Thus far, for the sake of convenience in dealing with a complicated
matter, I have spoken of primitive or raw drives or pushes, for
the most part, as though they were so many separate and distinct
actualities. In fact, however, hunger, sex-attraction, and all the
rest are generalizations. In the human species at least each actual
instance of hunger is less simple than mere hunger; each instance of
sex-attraction requires, if we are to describe it completely, something
more than an isolated instinct. With man, an instinctive satisfaction
is not the terminus of a railroad but an intermediate station through
which as well as to which he moves. The whole truth is that, though the
raw material of our personal selves is given to or thrust upon us, just
as sap is given to or thrust upon a tree, nevertheless it is from the
beginning human material; within it from the beginning personal selves
are in process of forming themselves, and society is in process of
forming itself. This motive is in all and through all the dynamics of
human conduct.
You can stop mere hunger by filling the stomach, but by no stuffing
process can you appease the life-urge that is human. Much of
the devastating irony that Plato’s Socrates directs against the
Sophists is based upon this truth. Gautama saw the merely negative
aspect of it, but he did not perceive, as Jesus did, that creative
self-activity--ethical love, for example--contains a satisfaction of
its own--a satisfaction, too, that is by no means to be equated with
other satisfactions, since it bestows value upon them or withholds it
from them. Self-discipline is a fact; so is voluntary acceptance of
work, and even of pain and loss and obloquy. If men revile you, and
persecute you, and say all manner of evil against you, still you are
blessed or happy if this experience comes because you are loyal to
“the ever-coming Kingdom of God.” It is partly by this transvaluation
of values, this conversion of our native drives, that men now and then
transmute both their environment and themselves into forms that yield
unprecedented beauty, and truth, and fellowship. In human experience,
I repeat, the motive of being a personal self among personal selves is
in all and through all. It may be weak or retarded, or it may become
distorted, yet even in conditions most unpropitious we find the spark
not quite extinguished.
A few years ago, a one-act play, a curtain-raiser, entitled “A Morality
Play for the Leisured Class,”[7] was given at the Neighborhood
Playhouse in New York City. There were two characters, a modern man
who had just been killed in an automobile smash-up, and an experienced
inhabitant of the other world. The deceased, gradually coming to
himself, and wondering where he is, calls out in the misty twilight
that surrounds him,
“Is anybody there?”
The mist clears away, revealing a shining Presence with wings. The
Presence asks,
“Can I do anything for you, Sir?”
The deceased wants to know what’s to be had here.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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