What Is and What Might Be Part 10

(3) All forms of life are exposed to the attacks of enemies of various kinds. Whether they shall beat off those attacks or succ.u.mb to them depends in large measure on the nature of the growth that they are making; and this again depends, largely if not wholly, on the nature of the general influences to which they have been exposed.

For many years I lived in a district in which hops were grown on a large scale; and I naturally took an interest in the staple industry of my adopted county. I noticed that whenever (during the summer months) there came a spell of cold winds from the north-east--winds which tend to arrest plant-growth--the hop-bines were at once a.s.sailed by blight and other pests, and the safety of the growing crop was imperilled. And I noticed further that when the wind got round to the south-west, and warm showers began to stimulate the growth of the flagging plants, the pests that had a.s.sailed them disappeared as if by magic, and the anxieties of the growers were relieved. As it is with plants, so it is with human beings. They too have their enemies,--temptations of various kinds and other evil influences that "war against the soul." And they too will be able to beat off their a.s.sailants just so far as their own growth is vigorous and healthy; and will succ.u.mb to their attacks, to their own serious detriment, just so far as their own growth is feeble and sickly.

The bearing of this fact on the problem of the origin of moral evil is obvious. That the evils which a.s.sail the organism, be it a plant or a human being, are not inherent in its nature, is proved by the fact that when the growth of the organism is normal and unimpeded, the a.s.sailants are always beaten off. As it is the growth of the organism--the development of its own nature--which enables it to resist the evils that threaten it, we must a.s.sume that its nature is good. Indeed the evils that threaten it are called evils for no other reason than that they imperil its well-being; and it follows that in calling them evils we imply that the organism is intrinsically good.

When we have eliminated from human nature the vicious tendencies which are due either to immaturity or to the numberless influences that come under the general head of environment, we shall find that a very small percentage remain to be accounted for. We need not have recourse to the doctrine of original sin in order to account for these. So far I have said nothing about heredity, partly because its influence on the moral development of the individual is, I think, very small compared with that of environment, and partly because it is impossible to consider the extent and character of its influence, without going deeply into certain large and complicated problems. For example, it would be impossible for me to say much about the current, though gradually waning, belief in the force of heredity, without saying something about its Far Eastern equivalent, the belief in re-incarnation,--in other words, without asking whether a man inherits from his parents and other ancestors, or from his former selves. That different persona are born with widely different moral tendencies and propensities, is as certain as that some strains of wheat are hardier and more productive than others. And it is possible, and even probable, that there are exceptional cases of moral evil which point to congenital depravity, and cannot otherwise be accounted for. But in these admissions I am making no concession to the believer in original sin; for he regards human nature as such as congenitally depraved, and therefore can take no cognisance of exceptional cases of congenital depravity, cases which by breaking the rule that the new-born child is morally and spiritually healthy, may be said to prove it.

In fine, then, all moral evil can be accounted for on grounds which are quite compatible with the a.s.sumption that the normal child is healthy, on all the planes of his being, at the moment of his birth.

That he carries with him into the world the capacity for being affected by adverse influences of various kinds, is undeniable; but so does every other living thing; and if congenital depravity is to be predicated of him for that reason, it must also be predicated of every new-born animal and plant.

But the final proof that Man is by nature a child of G.o.d, is one which has already been hinted at, and will presently be further developed,--namely, that growth--the healthy, vigorous growth of the whole human being, the harmonious development of his whole nature--is in its essence a movement towards moral and spiritual perfection. And the final proof that the doctrine of Man's congenital depravity is false is the practical one that the doctrine is ever tending to fulfil its own gloomy predictions, and to justify its own low estimate of human nature,--in other words, that by making education repressive and devitalising, by introducing externalism, with its endless train of attendant evils, into Man's daily life, and by making him disbelieve in and even despair of himself, it has done more perhaps than all other influences added together to deprave his heart and to wreck his life.

To one who has convinced himself that human nature is fundamentally good, in the sense that the new-born child is as a rule sound and healthy on all the planes of his being, it must be clear that the path of soul-growth or self-realisation is the only way of salvation.

What salvation means, what the path of self-realisation will do for him who enters it, is a theme to which I could not hope to do justice within the limits of this work. I will therefore content myself with indicating certain typical aspects of the process which I have called self-realisation, and saying something about each of these. Four aspects suggest themselves to me as worthy of special consideration,--the _mental_, the _moral_, the _social_, and the _religious_.[26]

_The Mental Aspect of Self-realisation._

There are two features of the process of self-realisation, on the importance of which I cannot insist too often or too strongly. The first is that the growth which the life of self-realisation fosters is, in its essence, harmonious and many-sided. The second is that the life of self-realisation is, from first to last, a life of self-expression, and that self-expression and perception are the face and obverse of the same mental effort.

If the life of self-realisation did not provide for the growth of the self in its totality, the self as a living whole, it would not be worthy of its name. One-sided growth, inharmonious growth, growth in which some faculties are hypertrophied and others atrophied, is not self-realisation. When trees are planted close together, as in the beech-forests of the Continent, they climb to great heights in their struggle for air and light, but they make no lateral growth. When trees are pollarded, they make abundant lateral growth, but they cease to climb upward. When trees are exposed to the prevailing winds of an open sea-coast, they are blown over away from the sea, and make all their growth, such as it is, on the landward side. When trees are on the border of a thick plantation, they make all their growth towards the open air, and are bare and leafless on the opposite side.

In each of these cases the growth made is inharmonious and one-sided: the balance between the two intersecting planes of growth, or between the two opposite sides, has been lost. But when a tree is planted in the open, and when all the other conditions of growth are favourable, it grows harmoniously in all directions,--upward, outward, and all around. In other words, it is growing as a whole, growing, as it ought to grow, through every fibre of its being, and yet maintaining a perfect symmetry of form and the harmony of true proportion among its various parts.

This is the kind of growth which the soul makes in the life of self-realisation; and if it falls appreciably short of this standard, if it develops itself on this side or that, to the neglect of all other sides, then we must say of it that, though it is realising this or that faculty or group of faculties, it is not realising itself. I have spoken of the six great expansive instincts which indicate the main lines of the child's natural growth, and I have shown that in Utopia the cultivation of all those instincts is duly provided for.

In the life of self-realisation the soul would continue to grow on the lines which those instincts had marked out for it. I do not mean that when the child goes out into the work-a-day world, he must give to all six instincts the systematic training which they received, or ought to have received, in school. The exigencies of the daily round of life are such as to make that impossible, in all but the most exceptional cases. But that is all the more reason why the expansive instincts should be carefully and skilfully trained in school. For where they are so trained, an impetus is given to each of them which will keep it alive and active long after the direct influence of the school has ceased, and will enable it to absorb and a.s.similate whatever nutriment may come in its way. If the Utopian training cannot be followed up, in its entirety, in the child's after-life, it can at least initiate a movement which need never be arrested,--a movement in the direction of the triune goal of Man's being, the goal towards which his expansive instincts are ever tending to take him, the goal of Love, Beauty, and Truth.

The life of many-sided growth is also a life of self-expression. This means that the self-expression, like the growth which it fosters, is many-sided; and this again means that the perceptive faculties, which unfold themselves through the medium of self-expression, are not so much separate faculties as a general capacity for getting on terms with one's environment and gaining an insight into its laws and properties. In a school which lays itself out to teach one or two subjects thoroughly, to the neglect of others, a sense, or special perceptive faculty, will gradually be evolved by the study of each subject, provided, of course, that the path of self-expression is followed,--a literary sense, a historical sense, a mathematical sense, and so on. But while these special senses are being developed, the remaining perceptive faculties are being starved, and no attempt is being made to cultivate that general capacity of which I have just spoken. The consequent loss to the child, both in his school-life and in his after-life, is very great. For not only is his mental growth one-sided and inharmonious, but even in the subjects in which he specialises he will lose appreciably, owing to his special perceptive faculties not having as their background any general capacity for seeing things as they are.

I will try to explain what I mean. In what is known as "Society"

there is a valuable quality called "tact," in virtue of which the man or woman who is endowed with it always says and does "the right thing." This quality is compounded partly of sympathetic insight into the feelings, actual and possible, of others, and partly of a keen and subtle sense for all the _nuances_ of social propriety.

Like every other perceptive faculty, it is the outcome of self-expression,--of years of self-expression on the plane of social intercourse. That general perceptive faculty, or perceptive capacity, which is the outcome of years of self-expression on many sides of one's being, has so much in common with the _tact_ of the man of society, that the epithet _tactful_ may perhaps be applied to it. The larger, like the lesser, faculty is compounded, partly of sympathetic insight into latent possibilities, and partly of a delicate sense for _nuances_ of all kinds. But even this formula does less than justice to its complex nature. Generated as it is by a life of many-sided self-expression, it reflects its origin in its internal const.i.tution.

Many elements of thought and feeling have woven themselves into it; and it is ready to take a colour from each new environment or even from each new situation. It can become emotional, for example, when the matter in hand appeals, in any sort or degree, to the emotions; and there are occasions when its latent sense of humour becomes an invaluable antidote to that over-seriousness which so often leads men astray. Above all, it is in its essence, imaginative, for it is ever learning to picture things to itself as they are or as they might be; and the higher the level and the wider the sphere of its activity, the more boldly imaginative it becomes. A faculty so subtle and so sympathetic must needs play a vitally important _role_, not only when its possessor is studying "subjects" or handling concrete problems, but also, and more especially, when he is dealing with the "affairs of life"; and we can understand that when it is wholly or largely lacking, each of the special faculties which specialising is supposed to foster will suffer from not being tempered and yet vitalised by its all-penetrating influence.

That we may the better understand this, and the better understand what the path of self-realisation does for the mental development of him who walks in it, let us ask ourselves what type of mind the conventional type of education is likely to produce. And let us study the conventional type of education on what is supposed to be its highest level. Let us consider the education given to the sons of the "upper cla.s.ses." And let us take this highest level at its own highest level. Let us take the case of those who go through that tri-part.i.te course of education which begins in a high-cla.s.s "Preparatory School," is continued in one of the "Great Public Schools," and is completed at Oxford or Cambridge. A boy enters a Preparatory School at the age of eight or nine, and is there prepared, in general for entrance into one of the Great Public Schools, and in particular for one of the compet.i.tive examinations on the results of which the entrance scholarships of the Great Public Schools are awarded. He enters one of the Great Public Schools at the age of thirteen or fourteen, and is there prepared, in general for admission to Oxford or Cambridge, and in particular for the scholarship examinations of the various Oxford and Cambridge Colleges. He enters Oxford or Cambridge at the age of eighteen or nineteen, and is there prepared, directly for his degree examination--"Pa.s.s" or "Honours" as the case may be--and indirectly for the public examination which admits to the Indian and Colonial, and the higher grades of the Home, Civil Service. This course of education lasts about fourteen years, and costs from 1,500 to 4,500.

What will it do for the boy who goes through it? The education given in the Preparatory School is completely dominated by the scholarship and entrance examinations at the Great Public Schools. The lines on which those examinations are conducted are the lines on which the Preparatory Schoolmaster must educate his pupils. He has no choice in the matter. The t.i.tle "Preparatory" seals his doom. His business is, not to give his pupils the education that is best suited to their capacities and their years, but to prepare them for admission to a more advanced school. The more scholarships he can win at Eton, Harrow, Winchester, Rugby, and the rest, the higher will be the repute of his school; and as the compet.i.tion between school and school is fierce and unintermittent, he cannot afford to throw away a single chance. In other words, he cannot afford to make a single serious experiment. The education given in the Great Public Schools is similarly dominated by the scholarship and entrance examinations held by the Oxford and Cambridge Colleges. The lines on which those examinations are conducted are in the main the lines on which the boys must be educated. It is possible that the Great Public Schools are freer to go their own ways than are the Preparatory Schools; but if they are, they make but little use of their freedom.

So far as the rank and file of the boys are concerned, it may be doubted if the word "educative" is applicable, in any sense or degree, to the daily round of their work. Of the six great expansive instincts which are struggling to evolve themselves in every healthy child, not one can be said to find a congenial soil or a stimulating atmosphere in the ordinary cla.s.sroom either of the Preparatory or of the Public School. Four of the six--the _dramatic_, the _artistic_, the _musical_, and the _constructive_--are entirely or almost entirely neglected. Music and Handwork[27] are "extras" (a fatally significant word); the teaching of Drawing is, as a rule, quite perfunctory; and Acting is not a recognised part of the school curriculum. The truth is that marks are not given for these "subjects"--for in the eyes of the schoolmaster they are all "subjects"--in any entrance or scholarship examination, and that therefore it does not _pay_ to teach them. There remain two instincts,--the _communicative_ and the _inquisitive_. The study of the "Humanities"--History and Literature, ancient and modern--ought to train the former; and the study of Science ought to train the latter. But in the case of the average boy, the study of the Humanities resolves itself, in the main, into a prolonged and unsuccessful tussle with the difficulties of the Greek and Latin languages, the mastering of which is regarded as an end in itself instead of as the gateway to the wonder-worlds of ancient life and thought; and the study of Science is, as a rule, a pure farce.[28]

Not one, then, of the expansive instincts of the average boy receives any training during the nine or ten years of his school life; and as, in his struggle for the "Pa.s.s" degree of his University, he will follow the lines on which he has been accustomed to work in both his schools, he will go out into the world at the age of twenty-two or twenty-three, the victim of a course of education which has lasted for fourteen years and cost thousands of pounds, and which has done nothing whatever to foster his mental or spiritual growth. It is true that in all the Public Schools a certain amount of informal education is done through the medium of Musical Societies, Natural History Societies, Debating Societies, School Magazines, and the like; that the discipline of a Public School, with its system of School and House prefects, has considerable educational value; that the playing fields do something towards the formation of character; that the boys, by exchanging experiences and discussing things freely among themselves, help to educate one another; and that during the four months of each year which the schoolboy spends away from school, he is, or may be, exposed to educative influences of various kinds.[29]

But the broad fact remains that the _studies_ of the youthful graduate, whether in school cla.s.sroom or college lecture-room, have been wholly unformative and therefore wholly uneducative.

But let us consider the education given in our Public Schools and Universities, at what is presumably the highest of all its levels.

Let us see what is done for the boys who have sufficient ability to win Scholarships and read for Honours at Oxford and Cambridge. It is to the supposed interests of these brighter boys that the vital interests of their duller schoolfellows are perforce sacrificed. Are the results worth the sacrifice? The brighter boys fall into two main groups,--those who have a turn for the "Humanities," and those who have a turn for Mathematics and Science. Where the "Humanities" are effectively taught,--where, for example, the scholar is allowed to pa.s.s through the portals of Latin and Greek grammar and composition into the wonder-world that lies beyond them,--the _communicative_ instinct receives a valuable training. It is, unfortunately, quite possible for a boy, or even for a man, to be what is called a "good scholar," and yet to take no interest whatever in the history or literature of Greece and Rome; and the examination system undoubtedly tends to foster this b.a.s.t.a.r.d type of humanism. But when, as a result of his school and University training, a scholar has pa.s.sed the linguistic portals and found pleasure in the worlds beyond, we may say of him that his education has fostered the growth of one of his expansive instincts,--perhaps the most important of all, but still only one. When Science is effectively taught, the growth of the _inquisitive_ instinct is similarly fostered; but the inquisitive instinct, though of great value, when trained in conjunction with other instincts, has but little value as a "formative" when trained by itself. From this point of view it compares unfavourably with the communicative instinct, being as much less formative than the latter, as the mysteries of the material world are less significant and less able to inspire and vitalise their interpreter than the mysteries of human life; and a purely (or mainly) scientific training is therefore worth far less as an instrument of education than a purely (or mainly) humanistic training.

But why should the boys at our Great Public Schools and the young men at our Universities have to choose between a scientific and a humanistic training? Why should these ancient and famous inst.i.tutions be content to train one only of the six expansive instincts instead of at least _two_? Here, as elsewhere, the scholarship system blocks the way. Some scholarships are given for Cla.s.sics, others for History, others for Mathematics, others for Natural Science. Not a single scholarship is given, at either University, for general capacity, as measured by the results of a many-sided examination.

Why should this be? The answer is that under any system of formal examination many-sidedness in education necessarily means _smattering_; and that against smattering the Universities have, very properly, set their faces. But, after all, there is no necessary connection between many-sidedness and smattering. In Utopia, where the concentric rings of growth are formed by the gradual evolution of an inner life, whatever feeds that inner life is a contribution, however humble, to the growth of the whole tree; and many-sidedness, far from being a defect, is one of the first conditions of success in education. But in the Great Public Schools, where veneers of information are being a.s.siduously laid on the surface of the boy's mind with a view to his pa.s.sing some impending examination, the greater the number and variety of such veneers, the more certain they all are to split and waste and perish. Indeed the real reason why specialising has to be resorted to in the case of the brighter boys, is that in no other way can provision be made for the fatal process of veneering being dispensed with, and for faculty being evolved by growth from within.

But a heavy price has to be paid for the growth of these specialised faculties. If Science is to be seriously studied the student must give the whole of his time to it. This means that he must give up the idea of educating himself. It is only by turning his back on history, on literature, on philosophy, on music, on art, that he can hope to meet the exacting and ever-growing demands which Science makes on those who desire to be initiated into its mysteries. To say that when he has "taken his degree" he is only half-educated, is greatly to over-estimate the formative influence of his highly specialised training. A sense has undoubtedly been developed in him, an instinct has been awakened, one or two of his mental faculties have been vigorously cultivated; but his training has been the reverse of humanising; and as his studies and his consequent att.i.tude towards Nature have been essentially _a.n.a.lytical_, he may, in the absence of those correctives which his compulsory specialising has withheld from him, have learned to regard the dead side of things as the real side,--a conception which, if it mastered him, would materialise his whole outlook on life.

The case of the "humanist" is different. The subjects which he studies appeal to many sides of his being; and if he could respond to their appeal, they might do much for his mental and spiritual development. That he should be able to respond to their appeal is of vital importance. When he has become a decent "scholar," a chance is given to him, which if he neglects he will probably lose for ever,--the chance of making good, in part at least, the deficiencies of his early education. Had he lived in Utopia, his life of many-sided self-expression would have given a general training to his perceptive faculties, in which the twin faculties of imagination and sympathy would have had their share. But neither in his Preparatory School nor in the lower cla.s.ses of his Public School has any serious attempt been made during school hours to ripen either of those mighty faculties, whereas much has been done in both schools to r.e.t.a.r.d their growth. He is doomed, then, to begin his study of the history and literature of the Ancient World with a considerable knowledge of the Latin and Greek languages, but (in too many cases) with an unimaginative mind and an unsympathetic heart. There is, however, much in that history and that literature,--not to speak of the history and the literature of his own and other modern countries,--which, if it could but have its way, would appeal strongly to his imagination and his sympathy, dormant and undeveloped as these faculties are,--appeal to them so strongly as to awaken them at last from their slumber and quicken them into active life. But alas! the shadow of an impending examination is always falling on his humanistic studies, nullifying the appeal that they make to him, and compelling him to look at them from a sordidly utilitarian point of view. For to give marks for the response that he might make to their appeal, or even to set questions which would afford free scope for the play of his imagination or the flow of his sympathy, is beyond the power of any examiner. There are two things, and two only, which "pay" on the examination day,--the possession of information and the power to make use of it; and the humanist who would win prizes at his school or gain high honours at his University, must therefore regard the memorable doings and the imperishable sayings of his fellow-men, not as things to be imagined and felt, admired and loved, wondered at and pondered over, but as things to be pigeon-holed in his memory, to be taken out and arranged under headings, to be dissected and commented on and criticised.[30]

Of the part that memory plays in the education of our humanist, I need not speak. An undue burden is probably laid upon it; but that is a matter of minor importance. What is of supreme importance is that in cultivating his critical faculty with an almost intensive culture, while they starve, or at any rate leave untended, his more vital and more emanc.i.p.ative faculties of imagination and sympathy, our Great Public Schools and Universities are doing him a serious and lasting injury. Let us take the case of a young man of energy and ability who has just left Oxford or Cambridge, having won high honours in one of the humanistic "schools." Let us a.s.sume that, like so many of his kind, he has a keenly critical mind, but is deficient in imagination and sympathy; and let us then try to forecast his future. That the faith of his childhood, undermined by his criticism, has already fallen to pieces or will shortly do so, is more than probable. That he will be too unimaginative to attempt to construct a new faith out of the ruins of the old, is practically certain. His lack of faith, in the broader sense of the word, will incapacitate him for high seriousness (which he will regard as "bad form"), and _a fortiori_ for enthusiasm (which he will shun like the plague), and will therefore predispose him to frivolity. Being fully persuaded, owing to his lack of imaginative sympathy, that his own outlook on life is alone compatible with mental sanity, and yet being too clear-sighted to accept that outlook as satisfactory, he will mingle with his frivolity a strain of bitterness and discontent,--the bitterness of self-corroding scepticism, and the discontent which grows apace through its very effort to ignore its own existence. In a word, his att.i.tude towards life will be one of _cynicism_,--that blend of hardness and bitterness with frivolity which exactly inverts the ideal of the modern poet, when he dreams of an age in the far-off future,

Which without hardness will be sage, And gay without frivolity.[31]

And the bitterness of his cynicism will be made bitterer still by the fact that, owing to his being (in all probability) unmusical, inartistic, and unable to amuse himself with any form of handwork, he will have no taste or hobby to distract him from himself. For a time, indeed, the "genial sense of youth" will keep his sinister tendencies in check; and in the middle period of life, his struggle to achieve "success"--for of course he will be an externalist to the core--will tend to keep them in the background. But in his later years, when he will have either failed to achieve "success" or discovered--too late--that it was not worth achieving, his cynicism will a.s.sert itself without let or hindrance, and, with his growing incapacity for frivolity, will become harder and bitterer, till at last the dark shadow of incurable pessimism will fall on him and involve his declining years in ever deepening gloom. I do not say that many of our University humanists will conform to this type; but I do say that the type is easily recognisable and is becoming increasingly familiar.

Even the intellectual development of our humanist, who is nothing if not intellectual, will be adversely affected by the one-sidedness of his education. Well-informed and acutely critical he will probably be; but he will lack the saving grace of that "tactful" faculty which years of many-sided self-expression can alone evolve,--a faculty which (as we have seen) is subtly adaptive when it deals with small matters, boldly imaginative when it deals with great matters, and delicately sympathetic along the whole range of its activity.

This sinuous and penetrative sense is to the more logically critical faculty what equity is to law; and in its absence the intellectuality of our young "intellectual" will be as incomplete as would be the legal system of a country which knew nothing of equity and tried to bring all legal problems under the direct control of positive law. For it will be his business, as he goes through life, to deal in and with words and phrases; and as words and phrases are ever tending to change their force, and even their meaning, under our hands, and as his use and treatment of them will be logical and "legal" rather than tactful and "equitable," he will again and again misinterpret and misuse them, and will so do badly the very thing which he is expected to do well. The man who, though endowed with an acute and vigorous intellect, can neither think imaginatively nor reason tactfully, has grave intellectual defects; and the blinder he is to the existence of these defects the more p.r.o.nounced will they become.

The pity of it is that when these unimaginative "intellectuals" go out into the world, they will fill posts in which they will have unrivalled opportunities for establishing and disseminating their unwholesome influence. A section of them will go into the teaching profession, the higher grades of which are almost entirely recruited from Oxford and Cambridge. Another section will go into the legal profession, and through it will enter Parliament in considerable numbers, where, being trained advocates, they will exercise an influence out of all proportion to their numerical strength. And a third section will man the higher grades of the Home, Colonial, and Indian Civil Services. Teachers, legislators, administrators,--if there are any walks in life in which cynicism and a capacity for merely destructive criticism are out of place, and in which imagination and sympathy are imperatively demanded, they are these three; and it is nothing short of a national calamity that these great and commanding professions should be manned, in part at least, by men whose mission in life is to paralyse rather than to vitalise, to fetter rather than to set free.

The further pity of it is that the training of these "intellectuals"

might easily have taken an entirely different course. Much of the specialising which goes on in our Great Public Schools and Universities, and which is so destructive of mental and spiritual vitality, is wholly unnecessary. The course of education which the sons of the "upper cla.s.ses" go through has this in common with elementary education, that in neither case need "utilitarian"

considerations weigh with the teachers. The parents of a large proportion of our Public School boys can afford to give their sons a _liberal_ education (in the truest and fullest sense of the word) up to the age of twenty-two or twenty-three; and in the case of these boys, at any rate, the excessive specialisation which makes their education so illiberal is done, not in response to the demands of professions (such as the medical or the engineering) which necessitate early specialising, but solely in response to the demands of an examination system which we adopted before we had begun to ask ourselves what education meant, and which, partly from the force of habit and partly because it is in keeping with our general att.i.tude towards life, we still bow down before with a devotion as ardent and as irrational as that which inspired the cry of "Great is Diana of the Ephesians."[32]

At its best, then, the education given by the Great Public Schools and Universities fosters the growth of one of the expansive instincts,--the _communicative_, a mighty instinct which opens up to imagination and sympathy the whole wide world of human life; but because it leaves all the other expansive instincts untended, it gives that one instinct an inadequate and unsymmetrical training, a training which checks the growth of the very faculties--imagination and sympathy--of which the instinct is largely compounded and for the sake of which it may almost be said to exist. At its second best, this costly education fosters the growth of the _inquisitive_ instinct,--a grandly expansive instinct when trained in conjunction with the others, but one which is constrictive rather than expansive when trained by itself and for its own sake. At its ordinary level, it trains no instinct whatever, and is therefore unworthy of the name of education. Why should this be so? Why should a course of education which lasts so long and costs so much do so little for its victims, and do that little so badly or, at any rate, so inadequately? Because from first to last it has looked outward instead of inward; because it has laboured unceasingly to produce "results," and has never given a thought to growth.[33]

Let us now go to the other end of the social scale. What the path of self-realisation might do for the children of the "upper cla.s.ses" if they were allowed to follow it, we may roughly calculate, partly by measuring what the alternative scheme of education has failed to do for them, partly by reminding ourselves of what the path has done for the village children of Utopia. The children of the "upper cla.s.ses"

have such an advantage over the children of Utopia in the matter of environment,--to say nothing of inherited capacity,--that one would expect the path to do much more for their mental development than it has done for the mental development of the Utopians, especially as they could afford to remain much longer in the first and most important of its stages, the stage of self-education (in the more limited sense of the word). The gain to the whole nation if the mental development of the highest social stratum could be raised as much above its normal level as the mental development of youthful Utopia has been raised above the normal level of an English rural village, would be incalculably great. But greater still--incalculably greater--would be the gain to the nation if the rank and file of its children could be led into the path of self-realisation, and therein rise to the high level of brightness, intelligence, and resourcefulness which has been reached in Utopia.

Nor is this dream so wildly impracticable as some might imagine. So far as the natural capacity of the average child is concerned, there is no bar to its realisation. Egeria has taught me that the mental capacity of the average child, even in a rustic village belonging to a county which is proverbial for the slow wits of its rustics, is very great. It is sometimes said that of the children who have been trained in our elementary schools, not one in twenty is fit to profit by the education given in a secondary school: and if by this is meant that in nineteen cases out of twenty the elementary scholar, _educated as he has probably been_, is unlikely to profit by the education given in a secondary school, _conducted as those schools usually are_, I am not prepared to say offhand that the statement is untrue. But if it means that the average mental capacity of the children of our "lower orders" is hopelessly inferior to that of the children of our middle and upper cla.s.ses, I can say without hesitation that it is a slander and a lie. Whether there is any difference, in respect of innate mental capacity, between level and level of our social scale, may be doubted; but the Utopian experiment has proved to demonstration that in the lowest level of all the innate mental capacity is so great that we cannot well expect to find any considerable advance on it even in the highest level of all.

But where, it will be asked, are we to find Egerias to man our elementary schools? For the moment this problem does not admit of a practical solution. But that need not discourage us. I admit that in far too many of our schools the teachers, through no fault of their own, are what I may call machine-made, and that they are engaged in turning out machine-made scholars, some of whom in the fullness of time will develop into machine-made teachers. But there is a way of escape from this vicious circle,--the path of self-realisation.

That path has transformed the children of a rustic village in a slow-witted county into Utopians. Why should it not transform some at least among the boys and girls who are thinking of entering the teaching profession into Egerias, or at any rate into teachers of Egeria's type? Even as it is, replicas of Egeria,--not exact replicas, for she is too original to be easily replicated, but teachers who, like her, preach and practise the gospel of self-education,--are beginning to spring up in various parts of the country; and each of their schools, besides being a centre of light, may well become a nursery for teachers who will follow in the footsteps of those who have trained them, and will in their turn do pioneer work in other schools. The thin end of the wedge is even now being driven into the close-grained ma.s.s of tradition and routine; and each successive blow that is struck by a teacher of intelligence and initiative will widen the incipient cleft.

The dream, then, of leading the children of England--the children of the "ma.s.ses" as well as of the "cla.s.ses"--into the path of self-realisation, is not so widely impracticable as to convict the dreamer of insanity. And if we could realise the dream, if we could go but a little way towards realising it, how immense would be the gain to our country! If the average level of mental development in England were as high as it is in Utopia, to what height would not the men and women of exceptional ability be able to rise? The mountain peaks that spring from an upland plateau soar higher towards the sky than the peaks, of the same apparent height, that spring from a low-lying plain. And "the great mountains lift the lowlands on to their sides."

But this is not the only reason why the gospel of self-realisation should be preached in all parts of the land. There is another reason which is becoming more and more urgent. If the Utopian scheme of education were widely adopted, an antidote would be found to a grave and growing evil which is beginning to imperil the mental health of every civilised community, and of this more than any other. The more civilised (in the Western sense of the word) a country becomes, the less educative does life--the rough-and-tumble life of the work-a-day world--tend to become. In a thoroughly "civilised" country, where the material conditions of life are highly organised, and where industry is highly specialised, so much is done for the individual by those who organise his life and labour, that it ceases to be necessary for him, except within narrow limits, to shift for himself. In a less civilised community men have to use their wits as well as their hands at every turn; and resourcefulness and versatility are therefore in constant demand. The industrial life of a Russian peasant, who is of necessity a Jack-of-many-trades, is incomparably more educative than that of the Lancashire cotton operative, most of whose thinking and much of whose operating may be said to be done for him by the complicated machinery which he controls; who does, indeed, learn to do one thing surpa.s.singly well, but in doing that one thing becomes, as he progresses, more and more automatic, so that the highest praise we can give him is to say that he does his work with the sureness and accuracy of a machine. It follows that the more civilised a country becomes, the more important is the part that the elementary school plays in the life of the nation,--and that not merely because the ability to read, write, and cipher is, in the conditions which modern civilisation imposes, almost as much a "necessary of life" as the ability to walk or talk, but also and more especially because it devolves upon the school to do for the citizen in his childhood what life will not do for him in his manhood, or will do for him but in scant measure, to stimulate his vital powers into healthful activity, to foster the growth of his soul. And the more the people in a civilised country are withdrawn from the soil and herded into mines and mills and offices, the more imperative is it that the school should quicken rather than deaden the child's innate faculties, should bring sunshine rather than frost into his adolescent life. In such a country as ours the responsibilities of the teacher are only equalled by his opportunities; for the child is in his hands during the most impressionable years of life; and those years will have been wasted, and worse than wasted, unless they have fitted the child to face the world with resourcefulness, intelligence, and vital energy, ready to wrest from his environment, by enlarging and otherwise transforming it, those educative influences which are still to be had for the seeking, but are no longer automatically supplied.

_The Moral Aspect of Self-Realisation._

If Man, if each man in turn, is born _good_, the process of growth, or self-realisation, which is presumably taking him towards the perfection of which his nature admits, must needs make him continuously _better_. In other words, growth, provided that it is healthy, harmonious, and many-sided, provided that it is growth of the whole being, is in itself and of inner necessity the most moralising of all processes. Nay, it is the only moralising process, for in no other way can what is naturally good be transformed into what is ideally best.

This argument, apart from its being open to the possible objection that it plays on the meaning of the word "good," is perhaps too conclusive to be really convincing. I will therefore try to make my way to its conclusion by another line of thought.

The desire to grow, to advance towards maturity, to realise his true self--the self that is his in embryo from the very beginning--is strong in every living thing, and is therefore strong in every child of man. But the desire, which necessarily takes its share in the general process of growth, must needs pa.s.s through many stages on its way to its own highest form. In infancy, it is a desire for physical life, for the preservation and expansion of the physical self; and in this stage it is, as I have already pointed out, uncompromisingly selfish. The new-born baby is the incarnation of selfishness; and it is quite right that he should be so. It is his way of trying to realise himself. As the child grows older, the desire to grow becomes a desire for self-aggrandis.e.m.e.nt,--a desire to shine in various ways, to surpa.s.s others, to be admired, to be praised; and though in this stage it may give rise to much vanity and selfishness, still, so long as it has vigorous growth behind it and is in its essence a desire for further growth, it is in the main a healthy tendency, and to call it sinful or vicious would be a misuse of words.

But when, in the course of time, the average, ordinary, surface self--the self with which we are all only too familiar--has been fully evolved and firmly established, the day may come when, owing to various adverse conditions, the growth of the soul will be arrested, and the ordinary self will come to be regarded as the true self, as the self which the man may henceforth accept and rest in, as the self in virtue of which he is what he is. Should the desire for self-aggrandis.e.m.e.nt survive that day, the door would be thrown open to selfishness of a malignant type and to general demoralisation. And this is what would a.s.suredly come to pa.s.s. In the first place, the desire for self-aggrandis.e.m.e.nt, which always has the push of Nature's expansive forces behind it, would certainly survive that ill-omened day. Indeed, it were well that it should do so; for "while there is life, there is hope," and when the soul is ceasing to grow, it is through the desire for self-aggrandis.e.m.e.nt that Nature makes her last effort to keep it alive, by compelling it to energise on one or two at least of the many sides of its being. In the second place, the desire would gradually cease to be resolvable into the desire for continued growth, and would gradually transform itself into the desire to glorify and make much of the ordinary self, to minister to its selfish demands, to give it possessions, riches, honour, power, social rank, and whatever else might serve to feed its self-esteem, and make it think well of itself because it was well thought of by "the world." And in the third place, in its effort to glorify and make much of the ordinary self, the desire would, without a moment's compunction, see other persons pushed to the wall, trampled under foot, slighted and humiliated, robbed of what they valued most, outraged and wounded in their tenderest feelings. It is my firm conviction that at the present day three-fourths of the moral evil in the world, or at any rate in the Western world, are the direct or indirect outcome of egoism,--egoism which, as a rule, is mean, petty, and small-minded, but is often cruel and ruthless, and can on occasion become heroic and even t.i.tanic in its capacity for evil and in the havoc that it works,--egoism which in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred is generated by the desire for self-aggrandis.e.m.e.nt having outlived its better self, the desire to grow.

If arrested growth is the chief source of malignant egoism, there is an obvious remedy for the deadly malady. The egoist must re-enter the path of self-realisation. His great enemy is his lower self;[34] and the surest way to conquer this enemy is to outgrow it, to leave it far behind. When the path of self-realisation has been re-entered, when the soul has resumed the interrupted process of its growth, the desire for self-aggrandis.e.m.e.nt will spontaneously transform itself, first into the desire for further growth, and then into the desire for outgrowth or escape from self, and will cease to minister to the selfish demands of the lower self; and as the lower self is all the while being gradually left behind by the growing soul, and is therefore ceasing to a.s.sert itself, and ceasing to clamour, like a spoilt child, for this thing and for that,--it will not be long before the antidote to the poison of egoism will have taken due effect, and the health of the soul will have been restored.

But let me say again--for I can scarcely say it too often--that the growth which emanc.i.p.ates from self is many-sided growth, the growth, not of any one faculty, or group of faculties, but of the soul as such. Were it not so, the life of self-realisation might easily become a life of glorified and therefore intensified selfishness. It is quite possible, as we know from experience, for a high degree of "culture" to co-exist with a high degree of egoism. It is possible, for example, for the aesthetic instincts, when not kept aglow by the sympathetic, or hardened with an alloy of the scientific, to evolve a peculiar form of selfishness which leads at last to looseness of life and general demoralisation. And it is possible for the scientific instincts, when developed at the expense of the aesthetic and the sympathetic, to evolve a hard, unemotional type of character which is self-centred and selfish owing to its positiveness and lack of imagination. But these are instances of inharmonious growth. When growth is harmonious and many-sided, it leads of necessity to out-growth, to escape from self. For the expansive instincts are so many ways of escape from self which Nature opens up to the soul;--the sympathetic instincts, a way of escape into the boundless aether of love; the aesthetic instincts, a way of escape into the wonder-world of beauty; the scientific instincts, a way of escape into the world of mysteries which is lighted by the "high white star of truth." It is only when one of the expansive instincts is allowed to aggrandise itself at the expense of the others, that the consequent outgrowth of selfishness in what I may call the internal economy of one's nature begins to reflect itself in a general selfishness of character. An instinct may readily become egoistic in its effort to affirm or over-affirm itself, to grasp at its share or more than its share of the child's rising life: and if it does, it may gradually suck down into the vortex of its egoism the whole character of the child as he ripens into the man. But growth, as such, is anti-egoistic just because it is growth, because it is a movement towards a larger, fuller, and freer life: and it is restricted, even more than one-sided growth,--it is the apathy, the helplessness, the deadness of soul that overtakes, first the child and then the man, when his expansive instincts are systematically starved and thwarted,--which is the chief cause of his incarceration in his petty self.

If three-fourths of the moral evil in the world are due to malignant egoism, the source of the remaining fourth is, in a word, _sensuality_. By sensuality I mean the undue or perverted development of the desires and pa.s.sions of the animal self,--the desire for food and drink, the s.e.xual desires, the desire for physical or semi-physical excitement, the animal pa.s.sion of anger, and the rest.

As an enemy of the soul, sensuality is less dangerous, because more open and less insidious, than egoism. The egoist, who mistakes his ordinary for his real self, may well lead a life of systematic selfishness without in the least realising that he is living amiss.

But the animal self is never mistaken for the real self; and the sensualist always has an uneasy feeling in the back of his mind that, in indulging his animal desires and pa.s.sions to excess, he is doing wrong. This feeling may, indeed, die out when he "grows hard" in his "viciousness"; but in the earlier stages of the sensual life it is sure to "give pause"; and there are, I think, few persons who do not feel that the sensual desires and pa.s.sions are so remote from the headquarters of human life, that in yielding to them beyond due measure they are acting unworthily of their higher selves. At any rate we may regard the temptations to sensual indulgence that lie in our path as evil influences which are a.s.sailing us from without rather than from within; and we may therefore liken them to the blight, rust, mites, mildew, and other pests that a.s.sail hops, fruit, wheat, and other growing plants.