Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 53.djvu/800

776 come, better by reason of that tenderness which it calls forth, and better by reason of that irresistible appeal to love and sympathy which a child alone can make. A life into which this holy experience has never come is not complete, whatever may be its other compensations. And I should deplore the higher education for both men and women if it made them less ready to meet the experience of parenthood, deplore it, not from the point of view of society or the state, for with the continuance of the race I feel that we have consciously nothing to do, but deplore it for the loss that it meant in their own lives.

The life of the organism begins in mystery, in birth. It ends in mystery, in death. But death may be terrible, or it may be beneficent. It is terrible when it comes as an interrupter to the full activities of life, and more terrible when it comes through slow, wasting disease and decay. But death is beneficent when it comes at the close of a complete, well-rounded life, comes as a savior from the infirmities of too great age. What is so universal must be good.

A scheme of education which neglects any of these functions of the complete bodily life, or fails to inculcate sound ideas regarding them, is sadly deficient, and can not be called rational. It would be a denial of the very philosophy upon which the new education rests.

The demands of the emotional life are no less exigent. Every human action has back of it a feeling, a desire. Where these desires are sluggish or wanting, the action is corresponding. We must never forget that we can only do what we want to do. It may seem a trivial statement upon which to base so much, but it is practically at the basis of all of psychology. However perfect the organism, the complete life is impossible unless back of the organism is the enginery of keen appetite and manifold desire. The whole human drama depends upon just this, upon mere sentiment, if you choose. This emotional life upon which so much depends, upon which everything depends, is wrapped up in the organism itself, is a part of the very flesh and blood, and can not be separated from it. It is only convenient to name it aside from the more obvious bodily functions. The same is true of the intellectual functions. I am naming them last not because they are least, but because they are greatest, and in the sequence of life they are the fruits of the others. The school works for those as the gardener works for his most perfect fruit. But if it work rationally, it must work, not from the empyrean downward, but from the earth upward, through sturdy limb, and branch, and leaf, and blossom.

The educational process itself is only highly evolved when it too recognizes in the most practical way the idea of causation, and adjusts its acts to ends. I often think that the friends of goodness miss