Logic Taught by Love/Chapter 19
CHAPTER XIX.
THE ART OF EDUCATION.
"The heathen say, Where is your God?"
Methods of teaching which, from the point of view of medical psychology, are sound (i.e., those which vitalize and sanitate the brain), are distinguished from vicious methods (i.e., those which exhaust the vital powers and create bad habits of mental sequence) by the fact that the former are conformed to the central or fundamental law of Thought-sequence.
The physiology teacher lays on his table two specimens of the same bone; one from which all the gelatine has been boiled, and the other from which the phosphates have been discharged by acid, leaving only a gelatine shape. The class are instructed to examine each separately, and then to form a mental picture of a bone in which these two structures mutually interpenetrate each other. The teacher probably supposes himself to be merely illustrating the structure of bone; but in reality he is illustrating the fundamental law of sound mental action. Would that all teaching was done on the same model! We should then hear very little about "breaking down from over- work in schools!"
The bone-lesson above referred to gives the standard model on a very minute scale; education should copy that model on various scales of size. The rhythmic beats of alternate specialization and synthesis may vary from the five minutes or so occupied by the bone-lesson, to a period of a whole year; they should be of various degrees of complexity; from learning to see as one, two aspects of the same bit of bone, to learning to see what light the year's lessons on History, Language, Mathematics, and Physical Science throw on each other's meaning. The most important rhythm would appear to be one whose pulsation occupies about seven days.
Gratry has pointed out how the habit of periodic synthesis of different branches of study strengthens the mind and enables it to do a marvellous quantity of work without exhaustion or injury. He also calls attention to the fact that when this habit of periodic synthesis is once gained, the brain does a good deal of it by some process of unconscious cerebration, and even during sound and refreshing sleep.
The principle on which Gratry's system, and every other vitally healthy one, depends, is that mere cessation of action, or even mere change of action, is not rest; rest must be prepared for by antithetic action. The normal sequence of the lungs is expansion, contraction, repose. If we tried to make our lungs stand still at any point of the cycle except the right one, such inaction would not give true rest, but induce disease. So it is with all our functions; each organ must not only have its period of non-action, but it must be prepared for inaction by completing its cycle of action, or else the inaction is not sufficient rest. The true brain cycle is this:—
Forming special conceptions; unifying those conceptions; washing out all conceptions by thinking of The Inconceivable Unity, Repose.
Sabbath and Jubilee mean not inaction but renewal. Sabbath was, in fact, in its origin, the Festival of The Unity; the true key-note was struck in the "Preparation for Sabbath"; recreative rest was to be prepared for by reaction against specialization, by seeking to know The Unity.
If ever parents understood the Art of mental recreation by Unity, the school-teachers must have had reason to feel that their lines had fallen in pleasant places! Teaching, especially for the more conscientious teachers, is made very unsatisfactory by the general lack of recognition of the true Art of recuperation; for this reason:—
The exercise of any organ or faculty takes place by converting its latent force into active force, which is then given off in the form of "function" (i.e., the action appropriate to the organ or faculty). That this exercise strengthens instead of weakening our faculties, is due to the fact that the withdrawal of latent force by exercise creates an immediate receptivity for new force, which then becomes latent. And, under all ordinary conditions, the new supply taken in is in excess of that given off. This new supply ought to come from extra-human sources (including, of course, but not exclusively consisting of, food and air). A sound method in Education means, chiefly, a method which secures that the recuperation shall come from these extra-human sources. But a teacher may be brilliantly successful at Examinations without understanding how to effect this, or caring to try. There are several non-legitimate ways by which he may be securing his apparent success. He may be draining either the physical vitality of his pupils, or those intellectual faculties which are not needed for the pursuit of his own subject, or the moral faculties, especially those for the exercise of which school-life affords no great scope, but which will be needed for the conduct of adult life. Now when a faculty is thus passively drained at second hand, it suffers the same loss of force as if it were itself exercised; and it is not stimulated to healthy recuperation. Therefore the "successful" teacher may, in reality, be either destroying the physical health of his pupils, or preventing more conscientious and less showy colleagues from attaining the amount of success which they deserve, or preparing his pupils to be bad men and women, and a source of moral corruption; or he may be sowing the seeds of what, in later life, will develop into what is even legally actual insanity. He may do any or all of these things without ever uttering a word in the hearing of pupils on any subject except the one he professes to teach.
From all that Gratry and Boole have said, it would appear that the question whether the faculties exercised recuperate themselves from extra-human sources, or by draining away the vitality of other faculties, especially the moral stamina, depends mainly on whether the synthetical work is commensurate in amount and kind with the specialization, and is properly alternated with it.
The process of synthesising the work of the week is by no means difficult, even for the teacher; and to the pupils it appears like mere amusement. There are two reasons why it is neglected. One is that any unification at all commensurate with the amount of specialization now going on in schools, is looked on at present (in England at least) with dread. Whenever those who understand the process try to call attention to its importance, the subject is almost sure to be treated, by those who do not understand it, as if we were talking of what is technically called "religion," and trenching on ground which is the proper domain of parents and the clergy. The thing which I mean (or rather which such Logicians as Gratry and Boole have, in all ages, meant) has no more connection with what is called "religious instruction," than it has with Algebra or Grammar. We mean the mental act of synthesis, which forms the compensating recoil from the specialization induced by study; completing the pulsation, of which special studies form one-half; and causing whatever faculties have been used in special studies to draw their force from the extra-human sources, instead of draining the vitality of other faculties. At present the Sabbath, so far as it is used at all, is appropriated to the teaching of the special study called " religion " (i.e., the history of the lives and opinions of former synthesizers); and no adequate provision is made for mental acts of synthesis on the part of the pupils themselves. Such synthesis as they are taught to do, is left to chance and to individual teachers. Boole's Text-Book of Differential Equations is, in its way, a model of what can be done, within the compass of a particular subject, towards alternating special study with synthesis. But, within that compass, there is no scope except for time-synthesis (i.e., the study of the History of the subject), which in Boole's book alternates with the study of the subject itself. The book has been superseded; more modern ones serve more effectually the purpose of preparing for Examinations. Gratry has received little attention from ordinary teachers. His splendid analysis of the effects of synthesis alternating with specialization, in giving vitality, is mixed up with details of the special plan of sequence in study by which he secured the alternation for himself. Now Gratry's sequence could not be accurately followed in any school; it could not be attempted in any school which prepared pupils for Examination. Therefore commonplace teachers ignore him altogether, and the course of Natural Selection throws all the benefit of Gratry's discoveries into the hands of teachers who have intellect enough to seize his main idea and disentangle it from his special plans.
So with regard to Boole's text-books. The time-synthesis (or so-called historical method), of which he exhibits samples, is a very good thing in its way, failing anything better. But the specialist teacher, even if he knows this method, can only use it within the limits of his own subject; and it must be, at best, utterly inadequate to compensate the strain of modern education and restore the needed amount of energy. No one was better aware of this than the Author himself. Nothing is really adequate, except a periodic synthesis class, in which a synthesis of all the week's work is made by the pupils themselves, under the guidance of a competent Logician. And it is essential to full success that no subject which has been forced on the attention of the pupils by any specialist teacher whatsoever shall be forbidden ground at the Logos-class. I use the word " Logos " in preference to Logic, because the latter term has been taken to imply a special kind of study. Logos is the old word for the thing of which I am speaking, the Logic of the Logan-stone; the blessed antithesis to those fixed stones of evil magic and arrested progress which show the consequence of not keeping Sabbath.
The much vilipended Examination-system has the great advantage of preventing the possibility of carrying out the plan of any Idealist as conceived by him. It forces us, therefore, if we would learn anything from the ideal purists, to understand thoroughly those principles of sanitation from which their plans are projected; so as to be able to create our plans for ourselves according to circumstances. Strange as it may sound, I venture to prophesy that the Examiner will prove, in the long run, the best friend of Idealism in Education, by making a clean sweep of all second-hand imitators of Idealist thinkers.
The whole notion of leaving the selection of a Logos-teacher to the caprice or ignorance of individual parents, would be, of course, absurd. The essence of his function is the re-uniting of strains of thought which have been forcibly separated by the school-work. The first condition of his performing it is that he should know something of the methods employed in the School. Properly speaking, the Logos-Class should be held by the Head-Master or Mistress. If that is impossible the substitute should be thoroughly in the confidence of the Head.
A second reason why synthesis is insufficiently taught, is that it gives to the teacher an appearance of mere Nihilism; he seems to be Socratically neutralizing everything and actually teaching Nothing. This Nihilism is only apparent; the general and ultimate effect is in the highest degree both conservative and constructive. But that specialist and positive teachers always feel the work of the synthesizer to be antagonistic to theirs, there is no denying. Long ago it was said that "the heathen" (by which was then meant the antagonists of Logos-teaching) said to the Prophets of the Formless and Invisible Unity: "Where is your God?" (or, where is your Good?) Oken's answer to this question is almost brutal in its cynical audacity:—
God = Zero.
Boole puts his statement into a less startling form; but it comes practically to the same as Oken's: x (1-x) =0; which means:—When you have selected your integral unity, or Universe of Thought (however large or small), and divided it into any two sections, x and not-x, if you then interpenetrate with each other the two conceptions, the result is zero. If any other result presents itself, your brain action has been imperfect.
The old Hindoo sages knew that we can form no idea of Deity except by affirming and then denying every quality in turn. A thing cannot, at one time, be black and white, except of course in different parts; yet to formulate aright a statement about God, we must say that He at once possesses every conceivable quality and its opposite, and yet has no parts. In other words
God is No-Thing.
Impatient ignorance asks, of course, "Cui bono?" "Who is better for the whole laborious proceeding of Meditation, if there remains Nothing to show for it?" The answer is that neither Oken's Zero, nor Boole's, has any connection with negation or non-existence. That Zero means: "No form, but a living Force; No-Thing, but a power of understanding, utilizing, and even creating things." The result of a proper synthesis-lesson is, not the knowledge of any theologic proposition which can be stated in a neat sentence at a Divinity-Examination; but an increased power of understanding the genesis and structure of facts generally, and an improved hygienic condition of brain. The pupil, in fact, gets out of the unification-lesson a supply (commensurate with his week's work) of Creative Energy. Idealists such as Gratry and Boole are too prone to wonder what more any man can want, for this world or the next, than just that, and then plenty more of the same. Practical teachers, however, know very well that man in general wants recognition by his fellow-man. He wants, in fact, success; that visible success which can only be attained by the use of some method which is, metaphysically-speaking, imperfect. Beneficent Nature, who implanted this desire in the teacher-mind, is wiser than the Ideal purists; she has made abundant provision for its legitimate gratification. Any clever teacher has a right to use any method he likes, and to become as successful at Examinations as he can. It is the business of the child's "Pastor" (not the preacher of a special religion, but the Shepherd-servant of the Unity) to harmonize all the special aberrations by a suitable periodic synthesis. He will seem to neutralize the work of the teachers. He will especially seem to be neutralizing the work of any teacher who either introduces a new method, becomes rapidly popular, is very successful in preparing for Examinations, or, above all, possesses Genius of a showy order. Genius and originality are dangerous factors in education, unless their action is counteracted by a specially suitable synthesis. But the more dangerous a method of teaching is when not suitably counteracted, the more capable it is of becoming a source of vitality when it is suitably synthesized. The very alternation between a method which is highly vicious (i.e., which rapidly produces showy results), and one which is sound (i.e., produces no results except accession of force), this alternation, when habitual, sets up its own glorious pulsation, and generates by induction a force, perhaps the very highest and most vital which Humanity can command. The danger of modern education does not consist in the imperfectness of imperfect methods; it is that no provision is made in the mental life for alternating their use with that of those perfect methods the result of which is "Nothing"—except force stored up for the specialist teachers to use. In the physical life it is now perfectly understood that it is some teachers' business to produce no result except a neutralization of the harm which is incidentally done by other teachers as a necessary concomitant to the good they are doing. Fifty years ago any one who had ordered young ladies to put their hands on their hips, then on their toes, and to assume, in fact, every position condemned by their parents and teachers as disorderly, would have been supposed to be trying to undo all the good work of parents and teachers, and to set children against lawful authority. Now, everybody knows that the very business of the Gymnast is to undo the cramping effect of the positions rendered necessary by the exigencies of study and of society; and nobody objects to its being done. We have all found out that the Gymnasts are the friends, not the enemies, of Order. We have seen the beneficial effects of gymnastic on the pupils; few notice the silent influence for good which it has exerted, through the pupils, on the parents and teachers; but it has exerted an influence on us all. What mother could condemn her daughter's desire for reversal of physical position as "unseemly" and "unlady-like," in the face of the fact that the girl will presently assume the condemned posture by the orders of the graceful lady who presides in the Gymnasium? We are content, now, to tell little girls that standing with one's hand on one's hip is a proceeding more suited to the play-room than the drawing-room. The Gymnasts only profess to cure the weakness of children's muscles: in reality they are helping to eradicate the irreverent dogmatism of parents. Let Logos-teachers boldly claim the right to do for children's minds what the Gymnast does for their bodies, i.e., renew vital elasticity by periodic reversal of attitude, and after a time the public will grow accustomed to the idea that it is some teachers' business to do nothing, except vitalize the minds of children by undoing other people's teaching. The conceit of specialist teachers of all sorts will have to give way before the Logical equation of brain-rhythm, as the conceit of would-be-genteel Mammas has had to give way before the Logic of muscular exercise. And we cannot lay too much stress on this point: the Gymnast is an absolute Nihilist; he does Nothing—except reverse the positions of the muscles; he has no results to show, except increased health and strength. The Logos or Pulsation-doctrine, pure and holy as it is, may, in one sense, be described as the Scavenger of our life. By burning up all that is specious and false, it prevents the development of those abnormal conditions which to the ignorant seem like culture, but which are in reality the product of corruption, the source of disease, and the main cause of insanity.
Those who, of old, attempted to base National Education on the principle of the Logos, or rhythmic pulsation, struck the true key-note at starting. The symbol of the covenant made with man by Infinite Knowledge was the Rainbow; which no man can capture or embalm or enshrine ; which is made by the breaking up of the One Light into many colours, to fade before long into the Unity of white light again; and leaves nowhere in all the world a trace of its ever having existed, except in Man's heart an impression of spiritual beauty, and in his mind a suggestion how to discover the Laws of Light. The type of mind which asks "Cui bono?" of every lesson for which there is nothing to show at Examination is the same as the type of mind which sneers because the Sacred Ark of the Hebrew Covenant contains, practically, Nothing—a few old-world tales illustrative of a state of society long passed away; a few self-evident laws of morality; and a mass of rules, very uninteresting, and to a large extent negative in form, tedious to carry out, of no obvious utility, but, on the contrary, in themselves a hindrance to active life. Of positive information, Nothing. It is time that teachers at least should be taught to understand that, though man has a right to desire and procure whatever he wants, the inner shrine whence Truth issues to hold converse with man may not be desecrated by the presence of immediately realizable results. If it be so desecrated, the Blessed Guest departs. In that Ark is preserved what the Rainbow leaves behind when it fades into white light:—the Keys of the Infinite Store-house of Science; the canons of the Art of Thinking; the Secret of the Method whereby man may draw down Truth from Heaven, without blighting either his body or his soul Life lives in that empty Ark; the true life of man's brain. For we are the children of the Creator; not His mere handiwork, made arbitrarily, unlike Himself; but the outcome of His very thought-processes; and sanity, for us, means thinking as He thinks, so far as we think at all. And (if His work reveals His manner of thinking) He thinks in an incessant rhythmic pulsation of alternate "positing and denying," of constructing and sweeping away; a pulsation which produces the appearance of negation and the reality of power. It is in vain that we try to fight against, or to ignore, this rhythmic alternation of contrary notions. If we carefully embody it in our daily study, it becomes to us a source of constant power, like the movement of our lungs. If we forget it, it never forgets to sweep our work away. Unless it has helped to build the mind, their labour is but lost that built it. It is vain that we haste to rise early, and late take rest, and devour many carefully compiled text-books; to those who love the Invisible, Formless, alternate-beating Unity, the knowledge which is power comes even during sleep.[1]