The Two Approaches to Life

The land of heart's desire is a place in which no man desires what he cannot have and each man can have what he desires. There have been great differences of opinion among men as to how they could best enter this happy land.

If they thought their natural impulses were by way of being lecherous, greedy, and cruel, they have accepted some form of the classical and Christian doctrine that man must subdue his naive impulses, and by reason, grace, or renunciation, transform his will. If they thought that man was naturally innocent and good, they have accepted some one of the many variants of liberalism, and concerned themselves not with the reform of desire but with the provision of opportunities for its fulfillment.

There are differences of emphasis among liberals, but they all accept the same premise, which is that if only external circumstances are favorable the internal life of man will adjust itself successfully. So completely does this theory of human nature dominate the field of contemporary thought that modern men are rarely reminded, and then only by those whom it is the fashion to ignore, that they are challenging the testimony not merely of their maiden aunts, but of all the greatest teachers of wisdom. Yet if the modern man is an optimist on the subject of his impulses, the reason is to be found less in his own self-confidence than in his distrust of men and in his intoxication over things.

Owing to the dissolution of the ancestral order he has learned to distrust those who exercise authority. Owing to the progress of science he has acquired an unbounded confidence in his capacity to create desirable objects. He is so rebellious and so constructive that he has still to ask himself whether the free and naive pursuit of desirable objects can really produce a desirable world. Yet in all the books of wisdom that is the question which confronts him. There it is written in many languages and in the idiom of many different cultures that if man is to find happiness, he must reconstruct not merely his world, but, first of all, himself.

Is this wisdom dead and done with, or has it a bearing upon the deep uneasiness of the modern man? The answer depends upon what we must conceive to be the nature of man.