motivational psych. of matters which ought to have been so thoroughly ingrained in him as practically not to exist for his consciousness at all. If there be such daily duties not yet ingrained in any one of my readers, let him begin this very day to set the matter right. In Professor Bain's chapter on "The Moral Habits" there are some admirable practical remarks laid down. Two great maxims emerge from his treatment. The first is that in the acquisition of a new habit, or the leaving off of an old one, we must take care to launch ourselves with as strong and decided an initiative as possible, Accumulate all the possible circumstances which shall re-enforce the right motives; put yourself assiduously in conditions that encourage the new way; make engagements incompatible with the old; take a public pledge, if the case allows; in short, envelop your resolution with every aid you know. This will give your new beginning such a momentum that the temptation to break down will not occur as soon as it otherwise might; and every day during which a breakdown is postponed adds to the chances of its not occurring at all. The second maxim is: Never suffer an exception to occur till the new habit is securely rooted in your life. Each lapse is like the letting fall of a ball of string which one is carefully winding up; a single slip undoes more than a great many turns will wind again. Continuity of training is the great means of making the nervous system act infallibly right. As Professor Bain says: "The peculiarity of the moral habits, contradistinguishing them from the intellectual acquisitions, is the presence of two hostile powers, one to be gradually raised into the ascendant over the other. It is necessary, above all things, in such a situation, never to lose a battle. Every gain on the wrong side undoes the effect of many conquests on the right. The essential precaution, therefore, is so to regulate the two opposing powers, that the one may have a series of uninterrupted successes, until repetition has fortified it to such a degree as to enable it to cope with the opposition, under any circumstances. This is the theoretically best career of mental progress." The question of "tapering-off," in abandoning such habits as drink and opium-indulgence, comes in here, and is a question about which experts differ within certain limits, and in regard to what may be best for an individual case. In the main, however, all expert opinion would agree that abrupt acquisition of the new habit is the best way, if there be a real possibility of carrying it out. We must be careful not to give the will so stiff a task as to insure its defeat at the very outset; but, provided one can stand it, a sharp period of suffering, and then a free time, is the best thing to aim at, whether in giving up a habit like that of opium, or in simply changing one's hours of rising or of work. It is surprising how soon a desire will die of inanition if it be never fed. "One must first learn, unmoved, looking neither to the right nor left, to walk firmly on the straight and narrow path, before one can begin 'to make one's self over again.' He who every day makes a fresh resolve is like one who, arriving at the edge of the ditch he is to leap, forever stops and returns for a fresh run. Without unbroken advance, there is no such thing as accumulation of the ethical forces possible, and to make this possible, and to exercise us and habituate us in it is the sovereign blessing of regular work."* 66 A third maxim may be added to the preceding pair: Seize the very first possible opportunity to act on every resolution you make, and on every emotional prompting you may experience in the direction of the habits you aspire to gain. It is not in the moment of their forming, but in the moment of their producing motor effects, that resolves and aspirations communicate the new set" to the brain. As the author last quoted remarks: "The actual presence of the practical opportunity alone furnishes the fulcrum upon which the lever can rest, by means of which the moral will may multiply its strength, and raise itself aloft. He who has no solid ground to press against, will never get beyond the stage of empty gesture-making." No matter how full a reservoir of maxims one may possess, and no matter how good one's sentiments may be, if one have not taken advantage of every concrete opportunity to act, one's character may remain entirely unaffected for the better. With mere good intentions, hell is proverbially paved. And this is an obvious consequence of the principles we have laid down. A "character," as J. S. Mill, says, "is a completely fashioned will"; and a will, in the sense in which he means it, is an aggregate of tendencies to act in a firm and prompt and definite way upon all the principal emergencies of life. A tendency to act only becomes effectively ingrained in us in proportion to the uninterrupted frequency with which the actions actually occur, and the brain grows" to their use. Every time a resolve or a fine glow of feeling evaporates without bearing practical fruit, is worse than a chance lost; it works so as positively to hinder future resolutions and emotions from taking the normal path of discharge. There is no more contemptible type of human character than that of the nerveless sentimentalist and dreamer, who spends his life in a weltering sea of sensibility and emotion, but who never does a manly concrete deed. Rousseau, inflaming all the mothers of France, by his eloquence, to follow Nature and nurse their babies themselves, while he sends his own children to the foundling hospital, is the classical example of what I mean. But every one of us in his measure, whenever, after glowing for an abstractly formulated Good, he practically ignores some actual case, among the squalid "other particulars" of which that same Good lurks disguised, treads straight on Rousseau's path. All Goods are disguised by the vulgarity of their concomitants, in this world; but woe to work-a-day him who can only recognize them when he thinks them in their pure and abstract form! The habit of * J. Bahnsen, "Beiträge zu Charakterologie," 1867, vol. i, p. 209. VOL. XXX.-29 excessive novel-reading and theatre-going will produce true monsters in this line. The weeping of the Russian lady over the fictitious personages in the play, while her coachman is freezing to death on his seat outside, is the sort of thing that everywhere happens on a less glaring scale. Even the habit of excessive indulgence in music, for those who are neither performers themselves nor musically gifted enough to take it in a purely intellectual way, has probably a relaxing effect upon the character. One becomes filled with emotions which habitually pass without prompting to any deed, and so the inertly sentimental condition is kept up. The remedy would be, never to suffer one's self to have an emotion at a concert, without expressing it afterward in some active way. Let the expression be the least thing in the world-the giving up of one's seat in a horse-car, if nothing more heroic offers—but let it not fail to take place. These latter cases make us aware that it is not simply particular lines of discharge, but also general forms of discharge, that seem to be grooved out by habit in the brain. Just as, if we let our emotions evaporate, they get into a way of evaporating; so there is reason to suppose that if we often flinch from making an effort, before we know it the effort-making capacity will be gone; and that, if we suffer the wandering of our attention, presently it will wander all the time. Attention and effort are, as we shall see later, but two names for the same psychic fact. To what brain-processes they correspond, we do not know. The strongest reason for believing that they do depend on brain-processes at all, and are not pure acts of the spirit, is just this fact, that they seem in some degree subject to the law of habit, which is a material law. As a final practical maxim, relative to these habits of the will, we may, then, offer something like this: Keep the faculty of effort alive in you by a little gratuitous exercise every day. That is, be systematically ascetic or heroic in little unnecessary points, do every day or two something for no other reason than that you would rather not do it, so that when the hour of dire need draws nigh, it may find you not unarmed and untrained to stand the test. Asceticism of this sort is like the insurance a man pays on his house and goods. The tax does him no good at the time, and possibly may never bring him in a return. But if the fire does come, his having paid it will be his salvation from ruin. So with the man who has daily inured himself to habits of concentrated attention, energetic volition, and selfdenial in unnecessary things. He will stand like a tower when everything rocks around him, and when his softer fellow-mortals are winnowed like chaff in the blast. The physiological study of mental conditions is thus the most powerful ally of hortatory ethics. The hell to be endured hereafter, of which theology tells, is no worse than the hell we make for ourselves in this world by habitually fashioning our characters in the wrong way. Could the young but realize how soon they will become mere walking SCIENCE IN RELIGIOUS EDUCATION. 451 bundles of habits, they would give more heed to their conduct while his nerve-cells and fibers the molecules are counting it, registering and L SCIENCE IN RELIGIOUS EDUCATION. Br DANIEL GREENLEAF THOMPSON. II. [Concluded.] ET us now turn our attention to those higher seminaries of learning, which, though often assisted by public funds, or patronized in one way or another by the state, are not exclusively state institutions. Wherever a college or university happens to be under state control, precisely the same principles should obtain regarding the teaching of religion as we have found applicable in the case of inferior schools. Indeed, whether the institution be public or private, these principles equally apply, but there are some differences in situation of which we must take note. Undoubtedly a religious organization has and should have the right to found and maintain schools to educate the young into its beliefs. Most of the New England colleges were established primarily to train ARI RARY 05-6 7 d young men for the Christian ministry, and in nearly all of them the promotion of the Christian religion (by which is meant the so-called evangelical religion) is the first object. As subsidiary to this come science, languages, and belles-lettres generally. Upon this basis, indeed, the greater part of the collegiate institutions in England and America stand to-day. With respect to all such, then, the question is, whether they are to be approved and supported; and, if not, what should be done to change their character so as to counteract whatever is unfortunate or baneful in their influences. Such we An ideal of education which sets up the attainment of truth before everything else, and claims not only the right but the necessity of questioning all things and proving all things, never can be satisfied with the constitution of any college or university whose first end and purpose is to promote any religion whatever, be it Christian, Mohammedan, Confucian, or Buddhistic. A theological, seminary to be entered after general education, may properly be sectarian and be maintained for the special purpose of teaching any kind of dogma that its founders and patrons desire taught. Not so, however, with an institution for general academic instruction and study. And it must not be overlooked that an institution whose chief aim is "to promote the religion of Christ," though apparently this would include many sects, is, after all, necessarily sectarian and partisan. To begin with, it is sectarian, because, since there are many Christian sects and a great variety of Christian doctrines, some form of this doctrine must be selected and favored, if "promotion" be the chief object. Any organization for convincing and persuading must have something respecting which it is to convince and persuade. It thus can not avoid being sectarian, if it preserves any character as an effective promoting force. find actually to be the case. Either by agreement at the outset or by a process of natural selection, colleges and seminaries whose chief aim is to promote the religion of Christ become inevitably Roman Catholic, Episcopalian, Baptist, Methodist, Presbyterian, Congregationalist, or something else, according to circumstances. However liberal they may be in selecting teachers for other departments, the religious teaching is all of a kind, just in the measure that they make the advancement of religion an object. Thus, though college authorities declare in their prospectus, for the purpose of attracting students, that their teaching is not sectarian, a person who reflects on the subject will not be deceived. It must be sectarian, so far as it is aggressively religious, although it may be very tolerant of all sects whose tenets are like its own. If the dominant sect differs from another only on the question of the mode of baptism, no very great amount of disfavor toward the latter would be discovered. But let the point of difference be the divinity of Christ, or the question of eternal punishment, and we shall soon see developed the strength of sectarian feeling in a manner sufficient to remove all doubts. |