Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and HygieneHall, G. Stanley (Granville Stanley)
Science
Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene
Hall, G. Stanley (Granville Stanley)
Adolescence; Children -- Health and hygiene; Educational psychology
In this way we shall have a strong, well-knit soul-texture, made up of
volitions and ideas like warp and woof. Mind and will will be so
compactly organized that all their forces can be brought to a single
point. Each concept or purpose will call up those related to it, and
once strongly set toward its object, the soul will find itself borne
along by unexpected forces. This power of totalizing, rather than any
transcendent relation of elements, constitutes at least the practical
unity of the soul, and this unimpeded association of its elements is
true or inner freedom of will. Nothing is wanting or lost when the
powers of the soul are mobilized for a great task, and its substance
is impervious to passion. With this organization, men of really little
power accomplish wonders. Without it great minds are confused and
lost. They have only velleity or caprice. The will makes a series of
vigorous, perhaps almost convulsive, but short, inconsistent efforts.
As Jean Paul says, there is sulphur, charcoal, and saltpetre in the
soul, but powder is not made, for they never find each other. To
understand this will-plexus is preeminent among the new demands now
laid on educators.
But, although this focalizing power of acting with the whole rather
than with a part of the soul, gives independence of many external,
conventional, proximate standards of conduct, deepening our interests
in life, and securing us against disappointment by defining our
expectations, while such a sound and simple will-philosophy is proof
against considerable shock and has firmness of texture enough to bear
much responsibility, there is, of course, something deeper, without
which all our good conduct is more or less hollow. This is that better
purity established by mothers in the plastic heart, before the
superfoetation of precept is possible, or even before the "soul takes
flight in language"; it is perhaps pre-natal or hereditary. Much every
way depends on how aboriginal our goodness is, whether the will acts
with effort, as we solve an intricate problem, in solitude, or as we
say the multiplication table, which only much distraction can confuse,
or as we repeat the alphabet, which the din of battle could not
hinder. Later and earlier training should harmonize with each other
and with nature. Thrice happy he who is so wisely trained that he
comes to believe he believes what his soul deeply does believe, to say
what he feels and feel what he really does feel, and chiefly whose
express volitions square with the profounder drift of his will as the
resultant of all he has desired or wished, expected, attended to, or
striven for. When such an one comes to his moral majority by standing
for the first time upon his own careful conviction, against the
popular cry, or against his own material interests or predaceous
passions, and feels the constraint and joy of pure obligation which
comes up from this deep source, a new, original force is brought into
the world of wills.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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