Human nature and the social orderCooley, Charles Horton
Science
Human nature and the social order
Cooley, Charles Horton
Individualism; Social psychology; Sociology
Thus love of a large and symmetrical sort, not merely a narrow
tenderness, implies justice and right, since a mind that has the breadth
and insight to feel this will be sure to work out magnanimous principles
of conduct.
It is in some such sense as this, as an expansion of human nature into a
wider life, that I can best understand the use of the word love in the
writings of certain great teachers, for instance in such passages as the
following:
“What is Love, and why is it the chief good, but because it is an
overpowering enthusiasm.... He who is in love is wise and is becoming
wiser, sees newly every time he looks at the object beloved, drawing
from it with his eyes and his mind those virtues which it
possesses.”[35]
“A great thing is love, ever a great good; which alone makes light all
the heavy and bears equally every inequality. For its burden is not a
burden, and it makes every bitter sweet and savory.... Love would be
arisen, not held down by anything base. Love would be free, and
alienated from every worldly affection, that its intimate desire may
not be hindered, that it may not become entangled through any temporal
good fortune, nor fall through any ill. There is nothing sweeter than
love, nothing braver, nothing higher, nothing broader, nothing
joyfuller, nothing fuller or better in heaven or on earth, since love
is born of God, nor can rest save in God above all created things.
“He that loves, flies, runs, and is joyful; is free and not
restrained. He gives all for all and has all in all, since he is at
rest above all in the one highest good from which every good flows and
proceeds. He regards not gifts, but beyond all good things turns to
the giver. Love oft knows not the manner, but its heat is more than
every manner. Love feels no burden, regards not labors, strives toward
more than it attains, argues not of impossibility, since it believes
that it may and can all things. Therefore it avails for all things,
and fulfils and accomplishes much where one not a lover falls and lies
helpless.”[36]
The sense of joy, of freshness, of youth, and of the indifference of
circumstances, that comes with love, seems to be connected with its
receptive, outgoing nature. It is the fullest life, and when we have it
we feel happy because our faculties are richly employed; young because
reception is the essence of youth, and indifferent to conditions because
we feel by our present experience that welfare is independent of them.
It is when we have lost our hold upon this sort of happiness that we
begin to be anxious about security and comfort, and to take a
distrustful and pessimistic attitude toward the world in general.
In the literature of the feelings we often find that love and self are
set over against each other, as by Tennyson when he says:
“Love took up the harp of life and smote on all the chords with might;
Smote the chord of self, that, trembling, passed in music out of sight.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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