Causes Are People
？苏珊·科布斯 / Susan Cobbs
It has not been easy for me to meet this assignment. In the first place， I am not a very articulate person， and then one has so many beliefs， changing and fragmented and transitory beliefs—besides the ones most central to our lives. I have tried hard to pull out and put into words my most central beliefs. I hope that what I say won’t sound either too simple or too pious.
I know that it is my deep and fixed conviction that man has within him the force of good and the power to translate that force into life. For me， this means a pattern of life that makes personal relationships more important. A pattern that makes more beautiful and attractive the personal virtues： courage， humility， selflessness and love. I used to smile at my mother because the tears came so readily to her eyes when she heard or read of some incident that called out these virtues. I don’t smile any more because I find I have become more and more responsive in the same inconvenient way to the same kind of story.
And so I believe that I both can and must work to achieve the good that is in me. The words of Socrates keep coming back to me： “The unexamined life is not worth living.” By examination we can discover what is our good， and we can realize that knowledge of good means its achievement. I know that such self-examination has never been easy—Plato maintained that it was the soul’s eternal search. It seems to me peculiarly difficult now. In a period of such rapid material expansion and such wide spread conflicts， black and white have become gray and will not easily separate.
There is a belief which follows this. If I have the potential of the good life within me and the compulsion to express it， then it is a power and compulsion common to all men. What I must have for myself to conduct my search， all men must have： freedom of choice， faith in the power and the beneficent qualities of truth. What frightens me most today is the denial of these rights， because this can only come from the denial of what seems to me the essential nature of man. For if my conviction holds， man is more important than anything he has created and our great task is to bring back again into a subordinate position the monstrous superstructures of our society.