CHARACTER AND PHYSICAL EDUCATION
The principle of educational unity which I have briefly tried to
illustrate demands a further development in connection with the claims
of physical culture. For after we have unified moral and intellectual
discipline in the one concrete concept of the education of the spirit,
whose activity cannot be cognitive without also being practical, and
cannot realise any moral values except through cognition, it might yet
seem that a complete and perfect system of education should aim at the
physical development as well as at the spiritual. For the pupil is not
solely mind. He has a body also; and these two terms, body and spirit,
must be conceived in such close connection and in such intimate
conjunction that the health of the one be dependent on the soundness of
the other.
Before elucidating this argument, we must voice our appreciation of the
pedagogical principle by virtue of which the ancient Greeks developed
their athletic education, and which since the Renaissance has for a
different motive been reintroduced into the theory of physical
culture,--a theory which I do not at all oppose, but rather intend to
reaffirm on the grounds of educational unity. This pedagogical
principle evidently originated in the mode of considering the function
of the bodily organism in respect to the human mind, since every time we
scrutinise the interest that has always guided men in the field of
education, we find that at all times the aim of education has been the
development of the mind. Nor could it have been otherwise; for whether
or not in possession of a clear understanding of his spiritual essence,
man spontaneously presents himself and is valued as a personality, which
affirms itself, speaks even though dumb, and says "I." Education begins
as a relation between master and slave, between parent and children. The
slave and the son are not supported and cared for--educated--as simple
brutes, but as beings endowed with the same attributes as the master or
the parent, beings who are therefore able to receive orders or
instructions and build their will out of these,--the will which those in
authority wish to be identical with their own. The superior commands and
therefore demands; the inferior obeys by replying, and he replies in so
far as he is a spiritual subject; and this reply will become gradually
better in proportion as he more fully actualises that spiritual nature
which the master wishes to be closely corresponding to his own.
Philosophy, as well as naive and primitive mentality, considers man to
be such in so far as he is conscious of what he does, of what he says,
of what he thinks; and also in that he is able to present himself to
others, because he has first been present to himself.
Man is man in that he is self-consciousness. Even the despicable tyrant
who brutally domineers over the wretch who is forced to submit to his
overbearing arrogance, even he wants his slave to be intelligent,
capable of guessing his thoughts, and refuses to consider him as an
unconscious tool of his whims. The mother who tenderly nurses her sick
child is indeed anxious for the health of the body over which she
worries, and she would like to see it vigorous and strong. But that body
is so endeared to her, because by means of it the child is enabled to
live happily with her; through it his fond soul can requite maternal
love by filial devotion; or in it he may develop a powerful and
beautiful personality worthy to be adored as the ideal creature of
maternal affection. If in the bloom of physical health he were to reveal
himself stupid and insensate, endowed with mere instinctive sensuality
and bestial appetites, this son would cease to be the object of his
mother's fondness, nay, he would arouse in her a feeling of loathing and
revulsion. It is this sense of loathing that we feel towards the brutes,
to the extent that we never can be sympathetically drawn to them, and
that we also feel for the human corpse from which life has departed; for
life is the basis of every psychological relation, and therefore of
every possible sympathy.
Education is union, communion, inter-individual unification; and unity
is possible only because men spiritually convene. Matter, we have seen,
nature, things, the non-spirit is multiplicity. As soon as the
multiplicity of natural elements begins to be organised, already in
their organism spiritual activity shines forth. In the spirit is the
root and possibility of every unification. It is spirit that unites men.
Education therefore cannot be a social relationship and a link between
men except by being a spiritual tie among human minds. Therefore it is
now, and has at all times been, what it naturally ought to be, education
of the spirit.
But as we aim at the education of the spirit, we may or we may not take
care of the body; or again we may take care of it in this or that way.
It all depends on what conception we have of the spirit. The ancients
made a great deal of physical culture, and the Greek philosophers of
antiquity considered gymnastics to be the essential complement of music,
including in music all forms of spiritual cultivation. The ancients
never divided the spirit from the physical reality of man: man as a
whole (body and psychic activity) was conceived by them as a natural
being subject to the mechanism which regulates and controls nature. When
Greek psychology fell under the influence of that mystic outlook which
is peculiar to religious belief, the soul, which was opposed to the
body, and which was looked upon as chained and emprisoned in the body,
was sharply distinguished from another soul. That other soul was kept
in contact with the materiality of all natural things, and together with
them was governed by the law of mechanical becoming, that is, of the
transformations caused by motion by which all the parts of matter are
bestirred. This natural soul, susceptible of development, and capable of
gradually rising to the height of the other, of the pure bodiless mind
whose act is the contemplation of truth; this soul imbedded in the body,
which does not therefore give to man a supernatural being, but like all
things of nature comes into the world, grows and dies, incessantly
passing from one mode of being to another, this soul is the one that can
and ought to be educated. The soul which results from the organic
process of the physical body, and which in its development proceeds side
by side with the transformations of the latter, could not be educated
except in connection with the development and improvement of the body.
Human thought, which then had not yet secured the consciousness of its
own irreducible opposition to nature,--the consciousness, in other
words, of its own essential freedom,--seeing itself immersed even as
spiritual substance in the indistinctness of nature, could not look upon
education as upon a problem of freedom which can not admit of nature as
limiting spiritual activity. It was accordingly reduced to conceive this
activity, displayed in dealing with man, as being on the same plane with
the other forms of activity which propose to deal with things of
nature. In a pedagogical naturalism of this sort, the mind could not be
the mind without also being body, and therefore had to include physical
development in its own process.
But with the advent of Christianity the spirit was sharply dissociated
from nature. The original dualism of law of the spirit and law of the
flesh, of grace and nature, rescued man at the very beginning from the
tyranny of merely natural things, and announced a kingdom of the spirit
which "is not of this world." And it is not in fact "of this world," if
by world we mean what the word ordinarily implies,--the world which
confronts us, and which we can point out to ourselves and to others; the
world which, being the object of our experience, is the direct
antithesis of what we are, subject of experience, free personality,
spirit, Christian humanity. Man, in this Christian conception, in this
opposition to nature and to the experimental world, overcomes what
within his own self still belongs to nature, subdues that part of him
which because natural appears as the enemy of freedom and of the
finality of the spirit; as the seducer and the source of guilty wiles
which clip the wing of man's loftier aspirations and weigh him down into
a beast-like subjection to instinct. He therefore tends to underrate
physical education, and sacrifices it to the demands of the spirit. He
does not completely neglect the question of the behaviour of man
towards physical nature; he could not, since his very dualism is
possible only on condition that he correlate the two terms of the
opposition. But finding that his attempt to attain freedom and realise
his spiritual destiny is thwarted by the natural impulses of the senses,
in which the life of the body is made manifest, he decides to remove
these hindrances and to clear the way which leads to spiritual
salvation. He does then take the body into consideration, but simply to
check its instincts and control its sensuous appetites. By the
discipline of self-mortification, under the guidance of an unbending
will, he subdues the flesh, and subjects it to the exigencies of the
spirit.
Evidently this subduing discipline is still physical exercise, but in
its own way. The haircloth of St. Francis corresponds in fact to the
club of Hercules, and serves the same purpose. The monsters which are
knocked down by the weapon which Hercules alone could wield torment the
saint of Assisi also; only, they are within him. He even tames the wolf,
but without club or chains, by the mere exercise of his gentle meekness.
These internal monsters are not, properly speaking, in the material
body. If they were, the Saint would not need to worry about them any
more than about the earth under his feet or the sack on his shoulder.
But they are in that body which he feels; they are in that soul which,
with the violence of its desires, the din of its harsh and fiercely
discordant voices, distracts him from the ideal where his life is. They
are in that soul which thrusts so many claims on him, that were he to
satisfy them he would have to part company with his Lady Poverty, and
become once more the slave of things which are not in his power,--of
wealth, which heaps up and blows away; of Fortune, which comes as a
friend and departs as an enemy. He would, in other words, return to a
materialistic conception of life. His Lernaean hydra is in the depths of
his heart, where hundred-headed instinct, with its hundred mouths, tears
the roots of his holy and magnanimous will, eager to resemble the
Saviour in love and self-sacrifice.
This monster is strangled with the haircloth, when the body is hardened
and trained to self-denial, to suffering, to the repression of all
animal passions which would keep man away from his goal. This
discipline, far from debilitating the body, gives it a new strength, an
endurance which enables man to live on a higher plane than he would if
he followed natural impulses. For this more difficult manner of living,
a robustness and a hardihood are requisite which are beyond the natural
means of the body. The system of physical culture which gives this
stupendous endurance is called asceticism.
But this system is an abstract one. Man's life is not poverty, since it
is work and therefore wealth. And the mind with its freedom cannot be
conceived of as antagonistic to nature. For as body and as sense, in so
far as we exist and know of our existence, we belong to this nature.
Antagonism and duality import the limitation of each of the opposed
terms and exclude freedom which is not to be found within fixed limits;
for freedom, as we have said, means infinitude.
The spirit is free only if infinite. It cannot have any obstructing
barrier in its path. It can be conceived as freedom only after it has
overcome dualism, and when in nature itself and in the body we see the
effect of the activity of the spirit. It has no need therefore of walls
within which it might feel the necessity of cloistering itself in the
effort to renounce the outer world. This is not the way to conquer
freedom. A liberty won under such conditions would always be insecure,
constantly threatened, always beleaguered, and therefore a mere shadow
of freedom. The spirit, if it is free, that is, if it is spirit, must be
conterminous with thought, it must extend its sway as far as there is
any sign of life to the last point where a vestige of being can be
revealed to it. Nothing thinkable can be external to it. Whatever
presents itself to it, whether in the garb of an enemy or under the
cloak of friendship, can only be one of its creatures, which it has
placed at its own side, or in front of itself, or against itself.
This new pedagogical and philosophical view, first disclosed to
Humanism, then enlightened by the genius of the Italian Renaissance,
appears now to us in the full light of modern thought. Superficially it
might seem identical with the classical and naturalistic outlook. In
reality, however, it has made its way back to it only in order to
confirm and integrate the concept of Christian spiritualism and to bring
out its truth. Greek athletics is the training of the body as an end in
itself: it surely serves the cause of the spirit, but only in so far as
the spirit is grafted on the trunk of the physical personality, and to
the extent that it is able to absorb all its vital sap, thereby
subjecting itself to generation and decay, the common destiny of all
natural beings. The physical culture of the ancients is spiritual
discipline, only to the extent that for them the mind too is essentially
body. Modern physical education, at least from the time of Vittorino da
Feltre, is spiritual formation of the body: it is bodily training for
the benefit of the spirit, just as the mediaeval ascetic would have it;
but of a spirit which does not intend to bury itself in abstract
self-seclusion away from the existential world, of a spirit which
passing beyond the cloister walls soars over the realm of nature,
induing it and subduing it instrumentally to its ends and as a mirror of
its will. So that for moderns, too, physical culture is spiritual
education, but for the reason that to us the body itself is spirit. Our
science is not merely a speculation of ultra-mundane truths, but rather
a science of man and of man in the Universe, and therefore also of this
nature which is dominated and spiritualised by becoming known, in the
same way that every book that is read is spiritualised.
This concrete notion of a spirit which excludes nothing from itself
gives concreteness to the Christian conception of physical discipline.
For it aims to turn the body into an obedient tool of the will, not
however of that will which renounces the world, but of that will which
turns to the world as to the field where its battles are fought and won;
to the world which it transforms by its work, constantly re-creating it,
now modifying one part and now another, but always acting on the entire
system, and renewing it as a whole in the intimate organic connection
and interdependence of these parts; to the world which forever confronts
it in a rebellious and challenging attitude, and which it laboriously
subdues and turns into a mirror of its own becoming.
Modern idealism and ancient naturalism both emphasise, though for
opposite motives, the importance of a positive education in distinction
to the negative discipline inculcated by mediaeval asceticism. We said
that to-day we develop the body because the body is spirit. This
proposition runs counter to common sense. But common sense as such
cannot be respected by the thinker unless he first transforms its
content. Our body, we must remember, is not one body out of many. If it
were actually mixed with and lost in the multitude of material things
which surround it, we could no longer speak of any bodies. For all
bodies, as psychologists say, are perceived in so far as they modify
ours and are somehow related to it. Or to put it in a different and
perhaps better way, all other bodies, which we possess as contents of
our experience, form a system, a circle, which has its centre; and this
centre is our body. These first of all occupy space, but a space which
no one of us can think of or intuit otherwise than as a radiating
infinity, the centre of which we occupy with our body. So that before we
can speak of bodies, we must first cognise our own. It is the foundation
and groundwork of all bodies. Justly, therefore, the immanent sense,
profound and continuous, which we have of our body, and whose
modifications constitute all our particular sensations, was called the
_fundamental sentiment_ by our Italian philosopher Rosmini. For our body
is ours only in so far as we feel it; and we feel it, at first,
confusedly or rather indistinctly, without discerning any differentiated
part. We feel it as the limit, the other, the opposite, the object of
our consciousness, which, were it not conscious of something (of itself
as of something), would not be consciousness, would not realise itself.
And it realises itself, in the first place, as consciousness of this
object which is the body. Accurately, therefore, was the body defined
by Spinoza as _objectum mentis_, as object of consciousness. Objectless
consciousness is not consciousness; and it is likewise obvious that the
object of consciousness cannot be such without consciousness.
The two terms are inseparable, for the reason that they are produced
simultaneously by one and the same act, from which they cannot be
detached and this act is the free becoming of the spirit.
Our body, this first object of consciousness, as yet indistinct and
therefore one and infinite, is not really in space, the realm of the
distinct, of the multiple, of the finite. It is within our own
consciousness. And it is only by recalling this inwardness that we are
able to understand how it happens that we ("We"--spiritual activity) act
upon our body, animating it, sustaining it, endowing it with our
vigorous and buoyant vitality; constantly transforming it, in very much
the same way that we act on what we easily conceive to be our moral
personality. As we direct our thoughts, and bringing them out of the
dark into the luminous setting of our consciousness, submit them to
scrutiny and correction, to elimination and selection; when we stifle or
feed the fire of our passions; when we cherish ideals, nourish them with
our own life's blood, and sustain them with our unbending resolve; and
again when we quench them in the fickleness of our whims, are we not
constantly creating and variously reshaping our spiritual life, making
it good or bad, that is, eagerly and scrupulously intent on the quest of
Truth or slothfully plunged in ignorance and forgetfulness?
But our body, this inseparable companion, which is our own self, is no
particular limb, which as such might be removed from us. We remain what
we are, even though mutilated. Each part of our organism is ours, in
that it is fused in the sole and indistinguishable totality of our
living being,--our heart and our brain, as well as the phalanx of a
finger, if perchance we should be unable to live without it, and it
therefore effectively constituted our being. The distinction between
organs that are vital and organs that are not is an empirical one, and
relative to an observation which is true within the limits of ordinary
occurrence.
If our body is the body which we perceive as ours, it is this one or
that one in accordance with our perception; and this perception
certainly is not arbitrary, but our own, subjective, to the point that,
in an abnormal way, one may cease to be in possession of his body and
thus to be no longer able to live in consequence of the loss of a
finger, or even of a hair. This hair then is a vital part, not because
it is a hair, but because it has been, insanely if you will, assumed and
absorbed in the distinct unity of our body.
I shall try to make my thought clearer by the use of an example. The
organ of organs, as a great writer once said, is the hand, and we can
look at it from two quite distinct points of view. We may place our hand
on a table by the side of other hands, the hands of persons sitting
around us. We see its shape, its colour, its size, etc.; we compare it
with the others, and we almost forget it is ours, because then we do
not, in act, distinguish it from the remaining ones. In these
circumstances, it is evident that our hand is in our consciousness as a
material object, separated from every essential relationship with
us--with us as we are in the act of looking and comparing. This is the
external point from which we may view our hand. But there is another
one: the hand that picks up the pen as we are about to write is truly
our hand, the instrument of which we avail ourselves in order to ply
another tool which is needed for our work. In these circumstances our
right hand, instead of being for us one in the midst of many, as it was
in the case previously considered, is ours, the only one which we can
possibly use, as we endeavour to carry out our intention of writing,
which intention is our will to realise our personality in that
determined way, since doing a thing always means realising that
personality of ours which does that thing. Our hand in this case
coalesces so completely with our being that without it--the hand already
trained to write--we could not be ourselves. Abstractly, to be sure, we
should be ourselves. But it is the same story over again. What exists is
not the abstract but the concrete. And in the concrete, we, who are
about to write, are this determined personality, in which our will flows
into the hand; and just as we could not in truth distinguish our Self
from our will (we being nothing more and nothing less than this will of
ours), in the same way it would be impossible to distinguish between
"us" and our hand, between our will and our hand. Since the hand now
wields the pen, having perfected its instrumentality by means of this
latter, our will no longer leans upon and terminates in the hand, but it
flows on and presses into the point of the pen itself, through which, if
neither ink nor paper offers resistance, it empties into the stream of
writing. This writing which is read is Thought, whereby the writer finds
himself at the end in front of his own thinking, that is, in front of
himself; that self, which, considering the act materially, he seemed to
be leaving further and further behind, whereas in reality he was
penetrating into it more and more deeply. But in such a case and by the
act itself, can we effectively distinguish between thought, arm, hand,
writing material, the written page, that same page when read, and the
new thought? It is a circle made up of contiguous points, without gaps
or interruptions. It is one sole process, wherein in consequence of a
particular organisation of our personality, we place ourselves in front
of ourselves, and thus realise ourselves. The hand is ours because it is
not distinguished from us, nor, consequently, from the remaining limbs
of our body nor from its material surroundings.
This, our hand, knows how to write because we have learned how to write:
in exactly the same way that our heart knows how to love, to dare and
renounce, by striving earnestly to see ourselves in others, to repress
the instinctive timidity of excessive prudence, and to break the force
of desire prompted by natural egoism. We are then what we want to be;
not merely in our passions and ideas, but in our limbs too, to the
extent that their being depends from their functions, and their
functions can be regulated by hygiene and exercise, which are our action
and our will.
There is, of course, a natural datum which we cannot modify, which we
have to accept as a basis for further construction. But this limitation,
imposed on the truths I mentioned above, must be accepted without in any
way renouncing the truth itself, and should be understood by virtue of
both its scientific and moral values. This warning is not merely helpful
in connection with the question now before us, but will always prove
useful on account of its bearing on the many problems which arise from a
spiritualistic conception of life and cause shiftless philosophasters to
shy and balk. It is true that there is a body which we did not give to
ourselves, which therefore is not a product of our spirit, nor part of
its life and substance, but only if we think of the body of the
individual, empirically considered as such. In this sense I am not
self-produced. The son can ascribe to his parents the imperfection that
mars his whole existence, whatever kind of life he may decide to lead.
The man who was born blind may blame his affliction upon cruel nature.
But the child who calls his parents to account, and the man who
complains of nature, is man as a particular; he is one of many men, one
of the animals, one of the beings, one of the infinite things wielded by
_Man_ (that man to whom we must always refer, when we wish to recall
that even if the world is not all spirit, there is at least a little
corner therein set aside for it); he is one of the infinite things which
Man gathers and unifies in his own thought because he is thought. The
particular man is man as he is being _thought_, who refers us to the
_thinking_ man as to the true man. This true man is also an individual,
not as a part but as the whole, and comprehends all within itself. And
in this man, parents and children are the same man. In it men and nature
are, likewise, one and the same, man or spirit in its universality. We
(each one of us) are one and the other of these men; but we are one of
them, the smaller one, only in that we are the other one, the larger
one, and we ought not to expect the small to take the place of the large
and to act in his stead. All our errors and all our sins are caused by
substituting one in place of the other.
And what is more, the large, the all embracing, the infinite, is
present in the small with all his infinitude. Personality as such, in
its actuality, does not shrink and restrict itself to the singular and
particular man. Within those boundaries which are only visible from
the outside, it internally expatiates to infinity, absorbing in
itself and surmounting all limitations. The man born blind does not
know the marvels and the wondrous beauties of nature which gladden the
eyes and the soul of the seeing man. But his soul pours out none the
less over the infinity of harmonies and of thought. And the blind man
who once saw, in the consciousness of his sightlessness, cherishes the
boundless image of the world once seen, and magnifies it indefinitely
by the aid of the imagination. He even heals the wounds and soothes
the pain of blindness by making it objective through reflection; and
the personality, at any event, always victoriously breaks out of the
narrow cell in which it might seem to be confined. So that in the
depths of even the gloomiest dungeon a ray of light always peers
through, to lighten and comfort the soul of man in misery, and to
restore to him the entire and therefore infinite liberty of creating
for himself a world of his own.
We can therefore say that man, he that lives--not the one which is seen
from the outside, but the thinking and the willing man, who is a
personality in the act--never submits to a nature which is not his own.
He shapes his own nature, beginning with his body, and gradually from
it magnifying the effect of his power, and crowding the environing
space, which is his, with the creatures he gives life to. We must not
consider the smaller man whom we see confined to a few square feet and
at the mercy of the passing instant. We must intently look upon that
other one who has done and still continues to do all the beautiful
things on which we thrive, on that one who is humanity, the spirit. We
must consider his power, which is thought and work (work, that is, as
thought); and ponder over this material world in which we live, all
blocked out, as it is, measured, and traversed by forces which we
bridle, accumulate and release, at pleasure,--this world which has been
altered from its former state, and has been made as we now see it fit
for human habitation, which has been joined to us, assimilated to our
life, spiritualised. When we have done all this we shall see how
impossible it is to disconnect nature from the spirit, and to think the
former without the latter. Nature may be dissociated from the natural
man, that is, one of its parts may be isolated from the remainder. But
such man of nature is not the one who rules over nature: he is not Volta
who clutches the electric current and transforms the earth; he is not
Michel Angelo who transfigures marble and creates the Moses.
Physical education, then, is not superadded to the education of the
spirit, but is itself education of the spirit. It is the fundamental
part of this education, in as much as the body is, in the sense we have
used the words, the seat of our spiritual personality. Living means
constructing one's own body, because living is thinking, and thinking is
self-consciousness; but this consciousness is possible only if we make
it objective, and the object as such is the body (our body). For as
consciousness is, so is the body. There is no thinking which is not also
doing. Thinking not only builds up the brain, but the rest of the body
besides. We may call it will, but then there is not one single act of
thought which is not the mental activity indicated by this word "will."
Without will we should have no bodily substance, in as much as the body
is always and primarily life, and living is impossible without willing.
What are called involuntary movements are not really such; they differ
from the so-called voluntary in that they are constant, immanent, so
much so that we can after all interrupt them. Without the exercise of
our will we could never hold ourselves erect and keep our feet, but
would forever be stumbling and falling; unless we willed it, the power
which keeps every organ in its place, and maintains all the organs in
the circle of life, would be annihilated. Therefore _morale_, as they
say, is a very considerable aid in curing the diseases of the body. It
is on this account that societies and religious sects have arisen which
make of moral faith an instrument of physical well-being. For the same
reason, also, it is impossible for the psychiatrists to draw a line
separating mental troubles from bodily ailments. The force of the will,
the vigour of the personality, the impulse of the spirit in its
becoming, this is the wondrous power which galvanises matter and
organically quickens it; which sustains life, equips it, and fits it for
its march towards ever renewed, ever improved finalities. It is not
temperament which is the basis of character, but character which is the
basis of temperament. If we reverse this proposition, every moral
conception of life becomes absurd, and every spiritual value appears
ineffectual. Don Abbondio then ceases to be wrong, and Cardinal Federico
Borromeo is no longer right.
Character too is an empirical concept, and like all such concepts, it
has a truthfulness which is not clearly discernible, but dimly visible.
Character signifies rational personality, using the term rationality to
mean, not the movement or the becoming which belongs peculiarly to
reason as the form of spiritual activity, but the coherence of the
object on which this activity is fixed, which coherence in turn consists
in the harmony whereby it is possible to think all the parts of
objective thought as forming a single whole, in that there is no
conflict or contradiction among them, and in as much as the object
remains always the same throughout all these particulars. If in the
course of reasoning we introduce conflicting statements which cannot
possibly be referred to the same thing, we cannot be said to reason.
Rationality is the permanence of the being of which we think: it is
firmness of conception, stability of a law which we apply to all
particulars that come under its sway. For the object of consciousness is
characterised, in respect to the act which constitutes it, by this
stability and immutability. What we think is _that_ and no other,
whereas thought, by which we think it, is a becoming and a continuous
change.
But the character of man is in the object, in the contents of his
thought, in what he gradually builds himself up to, in the determined
personality which he constitutes by thinking, or, in other words, _in
his body_. But body, be it remembered, in an idealistic sense, body as a
system, forming, with its law and its configuration, the solid basis of
every ulterior development. This truth, vaguely accepted by common
sense, which looks upon a strong constitution as a preliminary to a
sound character, will appear in its full light only after it has been
stripped of the fantastic and material attributes which it receives from
a realistically vulgar way of conceiving the body materially. For it is
evident that a feeble and sickly man may yet have a steel-like
character. Farinata, who stands "erect with breast and brow," as though
he held Hell in contempt: Giordano Bruno, who amidst the flames that
already consume his flesh disdainfully turns his eyes from the symbol of
the religion which had thrust him on the stake, are evident examples of
a strength of mind with no relation to their physical powers, which were
already destroyed or about to be scattered by an irresistible might.
Leopardi is right when he scornfully protests that his ill health is not
the cause of that sad pessimism which in his mind solemnly challenges
"the unseemly hidden Power."
Character is physical robustness to the extent that this latter is
spiritual haleness, and in so far as it is compact, firm, steadfast
thought. Thought in this respect appears externally as body, not subject
to the hostile forces that perpetually beset it from without and from
within; and on account of the intrinsic spirituality of its substance,
it is a law rather than a fact, and a process or a tendency rather than
a fixed and established manner of being. For organic endurance, which is
really what we mean by health, does not consist in muscular development
or in the bloom of an exuberant constitution, but rather in an
indwelling power, in dynamically persistent and tenacious struggle and
adaptation, in the capacity of self-preservation, of self-affirmation,
which is the specific essence of spiritual being.
This body, in which thought organises and consolidates itself; this
body, by means of which thought is enabled to press on its vigorous
development, reabsorbing in its actual present the past accomplishment,
and to proceed on its ascent, scaling the height step by step, never
sliding downward, because every grade it builds remains as a firm
support of the next one;--this is man's character, which is not an
attribute of the will considered as practical activity in
contra-distinction to theoretic activity. Character is an attribute of
the spirit _qua_ spirit, without any adjectives. We may, if we will,
distinguish the practical from the theoretical man, the soundness of the
will from intellectual originality. But just as it is not possible to
conceive of a really fruitful and constructive practical activity
without that coherence of design and self-supporting volitional
continuity which constitute character, in the same way intelligence and
ingenuity will not become manifest without firmness of purpose, without
persevering reflection and study of the object, and without stability of
this object of intellectual activity, which again constitute character.
If character is set as the basis of morality, then every science and
every form of culture, even those which aim at evil, considered in
themselves, as the life of the intelligence must have a moral value,
must be governed by an inviolable law. By spiritual steadfastness, which
is the condition of spiritual productivity, man sacrifices himself to an
ideal and constitutes his moral personality, whether he die for his
country or whether he labour to bring light amid his thoughts. Life in
all its phases is the untiring fulfilment of duty.
To conclude then, physical education must be encouraged, but as
spiritual training and as formation of character. Gymnastic exercise,
therefore, far from being the only way to this end, may even lead in the
opposite direction; and it will do so as long as it is considered apart
from the remainder of education, with a particular scope of its own, and
with heterogeneous contents in respect to spiritual education properly
so-called. The teacher of physical education must always bear in mind
that he is not dealing with _bodies_, bodies to be moved around, to be
lined up, or rushed around a track. He too is training souls, and
collaborates with all the other teachers in the moral preparation and
advancement of mankind. If, in addition to his special qualifications,
he does not possess culture enough to enable him to discern the spirit
beyond the body, and to understand therefore the moral value of order,
of precision, of gracefulness, of agility, by which man externally
realises his personality, he will no doubt fulfil the ordinary demands
of physical culture, but he will just as certainly antagonise and
disgust those of his pupils who are most highly gifted and otherwise
better trained, and he can therefore lay no claim to the title of
educator.
Education then is either one or not effective. The assumption that there
are many kinds of education leads to very disastrous results. Education
is one; and as a whole it appears unchanged in each one of the parts
that we ordinarily distinguish in it, according as we approach the human
spirit now from one side and now from the other.