human nature against all the cranks in Christendom. Human nature will
endure a faddist so long as he does not interfere with things it prizes.
One of these things is the right to select its partner for life. If a
man loves a girl he is not going to give her up because she happens to
have an aunt in a lunatic asylum or an uncle who has epileptic fits,"
etc. In the same way it may be said that a man will allow nothing to
interfere with his right to eat such food as he chooses, and is not
going to give up a dish he likes because it happens to be peppered with
arsenic. It may be so, let us grant, among savages. The growth of
civilization lies in ever-extended self-control guided by foresight.
[156] I have summarized some of the evidence on these points, especially
that showing that sexual attraction tends to be towards like persons and
not, as was formerly supposed, towards the unlike, in _Studies in the
Psychology of Sex_, Vol. IV, "Sexual Selection in Man."
[157] In other words, the process of tumescence is gradual and complex.
See Havelock Ellis, _Studies in the Psychology of Sex_, Vol. III, "The
Analysis of the Sexual Impulse."
[158] As Roswell Johnson remarks ("The Evolution of Man and its Control,"
_Popular Science Monthly_, January, 1910): "While it is undeniable that
love when once established defies rational considerations, yet we must
remark that sexual selection proceeds usually through two stages, the
first being one of mere mutual attraction and interest. It is in this
stage that the will and reason are operative, and here alone that any
considerable elevation of standard may be effective."
[159] Galton looked upon eugenics as fitted to become a factor in religion
(_Essays in Eugenics_, p. 68). It may, however, be questioned whether
this consummation is either probable or desirable. The same religious
claim has been made for socialism. But, as Dr. Eden Paul remarks in a
recent pamphlet on _Socialism and Eugenics_, "Whereas both Socialism and
Eugenics are concerned solely with the application of the knowledge
gained by experience to the amelioration of the human lot, it seems
preferable to dispense with religious terminology, and to regard the two
doctrines as complementary parts of the great modern movement known by
the name of Humanism." Personally, I do not consider that either
Socialism or Eugenics can be regarded as coming within the legitimate
sphere of religion, which I have elsewhere attempted to define
(Conclusion to _The New Spirit_).
[160] J. Grasset, in Dr. A. Marie's _Traité International de Psychologie
Pathologique_, 1910, Vol. I, p. 25. Grasset proceeds to discuss the
principles which must guide the physician in such consultations.
[161] This has been clearly realized by the German Society of Eugenics or
"Racial Hygiene," as it is usually termed in Germany (Internationale
Gesellschaft für Rassen-Hygiene), founded by Dr. Alfred Ploetz, with the
co-operation of many distinguished physicians and men of science, "to
further the theory and practice of racial hygiene." It is a chief aim of
this Society to encourage the registration by the members of the
biological and other physical and psychic characteristics of themselves
and their families, in order to obtain a body of data on which
conclusions may eventually be based; the members undertake not to enter
on a marriage except they are assured by medical investigation of both
parties that the union is not likely to cause disaster to either partner
or to the offspring. The Society also admits associates who only occupy
themselves with the scientific aspects of its work and with propaganda.
In England the Eugenics Education Society (with its organ the _Eugenics
Review_) has done much to stimulate an intelligent interest in
eugenics.
[162] How influential public opinion may be in the selection of mates is
indicated by the influence it already exerts--in less than a century--in
the limitation of offspring. This is well marked in some parts of
France. Thus, concerning a rural district near the Garonne, Dr. Belbèze,
who knows it thoroughly, writes (_La Neurasthénie Rurale_, 1911):
"Public opinion does not at present approve of multiple procreation.
Large families, there can be no doubt, are treated with contempt.
Couples who produce a numerous progeny are looked on, with a wink, as
'maladroits,' which in this region is perhaps the supreme term of
abuse.... Public opinion is all-powerful, and alone suffices to produce
restraint, when foresight is not adequate for this purpose."
VII
RELIGION AND THE CHILD
Religious Education in Relation to Social Hygiene and to
Psychology--The Psychology of the Child--The Contents of Children's
Minds--The Imagination of Children--How far may Religion be
assimilated by Children?--Unfortunate Results of Early Religious
Instruction--Puberty the Age for Religious Education--Religion as
an Initiation into a Mystery--Initiation among Savages--The
Christian Sacraments--The Modern Tendency as regards Religious
Instruction--Its Advantages--Children and Fairy Tales--The Bible of
Childhood--Moral Training.
It is a fact as strange as it is unfortunate that the much-debated
question of the religious education of children is almost exclusively
considered from the points of view of the sectarian and the secularist.
In a discussion of this question we are almost certain to be invited to
take part in an unedifying wrangle between Church and Chapel, between
religion and secularism. That is the strange part of it, that it should
seem impossible to get away from this sectarian dispute as to the
abstract claims of varying religious bodies. The unfortunate part of it
is that in this quarrel the interests of the community, the interests of
the child, even the interests of religion are alike disregarded.
If we really desire to reach a sound conclusion on a matter which is
unquestionably of great moment, both for the child and for the community
of which he will one day become a citizen, we must resolutely put into
the background, as of secondary importance, the cries of contending
sects, religious or irreligious. The first place here belongs to the
psychologist, who is building up the already extensive edifice of
knowledge concerning the real nature of the child and the contents and
growth of the youthful mind, and to the practical teacher who is in
touch with that knowledge and can bring it to the test of actual
experience. Before considering what drugs are to be administered we must
consider the nature of the organism they are to be thrust into.
The mind of the child is at once logical and extravagant, matter-of-fact
and poetic or rather mytho-poeic. This combination of apparent
opposites, though it often seems almost incomprehensible to the adult,
is the inevitable outcome of the fact that the child's dawning
intelligence is working, as it were, in a vacuum. In other words, the
child has not acquired the two endowments which chiefly give character
to the whole body of the adult's beliefs and feelings. He is without the
pubertal expansion which fills out the mind with new personal and
altruistic impulses and transforms it with emotion that is often
dazzling and sometimes distorting; and he has not yet absorbed, or even
gained the power of absorbing, all those beliefs, opinions, and mental
attitudes which the race has slowly acquired and transmitted as the
traditional outcome of its experiences.
The intellectual processes of children, the attitude and contents of the
child's mind, have been explored during recent years with a care and
detail that have never been brought to that study before. This is not a
matter of which the adult can be said to possess any instinctive or
matter-of-course knowledge. Adults usually have a strange aptitude to
forget entirely the facts of their lives as children, and children are
usually, like peoples of primitive race, very cautious in the deliberate
communication of their mental operations, their emotions, and their
ideas. That is to say that the child is equally without the internally
acquired complex emotional nature which has its kernel in the sexual
impulse, and without the externally acquired mental equipment which may
be summed up in the word tradition. But he possesses the vivid
activities founded on the exercise of his senses and appetites, and he
is able to reason with a relentless severity from which the
traditionalized and complexly emotional adult shrinks back with horror.
The child creates the world for himself, and he creates it in his own
image and the images of the persons he is familiar with. Nothing is
sacred to him, and he pushes to the most daring extremities--as it seems
to the adult--the arguments derived from his own personal experiences.
He is unable to see any distinction between the natural and the
supernatural, and he is justified in this conviction because, as a
matter of fact, he himself lives in what for most adults would be a
supernatural atmosphere; most children see visions with closed and
sometimes with open eyes;[163] they are not infrequently subject to
colour-hearing and other synæsthetic sensations; and they occasionally
hear hallucinatory voices. It is possible, indeed, that this is the case
with all children in some slight degree, although the faculty dies out
early and is easily forgotten because its extraordinary character was
never recognized.
Of 48 Boston children, says Stanley Hall,[164] 20 believed the sun, moon,
and stars to live, 16 thought flowers could feel, and 15 that dolls
would feel pain if burnt. The sky was found the chief field in which the
children exercise their philosophic minds. About three-quarters of them
thought the world a plain with the sky like a bowl turned over it,
sometimes believing that it was of such thin texture that one could
easily break through, though so large that much floor-sweeping was
necessary in Heaven. The sun may enter the ground when it sets, but half
the children thought that at night it rolls or flies away, or is blown
or walks, or God pulls it higher up out of sight, taking it up into
Heaven, according to some putting it to bed, and even taking off its
clothes and putting them on again in the morning, or again, it is
believed to lie under the trees at night and the angels mind it. God, of
whom the children always hear so much, plays a very large part in these
conceptions, and is made directly responsible for all cosmic phenomena.
Thus thunder to these American children was God groaning or kicking or
rolling barrels about, or turning a big handle, or grinding snow, or
breaking something, or rattling a big hammer; while the lightning is due
to God putting his finger out, or turning the gas on quick, or striking
matches, or setting paper on fire. According to Boston children, God is
a big, perhaps a blue, man, to be seen in the sky, on the clouds, in
church, or even in the streets. They declare that God comes to see them
sometimes, and they have seen him enter the gate. He makes lamps,
babies, dogs, trees, money, etc., and the angels work for him. He looks
like a priest, or a teacher, or papa, and the children like to look at
him; a few would themselves like to be God. His house in the sky may be
made of stone or brick; birds, children, and Santa Claus live with God.
Birds and beasts, their food and their furniture, as Burnham points out,
all talk to children; when the dew is on the grass "the grass is
crying," the stars are candles or lamps, perhaps cinders from God's
stove, butterflies are flying pansies, icicles are Christmas candy.
Children have imaginary play-brothers and sisters and friends, with whom
they talk. Sometimes God talks with them. Even the prosiest things are
vivified; the tracks of dirty feet on the floor are flowers; a creaking
chair talks; the shoemaker's nails are children whom he is driving to
school; a pedlar is Santa Claus.
Miss Miriam Levy once investigated the opinions of 560 children, boys
and girls, between the ages of 4 and 14, as to how the man in the moon
got there. Only 5 were unable to offer a serious explanation; 48 thought
there was no man there at all; 50 offered a scientific explanation of
the phenomena; but all the rest, the great majority, presented
imaginative solutions which could be grouped into seventeen different
classes.
Such facts as these--which can easily be multiplied and are indeed
familiar to all, though their significance is not usually
realized--indicate the special tendencies of the child in the religious
sphere. He is unable to follow the distinctions which the adult is
pleased to make between "real," "spiritual" and "imaginary" beings. To
him such distinctions do not exist. He may, if he so pleases, adopt the
names or such characteristics as he chooses, of the beings he is told
about, but he puts them into his own world, on a footing of more or less
equality, and he decides himself what their fate is to be. The adult's
supreme beings by no means always survive in the struggle for existence
which takes place in the child's imaginative world. It was found among
many thousand children entering the city schools of Berlin that Red
Riding Hood was better known than God, and Cinderella than Christ. That
is the result of the child's freedom from the burden of tradition.
Yet at the same time the opposite though allied peculiarity of
childhood--the absence of the emotional developments of puberty which
deepen and often cloud the mind a few years later--is also making itself
felt. Extravagant as his beliefs may appear, the child is an
uncompromising rationalist and realist. His supposed imaginativeness is
indeed merely the result of his logical insistence that all the new
phenomena presented to him shall be thought of in terms of himself and
his own environment. His wildest notions are based on precise, concrete,
and personal facts of his own experience. That is why he is so keen a
questioner of grown-up people's ideas, and a critic who may sometimes be
as dangerous and destructive as Bishop Colenso's Zulus. Most children
before the age of thirteen, as Earl Barnes states, are inquirers, if not
sceptics.
If we clearly realize these characteristics of the childish mind, we
cannot fail to understand the impression made on it by religious
instruction. The statements and stories that are repeated to him are
easily accepted by the child in so far, and in so far only, as they
answer to his needs; and when accepted they are assimilated, which means
that they are compelled to obey the laws of his own mental world. In so
far as the statements and stories presented to him are not acceptable or
cannot be assimilated, it happens either that they pass by him
unnoticed, or else that he subjects them to a cold and matter-of-fact
logic which exerts a dissolving influence upon them.
Now a few of the ideas of religion are assimilable by the child, and
notably the idea of a God as the direct agent in cosmic phenomena; some
of the childish notions I have quoted illustrate the facility with which
the child adopts this idea. He adopts, that is, what may be called the
hard precise skeleton of the idea, and imagines a colossal magician, of
anthropomorphic (if not paidomorphic) nature, whose operations are
curious, though they altogether fail to arouse any mysterious reverence
or awe for the agent. Even this is not very satisfactory, and Stanley
Hall, in the spirit of Froebel, considers that the best result is
attained when the child knows no God but his own mother.[165] But for the
most part the ideas of religion cannot be accepted or assimilated by
children at all; they were not made by children or for children, but
represent the feelings, thoughts, and experiences of men, and sometimes
even of very exceptional and abnormal men. "The child," it has been
said, "no doubt has the psychical elements out of which the religious
experience is evolved, just as the seed has the promise of the fruit
which will come in the fullness of time. But to say, therefore, that the
average child is religious, or capable of receiving the usual advanced
religious instruction, is equivalent to saying that the seed is the
fruit or capable of being converted into fruit before the fullness of
time."[166] The child who grows devout and becomes anxious about the state
of his soul is a morbid and unwholesome child; if he prefers praying for
the conversion of his play-fellows to joining them in their games he is
not so much an example of piety as a pathological case whose future must
be viewed with anxiety; and to preach religious duties to children is
exactly the same, it has been well said, as to exhort them to imagine
themselves married people and to inculcate on them the duties of that
relation. Fortunately the normal child is usually able to resist these
influences. It is the healthy child's impulse either to let them fall
with indifference or to apply to them the instrument of his unmerciful
logic.
Naturally, the adult, in self-defence, is compelled to react against
this indifferent or aggressive attitude of the child. He may be no match
for the child in logic, and even unspeakably shocked by his daring
inquiries, like an amiable old clergyman I knew when a Public School
teacher in Australia; he went to a school to give Bible lessons, and was
one day explaining how King David was a man after God's own heart, when
a small voice was heard making inquiries about Uriah's wife; the small
boy was hushed down by the shocked clergyman, and the cause of religion
was not furthered in that school. But the adult knows that he has on his
side tradition which has not yet been acquired by the child, and the
inner emotional expansion which still remains unliberated in the child.
The adult, therefore, fortified by this superiority, feels justified in
falling back on the weapon of authority: "You may not _want_ to believe
this and to learn it, but you've _got_ to."
It is in this way that the adult wins the battle of religious education.
In the deeper and more far-seeing sense he has lost it. Religion has
become, not a charming privilege, but a lesson, a lesson about
unbelievable things, a meaningless task to be learnt by heart, a
drudgery. It may be said that even if that is so, religious lessons
merely share the inevitable fate of all subjects which become school
tasks. But that is not the case. Every other subject which is likely to
become a school task is apt to become intelligible and attractive to
some considerable section of the scholars because it is within the range
of childish intelligence. But, for the two very definite reasons I have
pointed out, this is only to an extremely limited degree true as regards
the subject of religion, because the young organism is an instrument not
as yet fitted with the notes which religion is most apt to strike.
Of all the school subjects religion thus tends to be the least
attractive. Lobsien, at Kiel, found a few years since, in the course of
a psychological investigation, that when five hundred children (boys and
girls in equal numbers), between the ages of nine and fourteen, were
asked which was their favourite lesson hour, only twelve (ten girls and
two boys) named the religious lesson.[167] In other words, nearly 98 per
cent children (and nearly all the boys) find that religion is either an
indifferent or a repugnant subject. I have no reports at hand as regards
English children, but there is little reason to suppose that the result
would be widely different.[168] Here and there a specially skilful
teacher might bring about a result more favourable to religious
teaching, but that could only be done by depriving the subject of its
most characteristic elements.
This is, however, not by any means the whole of the mischief which, from
the religious point of view, is thus perpetrated. It might, on _a
priori_ grounds, be plausibly argued that even if there is among healthy
young children a certain amount of indifference or even repugnance to
religious instruction, that is of very little consequence: they cannot
be too early grounded in the principles of the faith they will later be
called on to profess; and however incapable they may now be of
understanding the teaching that is being inculcated in the school, they
will realize its importance when their knowledge and experience
increase. But however plausible this may seem, practically it is not
what usually happens. The usual effect of constantly imparting to
children an instruction they are not yet ready to receive is to deaden
their sensibilities to the whole subject of religion.[169] The premature
familiarity with religious influences--putting aside the rare cases
where it leads to a morbid pre-occupation with religion--induces a
reaction of routine which becomes so habitual that it successfully
withstands the later influences which on more virgin soil would have
evoked vigorous and living response. So far from preparing the way for a
more genuine development of religious impulse later on, this precocious
scriptural instruction is just adequate to act as an inoculation against
deeper and more serious religious interests. The commonplace child in
later life accepts the religion it has been inured to so early as part
of the conventional routine of life. The more vigorous and original
child for the same reason shakes it off, perhaps for ever.
Luther, feeling the need to gain converts to Protestantism as early as
possible, was a strong advocate for the religious training of children,
and has doubtless had much influence in this matter on the Protestant
churches. "The study of religion, of the Bible and the Catechism," says
Fiedler, "of course comes first and foremost in his scheme of
instruction." He was also quite prepared to adapt it to the childish
mind. "Let children be taught," he writes, "that our dear Lord sits in
Heaven on a golden throne, that He has a long grey beard and a crown of
gold." But Luther quite failed to realize the inevitable psychological
reaction in later life against such fairy-tales.
At a later date, Rousseau, who, like Luther, was on the side of
religion, realized, as Luther failed to realize, the disastrous results
of attempting to teach it to children. In _La Nouvelle Héloïse_,
Saint-Preux writes that Julie had explained to him how she sought to
surround her children with good influences without forcing any religious
instruction on them: "As to the Catechism, they don't so much as know
what it is." "What! Julie, your children don't learn their Catechism?"
"No, my friend, my children don't learn their Catechism." "So pious a
mother!" I exclaimed; "I can't understand. And why don't your children
learn their Catechism?" "In order that they may one day believe it. I
wish to make Christians of them."[170]
Since Rousseau's day this may be said to be the general attitude of
nearly all thinkers who have given attention to the question, even
though they may not have viewed it psychologically. It is an attitude by
no means confined to those who are anxious that children should grow up
to be genuine Christians, but is common to all who consider that the
main point is that children should grow up to be, at all events, genuine
men and women. "I do not think," writes John Stuart Mill, in 1868,
"there should be any _authoritative_ teaching at all on such subjects. I
think parents ought to point out to their children, when the children
begin to question them or to make observations of their own, the various
opinions on such subjects, and what the parents themselves think the
most powerful reasons for and against. Then, if the parents show a
strong feeling of the importance of truth, and also of the difficulty of
attaining it, it seems to me that young people's minds will be
sufficiently prepared to regard popular opinion or the opinion of those
about them with respectful tolerance, and may be safely left to form
definite conclusions in the course of mature life."[171]