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Title: When a Man Comes to Himself

Author: Woodrow Wilson

Release Date: February, 2004 [EBook #5078]

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[This file was first posted on April 16, 2002]

Edition: 10

Language: English

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When a Man Comes to Himself

Woodrow Wilson

Ph.D., Litt.D., LL.D.

President of the United States

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