The results indeed are all too obvious, and yet it must be presumed that

the individual has endeavoured to do the _right_ and not the _wrong_

thing. Does any one set out to catch a train relying upon a watch which

as he knows perfectly well is unreliable? Would any sane person place

dependence on the reading of a thermometer that he knows to be

defective? No, we must admit not only that there is a failure to

register accurately in the sensory appreciation, but also that the fault

is unrecorded in the conscious mind. And it is for this reason that the

pupil must be given a new and correct guiding and controlling centre,

before being asked to perform even the simplest acts in accordance with

his own idea and judgment.

Some understanding of these slightly technical and practical details is

necessary in order to form a clear idea of what is meant by the simple

word “habit,” which was the origin of this discussion; but I shall

return to a fuller analysis of method in this relation in Part II of

this work. What I wish to emphasise in this place is that the evil,

disturbing habit which it is necessary to eradicate is in the ordinary

experience both permanent and unrecognised. It may in some cases have

been originally incurred above the plane of reason, but this form of

habit is invariably perpetuated in the subconsciousness. On the other

hand, the mode of functioning which is substituted, but which may

nevertheless be spoken of quite correctly by the same term of “habit,”

is as subject to control as the routine of a well-organised office.

Certain rules are established for the ordinary conduct of business, but

the controller of that business must be at liberty to break the rules or

to modify them at his discretion. The man who allows an office to take

precedence of any other consideration—and I have known instances of such

a morbid concession to traditional procedure in business houses—is

surely and steadily on the way to commercial failure.

I will now take an illustration of the principle from my own practice.

Suppose a patient comes to me who has acquired incorrect respiratory

habits, and suppose he is plastic and ready to assimilate new methods,

and that after receiving the new guiding orders from me, he soon learns

consciously to make a proper use of the muscular mechanism which governs

the movements of the breathing apparatus, a word that fitly describes

this particular mechanism of the body. Now it would be absurd to suppose

that thereafter this person should in his waking moments deliberately

apprehend each separate working of his lungs, any more than we should

expect the busy manager of affairs constantly to supervise the routine

of his well-ordered staff. He has acquired conscious control of that

working, it is true, but once that control has been mastered, the actual

movements that follow are given in charge of the “subconscious self”

although always on the understanding that a counter order may be given

at any moment if necessary. Until, however, such counter order is given,

if ever it need be given, the working of the lungs is for all intents

and purposes subconscious, though it may be elevated to the level of the

conscious at any moment. Thus it will be seen that the difference

between the new habit and the old is that the old was our master and

ruled us, whilst the new is our servant ready to carry out our lightest

wish without question, though always working quietly and unobtrusively

on our behalf in accordance with the most recent orders given.

Briefly, as I see it, the subconsciousness in this application is only a

synonym for that rigid routine we finally refer to as habit, this rigid

routine being the stumbling-block to rapid adaptability, to the

assimilation of new ideas, to originality. On the other hand, the

consciousness is the synonym for mobility of mind, that mobility which

the subconscious control checks and impedes, mobility which will obtain

for us physical regeneration and a mental outlook that will make

possible for us a new and wider enjoyment of those powers which we all

possess, but which are so often deliberately stunted or neglected.

Consider this point also in its application to the case of John Doe,

cited in my second chapter. If the mental attitude of that individual

had been changed, and he had learned to use his muscles consciously; if,

instead of automatically performing a set of muscle-tensing exercises,

he had devoted himself to apprehending the control and co-ordination of

his muscles, he could have carried his knowledge into every act of his

life. In his most sedentary occupations he could have been using and

exercising his muscular system without resort to any violent

contortions, waving of the arms or kicking of the legs, and I cannot but

think that he could better have employed the hours spent in this manner

by taking a walk in the open air or by occupying himself with some other

form of natural exercise. Still, if in his case certain mild forms of

exercise at certain times were necessary, such exercises should have

employed his mental and physical powers, and through these agencies he

should have used his muscular mechanism in such a way that its uses

could have been applied to the simplest acts, such as sitting on a stool

and writing at a desk. There would then have been no question of what we

have termed “civil war” within his body; the whole physical machinery

would have been co-ordinated and adapted to his way of life.

In an earlier paragraph I pointed out that John Doe was suffering from

certain mental and physical delusions, and I endeavoured to show how

these delusions militated against his recovery of health. Returning to

this point now that the correct method has been indicated, I may use his

case to give another example of this method. What John Doe lacked was a

conscious and proper recognition of the right uses of the parts of his

muscular mechanism, since while he still uses such parts wrongly, the

performance of physical exercises will only increase the defects. He

will, in fact, merely copy some other person in the performance of a

particular exercise, copy him in the outward act, while his own

consciousness of the act performed and the means and uses of his

muscular mechanism will remain unaltered. Therefore before he attempts

any form of physical development, he must discover, or find some one who

can discover for him, what his defects are in the uses indicated. When

this has been done he must proceed to inhibit the guiding sensations

which cause him to use the mechanism imperfectly; he must apprehend the

position of mechanical advantage, and then by using the new correct

guiding sensations or orders, he will be able to bring about the proper

use of his muscular mechanism with perfect ease. If the mechanical

principle employed is a correct one, every movement will be made with a

minimum of effort, and he will not be conscious of the slightest

tension. In time a recognition will follow of the new and correct use of

the mechanism, which use will then become provisionally established and

be employed in the acts of everyday life.

For instance, if we decide that a defect must be got rid of or a mode of

action changed, and if we proceed in the ordinary way to eradicate it by

any direct means, we shall fail invariably, and with reason. For when

defects in the poise of the body, in the use of the muscular mechanisms,

and in the equilibrium are present in the human being, the condition

thus evidenced is the result of an _undue rigidity_ of parts of the

muscular mechanisms associated with _undue flaccidity_ of others. This

undue rigidity is always found in those parts of the muscular mechanisms

which are forced to perform duties other than those intended by nature,

and are consequently ill-adapted for their function.

As Herbert Spencer writes:

“Each faculty acquires fitness for its function by performing its

function; and if its function is performed for it by a substituted

agency, none of the required adjustment of nature takes place, but the

nature becomes deformed to fit the artificial arrangements instead of

the natural arrangements.”

Unfortunately, all conscious effort exerted in attempts at physical

action causes in the great majority of the people of to-day such tension

of the muscular system concerned as to lead to exaggeration rather than

eradication of the defects already present. Therefore it is essential at

the outset of re-education to bring about the relaxation of the unduly

rigid parts of the muscular mechanisms in order to secure the correct

use of the inadequately employed and wrongly co-ordinated parts.

Let us take for example the case of a man who habitually stiffens his

neck in walking, sitting, or other ordinary acts of life. This is a sign

that he is endeavouring to do with the muscles of his neck the work

which should be performed by certain other muscles of his body, notably

those of the back. Now if he is told to relax those stiffened muscles of

the neck and obeys the order, this mere act of relaxation deals only

with an effect and does not quicken his consciousness of the use of the

right mechanism which he should use in place of those relaxed. The

desire to stiffen the neck muscles should be inhibited as a preliminary

(which is not the same thing at all as a direct order to relax the

muscles themselves), and then the true uses of the muscular mechanism,

i.e., the means of placing the body in a position of mechanical

advantage, must be studied, when the work will naturally devolve on

those muscles intended to carry it out, and the neck will be relaxed

unconsciously. In this case the conscious orders, by which I mean the

orders given to the right muscles, are preventive orders, and the due

sequence of cause and effect is maintained.

I will, here, only note one more point in concluding my reference to the

hypothetical John Doe, who, nevertheless, stands as the representative

of a very large body of people. This point is the question of the

storing and reserving of energy, and, to use a phrase which has a

mechanical equivalent, the registration of tension. If you ask a man to

lift a _papier-mâché_ imitation of an enormous dumb-bell, leading him to

believe that it is almost beyond his capacity to raise it from the

floor, he will exert his full power in the effort to do that which he

could perform with the greatest ease. In a lesser degree the same

expenditure of unnecessary force is exerted by the vast majority of

“physical culture” students, and by practically every person in the

ordinary duties of daily life. The kinæsthetic system has not been

taught to register correctly the tension or, in other words, to gauge

accurately the amount of muscular effort required to perform certain

acts, the expenditure of effort always being in excess of what is

required, an excellent instance of the lack of harmony in the untutored

organism. This fact may be easily tested by any interested person who

will take the trouble to try its application. Ask a friend to lift a

chair or any other object of such weight that, while it may be lifted

without great difficulty, will in the process make an undoubted call on

the muscular energies. You will see at once that your friend will

approach the task with a definite preconception as to the amount of

physical tension necessary. His mind is exclusively occupied with the

question of his own muscular effort, instead of with the purpose in

front of him and the best means to undertake it. Before he has even

approached it, he will brace or tense the muscles of his arms, back,

neck, etc., and when about to perform the act he will place himself in a

position which is actually one of mechanical disadvantage as far as he

is concerned. Not only are all these preparations of course quite

unnecessary, but the whole attitude of mind towards the task is wrong.

In such instances as this, any preconception as to the degree of tension

required is out of place. If we desire to lift a weight with the least

possible waste of energy, we should approach it and grasp it with

relaxed muscles, assuming the position of greatest possible mechanical

advantage, and then gradually exert our muscular energies until

sufficient power is attained to overcome the resistance.

Returning now to the consideration of that bias or predisposing habit of

mind which so often balks us at the outset, we may see at once that this

predisposition takes many curious forms. Sometimes, it is frankly

objective, and is outlined in the statement, “Well, I don’t believe in

all this, but I may as well try it.” In this form a single unlooked-for

result is generally enough to change disbelief into credulity. I write

the word “credulity” with intention, for I mean to imply that the

reaction in a certain type of mind is little, if any, better than the

profession of disbelief. What is required is not prejudice in either

direction, but a calm, clear, open-eyed intelligence, a ready, adaptive

outlook, an outlook, believe me, which does not connote indefiniteness

of purpose or uncertainty of initiative.

Another form of predisposition arises from lack of purpose, and the

mental habits that go with this condition are hard to eradicate, more

particularly when the original feebleness has led to some form of

hypochondria or nervous disease which has been treated with the usual

disregard of the radical evil. It is not difficult for the most

superficial enquirer to understand that in treating cases like these any

method which relieves the subject still further of the exercise of

initiative—such a method as the rest cure, for instance, though I could

quote many others—only increases the original evil. The lack of purpose

is pandered to and cultivated, and after the six weeks or so of

treatment, the patient returns to his or her duties in ordinary life,

even more unfitted than before to perform them. As I have said before,

no account is taken of the instinct for self-preservation or the will to

live. This is the very mainspring of human life, yet in the routine of

our protected civilisation even its power tends at times to become

relaxed, and the machinery runs down. The machinery should then be wound

up again, instead of being allowed to become still further relaxed by

resting. This lack of purpose, the immediate effect of our educational

methods, is unhappily very common in all classes, but especially among

those who have no occupation, or those whose employment is a mechanical

routine which does not exercise the powers of initiative. The curious

thing about this very large class is that they do not really want to be

cured. They may be suffering from many physical disabilities or from

actual physical pain, and they may and will protest most earnestly that

they want to be free from their pains and disabilities, but in face of

the evidence we must admit that if the objective wish is really there,

it is so feeble as to be non-existent for all practical purposes. In

many cases this attitude of submission to illness is the outcome of a

strong subjective habit. The trouble, whatever it is, is endured in the

first instance; it is looked upon as a nuisance, perhaps, but not as an

intolerable nuisance; no steps are taken to get rid of it, and the

trouble grows until, by degrees, it is looked upon as a necessity. Then

at last, when the trouble has increased until it threatens the

interruption of all ordinary occupations, the sufferer seeks a remedy.

But the habit of submission has grown too strong, and as long as the

disease can be kept within certain bounds, no effort is made to fight

it. This is of course one of the commonest experiences in the healing

profession. A patient is treated and benefited and seems on the high

road to perfect health. Then follows a relapse. The first question put

is, “Have you been following the treatment?” and the answer, if the

patient is truthful, is “I forgot,” or “I didn’t bother any more about

it.” In a recent experience of a medical friend of mine, a patient

confessed to having stayed in the house for a week after a certain

relapse occurred, although the very essence of the prescription by which

he had previously benefited was to be in the fresh air as much as

possible. This simply means that the subjective habit of submission has

grown so strong that the objective mind, weakened in its turn by the

neglect of its guiding functions, is unable to conquer it. No

prescription or course of treatment can have any effect upon such a

patient as this, unless the subjective habit can be brought within the

sphere of conscious control. In other cases this apparent lack of desire

for health is due to an attachment to some dearly loved habit, which

must be given up if the proper functions of the body are to be resumed.

It may be a habit of petty self-indulgence or one that is imminently

threatening the collapse of the vital processes, but the attachment to

it is so strong that the enfeebled objective mind prefers to hold to the

habit and risk death sooner than make the effort of opposing it. Even in

cases where no harm can be traced directly to a markedly influencing

habit, the general all-pervading habit of lassitude or inertia is so

strong that any régime which may be prescribed is distasteful if it

involves, as it must, the exercise of those powers which have been

allowed to fall more or less into disuse.

Space will not permit of my giving further instances of the predisposing

habit, but very little introspection on the part of my readers should

enable them to diagnose their own peculiar mental habits, the first step

towards being rid of them. We must always remember that the vast

majority of human beings live very narrow lives, doing the same thing

and thinking the same thoughts day by day, and it is this very fact that

makes it so necessary that we should acquire conscious control of the

mental and physical powers as a whole, for we otherwise run the risk of

losing that versatility which is such an essential factor in their

development.

If, at this point, the reader feels inclined to analyse these habits and

to set about a control of them, I will give him one word of preliminary

advice, “Beware of so-called concentration.”

This advice is so pertinent to the whole principle that it is worth

while to elaborate it. Ask any one you know to concentrate his mind on a

subject—anything will do—a place, a person, or a thing. If your friend

is willing to play the game and earnestly endeavours to concentrate his

mind, he will probably knit his forehead, tense his muscles, clench his

hands, and either close his eyes or stare fixedly at some point in the

room. As a result his mind is very fully occupied with this unusual

condition of the body which can only be maintained by repeated orders

from the objective mind. In short, your friend, though he may not know

it, is not using his mind for the consideration of the subject you have

given him to concentrate upon, but for the consideration of an unusual

bodily condition which he calls “concentration.” This is true also of

the attitude of _attention_ required for children in schools; it

dissociates the brain instead of compacting it. Personally, I do not

believe in any concentration that calls for effort. It is the wish, the

conscious desire to do a thing or think a thing, which results in

adequate performance. Could Spencer have written his _First Principles_,

or Darwin his _Descent of Man_, if either had been forced to any rigid

narrowing effort in order to keep his mind on the subject in hand? I do

not deny that some work can be done under conditions which necessitate

such an artificially arduous effort, but I do deny that it is ever the

best work. Nor will I admit that such a case as that of Sir Walter Scott

can logically be argued against this view. For the real earnest wish to

write the Waverley novels was there, even if it originated in the desire

to pay the debts he took upon himself, and not in the desire to write

the novels because he took a pleasure in the actual performance.

Briefly, our application of the word “concentration” denotes a conflict

which is a morbid condition and a form of illness; singleness of purpose

is quite another thing. If you try to straighten your arm and bend it at

the same moment, you may exercise considerable muscular effort, but you

will achieve no result, and the analogy applies to the endeavour to

delimit the powers of the brain by concentration, and at the same time

to exercise them to the full extent. The endeavour represents the

conflict of the two postulates “I must” and “I can’t”; the fight

continues indefinitely, with a constant waste of misapplied effort. Once

eradicate the mental habit of thinking that this effort is necessary,

once postulate and apprehend the meaning of “I wish” instead of those

former contradictions, and what was difficult will become easy, and

pleasure will be substituted for pain. We must cultivate, in brief, the

deliberate habit of taking up every occupation with the whole mind, with

a living desire to carry each action through to a successful

accomplishment, a desire which necessitates bringing into play every

faculty of the attention. By use this power develops, and it soon

becomes as simple to alter a morbid taste which may have been a lifelong

tendency as to alter the smallest of recently acquired bad habits.

The following is an interesting experience with a pupil who was strongly

inclined to a belief in the value and power of concentration. This pupil

contested vigorously my attacks on the object of her faith, as practised

in accordance with the orthodox conception. She put forward the usual

arguments, of course, and I quite failed to make any impression on her

mental attitude towards the vexed question under discussion. But at

last, some days after our first encounter, my opportunity came. We were

not at the time directly discussing concentration, but we were dealing

with kindred subjects, and presently my pupil began to speak of the

attitudes adopted by people towards the things in life that they like or

dislike to do. Her own plan, she said, with a touch of pride, had been

to develop the habit of keeping her mind on other and more pleasant

subjects whenever she had been engaged in a task that was unsympathetic

to her, and she had so far succeeded in the cultivation of this habit

that the disagreeable sensations of any unpleasant duty were no longer

experienced by her. I then put one or two questions to her and

elucidated among other facts that for years she had been unable “to

concentrate” when reading and that this difficulty was becoming

constantly more pronounced. Fortunately this instance opened those

locked places of her intelligence that I had been unable to reach by

argument. I showed her how she had been cultivating a most harmful

mental condition, which made concentration on those duties of life which

pleased her appear as a necessity. She had been constructing a secret

chamber in her mind, as harmful to her general well-being as an

undiagnosed tumour might have been to her physical welfare. I am glad to

say that she came to admit the truth of my original position and has

since begun her efforts to carry out the suggestions I offered for the

correction of her bad habit.

And in all such efforts to apprehend and control mental habits, the

first and only real difficulty is to overcome the preliminary inertia of

mind in order to combat the subjective habit. The brain becomes used to

thinking in a certain way, it works in a groove, and when set in action,

slides along the familiar, well-worn path; but when once it is lifted

out of the groove, it is astonishing how easily it may be directed. At

first it will have a tendency to return to its old manner of working by

means of one mechanical unintelligent operation, but the groove soon

fills, and although thereafter we may be able to use the old path if we

choose, we are no longer bound to it.

In concluding this brief note on mental habits I turn my attention

particularly to the many who say, “I am quite content as I am.” To them

I say, firstly, if you are content to be the slave of habits instead of

master of your own mind and body, you can never have realised the

wonderful inheritance which is yours by right of the fact that you were

born a reasoning, intelligent man or woman. But, I say, secondly, and

this is of importance to the larger world and is not confined to your

intimate circle, “What of the children?” Are you content to rob them of

their inheritance, as perhaps you were robbed of yours by your parents?

Are you willing to send them out into the world ill-equipped, dependent

on precepts and incipient habits, unable to control their own desires,

and already well on the way to physical degeneration? Happily, I believe

that the means of stirring the inert is being provided. The question of

Eugenics, or the science of race culture, is being debated by earnest

men and women, and the whole problem of contemporary physical

degeneration is one which looms ever larger in the public mind. It is

the problem which has exercised me for many years, and which is mainly

responsible for the issue of this book, and in my next chapter I shall

treat it in connection with the theory of progressive conscious control

which I have outlined in the foregoing pages.

VII

RACE CULTURE AND THE TRAINING OF THE CHILDREN

“In what way to treat the body; in what way to treat the mind; in what

way to manage our affairs; in what way to bring up a family; in what

way to behave as a citizen; in what way to utilise those sources of

happiness which nature supplies,—how to use all our faculties to the

greatest advantage; how to live completely? And this being the great

thing needful for us to learn, is, by consequence, the great thing

which education has to teach. To prepare us for complete living is the

function which education has to discharge.”—HERBERT SPENCER,

_Education_.

Every child is born into the world with a predisposition to certain

habits, and furthermore, the child of to-day is not born with the same

development of instinct that was the congenital heritage of its

ancestors a hundred or even fifty years ago. Many modern children, for

example, are born with recognisable physical disadvantages that are the

direct result of the gradually deteriorating respiratory and vital

functioning of their forbears.

For many months, the period varying with the sex and ability of the

individual, the vital processes and movements are for all practical

purposes independent of any conscious control, and the human infant

remains in this helpless, dependent condition much longer than any other

animal. The habits which the child evidences during this protracted

period are those hereditary predispositions which are early developed by

circumstance and environment, habits of muscular uses, of vital

functioning, and of adaptability. If it were possible to analyse the

tendencies of a child when it is, say, twelve months old, we could soon

master the science of heredity which is at present so tentative and

uncertain in its deductions, but the child’s potentialities lie hidden

in the mysterious groupings and arrangement of its cells and tissues,

hidden beyond the reach of any analysis. The child is our material;

within certain wide limits we may mould it to the shape we desire. But

even at birth it is differentiated from other children; our limits may

be wide but they are fixed. Within those limits, however, our capacity

for good and evil is very great.

There are two methods by which a child learns. The first and, in earlier

years, the predominant method is by imitation, the second is by precept

or directly administered instruction, positive or negative.

With regard to the first method, parents of every class will admit the

fact not only that children imitate those who are with them during those

early plastic years, but that the child’s first efforts to adapt itself

to the conditions surrounding it are based almost exclusively on

imitation. For despite the many thousand years during which some form of

civilisation has been in existence, no child has yet been born into the

world with hereditary instincts tending to fit it for any particular

society. Its language and manners, for instance, are modelled entirely

on the speech and habits of those who have charge of it. The child

descended from a hundred kings will speak the language and adopt the

manners of the East End should it be reared among these associations;

and the son of an Australian aboriginal would speak the English tongue

and with certain limitations behave as a civilised child if brought up

with English people.

No one denies this fact; it has been proved and accepted, yet how often

do we seek to make a practical application of our knowledge? Although

the science of heredity is still tentative and indeterminate, no

reasoning person can doubt from this and other instances that in the

vast majority of cases at least, the influence of heredity can be

practically eradicated. Personally, I see very clearly from facts of my

own observation that when the characteristics of the father and mother

are analysed, and their faults and virtues understood, a proper training

of the children will prevent the same faults and encourage the same

virtues in their children.

To appreciate to the utmost the effect of training upon the children, we

must remember that the first tastes, likes, or dislikes of the infant

begin to be developed during the first two or three days after birth.

Long before the infant is a month old, habits, tending to become fixed

habits, have been developed, and if these habits are not harmful, well

and good. The first sense developed is the sense of taste, a sense that

develops very quickly and needs the most careful attention. Artificial

feeding is in itself a very serious danger, but when this feeding is in

the hands of careless or ignorant persons the danger becomes increased a

hundredfold. An instance of this is the common idea that considerable

quantities of sugar should be added to the milk. This is done very often

to induce the child to take food against its natural desire. It may be

that the child has been suffering from some slight internal derangement,

and Nature’s remedy has been to affect the child with a distaste for

food in order to give the stomach a rest. Then the unthinking mother

tempts the child with sugar, and all sorts of internal trouble may

follow. But in such a case as this the taste for a particular thing,

such as sugar, is encouraged, and apart from the direct harm which may

result, the habit becomes the master of the child, and may rule it

through life; the child, in fact, is sent out into the world the slave

of the sense of taste.

Unfortunately, in ninety cases out of a hundred, children up to the age

of six or seven years are allowed to acquire very decided tastes for

things which are harmful. Women are not trained for the sphere of

motherhood, they do not give these matters the thought and attention

they deserve, and hence they do not understand the most elementary

principles concerning the future welfare of their offspring in such

matters as feeding and sense guidance. Children are not taught to

cultivate a taste for wholesome, nourishing foods, but are tempted, and

their incipient habits pandered to, by such additions as the sugar I

have more particularly cited.

At the present time I know a child of five years old whose taste is

already perverted by the method, or lack of method, I have indicated.

This child dislikes milk unless undue quantities of sugar are added,

will not eat such food as milk puddings or brown bread, and has a strong

distaste for cream. It is almost impossible to make the child eat

vegetables of any kind, but he is always ready to take large quantities

of meat and sweets. The child is already suffering from malnutrition and

serious internal derangement. The latter would be greatly improved by

small quantities of olive oil taken daily, but it is only with the

greatest difficulty that the child can be induced to take it. If he

lives with his parents for the next ten years, he will grow into a weak

and ailing boy, and will suffer from the worst forms of digestive

trouble and imperfect functioning of the internal organs.

Apropos of this point, I remember hearing a question put to my friend,

Dr. Clubbe of Sydney, by a London specialist, who asked what, in Dr.

Clubbe’s opinion, was the primary cause of the derangement of the

natural working of a child’s muscular mechanism and respiratory system.

The answer was given without hesitation, “Toxic poisoning as a result of

artificial feeding.” The logic of this answer will be readily

apprehended by the layman, when he considers the interdependence of

every part of the system, for in this case the nerve centres connected

with the sensory apparatus of the digestive organs and the urea control

also the respiratory processes. As a consequence, when these centres are

dulled in their action as a result of toxic poisoning, there is a loss

of activity in the processes of respiration, with consequent

maladjustments of those parts of the muscular mechanism more nearly

concerned, and so the whole machine is thrown out of gear.

Thus we see that in such instances the mischief begins very early in the

life of the child, and it is carried on and exaggerated with every step

in its development. Even in babyhood precept and coercion should come

into play. Usually when the child cries, little effort is made to

discover the cause. Often the child is soothed by being carried up and

down the room. It is wonderful how soon the infant begins to associate

some rudiments of cause and effect. The child who is unduly pandered to

will soon learn to cry whenever it desires to be rocked or dandled, and

thus the foundations of pandering to sensation are quickly laid.

But as the child comes to the observant age its habits begin to grow

more quickly. We have admitted that a child imitates its parents or

nurses in tricks of manner and speech, yet we do not stop to consider

that it will also imitate our carriage of the body, our performance of

muscular acts, even our very manner of breathing. This faculty for

imitation and adaptation is a wonderful force, and one which we have at

our command if we would only pause to consider how we may use it in the

right way. The vast majority of wrong habits acquired by children result

from their imitation of the imperfect models confronting them. But how

many parents attempt to put a right model before their children? How

many learn to eradicate their own defects of pose and carriage so that

they may be better examples to the child? How many in choosing a nurse

will take the trouble to select a girl whom they would like their

children to imitate? Very, very few, and the reason is simple. In the

first place they do not realise the harmful effect of bad example, and,

in the second, the great majority of parents have so little perception

of truth in this matter that they are incapable of choosing a girl who

is a good specimen of humanity, and are sublimely unconscious of their

own crookedness and defects.

Children too accept their parents’ defects as normal and admirable. The

boy of 12 or 14 never dreams for instance that his father’s protruding

stomach is anything but the condition proper to middle-age, and often,

doubtless, figures to himself the time when he will arrive at the same

condition. The time will come when such things as these—I refer to the

abnormality of the father—will be considered a disgrace. What then can

we hope from these parents who are at the present time so unfit, so

incapable of teaching their own children the primer of physical life?

And I may note here that this principle has a wider application than

that of the nursery; it holds, also, in connection with the model of

physical well-being set by the teachers in all primary and secondary

schools. There is no need for me to elaborate this theme. The iniquity

of allowing children to be trained in physical exercises, in our Board

Schools for instance, by a teacher who is obviously physically unfit, is

sufficiently glaring.

The crux of the whole question is that we are progressing towards

conscious control, and have not yet realised all that this progress

connotes. Children, as civilisation becomes continually more the natural

condition, evidence fewer and fewer of their original savage instincts.

In early life they are faced by two evils, if they are developed on the

subconscious plane. If they are trained under the older methods of

education they become more and more dependent upon their instructors; if

under the more recent methods of “_free expression_” (to which I shall

presently refer at some length) they are left to the vagaries of the

imperfect and inadequate directions of subconscious mechanisms that are

the inheritance of a gradually deteriorated psycho-physical functioning

of the whole organism.

In such conditions it is not possible for the child to command the

kinæsthetic guidance and power essential to satisfactory free

expression, or indeed to any other satisfactory form of expression for

its latent potentialities. As well expect an automobile, if I may use

the simile, to express its capacity when its essential parts have been

interfered with in such a way as to misdirect or diminish the right

impulses of the machinery.

The child of the present day, once it has emerged from its first state

of absolute helplessness, and before it has been trained and coerced

into certain mental and physical habits, is the most plastic and

adaptable of living things. At this stage the complete potentiality of

conscious control is present but can only be developed by the

eradication of certain hereditary tendencies or predispositions.

Unfortunately, the usual procedure is to thrust certain habits upon it

without the least consideration of cause and effect, and to insist upon

these habits until they have become subconscious and have passed from

the region of intellectual guidance.

I will take one instance as an example of this, the point of

right-and-left-handedness. We assume from the outset, and the

superstition is so old that its source is untraceable, that a child must

learn to depend upon its right hand, to the neglect of its left. This

superstition has so sunk into our minds by repetition that it has become

incorporated in our language. “Dexterous” stands for an admirable, and

“sinister” for an inauspicious quality, and we may even find ignorant

people at the present day who say that they would never trust a

left-handed person. As a result of this attitude and of the absolute

rule laid down that a child must learn to write and use its knife with

the right hand only, the number of ambidextrous people is limited to the

few who, by some initial accident, used their left hand by preference

and were afterwards taught to use their right. In a fairly wide

experience I do not remember having heard of a father or mother who has

said: “This child may become an artist or a pianist,” for example, “and

may therefore need to develop the sensitiveness and powers of

manipulation of the left hand as well as the right,” although I have

known of many cases where much time and trouble had to be expended in

acquiring the uses of the left hand later in life, such cases as those

of persons suffering from writers’ cramp and dependent for their living

on their ability to use a pen.

I have cited this example of right-handedness because it exhibits the

pliability of the physical mechanism in early life, and the manner in

which we thoughtlessly bind it to some method of working, without ever

stopping to think whether that method is good in itself, or whether it

is the one adapted for the conditions of life into which the child will

grow. We thrust a rigid rule of physical life and mental outlook upon

the children. We are not convinced that the rule is the best, or even

that it is a good rule. Often we know, or would know if we gave the

matter a moment’s consideration, that in our own bodies the rule has not

worked particularly well, but it is the rule which was taught to us, and

we pass it on either by precept, or by holding up our imperfections for

imitation and then we wonder what is the cause of the prevailing

physical degeneration!

What is intended by these methods of education is to inculcate the

accumulated and inferentially correct lessons derived from past

experience. It is true that the lesson varies according to the

religious, political, and social colour of the parent and teacher, but

speaking generally, the intention would be logical enough, if we could

make the primary assumption that each generation starts from the same

point,—the assumption, in other words, that a baby is born with the same

potentialities, the same mental abilities and assuredly the same

physical organism whether he be born in the 16th or the 20th century.

And even as recently as a hundred years ago, that assumption might have

been made with some show of reason. For the changes were so slight and

have evolved so slowly as to attract little attention. Granted similar

conditions of parentage and upbringing, the differences between the

child of 1800 A. D. and that of 1700 A. D. were hardly noticeable.

That statement, however, does not apply to the child of 1917. For many

years past there has been unrest and dissatisfaction in the world of

education. New methods have been tried, superimposed for the most part

on the top of the older ones, and even more daring experiments have been

made, experiments which sought to throw over the old traditions, bag and

baggage. All these trials have so far failed, in my opinion; and one

reason for the failure has been due to the fact that educationalists as

a body have been unable to recognise the obvious truth that the child of

the twentieth century cannot be judged by the old standards.

This truth is so evident to me that I hesitate at the necessity to prove

it. It seems incredible to me that any one of my generation could fail

to realise the extraordinary differences between the contemporaries of

his own growth and the children of our present civilisation. I could

produce a dozen instances of this difference, but one must suffice in

this place. It is, however, an example that is peculiarly typical. For I

remember, and my experience has not been in any way an abnormal one, the

facility with which the children of my generation learnt the uses of

common tools. In a sense they may be said to have inherited a certain

dexterity in the handling of such things as a hammer, knife, or saw.

To-day many parents are greatly impressed if a child of from 2½ to 6

years old can use one of these implements with a reasonable show of

efficiency. I have known fathers and mothers representative of the

average parent of to-day who find any instance of this efficiency in

their own children an almost startling thing and certainly matter for

boast to their relations and friends.

Unhappily the real difference goes far deeper than this superficial

effect would at first seem to indicate. The early attempts of the modern

child to employ his physical endowment in such common and necessary acts

as walking, running, sitting or speaking, are far below the standard of

ability that I remember a generation ago. The standard of kinæsthetic

potentiality has been lowered. Elements that I will not attempt to

trace, lest I be tempted on to the fascinating ground of evolutionary

theory, have intervened most amazingly in the past thirty years, and the

most evident result of this intervention has been the marked change in

the subconscious efficiency of the modern child.

Thus, even from the birth of the infant, our problem is not precisely

that of the old educationalists; and this primary congenital difference

between the children of two generations has been, and is being,

exaggerated in the nurseries of the independent classes both in England

and America. (Doubtless in other countries of Europe the same effects

are being produced, but I prefer to speak only of that which I have

observed and closely studied for myself.) There is still a tendency to

take all responsibility and initiative away from the child of wealthy

parents. Nurses first and governesses later perform every possible act

of service that shall relieve the child of trouble. It is not even

allowed to invent its own games. Toys are supplied in endless

quantities, expensive, ingenious toys, that need no imaginative act to

transform them into reduced models of the motors, trains, or animals

they are manufactured to represent, and some one, some adult, is always

at hand to amuse the child and _teach him how to play_. I must italicise

the absurdity of that last sentence. For what does this teaching mean,

if it does not mean that it is seeking to substitute the adult idea of

play for the childish one? In my day, any old brick played the part of a

train or a horse, and in the mental act required to see the reality

under so uncompromising a guise my imagination was exercised. Then I,

and the other children of my time, grew dissatisfied with so poor a

substitute, and as we progressed in experience, the stimulated

imaginations found expression in _inventing_ and in _making_ better

replicas of the realities of our childish experience. And we grew with

the exercise. We had our little responsibilities and we taught ourselves

not only how to play but how presently to adapt our play to the great

business of social life. But what equipment is furnished to the child

who never has an independent moment throughout its nursery career? How

can such a child hope to succeed in life, should the fortune it hopes to

inherit from its parents be suddenly lost or diverted? Every one knows

the answer. We can see the results in any great city of modern

civilisation, in London slums and in the Bowery of New York. A few

generations of such teaching as this and we should have had a

differentiated race as helpless as the slave-keeping ants.

But although this petrifying method of teaching and supervision is still

practised, the reaction against it has already set in both in England

and America. Unhappily that reaction has been too violent as such

reactions commonly are. From one extreme of permitting the child no

opportunity of the exercise of independent thought and action, we have

flown to the other in adopting the principle which is now known as “Free

Expression”—a principle which I can show to be no less harmful than

over-supervision. In fact so far as the physical expression of a child

is concerned, the methods of Free Expression are even more dangerous

than those of the opposite school.

In England, this movement towards “Free Expression” has not so far been

crystallised into a definite propaganda, nevertheless a number of

thoughtful but unhappily inexpert parents are trying to adopt the

principle in their own homes. Mr. Shaw’s Preface to his _Misalliance_

puts the theory of the method in a very clear and convincing argument.

His main assumption is as follows: “What is a child? An experiment. A

fresh attempt to produce the first man made perfect; that is, to make

humanity divine. And you will vitiate the experiment if you make the

slightest attempt to abort it into some fancy figure of our own....”

That represents, of course, an idealist attitude, and every

idealistically minded parent in Great Britain who reads that Preface of

Mr. Shaw’s on “Parents and Children” at once attempts to put the theory

into practice. The results, if the theory is persisted in, will be

disastrous; and although in many cases the parents realise their error

by practical experience before the child reaches the age of seven or so,

certain cases I have seen demonstrate all too clearly that much mischief

is being done even at the age of seven; faults and bad habits have

become so far established that it is sometimes very hard to eradicate

them.

And in America the mischief is going further still. So-called “free”

schools have been instituted which, although they may differ in the

detail of their methods, are based on the same underlying principles. As

far as I have examined the theory and practice of these schools their

purposes are:

(1) To free the child as far as possible from outside interference and

restraint.

(2) To place him in the right environment and then to give him

materials and allow him activities through which he may “freely

express himself.”

Now this presupposes, firstly, that the child if left to himself has the

power of expressing himself adequately and freely; secondly, that

through this expression, he can educate himself. How far both these

suppositions are fallacies will be understood by any one who has

followed my argument and my citations of actual cases even up to this

point; but the matter is so important that I do not hesitate to bring

forward further evidence to establish my objection to this new and

dangerous method.

I will begin by drawing attention to the practical side of two of the

channels for self-expression, which are specially insisted upon in

schools where the new mode is being practised, namely, dancing and

drawing. A friend of mine always refers to them as the two D’s, a phrase

that refers very explicitly to these two forms of damnation when

employed as fundamentals in education.

The method of the “Free Expressionists” is to associate music with the

first of these arts. Now music and dancing are, as every one knows,

excitements which make a stronger emotional appeal to the primitive than

to the more highly evolved races. No drunken man in our civilisation

ever reaches the stage of anæsthesia and complete loss of self-control

attained by the savage under the influence of these two stimuli. But in

the schools where I have witnessed children’s performances, I have seen

the first beginnings of that madness which is the savage’s ecstasy.

Music in this connection is an artificial stimulus and a very potent

one. And though artificial stimuli may be permissible in certain forms

of pleasure sought by the reasoning, trained adult, they are uncommonly

dangerous incitements to use in the education of a child of six.

Need I defend still further my description of music as an artificial and

powerful stimulus? During the present war it has been reported that the

influence of alcohol and drugs has been resorted to by the Germans to

drive their men to the attack. But we know that in earlier wars, the

greatest effects could be attained by music, effects that drive the

fighters into the most delirious excesses of savagery. And, doubtless,

if the sound of music could have made itself heard above the awful din

of guns that precede a modern advance, the old stimulus would have been

preferred by the Germans to the administration of drugs. As it is, I

have heard that bands are used whenever possible. Full-grown men and

women will admit that they can become “drunk” with music and by “drunk”

I mean that the motions of the subconsciousness are excited to such a

pitch that they take control, until they completely dominate the

reasoning faculties. Alcohol produces this result by partial paralysis

of the peripheral cilia, music and dancing by overexaltation of the

whole kinæsthetic system. In the latter case, however, no evil effects

can be produced in the first instance, without the reasoning consent or

submission of the subject. Savages and _young children have not yet

learnt to withhold that consent_.

And altogether apart from this question of intoxication—to which by the

way every individual is not susceptible—these unrestrained, unguided

efforts of the children to dance are likely to prove extremely harmful.

I have watched while first one air and then another has been played on

the piano, the intention of these changes being to convey a different

form of stimulus with each air, and I admit that the children responded

in accordance with the more or less limited kinæsthetic powers at their

command. But it was very obvious to me that all these little dancers

were more or less imperfectly co-ordinated; that the idea projected from

the ideo-motor centre constantly missed its proper direction; that

subconscious efforts were being made that caused little necks to take up

the work that should have been done by little backs; that the larynx was

being harmfully depressed in the efforts to breathe adequately causing

both inspiration and expiration to be made through the open mouth

instead of through the nostrils; and that the young and still pliable

spines were being gradually curved backwards and the stature shortened

when the very opposite condition was essential even to a satisfying

æsthetic result.

And when we realise that the teachers who witness these lessons are

entirely ignorant of the ideal physical conditions that are proper to

children, and so are wofully unaware of the dangerous defects that are

being initiated by these efforts to dance, we must admit that, as

practised, this particular form of free expression is being encouraged

at a cost that far outweighs any imagined advantage.

Here, for instance, is an example that came directly under my notice. A

little girl six years old was brought to me for kinæsthetic examination

and I found her to be in really excellent physical condition. She was

then sent to school where she became interested in dancing. The dancing

at this school was considered a form of free expression, and the

children were encouraged to make their own movements, undirected.

Different airs were played to which the child was expected to react, and

the little girl of my example found great pleasure in this part of her

school work and gave much of her time to it, until she was considered to

express herself more freely than any of the other children in the form

of art she had chosen. I may point out that one of the essential

principles of these free-expression schools is to permit a child to

choose its own activity and to pursue it for practically as long as it

desires.

Her mother, however, became dissatisfied after a time with her child’s

general condition. Curious and somewhat alarming physical distortions

were beginning to manifest themselves, most noticeably a tendency to

carry her head on one side, a tendency she was unable to rectify. At

last the mother brought back the child to me for re-examination.

Now less than a year before I had passed this child as an unusually fine

example of correct physical co-ordination. When she came back to me she

was in little better condition than a congenital degenerate. All that

fluent co-ordination of her muscular mechanisms had disappeared, and in

place of it I found rigid tendons, stiffened muscles, and, worst of all,

faulty habits of guidance and control, among them a habit of governing

the muscles of her body and legs by stiffening the unrelated muscles of

her neck. (Incidentally I may note in passing that in the human being

the neck is very often the indicator of inadequate and false controls.

There are good reasons why this should be the case, _a priori_, but they

are too technical for this book.) A further particular defect was due to

a tensing and shortening of the upper muscles of the thighs where they

are attached to the torso, a defect that was tending to warp and shorten

the child’s stature. Lastly, the most significant change of all, the

child who a year before had been outspoken and fearless, and clear of

speech, was now timid and shy, and mumbled her words so badly that I

could with difficulty understand her.

Here then is a case of a child, starting in the best physical condition,

who was placed in what was considered the right environment and

permitted the exercise of free activity. And I claim that the harmful

result was so inevitable that any one of real experience might have

anticipated it with almost absolute certainty.

The second ominous “D” is drawing, and this comes into another category

of damnation, since mental rather than physical effects are concerned,

although the latter are involved both in the harmful, uncorrected poses

adopted by the children when seated at the table, and in the false

directions of the ideo-motor centres of which only a few reach the

essential fingers that are holding or more often grotesquely clutching

the pencil. It may seem a small thing to the layman that a child should

try to guide a pencil by movements of its tongue, but to the expert that

confusion of functions is indicative of endless subconscious troubles.

Let me describe the practical procedure of a certain type of

“free-drawing” lesson. Pencils, paper, and the usual paraphernalia are

placed on tables or desks in different parts of the schoolroom, in the

hope that the child may be tempted to use them in drawing. Then, one

day, a pupil takes up a pencil and makes an attempt to draw, another

follows his example and so on, until all the pupils have made some kind

of effort in this direction.

Now the act of drawing is in the last analysis a mechanical process that

concerns the management of the fingers, and the co-ordination of the

muscles of the hand and forearm in response to certain visual images

conceived in the brain and imaginatively projected on to the paper. And

the standard of functioning of the human fingers and hand in this

connection depends entirely upon the degree of kinæsthetic development

of the arm, torso, and joints; in fact upon the standard of

co-ordination of the whole organism. It is not surprising, therefore,

that hardly one of these more or less defectively co-ordinated children

should have any idea of how to hold a pencil in such a way as will

command the freedom, power, and control that will enable him to do

himself justice as a draughtsman.

Any attentive and thoughtful observer who will watch the movement and

position of these children’s fingers, hand, wrist, arm, neck and body

generally, during the varying attempts to draw straight or crooked

lines, cannot fail to note the lack of co-ordination between these

parts. The fingers are probably attempting to perform the duties of the

arm, the shoulders are humped, the head twisted on one side. In short,

energies are being projected to parts of the bodily mechanism which have

little or no influence on the performance of the desired act of drawing,

and the mere waste projection of such energies alone is almost

sufficient to nullify the purpose in view.

But I have already said enough to prove that no free expression can come

by this means. The right impulse may be in the child’s mind, but he has

not the physical ability to express it. Not one modern child in ten

thousand is born with the gift to draw as we say “by the light of

Nature,” and that one exceptional child will have his task made easier

if he is wisely guided in his first attempts.

But my chief objection to this teaching of drawing is the encouragement

it gives to profitless dreaming. Drawing is an art, and we know some of

the characteristics that are commonly imputed to the artist,—though many

of the greatest artists have been exemplarily free from them. These

characteristics are eccentricity, lack of balance, power of

self-hypnotism, and a general irrationality. Yet surely it cannot be

emphasised too strongly that the artist succeeds in spite of these

impediments to expression, and not because of them. These

characteristics that I have instanced are by-products of the artistic

genius. They are developed through erroneous conceptions and

overconcentration on a particular creative activity, and time and again

in the history of the world these by-products have ruined,

incapacitated, and disgraced men of real genius.

Nevertheless, if I can judge by my experience of this form of free

expression, the child is encouraged to practise the eccentricity as a

means to obtain the gift of drawing, which as a principle is about the

same as trying to breed race horses with weak lungs because it has been

noted that certain very fast horses have been rather deficient in this

respect. To encourage eccentricity is not to breed genius, and genius

itself is more free and more creative when it is not hampered by

eccentricity. Let us, at least, have some appreciation of rational cause

and effect.

So much for my two “D’s,” but my general criticism of the “free

expression” experiment does not end there. For I must confess that I

have been shocked to witness the work that has been going on in

these schools. I have seen children of various ages amusing

themselves—somewhat inadequately in quite a number of cases—by

drawing, dancing, carpentering, and so on, but in hardly a single

instance have I seen an example of one of these children employing

his physical mechanisms in a correct or _natural_ way. I insist upon

the use of the word _natural_ even though it be applied to such

relatively artificial activities as drawing and carpentering. For

there is a right, that is to say a most effective, way of holding

and using a pencil or a carpenter’s tool. But the children I saw

commonly sat or stood in positions of the worst mechanical

advantage, and the manner in which they held their pencils or their

tools demonstrated very clearly that until their management of such

instruments was corrected, they could never hope to produce anything

but the most clumsy results. Worse still, these children were

forming physical habits which would develop in a large majority of

cases into positive physical ills. A child who tries to guide its

pencil by futile movements of its head, tongue, and shoulders may be

preparing the way to ills so far-reaching that their origin is often

lost sight of.

As an instance of this, I recently had a case of a boy of 3½ years who

suffered from fear reflexes. If a stranger entered a room when the child

was present, he would cry and cling to his mother or nurse. At the

seaside after asking to be allowed to bathe with other children, he was

subsequently afraid to go near the water. And in many other ways he

exhibited unreasoning terrors which, according to the general diagnosis

common in such cases, were presumed to be the cause of his general

backwardness, a symptom particularly marked in his speech, for he was

only able to articulate a few words and those very imperfectly.

My first examination of him revealed the fact that he lacked proper

control of his lips and tongue, and of one internal physical function,

the latter chiefly at night. And that the lack of control in these

particulars was the direct cause of his psycho-physical condition was

very conclusively proved by my treatment of him. Treated on a basis of

conscious guidance and control, re-educated and co-ordinated, the child

made rapid advancement, and he progressed towards a condition

approximating more closely to what one might call normal, than he had

experienced since birth. The fear reflexes became less and less subject

to excitement, he grew less irritable, his temper was more controlled,

and his outbursts of crying were exhibited far less often.

I have cited this instance to show what strange psychic effects may

spring from apparently purely physical causes,—though, indeed, the

complement of psycho-physical is so unified that it is impossible to

divide the components and place them on one plane or the other. In this

boy’s case, the primary cause of the trouble was probably congenital,

but equal and greater troubles may arise from much smaller original

defects if the initial habit is confirmed and crystallised by use, as I

fear will be the case, if the child is left to develop itself on the

lines of the free expression advocates. It is quite certain, for

example, in the case just referred to, that no amount of “free” activity

could have released the child from his constrictions whilst the

influence caused by his malco-ordinations still existed.

But surely I have given evidence enough to prove my case against this

last development in education. In an ideal world into which children

were born with ideal capacities, Mr. Shaw’s thesis might have some

weight. In this rapidly changing world of the 20th century we require,

more than ever before, a system that shall guide and direct the child

during his earlier years. This implies no contradiction of what I have

said earlier anent the method of constant supervision. The necessary

correction of physical and mental faults that I am advocating is a very

different thing from the attempt to mould a child into one particular

preconceived form. I would only insist that the children of to-day, born

as they are with very feeble powers of instinctive control, absolutely

require certain definite instructions by which to guide themselves

before they can be left to free activity. And these directions must be

based on a principle that will help the child to employ his various

mechanisms to the best advantage in his daily activities. These

directions involve no interference with what the child has to express;

they represent merely a cultivation and development of the _means_

whereby he may find adequate and satisfying release for his

potentialities.

It is true that the foregoing principles must and will involve certain

necessary prohibitions, but if we select those essentials that deal with

the root cause of the evil instead of with the effects, we render

unnecessary the continual admonitions and “naggings” which represented

one of the vices of the old system, a vice from which it has been the

object of the new education to free the child.

To sum up this aspect of child-training, I find that on the whole the

methods of the older educationalists, with their definite prohibitions

and their exact instructions, were less harmful than the extremes of the

modern school that would base their scheme of education upon a child’s

instinctive reactions. The older methods failed, I admit, for one

reason, because the system was carried too far; for another, because the

injunctions and prohibitions were based on tradition, prejudice, and

ignorance, instead of upon a scientific principle dictated by reason.

But the new methods fail because they are founded on an entirely

erroneous assumption which is demonstrably fallacious. Can any method be

defended that is open to such a charge?

Give a child conscious control and you give him poise, the essential

starting point for education. Without that poise, which is a result

aimed at by neither the old nor the new methods of education, he will

presently be cramped and distorted by his environment. For although you

may choose the environment of a nursery or a school, there are few,

indeed, who can choose their desired environment in the world at large.

But give the child poise and the reasoned control of his physical being

and you fit him for any and every mode of life; he will have wonderful

powers of adapting himself to any and every environment that may

surround him. And if he be one of those exceptional individuals that, by

some rare gift of nature or by some force of personality, are able to

bend life to their own needs, be very sure that so far from having

suppressed his power of free expression, you will have strengthened and

perfected just those abilities which will enable the genius to put forth

all that is best and greatest in him.

My last charge against the advocates of free expression is that they

themselves are not free. So many propagandists and teachers show an

unwarranted intolerance towards the exponents of the old systems. They

are, in fact, too constricted in their mental attitude to give play to

their imagination. From one extreme they have flown to the other, and so

have missed the way of the great middle course which is wide enough to

accommodate all shades of opinion.

For let me state clearly in concluding this comment on a new method,

that I am, myself, as strong an advocate for free expression, rightly

understood, as any propagandist in the United States of America. But I

am convinced by long observation and experiment that the untrained child

has not the adequate power of free expression. There are certain

mechanical and other laws, deduced from untold centuries of human

experience, laws that are only in the rarest cases unconsciously

followed by the natural child of to-day. (One of these rare cases that

has recently come under my notice has been the billiard playing of Mr.

George Gray. I am of the opinion that the mechanical principle of the

position adopted by him could be scientifically demonstrated as being as

nearly perfect for its particular purpose as any position could be. And

according to my observation of him, Mr. Gray manifests in his play the

most remarkable and controlled kinæsthetic development I have yet

witnessed. But how many George Grays has the world so far produced?)

Over twenty-two years ago in Australia, I was teaching what I still

believe to be the true meaning of free expression. My pupils in this

case came to me for lessons in vocal and dramatic expression. Now by the

old methods these pupils would have been taught to imitate their master

very accurately in vocal and facial expression, in gesture, in the

manner of voice production; and it would have been at once apparent to

any one acquainted with the manner and methods of the teachers, where

each pupil had received his training. Furthermore, pupils educated by

those methods were taught to interpret each poem, scene, or passage on

the exact lines that were considered correct by their respective

teachers.

My own method, which at that time was regarded as very radical and

subversive, was to give my pupils certain lessons in re-education and

co-ordination on a basis of conscious guidance and control, and in this

way I gave the reciter, actor, or potential artist the means of

employing to the best advantage his powers of vocal, facial, and

dramatic expression, gesture, etc. He could then safely be permitted to

develop his own characteristics. A few suggestions might be necessary as

to interpretation, but the individual manner was his own. No pupil of

mine could be pointed to as representing some narrow school of

expression, although most of them could be recognised by the confidence

and freedom of their performances.

And in this connection it may be of interest to my readers to know that

in 1902–3 I decided to test the principles I advocated, and to this end

I organised performances of “Hamlet” and “The Merchant of Venice” for

which I gave special training on the lines I have just indicated to

young men and women, none of whom had previously appeared in a public

performance of any kind whatsoever. I trained all these young people on

the principles of conscious guidance and control, principles that I had

then developed and practised. My friends and critics naturally

anticipated a wonderful exhibition of “stage fright” on the evening of

the first performance, but as a matter of fact not one of my young

students had the least apprehension of that terror. By the time they

were ready to appear the idea of “stage fright” was one that seemed to

them the merest absurdity. It may be said that they did not understand

what was meant by such a condition. And this, although I would not allow

a prompter on the nights of the public performance! I regard this as one

of the most convincing public demonstrations I have yet made of the

wonderful command and self-possession that may be attained by the

inculcation of these principles.

For it must be observed that I sent these tyros to the performance

capable of expressing their own individualities. If they had been hedged

about or boxed in by an endless series of “Don’ts” confining their

performances by a rigid set of rules, the majority of them would almost

certainly have broken down within the first two minutes. On the other

hand, it is hardly necessary to picture the chaos that would have

ensued, had I sent them on the stage without training of any kind, poor,

helpless, ignorant examples of what they supposed to be free expression.

The foregoing is an example of education in only one sphere of art, but

it serves as an excellent indication of the essential needs of

education, in general, where the child is concerned. We must give the

child of to-day and of the future as a fundamental of education as

complete a command of his or her kinæsthetic systems as is possible, so

that the highest possible standard of “free expression” may be given in

every sphere of life and in all forms of human activity. We must build

up, co-ordinate, and re-adjust the human machine so that it may be _in

tune_. We are all acquainted with the expression “_tune up_” where the

automobile is concerned, and when we wish to command the best expression

of this machine we avail ourselves of the “_tuning up_” process of the

mechanical expert. And as the human organism is, as Huxley says, a

machine, we must remember that if we wish it to express its

potentialities adequately it must be “_in tune_.” This will represent

what we consider to be that satisfactory condition of the child’s

kinæsthetic systems which will enable him to express himself freely and

adequately. It constitutes the “means whereby” of free and full

expression, of adaptability to the ever changing environment of

civilised life, and to all that these two essentials connote.

In this note on race culture and the training of children, I have thus

far dwelt almost exclusively on the earlier years of childhood. But I

have much to say at some future time on the questions of primary and

secondary education, that is, of the boy and girl at school between the

ages of, say, seven and eighteen. No one who has read so far with

attention and has earnestly attempted to comprehend my point of view,

will now be able to urge that the question of education, secular or

religious, is outside my province, for the mental and physical are so

inextricably combined that we cannot consider the one without the other,

but, at the risk of being accused of repetition, I will briefly state my

case in this connexion once again, as follows:

I wish to postulate:

That conscious guidance and control, as a universal, must be the

fundamental of future education.

That civilisation and education, as manifested up to the present, cannot

be said to have compelled man to advance adequately from the lower to

those higher planes of satisfactory evolution, where his savage animal

instincts will not under any circumstances, or in response to any

stimuli, dominate his transcendent tendencies, or put him out of

communication with his reason.

That mankind should progress by slow continuous processes from one stage

of evolution to another. This will be particularly the case when he is

passing from his animal subconscious stage to the higher, reasoned

conscious stages, during which process he will develop a new

subconsciousness (cultivated, not inherited) under the guidance of

consciousness, likewise an increasing control which holds his animal

proclivities in check.

That the evolutionary progress from childhood to adolescence, and so

through the vicissitudes of life which follow, is determined by the

process adopted, the ratio of progress being in accordance with the

standard of efficacy of this process, and that this principle of

evolution applies equally to a nation.

That subconsciously developed mechanisms (subconscious guidance and

control) function satisfactorily during those stages of our evolution

which approximate to the more or less animal plane.

That the old moderate methods of education are not incompatible with

cultivation and development on the animal subconscious plane.

That “free expression” principles cannot bring satisfactory results

while the subject’s mechanisms are operated by inherited subconscious

guidance and control.

For this very reason, all aid to progressive development must conform to

the principle of the projection of guiding orders and controls in the

right direction or directions with the simultaneous employment of

positions of mechanical advantage, irrespective of the correctness or

otherwise of the immediate result. The result may be unsatisfactory

to-day and to-morrow, or during the next week, but if the position of

mechanical advantage is employed and orders and controls in the right

direction are held in mind and projected again and again, a new and

correct complex sooner or later supersedes the old vicious one, and

becomes permanently established.

That consciously controlled mechanisms (conscious guidance and control)

are essential to man’s satisfactory development and progress to the

higher stages of his evolution; and to that continued adequate vital

functioning of his physical or mental organism necessary in these

advanced stages, where more rapid adaptability to the swiftly and

everchanging environment, and the power to _see_, and _comprehend new

ideas_, are the urgent demands of an advancing civilisation.

That consciously controlled mechanisms are essential to the successful

inculcation of the principle of “free expression” and all that it

connotes in Education.

Conscious guidance and control, as the fundamental in education,

commands the fundamentals of “free expression.” The words free or

freedom are herein used in their true meaning, not in the ordinary

acceptation. I refer to the point of view which causes one to ask, “Is

there such a thing as real freedom?” For we know that we cannot have

freedom without restraint, any more than we can have psycho-physical

harmony without antagonism.

It is said that the dividing line between tragedy and comedy is not one

that the majority of people readily recognise, and this is also the case

in regard to what is called freedom and licence. This is the danger

which the new democracies of the world are facing at this very moment,

and their dangers will be increased a thousandfold in the near future,

when they will be called upon to pass through that critical period of

re-adjustment which must follow the present world crisis.

In this matter of education I am, admittedly, an iconoclast. I would

fain break down the idols of tradition and set up new concepts. In no

matters do we see more plainly the harmful effect of the rigid

convention than in this matter of teaching. We speak commonly of

training the minds of children. It is a happy expression in its origin,

and we still retain its proper intention when we apply the word to its

uses in horticulture.

The gardener does, indeed, train the young growth. He draws it out to

the light and warmth and leads it into the conditions most helpful for

its development.

And so, in teaching, the first essential should be to cultivate the uses

of the mind and body, and not, as is so often the case, to neglect the

instrument of thought and reason by the inculcation of fixed rules which

have never been examined. Again, where ideas that are patently erroneous

have already been formed in the child’s mind, the teacher should take

pains to apprehend these preconceptions, and in dealing with them he

should not attempt to overlay them, but should eradicate them as far as

possible before teaching or submitting the new and correct idea. I say

“teaching or submitting” and perhaps the latter word better expresses my

meaning, for by teaching I understand the placing of facts, for and

against, before the child, in such a way as to appeal to his reasoning

faculties, and to his latent powers of originality. He should be allowed

to think for himself, and should not be crammed with other people’s

ideas, or one side only of a controversial subject. Why should not the

child’s powers of intelligence be trained? Why should they be stunted by

our forcing him to accept the preconceived ideas and traditions which

have been handed down from generation to generation, without

examination, without reason, _without enquiry as to their truth or

origin_? The human mind of to-day is suffering from partial paralysis by

this method of forcing these unreasoned and antiquated principles upon

the young and plastic intelligence.

The educational system itself is grievously inadequate and detrimental,

as all thinking educationalists are aware, but the decision regarding

the necessity for physical exercise and “deep breathing” in our schools

has added another evil. I wish to say here deliberately that the many

systems of physical training generally adopted show an almost criminal

neglect of rational method, and of the test which can demonstrably prove

the practice to be unsound and hurtful.

Some years ago I wrote in the _Pall Mall Gazette_:

“I will merely point out that in our schools and in the Army human

beings are actually being developed into deformities by breathing and

physical exercises. I have before me a book on the breathing exercises

which are used in the Army, and any person reasonably versed in

physiology and psychology, and knowing they are inseparable in

practice, will at once understand why so much harm results from them.

Take either the officers or the men. In a greater or less degree the

unduly protruded upper chests (development of emphysema), unduly

hollowed backs (lordosis), stiff necks, rigid thorax, and other

physical eccentricities have been cultivated. It is for these reasons

that heart troubles, varicose veins, emphysema, and mouth breathing

(in exercise) are so much in evidence in the Army. As this is a matter

of _national importance, I am prepared to give the time necessary to

prove to the authorities (medical or official) connected with the

Army, the schools, or the sanatoria, that the ‘deep breathing’ and

physical exercises in vogue are doing far more harm than good_, and

are laying the foundations of much graver trouble in the future. The

truth is that all exercises involving ‘deep breathing’ cause an

exaggeration of the defective muscular co-ordination already present,

so that even if one bad habit is eradicated many others—often more

harmful—are cultivated.”

And again in my pamphlet “Why We Breathe Incorrectly” (Nov., 1909) I

wrote:

“Let me make myself clear by explaining that the man who breathes

incorrectly and inadequately, does so as an immediate and inevitable

consequence of abnormal and harmful conditions of certain parts of his

body. The man who breathes correctly and adequately does so as an

immediate and inevitable consequence of normal and salubrious

conditions of the same parts. It therefore follows that if the

conditions present in the second man can be induced in the first, he

will then, but not otherwise, be a correct and adequate breather. And

the process by which this is achieved is simply a re-adjustment of the

parts of the body by a new and correct use of the muscular mechanisms

through the directive agent of the sphere of consciousness. This

change brings about a proper mechanical advantage of all the parts

concerned, and causes, thanks to the right employment of the relative

machinery, such expansion and contraction of the thoracic cavity as to

give atmospheric pressure its opportunity. Now here we have (a) the

directive agent of the sphere of consciousness, and (b) the use of the

muscular mechanisms—the combination causing certain expansions and

contractions, and _the result being what is known as breathing_. It

will at once be seen, therefore, that the act of breathing is not a

primary, or even a secondary, part of the process, which is really

_re-education of the kinæsthetic systems associated with correct

bodily postures and respiration_, and will be referred to universally

as such in the near future. As a matter of fact, given the perfect

co-ordination of parts as acquired by my system, breathing is a

subordinate operation which will perform itself.”

I stand by every word of this to-day. Hundreds of soldiers every year

have to leave the British Army on account of heart trouble directly

brought about by the “drill-sergeant’s chest” and its concomitant

strains and rigidities. Not long ago, Mr. Punch had a picture of a young

boy riding in the Row with his groom and answering that worthy’s

question as to how he would salute a Royal Personage—“Same as the

soldiers do; hold my hand up to my hat and look as if I was going to

burst”! Certainly a straw showing which way the wind blows.

These same soldiers will start on a long route march with chest “well

set” and stiff. The strain of marching inevitably brings them later into

an easier slouching position, which makes continuance possible and at

its worst is not so positively harmful as is the tension of the other

posture.

Compare the free, loose but more healthy physical attitude of the sailor

ashore with that of the “smart” soldier strutting in town like a pouter

pigeon for the honour of the regiment. It is your team of sailors that

is the readier and the more effective for hard work.

And but a few weeks (now years) ago, I saw with dismay in a popular

illustrated daily paper a truly pathetic picture of a class of

schoolboys with hollowed backs and protruding chests looking like

nothing so much as very ruffled pouter pigeons. And the master was

commended for his zeal in producing such results by “deep breathing.”

(See photographs facing this page.)

Is it, I would ask, likely on the face of it that the right position in

which a man or woman should stand for health’s sake should be one

needing positive strain to preserve? The thing is preposterous, and I am

convinced that nothing can result from the application of such

principles but complete chaos, physical and mental.

To return to my general theory of training, I fear I must not

particularise too definitely in some directions, but my instance of

right-handedness has its application. On the one hand we are willing to

sacrifice reason for such a tradition and convention as this; on the

other for an untried and possibly illogical idea. The defence for the

latter sacrifice is generally based either on the need for enthusiasm or

the necessity for proceeding by a system of trial and error. Well, as to

enthusiasm, I will claim that no one is a greater enthusiast than I am

myself, but I will not permit my enthusiasm to dominate my reason. One

day I hope to write an account of how I arrived at the practical

elucidation of my principles of conscious control, and when I do, I

shall show very plainly how one of the greatest, if not _the_ greatest

danger against which I had to fight was my own enthusiasm. It is as

vivid and keen to-day as it was over twenty years ago, but I should

never have worked out my principles, if I had allowed it to dominate my

reason. Again, as to the argument pleading the necessity for empiricism,

I admit also that my own methods have been and still are, in some

directions, experimental. But with regard to the “free expression”

movement, I claim that the error in practice has been sufficiently

demonstrated, and further than that, I must insist that we are not

justified in experimenting on children. I have never done that inasmuch

as I have realised that the error may be irreparable. Could any fault

weigh heavier on a human conscience than that by which, however

unwittingly, another human life had been distorted?

Wherefore, pleading on behalf of my most important client, the child of

this younger generation, I demand that we shall proceed to neither of

the dangerous extremes that threaten his physical and mental well-being.

On the one hand we must avoid the thrusting upon him of fixed ideas, by

which you may narrow his mind, for I know that when you limit him,

imparting to him deliberately your own mental habits, the effects go far

beyond what we are pleased to call the “formation of character.” On the

other hand we are not justified in leaving him entirely to himself.

Whilst he has the right of choice within certain limits, he has not,

unhappily, the ability to choose in his earlier years. We need not bind

him to choose this or that, but we must educate him in such a way as to

give him the power of choice. In Mr. Allen Upward’s delightful work,

_The New Word_, which I have already quoted, he says: “Give the child

leave to grow. Give the child leave to live. Give the child leave to

hope and to hope truly.... He is the plaintiff in this case. I say that

he is mankind ... and his birthright is the truth.” And to that I would

add, “Give the child leave, also, to learn. Give him opportunity to

profit by all the knowledge we can give him out of our experience. His

birthright, indeed, is the truth, but we must aid him in making the

discovery.”

It is full time that we gave more earnest thought to this matter. I

cannot in this brief outline dwell on the many phases of proper food,

clothing, and physical training, and all those other points which we

must consider. The Kinæsthetic Systems concerned with correct and

healthy bodily movements and postures have become demoralised by the

habits engendered in the schoolroom through the restraint enforced at a

time when natural activity should have been encouraged and

scientifically directed, and in the crouching positions caused by

useless and irrational deskwork.

And I may note in this connection that I am continually being asked,

both by friends and unknown correspondents, for my opinion concerning

the correct type of chair, stool, desk or table to be used in order to

prevent the bad habits which these pieces of furniture are supposed to

have caused in schools. In my replies I have tried to demonstrate that

the problem is being attacked from the wrong standpoint.

Let us consider the problem in the light of common-sense. Suppose, for

example, that there is an ideal chair, some wonderful arrangement of

perfect angles, hollows, and supports that will almost magically rectify

or prevent every fault in the child’s physical mechanism. Suppose

further that the child finds great ease and repose when seated in this

ideal chair. How then can he avoid suffering the tortures of all that is

uncomfortable, when he rides in the cars, or sits down in his own home,

or visits a friend, or goes for a picnic on the river or in the woods? I

see nothing else for it; when that ideal chair has been found, our child

will have to carry it about with him wherever he goes.

In the second place, how is it possible for this ideal chair to be

miraculously adaptable to every age and type of child? Are we to treat

children as plastic lumps of clay to be fitted to the model insisted

upon by the lines of our ideal chair; or are we to study and measure

each individual and have a chair built to his measure, once a year, say,

until he is adult?

No, what we need to do is not to educate our school furniture, but to

educate our children. Give a child the ability to adapt himself within

reasonable limits to his environment, and he will not suffer discomfort,

nor develop bad physical habits, whatever chair or form you give him to

sit upon. I say, “within reasonable limits,” for it is obviously absurd

to expect a Brobdingnagian child to use a Lilliputian chair. But let us

waste no valuable time, thought, or invention in designing furniture,

when by a smaller expenditure of those three gifts we may train the

child to win its own conscious control, and rise superior to any

probable limitations imposed by ordinary school fittings.

For the problem to be solved in education is that same problem which

needs solution in the social, political, religious, industrial,

economic, ethical, æsthetic and other spheres of progressive human

activity. In every sphere of life we have for years given “effects” the

significance of “causes” and have made worthy attempts to put matters

right on this unsound basis. In the case of education certain symptoms

have been recognised as more or less harmful, and the whole blame has

been placed upon the method or methods of education involved.

For at least half a century, the method of the social worker was

conceived on the lines of giving money, food, and clothing to the poor,

in an attempt to ameliorate their condition. The evils of this false

policy came home to them in a practical way, and nowadays, the object of

the social worker is to give the poor the “means whereby” of general

advancement and of getting money, clothes, and food by their own

efforts.

The same principle holds good in the treatment of the children. Hitherto

educationalists have given them what they considered they needed. What

we must do in the future is to give them the “means whereby” they may

themselves satisfy their needs and command their own advancement.

The adoption of new methods is a procedure which always demands a due

and proper consideration of the thing, person, or persons to which they

are to be applied. Investigation along these lines would probably have

revealed the real _cause_ of the difficulties to be faced in the

education of the child of to-day, which is that the process of civilised

life has gradually changed the child’s psycho-physical condition at

birth. In this process much has been gained and much lost. From the

educator’s point of view the losses have been stupendous as compared

with the gains, for the all-important kinæsthetic systems have been

deteriorated by man’s attempt to pass from the lower (animal) to the

higher stages of the evolutionary plane while depending upon a

subconsciously controlled organism.

I have still very much more to say on this subject of education, and I

hope to have an opportunity in the near future of elaborating my methods

and of setting them out so that they may be practically and universally

applied. But if by these few remarks I can arouse some interest in this

world problem, I shall have done something towards its solution. It is a

problem which is very urgent at the present time, and is growing more

urgent every day. All that we have done up to the present time is to

enforce one rule or another upon the children as an experiment, for all

the rules have been rigid in their enforcement, however unscientific in

their conception. In place of these rules I look for an ideal which I

believe to be comparatively easy of realisation. I look for, and already

see, a method of training our children which shall make them masters of

their own bodies; I look for a time when the child shall be so taught

and trained that whatever the circumstance which shall later surround

it, it will without effort be able to adapt itself to its environment,

and be enabled to live its life in the enjoyment of perfect health,

physical and mental. For, as I have already pointed out, man has

progressed towards the higher and more complex stages of civilisation.

He has continued to change his habits of life and being still far from

the highest state attainable he will continue to change. The farther he

becomes removed from the primitive uncivilised stage of his evolution

the less likely is he to have the opportunity in the daily routine of

his life so to exercise the physical machinery that it will be prevented

from working imperfectly by the controls of instinct. “Conscious

control” will enable man to adapt himself more readily to changing

conditions of life. No one who looks out upon this latter day world with

discerning eyes can fail to see that the changes tend to become more

rapid and more radical than ever before in the history of the world’s

progress.

We look towards the goal, and it is best to seek the highest and be

content with no less, but at the same time it is necessary that we

should consider the practical detail of our journey. What follows in

Parts II and III may seem trivial by comparison with the high endeavour

I have outlined, but it is the triviality of the essential detail.

I wish to point the road still more clearly, and to show how every man

and woman may learn to walk upon it.

VIII

EVOLUTIONARY STANDARDS AND THEIR INFLUENCE ON THE CRISIS OF 1914

In the previous chapters I have dealt briefly with the fundamentals upon

which our whole structure of education and civilisation is based, and

have attempted to point to the different tendencies developed by the

individual in the struggle to progress upon this basis. At the same time

I have indicated that which I am confident is the only true fundamental

upon which mankind in a state of civilisation may progress and evolve to

a condition commanding freedom for all time from those limiting,

narrowing, and debasing qualities which belong to the animal spheres of

existence.

It seems to me that the present world crisis indicates that this is the

psychological moment to make a wide application of my principles, though

my reader may consider that I should not enter the debatable ground of

hypothesis in a work which has been devoted, up to this point, to

arguments almost entirely drawn from personal experiences and

observation.

I have dealt with the fundamentals employed in the development of the

child and the adult, and I have postulated that the evolutionary

progress from childhood to adolescence, and on through the vicissitudes

of life which follow, is determined by the process adopted, the ratio of

progress being in accordance with the standard of efficacy of this

process, and that this principle of evolution applies equally to a

nation.

It then devolves upon us to consider the different processes adopted by

different nations, in order to gauge accurately their different stages

of evolution and their possibilities of growth and development towards

real individual and national progress.

After centuries of endeavour in the direction of progress in accordance

with well-defined processes, founded upon approved educational,

religious, economic, political, industrial, ethical and æsthetic

principles, and after a century of unprecedented progress in the realm

of Arts and Sciences, we are faced with the spectacle, in a supposedly

civilised nation, of a debauched kinæsthesia which has manifested itself

in such a display of savage instincts as will present us in the eyes of

a more highly evolved universe as plunged in the depths of barbarism.

During the past three years the people of the world have been shocked

and stirred by events which even four years ago were considered

impossible in the stage of civilisation then reached. In consequence, we

find that a special and earnest endeavour is being made to solve

problems of vital importance which have a bearing upon the future

development and cultivation of the potentialities of mankind.

It is, therefore, essential to recognise that we have reached a point in

the process called civilisation which will be recorded as one of the

most critical and vital in the world’s history.

At this moment the great nations of Europe are engaged in the most

terrific conflict of force ever recorded, whilst in America, a land of

peace, there is being witnessed what is probably the most bitterly

contested conflict of opinion ever experienced regarding the conduct,

policy, and duty of the American nation where the old world is

concerned.

(This was penned prior to American intervention in the war.)

The happenings of the past three years must influence our present and

future opinion of the value of our educational, political, moral,

social, industrial, religious and other principles where the progress of

man is concerned, as he passes from the animal plane of his evolution to

those higher planes for which he is undoubtedly destined.

The conclusions thus reached will so influence the future welfare of

mankind that the facts from which these conclusions are deduced demand

the most serious attention and study of every human being.

It is therefore essential that we make an earnest endeavour to discover

fundamentals. In this connexion we must consider the available evidence

concerning the cause or causes of this conflict in Europe which has

shaken our boasted advancement in civilisation to its very roots. What

does this recrudescence of barbarity mean when viewed with an open and

unprejudiced mind in its relation to the future of those principles

which alone make for the real mental, physical, and spiritual growth of

mankind in progressive civilisation?

It signifies a tremendous clash of opposing forces, a desperate conflict

between the lowly-evolved peoples of the world as against the more

highly evolved races, the struggle of an open-minded, mobile idealism

for the supremacy of the individual against a narrow-minded, rigid,

material automatism which entails the suppression of the individual and

the obliteration of his reason in the supposed interests of the State.

Let us take, then, a general comparative view of the compelling

psycho-physical forces in the life of primitive and civilised nations up

to the crisis. America in this stands apart and must be considered

separately.

_In Primitive Nations._ The compelling forces were chiefly physical and

subconscious. The very essentials of life depended almost entirely upon

brute force. Daily experiences gave a keen edge to savage instincts and

unbridled passions, to an automatic development which opposed the

cultivation of the faculty of adaptability to new environment. Even the

spheres of courage were limited, and when confronted with the unusual

these peoples quaked like cowards, and fled panic-stricken from the

unaccustomed, as in the case of the negroes in the Southern States of

America when the men of the Ku-Klux Klan pursued them on horseback

dressed in white.

_In Civilised Nations._ The compelling forces have become less and less

physical and less subconscious than in the case of primitive nations,

but the advance from the physical to the mental and from the

subconscious to the conscious has not been adequate or sufficiently

comprehensive to establish the mental and conscious principles as the

chief compelling forces in the progress of the nation or even of the

individual. The essentials of life do not depend upon brute force, and

daily experiences become less and less associated with factors which

make for the development of savage instincts and unbridled passion, or

automatic development. But experience has proved that civilised nations

have failed to come through the ordeal of adaptation to the everchanging

environment of civilisation with satisfactory results. The spheres of

courage are still more or less limited, and when brought suddenly face

to face with the unusual and unexpected people still exhibit a tendency

to panic and loss of control. The progress made by civilised nations

from the primitive state to the present has not been upon comprehensive

lines. The result has been that the majority of the activities of the

nation have been limited, and in those few activities where the widening

influence held sway, the freedom became licence and led to

overcompensation. This condition was sufficiently harmful as long as it

applied to the individual and to individual effort, the individual being

more or less held in check by collective opinion; but when it applied to

the nation and to national effort, that nation which ignored the opinion

of other nations developed unchecked, and the national decision to

stifle the individual, body and soul, if it seemed to be for the welfare

of the State, constituted the most powerful force in the prevention of

progress on the evolutionary plane.

For this decision, once it became the result of national conception,

carried with it the most damaging and impossible of all mental processes

in the sphere of true evolutionary advancement. In the first place the

national decision was the result of an erroneous national conception,

the outcome of what I have called, for the want of a better name,

“manufactured premises.”

Manufactured premises are the forerunners of unsound and delusive

deductions—a stultification of reason—and demand the cultivation of a

form of self-hypnotism which is fatal to national or individual

progress.

A few observant people noted this dangerous habit even in the early

literature of the German nation, and watched with keen interest its

cultivation in all spheres of activity in recent years. This explains

the stupendous failure of German judgment in all matters of national and

international importance, of the impossibility of the peoples of that

nation to see anything from any other point of view but their own, of

their crass stupidity in gauging the psychology of other nations, and

particularly that of the American nation.

In the foregoing we have fundamentals worthy of consideration. They must

occupy the attention of all thinking people who wish to make a

contribution towards the uplifting of mankind and the establishment of a

standard of reasoned guidance and control which should make another

barbarous conflict unthinkable and therefore impossible.

Naturally, every nation is ready enough with a more or less humane

reason for its madness. Self-protection, an altruistic regard for the

rights of smaller nations, a sense of high duty towards mankind at

large, all these pleas have been urged as explaining the single

principle which has drawn this or that nation into the whirlpool. And

each and every nation must surely have pleaded liberty as their excuse

at some time or another, liberty being one of those adaptable terms that

may be used to mean almost anything. Before the war Germany was

maintaining a right for “liberty” of expansion, a defensive use of the

word that has hardly anything in common with the American use at the

present time.

On the other hand philosophers, economists, psychologists, commercial

experts, and the public at large have been busy with a dozen other

theories of the primary causes of the war. We have heard much talk of

race hatred, of business rivalry, of high commercial and political

intrigues, and a dozen other influences, and all of them have been put

forward at one time or another as the sole reason for the present welter

of blood and fury. We have, in fine, so many reasons from which to

choose that we may be quite sure no single one of them can possibly

afford us an inclusive and adequate explanation.

But I will go still further than that. For I maintain on grounds which I

find logically unshakeable, that if we admit, as seems the only sensible

course, that something of all these reasons and excuses has entered into

the conditions producing such awful results, we must still seek some

explanation of the preceding state that made these conditions possible.

All our reasons, in fact, are mere effects, and we are groping for our

primary cause among resultant phenomena. We can never solve our problem

by such a method as this. We might as well hope to find the origin of a

child by dissecting its limbs and intestines. Our only hope is to shift

our viewpoint, to cease our muddled examination of the details just in

front of us, and try to see our problem in the broad terms of one who

can stand back and see life moving through the centuries.

With all people, in all spheres of life, we know only too well that

certain mental and physical manifestations give an absolute clue to

their character, to their aims in life, their ideals, and, what is more

to the point, to the stage they have reached in the process called

evolution.

Incidentally, I would point out that education as generally understood,

even when it implies the most up-to-date methods, does not necessarily

mean progress on the evolutionary plane any more than ability as a

linguist need denote a high standard of mentality.

This applies also to most arts and particularly to those where music and

dancing are concerned. The lower the stage of evolution, within certain

limits, the greater the appeal of music and dancing.

When we review the history and general progress of humanity we

find the instincts and traits of the animal—the brute force

principle—predominating at certain stages. If we go back far

enough we find that there was a stage when it was always

predominant.

Therefore, a test as to the ratio of progress of nations on the

evolutionary plane is to be found in their tendency and desire to

advance beyond that stage where the mental and physical forces, which

should only belong as inherited instincts to the brute animals and

savages, hold sway; and with this in view, if we take a survey of the

history, ideals, habits of life, mental outlook, and general tendencies

of the German nation, it will show conclusively that these

self-hypnotised people approximated too closely to the lower animals and

savages in their mode and chief aims of life.

The great and noble ideals and aims of mankind making for progress

towards the more highly evolved states were cast aside for the

unreasoning, brutal, and ignoble principles which make for the

debasement of man’s elevating potentialities, and hold him a slave to

the cruel and lowly-evolved state of the primitive creatures. That any

nation or nations should deliberately adopt, as their highest ideals and

aims, brute force in all its hideous aspects, desecration of mind, body,

and soul for the State, justification of criminal instincts and acts if

employed on behalf of the State, destruction, rape and plunder, murder

and torture to terrify innocent civilians; that they should adopt, in

short, the brutal principle that “Might is Right” in that special

national form in which it has been manifested in the last half century

and directed towards what is now known as “Militarism,”—all this is

surely proof positive that they have progressed but little on the upward

evolutionary stage from the state occupied by the brute beast and the

savage. The criminal aspect of the outrage of all that rightthinking

human beings hold dear is intensified by the fact that the nations which

perpetrated the deed were among the most prosperous of the world, and

enjoyed, as aliens, the same privileges as the subjects of those nations

whose hospitality and confidence they abused.

The nations bearing the brunt of the struggle against this outburst of

primitive brutal instincts and desires have long since reached a stage

in their evolution which made the methods of Attila unthinkable. If

forced into war they conducted it on the evolved plane of the human, and

not that of the animal. They treated their captives as honourable men

and extended to them every conceivable consideration within their power.

Prior to this war the ideals and aims of these nations were the

antithesis of those of their lowly-evolved enemies, and they were ideals

and aims which made for the right to live in peace with all other

nations. They aimed at the reduction of armaments, and gave practical

proof of their aims. They opened their ports and their markets to their

present enemies and gave them a free hand in every respect in all

spheres of activity. They had no desire to beat down the ideals and

principles which make for the ennoblement of mankind, they had no wish

to dominate the world by brute force and to establish a system of living

and a form of conduct which grinds the individual into a mere heartless

unreasoning automaton, rigid-brained, driven like an animal, and not

daring to claim even his soul as his own.

For many years prior to the crisis of 1914 we listened to the blatant

outbursts of German professors and other educated authorities of that

nation concerning its superiority to other nations. We were asked to

believe that certain individuals of that nationality had reached the

stage of the superman. These unfortunate and deluded people have for

some time been cursed with this obsession.

Thinking men and women of other nations listened and wondered when these

claims were made concerning these supermen, and after examining the

evidence advanced to support these claims became convinced that they

were not justified. The stupendous failure of the supposed supermen in

every sphere of mental and physical activity in the present war proves

the correctness of these convictions.

It seems inconceivable that supermen could so have guided and directed

the whole national energy of Germany that it became more and more

narrowed,—like the German mind,—until it concentrated almost solely upon

the stupid conception of the domination of the world by Germany. To this

end, the national energy was diverted chiefly into two channels:

COMMERCIAL INDUSTRY AND MILITARISM

One of the great features connected with the former was the

extraordinary development of machinery, which demanded for its

successful pursuance that the individual should be subjected to the most

harmful systems of automatic training.

The standardised parts of the machine made demands which tended to

stereotype the human machine. The limitations of human activity, mental

and physical, reached the maximum. The power to continue work under such

conditions depended upon a process of deterioration in the individual.

He was slowly but surely being robbed of the possibility of development.

The very soul of man was crushed to foster an industrial process which

was to provide the sinews of the war machine, to support that curse

called militarism, and the demoralisation of Germany came chiefly

through that nation’s conceptions of militarism which, in the first and

last analysis, stands for the worst manifestation of those savage

instincts and unbridled passions associated with the lowest stages of

primitive race development.

The horrible results of the sum total of the national madness which the

foregoing represents are now revealed before us, for to Germany this

militarism constituted a rigid plan, a system, and a world-philosophy.

She is convinced, against all the evidence, that her plan, system, or

philosophy, is so undeniably right as to constitute an absolute. As a

nation she has no mobility, no poise. She is influenced by a stultifying

idea, the perfection of her own “Kultur” (a word more properly

translated as a civilisation than by the word “culture” as used in the

English or American sense). She is, in fact, just as badly co-ordinated,

as unable to follow the true mandate of reason, as any individual who is

dominated by a fixed idea.

For the trouble is that when reason is so far held in check that it

loses its power of denial, it must have lost its power of control. The

original “idea” formulated in the conscious mind has sunk so deep into

the subconscious that it cannot be changed except under the influence of

some stronger outside power. For nearly fifty years Germany, in her

schools, her gymnasiums, her universities, her civic and her political

life, has been inculcating a rigid and mentally demoralising system, and

she is suffering now—as the monomaniac in private life must suffer—for

her particular form of insanity.

Even in the conduct of her great campaign, this weakness of hers has

begun to defeat her. She has lost the power of adaptability in military

matters. She repeats the faults of her original plan, despite the

endless illustrations that have been afforded by her Western antagonists

that that plan can be very considerably bettered. No doubt the Higher

Command may realise in some instances the weakness of the old method in

conditions that have been immensely modified since August, 1914, but

they are impotent to change, in a year or in a decade, the effect of

their own teaching on the millions of Germany’s army. The massed attack,

for example, has been demonstrated to be a disastrous failure—a single

well-placed machine-gun can defeat it—but Germany’s soldiers will not

advance in a scattered attack. They have learnt to depend upon the

nearness of their comrades. Separate a German battalion and it has

neither confidence nor courage.

Again, can one reasonably doubt that the German nation suffers from some

form of self-hypnotism when one sees evidence of the almost pathetic

belief apparently still placed in the campaign of “frightfulness”? The

German people themselves are afraid—an inevitable symptom of certain

forms of monomania—of the horrible devices they themselves are using,

and no evidence can bring home to them the fact, that the plan of

terrorising their enemies not only fails but recoils even upon their own

heads. London—I speak from experience—is not intimidated by Zeppelin

raids by night, nor by seaplane raids by day. The inhabitants of London

do not cower under these terrible afflictions and beg for peace; on the

contrary each horrible incident arouses afresh their determination to

prevent, if possible, a recurrence of such savagery in the world’s

history. Any sane nation must have realised this fact eighteen months

ago; Germany, blind and rigid in the trance of her self-hypnosis, still

staggers on to her own destruction.

In the opposite direction it is interesting to note the methods of the

British. In their case, we can trace no such clear effort for narrowness

and organisation. The general policy of the nation, whether internal or

international, had that haphazard air which is so commonly cited as

being a characteristic of the English method as a whole. We saw an

almost complete inability to govern or even to manage that still largely

subconsciously ruled country of Ireland. We witnessed the most

astounding blunders of policy with regard to foreign countries (witness

Lord Salisbury’s cession of Heligoland to Germany in 1890, Gladstone’s

handling of the first Boer War, and a dozen other instances), and even

with regard to the treatment of Britain’s own colonies, whilst

internally her educational and administrative systems were the result of

a method of trial and error which was sometimes well-nigh disastrous.

The British have in them a peculiar kind of empiricism. They are ready

to laugh at and to criticise their own defects. They admit quite freely,

for example, that they “blundered through somehow” in the Boer War, and

that they have blundered again and again (most destructively in

Gallipoli) in the present campaign. Their criticism of the rigidity of

their own military methods is a proof that if the criticism is sometimes

justified, the people at home—aye! and the New Army abroad—have never

been infected with that rigidity themselves. But, in truth, that

rigidity of discipline is now little in evidence in the field. And how

little it has affected the British and French plan of campaign may be

judged by the fact that every new device of any importance during the

war, whether a device of method or of mechanical invention, has been

originated by France and Great Britain. Now, from the German point of

view, this adaptability to circumstances would be pronounced, _a

priori_, as certain to lead to disaster. I put it to America, on the

evidence afforded by the battle-fields of France, which method is the

more likely to achieve ultimate success?

Returning now to my single reason for the cause of the present war, I

feel that the explanation has already been given. Granted a nation

educated and trained as Germany has been, some explosion was inevitable

sooner or later. If we have in our midst an individual suffering from a

fixed idea, he must in time become intolerable to us. Never in the

history of the world have thought and the tendency to organisation been

more fluid than they were in the first years of the 20th century. Yet

one great and powerful nation interfered with us at every turn, impeding

the flow of liberal thought by her obsession with the ideas of her own

greatness and the omnipotence of her military machine. Nevertheless the

other nations of Europe adapted themselves within limits to the demands

of this rigid mechanism in their midst. And it may be that these very

powers of endurance and adaptability hastened the crisis. They were

regarded by the monomaniacs of Germany as signs of weakness, and just as

their own philosopher Nietzsche went mad by concentration on his own

invariable theme, so at last Germany crossed the bounds of sanity,

imbued with a crazy belief in her own omnipotence. She ran amuck in the

wide streets of Europe, and even yet she has not realised her own

madness. I seriously question whether she will come to anything like a

proper realisation of that madness in the present generation. She has

allowed a habit of mind to become fixed; and it has fallen into the

realms of her subconsciousness. We must treat her as mad, but she is

nevertheless to be pitied.

Earlier in this chapter, I separated America from the rest of the world.

And my reason for this is that I regard this great nation of the United

States as still in its early childhood from one point of view. I have an

immense confidence in the future of America. I see that she has

potentialities and opportunities such as no other nation has ever had.

For her the possibilities of control by reason are illimitable. But at

the same time I must issue a very serious warning to every American

reader of this book. For already I have seen the imitation of certain

habits of thought, habits which, if they are persisted in, will sink

deep into the national subconsciousness and prove a source of danger to

the body politic.

My wish for America is that she should preserve as far as possible an

open mind. She has recently entered the Great War for reasons that every

right-minded man and woman must applaud and respect. I trust that she

will come out of it with the same balance and power of choice, so that

when she has to turn again to her own affairs, to matters of education,

of government, and of her commercial interests, she will be able to form

a national mind, sane enough and strong enough to control the great

national body.

No finer ambition is possible than this. The old ambition of dominance,

whether commercial or military, defeats itself by its very exaggeration.

Such ambitions mount up until they become topheavy, and, even if they

could be achieved, the result would be nothing but a decadence such as

that which followed the Empire of Rome.

But given such a power of co-ordination and of self-control in the race,

as a unit, as could be compared with the balance of a wise and healthy

man, that nation would be free, with a greater liberty than history can

record, and to such a nation little would be impossible. She would

become the teacher of the world by the force of her reason and example.

She would inaugurate the coming of a greater and wiser humanity.

END OF PART I