Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 53.djvu/667

Rh seven months of treatment in Group 2 he was graduated, and has for the past three months been filling one of the most honorable positions attainable in the walls of the prison, and is on a fair road to ultimate parole release.

"Our third division, Group 3, is one to which men are assigned for general 'mental quickening.' These pupils are nonsusceptible to our parole regulations. They have failed habitually in trade school, school of letters, and in some cases in demeanor markings. For this group, out of fifty-one actual pupils we can show twenty-nine per cent who have been sufficiently awakened mentally and physically to be susceptible to reformatory measures and conditions governing their parole release."

According to the philosophy of life which I have tried to present to you, evil is the absence of goodness, cold as opposed to heat, ignorance as contrasted with knowledge. It is a negative quality, and is to be fought as such—not something to be met and dealt with in itself, but something to be met and dealt with through its opposites. This was the view of Socrates, as it was later of Emerson and many other earnest souls. When carried out in any thoroughgoing way, it changes the whole aspect of things. Evil ceases to be the great central fact of philosophy and religion. Ahriman gives up his eternal conflict with Ormuzd. The dualism of the moral world becomes a strict monism; the one force of religion and morality is seen to be righteousness. The voice of religion directs itself less and less against evil—with only the good listening—and more and more to the realization of good. Morality concerns itself less with the things we must not do, and more with the things we must do. It gives us no longer the chill pictures of renunciation, of Anthony, and Simon Stylites, and the rest, living in caves and standing on pillars and doing other useless and foolish things, but glowing pictures of a positive life, warmed with wholesome human passion, and directed to wholesome human ends.

"Whom man delights in, God delights in, too."

And when this morality becomes touched with emotion, when this passion for the perfect life has mixed with it the sentiment of reverence for that goodly company of men and women who have passed toward the same ideal, has mixed with it a sublime faith in the unseen world, in the eternal things that are yet to be—a faith still more the child of knowledge and insight than of ignorance and superstition—then morality becomes religion and the human heart finds peace.

It is in this spirit that manual training accomplishes its moral work. It fights disease by setting free the forces that are health-giving. It conquers evil by the establishment of good. Such a moral betterment results from the betterment of the organic tissue of the