How to be happy though human / by W. Béran Wolfe.
122/400
- Publication/creation
- London : George Routledge, 1932.
- Physical description
- xiv, 374 pages ; 22 cm
- Contributors
- Wolfe, W. Béran 1900-1935.
- Notes
-
This edition was reprinted in 1933, 1934, 1935, 1937, 1942, 1944, 1945, 1946 and 1948.
Copy 1 Note: 1937 reprint. X158203
- Attribution and usage
-
Wellcome Collection
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The image contains the following text:
tool thus becomes an end in itself. This confusion of
means, and tools, for purposes, ends, or goals, results in
the nullification of the original purpose and the elevation
of the tool or means into a secondary end.
Examples of this tendency of the means to annihilate
and replace the end are common in nature. Consider the
dinosaur. His vital goal was to keep alive and propagate
his species. The tools he chose from nature’s arsenal
were protective armour of heavy plates and scales. He
added scale after horny scale until he was the best
armoured animal that ever walked the earth. He became
so heavily armoured that he could hardly walk through
the lush swamps of a prehistoric age, much less make
love or fight against the obstacles of existence. Finally,
his armour became so heavy that he sank helplessly in
the marshes, and drowned. When tools are substituted
for the goals which they are designed to serve, they
annihilate those goals. The armour designed to preserve
the dinosaur killed him in the end, when it was substituted
for his true purpose to maintain his life.
The same may be said about thought. Thought is a
biological tool which nature has given man to help him
solve the problems of his existence. When thought
breaks loose from man’s tool chest, and becomes an
independent end in itself, it sets itself impossible problems
to solve. We misuse thought when we attempt to solve
the insoluble, and eternally futile, problem, the precedence
of the hen or the egg, or the equally futile problem of
the beginning of time. “ Why are we here ? ”, “ Where
are we going ? ”, “ Does immortality exist ? ”, and
similar questions are examples of the senseless quandaries
that mortals make for themselves when they divorce the
tool, thought, from its sole purpose, adjustment to
reality.
One of the most potent sources of human unhappiness
originates in this misuse of thought and thinking. There
are enough immediate problems in the world to occupy
all the time of all the thinkers everywhere, without
wasting time on metaphysics. When you see a human