Papers and Proceedings of the Thirty-Fourth Annual Meeting of the American Library Association: Held at Ottawa, Canada, June 26-July 2, 1912
Science
Papers and Proceedings of the Thirty-Fourth Annual Meeting of the American Library Association: Held at Ottawa, Canada, June 26-July 2, 1912
American Library Association; Library science -- Congresses
What does "public" signify in Canada and the United States? What
but all the people of these two great experiments in democratic
society? Pray note that I say society not government. An excursion
into discussion of the latter might involve dabbling in the stream of
politics which would threaten dangers far more imminent, for me, than
philosophy promised. To consider democratic society for a few moments
very simply is a less hazardous matter.
What is any society but "a world" again, a whole, in which the great
thing that matters is the level and fullness of mind that is reached
through the diversities of complete development and perfection of the
individual members which compose it?
The level of value and happiness for the whole can only be raised by
raising the condition of the individuals and, on the other hand, that
individuality is the most complete, of most real, felt value to itself,
which contributes to the perfection of the whole, because it is only
thus that the individual is conscious of having done his utmost.
Why try to say it again when the philosopher has said it so exactly?
"What a man really cares about--so it seems to me--may be
described as making the most of the trust he has received. He does
not value himself as a detached and purely self-identical subject.
He values himself as the inheritor of the gifts and surroundings
which are focussed in him and which it is his business to raise
to their highest power. The attitude of the true noble, one
in whom noblesse oblige is a simple example of what, mutatis
mutandis, all men feel. The man is a representative, a trustee for
the world, of certain powers and circumstances. And this cannot
fail to be so. For suffering and privation are also opportunities.
The question for him is how much he can make of them. This is
the simple and primary point of view, and also, in the main,
the true and fundamental one. It is not the bare personality or
the separate destiny that occupies a healthy mind. It is the
thing to be done, known and felt; in a word, the completeness of
experience, his contribution to it, and his participation in it.
"At every point the web of experience is continuous; he cannot
distinguish his part from that of others, and the more he
realizes the continuity the less he cares about the separateness
of the contribution to it.... It is impossible to overrate the
co-operative element in experience."
Does it not appear then that the highest possible service to the public
is service to the individual, in giving to the individual stimulus and
opportunity for the fullest, most diverse, most perfect development,
creating thus a world the more enriched, the more unified, in that each
of its members has rich powers, functions and experience of his own?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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