‘Masterly Inactivity.’––A blessed thing in our mental constitution is, that once we receive an idea, it will work itself out, in thought and act, without much after-effort on our part; and, if we admit the idea of ‘masterly inactivity’ as a factor in education, we shall find ourselves framing our dealings with children from this standpoint, without much conscious effort. But we must get clearly into our heads what we mean by masterly inactivity. Carlyle’s happy phrase has nothing in common with the laisser allez attitude that comes of thinking ‘what’s the good?’ and still further is it removed from the sheer indolence of mind that lets things go their way rather than take the trouble to lead them to any issue. It indicates a fine healthy moral pose which it is worth while for us to analyse. Perhaps the idea is nearly that conveyed in Wordsworth’s even more happy phrase, ‘wise passiveness’. It indicates the power to act, the desire to act, and the insight and self-restraint which forbid action. But there is, from our point of view at any rate, a further idea conveyed in ‘masterly inactivity.’ The mastery is not over ourselves only; there is also a sense of authority, which our children should be as much aware of when it is inactive as when they are doing our bidding. The sense of authority is the sine quâ non of the parental relationship, and I am not sure that without that our activities or our inactivity will produce any great results. This element of strength is the backbone of our position. ‘We could an’ if we would’ and the children know it––They are free under authority, which is liberty; to be free without authority is license.
A Fussy and Restless Habit––It is by way of an effort towards this adjustment of power that I wish to bring before parents and teachers the subject of ‘masterly inactivity.’ We ought to do so much for our children, and are able to do so much for them, that we begin to think everything rests with us and that we should never intermit for a moment our conscious action on the young minds and hearts about us. Our endeavours become fussy and restless. We are too much with our children, ‘late and soon.’ We try to dominate them too much, even when we fail to govern, and we are unable to perceive that wise and purposeful letting alone is the best part of education. But this form of error arises from a defect of our qualities. We may take heart. We have the qualities, and all that is wanted is adjustment; to this we must give our time and attention.
Anxiety the Note of a Transition Stage––Every new power, whether mechanical or spiritual, requires adjustment before it can be used to the full. In the scientific world there is always a long pause between the first dawn of a great discovery––as the Röntgen rays [x-rays], for example––and the moment when it is applied to the affairs of everyday life with full effect and without the displacement of other powers whose functions are just as important and as necessary. We should regard with suspicion any attempt to make the Röntgen rays supply the place of stethoscope, thermometer, and all other clinical apparatus. Just so is it in the moral sphere. Our keener sense of responsibility arises from a new development of altruistic feeling––we have greater power of loving and wider scope for our love; we are more leavened by the Spirit of Christ, even when we do not recognise the source of our fuller life. But to perceive that there is much which we ought to do and not to know exactly what it is, nor how to do it, does not add to the pleasure of life or to ease in living. We become worried, restless, anxious; and in the transition stage between the development of this new power and the adjustment which comes with time and experience, the fuller life, which is certainly ours, fails to make us either happier or more useful.
Parental Responsibility––If we all feel ourselves responsible for the distressed, the suffering, the sick, the feeble in body or mind, the deficient, the ignorant, and––would that we all felt this particular burden more––for the heathen, there is one kind of responsibility which is felt by thoughtful people with almost undue acuteness. Parental responsibility is, no doubt, the educational note of the day. People feel that they can bring up their children to be something more than themselves, that they ought to do so, and that they must; and it is to this keen sense of higher parental duty that the Parents’ Union owes its successful activity.
A Sign of Moral Progress.––If we take ourselves more easily, however, we take other people more seriously. The sense of responsibility still rests upon us with a weight ‘heavy as frost’; we have only shifted it to the other shoulder. The more serious of us are quite worn with the sense of what we owe to those about us, near and far off. Men carry the weight more easily than women, because, for most of them, each day brings work that must be done, and they have less time than women to think anxiously about their relations with, and duties to, others. By the way, it is rather a note of the time that the translators of the Revised Version have given us ‘Be not anxious for your life;’ instead of the older rendering. But, if women feel the wear of responsibility for others more constantly, let but a burning question arise––the condition of East London, Home Rule, massacres in Armenia––and men feel it more intensely and passionately. This sharpened sense is not a malady of the age, but a sign of the times.
To those of us who believe we are all at school and have our lessons set as we are fit to take them in, this general sense of responsibility for others is an encouraging sign that we are being taught from above, and are, on the whole, getting on.
Chapter 3 ‘Masterly Inactivity’
Increased Sense of Responsibility.––It would be an interesting task for a literary expert to trace the stages of ethical thought marked by the uses, within living memory, of the word responsibility. People, and even children, were highly responsible in the fifties and sixties, but then it was for their own character, conduct, and demeanour. It is not at all certain that we hold ourselves responsible in this matter to the same degree. We are inclined to accept ourselves as inevitable, to make kindly allowance for our own little ways and peccadilloes, and are, perhaps, wanting in that wholesome sense of humour, ‘the giftie’ which should “gie us
”To see oursels as ithers see us.”
CHAPTER III - PARENTS AS INSPIRERS
Children must be born again to the Life of Intelligence
1. Explain and verify the statement that parents owe a second birth to their children.
2. Show exactly how science supports this contention.
3. What are the processes and methods of this second birth?
4. Summarise Dr Maudsley’s views on heredity.
5. Distinguish between disposition and character.
6. What does Dr Maudsley say regarding the structural effects of ‘particular life experiences’?
7. Enumerate the articles of the educational charter which our age may be said to have acquired.
8. Make further comments on any of the above points.
Some Articles of this Charter––We may lay the physical basis of memory: while the wide-eyed babe stretches his little person with aimless kickings on his rug, he is receiving unconsciously those first impressions which form his earliest memories; and we can order those memories for him: we can see that the earliest sights he sees are sights of order, neatness, beauty; that the sounds his ear drinks in are musical and soft, tender and joyous; that the baby’s nostrils sniff only delicate purity and sweetness. These memories remain through life, engraved on the unthinking brain. As we shall see later, memories have a certain power of accretion––where there are some, others of a like kind gather, and all the life is ordered on the lines of these first pure and tender memories.
We may lay the foundation for the development of all the mental functions. Are there children who do not wonder, or revere, or care for fairy tales, or think wise child-thoughts? Perhaps there are not; but if there are, it is because the fertilising pollen grain has never been conveyed to the ovule waiting for it in the child’s soul.
These are some of the things that––according to the citations we have given from Dr Maudsley’s Physiology of Mind––his parents may settle for the future man, even in his early childhood:––
His definite ideas upon particular subjects, as, for example, his relations with other people.
His habits, of neatness or disorder, of punctuality, of moderation.
His general modes of thought, as affected by altruism or egoism.
His consequent modes of feeling and action.
His objects of thought––the small affairs of daily life, the natural world, the operations or the productions of the human mind, the ways of God with men. His distinguishing talent––music, eloquence, invention.
His disposition or tone of character, as it shows itself in and affects his family and other close relations in life––reserved or frank, morose or genial, melancholy or cheerful, cowardly or brave.
Our Age has acquired a great Educational Charter––Here we have sketched out a magnificent educational charter. It is as well, perhaps, that we do not realise the extent of our liberties; if we did, it may be, such a fervour of educational enthusiasm would seize us that we should behave as did those early Christians who every day expected the coming of the Lord. How should a man have patience to buy and sell and get gain had it been revealed to him that he was able to paint the greatest picture ever painted? And we, with the enthralling vision of what our little child might become under our hands, how should we have patience for common toils? That science should have revealed the rationale of education in our day is possibly the Divine recognition that we have become more fit for the task, because we have come to an increasing sense of moral responsibility. What would it be for an immoral people to discern fully the possibilities of education? But how slow we are! how––
’Custom lies upon us with a weight,
Heavy as frost, and deep almost as life!’
A generation has passed away since these words of Dr Maudsley, and many of like force by other physiologists, were published to the world. We have purposely chosen words that have stood the test of time; for today a hundred eminent scientific men, at home and abroad, are proclaiming the same truths. Every scientist believes them! And we? We go on after our use and wont, as if nothing had been said; dropping, hour by hour, out of careless hands, seeds of corn and hemlock, of bramble and rose.
Let us run over the charter of our liberties, as Dr Maudsley has summed them up in the passage quoted above.
Dr Maudsley on the Structural Effects of ‘Particular Life Experiences.’––”That which has existed with any completeness in consciousness leaves behind it, after its disappearance therefrom, in the mind or brain, a functional disposition to its reproduction or reappearance in consciousness at some future time. Of no mental act can we say that it is ‘writ in water’; something remains from it, whereby its recurrence is facilitated. Every impression of sense upon the brain, every current of molecular activity from one to another part of the brain, every cerebral action which passes into muscular movement, leaves behind it some modification of the nerve elements concerned in its function, some after-effect, or, so to speak, memory of itself in them which renders its reproduction an easier matter, the more easy the more often it has been repeated, and makes it impossible to say that, however trivial, it shall not under some circumstances recur. Let the excitation take place in one of two nerve cells lying side by side, and between which there was not any original specific difference, there will be ever afterwards a difference between them. This physiological process, whatever be its nature, is the physical basis of memory, and it is the foundation of the development of all our mental functions.
“That modification which persists, or is retained, in structure after functions, has been differently described as a residuum, or relic, or trace, or disposition, or vestige; or again as potential, latent, or dormant idea. Not only definite ideas, but all affections of the nervous system, feelings of pleasure and pain, desire, and even its outward reactions, thus leave behind them their structural effects, and lay the foundation of modes of thought, feeling, and action. Particular talents are sometimes formed quite, or almost quite, involuntarily; and complex actions, which were first consciously performed by dint of great application, become automatic by repetition; ideas which were at first consciously associated, ultimately coalesce and call one another up without any consciousness, as we see in the quick perception or intuition of the man of large worldly experience; and feelings, once active, leave behind them their large unconscious residua, thus affecting the generation of the character, so that, apart from the original or inborn nature of the individual, contentment, melancholy, cowardice, bravery, and even moral feeling, are generated as the results of particular life-experiences.”