A Man's Value to Society: Studies in Self Culture and CharacterHillis, Newell Dwight
Philosophy
A Man's Value to Society: Studies in Self Culture and Character
Hillis, Newell Dwight
Character; Self-culture
He who has one strong faculty, the using of which would give delight
and success, yet passes it by, to use a weaker faculty, is doomed to
mediocrity and heart-breaking failure. The eagle has powerful muscles
under the wings, but slender and feeble legs; the fawn lacks the
weight of the draught horse, but has limbs for swiftness. Now, if an
eagle should become a competitor in a walking race and if the fawn
should enter the list of draught horses, we should have that which
answers precisely to the way in which some men seek to gain their
livelihood, by tying up their strongest gift and using their feeblest
faculties. When it is said that only five merchants out of a hundred
succeed we perceive that the great majority of men do not think to any
purpose in choosing an occupation. Recalling his friends who had
misfitted themselves, Sidney Smith once said: "If we represent the
occupations of life by holes in a table, some round, some square, some
oblong, and persons by bits of wood of like shapes, we shall generally
find that the triangular person has got into the square hole, the
oblong into the triangular, while the square person has squeezed
himself into the round hole." For lack of wise thinking beforehand,
multitudes have died of broken hearts midst failure and misery who
might have achieved great happiness and success had they used their
thoughts in choosing their life-work. He who approaches his task with
a leaden heart is out of the race before he is in it. Success means
that the heart loves what the hand does. The bread-winning problem is
the one that touches us first and most closely, and to wise thoughts
only is it given to solve that problem.
The number and value of our thoughts determine a man's value to
society. No investments bring so high a rate of interest as
investments of brain. Hand work earns little, but head work much. In a
Western camp one miner put his lower brain into the pickaxe and earned
$2.00 a day; another miner put his higher brain into the stamp-mill
and soon was receiving a score of dollars daily for his work; a third
youth, toiling in the same mine, put his genius into an electric
process for extracting ore, and sold his invention for a fortune. It
seems that wealth was not in the pick, but in the thoughts that
handled it. Had God intended man to do his work through the body,
man's legs would have been long enough to cover leagues at a stride,
his biceps would have been strong enough to turn the crank for
steamships, his back would have been Atlantean for carrying freight
cars across the plains.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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