What Is and What Might Be, by Edmond Holmes
Posted: Mon Oct 21, 2019 3:20 am
What Is and What Might Be: A Study of Education in General and Elementary Education in Particular
by Edmond Holmes
Third Impression, 1911
Author of “The Creed of Christ,” “The Creed of Buddha,” “The Silence of Love,” “The Triumph of Love,” etc.
NOTICE: THIS WORK MAY BE PROTECTED BY COPYRIGHT
TABLE OF CONTENTS:
• PREFACE
• PART I: WHAT IS, OR THE PATH OF MECHANICAL OBEDIENCE
o I. SALVATION THROUGH MECHANICAL OBEDIENCE
o II. EDUCATION THROUGH MECHANICAL OBEDIENCE
o III. A FAMILIAR TYPE OF SCHOOL
• PART II: WHAT MIGHT BE, OR THE PATH OF SELF-REALISATION
• IV. A SCHOOL IN UTOPIA
• V. EDUCATION THROUGH SELF-REALISATION
• VI. SALVATION THROUGH SELF-REALISATION
by Edmond Holmes
Third Impression, 1911
Author of “The Creed of Christ,” “The Creed of Buddha,” “The Silence of Love,” “The Triumph of Love,” etc.
NOTICE: THIS WORK MAY BE PROTECTED BY COPYRIGHT
YOU ARE REQUIRED TO READ THE COPYRIGHT NOTICE AT THIS LINK BEFORE YOU READ THE FOLLOWING WORK, THAT IS AVAILABLE SOLELY FOR PRIVATE STUDY, SCHOLARSHIP OR RESEARCH PURSUANT TO 17 U.S.C. SECTION 107 AND 108. IN THE EVENT THAT THE LIBRARY DETERMINES THAT UNLAWFUL COPYING OF THIS WORK HAS OCCURRED, THE LIBRARY HAS THE RIGHT TO BLOCK THE I.P. ADDRESS AT WHICH THE UNLAWFUL COPYING APPEARED TO HAVE OCCURRED. THANK YOU FOR RESPECTING THE RIGHTS OF COPYRIGHT OWNERS.
TABLE OF CONTENTS:
• PREFACE
• PART I: WHAT IS, OR THE PATH OF MECHANICAL OBEDIENCE
o I. SALVATION THROUGH MECHANICAL OBEDIENCE
o II. EDUCATION THROUGH MECHANICAL OBEDIENCE
o III. A FAMILIAR TYPE OF SCHOOL
• PART II: WHAT MIGHT BE, OR THE PATH OF SELF-REALISATION
• IV. A SCHOOL IN UTOPIA
• V. EDUCATION THROUGH SELF-REALISATION
• VI. SALVATION THROUGH SELF-REALISATION
It is by answering possible objections to Utopianism that I shall best be able to unfold Egeria's philosophy of education. I shall perhaps be told that in my advocacy of that philosophy I am preaching dangerous doctrines; that the only alternative for obedience is the lawlessness of unbridled licence; and that anarchy, social, moral, and spiritual, is the ultimate goal of the path which I am urging the teacher to enter. Let me point out, in answer to this protest, that it is mechanical obedience which I condemn, not obedience as such.
If I condemn mechanical obedience, I do so because it is unworthy of the name of obedience, because the higher faculties of Man's being, the faculties which are distinctively human - reason, imagination, aspiration, spiritual intuition, and the like - take no part in it, because it is the obedience of an automaton, not of a living soul. What I wish to oppose to it is vital obedience, obedience to the master laws of Man's being, obedience to the laws which assert themselves as central and supreme, obedience more particularly to those larger and obscurer laws which obedience itself helps us to discover, obedience in fine to that hierarchy of laws - (the superior law always claiming the fuller measure and the higher kind of obedience) - which, if we are to use the Divine Name, we must needs identify with the will of God. Obedience, in this sense of the word, is a sustained and soul-deep effort in which all the higher faculties of Man's being take part, an effort which is in some sort a voyage of discovery, the doing of the more obvious duty being always rewarded by the deepening of the doer's insight and the widening of his outlook, and by the consequent unveiling to him of the way in which he is to walk and the goal at which he is to aim. That the path of soul-growth is the path of vital obedience can scarcely be doubted. The effort to grow is always successful just so far as it implies knowledge of the laws of the nature that is unfolding itself, and readiness to obey those laws; and so far as it is successful, it carries with it the outgrowth of the very faculties by which knowledge - the higher knowledge which makes further growth possible - is to be gained.
Here, as elsewhere, there is an unceasing interaction between perception and expression, between knowledge of law and obedience to law, what is given as obedience being received back as enlightenment, and what is received as enlightenment being given back as larger, fuller, and more significant obedience.
And, be it carefully observed, it is obedience to the laws of human nature, not obedience to the idiosyncrasies of the individual nature, which the process of soul-growth at once implies and makes possible. Growth is, in its essence, a movement towards that perfect type which is the real self of each individual in turn, and the approach to which involves the gradual surrender of individuality, and the gradual escape from the ordinary self. A man is to cling to and affirm his individuality, not in order that he may rest in it and make much of it, but in order that he may outgrow it and pass far beyond it in that one way - the best way for him - which it, and it alone, is able to mark out for him. In other words, he is to assert his individual self in order that he may universalise himself in his own way, and not in obedience to the ruling of custom and authority, in order that he may escape from himself through the real outlet of sincere self-expression, and not through the sham outlet of hypocrisy and cant.
What I may call the Utopian scheme of education, far from making for antinomianism [opposition to the obligatoriness of the moral law] and anarchy, is the sworn enemy of individualism and therefore, a fortiori [even more so], of everything that savours of licence. It is the conventional type of education, with its demands for mechanical obedience to external authority, which leads through despotism to social and political chaos. The whole régime of mechanical obedience is favourable, in the long run, to the development of anarchy. Let us take the case of a church or an autocracy which demands implicit obedience from its subjects, and is prepared to exact such obedience by the application of physical force or its moral equivalent. What will happen to it when its subjects begin to ask it for its credentials? The fact that it has always demanded from them literal rather than spiritual obedience, and that, in its application of motive force, it has appealed to their baser desires and baser fears, makes it impossible for it to justify itself to their higher faculties, rational or emotional, and makes it necessary for it to meet their incipient criticism with renewed threats of punishment and renewed promises of reward. But the very fact that it is being asked for its credentials means that the force on which it has hitherto relied is weakening, that its power to punish and reward, which has always been resolvable into the power to make people believe: that it can punish and reward, is being called in question and is therefore crumbling away. And behind that power there is nothing but chaos. For the régime of mechanical obedience, by arresting the spontaneous growth of Man's higher nature, and by making its chief appeal to his baser desires and baser fears, becomes of necessity the foster-mother of egoism; and when egoism, which makes each man a law to himself and the potential enemy of his kind, is unrestrained by authority, the door is thrown wide open to anarchy, and through anarchy to chaos. This is what is happening in the West, in our self-conscious and critical age. In every field of human action, in religion, in politics, in social life, in art, in letters, authority is being asked for its credentials; and as this demand, besides being a disintegrating influence, is a sign that the force on which authority relies is weakening, it is not to be wondered at that there is a steady drift in many Western countries in the direction of anarchy, - religious, political, social, artistic, literary, - or that this régime of incipient anarchy is taking the form of an ignoble scramble for wealth, for power, for position, for fame, for notoriety, for anything in fine which may serve to exalt a man above his fellows, and so minister to the aggrandizement of his lower self.....
If any of my readers have imagined that I am an advocate of what is called "secular education", they will, I hope, now realise that they have misread this book. Far from wishing to secularise education, I hold that it cannot be too religious. And, far from wishing to limit its religious activities to the first forty minutes of the morning sessions, I hold that it should be actively religious through every minute of every school session, that whatever it does it should do to the glory of God.
But how does knowledge of God show itself? Knowledge, so far as it is real, always shows itself in right bearing, and (if action is called for) in right action. Knowledge of arithmetic and of other more or less abstract subjects, shows itself in the successful working of the corresponding problems, theoretical or practical as the case may be. Knowledge of the laws of physical nature shows itself in practical mastery of the forces and resources of physical nature. Knowledge of history and geography, in a right attitude towards the problems and sub-problems of these complex and comprehensive subjects, an attitude which may on occasion translate itself into right action. And so on. Knowledge of God, being a state or attitude of the soul as such, must show itself in the right bearing and the right action of the soul as such, in other words, of Man as Man, - not as mathematician, not as financier, not as sculptor, not as cricketer, but simply as Man. Now Man as Man has to bear himself aright towards the world in which he finds himself, and in particular towards the world which touches him most closely and envelops him most completely, - the world of human life. Therefore knowledge of God will show itself, principally and chiefly, though by no means wholly, in dealing aright with one's fellow-men, in being rightly disposed towards them, and in doing the right things to them. I have found it convenient to disconnect the moral from the religious aspect of self-realisation. We can now see that in the last resort the two aspects are one.
From every point of view, then, and above all from that of Religion, the path of self-realisation is seen to be the path of salvation. For it is the only scheme of life which enables him who follows it to attain to knowledge of God; and knowledge of God has, as its necessary counterpart, a right attitude, in general towards the world which surrounds him, and in particular towards his fellow-men.....
The relations between the type and the various sub-types, between the type and the individual, between the sub-type and the individual - whether in plant or beast or man - are matters which could not be handled within the limits of this book, and which I have therefore as far as possible ignored. Nor have I attempted to deal with the difficult problems that are presented by the existence of races, such as the Negro, which seem to be far below the normal level of human development. There is, however, in the vast region of thought which these and kindred problems open out to us, one by-way which I must be allowed to follow for a while.
The wild bullace is, I believe, the ancestor of many of our yellow plums. In other words, bullacehood can develop into plumhood, and even into the perfection of plumhood. Similarly human nature can develop into something so high above the normal level of human nature that it might almost seem to belong to another genus. But there is a difference between the two cases. The bullace ideal is in the individual bullace tree. So, in a sense, is the plum ideal. But the latter cannot be realised, or even approached, by the individual bullace tree. It cannot be realised, or even approached, by the bullace species except through a long course of culture and breeding....
What then? Is this the end of the average man? Will Nature admit final defeat? The curve of a man's life, as it sweeps round from birth to death, passes through the point of apparent maturity; but the real nature of the man has never ripened, and when he descends into the grave he is still the embryo of his true self. Will the true self never be realised? Never, if death is indeed the end of life. But in that case the man will have failed to fulfil the central purpose of Nature, and, alone among her children, will have escaped from the control of her all-pervading law of growth.
It is in their desire to keep Man in line with the rest of Nature's children that so many thinkers and scientists in the West forbid him to look beyond the horizon of the grave. But in truth it is only by being allowed to look beyond that horizon that Man can be kept in line with the rest of Nature's children; for if death means extinction to him, as it means (or seems to mean) to the beetle or the fly, he will have lived to no purpose, having failed to realise in any appreciable degree what every other living thing realises within its appointed limits, - the central tendencies of his being. That a living thing, an average specimen of its kind, should within the limits of a normal life fail completely to realise those potentialities which are distinctive of its real nature, - fail so completely that the very existence of those potentialities might, but for an occasional and quite exceptional revelation, have remained unsuspected, - is entirely at variance with what we know of the ways and works of Nature. Yet failure to realise his true manhood is, outside the confines of Utopia, the apparent lot of nine men out of ten. An entire range of qualities, spiritual and mental, which blossom freely in the stimulating atmosphere of Utopia, and which must therefore exist in embryo in every normal child, fail to germinate (or at best only just begin to germinate) within the lifetime of the average non-Utopian. (14) The inference to be drawn from these significant facts is that the apparent limits of Man's life are not the real limits; that the one earth-life of which each of us is conscious, far from being the whole of one's life, is but a tiny fragment of it, - one term of its ascending "series", one day in its cycle of years. In other words, the spiritual fertility of the average Utopian child, taken in conjunction with the spiritual sterility of the average non-Utopian child (and man), points to the conclusion which the thinkers of the Far East reached thousands of years ago, - that for the full development of human nature a plurality of lives is needed, which will do for the individual soul what generations of scientific breeding and culture will do for the bullace that is to be transformed into a plum.
-- What Is and What Might Be: A Study of Education in General and Elementary Education in Particular, by Edmond Holmes