And joy in the people you’re going to be.”
The gradual realization of higher and higher types is the general law of evolution in the organic world; it is also the process of the ideal spiritual development of the individual man. The potency of an infinitely varied and beautiful world was in the primeval mist. The potency of each higher type of being lies in the simpler form preceding. Ideally the potency of a soul of strength and beauty, of continuous development, is in the child and youth. The self of to-day is the material of possibility which should grow into the higher self of to-morrow.
Growth is not merely gain in knowledge and intellectual power. The science of education must include a vision of the entire human soul with its need of sympathy and direction, its vague dreams of possibility, its ideals half-realized. We must view the scale of feelings from the lowest animal instinct to the most refined ethical emotions, the order of their worth from the meanest vindictiveness to the highest altruism under God and duty, and note the struggle for the survival of the fittest of the impulses and motives under the guidance of reason and with the responsibility of freedom.
We see men, yet in the vigor of life, men of learning, of position, of opportunity, complacent in their attainments, fixed in ideas and methods adapted to a previous generation or a different environment, psychically prematurely old, their powers half-developed, their life work half-done. The men who reach the complete development of their powers constantly renew their youth, and march with modern events.
We see young graduates, men of power, who, through degenerate tendencies, lack of faith, lack of insight or lack of courage, remain stationary and satisfied in the grade to which their diplomas duly testify. They have as much life and growth and are as ornamental as a painted canvas tree in a garden. A lazy indifferent man once said he would as soon be dead as alive. When asked why he did not kill himself, he could only explain that he would as soon be alive as dead.
In the established church is sometimes observed by its devotees a special season of solitude and silence for religious meditation; it is called a “retreat.” There is a German tale of an aged grandfather who, every Christmas season, spent a day alone in meditation upon the year and the years gone by, making a reckoning with himself, with his failures and his blessings, and casting a most conscientious account. On that day the noisy children were hushed by the servants—“The master is keeping his retreat”—and they went about in silent wonder and imagined he was making himself Christmas gifts in his quiet room upstairs. When he reappeared in the evening, after his day of solitude, he seemed by his quiet, gentle manners and thought-lit face to have received heaven-sent gifts.
I shall never forget the passage of Vergil which in my school days gave rise in me to a new sense of beauty in literature; nor shall I forget the unique and rich experience of the revelation. Every one has at times a new birth, a disclosure of hitherto unknown capacities and powers.
The soul must keep its retreats, not necessarily on church-anniversary days, but at epochs, at periods of dissatisfaction with the past, at stages of new insight—must have a reckoning with itself and readjust itself to life. When one reviews the panorama of his own history, and finds it inartistic, a profitless daub, empty of the ideal or heroic, he is keeping a retreat. When a new estimate of values and possibilities appears, he has experienced a conversion, has taken a new step in the evolution of his ideal life. The revolt of the soul may be as necessary to its health and growth as the upheaval of a nation is essential to its development. It is a battle for new principles, for advance, for freedom.
Tolstoï relates a most striking reminiscence of his own life, substantially thus: It was in 1872 that the Tolstoï of to-day saw the light. Then a new insight revealed his former life as empty. It was on a beautiful spring morning with bright sun, singing birds, and humming insects. He had halted to rest his horse by a wayside cross. Some peasants passing stopped there to offer their devotions. He was touched to the depths by their simple faith, and when he took up his journey he knew that the Kingdom of God is within us. He says: “It was then, twenty-three years ago, that the Tolstoï of to-day sprang into existence.”