Page images
PDF
EPUB

ones as they went on. What better gymnastic can our grandchildren desire for their children? Is n't it a thing that chills a parent to the heart, the fear that he might leave his children no legacy of clear ideals? There is in all our minds an intermittent, but devastating, realization how naked to the world, how cold on the hearthstone, will be their lives if unprovided with that vital fire. Is n't this utopian criterion for judging history a project good enough to be true and simple enough to be tried?

Projects, by the way,-those best hopes of education,-have often been too exclusively projects of mechanical skill and knowledge. At least I think

I mean such projects as a piece of engineering or of gardening or of designing or the planning of an expedition. The project of constructing a utopian scale for history is one that would release a different arm of the imagination. It would release the wish for ideal order and beauty. And it would reveal to the growing minds what unguessed spurts and smolderings of social passion were in their children's hearts. It would show them what injustices and stupidities of the elders most sear the hearts of the young with noble scars. I confess that I am constructing these results out of Spanish air. I have never tried this utopian discussion in the class-room.

But how can it help suiting the children to turn them loose on these Elysian Fields? There is, furthermore, a vital second part to my notion. When in one or two or three discussions a sketch has been blocked out of the world as the young folks would like to have it, the next class meeting ought not, it seems to me, to leap thousands of centuries backward to the monkey's

first faint aspiration toward becoming a man; nor even to Egyptian history, nor to the fall of Rome; nor even to Columbus. No; I would have those children sketch the (then) present time, fresh against the bright sunrise of their ideal world! Provincial, even parochial, their picture of the present is sure to be. The teacher can stretch it a little; she can perhaps get one foreign element brought in without brushing off too much of the bloom of the children's perishable spontaneity. To sketch the present at all will tax their perceptions; I was going to say, their imaginations. Probably it does take more real imagination to see the present than to construct a future. It requires that evanescent thing Sir Joshua Reynolds called the innocence of the eye.

It sounds at first a wild and topsyturvy thing to propose to posterity that they shall, from this beginning, continue to go backward into history, from the present to the near past, from the near past to the further past, and so on, through modern to medieval, from medieval to ancient, from ancient to prehistoric, to geologic, history. But when the ideal has been imagined as a possible future, and when the present has been freshly set in juxtaposition with that, what more sensible than to trace the present up-stream? We should look for the immediate causes of the present, and then for the causes of those causes, and so on forever. This would make history for the first time pragmatic, by causing it to be estimated, point by point, according to its actual achievements, rather than according to its traditions, justifications, or expectations. Consider, for instance, the late war. Studied by the usual method, the history of the war

would begin with a résumé of the Blue Books, White Books, Yellow Books, etc., or with the naval race between Germany and Great Britain, or the Franco-Prussian War, or the murders in Serajevo; and with an estimate, or implied estimate, of the amount of justice on each side. But studied by the pragmatic method, its history would begin with the present prostration of health and industry in Europe, and would trace their causes, and the causes of those causes, throughout the peace, throughout the war, and previously. By their fruits we should know them, rather than by the rationalizations that led up to them.

Sometimes I think we should end by following the boldly challenging inquiry of Mr. Whitsit, "Why should we preserve the details of the mistakes we have made in social living, such as wars? When we teach chemistry, we don't clutter and confuse the origins of our present knowledge about it by featuring the false starts that were made the wasted attempts to prove that wrong guesses were right." Thus, studying history backward, we might occasionally find ourselves strolling past one of these blind alleys, deciding not to explore it, if indeed we cannot find that it contributed anything positive to the present as we know it.

To walk backward into history would give a far more immediate point of contact. Suppose our own children began to study the history of locomotion with the automobile or airplane instead of with the Mesopotamian origin of the wheel? Their interest would be caught hot, exactly where it is at the moment, instead of being dragged directly off the vital and vivid world about them, in order to come slowly round to it again.

And it would better exercise the hunting, trailing faculties of the reason. It would require more of the pleasurable exercise of common sense to trace causes backward from known results. There should be more chance, far more, it seems to me, for selecting what seems to each child the significant trail. Let the young people (this method seems to me to say) become their own historians, the creators, or discoverers, of their own historical principles instead of being so largely the rememberers and repeaters of our principles.

It pleases me to reflect that if teachers and children like pragmatic history well enough to adopt it, there need n't be any difficulty about fitting it into the more successful of the present methods. It will work all right in the project method, for example. I think it will leave even more room for originality. It will be just as good material, too, for dramatizing. And such a pictorial annal as I have described can as well be unrolled backward as forward. Even the textbooks written from past to present could just as well be studied from present to past, beginning with the last chapter. It would suit the Dalton plan particularly well; the painting and pasting on of history pictures would be laboratory work; and the only difference about the assignment and the discussion would be that the discussion would come first. When the children's imaginations were kindled from the discussion, the laboratory work of topical research and picture-making for the annal would begin. And when the examination was due, the children could take one another aside in the laboratory and expound to each other the meaning of the work on the annal which each had done; so that they

could all prepare for the examination by reviewing the annal in groups.

as

But perhaps I am taking a good deal for granted in assuming that the free children of future generations will preserve any, even the newest, of the school methods we use to-day. For of course we all expect the schools of the future to measure their success, some do now, by the spiritual pleasure they give the children. Knowledge, as we all so longingly admit, far from being imposed upon children, ought to be treasure which they find in their frolicsome search after the wonderful and the beautiful; they should seek knowledge on the run, and find it with an exulting shout, as they find flowers in the woods in spring. This noble and simple ideal demands the abdication of the adult as the sovereign of the schools; it demands in the adult, whether teacher, parent, or taxpayer, a spirit of faith and humility far beyond what any of us, I think, yet possess, or can even imagine without such a sense of absurdity, as many husbands used to feel when they contemplated, or tried to contemplate, their wives running for

office. It means the actual bold application of freedom to the majority in the schools to govern them themselves. Can we look upon this possibility, fellow-adults, without the fear clutching at our vitals more or less, lest these riches of knowledge we want to bequeath to the children, they should n't care to take? I own that I cannot. That fear clutches often at my vitals. I am afraid, in fact, that my present little prophecy may be consigned to the first bonfire the children hold on their school playground when they take over their schools to run themselves.

But then I say to myself: "The teacher, too, must be free. The children surely won't want any other kind of teacher than he who freely and gaily teaches what he loves to teach. Must not the schools of the future be an association between equals, a free and pleasurable association of kindred minds? Let us draw a long breath and take our chances. I sanguinely hope there will be some teacher, and some children, in those days, who will like these notions, and try them and expand them and—well, yes-improve them.

T

Thomas Henry Huxley

Recalling the Great Days of the Religio-Scientific Battles

BY EDWARD CLODD

HOMAS HENRY HUXLEY was born at Ealing on May 4, 1825. Montaigne tells us that he "was borne between 11 of the clock and noone," and with like quaint precision Huxley gives the hour of his birth as "about eight o'clock in the morning." Speaking of his first Christian name, he humorously said that by curious chance his parents chose that of the particular apostle with whom as the doubting member of the twelve he had always felt most sympathy.

Concerning his father, who was one of the masters in a semi-public school at Ealing, Huxley has little to say in the slight autobiographical sketch reprinted as an introduction to the first volume of the "Collected Essays"; but we learn that he was a shiftless, easygoing man, of whom Huxley says that he could find hardly any trace in himself except a certain faculty for drawing and a certain hotness of temper. "Physically and mentally," Huxley was "the son of his mother, a slender brunette of an emotional and energetic temperament." In a letter to Mr. Havelock Ellis he jocosely says that he would do very well as a black Celt, but he thought that the Huxleys were Iberian mongrels. Perhaps his swarthy complexion warranted the theory. His boyhood was an unhappy

one; his school training was brief and profitless; his tastes were mechanical, and but for lack of means he would have been an engineer. So he started "walking the hospitals," and in his seventeenth year entered the Charing Cross Hospital School as a student. In those days there was no instruction in physics and only in such branch of chemistry as dealt with the nature of drugs. Non multa sed multum, was the general precept, and what was lacking in breadth was gained in thoroughness. Huxley had as excellent a teacher in Wharton Jones as the latter had a promising pupil in Huxley, and in working with the microscope the evidence came in his discovery of a certain root-sheath in the hair which has since then been known as "Huxley's layer." This was the first of a long series of original discoveries in anatomy.

In his twentieth year he obtained an appointment as surgeon on the Rattlesnake, a frigate commissioned to survey Australian waters. The voyage lasted four years. As with Darwin on the Beagle, this was the best apprenticeship to what was to be the serious work of his life. It may be remarked, by the way, that when Darwin started on his five-years' voyage, Huxley was a lad of six years. Among Huxley's resulting contributions to biology was a paper on

the Medusa, and the research which this indicated had fruit in his election at the early age of twenty-six to a fellowship of the Royal Society, whose presidential chair he was in later years to occupy. His public life may be said to date from 1854. Among his various duties lecturing took a leading place. This included a course given to working-men every alternate year. Among the most notable are those on "Our Knowledge of the Causes of the Phenomena of Organic Nature." At the outset of his public career lecturing was as distasteful to him as the trouble of writing was detestable, but mother wit and "needs must when the Devil drives" trained him in a short time to win the ear of an audience. One eveOne evening in 1852 he made his début at the Royal Institution, and the next day he received a letter charging him with every possible fault that a lecturer could commit-ungraceful stoop, awkwardness in the use of hands, and mumbling of words. The lesson was timely, and its effect salutary. Huxley was fond of telling this story, and it is worth recording, if only as encouragement to stammerers who have something to say, at what price he bought the freedom which later held audiences spellbound.

To recite the titles of the various contributions which Huxley made to biology would be to import the dryness of a catalogue into this brief paper. Besides the nine volumes of "Collected Essays," the more technical articles fill four large volumes. The original and elaborate investigations which they embody had recognition in the degrees and medals which decorated the author. But it is not by these that Huxley's renown as one of the most richly endowed and widely cultivated

personalities of the Victorian era will endure. They might sink into the oblivion which buries most purely technical work without in any way affecting that foremost place which he fills in the ranks of philosophical biologists both as clear-headed thinker and luminous interpreter.

In this high function the publication of the "Origin of Species" gave him his opportunity. That was in 1859.

As bearing on the influence of that book on Huxley, and of Huxley's influence on his time, reference should be made to the position of anthropology, or the science of man, down to the first half of the nineteenth century. Among the maxims inscribed on the Temple of Apollo at Delphi the best known and least acted upon was "Know thyself." The explanation is at hand. A reference to the position of other sciences supplies it. The brilliant discoveries in astronomy to which the Copernican theory gave impetus, although they displaced the earth from its assumed supremacy in the universe, did not apparently affect the doctrine of the supremacy of man as the creature of divine intervention. And the like applies to the discoveries of geology. The impact of these on traditional belief was softened by the buffers which a moderating spirit of criticism interposed in the shape of superficial reconciliations emptying the old cosmogony of all its poetry, therefore of its value as a key to primitive ideas, and converting it into spurious science. Thus an artificial unity was set up. But with the evidence supplied by study of the ancient life whose remains are embedded in the fossil-bearing strata, that unity is shattered.

The story differs when we deal with

« PreviousContinue »