Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 45.djvu/459

Rh what not to do. We do not have to take any position regarding the intuitive character of moral distinctions or the a priori character of moral laws to be sure that a child is intensely interested in everything that concerns himself, and that what he does and how other people react to it is a very intimate part of himself. To decline to show the child the meaning of his acts, to hold that his desire to know their reasons (that is, their meaning) is a sign of depravity, is to insult his intelligence and deaden his spontaneous interest in the whys and wherefores of life—an interest which is the parent's strongest natural ally in moral training.

Secondly, in and so far as the child can not see the meaning and value of his acts and value them for himself, it becomes absurd to insist upon questions of morality in connection with them. Make the widest possible allowance for the necessity that a child perform acts, the bearing of which he can not realize for himself, and the contradiction in the present method is only emphasized as long as parents impress upon the children strictly moral considerations in connection with such acts. Surely, if morality means (as all moralists are agreed) not simply doing certain acts, but doing them with certain motives and disposition, rational training would emphasize the moral features of acts only when it is possible for the child to appreciate something of their meaning, and in other cases simply manage somehow to get the acts done without saying anything about questions of right and wrong. To continue the present method of holding, on one side, that a child is so irrational that he can not see for himself the significance of his conduct, while, on the other, with regard to these self-same acts, the child is punished as a moral delinquent, and has urged upon him, on moral grounds, the necessity for doing them, is the height of theoretical absurdity and of practical confusion. Present methods seem to take both the intuitive and utilitarian positions in their extreme forms, and then attempt the combination of both. It is virtually assumed that prior to instruction the child knows well enough what he should and should not do; that his acts have a conscious moral quality from the first; it is also assumed, to a large extent, that only by appeal to external punishments and rewards can the child be got to see any reason for doing the right and avoiding the wrong. Now these two propositions are so related that they can not possibly both be true, while both may be false—and are both false unless all contemporaneous tendencies in ethics are in a wrong direction.