» Man as a Fighting Animal . lmm-anne.net

Man as a Fighting Animal

Gilbert and Anne discuss their teaching experiences, and their futures:

Gilbert had finally made up his mind that he was going to be a doctor.

“It’s a splendid profession,” he said enthusiastically. “A fellow has to fight something all through life… didn’t somebody once define man as a fighting animal?… and I want to fight disease and pain and ignorance… which are all members one of another. I want to do my share of honest, real work in the world, Anne… add a little to the sum of human knowledge that all the good men have been accumulating since it began. The folks who lived before me have done so much for me that I want to show my gratitude by doing something for the folks who will live after me. It seems to me that is the only way a fellow can get square with his obligations to the race.”

-Anne of Avonlea ch.7

The “somebody” who defined man as a fighting animal is George Santayana, a philosopher and a contemporary of Anne (or L. M. Montgomery.) defines his belief of “man as a fighting animal.”

1. Man is a fighting animal, his THOUGHTS are his banners and it is a failure of nerve in him if they are only thoughts.

2. All SPIRITUAL interests are supported by animal life.

3. The great difficulty in EDUCATION is to get experience out of ideas.

4. A creature without MEMORY cannot discover the PAST; one without EXPECTATION cannot conceive the FUTURE.

5. FANATICISM consists in REDOUBLING your efforts when you have forgotten your aim.

6. FRIENDSHIP, then, is an essentially open air and public bond, that neither grows out of the home nor tends to establish a new home. It feeds on adventure and discovery: The emotion of it is a truant emotion, the emotion of living FREELY, BOLDLY, even if not dangerously. But, again, in contrast to BROTHERLY LOVE, it is distinctly selective, personal, and exclusive: in this respect it resembles the passion of LOVE. They both excite the imagination, as brotherly love does not. But in FRIENDSHIP what excites the imagination is not the friendship itself, as in the case of FALLING IN LOVE, when the whole world becomes unimportant and an intruder, if only the love be returned. What fills the imagination of FRIENDS is the world, as a scene for action and an object of judgement; and the person of the FRIEND is distinguished and selected from all others because of exceptionally acceptable ways of acting, thinking, and feeling about other things or other persons. FRIENDSHIP is thus the UNION OF TWO FREELY RANGING SOULS THAT MEET BY CHANCE, RECOGNIZE AND PRIZE EACH OTHER< BUT REMAIN FREE.

7. The LOFTIEST edifice and the deepest FOUNDATIONS .

8. HAPPINESS is the only sanction of life; where HAPPINESS fails, existence remains a mad lamentable EXPERIMENT. For an IDEA ever to be FASHIONABLE is ominous, since it must afterwards be always old-fashioned.

9. The enterprise of LIFE, in its natural, animal, political forms is the basis of science and morality and the public arts: but it is utterly irreligious. Life is a spontaneous, crude, ignorant ambition; a blind self-assertion big with every sort of self-contradiction, agony, and crime. It is precisely that from which a veritable religion would come to redeem us. … . . . Great or small, recent or ancient, we living animals are all alike a TEMPORARY BROOD OF CHAOS. Our classic forms and our human arts are the flowers of some ? or planetary climate, scarcely attained before they are withered; and the knowledge of this predicament, in which life finds itself not by accident but just because it is LIFE, because it is a movement from the forgotten into the unforeseen, first opens to us the door to the eternal and founds the ULTIMATE RELIGION of THE SPIRIT upon the VERY VANITY OF THINGS.

10. The mass of MANKIND is divided into two classes, the Sancho Panzas who have a sense of REALITY, but no IDEALS< and the Don Quixotes with a sense for ideals, but mad.

11. SCEPTICISM is the chastity of the intellect, and it is shameful to surrender it too soon or to the first comer: There is nobility on preserving it coolly and proudly through long youth, until at last, in the ripasse of instinct and discretion, it can be safely exchanged for fidelity and happiness.

12. SCIENCE . . . is common knowledge extended and refined. Its validity is of the same order as that of ordinary perception, memory, and understanding. Its test is found like theirs, in actual imitation, which sometimes consists in perception and sometimes in intent. The flight of science is merely longer from perception to perception, and its deduction more accurate from meaning to meaning and from purpose to purpose.

13. A Child EDUCATED only at school is an uneducated child.