Category Archives: generally

Humanity’s Control

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(We begin a new year next weekend. Many will say, “It’s good to get 2021 behind us.”  But changing the page of a calendar does not wipe out lingering fears and uncertainties. Nor does it erase lingering joy, lingering hope, lingering striving for truth.  Cruelty and inhumanity remain.  But so, says Dr. Frank Crane, remains ideals that can overcome that cruelty and inhumanity. We must, however, constantly be on our guard that our ideals do not become the cruelty and inhumanity they should overcome.)

THE HUMANITIES VERSUS THE IDEALS

The humanities are the ordinary universal feelings, such as family affection, aversion to cruelty, love of justice and of liberty.

The ideals are the so-called big enthusiasms, as religion, patriotism, reform, and the like.

The humanities are sometimes called the red passions; the ideals the white passions.

The great institutions of the race have been formed and kept alive by the white passions. These include churches, political parties, nations, and various societies and associations, secret and public.

The progress of mankind has been made through institutions, embodying ideals, which we may call the centrifugal force. The humanities have always pulled against this, and may be termed the centripetal force.

Thus, although great ideals present themselves to men as beneficial, yet in the carrying out of them men often become cruel, unjust, and tyrannical. So the greatest crimes of earth are committed under the influence of movements designed to do the greatest good.

Under the church we have seen persecution, a ruthless disregard of human feeling, families torn asunder, opinion coerced, bodies tortured.

The humanities in time destroyed the baleful power of the religious ideal, its dreams of dominance and its inhuman fanaticism. Plain pity and sympathy battered down the monstrous structure of iron idealism. The horrors of the medieval inquisition and the dark intolerance of puritanism had to yield to the humanities.

Most of the great tragedies have been the crushing out of human and natural feeling by some ideal which, once helpful, has become monstrous. Such were the Greek tragedies, where men were the victims of the gods.

War is the colossal force of an ideal, patriotism, where the check of the humanities has been entirely cut off.

It is supposed to ennoble men and states. It has always been the preferred occupation of the noble class, kings and courtiers, because the contempt of personal feelings and the merciless sacrifice of the humanities have seemed grand and royal.

But by and by war must yield to the eternal humanities. Sheer human sympathies will abolish it.

The humanities are peculiarly of the common people. Therefore they find expression and come into political effect quickly in democracies. In the United States, for instance, the rule of a religious party or the program of patriotic militarism is impossible. We have too much red passion to permit the ascendency of white passions.

“Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” a book of red passion, sympathy for the Negro, overthrew the “white” ideals of the slave oligarchy.

The cry of a starving mother, the protest of wronged workmen, can defeat the apparently resistless power of massed capital.

One drop of blood outweighs the most splendid scheme of the theorist.

The history of the world is the unceasing struggle of the humanities against great ideals which, crystallized into institutions, have become inhuman.

Of Me I Sing

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(Many of us are too modest to display our singing talents in public, preferring to save our performances to times when there is water flowing about us.  But The Carpenters advised us many years ago:

“Sing, sing a song.  Sing out loud.  Sing out Strong.  Sing of good things not bad. Sing of happy not sad….Make it simple to last your whole life long.  Don’t worry that it’s not good enough for anyone else to hear. Just sing, sing a song.”

Long before the Carpenters were born, Dr. Frank Crane considered a similar sentiment—)

THE INWARD SONG

The poet speaks of those

“Who carry music in their heart

Through dusty lane and wrangling mart,

Plying their daily task with busier feet,

Because their secret souls a holier strain repeat.”

It would be interesting to have the statistics of what number, out of all the human stream that pours into the city every morning coming to their work, are singing inwardly.

How many are thinking tunefully? How many are moving rhythmically? And how many are going, as dead drays and carts, rumbling lifelessly to their tasks?

It is good that the greater part of the world is in love. For love is the Song of Songs. To the young lover Nature is transformed. Some Ithuriel* has touched the deadly commonplace; all is miraculous. The moon, the dead companion to our earth, the pale and washed-out pilgrim of the sky, has been changed into a silver-fronted fairy whose beams thrill him with a heady enchantment. Every breeze has its secret. The woods, the houses, all men and women are notes of that sweet harmony that fills him.

“Orpheus with his lute made trees,

And the mountain tops that freeze,

Bow their heads when he did sing.”

Every man is an Orpheus, so he but carry about in him an inward melody. There is for him “a new heaven and a new earth.”

This world is an insolvable puzzle to human reason. It is full of the most absurd antinomies, the most distressing cruelties, the most amazing contradictions. No wonder men’s minds take refuge in stubborn stoicism, in agnosticism, in blank unfaith.

There is no intellectual faith, no rational creed, no logical belief. FAITH COMES ONLY THROUGH MUSIC. It is when the heart sings that the mind is cleared. Then the pieces of the infinite chaos of things drop into order, confusion ceases, they march, dance, coming into radiant concord.

Marcus Aurelius, that curious anomaly of the Roman world, perfect dreamer in an age of iron, was rich in inner music. The thought in him beamed like a ray of creative harmony over the disordered crowd of men and events.

“Welcome all that comes,” he wrote, “untoward though it may seem, for it leads you to the goal, the health of the world order. Nothing will happen to me that is not in accord with nature.”

None but so noble a mind can see a noble universe, a noble humanity, a noble God.

What a drop from such a level to the place of the mad sensualists and pleasure-mongers who only know

“To seize on life’s dull joys from a strange fear,

Lest losing them all’s lost and none remains!”

What a whirl of cabaret music, what motion and forced laughter, what wild discord of hot viands, drugged drinks, and myriad-tricked lubricity it takes to galvanize us when our souls are dry and cracked and tuneless!

Have you ever had the feelings of Hazlitt? “Give me,” he said, “the clear blue 50sky over my head and the green turf beneath my feet, a winding road before me, and a three hours’ march to dinner—and then to thinking! I laugh, I run, I leap, I sing for joy.”

Whoever does something that makes the souls of men and women sing within them does more to make this earth habitable and this life tolerable than all the army of them that widen our comforts and increase our luxuries.

*Ithuriel is one of two angels sent by the archangel Gabriel in Milton’s Paradise Lost  to find Satan, who is in the Garden of Eden.  He is found in the shape of a toad, speaking to a sleeping Eve in an effort to corrupt her. Ithuriel touches him with his spear, causing Satan to resume his true form, after which he is taken to Gabriel.

 

Notes From a Quiet Street

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(being miscellaneous unconnected topics flitting through an aging mind)

This was The Quiet Street a couple of weeks ago. . Soon it will be a quiet ugly WINTER street. Just skeletal trees—the walnut tree on the right already had denuded itself. Snow now and then that turns to dirty slush. We are nearing the time of discontent.  The inner curmudgeon, who hides when it is warm and the trees and yards are lush and green, is beginning to emerge.

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Went to the drive-through line at a fast food restaurant the other day to pick up a large Coke and the lady at the window called me “sweetheart” twice within five seconds when she handed it to me.

Please, if you are an employee of a retail establishment, don’t call your customers “sweetheart,” or “dear,” or “honey” or any other such enderments. Especially if your customer is a curmudgeon who also doesn’t like people to wish him a good day. Be aware your customer, curmudgeon or not, is probably gritting his or her teeth as they walk or drive away.

Every now and then when somebody says, “Have a good one,” I respond, “I do.”  Not that they listen. Sometimes they personalize it: “You have a good one.” I am sometimes tempted to ask, “How do you know?” Maybe one of these days one of them will wonder what I meant.

Serves them right.

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A friend was talking about setting his clock radio on a country-western station that played such awful music that he was instantly awake and motivated into instant action—to turn off the radio.  It reminded me of hearing, during a Sons of the Pioneers Concert (with Roy Rogers Jr.) in Jefferson City a couple of years ago, one of the guys defining the difference between western music, which the Sons do, and country music. It went something like:

“Western music is about the outdoors—the trails, the mountains, the open plains, the sky, the cattle.  Country music is about the indoors—cheatin’ and lyin’ and  cryin’ and diein’.”

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We watched the Kansas City Chiefs beat the Washington Football Team a few days ago.  They used to be the Washington Redskins but finally decided to abandon the name after years of hearing Native Americans and others complain that the team name was a racial slur.  This is the second year the team hasn’t had a name and didn’t even have a “W” on the helmets in the game against the Chiefs.

We’ve decided the owners need some help in picking a new name.  Perhaps you have some suggestions you could offer in our response box below:

–Washington Anonymous Sources (The Washington Anons for short)

–Washington Leakers

—Washington Insurrectionists

—Washington Peaceful Tourists

—Washington Bureacrats (likely to be considered a slur, too)

—Washington Statesmen (well, somebody needs to be statesmen in that town)

—Washington Monuments

—Washington Lobbyists

—Washington Campaigners

—Washington Partisans

—Washington Deficits

—Washington Malls

What’s in YOUR head? No profanities allowed and remember children watch these teams play.

The Cleveland baseball team will be the Cleveland Guardians next year. Chief Wahoo bit the dust a couple of years ago and the team removed the “Indians” sign from the stadium a few days ago.

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A lot of today’s young people are not attracted to church because the music isn’t their kind of music.  Old Rugged Cross and Onward Christian Soldiers don’t resonate with them. The other day our pastor read the lyrics to an old favorite hymn—-and reading hymn lyrics can sometimes change our understanding of what the song (or the original poem) was all about.  I, for one, like to read hymns.

The Broadway Musical Hamilton is interesting to your vigilant observer because it displays a previously-unrealized musicality that can exist within Rap. When do you suppose church hymns carrying that Rap musicality will catch on—and whether that new kind of music will make church more meaningful to the “Nones” and the “Dones.”

Wonder what Organ Rap would sound like.

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And finally, this headline we could not resist from a few days ago:

COLLEGE COACHING VETERAN JOE LEE DUNN HAS PASSED

Passed what?   A kidney stone?  A nickel he swallowed?

Have his teams always just run with the ball?  Was it a completion?  Did get get a touchdown?  First down?

Ohhhhhhh.  It means he died. We trust that the headline was intentional because it was fitting. However…..

I have a long collection of obituary first paragraphs containing dozens of phrases that people use to avoid saying “died.”

One of my journalism professors told the class one day that “passing away” is a quarterback who hurls the ball downfield. It sails over the hands of he receiver, clears the goalposts and is last seen disappearing over the top of the stadium.

“THAT,” he said, “is passing away.”

People die.

Being Influential

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(We recognize the true movers and shakers of our communities and our nation. They are the ones who influence the policies that shape our lives. Some have money. Some rely on personal integrity. Some know how the system works and what strings to pull.  But being influential is not just the bailiwick of those who walk the marble halls of government.  Dr. Frank Crane says we all can exercise—-)

PERSONAL INFLUENCE

Of all the forces that drive human beings, the greatest is personal influence.

By personal influence I mean that force that goes out from you, simply by virtue of what you are. It has nothing to do with what you do or say or try, except as these things express what you are.

Every person sends out what we might call dynamic rays or invisible electric-like impulses which are of such nature as to affect other persons. These rays from me can make other individuals gay or sad, good or bad, and so forth.

This is the only power that pulls souls, the only wind that bends them, the only fire that warms them, the only stream that bears them along.

Emerson said that “what you are preaches so loudly that I cannot hear what you say”; which is a striking way of stating that one’s unconscious influence far outreaches in effect one’s conscious effort.

It would be well if we would keep this in mind; it would save us a lot of futile busying.

For instance, reformers bent on saving the world should not be so hot and impatient seeing that there is no real saving that ever has been or ever will be done that is not the result of the influence radiating from good people.

Laws are dead and wooden, but when a man incarnates a law it begins to work on other men. The “Word” is of no force until it is “made Flesh.”

It is the personal influence of a teacher that affects all the real educating of the pupil. The wise man understood this who said that the best university was “a log with Mark Hopkins on one end and me on the other.”

I sometimes doubt if any real good has ever been done by didactic teaching or preaching. All the moral maxims in the world are poor beside one strong, sweet, normal life. And a good woman is worth, as a guide, the most select list of “virtues and their opposite vices.”

To create such a character in fiction as “John Halifax” or “Jean Valjean” or “Little Nellie” or the man in the “Third Floor Back,” is to exert a lasting and potent uplift agency, better than a thousand sermons.

It is fascinating to many minds, the idea of “doing good” and “working for the Lord,” and devoting one’s time wholly to inducing people to become better; but it is not practical. The only way to improve mankind is to be something that inspires them; your argument and exhortation are of small avail. Just as the only way to dispel darkness is to shine, and the only way to electrify iron is to be a magnet.

Goodness is a contagion; we must “catch” it, we must have it and “give” it.

When you say in your creed that you believe in God, your declaration is of no help to you or to others unless what you mean is this: That you believe in the inherent potency of goodness, that it will live down, outwear, and destroy evil; that justice, cleanliness, honesty, and kindness will win in the long run against fraud, dirt, lying, and cruelty; and that persons who are upright and altruistic get more joy out of every minute of their lives than idle, sporty, and self-coddling folk; and that there is altogether a vast tidal or subterranean movement in the human race toward health, strength, and beauty.

Therefore why worry over what you will say or do, since it makes no matter? Simply BE right, and then say whatever comes to your mind, and do whatever comes to your hand, and you cannot fail to do the most possible toward helping along.

Heal Thyself

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(Six centuries, or so, before the Gospel of Luke was written, the sentiment, “Physician, heal thyself” was part of literature.  Aeschylus, the Greek dramatist, in Prometheus Bound has a chorus tell the title character, “Like and unskilled doctor, fallen ill, you lose heart and cannot discover by which remedies to cure your own disease.” Whether it is a twelve-step program, or through various self-help gurus, the thought continues that the solution of many of our problems lies, as Dr. Crane puts it, in—-)

SELF-CURE

“How,” writes a lady to me, “can I remove the following difficulties from my path?

“How can I overcome the lazy habit of oversleeping in the morning—laziness in general, in fact?

“How can I overcome the fear and worry habit?

“How can I ‘let go’ of the thoughts of past disappointments, mistakes, etc.? I have tried all manner of ways to divert my mind by work and study.

“Do you believe in confession, in the case of a non-Catholic, for the purpose of relieving the mind?

“How can I overcome prejudice? I find I am prejudiced against certain sects and races.”

Rather a stiff task, to answer all these questions. Of course, I cannot “answer” them fully. All I or anyone can do is to give a few hints which may be useful.

Oversleeping is not necessarily laziness. Go to bed earlier, if you have to rise at a certain hour. It’s a safe rule to take all the sleep you can get. The rule in my own family is, “Let the sleepy sleep.”

Laziness is not a bad quality always. A lazy body often houses a most energetic mind. The real cure for physical laziness is fun; find some form of exercise that lures you. Mental laziness is a more difficult disease, and you can only cure it by taking yourself severely in hand. Usually, I should say, it is hopeless.

Fear can generally be mitigated, if not altogether removed, by intelligence. It is a by-product of ignorance, as a rule. We are afraid of what we don’t know. Science (knowledge) has done much to alleviate superstition (ignorance).

Worry can only be remedied by adopting some rational theory of life, some common-sense philosophy. Maeterlinck and Emerson have done me more good, as worry-antidotes, than any other masters.

How to “let go” of bedeviling thoughts is a hard problem. Thoughts that burn, stew, ferment, and torment—who has not suffered from them? About all I can do is to let them run their course. I say, “This too shall pass!” and try to bear up against the pestiferous imaginings and memories until they wear themselves out.

It is also a good idea to have some attractive, interesting, fascinating vision, of a pleasant nature, to which we can turn our minds when annoying suggestions persist. The author of “Alice in Wonderland” (who was a great mathematician) used to work out geometrical tasks, which he called “pillow problems” (and wrote a book of that name), to get himself to sleep. Can’t you find some alluring things to think of when wooing slumber? Call for them, and by and by they will come.

Do I believe in confession? Nothing can so purge the soul. Still, it must be exercised with the extremest care, judgment, and discretion, else you may harm others in pacifying yourself.

“How can I overcome prejudices against such and such sects or races?” Just repeat over and over to yourself that all prejudice is stupid and ignorant. By and by you will, by auto-suggestion, get it into your subconsciousness that prejudice shall have no place in you.

Prejudice means “judging before” you have the facts. Never judge till after you have the facts.

Nothing is so utterly devoid of reason as a passionate hatred of any race or class. All men are much the same when you come to know them. Class or race faults are superficial. The human qualities strike deep.

 

Take it Easy

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(Last week, Dr. Frank Crane urged us to be active, to sell ourselves, to take command of our lives and expand our future opportunities.  This week, he suggests there’s another side to the story as he ponders—-)

IDLENESS: THE MOTHER OF PROGRESS_

Idleness is the mother of progress. So long as men were busy they had no time to think of bettering their condition.

Idleness is the mother of art. It was when men had leisure from the chase that they decorated the handles of their hunting-knives and the walls of their cave-dwellings.

Idleness is the mother of religion. It is in the relax and rebound from toil that men think of God.

We talk of all men’s right to work. There is a deeper right than that. It is the right to idleness.

The value of what we put upon the page of life depends upon the width of the margin.

The great, useful, redeeming, and lasting work of the world is that work which is a reaction from idleness. The continent of labor is barren. It is the little island of labor that is green and fruitful in the sea of leisure.

The curse of America is its deification of labor. Our little gods are the men who are ceaselessly forthputting.

Most of all we deify capital, which never rests, but goes on producing day and night.

We are so occupied in getting ready to live that we have lost the art of living.

With us a man is a fool if he sets about to enjoy himself before he has laid up a fortune. We count the woman happy when she has married money, and the child accursed when he has no inheritance.

Every morning we arise from our beds and charge bloodthirstily into the struggle. We all do it, millionaires and paupers. In his office the trust magnate sits at his scheming until his nerves are loosed, his arteries hardened, and his soul caked. The slaves of Rome never worked so hard as many of our laborers in mines and factories.

“After the Semitic fashion,” says Remy de Goncourt, “you make even the women work. Rich and poor, all alike, you know nothing of the joys of leisure.”

There ought to be two leisure classes, yea three: all children under twenty-one, all women, and all men over sixty.

The work of the world could be easily done by males between the ages of twenty-one and sixty. To accomplish this, all that is needed is to abolish militarism, that insane burden of men in idleness, abolish all piled-up wealth-units that keep husky males workless, and abolish our worship of activity.

Then there would be plenty of work for every man to keep him from want, and plenty of leisure for every man to preserve in him a living soul.

If I were czar of the world, no woman should work except as she might elect for her amusement; no child should do aught but play.

Among savages the women do all the work. In the coming civilization they shall do none. The progress of the race is the progress of the female from toil to leisure.

Every woman is a possible mother. She should have only to grow and to be strong. She should be the real aristocracy, the real Upper Class, to give culture and beauty to life. She should have time to attend to the duties of her eternal priesthood.

As for man, little by little, he also would lift himself from the killing grind of monotonous exertion. For he would make Steam and Electricity, and other giants not yet discovered, do the dirty work.

To bring all this to pass, you do not need to devise any cunning scheme of government, nor to join any party or specious ism. You need do only one thing.

And that is to establish Justice.

The end of fraud and wrong is fevered toil. The end of justice is the superior product of skill and genius, and their mother, leisure.

The power of a cat 

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We have two special members of our family.  Minnie Mayhem and her brother, Max (Maximus Meridius Decatimus, named for a movie character who among other things was a General of the Felix Legion, which had a lion as its symbol. And who can say “Felix” without thinking of the famous cat?).

The scampering thumps of little feet adds merriment to our lives.  Removing them from the tops of things keeps us moving, too.  It would help if they acknowledged their names when we tell them to “get down,” but we suspect they plot to make sure we don’t get too comfortable in our chairs. Or at our computer desks (the moving cursor seems to be interesting). And Nancy wished they weren’t so interested in helping her get our tax information together on the dining room table.

More than once, we have again been reminded that cats never say, “Oops!”

Nor do they ever apologize.  They think that all will be forgiven if they hop up in your lap, lick  your forehad, and purr a little bit (that’s Minnie’s modus operandi anyway)

Cat lovers might think that the most peaceful part of their existence is when they’re stretched out in their recliner under an afghan with a cat on top on a chilly day. Sometimes they’ll pet their favorite lap friend and cause static electricity to snap and pop and the fur stand on end. The cat is not usually amused.

Seldom does anyone think of their cat as a power source.  But they can be, apparently, as shown by this article we recently came across in the Columbia Daily Statesman of September 16, 1879.

The most remarkable invention in this or any other age is duly chronicled in the Columbus (Ohio) Dispatch. It is based upon the electrical properties of the fur of cats. 

With a battery of 128 cats the inventor succeeded in generating a current so strong that it instantly polarized all the lightning-arresters and demagnetized all the switch-boards on the way to Omaha.  The operators all along the line were terror stricken, and rushed from their offices.  Eighteen hundred and nine glass insulators were broken and as many poles shattered as if by lightning.  A great deal more damage would doubtless have resulted if the copper rod over which the battery was suspended had not suddenly become red hot and burned the tails off the cats and let them drop.

When only a moderately strong current of electricity is desired, it is obtained by densely populating the small floor of the cage, which is made of sheet copper, that being the best conductor.  The electricity thus generated charges the copper floor of the cage, and as it can not pass off to the ground through the glass insulators it seeks its exit over the wires that are connected by soldering to each end of the coper plate.

For generating a powerful current, the cats are carefully and securely tied tail to tail in pairs, and by the lop thus formed they are suspended from a heavy insulated copper rod that passes longitudinally through the cage, to the ends of which are attached the telegraph or telephone lines.

Please do not try to replicate this experiment at home.  Do not try to enter it in a school science fair. Better sources of electricity have been developed.  However—-

One month later, give or take a few days, after the article was published, Thomas Edison made a workable electric light.

We’re not sure where Edison got his electricity.  We have found no historical record that there were cats in his laboratory.

Sometimes as we hear Max and Minnie tearing through our house, we wonder how many watts they’re generating. And how can we use them in the next power outage.

 

Just try being happy

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(There are plenty of reasons to be down in the dumps.  Politics. Health. Lousy football results. Masks. The ongoing hassles of the pandemic. Dr. Frank Crane suggests your problem might be the result of just not trying hard enough to be happy.  He calls it —)

THE MIRTH CURE

There are all manner of cures, from mud baths and Perkins’s Patent Porous Plaster up to  Thought Vibrations, but the grandest of all is the Mirth Cure.

It keeps well in any climate, is guaranteed under the pure food and drug law, doesn’t cost a cent, and has helped others. Why not you?

The formula is found in the writings of the wisest man, who was a Jewish king and philosopher. He said: “A merry heart doeth good like a medicine.”

Note—he did not say a merry wife, though she certainly does good (perhaps he had too many wives and was afraid he would be asked which one). He did not say a merry husband, though he helps some. Nor did he say merry children, nor a merry house, nor a merry occupation, nor any such thing.

For his wise old eyes saw too deeply into life to make the mistake of supposing that circumstances are the root of joy. He knew that the real fountain of mirth is the heart.

If you have a merry heart it makes no difference what may be your position, whether you be a tramp on the road, a scrubwoman in an office building, a brakeman, a street car conductor, a merchant man, or even a college president. You are an electric light in the fog of human    despondency, sunshine breaking through earth sorrow clouds, water to parched souls.

Did you ever hear the story of “The Happy Man’s Shirt?” It is an old one, but one of those that ought constantly be re-told.

There was once a king who was smitten with sadness and disgust of life. He had gorged at all human pleasures, could no more be amused, and now was like to die.

They called in the soothsayers and medicine men, but none could suggest a remedy. At last they sent to an old hermit who lived in the wood, who said, “The case is simple. Let the king sleep all night in a happy man’s shirt, and he will be healed.”

Whereupon the king ordered that the palace be searched, a happy man be found and his shirt brought. But no happy man could be discovered in the palace.

Then they sought through the city and then throughout the length and breadth of the kingdom, but no man could they lay hands upon who would declare, without reservation or secret evasion of mind whatever, that he was entirely happy.

A little group of the king’s courtiers was returning home disconsolate, and as they rode along the highway they espied a beggar sitting under a tree, playing with the autumn leaves and smiling to himself.

“Hola!” they shouted. “Are you happy?”

“Surely!” replied the beggar.

“Why, you’re nothing but a beggar! You don’t know where you are going to get your dinner, do you?”

“Oh, no. But it isn’t dinner time yet. I had a good breakfast.”

Then they told him of the king’s plight and besought him to give them  his shirt forthwith, adding that it should be returned to him filled with gold pieces.

At that the ragged man lay back on the grass and laughed as if he  would expire.

“Come,” said the royal attendants, “We have no time for trifling. Off with your shirt, or we will jerk it off.”

“Hold hard, gentlemen,” said the beggar, striving to control his mirth.  “That is just what I am laughing at. I Ain’t Got No shirt!”

So they went and told the king that but one happy man could be  unearthed in all his realm, and that one was shirtless.

And the king had sense enough to perceive that happiness does not  depend on the shirt you sleep in, nor the bed on which you lie, nor the house that covers you— no, nor any external thing, but comes from the heart within you.

Thus was he cured, and arose and went about his business; and thus  also may you be cured, if so be that there is still left unparalyzed in you the power to think.

The Basic Question

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(In our quieter moments, all of us probably have questioned our existence. Most of us find it unprofitable to dwell on the issue because it gets in the way of living. But there are those who (often sequestered) ponder this matter. Do we exist only because of combinations of atoms set in motion billions of years ago by the Big Bang? And if there is life elsewhere in the universe, what will our discovery of it mean to our understanding of what we are and how we became what we are? Dr. Frank Crane is among those who have asked—-)

WHY WAS I BORN?

There is one question upon the answer to which rests the success or failure of life.

It is the question: “Why was I born?”

A strange fact is that nobody knows the answer. The purpose which the Creator had in mind when he made me has never been known, will never be known.

Curious that the most fateful of all problems should be forever  unanswerable!

We may believe this or that to be the reason; we cannot KNOW.

Notwithstanding this fact, the net result of my life depends upon the  THEORY I form to answer this query.

But how can I tell which theory is best when there is no means of knowing which is true?

There is a way to tell which theory is, if not true, at least approximately  true. This way is suggested by what is called PRAGMATISM.

That is to say: That answer to the question is most likely to be true Which WILL WORK .

We cannot answer the question, “Why was I born?” by investigating Causes. The secrets of life are beyond us. The Creator will not be interviewed.

But we can select an answer by noting RESULTS. For instance:

“I was made in order that I might get all the pleasure possible out of        life.” This solution means wreckage. Its fallacy is proved by insane hospitals, feeble-minded asylums, and by those murders, adulteries, and heartbreaks that constantly attend the end of the pleasure seeker.

“I was made in order that I might escape this evil world and get safely into a better one after death.” Such an answer leads logically to the asceticism that marked the dark ages and the hard morbidity that characterized Puritanism.

“I was born to labor for others” means a race of slaves.

“I was born to live and to enjoy myself upon the fruits of others’ labor”  means a class of snobs .

The most satisfactory answer, in twentieth century terms, is: “I was born to express what forces my Creator planted in me; to develop my instincts and talents under the   guidance of reason; to find permanent happiness by fostering the higher, more altruistic, and spirit impulses and by subduing the violence of the more brutal impulses. I was born to find love and my own work, and through these liberty. In one word the purpose of creating me was that I should be as GREAT as possible.”

Only by this answer do we get strength without cruelty, virtue without narrowness, love without contamination, reverence without superstition, joy without excess.

I do not know this answer is correct. I believe it to be the most NEARLY correct for the simple reason that IT WORKS .

 

Why Didn’t I Just say—?

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(It’s the hardest word for many of us to say and we often regret not having the courage to say it.  Failing to say it gets us into all kinds of good and bad situations.  Dr. Frank Crane suggests we think more than we do when we say—-)

NO

No is next to the shortest word in the English language.

It is the concentrated Declaration of Independence of the human soul.

It is the central citadel of character, and can remain impregnable forever.

It is the only path to reformation.

It is the steam-gauge of strength, the barometer of temperament, the electric indicator of moral force.

It is an automatic safety-first device.

It has saved more women than all the knights of chivalry.

It has kept millions or young men from going over the Niagara Falls of drunkenness, profligality, and passion.

It is the updrawn portcullis and barred gate of the castle of self-respect.

It is the dragon that guards beauty’s tower.

It is the high fence that preserves the innocence of the innocent.

It is the thick wall of the home, keeping the father from folly, the mother from indiscretion, the boys from ruin, and the girls from shame.

It is the one word you can always say when you can’t think of anything else.

It is the one answer that needs no explanation.

The mule is the surest footed and most dependable of all domestic animals. No is the mule-power of the soul.

Say it and mean it.

Say it and look your man in the eye.

Say it and don’t hesitate.

A good round No is the most effective of known shells from the human howitzer.

In the great parliament of life the Noes have it.

The value of any Yes you utter is measured by the number of Noes banked behind it.

Live your own life. Make your own resolutions. Mark out your own program. Aim at your own work. Determine your own conduct. And plant all around those an impregnable hedge of Noes, with the jaggedest, sharpest thorns that grow.

The No-man progresses under his own steam. He is not led about and pushed around by officious tugboats.

The woman who can say No carries the very best insurance against the fires, tornadoes, earthquakes, and accidents that threaten womankind.

Be soft and gentle as you please outwardly, but let the centre of your soul be a No, as hard as steel.