Philosophy and religion -- Study and teaching (Secondary) -- United States
“The spectator,” I said, “judges and chooses according to all he can
know. Surely, he chooses in relation with others. He can use all
experience; he goes even beyond his sorrow and pain. Do you understand?
He goes beyond sorrow and pain, and uses them. Do you remember I spoke
to you once of all things being a memory, of the body itself being a
memory? The basis of all sympathy is experience and memory. So the
spectator grows and uses everything. He is, as it were, in partnership
with the whole, with God. And he rises on his own knowledge. The higher
he goes, the farther can he see. Do you understand that aloofness, the
judging from the standpoint of the whole, of the whole self, is the
basis of morality? It is the part judging and living for the whole.
Those who know this make the laws for all, according to their knowledge;
and the others, who are only actors, whose spectator is not wide awake,
have to obey.”
At first they protested. Was this true? They did not understand. Henry
asked did I mean making laws to control anarchists? I explained how some
had to be forced to conform, even for their own good, and how the others
were free, because the law that was good for all, they knew to be best
for themselves.
I said: “My own limited personal life is my weapon and means, the only
weapon and means I have to come to completeness. I will always remember
that it is a means, something to use; but it is my only means, and for
that reason it is important and precious to me above all else.”
“You mean,” said Virginia, “that you don’t want to dream away your life,
like the ascetics of the middle ages, who dreamed of the whole, but
didn’t do their part?”
“Yes,” I said, “exactly. It is as if we were all watching a vast
chessboard, all together interested in the game, but each able to
control only one pawn, and yet anxious to play in such a way as to win
the game along with the others, each for the sake of the whole. And that
pawn is our own life; the only power we have.”
“Aren’t we ourselves the pawns?” asked Marian.
“No,” said Henry; “then we couldn’t manage them.”
“We are both pawn and player,” I said; “for if we were only the pawn, in
the crowd of little players, we could not see ahead, and would go
blindly forward without aim. One must be above the board to see it.”
And now I asked: “Shall we look once more over all we have said in these
few months?”
They answered that it seemed to them this last meeting had been a
review.
“Yes,” I answered, “aloofness, which a while ago you could not
understand, is now wholly clear to you; and more than that, it includes
all we have said.”
“It doesn’t include it all,” said Henry, “but it finishes and rounds it
out.”
“And our little club is finished,” I asked, “artistically finished?”
“Yes,” they said.
“I have noticed that sometimes some of you call it ‘class.’ Is it a
class? Is it not rather a club; have we not all gone forward together?”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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