MENTAL AND MORAL EDUCATION.
My dear Nephews:
Having touched, in our preceding letters, upon matters relating to Physical Training, Manner, and the lighter accomplishments that embellish existence, we come now to the inner life—to the Education of the Mind and Heart, or Soul of Man.
Metaphysicians would, I make no doubt, find ample occasion to cavil at the few observations I shall venture to offer you on these important subjects, and, painfully conscious of my total want of skill to treat them in detail, I will only attempt a few
desultory suggestions, intended rather to impress you with the importance I attach to self-culture, than to furnish you with full directions regarding it.
The genius of our National Institutions pre-supposes the truth that education is within the power of all, and that all are capable of availing themselves of its benefits. Education, in the highest, truest sense, does not involve the necessity of an elaborate system of scientific training, with an expenditure of time and money entirely beyond the command of any but the favored few who make the exception, rather than the rule, in relation to the race in general.
Happily for the Progress of Humanity, the "will to do, the soul to dare," are never wholly subject to the control of outer circumstance, and here, in our free land, they are comparatively untrammeled.
"There are two powers of the human soul," says one of our countrymen, distinguished for a knowledge of Intellectual Science, "which make self-culture possible, the self-searching, and the self-forming power. We have, first, the faculty of turning the mind on itself; of recalling its past, and watching its present operations; of learning its various capacities and susceptibilities; what it can do and bear; what it can enjoy and suffer; and of thus learning, in general, what our nature is, and what it is made for. It is worthy of observation, that we are able to discern not only what we already are, but what we may become, to see in ourselves germs and promises of a growth to which no bounds can be set; to dart beyond what we have actually gained, to the idea of perfection at the end of our being."
Assuming that to be the most enlightened system of education which tends most effectively to develop all the faculties of our nature, it is impossible, practically, to separate moral and religious from
intellectual discipline. If we possess the responsibility as well as the capacity of self-training—that must be a most imperfect system, one most unjust to our better selves, which cultivates the intellectual powers at the expense of those natural endowments, without which, man were fitter companion for fiends than for higher intelligences!