7.30 a. m......12.30 p. m..........Pigeon-holes12.30 p. m......3.00 p. m..........Miscellany3.00 p. m......
but the rest of the day need not concern us.
The Essayist had been reared in a stronghold of Method—a home where the dishes were never left over and the tools were always returned to their places, where the children always went to Sunday School and never stopped to think that they didn't enjoy it, and their elders always went to prayer-meeting and never missed church—in a word, where everybody was always doing everything never and always, and nobody ever doing anything sometimes.
Thus it came to pass that the Madness of Method followed, or rather pursued, him all his days, and his existence was filled with devices for the facilitation of the business of life. The big desk was one of these devices. It had a hundred and twenty pigeon-holes, and their labelling, especially in the rows that were to receive classified ideas, was a triumph of invention. He had had trouble with ideas. They got wrongly assorted, or lost, got away over night, flew at him in parabolic curves and never came back, or flitted about his head and would not submit to scrutiny, and otherwise flouted him. He would have no more of it.
Just now he was contemplating with a glow of satisfactionnot only his own particular pigeon-holes, but Pigeon-holes Universal. Blessings on the soul of that primitive man, the first really deserving to be called ancestor of the human race, who noticed that some things were like other things—that the world about him was not a mere agglomeration of endless individual objects and phenomena! What an impulse to the setting in order of the world's business, for example, and what relief to himself, when the Lucretian father of astronomy and history settled to the satisfaction of himself and his hairy fellows that the same sun they saw sink behind the hills at night would appear again next morning:
And when the sun and light of day had gone,With wailings loud they did not roam the fields,Crying for it among the shades of night,But quiet lay, in slumber sepulchred,Until the sun, with rosy torch, should come,And bring his light into the heaven again.
And when the sun and light of day had gone,With wailings loud they did not roam the fields,Crying for it among the shades of night,But quiet lay, in slumber sepulchred,Until the sun, with rosy torch, should come,And bring his light into the heaven again.
Hence the pigeon-holing of day and night, of moon and stars, of seasons and years, "seed-time and harvest, heat and hoary frost," of all the possibilities of life and achievement. Incomparable benefaction!
And what ineffable relief—his thoughts ran on—when men began to realize that some human beings were like others not only in form, but in feeling; that it was not necessary to scan each individual act of your neighbor in order to form a basis for each of your own acts, but that some details of conduct weresemper,ubique,ab omnibus! What a gain to be able to classify men into friends and enemies, to set apart by themselves the common good and the common bane, to be aware of correspondences of action and emotion, to judge of the future by the past! What an advance on the high road leading to stability of expectation and all its fruitful consequences!
And when men began to apply the principle of pigeon-holing to the actual business of life, what economy oftime and of energy! Civilization itself, with its multitudinous associations of human beings in common effort, was a big desk with pigeon-holes. Man hadnoticed, and was fast approaching the peak of perfection, while the races of wild, wide-wandering beasts, ignorant both of the blessings and of the very conception of pigeon-holing, still lived their hard and coarse existence among the acorn-bearing groves,
Of common welfare had no thought, nor knewThe use of law and custom among men.
Of common welfare had no thought, nor knewThe use of law and custom among men.
With all its intelligence, effort, and boldness, what would the human race not achieve! What had it not achieved already! The Essayist's enthusiasm was kindled as he thought of the past and present wonders of classification and organization—of races, nations, parties, unions, communities, families; of the marvels of social, educational, political, industrial, and military coöperation; of the religions and philosophies of history; of classified and recorded knowledge. He thought of the arts, sciences, law, and the crafts, with everything about them all printed in books and deposited in libraries, where anyone might read and learn. What high and rapid building, what numerous and rushing trains, what capacious liners and freighters, what ease and quickness of communication, what mingling of nations, what universalization of ideas! What wise use of means, and what efficiency! In education alone, scores of thousands of children in his own land, large and small, rich and poor, various in blood, quality, and color, were at that moment being instructed by common methods with common money in common ideas and ideals—the homogeneous fine flour of American citizenship ground in one great mill of omnicapacious hopper.
He looked next into the future, and there saw glorious visions. For pigeon-holing was not only progress, but cumulative progress. The greatest of its many virtueswas that the more it was perfected, the more time there was to make it still more perfect. Pigeon-holing begat organization; organization begat leisure; leisure begat contemplation; contemplation begat wisdom; wisdom begat action; action begat progress; progress meant advance in civilization; and civilization meant more and better pigeon-holing. The chain was endless.
Yes, pigeon-holing meant cumulative progress, and the cumulative process had never been so rapid, nor given so much promise, as just now. The world had never before possessed so many appliances to facilitate the pigeon-holing of men and things and movements. There had always been enormous losses in efficiency. Now, however, nothing was being lost or wasted, as in the days when System had been a less jealous goddess; now, everything which men found out was being accurately recorded or neatly tied up, or carefully deposited, or put into the general circulation of life universal, or otherwise conserved.
And not only was everything conserved, but production itself, thanks to pigeon-holing, was far more rapid now than ever before. The march of civilization was quickening to double time. Pigeon-holing and Efficiency were the two great features of the age, and walked, or rather rushed, hand in hand. The more pigeon-holing, the more efficiency; the more efficiency, the more time saved; the more time saved, the more pigeon-holes; and so on, with ever increasing momentum,in saecula saeculorum amen. From the labor unions that maintained walking delegates and boycotts, to the great trusts that were responsible for high-priced beef and long-packed eggs and pure-food inspectors, everyone was working with the greatest possible speed and efficiency, and everything was being pigeon-holed to the utmost perfection. It was the age of time-tables and interest-tables, cash registers, and adding machines; steam shovels, steam seeders, harvesters, and threshers; cyclometers, pedometers, and taxicabs; type-writingand linotyping and photography; telephones and automobiles and book reviews; technical schools and teachers' courses, education by correspondence, books on etiquette and how-to-enjoy-the-arts, piano-players and phonographs; library cataloguers, Who's Whos, encyclopedias, and blanks-to-be-filled-out-and-returned-at-once; world languages, one-class steamers, democracy, cosmopolitanism, and peace conferences; tinned foods, department stores, and women's clubs; reference Bibles, dictionaries of handy quotations, hints on diet, menus for the month, short cuts to culture, wireless telegraphy, big guns and big business, joy riding, air-ships, simplified spellings, and a universal A.B. degree.
Let us not be surprised if the Essayist grew a trifle delirious. Progress is a thing of enthusiasm, and its devotees are easily wrought upon by the frenzy of the god.
What was to be the glorious goal of this cumulative progress? The Essayist's thoughts took on aërial daring. In the realm of knowledge, for example—what an inspiring vision! He had often thought of the pity of it—that scholars through the ages had consumed their lives in effort that was largely in vain: laboriously amassing the knowledge possessed by their predecessors, only to die and leave it as scant as when they had received it.
But that was in the olden time. Now, with the art of printing democratized, with specialization firmly established, with all the wonderful book-keeping and card-cataloguing that characterized intellectual activities, with the willingness of scholars to study and recordeverything, and of libraries to purchase and preserveeverything, for fear of losinganything, with all the learning of the past immediately at hand, and with all the means and appliances available for its rapid utilization, why might scholarship not aspire to reach the absolute heights of knowledge? Might it not be possible now for the scholar to receive the torch of learning fully ablaze, and to run the race that was set before him without the necessity ofstopping to renew or even trim it—for him to make, so to speak, more effective dashes at the pole of learning—or to build to the very heaven the intellectual Tower of Babel, whose downfall would not be so easily possible now as in an age when men had not been alive to the need of linguistic pigeon-holes?
But intellect was not the greatest thing in the world. Might not the ever increasing skill in pigeon-holing lead before long to a definition of religion, the cessation of doctrinal quarrels, and the sinking of all differences in a common ideal of administration, conduct, and even belief? Yes; might it not lead to the final obliteration of national and racial, and even social, distinctions? Might it not lead, and at no distant date, not only to democracy and social equality, but to universal democracy—when the war-drum throbbed no longer, etc.?
Having thus in imagination surveyed the glories of pigeon-holing, the Essayist seized upon his pen, and rapidly set his thoughts to paper, not omitting to make liberal use of the pigeon-holes before him whenever he adumbrated quotations with which he thought his page might be embellished.
The task finished, he glanced at the clock. The forenoon was only half spent. Looking over his sheets, too, he observed that his essay was only half the length an intelligent and good-natured reader ought to endure.
This was just as he would have it, for he had begun with the definite intention of appearing both for and against pigeon-holes. There was time enough left to make his work symmetrical by presenting the other side, and to append a conveniently stated conclusion. He knew from the editors that readers in general disliked nothing quite so much as being left to make up their own minds.
So he took up the pen again.
What! After all that rhapsodizing, not a believer in pigeon-holes?
Not so bad as that. He was a believer, but not a blind believer. The fact is, he had a lively sense of the limitations of pigeon-holing. He had arrived at familiarity with both its virtues and its defects through personal experience. He had dealt in pigeon-holes himself, had made them, used them, and had been in them, and for years had been growing more and more conscious that the use of them was a difficult and delicate matter.
Earlier in life, it had not been so. He still remembered vividly the time when all men were easily classifiable—into good and bad, Christian and heathen, saved and unsaved, rich and poor, wise and foolish, as easily as into black and white, or fat and lean; when all nations except the United States, and all governments except democracy, were inferior. He remembered the surprise with which he had heard for the first time that there was a difference between prohibition and temperance, that there were many forms of intemperance besides drunkenness, that English government had many points of superiority over American. He had always supposed that with those questions it was as with slavery in the mind of Charles Sumner: "Gentlemen, to this slavery question there can be no other side."
He also recalled the ferment started in his mind by a much respected teacher's remark that all truth was relative, not absolute: whether a man was good depended on what you meant by goodness; whether two and two made four depended on whether one and one made two; grammar and spelling were after all only fashions, and things that appeared in print might not be true; not even the dictionary was absolute, and the Bible was not inspired in every letter and punctuation mark.
All this shook the ground under his feet, and it took some time to recover. That about the Bible and the dictionary was especially confounding. He reeled to and fro, and staggered like a drunken man, and was at his wit's end.
You will call him stupid. He was. Most pigeon-holers are, to tell the truth. He was like them in being so busy with virtuous action that he found but little time for thought. He used the pigeon-holes customary in his neighborhood, without questioning the correctness of content or label.
But in time he came to realize that there was religion outside of sects and that there were many believers who were unconscious unbelievers, that men might be honest and still dishonorable, that a great deal of the most pernicious lying in the world was done without the utterance of a syllable, that the guiltless were often criminal and the criminal guiltless, that many democrats were really aristocrats, many fools really wise, many a rich man poor and many a poor man rich, many a learned man ignorant, many pessimists really optimists, and many optimists really stumbling-blocks to progress.
By the Saturday morning on which we catch sight of him, he had come to have a wholesome distrust of the pigeon-holes of others; and whenever he took a specimen from his own, he submitted it to fresh examination, tolerating pigeon-holes at all only under perpetual protest against men's careless use of them.
For there were multitudinous differences between things to all appearances absolutely alike. It was impossible to classify even the inanimate without some sort of violence. Even the products of the die and the press showed variation, however infinitesimal; and as for Nature, in her realm there were no two things alike. Plants, animals, persons, mountains, valleys, and streams—unending variety was the rule. The two faces most alike in all the world proved widely different on close examination, and the points of difference between the persons who owned them were infinite.
And not only that. Not onlywereall individual things really different from all other things, but each individual thingseemeddifferent to different persons. Pigeon-holingimplied pigeon-holers, and no two pigeon-holers were alike. Like the artists in Plato, they saw the same thing from different angles: "I mean, that you may look at a bed from different points of view, obliquely or directly, or from any other point of view, and the bed will appear different, but there is no difference in reality." The same man appeared better or worse, according to the standards of his judge; the same rain was good or bad, according to the health or the purpose of the person under the umbrella. One man's meat was another man's poison. No two men ever formulated the same definition of a thing, let alone an abstraction; and if definitions agreed in words, the words themselves meant different things to their authors. The Essayist thought of the desperate pass of Philosophy, patiently waiting while her disciples fruitlessly endeavored to define each other's definitions. Lucky for life that living did not hang on wisdom of that sort!
Yes, more than that; no thing—at least, no living thing—had ever been seen twice in exactly the same aspect by the same person. Not only did the object change from second to second, under the outward impulse of sun and wind and rain and the inner impulse of expanding cell, but the beholder himself was absolutely identical at no two moments. He might change his physical position, or be subject to any of the thousand mutations that sweep over the human spirit like waves of shadow over the wheat. Everything was in the state of flux. Becoming, not Being, was the order of all things. And more, each reacted not only upon its fellow, but upon everything else. The shifting of an atom affected every other atom in the universe. Withdraw a drop of water from the ocean, and there was immediate readjustment of all the waters that covered the earth. Withdraw a member from human society, or change him by ever so little—in health, so that he ate more; in stature, so that he wore more; in morals, so that he acted differently—and the whole fabric suffered modification. Nothing could be lost,nothing changed, without impairing in some sort the universal order. Nothing could be duplicated.
And so in the world of ideas. There was no item of truth not connected with and dependent upon all other truth. Let an individual idea in the ocean of a man's ideas suffer modification, and there was instant readjustment of all his other ideas, and of his emotions, and of his actions; and, under their impulse, of the actions, emotions, and ideas of all other individuals. Truth was one great, unified whole, never yet beheld, save in partial vision, by the human mind. To know one item in all its connections was to possess all knowledge. For the botanist who knew completely the flower, the mystery of the universe was solved.
What folly, then, to look for perfect pigeon-holing, when no two atoms could be found alike, to say nothing of the motions of the human spirit,
Swift as a shadow, short as any dream.
Swift as a shadow, short as any dream.
And what injustice and cruelty might it be guilty of, did its devotees become too rapt in their enthusiasm!
What injustice had they not been guilty of, in the past! What violence done to nature and to man! What forcings together and what tearings asunder! What attenuations and amputations on Procrustean beds! What heart-burnings they had caused, what hatred and what strife! What wars on sea and land, what slaughter, what laying waste, what famine, disease, and hardship, what bereavement, what languishings in prison, what falling of men from high estates, what oppression, what rackings and twistings and manglings of limbs, what persecutions and executions and excommunications and banishments, what sunderings of nations and communities, what separations of persons really congenial who would have been friends if left to themselves, what disorders—all sprung from men's desire to force their fellows into their own socialand religious pigeon-holes! And ideas—what struggling and bleeding and screaming ofthemat being forced by brutal hands into narrow and stifling cells with other ideas in mutual hot resentment. History was filled with the heartless compulsion of men and things and ideas into groups where they rebelled against going.
Nor were persecutions and strife confined to the past. The injustices of pigeon-holing were rampant in the Essayist's own enlightened time. The old-time sets of pigeon-holes might no longer be used to such deadly purpose, but there were others that bade fair to take their place. The pigeon-holes of religion were less insisted on, but the pigeon-holes of science gave promise of another tyranny hardly less unendurable. The two prime factors in tyranny—arrogant authority and superstitious multitude—were already clearly to be seen. The tyranny of aristocratic pigeon-holing seemed past, but its place was being taken by the hardly less outrageous tyranny of democracy's pigeon-holes. In a world that boasted of producing the greatest equality known to human kind, there were more classifiers and more class feeling than men had ever known before. The pigeon-holes were different, but they were there, and their partitions as impenetrable as ever.
The very consciousness that theywerein different compartments kept men from attempting to understand each other, let alone their real differences; more, it made them hostile, and even aggressive. What philosopher, from Thales to the latest enemy of Pragmatism, what dogmatist, from the Stoic to the latest ridiculer of Christian Science, what political critic, from Aristophanes to the anarchist of yesterday, ever tried or was willing to understand his opponent, and did not wilfully misrepresent in order to confute him? Longfellow was right when he said that the South should come to see the North, the North go to see the South, and then the war would be over. Let men forsake their pigeon-holes and meet face to face, and many a problem of religion, philosophy,sociology, industry, and pedagogy would cease to be a problem—and many an official and professorial chair would be vacant.
But for the most part, either from their own impulse or from compulsion, men remained in their pigeon-holes. Many a man who had voluntarily emerged found his fellows unwilling to stir to meet him, or even take note of his having come forth. Many a man could not get out, if he would, and spent his life beating against the partitions, clamoring loudly and unheeded for redistribution on the ground of a thousand facts.
In vain! The malefactor and the magdalen could be rescued from their pigeon-holes only by a miracle, were they ever so repentant and filled with good works. The world had disposed of them, ceased to consider them, forgotten them—even though it was a loser as well as a tyrant. What service had been lost to the State by the pigeon-holing of party—talent and patriotism denied a sphere of usefulness because of being among the minority! What willing hearts lost to religion because of the pigeon-holes of creed and denomination! And there were men who were misjudged and abused all their lives long, living sacrifices to some accident of pigeon-holing, and to the neglect which was its usual consequence. Give a dog a bad name, and hang him.
Away with pigeon-holing then, as violent, tyrannical, and oppressive, a foe to individuality of men and ideas, and an obstacle to real progress! Away with curbs and yardsticks and tapes and molds and stamps and presses and dies, and all manner of interference with nature and her methods of expansion! Let nature, and especially human nature, realize itself, like any plant or flower! Fired by imagination, the Essayist started up, glowering at his desk and thinking of the axe. He had not yet attained, you see, to the full measure of Scientific Calm, and was in a fair way to usurp the functions of judge, jury, and sheriff, as well as attorney.
But he sat back again, and reflected. No pigeon-holes at all? What heresy, thus to fly in the face of his own practice, and of evolution! Imagine it—for men to eat only when hungry, to plan a costume for every dinner out, to have no office hours and no fixed prices, no churches and no schools, no coined money, no uniforms in parades, and no parades, no laws to regulate conduct in the large, no street numbers, no marks by which to detect a book agent or a mine promoter before answering the door-bell, no catalogues, no voting-machines, no diplomas, no marriage-bond, no social and religious ties at all! Why, what was that but anarchy?
Of course it was anarchy, and the Essayist knew it all the time. You must remember that he had set out to present both sides of the case. If he was a bit carried away by his own pleading, that is not a bad fault in the advocate.
And now he was ready to assume also the role of judge, and to charge the jury—by which I mean, of course, the readers ofThe Unpopular.
Being a Horatian, he summed up in favor of the Golden Mean, and recommended pigeon-holing to the favorable consideration of the jury. It had its proper use, and it had its misuse. There was harmless pigeon-holing, where you reduced to order dead and material things, or classified living entities on the basis of essentials. So long as you did no great violence, and were ready to entertain motions for reconsideration, it was desirable for the sake of economy in time and energy to use pigeon-holes, even at some cost. In other words, if you were to enjoy the benefits of civilization, or, indeed, to possess it at all, you must introduce into the anarchy of perfect individualism a greater or less degree of the artificiality of collectivism.
But there was a limit beyond which neither individual man nor society in the aggregate should go.
A limit, Your Honor? And pray, who was to establish the limit? That was not so easy. Clearly, no man couldestablish the limit for another man. Each man must determine for himself; and society must determine foritsself, by means of that most mysterious of all consciousnesses, the universal consciousness.
In other words, pigeon-holing was the creation of no rule; it was an Art. The masterpiece was an individual product, a resolution of many forces. And civilization, so closely dependent upon pigeon-holing, was an Art, not a science—no, not even a social science. Let those who looked to save society by invention and application of rules alone consider well their ways. No anarchist was farther removed than they from the truth that should make men free.
In still other words, it was the Golden Mean which society, as well as the individual, should strive for. And this was no easy Panacea. The Golden Mean meant struggle—a struggle constant and eternal—to maintain an equilibrium. You had to watch unceasingly your balances, and to shift and reshift your weights—without intermittence, and forever. The devotion called for was so great that it took the inspiration of religious ideals to insure it. Human society was a Gothic cathedral—a unified and beautiful structure, but one whose complex members exerted everlasting pressure each on each, and must not long be left to themselves. To measure, and hew, and build, was not all. The pile could not be finished at once and forever. Let the architect relax his watchfulness, and decaying members soon would spoil the symmetry of the noble lines, or even precipitate the whole in awful ruin.
And here was where lay most of the trouble with pigeon-holing, past and present. Man was lazy. It was not wholly the enlightened desire for progress which had inspired him to pigeon-holing, and was continuing to inspire. Dislike of work, and selfishness, and vanity, all played a part as well, and not a small one.
It was so reposeful to dispose of things in the large—toeducate by the hundred thousand, to rest in the arms of creed, to stand at the lever of a great machine, to have your tailor plan your suits and the cook or the newspaper your meals, to have a dozen pigeon-holes into which you conveniently popped new acquaintances and had them off your mind forever. It was so much easier to force men to accept your own beliefs and plans than to take the trouble to acquaint yourself with theirs. It was so much more satisfying and final to follow mere logic and go to the end of the process than always to be engaged in that most laborious of tasks—thinking and forming judgments. To write a volume embodying all the facts was much easier than to write an essay presenting the essentials and their interpretation. A perfectly democratic or a perfectly absolute government was far less difficult to plan than the ideal commonwealth. It was much easier to act on insufficient premises than to travail with thought and find that after all there was no ground for action. It was easier to be an ignoramus or a pedant than a real scholar, a dogmatist or an atheist than a good preacher, a lecturer on education than a teacher, a slouch or a dandy than a well dressed man, a persecutor or a humanitarian than a saver of souls, a despot or an anarchist than a shepherd of the people, a censor or an abettor than a monitor and adviser, a total abstainer or a drunkard than a temperate man, a conservative or a radical than a patriot, a boor or a fop than a gentleman. It was easier to be a beast, or not to be at all, than to be a MAN.
The Essayist looked at the clock. It was twelve-thirty. Once more he had successfully pigeon-holed the hours of his morning.
If any lesson can be learned from history, which historians tell us is not the case, it would seem to be that what we call "goodness" is on the whole ineradicable. By goodness the race survives. Every one of us, struggle as he may, is constrained in his degree to be less bad than he might be. Many of us confess freely that we do not know why this is so. We do not know whether there is a moral law. If there is a moral law, we do not know whether its origin is transcendental and arbitrary, biological and definitely ascertainable, or social and fluctuating. Moreover we do not so much as know whether we are free agents, choosing continually between good and evil, or automata, feeling, to be sure, the stress of conflicting forces, but bound mathematically to follow the line of their compromise. We are of course comfortably able to ignore all these considerations in our everyday trains of thought. Just as the schoolboy learns to say parrotwise that the sun sits still and swings us round, though he sees him every evening descend to rest in New Jersey like a tired commuter; and just as the uncompromising idealist behaves exactly like the man who believes in the knowable reality of the world; so the most convinced determinist must act from morning to night as though he were a free agent, and must judge his fellowmen as though they too were choosers. Moreover almost all of us adopt instinctively some concrete reason for the choices we assume we are making. These reasons being inevitably partial and ludicrously incommensurate with the cosmic results that we hang upon them, are constantly in process of giving way under the strain. The so-called "religious" reasons land us in the position of having to give animmoral basis for morality. Either they involve the doctrine of a future life, and so vitiate the moral impulse with egoism at its source, or, with a diminished confidence in the sureness of reward, which is all to the good, they tend to perpetuate affirmations that have lost their meaning, which is all to the bad. It seems to have been on the whole a misfortune that religion and morality, which historically and logically have neither more nor less to do with each other than marriage and love, should have become profoundly associated in Europe in the last two thousand years. The most pressing duty of the moralist—and every man is a moralist—is to dissolve the merger, and there are circumstances connected with its origin which may lessen our estimate of the inconvenience involved in the dissolution. The mythology, cult, doctrine, exegesis and ethics of Christianity are considerably more Greek than Hebraic in origin, and the Greeks in their prime had excellent ways of their own of dealing with all these matters. They managed to be profoundly religious while avoiding the two pits into which the Hebrews fell, first, the confounding of myth with history, and, second, the erection of morals on a supernatural, jural and egoistic basis. Let us then consider the Greeks.
The most remarkable fact in connection with the religion of the Greeks is its attitude towards the use of the reason. Of all the religions known to us this exercised the least restrictive power over the minds of those who entertained it. Over their conduct in matters of ritual it did of course exercise power both restrictive and positive, but the reason it left free. Greek religion is therefore recalcitrant to M. Reinach's definition of religion in general as "a sum of scruples which impede the free exercise of our faculties." All that was obligatory was ritual; there was no confession of faith, the priests did not form aclass with vested interests to maintain. The absence of dogma from a religion will not recommend it to everybody, but those who regard that as a fortunate circumstance will grant that the credit rests not with the religion itself but with the people who hold it. Just as any state can have as many paupers as it cares to pay for, so any body of religionists can have as many dogmas as it chooses to encourage. Greek religion began like any other with its terrors, its taboos and its magic. If it did not tie up its adherents hand and foot, as other primitive religions have done, that was due to the psychological idiosyncracy of the Greeks. When their time of expansion was over they became the patients and the agents of dogma, but in connection with a foreign religion. It might have been expected from the history of native religions in Greece, that the strong influence of Greek thought on early Christianity would have been anti-dogmatic. On the contrary, practically the whole dogmatic structure of the fathers, though Oriental in spirit, is Greek in form. The tradition of free thought could not stand before St. Paul, and Greek religion, which for fifteen hundred years had given the world a lesson in the true function and status of mythology, lent itself in its decay to the creation of a system which, in the hands of races of very different temperament, became dogma. But though Greek religion began with magic and ended with dogma, it very early rendered the one harmless, and never submitted to the other in connection with a native cult.
For the primitive Greek, as for the primitive Hebrew, the Latin, the Maori, the Melanesian, the American Indian, the world was full of a mysterious force, unaccountable, able either to curse or to bless; and man's very existence depended on his ability to learn the laws of this power's action, to direct it if possible, and if not, to placate it. As man proceeds along the well-worn path to animism, the force comes to be thought of as wielded by will and intelligence like his own. But he never leaves itbehind him. After the gods are born, he worships them in terms of it. From his earliest ritualistic act, to the contemporary sacrament of the Christian church, holy water for instance has been the means of salvation. For unnumbered ages ritual has remained unchanged, but its psychology has changed. What is everywhere performed today with hope, originated everywhere in the dark past with fear.
The Eleusinian mysteries sprang doubtless from as primitive beginnings as any Greek ritual of which we have knowledge. Nevertheless they are free from many of the marks of primitive ritual. They show no cannibalism, probably no totemism, certainly no orgiastic excesses. If animal sacrifice was practised in the precincts, no blood was spilt in the hall of the mysteries. Moreover there was originally nothing either mystic or mysterious about them, in our sense. But a god came to be associated with them, a newcomer to Greece, who brought mystery and mysticism in his train, a god whose mission was to emotionalize religion. Dionysus, of Thracian origin, was, to begin with, a vegetation-power, the son of the earth-goddess. The vine with its strange psychic powers became the plant oftenest associated with him, but the plane and the pine were also his, and if he was Dionysus-the-Grape at Philippi, he was Dionysus-the-Ivy at Acharnania. Remnants of strong magic, compelling the earth to fertility, were present in his rites. Like other vegetation-powers he had a dark side; he suffered death and resurrection, and was powerful in the world of the dead. In the history of culture the ritual of Dionysus has a distinguished place as the putative father of tragedy. In the history of religion that ritual is chiefly remarkable for having brought into Greece, together with all the phenomena of auto-suggestion, a conception that was to have a portentous sequel, the conception of a sacramental meal consisting of the body and blood of the god himself, by partaking of which the communicant shared the divinenature. The whole aim of the Dionysiac method in its native Thrace was hypnosis; the wild Bacchic dance, the tossing of the head, the frantic clash of the tambourine, the harrowing cry of wind-instruments, the waving of torches in the night, the use of stimulants or narcotics, and finally the rending and devouring of the still quivering flesh of the animal which incarnated the god, were all means of so altering the psychic states of the participant that he was no longer conscious of the operation of his own will, but was filled with the god,—enthusiastic. The practical aim of the induced ecstasy was doubtless originally the acquisition of divine power for magical purposes. As the savage eats his brave enemy to acquire his bravery, so the early agrarian eats the vegetation-god to acquire his power of making things grow. But in classical times the phenomena of enthusiasm had taken on a significance that overshadowed the claims of vegetation-magic. Among a people temperamentally self-restrained, nothing is more curious than the psychology of self-abandonment. If we must select one aspect of the godhead as most expressive of the Greek mind, that aspect will unquestionably be Apollo, lucid, rational, self-possessed and civilized. The gulf between the two doctrines, between Apollo's "never too much" and Dionysus' exhortation to let yourself go, would have constituted heresy and schism in a dogmatic age.
But the Greek, seeing how true and how indispensable both are, made shift to bridge the gulf by the set of opinions associated with the name of Orpheus. The state of our knowledge of the origins of Orphism may be illustrated by the fact that Maass says Orpheus was a god and indigenous in Greece, Miss Harrison believes him to have been a man, probably a native of Crete whence he made his way to Greece by way of Thrace, while Reinach declares he was a fox-totem of the Bassarids. Fortunately it does not greatly matter. What is really important, not only for Hellenism but for Christianity, is the spiritof his doctrine, of which we can recover, not it is true, anything like expository teaching, but the traces of the color it laid on almost every fabric of Greek thought. No image could more justly picture it than the faded remnants of paint found on the remains of Greek buildings and sculptures. It is pretty nearly impossible to our imagination to tolerate the vision of a temple or a statue clad otherwise than in its original whiteness or in the beautiful tones bestowed by time and rust. And similarly the forms of Greek spiritual expression show to the soul's eye as logical, pure and monotone. But just as surely as the houses of the gods were painted gaudily with red and blue and green, as surely as their hair was ruddy and their cheeks glowing, so surely was their worship touched and tinted with the emotion that transcends and defies reason.
Orphism took up and developed the mystic elements of the Dionysiac cult, giving them a higher spiritual content and a more restrained expression. It was a scheme of salvation, based on the hope of life after death. The central fact of religious experience was communion with the god; by eating his body and drinking his blood the worshipper partook of his nature, of which immortality was an attribute. "To become Bacchus" was the aim of the partaker of the sacrament. But whereas the old Thracian ritual surrendered the worshipper to the god by means of drunkenness and frenzy, the new ritual induced ecstasy by the equally efficacious use of fasting, silence and quiet suggestion. Orphism though of foreign origin became a genuine Greek religion, and was the last. It was never adopted by the state, but remained in the hands of private congregations. Through these it permeated Greece. Thinkers and poets and the plain people were reached by its different methods of appeal. If we sum up its most striking characteristics, we cannot fail to see how strong was its influence on the world-religion that was to succeed it. Orphism took up the beliefs of paganism, and adapted them to its own ends. It gavethem fresh life through its doctrine of the immortality of the soul. It taught that the soul after death rests for a time in a state of probation, and is finally, according to the works done in the body, either admitted to felicity or punished by reincarnation. Final felicity was to be obtained by ceremonial purity of life, reached through the use of sacraments necessary to salvation, and the chief of these sacraments was the symbolic and memorial partaking of the body and blood of a god slain by his enemies. By the proper use of sacraments, the living could improve the condition of the dead; unscrupulous priests sometimes traded on the simplicity of ignorant worshippers, and engaged for money to perform rites that should free the transgressor from the consequences of his transgression, whether he were alive or dead. The cult of Orpheus therefore summarizes an enormous range of human history. From the Mountain Mother of the Cretan seals and her son, through the patriarchal reign of Zeus, to Mary and the son of Mary, it follows certain apparently unchanging requirements of the soul.
The ceremony of the Eleusinia was a magnificent pageant, the culmination of the religious year. It was a strong appeal to eye and ear, and to thepsychologie de la foule. It was probably accompanied neither by dogmatic exhortation nor by any appeal to the intellect. Aristotle analyzed the method in a sentence: "The initiated do not learn anything; rather they feel certain emotions, and are put into a certain frame of mind." This frame of mind was a hopeful one for this life and the next. On the supernatural side, the mystic felt that he was sure of the good-will of the great powers of the underworld, having done them honor, eaten of their food and enrolled himself as their friend and follower. On the natural side, he had felt the benefit—on which all ritual is based—of performing, in unison with others, after preparation both bodily and mental, and with the moving accompaniments of beautiful and impressive sights and sounds, certainacts entirely apart from the ordinary routine of life, and venerable with the usage of the past. But it is to be noted that although the door was open for communication between religion and morals, the original conception of purity was formal and ceremonial, a survival of magic. We may picture Greek morals as standing with one foot on a religious, the other on a social basis; but if, as in the usual posture of Greek sculpture, the weight of the body is thrown chiefly on one foot, that is the social one. When foreign cults began to make their way into Greece, they generally followed the form of the mystery. Isis, Serapis and Mithras, oriental in origin but Hellenized in ritual, were centers for religions of the personal, mystic and consolatory type. All these oriental cults brought with them a tendency to take literally what the Greeks had taken loosely, and Mithraism brought a high development of the tendency to base morality on the egoistic motive.
Bearing in mind the wide prevalence of these and similar rites on the shores of the Mediterranean during the first century of our era, we are in a position to understand a situation which Archdeacon Cheetham and Dr. Hatch discussed fifteen years ago. In apostolic times the Christian sacraments were of the most informal character possible. A man could be baptized at any time in any place by anyone. "Lo, here is water; what hindereth me to be baptized?" For the years immediately succeeding the apostolic, we have no evidence, and by the time evidence begins again, a great change is visible. Baptism no longer follows at once on conversion, but is preceded by a probationary term, as was initiation. It can no longer be performed anywhere at any time, but only in the great churches and at one of the great festivals, generally Easter-even or Pentecost. Similarly, once in the year, on the 16th of Boedromion, the candidates for initiation used to go down to the sea in a body to be purified by immersion. And baptism is no longer a simple thing done in the sight of all men but a mystery—so JustinMartyr calls it—and the officiant is a "mystagogos." The baptized are now called "initiate," the unbaptized "uninitiate." Before the Lord's supper, the priest now asks, as the mystagogos used to ask, "Is there anyone who has a quarrel with any?" And until infant baptism removed the distinction, the "uninitiate" were directed to withdraw before the consummation of the mystery, as for unnumbered ages they had been bidden to withdraw from the crowning rites of the Eleusinia. It is clear that the founders of Christian mysticism, Clement for instance and Dionysius the Areopagite, did consciously all in their power to emphasize the resemblances between the new and the old. Gregory of Nyssa calls baptism "the mystic bath," Athanasius calls unction "the mystic oil," Gregory of Nazianzen calls the elements "mystic food." Secret formulas, the idea of which comes from the mysteries, are called by the old name, "what must not be spoken." Clement speaks the technical language of the mysteries. "O truly sacred mysteries! O stainless light! My way is lighted with torches, and I survey the heavens and God! I am become holy while I am being initiated! The Lord is my hierophant!"
During the last ten years the researches of Reitzensteim and Cumont have corrected the first impression that the influence of mystic cult and language was late and self-conscious. The very origin of the Christian sacraments, the very theology of Saint Paul, are now believed by many scholars to reflect the Hermitic and Gnostic versions of the mysteries.
The doctrine of the early church underwent as great a modification as its cult. The studies of Hatch were directed by the reflection expressed in the first paragraph of hisInfluence of Greek Ideas and Usages on the Christian Church. "It is impossible for anyone, whether he be astudent of history or no, to fail to notice a difference of both form and content between the Sermon on the Mount and the Nicene Creed. The Sermon on the Mount is the promulgation of a new law of conduct; it assumes beliefs rather than formulates them; the theological conceptions which underlie it belong to the ethical rather than the speculative side of theology; metaphysics are wholly absent. The Nicene Creed is a statement partly of historical facts and partly of dogmatic inferences; the metaphysical terms which it contains would probably have been unintelligible to the first disciples; ethics have no place in it. The one belongs to a world of Syrian peasants, the other to a world of Greek philosophers." The simple first formula of the creed dealt with matters of fact only, "Jesus Christ and him crucified." At the end of the second century it included various philosophical ideas, the creation of the world out of nothing, the Word, the revelation of the Creator to the world, of the Word or Son to the Father and of both to men. The Word—thelogosof Heraclitus and Philo—threatened to supplant the Messiah, and originated the endless and bitter controversies of the early church about the Trinity and the Incarnation. Christian scholars take pleasure and apparently pride in deriving the philosophical and ontological elements of their faith from the Greeks. Dr. Caird says, "In this case we can see that conquered Greece laid spiritual fetters on its victor. Greece provided Christianity with the weapons of culture which enabled it to subdue the minds of its opponents, but at the same time it did much to determine the main bias and direction of the religious consciousness which was established by its means. It gave its own form to the life and doctrines of the Church."
The very word "faith" changed its meaning under Greek influence. When the Hebrews spoke of having faith in Jehovah they meant that they had confidence in his character and good intentions. They used the word aspeople used it when they said that they had faith in Mr. Gladstone. Of course the formula assumed the existence of Jehovah, as of Mr. Gladstone, but that was supposed to be an object of knowledge, not of faith. The disciples again meant by faith the knowledge, direct or based on direct evidence, of certain historical facts. It was the Greeks, with their reliance on the processes of reason, who developed the doctrine that since the reflective action of the mind is at least as authoritative as the reports of the senses, the results of its cogitations are the objects of positive knowledge and faith is the evidence of things not seen. In a word the reasoned monotheism of the Greeks, originating, as far as we are concerned, with Plato, afforded a dialectic basis for the naive monotheism of the Hebrews. A passage from the writings of Hippolytus, of the third Christian century, puts the matter clearly before us: "The one God, the first and sole and universal Maker and Lord, had nothing coaeval with him, ... but he was one, alone by himself.... This supreme and only God begets Reason first, having formed the thought of him, not reason as a spoken word, but as an internal mental process of the universe.... The cause of the things that came into being was the Reason, bearing in himself the active will of Him who begat him ... so that when the Father bade the world come into being, the Reason brought each thing to perfection thus pleasing God." Obviously persons interested in tracing the pedigree of the God of Hippolytus will do well to turn not toGenesisbut to Plato'sTimaeus.
The fact that the Greek philosophers were the real fathers of the church, that the theological systems which have played so dominating a social and political role in Europe are rooted in the speculations of the great pagans, is a tribute to the power of Hellas. But the circumstances under which that power was exerted were unfavorable. It is interesting to consider what might have been the religious history of our civilisation if Christianity hadappeared while the Greek was still not only mythopoeic but mythocrates, still the master of his creation; if Socrates, for instance, perhaps the only religious teacher in history who could have dominated Saint Paul, had been the apostle to the gentiles, and if the great dynamic power of Christianity had been attached to the mechanism of Greek thought at its best. The Greek thought of early Christian times had become stereotyped; it is often characterized as sterile, but no adjective could be less apt in view of the mass and power of the doctrines that sprang from it. And stereotyped as it was, it was still flexible in comparison with its Christian offspring. The history of the word "dogma" is an instructive one. Beginning with a modest connotation, since it meant only "my impression," it stiffened gradually as accumulated authority adhered to it, yet even to the last in pre-Christian usage it meant simply a doctrine which one might take or leave. The union of the Christian notion of divine authority with the Greek notion of hard and fast definition made ruinous combination, and gave birth to the Christian belief that it is sometimes necessary to put a man to the torture or to the death to correct his ideas.
Christian exegesis also is of Greek origin, but Greek exegesis sprang in the first place from a rationalistic motive. The first case of allegorical interpretation of the scriptures of which we know occurred in the sixth century before Christ, and was an attempt to moralize one of the most scandalous passages in Homer, the battle of the gods in the twentieth book of the Iliad. Reason and morality had already combined at that time to acknowledge a uniform course of action in nature, and to make the gods the guardians of this uniformity. What could be said therefore of a hand-to-hand scrimmage between the guardians of the order of the world? Why, it could besaid, and Theagenes of Rhegium said it, that the gods represented inimical natural powers or inimical passions of the mind. "Against Hephaestos stood the great deep-eddying river whom gods call Zanthos and men Scamandros." Naturally, since fire and water cannot dwell together in unity. Science adopted this attractive way of dealing with scripture. Diogenes of Apollonia, who devoted his life to the effort to reconcile every system to every other, declared that Homer used the myths to propagate scientific truth. Antisthenes and the Cynics—a preaching order—developed the method to the full. When Christianity was making its way into a Hellenized world, the principle was established that the written word might have three meanings, the obvious one, the inferential ethical meaning and the symbolic meaning. This principle was eagerly adopted by educated Jews, and applied to their own scriptures. "The application," says Hatch, "fulfilled a double purpose. It enabled educated Jews on the one hand to reconcile their own adoption of Greek philosophy with their continued adhesion to their ancestral religion, and on the other hand to show to the educated Greeks with whom they associated, and whom they frequently tried to convert, that their literature was neither barbarous nor unmeaning nor immoral." Christian exegesis naturally adopted the same method in order to find Christianity everywhere, not only in the Pentateuch but in Homer. And it was inevitably applied to the New Testament, for the time came when the story of the life of Christ needed as much squaring with theology as the old traditions of the Hebrews. Irenaeus says, for instance, that "when Simeon took the young child in his arms and saidNunc dimittis, he was a picture of the Demiurge who had learned his own change of place on the coming of the Saviour, and who gave thanks to the infinite depth." As the pope said later to Father Tom, "the figgers of spache are the pillars of the church."
Plato had deprecated the symbolic method. He causesSocrates to say,à proposof the story of Boreas and Oreithyia, "If I disbelieved it as the philosophers do, I should not be unreasonable: then I might say, talking like a philosopher, that Oreithyia was a girl who was caught by a strong wind and carried off while playing on the cliffs yonder; but it would take a long and laborious and not very happy lifetime to deal with all such questions; and for my own part I cannot investigate them until, as the Delphian precept bids me, I first know myself." Plato's own method of exegesis consists quite simply of expurgation. "The chaining of Hera, and the flinging forth of Hephaistos by his father, and all the fightings of gods which Homer has described, we shall not admit into our state, whether with allegories or without them." To this method also Christian exegesis owed a great debt. Plato's famous short way with Homer and the other poets, his rejection of all myths that do not tend to edification, and that detract from the goodness of the gods, showed the fathers how to deal with what scandalized them in the Hebrew scriptures. Anyone who reads the last pages of the second book of Plato'sRepublicwill see whence Clement took his cue when he wrote: "Far be it from us to believe that the Master of the universe, the Maker of heaven and earth, 'tempts' men as though he did not know—for who then does foreknow? and if he 'repents,' who is perfect in thought and firm in judgment? and if he 'hardens' men's hearts, who makes them wise? and if he 'blinds' them, who makes them to see? and if he desires a 'fruitful hill,' whose then are all things? and if he wants the savor of sacrifices, who is it that needeth nothing? and if he delights in lamps, who is it that set the stars in heaven?"
But many feel that all these phenomena—cult, doctrine and exegesis, important as they are in the composition of Christianity, are still not the essential matter.Essential Christianity is a state of mind and a rule of life, and its basis is generally held to be the principles of the Sermon on the Mount. But while a great many people assent theoretically to the Sermon on the Mount, no one has ever put it in practice in its entirety and all the time. So-called Christian society is not organized on the lines of the Sermon on the Mount. It is not organized on the principle of self-abnegation tending to self-perfection, but on the principle of the development of the individual as a unit of society, with duties laid upon him by his relation to society, and rights guaranteed him by the society he supports. Our ethics are not conceived as founded on laws god-given and final, but as evolved by the growth of society, and subject to endless and progressive change. Where the interest of society requires that the desires of the bee shall be subordinated to the welfare of the hive, Christian ethics is often called in as an ally; but if it were fully in control, society as now organized would disintegrate. The ethics in which we live and move is that of Roman law, and Roman law is to a considerable extent a practical version of the ethics of the Stoics. Moreover the ethics of the Christian church is based on the doctrine of Ambrose, bishop of Milan, and the doctrine of Ambrose is based on Cicerode Officiis, and Cicero's book is based on the works of Panaetius the Greek stoic of the second century before Christ. Socrates and Plato had long ago bidden men to love their enemies, to take no heed for the morrow, to die rather than do wrong, and to hold their goods in common. The fathers were astounded by the Christlike utterances of these pagans, and cried in admiration that they were Christians before Christianity. When the old scholiast read how Plato's Socrates said that "there is no good thing which is not the gift of the gods," he wrote on his margin: "Every good gift and every perfect gift cometh from above." The anti-national character of Christianity, its determination to ignore frontiers, was anticipated in the Stoic and Cynic movements. Theworld was full of missionaries, and the itinerant Cynic preacher was very near to the Christian. Epictetus, who exhorted men to remember that they were sons of God, and to make their lives worthy of their divine parentage gives us a picture of the true Cynic apostle. That he may be free to deliver his message to his fellowmen the true Cynic goes as naked, homeless, and houseless, as a Christian apostle. Like the Christian he goes without wife, child and friends, if only he may thereby bring others to a knowledge of themselves and of God. We know of actual cases where Cynics became Christians, and Christians became Cynics, without any very great ado. It was, however, the Stoic system, embedded in Roman institutions, that conquered the world.
It is clear that the Greeks are largely responsible for bringing religion in Europe to the presentimpasse, where many people seriously hold that if we cease to affirm the incredible and the unproven, morals will suffer, and that a boy had better believe in hell when he is entrusted with his first latch-key. But it is the Greek also who can get us out. Whatever worthy sense we attach to the word "religious," the Greeks illustrate it. Their extraordinary moral earnestness is obscured for us only by the variety of their appeals to our attention. But they never from first to last allowed religion to swallow morals. They first of men perceived and declared that morals are man-made and are constantly to be altered by man; that the state exists to secure the noblest life for the citizens; that therefore social science, by definition, (says Aristotle) deals with right conduct. Plato was deeply interested in all the problems of religion, and alive to all the religious implications of the mysterious universe in which we live; but he worked out in his masterpiece—The Republic—a complete account of the social origin and sanction of ethics. Andas for his theology, "the father and maker of all this universe," said he, "is past finding out; and even if we found him, to tell of him to all men would be impossible."
Contemporary writers on religion are trying, thus far unsuccessfully, to agree on a definition of their subject. But while no one can define religion, everyone feels what it is. No society that we know of has been without it, and there is no reason to suppose that it will ever disappear. Both religion and morals are apparently social products, both are, as far as we can see, indestructible, and both have suffered cruelly from too close a union. And when they recover their independence, the religious emotion, like the other emotions, must be governed by morals.
Is itnotsublime? Really there appears to be no limit to the demands that are made on our schools and colleges. They are supposed to ground the rising generation in the principles and practise of good citizenship, in morality, and to some extent in religion; to develop the power to think (an endlessly difficult matter), the ability to enjoy nature and art, the desire to be useful; to instil habits of industry, self-control and wholesome living; and withal to impartmemoritera mass of miscellaneous book-knowledge such as can be tested by examination. Of late, too, we hear more and more that the schools should fit the young for some specific business in life—for a job, that is. In short we look to the schools to inculcate all the possible virtues of mind and character, and at the same time to turn out what the newest jargon calls efficient social units. And then there are special problems, more acute in some places than in others, such as the induction of alien children into the mysteries of the English language and American ways.
Now all that makes a pretty big task. It is safe to say that an army of Pestalozzis, Arnolds and Horace Manns, if we could command their services and give them all the money they might ask for, would never perform it to our entire satisfaction. Here and there we should find loose ends of failure. What wonder, then, if the schoolma'am, mostly an ordinary sort of well-meaning mortal, who is the victim of routine and must do her appointed work under hopeless conditions of "mass-treatment"—what wonder if many people are saying that the schoolma'am does not seem to measure up to her mission? It is notaltogether strange that she is being overtaken by the fate of Hamlet, whose tragic calamity it was, according to Goethe, to be obliged to shoulder a burden that was too heavy for him. In reading educational literature, one is sometimes reminded of those tribal gods from whom all things are demanded, and whom it is therefore proper to scold or to flog if anything goes wrong. For illustration let me quote a recent deliverance culled from a newspaper. It is by a man of some distinction, whose name I do not give because the language is probably nothing but a reporter's paraphrase. In speaking to an audience on "the fundamental trouble with conditions and the cause of the unrest today," the gentleman is said to have laid it all to "our national educational system, which is teaching the youth of our land to be consumers instead of producers, and only to acquire instead of to serve."
There we have it in a nutshell. It is the schools which are really to blame for the manifold ills that so many people are talking about. If we only had the right kind of schools—teaching the right things in the right way—our whole sea of troubles would quickly turn into pleasant arable land. Historical pundits are just now much interested in what is called the economic interpretation of history; that is, the theory that the whole history of man, including his religions and philosophies and ethnic movements, his flowerings of art, his Periclean and Augustan Ages, his Protestant Reformations and French Revolutions—has been determined primarily by economic conditions. And now, behold, the economic conditions themselves are the work of the schoolma'am. Verily,das Ewigweibliche zieht uns hinanwith a vengeance!
The newest thing is to have the schools cure the ancient ills that grow out of the pressure of sex—a subject that of late seems to claim more than its fair share of the limelight. The Paris dressmakers, accustomed for ages to attire women very seductively for evening exhibition,suddenly take to attiring them rather less seductively for the street. And lo, the Puritan eye is shocked. There are visions of social ruin à la Sodom and Gomorrah. Coincidently the theaters, newspapers and wofsmiths (Mr. Howells' word, wof meaning work-of-fiction), go in for the public washing of dirty linen, the existence and dirtiness of which have been known for some thousands of years. At the same time a new race of "sociologists" seek to alarm us by stirring up the foul pool of social vice and talking about it as if the filth were a thing of the day before yesterday. Result: a pretty general demand that the schools teach sex hygiene and physiology, in order that the boys and girls may be warned betimes of the dangers that lie in wait for them. I am not arguing that children should not be told the truth about these things. I am merely animadverting on the growing tendency to put everything on the schools.
The natural and intended inference from what precedes is that we demand too much of the schools—more than any schools could possibly do and do well. The result is that they are often blamed unreasonably, and that reasonable criticism is apt to be resented as unjust. There is wide-spread complaint of shortcomings—some even speak of the "failure" of popular education,—but the teachers reply with perfect truth that they are doing the best they can. The truth is, however, that there is more or less floundering due to multiplicity of aims, dispersion of effort, and the lack of a simple dominating principle by which to gage the relative importance of things. It is time for educationists to take sober thought and decide, if they can, what is on the whole the most valuable among the possible results of good schooling. If we could somehow reach a working agreement on that point, the path of wisdom would be tolerably clear: we should require ourschools to drive hard at the particular thing deemed most essential, no matter how many smatterings might have to be thrown overboard. It were better for the nation to lose somewhat of its sublime faith in schooling, if by expecting less it might get a surer and more valuable return on its enormous investment. The best of teachers, in kindergarten, high school or university, can never give the best that is in him unless he has a fairly definite idea of what it is all for. Only then can he see the main issue in its proper relation to the side-issues of his routine. Let us then attack this question with holy boldness—somewhat in the spirit of a prudent householder considering what one thing would be best worth saving if his house should take fire.
If we look for the fundamental charter of popular education in these United States we shall find it, if anywhere, in the famous Ordinance of 1787, one memorable passage of which runs thus: "Religion, morality and knowledge being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged." This formulation, which sees the purpose of education in the promotion of good government and the general happiness, may still be accepted. One might balk, perhaps, at the word "happiness," which to the modern mind is apt to connote a more or less passive contentment with one's lot. If the fathers ever thought that popular education was going to produce general contentment, they miscalculated. Its normal effect is the exact opposite. A wholesome discontent is the beginning of progress toward better things. It is vain to preach or teach contentment to the man who sees a chance to better his lot or who feels that he is being kept down by conditions that can in any wise be remedied. We have learned that class struggle of one kind or another is inherent in human society; and where there is class struggle there will be discontent. Today, then, one might prefer the word "welfare," which is not only compatiblewith discontent, but in great degree actually grows out of it.
The subject-matter of education was to be religion, morality and knowledge. Let us consider the impressive triad in the reverse order.
It is patent enough, and must have been patent to the fathers, that, so far as good government and the general welfare are concerned, there is no inherent virtue in mere knowledge. Knowledge got from books and teachers may be socially inert, or it may be positively harmful. Everything depends on the use to which it is put. It is true that, having regard to the long run, we may rest securely on the proposition that the more men know—reallyknowin an accurate way—the better off they will be, and the more likely to secure good government. The advancement of science—taking the word in its very broadest sense—is certainly an ideal that deserves our warmest allegiance. It is thus vastly important in any system of education, to keep open to talent a career from the humblest hovel to the high places of distinction and service.
But there are not many—not one in ten thousand—to whom it is given to increase knowledge in a way to affect government and the general welfare, which must always be largely concerned with the short run and with the preservation of a stable order amid the conflicts of classes, opinions and interests. And in this domain, as was remarked above, there is no inherent virtue in knowledge. What is learned in school may be put to bad use and become a social curse. Some knowledge of chemistry figures in the mental outfit of every dynamiter and adulterator of foods. A knowledge of law or medicine may be used to defeat as well as to promote the ends of justice. Indeed, a large part of our worst trouble comes now from "educated" men and women who prostitute their knowledge to anti-social purposes.
And then there is another reason why the schools shouldnot conceive it to be their highest mission to impart book-knowledge, or to train the mind, as the phrase runs. That reason is that they do not and can not really train the mind, when operating on a large number of pupils at the same time by the method of "recitation." What gets trained in that way is at best the memory; and when the pupil leaves school—at whatever stage of progress—he soon forgets what he has learned, unless he has constant occasion to use it. The result is that the most of the knowledge laboriously acquired in school and college soon becomes quite inert for the purposes of good government and the general welfare. Now it may be necessary, indeed it is necessary, in a progressive school system, to spend a good deal of time over knowledges that are destined soon to be forgotten. But that essential thing that we are searching for, that which the schools are to regard as the vitally important thing, must clearly be something that the pupil is going to need and to use all the time, no matter when his schooldays come to an end.
Next in our triad comes morality. If any one chooses to insist at this point that there can be no morality without religion, let him wait a moment or go off and debate the subject with a metaphysician. In the common use of words morality may be and is independent of religion, and our question here is whether the inculcation of it can possibly be the thing we are looking for, namely the chief end of schooling. Hardly, the wise will say, if the word is to be taken in its usual sense. For it is distinctly a low-caste word. People commonly speak of "mere morality" as if the thing by itself did not amount to much. One recalls the remark of Emerson to the effect that this is very much as if one should say, "Poor God with nobody to help him." Still, the fact remains that the word connotes something rather ordinary. This is why Lord Haldane in a recent address preferred to avoid it and to commend the GermanSittlichkeit, as a more soulful term. One notices, too, that thoughtful teachers who feel theweakness of a schooling that lays all the stress on memory-work such as can be tested by examination, are apt, when they wish to suggest something higher and larger, to use some such phrase as "character-building" rather than "moral training."