Old Burton, who wrote _The Anatomy of Melancholy_, well said:
“Men look to their tools; a painter will wash his pencils; a smith will look to his hammer, anvil, and forge; a husbandman will mend his plow-irons and grind his hatchet, if it be dull; a musician will string and unstring his lute; only scholars neglect that instrument, their brains and spirits I mean, which they daily use.”
Not scholars only, but all classes and conditions of men are guilty of this strange insanity. If the Duke of Westminster should offer to transfer to us his estates, we would rush with all conceivable speed to acquire our new potential possessions. We would go as with wings of an aeroplane to get the transaction accomplished before anything could occur to keep us from entering into our fortune. But here we are already within reach of a vastly better possession, of which we are strangely negligent. If it came to a choice between himself and his outward possessions, this duke who owns so much would not hesitate a minute which to prefer. If in a crisis of illness he could save himself by surrender of his goods, they would instantly go. “Give me health and a day,” Emerson said, “and I will make the pomp of emperors ridiculous.”
What we would do in a crisis we often fail to do when no crisis confronts us, and it is a fact that too often we miss and even squander that better possession, ourselves. The best way to win it and enjoy it is to cultivate those inner experiences and endowments which make us independent of external fortune. All Christ’s beatitudes attach to some inherent quality of life itself. The meek, the merciful, the pure, are “happy,” not because the external world conforms to their wishes, but because they have resources of life within themselves and have entered upon a way of life which continually opens out into more life and richer life. They have found a kind of Canaan that “comes” in continuous instalments.
One of the simplest ways to heighten the total value of life is to form a habit of appreciating the world we have here and now. It presents occasional inconveniences, no doubt, but think of the amazing donations which come to us: the tilting of the earth’s axis twenty-three and a half degrees to the ecliptic by which contrivance we have our seasons; the fact that the proportion of earth and water is just right to give us a fine balance of rain and sunshine; the extraordinary way in which the entire universe submits to our mathematics so that every movement of matter and every vibration of ether conforms to laws which we formulate; the accumulation and storage of fuel and motor power, with the prospect of even greater resources of energy to be had from the unoccupied space surrounding the earth. Then, again, it cannot be a matter of unconcern that there is such a wealth of beauty lavished upon us everywhere, waiting for us to enjoy it. There is here a strange fit between the outer and the inner. The more one draws upon the beauty of the world and enjoys it, so much the more does he increase his capacity to discover and enjoy beauty. Coal and oil may become exhausted, but beauty is inexhaustible. The only trouble is that we are so limited in our range of appreciation of it. We turn to cheaper values and miss so much of this free gift of loveliness.