02/25/2025
The Scottish Rite Cathedral in StL was completed within a few months of this old building in PH. I wanted to know what the Masons were talking about during this time, so I read through the ceremony. I found this speech given in StL when the Scottish Rite was opened. This speech could be given today, just like it was 100 years ago.
"Mankind has two chief interests around which most every one of his activities through life, center. In the first place, he is interested in himself. In the second place, he is interested in his group or association to which he belongs. Few things in life go beyond those two major interests.
Man comes in the world as a separate and distinct individual, and he retains that personality to the end. Whatever else he may become, he always remains an individual with an interest in that individual, with a service and duty distinct to protect and save himself as an individual. He comes with a heritage, a heritage of instinct and impulse, things which he can do without instruction. We do not need to teach a baby to suckle; neither could we keep him from learning to walk unless, perhaps, we physically band up his limbs by force so that he could not walk. And so far, many hundred things, we do them without instruction. We are bound to do them, part of our native equipment, physically and mentally instinctive and inherited.
Now, these particular instincts are necessary for our preservation and our lives, and yet they cannot be exercised without restraint, control, and training. It is important that they be improved by practice until they become habits. If our instincts cannot be trained into useful habits so that we may perform necessary functions of life and living immediately, automatically, accurately, and without conscious thought, our minds would not be free for those greater activities which have made man the crown of God’s creation.
Then, our instincts must be transformed and restrained and made over into habits, and our habits, in turn, must be controlled and restrained. So, we do not teach a baby to eat, we must teach him that he does not eat too much and that he does not eat the wrong things; else a diet of marbles and feathers and pins and other things which come within the grasp of his searching fingers, shall ruin his digestion or cost him his life.
Now, in life, we learn by experience that some things are not to be done. So, our instincts and our habits are purified for our service, by our sad experiences, or the experiences of others.
In addition to our instincts and our habits, we are also equipped with emotions: rage, fear, hate, jealousy, envy and love, courage and ambition, and all the things making up the stirring fields of life. And these emotions, all of them essential to our welfare; but some more essential than others. They, in turn, must be controlled and restrained and trained so that they may serve the purpose of useful living and make us into better men.
We must train our emotions so that they will be our servants in the tasks of life and not our masters, controlling our passions and regulating our lives according to the ideals that we believe to be necessary. And more than that, man is possessed of a superior intelligence by means of which he recognizes the necessity of the control of instinct, of habit, and of motion, and by means of which he selects those instincts, habits and emotions which shall be most valuable to himself and to mankind. It is this superior intelligence which enables us to pick out the things that we ought to do and determine a course which will bring us to their fulfillment. Beyond intelligence, lies rationality, reason, our ability to take facts and principles and discover new ones and apply those discovered by ourselves or others, enabling the abstract decision which formulates itself into a practical application to the affairs of life.
These elements – instincts, habits, emotions, intelligence and reason – they are by no means separate in life. They are mixed up in a great formula that makes the seething inside of us that is a man. They are interrelated and dependent, each combining with another resulting in many thousands of combinations, all making up the sum total of our conscious.
In general, the instincts, habits, and emotions enable us to adapt ourselves to the environment into which we come. Just as an animal born under and condition instinctively adapts himself to the conditions which make life possible. So, our instincts, habits, and emotional reactions in the man have for their purpose and result in the fact that we can go along in this world, in the environment in which we are placed.
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Dynamic space, universal events. We have two spaces and can accommodate any type of event. Max = 200
