Education and the larger life

Front matter

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EDUCATION AND THE LARGER LIFE

Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

I. The Point of View 1

II. The Social Purpose 30

Chapter I

It is the purpose of the present little volume to make a large inquiry, — the inquiry as to how education can be so applied in America as to best further the progress of civilization. The term civilization may be used to mean either the sum total of what man is doing in the way of material and intellectual achievement, or else the force underlying this achievement, the inner soul of it. Education has a similar double meaning. It is the outward, visible result of an inner experience, or it is the movement of the inner experience itself. No complete view of life may lose sight of either meaning. They stand, indeed, in the relation of effect and cause. It is important, however, upon which meaning we place the emphasis. The outer aspect of civilization is history, the inner aspect is philosophy. The outer aspect of education is knowledge, the inner aspect is development. In a practical inquiry like the present, it is more helpful to deal with causes than with effects. We shall mean by civilization a force, a progressive idea expressing itself as social environment. We shall mean by education an inner experience, a practical process for the nutrition and growth of the civilization idea.

This method of treatment is justified by events. The same universe apparently has always surrounded us, the same earth and air and fire and water. The stubborn facts of the world seem to remain pretty much the same. Cold and hunger and nakedness make their old-time demands upon human activity. But from these seemingly common elements we build in different times and places such totally unlike worlds ! There must be some unique ingredient which we severally add to the stubborn facts to work the wonder of the individual life. This ingredient is the idea. It makes the difference between savagery and civilization. What men or nations make out of their material environment depends solely upon the ideas which they bring to the adventure. Small ideas make a small, primitive, savage world. Great ideas make Greece or America.

When we come more critically to look at our material facts, earth and air and fire and water, to ask the origin of our transforming ideas, to seek the relation between fact and idea, we face at once one of the oldest of world-riddles. The ideas themselves come apparently from an experience of these very facts. But if the facts were truly stubborn, they could yield nothing beyond fixed ideas. To make any advance in civilization possible, there must be some progressive interplay between fact and idea. Either Nature is less unalterable than we unreflectively thought her, or else the impression she makes upon us is composite, a resultant of the present aspect, and the impressions induced by all previous aspects. In either case we are brought to look upon Nature, not as a fixed fact, but as a progressive environment. The important element is the idea, and the idea has the habit of growth ; fostered, or perhaps measured, by the enlarging of experience.

Experience, in the larger sense of the word, is the only road to truth. Leonardo called experience the mother of all science. Experience is sometimes obscure, but it is never more than seemingly contradictory. When we get to the bottom of any given experience, we find that it squares with the essential part of any other related experience. They both teach the same general truth, however different the special dress. It is this quality of experience, its inherent consistency, that has made our present civilization possible, As Browning put it, —

" All »s love, yet all 'slaw."

In the conduct of the individual and social life, it is a matter of the deepest concern to enlarge experience; to recognize the common element in human events ; to gather these elements into a distinct philosophy, and finally to see to it that the philosophy flowers into performance. And this process is the process of all scientific progress. We have the students and observers and investigators, the world over, gathering together the undisputed news of the universe. We have the generalizes, the Darwins and Spencers and Maxwells and Kelvins, disentangling the abstract truth from the special fact. And then finally we have the prophets, the far-seeing people, who turn the general truth back again into a novel fact. When these prophets deal with material laws, they are inventors ; when they deal with spiritual laws, they are seers. It is the time-honored process of induction, followed by deduction, and all branches of human inquiry must pass through both stages before they can rank as sciences. Auguste Comte affirmed the test of science to be the power of prediction. This presupposes an essential order and reasonableness in the universe. Were human experience not consistent, we should be in a sorry plight. In a world of caprice, in a world devoid of this saving uniformity, we should not even have sanity, much less civilization. The experience of to-day would conflict with and contradict the experience of yesterday. The times would be most surely out of joint and the world-distemper prove complete.

But happily we do not experience such confusion. The particular service of the great physical laws of the conservation of matter and the conservation of energy has been to exclude caprice from our view of Nature and to introduce order.

Education rests upon the same uniformity of experience. It is well at the very outset to disabuse one's mind of any lurking belief that education is at all the haphazard sort of process which it is commonly conceived to be. One is not free to decide, offhand, between the different methods in school-keeping as advocated by rival masters. The matter may not be disposed of in this casual fashion. In a large sense there is no room for any play of mere opinion. Education is a definite process, quite as definite as the other sciences of experience. But it is not a primary science : it is an application. The direction of education, that is to say, the motif, is predetermined by the inner aspect of civilization, by philosophy, and this for practical ends is expressed in the concrete terms of a social purpose. When the philosophic idea has been clearly formulated, education has also been clearly formulated. Education is wrapped up in the philosophic idea quite as completely as the propositions of geometry are wrapped up in the initial axioms. The method of education, that is to say, the art, is simply a rigid application of the principle of cause and effect.

It is my purpose, accordingly, to present education as a determinate, positive process, whose carrying out possesses the dignity of a moral duty. Let us have done, once for all, with the slippery notion that we may do this or that with our boys and girls, and that it is all right, provided we acted for their supposed good ; and let us lay hold of the far sturdier and truer notion that it is our supreme business to find out what is for their good, and that it is our supreme business not to be defeated in realizing that good.

Looked at in this way, the problem requires that we shall first gather our knowledge of life into a distinct philosophic idea, an idea which sums up the most general and abstract of human truth ; that we shall then express this idea in the concrete, specific terms of a social purpose, and finally that education proper shall be regarded as a practical process for the carrying out of the social purpose. As a process, education is to be judged by its efficiency and may be criticised on no other ground. Neither may its failures be lightly palliated. The educational process does or does not produce men and women of the desired social type, and this is a matter of very unimpassioned fact. To be an educator is not, then, to be a man merely conversant with the customs and conventionalities of the schoolroom. It is to be a man with a defensible social creed. To be a practical educator, a teacher, is to add to this the power to carry such a social creed into effect. Unless we are courageous enough and skillful enough to work back to this firm ground, the philosophic idea, we can have no assured position on any question of human import, and surely nothing to say about education that will be at all worth saying.

This matter of method in handling the furniture of one's own mind is of such grave importance that a word, in passing, may not be out of place. The earlier years of life are spent for the most part in accumulating the material of thought, and there are souls who, through some fatal paralysis of the will, never get beyond this process of accretion. But to the earnest man there comes a divine moment when new impulses are working in the heart, and he sets out to make use of his wealth. One who reaches this stage in the intellectual life must be appalled by the magnitude of the task before him. He finds perhaps in any single department of thought a fair degree of consistency. But when he compares these separate strands and attempts to weave them together into a beautiful and acceptable fabric of truth, he stands face to face with an impossible task. The separate results are contradictory. I am disposed to believe that there are many who are living in this confusion of thought, who are possibly consistent along one line, but who are quite inconsistent when it comes to comparing these different results and trying to make them square with one another. The task of bringing one's ideas on separate matters into consistency with one another is so tremendous that few attempt it, and still fewer succeed in doing it. And yet this is the supreme task of the intellectual life, and one that we must all set about very earnestly, if the final outcome of our living is to be sane and wholesome. By some process, the habit of rigid selfanalysis, the energy of untiring criticism, by some process adapted to one's temperament and carried to a conclusion, one must perform this initial vital act of the intellectual life, the finding of one's self, before one can find another or render the largest social service. Such an attempt to make one's ideas square with one another, one's esthetics and religion and pedagogy, one's science and politics and economics, only shows the entire hopelessness of the task so long as these ideas are reached on independent and inadequate grounds. It emphasizes anew the surpassing value of the scientific method, the working out of a firm philosophic basis, and the subsequent translation of this into the special terms of daily thought and action.

One may not attempt within the limits of a chapter, or even within a single volume, to work out anything so stupendous as the philosophic idea, but one may with all modesty indicate a path of approach, and report such content as one has, one's self, been led to appropriate.

Philosophy is a search for reality, or, as more cautious people prefer to say, it is the search for a theory of reality. As a practical matter, it is an attempt to rationalize the world, a profound attempt to harmonize and explain human experience. Philosophy has as a study this peculiar advantage, that it requires no equipment beyond an average intelligence, and no material beyond the data of daily experience. It is, then, open to every one to philosophize. It is worth remarking that the undertaking is not at all novel. All schemes of life, however simple and unsophisticated they may appear to be on the surface, are founded upon some theory of reality. Whether we are conscious of it or not, we all philosophize after a fashion, and perhaps those most unwarrantably who would most strenuously deny that they philosophize at all. The man who tells you that bricks are bricks ; and trees, trees ; and houses, houses ; and that this so-called outer world of matter and motion exists quite apart from man, takes what he supposes to be the common-sense view of the matter, and rather pities the rest of the world as a set of lost dreamers. But, in point of fact, he has become himself the most thorough-going of theorizers, for he has at one bound passed quite beyond the limits of human experience into a region of pure speculation. Take man out of the world-drama, and there is no reporter left to acquaint us with what is happening. We do not know a world divorced from human sensation, from sight and hearing and touch and taste and smell. Such a world is a pure abstraction. It is true that my senses report what seems to be a three-dimensional outer world as distinct from me as are the emotions of an unknown hero. Events happen in that outer world which I seem powerless to control. Sometimes I am the victim of them ; sometimes the beneficiary. But after all is done and said, I find that whether the events were enacted outside of me or not, the only report of them which I can possibly have is internal, has come to me filtered through my own brain, and colored by my own past.

But what are these seeming reports of the senses ?

If they represent the total material of the world-drama, it is of the utmost importance to know their essence. In reality they are only changing states of consciousness on my own part. And notice also that if the drama be the reaction of an independently-existing, outer world upon my own organism, it is conditioned through and through by the state of the sense organs, and is therefore strictly individual. But the difficulty is that I can never know whether this is the case, whether this outer world has any independent existence, for I can lay hands on no testimony whatever beyond just this bare testimony of my own consciousness. So the question must remain forever unsolved. If I assume the existence of an independent outer world, as Kant and Spencer do, I pass into a realm of pure speculation, and one quite barren of practical results, for the outer world, the cause of these sensations, must itself remain unknowable. It does no harm to label this hypothetical outer world, this abstraction of the philosophers. Kant calls it the Ding-an-sich, the " thing-in-itself," and Spencer robes it in appropriate mystery under the name of the Unknowable. But this labeling does no particular good. In either case, existent or nonexistent, such a world, distinct from the thinking self, is pure speculation. The sensations only are experienced, and it is these which go to make up one's real world. The world of strict experience turns out to be a unit world, a panorama which unfolds itself in one's own consciousness.

For convenience we may call this unit conception idealism. It is a view of the world which rests wholly upon every-day experience, and is quite devoid of theory. As an idealist, I use the common language of mankind. I speak of the inner and the outer world, of the things about me as if they had existence apart from myself, but this is only the projection of my thought into the realm of language. I create an outer world in order to express my inner experience. I speak, then, with my brother of opposite view, in a language which is equally sincere and definite to both of us. We use the same words to express the same facts.

In one sense, of course, we are all idealists, whether we accept or decline the particular label, for philosophy must rest upon human experience, and this experience, as a very little analysis has just shown, has no existence outside of consciousness. It is a panorama unfolding itself in the world of thought. As an experienced fact, the universe reduces itself to a succession of states of consciousness, and this is the only reality that we can know and build upon. It is perfectly natural to speculate about this tremendous world-drama, and to wonder what it would all turn out to be if one could see it from some extra-human, divine vantage ground. The speculation is not without advantage, for it gives a certain flexibility to thought. One sets up a number of apparent possibilities, and then examines as to how far they square with the observed facts. A source of error creeps in, however, just as soon as we become so enamored with any particular speculation that we mistake it for an observed fact of experience. All we experience is consciousness, a unit stream of consciousness ; and consciousness is inexplicable.

This speculative habit has long since divided the world into two sharply distinct modes of thinking, monism and dualism.

As the name implies, monism conceives man to be a unit. So far it is purely experiential and non-speculative. But it becomes speculative in its division into the two cults of psycho-monism and materialistic-monism. The first is what we have called idealism. It rests purely upon experience, and is the least daring and theoretical of all philosophic creeds. The idealist finds in his stream of consciousness a unit world of spirit, in which he recognizes not only himself but also the pageantry of human and non-human nature. The union of the self with other selves and Nature in one enfolding consciousness, of which he seems to share but a part, leads him to frame the conception of a cosmic consciousness, of a divine, pantheistic universe. Referring to the world-riddle with which we started out, it will be seen that the idealist absorbs the fact into the idea, and does not enter upon the difficult speculation of their separate life and interplay. The materialist is equally monistic, but he passes completely over to speculation, since he absorbs the idea into the seemingly outer fact. He declares this to be the reality, and consciousness a passing property of matter. The controversy between the two cults of monism is ancient and profound, and need not be entered upon here. It is, however, worth remarking that while idealism does not pretend to explain consciousness, materialism cannot explain matter. Idealism has the advantage of sticking closer to the experienced fact.

Idealism being pure experience, and materialism pure speculation, dualism, in spite of the apparent contradiction, occupies the curious position of standing midway between the two. It is part experience and part speculation, — experience in accepting the idea, the intellectual and spiritual life, and speculation in accepting the seeming fact of the outer world as an altogether separate reality. Dualism gives us two distinct worlds, — one of idea or spirit, and one of outer fact or matter. Man is thus divided into separate parts, into spirit and body. The social purpose and the educational process which grow out of this dualistic conception of man share its speculative character and its dilemmas. The particular difficulty appears when we attempt a theory of knowledge. So complete is the chasm between idea and fact that no bridge can be found between them. Neither can know the other. We have thus on our hands two worlds in place of the single one which we started out to explain.

The only view of the nature of man which can form an unchallenged part of the philosophic idea is just this bare and simple belief that man is a unit, an integral consciousness, and beyond this, one may not pass.

In thus limiting the world, as an experienced fact, to human consciousness, I seem at first sight to be robbing it of reality instead of conferring reality, for the intensity of consciousness varies. The world becomes more real and less real. It is as if existence itself ebbed and flowed, as if I were more awake and then less awake, living alternately under the influence of an intoxicant and an opiate. It is, of course, perfectly easy to declare this flux and flow a distemper of the individual mind, and to erect the outer world into a separate, unchangeable universe. But what you experience is not such a stable universe, with yourself left out, or even yourself as mere spectator. It is the flux and flow that you experience, the come and go, the projection and the fading. This is the life-drama, this is the world-passion, a stupendous panorama in which a part is distinct and clear-cut ; in focus, if you please to put it so ; and part is vague and shadowy, like the foreground in Corot's pictures. One is obliged to admit varying degrees of reality.

Have you ever noticed, for example, in an apartment, filled with a great many ugly things, and a very few beautiful things, that the ugly things gradually lose their power to annoy, and the beautiful things have increased power to attract ? In the end we cease to see the ugly things and see only the beautiful things. Do you remember, how in any great gallery of pictures the majority of canvases fade away ; how on your fourth visit to the Pitti Palace or the Uffizi you saw only a dozen or so pictures, and how in the Louvre the Salon Carre overshadows all the acreage of canvas ? Thinking now of your circle of acquaintance, do you notice that the real people are those you believe in and admire, that your love goes out to the people whom you have idealized ? It is the same in history, with places and books. Christ is more real than Pilate ; Athens than Kome ; Cinderella than her wicked sisters.

This unequal reality in the world-drama is simply due to its unequal power to stir the emotions. Consciousness is faint or vivid just in the measure that it is emotional. The ebb and flow of reality has its counterpart in the ebb and flow of feeling.

Not only our consciousness of other persons, places, and things, but even the consciousness of self shares in these fluctuations. There is a comeand-go character about the experience that is very baffling. The realities of the young man are not the realities of the middle-aged man, and these in turn are different from those of old age. In youth, the most persistent realities are those aroused by one's companions. There are moments when our love and interest so concentrate themselves on the person of a comrade that for the time he becomes a more intense object of consciousness, a greater reality, than ourselves. In moments of danger and illness, of great sorrow or great joy, of any supreme emotion indeed, the reality of self becomes secondary, and the greater reality is another. So in youth, the loss of a dear friend by death is to us a partial death for ourselves ; out of our own lives has gone an integral part of our own reality. Time assuages our grief by creating other realities, and so in part repairing the torn tissue of our emotions. Some of these fellow-voyagers altogether elude us, and when in later life their names are mentioned, we find them less familiar than the people in the last novel we have read. But to others, to the mother, to the beloved one, to the chosen comrade, we give the immortality of an ever-present reality.

It is impossible to believe that this varying reality is a result of caprice, a mere whimsy of consciousness. There must be some indwelling principle which determines the grade of reality by the measure of its own presence. How is it that the world is such a strictly individual experience ? How is it that it is literally true that there are as many worlds as there are people in it ? We can best find an answer to these queries by probing the most persistent of all realities, the consciousness of self, and trying to find what principle it is which confers intense reality by its presence, and dissipates reality by its absence. That my love and interest should so concentrate themselves upon the idea of self, and give it this intense reality, is not explained, I think, by what is commonly called self-interest ; does not rest upon what one may acquire, not even upon what one may accomplish. These represent a monotony of process which cannot stir the emotions unendingly. The persistent, emotional care for the self rests upon something deeper and more fundamental. It rests upon one's faith in one's self, upon the consciousness of an unfolding self, upon the assurance that the most real element in the self is an unquenchable aspiration for the things which are excellent and beautiful. So even to myself I seem more real and less real ; more real as I approach the goal of this high endeavor, less real as I recede from it. The ecstasy and the travail of the spirit represent the crest and the trough in the reality of life.

If I apply the same test to other persons, and to things, I get the same result. Their power to stir the emotions, to heighten consciousness, and so to become the intense realities of the experienced moment depends upon their supposed measure of worth. The persistent, emotional care which the self feels for other selves rests upon just such grounds as these. Our love for them rests upon what they are, or what we believe they are, upon our ideal of them, and no love is founded upon any other ground than a belief in the essential excellence of its object. It is the same with things. Art is always representative and symbolic. It lacks the reality of living men and women, of actual Nature, but the same touchstone applies to both. It is the greater excellence which confers the greater reality. The marbles of Greece, the frescoes and canvases of Italy, are still the objects of loving reverence. They have been imitated in countless numbers. In hundreds of galleries men and women make their mute appeal in marble or on canvas, but hardly one touches the spirit. It is so much material, so much technique, so much time doubtfully spent, but it is a slender reality. The marble of Greece has not only the poetry of form ; it has the deeper and more abiding loveliness of the indwelling spirit. So subtle is it that the eye alone cannot compass it. One would like to pass the hand reverently over the almost living limb and pulsing chest to fully apprehend it. The men of Michelangelo are the incarnation of penetrating, vital ideas. They are the channel through which he speaks. Beautiful and merciful, or stern and dreadful, they sweep over the whole scale of human emotion. This untiring quest of perfection is the most abiding impulse of the human spirit. Reality resides in this impulse towards perfection in the world of life ; in the promise of perfection in the world of things.

And I propose now to go a step further, carrying over into the remote and less known the same principles which hold good in our experience of the near and better known.

In moments of contemplation, we purify our ideals of all imperfectness. By constantly looking upon the goodness of the mother, we merge her at last in our thought into the perfect mother, the Madonna. By dwelling persistently upon the excellence and the beauty of the friend, we transfigure him into Apollo. So in the heart is accomplished the apotheosis of those whose nature cast about them in real life the aureole of assured goodness. The images which we thus create out of the material of our own emotional experience accomplish in our consciousness just those steps towards deeper goodness and wider knowledge and more radiant beauty which the unfolding self pictures as its own destiny. So the self, building, observe, out of its own inner experience, projects into Olympus a higher order of being than it has visibly experienced on the earth. Saints and heroes, angels and gods, become realities of experience in so much as they represent perfectly definite and rational steps in that process of becoming which the unfolding self is conscious of having entered upon.

One more step remains in this projection of the greater self into the empyrean of the unseen good. The quest of perfection stretches out unendingly. It is the occasion of infinite hope. But one can in words at least pass to the last term in such a series. When, by a supreme effort, the consciousness projects its image to the utmost limit of possible experience, and declares the realization of all goodness, the attainment of all knowledge, the satisfaction of all aspiration, the enfolding of all beauty in a cosmic is, then the self, though it may not conceive him, at least breathes the name of God, the consciousness which includes the whole of the world-drama.

When I ask myself what degrees of reality attach to these elements of consciousness, to the self, to the comrades, to the angels, to God, I can only answer that with the flux and flow of consciousness the reality changes. As we have seen, there are moments when the friend obscures the self and becomes the more intense reality. There are moments when the angels overshadow both, and become more real than either. There are moments when the vague idea of God transcends all else, and fills the whole of consciousness. But there is no necessity, indeed, there is no merit, in arranging these realities in anything like a graded scale. Their very soundness and integrity depend upon the unpersuaded play of consciousness.