The Call of the Twentieth Century by David Starr Jordan
D >>
David Starr Jordan >> The Call of the Twentieth Century
Above all, because including all, the century will ask for men of sober
mind. The finest piece of mechanism in all the universe is the brain of man
and the mind which is its manifestation. What mind is, or how it is related
to brain cells, we cannot say, but this we know, that as the brain is, so
is the mind; whatever injury comes to the one is shown in the other. In
this complex structure, with its millions of connecting cells, we are able
to form images of the external world, truthful so far as they go, to retain
these images, to compare them, to infer relations of cause and effect, to
induce thought from sensation, and to translate thought into action. In
proportion to the exactness of these operations is the soundness, the
effectiveness of the man. The man is the mind, and everything else is
accessory. The sober man is the one who protects his brain from all that
would do it harm. Vice is our name for self-inflicted injury, and the
purpose of vice is to secure a temporary feeling of pleasure through injury
to the brain. Real happiness does not come through vice. You will know that
which is genuine because it makes room for more happiness. The pleasures of
vice are mere illusions, tricks of the nervous system, and each time these
tricks are played it is more and more difficult for the mind to tell the
truth. Such deceptions come through drunkenness and narcotism. In greater
or less degree all nerve-affecting drugs produce it; alcohol, nicotine,
caffeine, opium, cocaine, and the rest, strong or weak. Habitual use of any
of these is a physical vice. A physical vice becomes a moral vice, and all
vice leaves its record on the nervous system. To cultivate vice is to
render the actual machinery of our mind incapable of normal action.
It is the brain's business to perceive, to think, to will, to act. All
these functions taken together we call the mind. The brain is hidden in
darkness, sheltered within a box of bone. All that it knows comes to it
from the nerves of sense. All that it can do in this world is to act on the
muscles it controls through its nerves of motion. The final purpose of
knowledge is action. Our senses tell us what lies about us, that we may
move and act, and do this wisely and safely. The sense-organs are the
brain's only teachers so far as we know, the muscles are its only servants.
But there are many orders which may be issued to these servants. Out of the
many sensations, memories, imaginations, how shall the brain choose?
The power of attention fixes the mind on those sensations or impressions of
most worth, pushing the others into the background. Past impressions,
memory-pictures, linger in the brain, and these, bidden or unbidden, crowd
with the others. To know the relation of all these, to distinguish present
impressions from memories, realities from dreams,--this is mental sanity.
The sane brain performs its appointed task. The mind is clear, the will is
strong, the attention persistent, and all is well in the world. But the
machinery of the brain may fail. The mind grows confused. It mistakes
memories for realities. It loses the power of attention. A fixed idea may
take possession of it, or it may be filled by a thousand vagrant
impressions, wandering memories, in as many seconds. In this case the
response of the muscles becomes uncertain. The acts are governed not by the
demands of external conditions but by internal whims. This is a condition
of mania or mental irresponsibility. Some phase of mental unsoundness is
produced by any of the drugs which affect the nerves, whether stimulants or
narcotics. They may help to borrow from our future store of energy, but
they borrow at compound interest and never repay the loan. They give an
impression of joy, of rest, of activity, without giving the fact; one and
all, their function is to force the nervous system to lie. Each indulgence
in any of them makes it harder to tell the truth. One and all, their
supposed pleasures are followed by reactions, subjective pains as unreal as
the joys which they follow. Each of them, if used persistently, brings
incapacity, insanity, and death. With each of them use creates appetite. To
yield once it is easier to yield again. The harm of some of them is slight.
Tea, coffee, beer, claret, in moderate quantities, do but moderate harm,
but all of them are without other effect on the nerves save to work them
injury. White lies at the best are falsehoods. These are the white lies of
physiology. In regard to each of these, the young man must count the cost.
Count all the cost and be prepared to pay. The song of Ulrich von Hütten,
when he gave his life for religious freedom, is worth applying to all other
costly things. He sang:--
"'Ich habe gewagt mit Sinnen
Und trage des noch kein Reu.'"
"With open eyes have I dared it,
and cherish no regret."
For all indulgence in wine and coffee and tobacco you will have a bill to
pay. Perhaps not a heavy bill. The indulgence may be worth the while, but
if so, find out for yourself beforehand whether others have found it so. If
you dare, dare with open eyes and cherish no regrets. For regret is the
most profitless thing to cherish. There is nothing more distressing than
remorse without will. The only hope in the world is to stop, and by the
time that the inebriate comes to realize where he is, it is too late to
stop.
"There is joy in life," says Sullivan, the pugilist, "but it is known only
to the man who has a few jolts of liquor under his belt." To know this kind
of joy is to put one's self beyond the reach of all others.
The joy of the blue sky, the bright sunshine, the rushing torrent, the
songs of birds, "sweet as children's prattle is," the breath of the
meadows, the glow of effort, the beauty of poetry, the achievement of
thought, the thousand and thousand real pleasures of life, are inaccessible
to him "who has a few jolts of liquor under his belt," while the sorrows he
feels, or thinks he feels, are as unreal as his joys, and as unworthy of a
life worth living.
There was once, I am told, a man who came into his office smacking his
lips, and said to his clerk, "The world looks very different to the man who
has had a good glass of brandy and soda in the morning." "Yes," said the
clerk, "and the man looks different to the world."
And this is natural and inevitable, for the pleasure, which exists only in
the imagination, leads to action which has likewise nothing to do with the
demands of life. The mind is confused, and may be delighted with the
confusion, but the confused muscles tremble and halt. The tongue is
loosened and utters unfinished sentences; the hand is loosened and the
handwriting is shaky; the muscles of the eyes are unharnessed, and the two
eyes move independently and see double; the legs are loosened, and the
confusion of the brain shows itself in the confused walk. And if this
confusion is long continued, the mental deterioration shows itself in
external things,--the shabby hat and seedy clothing, and the gradual drop
of the man from stratum to stratum of society, till he brings up some night
in the ditch. As the world looks more and more different to him, so does he
look more and more different to the world.
A prominent lawyer of Boston once told me that the great impulse to total
abstinence came to him when a young man, from hearing his fellow lawyers
talking over their cups. The most vital secrets of their clients' business
were made public property when their tongues were loosened by wine; and
this led him to the firm resolution that nothing should go into his mouth
which would prevent him from keeping it closed unless he wanted to open it.
The time will come when the only opening for the ambitious man of
intemperate habits will be in politics. It is rapidly becoming so now.
Private employers dare not trust their business to the man who drinks. The
great corporations dare not. He is not wanted on the railroads. The
steamship lines have long since cast him off. The banks dare not use him.
He cannot keep accounts. Only the people, long-suffering and generous,
remain as his resource. For this reason municipal government is his
specialty; and while this patience of the people lasts, our cities will
breed scandals as naturally as our swamps breed malaria. Already the
business of the century recognizes the truth of all this. The bonding
companies ask, before they sign a contract, whether the official in
question uses liquor, what kind of liquor, whether he smokes, gambles, or
in other ways so conducts himself that in five years he will be less of a
man than he is now.
The great corporations ask the same questions as to all their employees.
Even these organizations called "soulless" know the value of men, and that
the vices of to-day must be reckoned at compound interest and charged
against their estimate of the young man's future. The Twentieth Century
must be temperate; for only sober men can bear the strain of its
enterprises.
Equally dangerous is the search for the joys of love by those who would
shirk all love's responsibilities. Just as honest love is the most powerful
influence that can enter into a man's life, so is love's counterfeit the
most disintegrating. Happiness cannot spring from the ashes of lust. Love
looks toward the future. Its glory is its altruism. To shirk responsibility
is to destroy the home. The equal marriage demands equal purity of heart,
equal chastity of intention. Open vice brings with certainty disease and
degradation. Secret lust comes to the same end, but all the more surely
because the folly of lying is added to other sources of decay. That society
is so severe in its condemnation of "the double life" is an expression of
the bitterness of its experience. The real character of a man is measured
by the truth he shows to women. His ideal of womankind is gauged by the
character of the woman he seeks.
In general, the sinner is not the man who sets out in life to be wicked.
Few men are born wicked; many are born weak. False ideas of manliness;
false conceptions of good fellowship, which false ideas of the relationship
of men and women give, wreck many a young man of otherwise good intentions.
The sinner is the man who cannot say no. The fall through vice to sin is a
matter of slow transition. One virtue after another is yielded up as the
strain on the will becomes too great. In Kipling's fable of Parenness, the
demon appears before the clerk in the Indian service, who has been too long
a good fellow among the boys. It asks him to surrender three things in
succession: his trust in man, his faith in woman, then the hopes and
ambitions of his childhood. When these are given up, as they must be in the
life of dissipation, the demon leaves him in exchange a little crust of dry
bread. Bare existence without joy or hope is all that the demon can give
when the forces of life are burned out.
In our colleges, the one ethical principle kept before the athlete by his
associates is this: Never break training rules. The pitcher who smokes a
cigarette throws away his game. The punter who spends the night at a dance
loses his one chance of making a goal. The sprinter who takes the glass of
convivial beer breaks no record. His record breaks him. Some day we shall
realize that the game of life is more than the game of foot-ball. We have
work every day more intricate than pitching curves, more strenuous than
punting the ball. We must keep in trim for it. We must hold ourselves in
repair. We must remember training rules. When this is done, we shall win
not only games and races, but the great prizes of life. Almost half the
strength of the men of America is now wasted in dissipation, gross or
petty, in drink or smoke. This strength would be saved could we remember
training rules. Through the training rules of our fathers we have come to
consider as part of our inheritance the Puritan Conscience. As the success
of our nation is built upon this conscience, so in like fashion depends
upon it the success of our daily life.
I had a friend once, a mining man of some education, who made his fortune
in bonanza days in Nevada, and who drank up what he had made with the boys
who have long since passed away. As a hopeless sot he visited the gold cure
at Los Gatos. Not finding much relief, he walked over to Palo Alto to
borrow of me his fare to San Francisco. He said that he was going to pawn
his goods for a fare to Nevada, where he meant to kill himself. Whether he
did so or not, I do not know; for ten years have gone by and I have never
heard of him again.
As he sat in my room, haggard, bloodshot, ragged, gin-flavored, a little
boy who had then never known sin, came in, and being no respecter of
persons, took him for a man and offered him his hand.
Being taken for a man, brought him back his manhood for a moment. The
visions of evil left him, and from Dickens' poem of "The Children" he
repeated almost to himself these words:--
"'I know now how Jesus could liken The Kingdom of God to a child.'"
The old scene came back to him. When the Master was teaching, the children
crowded about him, and there were those who would send them away. But the
Master said, "No, let the little children come unto me, and do not forbid
them; for of such is the Kingdom of Heaven." And again he said, "The
Kingdom of Heaven is within you." And again those whose services the Lord
of the centuries could use, he likened to little children.
And of the many ways in which this likeness can be used this is one. The
child is born with brain and nervous system adequate to its many purposes
in life, if it is suffered to grow naturally, to become what God meant it
to be. There are not many children of sin not made so by vice,
intemperance, lust, and obscenity. They are victims of their elders' folly,
of our carelessness as to their environment. Half the troubles of men of
our race come through self-inflicted injury to the nervous system. We are
tormented by the "fool-killer." If we could revert to the child's simple
purity, the free movement of its machinery of life, we should find
ourselves in a new heaven on a new earth. We could understand for ourselves
part of what the Master meant. We should know now how Jesus could liken the
Kingdom of God to a child.
All forms of subjective enjoyment, all pleasures that begin and end with
self, unrelated to external things, are insane and unwholesome, destructive
alike to rational enjoyment and to effectiveness in life. And this is true
of spurious emotions alike, whether the pious ecstasies of a half-starved
monk, the neurotic imaginings of a sentimental woman, or the riots of a
debauchee. He is the wise man who for all his life can keep mind and soul
and body clean.
"I know of no more encouraging fact," says Thoreau, "than the ability of a
man to elevate his life by conscious endeavor. It is something to paint a
particular picture, or to carve a statue, and so make a few objects
beautiful. It is far more glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere
and medium through which we look. This morally we can do."
If it were ever my fortune in speaking to young men to become eloquent,
with the only real eloquence there is, the plain speaking of a living
truth, this I would say:--
Your first duty in life is toward your after-self. So live that your
after-self--the man you ought to be--may in his time be possible and
actual. Far away in the twenties, the thirties, of the Twentieth Century he
is awaiting his turn. His body, his brain, his soul are in your boyish
hands. He cannot help himself. What will you leave for him? Will it be a
brain unspoiled by lust or dissipation, a mind trained to think and act, a
nervous system true as a dial in its response to the truth about you? Will
you, boy of the Twentieth Century, let him come as a man among men in his
time, or will you throw away his inheritance before he has had the chance
to touch it? Will you turn over to him a brain distorted, a mind diseased,
a will untrained to action, a spinal cord grown through and through with
the devil grass of that vile harvest we call wild oats? Will you let him
come, taking your place, gaining through your experiences, hallowed through
your joys, building on them his own, or will you fling his hope away,
decreeing wanton-like that the man you might have been shall never be?
This is your problem in life, the problem of more importance to you than
any or all others. How will you solve it? Will you meet it as a man or as a
fool? When you answer this, we shall know what use the Twentieth Century
can make of you.
"Death is a thing cleaner than Vice," Owen Wister tells us, and in the long
run it is more profitable.
Charles R. Brown tells us of the old physician showing the physical effects
of vice in the Museum of Pathology. "Almighty God writes a very plain
hand." This is what he said. In every failure as in every success in the
Twentieth Century, this plain hand can be plainly traced. "By their long
memories the gods are known." This is an older form of the very same great
lesson, the "goodness and severity of God."
Those who control the spiritual thought of the Twentieth Century will be
religious men. They will not be religious in the fashion of monks,
ascetics, mystic dreamers, or emotional enthusiasts. They will not be
active in debating societies, discussing the intricacies of creeds. Neither
will they be sticklers as to details in religious millinery. They will be
simple, earnest, God-fearing, because they have known the God that makes
for righteousness. Their religion of the Twentieth Century will be its
working theory of life. It will be expressed in simple terms or it may not
be expressed at all, but it will be deep graven in the heart. In wise and
helpful life it will find ample justification. It will deal with the world
as it is in the service of "the God of things as they are." It will find
this world not "a vale of tears," a sink of iniquity, but a working
paradise in which the rewards of right doing are instant and constant. It
will find indeed that "His service is perfect freedom," for all things
large or small within the reach of human effort are done in His way and in
His way only.
Whittier tells us of the story of the day in Connecticut in 1780, when the
horror of great darkness came over the land, and all men feared the dreaded
Day of Judgment had come at last.
The Legislature of Connecticut, "dim as ghosts" in the old State House,
wished to adjourn to put themselves in condition for the great assizes.
Meanwhile, Abraham Davenport, representative from Stamford rose to
say:--
"This may well be
The Day of Judgment for which the world awaits;
But be it so or not, I only know
My present duty and my Lord's command
To occupy till He come.
So at the Post where He hath set me in His Providence,
I choose for one to meet Him face to face.
Let God do His work. We will see to ours."
Then he took up a discussion of an act relating to the fisheries of alewife
and shad, speaking to men who felt them obliged to stand by their duty,
though never expecting to see shad, or alewife, or even Connecticut again.
"Glad did I live and gladly die,
And I lay me down with a will."
This was Stevenson's word. "Let God do His work; we will see to ours." And
in whatever part of God's Kingdom we men of the Twentieth Century may find
ourselves, we shall know that we are at home. For the same hand that made
the world and the ages created also the men in whose hands the final
outcome of the wayward centuries finds its place within the Kingdom of
Heaven.