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Title: Education and the Higher Life

Author: J. L. Spalding

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EDUCATION AND THE HIGHER LIFE


BY BISHOP SPALDING.

EDUCATION AND THE HIGHER LIFE. 12mo. $1.00.

THINGS OF THE MIND. 12mo. $1.00.

MEANS AND ENDS OF EDUCATION. 12mo. $1.00.

THOUGHTS AND THEORIES OF LIFE AND EDUCATION. 12mo. $1.00.

OPPORTUNITY AND OTHER ESSAYS AND ADDRESSES. 12mo. $1.00.

SONGS: CHIEFLY FROM THE GERMAN. 16mo, gilt top. $1.25.

A. C. McCLURG & CO.

CHICAGO.



EDUCATION
AND
THE HIGHER LIFE

BY

J. L. Spalding

Bishop of Peoria


    The business of education is not, as I think, to perfect the learner
    in any of the sciences, but to give his mind that freedom and
    disposition, and those habits, which may enable him to attain every
    part of knowledge himself.--LOCKE


SIXTH EDITION

CHICAGO

A. C. McCLURG & CO.

1900

_Copyright_,

BY A. C. MCCLURG AND CO.,

A. D. 1890.




CONTENTS.


      CHAPTER                                  PAGE

   I. IDEALS                                          7

  II. EXERCISE OF MIND                               30

 III. THE LOVE OF EXCELLENCE                         51

  IV. CULTURE AND THE SPIRIT OF THE AGE              73

   V. SELF-CULTURE                                   92

  VI. GROWTH AND DUTY                               117

 VII. RIGHT HUMAN LIFE                              144

VIII. UNIVERSITY EDUCATION                          172




EDUCATION
AND
THE HIGHER LIFE.




CHAPTER I.

IDEALS.


                                A noble aim,
    Faithfully kept, is as a noble deed.

WORDSWORTH.


To few men does life bring a brighter day than that which places the
crown upon their scholastic labors, and bids them go forth from the
halls of the Alma Mater to the great world's battlefield. There is a
freshness in these early triumphs which, like the bloom and fragrance of
the flower, is quickly lost, never to be found again even by those for
whom Fortune reserves her most choice gifts. Fame, though hymned by
myriad tongues, is not so sweet as the delight we drink from the
tear-dimmed eyes of our mothers and sisters, in the sacred hours when we
can yet claim as our own the love of higher things, the faith and hope
which make this mortal life immortal, and fill a moment with a wealth of
memories which lasts through years. The highest joy is serious, and in
the midst of supreme delight there comes to the soul a stillness which
permits it to rise to the serene sphere where truth is most gladly heard
and most easily perceived; and in such exaltation, the young see that
life is not what they take it to be. They think it long; it is short.
They think it happy; it is full of cares and sorrows. This two-fold
illusion widens the horizon of life and tinges it with gold. It gives to
youth its charm and makes of it a blessed time to which we ever turn
regretful eyes. But I am wrong to call illusion that which in truth is
but an omen of the divine possibilities of man's nature. To the young,
life is not mean or short, because the blessed freedom of youth may make
it noble and immortal. The young stand upon the threshold of the world.
Of the many careers which are open to human activity, they will choose
one; and their fortunes will be various, even though their merits should
be equal. But if position, fame, and wealth are often denied to the most
persistent efforts and the best ability, it is consoling to know they
are not the highest; and as they are not the end of life, they should
not be made its aim. An aim, nevertheless, we must have, if we hope to
live to good purpose. All men, in fact, whether or not they know it,
have an ideal, base or lofty, which molds character and shapes destiny.
Whether it be pleasure or gain or renown or knowledge, or several of
these, or something else, we all associate life with some end, or ends,
the attainment of which seems to us most desirable.

This ideal, that which in our inmost souls we love and desire, which we
lay to heart and live by, is at once the truest expression of our nature
and the most potent agency in developing its powers. Now, in youth we
form the ideals which we labor to body forth in our lives. What in these
growing days we yearn for with all our being, is heaped upon us in old
age. All important, therefore, is the choice of an ideal; for this more
than rules or precepts will determine what we are to become. The love of
the best is twin-born with the soul. What is the best? What is the
worthiest life-aim? It must be something which is within the reach of
every one, as Nature's best gifts--air and sunshine and water--belong to
all. What only the few can attain, cannot be life's real end or the
highest good. The best is not far removed from any one of us, but is
alike near to the poor and the rich, to the learned and the ignorant, to
the shepherd and the king, and only the best can give to the soul
repose and contentment. What then is the true life-ideal? Recalling to
mind the thoughts and theories of many men, I can find nothing better
than this, "Seek ye first the kingdom of God." "Love not pleasure," says
Carlyle, "love God. This is the everlasting Yea, wherein all
contradiction is solved; wherein whoso walks and works, it is well with
him."

To the high and aspiring heart of youth, fame, honor, glory, appeal with
such irresistible power, and appear clad in forms so beautiful, that at
a time of life when all of us are unreal in our sentiments and crude in
our opinions, they are often mistaken for the best. But fame is good
only in so far as it gives power for good. For the rest, it is nominal.
They who have deserved it care not for it. A great soul is above all
praise and dispraise of men, which are ever given ignorantly and without
fine discernment. The popular breath, even when winnowed by the winds of
centuries, is hardly pure.

And then fame cannot be the good of which I speak, for only a very few
can even hope for it. To nearly all, the gifts which make it possible
are denied; and to others, the opportunities. Many, indeed, love and win
notoriety, but such as they need not detain us here. A lower race of
youth, in whom the blood is warmer than the soul, think pleasure life's
best gift, and are content to let occasion die, while they revel in the
elysium of the senses. But to make pleasure an end is to thwart one's
purpose, for joy is good only when it comes unbidden. The pleasure we
seek begins already to pall. It is good, indeed, if it come as
refreshment to the weary, solace to the heavy-hearted, and rest to the
careworn; but if sought for its own sake, it is "the honey of poison
flowers and all the measureless ill." Only the young, or the depraved,
can believe that to live for pleasure is not to be foreordained to
misery. Whoso loves God or freedom or growth of mind or strength of
heart, feels that pleasure is his foe.


    "A king of feasts and flowers, and wine and revel,
    And love and mirth, was never King of glory."


Of money, as the end or ideal of life, it should not be necessary to
speak. As a fine contempt for life, a willingness to throw it away in
defence of any just cause or noble opinion, is one of the privileges of
youth, so the generous heart of the young holds cheap the material
comforts which money procures. To be young is to be free, to be able to
live anywhere on land or sea, in the midst of deserts or among strange
people; is to be able to fit the mind and body to all circumstance, and
to rise almost above Nature's iron law. He who is impelled by this high
and heavenly spirit will dream of flying and not of hobbling through
life on golden crutches. Let the feeble and the old put their trust in
money; but where there is strength and youth, the soul should be our
guide.

And yet the very law and movement of our whole social life seem to point
to riches as the chief good.


    "What is that which I should turn to, lighting upon days like these?
    Every door is barred with gold, and opens but to golden keys."


Money is the god in whom we put our trust, to whom instinctively we pay
homage. We believe that the rich are fortunate, are happy, that the best
of life has been given to them. We have faith in the power of money, in
its sovereign efficacy to save us not only from beggary, from sneers and
insults, but we believe that it can transform us, and take away the
poverty of mind, the narrowness of heart, the dullness of imagination,
which make us weak, hard, and common. Even our hatred of the rich is but
another form of the worship of money. The poor think they are wretched,
because they think money the chief good; and if they are right, then is
it a holy work to strive to overthrow society as it is now constituted.
Buckle and Strauss find fault with the Christian religion because it
does not inculcate the love of money. But in this, faith and reason are
in harmony. Wealth is not the best, and to make it the end of life is
idolatry, and as Saint Paul declares, the root of evil. Man is more than
money, as the workman is more than his tools. The soul craves quite
other nourishment than that which the whole material universe can
supply. Man's chief good lies in the infinite world of thought and
righteousness. Fame and wealth and pleasure are good when they are born
of high thinking and right living, when they lead to purer faith and
love; but if they are sought as ends and loved for themselves, they
blight and corrupt. The value of culture is great, and the ideal it
presents points in the right direction in bidding us build up the being
which we are. But since man is not the highest, he may not rest in
himself, and culture therefore is a means rather than an end. If we make
it the chief aim of life, it degenerates into a principle of exclusion,
destroys sympathy, and terminates in a sort of self-worship.

What remains, then, but the ideal which I have proposed?--"Seek ye first
the Kingdom of God." Unless the light of Heaven fall along our way,
thick darkness gathers about us, and in the end, whatever our success
may have been, we fail, and are without God and without hope. So long
as any seriousness is left, religion is man's first and deepest concern;
to be indifferent is to be dull or depraved, and doubt is disease.
Difficulties assuredly there are, underlying not only faith, but all
systems of knowledge. How am I certain that I know anything? is a
question, debated in all past time, debatable in all future time; but we
are none the less certain that we know. The mind is governed by laws
which neither science nor philosophy can change, and while theories and
systems rise and pass away, the eternal problems present themselves ever
anew clothed in the eternal mystery. But little discernment is needed to
enable us to perceive how poor and symbolic are the thoughts of the
multitude. Half in pity, half in contempt, we rise to higher regions
only to discover that wherever we may be there also are the laws and the
limitations of our being; and that in whatsoever sanctuaries we may take
refuge, we are still of the crowd. We cannot grasp the Infinite;
language cannot express even what we know of the Divine Being, and hence
there remains a background of darkness, where it is possible to adore,
or to mock. But religion dispels more mystery than it involves. With it,
there is twilight in the world; without it, night. We are in the world
to act, not to doubt. Leaving quibbles to those who can find no better
use for life, the wise, with firm faith in God and man, strive to make
themselves worthy to do brave and righteous work. Distrust is the last
wisdom a great heart learns; and noble natures feel that the generous
view is, in the end, the true view. For them life means good; they find
strength and joy in this wholesome and cheerful faith, and if they are
in error, it can never be known, for if death end all, with it knowledge
ceases. Perceiving this, they strive to gain spiritual insight, they
look to God; toward him they turn the current of their thought and love;
the unseen world of truth and beauty becomes their home; and while
matter flows on and breaks and remakes itself to break again, they dwell
in the presence of the Eternal, and become co-workers with the Infinite
Power which makes goodness good, and justice right. They love knowledge,
because God knows all things; they love beauty, because he is its
source; they love the soul, because it brings man into conscious
communion with him and his universe. If their ideal is poetical, they
catch in the finer spirit of truth which the poet breathes, the
fragrance of the breath of God; if it is scientific, they discover in
the laws of Nature the harmony of his attributes; if it is political and
social, they trace the principles of justice and liberty to him; if it
is philanthropic, they understand that love which is the basis, aim,
and end of life is also God.

The root of their being is in him, and the illusory world of the senses
cannot dim their vision of the real world which is eternal. By
self-analysis the mind is sublimated until it becomes a shadow in a
shadowy universe; and the criticism of the reason drives us to doubt and
inaction, from which we are redeemed by our necessary faith in our own
freedom, in our power to act, and in the duty of acting in obedience to
higher law. Knowledge comes of doing. Never to act is never to know. The
world of which we are conscious is the world against which we throw
ourselves by the power of the will; hence life is chiefly conduct, and
its ideal is not merely religious, but moral. The duty of obedience to
our better self determines the purpose and end of action, for the better
self is under the impulse of God. Whether we look without or within, we
find things are as they should not be; and there awakens the desire,
nay, the demand that they be made other and better. The actual is a
mockery unless it may be looked upon as the means of a higher state. If
all things come forth only to perish and again come forth as they were
before; if life is a monster which destroys itself that it may again be
born, again to destroy itself,--were it not better that the tragedy
should cease? For many centuries men have been struggling for richer and
happier life; and yet when we behold the sins, the miseries, the wrongs,
the sorrows, of which the world is full, we are tempted to think that
progress means failure. The multitude are still condemned to toil from
youth to age to provide the food by which life is kept in the body;
immortal spirits are still driven by hard necessity to fix their
thoughts upon matter from which they with much labor dig forth what
nourishes the animal. Like the savage, we still tremble before the
pitiless might of Nature. Floods, hurricanes, earthquakes, untimely
frosts, destroy in a moment what with long and painful effort has been
provided. Pestilence still stalks through the earth to slay and make
desolate. Each day a hundred thousand human beings die; and how many of
these perish as the victims of sins of ignorance, of selfishness, of
sensuality.

To-day, as of old, it would seem man's worst enemy is man. What hordes
still wander through Asia and Africa, seeking opportunity for murder and
rapine; what multitudes are still hunted like beasts, caught and sold
into slavery. In Europe millions of men stand, arms in hand, waiting for
the slaughter. They still believe, because they were born on different
sides of a river and speak different languages, that they are natural
enemies, made to destroy one another. And in our own country, what other
sufferings and wrongs,--greed, sensuality, injustice, deceit,--make us
enemies one of another! There is a general struggle in which each one
strives to get the most, heedless of the misery of others. We trade upon
the weaknesses, the vices, and the follies of our fellow-men; and every
attempt at reform is met by an army of upholders of abuse. When we
consider the murders, the suicides, the divorces, the adulteries, the
prostitutions, the brawls, the drunkenness, the dishonesties, the
political and official corruptions, of which our life is full, it is
difficult to have complacent thoughts of ourselves. Consider, too, our
prisons, our insane asylums, our poor-houses; the multitudes of old men
and women, who having worn out strength and health in toil which barely
gave them food and raiment, are thrust aside, no longer now fit to be
bought and sold; the countless young people, who have, as we say, been
educated, but who have not been taught the principles and habits which
lead to honorable living; the thousands in our great cities who are
driven into surroundings which pervert and undermine character. And
worse still, the good, instead of uniting to labor for a better state
of things, misunderstand and thwart one another. They divide into
parties, are jealous and contentious, and waste their time and exhaust
their strength in foolish and futile controversies. They are not anxious
that good be done, nor asking nor caring by whom; but they seek credit
for themselves, and while they seem to be laboring for the general
welfare, are striving rather to satisfy their own selfish vanity.

But the knowledge of all this does not discourage him who, guided by the
light of true ideals, labors to make reason and the will of God prevail.
If things are bad he knows they have been worse. Never before have the
faith and culture which make us human, which make us strong and wise,
been the possession of so large a portion of the race. Religion and
civilization have diffused themselves, from little centres--from Athens
and Jerusalem and Rome--until people after people, whole continents,
have been brought under their influence. And in our day this diffusion
is so rapid that it spreads farther in a decade than formerly in
centuries. For ages, mountains and rivers and oceans were barriers
behind which tribes and nations entrenched themselves against the human
foe. But we have tunneled the mountains; we have bridged the rivers; we
have tamed the oceans. We hitch steam and electricity to our wagons,
and in a few days make the circuit of the globe. All lands, all seas,
are open to us. The race is getting acquainted with itself. We make a
comparative study of all literatures, of all religions, of all
philosophies, of all political systems. We find some soul of goodness in
whatever struggles and yearnings have tried man's heart. As the products
of every clime are carried everywhere, like gifts from other worlds, so
the highest science and the purest religion are communicated and taught
throughout the earth: and as a result, national prejudices and
antagonisms are beginning to disappear; wars are becoming less frequent
and less cruel; established wrongs are yielding to the pressure of
opinion; privileged classes are losing their hold upon the imagination;
and opportunity offers itself to ever-increasing numbers.

Now, in all this, what do we perceive but the purpose of God, urging
mankind to wider and nobler life? History is his many-chambered school.
Here he has taught this lesson, and there another, still leading his
children out of the darkness of sin and ignorance toward the light of
righteousness and love, until his kingdom come, until his will be done
on earth as it is in heaven. To believe in God and in this divine
education, and to make co-operation with his providential guidance of
the race a life-aim is to have an ideal which is not only the highest,
but which also blends all other true ideals into harmony. And the lovers
of culture should be the first to perceive that intellectual good is
empty, illusory, unless there be added to it the good of the heart, the
good of conscience. To live for the cultivation of one's mind, is, after
all, to live for one's self, and therefore out of harmony with the
eternal law which makes it impossible for us to find ourselves except in
what is not ourselves. "It is the capital fault of all cultivated men,"
says Goethe, "that they devote their whole energies to the carrying out
of a mere idea, and seldom or never to the realization of practical
good." Whatever may be said in praise of culture, of its power to make
its possessor at home in the world of the best thought, the purest
sentiment, the highest achievements of the race; of the freedom, the
mildness, the reasonableness of the temper it begets; of its aim at
completeness and perfection,--it is nevertheless true, that if it be
sought apart from faith in God and devotion to man, its tendency is to
produce an artificial and unsympathetic character. The primal impulse of
our nature is to action; and unless we can make our thought a kind of
deed, it seems to be vain and unreal; and unless the harmonious
development of all the endowments which make the beauty and dignity of
human life, give us new strength and will to work with God for the good
of men, sadness and a sense of failure fall upon us. To have a
cultivated mind, to be able to see things on many sides, to have wide
sympathy and the power of generous appreciation,--is most desirable, and
without something of all this, not only is our life narrow and
uninteresting, but our energy is turned in wrong directions, and our
very religion is in danger of losing its catholicity.

Culture, then, is necessary. We need it as a corrective of the tendency
to seek the good of life in what is external, as a means of helping us
to overcome our vulgar self-complacency, our satisfaction with low aims
and cheap accomplishments, our belief in the sovereign potency of
machines and measures. We need it to make our lives less unlovely, less
hard, less material; to help us to understand the idolatry of the
worship of steam and electricity, the utter insufficiency of the ideals
of industrialism. But if culture is to become a mighty transforming
influence it must be wedded to religious faith, without which, while it
widens the intellectual view, it weakens the will to act. To take us out
of ourselves and to urge us on to labor with God that we may leave the
world better because we have lived, religion alone has power. It gives
new vigor to the cultivated mind; it takes away the exclusive and
fastidious temper which a purely intellectual habit tends to produce; it
enlarges sympathy; it teaches reverence; it nourishes faith, inspires
hope, exalts the imagination, and keeps alive the fire of love. To lead
a noble, a beautiful, and a useful life, we should accept and follow the
ideals both of religion and of culture. In the midst of the
transformations of many kinds which are taking place in the civilized
world, neither the uneducated nor the irreligious mind can be of help.
Large and tolerant views are necessary; but not less so is the
enthusiasm, the earnestness, the charity of Christian faith. They who
are to be leaders in the great movements upon which we have entered,
must both know and believe. They must understand the age, must
sympathize with whatever is true and beneficent in its aspirations, must
hail with thankfulness whatever help science, and art, and culture can
bring; but they must also know and feel that man is of the race of God,
and that his real and true life is in the unseen, infinite, and eternal
world of thought and love, with which the actual world of the senses
must be brought into ever-increasing harmony. Liberty and equality are
good, wealth is good, and with them we can do much, but not all that
needs to be done. The spirit of Christ is not merely the spirit of
liberty and equality; it is more essentially the spirit of love, of
sympathy, of goodness; and this spirit must breathe upon our social life
until it becomes as different from what it is as is fragrant spring from
cheerless winter. Sympathy must become universal; not merely as a
sentiment prompting to deeds of helpfulness and mercy, but as the
informing principle of society until it attains such perfectness that
whatever is loss or gain for one, shall be felt as loss or gain for all.
The narrow, exclusive self must lose itself in wider aims, in generous
deeds, in the comprehensive love of God and man. The good must no longer
thwart one another; the weak must be protected; the wicked must be
surrounded by influences which make for righteousness; and the forces of
Nature itself must more and more be brought under man's control.
Pestilence and famine must no longer bring death and desolation; men
must no longer drink impure water and adulterated liquors, no longer
must they breathe the poisonous air of badly constructed houses;
dwellings which are now made warm in winter, must be made cool in
summer; miasmatic swamps must be drained; saloons, which stand like
painted harlots to lure men to sin and death, must be closed. Women
must have the same rights and privileges as men; children must no longer
be made the victims of mammon and offered in sacrifice in his temple,
the factory; ignorance, which is the most fruitful cause of misery, must
give place to knowledge; war must be condemned as public murder, and our
present system of industrial competition must be considered worse than
war; the social organization, which makes the few rich, and dooms the
many to the slavery of poorly paid toil, must cease to exist; and if the
political state is responsible for this cruelty, it must find a remedy,
or be overthrown; society must be made to rest upon justice and love,
without which it is but organized wrong. These principles must so
thoroughly pervade our public life that it can no more be the interest
of any one to wrong his fellow, to grow rich at the cost of the poverty
and misery of another. Life must be prolonged both by removing many of
the physical causes of death, and by making men more rational and
religious, more willing and able to deny themselves those indulgences
which are but a kind of slow suicide.

Never before have questions so vast, so complex, so pregnant with
meaning, so fraught with the promise of good, presented themselves; and
it can hardly be vanity or conceit which prompts us to believe that in
this mighty movement toward a social life in harmony with our idea of
God and with the aspirations of the soul, America is the divinely
appointed leader. But if this faith is not to be a mere delusion, it
must become for the best among us the impulse to strong and persevering
effort. Not by millionaires and not by politicians shall this salvation
be wrought; but by men who to pure religion add the best intellectual
culture. The American youth must learn patience; he must acquire that
serene confidence in the power of labor, which makes workers willing to
wait. He must not, like a foolish child, rush forward to pluck the fruit
before it is ripe, lest this be his epitaph: The promise of his early
life was great, his performance insignificant.

Do not our young men lack noble ambition? Are they not satisfied with
low aims? To be a legislator; to be a governor; to be talked about; to
live in a marble house,--seems to them a thing to be desired. Unhappy
youths from whom the power and goodness of life are hidden, who,
standing in the presence of the unseen, infinite world of truth and
beauty, can only dream some aldermanic nightmare. They thrust themselves
into the noisy crowd, and are thrown into contact with disenchanting
experience at a time of life when the mind and heart should draw
nourishment and wisdom from communion with God and with great thoughts.
Amid the universal clatter of tongues, and in the overflowing ceaseless
stream of newspaper gossip, the soul is bewildered and stifled. In a
blatant land, the young should learn to be silent. The noblest minds are
fashioned in secrecy, through long travail like,--


    "Wines that, Heaven knows where,
    Have sucked the fire of some forgotten sun
    And kept it thro' a hundred years of gloom
    Yet glowing in a heart of ruby."


Is it not worth the labor and expectation of a life-time to be able to
do, even once, the right thing excellently well? The eager passion for
display, the desire to speak and act in the eyes of the world, is
boyish. Will is concentration, and a great purpose works in secrecy. Oh,
the goodness and the seriousness of life, the illimitable reach of
achievement, which it opens to the young who have a great heart and
noble aims! With them is God's almighty power and love, and his very
presence is hidden from them by a film only. From this little islet they
look out upon infinite worlds; heaven bends over them, and earth bears
them up as though it would have them fly. How is it possible to remain
inferior when we believe in God and know that this age is the right
moment for all high and holy work? The yearning for guidance has never
been so great. We have reached heights where the brain swims, and
thoughts are confused, and it is held to be questionable whether we are
to turn backward or to move onward to the land of promise; whether we
are to be overwhelmed by the material world which we have so
marvelously transformed, or with the aid of the secrets we have
learned, are to rise Godward to a purer and fairer life of knowledge,
justice, and love.

Is the material progress of the nineteenth century a cradle or a grave?
Are we to continue to dig and delve and peer into matter until God and
the soul fade from our view and we become like the things we work in? To
put such questions to the multitude were idle. There is here no affair
of votes and majorities. Human nature has not changed, and now, as in
the past, crowds follow leaders. What the best minds and the most
energetic characters believe and teach and put in practice, the millions
will come to accept. The doubt is whether the leaders will be
worthy,--the real permanent leaders, for the noisy apparent leaders can
never be so. And here we touch the core of the problem which Americans
have to solve. No other people has such numbers who are ready to thrust
themselves forward as leaders, no other has so few who are really able
to lead. In mitigation of this fact, it may be said with truth, that
nowhere else is it so difficult to lead; for nowhere else does force
rule so little. Every one has opinions; the whole nation is awakened;
thousands are able to discuss any subject with plausibility; and to be
simply keen-witted and versatile is to be of the crowd. We need men
whose intellectual view embraces the history of the race, who are
familiar with all literature, who have studied all social movements, who
are acquainted with the development of philosophic thought, who are not
blinded by physical miracles and industrial wonders, but know how to
appreciate all truth, all beauty, all goodness. And to this wide culture
they must join the earnestness, the confidence, the charity, and the
purity of motive which Christian faith inspires. We need scholars who
are saints, and saints who are scholars. We need men of genius who live
for God and their country; men of action who seek for light in the
company of those who know; men of religion who understand that God
reveals himself in science, and works in Nature as in the soul of man,
for the good of those who love him. Let us know the right moment, and
let us know that it comes for those alone who are prepared.




CHAPTER II.

EXERCISE OF MIND.


     O heavens! how awful is the might of souls
     And what they do within themselves while yet
     The yoke of earth is new to them, the world
     Nothing but a wild field where they were sown.

     WORDSWORTH.



Learning is acquaintance with what others have felt, thought, and done;
knowledge is the result of what we ourselves have felt, thought, and
done. Hence a man knows best what he has taught himself; what personal
contact with God, with man, and with Nature has made his own. The
important thing, then, is not so much to know the thoughts and loves of
others, as to be able ourselves to think truly, and to love nobly. The
aim should be to rouse, strengthen, and illumine the mind rather than to
store it with learning; and the great educational problem has been, and
is, how to give to the soul purity of intention, to the conscience
steadfastness, and to the mind force, pliability, and openness to light;
or in other words, how to bring philosophy and religion to the aid of
the will so that the better self shall prevail and each generation
introduce its successor to a higher plane of life.

To this end the efforts of all teachers have, with more or less
consciousness, tended; and in this direction too, along winding ways and
with periods of arrest or partial return, the race of man has for ages
been moving; and he who aspires to gain a place in the van of the mighty
army on its heavenward march,--


    "And draw new furrows 'neath the healthy morn
    And plant the great Hereafter in this Now,"--


may be rash, but his spirit is not ignoble. To him it may not be given
"to fan and winnow from the coming step of Time the chaff of custom;"
but if he persevere he may confidently hope that his thought and love
shall at length rise to fairer and more enduring worlds. He weds himself
to things of light, seeks aids to true life within, learns to live with
the noble dead, and with the great souls of the present who have uttered
the truth whereby they live, in a way more intimate and higher than that
granted to those who are with them day by day; for minds are not
separated by time and space, but by quality of thought. But to be able
to love this life, and with all one's heart to seek this close communion
with God, with noble souls, and with Nature is not easy, and it may be
that it is impossible for those who are not drawn to it by irresistible
instincts. For the intellect, at least, attractions are proportional to
destiny; and the art of intellectual life is not most surely learned by
those whom circumstances favor, but by those whom will impels onward to
exercise of mind; whom neither daily wants, nor animal appetites, nor
hope of gain, nor low ambition, nor sneers of worldlings, nor prayers of
friends, nor aught else can turn from the pursuit of wisdom; who, with
ceaseless labor and with patient thought, eat their way in silence, like
caterpillars, to the light, become their own companions, walk uplifted
by their own thoughts, and by slow and imperceptible processes are
transformed and grow to be the embodiment of the truth and beauty which
they see and love.

The overmastering love of mental exercise, of the good of the intellect,
is probably never found in formal and prosaic minds; or if so, its first
awakening is in the early years when to think is to feel, when the soul,
fresh from God, comes trailing clouds of glory, and the sun and moon and
stars, and the hills and flowing waters seem but made to crown with joy
hearts that love. It is in these dewy dawns that the image of beauty is
imprinted on the soul and the sense of mystery awakens. We move about
and become a part of all we see, grow akin to stones and leaves and
birds, and to all young and happy things. We lose ourselves in life
which is poured round us like an unending sea; are natural, healthful,
alive to all we see and touch; have no misgivings, but walk as though
the eternal God held us by the hand. These are the fair spring days when
we suck honey that shall nourish us in the winters of which we do not
dream; when sunsets interfuse themselves with all our being until we are
dyed in the many-tinted glory; when the miracle of the changing year is
the soul's fair seed-time; when lying in the grass, the head resting in
clasped hands, while soft white clouds float lazily through azure skies,
and the birds warble, and the waters murmur, and the flowers breathe
fragrance, we feel a kind of unconscious consciousness of a universal
life in Nature. The very rocks seem to be listening to what the leaves
whisper; and through the silent eternities we almost see the dead
becoming the living, the living the dead, until both grow to be one, and
whatever is, is life.

He who has never had these visions; has never heard these airy voices;
has never seemed about to catch a glimpse of the inner heart of being,
pulsing beneath the veil of visible things; has never felt that he
himself is a spirit looking blindly on a universe, which if his eyes
could but see and his ears hear, would be revealed as the very heaven of
the infinite God,--must forever lack something of the freshness, of the
eager delight, with which a poetic mind contemplates the world and
follows whither the divine intimations point. This early intercourse
with Nature nourishes the soul, deepens the intellect, exalts the
imagination, and fills the memory with fair and noble forms and images
which abide with us, and as years pass on, gain in softness and purity
what they may lose in distinctness of outline and color. This is the
source of intellectual wealth, of tranquil moods, of patience in the
midst of opposition, of confidence in the fruitfulness of labor and the
transforming power of time. Here is given the material which must be
molded into form; the rude blocks which must be cut and dressed and
fitted together until they become a spiritual temple wherein the soul
may rest at one with God and Nature, and with its own thought and love.
To run, to jump, to ride, to swim, to skate, to sit in the shade of
trees by flowing water, to watch reapers at their work, to look on
orchards blossoming, to dream in the silence that lies amid the hills,
to feel the solemn loneliness of deep woods, to follow cattle as they
crop the sweet-scented clover,--to learn to know, as one knows a
mother's face, every change that comes over the heavens from the dewy
freshness of early dawn to the restful calm of evening, from the
overpowering mystery of the starlit sky to the tender human look with
which the moon smiles upon the earth,--all this is education of a higher
and altogether more real kind than it is possible to receive within the
walls of a school; and lacking this, nothing shall have power to develop
the faculties of the soul in symmetry and completeness. Hence a
philosopher has said there are ten thousand chances to one that genius,
talent, and virtue shall issue from a farmhouse rather than from a
palace. The daily intercourse with Nature in childhood and youth
intertwines with noble and enduring objects the passions which form the
mind and heart of man, whereas those who are shut out from such
communion are necessarily thrown into contact with what is mean and
vulgar; and since our early years, whatever our surroundings may have
been, seem to us sweet and fair because life itself is then a
clear-flowing fountain, they cannot help blending the memory of that
innocent and happy time with thoughts of base and mechanical objects,
or, it may be, of low and ignoble associates.

He is fortunate who, during the first ten years of his life, escapes the
confinement and repression of school, and lives at home in the country
amid the fields and the woods, day by day growing familiar with the look
on Nature's face, with all her moods, with every common object, with
living things in the air and the water and on the earth; who sees the
corn sprout, and watches it grow week after week until the yellow
harvest waves in the sunlight; who looks with unawed eye on rising
thunder-clouds and shouts with glee amid the lightning's play; who
learns to know that whatever he looks upon is thereby humanized, and to
feel that he is part of all he sees and loves. He will carry with him to
the study of the intellectual and spiritual world of men's thoughts shut
up in books, a strength of mind, a depth and freshness of heart which
only those can own who have drunk at Nature's deep flowing fountain, and
come up to life's training-course wet with her dews and with the
fragrance of her flowers on their breath. In the eyes of the old Greeks,
who first made education a science, the scholar was an idler,--one who
had leisure to look about him, to stroll amid the olive groves, to let
his eye rest upon the purple hills or the blue sea studded with green
isles, to listen to the brooks and the nightingales, to read the lesson
the fair earth teaches more than that imprinted on parchment; and the
school must still preserve something of this freedom from constraint,
must encourage the play of body and of mind, the delight natural to the
young in the exercise of strength of whatever kind, and thus as far as
possible lighten the labor and drudgery of elementary studies with
thoughts of liberty, of beauty, and of excellence. Let the boy feel how
good it is to be alive though life meant only the narrow world and the
mere surfaces of things with which alone it is possible for him to be
acquainted; and then when we ask him to believe that in high thinking
and in noble acting he will find a life infinitely more worthy, his
eager soul will be inflamed with a desire for knowledge and virtue, and
bearing in his heart the strength and wealth of imagination gained from
his early experience, his thoughts will turn to great and good men. Dim
visions of mighty conquerors, of poets at whose song the woods and waves
grow calm, of orators whose words with storm-like force, whatever way
they take, sweep with them the wills of men,--will rise before his mind.
His young fancy will endow them with preternatural qualities; and he
will yearn to draw near, to mingle with them and to catch the secret of
their divine power. The germ of the godlike within his bosom bursts and
springs. What they were, why may not he also become? What bars are
thrown athwart his path, what obstacles hem his way, which, whoever in
any age has excelled, has not had to break down and surmount? Here the
wise teacher comes to cheer him, to tell him his faith is not wrong, his
hope not without promise of attainment if he but trust himself, and bend
his whole mind to the task; that whatever goal within the scope of human
power, the will sets to itself, it may reach.

In order to develop, strengthen, and confirm this high mood, this noble
temper, let him by all means be made acquainted with the language and
genius of Greece. Here he will be introduced to a world of thought and
sentiment almost as fresh, as fair and many-sided as Nature
herself,--the fragrant blossoming in myriad hues and forms of the life
and mind of the most richly endowed portion of the human race. Not only
are the Greeks the most highly-gifted of all people, but in this
classical age they have also this special charm and power,--that the
keenest intellectual faculties are in them united with the feelings,
hopes, and fancies of a noble and great-hearted youth. Even Socrates and
Plato talk like high-souled boys who can see the world only in the light
of ideals, for whom what the mind beholds and the heart loves is alone
real. How healthfully they look on life, with what delight they breathe
the air! What fine contempt have they not of death, thinking no fortune
so good as that which comes to the hero who dies in a worthy cause!
There is Athens, already the world's university; but no books, no
libraries, no lecture-halls, only great teachers who walk about followed
by a crowd of youths eager to drink in their words. Here is the
Acropolis, with its snow-white temples and propylæum, fair and chaste as
though they had been built in heaven and gently lowered to this Attic
mound by the hands of angels. There in the Parthenon are the sculptures
of Phidias, and yonder in the temple of the Dioscuri, the paintings of
Polygnotus,--ideal beauty bodied forth to lure the souls of men to
unseen and eternal worlds. If they turn to the east, the isles of the
Ægean look up to them like virgins who welcome happy lovers; to the
west, Mount Pentelicus, from whose heart the architectural glory of the
city has been carved, bids them think what patience will enable man's
genius to accomplish; and to the north, Hymettus, fragrant with the
breath of a thousand herbs and musical with the hum of bees, stoops with
gentle undulations to their feet. They live in the air; their temples
are open to the sunlight; their theatres are uncovered to the heavens;
and whithersoever they move, they are surrounded by what is fair, noble,
and inspiring. This free and happy life in the company of great
teachers becomes the stimulus to the keenest exercise of mind. They are
as eager to see things in a true light as they are quick to sympathize
with whatever is heroic or beautiful; and all their talk is of truth and
justice, the good, the fair, the excellent, of philosophy, religion,
poetry, and art, and of whatever else seems favorable to human life and
to the development of ideal manhood. Of the merely useful they have the
scorn of young and inexperienced minds; and Hippocrates proclaims
himself ready to give Protagoras, not only whatever he himself
possesses, but also the property of his friends, if he will but teach
him wisdom. Superior knowledge was to them of all things the most
admirable and the most to be desired. What noble thoughts have they not
concerning education? "An intelligent man," says Plato, "will prize
those studies which result in his soul getting soberness, righteousness,
and wisdom, and will less value the others." The culture of the mind is
made a kind of religion, in the spreading of which the personal
influence of the teacher is not less active than the truths he sets
forth. Bonds of affection bind the disciple to the master whose words
have for him the sacredness of wisdom and the charm of genius, power to
confirm the will, and warmth and color whereby the imagination is
raised.

This secret of making knowledge attractive, of clothing truth in chaste
and beautiful language, of associating it with whatever is fair and
noble in Nature, and of relating it to life and conduct, which is part
of the genius of Greece, still lives in her literature; and to read the
words of her poets, orators, and philosophers is to feel the presence of
a high and active spirit, is to breathe in an intellectual atmosphere of
light and liberty, is of itself enlargement and cultivation of mind.
Hence, in the realms of thought, the Greeks are the civilizers and
emancipators of the world; and whoever thinks, is to some extent their
debtor. The music of their eloquence and poetry can never grow silent;
the forms of beauty their genius has created can never perish, and never
cease to win the admiration and love of noble minds and gentle hearts,
or to be the inspiration, generation after generation, to high thoughts
and heroic moods. So long as glory, beauty, freedom, light, and gladness
shall seem good and fair, so long will the finer spirits of the world
feel the attraction and the charm of Greece, and know the sweet surprise
which thrilled the heart of Keats when first he read Homer:--


    "Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
    When a new planet swims into his ken,
    Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
    He stared at the Pacific, and all his men
    Looked at each other with a wild surmise,
    Silent, upon a peak in Darien."


In a less degree, Roman literature, which is the offspring of Greek
culture, has value as an intellectual stimulus and discipline. Here also
the youthful mind is brought into the presence of a great and noble
people, who, if they have less genius and a duller sense of beauty than
the Greeks, excel them in steadiness of purpose, in dignity of
character, in reverence for law and religion, and above all in the art
of governing.

The educational value of the classics does not lie so much in the Greek
and Latin languages as in the type of mind, the sense of proportion and
beauty, the heroic temper, the philosophic mood, the keen relish for
high enterprise, and the joyful love of life which they make known to
us. The world to which they introduce us is so remote that the
pre-occupations and vulgarities of the present, by which we all are
hemmed and warped, fall away from us; and it is at the same time so real
and of such absorbing interest that we are caught up in spirit and
carried to the Attic Plain and the hills of Latium. They are useful, not
because they teach us anything that may not be learned and learned more
accurately from modern books, but because they move the mind, fire the
heart, ennoble and refine the imagination in a way which nothing else
has power to do. They are sources of inspiration; they first roused the
modern mind to activity; and the potency of their influence can never
cease to be felt by those whose aptitudes lead them to the love of
intellectual perfection, who delight in the free play of the mind, who
are attracted by what is symmetrical, who have the instinct for beauty,
who swim in a current of ideas as naturally as birds fly in the air.
They appeal to the mind as a whole, stimulate all its faculties, awaken
a many-sided sympathy both with Nature and with the world of men. They
widen our view of life, bring forth in us the consciousness of our
kinship with the human race, and of the application to ourselves,
however common and uninspiring our surroundings may be, of the best
thoughts and noblest deeds which have ever sprung from the brain and
heart of man. They help to make one, again to quote Plato, "A lover, not
of a part of wisdom, but of the whole; who has a taste for every sort of
knowledge, and is curious to learn and is never satisfied; who has
magnificence of mind, and is a spectator of all time and all existence;
who is harmoniously constituted, of a well-proportioned and gracious
mind, whose own nature will move spontaneously toward the true being of
everything; who has a good memory, and is quick to learn, noble,
gracious, the friend of truth, justice, courage, temperance." The ideal
presented is that of complete harmonious culture, the aim of which is
not to make an artisan, a physician, a merchant, a lawyer, but a man
alive in all his faculties, touching the world at many points, for whom
all knowledge is desirable, all beauty lovable, and for whom fine
bearing and noble acting are indispensable.

It is needless to point out in what, or why, the Greeks failed, since
here there is question only of intellectual life, and in this they did
not fail. Nor is there any thought, in what has here been said, of
depreciating the worth of the study of science, without a certain
knowledge of which no one, in this age, can in any true sense, be called
educated. Whoever, indeed, learns a language properly, acquires
scientific knowledge; and the Greeks are not only the masters in poetry
and eloquence, they are also the guides to the right use of reason and
to scientific method, and the teachers of mathematics, logic, and
physics. He who pursues culture, in the Greek spirit, who desires to see
things as they are, to know the best that has been thought and done by
men, will fear nothing so much as the exclusion of any truth, and he
will be anxious to acquaint himself not only with the method, but as
far as possible with the facts, of physical science. Still he perceives
that however great the value of natural knowledge may be, it is, as an
instrument of culture, inferior to literature. We are educated by what
calls forth in us love and admiration, by what creates the exalted mood
and the steadfast purpose. In bowing with reverence to what is above us,
we are uplifted. When we are moved, we are more alive; we are stronger,
tenderer, nobler. Now to look upon Nature with the detective eye of the
man of science is to be cold and unsympathetic; to learn by methodic
experiment is to gain knowledge, which, since it is only remotely or
indirectly related to life, is but little interesting. Such knowledge is
a fragment, and a fragment extremely difficult to fit into the temple
built by thought and love, by hope and imagination; and hence when we
have learned a great deal about chemical elements, geologic epochs,
correlation of forces, and sidereal spaces, we are rather astonished
than enlightened. We are brought into the presence of a world which is
not that of the senses, nor yet that which faith, hope, and love
forebode; and the bearing it may have upon human life is of more
interest to us than the facts made known. We are, indeed, curious to
know whatever may, with any certainty, be told us of atoms and
biogenesis; but our real concern is to learn what significance such
truth may have in its relation to questions of God and the soul.

There is doubtless a disciplinary value in the study of physical
science. It trains the mind to habits of patient attention, of careful
observation, teaches the danger of hasty generalization, and diminishes
intellectual conceit; but these results may also be obtained by other
means. The aim of education is not simply to develop this or the other
faculty, however indispensable, nor yet to make one thoroughly
conversant with a particular order of facts, but the aim is to bring
about a conscious participation in the life of the race, to evoke all
the powers of man, so that his whole being shall be quickened and made
responsive to the touch of things seen and unseen; and the study of
science is less adapted to the attainment of this end than the study of
human letters. The scientific temper draws to specialties; and
specialists are narrow, are incomplete. They, each in his own line, do
good work, and are the chief agents for the increase of natural
knowledge, and are, we may grant, leaders in every kind of improvement;
but like the operatives who provide our comforts and luxuries, they are
themselves warped and crippled by what they do. The habit of looking at
a single order of facts, coldly and always from the same point of view,
takes from the mind flexibility, weakens the imagination, and puts
fetters on the soul; and hence though it is important that there be
specialists, the kind of education by which they are formed, while it is
suited to make a geologist, a chemist, a mathematician, or a botanist,
is not suited to call forth the free and harmonious play of all man's
powers. We do not live on facts alone, much less on facts of a single
kind. Religion and poetry, love, hope, and imagination are as essential
to our well-being as science. Human life is knowledge, is faith, is
conduct, is beauty, is manners; it unfolds itself in many directions and
shoots its roots into infinitude; and for the general purposes of
education, science is learned to best advantage when it is embodied in
literature, and its methods and results, rather than the details of its
work, are presented to us. Whatever it is able to do, to improve the
mind, to widen the range of thought, to give true notions of the
workings of Nature,--it will do for whoever learns accurately its
general conceptions and results; and these cannot remain unknown to him
whose aim is culture, for such an one is, as Plato says, "A lover not of
a part of wisdom, but of the whole, and has a taste for every sort of
knowledge, and is curious to learn, and is never satisfied; and though
he will not know medicine like a physician, or the heavens like an
astronomer, or the vegetable kingdom like a botanist, his mind will play
over all these realms with freedom, and he will know how to relate the
principles and facts of all the sciences to our sense for beauty, for
conduct, for life and religion in a way which a mere specialist can
never find." And his view will not only be wider and less impeded, it
will also be deeper than that of the man of science; for he who sees but
one order of things sees only their surfaces, just as he who sees but
one thing sees nothing at all.

It would be a mistake to imagine that the ideal here commended, means
superficial accomplishments, an excessive love of style and the
ornaments of poetry and eloquence, or preoccupation in favor of aught
external or frivolous. It is the very opposite of dilettantism, and if
it mean anything, means thoroughness, and a thoroughness which can come
only of untiring labor carried on through many years; for time and
intercourse with men and varied experience are indispensable elements.
It is like the ideal of religion which makes the saint think himself a
sinner; it is as exacting as the miser's thought which makes millions
seem to be beggary; like the artist's vision, like the poet's dream, it
allures and yet forbids hope of attainment. The seeker after wisdom
must have a high purpose, a strong soul, and the purest love of truth.
He cannot live in the senses alone, nor in the mind, nor in the heart
alone, but the spiritual being, which is himself, yearns for whatever is
good, whatever is true, whatever is fair, and so he finds himself akin
to the infinite God and to all that he has made. When his thought is
carried out to atoms weaving the garment which is our body, and molding
the world we see and touch; when he beholds motion lighting, warming,
thrilling the universe,--he is filled with intellectual joy, but at the
same time he perceives that all this is but a phase of truth; that God
and the boundless facts are infinitely more than drilled atomics
marshaled rank on rank until they form the countless hosts of the
heavens. When the men of science have labeled the elements, and put
tickets upon all natural compounds, and with complacency declare that
this is the whole truth, he looks on the flowers around him and the
blooming children, on the stars above his head, on the sun slow wheeling
down the western horizon, on the moon climbing some eastern hill, and
his inmost soul is glad because he feels the thrill of the infinite,
living Spirit, and forebodes to what fair countries we are bound.

And when they proclaim the wonders science has wrought,--increase of
physical enjoyment and social comfort; the yoking of lightning and steam
to make them work for man; the providing of more abundant food; the
building of more wholesome dwellings; the lengthening of life; temporal
benefits of every kind,--he joins with those who utter praise, but knows
that infinitely more than all this goes to the making of man's life. So
he turns his mind in many directions, and while he looks on the truth in
science, does not grow blind to the truth in religion; while he knows
the value of what is practically useful, understands also the priceless
worth of what is noble and beautiful, and his acquaintance with many
kinds of thought, with many shades of opinion confirms him, as Joubert
says, in the acceptance of the best.




CHAPTER III.

THE LOVE OF EXCELLENCE.


     Why is this glorious creature to be found One only in ten thousand?
     what one is, Why may not millions be? what bars are thrown By
     Nature in the way of such a hope?

     WORDSWORTH.



He teaches to good purpose who inspires the love of excellence, and who
sends his pupils forth from the school's narrow walls with such desire
for self-improvement that the whole world becomes to them a
God-appointed university. And why shall not every youth hope to enter
the narrow circle of those for whom to live, is to think, who behold
"the bright countenance of truth in the quiet and still air of
delightful studies." An enlightened mind is like a fair and pleasant
friend who comes to cheer us in every hour of loneliness and gloom; it
is like noble birth which admits to all best company; it is like wealth
which surrounds us with whatever is rarest and most precious; it is like
virtue which lives in an atmosphere of light and serenity, and is itself
enough for itself. Whatever our labors, our cares, our disappointments,
a free and open mind, by holding us in communion with the highest and
the fairest, will fill the soul with strength and joy. The artist, day
by day, year in and year out, hangs over his work, and finds enough
delight in the beauty he creates; and shall not the friend of the soul
be glad in striving ceaselessly to make his knowledge and his love less
unlike the knowledge and the love of God? Seldom is opportunity of
victory offered to great captains, the orator rarely finds fit theme and
audience, hardly shall the hero meet with occasions worthy of the
sacrifice of life; but he who labors to shape his mind to the heavenly
forms of truth and beauty beholds them ever present and appealing. Life
without thought and love is worthless; and to the best men and women
belong only those who cultivate with earnestness and perseverance their
spiritual faculties, who strive daily to know more, to love more, to be
more beautiful. They are the chosen ones, and all others, even though
they sit on thrones, are but the crowd.

Without a free and open mind there is no high and glad human life. You
may as well point to the savage drowsing in his tent, or to cattle
knee-deep in clover, and bid me think them high, as to ask me to admire
where I can behold neither intelligence nor love. All that we possess is
qualified by what we are. Gold makes not the miser rich, nor its lack a
true man poor; and he who has gained insight into the fair truth that he
is a part of all he sees and loves, is richer than kings, and lives like
a god in his universe. Possibilities for us are measured by the kind of
work in which we put our hearts. If a man's thoughts are wholly busy
with carpentering do not expect him to become anything else than a
carpenter; but if his aim is to build up his own being, to make his mind
luminous, his heart tender and pure, his will steadfast, who but God
shall fix a limit beyond which he may not hope to go. Education, indeed,
cannot confer organic power; but it alone gives us the faculty to
perceive how infinitely wonderful and fair are man's endowments, how
boundless his inheritance, how full of deathless hope is that to which
he may aspire. Religion, philosophy, poetry, science,--all bring us into
the presence of an ideal of ceaseless growth toward an all-perfect
Infinite, dimly discerned and unapproachable, but which fascinates the
soul and haunts the imagination with its deep mystery, until what we
long for becomes more real than all that we possess, and yearning is our
highest happiness. Ah! who would throw a veil over the vision on which
young eyes rest when young hearts feel that ideal things alone are real?
Who would rob them of this divine principle of progress which makes
growth the best of life?


                        "Many are our joys
    In youth; but oh, what happiness to live
    When every hour brings palpable access
    Of knowledge, when all knowledge is delight!"


In all ages, we know those made wise by experience, which teaches us to
expect little, whether of ourselves or others, have made the thoughts
and hopes of youth a jest, even as men have made religion a jest, having
nothing to offer us in compensation for its loss, but witticisms and
despair. This is the fatal fault of life, that when we have obtained
what is good,--as wealth, position, wife, and friends,--we lose all hope
of the best, and with our mockery discourage those who have ideal aims;
who, remembering how the soul felt in life's dawn, retain a sense of
God's presence in the world, to whom with growing faculties they aspire,
feeling that whatsoever point they reach, they still have something to
pursue. This is the principle of the diviner mind in all high and heroic
natures; this is the spring-head of deeds that make laws, of "thoughts
that enrich the blood of the world;" this is the power which gives to
resolve the force of destiny, and clothes the soul with the heavenliest
strength and beauty when it stands single and alone, of men abandoned
and almost of God.

There is little danger that too many shall ever hearken to the
invitation from the fair worlds to which all souls belong, and where
alone they can be luminous and free. For centuries, now, what
innumerable voices have pleaded with men to make themselves worthy of
heaven; while they have moved on heedless of the heaven that lies about
us here, placing their hopes and aims in material and perishable
elements, athirst neither for truth, nor beauty, nor aught that is
divinely good! They sleep, they wake, they eat, they drink; they tread
the beaten path with ceaseless iteration, and so they die. If one come
appealing for culture of intellect, not because they who know, are
stronger than the ignorant and make them their servants, but because an
open, free, and flexible mind is good and fair, better than birth,
position, and wealth, they turn away as though he trifled with their
common-sense. Life, they say, is not for knowledge, but knowledge for
life; and they neither truly know, nor live. And if here and there some
nobler soul stand forth, he degrades himself to an aspirant to fame,
forgetting truth and love.


    Enough there are on earth who reap and sow,
    Enough who give their lives to common gain,
    Enough who toil with spade and axe and plane,
    Enough who sail the seas where rude winds blow;
    Enough who make their life unmeaning show,
    Enough who plead in courts, who physic pain;
    Enough who follow in the lover's train,
    And taste of wedded hearts the bliss and woe.

    A few at least may love the poet's song,
    May walk with him, their visionary guide,
    Far from the crowd, nor do the world a wrong;
    Or on his wings through deep blue skies may glide
    And float, by light transfused, like clouds along
    Above the earth and over oceans wide.


With unresting, wearing thought and labor we are striving to make earth
more habitable. We drag forth from its inner parts whatever treasures
are hidden there; with steam's mighty force we mold brute matter into
every fair and serviceable form; we build great cities, we spread the
fabric of our trade; the engine's iron heart goes throbbing through
tunneled mountains and over storm-swept seas to bear us and our wealth
to all regions of the globe; we talk to one another from city to city,
and from continent to continent along ocean's oozy depths the lightning
flashes our words, spreading beneath our eyes each morning the whole
world's gossip,--but in the midst of this miraculous transformation, we
ourselves remain small, hard, and narrow, without great thoughts or
great loves or immortal hopes. We are a crowd where the highest and the
best lose individuality, and are swept along as though democracy were a
tyranny of the average man under which superiority of whatever kind is
criminal. Our population increases, our cities grow, our roads are
lengthened, our machinery is made more perfect, the number of our
schools is multiplied, our newspapers are read in ever-widening circles,
the spirit of humanity and of freedom breathes through our life; but the
individual remains common-place and uninteresting. He lacks
intelligence, has no perception of what is excellent, no faith in
ideals, no reverence for genius, no belief in any highest sort of man
who has not shown his worth in winning wealth, position, or notoriety.
We have a thousand poets and no poetry, a thousand orators and no
eloquence, a thousand philosophers and no philosophy. Every city points
to its successful men who have millions, but are themselves poor and
unintelligent; to its writers who, having sold their talent to
newspapers and magazines, sink to the level of those they address,
dealing only with what is of momentary interest, or if the question be
deep, they move on the surface, lest the many-eyed crowd lose sight of
them. The preacher gets an audience and pay on condition that he stoop
to the gossip which centres around new theories, startling events, and
mechanical schemes for the improvement of the country. If to get money
be the end of writing and preaching, then must we seek to please the
multitude who are willing to pay those who entertain and amuse them.
Will not our friends, even, conceive a mean opinion of our ability, if
we fail to gain public recognition?

So we make ourselves "motleys to the view, and sell cheap what is most
dear." We must, perforce, show the endowment which can be brought to
perfection only if it be permitted to grow in secrecy and solitude. The
worst foe of excellence is the desire to appear; for when once we have
made men talk of us, we seem to be doing nothing if they are silent, and
thus the love of notoriety becomes the bane of true work and right
living. To be one of a crowd is not to be at all; and if we are resolved
to put our thoughts and acts to the test of reason, and to live for what
is permanently true and great, we must consent, like the best of all
ages, to be lonely in the world. All life, except the life of thought
and love, is dull and superficial. The young love for a while, and are
happy; a few think; and for the rest existence is but the treadmill of
monotonous sensation. There are but few, who, through work and
knowledge, through faith and hope and love, seek to escape from the
narrowness and misery of life to the summits of thought where the soul
breathes a purer air, and whence is seen the fairer world the multitude
forebodes. There are but few whose life is


    "Effort and expectation and desire,
    And something evermore about to be;"


but few who understand how much the destiny of Man hangs upon single
persons; but few who feel that what they love and teach, millions must
know and love.


    "A people is but the attempt of many
    To rise to the completer life of one;
    And those who live as models for the mass
    Are singly of more value than them all."


Only the noblest souls awaken within us divine aspirations. They are the
music, the poetry, which warms and illumines whole generations; they are
the few who, born with rich endowments, by ceaseless labor develop their
powers until they become capable of work which, were it not for them,
could not be done at all. History is the biography of aristocrats, of
the chosen ones with whom all improvement originates, who found States,
establish civilizations, create literatures, and teach wisdom. They work
not for themselves; for in spite of human selfishness and the personal
aims of the ambitious, the poet, the scholar, and the statesman bless
the world. They lead us through happy isles; they clothe our thoughts
and hopes with beauty and with strength; they dissipate the general
gloom; they widen the sphere of life; they bring the multitude beneath
the sway of law.

Now, here in America, once for all, whatever the thoughtless may
imagine, we have lost faith in the worth of artificial distinctions.
Indeed plausible arguments may be found to prove that the kind of man
democracy tends to form, has no reverence for distinctions of whatever
kind, and is without ideals, and that as he is envious of men made by
money, so he looks with the contempt of unenlightened common-sense upon
those whom character and intellect raise above him. This is not truth.
The higher you lift the mass, the more will they acknowledge and
appreciate worth, the clearer will they see that what makes man human,
beautiful, and beneficent is conduct and intelligence; and so increasing
enlightenment will turn thought and admiration from position and wealth,
from the pomp and show of life to what makes a man's self, his
character, his mind, his manners even,--for the source of manners lies
within us. In a society like ours, the chosen ones, the best, the models
of life, and the leaders of thought will be distinguished from the crowd
not by accident or circumstance, but by inner strength and beauty, by
finer knowledge, by purer love, by a deeper faith in God, by a more
steadfast trust that it must, and shall be, well with a world which God
makes and rules, and which to the fairest mind is fairest, and to the
holiest soul most sacred.

Here and now, if ever anywhere at any time, there is need of men, there
is appeal to what is godlike in man, calling upon us to rise above our
prosperities, our politics, our mechanical aims and implements, and to
turn the courage, energy, and practical sense which have wrought with
miraculous power in developing the material resources of America, to the
cultivation of our spiritual faculties. We alone of the great modern
nations are without classical writers of our own, without a national
literature. The thought and love of this people, its philosophy, poetry,
and art lies yet in the bud; and our tens of thousands of books, even
the better sort, must perish to enrich the soil that nourishes a life of
heavenly promise. Hitherto we have been sad imitators of the English,
but not the best the English have done will satisfy America. Their
language indeed will remain ours, and their men of genius, above all
their poets, will enrich our minds with great thoughts nobly expressed.
But a literature is a national growth; it is the expression of a
people's life and character, the more or less perfect utterance of what
it loves, aims at, believes in, hopes for; it has the qualities and the
defects of the national spirit; it bears the marks of the thousand
influences that help to make that spirit what it is,--and English
literature cannot be American literature, for the simple reason that
Americans are not Englishmen, any more than they are Germans or
Frenchmen. We must be ourselves in our thinking and writing, as in our
living, or be insignificant, for it is a man's life that gives meaning
to his thought; and to write as a disciple is to write in an inferior
way, since the mind at its best is illumined by truth itself and not
taught by the words of another. It is not to be believed that this
great, intelligent, yearning American world will content itself with the
trick and mannerism of foreign accent and style, or that those who build
on any other than the broad foundation of our own national life shall be
accepted as teachers and guides. There is, of course, no method known to
man by which a great author may be formed; no science which teaches how
a literature may be created. The men who have written what the world
will not permit to die have written generally without any clear
knowledge of the worth of their work, just as great discoverers and
inventors seem to stumble on what they seek; nevertheless one may hope
by right endeavor to make himself capable of uttering true thoughts so
that they shall become intelligible and attractive to others; he may
educate himself to know and love the best that has been spoken and
written by men of genius, and so become a power to lift the aims and
enlarge the views of his fellow-men. If many strive in this way to
unfold their gifts and to cultivate their faculties, their influence
will finally pervade the life and thought of thousands, and it may be of
the whole people.

I do not at all forget Aristotle's saying that "life is practice and not
theory;" that men are born to do and suffer, and not to dream and weave
systems; that conduct and not culture is the basis of character and the
source of strength; that a knowledge of Nature is of vastly more
importance to our material comfort and progress than philosophy, poetry,
and art. This is not to be called in question; but in this country and
age it seems hardly necessary that it be emphasized, for what is the
whole world insisting upon but the necessity of scientific instruction,
the importance of practical education, the cultivation of the
money-getting faculty and habit, and the futility of philosophy, poetry,
and art? Who is there that denies the worth of what is useful? Where is
there one who does not approve and encourage whatever brings increase of
wealth? Are we not all ready to applaud projects which give promise of
providing more abundant food, better clothing, and more healthful
surrounding for the poor? Does not our national genius seem to lie
altogether in the line of what is practically useful? Is it not our
boast and our great achievement that we have in a single century made
the wilderness of a vast continent habitable, have so ploughed and
drained and planted and built that it can now easily maintain hundreds
of millions in gluttonous plenty? Is not our whole social and political
organization of a kind which fits us to deal with questions and affairs
that concern our temporal and material welfare? What innumerable
individuals among us are congressmen, legislators, supervisors, bank and
school directors, presidents of boards and companies, committee-men,
councilmen, heads of lodges and societies, lawyers, professors,
teachers, editors, colonels, generals, judges, party-leaders, so that
the sovereign people seems to have life and being only in its titled
representatives! What does this universal reign of title and office mean
but the practical education which responsibility gives? If from the
midst of this paradise of utility, materialism, and business, a voice is
raised to plead for culture, for intelligence, for beauty, for
philosophy, poetry, and art, why need any one take alarm? While human
nature remains what it is, can there be danger that the many will be
drawn away from what appeals to the senses, to what the soul loves and
yearns for? If the Almighty God does not win the multitude to the love
of righteousness and wisdom, how shall the words of man prevail?

It is a mistake to oppose use to beauty, the serviceable to the
excellent, since they belong together. Beauty is the blossom that makes
the fruit-tree fair and fragrant. Life means more than meat and drink,
house and clothing. To live is also to admire, to love, to lose one's
self in the contemplation of the splendor with which Nature is clothed.
Human life is the marriage of souls with things of light. Its basis,
aim, and end is love, and love makes its object beautiful. Man may not
even consent to eat, except with decency and grace; he must have light
and flowers and the rippling music of kindly speech, that as far as
possible he may forget that his act is merely animal and useful. He will
lose sight of the fact that clothing is intended for protection and
comfort, rather than not dress to make himself beautiful. To speak
merely to be understood, and not to speak also with ease and elegance,
is not to be a gentleman. How easily words find the way to the heart
when uttered in melodious cadence by the lips of the fair and young.
Home is the centre and seat of whatever is most useful to us; and yet to
think of home is to think of spring-time and flowers, of the songs of
birds and flowing waters, of the voices of children, of floating clouds
and sunsets that linger as though heaven were loath to bid adieu to
earth. The warmth, the color, and the light of their boyish days still
glow in the hearts and imagination of noble men, and redeem the busy
trafficking world of their daily life from utter vulgarity. What hues
has not God painted on the air, the water, the fruit, and the grain that
are the very substance and nutriment of our bodies? Beauty is nobly
useful. It illumines the mind, raises the imagination, and warms the
heart. It is not an added quality, but grows from the inner nature of
things; it is the thought of God working outward. Only from drunken eyes
can you with paint and tinsel hide inward deformity. The beauty of hills
and waves, of flowers and clouds, of children at play, of reapers at
work, of heroes in battle, of poets inspired, of saints rapt in
adoration,--rises from central depths of being, and is concealed from
frivolous minds. Even in the presence of death, the hallowing spirit of
beauty is felt. The full-ripe fruit that gently falls in the quiet air
of long summer days, the yellow sheaves glinting in the rays of
autumn's sun, the leaf which the kiss of the hoar frost has made
blood-red and loosened from the parent stem,--are images of death but
they suggest only calm and pleasant thoughts. The Bedouin, who, sitting
amid the ruins of Ephesus, thinks but of his goats and pigs, heedless of
Diana's temple, Alexander's glory, and the words of Saint Paul, is the
type of those who place the useful above the excellent and the fair; and
as men who in their boards of trade buy and sell cattle and corn, dream
not of green fields and of grain turning to gold in the sun of June, so
we all, in the business and worry of life, lose sight of beauty which
makes the heart glad and keeps it young.

The mind of man is the earthly home of beauty, and if any real thing
were fair as the tender thought of imaginative youth, heaven were not
far. All we love is but our thought of what only thought makes known and
makes beautiful, and for what we know love's thought may be the essence
of all things.


    Fairer than waters where soft moonlight lies,
    Than flowers that slumber on the breast of Spring,
    Than leafy trees in June when glad birds sing,
    Than a cool summer dawn, than sunset skies;

    Than love, gleaming through Beauty's deep blue eyes,
    Than laughing child, than orchards blossoming;
    Than girls whose voices make the woodland ring,
    Than ruby lips that utter sweet replies,--

    Fairer than these, than all that may be seen,
    Is the poetic mind, which sheds the light
    Of heaven on earthly things, as Night's young Queen
    Forth-looking from some jagged mountain height
    Clothes the whole earth with her soft silvery sheen
    And makes the beauty whereof eyes have sight.


Nature is neither sad nor joyful. We but see in her the reflection of
our own minds. Gay scenes depress the melancholy, and gloomy prospects
have not the power to rob the happy of their contentment. The spring may
fill us with fresh and fragrant thoughts, or may but remind us of all
the hopes and joys we have lost; and autumn will speak to one of decay
and death, to another of sleep and rest, after toil, to prepare for a
new and brighter awakening. All the glory of dawn and sunset is but
etheric waves thrilling the vapory air and impinging on the optic nerve;
but behind it all is the magician who sees and knows, who thinks and
loves. "It is the mind that makes the body rich." Thoughts take shape
and coloring from souls through which they pass; and a free and open
mind looks upon the world in the mood in which a fair woman beholds
herself in a mirror. The world is his as much as the face is hers. If we
could live in the fairest spot of earth, and in the company of those who
are dear, the source of our happiness would still be our own thought and
love; and if they are great and noble, we cannot be miserable however
meanly surrounded. What is reality but a state of soul, finite in man,
infinite in God? Theory underlies fact, and to the divine mind all
things are godlike and beautiful. The chemical elements are as sweet and
pure in the buried corpse as in the blooming body of youth; and it is
defective intellect, the warp of ignorance and sin, which hides from
human eyes the perfect beauty of the world.


            "Earth's crammed with heaven,
    And every common bush afire with God;
    But only he who sees, takes off his shoes."


What we all need is not so much greater knowledge, as a luminous and
symmetrical mind which, whatsoever way it turn, shall reflect the things
that are, not in isolation and abstraction, but in the living unity and
harmony wherein they have their being.

The worth of religion is infinite, the value of conduct is paramount;
but he who lacks intellectual culture, whatever else he may be, is
narrow, awkward, unintelligent. The mirror of his soul is dim, the
motions of his spirit are sluggish, and the divine image which is
himself is blurred.

But let no one imagine that this life of the soul in the mind is easy;
for it is only less difficult than the life of the soul in God. To
learn many things; to master this or that science; to have skill in law
or medicine; to acquaint one's self with the facts of history, with the
opinions of philosophers or the teachings of theologians,--is
comparatively not a difficult task; and there are hundreds who are
learned, who are skillful, who are able, who have acuteness and depth and
information, for one who has an open, free, and flexible mind,--which is
alive and active in many directions, touching the world of God and
Nature at many points, and beholding truth and beauty from many sides;
which is serious, sober, and reasonable, but also fresh, gentle, and
sympathetic; which enters with equal ease into the philosopher's
thought, the poet's vision, and the ecstasy of the saint; which excludes
no truth, is indifferent to no beauty, refuses homage to no goodness.
The ideal of culture indeed, like that of religion, like that of art,
lies beyond our reach, since the truth and beauty which lure us on, and
flee the farther the longer we pursue, are nothing less than the eternal
and infinite God.

And culture, if it is not to end in mere frivolity and gloss, must be
pursued, like religion and art, with earnestness and reverence. If the
spirit in which we work is not deep and holy, we may become accomplished
but we shall not gain wisdom, power, and love. The beginner seeks to
convert his belief into knowledge; but the trained thinker knows that
knowledge ends in belief, since beyond our little islets of intellectual
vision, lies the boundless, fathomless expanse of unknown worlds where
faith and hope alone can be our guides. Once individual man was
insignificant; but now the earth itself is become so,--a mere dot in
infinite space, where, for a moment, men wriggle like animalcules in a
drop of water. And if at times a flash of light suddenly gleam athwart
the mind, and it seem as though we were about to get a glimpse into the
inner heart of being, the brightness quickly dies, and only the surfaces
of things remain visible. Oh, the unimaginable length of ages when on
the earth there was no living thing! then life's ugly, slimy beginnings;
then the conscious soul's fitful dream stretching forth to endless time
and space; then the final sleep in abysmal night with its one star of
hope twinkling before the all-hidden throne of God, in the shadow of
whose too great light faith kneels and waits!

Why shall he whose mind is free, symmetrical, and open, be tempted to
vain glory, to frivolous boasting? Shall not life be more solemn and
sacred to him than to another? Shall he indulge scorn for any being whom
God has made, for any thought which has strengthened and consoled the
human heart? Shall he not perceive, more clearly than others, that the
unseen Power by whom all things are, is akin to thought and love, and
that they alone bring help to man who make him feel that faith and hope
mean good, and are fountains of larger and more enduring life? The
highest mind, like the purest heart, is a witness of the soul and of
God.




CHAPTER IV.

CULTURE AND THE SPIRIT OF THE AGE.


     But try, I urge,--the trying shall suffice: The aim, if reached or
     not, makes great the life.

     BROWNING.



The mass of mankind, if we pass the whole race in review, are sunk in
gross ignorance; and even in civilized nations, where education is free,
the multitude have but a rude acquaintance with the elements of
knowledge. Their ability to read and write hardly serves intellectual
and moral ends; and such learning as they possess seems only to weaken
their power to admire and love what is best in life and thought.

If we turn to the more cultivated, whose numbers even in the most
enlightened countries are not great, we find but here and there an
individual who has anything better than a sort of mechanical cleverness.
Students, it has been said, on leaving college, quickly divide into two
classes,--those who have learned nothing, and those who have forgotten
everything. In the professions, the lawyer tends to become an advocate,
the physician an empiric, the theologian a dogmatist; and these are but
instances of a general falling away from ideals. The student of physical
science is subdued to what he works in; the man of letters loses depth
and earnestness; and the teacher, whose business it is to rouse and
illumine souls, shrivels until he becomes merely a repeater of facts and
doctrines in which there is no life, no power to exalt the imagination
or to give tone to the intellect. The teacher cannot create talent, and
his best work lies in stimulating and directing energy and impulse; but
this he seldom strives to do or to make himself capable of doing; and
hence pupils very generally leave school as men quit a prison, with a
sense of emancipation, and with a desire to forget both the place and
the kind of life there encouraged. A talent is like seed-corn,--it bears
within itself the power to break the confining walls and to spring
upward to light, if only it be sown in proper soil, where the rain and
the sunshine fall; but this is a truth which those who make education a
business are slow to accept. They repress; they overawe; they are
dictatorial; they prescribe rules and methods for minds which can gain
strength and wisdom only by following the bent given by their
endowments,--and thus the young, who are most easily discouraged in
things which concern their highest gifts, lose heart, turn away from
ideals, and abandon the pursuit of excellence. The nobler the mind, the
greater the danger of its being wrongly dealt with. We seldom find a man
whose thinking has helped to form opinion and to create literature, who,
if he care to say what he feels, will not declare that his scholastic
training was bad. Milton, Gray, Dryden, Wordsworth, Byron, Cowley,
Addison, Gibbon, Locke, Shelley, and Cowper had no love for the schools
to which they were sent; Swift and Goldsmith received no college honors;
and Pope, Thomson, Burns, and Shakespeare had little or nothing to do
with institutions of learning. A man educates himself; and the best work
teachers can do, is to inspire the love of mental exercise and a living
faith in the power of labor to develop faculty, and to open worlds of
use and delight which are infinite, and which each individual must
rediscover for himself. It is the educator's business to cherish the
aspirations of the young, to inspire them with confidence in themselves,
and to make them feel and understand that no labor can be too great or
too long, if its result be cultivation and enlightenment of mind. For
them ideals are real; their life is as yet wrapped in the bud; and to
encourage them to believe that if they are but true to themselves, the
flower and the fruit will be fair and health-bringing, is to open for
them the fountain of hope and noble endeavor.

What men have done, men can still do. Nay, shall we not rather believe
that the best is yet to be done? The peoples whom we call ancient were
but rude beginners. We are the true ancients, the inheritors of all the
wisdom and all the heroism of the past. We stand in a wider world, and
move forward with more conscious purpose along more open ways. Of the
past we see but the summits, illumined by the rays of genius and glory.
Could we look upon the plains where the multitudes lie in darkness,
wearing the triple chain of servitude, ignorance, and want, we should
understand how fair and beneficent our own age is. Enthusiasm for the
past cannot inspire the best intellectual work. The heart turns to the
past; but the mind looks to the future, and is forever untwisting the
cords which bind us to the things that pleased a childlike fancy. To
grow is to outgrow; and whatever of the past survives, survives, as the
very word implies, because it is still living and applicable here and
now. Let not the young believe that the age of the heroic and godlike is
gone. Good and the means of good are not harder to reconcile to-day than
they were a hundred or a thousand years ago, and they who have a heart
may now, as the best have done in the past, wring even from despair the
courage on which victory loves to smile. If we are weak and inferior the
fault lies in ourselves, not in the age. We are the age; and if we but
will and work, opportunities are offered us to become and to perform
whatever may crown and glorify a human soul. The time for doing best
things, like eternity, is ever present. Let but the man stand forth, and
he will find and do his work.

We are too near our own age to discern its true glory, which shall best
appear from the vantage-ground of another century; but surely we can
feel that it throbs with life, with immortal yearnings, with
ever-growing desire to give to all men higher thoughts and purer loves.
Society, the State, the Church, the individual, are striving with
conscious purpose to make life moral and intelligent. We have become
more humane than men have ever been, and accept more fully the duty and
the task of extending the domain of justice, of goodness, and of truth.
The aim of our civilization is not merely to instruct the ignorant, but
to make ignorance impossible; not merely to feed the hungry, but to do
away with famine; not merely to visit the captive, but to make captivity
the means of his regeneration. Already the chains of the slave have
been broken, and the earth has become the home of God's free children.
Disease has been tracked to its secret hiding-places, and barriers have
been built against pestilence and contagion. War has become less
frequent and less barbarous; persecution for opinion and belief has
become rare; man's inhumanity to woman, which is the deepest stain upon
the history of the race, has yielded to the influence of religion and
knowledge; and with ever-increasing force the truth is borne in upon
those who think and observe, that the fate of the rich and high-placed
cannot be separated from that of the poor and lowly. While we earnestly
strive to control and repress every kind of moral evil, we feel that
society itself is responsible for sin and crime, and that social and
political conditions and constitutions must change, until the weak and
the heavy-laden are protected from the heartlessness of the strong and
fortunate. Not only must those who labor with their hands have larger
opportunities than hitherto have ever been given them, but in the whole
social life of man there must be more justice, more love, more
tenderness, more of the spirit of Christ, than hitherto has ever been
found there.

What marvelous, intellectual work are we not doing? What admirable
expression of the highest truth do we not find in the best writers of
our age! It is not all pure gold; but whether we take a religious, a
moral, or an intellectual point of view, we may not affirm of the
literature of any age or country that it is perfect. When man clothes in
words what he thinks and loves, what he knows and believes, his work
bears the marks of his defects not less than those of his qualities.
Nay, if we turn to the Bible itself, how much do we not find there which
we either fail to comprehend or are unable to apply! Has not the mind of
Christendom been trained and illumined by the literatures of Greece and
Rome, which in moral purity, in elevation of sentiment, in breadth and
depth of thought, in the knowledge of the laws of Nature, in scientific
accuracy, in sympathy and tenderness, are altogether inferior to the
best writings of our own day? It is a mistake to suppose that this is a
material age in which the love of religion, of poetry, of art, of
excellence of whatever kind, is dead. The love of what is best has never
at any time been alive save in the hearts of the chosen few; and in such
souls it burns now with as sweet and steady a glow as when Plato spoke,
and the blessed Saviour uttered words of divine wisdom. Here and now, in
and around us, there is the heavenly presence of budding life, of
widening vision, of "new thoughts urgent as the growth of wings." Let
us turn the white forehead of hope to the fair time, and deem no labor
great by which we shall become less unfit to do the work of God and man.


    "Nay, never falter; no great deed is done
    By falterers who ask for certainty.
    No good is certain but the steadfast mind,
    The undivided will to seek the good:
    'T is that compels the elements and wrings
    A human music from the indifferent air.
    The greatest gift the hero leaves his race
    Is to have been a hero. Say we fail!
    We feed the high tradition of the world
    And leave our spirit in our children's breasts."


But to enter upon such a course of life with well-founded hope of
success, we must be reverent and devout. The thrill of awe is, as Goethe
says, the best thing humanity has. We must understand and feel that the
visible is but the shadow of the invisible, that the soul has its roots
in God, whose kingdom is within us. We must perceive that what we know,
believe, admire, love, and yearn for makes our real life; that we are
worth what we _are_, and not what we possess and use. We must be lovers
of perfection, as the divine Saviour bids us become,--"Be ye perfect,
even as your Father in heaven is perfect." We must be conscious of the
immortal spirit which is ourself, and walk in the company of God and of
just men made perfect, striving after light and purity and strength,
which are of the soul. We must love the inward, the true, and the
eternal rather than the outward and transitory. We must believe that in
very truth we are akin to God, that God is in us, and we in him, and
consequently that it is our first duty to follow after perfection,
completeness of life, in thought, in love, and in conduct. As it is good
to know, so is it good to be strong, to be patient, to be humble, to be
helpful; so is it good to do right, though the deed should be our only
reward.

But we are beset by all manner of temptations to turn aside from a high
and noble way of living. The line of least resistance for us is the
common highway of money-getters and place-winners; and the moment a man
gives evidence of ability, the whole world urges him to put it to
immediate use. Our public opinion identifies the good with the useful,
all else is visionary and unreal. The average man controls us not only
in politics, but in religion, in art, and in literature. To turn away
from material good in order to gain spiritual and intellectual benefit
is held to be evidence of a feeble or perverted understanding. If a man
is eloquent, let him become a lawyer, a politician, or a preacher; if he
have a talent for science, let him become a physician, a practical
chemist, or a civil engineer; if he have skill in writing, let him
become a journalist or a contributor to magazines. No one asks himself,
What shall I do to gain wisdom, strength, virtue, completeness of life;
but the universal question is, How shall I make a living, get money,
position, notoriety? In our hearts we should rather have the riches of a
Rothschild than the mind of Plato, the imagination of Shakespeare, or
the soul of Saint Theresa. We believe the best is outside of us, that
the aids to the most desirable kind of life are to be found in material
and mechanical things. We talk with pride of our numbers, our
institutions, our machines; we love the display and noise of life, are
eager to mingle in crowds, to live in great cities, and to listen to
exaggerated and declamatory speech. The soberness of wisdom, the
humility of religion, the plainness of worth, are unattractive and
unrecognized. We rush after material things, like hunters after game;
and in the excitement of the chase our pulse grows quick, and our vision
confused. We have lost the art of patient work and expectation. We are
no more capable of living in our work, of making it the means of our
growth and happiness. What we do, must be quickly done, must have
immediate results. Our success in solving the political and social
problems has spoiled us. When we hear of a man who has been prosperous
for years, whom no misfortune has sobered and softened, we expect him to
be narrow and supercilious; and in the same way, a prosperous people are
exposed to the danger of becoming self-complacent and superficial. We
exaggerate the importance of our own achievements and think that which
we have accomplished is the best; whereas the wise hold what they have
done in slight esteem, and think only of becoming themselves nobler and
wiser. Instead of boasting of our civilization, because we have
industrial and commercial prosperity, wealth and liberty, churches,
schools, and newspapers, we ought to ask ourselves whether civilization
does not imply something more and higher than this,--what kind of soul
lives and loves and thinks in this environment? Instead of trying to
persuade ourselves that we are the greatest and most enlightened people,
would it not be worth while to ask ourselves, in a dispassionate temper,
whether our best men and women are the most intellectual, the most
interesting, and the most Christian men and women to be found in the
world? Do they not lack repose, distinction, a sense for complete and
harmonious living? Must we not still look to Europe for our best
religious and philosophic thought, our best poetry, painting, music,
and architecture? "Let the passion for America," says Emerson, "cast out
the passion for Europe." This is desirable, but numbers and wealth will
not bring it about. While the best is said and done in Europe, the
better sort of Americans will look thither,--just as Europe looks to us
for corn and cotton, or mechanical appliances. We have done much, and
much that it was well to do. We have, as Matthew Arnold says, solved the
political and social problems better than any other people, though we
ourselves perceive that the solution is by no means final. The
conditions of our life are favorable to the many. It is easier for a man
to assert himself here, than it is or has ever been elsewhere. A little
sense, a little energy, is all that any one needs to make himself
independent and comfortable; and because success of this kind is so easy
it threatens to absorb our whole life. They alone seem to be living
worthily who are doing practical work, who are developing the natural
wealth of the country, starting new enterprises and inventing new
machines. The political problems which interest us are financial;
schools are maintained and fostered because they protect and strengthen
our institutions; religious beliefs are tolerated and encouraged because
they are aids to morality,--and morality means sobriety, honesty,
industry, which lead to thrift. Then there is an idea that religion is a
conservative power, useful as a bulwark against the assaults of
anti-social fanatics. Philosophy, poetry, and art are not considered
seriously, because they are not seen to bear any clear relation to our
institutions and temporal well-being. Opinion rules the wide world over;
and in the face of this strong public opinion which lays stress chiefly
upon external things,--the environment, the machinery of life,--and not
upon spiritual and intellectual qualities, it is not easy to love
knowledge and virtue for themselves, for the strength and beauty they
give to the soul, for their power to build up the being which is a man's
very self. It is rare that men have faith in what but few believe in;
they are gregarious, and need the encouragement that comes of having
aims and hopes of which the millions approve.

The predominance of the average man, of which our public opinion is the
result, puts other obstacles in the way of culture. It makes us
self-complacent, easily satisfied with what we perform. A representative
man will become a lawyer, a soldier, a merchant, a legislator, an
author, in turns, as occasion offers, and he has no doubt of his
sufficiency; because average work is all that is expected of any one. To
be able to do anything fairly well seems to us a more desirable
accomplishment than to be able to do some one thing better than anybody
else. But this is a view which only those may take who live in an
imperfectly developed society. As men become more cultivated, they more
and more want only the best; and the noblest natures feel the desire to
do their best, not with their actual power, but with the skill which
forty or fifty years of discipline and effort might give them. They are
laborious; they are patient; they persevere in one direction; they
believe that if they but continue to observe, to think, to read, to
compare, and to express in plain words what they know, their power of
seeing and of uttering will continue to grow. The charm of increasing
faculty in an infinite world sways and controls them. They never know
enough; they are never able to say well enough what they know; and so
they grow old still learning many things. They work in a spirit wholly
different from that of the common man, who if he get through with what
he has in hand is satisfied. They have an artist's sense of perfection;
and like Virgil would burn the works which if they once escape their own
hands, the world will never permit to perish.

It is hard to resist when many invite to utterance; and with us whoever
has ability is urged to put himself forward, and consequently to
dissipate in crude performances energies which if employed in
self-culture might make of him a philosopher, a poet, or a man of
science. As it is easier to act than to think, the multitude of course
will be only talkers, writers, and performers; but a great and civilized
people must have at least a few men who take rank with the profound
thinkers and finished scholars of the world. No lover of America can
help thinking it undesirable that any one should be able to say of us
with truth, what Locke has said, "The Americans are not all born with
worse understandings than the Europeans, though we see none of them have
such reaches in the arts and sciences." It is our aim to create the
highest civilization; but the highest civilization is favorable to the
highest life, which implies and requires more than the possession of
material things. Conduct is necessary, knowledge is necessary, beauty is
necessary, manners are necessary, and a civilized people must develop
life in all these directions, and as far as such a thing is possible,
harmoniously. Whoever excels in conduct, or in knowledge, or in a sense
for the beautiful, or in manners, helps to raise the standard of
living,--helps to give worth, dignity, charm, and refinement to life. It
is hard to take interest in a people who have no profound thinkers, no
great artists, no accomplished scholars, for only such men can lift a
people above the provincial spirit, and bring them into conscious
relationship with former ages and the wide world. The rule of the people
looks to something higher than opportunity for every man to have food
and a home; to something more than putting a church, a school, and a
newspaper at every man's door. Saints and heroes, philosophers and
poets, are a people's glory. They give us nobler loves, higher thoughts,
diviner aims. They show us how like a god man may become; and political
and social institutions which make saints and heroes, philosophers and
poets, impossible, can have but inferior value. And there is some
radical wrong where the noblest manhood and womanhood are not
appreciated and reverenced. Not to recognize genuine worth is the mark
of a superficial and vulgar character. The servile spirit has no
conception of the heroic nature; and they who measure life by material
standards, do not perceive the infinite which is in man and which makes
him godlike. A few only in any age or nation love the best, follow after
ideal aims; but when these few are wanting, all life becomes
common-place, and the millions pass from the cradle to the grave and
leave no lasting impression upon the world.

The practical turn of mind which finds expression in our commercial and
industrial achievements, makes itself felt also in our intellectual
activity, and those among us who have knowledge and power of utterance
are expected, almost required, to throw themselves into the breakers of
controversy, to discuss the hundred political, social, religious,
financial, sanitary, and educational problems which are ever waiting to
be solved. Let them enter the lists, let them take sides, let them
strive to see clear in an atmosphere of smoke and fog; and not to do
this is, in the estimation of the many, to be a dreamer, a dilettante, a
thinker to no purpose. But this is precisely what those who seek to
cultivate themselves, who seek to learn and communicate the best that is
known, ought not to do. They should live in a serene air, in a world of
tranquility and peace, where the soul is not troubled by contention,
where the view is not perturbed by passion. They should have leisure,
which is the original meaning of school and scholar; for the mind, like
the soul, is refreshed and strengthened by quiet meditation. Its
improvement is slow, is imperceptible often; its training is the result
of delicate methods which require patience and perseverance, faith in
ideals, and a constant looking to the all-perfect Infinite; and to throw
it into the noise and confusion of the busy excited world of practical
affairs is to stunt and warp its growth. We do not hitch a race-horse to
the plough, nor should we ask the best intellects to do the common work
of which every man is capable. They render the best service, when living
in communion with the highest and most cultivated minds of the past and
present, they learn and teach the way of looking and thinking, of
behaving and doing, which has been followed by the greatest and noblest
of the race. Political and social questions are forever changing; views
which commend themselves to-day will in a few years seem absurd;
measures which are thought to be of vital importance will grow to be
inapplicable. To talk and write about such things is well,--may help to
prevent stagnation and corruption in public life; but they exercise
altogether a higher office, who live in the presence of what is
permanently true and good and beautiful, who believe in ideal aims and
ends and prevent the masses from losing sight of what constitutes man's
real worth. They do what they alone can do, whereas the practical and
the useful may be any one's work. They may not, of course, isolate
themselves; on the contrary they must live closer than other men not
only to God and Nature, but also to the past and present history of
their country and of mankind. They study the movements of the age, but
they study them in a philosophic and not in a partisan spirit. They seek
to know, not what is popular, but what is right and good; and they often
see clearly where the view of others is uncertain and confused.
Encouragements and rewards are not necessary for them, for they are
drawn to the knowledge and love of the best by irresistible attractions,
and the more they learn and love the more beneficent and joy-giving does
their life become. Their aims and ends are in harmony with the highest
reason and the highest faith. The world they live in abides; and if they
are neglected or forgotten now, they can wait, for truth and goodness
and beauty can never lose their power or their charm.


    "The worthiest poets have remained uncrowned
    Till death has bleached their foreheads to the bone."





CHAPTER V.

SELF-CULTURE.


                  There is
    One great society alone on earth
    The noble Living and the noble Dead.

    WORDSWORTH.



The passion for truth and for the culture which makes its possession
possible is not rightly felt by the heart of boy or of youth; it is the
man's passion, and its power over him is most irresistibly asserted when
outward restraint has been removed, when escaping from the control of
parents and teachers he is left to himself to shape his course and seek
his own ends. When his companions have finished their studies he feels
that his own are now properly only about to begin; when they are
dreaming of liberty and pleasure, of wealth and success, of the world
and its honors, his mind is haunted by the mystery of God and Nature, by
visions of dimly discerned truth and beauty which he must follow
whithersoever they lead; and already he perceives that wisdom comes to
those alone who toil and cease not from labor, who suffer and are
patient. Hitherto he has learned the lessons given him by teachers
appointed by others; henceforth he is himself to choose his instructors.
As once, half-unconscious, he played in the smile or frown of Nature,
and drank knowledge with delight, so now in the world of man's thought,
hope, and love, he is, with deliberate purpose, to seek what is good for
the nourishment of his soul. Happy is he, for nearly all men toil and
suffer that they may live; but he is also to have time to labor, to make
life intelligent and fair. He must know not only what the blind atoms
are doing, but what saints, sages, and heroes have loved, thought, and
done. He will still keep close to Nature who, though she utters myriad
sounds, never speaks a human word; but he will also lend his ear to the
voice of wisdom which lies asleep in books, and to sympathetic minds
whispers from other worlds whatever high or holy truth has consecrated
the life of man. His guiding thought must be how to make the work by
which he maintains himself in the world subserve moral and intellectual
ends; for his aim is not merely or chiefly to have goods, but to be wise
and good, and therefore to build up within himself the power of conduct
and the power of intelligence which makes man human, and distinguishes
him from whatever else on earth has life.

It is our indolence and frivolity that make routine duties, however
distracting or importunate, incompatible with the serious application
which the work of self-culture demands; but we are by nature indolent
and frivolous, and only education can make us earnest and laborious.
None but a cultivated mind can understand that if the whole human race
could be turned loose, to eat and drink and play like thoughtless
children, life would become meaningless; that a paradise in which work
should not be necessary would become wearisome. The progress of the race
is the result of effort, physical, religious, moral, and intellectual;
and the advance of individuals is proportional to their exertion. Nature
herself pushes the young to bodily exercise; but though activity is for
them a kind of necessity, only the discipline of habit will lead them to
prefer labor to idleness; and they will not even use their senses
properly unless they are taught to look and to listen,--just as they are
taught to walk and to ride. The habit of manual labor, as it is directly
related to the animal existence to which man is prone, and supplies the
physical wants whose urgency is most keenly felt, is acquired with least
difficulty, and it prepares the way for moral and intellectual life; but
it especially favors the life which has regard to temporal ends and
conduces to comfort and well-being. They whose instrument is the brain
rarely aim at anything higher than wealth and position; and if they
become rich and prominent, they remain narrow and uninteresting. They
talk of progress, of new inventions and discoveries, and they neglect to
improve themselves; they boast of the greatness of their country, while
their real world is one of vulgar thought and desire; they take interest
in what seems to concern the general welfare, but fail to make
themselves centres of light and love. What is worse they have the
conceit of wisdom,--they lack reverence; they are impatient, and must
have at once what they seek. But the better among us see the
insufficiency of the popular aims, and begin to yearn for something
other than a life of politics, newspapers, and financial enterprise.
They desire to know and love the best that is known, and they are
willing to be poor and obscure, if they may but gain entrance into this
higher world. "I shall ever consider myself," says Descartes, "more
obliged to those who leave me to my leisure, than I should to any who
might offer me the most honorable employments." This is the thought of
every true student and lover of wisdom; for he feels that whatever a
man's occupation may be, his business is to improve his mind and to form
his character. He desires not to be known and appreciated, but to know
and appreciate; not to _have_ more, but to _be_ more; not to have
friends, but to be the friend of man,--which he is when he is the lover
of truth. He turns from vulgar pleasures as he turns from pain, because
both pleasure and pain in fastening the soul to the body deprive it of
freedom and hinder the play of the mind.


    He loves the best with single heart
    And without thought what gifts it bring.


Unless one have deep faith in the good of culture he will easily become
discouraged in the work which is here urged upon him. He must be drawn
to the love of intellectual excellence by an attraction such as a poet
feels in the presence of beauty; he must believe in it as a miser
believes in gold; he must seek it as a lover seeks the beloved. Our
wants determine our pleasures, and they who have no intellectual
cravings feel not the need of exercise of mind. They are born and remain
inferior. They are content with the world which seems to be real,
forgetting the higher one, which alone is real; they are not urged to
the intellectual life by irresistible instincts. They are discouraged by
difficulties, thwarted by obstacles which lie in the path of all who
strive to move forward and to gain higher planes. It is not possible to
advance except along the road of toil, of struggle, and of suffering.
We cannot emerge even from childish ignorance and weakness without
experiencing a sense of loss. Mental work in the beginning and for a
long time is weariness, is little better than drudgery. We labor, and
there seems to be no gain; we study and there seems to be no increase of
knowledge or power; and if we persevere, we are led by faith and hope,
not by any clear perception of the result of persistent application.
Genius itself is not exempt from this law. Poets and artists work with
an intensity unknown to others, and are distinguished by their faith in
the power of labor. The consummate musician must practice for hours, day
by day, year in and year out. The brain is the most delicate and the
finest of instruments, and it is vain to imagine that anything else than
ceaseless, patient effort will enable us to use it with perfect skill;
indeed, it is only after long study that we become capable of
understanding what the perfection of the intellect is, that we become
capable of discerning what is excellent, beautiful, and true in style
and thought.

Discouragement and weariness will, again and again, suggest doubts
concerning the wisdom of this ceaseless effort to improve one's self.
Why persist in the pursuit of what can never be completely attained?
Why toil to gain what the mass of men neither admire nor love? Why wear
out life in a course of action which leads neither to wealth nor honors?
Why turn away from pleasures which lie near us to follow after ideal
things? These are questions which force themselves upon us; and it
requires faith and courage not to be shaken by this sophistry. Visions
of ideal life float before young eyes, and if to be attracted by what is
high and fair were enough, it were not difficult to be saint, sage, or
hero; but when we perceive that the way to the best is the road of toil
and drudgery, that we must labor long and accomplish little, wander far
and doubt our progress, must suffer much and feel misgivings whether it
is not in vain,--then only the noblest and the bravest still push
forward in obedience to inward law. The ideal of culture appeals to them
with irresistible force. They consent to lack wealth, and the approval
of friends and the world's applause; they are willing to turn away when
fair hands hold out the cup of pleasure, when bright eyes and smiling
lips woo to indulgence. If, you ask, How long? They answer, Until we
die! They are lovers of wisdom and do not trust to hope of temporal
reward. Their aim is light and purity of mind and heart; these they
would not barter for comfort and position. As saints, while doing the
common work of men, walk uplifted to worlds invisible, so they, amid the
noise and distractions of life still hear the appealing voice of truth;
and as parted lovers dream only of the hour when they shall meet again,
so these chosen spirits, in the midst of whatever cares and labors, turn
to the time when thought shall people their solitude as with the
presence of angels. They hear heavenly voices asking, Why stay ye on the
earth, unless to grow? Vanity, frivolity, and fickleness die within
them; and they grow to be humble and courageous, disinterested and
laborious, strong and persevering. The cultivation of their higher
nature becomes the law of their life; and the sense of duty, "stern
daughter of the voice of God," which of all motives that sway the heart,
best stands the test of reason, becomes their guide and support. Thus
culture, which looks to the Infinite and All-wise as to its ideal, rests
upon the basis of morality and religion.

To think is difficult, and they who wish to grow in power of thought
must hoard their strength. Excess, of whatever kind, is a waste of
intellectual force. The weakness of men of genius has impoverished the
world. Sensual indulgence diminishes spiritual insight; it perverts
reason, and deadens love; it enfeebles the physical man, and weakens the
organs of sense, which are the avenues of the soul. The higher self is
developed harmoniously only when it springs from a healthful body. It is
the lack of moral balance which makes genius akin to madness. Nothing is
so sane as reason, and great minds fall from truth only when they fail
in the strength which comes of righteous conduct.

Let the lover of wisdom then strive to live in a healthy body that his
senses may report truly of the universe in which he dwells. But this is
not easy; for mental labor exhausts, and if the vital forces are still
further diminished by dissipation, disease and premature decay of the
intellectual faculties will be the result. The ideal of culture embraces
the whole man, physical, moral, religious, and intellectual; and the
loss of health or morality or faith cannot but impede the harmonious
development of the mind itself. Passion is the foe of reason, and may
easily become strong enough to extinguish its light. He who wishes to
educate himself must learn to resist the desires of his lower nature,
which if indulged deaden sensibility, weaken the will, take from the
imagination its freshness, and from the heart the power of loving. The
task he has set himself is arduous, and he cannot have too much energy,
too much warmth of soul, too much capacity for labor. Let him not waste,
like a mere animal, the strength which was given him that he might
learn to know and love infinite truth and beauty. The dwelling with
one's self and with thoughts of what is true and high, which is an
essential condition of mental growth, is impossible when the sanctuary
of the soul is filled with unclean images. Intellectual honesty, the
disinterested love of truth, without which no progress can be made, will
hardly be found in those who are the slaves of unworthy passions. The
more religious a man is, the more does he believe in the worth and
sacredness of truth, and the more willing does he become to throw all
his energies with persevering diligence into the work of
self-improvement. They who fail to see in the universe an all-wise,
all-holy, and all-powerful Being, from whom are all things and to whom
all things turn, easily come to doubt whether it holds anything of true
worth. History teaches this, and it requires little reflection to
perceive that it must be so. Of the Solitary, Wordsworth says,--


                      "But in despite
    Of all this outside bravery, within
    He neither felt encouragement nor hope;
    For moral dignity and strength of mind
    Were wanting, and simplicity of life
    And reverence for himself; and, last and best,
    Confiding thoughts, through love and fear of Him
    Before whose sight the troubles of this world
    Are vain."


The corrupt and the ignorant easily learn to feel contempt, but the
scholar is reverent. He moves in the midst of infinite worlds, and knows
that the least is part of the whole.

Now, how shall he who is resolved to educate himself set about his work?
What advice shall be given him? What rules shall be made for him that he
may not waste time and energy? He who yearns for the cultivation of mind
which makes wisdom possible must work his way to the light. All
intellectual men strive to educate themselves, but each one strives in a
different way. They all aim at insight rather than information, at the
perfect use of their faculties rather than learning. The power to see
things as they are, is what they want; and therefore they look, observe,
examine, compare, analyze, meditate, read, and write. And they keep
doing this day by day; and the longer they work, the more attractive
their work grows to be. Descartes, who is a typical lover of the
intellectual life, looked upon himself simply as a thinking being, and
gave all his thought to the cultivation of his higher faculties in the
hope that he might finally discover some truth which would bring
blessings to men. He had no thought of literary fame, published little,
and sedulously avoided whatever might bring him into notoriety. "Those,"
he says, "who wish to know how to speak of everything and to acquire a
reputation for learning, will succeed most easily if they content
themselves with the semblance of truth, which may readily be found." The
love of truth is the mark of the real student. What is, is; it is man's
business to know it. He is the foe of pretense; sham for him means
shame. He will have sound knowledge; he will do his work well; whether
men shall applaud or reward him for it, is a foreign consideration. He
obeys an inward law, and the praise of those who cannot understand him
sounds to him like mockery. True thought, like right conduct, is its own
reward. To see truth and to love it is enough,--is more than to have the
worship of the world. The important thing is to be a man, to have a
serious purpose, to be in earnest, to yearn for what is good and holy;
and without this the culture of the intellect will not avail.

We must build upon the broad foundation of man's life, and not upon any
special faculty. The merely literary man is often the most pitiful of
men,--able, it may be, to do little else than complain that his merits
are not recognized. Let it not be imagined then that the lover of
wisdom, the follower of intellectual good, should propose to himself a
literary career. He may of course be or become a man of letters, but
this is incidental to his life-purpose, which is to develop within
himself the power of knowing and loving. He will learn to think rightly
and to act well, first of all; for he knows that a man's writing cannot
be worth more than he himself is worth. He is a seeker after truth and
perfection; and understanding at the price of what countless labors
these may be hoped for, he is slow to imagine that words of his may be
of help to others.

Observation, reading, and writing are the chief means by which thought
is stimulated, the mind developed, and the intellect cultivated. The
habit of looking and the habit of thinking are closely related. A man
thinks as he sees; and for a mind like Shakespeare's, for instance,
observation is almost the only thing that is necessary for its
development. The boundless world breaks in upon him with creative force.
His sympathy is universal, and therefore so is his interest. He sees the
like in the unlike, the differences in things which are similar. Every
little bird and every little flower are known to him. He contemplates
Falstaff and Poor Tom with as much interest as though they were Hamlet
and King Lear. In all original minds the power of observation is great.
It is the chief source of our earliest knowledge, of that which touches
us most nearly and most deeply colors the imagination. When the boy is
wandering through fields, sitting in the shade of trees, or lying on the
banks of murmuring streams, he is not only learni