CORN-PONE* OPINIONS
"Corn-pone Opinions" was found in Mark Twain's papers after his death. It was first published in 1923 in Europe and Elsewhere, edited by Albert Bigelow Paine.
Fifty years ago, when I was a boy of fifteen and helping to inhabit a Missourian village on the banks of the Mississippi, I had a friend whose society was very dear to me because I was forbidden by my mother to partake of it. He was a gay and impudent and satirical and delightful young black man--a slave--who daily preached sermons from the top of his master's woodpile, with me for sole audience. He imitated the pulpit style of the several clergymen of the village, and did it well, and with fine passion and energy. To me he was a wonder. I believed he was the greatest orator in the United States and would some day be heard from. But it did not happen; in the distribution of rewards he was over-looked. It is the way, in this world.
He interrupted his preaching, now and then, to saw a stick of wood; but the sawing was a pretense-he did it with his mouth; exactly imitating the sound the bucksaw makes in shrieking its way through the wood. But it served its purpose; it kept his master from coming out to see how the work was getting along. I listened to the sermons from the open window of a lumber room at the back of the house. One of his texts was this:
I can never forget it. It was deeply impressed upon me. By my mother. Not upon my memory, but elsewhere. She had slipped in upon me while I was absorbed and not watching. The black philosopher's idea was that a man is not independent, and cannot afford views which might interfere with his bread and butter. If he would prosper, he must train with the majority; in matters of large moment, like politics and religion, he must think and feel with the bulk of his neighbors, or suffer damage in his social standing and in his business prosperities. He must restrict himself to corn-pone opinions-at least on the surface. He must get his opinions from other people; he must reason out none for himself; he must have no first-hand views.
I think Jerry was right, in the main, but I think he did not go far enough.
It was his idea that a man conforms to the majority view of his locality by calculation and intention.
This happens, but I think it is not the rule.
2. It was his idea that there is such a thing as a first-hand opinion; an original opinion; an opinion which is coldly reasoned out in a man's head, by a searching analysis of the facts involved, with the heart unconsulted, and the jury room closed against outside influences. It may be that such an opinion has been born somewhere, at some time or other, but I suppose it got away before they could catch it and stuff it and put it in the museum.
I am persuaded that a coldly-thought-out and independent verdict upon a fashion in clothes, or manners, or literature, or politics, or religion, or any other matter that is projected into the field of our notice and interest, is a most rare thing- if it has indeed ever existed.
A new thing in costume appears--the flaring hoop skirt, for example--and the passersby are shocked, and the irreverent laugh. Six months later everybody is reconciled; the fashion has established itself; it is admired, now, and no one laughs. Public opinion resented it before, public opinion accepts it now, and is happy in it Why? Was the resentment reasoned out? Was the acceptance work? It is our nature to conform; it is a force which not many can successfully resist. What is its seat? The inborn requirement of self-approval. We all have to bow to that; there are no exceptions. Even the woman who refuses from first to last to wear the hoop skirt comes under the law and is its slave; she could not wear the skirt and have her own approval; and that she must have, she cannot help herself. But as a rule our self-approval has its source in but one place and not elsewhere-the approval of other people. A person of vast consequences can introduce any kind of novelty in dress and the general world will presently adopt it--moved to do it, in the first place, by the natural instinct to passively yield to that vague something recognized as authority, and in the second place by the human instinct to train with the multitude and have its approval. An empress introduced the hoop skirt, and we know the result. A nobody introduced the bloomer, and we know the result. If Eve should come again, in her ripe renown, and reintroduce her quaint styles--well, we know what would happen. And we should be cruelly embarrassed, along at first.
The hoop skirt runs its course and disappears. Nobody reasons about it. One woman abandons the fashions; her neighbor notices this and follows her lead; this influences the next woman; and so on and so on, and presently the skirt has vanished out of the world, no one knows how nor why; or cares for that matter. It will come again, by and by, and in due course will go again.
Twenty-five years ago, in England, six or eight wine glasses stood grouped by each person's plate at a dinner party, and they were used, not left idle and empty; today there are but three or four in the group, and the average guest sparingly uses about two of them. We have not adopted this new fashion yet, but we shall do it presently. We shall not think it out; we shall merely conform, and let it go at that. We get our notions and habits and opinions from outside influences; we do not have to study them out.
Our table manners, and company manners, and street manners change from time to time, but the changes are not reasoned out; we merely notice and conform. We are not reasoned out; we merely notice and conform. We are creatures of outside influences, as a rule we do not think, we only imitate. We cannot invent standards that will stick; what we mistake for standards are only fashions, and perishable. We may continue to admire them, but we drop the use of them; we notice this in literature. Shakespeare is a standard, and fifty years ago we used to write tragedies which we couldn't tell from somebody else’s; but we don't do it any more, now. Our prose standard, three-quarters of a changed it in the directions of compactness and simplicity, and conformity followed, without argument. The historical novel starts up suddenly, and sweeps the land. Everybody writes one, and the nation is glad. We had historical novels before; but nobody read them, and the rest of us conformed--without reasoning it out. We are conforming in the other way, now, because it is another case of everybody.
The outside influences are always pouring in upon us, and we are always obeying their orders and accepting their verdicts. The Smiths like the new play; the Joneses go to see it, and they copy the Smith verdict. Morals, religions, politics, get their following from surrounding influences and atmospheres, almost entirely; not from study, not from thinking. A man must and will have his own approval first of all, in each and every moment and circumstance of his life-even if he must repent of a self-approval again: but, speaking in general terms, a man's self--approval in the large concerns of life has its source in the approval of the peoples about him, and not in a searching personal examination of the matter. Mohammedans are Mohammedans because they are born and reared among that sect, not because they have thought it out and can furnish sound reasons for being Mohammedans; we know why Catholics are Catholics; why Presbyterians are Presbyterians; why Baptists are Baptists; why Mormons are Mormons; why thieves are thieves; why monarchists are monarchists; why Republicans are Republicans and Democrats, Democrats. We know it is a matter of association and sympathy, not reasoning and examination; that hardly a man in the world has an opinion upon morals, politics, or religion which he got otherwise than through his associations and sympathies. Broadly speaking, there are none but corn-pone opinions. And broadly speaking, com-pone stands for self-approval. Self-approval is acquired mainly from the approval of other people. The result is conformity. Sometimes conformity has a sordid business interest--the bread-and-butter interest--but not in most cases, I think. I think that in the majority of cases it is unconscious and not calculated; that it is born of the human being's natural yearning to stand well with his fellows and have their inspiring approval and praise--a yearning which is commonly so strong and so insistent that it cannot be effectually resisted, and must have its way.
A political emergency brings out the corn-pone opinion in fine force in its two chief varieties--the pocketbook variety, which has its origin in self-interest, and the bigger variety, the sentimental variety--the one which can't bear to be outside the pale; can't bear to be in disfavor; can't endure the averted face and the cold shoulder; wants to stand well with his friends, wants to be smiled upon, wants to be welcome, wants to hear the precious words, "He's on the right track!" Uttered, perhaps by an ass, but still an ass of high degree, an ass whose approval is gold and diamonds to a smaller ass, and confers glory and honor and happiness, and membership in the herd. For these gauds many a man will dump his life-long principles into the street, and his conscience along with them. We have seen it happen. In some millions of instances.
Men think they think upon great political questions; and they do; but they think with their party, not independently; they read its literature, but not that of the other side; they arrive at convictions, but they are drawn from a partial view of the matter in hand and are of no particular value. They swarm with their party, they feel with their party, they are happy in their party’s approval; and where the party leads they will follow, whether for right and honor, or through blood and dirt and a mush of mutilated morals. In our late canvass, half of the nation passionately believed that in silver lay salvation, the other half as passionately believed that that way lay destruction. Do you believe that a tenth part of the people, on either side, had any rational excuse for having an opinion about the matter at all? I studied that mighty question to the bottom--came out empty. Half of our people passionately believe in high tariff, the other half believe otherwise. Does this mean study and examination, or only feeling? The latter, I think. I have deeply studied that question, too--and didn't arrive. We all do no end of feeling, and we mistake it for thinking. And out of it we get an aggregation which we consider a boon. Its name is public opinion. It is held in reverence. It settles everything. Some think it the voice of God.
(from Mark Twain on the Damned Human Race pp. 21-26. New York: Noonday Press, 1962. edited by Janet Smith.)
* "A corn
bread often made without milk or eggs and baked or fried. Webster's
Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary-
(msword\humanities\Corn-Pone opinions)
From
" Self-Reliance" from Essays:
First Series (1841)
by Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Ne
te quaesiveris extra."
Render
an honest and a perfect man,
Commands all light, all influence, all fate;
Nothing to him falls early or too late.
Our acts our angels are, or good or ill,
Our fatal shadows that walk by us still."
Epilogue
to Beaumont and Fletcher's Honest Man's Fortune
Cast
the bantling on the rocks,
Suckle him with the she-wolf's teat;
Wintered with the hawk and fox,
Power and speed be hands and feet.
ESSAY
II Self-Reliance
I
read the other day some verses written by an eminent painter which were original
and not conventional. The soul always hears an admonition in such lines, let the
subject be what it may. The sentiment they instill is of more value than any
thought they may contain. To believe your own thought, to believe that what is
true for you in your private heart is true for all men, -- that is genius. Speak
your latent conviction, and it shall be the universal sense; for the inmost in
due time becomes the outmost,---- and our first thought is rendered back to us
by the trumpets of the Last Judgment. Familiar as the voice of the mind is to
each, the highest merit we ascribe to Moses, Plato, and Milton is, that they set
at naught books and traditions, and spoke not what men but what they thought. A
man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across
his mind from within, more than the lustre of the firmament of bards and sages.
Yet he dismisses without notice his thought, because it is his. In every work of
genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts: they come back to us with a
certain alienated majesty. Great works of art have no more affecting lesson for
us than this. They teach us to abide by our spontaneous impression with
good-humored inflexibility then most when the whole cry of voices is on the
other side. Else, to-morrow a stranger will say with masterly good sense
precisely what we have thought and felt all the time, and we shall be forced to
take with shame our own opinion from another.
There
is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy
is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better,
for worse, as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no
kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that
plot of ground which is given to him to till. The power which resides in him is
new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he
know until he has tried. Not for nothing one face, one character, one fact,
makes much impression on him, and another none. This sculpture in the memory is
not without preestablished harmony. The eye was placed where one ray should
fall, that it might testify of that particular ray. We but half express
ourselves, and are ashamed of that divine idea which each of us represents. It
may be safely trusted as proportionate and of good issues, so it be faithfully
imparted, but God will not have his work made manifest by cowards. A man is
relieved and gay when he has put his heart into his work and done his best; but
what he has said or done otherwise, shall give him no peace. It is a deliverance
which does not deliver. In the attempt his genius deserts him; no muse
befriends; no invention, no hope.
Trust
thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string. Accept the place the divine
providence has found for you, the society of your contemporaries, the connection
of events. Great men have always done so, and confided themselves childlike to
the genius of their age, betraying their perception that the absolutely
trustworthy was seated at their heart, working through their hands,
predominating in all their being. And we are now men, and must accept in the
highest mind the same transcendent destiny; and not minors and invalids in a
protected corner, not cowards fleeing before a revolution, but guides,
redeemers, and benefactors, obeying the Almighty effort, and advancing on Chaos
and the Dark.
What
pretty oracles nature yields us on this text, in the face and behaviour of
children, babes, and even brutes! That divided and rebel mind, that distrust of
a sentiment because our arithmetic has computed the strength and means opposed
to our purpose, these have not. Their mind being whole, their eye is as yet
unconquered, and when we look in their faces, we are disconcerted. Infancy
conforms to nobody: all conform to it, so that one babe commonly makes four or
five out of the adults who prattle and play to it. So God has armed youth and
puberty and manhood no less with its own piquancy and charm, and made it
enviable and gracious and its claims not to be put by, if it will stand by
itself. Do not think the youth has no force, because he cannot speak to you and
me. Hark! in the next room his voice is sufficiently clear and emphatic. It
seems he knows how to speak to his contemporaries. Bashful or bold, then, he
will know how to make us seniors very unnecessary.
The
nonchalance of boys who are sure of a dinner, and would disdain as much as a
lord to do or say aught to conciliate one, is the healthy attitude of human
nature. A boy is in the parlour what the pit is in the playhouse; independent,
irresponsible, looking out from his corner on such people and facts as pass by,
he tries and sentences them on their merits, in the swift, summary way of boys,
as good, bad, interesting, silly, eloquent, troublesome. He cumbers himself
never about consequences, about interests: he gives an independent, genuine
verdict. You must court him: he does not court you. But the man is, as it were,
clapped into jail by his consciousness. As soon as he has once acted or spoken
with eclat, he is a committed person, watched by the sympathy or the hatred of
hundreds, whose affections must now enter into his account. There is no Lethe
for this. Ah, that he could pass again into his neutrality! Who can thus avoid
all pledges, and having observed, observe again from the same unaffected,
unbiased, unbribable, unaffrighted innocence, must always be formidable. He
would utter opinions on all passing affairs, which being seen to be not private,
but necessary, would sink like darts into the ear of men, and put them in fear.
These
are the voices which we hear in solitude, but they grow faint and inaudible as
we enter into the world. Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood
of every one of its members. Society is a joint-stock company, in which the
members agree, for the better securing of his bread to each shareholder, to
surrender the liberty and culture of the eater. The virtue in most request is
conformity. Self-reliance is its aversion. It loves not realities and creators,
but names and customs.
Whoso
would be a man [or woman] must be a nonconformist. He who would gather immortal
palms must not be hindered by the name of goodness, but must explore if it be
goodness. Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind. Absolve
you to yourself, and you shall have the suffrage of the world. I remember an
answer which when quite young I was prompted to make to a valued adviser, who
was wont to importune me with the dear old doctrines of the church. On my
saying, What have I to do with the sacredness of traditions, if I live wholly
from within? my friend suggested, -- "But these impulses may be from below,
not from above." I replied, "They do not seem to me to be such; but if
I am the Devil's child, I will live then from the Devil." No law can be
sacred to me but that of my nature. Good and bad are but names very readily
transferable to that or this; the only right is what is after my constitution,
the only wrong what is against it. A man is to carry himself in the presence of
all opposition, as if every thing were titular and ephemeral but he. I am
ashamed to think how easily we capitulate to badges and names, to large
societies and dead institutions. Every decent and well-spoken individual affects
and sways me more than is right. I ought to go upright and vital, and speak the
rude truth in all ways. If malice and vanity wear the coat of philanthropy,
shall that pass? If an angry bigot assumes this bountiful cause of Abolition,
and comes to me with his last news from Barbadoes, why should I not say to him,
`Go love thy infant; love thy wood-chopper: be good-natured and modest: have
that grace; and never varnish your hard, uncharitable ambition with this
incredible tenderness for black folk a thousand miles off. Thy love afar is
spite at home.' Rough and graceless would be such greeting, but truth is
handsomer than the affectation of love. Your goodness must have some edge to it,
-- else it is none. The doctrine of hatred must be preached as the counteraction
of the doctrine of love when that pules and whines. I shun father and mother and
wife and brother, when my genius calls me. I would write on the lintels of the
door-post, _Whim_. I hope it is somewhat better than whim at last, but we cannot
spend the day in explanation.
Virtues
are, in the popular estimate, rather the exception than the rule. There is the
man _and_ his virtues. Men do what is called a good action, as some piece of
courage or charity, much as they would pay a fine in expiation of daily
non-appearance on parade. Their works are done as an apology or extenuation of
their living in the world, -- as invalids and the insane pay a high board. Their
virtues are penances. I do not wish to expiate, but to live. My life is for
itself and not for a spectacle. I much prefer that it should be of a lower
strain, so it be genuine and equal, than that it should be glittering and
unsteady. I wish it to be sound and sweet, and not to need diet and bleeding. I
ask primary evidence that you are a man, and refuse this appeal from the man to
his actions. I know that for myself it makes no difference whether I do or
forbear those actions which are reckoned excellent. I cannot consent to pay for
a privilege where I have intrinsic right. Few and mean as my gifts may be, I
actually am, and do not need for my own assurance or the assurance of my fellows
any secondary testimony.
What
I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think. This rule, equally
arduous in actual and in intellectual life, may serve for the whole distinction
between greatness and meanness. It is the harder, because you will always find
those who think they know what is your duty better than you know it. It is easy
in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live
after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with
perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.
The
objection to conforming to usages that have become dead to you is, that it
scatters your force. It loses your time and blurs the impression of your
character. If you maintain a dead church, contribute to a dead Bible-society,
vote with a great party either for the government or against it, spread your
table like base housekeepers, -- under all these screens I have difficulty to
detect the precise man you are. And, of course, so much force is withdrawn from
your proper life. But do your work, and I shall know you. Do your work, and you
shall reinforce yourself. A man must consider what a blindman's-buff is this
game of conformity. If I know your sect, I anticipate your argument. I hear a
preacher announce for his text and topic the expediency of one of the
institutions of his church. Do I not know beforehand that not possibly can he
say a new and spontaneous word? Do I not know that, with all this ostentation of
examining the grounds of the institution, he will do no such thing? Do I not
know that he is pledged to himself not to look but at one side, -- the permitted
side, not as a man, but as a parish minister? He is a retained attorney, and
these airs of the bench are the emptiest affectation. Well, most men have bound
their eyes with one or another handkerchief, and attached themselves to some one
of these communities of opinion. This conformity makes them not false in a few
particulars, authors of a few lies, but false in all particulars. Their every
truth is not quite true.
The
other terror that scares us from self-trust is our consistency; a reverence for
our past act or word, because the eyes of others have no other data for
computing our orbit than our past acts, and we are loath to disappoint them.
But
why should you keep your head over your shoulder? Why drag about this corpse of
your memory, lest you contradict somewhat you have stated in this or that public
place? Suppose you should contradict yourself; what then? It seems to be a rule
of wisdom never to rely on your memory alone, scarcely even in acts of pure
memory, but to bring the past for judgment into the thousand-eyed present, and
live ever in a new day. In your metaphysics you have denied personality to the
Deity: yet when the devout motions of the soul come, yield to them heart and
life, though they should clothe God with shape and color. Leave your theory, as
Joseph his coat in the hand of the harlot, and flee.
A
foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen
and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing
to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what
you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard
words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day. -- `Ah, so you
shall be sure to be misunderstood.' -- Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood?
Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and
Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever
took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.
Your
genuine action will explain itself, and will explain your other genuine actions.
Your conformity explains nothing. Act singly, and what you have already done
singly will justify you now. Greatness appeals to the future.
I
hope in these days we have heard the last of conformity and consistency. Let the
words be gazetted and ridiculous henceforward. Instead of the gong for dinner,
let us hear a whistle from the Spartan fife. Let us never bow and apologize
more. A great man is coming to eat at my house. I do not wish to please him; I
wish that he should wish to please me. I will stand here for humanity, and
though I would make it kind, I would make it true. Let us affront and reprimand
the smooth mediocrity and squalid contentment of the times, and hurl in the face
of custom, and trade, and office, the fact which is the upshot of all history,
that there is a great responsible Thinker and Actor working wherever a man
works; that a true man belongs to no other time or place, but is the centre of
things. Where he is, there is nature. He measures you, and all men, and all
events.
That
popular fable of the sot who was picked up dead drunk in the street, carried to
the duke's house, washed and dressed and laid in the duke's bed, and, on his
waking, treated with all obsequious ceremony like the duke, and assured that he
had been insane, owes its popularity to the fact, that it symbolizes so well the
state of man, who is in the world a sort of sot, but now and then wakes up,
exercises his reason, and finds himself a true prince.
The
magnetism which all original action exerts is explained when we inquire the
reason of self-trust. Who is the Trustee? What is the aboriginal Self, on which
a universal reliance may be grounded? What is the nature and power of that
science-baffling star, without parallax, without calculable elements, which
shoots a ray of beauty even into trivial and impure actions, if the least mark
of independence appear? The inquiry leads us to that source, at once the essence
of genius, of virtue, and of life, which we call Spontaneity or Instinct. We
denote this primary wisdom as Intuition, whilst all later teachings are
tuitions. In that deep force, the last fact behind which analysis cannot go, all
things find their common origin. For, the sense of being which in calm hours
rises, we know not how, in the soul, is not diverse from things, from space,
from light, from time, from man, but one with them, and proceeds obviously from
the same source whence their life and being also proceed.
Man
is timid and apologetic; he is no longer upright; he dares not say `I think,' `I
am,' but quotes some saint or sage. He is ashamed before the blade of grass or
the blowing rose. These roses under my window make no reference to former roses
or to better ones; they are for what they are; they exist with God to-day. There
is no time to them. There is simply the rose; it is perfect in every moment of
its existence. Before a leaf-bud has burst, its whole life acts; in the
full-blown flower there is no more; in the leafless root there is no less. Its
nature is satisfied, and it satisfies nature, in all moments alike. But man
postpones or remembers; he does not live in the present, but with reverted eye
laments the past, or, heedless of the riches that surround him, stands on tiptoe
to foresee the future. He cannot be happy and strong until he too lives with
nature in the present, above time.
.
If we live truly, we shall see truly. It is as easy for the strong man to be
strong, as it is for the weak to be weak. When we have new perception, we shall
gladly disburden the memory of its hoarded treasures as old rubbish.
But
now we are a mob. Man does not stand in awe of man, nor is his genius admonished
to stay at home, to put itself in communication with the internal ocean, but it
goes abroad to beg a cup of water of the urns of other men. We must go alone. I
like the silent church before the service begins, better than any preaching. How
far off, how cool, how chaste the persons look, begirt each one with a precinct
or sanctuary! So let us always sit. At times the whole world seems to be in
conspiracy to importune you with emphatic trifles. Friend, client, child,
sickness, fear, want, charity, all knock at once at thy closet door, and say, --
`Come out unto us.' But keep thy state; come not into their confusion. The power
men possess to annoy me, I give them by a weak curiosity. No man can come near
me but through my act
If
we cannot at once rise to the sanctities of obedience and faith, let us at least
resist our temptations; let us enter into the state of war, and wake Thor and
Woden, courage and constancy, in our Saxon breasts. This is to be done in our
smooth times by speaking the truth. Check this lying hospitality and lying
affection. Live no longer to the expectation of these deceived and deceiving
people with whom we converse. Say to them, O father, O mother, O wife, O
brother, O friend, I have lived with you after appearances hitherto.
Henceforward I am the truth's. Be it known unto you that henceforward I obey no
law less than the eternal law. I will have no covenants but proximities. I shall
endeavour to nourish my parents, to support my family, to be the chaste husband
of one wife, -- but these relations I must fill after a new and unprecedented
way. I appeal from your customs. I must be myself. I cannot break myself any
longer for you, or you. If you can love me for what I am, we shall be the
happier. If you cannot, I will still seek to deserve that you should. I will not
hide my tastes or aversions. I will so trust that what is deep is holy, that I
will do strongly before the sun and moon whatever inly rejoices me, and the
heart appoints. If you are noble, I will love you; if you are not, I will not
hurt you and myself by hypocritical attentions. If you are true, but not in the
same truth with me, cleave to your companions; I will seek my own. I do this not
selfishly, but humbly and truly. It is alike your interest, and mine, and all
men's, however long we have dwelt in lies, to live in truth. Does this sound
harsh to-day? You will soon love what is dictated by your nature as well as
mine, and, if we follow the truth, it will bring us out safe at last. -- But so
you may give these friends pain. Yes, but I cannot sell my liberty and my power,
to save their sensibility. Besides, all persons have their moments of reason,
when they look out into the region of absolute truth; then will they justify me,
and do the same thing.
And
truly it demands something godlike in him who has cast off the common motives of
humanity, and has ventured to trust himself for a taskmaster. High be his heart,
faithful his will, clear his sight, that he may in good earnest be doctrine,
society, law, to himself, that a simple purpose may be to him as strong as iron
necessity is to others!
If
any man consider the present aspects of what is called by distinction _society_,
he will see the need of these ethics. The sinew and heart of man seem to be
drawn out, and we are become timorous, desponding whimperers. We are afraid of
truth, afraid of fortune, afraid of death, and afraid of each other. Our age
yields no great and perfect persons. We want men and women who shall renovate
life and our social state, but we see that most natures are insolvent, cannot
satisfy their own wants, have an ambition out of all proportion to their
practical force, and do lean and beg day and night continually. Our housekeeping
is mendicant, our arts, our occupations, our marriages, our religion, we have
not chosen, but society has chosen for us. We are parlour soldiers. We shun the
rugged battle of fate, where strength is born.
It is easy to see that a greater self-reliance must work a revolution in all the offices and relations of men; in their religion; in their education; in their pursuits; their modes of living; their association; in their property; in their speculative views.
From On Liberty by J.S. Mill
To
refuse a hearing to an opinion because they are sure that it is false is to
assume that their certainty is the same thing as absolute certainty.
All silencing of discussion is
an assumption of infallibility. People
. . . place the same unbounded reliance only on such of their opinions as are
shared by all who surround them, or to whom they habitually defer; for in
proportion to a man’s want of confidence in his own solitary judgment does he
usually repose, with implicit trust, on the infallibility of “the world” in
general. And the world, to each
individual, means the part of it with which he comes in contact: his party, his
sect, his church, his class of society; the man may be called, by comparison,
almost liberal and large-minded to whom it means anything so comprehensive as
his own country or his own age. Nor
is his faith in this collective authority at all shaken by his being aware that
other ages, countries, sects, churches, classes, and parties have thought, and
even now think, the exact reverse. He
devolves upon his own world the responsibility of being in the right against the
dissentient worlds of other people; and it never troubles him that mere
accidents has decided which of these numerous worlds is the object of his
reliance, and that the same causes which make him a churchman in London would
have made him a Buddhist or a Confucian in Peking. Yet it is as evident in itself, as any amount of argument can
make it, that ages are no more infallible that individuals—every age having
held many opinions which subsequent ages have deemed not only false but absurd;
and it is as certain that many opinions, now general, will be rejected by future
ages, as it is that many, once general, are rejected by the present.
There is a class of persons (happily not quite so numerous as formerly) who think it enough if a person assents undoubtingly to what they think true, though he has no knowledge whatever of the grounds of the opinion and could not make a tenable defense of it against the most superficial objections. Such persons, if they can once get their creed taught from authority, naturally think that no good, and some harm, comes of its being allowed to be questioned. Where their influence prevails, they make it nearly impossible for the received opinion to be rejected wisely and considerately, though it may still be rejected rashly and ignorantly; for to shut out discussion entirely is seldom possible, and when it once gets in, beliefs not grounded on conviction are apt to give way before the slightest semblance of an argument. Waiving, however, this possibility—assuming that the true opinion abides in the mind, but abides as a prejudice, a belief independent of, and proof against, argument—this is not the way in which truth ought to be held by a rational being. This is not knowing the truth. Truth, thus held, is but one superstition the more, accidentally clinging to the words which enunciate a truth.
He
who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that.
His reasons may be good, and no one may have been able to refute them.
But if he is equally unable to refute the reasons on the opposite side,
if he does not so much as know what they are, he has no ground for preferring either opinion. The rational position for him would be suspension of judgment,
and unless he contents himself with that, he is either led by authority or
adopts, like the generality of the world, the side to which he feels most
inclination. Nor is it enough the
he should hear the arguments of adversaries from his own teacher, presented as
they state them, and accompanied by what they offer as refutations. That is not the way to do justice to the arguments or bring
them into real contact with his own mind. He
must be able to hear them from persons who actually believe them, who defend
them in earnest and do their very utmost for them. He must know them in their most plausible and persuasive
form; he must feel the whole force of the difficulty which the true view of the
subject has to encounter and dispose of, else he will never really possess
himself of the portion of truth which meets and removes that difficulty.
(Mill, John Stuart. From On
Liberty, pp. 17, 34-35.)
Enlightenment is man’s leaving his self-caused immaturity.
Immaturity is the incapacity to use one’s intelligence without the
guidance of another. Such
immaturity is self-caused if it is not caused by lack of intelligence, but by
lack of determination and courage to use one’s intelligence without being
guided by another. Sapere Aude!
[Dare to know!] Have the
courage to use your own intelligence! is therefore the motto of the
enlightenment.
Through laziness and cowardice a large part of mankind, even
after nature has freed them from alien guidance, gladly remain immature. . . .
It is so comfortable to be a minor! If
I have a book which provides meaning for me, a pastor who has conscience for me,
a doctor who will judge my diet for me and so on, then I do not need to exert
myself. . . .Therefore there are only a few who have pursued a firm path and
have succeeded in escaping from immaturity by their own cultivation of the
mind”
(Immanuel
Kant)
