which decentralisation in higher education has been carried, not
infinitely more harm has been done, and that the harm it does, seems to
impress the Americans comparatively so little. Neither can be understood,
unless one fully realises to what a degree the American commonwealth
is still in its formative period, and what an astounding educational
power there is in American life. To the former it is principally due,
that the deleterious effects mentioned are here in fact of much less
consequence, than they would be, where the advantages of an historical
development, counting by more than centuries, are paid for by the
rigidity of age; and the latter supplements and corrects the work of the
schools so effectively, that it is not surprising to find even many a
keen-sighted and highly accomplished American more or less blindfolded
as to this. Because the ultimate results are satisfactory, it is taken
for granted, that the educational conditions of the country must be
all right, while a searching critical examination irresistibly forces
upon one the question, whether a good deal is not achieved in spite of
them. If this be so, failure to promptly attend to what is defective
in them will surely be punished, for thanks to the rapidity with which
the United States are being filled up, their formative period is fast
drawing to a close, and with its close, the educational power of American
life will be, in some important respects, very sensibly diminished. The
peculiar advantages, they have thus far enjoyed, are steadily growing
weaker, while intellectually and morally, the difficulties confronting
the whole civilised world, and difficulties peculiar to them, are as
steadily making greater demands upon the people. Growth of population and
development of economical life, with all its attending circumstances,
constantly working at the further nationalisation of the American people,
and the problems to be solved growing more and more intricate, disaster
must become inevitable, if education does not keep abreast of this
double movement; and this it cannot do, if we do not energetically and
systematically go to work to nationalise education without consolidating
it. Nor have we any time to lose, for the task is by no means easy. Every
inch of ground gained will be the price of an arduous and protracted
struggle.
From the Federal Government no direct assistance is to be derived, for
the question is not within the province of its constitutional powers,
and if it were, we ought not to ask its interference, because, as I said,
to nationalise education without consolidating it, is to be the aim.
Public opinion, unaided by law, must effect the reform. Public opinion,
however, is in this country even more powerful than the law. It is sure
finally to overcome not only all active, but even all passive resistance,
which is always much harder to overcome. But is there any possibility of
ever inducing public opinion to take the question up in full earnest? I
am confident there is, and at all events it must be tried. The difficulty
of the task is no excuse for not undertaking it. It only admonishes us,
not to waste time, strength, and enthusiasm in vain attempts to carry
the fortress by assault. The works are so extended and so strong that
only a methodical siege requiring a great deal of skill, patience, and
determination, offers any chance of success. Two preliminary questions
must, therefore, be answered, ere operations can be commenced: who is to
conduct the campaign, and by what tactics can the approaches be pushed on
the fastest?
The answer to be given to the first question is plain. The instructors
are to be considered the experts, if anybody can claim the title. Upon
them, therefore, devolves the duty to take the lead. This they have
already commenced to do. The very existence of a National Educational
(Teacher’s) Association is in itself irrefutable proof that the opinions
advanced by me, have, in some way and to some extent, asserted themselves
for some time. How this has been done and what has been effected, I do
not feel called upon to discuss. I merely state that while I appreciate
what it has done and expect from it still more in the future, I am
firmly convinced that the goal can never be reached if we are to content
ourselves with what this organisation is capable of achieving. This
will be deemed the less disparaging, if I furthermore state that, in my
opinion, the end could no more be attained by any other organisation
acting singlehanded. Hunting for any one device which will as certainly
effect a cure as patent medicines claim to cure bodily ailments, is but
to waste time. The evil has to be attacked from many points and in many
ways, if sanitation is to set in.
While I am fully persuaded of this, I am, however, on the other hand as
firmly convinced that nothing will be of avail if the Universities do
not step forward, heading the column of attack and adding compulsion to
suasion. The reform has to be worked from the top downward. At present
the law is, to a great extent, dictated by the schools of the lower
grade to those of the higher. This must be reversed. The Universities
must insist upon getting the proper material for doing what in their
judgment is the proper work. They must cease fitting themselves to what
the schools are pleased to send them. By closing their doors against
all applicants whom they do not really deem adequately prepared, they
must compel the schools, either to take down from their portals the
inscription “fitting school,” or to mend their ways and furnish their
pupils the kind and the amount of instruction they ought. A University
that meekly submits to travel on whatever roads some hundreds of schools,
which all more or less follow their own notions, happen to think good
enough, never can be a University except in name. No institution has a
moral right to the proud name of University that does not, consciously
and determinately, do all that is in its power to direct its educational
policy solely by what the civilisation of the age and the true interests
of the nation require.
I wish the old maxim _ultra posse nemo obligatur_ did not compel me to
say “to do all that is in its power,” for I am but too well aware how
deplorably little that is in many cases. State Universities are subject
to another will, and this other will is apt to have very much its own
notions as to how much a University may be allowed to cost, and to
determine the standard of the University entirely by the local standard
of schools. Other Universities, though legally their own masters, are
practically restrained as much or even more by implacable facts. No
University can entirely dispense with students, and the endowment of more
than one University forbids its making light of the number of students it
can secure. Being to some extent dependent upon the students for their
maintenance, they cannot afford to be very fastidious in regard to the
standard of schools they try to enlist into their constituency. But there
is also a goodly number of Universities whose position is in absolutely
every respect so strong that they can enter the lists without any risk
whatever to themselves. Whether they stop growing for a while or even
decline in numbers for some years does not affect their future in the
least. They are so much in quest by students that the fitting schools
are sure to make haste to meet their requirements, if these rise above
their curriculum. To move on in wild leaps would, of course, be foolish.
But so long as these Universities do not do that they never need to look
backward in their onward march; their whole constituency of schools must
follow close upon their heels, because they cannot afford to bolt and
drop out. The more the leading Universities proceed upon a concerted
plan, the larger the circle would grow, within which their joint pressure
would be irresistible: the strength of each would be doubled by pressing
on, shoulder to shoulder with the others, on the same lines. At the same
time it will make it correspondingly easier for the weaker ones to follow
in their wake. How could it fail to make an impression upon those on
whom they depend, if they can back their pleas by urging the practical
unanimity of all the foremost institutions of the country as to the right
course to take? The more the leading Universities are united, not only
as to the scope and method of their own work, but also as to what is
to be considered the proper preparation for University work, the more
will deviations from the rules laid down by them come to imply to public
opinion inferiority of standard; and if there is a whip under which
American communities smart, it is this. As to this would be added the
missionary influences of the alumni sent from the leading Universities
into all parts of the republic, it would be strange indeed, if the idea
were not constantly to spread and to cast deeper root, that to adequately
provide for the educational needs of the country, it is necessary
consciously to create and systematically to foster a tendency, by the
free action of public opinion, more and more to harmonise education, in
developing it everywhere and in all its ramifications into a thoroughly
organic structure.
I am prepared to hear the opinions I have ventured to advance strenuously
contested and, perhaps, even mercilessly ridiculed by many. The open
antagonists, however, cause me but little uneasiness. I fear only one
thing, i. e. that those who more or less endorse my criticisms and agree
with me as to what is desirable, will be induced by the arduousness of
the work to persuade themselves that it is impossible to bring about such
a reform. To them I should say: Where there is a will, there is a way,
and the American people _must_ be brought to will this reform, because
every year a portentous word is becoming more true and of greater import:
“the age of perils is past, but the age of difficulties has set it.”
H. VON HOLST.
FOOTNOTES:
[88] Commencement address at the Nebraska State University, June 7, 1893.
MEANING AND METAPHOR.
Professor Huxley supposes[89] “that so long as the human mind exists, it
will not escape its deep-seated instinct to personify its intellectual
conceptions.” He finds that “the science of the present day is as full of
this particular form of intellectual shadow-worship as is the nescience
of ignorant ages.” The difference he sees is “that the philosopher who is
worthy of the name knows that his personified hypotheses, such as law,
and force, and ether, and the like, are merely useful symbols, while the
ignorant and the careless take them for adequate expressions of reality.”
He then goes on to warn us against dealing with symbols as though they
were “real existences.”
Few indeed are free from reproach in this matter, so far as reproach is
deserved at all in the general unconsciousness of what constitutes the
danger. Few see the question to be vital or the danger to be urgent;
and even those who do are apt to deny that the search for a remedy can
be a crusade worth attempting; the very idea seems Utopian or pedantic.
On the one hand, teachers as a rule do not take their own analogies and
metaphors seriously. Both the literary and scientific, as well as the
philosophic and historical instinct tell against their doing so. In their
eyes figures have either faded into indifferent abstractions, or they are
obviously pictorial and merely rhetorical. But the average reader is apt
to take them at the foot of the letter. He is usually unaware both of the
extent to which he literalises and of the curious inconsistencies which
his literalising involves. So he makes his inferences with alight heart,
and wonders, perhaps, at the resulting confusion without suspecting its
true cause.
Would that the real state of the case and its practical consequences
could be pressed home to all with such force, that whatever be our line
of work or thought or expression we should strive in earnest to mend
matters. At least, we might begin by learning better what part symbolism
plays in the rituals of expression, and ask ourselves what else is
language itself but symbolism, and what it symbolises. We should then
examine anew the relations of the “symbolic” to the “real”; of image,
figure, metaphor, to what we call literal or actual. For this concerns
us all. Imagery runs in and out, so to speak, from the symbolic to the
real world and back again. As matters stand, we never know where we are
because we know so little where our phrases or our words are; indeed,
perhaps they and we are “neither here nor there.” Or, if we do know
where we are, we cannot be sure that our hearer or reader knows where
he is. He, too, is probably “neither here nor there.” He often praises
or agrees with us in the wrong place or the wrong manner. That is worse
than being complained of or differed from; it is difficult to repudiate
approval. Nor can we take refuge in lucidity and fancy that the clear
must be the true. In the long run and in the cases which _signify_ most,
there is no escape through merely lucid style or method. The “luminous”
speaker or writer, the “forcible” orator or essayist, the moment he tries
to convey to the public mind a thought which is really new, will find
himself hampered by his very clearness itself. His ideas are controverted
on assumptions not really his; or he himself is misled in subtle ways by
what he assumes in others.
Thus, by an instructive paradox, the clearest writer is often the most
controversial; and he wonders at our perverseness as, while we admire
his power and his “style,” we wonder at the perverseness in him. We
possibly agree with him in ways we do not suspect; he possibly agrees
with us in senses he ignores. Such a writer may pride himself on a chary
use of metaphor, or on a carefully sharp distinction between “image”
and “thing” or “object.” But he is liable to forget the danger dogging
him even here. One is tempted to say that there is only one term more
figurative as well as more ambiguous than “metaphorical,” and that is
“literal.” Most certainly much that is called “literal” is tinged with
the figurative in varying degrees, not always easy to distinguish, even
with the help of context. The word “literal” itself is indeed a case in
point. It has rarely, if ever, any reference to writing.
The question is, whether this state of things is quite so inevitable
as most of us seem to think. Certainly, so long as we are content to
live in the fool’s paradise of supposing that only the perverse, the
prejudiced, the stupid, or the ignorant can possibly mistake our meaning,
and that our misreadings of others are simply due to their “obscurity,”
or “quibbling,” or literary incapacity, we shall ourselves contribute to
the hopelessness of the situation. But this is a subject which cannot be
dealt with in an incidental way; it is rather a hope for the future, that
one of the most practically serviceable of subjects—that of Meaning, its
conditions and its changes—shall be seriously taken up. Then, indeed,
we may get back to the first of all questions, and that which is most
pregnant of helpful answers; that which needs asking more than any other
if good work is to be done in this day of universal “unsettlement”:—What
do we really mean? On all sides dead calms are stirred and ruffled,
dead levels upheaved or depressed; nothing (happily) can hope to escape
the wave of quickening force. So before long we may well be asking this
question in good earnest; and when we do we can but be the better, even
if we must needs submit in some cases where we may have been prematurely
positive, to be content (for the moment) with the answer: We do not
really know.
The fact is, that we have been postulating an absolute Plain Meaning to
be thought of, as it were, in capital letters. We have been virtually
assuming that our hearers and readers all share the same mental
background and atmosphere. We have practically supposed that they all
look through the same inferential eyes, that their attention waxes and
wanes at the same points, that their associations, their halos of memory
and circumstance, their congenital tendencies to symbolise or picture,
are all on one pattern. Verily, we need a “Critique of Plain Meaning”!
Again we _quote_ on the same assumption. Unless the language of our
author is obviously archaic; unless his allusions unmistakably betray
a different life-context, a different social “milieu,” in short, a
different mental world, we claim him or we repudiate him on the same
principle. We take his words, we take his phrases, we fill them out with
the same content as our own, we make him mean precisely what we ourselves
mean. And be it noted that it is always what we mean _now_. That this in
any way varies from what we meant at some time when, e. g., our attention
was differently focussed, rarely enters our heads.
We shall, I suppose, admit that until lately there was one very good
reason for this state of things. Only the exceptional mind (if any);
only the mind which could not make itself fully understood by its
contemporaries, and would risk being reckoned crazy or criminal if it
spoke “plainly,” had any suspicion that this way of looking at things
was being gradually invalidated by the general extension of the critical
domain. The history of language, its relation to thought; the scope
of expression and representation, the function of the figurative and
symbolic; the growth of all means of mental communion from the simplest
rudiments of gesture or cry to the highest point of intellectual
complexity,—all this was either ignored or taken for granted on radically
insecure bases.
Again, while the underlying conditions of language must be looked for
in the domain of psycho-physics, that science had not yet come into
existence. Even now it is but feeling its way and putting forth tentative
hypotheses, warning us, as it does, so that they are liable to be
constantly modified and occasionally revolutionised. And what does it
realise, first and foremost? That our difficulties on the very threshold
of the inquiry are, as usual, largely those of language. On all sides we
have to use, as best we may, modes of expression that inevitably convey
ambiguous meanings even to the thoughtful, even to the trained mind,
which cannot but carry with them a background of outgrown or disproved
premises, vitiating more or less every conclusion that we draw from them.
The very phrases which are our only shorthand for the vast oratory of
nature and experience betray us in the using. We have taken them as
though they were like numerals invariable in meaning, thus supposing them
subject to a permanent uniformity. We have taken them as though they
were without a history, merely fortuitous labels or symbols of unanimous
consent; the accepted sense, we think, being easily ascertainable, always
persistent, and wholly sufficient for practical purposes. In any case we
strangely assume that we may safely play upon all the chords of imagery,
reserving without difficulty for serious use a body of terms which are
direct expressions of “fact.”
But the suggestion now made is that this is precisely one of the most
dangerous of presuppositions. It is not the man who has mystified
himself, or who wishes to mystify others; it is not the man who confounds
the reality of the logical with that of the actual; it is not the man who
takes emotion for proof and notion for fact; it is none of these, but
the man who is clear on such points and sees that they must be drawn out
into clues and followed up to the uttermost, if we would know where we
are—who is beginning to see that the paramount need of the moment is the
“torpedo-shock” of the question, What do we really mean? He knows that
the off-hand vagueness and ready-made confusion, which too often from
sheer ignorance usurp the name of common-sense, are in the long run its
most deadly enemies.
We may look forward then with a new hope to the rise of a systematic
inquiry on the subject of meaning and its changes. This would entail
the much-needed work of classifying metaphor, and might even be found
to point to the existence of a third value, neither wholly literal, nor
wholly figurative, as that of a large proportion of ordinary expression.
From this and like causes, in this age of rapid changes due mainly to
scientific conquest, we can all readily put to each other questions to
which either a “yes” or a “no” must be equally misleading. And men of
science have specially realised this, since many a time they have been
unjustly credited with evasion, or with untenable or immoral views,
because they either answered to a “plain question”: “In one sense, yes;
in another, no,” or else gave an answer which could not fail to be
misunderstood by a mind which was governed by unconscious survivals. So
far as we are in touch with modern culture, we no longer mean what we
must have meant in the days before Copernicus, when we say, for instance,
“the sun rises.” When we speak of infection, we no longer mean what we
used to mean before microbes had been heard of. When we talk of “heat,”
we no longer mean what we used to mean even fifty years ago. And when a
man says that he believes in the sun, the planets, the cosmos, in the
heavens and the earth, in mind and matter, in soul and body, in spirit
and flesh, he cannot, if he would, mean just what his forefathers meant,
or indeed anything at all absolutely and finally. Whether we will or
no, the meaning of such terms is changing on our very tongues, and ever
swaying between the extremes which we call literal and metaphorical;
“heaven,” e. g., ranging in value from sky to human destiny; “earth,”
from soil to the visible Home of Man. We may appeal, and are right
to appeal to “hard, dry” facts; but we perforce put something out of
ourselves even into these. They become “facts” under the quickening
touch of “mind,” while that emerges from a dim world of prepossession,
bequeathing us many a primitive legacy from pre-intelligent sentience,
and perhaps from little-suspected sources lying yet further back. For
instance, primitive terror in its “superstitious” forms tended to
represent man as inferior to and dependent on powers of some sort;—and
this was true to natural order in the fact that his very world was not
self-centred and was dependent for its best boons upon a greater than
itself. As language advanced, he began quite naturally to express his
meaning in “appropriate metaphors”; to use, e. g., the figures of light
and then of sight to describe what he had, as we now say, “in his mind,”
or what sense-messages, as we now say, had “put into his head.” For
“something told him” that light, as it had been the first pleasure, was
also the great means of life.[90] And he “saw,” in however grotesque a
guise, the unbroken continuity of the organic and the inorganic, and
perhaps even more clearly than most of us yet do, that of so-called
“matter” and so-called “mind.” Perhaps in some cases, therefore, he
chose his imagery better than (after long ages of dualism carried to the
splitting-point) we generally do now.
He knew again that the senses after all, stern masters though they were
while life was so hard to live, had very narrow limits; and that the
world was in some sense fuller and richer of life than it had seemed to
be as known directly through them.[91] And then he wondered,—and began
to ask. He was the first Questioner. As Prof. Max Müller says,[92] “the
greater the savagery, the dullness, the stupidity with which _Homo
sapiens_ began, the greater the marvel at what must have been from the
first, though undeveloped, in him, and made him in the end what we find
him to be in the men of light and leading of our own age.” The mere fact
of the question is the riddle to be solved. For certainly the beasts had
not taught him either to wonder or to ask. And not merely insatiable
questioning but something more here rises to challenge our attention and
to demand reflection. Man is the first critic because he is the first
idealist; the first to be discontented, to protest, to see life as a
“ravelled end,” as something which is incomplete and speaks of something
more. Surely in any case the step of all steps, the deepest yet the
narrowest line to cross is the step from something noticed or found, from
something which happens or appears, from something which somehow affects
us, excites us, to its significance.