Problems of Conduct: An Introductory Survey of EthicsDrake, Durant
Philosophy
Problems of Conduct: An Introductory Survey of Ethics
Drake, Durant
Ethics
of time and money. [Footnote: For an arraignment of the money thrown
away on modern decadent art, see Tolstoy's What is Art? chapter I.]
In this connection we must mention the waste of time over what Arnold
called "instrument knowledge." Years are spent by most upper-class
boys and girls in half-learning several languages which they will never
use, in acquiring the technique of the piano, or of some other art
which they will never learn to practice with proficiency. There is,
to be sure, a certain mental training in all this, but no more than
can be found in more useful studies. A foreign language is essentially
a tool for carrying on conversation with its users, or for utilizing
the literature written therein; the technique of an art is a tool for
producing or copying beautiful forms of that art. And except as these
tools are actually so utilized, the time spent on learning to handle
them might better be otherwise occupied.
(2) More than this, cultural interests may fritter away in passive
and useless thrills the emotions and energies that ought to stimulate
moral and practical activity. It is so easy, where there is money enough
to live on, to let one's faculties become absorbed in the fascinations
of study, without applying it to practice; to enjoy the relatively
complete attainment possible in the fine arts, and keep out of the
dust and chaos and ugliness of real life. Or, when the student or
art-lover does return to realities, after his absorption in some
dream-world, there is danger that he carry over into actual moral
situations his habit of passive contemplation, that he be content to
remain a spectator instead of plunging in and taking sides. He has
learned to enjoy the spectacle-sin, suffering, and all-and lost the
primitive reaction of protest against evils, of practical response
to needs, and the impulse to realize ideals in conduct. Thus culture
and art may relax human energy or scatter it in trivial accomplishments;
the dilettante spends his days in dreaming rather than in doing.
[Footnote: Cf. William James, Psychology, vol. I, pp. 125-26: "Every
time a fine glow of feeling evaporates without bearing practical fruit
is worse than a chance lost; it works so as positively to hinder future
emotions from taking the normal path of discharge. There is no more
contemptible type of human] Footnote continued from Page 269 [character
than that of the nerveless sentimentalist and dreamer, who spends his
life in a weltering sea of sensibility and emotion, but who never does
a manly concrete deed. . . . The habit of excessive novel reading and
theater going will produce true monsters in this line. The weeping
of a Russian lady over the fictitious personages in the play, while
her coachman is freezing to death on his seat outside, is the sort
of thing that everywhere happens on a less glaring scale. Even the
habit of excessive indulgence in music, for those who are neither
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