George Herbert Palmer

“ In all good I too find satisfaction of desire. Only, though true, the definition is in my judgment vague and inadequate. For we shall still need some standard to test the goodness of desires. They themselves may be good, and some of them are better than others. It is good to eat candy, to love a friend, to hate a foe, to hear the sound of running water, to practice medicine, to gather wealth, learning, or postage stamps. But though each of these represents a natural desire, they cannot all be counted equally good. They must be tried by some standard other than themselves. ”

“ Shall I by adding a fresh power to myself strengthen those I already possess? By taking this path, rich in a certain sort of good as it undoubtedly is, shall I be diverted from paths where my special goods lie? Here I am, a student of ethics. A friend calls and tells me of the charms of astronomy, a study undoubtedly majestic and delightful. Since I desire to take all knowledge for my province, why not hurry off at once to study astronomy? ”

“ It breeds instincts and not understanding. So inwoven has goodness become with the very web of life that it is hard to disentangle. We cannot easily detach it from encompassing circumstance, look at it nakedly, and say what in itself it really is. Never appearing in practical affairs except as an element, and always intimately associated with something else, we are puzzled how to break up that intimacy and give to goodness independent meaning. It is as if oxygen were never found alone, but only in connection with hydrogen, carbon, or some other of the eighty elements which compose our globe. ”

“ They run after fame, because they can never be quite famous. They may become known to every person on their street, but there is the street beyond. Or to every one in their town, but there are other towns. Or if to every person on earth, there are still the after ages. Entire fame cannot be had; and exactly on that account it stirs every impulse of our nature in pursuit.
Now the aim at personal perfection is precisely of this sort. As servants of righteousness we cannot accept any other precept than "Be ye perfect as your Father which is in heaven is perfect." ”

“ It is true no really wise man ever was on earth, or ever will be. But that is the very reason why we are all so impassioned for wisdom, because every bit we seize only opens the door to more. If we could get it in full, if some time or other, knowing that we are now wise, we could sit down in our armchairs with nothing further to do, it would be a death blow to our colleges. Nobody would attend them or care for wisdom longer. An aim which one can reach, and discover to be finally ended, moves only children. ”

“ In asceticism we prize self-sacrifice for its own sake. We hunt out what we value most; we judge what would most completely fulfill our needs; and then we abolish it. Abolish it for what? For nothing but the mere sake of abolishing. This is to turn morality upside down; and in place of the Christian ideal of abounding life, to set up the pessimistic aim of impoverishment. There is nothing of this kind in self-sacrifice. Here we assert ourselves, our conjunct selves. We estimate what will be best for the community of man and seek to further this at whatever cost to our isolated individuality. ”

“ Perhaps the most admirable case of self-sacrifice is that in which no single person appears who is profited by our loss. The scholar, the artist, the scientific man dedicate themselves to the interests of undifferentiated humanity. They serve their undecipherable race, not knowing who will obtain gains through their toils. In their sublime benefactions they study the wants of no individual person, not even of themselves. ”

“ Yet obviously self- consciousness involves something like a deadlock. For how can one consciously exert himself to be unconscious and try not to try? We cannot arrange our lives so as to have no arrangement in them, and when shaking hands with a friend, for example, be on our guard against noticing. Once locked up in this vicious circle, we seem destined to be prisoners forever. That is what constitutes the anguish of the situation. The most tyrannical of jailers—one's self—is over us, and from his bondage we are powerless to escape. ”

“ Too easily does our sympathetic and sentimental age, recklessly eulogistic of altruism, hurry into self-sacrifice. Altruism in itself is worthless. That an act is unselfish can never justify its performance. He who would be a great giver must first be a great person. Our men, and still more our women, need as urgently the gospel of self-development as that of self-sacrifice; though the two are naturally supplemental. Our only means of estimating the propriety and dignity of sacrifice is to inquire how closely connected with ourselves is its object. ”

“ We can never catch up with goodness. It is always promising to disclose itself a little way beyond, and then evading us, slipping from under our fingers just when we are about to touch it. This meaning of goodness is self-contradictory.
And it is also too large. It includes more to goodness than properly belongs there. If we call everything good which is good for, everything which shows adaptation to an end, then we shall be obliged to count a multitude of matters good which we are accustomed to think of as evil. Filth will be good, for it promotes fevers as nothing else does. ”

“ Most of us in listening to music forget ourselves under its lulling charms, abandon ourselves to its spell, and by it are swept away, perhaps to the infinite, perhaps to an obliteration of all clear thought. Is it not largely because we are so hard pressed under the anxious conditions of modern life that music becomes such an enormous solace and strength? I do not say that no other factors have contributed to the vogue of music, but certainly it is widely prized as an effective means of escape from ourselves. ”

“ VII What I have set myself to make plain in this series of graded examples is simply this: self-sacrifice is not something exceptional, something occurring at crises of our lives, something for which we need perpetually to be preparing ourselves, so that when the great occasion comes we may be ready to lay ourselves upon its altar. Such romanticism distorts and obscures. Self-sacrifice is an everyday affair. By it we live. It is the very air of our moral lungs. Without it society could not go on for an hour. ”

“ We have seen how in the case of the watch we were almost obliged to abandon the thought of a single object and to speak of it as a kind of centre of constitutive relations. A plexus of ties runs in every direction, and where these cross there is the watch. So it is among human beings. If we try for a moment to conceive a person as single and detached, we shall find he would have no powers to exercise. No emotions would be his, whether of love or hate, for they imply objects to arouse them, no occupations of civilized life, for these involve mutual dependency. ”

“ To call a thing good only with reference to what lies outside itself would be almost equivalent to saying that nothing is good. For if the moment anything becomes good it refers all its goodness to something beyond its own walls, should we ever be able to discover an object endowed with goodness at all? ”

“ Many writers maintain that brutes differ from us precisely in this particular, that while they possess consciousness they have not self- consciousness. A brute, they say, has just such experiences as I have been describing: he tastes, smells, hears, sees, touches. All this he may do with greater intensity and precision than we. But he is entirely wrapped up in these separate sensations. The single experience holds his attention. He knows no other self than that; or, strictly speaking, he knows no self at all. It is the experience he knows, and not himself the experiencer. ”

“ We praise God in order to abase ourselves. Him we cannot really praise. That we understand at the start. He is beyond commendation. Excellence covers him like a garment, and is not attained, like ours, by struggle through obstacles. Yet this difference between him and us we can only express by trying to imagine ourselves like him, and saying how difficult such excellence would then be. We have here, therefore, a sort of reversed praise, where the disparagement which praise always carries falls exclusively on the praiser. ”

“ Change of a lamentable sort has come. What before was a beautiful whole, organically constituted in the way described in my first two chapters, has been torn asunder. What we formerly beheld with delight has disappeared.
And let us not accept false comfort. We often hear it said that, after all, destruction is an illusion. There is no such thing. What is once in the world is here forever. No particle of the watch can by any possibility be lost. And what is true of the watch is true of things far higher, of persons even. ”

“ Were it so, desire would cease. We must contrast the poverty of the present with the fullness of a possible future, or we should not incline to turn from that present. Yet our grand driving force is that sense of limitation, of want or need, which was discussed in the last chapter. And our aim is rather at a better than at a best, at the removal of some small distinct hindrance than at arrival at a completed goal. We come upon excellence piecemeal, and do not, like the architect, look upon it in its entirety at the outset. ”

“ Therefore we must confess that at no time can we account ourselves completed persons. Justly we use such strange expressions as "He is much of a person," "He is very little of a person." Personality is an affair of degree. We are moving toward it, but have not yet arrived. "Man partly is and wholly hopes to be." And can we ever arrive? I do not see how. We are chasing a flying goal. The nearer we approach, the farther it removes. Shall we call this fact discouraging, then, or even say that self-development is a useless process, since it never can be fulfilled? ”

“ If telling the truth is a spiritual excellence and the result of effort, why should it not be praised? But there lies the trouble. I assumed that to be a truth-teller required strain on your part. In reality it would have required greater strain for falsehood. It might then seem that I should praise those who are not easily excellent, since I am forbidden to praise those who are. And something like this seems actually approved. If a boy on the street, who has been trained hardly to distinguish truth from lies, some day stumbles into a bit of truth, I may justly praise him. ”

“ The precious part of the, watch was the organization of its particles, and that is gone. The face and form of my friend can indeed be blotted out in no single item. But I care nothing for its material items, The totality may be wrecked, and it is that totality to which my affections cling. And so it is in the world around—material remains, organic wholeness goes. It is almost a sarcasm of nature that she counts our precious things so cheap, while the bricks and mortar of which these are made—matters on which no human affection can fasten—she holds for everlasting. ”

“ But at least the thoughts of our day have become turned rather to the future than the past, a result which has attended the wider comprehension of development. To call development the discovery of our century would, however, be absurd. Aristotle bases his whole philosophy upon it, and it was already venerable in his time. Yet the many writers who have expounded the doctrine during the last fifty years have brought the thought of it home to the common man. It has entered into daily life as never before, and has done much to protect us against the sadness of destructive change. ”

“ We should aid him through the inaccurate, slow, and fatiguing period of his existence until, having tested many tracts of life and learned in them how to mechanize desirable conduct, he comes back on their farther side to a childhood more beautiful than the original. Many a man and woman possesses this disciplined childhood through life. Goodness seems the very atmosphere they breathe, and everything they do to be exactly fitting. Their acts are performed with full self-expression, yet without strut or intrusion of consciousness. ”

“ Indeed if anywhere such a self-sufficing organism did exist, we could never know it. For, by the hypothesis, it would be altogether adequate to itself and without relations beyond its own bounds. And if it were thus cut off from connection with everything except itself, it could not even affect our knowledge. It would be a closed universe within our universe, and be for us as good as zero. We must own, then, that we have no acquaintance with any such perfect organism, while the facts of life reveal conditions widely unlike those here represented. ”

“ Plainly, then, praise and blame are attributable exclusively to spiritual beings. Nature is unfit for honor. We may admire her, may wish that our ways were like hers, and envy her great law-abiding calm. But it would be foolish to praise her, or even to blame when her volcanoes overwhelm our friends. We praise spirit only, conscious deeds. Where self-directed action forces its path to a worthy goal, we rightly praise the director. ”

“ The more richly functional a thing or person is, the greater its goodness. Poverty of powers is everywhere a form of evil. For how can there be largeness of organization where there is little to organize? Or what is the use of organization except as a mode of furnishing the smoothest and most compact expression to powers? Wealth and order are accordingly everywhere the double traits of goodness, and a chief test of the worth of any organism will be the diversity of the powers it includes. ”

“ Goodness is the expression of the largest organization. Its aim is everywhere to bring object and environment into fullest cooperation. We have seen how in any organic relationship every part is both means and end. Goodness tends toward organism; and so far as it obtains, each member of the universe receives its own appropriate expansion and dignity. The present definition merely states the great truth of organization with too objective an emphasis; as that which found the satisfaction of desire to be the ground of goodness over-emphasized the subjective side. ”

“ Could I fully realize myself, I should have fulfilled all righteousness, and this view is sanctioned by the Great Teacher when he asks, "What shall a man give in exchange for his life?"—his life, his soul, his self. If any one fully believed this, and lived as if all his desires were fulfilled so long as he had opportunities of self-development, he might be said to have insured himself against every catastrophe. ”