Page:The Complete Works of Lyof N. Tolstoi - 08 (Crowell, 1899).djvu/344

330 They will say to us:—

"You yourself are a writer; you have, unconsciously to yourself, helped the boys on such paths as it is impossible to prescribe for other non-writing teachers as a rule."

They will say to you:—

"From all this it is impossible to deduce any general rule or theory. It is partly an interesting pheomenon, and nothing more."

I will endeavor to make my deductions so as to answer all these objections set before me.

The feelings of truth, beauty, and goodness are independent of the degree of development. Beauty, truth, and goodness are concepts, expressing only the harmony of relations toward truth, beauty, and goodness. Falsehood is only the unconformity of relations toward truth: there is no such thing as absolute truth. I do not lie when I say that tables turn from the contact of fingers, if I believe it, although it is not the truth; but I lie when I say I have no money, if, according to my notions, I have money. A large nose is not necessarily ugly, but it is ugly on a small face. Ugliness is only inharmoniousness in relation to beauty. To give one's dinner to a beggar, or to eat it oneself, has nothing wrong in it; but to give it away or eat it when my mother is dying of starvation is inharmoniousness toward goodness.

In training, educating, developing, or doing whatever you please to a child, we must have, and unconsciously have, one object,—the attainment of the greatest harmony as regards truth, beauty, and goodness. If the time did not pass, if the child did not live in all its phases, we might calmly attain this harmony, adding where there seemed to be a lack, and subtracting where there seemed to be a superfluity.

But the child lives; every side of his being strives toward development, one outstripping another, and for the most part, the forward motion of these sides of his we take for the goal, and coöperate only with the development, and not with the harmony of development.