Father’s duty in regard to religious instruction.
We believe it is the duty of the head of a household to rear his family in the ideas in which he believes. Whatever solution of the religious problem he may have attained, he ought to hide it from no one, and in especial not from his family. Moreover, even if he should wish to keep his opinions secret, he would be unable to do so, at least for the whole of his life. His dissimulation would simply result in such an association in the minds of his children between moral precepts and religious dogmas that the chances would be that they would stand, or rather fall, together. Of all people in the world the child is precisely the one who is likely to suffer most from a belief that religion and morality are inseparably bound up together. Of all human beings children are least philosophical, least metaphysical, least familiar with scientific ideas, and therefore of all others the most easily biassed once for all by the inculcation of false or doubtful notions presented as certain. In China, at the periodical conferences, certain mandarins dilate upon the following theme in the presence of the more notable among the inhabitants: “Do your duty as a citizen and beware of religion.” That is precisely what a father ought to say again and again to his children. It is a good principle of education to take it for granted that the child is rational, and to treat it as such, in order ultimately and gradually to develop the spirit of reason in it. What a child lacks is much less intensity of attention than continuity. Very often among country people, and almost always among inferior races (as also among animals), the young are more wide-awake, more curious, more quick-minded than the mature men; but their attention must be seized in transit; teaching them resembles teaching a bird on the wing. Their schoolmaster must have the gifts of a bird-fancier; and it is his fault much oftener than the child’s if the latter does not understand, does not ask questions, is inert and incurious. The scientific education of the child should begin with its first question; truth is a debt that one owes to it, and truth accessible to its intelligence. The moment a child asks a question out of its own head, it is at least in part prepared to understand the reply; the duty of the person interrogated is to reply, as fully and as truly as he believes the child capable of understanding, and if he leaves gaps he must at least never fill them with lies. It is so easy to tell the child to wait until it is bigger. There should be no fear of precociously developing the child’s reason in its two essential forms, the instinct of inquiry, of why and how, and the instinct of perception, of logical cogency in the reply to the “why” and “how.” One need not be afraid that the child will fatigue its brain by abstract reasoning; Pascals are rare. The danger does not lie in a premature development of the reason, which it is always easy moreover to check, but in a premature development of the sensibility. The child must not be encouraged to feel too strongly. To subject it to vain fears such as those of hell and the devil, or to beatific visions and mystic enthusiasms such as young girls experience at the time of the first communion, is to do it much greater harm than to teach it to reason justly and to develop in it a certain intelligent virility. Races become effeminate by excess of sensibility, never by excess of scientific and philosophic power.
Impossible to leave the child in ignorance.
It will perhaps be said, with Rousseau, that if the child is not to be trammelled with religious prejudice it may at least wait for reasoned instruction on religion until it has attained its intellectual maturity. We reply that it is impossible to do so in the present state of society. If the father does not teach his child it will absorb the prejudices of those it associates with, and to disabuse it of them afterward will demand a veritable crisis, which is always painful and often the cause of permanent suffering. The great art of education should consist precisely in avoiding crises of this sort in the orderly growth of the intellect. The father who postpones the decisive moment will be the first person to be surprised at the amount of pain he will be obliged to subject his child to in order to root up the error which he has placidly permitted to grow under his very eyes.
One must begin early.
M. Littré has given an account of a case of conscience of this kind; after having voluntarily held aloof from the religious education of his daughter till she had reached years of discretion, he found her at last so sincerely convinced, so completely fashioned by religion for religion, that he recoiled before so thorough-going a change; like a surgeon whose hand should tremble at the thought of an operation upon a body that love had rendered sacred to him; like an oculist who should feel that light was not worth the pain that he would have to inflict on eyes that were dear to him. The intellectual operator has not at his command even the resource of chloroform; he must practise his surgery upon a subject who is fully conscious and even excited by attention and reflection. Prevention is better than expectant treatment, which allows the disease to develop in the hopes of curing it afterward. The competent educator, like the competent physician, may be known by his ability in avoiding the necessity of operations. It is a mistake to allow a child to grow up in complete belief in religious legends, with the intention of undeceiving it afterward. It will be undeceived not without regret nor without effort. And often the effort put forth will itself be too great, will overshoot itself, and from excess of faith the child will pass at a bound to sceptical indifference and will suffer for it. Treasures in heaven are treasures in fiat money; the disappointment which must some day come, when one learns the truth, will be bitter. It would be better always to have known that one was poor. A child may early be accustomed to the conception of the infinite; it makes up its account with it as with the notion of the antipodes, or of the absence of an absolute up and down in the universe. The first sensation one experiences when one learns that the earth is spherical is of terror, a fear of the void, of tumbling off into the abyss of open space. The same naïve fear lies at the bottom of the religious sentiment in certain minds, and is due to factitious associations of ideas which are a matter of education wholly. A fish born in an aquarium becomes accustomed to its habitat, as the ancients were accustomed to the inverted crystal ball of the heavens; it would be lost in the ocean. Birds reared in the cage often die if they are abruptly given their liberty. A period of transition is always necessary, one needs time to become accustomed to intellectual expanses as well as to expanses of air and water. If mankind is to live without religion it must receive a non-religious education, and this education will spare it a great deal of the suffering that those who have been educated in the faith and have subsequently broken away by their own efforts have undergone. The wood-cutter’s child experiences no sentiment of fear in the solitude and obscurity of the forest, in the arched lanes and alleys, among the trees among which it was born. A town-born child would feel lost in such a place and would begin to cry. The world of science, with its shadowy labyrinths and limitless extent and its numberless obstacles which must be removed one at a time, is such a forest; the child who is born in it will not be frightened, will live in it always happily.
What to say to the child about death. M. Louis Ménard’s position.
Of all the problems of education which lie on the borders of religious metaphysics the most interesting is, unquestionably, what to say to the child about death and human destiny. When these questions are discussed before him, is a rational and truly philosophical method to be employed? Is he to be informed dogmatically, or is it a matter of indifference what is said to him? This problem has been discussed, in the “Critique philosophique,” by M. Louis Ménard, who deals with the hypothetical case of a child that has lost its mother and is cross-questioning its father. That is ingenious, but it is a specious way of raising the problem. When a young child loses its mother we regard it as the first duty of the father to console and spare its delicate organism the strain of all strong emotions. The question is one of moral hygiene, in which philosophy and religion are not concerned, in which the age and temperament of the child are the sole things to consider. Truth is not equally valuable at all periods of life; one does not tell a man abruptly that his wife has just died. The most convinced materialist will hesitate to announce to a nervous child that it will never see its mother again. But the materialist in question would always do wrong to put forth a categorical affirmation in a case in which there exists at best nothing more than probabilities; the most dangerous method of deception is to present as a recognized certainty what is really nothing of the kind. In any event there is one form of immortality, that of memory, and that species of immortality we may ourselves secure by implanting it in the mind of the child.[88] The father ought repeatedly to talk to the orphan child of the dead mother. He can create a recollection in the child as vivid and as detailed as his own; whether the child behaves well or ill he can always say, “If your mother were but here!” The child will thus become accustomed to find a recompense or a punishment in its mother’s approbation or disapprobation.[89]