Read Ebook: Means and Ends of Education by Spalding John Lancaster

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If thou canst not bear trouble, sorrow, and disappointment without loss of composure, thou art poorly equipped for life's struggle. If thou mayst not lead the life thou wouldst wish, thou canst at least make the life thou leadest the means to improve thyself. If we were so constituted that thought, feeling, and imagination might have free and healthful play in ever-during darkness and isolation, life would still be good. Could I live surrounded by those I love, I should feel less keenly the discontent which the consciousness of my higher needs creates; and besides, it is not easy to rest in the comforts and luxuries which make and keep us inferior, except in the company of those we love. If our ordinary power of sight were as great as that we gain with the help of the microscope, the world would become for us a place of horrors; and if we could clearly see ourselves as we are, life would be less endurable. God blurs our vision as a mother hides from her child its wound.

Pleasures which quickly end in revulsion of feeling are but momentary escapes from pain; and they alone are fortunate who are able to persevere in pursuits which give them pure delight. "All good," says Kant, "which is not based on the highest moral principle is but empty appearance and splendid misery."

Sensations of color, taste, sound, smell, touch, heat and cold, perceptions of magnitude, and temporal and spatial relations, is the sum of what we know; and yet we are conscious that reason means infinitely more than this, that its proper object is the eternal world of truth, goodness, and beauty. Think for thyself with a single view to truth; for so only will thy thought be of worth and service to others. We feel ourselves only in action, and hence the need of doing lest we lose ourselves and be swallowed in nothingness. And for the old and feeble even worry, I suppose, is a comfort, for it helps to keep this self-consciousness alive. It is impossible to say whence a thought comes, and it is often difficult to determine the occasion by which it has been suggested.

Fortunate are the children all of whose knowledge comes from man and nature in their purity, whose memory holds no words which are not the symbols of what they themselves have seen and felt, in whose minds no will-o'-the-wisp from chimera worlds flits to and fro. It is only by keeping men in ignorance and vice that it is possible to keep them from the contagion of great thoughts. They who have little are thought to have no right to anything. Thus the plagiarized sayings of Napoleon and other nurslings of fame pass for their own; who their real authors were, seeming to be a matter of indifference.

If I am not pleased with myself, but should wish to be other than I am, why should I think highly of the influences which have made me what I am? Should I publish what I believe to be true and well expressed, and competent judges should declare it to be worthless in form and substance, the verdict would be interesting to me, and I should set to work to discover why and how I had so far failed in discernment. "A thoroughly cultivated man," says Fontenelle, "is informed by all the thinkers of the past, as though he had lived and continued to grow in knowledge during all the centuries." The author is rewarded when his readers are made better.

The most persuasive of men are the praisers of patent medicines. Their eloquence is more richly rewarded than that of all the orators, who also are paid, for the most part, in inverse ratio to the amount of truth they utter. Fame, as fame, is the merest vanity. No wise man wishes to be talked and written about, living or dead, to be a theme chiefly for fools.

Literature is writing in which genuine thought and feeling are rightly expressed. They who content themselves with what others have uttered, learn nothing. The blind need a guide, but they who are able to see should look for themselves. There is, indeed, in the words of genius a glow which never dies; but it only dazzles and misleads, if it fails to stimulate and strengthen our own powers of vision. True speech is not idle; it is utterance of life, the mate of action, and the begetter of noble deeds. Strive for knowledge and strength, but do not appear to have them.

"A book," says La Bruy?re, "which exalts the mind and inspires high and manly thoughts, is good, and the work of a master." A phrase suffices to tell the man is ignorant or the book worthless. As the body is nourished by dead things, vegetable and animal, so the mind feeds on the thoughts of those who have ceased to live, which, it would seem, are never rightly understood until the thinkers have passed away.

To be unwilling to be proved wrong is to fail in love of truth; to resent an objection is to lack culture. One may believe what cannot be demonstrated, but to grow angry because there is no proof is absurd.

To do deeds and to utter thoughts which long after we have departed shall remain to cheer, to illumine, to strengthen and console, is to be like God; and the desire of noble minds is not of praise, but of abiding power for good.

He who is certain of himself needs not the good opinion of men, not of those even who are competent to judge. Only the vain and foolish or the designing and dishonest will wish to receive credit for more ability and virtue than they have. An exaggerated reputation may nourish conceit or win favor; but the wise and the good put away conceit, and desire not favors which are granted from mistaken notions.

"I hate false words," says Landor, "and seek with care, difficulty, and moroseness those that fit the thing."

Dwell not with complacency upon aught thou hast or hast achieved, but address thyself each day, like a simple-hearted child, to the task God sets thee; and remember when the last hour comes thou canst carry nothing to Him but faith in His mercy and goodness.

TRUTH AND LOVE.

Truth, which only doth judge itself, teacheth that the inquiry of truth, which is the love-making or wooing of it; the knowledge of truth, which is the presence of it; and the belief of truth, which is the enjoying of it, is the sovereign good of human nature.--BACON.

As those who have little think their little much, so those who have few ideas believe with obstinacy that they are the sum of all truth. If the world could but be made to see what they see there would be no ills. They have not even a suspicion of the unutterable complexity of the warp and woof of nature and of life; and when their opinions are combated they imagine they thereby acquire new importance, and they defend them with such zeal that they make proselytes and found sects in religion, politics, and literature. The source of the greater part of error is the absoluteness the mind attributes to its knowledge and, as part of this, the persuasion that at each stage of our mental life, we are capable of seeing things as they are. The aim of the philosopher, as of the Christian, is to escape from the ephemeral self by renouncing what is petty, partial, apparent, and transitory, that the true self may unfold in the world of the permanent, of things which have an aptitude for perpetuity; but the philosopher's efforts are intellectual and moral, while the Christian's source of strength is the love which is enrooted in divine faith.

"The brief precept," says St. Augustine, "is given there once for all,--Love, and do what thou wilt. If thou art silent, be silent for love; if thou speakest, speak for love; if thou correctest, correct for love; if thou sparest, spare for love. The root of love is within, and from it only good can come." Life springs from love, and love is its being, aim, and end. Each soul is born of souls yearning that he be born, and he lives only so far as he leaves himself and becomes through love part of the life of God and the race of man.

Primordial matter, with which the physicists start, is twin brother of nothing. In every conceivable hypothesis, we assume either that nothing is the cause of something, or that from the beginning there was something or some one who is all the universe may become. If truth and love and goodness are of the essence of the highest life evolved in nature, they are of the essence of that by which nature exists and energizes. If reason is valid at all, it avails as an immovable foundation for faith in God and in man's kinship with him. The larger the world we live in, the greater the opportunities for self-education. He who knows friends and foes, who is commended and found fault with, who tastes the delights of home and breathes the air of strange lands, who is followed and opposed, who triumphs and suffers defeat, who contends with many and is left alone, who dwells with his own thoughts and in the company of the great minds of all time,--necessarily gains wisdom and power, and learns to feel himself a man.

Science springs from man's yearning for truth; art, from his yearning for beauty; religion, from his yearning for love: and as truth, beauty, and love are a harmony, so are science, art, and religion; and if conflicts arise, they are the results of ignorance and passion. The charm of faith, hope, and love, of knowledge, beauty, and religion, lies in their power to open life's prison, thus permitting the soul to escape to commune with the Infinite and Eternal, with the boundless mysterious world of being which forever draws us on and forever eludes our grasp. The higher the man, the more urgent this need of self-escape.

We look upon lifelong imprisonment of the body as among the greatest of evils, but that the mind should be suffered to languish in the dungeon of ignorance, error, and prejudice, seems comparatively a slight thing. Thy whole business, as a rational being, is to know and follow truth,--with gratitude and joy if possible, but, in any case, with courage and resignation. Mind maketh man; and the most money and place can do, is to make millionnaires and titularies.

The Alpine guides, who lead travellers through the sublimest scenery in the world, are as insensible to its grandeur as the stocks they grasp; and we nearly all are as indifferent as these drudges to Nature's divine spectacle, with its starlit heavens, its risings and settings of sun and moon, its storms and calms, its changes of season, its clouds and snows and breath of many-tinted flowers, its children's faces, and plumage and songs of birds.

As we judge of many things by samples, a glance may suffice to show the worthlessness of a book, but the value of one that is genuine is not quickly perceived, for it reveals itself the more the oftener it is read and pondered. There is not a more certain, a purer, or a more delightful source of contentment and independence than a taste for the best literature. In the midst of occupations and cares of whatever kind it enables us to look forward to the hour when the noblest minds and most generous hearts shall welcome us to their company to be entertained with great thoughts rightly uttered and with information concerning whatever is of interest to man.

In every home the best works of the great poets, historians, philosophers, orators, and story-writers should lie within reach of the young, who should be permitted, not urged, to read them. We may know a man by the company he keeps; we may know him better still by the books he loves: and if he loves none, he is not worth knowing.

Matthew Arnold praises culture for "its inexhaustible indulgence, its consideration of circumstances, its severe judgment of actions joined to its merciful judgment of persons."

When we have learned to love work, to love honest work, work well done, excellently well done, we have within ourselves the most fruitful principle of education.

Who shall speak ill of bodily health and vigor? Herbert Spencer affirms that it is man's first duty to be a good animal. But since we cannot all be athletes or be well even, let us not refuse to find consolation in the fact that much of what is greatest, whether in the world of thought or action, has been wrought by mighty souls in feeble and suffering bodies; and since men gladly risk health and life to acquire gold, shall we not be willing, if need be, to be "sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought," if so we may attain to truth and love?

Great things are accomplished only by concentration. What we ourselves think, love, and do, until it becomes a habit, is the form and substance of our life.

To live in the company of those who have or seek culture is to breathe the vital air of mental health and vigor.

The scientific investigator gives his whole attention to the facts before him; but the discipline of close observation, however favorable it may be to accuracy, weakens capacity for wide and profound views. On the other hand, the speculative thinker is apt to grow heedless or oblivious of facts. Hence a minute observer is seldom a great philosopher, a great philosopher rarely a careful observer.

"Employment," says Ruskin, "is the half, and the primal half of education, for it forms the habits of body and mind, and these are the constitution of man." Tell me at and in what thou workest, and I will tell thee what thou art. The secret of education lies in the words of Christ,--He that hath eyes to see, let him see; he that hath ears to hear, let him hear. The soul must flow through the channels of the senses until it meets the universe and clothes it with the beauty and meaning which reveal God.

When I think of all the truth which still remains for me to learn, of all the good I yet may do, of all the friends I still may serve, of all the beauty I may see, life seems as fresh and fair, as full of promise, as is to loving souls the dawn of their bridal day. Animals, children, savages, the thoughtless and frivolous, live in the present alone; they consequently lead a narrow, ephemeral, and superficial existence. They strike no deep roots into the past, they forebode no divine future, they enter not behind the veil where the soul finds ever-during truth and power.

"The world is too much with us; late and soon, Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers."

Whatever sets the mind in motion may lead us to secret worlds, though it be a falling apple, as with Newton, or the swing of the pendulum, as with Galileo, or a boy's kite, as with Franklin, or throwing pebbles into the water, as with Turner. Watt sat musing by the fire, and noticed the rise and fall of the lid of the boiling kettle, and the steam engine, like a vision from unknown spheres, rose before his imagination. A child, carelessly playing with the glasses that lay on the table of a spectacle-maker, gave the clew to the invention of the telescope. The pestle, flying from the hand of Schwarz, told him he had found the explosive which has transformed the world. Drifting plants, of a strange species, whispered to Columbus of a continent that lay across the Atlantic. Patient observation and work are the mightiest conquerors.

Among the maxims, called triads, which have come down to us from the Celtic bards, we find this: "The three primary requisites of genius,--an eye that can see nature; a heart that can feel nature; and boldness that dares follow nature." He who has no philosophy and no religion, no theory of life and the world, has nothing which he finds it greatly important to say or do. He lacks the impulse of genius, the educator's energy and enthusiasm. Having no ideal, he has no end to which he may point and lead. To do well it is necessary to believe in the worth of what we do. The power which upholds and leads us on is faith,--faith in God, in ourselves, in life, in education.

Forever to be blessed and cherished is the love-inspired mother or the teacher whose generous heart and luminous mind first leads us to believe in the priceless worth of wisdom and virtue, thus kindling within the soul a quenchless fire which warms and irradiates our whole being.

To be God's workman, to strive, to endure, to labor, even to the end, for truth and righteousness, this is life.

"My desire," says Dante, "and my will rolled onward, like a wheel in even motion, swayed by the love which moves the sun and all the stars."

If there are any who shrink from wrong more than from disgrace they best deserve to be called religious.

Strive not to be original or profound, but to think justly and to express clearly what thou seest; and so it may happen that thy view shall pierce deeper than thou knowest.

The words and deeds which are most certain to escape oblivion are those which nourish the higher life of the soul. Self-love, the love of one's real self, of one's soul, is the indispensable virtue. It is this we seek when we strive to know and love truth and justice; it is this we seek, when we love God and our fellow-men. In turning from ourselves to find them, we still seek ourselves; in abandoning life we seek richer and fuller life.

Truth separate from love is but half truth. Think of that which unites thee with thy fellows rather than of what divides thee from them. Religion is the bond of love, and not a subject for a debating club. If thou wouldst refute thy adversaries, commit the task to thy life more than to thy words. Read the history of controversy and ask thyself whether there is in it the spirit of Christ, the meek and lowly One? Its champions belong to the schools of the sophists rather than to the worshippers of God in spirit and in truth. And what has been the issue of all their disputes but hatreds and sects, persecutions and wars? If it is my duty to be polite and helpful to my neighbor, it is plainly also my duty to treat his opinions and beliefs with consideration and fairness.

There is a place in South America where the whole population have the goitre, and if a stranger who is free from the deformity chances to pass among them, they jeer and cry, "There goes one who has no goitre." What could be more delightfully human? We think it a holy thing to put down duelling, the battle of one with one; but we are full of enthusiasm over battles of a hundred thousand with a hundred thousand. Thus the Southern slave-owners were sworn advocates of the rights of man and of popular liberty.

The explanation of many provoking things is to be found in Dr. Johnson's words,--"Ignorance, simple ignorance;" but of many more probably in these other words,--Greed, simple greed.

"In science," says Bulwer, "read by preference the newest books; in literature, the oldest." This is wiser than Emerson's saying: "Never read a book which is not a year old."

The facility with which it is now possible to get at whatever is known on any subject has a tendency to create the opinion that reading up in this or that direction is education, whereas such reading as is generally done, is unfavorable to discipline of mind. Shall our Chautauquas and summer schools help to foster this superstition?

What passion can be more innocent than the passion for knowledge? And what passion gives better promise of blessings to one's self and to one's fellow-men? Why desire to have force and numbers on thy side? Is it not enough that thou hast truth and justice?

The loss of the good opinion of one's friends is to be regretted, but the loss of self-respect is the only true beggary.

Zeal for a party or a sect is more certain of earthly reward than zeal for truth and religion.

As it is unfortunate for the young to have abundance of money, fine clothes, and social success, so popularity is hurtful to the prosperity of the best gifts. It draws the mind away from the silence and strength of eternal truth and love into a world of clamor and noise. Patience is the student's great virtue; it is the mark of the best quality of mind. It takes an eternity to unfold a universe; man is the sum of the achievements of innumerable ages, and whatever endures is slow in acquiring the virtues which make for permanence.

The will to know, manifesting itself in persistent impulse, in never-satisfied yearning, is the power which urges to mental effort and enables us to attain culture.

"If a thing is good," says Landor, "it may be repeated. The repetition shows no want of invention; it shows only what is uppermost in the mind, and by what the writer is most agitated and inflamed." What hast thou learned to admire, to long for, to love, genuinely to hope for and believe? The answer tells thy worth and that of the education thou hast received.

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