Religious Education

acteristic of all life. Not even the most unfortunate of human beings is born with a moral taint. What he inherits are powers, and these undeniably may vary both in a relative and in an absolute sense, so that the appeal of the environment may mean very different things to different children, and the education of the child into a virtuous manhood may be much more difficult in one case than in another."

Professor Rufus M. Jones (Professor of Philosophy, Haverford College), says: "Slowly the facts are compelling us to admit that the range and scope of inheritance have been overemphasized. Much of which was thought to be transmitted by heredity we now know is gained by imitation, both unconscious and conscious."

Professor J. M. Baldwin states: "No one, of course, believes now, if indeed anyone did in Locke's time, in innate ideas. There is no such complex furniture in the infant's mind at birth as the general idea; even what Kant called the forms of intuition, space, and time, modern psychology has shown to be the outcome of elaborate synthesis. The infant's experience begins in raw sensations, feelings of pleasure and pain, and the motor adaptations to which these lead.

"Inasmuch as instincts are automatic, consciousness being present at all instinctive actions only as a spectator, as it were, and not as a guide, it is obvious that no ethical attribute such as 'good' or 'bad' can be applied to them, or, at least, to the infant for possessing them."

Personality.

In the discussion which Rufus Jones undertakes in his SOCIAL LAW IN THE SPIRITUAL WORLD he elicits the fact that "It is impossible to see what end there could be to personality. As far as we can follow it out we discover only increasing possibilities. It seems like a number system, in which however far you have counted, you can always add one more number. There never could be a last number. There could no more be a terminal limit to personality. To be a person is to see something beyond the present attainment. If we were, as persons, nothing but curious functions of bodies, then of course we should cease with the dissolution of the body, as the iridescent

colors vanish when the bubble bursts. But if rather the body is only a medium for giving temporal manifestation to that which is essentially spirit, the falling away of the body may be only a stage in the process, like the bursting of the chrysalis by the insect which was meant to have wings and to live on flowers. The fact is, personality gets no sufficient origin in the phenomenal world. Nothing here explains it. From the first it trails clouds of glory.

"All changes, so far as we know, below the realm of selfconsciousness are changes which are caused by a force acting from behind—a tergo, i.e., a force which acts through a causal link. Thus the engine draws the train. The moon moves the tide. The wind blows down the tree. The forces of nature develop the plant. None of these things select or choose. They are caused from without. They are the effects of causes which can be described, and they are effects which can be accurately predicted.

"When we pass over from causation acting from behind to changes produced by ideals in front, we cross one of the widest chasms in the world. It is one of those facts which disproves the easy proverb, 'Nature abhors breaks.' It seems like a passage from one world-system to a totally different sort. In one case the moving cause is an actual, existing situation antecedent to the effect; in the other, the moving cause is an unrealized ideal-something which as yet does not exist in the world of describable things at all. We act to realize something which has induced us to act before it existed in the world of things. The entire spiritual development of persons is of this front type. Below man everything is moved by coercion. If things are moving toward a goal, they themselves know nothing about it, and it must be either accounted for as an accident or we must admit that from a deeper point of view all causation would be discovered to be toward a goal in front. In this case the end and goal would be present from the first as a directive force in the entire process of evolution."

Infancy and Education.

Both Professor Hill and President Butler have pointed out the significance of infancy. Says the former: "The lower ani

mals are born with an almost complete adaptation for the performance of their life-functions. The colt stands when only a few hours old. At the age of three, he can do almost all he can ever do in his life-time. It is not so with a human infant. For years it is absolutely dependent upon others for the continuance of its existence. No living creature is more ignorant, more defenceless, more entirely at the mercy of beings other than itself. Destined for the highest attainments of intelligence, the infant possesses the least automatic adaptation to the conditions of life. Everything has to be learned from the beginning. Instinct is at the minimum; intellect, undeveloped, but potential, is at the maximum. Almost everything done by the child is done by conscious physical reaction, not mechanically." And President Butler has added: "The meaning of the period of helplessness or infancy, lies, as I see it, at the bottom of any scientific and philosophical understanding of the part played by education in human life. Infancy is a period of plasticity; it is a period of adjustment; it is a period of fitting the organism to its environments; first, physical adjustment, and then adjustment on a far larger and broader scale."

The New-Born Child.

Caswell Ellis, Fellow in Psychology of Clark University, calls attention to the significant fact that for some time after birth the child cannot see, hear, feel, properly smell, or taste. He is not conscious of his own existence, of acts which are reflex, for the first week. There is innate in him, though latent, impulses or instincts, dormant, gradually unfolding and developing into activity; not all at once, but in different stages and periods of life.

The hereditary traits of character will be the foundation bases of his life, which it is the function of Education to train and exercise, and which, when thus affected and developed, so it may be absorbed, or diminished, by his environment, will result in the adult man.

These hereditary traits, while never transmitting disease or absolute mental or moral habits, unquestionably supply impulses, tendencies, capacities, desires, predispositions. The father's sin is indeed visited upon his Child, alas! too far beyond the fourth

generation. Fortunately good traits, as well as bad ones, come down to posterity through Heredity or so-called Atavism.

For the first four years of the child's life, family education. is his chief environment. Even before he can speak, his Will has begun to assert itself in action. He is a creature of imitation and tries to reproduce all that he sees others do around him.

During the first year he has learned to hold up his head, to see, to smell, to taste, to know sounds and colors, and to know individuality of objects, he can also creep and crawl. In his second year, he has learned to stand and walk, to speak some words and to understand the meaning of a great many more.

An act is educative when it is learned, and then only. After it has become a habit it is a second nature, and is no longer educative. The more man is educated the more does he become "a bundle of habits."

In the third and fourth years, the child, having learned to speak, is constantly asking questions, gaining information as the result of older people's observations.

The imitative faculty, which is so strong in the child, has the form of self-activity that strives to emancipate Self from its natural impulses and heredity, by assimilating the results of the experiences of others. Only souls can imitate, and the lower we go from man, the less we see of imitation. It is the first step, the lowest phase, in the evolution and development of spiritual achievements. With language and imitation begin the child's contemplation of Ideals, seeing the real with the possibilities of the ideal being realized.

The full life of Ideals does not appear until puberty commences; but its germ is here.

QUESTIONS FOR THOUGHT AND DISCUSSION.

1. What is meant by "the discovery of the child"?

2. Why is it at all necessary to study child-nature?

3. Discuss Heredity vs. Environment.

4. What is the significance of Infancy?

5. How does it affect the process of Education?

6. Is Infancy becoming lengthened?

7. What are the factors concerned in character-formation? Explain. Give concrete examples of the influence of each in your life.

CHAPTER IV.

A STUDY OF PSYCHOLOGY.

Self-Activity, Brain, Consciousness, Thinking, Ideas,

Apperception.

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