The Quest of the Simple LifeDawson, W. J. (William James)
Philosophy
The Quest of the Simple Life
Dawson, W. J. (William James)
Country life
of their own nature, succeeded in producing two poets who served
mankind each in a way not possible to the other.
I suspect there is a great deal of cant to be cleared out of the mind
before we can become equitable judges of what doing good really means.
I define doing good as the fulfilment of our best instincts and
faculties for the best use of mankind; but I do not expect that the
Good Earnest People will accept this definition. They would find it
much too catholic, simply because they have learned to attach a
specialised meaning to the phrase 'doing good,' which limits it to some
form of active philanthropy. If they would but allow a wider vision of
life to pass before the eye, they would see that there are many ways of
doing good besides those which satisfy their own ideals. It is a
singular thing that men find it very difficult to live lives of charity
without cherishing uncharitable tempers towards those who do not live
precisely as they themselves do. For instance, the busy
philanthropist, nobly eager to bring a little happiness into the grey
lives of the disinherited, often has the poorest opinion of artists and
novelists, who appear to him to live useless lives. But when Turner
paints a picture like the _Fighting Temeraire Towed to Her Last Berth_,
which is destined to stir generous thoughts in multitudes of hearts
long after his death: or when Scott writes novels which have increased
the sum of human happiness for a century, is not each doing good of the
rarest, highest, and most enduring kind? The fulfilment of one's best
instincts and faculties, for the best use of mankind, is not only the
completest, but also the only available form of philanthropy. Since
Nature has chosen to endow us with diverse faculties, our service of
mankind must be diverse too. In a word, doing good is a much larger
business than the ordinary philanthropist imagines; it has many
branches and a thousand forms; and they are not always doing the most
who seem the busiest, nor do those accomplish most in the alleviation
of human misery whose contact with it is the closest.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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