What is Character?
Sister Nivedita
Character is latency. A person’s very being is the record of his whole past. This is the secret of the profound significance of history. The future cannot be different from the past, any more than a man’s body can be inherited from the ancestors of another.
But the future is not born of some portion only of the past. It is born and created and conditioned by the whole. This is what is really meant by the doctrine of Karma. The East, with its belief in reincarnation, has a wonderful instrument for the understanding and discrimination of life. It catches shades and tints of personality that others could not distinguish. In what the person is, it can read what he aspired to. In what he unconsciously does, it can see the past. The throne may often fall to the lot of one who was used to be a slave. But we may be sure that for deeply penetrating sight the monarch’s robes cannot conceal the lash-marks on his back. The serf may many times have been an emperor. The keen observer will not fail to note the ring of command in his voice, the eye of decision in a crisis, the flush of pride rising hot under insult.
The whole of a man is in his every act, however difficult to the world be the reading of the script. Noble longing is never vain. Lofty resolve is never wasted. Said the Swami Vivekananda in this very paper, “the great impulses are only the great concentrations transformed.’’ As the act is expression of the person, so is the life the expression of the character. And so is the character the key to the life. The only sequences that never fail are the spiritual truths.
“All that we are is the result of what we have thought.” Water rises to its own level, say the engineers, and what is true of water is as true of the mind of man. One step gained in mastery finds a million applications. As high as we have climbed on this mountain, so high shall we attain, without rest or hindrance, on every height whereon our feet shall be set. The man ruling an empire may be doing nothing more in reality than re-acting the part he played in the games of his childhood. A Wellington, in his babyhood, fights all the battles of the future with his wooden soldiers. Even so one who has once found the secret of unity will never rest, in any birth, till he has reached once more, through the material he finds about him there, as deep a view.
How marvellous are the potentialities of humanity! There is no man so mean or servile but hides within himself the possibility of the Infinite. The ultimate fact in the world is the individual, not power: the ultimate fact in the individual is God. Therefore let all men and women believe in themselves. To all men let us say—Be strong. Quit we like men. Work out that which works in you. Believe in yourselves. For he that asketh, receiveth; he that seeketh findeth, and to him that knocketh, it shall be opened. The whole past is in every one of us. At any moment may the Supreme Light shine through me. At any moment may my personal become the hand, the lips, of That Impersonal. Why then should I be weak, either in taking or in losing? Am I not the Infinite Itself? Of whom and of what should I be afraid? Henceforth do I cast aside pleading and prayer. Henceforth do I throw away all hope, all fear, all desire, all shame. Contented am I to be a person, and that alone. For I know that if I be not that, verily even the jewels of the king and robes of state shall not hide my shame, nor the rags of the beggar detract from the glory of my humanness, if I have it.