FROM the external and visible world there comes an old adage: “Only the one who works gets bread.” Oddly enough, the adage does not fit the world in which it is most at home, for imperfection is the fundamental law of the external world, and here it happens again and again that he who does not work does get bread, and he who sleeps gets it even more abundantly than he who works. In the external world, everything belongs to the possessor. It is subject to the law of indifference, and the spirit of the ring obeys the one who has the ring, whether he is an Aladdin or a Noureddin, and he who has the wealth of the world has it regardless of how he got it.

It is different in the world of the spirit. Here an eternal divine order prevails. Here it does not rain on both the just and the unjust; here the sun does not shine on both good and evil. Here it holds true that only the one who works gets bread, that only the one who was in anxiety finds rest, that only the one who descends into the lower world rescues the beloved, that only the one who draws the knife gets Isaac. He who will not work does not get bread but is deceived just as the gods deceived Orpheus with an ethereal phantom instead of the beloved, deceived him because he was a zither player and not a man. Here it does not help to have Abraham as a father or to have seventeen ancestors. The one who will not work fits what is written about the Virgins of Israel; he gives birth to wind–but the one who will work gives birth to his own father.

There is a knowledge that presumptuously wants to introduce into the world of spirit the same law of indifference under which the external world sighs. It believes that it is enough to know what is great–no other work is needed. But for this reason it does not get bread; it perishes of hunger while everything changes to gold. And what in fact does it know? There were many thousands of Greek contemporaries, countless numbers in later generations, who knew all the triumphs of Miltiades, but there was only one who became sleepless over them. There were countless generations who knew the story of Abraham by heart, word for word, but how many did it render sleepless?

HE must embrace solitude as a bride. He must have his glees and his glooms alone. His own estimate must be measure enough, his own praise reward enough for him. And why must the student be solitary and silent? That he may become acquainted with his thoughts. If he pines in a lonely place, hankering for the crowd, for display, he is not in the lonely place; his heart is in the market; he does not see; he does not hear; he does not think. But go cherish your soul; expel companions; set your habits to a life of solitude; then will the faculties rise fair and full within, like forest trees and field flowers; you will have results, which, when you meet your fellow-men, you can communicate, and they will gladly receive. Do not go into solitude only that you may presently come into public. Such solitude denies itself; it is public and state. The public can get public experience, but they wish the scholar to replace to them those private, sincere, divine experiences, of which they have been defrauded by dwelling in the street. It is the noble, manlike, just thought, which is the superiority demanded of you, and not crowds but solitude confers this elevation. Not insulation of place, but independence of spirit is essential, and it is only as the garden, the cottage, the forest, and the rock, are a sort of mechanical aids to this, that they are of value. Think alone, and all places are friendly and sacred. The poets who have lived in cities have been hermits still. Inspiration makes solitude anywhere. Pindar, Raphael, Angelo, Dryden, De Stael, dwell in crowds, it may be, but the instant thought comes, the crowd grows dim to their eye; their eye fixes on the horizon,–on vacant space; they forget the bystanders; they spurn personal relations; they deal with abstractions, with verities, with ideas. They are alone in the mind.

We live in the sun and on the surface,–a thin, plausible superficial existence, and talk of muse and prophet, of art and creation. But out of our shallow and frivolous way of life, how can greatness ever grow? Come now, let us go and be dumb. Let us sit with our hands on our mouths, a long, austere, Pythagorean lustrum. Let us live in corners, and do chores, and suffer, and weep, and drudge, with eyes and hearts that love the Lord. Silence, seclusion, austerity, may pierce deep into the grandeur and secret of our being, and so diving, bring up out of secular darkness, the sublimities of the moral constitution. How mean to go blazing, a gaudy butterfly, in fashionable or political saloons, the foot of society, the foot of notoriety, a topic for newspapers, a piece of the street, and forfeiting the real prerogative of the russet coat, the privacy and the true and warm heart of the citizen!

GOOD deeds are such as are equiblanced, maintaining the Mean between two equally bad extremes–the too much and the too little. Virtues are the dispositions which are midway between two reprehensible extremes, one of which is characterized by excess, the other by deficiency. Good deeds are the product of these dispositions. To illustrate, abstemiousness is a disposition which adopts a middle course between inordinate passion and total insensibility to pleasure. Abstemiousness, then, is a proper rule of conduct, and the disposition which gives rise to it is an ethical quality; but inordinate passion, the extreme of excess, and insensibility to enjoyment, the extreme of deficiency, are both absolutely pernicious. Likewise, liberality is the Mean between miserliness and extravagance; courage, between recklessness and cowardice; dignity, between haughtiness and loutishness; humility, between arrogance and self-abasement; contentedness, between avarice and slothful indifference; gentleness, between irascibility and insensibility to shame and disgrace; and, modesty, between impudence and shamefacedness, So it is with the other qualities.

It often happens, however, that men err as regards these qualities, imagining that one of the extremes is good, and is a virtue. Sometimes, the extreme of too much is considered noble, as when bravado is made a virtue, and those who recklessly risk their lives are hailed as heroes. Thus, when people see a man who runs deliberately into danger, intentionally tempting death, and escaping only by mere chance, they laud such a one to the skies, and say that he is a hero. At other times, the opposite extreme, the too little, is greatly esteemed, and the coward is considered a man of prudence, the loafer a man of contentment, and a bovine creature a man of moderation. In like manner, profuse liberality and extreme lavishness are extolled as excellent characteristics. This is, however, an absolutely mistaken view, for the middle course alone is praiseworthy, and everyone should strive to adhere to it at all times.

FOR there are two classes of precious things in the world; those that God gives us for nothing–sun, air, and life; and the secondarily precious things, worldly wine and milk, can only be bought for definite money; they can never be cheapened. No cheating nor bargaining will ever get a single thing out of nature’s “establishment” at half-price. Do we want to be strong?–we must work. To be hungry?–we must starve. To be happy?–we must be kind. To be wise?–we must look and think. No changing of place at a hundred miles an hour, not making of stuffs a thousand yards a minute, will, make us one whit stronger, or happier, or wiser. There was always more in the world than men could see, walked they ever so slowly; they will see it no better for going fast. And they will at last, and soon too, find out that their grand inventions for conquering (as they think) space and time, do, in reality, conquer nothing; for space and time are, in their own essence, unconquerable, and besides did not want any sort of conquering; they wanted using. A fool always wants to shorten space and time: a wise man wants to lengthen both. A fool wants to kill space and time: a wise man, first to gain them, then to animate them. Your railroad, when you come to understand it, is only a device for making the world smaller; and as for being able to talk from place to place, that is, indeed, well and convenient; but suppose you have, originally, nothing to say. We shall be obliged at last to confess, what we should have known long ago, that the really precious things are thought and sight, not pace. It does a bullet no good to go fast; and a man, if he be truly a man, no harm to go slow; for his glory is not at all in going, but in being.

“Well; but railroads and telegraphs are so useful for communicating knowledge to savage nations.” Yes, if you have any to give them. If you know nothing but railroads, you can communicate nothing but aqueous vapor and gunpowder,–what then? But if you have any other things than those to give, then the railroad is of use only because it communicates that other thing; and the question is–what that other thing may be? Is it religion? I believe that if we had really wanted to communicate that, we could have done it in less than 1800 years, without steam. Most of the good religious communication that I remember, has been done on foot; and it cannot easily be done faster than at foot pace. Is it science? But what science–of motion, meat, and medicine? Well; when you have moved your savage, fed him with white bread, and shown him how to set a limb,–what next? Follow out that question. Suppose every obstacle overcome; give your savage every advantage of civilization to the full; suppose that you have put the Red Indian in tight shoes; taught the Chinese how to make Wedgwood’s ware, and to paint it with colours, that will rub off; and persuaded all Hindoo women that it is more pious to torment their husbands into graves than to burn themselves at the burial, what next? Gradually, thinking on from point to point, we shall come to perceive that all true happiness and nobleness are near us, and yet neglected by us; and that till we have learned how to be happy and noble we have not much to tell, even to Red Indians. The delights of horse-racing and hunting, of assemblies in the night instead of the day, of costly and wearisome music of costly and burdensome dress, of chagrined contention for place or power, or wealth, or the eyes of the multitude; and all the endless occupation without purpose, and idleness without rest, of our vulgar world, are not, it seems to me, enjoyments we need be ambitious to communicate. And all real and wholesome enjoyments possible to man have been just as possible to him, since first he was made of the earth, as they are now; and they are possible to him chiefly in peace. To watch the corn grow, and the blossoms to set; to draw hard breath over a ploughshare or spade; to read, to think, to love, to hope, to pray,–these are the things that make men happy; they have always had the power of doing this, they never will have the power to do more. The world’s prosperity or adversity depends on our knowing and teaching these few things; but upon iron, or glass, or electricity, or steam, in no wise.

IN our age, when men seem more than ever prone to confuse wisdom with knowledge, and knowledge with information, and to try to solve problems of life in terms of engineering, there is coming into existence a new kind of provincialism which perhaps deserves a new name. It is a provincialism not of space, but of time; one for which history is merely the chronicle of human devices which have served their turn and been scrapped, one for which the world is the property solely of the living, a property in which the dead hold no shares. The menace of this kind of provincialism is, that we can all, all the peoples on the globe, be provincials together; and those who are not content to be provincials, can only become hermits. If this kind of provincialism led to a greater tolerance, in the sense of forbearance, there might be more to be said for it, but it seems more likely to lead to our becoming indifferent, in matters where we ought to maintain a distinctive dogma or standard, and to our becoming intolerant, in matters which might be left to personal preference. We may have as many varieties of religion as we like, provided that we all send our children to the same schools.

THE different tribes have no government or chief; yet each is surrounded by other hostile tribes, speaking different dialects, and separated from each other only by a deserted border or neutral territory: the cause of their warfare appears to be the means of subsistence. Their country is a broken mass of wild rocks, lofty hills, and useless forests: and these are viewed through mists and endless storms. The habitable land is reduced to the stones on the beach; in search of food they are compelled unceasingly to wander from spot to spot, and so steep is the coast, that they can only move about in their wretched canoes. They cannot know the feeling of having a home, and still less that of domestic affection; for the husband is to the wife a brutal master to a laborious slave. Was a more horrid deed ever perpetrated, than that witnessed on the west coast by Byron, who saw a wretched mother pick up her bleeding dying infant-boy, whom her husband had mercilessly dashed on the stones for dropping a basket of sea-eggs! How little can the higher powers of the mind be brought into play: what is there for imagination to picture, for reason to compare, for judgment to decide upon? To knock a limpet from the rock does not require even cunning, that lowest power of the mind. Their skill in some respects may be compared to the instinct of animals; for it is not improved by experience: the canoe, their most ingenious work, poor as it is, has remained the same, as we know from Drake, for the last two hundred and fifty years.

Whilst beholding these savages, one asks, whence have they come? What could have tempted, or what change compelled a tribe of men, to leave the fine regions of the north, to travel down the Cordillera, or backbone of America, to invent and build canoes, which are not used by the tribes of Chile, Peru, or Brazil, and then to enter on one of the most inhospitable countries within the limits of the globe? Although such reflections must at first seize on the mind, yet we may feel sure that they are partly erroneous. There is no reason to believe that the Fuegians decrease in number; therefore we must suppose that they enjoy a sufficient share of happiness, of whatever kind it may be, to render life worth having. Nature by making habit omnipotent, and its effects hereditary, has fitted the Fuegian to the climate and the productions of his miserable country.

WHAT are the great faults of conversation? Want of ideas, want of words, want of manners, are the principal ones, I suppose you think. I don’t doubt it, but I will, tell you what I have found spoil more good talks than anything else;–long arguments on special points between people who differ on fundamental principles upon which these points depend. No men can have satisfactory relations with each other until they have agreed on certain ultimata of belief not to be disturbed in ordinary conversation, and unless they have sense enough to trace the secondary questions depending upon these ultimate beliefs to their source. In short, just as a written constitution is essential to the best social order, so a code of finalities is a necessary condition of profitable talk between two persons. Talking is like playing on the harp; there is as much in laying the hand on the strings to stop their vibrations as in twanging them to bring out their music.

WHEN the anarchist, as the mouthpiece of the declining strata of society, demands with a fine indignation what is “right,” “justice,” and “equal rights,” he is merely under the pressure of his own uncultured state, which cannot comprehend the real reason for his suffering–what it is that he is poor in: Life. A causal instinct asserts itself in him: it must be somebody’s fault that he is in a bad way.

Also, the “fine indignation” itself soothes him; it is a pleasure for all wretched devils to scold; it gives a slight but intoxicating sense of power. Even plaintiveness and complaining can give life a charm for the sake of which one endures it: there is a fine dose of revenge in every complaint; one charges one’s own bad situation, and under certain circumstances even one’s own badness, to those who are different, as if that were an injustice, a forbidden privilege. “If I am a canaille, you ought to be too”–on such logic are revolutions made.

Complaining is never any good: it stems from weakness. Whether one charges one’s misfortunes to others or to oneself–the socialist does the former; the Christian, for example, the latter–really makes no difference. The common, and, let us add, the unworthy, thing is that it is supposed to be somebody’s fault that one is suffering; in short, that the sufferer prescribes the honey of revenge for himself against his suffering. The objects of this need for revenge, as a need for pleasure, are mere occasions; everywhere the sufferer finds occasions for satisfying his little revenge. If he is a Christian–to repeat it once more–he finds them in himself. The Christian and the anarchist are both decadents. When the Christian condemns, slanders, and besmirches “the world,” his instinct is the same as that which prompts the socialist worker to condemn, slander, and besmirch “society.” The “last judgment” is the sweet comfort of revenge–the revolution, which the socialist worker also awaits, but conceived as a little farther off. The “beyond”–and why a beyond, if not as a means for besmirching this world?

WHAT if some wise man, dropped from heaven, should suddenly confront me at this point and exclaim that the person whom everyone has looked up to as a god and ruler is not even a man, because he is led sheeplike by his passions; that he is the meanest slave because he voluntarily serves so many and such foul masters? Or what if this wise man should instruct some one mourning his parent’s death to laugh, on the grounds that the parent had at last really begun to live–our life here being in one way nothing but a kind of death? And what if he should entitle another, who was glorifying in ancestry, ignoble and illegitimate, because he was so far from virtue, the only source of nobility? And what if he should speak of all others in the same way? What, I ask, would he gain by it except to be regarded as dangerously insane by everyone? Just as nothing is more foolish than unseasonable wisdom, so nothing is more imprudent than bull-headed prudence. And he is indeed perverse who does not accommodate himself to the way of the world, who will not follow the crowd, who does not at least remember the rule of good fellowship, drink or begone, and who demands that the play shall no longer be a play. True prudence, on the contrary, consists in not desiring more wisdom than is proper to mortals, and in being willing to wink at the doings of the crowd or to go along with it sociably. But that, they say, is folly itself. I shall certainly not deny it; yet they must in turn admit that it is also to act the play of life.

I hesitate to speak about the next point. But why should I be silent about what is truer than truth? For so great an undertaking, however, it would probably be wise to call the Muses from Helicon; the poets usually invoke them on the slightest pretext. Therefore, stand by for a moment, daughters of Jove, while I show that one can not acquire that widely advertised wisdom, which the wise call the secret of happiness, unless one follows the leadership of Folly. First, everyone admits that all emotions belong to folly. Indeed a fool and a wise man are distinguished by the fact that emotions control the former, and reason the latter. Now the Stoics would purge the wise man of all strong emotions, as if they were diseases; yet those emotions serve not only as a guide and teacher to those who are hastening toward the portal of wisdom, but also as a stimulus in all virtuous actions, as exhorters to good deeds. Of course, that superstoic, Seneca, strongly denies this and strips the wise of absolutely every emotion; yet in so doing he leaves something that is not a man at all, but rather a new kind of god or sub-god who never existed and never will. To put it bluntly, he makes a marble imitation of a man, stupid, and altogether alien to every human feeling.

If this is the way they want it, let them keep their wise man. They can love him without any rivals and live with him in Plato’s republic or, if they prefer, in the realm of Ideas, or in the garden of Tantalus. Who would not shudder at such a man and flee from him as from a ghost? He would be insensible to every natural feeling, no more moved by love or pity than if he were solid flint or Marpesian stone. Nothing escapes him; he never makes a mistake; like another Lynceus he sees all; he evaluates everything rigidly; he excuses nothing; he alone is satisfied with himself as the only one who is realty rich, sane, royal, free–in short, unique in everything, but only so in his own opinion. Desiring no friend, he is himself the friend of none. He does not hesitate to bid the gods go hang themselves. All that life holds he condemns and scorns as folly. And this animal is the perfect wise man.

I ask you, if it were put to a vote, what city would choose such a person as mayor? What army would want such a general? What woman such a husband? Who would not rather have any man at all from the rank and file of fools? Now such a choice, being a fool, would be able to command or obey fools. He would be able to please those like himself–or nearly everyone; he would be kind to his wife, a jolly friend, a gay companion, a polished guest; finally, he would consider nothing human alien to him. But this wise man has been boring me for some time; let us turn to other instructive topics.

The Third Great Booklet