Chapter 3

By this Fourier meant that a universal longing among human beings was certain proof that their ultimate destiny involved the fulfilment of the longing. The little girl fondling a doll foretells maternity. The hectoring boy foretells the soldier's career. No universal attraction, save with a destiny proportionate. ----

The human race since it began to think and believe has thought of and believed in immortality. The half wise declare that belief in immortality and a spirit world came to savage peoples through dreams, that it has been kept alive through superstition and the power of religion. Trivial, certainly, is such an explanation of a phenomenon as wide as mankind's existence. ----

A very consoling fact for the doubter is this. The strongest minds born on the earth have almost invariably, at some stage of development, rejected belief in immortality--only to return to the belief, or at least to the HOPE, with fuller age and riper wisdom. That no great mind has seen any positive argument against the hope of immortality is certainly comforting to all of us. Intelligence can always refute improbability and falsehood. ----

What about the nature of immortality? The Indian hopes for dogs and hunting, the Turk for a life of which the least said the better. The Christian, borrowing his ideas from the writings of the old Hebrews, looks forward to what may be called a solid gold existence--everything made of gold or of something more expensive.

We do not think that religious docility demands implicit belief in any of the published details of our future existence. Gold is not comfortable; jasper would not well replace the green turf.

Is it not more reasonable to assume, since immortality is to be ours, that it is ours now and always has been? We cannot imagine creation of the indestructible. Is it not sensible to take literally that most beautiful invocation: "Thy kingdom come ON EARTH as it is in heaven"?

We know that heaven cannot be above us or hell below; because as we whirl round in each twenty-four hour period those abodes would have to whirl also--quite unreasonable. ----

This earth would make a very good heaven--properly improved and managed. Wipe out human selfishness, and the Sahara and other deserts. Establish universal philanthropy, regulate the climate, confine human manual labor to the pushing of an electric button--all quite possible--and you have the sort of heaven that man would select if left to choose.

Why should we not come back here again and again, taking varying human forms, doing our duty well or badly each time according to our start in life, and finally enjoying perfect terrestrial happiness here as a finished race of immortal beings--immortal in the sense of being indestructible and of possessing the gift of perpetual reincarnation? ----

Now, this earthly reincarnation idea is what we have been driving at since the beginning of this particular article. What is the argument against prior and subsequent existence here? It is this:

"If I am to live here again, I must have lived here before. If I have lived here before I do not know it, and I do not look forward with pleasure to future existence here in which I shall not know myself."

This is a reasonable objection, certainly. Reincarnation without consciousness of former existences would miss half the fun. ----

But it is possible to be in too much of a hurry. Let us suppose that as yet we are not sufficiently developed to carry from one existence to another the memory of former existence. Suppose the time is to come when we shall suddenly advance as far beyond this intellectual stage as this stage of intellect is beyond that of the Bushman. Is it not conceivable that we may suddenly be enabled to recall all former existences and to remember all the various happenings of our former lives? May we not say, "There is Mrs. Jones. I was married to her six million years ago, and we quarrelled"? It seems quite hopeable.

You cannot deny that it is possible. For instance: You now lead a continuous existence. You know that you were alive three days ago and you remember what you did then. But a baby four weeks old does NOT know that he was alive three days ago and he does not know what he did then. He has not reached a stage where his mind can grasp even the fact of continuous existence. We may not have reached a stage enabling us to grasp continuous reincarnation.

Think of this, and see if you cannot get some comfort, or at least some amusing speculation out of it. ----

Science admits and thinks it proves that the inorganic atom of matter is indestructible--that it persists forever. Why should we not admit--and ultimately prove--that the atom of organic force called a soul is indestructible and exists forever?

Every atom of matter, every particle of force, existing in the visible universe will continue to exist billions of centuries after the universe shall have melted and lost its present shape. The nail on your finger will exist as separate atoms when the Milky Way shall have faded from the heavens. How does that strike you for immortality?

We predict that the mysterious force-atom called your soul will exist AND KNOW ITSELF AND ITS FRIENDS ten thousand billions of centuries from now and be as young as ever.

DISCONTENT THE MOTIVE POWER OF PROGRESS

At first the baby lies fiat on his back, eyes staring up at the ceiling.

By and by he gets tired of lying on his back. DISCONTENT with his condition makes him wriggle and wriggle. At last he succeeds in turning over.

If he were contented then, there would be no men on earth--only huge babies. But DISCONTENT again seizes him, and through discontent he learns to crawl.

Crawling--travelling on hands and knees--satisfied lower forms of animal life. It used to satisfy us, in the old days of early evolutionary stages.

But the human infant--thanks to inborn cravings--is DISCONTENTED with crawling. With much trouble and risk and many feeble totterings, he learns to walk erect. He gets up into a position that takes his eyes off the ground. He is able to look at the sun and stars and takes the position of a man. DISCONTENT is his mainspring at every stage. ----

What discontent does in the limited life of a child, it does on a much larger scale in the life of a man--and on a scale still larger in the life of a race.

You can always tell when a man has reached the limit of his possible development. He ceases to be discontented--or at least to show discontent actively.

Contentment, apathy, are signs of decadence and of a career ended in either a man or a nation.

If a baby lies still, no longer wiggling or trying to swallow his toe, you may be sure that he is seriously ill. The nation that no longer wiggles is in a condition as serious as that of the motionless infant. ----

The man or newspaper which imparts dissatisfaction--wise discontent to a nation or to individuals, gives them the motive power that brings improvement.

Ruskin as a young man declared that his one hope in life was to arouse "some dissatisfaction."

The constant aim of men in talking to each other, in writing for newspapers, even in writing novels, should be to arouse discontent.

In this column, as our readers will have noticed, the constant aim is to make the great crowd dissatisfied.

Only through discontent can changes come and are there not causes enough for discontent and need enough for changes?

A majority of the people half educated, and tens of thousands half fed.

Children run over daily because they have no playground but the gutter.

Men of noble aspirations kept down by hard work and poverty.

Children left locked up alone all day while their mothers work for a pittance.

Men, uncertain of their future and of their children's future, engage in a constant struggle for wealth that is not needed--a struggle that develops in the end a passion as useless as it is degrading.

Unless you believe that the world is perfect because YOU happen to have enough to eat and to wear, you should be discontented.

You should remember that the world's achievements and great changes have all come from discontent, and you should be, in as many ways as possible, a breeder of discontent among the human beings around you.

THE AUTOMOBILE WILL MAKE US MORE HUMAN

One of the commonest and most disagreeable sights in a big city is that of a strong, brutal human being beating a weak and overworked horse because it refuses to do what it cannot do.

Brutality inflicted upon horses is atrocious. But the bad effect of such unkind treatment of animals on HUMAN CHARACTER is far more serious than the actual physical suffering inflicted. ----

The perfection of the automobile will do much to improve human beings by taking away from their control and from brutal coercion submissive animals.

Everybody knows that the moral standard is raised immediately in a country when slavery is abolished.

In America we have abolished the slavery of human beings, but we still adhere to horse slavery, accompanied by all the worst forms of the old negro slavery. The faithful slave may be beaten and driven to death. The driver MUST BE BRUTALIZED.

Every day, on every street, you may see stupid, muscular boys and men jerking with all their might on the tender mouths of poor horses, only too willing to do their best.

This brutal indifference to the sufferings of animals makes us brutal and indifferent in other directions.

With the advent of the automobile and the disappearance of horses from our cities, horse slavery will be abolished and men, compelled to use their brains in dealing with machinery, will soon become more nearly human than they are at present. The practical abolition of the street-car horse is one great step in advance.

The abolition of the truck horse, carriage horse, cab horse, soon to come, will complete the dream of those modern and highly deserving abolitionists, the automobile inventors and manufacturers.

LET US BE THANKFUL

Thanksgiving Day, November 27, 1902.

Let us be thankful first of all for one great right:

The right, when dissatisfied, to SAY that we are dissatisfied, and to try to make things better.

Let us be thankful that every man--with few exceptions--has a holiday to-day.

However bad our national affairs may seem, let us be thankful they are no worse. And above all let us be thankful that we have the power and the constitutional right to change things, just as soon as we become wise enough to use our ballots. ----

Let us be devoutly thankful for the PUBLIC SCHOOLS, for the fact that every child is taught to read and encouraged to think. The nation now declares that a child has a right to food for the mind, as long as the child behaves properly. We are not so far from the day when human decency will declare that every child and every human being has a right to food for the BODY also, as long as they behave, and are ready for honest work. Let us be thankful for the constantly growing recognition of human rights.

The workingmen of America are better paid than they have ever been before. More of them than ever are at work, and the unions which protect them are more powerful than ever--let us be thankful for these facts. The whole nation prospers when the workers of the nation are busy and well paid.

Science has been, and is, making wonderful progress, explaining for us daily the problems of the universe. Every man must be thankful that highly specialized brains are constantly at work piling up knowledge for him.

As a nation we are too big to fear successful attack, and we are, it is to be hoped, too sensible to seek trouble with others. Let us be thankful that all things point to continued national, mental development on peaceful lines, free from the horrible wholesale murders, called war, that have bled and weakened all people through the ages. ----

Each of us individually has reason for thankfulness.

If you can feel that you are honestly trying to do your duty, that is much to be thankful for.

If you are dissatisfied with yourself, you should be thankful for the power of self-condemnation-- and thankful especially that you have long and blessed TIME ahead of you to make up for your mistakes and improve your record.

We live in a wonderful age--wonderful in the fact that life and liberty are fairly secure; wonderful in freedom of conscience.

You can believe in Heaven, Hades, Christian Science, or in nothing at all--and as long as you do not interfere with others, no one can imprison you, or question, or burn you at the stake. ----

We should all be especially thankful for the steady awakening of the national mind. We all pursue wealth--and doubtless circumstances compel us to pay too much attention to that line of effort. But we are all THINKING also. There are a thousand times more thinking, reading men and women to-day in America alone than lived on earth half a century ago. Love of knowledge is spreading, and with love of knowledge, love of justice and a sense of fairness will always be found.

Our material prosperity is great. But it is out- balanced by our mental prosperity. We are becoming a nation of THINKING men and women, and since that means real development, we have all reason to be thankful.

THE HARM THAT IS DONE BY OUR FRIENDS

Thought lives through the ages, flies about over the earth, and goes on visiting fresh minds, after the mind that gave it birth has gone back to dust and nothingness.

An Italian wrote words to this effect:

"Man is commanded to forgive his enemies. Nowhere is imposed on him the far more difficult task of forgiving his friends."

Francis Bacon, the philosopher, read in England the words of the Italian and quoted them.

Vincent W. Byars, a very able thinking man of St. Louis, read Bacon's quotation out there, and now, coming to New York, he says to this writer:

"Why don't you make an editorial on that old Italian saying quoted by Bacon?"

Italy--England--St. Louis--New York--thus the idea has hopped about, until to-day you get it in this column. A million of you read it, or at least glance at it; and so, if the idea has any value, it will go hopping on all over the earth's surface long after the steel press that prints this paper shall have crumbled away. ----

How little your ENEMIES can hurt you! How little harm they do, even when they try! You are warned against them and on your guard. The world knows they are your enemies, and discredits what they say.

It is quite easy to forgive our enemies, for they do us comparatively little harm.

But to forgive our friends would be hard indeed if we could realize how much harm they do us. ----

THE DRUNKARD'S FRIENDS

Who makes the drunkard? His enemies? No. The drunkard is made by his friends.

When it is known that he is inclined to drink no enemy is so vicious as to lead him on. No enemy slaps him on the back and begs him to take "just another drink." No enemy laughs down his poor, feeble attempts at reform. No enemy tells him that it will not hurt him "just this time," and that he really must not refuse to be a good fellow "just for once."

The drunkard is MADE a drunkard, is pushed into the last depths of drunkenness, by his friends.

And it is his friends who kick him and leave him and despise him when he has sunk into the mire.

Did ever the drunkard's enemy hurt him as much as the friend has hurt him? ----

AMBITION KILLED BY FRIENDS

A young man starts out to succeed in life. His enemy may lie about him, may call him worthless. He may think he is hurting him. If there is anything in the young man, the enemy's lies and discouraging words only spur him on to greater effort. They do him good.

It is the friend that ruins the young man by false, injudicious, unearned praise.

As artist, poet, writer, clerk, or in any other effort, the young man begins his work.

It is his friends who tell him that he is a splendid success, when he needs to be told that, at best, he has some slight chance of success, and that everything depends on desperate effort.

Look at the young, conceited fool who, instead of struggling on, rails at the world, feels that he is not appreciated. He is a failure--a sad, foolish failure. He has been made a failure, not by the attacks of his enemies, but by the more dangerous praise of his friends. ----

The lonely and friendless often succeed amazingly. "Multum incola fuit anima mea" ("My spirit hath been much alone") said the great Bacon. His mind fed on loneliness, on failure, and even on disgrace.

How much success is due to freedom from that harm which friendship does?

The reader can finish this editorial for himself with hundreds of other arguments. This is enough for a sample.

SHALL WE TAME AND CHAIN THE INVISIBLE MICROBE AS WE NOW CHAIN NIAGARA?

When Solomon was gathering his materials to build the Temple, his, large cedar trunks from Lebanon and his costly materials from everywhere, he used oxen, mules, camels.

With all his wisdom, he little dreamed that the day would come when his descendants, instead of using mules and huge beasts of burden, would heat water and with steam develop a force sufficient to tear his Temple from its foundation.

Still less did he dream that steam would eventually be superseded, as clumsy and primitive, by the invisible force of electricity.

When the thunder roared, the lightning flashed and his conscience troubled him, Solomon, turning away from his thousand wives and his numerous other doubtful associates, put his head under the richly embroidered pillow, worked, perhaps, by Sheba's own fair hands--it did not enter his mind that that lightning could be tamed and put to work.

Man has been gradually controlling and employing the various animals on the earth's surface. He taught the elephant to haul wood and water and to fight his battles. He trained the horse, the dog. He even taught falcons to bring him back birds from beyond the clouds, and otters to catch fish in the bottom of lakes and rivers.

Gradually he has made himself independent of his animal partners.

The rifle made the falcon useless; steam destroyed the importance of the horse and the ox.

But apparently we have only begun using animal life. We must run the whole gamut of the marvels of creation before conquering conditions on this earth. ----

We used to train the biggest dogs to kill wolves. The Government of the United States is now breeding darning-needles to kill mosquitoes.

A certain kind of wasp, with a black and white striped body, spends his time killing house-flies, and this creature could be bred and used to destroy the disease-spreading pests.

Even the invisible insect life can be made most useful to man and to his health.

The latest plan for disposing of city sewage involves the cultivation of microbes, to be employed as disinfectors.

Several towns in Illinois and in Wisconsin have established plants for the purification of sewage by means of microbe life. The collections of organisms invisible to the naked eye are to be kept in great antiseptic tanks, and employed in the purification of the city 's refuse.

Mosquitoes will ultimately be destroyed, undoubtedly, by breeding among them smaller creatures fatal to their existence.

Man, in his conquest and use of animal life, will run the gamut, from the biggest elephant, employed as a public executioner in India, to the invisible microbe, doing a work ten thousand times more important all over the globe.

These infinitesimal microbes, bred and controlled by science, will do regularly and methodically the work which buzzards and vultures have done on land, which sharks and dogfish have done at sea, throughout endless centuries.

To the marvellous workings of nature we cannot possibly give too much thought or too great admiration. Gardens are filled with beautiful flowers, and fields are fertile to-day because hundreds of years ago sea birds were devouring the carcasses of dead fish, acting as nature's scavengers, and building up the great guano fields of South America.

There is a Peruvian millionaire in his big yacht, and there is a rose in full bloom--the millionaire's money, the beauty of the rose, come from those birds that picked up the dead fish five hundred years ago.

It's an interesting world.

THE ELEPHANT THAT WILL NOT MOVE HAS BETTER EXCUSES THAN WE HAVE FOR FOLLY DISPLAYED

This is an editorial which we shall merely suggest, and which each reader will write out for himself.

In the Zoological Garden of New York a poor elephant has stood in chains for years. The animal was thought to be vicious, and was kept fastened tightly to one spot, that it might have no leeway to do damage.

A short time ago its keeper became convinced that the elephant would do no harm and might safely be unchained. The chains were taken off, and the keeper thought with satisfaction that the poor beast would now enjoy freedom and be made happy by the possibility of moving freely about its large inclosure.

The elephant did not move. The chains were gone, it was no longer tied, but it stood, and it still stands, in just the same spot.

The habit of slavery, of monotony, had become too strong. The elephant, though free, stands still, sadly swaying its heavy head, ignorant of the freedom that has come to it.

Men and women and children who see the elephant, and other men who write paragraphs for the newspapers, dilate on the poor animal's "stupidity."

"The elephant has been called the most intelligent of animals," says one writer, "but this elephant, that doesn't know when the chains are off, seems to prove that the elephant can be a good deal of a fool."

How easy it is for us human beings to see the faults in others, our fellows, and the animals below us.

But which one of us can truly say that he is not in exactly the same position as that poor elephant, fixed to one spot by the chains of long ago?

Are we not still standing as a race just as we stood years and centuries ago, ignorant of the freedom that has come to us?

Thousands of splendid men have worked, lived and died to free us from superstition, from credulity, from ignorance, yet still we stand in the same place, and fail to appreciate the freedom that is ours. ----

Millions of us, tied down by foolish superstition, are like that elephant--the chains are off, but we stand still.

The road to peace, happiness and universal progress has been shown us in the teachings of great leaders, but we still stand in the same old place, fighting, hating, cheating, suspecting, harming one another.

Here and there there is a little progress; gradually we begin to appreciate and enjoy the freedom that has been given to us with the striking away of old mental chains. The process is slow.

Look into your own mind. Do you take advantage of all the possibilities that are before you? Do you use your brain to control your existence, acts and habits for your own benefit and the benefit of others?

If not, you ought to sympathize with this poor elephant, and realize that as your brain exceeds his in bulk proportionately, so do you exceed him in the folly that misses opportunity.

LET US BE THANKFUL

You get tired of reading editorials in which one man, spouting from his editorial pulpit, lays down the law for you--without giving you a chance to reply or contradict.

So let us write this editorial together.

There you sit--the reader--in your street car, or perhaps clinging to a strap, and here we sit, impersonal editorial creature, thinking over thankfulness, Thanksgiving Day, and what reasons we have for feeling thankful.

Let us talk as few platitudes as possible, and try to get at a few of the inside workings of human life. ----

You look across the car and hate the fat man who lounges and spreads his feet around so boorishly.

LET US BE THANKFUL THAT WE SO READILY PERCEIVE THE SHORTCOMINGS OF OTHERS.