-^ I'l* iiiniTiri Mriimr- 
 
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Booklets in \ew k Fancy Bindings. 
 
 BLESSING OF CHEERFULNESS (THE). By the 
 
 Rev. J. R. Miller, D.D. 
 CHILDREN'S WING (THE). By Elizabeth Glover. 
 CONFLICTING DUTIES. By E. S. Elliott. 
 CULTURE AND REFORM. By Anna Robertson Brown. 
 DO WE BELIEVE IT ? By E. S. Elliott. 
 EXPECTATION CORNER. By E. S. Elliott. 
 FAMILY MANNERS. By author of "Talks about a Fine 
 
 GIRLS: 'faults AND IDEALS. By the Rev. J. R. 
 
 Miller, D.D. 
 HAPPY LIFE (THE). By Charles W. Eliot, L.L.D. 
 JESSICA'S FIRST PRAYER. By Hesba Stretton. 
 KING OF THE GOLDEN RIVER (THE). By John 
 
 Ruskin. 
 LADDIE. By the author of " Miss Toosey's Mission." 
 LOVE AND FRIENDSHIP. By Ralph Waldo Emerson. 
 MASTER AND MAN. By Count Lyof N. Tolstoi. 
 MISS TOOSEY'S MISSION. By the author of "Laddie." 
 PATHS OF DUTY (THE): Counsels to Young Men. 
 
 By Dean Farrar. 
 REAL HAPPENINGS. By Mrs. Mary B. Claflin. 
 SECRETS OF HAPPY HOME LIFE. By the Rev. J. 
 
 R. Miller, D.D. 
 STILLNESS AND SERVICE. By E. S. Elliott. 
 SWEETNESS AND LIGHT. By Matthew Arnold. 
 TALKS ABOUT A FINE ART. By Elizabeth Glover. 
 TOO GOOD TO BE TRUE. Bv E. S. Elliott 
 TWO PILGRIMS (THE). By Count Lyof N. Tolstoi. 
 VICTORY OF OUR FAITH (THE). By Anna Robert- 
 son Brown, Ph.D. 
 WHAT IS WORTH WHILE. By Anna Robertson 
 
 Brown, Ph.D. 
 WHAT MEN LIVE BY. By Count Lyof N. Tolstoi. 
 WHEN THE KING COMES TO HIS OWN. By 
 
 E. S. Elliott. 
 WHERE LOVE IS, THERE GOD IS ALSO. By 
 
 Count Lyof N. Tolstoi. 
 YOUNG MEN : FAULTS AND IDEALS. By the Rev. 
 
 J. R. MUler, D.D. 
 
 For sale by alt booksellers, or sent, postpaid, by the 
 publishers, on receipt of 35c. 
 
 Thomas Y, Crowell & Co,, NewYork & Boston, 
 
THE HAPPY LIFE 
 
 BY 
 
 CHARLES W. ELIOT, LL.D., 
 
 President of Harvard University 
 
 NEW YORK: 46 East Fourteenth Street 
 
 THOMAS Y. CROWELL & CO. 
 
 BOSTON; loo Purchase Street 
 
Copyright 1896, 
 By Thomas Y. Crowell & Co. 
 
THE HAPPY LIFE 
 
 By CHARLES W. ELIOT, LL. D. 
 
 Mt subject is " The Happy Life." I address here 
 ' especially young people who have passed the period of 
 childhood, with its unreflecting gayety, fleeting shad- 
 ows, gusty griefs, and brief despairs, and have entered, 
 under conditions of singular privilege, upon rational 
 and responsible living. For you happiness must be 
 conscious, considerate, and consistent with habits of 
 observing, reading and reflecting. Now reflecting has 
 always been a grave business, 
 
 " Where but to think is to be full of sorrow 
 And leaden-eyed despairs " ; 
 
 and it must be confessed that our times present some 
 new obstacles to a life of thoughtful happiness. Until 
 this century the masses of mankind were almost dumb ; 
 but now their moans and complaints have become audi- 
 ble through telephone, telegraph and rotary press. The 
 millions are now saying what the moody poets have 
 always said : 
 
 s 
 
b TSE HAPPY LIFE. 
 
 " The flower that smiles to-day 
 To-morrow dies, 
 All that we wish to stay- 
 Tempts and then flies. 
 What is this world's delight ? 
 Lightning that mocks the night, 
 Brief even as bright." 
 
 The gloomy moralist is still repeating : " I have seen 
 all the works that are done under the sun, and behold ! 
 all is vanity and vexation of spirit." 
 
 The manual laborers of to-day, who are much better 
 off than the same classes of laborers have been in any 
 eaiiier times, are saying just what Shelley said to the 
 men of England in 1819 : 
 
 " The seed ye sow another reaps, 
 The wealth ye find another keeps, 
 The robes ye weave another wears. 
 The arms ye forge another bears." 
 
 They would adopt without change the words in which 
 that eminent moralist, Robinson Crusoe, a century ear- 
 lier, described the condition of the laboring classes : 
 
 "The men of labor spent their strength in daily struggling 
 for bread to maintain the vital strength they labored with; 
 so living in a daily circulation of sorrow, living but to work, 
 and working but to live, as if daily bread were the only end of 
 wearisome life, and a wearisome life the only occasion of daily 
 bread." 
 
 Matthew Arnold calls his love to come to the window 
 
 and listen to the "melancholy, long-withdrawing roar" 
 
 of the sea upon the moonlit beach at Dover ; and these 
 
 are his dismal words to her : 
 
 "Ah, love, let us be true 
 To one another ! for the world, which seems 
 To lie before us like a land of dreams. 
 So various, so beautiful, so new. 
 Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light. 
 
THE MORAL PURPOSE OF THE UNIVERSE. 7 
 
 Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain ; 
 And we are here as on a darkling plain 
 Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight. 
 Where ignorant armies clash by night." 
 
 The poets are by no means the only offenders ; the 
 novelists and scientists take their turn. The fiction of 
 this century deals much with the lives of the wretched, 
 dissolute, and vicious, and with the most unjust and dis- 
 astrous conditions of modern society. A fresh diificulty 
 in the way of natural happiness is the highly speculative 
 opinion, lately put forward by men of science and 
 promptly popularized, to the effect that external nature 
 offsets every good with an evil, and that the visible uni- 
 verse is unmoral, or indifferent as regards right and 
 wrong, revealing no high purpose or intelligent trend. 
 This is, indeed a melancholy notion ; but that it should 
 find acceptance at this day, and really make people 
 miserable, only illustrates the curious liability of the 
 human intelligence to sudden collapse. The great solid 
 conviction, which science, within the past three centuries, 
 has enabled thinking men and women to settle down on, 
 is that all discovered and systematized knowledge is as 
 nothing compared with the undiscovered, and that a 
 boundless universe of unimagined facts and forces inter- 
 penetrates and encompasses what seems the universe to 
 us. In spite of this impregnable conviction people dis- 
 tress themselves because, forsooth, they cannot discern 
 the moral purpose or complete spiritual intent of this 
 dimly seen, fractional universe which is all we know. 
 Why should they discern it? 
 
 It is, then, in spite of many old and some new dis- 
 couragements that we are all seeking the happy life. 
 
8 THE HAPPY LIFE. 
 
 We know that education spreads, knowledge grows, and 
 public liberty develops ; but can we be sui-e that public 
 and private happiness increase ? What the means and 
 sources of happiness are in this actual world, with our 
 present surroundings, and with no reference to joys 
 or sorrows in any other world, is a natural, timely and 
 wholesome inquiry. We may be sure that one principle 
 will hold throughout the whole pursuit of thoughtful 
 happiness — the principle that the best way to secure 
 future happiness is to be as happy as is rightfully pos- 
 sible to-day. To secure any desirable capacity for the 
 future, near or remote, cultivate it to-day. What would 
 be the use of immortality for a person who cannot use 
 well half an hour ? asks Emerson. 
 
 In trying to enumerate the positive satisfactions which 
 an average man may reasonably expect to enjoy in this 
 world, I, of course, take no account of those too common 
 objects of human pursuit, wealth, power, and fame; first, 
 because they do not as a rule contribute to happiness ; 
 and secondly, because they are unattainable by mankind 
 in general. I invite you to consider only those means 
 of happiness which the humble and obscure mUlions may 
 possess. The rich and famous are too few to affect ap- 
 preciably the sum of human happiness. I begin with 
 satisfactions of sense. 
 
 Sensuous pleasures, like eating and drinking, are 
 sometimes described as animal, and therefore unworthy. 
 It must be confessed, however, that men are, in this 
 life, animals all through ■ — whatever else they may be — 
 and that they have a right to enjoy without reproach 
 those pleasures of animal existence which maintain 
 health, strength^ and life itself. Familiar ascetic and 
 
LOWER AND HIGHEB PLEASURES. » 
 
 pessimistic dogmas to the contrary notwithstanding, 
 these pleasures, taken naturally and in moderation, are 
 all pure, honorable and wholesome. Moreover, all at- 
 tempts to draw a line between bodily satisfactions on 
 the one hand, and mental or spiritual satisfactions on 
 the other, and to distinguish the first as beastly indul- 
 gences, and the second as the only pleasures worthy 
 of a rational being, have failed and must fail ; for it is 
 manifestly impossible to draw a sharp line of division 
 between pleasures, and to say that these are bodily, and 
 those intellectual or moral. Are the pleasures of 
 sight and hearing bodily or mental? Is delight in 
 harmony, or in color, a pleasure of the sense, or of the 
 imagination ? What sort of a joy is a thing of beauty ? 
 Is it an animal or a spiritual joy ? Is the delight of a 
 mother in fondling her smiling baby a physical or a 
 moral delight? But though we cannot divide pleasures 
 into animal and moral, unworthy and worthy, we can, 
 nevertheless, divide them into lower and higher pleas- 
 ures ; the lower, those which, like eating and drinking, 
 prompt to the maintenance and reproduction of life, 
 and which can be impaired or destroyed by prolonga- 
 tion or repetition ; the higher, those which, like the 
 pleasures of the eye or ear, seem to be ends in them- 
 selves; in the lower there <San be destructive excess, 
 in the higher excess is impossible. Recognizing, then, 
 that there are higher pleasures than eating and drinking, 
 let us clearly perceive that three meals a day all one's 
 life not only give in themselves a constantly renewed 
 innocent satisfaction, but provide the necessary founda- 
 tion for all other satisfactions. Taking food and drink 
 is a great enjoyment for healthy people, and those 
 
10 TBM HAPPY LIFE. 
 
 who do not enjoy eating seldom have much capacity 
 for enjoyment or usefulness of any sort. Under or- 
 dinary circumstances it is by no means a purely bodily 
 pleasure. We do not eat alone, but in families, or sets 
 of friends and comrades ; and the table is the best centre 
 of friendships and of the domestic affections. When^ 
 therefore, a workingman says that he has worked all his 
 life to procure a subsistence for himself and his family, 
 he states that he has secured some fundamental satis- 
 factions — namely, food, productive employment, and 
 family life. The satisfaction of eating is so completely 
 a matter of appetite that such distinction as there is 
 between the luxurious and the hardy in regard to this 
 enjoyment is altogether in favor of the hardy. Who 
 does not remember some rough and perhaps scanty 
 meal in camp, or on the march, or at sea, or in the 
 woods, which was infinitely more delicious than the 
 most luxurious dinner during indoor or sedentary life? 
 But that appetite depends on health. Take good care, 
 then, of your teeth and your stomachs, and be ashamed 
 not of enjoying your food, but of not enjoying it. 
 There was a deal of sound human nature in the unex- 
 pected reply of the dying old woman to her minister's 
 leading question : " Here at the end of a long life, which 
 of the Lord's mercies are you most thankful for ? " Her 
 eye brightened as she answered : " My victuals." 
 
 Let us count next pleasures through the eye. Unlike 
 the other senses, the eye is always at work except when 
 we sleep, and may, consequently, be the vehicle of far 
 more enjoyment than any other organ of sense. It has 
 given our race its ideas of infinity, symmetry, grace, 
 and splendor ; it is a chief source of childhood's joys. 
 
PLEASURES THROUGH EYE AND EAR. 11 
 
 and throughout life the guide to almost all pleasurable 
 activities. The pleasure it gives us, however, depends 
 largely upon the amount of attention we pay to the pic- 
 tures which it incessantly sets before the brain. Two 
 men walk along the same road ; one notices the blue 
 depths of the sky, the floating clouds, the opening leaves 
 upon the trees, the green grass, the yellow buttercups, 
 and the far stretch of the open fields ; the other has pre- 
 cisely the same pictures on his retina, but pays no atten- 
 tion to them. One sees, and the other does not see; 
 one enjoys an unspeakable pleasure, and the other loses 
 that pleasure which is as free to him as the air. The 
 beauties which the eye reveals are infinitely various in 
 quality and scale ; one mind prefers the minute, another 
 the vast; one the delicate and tender, another the coarse 
 and rough ; one the inanimate things, another the ani- 
 mate creation. The whole outward world is the king- 
 dom of the observant eye. He who enters into any part 
 of that kingdom to possess it has a store of pure enjoy- 
 ment in life which is literally inexhaustible and immeas- 
 urable. His eyes alone will give him a life worth living. 
 
 Next comes the ear as a minister of enjoyment, but 
 next at a great interval. The average man probably 
 does not recognize that he gets much pleasure through 
 hearing. He thinks that his ears are to him chiefly a 
 convenient means of human intercourse. But let him 
 experience a temporary deafness, and he will learn that 
 many a keen delight came to him through the ear. He 
 will miss the beloved voice, the merry laugh, the hum 
 of the city, the distant chime, the song of birds, the run- 
 ning brook, the breeze in the trees, the lapping wavelets, 
 and the thundering beach ; and he will learn that famil- 
 
12 THE HAP FT LIFE. 
 
 iar sounds have been to him sources of pure delight — 
 
 an important element in his well-being. Old Isaak 
 
 Walton found in the lovely sounds of earth a hint of 
 
 Heaven : 
 
 " How joyed my heart in the rich melodies 
 That overhead and round me did arise! 
 The moving leaves — the water's gentle flow — 
 Delicious music hung on every bough. 
 Then said I in my heart, If that the Lord 
 Such lovely music on the earth accord; 
 If to weak, sinful man such sounds are given, 
 Oh! what must be the melody of heaven! " 
 
 A high degree of that fine pleasure which music gives 
 is not within the reach of all; yet there are few to 
 whom the pleasure is wholly denied. To take part in 
 producing harmony, as in part-singing, gives the singers 
 an intense pleasure, which is doubtless partly physical 
 and partly mental. I am told that to play good music 
 at sight, as one of several performers playing different 
 instruments, is as keen a sensuous and intellectual 
 enjoyment as the world affords. 
 
 These pleasures through the eye and ear are open in 
 civilized society to all who have the will to seek them, 
 and the intelligence to cultivate the faculties through 
 which they are enjoyed. They are quite as likely to 
 bless him who works with hand or brain all day for a 
 living, as him who lives inactive on his own savings or 
 on those of other people. The outward world yields 
 them spontaneously to every healthy body and alert 
 mind ; but the active mind is as essential to the winning 
 of them as the sound body. 
 
 There is one great field of knowledge, too much 
 neglected in our schools and colleges, which offers to 
 the student endless pleasures and occupations through 
 
LOVE OF NA TUBE. 1 3 
 
 the trained and quickened senses of sight, hearing, and 
 touch. I mean the wide field called natural history, 
 which comprehends geography, meteorology, botany, 
 zoology, mineralogy, and geology. Charles Darwin, 
 the greatest naturalist of this century, saia that with 
 natural history and the domestic affections a man 
 might be truly happy. Not long ago I was urging a 
 young naturalist of twenty-six to spend the next sum- 
 mer in Europe. He thought it was hardly right for him 
 to allow himself that indulgence ; and when I urged 
 that the journey would be very enjoyable as well as 
 profitable, he replied : " Yes ; but you know I can be 
 happy anywhere in the months when things are grow- 
 ing." He meant that the pleasures of observation were 
 enough for him when he could be out-of-doors. That 
 young man was poor, delicate in health, and of a retiring 
 and diffident disposition ; yet life was full of keenest 
 interest to him. 
 
 Our century is distinguished by an ardent return of 
 civilized man to that love of nature from which books 
 and urban life had temporarily diverted him. The 
 poetry and the science of our times alike foster this love, 
 and add to the delights which come to lovers of nature 
 through the keen senses, the delights of the soaring 
 imagination and the far-reaching reason. In many of 
 our mental moods the contemplation of Nature brings 
 peace and joy. Her patient ways shame hasty little 
 man ; her vastnesses calm and elevate his troubled 
 mind ; her terrors fill him with awe ; her inexplicable 
 and infinite beauties with delight. Her equal care for 
 the least things and the greatest corrects his scale of 
 values. He cannot but believe that the vast material 
 
14 TBE HAPPY LIFE. 
 
 frame of things is informed and directed by an infinite 
 Intelligence and Will, just as his little animal body is 
 informed by his own conscious mind and will. 
 
 It is apparent from what I have said of pleasures 
 through the eye and ear and from contact with nature, 
 that a good measure of out-of-door life is desirable for 
 him who would secure the elements of a happy life. 
 The urban tendency of our population militates against 
 free access to out-of-door delights. The farmer works 
 all day in the fields, and his children wander at will in 
 the open air; the sailor can see at any moment the 
 whole hemisphere of the heavens and the broad plain 
 of the sea; but the city resident may not see a tree or 
 a shrub for weeks together, and can barely discern a 
 narrow strip of sky, as he walks at the bottom of the 
 deep ditches we call streets. The wise man, whose 
 work is in the city and indoors at that, will take every 
 possible opportunity to escape into the fresh air and the 
 open country. Certain good tendencies in this respect 
 have appeared within recent years. Hundreds of 
 thousands of people, who must work daily in compact 
 cities, now live in open suburbs; cities provide parks 
 and decorated avenues of approach to parks ; out-of- 
 door sports and exercises become popular; safe country 
 boarding-schools for city children are multiplied, and 
 public holidays and half-holidays increase in number. 
 These are appreciable compensations for the disadvan- 
 tages of city life. The urban population which really 
 utilizes these facilities may win a keener enjoyment 
 from nature than the rural population, to whom natural 
 beauty is at every moment accessible. The cultivation 
 of mind and the increased sensibility which city life 
 
OUT-OF-DOOR LIFE— FAMILY LOVE. 15 
 
 develops, heighten the delight in natural beauty. More- 
 over, though man destroys much natural loveliness in 
 occupying any territory for purposes of residence or 
 business, he also creates much loveliness of grassy fields 
 and banks, mirroring waters, perfectly developed trees, 
 graceful shrubs and brilliant flowers. In these days no 
 intelligent city population need lack the means and 
 opportunities of frequent out-of-door enjoyment. Our 
 climate is indeed rough and changeable, but, on the 
 whole, produces scenes of much more various beauty 
 than any monotonous climate, while against the occa- 
 sional severity of our weather artificial protection is more 
 and more provided. What we may wisely ask of our 
 tailors and our landscape architects is protection in the 
 open air from the extremes of heat, cold, and wind. 
 The provision of an equable climate indoors is by no 
 means sufficient to secure either the health or the hap- 
 piness of the people. 
 
 From the love of nature we turn to family love. The 
 domestic affections are the principal source of human 
 happiness and well-being. The mutual loves of husband 
 and wife, of parents and children, of brothers and sis- 
 ters, are not only the chief sources of happiness, but the 
 chief springs of action, and the chief safeguards from 
 evil. The young man and the young woman work and 
 save, in order that they may be married and have a home 
 of their own ; once married, they work and save, that 
 they may bring up well a family. The supreme object 
 of the struggling and striving of most men is the family. 
 One might almost say that the security and elevation of 
 the family and of family life are the prime objects of civ- 
 
16 THE HAPPY LIFE. 
 
 ilization, and the ultimate ends of all industry and trade. 
 In respect to this principal source of happiness, the 
 young mechanic, operative, clerk, or laborer is generally 
 better off than the young professional man, inasmuch 
 as he can marry earlier. He goes from the parental 
 roof to his own roof with only a short interval, if any, 
 between. The workingman is often a grandfather be- 
 fore he is fifty years old ; the professional man but sel- 
 dom. Love before marriage, being the most attractive 
 theme of poetry and fiction, gets a very disproportion- 
 ate amount of attention in literature, as compared with 
 the domestic affections after marriage. 
 
 Concerning these normal domestic joys, any discern- 
 ing person who has experienced them, and has been in- 
 timate with four or five generations, will be likely to 
 make three observations : In the first place, the realiza- 
 tion of the natural and legitimate enjoyments in dom- 
 estic life depends on the possession of physical and 
 moral health. Whatever impairs bodily vigor, animal 
 spirits, and good temper lessens the chance of attaining 
 to the natural domestic joys — joys which by them- 
 selves, without any additions whatever except food and 
 steady work, make earthly life worth living. In the 
 second place, they endure, and increase with lapse of 
 years ; the satisfactions of normal married life do not 
 decline, but mount. Children are more and more in- 
 teresting as they grow older ; at all stages, from baby- 
 hood to manhood and womanhood, they are to be daily 
 enjoyed. People who think they shall enjoy their 
 children to-morrow, or year after next, will never enjoy 
 them. The greatest pleasure in them comes late ; for as 
 Hamerton mentions in his "Human Intercourse," the 
 
PLEA SVRH IN BODILY EXEB TION. 1 7 
 
 most exquisite satisfaction of the parent is to come to 
 respect and admire the powers and character of the child. 
 Thirdly, the family affections and joys are the ultimate 
 source of civilized man's idea of a loving God — an idea 
 which is a deep root of happiness when it becomes an 
 abiding conviction. They have supplied all the concep- 
 tions of which this idea is the supreme essence, or in- 
 finite product. It deserves mention here that these 
 supreme enjoyments of the normal, natural life — the 
 domestic joys — are woman's more than man's ; because 
 his function of bread- winning necessarily separates him 
 from his home during a good part of his time, particu- 
 larly since domestic or house industries have been super- 
 seded by factory methods. 
 
 I turn now to the satisfaction which comes from phys- 
 ical exertion, including brainwork. Everybody knows 
 some form of activity which gives him satisfaction. Per- 
 haps it is riding a horse, or rowing a boat, or tramping 
 all day through woods or along beaches with a gun on 
 the shoulder, or climbing a mountain, or massing into a 
 ball or bloom a paste of sticky iron in a puddling fur- 
 nace (that heaviest of labor), or wrestling with the handles 
 of the plunging, staggering plow, or tugging at a boat's 
 tiller when the breeze is fresh, or getting in hay before 
 the shower. There is real pleasure and exhilaration in 
 bodily exertion, particularly with companionship (of 
 men or animals) and competition. There is pleasure in 
 the exertion even when it is pushed to the point of fa- 
 tigue, as many a sportsman knows ; and this pleasure is 
 in good measure independent of the attainment of any 
 practical end. There is pleasure in mere struggle, so it 
 
18 THE HAPPY LIFE. 
 
 be not hopeless, and in overcoming resistance, obstacles, 
 and hardships. When to the pleasure of exertion is 
 added the satisfaction of producing a new value, and the 
 further satisfaction of earning a livelihood through that 
 new value, we have the common pleasurable conditions 
 of productive labor. Every workingman who is worth his 
 .salt (I care not whether he works with his hands and brains, 
 or with his brains alone), takes satisfaction, first, in the 
 working, secondly, in the product of his work, and thirdly, 
 in what that product yields to him. The carpenter who 
 takes no pleasure in the mantel he has made, the farm 
 laborer who does not care for the crops he has cultivated, 
 the weaver who takes no pride in the cloth he has woven, 
 the engineer who takes no interest in the working of the 
 engine he directs, is a monstrosity. It is an objection 
 to many forms of intellectual labor that their immediate 
 product is intangible and often imperceptible. The fruit 
 of mental labor is often diffused, remote, or subtile. It 
 eludes measurement, and even observation. On the 
 other hand, mental labor is more enjoyable than manual 
 labor in the process. The essence of the joy lies in the 
 doing, rather than in the result of the doing. There 
 is a lifelong and solid satisfaction in any productive 
 labor, manual or mental, which is not pushed beyond 
 the limit of strength. The difference between the 
 various occupations of men in respect to yielding 
 this satisfaction is much less than people suppose ; for 
 occupations become habitual in time, and the daily 
 work in every calling gets to be so familiar that it may 
 fairly be called monotonous. My occupation, for in- 
 stance, offers, I believe, more variety than that of most 
 professional men ; yet I should say that nine-tenths of 
 
THE PLEASURE OF BEADING. 19 
 
 my work, from day to day, was routine work, present- 
 ing no more novelty or fresh interest to me than the 
 work of a carpenter or blacksmith, who is always mak- 
 ing new things on old types, presents to him. The 
 Oriental, hot-climate figment, that labor is a curse, is 
 contradicted by the experience of all the progressive 
 nations. The Teutonic stock owes everything that is 
 great and inspiring in its destiny to its faculty of over- 
 coming difficulties by hard work, and of taking heartfelt 
 satisfaction in this victorious work. It is not the dawd- 
 lers and triflers who find life worth living; it is the 
 steady, strenuous, robust workers. 
 
 Once when I was talking with Dr. Oliver Wendell 
 Holmes about the best pleasures in life, he mentioned, 
 as one of the most precious, frequent contact with quick 
 and well-stored minds in large variety ; he valued high- 
 ly the number, frequency, and variety of quickening in- 
 tellectual encounters. We were thinking of contact in 
 conversation ; but this pleasure, if only to be procured 
 by personal meetings, would obviously be within the 
 reach, as a rule, of only a very limited number of per- 
 sons. Fortunately for us and for posterity, the cheap 
 printing press has put within easy reach of every man 
 who can read all the best minds both of the past and 
 the present For one-tenth part of a year's wages a 
 young mechanic can buy, before he marries, a library 
 of famous books which, if he masters it, will make him 
 a well-read man. For half-a-day's wages a clerk can 
 provide himself with a weekly paper which will keep 
 him informed for a year of all important current events. 
 Public libraries, circulating libraries, Sunday-school 
 
20 TBE HAPPY LIFE. 
 
 libraries, and book-clubs nowadays bring much reading 
 to the door of every household and every solitary crea- 
 ture that wants to read. This is a new privilege for the 
 mass of mankind ; and it is an inexhaustible source of 
 intellectual and spiritual nutriment. It seems as if this 
 new privilege alone must alter the whole aspect of soci- 
 ety in a few generations. Books are the quietest and 
 most constant of friends ; they are the most accessible 
 and wisest of counselors, and the most patient of teach- 
 ers. With his daily work and his books, many a man, 
 whom the world thought forlorn, has found life worth 
 living. It is a mistake to suppose that a great deal of 
 leisure is necessary for this happy intercourse with books. 
 Ten minutes a day devoted affectionately to good books 
 — indeed to one book of the first order like the English 
 Bible or Shakespeare, or to two or three books of the 
 second order like Homer, Virgil, Milton or Bacon ^ — will 
 in thirty years make all the diEference between a culti- 
 vated and an uncultivated man, between a man mentally 
 rich and a man mentally poor. The pleasures of read- 
 ing are, of course, in good part pleasures of the im- 
 agination ; but they are just as natural and actual as 
 pleasures of the sense, and are often more accessible and 
 more lasting. 
 
 In the next place I ask your attention to the fact that 
 man is a part of outward nature, and that the men and 
 women among whom our lot is cast are an important 
 part of our actual environment. In some relation or 
 other to these human beings we perforce must stand. 
 The question — in what relation we had better stand to 
 them — is a practical, this- world question, and not a 
 
MUTUAL SERVICE AND CO-OPERATION. 21 
 
 sentimental or next-world question. Further, our sym- 
 pathetic feelings, over which we have hardly more con- 
 trol than we have over the beating of our hearts, 
 go out to our fellow-men more and more widely, as bet- 
 ter means of communication bring home to us the joys 
 and sorrows of widespread multitudes. In what rela- 
 tion is it for our satisfaction to stand in this world to- 
 ward our fellow-men? Shall we love or hate them, 
 bless or curse them, help or hinder them ? These are 
 not theoretical questions which arise out of religious 
 speculation or some abstract philosophy. They are 
 earthly, every-day, concrete questions, as intensely prac- 
 tical as the question how are we to get our daily bread, 
 or where are we to find shelter from the snowstorm. 
 Human beings are all about us ; we and they are mutu- 
 ally dependent in ways so complex and intricate that 
 no wisdom can unravel them. It is in vain for us or 
 them to say. Let us alone ; for that is a downright im- 
 possibility. To the question, — How do reasonable men 
 under these circumstances, naturally and inevitably in- 
 cline to act toward their fellow-beings? — there is but 
 one common-sense, matter-of-fact answer, namely — 
 they incline to serve and co-operate with them. That 
 civilized society exists at all is a demonstration that this 
 inclination in the main governs human relations. Every 
 great city is dependent for food, drink, and fuel on a 
 few bridges, dams, canals, or aqueducts which a dozen 
 intelligent human devils, armed with suitable explosives 
 and fire-bombs, could destroy in a night. If the doc- 
 trine of total depravity were anything but the invention 
 of a morbid human imagination, the massing of people 
 by hundreds of thousands would be too dangerous to be 
 
22 TBE SAPPY LIFE. 
 
 attempted. Civilized society assumes that the great 
 majority of men will combine to procure advantages, re- 
 sist evils, defend rights, and remedy wrongs. Follow- 
 ing this general and inevitable inclination, the individ- 
 ual finds that by serving others he best serves himself; 
 because he thus conforms to the promptings of his own 
 and their best nature. The most satisfactory thing in 
 all this earthly life is to be able to serve our fellow-be- 
 ings — first those who are bound to us by ties of love, 
 then the wider circle of fellow-townsmen, fellow-country- 
 men or fellow-men. To be of service is a solid foundation 
 for contentment in this world. For our present purpose 
 it does not matter where we got these ideas about our 
 own better nature and its best satisfaction ; it is enough 
 that our generation, as a matter of fact, has these ideas, 
 and is ruled by them. 
 
 The amount of the service is no measure of the satis- 
 faction or happiness which he who renders the service 
 derives from it. One man founds an academy or a hos- 
 pital ; another sends one boy to be educated at the acad- 
 emy, or one sick man to be treated at the hospital. The 
 second is the smaller service, but may yield the greater 
 satisfaction. Sir Samuel Romilly attacked the mon- 
 strous English laws which affixed the death penalty to a 
 large number of petty offences against property, like 
 poaching, sheep-stealing and pocket-picking. In the 
 dawn of a February morning, when the wind was blow- 
 ing a gale and the thermometer was below zero. Captain 
 Smith, of the Cuttyhunk Lighthouse, took three men off 
 a wreck which the heavy sea was fast pounding to pieces 
 on a reef close below the light. Sir Samuel Romilly's 
 labors ultimately did an amount of good quite beyond 
 
TBE SPIRIT OF SERVICE— A GOOD NAME. 23 
 
 computation ; but he lived to see accomplished only a 
 small part of the beneficent changes he had advocated. 
 The chances are that Captain Smith got more satisfac- 
 tion for the rest of his life out of that rescue, done in an 
 hour, than Sir Samuel out of his years of labor for a 
 much-needed reform in the English penal code. There 
 ■was another person who took satisfaction in that rescue 
 ever after, and was entitled to. When day dawned on 
 that wintry morning. Captain Smith's wife, who had 
 been listening restlessly to the roar of the sea and the 
 wind, could lie still no longer. She got up and looked out 
 of the window. To her horror there was a small schooner 
 on the reef in plain sight, one mast fallen over the side, 
 and three men lashed to the other mast. Her husband 
 was still fast asleep. Must she rouse him ? If she did, 
 she knew he would go out there into that furious sea and 
 freezing wind. If she waited only a little while, the 
 men would be dead, and it would be of no use to 
 go. Should she speak to him? She did. Oh, it is 
 not the amount of good done which measures the love 
 or heroism which prompted the serviceable deed, or the 
 happiness which the doer gets from it ! It is the spirit 
 of service which creates both the merit and the satisfac- 
 tion. 
 
 One of the purest and most enduring of human pleas- 
 ures is to be found in the possession of a good name 
 among one's neighbors and acquaintances. As Shake- 
 speare puts it : 
 
 " The purest treasure mortal times afford 
 Is spotless reputation." 
 
 This is not fame, or even distinction ; it is local repu- 
 tation among the few scores or hundreds of persons 
 
24 THE SAPPY LIFE. 
 
 who really know one. It is a satisfaction quite of this 
 world, and one attained by large numbers of quiet men 
 and women whose names are never mentioned beyond 
 the limits of their respective sets of acquaintance. Such 
 reputation regards, not mental power or manual skill, 
 but character ; it is slowly buUt upon purity, integrity, 
 courage, and sincerity. To possess it is a crowning satis- 
 faction which is oftenest experienced to the full rather 
 late in life, when some other pleasures begin to fade 
 away. 
 
 Lastly, I shall venture to call your attention to the 
 importance — with a view to a happy life — of making 
 a judicious selection of beliefs. Here we are living on 
 a little islet of sense and fact in the midst of a bound- 
 less ocean of the unknown and mysterious. From year 
 to year and century to century the islet expands, as new 
 districts are successively lifted from out the encompass- 
 ing sea of ignorance ; but it still remains encircled by 
 this prodigious sea. In this state of things every in- 
 quisitive, truth-seeking human being is solicited by in- 
 numerable beliefs, old and new. The past generations, 
 out of which we spring, have been believing many 
 undemonstrated and undemonstrable things ; and we in- 
 herit their beliefs. Every year new beliefs appeal to us 
 for acceptance, some of them clashing with the old. 
 Everybody holds numerous beliefs on subjects outside 
 the realm of knowledge ; and, moreover, everybody has 
 to act on these beliefs from hour to hour. All men of 
 science walk by faith and not by sight in exploring and 
 experimenting, the peculiarity of their walk being that 
 they generally take but one step at a time, and that a 
 
THE SELECTION OF BELIEFS. 25 
 
 short one. All business proceeds on beliefs, or judg- 
 ments of probabilities, and not on certainties. The very- 
 essence of heroism is that it takes adverse chances ; so 
 that full foreknowledge of the issue would subtract from 
 the heroic quality. Beliefs, then, we must have and 
 must act on ; and they are sure to affect profoundly our 
 happiness in this world. How to treat our old beliefs 
 and choose our new ones, with a view to happiness, is 
 in these days a serious problem for every reflective 
 person. 
 
 The first steps toward making a calm choice are to 
 observe strictly the line of demarcation between facts 
 on the one hand and beliefs on the other, and to hold 
 facts as facts and beliefs as nothing more than beliefs. 
 Next we need a criterion or touchstone for beliefs old 
 and new. The surest touchstone is the ethical standai-d 
 vrhich, through inheritance, education, and the experi- 
 ence of daily life, has, as a matter of fact, become our 
 standard. It is not for our happiness to believe any 
 proposition about the nature of man, the universe, or God, 
 which is really at war with our fundamental instincts of 
 honor and justice, or with our ideals of gentleness and 
 love, no matter how those instincts and ideals have been 
 implanted or arrived at. The man or woman who hopes 
 to attain reflective happiness, as he works his strenuous 
 way through the world, must bring all beliefs, old and 
 new, to this critical test, and must reject, or refuse to 
 entertain, beliefs which do not stand the test. 
 
 One obvious fact of observation seems to contradict 
 this correlation of beliefs with ethical content and, 
 therefore, with happiness. Millions of comfortable men 
 and women do, as a matter of fact, believe various long- 
 
26 THE HAPPY LIFE. 
 
 transmitted doctrines which are clearly repulsive to the 
 moral sense of the entire present generation. How can 
 this be ? Simply because these millions accept also 
 antidotal doctrines which neutralize the natural efEect of 
 the first beliefs. This process may persist for genera- 
 tions without affecting much the happiness of mankind, 
 but nevertheless it has its dangers ; for if faith in the 
 antidotes be lost first, a moral chaos may set in. 
 
 Sudden and solitary changes of belief are seldom 
 happy. A gentle, gradual transformation of beliefs, in 
 company with kindred, neighbors and friends, is the 
 happiest. Men have always been gregarious in beliefs ; 
 if they cannot remain with their own herd, it will be for 
 their happiness to join a more congenial herd as quickly 
 as possible. 
 
 Of the two would-be despots in beliefs — the despot 
 who authoritatively commands men to believe as he 
 says, and the despot who forbids men to believe at all 
 — the first is the more tolerable to the immense majority 
 of mankind. Under the first despot millions of people 
 have lived and now live in contented faith ; but nobody 
 can live happily under the other. To curious, truth- 
 seeking, pioneering minds one seems as bad as the other, 
 and neither in any way endurable. 
 
 A certain deliberation in accepting new beliefs is 
 conducive to happiness, particularly if the new ideas 
 are destructive rather than constructive. Emerson rec- 
 ommends us, as a measure of intellectual economy, not 
 to read a book until it is at least one year old — so many 
 books disappear in a year. In like manner, of novel 
 speculative opinions, all but the best built and most 
 
THE CONFLICT WITH EVIL. 27 
 
 buoyant will go under within ten years of their launch- 
 ing. 
 
 We may be sure that cheerful- beliefs about the un- 
 seen world, framed in full harmony with the beauty of 
 the visible universe, and with the sweetness of the 
 domestic affections and joys, and held in company with 
 kindred and friends, will illuminate the dark places on 
 the pathway of earthly life, and brighten all the road. 
 
 Having thus surveyed the various joys and satisfac- 
 tions which may make civilized life happy for multitudes 
 upon multitudes of our race, I hasten to admit that there 
 are physical and moral evils in this world which impair 
 or interrupt earthly happiness. The worst of the 
 physical evils are lingering diseases and untimely deaths. 
 I admit, too, that not a few men do, as a matter of fact, 
 lead lives not worth living. I admit, also, that there 
 are dreadful, as well as pleasing, sights and sounds in this 
 world, and that many seemingly cruel catastrophes and 
 destructions mark the course of nature. Biological 
 science has lately impressed many people with the preva- 
 lence of cruelty and mutual destruction in the animal 
 and vegetable world. From man down, the creatures 
 live by preying on each other. Insidious parasites in- 
 fest all kinds of plants and animals. Every living thing 
 seems to have its mortal foe. The very ants go to war, 
 for all the world like men, and Venus's flytrap (Dionasa) 
 is as cruel as a spider. So human society is riddled 
 with mischiefs and wrongs, some, like Armenian mas- 
 sacres, due to surviving savagery, and some, like slums, to 
 sickly civilization. It would seem impossible to wring 
 satisfaction and thoughtful happiness from such evils; 
 
28 THE HAPPY LIFE. 
 
 yet that is just what men of noble natures are con- 
 stantly doing. They fight evil, and from the contest 
 win content and even joy. Nobody has any right to 
 find life uninteresting or unrewarding, who sees within 
 the sphere of his own activity a wrong he can help 
 to remedy, or within himself an evil he can hope to 
 overcome. It should be observed that the inanimate 
 creation does not lend itself, like the animate creation, 
 to the theory that for every good in nature there is an 
 equivalent evil, and for every beautiful thing an ugly 
 offset. There is no offset to the splendor of the heavens 
 by night, or to the glories of the sunset, no drawback on 
 the beauty of perfect form and various hue in crystal- 
 line minerals, and no evil counterbalancing the serenity 
 of the mountains or the sublimity of the ocean. 
 
 Again, the existence of evils and mysteries must not 
 blind us to the abounding and intelligible good. We 
 must remember that the misfortunes hardest to bear are 
 those which never come, as Lowell said. We must 
 clear our minds, so far as possible, of cruel imaginings 
 about the invisible world and its rulers ; and, on the 
 other hand, we must never allow imagined consolations, 
 or compensatory delights, in some other world to recon- 
 cile us to the endurance of resistible evils in this. We 
 must never distress ourselves because we cannot fully 
 understand the moral principles on which the universe 
 is conducted. It would be vastly more reasonable in an 
 ant to expect to understand the constitution of the sun. 
 
 We must be sure to give due weight in our minds to 
 the good side of every event which has two sides. A 
 fierce northeaster drives some vessels out of their course, 
 and others upon the ruthless rocks. Property and life 
 
THE PREPONDERANCE OF GOOD. 29 
 
 are lost. But that same storm watered the crops upon 
 ten thousand farms, or filled the springs which later will 
 yield to millions of men and animals their necessary- 
 drink. A tiger springs upon an antelope, picks out the 
 daintiest bits from the carcass, and leaves the rest to the 
 jackals. We say. Poor little antelope ! We forget to 
 say, Happy tiger ! Fortunate jackals ! who were seek- 
 ing their meat from God, and found it. A house which 
 stands in open ground must have a sunny side as well 
 as a shady. Be sure to live on the sunny side, and even 
 then do not expect the world to look bright, if you habit- 
 ually wear graybrown glasses. 
 
 We must assiduously cultivate a just sense of the pro- 
 portion between right and wrong, good and evil in this 
 world. The modern newspaper press is a serious ob- 
 stacle to habitual cheerfulness; because it draws constant 
 attention to abnormal evils and crimes, and makes no 
 account of the normal successes, joys, and well-doings. 
 We read in the morning paper that five houses, two 
 barns, three shops, and a factory have burned up in the 
 night ; and we do not say to ourselves that within the 
 same territory five hundred thousand houses, three 
 hundred thousand barns, as many shops and a thousand 
 factories, have stood in safety. We observe that ten 
 persons have been injured on railways within twenty- 
 four hours, and we forget that two million have traveled 
 in safety. Out of every thousand persons in the city of 
 Cambridge twenty die in the course of a year, but the 
 other nine hundred and eighty live ; and of the twenty 
 who die some have filled out the natural span of life, 
 and others are obviously unfit to live. Sometimes our 
 individual lives seem to be full of troubles and miseries 
 
30 TBM HAPPY LIFE. 
 
 — our own or those of others. Then we must fall back 
 on this abiding sense of the real proportion between the 
 lives sorrowful and the lives glad at any one moment ; 
 and of the preponderance of gain over loss, health over 
 sickness, joy over sorrow, good over evil, and life over 
 death. 
 
 I shall not have succeeded in treating my subject 
 clearly if I have not convinced you that earthly happi- 
 ness is not dependent on the amount of one's possessions 
 or the nature of one's employment. The enjoyments 
 and satisfactions I have described are accessible to 
 poor and rich, to humble and high alike, if only they cul- 
 tivate the physical, mental, and moral faculties through 
 which the natural joys are won. Any man may win 
 them who by his daily labor can earn a wholesome liv- 
 ing for himself and his family. I have not mentioned 
 a single pleasure which involves unusual expense, or the 
 possession of any "uncommon mental gifts. It follows 
 that the happiness of the entire community is to be most 
 surely promoted, not by increasing its total wealth, or 
 even by distributing that wealth more evenly, but by 
 improving its physical and moral health. A poorer 
 population may easily be happier than a richer, if it be of 
 sounder health and morality. 
 
 In conclusion, let me ask you to consider whether the 
 rational conduct of life on the this-world principles here 
 laid down would differ in any important respect from 
 the right conduct of life on the principles of the Chris- 
 tian gospels. It does not seem to me that it would.