The Call of the Job
I
A CAMPER starting into the woods on his annual vacation undertakes with enthusiasm the familiar task of carrying a Saranac boat upon a shoulder yoke. The pressure of the yoke on his shoulders feels as good as the grasp of an old friend’s hand. The tautening of his muscles to the strain of carrying seems to gird up his loins and true up his whole frame. With the spring of the ground beneath him and the elastic rebound of the boat on its springy yoke, he seems to dance over the ground between two enlivening rhythms. It is pure fun.
In the course of half a mile or so, the carry begins to feel like work. The pleasant, snug fit of the yoke has become a very respectable burden, cheerfully borne for the sake of the object in view, but not pleasant. The satisfaction of the carry is now something anticipated, no longer grasped in the present. The job is well worth while, but it is no joke. It will feel good to reach the end and set the boat down.
Finally, if in about ten minutes more there is still no sight, of the end, no blue sparkling glimmer of distant water low down among the trees, the work becomes drudgery. Will it ever end? Are we on the right trail at all? Is it worth while to go on?
Perhaps not, but to stop means painfully lowering the boat to the ground and later heaving it up again, which is the worst task of all —worse than going on as we are. So we hang to it, but now in scowling, stumbling, swearing misery, that edges always nearer to revolt.
In varying proportions every one’s life mingles the experiences of that carry. At its best and for a few, work becomes play, at least for blessed jewellike moments. By the larger number it is seen not a joy but as a tolerable burden, borne for the sake of the children’s education, the butter on the daily bread, the hope of promotion. Finally, for the submerged fraction of humanity who are forced to labor without choice and almost from childhood, life seems drudgery, borne simply because they cannot stop without still greater misery. They are committed to it, as to a prison, and they cannot get out.
It is not often, I believe, that a whole life is possessed by any one of these elements, — play, work, or drudgery. Work usually makes up the larger part of life, with play and drudgery sprinkled in. Some of us at most seasons, all of us at some seasons, find work a galling yoke to which we have to submit blindly or angrily for a time, but with revolt in our hearts. Yet I have rarely seen drudgery so overwhelming as to crush out altogether the play of humor and good fellowship during the day’s toil as well as after it.
In play you have what you want. In work you know what you want and believe that, you are serving or approaching it. In drudgery no desired object is in sight; blind forces push you on.
In all work and all education the worker should be in touch with the distant sources of interest, else he is being trained to slavery, not to self-government and self-respect.
Present good, future good, no good, — these possibilities are mingled in the crude ore which we ordinarily call work. Out of that we must smelt, if we can, the pure metal of a vocation fit for the spirit of man. The crude mass of ‘ work’ as it exists to-day in mines, stores, railroads, schoolrooms, studies, and ships, contains elements that should be abolished, elements that are hard, but no harder than we need to call out the best of us, and here and there a nugget of pure delight.
Defined in this way, work is always, I suppose, an acquired taste. For its rewards are not. immediate, but come in foretastes and aftertastes. It involves postponement and waiting. In the acquisition of wealth, economists rightly distinguish labor and waiting; but in another sense labor is always waiting. You work for your picture or your log-house because you want it, and because it cannot be had just for the asking. It awaits you in a future visible only to imagination. Into the further realization of that, future you can penetrate only by work; meantime you must wait for your reward.
Further, this future is never perfectly certain. There is many a slip between the cup and the lip, and even when gross accidents are avoided, your goal, — your promotion, your home, the degree for which you have worked, usually do not turn out to be what you have pictured them. This variation you learn to expect, to discount, perhaps to enjoy, beforehand, if you are a trained worker, just because you have been trained in faith. For work is always justified by faith. Faith, holding the substance (not the details) of things unseen, keeps us at our tasks. We have faith that our efforts will some day reach their goal, and that this goal will be something like what we expected. But no literalism will serve us here. If we are willing to accept nothing but the very pattern of our first desires, we are forever disappointed in work and soon grow slack in it. In the more fortunate of us, the love of work includes a love of the unexpected, and finds a pleasant spice of adventure in the difference between what we work for and what we actually get.
Yet this working faith is not pure speculation. It includes a foretaste of the satisfaction to come. We plunge into it as we jump into a cold bath, not because the present sensations are altogether sweet, but because they arc mingled with a dawning awareness of the glow to follow. We do our work happily because the future is alive in the present,—not like a ghost but like a leader.
Where do we get this capacity to incarnate the future and to feel it swelling within us as a present inspiration? The power to go in pursuit of the future with seven-leagued boots or magic carpets can hardly be acquired or even longed for until we have had some actual experience of its rewards. We seem, then, to be caught in one of those circles which may turn out to be either vicious or virtuous. In the beginning something, or somebody, must magically ent ice us into doing a bit of work. Having done that bit, we can see the treasure of its results; these results will in turn spur us to redoubled efforts, and so once more to increased rewards. Given the initial miracle and we are soon established in the habit and in the enjoyment of work.
But there is a self-maintaining circularity in disease, idleness, and sloth, as well as in work, virtue, and health. Until we get the result of our work, we cannot feel the motive for exertion. Until we make the exertion (despite present pain and a barren outlook) we cannot taste the delightful result, or feel the spur to further effort. The wheel is at the dead point! Why should it ever move?
Probably some of us are moved at first by the leap of an elemental instinct in our muscles, which act before and beyond our conscious reason. Other people are tempted into labor by the irrational contagion of example. We want to be ‘in it’ with the rest of our gang, or to win some one’s approval. So we get past the dead point, — often a most alarming point to parents and teachers, — and once in motion, keep at it by the circular process just described.
Various auxiliary motives reinforce the ordinary energies of work. Here I will allude only to one — a queer pleasure in the mere stretch and strain of our muscles. If we are physically fresh and not worried, there is a grim exhilaration, a sort of frowning delight, in taking up a heavy load and feeling that our strength is adequate to it. It seems paradoxical to enjoy a discomfort, but the paradox is now getting familiar. For modern psychologists have satisfactorily bridged the chasm between pleasure and pain, so that we can now conceive what athletes and German poets have long felt, the delight in a complex of agreeable and disagreeable elements. In work we do not often get as far as the ‘selige Schmerzen’ so familiar in German lyrics, but we welcome difficulties, risks, and physical strains because (if we can easily conquer them) they add a spice to life, — a spice of play in the midst of labor.
Work gets itself started, then, by the contagion of somebody else’s activity or by an explosion of animal energies within us. After a few turns of the work-rest cycle we begin to get a foretaste of rewards. A flavor of enjoyment appears in the midst of strain. Habit then takes hold and carries us along until the taste for work is definitely acquired.
II
In the crude job as we get it there is much rubbish. For work is a very human product. It is no better than we have made it, and even when it is redeemed from brutal drudgery it is apt to be scarred and warped by our stupidities and our ineptitudes. Out of the rough-hewn masses in which work comes to us it is our business - it is civilization’s business — to shape a vocation fit for man. We shall have to remake it again and again; meantime, before we reject what we now have, it is worth while to see what we want.
What (besides better hours, better wages, healthier conditions) are the points of a good job? Imagine a sensible man looking for a satisfactory work, a vocational adviser guiding novices toward the best available occupation, and a statesman trying to mould the industrial world somewhat nearer to the heart’s desire, — what should they try for? Physical and financial standards determine what we get out of a job. But what shall we get in it? Much or little, I think, according to its fitness or unfitness for our personality, — a factor much neglected nowadays.
Among the points of a good job I shall name seven: — 1. Difficulty and crudeness enough to call out our latent powers of mastery. 2. Variety and initiative balanced by monotony and supervision. 3. A boss. 4. A chance to achieve, to build something and to recognize what we have done. 5. A title and a place which is ours. 6. Connection with some institution, some firm, or some cause, which we can loyally serve. 7. Honorable and pleasant relations with our comrades in work.
Fulfill these conditions and work is one of the best things in life. Let me describe them more fully.
We want a chance to subdue. We want to encounter the raw and crude. Before the commercial age, war, hunting, and agriculture gave us this foil. We want it still, and for the lack of it often find our work too soft.
Of course, we can easily get an overdose of crude resistance. A good job should offer us a fair chance of our winning. We have no desire to be crushed without a struggle. But we are all the better pleased if the fish makes a good fight before he yields.
Not only in the wilderness, but wherever we deal with raw material, our hands meet adventures. Every bit of wood and stone, every stream and every season has its own tantalizing but fascinating individuality, and as long as we have health and courage, these novelties strike not as a frustration but as a challenge.
Even in half-tamed products, like leather or steel, there are, experts tell me, incalculable variations which keep us on the alert if we are still close enough to the elemental to feel its fascinating materiality. When a clerk sells drygoods over the counter, I suppose he has to nourish his frontiersman’s spirit chiefly in foiling the wily bargain-hunter or trapping the incautious countryman. But I doubt if the work is as interesting as a carpenter’s or a plumber’s. It reeks so strong of civilization and the ‘finished product’ that it often sends us back to the woods to seek in a ‘vacation’ that touch with the elemental which should properly form part of daily work.
We want both, monotony and variety. The monotony of work is perhaps the quality of which we complain most, and often justifiably. Yet monotony is really demanded by almost everyone. Even children cry for it, though in doses smaller than whose which suit their elders. Your secretary does not like her work, if you put more than her regular portion of variety into it. She does not want to be constantly undertaking new tasks, adapting herself to new situations. She wants some regularity in her traveling, some plain stretches in which she can get up speed and feel quant ity of accomplishment,—that is, she wants a reasonable amount of monotony. Change and novelty in work are apt to demand fresh thought, and reduce our speed.
Naturally, there is a limit to this. We want some variety, some independence in our work. But we can easily get too much. I have heard as many complaints and felt in myself as many objections against variety as against monotony. I have seen and felt as much discontent with‘uncharted freedom’as with irksome restraint. Bewilderment, a sense of incompetence and of rudderless drifting, are never far off from any one of us in our work. There is in all of us something that likes to trot along in harness, —not too tight or galling, to be sure, — but still in guidance and with support. That makes us show our best paces.
Nor is there anything slavish or humiliating in this. It is simply the admission that we are not ready at every moment to be original, inventive, creative. We have found out the immense strain and cost of fresh thinking. We are certain that we were not born to be at it perpetually. We want some rest in our work, some relief from high tension. Monotony supplies that relief. Moreover the rhythmic and habitual elements in us (ancient labor-saving devices) demand their representation. To do something again and again as the trees, the birds, and our own hearts do, is a fundamental need which demands and receives satisfaction in work as well as in play.
For the tragedies and abominations, the slaveries and degradations of manual labor we cannot put all the blame on the large element of monotony and repetition which such labor olten contains. We should revolt and destroy any work that was not somewhat monotonous. But the point is that work should offer to each worker as much variety and independence as he has originality and genius, no more and no less. Give us either more or less than our share and we are miserable. We can be crushed and overdriven by too much responsibility, as well as by too little. Our initiative, as well as our docility, can be overworked.
We want a boss, especially in heavy or monotonous labor. Most monotonous work is of the sort that is cut out and supplied ready to hand. This implies that some one else plans and directs it. In so far as we want monotony, therefore, we want to be driven, though not overdriven, by a boss. If we are to do the pulling some one else should hold the reins. When I am digging my wife’s garden beds I want her to specify where they shall go. We all want a master of some kind, and most of us want a master in human shape. The more manual our work is, the more we want him. Boatmen poling a scow through a creek need some one to steer and tell them which should push harder as they turn the bends of the stream. The steersman may be chosen by lot or each may steer in turn, but some boss we must have, for when we are poling we cannot well steer and we dont want the strain of trying fruitlessly to do both. This example is typical of the world’s work. It demands to be bossed, and it is more efficient, even more original when it is bossed, — just enough!
Monotony, then, and bossing we need, but in our own quantity and also of our own kind. For there are different kinds (as well as different doses) and some are better than others. For example, to go to the same place of work every day is a monotony that simplifies life advantageously for most, of us, but to teach the same subject over and over again is for most teachers an evil, though it may be just now a necessary evil.
We must try to distinguish. When we delight in thinking ourselves abused, or allow ourselves the luxury of grumbling, we often single out monotony as the target of our wrath. But we must not take all complaints (our own or other people’s) at their face value. A coat is a misfit if it is too big or too small, or if it puckers in the wrong place. A job can be a misfit in twenty different ways and can be complained of in as many different tones. Let us be clear about this. If our discontent is as divine as it feels, it is not because ah monotony is evil, but because our particular share and kind of monotony has proved to be a degrading waste of energy.
We want to see the product of our work. The bridge we planned, the house we built, the shoes we cobbled, help us to get before ourselves and so to realize more than a moment’s worth of life and effort. The impermanence of each instant’s thought, the transience of every flush of effort tends to make our lives seem shadowy even to ourselves. Our memory is like a sieve through which most that we pick up runs back like sand. But in work we find refuge and stability, because in the accumulated product of many days’ labor we can build up and present at last to our own sight the durable structure of what we meant to do. Then we can believe that our intentions, our hopes, our plans, our daily food and drink, have not passed through us for nothing, for we have funded their worth in some tangible achievement which outlasts them.
Further, such external proofs of our efficiency win us not only self-respect, but the recognition of others. We need something to show for ourselves, something to prove that our dreams are not impotent. Work gives us the means to prove it.
I want to acknowledge here my agreement in the charge often brought against modern factory labor, — namely that since no workman plans or finishes his product, no one can recognize his product, take pride in it or see its defects. Even when factory labor is well paid, its impersonal and wholesale merging of the man in the machine goes far to make it unfit for men and women.
We want a handle to our name. Every one has a right to the distinction which titles of nobility are meant to give, but it is from our work that we should get them. The grocer, the trapper, the night-watchman, the cook, is a person fit to be recognized, both by his own timid self and by the rest of the world. In time the title of our job comes to stand for us, to enlarge our personality and to give us permanence. Thus it supplement s the standing which is given us by our product. To ‘hold down a job’ gives us a place in the world, something approaching the home for which in some form or other everyone longs. ‘Have you any place for me?’ we ask with eagerness, for until we find ‘a place’ we are tramps, — men without a country.
A man with a job has, at least in embryo, the kind of recognition which we all crave. He has won membership in a club that he wants to belong to and especially hates to be left out of. To be in it. as a member in full standing gives a taste of self-respect and selfconfidence.
We want congeniality in our fellow workmen. One of the few non-physical ‘ points ’ which people have already learned to look for in selecting work, is the temper and character of the ‘ boss.’ Men, and especially women, care almost as much about this as about the hours and wages of the job. Young physicians will work in a laboratory at starvation wages for the sake of being near a great teacher, even though he rarely notices them. The congeniality of fellow workmen is almost as important as the temper of the boss. Two unfriendly stenographers in a single room will often give up their work and take lower wages elsewhere in order to escape each other.
All this is so obvious to those who look for jobs that I wonder why so few employers have noticed it. The housewives who keep their servants, the manufacturers who avoid strikes, are not always those who pay the best wages and offer the best condition of work. The human facts — the personal relations of employer and employee — are often disregarded, but always at the employer’s peril. The personal factor is as great as the economic in the industrial unrest of to-day. Are not even the ‘captains of industry’ beginning to wake up to this fact?
III
Payment can be given a working man only for what some other man might have done, — because his pay is fixed by estimate of ‘what the work is worth,’that is, what you can get other people to do it for. Hence you never pay anyone for what he individually does, but for what ‘a man like him,’ that fictitious being, that supposedly fair specimen of his type and trade, can be expected to do.
The man himself you cannot pay. Yet anyone who does his work well or gets satisfaction out of it, puts himself into it. Moreover he does things that he cannot be given credit for, finishes parts that no one else will notice. Even a mediocre amateur musician knows that the best parts of his playing, his personal tributes to the genius of the composer whom he plays, are heard by no one but himself and ‘the God of things as they are.’ There might be bitterness in the thought that in our work we get paid or praised only for what is not particularly ours, while the work that we put our hearts into is not recognized or rewarded. But in the struggle for spiritual existence we adapt ourselves to the unappreciative features of our environment and learn to look elsewhere for recognition. We do not expect people to pay us for our best. We look to the approval of conscience, to the light of our ideal seen more clearly when our work is good, or to the judgment of God. Our terms differ more than our tendencies. The essential point is that for appreciation of our best work we look to a Judge more just and keen-sighted than our paymaster.
Nevertheless there is a spiritual value in being paid in hard cash. For though money is no measure of the individual value in work, it gives precious assurance of some value, some usefulness to people out of the worker’s sight. Workers who do not need a money wage for the sake of anything that they can buy with it, still need it for its spiritual value. Doctors find this out when they try to get invalids or neurasthenics to work for the good of their health. Exercise done for exercise’s sake is of very little value, even to the body, for half its purpose is to stimulate the will, and most wills refuse to work at chest-weights and treadmills, however disguised. But our minds are still harder to fool with hygienic exercises done for the sake of keeping busy. To get any health or satisfaction out of work it must seem to the worker to be of some use. If he knows that the market for raffia baskets is nil, and that he is merely being enticed into using his hands for the good of his muscles or of his soul, he soon gets a moral nausea at the whole attempt.
This is the flaw in ideals of studiousness and self-culture. It is not enough that the self-culture shall seem good to President A. Lawrence Lowell or to some kind neurologist. The college boy himself, the psychoneurotic herself must feel some zest along with the labor if it is to do them any good. And this zest comes because they believe that by this bit of work they are ‘getting somewhere,’ winning some standing among those whose approval they desire, serving something or somebody besides the hired teacher or trainer.
I once set a neurasthenic patient, formerly a stenographer, to helping me with the clerical work in my office. She began to improve at once, because the rapid return of her former technical skill made her believe (after many months of idleness and gnawing worry about money) that, some day she might get. back to work. But what did her far more good was the check which I sent her at the end of her first week’s work. She had not expected it, for she did not think her work good enough. But she knew me well enough to know that I had sworn off lying in all forms (even the most philanthropic and hygienic) and would not deceive her by pretending to value her work. The money was good for what it would buy, but it was even better because it proved to her t he world’s need for what she could do, and thus gave her a right to space and time upon the earth.
This is the spiritual value of pay. So far no one has thought of so convenient and convincing a way to wrap up and deliver at each citizen’s door a parcel of courage for the future, and a morsel of self-respect which is food for the soul. But money is not the only means of paying people. The goods which money buys, the ends which it helps us to achieve are part of our reward, perhaps the most genuine part. But gratitude, service to others, and success to our aims are often thought of as the proper ends or rewards of work. Do we want them? Can we achieve them? Let us see.
Gratitude given or received is one of the best things in the world. We need far more of it and far better quality. Yet I have never read any satisfactory account of what it so gloriously means. Its value begins just where the value of pay ends. Thanks are personal, and attempt to fit an adequate response to the particular service performed. Pay is an impersonal coin which has been handed out to many before it reaches you, and will go to many others when it leaves you. It is your right and you are not grateful for it. But thanks are a free gift and enrich the giver. There is no nobler art than the art of expressing one’s gratitude in fresh, unhackneyed, unexaggerated terms which answer devotion with fresh devotion, fancy with new fancy, clarity with sincerity. Artists who get their reward only in money and in the stale plaudits of clapping hands are restless for something more individual. They want to be intimately understood and beautifully answered. For such gratitude they look to brother artists, to the few who really understand. There they find their best reward; — but even this leaves something wanting.
Why is it so notoriously difficult to accept thanks? Most things that I am thanked for I am not conscious of having done at all. Obviously the thanks arc misdirected. Or, if I am conscious of having done what the thanker is grateful for, I am likewise conscious that I only handed on to a third person what had previously been given to me. I learned from Smith and then enlightened Jones. Smith is the man to thank. Or, again, one is thanked for simply carrying out a contract; but one could not honorably do less. Thanks for going along the usual and necessary road seem gratuitous and undeserved. Or finally one receives gratitude for what one did with joy; that seems as queer as being thanked for eating one’s dinner.
But suppose that the deed one is thanked for was not an act of passing along what came originally from another as you pass money in a street car. Suppose a man has really originated something, an invention, a poem, a statue. He hardly claims it as his, for he does not know where it. came from, He did not ‘make it up.’ It sprang into his mind, given to him as much as if he had received it from a friend. He does not feel that he is the one to receive thanks. The thanks should pass through him, as the gift did, to some one else, —to his parents who gave him and taught him so much, to his race, his nation, his health, his friends, his opportunities. That is where it all came from; that is where thanks are due. But each of these influences is itself the recipient of countless other influences. Every fact in the universe depends on every other fact. Ultimately, then, not he but the universe must be thanked.
He deals with firms and employers, but he looks behind them, over their shoulders, and redirects their thanks elsewhere, ultimately, if he but knew it, to the World-Spirit. One may not remember that spirit. One often does not bother about the world’s work. Thinking exhausts some people and fatally confuses others. But if one thinks at all he runs up hard against the world plan and finds it the bulkiest object in sight.
The unsentimental male American is quick to reject the idea that he cares about serving anybody or anything. He may admit that he wants to ‘make good ’ in a fair and square way, according to the rules of the game. But ‘service’ sounds too ‘stuck up’ and Pharisaical for him.
Nevertheless I firmly believe that his derision is only a ruse to conceal his morbid bashfulness and oafish sensitiveness. For in point of fact service is one of the things that pretty much everybody wants, — however much he may disguise it and conceal it from himself. I have never seen any more unsentimental and raw-boned being than the American medical student; yet he is simply hankering for service. Medical teachers spread before him banquets of tempting ‘opportunities,’ rare ‘cases,’ ‘beautiful’ specimens, easy chances to distinguish himself in research and to absorb his medical food in predigested mouthfuls. He often remains indifferent. But the moment you give him a place to work in a clinic, to serve as Dr. Blank’s fourteenth assistant in a hospital where good work is done, he will jump at the chance. The work is much harder and more monotonous than his regular studies. Much of it is not teaching him medicine. He has to go on doing Fehling’s test for sugar and trying knee jerks long after he has learned the trick. He has to measure stomach contents, to weigh patients, to bandage legs, and to write down names and addresses in monotonous routine day after day. Yet he loves the job. Despite all the drudgery, he learns far more medicine by holding down an actual job of this kind, than by lectures and classes. If you separate out the instructive portion of his day’s work and present it to him without assigning him any regular position and duties, he does not like the work as well or learn so much.
Extraordinarily sound, those students’ instincts! The men are bored when we offer them more opportunities to do what is easy and self-centred, but outside the current of reality. It is only when we give them hard, dry work like an assistantship in a clinic, — a place where they can accomplish something that has a real value in the actual world, — that they fall to with real appetite.
The sense of somebody’s need is, I believe, the most powerful motive in the world, one that appeals to the largest number of people of every age, race, and kind. It wakes up the whole nature, the powers that learn as well as those that perform; it generates the vigor of interest that submerges selfishness and cowardice; it rouses the inventiveness and ingenuity that slumber so soundly in students’ classrooms. For many of us, for more every time the world takes a step in the right direction, work which is service taps a great reservoir of power, sets free our caged and leashed energy.
I conclude then that pay, gratitude, and service as ends of work, have each a value, though not exactly of the sort one might expect. What about success as a reward of work?
Financial rewards are nowadays less advertised than the general prosperity which they express. Civic ideals are kept in the foreground, alike by ‘ boosters,’real-estate men, and chambers of commerce. According to these authorities business success means a flourishing city and a contented, healthy community. To help build up a fine city is what we are asked to do in case we take the investment offered us. A fine city is an efficiently managed, well-lighted community, with plenty of schools, parks, and churches. But stop a moment. What is the use of such a place?
When we have built and finished this perfect city, with ils smooth-running government, its crime-freed, sanitary streets will be swept and garnished, all ready to begin —what? It is hard to hear any answer. Few are interested enough even to attempt one. For the interest of civic reform is mainly in the process,— far less in the result. Boys who build a boat or a play-house usually find that there is far more fun in the process of building than in using the finished product. So it is with the reform of a slum or a municipal government. The best of it is in the reforming. We shall hardly stop to notice it when it is perfect. We shall take it for granted as we do the safe delivery of the letters which we post, and be off on another campaign. Our civic goals are like the scented rushes in ‘Wool and Water.’ The most beautiful ones, Alice found, were always those just beyond her reach. Perfect adaptation to environment, which seems to be what the sanitary and civic reformers aim at, would mean absolute stagnation, — attainment that buds no more. For what should stir us further?
‘Well, anyway, to reform our city is the best thing in sight. It is certainly in the right direction.’ Ah, then we know what the right direction is! That is something far more significant than any single step in civic progress. If we know the true direction we can point beyond the civic models to something towards which they are on the road, and get our satisfaction all along its course.
The worship of ‘the right direction’ is a fundamental motive in art and play as well as in work. Every noble game and work of art calls for others, incites to pilgrimages, reforms and nobler arts. Art is not meant to give us something final; everything in it is pointing ahead and gets it s justification because it is ‘in the right direction.' Everything in art, as in civics, gets the courage to exist and to push on because of its readiness to be corrected by experience to a truer version of its own purpose. Sincere people want the true, in their work as well as in their thinking. But the truth is an Infinite, and the will to approach it is an infinite intention. The fruit of this infinite intention would be our utter prostration of self before the vision, ‘Do with me as thou wilt.’ ‘Thy will not mine be done.’
I cannot see the end of all this. I see reform after reform of character and of civilization, progress after progress in science and art, rising like mountain ranges, one behind the other. But there is no conceivable sense in all these upheavals if they are mere changes, mere uneasy shifts in the position of a dreaming world-spirit. To make sense they must be moving in a single direction.
It is obvious enough that all work is supposed to fulfill someone’s plan — the worker’s plan or his master’s. It is good for something. But every one of the goods we buy with our work is itself a means to something else, a coin with which to purchase something more. The goods we supply, the clothes, food, transportation, medicine, knowledge, inspiration which we give, are themselves means to something else, perhaps to comfort, health, education, courage. These again are means to better work, to civic perfection, to family happiness. But these once more are in themselves as worthless as fiat money or dolls stuffed with sawdust, unless there is absolute value behind them. Happiness, civic perfection, love, are sometimes named as the ultimate ends towards which the activities of busy men and women are means, but anybody who experiences any of these states and is not a Buddhist wallowing in vague bliss, finds that they incite us to new deeds. If they are not soporific drugs they are spurs to fresh action.
Taken literally, the ideals of utility and civic reform are like the old myth which explained the world’s support as the broad back of an elephant. Who supports the elephant? He rests on a gigantic tortoise; and who supports the tortoise? No answer is audible in the business sections of our cities, in the schoolrooms or in the colleges. The church’s answer is derided or ignored by a large fraction of us. But it is the right one; and we shall learn to listen to it or pay the penalty. Government does not rest ultimately on the consent of the governed, but on their conformity to the will of the World-Spirit who makes and unmakes civilizations.
Success in industry, in art, or in love is saved from bitterness and disappointment because we regard our achievements far more symbolically than we know, and rest far more than we are aware upon the backing of God.
Assuming that in everyone there is an infinite and restless desire to get into the life of the World, — to share any and all life that is hot and urgent or cool and clear,—we can tackle this infinite task in two ways: —
By trying to understand the universe in the samples of it which come into our ken and to draw from these bits a knowledge which typifies and represents the whole. That is science.
By trying to serve. Service is one of the ways by which a tiny insect like one of us can get a purchase on the whole universe. If he finds the job where he can be of use, he is hitched to the star of the world, and moves with it.