A portion of this work appeared, some months ago, in papers in the People's Journal. The appearance of these papers was suspended by the change in the affairs of that Journal. From that time to the present, applications have been made to me at intervals, to request me to finish my subject. In deference to these requests, I have completed my original design. For its suggestion, I am indebted to Mr. Saunders, the late editor of the People's Journal. For the imperfections of the work, which I know to be many and great, notwithstanding my earnest interest in what I was writing, no one is responsible but myself.
Ambleside,
November 16th, 1848.
Household education is a subject so important in its bearings on every one's happiness, and so inexhaustible in itself, that I do not see how any person whatever can undertake to lecture upon it authoritatively, as if it was a matter completely known and entirely settled. It seems to me that all that we can do is to reflect, and say what we think, and learn of one another. This is, at least, all that I venture to offer. I propose to say, in a series of chapters, what I have observed and thought on the subject of Life at Home, during upwards of twenty years' study of domestic life in great variety. It will be for my readers to discover whether they agree in my views, and whether their minds are set to work by what I say on a matter which concerns them as seriously as any in the world. Once for all, let me declare here what I hope will be remembered throughout, that I have no ambition to teach; but a strong desire to set members of households consulting together about their course of action towards each other.
It will be seen by these last words that I consider all the members of a household to be going through a process of education together. I am not thinking only of parents drawing their chairs together when the children have gone to bed, to talk over the young people's qualities and ways. That is all very well; but it is only a small part of the business. I am not thinking of the old, experienced grandfather or grandmother talking at the fireside, telling the parents of the sleeping children how they ought to manage them, and what rules and methods were in force in their day. This is all very well; and every sensible person will be thankful to hear what the aged have to tell, out of their long knowledge of life: but this again is a very small part of the matter. Every member of the household—children, servants, apprentices—every inmate of the dwelling, must have a share in the family plan; or those who make it are despots, and those who are excluded are slaves.
Of course, this does not mean that children who have scarcely any knowledge, little judgment, and no experience, are to have a choice about the rules of their own training. The object of training is one thing; and the rules and methods are another. With rules and methods they have nothing to do but to obey them till they become able to command themselves. But there is no rational being who is not capable of understanding, from the time he can speak, what it is to wish to be good. The stupidest servant-girl, and the most thoughtless apprentice-boy, are always impressed by seeing those about them anxious to improve; and especially the oldest of all endeavouring the more to become wiser and wiser, better and better, as their few remaining days dwindle away. If the family plan therefore be the grand comprehensive plan which is alone worthy of people who care about education at all—a plan to do the best that is possible by each other for the improvement of all—every member of the family above the yearling infant must be a member of the domestic school of mutual instruction, and must know that he is so.
It is a common saying that every child thinks his father the wisest man in the world. This is very natural; as parents are their children's fountains of knowledge. To them their children come for anything they want to know: and by them they are generally satisfied. But every wise parent has occasion to say, now and then—"I do not know, my dear." The surprise of the child on first hearing that there is anything that his parents do not know fixes the fact in his mind. When he has once discovered that his parents have something more to learn, he becomes aware—and this also ought to be fixed in his mind—that their education is not finished; and that it is their business, as it is his, to learn something more every day, as long as they live. So much for knowledge. The case ought to be as clear to him with regard to goodness. It is not enough that in church he hears that all men and women are sinners; and that in prayers at home he hears his parents pray that they may become more worthy of the goodness of God, and more like the Christ who is set before them. These things may set him thinking; but there will be, or ought to be, more light every day to clear up his ideas. The same parents who honestly own to their child that they are ignorant of things about which he questions them will own to him that they are not nearly so good as they wish to be. Thus is the truth opened to the feeblest and smallest mind that education has still to go on, even when people are so inconceivably old as children are apt to think their parents.
To us, grown up to this mighty age, there can be no doubt on such a point. We know very well that we are all, through the whole range of society, like a set of ignorant and wayward children, compared with what we are made capable of being. Our best knowledge is but a glimmering—a dawn of light which we may hope will "increase more and more unto the perfect day." Our best goodness is so weak, so mixed, so inferior to what we can conceive of, that we should blush to say that during any day of our lives we had been as good as we ought to be. It is as clear to us as to children, that there is room for improvement in both ways as long as we live. To us there is another question which children cannot enter into, and have no present business with;—whether human beings remain capable of improvement as long as they live.
About this, there are different opinions. I rather think the prevailing belief is that they are not; and that this prevailing belief arises from the commonness of the spectacle, not only of the faults of old age, but of the inability of even amiable and lively old people to receive new ideas, or correct bad habits. This is certainly the commonest aspect of old age; and serious is the warning it affords to correct our faulty tempers and ways before we grow stiff in mind, as well as in body. But I do not think that this spectacle settles the question. We might as well say that the human intellect can achieve no great work after five-and-twenty, because the ill-educated mind never does. As long as we see one single instance of a mind still expanding in a man of eighty-five, of a temper improving in one of ninety, of a troublesome daily habit conscientiously cured, after the indulgence of a life-time, by an old lady of seventy-five, we perceive that education may go on to the extreme limit of life, and should suppose that it might be generally so, but for the imperfect training of preceding years.
I have known of one old man whose mind was certainly still growing when he died, at the age of eighty-six. I have known of another, whose study through life had been the laws of the mind, and who, when his faculties were failing him, applied himself to that study, marking the gradual decline of certain of his powers, adding the new facts to his stores of knowledge, and thus, nourishing to the last a part of his mind with the decay of the rest. This instance of persevering self-improvement under conditions which any one would admit to be those of release from labour, appears to me even more affecting than that of the great physician who watched his own approaching death with his finger on his pulse, notifying its last beat as his heart came to a stop, hoping to contribute one more fact to useful science. With cases like these before us, how shall we dare to suppose our education completed while we have one faculty remaining, or our hearts have yet one more beat to give?
As for the continuance of moral education to the last, I have seen two contrasted cases, in close neighbourhood, which make the matter pretty plain, in a practical sense, to me. I knew two old ladies, living only the length of a street apart, who were fair specimens of educated and uneducated old age. The one belonged to a family who were remarkable for attaining a great age; and she always confidently reckoned on her lot being the same as that of her predecessors. It is true, her mother, being above a hundred, called her and her sister "the girls" when they were above seventy; but still one would have thought that grey hairs and wrinkles would have gone some way as a warning to her. Instead, however, of reckoning on her future years (if she must reckon on them) as so much time to grow wiser in, she was merely surprised at her friends when they advised her (she being then eighty) to make some other terms for her house than taking another lease of fourteen years. She could not conceive, as the last lease had answered so well, why the next should not. I remember seeing her face, all puckered with wrinkles, surmounted by rows of bright brown false curls, and her arms, bare above the elbows, adorned with armlets, such as young ladies wore half a century before. I remember a clever pert youth setting himself to quiz and amuse her by humouring her in her notions about the state of the world, drawing her out to praise the last century and express her ignorant contempt of this, till she nodded emphatically over her hand of cards, and declared that the depravity of the age was owing to gas-lamps and macadamisation. She died very old, but no wiser than this. Her case proves only that her education did stop; and not that it need have stopped. The other was a woman of no great cultivation, but of a humble, earnest, benevolent nature, full of a sense of duty towards God and man; and, in them, towards herself. Having survived her nearest connections, she had no strong desire to live; and her affairs were always arranged for departure, down to the labelling of every paper, and the neatness of every drawer. Yet no one was more alive to the improvements of the modern world. I shall never forget the earnest look with which she would listen to any tidings of new knowledge, or new social conveniences. A more dignified woman I never knew; yet she listened to the young who brought information—listened as a learner—with a deference which was most touching to witness. But there was more than this. She was conscious of having been, in her earlier days, somewhat hard, somewhat given to lecture and lay down the law, and criticise people all round by family notions; a tendency which, if it really existed, arose from family and not personal pride; for, though she might overrate the wisdom of parents and brothers, there never was any sign of her overvaluing her own. However this might be, she believed that she had been hard and critical in former times; and she went on softening and growing liberal to the day of her death. I never observed any weakness—much less any laxity—in her gentleness towards the feeble and the frail. It was the holy tenderness which the pure and upright can afford to indulge and impart. The crowning proof that her improvement was the result of self-discipline and not of circumstances was that when, at above seventy years of age, she became the inmate of a family whose habits were somewhat rigid, and in many respects unlike her own, she changed her own to suit theirs, even forcing herself to an observance of punctuality, in which she had been deficient all her life, and about which she had scarcely ever needed to think while for many years living alone. Of course, this moral discipline implies some considerable use of the intellect. She read a good deal; and carried an earnest mind into all her pursuits. And when her memory began to fail, and she could not retain beyond the day what she had read, her mind did not become weak. It was always at work, and always on good subjects, though she could no longer add much to her store of mere knowledge. Her case proves surely that education need never stop.
Now, if we picture to ourselves a household, with an honoured being like this as the occupant of the fireside chair, we can at once see how it may be completely understood and agreed upon among them all that the education of every one of them is always going on, and to go on for ever while they live. No child could ever stand at the knee of my old friend without feeling that she was incessantly bent on self-improvement—as earnest to learn from the humblest and youngest as ready to yield the benefits of her experience and reflections to any whom she could inform and guide. When taken severely ill, she said with a smile, to one by her bedside, "Why do you look so anxious? If I do die to-day, there is nothing to be unhappy about. I have long passed the time when I expected to go. What does it matter whether I die now or a twelve-month hence?" And when that illness was over, she regarded it as a process in her training, and persevered, as before, in trying to grow wiser and more worthy. Here was a case in which Household Education visibly included the oldest as naturally as the youngest. And in all dwellings, all the members are included in the influences which work upon the whole, whether they have the wisdom to see it or not. Henceforward, therefore, I shall write on the supposition that we are all children together—from the greatest to the least—the wisest and the best needing all the good they can get from the peculiar influences of Home.
Every home being a school for old and young together, it is necessary, if the training is to be a good one, to be clear as to what the schooling is for.
For the improvement of the pupils, is the most obvious answer.
Yes; but what do you mean by improvement? We must settle what we want to make of the pupils, or everything will go on at random. In every country of the world there is some sort of general notion of what the men and women in it ought to be: and the men and women turn out accordingly: and the more certainly, the more clear the notion is.
The patriarchs, some thousands of years ago, had very clear notions of their own of what people ought to be. One of these sitting in the evening of a hot day under a terebinth tree ten times his own age, would be able to give a distinct account of what he would have the training of his great-grandchildren tend to. He would lay it down as the first point of all that the highest honour and the greatest privilege in the world was to be extremely old. The next most desirable thing was to have the largest possible number of descendants; because the earth was very wide, with not half enough people in it; and the more people a patriarch had about him, the richer and more beautiful would the valleys and pastures be, and the more power and authority he would have—every patriarch being an absolute ruler over his own family, and the more like a king the larger his tribe. Of course, the old man would say decidedly that to make the best possible man you must train a child to obey his parents, and yet more the head of the tribe, with the most absolute submission; to do in the cleverest way what was necessary for defence against an enemy, and to obtain food, and the skins of beasts for clothing. The more wives and the more children the better. These were the principal points. After these, he would speak of its being right for such as would probably become the head of a tribe to cultivate such wisdom and temper as would make them good rulers, and enable them to maintain peace among their followers. Such was the patriarchal notion of improving a man to the utmost—omitting certain considerations which we think important—truthfulness, temperance, amiability, respect for other men, and reverence for something a good deal more solemn than mere old age.
Some wise men in Greece would have given a different account of the aim of Education. A Spartan, for instance, living in a little country which was always in danger from enemies without and slaves within, looked upon every boy as a future soldier, and as born to help to preserve the state. Every sickly or deformed child might be killed off at the desire of his father's kin. The healthy and promising were looked after by the state from their earliest years; and at the age of seven were put under public training entirely. They were taught to bear hunger, and be content with coarse food; to endure flogging without a groan, sometimes to the point of death; and all for practice in bearing pain. They were trained to all warlike exercises; their amusements were wrestling and sham battles; their accomplishments singing martial songs. They were taught to reverence rank and age; to hate their enemies; to use fraud in war; to be unable to bear shame, whether deserved or not; and to treat women with respect, not at all for their own sakes, but because despised women could not be the mothers of heroes. Thus, to make a perfect soldier was what a good Spartan considered the great object of education.
The Jew in his own Palestine would have given a different answer, in some respects, though he also reared his children to hate their enemies, and to covet both martial and patriarchal glory. His leading belief was that a greater God than any other nation had ever worshipped was the special ruler and protector of his own. Jehovah was the king as well as the God of the Jews; and the first virtue of a Jew was to obey every tittle of the Law, which ordered all things whatsoever in the lives of those who lived under it. Obedience to the Law, in affairs of food, dress, seasons of work, sleep, worship, journeying, &c., as well as in some higher matters, was the main thing taught by a good parent, while he knew and thought nothing of the higher and holier aims opened by the Gospel; of which, indeed, many a well-meaning Jewish parent could not bear to hear from the lips of Christ, when he came to declare what every man should be. When he declared that men should rise above the Law, and be perfect as their Father in Heaven is perfect, some strict Jewish educators crucified him. In a Jew's mind, the best man was he who most servilely obeyed the letter of the Law.
When I was in America, I saw three kinds of people who had their own notions of what it was to be a perfect man—each their own idea of the chief aim in Education; notions as wide of each other as those of the Patriarch, the Spartan, and the Jew. There were the dwellers in the cities; men speaking our language, and looking very like ourselves. These men were, as was natural, proud of their young and prosperous republic; and they thought more about politics than appears to us necessary or wise in a life which contains so many other great interests. Their children were brought up to talk politics before they could be qualified to have an opinion; and taught at school to despise other nations, and glorify their own, as a preparation for exercising the suffrage at twenty-one, and thereby becoming, in a republic so constituted, a member of the government. The privilege—the trust—is a most important one; and we cannot wonder that the subject is an engrossing one to parents and children. The object of education among a very large proportion of American parents is to make politicians: and it certainly is attained.
On the same continent, I saw something of a very different race—the red men. Their idea of perfection is a man's being a perfect warrior; and yet in a way quite unlike the Spartans. The red Indian is not trained as a servant of the State, but as an individual: and the Indian women are degraded and oppressed, while the Spartan women were considered and respected—whatever the ground of consideration might be. The Indian boy is trained to use his five senses till they reach an unequalled degree of nicety. And, when old enough to bear the pain without dying, he is subjected first to hunger and want of sleep, and then to such horrible tortures as it turns one sick to think of. He who comes out of this trial the most bravely, and who afterwards shows himself the most alert sentinel, the strongest and most enduring soldier, the most revengeful enemy, the most cruel conqueror, and the sternest husband and father, is, in the eyes of his people, the most perfect man. The red Indians, therefore, generally make an approach to this kind of character.
In the island of Mackinaw lives the other sort of people I have referred to. This island rises out of the wide waters of the great northern lakes, a perfect paradise in the midst of the boundless blue expanse. The people who inhabit it are, for the most part, half-breeds—the offspring of the red race and the French colonists who first settled on the island. The great object here seems to be to become amphibious; and truly, it appeared to me pretty well attained. The dark-skinned boys who surrounded our ship, and all others that I saw, were poppling about in the water, as easily as so many fowl: and they scud about in their tiny birch-bark canoes as readily as we walk on our feet, thinking no more of being capsized than we do of falling.
The aim here has about the same level as that of the Arabs, to whom water is the greatest rarity, and to whom the sandy desert serves much the same purpose as the inland seas to the dwellers in Mackinaw. The horse of the Arab is to him as the bark-canoe to the half-breed of Mackinaw: and children are launched into the desert, to live in it as they best may, as the half-breed boys are into the watery waste. And they succeed as well, conquering the desert, turning its dangers into sport, and making a living out of it. And so it is with the native dwellers in the icy deserts of Siberia. A perfectly educated person there is one who can surprise the greatest number of water-fowl in summer, foretell soonest the snow storm in winter, best learn the hour from the stars, bank up the most sheltered sleeping-place in the snow, and light a fire within it the most quickly; dive among the beavers for the longest time; see in the dark like an owl, track game like a pointer, fetch it like a spaniel, hearken like a deer, and run like an ostrich. Such being the Mongolian notion of perfection, it is more nearly approached by them than by others.
None of these aims are ours, or such as we approve. What then is ours? It is easy to answer, "to grow wiser and better every day:" but then comes the question, what is the wisdom, what is the goodness, that we aspire to? All the people I have mentioned aim at improvement in wisdom and goodness every day. Our difference with them is precisely about what wisdom and goodness are.
We are not likely to agree by setting up each our own notion of wisdom and goodness. Hear children at school talking of the heroes they admire most, and see how seldom they agree. One admires the brave man; another the patient man; another the philanthropist; another the man of power; another the man of holiness; another the patriot. Hear men talking by the fireside of the sages of the race; how they vary in their preferences, and select for themselves from among the group of mighty minds—the fathers of philosophy, of science, of art, of law and government, of morals. We shall never arrive at a practical point by setting up our separate preferences as aims for all.
Nor will it answer to fix our aim by any single example: no, not even—with reverence be it spoken—by the great Exemplar, Christ himself. The fault and weakness of this inability are in ourselves. It is not any cloud in him, but partial blindness in us, which renders this method insufficient by itself. All-perfect as is the example, we cannot all, and constantly, use its full perfection, from our tendency to contemplate it from the favourite point of view which every one of us has. One of us dwells most on the tenderness of his character; another on its righteous sternness; one on his power; another on his meek patience; and so on. And thus, while it is, and ever will be, of the utmost importance that we should preserve the aim of becoming like Christ, it yet remains to be settled among us, in fact though not perhaps in words, what Christ was, the images of him in different minds varying so endlessly as they certainly do.
The only method that appears to me absolutely safe and wise, is one which perfectly well agrees with our taking this great Exemplar as our model. Each of us has a frame, "fearfully and wonderfully made;" with such a variety of powers, that no one yet knows them all, or can be sure that he understands the extent of any one of them. It is impossible that we can be wrong in desiring and endeavouring to bring out and strengthen and exercise all the powers given to every human being. In my opinion, this should be the aim of education.
I have said "to bring out, and strengthen, and exercise all the powers." Some would add, "and balance them." But if all were faithfully exercised, I am of opinion that a better balance would ensue than we could secure, so partial as are our views, and so imperfect as has been the training of the best of us.
I shall gladly proceed, in my next chapter, to declare what I think we have learned as to what the powers of the human being are. At present, I can only just point out that the aim proposed is superior to every other mentioned, and I believe to any other that can be mentioned for this reason; that it applies universally—meets every case that can be conceived of. In the patriarch's scheme of education, the women—half the race—were slighted. In the Spartan system, the slaves and all work-people were left out. Among the modern republicans, citizens have the preference over women and slaves: and under the savage training—the Indian, Arab, and Mongolian—no individual whatever is done justice to. And there is not a country in Christendom where equal justice is done to all those whom we see entering the world so endowed as that we ought to look on every one of them with religious awe as a being too noble for our estimate. The aim proposed—of doing justice to all the powers of every human being under training—includes all alike, and must therefore be just. It includes women, the poor, the infirm—all who were rejected or slighted under former systems—while it does more for the privileged than any lower principle ever proposed to do. It appears that under it none will be the worse, but all the better, in comparison of this with any lower aim.
To obtain a clearer and firmer notion of what this object really comprehends, we must next make out, as well as our present knowledge allows, what the powers of the human being are. I mean as to their kind; for I do not think any one will venture to say what is the extent of endowments so vast; and in their vastness so obscure.
What are the powers of the human being?
I speak of those powers only which are the object of education. There are some which work of themselves for the preservation of life, and with which we have nothing to do but to let them work freely. The heart beats, the stomach digests, the lungs play, the skin transpires, without any care of ours, and we have only to avoid hindering any of these actions.
Next, man has four limbs. Of these, two have to be trained to move him from place to place in a great variety of ways. There are many degrees of agility between the bow-legged cripple, set too early upon his feet, and the chamois hunter of the Alps, who leaps the icy chasms of the glacier, and springs from point to point of the rock. The two seem hardly to be of the same race; yet education has made each of them what he is.
The two other limbs depend upon training for much of their strength and use. Look at the pale student, who lives shut up in his study, never having been trained to use his arms and hands but for dressing and feeding himself, turning over books, and guiding the pen. Look at his spindles of arms and his thin fingers, and compare them with the brawny limbs of the blacksmith, or the hands of the quay porter, whose grasp is like that of a piece of strong machinery. Compare the feeble and awkward touch of the book-worm who can hardly button his waistcoat, or carry his cup of tea to his mouth, with the power that the modeller, the ivory carver, and the watchmaker have over their fingers. It is education which has made the difference between these.
Man has five senses. Though much is done by the incidents of daily life to exercise all the five, still a vast difference ensues upon varieties of training. A fireman in London, and an Indian in the prairie, can smell smoke when nobody else is aware of it. An epicure can taste a cork in wine, or a spice in a stew, to the dismay of the butler, and the delight of the cook, when every one else is insensible. One person can feel by the skin whether the wind is east or west before he gets out of bed in the morning; while another has to hold up a handkerchief in the open air, or look at the weathercock, before he can answer the question—"How's the wind?"
As for the two noblest senses, there are great constitutional differences among men. Some are naturally short-sighted, and some dull of hearing; but the differences caused by training are more frequent and striking. If, of two boys born with equally good eyes and ears, one is very early put, all alone, to keep sheep on a hill side, where he never speaks or is spoken to, and comes home only to sleep, and the other works with his father at joiner's work, or in sea-fishing, or at a water-mill, they will, at manhood, hardly appear to belong to the same race. While the one can tell veneer from mahogany in passing a shop-window, the other cannot see any difference between one stranger's face and another's. While the sleepy clown cannot distinguish sea from land half a mile off, the fisherman can see the greyest sail of the smallest sloop among the billows on the horizon. While the shepherd does not hear himself called till the shout is in his ear, the miller tells by the fireside, by the run of the water, whether the stream is deepening or threatening to go dry. Of course, the quickness or slowness of the mind has much to do with these differences of eye and ear; but besides that, the eye and ear differ according to training. The miller, with his mind and ear all awake, would hear, with all his efforts, only four or five birds' notes in a wood, where a naturalist would hear twenty; and the fisherman might declare the wide air to be vacant, when a mountain sportsman would see an eagle, like a minute speck, indicating by its mode of flight where the game lay below.
Man has a capacity for pleasure and pain.
This is an all-important part of his nature of which we can give no account, because it is incomprehensible. How he feels pleasure and pain, and why one sensation or thought delights him and another makes him miserable, nobody ever knew yet, or perhaps ever will know. It is enough for us that the fact is so. Of all the solemn considerations involved in the great work of education, none is so awful as this—the right exercise and training of the sense of pleasure and pain. The man who feels most pleasure in putting brandy into his stomach, or in any other way gratifying his nerves of sensation, is a mere beast. One whose chief pleasure is in the exercise of the limbs, and who plays without any exercise of the mind, is a more harmless sort of animal, like the lamb in the field, or the swallow skimming over meadow or pool. He whose delight is to represent nature by painting, or to build edifices by some beautiful idea, or to echo feelings in music, is of an immeasurably higher order. Higher still is he who is charmed by thought, above everything—whose understanding gives him more satisfaction than any other power he has. Higher still is he who is never so happy as when he is making other people happy—when he is relieving pain, and giving pleasure to two, or three, or more people about him. Higher yet is he whose chief joy it is to labour at great and eternal thoughts, in which lies bound up the happiness of a whole nation and perhaps a whole world, at a future time when he will be mouldering in his grave. Any man who is capable of this joy, and at the same time of spreading comfort and pleasure among the few who live round about him, is the noblest human being we can conceive of. He is also the happiest. It is true that his capacity for pain is exercised and enlarged, as well as his power of feeling pleasure. But what pains such a man is the vice, and folly, and misery of his fellow-men; and he knows that these must melt away hereafter in the light of the great ideas which he perceives to be in store for them: while his pleasure being in the faith of a better future is as vivid and as sure as great thoughts are clear and eternal. For an illustration of this noblest means of happiness, we had better look to the highest instance of all. I have always thought that we are apt to dwell too much on the suffering and sorrow of the lot and mind of Christ. Our reverence and sympathy should be more with his abounding joy. I think those who read with clear eyes and an open mind will see evidences of an unutterable joy in his words—may almost think they hear it in his tones, when he promised heaven to the disinterested and earth to the meek, and satisfaction to the earnest; when he welcomed the faith of the centurion, and the hope of the penitent, and the charity of the widow; when he foresaw the incoming of the Gentiles, and knew that heaven and earth should pass away sooner than his words of life and truth. The sufferings of the holy can never surely transcend their peace: and whose fulness of joy can compare with theirs?
Before man can feel pleasure or pain from outward objects or from thoughts, he must perceive them. To a new-born infant, or a blind person enabled to see for the first time, objects before the eyes can hardly be said to exist. The blue sky and a green tree beside a white house are not seen but as a blotch of colours which touches the eye. This is the account given by persons couched for cataract, who have never before seen a ray of light. They see as if they saw not. But the power is in them. By degrees they receive the images, and perceive the objects. A child learns to receive sounds separately; then to perceive one voice among others; then to distinguish one tone from another—the voice of soothing from that of playfulness—the tone of warning from that of approbation; then it receives thoughts through the sounds; and so on, till the power is exercised to the fullest extent that we know of—when distinct ideas are admitted from the minutest appearances or leadings—strange bodies detected in the heavens, and fresh truths in the loftiest regions of human speculation. It depends much on training whether objects and thoughts remain for life indistinct and confused before the perceptive power, as before infant vision, or whether all is clear and vivid as before a keen and practised eye.
We know not how Memory acts, any more than we understand how we feel pleasure and pain. But we all know how the power of recalling images, words, thoughts, and feelings, depends on exercise. A person whose power of memory has been neglected has little use of his past life. The time, and people, and events that have passed by have left him little better than they found him: while every day, every person, and every incident deposits some wealth of knowledge with him whose memory can receive and retain his experience.
Then there are other powers which it will be enough merely to mention here, as we shall have to consider them more fully hereafter. Man has the power, after perceiving objects and thoughts, to compare them, and see when they differ and agree; to penetrate their nature, and understand their purpose and action. It is thus that he obtains a knowledge of creation, and the curious powers, whether hidden or open to view, which are for ever at work in it.
He can reason from what he knows to what he has reason to suppose, and put his idea to the proof. He can imitate what he sees; and also the idea in his mind; and hence comes invention; and that wise kind of guess into what is possible which leads to great discovery; discovery sometimes of a vast continent, sometimes of a vast agency in nature for men's uses, sometimes of a vast truth which may prove a greater acquisition to men's souls than a new hemisphere for their habitation.
Man has also a wonderful power of conceiving of things about which he cannot reason. We do not know how it is, but the more we dwell on what is beautiful and striking, what is true before our eyes and impressive to our minds, the more able we become to conceive of things more beautiful, striking, and noble, which have never existed, but might well be true. None of our powers require more earnest and careful exercise than this grand one of the Imagination. Those in whom it is suppressed can never be capable of heroic acts, of lofty wisdom, of the purest happiness. Those in whom it is neglected may exercise the little power they have in a fruitless direction, probably aggravating their own faults, and certainly wasting the power on ideas too low for it, as the voluptuary who dreams of selfish pleasure, or the despot, grand or petty, who makes visions of unchecked tyranny. Those in whom it is healthily exercised will become as elevated and expanded as their nature admits, and one here and there proves a Mahommed, lifting up half the human race into a higher condition; or a Raffaelle, bringing down seraphs and cherubs from heaven, and so clothing them as that men may look upon them and grow like them; or a Shakspere who became a creator in that way which is truly no impiety, but, on the contrary, the highest worship. Men are apt, in all times and everywhere, to blaspheme, by attributing to God their own evil passions and narrow ideas. It is through this power of the Imagination that they rise to that highest ideal which is the truest piety. They rise to share godlike attributes; the prophet seeing "the things that are not as though they were," and the poet creating beings that live and move and have their being, immortal in the mind of man. Such a power resides more or less in every infant that lies in the bosom of every family. Alas for its guardians if they quench this power, or turn it into a curse and disease by foul feeding!
Then, the Emotions of men are so many powers, to be recognised and trained. Of the power of Hope there is no need to speak, for all see what it is as a stimulus, both in particular acts, and through the whole course of a life. Fear is hardly less important, though it is intended to die out, or rather to pass into other and higher kinds of feeling. A child who has never known a sensation of fear (if there be such an one) can never be a man of a high order. He must either be coarsely made in body, or unable to conceive of anything but what is familiar to him. A child whose heart beats at shadows and the fitful sounds of the invisible wind, and who hides his face on his mother's bosom when the stars seem to be looking at him as they roll, is no philosopher at present; but he is likely to grow into one if this fear is duly trained into awe, humility, thoughtfulness, till, united with knowledge, it becomes contemplation, and grows into that glorious courage which searches all through creation for ultimate truth. Out of Fear, too, grows our power of Pity. Without fear of pain, we could not enter into the pain of others. Fear must be lost in reverence and love: but reverence and love could never be so powerful as they ought to be, if they were not first vivified by the power of Fear.
What the power of Love is, in all its forms, there is no need to declare to any one who has an eye and a heart. In the form of Pity, how it led Howard to spend his life in loathsome prisons, crowded with yet more loathsome guilt! In other forms, how it sustains the unwearied mother watching through long nights over her wailing infant! How it makes of a father, rough perhaps to all others, a holy and tender guardian of his pure daughters! and how it makes ministering angels of them to him in turn! How we see it, everywhere in the world, making the feeble and otherwise scantily-endowed strong in self-denial, cheerful to endure, fearless to die! A mighty power surely is that which, breathing from the soul of an individual man, can "conquer Death, and triumph over Time."
Then there is in man a force by which he can win and conquer his way through all opposition of circumstance, and the same force in others. This power of Will is the greatest force on earth—the most important to the individual, and the most influential over the whole race. A strong Will turned to evil lets hell loose upon the world. A strong Will wholly occupied with good might do more than we can tell to bring down Heaven into the midst of us. If among all the homes of our land, there be one infant in whom this force is discerned working strongly, and if that infant be under such guardianship as to have its will brought to bear on things that are pure, holy, and lovely, to that being we may look as to a regenerator of his race. He may be anywhere where there are children. Are there any parents who will not look reverently into the awful nature of their children, search into their endowments, and try of every one of them whether it may not be he? If not he, it is certain that every one of them is a being too mysterious, too richly gifted, and too noble in faculties not to be welcomed and cherished as a heaven-sent stranger. How can we too carefully set in order the home in which it is to dwell?
Whatever method parents may choose for educating a child, they must have some idea in their minds of what they would have him turn out. Even if they set before them the highest aim of all—exercising and training all his powers—still they must have some thoughts and wishes, some hopes and fears, as to what the issue will prove to be.