It is thus that their personality is unified and strengthened. The exercise which serves as the means to this end is designed gradually to perfect the accuracy with which they perceive the external world, observing, reasoning, and correcting the errors of the senses in a sustained and spontaneous activity. It is they who act, they who choose the objects, they who persevere in their work, they who seek to win from their environment the possibility of concentrating their minds upon it. Each one of them moves in obedience to the motor power within him. They are not disturbed by a teacher, by a being obviously superior to themselves, who intimidates the shrinking poverty of those who are beginning life by her lofty intellectual riches, who darkens rather than illuminates, who wearies rather than refreshes; but they live in peace with her who, almost a priestess, is yet a servant. As in some ideal convent, humility, simplicity, and work make up the environment where he who meditates will some day feel within himself the clearness of vision, the intuition, almost the sensibility, which make one ready to receive the truth.
To a different end, but by the same road, amidst the silence, the simplicity, and the humility of the monastery, the spirit prepares itself to receive the faith at the outset of life.
Many years ago, when I first received the impression that our children revealed general principles of life which in practise we are only privileged to encounter among the intellectual and spiritualéliteof society, and that for this reason they were at the same time the revealers of a form of unconscious oppression which weighed down humanity, deforming the inner life, I spoke at length upon the matter to an intellectual lady, who was much interested in my "theories,"and very anxious that I should make them the subject of an elaborate philosophical treatise; but she could not bring herself to accept the idea that it was a question of an experimental process. When I spoke of the children, she showed some impatience: "Oh, yes, I quite understand all about these children; in intelligence they are so many geniuses, and in goodness so many angels." But when, after some persuasion, I succeeded in making her come andseefor herself, she took my hands and looked earnestly in my face: "Have you never thought," she asked, "that you may die at any moment?... Write at once, anyhow, in all haste, as you would write a will, a simple description of the facts, that you may not carry away this secret with you to the grave."
Nevertheless, I was in excellent health.
If we examine the mental labors of men of genius to whom we owe discoveries which have opened new paths to thought, and have given us new sources of well-being and social progress, we shall have to admit that in themselves they cannot be described as extraordinary processes, inaccessible to mediocrity. "Genius coincides with the possession in a very high degree of the power of association by similarity. This is the essential quality of genius," says Bain. Even at the "central point" of discovery, it is only by accurate observation and a very simple process of reasoning, of which most persons would consider themselves capable, that the discovery is made. At most it is due to a marshalling of "evidences" which, however, passed unnoticed by all but the discoverer.
We may say that genius has the faculty of isolating a fact in the consciousness, and of so distinguishing it from all others that it isas if a single ray of light should fall upon a diamond in a dark room. This single idea, then, causes a complete revolution in the consciousness, and is capable of constructing something infinitely great and precious for all humanity.
But it is the intense significance of ordinary things, and not the abnormal, which is the main factor; it is the isolation in a homogeneous field, not the intrinsic value of the thing, which determines the marvelous phenomenon. Perhaps within countless thousands of chaotic perceptions the gem had existed, stored up amidst a multitude of useless and cumbrous objects, and had never succeeded in arresting attention; meanwhile inertia continued to allow new objects to penetrate continually within the distended and impotent walls. After a discovery, many will perceive that they themselves held the same truth within them; but in this case it is not the truth itself that has value, but the man who is capable of appreciating it and bringing it into relation with action.
But very often it is not the case that the newly discovered truth already exists in the chaos of obscure consciousness; and then the new light, simple though it be, can find no way by which to penetrate into the mind.
It is rejected as something strange and fallacious; and a certain lapse of time is necessary, a certain coordination of the intelligence, to enable the "novelty" to enter. Yet some day it will be considered clear as crystal. It was not the "nature" of man which shrank from it, but his "errors." These errors not only make man incapable of production, but are in themselves hostile to receptivity. Thus it often happens that the pioneers of salvation are persecuted by a sort of unconscious ingratitude, which is the fruit of spiritual darkness.
What was the argument of Christopher Columbus? He thought: "If the earth is really round, he who starts from a certain point and advances steadily, will return to the point of departure." This was thesumof the intellectual work which enriched mankind with a new world.
That a great continent should have lain in the track of Columbus, and that he should have encountered this and not death, was the destiny due to the chance of environment. The environment sometimes rewards "small reasonings" of this kind in a surprising manner.
It was certainly not a great labor of human intelligence which brought about these great results; it was the triumph of this idea over the whole consciousness, and the heroic courage of the man, which gave it its value. The great difficulty, for the man who had conceived the idea, was to persevere until he could persuade others to help him in his enterprise, to give him ships and followers. It was thefaithand not theideaof Columbus which triumphed.
That simple and logical reasoning kindled within him something infinitely more precious than intelligence, and enabled a single man of humble origin, and almost uneducated, to present a world to a queen.
We are told that Alessandro Volta's wife was ill with fever, and that he, in accordance with the practise of his day, was preparing the usual febrifuge, a broth of skinned frogs; it was a rainy day, and when he hung up the dead frogs on the iron bar of the window, he noticed that their legs contracted. "If dead muscles contract, it must mean that some external force has penetrated them." This was the simple argument of the "genius," the "great discoverer." And seeking this force, Volta, by means of his piles, was able to wrest from theearth electricity, which is, literally as well as figuratively, the "gleam" of an immense progress. Laying due weight upon a little fact, such as that of a dead being having moved, considering it soberly without any fanciful additions, and fixing the mind upon the resulting problem: Why does it move?—such was the lengthy process by which one of the greatest conquests of civilization was achieved.
Akin to this was Galileo's discovery, when, standing in Pisa Cathedral, he watched the oscillations of a hanging lamp. He observed that the oscillations were all completed in the same space of time, and the isochronism of the pendulum was the beginning of the measurement of time for all men, and of the measurement of worlds for the astronomer.
How simple, too, is the story of Newton, who felt an apple fall upon him as he lay under a tree, and thought to himself: "Why did that apple fall?" Such was the simple origin of the theory of the gravity of bodies, and that of universal gravitation.
When we study of the life of Papin, we marvel at the culture which placed him on a level with the most learned men of his times: as physician, physiologist, and mathematician, he was distinguished and honored by the universities of England and Germany. Nevertheless, what gave him his value to humanity, and hence his greatness, was the fact that his attention had been arrested by the sight of the lid of a saucepan of boiling water raised by the steam. "Steam is a force which could lift a piston as it lifts the cover of a saucepan, and become the motor power of a machine." Papin's famous saucepan is a kind of magic wand in the history of mankind, which thenceforth began to workand travel without fatigue. How wonderful are such stories of great discoveries arising from humble beginnings, and working miracles throughout the world!
These, in their origins, resemble those living creatures, born of two imperceptible microscopic cells, the fusion of which inevitably tends to the creation of complex lives. To perceive exactly and to connect the things perceived logically is the work of the highest intelligence. But this work is characterized by a peculiar power of attention, which causes the mind to dwell upon a subject in a species of meditation, the characteristic mark of genius; the outcome is an internal liferich in activities, just as the germinative cells are the fruit of internal existences. It would seem that such mentalities are distinguished from those of the ordinary type, not by their form, but by their "force." It is the vigorous life from which those two small intellectual sparks arise, which makes them so marvelous. If they had not sprung from strong, independent personalities, capable of persistent effort and heroic self-sacrifice, those little intellectual works would have remained as things inert and negligible. Hence all that strengthens the spiritual man may lead him in the footsteps of the genius.
Thus, as regards the intelligence in itself, the work it has to accomplish is a small matter, but it is clearly defined, and stripped of superfluous complications. Simplicity is the guide to discovery; simplicity which, like truth, should be naked. Very little is necessary; but this little must constitute a powerful unity; the rest is vanity.
And the greater this vanity, that is to say, the futile encumbrance of the mind, the more will the light of the spirit be darkened and its forces dissipated, making it difficult or impossible not only toreason and act, but even to perceive reality, to see.
It would be interesting to make a rapid survey of those collective individual errors by which the progress of a new discovery of a simple kind, offering relief to suffering humanity, has been impeded; errors which have even caused persistent denial of the existence of obvious facts, merely because these were not generally known.
Let us consider for a moment the discovery of the cause of malaria. This discovery, due to the Englishman, Ross, in connection with birds, and to the Italian, Grassi, in connection with man, consists in having found out that the plasmodium of malaria, which produces the malady, is inoculated in man and in the various animals subject to it, by a special kind of mosquito. Let us inquire what was the state of science prior to this discovery. In 1880 Laveran had described an animal micro-organism, which preyed upon the red corpuscles of the blood, producing an attack of fever with the cycle of its existence. Subsequent studies confirmed and elucidated this fact, and theplasmodium malariaebecame a matter of common knowledge. It was known that animal micro-organisms, unlike vegetable micro-organisms, after a cycle of life in which reproduction takes place by scission—that is, by subdivision of a single body into several other bodies equal to the first, give place tosexual forms, masculine and feminine, which are separate, and incapable of scission, but are designed forfusion into one another, after which the organism recommences its cycle of scissions until it again reaches the sexual forms.
Laveran had found that in the blood of sufferers who recover spontaneously from malarial fever there are a great number ofcorpuscles which have no longer the rounded forms of the plasmodia, but are crescent-shaped and rayed. He took these to be transformations of the plasmodia, "modified in form" and "incapable of producing disease," and pronounced them to be "degenerate" organisms, almost as if they had been deformed and exhausted by the "excess of work" they had previously performed. These organisms were described as "Laveran's degenerative forms." After the discovery of the transmission of malaria in 1900, Laveran's "degenerative forms" were recognized as the sexual individuals of the reproductive cycle: individuals which were incapable of conjugation in the blood of man, and could only produce new organisms in the body of the mosquito. We may well wonder: Why did not Laveran simply recognize those sexual forms, and why did he not seek for the period of conjugation in the plasmodia, which were animal micro-organisms? If he had borne in mind the complete cycle of the protozoa, he would have recognized them. But evidently Morel's theories of the degeneration of man had made a much livelier impression on his imagination; and his leap from these remote theories to his interpretation of the plasmodia seemed an achievement of "genius." It may be said that this "feat of genius," this visionary generalization, prevented Laveran from seeing the truth. A form ofarroganceandlevityis apparent in such errors.
Moreover, we are astonished by something still more serious: how came it that hundreds and thousands of students throughout the world accepted Laveran's error with their eyes shut, that not one among so many took into consideration on his own account the cycle of the protozoa, and that not one was sufficiently independent to set about studying the phenomenon for himself? What is this mental form ofinertia? and why does it produce itself in man? All these disciples, heedless of the problem presented to their minds by the sexual form of the plasmodium, left it alone, although it had not yet been solved, and certainly had no intuition of the fame, the progress in science, and the benefit to humanity which would have been the outcome, had the problem constituted an obstacle which had arrested their attention, saying: "Solve me."
They passed on indifferently, commending Laveran's "effort of genius," repeating with him: They are degenerate forms. A futile effort, which only increased a crowd of persons who had resigned their own individuality all unconsciously.
Another biological acquisition was the assurance that the circulatory system of the blood is a closed system of vessels, and that the enclosing epithelium is not permeable by non-incisive solid bodies such as vegetable microbes, and still less by rounded protozoa, which are much larger than microbes and soft in substance. This well-known and clearly demonstrated fact ought to have suggested a problem to the minds of students: How do the protozoa of malaria enter the circulatory current of the blood? But ever since the days of Hippocrates, Pliny, Celsius and Galen it had been held that this fever was caused by the "poisonous atmosphere" of marsh lands, the bad air of the morning and the evening, so much so that even a few years before the discovery of the real cause of malaria, eucalyptus trees were planted in the belief that they would filter and disinfect the air. How was it that no one asked himself how it was possible that the plasmodia could enter thecurrent of the bloodfrom theair? What was the species of torpor which took possession of the intelligence of persons who had specialized in intellectual work? Here was a colossalsumof intelligence, without any individuality.
Until Ross discovered that birds are inoculated with malaria by a particular kind of mosquito.
And then, behold! we have at last the fundamental argument from which the knowledge of the truth sprang forth: "If birds are inoculated with malaria by mosquitoes, then the same thing must happen to man."
A simple argument, which sped like an arrow to the final discovery. Nothing seemed moreincrediblethan the fact that in the malarial regions good air and fertile soil were to be found, that it was possible to breathe that air morning and evening and remain in perfect health, so long as one was not bitten by mosquitoes, and that the innumerable peasants who were wasted by malarial anemia would be saved and restored if they protected themselves by mosquito-netting. But after the first stupefaction, when men were convinced of the facts, there was an outcry from all the intelligent: How was it possible that we did not find it out before? Was not the cycle of the protozoa a well-known fact? Did not every one declare that the system of circulation was closed and impervious to micro-organisms? Was it not natural to think that only a blood-sucking insect could innoculate it?
How many studentsfeltthat glory had passed close to them, and were amazed and saddened by the knowledge, like the disciples of Emmäus, who said to each other when the Master disappeared before they recognized Him: "Did not our hearts burn within us when He spoke and expounded the Scriptures to us?"
Many must have thought: We worked so laboriously only to encumber our minds, and yet but one thing was needful: we should have been humble and simple, but independent. Instead, we filled our souls withdarkness, and the ray that would have made us see, could not penetrate to us.
Let us take some grosser errors. As far back as the days of the Greek civilization it was known empirically that "stones can fall from the sky." Falls of aërolites are recorded in the most ancient Chinese chronicles. In the Middle Ages and in modern times intimations of the fall of aërolites have increased in frequency. Remarkable facts are indeed recorded in history in connection with similar phenomena: the meteorite which fell in 1492 served the Emperor Maximilian I of Germany as a pretext to excite Christendom to a war against the Turks. Nevertheless, the phenomenon was not admitted by men of science until the eighteenth century. One of the largest meteorites on record was that which fell near Agram in 1751; it weighed about forty kilogrammes, and was deposited and catalogued in the court mineralogical museum at Vienna. This is what Stütz, a German savant, had to say on the subject in 1790: "Those ignorant of natural history may believe that iron has fallen from the sky, and even educated men in Germany may have believed this in 1751, taking into account the universal ignorance then prevalent as to natural history and physics; but in our times it would be unpardonable to admit even the plausibility of such fables."
In the same year 1790, an aërolite weighing ten kilogrammes fell in Gascony. It was observed by a large number of persons, and an official report, signed by three hundred witnesses, was sent to the Academy of Paris. The reply was that "it had been very amusing to receive a legal document dealing with such an absurdity."[7]
When, a few years later, Chladni of Wittenberg, the founder of scientific acoustics, began to admit the phenomenon and to believe in the existence of aërolites, he was stigmatized as "a man who was ignorant of every law and who did not consider the damage he was doing in the moral world"; and one savant declared that "if he had himself seen iron fall from the sky at his own feet, he would not have believed it."
This was incredulity greater than that of St Thomas, who said: "Unless I can touch I will not believe." Here were pieces of iron weighing ten and forty kilogrammes, which could be touched, but the savant said: "Even if I touch them, I will not believe."
It is, therefore, not enoughto see in order to believe; we mustbelieve in order to see. It is faith which leads to sight, not sight which produces faith. When the blind man in the gospel uttered the anxious cry: "Make me to see," he asked for "faith," because he knew that it is possible to have eyes and not to see.
The fact of being insensible to evidence is little considered in psychology, much less is it taken into account in pedagogic laws. And yet many similar facts, though of an inferior psychological order, are notorious, as, for instance, that stimuli will appeal in vain to the senses, if the internal cooperation of attention be lacking. A thousand experiences of this kind enter in to make up the sum of common knowledge. It is not enough that an object should be before our eyes to make us see it; it is necessary that we should fix our attention upon it; an internal process, preparing us to receive the impression of the stimulus, is essential.
In a loftier and purely spiritual sphere something of the same kind takes place: an idea cannot enter triumphantly into the consciousness, if it is not accompanied by a preparation of faith. Lacking this, it may knock violently and brutally, with clamorous insistence, without being able to penetrate. It is necessary that the field of consciousness should be not only free, but "expectant." He who is bewildered by a chaos of ideas cannot accept a truth which arrives unexpectedly in the unprepared field.
This fact is not only analogous to other psychical facts of less importance, such as that of sensory perception in relation to attention; it is also analogous to the spiritual facts which are so well known in the field of religion. In vain will a fact, however remarkable, be explained or evendemonstratedwhere there is nofaith; it is not evidence but faith which opens the mind to truth. The very senses are useless as a medium if the internal activity does not open the doors to receive it. When the most striking miracles of Christ are related in the gospel, the narrative always concludes with: "Andmanyof those who saw, believed." The parable of the invitation to the feast, to which those who were absorbed in their own affairs could not respond, seems to indicate a fact similar to this intellectual fact, that the "preoccupations" of complicated pre-existing ideas prevent the new and obvious truth that presents itself, from entering in. It is for this reason that we need the Precursor to make ready for the Messiah. And for this reason the Messiah, and also new ideas, are readily received by the "simple," by those who are not "laden with heavy preoccupations," but have preserved the natural characteristics of the spirit: to be pure and always "expectant."
When in 1628 Harvey discovered the circulation of the blood, physiology was almost unknown, and medicine was in the full tide of empiricism. It is well known that the Faculty of Medicine of Paris refused to believe in circulation, inspite ofexperiments, and that it persecuted and calumniated Harvey. "That which pleases me in my son," said Diafoirus, "and in which he follows my example, is, that he remains faithful to the opinions of our ancient teachers, and that he has always refused either tounderstandor tolistento the arguments and experiments of the pretended discoveries of our century, especially as regards the circulation of the blood."
The history of the discovery of germinative foliations in the embryonic development of vertebrates forms one of the most impressive of human documents. In 1700 the theory ofpre-formationwas vigorously upheld amongst the many ideas relating to generation: that is to say, it was believed that the germs contained little organisms completely formed which would eventually unfold and increase the parts of infinitesimal dimensions which were packed one within the other. This theory applied to every living creature, animal, vegetable, and human. It had led, by its own logical development, to the more far-reaching theory of "mutual inclusion"—that is, the doctrine that, as all living organisms arepre-formed, they must of necessity all have existed from the Creation, the one included, or wrapped up, in the other. All humanity must have lain in the ovaries of Eve. When in 1690 Leuwenhoek discovered spermatozoa by the aid of the microscope, the idea was evolved that each male cell contained a complete microscopic man, thehomunculus; and then it was announced that not Eve, but Adam had contained all humanity within himself. Hence thetwo contradictory theories which in the eighteenth century kept their adherents sharply divided, the theories of the ovulists and those of the animalculists, and the dispute seemed to offer little hope of a possible decision. The names of famous scientists and philosophers were associated with these dissensions, those, for instance, of Spallanzani and of Liebnitz, who applied the principles of generation even to the soul. "Thus I should think," said Liebnitz, "that the souls which will one day become human souls, were present in the germ; that they have always existed as organized bodies in their progenitors from Adam onwards—that is, from the beginning of things."[8]
Haller, the ovulist, who had great authority as a physiologist, in a famous work,Elementa physiologiae, upheld the principle vigorously: "Nulla est epigenesis. Nulla in corpore animale pars ante aliam facta est et omnes simul creatae existunt" (nothing is created anew, no part of the human body is made before any other part, all are created at the same time). Making a calculation based on Biblical cosmogony of the number of human beings who were packed in the ovaries of Eve, he reckons them at two hundred thousand millions. Such was the state of thought when in 1759 K. F. Wolff published some of his studies in the workTheoria generationis, where he maintained, on the strength of experiments and microscopic observations made on the embryos of fowls, that new organisms are not pre-formed, but that they create themselves entirely, starting from nothing—that is, from a microscopic cell, simple as are all primitive cells. He described the simple process by which the real evolution of individuals is brought about: from a single cell, by division, two, and then four and then eight, areformed, and so on. And the cells thus germinated divide themselves into two or three tiny folds of "primitive folioles" from which all the organs are evolved, beginning with the alimentary canal. "This assertion," says Wolff "is not a fanciful theory; it is a description of facts collected by means of the most trustworthy observations."
All the scientists of his day knew and made use of the microscope; all might have taken an egg, that is, the embryo of a fowl, as a subject for observation; they were not indifferent to the problem of individual genesis, but in their case it had merely excited the most complex efforts of the imagination, and had divided them into factions, as adversaries in a battle of thought. Could any one of them attempt to experiment and observe save at the risk of destroying himself together with his adversaries, as Samson destroyed himself with the Philistines? The possibility that there might be some truth in what had been seen and described, and that it might recur, should indeed have induced some one to venture upon a road which, if it proved to be the right one, would have been a glorious path to a future of discoveries and distinctions. But no. A dense fog obscured all minds, and the dazzling truth could not pierce it; thus all progress in embryology was precluded.
Fifty years had passed, and Wolff, poor and persecuted, had died at Petrograd, an exile from his native land, when Pander and Ernest von Baer grappled anew with the theory of "blastodermic foliation." Then the scientific worldperceivedthe truth and accepted the evidence, inaugurating those studies in embryology which shed so much luster on the nineteenth century.
Why was it necessary that fifty years should elapse before men couldsee what was evident? What had happened in these fifty years? The work of Wolff, dead and forgotten, can have had no influence whatever. The fact was merely that men sawsubsequentlywhat it had been previouslyimpossible for them to see. A kind of internal maturity must have come about in them, by virtue of which their spiritual eyes were opened, and they saw. Whenthose eyes were closed, evidence was useless. Fifty years earlier, a direct attack would have spent itself on insuperable obstacles; but with the lapse of time the subject presented itself, and was simply and universally accepted, not only without a struggle, but without any excitement.
This fact might be arguable in relation to the internal maturation of the masses; but it is beyond question in its relation to the individual. When an obvious truth cannot be seen, we must retire, and leave the individual to mature. A struggle "to bring about perception of evidence" would be bitter and exhausting. But when maturity comes, we shall find the seer filled with enthusiasm, and bearing fruit like the vines of the Land of Promise.
When in 1859 Charles Darwin expounded the theory of evolution in his book, "The Origin of Species," he recognized the great influence it had had upon the thought of his day, for he wrote in his note-book: "My theory will lead to a philosophy." His conception of the struggle for life and of the natural selection of characteristics, so widely adopted by the thinkers of his day, popularized the principles of Lamarck as to the casual formation of new characteristics in a species by adaptation to environment; Darwin's conception carried these principles along with it—and almost fused them in its own content. These principles, excluding both creation and its finalities,implicitly denied the immortality of the soul. The effect of such a revolution may be imagined; for many centuries the soul had been theobject of life, and when the fundamental faith of existence was shaken, the life of the conscience itself was convulsed. It may be supposed that there was an anxious search for contradictions in the destructive theory, if on no other grounds than that of the instinct to preserve ancient beliefs, which lies deeply rooted in the human race.
But let us take into consideration the two revolutionary principles which so greatly impressed and fired the consciousness of the university students of several generations. One principle was: "There can be no function without an organ." The other principle which created much enthusiasm among studious youths was: "The function creates the organ." What! There is no function without an organ, nor can the function evenexist withoutthe organ; and yet, on the other hand, the function without the organ can exist so vigorously as tocreate? No such glaring and tangible contradiction had ever existed in any theory.
And it cannot be said that Darwinism and the principles of Lamarck were hastily studied and confused in a varied series of philosophical theories, for Darwinism had isolated itself as a victorious idea which drives out all other ideas, as the light of day disperses the darkness of night. And students dwelt upon it, anxious to construct a new morality and a new conscience; therefore these two principles were not studied coldly and languidly. Moreover, theypenetrated togetherinto the consciousness and excited enthusiasmeach on its own account; on such a triumphant contradiction it was proposed to destroy a world and create another.
The final conclusion of thought, then, was this: "We are mere beasts, there is no substantial difference between the animals and ourselves; we are apes, but our more remote ancestors were earthworms." With what ardor did professors from their chairs analyze the psychology of men, to prove that, try as we may, we can find nothing in ourselves which we do not share with animals, and with what enthusiasm did their pupils applaud them! When professors of psychiatry removed the brains of pigeons and monkeys by vivisection, and, after curing the creatures, exhibited them at international psychological congresses, devoting the most sincere attention to the study of their psychical reactions, observing the attitudes of their bodies, their activity of perception, and similar things—all really believed that an animal without a brain could throw light upon the psychology of man!
When we think that this was the epoch ofpositivism—that is to say, of those who could not believe without touching, we are profoundly impressed by this reflection: The intelligence, then, is threatened by dangers, like the spirit. It may be obscured, it may contain a contradiction, an "error," without perceiving it, and as a result of a single unnoticed error it may rush into a species of delirium, a mortal aberration. Like the spirit, then, it has its way of salvation, and itneeds to be sustainedlest it should perish. The support it requires isnot that of the senses. Like the spirit, it needs a continual purification, which, like the fish of Tobias, heals the eyes of their blindness. That "self-care" which the hygiene of to-day prescribes for the body, and which makes us spend so much time even on cleaning and polishing our nails, should be extended to the inner man, that this may preserve its health and its integrity.
This should be the object of "the education of the intelligence." To educate the intelligence is to save it from its peculiar perils of disease and death; it is to "purge it of its offenses." We shall not educate the intelligence if we weary it by making it learn things. This is patent in these days of ours, when the victims of nervous disorders and lunacy abound, and when, even among those who are considered healthy, the material consequences of madness may explode, threatening the whole of humanity with ruin.
Our care of the child should be governed, not by the desire "to make him learn things," but by the endeavor always to keep burning within him that light which is called the intelligence. If to this end we must consecrate ourselves as did the vestals of old, it will be a work worthy of so great a result.
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The creative imagination of science is based upon truth.—If, a century ago, some one had told the men who were traveling in stage-coaches and using oil-lamps that some day New York would blaze with light at midnight; that men would ask for succor in mid-ocean and that their message would be understood on land, that their flight in the air would surpass that of the eagle—our good forefathers would have smiled incredulously. Their imaginations would never have been able to conceive these things. To them, modern men would have seemed almost like men of another species.
This is because the imagination of modern men is based upon the positive researches of science, whereas the men of past ages allowed their minds to wander in the world of unreality.
This single fact has changed the face of the world.
When man loses himself in mere speculations, his environment will remain unchanged, but when imagination starts from contact with reality, thought begins to construct works by means of which the external world becomes transformed; almost as if the thought of man had assumed a marvelous power: the power to create.
It is thus we imagine the thought of God; all creation is the divine thought, which has the property of realizing itself. God thought: and behold! light, the order of creation, living things, appeared.
Modern man by the method of positive science seems to have found thesecret trace of thought which puts him in the divine path, which gives him the revelation of his true nature, as indicated in the words of Scripture: "Let us make man in our image and likeness."
Thus human intelligence said: "Let there be light"—and there was a magic effulgence which comes and goes at a touch. "Let man fly in the air and rise far above all the birds of creation"—and it was so. "Let the voices of shipwrecked mariners travel mysteriously and without sound, and reach distant places"—and it was so. "Let things multiply, plants in their varieties, so that all men may have the means of life more abundantly"—and it was so.
The imagination has created when it has started from creation: that is, when it has first taken in existing truth. Only then has it accomplished marvelous things.
Like the tiny bird which hid under the wing of an eagle about to soar, and when it had been thus borne up to an immense height, disengaged itself from the eagle and began to fly still higher by its own efforts—so too is man, who at first holds fast to Nature, attaches himself to her by means of the most severe speculations, and with her soars aloft in search of truth; then he disengages himself from her, and his imagination creates over and above Nature herself. In this manner man seems to reflect divine attributes; the marvelous and miraculous issue from him in such grandiose form that the man of the past, the wren without the eagle, could not even have conceived it.
Original sin is an allegory of this eternal story, of the manwho wished to act for himself, to substitute himself for God, to emancipate himself from Him, and to create. Whereupon he fell into impotence, slavery and misery.
The mind that works by itself, independently of truth, works in avoid. Its creative power is ameansfor working uponreality. But it confuses the means with the end, it is lost.
This kind ofsinof the intelligence, so akin to original sin, the sin of confounding the means with the end, recurs in every form as a "force of inertia" which pervades the psychical life. Thus man confounds the means, which is simpler, easier and more comprehensible, with the end in many of his functions. Thus, for example, when nutrition is made a pretext for gluttony, and the appetite an end in itself, the body, instead of renewing itself in health and purity, is poisoned. Again, when in the reproduction of species the sexual emotion becomes an end in itself rather than a means for the renewal of life, degeneration and sterility result. Man is guilty of a like sin against the intelligence when he employs his creative activity of thought for its own sake, without basing it upon truth; by so doing he creates an unreal world, full of error, and destroys the possibility of creating in reality, like a god, producing external works.
Thus positive science represents to us the "redemption" of thought; its purification from original sin, a return to thenatural lawsof psychical energy. Scientists are like those men of the Bible story who, after Israel had come out of Egypt, were permitted to explore the Land of Promise, and who came back with such a huge cluster of grapes that it took two men to carry it, and the people saw it with amazement.
So have the scientists of to-day penetrated into the Promised Land of truth, where lies the secret which enables man to scrutinize Nature; and they have come out therefrom, bearing marvelous fruits for all men to see. The secret is a simple one: it consists of an exact methodbased on observation, prudence, and patience. All men might be allowed to share the secret, for indeed such virtues correspond to the "occult," intimate needs of their spiritual life.
It may be asked: Why should only explorers enter in, while the people remain outside, passively enjoying the fruits of their labors?
Is it because the method of positive science, which puts man in the way of knowing the truth, of gathering up realities—and hence of building up his own imagination thereupon—is a monopoly, the privilege of the chosen few?
That method which denotes the redemption of the intelligence ought to be the method by which all new humanity is molded—the formative method of the new generation.
In the Bible story, the explorers were the messengers, and the witnesses to the existence of the Promised Land, into which the whole people was to enter. And so it is here: all men should come under the influence of the scientific method; and every child should be able to experiment at first hand, to observe, and to put himself in contact with reality. Thus the flights of the imagination will start from a higher plane henceforth, and the intelligence will be directed into its natural channels of creation.
Truth is also the basis of artistic imagination.—The work of the intelligence is not limited to the exact observation and the simple, logical reasoning upon which great scientific discoveries may be founded. There is a more exalted work, confronting which none can say, as in the presence of certain scientific discoveries; "I also might have been able to do this."
Dante, Milton, Goethe, Raphael, Wagner, are mighty mysteries, miracles of intelligence, which cannot be classed with the simple processes ofobservation and reasoning. Nevertheless, every man has his share of artistic imagination, he has the instinct to create the beautiful with his mind; and from this instinct duly developed come all the vast treasures of art, scattered almost like crumbs of gold wherever there was an intensity of civil life, wherever the intelligence had time to mature in peace. In every province which has preserved traces of ancient peoples we find local artistic types of work, of furniture, of poetic songs and popular music. This multiform creation of the inner man, then, enfolds him and protects his spirit in its intellectual needs, just as the iridescent shell encloses the mollusc.
In addition to the work of observing material reality, there is a creative work which lifts man up from earth and transports him into a higher world which every soul may attain, within its individual limits.
Yet no one can say that mancreatesartistic products out of nothing. What is calledcreationis in reality a composition, a construction raised upon aprimitive materialof the mind, which must be collected from the environment by means of the senses. This is the general principle summed up in the ancient axiom:Nihil est in intellectu quod prius non fuerit in sensa(There is nothing in the intellect which was not first in the senses). We are unable to "imagine" things which do not actually present themselves to our senses; even language would be lacking to us to explain things lying beyond those customary limits by which our consciousness is bounded. The imagination of Michelangelo was unable to picture God otherwise than as a venerable old man with a white beard. When we try to imagine the eternal torments of hell, we talk of fire; we think of Paradise as a place of light. Those born blind and deaf can form no definite ideaof sensations they have never been able to perceive. It is well known that persons blind from their birth imagine colors by comparing them to sounds: for instance, they imagine red as the sound of a trumpet, blue as the sweet music of the violin. The deaf, when they read descriptions of delicious music, imagine the classic beauty of a painted picture. The temperaments of poets and artists are pre-eminently sensorial. And all the senses do not contribute in equal measure to give a type to the individual imagination; but certain senses are often predominant. Musicians are auditive, and are inclined to describe the world from the sounds it conveys to them; the warbling of the nightingale in the silence of a wood; the patter of the rain in the solitude of the country-side, may be as springs of inspiration for great musical composers; and some of them, describing a tract of country, will dwell only on its silences and noises. Others again, whose susceptibilities are predominantly visual, are impressed by the forms and colors of things. Or it may be the motion, the flexuosity, the impetus of things; the tactile impressions of softness and harshness, which make up the descriptive content of imaginative types in whom the tactile and muscular sensations predominate.
There are persons who have had non-sensorial impressions, and they are persons whose spiritual life was of very great intensity. They haveinternal impressionswhich cannot be accounted fruits of the imagination, but must be accepted as realities simply perceived. That they are realities is affirmed not only by the introspection of normal subjects, but by the effect upon their internal personality. "The revelations vouchsafed by God," says Saint Teresa, "are distinguished by the great spiritual benefits with which they enrich the soul; theyare accompanied by light, discernment, and wisdom." But if such persons wish to describe these impressions which do not penetrate by means of the senses, they are obliged to borrow the language of sensorial impression. "I heard a voice," says the Blessed Raymond of Capua, "which was not in the air, and which pronounced words that reached my spirit, but not my ear; nevertheless I understood it more distinctly than if it had come to me from an external voice. I could not reproduce this voice, if I can call that a voice which had no sound. This voice formed words and presented them to my spirit." The Life of Saint Teresa abounds in similar descriptions, in which she tries to convey, by the inappropriate language of the senses, what she saw, not with her eyes, but with her soul.
The difference between these internal impressions, which occur in others as well as in saints (and certainly do not constitute saintliness), and the hallucinations of the insane, is clearly marked. In the madman, an excitement of the cerebral cortex reproduces old images deposited by the sensorial memory, which project themselves into the external world whence they were taken, with external sensorial characteristics; so that the sufferer really believes that he sees his phantasms with his actual eyes, and that he hears the voices which persecute him; he is the victim of a pathological condition; the whole personality reveals signs of his organic decadence, the concomitants of his psychical disintegration.
Setting aside, then, direct spiritual impressions of very rare occurrence, not to be looked upon even as aids to sanctity, impressions which may form suitable subjects of study for specialists such as teleologists or the members of the English Society of Psychical Research, but which do not enter into educationalconceptions, there remains for our consideration but a single material of construction for intellectual activities: that of the senses.
Imagination can have only a sensory basis.
The sensory education which prepares for the accurate perception of all the differential details in the qualities of things, is therefore the foundation of the observation of things and of phenomena which present themselves to our senses; and with this it helps us to collect from the external world the material for the imagination.
Imaginative creation has no mere vague sensory support; that is to say, it is not the unbridled divagation of the fancy among images of light, color, sounds and impressions; but it is a construction firmly allied to reality; and the more it holds fast to the forms of the external created world, the loftier will the value of its internal creations be. Even in imagining an unreal and superhuman world, the imagination must be contained within limits which recall those of reality. Man creates, but on the model of that divine creation in which he is materially and spiritually immersed.
In literary works of the highest order, such as theDivina Commedia, we admire the continual recurrence to the mind of the supreme poet of material and tangible things which illustrate by comparison the things imagined:
As dovesBy fond desire invited, on wide wingsAnd firm to their sweet nest returning home,Cleave the air, wafted by their will along;Thus issued from that troop where Dido ranks,They, through the ill air speeding.(Carey's translation of Dante'sInferno, Canto V.)