In the future, to an even greater extent than in the recent past, crude
labour will be replaced by mechanical contrivances. The kind of labour
which can command its price is the kind which has trained intelligence
behind it. One of the great needs of our time is the multiplication of
skilled and special labour. The demand for the products of intelligence
is far greater than that for mere crude products of labour, and it will
be more and more so. For there comes a time when the latter products
have satisfied the limit to which a man can consume food and drink and
shelter,--those things which merely keep the animal alive. But to those
things which minister to the requirements of the spiritual side of a man
there is almost no limit. The demand one can conceive is well-nigh
infinite. One of the philosophical things that have been said, in
discriminating man from the lower animals, is that he is the one
creature who is never satisfied. It is well for him that he is so, that
there is always something more for which he craves. To my mind this fact
most strongly hints that man is infinitely more than a mere animate
machine.
THE NEW STUDY OF CHILDREN
PROFESSOR JAMES SULLY
[This eminent writer is Grote Professor of the Philosophy of
Mind and of Logic at University College, London. His works
published by D. Appleton & Co., New York, are "Illusions,"
"Outlines of Psychology with Special Reference to the Theory
of Education," "Teachers' Handbook of Psychology," "The Human
Mind," "Pessimism," "Children's Ways," and "Studies of
Childhood." From the last mentioned work, copyright by D.
Appleton & Co., the following is the introductory chapter.]
Man has always had the child with him, and one might be sure that since
he became gentle and alive to the beauty of things he must have come
under the spell of the baby. We have evidence beyond the oft-quoted
departure of Hector and other pictures of childish grace in early
literature that baby-worship and baby-subjection are not wholly things
of modern times. There is a pretty story taken down by Mr. Leland from
the lips of an old Indian woman, which relates how Glooskap, the
hero-god, after conquering all his enemies, rashly tried his hand at
managing a certain baby, Wasis by name, and how he got punished for his
rashness.
Yet there is good reason to suppose that it is only within comparatively
recent times that the more subtle charm and the deeper significance of
infancy have been discerned. We have come to appreciate babyhood as we
have come to appreciate the finer lineaments of nature as a whole. This
applies of course more especially to the ruder sex. The man has in him
much of the boy's contempt for small things, and he needed ages of
education at the hands of the better-informed woman before he could
perceive the charm of infantile ways.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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