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Title: A way of life
An address to Yale students Sunday evening, April 20th, 1913
Author: Sir William Osler
Release date: March 6, 2024 [eBook #73116]
Most recently updated: October 28, 2024
Language: English
Original publication: London: Constable & Company, 1913
Credits: Al Haines
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A WAY OF LIFE ***
A WAY OF LIFE
_An Address to Yale Students
Sunday evening, April 20th, 1913_
By
WILLIAM OSLER
LONDON
CONSTABLE & COMPANY LTD.
1913
What each day needs that shall thou ask,
Each day will set its proper task.
_Goethe._
FELLOW STUDENTS--
Every man has a philosophy of life in thought, in word, or in deed,
worked out in himself unconsciously. In possession of the very best,
he may not know of its existence; with the very worst he may pride
himself as a paragon. As it grows with the growth it cannot be
taught to the young in formal lectures. What have bright eyes, red
blood, quick breath and taut muscles to do with philosophy? Did not
the great Stagirite say that young men were unfit students of
it?--they will hear as though they heard not, and to no profit. Why
then should I trouble you? Because I have a message that may be
helpful. It is not philosophical, nor is it strictly moral or
religious, one or other of which I was told my address should be, and
yet in a way it is all three. It is the oldest and the freshest, the
simplest and the most useful, so simple indeed is it that some of you
may turn away disappointed as was Naaman the Syrian when told to go
wash in Jordan and be clean. You know those composite tools, to be
bought for 50 cents, with one handle to fit a score or more of
instruments. The workmanship is usually bad, so bad, as a rule, that
you will not find an example in any good carpenter's shop; but the
boy has one, the chauffeur slips one into his box, and the sailor
into his kit, and there is one in the odds-and-ends drawer of the
pantry of every well-regulated family. It is simply a handy thing
about the house, to help over the many little difficulties of the
day. Of this sort of philosophy I wish to make you a present--a
handle to fit your life tools. Whether the workmanship is Sheffield
or shoddy, this helve will fit anything from a hatchet to a corkscrew.
My message is but a word, _a Way_, an easy expression of the
experience of a plain man whose life has never been worried by any
philosophy higher than that of the shepherd in _As You Like It_. I
wish to point out a path in which the wayfaring man, though a fool,
cannot err; not a system to be worked out painfully only to be
discarded, not a formal scheme, simply a habit as easy--or as
hard!--to adopt as any other habit, good or bad.
I
A few years ago a Xmas card went the rounds, with the legend "Life is
just one 'derned' thing after another," which, in more refined
language, is the same as saying "Life is a habit," a succession of
actions that become more or less automatic. This great truth, which
lies at the basis of all actions, muscular or psychic, is the
keystone of the teaching of Aristotle, to whom the formation of
habits was the basis of moral excellence. "In a word, habits of any
kind are the result of actions of the same kind; and so what we have
to do, is to give a certain character to these particular actions"
(_Ethics_). Lift a seven months old baby to his feet--see him tumble
on his nose. Do the same at twelve months--he walks. At two years
he runs. The muscles and the nervous system have acquired the habit.
One trial after another, one failure after another, has given him
power. Put your finger in a baby's mouth, and he sucks away in
blissful anticipation of a response to a mammalian habit millions of
years old. And we can deliberately train parts of our body to
perform complicated actions with unerring accuracy. Watch that
musician playing a difficult piece. Batteries, commutators,
multipliers, switches, wires innumerable control those nimble
fingers, the machinery of which may be set in motion as automatically
as in a pianola, the player all the time chatting as if he had
nothing to do in controlling the apparatus--habit again, the gradual
acquisition of power by long practice and at the expense of many
mistakes. The same great law reaches through mental and moral
states. "Character," which partakes of both, in Plutarch's words, is
"long-standing habit."
Now the way of life that I preach is a habit to be acquired gradually
by long and steady repetition. It is the practice of living for the
day only, and for the day's work, _Life in day-tight compartments_.
"Ah," I hear you say, "that is an easy matter, simple as Elisha's
advice!" Not as I shall urge it, in words which fail to express the
depth of my feelings as to its value. I started life in the best of
all environments--in a parsonage, one of nine children. A man who
has filled Chairs in four universities, has written a successful
book, and has been asked to lecture at Yale, is supposed popularly to
have brains of a special quality. A few of my intimate friends
really know the truth about me, as I know it! Mine, in good faith I
say it, are of the most mediocre character. But what about those
professorships, etc.? Just habit, a way of life, an outcome of the
day's work, the vital importance of which I wish to impress upon you
with all the force at my command.
Dr. Johnson remarked upon the trifling circumstances by which men's
lives are influenced, "not by an ascendant planet, a predominating
humour, but by the first book which they read, some early
conversation which they have heard, or some accident which excited
ardour and enthusiasm." This was my case in two particulars. I was
diverted to the Trinity College School, then at Weston, Ontario, by a
paragraph in the circular stating that the senior boys would go into
the drawing-room in the evenings, and learn to sing and dance--vocal
and pedal accomplishments for which I was never designed; but like
Saul seeking his asses, I found something more valuable, a man of the
White of Selborne type, who knew nature, and who knew how to get boys
interested in it.[1] The other happened in the summer of 1871, when
I was attending the Montreal General Hospital. Much worried as to
the future, partly about the final examination, partly as to what I
should do afterwards, I picked up a volume of Carlyle, and on the
page I opened there was the familiar sentence--"_Our main business is
not to see what lies dimly at a distance, but to do what lies clearly
at hand._" A commonplace sentiment enough, but it hit and stuck and
helped, and was the starting-point of a habit that has enabled me to
utilize to the full the single talent entrusted to me.
[1] The Rev. W. A. Johnson, the founder of the school.
II
The workers in Christ's vineyard were hired by the day; only for this
day are we to ask for our daily bread, and we are expressly bidden to
take no thought for the morrow. To the modern world these commands
have an Oriental savour, counsels of perfection akin to certain of
the Beatitudes, stimuli to aspiration, not to action. I am prepared
on the contrary to urge the literal acceptance of the advice, not in
the mood of Ecclesiastes--"Go to now, ye that say to-day or to-morrow
we will go into such a city, and continue there a year, and buy and
sell and get gain; whereas ye know not what shall be on the morrow";
not in the Epicurean spirit of Omar with his "jug of wine and Thou,"
but in the modernist spirit, as a way of life, a habit, a strong
enchantment, at once against the mysticism of the East and the
pessimism that too easily besets us. Change that hard saying
"Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof" into "the goodness
thereof," since the chief worries of life arise from the foolish
habit of looking before and after. As a patient with double vision
from some transient unequal action of the muscles of the eye finds
magical relief from well-adjusted glasses, so, returning to the clear
binocular vision of to-day, the over-anxious student finds peace when
he looks neither backward to the past nor forward to the future.
I stood on the bridge of one of the great liners, ploughing the ocean
at 25 knots. "She is alive," said my companion, "in every plate; a
huge monster with brain and nerves, an immense stomach, a wonderful
heart and lungs, and a splendid system of locomotion." Just at that
moment a signal sounded, and all over the ship the water-tight
compartments were closed. "Our chief factor of safety," said the
Captain. "In spite of the _Titanic_," I said. "Yes," he replied,
"in spite of the _Titanic_." Now each one of you is a much more
marvellous organization than the great liner, and bound on a longer
voyage. What I urge is that you so learn to control the machinery as
to live with "day-tight compartments" as the most certain way to
ensure safety on the voyage. Get on the bridge, and see that at
least the great bulkheads are in working order. Touch a button and
hear, at every level of your life, the iron doors shutting out the
Past--the dead yesterdays. Touch another and shut off, with a metal
curtain, the Future--the unborn to-morrows. Then you are safe,--safe
for to-day! Read the old story in the _Chambered Nautilus_, so
beautifully sung by Oliver Wendell Holmes, only change one line to
"Day after day beheld the silent toil." Shut off the past! Let the
dead past bury its dead. So easy to say, so hard to realize! The
truth is, the past haunts us like a shadow. To disregard it is not
easy. Those blue eyes of your grandmother, that weak chin of your
grandfather, have mental and moral counterparts in your make-up.
Generations of ancestors, brooding over "Providence, Foreknowledge,
Will and Fate--Fixed fate, free will, foreknowledge, absolute," may
have bred a New England conscience, morbidly sensitive, to heal which
some of you had rather sing the 51st Psalm than follow Christ into
the slums. Shut out the yesterdays, which have lighted fools the way
to dusty death, and have no concern for you personally, that is,
consciously. They are there all right, working daily in us, but so
are our livers and our stomachs. And the past, in its unconscious
action on our lives, should bother us as little as they do. The
petty annoyances, the real and fancied slights, the trivial mistakes,
the disappointments, the sins, the sorrows, even the joys--bury them
deep in the oblivion of each night. Ah! but it is just then that to
so many of us the ghosts of the past,
Night-riding Incubi
Troubling the fantasy,
come in troops, and pry open the eyelids, each one presenting a sin,
a sorrow, a regret. Bad enough in the old and seasoned, in the young
these demons of past sins may be a terrible affliction, and in
bitterness of heart many a one cries with Eugene Aram, "Oh God!
Could I so close my mind, and clasp it with a clasp." As a vaccine
against all morbid poisons left in the system by the infections of
yesterday, I offer "a way of life." "Undress," as George Herbert
says, "your soul at night," not by self-examination, but by shedding,
as you do your garments, the daily sins whether of omission or of
commission, and you will wake a free man, with a new life. To look
back, except on rare occasions for stock-taking, is to risk the fate
of Lot's wife. Many a man is handicapped in his course by a cursed
combination of retro- and intro-spection, the mistakes of yesterday
paralysing the efforts of to-day, the worries of the past hugged to
his destruction, and the worm Regret allowed to canker the very heart
of his life. To die daily, after the manner of St. Paul, ensures the
resurrection of a new man, who makes each day the epitome of a life.
III
The load of to-morrow, added to that of yesterday, carried to-day
makes the strongest falter. Shut off the future as tightly as the
past. No dreams, no visions, no delicious fantasies, no castles in
the air, with which, as the old song so truly says, "hearts are
broken, heads are turned." To youth, we are told, belongs the
future, but the wretched to-morrow that so plagues some of us has no
certainty, except through to-day. Who can tell what a day may bring
forth? Though its uncertainty is a proverb, a man may carry its
secret in the hollow of his hand. Make a pilgrimage to Hades with
Ulysses, draw the magic circle, perform the rites, and then ask
Tiresias the question. I have had the answer from his own lips. The
future is to-day,--there is no to-morrow! The day of a man's
salvation is _now_--the life of the present, of to-day, lived
earnestly, intently, without a forward-looking thought, is the only
insurance for the future. Let the limit of your horizon be a
twenty-four hour circle. On the title page of one of the great books
of science, the _Discours de la M├ęthode_ of Descartes (1637) is a
vignette showing a man digging in a garden with his face towards the
earth, on which rays of light are streaming from the heavens; beneath
is the legend "_Fac et Spera_." 'Tis a good attitude and a good
motto. Look heavenward, if you wish, but never to the horizon--that
way danger lies. Truth is not there, happiness is not there,
certainty is not there, but the falsehoods, the frauds, the
quackeries, the _ignes fatui_ which have deceived each
generation--all beckon from the horizon, and lure the men not content
to look for the truth and happiness that tumble out at their feet.
Once while at College climb a mountain-top, and get a general outlook
of the land, and make it the occasion perhaps of that careful
examination of yourself, that inquisition which Descartes urges every
man to hold once in a lifetime,--not oftener.
Waste of energy, mental distress, nervous worries dog the steps of a
man who is anxious about the future. Shut close, then, the great
fore and aft bulkheads, and prepare to cultivate the habit of a life
of Day-Tight Compartments. Do not be discouraged,--like every other
habit, the acquisition takes time, and the way is one you must find
for yourselves. I can only give general directions and
encouragement, in the hope that while the green years are on your
heads, you may have the courage to persist.
IV
Now, for the day itself! What first? Be your own daysman! and sigh
not with Job for any mysterious intermediary, but prepare to lay your
own firm hand upon the helm. Get into touch with the finite, and
grasp in full enjoyment that sense of capacity in a machine working
smoothly. Join the whole creation of animate things in a deep,
heartfelt joy that you are alive, that you see the sun, that you are
in this glorious earth which nature has made so beautiful, and which
is yours to conquer and to enjoy. Realise, in the words of Browning,
that "There's a world of capability for joy spread round about us,
meant for us, inviting us." What are the morning sensations?--for
they control the day. Some of us are congenitally unhappy during the
early hours; but the young man who feels on awakening that life is a
burden or a bore has been neglecting his machine, driving it too
hard, stoking the engines too much, or not cleaning out the ashes and
clinkers. Or he has been too much with the Lady Nicotine, or fooling
with Bacchus, or, worst of all, with the younger Aphrodite--all
"messengers of strong prevailment in unhardened youth." To have a
sweet outlook on life you must have a clean body. As I look on the
clear-cut, alert, earnest features, and the lithe, active forms of
our college men, I sometimes wonder whether or not Socrates and Plato
would find the race improved. I am sure they would love to look on
such a gathering as this. Make their ideal yours--the fair mind in
the fair body. The one cannot be sweet and clean without the other,
and you must realise, with Rabbi Ben Ezra, the great truth that flesh
and soul are mutually helpful. The morning outlook--which really
makes the day--is largely a question of a clean machine--of physical
morality in the wide sense of the term. "_C'est l'estomac qui fait
les heureux,_" as Voltaire says; no dyspeptic can have a sane outlook
on life; and a man whose bodily functions are impaired has a lowered
moral resistance. To keep the body fit is a help in keeping the mind
pure, and the sensations of the first few hours of the day are the
best test of its normal state. The clean tongue, the clear head, and
the bright eye are birth-rights of each day. Just as the late
Professor Marsh would diagnose an unknown animal from a single bone,
so can the day be predicted from the first waking hour. The start is
everything, as you well know, and to make a good start you must feel
fit. In the young, sensations of morning slackness come most often
from lack of control of the two primal instincts--biologic
habits--the one concerned with the preservation of the individual,
the other with the continuance of the species. Yale students should
by this time be models of dietetic propriety, but youth does not
always reck the rede of the teacher; and I dare say that here, as
elsewhere, careless habits of eating are responsible for much mental
disability. My own rule of life has been to cut out unsparingly any
article of diet that had the bad taste to disagree with me, or to
indicate in any way that it had abused the temporary hospitality of
the lodging which I had provided. To drink, nowadays, but few
students become addicted, but in every large body of men a few are to
be found whose incapacity for the day results from the morning
clogging of nocturnally-flushed tissues. As moderation is very hard
to reach, and as it has been abundantly shown that the best of mental
and physical work may be done without alcohol in any form, the safest
rule for the young man is that which I am sure most of you
follow--abstinence. A bitter enemy to the bright eye and the clear
brain of the early morning is tobacco when smoked to excess, as it is
now by a large majority of students. Watch it, test it, and if need
be, control it. That befogged, woolly sensation reaching from the
forehead to the occiput, that haziness of memory, that cold fish-like
eye, that furred tongue, and last week's taste in the mouth--too many
of you know them--I know them--they often come from too much tobacco.
The other primal instinct is the heavy burden of the flesh which
Nature puts on all of us to ensure a continuation of the species. To
drive Plato's team taxes the energies of the best of us. One of the
horses is a raging, untamed devil, who can only be brought into
subjection by hard fighting and severe training. This much you all
know as men: once the bit is between his teeth the black steed
Passion will take the white horse Reason with you and the chariot
rattling over the rocks to perdition.
With a fresh, sweet body you can start aright without those feelings
of inertia that so often, as Goethe says, make the morning's lazy
leisure usher in a useless day. Control of the mind as a working
machine, the adaptation in it of habit, so that its action becomes
almost as automatic as walking, is the end of education--and yet how
rarely reached! It can be accomplished with deliberation and repose,
never with hurry and worry. Realise how much time there is, how long
the day is. Realise that you have sixteen waking hours, three or
four of which at least should be devoted to making a silent conquest
of your mental machinery. Concentration, by which is grown gradually
the power to wrestle successfully with any subject, is the secret of
successful study. No mind however dull can escape the brightness
that comes from steady application. There is an old saying, "Youth
enjoyeth not, for haste"; but worse than this, the failure to
cultivate the power of peaceful concentration is the greatest single
cause of mental breakdown. Plato pities the young man who started at
such a pace that he never reached the goal. One of the saddest of
life's tragedies is the wreckage of the career of the young collegian
by hurry, hustle, bustle and tension--the human machine driven day
and night, as no sensible fellow would use his motor. Listen to the
words of a master in Israel, William James: "Neither the nature nor
the amount of our work is accountable for the frequency and severity
of our breakdowns, but their cause lies rather in those absurd
feelings of hurry and having no time, in that breathlessness and
tension, that anxiety of feature and that solicitude of results, that
lack of inner harmony and ease, in short, by which the work with us
is apt to be accompanied, and from which a European who would do the
same work would, nine out of ten times, be free." _Es bildet ein
Talent sich in der Stille_, but it need not be for all day. A few
hours out of the sixteen will suffice, only let them be hours of
daily dedication--in routine, in order and in system, and day by day
you will gain in power over the mental mechanism, just as the child
does over the spinal marrow in walking, or the musician over the
nerve centres. Aristotle somewhere says that the student who wins
out in the fight must be slow in his movements, with voice deep, and
slow speech, and he will not be worried over trifles which make
people speak in shrill tones and use rapid movements. Shut close in
hour-tight compartments, with the mind directed intensely upon the
subject in hand, you will acquire the capacity to do more and more,
you will get into training; and once the mental habit is established,
you are safe for life.
Concentration is an art of slow acquisition, but little by little the
mind is accustomed to habits of slow eating and careful digestion, by
which alone you escape the "mental dyspepsy" so graphically described
by Lowell in the _Fable for Critics_. Do not worry your brains about
that bugbear Efficiency, which, sought consciously and with effort,
is just one of those elusive qualities very apt to be missed. The
man's college output is never to be gauged at sight; all the world's
coarse thumb and finger may fail to plumb his most effective work,
the casting of the mental machinery of self-education, the true
preparation for a field larger than the college campus. Four or five
hours daily--it is not much to ask; but one day must tell another,
one week certify another, one month bear witness to another of the
same story, and you will acquire a habit by which the one-talent man
will earn a high interest, and by which the ten-talent man may at
least save his capital.
Steady work of this sort gives a man a sane outlook on the world. No
corrective so valuable to the weariness, the fever and the fret that
are so apt to wring the heart of the young. This is the talisman, as
George Herbert says,
The famous stone
That turneth all to gold,
and with which, to the eternally recurring question, What is Life?
you answer, I do not think--I act it; the only philosophy that brings
you in contact with its real values and enables you to grasp its
hidden meaning. Over the Slough of Despond, past Doubting Castle and
Giant Despair, with this talisman you may reach the Delectable
Mountains, and those Shepherds of the Mind--Knowledge, Experience,
Watchful and Sincere. Some of you may think this to be a miserable
Epicurean doctrine--no better than that so sweetly sung by Horace:--
Happy the man--and Happy he alone,
He who can call to-day his own,
He who secure within can say,
To-morrow, do thy worst--for I have lived to-day.
I do not care what you think, I am simply giving you a philosophy of
life that I have found helpful in my work, useful in my play. Walt
Whitman, whose physician I was for some years, never spoke to me much
of his poems, though occasionally he would make a quotation; but I
remember late one summer afternoon as we sat in the window of his
little house in Camden there passed a group of workmen whom he
greeted in his usual friendly way. And then he said: "Ah, the glory
of the day's work, whether with hand or brain! I have tried
To exalt the present and the real,
To teach the average man the glory of
his daily work or trade."
In this way of life each one of you may learn to drive the straight
furrow and so come to the true measure of a man.
V
With body and mind in training, what remains?
Do you remember that most touching of all incidents in Christ's
ministry, when the anxious ruler Nicodemus came by night, worried
lest the things that pertained to his everlasting peace were not a
part of his busy and successful life? Christ's message to him is His
message to the world--never more needed than at present: "Ye must be
born of the spirit." You wish to be with the leaders--as Yale men it
is your birthright--know the great souls that make up the moral
radium of the world. You must be born of their spirit, initiated
into their fraternity, whether of the spiritually-minded followers of
the Nazarene or of that larger company, elect from every nation, seen
by St. John.
Begin the day with Christ and His prayer--you need no other.
Creedless, with it you have religion; creed-stuffed, it will leaven
any theological dough in which you stick. As the soul is dyed by the
thoughts, let no day pass without contact with the best literature of
the world. Learn to know your Bible, though not perhaps as your
fathers did. In forming character and in shaping conduct, its touch
has still its ancient power. Of the kindred of Ram and sons of
Elihu, you should know its beauties and its strength. Fifteen or
twenty minutes day by day will give you fellowship with the great
minds of the race, and little by little as the years pass you extend
your friendship with the immortal dead. They will give you faith in
your own day. Listen while they speak to you of the fathers. But
each age has its own spirit and ideas, just as it has its own manners
and pleasures. You are right to believe that yours is the best
University, at its best period. Why should you look back to be
shocked at the frowsiness and dullness of the students of the
seventies or even of the nineties? And cast no thought forward, lest
you reach a period when you and yours will present to your successors
the same dowdiness of clothes and times. But while change is the
law, certain great ideas flow fresh through the ages, and control us
effectually as in the days of Pericles. Mankind, it has been said,
is always advancing, man is always the same. The love, hope, fear
and faith that make humanity, and the elemental passions of the human
heart, remain unchanged, and the secret of inspiration in any
literature is the capacity to touch the cord that vibrates in a
sympathy that knows nor time nor place.
The quiet life in day-tight compartments will help you to bear your
own and others' burdens with a light heart. Pay no heed to the
Batrachians who sit croaking idly by the stream. Life is a straight,
plain business, and the way is clear, blazed for you by generations
of strong men, into whose labours you enter and whose ideals must be
your inspiration. In my mind's eye I can see you twenty years
hence--resolute-eyed, broad-headed, smooth-faced men who are in the
world to make a success of life; but to whichever of the two great
types you belong, whether controlled by emotion or by reason, you
will need the leaven of their spirit, the only leaven potent enough
to avert that only too common Nemesis to which the Psalmist refers:
"He gave them their heart's desire, but sent leanness withal into
their souls."
I quoted Dr. Johnson's remark about the trivial things that
influence. Perhaps this slight word of mine may help some of you so
to number your days that you may apply your hearts unto wisdom.
WILLIAM BRENDON AND SON, LTD.
PRINTERS, PLYMOUTH
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