STUDIES

INTRODUCTORY TO A THEORY OF EDUCATION

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS C. F. CLAY, MANAGER

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THE MARUZEN-KABUSHIKI-KAISHA

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STUDIES

INTRODUCTORY TO A THEORY OF EDUCATION

BY

E. T. CAMPAGNAC

Professor of Education in the University of Liverpool Formerly H.M. Inspector of Schools

Cambridge :

at the University Press 1915

A\ 1-

Caminlrge :

PRINTED BY JOHN CLAY, M.A. AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS

TO NORMAN WYLD

BEST OF CRITICS AND OF FRIENDS

neque enim est sanctius sacris iisdem quam studiis initiari.

QUINTILIAN, Instit. Orat. i. 2. 20.

333823

PREFACE

THE writer of short and fragmentary studies such as make up this volume may well lay himself open to a charge of arrogant pretension if he gives a long list of authors to whom he acknowledges a debt. If no list of this kind is provided here, I think I have two reasons for the omission : first, that my obligations, neither few nor slight, are almost all of them sufficiently patent ; and second, that the rest, if I were to re-trace them, would lead through winding by-ways, of interest to me since I have often preferred these to high-roads, but not likely to be of interest to my readers.

The studies form parts of long series of lectures given to my own pupils in the University, students who propose to enter what is called the profession of teaching. I seem to myself to have been able to tell them very little; my counsels, heard with unfailing patience and a courtesy touched, I have suspected, with a pleasant humour, have amounted to no more than they might quite well have offered to themselves ; but I have given and repeated them in the belief that students fresh from their degrees or still awaiting them, are apt, for all their wealth of curious knowledge, to miss some commonplaces of reflection. I have therefore begged them to concede in their own case, what I do not doubt they have readily granted for me, that it is not much of anything that we really know; that

viii Preface

an excellent test of the reality of our own knowledge is to be found in the practice of saying what we know quite clearly and quite simply to other persons, and that what we claim to know is of no account whatever till it is fused with what we feel, mingled inextricably and yet not confusedly with our hopes and fears, with what I have not scrupled to call our ideals. Gathering these trite doctrines together, I have attempted to persuade them that our ideals never reach the vivid intensity at which they can properly be regarded as personal until they have become social.

For I cannot force myself to suppose that Education any more than Religion is a "special" subject; it is a national concern. Some men may render their best service to their generation and their country by devising curricula for schools, by fashioning and revising schemes of teaching or research for Universities, as others may render theirs in providing, wholesale or retail, the food and drink of the people. Who shall deny the importance of what they do? But the food and the drink must be consumed to be of use, and eating and drinking are acts from which the mind revolts except in society; they are at once the emblems and the conditions of what we call a corporate, because it is a spiritual, life. The "specialist" who will not admit this offers poison to his neighbours and starves himself.

If "specialism" is not the guise, the livery, in which a man accepts and proclaims his place in the co-ordinated services of a community, he should hide it like some deformity, trusting the charity of the world to ignore the terrible affliction of which he cannot win forgetfulness himself.

My thanks are due to Dr Sampson, Librarian of the University, for reading part of my MS., and for letting me draw in a hundred ways upon his kindness and his

Preface ix

learning; and to Miss Dorothy Allmand for her assistance in preparing the book for the press and for compiling the index.

Not a line has been seen by a friend to whom I am most beholden. Over many of England's great roads, wrought by the art of wayfarers over lines drawn first by Nature, I have travelled with him; with him I have threaded the finer tracery of twisted and interwoven lanes to hidden villages, remote hamlets, and solitary farms, deep inland or upon the sea's edge ; and we have followed faint and narrowing foot-paths, to their end at some point from which (for no progress could further be made) we must needs return — baffled and balked, but beyond the mea- sure of intimate words, for silence held us, gladdened and enriched. In other journeys, too, we have by choice and chance left the beaten course, pursuing what we could not name, and seeking what we never found; yet overtaken once and yet again by influences impalpable, compelling and very tranquil; an image of youth like a flower unfulfilled but unfading, a vision of old age, tremulous but serene, like a star undimmed in a threatening sky.

Such pilgrimages, if ever made, score the mind so strangely with the patterned and enlacing tracks of memory and imagination, that new and lonely courses seem to be marked by a friendly and familiar light.

E. T. C.

LIVERPOOL,

i March, 1915.

CONTENTS

CHAP. PAGE

I. THE MEANING OF IDEALS FOR SOCIETY AND

FOR THE INDIVIDUAL .... i

II. PROGRESS AND REPOSE 23

III. SURVEY OF CERTAIN IDEALS .... 41

IV. ORGANISATION FOR THE ACHIEVEMENT OF THE

IDEAL 65

V. THE AIM AND PROVINCE OF EDUCATION . 71

VI. EDUCATION AND SCHOOLS : THE CODE . . 92

VII. THE FREEDOM OF THE PUPIL . . . . in

VIII. THE BUSINESS OF THE TEACHER . . . 119

INDEX ........ 131

CHAPTER I

THE MEANING OF IDEALS FOR SOCIETY AND FOR THE INDIVIDUAL

MORALISTS and satirists and cynics, surveying human life from their several points of view, have all been apt to dwell upon its fleeting nature.

The present, they tell us who need not to be told, is gone as we name it, the future pressing upon us, as we travel towards it, hasting without pause or stay to an unseen but inevitable end. And some with stout-hearted acquiescence, some with protesting indignation, they have compared man to the flower of the field, growing, blooming, withering; and their doctrine varying with their outlook has been that we must work — for the night comes : or that we must eat and drink — for to-morrow we die. Not only is life short : but we hold it on a fickle tenure, and within this brief and uncertain span all kinds of fortune may befal — pleasant things and painful; gains and losses; friend- ships cemented and dissolved; youth, maturity, and age. For such a life, it would seem, no plans could be made, no schemes laid down, no prospects cherished.

So men have said and felt at all times; yet the while they have ever been setting a resolute, if anxious, grasp upon the intractable future, and reckoning on their life as on a thing not short, not uncertain, but a possession, a heritage, secure, real, permanent. Defying the risks to which they cannot be blind, refusing to be paralysed by

c. E. i

2 The Meaning of Ideals for Society [CH.

the fears which they must needs entertain, they have fashioned for themselves an image, an ideal of themselves as they desire to be, as they believe that they ought to be, as, for all their misgivings, they are confident that they can be. They value their life above all price, but on a condition — not that it shall last long, but that it shall be of a proper quality.

What is true of men as individuals is true of the groups, societies, States, in which they are collected. The life of a State is its quality or character: it is not the splendour of its domestic institutions, not the fear which its name inspires beyond its borders, that makes its life, but an ideal, formed, fostered and maintained. Of course, the State fills a larger space than any of its members, and outlives them. They come and go; one generation passes and another takes its place ; the State remains, but it remains, not because it carries on the routine of government, and administration, and defence, but because it preserves a spirit which governs all the interests which it embraces, and controls all the forms of its activity.

In spite of his own fears, in spite of the despondency and terror which sometimes overtake him as he contem- plates the strange and alarming conditions in which he is set, a man either reckons, by a bold assumption, upon length of days; or, putting that hope away, makes an escape, by a flight of imagination, from the dominion of time. The ideal which he places in his breast as in a shrine because it is an ideal is a thing perfect ; its quality is the same whether he lives long or not. And the State too, but by a more complex and wonderful process, in which many forces are blended and combined, builds for itself a figure of its corporate life, as something good, desirable, and to be possessed.

Yet if ideals baffle circumstance and conquer time, to be permanent they must be progressive; their stability

i] and for the Individual 3

depends upon their capacity for change. And if they are spiritual and intangible they need for their continuance and their growth some outward and formal expression.

We distinguish in our speech between means and ends. Ideals are the ends which we seek; in expression we seem to discover the means for their realisation. The multitu- dinous and varied activities of men have their value only as devices adopted deliberately and with clear thought, or used under the stress of custom or habit without clear thought, for this purpose. The irony and the greatness of human fortune are here exhibited ; its irony, for we are driven upon a task which cannot be fulfilled : its greatness, for in the attempt we enlarge and heighten the object for which our labours are undertaken.

In whatever special professions men are occupied, or in the general profession of living, there are two questions which they must put to themselves. They must inquire what is the end to be pursued, and also what is the road to be taken in its quest. The first question has a logical priority; but we have all travelled far before we can ask whither we are tending or what goal we would wish to reach ; and even when we have learnt to ask the question we have to be content with a very imperfect answer. An answer is no sooner given than it ceases to be satisfactory and true. The answer is given not in words but in conduct; the expression of an ideal is a step taken towards it, is a device used for securing it. And either we perceive how small the step has been, and how paltry the device, or having made a real advance and set in motion the right machinery, we think the goal, now that we are nearer it, looks inadequate and in- sufficient ; our view is more extensive, and what was once the limit of ambition can be at best only a half-way house.

Or, we may say the goal recedes, and changes in quality ; it keeps the same name, it resides in the same place, but it takes a different and deeper meaning. Old words come

i — 2

4 The Meaning of Ideals for Society [CH.

to have a new significance; a vague idea is charged with experience, and expands; and yet though it is stuffed with facts it is not gross and material, but becomes more truly an idea because of its perfect union with the body that supports it.

The motives, the powers, the ideals which govern us, spring from our own hearts ; they are the fruit and flower of our own nature; but in the growing and the blooming they may be said to change the nature of the soil out of which they spring, and the changed soil in its turn changes the plant which is reared upon it. It is hard to say in a man what is the natural soil, what is the development deliberately made of his character; what was once the result, the almost artificial result, of deliberate effort, becomes natural ; we do easily things which formerly were difficult, and effort constantly renewed after an increasing and an advancing ideal results in a higher achievement, a further stage marked, a richer fruit, and a riper harvest, and in time a more fertile soil.

What we name character is the writing which the ideal, using conduct as its pen, sets down upon the hearts (and the faces) of men.

The statement of the ideal, .always with less or more insistence coveted, can never be completely made either in deeds or in words, for the aid of words too is sought ; and a man may well be forgiven if he has little to say, and will say less about the ends which he proposes to himself. But some ends he must propose; in their changeful yet unfluctuating reality he must believe; it is in the light of these ends and for the sake of them that he acts, and his actions ever reconstitute them afresh.

At this point we encounter a difficulty. Action implies purpose or device, or to use a word of wider range, action implies thought. Now nothing is more tiring to mind and body than thinking. Some natures can endure more of

i] and for the Individual 5

it than others, but for the most vigorous there is a limit of strength, and sooner or later fatigue subdues all. Half our life is passed in sleep, which either brings cessation of thought, or carries it to a different plane from that of our waking hours. If sleep fails to bring on this repose, or this variety of mental life, it comes unfriendly and un- welcome. But a failure in alertness, a dulling of perception, is common enough when we appear to be awake. It is not necessary to go to bed in order to go to sleep. It is enough to be tired. Some simple instances will suffice to make this evident. We walk down a street or along a country road, noticing persons and things, and presently we grow weary of taking notice, and as we go on our way see and hear little or nothing. Or we read a few pages of a book with intelligence, and presently though our eyes travel from line to line we are seizing its sense no longer- Or, stranger still, in what looks like conversation, we may present the appearance of polite listeners and even exchange the counters of talk, and yet be neither receiving nor giving ideas. The pleasantest explanation is that we are, at least, half asleep.

It is just this which happens in the case of other actions which we should have supposed to necessitate attention. A moment's consideration is enough to show us that a very large part of what we do is done as if by sleep-walkers. We make this our excuse sometimes for things done amiss. "We did them," we say, "without thinking." The excuse is, no doubt, insufficient if it is offered as extenuation of idleness or indifference. It is used at times as a cloak for unkindness or meanness. The person or the society has not taken the trouble to think, when thinking was both possible and necessary.

The unrecorded but memorable injuries of private life are frequently due to want of thought; and the wrongs that a community does to itself and to those who inherit

6 The Meaning of Ideals for Society [CH.

its name and its work may not seldom be attributed to the same cause. Great streets of ugly and unmeaning houses are built, not because people desired them, but because they were disinclined to the effort of thought which would have given them houses beautiful and convenient.

But it is not only foolish and bad things that are done without thought. Good and useful things are done without thought also. The momentum of routine carries us on, and we do easily, thoughtlessly, and sometimes excellently well, what we do without thought. Practice makes us perfect, and unconscious. The operations of dressing and of eating are cited in evidence, and quite properly. But more gratifying examples might well be chosen.

The little, nameless, unremembered acts Of kindness and of love

which adorn life are done, most of them, as we say, from habit. They are not the less, but the more, precious for this. Their pretermission would give a shock of disappoint- ment not only to those for whom they are done, but to those who do them. I do not know whether any psycho- logist has explained this very common yet remarkable lapse. A man takes his watch from his dressing-table morning after morning, and puts it into his pocket, without thinking, and one morning there is a lapse in this unthinking process, and he discovers, later in the day, that he has omitted to do what he has hitherto done quite regularly and quite unconsciously.

The force of habit is a thing more than personal. We are borne forwards on the stream not only by the routine of action which we have made for ourselves, but by the customary action of the society in which we have our part, and of this action also a great part is unconscious, or half -conscious. The body politic, like the body physical, continues in a state of rest or of motion in a given straight

i] and for the Individual 7

line until its rest is disturbed or its motion diverted or arrested by some power; and its members abide or move with it.

So tranquil for the most part is the rest, so smooth the motion, that we are beguiled into the belief that no change can come ; but, if nothing else, friction at last stays us in our course, and even in rest those slow or rapid processes of combustion are at work which reduce all organisms quietly to ashes or scatter them with violent explosion.

The philosophic or the religious mind has no quarrel with these issues ; it acquiesces or even rejoices in them, but remembering shrewdly that habit which facilitates also benumbs activity, it welcomes a law of nature or an ordinance of God by which in general and with proper allowances made our energy is saved and released for new and untried ventures, if we have the courage and the ingenuity to make them.

But allowances have to be made ; our stability, in which we seem to be safe, our progress on which we count securely are both threatened, and it would appear that neither can be maintained as it has been without renewed effort to make good whatever may have been lost. To speak in this way is to speak only with approximate accuracy: we must attempt to come nearer to the truth. Effort comes of deliberation, or choice ; it springs from a reference to an ideal, and a reference made with a view to further action. It is a comparison of what is with what is desired ; it is prompted by a sense of want, and the intention of satisfying the want. It means self-examination in the light of an idea, which once luminous and patent, after- wards, perhaps slowly, fell into oblivion and gradually lost its efficacy, and is now resought and revisited. It means a return to the sources of supply from which to replenish and restore what is failing.

We must turn back to an earlier, the earliest stage,

8 The Meaning of Ideals for Society [CH.

before we can understand the significance of this fresh search for a waning ideal.

The simplest and the most universal activities of men are those which are prompted by their most essential needs. They must have food, and shelter for themselves and for their children. These they seek and find; but they find more than they sought. They discover, as they satisfy these bare wants of the physical life, that they are also satisfying wants of which they had been unaware; they wanted homes and decency and comfort, and getting them they discover at once that they have a standard in these spiritual values; that their standard rises, and that with its advance their needs become subtler and more insistent. Henceforward, they seek what at first they believed to be their only necessities, as means towards, as expressions of, these higher things. But these too suffer a change from use ; they grow familiar, matters of course, and in their turn become materialised. The remedy is indicated and in part provided by the malady; for what were at first ideals, now materialised, satisfy the spiritual hunger no more ; the appetite is whetted by want ; and the new search, of which we have just spoken, is begun. But the search is never rewarded precisely and exactly. What we find is something different from what we set out to find, and in proportion to the keenness of our search, better. We seem to be turning again to something at which in the business of life we had forgotten to look ; but when we look again we see something other than we expected. We may perhaps retrace our steps to an ancient shrine, but we find another deity or the same wearing a new aspect ; or we discover the shrine, and it is empty, and we must seek elsewhere for satisfaction. Progress is measured by these disappointments, more fruitful than the fulfilment of expectation. Mechanical processes may be repeated with perfect accuracy, and sameness; spiritual processes

i] and for the Individual 9

may not. It is curious to note that the least natural and the least human of activities are those of which what is carelessly called civilisation most proudly boasts. The returning crops of the fields, the fruits of trees vary season by season; the spiritual and intellectual products of men vary not less; but we have invented a series of activities from which variation is excluded, and by this performance, a tour de force, indeed, we are enchanted.

There is a difference to be observed between the satis- faction of the elementary needs of man and the satisfaction of his subtler, but more urgent needs. Upon the lower level, the man whose hunger is for bread, sees it, and takes it. Upon the other plane there is reflection, and criticism, the representation of the idea of the thing desired; and so a pause, an interval, between the transference of emotion into action, if action is to have a spiritual quality. Of course it may be shorn of that quality; it may be made mechanical by those who will not wait, but merely express at once an idea of which they have had a glimpse. Still more mechanical is the action of those who having had no vision, however fleeting, mimic what is done by others. But the wise delay. The lower animals reproduce their kind with bewildering rapidity; the higher animals take longer over the process. The delay, of which we speak, is a period of spiritual gestation, in which a living idea is shaped by that which nourishes and sustains it, but in which also it shapes itself to individuality.

The mind is big with an unborn idea, the form of which none can foretell. Two prophecies only are safe ; the idea, when expressed, will be different from the sources from which it came, though it will bear the resemblance of kindred, just as a child is both unlike and like his parents; and the form, which is its expression, will be, however good, yet imperfect. And so progress, springing afresh from discontent, is renewed. We desire, not merely to

io The Meaning of Ideals for Society [CH.

live, but to live well, and our conception of living well becomes finer in quality and takes a larger scope. There will always be a gap between 'mere living' and 'living well/ but constantly 'mere living' becomes more and more completely infused with the idea of living well. Thus our notions of utility and of beauty are blended. To take a simple example : one man might find a table with turned legs quite useful; but another, who had no fault to find with the strength or the size or the material of the table, might not be able to work at it, because it was to him ugly, and being ugly it would not, to him, be useful. It must be remembered that higher sensitivity may be either morbid or healthy. In furniture much that is called ' aesthetic ' is the product of morbid affectation. But the test is easily applied. The man who likes tables with turned legs must not be coerced into buying tables of another kind; but tables of another kind must be real tables, which can be used. Virtue (in what is called taste) is its own reward, not because it gives less, but because it gives more than vice. The beautiful table has beauty, and usefulness also. The interval between desire or purpose or vision and action is no blank space, it is not a cessation of activity, except in a sense which we must presently consider. It is indeed a period of the most vivid and intense activity. An idea is pushing its way to birth in material form; an incarnation is in process; desire is on its way to action. The birth may be delayed, the process thwarted, the goal not reached, or success may be won. The clearest evidence of success is the achievement (with such loss, no doubt, as must befal when the ideal takes the material form) of what was desired : a building is raised, a picture painted, a law enacted, a thing — whatever it may be — is done, and the world beholds and attests it. But the author, unless victory has defeated him and success, colder than penury, chilled his spirit, is not content, though he may well be

i] and for the Individual n

pleased. For him, at least, the contrast will be drawn between his hopes and this, apparently, complete fulfilment. Yet he too, with his fellows, will welcome what has been wrought, and those who come after him will receive it as an inheritance, and note it as a mark of progress. Its significance will be the richer for them if, surprising the author in those uncharted spaces where spirits move, they can divine, behind or in what was accomplished, what was intended and so eagerly (and, for all the success, so vainly) sought.

Or, a different fortune, whether nobler or less happy — perhaps in its unhappiness most noble — may await the idea clamant for manifestation. Not destined to appear in solid and successful flesh, it may put on the spiritual form of art. The time is not ripe for it; it comes into a world which hardly, and for a brief hour perhaps, tolerates it ; but it enters none the less, not quite unwelcomed, into an alien sphere. It shines, as a light in darkness ; shining invincibly, but surrounded by a darkness still unillumined by its gleams. Suddenly and at last it will penetrate the dense environing shadows, but now, unextinguished, it yet makes no advance.

Or it may win its way more quickly and surely upon this strange plane, a ghostly power. Unable to fashion the programme of a party, a man may discover a philosophy of social and political life, and mould the thought of his contemporaries and of later generations with a stronger and a more certain hand than that of the administrator or the statesman. In poetry he may create and set in move- ment those symbols of thought and feeling, which, understood, become feeling and thought for others as for himself. And in that wide-ranging art which pierces the sense of a society as with the keen intimacy of personal knowledge, and drives it on occasion, in concerted action, to declare its secrets — in the drama, a man may originate

12 The Meaning of Ideals for Society [CH.

and control the motives of ideas, which will presently adopt a more substantial shape, and grow to potency upon an ampler stage. As actions done in unreflecting response to stimulus are first understood, then shared and finally repeated in ritual, as ritual interpreted and become self- conscious is transformed into art; so art itself, kindled afresh by intelligence, leaves the intermediate space which it had held between the realm of mere idea and the province of what we call real life; it grows real itself and lifts the convention of reality to a new level, and breathes a new spirit into it. We are apt to believe that every new stage in this process is made solely by the individual genius of great men, but without making little of our debt to them, we have to remember that if each of the advances which we have indicated marks a quickening of the individual personal apprehension which some leader among men has of the ideal, it also marks a broadening of the range over which the ideal works. Access of power is extension of power; the vivid personal response to the ideal, newly interpreted, is a response made not only by one, but by many acting in common because they have witnessed together the operation of an ideal, and have all come, in some measure, to understand, and understanding to obey it. Indeed the co-operation of others is necessary to the rare visionary.

We shall later have to find some more definite account than we have yet gained of the ideal. For the present we may repeat that it is an image of ourselves, as we desire to be. To realise ourselves is our object. But we speak at times of two or of many selves : a good self and a bad self ; we are conscious even of a war waged between the different selves. We seem to ourselves to be a collection, gathered we know not how, of contradictory impulses and powers; but if we look more closely we see that this medley moves in one direction, it has one general form, one character,

i] and for the Individual 13

not unchallenged, but on the whole dominant ; the realisa- tion of this involves the subjugation to it of the discordant and mutinous elements in what we call our 'self.' But as soon as a man perceives this supreme and controlling element, and sets himself to consolidate and extend its rule, as soon in fact as he becomes truly aware of himself, he learns that to achieve his end he must travel beyond the boundaries, narrow at their largest, of himself; he has to take into consideration the presence and the value of other selves, surrounding him, touching him, helping or hindering. In this throng he appears to lose himself ; but as with increasing clearness he apprehends the reality of these other selves, in so far as he makes himself one with them, and absorbs their life in his own, he rediscovers himself. That discovery, won by imagination, reveals to him at once the unity of the elements of which he consists, and of those other selves by which he is encompassed. He finds that he lives in a community ; he learns his place in the world. Meanwhile, what has been happening (for of the process we know so little that we may speak of it as 'happening') in himself, has taken place also in the larger self, the society, of which his self-realisation has made him cognisant. That too has composed the strife of its warring members, and has restored and brought to a new clearness an image of itself. Here too imagination has been at work, and for its product language has no exact symbol; we must speak, in words which belie each other and belittle the fact, of a 'corporate ideal,' a 'civic conscience,' a 'national character.' This image which a Society makes of itself is a thing stranger than that which a man fashions for himself : it is subtler, though it can reveal itself more evidently in outward form, and it holds time with a firmer grasp. These two processes, the one by which a man realises himself in escaping from himself, and traversing the boundaries which hitherto kept him from his neighbours ;

14 The Meaning of Ideals for Society [CH.

the other, by which a Society, compact of many elements, by yielding to each room for free expansion, yet draws them all into subjection to a simple motive, as the varied but harmonious expressions of a single spirit — these two processes are not by chance simultaneous; they are most closely related to each other; they both depend upon a vaster and nobler operation, in which man indeed, and human society, play their part and do their share, but now with an activity serene and effortless, for they are swayed by spiritual powers, kindred with their own, but greater, whose placid movement is directed not by a choice painfully made among many courses, but by the passionless impulse of a nature in harmony with itself, and seeking self- realisation not in impatience or in discontent with what at any moment it is, but for the more intense enjoyment of its proper and inherent qualities.

The history of Education may be written from a study of the institutions in which men have sought to embody their ideals of well-living; it may include the usages and conventions of personal, of social, and of national life; or again, if these records appear at once too voluminous and too vague for use, the historian may turn, not ill- advisedly, to those more detailed accounts which some men have left of their performance as teachers. They have admitted that the world at large provides the education of its inhabitants, but they have chosen as their special business the task of selecting from experience, and giving to certain parts of it a particular emphasis by arrangement and by repetition. As a herdsman might withdraw his cattle from time to time from the ample, but uncertain, pasturage of the wide fields, and give them, in confined pens and stables, what is in his judgment good for them in due proportions and amounts, so shepherds among men have gathered the young, and constrained them to receive, not what in perilous or pleasant wandering they might

l] and for the Individual 15

find, but what mature wisdom, or maturity unwise, decided to be appropriate nutriment.

Schoolrooms, and stables, have been erected, and within them sedulous men and women have done well and ill by their charges; and whether well or ill, the sturdier and more adventurous creatures have eluded and outrun their care and made their way, rejoicing in their strength, to the open fields, there to crop, untutored, the succulent food, or the delicious poisons of the exuberant earth; and time, if not inclination, has set free those others who will not seek food for themselves while others will supply it for them. For all alike, the day comes when they get freedom, or if not freedom yet a mitigation of the restraints in which they have been held. It is idle and ungenerous to disparage the work of the trainer and teacher; they are doing for Society a very necessary thing, and anticipating, within a limited range, what Society is always doing for its members and through them for itself. For if we ask why the school- master or the parent fences his pupils or his children off from the large, miscellaneous commerce of the world, it is not enough to be told that the tender age of children demands this; and unfair to accuse their guardians of any jealousy in the exercise of power, or any shortness of vision. These are answers, insufficient at best, and often untrue. The reason is this; that those who have the care of the young make a selection from the experiences which life and the world offer, and insist on a frequent repetition of these experiences throughout a certain span of years, in order to disclose the coherent system in which they have their place, in order, in little, to figure in imagination, and by familiar daily practice to form for their pupils, a cosmos, an ordered unity of ideas, achieved through an ordered scheme of things done. And this is what Society or the State does at a later stage and indeed at every stage for its members, who are in a sense its pupils and its children too. It seeks

16 The Meaning of Ideals for Society [CH.

for unity in all the variety of practices and institutions which make up the substance, because they represent the spirit of its life; and it discovers that unity by bringing them all into relationship with each other and under the control of a law, not written in formal statutes, but inscribed upon its own heart. A copy of this law (or shall we better say its original?) is in the heart of every member ; and their education is the process by which it is found and read by each. Each finds it with surprise so sharp that he is persuaded for a moment that it is a treasure-trove, his very own; but as he turns to tell his neighbour of his fortune, he meets a man who has the same story to tell. They are indeed the individual and private possessors of a common good: it would have little savour if it lacked the taste of food won by a man's own toil ; it would have no power of transubstantiation if it were not shared. This law controls and gives significance to the acts which it enjoins, and by these acts repeated, over an ever widening range, is itself tested and tempered to a higher purity. The law gives liberty in so far as it gives unity and system to conduct, and conduct may be enlarged until the law accords a perfect liberty to men whose acts have been made consonant with it and with each other. The law still uses constraint, but uses it as with a personal entreaty, and is itself addressed as though in prayer. The interdependence of idea and action is thus perfectly shown in the words of the collect "that all our doings may be ordered by thy governance, to do always those things which are righteous in thy sight." These words, and words like these — for they may be matched in many utterances — express the homage paid by men to a law, which has become the object, no longer of such obedience as may be paid to a principle, but of the loyalty due to a person. They are used, when they are needed, for maintaining and recording the communi- cation of men with ideals, and they have a rhythmic balance,

i] and for the Individual 17

a rise and fall, comparable to the pulsation of the soul engaged in that high conversation. This conversation prompts action, strenuous and laborious, and is itself maintained with effort:

The " tasks in hours of insight will'd May be through hours of gloom fulfill'd."

If the hours of gloom are periods of plodding toil, these hours of insight also strain the mind by their intensity, and because of their intensity they are for the most part quickly interrupted. The pure air of the height, invigo- rating at first, becomes intoxicating and presently is found too rare to breathe ; the climber descends to a lower level, not only for work but for relief. But he remembers some- thing of the exhilaration which he has felt.

Whatever else may be said of ideals which have held the minds of men and governed their conduct, this at any rate may be said : they have stood for a good, in which the character of the individual achieved its fullest self-develop- ment by self-devotion, and upon the condition of aiding the equal self-development of others, so that sooner or later, and certainly at last, self-development has meant the self-surrender in which giving up all he is, a man recovers himself in the community. For the community he has made his sacrifice, in it he finds his life revivified; and the community in its turn takes on a personal quality, and becomes a real and sentient organism, a unity in which the individual has his life, and from which he cannot dissociate himself.

But a process such as this, from less to more perfect self-realisation, from less to more complete understanding of the life of the community and more assured and conscious participation in it, implies, of course, imperfection. Effort is made for something yet to be attained. When all is attained, if all were attained, would effort be possible?

c. E. 2

18 The Meaning of Ideals for Society [CH.

The highest good must be regarded as an activity; but an activity directed to some end. What if the end were reached ? Would activity continue ? Activity is continued because progress is held to be possible, and because progress is actually made; but the end of human activity must have two qualities, however for the rest it may be described ; it must be the complete development of the individual in complete harmony with his fellows and with the world in which he and they are placed; and it must be desirable, because it is this, apart from and above all other considera- tions. Such a complete development is so remote that the questions which we have asked may seem to be not only difficult to answer, but wholly unnecessary. But in fact they press for some solution ; and an answer to them is necessary, for a determination of the character of the end must govern all activity undertaken in pursuit of it. The end is not, then, a point or a place at which activity ends: it is the sum of those conditions in which activity is completely free because completely expressing a will wrought by discipline and obedience into harmony with itself and the world. Such a harmony resolves the differences and discords which were perceived with pain at the earlier stage of development. When it is achieved, the will of the individual and the law of the world have become one. But the unity now established is not solitude; it is a communion as pervasive and manifold in its forms and its expressions, as it is intimate and serene in temper. Hitherto self-knowledge aided knowledge of the world, and in its turn was aided by it; now these two are combined in a single process.

The chief end of man has been denned as knowing God and enjoying Him for ever. The language of theology, like that of philosophy, is often liable to the charge of obscurity. But sometimes the charge is brought unfairly. It is said that such words as those just quoted have no precise

i] and for the Individual 19

meaning. It may be admitted that they do not correspond exactly with experience, but it must be claimed that this is because they anticipate experience, and are in the nature of prophecy. And a stronger plea may be made for them. To anticipate experience, to essay prophecy is itself a mode of special experience, a form of spiritual life already detached and set free from the limitations in which life and experience are commonly held.

Here we may go back to a problem from which we turned aside at an earlier point in this discussion. Conduct, we saw, gets its impulse from ideals, and they receive content and colour and quality from the actions which they inspire; but for the most part, and for most men, the ideals, under the stress and impact of which they move, are dulled and robbed of their cogency during those periods in which conduct absorbs energy. (Coleridge's profound and splendid aphorism cannot be cited against this view. "To restore a commonplace truth," he says, "to its first uncommon lustre, you must act upon it, but to act upon it you must first reflect upon it.") And thus gradually their power wanes till action becomes automatic and at last ceases. It is in the period when action — originated we must not forget by the stimulus of ideals — is automatic, that institutions are, not indeed founded, but certainly consolidated and multiplied. It is in this period that success, of the sort most easily and not improperly reckoned, is most readily and most richly achieved, just as the moment of fullest bloom is the moment when a flower is ready to shed its petals or fall into decay. For the lapse of the power of ideals we need not repine; it is the condition of their regeneration and transformation. They have become commonplaces and lost their lustre. True, as Coleridge declared, to restore them to their first lustre, we must act upon them ; but, as he added, to act, we must first reflect, upon them. And to reflect, to turn back upon them, is to

2 — 2

2O The Meaning of Ideals for Society [CH.

see them in a fresh light, and so be urged, not to a repetition of the conduct which they first prompted, but to conduct appropriate to the new time, but still consonant with the ancient ideal. Tradition is the channel of progress, but obedience to tradition is not the continuance of ancient ritual; it is the revival in new forms of ancient beliefs.

We have remarked some of the phases of advance, as ideals express themselves in outward semblance, lose and rediscover their native potency, and spring afresh to novel and undreamed manifestations. All these phases, marking as they do the progress of man towards his goal, are proofs meanwhile that the goal is not yet reached. But as a traveller, at some sudden bend of his road, his journey not yet done, whether he stays or still moves forward, finds himself strangely refreshed, so the spirit, at the gift not wholly undeserved of a kindly fortune, finds relief from labour and effort. A wide view is spread before the traveller, he breathes a very tranquil air, and already, aware of toil undergone and still to be endured, he enjoys with quiet assurance and sober exhilaration, a certain cessation from toil. Then he can measure what has been achieved, measuring too what remains ; but in his reckoning he has a serenity which is more than a foretaste of his ultimate, long-desired success; it is that success itself, wonderfully achieved for that rare moment. Not undeserved is this gift ; the man has laboured for it ; and yet now it is granted, it has for him the quality of a gift, and it confirms a kindred with the giver. The way has become the end, since the journey is maintained in the strength of the truth which is, as its end and reward, to be finally revealed. Like bodily fitness, perfect vigour of the spirit is the result of an athletic, an ascetic, discipline : and the end of training is nothing else than the easy balance and repose, which come of fatigue endured and strains blithely suffered.

i] and for the Individual 21

We saw that when action has grown automatic, the influence of ideals is waning or has already ceased. Then the 'practical' man, with his easily moving machinery in operation around him, asks triumphantly what is the good of theory and theorists. There is no need to answer him. In those very different periods which we have just described action is suspended; while the mind is charged with new power, and endued with the lucidity which stillness brings. After this repose, the journey is begun again, and work resumed, and with increased vigour and efficiency ; but all this is but a small part of what has been gained. The harvest of the quiet mind is not garnered in barns or reckoned in the measures of the market-place, though it may be set at the service of those who never reaped it for themselves. It may be set at their service, but not given into their possession. It can never be materialised, though it may affect material interests and govern practical values.

Societies of men, nations like individuals, may give themselves up at times to the 'vacant* or the 'pensive mood/ when simple things seen often before but never understood "flash upon the inward eye." Then the poet or the orator, or the artist in whatever kind, articulate when others are confused in utterance or dumb, renders for his contemporaries and for all time an image of his people, not as they are in fact, but as they are at heart, and in aspiration.

The student of Education, seeking the aid of history, may find it in three sources. He may look at institutions long since established and still surviving, and learn from them something of what men hoped to do from the measures they took for achieving their ends: or where institutions no longer remain, he may turn, if he can find them, to the notes and records made by practitioners of other days

22 The Meaning of Ideals for Society [CH. r

upon their methods. Such memorials are rare, generally bad, and when good difficult to interpret. Expecting guidance from either or from both of these sources, the student may very easily be misled. He may learn how to do what others did, and care little to inquire how far their practice was adapted to the ends they had in view, and how far their ends differed from any which he may himself properly pursue. He cannot neglect these sources : but he must have recourse to that other which we have named. He must go back to the ideals of the past, and not only to those which were framed with reference to action, but also to those which had no such reference. The records of things done are indeed of very little value uninterpreted by the records, fragmentary as they may be, and elusive, of what men desired.

In the following pages an attempt is made to get from all these sources, and mainly from the last, some account of the ideas which have guided men at certain great and critical epochs in the past; and to consider their applica- bility to the main problems of Education at the present time.

CHAPTER II

PROGRESS AND REPOSE

THE supreme object of human activity, the ideal which men seek, may, as we have seen, be called the complete development of the individual in a Society completely developed. On the one hand, the individual in learning and perfecting his own powers, by interpreting and satis- fying his desires, makes the discovery of a community, a world, in which he lives, and on which he depends ; on the other a society if it deserves the name is itself a unity, enjoys a conscious and coherent life, and exhibits a character which is justly called personal. The individual is to devote himself to this larger whole in which he has his being, and to gain, not indeed what he sacrificed, but something more intimately his own because of its universal quality, namely the life of the community itself transforming and ennobling his own.

In various ages peoples differing in a thousand ways have set before them this ideal. But the content of the ideal has varied. The summum bomtm, transcending all particular good things, is yet in a sense made up of particular good things, and the progress of men has been marked by the success with which they have brought an increasing number of good things within the scope of their ideal, or by the courage of their attempt even to draw all things under its operation. To such an attempt they are urged

24 Progress and Repose [CH.

both by the necessity of logic and by the force of Nature ; but neither logic nor Nature shrinks from thorny paths. "God," we are taught, "saw everything that he had made; and, behold, it was very good." The immediate revelation of the goodness of all things is not granted to men, who proceed to the discovery by successive and often painful experiments. Until all things are known and tried, the goodness even of the things proved to be good is not a com- plete goodness; and the discrepancy between the things proved good and the things either untried or assumed to be bad causes discomfort and vexation; and the good things themselves jostle each other like valuable possessions in a half-packed box. We may find an instance again in the Book of Genesis. "The woman saw" (quite clearly and justly) "that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise." She had indeed been instructed by her Creator that it had all these properties ; but when she took it, she brought a curse upon herself and her descendants. All progress is attended by similar trouble. If men do not live in continual vexation of spirit, it is because they grow accustomed to such good things as they have, and shutting their eyes against visions of other good things to which they might stretch out their hands, declare that there are none, or that they are bad. Then as contentment passes from placid torpor to tedium, and tedium at last grows intolerable, they open their eyes, and seize some new thing; and are plunged once more in difficulties. They must make the new thing fit what they had before, and they must present the sum of what they now possess in its right relation to the universe, of which they are so fain to be oblivious and are so painfully aware.

Again it is easy to allow that the development of the individual and the perfection of society are but different aspects of the same ideal. As theorists we are at liberty

n] Progress and Repose 25

to postulate and assume what we desire, to speak of the end as already attained; but in fact men find that self- development conflicts or seems to conflict with the welfare of Society, and that the cultivation of their personal gifts or powers ill consorts with devotion to the State and sacrifice on its behalf. The claim of the individual appears as the rival of the claim made for Society; and each comes (and this makes tragedy) with the appeal and the sanction of duty. In every department of human life the conflict is urged: How shall a man serve his family or his friends best? It is not enough to say he must devote himself whole-heartedly to them : it is patent that if devotion is to be generous in its effects it must be governed by discretion ; there will be giving, but also withholding ; and the question is how much to give and how much and when to withhold. We may speak, not vainly though in general terms, of a state of life in which this division shall be healed, and the question answered; but we have not achieved that state, and everywhere and at all times the division has remained open, for the insistent question has not been silenced by a complete answer. As we have already observed, men are not wholly unfortunate in being baffled by the unsolved riddle. They ask how what they ought to do in obedience to a strong and clearly recognised claim is to be reconciled with what they ought to do in obedience to another and an equally strong claim; and discovering no satisfactory reply in the terms of things to be done, they betake themselves, sometimes in anaemic sentimentalism, but sometimes also, happily, in a sane and lusty spirit, to the region of ideas, and anticipate in a province, other than that of what is grossly called conduct, and in the happier case, far higher, not all, it is true, but a part of the final and composing answer. But upon the plane of conduct the question stands, challenging and challenged.

26 Progress and Repose [CH.

If we are to present to ourselves a picture of a Society in which the problem is solved, we must either use the pale and indefinite colour in which we are constrained to paint an ideal Commonwealth, or we have to guess our way backwards to the conditions of some primitive and pre- historic folk, and even then forbid our imagination or our research to trace what must have been for them as they are for ourselves the most interesting and important paths of life, which leave the beaten territory of use and wont and border upon and lead dimly towards the unknown and untried.

We need not trust to the fickle guidance of imagination nor essay an intricate piece of research to set before our- selves a picture of a group of men cut off for a time from the common surroundings of human institutions, and forced at the utmost peril to provide themselves with what they needs must have if they are to live. Let us imagine a small group of colonists setting out to make their way in a new country ; half a dozen or a dozen men fighting their way against the forces of nature; getting food and drink; providing themselves with shelter, and with clothing; making a clearing in a forest ; collecting timber ; keeping a fire alight; building their rude huts, presently to give place to more substantial dwellings ; taming the wild fields to their use; planting crops and reaping. Gradually as they advance their numbers increase; they call from over the seas others to join them, and become a larger and ever more and more flourishing community. In the earliest stages of such a work as this, each man would have known that his labour was a real contribution to the welfare of the little group of which he was a member; he would have understood how he was related to each of the others, and how what he did was related to what they did; but the very success and growth of their enterprise would tend to dissipate this unity ; they would fail after a time to under-

n] Progress and Repose 27

stand, at any rate as precisely as they had understood before, how what each man did was a contribution to the welfare of all, and though there might be in fact a unity of purpose and of aim, some loss and damage would occur from the circumstance that this unity was not so clearly seen and intimately felt by everyone ; and as this change proceeded the unity at first consciously present to every mind, and later implicit, would be gradually forgotten, and being forgotten, might almost cease to be. And there would be, instead of one community, a number of small groups called by the single name of the original society, but with their own separate and often conflicting interests. Such an instance reminds us how essential unity of purpose and sentiment is; it reminds us also how this unity may be lost or at least how it is menaced at the very moment when it seems to have been fulfilled and realised, and by the very circumstances which appear to be the measure and the substance of success.

We may see from another instance how the semblance of unity may cover a simplicity merely mechanical.

Let us imagine a great capitalist seeking to employ his money usefully and productively. He finds and engages a man whose brain can do what he can not — an inventor, an engineer. This person plans machinery. Presently it is set up, let us say, in a cotton mill for spinning or for weaving. The enterprise grows, and soon there are hundreds and thousands of spinning machines and weaving looms placed in position, and standing by them are the operatives who are to work them. As a result of this system of machines and of human beings, raw produce gathered from some distant part of the world is manufactured, and turned out as cloth. And it may very well be that, though all this process seems to be uniform and harmonious, the persons who are tending the machines, doing each in his several station his part of the common work, have no knowledge

28 Progress and Repose [CH.

either of the way in which the machines are constructed, of the sources from which the crude material is drawn, of the kind of work in which their neighbours are engaged, of the object of it all — they are parts themselves of a vast machine; and the mind which controls them all is the mind of the inventor or engineer who planned the whole, or of the capitalist who set the inventor at work. These persons are part of a community; and yet they are not taking a proper, which would be an intelligent and also an affectionate share, in this common enterprise; they are neither putting into it nor drawing from it what as human beings they ought to offer and to receive.

The need for unity, and the danger of confusion may be felt more keenly if not seen more plainly in the life of an individual. A man must be himself, but he plays many parts, and has a thousand different occupations and interests: he is at home as a brother, or a father, or a husband, and he is out in the world as a clerk, as a trades- man, as the head of a business, as a student, as a teacher. He has his relations with his equals in years and station; and with people who are older than himself. He plays, he works ; he eats, he sleeps ; and sometimes, in a reflective moment, he may try to discover, among all the parts which he plays, his own character, and it is as difficult as finding the character of a personage in Shakespeare. How shall he discover himself under all these disguises? How shall he reconcile these different and changeful aspects of himself? Sometimes a change of place, or some sudden shock of calamity, or some unexpected joy causes him to see more deeply than ever he has before into the meaning of some of the pursuits in which he is habitually engaged. Hitherto, he has done these things without thinking; they were a matter of course. But now he asks himself why he does them, whether it is really he who is doing them at all, or some human machine which wears his shape, and bears

n] Progress and Repose 29

his name, but is not really himself. Circumstances such as these sometimes make a man reflect upon his own career. He will discover, perhaps, that some of the things in which he is engaged need not be done at all ; that others must continue to be done, but done in a new spirit; and that in regard to all of them if they are to be continued they must be gathered up, fused, and made one by the imagina- tion. He must see himself as an artist might see some subject in which he was engaged, and which he was rendering in outward form before his own eyes, and the eyes of others ; in a sense he becomes an artist of his own life, finding and keeping and representing the central force which is to give unity in variety, which is to control and harmonise detail, which is to make a man of many parts and interests one real person, or as we say a character.

It is imagination, it is artistry, which gives significance to a man's acts. Is there an artistry which shall make the significance and reveal the secret of a State's manifold activities? We are not wont to identify or even closely to associate affairs of State with Art, or public administra- tion with artistry : we do not speak in the same breath of practical politics and of imagination ; there would seem to be a gulf, fixed, between municipal government and the world of ideas. And yet, even in our own time, there have been voices raised in protest against this divorce. They may not have used the language of religion, but they have made an appeal which, based on romance and pressed with confident expectation, has had some at least of the characteristics of a religious exhortation. The notion of Empire, adopted and spoilt by meaner minds, was the legitimate offspring of imagination and statecraft for Mr Cecil Rhodes ; and Lord Rosebery, with greater courage, has pointed to the field of municipal organisation as one in which generous ambition, fired but not consumed by noble ideals, may find most proper scope.

30 Progress and Repose [CH.

Is it right to give the name of artists to these men, as we give it to great painters or musicians, or, to those whose work is more easily comparable with theirs, to great architects ? A writer would not be taxed with a loose and slovenly use of the word if he spoke of Pericles or of Gaius Julius Caesar, as 'artist': it might not be allowed by all, though it would be argued by some, that the word was employed in its literal sense ; but on all hands it would be admitted that a reasonable and fair analogy had been drawn. Are we to believe that there was some essential difference between the conditions and the nature of the ancient State of Athens or of Rome, and the conditions of our own country and Empire; and that a statesman in either of them might have been an artist; but not in England now?

To answer this question fully, we need a definition of Art, and a definition also of the State. Not one, of the many definitions proposed, has won universal or even general acceptance; and no attempt is offered here at a comprehensive and satisfactory definition of these common but difficult words. Yet it is worth while to raise afresh a question to which one cannot furnish a complete answer. It is worth while to indicate what appear to be some of the elements of which account must be taken in a final definition, if ever it is provided. Indeed the failure of those who have had in many ages and countries the best claim to speak with authority, so far from discouraging, may encourage others who have no such claim (for the most part repeating what others have said, and patching together fragments taken, not ungently or with disrespect, from the ampler fabrics woven by poetic philosophers, the consummate artificers of human liberty) to set out and so far as they can piece together the fragments that they have gathered. They may not be able to arrange them in order ; they will be aware of gaps ; but they may,

il] Progress and Repose 31

even so, contribute something towards the making of what they desire.

We shall only note a few of the characteristics of the artist : —

(1) He selects from the world what suits him, and leaves what is irrelevant to his purpose. Whether his range is large or narrow, he declines to take, because he cannot enjoy and use, much of what the world offers him.

(2) What he selects, he arranges upon some plan. He gives unity to what he accepts from the world. The principle which governs and unifies his possessions is indeed the principle which has guided him in selecting or accepting them.

His possessions, thus selected and unified, are now no more fragments wrested from the world, but form a whole and separate embodiment of an idea.

(3) And this idea, whatever may be the material in which he works, he represents to the world.

Artists might claim many other characteristics; but they probably would not disclaim these. Many other characteristics have been attributed to them; but not with universal or even common agreement; upon these there is probably no disagreement. Let us see, then, what is involved in the possession of these characteristics. It is clear that the artist distinguishes himself, and is by his neighbours distinguished from the world in which he lives. From it he takes what he can get for his work, which he is inclined to think of as his life, but he sets aside what is or seems to be useless for his work. What an artist in one kind selects is not what an artist in another kind desires and, desiring, selects. The painter and the musician seek each his own proper material. And more than this; painters differ from painters, and musicians from musicians, in their choice. The complaint is often made against artists that they live in an unreal world. The complaint

32 Progress and Repose [CH.

is unjust. It may, however, quite fairly be said that they live in a fragmentary world, or rather in a fragment of the real world; but this might be said of most men, whether they are artists or not.

The faults which his enemies or even his friends find with a man are commonly less flagrant in his judgment than those which he finds with himself; but when his own censure confirms the censure of his fellows he is bound to take note of it. And most men, if not all, agree with those who tell them, either in hostile or in amicable tones, that their range is narrower than it might be, and they will strive to extend their range. Or if they should be too indolent for this, time itself in its course, and what we call experience widen the range in which they practise their art. They take and use new material. Of course, and of necessity, it is drawn from the world, the only source from which it could be drawn. What does this mean? It means, clearly, that the artists have found the significance, and so made use, of material which they had hitherto deemed irrelevant or alien to their object, or which they had not detected. Artists are inclined, like other men, to think of their work as identical with their life, and are perhaps more apt to say so; but neither they nor other men completely deceive themselves. If work is regarded in its meanest sense as the business by which they earn their bread, men are not ready to say that they are no more than bread-earning and bread-consuming creatures. But even when, as is usually and indeed always the case, work is more generously and largely interpreted, when it means, let us say, their organised activities, they are aware that they engage in other activities, willingly or unwillingly, with delight or with pain. What proportion these other, the unorganised, activities bear to the organised, is not at the moment our question; we shall have to consider that later. As in a house, besides the things which are in daily

n] Progress and Repose 33

use, there are other possessions, some of which a man prizes highly, while some he stores out of his sight in a lumber room, so in his mind there are spaces in which he keeps what he cannot use, or does not desire to use. Unused and neglected possessions are a burden to the mind, and as in his house a man is glad when he discovers a use for some property, which, of great or of trifling value, he has not hitherto fully enjoyed because he has not made it serve his purpose, so he is delighted when he can draw into the service of his mind some of his spiritual possessions previ- ously neglected. He is very properly delighted ; for he has relieved himself of a cause of discomfort ; he has set himself free from a burden; he has gained the mastery of a new tool. Or we may use another parable. A man may organise and arrange what he calls his work, and he may organise and arrange his recreations and amusements; as a schoolboy who has toiled at his Latin Grammar may shut the book, and take up his bat or his racquet. But until he has brought these two systems into relation one with the other, until he has comprehended them in some one larger system, he is not quite happy, because he is not quite comfortable.

Even men who have done most to establish such a unity are conscious that there are some elements in their life which are not duly correlated with the rest ; and they will not scruple to admit, first that their work, their main interest whatever it may be, has not extended itself over the whole of their life, has not dominated it and ordered it, and next that their life, the sum of their manifold interests, does not suffice them. They look beyond the borders of life as they have known it, and of work as they have conceived it, for something to complete and round the imperfect sphere of their activity and their experience. And they look to the world to supply what they lack.

Yet, at every stage of this process of enlargement, the

c. E.

34 Progress and Repose [CH.

opposition remains, clearly marked, and by many men painfully felt, between themselves and the world.

The opposition remains, whether the 'world' is considered as holding in its grasp good things not yet realised and won, or is regarded as evil. Indeed it is not possible completely to sever these two interpretations of the world, though now one, and now the other is more vigorously taken. In the language of the New Testament, for instance, the world is represented as the sum of forces and influences unspiritual, debasing and sordid; yet in the same language we read of a victory over the world which is called faith; the conquest of the world is made by the discovery within it, for all its apparent hostility, of elements akin to what is most spiritual in man. This is language which recalls that of Plato; the philosophic mind, discerning as it is gentle, perceives the strange and alien character of the world, but perceiving penetrates it, and discovers or creates in it the good which is one with its own good nature. The controversy between the individual and the world may be presented in another way as the strife between the old and the new, between tradition and progress, between authority and freedom. Here again words which are generally supposed to have a special and religious sense may be used without impropriety in a domain wider than that unintelligently assigned by convention to religion. Wisdom is said to begin in a certain fear; the law which once restrained with irksome fetters becomes at last the object of love. The beginning and the end, shadowed in such language with vague terror or obscure majesty, are both beyond the bounds of human knowledge, both are abstractions from experience. No wisdom of which we have evidence springs from fear untouched by love; no loyalty is untinged by fear. The highest consummation is better expressed in words more intelligible though they seem to contradict each

n] Progress and Repose 35

other, when freedom is declared to be perfected in bondage.

Human progress may be said to be marked by the continuous advance made by men from the known to the unknown, from what they have appropriated to that which they seek to make their own. It is an endless enterprise of exploration and discovery. But the most restless and the most courageous traveller pauses at times, and if his success is measured by the distance over which he has ranged, it is also measured, and measured more certainly, by what he does in these intervals of repose. Repose, tranquillity, quiet — these are some of the names by which men call the object of their activities, the goal of their journey ings. They do not suffer themselves to be deceived by the ambiguity of speech; they do not imagine that repose is the heavy dreamless slumber of minds surfeited with success; they are well aware, as we have seen, that it may be the highest mode of action ; but of action balanced and serene.

These periods of repose are, no doubt, intervals in a journey, when men recover strength for fresh effort; but they are much more than intervals. They make the greater part and the most valuable part of life. In them men review what they have seen, reflect upon experience gathered, build for themselves from the materials which they have won, habitations to dwell in. They know that they will not always dwell in them; they fear that they may quickly depart; but they pretend with obstinate feigning that here they may rest. The nomadic instinct itself bears witness as much to men's longing for sameness and permanence as to their longing for fresh scenes. They move, like cattle, from place to place in search of food, which the earth yields at successive seasons in various climates. They must needs have a certain temperature, and they travel with the sun, not for variety, but to escape

3—2

36 Progress and Repose [CH.

the hardships of variety. And as quickly as may be they strive by cheating or subduing nature to make for themselves in one place or another one mode of life unbroken by change. They can never, it is true, completely persuade themselves that they have what they hoped to get : summer is followed by winter ; youth gives way to age and age to death ; but baffled in the simpler fraud, they show a subtler daring, and make-believe that for the spirit life need be no 'great mutation.' And when at last they are driven upon despair, and lament that here they have no abiding city, they break camp and set forth anew in quest of a dwelling- place from which they shall not be removed.

What, then, we may ask, are these habitations, encamp- ments, shelters in which men pause? And how are men engaged while they rest in them? They are not, even for the meanest of men, hostelries or sleeping-places by the roadside. An inn can hardly be a home for an inn-keeper ; for his guests certainly not. And the halting-places, of which we are speaking, are made by the travellers for themselves, and bear the marks of their characters. They may be left too quickly, or they may be stayed in too long ; but whether they are from hasty building uncomfortable or from gross familiarity dull, they are the homes of those who pause in them. They are a barrier against the world ; they are a record of travel accomplished; they are a storehouse of riches gathered; they are an expression in the terms of experience past of hopes yet unfulfilled. They are, in effect, the product of that artistry which is native and invincible in the human spirit. Men have selected what they want; they have ordered what they selected into a whole, a unity, a system. They have rendered in such material as they could the ideal which beckoned and baffled them. And this unity for its very perfection, this system for its very completeness, disposes the mind at once to rest and to inquiry. A man may rejoice that his

n] Progress and Repose . 37

fences are strong, but he will look over them and beyond ; and he will not forget to make a gate and a way out. When a work of what is ordinarily called art is said to be suggestive, this surely is meant : that while it has some central and dominating interest, it also leads the mind out- wards and beyond itself. An Englishman's home is called his castle; and he may, in his anxiety to be safe from intruders, make himself a prisoner in the midst of his possessions. But the most self-centred and self-satisfied of men must compare themselves with their neighbours to maintain their dull complacency; and weariness at last will do what intelligence might at first have suggested — it will drive them to look and to travel beyond their own borders. They delay while they can; they strengthen their fences, and adorn them after their taste; they set up heavy railings of iron twisted to fantastic shapes between their tiny gardens and the pavement, or spend a fortune upon the boundary-wall of their parks, as they frame their pictures in massive gilt; but sooner or later they escape ; or are released by death from captivity.

The instinct, to which the proverb bears testimony, is not wholly bad. On the contrary, it is natural and good, and only becomes bad when unbalanced by the comple- mentary instinct of inquiry and expansion. And the desire for advance and new adventure must be controlled, if experience is not to be wasted. The periods of arrange- ment and review and consolidation must be longer than those of forward movement, though each should be regarded as a mode and an opportunity of preparation for the other.

The selection, the rearrangement, the representation of what the world offers are the occupation of the artist; but they are also, necessarily, the occupation of the ordinary man, who differs from the artist not in kind, but in quickness and in cultivation. Even a pint pot may be said to select, and to rearrange if not to represent what is put into it;

38 Progress and Repose [CH.

and the dullest of men is a little, if only a little, more actively receptive than a pint pot.

The distinction and excellence of the artist are shown, and in truth consist, in the vividness and the range of his experience. We have set 'selection' and 'rearrangement' before 'representation'; they have a logical and perhaps (though this might well be contested) a temporal precedence ; but we must remind ourselves again (see page 12) that the power that seizes and gives fresh form to an idea is also the power which appropriates and orders, and makes experience personal. The artist, more than other men, is dealing with his own experience; others borrow, he can afford to lend, or rather, to give to others what he has made his own, drawing the recipients of his benefaction into his own life and so sharing with them what could not be so conclusively proved to be his own possessions as by his right and custom of giving them away. The artist has a nice catholicity, a fastidious exuberance.

The qualities which, highly developed, make the artist, are present, undeveloped or ill-developed or little developed, in all men. Else the artist could not speak to them. Speak he must ; and he speaks to be heard. It is true, he may choose to invest his hearers with higher sensibility than they yet possess; and so we may say, that he addresses an imaginary audience. He speaks to himself; but the self whom he addresses is the world, that other self, which in this high communication he uplifts to his own serene and ravishing experience.

Wordsworth has said this in memorable language. He speaks of the poet ; but we may, without injuring his doctrine, use the larger word, artist. "He is a man, speaking to men: a man, it is true, endowed with more lively sensibility, more enthusiasm and tenderness, who has a greater knowledge of human nature, and a more comprehensive soul, than are supposed to be common

n] Progress and Repose 39

among mankind; a man pleased with his own passions and volitions, and who rejoices more than other men in the spirit of life that is in him ; delighting to contemplate similar volitions and passions as manifested in the goings-on of the Universe, and habitually impelled to create them where he does not find them."

The work of the artist takes a universal range from the intensity of the personal emotion in which it has its origin. Emotions less intense have a social quality and are quickened by communion. Religious ceremonies are the expression of emotions at once intimate and ordinary, the emotions of simple men in whom the artistic impulse may be held to be of not more, though not less, than its average strength. But ceremonies, expressing in whatever fashion the emotions which a man entertains in the lonely company of his God, are yet observances, witnessed and shared by others, engaged, with the same austere isolation, in the same act of absorbed and absorbing communication. And it is because they are witnessed and shared and repeated with the fixity of ritual that they widen the range of the emotions which they at the same time and by the same processes intensify and make more and more personal.

But the ceremonies which have been central or funda- mental for religion have been those which expressed or aided actions necessary to the preservation of those groups in which alone men have maintained themselves. They are the ceremonies of the family and of the State.

A widening consciousness has made men aware of each other ; and as their homes have been something more than the place in which they stored their goods, and gathered themselves for shelter and repose, so their cities have been for them more than an aggregation of houses; they have been habitable, because ideal.

Here also, but upon an ampler scale, and with subtler but more masterful discrimination, they have selected;

40 Progress and Repose [CH. n

here, with a more generous plan, they have arranged ; here, with whatever failure, they have represented an idea.

It is not difficult to conceive of human life, at its largest, as instinct with artistry; it is impossible to conceive of it otherwise.

As for an individual some dominant idea gives to his experience — to his possessions — such order as he attains, -so for a State a supreme hope or ambition has claimed 'sovereignty over less potent and less pervasive interests. The sovereignty is always disputed; progress cannot be made without controversy; the sovereignty takes new forms or shifts its centre; but some sovereignty remains, and its security rests upon its artistic quality, its power of choice, and of arrangement ; upon its power of fashioning in the modes and fabrics of human institutions, the ideas which lie at the heart of individual or of social life.

From time to time, it has seemed that these ideas, or from among them those which have won a certain supremacy, have been, by fortune or destiny, entrusted, on behalf of the State, to a representative, a Statesman. And if, acting for a community, with the decision which most men find hard even in their private affairs to exercise, he discovers and achieves an expression for them, he may in the largest sense of the word be called an artist. Commonly, no one man possesses or seems to hold this elevation above his fellows, and to be entitled to this trust; but always, as a condition of its life, and whether through the pre- eminent services of an eminent citizen or through the less vivid but not less vital action of the community itself, a State wields the artistic gift, the product of an ideal conceived and a technique practised, and gives to its life the character of this ideal so far as its technique of govern- ment, administration and defence is adequate to the task.

CHAPTER III

SURVEY OF CERTAIN IDEALS

THE study of the Greek and Roman literatures has held its place as a main element in liberal education because through them there have been offered to the imagination of the world consummate examples of this comprehensive artistry. The natural vigour and exquisite perfection of language, the grace, the wealth, the splendid economy of style may be justly estimated by scholars, who have literary sense, or by men of letters whose judgment has been refined and fortified by scholarship: of the great majority of those Englishmen who have spent their schooldays and their university terms upon the 'classics/ there can be few who within two years of graduating could quote half a dozen lines of Greek or Roman poetry, or find the context of a trite quotation from historian or orator. But there remains for them at least an image, fragmentary, no doubt, and dim, of a form of civil and social life, which they believe in its kind to have been perfect. Their faint and partial recollections of a knowledge never very vivid or accurate, stir them at times to an unwonted admiration, and provide for them standards by which to measure men and the works of men in their own day. The process of education is the turning of men's minds with open eyes to recognise their own ideals ; and neither the remoteness nor the difference

42 Survey of Certain Ideals [CH.

of Greek and of Roman civilisation from our own has availed to rob this image of its persuasive force or to blunt the fine intimacy of its appeal.

When Pericles spoke of Athens as the "School of Hellas" he meant, as Thucydides makes evident, that from Athens the Greek world sought to learn, not any special art, but the general art of life. Whether we read panegyric or satire, or lyrics, or speeches legal and political, or the stories in which the dramatists justified the ways of gods to men, or with constructive scepticism gathered and arranged the materials of philosophy, or if we use the evidence furnished by the archaeologists, we can see, however wide the gaps may be in our knowledge, that Athens had in the fifth century drawn into an ordered and coherent system the elements of good living. The State was a unit, and the citizens were identified with it ; for it and in it they lived, yet so that no interest of the individual was sacrificed, no just ambition baulked of its development. Individual excellence was sought and recognised, and a citizen in any way distinguished was "preferred to the public service, not as a matter of privilege, but as a reward of merit 1." " Athens alone of all the City States of antiquity solved for a time the problem of freely developing the talent of the individual, while maintaining fully that identification of the individual with the State which was the very essence of Greek social life2."

It is difficult for us to accept with constant seriousness what everyone knows to be true of her. We are apt to be shy of ideals, even when they are placed in the distant past, and afraid of them since they disturb our comfortable torpor, or bring a sting to discomfort by the suggestion that we have fallen short of what men once attained. But we are forbidden by a certain inexorable pride from

1 Thuc. II. 37. « Warde Fowler, City State, p. 150.

in] Survey of Certain Ideals 43

abandoning them, and the conception of a civic-national life instinct with beauty and strong in the harmony of balanced energies — to which the name of Athens has been given — is the inalienable property not only of students and of scholars, but of the western world. It is a tradition which we have inherited. For that very reason we are too often disinclined to pay it the tribute of critical at- tention.

It is worth while from time to time to inquire what were the principles which wrought and for a time main- tained the fair structure, the object of our pious but vague reverence.

We find it hard to call a community so small as that of Athens a State — and easy to remember that though Athens, and other Hellenic city-communities, achieved severally a splendid perfection, such attempts as were made for combining them into a nation disastrously failed. Yet we ought not to forget that at the moment when Athens was decisively rising to pre-eminence, with a generous self-consciousness she was able to recall to herself and her citizens acts of chivalrous self-sacrifice done in the interest of the Hellenic spirit and civilisation, and later when the first staggering calamity fell upon her in her struggle with Sparta she was able to bring back to her citizens their confidence by the recollection of what they had given up, not for their own welfare, but for the sake of Hellas in the earlier contest with the Persians. The Athenians justly regarded themselves as having in that encounter at least fulfilled the office ascribed at a later time by Plato to the guardians of his ideal commonwealth : they had been 'consummate artificers of liberty,' they had been the protectors of an 'opinion' or a principle. At critical moments in their history, when they were girding them- selves for some high task or were driven by misfortune upon reflection, they reviewed and analysed this principle

44 Survey of Certain Ideals [CH.

or group of principles: it may well be believed that on lesser occasions they may have thought little of the founda- tions on which their greatness was reared, or given a general and unheeding assent to doctrines which were the bulwarks of their strength. We too, looking backwards upon that people and that period, are diverted from the consideration of the spirit which governed them by the very manifesta- tions of its reality, the amazing variety and range of the activities centred in Athens. At the beginning of the Peloponnesian War her free population has been estimated at 135,000 and her slave population at 100,000 — a very small total, when both items are included, if compared with cities of much less than the first magnitude in England to-day. Yet this small community maintained an army and a navy; it had relations of commerce and trade with other Greek states and with states not Greek ; its ambassa- dors went out to make treaties, to effect bargains, to carry on the business of diplomacy. At home, their system of government was properly called a democracy; it was highly organised and planned upon a definite scheme, yet its citizens enjoyed freedom both to serve the State and to develop their own individual gifts, and were taught indeed that if they were to do either of these things they must not leave the other undone. "An Athenian," Pericles declared, "does not neglect the State because he takes care of his own household; and even those of us who are engaged in business have a very fair idea of politics. We alone," he continues, "regard a man who takes no interest in public affairs, not as a harmless, but as a useless character ; and if few of us are originators, we are all sound judges of a policy1." The orator had spoken of the courage and the endurance which his fellow-citizens possessed and exhibited, of the 'light heart' with which they met danger; not as men for ever schooled by an unpleasant discipline, but as 1 Thuc. ii. 40, trl. Jowett.

in] Survey of Certain Ideals 45

those who find life delightful and can oppose a spirited resistance to such troubles as time brings. "Thus," he says, "our city is equally admirable in peace and in war. For" (and this is his deliberate argument) "we are lovers of the beautiful, yet simple in our tastes, and we cultivate the mind without loss of manliness." There is warrant, then, for believing that some Athenians clearly recognised these duties, and that Athenians generally recognised them, if not clearly, yet with sufficient distinctness and certainty for such an exhortation as that of Pericles to have had a meaning for them all. The beauty which they sought was not a mere external decoration, but the expression in outward form of an excellent harmony of a mind liberal, independent, and at peace with itself. To cultivate the mind is to engage it upon fit ideas ; the idea of beauty was one of the ideas with which the Athenians occupied them- selves.

To be occupied with ideas is the only safeguard against preoccupation with idealess concerns, the only remedy for restlessness; to be occupied with ideas is to endow activity with significance by giving it tranquillity. It may be objected at once that the Athenians were restless people: and it may be urged in reply that they were at any rate aware of their fault ; and it must be added that repose does not mean slumber, and that ideas are more than dreams. They claimed leisure. Leisure, we must ask, for what? It was leisure to conduct their affairs of State, great in kind, though the scale upon which they were conducted seems small to us ; leisure for active participation in the business of government ; leisure for the production and the enjoyment of art and for amusement; leisure to keep the recurrent seasonal festivals, the ritual symbols and fulfilment of those primitive and permanent appetites and emotions which blend body and soul in the rational medley of human nature.

46 Survey of Certain Ideals [CH.

The affairs of State, the business of government, were burdens and privileges in which the Athenians were directly and immediately concerned. We are frequently reminded that in legislative and judicial work the Athenian citizens took their part, though the reminder not seldom comes from those who have insufficiently considered the differences between the conditions of Athens and those of a modern State. We are less often reminded of what is of equal moment, namely that the Athenian citizens had their share also of administrative work. "Almost every Athe- nian," Mr Warde Fowler writes, "must at one time or other in his life have taken part in the conduct of public business." Initiating legislation, carrying proposals, and executing decisions; the framing, the discussing, and the working of a policy all fell within their experience.

A distinction of much importance with us, the distinction between politicians and permanent officials, did not exist for them. We have ministers sitting in the Cabinet directing the affairs, or supposed to direct the affairs, of the departments over which they preside. They appear upon the public platform and make speeches to win votes out of doors, or in our legislative chambers persuade their colleagues to carry a measure. They stay in office for a short period, and they disappear, perhaps to other depart- ments of State in England, or into the obscurity of private life ; and other men take their place. These are no doubt important persons. Underneath them, behind them, there are permanent officials who drive the machine of Govern- ment, knowing its capacities and its weaknesses. They do not appear in public ; they do not speak upon questions of policy — it is not supposed to be their business to make a policy ; they remain concealed, quiet, and invested with the power which use and knowledge give. We speak, at times of course with politely managed irony, of the politicians as the creators, and of the permanent officials

in] Survey of Certain Ideals 47

as the executants, setting men of insight and imagination on one side, and on the other men of method. For the Athenians routine was illuminated by public responsibility, and impetuous rhetoric either gently held in check by the thought that he who made a suggestion might have to give it effect, or, more commonly, sped shrewdly to its mark by a speaker whose enunciation of general principles got an edge and a point from his attempts to apply them in practice.

Our best example is provided by Demosthenes, whose speeches also illustrate two other characteristics of Greek oratory and Greek tradition. Upon one of these we have already touched. His method, as Professor Butcher showed in his altogether admirable monograph1, was like that of Burke, historical. "At times he recalls some chapter of history, and with a few bold strokes lights up the page — ' The time of those events has indeed gone by, but the time for reading the lessons of the past is ever present to the wise2.'" It is remarkable that when the brilliance of the Athenian leadership had been eclipsed and the glory of Athens departed, Demosthenes makes the same appeal as that urged by Pericles when that splendid day was dawning. "He had learned" — I quote again from Professor Butcher3 — "to look on the cause of Athens as one with the cause of Greece. His early and instinctive admiration of all that was generous in conduct meets us again in The Crown, in a reasoned defence of magnanimity — 'Communities like individuals should ever strive to mould their future by the noblest chapters of their past.'" Patriotic pride is the link which binds the memories of ancient greatness to high hopes for the future.

The union of the various elements which made up the composite total of an Athenian citizen's experience is

1 Demosthenes. Macmillan, 1881. 2 De Cor. 48.

3 Op. cit. p. 144.

48 Survey of Certain Ideals [CH.

manifested in the consummate orator who represents citizenship in its most complete and efficient development. The orator, like his fellow-citizens, was trained not only in political and administrative, but also in legal duties. It is not unfair to cite eminent persons in proof of the reality of a tendency. The vigour and precision of Demosthenes' speeches were largely due to his legal practice, and the acumen of the ordinary Athenian was sharpened by his share in the work of the law courts.

Within the wide circle of our modern communities one man may be called upon to play many parts ; but he can put down one role before he takes another, and he plays before different audiences. In a small community, the variety of parts may not have been less, but the actor must constantly have been playing to the same critics. In social engagements he must have had for his companions many of those with whom he was engaged in his public and official occupations. We can escape from our offices to our homes, and leave our colleagues for our friends. We wear different faces for different occasions because we are meeting different people. At work, our private relation- ships may be unknown or ignored; in our festivities the quality of our work and the conditions in which it is done may be forgotten. And we judge a man's aptitude for society by his readiness and ability to forget what it becomes him at any moment to forget. "To be all things to all men " is a necessary, if difficult, rule of polite society. For the Athenians the rule must have been as difficult to fulfil as it is here for the inhabitants of a small country town, in which every citizen possesses about every other an informa- tion almost paralysing because of its completeness and detailed accuracy. They had to be all things to the same men, and without those aids to honest acting which the presence of women affords in the structure of our own society. They needed and, needing, practised, versatility,

in] Survey of Certain Ideals 49

the quality of a man who can turn easily from one occasion to another, from one state of affairs to a different situation ; who can conduct himself with ease in all; who comes gracefully, because he comes surely, into any society, who has the right word, and the right gesture, who can speak without offence, and be silent without gaucherie. To be dignified, and not stiff ; to combine propriety with ease of manner — this is a high art, and it must have been almost as difficult for an Athenian to practise in Athens, as for an Englishman in his own family.

Versatility, if it was to achieve so much, must have been more than a trick, more than agility. It was the very supple grace, which reckons upon strength and upon keenness and perception. It is behaviour trained by a social gymnastic; it is the manners in which a special kind of morality is expressed. 'Temperance' is not a wholly satisfactory but yet perhaps the best word, for a quality on which this grace of social life was based. For us the word means something negative, the avoidance of evil things, or, at its fullest, restraint in the use of what is good. But for the Greeks, and specially for the Athenians, it was a positive principle, a golden mean between excess and exaggeration on the one hand, and defect or any falling short of the mark on the other; it meant for them that sort of obedience to convention in which a man may realise himself ; that sort of deference to fashion in which a man may still preserve his individual characteristics. It would show itself in every attitude of his body, in every movement of his mind, in his speech which would be gracious, well poised and winged to reach its goal.

If we ask why they set this store by temperance, so conceived, we may reply, that more sensitively than most men, they shrank from making themselves ridiculous (and they were quick to laugh at their neighbours and at them- selves) ; but much more than this, it was because they

c. E. 4

5o Survey of Certain Ideals [CH.

had a dread of injuring or in any way offending, and so rousing the indignant, avenging anger of powers, other than human, more than mortal, which, elusive yet ever present, surrounded them and mysteriously affected them. They feared the dark, and held, or rather were held by a belief which sprang from the union of fear with hope, in the reality of these powers. These they had in reverence: it is the feeling due from a man to his parents, from the younger to the elder. It is derived from kinship, and implies a certain intimacy and understanding, yet it marks a difference between those to whom it is paid and those who offer it. Children can never quite understand their parents; the young can never completely span the gulf that separates them from the old, though imagination may begin and carry far out over the stream a bridge from either side. The gods were as elder kinsmen to the Greeks — nearly related and yet imperfectly known. Their ways were past finding out. Their deeds were often challenged by perplexed inquiry and even by angry reproach. They were accused of caprice and of cruelty at times; at times praised for kindly protection. They were entreated in prayer, and bribed with gifts, and propitiated with sacrifice ; or they were made the objects of a critical inquiry, of rationalist interpretation; as persons or as notions they were loved or hated, but still feared. They were perhaps brought nearest to human understanding when they were regarded as, like men, submissive to or controlled by Destiny stronger than themselves, Destiny inscrutable, eternal, all-powerful.

The note of submission in which Greek plays end attests this sentiment of reverence. It indicates the folly of striving where no effort can avail, of straining the eye to see what will not be revealed; it proclaims the wisdom of acquiescence, of a dauntless tranquillity, perhaps of a resolute hopefulness; certainly it proclaims the necessity

in] Survey of Certain Ideals 51

as well of waiting till the end, and reserving judgment upon men and things till the end is reached. It may be mistaken, it is not rightly taken as a note of despair.

For we are all like swimmers in the sea

Poised on the top of a huge wave of fate;

And whether it will heave us up to land,

Or whether it will bear us out to sea,

Back out to sea and the black waves of death

We know not, and no search can make us know,

Only the event will teach us in its hour.

Submission is the appropriate attitude to adopt in the presence, dimly or sharply felt, of the gods or before their works, kindly or unfavourable to human hope and effort. It does not betoken or go with a feeble spirit. "The visitations of heaven should be borne with resignation, the sufferings inflicted by an enemy with manliness1." This was Pericles' counsel to the Athenians when the fortunes of war were hard against them, and when the plague had fallen upon them, an unforeseen and unnerving disaster. "This," he adds, "has always been the spirit of Athens, and should not die out in you."

The Athenians, like other people, extolled virtues which they found difficult to practise. Self-restraint and quiet persistence in hopes long baffled and apparently quite frus- trated are not easily achieved by quick and sensitive natures. They were doubly ready to take impressions and to yield to them, for they had both the sensibility pro- duced by experience which shrewdly exposes highly-strung nerves and takes off from those who seem to need it most the protecting wraps of grossness (as old age refines the body, robbing it of its material quality, and at once weakening and spiritualising it) — and with this the sensibility of youth, always in unstable equilibrium and easily swayed.

1 Thuc. n. 64.

4—2

52 Survey of Certain Ideals [CH.

In youth there's nothing so becomes a man As modest stillness and humility.

Humility indeed the Greeks did not reckon as a virtue (or should we say that they hardly knew the virtue to which we give that name ?) . For us it passes rapidly into something weak and ignoble. The reverence which they cultivated had certainly, as one of its elements, an astringent humour foreign to Christian piety. But modest stillness might be translated into Greek. Just as we dislike the petulant opposition of a child who yields at last and grudgingly to superior force unconvinced by superior reason, or the continued murmurs of a man who cannot be silent when a decision is given against him, or the too solicitous entreaties of those who cannot wait — we arraign them of bad manners — so in their dealings with the gods, and in their acceptance of what the gods decreed, the Greeks, and the Athenians perhaps most because they of all the Greeks found the duty most severe in its demands, set themselves the duty of reverent acquiescence.

A very impressive example is provided by Professor Butcher : " The close of an Attic speech," he wrote, "recalls the close of an Attic tragedy in its sedate harmony, and in the place it gives to artistic convention and euphemistic phrase"; and he cites the endings of the First Philippic — "May that prevail which is for the common good of all"; and of the Third Philippic — "Whatever it (the decision) may be, grant, all ye gods, that it may be for our good"; and of the First Olynthiac — "On all accounts may it turn out well." The passages are memorable; they show that the life of the Greeks was wrought at times by the fusion of religious with political interests, and that in the domain of religion good manners were part of an ' artistic convention/ a common agreement in regard to propriety.

Activity exhausts itself, and ingenuity comes to the end of its resources. What can be achieved by effort

in] Survey of Certain Ideals 53

directed even by the finest ardour and the most practised skill, falls short of desire; and desire itself may mistake its proper object.

The issues of human purpose and labour rest with a Destiny inscrutable indeed, yet kindred, for all its difference, with human will, which may set before itself an end to be sought. This for the Greeks was the end: a social, civic, political life, harmonious, beautiful, efficient, and expressing itself in institutions congruous with itself. It must express itself also in a body trained to serve the spirit, and wrought by it to an athletic perfection of balanced strength and grace.

What means, we must ask, did they adopt to secure this end? The means were determined by their needs; the claims of life themselves prescribed the methods by which they were to be satisfied.

The art of speech was necessary for people who had to deal with one another so constantly and in so many various relations. To speak, a man must have something to say; and he must begin to gather in materials early. Children were taught the use of open eyes and listening ears, and what they saw and heard in communication with their age-fellows, and as they assisted at the conversation of their elders, was at once blended with the heroic legends with which they were made familiar. To become possessed by the interests, achievements, and traditions of their contemporaries and their predecessors was the first stage to be traversed. All the succeeding stages were natural developments from this; the way of education was the life of the spirit, because it revealed the truth, the facts lit by imagination, on which the spirit feeds. Next, after this accumulation of experience and knowledge, was to come logic, the clear and orderly disposition of the material which instruction and observation had provided.

And next again, after the collection of material and the logical arrangement of it in the mind, came rhetoric, the

54 Survey of Certain Ideals [CH.

art of refashioning the material already sorted, and sifted by logic into a form appealing, convincing, moving. Rhetoric is the art of persuasion, the art in which the speaker wins his hearers for himself by giving himself to them. This gift was not to become cheap and threadbare. The crowning discipline of this natural series was dialectic, the art by which the mind learns to maintain conversation with itself as a condition of its intelligent conversation with the world ; to govern and unify its thoughts, to draw them into a system, and with increasing clearness of apprehension to become aware of a system larger than its own, a world of ideas of which its thoughts are images and reflections.

The history of Rome was never more concisely or more truly written than in the daring paradox of Rutilius : Urbem fecisti quod prius orbis erat. " After all the praises lavished on her for centuries by so many of her illustrious children, it was left for this foreigner, in the age of her decay, to pay her the most complete and most splendid eulogy1 :

'Quod regnas minus est quam quod regnare mereris;

Excedis factis grandia fata tuis: Nam solis radiis aequalia munera tendis,

Qua circumfusus fluctuat oceanus. Fecisti patriam diversis gentibus unam:

Profuit invitis te dominante capi; Dumque offers victis proprii consoiibia iuris,

Urbem fecisti quod prius orbis erat.' "

The Romans had a more material, and yet a more spiritual, conception of their destiny than the Greeks. The Greeks were artists; the Romans were politicians and statesmen. The Greeks stood, as artists must, for the

1 Mackail, Latin Literature, Part in. chap. viu. pp. 275-6. The whole chapter deserves most careful reading.

in] Survey of Certain Ideals 55

embodiment of their ideas in a perfect form, or in a form which came as near perfection as might be. They had a notion of a city, beautiful, orderly, proportionate, and did their best to make the actual city in which they lived comparable at least to the city built in their imagination. And they wrought in a definite medium : that of the limited, self-contained city state. The Romans, eager as the Greeks for the maintenance, enlargement, and glorification of their city, realised at once that it was not bounded by physical limits, but that it truly existed and had its place in the mind. A handful of warlike men seeking by force to establish their claim to a territory which they held at first on the precarious tenure of invaders, presently they spread their influence over the adjacent country, possessed them- selves of Latium, became masters of Italy and set their outposts in lands untouched by the Mediterranean, uncon- quered except by the adventurous valour of their imagination. Yefit was not the Roman city that they were carrying to the uttermost parts of the world, for that was impossible; they were carrying the Roman name. For such an achievement they had, as they needed, special gifts rare in the degree of their development, rarer still in combination. They had, and they exercised, the gifts of the lawyer with those of the soldier. The men who, when called to maintain, succeeded in extending, their own power against surrounding enemies, who crushed rebellion and added fresh provinces to their empire, imposed upon them- selves and upon their defeated opponents a code of laws, a form of society, a constitution. Idealists of Empire, they must teach their sons the arts which should make them what they in turn must become.

Idealists are always imperfectly equipped for the attainment of their hopes ; for their ambitions outrun their resources, and when they have elaborated means for achieving certain ends, it is other and remoter ends which

56 Survey of Certain Ideals [CH.

have won their devotion and claimed their unending labour. When they succeed, their success is a spiritual triumph, inexplicable by the coarse reckoning which measures the power of machinery, and has no standards for estimating the force of imagination. The great victories are those of faith, the substance — as St Paul, with Roman not less than Christian insight, discovered — of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. These victories are not least surprising to those who win them; the conquerors often attribute them to causes which in their very nature could not have brought them about. The education of the Romans was much less a carefully planned system of preparation for a mode of life fixed and duties foreseen, than a training imposed by responsibilities urgent when they came into being, but transcending in their magnitude the largest interpretation of patriotic prophecy.

No doubt, the scheme of education which Quintilian formulated seems to have a clearly conceived object. In his time, and in the generation preceding his own, the Romans had fallen under Greek influence, and persuaded themselves that the training of the orator was valuable, and set their sons to learn what they could from the litterator, the grammaticus and the rhetor. They were more firmly convinced about this and perhaps with better reason than Englishmen have been convinced, until lately, of the necessity of classical studies for the sons of the English governing class ; and it may be believed that they provided at once a more rigorous and a more practical discipline for the aptest pupils than we have for the average of our own. And yet it must be said that their conviction had something of the exaggerated fervour with which men acclaim and profess borrowed beliefs and practices. At best this Hellenic form was second nature; it was not nature to the Romans.

And there are two other considerations to be kept in

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mind. If the education of which Quintilian gives so clear and full an account was designed to meet the needs of a society, they were the needs of a society which had already passed away. The general condition upon which life itself is held obtained here also : by the time men have acquired an instrument and learnt its use, they no longer need it or are no longer permitted to employ it. When power and skill are complete, the occasion for them is gone, and death paralyses the hand that has got mastery of its tools.

And besides, the 'orator' presents an ideal of citizen- ship at once too narrow and too wide. Too narrow, because only the few could reach oratory or command the means even to approach it ; too wide, for, as Cicero and Quintilian both maintain, nothing was to fall outside the scope of the orator : he was to be good, but he was to be equipped with every kind of knowledge.

Preparation for work involves the choice of work of some particular kind, and the selection and employment of particular modes of instruction and training with a view to equipping a man to discharge it. It involves the neglect, the deliberate rejection, of other work of other kinds. It means specialisation.

The Romans were not specialists in our modern or indeed in any legitimate sense of the word. An illegitimate and yet true sense of the word in regard to them would be found if we said their special strength was their general capacity; their readiness to encounter new and untried problems; their resource. Their city was any place in which their temper was undaunted, their spirit unquenched ; and there was no quarter to which, without loss of character, they were unwilling to adapt themselves.

At the root of this inflexible versatility, this indomitable suppleness, was their characteristic virtue of pietas. The pietas of a Roman taught him to pay to his father, besides what we should regard as filial respect, the more formal

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reverence due to a magistrate, and to the State as represented by a magistrate. It taught him also to offer to the State, that definite body, that intangible and elusive spirit, more than what we expect of citizens, the devotion which a man owes and pays to his kindred and his elders.

The critical difference between the Roman and the Greek spirit is found here: for the Greeks the good was limited ; the unlimited, or infinite, was evil — for the Romans limits existed to be surpassed, barriers to be overthrown; the good was infinite. It was in this conception, more than in the more material forms of her laws and institutions of civil and political life, that Rome provided foundations for a Christian Empire. When Rome reached her widest extent of power, touched her highest point of splendour, and seemed to have deserved the title of eternal, when she had become the mistress of men's minds as well as the strong ruler of their lands, the virtue to which she owed her dominion was forgotten; but it was to the practice of that virtue that her greatness was due.

In the minds of Greeks and of Romans alike, the citizen owed a complete allegiance to the State, for the sake of which he existed, to protect or aggrandise which he was permitted and enabled to live. But for the Romans the State was not only a vaster organisation than it was for the Greeks; it was a more spiritual and vital organism.

The Greeks were artists in a sense in which the Romans were not ; the Romans gave a new meaning to the word. The illimitable horizon, the unprescribed and expanding boundary, is the province of Romance.

We have seen that in the gradual development of the conception which men formed of Society and of the place of the individual in Society, two discoveries were made: first, that the individual member of the community, being

in] Survey of Certain Ideals 59

a creature of priceless worth, was independent, and might claim to exercise the rights of an independent person ; and next, that because each individual member of the com- munity was of so great a value, both for his own sake and for the sake of the community, no harm must be suffered to come to him, even from his own action — he must not be allowed to do any injury or damage to himself; in a word, that this independence and freedom which he had just learned to claim must be restricted and curbed.

The new society which rose upon the foundations, or upon the ruins, of the Roman Empire, claimed an authority which that old Empire had never claimed, and exercised it more vigilantly and more severely. Changes came in the relative values of things which had always in some measure been valuable. Hitherto a man's visible achievements, his definite contributions to the service of a material State, were of supreme if not of unique importance; now his character and his destiny, rather than his activities and his place in Society, became the object of his own and of the community's attention. The consequence was, unfor- tunately in the main, but very naturally, that the achieve- ments and performances of men in arts, in letters, even in warfare, came to be less prized. What was sought was the strengthening of a spiritual empire, partly within the individual himself and partly within the community to which he belonged, the community half earthly and half heavenly of which he was a member.

It seemed indeed to some that only one thing was needful : that the appearances in which men had delighted, the feats of which they had been proud, the arts which had decorated their lives, were nothing, and less than nothing, compared with what must be the real object of a man's ambition, and of a community's aim, namely, the welfare, the salvation of the eternal part of man and of society — the soul of each.

60 Survey of Certain Ideals [CH.

To keep a balance between these two claims, to believe in the supreme importance of what we must call spiritual, and yet not to neglect those forms in which we seek to express it under the conditions of human life, is the mark of a sane and sober mind; and it is very easy indeed to fall into one or other of two extremes : either to be so much occupied with the outward form that the inner meaning becomes stereotyped and then dulled and finally obliterated ; or to be so intent upon the inner meaning of things that no attempt is made to express them in the field of conduct. A man who says that his own and his community's ideals are very imperfectly represented by the conventional expressions, neglects and omits them. But the very fact that he is a man, living in the world which we know, compels him to substitute for the ordinary expressions new but still outward expressions of these ideals. It is idle, he may think, for a creature like himself, with aspirations so lofty and with purposes so sublime, to walk along the common ground. Yet move he must. He may try to move through the air, or burrow underground ; but he will probably find that the ordinary is the best mode of passage from one point to another, and the surest sign that his mind is advancing. He may be discontented with the ordinary forms of political life, but either he must decide to live alone as far as that is possible (in complete isolation he cannot live) or else he must try to live in co-operation and harmony with his fellow creatures. The moment he tries to do that, he must set up some forms, some systems of communication. He has abandoned the usual forms, and so is driven to discover and to use other forms of his own. Then it becomes a question whether the forms he has invented are better than the forms which other people use. In one respect, of course, his own forms are bound to be worse than the usual forms: they will be less easily and less commonly understood. Usually, for example, we

in] Survey of Certain Ideals 61

shake hands as a sign of greeting. A man who was not satisfied with that might decide that his form of greeting should be to strike his acquaintances sharply on the shoulder ; this, he might claim, well expressed the heartiness of his pleasure at seeing them, but it would be quite apt to be misunderstood, and in that respect, therefore, his method would be less successful than the usual method.

The men who brought about the Renaissance felt that the forms of life which the Church had introduced and established were artificial and inadequate for their ideals: that a large and essential part of man's interests — his intellectual and artistic interests which they were fain to regard as part of his spiritual life — was neglected and shut out by the Church. They claimed therefore that a man must not only be himself but the whole of himself, not only a member of a heavenly community, but also actively and fully a member of a visible earthly community. Some of them broke away from the Church, offering as their justification the claim of the intellect, the claim of art. Trained in the habit of veneration for the forms of Greek •civilisation, and recently enriched with new materials for enlarging their knowledge of it, they turned these forms, or such an adaptation of them as they could fashion, to their own uses. It is remarkable, however, that while they claimed a full and unrestricted self-development they should have left largely out of account one essential thing which the Church had not forgotten, namely, the idea of society itself, the idea that a man's self-realisation, in part the gift of nature, is also in part the gift of the society in which he lives and moves and has his being. They did not clearly see that apart from it he is nothing: that if in place of the great and universal society which the Church, however imperfect, represented, he forms for himself and his friends a party, a coterie, or class, he cuts himself off from the main roots which sustain him. The

62 Survey of Certain Ideals [CH.

Renaissance societies grew up with a sudden and memorable beauty, but quickly bloomed and vanished.

The mutual dependence of men and the community, of groups and parties of men, and the whole society of man, received another illustration ; and again in a revolt against the Church.

The men who wrought what is called the Reformation violently attacked the Church, not because of any wrong that she was doing to the intellect of man or to his material fortunes, but because of what they conceived to be a deeper wrong, an injury to his spirit, to his moral nature. The Reformation was an attack against the Church made in the name of righteousness, just as the Renaissance was an attack against it made in the name of art and intellect. If man was in himself of supreme worth, if he was in himself as much possessed of the divine quality and of the spiritual nature as the community to which he belonged, he had in his own heart the means of judging whether a command made to him by that community was right or wrong : that is to say, there was set up in the heart of every individual a new authority which might be in accord with the general authority of the community or of the Church of which he was a member, but which might be, and often was, in opposition to it. The teachers of the Reformation framed for themselves and for those who followed them, the con- ception that each person, each individual, was in the last resort supreme judge of his own action; that he must do what seemed right in his own eyes; that though as a rule he might well be guided by the wisdom and experience of his neighbours and his forefathers, yet on a critical occasion he must stand absolutely alone; and though he had to resist the collective, common authority of the vast and reverend community which he had been taught to respect

in] Survey of Certain Ideals 63

and love, he must even do that rather than sacrifice this inward freedom, rather than disobey this inward authority.

We have been taught to admire this spirit, this temper of the reformers, and there is much that is really admirable in it. To it we owe much, not only of our religious freedom, as it is called, but of our political and civil freedom as well ; to it we owe great intellectual advances. But just as on a different ground in the movement which is called the Renaissance, so also in this movement there was a danger : the danger of breaking away rudely and inconsiderately from the past, of losing the sense of proportion, of forgetting that the world is an institution older than ourselves: the danger of failing in respect and reverence for others, and accordingly in a proper degree for ourselves. A certain harshness, a certain aggressiveness, a certain egotism, were likely to come, and indeed came, as results of this move- ment. Man stood for himself; he forgot once more that beyond himself, vaster than himself, and indeed as the condition of his being himself at all, there is a community, however defined, called by whatever name, to which we belong, and in belonging to which we are most truly ourselves.

The human spirit, which is larger than any form which it may use, tries to express itself in some form or other. Form after form is adopted, used for a time, and discarded. Form after form represents a combination which men find it hard to make : the combination of freedom with reverence, of progress with a due regard for tradition. In these forms men have represented to themselves their conception of society as a whole. They have tried to discover some single ruling principle which would give unity to it, and to themselves, so that they could be, fully and liberally, what they had it in them to be, and yet pay a proper respect to society. And none of these forms has lasted, though each of them has served its purpose. It would seem as if in the nature of things none of these forms could last,

64 Survey of Certain Ideals [CH. in

because our minds are always advancing as our circum- stances are changing; and it is for us in our own day, as it was for others in earlier days, to discover what may be, for our time at any rate, if for no more than our time, the expression of this double purpose; of realising ourselves, and of being loyal members of a community. This is the aim of those who seek for an ideal in Education.

CHAPTER IV

ORGANISATION FOR THE ACHIEVEMENT OF THE IDEAL

WITHIN any community, the greatest or the simplest, or in human society most largely conceived, we may distinguish several classes or groups of which it is composed, each doing what it can in the service of a general ideal; and within each of those several groups, the members of it, the practitioners of the various arts or crafts represented by them. So, for instance, there is the class of teachers, the profession, as it is called, and within that class or profession many thousands of individuals, who are more or less consciously and more or less effectively carrying out the desires, fulfilling the aspirations, of their class, just as their class is contributing its share to the building up of the general ideal, which embraces all the good things which its various sections imagine and conceive for society as a whole.

We may picture to ourselves a pyramid. At its base are the members of various trades or professions; above them are the professions and trades and crafts; and, as the crown and apex of the pyramid, the ideal toward which all are converging. How, we may ask, is the general ideal, and how again is the sectional ideal, conveyed to the individuals who are at once members of the whole society and of one or other of its sections ?

c. E. 5

66 Organisation for the [CH.

We may approach the answer if we make a new classi- fication of men into three groups. In the first we may place prophets and poets and visionaries. They see visions and dream dreams, but they commonly fail to achieve the things that they have dreamt of, to bring their visions down to the earth, and to consolidate them there in actual facts. Unsatisfied themselves, they are unsatisfactory to their fellows, and we sometimes turn in relief from them to men of a different kind, to what we should call political people, the makers of programmes. These men are often more indebted to the idealists and visionaries than they know or admit. They have caught up, often without appreciating its true worth, some part of what the prophets said, but that part they have tried to throw into a code, into a body of rules or regulations; not that they are often concerned with doing things themselves, but rather that they act as intermediaries between the idealists on the one hand and the practitioners upon the other. They are the purveyors of ideas rather than the makers, and they too have their place, and they too are unsatisfactory and unsatisfied. And then there is a third division, people whom we call workers, though, perhaps, they do not specially deserve the name; those who in detail, with little or infrequent reference to the general programme, though in tacit obedience to it, and with still less reference to the general and supreme ideal, carry out from day to day and from hour to hour the laborious and often mechanical duties which fall to them.

Now, a society is unsound and unhealthy if these three divisions are severely separated : if the programme-monger is cut off too violently from the idealist, and if the worker, as for convenience we may still call him, does not realise that the detailed occupations of his day are grouped together and unified in the light of the general programme, which covers a wider field than he himself occupies, and in its

iv] Achievement of the Ideal 67

turn contributes to the interpretation of the ideal which is above them all. The prophet, his entrepreneur, and his executor should be working together towards the same end. What, then, is this end or ideal ? For all our differences we shall agree that the supreme object of all endeavour and aspiration, for society, for its constituent groups and for individuals, is something which we must call quite simply goodness. We may be a little impatient with anyone who asks for a strict account of what goodness is. We recognise goodness immediately, and we protest its signs are obvious, its character is unmistakable. We cannot define goodness, because there is nothing above goodness to which we can appeal or by which we can test it. Yet, for this very reason, the goodness which we demand of other people, and still more the goodness which we attribute to ourselves, is apt to be a very vague and unsatisfactory thing. Goodness is never sufficiently shown in good deeds, but it must be shown in some activities, if it is to remain alive. Goodness grows above the scene of human operations ; but it exercises its influence upon them; it must be felt here; in fact, it must be known by its fruits. Fruits we must expect, but fruits of what sort ? Can we discriminate shrewdly between good fruits and bad? If goodness is to be operative and active, it must be active and operative upon a certain field. But if goodness is so large a thing as I have described, its field of operation must be the field of human life, nothing narrower or smaller. If it is the supreme combination of all that we believe in as admirable and desirable, it can have no narrower range or sphere than the whole of human life, in action and thought.

If men are to be 'good' upon such a scale, they must know the nature of the field upon which they are working, the character of the world in which they live. To know it, they must contemplate it. They will see that it may be divided into two main parts. There is on the one hand

5—2

68 Organisation for the [CH.

the region of human conduct embracing not only what men do, but what they think and feel and hope; and on the other hand there is the region or province of what, curiously, we call nature, distinguishing nature from man, who is her child and her product : nature, independent of man, caressing him and supporting him at times ; at times crushing him ; often thwarting him ; there existent before him; surviving him; passionless and detached.

As in the first province we may distinguish between the performance and the ideals of man, so in the second we may distinguish between the works of nature and the laws of nature. The works of nature we may set against the works of man, the deeds of his hand, the accomplishments of his mind. But if we look more closely, and inquire why he achieved these deeds, and in what strength he performed them, we are asking what are his hopes, what are his aspirations, what are his ambitions; and if on the other hand we look closely into any of the operations of what we call nature, we discover, in part, certain principles, certain habitual modes of action which we call laws. We seem to put a human expression and imagery upon Nature's silent workings, and maintain that her laws determine what she does. Certainly, as we are bound to survey and examine men's hopes, in order to understand their deeds, so we attempt to discover the laws in order to understand the operations of nature. We might almost transpose the words, and speak about the laws of man and the hopes of nature.

To be good, then, it would seem men must be intelligent. But must they? Does the increase of intellectual force make for goodness? Is knowledge necessary to virtue? Here is a great problem. What is the relation of knowledge and the pursuit of knowledge to virtue and the pursuit of virtue? An old illustration may serve us here. When Socrates compared the philosopher to the watch-dog, his

iv] Achievement of the Ideal 69

friends were confused at the image and begged him to explain. "You know," he said, "that a dog welcomes his friends and shows hostility towards his foes. But who are his friends, and who are his foes? His friends are the people whom he knows, his foes are strangers: but as he gets used to people they cease to be strangers, they become friends, and his hostility changes and turns to friendship. But always it is the strange which is the enemy: always it is the known which is received with friendliness. The philosopher is like a watch-dog, because he loves his friends and hates his foes ; but like the watch-dog he is constantly turning strangers and foes into familiars and friends, by learning to know them; and he enjoys this process of learning." What is this process of learning? "You learn to know people," so he says, "by discovering in them, for all their strange appearance, something which is akin to yourself." But supposing what is like yourself is not in itself a good thing, what then? I may discover in a man something like myself which makes him at his ease and familiar, but it may be my worst fault, and not any virtue at all.

Now, what Socrates claims, not indeed by formal argument, but by an effrontery of splendid optimism, is that what we really recognise, whether in ourselves or in others, is the true self, and the true self is the good. If we maintain that the growth of intelligence may be an aid to the growth of virtue, are we entitled also to maintain that real advance in knowledge and in discernment means a real and an equal advance in the discovery of the good, whether in ourselves or in the world ?

We shall come back presently to this question, and shall review its treatment in a modern document of a kind in which philosophical discussions were till lately rare. Let us leave it now, and admit for the moment that we want goodness, and that we want intelligence serving goodness.

70 Organisation for Achievement of Ideal [CH. iv

There is one thing more which we shall want — a sound and vigorous body which will support the intelligent mind and the good heart.

But have we not in saying all this given some clearness to our conception of the ideal of the State, when we ask that its citizens shall be good ; that their goodness shall be directed by intelligence and based upon knowledge; that their knowledge shall not be hampered by the defects of the body, but shall be built up like their goodness in a body which represents in dignity, in proportion, in stability both goodness and knowledge? Have we not, in some measure, set up what one might call a tangible ideal for the State and for the citizens of the State?

CHAPTER V

THE AIM AND PROVINCE OF EDUCATION

WE have tried to examine our notion of Society, and to discover what is the relation in which we as individual people stand to this whole of which we call ourselves parts, but from which we can distinguish ourselves. The process which we call education consists in the harmonising and unifying of these two facts of our consciousness — the fact of ourselves on the one hand, and the fact of the world in which we are placed, with which we struggle, and which we try to appropriate, on the other. We often speak of education as a way, leading from a starting-point to some goal. The metaphor, though useful, may be misleading, for we do not leave the point from which we start and pass stage by stage to the point at which we are aiming: the process is one of self-development, of self-realisation by the progressive realisation of this world. It is for this reason that anything which for human beings can be called a method or a way is also a life ; the rule which they adopt must be a spirit which they obey; the course they follow is one which they planned in obedience to the instincts of their own nature, as it is moulded by the demands of Society.

Everything that we do, as individuals, or as members of smaller groups within Society, is affected by and reacts upon the general sense of the community as a whole.

Even the struggles which we naturally make, with perhaps a good deal of vehemence while we are young, to

72 The Aim and [CH.

discover and assert ourselves, are part of the process by which we learn to know the world and bring ourselves into conformity with it, gradually finding a way of subduing ourselves and harmonising ourselves with our surroundings ; they are part also of the process by which we change the world. It is important for teachers to cherish the belief that it is their business not merely to prepare their pupils for the world as it is, but to prepare the world for them as they ought to be. Every reasonable scheme of progress and reformation springs from this belief. The idealist allies himself with the conservative who jealously protects the deep-rooted sentiments and traditions of the community which he reverences and which he is proud to claim as his parent, and the guardian of ancient forms welcomes in the revolutionary the unquenched spirit which gave to those sentiments and traditions their life. If this is so, schools, being part of the structure of a state or society, must contribute in some way more or less direct to the fitting of their pupils for the world, and through their pupils to the changing of the world as we know it into the world as we hope it will be.

We may now speak of Education in new terms. Education, we may claim, is a process by which a man learns to maintain conversation with the world in which he lives. It speaks to him through all his senses, it brings a message to him in tradition, and he responds to the appeal of the moment, and reacts upon the subtler and more complex influence of tradition. All his action and his thought may be regarded as in a sense the speech he offers in reply to the world which is speaking to him ; the questions which he puts to the world are answered in the sum of his experience. What, then, is the world with which this conversation is held? We can divide it into two fields: the field of what man is, and thinks, and does; and that other field which we call 'Nature.' What are the processes

v] Province of Education 73

by which man investigates these two fields? How does he ask his questions? And in what fashion does he receive answers ?

We may get some help in dealing with this problem, if we consider one of the many schemes in which the subjects of school work have been classified, and attempt some criticisms upon it. Taking the two main divisions which we have noted, a well-known writer proposes the following arrangement1 : —

A. Nature : (i) Inorganic : Arithmetic and Natural Philo-

sophy. (2) Organic : Geography and Natural History.

B. Man : (i) Theoretical : Grammar and Logic.

(2) Practical: History.

(3) Aesthetic: Literature, Drawing, Music. Let us look first at the theoretical subjects. These

are concerned with the forms of human thought, and the forms of human expression in language : that is to say, the necessary conditions of thinking, if we are to think at all, if we are to be rational; and the necessary conditions of speech, if our speech is to be made up of thoughts put into words — logic and grammar.

Practical subjects we may take to be those the effect of which shows itself decisively in conduct. History in its largest definition is the study of human affairs; but the study of human affairs looked at through human eyes, and therefore appealing to human affection; establishing an ideal of behaviour and issuing in action. The historian is so influenced and moulded by what he sees of the deeds of men, that he patterns for himself from his knowledge of the real world an ideal world to the semblance of which he tries to conform the real world in which he lives. In that sense history is practical. It is not merely the record of

1 Harris' Psychologic Foundations of Education, p. 340.

74 The Aim and [CH.

things done, but a judgment made upon them; it is there- fore a sketch and forecast of things as they ought to be.

But how can we examine this region of things done by men, the memorials that they have left of themselves in the past, the achievements which they are building with their hands at the very moment while we are beholding them, unless we have learnt them? And how can we learn without instruments and rules of thought and speech ? In the third section of the second main division, the aesthetic, the writer places three subjects, and for him at any rate the special characteristic of each is that it appeals to taste, to sentiment. In each there is an attempt made by man not merely to do something which is necessary, but to achieve something which is beautiful, or perhaps to realise the necessary by the pursuit of the beautiful. Let us look at those three subjects a little more closely. A very large part of literature — indeed one might say, quite reasonably, the whole of literature — is history, if history is the record of what men have done or are doing. Drawing, once more, is historical; it is the record, in another kind of writing through different media, of what men have achieved or experienced : what their eyes have looked upon, and what their imagination has pictured to them. And in music perhaps more intimately than in the other subjects there is the dominant, the persuasive appeal of beauty, moving the heart, firing the emotions. But to what end? To the same end as that to which the appeal of drawing, and the appeal of literature lead. Emotion is the force which drives men to action of some kind or other. But if so, this third section, the aesthetic, which presents the world in the forms of beauty, is at the very heart of the practical. We are moved to action by our ideals, and our ideals are our expressions of beauty.

Or look again at the section given to History. To collect and order his materials, the historian must have

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learnt discrimination, the art of minute and just observation. And if he is to render what he has gathered in a form intelligible and convincing, he must have some perception of beauty in words; he must have analysed for himself the meaning of beauty, and have carried his thinking into the domain of feeling.

The fact is, that though for convenience we may make these sections of knowledge and investigation, we cannot break up the human mind in this manner. Thought, conduct, feeling, are inseparable components of human life. We feel because we think; we judge beauty by the general laws of thought by which we tell one thing from another, what is beautiful from what is not beautiful. And it is because we think and feel, feeling guided by thought, and thought illuminated by feeling, that we act. But we act as one person, one character, one living principle, a force making itself felt in the world by the double process of giving to the world what is in us to give, and of drawing from the world what we need for the maintenance of our own life.

The general forms of human thought must be used in both provinces, in that of 'Nature' as much as in that of 'Man.' Let us look a little more closely into the divisions called inorganic and organic. In the former the writer places, as we have seen, two subjects, arithmetic and natural philosophy, contrasting them by this arrangement with geography and natural history in the second division. In these two we have nature operative; whereas in the group composed of arithmetic and natural philosophy we have, so to speak, nature thinking. But is it nature that thinks, or is it man who thinks for nature and uses her for his purposes by the very same modes of thought which he imposes on himself in what we call logic and grammar?

The scheme which we have discussed is full of suggestion and of great value, which our criticisms may have served

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to illustrate; but a more satisfactory, if less immediately useful, arrangement might be proposed. The world, we might declare, is ours; human thought and knowledge are concerned partly with what men do, partly with what other forces, not human, do independently of man, or in co-operation with man ; and for either of these groups we must employ the same type of thinking as for the other, and in both, thought can only be pursued and knowledge attained under the stress of some impelling emotion. We shall know what we desire to know, and seek what we desire to seek. Conduct is something more than external action ; it is, in its amplest and most legitimate sense, the fashioning within a man, by his imagination working upon and directing his activities, of an ideal of life; it is the building of his character.

We may now return with more confidence than we could earlier possess to a problem already partially presented in several different forms. Character — individual, personal and unique — in every man is yet a human character. Not less important than its unique quality is its common nature; and the business of a school, more definitely and more directly than the business of any other human organi- sation, is the framing and up-building of this character. How then may schools build up character? Not by the teaching of a multitude of subjects, but by providing proper activities in which teachers and pupils may jointly engage. It is as true to say that we learn by doing, as that we learn in order to do. And we select school activities on two grounds — first, because we think that these are some of the many possible and desirable activities in which a human being can be engaged, for which the world outside school does not provide sufficient, if any, opportunity; and secondly, because, though the world may provide ample opportunities for these activities, we can yet, under the special conditions of quiet, or abstraction, or seclusion,

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or the companionship of people of a like age, or under the guidance of a sympathetic and intelligent person of older years, engage the young in these activities to better purpose, and encourage them to reflect upon these activities more carefully in school than elsewhere. We are too apt to dissociate reflection from action. The truth is that in reflection, in concentrated thought, directed under stress of emotion to some definite end, we have not something distinct from activity, but, on the contrary, activity of the very highest type. It is true that we do not often think at this high level of concentration. Yet we know very well that when we have thought hard, when thought has gathered up and focused the experience of life, when it has been not merely clear but glowing, though we may not have set our hand to any definite piece of work nor done anything which we can show to our neighbours, we have been engaged in an activity which has heavily taxed our powers. It is important to bear this in mind in teaching children. To awake their attention is to engage them in the most strenuous activity in which they can be occupied. That is why they want spells of rest, or change of occupation. Action, so conceived, and including reflection as its highest form, is the mode in which we maintain our conversation with the world.

For conversation, it is obvious, there must be at least two parties; yet it is often forgotten that the pupil to be taught is a person who has not only to receive but to give impressions ; he is not there simply to accept, but to offer.

Teachers are apt to forget within the bounds of their profession what their commerce with a larger Society cannot but have taught them. They figure the school world as one of concentric circles, themselves the largest, their pupils the smallest; and they conceive that growth for their pupils simply means enlargement up to the dimensions which they have themselves attained. But we all know

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in general society, and even with intimate friends, that the relation in which we stand to groups of people among whom we have our place and our part, does not seem to be that of a number of concentric circles, some small and some larger, but rather of circles which intersect and cut one another at points, so that a fragment, and apparently a small fragment, is common, while the greater part of each is peculiar to itself, and foreign and unknown to the others, falling outside their scope and range. We talk to the best and most intimate of our friends, and at some points feel completely at one with them ; speech then becomes almost unnecessary, the expression of a common sympathy needless, because the sympathy is so complete and so obvious. And yet, even in our dealings with our best and most intimate friends, we are frequently shocked by the sudden discovery from time to time that the space of experience and sentiment which we have in common is very small, and beyond its limits we and they are strangers to one another. We thought we knew each other completely, but it is only a little of each other that we have known and understood.

Now let us consider, not persons who know each other, as we think, well, but persons who know each other but slightly, and who form parts of different groups which we can distinguish. The difficulty some men feel acutely, and most people in greater or less measure, in social engage- ments, is simply that they do not know what to say. The reason is sometimes and in part a certain lack of practice and experience in the mere act of talking and behaviour, but it is not only that ; it is far more than that. They do not know what to say because they do not know how far the things which they want to say would be intelligible to the people they are addressing. When we step outside the relations of intimate friendship we at once become aware of this difficulty that the range of the unknown and

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the strange becomes larger, and the range of what is known and common becomes smaller, and is at best hypothetical, something imagined rather than known, something to be taken on trust, not yet proven.

Now if we widen our survey, we encounter a problem which is more difficult than these, and yet suggests a solution both for" itself and for them.

We hold conversation day by day with people on whom we have never set eyes, whose voices we shall never hear: as civilised men, living in an elaborate and complex State, we institute and maintain communication with persons who belong to groups not our own, who inherit traditions alien from ours, who cherish sentiments repugnant to our sentiments. The barriers of external circumstance which divide us from them are so great that understanding and sympathy must needs be miraculous if they are to exist. How can this conversation be held ? We know the fact that in some measure it is held, but if we try to look for an explanation, we are almost driven to the conclusion that we must be deceived, and that the thing we thought we knew as a matter of fact cannot exist. The explanation is twofold; on part of it we touched on an earlier occasion : all the advance which we make in the materials and modes of human intercourse, the external means of communication — the post, the telegraph, the railway trains, and so forth — the great enterprises for the exchange not only of merchandise but of ideas all over the world — depends upon an increasing use of a developed and highly sensitive imagination. So far as they do not depend upon that and imply that, they are but hindrances to the growth and activity of the human spirit: these things which we look upon as the very proof of our civilisation may be the signs of our failure and degradation. But there is a sense in which they are the signs of a real success, and in so far as they are that, they depend upon and involve a

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sympathetic play of a quick imagination among people whose relations with one another are spiritual and nothing else at all.

That is part of the explanation ; the other, closely akin to it, is this. When we talk of friendship — to go back to the earliest example — between individuals, we think we depend, but in fact we only partially depend, upon common experience. Common experience seems to be the essence of friendship, whereas in truth it is only a support or the occasion for friendship. And we sometimes find, indeed, as we lose our youthful friendships in exchange for the more enduring friendships of later years, that we were not friends at all, we only had some toys in common with our former associates. What we really share with our friends who remain our friends is what we may share, and what in certain moments, when we are at our very best, we actually share not only with them but with every other human creature — we share our humanity: we share not only a part of ourselves, still less a part of our circumstances, but our whole nature, which reaches its highest individual fulfilment as it becomes merged and lost in a larger thing which we call, in general, human nature.

It is upon this that teachers have to depend in their difficult enterprise. The people whom we teach are younger than ourselves, they belong to different house- holds, they are not numbered among our friends; and it seems as if we could scarcely hope to establish communi- cation between ourselves and persons so remote in age, in sentiment, in tradition. We come gradually, it is true, to share with them a certain number of experiences: we sit in the same room, breathe the same air, perform together some of the same duties; and on this we try to base knowledge and growing sympathy. These common ex- periences can and must help our sympathy, but the essential thing is something with which we begin, something

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which we can assume as common: it is human nature, manifesting itself in different guises, no doubt, but still manifesting itself in them and in us, and making us one; and we only have eyes to see the unity.

We have spoken of education as a process of learning to hold conversation with the world. We may help our- selves to give meaning to this general formula, if we say, more simply (though less adequately), that it is the process of learning to talk.

Let us look at that for a moment. A child in his earliest days has not words, but cries, movements, in part, at any rate, intelligible to those who try to understand, and who have a quick and imaginative feeling for his needs and wishes. Later he learns what we call language, but it is an imperfect language, his vocabulary is smaller than ours, and inadequate even for his own purposes. Accordingly we try to give children a more complete and appropriate set of symbols, word symbols, for ideas and experiences which we believe to be in their minds, and to have formed part of their lives, and we test their general advance largely by their increasing command of language. But here we should be on our guard. A person who can say the whole of what he thinks probably means very little indeed. The language that we use, the actual words that we utter, and the symbols of action which we also employ to express our meaning, are at best symbols; they suggest more than they convey. The symbols of expression which a young child uses — in cries and movements — are probably inade- quate to his needs, to what he desires to express, but they come much nearer to expressing what, as a baby, he desires to express. The wants of a baby are after all comparatively simple and can be enumerated : briefly, he wants warmth, food, sleep; and he has different kinds of cries and of movements, which most people, if they will take the trouble, can learn to understand, perhaps with a high degree of

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accuracy, and they can do what he asks them to do for him. But a child, having learned to talk, has increased the range of his ideas at a rate which has altogether out- stripped the growth of his means of expression; his means of expression have grown, but the number and the variety and the complexity of the things which he desires to express have grown with incomparably greater rapidity.

As experience enlarges, though the gift of speech may become richer, more varied, more flexible, and more ready to command, yet the discrepancy, the interval between what a man can say, and what he desires to say, grows with advancing experience and ripening powers. This would appear to be an insoluble problem, a difficulty not to be surmounted, were not the problem solved, the difficulty overcome, by the word symbol itself. The people who express themselves best, with the most just and the most accurate representation of the experience and of the emotion, the flower of experience, which their lives have had, deal most unreservedly, and yet with the greatest self-restraint, in the most imaginative, the least material and formal mode of human expression — that is to say, in poetry; and the essential quality of poetry is this, that it offers us exquisitely fashioned symbols, representations inadequate but not unjust, because the eye pierces through them, as through some diaphanous raiment, to the immaterial spirit, the formless form which they clothe.

How then are we to be teachers at all if teaching means the constant imparting, not of information merely, upon a variety of subjects chosen for us, but the imparting of ourselves to other people who are not ourselves, if every day of our lives we shall be less and less able to express ourselves? There is no complete answer to a riddle which is as fundamental as human nature itself, but there is an answer, not complete, yet sufficient. It is that the highest use, the most unreserved and yet the most careful use of

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the best symbolism, the best forms which we have at our disposal, drives us at times to a height and a heat of self- expression in which the form itself disappears, because the self itself disappears, and the speaker or the teacher, and the listeners or the pupils, cease to be two opposing groups set one against the other, and develop for the time a common consciousness. For the time they are one mind, they are sharing a common experience, not as several people might share a common dish, and each eat a portion ; but as the various parts of the body share a common life, because it flows through every part, and makes all the parts one.

Such a fusion of minds is wrought by teaching at its best and highest level ; and something like that is achieved in any serious and conscientious effort to teach; with many limitations and many failures there are points at which a common life makes itself felt in the teacher and the pupil alike.

We may agree that if the State is a whole, a unity, then it has a character, a life, which marks it in all its activities and enterprises, directs its ambitions, and points out its goal. And again, its parts must contribute to the life of the whole to which they belong, and foster and maintain its spirit and character. The whole is not a total, arrived at by mere addition. Not addition, but a spiritual combination is needed to make a State what it is.

Let us now examine this matter more closely, and first let us look at ourselves as individuals. We should say of course that the supremely good thing for a man is to be a man, the supremely good thing for a woman is to be a woman ; that is to say, that we want all they do and think and hope for to be governed and controlled by some dominant principle, which is as large as their life and as intimate as their inmost thought. In other words, there must be a relationship, understood and deeply felt, between the various things that they do, the various thoughts which

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occupy their minds, the various aspirations by which they are attracted. And it is, I think, fair to say that the spirit of a man and his character consists in the sum of these relationships, the supreme idea which holds them all together.

If that is true of an individual, it is true also of a larger unit which we call a State or a Society ; indeed we claim that a State or a Society lives in virtue of an idea which controls them and holds together all their members ; it is an aggre- gate of relationships rather than an addition of individual persons. Every society, therefore, has its seat in the imagination. Yet we are confronted day by day, and indeed moment by moment, by this very practical difficulty. We may say that the supreme good thing for us all is humanity — to be men and women ; but we have to express our humanity in certain particular forms. Humanity is a valueless idea if it is not strongly conceived, clearly thought out, and definitely expressed in some kind of action. But if we try to put an idea into the form of any outward expression of speech or action, we limit and seem at any rate to damage it. If we avoid expression, or are too lazy to seek it, then the idea evaporates or turns bad. If we are too sensitive, if we hold our ideals in too delicate a regard to put them to the test and trial of real experience, we lose our grasp upon them. If, on the other hand, we throw them into the rough conflict and commerce of the world, we damage them. We may become grossly content with a form which is at best a symbol of a reality other than its expression, and by continued self-deception at last rob ourselves of the idea itself.

This is true not only of modes of action adopted by individuals, but of that general mode of action which a man may call his profession or his trade. A man may, for example, have humanity as his general ideal, but he seeks to express it in the terms of his profession. Here

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we come upon a curious and melancholy fact: that the people who belong to a particular profession, and not least to the teaching profession, often bear much more clearly and deeply stamped upon them the peculiar characteristics of their profession, than the common and notable marks of that general humanity which they desire to express through their profession. If they are unwilling to make this admission about themselves, common speech shows that they make it about other persons. They talk of errand- boys, char-women, and cab-men, differentiating people ac- cording to their functions : the emphasis is laid on the special calling or occupation, not upon the general humanity which is to be expressed in the calling. It is a better thing to be a man than to be a soldier, a sailor, an apothecary, or a teacher ; it is only tolerable to be any one of these if at the same time it is possible to be a man ; or, to put it more truly, if the occupation, whatever it may be, proves itself not merely a mode, but an adequate mode, of expressing his humanity. Granted that a man is happy in the choice of his profession, even then his profession will restrict the ideal which it is intended to serve. But if a choice in the means of expression is properly made, though restriction and curtailment may be necessary, there may be gain as well as loss.

Let us use a simple illustration. When we talk of expression, we most commonly mean the expression in words of thoughts which we have in our minds. The most fluent and skilful speaker will allow that generally — not, I believe, always, but generally — his words, though they may please the listener, and even in a measure please himself who is more difficult to satisfy, yet come short of the thing which he desired to put forth in these words. They do justice to a part only of what he has in mind. They do less than justice to the whole. That is inevitable ; because words, even the subtlest and the most intelligently used,

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are heavy and gross compared with ideas. On the other hand, the effort to say what is in the mind means the effort, not merely to cast out upon the world in a formal and intelligible shape for other minds what existed previously in the speaker's alone, but to give precision, clearness and firmness of outline to what was in his mind. Accordingly, if there is restriction, if he says less than he means, or not quite perfectly what he means, at the same time he will recognise with pleasure, as a compensation, that he has at any rate done something to make what was in his mind more definite than it was.

There is a further advantage in the restriction of any form. No one who cares about form, whether in speech, or dress, or manners, is ever satisfied even with the best form which he achieves; partly for the reason just now indicated, that the best form falls short of the idea which it is intended to embody; and partly because, with the definition or clearness which form gives to idea, there comes, as with trees after pruning, a fresh and a more vigorous, and a better-directed growth. To change our image, the form which, like a dress for a child, fitted well enough for the time, is presently seen to be too small ; it is outgrown, it is cast aside, and its place is taken by another, still not perfect but less imperfect than that which went before it.

If that is true of expression in words, it is also true of the expression of our general ideal for ourselves, in what we call our profession. It may be said that a man can never escape from his profession, and certainly he very rarely makes the attempt with advantage. But for that matter, a man can never escape from words ; he must say what he thinks, if he is to live with his fellows. Words must be his constant and inevitable medium of communication. They come short of what he desires to express, and do less than justice to his meaning; his profession gives him opportunity, but not perfect opportunity, for exercising

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and developing and fulfilling his character. And indeed, the sum of his activities, professional and private, very meagrely represents what he believes himself to be — unless the worst of fortunes befalls him : he may accept his own words, not as the symbols of his meaning, but as the equivalent of his meaning, and he may mistake his activities for his soul ; thus robbing both speech and action of their value, which lies in their representative and symbolic quality, and at last robbing himself of himself.

For we have to remark that every kind of expression, when it is deliberately and not automatically used, is itself proof that the man who adopts it intends to express himself, as a whole, in a particular mode ; and is therefore also proof that he can survey and criticise himself. He is, in fact, self-conscious. This ability of the mind to take knowledge of itself, while it seems to divide the mind against itself, is the ultimate evidence of its unity.

We have spoken of the State as a whole. Is the State, then, aware of itself? Does the State prove that it has a character by the act of surveying and criticising its character ? Is there above the host of units, the men and women who make up what we call the State, some heart, some soul of Society itself ?

We can no more prove it than we can prove the humanity which is the ideal of individual men and women ; but, it is to be added, we can no more neglect to assume it. And it is an assumption universally made, because, though it cannot be proved to be necessary to human action by any tangible evidence, it is proved to be necessary to human thought. To think is to analyse experience so as by re-arrangement to draw it into a unity more perfect than that of experience, to discover and to develop relations which were obscure or incomplete between the various elements of experience, and to complete the sum, which is always incomplete and ragged at its edges, by additions which are felt to be required

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to give it consistency and significance. It is always what falls outside the edge of the actual which both excites the desire of men and provides them with their standards of judgment.

The several groups into which the members of a com- munity or State are divided have their own special functions and interests. But they are only able to exercise their distinctive functions and to satisfy their interests because they are maintained by the State as a whole, and balanced within it by other groups, each of them with equally distinctive functions and interests of its own. And if they are maintained by the whole, they also take their share in maintaining the whole on which their life depends.

But, can a general idea, the idea which governs a whole society, be expressed in the terms of a profession or group, or be realised by its action? At best, of course, but imperfectly; and yet — for this question too has to be answered — can the members of a particular profession do other than seek to express the idea of society through the medium which their profession offers them ? — and in doing that, may they not be subjected to just that very restriction which we noted earlier in considering speech, and receive its twofold compensating advantages? They will feel that beyond their profession, transcending its limits, sometimes apparently defying its petty conventions, there is a vast organisation in which they would gladly be merged. They may at tunes be discontented, and very properly discontented, with the limitations of their craft. "This," they will say, "is no adequate mode for expressing the life of the society which is throbbing in ourselves. But," they will add, "we have no other mode of expression." Accord- ingly they will seek to make their mode, their profession, as good as they can, as useful as they can, for the purpose ; and in doing that, they will be giving a distinctness which it never had before to their notion of society itself; the

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idea of the whole, which formerly was vague, will now become more definite, more clear; it gains in spiritual reality as it comes under the restrictions of matter and circumstance.

The idea of Society, like any other idea, is a composite thing in which thought and emotion are blended elements ; we are too apt to dissociate these elements one from the other. Ideas exercise a proper sway when they are them- selves controlled, and the best mode of controlling them is to apply them to practical uses. We have seen that the test of use tends to give precision and clearness to an idea ; it tends not less to increase its potency and range. Men are forced by the very limitations of their several callings to give to their idea of society a definition which it would else lack, and this definition serves to intensify the emotional, the operative energy of the idea.

If, even so, men are discontented with their calling as a form of expression and a mode of realisation for their idea of society, there is still a resource for them. Unable to throw off their vocation like a garment that is used, they may do something better: they may adopt it, not as a vesture, but as a part of their being, to change with their change, and grow with their growth. Their professions come to be, like style, their very selves. Then they find out at once their severest limitations and their largest opportunities. Most men choose their professions as little as they choose their characters; both are inherited, but both may, and indeed must, undergo a continual refashion- ing. It is idle for men to exclaim that their professions are too small for them, and for other reasons do not fit them ; their real difficulty is that they do not fit themselves.

The profession of teaching may be used in illustration. Some men, we are assured, are born teachers ; others, it is believed, achieve teaching ; others again (the vast majority) have teaching thrust upon them. Nature, election, and

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necessity have made them all what they are; the deed is done. It were unkind and unjust to all alike to say " facilis descensus Averni"; it is not unfair to any to say "sed revocare pedem . . . ." Choice, if choice there was, has been made of the profession; the only choice which remains is, within the profession, of activities which shall be first of all not untrue to the teachers themselves, second, appropriate to their pupils, and third, apt and adequate expressions of the idea of society as a whole.

The activities of the teacher are represented (in part at least) by the subjects which he teaches. These must be an expression of his character and consonant with the rest of the activities which make up his life. More than this, the activities in which the teacher engages must be an expression of the sentiment, the common judgment, the garnered and collected wisdom of his confederates, his allies, the members of his profession. They are a body of people devoted to this work, agreed that certain things are to be done in a certain order; and the task in which an individual teacher engages should be not merely the expression of his personal life and character, but in some sense the expression of this collective life and character of his profession. A teacher ought to speak not only of himself, though that is the first thing, but he ought to speak as a member of a great organisation to which he is proud to belong.

Again, these activities must also be an expression, increasingly suitable and appropriate, of the life of his pupils. They represent and stand for experiences, which have been selected from the general mass of experiences which the world offers, and arranged in an ordered sequence ; but they are experiences to be — the word is not too bold — enjoyed by the pupils ; they are, at any rate, to be their own experiences, shared with their teachers.

And lastly, these activities in which teachers and pupils

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thus unite must be the expression of the general life of the society, the community, in which both alike are absorbed and merged.

Now, if that is so, our business as students of this question is, among other things, to inquire in what way the usual conventional elements of instruction may be said to contribute to these three ends. How can a man or a woman throw himself or herself into these subjects? How can these subjects be the forms in which a great corpora- tion, a society of teachers, expresses itself ? How can pupils be brought to use these forms, and to share in the life which they symbolise ? How can these occupations represent the large, the endless life and character of a vast people ?

CHAPTER VI

EDUCATION AND SCHOOLS; THE CODE

IF Education is in its largest sense the sum of the experiences which the world provides, in a narrower and more practical sense it is those special experiences which Society selects or arranges in a definite order for the benefit of its younger members. Whatever else they miss, and in whatever disarray they may encounter other experiences, these, at any rate, Society decides, they shall not miss, but shall have them in an appropriate order.

But Societies make decisions, act upon them, and forget the reasons which guided them at the outset in making them. If challenged for their reasons, Societies like indivi- duals are disposed to show resentment; custom has a certain sanctity, and to raise questions is held a daring impiety. Yet from time to time questions are raised; men will inquire about the most firmly established usage what purpose it serves, and what purpose it was intended to serve; they will inquire whether these purposes are identical; they will go further and inquire whether the original purpose is one which, if still pursued, will fulfil the needs of the present hour. They will press their investi- gation further still; they will profess to be ignorant of what is actually going forward in some department of Society's life ; the customary programme familiarly known to those who carry it into effect, though little reflected on even by them, is not known so intimately by others; and yet it was designed and is presumably being worked for

CH. vi] The Code 93

the benefit of the whole Society. Some members of that Society may then very properly ask to be informed what exactly the programme is.

In particular these critics may turn to the school or to the educational system of their country, and ask what it is doing. If they are told that it is seeking by a hundred special activities to quicken and keep alive in the minds of the young the general ideals which the community has formed for their life and its own, they may be gratified with the answer, but not content without further informa- tion. Clearly a teacher who deserves his place and his title should have not a vague but a distinct and growingly clear conception of what the State desires, if he is to do what the State wants; and he must have at once the freedom and the restraint of an artist who is working with the most delicate of implements upon the most sensitive of materials, using the gathered experience of the past to fashion the minds of those to whom it will come as an inheritance.

Can it be justly claimed, the critics will ask, without hostility, and desiring simply to be assured on so vital a matter, that teachers have this clear conception of the nature of their task, and are they equipped for it by this disciplined artistry which it is evident they need? It is notorious that many teachers have been numbered among the inquirers. What is more remarkable is that the State itself, represented by its Department of Education, raised these questions. It asked itself what it was doing in the schools of the country, why it was doing these things, and whether the things which it did were of a sort to fulfil a national ideal. It was led, beyond these questions, to ask what a national ideal for us, now, ought to be. In a mood of unwonted reflection an answer was attempted and was offered.

The appearance, first in 1903, of a Preface to the

94 Education and Schools [CH.

Elementary Schools Code marked an epoch in the History of English Education. The Preface is perhaps the shortest but probably the most comprehensive and statesmanlike treatise on Education which our language possesses. Appearing under the auspices of a Board, it suggests, by its vivid simplicity, the conviction of a single mind, but of a mind not safeguarded from popular sentiment by the ramparts of official dignity, but accessible and sympathetic. It is in fact its personal quality which gives it its wide appeal.

The State attempted a survey of its own work in the province of Education. A survey was demanded ; questions had become insistent, definite objections had been raised against the practice of the schools, and vague but deeply- felt complaints made in many quarters that the schools were not serving the State properly.

The community forced upon self-examination met the same experience which an individual meets in the same case. In trying to explain what it was doing it found, or seemed to find, that parts were not worth doing at all, and that other parts, if they were to be continued, must be done not only in a new manner, but with a fresh and more vivid conception of the service which they were intended to render. Reform in methods, and reformation of spirit were believed to be needed; and the Board of Education, largely responsible for the shortcomings, the mistakes, the dulness which it now sought to make good, to retrieve or to overcome, welcomed criticisms and met them more than halfway. The extraordinary spectacle was presented to a people at first delighted, then astounded, and at last a good deal frightened, of a Government Department reforming itself and bent on reforming other people, a bureau with a mission, an office with initiative. A reaction was inevitable, and it came ; but not before questions had been raised, not before some answers at least had been

vi] The Code 95

proposed; not before objections and difficulties had been presented for consideration, and in some measure, at least, considered.

The metaphors of warfare do some injustice to the spirit of the criticism directed on an established practice, but they are convenient, and with this warning notice will deceive no one. The criticisms, by converging lines starting at diverse points, drew towards this centre: that what we have been offering to our pupils of whatever age has been facts, some of them of value, some perhaps of no value, but in either case facts uninterpreted either by us or by our pupils, and because uninterpreted, unmeaning: that in the schools we have been devoting ourselves with wonderful care and patience to detailed duties, but that we got no conception of the whole, because of the intense devotion which we paid to particular parts of the whole. That is what parents have said in reviewing their children's education ; that is what people who have emerged from schooldays say about their own school career: they wonder what was its meaning; and upon reflection they begin to get some meaning for some only of the many activities which they did dully and without significance there. And children themselves, though very patient, and having many sources of relief and amusement, show in a thousand ways in schools that they do not completely understand what is going on: their look of listlessness, or even of discomfort, is their silent criticism of the whole procedure in which they are taking an unwilling part.

This document, the Preface, came as a challenge both to complaints and to current practices. It offered a touchstone for both; both were, in part, justified.

It sets forth with great clearness the idea that we must regard the child himself, our pupil, not as made up of a number of qualities or faculties or parts to which we apply the appropriate exercise, but as one complete creature,

g6 Education and Schools [CH.

having in fact a character of his own. The effect of the school should be to make this character, or to help it to become, good. Goodness seems to involve first of all a sense of discipline, a fairly clear conception of the difference between what is right and what is wrong, and a feeling of restraint imposed partly by the tradition and temper of the institution, the school, to which the child belongs; but what is far more important, a sense of restraint imposed upon the child by himself ; a feeling, that is to say, of what is due to his neighbours, springing from a feeling, or at any rate accompanying a feeling, of what is due to himself. It is after this sense of discipline has been assumed that we may look for habits of industry, self-control, and perseverance in the face of difficulties. Then, and only then, is granted or won the possibility of teaching children to reverence what is noble, to be ready for sacrifice, to make an effort after purity and truth. Restraint implies activity ready to leap forth in this direction or that; but power restrained, in order to be directed.

These marks of goodness can only exist — that is the view suggested here at any rate — if they are accompanied by intelligence as well; an unintelligent goodness would seem rather to be a contradiction in terms, because goodness as it is described here means a deliberate goodness, that is, a goodness which forms a judgment upon its own powers, and upon its neighbours, which has a view with regard to what is necessary and desirable in the world; and intelli- gence is needed if goodness is not to become a mere easy sentiment, but is to be built up into some solid structure for the benefit of the individual and of the society.

We reach in this practical document a conclusion which we saw to be necessary when we were considering more general questions, at an earlier stage. What we saw then was that the individual, even if he wished to do so, could not live apart from, out of touch with, the community.

vi] The Code 97

He is a part of it, just as it, in a sense, may be said to be a part of him : the two exist together : the one cannot be without the other ; and that is definitely put forward here : "The schools are intended to prepare boys and girls in various ways, according to their various needs, to fit themselves for the work of life."

Now the work of life, obviously, is not a thing any individual can carry on in solitude by himself. Work, just as much as play, involves society. The Code holds up to us a social ideal, an ideal which can only be fulfilled indeed by the conscious and increasing realisation of Society by the individual.

Intelligence must have some field for its activity, and the field for its activity is marked out into two parts : it occupies itself with the doings of men, on the one side, and with the works of nature on the other. This is an interesting and valuable division, which is presumed here rather than argued. But it is implied here that the more we know about the doings and ideals of men, and about the works and laws of nature, the more our goodness will be established. Kindness of heart, self-respect, and consideration for others, will all be confirmed and established by the growth of knowledge, as intelligence occupies itself from day to day, and in many different spheres of inquiry : with what men have done, their actual achievements; with what men have hoped for, the ideals they formed for themselves and cherished in their hearts ; and on the other hand with the manifestations in their countless forms of that other part of the world, which we call nature.

It is a bold hypothesis that the growth of knowledge in these two realms corroborates goodness. There are some people who do not admit it ; but if we agree that it does, we shall maintain that intelligence will only have this effect if it is properly directed forward, and properly occupied with man and with nature.

c. E. 7

98 Education and Schools [CH.

But the intelligence will not be properly occupied with these subjects if it is engaged in recording and amassing mere facts. The intelligence cannot advance to something which is better than facts without the facts themselves; but the only use and profit in the collection of facts is the interpretation of them. The teacher must be, and must regard himself as, a deliberate and conscious artist, using fact for something which is better than fact, and because better than fact, other than fact : that is to say, for truth. The truth is not the fact : it is much more than the fact ; it is the fact seen through a live human brain, and inter- preted by a warm and generous human heart. Fact is something pale and lifeless, compared with that. The teacher must present to his pupils not mere facts, but facts that have been restored to life, and clothed with a fresh signification, because they have passed through his mind and heart, and been illuminated by his imagination.

All this is implied in this document, and some of it is quite directly expressed.

There is another point. The children in schools are to learn history — what men have done, and, what is perhaps even more valuable, what men have wanted to do: their ideals as well as their achievements. They are to learn something about the operations, and through the operations, if we carry our division so far, about the laws of nature; but if a child is to do that, one of the conditions, and a primary condition, is that he should be not merely a recipient but a performer, not merely someone who accepts a number of impressions, however valuable and true they may be or appear to be, but who makes impressions as well. In fact, not only must these two processes go on, but they must be simultaneous. The teacher's attempt and the world's attempt to impress the child cannot go on unless he is, at the same time, making his attempt to impress them by expressing himself, because of this simple fact: that

vi] The Code 99

the human creature who is not striving to express himself is dead. They only make their impression as he comes forward to receive it ; and as he comes forward to receive it, he necessarily strikes them with the same force as that with which they strike him: it is a collision of minds; and if the teacher is sensitive as well as powerful, he will receive an impression quite as deep as that which he gives. In any case, there is to be this give-and-take. To put it in another way, the child who is accepting the world, and his teacher included in it, is also making the world which he accepts ; he is refashioning what he receives in the very act of taking it to himself.

That is indicated in several passages. It is indicated for instance here : "It will be the aim of the school to give the children some power over language, as an instrument of thought and expression"; that is, of course, of their thought and expression. We are too little apt to recognise that the response of any organism to any stimulus is the criticism of the organism upon the stimulus which is applied to it. The reply — and there must be a reply if the process is to be continued — of any creature to what we say to him is his criticism of what we say; it is his valuation of what we say ; it is his interpretation of it.

In ordinary conversation, between people of the same age and standing, we accept that in practice ; we make our observations to our friends, and they take them up ; and if our conversation is at once intimate and animated, it is com- posed of very lively criticisms ; and the result of this series of criticisms is that we manifestly build up for ourselves and for each other a joint product, something to which each party has contributed. It is a process of give-and-take, not by mere exchange, but one in which, in the process of passage from one side to another, the things which are exchanged are transmuted and transfused into one another and become a single thing, which henceforth is a common

7—2

ioo Education and Schools [CH.

possession of those who have engaged in this traffic of thought. They do not go away each with a separate thing in his pocket, but they go away with a common mind, a new mind. The main business of teaching consists in establishing the easy relationship in which exchange of this kind may take place. To take from a child his idea, his thought, is to rob him of a real part of his life, to reduce his vitality; it must be restored by something of equal value, which can become thoroughly his own.

The true relationship between teachers and pupils is one in which the minds of both are occupied ; and what is achieved as the result is neither the teacher's nor the pupil's, but a new experience which they have both lived through together, and which they cannot forget, or at any rate can never lose, because it has become part of themselves.

The Code proclaims a social ideal in Education; it proclaims belief in the fact of society, and demands a partnership between teachers and pupils within the small community of the school as the necessary means of realising that fact.

One of the most difficult and interesting problems of the teacher is this : to make a bridge, a connection, between intellectual and moral training. It is said sometimes that the supreme task of a teacher is to provide moral training, to form right habits and a sound character in his pupils. And yet, as we know the teacher in his class-room, he is occupied day by day with a long programme of subjects : he supplies his pupils with information; he sets them a number of exercises intended to sharpen their intelligence, to strengthen their judgment and to increase their skill in various matters; and if he spends some small fraction of his time and theirs in what is called moral instruction, even then it would hardly appear that he is giving them a discipline of emotion and conduct which deserves to be called moral training.

vi] The Code 101

Does moral training come by accident ? Does a teacher develop and foster character of the kind which he wishes to see in his pupils unconsciously, even unintentionally; or is there some necessary and designed connection between the intellectual discipline which he offers them in acquiring information and in using information acquired, and the moral end which he seeks?

The problem may be approached in many ways: let us take one of them. It is maintained that in a child's development certain stages are marked. First there is the stage of what is called sense-perception; after that there come the power and the practice of forming images and ideas; and, third, reasoning or thinking. In the first of those stages, there is, or rather there seems to be, the mere impact of objects upon a sensitive and receptive mind. We say that we see or taste 'things,' and we attribute to 'things/ as if to causes, the sensations of which we are aware. Already it is clear we are dealing with a complicated business — with 'things/ with sensations, with awareness of sensations; but we shall accept here, without further remark, the description of all this as a first stage. But we must note, that though for convenience it may be marked off as separate, in fact it merges in the second stage, that of image-making. We give names to things, and group many similar things under a common name. Upon receiving the simplest sensations we try to interpret them; we make them recognisable by naming them; we proclaim their relation to us and to each other by giving to the idea which they represent a title. In thinking, we do more than all this: we look beyond the immediate things and groups of things, which within a narrow range we have tried to interpret; we attempt to fashion a larger system, an order, or universe which controls these several groups, relates each to all, and controls and comprehends both them and ourselves.

IO2 Education and Schools [CH.

To do that is to make an advance towards morality. To think, to understand, to make a world in which we have our place, which has (for us) its significance because of our place in it, and which yet assigns to us our place, is to discover a law, a principle, the recognition and fulfilment of which is the achievement of self-ordered liberty.

It is always difficult to pass from theory to practice, and for several reasons. First, the application of any principle must always be something individual. We give our allegiance to general principles or rules, but the words which we use in defining and expressing them convey for different people different meanings, and the result is that in our practice, when we come to interpret these laws or principles, we vary one from another.

There is another point to remember: that practice | means not merely a single performance, but the repeated performance, of certain acts. Practice in that sense makes perfect; the constant repetition of a familiar act gives to the performer a sureness of touch which he will not get from even the most lucid exposition of principles ; principles, indeed, apart from practice, are very shadowy and vague things. To say this is not to offer unmixed praise to what are called practical people, perfect in performance, and thinking very little about the nature of what they do; what we desire is rather that as they turn eagerly from the discussion of principle to practice, so teachers should return afterwards and constantly from practice to principle, enlarging the range of their principles by what they have learnt in the actual business and commerce of school, and illuminating practice by their enlightened understanding of principle.

But how are they to proceed in a school ? Can a teacher diagnose his pupil as a physician diagnoses, or attempts to diagnose, his patient, and prescribe what is suitable in each case? The truth is that the teacher cannot act even

vi] The Code 103

with such rough certainty as the physician attains. The mind is a mould which shapes what it receives and is formed by what it takes; there is always this action and reaction between the mind and the world which it tries to interpret. To offer to children mere things to look at, touch and play with, is to offer them less than they ought to have and less than they desire. It is, literally, to offer them what they cannot accept. Always a child asks and expects from his teacher more than things : he claims some interpretation of the things offered, and some opportunity on his own part of interpreting them. A child's plaything is a play- thing, not because of its material qualities, but because of the immaterial qualities with which he chooses to invest it, and with which he expects his companions to join him in investing it. What we call material is, in fact, a symbol, often of great intrinsic worth, but mainly valuable for its symbolic character, because it suggests and expresses something of the mind, something spiritual. The first stage, of sense-perception, passes at once into that of image- making, and this second into that of thinking. We cannot prescribe with formal accuracy for our pupils what they ought to have. The reasons for that may be made still more plain. There are two : first, the pupil himself, though he may seem to be in one stage, is constantly crossing the borders of the others. The other reason is that the teacher is, like the pupil, a human creature, and though in his own mind he may for convenience distinguish certain elements, and in his development certain stages, it is the teacher as a whole, a composite unity, who is dealing with the pupil, and he cannot present to the pupil a merely material object for the eye to rest on and be content. He presents objects with names, and objects which have provoked thought. He belongs to all three stages of development, and his pupil, though less fully, owes allegiance to all of the three domains which have been distinguished. Though this is

104 Education and Schools [CH.

true, it is also true that a pupil may at a particular moment be mainly in one of these stages or provinces, and that he passes successively through all of them. At any rate, as a hypothesis this view may be considered: what guidance can we take to ourselves from it in regard to our practice in teaching?

A teacher's work may be said to fall into three stages. In the first, corresponding with that first stage of a child's development, he presents to his pupils a number of things for them to look at, to touch, to hear. He familiarises them with these objects. He selects from the great variety and wealth of the world certain things, separating them as he can, isolating them, as we say, within the schoolroom, that they may attract not merely the superficial gaze of his pupils, but a more attentive gaze and a more complete scrutiny than would else be bestowed; he presents to his pupils not only one aspect of these objects but many. He gives them the opportunity of achieving perceptions, under special conditions of quiet and security and freedom from disturbance, which would not be possible elsewhere. But he goes on at once from that preliminary process to another : he gives names to the things which he puts before them, and the names which he gives quickly appear to be the names not merely of individual objects, but of groups of such objects which correspond with the name because they correspond with an idea which the name represents. But the pupils must not be content with labelling or accepting without question the names of objects or groups of objects which are there before their eyes : they must learn to name for themselves. And if they are to do that, they must know why a name is attached definitely, what is the distinction which marks one thing off from another, and so necessitates a separate and a distinct name ; what are the points of resemblance and identity which bind other things together. Things are what we make them ; we are bound

vi] The Code 105

by them because we are bound by the laws of our own minds ; and if so, the very bonds which hold us are the symbols and insignia of our freedom.

To each of these several stages of development and of method, Rosenkranz1 has given convenient titles. The first he calls the illustrative, the second the method of combination, and the third the demonstrative method.

The first of these names needs little further explanation : the teacher shows his pupils the things he is talking about. Often to young children he shows actual external things, which may be presented at once to the eye, or may be touched and handled.

In the second stage, the image-making stage, he does more than that : he presents his object, whether it is some- thing visible and tangible or not, in such a way as to get them to look at it from various sides, to see of what elements it is made up, and by discovering these elements and the relations which they bear to each other, to discover also something at any rate of its relations with the world. Any definition of any thing means a partial definition of the whole universe. A definition marks out the boundaries of the thing defined, and also the boundaries, or some of the boundaries of everything which is not it. Image- making, in that sense, involves the establishment of relation- ships of two kinds: the relationship in the first place of the elements or constituents of the thing to one another, and the relationship in the second place of that thing as a whole to the whole world which embraces it.

The demonstrative method succeeds. If in the image- making stage we discover relationships, in the later, thinking, stage we discover the necessity for these relationships. Now the demonstrative method proceeds by one or other of two modes — lines which meet at last in a final and supreme method, to which modern philosophers like 1 Philosophy of Education, chap. vin.

io6 Education and Schools [CH.

Rosenkranz, and ancient philosophers like Plato, have alike given the name of dialectic. One of the modes of demonstration is analysis, the other is synthesis. The two combine in dialectic: a faithful and shrewd analysis leads to synthesis, just as a synthesis which is complete, by revealing the elements of which a thing is composed, involves analysis.

Let us see what that means. Let us take first the method of synthesis. We may begin with some particular fact; we collect more facts, and still more; for a time it seems as if we might continue to enlarge our experience so rapidly and so exhaustively that at last it should embrace all that was possible in whatever kind it might be : so that at last upon experience we could build a rule or law. But we soon learn that we cannot get all the examples, even of some very narrow and limited class under our observation. Always there will be some possibility at least, and generally a certainty, that there are other and still other examples of this kind or class which fall outside our range, and elude our grasp. What that involves us in is neither more nor less than this. We have seen that it is impossible to offer to other people, or receive from them, anything which is merely material. What we offer and what we give, though it seems material, has an immaterial or a spiritual quality, and it is in virtue of that mainly that we are able to seize it. The material form, the actual example, is not without worth : it is of very great value ; but it is of value mainly in so far as it is a symbol of this immaterial quality. We do not arrive at a general principle then by collecting every possible and actual instance of its operation. On the contrary, we must always make, if we are going from experience up to principle, a leap in the dark which is only justified by success. That is both an intellectual and a moral law. . A principle, whether of thinking, or of believing, or of conduct, is something intangible, general and immaterial.

vi] The Code 107

If we say that we arrive at this law by the collection and examination of particular instances, that is true, but it is only partly true. We can never collect all the instances, and even if we collected all the instances, they would remain material things. To pass from the material to the immaterial is to cross a stream over which there is neither bridge nor ferry, over which, if we are to pass it at all, we must pass by an act of venture, of faith, which may be justified or may not: we must take the risk. Complete proof of what is immaterial can never be supplied by however large a collection of material instances.

Let us now regard the matter from the opposite end, starting from principle, and in the light of principle seeking instances. The instances, though they seem, and rightly, to fall under our general principle, will constantly be, some in one way and some in another, defective; we shall not get a perfect instance, or if we did, contrary to experience, find a perfect instance, it would be an instance still, it would be a material thing. And just as in the other process we have to make a leap from the material to the immaterial, so we have in this process to make a leap from the im- material to the material.

We may test this doctrine in our own practice as teachers. We do not carry principles direct into a class-room. What we do in a class-room is, having reflected upon principle, having made it part of ourselves, to forget about it, and to behave as one imagines an artist does, delighting in his material, and, as by a fresh discovery, recognising his principle as it smiles back to him from the material in which he occupies his hands and his mind. We shall not do much good in a class-room if we reflect too deeply while we are there about the principles of teaching which we may have learnt. If we have learnt those things at all satis- factorily, we shall have learnt them in such a way that we can begin to use them, and shall have the delight of finding

io8 Education and Schools [CH.

our principle freshly embodied and newly presented in the instances of pupils or subjects with which we are dealing. But we shall have made a leap in the dark. We may believe that a leap in the dark made with real courage is never a leap into an abyss, but we have to admit that the leap in the dark which we make every time we do anything at all, is a leap which rarely lands us precisely where we expected to arrive. And it is because of the discrepancy, the difference between anticipation and reality, that our grasp of principle changes and improves, and practice becomes more perfect and certain. Or, to put that in other words which may now be fairly adopted, we do not discover our principle until we have applied it. The point from which we leap, as from some firm and strong starting-place, is never so firm, and never so real, as when we have leaped off it, and when we have leaped off it, we see it with a clearness and distinctness which were impossible when we were actually standing on it. The discovery of this truth is sometimes very painful, but teachers who do not make this discovery soon fall into a sleep which closely resembles death.

What is meant by the word dialectic? We have a kindred word in dialogue, the talk of two people together. Dialectic is the intimate conversation of the mind with itself, knowing itself, and yet making the discovery of itself; returning with familiarity upon what was well- known, to find that it was less well-known than was imagined. It is an advance into the unknown and the unfamiliar, and the discovery there of something homely and natural and not strange at all. Dialectic is a method which combines analysis and synthesis, that unites what is called induction and deduction; the mind itself is at home reflecting upon its own processes, engaged consciously upon its own activities.

There are, let us remind ourselves, three main conditions

vi] The Code 109

governing the work of the teacher : the nature of his subject, the nature of his pupils, and his own nature. The third is not the least important. While he is teaching, a man is not merely reviewing and repeating something which he has long known, and has now decided to rehearse, but reviving an experience. Now, if one revives an experience of the mind a second time or a thousandth time, he will find that he does not repeat it in precisely its original fashion ; his course varies, and though in general he seems to be pursuing the same path, fresh views present them- selves, fresh horizons open, and a different goal is arrived at. That is one of the attractions but also one of the dangers of teaching. It is a danger against which beginners have to be very much upon guard. Able and alert teachers, at the beginning of their course, often do what is indeed essential in a vivid and attractive lesson: they engage their own minds upon it as they proceed ; and yet because of that very virtue fail to arrive at the goal that they proposed, or perhaps arrive at no goal at all, and lead their pupils to none. That is a bad fault; but it is a better thing than the wooden and mechanical perfection of a person who plans out in detail exactly what he is going to do, and does that and nothing more.

Now, while the teacher's mind is engaged upon his subject, the pupil's mind is engaged, also, we will hope, upon the same subject, or upon some other subject, as well as may be, the teacher notwithstanding. In either case the effect is not the simple experience which the teacher projected for himself and for his pupil, but a composite thing consisting of something which came from the pupil as much as of something which came from the teacher. It is an experience shared, to which both parties have made a contribution. The mind of the pupil, like that of the teacher, is elusive, because it is alive and active. Though the teacher may aim at clearness and precision,

no Education and Schools [CH. vi

though he may plan his lesson out accurately and formally, he is always disappointed with a formal success, and always inclined, and rightly inclined, to prefer to mere formal perfection the sudden and unexpected gift of mind to mind when he warms to his subject, kindling his pupil's mind, and in turn getting illumination from him. Such a result the teacher can never exactly forecast, though he can prepare for it by cultivating a readiness to understand the conditions which we have now reviewed, and to meet the demands which they impose.

CHAPTER VII

THE FREEDOM OF THE PUPIL

IT may be well to reconsider the subjects dealt with in the last chapter. They may be presented now in a different form.

A teacher planning his lessons decides what he wants to

say and arranges his material, dividing it into natural

and proper sections, one leading on to another. He tries

to throw each of these sections into a form which will

interest and hold the attention of his pupils and through

the whole to maintain an artistic unity. The perfect

performance in any kind of human activity, the true work

of art, owes its rounded completeness to two causes. The

first of these is its clearness of definition, the strong and

unerring line which marks it off from other things which

are irrelevant, and not at the moment under consideration ;

and, what seems to contradict that, but does not in fact

contradict it, it owes its completeness to its power of relating

other things to itself; so that when teaching reaches the

level of artistry, the experience both of pupil and of teacher,

instead of consisting of a number of separate though

beautiful elements, is a whole as large as the life of each

and as wide-embracing as the world in which each lives.

The perfect lesson is always suggestive; it is not only

luminous and clear within its own limits, but it opens

avenues of interest and of light into fresh subjects and into

new fields upon which the teacher and the pupil both are

attracted to enter and travel.

H2 The Freedom of the Pupil [CH.

But teachers have also to consider their pupils. Novices have been known to declare that their main difficulty in giving lessons is, as they put it, to come down to the level of children. The phrase is unfortunate, but it represents a real effort that they have to make to take the point of view of those to whom they are addressing themselves, to learn their mind. It is a very good sign that this, which is a necessary thing, should appear to them to be a difficult thing. They make conscious and deliberate efforts to enter into the mind and to take the attitude of those whom they hope to teach. It is easy to fail in this meritorious attempt; and for two reasons. One is just want of experience ; that they have not mixed enough with the world, have not talked enough with people to be able readily to take up a point of view which is other than their own. The second is this: that they do not know their own point of view. A man cannot take his neighbour's point of view unless he has a point of view of his own ; he cannot understand another man's mind unless he has made some attempt, and a not unsuccessful attempt, to under- stand his own mind; and in order to understand his own mind he must have a mind to understand. If this appears too unkind a doctrine, we cannot abandon it ; but we may state it in a less disconcerting way. A guide must know where he is, before he can render the services which his name promises ; he must know also his route and his goal. So a teacher must have some clear direction, determined by his starting-point and his destination. The guide and the teacher are alike in another respect : each demands for the time from those whom he leads a certain self-surrender. Yet the guide is the servant, and the teacher the minister, of those who may use them.

We are often told that the best thing for children is to be natural, to develop spontaneously and freely the powers and gifts with which their nature is endowed: the

vn] The Freedom of the Pupil 113

process of education, it is urged, should be one by which they come to be more fully themselves.

Certainly we are all apt to resent restraint; we offer with such strength as we have an instinctive opposition to any will which conflicts with ours, to any purpose which seeks to dominate ours; we claim what we call freedom. Now, if education means the deliberate exercise of influence by one mind upon another, there can be no education at all without something like a violation of this freedom. Teachers are always trespassing upon the rights, invading the privileges, violating the freedom of their pupils; and it is very natural and very proper that the pupils should resent that. Granting that they resent it, that they feel this constraint to be irksome, as at times they must; or supposing that, even if the pupils did not feel the restraint to be irksome, their teachers felt some hesitation about imposing themselves upon their charges, would it be right for teachers to withhold that restraint, and to allow the pupils to do as they wished, and to grow up as they liked? 'Kindergarten' is a familiar word; it suggests a place in which children grow and bloom like flowers. Are they wild flowers, with their inimitable beauty, or are they cultivated flowers, with a beauty sometimes enhanced and more perfect, with a beauty often less perfect, less subtle, less fascinating? And even if they are wild flowers, to what does that analogy lead us? It leads us to the idea of dangers which may threaten the tender and beautiful growth, of drought and excessive heat, or torrent and tempest, damaging and blasting the beauty which should grow spontaneously and freely. If children are to grow like flowers, it will hardly be contended that they are to grow like wild flowers. We think rather of the cultivated garden, where the plants grow according to their nature but also according to art, where they are themselves, but where they become both what they are intended to be c. E. 8

114 The Freedom of the Pupil [CH.

and what they ought to be. They are subjected in fact to training. Then a question arises and claims an answer from all who are concerned in the practice of teaching: what right have you, with your scanty knowledge, with your vacillating will, with your imperfect character, with your dim realisation of what is best for yourself or for others, what right have you to impose yourself upon them even for a moment; and if you could make out a right, what instruments have you, what means at your disposal for your task? It is a question which might well give pause even to a stout practitioner and yet need not daunt a sensitive spirit. There is an answer; it is this: that while you cannot for your own sake, or for your pupils' sake, or indeed for the sake of the world, abandon the responsibility which seems to be put into your hand, of exercising influence, the condition of exercising influence is the receiving of influence at the same time. The real teacher, the master of his art, fashions for himself and for his pupils a new synthesis, an experience which combines what he offers to his pupils with what his pupils offer, sometimes uncon- sciously, to him. In that is at once the excuse and the justification for the teacher. In that view he appears no more as an intruder, an invader upon another's province. He appears rather as a fellow-citizen of a commonwealth in which he and they both have part : as a companion upon a journey which both are making. It is true he imposes a rule; but a rule which he himself obeys.

We have already noted three main stages or phases of a child's or a pupil's development, stages which pass, just like the stages of any road or journey, insensibly into one another. We may mark them off by milestones, but there is no break or gap between one division and another. Yet for convenience, and with a certain amount of truth, we may say that we see a beginning, a middle and an end to our journey. The beginning corresponds roughly to the

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stage of sense-perception, the stage characterised by the impact or impression of what we call outward things, the outward world, upon the senses. It is an old controversy with philosophers whether there is an outward world at all. So strongly have some people felt that the attributes which we give to external things are but the names of our own feelings, that they have been inclined to deny the existence of anything but mind itself. What we may more safely say is that the world exists for the mind, for the mind which sees and hears and interprets sensation to itself. But in saying so much we have already passed beyond mere sensation; we have used the word 'interpret.' We give a meaning to our experience. A touch is more than a touch ; a sight is more than what we see ; what we hear is more than a mere sound. Sight and touch and sound are all significant. But if these experiences are significant, if they have a meaning, they have a meaning because each one is more than itself. If we give a name to anything that we are acquainted with, the value of that name is twofold. It helps us to distinguish the thing from other things unlike it ; it helps us to co-ordinate the thing with other things that are like it. A name is a convenient symbol in speech or in writing, the symbol of an idea ; and an idea is always more than any particular thing, it is always more than all the things of the kind which are gathered together under the name. The truth of a thing, and still more the truth of groups of things, the idea which governs them, is other than the things which it governs, because it is greater than they : it is a principle which, reached through knowledge of things, itself makes them what they are. Though the stage of sense-perception may be said, not untruly or improperly, to precede that, it precedes it only by very little, and while preceding it, it is of hardly any value at all. By a necessity of its nature, by the desire, the hunger for interpretation, the mind is driven to give meanings to things, to group them, to

8—2

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form an image of them, which is no mere reflection upon a mirror, but fashions itself forth as a principle, true, no doubt, to fact, but controlling fact, because discovering the meaning which underlies fact.

In doing that, in arriving at this image-making stage, we pass from the tangible to the intangible, from the material to the immaterial; and such a passage is more clearly marked just as it becomes more necessary, when we consider the third stage of which Rosenkranz speaks. The third stage is what he calls the stage of thinking, always a difficult performance, and, as he seems to believe, rarely achieved. The thinking stage can be distinguished from the others in this way: that whereas in the image- making stage a number of particulars — particular things, particular elements of experience — which fall appropriately in a class are grouped under a name, or an idea, or an image, in the thinking stage something more than that is done: we discover the reason or the necessity which makes these elements into a class ; we also discover the links or bonds which unite the several classes of several sets of things into a whole system, into an organised world, the world of our mind.

What is this reason or necessity? This question is often put in another form : What are the grounds of proof ? How do we prove anything? Let us take an example. Supposing we say that a lyric is a short poem. How do we prove that? We might collect a thousand lyrics; they are all short ; we might collect ten thousand lyrics ; they are all short ; we might collect all the lyrics that have ever been written and find them all short. Though we might seem to have established strong grounds for believing that a lyric is short, we should not have proved it, because we might go away, for all the proof that was there, and write a long lyric. We prove that a lyric is short, not by collecting all the lyrics that were ever written and showing

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that they were all short things, but by showing in any one lyric, in half-a-dozen lyrics, some essential quality in virtue of which the lyric is short and can be nothing else. If we say a lyric is the passionate note in which some single poignant feeling is expressed — the delight of a child in a flower, the exquisite rapture which music brings, the sharp- ness of pain, the vehement happiness of memory or anticipation or present enjoyment; if we say that, we have proved that a lyric is short because it is evident no one can long sustain feeling so exquisite or expression so pure. Proof is not a process but a revelation.

It is with facts that we have to deal ; it is in practical concerns that we have to spend our lives. The most practical people are those who make a journey to and fro between the common ground of experience and this higher region. The triumph of thought is achieved when they have made one the territory of experience and the province of idea.

How can they achieve so strange a triumph? We must not allow ourselves to be confused by the metaphor we have employed : it has its use ; it can easily be misused. It might be argued, by a prosaic disputant, that we have named one territory, with which he is familiar, that of ordinary experience; that we have assumed the existence of another with which he is content or even proud to be unacquainted, that of ideas; and — here he would claim that he finally routed us — we have spoken of a passage from the first to the second, without indicating the means by which the passage could be made.

The reply to these objections is not in fact hard to make : the acquaintance, which the sceptic admits, with facts or ordinary experience is only possible to him in the measure in which he understands facts and interprets experience; already he is an idealist ; but he is a dissatisfied and half- hearted idealist not because he has failed to identify the two regions of human activity and thought, but because

n8 The Freedom of the Pupil [CH. vn

he has failed to discover or create a unity in himself. The journey of which we have spoken is the progress of a life, obeying its own laws : in such a progress the road cannot be dissociated from its goal.

If then we ask once more the question which we put to ourselves earlier: "By what right does a teacher invade the freedom of the pupil? " we may reply that it is in virtue of the recognition within himself of a law which constrains him to obedience, since it unifies and rationalises his life; a law which, while expressing in a supreme form the significance of his life, has a range of operation wider and more general than his life. What hitherto has seemed to be an invasion made by him upon the freedom of his pupil is the discovery to his pupil that the same law has power over him also. A man who undertakes the business of education is engaged in revealing to his pupils what they have imperfectly apprehended of themselves — the unity of their own lives.

CHAPTER VIII

THE BUSINESS OF THE TEACHER

THE curriculum of a school is the list of subjects which are taught in it. The experience of our predecessors, the wisdom of the community in which we live, have decided that these things are necessary. They make a long and formidable list. In Elementary Schools the teacher must attempt to deal with several, if not all of them; and in Secondary Schools, where what is called specialisation is allowed, the specialist teacher will rarely find himself exclusively occupied with the one subject in which he claims to have special knowledge.

A moment's attention will show that it is a monstrous thing for a man to attempt to teach all these subjects — for the very simple reason that he does not know them. He is to teach children to read and write. Does he read, and can he write? There are comparatively few people who can write a good English sentence, fewer who can make a good English paragraph ; fewer still who can get to the end of even a short essay without quite serious and obvious mistakes in grammar, in arrangement, in style. But he is to teach children to read and write. He is to teach them arithmetic and elementary mathematics. Does he under- stand what number is, can he use number, can he even do the ordinary reckonings of daily life with rapidity and ease and correctness? But these are not all the subjects with which he will deal. He will teach children history. But

I2O The Business of the Teacher [CH.

he has read very little history; certainly he cannot claim to be a historian. Again, what is his knowledge of geography? Drawing appears in the curriculum. What is drawing? Is it a symbolic writing? Is it a mode more convenient than words for representing ideas? But does the teacher represent his ideas in forms and colours? Is it natural to him to express himself in that way? But he will be teaching drawing. Once more, he will teach children physical exercises. Let us suppose that he can do the things he asks of them; but it is very much open to question whether vigour of body, expressing itself in grace of movement, in balance of form, in proportion, and, what gives to proportion life, the control of the whole body by an intelligent and alert mind — it is open to question whether this is for him a living and operative idea. We need not prolong the list. How is the teacher to give instruction in these things, which, if the truth were told, he does not know?

The answer to this troublesome question may be found if the question is fearlessly and fully put. Let the teacher review the subjects which he knows best. The more he knows, the less inclined will he be to claim more than that he is interested, that he desires to know more of them. But he has undertaken to teach these subjects: is his equipment adequate for the task? He is to be for a time, and in a particular place — a school — the representative of these subjects. What are subjects? Subjects are ideas which have seized the mind, held it so strongly, moved it so powerfully, that it expresses them in some outward form. Has he been seized, held, swayed in this fashion?

There is another question to consider in dealing with the curriculum of a school. It is often said, wisely some- times, plausibly always, that the business of a school, or a business of the school, is to prepare pupils for their calling or vocation in life. Here again is a difficulty. We do

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not know what their calling in life is to be. They may be tinkers, tailors, soldiers, and so on: and at that age it is impossible to anticipate which of these various professions they will take up. But supposing he knew, how is a man to teach a profession which he has not learnt himself? He is not a clerk, not a plumber. He is a teacher. Teaching what? Everything, on this assump- tion, except his own subject. A teacher seems to be a pale shadow: there seems to be no substance in his work. In self-defence he may say that this claim put forward for the schools is a wrong claim, that it is not his business to prepare children for their calling. The technical equip- ment of his pupils must come, he may contend, as his own has come, by practice or by special instruction, or by both. It is for him to give them a preliminary training on which their special training may presently be based. That can reasonably be said. But we have still to admit that this preliminary training includes subjects the variety and number of which may well alarm a teacher. He may draw some comfort for himself from the consideration of some familiar facts, which he should recall and keep in mind.

At the earliest stages a child expresses himself by various shouts and cries, all intelligible enough to those who are nearest to him, his mother and his nurse. Whether it is warmth or food or sleep, he gets on the whole what he wants. He has not yet learnt to say: "I want this or that," or "I feel so and so" ; his want is himself; his feeling is himself; he does not distinguish between them and himself. He is a joy or he is a pain ; he is a hunger or he is a satisfaction : he does not possess and feel these states which are of the simplest kind. Presently he grows older, and finds that over against him is a world, which, as he gazes upon it more and more intently, he divides in his speculation into parts : parts of it are hard, parts soft, bright, dull, and so forth;

122 The Business of the Teacher [CH.

parts make noises, parts are always silent; and while he is making this simple analysis of the world, he is necessarily making an analysis of himself. He has made his first analysis when he distinguished himself from the world. Earlier not only was he his own sensations, but he was his world. Now he has a world, and when he has got a world he discovers that he has a self. He looks at himself, and finds in himself states of pleasure or pain, satisfaction or want, ambitions, impulses, and the rest. When such an analysis has been made, the mere shout or cry of pleasure or pain, expressing a simple want, which the child uttered before, is insufficient for him. He does not now want the world, which to him was once sleep and food, but he wants a part of the world; he wants a toy, he wants to stroke the cat, to play with the ball ; he wants this or that parti- cular bit of the world, and so the mere shout will not suffice him: he has to make the shouts into articulate words. He is not always successful in this differentiation. Children often use a common word for a variety of things, and the wrong word for something which they desire.

Now, at home what we do of course is to give the child what he wants or what he needs, when that is possible, and with the thing the name of it. We satisfy his need and form his vocabulary at the same time. We teach him in fact to speak. We help him to make a correct analysis of the world and a correct analysis of himself, and to have the parts into which he analyses himself and the world duly under his command by having the proper names to which they answer on his lips. This is the very essence of speech ; it is at the root of reading and writing, arts which we practise and try to cultivate in school. Or again, as a child learns to move, moving his hands, his eyes, then getting command of his legs and being able to crawl or walk, he is learning measurement and number. He realises as he falls against one chair and then another and

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then a third, that there are more hard things than one in the room. He realises, moreover, that there are intervals of time represented by certain stresses of muscular effort between these various objects which touch him and hurt him. It takes him time, which he dimly realises, it takes him trouble, which he more clearly realises, to pass from one of these objects to another. He soon desires to know the meaning and the nature of the things which he encounters. He desires to be exact: to know how many chairs or other things there may be, and how long it will take him to reach one when he has left another. He is measuring, he is counting, and we help him there again. We help him by our own practice, as he sees us moving from point to point. We are dealing with the elements of number, and the elements of measurement, and we give names to our numbers and measures.

Or, to take yet another example, when a teacher walks into a room with a certain beauty of movement, or sits down as a human being may, pleasantly and easily, or gets up again and goes away with a graceful dignity — he is teaching himself, as well as the child whose gaze is fixed upon him, balance and proportion and harmony of the human frame in movement, in action, and at rest. What is done in the playground or in the schoolroom under the heading of drill is only, if it is any good at all, the ordered and systematic training in certain movements and attitudes which men have realised to be movements and attitudes of grace and beauty, and of grace and beauty because of health and strength.

The subjects of school instruction are no doubt numerous, but the embarrassed and over-conscientious teacher may ask himself whether he may not be using, practising, and therefore, perhaps in the most effective way of all, teaching all these subjects, not as a teacher but as a human being. If so, his use of these subjects in general will be coloured

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and affected, made more vivid and more valuable, because more characteristic and personal, by his special use of the particular subject in which he is supremely interested; but the fact that he has what we call a 'special subject' need not condemn him to the dull and mechanical career of a specialist, as the specialist is too apt to make it. The specialist should be a man in whom, above the normal level to which the common powers of human nature are developed, some particular power rises to eminence; not a man who has sacrificed the common powers with the single exception which he is pleased to regard as his special distinction. A mole-hill on a flat lawn is not a mountain. We must, then, discover what is our main subject, but recognise that besides this main subject, which we pursue to technical perfection because of our natural aptitude for it, we have as human beings necessarily the use of a score of other subjects, and our use of these subjects gives at least one qualification for teaching them.

We may now go back to the two questions with which we set out. How are we to teach children what we do not know? The reply is that we do know something of the subjects, most of them, perhaps all of them : we are using them, imperfectly it may be, but constantly and actively, in our career, not as teachers but as human beings. And it is more important to be a human being, and to remain that, than to be a teacher. The only justification for a teacher is that he is one of a particular kind of human beings who realise their humanity in the form of that profession. If all that can be said of him is that he is a teacher of a particular sort, then he is a thin abstraction and hardly deserves to be thought of.

And then for the second problem — the preparation of the pupil for his career. We saw what the difficulty was there. Surely we have discovered a way of escape: his main calling is the same as ours. It is the calling of a human

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being. He must learn to be himself; he must, with our aid, practise his body and his mind in all the manifold activities in which body and mind can take healthy and beautiful exercise, and that is the real foundation upon which presently special skill in this craft or another may be built up.

Let us approach these problems once more in the light of our experience. Every extension of our knowledge and of our power involves first a deepening realisation of our own selves, and next, a vision growing daily clearer of the world in which we are placed. Now, if this self-realisation and this comprehension of the world are sincere and vivid, the two processes are found more and more completely to coalesce and to combine the one with the other. We discover the world in which we live in the process of realising ourselves, and find ourselves by this simultaneous process of discovering the world. We are often misled by the figures which we are almost bound to use in explanation or illustra- tion of our meaning. For example, we talk of progress, and we picture before our minds a journey, a way leading from a starting-point to some goal or destination; we imagine a traveller passing stage by stage from the be- ginning to the end of this way. Each stage is marked by so much of the journey done, so much of the road left behind him, and consequently so much less to achieve, so much the shorter distance to travel. It is a very natural image and sometimes very useful, but it is always apt to be, and very frequently is, misleading; for any progress in which a man is occupied as a thinking, feeling, conscious creature, is not a progress from one point of departure to another point of termination, but a development round a centre. It is a progress in which each stage is included in each following stage, in which nothing is left behind. The journey, in fact, is never done.

This is readily admitted as a general observation, but

126 The Business of the Teacher [CH.

its application is often forgotten in particular instances: it is sometimes forgotten by teachers in regard to their pupils. They too are pursuing a journey, but the way which they travel is also a life. It is dangerous to distinguish between the road which is being travelled, and the con- sciousness of the person who is moving along it. Way and life must be identified if truth is to be won. And the truth is nothing else than the unification, gradually becoming more and more complete, of the individual with the world, the realisation of self in society, the develop- ment of a citizen loyal to his country because true to himself.

Pupils are like their teachers alive, discovering them- selves by the discovery of the world, making the world their own by the growing clearness with which they realise their own needs, and their own powers. Shall we then say that the best system of education is simply letting people alone? There they are and there is the world, and the vital principle within them will make them expand and realise and absorb the world in which they are placed. Let us permit them to grow in happy security. There is much to be said for that view. Most of us are far too much doctored and tended and trained, and would be a great deal the better for some considerable period of wholesome neglect, when we should lose "the creeping hours of time." We need not undervalue this self-education, this education, as it might be called, of neglect, but we cannot be content with it. Look carefully at a list of subjects to be taught in schools, and you will see that however professional and technical their names, they stand for things which you yourself are using in your daily commerce with the world. You may not be a mathematician, but you are dependent to some extent upon mathematics and are using them; you may not be an orator, but you are dependent constantly upon speech, and you are using it; you may not be a

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person of letters, or even of literary taste, but once more you are dependent upon letters and upon books. In every case you are in some degree more or less concerned with and dependent upon these subjects, as we call them, of school instruction.

Now, for people who have been 'left alone,' whose education has been, as we say, neglected, though they know some things remarkably well, and with a vivid- ness and fullness that schooling rarely imparts, there are, as against that advantage, large and important parts of human experience and knowledge, in regard to which their knowledge is so fragmentary and so unsystematised as to be of very little practical value. What the teacher has to do is to remedy this danger and correct this defect. The child, like the teacher, needs these subjects primarily as a human being, in order to live a human life in society. The teacher has to analyse as well as he may the contents of his pupils' minds. He cannot ask them questions about their minds; he has to divine and guess at their quality and their possessions. He has to discover for himself the tradition of the home from which they come. He will get some inkling from the stories they read ; he will eagerly catch their turns of speech ; he will notice their complexion, their tricks and habits of body, their vigour or their lassitude. All these and a hundred other evidences he will use, and he will see that, rich as they may be in one point, they are poor elsewhere, and he will seek to fortify and establish what is weak in their experience by adding to what the world, what society, what home has given them in unconscious education, those things which are to be provided in a conscious and deliberate education. There are indeed some persons who think that the task of the teacher, the professional teacher, lies wholly in the field of deliberate education. That is an extreme and mistaken view. It is necessary to distinguish between the two

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types or modes of education, but not to divorce them. This becomes clear if the question is regarded from another standpoint. It is sometimes said that the greatest success in teaching is reached and proved when the teacher makes himself, not indispensable but, unnecessary to his pupils. The sooner they can do without him, it is urged, the better for them and for him. This is a vehement and provocative way of expressing what, if more temperately stated, may be taken as true.

The truth is that neither teacher not pupil is independent ; each is dependent on the other, because each is a part of and dependent on society, humanity at large. This wider dependence qualifies the narrower dependence in which they stand as related one to the other, and gives each of them his proper dignity. If the teacher is to bring his pupils to a realisation of themselves, he must be living his own life, subordinating the professional element to his own natural and spontaneous desires and instincts, merging the teacher in the man. It ought to be obvious to his pupils that he is enjoying himself as a whole, not his special skill upon the blackboard, his rapidity in arithmetic, his happy turns in English composition, but himself as a complete, healthy and happy human being, who finds his particular metier for part of his time in a certain group of duties, discharged as it happens in a schoolroom, and doing them not because he must, but because he likes doing them.

Real teaching consists in this and in nothing less than this : it is a building up, partly with the skill of well-directed effort, but partly also without premeditation, and as the free and generous gift of heaven, of a common experience shared by teacher and pupils, a thing neither his nor theirs, but a fresh impulse of life which comes and enriches both, as two minds and hearts come into contact, as two worlds strike one another and break and dissolve, and become a larger world than either was before.

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A man who teaches in this manner, and at this level, will find his work irresistible in its fascination, and in the end irresistible in its power. He will probably also find it very fatiguing. It is fatiguing to the spirit and to the body of a man to say what he means. There are in fact very few things that a man means, that he knows at first hand. Here a difficult question is constantly being put by the nature of his work to the teacher. He is using words more constantly than ordinary folk, and using words which ought to be specially significant. It is possible to use them as mere counters without realising the signi- ficance which properly attaches to them. But supposing that in dealing with what he calls school-subjects he attaches not merely a formal and conventional meaning, but a real meaning, corresponding to some actual need, and use, and power of his own life, — the pressure and strain upon his vitality will be great.

Imagine such a teacher; what would be the character- istics of his work? His teaching would be simple; there would be no mystery about it, no beating about the bush. The plainest language would be sufficient for his purpose, and indeed it would be the only tolerable language for a person who was so intent upon the reality and beauty of the subject with which he was dealing, as to be impatient of any formal or conventional decoration of words : — his speech would be limpid and lucid.

Another quality that would mark such teaching would be its hopefulness. There would be no question at all in the mind of such a teacher as to the ultimate victory of his cause, the ultimate winning, for what he must regard not merely as knowledge but as belief, of the ground held at the moment by ignorance or disbelief. He would be quite sure of himself because he was quite sure of his subject. He would accordingly be patient and hopeful.

He would make very little appeal to authority; he c. B. o

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would not need to support what he said by reference to this or that great name; still less would he press his own authority upon those who listened to him. He would speak with authority because he would speak with convic- tion; but he would scorn to speak by authority. The person who speaks by authority speaks at second hand; he speaks what another has told him. The person who speaks with authority speaks at first hand; he says what he knows.

One more characteristic of such a teacher has been named already. His teaching would be sympathetic, he would, quite naturally, share the experience of his pupils; for he would invite them with proper reserve, and with the frankness which goes with proper reserve, to share his experience, to enter into his own life.

INDEX

Action, and habit, 5, 6, 21; prompted by emotion, 9, 10; mechanical and spiritual, g ; transformed into ritual, 12; interdependence of idea and, 16; made significant by imagination, 29

Activity, prompted by necessity, 8 ; governed by two quali- ties, 18; development the object of, 23 ; organised and unorganised, 32, 33

Artist, interpreter of an ideal, 1 1 ; characteristics of the, 31 ; his work of selection and interpretation, 36 sq. ; teacher as an, 98, in, 114

Athens, the 'School of Hellas,' 42 ; her preeminence, 43 ; the duties of her citizens, 44, 46 ; her social ideal, 53, 55 ; her ideal contrasted with that of Rome, 58

Beauty, and utility, 10 ; sought after by the Athenians, 45, 53 ; relation of, to action, 75

Butcher, S. H., monograph on Demosthenes, 47, 52

Character, personal, 4 ; national, 13 ; aim of a school to form, 76,96

Cicero, on oratory, 57 Coleridge, S. T., on truth, 19

Demosthenes, monograph on, 47 ; The Crown, 47 ; his train- ing as an orator, 48 ; closing words of his speeches, 52

Destiny, inscrutability of, 51, 53 ; yet kindred with human will, 53

Drama, as an expression of the ideal, n

Education, history of, based on study of social institutions, 14, 21 ; discovery and ob- servance of the social law, 16; by means of Greek and Roman literature, 41 sq. ; in Athens, 53, 54; process of learning to maintain con- versation, 72; subjects of, 73 sq., 119, 120; formation of character, 76, 96 ; English, criticism of, 95 ; outlined in the Code, 95 sq. ; a sharing of experiences, 109, 114, 128; self -education, 126

Fowler, W. Warde, on the Athenian citizen, 46

Gods, attitude of the Greeks

towards, 50 Goodness, aim of the idealist, 17,

67 ; intelligence necessary to,

69, 96; involves discipline,

96

Habit, and action, 5

Harmony, of the mind with itself, 14, 15; between man and the world, 17, 18, 34; in the varied interests of a man's life, 29, 33; in the social ideal of the Greeks, 43, 53 ; in the human frame, 123

132

Index

Harris, W. T., Psychologic Foun- •>1 dations of Education, 73 Health, result of discipline, 20, 53; as an expression of the ideal, 53, 70, 120, 123; morality of, 49

Humanity, aim of education, 64, 80,124; the supremely good thing, 83, 84 ; hard to define, 85 ; its expression in various professions, 85 sq. Humility, contrast between Greek and modern conception of, 52; in teacher and pupil, 118

Ideals, individual, 2 ; social, 2 ; their expression in conduct, 3, 19 ; change essential to their existence, 3, 4, 8, 20; expressed in convention, 60; our expressions of beauty, 74 ; difficulties in giving expres- sion to, 84 sq. ; of the Code, 97, 100

Imagination, makes action sig- nificant, 29

Individual, ideals of the, 2; his character, 4; his self- realisation, 13 ; his self- surrender, 17, 126; apparent antagonism to claims of Society, 25, 34

Intelligence, necessary to good- ness, 69, 96

Language, and the Greeks, 53; symbols for ideas, 81, 115, 122; at its highest level becomes poetry, 82 ; limits thought, 84; but gives it precision, 86 ; inevitable me- dium of communication, 86 ; place of, in the Code, 99 ; of good teaching, 129

Leisure, claimed by the Athe- nians, 45

Mackail, J. W., Latin Literature, Man, province of, 68, 73, 97

Morality, and manners, 49 Moral training, and intellectual discipline, 100 sq.

Nature, province of, 68, 75, 97

Orator, comprehensive training of the Greek, 48; value set by the Romans upon oratory, 56; and citizenship, 57

Paul, St, 56

Pericles, calls Athens the ' School of Hellas,' 42 ; on the duties of an Athenian, 44, 51

Plato, and the harmony between man and the world, 34 ; on the guardians of the ideal commonwealth, 43 ; and dia- lectic, 105

Poet, Wordsworth's definition of the, 38

Poetry, as an expression of the ideal, n

Progress, discontent cause of, 8, 24; condition of activity, 18; obeys tradition, 20; advance from known to un- known, 35 ; development round a centre, 125

Psychology, of child's develop- ment, 101 sq.

Quintilian, scheme of Roman education, 56, 57

Reformation, ideals of the, 62 Renaissance, ideals of the, 61 Repose, the object of activity, 1 8, 20, 35; enables the mind to renew its strength, 21, 35 ; periods of, arrangement and review of activity in, 37; not slumber, 45 ; in teaching,

Ritual, 12, 39

Rome, her ideal of Empire, 55 ;

her scheme of education, 56 ;

her ideal contrasted with

that of Athens, 58

Index

133

Rosenkranz, J. K. F., his theory of intellectual development, 105, 116

Rutilius, Namatianus (Claudius), 54

Self, realisation of the personal, 13; the social, 14

Self-development, involves self- surrender, 17, 25

Society, ideals of, 2 ; character of, 13 ; the social self, 14 ; law of, 1 6 ; claim of, on the individual, 17> 25i 341 its soul, 87

Socrates, and goodness, 69

Statesmanship, as an art, 29, 30, 40 ; ancient and modern, 30, 46

Taste, virtue in, 10

Teaching, fusion of minds, 83, 100, 109, 128; must be an expression of the characters

of Society, the profession, the individual teacher, the pupils, 90, 91 ; art of, 98, in, 114; three stages in, 104, 114; three conditions governing, io3, 109 ; of sub- jects, 90, ngsq. ; character- istics of good, 129, 130 Temperance, for the Athenian,

49

Thucydides, on the State of Athens, 42, 44, 45

Tradition, the channel of pro- gress : belief and ritual, 20

Unity, of Society, 13, 83 ; means of effecting it, 16; need for intelligent, 27, 28; induces repose, 36

Versatility, art of, 49, 57 Wordsworth, William, 38

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