*

with a phase of man's relationship to the brute creation which historically has been a most important one, and which is destined to continue until all animals are extirpated except those which can be domesticated or which in their natural state do not hinder the extension of civilization. The Egyptians would allow human beings to perish by famine rather than kill one of their sacred animals, and once, when a Roman in Alexandria killed a cat, an insurrection ensued in which the infuriated populace murdered the aggressor. Buddhism today declares it a sin to take animal life, so no Buddhist could consistently celebrate a hunter or show children Froebel's shadow pictures. But we eat food and wear furs which the hunter provides, and each one of us wages unrelenting war against mice, spiders, flies, and mosquitoes. Either we are wrong in hunting and trapping these living creatures, in eating animal food, and wearing animal raiment, or we can not sit in judgment on the hunter. Moreover, unless wild beasts are exterminated civilization can not extend, and if we honor St. Patrick for purging Ireland of serpents, how may we refuse honor to the huntsman who in * Hegel's Philosophy of History.

his attack upon tigers, panthers, and boars is really the pioneer of progress.

Whether young children may be shown pictures of a hunter or told stories celebrating his deeds is another question. In my judgment it is one of many whose general purport is how far the shadow side of life should be presented to immature minds, and all of which must be met as their occasion arises.

It must be conceded that Froebel has presented this delicate subject in its least objectionable light. The story implied in the picture of the hare is identical with our traditional nursery rhyme Bye-baby Bunting. The hunter is a father who through the chase provides for the needs of his children, and who with thoughtful affection brings home a living pet for his little daughter. Two other Shadow Songs relate to the destruction of the wolf and wild boar, both of which are fierce and dangerous animals. Finally, in a suggestive picture Froebel shows us that the wolves have been busy in the sheepfold, and have carried off and devoured a lamb.

Every natural fact, says Emerson, has a higher value as a symbol. Froebel's commentaries on the

Shadow Songs indicate that he was thinking of the beast in man as well as the beast in the world. The wolf and boar must become extinct in man, and each human being must be a hunter who in the tangled forest of the soul meets and slays the beasts that skulk there. Failing in his duty as spiritual huntsman, he becomes a demon. This unconquered bestiality which sinks reasonable man lower than the irrational brute is strikingly imaged by Dante in the man-wolf, the man-bull, and the man-serpent of his Inferno, and by Goethe in his evolution of Mephistopheles from the dog.

It was doubtless with intention that Froebel illustrated the outer and inner mastery of the brute by shadow pictures. For as shadows are produced by intercepting light, so the dense body of our ignorance, barring the passage of that universal reason which is the light of spirit, gives rise to all the problems which torment our minds. Among these problems few are more serious than those connected with the brute creation. No less to us than to the ancients is animal life one of the chief of mysteries, but the mystery has changed its form. To the Egyptian, as we have seen, the animal soul, shut up within its physical organization and dulled

thereby, seemed divine. "Spirit had," says Hegel, "a band around its forehead." Itself imprisoned, it worshiped the imprisoned spirit of animals. To the modern world, which has torn the band from its forehead, the problem changes its nature. Ourselves conscious and conscious of consciousness, we look with dismay upon creatures who, lacking reason, share with us the mystery of sentient existence. In a sermon entitled Mysteries of Nature and of Grace, Cardinal Newman has put this problem before us in all its force. "We behold," he writes,

the spectacle of brute nature, of impulses, feelings, propensities, passions, which in us are ruled or repressed by a superintending reason, but from which when ungovernable we shrink as fearful and hateful because in us they would be sin. Millions of irrational creatures surround us, and it would seem as though the Creator had left part of his work in its original chaos, so monstrous are these beings which move and feel and act without reflection and without principle. To matter he has given laws. He has divided the moist and the dry, the heavy and the rare, the light and the dark. He has placed the land as a boundary for the sea, a perpetual precept which it shall not pass. He has