“The highest force in the universe is Mind. This created the heavens and earth. This has changed the wilderness into fruitfulness, and linked distant countries in a beneficent ministry to one another’s wants. It is not to brute force, to physical strength, so much as to art, to skill, to intellectual and moral energy, that men owe their mastery over the world. It is mind which has conquered matter. To fear, then, that by calling forth a people’s mind, we shall impoverish and starve them, is to be frightened at a shadow.”
“It is chiefly through books that we enjoy intercourse with superior minds, and these invaluable means of communication are in the reach of all. In the best books, great men talk to us, give us their most precious thoughts, and pour their souls into ours. God be thanked for books. They are the voices of the distant and the dead, and make us heirs of the spiritual life of past ages. Books are the true levellers. They give to all, who will faithfully use them, the society, the spiritual presence, of the best and greatest of our race. No matter how poor I am; no matter though the prosperous of my own time will not enter my obscure dwelling; if the sacred writers will enter and take up their abode under my roof, if Milton will cross my threshold to sing to me of Paradise, and Shakespeare to open to me the worlds of imagination and the workings of the human heart, and Franklin to enrich me with his practical wisdom, I shall not pine for want of intellectual companionship, and I may become a cultivated man though excluded from what is called the best society in the place where I live.”
665. Horace Mann (1796-1859).—Horace Mann is not a philosopher who discusses education, but a politician who reformed and developed the education of his country. Secretary of the Massachusetts Board of Education, he opened schools, founded libraries, and pronounced a great number of discourses, the best known of which is The Necessity of Education in a Republican Government.
“When, then,” he often said, “will men give their thought to infancy? We watch the seed which we confide to the earth, but we do not concern ourselves with the human soul till the sun of youth has set. Were it in my power, I would scatter books over all the earth as men sow wheat on the plowed fields.”
Speaking to Americans, to working people, and to tradesmen, he made apparent the positive advantages of instruction:—
“If to-morrow some one were to tell you that a coal mine had been discovered which would pay ten per cent, you would all rush to it; and yet there are men whom you let grovel in ignorance when you might realize from forty to fifty per cent on them. You are ever giving your thought to capital and to machines; but the first machine is man, and the first capital, man, and you neglect him.”
But he also interested himself in the moral effects of education, especially in a democratic society, where each citizen is a sovereign:—
“The education which has already been given a people makes it necessary to give them more. By instructing them, new powers have been awakened in them, and this intellectual and moral energy must be regulated. In this case we have not to do with mechanical forces, which, once put in action, accomplish their purpose and then stop. No; these are spiritual forces endowed with a principle of life and of progress which nothing can quench.”
666. Conclusion.—The labors of Mr. Spencer and Mr. Bain, the works of Channing and Mann, and others still, will contribute, we hope, to prepare the definite solutions demanded by our times in the matter of education. These solutions are important for the security and the greatness of our country. More than ever it is necessary that education become something else than an affair of inspiration, abandoned to caprice and hazard, but that it be a work of reflection. It is said that the future is uncertain, that events are leading French society no one knows where, and that our destinies are at the mercy of the most unforeseen storms. We do not believe this, since it is within our power that it shall be otherwise. There is a means, in fact, of assuring the future of peoples, and this is to give them an intellectual and moral education which purifies the soul and strengthens character. Do not let us look for regeneration and progress from a sudden and miraculous transformation; do not let us demand them even of the immediate efficiency of such or such a political institution. Everything here below is accomplished according to the laws of a slow progression, by trifling and successive modifications. Just as for the child there is no abridgment which allows us to suppress the slow steps of the insensible growth which each year brings forward, so for nations there is no other process than the action, slow but sure, of a wise and vigorous education, for causing them to pass from vice to virtue, from abasement to grandeur.
The partisans of evolution sometimes seem to announce to us the near apparition of a race superior to our own, called to supplant us, as we shall have supplanted the inferior races. One day or another we shall be liable, it seems, to meet “at the angle of a rock” the successor of the human race. We count but little on such promises, and the coming of this hypothetical race of men, suddenly evoked by a wave of the magic wand of natural selection, leaves us very incredulous.