Things of the mind

Contents

Chapter Page

I. Views of Education 7

II. Views of Education 40

Chapter I. Views Of Education

To be an interpreter and relater of the best and sagest things among mine own citizens. — Milton.

WHETHER it be beautiful scenery, or noble monuments, or venerable ruins, or painting, or sculpture, or music, or books, or contact with life, things presented to us educate us only inasmuch as we react upon them. Lead the listless savage through all that is most worth seeing, knowing, admiring, and loving, and at the end he is what he was at the start. The general problem of education is how best to place instinct and passion under the control of reason and conscience, of higher motives and tastes, that men may learn to find their pleasure and their happiness in doing what brings health, knowledge, and virtue. The educator's aim is to create interest, for thus alone is it possible to awaken mind. How often it happens, where dulness and listlessness had prevailed, a new-comer brings joy and fresh thoughts. This the teacher should do ; when he appears, he should call forth a sense of glad expectancy, just as a true actor at once lifts a heavy scene into the region of active interest. He is wholly free from the pedant's vanity and conceit, and in his skill there is the play of life. Mechanical iteration is the radical fault in education. We pardon our instructors almost anything if only they be not tiresome. Better not to teach or preach than to weary. When the pupil's intercourse with the teacher opens to him glimpses into higher worlds, he is quick to believe all that is told him of heroes, saints, and sages. Sowers, reapers, and gardeners, hunters, fishermen, and the feeders of flocks are the best society for boys; they stimulate an observant interest in the things which are always around them, and touch the sources of pure delight in nature in her most beneficent and pleasant manifestations.

To watch, when one is young, the sun with gradual wheel sink slowly from sight, or the stars, as one by one they break upon the view, or the birds when with gentle flutterings they settle to rest amid the leaves, or the full-fed cattle as they lie in wakeful dreams, or the young of animals disporting themselves upon the green, or the bees plying their task amid the flowers, or ants providing their hoard, or any of the thousand things nature offers so prodigally to our gaze, — is to drink at the purest and freshest fountain of knowledge, is to store the mind with thoughts and images which, as the years go on, remain with us fragrant and wholesome as a breath of air from life's fair dawn. To look on the fierce battles of bulls, of boars, and of cocks is to feel the might of courage and endurance. To see the little martens as they sally forth to attack the hawk is to learn what pluck and daring, what a union of several may accomplish. The great source of sympathy with mankind, as with nature, are those early recollections which bring back to us fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters, and all the fair, fresh world which circled about our childhood. Read no book unless it interest thee. When thou readest, or speakest, or hearest, look steadfastly with the mind at the things the words symbolize. If there be question of mountains, let them loom before thee; if of the ocean, let its billows roll beneath thy eyes. This habit will give to thy voice even pliancy and meaning. The more sources of interest we have, the richer is our lO THINGS OF THE MIND.

life. To hold any portion of truth in a vital way is better than to have its whole baggage stored merely in one's memory. The self-taught look at the world with their own eyes and think their own thoughts. Thy own mind is the first and final court of evidence, and what it receives it should receive on the authority of evidence or on the evidence of authority; in other words, it should accept only what it sees to be true, or has sufficient warrant for believing. The more cultivated a man is, the greater the number of things which interest him. Where others see nothing he finds a well-spring of fresh thoughts; he observes, and attends to what he observes; he receives much because he brings much; he discovers truth and beauty and goodness in things because he bears them within himself. His mind is a light which clothes what he contemplates in well-defined forms and rightly shaded colors; his heart is an alembic in which the fine spirit of love is distilled; his imagination, like a god, calls forth a living world from the waste and void abyss of matter. He who thinks for himself is rarely persuaded by another. Information and inspiration he gladly receives, but he forms his own judgment. Arguments and reasons which to the thoughtful sound like mockery satisfy the

VIEWS OF EDUCATION. II

superficial and the ignorant. An enlightened mind sympathizes with the multitude as he sympathizes with children, not so much for what they are as for what it is possible to make of them.

"To be a fool after the fashion," says Kant, "is better than to be a downright fool." Noble thoughts and pure loves inform the countenance, and give dignity and grace to one's whole bearing. A fair and luminous soul makes its body beautiful. Take up anew each day the task set thee, — to make thyself more truly a rational, social, and moral being.

Hasteless, but restless, O my soul, follow after the light That still gleams as brightly as the stars that follow the night.

Man is not born, he is made by education, — by the education he receives and by the education he gives himself. Imagination rules our life. It creates the ideals by which we live ; from point to point it beckons us on to the unattained. Over vulgar reality it throws a mystic veil; it draws the charmed circle wherein move friendship, love, and freedom. It blows the trumpet of honor and fame; it leads the way to glorious death.

Superficial minds are fond of dwelling upon the evils religion has wrought; but serious thinkers know that the ever open and inexhaustible fountain of faith, hope, and love, is belief in God, — or in gods, if you will.

If men have fought and persecuted and died for their religion, it is because they have held it to be a priceless blessing. This breath from higher worlds, unseen but felt to be real, is to young unfolding souls what sunshine and rain are to the growing corn.

When the vital current flows rich and healthful, as in the young, life is believed, without the remotest shadow of doubt, to be good; but this is largely unconscious life, and the question is, whether consciousness is a blessing, whether to see things as they are brings joy and peace. The problem therefore resolves itself into this, — whether, at the heart of being, behind, within, and above all, there is truth and love; in other words, whether the ultimate fact is conscious life. They who are unable to think that this is so must hold that to think is to be sad, whereas they who believe in God cannot but think that the misery of conscious existence is accidental. Theism is optimism, atheism is pessimism. If there were no God, ignorance would be bliss, and education a crime. Hope and love are the expression of faith in life's goodness. He alone is a true pessimist who neither hopes nor loves. The end of education is the formation of character; character rests on the basis of morality; and morality, if it have life and vigor, is interfused with religion. True religion is inseparable from morality, and morality from right life, and therefore from right education. Hence religion, morality, and education, are a trinity. "Religion," says Herbart, "will never hold the tranquil place in the depths of the heart which it ought to have, if its fundamental ideas are not among the earliest which belong to recollection, — if it is not bound up and blended with all that changing life leaves behind in the centre of personality."

As we should strive to teach ourselves to take delight in whatever is fair in nature, in whatever is true or beautiful in literature or art, so we should learn to find pleasure in whatever brings good to men, and first of all in the welfare and success of those around us, though they be our foes and rivals. A noble man feels that no human being, not even his enemy, is as happy as he would have him be, and thus he finds satisfaction in what only embitters and saddens mean and narrow souls. This enlightened good-will which enables us to have genuine sympathy with all men, is the very soul of the moral character which- it is the aim and end of education to form. Why do men choose an avocation? To gain a livelihood. But the better sort, whatever their special occupation, labor to fit themselves for life in the higher world of thought and love. Let every faculty be developed in the mild and wholesome air of religion. Good teachers feel they are educating themselves as well as their pupils, and when this belief is not found the power to educate is lacking. He who is led by the ideal of intellectual culture concerns himself little with mere questions of social order and political economy, for he feels that if he can but make reason prevail it will put right whatever may need ordering. They who are able to draw forth the mind and illumine the soul should be relieved from all other tasks. In our social gatherings we ascend from out the true self, to glide on the surface amid the forms and shows of life. Hence nothing deeply interesting is ever heard where men meet to eat and talk. Do what it is right thou shouldst do now; but strive ceaselessly that it may become possible for thee to do the work thou wast born to do.

The craving for applause is as morbid as the craving for alcohol. He alone is strong who is self-sufficient, since he is what he is through communion with God and the world of truth. When the great man — poet, philosopher, statesman, orator, or captain — has gained recognition, he becomes indifferent to the praise he once longed for. Happier is he who dies knowing his own worth, himself unknown, "and what most merits fame in silence hid." Let the young be made to understand that the desire to appear, to be seen, to be noticed, to be talked of, springs from a crude and barbarous nature. When we look to changes to be wrought in the social and religious world, it may be permitted to feel discouragement, but when there is question of upbuilding and transforming our own being we should be filled with a divine confidence, knowing that the aids to noble life, like the kingdom of God, lie within us. Be a man, not a partisan. " Great moral energy," says Herbart, "is the result of broad views and of whole unbroken masses of thought." Every secret, for those who can see, is an open secret. How any man achieved any godlike thing, any man may know.

Thou mayst not be an artist who works in stone or on canvas, or who breathes harmonious numbers, but an artist thou shouldst become, in the ceaseless effort to fashion thy own life into the likeness of what is true, beautiful, and good. Though thou shouldst think all the world a stage, learn at least, like Augustus, to play well thy part. For a century now and more, the world resounds with much speech about the rights of man. His first and chief right is the right to grow, to unfold his being on many sides, and to bring himself into conscious harmony with all that is. Heed not the tempter's voice, seeking to persuade thee thou hast done thy best. To have done the best he can is little for the man who feels that his ever urgent duty is to make himself capable of still better things by pushing day by day into wider and serener worlds. Each man is the maker of himself, the power he uses being God's; and each present moment bears within itself the future's form and substance. To be a man is to be a fighter, a combatant on the world's wide battlefield, where the cohorts of ignorance and sin wage ceaseless warfare against the soul. No one is by nature good or great or wise, but whoever attains such height reaches it by hard toil and long struggles with temptations and hindrances of many kinds. Education lays the foundation, self-education erects the building. Another may show the way, but if we would reach the goal we must ourselves walk therein. Whatever may strengthen body, mind, or soul, the educator needs and should make use of. The strong man, in the right sense, is also wise and good, helpful and loving. They who

VIEWS OF EDUCATION. ly

starve the body cannot nourish the mind, and if the heads of institutions of learning have not the means to supply copious, wholesome food, they should be made to withdraw from the business of education; but if, having the means, they seek to save money at the expense of health and life, they should be dealt with as criminals. To educate to passive obedience is to predestine to failure.

When Demosthenes was asked what makes an orator, he replied, ''Action, action, action." Had the question been, "What makes a man? " the answer should have been the same, — "Action, action, action." We know what will is only when we begin to act, for action begets will. When we clearly see a thing to be possible we have begun to teach ourselves how to make it real. The circle of thought which we create for ourselves and in which we habitually move, makes us what we are. As the gardener by engrafting can produce the most precious fruit from an inferior stock, so the educator, by implanting fresh thoughts and principles, new aims and desires in the mind of his pupil, may recreate and transform his whole being. The supreme problem for the individual, the family, the school, the State, and the Church, is how to harmonize liberty with order. The higher the source of authority, and the head of rule, the easier the solution. The rhythmic movement of life is the mark of health in the physical, the domestic, and the social body. In every ill-ordered household there is degeneracy.

The power within and behind nature is the power within and behind man, and the more we realize that we are part of nature, that what we call nature is a force which streams through us as a type of law and order, of wisdom and harmony, of strength and goodness, the more do we advance in dignity of being as rational and moral men. Endowments are possibilities merely; each one's self-activity must determine what for him they shall become.

When we say man is born free we mean nothing more than that he is born capable of making himself free by a process of gradual emancipation from the thraldom of ignorance, selfishness, and sensuality. This, self-education must accomplish for him. In a world where multitudes strive for knowledge, power, and wealth, the indolent and the listless are made use of or thrust back. The law of affinity, beginning with chemical atoms, runs upward to souls and God. The mind is drawn to what is akin to it, as planets are drawn to suns.

Our talents come to us largely from our social inheritance and environment, and they should be used for the common good. We begin with studying how to learn, and we end with learning how to study. The more we advance the more conscious we become of obeying ideal aims and ends. Only he who strives to distinguish himself, to make himself different from the crowd around him, becomes wise and strong. Be many kinds of man, but be sincere and high. What a wise man knows and loves is more interesting than himself, and if he write he will write of that, not of himself. The proper attitude of the mind toward the objective world is that of philosophical indifference. Things are what they are, and we, too, from moment to moment, are what we are; let the relation be seen and recognized. Beware of the will-o'-the-wisp which would lead thee to defend whatever thou mayst at any time have said or written. Little of what the best have written has significance for more than one generation. They who have learned most have had most to unlearn.

All the child and youth has been taught, the man must relearn if he is to arrive at insight. Possession makes us indifferent or self-satisfied; the ceaseless striving after better things makes us men. When we consider the diseases to which man is subject it seems marvellous that any one should have good health; and when we attend to the innumerable sources of his errors, it seems almost incredible that any one should think and judge rightly; for his mind is swayed from the line of truth by youth and by age, by ignorance and by learning, by feebleness, as by excessive vigor of body, by imagination, and by the lack of it, by love and by hate, by hope and by despair, by wealth and by poverty, by sluggishness and by haste, by fear and by envy, by lust and by greed, by pride and by conceit, by rationalism and by fanaticism, by cowardice and by hypocrisy, by credulity and by incredulity. How then shall he learn to see things as they are? Not malice and self-interest alone, but pity, sympathy, love, and prudence prompt us to deceive. The truth is sometimes cruel and brutal, or shocking in its nakedness, and they who soften its harshness, or throw a veil over its hideousness, will not believe they are wicked. The mother hides it from her child, the physician from his patient. We soon learn all our friends have to tell us; our intellectual shocks and surprises come from those who disagree with us, and they are our best teachers. The more we know, the more we doubt. Doubt is the shadow which the splendor of truth as it falls upon the mind always casts. It is easy to speak or write of what we know little; they whose knowledge is large and profound find less to say. Whoever turns his mind habitually and strongly in a given direction will find that, little by little, it loses the power of taking any other. The scientist becomes unable to think poetically or religiously; the poet and the mystic lose sight of the definiteness of things. Thus the soul, like the body, is subdued to what it works in. No state of things is good, no theory is practice, the real is never the ideal, — the spirit whereby and wherein thou livest and workest is the all in all.

O for a thrill of love, a thrill from life's fair prime,

To make my being start and blossom into rhyme,

Bring heaven near and give to stars their appealing light

And to my soul the wings which tempt infinite flight.

By love we live, when love is dead all things are dead,

And in a world we move whence God and the soul have fled.

" Never," says Jean Paul, " has one forgotten his pure, right-educating mother. On the blue mountains of our dim childhood toward which we ever turn and look, stand the mothers who marked out to us from thence our life ; the most blessed age must be forgotten ere we can forget the warmest heart."

At her death Laura appeared to Petrarch, in a dream, and holding out her hand she asked:

*' Do you not remember her who influenced your youth and led you out of the common road of life?"

A woman cannot hope to make a sage or a saint or a hero of the man who loves her, but she may, of the child. Contempt for women is the mark of a crude mind or of a corrupt heart. What strength is there not in the rich joyfulness of youth, bursting forth into glad song and laughter, and passing lightly away from hardship and disappointment, out again to where the glorious sunshine plays upon the rippling waters and the happy flowers. The very memory of it all comes back to us like a message from God to bid us be stout of heart and to keep growing. Those we love sanctify for us the places where they have lived ; the spots even where they have but passed are sacred.

The philosophy of life is the philosophy of education, and sympathy with the race tends to resolve itself into the desire to give to all a right culture; for it is plain that in this way better than in any other we are able to be of help to our fellows. Our interest in education is the measure of our interest in the world and in humanity. He alone is a true believer in the ideal of culture who is persuaded that culture, like virtue, is its own reward, that nothing an enlightened mind may enable him to obtain is as good as the enlightened mind itself. The aim of culture, as it is also the aim of religion, is to create an inner strength and enlightenment which supersedes and makes superfluous mere legalism.

Power of concentration, of persevering application of the whole mind to what ought to be known and done, is a mark of genius, and it is also one of the best results of right education. The educational value of the study of physical science is found in the sense it awakens of the universal presence of law and order, and also in the training to close and accurate observation which it enforces.

It is easy to educate too much, to put one's own mind and will in the place of the learner's ; but we are always safe when we help the pupil to educate himself. ** The mind," says Schiller, *' possesses only what it does." All of us, the most ignorant even, know more than we know how to put to right use. Prejudices are idols to which we sometimes sacrifice the most precious things, — the light of the mind, the joy of the soul, the free play of the imagination, the love of truth itself, and yet a man without prejudices is like a man without a home or a country. He is a stranger who finds no fellows, no company in which he will gain recognition, for nothing makes the crowd so uncomfortable as dispassionate reason, the pure light of the intellect. It is easy to meet with well-informed minds, but we seldom find one who has a real world-view and a circle of thought in which he is at home, whose life rests upon unity of purpose, whose conduct is controlled by principle, whose thinking has truth for its single aim. In former times to assert truth was to risk life, or, at the least, loss of name and goods; but now, when there is no danger and the whole rabble rush in each with his torch to enlighten the world, truth, grown ashamed of its nakedness, hides from the eyes of men.

'* Work and enthusiasm," says Goethe, *' are the pinions on which great deeds are borne." If the pupil see that his teacher is mean or arbitrary, the school becomes for him a place of perversion. Language is interesting because it is the garb and medium of thought and feeling; it is a symbol which has educational value only when it brings us into conscious communion with the things symbolized. All experience is first of all a mental fact. The word " matter," like matter itself, is the expression of a condition of mind.

Culture enables us to see how little worth most of our knowledge has, how little it deserves the name of knowledge. Learn to know and feel the soul of goodness, truth, and beauty, which, however hidden, acts everywhere in man and in the universe, making the world fair and life precious. " There is no easy way of learning what is difficult," says De Maistre ; '' the unique method is to shut one's door, to say one is not at home, and to work." In education the essential is not programmes and methods, but able and devoted men ; not the things taught, but the spirit in which they are taught. To attempt to teach morality as a separate something, and not to recognize that it ought to penetrate and dominate all our studies, is a fatal error. In high men the highest happiness springs from the consciousness of being and doing right. To be truthful and honorable are the most difficult virtues, for truth and honor spring from the finest sense of duty of which the soul is capable. The educator's ceaseless endeavor should be to prevent the formation of habits of wrong-doing; for such habits are enfeeblement of will, are the weakness which is misery. Character is educated will. Will is dark, mind is luminous ; and it is the purpose of education to flood the will with intellectual light. What we steadfastly will to be, we become. A mighty purpose gives us now, in a way, what we are resolved to have. It is hardly a paradox to maintain that it is better not to read at all than to read only newspapers. Health and wealth are appreciated when they have been lost; knowledge and virtue when they have been found. He teaches best who enables his pupil to dispense with his aid, as he governs best who makes his rule unnecessary. The virtue of the intellect makes us take delight in truth and beauty simply because they are true and beautiful, as moral virtue makes us love goodness simply because it is good. The shallowness and triviality of man's spirit is the most perplexing puzzle for a serious mind. Since he is not really concerned in any intelligent way, even for his bodily health and well-being, is it not idle to suppose in him a yearning for truth and love? If he takes little pains to make the best of this life, how shall we believe that he truly longs for immortal life? Have we not all, like biases viveiirs, lost the sense of the joy and sweetness of life? To see, to hear, to feel, to drink the light of day and star-illumined night, to breathe the perfume of flowers and ripening corn, to watch the pageant of the changing year, the play of children and the flight of birds, to dream, to think, to know, to believe, to hope, to love, — this and all else which only God could give, were bliss and pure delight if we were but sensible of the boundless boon.

'' Gods are we, bards, saints, heroes, If we will." The finding pleasure in doing right is a certain result of a habit of right-doing. Immoral conduct is a mark of retrogression toward the life of primitive man; and as savages, when thrown into contact with civilized races, disappear, so in a healthful society there should be an irresistible tendency to eliminate the vicious and criminal. Base pleasures deaden the relish for life. They who are most conscious of the need of self-improvement are most humble, and they w^ho devote themselves most assiduously to this task are most wise. The best men have no price; they can be bought neither with hope of reward nor with fear of punishment, purchased neither with money nor with place nor with pleasure. Let money be thy servant and procurator, not thy lord and master. Formerly culture was to be had only in half a dozen centres, — in Athens, Rome, or Alexandria, in Paris, Oxford, or Leipsic; but this is true no longer, and when young men tell me they cannot pursue the work of self-education in a Western village, I believe them. The fault lies within themselves. If I have only bread, and you want water, you will go to some one else; if you want muscle and I have only brains, if you want money and I have only virtue, you will not care for me. To have the best of everything is possible only for those who are themselves the best. The best thoughts are to be found in literature, but who loves them? The best eloquence, poetry, and music, like the glories of nature, are wasted merely on clowns and boors. The best which has been made known to man is the power of love, as it is revealed in Christ, but who believes it? Until our faith and knowledge enter into our very flesh and blood, we neither believe nor rightly understand. We truly know only what we have undergone, what suffering has taught us. Over those who lack the spirit of self-sacrifice, ideals have little power; they live in the present, absorbed in the selfish desire of possessing and enjoying. The discipline of want and sorrow by which man has been hammered into shape, purified, and made human, is for them simply an evil. They must indulge themselves; or, if this is denied them they are filled with envy and hate. Knowing nothing of the inner aids to life, they would grasp everything. They do not see that wisdom is taught by sufi"ering, and that consciousness of higher needs is indispensable to the attainment of wealth of heart and mind. Knowledge makes us unafraid, while love ever fills us with dread of loss.