Talks to teachers on psychology : and to students on some of life's ideals / by William James.

  • William James
Date:
1899
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Talks to teachers on psychology : and to students on some of life's ideals / by William James. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, Harvard Medical School.

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    solid. No life like poverty could so get one to the heart of things and make men know their meaning, could so let us feel life and the world with all the soft cushions stripped off and thrown away. . . . Poverty makes men come very near each other, and recognize each other's human hearts; and poverty, highest and best of all, de- mands and cries out for faith in God. ... I know how superficial and unfeeling, how like mere mockery, words in praise of poverty may seem. . . . But I am sure that the poor man's dignity and freedom, his self-respect and energy, depend upon his cordial knowledge that his poverty is a true region and kind of life, with its own chances of character, its own springs of happiness and reve- lations of God. Let him resist the characterless- ness which often come with being poor. Let him insist on respecting the condition where he lives. Let him learn to love it, so that by and by, [if] he grows rich, he shall go out of the low door of the old familiar poverty with a true pang of regret, and with a true honor for the narrow home in which he has lived so long. * The barrenness and ignobleness of the more usual laborer's life consist in the fact that it is ♦Sermons, 5th Series, New York, 1893, pp. 166,167.