Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 10.djvu/118

106. But conventionally to separate these two aspects of life—experience, on the one hand, and the mode of its building up, on the other—is a convenient way of defining a mental position in regard to social education. We want to be able to say to the empirical sociologists: "There is a certain position in sociology; reach it, and you will be amply rewarded. There are certain sociological habits of mind, certain propensities to social action; acquire these, and you will taste the pleasures of scientific discovery and feel the joys of artistic creation in their highest fields, viz., in the knowledge of human action and the creation of human character."

What in detail are these sociological habits of mind, these propensities to social action? Man, of all the higher animals, is born into the world with the least powers of self-adaptation. As an eminent biologist has put it, the human animal has the fewest ready-made tricks of the nerve centers; which is a psychological way of saying that children require a great deal more education than puppies or kittens. How these defects of human instinct have in the course of ages been transformed into qualities of human reason is just the history of education—which, in its highest sense, is the history of social evolution—or, from another point of view, social evolution in history.

In the sphere of the fine arts, more than in any other fields of human activity, individual effort is believed to depend most on inherited propensities. And yet, even here, what prodigious feats of self-education have characterized the apprentice period of the lives of most—perhaps of all—of the great masters! Leonardo, as he is the artist of artists, so is he also the student of students, engaged up to the very end of his life in a systematic exploration of new fields of experience. What Michael Angelo said of Raphael—"he did not possess his art from nature, but by study"—was said of Michael Angelo himself by Sir Joshua Reynolds. His ripest counsel to young artists, that in which he summarized his own life of experience, was this, that "the habit of contemplating and brooding over the ideas of the great geniuses until you find yourself warmed by the contact is the true method of forming an artist-like mind."