Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 53.djvu/163

Rh of education comes to an end. And these ideas are not only vague, but frequently they are contradictory as well, and so the long journey turns out to be aimless.

To attempt to formulate, and particularly to formulate for others, what would be a reasonable ideal of life, is to put one's philosophy to the supreme test. When I look about me on the drama of life—when I look within, upon the drama of my own life—what is it that stands out above the rest as the very necessary and essential thing? What constitutes the most evolved conduct and animates the most evolved people? In putting such basal inquiries as these it may be thought that, like the Hegelian I mentioned, I am going back almost as far as Adam and Eve. But unless one is willing to ask such questions one's speculations will continue to play forever about the surface of all educational problems, and will never strike into the heart of the matter.

In the first place, then, how much of conduct does education cover? The answer is not far to seek. If education be a process for the realization of an ethical ideal, it must have to do with all that part of human action which is touched with morality—that is, with conduct as a whole. And what constitutes conduct? Arnold says that conduct is three fourths of life. Spencer says that it includes all action which involves a purpose. But the ethical teaching of these undoubted masters of ethics may, I think, be profitably extended. A keener scrutiny of cause and effect throws out the fractions and dispenses with the qualifications. Conduct has to do with the whole of life, and education, which has to do with conduct, must have to do with the whole of life. There is no action which is ethically indifl:'erent. Even the bodily functions, the act of breathing, the beating of the heart, the process of digestion, which in health are so automatic that we are quite unconscious of them, are nevertheless the product of knowable conditions, and as such are under the indirect control of the informed spirit.

Whether the breathing be long and deep, bringing with it the power of wholesome, manly action, is a moral question. Whether the pulse beat be strong and steady, sending the blood coursing through the veins and making one the center of a radiant helpful life, is a moral question. Whether the digestive apparatus is doing good work, renewing and refreshing the tissues, is a moral question. Since all these functions are open to modification, they are open to improvement, and the quality of the life dependent on them may be made better or worse. In the last analysis, every act of life, be it bodily or intellectual, is morally significant. Modern man has tasted too deep of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil to plead ignorance and hide when the lord