How many are there who go through life with glaring defects of character, injurious to their welfare, who are never warned, either by kind friends or by conscience, and never realize the necessity of any higher wisdom than their own, or the necessity of self-culture.
Hence the imperative necessity of psychic science, not that barren abstraction called psychology in colleges, but a science which, like a faithful mirror, reveals to us that which we cannot see. As the gymnastic teacher reveals by a system of measurement (anthropometry) the defective muscles that need development, so should the psychologist discover in the conformation of the brain the special culture needed by defective faculties.
There is nothing of this kind in the universities at present. Glaring faults are seen everywhere, working out their disastrous results, with no preventive method. We have orthopedic and orthopraxic institutions, and gymnastic halls to correct the defects of the body, but no attempt to recognize or correct the far more important defects and deformities of the soul. The orthopneumatic institution for the soul has not yet been conceived. The school or college should be such an institution, and in The New Education I have endeavored to show how it may perform this duty. The pulpit should be a similar institution; but, alas, the pulpit itself, has no adequate system of ethics—its theology has starved its ethics, and it lifts its followers, in the main, no higher than the level of exterior respectability. The task remains for some able critic to show how many of the important duties of life, though plainly implied by the fundamental law of Christianity, are ignored by the pulpit.
Anthropology alone reveals the ethical fulness and symmetry of character, which all should seek; and when science shall be advanced far beyond the barriers that circumscribe it at present, men and women will seek the profound and intuitive anthropologist for consultation, as they now seek the physician for the attainment of health.
It has been for the attainment of a possible superiority that millions have submitted to the discipline of collegiate education, while others with nobler aims have sought in meditation, in prayer, and in imitation of the illustrious, for the ennoblement of their own lives. No book has sold more largely than the Imitation of Christ. But was it not often a blind struggle in the dark, an attempt to reach a goal never clearly seen. Wandering in a labyrinth of fanaticism, agonizing in the effort to distort nature, the biographical record of religious aspiration serves to show how nearly multitudes may approach the boundary line of insanity in their protracted periods of causeless mental agony and in their fierce hostility to heresy and to science. Alike in Brahmin, Buddhist, Mohammedan, and Christian nations have we seen the vast expenditure of spiritual energy in the blind struggle of aspiring souls.
To all this, Anthropology will put an end, for it will give to each a definite conception of the full normal development of humanity, and of the organization or brain development by what it is sustained. To those who fall far short of that development, it gives the means of a definite measurement of the defect, and shows by cranioscopy and psychometry what is to be done in self-culture, as clearly as we learn in the gymnasium what muscles need greater development.
The desire for such improvement is often absent when it is most needed. A vast multitude of inferior people are perfectly content with themselves in a selfish life, wholly absorbed in providing for their own wants, or, if possessed of wealth, using it only in selfishness and ostentation,—content in believing themselves as good as their neighbors, doing nothing to benefit society, unless under the coercion of public opinion, leading such lives that the world is certainly no better, and perhaps a little worse, for their advent.
A very different class, who are more apt to profit by anthropology is composed of those in whom there is a decided predominance of good. In some cases they are deficient in selfish and combative energy, do not know how to assert their rights, are credulous and confiding. Children of that character if reared by timid and over-fond parents, are deprived of the rough contact with society that is necessary to their development. There are many whom the lack of self-confidence, the lack of ambition, and lack of business energy condemn to an obscure life, when their intellectual capacities would fit them for an influential position. A kind but mistaken system of training confirms the defect, and dooms them to an inefficient life, or a stern system of repression deprives them of all self-confidence and energy. Millions of good women are victimized in this manner. This amiable class are amenable to instruction, but are often by their easy credulity, induced to yield to unworthy teachers, or to the guidance of unsound but pretentious or delusive literature. They lack in the energy of criticism which might protect them from error.
Throughout the whole course of education, from infancy to manhood, Anthropology may be an ever-present monitor, warning against excesses, against failures, against errors of opinion, while urging the cultivation of our feebler faculties as the gymnastic teacher urges the cultivation of the feebler muscles.
Unaware of their errors, many would resent all such criticism, but the science which cannot help them, because they will have none of it, will enable us to understand them correctly and know how to deal with them.