Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: LECTURE III AN UNFRIGHTENED HOPE IF we were asked what we considered to be the supremest motive in life, the motive which does actually exercise the largest control over human conduct, what would our answer be? A generation ago men would have answered glibly enough:
The desire for happiness. That was then supposed to be the one commanding motive of mankind. But it was not long before the answer seemed unsatisfactory and indefinite, because what brings happiness to one man brings misery to another, or what a man thinks will delight him in the end disappoints and such experiences issue in confusion. It was ethically indiscriminate also. The same motive covered moral contradictions, and men wanted some more consistent answer to the question. Nowadays those who look despondently at life often say in reply:
Avarice, ?the desire for wealth. Or, those who look a little more deeply say it is not money, but the power that money represents that men desire, and that their real motive is to acquire sources of influence and control. Some who look at life more hopefully are likely to reply:
Love orfriendship. That is the thesis of one of the noblest books of our generation, written by the late Dr. Henry Clay Trumbull, entitled
Friendship, the Master Passion. Doctor Trumbull told me once that when he first began the work on this theme he spoke about it to his friend Charles Dudley Warner, who said:
Trumbull, you cannot prove that thesis. After the book was done, Doctor Trumbull took the book to him and asked if he would read it. He read it, gave it back, saying:
Well, Trumbull, you have shown that it is true, after all. And that is a lovely view to take of life: that the motive that lies deeper than any other, and that really in the actual conduct of men and women is the …