The World's Greatest Books - Volume 14 Part 11

All philosophers counsel that some benefits be given in public (like military decorations), others in secret (like those that succour weakness, want, or disgrace). Sometimes the very person helped must be deceived into taking our bounty without knowing its origin. One may insist, "I wish him to know"; but on that principle will you refuse to save a man's life in the dark? Why should I not abstain from showing him that I have given him anything, when it is one of the cardinal rules never to reproach a man with what you have done for him, and not even to remind him of it? For this is the law of benefits as between the two parties; the one must at once forget what he has given, the other must never forget what he has received.

_III.--On the Receiving of Benefits_

Now, let us cross to the other side, to treat of the behaviour which becomes men in receiving benefits. "From who are we to receive?" To answer you briefly, I should say, "From those to whom we should have liked to give." It is a severe torment to be indebted to anyone against, your will; on the other hand, it is more delightful to have received a benefit from one whom you could love even after he has done you a wrong.

The truth is that more care must be taken in the choice of a creditor for a benefit than for money; for the latter must have back only as much as I received, but the former must have more paid to him. And even after repayment of the favour, we nevertheless remain bound to each other.

Thus an unworthy person is not to be admitted into that most sacred bond of kindnesses bestowed whence friends.h.i.+p arises. "But," it is pleaded, "I cannot always say 'No.'" Suppose the offer is from a cruel and hot-tempered despot, who will interpret your rejection of his bounty as an insult?

Well, when I say you ought to choose, I except superior force and intimidation; for these are factors which destroy choice. But after we have decided on acceptance, let us accept with cheerfulness, showing our gratification, and let it be evident to the giver, so that he may have some immediate return.

There are some who like to receive benefits only in private, for they object to a witness and confidant. One may conclude that such persons have no good intentions. Other men speak most offensively of their greatest benefactors. There are some people whom it is safer to affront than to serve, since by their dislike they seek to give the impression of being under no obligation. One ought to accept without fastidious affectation, and without cringing humility; for if a man shows small care at the time of bestowal, when every newly-conferred benefit should please, what will he do when the first glow of pleasure has cooled down?

_IV.--Ingrat.i.tude_

We must now investigate the main cause of ingrat.i.tude. It is caused by excessive self-esteem, the fault inherent in mortality of partiality to ourselves and all that concerns us; or it is caused by greed; or by jealousy. Let us begin with the first of these. Everybody is a favourable judge of his own interest; hence it comes that he believes himself to have earned all he has received, and views a benefit as payment for services.

Nor does greed allow anyone to be grateful, for a gift is never sufficient for its exorbitant expectations. Of all these hindrances to grat.i.tude, the most violent and distressing vice is jealousy, which torments us with comparisons of this nature: "He bestowed this on me, but more upon _him_, and he gave it _him_ earlier." There is no kindness so complete that malignity cannot pull it to pieces, and none so paltry that a friendly interpreter may not enlarge it. You shall never fail of an excuse for grumbling if you look at benefits on their wrong side.

See how certain men--yes, even some who make a profession of their philosophy--pa.s.s unfair censures upon the gifts of heaven. They complain because we do not equal elephants in bulk of body, harts in swiftness, birds in lightness, bulls in vigour. But what has been denied to mankind could not have been given. Wherefore, whosoever thou art that undervaluest human fortune, bethink thee what blessings our Father has bestowed upon us, how many beasts more powerful than ourselves we have tamed to the yoke, how many swifter creatures we overtake, and how nothing mortal is placed beyond the reach of our weapons.

Not to return grat.i.tude for benefits is base in itself, and is held base in all men's opinion. Therefore, even the ungrateful men complain of the ungrateful, and yet all the time this failing, which none commend, is firmly planted in all; so perverse is human nature that we find some become our deadliest enemies, not merely after benefits received, but for those very favours. I cannot deny but that this befalls some from a kink in their disposition; yet more act so because the interposition of time has extinguished the remembrance. Ungrateful is the man who denies that he has received a good turn which has been done him; ungrateful is he who pretends he has not received it; ungrateful is he who makes no return; but the most ungrateful of all is he who has forgotten.

There is a question raised whether so hateful a vice ought to go unpunished. Now, with the exception of Macedonia, there is no country where an action at law is possible for ingrat.i.tude. And this is a strong argument that no such action should be granted. This most frequent crime is nowhere punished, although everywhere condemned. Many reasons occur to me whereby it must needs follow that this fault ought not to come under the purview of law. First of all, the best part of a benefit is lost if a lawsuit is allowable, as in the case of a definite loan.

Again, whereas it is a most honourable thing to show grat.i.tude, it ceases to be honourable if it be forced. By such coercion we should spoil two of the finest things in human life--a grateful man and a bountiful giver. "What, then? Shall the ungrateful man be left unchastised?" My answer is: "What, then? Shall the undutiful man be left unchastised--the malignant man, or the avaricious, or the man with no self-control, or the cruel? Dost thou think that goes unpunished which is loathed? Dost thou not call him unhappy who has lost his eyesight, or whose hearing has been impaired by disease? And dost thou not call him miserable who has lost the sense of feeling benefits?"

_V.--Divine Benefits to Man_

Who is there so wretched, so totally forlorn, who has been born under so hard a fate and to such travail as never to have felt the vastness of the Divine generosity? Look even at those who complain of and live malcontent with their lot, and you will find they are not altogether without a portion in the celestial generosity; and there is none on whom some drops have not fallen from that most gracious fountain. G.o.d not give benefits! Whence, then, all you possess, all you give, or refuse or keep or seize?

Whence comes the infinity of delights for eye, ear, and understanding?

Whence that abundance that even furnishes our luxury? Think of all the trees in their rich variety, the many wholesome herbs, and such diversity of foods apportioned among the seasons that even the sluggard might find sustenance from the casual bounty of earth. Whence come living creatures of every kind, some bred on solid dry land, some in water, others speeding through the air, to the end that every part of nature may yield us some tribute? Those rivers, too, that, with their pretty bends, environ the plains, or afford a pa.s.sage for merchandise as they flow down their broad, navigable channel? What of the springs of medicinal waters? What of the bubbling forth of hot wells upon the very seash.o.r.e?

And what of thee, O mighty Larian Lake?

And thee, Benacus, whom wild waves shake?

"Nature," remarks my critic, "gives all this." Do you not realise that in saying this you simply change the name of G.o.d? For what else is "nature" but G.o.d and Divine Reason pervading the whole universe and all its parts?

It is a question whether one who has done all in his power to return a benefit has returned it. Our opponent urges that the fact that he tried everything proves that he did not in fact succeed in returning it; and, therefore, evidently that he could not have done a thing for which he found no opportunity. But if a physician has done all in his power to effect a cure, he has performed his duty.

So your friend did all in his power to repay you a good turn, only your good fortune stood in his way. He could not give money to the wealthy, nurse one in good health, or run to your aid when all was prosperous. On the other hand, if he had forgotten a benefit received, if he had not even tried to be grateful, you would say he had not shown grat.i.tude; but as it was, he laboured day and night, to the neglect of other claims, to let no chance of proving his thankfulness escape him.

HERBERT SPENCER

Education

Herbert Spencer was born at Derby, in England, in 1820. He was taught by his father who was a teacher, and by his uncle, a clergyman. At the age of seventeen he became a civil engineer, but about eight years later abandoned the profession because he believed it to be overcrowded. In 1848 he was engaged on the "Economist," and five years later he began to write for the quarterly reviews. Spencer's little book on Education dates from 1861, and has probably been more widely read than all his other works put together, having been translated into almost all civilised, and several primitive languages. It is generally recognised as having effected the greatest educational reform of the nineteenth century. It was certainly the most powerful of single agents in effecting the liberation of girlhood from its unnatural trammels. It placed the whole theory of education upon a sound biological basis in the nature of the child and the natural course of its evolution as a living creature. Spencer struck a fatal blow at the morbid asceticism by proxy which adults used to practice upon their children, and so great has been the influence of his work for the amelioration of childhood that he is certainly to be counted with the philanthropic on this ground. The first chapter has no equal in literature in its splendidly sober praise of natural knowledge. The wide knowledge which Spencer's writings display of physical science, and his constant endeavor to ill.u.s.trate and support his system by connecting its position with scientific facts and laws have given his philosophy great currency among men of science--more so, indeed, than among philosophical experts. Spencer died December 8, 1903.

_I.--What Knowledge is of Most Worth?_

It has been truly remarked that in order of time decoration precedes dress, the idea of ornament predominates over that of use. It is curious that the like relations hold with the mind. Among mental, as among bodily acquisitions, the ornamental comes before the useful. Alike in the Greek schools as in our own, this is the case. Men dress their children's minds as they do their bodies in the prevailing fas.h.i.+on; and in the treatment of both mind and body, the decorative element has continued to predominate in an even greater degree among women than among men. The births, deaths, and marriages of kings, and other like historic trivialities are committed to memory, not because of any direct benefit that can possibly result from knowing them, but because society considers them parts of a good education--because the absence of such knowledge may bring the contempt of others. Not what knowledge is of the most real worth is the consideration; but what will bring most applause, honour, respect--what will be the most imposing. As throughout life not what we are but what we shall be thought is the question, so in education the question is not the intrinsic value of knowledge so much as its extrinsic effect on others; and this being our dominant idea, direct utility is scarcely more regarded than by the barbarian when filing his teeth and staining his nails.

The comparative worths of different kinds of knowledge have been as yet scarcely even discussed. But before there can be a curriculum, we must determine, as Bacon would have said, the relative value of knowledges.

To this end a measure of value is the first requisite, and here there can happily be no dispute. How to live?--that is the essential question for us. To prepare us for complete living is the function which education is to discharge. We must therefore cla.s.sify the leading kinds of activity which const.i.tute human life. In order of importance they are (1) those which directly minister to self-preservation, (2) those which by securing the necessaries of life indirectly minister to self-preservation, (3) those which have for their end the rearing and discipline of offspring, (4) those which are involved in the maintenance of proper social and political relations, (5) those miscellaneous activities which fill up the leisure part of life, devoted to the gratification of the tastes and feelings.

It can easily be shown that these stand in something like their true order of subordination, and such should be the order of education. It must give attention to all of these; greatest where the value is greatest; less where the value is less; least where the value is least.

Happily that all-important part of education which goes to secure direct self-preservation is in great part already provided for. Too momentous to be left to our blundering, nature takes it into her own hands, but there must be no such thwarting of nature as that by which stupid school-mistresses commonly prevent the girls in their charge from the spontaneous physical activities they would indulge in; and so render them comparatively incapable of taking care of themselves in circ.u.mstances of peril.

But more is needed, and it is that we should learn the laws of life and of health. This depends upon science, yet that increasing acquaintance with the laws of phenomena which has through successive ages enabled us to subjugate nature to our needs, and in these days gives the common labourer comforts which a few centuries ago kings could not purchase, is scarcely in any degree old to the appointed means of instructing our youth. The vital knowledge--that by which we have grown as a nation to what we are, and which underlies our whole existence--is a knowledge that has got itself taught in nooks and corners, while the ordained agencies for teaching have been mumbling little else than dead formulas.

Hitherto we have made no preparation whatever for the third great division of human activities--the care of offspring, on which no word of instruction is ever given to those who will by and by be parents. Yet that parents should begin the difficult task of rearing children, without ever having given a thought to the principles, physical, moral, or intellectual, which ought to guide them, excites neither surprise at the actors nor pity for their victims. To tens of thousands that are killed, and hundreds of thousands that survive with feeble const.i.tutions, add millions that grow up with const.i.tutions not so strong as they should be, and you will have some idea of the curse inflicted on their offspring by parents ignorant of the laws of life.

Architecture, sculpture, painting, music, and poetry may truly be called the efflorescence of civilised life, but the production of a healthy civilised life must be the first condition. The vice of our educational system is that it neglects the plant for the sake of the flower. In anxiety for elegance it forgets substance, preparing not at all for the discharge of parental functions and for the duties of citizens.h.i.+p, by imparting a ma.s.s of facts most of which are irrelevant, and the rest without a key. But the accomplishment of all those things which const.i.tute the efflorescence of civilisation should be wholly subordinate to that instruction and discipline on which civilisation rests. As they occupy the leisure part of life, so should they occupy the leisure part of education.

Yet in this remaining sphere of activity, also, scientific knowledge is fundamental, and only when genius is married to science can the highest results be produced; indeed, not only does science underlie the arts, but science is itself poetic. The current opinion that science and poetry are opposed is a delusion. On the contrary, science opens up realms of poetry where to the unscientific all is blank. Think you that the rounded rock marked with parallel scratches calls up as much poetry in an ignorant mind as in the mind of a geologist, who knows that over this rock a glacier slid a million years ago? The truth is that those who have never entered upon scientific pursuits are blind to most of the poetry by which they are surrounded. Sad indeed is it to see how many men occupy themselves with trivialities, and are indifferent to the grandest phenomena--care not to understand the architecture of the heavens, but are deeply interested in some contemptible controversy about the intrigues of Mary Queen of Scots are learnedly critical over a Greek ode, and pa.s.s by without a glance that grand epic written by the finger of G.o.d upon the strata of the earth!

If we examine the value of science as discipline, its priority is still a.s.sured, whether for discipline of memory, or of judgment, or for moral discipline. Also, the discipline of science is superior to that of our ordinary education because of the religious culture that it gives.

Doubtless, to the superst.i.tions that pa.s.s under the name of religion, science is antagonistic; but not to the essential religion which these superst.i.tions merely hide; doubtless, too, in much of the science that is current there is a pervading spirit of irreligion, but not in that true science which has pa.s.sed beyond the superficial into the profound.

Not science, but the neglect of science, is irreligious; devotion to science is a tacit wors.h.i.+p--a tacit recognition of worth in the things studied; and by implication in their Cause. Only the genuine man of science can truly know how utterly beyond not only human knowledge, but human conception, is the Universal Power of which Nature and Life and Thought are manifestations.

_II.--Intellectual Education_

While "believe and ask no questions" was the maxim of the church, it was fitly the maxim of the schools. In that age men also believed that a child's mind could be made to order, that its powers were to be imparted by the schoolmaster; that it was a receptacle into which knowledge was to be put and there built up after the teacher's idea. But now we are learning that there is a natural process of mental evolution which is not to be disturbed without injury; that we may not force on the unfolding mind our artificial forms, but that psychology, like economics, discloses to us a law of supply and demand, to which, if we would not do harm, we must conform.

The forcing system has been by many given up, and precocity is discouraged. People are beginning to see that the first requisite to success in life is to be a good animal. The once universal practice of learning by rote is daily falling into discredit. We are subst.i.tuting principles for rules, as is exemplified in the abandonment of that intensely stupid custom, the teaching of grammar to children. But of all the changes taking place, the most significant is the growing desire to make the acquirement of knowledge pleasurable rather than painful--a desire based on the more or less distinct perception that at each age the intellectual action which a child likes is a healthy one for it; and conversely. We are on the highway towards the doctrine long ago enunciated by Pestalozzi that alike in its order and its methods, education must conform to the natural process of mental evolution.

Education should be a repet.i.tion of civilisation in little. Children should be told as little as possible and induced to discover as much as possible. The need for perpetual telling results from our stupidity, not from the child's. We drag it away from the facts in which it is interested, and which it is actively a.s.similating of itself. We put before it facts far too complex for it to understand, and therefore distasteful to it. By denying the knowledge it craves, and cramming it with knowledge it cannot digest, we produce a morbid state of its faculties; and a consequent disgust for knowledge in general. And having by our method induced helplessness, we make the helplessness a reason for our method.

Education of some kind should begin from the cradle. Whoever has watched with any discernment the wide-eyed gaze of the infant at surrounding objects, knows very well that education _does_ begin thus early, whether we intend it or not; and that these fingerings and suckings of everything it can lay hold of, these open-mouthed listenings to every sound, are first steps in the series which ends in the discovery of unseen planets, the invention of calculating engines, the production of great paintings, or the composition of symphonies and operas. This activity of the faculties from the very first, being spontaneous and inevitable, the question is whether we shall supply in due variety the materials on which they may exercise themselves; and to the question so put, none but an affirmative answer can be given. Here we must take the course which psychology dictates.

What can be more manifest than the desire of children for intellectual sympathy? Mark how the infant sitting on your knee thrusts into your face the toy it holds, that you may look at it. See when it makes a creak with its wet finger on the table, how it turns and looks at you; does it again, and again looks at you; thus saying as clearly as it can--"Hear this new sound." Watch the elder children coming into the room exclaiming--"Mamma, see what a curious thing;" "Mamma, look at this;" "Mamma, look at that;" a habit which they would continue did not the silly mamma tell them not to tease her. Does not the induction lie on the surface? Is it not clear that we must conform our course to these intellectual instincts--that we must just systematise the natural process--that we must listen to all the child has to tell us about each object, and thence proceed? To tell a child this, and to show it the other, is not to teach it how to observe, but to make it a mere recipient of another's observations; a proceeding which weakens rather than strengthens its power of self-instruction.

Object lessons should be arranged to extend to things far wider and continue to a period far later than now; they should not be limited to the contents of the house, but should include those of the fields and hedges, the quarry and the seash.o.r.e; they should not cease with early childhood, but should be so kept up during youth as insensibly to merge into the investigation of the naturalist and the man of science.

We are quite prepared to hear from many that all this is throwing away time and energy; and that children would be much better occupied in writing their copies and learning their pence tables, and so fitting themselves for the business of life. We regret that such crude ideas of what const.i.tutes education, and such a narrow conception of utility, should still be prevalent. But this gross utilitarianism which is content to come into the world and quit it again without knowing what kind of a world it is, or what it contains, may be met on its own ground. It will by and by be found that a knowledge of the laws of life is more important than any other knowledge whatever--that the laws of life underlie not only all bodily and mental processes, but by implication all the transactions of the house and the street, all commerce, all politics, all morals--and that therefore without a comprehension of them, neither personal nor social conduct can be rightly regulated. It will eventually be seen, too, that the laws of life are essentially the same throughout the whole organic creation.

No one can compare the faces and manners of two boys--the one made happy by mastering interesting subjects, and the other made miserable by disgust with his studies, by consequent inability, by cold looks, by threats, by punishment--without seeing that the disposition of one is being benefited and that of the other injured. Whoever has marked the effects of success and failure upon the mind and the power of the mind over the body, will see that in the one case both temper and health are favourably affected, while in the other there is danger of permanent moroseness, of permanent timidity, and even of permanent const.i.tutional depression.

As suggesting a final reason for making education a process of self-instruction, and by consequence a process of pleasurable instruction, we may advert to the fact that, in proportion as it is made so, there is a probability that it will not cease when schooldays end.