2024-07-02_A_Way_of_Life
00:00:00.000 | "What each day needs, that shalt thou ask; each day will set its proper task."
00:00:08.180 | - Goethe Fellow students, every man has a philosophy
00:00:14.560 | of life in thought, in word, or in deed worked out in himself unconsciously.
00:00:23.100 | In possession of the very best, he may not know of its existence; with the very worst,
00:00:28.860 | he may pride himself as a paragon.
00:00:31.980 | As it grows with the growth, it cannot be taught to the young in formal lectures.
00:00:37.180 | What have bright eyes, red blood, quick breath, and taut muscles to do with philosophy?
00:00:43.260 | Did not the great staggerites say that young men were unfit students of it?
00:00:48.340 | They will hear as though they heard not, and to no profit.
00:00:52.580 | Why then should I trouble you?
00:00:55.260 | Because I have a message that may be helpful.
00:00:57.620 | It is not philosophical, nor is it strictly moral or religious, one or other of which
00:01:03.920 | I was told my address should be, and yet, in a way, it is all three.
00:01:10.580 | It is the oldest and the freshest, the simplest and the most useful.
00:01:16.300 | So simple indeed is it that some of you may turn away disappointed, as was Naaman the
00:01:21.340 | Syrian when told to go wash in Jordan and be clean.
00:01:26.260 | You know those "composite tools" to be bought for fifty cents with one handle to
00:01:30.500 | fit a score or more of instruments?
00:01:33.100 | The workmanship is usually bad, so bad as a rule that you will not find an example in
00:01:38.540 | any good carpenter's shop, but the boy has one.
00:01:42.100 | The chauffeur slips one into his box, and the sailor into his kit, and there is one
00:01:46.980 | in the odds-and-ends drawer of the pantry of every well-regulated family.
00:01:51.260 | It is simply a handy thing about the house to help over the many little difficulties
00:01:55.140 | of the day.
00:01:56.660 | Of this sort of philosophy I wish to make you a present, a handle to fit your life tools.
00:02:03.340 | Whether the workmanship is Sheffield or shoddy, this heave will fit anything from a hatchet
00:02:09.700 | to a corkscrew.
00:02:12.180 | My message is but a word, a way, an easy expression of the experience of a plain man whose life
00:02:20.140 | has never been worried by any philosophy higher than that of the shepherd in As You Like It.
00:02:26.420 | I wish to point out a path in which the wayfaring man, though a fool, cannot err, not a system
00:02:32.700 | to be worked out painfully only to be discarded, not a formal scheme, simply a habit as easy
00:02:38.940 | or as hard to adopt as any other habit, good or bad.
00:02:46.180 | A few years ago a Christmas card went the rounds with the legend, "Life is just one
00:02:50.740 | denied thing after another," which in more refined language is the same as saying, "Life
00:02:58.300 | is a habit, a succession of actions that become more or less automatic."
00:03:04.700 | This great truth, which lies at the basis of all actions, muscular or psychic, is the
00:03:10.580 | keystone of the teaching of Aristotle, to whom the formation of habits was the basis
00:03:16.060 | of moral excellence.
00:03:18.620 | In a word, habits of any kind are the result of actions of the same kind.
00:03:23.380 | And so what we have to do is to give a certain character to these particular actions.
00:03:29.900 | From Ethics.
00:03:31.740 | Lift a seven-months-old baby to his feet, see him tumble on his nose.
00:03:36.820 | Do the same at twelve months, he walks.
00:03:40.360 | At two years, he runs.
00:03:43.260 | The muscles and the nervous system have acquired the habit.
00:03:47.840 | One trial after another, one failure after another has given him power.
00:03:53.500 | Put your finger in a baby's mouth and he sucks away in blissful anticipation of a response
00:03:58.500 | to a mammalian habit millions of years old.
00:04:02.020 | And we can deliberately train parts of our body to perform complicated actions with unerring
00:04:06.820 | accuracy.
00:04:08.380 | Watch that musician playing a difficult piece.
00:04:10.980 | Batteries, commutators, multipliers, switches, wires, innumerable control those nimble fingers,
00:04:19.220 | the machinery of which may be set in motion as automatically as in a pianola.
00:04:24.220 | The player all the time chatting as if he had nothing to do in controlling the apparatus.
00:04:30.020 | Habit again.
00:04:31.180 | The gradual acquisition of power by long practice and at the expense of many mistakes.
00:04:37.420 | The same great law reaches through mental and moral states.
00:04:41.580 | Character, which partakes of both in Plutarch's words, is "long-standing habits."
00:04:49.020 | Now the way of life that I preach is a habit to be acquired gradually by long and steady
00:04:54.500 | repetition.
00:04:56.120 | It is the practice of living for the day only and for the day's work.
00:05:01.260 | Life in day-tight compartments.
00:05:03.860 | "Ah," I hear you say, "that is an easy matter, simple as Elisha's advice.
00:05:09.900 | Not as I shall urge it in words which fail to express the depth of my feelings as to
00:05:14.600 | its value."
00:05:16.220 | I started life in the best of all environments, in a parsonage, one of nine children.
00:05:22.580 | A man who has filled chairs in four universities, has written a successful book, and has been
00:05:27.640 | asked to lecture at Yale, is supposed, popularly, to have brains of a special quality.
00:05:33.940 | A few of my intimate friends really know the truth about me, as I know it.
00:05:38.980 | Mine in good faith, I say it, are of the most mediocre character.
00:05:44.340 | But what about those professorships, etc.?
00:05:47.900 | Just habit, a way of life, an outcome of the day's work, the vital importance of which
00:05:53.980 | I wish to impress upon you with all the force at my command.
00:05:57.620 | Dr. Johnson remarked upon the trifling circumstances by which men's lives are influenced.
00:06:03.580 | Not by an ascendant planet, a predominating humor, but by the first book which they read,
00:06:09.060 | some early conversation which they have heard, or some accident which excited ardor and enthusiasm.
00:06:16.400 | This was my case in two particulars.
00:06:18.940 | I was diverted to the Trinity College School, then, at Weston, Ontario, by a paragraph in
00:06:24.740 | the circular stating that the senior boys would go into the drawing room in the evenings
00:06:28.860 | and learn to sing and dance, vocal and pedal accomplishments for which I was never designed.
00:06:34.820 | But like Saul seeking his asses, I found something more valuable, a man of the white of Selburne
00:06:41.420 | type, who knew nature, and who knew how to get boys interested in it.
00:06:46.300 | The other happened in the summer of 1871 when I was attending the Montreal General Hospital.
00:06:52.060 | Much worried as to the future, partly about the final examination, partly as to what I
00:06:56.940 | should do afterwards, I picked up a volume of Carlyle, and on the page I opened there
00:07:01.820 | was the familiar sentence, "Our main business is not to see what lies dimly at a distance,
00:07:11.700 | but to do what lies clearly at hand."
00:07:15.900 | A commonplace sentiment enough.
00:07:18.100 | But it hit and stuck and helped, and was the starting point of a habit that has enabled
00:07:24.420 | me to utilize to the full the single talent entrusted to me.
00:07:31.140 | The workers in Christ's vineyard were hired by the day.
00:07:34.460 | Only for this day are we to ask for our daily bread, and we are expressly bidden to take
00:07:39.980 | no thought for the morrow.
00:07:42.360 | To the modern world, these commands have an Oriental savor, counsels of perfection akin
00:07:49.140 | to certain of the Beatitudes, stimuli to aspiration, not to action.
00:07:55.620 | I am prepared, on the contrary, to urge the literal acceptance of the advice, not in the
00:08:01.340 | mood of Ecclesiastes, "Go to now, ye that say today or tomorrow we will go into such
00:08:06.740 | a city, and continue there a year, and buy and sell and get gain, whereas ye know not
00:08:11.820 | what shall be on the morrow."
00:08:14.700 | Not in the Epicurean spirit of Omar with his "jug of wine and thou," but in the modernist
00:08:22.260 | spirit as a way of life, a habit, a strong enchantment at once against the mysticism
00:08:29.100 | of the East and the pessimism that too easily besets us.
00:08:34.220 | Change that hard saying, "Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof" into "the goodness
00:08:39.820 | thereof," since the chief worries of life arise from the foolish habit of looking before
00:08:45.460 | and after.
00:08:47.320 | As a patient with double vision from some transient unequal action of the muscles of
00:08:51.700 | the eye finds magical relief from well-adjusted glasses, so returning to the clear binocular
00:08:57.660 | vision of today, the over-anxious student finds peace when he looks neither backward
00:09:03.620 | to the past nor forward to the future.
00:09:08.100 | I stood on the bridge of one of the great liners, plowing the ocean at 25 knots.
00:09:12.260 | "She is alive," said my companion, "in every plate, a huge monster with brain and nerves,
00:09:18.540 | an immense stomach, a wonderful heart and lungs, and a splendid system of locomotion."
00:09:25.140 | Just at that moment, a signal sounded, and all over the ship the watertight compartments
00:09:29.700 | were closed.
00:09:30.700 | "Our chief, factor of safety," said the captain.
00:09:34.020 | "In spite of the Titanic?"
00:09:35.820 | I said.
00:09:36.820 | "Yes," he replied, "in spite of the Titanic.
00:09:41.860 | Now each one of you is a much more marvelous organization than the great liner, and bound
00:09:47.940 | on a longer voyage.
00:09:50.140 | What I urge is that you so learn to control the machinery as to live with day-tight compartments,
00:09:56.620 | as the most certain way to ensure safety on the voyage.
00:10:01.020 | Stand on the bridge and see that at least the great bulkheads are in working order.
00:10:06.500 | Touch a button and hear at every level of your life the iron doors shutting out the
00:10:12.340 | past, the dead yesterdays.
00:10:16.220 | Touch another and shut off with a metal curtain the future, the unborn tomorrows.
00:10:23.460 | Then you are safe, safe for today.
00:10:28.180 | Read the old story in "The Chambered Nautilus," so beautifully sung by Oliver Wendell Holmes.
00:10:33.540 | Only change one line to, "Day after day beheld the silent toil.
00:10:39.660 | Shut off the past.
00:10:42.300 | Let the dead past bury its dead."
00:10:45.700 | So easy to say, so hard to realize.
00:10:48.980 | The truth is the past haunts us like a shadow.
00:10:51.980 | To disregard it is not easy.
00:10:54.980 | Those blue eyes of your grandmother, that weak chin of your grandfather have mental
00:11:00.300 | and moral counterparts in your makeup.
00:11:03.900 | Generations of ancestors brooding over providence, foreknowledge, will, and fate, fixed fate,
00:11:11.340 | free will, foreknowledge, absolute, may have bred a New England conscience, morbidly sensitive,
00:11:19.160 | to heal which some of you had rather sing the 51st Psalm than follow Christ into the
00:11:23.780 | slums.
00:11:25.080 | Shut out the yesterdays, which have lighted fools the way to dusty death, and have no
00:11:30.140 | concern for you personally, that is, consciously.
00:11:34.380 | They are there all right, working daily in us, but so are our livers and our stomachs.
00:11:40.920 | And the past, in its unconscious action on our lives, should bother us as little as they
00:11:46.000 | do.
00:11:47.040 | The petty annoyances, the real and fancied slights, the trivial mistakes, the disappointments,
00:11:53.840 | the sins, the sorrows, even the joys, bury them deep in the oblivion of each night.
00:12:00.600 | Ah, but it is just then that to so many of us the ghosts of the past, night riding incubi,
00:12:08.040 | troubling the fantasy, come in troops and pry open the eyelids, each one presenting
00:12:14.680 | a sin, a sorrow, a regret.
00:12:19.560 | Bad enough in the old and seasoned, in the young these demons of past sins may be a terrible
00:12:25.280 | affliction.
00:12:26.600 | And in bitterness of heart many a one cries with Eugene Arum, "Oh God, could I so close
00:12:32.280 | my mind and clasp it with a clasp?"
00:12:35.600 | As a vaccine against all morbid poisons left in the system by the infections of yesterday,
00:12:40.840 | I offer a way of life.
00:12:43.800 | Undress, as George Herbert says, your soul at night.
00:12:49.200 | Not by self-examination, but by shedding, as you do your garments, the daily sins, whether
00:12:56.880 | of omission or of commission, and you awake a free man with a new life.
00:13:03.060 | To look back, except on rare occasions for stocktaking, is to risk the fate of Lot's
00:13:09.360 | wife.
00:13:10.360 | Many a man is handicapped in his course by a cursed combination of retro and introspection,
00:13:17.160 | the mistakes of yesterday paralyzing the efforts of today, the worries of the past hugged to
00:13:23.120 | his destruction, and the worm regret allowed to canker the very heart of his life.
00:13:30.960 | To die daily after the manner of St. Paul ensures the resurrection of a new man who
00:13:37.360 | makes each day the epitome of a life.
00:13:42.840 | The load of tomorrow added to that of yesterday carried today makes the strongest falter.
00:13:51.320 | Shut off the future as tightly as the past, no dreams, no visions, no delicious fantasies,
00:13:57.520 | no castles in the air with which, as the old song so truly says, hearts are broken, heads
00:14:03.240 | are turned.
00:14:05.080 | The youth, we are told, belongs the future, but the wretched tomorrow that so plagues
00:14:10.320 | some of us has no certainty except through today.
00:14:15.460 | Who can tell what a day may bring forth?
00:14:18.240 | Though its uncertainty is a proverb, a man may carry it secret in the hollow of his hand,
00:14:23.560 | make a pilgrimage to Hades with Ulysses, draw the magic circle, perform the rites, and then
00:14:29.240 | ask Tiresias the question, "I have had the answer from his own lips."
00:14:35.040 | The future is today.
00:14:38.560 | There is no tomorrow.
00:14:41.440 | The day of a man's salvation is now.
00:14:44.400 | The life of the present of today, lived earnestly, intently, without a forward-looking thought,
00:14:51.440 | is the only insurance for the future.
00:14:54.520 | Let the limit of your horizon be a 24-hour circle.
00:14:59.920 | On the title page of one of the great books of science, the Discours de la méthode of
00:15:04.960 | Descartes, 1637, is a vignette showing a man digging in a garden with his face towards
00:15:10.840 | the earth, on which rays of light are streaming from the heavens.
00:15:16.320 | Beneath is the legend, "Fac'espera," 'tis a good attitude and a good motto.
00:15:23.560 | Look heavenward if you wish, but never to the horizon.
00:15:26.640 | That way danger lies.
00:15:28.960 | Truth is not there.
00:15:30.880 | Happiness is not there.
00:15:32.480 | Certainty is not there.
00:15:34.320 | But the falsehoods, the frauds, the quackeries, the "ignes fatui," which have deceived
00:15:39.680 | each generation, all beckon from the horizon and lure the men not content to look for the
00:15:45.560 | truth and happiness that tumble out at their feet.
00:15:50.280 | Once while at college, climb a mountaintop and get a general outlook of the land and
00:15:55.320 | make it the occasion, perhaps, of that careful examination of yourself, that inquisition
00:16:00.540 | which Descartes urges every man to hold once in a lifetime, not oftener.
00:16:06.720 | Waste of energy, mental distress, nervous worries dog the steps of a man who is anxious
00:16:13.080 | about the future.
00:16:14.840 | Shut close, then, the great fore and aft bulkheads, and prepare to cultivate the habit of a life
00:16:21.880 | of day-tight compartments.
00:16:24.880 | Do not be discouraged.
00:16:27.080 | Like every other habit, the acquisition takes time, and the way is one you must find for
00:16:32.480 | yourselves.
00:16:33.480 | I can only give general directions and encouragement, and the hope that, while the green years are
00:16:39.040 | on your heads, you may have the courage to persist.
00:16:42.760 | Now, for the day itself, what first?
00:16:47.920 | Be your own daysman, and sigh not with Job for any mysterious intermediary, but prepare
00:16:54.240 | to lay your own firm hand upon the helm.
00:16:57.520 | Get into touch with the finite, and grasp in full enjoyment that sense of capacity in
00:17:02.640 | a machine working smoothly.
00:17:05.440 | Join the whole creation of animate things in a deep, heartfelt joy that you are alive,
00:17:11.000 | that you see the sun, that you are in this glorious earth which nature has made so beautiful
00:17:16.200 | and which is yours to conquer and to enjoy.
00:17:21.920 | Recognize in the words of Browning that there's a world of capability for joy spread round
00:17:26.580 | about us, meant for us, inviting us.
00:17:30.440 | What are the morning sensations?
00:17:32.800 | For they control the day.
00:17:34.760 | Some of us are congenitally unhappy during the early hours, but the young man who feels
00:17:39.800 | on awakening that life is a burden or a bore has been neglecting his machine, driving it
00:17:46.600 | too hard, stoking the engines too much, or not cleaning out the ashes and clinkers.
00:17:53.240 | Or he has been too much with the lady nicotine, or fooling with Bacchus, or worst of all with
00:17:58.880 | the younger Aphrodite, all messengers of strong prevailment in unhardened youth.
00:18:05.840 | To have a sweet outlook on life, you must have a clean body.
00:18:10.160 | As I look on the clear-cut, alert, earnest features and the lithe, active forms of our
00:18:15.720 | college men, I sometimes wonder whether or not Socrates and Plato would find the race
00:18:22.160 | improved.
00:18:23.880 | I am sure they would love to look on such a gathering as this.
00:18:27.720 | Make their ideal yours, the fair mind in the fair body.
00:18:33.640 | The one cannot be sweet and clean without the other, and you must realize, with Rabbi
00:18:38.280 | Ben Ezra, the great truth that flesh and soul are mutually helpful.
00:18:43.900 | The morning outlook, which really makes the day, is largely a question of a clean machine,
00:18:49.960 | of physical morality in the wide sense of the term.
00:18:53.700 | C'est l'estomac qui fait les heureux, as Voltaire says.
00:18:58.160 | No dyspeptic can have a sane outlook on life, and a man whose bodily functions are impaired
00:19:03.120 | has a lowered moral resistance.
00:19:05.960 | To keep the body fit is a help in keeping the mind pure, and the sensations of the first
00:19:11.160 | few hours of the day are the best test of its normal state.
00:19:15.080 | The clean tongue, the clear head, and the bright eye are birthrights of each day.
00:19:20.760 | Just as the late Professor Marsh would diagnose an unknown animal from a single bone, so can
00:19:26.120 | the day be predicted from the first waking hour.
00:19:29.520 | The start is everything, as you well know, and to make a good start you must feel fit,
00:19:35.880 | and the young sensations of morning slackness come most often from lack of control of the
00:19:40.760 | two primal instincts, biologic habits, the one concerned with the preservation of the
00:19:45.960 | individual, the other with the continuance of the species.
00:19:50.480 | Yale students should by this time be models of dietetic propriety, but youth does not
00:19:55.440 | always wreck the reed of the teacher, and I dare say that here, as elsewhere, careless
00:20:01.080 | habits of eating are responsible for much mental disability.
00:20:05.640 | My own rule of life has been to cut out unsparingly any article of diet that had the bad taste
00:20:11.320 | to disagree with me, or to indicate in any way that it had abused the temporary hospitality
00:20:17.480 | of the lodging which I had provided.
00:20:20.160 | To drink, nowadays, but few students become addicted, but in every large body of man a
00:20:25.560 | few are to be found whose incapacity for the day results from the morning clogging of nocturnally
00:20:31.040 | flushed tissues.
00:20:33.480 | As moderation is very hard to reach, and as it has been abundantly shown that the best
00:20:38.880 | of mental and physical work may be done without alcohol in any form, the safest rule for the
00:20:43.600 | young man is that which I am sure most of you follow, abstinence.
00:20:49.120 | A bitter enemy to the bright eye and the clear brain of the early morning is tobacco, when
00:20:53.720 | smoked to excess, as it is now by a large majority of students.
00:20:58.600 | Watch it, test it, and if need be, control it.
00:21:02.800 | That befogged, woolly sensation reaching from the forehead to the occiput, that haziness
00:21:09.360 | of memory, that cold, fish-like eye, that furred tongue and last week's taste in the
00:21:16.240 | mouth—too many of you know them, I know them—they often come from too much tobacco.
00:21:22.040 | The other primal instinct is the heavy burden of the flesh, which nature puts on all of
00:21:26.200 | us to ensure a continuation of the species.
00:21:29.480 | To drive Plato's team taxes the energies of the best of us.
00:21:34.320 | One of the horses is a raging, untamed devil, who can only be brought into subjection by
00:21:38.640 | hard fighting and severe training.
00:21:41.280 | This much you all know as men.
00:21:43.200 | Once the bit is between his teeth, the black steed passion will take the white horse reason
00:21:48.080 | with you, and the chariot rattling over the rocks to perdition.
00:21:52.880 | With a fresh, sweet body, you can start a rite without those feelings of inertia that
00:21:56.760 | so often, as Goethe says, make the morning's lazy leisure usher in a useless day.
00:22:03.960 | Control of the mind as a working machine, the adaptation in it of habit so that its
00:22:08.880 | action becomes almost as automatic as walking, is the end of education, and yet how rarely
00:22:15.080 | reached.
00:22:16.280 | It can be accomplished with deliberation and repose, never with hurry and worry.
00:22:22.640 | Realize how much time there is, how long the day is.
00:22:25.920 | Realize that you have sixteen waking hours, three or four of which, at least, should be
00:22:30.040 | devoted to making a silent conquest of your mental machinery.
00:22:35.400 | Concentration, which has grown gradually the power to wrestle successfully with any subject,
00:22:40.280 | is the secret of successful study.
00:22:43.160 | No mind, however dull, can escape the brightness that comes from steady application.
00:22:48.720 | There is an old saying, "Youth enjoyeth not for haste," but worse than this, the
00:22:55.040 | failure to cultivate the power of peaceful concentration is the greatest single cause
00:22:59.480 | of mental breakdown.
00:23:01.760 | Plato pities the young man who started at such a pace that he never reached the goal.
00:23:06.940 | One of the saddest of life's tragedies is the wreckage of the career of the young collegian
00:23:10.880 | by hurry, hustle, bustle, and tension.
00:23:15.640 | The human machine driven day and night as no sensible fellow would use his motor.
00:23:21.320 | Listen to the words of a master in Israel, William James, "Neither the nature nor the
00:23:26.520 | amount of our work is accountable for the frequency and severity of our breakdowns,
00:23:31.000 | but their cause lies rather in those absurd feelings of hurry and having no time, in that
00:23:36.680 | breathlessness and tension, that anxiety of feature and that solicitude of results, that
00:23:42.420 | lack of inner harmony and ease, in short, by which the work with us is apt to be accompanied,
00:23:48.660 | and from which a European who would do the same work would, nine out of ten times, be
00:23:53.800 | free."
00:23:54.800 | Es bildet ein Talent, sichende Stille, but it need not be for all day.
00:24:00.760 | A few hours out of the sixteen will suffice.
00:24:03.920 | Only let them be hours of daily dedication, in routine, in order, and in system.
00:24:10.040 | And day by day you will gain in power over the mental mechanism, just as the child does
00:24:14.640 | over the spinal marrow in walking, or the musician over the nerve centers.
00:24:19.680 | Aristotle somewhere says that the student who wins out in the fight must be slow in
00:24:24.100 | his movements, with voice deep and slow speech, and he will not be worried over trifles which
00:24:30.000 | make people speak in shrill tones and use rapid movements.
00:24:34.320 | Shut close in our tight compartments, with the mind directed intensely upon the subject
00:24:39.880 | in hand, you will acquire the capacity to do more and more.
00:24:45.040 | You will get into training, and once the mental habit is established, you are safe for life.
00:24:54.000 | Concentration is an art of slow acquisition, but, little by little, the mind is accustomed
00:25:00.120 | to habits of slow eating and careful digestion, by which alone you escape the mental dyspepsi
00:25:07.280 | so graphically described by Lowell in The Fable for Critics.
00:25:12.460 | Do not worry your brains about that bugbear efficiency, which, sought consciously and
00:25:17.980 | with effort, is just one of those elusive qualities very apt to be missed.
00:25:22.500 | The man's college output is never to be gauged at sight.
00:25:26.120 | All the world's coarse thumb and finger may fail to plumb his most effective work.
00:25:30.840 | The casting of the mental machinery of self-education, the true preparation for a field larger than
00:25:36.440 | the college campus.
00:25:38.760 | Four or five hours daily, it is not much to ask, but one day must tell another, one week
00:25:45.080 | certify another, one month bear witness to another of the same story, and you will acquire
00:25:50.980 | a habit by which the one talent man will earn a high interest, and by which the ten-talent
00:25:55.860 | man may at least save his capital.
00:25:59.560 | Steady work of this sort gives a man a sane outlook on the world.
00:26:03.780 | No corrective so valuable to the weariness, the fever, and the fret that are so apt to
00:26:08.100 | ring the heart of the young.
00:26:10.300 | This is the tallies man, as George Herbert says, the famous stone that turneth all to
00:26:16.860 | gold, and with which, to the eternally recurring question, what is life?
00:26:23.220 | You answer, I do not think, I act it, the only philosophy that brings you in contact
00:26:28.260 | with its real values and enables you to grasp its hidden meaning.
00:26:32.440 | Over the slew of despond, past doubting castle, and giant despair, with this tallies man you
00:26:39.900 | may reach the delectable mountains and those shepherds of the mind, knowledge, experience,
00:26:48.020 | watchful and sincere.
00:26:51.300 | Some of you may think this to be a miserable Epicurean doctrine, no better than that so
00:26:57.000 | sweetly sung by Horace, "Happy the man, and happy he alone, he who can call today
00:27:03.240 | his own, he who secure within can say, Tomorrow do thy worst, for I have lived today."
00:27:12.540 | I do not care what you think, I am simply giving you a philosophy of life that I have
00:27:17.700 | found helpful in my work, useful in my play.
00:27:22.260 | Walt Whitman, whose physician I was for some years, never spoke to me much of his poems,
00:27:27.620 | though occasionally he would make a quotation, but I remember late one summer afternoon as
00:27:32.060 | we sat in the window of his little house in Camden, there passed a group of workmen whom
00:27:36.460 | he greeted in his usual friendly way, and then he said, "Ah, the glory of the day's
00:27:43.340 | work, whether with hand or brain, I have tried to exalt the present and the real, to teach
00:27:51.220 | the average man the glory of his daily work or trade."
00:27:56.220 | In this way of life, each one of you may learn to drive the straight furrow, and so come
00:28:01.940 | to the true measure of a man.
00:28:06.500 | With body and mind in training, what remains?
00:28:10.940 | Do you remember that most touching of all incidents in Christ's ministry, when the
00:28:15.460 | anxious ruler Nicodemus came by night, worried lest the things that pertained to his everlasting
00:28:22.120 | peace were not a part of his busy and successful life?
00:28:27.860 | Christ's message to him is his message to the world, never more needed than at present.
00:28:33.620 | Ye must be born of the Spirit.
00:28:36.840 | You wish to be with the leaders.
00:28:38.940 | As Yale men, it is your birthright.
00:28:41.200 | Know the great souls that make up the moral radium of the world.
00:28:46.200 | You must be born of their Spirit, initiated into their fraternity, whether of the spiritually
00:28:52.220 | minded followers of the Nazarene, or of that larger company, elect from every nation, seen
00:28:58.100 | by St. John.
00:29:00.420 | Begin the day with Christ and his prayer.
00:29:03.360 | You need no other.
00:29:04.900 | Creedless, with it you have religion.
00:29:08.420 | Creed stuffed, it will leaven any theological dough in which you stick.
00:29:13.180 | As the soul is dyed by the thoughts, let no day pass without contact with the best literature
00:29:18.660 | of the world.
00:29:20.380 | Learn to know your Bible, though not perhaps as your fathers did.
00:29:24.840 | In forming character and in shaping conduct, its touch has still its ancient power.
00:29:31.200 | Of the kindred of Ram and sons of Elihu, you should know its beauties and its strength.
00:29:36.860 | Fifteen or twenty minutes day by day will give you fellowship with the great minds of
00:29:40.740 | the race, and little by little as the years pass, you extend your friendship with the
00:29:46.020 | immortal dead.
00:29:47.980 | They will give you faith in your own day.
00:29:50.780 | Listen, while they speak to you of the fathers.
00:29:54.840 | But each age has its own spirit and ideas, just as it has its own manners and pleasures.
00:30:00.980 | You are right to believe that yours is the best university at its best period.
00:30:06.420 | Why should you look back to be shocked at the frowziness and dullness of the students
00:30:10.360 | of the seventies or even of the nineties, and cast no thought forward lest you reach
00:30:15.060 | a period when you and yours will present to your successors the same doubtiness of clothes
00:30:20.180 | and times?
00:30:22.180 | But while change is the law, certain great ideas flow fresh through the ages and control
00:30:29.180 | us effectually as in the days of Pericles.
00:30:32.660 | Mankind, it has been said, is always advancing; man is always the same.
00:30:40.420 | The love, hope, fear, and faith that make humanity and the elemental passions of the
00:30:48.100 | human heart remain unchanged, and the secret of inspiration in any literature is the capacity
00:30:54.220 | to touch the chord that vibrates in a sympathy that knows nor time nor place.
00:31:02.340 | The quiet life in daytight compartments will help you to bear your own and others' burdens
00:31:08.660 | with a light heart.
00:31:10.820 | Pay no heed to the Betrachians who sit croaking idly by the stream.
00:31:15.900 | Life is a straight, plain business, and the way is clear, blazed for you by generations
00:31:22.020 | of strong men, into whose labors you enter and whose ideals must be your inspiration.
00:31:28.580 | In my mind's eye I can see you twenty years hence, resolute-eyed, broad-headed, smooth-faced
00:31:35.340 | men who are in the world to make a success of life.
00:31:38.740 | But to whichever of the two great types you belong, whether controlled by emotion or by
00:31:44.220 | reason, you will need the leaven of their spirit, the only leaven potent enough to avert
00:31:51.100 | that only-too-common nemesis to which the psalmist refers.
00:31:56.060 | He gave them their heart's desire, but sent leanness withal into their souls.
00:32:03.340 | I quoted Dr. Johnson's remark about the trivial things that influence.
00:32:08.980 | Perhaps this slight word of mine may help some of you so to number your days that you
00:32:15.100 | may apply your hearts unto wisdom.
00:32:20.220 | A Way of Life, an address to Yale students, Sunday evening, April 20, 1913, by William
00:32:26.300 | Osler.
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