He who has right habits will go farther and rise higher than he who has only brilliant attainments. It is an error, and a very common one, to suppose that education is merely, or chiefly, a mental process, and consequently that the best school is that in which the various kinds of knowledge are best taught. Our whole being, physical, intellectual, and moral, is subject to the law of education. We may educate the eye, the ear, the hand, the foot; and each member of the body may be trained in many ways. The eye of the microscopist has received a training different from that of the painter; the sculptor's hand has been taught a cunning unlike that of the surgeon; the voice of the orator is developed in one way, that of the singer in another. And so the faculties of the mind may be drawn forth, and each one in various ways. The powers of observation, of reflection, of intuition, of imagination, are all educable. One of the most important and most difficult lessons to learn is that of attention. We know only what we are conscious of, and we are conscious only of that to which we give heed. If we but hold the mind to any subject with perseverance, it will deliver its secret. The little knowledge we have is often vague and unreal, because we are heedless, because we have never taught ourselves to dwell in conscious communion with the objects of thought. The trained eye sees innumerable beauties which are hidden from others, and so the mind which is taught to look right sees truths the uneducated can never know. We may be taught to judge as well as to look. Indeed, once we have learned to see things as they are, correct opinions and judgments naturally follow. All faculty is the result of education. Poets, orators, philosophers, and saints bring not their gifts into the world with them; but by looking and thinking, doing and striving, they rise from the poor elements of half-conscious life to the clear vision of truth and beauty. Natural endowments are not equal; but the chief cause of inequality lies in the unequal efforts which men make to develop their endowments. The lack of imagination in the multitude makes their life dull, uninteresting, and material, and it is assumed that we are born with, or without, imagination, and that there is no remedy for this misery. And those who admit that imagination is subject to the law of development, frequently hold that it should be repressed rather than strengthened. Doubtless the imagination can be cultivated, just as the eye or the ear, the judgment or the reason, can be cultivated; and since imagination, like faith, hope, and love, helps us to live in higher and fairer worlds, an educator is false to his calling when he leaves it unimproved. The classics, and especially poetry, are the great means of intellectual culture, because more than anything else they have power to exalt and ennoble the imagination. To suppose that this faculty is one which only poets and artists need, is to take a shallow and partial view. The historian, the student of Nature, the statesman, the minister of religion, the teacher, the mechanic even, if they are to do good work, must possess imagination, which is at once an intellectual, a moral, and a religious faculty. It is the mother and mistress of faith, hope, and love. It is the source of great thoughts, of high aspirations, and of heavenly dreams. Without it the illimitable starlit expanse loses its sublimity, oceans and mountains their awfulness and majesty, flowers their beauty, home its sacred charm, youth its halo, and the grave its solemn mystery.
Those powers within us which are directly related to conduct, the impulses to self-preservation, and to the propagation of the race, are subject to the law of education, not less than our physical and intellectual endowments. And the importance of dealing rightly with these powers is readily perceived if we reflect that conduct is the greater part of human life, which is a life of thought and love, of hope and faith, of imagination and desire.
As we can educate the faculties of thought and imagination, so can we develop the power to love, to hope, to believe, and to desire. When there is question of the intellect, teachers seek to impart information rather than to strengthen the mind, and when there is question of the moral nature, they have recourse to precepts and maxims instead of striving to confirm the will and to direct impulse. It is generally held, in fact, that will is a gift, not a growth, and the same view is taken of all our moral dispositions. We are supposed to receive from Nature a warm or a cold heart, a hopeful or a despondent temper, a believing or a skeptical turn of mind, a spiritual or a sensual bent. Now as I have already admitted, endowments are unlike; but what has this to do with the drift of the argument? Minds, though by nature unequal, may all be educated; and so wills may be educated, and so that which makes us capable of faith, hope, and desire, may be drawn forth, strengthened, and refined. Emerson, whose thought is predominantly spiritual, takes a low and material view of the moral faculties, confusing strength of will with health. "Courage," he says, "is the degree of circulation of the blood in the arteries.... When one has a plus of health, all difficulties vanish before it." But will is a moral rather than a constitutional power; and in so far as it is moral, it may be cultivated and directed to noble aims and ends. And if the teacher perform this work with fine knowledge and tact, he becomes an educator; for upon the will, more than upon the intellectual faculties, success or failure depends. Whatever we are able to will, we are able to learn to do; and the best service we can render another is to rouse and confirm within him the will to live and to work, that he may make himself a complete man, that thus he may become a benefactor of men and a co-worker with God. The rational will, which is the educated will, should give impulse and guidance to all our thinking, loving, and doing. It should control appetite; it should nourish faith and hope; it should lead us on through the illusory world of sensual delights, through the hardly less illusory world of wealth and power, still bidding us look and see that the world to which the conscious self really belongs, is infinite and eternal, and that to seek to rest in aught else is to apostatize from reason and conscience. Thus it would awaken in us a divine discontent, a sacred unrest, which might urge us on through the darkness of appetite and the unwholesome air of avarice and ambition, whispering to us that our life-work is to know truth, to love beauty, to do righteousness. To none is the education of the will so necessary as to the lovers of intellectual excellence, for they who live in the world of ideas are easily content to let the world of deeds take care of itself. As the astronomer sees the earth lost like a grain of sand in infinite space, so to the wide and deep view of one who is familiar with the course of human thought and action, what any man, what the whole race of man, may do, can seem but insignificant. From the vanity and noise of actors who fret and storm for their brief hour, and then pass forever from life's stage, he flies to ideal worlds where truth never changes, where beauty never grows old, and lives more richly blest than lovers in Tempe or the dales of Arcady. And then the habit of looking at things from many sides leads to doubt, hesitation, and inaction. While the wise deliberate, the young and inexperienced have won or lost the battle. Thus the purely intellectual life tends to weaken faith, hope, and desire, which are the sources whence conduct springs, the drying up of which leaves us amid barren wastes, where high thinking, if it be not impossible, brings neither strength nor joy; for the secret of strength and joy lies in doing and not in thinking. It is a law of our nature that conduct brings the most certain and the most permanent satisfaction, and hence whatever our ideals, the pursuit should be inspired by the sense of duty.
"Stern law-giver! yet thou dost wear
The Godhead's most benignant grace;
Nor know we anything so fair
As is the smile upon thy face.
Flowers laugh before thee on their beds
And fragrance in thy footing treads."
Then only do we move with certain step when we hear God's voice bidding us go forward, as he commands the starry host to fly onward, and all living things to spring upward to light and warmth. When we understand that he has made progress the law of life, we learn to feel that not to grow is not to live. Then our view is enlarged; we become lovers of perfection; we cherish every gift, and in many ways we strive to cultivate the many powers which go to the making of a man. They all are from him, and from him is the effort by which they are improved. We were born to make ourselves alive in him and in his universe, and like the setter in the field, we stretch eye and ear and nose to catch whatever message may be borne to us from his boundless game park. We observe, reflect, compare; we read best books; we listen to whoever speaks what he knows and feels to be truth. We take delight in whatever in Nature is sublime or beautiful, and fresh thoughts and innocent hearts make us glad. Wherever an atom thrills, there too is God, and in him we feel the thrill and are at home. Our faith grows pure; our hope is confirmed; and our love and sympathy identify us with an ever-widening sphere of life beyond us. The exclusive self passes into the larger movement of the social and religious world around us, which, as we now realize, is also within us, giving aims and motives to our love and self-devotion. We understand that what hurts another can never help us, and that our private good must tend to become a general blessing. Thus we find and love ourselves in the intellectual, moral, and religious life of the race, which is a type and symbol of the infinite life of God, the omen and promise of the soul's survival. As we become conscious of ourselves only through communion with what is not ourselves, so we truly live only when we live for God and the world he creates,—losing life that we may find it; dying, like seed-corn, that we may rise to a new and richer life. Not what gratifies our selfish or sensual nature will help us to lead this right human life; but that which illumines and deepens thought and love, which gives to faith a boundless scope, to hope an everlasting foundation, to desire the infinite beauty which, though unseen, is felt, like memory of music fled. The unseen world ceases to be a future world; and is recognized as the very world in which we now think and love, and so intellectual and moral life passes into the sphere of religion. We no longer pursue ideals which forever elude us, but we become partakers of the divine life; for in giving ourselves to the Eternal and Infinite we find God in our souls. The ideal is made real; God is with us, and through faith, hope, and love we are one with him, and all is well. Henceforth in seeking to know more, to become more, we are animated by a divine spirit. Now we may grow old, still learning many things, still smitten with the love of beauty, still finding delight in fresh thoughts and innocent pleasures, and it may be that we shall be found to be teachers of wisdom and of holiness. Then, indeed, shall we be happy, for it is better to teach truth than to win battles. A war-hero supposes a barbarous condition of the race, and when all shall be civilized, they who know and love the most shall be held to be the greatest and the best.
CHAPTER VIII.
UNIVERSITY EDUCATION.
As they who look on the ocean think of its vastness; of the many shores in many climes visited by its waves to ply "their priest-like task of clean ablution;" of cities and empires that rose beside its waters, flourished, decayed, and became a memory; of others that shall rise and also pass away, while the moving element remains,—so we to-day beholding ancient Faith, laying, in the New World, the cornerstone of an institution which better than anything else symbolizes the aim and tendency of modern life, find ourselves dwelling in thought upon what has been and what will be.