Part 9

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.

We may trace this reverent attitude of mind upward through the acts and activities of the spirit, and it makes no difference whether we regard religion as the source and origin of them all or as the summary of them all.

In Shakespeare’s plays we see a cycle of human beings, the most living that we have ever met with, and the absence of mystical or emotional religion from many of the plays is one of the wonders of nature. There is no God anywhere, and God is everywhere; we are not offended. The reason may be that the element has been employed in the act of creation. Religion has been consumed in the development of character. It is felt in the relation of Shakespeare to the characters. It is here seen as artistic perfection. The same is true of the Greek statues and of the Sistine Sibyls, and of other work left by those two periods, the only other periods in which the individual attained completion.

Observe that in all this philosophy there is no dogma anywhere, no term whose definition you have to learn, no term which makes the lying claim that it can be used twice with the same connotation. Froebel had the instinct of a poet and knew his language was figurative. It was this that freed him from the Middle Ages and gave him to the future. He took theology as lightly as he took metaphysics. He did not impose them, he evoked them. He lived and thought in the spirit.

If you turn from Froebel’s analysis of human nature to Goethe’s, there seem to be a thousand years between them. The one is scientific, the other is mediæval. The one has freed himself from the influences of the revival of learning, the other has not. The one is open, the other is closed. The one is free, the other is self-conscious. But Froebel has not yet set free the rest of the race, and of course the literature and practices of the kindergartners are full of dogmas. The terms of Froebel are a snare to those whose interest in childhood came later than their interest in education and whose attention is fixed upon the terms rather than upon the child. He is easy reading to the other sort.

But more important than Froebel’s formulation of these great truths was his formulation of subsidiary truths. I do not mean his labored systems, but his practical suggestions born of experience as to how to help another person to develop. It was these methods, this attitude of the teacher towards the child, of the individual towards his fellow, that came at me in my own house unexpectedly, emanating from some unknown mind, which seemed so great as practically to include Christianity.

“Do not imagine,” he says at every moment, “that you can do anything for this creature except by getting it to move spontaneously. You have not begun till you have done this, and remember that anything else you do is just so much harm.”

He was never tired of suggesting devices for doing this. The following passage gives in a few words the answer to the most important practical question in life: how we ought to approach another human being. The thing is said so simply, it seems almost commonplace, yet it comes from one greater than Kant.

“Between educator and pupil, between request and obedience, there should invisibly rule a third something to which educator and pupil are equally subject. This third something is the right, the best, necessarily conditioned and expressed without arbitrariness in the circumstances. The calm recognition, the clear knowledge, and the serene, cheerful obedience to the rule of this third something, is the particular feature that should be constantly and clearly manifest in the bearing and the conduct of the educator and teacher, and often firmly and sternly emphasized by him.”

Beneath this statement there lies a law of reaction. The human organism responds in kind. Strike a man and he strikes, sneer and he sneers, forget and he forgets. If you wish to convince him that you are right, concede that from his point of view he is right, then move the point and he follows. If you keep your temper in teaching a child, you teach him to keep his temper, and this is more important than his lesson.

The difficulty we find is to resist the reaction in ourselves to some one else’s initiative. The affair is outside the province of reason, and results from a transfer of force by means which we do not understand. The command to “turn the other cheek” is a picturesque figure for the attitude which will enable you to prevail the quickest and by the highest means, and which Froebel enables us to see in its scientific aspect.

But it is unnecessary to illustrate further what any one who comes in contact with a kindergarten will, through all the mists of dogma and ignorance which overspread the place, discover for himself. We have a science founded upon human nature, applied to education. Mr. Hughes in his closing paragraph uses the language of theology, but he makes no overstatement:--

“When Froebel’s ethical teaching has wrought its perfect work in the homes, the schools, and the churches, then his complete ideal, which is the gospel ideal in practice, will be the greatest controlling and uplifting force in the world.”

One word more about the relation between Froebel’s thought and current science.

The view of man as an active animal, a struggler, alive and happy only in activity, falls in naturally with what we know of the animal kingdom. The philosophers are at war over science and religion, over the origin of the non-self-regarding instincts. By an external consideration of the animal hierarchy they have come to certain conclusions which they strive to apply to the highest animal, man. There is great boggling over him; because these non-self-regarding instincts, which are not very apparent from the outside, seem to conflict with certain generalizations relative to the conservation of species. The scientists look into a drop of water and see animals eating each other up. What they have not seen is that all this ferocity goes forward, subject to customs as rigid as a military code, and that it is this code which conserves the species. The “struggle for existence” as it is commonly conceived would exterminate in short order any species that indulged in it.

Meanwhile Froebel, beginning at the other end of the scale and studying life from the inside, has established certain facts, certain laws, which have as great a weight, and deserve as much to be carried downward in the scale, as the generalizations of the naturalists (very likely imperfect) have to be carried upward.

The animal man is unselfish. It is impossible to make his organism vibrate as a unity except by some emotion which can be shown to be non-self-regarding. At what point in the scale of nature does this quality begin to manifest itself? Is the dog happy when he is selfish; do the laws of psychology outlined by Froebel apply, and to what extent do they apply, to the horse or the monkey? These things must be patiently studied, and the corrections must be made. In the mean time, in dealing with man himself, we are obliged to rely upon the latest scientific report of him, however imperfect, and until Froebel’s laws are destroyed, we need not attempt to adjust our ideas of man to the dogmas developed by the study of the lower animals.

DEMOCRACY

DEMOCRACY

The system of choosing public officials by popular vote is properly enough called Democracy. The terms of tenure and nomenclature, etc., are matters of detail. If we are to seek any test as to what constitutes a Democracy, we may as well take as a test the formal setting up at a particular time of some scheme of government by the popular will. England has been a democracy since the Act of Settlement, and if it be said that universal suffrage was not then known, the answer is that it is not known now, and never can be known. The exclusions of women and non-naturalized residents or even of criminals and lunatics are matters of convenience. It is a question of degree.

Again, it is impossible that all the officials should be elected, and the assignment to the elected officials of the power to appoint the others is a matter of convenience. The very simple expedients adopted by the framers of the United States Constitution were the result of English experience and French theory. The intellect of France had, during the eighteenth century, put into portable form the ideas that had been at work in England’s institutions. The theoretical part of it, the division of government into three departments, had been worked out from European experience going back to Greek times. The written constitution was a mere expansion of the Bill of Rights. Our Framers were men who had had personal experience in governing under the English system in force in the colonies, where the power of practical self-government had been developed by isolation. They received from the French a scientific view of that system. They had learned by experience that a confederacy was not a government, and they proceeded to bind the country together by the grant of that power which defines government, the power to tax. The extension to a large territory of a system which was in practical operation in all its parts, was in one sense a miracle of intelligence, in another sense it was the only conceivable solution of the problem of unity. Philosophers speak of Democracy as if it were the outcome of choice. It has been the outcome of events. No other system would have endured, and every formula of government that did not embody an old usage would have been transformed in ten years by the popular will into something that did.

The reason the Constitution of the United States is the most remarkable document in existence is that it contained so little of novelty. The election of some officers and the appointment of the rest, that was what the people were used to. That is democracy. There is of course no such thing as a pure democracy, or a pure monarchy. Every government is in practice the outcome of forces of which a very small fraction are expressed in its constitution and laws.