Part 5

Let us assume for a moment that these things are true, that they are the most important truths about the child; and let us see how they must affect our views of life, of politics, sociology, art, religion, conduct. There is of course no moment at which the child ceases to be a child. The laws of its growth and being are not at any discoverable time superseded by any new laws. Man as a creature, as an organism, has here by Froebel, and for the first time in history, been ingenuously studied, and the main laws of him noted. With the discovery that he is a unity, there vanishes every classification of science made since the days of Aristotle. They are convenient dogmas, thumb rule distinctions, useful as aids in the further pushing of our studies into the workings of this unity. Take up now a book of political economy, a poem, a history: this thought of Froebel’s runs through it like quicksilver. The scheme of thought of the writer is by it dissolved at once into human elements. You find you are studying the operation of the mind of some one, whom you picture to yourself as a man, as a unit; you are interpreting this by your own experience. It is all psychology, you are pushing your analysis. The universe is receiving its interpretation through you yourself. We are thus brought to the point of view of the mystic, as the only conceivable point of view.

“That the organism develops by creative activity.” This might have come as a deduction from Darwin. It is an expression in metaphysical language of the “struggle for life.” Froebel discovered it independently. The consequences of a belief in it are so tremendous, that no man who is not prepared to spend the rest of his life completely dominated by the idea, ought even to pause to consider it.

Your capacities, your beliefs, your development, your spiritual existence are the result of what you do. Active creation of some sort, occupation which takes your entire attention and calls upon you, merely incidentally and as a matter of course, for thought, resource, individual or original force; this will develop you and nothing else will.

The connection between this thought and the previous one is apparent. It is only by such creative activity that the organism as a unit gets into play. If you set a man copying or memorizing, you have occupied only a fraction of him. If you set him to making something, the minute he begins, his attention is concentrated. Willy nilly he is trying to make something significant, he is endeavoring to express himself, the forces and powers within him begin coming to his succor, offering aid and suggestion. Before he knows it, his whole being is in operation. The result is a statement of some sort, and in the process of making it the creature has developed. But when you say “significant” you have already implied the existence of other organisms. He is not expressing himself only, he is expressing them all, and here comes Froebel with his third great discovery, that it is by constant personal intercourse with others that the power to express is gained. And on top of this comes the last law, so closely related to the third as to be merely a new view of it, but discovered by experiment, tested by practice, announced empirically and as a fact, that the child is unselfish and only really happy when at work creatively and for the use and behoof of others.

This conclusion throws back its rays over the course of the argument, and we are compelled to see, what we have already known, that unselfishness and intellectual development are one and the same thing, that there is no failure of intellect which cannot be expressed in terms of selfishness, and no selfishness that cannot be expressed as intellectual shortcoming. Criminology has reached the same point by another route.

The matter is really very simple, for anything self-regardant means a return of the organism upon itself, a stepping on your own toes, and brings self-consciousness, discomfort, pain. Self-sacrifice on the other hand brings fulfilment. The self-sacrifice is always illusory, and the development real. This becomes frightfully apparent in ingenuous and unhappy love affairs, for the organism robbed of fulfilment returns upon itself.

It makes little difference what province of thought we begin with in applying these views to the world. They give results like a table of logarithms. They do more than this, they unravel the most complex situations, they give the key to conduct and put a compass in the hands of progress. They explain history, they support religion, they justify instinct, they interpret character. They give the formula for doing consciously what mankind has been doing unconsciously in so far as it has been doing what any one of us in his soul approves of or cares to imitate.

Let us take up the most obvious deductions. If people develop according to their activities, their opinions will be a mere reflex of their conduct. What they see in the world comes out of what they do in the world. Here in a mere niche of Froebel we find the whole of Emerson.

The power and permanence of Sainte Beuve are due to his having applied this theory to the interpretation of literature. He is not content till he has seen the relation between the conduct and the opinions, the conduct and the art of a character.

Or take Emerson himself, why was it that being so much he was not more? How came it that after his magnificent prologue in the Phi Beta Kappa address, which is like the opening of a symphony, he relapsed into iteration and brilliant but momentary visions of his own horizon? He kept repeating his theme till he piped himself into fragmentary inconsequence. The reason is that he had learned all he knew before he retired to Concord and contemplation. Active life would have made him blossom annually and last like Gladstone.

Or take Goethe: all that is questionable in him results from his violation of two of Froebel’s laws of psychology. He fixed his attention upon self-development and thereby gradually ossified. Every moment of egotism was an intellectual loss. His contact with people, meanwhile, became more and more formal as he grew older, and his work more and more inexpressive.

Give me a man’s beliefs, and I will give you his occupation. What has happened to that radical that he seems to have become so moderate and reasonable? You find that for six months he has been clerk to the Civil Service Reform Club. Why is the mystical poetry of this intellectual man as vacant as the fashion print he edits for his daily bread? His employment has tracked his mind to these unearthly regions. He is dead here too.

There is no such thing as independent belief, based on evidence and reflection. The thing we call belief is a mere record left by conduct. If you sincerely go through the regimen of Loyola’s manual, you will come out a Jesuit. You can no more resist it than you can resist the operation of ether. This man is an optimist. It means that he has struggled. That man is a pessimist. It means that he has shirked. Here is one who has been in touch with all movements for good during a dismal era of corruption, and yet he has no faith. It means that the whole of him has not been enlisted. His conscience has drawn him forward. It is not enough. There is compromise in him. He is not an absolute fighter.

Here is the most excellent gentleman in America, an old idealist untouchably transcendental, an educated man. To your amazement he thinks that it is occasionally necessary to subsidize the powers of evil. He was bred a banker.

Here is a village schoolma’am who from a rag of information in a county paper has divined the true inwardness of a complicated controversy at Washington which you happen to know all about. She has been reforming a poorhouse.

A is a clergyman, good but ineffective. He relies on beneficence and persuasion. He does not know the world better than a club loafer knows it. The only entry to it is by attack, the only progress by action.

B is a good fellow, yet betrays a momentary want of delicacy which gives you a shock, and which you forgive him, saying: “It is a coarseness of natural fibre.” It is no such thing. There is in every man a natural fibre as fine as a poet’s. His coarseness is the residuum of an act.

You meet a man whom you have known as a court stenographer, and whom you have supposed to be drowned in worldly cares. At a chop house he gives you a discourse on Plato’s Phædrus which he interprets in a novel way. The brains of the man surprise you. This man, though he looks sordid, positively must have been sending a younger brother to college during many years. There is no other explanation of him.

The nemesis of conduct then stalks about in the form of a natural law, not as the pseudo science of fancy, but as a mode of growth, modestly formulated by a great naturalist.

Take the matter up on its other side. You can only discover in the universe, try how you will, strain your eyes how you please, you can only see what you have lived. Out of our activity comes our character, and it is with this that we see beauty or ugliness, hope or despair. It is by this that we gauge the operation of economic law and of all other spiritual forces. It is with this that we interpret all things. What we see is only our own lives.

We are all more or less in contact with human life. We live in a pandemonium, a paradise of illustrations, and if we have only eyes to see, there is enough in any tenement house to-day to lay bare the heart and progress of Greek art.

But the worst is to come--the horror that makes intellect a plaything. By a double consequence the past fetters the future. Once take any course and our eyes begin to see it as right, our hearts to justify it. Only fighting can save us, and we see nothing to fight for. Thraldom enters and night like death where no voice reaches. The eternal struggle is for vision.

How idiotic are the compliments or the contempt of the inexperienced. Nothing but life teaches. Hallam thinks Juliet immodest, and he had read all the literatures of Europe. If you want to understand the Greek civilization you have got to be Sophocles. If you want to understand the New Testament you have got to be Christ. If you want to understand that most complex and difficult of all things, the present, you must be some or all of it, some of it any way. You must have it ground into you by a contact so wrenchingly close, by a struggle so severe, that you lose consciousness, and afterwards--next year--you will understand.

Here is the reaction familiar to all men since the dawn of history, which makes the man of action the hero of all times. It goes in courage, it comes out power.

This reaction, this transformation goes forward in the very stuff that we are made of, and if we come to look at it closely, we are obliged to speak of it in terms of consciousness. There are so many different kinds of consciousness, that the best we can do is to remind some one else of the kind we mean. The hand of the violinist is unconscious to the extent that it is functioning properly, and as his command over music develops, this unconsciousness creeps up his arm and possesses his brain and being, until he, as he plays, is completely unself-conscious and his music is the mere projection of an organism which is functioning freely.

But this condition of complete concentration makes us in a different sense of the word self-conscious in the highest degree, self-comprehending, self-controlled, self-expressing. And it is in this philosophical sense that the word self-conscious is used by the Germans, and may sometimes be conveniently used by us, if we can do so without foregoing the right to use the words conscious and unconscious in their popular sense at other times.

The discovery of Froebel was that this mastery over our own powers was to be obtained only through creative activity. The suggestion, it may be noted, is destined to reorganize every school of violin playing in Europe. For we have here the major canon of a rational criticism. We find that in the old vocabulary such words as genius, temperament, style, originality, etc., have always been fumblingly used to denote different degrees in which some man’s brain was working freely and with full self-consciousness. A deliverance of this kind has always been designated as ‘creative,’ no matter in what field it was found.

Approaching the matter more closely, we see that the whole of the man must have responded in real life to every particle of experience which he uses in his work. An imitation means something which does not represent an original unitary vibration.

Goethe puts in the mouth of the mad Gretchen a snatch of German song in imitation of Ophelia. The treatment does not fit the character. It has only been through that part of Goethe’s mind with which he read Shakespeare. As a sequel to this suggestion, the peasant of the early scenes has lavished upon her all the various reminiscences of the pathetic that Goethe could muster. It is moving, but it is inorganic. It is not true.

For note this, that while it takes the whole of a man to do anything true, no matter how small, anything that the whole of him does is right. Hence the inimitable grotesques of greatness, the puns in tragedy. These things belong to the very arcana of nature. By and by, when the reasons are understood, nature will be respected. No one will attempt to imitate genius, or to reproduce an artistic effect of any kind.

If we look at recent literature by the light of this canon, we find the reason for its inferiority. It is the work of half minds, of men upon whose intelligence the weight of a dogma is pressing.

The eclipse of philosophy was of course reflected in fiction. There is the same trouble with Herbert Spencer as with Zola. Each of them thinks to wrest the secrets of sociology from external observation. Their books lack objectivity and are ephemeral. Kant and Balzac did better because their method was truer.

Everything good that has been done in the last fifty years has been done in the teeth of current science. The whole raft of English scientists are children playing with Raphael’s brushes the moment they leave some specialty. There never lived a set of men more blinded by dogma, blinded to the meaning of the past, to the trend of the future, by the belief that they had found new truth. Not one of them can lift the stone and show what lies under Darwin’s demonstration. They run about with little pamphlets and proclaim a New Universe like Frenchmen. They bundle up all beliefs into a great Dogma of Unbelief, and throw away the kernel of life with the shell. This was inevitable. A generation or two was well sacrificed, in this last fusillade of the Dogma of Science--the old guard dogma that dies but never surrenders. Hereafter it will be plain that the whole matter is a matter of symbols on the one hand, knowledge of human nature on the other.

Herbert Spencer has been a useful church-warden to science, but his knowledge of life was so trifling, his own personal development so one-sided, that his sociology is a farce.

This canon of criticism explains in a very simple manner the art ages, times when apparently every one could paint, or speak, or compose. The art which is lost is really the art of courageous action. Neither war nor dogma nor revolution is necessary, for feeling can no more be lost than force, and the power to express it depends upon an interest in life. The past has enriched us with conventions, and whenever a man or a group of men arises who uses them and is not subdued to them, we have art. The thing is easy. To the doers it is a mere knack of the attention.

We had almost thought that art was finished, and we find we are standing at the beginning of all things. Froebel has found a formula which fits every human activity.

Let us take the supreme case, the apogee of human development, and what will it be?

The sum of all possible human knowledge is, as we have seen, an expansion of our understanding of human nature, and this is got by intercourse, by dealing with men, by getting them to do something. In order to make them do it, in order to govern, you must understand, and the rulers of mankind are the wisest of the species. They summarize society. Solomon, Cæsar, Hildebrand, Lincoln, Bismarck, these men knew their world.

But if a virtuous ruler be the prototype of all possible human fulfilment, there is no other art or province of employment to which the same views do not apply. When any man reaps some of the power which his toil has sown, and throws it out as a note or a book or a statue, it has an organic relation to the human soul and is valuable forever. There is only one rule of art. Let a man work at a thing till it looks right _to him_. Let him adjust and refine it till, as he looks at it, it passes straight into him, and he grows for a moment unconscious again, that the forces which produced it may be satisfied. As it stands then, it is the best he can do. In so far as we completely develop this power we become completely happy and completely useful, for our acts, our statements, our notes, our books, our statues become universally significant.

Once feel this truth, and you begin to lose the sense of your identity, to know that your destiny, your self, is an organic part of all men. It is they that speak. It is themselves that have been found and expressed. It was this toward which we tended, this that we cared for--action, art, intellect, unselfishness, are they not one thing?

The complete development of every individual is necessary to our complete happiness. And there is no reason why any one who has ever been to a dull dinner party should doubt this. Nay, history gives proof that solitude is dangerous. Man cannot sing, nor write, nor paint, nor reform, nor build, nor do anything except die, alone. The reasons for this are showered upon us by the idea of Froebel, no matter which side of it is turned toward us.

This philosophy which seemed so dry till we began to see what it meant, begins now to circumscribe God and include everything. For Christ himself was one whose thoughts were laws and whose deeds are universal truth. Shakespeare’s plays are universal truth. They are the projection of a completely developed and completely unconscious human intellect. They educated Germany, and it is to the study of them that Hegel’s view of life is due. The great educational forces in the world are proportioned in power to the development of the individual man in the epochs they date from. Here and there, out of a hotbed, arises a personal influence which directs thought for a thousand years and qualifies time forever.

The division of the old ethics into egoism and altruism receives the sanction of science. The turning of the attention upon selfish ends, no matter how remote nor how momentary, hurts the organism, contracts the intellect, dries up the emotions, and is felt as unhappiness. The turning of the attention toward public aims benefits the organism, enlarges the intellect, and is felt as happiness. There is no complexity possible, for any mixed motive is a selfish motive.

All the virtues are different names for the injunction of self-mastery, by which the internal struggle is made more severe, and the force cooped in and controlled until it is released in the functioning of the whole man.

In any sincere struggle for right, then, no matter how petty, we are fighting for mankind, and this is just what everybody has always known, always believed.

It is thrown at us as a great paradox, that somebody must pay the bills; that if you live upon charity and can succeed in getting yourself crucified, you are still a mere product of thrift and selfishness somewhere. But the paradox is the same if put the other way, for selfishness would never support you.

The question is purely one of fact, what thing comes first, what thing satisfies the heart of man. He may support himself merely as a means to help others. A man may start a pauper and die a millionaire, and yet never think a thought or do an act which does not add to the welfare of man. It is a question of ultimate controlling intention.

Man the microcosm is a kingdom where reigns continual war. Now he is a furnace of love, the next moment he is a mean scamp. We know very little about the mechanism by which these microcosms communicate with one another. It seems likely that every iota of feeling must be either transmitted or transformed; that if a spasm of selfishness be conveyed, or some part of it, even by a glimpse of the eye, it must leave a record of injury and start on a career of injury, just so much loss to the world. On the other hand it may be transformed into the other kind of force and expended later in good.

The thing is governed by some simple law, although man has not yet been able to reduce it to algebra. What is most curious is this, that the tendency of any man to believe in the reaction as a law, is not dependent upon his scientific training, but upon his moral experience. The best heads in physics will still betray a belief that a man must be able to afford to be unselfish, that selfishness often does good, that it is a muddled up affair, and a thing outside of science which they will get round to later. Everybody sees a few degrees in the arc of this law. Read the index on the quadrant and you will have his character. Now and then some saint swears he sees a circle.

Let us press the inquest. It is not likely that life itself is duplex or consists of two kinds of force, one egoistic, one altruistic. The likelihood is the other way. There is only one force which vibrates through these organisms. It is absolutely beneficent only when it completely controls one of them, so that the whole thing sings together.

This music is the highest, but the notes that go to make it up are everywhere. Altruism does not arise, is not imposed from without, at any period or by any crisis, by progress or by society. The spiral unwinds with the unwinding life upon the globe. It is the form of illusion under which all life proceeds. It is the law of mind. The eye treats space and color as entities. It cannot see on any other terms. The stomach digests food, but not its own lining. We are obliged to think in terms of the objective universe. We are not wholesome unless we are self-forgetting. There is no cranny in all the million manifestations of nature where you can interfere between the organism and its object without representing disease.

And man is more than a mere altruistic animal. At least the religions of Humanity have never expressed him. At those times when he is entirely unselfish and therefore entirely himself, when he feels himself to be one single well-spring, all unselfishness, all love, all reverence, all service to something not himself, yet something personal, he has faith. The theologies are attempts to formulate this state of mind in order that it may be preserved. It is clear enough that every mind must speak in its own symbols, and that the symbols of one must always appear to another as illusions. Yet each man for himself knows he faces a reality. This is a psychological necessity. Destroy the belief, and on the instant he changes. Show him that he is the victim of an illusion, and he is divided, a half man. A man whose mind is divided, as, for instance, by the consciousness of a personal motive, cannot believe. He stands like the wicked king in the play of Hamlet; unable to pray. It is a psychological impossibility.

The concern of mankind for their forms of doctrine is gratuitous. Faith re-appears under new names. You cannot convince a lover that he is bent on self-development, nor any decent man that he does not believe in, is not controlled by something higher than himself. The question is not one of words.