Abraham Myerson

“ We are insulted—some one slaps our face—the fierce emotion of anger arises and through us surge waves of feeling manifested on the motor side by tensed muscles, rapid heart, harsh breathing, perhaps a general reddening of face and eyes. Instinctively our fists are clenched, a part of the reaction of fight, and it needs but the slightest increase of anger to send us leaping on the aggressor, to fight him perhaps to the death. ”

“ The heat is the body temperature, the motion is the movement of the human body in all the marvelous variety of which it is capable. In other words, the discharge of energy is the play of our childhood and of our later years; it is the skill and strength of our arms, the cleverness of our hands, the fleetness of our feet, the joyous vigor of our love-making, the embrace; it is the noble purpose, the long, hard-fought battles of any kind. ”

“ Yet there is for the child a care, and more important, an immersion in love and tender feeling, possible in no other way. We should lose the sacred principles of motherhood and fatherhood, the only example of consistent and unrewarded love, if the home disappeared. The only real altruism of any continuous and widespread type is there found. It is the promise and the possibility of our race that we see in the living parents. We know that unselfishness exists when we think of them, and the idealist who dreams of a world set free from greed and struggle merely enlarges the ideal home. ”

“ One of the fundamental strivings of the human being is the enlargement of the self-feeling, which fundamentally is the wish to be superior, to have the admiration and homage of others. All daydreaming builds this air castle; all ambition has this as its goal. No matter how we disguise it to ourselves and others, the main ends of purpose are power and place. True, we may wish for power and place so as to help others; we may wish them as the result of constructive work and achievement, but the enlargement of self-feeling is the end result of the striving. ”

“ All work at home has the difficulty of the segregation, the isolation of the home. Man, the social animal who needs at least some one to quarrel with, has deliberately isolated his household, somewhat as a squirrel hides nuts,—on a property basis. There has grown up a definite, aesthetic need of privacy; all of modesty and the essential family feeling demand it.
This is good for the man, and perhaps for the children, but not for the woman. Her work is done alone, and at the time her husband comes home and wants to stay there, she would like to get out. ”

“ From the cradle to the grave, we desire fellowship as an addition to our gregarious feeling. We ask for approval, for we expand under sympathy and contract under cold criticism. Nothing is so pleasant as "appreciation," which means taking us at our own valuation or adding to it,, and there is no complaint so common as, "They don't understand me," which merely means, "They blame me without understanding that I really seek the good, that I am really good, though perhaps I seem not to be." ”

“ For the poor housewife who sees no escape from poverty, whose husband is either a workman or a struggling business man always on the edge of failure, life often seems like a wall closing in, a losing battle without end. ”

“ There is, however, a quiet joy called relief, which is like sailing into a smooth, safe harbor after a tempestuous voyage; and there is an agitated grief, with lamentation, the wringing of hands and self-punishment of a frantic kind. Joy and triumph are closely associated, sorrow and defeat likewise. There are some whose rivalry-competitive feelings are so widespread that they cannot rejoice even at the triumph of a friend, and a little of that nature is in even the noblest of us. There are others who find sorrow in defeat of an enemy, so widespread is their sympathy. ”

“ And women, even those who trust their husbands absolutely so far as physical loyalty goes, jealously watch them for the appearance of boredom, or lack of interest, for the falling off of the lover's spirit and feeling.
After marriage the rivalry of men expresses itself in business more than in love. Even where a woman does not fear another woman as a rival she fears the rivalry of business,—and with reason. ”

“ So the idealist finds himself condemned to a meager life, unless his idealism brings him wealth, and he drifts in spirit away from the character of his youth. It is the strain of life, the fear of old age and sickness, the silent pressure of the deprivations of a man's beloved ones, the feeling of helplessness in disaster and the silent envious feeling of inferiority that makes inroads in the ranks of the idealists so that at twenty there are ten idealists to the one found at forty. ”

“ When the home is quiet and harmonious it is the place where great virtues are developed. But when it is noisy and disharmonious, then its very seclusiveness, its segregation, lends to the quarrels the bitterness of civil war. The intensity of feeling aroused is proportional to the intimacy of the home and not to the importance of the thing quarreled about. Good manners and that sign and symbol of largeness of spirit, tolerance for the opinions of others, rarely are born in the home. ”

“ Love counteracts disgust. The young girl who turns in loathing from uncleanliness finds it easy and a pleasure to care for her soiled baby. In fact, tender feeling of any kind overcomes—or tends to overcome—disgust; and pity, the tenderest of all feelings and without passion, impels us to march into the very jaws of disgust. The angry may have no pity,—but they are not less unkind in commission than the disgusted are unkind in omission. Thus a too refined breeding leads people away from effective pity and that sturdiness of conduct which is real philanthropy. ”

“ It is a reward, a purpose in that men and women dream of their own home and are thrilled by the thought. Throughout its quiet runs the scarlet thread of its sex life. Home is where love is legitimate and encouraged. ”

“ The organizing energy of some is low; they never seem to unify their experiences into a code of life and living; they are like a string of beads loosely strung together with disharmonious emotions, desires, purposes. In others this energy is high, they chew the cud of every experience and (to change the metaphor) they weld life's happenings, their memories, their emotions and purposes into a more unified ego, a real I, harmonious, self-enlightened; clearly conscious of aim and end and striving bravely towards it. ”

“ How deeply the fear of death modifies the life of people it is impossible to state. To every one there comes the awful reflection that he, that warmly pulsating being, in love with the world and with living, "center of the universe," HE himself must die, must be cold and still and have no will, no power, no feeling; be buried in the ground. Most of the essential melancholy of the world is due to this realization, and most of the feeling of pessimism and futility thus has its origin. ”

“ If her first vocation was business, she is bored to death by domesticity. But if she marries poverty, she looks on herself as a drudge, and though loyalty and pride may keep her from voicing her regrets, they eat like a canker worm in the bud,—and we have the neurosis of this type of housewife. Or else her experience in business makes her size up her husband more keenly, and we find her rebelling against his failure, criticizing him either openly to the point of domestic disharmony, or inwardly to her own disgust. ”

“ The school histories, which should emphasize the admirable as well as point out the reverse, have played a poor role in education. The hero they depict is the warrior, and they fire the hearts of the child with admiration and desire for emulation. They say almost nothing of the great inventors, scientists and philanthropists. The teaching of history should, above all, set up heroes for the child to study, admire and emulate. "When the half-gods go the gods arrive." The stage of history as taught is cluttered with the tin-plate shedders of blood to the exclusion of the greater men. ”

“ It is all that is summed up in desire, purpose, and achievement.
Now all these things may be impeded by actual reduction of energy, as in tuberculosis, cancer, or in the lassitude of convalescence. In addition there are emotions, feelings, thoughts that energize,—that create vigor and strength of body and mind. Joy rouses the spirit; one dances, laughs, sings, shouts; or the more quiet type of person takes up work with zeal and renewed energy. Hope brings with it an eagerness for the battle, a zest for work. ”

“ To feel that something is expected of one because one's ancestors lived up to a high standard becomes a guiding feeling in life. Not to be inferior, not to disappoint expectation, to maintain the tradition that a "So-and-So" never shows the white feather, makes, heroes of the soldiers of famous regiments, of firemen and policemen, of priests, of the scions of distinguished families, aye, even of races. ”

“ The world owes its progress to those whose anger, sustained and intellectualized, becomes the power behind reform; to those like Abraham Lincoln, who vowed to destroy slavery because he saw a slave sold down the river; to the Pinels, outraged by the treatment of the insane; to the sturdy "Indignant Citizen," who writes to newspapers about what "is none of his business," but who is too angry to keep still, and whose anger makes public opinion. Whether anger is useful or not depends upon its cause and the methods it employs. ”

“ It is no true democracy where old age governs the rest of the periods of life.
Unification of purpose often goes too far. Men lose sight of the duties they owe to wife and family in their pursuit of wealth or fame; they forget that relaxation and pleasure-seeking are normal and legitimate aims. They deify a purpose; they attach it to themselves so that it becomes more essentially themselves than their religion or their family. They speak of their work as if every letter were capitalized and lose sympathy and interest in the rest of the wide striving world. ”

“ A great factor in religion is the longing to compensate for death and suffering. Religion represents a reaction against fear, horror and humiliation. It is a cry of triumph in the face of what otherwise is disaster "I am not man, the worm, sick, old, doomed to die; I am the heir of the divine and will live forever, happy and blessed." Whether religious teaching is true or not, its great value lies in the happiness and surety of those who believe. ”

“ Let their self-esteem crumble, and these proud and haughty ones are humble, weak, inefficient. We fiercely resent criticism because in it is a threat to our source of energy, our very feeling of being alive.
One has shrewdly to examine his fellow men from this angle: "Does he work up his own steam; are his boilers of energy heated by his own enthusiasm and his own self-approval? Or does he borrow; can he work only if others add their fire to his; does his light go out if his neighbors turn away or are too busy to help him?" ”

“ When the object that confronts us is so superior, so vast, that we sink into insignificance, then admiration takes on a tinge of fear in the state or feeling of awe. All men feel awe in the presence of strength and mystery, so that the concept of God is that most wrapped up with this emotion, and the ceremonies with which kings and institutions have been surrounded strike awe by their magnificence and mystery into the hearts of the governed. ”

“ There is the country, there is the lake for fishing; there is the dance hall where a pretty girl smiles as your arm encircles her waist; there is the ball field where on a fine day you may go and forget duty and strained effort in the swirl of an enthusiasm that emanates from the thousands around you as they applaud the splendid athletes; there is the good fellowship and pleasure that beckon as you bend to a task. To shut these out, to inhibit the temporary "good" for the permanent good, is the measure of character.
These sex and work situations we must take up in detail in separate chapters. ”

“ There is a demand for a more satisfying life, involving less self sacrifice on the part of those who have in the past made the bulk of the sacrifices. Woman, demanding equality, refuses to be regarded as merely a child bearer and is become a seeker of luxury. The working man, looking at the world he has built, now able to read, write and vote, asks why the duty is all on his side. In other words, a demand for justice, which is merely reciprocal, universal duty, has weakened something of the sense of duty. In fact, that is the first effect of the feeling of injustice, of unjust inequality. ”

“ Though we may actually restrict the sex life so that some men and women become pure in the accepted sense, it will always be true that men and women will be vaguely or definitely attracted to each other. Like the atmospheric pressure which though fifteen pounds to the square inch at the sea level is not felt, so there exists a sex pressure, excited by men and women in each other. There is a smoldering excitement always ready to leap into flame whenever the young and attractive of the sexes meet. ”

“ What is really implied by sincerity is the absence of camouflage or disguise, so that it becomes possible to know what a man believes and thinks by his words and his acts. As a matter of fact, that ideal is neither realized nor desirable, and it is as wise and natural to inhibit the expression of our beliefs and feelings as it is to inhibit our actions. To be frank with a man, to tell him sincerely that we believe he is a scoundrel, and that we hate him and to show this feeling by act, would be to plunge the world into barbarism. ”

“ It is easy for those who reap pleasure and reward from their labors to sing of the joy of work; business man, professional man, artist, handicraftsman, farmer,—these may find in the thing they do the satisfaction of the creative desires and the reward of seeing their product; but the factory is a Frankenstein delivering huge masses of products but eating up the producers. The more specialized it becomes the less each man creates of the unit, machine or ornament; the less he feels of achievement. ”