Effective effrontery is the result of courageous ignorance, for millions are more easily influenced by illusive promises than by the lessons of experience.
Modern civilization has hurried to meet four deadly things--riches, pleasures, materialism and war. But the tortoise is a better example of progress than the hare fleeing before the greyhound.
ELIZABETH CADY STANTON
It appalls the normal mind to stop and consider the criminal blunders made by the educated Prussian and the educated Englishman prior to 1914. No statesman had the vision to see what was going to happen to the man-made world.
Since it is a question of intuition and feeling versus cold reason and business logic, let us see which side is the more vital and all-enduring.
Let us consider for a brief space what it is that influences people. Let us consider the influence exerted by the arts. What is music? Emotion created by sound vibrations. What is dramatic acting? Emotion created by vocal vibrations combined with gesture and physical movement. Has anyone ever witnessed automatic acting that left a profound impression?
Orators become famous when they unite deep feeling with knowledge. But what gives expression? The power of awakening emotion in others. Feeling is always more convincing than intellect. Intellect is full of theories, notions and superstitions. But where you find deep feeling combined with knowledge, you will find reason directed by qualities which pass through the surface and attain the heart-throbs of the real.
There are many kinds of emotion. There is the hard emotion of anger, the confused emotion of fear, the painful emotion of jealousy, the indescribable emotion of despair, the radiant emotion of joy. But the greatest emotion of all is that of knowledge united to feeling.
Men, as a rule, speak of emotion as a weakness, and they confuse it with impulse--a very different thing. Impulse is often the result of weak nerves, uncontrolled by the will; but we must not confuse it with the emotional quality which underlies all great achievement in art, literature, philosophy and personality. The more impulsive the individual is, the more primitive the reasoning faculty.
English and American business men are limited in general knowledge. I have never been able to discover any distinctive difference between the two.
In France and Italy many business men are able to discuss art, literature and music on the same level with the masters. The Latin races and the Celtic races possess a culture that can be traced back for two or three thousand years, but Anglo-Saxon culture only to the time of the Saxon invasion. The Anglo-Saxons were the mushrooms of our civilization. They were a stolid business people who lacked creative genius.
The outstanding intellect of England today is Celtic. The Scotch, the Irish and the Welsh combine emotion and power with tenacity of purpose, and it is this Celtic element that keeps America in the front rank of nations.
What women have been opposing is the primitive monotony of the Anglo-Saxon trend. It has meant a mixture of politics and commerce so primitive and so naive that Frenchmen are amazed when they visit America and note the striking difference between the culture of the women and the mentality of the average man.
One of your great mystics has said: "The chemical constituents of human bodies is the same. The ashes of a saint and the ashes of a sinner give the same chemical results. As human bodies they are the same, but their functions separate them and make them totally different, so that the difference cannot by any hocus-pocus of metaphysics or magic be bridged or spanned."
Two things of the same material are really different if their functions are different. The real substance of a thing is in its function. We have to judge people by the things they do, not by their appearance; for there is no clear understanding between two persons whose aims are different.
This is why there are so many divorces. This is why so many intellectual women live separate lives from their husbands in the same house.
People seem to be similar and equal but they differ according to their functions. If we take a philosopher, a hangman and a sailor who appear to be equal as human beings we shall see that in their functions there is nothing in common. The souls of these men are different in the very nature, origin and purpose of their existence.
Thousands of people move in a world of material shadows while their souls, the substance of which is intellectual and spiritual, inhabit a sphere absolutely apart. Especially is this the case with many of the cultured women of our time who are compelled to live a double life. Their intellects are far removed from the ordinary pursuits of the commercial world.
A woman of spiritual culture who marries a commercial man has married a shadow. A woman of high ideals who marries a professional politician has hitched her motor car to a meteor. A romantic woman married to a multi-millionaire whose world is bound in liberty bonds loses her liberty.
A metaphysical woman who marries a financier is handicapped by the physical.
A union of spiritual functions with material formulas is impossible, for there is no way in which mere sensation can be made to harmonize with the higher emotions.
The new era of woman, which is just beginning to dawn, will direct education; and through education, politics; through politics, the progress of nations. Heretofore, the commercial and political world had a free hand. The progressive element was confined to a limited number of men in the colleges and the ministry, together with a remnant of law-makers. But their influence was negative owing to lack of material support.
Women will now present a formidable force in numbers, backed by a spiritual power, aided by men who understand the difference between functions and appearance, sensuous desires and ideal emotions.
For years I maintained that women do not realize the power they possess.
They live so much in a world of their own that they do not regard the man-made commercial world as worth elevating.
Thousands of men are living in a sphere some degrees below the normal.
They have been surrounded from the beginning with influences that obliterate all the higher faculties of the mind.
It has taken woman some centuries to rise to power, but the work is only half done. Never can the commercial instinct and the intellectual ideal be made to harmonize. The two spheres of consciousness are totally distinct.
The modern intellect has been organized without considering the moral meaning of its activity. This has caused the delusion that the crowning glory of European culture is the dreadnaught. Ninety per cent of all modern inventions are for bodily destruction or bodily comfort. While the body lolls in luxury, the spirit is soused in lethargy.
As Ouspensky says, we have created two lives--one material, the other spiritual. I believe this is owing to the fact that man is living and working in the material and woman in the spiritual. In other words, she is carrying her own responsibilities on one shoulder and man's baneful burdens on the other. The figure of Atlas holding up the Globe should be changed to that of a female.
One would think that in these days, when psychology is taught even to children, that a man who has lived forty years in the world of action would know better than to boast of his eternal activities. The word "busy"
has grown to be a veritable fetish with thousands who have little or nothing to do. The truth is, most men are not half as busy as they seem and not more than a fourth as wise as they look.
We have to find out by exact analysis just what incentive lies behind people's actions. What makes the distinction is the quality of our acts.
Everything in the material and the spiritual worlds is judged according to quality. Gold, diamonds, clothes, bricks, music, poetry, literature, are adjudged, in the last resort, on the basis of intrinsic value. When people are engaged in pursuits for the sake of money the results will be on a plane with the quality of the incentive.
In the work done by women in the past fifty years in this country, the incentive has been of a higher quality than that shown by men.
While men introduced a coarse realism into the novel, women saved the situation by new ideals. I do not think there would be much left worth reading today but for woman's taste and judgment.
In the world of intellect and emotion things hang together. A low plane of intellect will produce low impulses. The more we know the greater our control of the different sense organs. Nothing can happen without a corresponding cause behind it.
The hysteria so common at great political conventions is caused by the exceedingly limited intelligence of the managers and directors who labor under the illusion that blind impulse is tantamount to vision. In other words, where the critical faculties are not developed anything can happen.
And it is not difficult to predict that when political conventions are swayed by hysterical temperaments the authority at the White House will have all he can do to steer the Ship of State through the troubled waters of impulse and confusion.
There is a will to power that is blind. There is another will to power that brings the higher emotions to bear on the lower impulses, controls and directs the organs of sense.
The people who elect a President are the ones who will influence his actions. And when we talk about a President being a good man for business we are compelled to seek for the reason behind the statement.
If finance lands a President at the White House, women, children, teachers and philosophers must shift for themselves, since the supreme test lies in function, and not in manners, words and looks. And finance means finesse.
Do not expect great innovations at the Capitol until a strong woman takes her seat at the White House; and by this I do not mean one of Barnum's bearded ladies.
Conservatism is a good thing when it is coupled with vision and judgment, but bear in mind that monotony and mediocrity start in the same groove, run at the same pace and arrive at the same grave.
BENJAMIN FRANKLIN
There is but one mark of patriotism and that is vigilance and enthusiasm.
The cause of your trouble is the sincerity with which your foes think and act and the lukewarm sentiment shown by Americans. The reason is to be found in the comfort and luxury of the present day compared with the pioneer sacrifices of your fathers and grandfathers. Your opponents are vindictive as well as vigilant. They mean what they say and do what they will. They are working as individuals, as well as in groups and parties, but Americans who inherited the land with liberty are exchanging both for the license of the maw.
When school teachers and farm hands are permitted to leave the country for the city, the end is not so far off as your sophisticated solons of the State Capitols would lead you to suppose.
I once stated that three movings equal one fire, and I can say now that the lack of teachers and farm hands has resulted in a damage equal to one revolution. No calamity comes and goes single handed. The world, the flesh and the devil are a triumvirate bound together by ties of consanguinity.
Your school teachers are passing over to the world, your farm laborers to the flesh, and your ministers to the devil.
You are browsing on the stubble. One delinquency involves another, and eventually the monetary capital of the nation may be reduced to that of France. The nation will awake one day to the disillusioning fact that peace and progress cannot be gauged by commercial prosperity alone. For without food what avails your steel, your oil and your gold?