Spontaneous Activity in Education Part 16

Creation finds its expansion in _order_. We find this conception in the Genesis of Scripture. G.o.d did not begin to create without preparation; and this preparation was the introduction of order into chaos. "And G.o.d divided the light from the darkness. And he said: Let the waters be gathered together into one place, and let the dry land appear." The consciousness may possess a rich and varied content; but when there is _mental confusion_, the intelligence does not appear.

Its appearance is exactly like the kindling of a light which makes it possible to distinguish things clearly: "Let there be light."

Thus we may justly say that to help the development of the intelligence is to help to put the images of the consciousness in order.

We ought to think of the mental state of the little child of three years old, who has already looked upon a world. How often he has fallen asleep utterly weary from having seen so many things. It has not occurred to any one that for him to walk is, in fact, to work; that seeing and hearing, when the organs are not as yet accommodated, so that he is obliged to be perpetually correcting the errors of his senses, and verifying with his hand what he cannot as yet appraise correctly with his eye, is a great exertion. Hence the little one who is over-taxed by stimuli, in places where these abound, cries or falls asleep.

The little child of three years old carries within him a heavy _chaos_.

He is like a man who has acc.u.mulated an immense quant.i.ty of books, piled up without any order, and who asks himself "What shall I do with them?" When will he be able to arrange them in such fashion as to enable him to say: "I possess a library"?

By means of our so-called "sensory exercises" we make it possible for the child to _distinguish_ and to _cla.s.sify_. Our sensory material, in fact, a.n.a.lyses and represents the attributes of things: dimensions, forms, colors, smoothness or roughness of surface, weight, temperature, flavor, noise, sounds. It is the qualities of the objects, not the objects themselves which are important; although these qualities, isolated one from the other, are themselves represented by objects. For the attributes long, short, thick, thin, large, small, red, yellow, green, hot, cold, heavy, light, rough, smooth, scented, noisy, resonant, we have a like number of corresponding "objects" arranged in graduated series. This gradation is important for the establishment of order; indeed, the attributes of the objects differ not only in quality, but also in quant.i.ty. They may be more or less high or more or less low, more or less thick or more or less thin; the sounds have various tones; the colors have various degrees of intensity; the shapes may resemble each other in varying degrees; the states of roughness and smoothness are by no means absolute.

The material for the education of the senses lends itself to the purpose of distinguishing between these things. First of all it enables the child to ascertain the _ident.i.ty_ of two stimuli by means of numerous exercises in matching and fitting. Afterwards _difference_ is appreciated when the lessons direct the child's attention to the external objects of a series: light, dark, long, short.

At last he begins to distinguish the _degrees of the various attributes_, arranging a series of objects in gradation, such as the tablets which show the various degrees of intensity of the same chromatic tone; the bells which produce the notes of an octave, the objects which represent length in decimal proportions, or thickness in centimetric proportions, etc.

These exercises, which are so attractive to children, are, as we have seen, repeated by them indefinitely. The teacher puts the seal upon each acquisition with a word; thus the cla.s.sification is complete, and finally has its schedule: that is, it becomes possible to recall the attribute and its _image_ by a name.

Now as we have no possible means of distinguishing things other than by their attributes, the cla.s.sification of these entails a fundamental order of arrangement comprehending everything. Henceforth the world is no longer a chaos for the child; his mind bears some resemblance to the orderly shelves of a library or a rich museum; each object is in its place, in its proper category. And each acquisition he makes will be no longer merely "stored," but duly "allocated." This primitive order will never be disturbed, but only enriched by fresh material.

Thus the child, having acquired the power of distinguishing one thing from another, has laid the foundations of the intelligence. It is unnecessary to repeat what an internal impulse the acquired order contributes towards the seeking after objects in the environment; henceforth the child "recognizes" the objects which surround him. When he discovers with so much emotion that the sky is blue, that his hand is smooth, that the window is rectangular, he does not in reality discover sky, nor hand, nor window, but he discovers their position in the order of his mind by arrangement of his ideas. And this determines a stable equilibrium in the internal personality, which produces calm, strength, and the possibility of fresh conquests, just as the muscles which have coordinated their functions enable the body to maintain its equilibrium, and to acquire that stability and security which facilitate all movements. This order conduces to an economy of time and strength; like a well-arranged museum, it saves the time and strength of inquirers. The child can therefore perform a greater quant.i.ty of work without fatigue, and can react to stimuli in a briefer s.p.a.ce of time.

To be able to distinguish, cla.s.sify, and catalogue external things on the basis of a secure order already established in the mind--this is at once intelligence and culture. This is, indeed, the popular conception; when an educated person can recognize an author by his style, or the characteristics of the literary compositions of a period, he is p.r.o.nounced "versed (_intelligente_) in literature." In the same way we say of one who can recognize a painter by the manner in which he lays his colors on the canvas, or fix the period of a sculptor from the fragment of a bas-relief, that he is "versed (_intelligente_) in art." The scientist is of the same type. He is able to observe things, and to give due value even to their minutest details; hence the differences between the characteristics of things are clearly perceived and cla.s.sified. The scientist distinguishes objects in accordance with the orderly content of his mind. A seedling, a microbe, an animal or the remains of an animal, are not enigmas to him, though in themselves they may be strange to him. We may say the same of the chemist, the physicist, the geologist, the archaeologist.

It is not the acc.u.mulation of a direct knowledge of things which forms the man of letters, the scientist, and the connoisseur; it is the prepared order established in the mind which is to receive such knowledge. On the other hand, the uncultivated person has only the direct knowledge of objects; such a person may be a lady who spends a great part of the night reading books, or a gardener who spends his life making material distinctions between the plants in his garden.

The knowledge of such uncultured minds is not only disorderly, but it is confined to the objects with which it comes into direct contact, whereas the knowledge of the scientist is infinite, because, possessing the power of cla.s.sifying the attributes of things, he can recognize them all, and determine now the cla.s.s, now the relationships, now the origins of each; facts much more profound than the actual things could of themselves reveal.

Now our children, after the manner of the connoisseur of art and the man of science, recognize objects in the external world by means of their attributes and cla.s.sify them; hence they are sensitive to all objects; everything possesses a value for them. Uncultured children, on the other hand, pa.s.s blind and deaf close to things, just as an ignorant man pa.s.ses by a work of art or listens to a performance of cla.s.sical music without recognition or enjoyment.

The educational methods now in use proceed on lines exactly the reverse of ours; having first abolished spontaneous activity, they present objects with their acc.u.mulation of attributes directly to the child, calling attention to each attribute, and hoping that from all this ma.s.s the mind of the child will be able to abstract the attributes themselves, without any guidance or order. Thus they create in a pa.s.sive being an artificial chaos, more limited than that which the natural world would offer.

The "objective" method now in use, which consists in presenting an object and noting all its attributes--that is, describing it, is nothing but a "sensory" variation on the customary mnemonic method; instead of describing an absent object, a present object is described; instead of the imagination alone working to effect its reconstruction, the senses intervene; this is done so that the distinctive qualities of the object itself should be better remembered. The pa.s.sive mind receives images, which are limited to the objects presented; and which are "stored up" without any order. As a fact, every object may have infinite attributes; and if, as often happens in object-lessons, the origins and ultimate ends of the object itself are included among these attributes, the mind has literally to range throughout the universe. If, for instance, in an object lesson on coffee, which I heard given in a Kindergarten school, the object is described and the attention of the children directed to its size, its color, its shape, its aroma, its flavor, its temperature; and then if the teacher goes on to describe the plant and the manner in which the substance was brought to Europe across the ocean, and, finally, lighting a spirit-lamp, boils the water, grinds the berries and prepares the beverage, the mind has been led to wander in infinite s.p.a.ces, but the subject has not been exhausted. For it would be possible to go on to describe the exciting effects of coffee, caffeine, which is extracted from the berry, and many other things. Such an a.n.a.lysis would spread like spilt oil until finally dispersed, and the outcome would be of no use in any way. If, indeed, we should ask a child so instructed: "What is coffee, then?" he might well reply: "It is such a long story that I cannot remember it." A notion so vague (I cannot certainly say so complete!) fatigues and enc.u.mbers the mind and can never transform itself into a dynamic excitation of similar a.s.sociations. The efforts the child makes will be, at the most, efforts of memory to recall the history of coffee. If a.s.sociations are formed in his mind, they will be inferior a.s.sociations of contiguity: his mind will wander from the teacher who is speaking to the ocean that was traversed, to the dining-table at home on which coffee appears in cups every day; in other words, it will stray aimlessly as does the idle mind when it "allows itself" to wander from the continuity of its pa.s.sive a.s.sociations.

In this kind of _reverie_ to which the minds of children give themselves up, there is no sign of internal activity, far less of any individual difference. Children subjected to the object-lesson system always remain purely receptive beings; or, if we prefer to put it so, storehouses in which new objects are continually deposited.

No activity is thus aroused and directed towards the object, in order to recognize its qualities in such a manner that the child himself forms an idea of it; nor can the possibility of connecting other objects with the first by their common characteristics arise in his mind. For in what particular does any object resemble the others? In its use?

When we a.s.sociate the images of different objects by similarity, we should extract from the whole the qualities which the objects themselves have in common. If, for instance, we say that two rectangular tablets are alike, we have first extracted from the numerous qualities of these tablets such facts as that they are of wood, that they are polished, smooth, colored, of the same temperature, etc., the quality relating to their _shape_. They are alike in _shape_. This may suggest a long series of objects: the top of the table, the window, etc.; but before such a result as this can be achieved, it is necessary that the mind should first be capable of abstracting from the numerous attributes of these objects the quality of _rectangular shape_. The work of the mind in this quest must necessarily be _active_; it a.n.a.lyzes the object, extracts a determined attribute therefrom, and under the guidance of this determined attribute makes a synthesis a.s.sociating many objects by the same medium of connection. If this capacity for the selecting of single attributes among all those proper to the object be not acquired, a.s.sociation by means of similarity, synthesis, and all the higher work of the intelligence becomes impossible. Moreover, this is intellectual work in reality, because the essential quality of the intelligence is not to "photograph" objects, and "keep them one upon the other" like the pages of an alb.u.m, or juxtaposed like the stones in a pavement.

Such a labor of mere "deposit" is an outrage on the intellectual nature. The intelligence, with its characteristic orderliness and power of discrimination, is capable of distinguishing and extracting the dominant characteristics of objects, and it is upon these that it proceeds to build up its internal structures.

Now our children, whose minds are thus ordered in relation to the cla.s.sification of attributes by the pedagogic aid they have received, are led, not only to observe objects according to all the attributes they have a.n.a.lyzed, but also to distinguish ident.i.ties, differences, and resemblances; and this work renders the extraction of one of the qualities corresponding to one of the sensory groups which have been considered apart, easy and spontaneous. That is to say, it will be easy for the child thus to recognize the various qualities of an object, to note, for instance, that certain objects are alike in form, or alike in color; because "forms" and "colors" have already been grouped into very distinctive categories, and they therefore recall series of objects by similarity. This cla.s.sification of attributes is a kind of loadstone; it is an attractive force of a determined group of qualities; and the objects which have this quality are attracted thereto and united one with another; this is a.s.sociation by similitude, almost of a mechanical kind. Books are of the shape of prisms, one of our children might say; and such a p.r.o.nouncement would be the conclusion arrived at by a very complex mental process, were it not that prismatic forms already existed as a well-defined series in his mind, attracting to itself all the surrounding objects which possess the same character. Thus the whiteness of sheets of paper, interrupted by dark signs, may be attracted, by the colors systematized in the mind, into a synthetic whole, which might make the child say: Books are sheets of white printed paper.

It is in this _active_ work that individual differences may manifest themselves. What will be the group of attributes which will attract similar objects? And what will be the prevailing characteristic chosen for the purpose of a.s.sociation by similarity? One child will note that a curtain is light green; another that the same curtain is light in weight; one will be struck by the whiteness of a hand, another by the smoothness of its skin. For one child the window will be a rectangle; to another it is something through which the blue of the sky may be seen. The choice of prevailing characteristics made by children becomes a "natural selection" harmonizing with their own innate tendencies.

In like manner, a scientist will choose the characters _most useful_ to his a.s.sociations. An anthropologist may choose the shape of the head to distinguish the human races, and another might choose the cutaneous pigment--either will serve the purpose. Each anthropologist may have the most accurate knowledge of the external characteristics of men; but the important matter consists in finding a characteristic which will serve as a basis for cla.s.sification: that is to say, a characteristic on which it will be possible to group numerous characteristics in the order of similitude. Purely practical persons would consider man from the utilitarian rather than from the scientific point of view; a maker of hats would single out the dimensions of the head from among other human characteristics; an orator would consider man from the point of view of his susceptibility to the spoken word. But _selection_ is the fundamental necessity which enables us to realize things; to emerge from the vague into the practical, from aimless contemplation into the sphere of action.

Every created thing in existence is characterized by the fact that it has _limitations_. Our own psycho-sensory organization is founded upon a selection. What are the functions of the senses, but to respond to a determined series of vibrations and to no others? Thus the eye limits light and the ear sounds. In forming the contents of the mind the first step is, therefore, a selection, necessarily and materially limited. Nevertheless, the mind imposes still further limits on the selection possible to the senses, fashioning it upon the activity of internal choice. Thus attention is fixed upon determined objects and not upon all objects; and the volition _chooses_ the actions which are really to be performed from among a mult.i.tude of possible actions.

It is in like fashion that the lofty work of the intelligence is accomplished; by an a.n.a.logous action of attention and internal will, it abstracts the dominant characteristics of things, and thus succeeds in a.s.sociating their images, and keeping them in the foreground of consciousness. It ceases to consider an immense amount of ballast which would render its context formless and confused. Every superior mind distinguishes the essential form from the superfluous, rejecting the latter, and thus it is enabled to achieve its characteristic, clear, delicate, and vital activities. It is capable of extracting that which is useful to its creative life, and thus finds in the cosmos the means of salvation. Without this characteristic activity, the intelligence cannot construct itself; it would be like an attention that wanders from thing to thing without ever fixing upon any one of them, and like a will that can never decide upon any definite action.

"It is possible to suppose," says James, "that a G.o.d could, without impairing his activity, simultaneously behold all the minutest portions of the world. But if our human attention should be thus dissipated, we should merely contemplate all things vacuously, without ever finding occasion to do any particular act."

It is one of the marvelous phenomena of life that it is impossible to realize anything, without determining limits; that mysterious law which ordains that every living being has its "form" and "stature,"

unlike the minerals, which are indefinite in form and dimensions, is repeated in the psychical life. Its development, its auto-creation, is nothing but a determination even more precise, a progressive "concentration"; it is thus that from the primitive chaos our internal characteristic form is gradually shaped and chiselled.

The capacity for forming a conception of a thing, for judging and reasoning, has always this foundation. When, after having noted the usual qualities of a column, we abstract the general truth that the column is a support, this synthetic idea is based upon a selected quality. Thus in the judgment we may p.r.o.nounce: columns are cylindrical, we have abstracted one quality from among the many others we could have adduced, as, columns are cold, they are hard, they are a composition of carbonate of lime, etc. It is only the capacity for such a selection which makes reasoning possible. When, for example, in the demonstration of the theorem of Pythagoras, children handle the various pieces of the metal insets, they should start from the point at which they become aware that a rectangle is equal to the rhomb, and a square is equal to the same rhomb. It is the perception of this truth which makes it possible to go on to the following reasoning: therefore the square and the rectangle are equal to each other. If it had not been possible to determine this attribute, the mind could not have arrived at any conclusion. The mind has succeeded in discovering an attribute common to two dissimilar figures; and it is this discovery which may lead to a series of conclusions by means of which the theorem of Pythagoras will be finally demonstrated.

Now, as in the case of will, decision presupposes a methodical exercise of the impulsive and inhibitory forces, only to be performed by the individual himself, until habits have been established, so in case of the intelligence, the individual must exercise himself in his activities of a.s.sociation and selection, guided and aided by external means, until he has developed, by the definitive elimination of certain ideas and the choice of others, "mental habits" characteristic of the individual, characteristic of the "type." Because, underlying all the internal activities the mind can construct, there is, as the phenomena of attention show us, the individual tendency, the "nature."

There is, undoubtedly, a fundamental difference between understanding and learning the reasoning of others, and being able "to reason,"

between learning how an artist may see the external world according to his prevailing interest in color, harmony, and form, and actually seeing the external world about a fulcrum which sustains one's own aesthetical creation. In the mind of one who "learns the things of others" we may find, as in a sack of old clothes hanging over the shoulders of a hawker, solutions of the problems of Euclid, together with the images of Raphael's works, ideas of history and geography, and rules of style, huddled together with a like indifference and a like sensation of "weight." While, on the other hand, he who uses all these things for his own life, is like the person who is a.s.sisted in attaining his own welfare, his own relief, his own comfort by those same objects which are merely burdens when in the sack of the hawker.

Such objects are, however, no longer huddled together without order and without purpose in a closed bag, but set out in the s.p.a.cious rooms of a well-ordered house. The mind which constructs may contain a great deal more than that mind in which pieces of knowledge are heaped up as in the bag; and in that mind, as in the house, the objects are clearly divided one from another, harmoniously arranged, and distinctive in their uses.

Between "understanding" because another person seeks to impress upon us the explanation of a thing by speech, and "understanding" the thing of ourselves, there is an immeasurable distance; the two are comparable to the impression made in soft wax, which will subsequently be effaced and replaced by other impressions, and the form chiselled in the marble by an artist, as his creation. He who understands of himself has an unforeseen impression; he feels that his consciousness has been liberated, and something luminous shines forth within him.

Understanding, then, is not a matter of indifference; it is the beginning of _something_; sometimes it is the beginning of a life which renews itself within us. Perhaps no emotion is more fruitful for man than the intellectual emotion. He who makes a discovery rich in results certainly enjoys the greatest of human felicities; but even he who merely "understands" gets a lofty enjoyment which will rise superior to and overcome the most acute suffering. Indeed, he who is oppressed by a misfortune, if he can be brought to differentiate his own case from that of another, or to see a reason for his affliction, experiences relief, and a "sense of salvation." Amidst the confused darkness in which he was plunged, a consoling ray of intellectual light has reached him. The difficult matter, indeed, is to find the way of escape in the hour of darkness. When we reflect that a dog may die of grief on the grave of his master, and that a mother can survive on the grave of her only son, we see at once that it is the light of _reason_ which makes the difference between the two. The dog _cannot reason on the matter_; it may die because no light can penetrate the darkness of its intelligence to overcome the depression of its grief.

But the thought of a universal justice, the living memory of the lost one which remains to us, saves the human being. And by degrees, not forgetfulness, which alone can save the animal, but the connection which the intelligence establishes with the universe, restores calm to the suffering soul. Such comfort could never be derived from the dry lesson of a professor, from memorizing the theory of a savant who is not in sympathy with the state of our soul. When we say, "to give ourselves a reason," "to derive strength from a principle," we imply that the ever-inquiring intelligence should be left at liberty to perform its work of reconstruction and salvation.

Now if intelligence in "comprehending" may actually prove our salvation when in danger of death, what a source of enjoyment it should prove to man!

When we talk of "the opening of the mind," we mean a creative phenomenon, which is not the weak result of an impression violently made from without. The opening of the mind is the _active comprehension_ which accompanies great emotions, and which is therefore felt as a spiritual event.

I once knew a motherless girl, who was so much depressed by the arid teaching of her school, that she had become almost incapable of study and even of understanding the things which were taught her. Her life of solitude, lacking in natural affection, was a further aggravation of her mental fatigue. Her father decided that she should live for a year or two in the open country like a little savage; he then brought her back to town, and placed her under the private direction of a number of "professors." The girl studied and learned, but remained pa.s.sive and weary. Every now and then her father would say: "Is your mind opening again?" and the girl always replied: "I do not know. What do you mean?" Owing to a curious coincidence in my life, this girl was confided to my sole care; and it was thus that I, when I was still a medical student, made my first pedagogic experiment, upon which I cannot linger now, though it would be worthy of interest. One day we were together and when she was at work on organic chemistry, she broke off, and looking at me with beaming eyes, said: "Here it is now! I _do_ understand!" She then got up and went away, calling out aloud: "Father, father! My mind has opened!" I, not then knowing the girl's history, was astonished and agitated. She had taken her father's hand, and was saying: "Now I can tell you, yes, yes; I did not know what it meant before; my mind has opened." The joy of father and daughter and their union at that moment made me think of the joys and wellsprings of life which we destroy by enslaving the intelligence.

Indeed, every intellectual conquest is a wellspring of joy to our free children. This is the "pleasure" to which they are now most susceptible, and which makes them scorn lower pleasures; it is after having tasted of this that; our little ones despise sweetmeats, toys, and vanities.

It is this which makes them sublime to the eyes of those who contemplate them.

Their pleasure is that lofty pleasure which distinguish man from the brute, and can save us even from the desolation of grief and darkness.

When it is made a reproach to our method that it seeks to promote the "pleasure" of the child, and that this is immoral, it is the child and not the method which is insulted. For the essence of this reproach is the calumny against the child, who is considered by all as on a level with the beasts, and whose "pleasure" is supposed to lie solely in gluttony and idleness, and worse. But none of these could keep the child's "pleasure" alive for hours and days and years. It is only when he has laid hold on "humane pleasure" that he persists in it, and lives with a joy which is comparable to that of the young girl who ran to her father to proclaim the end of the darkness in which she had languished for years.

May it not perhaps be that those "crises," which are to-day but the intellectual illuminations of genius when it discovers a truth, represent a natural phenomenon of psychical life? May not the manifestation of the genius be but the manifestation of a "vigorous life," saved from perils by its exceptional individuality, and therefore itself alone capable of revealing the true nature of man?

His type would then be the common one, and all men, in a greater or less degree, would seem to be of the same "species." The paths the child follows in the active "construction" of his individuality are indeed identical with those followed by the genius. His characteristics are absorbed attention, a profound concentration which isolates him from all the stimuli of his environment, and corresponds in intensity and duration to the development of spiritual activities.

As in genius, this concentration is not without results, but is the source of intellectual crises, of rapid internal developments, and, above all, of an "external activity" which expresses itself in work.

We may say, then, that the genius is the man who has burst his bonds asunder, who has maintained his liberty, and who has upheld before the eyes of the mult.i.tude the standard of the humanity conquered by him.

Nearly all the manifestations of those men who liberated themselves from the external bondage of their times are to be noted in our children. Such, for instance, is that sublime "spiritual obedience,"

at present still unknown to the majority of mankind, with the exception of monks, who, however, often recognize it only in theory, and contemplate it only in the examples given by the saints; such again are those means necessary to the construction of a strong internal life which form part of the preparation for the cloistered life in the methodical "meditations" of those about to enter upon it.

No persons, with the exception of monks, practise meditation. We can hardly distinguish meditation from methods for "learning"

intellectually. We know, for example, that to read a great number of books consecutively, dissipates our powers and our capacity for thought; and that to learn a piece of poetry by heart means to repeat it until it is engraven on our minds: and that all this is not "meditation."

He who commits a verse of Dante to memory and he who meditates upon a verse of the gospel, performs a totally different task. The canto will "adorn" the mind on which it is impressed for a certain time, without leaving any lasting trace upon it. The verse which has been the subject of meditation will have a transforming and edifying effect. He who meditates clears his mind as far as possible of every other image, and tries to concentrate upon the subject of meditation in such a manner that all the internal activities will be polarised thereby: or, as the monks say, "all the powers of the mind."