Chapter 11

Besides the actual sensations, the so-called realities, the brain retains also the sensations which have been, and which are not wholly lost. Memory-pictures crowd the mind, mingling with pictures which are brought in afresh by the senses. The force of suggestion causes the mental states or conditions of one person to repeat themselves in another. Abnormal conditions of the brain itself furnish another series of feelings with which the brain must deal. Moreover, the brain is charged with impulses to action passed on from generation to generation, surviving because they are useful. With all these arises the necessity for choice as a function of the mind. The mind must neglect or suppress all sensations which it cannot weave into action. The dog sees nothing that does not belong to its little world. The man in search of mushrooms "tramples down oak-trees in his walks." To select the sensations that concern us is the basis of the power of attention. The suppression of undesired actions is a function of the will. To find data for choice among the possible motor responses is a function of the intellect. Intellectual persistency is the essence of individual character.

As the conditions of life become more complex, it becomes necessary for action to be more carefully selected. Wisdom is the parent of virtue. Knowing what should be done logically precedes doing it. Good impulses and good intentions do not make action right or safe. In the long run, action is tested not by its motives, but by its results.

The child, when he comes into the world, has everything to learn. His nervous system is charged with tendencies to reaction and impulses to motion, which have their origin in survivals from ancestral experience. Exact knowledge, by which his own actions can be made exact, must come through his own experience. The experience of others must be expressed in terms of his own before it becomes wisdom. Wisdom, as I have elsewhere said, is knowing what it is best to do next. Virtue is doing it. Doing right becomes habit, if it is pursued long enough. It becomes a "second nature," or, we may say, a higher heredity. The formation of a higher heredity of wisdom and virtue, of knowing right and doing right, is the basis of character-building.

The moral character is based on knowing the best, choosing the best, and doing the best. It cannot be built up on imitation. By imitation, suggestion, and conventionality the masses are formed and controlled. To build up a man is a nobler process, demanding materials and methods of a higher order. The growth of man is the assertion of individuality. Only robust men can make history. Others may adorn it, disfigure it, or vulgarize it.

The first relation of the child to external things is expressed in this: What can I do with it? What is its relation to me? The sensation goes over into thought, the thought into action. Thus the impression of the object is built into the little universe of his mind. The object and the action it implies are closely associated. As more objects are apprehended, more complex relations arise, but the primal condition remains--What can I do with it? Sensation, thought, action--this is the natural sequence of each completed mental process. As volition passes over into action, so does science into art, knowledge into power, wisdom into virtue.

By the study of realities wisdom is built up. In the relations of objects he can touch and move, the child comes to find the limitations of his powers, the laws that govern phenomena, and to which his actions must be in obedience. So long as he deals with realities, these laws stand in their proper relation. "So simple, so natural, so true," says Agassiz. "This is the charm of dealing with Nature herself. She brings us back to absolute truth so often as we wander."

So long as a child is lead from one reality to another, never lost in words or in abstractions, so long this natural relation remains. What can I do with it? is the beginning of wisdom. What is it to me? is the basis of personal virtue.

While a child remains about the home of his boyhood, he knows which way is north and which is east. He does not need to orientate himself, because in his short trips he never loses his sense of space direction. But let him take a rapid journey in the cars or in the night, and he may find himself in strange relations. The sun no longer rises in the east, the sense of reality in directions is gone, and it is a painful effort for him to join the new impressions to the old. The process of orientation is a difficult one, and if facing the sunrise in the morning were a deed of necessity in his religion, this deed would not be accurately performed.

This homely illustration applies to the child. He is taken from his little world of realities, a world in which the sun rises in the east, the dogs bark, the grasshopper leaps, the water falls, and the relation of cause and effect appear plain and natural. In these simple relations moral laws become evident. "The burnt child dreads the fire," and this dread shows itself in action. The child learns what to do next, and to some extent does it. By practice in personal responsibility in little things, he can be led to wisdom in large ones. For the power to do great things in the moral world comes from doing the right in small things. It is not often that a man who knows that there is a right does the wrong. Men who do wrong are either ignorant that there is a right, or else they have failed in their orientation and look upon right as wrong. It is the clinching of good purposes with good actions that makes the man. This is the higher heredity that is not the gift of father or mother, but is the man's own work on himself.

The impression of realities is the basis of sound morals as well as of sound judgment. By adding near things to near, the child grows in knowledge. "Knowledge set in order" is science. Nature-study is the beginning of science. It is the science of the child. To the child training in methods of acquiring knowledge is more valuable than knowledge itself. In general, throughout life sound methods are more valuable than sound information. Self-direction is more important than innocence. The fool may be innocent. Only the sane and wise can be virtuous.

It is the function of science to find out the real nature of the universe. Its purpose is to eliminate the personal equation and the human equation in statements of truth. By methods of precision of thought and instruments of precision in observation, it seeks to make our knowledge of the small, the distant, the invisible, the mysterious as accurate as our knowledge of the common things men have handled for ages. It seeks to make our knowledge of common things exact and precise, that exactness and precision may be translated into action. The ultimate end of science, as well as its initial impulse, is the regulation of human conduct. To make right action possible and prevalent is the function of science. The "world as it is" is the province of science. In proportion as our actions conform to the conditions of the world as it is, do we find the world beautiful, glorious, divine. The truth of the "world as it is" must be the ultimate inspiration of art, poetry, and religion. The world as men have agreed to say it is, is quite another matter. The less our children hear of this, the less they will have to unlearn in their future development.

When a child is taken from nature to the schools, he is usually brought into an atmosphere of conventionality. Here he is not to do, but to imitate; not to see, nor to handle, nor to create, but to remember. He is, moreover, to remember not his own realities, but the written or spoken ideas of others. He is dragged through a wilderness of grammar, with thickets of diacritical marks, into the desert of metaphysics. He is taught to do right, not because right action is in the nature of things, the nature of himself and the things about him, but because he will be punished somehow if he does not.

He is given a medley of words without ideas. He is taught declensions and conjugations without number in his own and other tongues. He learns things easily by rote; so his teachers fill him with rote-learning. Hence, grammar and language have become stereotyped as teaching without a thought as to whether undigested words may be intellectual poison. And as the good heart depends on the good brain, undigested ideas become moral poison as well. No one can tell how much of the bad morals and worse manners of the conventional college boy of the past has been due to intellectual dyspepsia from undigested words.

In such manner the child is bound to lose his orientation as to the forces which surround him. If he does not recover it, he will spend his life in a world of unused fancies and realities. Nonsense will seem half truth, and his appreciation of truth will be vitiated by lack of clearness of definition--by its close relation to nonsense.

That this is no slight defect can be shown in every community. There is no intellectual craze so absurd as not to have a following among educated men and women. There is no scheme for the renovation of the social order so silly that educated men will not invest their money in it. There is no medical fraud so shameless that educated men will not give it their certificate. There is no nonsense so unscientific that men called educated will not accept it as science.

It should be a function of the schools to build up common sense. Folly should be crowded out of the schools. We have furnished costly lunatic asylums for its accommodation. That our schools are in a degree responsible for current follies, there can be no doubt. We have many teachers who have never seen a truth in their lives. There are many who have never felt the impact of an idea. There are many who have lost their own orientation in their youth, and who have never since been able to point out the sunrise to others. It is no extravagance of language to say that diacritical marks lead to the cocaine habit; nor that the ethics of metaphysics points the way to the Higher Foolishness. There are many links in the chain of decadence, but its finger-posts all point downward.

"Three roots bear up Dominion--Knowledge, Will, the third, Obedience." This statement, which Lowell applies to nations, belongs to the individual man as well. It is written in the structure of his brain--knowledge, volition, action,--and all three elements must be sound, if action is to be safe or effective.

But obedience must be active, not passive. The obedience of the lower animals is automatic, and therefore in its limits measurably perfect. Lack of obedience means the extinction of the race. Only the obedient survive, and hence comes about obedience to "sealed orders," obedience by reflex action, in which the will takes little part.

In the early stages of human development, the instincts of obedience were dominant. Great among these is the instinct of conventionality, by which each man follows the path others have found safe. The Church and the State, organizations of the strong, have assumed the direction of the weak. It has often resulted that the wiser this direction, the greater the weakness it was called on to control. The "sealed orders" of human institutions took the place of the automatism of instinct. Against "sealed orders" the individual man has been in constant protest. The "warfare of science" was part of this long struggle. The Reformation, the revival of learning, the growth of democracy, are all phases of this great conflict.

The function of democracy is not good government. If that were all, it would not deserve the efforts spent on it. Better government than any king or congress or democracy has yet given could be had in simpler and cheaper ways. The automatic scheme of competitive examinations would give us better rulers at half the present cost. Even an ordinary intelligence office, or "statesman's employment bureau," would serve us better than conventions and elections. But a people which could be ruled in that way, content to be governed well by forces outside itself, would not be worth the saving. But this is not the point at issue. Government too good, as well as too bad, may have a baneful influence on men. Its character is a secondary matter. The purpose of self-government is to intensify individual responsibility; to promote abortive attempts at wisdom, through which true wisdom may come at last. Democracy is nature-study on a grand scale. The republic is a huge laboratory of civics, a laboratory in which strange experiments are performed; but by which, as in other laboratories, wisdom may arise from experience, and having arisen, may work itself out into virtue.

"The oldest and best-endowed university in the world," Dr. Parkhurst tells us, "is Life itself. Problems tumble easily apart in the field that refuse to give up their secret in the study, or even in the closet. Reality is what educates us, and reality never comes so close to us, with all its powers of discipline, as when we encounter it in action. In books we find Truth in black and white; but in the rush of events we see Truth at work. It is only when Truth is busy and we are ourselves mixed up in its activities that we learn to know of how much we are capable, or even the power by which these capabilities can be made over into effect."

Mr. Wilbur F. Jackman has well said: "Children always start with imitation, and very few people ever get beyond it. The true moral act, however, is one performed in accordance with a known law that is just as natural as the law which determines which way a stone shall fall. The individual becomes moral in the highest sense when he chooses to obey this law by acting in accordance with it." Conventionality is not morality, and may co-exist with vice as well as with virtue. Obedience has little permanence unless it be intelligent obedience.

It is, of course, true that wrong information may lead sometimes to right action, as falsehood may secure obedience to a natural law which would otherwise have been violated. But in the long run men and nations pay dearly for every illusion they cherish. For every sick man healed at Denver or Lourdes, ten well men may be made sick. Faith cure and patent medicines feed on the same victim. For every Schlatter who is worshiped as a saint, some equally harmless lunatic will be stoned as a witch. This scientific age is beset by the non-science which its altruism has made safe. The development of the common sense of the people has given security to a vast horde of follies, which would be destroyed in the unchecked competition of life. It is the soundness of our age which has made what we call its decadence possible. It is the undercurrent of science which has given security to human life, a security which obtains for fools as well as for sages.

For protection against all these follies which so soon fall into vices, or decay into insanity, we must look to the schools. A sound recognition of cause and effect in human affairs is our best safeguard. The old common sense of the "un-high-schooled man," aided by instruments of precision, and directed by logic, must be carried over into the schools. Clear thinking and clean acting, we believe, are results of the study of nature. When men have made themselves wise, in the wisdom which may be completed in action, they have never failed to make themselves good. When men have become wise with the lore of others, the learning which ends in self, and does not spend itself in action, they have been neither virtuous nor happy. "Much learning is a weariness of the flesh." Thought without action ends in intense fatigue of soul, the disgust with all the "sorry scheme of things entire," which is the mark of the unwholesome and insane philosophy of Pessimism. This philosophy finds its condemnation in the fact that it has never yet been translated into pure and helpful life.

With our children, the study of words and abstractions alone may, in its degree, produce the same results. Nature-studies have long been valued as a "means of grace," because they arouse the enthusiasm, the love of work which belongs to open-eyed youth. The child _blasé_ with moral precepts and irregular conjugations turns with delight to the unrolling of ferns and the song of birds. There is a moral training in clearness and tangibility. An occult impulse to vice is hidden in all vagueness and in all teachings meant to be heard but not to be understood. Nature is never obscure, never occult, never esoteric. She must be questioned in earnest, else she will not reply. But to every serious question she returns a serious answer. "Simple, natural, and true" should make the impression of simplicity and truth. Truth and virtue are but opposite sides of the same shield. As leaves pass over into flowers, and flowers into fruit, so are wisdom, virtue, and happiness inseparably related.

[1] Read before the National Educational Association at Buffalo, New York, 1896.

THE HIGHER SACRIFICE.[1]

Each man that lives is, in part, a slave, because he is a living being. This belongs to the definition of life itself. Each creature must bend its back to the lash of its environment. We imagine life without conditions--life free from the pressure of insensate things outside us or within. But such life is the dream of the philosopher. We have never known it. The records of the life we know are full of concessions to such pressure.

The vegetative part of life, that part which finds its expression in physical growth, and sustenance, and death, must always be slavery. The old primal hunger of the protoplasm rules over it all. Each of the myriad cells of which man is made must be fed and cared for. The perennial hunger of these cells he must stifle. This hunger began when life began. It will cease only when life ceases. It will last till the water of the sea is drained, the great lights are put out, and the useless earth is hung up empty in the archives of the universe.

This old hunger the individual man must each day meet and satisfy. He must do this for himself; else, in the long run, it will not be done. If others help feed him, he must feed others in return. This return is not charity nor sacrifice; it is simply exchange of work. It is the division of labor in servitude. Directly or indirectly, each must pay his debt of life. There are a few, as the world goes, who in luxury or pauperism have this debt paid for them by others. But there are not many of these fugitive slaves. The number will never be great; for the lineage of idleness is never long nor strong.

When this debt is paid, the slave becomes the man. Nature counts as men only those who are free. Freedom springs from within. No outside power can give it. Board and lodging on the earth once paid, a man's resources are his own. These he can give or hold. By the fullness of these is he measured. All acquisitions of man, Emerson tells us, "are victories of the good brain and brave heart; the world belongs to the energetic, belongs to the wise. It is in vain to make a paradise but for good men."

In the ancient lore of the Jews, so Rabbi Voorsanger tells us, it is written, "Serve the Lord, not as slaves hoping for reward, but as gods who will take no reward." The meaning of the old saying is this: _Only the gods can serve_.

Those who have nothing have nothing to give. He who serves as a slave serves himself only. That he hopes for a reward shows that to himself his service is really given. To serve the Lord, according to another old saying, is to help one's fellow-men. The Eternal asks not of mortals that they assist Him with His earth. The tough old world has been His for centuries of centuries before it came to be ours, and we can neither make it nor mar it. We were not consulted when its foundations were laid in the deep. The waves and the storms, the sunshine and the song of birds need not our aid. They will take care of themselves. Life is the only material that is plastic in our hand. Only man can be helped by man.

When they hung John Brown in Virginia, many said, you remember, that in resisting the Government he had thrown away his life, and would gain nothing for it. He could not, as Thoreau said at the time, get a vote of thanks or a pair of boots for his life. He could not get four-and-sixpence a day for being hung, take the year around. But he was not asking for a vote of thanks. It was not for the four-and-sixpence a day that he stood between brute force and its victims. It was to show men the nature of slavery. It was to help his fellow-citizens to read the story of their institutions in the light of history. "You can get more," Thoreau went on to say, "in your market [at Concord] for a quart of milk than you can for a quart of blood; but yours is not the market heroes carry their blood to." The blood of heroes is not sold by the quart. The great, strong, noble, and pure of this world, those who have made our race worthy to be called men, have not been paid by the day or by the quart; not by riches, nor fame, nor power, nor anything that man can give. Out of the fullness of their lives have they served the Lord. Out of the wealth of their resources have they helped their fellow-men.

The great man cannot be a self-seeker. The greatness of a Napoléon or an Alexander is the greatness of gluttony. It is slavery on a grand scale. What men have done for their own glory or aggrandizement has left no permanent impress. "I have carried out nothing," says the warrior, Sigurd Slembe. "I have not sown the least grain nor laid one stone upon another to witness that I have lived." Napoléon could have said as much, if, like Sigurd, he had stood "upon his own grave and heard the great bell ring." The tragedy of the Isle of St. Helena lay not in the failure of effort, but in the futility of the aim to which effort was directed. There was no tragedy of the Isle of Patmos.

What such men have torn down remains torn down. All this would soon have fallen of itself; for that which has life in it cannot be destroyed by force. But what such men have built has fallen when their hands have ceased to hold it up. The names history cherishes are those of men of another type. Only "a man too simply great to scheme for his proper self" is great enough to become a pillar of the ages.

It is part of the duty of higher education to build up ideals of noble freedom. It is not for help in the vegetative work of life that you go to college. You are just as good a slave without it. You can earn your board and lodging without the formality of culture. The training of the college will make your power for action greater, no doubt; but it will also magnify your needs. The debt of life a scholar has to pay is greater than that paid by the clown. And the higher sacrifice the scholar may be called upon to make grows with the increased fullness of his life. Greater needs go with greater power, and both mean greater opportunity for sacrifice.

In the days you have been with us you should have formed some ideals. You should have bound these ideals together with the chain of "well-spent yesterdays," the higher heredity which comes not from your ancestors, but which each man must build up for himself. You should have done something in the direction of the life of higher sacrifice, the life that from the fullness of its resources can have something to give.