It is true that in America, where politicians have learnt more successfully than elsewhere the art of controlling other men's unconscious impulses from without, there have been of late some noteworthy declarations as to the need of conscious control from within. Some of those especially who have been trained in scientific method at the American Universities are now attempting to extend to politics the scientific conception of intellectual conduct. But it seems to me that much of their preaching misses its mark, because it takes the old form of an opposition between 'reason' and 'passion.' The President of the University of Yale said, for instance, the other day in a powerful address, 'Every man who publishes a newspaper which appeals to the emotions rather than to the intelligence of its readers ... attacks our political life at a most vulnerable point.'[[60]] If forty years ago Huxley had in this way merely preached 'intelligence' as against 'emotion' in the exploration of nature, few would have listened to him. Men will not take up the 'intolerable disease of thought' unless their feelings are first stirred, and the strength of the idea of Science has been that it does touch men's feelings, and draws motive power for thought from the passions of reverence, of curiosity, and of limitless hope.
The President of Yale seems to imply that in order to reason men must become passionless. He would have done better to have gone back to that section of the Republic where Plato teaches that the supreme purpose of the State realises itself in men's hearts by a 'harmony' which strengthens the motive force of passion, because the separate passions no longer war among themselves, but are concentrated on an end discovered by the intellect.[[61]]
In politics, indeed, the preaching of reason as opposed to feeling is peculiarly ineffective, because the feelings of mankind not only provide a motive for political thought but also fix the scale of values which must be used in political judgment. One finds oneself when trying to realise this, falling back (perhaps because one gets so little help from current language) upon Plato's favourite metaphor of the arts. In music the noble and the base composer are not divided by the fact that the one appeals to the intellect and the other to the feelings of his hearers. Both must make their appeal to feeling, and both must therefore realise intensely the feelings of their audience, and stimulate intensely their own feelings. The conditions under which they succeed or fail are fixed, for both, by facts in our emotional nature which they cannot change. One, however, appeals by easy tricks to part only of the nature of his hearers, while the other appeals to their whole nature, requiring of those who would follow him that for the time their intellect should sit enthroned among the strengthened and purified passions.
But what, besides mere preaching, can be done to spread the conception of such a harmony of reason and passion, of thought and impulse, in political motive? One thinks of education, and particularly of scientific education. But the imaginative range which is necessary if students are to transfer the conception of intellectual conduct from the laboratory to the public meeting is not common. It would perhaps more often exist if part of all scientific education were given to such a study of the lives of scientific men as would reveal their mental history as well as their discoveries, if, for instance, the young biologist were set to read the correspondence between Darwin and Lyell, when Lyell was preparing to abandon the conclusions on which his great reputation was based, and suspending his deepest religious convictions, in the cause of a truth not yet made clear.
But most school children, if they are to learn the facts on which the conception of intellectual conduct depends, must learn them even more directly. I myself believe that a very simple course on the well-ascertained facts of psychology would, if patiently taught, be quite intelligible to any children of thirteen or fourteen who had received some small preliminary training in scientific method. Mr. William James's chapter on Habit in his Principles of Psychology would, for instance, if the language were somewhat simplified, come well within their range. A town child, again, lives nowadays in the constant presence of the psychological art of advertisement, and could easily be made to understand the reason why, when he is sent to get a bar of soap, he feels inclined to get that which is most widely advertised, and what relation his inclination has to that mental process which is most likely to result in the buying of good soap. The basis of knowledge necessary for the conception of intellectual duty could further be enlarged at school by the study in pure literature of the deeper experiences of the mind. A child of twelve might understand Carlyle's Essay on Burns if it were carefully read in class, and a good sixth form might learn much from Wordsworth's Prelude.
The whole question, however, of such deliberate instruction in the emotional and intellectual facts of man's nature as may lead men to conceive of the co-ordination of reason and passion as a moral ideal is one on which much steady thinking and observation is still required. The instincts of sex, for instance, are becoming in all civilised countries more and more the subject of serious thought. Conduct based upon a calculation of results is in that sphere claiming to an ever increasing degree control over mere impulse. Yet no one is sure that he has found the way to teach the barest facts as to sexual instinct either before or during the period of puberty, without prematurely exciting the instincts themselves.
Doctors, again, are more and more recognising that nutrition depends not only upon the chemical composition of food but upon our appetite, and that we can become aware of our appetite and to some extent control and direct it by our will. Sir William Macewen said not long ago, 'We cannot properly digest our food unless we give it a warm welcome from a free mind with the prospect of enjoyment.'[[62]] But it would not be easy to create by teaching that co-ordination of the intellect and impulse at which Sir William Macewen hints. If you tell a boy that one reason why food is wholesome is because we like it, and that it is therefore our duty to like that food which other facts of our nature have made both wholesome and likeable, you may find yourself stimulating nothing except his sense of humour.
So, in the case of the political emotions, it is very easy to say that the teacher should aim first at making his pupils conscious of the existence of those emotions, then at increasing their force, and finally at subordinating them to the control of deliberate reasoning on the consequences of political action. But it is extraordinarily difficult to discover how this can be done under the actual conditions of school teaching. Mr. Acland, when he was Education Minister in 1893, introduced into the Evening School Code a syllabus of instruction on the Life and Duties of the Citizen. It consisted of statements of the part played in social life by the rate-collector, the policeman, and so on, accompanied by a moral for each section, such as 'serving personal interest is not enough,' 'need of public spirit and intelligence for good Government,' 'need of honesty in giving a vote,' 'the vote a trust as well as a right.' Almost every school publisher rushed out a text-book on the subject, and many School Boards encouraged its introduction; and yet the experiment, after a careful trial, was an acknowledged failure. The new text-books (all of which I had at the time to review), constituted perhaps the most worthless collection of printed pages that have ever occupied the same space on a bookshelf, and the lessons, with their alternations of instruction and edification, failed to stimulate any kind of interest in the students. If our youths and maidens are to be stirred as deeply by the conception of the State as were the pupils of Socrates, teachers and the writers of text-books must apparently approach their task with something of Socrates' passionate love of truth and of the searching courage of his dialectic.
If again, at an earlier age, children still in school are to be taught what Mr. Wells calls 'the sense of the State,'[[63]] we may, by remembering Athens, get some indication of the conditions on which success depends. Children will not learn to love London while getting figures by heart as to the millions of her inhabitants and the miles of her sewers. If their love is to be roused by words, the words must be as beautiful and as simple as the chorus in praise of Athens in the Oedipus Coloneus. But such words are not written except by great poets who actually feel what they write, and perhaps before we have a poet who loves London as Sophocles loved Athens it may be necessary to make London itself somewhat more lovely.
The emotions of children are, however, most easily reached not by words but by sights and sounds. If therefore, they are to love the State, they should either be taken to see the noblest aspects of the State or those aspects should be brought to them. And a public building or ceremony, if it is to impress the unflinching eyes of childhood, must, like the buildings of Ypres or Bruges or the ceremonies of Japan, be in truth impressive. The beautiful aspect of social life is fortunately not to be found in buildings and ceremonies only, and no Winchester boy used to come back uninfluenced from a visit to Father Dolling in the slums of Landport; though boys' eyes are even quicker to see what is genuine in personal motive than in external pomp.