The Growth of Thought | Page 2

this: The life of a creature is that perfection and flourish of its faculties, of which its constitution is capable, and which some of the race are destined to reach. Thus, the life of the lion is realized, when the animal ranges undisputed lord of the sunny desert; finds sufficiency of prey for himself and offspring, which he raises to inherit dominion; lives the number of years he is capable of enjoying existence, and then closes it, without excessive pains, lingering regrets, or fearful anticipations.
Life differs from happiness. It is supposable, that the lion, tamed and petted, trained to feed somewhat after man's chosen manner, may be as happy as if at liberty in his native range. But such happiness is not the animal's life; since this implies the kind of happiness proper to the creature's constitution, in distinction from that induced by forced habits.
To happiness add knowledge and intellectual culture, and all together do not realize the idea of life. The tame lion may be taught many arts, assimilating him to the intelligence of man; but these remove him so much further from his appropriate life. Thus there may be a cultivated intelligence, which constitutes no part of the creature's life; and this without considering the same as a moral agent.
Macauley remarks, that the Jesuits seem to have solved the problem, how far intellectual culture may be carried, without producing intellectual emancipation. I suppose it would be only varying the expression of his thought to say, Jesuitical education strikingly exemplifies, how much intellectual culture may be superinduced upon the mind, without awakening intellectual life--without developing a spontaneous aptness to appreciate, seek, find, embrace the truth. The head is filled with the thoughts of others-many ascertained facts and just conclusions. It can reason aright in the circles of thought, where it has been trained to move; but elsewhere, no spontaneous activity--no self-directed power of thinking justly on new emergencies and questions not yet settled by rule--no spring within, from which living waters flow.
The difference between intellectual culture and intellectual life appears in the fact, that in regard to those mastering ideas, which to after times mark one age as in advance of the preceding, the classical scholars, the scientific luminaries, the constitutional expounders of the day, are quite as likely to be behind the general sense of the age, as to be in advance.
The question, What is human life? arises on a contemplation like this: There is no difficulty in determining the life of all the other tenants of earth; unless, indeed, those which man has so long and so universally subjected to his purposes, that the whereabouts, or indeed the existence of the original stock, remains in doubt. The inferior animals, left to themselves in favorable circumstances, manifest one development, attain to one flourish, live the same life, from generation to generation. Man may superinduce upon them what he calls improvements, because they better fit them for his purposes. But said improvements are never transmitted from generation to its successor; left to itself, the race reverts to proper life, the same it has lived from the beginning.
Man here presents a singular exception to the general rule of earth's inhabitants. The favorite pursuits of one age are abandoned in the next. This generation looks back on the earnest occupations of a preceding, as the adult looks back on the sports and toys of childhood. It is more than supposable, that the planning for the chances of office, the competition for making most gain out of the least productiveness--these earnest pursuits of the men of this age--in the next will be resigned to the children of larger growth; just as are now resigned the trappings of military glory. Where then is the human mind ultimately to fix? Where is man to find so essentially his good, as to fix his earnest pursuit in one direction, in which the race is still to hold on? Such seems to be the question, What is life?
The elements of that darkness, which excludes the light of life, may be considered as these three: First, the excessive preponderance of self-love, as the ruling motive of human conduct. Secondly, the short-sightedness of self-love, in magnifying the present, at the cost of the distant future. And, Thirdly, the grossness of self-love, in preferring of present goods the vulgar and the sensible, to the refined and more exquisitely satisfactory. And there are three ways, in which we may attempt the abatement of existing evils; or, there are three agencies we may call in for this purpose.
In the first place, leaving individuals to the operation of the common motives, we may labor at the social institutions, to adjust them to the rule, that, each seeking his own, after the common apprehension of present interests, may do so consistently with acting