Self Help by Samuel Smiles (desktop ebook reader txt) 📖

>thoughts, and to be the passive recipient of their impressions of

things, but to enlarge our individual intelligence, and render us

more useful and efficient workers in the sphere of life to which we

may be called. Many of our most energetic and useful workers have

been but sparing readers. Brindley and Stephenson did not learn to

read and write until they reached manhood, and yet they did great

works and lived manly lives; John Hunter could barely read or write

when he was twenty years old, though he could make tables and

chairs with any carpenter in the trade. “I never read,” said the

great physiologist when lecturing before his class; “this”—

pointing to some part of the subject before him—“this is the work

that you must study if you wish to become eminent in your

profession.” When told that one of his contemporaries had charged

him with being ignorant of the dead languages, he said, “I would

undertake to teach him that on the dead body which he never knew in

any language, dead or living.”

 

It is not then how much a man may know, that is of importance, but

the end and purpose for which he knows it. The object of knowledge

should be to mature wisdom and improve character, to render us

better, happier, and more useful; more benevolent, more energetic,

and more efficient in the pursuit of every high purpose in life.

“When people once fall into the habit of admiring and encouraging

ability as such, without reference to moral character—and

religious and political opinions are the concrete form of moral

character—they are on the highway to all sorts of degradation.”

{30} We must ourselves BE and DO, and not rest satisfied merely

with reading and meditating over what other men have been and done.

Our best light must be made life, and our best thought action. At

least we ought to be able to say, as Richter did, “I have made as

much out of myself as could be made of the stuff, and no man should

require more;” for it is every man’s duty to discipline and guide

himself, with God’s help, according to his responsibilities and the

faculties with which he has been endowed.

 

Self-discipline and self-control are the beginnings of practical

wisdom; and these must have their root in self-respect. Hope

springs from it—hope, which is the companion of power, and the

mother of success; for whoso hopes strongly has within him the gift

of miracles. The humblest may say, “To respect myself, to develop

myself—this is my true duty in life. An integral and responsible

part of the great system of society, I owe it to society and to its

Author not to degrade or destroy either my body, mind, or

instincts. On the contrary, I am bound to the best of my power to

give to those parts of my constitution the highest degree of

perfection possible. I am not only to suppress the evil, but to

evoke the good elements in my nature. And as I respect myself, so

am I equally bound to respect others, as they on their part are

bound to respect me.” Hence mutual respect, justice, and order, of

which law becomes the written record and guarantee.

 

Self-respect is the noblest garment with which a man may clothe

himself—the most elevating feeling with which the mind can be

inspired. One of Pythagoras’s wisest maxims, in his ‘Golden

Verses,’ is that with which he enjoins the pupil to “reverence

himself.” Borne up by this high idea, he will not defile his body

by sensuality, nor his mind by servile thoughts. This sentiment,

carried into daily life, will be found at the root of all the

virtues—cleanliness, sobriety, chastity, morality, and religion.

“The pious and just honouring of ourselves,” said Milton, may be

thought the radical moisture and fountain-head from whence every

laudable and worthy enterprise issues forth.” To think meanly of

one’s self, is to sink in one’s own estimation as well as in the

estimation of others. And as the thoughts are, so will the acts

be. Man cannot aspire if he look down; if he will rise, he must

look up. The very humblest may be sustained by the proper

indulgence of this feeling. Poverty itself may be lifted and

lighted up by self-respect; and it is truly a noble sight to see a

poor man hold himself upright amidst his temptations, and refuse to

demean himself by low actions.

 

One way in which self-culture may be degraded is by regarding it

too exclusively as a means of “getting on.” Viewed in this light,

it is unquestionable that education is one of the best investments

of time and labour. In any line of life, intelligence will enable

a man to adapt himself more readily to circumstances, suggest

improved methods of working, and render him more apt, skilled and

effective in all respects. He who works with his head as well as

his hands, will come to look at his business with a clearer eye;

and he will become conscious of increasing power—perhaps the most

cheering consciousness the human mind can cherish. The power of

self-help will gradually grow; and in proportion to a man’s self-respect, will he be armed against the temptation of low

indulgences. Society and its action will be regarded with quite a

new interest, his sympathies will widen and enlarge, and he will

thus be attracted to work for others as well as for himself.

 

Self-culture may not, however, end in eminence, as in the numerous

instances above cited. The great majority of men, in all times,

however enlightened, must necessarily be engaged in the ordinary

avocations of industry; and no degree of culture which can be

conferred upon the community at large will ever enable them—even

were it desirable, which it is not—to get rid of the daily work of

society, which must be done. But this, we think, may also be

accomplished. We can elevate the condition of labour by allying it

to noble thoughts, which confer a grace upon the lowliest as well

as the highest rank. For no matter how poor or humble a man may

be, the great thinker of this and other days may come in and sit

down with him, and be his companion for the time, though his

dwelling be the meanest hut. It is thus that the habit of well-directed reading may become a source of the greatest pleasure and

self-improvement, and exercise a gentle coercion, with the most

beneficial results, over the whole tenour of a man’s character and

conduct. And even though self-culture may not bring wealth, it

will at all events give one the companionship of elevated thoughts.

A nobleman once contemptuously asked of a sage, “What have you got

by all your philosophy?” “At least I have got society in myself,”

was the wise man’s reply.

 

But many are apt to feel despondent, and become discouraged in the

work of self-culture, because they do not “get on” in the world so

fast as they think they deserve to do. Having planted their acorn,

they expect to see it grow into an oak at once. They have perhaps

looked upon knowledge in the light of a marketable commodity, and

are consequently mortified because it does not sell as they

expected it would do. Mr. Tremenheere, in one of his ‘Education

Reports’ (for 1840-1), states that a schoolmaster in Norfolk,

finding his school rapidly falling off, made inquiry into the

cause, and ascertained that the reason given by the majority of the

parents for withdrawing their children was, that they had expected

“education was to make them better off than they were before,” but

that having found it had “done them no good,” they had taken their

children from school, and would give themselves no further trouble

about education!

 

The same low idea of self-culture is but too prevalent in other

classes, and is encouraged by the false views of life which are

always more or less current in society. But to regard self-culture

either as a means of getting past others in the world, or of

intellectual dissipation and amusement, rather than as a power to

elevate the character and expand the spiritual nature, is to place

it on a very low level. To use the words of Bacon, “Knowledge is

not a shop for profit or sale, but a rich storehouse for the glory

of the Creator and the relief of man’s estate.” It is doubtless

most honourable for a man to labour to elevate himself, and to

better his condition in society, but this is not to be done at the

sacrifice of himself. To make the mind the mere drudge of the

body, is putting it to a very servile use; and to go about whining

and bemoaning our pitiful lot because we fail in achieving that

success in life which, after all, depends rather upon habits of

industry and attention to business details than upon knowledge, is

the mark of a small, and often of a sour mind. Such a temper

cannot better be reproved than in the words of Robert Southey, who

thus wrote to a friend who sought his counsel: “I would give you

advice if it could be of use; but there is no curing those who

choose to be diseased. A good man and a wise man may at times be

angry with the world, at times grieved for it; but be sure no man

was ever discontented with the world if he did his duty in it. If

a man of education, who has health, eyes, hands, and leisure, wants

an object, it is only because God Almighty has bestowed all those

blessings upon a man who does not deserve them.”

 

Another way in which education may be prostituted is by employing

it as a mere means of intellectual dissipation and amusement. Many

are the ministers to this taste in our time. There is almost a

mania for frivolity and excitement, which exhibits itself in many

forms in our popular literature. To meet the public taste, our

books and periodicals must now be highly spiced, amusing, and

comic, not disdaining slang, and illustrative of breaches of all

laws, human and divine. Douglas Jerrold once observed of this

tendency, “I am convinced the world will get tired (at least I hope

so) of this eternal guffaw about all things. After all, life has

something serious in it. It cannot be all a comic history of

humanity. Some men would, I believe, write a Comic Sermon on the

Mount. Think of a Comic History of England, the drollery of

Alfred, the fun of Sir Thomas More, the farce of his daughter

begging the dead head and clasping it in her coffin on her bosom.

Surely the world will be sick of this blasphemy.” John Sterling,

in a like spirit, said:- “Periodicals and novels are to all in this

generation, but more especially to those whose minds are still

unformed and in the process of formation, a new and more effectual

substitute for the plagues of Egypt, vermin that corrupt the

wholesome waters and infest our chambers.”

 

As a rest from toil and a relaxation from graver pursuits, the

perusal of a well-written story, by a writer of genius, is a high

intellectual pleasure; and it is a description of literature to

which all classes of readers, old and young, are attracted as by a

powerful instinct; nor would we have any of them debarred from its

enjoyment in a reasonable degree. But to make it the exclusive

literary diet, as some do,—to devour the garbage with which the

shelves of circulating libraries are filled,—and to occupy the

greater portion of the leisure hours in studying the preposterous

pictures of human life which so many of them present, is worse than

waste of time: it is positively pernicious. The habitual novel-reader indulges