Education and the Higher Life

by John Lancaster Spalding

Let the lover of wisdom then strive to live in a healthy body that his senses may report truly of the universe in which he dwells. But this is not easy; for mental labor exhausts, and if the vital forces are still further diminished by dissipation, disease and premature decay of the intellectual faculties will be the result. The ideal of culture embraces the whole man, physical, moral, religious, and intellectual; and the loss of health or morality or faith cannot but impede the harmonious development of the mind itself. Passion is the foe of reason, and may easily become strong enough to extinguish its light. He who wishes to educate himself must learn to resist the desires of his lower nature, which if indulged deaden sensibility, weaken the will, take from the imagination its freshness, and from the heart the power of loving. The task he has set himself is arduous, and he cannot have too much energy, too much warmth of soul, too much capacity for labor. Let him not waste, like a mere animal, the strength which was given him that he might learn to know and love infinite truth and beauty. The dwelling with one's self and with thoughts of what is true and high, which is an essential condition of mental growth, is impossible when the sanctuary of the soul is filled with unclean images. Intellectual honesty, the disinterested love of truth, without which no progress can be made, will hardly be found in those who are the slaves of unworthy passions. The more religious a man is, the more does he believe in the worth and sacredness of truth, and the more willing does he become to throw all his energies with persevering diligence into the work of self-improvement. They who fail to see in the universe an all-wise, all-holy, and all-powerful Being, from whom are all things and to whom all things turn, easily come to doubt whether it holds anything of true worth. History teaches this, and it requires little reflection to perceive that it must be so. Of the Solitary, Wordsworth says,—

"But in despite
Of all this outside bravery, within
He neither felt encouragement nor hope;
For moral dignity and strength of mind
Were wanting, and simplicity of life
And reverence for himself; and, last and best,
Confiding thoughts, through love and fear of Him
Before whose sight the troubles of this world
Are vain."

The corrupt and the ignorant easily learn to feel contempt, but the scholar is reverent. He moves in the midst of infinite worlds, and knows that the least is part of the whole.

Now, how shall he who is resolved to educate himself set about his work? What advice shall be given him? What rules shall be made for him that he may not waste time and energy? He who yearns for the cultivation of mind which makes wisdom possible must work his way to the light. All intellectual men strive to educate themselves, but each one strives in a different way. They all aim at insight rather than information, at the perfect use of their faculties rather than learning. The power to see things as they are, is what they want; and therefore they look, observe, examine, compare, analyze, meditate, read, and write. And they keep doing this day by day; and the longer they work, the more attractive their work grows to be. Descartes, who is a typical lover of the intellectual life, looked upon himself simply as a thinking being, and gave all his thought to the cultivation of his higher faculties in the hope that he might finally discover some truth which would bring blessings to men. He had no thought of literary fame, published little, and sedulously avoided whatever might bring him into notoriety. "Those," he says, "who wish to know how to speak of everything and to acquire a reputation for learning, will succeed most easily if they content themselves with the semblance of truth, which may readily be found." The love of truth is the mark of the real student. What is, is; it is man's business to know it. He is the foe of pretense; sham for him means shame. He will have sound knowledge; he will do his work well; whether men shall applaud or reward him for it, is a foreign consideration. He obeys an inward law, and the praise of those who cannot understand him sounds to him like mockery. True thought, like right conduct, is its own reward. To see truth and to love it is enough,—is more than to have the worship of the world. The important thing is to be a man, to have a serious purpose, to be in earnest, to yearn for what is good and holy; and without this the culture of the intellect will not avail.

We must build upon the broad foundation of man's life, and not upon any special faculty. The merely literary man is often the most pitiful of men,—able, it may be, to do little else than complain that his merits are not recognized. Let it not be imagined then that the lover of wisdom, the follower of intellectual good, should propose to himself a literary career. He may of course be or become a man of letters, but this is incidental to his life-purpose, which is to develop within himself the power of knowing and loving. He will learn to think rightly and to act well, first of all; for he knows that a man's writing cannot be worth more than he himself is worth. He is a seeker after truth and perfection; and understanding at the price of what countless labors these may be hoped for, he is slow to imagine that words of his may be of help to others.

Observation, reading, and writing are the chief means by which thought is stimulated, the mind developed, and the intellect cultivated. The habit of looking and the habit of thinking are closely related. A man thinks as he sees; and for a mind like Shakespeare's, for instance, observation is almost the only thing that is necessary for its development. The boundless world breaks in upon him with creative force. His sympathy is universal, and therefore so is his interest. He sees the like in the unlike, the differences in things which are similar. Every little bird and every little flower are known to him. He contemplates Falstaff and Poor Tom with as much interest as though they were Hamlet and King Lear. In all original minds the power of observation is great. It is the chief source of our earliest knowledge, of that which touches us most nearly and most deeply colors the imagination. When the boy is wandering through fields, sitting in the shade of trees, or lying on the banks of murmuring streams, he is not only learning more delightful things than books will ever teach him, but he is also acquiring the habit of attention, of looking at what he sees, which nowhere else can be gotten in so natural and pleasant a way. Hence the best minds have either been born in the country or have passed there some of their early years. Unless we have first learned to look with the eye, we shall never learn to look with the mind. They who walk unmoved beneath the starlit heavens, or by the ever-moving ocean, or amid the silent mountains; who do not find, like Wordsworth, that the meanest flower that blows gives thoughts which often lie too deep for tears, will not derive great help from the world of books. But in the world of books the intellectual must also make themselves at home and live, must thence draw nourishment, light, wisdom, strength, for there as nowhere else the mind of man has stamped its image; and there the thoughts of the master spirits still breathe, still glow with truth and beauty. The best books are powers

"Forever to be hallowed; only less,
For what we are and what we may become,
Than Nature's self, which is the breath of God,
Or his pure Word, by miracle revealed."

But it is as difficult to know books as to know men. There are but few men who can be of intellectual service to us; and there are but few books which stimulate and nourish the mind. The best books are, as Milton says, "the precious life-blood of a master spirit;" and it is absurd to suppose that they will reveal their secret to every chance comer, to every heedless reader. As it takes a hero to know a hero, so only an awakened mind can love and understand the great thinkers. The reading of the ignorant is chiefly a mechanical proceeding; and, indeed, for men in general reading is little better than waste of time. Their reading, like their conversation, leaves them what they were, or worse. The mass of printed matter has no greater value from an intellectual point of view at least than the wide ever-flowing stream of talk; and for the multitude it is all the same whether they gossip and complain, or read and nod. However much they read, they remain unintelligent; what knowledge they gain is fragmentary, unreal; they learn merely enough to talk about what they do not understand. We may of course read for entertainment, as we may talk for entertainment; but this is merely a recreation of the mind, which is good only because it rests and prepares us for work. The wise read books to be enlightened, uplifted, and inspired. Their reading is a labor in which every faculty of the mind is awake and active. They are attentive; they weigh, compare, judge. They re-create within their own minds the images produced by the author; they seek to enter into his inmost thought; they admire each well-turned phrase, each happy epithet; they walk with him, and make themselves at home in the wonderland which his genius has called into being; past centuries rise before them, and they almost forget that they did not hear Plato discourse in the Academy, or stroll with Horace along the Sacred Way. As they are brought thus intimately into the company of the noblest minds, they think as they thought, feel as they felt, and so are enlightened and inspired. They drink the spirit of the mighty dead, and gradually come to live in a higher and richer world. The best in life and literature is seen to be such only by those who have made themselves worthy of the heavenly vision; and once we have learned to love the few real books of the world, or rather what in these few is eternally true and beautiful, we breathe the atmosphere of the intellectual life. What is frivolous, or false, or vulgar can no longer please us; having seen and loved what is high we may not sink to the lower.

Knowledge may be useful, and yet have little power to nourish, train, and enlarge the mind, and it is its disciplinary and educational value which we are here considering. Medicine for a physician, law for an attorney, theology for a clergyman, is the most useful knowledge; but they are not therefore the best means of intellectual culture. Natural science, though it is most useful, ministering as it does in a thousand ways and with ever-increasing efficacy to our wants and comforts, has but an inferior educational power. Acquaintance with the uniform co-existences and sequences of phenomena is not a mental tonic. Such knowledge not only leaves us unmoved,—it has a tendency even to fetter the free play of the mind and to chill the imagination. It unweaves the rainbow, and leaves us the dead chemical elements. The information we have gained is practical, but it does not exalt the soul or render us more keenly alive to the divine beauty which rests on Nature's face. It does not enable us, as does the knowledge of literature and history, to participate in the conscious life of the race. It makes no appeal to our nobler human instincts. There is no book on natural science, nor can there ever be one, which may take a place among the few immortal works which men never cease to read and love. Physical science has its own domain, and its study will continue to enrich the world, to make specialists of a hundred kinds; but it never can take the place of literature and history as a means of culture; and as an educational force its value is greatest when it is studied not experimentally, but as literature,—though of course, every cultivated man should be familiar with the inductive method, and should receive consequently a certain scientific training.

History, in bringing us into the presence of the greatest men and in showing us their mightiest achievements, rouses our whole being. It sets the mind aglow, awakens enthusiasm, and fires the imagination. It makes us feel how blessed a thing it is "to scorn delights and live laborious days;" how divine to perish in bringing truth and holiness to men. We commingle with the makers of the world; we hear them speak and see them act; we catch the spirit of their lofty purpose, their high courage, their noble eloquence. When we drink deeply of the wisdom which history teaches, we come to understand that truth and justice, heroism and religion, which are the virtues of the greatest men, may be ours as easily as theirs; that opportunity for true men is ever present, and that the task set for each one of us is as sacred and important as any which has ever been entrusted to the human mind and will. Our thought is widened, our hearts are strengthened, and we come to feel that it shall be well for others that we too have lived. When we have learned to be at home with lofty and generous natures, the heroic mood becomes natural to us.