From what has already been said, it is evident that there are at least three fundamental principles to be observed by all parents who would give their children a good start in life. Care must be taken to set the little ones a really good parental example; they must be surrounded from the dawn of consciousness by a favourable environment; and the effort should be made by direct instruction to develop in them habits of right thinking and acting before wrong habits have time to get formed. To these three principles a fourth must now be added: the exercise of constant vigilance to detect and correct any physical disabilities, no matter how trivial they may seem to be.
As was noted when discussing the case of the boy who “goes wrong,” even comparatively slight physical defects, by causing neural stress, may contribute directly to the making of the juvenile delinquent. So, too, mental development may be hampered by unfavourable conditions of bodily health. This, of course, has long been recognised in a general way. But in essential details it still is a fact far too little appreciated by the majority of parents. Nay, it is ignored or misunderstood even by some scientific students of the nature of man, as is shown, for example, by the varying views held to-day regarding that widespread human frailty, laziness.
Only a short time ago, looking through some scientific works bearing on a complicated educational problem, I was greatly struck by two pronouncements concerning laziness. On the one hand I found an eminent physiologist declaring unreservedly, “The love of work and activity is an acquired characteristic rather than a natural one; for the human tendency is toward the line of least effort.” And opposed to this another authority asserted with equal emphasis, “There never was a child born into this world who was born into it lazy.”
To reconcile these statements is a manifest impossibility. Yet it is certain that each of them finds in facts of everyday observation a strong body of evidence to support it. The average child of tender years, as every parent knows, is supremely active and energetic. He is always in motion, always busying himself about something, his mind alert and inquiring, his hands ceaselessly occupied in testing, exploring, putting together, and taking to pieces. Left to himself, he often will display an amazing tenacity of purpose and vigour of performance.
Of one child, less than a year old, a close observer has recorded, “He would over and over again seem to be trying to solve the problem of the hinge to his nursery door, patiently and with riveted attention opening and shutting the door. Day after day saw him at his self-appointed task.” Another, fourteen months old, while playing with a tin can, was seen to put the cover on and off “not less than seventy-nine times without stopping for a moment.” The incessant questioning with which children bombard their parents is another impressive indication of their exuberant, irrepressible activity and energy. But, for that matter, the whole life of the average child goes to corroborate the dictum that the people of this world come into it free from the taint of laziness.
When, however, we look at the same child grown to manhood, or even a few years removed from early youth, more often than not his behaviour seems to bear out the contrary view that man is naturally lazy and acquires love of work, if at all, only under strong compulsion. “To get results from my boys, to induce them to apply themselves to their books and their studies,” many a despairing school-teacher has lamented, “I have to be forever watching and driving them.” In college, office, factory, workshop, and store, one hears the same complaint. There is perpetual waste of time, dawdling, loitering, gossiping—a seeming passion for the ways of slothful ease and aversion from sustained endeavour. To a large extent, too, the history even of those who have won distinction as leaders of thought and action seemingly justifies the doctrine that mankind is naturally prone to idleness rather than to productive activity, and that any tendency in the latter direction is invariably a characteristic acquired in the course of individual development.
Thus Charles Darwin, world-famous for his splendid contributions to the advance of science, was so lazy in boyhood that his father predicted he would turn out a ne’er-do-well and a disgrace to the family. His great contemporary, Sir Charles Lyell, similarly had as a boy a profound dislike for work of any sort. Heinrich Heine, on his own confession, idled away his time in school, and was “horribly bored” by the instruction given him at Göttingen. According to an American psychologist, Edgar James Swift, who has made an extensive study of the boyhood of great men, Wordsworth up to the age of seventeen was so lazy as to be “wholly incapable of continued application to prescribed work.” Of Patrick Henry it is recorded by an early biographer that in boyhood “he was too idle to gain any solid advantage from the opportunities which were thrown in his way.” And, after his schooling was done, indolence caused him to fail dismally in several business ventures before he took up the study of law.
When James Russell Lowell was a boy his relatives were greatly distressed by his laziness, and he was suspended by the authorities of Harvard University “on account of continual neglect of his college duties.” A boyhood friend who had unusual facilities for observation is credited with having repeatedly declared that “there never was so idle a dog as young Humphry,” afterward Sir Humphry Davy of scientific renown. “My master,” Samuel Johnson once remarked, in speaking of his school-boy days, “whipped me very hard. Without that, sir, I should have done nothing.” Balzac, who wrote so many novels, yet did not let one appear until it had undergone repeated revision, confessed that not only in boyhood but throughout the years of his literary labours he was tormented by longings for an existence of pleasure-seeking leisure. Through the lips of his famous character, Raphael de Valentin, here is what he says of himself:
“Since the age of reason until the day when I had finished my task, I observed, read, wrote without ceasing, and my life was like a long imposition; an effeminate lover of oriental indolence, enamoured of my dreams, sensual, I have always worked, refusing to allow myself to taste the joys of Parisian life; gourmand, I have been temperate; enjoying movement and sea voyages, longing to visit other countries, still finding pleasure, like a child, in making ducks and drakes on the water, I remained constantly seated, pen in hand.”
Taking into consideration facts like these, the evidence would certainly seem to be in favour of the view that, in yielding to a desire for idleness, men are, after all, only following the dictate of Nature. But, recalling the intense activity, the abounding energy of childhood, recalling also the demonstrable truth that in most cases even the laziest of school-boys has had a past characterised by the reverse of laziness, just as he may have, like Darwin, Lyell, and the rest, a future of marvellous accomplishment, the mind must once more incline to the opposite belief.