Page:Education and Life; (IA educationlife00bakerich).pdf/92

 to new investigations. This is the history of all progress.

The subject of interest deserves a further thought. It goes without saying that all a man thinks, feels, and does centres around his own personality, and, in that sense, is a self-interest. But we are not to infer that, therefore, interest must be pleasure. We are born with native impulses to action, impulses that reach out in benevolence and compassion for the good of others, impulses that reach out toward the truth and beauty and goodness of the world, without regard to pleasure or reward. These impulses tend toward the perfection of our being, and the reward lies in that perfection, the possession of a strong and noble intellectual, æsthetic, and ethical character. The work of the teacher is to invite these better tendencies by presenting to them the proper objects for their exercise in the world of truth, beauty, and right. Interest and action will follow, and, later, the satisfaction that attends right development. Whenever this spontaneous interest does not appear and cannot be invited, the child should face the fact that some things must be, because they are required, and are for his good. When a course of action is obviously the best, and inclination does not lead the way, duty must come to the rescue.

We are not touching this matter as an old ethical controversy, but because it is a vital practical problem of to-day in education, because the pleasure theory is bad philosophy, bad psychology, bad ethics, bad pedagogy, a caricature of man, contrary to our consciousness of the motives of even our ordinary useful acts, a theory that will make a genera