Idealism

YOUTH, MATURITY, AND IDEALISM

(by Albert Schweizer, Memoirs of Childhood and Youth published in 1924)

The epithet “ripe” applied to persons always did, and does still, convey to me the idea of something depressing. I hear with it, like musical discords, the words, impoverishment, stunted growth, blunted feelings. What we are usually invited to contemplate as “ripeness” in a man is the resigning of ourselves to an almost exclusive use of the reason. One acquires it by copying others and getting rid, one by one, of the thoughts and convictions which were dear in the days of one’s youth. We believed once in the victory of truth; but we do not now. We believed in goodness; we do not now. We were zealous for justice; but we are not so now. We trusted in the power of kindness and peaceableness; we do not now. We were capable of enthusiasm; but we are not so now. To get through the shoals and storms of life more easily we have lightened our craft, throwing overboard what we thought could be spared. But it was really our stock of food and drink of which we deprived ourselves; our craft is now easier to manage, but we ourselves are in a decline.

I listened, in my youth, to conversations between grown-up people through which there breathed a tone of sorrowful regret which oppressed the heart. The speakers looked back at the idealism and capacity for enthusiasm of their youth as something precious to which they ought to have held fast, and yet at the same time they regarded it as almost a law of nature that no one should be able to do so. This woke in me a dread of having ever, even once, to look back on my own past with such a feeling; I resolved never to let myself become subject to this tragic domination of mere reason, and what I thus vowed in almost boyish defiance I have tried to carry out. (Memoirs of Childhood and Youth, pp. 97 ff.)

The ripeness that our development must aim at is one which makes us simpler, more truthful, purer, more peace-loving, meeker, kinder, more sympathetic. That is the only way in which we are to sober down with age. That is the process in which the soft iron of youthful idealism hardens into the steel of a full-grown idealism which can never be lost. (Memoirs of Childhood and Youth, p. 100.)

It is through the idealism of youth that man catches sight of truth, and in that idealism he possesses a wealth which he must never exchange for anything else. We must all be prepared to find that life tries to take from us our belief in the good and the true, and our enthusiasm for them, but we need not surrender them. That ideals, when they are brought into contact with reality, are usually crushed by facts does not mean that they are bound from the very beginning to capitulate to the facts, but merely that our ideals are not strong enough; and they are not strong enough because they are not pure and strong and stable enough in ourselves. (Memoirs of Childhood and Youth, pp. 99 f.)

The power of ideals is incalculable. We see no power in a drop of water. But let it get into a crack in the rock and be turned to ice, and it splits the rock; turned into steam, it drives the pistons of the most powerful engines. Something has happened to it which makes active and effective the power that is latent in it.

So it is with ideals. Ideals are thoughts. So long as they exist merely as thoughts, the power latent in them remains ineffective, however great the enthusiasm, and however strong the conviction with which the thought is held. Their power only becomes effective when they are taken up into some refined human personality. (Memoirs of Childhood and Youth, p. 100.)

The knowledge of life which we grownups have to pass on to the younger generation will not be expressed thus: “Reality will soon give way before your ideals,” but “Grow into your ideals, so that life can never rob you of them.” If all of us could become what we were at fourteen, what a different place the world would be! (Memoirs of Childhood and Youth, p. 102.)

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