Principles
I have often reproached myself that principles have done so little for me. It is not that I have not got any. I have been for years familiar with all the wisest and noblest principles which are to be found in philosophical and religious books from the time of Moses downwards. Nor is it a failing of mine that I have not the courage or strength to apply principles. I am weak as other men are, and liable to yield to temptation; but this is not my main difficulty; my trouble is that I never know how to apply my principles. Take a case: It is true that every man ought to be satisfied with the limitations of his own nature. He ought not to repine that he cannot write poems or carve statues. The principle is of some service when the question is of poems or statues; but I should be equally helped without it, for the most uncultivated of mortals is not so foolish as to be melancholy because he cannot fly. At other times, when I most need assistance, and call upon this principle to aid me, I am all adrift. I am placed in such a position, for example, that it is my duty to exercise control over somebody below me. I ought to tell him that he is going wrong and put him right, but I feel that I cannot, and that he is too strong for me. This may be mere conquerable cowardice, or it may be that in this direction I am as limited as I am in relation to poems or statues. I do not know. When I have done what I think I can do, am I to sit down contented and say I can do no more, or am I to listen to a voice which forever prompts me and whispers, “All you can do you have not done?”
During the major portion of my life I am the victim of antagonisms, and each opposing force seems able to plead equal justification. This, however, is the system on which the world is built. It is a mistake to expect a principle to be anything else than abstract. An act is concrete, and that means that it is something in which oppositions find their solution and lie in repose. This, it will be said, leaves us just where we were and gives us no assistance. It is a just criticism. Man is man because he possesses the proud prerogative of actualising the abstract. He is not its fool. In each deed he does he has to be aware of two poles, and say, “Between them, doing justice to both, I fix this deed so.” Instead of two poles there may be a dozen or more, not exactly poles, but divergent or opposite pulls. The richer the nature is, the more there will be of them; the stronger the nature, the more perfect will be the harmony in which they will all meet in external life.
To know principles, although at first it seems as if the consciousness of them is of no service to us, is really an enormous benefit. The more we have, if we have only the gift to manage them, the more real and less shadowy shall we be. Let it ever be remembered that the reality of an act or of a man is in exact proportion to the number of principles which lie in that man or act, and that the single abstract is unreality, unsubstantiality, uselessness. Let us not be cast down at our difficulties. Let us rejoice rather at the exalted, the divine task that is imposed on us. Man is the very top of the creation, the express image of the Creator, because at every moment of his life he resolves abstracts into realities.
The curse of every truth is that a counterfeit of it always waits on it, and is its greatest enemy. What is this which I have said but the mere commonplace that we must never go too far, and that compromise is the rule of life. But between my doctrine and this commonplace there is a great difference. The commonplace teaches that no principle is ultimately efficacious; that it is to be trusted to a certain arbitrary point, and beyond that it somehow ceases to be valid. The truth, on the other hand, is that every principle is efficacious up to the uttermost, and that faith in it is never to be abandoned. The compromise comes of imbecility or impotence, and is essentially contrary to the concrete reconciliation of abstracts.
It is difficult to separate morals from wisdom, and in fact no clear line of demarcation is possible; but perhaps we may say that in morals a single clear principle is more distinctly supreme than in wisdom. Morality is the region of the abstract. It is mercifully provided that that which is of the most importance to us in the conduct of life should be under the dominion of the abstract, and therefore be plain to everybody. There is no wit necessary in order to
