What Is and What Might Be

E >> Edmond Holmes >> What Is and What Might Be

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Let us now go to the other end of the social scale. What the path of
self-realisation might do for the children of the "upper classes" if
they were allowed to follow it, we may roughly calculate, partly by
measuring what the alternative scheme of education has failed to do
for them, partly by reminding ourselves of what the path has done for
the village children of Utopia. The children of the "upper classes"
have such an advantage over the children of Utopia in the matter of
environment,--to say nothing of inherited capacity,--that one would
expect the path to do much more for their mental development than
it has done for the mental development of the Utopians, especially
as they could afford to remain much longer in the first and most
important of its stages, the stage of self-education (in the more
limited sense of the word). The gain to the whole nation if the
mental development of the highest social stratum could be raised as
much above its normal level as the mental development of youthful
Utopia has been raised above the normal level of an English rural
village, would be incalculably great. But greater still--incalculably
greater--would be the gain to the nation if the rank and file of its
children could be led into the path of self-realisation, and therein
rise to the high level of brightness, intelligence, and
resourcefulness which has been reached in Utopia.

Nor is this dream so wildly impracticable as some might imagine. So
far as the natural capacity of the average child is concerned, there
is no bar to its realisation. Egeria has taught me that the mental
capacity of the average child, even in a rustic village belonging to
a county which is proverbial for the slow wits of its rustics, is
very great. It is sometimes said that of the children who have been
trained in our elementary schools, not one in twenty is fit to profit
by the education given in a secondary school: and if by this is
meant that in nineteen cases out of twenty the elementary scholar,
_educated as he has probably been_, is unlikely to profit by the
education given in a secondary school, _conducted as those schools
usually are_, I am not prepared to say offhand that the statement
is untrue. But if it means that the average mental capacity of the
children of our "lower orders" is hopelessly inferior to that of
the children of our middle and upper classes, I can say without
hesitation that it is a slander and a lie. Whether there is any
difference, in respect of innate mental capacity, between level
and level of our social scale, may be doubted; but the Utopian
experiment has proved to demonstration that in the lowest level of
all the innate mental capacity is so great that we cannot well expect
to find any considerable advance on it even in the highest level of
all.

But where, it will be asked, are we to find Egerias to man our
elementary schools? For the moment this problem does not admit of a
practical solution. But that need not discourage us. I admit that in
far too many of our schools the teachers, through no fault of their
own, are what I may call machine-made, and that they are engaged in
turning out machine-made scholars, some of whom in the fullness of
time will develop into machine-made teachers. But there is a way of
escape from this vicious circle,--the path of self-realisation.
That path has transformed the children of a rustic village in a
slow-witted county into Utopians. Why should it not transform some
at least among the boys and girls who are thinking of entering the
teaching profession into Egerias, or at any rate into teachers
of Egeria's type? Even as it is, replicas of Egeria,--not exact
replicas, for she is too original to be easily replicated,
but teachers who, like her, preach and practise the gospel of
self-education,--are beginning to spring up in various parts of the
country; and each of their schools, besides being a centre of light,
may well become a nursery for teachers who will follow in the
footsteps of those who have trained them, and will in their turn do
pioneer work in other schools. The thin end of the wedge is even now
being driven into the close-grained mass of tradition and routine;
and each successive blow that is struck by a teacher of intelligence
and initiative will widen the incipient cleft.

The dream, then, of leading the children of England--the children of
the "masses" as well as of the "classes"--into the path of
self-realisation, is not so widely impracticable as to convict the
dreamer of insanity. And if we could realise the dream, if we could
go but a little way towards realising it, how immense would be the
gain to our country! If the average level of mental development in
England were as high as it is in Utopia, to what height would not the
men and women of exceptional ability be able to rise? The mountain
peaks that spring from an upland plateau soar higher towards the sky
than the peaks, of the same apparent height, that spring from a
low-lying plain. And "the great mountains lift the lowlands on to
their sides."

But this is not the only reason why the gospel of self-realisation
should be preached in all parts of the land. There is another reason
which is becoming more and more urgent. If the Utopian scheme of
education were widely adopted, an antidote would be found to a grave
and growing evil which is beginning to imperil the mental health of
every civilised community, and of this more than any other. The more
civilised (in the Western sense of the word) a country becomes, the
less educative does life--the rough-and-tumble life of the work-a-day
world--tend to become. In a thoroughly "civilised" country, where the
material conditions of life are highly organised, and where industry
is highly specialised, so much is done for the individual by those
who organise his life and labour, that it ceases to be necessary for
him, except within narrow limits, to shift for himself. In a less
civilised community men have to use their wits as well as their hands
at every turn; and resourcefulness and versatility are therefore in
constant demand. The industrial life of a Russian peasant, who is of
necessity a Jack-of-many-trades, is incomparably more educative than
that of the Lancashire cotton operative, most of whose thinking and
much of whose operating may be said to be done for him by the
complicated machinery which he controls; who does, indeed, learn to
do one thing surpassingly well, but in doing that one thing becomes,
as he progresses, more and more automatic, so that the highest praise
we can give him is to say that he does his work with the sureness and
accuracy of a machine. It follows that the more civilised a country
becomes, the more important is the part that the elementary school
plays in the life of the nation,--and that not merely because the
ability to read, write, and cipher is, in the conditions which modern
civilisation imposes, almost as much a "necessary of life" as the
ability to walk or talk, but also and more especially because it
devolves upon the school to do for the citizen in his childhood what
life will not do for him in his manhood, or will do for him but in
scant measure, to stimulate his vital powers into healthful activity,
to foster the growth of his soul. And the more the people in a
civilised country are withdrawn from the soil and herded into mines
and mills and offices, the more imperative is it that the school
should quicken rather than deaden the child's innate faculties,
should bring sunshine rather than frost into his adolescent life. In
such a country as ours the responsibilities of the teacher are only
equalled by his opportunities; for the child is in his hands during
the most impressionable years of life; and those years will have been
wasted, and worse than wasted, unless they have fitted the child to
face the world with resourcefulness, intelligence, and vital energy,
ready to wrest from his environment, by enlarging and otherwise
transforming it, those educative influences which are still to be had
for the seeking, but are no longer automatically supplied.

_The Moral Aspect of Self-Realisation._

If Man, if each man in turn, is born _good_, the process of growth,
or self-realisation, which is presumably taking him towards the
perfection of which his nature admits, must needs make him
continuously _better_. In other words, growth, provided that it is
healthy, harmonious, and many-sided, provided that it is growth of
the whole being, is in itself and of inner necessity the most
moralising of all processes. Nay, it is the only moralising process,
for in no other way can what is naturally good be transformed into
what is ideally best.

This argument, apart from its being open to the possible objection
that it plays on the meaning of the word "good," is perhaps too
conclusive to be really convincing. I will therefore try to make my
way to its conclusion by another line of thought.

The desire to grow, to advance towards maturity, to realise his true
self--the self that is his in embryo from the very beginning--is
strong in every living thing, and is therefore strong in every child
of man. But the desire, which necessarily takes its share in the
general process of growth, must needs pass through many stages on its
way to its own highest form. In infancy, it is a desire for physical
life, for the preservation and expansion of the physical self; and in
this stage it is, as I have already pointed out, uncompromisingly
selfish. The new-born baby is the incarnation of selfishness; and it
is quite right that he should be so. It is his way of trying to
realise himself. As the child grows older, the desire to grow becomes
a desire for self-aggrandisement,--a desire to shine in various ways,
to surpass others, to be admired, to be praised; and though in this
stage it may give rise to much vanity and selfishness, still, so long
as it has vigorous growth behind it and is in its essence a desire
for further growth, it is in the main a healthy tendency, and to call
it sinful or vicious would be a misuse of words.

But when, in the course of time, the average, ordinary, surface
self--the self with which we are all only too familiar--has been
fully evolved and firmly established, the day may come when, owing to
various adverse conditions, the growth of the soul will be arrested,
and the ordinary self will come to be regarded as the true self, as
the self which the man may henceforth accept and rest in, as the
self in virtue of which he is what he is. Should the desire for
self-aggrandisement survive that day, the door would be thrown open
to selfishness of a malignant type and to general demoralisation. And
this is what would assuredly come to pass. In the first place, the
desire for self-aggrandisement, which always has the push of Nature's
expansive forces behind it, would certainly survive that ill-omened
day. Indeed, it were well that it should do so; for "while there is
life, there is hope," and when the soul is ceasing to grow, it is
through the desire for self-aggrandisement that Nature makes her last
effort to keep it alive, by compelling it to energise on one or two
at least of the many sides of its being. In the second place, the
desire would gradually cease to be resolvable into the desire for
continued growth, and would gradually transform itself into the
desire to glorify and make much of the ordinary self, to minister to
its selfish demands, to give it possessions, riches, honour, power,
social rank, and whatever else might serve to feed its self-esteem,
and make it think well of itself because it was well thought of by
"the world." And in the third place, in its effort to glorify and
make much of the ordinary self, the desire would, without a moment's
compunction, see other persons pushed to the wall, trampled under
foot, slighted and humiliated, robbed of what they valued most,
outraged and wounded in their tenderest feelings. It is my firm
conviction that at the present day three-fourths of the moral evil in
the world, or at any rate in the Western world, are the direct or
indirect outcome of egoism,--egoism which, as a rule, is mean, petty,
and small-minded, but is often cruel and ruthless, and can on
occasion become heroic and even titanic in its capacity for evil and
in the havoc that it works,--egoism which in ninety-nine cases out of
a hundred is generated by the desire for self-aggrandisement having
outlived its better self, the desire to grow.

If arrested growth is the chief source of malignant egoism, there is
an obvious remedy for the deadly malady. The egoist must re-enter the
path of self-realisation. His great enemy is his lower self;[34] and
the surest way to conquer this enemy is to outgrow it, to leave it
far behind. When the path of self-realisation has been re-entered,
when the soul has resumed the interrupted process of its growth, the
desire for self-aggrandisement will spontaneously transform itself,
first into the desire for further growth, and then into the desire
for outgrowth or escape from self, and will cease to minister to the
selfish demands of the lower self; and as the lower self is all the
while being gradually left behind by the growing soul, and is
therefore ceasing to assert itself, and ceasing to clamour, like a
spoilt child, for this thing and for that,--it will not be long
before the antidote to the poison of egoism will have taken due
effect, and the health of the soul will have been restored.

But let me say again--for I can scarcely say it too often--that the
growth which emancipates from self is many-sided growth, the growth,
not of any one faculty, or group of faculties, but of the soul as
such. Were it not so, the life of self-realisation might easily
become a life of glorified and therefore intensified selfishness. It
is quite possible, as we know from experience, for a high degree of
"culture" to co-exist with a high degree of egoism. It is possible,
for example, for the aesthetic instincts, when not kept aglow by the
sympathetic, or hardened with an alloy of the scientific, to evolve
a peculiar form of selfishness which leads at last to looseness
of life and general demoralisation. And it is possible for the
scientific instincts, when developed at the expense of the aesthetic
and the sympathetic, to evolve a hard, unemotional type of character
which is self-centred and selfish owing to its positiveness and lack
of imagination. But these are instances of inharmonious growth. When
growth is harmonious and many-sided, it leads of necessity to
out-growth, to escape from self. For the expansive instincts are so
many ways of escape from self which Nature opens up to the soul;--the
sympathetic instincts, a way of escape into the boundless aether of
love; the aesthetic instincts, a way of escape into the wonder-world
of beauty; the scientific instincts, a way of escape into the world
of mysteries which is lighted by the "high white star of truth." It
is only when one of the expansive instincts is allowed to aggrandise
itself at the expense of the others, that the consequent outgrowth of
selfishness in what I may call the internal economy of one's nature
begins to reflect itself in a general selfishness of character. An
instinct may readily become egoistic in its effort to affirm or
over-affirm itself, to grasp at its share or more than its share of
the child's rising life: and if it does, it may gradually suck down
into the vortex of its egoism the whole character of the child as he
ripens into the man. But growth, as such, is anti-egoistic just
because it is growth, because it is a movement towards a larger,
fuller, and freer life: and it is restricted, even more than
one-sided growth,--it is the apathy, the helplessness, the deadness
of soul that overtakes, first the child and then the man, when his
expansive instincts are systematically starved and thwarted,--which
is the chief cause of his incarceration in his petty self.

If three-fourths of the moral evil in the world are due to
malignant egoism, the source of the remaining fourth is, in a word,
_sensuality_. By sensuality I mean the undue or perverted development
of the desires and passions of the animal self,--the desire for
food and drink, the sexual desires, the desire for physical or
semi-physical excitement, the animal passion of anger, and the rest.
As an enemy of the soul, sensuality is less dangerous, because more
open and less insidious, than egoism. The egoist, who mistakes his
ordinary for his real self, may well lead a life of systematic
selfishness without in the least realising that he is living amiss.
But the animal self is never mistaken for the real self; and the
sensualist always has an uneasy feeling in the back of his mind that,
in indulging his animal desires and passions to excess, he is doing
wrong. This feeling may, indeed, die out when he "grows hard" in his
"viciousness"; but in the earlier stages of the sensual life it is
sure to "give pause"; and there are, I think, few persons who do not
feel that the sensual desires and passions are so remote from the
headquarters of human life, that in yielding to them beyond due
measure they are acting unworthily of their higher selves. At any
rate we may regard the temptations to sensual indulgence that lie in
our path as evil influences which are assailing us from without
rather than from within; and we may therefore liken them to the
blight, rust, mites, mildew, and other pests that assail hops,
fruit, wheat, and other growing plants.

And, like the pests that assail growing plants, the sensual pests
that war against the soul must be beaten off by vigorous and
continuous growth. No other prophylactic is so sure or so effective
as this. When I was asked whether the Utopian education was useful
or not, I adduced, as an instance of its usefulness, its power of
protecting the young from the allurements of a pernicious literature,
to which the victims of the conventional type of education, with
their lowered vitality and their lack of interest in life, too
readily succumb. This is a typical example of the way in which the
rising sap of life strengthens the soul to resist the temptations to
undue sensual indulgence by which it is always liable to be assailed.
The victim of a repressive, growth-arresting type of education,
having few if any interests in life, not infrequently takes to the
meretricious excitements of sensuality in order to relieve the
intolerable monotony of his days. But the training which makes for
many-sided growth, by filling the life of the "adolescent" with many
and various interests, removes temptations of this particular type
from his path. And it does more for him than this. It generates in
him a state of health and well-being, in which the very vigour and
elasticity of his spiritual fibre automatically shields him from
temptation by refusing to allow the germs of moral disease to effect
a lodgment in his soul. It would be well if our moralists could
realise that the chief causes of weakness in the presence of sensual
temptation are, on the one hand, boredom and _ennui_, and on the other
hand flabbiness and degeneracy of spiritual fibre, and that the
remedy for both these defects is to give the young the type of
education which will foster rather than hinder growth.

We are now in a position to estimate the respective values, as
moralising influences, of the path of self-realisation and the path
that leads to "results." Whatever tends to arrest growth tends also
and in an equal degree to demoralise Man's life; for, on the one
hand, by transforming the healthy desire for continued growth into
the unhealthy desire for mere self-aggrandisement, it generates
malignant egoism, with its endless train of attendant evils; and, on
the other hand, by depressing the vitality of the soul and so
weakening its powers of resistance, it exposes it to the attacks of
those powers and desires which we speak of in the aggregate as
sensuality. If this is so, the inference is irresistible that the
externalism of "civilised" life, with the repressive and devitalising
system of education which it necessitates, is responsible for the
greater part of the immorality--I am using the word in its widest
sense--of the present age. Contrariwise, whatever tends to foster
growth tends also, and in an equal degree, to moralise Man's
life; for, on the one hand, by transforming the desire for
self-aggrandisement into the desire, first for continued growth
and then for out-growth, it gives the soul strength to eliminate
the poison of egoism from its system; and, on the other hand, by
vitalising the soul and so strengthening its powers of resistance, it
enables it to beat off the attacks of those enemies of its well-being
which serve under the banner of sensuality. If this is so, the
inference is irresistible that self-realisation is the only effective
remedy for the immorality of the present age.

The comparison between the two schemes of life may be carried a stage
further. If egoism and sensuality are the two primary vices, the
secondary vices will be the various ways and means by which egoism
and sensuality try to compass their respective ends. Let us select
for consideration one group of these vices,--the important group
which fall under the general head of _untruthfulness_. Insincerity,
disingenuousness, shiftiness, trickery, duplicity, chicanery,
evasion, intrigue, _suppressio veri_, _suggestio falsi_, fraud,
mendacity, treachery, hypocrisy, cant,--their name is Legion. That
externalism, whether in school or out of school, is the foster-mother
of the whole brood, is almost too obvious to need demonstration.
In school the child lives in an atmosphere of unreality and
make-believe. The demand for mechanical obedience which is always
pressing upon him is a demand that he shall be untrue to himself.
Sincerity of expression, which is the fountain-head of all
truthfulness, is not merely slighted by his teacher, but is
systematically proscribed. He is always (under compulsion) pretending
to be what he is not,--to know what he does not know, to see what he
does not see, to think what he does not think, to believe what he
does not believe. And he lives, from hour to hour, under the dark
shadow of severity and distrust,--severity which is too often
answered by servility, and distrust which is too often answered by
deceit. When he goes out into the world, he finds that though there
are many sins for which there is forgiveness, there is one for which
there is no forgiveness,--the sin of being found out; and he orders
his life accordingly. He finds that he must give account of himself
to public opinion, which necessarily judges according to the
appearance of things, and is only too ready to be hoodwinked and
gulled. He finds that to "succeed" is to achieve certain outward and
visible results,--results which are out of relation to the _vraie
verite_ of things, which are in no way symbolical of merit, and for
the winning of which any means may be resorted to provided that
scandals are avoided and the letter of the law is obeyed. He finds
that the system of advertising which plays so large a part in modern
life, and without which it is so hard to "succeed," is in the main a
system of organised mendacity. Finally, and above all, he finds that
the examination system, with its implicit demands for trickery and
shiftiness, and its almost open invitation to cram and cheat, is not
confined to the school but has its equivalent in "the world," and is
in fact the basis of civilisation as well as of education in the
West.

This is the provision that externalism makes for the practical
inculcation of truthfulness,--a virtue which its religion and
its ethics profess to honour above all others. The life of
self-realisation, on the other hand, is a life of genuine
self-expression; and a life of genuine self-expression is obviously
a life of fearless sincerity. In such a life there is no place for
untruthfulness or any member of its impish brood. The one concern of
the child, as of the man, is to be loyal to intrinsic reality, to be
true to his true self. His standard is always inward, not outward.
He knows that he is what he is, not what he is reputed to be.
_Quantum unusquisque est in oculis Tuis, tantum est et non amplius._

Here, then, as elsewhere, we see that the difference between the
morality of externalism and the morality of self-realisation is a
difference, not of degree but of direct antagonism,--the difference
between a poison and its antidote, between the cause of a malady and
the cure.

While the path of self-realisation is emancipating us from egoism and
sensuality, in what general direction is it leading us? Is its
ethical ideal positive or merely negative? And if it is positive,
what is its character, and how is it to be realised? The answer to
this question will be given in the remaining sections.

_The Social Aspect of Self-realisation._

He must either be richly endowed with "the good things of life" or be
of an exceptionally optimistic disposition, who can view the existing
social order with complete satisfaction. Even among those who are
richly endowed with "the good things of life" there must be many who
realise that the "Have-nots" have some cause for complaint. And even
among those who are of an exceptionally optimistic disposition there
must be some who realise that the grounds of their optimism are
personal to themselves, and that they cannot expect many others to
share their satisfaction with things as they are.

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