+The deepest fellowship cannot be made to order. It comes of itself
along lines of common interests and common aims.+--The harder we try to
force people together, and to make them like each other, the farther
they fly apart. Give them some interest or enthusiasm in common, whether
it be practical, or scientific, or literary, or artistic, or musical, or
religious, and this interest, which draws both toward itself at the same
time draws them toward each other. Hence a person, who from bashfulness
or any other reason is kept from intimate fellowship with others, will
often find the best way to approach them, not to force himself into
their companionship, against his will and probably against theirs; but
to acquire skill as a musician, or reader, or student of science or
letters, or philanthropy or social problems. Then along these lines of
common interest he will meet men in ways that will be at once helpful
and natural.
THE VIRTUE.
+Love is not soft, sentimental self-indulgence. It is going out of
ourselves, and taking others into our hearts and lives.+--Love calls for
hard service and severe self-sacrifice, when the needs of others make
service possible and self-sacrifice necessary. Love binds us to others
and others to ourselves in bonds of mutual fidelity and helpfulness. A
Latin poet sums up the spirit of love in the famous line:
Homo sum: humani nil a me alienum puto.
[I am a man: and I count nothing human foreign to myself.]
Kant has expressed the principle of love in the form of a maxim: "Treat
humanity, whether in thyself or in others, always as an end, never as a
means." We have seen that the temptation to treat others merely as tools
to minister to our gratification, or as obstacles to be pushed out of
our pathway, is very strong. What makes us treat people in that way is
our failure to enter into their lives, to see things as they see them,
and to feel things as they feel them. Kant tells us that we should
always act with a view to the way others will be affected by it. We must
treat men as men, not as things. This sympathy and appreciation for
another is the first step in love. If we think of our neighbor as he
thinks of himself we cannot help wishing him well. As Professor Royce
says, "If he is real like thee, then is his life as bright a light, as
warm a fire, to him, as thine to thee; his will is as full of struggling
desires, of hard problems, of fateful decisions; his pains are as
hateful, his joys as dear. Take whatever thou knowest of desire and of
striving, of burning love and of fierce hatred, realize as fully as thou
canst what that means, and then with clear certainty add: Such as that
is for me, so it is for him, nothing less. Then thou hast known what he
truly is, a Self like thy present self."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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