Your Business as Thinkers

By: Oliver Wendell Holmes

Right from the beginning, Holmes throws a philosophical question: What is all this to my soul?What have you said to show that I can reach my own spiritual possibilities through such a door as this? Here, of course, the door can be likened to becoming a lawyer. Holmes seems to be asking, what or how does becoming a lawyer then make one spiritually fulfilled? If one is a lawyer… what now? How does a laborious study of a dry and technical systemmake out of life? Holmes says that to some, these questions may appear to be unanswerable, but he believes that there is actually an answer.

For Holmes, the law is not the place for the artist or the poet. Instead, the law is the calling of thinkers. However, even this is his stand, he says that a man may live greatly in the law as well as elsewhere, where elsewhere may be where a man can find his own happiness. He says that if the universe is one universe, it does not matter very much what that fact is.Only men do not see how one fact leads to another. Basically, Holmes is saying that the path of one man can only be realized by that particular man after walking through his own self-paved path. Holmes then says, your business as thinkers is to make plainer the way from the thing to the whole of things; to show the rational connection between your fact and the frame of the universe. If the path one chooses is law, then it would cover subjects such as anthropology, political economy, ethics, and such. If one’s path is another, other subjects will be given focused and mastery on. One’s focus is not only on one subject, but also on other related subjects. Holmes exclaims that to know anything, you must know all. (What a great idea)

Holmes moves on by saying that he aspires for a future where ideals will be on the dignified acceptance of life, rather than aspiration and the passion for achievement, which he says is yet to come. He says the for generations now, the aspirations have not changed, particularly that barbaric thirst for conquest. Although this is his ideal future, he says that the road to it is not easy. No result is easy which is worth having. Education starts when what is called one’s education is over, where one starts to work for results which is not yet to be seen, and one that cannot be predicted. To achieve this, he says, one must be both a hero as well as an idealist. Only these can one find the secret isolated joy of the thinker, who knows that, a hundred years after he is dead and forgotten, men who never heard of him will be moving to the measure of his thought – the subtile rapture of a postpones power, which the world knows not because it has not external trappings, but which to his prophetic vision is more real than that which commands an army.