assassins there, he left at midnight for Zürich, where he put himself
under the protection of Ulrich Zwingli. In Zwingli, the purest,
loftiest, and clearest of insight of all of the leaders of the
Reformation, Hutten found a congenial spirit. His health was now
utterly broken. To the famous Baths of Pfaffers he went, in hope of
release from pain. But the modern bath-houses of Ragatz were not built
in those days, and the daily descent by a rope from above into the dark
and dismal chasm was too much for his feeble strength. Then Zwingli
sent him to a kindly friend, the Pastor Hans Schnegg, who lived on the
little Island of Ufnau, in the Lake of Zürich. And here at Ufnau, worn
out by his long, double conflict with the Pope and with disease, Ulrich
von Hutten died in 1523, at the age of thirty-five. "He left behind
him," wrote Zwingli, "nothing of worth. Books he had none; no money,
and no property of any sort, except a pen."
[Illustration: Ulrich Zwingli.]
What was the value of this short and troubled life? Three hundred
years ago it was easy to answer with Erasmus and the rest--Nothing.
Hutten had denounced the Pope, and the Pope had crushed him. He had
stirred up noble men to battle for freedom, and they, too, had been
destroyed. Franz von Sickingen was dead. The league of the cities and
princes had faded away forever. Luther was hidden in the Wartburg, no
one knew where, and scarcely a trace of the Reformation was left in
Germany. Whatever Hutten had touched he had ruined. He had "dared
it," and the force he had defied had crushed him in return.
But, looking back over these centuries, the life of Hutten rises into
higher prominence. His writings were seed in good ground. At his
death the Reformation seemed hopeless. Six years later, at the second
Diet of Spires, half Germany signed the protest which made us
Protestants. "It was Luther alone who said _no_ at the Diet of Worms.
It was princes and people, cities and churches, who said _no_ at the
Diet of Spires."
Hutten's dream of a United German people freed from the yoke of Rome
was for three hundred years unrealized. For the Reformation sundered
the German people and ruined the German Empire, and not till our day
has German unity come to pass. But, as later reformers said, "It is
better that Germany should be half German, than that it should be all
Roman."
For the true meaning of this conflict does not lie in any question of
church against church or creed against creed, nor that worship in
cathedrals with altars and incense and rich ceremony should give way to
the simpler forms of the Lutheran litany. The issue was that of the
growth of man. The "right of private interpretation" is the
recognition of personal individuality.
The death of Hutten was, after all, not untimely. He had done his
work. His was the "voice of one crying in the wilderness." The head
of John the Baptist lay on the charger before Jesus had fulfilled his
mission. Arnold Winkelried, at Sempach, filled his body with Austrian
spears before the Austrian phalanx was broken. John Brown fell at
Harper's Ferry before a blow was struck against slavery. Ulrich von
Hutten had set every man, woman, and child in Germany to thinking of
his relations to the Lord and to the Pope. His mission was completed;
and longer life for him, as Strauss has suggested, might have led to
discord among the Reformers themselves.
For this lover of freedom was intolerant of intolerance. For fine
points of doctrine he had only contempt. When the Lutherans began to
treat as enemies all Reformers who did not with them subscribe to the
Confession of Augsburg, Hutten's fiery pen would have repudiated this
confession. For he fought for freedom of the spirit, not for the
Lutheran confession.
Had he remained in Switzerland, he would have been still less in
harmony with the prevailing conditions. Not long after, Zwingli was
slain in the wretched battle of Kappel, and, after him, the Swiss
Reformation passed under the control of John Calvin. There can be no
doubt that the stern pietist of Geneva would have burned Ulrich von
Hutten with as calm a conscience as he did Michael Servetus.
The idea of a united and uniform Church, whether Catholic, Lutheran, or
Calvinist, had little attraction for Hutten. He was one of the first
to realize that religion is individual, not collective. It is
concerned with life, not with creeds or ceremonies. In the high sense,
no man can follow or share the religion of another. His religion,
whatever it may be, is his own. It is built up from his own thoughts
and prayers and actions. It is the expression of his own ideals. Only
forms can be transferred unchanged from man to man, from generation to
generation; never realities. For whatever is real to a man becomes
part of him and partakes of his growth, and is modified by his
personality.
Hutten was buried where he died, on the little island of Ufnau, in the
Lake of Zürich, at the foot of the mighty Alps. And some of his old
associates put over his grave a commemorative stone. Afterwards, the
monks of the abbey of Einsiedein, in Schwytz came to the island and
removed the stone, and obliterated all traces of the grave.
It was well that they did so; for now the whole green island of Ufnau
is his alone, and it is his worthy sepulcher.
[1] For many of the details of the life of Hutten, and for most of the
quotations from Hutten's writings given in this paper, the writer is
indebted to the excellent memoir by David Friedrich Strauss, entitled
"Ulrich von Hutten." (Fourth Edition: Bonn, 1878.) No attempt has been
made to give here an account of Hutten's writings, only a few of the
more noteworthy being mentioned.
[2] "Sehet ihr nicht dasz die Luft der Freiheit weht?"
NATURE-STUDY AND MORAL CULTURE.[1]
In pleading for nature-study as a means of moral culture, I do not wish
to make an overstatement, nor to claim for such study any occult or
exclusive power. It is not for us to say, so much nature in the
schools, so much virtue in the scholars. The character of the teacher
is a factor which must always be counted in. But the best teacher is
the one that comes nearest to nature, the one who is most effective in
developing individual wisdom.
To seek knowledge is better than to have knowledge. Precepts of virtue
are useless unless they are built into life. At birth, or before, "the
gate of gifts is closed." It is the art of life, out of variant and
contradictory materials passed down to us from our ancestors, to build
up a coherent and effective individual character.
The essence of character-building lies in action. The chief value of
nature-study in character-building is that, like life itself, it deals
with realities. The experience of living is of itself a form of
nature-study. One must in life make his own observations, frame his
own inductions, and apply them in action as he goes along. The habit
of finding out the best thing to do next, and then doing it, is the
basis of character. A strong character is built up by doing, not by
imitation, nor by feeling, nor by suggestion. Nature-study, if it be
genuine, is essentially doing. This is the basis of its effectiveness
as a moral agent. To deal with truth is necessary, if we are to know
truth when we see it in action. To know truth precedes all sound
morality. There is a great impulse to virtue in knowing something
well. To know it well, is to come into direct contact with its facts
or laws, to feel that its qualities and forces are inevitable. To do
this is the essence of nature-study in all its forms.
The claim has been made that history treats of the actions of men, and
that it therefore gives the student the basis of right conduct. But
neither of these propositions is true. History treats of the records
of the acts of men and nations. But it does not involve the action of
the student himself. The men and women who act in history are not the
boys and girls we are training. Their lives are developed through
their own efforts, not by contemplation of the efforts of others. They
work out their problem of action more surely by dissecting frogs or
hatching butterflies than by what we tell them of Lycurgus or Joan of
Arc. Their reason for virtuous action must lie in their own knowledge
of what is right, not in the fact that Lincoln, or Washington, or
William Tell, or some other half-mythical personage would have done so
and so under like conditions.
The rocks and shells, the frogs and lilies always tell the absolute
truth. Association with these, under right direction, will build up a
habit of truthfulness, which the lying story of the cherry-tree is
powerless to effect. If history is to be made an agency for moral
training, it must become a nature-study. It must be the study of
original documents. When it is pursued in this way it has the value of
other nature-studies. But it is carried on under great limitations.
Its manuscripts are scarce, while every leaf on the tree is an original
document in botany. When a thousand are used, or used up, the archives
of nature are just as full as ever.
From the intimate affinity with the problems of life, the problems of
nature-study derive a large part of their value. Because life deals
with realities, the visible agents of the overmastering fates, it is
well that our children should study the real, rather than the
conventional. Let them come in contact with the inevitable, instead of
the "made-up," with laws and forces which can be traced in objects and
forms actually before them, rather than with those which seem arbitrary
or which remain inscrutable. To use concrete illustrations, there is a
greater moral value in the study of magnets than in the distinction
between _shall_ and _will_, in the study of birds or rocks than in that
of diacritical marks or postage-stamps, in the development of a frog
than in the longer or the shorter catechism, in the study of things
than in the study of abstractions. There is doubtless a law underlying
abstractions and conventionalities, a law of catechisms, or
postage-stamps, or grammatical solecisms, but it does not appear to the
student. Its consideration does not strengthen his impression of
inevitable truth. There is the greatest moral value, as well as
intellectual value, in the independence that comes from knowing, and
knowing that one knows and why he knows. This gives spinal column to
character, which is not found in the flabby goodness of imitation or
the hysteric virtue of suggestion. Knowing what is right, and why it
is right, before doing it is the basis of greatness of character.
The nervous system of the animal or the man is essentially a device to
make action effective and to keep it safe. The animal is a machine in
action. Toward the end of motion all other mental processes tend. All
functions of the brain, all forms of nerve impulse are modifications of
the simple reflex action, the automatic transfer of sensations derived
from external objects into movements of the body.
The sensory nerves furnish the animal or man all knowledge of the
external world. The brain, sitting in absolute darkness, judges these
sensations, and sends out corresponding impulses to action. The
sensory nerves are the brain's sole teachers; the motor nerves, and
through them the muscles, are the brain's only servants. The untrained
brain learns its lessons poorly, and its commands are vacillating and
ineffective. In like manner, the brain which has been misued
[Transcriber's note: misused?], shows its defects in ill-chosen
actions--the actions against which Nature protests through her scourge
of misery. In this fact, that nerve alteration means ineffective
action, lying brain, and lying nerves, rests the great argument for
temperance, the great argument against all forms of nerve tampering,
from the coffee habit to the cataleptic "revival of religion."
The senses are intensely practical in their relation to life. The
processes of natural selection make and keep them so. Only those
phases of reality which our ancestors could render into action are
shown to us by our senses. If we can do nothing in any case, we know
nothing about it. The senses tell us essential truth about rocks and
trees, food and shelter, friends and enemies. They answer no problems
in chemistry. They tell us nothing about atom or molecule. They give
us no ultimate facts. Whatever is so small that we cannot handle it is
too small to be seen. Whatever is too distant to be reached is not
truthfully reported. The "X-rays" of light we cannot see, because our
ancestors could not deal with them. The sun and stars, the clouds and
the sky are not at all what they appear to be. The truthfulness of the
senses fails as the square of the distance increases. Were it not so,
we should be smothered by truth; we should be overwhelmed by the
multiplicity of our own sensations, and truthful response in action
would become impossible. Hyperaesthesia of any or all of the senses is
a source of confusion, not of strength. It is essentially a phase of
disease, and it shows itself in ineffectiveness, not in increased power.
Besides the actual sensations, the so-called realities, the brain
retains also the sensations which have been, and which are not wholly
lost. Memory-pictures crowd the mind, mingling with pictures which are
brought in afresh by the senses. The force of suggestion causes the
mental states or conditions of one person to repeat themselves in
another. Abnormal conditions of the brain itself furnish another
series of feelings with which the brain must deal. Moreover, the brain
is charged with impulses to action passed on from generation to
generation, surviving because they are useful. With all these arises
the necessity for choice as a function of the mind. The mind must
neglect or suppress all sensations which it cannot weave into action.
The dog sees nothing that does not belong to its little world. The man
in search of mushrooms "tramples down oak-trees in his walks." To
select the sensations that concern us is the basis of the power of
attention. The suppression of undesired actions is a function of the
will. To find data for choice among the possible motor responses is a
function of the intellect. Intellectual persistency is the essence of
individual character.
As the conditions of life become more complex, it becomes necessary for
action to be more carefully selected. Wisdom is the parent of virtue.
Knowing what should be done logically precedes doing it. Good impulses
and good intentions do not make action right or safe. In the long run,
action is tested not by its motives, but by its results.
The child, when he comes into the world, has everything to learn. His
nervous system is charged with tendencies to reaction and impulses to
motion, which have their origin in survivals from ancestral experience.
Exact knowledge, by which his own actions can be made exact, must come
through his own experience. The experience of others must be expressed
in terms of his own before it becomes wisdom. Wisdom, as I have
elsewhere said, is knowing what it is best to do next. Virtue is doing
it. Doing right becomes habit, if it is pursued long enough. It
becomes a "second nature," or, we may say, a higher heredity. The
formation of a higher heredity of wisdom and virtue, of knowing right
and doing right, is the basis of character-building.
The moral character is based on knowing the best, choosing the best,
and doing the best. It cannot be built up on imitation. By imitation,
suggestion, and conventionality the masses are formed and controlled.
To build up a man is a nobler process, demanding materials and methods
of a higher order. The growth of man is the assertion of
individuality. Only robust men can make history. Others may adorn it,
disfigure it, or vulgarize it.
The first relation of the child to external things is expressed in
this: What can I do with it? What is its relation to me? The
sensation goes over into thought, the thought into action. Thus the
impression of the object is built into the little universe of his mind.
The object and the action it implies are closely associated. As more
objects are apprehended, more complex relations arise, but the primal
condition remains--What can I do with it? Sensation, thought,
action--this is the natural sequence of each completed mental process.
As volition passes over into action, so does science into art,
knowledge into power, wisdom into virtue.
By the study of realities wisdom is built up. In the relations of
objects he can touch and move, the child comes to find the limitations
of his powers, the laws that govern phenomena, and to which his actions
must be in obedience. So long as he deals with realities, these laws
stand in their proper relation. "So simple, so natural, so true," says
Agassiz. "This is the charm of dealing with Nature herself. She
brings us back to absolute truth so often as we wander."
So long as a child is lead from one reality to another, never lost in
words or in abstractions, so long this natural relation remains. What
can I do with it? is the beginning of wisdom. What is it to me? is the
basis of personal virtue.
While a child remains about the home of his boyhood, he knows which way
is north and which is east. He does not need to orientate himself,
because in his short trips he never loses his sense of space direction.
But let him take a rapid journey in the cars or in the night, and he
may find himself in strange relations. The sun no longer rises in the
east, the sense of reality in directions is gone, and it is a painful
effort for him to join the new impressions to the old. The process of
orientation is a difficult one, and if facing the sunrise in the
morning were a deed of necessity in his religion, this deed would not
be accurately performed.
This homely illustration applies to the child. He is taken from his
little world of realities, a world in which the sun rises in the east,
the dogs bark, the grasshopper leaps, the water falls, and the relation
of cause and effect appear plain and natural. In these simple
relations moral laws become evident. "The burnt child dreads the
fire," and this dread shows itself in action. The child learns what to
do next, and to some extent does it. By practice in personal
responsibility in little things, he can be led to wisdom in large ones.
For the power to do great things in the moral world comes from doing
the right in small things. It is not often that a man who knows that
there is a right does the wrong. Men who do wrong are either ignorant
that there is a right, or else they have failed in their orientation
and look upon right as wrong. It is the clinching of good purposes
with good actions that makes the man. This is the higher heredity that
is not the gift of father or mother, but is the man's own work on
himself.
The impression of realities is the basis of sound morals as well as of
sound judgment. By adding near things to near, the child grows in
knowledge. "Knowledge set in order" is science. Nature-study is the
beginning of science. It is the science of the child. To the child
training in methods of acquiring knowledge is more valuable than
knowledge itself. In general, throughout life sound methods are more
valuable than sound information. Self-direction is more important than
innocence. The fool may be innocent. Only the sane and wise can be
virtuous.
It is the function of science to find out the real nature of the
universe. Its purpose is to eliminate the personal equation and the
human equation in statements of truth. By methods of precision of
thought and instruments of precision in observation, it seeks to make
our knowledge of the small, the distant, the invisible, the mysterious
as accurate as our knowledge of the common things men have handled for
ages. It seeks to make our knowledge of common things exact and
precise, that exactness and precision may be translated into action.
The ultimate end of science, as well as its initial impulse, is the
regulation of human conduct. To make right action possible and
prevalent is the function of science. The "world as it is" is the
province of science. In proportion as our actions conform to the
conditions of the world as it is, do we find the world beautiful,
glorious, divine. The truth of the "world as it is" must be the
ultimate inspiration of art, poetry, and religion. The world as men
have agreed to say it is, is quite another matter. The less our
children hear of this, the less they will have to unlearn in their
future development.
When a child is taken from nature to the schools, he is usually brought
into an atmosphere of conventionality. Here he is not to do, but to
imitate; not to see, nor to handle, nor to create, but to remember. He
is, moreover, to remember not his own realities, but the written or
spoken ideas of others. He is dragged through a wilderness of grammar,
with thickets of diacritical marks, into the desert of metaphysics. He
is taught to do right, not because right action is in the nature of
things, the nature of himself and the things about him, but because he
will be punished somehow if he does not.
He is given a medley of words without ideas. He is taught declensions
and conjugations without number in his own and other tongues. He
learns things easily by rote; so his teachers fill him with
rote-learning. Hence, grammar and language have become stereotyped as
teaching without a thought as to whether undigested words may be
intellectual poison. And as the good heart depends on the good brain,
undigested ideas become moral poison as well. No one can tell how much
of the bad morals and worse manners of the conventional college boy of
the past has been due to intellectual dyspepsia from undigested words.
In such manner the child is bound to lose his orientation as to the
forces which surround him. If he does not recover it, he will spend
his life in a world of unused fancies and realities. Nonsense will
seem half truth, and his appreciation of truth will be vitiated by lack
of clearness of definition--by its close relation to nonsense.
That this is no slight defect can be shown in every community. There
is no intellectual craze so absurd as not to have a following among
educated men and women. There is no scheme for the renovation of the
social order so silly that educated men will not invest their money in
it. There is no medical fraud so shameless that educated men will not
give it their certificate. There is no nonsense so unscientific that
men called educated will not accept it as science.
It should be a function of the schools to build up common sense. Folly
should be crowded out of the schools. We have furnished costly lunatic
asylums for its accommodation. That our schools are in a degree
responsible for current follies, there can be no doubt. We have many
teachers who have never seen a truth in their lives. There are many
who have never felt the impact of an idea. There are many who have
lost their own orientation in their youth, and who have never since
been able to point out the sunrise to others. It is no extravagance of
language to say that diacritical marks lead to the cocaine habit; nor
that the ethics of metaphysics points the way to the Higher
Foolishness. There are many links in the chain of decadence, but its
finger-posts all point downward.
"Three roots bear up Dominion--Knowledge, Will, the third, Obedience."
This statement, which Lowell applies to nations, belongs to the
individual man as well. It is written in the structure of his
brain--knowledge, volition, action,--and all three elements must be
sound, if action is to be safe or effective.
But obedience must be active, not passive. The obedience of the lower
animals is automatic, and therefore in its limits measurably perfect.
Lack of obedience means the extinction of the race. Only the obedient
survive, and hence comes about obedience to "sealed orders," obedience
by reflex action, in which the will takes little part.
In the early stages of human development, the instincts of obedience
were dominant. Great among these is the instinct of conventionality,
by which each man follows the path others have found safe. The Church
and the State, organizations of the strong, have assumed the direction
of the weak. It has often resulted that the wiser this direction, the
greater the weakness it was called on to control. The "sealed orders"
of human institutions took the place of the automatism of instinct.
Against "sealed orders" the individual man has been in constant
protest. The "warfare of science" was part of this long struggle. The
Reformation, the revival of learning, the growth of democracy, are all
phases of this great conflict.