A Preface to Morals > Chapter IX. The Insight of Humanism > The Passage Into Maturity
The critical phase of human experience, then, is the passage from childhood to maturity; the critical question is whether childish habits and expectations are to persist or to be transformed.
We grow older. But it is by no means certain that we shall grow up. The human character is a complicated thing, and its elements do not necessarily march in step. It is possible to be a sage in some things and a child in others, to be at once precocious and retarded, to be shrewd and foolish, serene and irritable. For some parts of our personalities may well be more mature than others; not infrequently we participate in the enterprises of an adult with the mood and manners of a child.
The successful passage into maturity depends, therefore, on a breaking up and reconstruction of those habits which were appropriate only to our earliest experience.
In a certain larger sense this is the essence of education. For unless a man has acquired the character of an adult, he is a lost soul no matter how good his technical equipment. The world unhappily contains many such lost souls. They are often in high places, men trained to manipulate the machinery of civilization, but utterly incapable of handling their own purposes in any civilized fashion. For their purposes are merely the relics of an infancy when their wishes were law, and they knew neither necessity nor change.
When a childish disposition is carried over into an adult environment the result is a radically false valuation of that environment. The symptoms are fairly evident. They may appear as a disposition to feel that everything which happens to a man has an intentional relation to himself; life becomes a kind of conspiracy to make him happy or to make him miserable. In either case it is thought to be deeply concerned with his destiny. The childish pattern appears also as a deep sense that life owes him something, that somehow it is the duty of the universe to look after him, and to listen sharply when he speaks to it. The notion that the universe is full of purposes utterly unknown to him, utterly indifferent to him, is as outrageous to one who is imperfectly matured as would be the conduct of a mother who forgot to give a hungry child its lunch. The childish pattern appears also as a disposition to believe that he may reach out for anything in sight and take it, and that having gotten it nobody must ever under any circumstances take it away. Death and decay are, therefore, almost an insult, a kind of mischief in the nature of things, which ought not to be there, and would not be there, if everything only behaved as good little boys believe it should. There is indeed authority for the belief that we are all being punished for the naughtiness of our first grandmother; that work and trouble and death would not really be there to plague us but for her unhappy transgression; that by rights we ought to live in paradise and have everything we want for ever and ever.
Here, too, is the source of that common complaint of the world-weary that they are tired of their pleasures. They have what they yearned for; yet having it they are depressed at finding that they do not care. Their inability to enjoy what they can have is the obverse of the desire to possess the unattainable: both are due to carrying over the expectations of youth into adult life. They find themselves in a world unlike the world of their youth; they themselves are no longer youths. But they retain the criteria of youth, and with them measure the world and their own deserts.
Here, too, is the origin of the apparent paradox that as men grow older they grow wiser but sadder. It is not a paradox at all if we remember that this wisdom which makes them sadder is, after all, an incompleted wisdom. They have grown wiser as to the character of the world, wiser too about their own powers, but they remain naive as to what they may expect of the world and themselves. The expectations which they formed in their youth persist as deeply ingrained habits to worry them in their maturity. They are only partially matured; they have become only partially wise. They have acquired skill and information, but the parts of them which are adult are embedded in other parts of their natures which are childish. For men do not necessarily mature altogether and in unison; they learn to do this and that more easily than they learn what to like and what to reject, intelligence is often more completely educated than desire; our outward behavior has an appearance of being grown up which our inner vanities and hopes, our dim but powerful cravings, often belie. In a word, we learn the arts and the sciences long before we learn philosophy.
If we ask ourselves what is this wisdom which experience forces upon us, the answer must be that we discover the world is differently constituted than we had supposed it to be. It is not that we learn more about its physical elements, or its geography, or the variety, of its inhabitants, or the ways in which human society is governed. Knowledge of this sort can be taught to a child without in any fundamental way disturbing his childishness. In fact, all of us are aware that we once knew a great many things which we have since forgotten. The essential discovery of maturity has little if anything to do with information about the names, the locations, and tile sequences of facts; it is the acquiring of a different sense of life, a different kind of intuition about the nature of things.
A boy can take you into the open at night and show you the stars; he might tell you no end of things about them, conceivably all that an astronomer could teach. But until and unless he feels the vast indifference of the universe to his own fate, and has placed himself in the perspective of cold and illimitable space, he has not looked maturely at the heavens. Until he has felt this, and unless he can endure this, he remains a child, and in his childishness he will resent the heavens when they are not accommodating. He will demand sunshine when he wishes to play, and rain when the ground is dry, and he will look upon storms as anger directed at him, and the thunder as a personal threat.
The discovery that our wishes have little or no authority in the world brings with it experience of the necessity that is in the nature of things. The lesson of this experience is one from which we shrink: and to which few ever wholly accommodate themselves. The world of the child is a kind of enchanted island. The labor that went into procuring his food, his clothes, his toys, is wholly invisible at first. His earliest expectations are, therefore, that somehow the Lord will provide. Only gradually does the truth come home to him how much effort it takes to satisfy. It takes even longer for him to understand that not only does he not get what he wants by asking for it but he cannot be sure to get what he wants by working for it. It is not easy to accept the knowledge that desire, that prayer, that effort can be and often are frustrated, that in the nature of things there is much fumbling, trial and error, deadlock and defeat.
The sense of evil is acquired late; by many persons it is never acquired at all. Children suffer, and childhood is by no means so unreservedly happy as some make it out to be. But childish suffering is not inherently tragic. It is not stamped with the irrevocability which the adult feels to be part of the essence of evil. Evil for the child is something which can be explained away, made up for, done away with. Pretentious philosophies have been built on this fancy purporting somehow to absorb the evil of the world in an all-embracing goodness, as a child's tears are dried by its mother's kisses. The discovery that there is evil which is as genuine as goodness, that there is ugliness and violence which are no less real than joy and love, is one of those discoveries that the adult is forced somehow to accept in his valuation of experience.
And then there is the knowledge, which only experience can give, that everything changes and that everything comes to an end. It is possible to tell a child about mortality, but to realize it he must live long enough to experience it. This knowledge does not come from words; it comes in feeling, in the feeling that he himself is older, in the death of kin and friends, in seeing well-known objects wear out, in discarding old things, in awakening to the sense that there is a whole new generation in the world which looks upon him as old. There is an intimation of immortality in our youth because we have not yet had experience of mortality. The persons and the things which surround us seem eternal because we have known them too briefly to realize that they change. We have seen neither their beginning nor their end.
In the last analysis we have no right to say that the world of youth is an illusion. For the child it is a true picture of the world in that it corresponds to, and is justified in, his experience. If he did not have to grow older, it would be quite sufficient because nothing in his experience would contradict it. Our sense of life as we mature is quite different, but there is no reason to think that it has any absolute finality. Perhaps if we lived several hundred years we should acquire a wholly different sense of life, compared with which all our adult philosophy would seem quite callow.
The child's sense of life can be called an illusion only if it is carried over into manhood, for then it ceases to fit his experience and to be justified by events. The habits formed in a childish environment become progressively unworkable and contradictory as the youth is thrust out from the protection of his family into an adult environment. Then the infantile conviction that his wants will somehow be met collides with the fact that he must provide for himself. The world begins to seem out of joint. The child's notion that things are to be had for the asking becomes a vast confusion in which words are treated as laws, and rhetoric as action. The childish belief that each of us is the center of an adoring and solicitous universe becomes the source of endless disappointments because we cannot reconcile what we feel is due us with what we must resign ourselves to. The sense of the unreality of evil, which our earliest experience seemed to justify, becomes a deep preference for not knowing the truth, an habitual desire to think of the world as we should prefer it to be; out of this rebellion against truth, out of this determination that the facts shall conform to our wishes, are born all manner of bigotry and uncharitableness. The child's sense that things do not end, that they are there forever, becomes, once it is carried over into maturity, a vain and anxious effort to possess things forever. The incapacity to realize that the objects of desire will last only a little while makes us put an extravagant value upon them, and to care for them, not as they are and for what they can actually give us, but for what we foolishly insist they ought to be and ought always to give us.
The child's philosophy rests upon the assumption that the world outside is in gear with his own appetites. For this reason an adult with a childish character will ascribe an authority to his appetites which may easily land him in fanaticism or frustration, in a crazy indulgence or a miserable starvation. And to the environment he will ascribe a willingness to conform to him, a capacity to be owned by him, which land him in all sorts of delusions of grandeur. Only the extreme cases are in the asylums. The world is full of semi-adult persons who secretly nurse the notion that they are, or that by rights they ought to be, Don Juan, Croesus, Napoleon, or the Messiah.
They have brought with them the notion that they are still as intimately attached to nature and to society as the child is to its household. The adult has to break this attachment to persons and things. His world does not permit him to remain fused with it, but compels him to stand away from things. For things no longer obey his wishes. And therefore he cannot let his wishes become too deeply involved in things. He can no longer count on possessing whatever he may happen to want. And therefore he must learn to want what he can possess. He can no longer hold forever the things at which he grasps; for they change, and slip away. And therefore he must learn to hold on to things which do not slip away and change, to hold on to things not by grasping them, but by understanding them and by remembering them. Then he is wholly an adult. Then he has conquered mortality in the only way mortal men can conquer it. For he has ceased to expect anything of the world which it cannot give, and he has learned to love it under the only aspect in which it is eternal.