The Five Great Philosophies of Life. William de Witt Hyde
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of simple food that keeps him in perfect condition; and no enticements of sweetmeats or stimulants will divert him from the simplicity in which the most permanent pleasure is found. To eat cake and candy between meals, to sip tea at all hours, no less than to drink whiskey to the point of intoxication, are sins against the simplicity of the true Epicurean regimen.
The Epicurean will not lose an hour of needed sleep nor tolerate such an abomination as an alarm clock in his house. If he permits himself to be awakened in the morning, it will be as Thomas B. Reed used to when, as a student at Bowdoin College, he was obliged to be in chapel at six o'clock. He had the janitor call him at half-past four, in order that he might have the luxury of feeling that he had another whole hour in which to sleep, and then call him again at the last moment which would permit him to dress in time for chapel.
These things, however, we may for the most part take for granted. We do not require a philosopher to regulate our diet for us; or to put us to bed at night, and tuck us in, and hear us say our prayers. Those elementary lessons were doubtless needed in the childhood of the race. The selection from Spencer on work and play strikes closer to the problem of the modern man; and it is at this point that we all sorely need to go to school to Epicurus. Perhaps we are inclined to look down on Epicurus's ideal as a low one. Well, if it is a low ideal, it is all the more disgraceful to fall below it. And most of us do fall below it every day of our tense and restless lives. Let us test ourselves by this ideal, and answer honestly the questions it puts to us.
How many of us are slaving all day and late into the night to add artificial superfluities to the simple necessities? How many of us know how to stop working when it begins to encroach upon our health; and to cut off anxiety and worry altogether? How many of us measure the amount and intensity of our toil by our physical strength; doing what we can do healthfully, cheerfully, joyously, and leaving the rest undone, instead of straining up to the highest notch of nervous tension during early manhood and womanhood, only to break down when the life forces begin to turn against us? Every man in any position of responsibility and influence has opportunity to do the work of twenty men. How many of us in such circumstances choose the one thing we can do best, and leave the other nineteen for other people to do, or else to remain undone? How many of us have ever seriously stopped to think where the limit of healthful effort and endurance lies, unless insomnia or dyspepsia or nervous prostration have laid their heavy hands upon us and compelled us to pause? Every breakdown from avoidable causes, every stroke of work we do after the border-land of exhaustion and nervous strain is crossed, is a crime against the teaching of Epicurus; and these diseases that beset our modern business life are the penalties with which nature visits us in vindication of the wisdom of his teachings. Every day that we work beyond our strength; every hour that we spend in consequent exhaustion and depression; every minute that we give over to worrying about things beyond our immediate control, we either fall below, or else rise above, Epicurus's level.
If we rise above him, to serve higher ideals, conscious of the sacrifice we make, and clear about the superior ends we gain thereby, then we may be forgiven. What some of those higher ideals are we shall have occasion to consider later. But to work ourselves into depression, disease, and pain, for no better reason than to get high mark in some rank-book or other, to gratify somebody's false vanity, to get together a little more gold than we can spend wisely or our children can inherit without enervation, to live in a bigger house than our neighbour has or we can afford to take care of—to work for such ends as these beyond the point where work is healthy and happy, is to commit a sin which neither Epicurus nor Nature will forgive. With the people who have risen above Epicurus, and are deliberately sacrificing to some extent the Epicurean to one of the higher ideals, as I have said, we have no quarrel; for them we have only hearty commendation. We do not ask the mother whose child is dangerously sick, the statesman in a political crisis, the artist when the conception of his great work comes over him, to heed for the time being the limits of strength and the conditions of completest health. All we ask of them is that later on, when the child has recovered, when the crisis is past, when the picture is painted, they shall reverently and humbly pay to Epicurus, or to Nature whom he represents, the penalty for their sin, by a corresponding period of complete rest and relaxation. We must bear strain at times; and Nature will forgive us if we do not take it too often. But we must not bunch our strains. We must not pass from one strain to another, and another, without periods of relaxation between. We must not let the attitude of strain become chronic, and develop into a moral tetanus, which keeps us forever on the rack of exertion from sheer restless inability to sit down and enjoy ourselves.
What we take from excessive work Epicurus would bid us add to needed play. Play is an arrangement by which we get artificially, in highly concentrated form, the pleasure which in ordinary life is diffused over long periods, and attainable only in attenuated form. Play puts the great fundamental pleasures of the race at the disposal of the individual.
Foot-ball, for instance, gives the student of to-day the essential joy in combat of his barbarian ancestors, with the modern field-marshal's delight in subtle tragedy thrown in. Base-ball gives the intense zest that comes of speed, accuracy, and cunning exercised in emergencies. Golf, in milder form, gives us the pleasure that comes of accuracy of aim and calculation of conditions in good company and in the open air. Billiards give to the clerk cramped all day over his desk the joy of a delicate touch which otherwise would be the exclusive property of his artisan brother. The various games of cards give the mechanic and the housewife a taste at evening of the eager interests that fill the banker's and the broker's days. Checkers and chess give to the humblest in their homes some touch of the pleasures of the general and admiral. Dancing carries to the limit of orderly expression that delight in the person and presence of the opposite sex which otherwise would have to be postponed until youth was able to assume the more serious responsibilities of permanent relationships. Sailing, tramping, camping out, hunting, fishing, mountain climbing, are all devices for bringing into the lives of studious, strenuous, city people the elemental pleasures which otherwise would be the monopoly of sailors, fishermen, foresters, and explorers. Swimming, skating, bicycle riding, driving a horse or an automobile, all give the keen joy that comes of the mastery of graceful and forceful motion.
The theatre, which embodies so distinctively the peculiar essence of play that its performances have appropriated the name, takes us in a couple of hours through the epitomised experience of many persons extending over many years in circumstances far removed from our individual lives. Poetry, novels, biographies, histories, painting, music, and all the forms of art perform for us this same function. They take us out of our local and temporal situation, and let us live in other days and other lands, in other customs and costumes; and so enormously widen the world of experience we imaginatively make our own. Besides in all the forms of play and art the ends are made artificially simple, the means are made supernaturally accessible; so that instead of toiling for years in doubt of results as in actual work, we experience in play, and witness in artistic representation, the whole process of selecting materials and moulding them to a successful issue in a few minutes, or a few hours at most. All this reacts upon our power to prosecute with confidence the remoter ends, and marshal the more obdurate means of real work. It expands and limbers our capacity to subordinate means to ends and find delight in the process as well as in the outcome. Hence a man who goes a year without a considerable period given over to play, or a week without at least one or two solid periods of it, or lets many days go by without any play whatever, is selling his birthright of personality for a mess of pottage. Psychology and pedagogy are recognising the important function of play in the development of personality as never before. Professor Baldwin, in his "Social and Ethical Interpretations," sums up the functions of play in these words: "In the education of the individual for his life-work in a network of social relationships play is a most important form of organic exercise—a most important method of realisation of the social instincts; gives flexibility of mind and body with self-control; gives constant opportunity for imitative learning and invention, and is the experimental verification of the benefits and pleasures of united action."
III
THE EPICUREAN PRICE OF HAPPINESS
Whoever contracts his work and expands his play, on Epicurean principles, will of course have common sense enough to cut off hurry and worry altogether. Both are sheer waste and wantonness—the