Читать книгу The Kernel and the Husk: Letters on Spiritual Christianity онлайн

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“By ‘failure,’ I do not mean that your theory will prevent you from getting on and making your way in the world, but that it will prevent you from operating on yourself and on mankind, so that you and they may do the work which you are intended to do. You say the business of a student of men is to be critical. I say that such a student is a mere pedant, a book-philosopher: but the scientific student of men is he who knows how to ‘work’ them: and those who have in the true sense of the term ‘worked’ men, have not been of the critical temperament which you eulogize, but often quite uncritical, wondrously uncritical, but full of a fervent faith in a high ideal of humanity, and in a destiny that would ultimately conform humanity to its ideal. If you aim at exerting no social ennobling influence of this kind, if you are content, while leading the life of a man of the world, to abide, spiritually speaking, in the cave of a recluse, then keep on your present course. Criticize men dispassionately to your heart’s content. Try to persuade yourself that you know them. But you will never succeed—you will never persuade even yourself that you have succeeded—in making a single human being the better for your influence.