The Biggest Lesson Life Has Taught Me

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 388, 23 June 1928, Page 23

The Biggest Lesson Life Has Taught Me

] D f/ic notni my opinion, firmly held at. that time. J .relist thinks that Tolerance ts perhaps ■ greatest lesson to be learned in this that I had learnt the great lesson. th* v world.

■IT is not so easy to sum I up the great lessons of I life in a phrase, and the j attempt almost invari- ’ ably results in arriving at a restatement of the wisdom of some great teseber of the past. Nevertheless, there remains always [lie personal element to be taken into account. Mankind is very various. We 3r e born with different tendencies, different failings, and we have to learn different methods of adaptation. So *liat life has taught me may perhaps be pest understood by considering my personal case. I was born in a period of hard-and-fast, passionately held opinions. In ,he last quarter of the 19th cenutry ,be country parsonage that was my first experience of this world represented a very bigoted society. My parents were intensely Conservative and low church, and I was brought up to believe that anyone who did not think as we did was either a fool or a villain. Outside the Pale Gladstone was a villain because he wanted to disestablish the Welsh Church. Bradlaugh only a fool, because in his frank avowal of atheism he was being, in our opinion, merely absurd. And, speaking generally, all free-thinkers and radicals were outside the pale of decent society. Following the general rule—though there are many exceptions to it —of reaction against a creed too sternly imposed from without, I changed my opinions about many of these early dogmas when I came to think for myself. In politics I became a Radical, in religion an agnostic, and particularly I became intensely curious about all that side of science which had been withheld from me in my youth. But although X thus changed my opinions, I cannot say that I changed my attitude. As a Radical and agnostic, I was quite as intolerant as I had been before. The number of "villains” in my world had certainly decreased, but the number of "fools” had been added to. And looking back now, I see that it 1 bad remained for the rest of my life in that second phase of reaction, I should have been deceived in

The Principal Lesson But whether because of some constitutional ambition to go on learning, or because the circumstances of my life prevented me from crystalising, I did not remain at that phase. And when a man has held directly contradictory opinions and failed to continue in them, he is almost bound to admit that intolerance of the opinions of others is, to say the least of it, illogical. So by degrees the villains practically disappeared from my world, and most of the fools with them. By that time I was well in sight of the principal lesson life bad to teach me, which, put in two words, might be written, “Make allowances.” Stated in those terms, this may seem to be a very simple rule of life, but in my experience there are few people who even attempt to apply it. When anyone annoys us by criticism, disagreement, or, it may be, by direct insult, the last thing we think of is to make allowance for their temperament, circumstances or education. What we instantly and passionately desire is the affirmation and asseveration of our own point of view; never an intelligent, much less a sympathetic, understanding of the point of view of our critic. And Its Application This is. of course, essentially illogical. To insult the man who has just insulted you is to imitate his fault. To defend ourselves on the ground that it is only "human nature” is to beg the same question. And I, for one, am not proud of heing the slave of various savage impulses that are so euphemistically disguised by the description “human nature.” The applications of my little lesson have, moreover, a far wider scope than in the little day-to-day relations with our own acquaintances. I have lived in France for four years, and have come to some sort of understanding of what we call "racial antagonisms.” The French cannot understand us, nor we them, because neither side ever attempts to make allowance for the difference in blood and training. And from failures of that kind ai’ise most of the suspicions and ill-faith that may finally set two nations drifting into the horrors of war. To make allowances for one’s fellowcreatures, in short, indicates the attempt to understand them, and I rather think that that is the greatest lesson life can teach any one of us.