Then, having _started_ right, one may have more confidence and assurance in taking the next step, which is the second thing connected with the will that I would radiate, viz.: I will to be good for something. What is the purpose, the object of life? What are we here for? To eat and drink, sleep and satisfy our appetites and then die like other mere animals who do the same thing? I don't believe it. I never did. As Browning puts it, a spark has disturbed my clod, and now I am discontented to remain a clod--a mere brute beast, living, as does the hog, merely for the satisfaction of my physical senses. I feel higher, nobler, worthier aspirations within me. John Muir, the great California Nature-lover, scientist, and poet, wrote when he was twenty-seven years old a letter in which he said:
A lifetime is so little a time that we die ere we get ready to live. I would like to go to college, but then I have to say to myself "you will die ere you can do anything else." I should like to invent useful machinery, but it comes "you do not wish to spend your lifetime among machines and you will die ere you can do anything else." I should like to study medicine that I might do my part in lessening human misery, but again it comes "you will die ere you are ready, or able to do so." How intensely I desire to be a Humboldt, but again the chilling answer is reiterated. But could we live a million years then how delightful to spend in perfect contentment so many thousand years in quiet study in college, so many amid the grateful din of machines, so many among human pain, so many thousands in the sweet study of Nature among the dingles and dells of Scotland, and all the other less important parts of our world.
Here were four noble and beautiful aspirations. 1. To go to college and learn more. 2. To invent useful machinery. 3. To study medicine that he might lessen human misery. 4. To be a Humboldt and explore the world for the enlightenment of mankind.
To go to college to have a good time (!)--save the mark--as some students do? I was once riding on a railway train going to Boston, and at New Haven twenty-seven young students got on board and every one drunk. Do you think Muir had anything of that kind in mind when he said he wanted to go to college? At one of the great universities of the West I was present when the students made a great uproar because the faculty had prohibited beer-wagons from coming upon the campus to deliver their wares at the "frat" houses. I have seen university "men" celebrating some baseball or other victory when the celebration has taken the form of a drunken and sensual orgy. Can you imagine a man like Muir ever having wanted to engage in such a disgraceful and degrading scene?