For this reason the school must have a library, and should adopt all possible means to encourage the habit and develop the taste of reading, since the word which truly expresses the soul of man is not _that_ one word, nor the word of _that_ one book. A word or a book will always be a mere fragment of life, and many of them therefore will be needed. Many, very many books, to satisfy the ever-growing needs of the child"s mind!
Books that will spur his thought constantly towards more distant goals, and his heart and imagination with it. Thus the child grows to be a man.
Instruction then which is not education is not even instruction. It is a denuded abstraction, violently thrust like other abstractions into the life of the spirit where it generates that monstrosity which we have described as material culture, mechanical and devoid of spiritual vitality. That culture, being material, has no unity, is fragmentary, inorganic, capable of growing indefinitely without in any way transforming the recipient mind or becoming a.s.similated to the process of the personality to which it simply adheres extrinsically.
This mechanical teaching is commensurate with things, and grows proportionately with them; but it has no intimate relation with the spirit. He who knows one hundred things has not a greater nor a different intellectual value from him who knows ten, since the hundred and the ten are locked up in both in exactly the same way that two different sums of money are deposited in two different vaults. What merit is there in the safe which contains the greater sum? The merit would belong to the man who had acc.u.mulated the greater amount by a greater sum of labour, for it would then be commensurate with work, which is the developing process itself and the life of the human personality to which we must always have recourse when we endeavour to establish values. For as we have seen, nothing is, properly speaking, thinkable except in relation to the human spirit.
Whether one reads a single book or an entire library, the result is the same, if what is read fails to become the life of the reader--his feelings and his thoughts, his pa.s.sions and his meditation, his experience and the extolment of his personality. The poet Giusti has said: "Writing a book is worse than useless, unless it is going to change people." Reading a book with no effect is infinitely worse. Of course the people that have to be transformed, both for the writer and for the reader (who are not two very different persons after all), are not the others, but first of all the author himself. The mere reading of a page or even a word inwardly reconst.i.tutes us, if it does consist in a new throb of our personality, which continuously renews itself through the incessant vibrations of its becoming. This then is the all-important solution,--that the book or the word of a teacher arouse our souls and set them in motion; that it transform itself into our inner life; that it cease to be a thing, special and determinate, one of the many, and become transfused into our personality. And our personality in its act, in the act, I say, and not in the abstract concept which we may somehow form of it,--is absolute unity: that moving unity to which education can in no wise be referred, unless it is made identical with its movement, and therefore entirely conformant to its unity.
The man whose culture is limited, or, rather, entirely estranged from the understanding of life, is called _h.o.m.o unius libri_. We might just as well call him _h.o.m.o omnium librorum_. For he who would read all books need have a leaking brain like the perforated vessel of the daughters of Danaus,--a leak through which all ideas, all joys, all sorrows, and all hopes, everything that man may find in books, would have to flow unceasingly, without leaving any traces of their pa.s.sage, without ever forming that personality which, having acquired a certain form or physiognomy, reacts and becomes selective, picks what it wants out of the congeries, and chooses, out of all possible experiences, only what it requires for the life that is suited to it. We should never add books upon books _ad infinitum_! It is not a question of quant.i.ty. What we need is the ability to discover our world in books,--that sum total of interests which respond to all the vibrations of our spirit, which a.s.suredly, as Herbart claimed, has a multiplicity of interests, but all of them radiating from a vital centre. And everything is in the centre, since everything originates there.
Education which strives to get at the centre of the personality, the sole spot whence it is possible to derive the spiritual value of a living culture, is essentially moral, and may never be hemmed in within the restricted bounds of an abstract intellectual training. There is in truth a kind of instruction which is not education; not because it is in no way educative, but because it gives a bad education and trains for evil. This realistic education, which is substantially materialistic, extinguishes the sentiment of freedom in man, debases his personality, and stifles in him the living consciousness of the spirituality of the world, and consequently of man"s responsibility.
The ant.i.thesis between instruction and education is the ant.i.thesis between realistic and idealistic culture, or again, that existing between a material and a spiritual conception of life. If the school means conquest of freedom, we must learn to loathe the sc.r.a.ppiness of education, the fractioning tendency which presumes to cut off one part from the rest of the body, as if education, that is, personality, could have many parts. We must learn to react against a system of education which, conceiving its role to be merely intellectualistic, and such as to make of the human spirit a clear mirror of things, proceeds to an infinite subdivision to match the infinite multiplicity of things. Unity ought to be our constant aim. We should never look away from the living, that is, the person, the pupil into whose soul our loving solicitude should strive to gain access in order to help him create his own world.
CHAPTER IX
CHARACTER AND PHYSICAL EDUCATION
The principle of educational unity which I have briefly tried to ill.u.s.trate demands a further development in connection with the claims of physical culture. For after we have unified moral and intellectual discipline in the one concrete concept of the education of the spirit, whose activity cannot be cognitive without also being practical, and cannot realise any moral values except through cognition, it might yet seem that a complete and perfect system of education should aim at the physical development as well as at the spiritual. For the pupil is not solely mind. He has a body also; and these two terms, body and spirit, must be conceived in such close connection and in such intimate conjunction that the health of the one be dependent on the soundness of the other.
Before elucidating this argument, we must voice our appreciation of the pedagogical principle by virtue of which the ancient Greeks developed their athletic education, and which since the Renaissance has for a different motive been reintroduced into the theory of physical culture,--a theory which I do not at all oppose, but rather intend to reaffirm on the grounds of educational unity. This pedagogical principle evidently originated in the mode of considering the function of the bodily organism in respect to the human mind, since every time we scrutinise the interest that has always guided men in the field of education, we find that at all times the aim of education has been the development of the mind. Nor could it have been otherwise; for whether or not in possession of a clear understanding of his spiritual essence, man spontaneously presents himself and is valued as a personality, which affirms itself, speaks even though dumb, and says "I." Education begins as a relation between master and slave, between parent and children. The slave and the son are not supported and cared for--educated--as simple brutes, but as beings endowed with the same attributes as the master or the parent, beings who are therefore able to receive orders or instructions and build their will out of these,--the will which those in authority wish to be identical with their own. The superior commands and therefore demands; the inferior obeys by replying, and he replies in so far as he is a spiritual subject; and this reply will become gradually better in proportion as he more fully actualises that spiritual nature which the master wishes to be closely corresponding to his own.
Philosophy, as well as nave and primitive mentality, considers man to be such in so far as he is conscious of what he does, of what he says, of what he thinks; and also in that he is able to present himself to others, because he has first been present to himself.
Man is man in that he is self-consciousness. Even the despicable tyrant who brutally domineers over the wretch who is forced to submit to his overbearing arrogance, even he wants his slave to be intelligent, capable of guessing his thoughts, and refuses to consider him as an unconscious tool of his whims. The mother who tenderly nurses her sick child is indeed anxious for the health of the body over which she worries, and she would like to see it vigorous and strong. But that body is so endeared to her, because by means of it the child is enabled to live happily with her; through it his fond soul can requite maternal love by filial devotion; or in it he may develop a powerful and beautiful personality worthy to be adored as the ideal creature of maternal affection. If in the bloom of physical health he were to reveal himself stupid and insensate, endowed with mere instinctive sensuality and b.e.s.t.i.a.l appet.i.tes, this son would cease to be the object of his mother"s fondness, nay, he would arouse in her a feeling of loathing and revulsion. It is this sense of loathing that we feel towards the brutes, to the extent that we never can be sympathetically drawn to them, and that we also feel for the human corpse from which life has departed; for life is the basis of every psychological relation, and therefore of every possible sympathy.
Education is union, communion, inter-individual unification; and unity is possible only because men spiritually convene. Matter, we have seen, nature, things, the non-spirit is multiplicity. As soon as the multiplicity of natural elements begins to be organised, already in their organism spiritual activity shines forth. In the spirit is the root and possibility of every unification. It is spirit that unites men.
Education therefore cannot be a social relationship and a link between men except by being a spiritual tie among human minds. Therefore it is now, and has at all times been, what it naturally ought to be, education of the spirit.
But as we aim at the education of the spirit, we may or we may not take care of the body; or again we may take care of it in this or that way.
It all depends on what conception we have of the spirit. The ancients made a great deal of physical culture, and the Greek philosophers of antiquity considered gymnastics to be the essential complement of music, including in music all forms of spiritual cultivation. The ancients never divided the spirit from the physical reality of man: man as a whole (body and psychic activity) was conceived by them as a natural being subject to the mechanism which regulates and controls nature. When Greek psychology fell under the influence of that mystic outlook which is peculiar to religious belief, the soul, which was opposed to the body, and which was looked upon as chained and emprisoned in the body, was sharply distinguished from another soul. That other soul was kept in contact with the materiality of all natural things, and together with them was governed by the law of mechanical becoming, that is, of the transformations caused by motion by which all the parts of matter are bestirred. This natural soul, susceptible of development, and capable of gradually rising to the height of the other, of the pure bodiless mind whose act is the contemplation of truth; this soul imbedded in the body, which does not therefore give to man a supernatural being, but like all things of nature comes into the world, grows and dies, incessantly pa.s.sing from one mode of being to another, this soul is the one that can and ought to be educated. The soul which results from the organic process of the physical body, and which in its development proceeds side by side with the transformations of the latter, could not be educated except in connection with the development and improvement of the body.
Human thought, which then had not yet secured the consciousness of its own irreducible opposition to nature,--the consciousness, in other words, of its own essential freedom,--seeing itself immersed even as spiritual substance in the indistinctness of nature, could not look upon education as upon a problem of freedom which can not admit of nature as limiting spiritual activity. It was accordingly reduced to conceive this activity, displayed in dealing with man, as being on the same plane with the other forms of activity which propose to deal with things of nature. In a pedagogical naturalism of this sort, the mind could not be the mind without also being body, and therefore had to include physical development in its own process.
But with the advent of Christianity the spirit was sharply dissociated from nature. The original dualism of law of the spirit and law of the flesh, of grace and nature, rescued man at the very beginning from the tyranny of merely natural things, and announced a kingdom of the spirit which "is not of this world." And it is not in fact "of this world," if by world we mean what the word ordinarily implies,--the world which confronts us, and which we can point out to ourselves and to others; the world which, being the object of our experience, is the direct ant.i.thesis of what we are, subject of experience, free personality, spirit, Christian humanity. Man, in this Christian conception, in this opposition to nature and to the experimental world, overcomes what within his own self still belongs to nature, subdues that part of him which because natural appears as the enemy of freedom and of the finality of the spirit; as the seducer and the source of guilty wiles which clip the wing of man"s loftier aspirations and weigh him down into a beast-like subjection to instinct. He therefore tends to underrate physical education, and sacrifices it to the demands of the spirit. He does not completely neglect the question of the behaviour of man towards physical nature; he could not, since his very dualism is possible only on condition that he correlate the two terms of the opposition. But finding that his attempt to attain freedom and realise his spiritual destiny is thwarted by the natural impulses of the senses, in which the life of the body is made manifest, he decides to remove these hindrances and to clear the way which leads to spiritual salvation. He does then take the body into consideration, but simply to check its instincts and control its sensuous appet.i.tes. By the discipline of self-mortification, under the guidance of an unbending will, he subdues the flesh, and subjects it to the exigencies of the spirit.
Evidently this subduing discipline is still physical exercise, but in its own way. The haircloth of St. Francis corresponds in fact to the club of Hercules, and serves the same purpose. The monsters which are knocked down by the weapon which Hercules alone could wield torment the saint of a.s.sisi also; only, they are within him. He even tames the wolf, but without club or chains, by the mere exercise of his gentle meekness.
These internal monsters are not, properly speaking, in the material body. If they were, the Saint would not need to worry about them any more than about the earth under his feet or the sack on his shoulder.
But they are in that body which he feels; they are in that soul which, with the violence of its desires, the din of its harsh and fiercely discordant voices, distracts him from the ideal where his life is. They are in that soul which thrusts so many claims on him, that were he to satisfy them he would have to part company with his Lady Poverty, and become once more the slave of things which are not in his power,--of wealth, which heaps up and blows away; of Fortune, which comes as a friend and departs as an enemy. He would, in other words, return to a materialistic conception of life. His Lernaean hydra is in the depths of his heart, where hundred-headed instinct, with its hundred mouths, tears the roots of his holy and magnanimous will, eager to resemble the Saviour in love and self-sacrifice.
This monster is strangled with the haircloth, when the body is hardened and trained to self-denial, to suffering, to the repression of all animal pa.s.sions which would keep man away from his goal. This discipline, far from debilitating the body, gives it a new strength, an endurance which enables man to live on a higher plane than he would if he followed natural impulses. For this more difficult manner of living, a robustness and a hardihood are requisite which are beyond the natural means of the body. The system of physical culture which gives this stupendous endurance is called asceticism.
But this system is an abstract one. Man"s life is not poverty, since it is work and therefore wealth. And the mind with its freedom cannot be conceived of as antagonistic to nature. For as body and as sense, in so far as we exist and know of our existence, we belong to this nature.
Antagonism and duality import the limitation of each of the opposed terms and exclude freedom which is not to be found within fixed limits; for freedom, as we have said, means infinitude.
The spirit is free only if infinite. It cannot have any obstructing barrier in its path. It can be conceived as freedom only after it has overcome dualism, and when in nature itself and in the body we see the effect of the activity of the spirit. It has no need therefore of walls within which it might feel the necessity of cloistering itself in the effort to renounce the outer world. This is not the way to conquer freedom. A liberty won under such conditions would always be insecure, constantly threatened, always beleaguered, and therefore a mere shadow of freedom. The spirit, if it is free, that is, if it is spirit, must be conterminous with thought, it must extend its sway as far as there is any sign of life to the last point where a vestige of being can be revealed to it. Nothing thinkable can be external to it. Whatever presents itself to it, whether in the garb of an enemy or under the cloak of friendship, can only be one of its creatures, which it has placed at its own side, or in front of itself, or against itself.
This new pedagogical and philosophical view, first disclosed to Humanism, then enlightened by the genius of the Italian Renaissance, appears now to us in the full light of modern thought. Superficially it might seem identical with the cla.s.sical and naturalistic outlook. In reality, however, it has made its way back to it only in order to confirm and integrate the concept of Christian spiritualism and to bring out its truth. Greek athletics is the training of the body as an end in itself: it surely serves the cause of the spirit, but only in so far as the spirit is grafted on the trunk of the physical personality, and to the extent that it is able to absorb all its vital sap, thereby subjecting itself to generation and decay, the common destiny of all natural beings. The physical culture of the ancients is spiritual discipline, only to the extent that for them the mind too is essentially body. Modern physical education, at least from the time of Vittorino da Feltre, is spiritual formation of the body: it is bodily training for the benefit of the spirit, just as the mediaeval ascetic would have it; but of a spirit which does not intend to bury itself in abstract self-seclusion away from the existential world, of a spirit which pa.s.sing beyond the cloister walls soars over the realm of nature, induing it and subduing it instrumentally to its ends and as a mirror of its will. So that for moderns, too, physical culture is spiritual education, but for the reason that to us the body itself is spirit. Our science is not merely a speculation of ultra-mundane truths, but rather a science of man and of man in the Universe, and therefore also of this nature which is dominated and spiritualised by becoming known, in the same way that every book that is read is spiritualised.
This concrete notion of a spirit which excludes nothing from itself gives concreteness to the Christian conception of physical discipline.
For it aims to turn the body into an obedient tool of the will, not however of that will which renounces the world, but of that will which turns to the world as to the field where its battles are fought and won; to the world which it transforms by its work, constantly re-creating it, now modifying one part and now another, but always acting on the entire system, and renewing it as a whole in the intimate organic connection and interdependence of these parts; to the world which forever confronts it in a rebellious and challenging att.i.tude, and which it laboriously subdues and turns into a mirror of its own becoming.
Modern idealism and ancient naturalism both emphasise, though for opposite motives, the importance of a positive education in distinction to the negative discipline inculcated by mediaeval asceticism. We said that to-day we develop the body because the body is spirit. This proposition runs counter to common sense. But common sense as such cannot be respected by the thinker unless he first transforms its content. Our body, we must remember, is not one body out of many. If it were actually mixed with and lost in the mult.i.tude of material things which surround it, we could no longer speak of any bodies. For all bodies, as psychologists say, are perceived in so far as they modify ours and are somehow related to it. Or to put it in a different and perhaps better way, all other bodies, which we possess as contents of our experience, form a system, a circle, which has its centre; and this centre is our body. These first of all occupy s.p.a.ce, but a s.p.a.ce which no one of us can think of or intuit otherwise than as a radiating infinity, the centre of which we occupy with our body. So that before we can speak of bodies, we must first cognise our own. It is the foundation and groundwork of all bodies. Justly, therefore, the immanent sense, profound and continuous, which we have of our body, and whose modifications const.i.tute all our particular sensations, was called the _fundamental sentiment_ by our Italian philosopher Rosmini. For our body is ours only in so far as we feel it; and we feel it, at first, confusedly or rather indistinctly, without discerning any differentiated part. We feel it as the limit, the other, the opposite, the object of our consciousness, which, were it not conscious of something (of itself as of something), would not be consciousness, would not realise itself.
And it realises itself, in the first place, as consciousness of this object which is the body. Accurately, therefore, was the body defined by Spinoza as _objectum mentis_, as object of consciousness. Objectless consciousness is not consciousness; and it is likewise obvious that the object of consciousness cannot be such without consciousness.
The two terms are inseparable, for the reason that they are produced simultaneously by one and the same act, from which they cannot be detached and this act is the free becoming of the spirit.
Our body, this first object of consciousness, as yet indistinct and therefore one and infinite, is not really in s.p.a.ce, the realm of the distinct, of the multiple, of the finite. It is within our own consciousness. And it is only by recalling this inwardness that we are able to understand how it happens that we ("We"--spiritual activity) act upon our body, animating it, sustaining it, endowing it with our vigorous and buoyant vitality; constantly transforming it, in very much the same way that we act on what we easily conceive to be our moral personality. As we direct our thoughts, and bringing them out of the dark into the luminous setting of our consciousness, submit them to scrutiny and correction, to elimination and selection; when we stifle or feed the fire of our pa.s.sions; when we cherish ideals, nourish them with our own life"s blood, and sustain them with our unbending resolve; and again when we quench them in the fickleness of our whims, are we not constantly creating and variously reshaping our spiritual life, making it good or bad, that is, eagerly and scrupulously intent on the quest of Truth or slothfully plunged in ignorance and forgetfulness?
But our body, this inseparable companion, which is our own self, is no particular limb, which as such might be removed from us. We remain what we are, even though mutilated. Each part of our organism is ours, in that it is fused in the sole and indistinguishable totality of our living being,--our heart and our brain, as well as the phalanx of a finger, if perchance we should be unable to live without it, and it therefore effectively const.i.tuted our being. The distinction between organs that are vital and organs that are not is an empirical one, and relative to an observation which is true within the limits of ordinary occurrence.
If our body is the body which we perceive as ours, it is this one or that one in accordance with our perception; and this perception certainly is not arbitrary, but our own, subjective, to the point that, in an abnormal way, one may cease to be in possession of his body and thus to be no longer able to live in consequence of the loss of a finger, or even of a hair. This hair then is a vital part, not because it is a hair, but because it has been, insanely if you will, a.s.sumed and absorbed in the distinct unity of our body.
I shall try to make my thought clearer by the use of an example. The organ of organs, as a great writer once said, is the hand, and we can look at it from two quite distinct points of view. We may place our hand on a table by the side of other hands, the hands of persons sitting around us. We see its shape, its colour, its size, etc.; we compare it with the others, and we almost forget it is ours, because then we do not, in act, distinguish it from the remaining ones. In these circ.u.mstances, it is evident that our hand is in our consciousness as a material object, separated from every essential relationship with us--with us as we are in the act of looking and comparing. This is the external point from which we may view our hand. But there is another one: the hand that picks up the pen as we are about to write is truly our hand, the instrument of which we avail ourselves in order to ply another tool which is needed for our work. In these circ.u.mstances our right hand, instead of being for us one in the midst of many, as it was in the case previously considered, is ours, the only one which we can possibly use, as we endeavour to carry out our intention of writing, which intention is our will to realise our personality in that determined way, since doing a thing always means realising that personality of ours which does that thing. Our hand in this case coalesces so completely with our being that without it--the hand already trained to write--we could not be ourselves. Abstractly, to be sure, we should be ourselves. But it is the same story over again. What exists is not the abstract but the concrete. And in the concrete, we, who are about to write, are this determined personality, in which our will flows into the hand; and just as we could not in truth distinguish our Self from our will (we being nothing more and nothing less than this will of ours), in the same way it would be impossible to distinguish between "us" and our hand, between our will and our hand. Since the hand now wields the pen, having perfected its instrumentality by means of this latter, our will no longer leans upon and terminates in the hand, but it flows on and presses into the point of the pen itself, through which, if neither ink nor paper offers resistance, it empties into the stream of writing. This writing which is read is Thought, whereby the writer finds himself at the end in front of his own thinking, that is, in front of himself; that self, which, considering the act materially, he seemed to be leaving further and further behind, whereas in reality he was penetrating into it more and more deeply. But in such a case and by the act itself, can we effectively distinguish between thought, arm, hand, writing material, the written page, that same page when read, and the new thought? It is a circle made up of contiguous points, without gaps or interruptions. It is one sole process, wherein in consequence of a particular organisation of our personality, we place ourselves in front of ourselves, and thus realise ourselves. The hand is ours because it is not distinguished from us, nor, consequently, from the remaining limbs of our body nor from its material surroundings.
This, our hand, knows how to write because we have learned how to write: in exactly the same way that our heart knows how to love, to dare and renounce, by striving earnestly to see ourselves in others, to repress the instinctive timidity of excessive prudence, and to break the force of desire prompted by natural egoism. We are then what we want to be; not merely in our pa.s.sions and ideas, but in our limbs too, to the extent that their being depends from their functions, and their functions can be regulated by hygiene and exercise, which are our action and our will.
There is, of course, a natural datum which we cannot modify, which we have to accept as a basis for further construction. But this limitation, imposed on the truths I mentioned above, must be accepted without in any way renouncing the truth itself, and should be understood by virtue of both its scientific and moral values. This warning is not merely helpful in connection with the question now before us, but will always prove useful on account of its bearing on the many problems which arise from a spiritualistic conception of life and cause shiftless philosophasters to shy and balk. It is true that there is a body which we did not give to ourselves, which therefore is not a product of our spirit, nor part of its life and substance, but only if we think of the body of the individual, empirically considered as such. In this sense I am not self-produced. The son can ascribe to his parents the imperfection that mars his whole existence, whatever kind of life he may decide to lead.
The man who was born blind may blame his affliction upon cruel nature.
But the child who calls his parents to account, and the man who complains of nature, is man as a particular; he is one of many men, one of the animals, one of the beings, one of the infinite things wielded by _Man_ (that man to whom we must always refer, when we wish to recall that even if the world is not all spirit, there is at least a little corner therein set aside for it); he is one of the infinite things which Man gathers and unifies in his own thought because he is thought. The particular man is man as he is being _thought_, who refers us to the _thinking_ man as to the true man. This true man is also an individual, not as a part but as the whole, and comprehends all within itself. And in this man, parents and children are the same man. In it men and nature are, likewise, one and the same, man or spirit in its universality. We (each one of us) are one and the other of these men; but we are one of them, the smaller one, only in that we are the other one, the larger one, and we ought not to expect the small to take the place of the large and to act in his stead. All our errors and all our sins are caused by subst.i.tuting one in place of the other.
And what is more, the large, the all embracing, the infinite, is present in the small with all his infinitude. Personality as such, in its actuality, does not shrink and restrict itself to the singular and particular man. Within those boundaries which are only visible from the outside, it internally expatiates to infinity, absorbing in itself and surmounting all limitations. The man born blind does not know the marvels and the wondrous beauties of nature which gladden the eyes and the soul of the seeing man. But his soul pours out none the less over the infinity of harmonies and of thought. And the blind man who once saw, in the consciousness of his sightlessness, cherishes the boundless image of the world once seen, and magnifies it indefinitely by the aid of the imagination. He even heals the wounds and soothes the pain of blindness by making it objective through reflection; and the personality, at any event, always victoriously breaks out of the narrow cell in which it might seem to be confined. So that in the depths of even the gloomiest dungeon a ray of light always peers through, to lighten and comfort the soul of man in misery, and to restore to him the entire and therefore infinite liberty of creating for himself a world of his own.
We can therefore say that man, he that lives--not the one which is seen from the outside, but the thinking and the willing man, who is a personality in the act--never submits to a nature which is not his own.
He shapes his own nature, beginning with his body, and gradually from it magnifying the effect of his power, and crowding the environing s.p.a.ce, which is his, with the creatures he gives life to. We must not consider the smaller man whom we see confined to a few square feet and at the mercy of the pa.s.sing instant. We must intently look upon that other one who has done and still continues to do all the beautiful things on which we thrive, on that one who is humanity, the spirit. We must consider his power, which is thought and work (work, that is, as thought); and ponder over this material world in which we live, all blocked out, as it is, measured, and traversed by forces which we bridle, acc.u.mulate and release, at pleasure,--this world which has been altered from its former state, and has been made as we now see it fit for human habitation, which has been joined to us, a.s.similated to our life, spiritualised. When we have done all this we shall see how impossible it is to disconnect nature from the spirit, and to think the former without the latter. Nature may be dissociated from the natural man, that is, one of its parts may be isolated from the remainder. But such man of nature is not the one who rules over nature: he is not Volta who clutches the electric current and transforms the earth; he is not Michel Angelo who transfigures marble and creates the Moses.
Physical education, then, is not superadded to the education of the spirit, but is itself education of the spirit. It is the fundamental part of this education, in as much as the body is, in the sense we have used the words, the seat of our spiritual personality. Living means constructing one"s own body, because living is thinking, and thinking is self-consciousness; but this consciousness is possible only if we make it objective, and the object as such is the body (our body). For as consciousness is, so is the body. There is no thinking which is not also doing. Thinking not only builds up the brain, but the rest of the body besides. We may call it will, but then there is not one single act of thought which is not the mental activity indicated by this word "will."
Without will we should have no bodily substance, in as much as the body is always and primarily life, and living is impossible without willing.
What are called involuntary movements are not really such; they differ from the so-called voluntary in that they are constant, immanent, so much so that we can after all interrupt them. Without the exercise of our will we could never hold ourselves erect and keep our feet, but would forever be stumbling and falling; unless we willed it, the power which keeps every organ in its place, and maintains all the organs in the circle of life, would be annihilated. Therefore _morale_, as they say, is a very considerable aid in curing the diseases of the body. It is on this account that societies and religious sects have arisen which make of moral faith an instrument of physical well-being. For the same reason, also, it is impossible for the psychiatrists to draw a line separating mental troubles from bodily ailments. The force of the will, the vigour of the personality, the impulse of the spirit in its becoming, this is the wondrous power which galvanises matter and organically quickens it; which sustains life, equips it, and fits it for its march towards ever renewed, ever improved finalities. It is not temperament which is the basis of character, but character which is the basis of temperament. If we reverse this proposition, every moral conception of life becomes absurd, and every spiritual value appears ineffectual. Don Abbondio then ceases to be wrong, and Cardinal Federico Borromeo is no longer right.
Character too is an empirical concept, and like all such concepts, it has a truthfulness which is not clearly discernible, but dimly visible.
Character signifies rational personality, using the term rationality to mean, not the movement or the becoming which belongs peculiarly to reason as the form of spiritual activity, but the coherence of the object on which this activity is fixed, which coherence in turn consists in the harmony whereby it is possible to think all the parts of objective thought as forming a single whole, in that there is no conflict or contradiction among them, and in as much as the object remains always the same throughout all these particulars. If in the course of reasoning we introduce conflicting statements which cannot possibly be referred to the same thing, we cannot be said to reason.
Rationality is the permanence of the being of which we think: it is firmness of conception, stability of a law which we apply to all particulars that come under its sway. For the object of consciousness is characterised, in respect to the act which const.i.tutes it, by this stability and immutability. What we think is _that_ and no other, whereas thought, by which we think it, is a becoming and a continuous change.
But the character of man is in the object, in the contents of his thought, in what he gradually builds himself up to, in the determined personality which he const.i.tutes by thinking, or, in other words, _in his body_. But body, be it remembered, in an idealistic sense, body as a system, forming, with its law and its configuration, the solid basis of every ulterior development. This truth, vaguely accepted by common sense, which looks upon a strong const.i.tution as a preliminary to a sound character, will appear in its full light only after it has been stripped of the fantastic and material attributes which it receives from a realistically vulgar way of conceiving the body materially. For it is evident that a feeble and sickly man may yet have a steel-like character. Farinata, who stands "erect with breast and brow," as though he held h.e.l.l in contempt: Giordano Bruno, who amidst the flames that already consume his flesh disdainfully turns his eyes from the symbol of the religion which had thrust him on the stake, are evident examples of a strength of mind with no relation to their physical powers, which were already destroyed or about to be scattered by an irresistible might.
Leopardi is right when he scornfully protests that his ill health is not the cause of that sad pessimism which in his mind solemnly challenges "the unseemly hidden Power."
Character is physical robustness to the extent that this latter is spiritual haleness, and in so far as it is compact, firm, steadfast thought. Thought in this respect appears externally as body, not subject to the hostile forces that perpetually beset it from without and from within; and on account of the intrinsic spirituality of its substance, it is a law rather than a fact, and a process or a tendency rather than a fixed and established manner of being. For organic endurance, which is really what we mean by health, does not consist in muscular development or in the bloom of an exuberant const.i.tution, but rather in an indwelling power, in dynamically persistent and tenacious struggle and adaptation, in the capacity of self-preservation, of self-affirmation, which is the specific essence of spiritual being.
This body, in which thought organises and consolidates itself; this body, by means of which thought is enabled to press on its vigorous development, reabsorbing in its actual present the past accomplishment, and to proceed on its ascent, scaling the height step by step, never sliding downward, because every grade it builds remains as a firm support of the next one;--this is man"s character, which is not an attribute of the will considered as practical activity in contra-distinction to theoretic activity. Character is an attribute of the spirit _qua_ spirit, without any adjectives. We may, if we will, distinguish the practical from the theoretical man, the soundness of the will from intellectual originality. But just as it is not possible to conceive of a really fruitful and constructive practical activity without that coherence of design and self-supporting volitional continuity which const.i.tute character, in the same way intelligence and ingenuity will not become manifest without firmness of purpose, without persevering reflection and study of the object, and without stability of this object of intellectual activity, which again const.i.tute character.
If character is set as the basis of morality, then every science and every form of culture, even those which aim at evil, considered in themselves, as the life of the intelligence must have a moral value, must be governed by an inviolable law. By spiritual steadfastness, which is the condition of spiritual productivity, man sacrifices himself to an ideal and const.i.tutes his moral personality, whether he die for his country or whether he labour to bring light amid his thoughts. Life in all its phases is the untiring fulfilment of duty.
To conclude then, physical education must be encouraged, but as spiritual training and as formation of character. Gymnastic exercise, therefore, far from being the only way to this end, may even lead in the opposite direction; and it will do so as long as it is considered apart from the remainder of education, with a particular scope of its own, and with heterogeneous contents in respect to spiritual education properly so-called. The teacher of physical education must always bear in mind that he is not dealing with _bodies_, bodies to be moved around, to be lined up, or rushed around a track. He too is training souls, and collaborates with all the other teachers in the moral preparation and advancement of mankind. If, in addition to his special qualifications, he does not possess culture enough to enable him to discern the spirit beyond the body, and to understand therefore the moral value of order, of precision, of gracefulness, of agility, by which man externally realises his personality, he will no doubt fulfil the ordinary demands of physical culture, but he will just as certainly antagonise and disgust those of his pupils who are most highly gifted and otherwise better trained, and he can therefore lay no claim to the t.i.tle of educator.
Education then is either one or not effective. The a.s.sumption that there are many kinds of education leads to very disastrous results. Education is one; and as a whole it appears unchanged in each one of the parts that we ordinarily distinguish in it, according as we approach the human spirit now from one side and now from the other.