Part 6
In a word, all who knew them liked them—and marvelled at them. There was abundant cause for marvel. Not only did they keep up with their studies with ease, but in more than one department of knowledge they outdid their classmates, some of whom were well into their twenties. The following excerpt from “The Book of the Jubilee” gives a vivid idea of the scholastic achievements of these two remarkable boys in the first years of their life at Glasgow University:
“At the end of his first winter’s work William Thomson carried off two prizes in the Humanity Class; this before he was eleven. In the next session we follow him to the classes of Natural History and Greek—we wonder what the present occupants of these chairs would say to a stripling under twelve who presented himself at their lectures—and his name figures in both prize-lists.
“Sympathy is not lacking for the hard-worked school-boy of to-day; but what would the child of twelve think of the holiday task of translating Lucian’s ‘Dialogues of the Gods,’ with full parsing of the first three dialogues! This is the piece of work for which William Thomson, Glasgow College, receives a prize in May, 1836.
“Next session we find the two brothers together in the Junior Mathematical Class, of the Junior Division of which they are first and second prize-men. They appear again at the head of the list for the Monthly Voluntary Examinations on the work of the class and its applications. Proceeding to the Senior Mathematical Class in 1837-38, they again stand at the top, nor have they failed to present themselves for the Voluntary Examinations. William is not satisfied with this class, but in addition receives the second prize in the Junior Division of Professor Robert Buchanan’s Logic Class.”
And, continuing to win laurels, at the close of the next session they took the first and second places as prize-men in natural philosophy, while William the following year gained the class prize in astronomy, and was awarded a university medal for an essay, “On the Figure of the Earth,” the manuscript of which, a carefully bound volume of eighty-five pages, is still in existence. He was then not sixteen years old.
Of course there were not lacking wiseacres who dolefully predicted all manner of unpleasant things for these “unhappy victims of a father’s folly,” who must inevitably fade into an early grave. But the father only smiled serenely, confident that the future would vindicate his educational innovation. And, of a surety, the future did. For James Thomson, the older of the two, living to the age of seventy, left behind him the reputation of one of England’s leading authorities on engineering; while William, who did not die until he was eighty-three, became even more famous, winning, as Lord Kelvin of Largs, a place in the annals of science fairly comparable with that held by the immortal Newton.
A similar process of intensive child culture was carried out, with similarly happy results, in the case of John Stuart Mill, whose father modelled his whole upbringing in accordance with the theory that the mind, like the body, grows with exercise, and that the sooner the process of exercising and training it begins, the better the child’s prospects for a worthy and efficient manhood. Like James Thomson the elder Mill was an exceedingly busy man, but this did not prevent him from making the intellectual development of his son a matter of patient, personal attention. Almost as soon as the little John could talk, his formal education began, and throughout his childhood was continued along lines that have provoked indignant comment in many quarters.
“I have no remembrance,” he tells us, in his interesting “Autobiography,” “of the time when I began to learn Greek. I have been told that it was when I was three years old. My earliest recollection on the subject is that of committing to memory what my father termed vocables, being lists of common Greek words, with their signification in English, which he wrote out for me on cards. Of grammar, until some years later, I learned no more than the inflexions of the nouns and verbs, but after a course of vocables, proceeded at once to translation; and I faintly remember going through ‘Æsop’s Fables,’ the first Greek book which I read. The ‘Anabasis,’ which I remember better, was the second. I learned no Latin until my eighth year.
“At that time I had read, under my father’s tuition, a number of Greek prose authors, among whom I remember the whole of Herodotus, and of Xenophon’s ‘Cyropaedia’ and ‘Memorials of Socrates’; some of the lives of the philosophers by Diogenes Laertius; part of Lucian; and ‘Isocrates ad Demonicum’ and ‘Ad Nicoclem.’... What he himself was willing to undergo for the sake of my instruction, may be judged from the fact that I went through the whole process of preparing my Greek lessons in the same room and at the same table at which he was writing; and as in those days Greek and English lexicons were not, and I could make no more use of a Greek and Latin lexicon than could be made without having yet begun to learn Latin, I was forced to have recourse to him for the meaning of every word which I did not know. This incessant interruption he, one of the most impatient of men, submitted to, and wrote under that interruption several volumes of his history and all else that he had to write during those years.
“The only thing besides Greek that I learned as a lesson in this part of my childhood was arithmetic; this also my father taught me. It was the task of the evenings, and I well remember its disagreeableness. But the lessons were only a part of the daily instruction I received. Much of it consisted in the books I read by myself, and my father’s discourses to me, chiefly during our walks.
“From 1810 to 1813 (that is, from Mill’s fourth to eighth year) we were living in Kensington Green, then an almost rustic neighbourhood. My father’s health required considerable and constant exercise, and he walked habitually before breakfast, generally in the green lanes toward Hornsey. In these walks I always accompanied him, and with my earliest recollections of green fields and wild-flowers, is mingled that of the account I gave him daily of what I had read the day before. To the best of my remembrance, this was a voluntary rather than a prescribed exercise. I made notes on slips of paper while reading, and from these in the morning walks I told the story to him....
“In these frequent talks about the books I read, he used, as opportunity offered, to give me explanations and ideas respecting civilisation, government, morality, mental cultivation, which he required me afterward to restate to him in my own words.... He was fond of putting into my hands books which exhibited men of energy and resource in unusual circumstances, struggling against difficulties and overcoming them: of such works I remember Beaver’s ‘African Memoranda,’ and Collins’s ‘Account of the First Settlement of New South Wales.’... Of children’s books, any more than of playthings, I had scarcely any, except an occasional gift from a relation or acquaintance: among those I had, ‘Robinson Crusoe’ was pre-eminent, and continued to delight me through all my boyhood.
“It was no part, however, of my father’s system to exclude books of amusement, though he allowed them very sparingly. Of such books he possessed at that time next to none, but he borrowed several for me; those which I remember are the ‘Arabian Nights,’ Cazotte’s ‘Arabian Tales,’ ‘Don Quixote,’ Miss Edgeworth’s ‘Popular Tales,’ and a book of some reputation in its day, Brooke’s ‘Fool of Quality.’”
In one respect, it must be conceded, Mill’s early education was deficient—it depended altogether too much on the knowledge to be gained from books, and not enough on direct study of the laws and beauties of Nature. But against this stands the unquestionable fact that it did establish in him lifelong habits of industry and thoroughness, and an abiding joy in intellectual achievement; and, more important, it had the happy result of habituating him to regard himself as consecrated to a life of labour for the public good. As to the “wrong” done to Mill by “robbing him of the joys of childhood,” one of his biographers, Professor William Minto, justly observes:
“Much pity has been expressed over the dreary, cheerless existence that the child must have led, cut off from all boyish amusements and companionship, working day after day on his father’s treadmill; but a childhood and boyhood spent in the enlargement of knowledge, with the continual satisfaction of difficulties conquered, buoyed up by day-dreams of emulating the greatest of human benefactors, need not have been an unhappy childhood, and Mill expressly says that his was not unhappy. It seems unhappy only when we compare it with the desires of childhood left more to itself, and when we decline to imagine its peculiar enjoyments and aspirations. Mill complains that his father often required more than could be reasonably expected of him, but his tasks were not so severe as to prevent him from growing up a healthy, hardy, and high-spirited boy, though he was not constitutionally robust, and his tastes and pursuits were so different from those of other boys of the same age.”
Mill was never a college student, and was for the most part self-educated after his sixteenth year. But had he been sent to college at an early age, as his home training amply warranted, there is every reason to think he would have acquitted himself as brilliantly as did the Thomson boys, and as did Karl Witte, another noteworthy example of the possibilities open to all parents. Indeed, Witte’s case is in some respects the most interesting and instructive on record. For one thing his father has left a minutely detailed account of the methods employed in his education; and there is ground to suspect that at the outset of life Karl Witte was below rather than above the average in mentality.
Born in July, 1800, in the German village of Lochau, near Halle, he was the son of a country clergyman, likewise named Karl Witte, who had long been regarded as somewhat “eccentric.” In especial the elder Witte was known to hold “peculiar” views on education. It was his firm belief, just as it was the belief of James Thomson and James Mill, that only by beginning the educational process in infancy could one make sure of developing children into really rational men and women. Looking at the world about him, and noting the extent to which people wasted their lives in hopeless inefficiency and reckless dissipation, he said to himself, in effect:
“These poor people do not reason, do not use their God-given intellects. If they did they would conduct themselves altogether differently. The trouble must be that they have not been educated aright. They have not been taught how to think, and what to think about. They have been started wrong in life. The schools and universities are to blame, but far more their parents are to blame. If love of the good, the beautiful, and the true had been implanted in them in youth, if they had been trained from the first in the proper use of their minds, they would not now be living so foolishly.”
Holding these views, Pastor Witte promised himself that if God blessed him with children he would make their education his special care. His first child, however, died in early infancy. Then came Karl, at birth so unprepossessing and “stupid” in appearance that his father wondered in what way he had offended God that he should be afflicted with a witless child. The neighbours, sympathising, held out what hopes they could, but secretly agreed that Pastor Witte’s boy was undoubtedly an idiot.
Thus matters stood until one day the father fancied that he detected in the child signs of intelligence. There and then he set about “making a man of him,” as he expressed it. He began, even before Karl could speak, by naming to him different parts of the human body, objects in his bedroom, etc. Later, as soon as the child was old enough to toddle about, he gradually broadened the horizon of his knowledge, taking him for walks through the streets and fields of Lochau, and calling his attention to all sorts of interesting things. Encouraging him to ask questions he went in his replies as fully as possible into the essential details of the subject under discussion. Above all, he avoided giving superficial answers, for it was his great aim to impress on Karl the importance of reasoning closely, of appreciating relationships and dissimilarities. If the child asked him something to which he could not respond intelligently, he frankly confessed his ignorance, but suggested that by working together they might obtain a satisfactory answer.
Also, in his daily walks and conversations with his son, “baby talk” had no place. It was part of Pastor Witte’s theory, as it is part of Doctor Berle’s to-day, that this mode of addressing children, however it may appeal to the sentimental side of fathers and mothers, is intellectually enervating to their little ones. The child who would think correctly, he argued, must be taught to speak correctly.
For this reason he not only drilled Karl in the correct pronunciation and use of words, but insisted that all who talked with the child should be careful how they spoke to him. Besides which, with an intuitive appreciation of the formative value of even the seemingly most trivial details of the home environment, he arranged the household furnishings so that they too, by the subtle influence of suggestion, should contribute powerfully to Karl’s development. As he tells us in his own account, of which an abridged translation into English has recently been made by Professor Leo Wiener, of Harvard University:[1]
“I tolerated as far as possible nothing in my house, yard, garden, etc., that was not tasteful, especially nothing that did not harmonise with its surroundings. If anything was not harmonious, I was uneasy about it until it was removed. All my rooms were papered with wall-paper of one colour, the fields being surrounded by pleasing borders. In every room there was but little furniture, but such as there was, was carefully selected. On all the walls hung paintings or etchings, but none of these was tastelessly glaring in colours, or represented an unpleasant subject. Our yard and garden were in bloom from earliest Spring to very late in the Fall. Snowbells and crocuses started the procession, and winter asters were crushed only by the snow or a severe frost. We ourselves were always dressed cleanly but simply.”
At first, it must be said, Karl’s mother had scant sympathy with her husband’s enthusiasm. She felt that he was mistaken, that the child was “too stupid” to be educated, and that nothing would come of the pains taken with him. This was the general belief of the neighbourhood, but it gave place to a feeling of astonished incredulity upon the discovery that in reality the youngster was making extraordinary progress, and was displaying not only intelligence but a love of knowledge rarely seen in boys of any age. Before he was six all who talked with him were amazed at the proofs he gave of the great extent to which he had profited from his early training.
Most impressive was the accuracy and fulness of the information he even then possessed regarding a variety of subjects, and his linguistic proficiency. His study of foreign languages began with French, while he still was very young, and was conducted in a novel way, his father giving him French translations of books with which he was already familiar in German, and telling him to read them for a certain time each day. No attempt was made to teach him the grammar of the language as it is commonly taught in the schools, his father’s belief being that the boy could best pick up the grammar for himself in the course of his reading, and that he would be able to master the French translations with comparatively little trouble by reason of his previous training in the art of observation, analysis, and synthesis. This expectation was realised so fully that, according to his father’s statement, Karl within a year was reading French with ease.
Meantime he had begun the study of Italian, and from Italian passed to Latin. Chance played some part in introducing him to this language. His father had taken him to a concert in Leipzig, and during an intermission handed him the libretto. He looked at it casually, then with some intentness, and exclaimed:
“Why, father, this is not French, nor is it Italian. It must be Latin!”
“Let it be what it may,” said Witte, “if only you can make out what it means. Try at least.”
The boy, already grounded in two languages derived from Latin, puzzled out the meaning with considerable success, and declared enthusiastically:
“Father, if Latin is such an easy language as this, I should like to learn it.”
English came next, and then the study of Greek, a language regarding which the boy’s curiosity was whetted by tales from Homer and Xenophon told to him by his father. Again the process was chiefly one of self-education, the father answering—when he could—the questions put to him by Karl, but always insisting to the latter that the proper way to learn anything is to overcome its difficulties for oneself. He was now studying and reading French, Italian, Latin, English, and Greek, in all of which he made such progress that, we are told, by the time he was nine he had read Homer, Plutarch, Virgil, Cicero, Fénelon, Florian, and Metastasio in the original, besides Schiller and other classical German writers.
Naturally the fame of the boy spread abroad, and with its spreading his father came in for some sharp criticism. Formerly he had been laughed at as a man who was essaying the impossible in striving to impart intelligence to a mentally subnormal child. Now that he had succeeded so well in his undertaking people asserted that he was fanatically endeavouring to convert the child into a weird thinking machine, and endangering his health and sanity. Precisely the same objections, in short, were raised to his educational experiment that were later raised in the case of the Thomson boys and John Stuart Mill, and that have recently been raised against the educational methods of the fathers of the three youths now in Harvard.
All kinds of absurd stories were circulated regarding Karl. He was pictured quite generally as a pale, anæmic, puny, goggle-eyed “freak,” who had missed the delights of childhood and was vastly to be pitied. In reality, he was a happy, joyous youngster, who got as much “fun” out of life as any boy could. This is the unanimous testimony of those who “investigated” the lad for themselves. Thus the archæologist Heyne, in a statement to his friend the famous philosopher and poet Wieland, frankly admitted:
“I allowed myself to be persuaded to examine young Witte, in order to be able to form my own opinion of him. I found the boy in body and mind happy and hale to a greater degree than I had expected. I found, in testing him with Homer and Virgil, that he had sufficient knowledge of words and things to translate readily and strike the right meaning, and that, without exact grammatical and lingual knowledge, he was able to guess correctly the meaning of a passage from its context. What was most remarkable to me was that he read with understanding, feeling, and effect.
“Otherwise I found in him no preponderating faculty. Memory, imagination, reasoning, were about in equilibrium. In other matters besides those that had been inculcated by education, I found him a happy, lusty boy, not even averse from mischief, which was to me a quieting thing.”
At the same time that he was thus instructing Karl in languages and literature, Witte sought to awaken in him a love of art and science. Neither artist nor scientist himself, he none the less believed that if he could only interest his son sufficiently in artistic and scientific subjects, he would study them enthusiastically. To this end he adopted a plan which might well be imitated by all parents.
Whenever he went to Halle, Leipzig, or any other German city, he took Karl with him, and together they visited art galleries, natural history museums, zoölogical and botanical gardens, and manufacturing establishments. Not for a moment, however, did he hint to the boy that he was doing this for educational purposes. When, for example, they visited a factory, he did not say, “I have brought you here to give you a lesson in mechanics.” He allowed the boy to think that he simply wished to entertain him; and in this way, without Karl’s suspecting it, he was able to impart to him much elementary instruction in zoölogy, botany, physics, chemistry, etc.
Similarly he taught Karl geography by the pleasing device of first taking him, on a clear day, to the top of a high tower that happened to be in Lochau, and asking him to mark on a piece of paper, brought to the tower for that purpose, the position of the different villages visible in the surrounding country. This first trip was followed by others, in which the boy expanded and corrected the markings on his paper, putting in rivers, lakes, and forests. Witte then bought for him a set of maps showing, in succession, the part of Germany in which he lived, all Germany, Europe, and the other continents. These father and son studied together, not as a study, but as a game, in which the boy took part with the greatest enthusiasm.
“I never acted,” Witte himself has declared, “as though he had to learn these things. He would have been surprised if told that he had been studying geography, physics, chemistry. I avoided the mention of such terms, so as not to frighten him, and in order not to make him vain.”
Not to make him vain! Be sure, indeed, that Pastor Witte, while promoting his son’s mental development, would not forget to ground him in moral principles. He was not, let it be clearly understood, striving to make an intellectual “prodigy” of his son; he was aiming only to make him a man in the truest sense, strong physically and morally as well as mentally. If he believed that the boy’s reasoning powers could not be properly developed unless he were trained from infancy in the principles of sound reasoning, he was quite as firmly convinced that the process of moral education should likewise begin at the earliest possible moment. To this end, believing as he did in the importance of early environmental influences and of parental example, he endeavoured to secure for his son wholly ennobling surroundings.
He even laid down rules to be observed by the maid-of-all-work, a simple but good-hearted peasant girl, in her dealings with the child. The whole family life was regulated with a view to “suggesting” to the little Karl ideas which, sinking into the subconscious region of his mind, would tend to affect favourably his moral outlook and exercise a lasting influence on his conduct. In their relations with all who visited their home—as with each other, with Karl himself, and with the little serving-maid—both Pastor Witte and his wife were unfailingly courteous, considerate, and sympathetic. Over and above all this, they set him a constant example in diligence, of that earnest activity which is itself a powerful factor in moral discipline.