Causes and Consequences

by John Jay Chapman

The laws he discovered may be stated in a paragraph. The child is a growing organism. It is a unity. It develops through creative activity. It is benefited by contact with other children and is happy in proportion as it is unselfishly employed.

Let us assume for a moment that these things are true, that they are the most important truths about the child; and let us see how they must affect our views of life, of politics, sociology, art, religion, conduct. There is of course no moment at which the child ceases to be a child. The laws of its growth and being are not at any discoverable time superseded by any new laws. Man as a creature, as an organism, has here by Froebel, and for the first time in history, been ingenuously studied, and the main laws of him noted. With the discovery that he is a unity, there vanishes every classification of science made since the days of Aristotle. They are convenient dogmas, thumb rule distinctions, useful as aids in the further pushing of our studies into the workings of this unity. Take up now a book of political economy, a poem, a history: this thought of Froebel’s runs through it like quicksilver. The scheme of thought of the writer is by it dissolved at once into human elements. You find you are studying the operation of the mind of some one, whom you picture to yourself as a man, as a unit; you are interpreting this by your own experience. It is all psychology, you are pushing your analysis. The universe is receiving its interpretation through you yourself. We are thus brought to the point of view of the mystic, as the only conceivable point of view.

“That the organism develops by creative activity.” This might have come as a deduction from Darwin. It is an expression in metaphysical language of the “struggle for life.” Froebel discovered it independently. The consequences of a belief in it are so tremendous, that no man who is not prepared to spend the rest of his life completely dominated by the idea, ought even to pause to consider it.

Your capacities, your beliefs, your development, your spiritual existence are the result of what you do. Active creation of some sort, occupation which takes your entire attention and calls upon you, merely incidentally and as a matter of course, for thought, resource, individual or original force; this will develop you and nothing else will.

The connection between this thought and the previous one is apparent. It is only by such creative activity that the organism as a unit gets into play. If you set a man copying or memorizing, you have occupied only a fraction of him. If you set him to making something, the minute he begins, his attention is concentrated. Willy nilly he is trying to make something significant, he is endeavoring to express himself, the forces and powers within him begin coming to his succor, offering aid and suggestion. Before he knows it, his whole being is in operation. The result is a statement of some sort, and in the process of making it the creature has developed. But when you say “significant” you have already implied the existence of other organisms. He is not expressing himself only, he is expressing them all, and here comes Froebel with his third great discovery, that it is by constant personal intercourse with others that the power to express is gained. And on top of this comes the last law, so closely related to the third as to be merely a new view of it, but discovered by experiment, tested by practice, announced empirically and as a fact, that the child is unselfish and only really happy when at work creatively and for the use and behoof of others.

This conclusion throws back its rays over the course of the argument, and we are compelled to see, what we have already known, that unselfishness and intellectual development are one and the same thing, that there is no failure of intellect which cannot be expressed in terms of selfishness, and no selfishness that cannot be expressed as intellectual shortcoming. Criminology has reached the same point by another route.

The matter is really very simple, for anything self-regardant means a return of the organism upon itself, a stepping on your own toes, and brings self-consciousness, discomfort, pain. Self-sacrifice on the other hand brings fulfilment. The self-sacrifice is always illusory, and the development real. This becomes frightfully apparent in ingenuous and unhappy love affairs, for the organism robbed of fulfilment returns upon itself.

It makes little difference what province of thought we begin with in applying these views to the world. They give results like a table of logarithms. They do more than this, they unravel the most complex situations, they give the key to conduct and put a compass in the hands of progress. They explain history, they support religion, they justify instinct, they interpret character. They give the formula for doing consciously what mankind has been doing unconsciously in so far as it has been doing what any one of us in his soul approves of or cares to imitate.

Let us take up the most obvious deductions. If people develop according to their activities, their opinions will be a mere reflex of their conduct. What they see in the world comes out of what they do in the world. Here in a mere niche of Froebel we find the whole of Emerson.

The power and permanence of Sainte Beuve are due to his having applied this theory to the interpretation of literature. He is not content till he has seen the relation between the conduct and the opinions, the conduct and the art of a character.