The Story of the Innumerable Company, and Other Sketches

by David Starr Jordan

The rocks and shells, the frogs and lilies always tell the absolute truth. Association with these, under right direction, will build up a habit of truthfulness, which the lying story of the cherry-tree is powerless to effect. If history is to be made an agency for moral training, it must become a nature-study. It must be the study of original documents. When it is pursued in this way it has the value of other nature-studies. But it is carried on under great limitations. Its manuscripts are scarce, while every leaf on the tree is an original document in botany. When a thousand are used, or used up, the archives of nature are just as full as ever.

From the intimate affinity with the problems of life, the problems of nature-study derive a large part of their value. Because life deals with realities, the visible agents of the overmastering fates, it is well that our children should study the real, rather than the conventional. Let them come in contact with the inevitable, instead of the "made-up," with laws and forces which can be traced in objects and forms actually before them, rather than with those which seem arbitrary or which remain inscrutable. To use concrete illustrations, there is a greater moral value in the study of magnets than in the distinction between shall and will, in the study of birds or rocks than in that of diacritical marks or postage-stamps, in the development of a frog than in the longer or the shorter catechism, in the study of things than in the study of abstractions. There is doubtless a law underlying abstractions and conventionalities, a law of catechisms, or postage-stamps, or grammatical solecisms, but it does not appear to the student. Its consideration does not strengthen his impression of inevitable truth. There is the greatest moral value, as well as intellectual value, in the independence that comes from knowing, and knowing that one knows and why he knows. This gives spinal column to character, which is not found in the flabby goodness of imitation or the hysteric virtue of suggestion. Knowing what is right, and why it is right, before doing it is the basis of greatness of character.

The nervous system of the animal or the man is essentially a device to make action effective and to keep it safe. The animal is a machine in action. Toward the end of motion all other mental processes tend. All functions of the brain, all forms of nerve impulse are modifications of the simple reflex action, the automatic transfer of sensations derived from external objects into movements of the body.

The sensory nerves furnish the animal or man all knowledge of the external world. The brain, sitting in absolute darkness, judges these sensations, and sends out corresponding impulses to action. The sensory nerves are the brain's sole teachers; the motor nerves, and through them the muscles, are the brain's only servants. The untrained brain learns its lessons poorly, and its commands are vacillating and ineffective. In like manner, the brain which has been misued [Transcriber's note: misused?], shows its defects in ill-chosen actions—the actions against which Nature protests through her scourge of misery. In this fact, that nerve alteration means ineffective action, lying brain, and lying nerves, rests the great argument for temperance, the great argument against all forms of nerve tampering, from the coffee habit to the cataleptic "revival of religion."

The senses are intensely practical in their relation to life. The processes of natural selection make and keep them so. Only those phases of reality which our ancestors could render into action are shown to us by our senses. If we can do nothing in any case, we know nothing about it. The senses tell us essential truth about rocks and trees, food and shelter, friends and enemies. They answer no problems in chemistry. They tell us nothing about atom or molecule. They give us no ultimate facts. Whatever is so small that we cannot handle it is too small to be seen. Whatever is too distant to be reached is not truthfully reported. The "X-rays" of light we cannot see, because our ancestors could not deal with them. The sun and stars, the clouds and the sky are not at all what they appear to be. The truthfulness of the senses fails as the square of the distance increases. Were it not so, we should be smothered by truth; we should be overwhelmed by the multiplicity of our own sensations, and truthful response in action would become impossible. Hyperaesthesia of any or all of the senses is a source of confusion, not of strength. It is essentially a phase of disease, and it shows itself in ineffectiveness, not in increased power.

Besides the actual sensations, the so-called realities, the brain retains also the sensations which have been, and which are not wholly lost. Memory-pictures crowd the mind, mingling with pictures which are brought in afresh by the senses. The force of suggestion causes the mental states or conditions of one person to repeat themselves in another. Abnormal conditions of the brain itself furnish another series of feelings with which the brain must deal. Moreover, the brain is charged with impulses to action passed on from generation to generation, surviving because they are useful. With all these arises the necessity for choice as a function of the mind. The mind must neglect or suppress all sensations which it cannot weave into action. The dog sees nothing that does not belong to its little world. The man in search of mushrooms "tramples down oak-trees in his walks." To select the sensations that concern us is the basis of the power of attention. The suppression of undesired actions is a function of the will. To find data for choice among the possible motor responses is a function of the intellect. Intellectual persistency is the essence of individual character.

As the conditions of life become more complex, it becomes necessary for action to be more carefully selected. Wisdom is the parent of virtue. Knowing what should be done logically precedes doing it. Good impulses and good intentions do not make action right or safe. In the long run, action is tested not by its motives, but by its results.

The child, when he comes into the world, has everything to learn. His nervous system is charged with tendencies to reaction and impulses to motion, which have their origin in survivals from ancestral experience. Exact knowledge, by which his own actions can be made exact, must come through his own experience. The experience of others must be expressed in terms of his own before it becomes wisdom. Wisdom, as I have elsewhere said, is knowing what it is best to do next. Virtue is doing it. Doing right becomes habit, if it is pursued long enough. It becomes a "second nature," or, we may say, a higher heredity. The formation of a higher heredity of wisdom and virtue, of knowing right and doing right, is the basis of character-building.

The moral character is based on knowing the best, choosing the best, and doing the best. It cannot be built up on imitation. By imitation, suggestion, and conventionality the masses are formed and controlled. To build up a man is a nobler process, demanding materials and methods of a higher order. The growth of man is the assertion of individuality. Only robust men can make history. Others may adorn it, disfigure it, or vulgarize it.

The first relation of the child to external things is expressed in this: What can I do with it? What is its relation to me? The sensation goes over into thought, the thought into action. Thus the impression of the object is built into the little universe of his mind. The object and the action it implies are closely associated. As more objects are apprehended, more complex relations arise, but the primal condition remains—What can I do with it? Sensation, thought, action—this is the natural sequence of each completed mental process. As volition passes over into action, so does science into art, knowledge into power, wisdom into virtue.