unselfishness and self-sacrifice and duty, as their generation
apparently used to do, and conclude that we do not know what these
things mean. It is true that we do not fuss and fume about our souls,
or tend our characters like a hot-house plant. This is a changing,
transitional age, and our view is outward rather than inward. In an
age of newspapers, free libraries, and cheap magazines, we necessarily
get a broader horizon than the passing generation had. We see what is
going on in the world, and we get the clash of different points of
view, to an extent which was impossible to our fathers. We cannot be
blamed for acquiring a suspicion of ideals, which, however powerful
their appeal once was, seem singularly impotent now, or if we seek for
motive forces to replace them, or for new terms in which to restate
the world. We have an eagerness to understand the world in which we
live that amounts almost to a passion. We want to get behind the
scenes, to see how the machinery of the modern world actually works.
We are curious to learn what other people are thinking, and to get
at the forces that have produced their point of view. We dabble in
philanthrophy as much from curiosity to see how people live as from any
feeling of altruism. We read all sorts of strange philosophies to get
the personal testimony of men who are interpreting the world. In the
last analysis, we have a passion to understand why people act as they
do.
We have, as a result, become impatient with the conventional
explanations of the older generation. We have retained from childhood
the propensity to see through things, and to tell the truth with
startling frankness. This must, of course, be very disconcerting to
a generation, so much of whose activity seems to consist in glossing
over the unpleasant things or hiding the blemishes on the fair face
of civilization. There are too many issues evaded which we would
like to meet. Many of us find, sooner or later, that the world is a
very different sort of place from what our carefully deodorized and
idealized education would have us believe.
When we find things simply not as they are painted, is it any wonder
that we turn to the new prophets rather than to the old? We are more
than half confident that the elder generation does not itself really
believe all the conventional ideals which it seeks to force upon us,
and much of our presumption is a result of the contempt we naturally
feel for such timorousness. Too many of your preachers seem to be
whistling simply to keep up your courage. The plain truth is that the
younger generation is acquiring a positive faith, in contact with
which the elder generation with its nerveless negations feels its
helplessness without knowing just what to do about it except to scold
the young.
This positive aspect is particularly noticeable in the religion of the
rising generation. As our critic says, the religious thinking of the
preceding generation was destructive and uncertain. We are demanding a
definite faith, and our spiritual centre is rapidly shifting from the
personal to the social in religion. Not personal salvation, but social;
not our own characters, but the character of society, is our interest
and concern. We feel social injustice as our fathers felt personal sin.
Settlement work and socialist propaganda, things done fifty years ago
only by rare and heroic souls like Kingsley, Ruskin, and Maurice, are
now the commonplaces of the undergraduate.
The religion that will mean anything to the rising generation will be
based on social ideals. An essay like ex-President Eliot’s “Religion
of the Future,” which in a way synthesizes science and history and
these social ideals and gives them the religious tinge which every age
demands, supplies a real working religious platform to many a young
man and woman of the rising generation, and an inspiration of which
our elders can form no conception. Perhaps it is unfair to call this
religion at all. Perhaps it is simply the scientific attitude toward
the world. But I am sure that it is more than this; I am sure that
it is the scientific attitude tinged with the religious that will be
ours of the rising generation. We find that we cannot keep apart our
religion, our knowledge, our practice, and our hopes in water-tight
compartments, as our ancestors did. We are beginning to show an
incorrigible tendency to work our spiritual assimilations into one
intelligible, constructive whole.
It is to this attitude rather than to a softening of fibre that I think
we may lay our growing disinclination to deify sacrifice and suffering.
A young chemistry student said to me the other day, “Science means that
nothing must be wasted!” This idea somehow gets mixed up with human
experience, and we come to believe that human life and happiness are
things that must not be wasted. Might it not be that such a belief that
human waste of life and happiness was foolish and unnecessary would
possibly be of some avail in causing that waste to disappear? And one
of the most inspiring of the prophets to the rising generation, William
James, has told us that certain “moral equivalents” of these things are
possible which will prevent that incurable decaying of fibre which the
elder generation so anxiously fears.
Another result of this attitude is our growing belief in political
machinery. We are demanding of our preachers that they reduce quality
to quantity. “Stop talking about liberty and justice and love, and show
us institutions, or concerted attempts to model institutions that shall
be free or just or lovely,” we cry. You have been trying so long to
reform the world by making men “good,” and with such little success,
that we may be pardoned if we turn our attention to the machinery of
society, and give up for a time the attempt to make the operators of
that machinery strictly moral. Indeed, the charm of Socialism to so
many of the rising generation is just that scientific aspect of it,
its claim of historical basis, and its very definite and concrete
organization for the attainment of its ends. A philosophy which gives
an illuminating interpretation of the present, and a vision of the
future, with a definitely crystallized plan of action with concrete
methods, however unsound it may all be, can hardly be said to appeal
simply to the combination of “a weak head, a soft heart, and a desire
to shirk.”
Placed in such a situation as we are, and with such an attitude
toward the world, we are as interested as you and the breathless
generations behind you to see what destinies we shall work out for
ourselves. An unpleasantly large proportion of our energy is now
drained off in fighting the fetishes which you of the elder generation
have passed along to us, and which, out of some curious instinct of
self-preservation, you so vigorously defend. We, on the other hand,
are becoming increasingly doubtful whether you believe in yourselves
quite so thoroughly as you would have us think. Your words are very
brave, but the tone is hollow. Your mistrust of us, and your reluctance
to convey over to us any of your authority in the world, looks a
little too much like the fear and dislike that doubt always feels in
the presence of conviction, to be quite convincing. We believe in
ourselves; and this fact, we think, is prophetic for the future. We
have an indomitable feeling that we shall attain, or if not, that we
shall pave the way for a generation that shall attain.
Meanwhile our constructive work is hampered by your distrust, while
you blame us for our lack of accomplishment. Is this an attitude
calculated to increase our responsibility and our self-respect? Would
it not be better in every way, more constructive and more fruitful, to
help us in our aspirations and endeavors, or, failing that, at least to
strive to understand just what those aspirations and endeavors are?
FOOTNOTES:
[2] _The Atlantic Monthly_, February, 1911.
III
THE VIRTUES AND THE SEASONS OF LIFE
Each season of life has its proper virtues, as each season of the year
has its own climate and temperature. If virtue is the excellent working
of the soul, then youth, middle age, and old age, all have their
peculiar ways of working excellently. When we speak of a virtuous life,
we should mean, not a life that has shown one single thread of motive
and attitude running through it, but rather one that has varied with
the seasons, as spring grows gently into summer and summer into autumn,
each season working excellently in respect to the tilling and harvest
of the soul. If it is a virtue to be contented in old age, it is no
virtue to be contented in youth; if it is a virtue for youth to be bold
and venturesome, it is the virtue of middle life to take heed and begin
to gather up the lines and nets so daringly cast by youth into the sea
of life. A virtuous life means a life responsive to its powers and its
opportunities, a life not of inhibitions, but of a straining up to
the limit of its strength. It means doing every year what is fitting
to be done at that year to enhance or conserve one’s own life or the
happiness of those around one. Virtue is a word that abolishes duty.
For duty has steadily fallen into worse and worse opprobrium; it has
come to mean nothing but effort and stress. It implies something that
is done rightly, but that cuts straight across the grain of all one’s
inclinations and motive forces. It is following the lines of greatest
resistance; it is the working of the moral machine with the utmost
friction possible. Now there is no doubt that the moral life involves
struggle and effort, but it should be the struggle of adequate choice,
and not of painful inhibition. We are coming to see that the most
effective things we do are those that have some idea of pleasure yoked
up with them. In the interests of moral efficiency, the ideal must be
the smooth and noiseless workings of the machine, and not the rough and
grinding movements that we have come to associate with the word “duty.”
For the emphasis on the negative duty we must substitute emphasis on
the positive virtue. For virtue is excellence of working, and all
excellence is pleasing. When we know what are the virtues appropriate
to each age of life, we can view the moral life in a new light. It
becomes not a claim upon us of painful obligation, but a stimulus to
excellent spontaneity and summons to self-expression.
In childhood we acquire the spiritual goods that we shall take with
us through life; in youth we test our acquisitions and our tools,
selecting, criticizing, comparing; in old age, we put them away
gently into the attic of oblivion or retire them honorably, full of
years and service. Our ideas, however, of what those spiritual goods
were that childhood acquired have been very much confused. We have
imagined that we could give the child “the relish of right and wrong,”
as Montaigne calls it. The attempt has usually been made to train up
the child in the moral life, by telling him from his earliest years
what was right and what was wrong. It was supposed that in this way
he absorbed right principles that would be the guiding springs of
his youthful and later life. The only difficulty, of course, with
this theory is that the moral life hardly begins before the stresses
and crises of youth at all. For really moral activity implies choice
and it implies significant choice; and the choices of the child are
few in number and seldom significant. You can tell a child that a
certain thing is wrong, and he will believe it, but his belief will be
a purely mechanical affair, an external idea, which is no more woven
into the stuff of his life than is one of those curious “post-hypnotic
suggestions,” that psychologists tell about, where the subject while
hypnotized is told to do something at a certain time after he awakes.
When the time comes he does it without any consciousness of the reason
and without any immediate motive. Now most moral ideas in a child’s
mind are exactly similar to these suggestions. They seem to operate
with infallible accuracy, and we say,--“What a good child!” As a fact
the poor child is as much under an alien spell as the subject of
the hypnotist. Now all this sort of hypnotized morality the younger
generation wants to have done with. It demands a morality that is
glowing with self-consciousness, that is healthy with intelligence. It
refuses to call the “good” child moral at all; it views him as a poor
little trained animal, that is doomed for the rest of his life to go
through mechanical motions and moral tricks at the crack of the whip
of a moral code or religious authority. From home and Sunday-school,
children of a slightly timid disposition get moral wounds, the scars of
which never heal. They enter a bondage from which they can never free
themselves; their moral judgment in youth is warped and blighted in a
thousand ways, and they pass through life, seemingly the most moral
of men and women, but actually having never known the zest of true
morality, the relish of right and wrong. The best intentions of parents
and teachers have turned their characters into unnatural channels from
which they cannot break, and fixed unwittingly upon them senseless
inhibitions and cautions which they find they cannot dissolve, even
when reason and common sense convince them that they are living under
an alien code. Looked upon from this light, childish goodness and
childish conscientiousness is an unhealthy and even criminal forcing
of the young plant, the hot-house bringing to maturity of a young soul
whose sole business is to grow and learn. When moral instruction is
given, a criminal advantage is taken of the child’s suggestibility,
and all possibility of an individual moral life, growing naturally
and spontaneously as the young soul meets the real emergencies and
problems that life will present to it, is lost. If, as we are coming
more and more to realize, the justification of knowledge is that it
helps us to get along with and enjoy and grapple with the world, so
the justification of virtue is that it enables us to get along with
and enjoy and grapple with the spiritual world of ideals and feelings
and qualities. We should be as careful about giving a child moral
ideas that will be of no practical use to him as we are in giving him
learning that will be of no use to him.
The virtues of childhood, then, we shall not find in the moral realm.
The “good” child is not cultivated so much to-day as he was by the
former generation, whose one aim in education and religion was to bind
the young fast in the fetters of a puritan code; but he is still, in
well-brought-up families, an appalling phenomenon. The child, who at
the age of five has a fairly complete knowledge of what God wants
him and all around him to do and not to do, is an illustration of
the results of the confusion of thought that would make childhood
instead of youth the battle-ground of the moral life. We should not
dismiss such a child as quaint, for in him have been sowed the seeds
of a general obscurantism and conservatism that will spread like a
palsy over his whole life. The acceptance of moral judgments that
have no vital meaning to the young soul will mean in later life the
acceptance of ideas and prejudices in political and religious and
social matters that are uncriticized and unexamined. The “good” child
grows up into the conventional bigoted man. The duties and tastes which
are inculcated into him in childhood, far from aiding the “excellent
workings of his soul,” clog and rust it, and prevent the fine free
expression of its individuality and genius. For the child has not
yet the material of experience that will enable him to get the sense
of values which is at the bottom of what we call the spiritual life.
And it is this sense that is so easily dulled, and that must be so
carefully protected against blunting. That the child cannot form
moral judgments for himself, however, does not mean that they must be
formed for him by others; it means that we must patiently wait until
he meets the world of vivid contrasts and shocks and emergencies that
is youth. It is not repairing his lack of moral sensitiveness to get
him to repeat parrot-like the clean-cut and easily learned taboos and
permissions of the people around him. To get him to do this is exactly
like training an animal to bolt any kind of food. The child, however,
has too weak a stomach to digest very much of the moral pabulum that
is fed him. The inevitable result is a moral indigestion, one form of
which is the once fashionable sense of sin. The youth, crammed with
uncriticized taboos delivered to him with the awful prestige of an
Almighty God, at a certain age revolts, and all the healthy values
of life turn sour within him. The cure for this spiritual dyspepsia
is called conversion, but it is a question whether the cure is not
often worse than the disease. For it usually means that the relish of
right and wrong, which had suddenly become a very real thing, has been
permanently perverted in a certain direction. By a spiritual operation,
the soul has been forced to digest all this strange food, and acquires
the ability to do so forever after. Those who do not suffer this
operation pass through life with an uneasiness of spirit, the weight
and burden of an imperfectly assimilated moral life. Few there are
who are able to throw off the whole soddenness, and if they do they
are fortunate if they are not left without any food at all. Religious
teachers have always believed that all these processes were necessary
for the soul’s health. They have believed that it was better to have
mechanical morals than no morals at all. When the younger generation
sees the damage such morals work, it would prefer to have none.
Discarding the “good” child, then, we will find the virtues of
childhood in that restless, pushing, growing curiosity that is the
characteristic of every healthy little boy or girl. The child’s life is
spent in learning his way around the world; in learning the ropes of
things, the handles and names of whatever comes within the range of his
experience. He is busy acquiring that complex bundle of common-sense
knowledge that underlies all our grown-up acts, and which has become
so automatic with us that it hardly seems possible to us that we have
slowly acquired it all. We do not realize that thousands of facts and
habits, which have become stereotyped and practically unconscious in
our minds, are the fresh and vital experiences of the mind of the
little child. We cannot put ourselves back into that world where the
absorbing business is to give things a position and a name and to
learn all the little obvious facts about the things in the house and
the yard and the village, and in that far land of mystery beyond. What
sort of sympathy can we have with these little people,--we, to whom all
this naïve world of place and nomenclature is so familiar as to seem
intuitive? We should have to go back to a world where every passing
railroad train was a marvel and a delight, where a walk to the village
meant casting ourselves adrift into an adventurous country where
anything was likely to happen and where all calculations of direction
or return were upset. It takes children a long time to get accustomed
to the world. This common workaday knowledge of ours seems intuitive
to us only because we had so many years during which it was reiterated
to us, and not because we were unusually sensitive to impressions.
Children often seem almost as stupid as any young animal, and to
require long practice before they know their way around in the world,
although, once obtained, this common sense is never forgotten. That
child is virtuous who acquires all he can of it.
This curiosity of childhood makes children the first scientists. They
begin, as soon as their eyes are open, dissolving this confused mystery
of the world, distinguishing and classifying its parts according to
their interests and needs. They push on and on, ever widening the
circle, and ever bringing more and more of their experience under the
subjugation of their understanding. They begin the process that the
scientist completes. As children, after several years we came to know
our house and yard, although the attic and cellar were perhaps still
dim and fearsome places. Inside the household things were pretty
well tabulated and rationalized. It was only when we went outside the
gate that we might expect adventures to happen. We should have been
very much shocked to see the fire leap from the stove and the bread
from the table, as they did in the “Blue Bird,” but in walking down
to the village we should not have been surprised to see a giant or a
fairy sitting on the green. When we became familiar with the village,
the fairies were, of course, banished to remoter regions, until they
finally vanished altogether. But it is not so long ago that I lost the
last vague vestige of a feeling that there were fairies in England.
The facility, one might almost say skill, which children show in
getting lost, is the keynote of childhood’s world. For they have no
bearings among the unfamiliar, no principles for the solution of the
unknown. In their accustomed realm they are as wise and canny and
free from superstition as we are in ours. We, as grown-ups, have not
acquired any magical release from fantasy. The only difference is that
we are accustomed to make larger hazards of faith that things will
repeat themselves, and that we have a wider experience to check off
our novelties by. We have charted most of our world; we unfortunately
have no longer any world to get lost in. To be sure, we have opened
up perhaps an intangible world of philosophy and speculation, which
childhood does not dream of, and heaven knows we can get lost there!
But the thing is different. The adventure of childhood is to get lost
here in this everyday world of common sense which is so familiar to us.
To become really as little children we should have to get lost again
here. The best substitute we can give ourselves is to keep exploring
the new spiritual world in which we may find ourselves in youth and
middle life, pushing out ever, as the child does, our fringe of
mystery. And we can gain the gift of wonder, something that the child
does not have. He is too busy drinking in the facts to wonder about
them, or to wonder about what is beyond them. We may count ourselves
fortunate, however, that we are able to retain the child’s virtue of
curiosity, and transmute it into the beauty of spiritual wonder.
It is facts and not theories that the child is curious about, and
rightly. He cannot assimilate moral theories, nor can he assimilate
any other kind of theories. It is his virtue to learn how the world
runs; youth will be time enough to philosophize about that running.
It is the immediate and the present that interest children, and they
are omnivorous with regard to any facts about either. What they hear
about the world they accept without question. We often think when we
are telling them fairy stories or animal stories that we are exercising
their poetic imagination; but from their point of view we are telling
them sober facts about the world they live in. We are often surprised,
too, at the apathy they show in the midst of wonders that we point out
to them. They are wonders to us because we appreciate the labor or the
genius that has produced them. In other words, we have added a value
to them. But it is just this value which the child-mind does not get
and can never get. To the child they are not surprising, but simply
some more information about his world. All is grist that comes to the
child’s mill. Everything serves to plot and track for him a new realm
of things as they are.