EXERCISE OF MIND.
O heavens! how awful is the might of souls
And what they do within themselves while yet
The yoke of earth is new to them, the world
Nothing but a wild field where they were sown.
WORDSWORTH.
Learning is acquaintance with what others have felt, thought, and done;
knowledge is the result of what we ourselves have felt, thought, and
done. Hence a man knows best what he has taught himself; what personal
contact with God, with man, and with Nature has made his own. The
important thing, then, is not so much to know the thoughts and loves of
others, as to be able ourselves to think truly, and to love nobly. The
aim should be to rouse, strengthen, and illumine the mind rather than to
store it with learning; and the great educational problem has been, and
is, how to give to the soul purity of intention, to the conscience
steadfastness, and to the mind force, pliability, and openness to light;
or in other words, how to bring philosophy and religion to the aid of
the will so that the better self shall prevail and each generation
introduce its successor to a higher plane of life.
To this end the efforts of all teachers have, with more or less
consciousness, tended; and in this direction too, along winding ways and
with periods of arrest or partial return, the race of man has for ages
been moving; and he who aspires to gain a place in the van of the mighty
army on its heavenward march,--
"And draw new furrows 'neath the healthy morn
And plant the great Hereafter in this Now,"--
may be rash, but his spirit is not ignoble. To him it may not be given
"to fan and winnow from the coming step of Time the chaff of custom;"
but if he persevere he may confidently hope that his thought and love
shall at length rise to fairer and more enduring worlds. He weds himself
to things of light, seeks aids to true life within, learns to live with
the noble dead, and with the great souls of the present who have uttered
the truth whereby they live, in a way more intimate and higher than that
granted to those who are with them day by day; for minds are not
separated by time and space, but by quality of thought. But to be able
to love this life, and with all one's heart to seek this close communion
with God, with noble souls, and with Nature is not easy, and it may be
that it is impossible for those who are not drawn to it by irresistible
instincts. For the intellect, at least, attractions are proportional to
destiny; and the art of intellectual life is not most surely learned by
those whom circumstances favor, but by those whom will impels onward to
exercise of mind; whom neither daily wants, nor animal appetites, nor
hope of gain, nor low ambition, nor sneers of worldlings, nor prayers of
friends, nor aught else can turn from the pursuit of wisdom; who, with
ceaseless labor and with patient thought, eat their way in silence, like
caterpillars, to the light, become their own companions, walk uplifted
by their own thoughts, and by slow and imperceptible processes are
transformed and grow to be the embodiment of the truth and beauty which
they see and love.
The overmastering love of mental exercise, of the good of the intellect,
is probably never found in formal and prosaic minds; or if so, its first
awakening is in the early years when to think is to feel, when the soul,
fresh from God, comes trailing clouds of glory, and the sun and moon and
stars, and the hills and flowing waters seem but made to crown with joy
hearts that love. It is in these dewy dawns that the image of beauty is
imprinted on the soul and the sense of mystery awakens. We move about
and become a part of all we see, grow akin to stones and leaves and
birds, and to all young and happy things. We lose ourselves in life
which is poured round us like an unending sea; are natural, healthful,
alive to all we see and touch; have no misgivings, but walk as though
the eternal God held us by the hand. These are the fair spring days when
we suck honey that shall nourish us in the winters of which we do not
dream; when sunsets interfuse themselves with all our being until we are
dyed in the many-tinted glory; when the miracle of the changing year is
the soul's fair seed-time; when lying in the grass, the head resting in
clasped hands, while soft white clouds float lazily through azure skies,
and the birds warble, and the waters murmur, and the flowers breathe
fragrance, we feel a kind of unconscious consciousness of a universal
life in Nature. The very rocks seem to be listening to what the leaves
whisper; and through the silent eternities we almost see the dead
becoming the living, the living the dead, until both grow to be one, and
whatever is, is life.
He who has never had these visions; has never heard these airy voices;
has never seemed about to catch a glimpse of the inner heart of being,
pulsing beneath the veil of visible things; has never felt that he
himself is a spirit looking blindly on a universe, which if his eyes
could but see and his ears hear, would be revealed as the very heaven of
the infinite God,--must forever lack something of the freshness, of the
eager delight, with which a poetic mind contemplates the world and
follows whither the divine intimations point. This early intercourse
with Nature nourishes the soul, deepens the intellect, exalts the
imagination, and fills the memory with fair and noble forms and images
which abide with us, and as years pass on, gain in softness and purity
what they may lose in distinctness of outline and color. This is the
source of intellectual wealth, of tranquil moods, of patience in the
midst of opposition, of confidence in the fruitfulness of labor and the
transforming power of time. Here is given the material which must be
molded into form; the rude blocks which must be cut and dressed and
fitted together until they become a spiritual temple wherein the soul
may rest at one with God and Nature, and with its own thought and love.
To run, to jump, to ride, to swim, to skate, to sit in the shade of
trees by flowing water, to watch reapers at their work, to look on
orchards blossoming, to dream in the silence that lies amid the hills,
to feel the solemn loneliness of deep woods, to follow cattle as they
crop the sweet-scented clover,--to learn to know, as one knows a
mother's face, every change that comes over the heavens from the dewy
freshness of early dawn to the restful calm of evening, from the
overpowering mystery of the starlit sky to the tender human look with
which the moon smiles upon the earth,--all this is education of a higher
and altogether more real kind than it is possible to receive within the
walls of a school; and lacking this, nothing shall have power to develop
the faculties of the soul in symmetry and completeness. Hence a
philosopher has said there are ten thousand chances to one that genius,
talent, and virtue shall issue from a farmhouse rather than from a
palace. The daily intercourse with Nature in childhood and youth
intertwines with noble and enduring objects the passions which form the
mind and heart of man, whereas those who are shut out from such
communion are necessarily thrown into contact with what is mean and
vulgar; and since our early years, whatever our surroundings may have
been, seem to us sweet and fair because life itself is then a
clear-flowing fountain, they cannot help blending the memory of that
innocent and happy time with thoughts of base and mechanical objects,
or, it may be, of low and ignoble associates.
He is fortunate who, during the first ten years of his life, escapes the
confinement and repression of school, and lives at home in the country
amid the fields and the woods, day by day growing familiar with the look
on Nature's face, with all her moods, with every common object, with
living things in the air and the water and on the earth; who sees the
corn sprout, and watches it grow week after week until the yellow
harvest waves in the sunlight; who looks with unawed eye on rising
thunder-clouds and shouts with glee amid the lightning's play; who
learns to know that whatever he looks upon is thereby humanized, and to
feel that he is part of all he sees and loves. He will carry with him to
the study of the intellectual and spiritual world of men's thoughts shut
up in books, a strength of mind, a depth and freshness of heart which
only those can own who have drunk at Nature's deep flowing fountain, and
come up to life's training-course wet with her dews and with the
fragrance of her flowers on their breath. In the eyes of the old Greeks,
who first made education a science, the scholar was an idler,--one who
had leisure to look about him, to stroll amid the olive groves, to let
his eye rest upon the purple hills or the blue sea studded with green
isles, to listen to the brooks and the nightingales, to read the lesson
the fair earth teaches more than that imprinted on parchment; and the
school must still preserve something of this freedom from constraint,
must encourage the play of body and of mind, the delight natural to the
young in the exercise of strength of whatever kind, and thus as far as
possible lighten the labor and drudgery of elementary studies with
thoughts of liberty, of beauty, and of excellence. Let the boy feel how
good it is to be alive though life meant only the narrow world and the
mere surfaces of things with which alone it is possible for him to be
acquainted; and then when we ask him to believe that in high thinking
and in noble acting he will find a life infinitely more worthy, his
eager soul will be inflamed with a desire for knowledge and virtue, and
bearing in his heart the strength and wealth of imagination gained from
his early experience, his thoughts will turn to great and good men. Dim
visions of mighty conquerors, of poets at whose song the woods and waves
grow calm, of orators whose words with storm-like force, whatever way
they take, sweep with them the wills of men,--will rise before his mind.
His young fancy will endow them with preternatural qualities; and he
will yearn to draw near, to mingle with them and to catch the secret of
their divine power. The germ of the godlike within his bosom bursts and
springs. What they were, why may not he also become? What bars are
thrown athwart his path, what obstacles hem his way, which, whoever in
any age has excelled, has not had to break down and surmount? Here the
wise teacher comes to cheer him, to tell him his faith is not wrong, his
hope not without promise of attainment if he but trust himself, and bend
his whole mind to the task; that whatever goal within the scope of human
power, the will sets to itself, it may reach.
In order to develop, strengthen, and confirm this high mood, this noble
temper, let him by all means be made acquainted with the language and
genius of Greece. Here he will be introduced to a world of thought and
sentiment almost as fresh, as fair and many-sided as Nature
herself,--the fragrant blossoming in myriad hues and forms of the life
and mind of the most richly endowed portion of the human race. Not only
are the Greeks the most highly-gifted of all people, but in this
classical age they have also this special charm and power,--that the
keenest intellectual faculties are in them united with the feelings,
hopes, and fancies of a noble and great-hearted youth. Even Socrates and
Plato talk like high-souled boys who can see the world only in the light
of ideals, for whom what the mind beholds and the heart loves is alone
real. How healthfully they look on life, with what delight they breathe
the air! What fine contempt have they not of death, thinking no fortune
so good as that which comes to the hero who dies in a worthy cause!
There is Athens, already the world's university; but no books, no
libraries, no lecture-halls, only great teachers who walk about followed
by a crowd of youths eager to drink in their words. Here is the
Acropolis, with its snow-white temples and propylæum, fair and chaste as
though they had been built in heaven and gently lowered to this Attic
mound by the hands of angels. There in the Parthenon are the sculptures
of Phidias, and yonder in the temple of the Dioscuri, the paintings of
Polygnotus,--ideal beauty bodied forth to lure the souls of men to
unseen and eternal worlds. If they turn to the east, the isles of the
Ægean look up to them like virgins who welcome happy lovers; to the
west, Mount Pentelicus, from whose heart the architectural glory of the
city has been carved, bids them think what patience will enable man's
genius to accomplish; and to the north, Hymettus, fragrant with the
breath of a thousand herbs and musical with the hum of bees, stoops with
gentle undulations to their feet. They live in the air; their temples
are open to the sunlight; their theatres are uncovered to the heavens;
and whithersoever they move, they are surrounded by what is fair, noble,
and inspiring. This free and happy life in the company of great
teachers becomes the stimulus to the keenest exercise of mind. They are
as eager to see things in a true light as they are quick to sympathize
with whatever is heroic or beautiful; and all their talk is of truth and
justice, the good, the fair, the excellent, of philosophy, religion,
poetry, and art, and of whatever else seems favorable to human life and
to the development of ideal manhood. Of the merely useful they have the
scorn of young and inexperienced minds; and Hippocrates proclaims
himself ready to give Protagoras, not only whatever he himself
possesses, but also the property of his friends, if he will but teach
him wisdom. Superior knowledge was to them of all things the most
admirable and the most to be desired. What noble thoughts have they not
concerning education? "An intelligent man," says Plato, "will prize
those studies which result in his soul getting soberness, righteousness,
and wisdom, and will less value the others." The culture of the mind is
made a kind of religion, in the spreading of which the personal
influence of the teacher is not less active than the truths he sets
forth. Bonds of affection bind the disciple to the master whose words
have for him the sacredness of wisdom and the charm of genius, power to
confirm the will, and warmth and color whereby the imagination is
raised.
This secret of making knowledge attractive, of clothing truth in chaste
and beautiful language, of associating it with whatever is fair and
noble in Nature, and of relating it to life and conduct, which is part
of the genius of Greece, still lives in her literature; and to read the
words of her poets, orators, and philosophers is to feel the presence of
a high and active spirit, is to breathe in an intellectual atmosphere of
light and liberty, is of itself enlargement and cultivation of mind.
Hence, in the realms of thought, the Greeks are the civilizers and
emancipators of the world; and whoever thinks, is to some extent their
debtor. The music of their eloquence and poetry can never grow silent;
the forms of beauty their genius has created can never perish, and never
cease to win the admiration and love of noble minds and gentle hearts,
or to be the inspiration, generation after generation, to high thoughts
and heroic moods. So long as glory, beauty, freedom, light, and gladness
shall seem good and fair, so long will the finer spirits of the world
feel the attraction and the charm of Greece, and know the sweet surprise
which thrilled the heart of Keats when first he read Homer:--
"Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken,
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He stared at the Pacific, and all his men
Looked at each other with a wild surmise,
Silent, upon a peak in Darien."
In a less degree, Roman literature, which is the offspring of Greek
culture, has value as an intellectual stimulus and discipline. Here also
the youthful mind is brought into the presence of a great and noble
people, who, if they have less genius and a duller sense of beauty than
the Greeks, excel them in steadiness of purpose, in dignity of
character, in reverence for law and religion, and above all in the art
of governing.
The educational value of the classics does not lie so much in the Greek
and Latin languages as in the type of mind, the sense of proportion and
beauty, the heroic temper, the philosophic mood, the keen relish for
high enterprise, and the joyful love of life which they make known to
us. The world to which they introduce us is so remote that the
pre-occupations and vulgarities of the present, by which we all are
hemmed and warped, fall away from us; and it is at the same time so real
and of such absorbing interest that we are caught up in spirit and
carried to the Attic Plain and the hills of Latium. They are useful, not
because they teach us anything that may not be learned and learned more
accurately from modern books, but because they move the mind, fire the
heart, ennoble and refine the imagination in a way which nothing else
has power to do. They are sources of inspiration; they first roused the
modern mind to activity; and the potency of their influence can never
cease to be felt by those whose aptitudes lead them to the love of
intellectual perfection, who delight in the free play of the mind, who
are attracted by what is symmetrical, who have the instinct for beauty,
who swim in a current of ideas as naturally as birds fly in the air.
They appeal to the mind as a whole, stimulate all its faculties, awaken
a many-sided sympathy both with Nature and with the world of men. They
widen our view of life, bring forth in us the consciousness of our
kinship with the human race, and of the application to ourselves,
however common and uninspiring our surroundings may be, of the best
thoughts and noblest deeds which have ever sprung from the brain and
heart of man. They help to make one, again to quote Plato, "A lover, not
of a part of wisdom, but of the whole; who has a taste for every sort of
knowledge, and is curious to learn and is never satisfied; who has
magnificence of mind, and is a spectator of all time and all existence;
who is harmoniously constituted, of a well-proportioned and gracious
mind, whose own nature will move spontaneously toward the true being of
everything; who has a good memory, and is quick to learn, noble,
gracious, the friend of truth, justice, courage, temperance." The ideal
presented is that of complete harmonious culture, the aim of which is
not to make an artisan, a physician, a merchant, a lawyer, but a man
alive in all his faculties, touching the world at many points, for whom
all knowledge is desirable, all beauty lovable, and for whom fine
bearing and noble acting are indispensable.
It is needless to point out in what, or why, the Greeks failed, since
here there is question only of intellectual life, and in this they did
not fail. Nor is there any thought, in what has here been said, of
depreciating the worth of the study of science, without a certain
knowledge of which no one, in this age, can in any true sense, be called
educated. Whoever, indeed, learns a language properly, acquires
scientific knowledge; and the Greeks are not only the masters in poetry
and eloquence, they are also the guides to the right use of reason and
to scientific method, and the teachers of mathematics, logic, and
physics. He who pursues culture, in the Greek spirit, who desires to see
things as they are, to know the best that has been thought and done by
men, will fear nothing so much as the exclusion of any truth, and he
will be anxious to acquaint himself not only with the method, but as
far as possible with the facts, of physical science. Still he perceives
that however great the value of natural knowledge may be, it is, as an
instrument of culture, inferior to literature. We are educated by what
calls forth in us love and admiration, by what creates the exalted mood
and the steadfast purpose. In bowing with reverence to what is above us,
we are uplifted. When we are moved, we are more alive; we are stronger,
tenderer, nobler. Now to look upon Nature with the detective eye of the
man of science is to be cold and unsympathetic; to learn by methodic
experiment is to gain knowledge, which, since it is only remotely or
indirectly related to life, is but little interesting. Such knowledge is
a fragment, and a fragment extremely difficult to fit into the temple
built by thought and love, by hope and imagination; and hence when we
have learned a great deal about chemical elements, geologic epochs,
correlation of forces, and sidereal spaces, we are rather astonished
than enlightened. We are brought into the presence of a world which is
not that of the senses, nor yet that which faith, hope, and love
forebode; and the bearing it may have upon human life is of more
interest to us than the facts made known. We are, indeed, curious to
know whatever may, with any certainty, be told us of atoms and
biogenesis; but our real concern is to learn what significance such
truth may have in its relation to questions of God and the soul.
There is doubtless a disciplinary value in the study of physical
science. It trains the mind to habits of patient attention, of careful
observation, teaches the danger of hasty generalization, and diminishes
intellectual conceit; but these results may also be obtained by other
means. The aim of education is not simply to develop this or the other
faculty, however indispensable, nor yet to make one thoroughly
conversant with a particular order of facts, but the aim is to bring
about a conscious participation in the life of the race, to evoke all
the powers of man, so that his whole being shall be quickened and made
responsive to the touch of things seen and unseen; and the study of
science is less adapted to the attainment of this end than the study of
human letters. The scientific temper draws to specialties; and
specialists are narrow, are incomplete. They, each in his own line, do
good work, and are the chief agents for the increase of natural
knowledge, and are, we may grant, leaders in every kind of improvement;
but like the operatives who provide our comforts and luxuries, they are
themselves warped and crippled by what they do. The habit of looking at
a single order of facts, coldly and always from the same point of view,
takes from the mind flexibility, weakens the imagination, and puts
fetters on the soul; and hence though it is important that there be
specialists, the kind of education by which they are formed, while it is
suited to make a geologist, a chemist, a mathematician, or a botanist,
is not suited to call forth the free and harmonious play of all man's
powers. We do not live on facts alone, much less on facts of a single
kind. Religion and poetry, love, hope, and imagination are as essential
to our well-being as science. Human life is knowledge, is faith, is
conduct, is beauty, is manners; it unfolds itself in many directions and
shoots its roots into infinitude; and for the general purposes of
education, science is learned to best advantage when it is embodied in
literature, and its methods and results, rather than the details of its
work, are presented to us. Whatever it is able to do, to improve the
mind, to widen the range of thought, to give true notions of the
workings of Nature,--it will do for whoever learns accurately its
general conceptions and results; and these cannot remain unknown to him
whose aim is culture, for such an one is, as Plato says, "A lover not of
a part of wisdom, but of the whole, and has a taste for every sort of
knowledge, and is curious to learn, and is never satisfied; and though
he will not know medicine like a physician, or the heavens like an
astronomer, or the vegetable kingdom like a botanist, his mind will play
over all these realms with freedom, and he will know how to relate the
principles and facts of all the sciences to our sense for beauty, for
conduct, for life and religion in a way which a mere specialist can
never find." And his view will not only be wider and less impeded, it
will also be deeper than that of the man of science; for he who sees but
one order of things sees only their surfaces, just as he who sees but
one thing sees nothing at all.
It would be a mistake to imagine that the ideal here commended, means
superficial accomplishments, an excessive love of style and the
ornaments of poetry and eloquence, or preoccupation in favor of aught
external or frivolous. It is the very opposite of dilettantism, and if
it mean anything, means thoroughness, and a thoroughness which can come
only of untiring labor carried on through many years; for time and
intercourse with men and varied experience are indispensable elements.
It is like the ideal of religion which makes the saint think himself a
sinner; it is as exacting as the miser's thought which makes millions
seem to be beggary; like the artist's vision, like the poet's dream, it
allures and yet forbids hope of attainment. The seeker after wisdom
must have a high purpose, a strong soul, and the purest love of truth.
He cannot live in the senses alone, nor in the mind, nor in the heart
alone, but the spiritual being, which is himself, yearns for whatever is
good, whatever is true, whatever is fair, and so he finds himself akin
to the infinite God and to all that he has made. When his thought is
carried out to atoms weaving the garment which is our body, and molding
the world we see and touch; when he beholds motion lighting, warming,
thrilling the universe,--he is filled with intellectual joy, but at the
same time he perceives that all this is but a phase of truth; that God
and the boundless facts are infinitely more than drilled atomics
marshaled rank on rank until they form the countless hosts of the
heavens. When the men of science have labeled the elements, and put
tickets upon all natural compounds, and with complacency declare that
this is the whole truth, he looks on the flowers around him and the
blooming children, on the stars above his head, on the sun slow wheeling
down the western horizon, on the moon climbing some eastern hill, and
his inmost soul is glad because he feels the thrill of the infinite,
living Spirit, and forebodes to what fair countries we are bound.
And when they proclaim the wonders science has wrought,--increase of
physical enjoyment and social comfort; the yoking of lightning and steam
to make them work for man; the providing of more abundant food; the
building of more wholesome dwellings; the lengthening of life; temporal
benefits of every kind,--he joins with those who utter praise, but knows
that infinitely more than all this goes to the making of man's life. So
he turns his mind in many directions, and while he looks on the truth in
science, does not grow blind to the truth in religion; while he knows
the value of what is practically useful, understands also the priceless
worth of what is noble and beautiful, and his acquaintance with many
kinds of thought, with many shades of opinion confirms him, as Joubert
says, in the acceptance of the best.