Our Standard of Altitude by F W Boreham
A handwritten essay by F W Boreham which has lost page one and the last page/s.
…water passes; the river abides. The water is transitory; the river is permanent.
Similarly, a man’s feelings and adventures change from day-to-day; but he himself remains. Personality is the biggest thing about him; indeed, it is the biggest thing in the universe by far. As life proceeds, we do two things. We grow, and, in growing we grow upon ourselves. A child thinks everything colossal but himself. He despises his own diminutive stature. He feels himself to be a pygmy in the midst of titans. Every object appears tremendous; every person seems gigantic.
A few years later, the objects that so overawed him will no longer impress him. He has caught a glimpse of the splendour of those potentialities and prerogatives that are incidental to his own manhood. After all, the towers and spires that once tyrannised his fancy were made by men and could, by men, be destroyed. He no longer feels dwarfed by objects that once seemed terrific. In growing, he has grown upon himself.
Tell a child that the sun is a million times as big as the earth, and he will stare incredulously. Then tell him that he himself is a million times as big as the sun, and he will reply that now he knows that you are joking. But the second statement is as true as the first. The difference between Saturn and Jupiter is a difference in bulk – mere avoirdupois – but the difference between the boy and his brother is vital and fundamental. Each is endowed with consciousness and individuality; they differ radically, basically and differ to all eternity.
Pascal, the penetrating French metaphysician, used to say that, if the universe were to fall upon a little girl and crush her, she would be infinitely greater in her death than the universe in its victory; for she, in being crushed, would know that she was being crushed, whilst the huge, dumb, insensate universe, in crushing her, would be unconscious of its triumph. That spark of consciousness stamps man as being immeasurably greater than all the stellar systems that revolve around him.
When the world was young, the same thought was voiced by an ancient singer in cadences as lyrical as any which have since been written. ‘Lead me,’ he cried, ‘to the rock that is higher than I!’ Only a seer of most discerning insight would dream of employing such a standard of altitude. A child would say “higher than the house” or “higher than the steeple”; a youth would say “higher than the mountains” or “higher than the stars.” Only a man who had acquired some adequate realisation of the unutterable immensity of man would take himself as the utmost limit of loftiness.
The conception of that ancient seer has been expressed in…