This is precisely the character of those
speculative systems which deny the reality of action and substitute
the idea for the deed; such a world does more than suffocate the
individual soul; it destroys the very meaning of life by robbing it of
moral order and meaning. The end of such a conception of the universe
is necessarily annihilation, and its mood is necessarily despair.
"How can a man come to know himself?" asked Goethe. "Never by
thinking, but by doing." Now, this knowledge of self in the large
sense is precisely the knowledge which ripens and clarifies us, which
gives us sanity, repose, and power. To know what is in humanity and
what life means to humanity, we must study humanity in its active, not
in its passive, moods; in the hours when it is doing, not thinking.
Sooner or later all its thinking which has any reality in it passes on
into action. The emotion, passion, thought, impulse, which never gets
beyond the subjective stage, dies before birth; and all those
philosophies which urge abstinence from action would cut the plant of
life at the root; they are, in the last analysis, pleas for suicide.
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