The making of character; some educational aspects of ethics

Front matter

CORNELL

UNIVERSITY

LIBRARY

PART I Congenital Endowment: its nature and treatment

It has been reserved for our democratic generation to give a new life to the fast perishing faith in pedigrees. It writes, it preaches, it talks, it thinks biologic- Heredity is" ally; and with the result among others that the generally idea of Heredity has been lodged beyond displacing in the mind even of the average man. Thus rooted it has its applications, and of these there are at any rate two which intimately concern the making of character.

One is that the old familiar metaphor of the pure white sheet of paper, so often in times past invoked in the interests of educational responsibility, must that'we'cannot now be decently and finally laid to rest. Psy- in Education chology knows nothing of absolute beginnings, beginning.* Everywhere its analysis strikes on existing preformations, and if the old metaphor is to survive at all, it must be by saying that the page of the youngest life is so far from being blank that it bears upon it characters in comparison with which the faded ink of palaeography is as recent history. So that, by general consensus, the first step towards the making of character is the recognition of beginnings that have been already made.

Hence, as further result, the growth of a new educational

motive. When a father knows that his boy

aifTdde'd'intl! inherits tendencies, none the less definite because

rest to educa- possibly hidden even from the eye of affection,

tional work. , . , . ,, .,., , rr<i

there is no loss of responsibihty here. There is the enhanced responsibility to be for ever on the watch, as there is with the gardener who watches his seedlings, or the farmer his stock. Just because none of them know what is going to happen, just because the tender plant, animal, child, may at any moment unfold unsuspected tendencies, so must there devolve upon those to whose care they are entrusted the obligation of an unintermitting watchfulness. It is in fact precisely this that imparts to education so much of its fascinating interest. Moulding the clay or hewing the block (well-worn metaphors !) is dull work in comparison. For education, and especially the education of character, would lose half its interest if, as some have fancied, education were everything. It is interesting just because it is not everything, because, in other words, the youngest child is already old in proclivities whose manifestation is often the first sign to us of their existence. Nor does either this responsibility or this interest limit Tendencies itself to our dealings with the young. Inherited may be in- tendencies, it is to be remembered, need by no

auhllfeh tiieir means appear all at once. Like the seeds of an manifestation hereditary malady, they may lie latent for many a year, and are none the less inherited though their manifestation is deferred. It is the source of many a surprise and many a disappointment. The "ugly duckling" becomes the swan : the cygnet too becomes the duck. And so it will continue to be, so long as these deferred instincts have to wait upon physiological development, upon favouring environment, or upon simple lapse of time, to bring them at last to light. It is difficult to set limits to this. There are cases of men who seem to develop in comparatively late life belated tastes — tastes for travel or society or art or sport — which persistently struggle through, though they may have been inhibited for half a lifetime. We are apt to caU such tastes acquired, attributing them to the influences of environment which have been so long at work before they make their appearance. Yet the proclivity may have been there from the first. We may at least suspect it was, because it often seems to survive much discouragement, and because we are often able when it appears to identify it as a family trait long hidden but revealed at last.

Thus far then, it may with confidence be said that the idea of heredity is practically fruitful. It brings this enhanced responsibility, and this added interest into all educational work.

It is another matter when we go beyond this, and ask if what is known about Heredity can justify hopes that we can ascertain, otherwise than by the Heredity furactual watching of those with whom we have ther suggests

, , , . . '11 . t^c value of a

to deal, what their congenital endowment is. knowledge of And we may reduce this question to its most stock and

^ ^ parentage.

practical terms by asking if it is of real moment

to study stock and parentage, in order that we may better

discern the endowment of the child.

There seems no reason to doubt that something can be done in this direction. Supposing ourselves able to arrive at trustworthy knowledge of the characteristics not only of parentage but of stock, we stand at an undoubted advantage. For when we detect some trait emerging which we know to have had a masterful influence upon the family history — be it love of adventure, or of money, or of ease, or of fighting, and so forth — we can understand that we are in presence of a proclivity that will tax all our resources. We may thus find an index as to the lines upon which we have to watch and work. It may be granted further that our knowledge of ancestry will bear the fruit of all genuine knowledge. It will sharpen our perceptions by giving us " pre-perceptions. " It will enable us, by knowing what to look for, to detect the first tiny shoots of congenital proclivity as soon as they break the soil, and to lay our plans accordingly. In this way knowledge of stock and parentage may work in helpful alliance with observation. Yet it is safest here not to expect too much. The con- •„ . V ,. . ■ viction that every new life inherits much is

Yet beliet in • i i • i_

Heredity need entirely Consistent with the contention that much colifi- knowledge of stock and parentage, even much dence in the fuller and morc carefully generalised than seems of su'ch^itnow-" possible for those whose ends are practical, can ledge. furnish but an imperfect clue as to what we may

expect to find in the individual boy or girl, even when these are of our own household. This for quite definite reasons. In the first place, we are not, in the present stage of controversy, entitled to treat the habits a father transmisBion Or mother has formed during lifetime, be they of acquired virtues Or vices, as indicative of what the child

characteristics '

is still doubt- is to inherit. Too many of the preachers and '"'■ teachers of our day, over eager to impress Science

into the service of edification, have caught at the doctrine that the acquired characteristics of one generation become, by inheritance, the instincts of the next. It may be so. Habitual skill with chisel, pencil, or piano, habitual temperance or immoderation, thrift or prodigality, may thus be transmitted in ways we cannot trace. But we really cannot be said to know. The evidence is inconclusive. We seem powerless to adduce a single conclusive instance. What we actually know is that this whole question of the transmission of "acquired characters " is open, and vigorously argued by Lamarckians and Weismannians. Till they settle their differences, results are too uncertain to be made the basis of responsible action.

When we pass to the other qualities — the qualities handed on from generation to generation irrespective of the life-acquisitions of individuals — we are other quaiuies in a sense upon surer ground. It will not now- *'= transadays be denied that such transmission is a fact. Even primitive tribesmen recognised it in their flocks and herds; and the reappearance in sons of family traits has long been one of the stock themes of popular remark and conversation. It appears to be scientifically well established in regard to inherited physical constitution. It need not be doubted in the region of temperament (especially emotional temperament), capacity and instinct.

Yet this fact is of less practical value than might at a first glance appear. It is only necessary to set ourselves to study any given family history to meet the initial difficulty of discriminating what is inherent in the stock and transmissible, from what is acquired in the lifetime of individuals and (it may be) not transmissible. Even if this difficulty, and it is not slight, could be overcome, the knowledge of what is inherent in the stock could not with much confidence be made the basis of action. For Nature is wayward. Marvellously conservative though she be in passing on qualities ^^ ^^^ ^ from generation to generation, she yet strangely ties of parents loves to hide from our eyes her ways of working, appea^ln uie Thus the congenital tendencies of a father, nextgenerathough they be pronounced and unmistakable, need by no means reappear in the son. They may go under for generations, and only reappear in children's children. Add to this that children may manifest unexpected qualities of their own. For in any given child we may, to an extent not easy to limit, find ourselves confronted by those "sports," those variations small or great from aifoi-xhibit"'^ the ancestral stock, of which so little seems to be variations from known, except that they are many and incalcu- stoc"*^'* ' lable. Rare gifts, both of mind and disposition, may thus break the crast of unlikely soils, and inexplicable, lamentable perversions seem to give the lie to the most excellent of ancestries. Not without their lessons. The one surprise tells us never rashly to despair of the progeny even of the worst. The other warns us never to lull ourselves into a careless confidence in the progeny even of the best. Both forbid us, however firm our faith in Heredity, to see a prophecy of the son in the parent. And both remind us that preconceptions based on study of stock and parentage may betray us into the fatal errors of foregone conclusions in regard to the young lives we have to deal with.

Nor must we forget that the genealogical tree of every son of man broadens out, as we ascend it, into a child possibly quitc limitless host of ancestral kindred. It is bLwMering '^'^'^ necessary for our argument to ascend very multitude of far. Ten or twenty generations will su£Sce. For even then, precisely as we are firm in the faith that ancestral traits persist, so must our anticipations of the inherited endowment of any individual multiply; if indeed we do not sink bewildered in presence of the number of accumulated possibilities of the small final product, in whose veins runs blood, mixed in ways subtler than chemical combination, by the intermarriage of hundreds or thousands of families.

"The blessings of a good parentage," Dr Maudsley assures

Hence it "^» '^'^ ^° more for a man in the trials and

seems safer to crises of life, "in the hour of death," he says,

know'iedgeof "and in the day of judgment than all that has

congenital en- \,^^^ taught him by his pastors and masters."^

dowment upon mi j J r

direct observa- The words are, of course, as controvertible as *'''°' they are sweeping. They obviously carry with

them a startling estimate of the influence of what is congenital upon the rest of a man's life. But, even were they true, many

1 Physiology of Mind, p. 367.

A full discussion of Heredity will be found in Ribot's Heredity (H. S. King and Co.). Cf. also Lloyd Morgan, Habit and Instinct, c. xv.

Vital Energy 7

a large gap in knowledge would have to be filled before they could be made to yield a justifiable expectation that the study of stock and parentage is a trustworthy path to a knowledge of the concrete child. For even if we believed that all that is congenital must be inherited/ the belief would not dispel the difficulties still to be overcome before we could predict with confidence what the inheritance in a given concrete case is likely to be. And so long as this is so, it would seem the more practical course to look for our knowledge of the congenital endowment of those we have to educate, less to what we can glean about their ancestry than to what, by direct observation, we can learn about the young lives themselves.

CHAPTER II

VITAL ENERGY

It is an impossible task to discriminate sharply between what is congenital and what is due to the in- h is difficult fluence of environment. Environment begins to discriminate

^ between what

to operate with the beginnings of life, nor does is congenital it ever cease to operate, not for an instant, as the due t^'^enVirondays become months and the months years. ment.

" Our bodies feel where'er they be Against or with our will."

So do our souls.''' And this being so, it is inevitable that, though we watch never so narrowly, many an effect upon soul, as upon body, will be wrought unobserved.

It is for this reason that it is so easy to set down as congenital much that is really due to the unmarked, silent and

^ A statement not too rashly to be accepted.

2 It seems convenient often to use " Soul " instead of " Mind," which is apt to suggest too exclusively the cognitive aspect of conscious life.

8 Vital Energy

subtle co-operation of external circumstance. When, for

example, a boy exhibits what seems an inborn aptitude for his

father's trade, or reproduces with precocious fidelity the traits

of his father's temper, these things need not be ascribed to the

hand of Nature. Capacity and the response to stimulua that

capacity implies, this of course must at very least be there.

But this much given, the rest may well be due to the simple

fact that the boy has first seen the light in a home upon which

paternal trade or temper has set its mark. The late master of

Balliol used to make merry over certain contemporaries who

saw Heredity in the fact that the sons of deans themselves

became deans, there being of course other, less occult, reasons

why sons walk in the footsteps of their father.

Foremost among these is the fact that the experience and

., „ . . the achievement of the elder generation store heredity" themselves up m the environment. They leave

powe'ifutTn- ^^^"^ impress upon the habitual pursuits and fluence from atmosphcrc of the home, upon its ideal of duty and its ideal of pleasure, upon its choice of friends and its standard of living; and thereby come to act with masterful effect upon the young soul which lives and moves and has its being in their presence. It is thus that family tradition is carried on, it may be for generations. There is of course a given temperament, capacity, and proclivity to work upon. Yet these, it is to be remembered, are modes of endowment which do not, which, in truth cannot, exist, where there is not already an environment under whose influence they are, from the very dawn of life, undergoing modification. This is especially true of those deferred instincts which postpone their appearance till later years. They are not to be regarded as acquisitions. But neither can we doubt that the manner and energy of their appearance when the day for that comes, must be influenced by the action and reaction between organism and environment which has been going on in the years before they found expression.

Vital Energy 9

What happens here conspicuously, happens in less degree in the instincts and capacities that are not "deferred." Bare instinct, mere capacity, are things unknown, creatures of analysis. The actual fact is always proclivity and environment in living relation one to the other. The point is practical. When the child reproduces the parent, and especially when he does so with a baleful fidelity to what is bad, it is only too easy to lay the blame on "original sin." But the damnosa hereditas is not always, perhaps it is never wholly, the gift of Nature. It comes from the remediable defect of the slipshod home, the barren or vicious example, the sour pasture of a miserable lot. No one nowadays will say that circumstance is everything. Are figs of thistles or flowers of thorns? But _.

o The rccog-

circumstance — " social heredity " as some have nised influence called it, " tradition " as others have it — this is heredity"'i3 there from the first. And every discovery that a ground for analysis makes as to its manner of action, must '"'' feed the hopes and nerve the efforts of all, and especially of parents, with whom it rests to make it or to mar it. Yet Nature plays her part, and it is none the less unmistakable though we need not expect to mark the precise point where nurture begins to be added to Nature.

Thus it is Nature that allots to each of her sons his quantum of inherent force or energy.

,, . . 1 1-1- Yet Nature

When men are out of heart at the inequalities assigns to each of human lot and faculty, and ready to rail at f '^rtain quan-

■' ' ■' , turn of energy.

niggard Nature for their own shortcomings, it has been customary for preachers and moralists to tell them that, if they will, they can redress the balance, however unfavourable, by making themselves second to none in moral character. Has not the gospel of independence, from the Stoics to Burns, consoled the honest man with the assurance that he can be "king of men for a' that"? "Brother, thou hast possibility in thee for much," writes Carlyle, "the possibility of writing on the eternal skies the record of a heroic lO Vital Energy

life." * It will be time enough in the sequel to judge how far such words are to be justified." Meanwhile it is necessary to press the point that, in the volume of congenital vitality available for flooding the channels of capacity and instinct, inequality is the glaring fact. Few and feeble instincts, torpid capacities that are the despair of the educator, lie at the one extreme : at the other, a rich endowment of pronounced proclivities, and a faculty of response that perplexes by its many-sidedness. Between, an almost endless scale. It takes time to make this manifest; and hence the dogma, so much in

Education vogue a hundred years ago, that these inequalireveaisthe ties are due to education — that dogma which

equaiiticB of SO singularly overlooked the fact that education, ™®°- for whatever inequalities of its own making it

may be responsible, is the revealer of the inequalities for which it is not responsible.

Each of these extremes presents its own peculiar problems.

Each of The many-sidedness of development, the differ-

these extremes entiation that Strengthens and integrates the

presents its . i r -i *.

peculiar difB- Central character, where there is a large fund of cuities. energy to draw upon, may fritter it away where

response to treatment is weak and wavering. We see this when we have to deal with natures of little force. If we set ourselves to turn the small current ot their being into the channels of a few virtues and a simple life, we are reminded that it is through variety of aim and interest that general vitality is strengthened. If we aim at a richer and more many-sided result, we may be beset by the misgiving lest we create a multiform nobody. The energetic natures on the other hand perplex us in ways of their own. They may be masterful in proclivity, "choleric "; and then they are intractable : or they may be quick to respond in many ways, "sanguine," and then they are "everything by turns and nothing long." * In any case however the time comes

^ Past and Present, bk. rv. c. viii. 2 Cf. p. 210. ' See below, pp. 13, 16.

when father or teacher must make up his mind as to what manner of being he has to deal with. He must ask, and answer the question, so apt to be shelved, " What is he fit for? " The first condition of an answer here is to know in what directions to look. And the abstract expression "congenital endowment," will help us little, forms^fcon- The reality is found in specific modes of endow- e^n'ta' en-

•^ , , dowment.

ment. And the first task must therefore be to

determine, at least roughly, what these are. One of them,

and it is of far-reaching significance, is Temperament.

Chapter III

Temperament is not to be regarded as one element among other elements of human nature. It is rather Temperathe result of the manner in which the elements ments differ are mixed. So far as analysis can go, it would the proportions seem that these elements are various. To say '" which the

, , ..... , , . elements of

that the soul is alive is to say that, at least m the soui are rudimentary fashion, it strives, feels, and knowsj """='*• and that it has already (if such a metaphor be applicable to organic relation) struck that partnership with the body which is not dissolved while life lasts. Nor has the youngest lived a day till each of these elements has already asserted itself in the irresistible tendency, bound up with all life, further to differentiate itself. There are differences between man and man of course; but they are differences, not of ultimate elementary constitution, but of comparative preponderance of elements.*

1 For suggestive treatment of Temperament cf. Lotze, Mikrocosmus, bk. VI. c. ii.

'^ Hoffding, Outlines of Psychology, p. 88.

We say sometimes in our haste, "The man has no feeling," "no passions," "no imagination," "no sense." But we cannot really mean it. The worst that can happen is that feeling, passion, and the rest, are in meagre proportion. All the elements are there in subtlest intermixture, and in proportions so various that different persons may so little recognise their common constitution as to eye their next-door neighbours as if they belonged to a different species. Writers used to speak of " the native equality of man " : it is truer to say that, by the very constitution of human nature, there are no two men alike.

It is here one might hint that the man of the world has something to learn from the philosopher, at

It IS the man . ^ , , .

of the world, whom he IS apt to smile on the ground that, m

iosophef'*who ^^^ generalisations he is blind to the diversities

underesti- of man from man. De tefabula. It is the man

"fferences of ^^ ^he world who, in his innocence of analysis, is

man from ignorant that, by virtue of the very plan on which

It IS built, human nature is, by this endlessly varied mixing of its elements, predestined to an endless diversity.

Of this mixing of the elements, Temperament is the reflexion. Inwrought in the very texture of the life, it modifies all we receive, and from first to last conditions all we do. It is, so to say, a medium that colours, that suffuses all experience. It is modifiable enough. For every influence that alters the relative preponderance of the elements within us must ipso facto alter it. Yet, bound up with the proportions in which our capacities for sensation and idea, for striving and feeling, in all their varied modes have been, by Nature's distribution, intermixed, it can rarely, if ever, by the most coercive of educations, be revolutionised.

From this it follows that we go astray if we seek for the seat of Temperament exclusively in any single element of our constitution. Its secret is not to be found in physiological constitution, nor in those general or organic sensations which so vaguely yet so deeply colour our moods, nor in our emotional susceptibility. These all work ; ment is thereoften they work upon Temperament with master- ^°" ^°' I*"* '° ful power. But Temperament is not thus simple, element in Rather is it like a ten-stringed instrument that *"""*" °''*""- vibrates in all its chords, now in this fashion and now in that, as these have been variously attuned.

It also follows that Temperament has many modes. Few elements maybe fruitful of many combinations.

•' -^ It may also

And when one begins to think how the diverse be endlessly phases of our mental and emotional and conative ^"'*''' life may be multifariously blended and interfused, there is room enough here for the warning, always so needful in psychological analysis, not to travesty the lavish, finely-discriminated varieties of Nature by reducing them to a handful of cut and dried types.

Yet types of Temperament exist, and indeed the four classical types have, in literature and usage, so ^j^^ ^^^^ long and persistently survived the effete physi- classical temology which gave them names, that it may be p^'^™^"*'- assumed that experience has found it profitable to discriminate them. Diagnosis will at any rate not be fruitless if it suggests ideas as to the manner of their educational treatment.

Thus there is one type whose characteristic it is to be rapidly and easily responsive to all impressions ^j^^ ,. ^^^_ and interests. It is caught by the event or the guine " temappearance of the moment; and, when one has p"^*™^" • it at its height, it is difficult to know at which trait most to wonder — at its responsiveness or at its fickleness, at its readiness to be interested, or at its readiness to transfer its interest. This is the characteristic temperament of most children, to whose unpreoccupied outlook the world is so interesting a place that they cannot fix their interest for long upon anything in it. But it does not pass with childhood. It lives on in the man or woman who is so excellently fitted to be a pleasant companion and agreeable member of society, whose interests are many and quick, who does not, because he cannot, agitate or bore us by absorbing enthusiasms, who, in a word, is something of everything and everything of nothing. Such is the

so-called " sanguine " temperament. Its strength

rengt , ^.^^ .^ .^^ open and ready receptiveness, and in

the promise these contain of cheerful and fruitful contact with

experience. Hence we like to see it in children.

But then it has the defects of its virtues. It is infirm of purpose, and it has a fatal facility for skating lightly over the deeper experiences. Not only is it incapable of heroisms or devotions : it does not seem to miss them. Left to itself it would people the world with " ten-minuted emotionalists. " Yet, when all is said, such are hopeful material to work upon. They come half-way to meet us. They spare us the

dreary task of awakening interest where none is. treatment. ^'^'^ ^^ ^'^^J' "^^^ Can jDe yoked to more strenuous

fellow-workers, or enlisted in the service of some great institution, or deepened by hardship and struggle, or convinced (even though the appeal be in part to their vanity ^) that something is expected of them, they will not fail of a creditable ending. The drawback is that they are so apt to disappoint the promise of early years. In the University it is the youth whose reputation for animated conversation, charm,' general ability, is so brilliant — till the day comes when it is whispered that Pendennis of St Boniface is plucked : in Literature it is the versatile author of unwritten books : in business, the man of many enterprises and few dividends: in industry, the "Jack of all trades " : in life in general the man of promise who could "do anything," yet has it not in him, when his chance comes, to bend himself to one resolute effort. Is it to their credit or otherwise that these sanguine types nevertheless remain cheerful to the last, the one thing to which they

1 Adam Smith goes so far as to say that " the great secret of education is to direct vanity to proper objects." Moral Sentiments, vi. 3.

seem unable to turn their minds being the fact, so obvious to the onlooker, that they have been tried in the balance and found wanting.

Very different is the sentimental, or as it is usually called the " melancholic " type. Like the sanguine it ^^ „ ,

■' ^ ° The " melan-

is sensitive and responsive: unlike it, it has choiic"temneither the open outward outlook, nor the ready p'"™^"'- responsiveness to changing influences. On the contrary, it dips deep in moods, and is prone to brood over them even till they touch the dark fringe of morbidity. In certain

. ^ Its supenor-

respects this type is superior to the other. It is ity to the not the shuttlecock of every new attraction, ^""^ume. Whatever it be it is not flighty. From what experience offers, it selects : and what it selects it cleaves to — a direct contrast to the facile appreciations of the sanguine. The depth of its interests moreover is some compensation for its want of flexibility; and whatever future awaits it, it is likely to take life seriously. On the other hand, it is just this

. , . , . , . Its dangers.

preoccupation with particular experiences that is its snare, so that many an aspect of the great opening spectacle of life is suffered to pass unheeded away without eliciting a single response. This tendency may have still more serious results. Sentimentality may become the keynote; and emotion which, in less one-sided natures, is the prelude to active expression, comes to be valued so much for its own sake that it quenches the practical impulses it ought to have vitalised. This is at any rate the result in many a case where temperament has found food in literature and art, in music, in poetry, in novel-reading and all the means whereby, with little trouble to ourselves, we can enjoy the luxury of emotion. Hence Weltschmerz in all its modes. Hence the make-believe afflictions of "those good old days when we were so miserable." Hence those other afflictions, not make-believe, which catch up all the promise of life in the absorbing vortex of one rooted sorrow, one baffled ambition, one irreparable mistake.