Orators become famous when they unite deep feeling with knowledge. But
what gives expression? The power of awakening emotion in others. Feeling
is always more convincing than intellect. Intellect is full of theories,
notions and superstitions. But where you find deep feeling combined with
knowledge, you will find reason directed by qualities which pass through
the surface and attain the heart-throbs of the real.
There are many kinds of emotion. There is the hard emotion of anger, the
confused emotion of fear, the painful emotion of jealousy, the
indescribable emotion of despair, the radiant emotion of joy. But the
greatest emotion of all is that of knowledge united to feeling.
Men, as a rule, speak of emotion as a weakness, and they confuse it with
impulse--a very different thing. Impulse is often the result of weak
nerves, uncontrolled by the will; but we must not confuse it with the
emotional quality which underlies all great achievement in art,
literature, philosophy and personality. The more impulsive the individual
is, the more primitive the reasoning faculty.
English and American business men are limited in general knowledge. I have
never been able to discover any distinctive difference between the two.
In France and Italy many business men are able to discuss art, literature
and music on the same level with the masters. The Latin races and the
Celtic races possess a culture that can be traced back for two or three
thousand years, but Anglo-Saxon culture only to the time of the Saxon
invasion. The Anglo-Saxons were the mushrooms of our civilization. They
were a stolid business people who lacked creative genius.
The outstanding intellect of England today is Celtic. The Scotch, the
Irish and the Welsh combine emotion and power with tenacity of purpose,
and it is this Celtic element that keeps America in the front rank of
nations.
What women have been opposing is the primitive monotony of the Anglo-Saxon
trend. It has meant a mixture of politics and commerce so primitive and so
naive that Frenchmen are amazed when they visit America and note the
striking difference between the culture of the women and the mentality of
the average man.
One of your great mystics has said: "The chemical constituents of human
bodies is the same. The ashes of a saint and the ashes of a sinner give
the same chemical results. As human bodies they are the same, but their
functions separate them and make them totally different, so that the
difference cannot by any hocus-pocus of metaphysics or magic be bridged or
spanned."
Two things of the same material are really different if their functions
are different. The real substance of a thing is in its function. We have
to judge people by the things they do, not by their appearance; for there
is no clear understanding between two persons whose aims are different.
This is why there are so many divorces. This is why so many intellectual
women live separate lives from their husbands in the same house.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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