Reason, with the Will to execute its dictates, is the distinguishing type of man. It is towards this end that his faculties tend; in this consists his peculiarity, his charter of existence. Any failure to reach this end, is as much an arrest of development as is a case of spina bifida, or the imperfect closure of the heart’s ventricles. We cannot judge of the Nature of man, without the clear recognition of this distinctive type, and it is impossible to establish sound methods of education, without constantly keeping in view, both the true nature of man and the steps by which it must be reached. These steps—i.e., the method by which man grows towards his distinctive type in creation—constitute the fundamental question in the present inquiry.
One distinguishing feature of human growth is its comparative slowness. No animal is so helpless during its infancy, none remains so long in a state of complete dependence on its parents. During the first few years, the child is quite unable either to procure its own food, or to keep itself from accidents, and it attains neither its complete bodily nor mental development, until it is over twenty years of age. We find this slow growth of faculties to be an essential condition of their excellence. It is observed to be a law of organized existence that the higher the degree of development to be reached, the slower are the processes through which it is attained, and the longer is its period of dependence on parental aid.
The forces employed in the elaboration of the human being, differ in their manifestation at various stages of its growth. There are two marked forces to be noted, often confounded together, but important to distinguish—viz., the power of growth and the power of development, the former possessed throughout life, the latter at certain epochs only. The capacity for growth and nutrition, by means of which the human frame is built up and maintained out of the forces derived from food and other agents, is shown until the last breath of life, by the power of repair, which continues as long as the human being lives. All action of the organism, every employment of muscular or nervous tissue, uses up such tissue. The body is wasted by its own activities, and it is only by the exact counterpoise of these two forces—disintegration and repair—that health and life itself are maintained. In youth, in connection with very rapid waste of tissue, exists a great excess of formative power, which excess enables each complete organ to enlarge and consolidate itself. The reduction of this excess of formative power to a balance with the waste of tissue, marks the strength of adult life. Its diminution below the power of repair marks the decline of life.
The force of development, however, is shown, not in the enlargement and maintenance of existing parts, but in the creation of new tissues or organs or parts of organs, so that quite new powers are added to the individual. After birth these remarkable efforts of creative force belong exclusively to the youth of the individual. They are chiefly marked by dentition, by growth of the skeleton and the brain, and still more by the addition of the generative powers. With this work of development the adult has nothing to do; it is a burden laid especially upon the young: it is a work as important and exclusively theirs, as child-bearing is the exclusive work of the mother.
One of the first lessons, then, that Physiology teaches us in relation to the healthy growth of the human being, is the slow and successive development of the various faculties. Although the complete type of the future man exists potentially in the infant, long time and varying conditions are essential to its establishment, and the type will never be attained, if the necessary time and conditions are not provided.
The second physiological fact to be noted is the order observed in human development. The faculties grow in a certain determined order. First, those which are needed for simple physical existence; next, those which place the child in fuller relations with Nature; and, lastly, those which link him to his fellows. As digestion is perfected before locomotion, so muscular mobility and activity exist before strength, perception before observation, affection and friendship before love. The latest work of Nature in forming the perfect being is the gift of sexual power. This is a work of development, not simply of growth. There are new organs coming into existence, and the same necessary conditions of gradual consolidation and long preparation for special work exist as in the growth of all the organs of animal life. At the age of puberty, when the special life of sex commences, the other organs of relation—skeleton, muscles, brain—are still carrying on their slow process of consolidation. ‘At eighteen the bones and muscles are very immature. Portions of the vertebræ hardly commence to ossify before the sixteenth year. After twenty, the two thin plates on the body of the vertebræ form, completing themselves near the thirtieth year. Consolidation of the sacrum commences in the eighteenth year, completing after the twenty-fifth. The processes of the ribs and of the scapula are completed by the twenty-fifth year; those of the clavicle begin to form between eighteen and twenty; those of the radius and ulna, of the femur, tibia, and fibula, are all unjoined at eighteen, and not completed until twenty-five. The muscles are equally immature; they grow in size and strength in proportion to the bones, and it is not until twenty-five years of age, or even later, that all epiphyses of the bones have united, and that the muscles have attained their full growth.’[16]
As a necessary consequence of this slow order of natural growth, the individual is injured when sufficient time for growth is not allowed, or when faculties which should remain latent, slowly storing up strength for the proper time of unfolding, are unduly stimulated or brought forward too soon. The writer above quoted remarks: ‘It is not only a waste of material, but a positive cruelty, to send lads of eighteen or twenty into the field.’[17] The evil effect of undue stimulation to a new function is twofold. The first effect is to divert Nature’s force from the consolidation of faculties already fully formed, and, second, to injure the substantial growth of the later faculty, which is thus prematurely brought forward. Thus the child compelled to carry heavy burdens will be deformed or stunted; the youth weighed down by intellectual labour will destroy his digestion or injure his brain. So, if the faculty which is bestowed as the last work of development, that which requires the longest time and the most careful preparation for its advent—the sexual power—be brought forward prematurely, a permanent injury is done to the individual, which can never be completely repaired.
The marked distinction which exists between puberty and nubility should here be noted. It is a distinction based upon the important fact that a work of long-continued preparation takes place in the physical and mental nature, before a new faculty enters upon its complete life. Puberty is the age when those changes have taken place in the child’s constitution, which make it physically possible for it to become a parent, but when the actual exercise of such faculty is highly injurious. This change takes place, as a general rule, from fourteen to sixteen years of age. Nubility, on the other hand, is that period of life when marriage may take place, without disadvantage to the individual and to the race. This period is generally reckoned, in temperate climates, in the man at from twenty-three to twenty-five years of age. About the age of twenty-five commences that period of perfect manly vigour, that union of freshness and strength, which enables the individual to become the progenitor of vigorous offspring. The strong constitution transmitted by healthy parents between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-five indicates the order of Nature in the growth of the human race. The interval between these two epochs of puberty and confirmed virility, is a most important period of rapid growth and slow consolidation. Not only is the lifelong work of the body going on at this time, with much greater activity than belongs to adult life—i.e., the work of calorification, nutrition, and all that concerns the maintenance of the body during its unceasing expenditure of mechanical and mental force—but the still more powerful actions of development and growth are being carried on to their last and greatest perfection. Although, as will be shown later, the influences brought to bear upon the very young child strongly affect its later growth in good or evil, yet this period between fourteen and twenty-five is the most critical time of preparation for the work of adult life.
Another important fact announced by physiological observation, is the absolute necessity of establishing a proper government of the human faculties, by the growth of intelligent self-control. Reason, not Instinct, is the final guide of our race. We cannot grow, as do the lower animals, by following out the blind promptings of physical nature. From the earliest moment of existence, intelligence must guide the infant. At first this guiding intelligence is that of the mother, and through all the earlier stages of life, a higher outside intelligence must continue to provide the necessary conditions of growth, until the gradual mental development of the child fits it for independent individual guidance. The great difficulty of education lies in the adjustment of intelligence, for there are antagonisms to be encountered. There is first of all to be considered the adaptation of parental intelligence to the large proportion of indispensable physical instinct, with which each child is endowed by Nature. There is next the adjustment of the two intelligences, the parental and filial. These relations are constantly changing, and the true wisdom of education consists in meeting these changes rightly.
It is very important to observe that each new phase of life, each new faculty, begins in the child-like way—that is to say, there is always a large proportion of the blind, instinctive element which absolutely needs a higher guidance. The instinctive life of the body always necessarily exists, and, therefore, constantly strives to make itself felt. This life of sensation will (in many different ways) obtain a complete mastery over the individual, if Reason does not exist, and grow into a controlling force. This danger of an undue predominance of the instinctive force is emphatically true of the life of sex. It begins, child-like, in a tumult of overpowering sensations—sensations and emotions which need as wisely-arranged conditions and as high a guiding influence as does the early life of the child. At this period of life, an adjustment of the parental and filial intelligence is required, quite as wisely planned as in childhood, in order to secure the gradual growth of intelligent self-control in the young life of sex. If we do not recognise this necessity, or fail to exercise this directing influence, we do not perceive the crowning obligation of the older to the younger generation. However much parents may now shrink from this obligation, and, owing to incorrect views of sex, be really unable to exercise the kind of influence required, the necessity for such influence, nevertheless, exists as a law of human nature, unchangeable, rooted in the human constitution. It is Nature’s method, that every new faculty requires intelligent control from the outset, but only gradually can this guidance become self-control.