The speaker's most valuable possession is personality--that indefinable,

imponderable something which sums up what we are, and makes us different from

others; that distinctive force of self which operates appreciably on those whose

lives we touch. It is personality alone that makes us long for higher things.

Rob us of our sense of individual life, with its gains and losses, its duties

and joys, and we grovel. "Few human creatures," says John Stuart Mill, "would

consent to be changed into any of the lower animals for a promise of the fullest

allowance of a beast's pleasures; no intelligent human being would consent to be

a fool, no instructed person would be an ignoramus, no person of feeling and

conscience would be selfish and base, even though he should be persuaded that

the fool, or the dunce, or the rascal is better satisfied with his lot than they

with theirs.... It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig

satisfied, better to be a Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. And if

the fool or the pig is of a different opinion, it is only because they know only

their own side of the question. The other party to the comparison knows both

sides."

 

Now it is precisely because the Socrates type of person lives on the plan of

right thinking and restrained feeling and willing that he prefers his state to

that of the animal. All that a man is, all his happiness, his sorrow, his

achievements, his failures, his magnetism, his weakness, all are in an amazingly

large measure the direct results of his thinking. Thought and heart combine to

produce _right_ thinking: "As a man thinketh in his heart so is he." As he does

not think in his heart so he can never become.