How to be happy though human / by W. Béran Wolfe.
171/400

important problem of values. If you have been troubled with a doubt about the whence and the whither and the why of human existence—and there is hardly a man or woman who has not at some time f^ced this problem— it may encourage you to know that these problems are not soluble for the very reason that human thought is one of the tools to help us in our adjustment, and is not suited, and never will be suited, for the examination of the reason or purpose of our existence. The Misuse of Mind When you use your thought processes, which were designed to help you build your house, find your mate, choose your vocation, or escape your enemies, to investigate the origin of time and space or the beginning of life, the possibility of immortality or reincarnation, or if you use your brain in an attempt to determine whether the hen preceded the egg, or whether man was created before woman, or to solve any other similarly fatuous and vain riddle, you are prostituting your thought to a false end. The architect does not build his house with the draughting pencil with which he drew up the plans. You cannot pave a street with a darning needle, and you cannot dig a trench with a surgeon’s scalpel. Neither can you answer the riddles of the cosmos, using human thought as a tool. To misuse thought to these ends is to divorce it from its one and only true purpose, the adjust¬ ment of man to the vicissitudes of life on this planet. As we showed in a previous chapter, the moment you make a goal out of an instrument you not only destroy the tool but also paralyse the original function which the tool might have served. We live because we are alive, and living is the one and only goal of life. Those who are afraid to live the full and good life often attempt to cloak their own cowardice with an immature cynicism that deprecates life in its entirety. The shabby, we might almost say obscene, spectacle of man, so puny, so impotent, so stupid that