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Title: When a Man Comes to Himself
Author: Woodrow Wilson
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When a Man Comes to Himself
Woodrow Wilson
Ph.D., Litt.D., LL.D.
President of the United States
1901.I
It is a very wholesome and regenerating change which a man undergoes
when he “comes to himself.” It is not only after periods of
recklessness or infatuation, when has played the spendthrift or the
fool, that a man comes to comes to himself. He comes to himself
after experiences of which he alone may be aware: when he has left
off being wholly preoccupied with his own powers and interests and
with every petty plan that centers in himself; when he has cleared
his eyes to see the world as it is, and his own true place and
function in it.
It is a process of disillusionment. The scales have fallen away.
He sees himself soberly, and knows under what conditions his powers
must act, as well as what his powers are. He has got rid of earlier
prepossessions about the world of men and affairs, both those which
were too favorable and those which were too unfavorable—both those
of the nursery and those of a young man’s reading. He has learned
his own paces, or, at any rate, is in a fair way to learn them; has
found his footing and the true nature of the “going” he must look
for in the world; over what sorts of roads he must expect to make
his running, and at what expenditure of effort; whither his goal
lies, and what cheer he may expect by the way. It is a process of
disillusionment, but it disheartens no soundly made man. It brings
him into a light which guides instead of deceiving him; a light
which does not make the way look cold to any man whose eyes are fit
for use in the open, but which shines wholesomely, rather upon the
obvious path, like the honest rays of the frank sun, and makes
traveling both safe and cheerful.
II
There is no fixed time in a man’s life at which he comes to himself,
and some man never come to themselves at all. It is a change
reserved for the thoroughly sane and healthy, and for those who can
detach themselves from tasks and drudgery long and often enough to
get, at any rate once and again, a view of the proportions of life
and of the stage and plot of its action. We speak often with
amusement, sometimes with distaste and uneasiness, of men who “have
no sense of humor,” who take themselves too seriously, who are
intense, self-absorbed, over-confident in matters of opinion, or
else go plumed with conceit, proud of we cannot tell what, enjoying,
appreciating, thinking of nothing so much as themselves. These are
men who have not suffered that wholesome change. They have not come
to themselves. If they be serious men, and real forces in the
world, we may conclude that they have been too much and too long
absorbed; that their tasks and responsibilities long ago rose about
them like a flood, and have kept them swimming with sturdy stroke
the years through, their eyes level with the troubled surface—no
horizon in sight, no passing fleets, no comrades but those who
struggled in the flood like themselves. If they be frivolous,
light-headed, men without purpose or achievement, we may conjecture,
if we do not know, that they were born so, or spoiled by fortune, or
befuddled by self-indulgence. It is no great matter what we think
of them.
It is enough to know that there are some laws which govern a man’s
awakening to know himself and the right part to play. A man is the
part he plays among his fellows. He is not isolated; he cannot be.
His life is made up of the relations he bears to others—is made or
marred by those relations, guided by them, judged by them, expressed
in them. There is nothing else upon which he can spend his spirit—
nothing else that we can see. It is by these he gets his spiritual
growth; it is by these we see his character revealed, his purpose
and his gifts. Some play with a certain natural passion, an
unstudied directness, without grace, without modulation, with no
study of the masters or consciousness of the pervading spirit of the
plot; others gives all their thought to their costume and think only
of the audience; a few act as those who have mastered the secrets of
a serious art, with deliberate subordination of themselves to the
great end and motive of the play, spending themselves like good
servants, indulging no wilfulness, obtruding no eccentricity,
lending heart and tone and gesture to the perfect progress of the
action. These have “found themselves,” and have all the ease of a
perfect adjustment.
Adjustment is exactly what a man gains when he comes to himself.
Some men gain it late, some early; some get it all at once, as if by
one distinct act of deliberate accommodation; others get it by
degrees and quite imperceptibly. No doubt to most men it comes by
slow processes of experience—at each stage of life a little. A
college man feels the first shock of it at graduation, when the
boy’s life has been lived out and the man’s life suddenly begins.
He has measured himself with boys; he knows their code and feels the
spur of their ideals of achievement. But what the expects of him he
has yet to find out, and it works, when he has discovered, a
veritable revolution in his ways both of thought and of action. He
finds a new sort of fitness demanded of him, executive, thorough-going, careful of details, full of drudgery and obedience to orders.
Everybody is ahead of him. Just now he was a senior, at the top of
the world he knows and reigned in, a finished product and pattern of
good form. Of a sudden he is a novice again, as green as in his
first school year, studying a thing that seems to have no rules—at
sea amid crosswinds, and a bit seasick withal. Presently, if he be
made of stuff that will shake into shape and fitness, he settles to
his tasks and is comfortable. He has come to himself: understands
what capacity is, and what it is meant for; sees that his training
was not for ornament or personal gratification, but to teach him how
to use himself and develop faculties worth using. Henceforth there
is a zest in action, and he loves to see his strokes tell.
The same thing happens to the lad come from the farm into the city,
a big and novel field, where crowds rush and jostle, and a rustic
boy must stand puzzled for a little how to use his placid and
unjaded strength. It happens, too, though in a deeper and more
subtle way, to the man who marries for love, if the love be true and
fit for foul weather. Mr. Bagehot used to say that a bachelor was
“an amateur at life,” and wit and wisdom are married in the jest. A
man who lives only for himself has not begun to live—has yet to
learn his use, and his real pleasure, too, in the world. It is not
necessary he should marry to find himself out, but it is necessary
he should love. Men have come to themselves serving their mothers
with an unselfish devotion, or their sisters, or a cause for whose
sake they forsook ease and left off thinking of themselves. If is
unselfish action, growing slowly into the high habit of devotion,
and at last, it may be, into a sort of consecration, that teaches a
man the wide meaning of his life, and makes of him a steady
professional in living, if the motive be not necessity, but love.
Necessity may make a mere drudge of a man, and no mere drudge ever
made a professional of himself; that demands a higher spirit and a
finer incentive than his.
III
Surely a man has come to himself only when he has found the best
that is in him, and has satisfied his heart with the highest
achievement he is fit for. It is only then that he knows of what he
is capable and what his heart demands. And, assuredly, no
thoughtful man ever came to the end of his life, and had time and
a little space of calm from which to look back upon it, who did not
know and acknowledge that it was what he had done unselfishly and
for others, and nothing else, that satisfied him in the retrospect,
and made him feel that he had played the man. That alone seems to
him the real measure of himself, the real standard of his manhood.
And so men grow by having responsibility laid upon them, the burden
of other people’s business. Their powers are put out at interest,
and they get usury in kind. They are like men multiplied.
Each counts manifold. Men who live with an eye only upon what is
their own are dwarfed beside them—seem fractions while they are
integers. The trustworthiness of men trusted seems often to grow
with the trust.
It is for this reason that men are in love with power and greatness:
it affords them so pleasurable an expansion of faculty, so large a
run for their minds, an exercise of spirit so various and
refreshing; they have the freedom of so wide a tract of the world of
affairs. But if they use power only for their own ends, if there be
no unselfish service in it, if its object be only their personal
aggrandizement, their love to see other men tools in their hands,
they go out of the world small, disquieted, beggared, no enlargement
of soul vouchsafed them, no usury of satisfaction. They have added
nothing to themselves. Mental and physical powers alike grow by
use, as every one knows; but labor
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