On Being Human | Page 7

the quick perceiving vision, taking meanings at a glance, reading
suggestions as if they were expositions. You shall not otherwise get full
value of your humanity. What good shall it do you else that the long
generations of men which gave gone before have filled the world with
great store of everything that may make you wise and your life various?
Will you not take the usury of the past, if it may be had for the taking?
Here is the world humanity has made: will you take full citizenship in it,
or will you live in it as dull, as slow to receive, as unenfranchised, as
the idlers for whom civilization has no uses, or the deadened toilers,
men or beasts, whose labor shuts the door on choice?
That man seems to me a little less than human who lives as if our life in
the world were but just begun, thinking only of the things of sense,
recking nothing of the infinite thronging and assemblage of affairs the
great stage over, or of the old wisdom that has ruled the world. That is,

if he have the choice. Great masses of our fellow-men are shut out from
choosing, by reason of absorbing toil, and it is part of the
enlightenment of our age that our understandings are being opened to
the workingman's need of a little leisure wherein to look about him and
clear his vision of the dust of the workshop. We know that there is a
drudgery which is inhuman, let it but encompass the whole life, with
only heavy sleep between task and task. We know that those who are so
bound can have no freedom to be men, that their very spirits are in
bondage. It is part of our philanthropy--it should be part of our
statesmanship--to ease the burden as we can, and enfranchise those who
spend and are spent for the sustenance of the race. But what shall we
say of those who are free and yet choose littleness and bondage, or of
those who, though they might see the whole face of society,
nevertheless choose to spend all a life's space poring upon some single
vice or blemish? I would not for the world discredit any sort of
philanthropy except the small and churlish sort which seeks to reform
by nagging--the sort which exaggerates petty vices into great ones, and
runs atilt against windmills, while everywhere colossal shams and
abuses go unexposed, unrebuked. Is it because we are better at being
common scolds than at being wise advisers that we prefer little reforms
to big ones? Are we to allow the poor personal habits of other people to
absorb and quite use up all our fine indignation? It will be a bad day for
society when sentimentalists are encouraged to suggest all the measures
that shall be taken for the betterment of the race. I, for one, sometimes
sigh for the generation of "leading people" and of good people who
shall see things steadily and see them whole; who shall show a
handsome justness and a large sanity of view, an opportune tolerance
for details, that happen to be awry, in order that they may spend their
energy, not without self-possession, in some generous mission which
shall make right principles shine upon the people's life. They would
bring with them an age of large moralities, a spacious time, a day of
vision.
Knowledge has come into the world in vain if it is not to emancipate
those who may have it from narrowness, censoriousness, fussiness, an
intemperate zeal for petty things. It would be a most pleasant, a truly
humane world, would we but open our ears with a more generous
welcome to the clear voices that ring in those writings upon life and

affairs which mankind has chosen to keep. Not many splenetic books,
not many intemperate, not many bigoted, have kept men's confidence;
and the mind that is impatient, or intolerant, or hoodwinked, or shut in
to a petty view shall have no part in carrying men forward to a true
humanity, shall never stand as examples of the true humankind. What
is truly human has always upon it the broad light of what is genial, fit
to support life, cordial, and of a catholic spirit of helpfulness. Your true
human being has eyes and keeps his balance in the world; deems
nothing uninteresting that comes from life; clarifies his vision and gives
health to his eyes by using them upon things near and things far. The
brute beast has but a single neighborhood, a single, narrow round of
existence; the gain of being human accrues in the choice of change and
variety and of experience far and wide, with all the world for stage--a
stage set and appointed by this