It is only by such creative activity that the organism as a unit gets
into play. If you set a man copying or memorizing, you have occupied
only a fraction of him. If you set him to making something, the minute
he begins, his attention is concentrated. Willy nilly he is trying to
make something significant, he is endeavoring to express himself, the
forces and powers within him begin coming to his succor, offering aid
and suggestion. Before he knows it, his whole being is in operation.
The result is a statement of some sort, and in the process of making
it the creature has developed. But when you say “significant” you have
already implied the existence of other organisms. He is not expressing
himself only, he is expressing them all, and here comes Froebel with
his third great discovery, that it is by constant personal intercourse
with others that the power to express is gained. And on top of this
comes the last law, so closely related to the third as to be merely
a new view of it, but discovered by experiment, tested by practice,
announced empirically and as a fact, that the child is unselfish and
only really happy when at work creatively and for the use and behoof of
others.
This conclusion throws back its rays over the course of the argument,
and we are compelled to see, what we have already known, that
unselfishness and intellectual development are one and the same thing,
that there is no failure of intellect which cannot be expressed in
terms of selfishness, and no selfishness that cannot be expressed as
intellectual shortcoming. Criminology has reached the same point by
another route.
The matter is really very simple, for anything self-regardant means
a return of the organism upon itself, a stepping on your own toes,
and brings self-consciousness, discomfort, pain. Self-sacrifice
on the other hand brings fulfilment. The self-sacrifice is always
illusory, and the development real. This becomes frightfully apparent
in ingenuous and unhappy love affairs, for the organism robbed of
fulfilment returns upon itself.
It makes little difference what province of thought we begin with in
applying these views to the world. They give results like a table of
logarithms. They do more than this, they unravel the most complex
situations, they give the key to conduct and put a compass in the hands
of progress. They explain history, they support religion, they justify
instinct, they interpret character. They give the formula for doing
consciously what mankind has been doing unconsciously in so far as it
has been doing what any one of us in his soul approves of or cares to
imitate.
Let us take up the most obvious deductions. If people develop according
to their activities, their opinions will be a mere reflex of their
conduct. What they see in the world comes out of what they do in the
world. Here in a mere niche of Froebel we find the whole of Emerson.
The power and permanence of Sainte Beuve are due to his having applied
this theory to the interpretation of literature. He is not content till
he has seen the relation between the conduct and the opinions, the
conduct and the art of a character.
Or take Emerson himself, why was it that being so much he was not
more? How came it that after his magnificent prologue in the Phi Beta
Kappa address, which is like the opening of a symphony, he relapsed
into iteration and brilliant but momentary visions of his own horizon?
He kept repeating his theme till he piped himself into fragmentary
inconsequence. The reason is that he had learned all he knew before he
retired to Concord and contemplation. Active life would have made him
blossom annually and last like Gladstone.
Or take Goethe: all that is questionable in him results from his
violation of two of Froebel’s laws of psychology. He fixed his
attention upon self-development and thereby gradually ossified. Every
moment of egotism was an intellectual loss. His contact with people,
meanwhile, became more and more formal as he grew older, and his work
more and more inexpressive.
Give me a man’s beliefs, and I will give you his occupation. What has
happened to that radical that he seems to have become so moderate and
reasonable? You find that for six months he has been clerk to the Civil
Service Reform Club. Why is the mystical poetry of this intellectual
man as vacant as the fashion print he edits for his daily bread? His
employment has tracked his mind to these unearthly regions. He is dead
here too.
There is no such thing as independent belief, based on evidence and
reflection. The thing we call belief is a mere record left by conduct.
If you sincerely go through the regimen of Loyola’s manual, you will
come out a Jesuit. You can no more resist it than you can resist the
operation of ether. This man is an optimist. It means that he has
struggled. That man is a pessimist. It means that he has shirked.
Here is one who has been in touch with all movements for good during
a dismal era of corruption, and yet he has no faith. It means that
the whole of him has not been enlisted. His conscience has drawn him
forward. It is not enough. There is compromise in him. He is not an
absolute fighter.
Here is the most excellent gentleman in America, an old idealist
untouchably transcendental, an educated man. To your amazement he
thinks that it is occasionally necessary to subsidize the powers of
evil. He was bred a banker.
Here is a village schoolma’am who from a rag of information in a county
paper has divined the true inwardness of a complicated controversy at
Washington which you happen to know all about. She has been reforming a
poorhouse.
A is a clergyman, good but ineffective. He relies on beneficence and
persuasion. He does not know the world better than a club loafer knows
it. The only entry to it is by attack, the only progress by action.
B is a good fellow, yet betrays a momentary want of delicacy which
gives you a shock, and which you forgive him, saying: “It is a
coarseness of natural fibre.” It is no such thing. There is in every
man a natural fibre as fine as a poet’s. His coarseness is the residuum
of an act.
You meet a man whom you have known as a court stenographer, and whom
you have supposed to be drowned in worldly cares. At a chop house he
gives you a discourse on Plato’s Phædrus which he interprets in a novel
way. The brains of the man surprise you. This man, though he looks
sordid, positively must have been sending a younger brother to college
during many years. There is no other explanation of him.
The nemesis of conduct then stalks about in the form of a natural law,
not as the pseudo science of fancy, but as a mode of growth, modestly
formulated by a great naturalist.
Take the matter up on its other side. You can only discover in the
universe, try how you will, strain your eyes how you please, you can
only see what you have lived. Out of our activity comes our character,
and it is with this that we see beauty or ugliness, hope or despair. It
is by this that we gauge the operation of economic law and of all other
spiritual forces. It is with this that we interpret all things. What we
see is only our own lives.
We are all more or less in contact with human life. We live in a
pandemonium, a paradise of illustrations, and if we have only eyes to
see, there is enough in any tenement house to-day to lay bare the heart
and progress of Greek art.
But the worst is to come--the horror that makes intellect a plaything.
By a double consequence the past fetters the future. Once take any
course and our eyes begin to see it as right, our hearts to justify it.
Only fighting can save us, and we see nothing to fight for. Thraldom
enters and night like death where no voice reaches. The eternal
struggle is for vision.
How idiotic are the compliments or the contempt of the inexperienced.
Nothing but life teaches. Hallam thinks Juliet immodest, and he had
read all the literatures of Europe. If you want to understand the Greek
civilization you have got to be Sophocles. If you want to understand
the New Testament you have got to be Christ. If you want to understand
that most complex and difficult of all things, the present, you must be
some or all of it, some of it any way. You must have it ground into you
by a contact so wrenchingly close, by a struggle so severe, that you
lose consciousness, and afterwards--next year--you will understand.
Here is the reaction familiar to all men since the dawn of history,
which makes the man of action the hero of all times. It goes in
courage, it comes out power.
This reaction, this transformation goes forward in the very stuff that
we are made of, and if we come to look at it closely, we are obliged
to speak of it in terms of consciousness. There are so many different
kinds of consciousness, that the best we can do is to remind some one
else of the kind we mean. The hand of the violinist is unconscious
to the extent that it is functioning properly, and as his command
over music develops, this unconsciousness creeps up his arm and
possesses his brain and being, until he, as he plays, is completely
unself-conscious and his music is the mere projection of an organism
which is functioning freely.
But this condition of complete concentration makes us in a
different sense of the word self-conscious in the highest degree,
self-comprehending, self-controlled, self-expressing. And it is in
this philosophical sense that the word self-conscious is used by the
Germans, and may sometimes be conveniently used by us, if we can do so
without foregoing the right to use the words conscious and unconscious
in their popular sense at other times.
The discovery of Froebel was that this mastery over our own powers was
to be obtained only through creative activity. The suggestion, it may
be noted, is destined to reorganize every school of violin playing in
Europe. For we have here the major canon of a rational criticism. We
find that in the old vocabulary such words as genius, temperament,
style, originality, etc., have always been fumblingly used to denote
different degrees in which some man’s brain was working freely and
with full self-consciousness. A deliverance of this kind has always
been designated as ‘creative,’ no matter in what field it was found.
Approaching the matter more closely, we see that the whole of the
man must have responded in real life to every particle of experience
which he uses in his work. An imitation means something which does not
represent an original unitary vibration.
Goethe puts in the mouth of the mad Gretchen a snatch of German song
in imitation of Ophelia. The treatment does not fit the character. It
has only been through that part of Goethe’s mind with which he read
Shakespeare. As a sequel to this suggestion, the peasant of the early
scenes has lavished upon her all the various reminiscences of the
pathetic that Goethe could muster. It is moving, but it is inorganic.
It is not true.
For note this, that while it takes the whole of a man to do anything
true, no matter how small, anything that the whole of him does is
right. Hence the inimitable grotesques of greatness, the puns in
tragedy. These things belong to the very arcana of nature. By and by,
when the reasons are understood, nature will be respected. No one will
attempt to imitate genius, or to reproduce an artistic effect of any
kind.
If we look at recent literature by the light of this canon, we find the
reason for its inferiority. It is the work of half minds, of men upon
whose intelligence the weight of a dogma is pressing.
The eclipse of philosophy was of course reflected in fiction. There is
the same trouble with Herbert Spencer as with Zola. Each of them thinks
to wrest the secrets of sociology from external observation. Their
books lack objectivity and are ephemeral. Kant and Balzac did better
because their method was truer.
Everything good that has been done in the last fifty years has been
done in the teeth of current science. The whole raft of English
scientists are children playing with Raphael’s brushes the moment they
leave some specialty. There never lived a set of men more blinded
by dogma, blinded to the meaning of the past, to the trend of the
future, by the belief that they had found new truth. Not one of them
can lift the stone and show what lies under Darwin’s demonstration.
They run about with little pamphlets and proclaim a New Universe like
Frenchmen. They bundle up all beliefs into a great Dogma of Unbelief,
and throw away the kernel of life with the shell. This was inevitable.
A generation or two was well sacrificed, in this last fusillade of the
Dogma of Science--the old guard dogma that dies but never surrenders.
Hereafter it will be plain that the whole matter is a matter of symbols
on the one hand, knowledge of human nature on the other.
Herbert Spencer has been a useful church-warden to science, but his
knowledge of life was so trifling, his own personal development so
one-sided, that his sociology is a farce.
This canon of criticism explains in a very simple manner the art ages,
times when apparently every one could paint, or speak, or compose. The
art which is lost is really the art of courageous action. Neither war
nor dogma nor revolution is necessary, for feeling can no more be lost
than force, and the power to express it depends upon an interest in
life. The past has enriched us with conventions, and whenever a man
or a group of men arises who uses them and is not subdued to them, we
have art. The thing is easy. To the doers it is a mere knack of the
attention.
We had almost thought that art was finished, and we find we are
standing at the beginning of all things. Froebel has found a formula
which fits every human activity.
Let us take the supreme case, the apogee of human development, and what
will it be?
The sum of all possible human knowledge is, as we have seen, an
expansion of our understanding of human nature, and this is got by
intercourse, by dealing with men, by getting them to do something. In
order to make them do it, in order to govern, you must understand, and
the rulers of mankind are the wisest of the species. They summarize
society. Solomon, Cæsar, Hildebrand, Lincoln, Bismarck, these men knew
their world.
But if a virtuous ruler be the prototype of all possible human
fulfilment, there is no other art or province of employment to which
the same views do not apply. When any man reaps some of the power
which his toil has sown, and throws it out as a note or a book or a
statue, it has an organic relation to the human soul and is valuable
forever. There is only one rule of art. Let a man work at a thing till
it looks right _to him_. Let him adjust and refine it till, as he
looks at it, it passes straight into him, and he grows for a moment
unconscious again, that the forces which produced it may be satisfied.
As it stands then, it is the best he can do. In so far as we completely
develop this power we become completely happy and completely useful,
for our acts, our statements, our notes, our books, our statues become
universally significant.
Once feel this truth, and you begin to lose the sense of your identity,
to know that your destiny, your self, is an organic part of all men.
It is they that speak. It is themselves that have been found and
expressed. It was this toward which we tended, this that we cared
for--action, art, intellect, unselfishness, are they not one thing?
The complete development of every individual is necessary to our
complete happiness. And there is no reason why any one who has ever
been to a dull dinner party should doubt this. Nay, history gives proof
that solitude is dangerous. Man cannot sing, nor write, nor paint, nor
reform, nor build, nor do anything except die, alone. The reasons for
this are showered upon us by the idea of Froebel, no matter which side
of it is turned toward us.
This philosophy which seemed so dry till we began to see what it
meant, begins now to circumscribe God and include everything. For
Christ himself was one whose thoughts were laws and whose deeds are
universal truth. Shakespeare’s plays are universal truth. They are the
projection of a completely developed and completely unconscious human
intellect. They educated Germany, and it is to the study of them that
Hegel’s view of life is due. The great educational forces in the world
are proportioned in power to the development of the individual man in
the epochs they date from. Here and there, out of a hotbed, arises
a personal influence which directs thought for a thousand years and
qualifies time forever.
The division of the old ethics into egoism and altruism receives the
sanction of science. The turning of the attention upon selfish ends,
no matter how remote nor how momentary, hurts the organism, contracts
the intellect, dries up the emotions, and is felt as unhappiness. The
turning of the attention toward public aims benefits the organism,
enlarges the intellect, and is felt as happiness. There is no
complexity possible, for any mixed motive is a selfish motive.
All the virtues are different names for the injunction of self-mastery,
by which the internal struggle is made more severe, and the force
cooped in and controlled until it is released in the functioning of the
whole man.
In any sincere struggle for right, then, no matter how petty, we are
fighting for mankind, and this is just what everybody has always known,
always believed.
It is thrown at us as a great paradox, that somebody must pay the
bills; that if you live upon charity and can succeed in getting
yourself crucified, you are still a mere product of thrift and
selfishness somewhere. But the paradox is the same if put the other
way, for selfishness would never support you.
The question is purely one of fact, what thing comes first, what thing
satisfies the heart of man. He may support himself merely as a means to
help others. A man may start a pauper and die a millionaire, and yet
never think a thought or do an act which does not add to the welfare of
man. It is a question of ultimate controlling intention.
Man the microcosm is a kingdom where reigns continual war. Now he is
a furnace of love, the next moment he is a mean scamp. We know very
little about the mechanism by which these microcosms communicate with
one another. It seems likely that every iota of feeling must be either
transmitted or transformed; that if a spasm of selfishness be conveyed,
or some part of it, even by a glimpse of the eye, it must leave a
record of injury and start on a career of injury, just so much loss to
the world. On the other hand it may be transformed into the other kind
of force and expended later in good.
The thing is governed by some simple law, although man has not yet
been able to reduce it to algebra. What is most curious is this, that
the tendency of any man to believe in the reaction as a law, is not
dependent upon his scientific training, but upon his moral experience.
The best heads in physics will still betray a belief that a man must
be able to afford to be unselfish, that selfishness often does good,
that it is a muddled up affair, and a thing outside of science which
they will get round to later. Everybody sees a few degrees in the arc
of this law. Read the index on the quadrant and you will have his
character. Now and then some saint swears he sees a circle.
Let us press the inquest. It is not likely that life itself is duplex
or consists of two kinds of force, one egoistic, one altruistic. The
likelihood is the other way. There is only one force which vibrates
through these organisms. It is absolutely beneficent only when it
completely controls one of them, so that the whole thing sings together.
This music is the highest, but the notes that go to make it up are
everywhere. Altruism does not arise, is not imposed from without, at
any period or by any crisis, by progress or by society. The spiral
unwinds with the unwinding life upon the globe. It is the form of
illusion under which all life proceeds. It is the law of mind. The
eye treats space and color as entities. It cannot see on any other
terms. The stomach digests food, but not its own lining. We are obliged
to think in terms of the objective universe. We are not wholesome
unless we are self-forgetting. There is no cranny in all the million
manifestations of nature where you can interfere between the organism
and its object without representing disease.
And man is more than a mere altruistic animal. At least the religions
of Humanity have never expressed him. At those times when he is
entirely unselfish and therefore entirely himself, when he feels
himself to be one single well-spring, all unselfishness, all love,
all reverence, all service to something not himself, yet something
personal, he has faith. The theologies are attempts to formulate this
state of mind in order that it may be preserved. It is clear enough
that every mind must speak in its own symbols, and that the symbols
of one must always appear to another as illusions. Yet each man for
himself knows he faces a reality. This is a psychological necessity.
Destroy the belief, and on the instant he changes. Show him that he is
the victim of an illusion, and he is divided, a half man. A man whose
mind is divided, as, for instance, by the consciousness of a personal
motive, cannot believe. He stands like the wicked king in the play of
Hamlet; unable to pray. It is a psychological impossibility.
The concern of mankind for their forms of doctrine is gratuitous. Faith
re-appears under new names. You cannot convince a lover that he is bent
on self-development, nor any decent man that he does not believe in, is
not controlled by something higher than himself. The question is not
one of words.
We may trace this reverent attitude of mind upward through the acts and
activities of the spirit, and it makes no difference whether we regard
religion as the source and origin of them all or as the summary of them
all.
In Shakespeare’s plays we see a cycle of human beings, the most living
that we have ever met with, and the absence of mystical or emotional
religion from many of the plays is one of the wonders of nature.
There is no God anywhere, and God is everywhere; we are not offended.
The reason may be that the element has been employed in the act of
creation. Religion has been consumed in the development of character.
It is felt in the relation of Shakespeare to the characters. It is here
seen as artistic perfection. The same is true of the Greek statues and
of the Sistine Sibyls, and of other work left by those two periods, the
only other periods in which the individual attained completion.
Observe that in all this philosophy there is no dogma anywhere, no term
whose definition you have to learn, no term which makes the lying claim
that it can be used twice with the same connotation. Froebel had the
instinct of a poet and knew his language was figurative. It was this
that freed him from the Middle Ages and gave him to the future. He took
theology as lightly as he took metaphysics. He did not impose them, he
evoked them. He lived and thought in the spirit.
If you turn from Froebel’s analysis of human nature to Goethe’s, there
seem to be a thousand years between them. The one is scientific, the
other is mediæval. The one has freed himself from the influences of the
revival of learning, the other has not. The one is open, the other is
closed. The one is free, the other is self-conscious. But Froebel has
not yet set free the rest of the race, and of course the literature
and practices of the kindergartners are full of dogmas. The terms of
Froebel are a snare to those whose interest in childhood came later
than their interest in education and whose attention is fixed upon the
terms rather than upon the child. He is easy reading to the other sort.
But more important than Froebel’s formulation of these great truths
was his formulation of subsidiary truths. I do not mean his labored
systems, but his practical suggestions born of experience as to how to
help another person to develop. It was these methods, this attitude
of the teacher towards the child, of the individual towards his
fellow, that came at me in my own house unexpectedly, emanating from
some unknown mind, which seemed so great as practically to include
Christianity.
“Do not imagine,” he says at every moment, “that you can do anything
for this creature except by getting it to move spontaneously. You have
not begun till you have done this, and remember that anything else you
do is just so much harm.”
He was never tired of suggesting devices for doing this. The following
passage gives in a few words the answer to the most important practical
question in life: how we ought to approach another human being. The
thing is said so simply, it seems almost commonplace, yet it comes from
one greater than Kant.