Felix Adler

“ But the world is the playground of good and evil forces. There is a semblance of design; there is on the other hand apparently the wildest disorder. The stars in their courses travel with incredible celerity in every direction, but no astronomer has ever yet been able to discern a plan in their journeyings. Human life is full of sorrow as well as joy; and whether there be more sorrow or more joy in the lives of most persons, who will venture to say? There is kindness, but there is also cruelty. There is coöperation, and there is merciless competition. ”

“ The view of life that man has on leaving it is the final test of his philosophy of life. These are my thoughts: It is time to detach thyself from this earth. The shadows are lengthening. Look around you and note the strange changes that have taken place in the men and women of your acquaintance. Those that you once knew in their prime are now old and wrinkled,—and how many already dead! As you survey the procession of life, how many vacant places are there in it! ”

“ I have seen the vision of democracy in the air, and on the ground around me I have seen the sordid travesty of democracy—not only in practice but in idea. I have caught the far outlook upon the organization of mankind, the extension of the spiritual empire over the earth by the addition to it of new provinces, and I do not find even the faintest beginnings, or recognition of the task which the advanced nations should set themselves. ”

“ Consider how far fetched is the argument, on what wavering foundations has been placed the ethical pronouncement of human worth and human equality in which our interest is so profoundly engaged. We do wish to be assured of this cardinal truth. No other truth is practically and theoretically of greater importance. As against the iniquitous practices of the world, as against the exploitation of labor, as against the degradation of woman, as against political tyranny whether exercised by kings or by mobs, we raise up for our shield the indefeasible worth of men—not of some men but of all men. ”

“ It is this plan that conveys the certainty as to what verily exists beyond, within, beneath.
As to my empirical self, I let go my hold on it. I see it perish with the same indifference which the materialist asserts, for whom man is but a compound of physical matter and physical force. It is the real self, of which the empirical was the substratum, upon which I tighten my hold. I do not assert immortality, since immortality, like creation, is a bridge between the phenomenal and the spiritual levels. Creation is the bridge at the beginning; immortality the bridge at the end. ”

“ But if this expectation is deceived, if things continue in their ancient course, if the world and the flesh persist, taking on ever new and more baffling shapes, how is a system of ethics which is based on the assumption of one state of things to be reconciled with a state of things exactly the opposite? How shall an ethical person conduct himself in a world which his philosophy of life teaches him to reject, but with which the necessities of his existence compel him to come to terms day by day and hour by hour? ”

“ To care for anyone else enough to make his problem one’s own is ever the beginning of one’s real ethical development. To care for a group of people in the sense of being challenged to suggest to them ideas and ways of behavior that shall really be of use to them in the storm and stress of life, is the most searching incentive to self-development imaginable. It is more powerful than the desire to get truth for one’s own sake. ”

“ I should attribute worth to stones and to animals could they respond, were the power of forming ideas, without which the idea of relation or connectedness is impossible, apparent in them. Doubtless stones and trees and animals, and the physical world itself, are but the screen behind which lies the infinite universe. But the light of that universe does not break through the screen where it is made up of stones and trees and the lower animals. It breaks through, however faintly, where there is consciousness of relation: and wherever I discover that consciousness I find my opportunity. ”

“ No detached thing has worth. No part of an incomplete system has worth. Worth belongs to those to whom it is attributed in so far as they are conceived of as not to be spared, as representing a distinctive indispensable preciousness, a mode of being without which perfection would be less than perfect.
So that morality depends on the attribution of worth to men, and worth depends on the formation in the mind of an ideal plan of the whole—or instead of a complete plan let me say more precisely a rule of relations whereby the plan is itself progressively developed. ”

“ The love of the parent is the warm nest for the fledgling spirit of the child. To be at home in this strange world the young being with no claims as yet on the score of usefulness to society or of merit of any kind, must find somewhere a place where it is welcomed without regard to usefulness or merit. And it is the love of the parents that makes the home, and it is his own home that makes the child at home in the world. ”

“ Can we ascribe worth to those whom we hold cheap? The reason of our habitual under-estimation of fellowmen I think is that we regard them from the standpoint of the use to which we can put them, and do not see them from the inside, as it were, in the light of the marvelous energies of which human nature is the scene. The grossest matter, the most ordinary physical happenings, reveal to the instructed eye of the scientist the play of forces which it taxes the most powerful intellects in some measure to apprehend and describe. ”

“ The fundamental ideal of the American people is that of freedom! The notion of freedom is crude as yet, but is capable of being ennobled and refined. To be free is to express power. To be free in the highest sense is to express the highest kind of power. The highest kind is that which is exercised in such wise as to elicit unlike yet cognate power in others. A people is to be called free when all the different social or vocational groups of which it is the integrated whole spontaneously react upon one another, and when in each group each member of it realizes some mental gift of his own. ”

“ We might say that that man had lived best who on his deathbed could declare with perfect truth: “I have achieved the certainty, and in through the vicissitudes of my life, that there is a universe.” I here emphasize again the distinction between universe and world. To say that the universe is “good” is equivocal. The term “good,” as commonly used, describes the moral striving of a finite nature, and not the quality that belongs to the spiritual universe and its members, thinking of them as ideally we must, as freed from finite limitation. ”

“ Each ethical unit, each member of the infinite universe, is to be regarded as a center from which such a ray emanates, touching other centers, and awakening there the light intrinsic in them. Or we may think of a fountain from which stream forth jets of indescribable life-power—playing out of it, playing into other life, and evoking there kindred and yet unkindred life-waves, waves effluent and refluent. ”

“ The ideal here indicated may be expressed in the phrase, The spiritual universe with its endless lights reflected on the face of human society! The task of humanity is one which can never be completed, one from which mankind may never desist. To see evil as sin is to see it as contravening the collective task of mankind, the task of weaving the human groups more and more into the fabric of the spiritual relations. ”

“ The amount I spend on my house, food, recreation, might if divided prolong the life of many a child in the slums. Am I not then actually a parasite, that is, a murderer? It is this shocking scruple that has led fine people to live among the poor, and to try to equalize their mode of living with that prevailing in the environment. The motive is noble, though as a matter of fact they may never succeed in doing what they set out to do because they never actually touch bottom. There are always depths of poverty to which they can not descend. ”

“ As a physician he may watch night after night at the bedside of the sick, foregoing sleep though fatigued to the point of exhaustion in order to be at hand to mitigate the pains of the sufferer, jeopardizing his own health in order to assist others in recovering theirs. Yes, he may even give of his own blood to renew their ebbing life. In all this he will look for no material compensation. Gratitude, especially gratitude expressed in words, is repugnant to him. The lofty image of self which he strives to create would be marred if any such coarsely selfish motive were allowed to intrude. ”

“ There may be young children that still need fostering care. Dangers to the family may arise after I am gone. The more my life is implicated in the lives around me, the more as I stand on the edge of life will my thoughts be occupied, not with the obliteration of my empirical self, but with the future of those that survive—that best future of theirs which I long to assure. ”

“ There must be some object to be gained by the patience to make it commendable. I can be patient in a storm at sea if I may entertain the hope of reaching port. I can be patient in conducting a difficult scientific experiment if I may hope that it will issue in an important discovery, or prepare the way for such discovery by others. I can be patient in sickness if I have any reason to expect a return to health. But patience for mere patience’s sake is absurd. Well, then, the third answer is,—patience for the sake of manifesting your faith and trust in a wise and beneficent Deity. ”

“ The dominating thought is this: in a work of art each line, color, sound, word, must be irreplaceable, and on that account convincing. Each member must be indispensable in its place and the connection with the rest inevitable. Substitute for line, color, sound, etc., a life—an ethical being,—conceive the members to be not a few but in number infinite, and you have the spiritual ideal, which is the reality whereof the art work is a semblance. This is the relation of art to ethics—the quality which we call in art “convincing,” in ethics we call “worth.” ”

“ The mere idea of coöperation affords no clue. The self-sacrifice of the individual to the whole of which he is a part is socially useful. But on what occasions and to what degree is it useful? Altruism is socially useful. We are to serve others. But what in them shall we serve? Their physical needs, their intellectual needs, all their needs together? Is that humanly possible? Here again an ethical principle is required to define the quality and the limits of the service. The latent race-consciousness of which Darwin speaks affords no light on the ethical problems proper. ”

“ The object of religious devotion is the infinite holy community, the spiritual universe. The function of the religious society is to generate the ideal of the infinite holy community, of the spiritual universe. The family, the vocation, the nation, are sub-groups of this, lesser entities. Even mankind itself is but a province of the ideal spiritual commonwealth that extends beyond it. To concentrate worship upon the state or nation as some propose, would be to usurp for the part the piety that belongs to the whole. ”

“ I do not indeed believe it possible to establish the negative, to wit, that the sense of duty does not lurk somewhere, is not latent somewhere in the consciousness of persons morally the most obtuse; but I hold it to be impossible to prove the affirmative, to wit, that a sense of duty does exist in all human beings, even in the most degraded. Kant’s dictum of equality depends on making good the affirmative proposition, but this he has failed to do. ”

“ It is the great datum of ethics, of which ethical theory must give an account. All other data or problems that have been thrust into the foreground—freedom of the will, responsibility, altruistic self-sacrifice—are secondary, in the sense that they depend for their solution on a right conception of man as end per se. As possessing worth on his own account he is an ethical unit. Only as a member of the infinite spiritual universe does he possess the two-fold attributes implied in worth—inviolability with respect to outsiders and indefeasible, intrinsic preciousness. ”

“ The ethical rule, Live in the life of another, live so as to enhance to the highest degree the possibilities of another, seems almost no longer a counsel of perfection but an actual experience. Hence the utter grief into which the sundering of the tie is apt to plunge the survivor. On the other hand, Jonathan Edwards said on his deathbed to his wife: “Our relation has been spiritual, and therefore is eternal.” And there is indeed an element of eternality in marriage, only it is not the sex relation as such that is or can be conceived of as eternal. ”

“ Science also incidentally encourages the virtues of veracity, and the like.
Knowledge for knowledge’s sake cannot be the final end of the pursuit of science, since the world of space and time with which science deals is not only not as yet rationalized but is not ultimately rationalizable.
While in all the respects just mentioned the pursuit of science is indirectly instrumental to the spiritual end—instrumental to the instrument—it is directly instrumental to it in so far as, at the hand of the supreme scientist, man is conducted through the finite as far as the gate of the infinite. ”

“ On the other hand, to say with certain modern liberals that he was just a man, an infinitely gracious personality, one who exemplified in his life the virtues of forgiveness and self-sacrifice, did not satisfy me either. Buddha too had taught forgiveness: “For hatred is not conquered by hatred at any time; hatred is conquered by love.” It could not then be the bare precept of forgiveness that lets light on the secret of Jesus. And self-sacrifice—“Greater love hath no man than this, that he should lay down his life for his friend”—had been practiced within and without the pale of Hebraism. ”

“ Spiritual appreciation, appreciation of the inner self despite the mask, is the greatest of gifts, to manifest it is the greatest of arts. In its supreme form it is the art of going down to the lowest of human beings—the man in the ditch, the woman on the street—and making them think well of themselves because of possibilities in their nature they themselves hardly surmise. It is also the art of making the most developed and advanced human beings realize in themselves something still higher and better than they have ever reached. ”

“ Exploitation is palpably one of them. It is the clearest possible case of trespass on personality. Why not then demand respect simply for personality in general, without inquiring into the nature of personality? Is it not beyond all question dishonoring to human nature that some should be on the verge of starvation while others are even themselves injured by excessive possessions; that the energies of children should be exhausted by premature toil; that adults should be worked like beasts of burden? ”