EDUCATION.
A.—LESSONS OF INSTINCT.
The doctrine of Pythagoras, the philosophic Messiah of Paganism,
included the strange tenet of metempsychosis. After death, held the
confessors of that dogma, the souls of men and brutes would reappear in
new forms, higher or lower, according to the character-traits of the
dying individual. Thus the soul of a wealthy glutton might be reborn in
a pig-sty, that of a high-minded peasant perhaps on the throne of a
king. Death and rebirth are the upper and lower spokes of a wheel that
turns and turns forever, and in the persons of their neighbors the
Pythagoreans saw wanderers that might have walked this earth thousands
of years ago.
The strangeness of such a theory is still increased by the circumstance
that its teacher was an eminent astronomer, an accomplished
mathematician, and the leader of a memorable hygienic reform. Our
astonishment is not lessened by the well-established fact that, under
some form or other, the doctrine of soul-migration has for ages been
the accepted creed of a large plurality of our fellow-men. It is well
known, however, that to his trusted disciples Pythagoras imparted an
esoteric or explanatory version of his dogmas; and if we learn that the
great philosopher attached a special importance to the influence of
hereditary dispositions, the truth at last dawns upon us that the
doctrine of metempsychosis referred to the reappearance of individual
types, passions, and dispositions in the bodily and mental
characteristics of the next generation. “Parents live in their
children.” The instinctive recognition of that truth reconciles our
dumb fellow-creatures to the prospect of death. At the end of summer
the night-moth carefully deposits her eggs in a silver cradle, hidden
safe in the crevice of some sheltering nook, where they will survive
the rigor of the winter and answer the first summons of spring. Having
thus, as it were, insured the resurrection of her type, the parent moth
quietly resigns herself to the fate of sleeping her own winter-slumber
in the arms of death. On the Orinoco wounded river-turtles will use
their last strength to climb the slope of some bush-hidden sand-bank,
and after intrusting their eggs to the protection of the deep drift
sand, will reënter the water and quietly float off with the seaward
currents. In the virgin-woods of Southern Mexico, where the harpy-eagle
fills the maws of her hungry brood by incessant raids on the small
denizens of the tree-tops, the traveler D’Armand once witnessed a
curious scene. An eagle had pounced upon a nursing mother monkey, who
at first struggled desperately to free herself from the claws of the
murderer; but, finding resistance in vain, she loosened her grasp on
the branches, and, just as the eagle carried her off, she disengaged
the arm of her baby from her neck, and shaking off the little creature
with a swing of her arm, she deliberately flung it back into the
sheltering foliage of the tree-top, thus taking the last possible
chance of surviving in her child.
The “dread of annihilation” reveals itself in the instincts of a dying
philosopher as plainly as in the instincts of a wounded animal; but, on
self-examination, that fear would prove to have but little in common
with a special solicitude for the preservation of material forms or
combinations—conditions which the process of organic change constantly
modifies in the cradle as well as in the grave. It is rather the type
of the body and its correlated mental dispositions which the hope of
resurrection yearns to preserve, and even childless men have often
partly realized that hope by impressing the image of their soul on a
younger mind, and transmitting their cherished projects and theories
through the medium of education. In the consciousness of that
accomplished task Socrates could as calmly die in the arms of his
disciples as the Hebrew patriarch in the arms of his children and
grandchildren. “You kill a sower,” cried St. Adalbert under the clubs
of his assassins, “but the seed he has planted will rise and survive
both his love and your hatred.”
Even the influence of a great practical example has often impressed the
mental type of a reformer or patriot on a series of subsequent
generations. The Buddhist Calanus, preaching the doctrine of
renunciation to an audience of scoffers, deeply affected the most
thoughtless of his witnesses by proving his personal convictions in the
flames of a funeral pile. “I leave no sons,” were the last words of
Epaminondas, “but two immortal daughters, the battles of Leuctra and
Mantinea.” Rousseau smiled when he learned the intrigues of his enemies
who were trying their utmost to enlist the coöperation of a violent
pulpit-orator. “They are busy recruiting their corps of partisans,”
said he, “but Time will raise me an ally in every intelligent reader of
the next generation.”
B.—REWARDS OF CONFORMITY.
In the simple lives of the lower animals every day may bring the
sufficient reward of its toil; but the problem of progress, even from
the first dawn of civilization, involves tasks too apt to extend beyond
the span of individual existence. The forest-clearing husbandman, the
state-founding patriot, the scientific inquirer, all risk to receive
the summons of night before the completion of their labor. Before
reaching the goal of their hopes their earthly pilgrimage may end at
the brink of the unknown river, and education alone can bridge that
gulf, and make every day the way-station, of an unbroken road. Children
or children’s children will take up the staff from the last
resting-place of their pilgrim father; and, moreover, all progress is
cumulative. Every laborer works with the experience of his forefathers,
as well as his own; every son stands on the shoulders of his father.
Even the failure of individual efforts contributes a helpful lesson to
the success of the next attempt:
Freedom’s brave battle, once begun,
Bequeathed from bleeding sire to son,
Though often baffled, e’er is won.
Persistent adherence to the programme of a traditional policy has often
made the work of successive centuries the triumphant execution of a
single plan. The empire of Islam sprung from the seed which the prophet
of Mecca had planted in the soil of his native land. The storm of the
Protestant revolt rose from the anathemas of a poor Wittenberg friar;
the unquenchable fire of the French Revolution was kindled by the
burning indignation of a Swiss recluse, and his fervid appeals:
Those oracles that set the world aflame,
Nor ceased to burn till kingdoms were no more;
and the vast fabric of our republican federation was founded by the
poor colonists who sought independence in the freedom of the
wilderness, and combined against the power of a selfish despot.
Education sows a seed which may sprout even during the life-time of the
sower, and bless individual life with the sweets of a guaranteed
triumph over the power of death. Resurgam, “I shall live after death,”
expresses the significance of that triumph, and of the “esoteric
doctrine of Pythagoras.”
C.—PERVERSION.
The Christian church has constantly perverted the purpose of education,
but has never yet deserved the reproach of having neglected its means.
From the very beginning the sect of the apostle-training Galilean has
been a sect of assiduous educators. They were not satisfied with
founding schools and opening their doors to all comers, but went forth
in quest of new converts, and pursued their aim with a persistence of
zeal and a versatility of skill that could not fail to accomplish its
purpose. As soon as a sufficient increase of power enabled them to
control the institutes of primary instruction they turned their chief
attention to the dogmatical education of the young. They derived no aid
from the attractiveness and still less from the plausibility of their
doctrine, but they realized Schopenhauer’s remark that “there is in
childhood a period measured by six, or at most by ten years, when any
well-inculcated dogma, no matter how extravagantly absurd, is sure to
retain its hold for life.” And though the propagation of an unnatural
creed is not favored by natural fertility, the naturally barren
doctrine of renunciation was thus successfully propagated by a system
of incessant grafting. By the skilful application of that process the
most dissimilar plants were made subservient to its purpose. The
“Worship of Sorrow” with its whining renunciation of worldly
enjoyments, and its indifference to health and physical education, was
grafted on the manful naturalism of the Hebrew law-giver.
Saint-worship, the veneration of self-torturing fanatics, was grafted
on a stem of pagan mythology, and dozens of Christian martyrs have thus
usurped the honor and the sacrifices of pagan temples. Christian
holidays were grafted on the festivals of the nature-loving Saxons. But
persuasion failing, the missionaries of the cross did not hesitate to
resort to more conclusive measures. Like refractory children cudgeled
along the path of knowledge, the obstinate skeptics of northern Europe
were harassed with fire and sword till they could not help admitting
the dangers of unbelief. The garden-lands of the Albigenses were wasted
till they found no difficulty in yearning for the peace of a better
world. Philosophers were tortured in the prisons of the Holy
Inquisition till the sorrows of life favored the renunciation of its
hopes.
For thirteen centuries the sunshine of millions of human hearts was
ruthlessly sacrificed to promote the task of luring mankind from life
to ghost-land, and during all those ages education was systematically
turned from a blessing into an earth-blighting curse.
D.—PENALTIES OF NEGLECT.
There is a story of a Portuguese slave-dealer who carried a private
chaplain on his pay-roll, and frequently expressed his solicitude for
the spiritual welfare of his shackled captives. A very similar kind of
spiritual duty has for centuries been made the excuse for an almost
total neglect of secular education. Divorced from the control of common
sense, religion soon degenerated into mere ceremonialism. A priest who
would travel twenty miles through a snow-storm to supply a dying man
with a consecrated wafer had no sympathy with the needs of the living.
He would extort the last penny of his tithes at the risk of starving a
village full of needy parishioners. He would groan at the sight of an
unbaptized child, but had not a drop of water to cool the brows of
burning Moors or Jews. He would rave about the cruelty of a prince who
had deprived the clergy of their mass-shillings, but had no ear for the
laments of the exiled Moriscos or the curses of starving serfs.
Such was the morality which arrogated the right of suppressing that
system of physical and intellectual education which had filled the
homes of the Mediterranean nations with all the blessings of health,
science, and beauty. Theological training had failed to kindle the dawn
of a supernatural millennium, but had thoroughly succeeded in
extinguishing the light of human reason. Not absolute ignorance only,
but baneful superstition—worse than ignorance by just as much as poison
is worse than hunger—was for centuries the inevitable result of all
so-called school-training; and the traditions of that age of
priest-rule have made religion almost a synonyme of cant. It also gave
book-learning its supposed tendency to mental aberration. Can we wonder
at that result of an age when the literary products of Christian Europe
were confined almost exclusively to ghost-stories and manuals of
ceremony? Can we wonder that delusions of the most preposterous kind
assumed the virulence of epidemic diseases? Maniacs of self-mutilation,
of epileptic contortions, of were-wolf panics, traversed Europe from
end to end. Men gloried in ignorance, and boasted their neglect of
worldly science till the consequences of that neglect avenged its folly
in actual madness.
The saddest of all the sad “it might have beens” is, perhaps, a reverie
on the probable results of earlier emancipation—of the employment of
thirteen worse than wasted centuries in scientific inquiries,
agricultural improvements, social and sanitary reforms. We might have
failed to enter the portals of the New Jerusalem, but we would probably
have regained our earthly paradise.
E.—REFORM.
The days of the Holy Inquisition are past; but the restless propaganda
of Jesuitry still shames the inactivity of Rationalism. Our friends sit
listless, relying on the theoretical advantages of their cause, while
the busy intrigues of our enemies secure them all practical advantages.
Even in our model republic only primary education stands neutral, while
private enterprise has made nearly every higher college a stronghold of
dogmatism. And even the semi-secularism of primary instruction is more
than offset by the ultra-orthodoxy of “Sunday-schools.” Millions of
factory children have to sacrifice their only day of leisure at the
bidding of their dogmatic task-master and with the timid connivance of
their parents. “We cannot row against the stream,” I have heard even
Freethinkers say. “Let the youngsters join the crowd; if it does them
no good, it can do no harm.” But it will do harm, even beyond the waste
of time and the wasted opportunities for health-giving exercise. The
process of dogmatic inoculation may fail to serve its direct purpose,
but the weekly repetition of the experiment is sure to contaminate the
moral organism with unsound humors which may become virulent at
unexpected times and, likely enough, undermine that very peace of the
household which a short-sighted mother hoped to promote by driving her
boys to Sunday-school, as she would drive troublesome cattle to a
public pasture.
The Freethinkers of every community should combine to engage a teacher,
or at least facilitate home instruction by collecting text-books of
Secularism, such as Voltaire’s “Philosophical Cyclopedia;” Rousseau’s
“Emile;” Hallam’s “History of the Middle Ages;” Ingersoll’s pamphlets;
Paine’s “Age of Reason;” Lecky’s “History of Rationalism” and “History
of Morals;” Lessing’s “Nathan;” Goethe and Schiller’s “Xenions;”
Darwin’s “Descent of Man;” Plutarch’s Biographies; Trelawney’s “Last
Days of Shelley and Byron;” McDonnell’s Freethought novels; Parker
Pillsbury’s “Review of Sabbatarian Legislation;” Reade’s “Martyrdom of
Man;” Bennett’s “Gods and Religions of Ancient and Modern Times;”
Gibbon’s “History of Christianity;” Keeler’s “Short History of the
Bible;” “Bible Myths and Their Parallels in Other Religions;”
“Supernatural Religion;” Greg’s “Creed of Christendom;” Lord Amberley’s
“Analysis of Religious Belief;” “Religion Not History.”
We should have Freethought colleges and Secular missions, and even
isolated Liberals might do better than “drift with the stream.” They
might let their children pass their Sundays in the freedom of the
forests and mountains to worship the God of Nature in his own temple,
and learn a lesson from the parental devotion of their dumb
fellow-creatures. She-wolves, deprived of their whelps, have been known
to enter human habitations at night to suckle their young through the
bars of a heavy cage. Thrushes and fly-catchers will enter an open
window to feed or rescue their captive nestlings, and with a still
wider sympathy a Liberal friend of mine tries to aid his neighbors’
children, as well as his own. Renouncing the hope of abolishing
Sabbatarianism, he conceived the idea of controlling it, and induced
his neighbors to send their children to a “Sunday Garden” with a free
museum of pictures and stuffed birds, gymnastic contrivances, and a
little restaurant of free temperance refreshments—apples, peanuts, and
lemonade. He defrays the expenses of the establishment, which his
neighbors consider a sort of modified kindergarten; and under the name
of “Sunday books” circulates a private library of purely secular
literature.
“If life shall have been duly rationalized by science,” says Herbert
Spencer, “parents will learn to consider a sound physical constitution
as an entailed estate, which should be transmitted unimpaired, if not
improved;” and with a similar recognition of social obligations
Freethinkers should endeavor to transmit to their children a bequest of
unimpaired common sense. Loyalty to their Protestant ancestors, loyalty
to posterity, and to the majesty of truth herself, should prompt us to
stand bravely by our colors and train our children to continue the
struggle for light and independence.
By the far-reaching influence of education Secularists should bridge
the chasm which orthodoxy hopes to cross on the wings of faith.
Secularism shall preach the gospel of immortality on earth.
IV—OBJECTIVE MAXIMS.