Education and heredity : A study in sociology

Front matter

OF THE

U N I VLRSITY or ILLINOIS

370.1

Chapter I. Page

Suggestion and Education as Influences

MODIFYING THE MORAL INSTINCT

1-45

I. Nervous Suggestion and its Effects.

II. Psychological Suggestion, Moral and Social.

III. Suggestion as a Means of Moral Education, and as an Influence modifying Heredity.

Chapter II

The Genesis of the Moral Instinct. The

Role of Heredity, Ideas, and Education 46-110

I. The Power of Habits, giving rise to a Moment¬ ary Impulse or to a Permanent Obsession.

II. The Power of the Consciousness and Idea-Forces, the Moral Agent.

III. Power begetting Duty.

IV. Possible Dissolution of Morality.

V. The Role of Education and Heredity in the Moral Sense.

VI

CONTENTS.

, ^ ^ CHAPTER III.

Physical Education and Heredity. The

m

Boarding-School. Overpressure .

I. The Absolute Necessity of Physical Education in the Education of the Race.

II. The Boarding-School Question.

III. The Question of Overpressure.

IV. Manual Work in wSchools.

V. The Physical Progress of the Race, and the Growth of Population.

CHAPTER IV. The Object and Method of Intellectual Education

I. The Object and Method of Intellectual Educa¬ tion.

II. Methods of Teaching.

CHAPTER V. The School

I. The Inadequacy and Dangers of purely Intel¬ lectual Education.

1 1. Possibility of Teaching Ethics Methodically.

III. Moral Discipline in the Primary School.

IV. Necessity for the Teaching of Civic Duties in

all stages of Instruction.

V. Instruction in Esthetics.

VI. Intellectual Education.

PAGE

111-158

159-177

178-234

CONTENTS.

Vll

Chapter IX

The Aim of Evolution and Education. Is IT Consciousness, or the Automatism of Heredity? ...... 283-296 x!

*

V

TRANSLATOR’S PREFACE.

In this posthumous work I have taken the liberty of inserting many marks of quotation, which no doubt would have been added upon revision if the untimely death of the lamented author had not intervened. I must express my obligations to all who have assisted me while engaged upon this translation. I am glad of* this opportunity of expressing my indebtedness to M. Alfred Fouillee for his extreme courtesy to a complete stranger, and for the trouble he has taken to explain such difficulties as I have from time to time referred to him for solution. In particular, I have to acknowledge the advice and unfailing sym¬ pathy received from my friend Mr. G. F. Stout, whose ungrudging assistance has been invaluable.

Cardiff, 1891.

W. J. G.

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Introduction

SM

JeaN-Marie Guyau, philosopher and poet, was born on the 28th of October 1854, and died at the age of thirty-three. His early training was mainly due to his mother, who is known in France as the author of various works on education, and to his step-father, M. Fouillee, one of the most remarkable of living French philosophers. At the age of nineteen, M. Guyau wrote a volume on the Utilitarian moralists from Epicurus to Bentham and his school. Portions of this work, which was ‘‘crowned’^ by the Academic des sciences morales et politiques, were afterwards expanded into two treatises. The first of these was on the Philosophy of Epicurus; it received a full and ap¬ preciative notice in the English Journal of Philology ; the second treatise was an exposition and criticism of contemporary English Ethics. At the age of twenty his health broke down, and he was practically compelled to reside for the rest of his life on the shores of the Mediterranean. During the few years that remained to him he showed himself marvellously prolific, producing a series of works on the leading problems of philosophy, marked by striking origin¬ ality and power. In addition, he also published a volume of poems, entitled Vers d'un philosopher ex¬ hibiting a unique vein of genius. They represent’ in the clearest and simplest language the emotional aspect of philosophy ; in the fullest sense they justify

Xll

INTRODUCTION.

their title, they are the verses of a philosopher who was in his inmost nature a genuine poet. From the bibliography appended to this Introduction the reader will see that M. Guyau gavd to the world three sociological studies on Art, Religion, and Education respectively. The last of these is here presented in an English dress. Perhaps a few preparatory words on its distinctive aim and value may be acceptable to the general reader.

The main value of M. Guyau’s work on Education and Heredity is to be found in the point of view from which it is written. The ultimate good of society is ever present to his mind as the one standard by which to estimate and regulate all educational aims and methods. At the same time he holds that the good of the individual is only to be found in social activity. The development of the life of each of us is measured by the range and intensity of our human interests. Thus, though Guyau is essentially prac¬ tical, he is not utilitarian in the bad sense of the word. He does not set up as the ultimate aim of education the acquirement of useful knowledge, or the training of the intellect, or the passing of examinations. These ends are to be pursued only in so far as they conduce to the conservation of social tissue,” and to the progress of the race.

In accordance with his general principle, Guyau gives the first place in order of value, and in order of treatment, to moral education. Like Plato, he draws a distinct line of demarcation between the morality of impulse and the morali^of insight. The morality of impulse takes the form of inward imperatives which impose themselves on the mind of the agent without his knowing whence they come^ or why they

INTRODUCTION.

Xlll

possess authority. These inward imperatives are in part instincts transmitted by heredity. But according to Guyau it is also possible to create them by educa¬ tion. In order to elucidate this point he lays stress on the analogy between the operation of natural instinct and that of suggestions made to hypnotised subjects, which are afterwards spontaneously carried into action. In such cases the person who performs the suggested action commonly feels himself under a kind of necessity or obligation to act as he does, but he cannot trace back this necessity or obligation to its true source. The artificially created impulse governs him as if it were an innate instinct. Now, just as hypnotic patients are suggestible because their mental organisation is disordered, so young children are suggestible because their mental organisation is as yet imperfect. What the experimenter is able to do in the one case, the educator ought to be able to do in the other.

But the morality which is based on a blind sense of obligation is only a preparation for the morality which is based on insight. Guyau's views on the subject of direct moral instruction are coloured by his peculiar ethical theories. He seems to start with the assumption, which is perhaps not altogether justi¬ fiable, that every healthy child has a natural dis¬ position to be active for the sake of being active. So soon as he is made aware of his powers and capabilities he will straightway endeavour to realise these powers and capabilities. For the same reason he will prefer the higher modes of self-realisation to the lower, so soon as he becomes alive to the distinc¬ tion between them. Thus a child in good physical health and with moral instincts need only be shown xlv introduction.

how he can live the most complete life. When once he feels that he can^ he will at the same time feel that he ought. Ideas tend by their very nature to act them¬ selves out. The more pervasive and persistent the ideas the more potent and enduring is this tendency.

Now the representation of an ideal self may be made the most pervasive and persistent of ideas, and may thus become the dominant principle of conduct. To effect this is the aim of ethical education. It is of course essential that the child should be brought to see and feel his true relation to the society of which he forms a part He must be led to understand that his own self-realisation is possible only if and so far as he widens and deepens his social interests and sympathies.

Physical education is, in Guyau’s opinion, second in importance only to moral education. For on it depends the general health and vigour of the race — the general store of energy necessary to moral and intellectual activity. To train the intellect at the expense of bodily health is to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs. This becomes apparent when we consider the question from the point of view of the race. An individual may be supposed to gain an equivalent in the way of worldly success and so forth for the physical exhaustion produced by over¬ pressure. But the general result to the race can only be decay.

Guyau's consistently sociological point of view makes his treatment of intellectual education very interesting and suggestive. He is led by it to emphasise the claims of aesth^c and literary culture. For him the word useful means useful to the com¬ munity and to the race as a whole. Whatever then

INTRODUCTION.

XV makes men more human by giving them a wider and fuller sympathy with their fellow-men is useful par excellence. Now Guyau holds that it is the function of art and literature to bind society together. They supply common sources of enjoyment disconnected from the

private aims and interests of the individual. They give definite form and vivid colouring to ideals in an ob¬ jective embodiment which is common property, and in this way they tend to excite a common impulse towards the realisation of ideal ends. Lastly, in so far as they reflect human life and emotion, they tend to widen the mental horizon of the individual by giving him enlarged sympathy and insight. With these ideas of the nature and scope of art it is not surprising that Guyau should regard aesthetic education as more important than scientific. Botany and chemistry are good in their way; but poetry is indispensable.

The reader may perhaps be somewhat perplexed by the title of the book. He may be led to expect a discussion of the relative parts played by ‘‘ nature and nurture’’ in forming the character of the individual. Now the only passage in which this subject is directly discussed is contained in the last section of Chapter II. The book as a whole seems to be concerned merely with Education apart from Heredity. Nevertheless, the title, Education and Heredity^ is quite appropriate. It indicates the general standpoint of the author. Guyau never for a m.oment loses sight of the fact that every child is a possible parent, and that on the edu¬ cation of the child depends the future of the race. The physical, intellectual, and moral health of each generation must be so cared for as to ensure the physical, intellectual, and moral health of posterity.

G. F. S.

WORKS BY THE SAME AUTHOR.

La Morale d’Epicure et ses rapports avec les doctrines contemporaines.

La morale anglaise contemporaine.

Les Probl^mes de Pesthdtique contemporaine.

Esquisse d’une morale sans obligation ni sanction.

Vers d’un philosophe.

La Gen^se de I’idee de temps.

Pascal : Entretien avec M. de Sacy, Edition classique.

La Premiere ann^e de lecture courante, livre de morale pour les ecoles primaires.

L’annee preparatoire.

L’annde enfantine.

Preface

4 ♦ - -

It is in paternity alone that man first ‘‘ sounds the depths of his heart ’’ — in complete, conscious paternity, that is to say, in the education of his child. Ah ! the patter of the little feet ! the light and gentle patter¬ ing of the feet of the generations, that come as doubt¬ ful and uncertain as the future. And perhaps that future will be determined by the way in which we bring up the new generations.

Flaubert says that life ought to be an incessant education, that “from speaking to dying” everything has to be learned. Left to chance, this long education is every moment deviating. Even parents, in most cases, have not the slightest idea of the aim of education, especially when the children are still very young. What is the moral idea set before most children in a family ? Not to be too noisy, not to put the fingers in the nose or mouth, not to use the hands at table, not to step into puddles when it rains, etc.^ A reasonable being ! In the eyes of many parents the reasonable child is a marionette, which is not to stir unless the strings are pulled ; he is supposed to have hands which are meant to touch nothing, eyes which are never to sparkle with desire for what he sees, little feet which must never trot noisily on the floor, and a silent tongue.

^ From a higher point of view, is the ideal of most men more elevated of its kind ?

XVlll

PREFACE.

Many parents bring up their children, not for the children’s sake, but for thei;* own. I have known parents who did not wish their daughter to marry, because it would involve separation from her ; others who did not want their son to take up this or that profession (that of a veterinary surgeon, for instance), because it was displeasing to thein^ etc. The same rules dominated their whole course of conduct towards their children. That is egoistic education. There is another kind of education which has as its object, not the pleasure of the parents, but the pleasure of the child as estimated by the parents. Thus a peasant, whose whole life has been spent in the open air, will consider it his duty to spare his son the labour of tilling the soil ; he will bring him up to make him a government clerk, a poor official stifled in his office, who, cooped up in a town, will sooner or later die of consumption. True education is disinter-

JL

ested : it brings up the child for its own sake ; it also and especially brings it up for its country and for the human race as a whole. In the various works I have published I have had a single end in view : the linking together of ethics, aesthetics, and religion, with the idea of life — life in its most intensive, extensive, and there¬ fore most fruitful form ; it is this idea therefore which will supply us in this volume with the object of education, the fundamental formula of pedagogy. Pedagogy might be defined as the art of adapting new generations to those conditions of life which are the most intensive and fruitful for the individual and the species. It has been asked if the object of education is individual or social ; it is simultaneously individual and social : it is, to speak accurately, the search for means to bring the most intensive

PREFACE.

XIX individual existence into harmony with the most extensive social life. Besides, in my opinion, there is a profound harmony underlying the antinomies between individual existence and collective existence; whatever is really conformable to the summum bonum of individual life (moral and physical) is ipso facto useful to the whole race. Education ought, there¬ fore, to have a triple end in view: — ist. The har¬ monious development in the human individual of all the capacities proper to the human race and useful to it, according to their relative importance. 2nd. The more particular development in the individual of those capacities which seem peculiar to him, in so far as they cannot disturb the general equilibrium of the organism, 3rd. To arrest and check those tendencies and instincts which may disturb that equilibrium — in other words, to aid heredity in proportion as it tends to create permanent superiority within the race, and to resist its influence when it tends to accumulate causes pernicious to the race itself. Thus education becomes the pursuit of the means of bringing up the largest number of individuals in perfect health, endowed with physical or moral faculties as well developed as possible, and thereby capable of contri¬ buting to the progress of the human race.

It follows that the whole system of education should be orientated with reference to the mainten¬ ance and progress of the race. In time past the creeds of a race acted by means of education, and preserved either the elect of a people or the nation as a whole. In this direction, therefore, education must act to-day. In my opinion education has been far too much looked upon as the art of bringing up the individual — apart from the family and the race.

XX

PREFACE.

From the individual we try to get the best yield ; but it is as if a farmer were to endeavour for a few years to get the largest possible crops from a field without restoring to the land what he has taken from it : the i field would eventually be exhausted. This is the case | with exhausted races ; but with this difference, that land lasts for ever, and in the long run regains its original fertility by rest and lying fallow, while the exhausted race may grow weaker and disappear for ever. Recent studies in heredity (Jacoby, De Candolle, Ribot), statistics of the professions, etc., have shown / in a very striking manner that certain environments, J certain professions or social conditions, are fatal to I the race in general. People talk of the “ devouring / existence ” of our great towns, without realising that I they are not using a mere figure of speech, but are j speaking the sober truth. Towns are the whirlpools ) of the human race, said Jean Jacques. As much may I be said, not only of great towns, but of most places i where there is a fashionable world, where there are salons, theatres, and political assemblies ; all excess of I nervous excitement in the individual will, by the- \ law of organic equilibrium, introduce into the race I either mental weakness or diseases of the nervous system, or some form of physiological derangement which will issue in sterility. According to the statisticians, there are “ devouring ” provinces and towns, districts peopled only at the expense of the neighbourhood which is thus more or less exhausted ; similarly, there are “ devouring professions ; and they are often the most useful to the progress of the community, and at the same time the most tempting to the individual. In fact, some have gone so far as to assert that every intellectual superiority in the

PREFACE.

xxi struggle for existence is a sentence of death for the race, that progress is literally made by the sacrifice of the very individuals or races who have worked the hardest in the direction of progress, that the best condition for the permanence of the race is life as little intellectual as possible, and that all education which over-excites a child's faculties, which tries to make the child a rare and exceptional being, is ipso facto endeavouring to destroy both the individual and the race.^

I think this assertion is partly true for education as at present organised, but I shall show that education, when better understood and more far-sighted in its aims, might remedy this exhaustion of the race, just as in agriculture exhaustion of the soil is remedied by rotation of crops.

It is only in modern times that science has been formed ; a crowd of subjects of knowledge have sprung up, which are not as yet adapted to the human mind. This adaptation can only be produced by a rational division and classification of the different subjects of study; and the mind is exposed to suffer¬ ing and overpressure because this division is not yet effected. It follows that the science of education must be harmonised with new conditions. Education must be organised — that is to say, we must establish the subordination of subjects of study and their hierarchy in the social unity.^ As Spencer justly remarks, the more perfect and therefore the more complex an organism is, the more difficulties beset its harmonious development.

^ Vide Galton, Natural Inheritance^ Appendix F, p. 241. (Tr.)

^ Vide Dr. J. Ward, “ Educational Values, of Education^ November 1890. (Tr.)

XXll

PREFACE.

The education of each new-comer in the case of the lower races of animals is not of long duration ; and whatever is not actually ta^ught it by others will be taught it by life, and that without great danger ; its instincts are simple, therefore but few experiences are necessary for its guidance. But the higher we rise in the scale of beings, the longer is the evolution ; the necessity of a real education then begins to make itself felt; the adults must help, support, and succour the young for a longer period, as, for instance, in the case of the higher mammiferous animals, the mother must carry the young and suckle it. So even in animals we find the germ of a kind of primi¬ tive pedagogy : education is a prolongation of this suckling, and its necessity is derived from the laws of evolution.

Here, however, a serious objection is presented, to which Spencer’s own ideas have given rise. Must it be maintained, as has been done, that education is useless, or even powerless, because human evolution is necessary, and that evolution always depends on heredity? In the last century the importance of education was so far exaggerated that a man like Helvetius naively asked if all the difference between men does not spring from nothing but the difference of instruction they have received, and from their varied environment ; if talent and virtue alike cannot be taught. We are now thrown upon distinctly opposite assertions by recent studies in heredity. Many philosophers and men of science now believe that education is radically powerless when it has to modify to any great extent the racial temperament and character of the individual ; according to them a criminal as well as the poet nascitur non fit; the child’s

PREFACE. XXlil

whole moral destiny is contained in it while yet unborn, and in later life this destiny develops itself relentlessly. Obviously, then, there is no possible remedy for this common disease called neurasthenia^ to which all criminals, poets, visionaries, the insane, hysterical women — in fact, all whose mental equili¬ brium is disturbed — are subject ; races simultaneously descend the scale of life and morality, and there is no ascent. The disequilibrated are for ever lost to humanity ; if they do propagate their kind for a longer or shorter period, it is all the worse for them. The Jukes family,^ starting from a drunkard, pro¬ duced in seventy-five years, 200 thieves and assassins, 248 invalids, and 90 prostitutes. By the ancients, whole families were proscribed as impure ; it must be confessed antiquity was right. We are told in the Bible that the sins of the fathers were visited upon the children to the third and fourth generations : modern science pronounces curses of the same kind, and seems to justify the Jews by the remark, that every moral characteristic, good or bad, does in fact tend to persist for about five generations, and then to be effaced altogether if abnormal. Woe, then, to the weak ! they must be eliminated, and we must merci¬ lessly apply to them the words of Jesus to the Canaanitish woman — Jesus, pitiless and angered — “ It is not meet to take the children’s bread and to cast it to the dogs.

In fact, between the powers attributed by some thinkers to education, and by others to heredity, is an

^ The Criminal^ Havelock Ellis (Walter Scott), p. 100. (Tr.)

^ Vide Fere, Sensation et mouvemefit ; Dr. Jacoby, La Selection; Dr. Dejerine, L ' Heridite dans les maladies du systeme nerveux ; and the Italian criminalists — Lombroso, Ferri, Garofalo.

I xxiv PREFACE.

antinomy dominating the whole of moral and even political science ; for if the effects of heredity are without a remedy, political science is paralysed. The problem has therefore a twofold aspect, and needs serious examination. I shall endeavour to exhibit ) the exact role belonging to the two terms before us, namely, hereditary or ancestral habit, and individual habit — the one incarnate in the organism, and the other acquired. We shall examine if the laws of i suggestion^ which have been recently ascertained by our psycho-physiologists, and of which the effects are ■ still imperfectly known, do not constitute a new element, and if we cannot by their aid modify the data of the problem. Modern discoveries in sugges¬ tion seem to me of capital importance in education, because they give us the power of ascertaining de facto the possibility of always creating in a mind, at every stage of its evolution, an artificial instinct capable of producing an equilibrium of long or short persistence in pre-existing tendencies. If this intro¬ duction of new sentiments is possible by entirely physiological means, it should be equally possible by moral and psychological means. Recent studies on the nervous system will be adapted to correct scientific prejudices by means of a more complete science. Suggestion, which creates artificial instincts, capable of keeping in equilibrium the hereditary instincts, or even of stifling them, constitutes a new power, comparable to heredity itself ; now, in my opinion, education is nothing but a totality of co-or¬ dinated and reasoned-out suggestions ; and we may readily foresee the efficiency it may acquire from the psychological and the physiological points of view.

J. M. G.

EDUCATION AND HEREDITY.

THE r6lE of heredity AND SUGGESTION IN MORAL EDUCATION.