The Whence and the Whither of Man: A Brief History of His Origin and Development through Conformity to Environment; Being the Morse Lectures of 1895Tyler, John M. (John Mason)
Religion
The Whence and the Whither of Man: A Brief History of His Origin and Development through Conformity to Environment; Being the Morse Lectures of 1895
Tyler, John M. (John Mason)
Evolution
Our emotions, and this is but another word for our motives, stand
far nearer to the centre of life; for they control our conduct and
directly determine what we are. Knowledge of environment is good,
but of what real and permanent use is such knowledge without
conformity? Our real weakness is not our ignorance; we know the
good, but lack the will and purpose to live it out. And this is
because the thought of truth and goodness excites no such strength
of feeling as that of some lower gratification. We cannot perhaps
overrate the value of intellect; we certainly underrate the value of
emotion and feeling. "Knowledge puffeth up, love buildeth." It does
not require great intellect, it does require intense feeling to be a
hero. We slander the emotions by calling people emotional because
they are always talking about their feelings; but deep feeling is
always silent. It is not fashionable to feel deeply, and we are
dwarfed by this conventionality. We have almost ceased to wonder,
and hence we have almost ceased to learn; for the wise old Greeks
knew that wonder is the mother of wisdom.
The man of the future will probably be a man of strong appetites,
for he will be healthy; he will be prudent, because wise; but he
will hold his appetites well in leash. He will trample upon mere
prudential considerations at the call of truth or right. For in him
these highest motives will be absolute monarchs, and they are the
only motives which can enable a man to face rack and stake without
flinching. He will be a hero because he feels intensely. In other
words, he will be a man of gigantic will, because he has a great
heart. And in the man of the future all these powers will be not
only highly developed; they will be rightly proportioned and duly
subordinated. He will be a well-balanced man. But how few complete
men we now see.
We see the strong will without the clear intellect to guide it; the
gush of feeling either directed toward low ends or evaporating in
sentiment; the clear head with the cold heart. The high development
of one mental power seems to draw away all strength and vitality
from the rest. How rarely do we find the strong will guided by the
keen intellect toward the highest aims clearly discerned. Memory and
imagination must always play their part in the joy set before us.
But in addition to all these, the white heat of feeling, of which
man alone is capable, is necessary for his grandest efforts. Such a
being would be a man born to be a king. And there will be a race of
such men. And we must play the man that they may be raised upon our
buried shoulders. And they will tower above us, as the seers of old
in Judea, Athens, India, and Rome towered above their indolent,
luxurious, blind, and material contemporaries. And with all their
accelerated development, infinite possibilities will still stretch
beyond the reach of their imagination. For "men follow duty, never
overtake."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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