Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers Part 25

With the old ladies of his boarding-house, he was on friendly terms, and his commonplace talk with them never gave them a guess concerning the worldwide character of his work. Very seldom did he refer to what he was doing and thinking--and then only among his most intimate friends.

Huxley was his nearest confidant; and a recent writer, who knew him closely in a business way for many years, says that only with Huxley did he throw off his reserve and enter the social lists with abandon.

No one could meet Spencer, even in the most casual way, without being impressed with the fact that he was in the presence of a most superior person. The man was tall and gaunt, self-contained--a little aloof--he asked for nothing, and realized his own worth. He commanded respect because he respected himself--there was neither abnegation, apology nor abas.e.m.e.nt in his manner. Once I saw him walking in the Strand, and I noticed that the pedestrians instinctively made way, although probably not one out of a thousand had any idea who he was. No one ever affronted him, nor spoke disrespectfully to his face; if unkind things were said of the man and his work, it was in print and at a distance.

His standard of life was high--his sense of justice firm; with pretense and hypocrisy he had little patience, while for the criminal he had a profound pity.

Music was to him a relaxation and a rest. He knew the science of composition, and was familiar in detail with the best work of the great composers.

In order to preserve the quiet of his thoughts in the boarding-house, he devised a pair of ear-m.u.f.fs which fitted on his head with a spring.

If the conversation took a turn in which he had no interest, he would excuse himself to his nearest neighbor and put on his ear-m.u.f.fs. The plan worked so well that he carried them with him wherever he went, and occasionally at lectures or concerts, when he would grow more interested in his thoughts than in the performance, he would adjust his patent.

So well pleased was he with his experiment that he had a dozen pairs of the ear-m.u.f.fs made one Christmas and gave them to friends, but it is hardly probable they had the hardihood to carry them to a Four-o'Clock.

Seldom, indeed, is there a man who prizes his thoughts more than a polite appearance.

In an address before the London Medical Society, in Eighteen Hundred Seventy-one, Spencer said, "The man who does not believe in devils during his life, will probably never be visited by devils on his deathbed." Herbert Spencer died December Eighth, Nineteen Hundred Three, in his eighty-fourth year. Up to within two days of his death, his mind was clear, active and alert, and he worked at his books with pleasure and animation--revising, correcting and amending. He never lost the calm serenity of life. He sank gradually into sleep and pa.s.sed painlessly away. And thus was gracefully rounded out the greatest life of its age--The Age of Herbert Spencer.

He left no request as to where he should be buried, but the thinking people who recognized his genius considered Westminster Abbey the fitting place--an honor to England's Valhalla. The Church of England denied him a place there before it was asked, and the hallowed precincts which shelter the remains of Queen Anne's cook and John Broughton the pugilist are not for Herbert Spencer. His dust does not rest in consecrated ground.

Herbert Spencer had no t.i.tles nor degrees--he belonged to no sect, party, nor society. Practically, he had no recognition in England until after he was sixty years of age. America first saw his star in the east, and long before the first edition of "Social Statics" had been sold, we waived the matter of copyright and were issuing the book here. On receiving a volume of the pirated edition, the author paraphrased Byron's famous mot, and grimly said, "Now, Barabbas was an American."

However, Spencer was really pleased to think that America should steal his book; we wanted it--the English didn't. It took him twelve years to dispose of the seven hundred fifty volumes, and most of these were given away as inscribed copies. They lasted about as long as Walt Whitman's first edition of "Leaves of Gra.s.s," although Whitman had the a.s.sistance of the Attorney-General of Ma.s.sachusetts in advertising his remarkable volume.

Henry Th.o.r.eau's first book fared better, for when the house burned where the remnant of four hundred copies lingered long, he wrote to a friend, "Thank G.o.d, the edition is exhausted."

England recognized the worth of Th.o.r.eau and Whitman long before America did; and so, perhaps, it was meet that we should do as much for Spencer, Ruskin and Carlyle.

One of the most valuable of the many great thoughts evolved by Spencer was on the "Art of Mentation," or brain-building. You can not afford to fix your mind on devils or h.e.l.l, or on any other form of fear, hate and revenge. Of course, h.e.l.l is for others, and the devils we believe in are not for ourselves. But the thoughts of these things are registered in the brain, and the h.e.l.l we create for others, we ourselves eventually fall into; and the devils we conjure forth, return and become our inseparable companions. That is to say, all thought and all work--all effort--are for the doer primarily, and as a man thinketh in his heart, so is he. This sounds like the language of metaphysics, which Kant said was the science of disordered moonshine. But Herbert Spencer's work was all a matter of a.n.a.lytical demonstration. And while the word "materialist" was everywhere applied to him, and he did not resent it, yet he was one of the most spiritual of men. A meta-physician is one who proves ten times as much as he believes; a scientist is one who believes ten times as much as he can prove. Science speaks with lowered voice.

Before Spencer's time, German scientists had discovered that the cell was the anatomical unit of life, but it was for Spencer to show that it was also the psychologic or spiritual unit. New thoughts mean new brain-cells, and every new experience or emotion is building and strengthening a certain area of brain-tissue. We grow only through exercise, and all expression is exercise. The faculties we use grow strong, and those not used, atrophy and wither away. This is no less true, said Spencer, in the material brain than in the material muscle. A new thought causes a new structural enregistration. If it is the repet.i.tion of thought, the cells holding that thought are exercised and trained, and finally they act automatically, and repeated thought becomes habit, and exercised habit becomes character--and character is the man. It thus is plain that no man can afford to entertain the thought of fear, hate and revenge--and their concomitants, devils and h.e.l.l--because he is enregistering these things physically in his being.

These physical cells, as science has shown, are transmitted to offspring; and thus through continued mind-activity and consequent brain-cell building, a race with fixed characteristics is evolved.

Pleasant memories and good thoughts must be exercised, and these in time will replace evil memories, so that the cells containing negative characteristics will atrophy and die. And when Herbert Spencer says that the process of doing away with evil is not through punishment, threat or injunction, but simply through a change of activities--thus allowing the bad to die through disuse--he states a truth that is even now coloring our whole fabric of pedagogics and penology. I couple these two words advisedly, for fifty years ago, pedagogics was a form of penology--the boarding-school with its mentors, scheme of fines, repressions and disgrace! And now we have lifted penology into the realm of pedagogics.

I doubt me much whether the present penitentiary is a more unhappy place than a boys' English boarding-school was in the time of Squeers.

All of our progress has come from replacing bad activities with the good. Bad people we now believe are good folks who have misdirected their energies; and we all believe a deal more in the goodness of the bad than the badness of the good, with the result that "total depravity"

and "endless punishment" have been shamed out of every pulpit where sane men preach. No devils danced on the footboard of Herbert Spencer's bed, because there were no devil-cells in his brain.

Another great discovery of Herbert Spencer's was that the emotions control the secretions. And the quality of the secretions determines the chemical changes which const.i.tute all cellular growth. Thus, cheerful, happy emotions are similar to sunshine--they stand for health and harmony, and as such, are constructive. Good-will is sanitary; kindness is hygienic; friendship works for health. These happy emotions secrete a quality in the blood called anabolism, which is essentially vitalizing and life-producing.

On the other hand, fear, hate, and all forms of unkindness evolve a toxin, katabolism, which tends to clog circulation, disturb digestion, congest the secretions and stupefy the senses; and it tends to the dissolution and destruction of life. All that saddens, embitters and disappoints produces this chemical change that makes for death. "A poison," said Spencer, "is only a concentrated form of hate."

Spencer's discoveries in electricity have been most valuable, and it was by building on his suggestions and seeing with his prophetic eye that the Crookes Tube, the Roentgen Ray, and the discovery of radium have become possible.

The distinguishing feature of radium is its radioactivity, brought about through its affinity for electricity. It absorbs electricity from the atmosphere and gives it off spontaneously in the form of light and heat without appreciable loss of form or substance. Every good thing in life is dual, and through this natural and spontaneous marriage of radium and electricity, we get very close to the secret of life. As the sun is the giver of life and death, so by the use of the salts of radium have scientists vitalized certain forms of cell-life into growth and activity, and by the same token, and the use of the radium-ray, do they destroy the germs of disease.

By his prophetic vision, Spencer saw years ago that we would yet be able to eliminate and refine the substances of earth until we found the element that would combine spontaneously with electricity, and radiate life and heat. Among the very last letters dictated by Spencer, only a few days before his death, was one to Madame Curie congratulating her on her discovery of radium, and urging her not to relax in her further efforts to seek out the secret of life. "My only regret is," wrote the great man, "that I will not be here to rejoice with you in the fulness of your success." Thus to the last did he preserve the eager, curious and receptive heart of youth, and prove to the scientific world his theory that brain-cells, properly exercised, are the last organs of the body to lose their functions.

SCHOPENHAUER

Wherever one goes one immediately comes upon this incorrigible mob of humanity. It exists everywhere in legions; crowding, soiling everything, like flies in summer. Hence the numberless bad books, those rank weeds of literature which extract nourishment from the corn and choke it. They monopolize the time, money and attention which really belong to good books and their n.o.ble aims; they are written merely with a view to making money or procuring places.

They are not only useless, but they do positive harm. Nine-tenths of the whole of our present literature aims solely at taking a few shillings out of the public's pocket, and to accomplish this, author, publisher and reviewer have joined forces.

--_Schopenhauer_

[Ill.u.s.tration: SCHOPENHAUER]

The philosophy we evolve is determined by what we are; just as a nation pa.s.ses laws legalizing the things it wishes to do. "Where the artist is, there you will find art," said Whistler. We will not get the Ideal Commonwealth until we get Ideal People; and we will not get an ideal philosophy until we get an ideal philosopher. Place the mentally and morally slipshod in ideal surroundings and they will quickly evolve a slum, just as did John Shakespeare, when at Stratford he was fined two pounds ten for maintaining a sequinarium. All we can say for John is that he was the author of a fine boy, who resembled his mother much more than he did his father. This seems to prove Schopenhauer's remark concerning a divine sonship: "Paternity is a cheap office, anyway, accomplished without cost, care or risk, and of it no one should boast.

A divine motherhood is the only thing that is really sacred."

It isn't his philosophy that makes a man--man makes his philosophy, and he makes it in his own image. Living in a world of strife, where the most savage beast that roams the earth is man, the Philosophy of Pessimism has its place.

Schopenhauer proved himself a true philosopher when he said: "All we see in the world is a projection from our own minds. I may see one thing, you another; and according to the test of a third party we are both wrong, for he sees something else. So we are all wrong, yet all are right."

He was quite willing to admit that he had a well-defined moral squint and a touch of mental strabismus; but he revealed his humanity by blaming his limitations on his parents, and charging up his faults and foibles to other people.

It is possible that Carlyle's famous remark about the people who daily cross London Bridge was inspired by Schopenhauer, who, when asked what kind of people the Berliners were, replied, "Mostly fools!"

"I believe," ventured the interrogator--"I believe, Herr Schopenhauer, that you yourself live at Berlin?"

"I do," was the response, "and I feel very much at home there."

Heinrich Schopenhauer, the father of Arthur Schopenhauer, was a banker and shipping merchant of the city of Danzig, Germany. He was a successful man, and, like all successful men, he was an egotist. Before the world will believe in you, you must believe in yourself. And another necessary element in success is that you must exaggerate your own importance, and the importance of your work. Self-esteem will not alone make you successful, but without a goodly jigger of self-esteem, success will forever dally and dance just beyond your reach. The humble men who have succeeded in impressing themselves upon the world have all taken much pride in their humility.

Heinrich Schopenhauer was a proud man--as proud as the Merchant of Venice--and in his veins there ran a strain of the blue blood of the Castilian Jew. Too much success is most unfortunate. Heinrich Schopenhauer was proud, unbending, harsh, arbitrary, wore a full beard and a withering smile, and looked upon musicians, painters, sculptors and writers as court clowns, to be trusted only as far as you could fling Taurus by the tail. All good bookkeepers have, even yet, this pitying contempt for those whose chief a.s.sets are ideas--the legal tender of the spirit. The Alameda smile is the smile of scorn worn by the bookkeepers who prepare the balance-sheets for the great merchants of San Francisco. Alameda is young, but the Alameda smile is cla.s.sic.

When Heinrich Schopenhauer was forty he married a beautiful girl of twenty. She had ideas about art and poetry, and was pa.s.sing through her Byronic stage, before Byron did, and taking it rather hard, when her parents gave her in troth to Heinrich Schopenhauer, the rich merchant.

It was regarded as a great catch.

I wish that I could say that Heinrich and Johanna were happy ever after, but in view of the well-known facts put forth by their firstborn child, I can not do it.

Before marriage the woman has her way: let her make the most of her power--she'll not keep it long! Shortly after their marriage Heinrich saw symptoms of the art instinct creeping in, and players on sweet zither-strings, who occasionally called, compelled him to take measures.

He bought a country seat, four miles from the city, on an inaccessible road, and sent his bride thither. Here he visited her only on Sat.u.r.days and Sundays, and her callers were the good folk he chose to bring with him.

Marital peace is only possible where women are properly suppressed--lumity dee!

It was under these conditions that Arthur Schopenhauer was born, on February Twenty-second--in deference to our George Washington--Seventeen Hundred Eighty-eight.

The chief quality that Schopenhauer inherited from his father was the Alameda smile--and this smile of contempt was for all those who did not think as he did. The mother never professed to have any love for her husband, or the child either, and the child never professed to have any love for his mother. He once wrote this: "I was an unwelcome child, born of a mother in rebellion--she never wanted me, and I reciprocate the sentiment."