* * * * *
I am indeed a Dominie in Doubt. What is education striving after? I
cannot say, for education is life and what the aim of life is no one
knows. Psycho-analysis can clear up a life; it can release bottled up
energy, but it cannot say how the released energy is to be used. The
analyst cannot advise, because no man can tell another how to live his
life. Freud clears up the past, but he cannot clear up the future.
Is there such a thing as Re-incarnation? I wonder. Am I living the
life that my past lives on earth fitted me for? If so analysis is
wrong. If I am suffering from a severe neurosis it is because I earned
this punishment in my past lives, and Freud has no right to cure me.
He is interfering with the plans of the Almighty. If, as I have heard
a Theosophist declare, the children in the slums are miserable because
they failed to learn their lesson in previous lives, then the people
who try to abolish slums are all wrong. I think my Theosophist would
argue that the charitable person is growing in grace, thereby rising
above his previous lives. And thus one soul helps another to rise to
perfection. It may be, and I hope it is so, for then life would have a
meaning. Pain and war would then be less terrible, for they would be
but incidents in the eternal unfolding of perfection.
Yet I find myself doubting. If I am William Shakespeare born again I
do not know it, and I am left in doubt as to whether I may not have
been Charles Peace instead. Possibly I was both.
Then there is psychical research. I have been to a medium and have
heard things that all the psycho-analysis in the world cannot account
for. I want to believe that the dead can speak to us, but where are
the dead? I have read Sir Oliver Lodge's _Raymond_, and the
description of the next world given there. Frankly I don't fancy it,
and I have no desire to go there.
How then can I attempt to educate children when the ultimate solution
of life is denied me? I can only stand by and give them freedom to
unfold. I do not know whither they are going, but that is all the more
a reason why I ought not to try to guide their footsteps. This is the
final argument for the abolition of authority. We may beat and break a
horse because we selfishly require a horse's service, and according to
the accepted view a horse has no immortal soul. We dare not beat and
break a child, for a child is going to an end that we cannot know.
I like the Theosophist schools, although I do not like all
Theosophists. Some of them seem to be living the higher life
consciously, and repressing their lower natures. Most of them do not
smoke or drink or eat meat or swear or go to music-halls. That may be
living on a higher plane, but it is not living fully. Still, in many
ways they are broad-minded. In their schools they do not force
Theosophy down the children's throats; they allow a great amount of
freedom, but their schools are not free schools. There is a definite
attempt to mould character chiefly by insisting on good taste. I am
quite sure that no head-master of a Theosophical School would take his
children to see a Charlie Chaplin film. Charlie is not obviously
living the higher life; he stands for the vulgar side of life; he picks
up girls and gets drunk (in the play) and is sea-sick and very vulgar
about soda-water.
I find myself insisting on the inclusion of Charlie in any scheme of
education because no one ought to be taught to be shocked at
sea-sickness and soda-water squirting. Charlie to me is the antidote
to the higher-plane crowd; he and his kind are as essential as Shelley.
I admit that reading Shelley is a higher kind of pleasure than watching
"Champion Charlie," but no human being can safely live on the higher
plane, and no child wants to. Education must deal with _all_ life; a
higher plane diet will produce hot-house plants, beautiful perhaps, but
delicate and artificial.
* * * * *
Old Willie Murray the cobbler had been bed-ridden for over a year, and
when I dropped into Dauvit's shop this morning Mary Rickart was telling
Dauvit that his old master was dead.
"Aye, Dauvit," she was saying when I entered, "I'm no the kind that
speaks ill o' the deid, but I will say this, that Wull Murray had his
faults. Aye, and though he's a corp the day, I canna pertend that he
was ony freend o' mine."
When Mary had gone Dauvit turned to me with a queer smile.
"Dominie, you tell me that you have studied the science o' the mind,
psy--what is't you call it?"
"Psychology," I said.
"That's the word. Weel then, dominie, just tell me why Mary Rickart
had sic a pick at auld Willie Murray."