Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 53.djvu/799

Rh blossoms and the tree grows, as the earth moves and the star shines, all as the result of an inner quality, all in fulfilling the law of life, so the soul of man when it turns from the piety of the cloister to the piety of Nature is under the stress and strain of no moral conflict, but is at peace. Morality spans the difference between what is and what ought to be. When these coincide in the perfect life, morality has fulfilled its function and must cease to be. The gods are not moral. To attain the divine perfectness is to outgrow morality. These young people of eighteen, in whom we are interested if they are to come into the perfect life, must do so as the result of their own spontaneity, and as unconsciously as possible. The process of education which is to endow them with a perfect organism and plant in them the seeds of the complete life fails unless it leave them spontaneous and wholesomely unconscious of themselves. One of the most dangerous dangers of the schools, if I may so express it, is self-consciousness. It mars nearly all whom the schools touch, and makes unendurable the teacher of too long a term of service.

The term organism, once for all, stamps the man or woman, boy or girl, as a unit, and we may speak of the bodily, emotional, and intellectual functions of the organism without being misunderstood. We may conveniently enumerate under these three heads those essential human qualities which are of prime importance in the educational data. The bodily life includes birth, nutrition, growth, reproduction death. We may limit nutrition, restrict growth, avoid reproduction, but we can not escape the first and last of these great functions, birth and death. Yet complete morality is only satisfied with the complete discharge of all these functions. The morality of birth lies with our ancestors. They owe it to us, as we owe it to our children, to give birth only to sound, true bodies. Yet a perfectly healthy man or woman is a rare sight. The morality of nutrition and growth is the morality of hygiene and health. It is satisfied only with strong, sound, beautiful bodies, beautiful not only to look upon, but beautiful in the perfection with which they operate, the sound digestion, strong pulse beat, free circulation, deep breath, keen hearing, sharp eyesight, delicate touch, discriminating taste, quick will, co-ordinated movement—a long list, truly, but not longer than the requirements of the perfect life.

The morality of parenthood is bound up so closely with the emotional life, and is most holy when most closely bound, that it seldom finds distinct utterance, and such utterance as we have is mostly false—on the one side, the celibacy of religious orders; on the other side, a reputed duty to the state or to the race. I find the sanction of marriage and parenthood to reside in the individual. Men and women are better into whose lives the mystery of birth h