THE NATURAL POSSESSIONS OF MAN.
What are the powers of the human being?
I speak of those powers only which are the object of education. There
are some which work of themselves for the preservation of life, and with
which we have nothing to do but to let them work freely. The heart
beats, the stomach digests, the lungs play, the skin transpires, without
any care of ours, and we have only to avoid hindering any of these
actions.
Next, man has four limbs. Of these, two have to be trained to move him
from place to place in a great variety of ways. There are many degrees
of agility between the bow-legged cripple, set too early upon his feet,
and the chamois hunter of the Alps, who leaps the icy chasms of the
glacier, and springs from point to point of the rock. The two seem
hardly to be of the same race; yet education has made each of them what
he is.
The two other limbs depend upon training for much of their strength and
use. Look at the pale student, who lives shut up in his study, never
having been trained to use his arms and hands but for dressing and
feeding himself, turning over books, and guiding the pen. Look at his
spindles of arms and his thin fingers, and compare them with the brawny
limbs of the blacksmith, or the hands of the quay porter, whose grasp is
like that of a piece of strong machinery. Compare the feeble and awkward
touch of the book-worm who can hardly button his waistcoat, or carry his
cup of tea to his mouth, with the power that the modeller, the ivory
carver, and the watchmaker have over their fingers. It is education
which has made the difference between these.
Man has five senses. Though much is done by the incidents of daily life
to exercise all the five, still a vast difference ensues upon varieties
of training. A fireman in London, and an Indian in the prairie, can
smell smoke when nobody else is aware of it. An epicure can taste a cork
in wine, or a spice in a stew, to the dismay of the butler, and the
delight of the cook, when every one else is insensible. One person can
feel by the skin whether the wind is east or west before he gets out of
bed in the morning; while another has to hold up a handkerchief in the
open air, or look at the weathercock, before he can answer the
question--"How's the wind?"
As for the two noblest senses, there are great constitutional
differences among men. Some are naturally short-sighted, and some dull
of hearing; but the differences caused by training are more frequent and
striking. If, of two boys born with equally good eyes and ears, one is
very early put, all alone, to keep sheep on a hill side, where he never
speaks or is spoken to, and comes home only to sleep, and the other
works with his father at joiner's work, or in sea-fishing, or at a
water-mill, they will, at manhood, hardly appear to belong to the same
race. While the one can tell veneer from mahogany in passing a
shop-window, the other cannot see any difference between one stranger's
face and another's. While the sleepy clown cannot distinguish sea from
land half a mile off, the fisherman can see the greyest sail of the
smallest sloop among the billows on the horizon. While the shepherd does
not hear himself called till the shout is in his ear, the miller tells
by the fireside, by the run of the water, whether the stream is
deepening or threatening to go dry. Of course, the quickness or slowness
of the mind has much to do with these differences of eye and ear; but
besides that, the eye and ear differ according to training. The miller,
with his mind and ear all awake, would hear, with all his efforts, only
four or five birds' notes in a wood, where a naturalist would hear
twenty; and the fisherman might declare the wide air to be vacant, when
a mountain sportsman would see an eagle, like a minute speck, indicating
by its mode of flight where the game lay below.
Man has a capacity for pleasure and pain.
This is an all-important part of his nature of which we can give no
account, because it is incomprehensible. How he feels pleasure and pain,
and why one sensation or thought delights him and another makes him
miserable, nobody ever knew yet, or perhaps ever will know. It is enough
for us that the fact is so. Of all the solemn considerations involved in
the great work of education, none is so awful as this--the right
exercise and training of the sense of pleasure and pain. The man who
feels most pleasure in putting brandy into his stomach, or in any other
way gratifying his nerves of sensation, is a mere beast. One whose chief
pleasure is in the exercise of the limbs, and who plays without any
exercise of the mind, is a more harmless sort of animal, like the lamb
in the field, or the swallow skimming over meadow or pool. He whose
delight is to represent nature by painting, or to build edifices by some
beautiful idea, or to echo feelings in music, is of an immeasurably
higher order. Higher still is he who is charmed by thought, above
everything--whose understanding gives him more satisfaction than any
other power he has. Higher still is he who is never so happy as when he
is making other people happy--when he is relieving pain, and giving
pleasure to two, or three, or more people about him. Higher yet is he
whose chief joy it is to labour at great and eternal thoughts, in which
lies bound up the happiness of a whole nation and perhaps a whole world,
at a future time when he will be mouldering in his grave. Any man who
is capable of this joy, and at the same time of spreading comfort and
pleasure among the few who live round about him, is the noblest human
being we can conceive of. He is also the happiest. It is true that his
capacity for pain is exercised and enlarged, as well as his power of
feeling pleasure. But what pains such a man is the vice, and folly, and
misery of his fellow-men; and he knows that these must melt away
hereafter in the light of the great ideas which he perceives to be in
store for them: while his pleasure being in the faith of a better future
is as vivid and as sure as great thoughts are clear and eternal. For an
illustration of this noblest means of happiness, we had better look to
the highest instance of all. I have always thought that we are apt to
dwell too much on the suffering and sorrow of the lot and mind of
Christ. Our reverence and sympathy should be more with his abounding
joy. I think those who read with clear eyes and an open mind will see
evidences of an unutterable joy in his words--may almost think they hear
it in his tones, when he promised heaven to the disinterested and earth
to the meek, and satisfaction to the earnest; when he welcomed the faith
of the centurion, and the hope of the penitent, and the charity of the
widow; when he foresaw the incoming of the Gentiles, and knew that
heaven and earth should pass away sooner than his words of life and
truth. The sufferings of the holy can never surely transcend their
peace: and whose fulness of joy can compare with theirs?
Before man can feel pleasure or pain from outward objects or from
thoughts, he must perceive them. To a new-born infant, or a blind person
enabled to see for the first time, objects before the eyes can hardly be
said to exist. The blue sky and a green tree beside a white house are
not seen but as a blotch of colours which touches the eye. This is the
account given by persons couched for cataract, who have never before
seen a ray of light. They see as if they saw not. But the power is in
them. By degrees they receive the images, and perceive the objects. A
child learns to receive sounds separately; then to perceive one voice
among others; then to distinguish one tone from another--the voice of
soothing from that of playfulness--the tone of warning from that of
approbation; then it receives thoughts through the sounds; and so on,
till the power is exercised to the fullest extent that we know of--when
distinct ideas are admitted from the minutest appearances or
leadings--strange bodies detected in the heavens, and fresh truths in
the loftiest regions of human speculation. It depends much on training
whether objects and thoughts remain for life indistinct and confused
before the perceptive power, as before infant vision, or whether all is
clear and vivid as before a keen and practised eye.
We know not how Memory acts, any more than we understand how we feel
pleasure and pain. But we all know how the power of recalling images,
words, thoughts, and feelings, depends on exercise. A person whose power
of memory has been neglected has little use of his past life. The time,
and people, and events that have passed by have left him little better
than they found him: while every day, every person, and every incident
deposits some wealth of knowledge with him whose memory can receive and
retain his experience.
Then there are other powers which it will be enough merely to mention
here, as we shall have to consider them more fully hereafter. Man has
the power, after perceiving objects and thoughts, to compare them, and
see when they differ and agree; to penetrate their nature, and
understand their purpose and action. It is thus that he obtains a
knowledge of creation, and the curious powers, whether hidden or open to
view, which are for ever at work in it.
He can reason from what he knows to what he has reason to suppose, and
put his idea to the proof. He can imitate what he sees; and also the
idea in his mind; and hence comes invention; and that wise kind of guess
into what is possible which leads to great discovery; discovery
sometimes of a vast continent, sometimes of a vast agency in nature for
men's uses, sometimes of a vast truth which may prove a greater
acquisition to men's souls than a new hemisphere for their habitation.
Man has also a wonderful power of conceiving of things about which he
cannot reason. We do not know how it is, but the more we dwell on what
is beautiful and striking, what is true before our eyes and impressive
to our minds, the more able we become to conceive of things more
beautiful, striking, and noble, which have never existed, but might well
be true. None of our powers require more earnest and careful exercise
than this grand one of the Imagination. Those in whom it is suppressed
can never be capable of heroic acts, of lofty wisdom, of the purest
happiness. Those in whom it is neglected may exercise the little power
they have in a fruitless direction, probably aggravating their own
faults, and certainly wasting the power on ideas too low for it, as the
voluptuary who dreams of selfish pleasure, or the despot, grand or
petty, who makes visions of unchecked tyranny. Those in whom it is
healthily exercised will become as elevated and expanded as their nature
admits, and one here and there proves a Mahommed, lifting up half the
human race into a higher condition; or a Raffaelle, bringing down
seraphs and cherubs from heaven, and so clothing them as that men may
look upon them and grow like them; or a Shakspere who became a creator
in that way which is truly no impiety, but, on the contrary, the highest
worship. Men are apt, in all times and everywhere, to blaspheme, by
attributing to God their own evil passions and narrow ideas. It is
through this power of the Imagination that they rise to that highest
ideal which is the truest piety. They rise to share godlike attributes;
the prophet seeing "the things that are not as though they were," and
the poet creating beings that live and move and have their being,
immortal in the mind of man. Such a power resides more or less in every
infant that lies in the bosom of every family. Alas for its guardians if
they quench this power, or turn it into a curse and disease by foul
feeding!
Then, the Emotions of men are so many powers, to be recognised and
trained. Of the power of Hope there is no need to speak, for all see
what it is as a stimulus, both in particular acts, and through the whole
course of a life. Fear is hardly less important, though it is intended
to die out, or rather to pass into other and higher kinds of feeling. A
child who has never known a sensation of fear (if there be such an one)
can never be a man of a high order. He must either be coarsely made in
body, or unable to conceive of anything but what is familiar to him. A
child whose heart beats at shadows and the fitful sounds of the
invisible wind, and who hides his face on his mother's bosom when the
stars seem to be looking at him as they roll, is no philosopher at
present; but he is likely to grow into one if this fear is duly trained
into awe, humility, thoughtfulness, till, united with knowledge, it
becomes contemplation, and grows into that glorious courage which
searches all through creation for ultimate truth. Out of Fear, too,
grows our power of Pity. Without fear of pain, we could not enter into
the pain of others. Fear must be lost in reverence and love: but
reverence and love could never be so powerful as they ought to be, if
they were not first vivified by the power of Fear.
What the power of Love is, in all its forms, there is no need to declare
to any one who has an eye and a heart. In the form of Pity, how it led
Howard to spend his life in loathsome prisons, crowded with yet more
loathsome guilt! In other forms, how it sustains the unwearied mother
watching through long nights over her wailing infant! How it makes of a
father, rough perhaps to all others, a holy and tender guardian of his
pure daughters! and how it makes ministering angels of them to him in
turn! How we see it, everywhere in the world, making the feeble and
otherwise scantily-endowed strong in self-denial, cheerful to endure,
fearless to die! A mighty power surely is that which, breathing from the
soul of an individual man, can "conquer Death, and triumph over Time."
Then there is in man a force by which he can win and conquer his way
through all opposition of circumstance, and the same force in others.
This power of Will is the greatest force on earth--the most important
to the individual, and the most influential over the whole race. A
strong Will turned to evil lets hell loose upon the world. A strong Will
wholly occupied with good might do more than we can tell to bring down
Heaven into the midst of us. If among all the homes of our land, there
be one infant in whom this force is discerned working strongly, and if
that infant be under such guardianship as to have its will brought to
bear on things that are pure, holy, and lovely, to that being we may
look as to a regenerator of his race. He may be anywhere where there are
children. Are there any parents who will not look reverently into the
awful nature of their children, search into their endowments, and try of
every one of them whether it may not be he? If not he, it is certain
that every one of them is a being too mysterious, too richly gifted, and
too noble in faculties not to be welcomed and cherished as a heaven-sent
stranger. How can we too carefully set in order the home in which it is
to dwell?