to be their boards of direction. 
 This is an evil that the years are sure to lessen ; an 
 evil which, while it lasts, brings more discomfort 
 than real danger; and one which does not seriously 
 reduce the value of these institutions. A state 
 university is a noble effort to affiliate all classes 
 and all sects in the highest walks of education, to 
 compact the repellant nationalities and conflicting 
 interests, so conspicuous in our western states, 
 by participation in kindred labors and in the same 
 high attainments. If these institutions were much 
 less successful than they really are, they would 
 still be worth the effort they involve. Indeed, 
 the things, which make them difficult, make them 
 necessary. In achieving unity, we may give 
 occasion to strife, but not to such strife as arises 
 across great gaps, fixed in our social relations. 
 The state universities of the west are doing, and 
 are destined to do, a most patriotic work, in bring- 
 ing together the very discordant social and political
 
 Events 69 
 
 material of those states. Young men and young 
 women, of all affiliations, trained together in the 
 university, have a common temper and a mutual 
 confidence, which never forsake them. Here is a 
 stimulating contact of mind with mind, which 
 easily extends to all the relations of life. The 
 University of Wisconsin has done more to reduce 
 class collisions in that state than has any other 
 one agency. 
 
 The political cast of ruling boards is likely to 
 pass away in the progress of years. The politician 
 sinks as civilization rises, and public opinion 
 becomes more sound and exacting. The personal 
 annoyance arising from the construction of the 
 Board, during my connection with the University 
 of Wisconsin, was very great, but it affected me 
 far more than it affected the University. It made 
 my work very vexatious, and somewhat reduced 
 its range, but it did not very materially check the 
 growth of the institution. The irritation of these 
 unfortunate relations falls chiefly on the President, 
 and, in my case, it much exceeded all other forms 
 of discomfort. An inflexible moral sense made 
 me very reluctant to conform to methods of which 
 I did not approve. 
 
 The Board was made up almost exclusively of 
 those interested in politics, and who were thought,
 
 70 Things Learned by Living 
 
 on this score, to have some claim to the dignity 
 of an appointment. Rarely, indeed, was any man 
 granted the position of Regent who had any special 
 knowledge of the methods of education, or interest 
 in them. The result was that questions of manage- 
 ment were settled on narrow grounds, and trifling 
 and personal interests were in the ascendancy. 
 Consultation on grave questions with those who 
 have no large ruling ideas is very irksome and 
 disappointing. Deliberation is sickled o'er with 
 the pale cast of expediency. I rarely stood on 
 cordial terms with the Board, and in the later 
 years of my administration the division of senti- 
 ment was much increased by an earnest advocacy, 
 on my part, of prohibition. A state university 
 gives more liberty to religious, than to political, 
 conviction. In Williams College, I came under 
 censure on the ground of too discursive religious 
 ideas, and in the University of Wisconsin, for 
 enforcing political convictions. In neither case, 
 was my instruction ever made the medium of a 
 personal opinion. 
 
 The chairman of the Executive Committee had 
 in his hands, during my term of service, almost 
 the entire practical administration of affairs. This 
 position was occupied, in the period of my presi- 
 dency, by two very different men, each in his way
 
 Events 71 
 
 peculiarly difficult to work with on tenable grounds 
 Napoleon Bonaparte Van Slyke, and Edwin W. 
 Keyes. The first was a banker, of a very positive 
 and tyrannical temper, and of most minute and 
 searching observation. He was interested in the 
 University, but interested in it as something which 
 he held very closely in his own hand. He brought 
 the irritation of a collar that chafes and chokes you 
 in every movement you make and every word you 
 utter. Mr. Keyes was the boss Republican politi- 
 cian of the state. He was not without kindly social 
 quality, and was concessive in some directions, but 
 he brought all things finally to the test of their im- 
 mediate personal and political bearings. I had no 
 taste for the indirect methods which such contact 
 calls for, and deeply disliked the delays and limi- 
 tations it puts upon all direct adequate measures. 
 
 As the entanglements of my position decreased 
 the value of my work, and as they became increas- 
 ingly distasteful to me with declining strength, 
 I felt it wise to resign rather than to expose myself 
 to those accidents which might make resignation 
 compulsory. I had proposed, in going to Wis- 
 consin, to remain not less than ten nor more than 
 fifteen years. I had now been President over 
 thirteen years, and given the instruction in phil- 
 osophy to fifteen classes.
 
 72 Things Learned by Living 
 
 When I left Williamstown, I retained my home 
 with the expectation of returning to it. At the 
 age of sixty I sheltered myself in the delightful 
 retirement of Williamstown, hoping, under its 
 peace and beauty, to pass gently into the beauty 
 and peace of a higher and more serene life. Yet 
 storms are the companions of all active processes 
 and they are native to all quarters of the sky. My 
 funds unexpectedly failed me. The college was 
 reluctant to allow me the work that lay right under 
 my hand. I was compelled to take up at disad- 
 vantage the battle for subsistence once more 
 this time physical subsistence. On the whole, 
 with more or less fitfulness, I have attained to 
 peace, though I could easily mark out a pathway 
 apparently brighter than the one I have pursued. 
 This impression is due in part to the fact that sun- 
 shine is more conspicuous when it falls on distant 
 hills, and shadows more conspicuous when they 
 hang above us and rest about us. I am devoutly 
 thankful for life, so far as I myself have won this 
 life. I will not regret any one of the sacrifices by 
 which I have gained it. 
 
 Shortly after my return to Williamstown, the 
 earnings and savings of a life-time in themselves 
 quite sufficient for my estimate of what is needful 
 nearly vanished. For several years I gave a few
 
 Events 73 
 
 lectures on sociology in the college and partial 
 courses in other institutions on the same subject. 
 This work was very irksome and unsatisfactory to 
 me, as it involved meeting a good many different 
 persons and gave me nowhere the time, which I 
 have always found so necessary in making any 
 adequate impression. 
 
 In 1891, the professorship of political science, 
 owing to the sudden illness of Professor Perry, 
 became vacant, and I was asked to take his 
 place. I was very reluctant to undertake the 
 work, as it involved a change for the third time 
 of my primary line of study. I entered on this 
 labor with much anxiety, but have now finished 
 eight years successfully. It has been as productive 
 in my own experience, as any previous period, of 
 clearer and wider ideas. A thorough interest in 
 social construction has given direction and vitality 
 to my discussions. It soon became evident that 
 I could interest the minds of the students in these 
 stirring questions, and this fact at once restored 
 the confidence and pleasure of imparting knowl- 
 edge. I am sorry to have owed so little to the 
 liberality of Williams College, but if I can make it 
 owe something to me, that is still better. The years 
 during which I have held the professorship have 
 been as fruitful in study and in new ideas as any
 
 74 Things Learned by Living 
 
 years that have gone before them. I have intro- 
 duced aesthetics and English literature and now 
 sociology into the course of instruction at Williams 
 and, to my thinking, the last addition should be 
 the most significant of all. Sociology has not yet 
 won in colleges the position it is bound to ac- 
 quire, not so much as a new science as in furnishing 
 the ideas and motives under which economic and 
 civic principles are to be successfully developed. 
 In 1903 I encountered nervous prostration for 
 several months, followed for as many more months 
 by pleurisy. The attacks were severe and the 
 recovery has been tedious. Now, in my ninth 
 decade, I am in enjoyable health, though feeling 
 constantly that the coin in hand is nearly all spent : 
 I wait trustfully for a new allowance. Let God's 
 providence remain such as it always has been and 
 I am content.
 
 CHAPTER II 
 
 HEALTH 
 
 '"THERE is no term in life which is more simply 
 and directly good in itself, and none which is 
 a more immediate preparation for other blessings, 
 than health. It is difficult for any accumulation 
 of misfortunes to overcome the buoyancy of perfect 
 health, and no multiplication of gifts can lift alto- 
 gether the depression of ill health. The most 
 immediate exercise of reason lies in the govern- 
 ment and nurture of the body. It is astonishing 
 how slowly reason asserts itself at this point, how 
 easily it is defeated in its purposes and disparaged 
 in its authority. The mass of men, even of intel- 
 ligent men, treat their bodies as if they were a 
 kind of mysterious, supernatural, self-regulating 
 mechanism, put at their disposal for a fixed period. 
 In behalf of indolence, appetite, or ambition, they 
 overlook the obvious sequences of cause and effect, 
 and act as if the conditions of physical strength 
 were arbitrary or indeterminate or capricious ; as 
 if circumspection were a kind of feebleness from 
 
 75
 
 76 Things Learned by Living 
 
 which a strong man may well excuse himself. 
 This stupid disregard of hygiene is often associated 
 with a trust in medicine still more astonishing. 
 Remedies, whose relation to health no human 
 being can expound, are made to take the place of 
 the most obvious measures of self-control. The 
 terms of wise action are hopelessly confounded. 
 Reason beats a retreat in the government of its 
 own most immediate household. The wisdom of 
 the valetudinarian is slowly gained amid the 
 crotchets of baseless opinion, the insensate con- 
 cessions to appetite, and the fanciful remedies 
 of sheer quackery. Thus partial deprivation of 
 health often becomes its best friend, and full 
 enjoyment its most dangerous enemy. If one 
 wishes proof that man is only in a very limited 
 degree rational, where he touches the secrets of 
 his own life, he may find it in medical advertise- 
 ments, which are as much an effrontery to common 
 sense as were ever charms and love potions and 
 an evil eye. 
 
 My experience in matters of health has had some 
 instruction and some encouragement worth giving. 
 On a purely appetitive basis, a somewhat stern 
 temperance is the law of highest pleasure. The 
 appetite is thus maintained at the maximum point 
 of enjoyment, and neither undermines its own
 
 Health 77 
 
 pleasure nor other pleasures. I envy no man the 
 delights he has derived from any excesses of indulg- 
 ence, even the slightest. Some men doubtless re- 
 ceive very sensible pleasure from the use of tobacco 
 a habit, it seems to me, most unfortunate in its 
 physical, social, aesthetical, and spiritual affilia- 
 tions but I wholly disbelieve that the balance, 
 even of physical enjoyment, lies in this direction. 
 This habit so narrows in other more just appetites, 
 creates so many cravings, imposes so many incon- 
 veniences, offers so many offenses, brings such 
 frequent retribution, and so obviously falls off from 
 the higher standards of self government, that the 
 wise man, who has not been subdued to it intel- 
 lectually, as well as physically, will pronounce 
 against the habit on the ground of wide and well- 
 ordered pleasures. I have never regretted from 
 any point of view any act of temperance. I have 
 regretted from every point of view any excess of 
 appetite. Our physical sensibilities are the very 
 garden of reason, and its thrift, beauty, and fra- 
 grance demand the most delicate taste and tender 
 cultivation. 
 
 I was endowed with a sound, physical constitu- 
 tion, but not a vigorous one. I was never able to 
 generate as much nervous energy as my physical or 
 my intellectual activity called for; I was constantly
 
 78 Things Learned by Living 
 
 threatened either with a prostration of the entire 
 nervous system, or of some portion of it. The 
 force and tone of consciousness are largely deter- 
 mined by this portion of our constitution. The 
 world that niters in to us through an irritable me- 
 dium is very different from the world that enters 
 by a reposeful one. A tinge of color in the glass 
 through which we are looking may make the most 
 peaceful sky seem threatening. Without assent- 
 ing to any identification of the higher life with its 
 physical conditions, we must grant that the prob- 
 lems of life are much altered by the terms under 
 which they are thus expressed. The texture of the 
 cloud is not the light; but it intercepts the light, 
 or glorifies it, by its own quality. 
 
 In consequence of these narrow, nervous 
 resources, I have pursued a very sinuous path 
 between weakness and strength. Most days I 
 have reached, for a portion of the time, the region 
 of hilarious life, and nearly every day have sunk 
 into that of positive and painful depression. I 
 have rarely lost an entire day from work; in my 
 thirteen years at Wisconsin, I missed but one 
 recitation. Yet I have never been able to devote 
 an entire day to work, and have reached the limit 
 of my endurance with most of its hours still unoc- 
 cupied. I have entertained no fanciful theories
 
 Health 79 
 
 nor fallen into any extreme practices; yet each 
 smallest period has had its own narrow possibilities 
 according to the nervous tone, the intellectual 
 weather prevailing in it. 
 
 These are some facts, therefore, which my 
 delicate nervous organization has made plain to 
 me, and confirmed by long experience. One of 
 the most important of them, sufficiently obvious 
 in itself, is frequently overlooked in theory, and 
 constantly disregarded in physical training. The 
 principle is this, nervous expenditure in mental and 
 in physical activity are additive rather than com- 
 pensatory. They are compensatory only to this 
 degree: physical action, united with intellectual 
 effort, promotes circulation and nutrition, and so 
 helps to replenish the common resources of the 
 nervous system. Diversity in the form of effort is 
 better for health, and so for each form, than is 
 concentrated exertion. But all exertion is expen- 
 diture, and must be treated as expenditure. A 
 tired body is no preparation for an active brain. 
 Nor can a weary brain be resuscitated by physical 
 effort. Large stores of nerve energy may disguise 
 this relation ; they do not alter it. 
 
 It follows, therefore, that one must choose 
 between highly organized brain action, and in- 
 tensely developed physical powers. To attempt
 
 8o Things Learned by Living 
 
 to add the one to the other is to endanger both. 
 One may cultivate both in moderation, but the 
 double training will prevent the highest develop- 
 ment of either. The only limit to this assertion 
 is that there must be sufficient variety in our 
 action to maintain nutrition. The ruling fact 
 remains, however; intense, mental activity tends 
 to engross nervous energy, and must be allowed 
 to do so. Physical exertion does the same thing 
 in a less degree, and must be granted the same 
 indulgence. The proper resuscitation in both 
 cases is rest. 
 
 College games that aim at a powerful physical 
 organization, and subject that organization to 
 great strain under the idea that the body will thus 
 become a better instrument of the mind are a 
 serious mistake. All unusual powers of the body 
 or of the mind are cultivated somewhat at the 
 expense of other powers, and help to consume the 
 common energy. I have found the principle 
 involved in these statements undeniably true in 
 my own experience, and have had occasion to 
 observe it in the experience of others. One may 
 be a leader in boat races in college and still show, 
 as compared with one of very ordinary physical 
 strength, much less ability to bear protracted 
 mental effort. If college students choose to enter
 
 Health 81 
 
 the arena for the amusement of the public, the 
 reasons by which they justify their choice should 
 rest on physical grounds. They deceive them- 
 selves, if they suppose the best outlay of physical 
 energy prepares the way for kindred mental power. 
 A transfer of strength from the physical to the 
 mental world is not found among the ready con- 
 versions of force; and the multiplication of force 
 by such a transformation is impossible. 
 
 The first marked failure of my nervous system 
 to meet the demand made upon it disclosed itself 
 in an irritability of the eyes. Before I left college 
 spectra muscce volitantes began to show them- 
 selves, and later they became very numerous. 
 Though of not much moment in themselves, they 
 were very annoying by virtue of their pertinacity, 
 and by the apprehension they occasioned. At 
 first I watched them constantly, but when at length 
 I settled down to them as inconvenient, but not 
 dangerous visitors, I forgot them almost wholly. 
 When I returned as tutor to Williams, I found 
 occasion for close application to my classical work, 
 and this rapidly completed the mischief. My eyes 
 soon became so sensitive to light that they claimed 
 constant and careful adjustment to it in all situa- 
 tions. This lasted for years, till it was difficult for 
 me to conceive that light was not usually a source 
 
 6
 
 82 Things Learned by Living 
 
 of pain. The feelings that we project outward 
 on the world for any length of time seem to belong 
 to it more than to us. On leaving my college 
 work, I gave up wholly the use of my eyes for 
 reading and writing, and was not able to resume 
 it for seven or eight years. I then, slowly, in as 
 many more years, regained the power of employing 
 them a few hours each day. Of late years they 
 have rendered me all the service that my general 
 nervous vigor would allow me to ask of them. This 
 period of enforced relaxation was greatly relieved 
 by the aid of my wife in reading and writing. The 
 womanly and divine element of devotion came out 
 in full strength. This irritation of the eyes also 
 put a further limit on all close and protracted 
 thought. Any weariness of the nervous system 
 showed itself at once at this point. Improvement 
 was a very slow process of general recuperation 
 under light labor and much outdoor exercise. 
 
 The ready collapse of the nervous system also 
 showed itself as an occasional attack of neuralgia, 
 in protracted pain at the base of the brain, in ir- 
 ritability of the scalp, in sharp intercostal twinges, 
 rheumatism, and sciatica. This dismal array of 
 visitants is mentioned simply to show how many 
 spirits of mischief may be kept at bay by patient 
 hygiene. With exacting ambitions it was impos-
 
 Health 83 
 
 sible for me not to find, at some early moment, the 
 limits of strength; and having once found them, 
 I was never able to retire from them by any con- 
 siderable space or for any considerable period, but 
 I was able, by uniform temperance, wholesome 
 food, and much exercise, to force back defeat during 
 a long and not unhappy life. I was a foot pas- 
 senger, harassed by a half dozen wolves howling 
 in the rear; yet they drew sullenly back when 
 firmly confronted. 
 
 The point at which I have found it most difficult 
 to discover and to maintain a wise equilibrium has 
 been in the balance of physical and mental activity. 
 Both were congenial to me. If I had been content 
 to sacrifice intellectual work, I should have at- 
 tained comparatively robust health. Study has 
 always exhausted my nervous energy three times 
 more rapidly than muscular effort. I have been 
 slow to learn that outdoor air, with slight exertion, 
 is the proper corrective of mental fatigue. I have 
 been tempted to use at once any remainder of 
 strength in active labor in itself pleasant to me, 
 and sustaining that hereditary and acquired sense 
 of the useful, which has often ruled my feelings 
 in the very face of my judgment. Vacations, 
 entirely free from mental labor, may be devoted 
 to active physical effort, but even then great care
 
 84 Things Learned by Living 
 
 is needed in making the transition from thought to 
 work, and back again from work to thought. The 
 opening of a term was often accompanied by severe 
 attacks of nervous prostration. The fall term in 
 college frequently brings with it more than the 
 average number of sudden failures, due, I think, 
 to a violent change of habit. 
 
 The productive conditions of the world are so 
 tyrannical as to render the demand on us at once 
 intense and narrow. It is hard labor or hard 
 thought that is required of us. It is only by some 
 resistance and much painstaking that we can 
 so complement action by action as to present 
 some appearance of harmony and well rounded 
 robustness. 
 
 Peace is the most noble and the most difficult 
 attainment of life. The equilibrium and com- 
 posure of forces are their truest expression of 
 strength. Time is a supreme element in all con- 
 siderable changes. We are dropped in the midst 
 of eternity, and yet we exhort ourselves and exhort 
 one another to improve our time, as if it were the 
 first and only thing likely to give out. The exhor- 
 tation becomes rational only by virtue of an irra- 
 tional indolence which it is designed to overcome. 
 We may well be speedy in making processes of life 
 correct in kind, but the movement itself must
 
 Health 85 
 
 chime in with the slow moving years of God. The 
 pace of the world is exceedingly deliberate, since 
 the breadth of the movement constitutes its true 
 magnitude. It may not resolve itself, like a falling 
 stream, first into drops, then into vapor. It must 
 move quietly and productively, like a majestic 
 river, fed of all and feeding all. 
 
 The resources of our individual lives are in the 
 world. We must learn how to draw them thence, 
 and to return them thither. Time must be given 
 to the formation and correction of physical, intel- 
 lectual, and spiritual habits; modes of interaction 
 with our complex environment. Spurts of activity 
 and snatches of rest do not suffice. Time must 
 be conceded to the mind to come into large posses- 
 sion of great topics, to make familiar their bearings, 
 and to experience their diversified emotions. Time 
 must be granted time that leaves a broad and 
 lengthened trail on the face of eternity to bring 
 society together in a sympathetic hold on truth; 
 in a living rendering of truth under those affections, 
 which are woven into the complex web of life, not 
 along its primary dependencies merely, but through 
 all the intricacies of its perfected pattern. A 
 serene movement is the only wholesome one physi- 
 cally, as it is the only sound one spiritually; a 
 movement that gathers in, with fine reconciliation
 
 86 Things Learned by Living 
 
 and perfect contentment, the most manifold and 
 varied gifts of God. 
 
 An undertone of disappointment and despair in 
 life almost always arises from a chord that has 
 been struck awry in our physical constitution. 
 Happiness is the overflow of all the ways of life. 
 Life is hilarity, exhuberant strength, the gushing 
 up of the soul into light. The darkness of a somber 
 day is the shadow of some cloud ; the weariness of 
 the spirit is due to some physical obstruction which 
 has come between us and the light. We may not 
 have observed in what obscure ways or in what 
 moments of forgetfulness these clouds have stolen 
 into the sky, but there they are, and the glory of 
 the world fades from us. Life, large life, always 
 dips its web in purple. We should remember this 
 in making up our mental inventory of the well- 
 being of the world. The working classes often 
 have a serenity of physical strength, which is quite 
 their own. The discords of transgression have not 
 gotten, in anything like the same degree, into the 
 simple harmonies of their lives. However cap- 
 tivating the music, however deep its inspiration, 
 it all starts in a just and delicate touch of the 
 strings of the instrument we have in hand.
 
 CHAPTER III 
 
 RECREATIONS 
 
 \ 7ERY many put pleasure as the one com- 
 prehensive motive of action, and yet the 
 greater portion of our pleasures arise incidentally 
 in the pursuit of other things. A large share, per- 
 haps the larger share of the enjoyments of life is 
 incident to well-advised work, the work itself 
 having some ulterior end. If labor in itself were 
 simply burdensome, the gains of labor would but 
 poorly compensate it. As a matter of fact, it has 
 been more frequently found that the years of oc- 
 cupation are the pleasurable ones, and the years of 
 repose the weary ones. Not only are our pleasures 
 largely gathered along the highways of toil, amid 
 duties enforced by stern necessity or exacted by am- 
 bitious desire, but also the additional enjoyments 
 more directly sought for are only in one degree less 
 dependent on labor. Recreations receive their rest 
 from labor relaxed, and prepare us in turn for its 
 renewal. Among the many things we miss by a 
 too direct pursuit, the most subtle and evasive is 
 
 87
 
 88 Things Learned by Living 
 
 this very thing, pleasure; yet pleasure is said to be 
 the all-inclusive motive of action. It offers itself 
 rather as everywhere the incident of life, and is 
 fully attained and firmly held according to the 
 measure of the life it accompanies. The rhythmic 
 pulse of well-developed life beats between day and 
 night, wise labor and wise relaxation, wide effort 
 to make the world better and a wide relish of 
 it as it becomes better. 
 
 The two leading forms of recreation are the 
 enjoyment of nature and the enjoyment of men, 
 natural scenery and society. The last of these 
 is doubtless more comprehensive and carries with 
 it, in its higher forms, more spiritual nourishment, 
 but it is more dilute with evil, and far less repose- 
 ful. Nature chimes in with a weary spirit in a 
 much more coy and restful way than does man. 
 It gives only as we are prepared to receive, and 
 exacts nothing for what it gives. The healthy, 
 sober pulse of nature is quite another thing from 
 the fluttering pulsations of human thought. It 
 rests one as the arms of a strong man rest and 
 soothe the weary child. 
 
 When I went to college, I met, for the first time, 
 with mountain scenery, and it has yielded to me 
 the best relaxation and the most skillfully con- 
 cocted cup of physical and spiritual pleasures that
 
 Recreations 89 
 
 I have anywhere found in life. I have never been 
 in the presence of mountains without a kindred 
 uplift of feeling, nor climbed to their summits with- 
 out a sense of revelation that has widened the 
 spiritual horizon as well. 
 
 The poem of the mountains has been perused 
 with incessant refreshment. The presence of 
 others, with rare exceptions, adds nothing to the 
 influences that steal into the soul under the silent 
 induction of nature, the spirit catching a kindred 
 extension and tranquillity. Starting out for a 
 mountain trip, the spontaneous utterance has been, 
 " All day with thee, O God, all day with thee." 
 
 The ocean, in its magnitude and mobile strength, 
 is perhaps the most impressive object, to the senses 
 and the mind alike, of any terrestrial thing. But 
 there is a certain physical affinity which determines 
 the impression we receive from external realities, 
 as there is a spiritual sympathy which settles for 
 us the connections of thought. The ocean has 
 been to me an image of desolation, restless and 
 devouring. The seasick body becomes the sea- 
 sick mind, and the hovering gulls and chafing 
 waves and undying murmur along the ship's sides 
 disturb and torment every restful instinct in the 
 soul. Ceaseless and meaningless motion wears 
 the spirit away, as does the dull mechanical drop-
 
 90 Things Learned by Living 
 
 ping of water the rock. The refreshing activity, 
 on the other hand, of climbing the mountains, 
 brings out the joyous, conquering impulses, and 
 places life in sympathetic play with life, as it 
 clothes the broad slopes, gathers under the shelter 
 of rocks, or creeps lovingly over them. The reci- 
 procities of the mind with the world about us are 
 like the cooings of a child in its cradle, a thing of 
 sensations and unvoiced affections and an over- 
 shadowing presence. 
 
 There are three types of mountains. The first 
 and most familiar form, and one which may well 
 make up the staple of our sensuous pleasures, is 
 that found at Williamstown forest-clothed moun- 
 tains, with few bare summits or ragged flanks. 
 Hills hardly have the force of mountains until they 
 penetrate the region of clouds, and unite earth and 
 air. It is not enough that the mist, in rising, 
 trails along them, or that the storm descends upon 
 them, they themselves must be of the heavens and 
 full partakers in its significant moods. One must 
 look to them, as the laborer looks to Greylock, to 
 see the predictions of the weather. If the day is 
 brooding, it must brood on these summits; if it 
 is gathering storms, there must be their rallying 
 points ; if it is sweeping together the tenuous mists 
 of a summer's morning to dismiss them, like a
 
 Recreations 91 
 
 flock sent afield, into the empty areas of the sky, 
 the last visible traces must lie along these slopes. 
 It is their interplay of earth and air that gives to 
 the mountains half their fascination, and they are 
 not mountains unless they rise with relish into 
 this fellowship. Mountains become lines of meas- 
 urement in cloud scenery. They help to define its 
 masses, make real its positions, and open up its 
 spaces. The mind is thus borne definitely out- 
 ward and upward from one step to another. The 
 stability of the mountains gives reality to all that 
 is associated with them. The features of the sky 
 lose their dreaminess and remoteness and unre- 
 lieved form. The unfailing yet mercurial beauty 
 of the heavens calls for this contact with the earth, 
 or it floats away from us and is lost. Our eyes are 
 not lifted to it, and do not penetrate it. Sunsets, 
 of which mountains so often rob us, owe their 
 power in large part, to the fact that so many tints 
 of brilliant color are poured out along the horizon 
 and thence travel to the zenith. Spaces are once 
 more defined for us. The tent of the sky rises 
 high above us, yet droops everywhere in gorgeous 
 bands to the earth. 
 
 Forest-clad mountains have a nearness to, a 
 fellowship with the forms and wants of life, a 
 clinging to the earthward side of things, which make
 
 92 Things Learned by Living 
 
 them the most friendly expression of beauty, and 
 give them, if not the strongest, the most constant 
 hold on the feelings. Beauty has in them a domes- 
 ticity, which is found only here and there in nooks 
 and sheltered retreats of higher ranges. 
 
 The second form is illustrated in the Rocky 
 Mountains. We have in this type an elevation 
 which passes beyond the timber line, and enters 
 the region of perpetual snow and constantly return- 
 ing storms. Yet the summer months have a vital 
 force everywhere. The snow nearly disappears, 
 and the spaces between the timber and the sum- 
 mits are covered luxuriantly with grass and flowers. 
 Though there are fine forests and many plants 
 along the slopes and watercourses, the sense of 
 barrenness predominates, and a feeling of desola- 
 tion, as the ranges are viewed from their lofty 
 peaks, clings to the landscape. Grandeur and 
 strength and beauty are on all sides, and yet there 
 is no predominate force, either of living things or 
 of elemental energies, which fills the mind. It is a 
 region of conflict between the two tendencies, with 
 variable results here and there. The storms, with 
 scarcely an intimation of their coming, envelop 
 the summits and sweep along the ridges. Ascend- 
 ing Pike's Peak I have been suddenly overtaken by 
 a snowstorm, seen it in a few minutes pass by me
 
 Recreations 93 
 
 and sink below me, and shortly leave a long stretch 
 of upland glittering in the sunlight with the purest 
 possible mantle. There is much grandeur in these 
 mountains, but hardly the same sweet peace, which 
 belongs to lower ranges; nor the overpowering 
 sublimity of higher ones. 
 
 The third type of which the Alps are an example, 
 with somewhat greater height penetrate to the 
 very heart of strife, and by their vexing, stubborn 
 tops create permanent centers of storm, and treas- 
 ure houses of ice and snow. Along their slopes 
 and through their tortuous ravines the glaciers 
 creep perpetually down to the plains, and dissolve 
 away amid the affluent life, which climbs their 
 sides and crowds its way to the very edge of des- 
 olation. The cold streams, which burst from be- 
 neath the glaciers, the glaciers, which forever weigh 
 down the streams mark the overlap of the conflict- 
 ing forces. Summer and winter, construction and 
 destruction, the warring elements that invade the 
 open spaces and the flowers that spread into them 
 wage an interminable warfare, retreating and ad- 
 vancing with the rhythm of the seasons. I know 
 of no revivification of the entire life like a long 
 tramp in the Alps, whose changes lie so close 
 upon one another, are so sublime, so tender, so 
 instinct with power. The shifting of scenes is so
 
 94 Things Learned by Living 
 
 frequent that one, with any fair measure of 
 strength, is glad to be left to what becomes one's 
 own sweet will amid these perpetual enticements. 
 The method of movement most in fellowship with 
 the world is walking; next, but quite a way off, 
 is riding, having taken to ourselves fellowship with 
 a life a little lower than our own. 
 
 Mountains owe their first and simplest power 
 to their magnitude, magnitude upward, which most 
 of all impresses us. A more important feature 
 is their combination and grouping. Hills that 
 hardly attain the elevation of mountains, as in 
 the Lake country of England, may, by variety of 
 outline, centers of strength, and lines of retreat pro- 
 duce all the minor impressions of bold scenery. A 
 third source of power is the diversity of life, which 
 accompanies them, its uplift and large presenta- 
 tion. The crowning force of the mountains is 
 their fellowship with the air. Their summits are 
 points of transfiguration. It is here that a sweet, 
 dreamy feeling of victory over the world pervades 
 us, a feeling that, without separating us from it, 
 puts it under our feet, and leaves it floating in 
 softened form and color in that highest, remotest 
 sense, vision; but carries it quite away from all 
 nearer senses and immediate uses. There are a 
 liberty of feeling and a spiritual tone begotten
 
 Recreations 95 
 
 at once of the freedom and of the purity of the 
 place. 
 
 It is a great aid to recreation to have a some- 
 what extended knowledge of some branch of 
 natural science, and so a growing interest in it. 
 Such a pursuit helps to impart that definiteness of 
 aim which is necessary to give point even to the 
 pleasures of the mind, and relieves us from taking 
 up such amusements as fishing and hunting, which 
 are at war with the peace and beauty of nature 
 and which appeal to much lower sentiments. That 
 a destruction of the most sensitive and expressive 
 objects in the world should go hand in hand with 
 our enjoyment of that world is a betrayal of brutal 
 impulses amid rational insights; a presence of 
 Satan among the sons of God. I have found 
 botany to fulfill this purpose of definition ad- 
 mirably. I have only regretted that I have not 
 made my knowledge more ample and exact. Yet 
 the mind must be somewhat easy going in its 
 recreations. 
 
 Two fine arts blend with and grow out of a love 
 of nature, landscape gardening and architecture. 
 No fine art unites strong sensuous and intellectual 
 impressions more distinctly than architecture. In 
 the interior of a grand cathedral, wit and work- 
 manship, the subtility of the mind and the cunning
 
 9 6 Things Learned by Living 
 
 of the hand are at their boldest, if not at their high- 
 est expression. Fine architecture in fitting sur- 
 roundings is the most visible and emphatic example 
 of concord between nature and man. The enjoy- 
 ment of it is as intense, and as easily renewed, as 
 is that of nature itself. 
 
 True recreation does not so much recreate as 
 create the mind. While it brings again to an edge 
 the tools of labor, it puts labor itself in a new, a 
 larger, and a better relation to the world. We are 
 apt to think of recreation as something indulged in 
 for the sake of labor ; it is quite as just to look upon 
 labor as something undergone for the sake of recre- 
 ation, for a better grasp of the emotional world 
 to which we belong. Systematic recreation is no 
 small part of life as giving illumination and insight 
 to its toil. Neither is well save in the full reflec- 
 tion of the other. 
 
 Fortunately more men find relief in social relaxa- 
 tion than in rustication. I have owed my habitual 
 preference for the solitude of nature in part to a 
 weariness that grew more weary among men. 
 Men make a demand that it requires some vi- 
 vacity to meet, while nature steals in restfully at 
 every sense, giving all and asking nothing. Nature 
 is the more divine, the more creative, the more 
 recreative.
 
 Recreations 97 
 
 Society brings ready refreshment to those who 
 love it, and have strength to bear it, but it leaves 
 the temper of thought much as it finds it saving 
 ever that higher intercourse, which most of all 
 things vocalizes for us the mind of God.
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 
 PERSONS 
 
 T SHALL speak of but few persons, and those only 
 who have shown remarkable quality and have 
 been well known by me. My experience has led me 
 to feel that the differences in power among men 
 are less than our imagination is wont to make them 
 to be. One who overpasses the ordinary standard 
 but a little, takes a position quite in advance of 
 his fellows. The limit in human life is compara- 
 tively close and firm, and to make a sensible im- 
 pression on it becomes a great feat. Superiority 
 on the race-course is an affair of seconds and half 
 seconds. 
 
 Though circumstances do not make men, men 
 are much indebted to them for the esteem they 
 enjoy. The microscope magnifies the object with- 
 out altering it. This is especially obvious when 
 the traits of character, which give eminence, are to 
 be displayed in action. The war of the rebellion 
 produced a crop of heroes, which would hardly have 
 been grown without it. In all probability, General 
 
 98
 
 Persons 99 
 
 Grant would have remained an ordinary man in 
 men's estimation but for this event. 
 
 One is usually intimately acquainted with those 
 only in his own department of labor. The phase 
 of power they show is familiar; though all real 
 power has much the same inner validity. The 
 honor bestowed by us on high qualities in public 
 life is greater than that we accord to talent shown 
 in literature, in the professions, in business, or in 
 invention Yet the difference is one of conspicu- 
 ousness rather than of inherent strength. Most of 
 those who have occupied public attention in poli- 
 tics, and whom I have had the opportunity to know, 
 have shrunk under near observation to something 
 very moderate in itself, but magnified because the 
 sense of greatness, the possibility of growth, which 
 it imparts, are so much to us in all forms of attain- 
 ment. The ambitions and reverence of the race 
 attach themselves instantly to those who gain the 
 front, even by a little, and so the heart of humanity 
 pushes by their means onward. Judging as we do in 
 a narrow and sensuous way, we are more quickly 
 aware of this superiority in one calling than we are 
 in another, and so we misproportion our esteem. 
 
 The first man of unusual power with whom I 
 came in close contact was Dr. Hopkins. Dr. 
 Hopkins was a man of very generous gifts in body
 
 ioo Things Learned by Living 
 
 and mind. He easily made himself felt by his 
 personal presence, his manner of expression, and by 
 what he had to say. There was very little passion 
 in his address, but there were breadth and insight 
 and force. Though he addressed himself more to 
 the intellect than to the feelings, his words carried 
 with them a quiet, and occasionally a strong, 
 undercurrent of emotion. He was never entangled 
 in the subtleties of thought in oversight of its 
 practical uses, yet the uses he sought for were more 
 often larger uses than those which concern some 
 immediate form of action. He moved chiefly in 
 that middle region which lies between current 
 events and speculative discussion. The men of 
 action did not find themselves much moved by 
 him, and the men of recondite thought were not 
 often aware of his presence. While his chief in- 
 fluence flowed outward toward the world of real- 
 ities and the nourishment of social institutions 
 and religious sentiments, it reached men, as the 
 waters of irrigation reach plants, through many 
 secondary and receiving channels. 
 
 His great mastery, and it was a notable power, 
 lay in putting ideas, moderately profound, so as to 
 attract and to stimulate active, educated men 
 men engaged in the ordinary pursuits of life, and 
 who rise somewhat reluctantly into the region of
 
 Persons 101 
 
 pure thought. He was a man of the masses, but of 
 the educated masses, and only through them did he 
 approach that deeper and darker stratum of society 
 which bears us all up. In lucid, penetrative, and 
 forceful statement of relatively abstract concep- 
 tions, he rarely failed of high attainment. That nu- 
 merous band of the best men who, in the hard fight 
 of life, often covet a cup of those cool, refreshing 
 waters of truth, which spring deeper than the 
 surface, looked to him with unfailing reverence and 
 admiration. Thus, year after year, his annual bac- 
 calaureate discourses appealed to the entire body 
 of the alumni. At each meeting of the American 
 Board he expounded and strengthened those sen- 
 timents which underlie and ennoble the great work 
 of missions. In thus uniting the speculative and 
 the practical in an expository process that ad- 
 dressed itself to culivated minds, he found the path 
 of highest service. It was not a result, however, 
 that he reached designedly so much as one which 
 belonged to the very constitution of his mind. His 
 powers of elaboration were admirable in their exer- 
 cise. His method of unfolding and of presenting 
 truth was not primarily a logical process. He had 
 no especial relish for logic, nor did he ever care to 
 teach it. It was not the skeleton'of truth that he 
 was at pains to construct but its immediate, living
 
 102 Things Learned by Living 
 
 body. He enriched his premises with inductive 
 data, and did not expect the wine-press to yield 
 wine till he had filled it with grapes. Herein he 
 showed his close affiliation with the practical in- 
 terests of life. He did not weary himself and 
 others by an analytic movement too narrow in 
 its terms to enrich the heart, but strove, rather, 
 to weave thought and feeling into a wise compre- 
 hension of our immediate but better life. He 
 penetrated deeper than the surface of things, but it 
 was always with the hope of striking veins of pure 
 water and giving them an immediate outlet up- 
 ward. He did very little for truth's sake simply. 
 He did very much for conviction; for those who 
 were to receive the truth and to be enlivened by it. 
 His habit of mind was leisurely and unexacting. 
 He rarely did anything which was not required of 
 him by the circumstances in which he was placed, 
 but these requisitions, when they arose, he met 
 promptly and fully promptly, however, in the 
 sense of being ready when the time came, not in 
 the sense of anticipating it. All his works were 
 the product of a specific demand, and sometimes 
 suffered from the narrowness of the occasion. 
 Thus the Outlines of Man, delivered as lectures, 
 was a meager outcome of fifty years spent in the 
 pursuit and the instruction of philosophy.
 
 Persons 103 
 
 He suffered the limitations, as we all must, of 
 a dominant bent. He was so successful in the 
 easy, critical action of a vigorous mind; so enjoyed 
 liberty of thought, and was so influential over 
 others and profitable to them by means of it, 
 that he came to entertain something very like 
 contempt for hard study and close scholarship, 
 as things he had not found necessary. He was not 
 a scholar in any department, and can hardly be 
 said to have given himself at any time in any direc- 
 tion to continuous inquiry. He was a good gleaner, 
 caught quickly the reflection here and there of 
 expanding knowledge, and with much boldness 
 proceeded at once to weave these snatches of 
 insight into the tissue of his discourses. If he 
 had lived a little later, when the demand had be- 
 come more exacting, he would have prospered less. 
 The data of sound judgment on social theories and 
 spiritual principles are now too many, too recondite, 
 too extendedly historical, to be reached by indolent, 
 even though it be gifted, observation. 
 
 German philosophy he was disposed, with very 
 slight apprehension of it, to pronounce futile. 
 He had neither a bitter, nor an arrogant, but a com- 
 fortable contempt for any fruitage in the intel- 
 lectual vineyard that did not yield at once a full 
 stream to the pressure of thought he could apply
 
 104 Things Learned by Living 
 
 to it. He had but slight sympathy with those 
 many painful explorations, that search for one 
 thing and finding another, with that mapping of 
 desert areas which necessarily accompany all wide 
 surveys. He had to the full that confidence which 
 goes with strong powers, and those of us who were 
 hard at work felt that his satisfaction in us was 
 united with the least bit of pity that we found so 
 much labor needful. He enjoyed the first fruits 
 of thought, and found them sufficient to meet his 
 purposes and satisfy his tastes. For this reason 
 he sometimes mistook repellant for unfruitful toil. 
 He never mastered few theologically trained 
 minds do master the methods of scientific reason- 
 ing, and so was never prepared to judge its results. 
 This want of mastery arises from a want of fami- 
 liarity with extended inductive inquiry, and shows 
 itself in not feeling to the full the accumulative 
 powers of a wide-spread empirical argument. Who 
 shall call himself wise in these forms of thought? 
 Some are swept before converging facts as if the 
 convictions of mind were mere driftwood on the 
 current of events; while others stand braced in 
 the stream, swaying and staggering, determined 
 to cross it at right angles. The men we need are 
 those who can unite induction and insight, science 
 and philosophy, in an harmonious whole of ample
 
 Persons 105 
 
 rendering, who, planted in the midst of the diver- 
 sified facts of the world, can rise above them into 
 the atmosphere of pure reason. Dr. Hopkins 
 did this in a good degree, in the large, yet restricted 
 region of inquiry with which he was familiar, but 
 he never much increased his earlier range of vision 
 by wide study, deep speculation, or real familiarity 
 with the new terms of construction which our time 
 is constantly giving us. His uniform popularity 
 with the cultivated and devout, yet busily oc- 
 cupied, class which he addressed, was due to the 
 fact that he stood within easy range of their vi- 
 sion, and, from an eminence, gave fresh authority 
 to their own indolent conclusions. 
 
 Dr. Hopkins was primarily a rhetorician, yet 
 a rhetorician of the noblest order. His presenta- 
 tions rested on wide principles, clearly and coher- 
 ently put, with apt enforcement, and with no tricks 
 or conceits of method. A sense of soundness and 
 breadth uniformly accompanied his words, and 
 this, with an unfailing dignity of manner, built 
 up and retained that very unusual and universal 
 respect which was so freely accorded to him. 
 
 Dr. Hopkins was, in many particulars, an admir- 
 able teacher, and the force and prestige of this fact, 
 in a large college community with which he was 
 so long associated, became very great. His chief
 
 io6 Things Learned by Living 
 
 merit as a teacher was that he went, at once, to the 
 substance of his topic, with an animated and inter- 
 esting play of thought. He was quite sure to 
 awaken the mind of the pupil, and put it "in act 
 and use." He was formidable in the recitation 
 room, but not in the least dogmatic. The student, 
 aroused to eager inquiry, might catch, if he were 
 not cautious, a ridiculous fall; but he was never 
 pushed aside with mere brute force. A lively 
 sense of humor was present, if not to relieve the 
 immediate embarrassment of a mishap, at least to 
 diminish the permanent sense of pain. Few have 
 equalled him as a teacher in a lively, gracious inter- 
 change of ideas with those under his direction, and 
 to many, therefore, he became the first vigorous, 
 intellectual presence thay had encountered, and 
 went with them, in this delightful relation, through 
 all their lives. The alumni of Williams were very 
 fond of returning to a conviction which President 
 Garfield tersely put in the assertion, "A bench, 
 with a student at one end and Dr. Hopkins at the 
 other, makes a well-endowed college." This was 
 with them a pleasant and dignified casting of a 
 rich mantle over somewhat threadbare garments. 
 That the method of Dr. Hopkins reached its 
 primary purpose with the majority of students, is 
 undoubtedly true ; and that it suffered some severe
 
 Persons 107 
 
 limitations seems to me equally true. While many 
 were awakened to activity, few were prompted to 
 enter on any patient and profound research . Ready 
 strokes of comprehension were more current than 
 protracted investigation . While the unusual vigor, 
 which belonged to Dr. Hopkins, prevented degen- 
 eration into superficial and verbal dialectics, his 
 bold, self-contained movement anticipated that 
 assiduous, empirical, historical consideration of 
 an entire topic, which can alone give safe conclu- 
 sions. Here again Dr. Hopkins hit the cultivated, 
 rather than the scholarly mind. While the 
 alumni of Williams have gained much from their 
 long relation to one great man, they have also 
 suffered from it. Alumni meetings and reunions 
 perhaps this is true of like gatherings in other 
 colleges, I have sometimes feared it is have lacked 
 that clear, breezy, progressive atmosphere, which 
 ought to be native to our higher institutions. I 
 have often been reminded at our alumni dinners of 
 the lines, 
 
 " They gently yield to one mellifluous joy, 
 The only sweet that is never known to cloy 
 Bland adulation." 
 
 All things are dangerous in the degree of their 
 goodness, admiration among them.
 
 io8 Things Learned by Living 
 
 The department of thought, in which the labors 
 of Dr. Hopkins were the freshest and most success- 
 ful, was ethics. He presented an ingenious theory 
 of morals with happy points of construction within 
 itself, but one which fails to be adequate, because 
 it strives to occupy intermediate ground between 
 the two great historic schools of morals, doing full 
 justice to neither of them. A more thorough 
 acquaintance with these schools would have led 
 Dr. Hopkins to see that they cover the entire field, 
 and that they cannot be put together, by parts 
 and patches, into any third thing. Many others, 
 however, have shared this futile effort with Dr. 
 Hopkins. His great adroitness was strikingly 
 shown in his defense of his ethical system against 
 Dr. McCosh. With the weaker side of the ques- 
 tion, he managed, if not to win the verdict, at 
 least to adjourn the case. 
 
 There is no question we can ask of more moment 
 concerning any man, especially one in the position 
 of Dr. Hopkins, than, what was his moral force? 
 Men in physical struggles may rank according to 
 the physical powers at their disposal; in the con- 
 flict of policies, by their intellectual vigor, but all 
 lower forms of influence must, in determining ul- 
 timate values, be brought to the test of the moral 
 ideas which underlie them. No man can be wise
 
 Persons 109 
 
 without wide moral sensibilities; since it is these 
 sensibilities which disclose to him true terms of 
 action, man with man. One might as well expect 
 to be a great architect without understanding 
 methods of construction, as to be sagacious in 
 social renovation without apprehending the inner 
 force of sentiments and the outer forms of law, by 
 which men are bound to each other. 
 
 Religious sensibilities are the most vital and 
 pervasive which lie between men. There are three 
 phases of a positive religious life; one which 
 nourishes religious sentiments and is earnest in 
 their propagation; one which strengthens religious 
 convictions and is clear and constant in their en- 
 forcement ; and one which is occupied with philan- 
 thropic reconstructions of society and a fresh 
 ordering of facts under them. The first form 
 belonged distinctively to Professor Albert Hopkins. 
 It is the form to which the devout mind is wont to 
 attach the most value, as holding in it all germs of 
 propagation. Professor Hopkins possessed and 
 was possessed by religious sentiments more pro- 
 foundly and habitually than any other man I ever 
 met. His was the prophetic spirit which abides 
 in the region of spiritual vision, the temperament 
 which gives pervasive power to spiritual principles 
 and receives constant life from them. There was
 
 i io Things Learned by Living 
 
 always a movement in the valley of dry bones when 
 his path lay through it. His spiritualized imag- 
 ination at once knit together truths, dead to other 
 men, in vital relations. He was the only man 
 who ever, for a moment, carried me beyond the 
 sober connections of reason. 
 
 Dr. Hopkins belonged to the second type. His 
 religious influence was permanent, but chiefly 
 intellectual. His nature was not an emotional one, 
 and even when he gave expression to pathos, it 
 carried with it to some minds an impression of 
 unreality. It was a natural division of labor 
 between the two brothers that when the elder 
 had laid down the ways of righteousness, the 
 younger should compel men to walk in them. 
 Each of the three types is admirable, if sufficiently 
 enlarged by the other two. The third, or active 
 type, is the most divine, if it is sustained by wisdom 
 of thought and depth of sentiment. 
 
 Dr. Hopkins, in the liberality of his religious 
 convictions, stood in the first solid rank of the 
 church to which he belonged. The natural free- 
 dom of his mind carried him thus far, while his 
 keen sense of urgent practical interests prevented 
 his going farther. It was rare indeed that he 
 either fell behind, or stepped in advanced of this 
 position the position of most immediate honor
 
 Persons 1 1 1 
 
 and influence. He did not seem so much to aim 
 at this result, as spontaneously to reach it by a 
 natural balance of forces. He knew very easily 
 and very thoroughly the whereabouts of those 
 whose opinions he respected, the movable centers 
 around which the thoughts of men were beginning 
 to revolve. His intellectual and emotional habitat 
 always lay in that region. Dr. Hopkins was a 
 sagacious man, and sagacity, when it companions 
 with devotion, always frequents this border-land, 
 where the past and the future are commingling. 
 Studying principles, not so much for their own 
 sake and for their ulterior relations, as for their 
 immediate uses, he saw at once and felt these uses, 
 and was not easily driven beyond them. His bent 
 was that of the builder who knows the existing 
 demand and strives to supply it, not that of the 
 architect ever rearing in imagination edifices whose 
 materials are yet hidden in the mountains, and 
 whose realization no man asks at his hand. 
 
 There is here a discrepancy between our pure 
 and our practical ideals, which shows how little 
 men are at one with one another resting on 
 the same organic centers. The admirers of Dr. 
 Hopkins, and they were not only very many but 
 very wise and very earnest men, would be quite 
 likely to receive the statement, with pause, that
 
 ii2 Things Learned by Living 
 
 Dr. Hopkins, gravitated, by moral habit, into 
 the first ranks, but never took the position of a 
 leader in front of all ranks. That which they 
 accept uneasily when offered as a speculative 
 theory of conduct, they especially delight in when 
 brought to bear on action itself. No man is so 
 honored as one who can keep well within the front 
 lines and yet be there felt as a progressive force. 
 This method is the realization of instant, practical 
 power. Much may be said for it, and it may be 
 commended on many sides. Into this path, the 
 reason and the instincts, the clear perceptions and 
 obscure feelings of Dr. Hopkins carried him. That 
 cogent thought and far-off promise of the future, 
 which are ever pushing us beyond the plane of 
 personal contentment and social acquiescence, 
 do not merely bring immediate discomfort, they 
 necessarily bring much censure from the good men 
 who are keeping things safe and taut. A sound 
 philosophy of our higher life lies very largely in 
 understanding all that is involved in these asser- 
 tions. The inner calling of a man is determined 
 by whether he harks before him or harks behind 
 him. 
 
 Society is organic by virtue of the sympathetic 
 submission of man to man, this imperious control 
 of man by man. If it were essentially reduced,
 
 Persons 113 
 
 division and dispersion would immediately follow. 
 Some men, like Edmund Burke and Dr. Hopkins 
 in his degree feel these organic forces in their 
 every vibration, and work as tentatively and 
 timidly among them as the surgeon whose knife 
 is separating quivering tissues. Every community 
 strong within itself must have this conservative 
 instinct, and also an equally vigorous progressive 
 temper to work upon it. The one is vital material, 
 the other vital power The resistance of conser- 
 vation is sustained by the inertia of men, and by 
 the convictions of a few eminently wise men, who 
 fear the dissolving force of change on the safe- 
 guards of custom. The progressive movement is 
 chiefly due to a few earnest, ethical minds, sup- 
 ported by the restlessness of men under one or 
 another evil. Customs and moral convictions are 
 the two contending and constructive energies in 
 society. When these convictions are clear and 
 forceful, customs may be relaxed and reformed; 
 when moral judgments are vacillating and way- 
 ward, the safe bonds of custom must be drawn the 
 closer. A breaking away from familiar methods, 
 when there is no supreme sense of right to guide 
 the action, is the bursting of water through the 
 sides of the reservoir which contains it. The 
 radical leader, because of the force, it may be the
 
 ii4 Things Learned by Living 
 
 sufficient force, of ethical sentiment in his own 
 mind, sets little store by the restraints of custom ; 
 and the conservative leader, distrustful of the 
 popular temper, looks with alarm at any relaxation 
 of existing ties. He has little confidence in a suc- 
 cessful replacement of the old by the new. This 
 balance of sentiments, holding one another in check 
 at points of growth, is the essential condition of 
 progress. It is not easy to supply either of them 
 in a wise form, and least easy is it to furnish the 
 incentives of movement. Whenever this progres- 
 sive sentiment is present, in any high degree, it 
 necessarily begets antagonism. There is no pos- 
 sibility of applying a positive push to society 
 without being made painfully aware of its inertia. 
 There may be faults of temper in the manner of 
 doing it but they do not constitute, though they 
 may often be thought to do so, the real obstacle. 
 The chief difficulty is found in the unavoidable 
 collision of tendencies: no amount of tact, which 
 does not smother the moral forces involved, can 
 escape the conflict incident to growth. The ulti- 
 mate illumination and correction of society lie in 
 this very struggle of ideas. The cogency and the 
 success of the movement are inseparable from each 
 other. 
 
 Those who prepare the way for progress, those
 
 Persons 115 
 
 who propound methods in advance of the time, 
 and familiarize men's minds with them, have, of 
 necessity, an irksome task. They not only sepa- 
 rate themselves from the masses of men, but also 
 from those prudent, successful men, on whom guid- 
 ance and authority are devolving. They sacrifice 
 ease and honor and confidence in behalf of a phase 
 of growth not yet in sight. They lead the most 
 solitary, and the most useful, lives of any class 
 of men. Their strength is the self-contained 
 strength of convictions held in close and painful 
 conflict with the doubts, perplexities, and hostili- 
 ties of the times to which they belong. Seeking 
 the well being of men, they would gladly win their 
 sympathy and approval, but they are forever cut 
 off from them by the spiritual spaces which 
 divide them from those they would help. 
 
 Perhaps the one thing which brings most trial to 
 social leaders is the fact that they are compelled to 
 bear the opprobrium, and that from the better 
 men of the time, of being unwise, imprudent, 
 untrustworthy men. They are the more sensitive 
 to this reflection as it is the very thoroughness and 
 carefulness of their methods of inquiry that force 
 them on to their conclusions. Because the new 
 idea is a mine of truth barely opened, it furnishes 
 no current coin, and men can easily deny that it
 
 ii6 Things Learned by Living 
 
 will ever do so. The domineering present has its 
 own way, and honors those who have the compara- 
 tively easy office of keeping it true to its traditions. 
 Men have a dull faith that improvements arise 
 of themselves in each stage of the world's gestation, 
 and have no observation for the first filaments of 
 thought which precede these changes. 
 
 Under these conditions of progress, those who 
 deal with institutions are situated very differently 
 from those who deal with ideas. The latter should 
 insist on the liberty of thought and keep the hori- 
 zon clear; the former must accept the material 
 most immediately applicable to purposes of sup- 
 port and construction. Those men are fortunate 
 in their honors and fortunate in their pleasures, 
 and render an admirable, though inferior service, 
 who, standing near the centers of change, help to 
 steady, to restrain, and to direct the movement. 
 This was the position of Dr. Hopkins. He appro- 
 priated the conditions of growth, which began to 
 offer themselves so readily that they seemed to be 
 of his own providing, and he directed them so saga- 
 ciously to their proper service that he appeared to 
 be a master builder. May we have many men of 
 this especial power, though not at the cost of those 
 more penetrative, self-contained, and remote minds 
 who work up the obscure terms of thought until
 
 Persons 117 
 
 they are within the reach of the assimilative 
 processes. 
 
 It is wise to be satisfied with our limitations as 
 well as with our powers. The desire to combine 
 incompatible forms of service is vexatious, weari- 
 some, and weak, and leads us at once to injustice 
 in our estimates of men. To do one thing well 
 in that very complex and difficult process by which 
 society is carried forward, even if it be nothing 
 more than holding fast the stays which prevent it 
 from swerving in its course, is quite sufficient. In 
 the throws of fortune determined by the intri- 
 cate interplay of one's powers with one's circum- 
 stances, Dr. Hopkins more often won doublets and 
 triplets than any man I have ever known. Not 
 merely astonishing, but uniform and admirable 
 success, went with him through his entire life. 
 The sweep of his thought was exactly that which 
 enclosed sufficient of the present and struck far 
 enough into the future to interest and to excite 
 men without alarming them, and one uniform 
 shout of approval, not loud but intelligent and 
 assuring, accompanied his every effort. 
 
 This result was aided by a dignity and com- 
 posure of manner which consorted well with his 
 breadth of thought. He was not a man of strong 
 or impulsive feeling, and was almost never driven
 
 ii8 Things Learned by Living 
 
 from his intellectual equipoise. In meetings of 
 the faculty, things were sometimes said, in the 
 heat and discrepancy of opinion, which were 
 unkindly and irritating. He was rarely ruffled by 
 them. His self-restraint enabled him readily to 
 parry attack, and to put his opponent in the wrong. 
 He had a lively sense of humor and a cheerful, 
 social disposition, which rendered him very com- 
 panionable. His hold on young men, and on men 
 in general, became very strong. His adroitness 
 and slowness to commit himself occasionally lost 
 him the entire confidence of the more enthusiastic, 
 but this was compensated by retaining the con- 
 fidence of the larger number. 
 
 The most serious restriction in his influence arose 
 from the want of a laborious, progressive move- 
 ment in his own intellectual experience, and the 
 narrow sympathy incident to it with the advance 
 of others in knowledge. Most of those young 
 men who returned to the college as tutors and 
 professors found their second relation to him less 
 pleasing than their first. There was something 
 in the changed conditions to make this natural, 
 but it arose chiefly from a lack of interest, on his 
 part, with hard work. In my own case, he soon 
 lost the hold upon me which he had previously 
 had, and might easily have retained. I quickly
 
 Persons 119 
 
 felt that I must prosecute my studies independ- 
 ently of his appreciation A little belligerency of 
 speculative thought between us might have ex- 
 plained this in part, had it not been an experience 
 repeated by others whose pursuits were remote 
 from philosophy. The underlying difficulty in 
 each case was this, his lazy, reposeful strength 
 rendered him indifferent to diligence and slightly 
 scornful of it. This attitude helped again to keep 
 him in contact with those half-trained college 
 graduates who control practical affairs, and have 
 not much time or taste for research; but it lost 
 him any stronghold on scholarship. 
 
 During his presidency, the college was char- 
 acterized by a wakeful, effective temper, with 
 comparatively little accurate and extended knowl- 
 edge. If it had not been for the superior personal 
 power of Dr. Hopkins, this result would have been 
 felt to be very unfortunate. The majority of in- 
 structors do not have, and can hardly be expected 
 to have, intellectual powers as vigorous as to com- 
 mand attention by their own movement simply. 
 They must supply this deficiency by extended 
 acquisition, and the ability to give the student 
 thoroughly the data of thought. Indeed such men 
 are of great value in a college faculty, no matter 
 what may be the more attractive endowments of
 
 120 i nings Learned oy civmg 
 
 their colleagues. Dr. Hopkins was by far too 
 indifferent to the formation of a select corps of 
 professors, each able in his own department to 
 call out and to reward the labor of the student. 
 
 Each man, like a plant or an animal, has his 
 habitat, and must be judged in connection with 
 it. To disparage what one does because of that 
 he leaves undone, or to extend the honor of his 
 achievement beyond the bounds peculiar to him, 
 are alike unfavorable to that sober thought which 
 must give us our standard weights and measures 
 in the spiritual world. Knowing him long and 
 well, I thankfully accord great honor to Dr. Hop- 
 kins as one who helped to keep open the paths of 
 truth; knowing him long and well, I must also 
 recognize the fact that he was but an indolent 
 explorer in that exhaustless realm yet to be sub- 
 jected to us as the sons of God. 
 
 The instructor to whom I have been most 
 indebted was Laurens P. Hickok; with whom I 
 took my course in systematic theology at Auburn. 
 This indebtedness arose partly from an affiliation 
 of tastes, and more from his own great intellectual 
 and spiritual powers. He was a man of almost 
 perfect candor and catholicity. The personal ele- 
 ment disappeared, save as a warm, genial interest 
 in truth, in his students, and in their pursuit of it.
 
 Persons 121 
 
 We were received, as those who were to explore 
 for ourselves fresh continents, into large and inex- 
 haustible resources of enthusiasm. Doubt and 
 uncertainty were as much in order as belief, and 
 the mind was trained to take possession with 
 cautious conviction of its own captures. There 
 was no distrust of truth or of God's leadership into 
 it, no narrowing down of its range, no depreciation 
 of the mind as an instrument of inquiry, no dog- 
 matic enforcement of conclusions already attained. 
 Freedom was given to all our powers in a large 
 way; freedom was felt itself to involve the most 
 undeniable feature in the divine plan. I would 
 place no light value on the honesty and openness, 
 which frequently accompany scientific inquiry, 
 but it is far more difficult to secure this spirit in 
 handling principles which intimately concern con- 
 duct, principles with which all the dearest ties of 
 life are intertwined, and which touch facts often 
 obscure and remote in their interpretation. Those 
 months of study under Dr. Hickok were the most 
 delightful and exhilarating of any that I have ever 
 known. I felt the safety of a strong man guiding 
 my thoughts in new and bold research. 
 
 Dr. Hickok was a decided intuitionalist, and by 
 his Empirical Psychology and his Rational Psy- 
 chology has done much to make more clear and
 
 inmgb i^earnea oy living 
 
 convincing the proof of the native grasp of the 
 mind. To understand without the power of un- 
 derstanding seemed to him an impossible achieve- 
 ment and an absurd principle. Whatever haste 
 and presumption may attach to this school of 
 philosophy, it is able, as no other school is, to 
 awaken and to elevate the thoughts. Dr. Hickok 
 was an instructor, whose manner and method were 
 wholly enjoyable and he stood with those, who 
 were best able to appreciate his power, the vener- 
 able hierophant of a perfectly pure and peaceful 
 spiritual cult. The elevation of a transcendental 
 faith gained in him constant, proportionate, beau- 
 tiful expression. 
 
 For a long time after I left the seminary, I 
 remained in close communication with Dr. Hickok. 
 His cosmic philosophy, for a time, greatly inter- 
 ested me and I often carried my inquiries to him. 
 I slowly, however, came to see or thought I 
 came to see that these speculations transcend 
 the sound data of both our intellectual and sensu- 
 ous experience, and that they can lead, therefore, 
 to no profitable results. The terms of thought are 
 vague, are expanded under a highly etherialized 
 imagination, and leave behind them no verifiable 
 conclusions. One's conceptions were an inter- 
 lacing of sunbeams, lost with each shifting of the
 
 Persons 123 
 
 clouds. While holding fast the essential principles 
 of intuitionalism, I turned for their expansion and 
 correction to the empirical methods. The con- 
 clusions that I have thus been able to attain, if 
 more narrow, are also more secure, than are those 
 reached by the transcendentalism of Dr. Hickok. 
 
 Dr. Hickok was strongly influenced by German 
 philosophy, having made an intellectual gymna- 
 sium of the works of Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel. 
 The boldness and freedom, which belong to these 
 upper ranges of speculation, were very native to 
 him. In theology, his opinions bore a sober, 
 liberal cast and rendered him a very desirable 
 instructor. His method was somewhat difficult 
 and obscure for young men who had no predilec- 
 tions for philosophy; but a rare love and reverence 
 were felt toward him by those who were prepared 
 to be profited by his work. His life, in its even 
 flow of graces, was one greatly to be coveted for 
 the children of God. " Let the beauty of the Lord 
 our God be upon us." A fine, measured spirit of 
 philanthropy and of affection was with him always. 
 Memories purifying, strengthening, and stimula- 
 ting gather around him in all the higher ranges 
 of thought. 
 
 In Andover Seminary, I met Dr. Park and Dr. 
 Shedd. Dr. Park had a very subtle, analytic
 
 inmgs i^earnea oy Living 
 
 mind, was exacting in his temper, and fond of con- 
 trol. His theological system was so liberal and so 
 well sustained that one might be content to see it 
 prevail, but in his own hands it carried with it so 
 much of the stress of personal feeling as to give it 
 somewhat the effect of dogmatism and to em- 
 barrass the mind in receiving it. He moved freely 
 himself, but he wished his flock to keep close behind 
 him. His powers were brilliant. An acute intel- 
 lect and incisive rhetoric made him formidable, 
 and he was not unmindful of the fact. He was 
 willing to have it so. His personality was not 
 swallowed up in the truth, and it was a piece of 
 good fortune if the truth was not swallowed up in 
 his personality. It was quite possible for his pupils 
 to have for him a very reverential regard, espe- 
 cially that portion of them who added docility to 
 quick apprehension. 
 
 Dr. Shedd was a lovable man, but possessed a 
 mind that was a curiosity in its mediaeval char- 
 acter. The most extreme views were held by him 
 in quiet conviction, with complete oversight of the 
 outrage on common sense and growing knowledge 
 involved in them. The realism of the scholastic 
 era renewed itself in this good, genial, able man, 
 so belated in the world's history. It was very 
 pleasant to come in contact with him, because
 
 Persons 125 
 
 he was thoroughly a man, and because he was a 
 revelation of things that have passed away. One 
 of the least progressive temper could hardly believe 
 in him, much less do him justice, without knowing 
 him; and could not know him without wondering 
 how such insoluble truths, broken down in his 
 intellect and heart, could recrystallize in such pure 
 and gentle affections. 
 
 Perfect success in theological instruction in a 
 progressive period, and especially when associated 
 with the liberal temper which characterizes our 
 Congregational churches, is very difficult of attain- 
 ment. A theological seminary must, of necessity, 
 be conservative. It stands as the representative 
 of the church to which it belongs, and of the 
 authoritative instruction within that church. 
 Authority, even though it be purely spiritual, 
 must be cautious and critical. It destroys itself 
 by any other attitude. Unitarianism has too dis- 
 persive and rare an atmosphere to retain its own 
 strength. Religion is not simply a theory of truth, 
 but conclusions deeply implanted in the popular 
 mind with the sentiments and actions which 
 accompany and sustain them. Faith cannot 
 change more rapidly than life changes, without 
 losing its hold on life, and missing its office. Yet 
 it is an unmitigated misfortune when the accredited
 
 i2o inmgs Learned by Living 
 
 expounders of a faith move less rapidly than the 
 Christian life about them, and weaken truth by 
 allowing it to become antiquated in expression. 
 The truly beneficent professor of theology lives in 
 close contact with his own time; is thoroughly 
 aware of its latest attainments and changing 
 sentiments; and is yet at one with that grand, 
 historic, divine movement of which these mani- 
 festations are only passing phases. The force of 
 the common life as it pushes onward, continuous, 
 irresistible in volume, levelling all barriers and 
 filling all chasms, full of a momentum that extends 
 to every part of it should often be impressed on 
 every one and on none more than on those, who 
 attempt to expound the spiritual truths which 
 spring from the insight of gifted minds, but suffer 
 the correction and accept the uses of all minds 
 perhaps it would be more exact to say, those 
 spiritual truths which arise in the service of all 
 men, and are brought out in the clear consciousness 
 of a few men. To stand firmly in the present, 
 between the past and the future, with accurate 
 exposition on this side and prophetic vision on 
 that, is to be a messenger of God. There is no 
 position I would have more coveted than that 
 of a professor in a theological seminary. But I 
 came early to see that I could not keep step with
 
 Persons 127 
 
 any church, and must of necessity be a voice crying 
 in the wilderness. 
 
 I would be glad to leave my own tribute of 
 admiration and love to Dr. Bushnell. I met him 
 but a few times and am hardly entitled to say more 
 than so many are able to say who have entered into 
 his rich, literary, intellectual, and spiritual life. He 
 was a supreme product of the best productive 
 powers of New England. 
 
 The one man of all whom I have known, who was 
 most delightful to me in simply personal inter- 
 course, was Professor Charles F. Gilson. In his 
 college course, he suffered an injury in the knee in 
 wrestling. It became the occasion of a permanent 
 irritation of the nervous system which subjected 
 him to a life-long discipline of pain and prostration. 
 It softened and enriched his temper, without dis- 
 tressing or weakening it. He was a man of fine 
 literary taste, artistic and spiritual insight; not 
 over-ready of belief nor inclined to disbelief ; vol- 
 atile and warm in sentiment, and with a sportive, 
 tripping imagination enlivened by humor and 
 sobered by sympathy. One was able at any time 
 to obtain with him that most enjoyable experience, 
 an easy ramble in the higher and more emotional 
 regions, without being compelled by any cogency 
 of argument either to advance new positions or
 
 128 Things Learned by Living 
 
 to defend old ones. That pushing of the thoughts 
 against one another, which soon becomes vexing, and 
 may easily be narrowing, was {readily escaped, and 
 the additional pleasure and comprehension were 
 secured, which belong to friends of like and unlike 
 susceptibilites who travel together through a mag- 
 nificent landscape. So few can move in the spirit- 
 ual world awake to its music, and yet not tensely 
 strung to an old melody and an enforced measure. 
 Professor Gilson, without leaving anything to 
 his friends but those bright memories by which we 
 save the past from the extinguishing stroke of 
 oblivion, and stretch our lives backward under a 
 sense of moving things and many years, was ex- 
 ceedingly useful and stimulating in a wide circle of 
 acquaintances. We are so ruled by that instinct 
 of individuality which impels us to grasp hastily 
 at personal distinction, that we do not at once 
 recognize the beauty of a life that flows noiselessly 
 into the lives of other men, and gives them volume, 
 depth, and purity. We may be more interested in 
 the monumental stone which stands on the bank of 
 the river and is soon left behind,ithan by the rivulet, 
 which empties into it, keeps pace with it, and main- 
 tains its strength. Professor Gilson was a con- 
 stant disclosure of the freshness and perfection 
 of an experience, quietly centered in itself, yet
 
 Persons 129 
 
 in eager ministration to the pleasures of others. 
 My intercourse with no one has been less fatiguing, 
 more refreshing, more diversified and free like 
 the following of mountain paths than the famili- 
 arity I enjoyed with him for many years, yet years 
 too few. The world is sensibly less habitable for 
 me now that he is gone from it. The ear finds 
 that a familiar echo has become remote and indis- 
 tinct. The deep forest that gave rise to it has been 
 swept away. Blessed is he who makes the world 
 spiritually vocal. 
 
 The one man who has been to me the most 
 constant, as well as the most intimate of friends, 
 has been Professor Arthur L. Perry. Warm 
 friendship imposes obligations as well as confers 
 pleasures. I have always felt it unwise to allow 
 the formation of these bonds unless one could wear 
 them gracefully and gratefully. Repeated and 
 vexatious readjustments destroy their value. 
 There must be freedom and naturalness in them, or 
 the compensations multiply beyond the gains. 
 Yet it is a pity that one should have no ties but 
 those of the household and those of acquaintance- 
 ship. Those of the household are too nearly allied 
 to personal interest, and those of intercourse are 
 too light and changeable. Neither quite covers 
 the region of strong, spiritual affiliations. The
 
 L,cttincu uy 
 
 knitting of friendship, an integration of the life that 
 is neither imperative nor indifferent is one of the 
 most positive, vital, and perfect of enjoyments. 
 Yet its essential condition, no matter how much 
 pleasure it may confer and how many duties it 
 may impose, is freedom. A true friendship is the 
 spontaneous, organic product of our better im- 
 pulses. It grows, therefore, rather than is formed, 
 and not often do the fortunate conditions of its 
 development return to us in our lives. The 
 attachments of childhood are accidental and 
 ephemeral, and in late periods we yield our regard 
 very gradually, if not grudgingly. We feel the di- 
 viding force of events quite as much as we feel the 
 uniting power of convictions. Early manhood, 
 with its ripening judgments, hearty enthusiasms, 
 and untrammelled action is the true era of ffriend- 
 ship. Young men of like spirit, if planted together, 
 may grow together, as interlocked trees. Yet the 
 simile is only a partial one, for the integrity of 
 every strong nature is too great to accept much 
 modification that is alien to its own type. 
 
 Professor Perry and I spent many years in close 
 contact in kindred pursuits, and under this affinity 
 a friendship grew up that has easily borne all the 
 strain of life, and has been perennially fruitful. 
 While solitude is almost necessarily the habit of
 
 Persons 131 
 
 the thoughtful mind, it is a solitude that may be 
 delightfully broken by one who comes without 
 intrusion and departs without circumstances. Nor 
 is a close concurrence of convictions an essential 
 of friendship. Friendship demands integrity, is 
 the product of entire confidence sustained by a 
 general affiliation of tastes. 
 
 Professor Perry was a man without guile. He 
 entertained no devices and fostered no tricks. The 
 absolute transparency of the man was unusual. 
 It occasionally laid open his inner consciousness 
 too deeply, but it left no wounds, no uncomfortable 
 sense of things covered up. His frankness was 
 accompanied with courtesy, but was not closely 
 affiliated with it, as there was so little in his thought 
 over which he had occasion to cast this form of 
 concealment. 
 
 He combined a very positive, even dogmatic 
 temper with one of much modesty and deference. 
 What he knew he thought he knew absolutely a 
 feeling very common to laborious and painstaking 
 minds and what he did not know, he was ready 
 to learn in the freest way of any one. His mental 
 landscape was not one of lights and shadows, the 
 visible and the invisible melting into each other, 
 but one of well-defined and carefully traced parts, 
 side by side with unmapped portions. The culti-
 
 inmgs ^earned oy living 
 
 vated field and the open forest bordered on each 
 other. Much as I regarded him, a regard that 
 rarely suffered any jar, I often chose to sit quietly 
 in the shadow of my own thoughts rather than to 
 venture out with a contradiction, a criticism, a 
 suggestion, into the sultry domain of his economic 
 and political speculations. No light touch was 
 possible, and a heavy hand was disagreeable and 
 unprofitable. I have usually been ready for an 
 occasional struggle, but I very much dislike to be 
 compelled to contend convulsively for the very air 
 I breathe. Our thoughts thrive best on the gentle 
 insinuations of truth, which neither compel nor 
 bar our own activity. 
 
 Professor Perry was the apostle of free trade, and 
 did hard and successful labor in Economics. If 
 one may desire opinions more qualified and sym- 
 pathetic than those of the Professor, he may also 
 be advantageously reminded that the action of 
 society is the resultant of opposed forces, and if 
 the economist is to give his theories their due share 
 in the final diagonal of movement, he must not 
 hesitate in their assertion, nor be slow to put them 
 in definite contrast with conflicting beliefs. This 
 necessity Professor Perry readily accepted, and 
 though he may have suffered somewhat in his own 
 thinking by the process, he did the work, and did
 
 Persons 133 
 
 it well, that had fallen to him. His type of char- 
 acter was a decided one, and one ruled by deep 
 convictions. If he had striven to soften it to suit 
 the tastes of others, it is possible that he might 
 have been more agreeable, it is probable that he 
 would have been less useful, and quite certain 
 that he would have been less a man. We may well 
 broaden our movement, but for ends of strength 
 every part of it must yield concurrent momentum. 
 As the waves divide more and more in the wake of 
 a steamer, so the expansion of thought for a vigor- 
 ous mind lies chiefly in the rear. It encounters 
 the obstacles before it with a sharp prow. It is 
 only the opinion of an indolent, purposeless thinker, 
 which comes gracefully curving downward to the 
 perpendicular out of the sky and so sends an even 
 ripple in all directions. 
 
 In 1899, Professor Perry published the last 
 volume of his history of the town and college. It 
 met with severe criticism as containing matter un- 
 just and too personal, especially in connection with 
 Dr. Hopkins, Dr. Chadbourne, and Dr. Carter. 
 These discussions were in entire keeping with the 
 character of the Professor, who was wont to go 
 directly at the facts without much regard of con- 
 ventionalities. The facts have not been stated 
 in all cases as I understand them. Dr. Carter is
 
 134 Things Learned by Living 
 
 treated with undue acrimony. The faults of the 
 book are not to be explained on the theory of 
 "a softening of the brain," but rather on that of 
 a somewhat too full flow of Scotch-Irish blood. 
 The general views of the purposes of a college, its 
 government, and interior construction are emi- 
 nently just. 
 
 A friend from whom I have been much separated 
 but whose regard has suffered no languor thereby, 
 has been Professor Edward Orton. He was a man 
 of a most independent but most gentle spirit, 
 devoted to natural science yet ever in search of 
 the clues of spiritual truth ; ready to believe, yet 
 finding it hard to believe under the repulsion of 
 the irrational forms in which faith is so often 
 offered. Our lives were enclosed in somewhat the 
 same ellipse, though we occupied its opposite 
 foci. Psychological truths were of chief interest 
 to me, though I rejoiced to see them reflected by 
 external things and gathered at a cosmic center. 
 Material relations were his primary study, though 
 he was ever anxious that they should become paths 
 of light into impalpable regions. 
 
 We began our acquaintance in our theological 
 course at Andover. In our very different lines of 
 pursuit, we both passed, by similar divergence, 
 from the lines of inherited belief. Meeting but
 
 Persons 135 
 
 rarely, on each occasion, we sought anew our spir- 
 itual bearings. His generous regard, to which all 
 acts of goodwill were spontaneous, has helped to 
 give me a better hold on the trustfulness and rest- 
 fulness of the human heart, to disbelieve the 
 "vanity and vexation" of life. Is not this the 
 most divine service any man ever renders us? 
 
 All along that dividing line which separates 
 friends and acquaintances, I have found many 
 delightful and worthy men, so many as to give but 
 little excuse or palliation to my own social failures. 
 I can only plead that my reticence has usually been 
 the separation neither of pride nor of indifference, 
 but the instinctive retirement of one, who feels 
 that most of his pursuits are removed from the 
 immediate interest of those about him, and that 
 the spaces which must be traveled are already too 
 wide for his strength. A good deal of the over- 
 flow of life arises from the redundancy of vitality. 
 This physical impulse has almost always been 
 wanting in me. The words have died on the lips 
 because of the physical languor back of them.
 
 CHAPTER V 
 
 FORMS OF WORK 
 
 """THE chief occupation of my life has been that of 
 a teacher. This was not a premeditated 
 result, but one which grew out of circumstances. 
 My preparation and purpose looked toward the 
 ministry, and not toward instruction. The call to 
 a professorship in Williams College, at a moment 
 when its acceptance seemed desirable, settled the 
 question of a vocation. The rough-hewn intention 
 assumed an unexpected form under the moulding 
 force of events. It has been a decided preference 
 with me, though the principle bears a somewhat 
 passive and feeble appearance, to shape my choices 
 to conditions I had not myself secured. I have 
 not liked to apply for places nor to force results. 
 I have loved to feel that the shuttle of life was not 
 driven both ways by the same mechanical, cal- 
 culated stroke ; that it played between those wide 
 providences, which rule the world and my own 
 immediate purposes under them. One's lines of 
 preparation may well be definite, but when they 
 
 136
 
 Forms of Work 137 
 
 strike events they may also well be flexible under 
 these new forces. 
 
 The idea of "a call" is a pleasant one, and not 
 an unphilosophical one, if we mean by it a willing- 
 ness to walk in any open path which seems to in- 
 vite us. That that labor is assigned us, which lies 
 most directly under our hand, is certainly a more 
 generous and concessive view than that we are to 
 pursue unswervingly that which best pleases us. 
 Our overruling of the world, after all, goes but a 
 little way; and it is better to give ear to its 
 intimations than to wait till they become com- 
 mands. Our wills should guide us, as the steers- 
 man his boat, according to the windings of the 
 channel. 
 
 There seem to me to be four primary qualities 
 in good instruction, the power to impart informa- 
 tion, the power to guide the pupil in its acquisi- 
 tion, the power to awaken the mind to a love and 
 mastery of knowledge, and the power to disclose 
 the essential unity and composite scope of truth. 
 The professional necessity sinks from the first 
 to the last, the personal inspiration rises from the 
 beginning to the end. The lower excellence can 
 hardly be secured without some measure of the 
 higher, and the higher ceases to be permanently 
 fruitful without a large measure of the lower.
 
 inmgs Learned oy Living 
 
 One cannot impart information well without being 
 able to distinguish between central and circumfer- 
 ential, constructive and incidental facts; and 
 this he can do only as the result of wide insight. 
 To give vantage points to the pupil, to lead him 
 to commanding outlooks, is a first pleasure to the 
 teacher, and an office he cannot fulfill without very 
 considerable breadth of thought. The clues of 
 knowledge are discoverable only by those who are 
 wise. An instructive storing of information, as 
 a squirrel gathers nuts, is but a poor parody on 
 the pursuit of truth. Nowhere does the letter 
 kill more quickly and finally than in education. 
 Erudition is the vanity and vexation of our higher 
 pursuits, the much study which is not only a weari- 
 ness to the flesh, but ultimately to the spirit also. 
 
 Perhaps no branch of knowledge, in its acquisi- 
 tion, better illustrates the wrong and the right 
 method, than that of language language which 
 has so many conventional intricacies to which we 
 can attach a factitious value, and language which 
 sends so many delicate fibers into the fruitful 
 soil of historic, artistic, and ethical development. 
 
 On the other hand, the amplification of thought 
 can neither be continuous, secure, nor broad with- 
 out a full and critical possession of the data which 
 are their proper support. The vine must have the
 
 Forms of Work 139 
 
 wall, the tree, the frame ; without them its twistings 
 and attachments become but a tangle of hopeless 
 involutions. It is at this point that erudition, 
 which seems recondite and remote, may regain 
 at once its footing by opening up an unexpected 
 clue among facts. These, however out of the 
 way they may appear to be, may still have vital 
 connections. The relation of the two is simple and 
 permanent. Knowledge is the proper food of 
 thought, but the disclosure of mental relations is 
 the only real mastery of knowledge. 
 
 There is a good deal of error and yet more stupid- 
 ity in the current tendency to decry metaphysics. 
 It frequently arises from a very vague idea of what 
 is meant by metaphysics, and is often accompanied 
 by a fresh exhibition of the very fault it is the 
 purpose of the critic to censure. Metaphysics, 
 as a philosophical and spiritual rendering of the 
 world, needs constant correction, but it remains 
 forever the most subtle form of our intellectual 
 activities, making life pungent, inspiring, and wor- 
 shipful. If we should eliminate the reasons of 
 things, either in their more or their less obvious 
 relations to mind, we should store empty nuts, 
 nuts whose shells had been perforated and their 
 life plundered, or nuts whose shells were too hard 
 for our teeth. That we should ever be forbidden
 
 140 Things Learned by Living 
 
 the highest uses of knowledge, because they are 
 at the same time the most difficult and the most 
 inexhaustible uses, is a queer consummation of 
 inquiry. 
 
 The function of instruction, the widest and the 
 most worthy, is the disclosure of the world as an 
 harmonious, sensuous, intellectual, and spiritual 
 product. A knowledge of parts and minor pro- 
 cesses has but a restricted service until we are able 
 to see something of the inner force of the one whole 
 in which they are combined. Nor let it be charged 
 up against philosophy, that its conclusions are 
 variable and indeterminate. This difficulty inheres 
 quite as much in the largeness of the theme as 
 in the inadequacy of the presentation; and this 
 magnitude, this infinity is 'the foremost medium 
 of penetrative thought. Would we complain of 
 the clouds that they come and go in so many un- 
 definable ways? Would we sweep the heavens of 
 them, or put blotches of paint in their place? 
 
 The most serious evil, associated with the 
 present tendency in education to special depart- 
 ments, is that the immediate uses of knowledge 
 are allowed to take the place of its widest spiritual 
 ministrations. The mind is made microscopic in 
 vision and minute in method, rather than truly 
 comprehensive and penetrating. That teacher
 
 Forms of Work 141 
 
 alone is a great teacher who, with the outer bear- 
 ings and sensuous forms of truth, leaves a vital 
 sense of the way in which things, events, spiritual 
 processes flow into one another, and together build 
 up a universe of marvelous scope, inextinguish- 
 able activity, absolute unity, and growing intel- 
 lectual light. Here is the true solution of the 
 problem of religious instruction. Dogmas of faith, 
 blazed points along the path of revelation must 
 forever be subordinate to the actual, spiritual 
 world which receives them. They may help us 
 to find our way through it, but it is its own light 
 that gathers in their light and enables us, in the 
 end, to understand both it and them. The deepest, 
 best religious instruction can never be the enforce- 
 ment of doctrine, it must ever be a wider revela- 
 tion of the complex world, physical and spiritual, 
 which will enable us to see how this world accepts 
 the doctrines brought to it, expounds, modifies, 
 and combines them into the Kingdom of Heaven, 
 what statements are rejected, what retained, and 
 what reshaped by the flow of spiritual events 
 Godward. The best exposition of faith may but 
 vaguely define faith, so called, and yet be a real 
 and comprehensive deliverance of the indissoluble 
 interlock of physical and spiritual forces in the 
 universe of God. Religious instruction must
 
 142 Things Learned by Living 
 
 discover to the mind the grace and eternity, the 
 infinite resources and irresistible force of the 
 divine thought. Reason, immeasurable, pure, and 
 perfect, must seem to pervade the world in urgent 
 correction of its evils, in an hourly disclosure of 
 the growing resources of life. The movement in 
 mind and the movement in things must synchro- 
 nize in revelation. This is religious instruction, 
 and all short of it is temporary, apologetic, frag- 
 mentary. The conflict and clamor of religious 
 opinion, like the collision of waves, is on the sur- 
 face. Drop deeper, and all is peace. 
 
 The antagonism of science and religion, of 
 belief and belief, is due to a want of comprehen- 
 siveness, an inability to correct conviction by con- 
 viction, truth with truth, and to see that these 
 adjustments must forever shift their form by 
 virtue of that movable equilibrium, which con- 
 structive yet contending energies are ever assum- 
 ing in their onward sweep. 
 
 Students accept good things gratefully. Second- 
 ary faults may mar a teacher's relations to his 
 pupils, but, if he has insight and gives his vision 
 unreservedly to them, the deeper enthusiasm 
 awakened will make light of failures, or impart 
 to them their own fascination as points of broken 
 color. There will be a consensus of life, like a
 
 Forms of Work 143 
 
 full stream flowing from the mountains, clear, 
 vocal, and strong. 
 
 Successful instruction in profound topics is 
 most delightful, for it is the leading afield and 
 shepherding eager appetites in the spiritual world. 
 
 Preaching, though a primary purpose, fell into 
 the background in the actual unfolding of my life. 
 I have preached continuously some nine years, 
 and discontinuously some four or five years more. 
 A want of continuity is a great abatement in the 
 influence of sermons and in their disciplinary 
 power. I have never taken much pleasure in dis- 
 courses ordered by accident in the time and place 
 of delivery, and having no close connection with 
 the general flow of thought finding its way in the 
 lives of the hearers. Not till life touches life are 
 words, the flowers of life, fructified. 
 
 There are two very distinct forms of preaching, 
 one that assumes an adequate possession of truth 
 and looks chiefly to its popular enforcement, and 
 one that institutes an ever fresh inquiry into truth, 
 tracing tentatively its variable relations to action. 
 A preacher, whose method is of the first order, will 
 cheerfully accept, and will profit by any amount of 
 repetition. It is said that Whitefield did not 
 reach his full force in any given discourse until he 
 had repeated it many times. His purpose was
 
 144 Things Learned by Living 
 
 immediate conquest with given weapons. The 
 handling of the weapons was the secret of success. 
 His aim was impression, his manner, histrionic, 
 his force, the pressure of passion. Perfect famil- 
 iarity, therefore, with what he had to say, and a 
 complete elaboration of method were essentials of 
 entire success. What is called eloquence, both in 
 the pulpit and on the platform, is more frequently 
 a product of this order. Eloquence, extraordi- 
 nary power in enforcing truth, attaches, from the 
 nature of the case, chiefly to some conventional 
 routine of thought. Convictions that are already 
 accepted and need only to be awakened in fresh 
 activity are its proper subjects. The office of 
 eloquence is to give sudden tone to the mind, as 
 the energy of a galvanic battery is restored by 
 renewing the bite of its liquid. 
 
 An inquiry into truth, on the other hand, is 
 predominantly intellectual, not emotional. The 
 new presentation cannot win at once such general 
 assent, nor so awaken familiar feelings as to become 
 the occasion of the stirring appeal. The orator 
 leads the masses along broad and open highways 
 rather than through obscure paths of exploration. 
 The occasional discourse, therefore, in order to win 
 the power of eloquence, must assume the chief 
 points of discussion on common grounds of
 
 Forms of Work 145 
 
 thought, and throw its full strength into their en- 
 forcement. Repetition does not necessarily wear 
 out this movement, but may increase its dexterity. 
 It may also imply a predominant interest in rally- 
 ing men to a standard, rather than an interest 
 in advancing the standard to some new position. 
 
 One, whose words are the fruit of an immediate 
 and interested activity of one's own mind on themes 
 which seem to one's capable of fresh and more 
 adequate presentation, finds decreasing satisfaction 
 with each recurrence of effort, after that effort has 
 once prospered. The freshness of thought is lost, 
 and no excellency of manner comes in to take its 
 place. He is walking in the fields after the sun is 
 well up, the dew off, the flowers closed, and the 
 fragrance out of the air. An uninspired memoriter 
 movement takes the place of the eager, animated 
 vision of the mind. I have almost uniformly 
 found that the later renderings of a subject I had 
 once mastered were unsatisfactory, unless a 
 period had clasped sufficient to put the memory at 
 rest, and to leave the inventive powers once more 
 freedom of action. Even the most beautiful 
 scenery needs absence to gain its hold upon us, 
 and to unite a new and an old revelation into some- 
 thing better than either. The constant fading 
 out of thought is necessary to its restored tension
 
 146 Things Learned by Living 
 
 and additive force. It is by no means a simple 
 misfortune that we forget so much. Forgetful- 
 ness is like sleep, it gives a fresh edge to all our 
 energies. The intellectual food that passes vitally 
 into the system returns to it not as food but as 
 strength. If we remembered all that we acquired, 
 we should be confined much more than we now 
 are to the dusty highways of thought. We should 
 find ourselves in the least interesting phase of 
 travel, the wide, well-beaten road that approaches 
 a city. It is dangerous to know very much and 
 to remember it all. The mind thereby loses the 
 relish of knowledge. 
 
 I must think that there is something not more 
 rare but better than eloquence, the movement of 
 the mind of its own sweet will, in changeable ways, 
 through all the seasons of thought. The necessity 
 of eloquence is put upon us by flocks we are com- 
 pelled to drive and cannot lead into adequate 
 pasture. The eloquent man is a good driver of 
 men. 
 
 Continuous preaching has two felicities. It 
 demands a productive spiritual mood and tends 
 to beget it. The mind is led to search for those 
 clues, by which things and events lead upward into 
 a higher life. It also compels the preacher to 
 be familiar with the whereabouts of men. He is a
 
 Forms of Work 147 
 
 truly empirical, yet spiritual interpreter of society. 
 One of the worst results of a severe system of doc- 
 trine is that the facts, in their most significant and 
 divine import, are daily over-ridden by a distorting 
 theory of them. The true preacher adds obser- 
 vation to insight, interprets the divine word as 
 it runs side by side with the divine work in the 
 world, and so is ever winning new points of depar- 
 ture and return, of instruction and correction in 
 the Kingdom of Heaven. If he is lifted as on 
 wings, his flight is still from position to position, 
 from place to place, and he makes his home on 
 the earth as certainly as if he only hopped along 
 the ground. The eloquent preacher renews his 
 inspiration by a fresh audience, the thoughtful 
 preacher by a new service to be rendered to the 
 same audience. The parallel rails which bear 
 his car along are the inherent relations of truth 
 and the immediate wants of men. Here lie all 
 his demonstrations. The want discloses the truth, 
 and the truth satisfies the want. The wise engi- 
 neer in spiritual affairs, pressing the figure a little 
 farther, lays down his road-bed along a graded 
 incline, in which the theoretical and the practical 
 so wisely concur that all the hopes of our lives, 
 like the burdens of commerce, are borne by its ins 
 and outs, its ups and downs, prosperously on their
 
 148 Things Learned by Living 
 
 way. Our immediate march is made not merely 
 toward, but also in the Kingdom of Heaven. We 
 have passed the frontier, and are now pushing 
 forward toward its wealth-laden centers. 
 
 The preacher is properly an explorer and guide, 
 and only half does his work when he falls back on 
 exhortation, no matter how cogent. Eloquence 
 simply closes up the ranks of an army, whose lines 
 of advance have been determined for it. The 
 preacher deals with all the sanctities of religion in 
 their daily ministration. Some may think this 
 ministration his primary purpose, to which preach- 
 ing is only incidental. This is the formal order, 
 but the inherent relation is the reverse of this. The 
 true preacher is a priest because he is a prophet, 
 not a prophet because he is a priest. He ministers 
 in the most sacred relations of life because he is 
 at one with them in insight and temper; because 
 he comes forth from their spiritual penetralia. 
 It is then that he puts on his priestly robes. In 
 the mechanical inversions men are always making, 
 they have put the priestly before the prophetic 
 function, and have bidden the preacher to confine 
 himself to the routine of religious thought rather 
 than to explore spiritual realms. The aim is 
 religious habit, not religious life, a repetition of 
 one thing, not the winning of all things.
 
 Forms of Work 149 
 
 The never ending, never failing purpose of the 
 preacher is to attain, for himself and for others, 
 through himself and through others, the spiritual 
 theory of life, and to give it a growing expression in 
 the actions of men. This purpose will result in 
 very different forms of presentation according to 
 the current of events in the time to which one 
 belongs. The doctrinal preaching of earlier years 
 was not, certainly not as a whole, misplaced. Men 
 were predisposed to a theoretical discussion of 
 their relations to God and to the world. There 
 was an intellectual and a spiritual demand at this 
 point. They were doing their best to give these 
 relations better expression. New dimensions were 
 called for in this direction. That they should 
 partially fail was a foregone conclusion. The 
 narrow and hard forms of existing relations neces- 
 sarily imparted their own severity to the intel- 
 lectual formulae of them, which were offered. Yet 
 the thoughts were broadened, the feelings deep- 
 ened, and one great realm ceased to be unknown 
 and untraversed. The new conceptions were 
 better than the old, better than the doubt and 
 superstition they displaced. 
 
 In our time individual character and social con- 
 struction in themselves inseparable terms are 
 in the foreground. The mind of prophetic in-
 
 150 Things Learned by Living 
 
 sight is called on to furnish the clues of conduct, 
 the paths in the social world, which lead to the 
 Kingdom of Heaven, as an actual, a transcendent, 
 a universal achievement. The prophet and the 
 two elements of prophecy, insight and foresight, 
 are inseparable must master his own time in its 
 relation both to the past and to the future. Lessons 
 by rote taken from the past lack both courage and 
 guidance. The true preacher is always bearing 
 the latest message in the Kindgom of Heaven, 
 that Kingdom, whose inexpugnable term is growth, 
 whose felicity it is to maintain the poise of motion 
 between the conflicting temptations, the excesses, 
 and the defects of method. 
 
 Dr. Hopkins once said to me, repeating the re- 
 mark of a student, with a qualified endorsement, 
 that my preaching had not a particle of religious 
 power. The criticism no more implies that the 
 preaching was bad, than that it was good. Excel- 
 lent discourses, to a conventional mind, would 
 come under this censure. One, who is ever watching 
 for the accepted doctrine and the familiar phrase, 
 who is steeped in the commonplace of religion, 
 missing these insignia of grace, would think a 
 sermon wanting in piety, though it were blazing 
 a fresh path into the heart of truth. The sanctities 
 of faith may be only the more deeply imbedded in
 
 Forms of Work 151 
 
 our speech, because, like one at work, it has laid 
 aside garments, which do but trammel it, and has 
 gone at its task stripped to the flesh. When the 
 grace of God is preeminently at work, men rarely 
 recognize it. They may easily mistake it for a 
 Satanic movement, the destructive energy being 
 so often in advance of the constructive force. The 
 very highest effort of the preacher is to anticipate, 
 to push, and so to soften the transitions and col- 
 lisions of growth. He is with God, reverently, 
 humbly, confidently, as a creator. Creation, rather 
 than grace, is the watchword in the Kingdom of 
 Heaven. Grace only widens and softens creation. 
 Creation makes all things new. 
 
 To push forward, and at the same moment and 
 by the same movement to achieve peace for one- 
 self and for others, this is the divine mind. The 
 Kingdom of Heaven is righteousness, peace, and 
 joy in the Holy Ghost. The constant correction 
 of our convictions along all the lines of truth, 
 satisfaction in the concurrent force which these 
 lines express, ecstasy in the manifest command of 
 them all by a living spirit, this is the achievement 
 of faith. 
 
 Burke deeply disbelieved in the French Revolu- 
 tion, yet he heard with reluctance and fretfulness 
 the same opinions expressed from the pulpit. He
 
 152 Things Learned by Living 
 
 wished peace and spiritual rest in the house of God. 
 A sentiment of this order is a wide one. Men 
 love to retire into their religion as into a quiet and 
 secluded shrine, from which much of the light, and 
 all of the noise of the world is shut out, a place 
 of repose and of renewed resolution, dropped with 
 its solemn stillness out of heaven close by the 
 thoroughfares of life. How is this somewhat just 
 feeling to be met, and yet religion maintain its 
 pervasive, commanding power? Rest and spir- 
 itual renovation are somewhat irreconcilable. The 
 true preacher comes from a peaceful realm, one 
 above the storm yet in full view of it. He is not 
 hidden away from the tempest in a cave, waiting 
 to creep out when its devastation is well over. 
 He looks upon it as that which expresses, but also 
 dissipates the dangers of the world. He walks 
 with God in the storm. He wins peace by a deeper 
 sense of the grace, which moves forward by calm 
 and by storm harnessing them both, as two steeds, 
 to the same chariot. 
 
 The true preacher is always prophetic, is neces- 
 sarily prophetic, for he walks on the level of events 
 and sees whither they are tending. The function 
 of the preacher will never wear out, because he 
 shares the divine mind ever declaring itself anew 
 in the progress of the spiritual world. The mind
 
 Forms of Work 153 
 
 that is brought into fellowship with the Divine 
 Spirit, is ever looking outward, where the work 
 of renovation and creation is going on in its infinite 
 fullness, variety, and beauty ot effect. The first 
 command carries all its force over into the second 
 command, and secures in it the entire rendering 
 of obedience. The thing done and the doer, love 
 among men and love toward God, eternally inter- 
 pret and reflect each other ; as image after image, 
 in unending perspective, is yielded in the heart of 
 each of two opposed mirrors, a single taper as a 
 midway flame, flowing down a path of light, into 
 the depths of both. 
 
 Whatever success I have met with as a preacher 
 has lain chiefly in correcting and deepening spir- 
 itual ideals. I have always found it difficult to 
 write a good sermon. The abstract thought has 
 won the mastery. I have needed the presence of 
 an audience to hold the mind to its labor of eluci- 
 dation and enforcement. Men are not fond of 
 thought; they think they are but they are not; 
 certainly not in quantity. One who measures off 
 his truths, as a linen draper his goods, with unend- 
 ing precision, may be useful, but is not likely to 
 be interesting. While facts without a fitting ex- 
 position are hardly of more worth than words with- 
 out a meaning, men do not so regard them. They
 
 154 Things Learned by Living 
 
 accept the sensuous image even when its final pur- 
 pose of instruction and inspiration is not sub- 
 served. I have striven to lead on, but have not 
 unfrequently simply gone on. Yet it is in this 
 very effort to turn truth into a highway of knowl- 
 edge that truth most completely discloses itself 
 to us. I have not been uninstructed and unre- 
 proved by my own preaching. I have stood with 
 the audience in the presence of the truth overshad- 
 owing us all. I have not announced truth as if 
 it were in some way my possession, but as that, of 
 which we are together in search. The impersonal 
 truth, as in some spiritual way gaining a personal 
 presence, must be helped to do its correcting, 
 guiding, and comforting work.
 
 CHAPTER VI 
 
 
 
 WRITINGS 
 
 ""THE books published by me have been of two 
 kinds, those called out by my work as a 
 teacher, and those elicited by my interest in the 
 topics discussed. My first work was Political 
 Economy. In the second year of my tutorship 
 at Williams, I taught political economy, using Dr. 
 Wayland's treatise; it seemed to me intolerably 
 simple and primary. A good college text-book 
 should go directly and concisely to the heart of its 
 topic, and leave plenty of work for the teacher 
 and the pupil in enlargement and illustration. It 
 is difficult to make a book instructive and interest- 
 ing that is shallow, pellucid, tepid, with but slight 
 suggestion of fundamental relations. One need 
 not be afraid of any obscurity incident, not to the 
 style nor to the method, but to the scope of the 
 discussion. Attention is always awakened by 
 any true vista into and through the topic in hand. 
 When I returned to Williams as professor, in 
 1855, Professor Perry was teaching economics.
 
 156 Things Learned by Living 
 
 We found frequent occasions to discuss the subject 
 with each other and he urged me to write a text- 
 book. My preparation for the task consisted 
 only in a fair mastery of the principles of economics 
 as presented in current English works, and the 
 ability to put them compactly. I wrote a book 
 not perfectly easy to use, but comprehensive, con- 
 cise, and clear. I venture to call it clear, though 
 all that I have written is, to a very considerable 
 number of persons, obscure and difficult. For 
 reasons not obvious to me, they find it hard to 
 keep step with my discussions. 
 
 This book added very little, if anything, to the 
 subject as presented by standard writers, but it 
 placed it within easy reach of the teacher. It 
 opened up the way for work in the recitation room. 
 It was used several years in Williams, a short time 
 in Yale, and for a considerable period in some 
 smaller colleges. Shortly after its publication, 
 a much wider interest in economics sprang up. 
 New books appeared rapidly and many easy and 
 fairly adequate ways of approach were furnished 
 the student. My time has been so much occupied 
 since its publication with other themes, that I 
 have never revised the book, nor attempted to 
 keep fully in with the growing literature of this 
 subject. Professor Perry soon developed personal
 
 Writings 157 
 
 and positive lines of inquiry, and all the office that 
 fell to my hasty treatise was to furnish a little 
 nourishment to the roots of other plants. Its 
 composition, however, left me with a lasting 
 interest in the topic. 
 
 The deductive method, which characterized 
 the earlier English works, with its rapid, easy, and 
 positive movement, is very fascinating to vigorous 
 and inexperienced minds. I strove in this book 
 to cover the fundamental conclusions of political 
 economy and had the fullest confidence in their 
 validity. This feeling has been much modified 
 by a wider outlook. It still seems to me that 
 economics, as a science, is to be secured only by 
 a close limitation of the impulses discussed; but 
 this restriction must be accepted understandingly, 
 and the caution and restraint it puts in practi- 
 cal use on the principles reached must be fully 
 recognized. With this concession, the unqualified 
 statements of economics are not only interesting, 
 but of great value. When, however, we come to 
 apply them, we must restore the phenomena 
 involved to their full complexity. In doing this, 
 we shall find that the demonstrative force of our 
 conclusions is lost, and that we are in the midst 
 of the very obscure, complicated, and variable facts 
 of sociology. ' My later inquiries have been eagerly
 
 158 Things Learned by Living 
 
 directed toward sociology, and so toward the con- 
 ditions, which surround and modify economic 
 principles, quite as much as to the principles them- 
 selves. The little that I contributed to political 
 economy was soon lost in the swirl of a rising 
 stream, and I make no search for it. 
 
 The second book which I published was ^Esthetics. 
 This has been one of the most permanently success- 
 ful of my ventures. It arose from the demands 
 of the instruction I was giving. Kames's Elements 
 of Criticism had been associated with Campbell's 
 Rhetoric in the college curriculum, as opening the 
 way to literary and plastic art; I found the need 
 of widening these approaches, and of giving them 
 better support. While I was not averse to a dis- 
 cussion of the theory of beauty, I felt much 
 hesitancy in touching its practical applications. 
 My observation of art was narrow and untrained, 
 and I very much needed a firmer grasp of the 
 subtle insights and shifting sensibilities involved 
 in it. This fact, however, helped to save me from 
 an over-refined and supersensuous method, and left 
 me squarely planted on a platform not too high 
 nor too remote for the audience I had to address. 
 My later knowledge of art has not seriously broken 
 with these earlier principles. One cannot fail to 
 see how very diverse are the criteria of beauty in
 
 Writings 159 
 
 different minds, according to the predominant sen- 
 timents which belong to them. Catholicity in art, 
 as in faith, is difficult of attainment, both because 
 of the great scope of the beautiful and because of 
 its variable degree of intensity in each one of its 
 forms. Perversion, the perversion which accom- 
 panies strong personal preferences, is inevitable. 
 The liberal, large, and enlarging refinements of art 
 can follow only wholesome, robust, spiritual 
 development . It is the higher forms of this enfold- 
 ing that all beauty, in the very end, proffers to us. 
 Only from the later eminences of mankind may the 
 entire landscape be surveyed. The variety of 
 impression, which belongs to a world of such very 
 diverse yet mutually penetrable and harmonious 
 elements, can only find entrance with us when 
 different qualities, like distinct colors, flow at once 
 together in a product to whose composite force 
 we have been awakened by the experience of a 
 life- time. 
 
 My third book, Philosophy of Rhetoric, grew 
 even more directly from the tasks in hand. Called 
 on to direct and to supervise the literary work of 
 others, I strove to give a more positive flavor of 
 philosophy to rules which wearied me in their 
 routine use. The book was fitted, and is still 
 fitted, to make the constructive processes of
 
 160 Things Learned by Living 
 
 thought more coherent and thorough. This was 
 the only interest rhetoric ever had for me, that 
 of intellectual architecture, though I was long 
 constrained by the force of circumstances to give 
 attention to a drill, which so readily becomes irk- 
 some to pupil and master. 
 
 Those whom I could most aid in composition 
 were those whose methods of thought and expres- 
 sion were alike immature. The two processes 
 could then grow together and help on either side 
 strengthened the entire product. On the other 
 hand, ease of thought and facility of expression 
 were the most serious obstacles to improvement. 
 This readiness of the mind anticipated all strenu- 
 ous effort. There was no travail of spirit. Like 
 water poured down an incline, sentiment and 
 expression ran glibly on, and there was no volume, 
 no accumulated power, no backward pressure. 
 Hesitancy, embarrassment, inadequacy, all serve to 
 check the mind, to force it back on itself, and to com- 
 pel a more comprehensive survey the necessary 
 condition of more adequate expression. Thought 
 and expression are so complementary, so much 
 opposite sides of one indivisible movement, that 
 ease and superficiality are almost inevitable associ- 
 ates. It is difficult to force the mind inward 
 toward the penetralia of thought, when the out-
 
 Writings 161 
 
 ward doors of language are swung wide before it. 
 I have always experienced the danger of treating 
 a topic hastily, in an inadequate moment. The 
 road thus improvised always lay in my way when 
 I was desirous to give the discussion more breadth 
 and force. Gestation is once for all . An awkward 
 yet able mind, one that has not yet found itself, 
 is the only really interesting problem to a pro- 
 fessor of literary obstetrics. 
 
 The first work, which I published simply and 
 singly from my interest in the subject considered, 
 was Principles of Psychology. Much later, when 
 I came to teach philosophy in the University of 
 Wisconsin, I rewrote and expanded this treatise 
 that it might serve as a text-book. It always 
 retained, however, in the prominence it gave to 
 different subjects, the freedom of its first construc- 
 tion. In revising it, I changed the title to Science 
 of Mind. The leading idea both of the first and 
 of the second volume was a fuller and better sus- 
 tained presentation of the intuitive philosophy. 
 The trend of thought for a series of years has been 
 very decidedly in the direction of empiricism. 
 This fact, though it has served to divert attention 
 from every intuitive rendering of the powers of 
 mind, rather increases than lessens the value of 
 this form of work. The present fashion of thought
 
 1 62 Things Learned by Living 
 
 will, in time, exhaust itself, and then the mind, 
 its gains secured, will return to the corrections and 
 further expansions of intuitionalism. Science of 
 Mind leaves ample room for all that empirical 
 philosophy has established, and places it on a much 
 wider foundation than this philosophy alone can 
 furnish. There is no form of thought to which I 
 have given more protracted study than to empiri- 
 cism; chiefly because in this direction have lain 
 the corrections and enlargements especially called 
 for by intuitionalism. Yet I have not for a 
 moment felt that empiricism, by itself alone, con- 
 tained any adequate guidance. It is only as a 
 reflecting surface for light other than its own 
 that it possesses real value. 
 
 The points, which I feel confident, with the 
 confidence that always accompanies insight, will 
 be gathered up by the philosophy of the future, 
 are the primitive quality of mental powers, their 
 wholly distinctive form-element in consciousness, 
 and the consequent impossibility of blending phys- 
 ical and mental phenomena by any third fact 
 termed sub-conscious. These alleged facts are 
 wholly intangible and fanciful; most completely 
 unempirical, though so often urged by empiricism. 
 They offer a third something between the phenom- 
 ena of space and the phenomena of conscious-
 
 Writings 163 
 
 ness which has neither intelligible locality nor 
 conceivable form. All phenomena that directly 
 concern the mind are either distinctly neural or 
 distinctly mental phenomena; the two are incap- 
 able of confusion by virtue of their respective 
 form-elements, space and consciousness. 
 
 The ruling idea of Science of Mind is that 
 consciousness, as an ultimate form-element, holds 
 its own phenomena in absolutely primitive and 
 incommunicable limits. Subconscious phenomena 
 drop away as mere chimera. The subtle and 
 influential character of neural facts are fully 
 admitted, and the analysis of mental powers, 
 absolutely unique in nature, is made as complete 
 as possible. While the ultimate paths of thought 
 will not conform to any one man's vision, the 
 spirit of prophecy is deeply involved in all clear 
 insight, and a possible forecast of the rational world 
 is certainly present in every part of that world. 
 Let the light wax, let the dim outline become 
 assured sight, let the day spread itself over fields 
 that just begin to be seen, the beginning and the 
 end will still touch each other, parts of one growing 
 revelation. The personal and the universal will 
 be gathered up into one indivisible product. 
 
 Whatever value attaches to my labor, it inheres 
 just here, in the defense of the primitive force of
 
 164 Things Learned by Living 
 
 thought, self -directed toward the interpretation 
 of ever changing, ever coherent events. The 
 event does not gather in the thought, the thought 
 gathers in the event. Here is the everlasting 
 struggle, equally in empiricism as in intuitionalism. 
 Here lies our defense alike against dogmatism and 
 scepticism, against a purely idealistic and a purely 
 empirical tendency. If one's thoughts are simply 
 another phase of enveloping events, they can 
 have no universality, they cannot attain to that 
 ineffable thing, truth. They remain variable facts 
 among facts infinitely variable. If the mind, by 
 virtue of data within itself, develops deductively 
 the line of events, it is thereby led to lose sight 
 of the utter emptiness of its symbols, symbols 
 that can only be impregnated, made fertile by 
 a universe in and with which they have arisen; 
 symbols that must rest back on some substance 
 if they are to issue in the harmony and extension 
 of all knowledge. Reason, pure, transparent, is 
 in its flow like the clear stream, which gives a 
 mathematically just reflection of the objects 
 among which it moves; which yet, by virtue of 
 shifting banks, shifting days, shifting seasons, 
 renders nothing twice alike, though all things 
 are in eternal continuity. Philosophy, theology, 
 sociology remain to be wrought out under variable
 
 Writings 165 
 
 events, never twice the same nor twice lying in the 
 same light, yet by an insight as certain and coherent 
 in its principles as are the laws of color which at 
 any moment rule the physical landscape. Thought 
 is no more disturbed by the complexity of its 
 subjects than mathematics are baffled by the 
 multiplicity of the phenomena in which they in- 
 here. The flexible and the inflexible are the 
 eternal constituents of knowledge. 
 
 Principles of Psychology led to a course of 
 Lowell Lectures, entitled Science, Philosophy, and 
 Religion. These lectures were moderately suc- 
 cessful in the delivery and, in their published 
 form, were not carried beyond the first edition. 
 They were too abstract for the popular mind. 
 There is a handling of pertinent truth which is 
 clear, catholic, and just, without being tenderly 
 sympathetic. The theme rather than the thoughts 
 of men about it occupies the attention. The air 
 grows purer as we rise in it, but it also grows colder, 
 and has not the prolific vital power of its lower, 
 less elastic, and vapor-laden strata. 
 
 A second course of Lowell Lectures was granted 
 me two years later. This course I published under 
 the title, Philosophy of English Literature. When 
 I introduced the study of English literature at 
 Williams, it was not often embraced in college
 
 1 66 Things Learned by Living 
 
 work. There was no accumulated experience as 
 to the best method of instruction. At first I 
 found it difficult to arouse interest in the multi- 
 plicity of facts embraced in the few current man- 
 uals. This difficulty gave occasion for an effort 
 to unite the facts more closely in a succinct review, 
 and to give them somewhat of a continuous, his- 
 toric, and causal development. I ultimately suc- 
 ceeded in doing this. The lectures were the 
 fruit of this effort, and have been found useful by 
 many teachers in the same direction. The work 
 grew out of the needs of the recitation room, and 
 has distinguished itself from most of my books by 
 being remunerative. A general survey of the 
 facts of English literature, followed by a concise 
 discussion of their dependence on one another and 
 accompanied by a study of leading authors, be- 
 comes a very quickening and a very thoughtful 
 form of work. Insight and reflection are alike 
 called out. When the chief attention is directed 
 to a few classical writers, our knowledge loses the 
 breadth we have a right to expect, and may easily 
 become a somewhat indolent indulgence of lit- 
 erary tastes. 
 
 A Philosophy of Religion, the next book that 
 I published, was a spontaneous product of my 
 deepest, most habitual experience. I had no
 
 Writings 167 
 
 other purpose in view than to render spiritual 
 truth more distinct to my own mind and to the 
 minds of others. All the discussions of philosophy, 
 all the experiences of life have had their chief 
 interest for me in the light which I have found 
 them able to cast on the one problem of spiritual 
 destiny. The difficulty of this problem, far from 
 being a reason for waiving inquiry, has only been 
 a provocation to inquiry. It has seemed to me 
 the natural accompaniment of the magnitude of 
 the questions involved. This is a region in which 
 slight gains are large rewards; in which all times 
 and persons gather truth in one common treasure. 
 The movement, like evolution, is inevitable and 
 increasingly fruitful. Knowledge and achieve- 
 ment are inseparable in it; we see farther by 
 moving forward. If the gold of truth, which with 
 all his diligence is found in any one man's sieve, is 
 very little, it none the less adds something to the 
 sum of the most representative, permanent, and 
 enticing of values. 
 
 The movement which this volume indicates 
 has gone somewhat farther in my mind since its 
 publication. The doctrinal and traditional tram- 
 mels of religious truth have almost wholly fallen 
 off, and that with no loss of the sense of verity, 
 authority, safety. The fortifications to which the
 
 i68 Things Learned by Living 
 
 mind had first turned for refuge have crumbled 
 away, but the feeling of security has grown at 
 every stage of the process. The spirit of power 
 moves only the more freely, and encamps only 
 the more fearlessly in the open field, the unob- 
 structed spaces of the universe. Here alone it is 
 able to say all is mine. This volume I have reason 
 to suppose has strength and arouses in a few minds, 
 though only in a few, the same feelings which gave 
 occasion to it in my own experience. These 
 feelings, once called out are sure to grow, though 
 they have no occasion to feed long on that which 
 first nourishes them. The work is not addressed 
 to any violent or sceptical frame of mind, but to 
 one who is beginning to loosen, in many directions, 
 the cords which have bound him too tightly. 
 
 The book had the good fortune to find its way 
 as a work of reference and study into one theolog- 
 ical seminary, a seminary in which the traditions 
 of the fathers were held to be garments which 
 might be overworn. As long as men are proceed- 
 ing but slowly in bursting the present integuments 
 of thought, and breaking out into light and air, 
 this volume may be helpful as rendering one of the 
 ways in which spiritual liberty may be won. 
 
 The Growth and Grades of Intelligence Com- 
 parative Psychology was an effort to unite a
 
 Writings 169 
 
 belief in the primitive powers of mind and their 
 empirical development into one consistent view. 
 The statement suffers somewhat, as much of my 
 work suffers, from a too concise and too narrow pre- 
 sentation. The voluminousness of most authors 
 has been so tedious to me, that I have striven in 
 every way to avoid it. Moreover, the force of 
 a clear conception has seemed so final that I have 
 not sufficiently felt the necessity of detailed sup- 
 port. Yet, in a discussion of this sort, the im- 
 pression made on most minds will be proportioned 
 to the number of examples by which it is induc- 
 tively sustained. I believe that the general 
 relation of the several phases of intelligence 
 indicated in this work is capable of most adequate 
 and abundant illustration, and that the more 
 obtrusive facts, which look to an opposite conclu- 
 sion, easily give way under wise and extended 
 interpretation. My books have had many brief 
 notices, but rarely one indicative of any insight. 
 Praise has not given me much pleasure, nor censure 
 much pain, since neither the one nor the other has 
 been delivered at the center of the target. This 
 work received in the New York Tribune the most 
 discriminating review it has been my good fortune 
 to secure. The book, though one of the best that 
 I have written, has attracted very little attention.
 
 170 Things Learned by Living 
 
 I have great confidence in the belief that the 
 forms and grades of intelligence, as here defined, 
 will be found to harmonize the facts of animal 
 and rational life; that the lines of division laid 
 down cannot be effaced. 
 
 When I took up a new field of instruction in the 
 University of Wisconsin, I experienced a second 
 time the need of text-books. This need gave rise 
 to Ethics and to Natural Theology, and to the 
 revision of Principles of Psychology and Science 
 of Mind. I first used the Moral Science of Dr. 
 Hickok. My own book is in fundamental accord 
 with this volume. My desire in publishing it was 
 to shift somewhat the point of view, to give the 
 theory of morals a statement suited to. the changing 
 criticisms of empiricism, and to widen out its 
 principles on the side of sociology. I have found 
 in instruction that the interest of students is more 
 easily secured in a discussion of the theory of 
 morals than in a presentation of duties under it. 
 This presentation should be, I believe, a brief one 
 on the side of principles, when it deals with familiar 
 virtues, and receive expansion only in fields of 
 action whose obligations are less well defined. 
 Sociology, with its often obscure and difficult 
 duties and its many fresh directions of inquiry, 
 affords one of the most needful and desirable
 
 Writings 171 
 
 opportunities for the extension and correction of 
 ethical ideas. Principles become vital, and the 
 logic of duty coherent and forceful, when they 
 are unfolded along the lines of urgent, social 
 activity. Vitality is the one quality of good 
 instruction, and this we can find only where 
 vital forces are at work. He who can apply prin- 
 ciples is so far a master, and he who does apply 
 them in action is so far virtuous. Nowhere do 
 clear insight, refined sensibility, and wholesome 
 activity blend so perfectly as in the knowledge 
 of duty. 
 
 I wrote my work on Natural Theology in order to 
 present the argument for the being and attributes 
 of God as modified by the doctrine of evolution. 
 The objections one meets with to the familiar 
 proofs of Natural Theology are almost wholly 
 associated with evolution. They can be over- 
 come only by a thorough apprehension of this 
 theory in its strong and in its weak points; in 
 the things to be accepted and the things to be 
 modified or to be rejected in connection with it. 
 This idea of evolution has been of so incalculable a 
 value in giving coherence to our conception of the 
 universe, and has done so much to expand and 
 to purify our notion of God as immanent reason, 
 that it should be with us a first principle, equally
 
 172 Things Learned by Living 
 
 in theology as in science. My work on Natural 
 Theology assigns it this position, and restates the 
 argument in harmony with this view. The rela- 
 tions of matter and mind, the interdependence 
 of the two, and the question between them of 
 priority involves the deepest philosophy, and 
 must, therefore, be capable of an ever improving 
 statement as our knowledge and insight enlarge. 
 A profound personal experience of truth is a pre- 
 requisite to any satisfactory formula in this field 
 of thought. Belief here involves faith in that it 
 searches our purest spiritual life for the fitting 
 terms of its expression. We can touch the coin- 
 cidence of matter and mind, the incidence of thing 
 and thought, deftly and truly only as, and where 
 mind asserts itself most profoundly and independ- 
 ently. All along border-lines matter is the pre- 
 dominant element. It is matter that fences in 
 and defines the universe, as the body fences in 
 and defines the powers of the spirit. The spirit 
 itself is revealed to the spirit and to it only. Cer- 
 tainty and self-assertion, being and comprehension 
 here blend in one. 
 
 The four books which followed, The Words of 
 Christ, Problems in Philosophy, Sociology, and The 
 New Theology, were all called out by an interest in 
 the topics discussed, and had no connection with
 
 Writings 173 
 
 my work as a teacher. The Words of Christ aims 
 at disclosing the overwhelming rational element in 
 the instructions of our Lord. It is this element, 
 not dogmatic authority, which assigns his teachings 
 their true position. It is by virtue of light that he 
 is Lord of Light, by virtue of truth that he is the 
 Truth. It is this perfectly independent, interior, 
 and universal force in the words of Christ that the 
 volume strives to present. The first chapter was 
 written for the Unitarian Review and then with- 
 drawn because of the suggestion which it gave me 
 of a wider treatment. Some topics, like the 
 closing chapter on the natural and the super- 
 natural, reappear elsewhere in my writings, partly 
 because of their many-sided character, and still 
 more because I have found it difficult to say my 
 last word upon them, so central are they, so capable 
 of suffering fresh confusion and receiving fresh 
 exposition. A single line of presentation no more 
 retains its serene light under changing perplexities 
 than does a summer day the lucid air of the morn- 
 ing. The visible and the invisible melt into each 
 other no more constantly along the fringe of clouds 
 than do changeable conceptions replace one an- 
 other in the eternal blending of the natural and 
 the supernatural, the outer physical form and the 
 inner spiritual force.
 
 174 Things Learned by Living 
 
 Problems in Philosophy is a system of philosophy 
 cut down to a few of its most pregnant principles. 
 In this reduced form it offers itself more modestly 
 and more bearably, when the assurance and the 
 burdens of speculation are already so great. It 
 may well be doubted, however, whether current 
 methods of discussion are any more tedious than 
 are the processes of thought with which they are 
 associated. I have found in public assemblies that 
 debate is exceedingly circuitous and wearisome, 
 but that hasty efforts to shorten and to correct 
 it only involve fresh confusion. Presentation is 
 so slow because the pace of the mind is so painful. 
 Then also the corrections and counter-corrections 
 which lie among us must each have the full light 
 of thought turned upon them. According to the 
 complexity of truth are the multiplicity and 
 difficulty of its readjustments; and according to 
 the number who take part in the inquiry is the 
 earlier confusion of cross-conceptions. There is no 
 use in begrudging the time it takes to secure and to 
 diffuse adequate knowledge. Long speeches and 
 full discussions gain also somewhat by sheer 
 volume. Length is a ready measure of amount, 
 momentum is inseparable from bulk. A curt 
 speech and a concise treatise are often followed by 
 so many objections and misconceptions as to com-
 
 Writings 175 
 
 pel a re-opening of the entire topic. The fagots so 
 snugly bound up must be untied and spread out a 
 second time for observation. I have also found 
 that conciseness may be mistaken for repetition. 
 A second sentence may present an important shade 
 of thought not contained in the previous one. If 
 the difference were dwelt on, it would be recognized, 
 but passed rapidly, it is not seen, and the second 
 assertion is mistaken for a needless restatement 
 of the former idea. I began very early to cultivate 
 the power of concise composition, but have found 
 it, like all other methods, subject to its own diffi- 
 culties and limitations. A full presentation will 
 often seem to be and will be a wiser one, and will 
 better impress the mind with the amplitude of the 
 thought. Moreover, we must keep step in intel- 
 lectual as in physical movement. If the reader is 
 not sufficiently familiar with the subject of discus- 
 sion to spread it out at once under the light, then 
 the writer must shake it loose, let it fall in ample 
 folds, and carry the eye luxuriously over it. Prob- 
 lems in Philosophy is made up of bits of closely folded 
 thought, which, if one has the wisdom to unfold 
 and to unite them again, offer a cloak of no scrimped 
 pattern. My error has usually lain in not making 
 a sufficiently voluble and voluminous appeal to the 
 attention of men.
 
 176 Things Learned by Living 
 
 The work on Sociology is preliminary and 
 theoretical. I found a much fuller, and more prac- 
 tical presentation shaping itself in my thoughts. 
 I have had occasion, for several years, to lecture 
 on sociology, and a field so wide and fertile over- 
 whelms one with the multitudinous processes of 
 reaping and of storing the harvest. All culture of 
 mind and heart, all gains of science and faith, all 
 inherited forms of law, and all renewed forces of 
 life are united and completed in sociology. One 
 can hardly be adequately furnished for this work. 
 My instruction, on this subject, began with Sunday 
 afternoon lectures in the University of Wisconsin. 
 I have been struggling somewhat vainly for a 
 long time to secure for it an adequate presentation 
 in the course at Williams. This effort now 
 promises to be successful, and I hope to make the 
 next few years effective on the side of social 
 theory. 
 
 When I find my theoretical out-look on life so 
 hopelessly in advance of the conditions which 
 surround me, I instinctively take up the refrain: 
 "I would not live always." We sometimes think 
 that the world loses much in losing ripe men, yet 
 ripe men, like ripe fruit, need to return to the 
 seed again for all purposes of growth. We do most 
 for the world when we are working at close quarters
 
 Writings 177 
 
 with it, gathering our conclusions into fresh 
 centers of thought and suffering all the collisions 
 of immediate contact. These first steps over, our 
 lives are segregated, are separated out from the 
 crude material about them, and are less responsive 
 and submissive to its present wants. The plant 
 that looks to transplanting is ready for the change 
 the moment it begins to overshadow and to burden 
 the soil. One is fortunate in keeping, as a teacher 
 of young men, so long in the center of the stream. 
 The New Theology aims to present those inevit- 
 able, just, and living tendencies which are issuing 
 in the interior evolution and enlargment of faith. 
 I have paid the price not a very severe price, yet 
 the price of personal liberty, and I have won a 
 right to its ready and easy use in all the higher 
 forms of thought. It is a glorious thing to feel 
 faith strengthened by what at first seemed a 
 rupture of its bonds. A bird falling from its nest 
 turns the disaster into a discovery of new powers 
 of flight. I am chiefly thankful that I have been 
 able to stand quietly, continuously, and fully by 
 my own convictions, and that these convictions 
 have been corrected I would that they had been 
 more completely corrected by sympathy with 
 all the renovating thought of the world. Let the 
 spiritual world be renovated, let the Kingdom of
 
 178 Things Learned by Living 
 
 Heaven come. That interpretation which renews 
 the world in its vital forces leads into the Kingdom. 
 I do not feel that the liberty which I have used 
 has been a wasteful or a reckless one, but chiefly 
 a divine ministration of truth to the spirit it- 
 self. Theology is new, life is new, all things are 
 new in the measure in which they are an im- 
 mediate medium to the incoming revelation of 
 God. 
 
 I have a volume ready for publication entitled, 
 An Historical Interpretation of Philosophy. I 
 have endeavored to trace in it, carefully and critic- 
 ally, the one central channel which, amid innumer- 
 able shallows and lagoons, makes navigable the 
 stream of philosophical speculation. There ought 
 to be, there is, one movement which cannot be 
 covered nor confounded by these vagrant and 
 divergent expressions of thought . The gravitation 
 of truth, obscure and intangible as it is, cannot be 
 less real than the gravitation to one issue of 
 widespread and sluggish waters. There must 
 come confirmation to correct theory, as there 
 comes, no matter how slowly, discharge to a river 
 choked by its own drift. This midway current, 
 fed both by empirical and by purely speculative in- 
 quiry, is found in a modified intuitionalism. Every 
 form of knowledge has its own ultimates, and these
 
 Writings 179 
 
 ultimates are, in philosophy, our own powers of 
 comprehension . 
 
 My books, up to the present time, 1892, have 
 cost me over $6000 and have returned to me about 
 $4000. This means an aggregate circulation of 
 15,000 copies, and an average sale of 1071 copies. 
 According to the terms which have been granted 
 me, each volume must reach a circulation of nearly 
 2000 copies before it begins to be remunerative. 
 A large part of my warfare has been at my own 
 charges, but, as I have chiefly aimed at the pre- 
 sentation of things which seemed to me valuable, 
 the only tangible regret is found, not in the cost- 
 liness, but in the inadequacy, of the work. It is 
 fortunate that all vigorous life is so overcharged 
 with confidence that it does not easily admit the 
 fear of failure. We confront the world with a 
 brave heart because we take it and ourselves at 
 our own estimates. If we cannot square the 
 account as it stands, we increase and diminish 
 values until it yields the desired balance. Is this 
 dishonesty, or is it that truly wise temper which 
 makes a spiritual gain, the utterance of our own 
 lives, outweigh all other gains? An adequate aim 
 is requisite to give a rational form to action, but 
 action, once entered on, gathers much of its profit- 
 ing from the incidents which lie along the way.
 
 i8o Things Learned by Living 
 
 An excursion in the spiritual world is not unlike 
 a recreative trip in fine scenery. We need a 
 destination, but it is not the destination alone, 
 but quite as much the intervening spaces, which 
 make the day successful. Often as we must 
 apply the narrower standards of success to our 
 work, so keeping ourselves in the thoroughfares 
 of life, we constantly find within ourselves, and 
 are ever cherishing the hope that there may be 
 beyond ourselves obscure rewards carrying with 
 them a more adequate justification of our conduct. 
 We live by bread, but not by bread alone, but by 
 every word which proceedeth out of the mouth 
 of God. Bread is only the conspicuous, capital 
 letter which introduces the divine word, not the 
 very fullness of the word itself. I have been 
 criticized for writing too much. Perhaps so; but 
 much of the force of the criticism arises from a 
 failure to see the innumerable secondary purposes 
 subserved by composition. Would it be better to 
 do a "big thing" ; or would the big thing be better 
 done by a surveillance of the many minor things 
 which lie close at hand? Life must be left to lift 
 itself, to declare itself as it is and where it is. The 
 only excuse I offer is diligence in doing little things. 
 At the present date, 1900, I have added several 
 volumes to my published works. Social Theory
 
 Writings 181 
 
 grew out of instruction, and gives a much wider 
 and more practical statement of social principles 
 than that contained in Sociology. 
 
 Evolution and Religion was designed to show 
 how thoroughly the spiritual development which 
 is expressed in religion is contained in the unfolding 
 of the world; and consequently how undeniable 
 and invincible are the primary beliefs and ten- 
 dencies contained in faith. Growth of Nationality 
 in the United States arose from lectures accompany- 
 ing a study of the Constitution, and thus has been 
 offered as a fruit of instruction and an aid to it. 
 
 I have now ready a book entitled God and His 
 Goodness. This is likely to finish my publications. 
 I should be glad to give a treatise on the English 
 Constitution, but the shadows are too long. God 
 and His Goodness aims to present that view of 
 human life, which best brings out its inner force 
 and the goodness of God shown therein. It again 
 is offered solely as the vision of love. Later than 
 the time above indicated, this book was published 
 but wholly at my own cost and has chiefly been 
 given away. This has happened partly because it 
 would bear no price and partly because it, like all 
 love, is without price.
 
 CHAPTER VII 
 
 THE FORMULA OF PERSONAL LIFE 
 
 CACH of us opens manhood with a maximum 
 *^ of fresh personal power. All germs are full of 
 special potency, and often rich in nutritive 
 material; but nowhere does conquering force 
 come into such complete consciousness as in the 
 mind of the young man. He matches himself 
 with events as if the conflict could not but declare 
 in his favor. It matters very little what phi- 
 losophy may say about freedom, the problem is 
 entered on with unfailing confidence and solved 
 in the one bold way every time a man-child is born 
 into the world. Conquering and to conquer is 
 the inner meaning and motto of all life. 
 
 As this first impulse exhausts itself by its own 
 efforts; as the obstacles to be overcome renew 
 themselves inexhaustibly ; as the immense breadth, 
 depth, momentum of the forces, with which men 
 have to deal, disclose themselves; the hero, just 
 now so sure to conquer, may be led to feel that he 
 
 is the sport of energies wholly beyond him, the 
 
 182
 
 The Formula of Personal Life 183 
 
 victim of a delusive liberty, the bond-servant of 
 an inexorable fate. The vigorous youth hardly 
 notices, or spurns joyfully aside the snowflakes 
 that fall on his path. He finds in them no burden ; 
 he is aware of no opposition. Hour after hour 
 they come trembling down. The light feathery 
 mass begins to delay the feet. The loose drift 
 is gaining coherence every moment. He is com- 
 pelled to arouse his energies to meet it. His 
 strength is disclosing limits close at hand, the 
 obstacle seems more and more illimitable. The 
 inequality of the conflict declares itself, and the 
 strong man perishes like a very feeble thing. 
 
 All the forces of inheritance within ourselves, 
 all the determinate and unchangeable conditions 
 of life without ourselves, unintermittingly, when 
 we sleep and when we wake, spend their inexhaust- 
 ible energies, their eternal inertias, in wearying out 
 our will, in subduing our strength, and in bring- 
 ing our new life into subjection to the old, old laws 
 of the inconvertible world about us. How can 
 this conflict, so deceptive in its incipiency, so full 
 of the illusions of mere cloud-drift, terminate 
 otherwise than in the world's becoming, in its 
 gross texture and heavy weights, the open grave 
 in which the spirit, in spite of its higher potencies 
 and subtle ways of elusion, is sure to be buried?
 
 1 84 Things Learned by Living 
 
 An easy victory over the world is the morning 
 dream of youth, a wide-spread and dreadful 
 conflict is the noonday impression, ready, 
 with the coming night, unless the soul finds 
 succor, to darken down into the sense of utter 
 defeat. 
 
 The working formula of our personal life is 
 liberty, an indefinite power of doing; increasing 
 strength and inexhaustible satisfaction in the 
 thing done, spontaneous impulse, imperishable 
 hope, rational forecast, a growing sense of duty, 
 the vision of faith, all concur in fastening upon us 
 this indomitable law of conduct. They all offer 
 us this one formula liberty. Is it an illusion? 
 Does the wider survey of philosophy assure us 
 that we are accepting a struggle to which there 
 can be but one issue; that we are wearying our- 
 selves with no sufficient purpose; that the snow 
 which is gathering along our path is making the 
 question one of miles, rods, feet? Would sober, 
 proportionate, prudent thought lead us to substi- 
 tute another formula, submission to the inevitable? 
 Is this the law of our real life, when stripped of all 
 misleading hopes? Are its precepts: Do what is 
 immediately rewardf ul in the doing ; Leave undone 
 what cannot be done; Sit down when fatigue 
 overtakes you ; Cross no weapons with the inevit-
 
 The Formula of Personal Life 185 
 
 able ; Cherish an abiding sense of the immeasurable 
 and invincible? 
 
 Every human spirit is thrown back on itself a 
 thousand times as this one question is put to it in a 
 thousand different ways, with a pertinacity as tire- 
 less as it is evil. All one's life is spent in resolving 
 this doubt. It does not simply return in a triple 
 form at the opening of life, like the temptations 
 of our Lord, but it comes sneaking back all through 
 life like a worthless dog that has been driven away 
 and stands as of old at our back door when we are 
 ready to sally out on some new enterprise. Does 
 this lack within ourselves of a harmonious and 
 restful method belong to us as the doubt and 
 disturbance of peevish, pessimistic powers; or is 
 it the seal and significance of unattained greatness? 
 Is this the way in which life defeats itself; or do 
 here lie the victories of faith, the steps by which 
 we go up into the mountain of God? 
 
 The first reconciling term is a due sense of the 
 universe as necessarily furnishing the continuous, 
 coherent, common lines of all change. A large 
 share of inflexibility must belong to the world, in 
 its function of storing our collective growth. Will, 
 in its voluble, fickle impulses, must not sink 
 deeply, and at once, into the framework of things. 
 Resistance and constructive value measure each
 
 1 86 Things Learned by Living 
 
 other. We are dealing with all the world and with 
 the will of God, and we must find our way slowly 
 into places of wisdom, peace, power. When the 
 universe takes us up, we are taken up for the 
 Kingdom of Heaven. 
 
 A second reconciling thought is the certainty 
 and sufficiency, for our purposes, of the change we 
 are able to work in the world. The world in many 
 ways bends to our service, and once broken it 
 submits to its load like a patient beast of burden. 
 We sit by the bank of a river. We cannot re- 
 plenish its fountains. We cannot alter its destina- 
 tion. Yet to how many uses we can put it. To 
 how many changes of much significance to us we 
 can subject it. How completely the new and the 
 old unite in it in the aid it renders to our lives. 
 Deeper modifications would mean mischief oftener 
 than improvement. 
 
 Moreover this inextinguishable impulse of life 
 may well stand for the last direction, the latest 
 momentum given us as we go forth from the hand 
 of God. Life has conquered the world, spiritual 
 life may well conquer it again . There is more hope, 
 more vision, more acceleration in the second than 
 in the first conquest. Let us stand by the instant, 
 the most significant path of the world, that in 
 which it is budding forth afresh in us in its endless
 
 The Formula of Personal Life 187 
 
 evolution. Evolution is with us, not against us. 
 The things as yet but half declared command the 
 future. Light is the dawn of a coming day. 
 
 A fourth reconciling term is that of time. The 
 physical universe has the better of us, as yet, in 
 the matter of time. Its folds are so voluminous 
 that it easily inwraps and smothers our resentful 
 lives as very little things. We are dealing with 
 days. The world deals with aeons. But the 
 future is ours as certainly as it is the world's. 
 Past years will not avail it forever. The chariot 
 may weary us when we first begin to run with it, 
 but our strength will mount up to the contention. 
 We are born into the world. We may share its 
 patient, imperturbable power. Confronting the 
 limitless past, we must rest back on the limitless 
 future. Having this support, the past itself will 
 become increasingly ours. We are not unequal 
 combatants in the struggle with the world for 
 larger life, for this life is not a thing of the past 
 but of the future. Prophecy is with us. The 
 past even is not at one with itself; it hints of 
 things beyond itself; while the future is set 
 apart as the field of their fulfillment. It has no 
 other significance. If we once more strike in, in 
 this long race, we shall find that the inner energies, 
 the inspirations of the conflict, are not evenly
 
 1 88 Things Learned by Living 
 
 divided between us and our adversary, the sense- 
 less and dull soul of things, but that they are all 
 with us, the last living force of things. 
 
 The reconciling element, which above all others 
 justifies our practical formula, is the presence of 
 God in the world. The world is not a dead world, 
 it is not even a mechanical world, whose method 
 and rate of rotation are fixed. While elements of 
 fixedness and certainty enter largely into it, they 
 are, in many ways, modified and softened in their 
 relation to mind. Bounds are elastic, ends may 
 be re-shaped, movements may be retarded and 
 accelerated. The world is alive with a Spiritual 
 Presence. While, therefore, its inertia and its 
 momentum remain as the expression of the sobri- 
 ety and adequacy of the divine thought, they are 
 not forces with which man intermeddles at his peril. 
 They concur with him and he with them in accom- 
 plishing purposes which may be widened and 
 hastened in their own order. The element which 
 most delays the Kingdom of Heaven is the 
 spiritual one, the human one, and enthusiasm vis- 
 ibly accelerates its movement. The devotion of 
 the spirit to good, its resistfulness to evil, its 
 struggle for instant obedience are not ill-directed 
 or wasted energies, they unite the mind of man with 
 the mind of God ; they inspire in men kindred pur-
 
 The Formula of Personal Life 189 
 
 poses ; they harness our powers productively into 
 the physical and spiritual system to which we 
 belong. Its magnitude, even though that magni- 
 tude expresses itself as inertia, is no longer an 
 injury. If the world were more flexible, if all things 
 could be speedily accomplished by us, there would 
 be in this fact no spiritual gain. Better, far better, 
 is it to work with God at great things, slowly 
 wrought into the very frame-work of the world, 
 and at the same time and by the same processes into 
 the secret recesses of our own lives. All fresh en- 
 thusiasms are truly germinant terms in the problem 
 of being. It is thus that the sense of waiting on 
 God plays so large a part in spiritual life. Though 
 the vision tarry, wait for it ; because it will surely 
 come; it will not always tarry. Waiting is not 
 waiting, but the curbing of our superficial and 
 fitful thoughts, until they settle down like well- 
 broken horses, to the work which engages them. 
 Our entire spiritual experience turns on our ability 
 to cast ourselves unreservedly upon the renovating 
 forces of the world, and there by insight and by 
 obedience to grow into the divine mind. It is law 
 and law only that binds us to our tasks. We 
 thus come to see that we are not, in our devo- 
 tion, flinging ourselves passionately and foolishly 
 against adamantine walls;' but that we are finding
 
 19 Things Learned by Living 
 
 our obscure obscure to our mole-like vision 
 way into the unfolding purposes and sustaining 
 love of our Heavenly Father. Thus we meet 
 the infinite in, and through the finite ever taking 
 form under his and our creative hands. 
 
 A sixth reconciling fact is immortality. If our 
 work could be gotten as easily and quickly over 
 as we would wish it to be, where were the signifi- 
 cance, the intellectual and spiritual extension of 
 these everlasting years. If we are being incor- 
 porated into the universe, sharing and accelerating 
 its wide-cast movement; if we are rising to a 
 position of real forecast and true participation; 
 then are the years of God and the divine life 
 truly with us and in us. Our lives are gaining 
 depth enough, gathering breadth enough to share 
 the seed-sowing and fruition of all years. 
 
 Immortality, also, as involving a transition, 
 a change of conditions, whose nature and extent 
 we cannot fully anticipate, will doubtless bring 
 to us more favorable terms of life and may carry 
 us forward into fields of activity, in which the 
 constructive processes shall respond more imme- 
 diately to our touch; in which the inner forces 
 and outer forms of action shall lie more nearly 
 parallel with each other, and in which things 
 otherwise dead shall be more instantly permeable
 
 The Formula of Personal Life 191 
 
 by things forever alive. If so, what an infinite de- 
 mand will be laid upon us for the wisdom, which 
 prudence and patience and experience have here 
 wrought in us. 
 
 Yet this anticipation is often only another of 
 our indolent devices by which we put outside 
 conditions in place of inside energies, the work of 
 another for our own work. When we have a 
 feeble, slipping hold on what is, we wait anxiously 
 for what is to be, expecting a better grip on our 
 part of its possibilities. Yet a tree that is with- 
 ering up in the soil assigned it will hardly revive 
 when transferred to new and strange conditions. 
 We are straitened in ourselves ; and difficulties are 
 ever difficulties of life, not of the terms of life. 
 
 The power of our personal formula is the power 
 of faith, the inspiration of the soul within itself. 
 This faith is an achievement, not a principle; an 
 unfolding of the mind toward the light, not a 
 dogma. It carries with it the sense of immortality 
 by virtue of inexhaustible powers, a growth that 
 is ever pushing into growth. Growth commands 
 all powers, answers all questions, holds within 
 itself all promises, contains all secrets, resolves 
 all doubts. Let the affections begin to unfold 
 themselves in the light, and light becomes not 
 merely revelation but life, which is the joy of
 
 192 Things Learned by Living 
 
 revelation. A wonderful unity and power enter 
 at once into life the moment it asserts itself. It 
 becomes true to the world, the world becomes 
 true to it, and delays and failures turn themselves 
 into fresh forces and larger victories. 
 
 A seventh justification of the law of liberty is 
 found in the very nature of liberty. Liberty is 
 not spasmodic, detached volition. Volition is the 
 incident and product of rational life, not its very 
 substance; as the sparks beneath an electric car 
 are mere indications of its motive power. Reason, 
 by its own coherent processes, its own self -directed 
 insight, moves forward from within to take posses- 
 sion of the world. This is liberty, the liberty of the 
 soul to see, to act, to enter into, and to share all 
 wisdom. By this movement things themselves, 
 fully framed in rational relations, are possessed and 
 subjected by mind. Is it matter that is winning its 
 way over mind, or is it mind that is pushing its way 
 with fresh explorations into matter? Liberty, in 
 the very end, is not so much resistance as it is 
 concession, and concession that subdues the con- 
 flicting forces, as the hawk rides on the brisk wind 
 it confronts. One movement only holds all things, 
 expounds all things, the movement of reason, and 
 liberty means our participation in that movement. 
 Reason can never sell itself to servitude, can never
 
 The Formula of Personal Life 193 
 
 accept servitude. This is suicide, the one act 
 which is ever and utterly illogical. 
 
 We cannot rise into spiritual life until we under- 
 stand and know how to employ the free, forceful 
 laws of that life; and the moment we do this, the 
 new power, which is in us, gains a strange energy, 
 a conquering strength over things, which before 
 seemed stubborn, rock-like, hardly subject even 
 to fracture. It is true that the relatively immut- 
 able remains immutable, but it remains so only as 
 the antithesis, the measure of the mutable; as 
 the tenacious fiber out of which, by a deft, delicate 
 hand, the strong, smooth thread of life is quickly 
 twisted. The crucifix is the symbol of utmost 
 resistance, and also of utmost assertion, and by 
 that sign we conquer. Not until, by the sense of 
 spiritual power, we can overtop the topmost 
 thing in the world, shall we subdue the world 
 under us. This is our victory. 
 
 13
 
 CHAPTER VIII 
 
 THE FORMULA OF SOCIAL LIFE 
 
 IF personal life meets immense resistance to any- 
 thing like violent or extended change, much 
 more does social life. We here come in contact 
 with a still wider range of resistful influences, and 
 confront them, not with the exceptional vigor of 
 a single will, but with the average, indolent pur- 
 poses of the mass of men. The prudent view and 
 the inspired view of duty are, therefore, still more 
 diverse from each other in collective than in per- 
 sonal interests. A quiet, philosophical outlook 
 over the field of development compels us to see 
 how much time must necessarily be consumed in 
 implanting, as convictions, feelings, customs, fresh 
 social principles; how much more time will be 
 required to soften, to subdue, and to change these 
 very convictions and customs as the progress of 
 events puts them into new relations. Events them- 
 selves are slow; the correct interpretation of them 
 still slower; while each new movement chokes the 
 way for that which is to follow. The progress 
 
 194
 
 The Formula of Social Life 195 
 
 of society is like the march of an unskilled army, 
 it is subject to every variety of accident ; each divi- 
 sion is in the way of other divisions, and helpless 
 and exasperating delay overtakes them all in turn. 
 Philosophy, therefore, is ready to say that these 
 cumbersome forces, which rule society, cannot be 
 much accelerated in their action. The law of the 
 movement compels it to be a sluggish and a wasteful 
 one. A providence far wider and deeper than hu- 
 man providence has these changes in hand, and our 
 wisdom lies in keeping aloof from either repulsion 
 or propulsion. It matters, indeed, little whether 
 we push against so formidable a body in front or in 
 the rear; in either case we waste our strength. A 
 goodness, therefore, which assumes the type of pru- 
 dence, will leave that to be done which is being 
 done and wait with most comfort and least loss for 
 that which can not yet be done. Philosophy is 
 wise and will not sanction a useless squandering 
 of forces. 
 
 Religion, on the other hand, in its more eager 
 vision; its fellowship with the supernatural; its 
 convulsions and conversions : its days of the Lord ; 
 and its millenniums, pronounces for immediate 
 and exhaustive efforts, and this, century after cen- 
 tury, though nothing in the actual progress of 
 society, under all the exertions of faith, contra-
 
 196 Things Learned by Living 
 
 diets the calmer thought of philosophy. Religion 
 has mistaken little flurries of dust for cyclones. 
 Formal changes have been magnified in their 
 importance. Pietism and fanaticism have re- 
 peated themselves, not indeed without growth, 
 but with no such deep or rapid renovation as in 
 any way to break the slow, continuous march of 
 society. The church, with its divided brother- 
 hoods, remains an isolated organization, an inci- 
 dental, vacillating, and frequently secondary 
 cause in the coming of the Kingdom of Heaven 
 the Kingdom in which the divine idea in its 
 breadth and strength is to declare itself. The 
 world, the world of God, moves slowly, picking 
 up or pushing aside religious ideas and methods 
 as a portion only of the multitudinous things which 
 are rolling on, like a river to the sea, under the 
 comprehensive, constructive providence of our 
 Heavenly Father. 
 
 Standing between this philosophical impotency, 
 this fatalism on the one side, and the sense of 
 spiritual potency, so often fatuous, on the other, 
 what is the true formula of social action? Is it 
 not, Push earnestly, continuously, unhesitatingly 
 the development of truth for its vivifying relations 
 to our own minds and to the minds of all men? 
 Here again consecration, and consecration alone,
 
 The Formula of Social Life 197 
 
 is achievement. The central, the ruling power of 
 the spiritual world is truth. One must so conceive 
 this world, and be faithful to this conception, or one 
 does not rise into it, one misses its unity, one falls off 
 from the divine mind. In a search into the truth 
 and into the use of the truth, processes in the end 
 inseparable from each other we have to do with 
 its intrinsic force and with its widest relations to 
 the minds of men. It is its intrinsic force which 
 justifies our formula. Its highest gifts will follow in 
 this line alone. We are not to use truth simply as 
 a convenient lever to pry into position the weight- 
 ful minds about us, and so to make an open path 
 suitable to our immediate wants. Truth is not 
 to be, as it is so often made to be, one among the 
 many means we employ in influencing men. This 
 notion always implies some end ulterior to the 
 enrichment of the spirit itself. It is not life, but 
 something wherewith to grace life, that we are 
 thus seeking. A quick sense of the effect of what 
 we are saying on the minds of others is a very 
 different thing, in its relation to character, from 
 a keen insight into the scope and applications of 
 truth itself. The one directs our attention to the 
 relation of men to our immediate wants ; the other, 
 to the complete dependence of our own mind and 
 all minds on the inherent force of spiritual things.
 
 198 Things Learned by Living 
 
 The misapprehensions and perversions, which 
 truth must meet and'overcome, are involved in its 
 constructive purposes. We might as well expect 
 to lift great blocks of granite to their positions in 
 a wall, without inconvenience or strain, as to Sub- 
 ject the lives of men to new and higher principles 
 without resistance. As a certain weight attends 
 all things and is the ultimate bond in all physical 
 union, so an inertia belongs to thought, and be- 
 comes the firmness of all spiritual movement. 
 There is no way of working without work, no 
 way of measuring results save by the labor of 
 attainment. 
 
 While we have great and constant occasion to 
 fear a too narrow application of the truth, we 
 have no occasion to fear a too early or a too per- 
 sistent urging of it for the ends of growth. The 
 inertia of the human mind is quite sufficient to 
 steady it. Nothing so steadies the mind as truth 
 itself, in its checks and counter-checks. The mind 
 is always and above all things entitled to the truth, 
 and entitled to be brought in the most complete 
 form, and with greatest possible rapidity under 
 its influence. There is no worse usurpation, no 
 more unwarrantable appropriation, than that of 
 the truth as an esoteric possession by those, who 
 think themselves alone worthy of it; nor is there
 
 The Formula of Social Life 199 
 
 any way in which truth is more surely squandered 
 in its most benign influences than by this neglect 
 of its largest relations. The very fact that there 
 is so much misapprehension to be removed, so 
 much resistance to be overcome is ground and 
 reason for haste If the morning is cold and misty , 
 so much the greater occasion for the sun. 
 
 One of the grandest books of our generation is 
 John Morley's Compromise. It most profoundly 
 accepts and enforces the eternal claims of truth. 
 There is no more unripe and sour fruitage of truth 
 than contempt, and contempt is the ruling feeling 
 in withholding truth. It is the capacity of the 
 mind for the truth which alone makes it worthy 
 to be revered. One may, indeed, be embittered 
 against the world, bringing to it many trains of 
 thought for which it is not yet ready, but his ill 
 success comes to him because he lacks the skill, 
 the quietness, and the patience of a good gardener. 
 He hastily thrusts his seeds into the soil, and is 
 angry at the cold, wet ground which as speedily 
 rots them. The discipline of the truth is a dis- 
 cipline of our entire nature. Our virtues flow 
 from exactly the same fountains as do our just 
 conceptions. As light, heat, the actinic ray are 
 all present in every sunbeam, and together con- 
 stitute its revealing and vitalizing force, so are
 
 200 Things Learned by Living 
 
 there discovery, enlargement, new affections in the 
 truth-seeking, truth-giving temper, rendering it 
 in the spiritual kingdom the one constructive 
 power of the divine mind. 
 
 Seeking to move society, we cannot plant our 
 capstans too directly and distinctly in front. 
 All corrections, for it and for us, will come out 
 of the labor. The formula of prudence presup- 
 poses independent renovating powers in whose 
 action we acquiesce ; the religious formula assumes 
 a divine energy which is to renovate the world in 
 an irresistible way, we waiting on it in prayer; 
 the spiritual formula remembers that we our- 
 selves, primary powers in spiritual things, chief 
 instruments in the hand of God, are to fur- 
 nish the impulses under which all progress is 
 achieved. Thoughtfulness, consecration, progress 
 are all variable phases of one thing. There is 
 among them a vital interaction under which 
 they prosper together or fail together. The 
 philosophic formula assumes impulses which it 
 fails to furnish. So science often traces the pro- 
 cesses of life and ignores life itself. The secret 
 of Christ is the reverse of this. The attention is 
 diverted from the immediate gains of life to life 
 itself; the inner hold of the mind on truth, and of 
 the truth on the mind. This movement, in its
 
 The Formula of Social Life 201 
 
 just completion, cannot fail to disclose all the 
 beauty of perfect and proportionate spiritual 
 things. Thought and love, human insight and 
 divine revelation unfold together as one kingdom, 
 in which neither is an instrument but both are 
 reciprocally instrumental. That to move in behalf 
 of reason, to move with the divine mind are at 
 once sound philosophy and true religion is the 
 secret of spiritual life, the formula of social life. 
 Only thus do we gather that life into ourselves; 
 only thus does that life gather us into itself. 
 To live and to move and to have our being in God 
 is to stand in the most conscious direct contact 
 with his renovating grace, ourselves appropriating 
 it by being a medium of it to others. We gather 
 life by being where life is, ever reaching forward 
 with it.
 
 CHAPTER IX 
 
 RELIGION 
 
 'T'HE great spiritual struggle in my time has lain 
 between naturalism and supernaturalism. 
 In my youth, supernaturalism, scarcely broken 
 in force, was in possession of the field. The attack 
 of naturalism, in the form of science, had been 
 fully opened, but its chief batteries were not yet 
 in position ; the doctrine of evolution had still to 
 complete and to establish itself. The urgent need, 
 therefore, of a thoughtful life, covering this period, 
 has been a new adjustment of these two tendencies. 
 Monism has been the predominant faith of philo- 
 sophy. It has arisen from this need of a higher 
 unity, and has taken an empirical or a spiritual 
 direction according to the constructive predis- 
 position of different minds. Neither science nor 
 philosophy nor religion can fully maintain itself 
 without an unbroken field of thought, the con- 
 dition of continuous and coherent inquiry. Each 
 and all demand a world at one with itself. 
 Monism has been sought by the subjection of 
 
 202
 
 Religion 203 
 
 the laws of mind to the laws of matter; by the 
 subjection of the laws of matter to the laws of 
 mind; and by taking both up into the being of 
 God. 
 
 In this strife, I have accepted naturalism as 
 against sporadic supernaturalism, and super- 
 naturalism as against a fatalistic naturalism. 
 Mind is the seat of orderly supernaturalism, 
 matter of determinate naturalism. Nature, as 
 the root of the two worlds, should mean fixed, 
 physical coherences. The one thing that has 
 grown for me ever clearer has been that the pro- 
 cesses of reason underlie all other processes; that 
 the sensuous terms of matter are simply diagrams 
 in the demonstrations of reason ; that the transition 
 between the mobile movement of thought and the 
 immobile movement of matter is that between the 
 sentiment not yet uttered and the sentiment once 
 uttered. While, therefore, the world of experience 
 necessarily opens with dualism offering itself in 
 all primitive terms it ripens under reason into 
 one product, everywhere alike permeated by mind. 
 The unity of the world is purely rational. Indeed 
 unity is pertinent to reason, and to reason alone. 
 It is correlative with the diversity of things. 
 Each is necessary to the other. 
 
 While, therefore, the coherence of the unfolding
 
 204 Things Learned by Living 
 
 processes of the world, disclosed to us as physical 
 laws, has ever been on the increase in my thought, 
 the sense of a pervasive personality has been 
 equally on the increase. The diagram and the 
 demonstration have been flowing on together. 
 Reason has kept pace with the instruments of its 
 utterance. Reason, in its expression, resolves itself 
 into two products, an unfolding universe and a 
 ripening spiritual life. The firmness of the one in 
 no way destroys the elasticity of the other. Both 
 are equally real, and real through each other. 
 
 The illustrations are many. The more vigorous 
 is any given form of life the less may its laws 
 be violated, and the more freedom and ease are 
 there in the handling of them within themselves. 
 Reason is ever resolving itself into the logical 
 coherence of propositions, and is, at the same time, 
 subject to the infinitely susceptible movement of 
 the feelings. The vine, climbing at liberty over 
 its trellis, is no more subject to the straight lines 
 of its support than is the human spirit, at play 
 with its own emotions, bound to the fixed forms 
 of the physical world. This liberty of thought has 
 increasingly seemed to me the true flowering of 
 material things, that into which all evolution is 
 forever ripening. It is the lambent flame which 
 gives light, not the fixed relations, which underlie
 
 Religion 205 
 
 its immediate activity. We must accept the 
 phenomenal force of laws, the spiritual freedom 
 to which they give occasion, or they lose all 
 significance. Unity lies in enveloping the neces- 
 sary with the free, as life lies in wrapping the 
 world about with a vital, volatile atmosphere. 
 
 Under this process of thought the collision of 
 creeds has been left behind. One supreme, per- 
 vasive, personal presence thought shining forth 
 as love has been the central fact of being. All 
 other facts derive their significance from this fact. 
 Christ, our Lord, is the fullest revelation of this 
 Divine Spirit, and draws all eyes by this simple 
 force of light. The laws above all law are those of 
 conduct, waiting to be disclosed and to be achieved 
 in spiritual liberty. In this disclosure and achieve- 
 ment a divine purpose and a human fulfillment 
 all wisdom, grace, conquest express themselves. 
 There are no definite limits, no fixed lines to this 
 movement. It has in it the growing resources of 
 the universe. It will spread over, cover, adorn, 
 and turn into liberty all its sensuous and gross 
 forms. How it will, in each instance, issue is 
 beyond our prediction, but not beyond our hope. 
 The victories of righteousness, whatever losses may 
 attend on them, will be complete and universal. 
 Life, spiritual life, is ever taking deeper, more
 
 206 Things Learned by Living 
 
 penetrative possession of its own. This is evolu- 
 tion. Immortality is the essential, rational and 
 all things are rational condition of this move- 
 ment, and this movement is the immediate force 
 and proof of immortality. 
 
 Generic, general well-being includes specific, 
 personal well-being. There is no salvation of the 
 race which is not, at the same time, the salvation 
 of those who compose it. Holiness is the all-inclu- 
 sive and conquering law, and holiness is at once the 
 inexorable law and the enduring liberty of reason. 
 
 The various phases of dogma which this creed 
 displaces seem to me to have held some fragments 
 of truth, more or less firmly, as their vital force. 
 The germ is enveloped in tough, oftentimes coarse 
 integuments. These, once broken asunder and 
 left behind, are thenceforward of very little value. 
 Yet they have, in their order, held the life, have 
 subserved its purposes, and have lain in the line 
 of its development. 
 
 If religious truth is the most stimulating of all 
 forms of truth; if it is the oxygen of the spiritual 
 world, by whose eager affinities all other truths are 
 built up into a system, then religion is no external, 
 partial want of the spirit, otherwise complete 
 in itself; it is the breath of its life, without which 
 it suffers slow strangulation. Religion is life
 
 Religion 207 
 
 a wider, deeper, fuller life gathered, by slow 
 transfer, about a new and higher center. It is 
 being born into the Kingdom of Heaven. It is 
 the descent of the Kingdom of Heaven upon us. 
 
 Religion as a life, with resources and felicities 
 wholly its own, may be understood and tested only 
 within itself, only by living it. Its insights attend 
 on achievements, its range of observation on 
 ascending heights in the spiritual world. Does 
 this faith justify itself in the vital force that comes 
 with it? Does this life reward itself in the very 
 putting forth of its own powers? It has seemed 
 to me, in the measure in which I have possessed it, 
 to put the idea of extraneous authority and exter- 
 nal reward out of the question and to leave the soul 
 full, overflowing with the pure felicity of being. 
 To make this quite true, and continually true, 
 this life must be allowed to have, and must win 
 its full sweep. It is not a maimed and limping 
 movement, which gives unalloyed delight. The lib- 
 erty of the spirit must carry with it the liberty of 
 the mind; and the liberty of the mind, the liberty 
 of the affections; and the liberty of all, the liberty 
 of the body. The higher powers and impulses 
 must rest freely and firmly back on the lower 
 ones. The light which falls on the summit of the 
 range must not disclose any undue ruggedness or
 
 208 Things Learned by Living 
 
 precipitancy or barrenness along its slopes. Se- 
 renity and proportion and affluence must be found 
 everywhere. If the religious life is complete in 
 itself, and in full fellowship with all life, then it 
 is true that a loving Heavenly Father giveth unto 
 his own all things richly to enjoy. The struggles 
 by which this victory of spiritual life is to be won, 
 the failures, near and remote, which attend upon it, 
 do not essentially mar the life which prospers by 
 them and rises above them. The substance of 
 that life is and must be a sense of power, a sense 
 of possession, an apprehension of, and an appetite 
 for virtue achieved under turmoil. The beautiful 
 day, the day of supreme refreshment, breaks 
 through breaking clouds, and rules the elements 
 rife with storms. If we can feel the Great Heart 
 of the world beat, and our hearts beat with it, 
 we shall not wish its mighty throb quieted, nor 
 our pulses stilled. The march of events, their 
 various and multitudinous voices, will all serve 
 to express the scope and force of the life, of 
 which God has 1 made us partakers and which he 
 marshalls, century by century, with fresh, creative 
 energy. All we shall desire will be to grow into 
 the universe, which is growing into us. 
 
 My religious faith seems to me to gather increas- 
 ingly all the force of reason into itself. It has
 
 Religion 209 
 
 never suffered any shocks of unbelief, nor tarried 
 in any one camp for any considerable period. I 
 have been upon the march in my spiritual beliefs 
 from the beginning to the end. Though the men- 
 tal movement has been somewhat in advance of 
 the practical movement of personal and social 
 regeneration, the two have not been sundered, 
 and I have a growing sense of the certainty of the 
 coming of the Kingdom of Heaven in the earth, 
 and of its methods. 
 
 My changes in religious belief have consisted 
 chiefly in steadily shaking off formal, theological 
 opinions as not sufficiently grounded in facts, as 
 subtle beyond knowledge, and in putting in their 
 place a spiritual rendering of the events of the 
 world. Faith has thus become inductive; and 
 life and faith have grown together. Such a tie 
 once formed, is not easily broken asunder. 
 
 If I were to judge the world by my own expe- 
 rience, my own consciousness, I should find no 
 great darkness, no spiritually inexplicable points 
 in it. My own discipline has been plainly a 
 discipline full of all ennobling possibilities. The 
 things not understood, the irresolvable nebulae, 
 lie in the apparent conditions of many other lives. 
 Yet I feel that we are here liable to a deceptive 
 rendering. We put together incompatible terms,
 
 210 Things Learned by Living 
 
 which are nowhere actually joined, our own per- 
 sonal impulses and another man's external sur- 
 roundings. The outer and the inner are the 
 reverse and the obverse of the same thing. A life, 
 no matter what that life is, has a certain harmony 
 of its own. Its forces, spiritual and physical, are 
 in vigorous action and reaction on each other, 
 and are, therefore, however depressed the position 
 occupied, pushing toward a corrected and per- 
 fected equilibrium. The internal and external 
 are not, for any considerable time nor in any 
 considerable degree, in conflict with each other. 
 Germs and climate fight their own battles, in 
 their own way, and are ever looking toward some 
 adjustment, some form of life. I believe it, 
 therefore, the sounder philosophy to take to our- 
 selves the comfort of our own inner form of light, 
 to feel assured that God's grace is in no way 
 limited to us, and that what is done here and now 
 with us and for us stands for the larger, later 
 possibility in the entire world of truth. 
 
 We ought to accept life, even spiritual life, in 
 the full circuit of its varieties and incipient forms. 
 This is a part of the teaching of the doctrine 
 of evolution. Things have value backward and 
 forward. The earlier life is not to fall into the 
 shadow of the later life, since that later life has
 
 Religion 211 
 
 sprung from it. The world moves together, and so 
 takes all with it. We have no right to put upon 
 incipient lower forms of intellectual and spiritual 
 life the stringency and scope of moral forces which 
 fall to us. The danger and liabilities are, in each 
 phase of being, according to the character of the 
 being itself. The wrath we have accumulated 
 about the baser, more sensuous kinds of trans- 
 gression, belongs more properly with us alone. 
 We must have a summer sky before we can have 
 the thunder-cloud. Widening my judgments 
 with these consolatory thoughts which are the 
 most necessary expansions of faith and the world 
 seems to me to be the very garden of God, resting 
 under the first warm spring days of his love, and 
 our prayer becomes that we all may thrive in this 
 vital sunshine.
 
 A PARTIAL LIST OF 
 
 ADDRESSES AND PUBLISHED WRITINGS BY 
 JOHN BASCOM 
 
 1852. Address: Mental Vigor: Its Component 
 
 Parts. 
 
 Dialexian Society, New York 
 Central College. 
 
 1853. A. M. Oration: Modes of Mental Action. 
 
 Williams College Magazine. 
 1853. Address: Nature as Emotional Expression. 
 
 Landscape Gardening Association, 
 
 Williams College. 
 1857. Article: Hickox's Empirical Psychology. 
 
 North American Review, vol. Ixxxiv, 
 
 PP. 364-379. 
 1859. Book: Political Economy. 
 
 Warren F. Draper, Publisher, 
 
 Andover, Massachusetts. 
 
 1 86 1 Sermon: Baccalaureate, Williams College. 
 1862. Book: Esthetics, or The Science of Beauty. 
 G. P. Putnam's Sons, Publishers. 
 1862. Article: Buckle's History of Civilization. 
 New Englander, vol. xxi, pp. 173- 
 193- 
 
 212
 
 Writings of John Bascom 213 
 
 1862. Article: 
 
 1862. Article: 
 
 1863. 
 
 Sermon : 
 
 1863. 
 
 Sermon : 
 
 1865. 
 
 Book: 
 
 1865 
 
 Address : 
 
 1865. 
 
 Address : 
 
 1866. Article: 
 
 1866. Article: 
 
 1866. Article: 
 
 Laws of Political Economy in their 
 Moral Relation. 
 
 New Englander, vol. xxi, pp. 649- 
 668. 
 
 The Morality of Political Econ- 
 omy. 
 
 National Review, April. 
 
 Our Duty to the Community. 
 
 North Pownal, Vermont. 
 
 On Temperance. Williams Col- 
 lege. 
 
 Philosophy of Rhetoric. 
 
 G. P. Putnam's Sons, Publishers. 
 
 Political Economy of Agriculture. 
 
 Massachusetts A gricultural Reports. 
 
 Agricultural Society, Pittsfield, 
 Massachusetts. 
 
 Transactions Berkshire Agricul- 
 tural Society, pp. 3-12. 
 
 Relations of Intuitions to 
 Thought. 
 
 American Presbyterian Review, vol. 
 xv, pp. 272-291. 
 
 Intuitive Ideas and their Relation 
 to Knowledge. 
 
 Bibliotheca, vol. xxiii, pp. 1-48. 
 
 Utilitarianism. 
 
 Bibliotheca, vol. xxiii, pp. 435- 
 452.
 
 214 Addresses and Published Writings 01 
 
 1867. Address: Agricultural Society, Greenfield, 
 Massachusetts. 
 
 Massachusetts Agricultural Re- 
 ports. 
 
 Secret Societies in Colleges. 
 Williams College. 
 
 Temperance. 
 
 Great Barrington. 
 
 Conscience ; its Relation and Office. 
 
 Bibliotheca, vol. xxiv, pp. 150-175. 
 
 Cause and Effect. 
 
 Bibliotheca, vol. xxiv, pp. 296-317. 
 
 (1) Natural Theology of the Social 
 Sciences. 
 
 Bibliotheca, vol. xxiv, pp. 722-744. 
 
 (2) Natural Theology, etc. vol. 
 xxv, pp. 1-23. 
 
 (3) Natural Theology, etc. vol. 
 xxv, pp. 270-315. 
 
 (4) Natural Theology, etc. vol. 
 xxv, pp. 645-686. 
 
 (5) Natural Theology, etc. vol. 
 xxvi, pp. 120-162. 
 
 (6) Natural Theology, etc. vol. 
 xxvi, pp. 401-442. 
 
 (7) Natural Theology, etc. vol. 
 xxvi, pp. 609-646. 
 
 Principles of Psychology. 
 
 G. P. Putnam's Sons, Publishers. 
 
 1867. 
 
 Sermon 
 
 1867. 
 
 Sermon 
 
 1867. 
 
 Article : 
 
 1867. 
 
 Article : 
 
 1867. 
 
 Article : 
 
 1868. 
 
 Article : 
 
 1868. 
 
 Article : 
 
 1868. 
 
 Article : 
 
 1869. 
 
 Article: 
 
 1869. 
 
 Article : 
 
 1869. 
 
 Article : 
 
 1869. 
 
 Book:
 
 John Bascom 
 
 215 
 
 1869. Article: 
 
 1869. Article: 
 
 1870. Article: 
 
 1870. Article: 
 
 1871. Article: 
 1871. Book: 
 1871. Address: 
 1871. Article: 
 
 1871. Article: 
 
 1872. Article: 
 
 Consciousness; What is it? 
 American Presbyterian Review, vol. 
 
 xviii, pp. 478-491 . 
 Foci of the Social Ellipse. 
 Putnam's Magazine, vol. xiv, pp. 
 
 7I3-725- 
 
 Human Intellect. 
 
 Bibliotheca, vol. xxvii, pp. 68-90. 
 
 Inspiration and the Historic Ele- 
 ment in the Scriptures. 
 
 American Presbyterian Review, 
 vol. xix, pp. 90-105. 
 
 Instinct. 
 
 Bibliotheca, vol.xxviii, pp. 654-685. 
 
 Science, Philosophy, and Religion. 
 
 G. P. Putnam's Sons, Publishers. 
 
 Agricultural Address. 
 
 North Adams, Massachusetts. 
 
 Sphere of Civil Law in Social 
 Reform. American Presbyterian 
 Review, vol. xx, pp. 40-51. 
 
 Darwin's Theory of the Origin of 
 Species. 
 
 American Presbyterian Review, vol. 
 xx, pp. 349-379- 
 
 Influence of the Press. 
 
 Bibliotheca, vol. xxix, pp. 401- 
 418.
 
 216 Addresses and Published Writings of 
 
 1872. 
 1872. 
 
 Article : 
 Address : 
 
 1872. Article: 
 
 1872. 
 
 Report : 
 
 1872. 
 
 Address : 
 
 1873. 
 
 Article : 
 
 1873. 
 
 Article : 
 
 1874. 
 
 Book: 
 
 1874. 
 
 Address : 
 
 1874. Sermon: 
 
 1875. Address 
 
 Influence of the Pulpit. 
 
 Bibliotheca, vol. xxix, pp. 698-719. 
 
 The Threefold Kingdom. 
 
 Mills Theological Society, Will- 
 iams College. 
 
 Evolution as advocated by Her- 
 bert Spencer. 
 
 Presbyterian Quarterly Review, vol. 
 i, pp. 496-5I5- 
 
 Minority Report on Coeducation. 
 
 Williams Vidette, July. 
 
 Inauguration of Dr. Chadbourne. 
 
 Williams College. 
 
 The Nation. 
 
 Bibliotheca, vol. xxx, pp. 465-481. 
 
 Taine's English Literature. 
 
 Bibliotheca, vol. xxx, pp. 628-647. 
 
 Philosophy of English Literature. 
 
 G. P. Putnam's Sons, Publishers. 
 Economy in Farming. 
 
 Transactions Wisconsin Agricul- 
 tural Society, vol. xiii, pp. 1 48-1 60. 
 
 Freedom of Faith. 
 
 Baccalaureate, University of 
 Wisconsin. 
 
 Dress. 
 
 Transactions Wisconsin Agricul- 
 tural Society, vol. xiii, pp. 434- 
 452.
 
 John Bascom 
 
 217 
 
 1876. 
 1876. 
 
 1878. 
 1878. 
 
 Book: 
 Article : 
 
 1876. Sermon: 
 
 1876. Address: 
 
 1877. Sermon: 
 
 Book: 
 Sermon : 
 
 Albert Hopkins. 
 
 Bibliotheca, vol. xxxii, pp. 350-362. 
 
 Consciousness. 
 
 Bibliotheca, vol. xxxii, pp. 676-702. 
 
 Faith and Reason. 
 
 Baccalaureate. University of 
 
 Wisconsin. 
 
 Philosophy of Religion. 
 G. P. Putnam's Sons, Publishers. 
 Synthetic or Cosmic Philosophy. 
 Bibliotheca, vol. xxxiii, pp. 618- 
 
 655 
 
 Seat of Sin. 
 
 Baccalaureate. University of 
 Wisconsin. 
 
 Conditions of Progress in Agricul- 
 tural Classes. 
 
 Transactions Wisconsin Agricul- 
 tural Society, vol. xiv, pp. 110- 
 
 I2O. 
 
 Education and the State. 
 Baccalaureate. University of 
 
 Wisconsin. 
 
 Growth and Grades of Intelligence. 
 G. P. Putnam's Sons, Publishers. 
 Common Schools. 
 Baccalaureate. University of 
 
 Wisconsin.
 
 218 Addresses and Published Writings of 
 
 1879. 
 1879. 
 
 1880. 
 
 1881. 
 
 Book: 
 Sermon : 
 
 1879. 
 
 Article : 
 
 1879. 
 
 Article : 
 
 1879. 
 
 Article : 
 
 1880. 
 
 Article : 
 
 1880. 
 
 Article : 
 
 1880. 
 
 Book: 
 
 1880. 
 
 Sermon : 
 
 Article : 
 Sermon : 
 
 1 88 1. Article: 
 
 Ethics, or The Science of Duty. 
 G. P. Putnam's Sons, Publishers. 
 Government by Growth. 
 Baccalaureate. University of 
 
 Wisconsin. 
 
 Conventional Conscience. 
 Sunday Afternoon. 
 A Kind of Cooperation. 
 Sunday Afternoon . 
 Kingdom of Heaven. 
 Sunday Afternoon. 
 Names. 
 
 Sunday Afternoon. 
 Destruction of the Poor. 
 Sunday Afternoon. 
 Natural Theology. 
 G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1 Publishers. 
 Tests of a School-System. 
 Baccalaureate. University of 
 
 Wisconsin. 
 Examinations. 
 
 The Western, vol. vi, pp. 497-499. 
 Truth and Truthfulness. 
 Baccalaureate. University of 
 
 Wisconsin. 
 Atheism in Colleges. 
 North American Review, vol. cxxxii. 
 
 pp. 32-40.
 
 John Bascom 
 
 219 
 
 1 88 1. Article: Improvements in Language. 
 
 The Western, vol. vii, pp. 492-509. 
 
 1 88 1. Article: (i) State Universities of the 
 
 Northwest. 
 The Western, vol. vii, pp. 134-145. 
 
 1 88 1. Article: (2) State Universities of the 
 
 Northwest. 
 The Western, vol. vii, pp. 229-238. 
 
 1 88 1. Article: Logic for Lire. 
 
 The Western, vol. vii, pp. 270-273. 
 
 1 88 1. Article: The University and the High 
 
 School. 
 Wisconsin Journal of Education, 
 
 vol. xi, pp. I55-I59- 
 Philosophical Results of a Denial 
 
 of Miracles. 
 Princeton Review, vol. viii, N. S., 
 
 pp. 85-94. 
 
 The Historic Sense. 
 Annual Convention of Beta Theta 
 Pi, Chicago, Illinois. 
 
 1 88 1 . B ook : Science of Mind. 
 
 G. P. Putnam's Sons, Publishers. 
 
 1882. Article: Gains and Losses of Faith from 
 
 Science. 
 
 Journal of Christian Philosophy, 
 vol. i, p. 18. 
 
 1 88 1. Article: 
 
 1 88 1. Address:
 
 220 Addresses and Published Writings of 
 
 1882. Article: 
 
 1882. 
 1882. 
 1882. 
 
 1883. 
 1883. 
 
 Pamphlet 
 Address : 
 Sermon : 
 
 Book: 
 Sermon: 
 
 1883. Article: 
 
 1883. Article: 
 
 1883. Article: 
 
 1883. Pamphlet: 
 
 Instruction in Philosophy in 
 
 Colleges and Universities. 
 Education, vol. ii, pp. 437-445. 
 : The Philosophy of Prohibition. 
 
 23 PP- 
 
 Woman Suffrage. 
 Madison. 
 The Lawyer and the Lawyer's 
 
 Question. 
 Baccalaureate. University of 
 
 Wisconsin. 
 Words of Christ. 
 
 G. P. Putnam's Sons. Publishers. 
 The Natural and the Supernatural. 
 Baccalaureate. University of 
 
 Wisconsin. 
 Mind and Matter; Their Ultimate 
 
 Reference. 
 Journal of Christian Philosophy, 
 
 vol. ii, p. 195. 
 Freedom of the Will. 
 Christian Thought, vol. i, pp. 49- 
 
 64. 
 
 Mind and Matter; Their Im- 
 mediate Relation. 
 Journal of Christian Philosophy, 
 
 vol. ii, p. 195. 
 
 Prohibition and Common Sense, 
 National Tract Society.
 
 John Bascom 221 
 
 1883. Address: First Principles. 
 
 Transactions Wisconsin Agricul- 
 tural Society, vol. xxii, pp. 226- 
 236. 
 
 1884. Sermon: The New Theology. 
 
 Baccalaureate. University of 
 
 Wisconsin. 
 1884. Paper: Part which the Study of Language 
 
 Plays in Education. 
 National Educational Association. 
 1884. Article: The Public Press and Personal 
 
 Rights. 
 Education, vol. iv, p. 604. 
 
 1884. Address: The University and the State. 
 
 University Review. Kansas. 
 
 1885. Sermon: Hero Worship. 
 
 Baccalaureate. University of 
 
 Wisconsin. 
 1885. Book: Problems in Philosophy . 
 
 G. P. Putnam's Sons, Publishers. 
 
 1885. Article: Inspiration. 
 
 New Englander, January, pp. 89- 
 103. 
 
 1886. Sermon: Common Sense and Spiritual In- 
 
 sight. 
 
 Baccalaureate. University of 
 
 Wisconsin. 
 
 1886. Article: The Pulpit and Practical Benevo- 
 lence. 
 
 Pulpit Treasury, January.
 
 222 Addresses and Published Writings of 
 
 1886. Articles: 
 
 1887. Sermon: 
 
 1887. 
 1887. 
 1887. 
 1887. 
 
 1890. 
 1890. 
 
 Book: 
 Article : 
 Article : 
 Article : 
 
 1888. Article: 
 
 1889. Address: 
 
 Memorial 
 Address : 
 
 Practical Benevolence and Length 
 of Pastorate. 
 
 Pulpit Treasury, March. 
 
 A Christian State. 
 
 Baccalaureate. University of 
 Wisconsin. 
 
 Sociology. 
 
 G. P. Putnam's Sons, Publishers. 
 
 Books that Have Helped Me. 
 
 Forum, vol. iii, pp. 263-272. 
 
 Gist of the Labor Question. 
 
 Forum, vol. iv, pp. 87-95. 
 
 Scientific Theism. 
 
 New Englander and Yale Review, 
 April, pp. 346-357- 
 
 Prohibitory Law and Personal 
 Liberty. 
 
 North American Review, vol. cxlvii, 
 pp. I35-HO. 
 
 The Ideal Element in the Good 
 Teacher. 
 
 Semi-centennial, Westfield, Massa- 
 chusetts. 
 : Joseph White. 
 
 Williamstown, Massachusetts. 
 
 Civic Growth of Society. 
 
 Law Class. University of Wis- 
 consin.
 
 John Bascom 
 
 223 
 
 1891. 
 1891. 
 
 Book: 
 Address: 
 
 1891. 
 
 Article: 
 
 1891. 
 
 Article : 
 
 1.891. 
 
 Article : 
 
 1891. 
 
 Article: 
 
 1891. 
 
 Article : 
 
 1891. 
 
 Article : 
 
 1893. Book: 
 
 1893. Article: 
 
 1893. Address: 
 
 The New Theology. 
 
 G. P. Putnam's Sons, Publishers. 
 
 To the Young Men's Christian 
 Association. 
 
 Massachusetts Agricultural Col- 
 lege. 
 
 The Bennett Law. 
 
 Educational Review, vol . i, pp. 48-52 . 
 
 A New Policy in Public Schools. 
 
 Forum, vol. xi, pp. 59-66. 
 
 Liquor Logic. 
 
 Cyclopaedia of Temperance. 
 
 General Principles of Prohibition. 
 
 Cyclopaedia of Temperance. 
 
 Coeducation. 
 
 American University Magazine. 
 
 ./Esthetics. 
 
 Encyclopedia Britannica, Ameri- 
 can Supplement, pp. 50-52. 
 
 Historical Interpretation of Phi- 
 losophy. 
 
 G. P. Putnam's Sons, Publishers. 
 
 Pres. Edwards. 
 
 Vol. n, Berkshire Historical So- 
 ciety. 
 
 Office of a Christian College in 
 Connection with Social Duties. 
 
 Williams Centennial.
 
 224 Addresses and Published Writings ot 
 
 1895. Book: 
 
 1895. Article: 
 
 1895. Article: 
 
 1897. Book: 
 
 1897. 
 1898. 
 
 1900. 
 1900. 
 
 Memorial 
 Article: 
 
 1899. Book: 
 
 1900. Article: 
 
 Article: 
 Sketch: 
 
 1901. Book: 
 
 Social Theory. 
 
 Thomas Y. Crowell & Company, 
 Publishers. 
 
 Philosophical Basis of the Super- 
 natural. 
 
 The New World, vol. iv, p. 279. 
 
 A Standard of Values. 
 
 Quarterly Journal of Economics, vol. 
 x, p. 54. 
 
 Evolution and Religion. 
 
 G. P. Putnam's Sons, Publishers. 
 : Professor Dodd. 
 
 Introduction to the Study of Soci- 
 ology. 
 
 The Expositor. 
 
 Growth of Nationality in the United 
 States. 
 
 G. P. Putnam's Sons, Publishers. 
 
 Competition, Actual and Theo- 
 retical. 
 
 The Quarterly Journal of Eco- 
 nomics, vol. xiv, p. 537. 
 
 The Alleged Failure of Democracy. 
 
 Yale Review, vol. ix, pp. 253-264. 
 
 Mark Hopkins. Historical Col- 
 lections of The Berkshire 
 Historical Society, vol. iii. 
 
 God and His Goodness. 
 
 G. P. Putnam's Sons, Publishers.
 
 John Bascom 
 
 225 
 
 1901. Address: 
 
 1902. Article: 
 1902. Article: 
 1902-3. Article: 
 
 1902. Address: 
 
 1903. Article: 
 
 1904. Article: 
 1904. Article: 
 
 1904. Sermon: 
 
 1905. Article: 
 1905. Sermon: 
 1905. Article: 
 
 Phi Beta Kappa. 
 University of Wisconsin. 
 The Supernatural. 
 Bibliotheca, vol. lix, pp. 238-253. 
 Constitutional Interpretation. 
 Yale Review, vol. x, p. 350. 
 Changes in College Life. 
 Atlantic, vol. xci, p. 749. 
 True Force of Education. 
 Semi-centennial, Wisconsin. 
 Teachers' Association. 
 Free Press Proceedings. 
 Is the World Spiritual? 
 Bibliotheca, vol. Ix, pp. 223-243. 
 The Addenda of Psychology. 
 Bibliotheca, vol. Ixi, pp. 209-231. 
 The Right to Labor. 
 Quarterly Journal of Economics, vol. 
 
 xviii, p. 492. 
 Wisdom by Growth and Growth 
 
 in Wisdom. Baccalaureate. 
 
 University of Wisconsin. 
 Social Basis of the Ministry. 
 
 Presbyterian Review. 
 Baccalaureate at the University of 
 Wisconsin. 
 
 Open vs. Closed Shop. 
 North American Review, vol. 
 
 clxxx, pp. 912-917.
 
 226 Addresses and Published Writings of 
 
 1905. Article: Economics and Ethics. 
 
 Bibliotheca, vol. Ixii, pp. 211-228. 
 
 1905. Article: Railroad Rates. 
 
 Yale Review, vol. xiv, pp. 237-259. 
 
 1906. Article: Causes and Reasons. 
 
 Bibliotheca, vol. Ixiii, pp. 125-149. 
 1906. Article: Unemployed in London. 
 
 Bibliotheca, vol. Ixiii, pp. 335-351. 
 1906. Article: Industrial Corporations. 
 
 Moody' s Magazine, vol. i, pp. 401- 
 
 407. 
 
 The Amendments. 
 Annals of the American Academy 
 of Political and Social Science, 
 vol. xxvii, pp. 597-609. 
 Reconciliations of Instruction. 
 Address at Normal School, North 
 
 Adams, Massachusetts. 
 1906. Article: Debate on Railroad Bill. 
 
 Moody' s Magazine. 
 
 1906. Paper: Prof. Perry, Berkshire Historical 
 Society. 
 
 1906. Paper: Greylock Reservation, Berkshire 
 
 Historical Society. 
 
 1907. Article: Watered Stock. 
 
 Moody' s Magazine. 
 1907. Sermon: Divine Giving. 
 
 Williamstown, Massachusetts. 
 Published by request. 
 
 1906. Article: 
 
 1906. Address:
 
 John Bascom 
 
 227 
 
 1907. Article: 
 
 1907. 
 1907. 
 
 1907. 
 1907. 
 
 1908. 
 1908. 
 
 1909. 
 1909. 
 1909. 
 1909. 
 
 1910. 
 1910. 
 
 Pamphlet 
 Article: 
 
 Article : 
 Article : 
 
 Article : 
 Article : 
 
 Article : 
 Article : 
 Article : 
 Article : 
 
 Article : 
 Article : 
 
 Esthetics and Ethics. 
 Bibliotheca, vol. Ixiv, pp. 33- 
 
 50. 
 ; College Tax Exemption. 
 
 Is Language a Living Thing? 
 
 Pedagogical Seminary. 
 
 Industrial Corporations. 
 
 Moody' s Magazine. 
 
 American Higher Education. 
 
 Educational Review, vol. xxxiv, pp. 
 130-143. 
 
 Dr. Hickox. 
 
 Journal of Psychology. 
 
 Coeducation in College Training. 
 
 Educational Review, vol. xxxvi, pp. 
 442-452. 
 
 Immortality. 
 
 Bibliotheca, vol. Ixvi, pp. 1-14. 
 
 College Library. Educational Re- 
 view, vol. xxxviii, pp. 139-149. 
 
 The Unemployed. 
 
 La Salle Exemption University. 
 
 College Optimism. 
 
 Williams Alumni Review, vol. i, 
 No. 4, pp. 6-10. 
 
 Difficulties of Faith. 
 
 Bibliotheca, vol. Ixvii, pp. 1-19 
 
 Stocks. 
 
 Moody' s Magazine.
 
 228 Writings of John Bascom 
 
 1910. Article: College Library. 
 
 Williams Alumni Review, vol. ii, 
 
 No. 2, pp. 7-15. 
 1910. Article: Athletics. 
 
 Williams Alumni Review, vol. ii, 
 No. 4, pp. 6-14. 
 
 1910. Address: Reason and Religion. 
 
 Coffee Club Papers. 
 
 1911. Article: Basis of Theism. 
 
 Bibliotheca, vol. Ixviii, pp. 132- 
 
 153- 
 1911. Article: As One Whole. 
 
 Bibliotheca, vol. Ixviii, pp. 627- 
 
 640. 
 1913. Book: Sermons and Addresses. 
 
 G. P. Putnam's Sons, Publishers.