new, original force is brought into the world of wills. Call it inspiration, or
Kant's transcendental impulse above and outside of experience, or Spencer's
deep reverberations from a vast and mysterious past of compacted ancestral
experiences, the most concentrated, distilled and instinctive of all psychic
products, and as old as Mr. Tyndall's "fiery cloud"—the name or even source is
little. We would call it the purest, freest, most prevailing, because most inward,
will or conscience.
This free, habitual guidance by the highest and best, by conviction with no sense
of compulsion or obligation, impractical if not dangerous ideal, for it can be
actually realized only by the rarest moral genius. For most of us, the best
education is that which makes us the best and most obedient servants. This is the
way of peace and the way of nature, for even if we seriously try to keep up a
private conscience at all, apart from feeling, faction, party or class spirit, or even
habit, which are our habitual guides, the difficulties are so great that most hasten,
more or less consciously and voluntarily, to put themselves under authority
again, serving only the smallest margin of independence in material interests,
choice of masters, etc, and yielding to the pleasing and easy illusion that inflates
the minimum to seem the maximum of freedom, and uses the noblest ideal of
history, viz., that of pure autonomous oughtness, as a pedestal for idols of
selfishness, caprice and conceit. The trouble is in interpreting these moral
instincts, for even the authorities lack the requisite self-knowledge in which all
wisdom culminates. The moral interregnum which the Aufklärung
[Enlightenment] has brought will not end till these instincts are rightly
interpreted by in intelligence. The richest streams of thought must flow about
them, the best methods must peep and pry till their secrets are found and put into
the idea-pictures in which most men think.
This brings us, finally, to the highest and also immediately practical method of
moral education, viz., training the will by and for intellectual work. Youth and
childhood must not be subordinated as means to maturity. Learning is more
useful than knowing. It is the way and not the goal, the work and not the
product, the acquiring and not the acquisition, that educates will and character.
To teach only results, which are so simple, without methods by which they were
obtained, which are so complex and hard, to develop the sense of possession
without the strain of activity, to teach great matters too easily or even as play,
always to wind along the lines of least resistance into the child's mind, is imply
to add another and most enervating luxury to child-life. Only the sense and
power of effort, which made Lessing prefer the search to the possession of truth,