What Is and What Might Be Part 9

If education is useful in proportion as it tends to produce good men and women, the education given in Utopia is useful to the highest degree. For a child cannot become a good man (or woman) except by _growing_ good; and if he is to grow good, his nature must be allowed to develop itself freely and harmoniously (for just so far as it is normal and healthy it is necessarily making for its own perfection), and the one end and aim of the teacher must be to stimulate and direct this process of spontaneous growth. This, as we have seen, is the one end and aim of Egeria; and it is therefore clear that she is taking effective steps--the most effective that can possibly be taken--to produce good men and women. We have but to name the qualities which are characteristic, as we have already seen, of her pupils and ex-pupils,--activity, versatility, imaginative sympathy, a large and free outlook, self-forgetfulness, charm of manner, joy of heart,--in order to convince ourselves that those who have pa.s.sed through the Utopian school are on the high road which leads to "goodness." So obvious is all this, that in defining the word "useful" I may be said to have decided the question in favour of Utopia; and what is now in dispute is not whether Utopianism is "useful," in any sense of the word, but whether my sense of the word is the right one.

I cannot go much further into this question without exceeding the limits of the theme which I am handling in this chapter. For in considering the after life of the Utopian child, I am entering a region in which the idea of _education_ begins to merge itself in the larger idea of _salvation_; and though education, as begun in Utopia, is in its essence a life-long process, I must pay some heed to the limits which tradition and custom have imposed on the meaning of the word.

But before I close this chapter I must be allowed to give one ill.u.s.tration in support of my contention that the education given in Utopia is useful. Of the many complaints that are brought against the output of our elementary schools, one of the most serious is that the boys and girls who have recently left school are voracious readers of a vicious and demoralising literature which seems to be provided for their special benefit. The reason why they take so readily to this garbage is that they have lost their appet.i.te for wholesome food.

They are not interested in healthy literature, in Nature-study, in music, in art, in handicraft,--in any pursuit which might take them out of themselves into a larger and freer life; and so they fall victims to the allurements of a literature which appeals to their baser, more sensual, and more selfish instincts,--the very instincts which growth (in the true sense of the word) spontaneously relegates to a subordinate position and places under effective control. It is the inertness, the apathy, the low vitality of the average child of fourteen, which is the cause of his undoing. His taste for false and meretricious excitement--a taste which may lead him far along the downward path--is the outcome of his very instinct to live, an instinct which, though repressed by the influences that have choked its natural channels, cannot resign itself to extinction, and at last, in its despairing effort to energise, forces for itself the artificial outlet of an imaginative interest in vice and crime.

The "young person" who, on leaving school, becomes a voracious devourer of unwholesome literature, cannot be said to have received a "useful" education. That vice and crime--whether practised or imagined--are in the first instance artificial outlets, outlets which the soul would not use if its expansive instincts were duly fostered, is proved by the absence of "naughtiness" in the Utopian school, and the absence of any taste for morbid excitement amongst Utopian ex-scholars. The unwholesome literature which gives so much concern to those who are interested in the welfare of the young, is unknown in Utopia. And in this, as in other matter, the "goodness" of the children and "young persons" is due, not to any lack of life and spirit, but to the very abundance of their vitality. Apart from the fact that vigorous growth, whether in plant or animal or human soul, is in itself a sure prophylactic against the various evils to which growing life is exposed, the Utopians are guarded against the danger of demoralising books and demoralising amus.e.m.e.nts by their many-sided interest in life. Their instinct to live, finding natural and adequate outlets in many directions, has no need to force for itself the artificial outlet of morbid excitement,--an outlet for imprisoned energies, which has too often proved an opening to a life of vice and crime. There is a Shakespeare in every cottage in Utopia; but the advocates of a repressive and restrictive education for the "lower orders" need not be alarmed at this, for the Utopians, who have found the secret of true happiness, are freer than most villagers from social discontent. Nor are Egeria's ex-pupils less efficient as labourers or domestic servants because they are interested in good literature, in Nature-study, in acting, or because they can still dance the Morris Dances and sing the Folk Songs which they learned in school.

FOOTNOTES:

[20] I am thinking more particularly of some of the Roman Catholic schools in the Irish quarter of Liverpool, where the singularly kind and gracious bearing of the teaching "sisters"

towards their poor, ill-fed, and ill-clad pupils is an educative influence of incalculable value.

[21] The sense of justice, which would give to each his due, and therefore not more than his due to oneself, seems to hold the balance between selfishness and love, being as it were, equidistant from the greed and self-indulgence of the former and the lavishness and self-devotion of the latter. If this is so, and if the sense of duty is, as I have suggested, an offshoot from the sense of justice, one can understand why, on the one hand, the sense of duty should be needed to hold the self-seeking instincts in check, and why, on the other hand, it should be an altogether lower and weaker motive than love, by which indeed, _in its own interest_, it should always be ready to be superseded.

[22] I was once present when the Utopian children were going through a programme of Folk Songs and Morris Dances in the village hall. A lady who was looking on remarked to me: "This is all very fine; but if this sort of thing goes on, where are we going to find our servants?" The selfishness of this remark is obvious. What is less obvious, but more significant, is its purblindness. In point of fact the Utopian girls make excellent domestic servants, and are well content to "go into service."

[23] Some two or three years ago it was seriously proposed that _marine navigation_ should be taught in all the elementary schools of a certain maritime county!

[24] The parent who wrote to a schoolmaster, "Please do not teach my boy any more poetry, as he is going to be a grocer," must have been under the influence of this conception of usefulness.

CHAPTER VI

SALVATION THROUGH SELF-REALISATION

In Utopia the transition from _education_ to _salvation_, both in theory and practice, is obvious and direct. The difference between education and salvation is, indeed, purely nominal: in their essence the two processes are one. As the education given in Utopia is, in the main, self-education, there is no reason why it should not be continued indefinitely after the child has left school; and as its function is to foster the growth of the child's many-sided nature (with its vast potentialities), there is every reason why it should be continued as long as he lives. In other words, the path of salvation is the path of self-realisation, the most important part of which is traversed in childhood; and to attain to salvation (which is in a sense unattainable) is to remain faithful to that path till it pa.s.ses beyond our thought.

Outside Utopia there is a widely different conception of the meaning and purpose of education, and a correspondingly different conception of the nature of salvation and the means by which it is to be achieved. The idea of salvation, with the complementary idea of perdition, may be regarded as the crown and completion of that scheme of external rewards and punishments which plays so prominent a part in Western education. Salvation, which is the highest of all external rewards, just as perdition is the severest of all external punishments, is not a path to be followed, but a state of happiness to be won and enjoyed. It follows that the relation between education and salvation is, in the main, one of a.n.a.logy, rather than of ident.i.ty (as in Utopia), or even of vital connection. Or shall we say that education is not so much the first act in the drama of salvation as the first rehearsal of the play?

There are, of course, two conceptions of salvation in the West, just as there are two worlds to be lived in,--the Supernatural world and the world of Nature.

In what are called religious circles, to be saved is to have gained admission to Heaven, and, in doing so, to have escaped the torment and misery of h.e.l.l. There was a time when h.e.l.l was taken very seriously; but the idea of never-ending torment and misery is found, when steadily faced, to be so intolerable that popular thought, even in religious circles, is now turning away from it; and so loosely do men sit, in these "degenerate days," to the old doctrine of eternal punishment, that "to die" and "to go to heaven" are becoming interchangeable terms. But if all men are to be admitted to Heaven (or to its ante-room, Purgatory) at the end of this, their one earth-life, it is clear that there can be no causal connection between conduct and salvation. For though there may be degrees of happiness in Heaven to reward the varying degrees of virtue on earth, all these are dwarfed to nothing by the unimaginable abyss of difference which yawns between Heaven and h.e.l.l; and the practical upshot of the current eschatology is that all men--the self-sacrificing equally with the self-indulgent, the kind and compa.s.sionate equally with the hard-hearted, the spiritually-minded equally with the worldly, the aspiring equally with the indifferent--are to reap the same reward. If a man is a notoriously evil liver, those who have suffered at his hands or been violently scandalised by his conduct may perhaps find a sombre pleasure in consigning him to h.e.l.l, which, indeed, might otherwise have to put up its shutters. But though the doors of Heaven may be closed against a few exceptional scoundrels, they are nowadays thrown open to all the rest of Mankind; and the maxim, "Live anyhow, and you will be saved somehow," seems to sum up with tolerable accuracy the popular att.i.tude towards the twofold problem of duty and destiny.

I do not for a moment suggest that this happy-go-lucky eschatology is formally countenanced by the Churches and Sects. They would doubtless repudiate it with indignation; but the fact remains that their own teaching is largely responsible for it. For not only is the idea of _natural_ retribution wholly foreign to the genius of supernaturalism, but also, in the two great schools of Western theology, there is, and always has been, a strong tendency to undervalue conduct (in the broad, human sense of the word), and to make the means of salvation mechanical rather than vital. At any rate the sacramental teaching of the Catholic Church, and the Calvinistic doctrine of salvation through faith in the finished work of Christ, readily lend themselves to such an interpretation.

So ineffective is the current eschatology, in its bearing on conduct, that the latent energy of Man's nature--his latent desire to have a central purpose in life--is compelling him to work out for himself another and a more mundane conception of salvation, to set before himself as the end of life the winning of certain temporal prizes, and to keep this end steadily in view from day to day and from year to year. Such a conception of salvation has always had a strong attraction for him, though in his more orthodox days he found it desirable to subordinate it to, or if possible harmonise it with, the conception which his religion dictated to him; and of late its attractiveness has been increased by the fact that he is beginning to throw his eschatology (even in its present emasculated form) to the winds.

So far, I have had in my mind those quarters of Western thought in which the belief in the reality of the soul and the kindred belief in immortality still survive. But in point of fact both beliefs are dying before our eyes,--dying as a dumb protest against the inadequacy of the popular philosophy, against the intrinsic incredibility of its premises, against its fundamental misconception of the meaning of life and the nature and conditions of salvation, above all against the way in which the beliefs themselves have been persistently misinterpreted and travestied. And where the beliefs are dying, the latent externalism and materialism of Western thought and Western life are able to a.s.sert themselves without let or hindrance.

"To be saved," as the phrase is now widely understood, means to get on in life, to succeed in business or in a profession, to make money, to rise in the social scale (if necessary, on the shoulders of others), to force one's way to the front (if necessary, by trampling down others), to be talked about in the daily papers, to make a "splash" in some circle or coterie,--in these and in other ways to achieve some measure of what is called "success."

And in proportion as this mundane conception of salvation tends to establish itself, so does the drift towards social and political anarchy, which is now beginning to alarm all the lovers of order and "progress," tend to widen its range and accelerate its movement. For though the current idea of achieving salvation through "success" is a comfortable doctrine for the successful few, it is the reverse of comfortable for the unsuccessful many, among whom the idea is gaining ground that as salvation is the reward, not of virtue, but of a judicious blend of cleverness, unscrupulousness, selfishness, and greed, there is no reason, in the moral order of things, why it should not be wrested from those who are enjoying it, either by organised social warfare or by open violence and crime. And even if an anarchical outbreak should result in perdition all round instead of salvation all round, it would at least be some consolation to the "lost" to feel that they had dragged the "saved" down into their own bottomless pit. This would not be a lofty sentiment; yet I do not see who is in a position to condemn it,--not the supporter of the existing social order, which legalises a general scramble, first for the "prizes" of life and then for the bare means of subsistence, and is well content that in that scramble the weak, the ignorant, and the unfortunate should go to the wall,--not the exponent of the conventional theology, which has taught men to dream of a Heaven in which the happiness of the "elect" will be unruffled by the knowledge that an eternity of misery is the doom of perhaps a majority of their fellow-men.

In the West, then, there are two conceptions of salvation,--a selfish, worldly conception which is daily becoming more effective, and a selfish other-worldly conception which is daily becoming more ineffective, and is therefore less and less able to compete with or control its rival. Out of the attempts that are made to realise both these conceptions and to keep them on friendly terms with one another, there is emerging a state of chaos--political, social, moral, spiritual,--a weltering chaos of new and old ideals, new and old theories of life, new and old standards of values, new and old centres of authority, new and old ambitions and dreams. And in this chaos there are only two principles of order, the first (which is also the ultimate cause of all our disorder) being the pathetic fact that nearly all the actors in the bewildering drama are still seeking for happiness outside themselves, the second being the fundamental goodness of man's heart.

I will now go back to Utopia. There a new conception of salvation is implicit in the new theory of education which has revolutionised the life of the school. Humble as is the sphere and small as is the scale of Egeria's labours, her work is, I firmly believe, of world-wide importance and lasting value, for she has provided an experimental basis for the idea that salvation is to be achieved by growth, and growth alone.

I will now try to interpret that idea.

The education of the child in school begins when he is four or five years old, and lasts till he is thirteen or fourteen. But he enters the path of salvation the day he is born. He comes into the world a weak, helpless baby; but, like every other seedling, he has in him all the potencies of perfection,--the perfection of his kind.

To realise those potencies, so far as they can be realised within the limits of one earth-life, is to achieve salvation. Are those potencies worth realising? To this question I can but answer: "Such as they are, they are our all." We might ask the same question with regard to an acorn or a grain of wheat; and in each case the answer would be the same. There are, indeed, plants and animals which are noxious _from our point of view_. But that is not the view which they take of themselves. Each of them regards his own potencies in the light of a sacred trust, and strives with untiring energy to realise them. If the potencies of our nature are not worth realising we had better give up the business of living. If they are, we had better fall into line with other living things.

An unceasing pressure is being put upon us to do so. The perfect manhood which is present in embryo in the new-born infant, just as the oak-tree is present in embryo in the acorn, will struggle unceasingly to evolve itself. With the dawn of self-consciousness, we shall gradually acquire the power of either co-operating with, or thwarting, the spontaneous energies that are welling up in us and making for our growth. In this respect we stand, in some sort, apart from the rest of living things. But the power to co-operate with our own spontaneous energies is to the full as natural as are the energies themselves. To fathom the mystery of self-consciousness is beyond my power and beside my present purpose; but we may perhaps regard our power of interfering, for good or ill, with the spontaneous energies of our nature, as the outcome of a successful effort which our nature has made both to widen the sphere of its own life and to accelerate the process of its own growth. But just because we possess that power, it is essential that we, above all other living things, should believe in ourselves, should believe in the intrinsic value of our natural potencies, with a whole-hearted faith. For if we do not, we shall hinder instead of helping the forces that are at work in us, and we shall r.e.t.a.r.d instead of accelerating the process of our growth.

We have seen that education in the West has. .h.i.therto been a failure because, owing to the ascendency of the doctrine of original sin, it has been based on distrust of human nature; and we have seen that in Utopia, where Egeria's faith in human nature is so profound that she has allowed the children to go far towards educating themselves, the results achieved have gone beyond my wildest dream of what was practicable, at any rate within the limits of the school life of village children. What is true of education is true _a fortiori_ of salvation. If it is impossible to construct a satisfactory scheme of education on the basis of distrust of human nature, it is even more impossible (if there are degrees in impossibility) to construct on the same basis a satisfactory scheme of salvation. I have already contended that if education is to be reformed, the doctrine of original sin must go; and I now contend that if our philosophy of life is to be reformed, we must abandon, not that doctrine only, but the whole dualistic philosophy which centres in the opposition of Nature to the Supernatural. For trust in human nature--the microcosm--is impossible, so long as Nature--the macrocosm--is liable to be disparaged and discredited (in our minds) by the visionary splendours of the Supernatural world; and to devise a harmonious scheme of life is impossible so long as an inharmonious conception of the Universe dominates our thought,--a conception so inharmonious that it divides the Universe, the All of Being, into two hostile camps, and in doing so introduces the "war of the worlds" into each individual life.

When a fruit-grower plants a fruit-tree, he does three things for it.

By choosing an appropriate soil and aspect, he brings adequate supplies of _nourishment_ within reach of it. By manuring it at the right season, he both adds to its store of nourishment and gives it the _stimulus_ which will help it to absorb and a.s.similate the nourishment that is immediately available for its use. And, by pruning and training it judiciously, he gives it the _guidance_ which will enable it to develop itself to the best advantage from the fruit-bearing point of view (fruit-bearing being the end which he sets it). He does these three things for it, but he does no more than these. He realises that in all these operations he is only taking advantage of the innate powers and tendencies of the tree, and enabling these to deploy themselves under as favourable conditions as possible; and he is therefore well content to leave the rest to the tree itself, feeling sure that its own spontaneous effort to achieve perfection will do all that is needed. His trust in the ability and willingness of the tree to work out its salvation is complete.

These are the lines on which the farmer and the fruit-grower conduct their business,--lines, the neglect of which would involve them in early disaster and in ultimate ruin. And these are the lines on which human nature ought to be trained, in school and out of school, from the day of birth to the day of death. But they are lines on which it will never be trained so long as the doctrine of the depravity of Nature in general and human nature in particular controls our philosophy of life.

The doctrine of natural depravity, or original sin, is the outcome of Man's attempt to explain to himself the glaring fact of his own imperfection. The doctrine grew up in an age when men were ignorant of the fundamental laws of Nature, and among a people who, though otherwise richly gifted, had no turn for sustained thought. So long as men were ignorant of Nature's master law of evolution, it was but natural that they should account for their own imperfection by looking back to a Golden Age,--a state of innocence and bliss from which they had somehow fallen, and to which they could not, by any effort or process of their corrupted nature, hope to return. While this idea--half myth and half doctrine--was growing up in the mind of Israel, the counter idea of the evolution or growth of the soul, of its ascent from "weak beginnings" towards a state of spiritual perfection, was growing up among the thinkers of India, and the derivative doctrine of salvation through the natural process of soul-growth was being gradually elaborated. But though the philosophy of India produced some impression on the conscious thought, and a far deeper impression on the subconscious thought, of the West, its master idea of spiritual evolution--_through a long sequence of lives_--was wholly foreign to the genius of Christendom, which had borrowed its _ideas_ from the commonplace philosophy of Israel; and it was not till the nineteenth century of our era that the idea of evolution began to make its way, from the quarter of physical science, into Western thought.

The doctrine of original sin must once have had a meaning and a purpose. For one thing, it must have been generated by a sudden rise in Man's moral standard; and as such it must have had a salutary influence on his conduct and inward life. But it is now outstaying its welcome. The Biblical story of the Fall, in virtue of which it was once authoritatively taught, is ceasing to be regarded as serious history; and the doctrine must therefore either justify itself to critical thought or resign itself to rejection as inadequate and unsound. But there is only one line of defence which its supporters can take. As the doctrine was the outcome of Man's premature attempt to explain the fact of his own imperfection, if it is to survive in the world of ideas it must be able to show, first and foremost, that the fact in question cannot be accounted for on other grounds. Will it be able to do this, at a time when the idea of evolution is beginning to impregnate our mental atmosphere, and in doing so is making us realise that we are near of kin to all other living things, and that our lives, like theirs, are dominated by the master-law of _growth_?

That there is much moral evil in the world is undeniable. Are we therefore to predicate original depravity of man's heart and soul?

But there is also much physical evil in the world,--pain, weakness, disease, decay, and death. Are we therefore to predicate original depravity of man's body? And this physical evil, this liability to disease, is not confined to man, but also affects all other living things. Are we therefore to predicate original depravity of a new-born lamb, of a new-laid egg, of an acorn, of a grain of wheat?

Let us consider certain typical forms of moral evil, and see if we can account for them, without having recourse to the hypothesis of original sin. The vicious propensities which manifest themselves in children and "young persons" may be divided into two main cla.s.ses, _apparent_ and _actual_.[25] Of the former cla.s.s the chief cause is, in a word, _immaturity_. Of the latter, _environment_.

a.n.a.logies drawn from plant life may help us to understand how these causes operate.

_Immaturity._ If an Englishman who had never before tasted an apple were to eat one in July, he would probably come to the conclusion that it was a hard, sour, indigestible fruit, "conceived in sin and shapen in iniquity," and fit only to be consigned to perdition (on a dustheap, or elsewhere). But if the same man were to wait till October and then eat an apple from the same tree, he would form a wholly different conception of its value. He would find that the sourness had ripened into wholesome and refreshing acidity; the hardness into that firmness of fibre which, besides being pleasant to the palate, makes the apple "keep" better than any other fruit; the indigestibility into certain valuable dietetic qualities; and so on.

It is the same with the growing child. _Most of his vices are virtues in the making_. During the first year or so of his life he is a monster of selfishness; and selfishness is the most comprehensive and far-reaching of all vicious tendencies. Does this mean that he has been conceived in sin? Not in the least. It means that he is making a whole-hearted effort to guard and unfold the potencies of life--in the first instance, of physical life--which have been entrusted to him. It means that he has entered the path of self-realisation, and that if he will be as faithful to that path during the rest of his life as he has been during those early months of uncompromising selfishness, he will be able at last to scale the loftiest heights of self-forgetfulness and self-sacrifice.

_Environment._ The influences which environment exerts seem to fall under three heads--

(1) General influences of a more or less permanent character, such as home, neighbourhood, social grade, etc.

(2) General influences of a more or less variable character, such as education, employment, friendship, etc.

(3) Particular influences, such as companionship (good or bad), literature (wholesome or pernicious), places of amus.e.m.e.nt (elevating or debasing), special opportunities for self-sacrifice or self-indulgence, etc.

Corresponding to these in plant-life we have--

(1) Soil, situation, and climate: (2) Cultivation and weather: (3) The various insects and micro-organisms which are ready to a.s.sail or protect growing life.

(1) If two acorns from the same tree were sown, the one in a deep clay soil and a favourable situation, the other in a light sandy soil and an unfavourable situation, the former would in time develop into a large and shapely, the latter into a puny and misshapen oak-tree.

It would be the same, _mutatis mutandis_, with two human beings who were exposed from their earliest days to widely different permanent influences.

(2) If wheat of a certain strain were sown on the same day in two adjoining fields, one of which was well farmed and the other badly farmed, the resulting crops would differ widely in yield and value.

It would be the same with two human beings, one of whom (to take a pertinent example) attended a school of Utopian tendencies, and the other a school of a more conventional type. Of all moralising (or demoralising) influences education is by far the most important, owing to the fact that it can do more, and is in a position to do more, than any other influence either to foster or to hinder growth.

The influence of weather on plant-life is, of course, enormous. In one year the fruit-crop in a given neighbourhood is a failure: in another year it gluts the market. One explanation of this fact, which has its exact a.n.a.logies in human life, will be given in the next paragraph.