The Simple Life | Page 8

it has been hard to see clearly;
right thinking has been difficult everywhere and always. In the matter
the ancients were in no wise privileged above the moderns, and it might
be added that there is no difference between men when they are
considered from this point of view. Master and servant, teacher and
learner, writer and artisan discern truth at the same cost. The light that
humanity acquires in advancing is no doubt of the greatest use; but it
also multiplies the number and extent of human problems. The
difficulty is never removed, the mind always encounters its obstacle.

The unknown controls us and hems us in on all sides. But just as one
need not exhaust a spring to quench his thirst, so we need not know
everything to live. Humanity lives and always has lived on certain
elemental provisions.
We will try to point them out. First of all, humanity lives by confidence.
In so doing it but reflects, commensurate with its conscious thought,
that which is the hidden source of all beings. An imperturbable faith in
the stability of the universe and its intelligent ordering, sleeps in
everything that exists. The flowers, the trees, the beasts of the field, live
in calm strength, in entire security. There is confidence in the falling
rain, in dawning day, in the brook running to the sea. Everything that is
seems to say: "I am, therefore I should be; there are good reasons for
this, rest assured."
So, too, mankind lives by confidence. From the simple fact that he is,
man has within him the sufficient reason for his being--a pledge of
assurance. He reposes in the power which has willed that he should be.
To safeguard this confidence, to see that nothing disconcerts it, to
cultivate it, render it more personal, more evident--toward this should
tend the first effort of our thought. All that augments confidence within
us is good, for from confidence is born the life without haste, tranquil
energy, calm action, the love of life and its fruitful labor. Deep-seated
confidence is the mysterious spring that sets in motion the energy
within us. It is our nutriment. By it man lives, much more than by the
bread he eats. And so everything that shakes this confidence is
evil--poison, not food.
Dangerous is every system of thought that attacks the very fact of life,
declaring it to be an evil. Life has been too often wrongly estimated in
this century. What wonder that the tree withers when its roots are
watered with corrosives. And there is an extremely simple reflection
that might be made in the face of all this negation. You say life is an
evil. Well; what remedy for it do you offer? Can you combat it,
suppress it? I do not ask you to suppress your own life, to commit
suicide;--of what advantage would that be to us?--but to suppress life,
not merely human life, but life at its deep and hidden origin, all this

upspringing of existence that pushes toward the light and, to your mind,
is rushing to misfortune; I ask you to suppress the will to live that
trembles through the immensities of space, to suppress in short the
source of life. Can you do it? No. Then leave us in peace. Since no one
can hold life in check, is it not better to respect it and use it than to go
about making other people disgusted with it? When one knows that
certain food is dangerous to health, he does not eat it, and when a
certain fashion of thinking robs us of confidence, cheerfulness and
strength, we should reject that, certain not only that it is a nutriment
noxious to the mind, but also that it is false. There is no truth for man
but in thoughts that are human, and pessimism is inhuman. Besides, it
wants as much in modesty as in logic. To permit one's self to count as
evil this prodigious thing that we call life, one needs have seen its very
foundation, almost to have made it. What a strange attitude is that of
certain great thinkers of our times! They act as if they had created the
world, very long ago, in their youth, but decidedly it was a mistake, and
they had well repented it.
Let us nourish ourselves from other meat; strengthen our souls with
cheering thoughts. What is truest for man is what best fortifies him.
* * * * *
If mankind lives by confidence, it lives also by hope--that form of
confidence which turns toward the future. All life is a result and an
aspiration, all that exists supposes an origin and tends toward an end.
Life is progression: progression is aspiration. The progress of the future
is an infinitude of