which are its organ, or how endurance and self-control, no less than great
achievement, depend on muscle-habits. Both in Germany and Greece, a golden
age of letters was preceded, by about a generation, by a golden age of national
gymnastic enthusiasm which constitutes, especially in the former country, one of
the most unique and suggestive chapters in the history of pedagogy. Symmetry
and grace, hardihood and courage, the power to do everything that the human
body can do with and without all conceivable apparatus, instruments, and even
tools, are culture ideals that in Greece, Rome, and Germany respectively have
influenced, as they might again influence, young men, as intellectual ideals
never can do save in a select few. We do not want "will-virtuosos," who perform
feats hard to learn, but then easy to do and good for show; nor spurtiness of any
sort which develops an erethic habit of work, temper, and circulation, and is
favored by some of our popular sports but too soon reacts into fatigue. Even
will-training does not reach its end till it leads the young up to taking a
intelligent, serious and life-long interest in their own physical culture and
development. This is higher than interest in success in school or college sport;
and, though naturally later than these, is one of the earliest forms of will-culture
in which it is safe and wise to attempt to interest the young for its own sake
alone. In our exciting life and trying climate, in which the experiment of
civilization has never been tried before, these thoughts are merely exercises.
But this is, of course, preliminary. Great as is the need, the practical difficulties
in the way are very great. First, there are not only no good text-books in ethics,
but no good manual to guide teachers. Some give so many virtues or good habits
to be taught per term, ignoring the unity of virtue as well as the order in which
the child's capacities for real virtue unfold. Advanced text-books discuss the
grounds of obligation, the nature of choice or freedom, or the hedonistic
calculus, as if pleasures and pains could be balanced as measurable quantities,
etc., so that philosophic morality is clearly not for children or teachers.
Secondly, evolution encourages too often the doubt whether virtue can be taught,
when it should have the opposite effect. Perversity and viciousness of will are
too often treated as constitutional disease; and insubordination or obstinacy,
especially in school, are secretly admired as strength, instead of being vigorously
treated as crampy disorders of will, and the child is coddled into flaccidity.
Becomes the lowest develops first, there is danger that it will interfere with the
development of the higher, and thus, if left to his own, the child may come to
have no will. The third and greatest difficulty is, that with the best effort to do
so, so few teachers can separate morality from religious creed. So vital is the
religions sentiment here that it is hard to divorce the end of education from the