Chapter VII: Part I: Man’s Supreme Inheritance (5)

Let us consider the problem in the light of common-sense. Suppose, for example, that there is an ideal chair, some wonderful arrangement of perfect angles, hollows, and supports that will almost magically rectify or prevent every fault in the child’s physical mechanism. Suppose further that the child finds great ease and repose when seated in this ideal chair. How then can he avoid suffering the tortures of all that is uncomfortable, when he rides in the cars, or sits down in his own home, or visits a friend, or goes for a picnic on the river or in the woods? I see nothing else for it; when that ideal chair has been found, our child will have to carry it about with him wherever he goes.

In the second place, how is it possible for this ideal chair to be miraculously adaptable to every age and type of child? Are we to treat children as plastic lumps of clay to be fitted to the model insisted upon by the lines of our ideal chair; or are we to study and measure each individual and have a chair built to his measure, once a year, say, until he is adult?

No, what we need to do is not to educate our school furniture, but to educate our children. Give a child the ability to adapt himself within reasonable limits to his environment, and he will not suffer discomfort, nor develop bad physical habits, whatever chair or form you give him to sit upon. I say, “within reasonable limits,” for it is obviously absurd to expect a Brobdingnagian child to use a Lilliputian chair. But let us waste no valuable time, thought, or invention in designing furniture, when by a smaller expenditure of those three gifts we may train the child to win its own conscious control, and rise superior to any probable limitations imposed by ordinary school fittings.

For the problem to be solved in education is that same problem which needs solution in the social, political, religious, industrial, economic, ethical, æsthetic and other spheres of progressive human activity. In every sphere of life we have for years given “effects” the significance of “causes” and have made worthy attempts to put matters right on this unsound basis. In the case of education certain symptoms have been recognised as more or less harmful, and the whole blame has been placed upon the method or methods of education involved.

For at least half a century, the method of the social worker was conceived on the lines of giving money, food, and clothing to the poor, in an attempt to ameliorate their condition. The evils of this false policy came home to them in a practical way, and nowadays, the object of the social worker is to give the poor the “means whereby” of general advancement and of getting money, clothes, and food by their own efforts.

The same principle holds good in the treatment of the children. Hitherto educationalists have given them what they considered they needed. What we must do in the future is to give them the “means whereby” they may themselves satisfy their needs and command their own advancement.

The adoption of new methods is a procedure which always demands a due and proper consideration of the thing, person, or persons to which they are to be applied. Investigation along these lines would probably have revealed the real _cause_ of the difficulties to be faced in the education of the child of to-day, which is that the process of civilised life has gradually changed the child’s psycho-physical condition at birth. In this process much has been gained and much lost. From the educator’s point of view the losses have been stupendous as compared with the gains, for the all-important kinæsthetic systems have been deteriorated by man’s attempt to pass from the lower (animal) to the higher stages of the evolutionary plane while depending upon a subconsciously controlled organism.

I have still very much more to say on this subject of education, and I hope to have an opportunity in the near future of elaborating my methods and of setting them out so that they may be practically and universally applied. But if by these few remarks I can arouse some interest in this world problem, I shall have done something towards its solution. It is a problem which is very urgent at the present time, and is growing more urgent every day. All that we have done up to the present time is to enforce one rule or another upon the children as an experiment, for all the rules have been rigid in their enforcement, however unscientific in their conception. In place of these rules I look for an ideal which I believe to be comparatively easy of realisation. I look for, and already see, a method of training our children which shall make them masters of their own bodies; I look for a time when the child shall be so taught and trained that whatever the circumstance which shall later surround it, it will without effort be able to adapt itself to its environment, and be enabled to live its life in the enjoyment of perfect health, physical and mental. For, as I have already pointed out, man has progressed towards the higher and more complex stages of civilisation. He has continued to change his habits of life and being still far from the highest state attainable he will continue to change. The farther he becomes removed from the primitive uncivilised stage of his evolution the less likely is he to have the opportunity in the daily routine of his life so to exercise the physical machinery that it will be prevented from working imperfectly by the controls of instinct. “Conscious control” will enable man to adapt himself more readily to changing conditions of life. No one who looks out upon this latter day world with discerning eyes can fail to see that the changes tend to become more rapid and more radical than ever before in the history of the world’s progress.

We look towards the goal, and it is best to seek the highest and be content with no less, but at the same time it is necessary that we should consider the practical detail of our journey. What follows in Parts II and III may seem trivial by comparison with the high endeavour I have outlined, but it is the triviality of the essential detail.

I wish to point the road still more clearly, and to show how every man and woman may learn to walk upon it.

VIII
EVOLUTIONARY STANDARDS AND THEIR INFLUENCE ON THE CRISIS OF 1914

In the previous chapters I have dealt briefly with the fundamentals upon which our whole structure of education and civilisation is based, and have attempted to point to the different tendencies developed by the individual in the struggle to progress upon this basis. At the same time I have indicated that which I am confident is the only true fundamental upon which mankind in a state of civilisation may progress and evolve to a condition commanding freedom for all time from those limiting, narrowing, and debasing qualities which belong to the animal spheres of existence.

It seems to me that the present world crisis indicates that this is the psychological moment to make a wide application of my principles, though my reader may consider that I should not enter the debatable ground of hypothesis in a work which has been devoted, up to this point, to arguments almost entirely drawn from personal experiences and observation.

I have dealt with the fundamentals employed in the development of the child and the adult, and I have postulated that the evolutionary progress from childhood to adolescence, and on through the vicissitudes of life which follow, is determined by the process adopted, the ratio of progress being in accordance with the standard of efficacy of this process, and that this principle of evolution applies equally to a nation.

It then devolves upon us to consider the different processes adopted by different nations, in order to gauge accurately their different stages of evolution and their possibilities of growth and development towards real individual and national progress.

After centuries of endeavour in the direction of progress in accordance with well-defined processes, founded upon approved educational, religious, economic, political, industrial, ethical and æsthetic principles, and after a century of unprecedented progress in the realm of Arts and Sciences, we are faced with the spectacle, in a supposedly civilised nation, of a debauched kinæsthesia which has manifested itself in such a display of savage instincts as will present us in the eyes of a more highly evolved universe as plunged in the depths of barbarism.

During the past three years the people of the world have been shocked and stirred by events which even four years ago were considered impossible in the stage of civilisation then reached. In consequence, we find that a special and earnest endeavour is being made to solve problems of vital importance which have a bearing upon the future development and cultivation of the potentialities of mankind.

It is, therefore, essential to recognise that we have reached a point in the process called civilisation which will be recorded as one of the most critical and vital in the world’s history.

At this moment the great nations of Europe are engaged in the most terrific conflict of force ever recorded, whilst in America, a land of peace, there is being witnessed what is probably the most bitterly contested conflict of opinion ever experienced regarding the conduct, policy, and duty of the American nation where the old world is concerned.

(This was penned prior to American intervention in the war.)

The happenings of the past three years must influence our present and future opinion of the value of our educational, political, moral, social, industrial, religious and other principles where the progress of man is concerned, as he passes from the animal plane of his evolution to those higher planes for which he is undoubtedly destined.

The conclusions thus reached will so influence the future welfare of mankind that the facts from which these conclusions are deduced demand the most serious attention and study of every human being.

It is therefore essential that we make an earnest endeavour to discover fundamentals. In this connexion we must consider the available evidence concerning the cause or causes of this conflict in Europe which has shaken our boasted advancement in civilisation to its very roots. What does this recrudescence of barbarity mean when viewed with an open and unprejudiced mind in its relation to the future of those principles which alone make for the real mental, physical, and spiritual growth of mankind in progressive civilisation?

It signifies a tremendous clash of opposing forces, a desperate conflict between the lowly-evolved peoples of the world as against the more highly evolved races, the struggle of an open-minded, mobile idealism for the supremacy of the individual against a narrow-minded, rigid, material automatism which entails the suppression of the individual and the obliteration of his reason in the supposed interests of the State.

Let us take, then, a general comparative view of the compelling psycho-physical forces in the life of primitive and civilised nations up to the crisis. America in this stands apart and must be considered separately.

_In Primitive Nations._ The compelling forces were chiefly physical and subconscious. The very essentials of life depended almost entirely upon brute force. Daily experiences gave a keen edge to savage instincts and unbridled passions, to an automatic development which opposed the cultivation of the faculty of adaptability to new environment. Even the spheres of courage were limited, and when confronted with the unusual these peoples quaked like cowards, and fled panic-stricken from the unaccustomed, as in the case of the negroes in the Southern States of America when the men of the Ku-Klux Klan pursued them on horseback dressed in white.

_In Civilised Nations._ The compelling forces have become less and less physical and less subconscious than in the case of primitive nations, but the advance from the physical to the mental and from the subconscious to the conscious has not been adequate or sufficiently comprehensive to establish the mental and conscious principles as the chief compelling forces in the progress of the nation or even of the individual. The essentials of life do not depend upon brute force, and daily experiences become less and less associated with factors which make for the development of savage instincts and unbridled passion, or automatic development. But experience has proved that civilised nations have failed to come through the ordeal of adaptation to the everchanging environment of civilisation with satisfactory results. The spheres of courage are still more or less limited, and when brought suddenly face to face with the unusual and unexpected people still exhibit a tendency to panic and loss of control. The progress made by civilised nations from the primitive state to the present has not been upon comprehensive lines. The result has been that the majority of the activities of the nation have been limited, and in those few activities where the widening influence held sway, the freedom became licence and led to overcompensation. This condition was sufficiently harmful as long as it applied to the individual and to individual effort, the individual being more or less held in check by collective opinion; but when it applied to the nation and to national effort, that nation which ignored the opinion of other nations developed unchecked, and the national decision to stifle the individual, body and soul, if it seemed to be for the welfare of the State, constituted the most powerful force in the prevention of progress on the evolutionary plane.

For this decision, once it became the result of national conception, carried with it the most damaging and impossible of all mental processes in the sphere of true evolutionary advancement. In the first place the national decision was the result of an erroneous national conception, the outcome of what I have called, for the want of a better name, “manufactured premises.”

Manufactured premises are the forerunners of unsound and delusive deductions—a stultification of reason—and demand the cultivation of a form of self-hypnotism which is fatal to national or individual progress.

A few observant people noted this dangerous habit even in the early literature of the German nation, and watched with keen interest its cultivation in all spheres of activity in recent years. This explains the stupendous failure of German judgment in all matters of national and international importance, of the impossibility of the peoples of that nation to see anything from any other point of view but their own, of their crass stupidity in gauging the psychology of other nations, and particularly that of the American nation.

In the foregoing we have fundamentals worthy of consideration. They must occupy the attention of all thinking people who wish to make a contribution towards the uplifting of mankind and the establishment of a standard of reasoned guidance and control which should make another barbarous conflict unthinkable and therefore impossible.

Naturally, every nation is ready enough with a more or less humane reason for its madness. Self-protection, an altruistic regard for the rights of smaller nations, a sense of high duty towards mankind at large, all these pleas have been urged as explaining the single principle which has drawn this or that nation into the whirlpool. And each and every nation must surely have pleaded liberty as their excuse at some time or another, liberty being one of those adaptable terms that may be used to mean almost anything. Before the war Germany was maintaining a right for “liberty” of expansion, a defensive use of the word that has hardly anything in common with the American use at the present time.

On the other hand philosophers, economists, psychologists, commercial experts, and the public at large have been busy with a dozen other theories of the primary causes of the war. We have heard much talk of race hatred, of business rivalry, of high commercial and political intrigues, and a dozen other influences, and all of them have been put forward at one time or another as the sole reason for the present welter of blood and fury. We have, in fine, so many reasons from which to choose that we may be quite sure no single one of them can possibly afford us an inclusive and adequate explanation.

But I will go still further than that. For I maintain on grounds which I find logically unshakeable, that if we admit, as seems the only sensible course, that something of all these reasons and excuses has entered into the conditions producing such awful results, we must still seek some explanation of the preceding state that made these conditions possible. All our reasons, in fact, are mere effects, and we are groping for our primary cause among resultant phenomena. We can never solve our problem by such a method as this. We might as well hope to find the origin of a child by dissecting its limbs and intestines. Our only hope is to shift our viewpoint, to cease our muddled examination of the details just in front of us, and try to see our problem in the broad terms of one who can stand back and see life moving through the centuries.

With all people, in all spheres of life, we know only too well that certain mental and physical manifestations give an absolute clue to their character, to their aims in life, their ideals, and, what is more to the point, to the stage they have reached in the process called evolution.

Incidentally, I would point out that education as generally understood, even when it implies the most up-to-date methods, does not necessarily mean progress on the evolutionary plane any more than ability as a linguist need denote a high standard of mentality.

This applies also to most arts and particularly to those where music and dancing are concerned. The lower the stage of evolution, within certain limits, the greater the appeal of music and dancing.

When we review the history and general progress of humanity we find the instincts and traits of the animal—the brute force principle—predominating at certain stages. If we go back far enough we find that there was a stage when it was always predominant.

Therefore, a test as to the ratio of progress of nations on the evolutionary plane is to be found in their tendency and desire to advance beyond that stage where the mental and physical forces, which should only belong as inherited instincts to the brute animals and savages, hold sway; and with this in view, if we take a survey of the history, ideals, habits of life, mental outlook, and general tendencies of the German nation, it will show conclusively that these self-hypnotised people approximated too closely to the lower animals and savages in their mode and chief aims of life.

The great and noble ideals and aims of mankind making for progress towards the more highly evolved states were cast aside for the unreasoning, brutal, and ignoble principles which make for the debasement of man’s elevating potentialities, and hold him a slave to the cruel and lowly-evolved state of the primitive creatures. That any nation or nations should deliberately adopt, as their highest ideals and aims, brute force in all its hideous aspects, desecration of mind, body, and soul for the State, justification of criminal instincts and acts if employed on behalf of the State, destruction, rape and plunder, murder and torture to terrify innocent civilians; that they should adopt, in short, the brutal principle that “Might is Right” in that special national form in which it has been manifested in the last half century and directed towards what is now known as “Militarism,”—all this is surely proof positive that they have progressed but little on the upward evolutionary stage from the state occupied by the brute beast and the savage. The criminal aspect of the outrage of all that rightthinking human beings hold dear is intensified by the fact that the nations which perpetrated the deed were among the most prosperous of the world, and enjoyed, as aliens, the same privileges as the subjects of those nations whose hospitality and confidence they abused.

The nations bearing the brunt of the struggle against this outburst of primitive brutal instincts and desires have long since reached a stage in their evolution which made the methods of Attila unthinkable. If forced into war they conducted it on the evolved plane of the human, and not that of the animal. They treated their captives as honourable men and extended to them every conceivable consideration within their power. Prior to this war the ideals and aims of these nations were the antithesis of those of their lowly-evolved enemies, and they were ideals and aims which made for the right to live in peace with all other nations. They aimed at the reduction of armaments, and gave practical proof of their aims. They opened their ports and their markets to their present enemies and gave them a free hand in every respect in all spheres of activity. They had no desire to beat down the ideals and principles which make for the ennoblement of mankind, they had no wish to dominate the world by brute force and to establish a system of living and a form of conduct which grinds the individual into a mere heartless unreasoning automaton, rigid-brained, driven like an animal, and not daring to claim even his soul as his own.

For many years prior to the crisis of 1914 we listened to the blatant outbursts of German professors and other educated authorities of that nation concerning its superiority to other nations. We were asked to believe that certain individuals of that nationality had reached the stage of the superman. These unfortunate and deluded people have for some time been cursed with this obsession.

Thinking men and women of other nations listened and wondered when these claims were made concerning these supermen, and after examining the evidence advanced to support these claims became convinced that they were not justified. The stupendous failure of the supposed supermen in every sphere of mental and physical activity in the present war proves the correctness of these convictions.

It seems inconceivable that supermen could so have guided and directed the whole national energy of Germany that it became more and more narrowed,—like the German mind,—until it concentrated almost solely upon the stupid conception of the domination of the world by Germany. To this end, the national energy was diverted chiefly into two channels:

COMMERCIAL INDUSTRY AND MILITARISM

One of the great features connected with the former was the extraordinary development of machinery, which demanded for its successful pursuance that the individual should be subjected to the most harmful systems of automatic training.

The standardised parts of the machine made demands which tended to stereotype the human machine. The limitations of human activity, mental and physical, reached the maximum. The power to continue work under such conditions depended upon a process of deterioration in the individual. He was slowly but surely being robbed of the possibility of development. The very soul of man was crushed to foster an industrial process which was to provide the sinews of the war machine, to support that curse called militarism, and the demoralisation of Germany came chiefly through that nation’s conceptions of militarism which, in the first and last analysis, stands for the worst manifestation of those savage instincts and unbridled passions associated with the lowest stages of primitive race development.

The horrible results of the sum total of the national madness which the foregoing represents are now revealed before us, for to Germany this militarism constituted a rigid plan, a system, and a world-philosophy.

She is convinced, against all the evidence, that her plan, system, or philosophy, is so undeniably right as to constitute an absolute. As a nation she has no mobility, no poise. She is influenced by a stultifying idea, the perfection of her own “Kultur” (a word more properly translated as a civilisation than by the word “culture” as used in the English or American sense). She is, in fact, just as badly co-ordinated, as unable to follow the true mandate of reason, as any individual who is dominated by a fixed idea.

For the trouble is that when reason is so far held in check that it loses its power of denial, it must have lost its power of control. The original “idea” formulated in the conscious mind has sunk so deep into the subconscious that it cannot be changed except under the influence of some stronger outside power. For nearly fifty years Germany, in her schools, her gymnasiums, her universities, her civic and her political life, has been inculcating a rigid and mentally demoralising system, and she is suffering now—as the monomaniac in private life must suffer—for her particular form of insanity.

Even in the conduct of her great campaign, this weakness of hers has begun to defeat her. She has lost the power of adaptability in military matters. She repeats the faults of her original plan, despite the endless illustrations that have been afforded by her Western antagonists that that plan can be very considerably bettered. No doubt the Higher Command may realise in some instances the weakness of the old method in conditions that have been immensely modified since August, 1914, but they are impotent to change, in a year or in a decade, the effect of their own teaching on the millions of Germany’s army. The massed attack, for example, has been demonstrated to be a disastrous failure—a single well-placed machine-gun can defeat it—but Germany’s soldiers will not advance in a scattered attack. They have learnt to depend upon the nearness of their comrades. Separate a German battalion and it has neither confidence nor courage.

Again, can one reasonably doubt that the German nation suffers from some form of self-hypnotism when one sees evidence of the almost pathetic belief apparently still placed in the campaign of “frightfulness”? The German people themselves are afraid—an inevitable symptom of certain forms of monomania—of the horrible devices they themselves are using, and no evidence can bring home to them the fact, that the plan of terrorising their enemies not only fails but recoils even upon their own heads. London—I speak from experience—is not intimidated by Zeppelin raids by night, nor by seaplane raids by day. The inhabitants of London do not cower under these terrible afflictions and beg for peace; on the contrary each horrible incident arouses afresh their determination to prevent, if possible, a recurrence of such savagery in the world’s history. Any sane nation must have realised this fact eighteen months ago; Germany, blind and rigid in the trance of her self-hypnosis, still staggers on to her own destruction.

In the opposite direction it is interesting to note the methods of the British. In their case, we can trace no such clear effort for narrowness and organisation. The general policy of the nation, whether internal or international, had that haphazard air which is so commonly cited as being a characteristic of the English method as a whole. We saw an almost complete inability to govern or even to manage that still largely subconsciously ruled country of Ireland. We witnessed the most astounding blunders of policy with regard to foreign countries (witness Lord Salisbury’s cession of Heligoland to Germany in 1890, Gladstone’s handling of the first Boer War, and a dozen other instances), and even with regard to the treatment of Britain’s own colonies, whilst internally her educational and administrative systems were the result of a method of trial and error which was sometimes well-nigh disastrous.

The British have in them a peculiar kind of empiricism. They are ready to laugh at and to criticise their own defects. They admit quite freely, for example, that they “blundered through somehow” in the Boer War, and that they have blundered again and again (most destructively in Gallipoli) in the present campaign. Their criticism of the rigidity of their own military methods is a proof that if the criticism is sometimes justified, the people at home—aye! and the New Army abroad—have never been infected with that rigidity themselves. But, in truth, that rigidity of discipline is now little in evidence in the field. And how little it has affected the British and French plan of campaign may be judged by the fact that every new device of any importance during the war, whether a device of method or of mechanical invention, has been originated by France and Great Britain. Now, from the German point of view, this adaptability to circumstances would be pronounced, _a priori_, as certain to lead to disaster. I put it to America, on the evidence afforded by the battle-fields of France, which method is the more likely to achieve ultimate success?

Returning now to my single reason for the cause of the present war, I feel that the explanation has already been given. Granted a nation educated and trained as Germany has been, some explosion was inevitable sooner or later. If we have in our midst an individual suffering from a fixed idea, he must in time become intolerable to us. Never in the history of the world have thought and the tendency to organisation been more fluid than they were in the first years of the 20th century. Yet one great and powerful nation interfered with us at every turn, impeding the flow of liberal thought by her obsession with the ideas of her own greatness and the omnipotence of her military machine. Nevertheless the other nations of Europe adapted themselves within limits to the demands of this rigid mechanism in their midst. And it may be that these very powers of endurance and adaptability hastened the crisis. They were regarded by the monomaniacs of Germany as signs of weakness, and just as their own philosopher Nietzsche went mad by concentration on his own invariable theme, so at last Germany crossed the bounds of sanity, imbued with a crazy belief in her own omnipotence. She ran amuck in the wide streets of Europe, and even yet she has not realised her own madness. I seriously question whether she will come to anything like a proper realisation of that madness in the present generation. She has allowed a habit of mind to become fixed; and it has fallen into the realms of her subconsciousness. We must treat her as mad, but she is nevertheless to be pitied.

Earlier in this chapter, I separated America from the rest of the world. And my reason for this is that I regard this great nation of the United States as still in its early childhood from one point of view. I have an immense confidence in the future of America. I see that she has potentialities and opportunities such as no other nation has ever had. For her the possibilities of control by reason are illimitable. But at the same time I must issue a very serious warning to every American reader of this book. For already I have seen the imitation of certain habits of thought, habits which, if they are persisted in, will sink deep into the national subconsciousness and prove a source of danger to the body politic.

My wish for America is that she should preserve as far as possible an open mind. She has recently entered the Great War for reasons that every right-minded man and woman must applaud and respect. I trust that she will come out of it with the same balance and power of choice, so that when she has to turn again to her own affairs, to matters of education, of government, and of her commercial interests, she will be able to form a national mind, sane enough and strong enough to control the great national body.

No finer ambition is possible than this. The old ambition of dominance, whether commercial or military, defeats itself by its very exaggeration. Such ambitions mount up until they become topheavy, and, even if they could be achieved, the result would be nothing but a decadence such as that which followed the Empire of Rome.

But given such a power of co-ordination and of self-control in the race, as a unit, as could be compared with the balance of a wise and healthy man, that nation would be free, with a greater liberty than history can record, and to such a nation little would be impossible. She would become the teacher of the world by the force of her reason and example. She would inaugurate the coming of a greater and wiser humanity.

END OF PART I

PART II
CONSCIOUS GUIDANCE AND CONTROL

EDUCATION

“It is because the body is a machine that education is possible. Education is the formation of habits, a superinducing of an artificial organisation upon the natural organisation of the body; so that acts, which at first require a conscious effort, eventually become unconscious and mechanical.”—HUXLEY.

RE-EDUCATION

“It is because the body is a machine that (RE)education is possible. (RE)education is the formation of (NEW AND CORRECT) habits, a (RE-INSTATING OF THE CORRECT) artificial organisation upon the natural organisation of the body; so that acts, which at first require conscious effort, eventually become unconscious and mechanical.”