It is also the most comprehensive, for it is first felt only towards persons, and
personality is a bond, enabling any number of complex elements to act or be
treated as whole, as everything does and is in the child's soul, instead of in
isolation and detail. In the feeling of respect culminating in worship almost all
educational motives are involved, but especially those which alone can bring the
will to maturity; and happy the child who is bound by the mysterious and
constraining sympathy of dependence, by which, if unblighted by cynicism, a
worthy mentor directs and lifts the will. This unconscious reflection of our
character and wishes is the diviner side of childhood, by which it is quick and
responsive to everything in its moral environment. The child may not be able to
tell whether its teacher often smiles, dresses in this way or that, speaks loud or
low, has many rules or not, though every element of her personality affects him
profoundly. His acts of will have not been choices, but a mass of psychic causes
far greater than consciousness can estimate have laid a basis of character, than
which heredity alone is deeper, before the child knows he has a will. These
influences are not transient but life-long, for if the conscious and intentional may
anywhere be said to be only a superficial wave over the depths of the
unconscious, it is in the sphere of will-culture.
But command and obedience must also be specific to supplant nature. Here
begins the difficulty. A young child can know no general commands. "Sit in
your chair," means sit a moment, a sort of trick, with no prohibition to stand the
next instant. Any just-forbidden act may be done in the next room. All is here
and now, and patient reiteration, till habit is formed, and no havoc-making rules
which it cannot understand or remember, is our cue. Obedience can, however, be
instinct even here, and is its chief virtue, and there is no more fear of weakening
the will by it than in the case of soldiers. As the child grows older, however, and
as the acts commanded are repugnant, or unusual, there should be increasing
care, lest authority be compromised, sympathy ruptured, or lest mutual timidity
and indecision, if not mutual insincerity and dissimulation, as well as parodied
disobedience, etc., to test us, result. We should, of course, watch for favorable
moods, assume no unwonted or preternatural dignity or owlish air of wisdom,
and command in a low voice which does not too rudely break in upon the child's
train of impressions. The acts we command or forbid should be very few at first,
but inexorable. We should be careful not to forbid where we cannot follow a
untrusty child, or what we can not prevent. Our own will should be a rock and
not a wave. Our requirements should be uniform, with no whim, mood, or
periodicity of any sort about them. If we alternate from caresses to severity, are
fields and capricious instead of commanding by a fixed and settled plan, if we