The Investment of Influence: A Study of Social Sympathy and ServiceHillis, Newell Dwight
Philosophy
The Investment of Influence: A Study of Social Sympathy and Service
Hillis, Newell Dwight
Conduct of life
The artist also remembers the inventors whose useful thoughts blossom
into engines and ships; statesmen whose wise thoughts blossom into
codes and constitutions; speakers whose true thoughts blossom into
orations, and artists whose beautiful thoughts appear as pictures. At
this assembly of the immortals great thinkers touch and jostle. But if
the great minds are remembered, no chair is made ready for the great
hearts. He who lingers long before this painting will believe that
brain is king of the world; that great thinkers are the sole architects
of civilization; that science is the only providence for the future;
that God himself is simply an infinite brain, an eternal logic engine,
cold as steel, weaving endless ideas about life and art, about nature
and man.
But the throne of the universe is mercy and not marble; the name of the
world-ruler is Great Heart, rather than Crystalline Mind, and God is
the Eternal Friend who pulsates out through his world those forms of
love called reforms, philanthropies, social bounties and benefactions,
even as the ocean pulsates its life-giving tides into every bay and
creek and river. The springs of civilization are not in the mind. For
the individual and the state, "out of the heart are the issues of life."
What intellect can dream, only the heart realizes! John Cabot's mind
did, indeed, blaze a pathway through the New England forest. But with
burning hearts and iron will the Pilgrim Fathers loved liberty, law and
learning, and soon they broadened the path into a highway for commerce,
turned tepees into temples and made the forests a land of vineyards and
villages. Mind is the beginning of civilization, but the ends and
fruitage thereof are of the heart.
Christopher Wren's intellect wrought out the plan for St. Paul's
Cathedral. But all impotent to realize themselves, these plans, lying
in the King's council chamber grew yellow with age and thick with dust.
One day a great heart stood forth before the people of London, pointing
them to an unseen God, "from whom cometh every good and perfect gift,"
and, plying men with the generosity of God, he asked gifts of gold and
silver and houses and lands, that England might erect a temple worthy
of him "whom the heaven of heavens could not contain." The mind of a
great architect had created a plan and a "blue-print," but eager hearts
inspiring earnest hands turned the plan into granite and hung in the
air a dome of marble.
Thus all the great achievements for civilization are the achievements
of heart. What we call the fine arts are only red-hot ingots of
passion cooled off into visible shape. All high music is emotion
gushing forth at those faucets named musical notes. As unseen vapors
cool into those visible forms named snowflakes, so Gothic enthusiasms
cooled off into cathedrals.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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