Bailey Love and Low THE LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LOS ANGELES GIFT OF Santa Barbara Public Librarj' ..,'^,„,-«' 1 LOVE AND LAW An Essay "Based on some Talks to Teachers and Parents THOMAS P. BAILEY, Jr., Ph.D. lAsiociatc Profeisor in the University of California San Francisco Tbc IVhitaker &• Ray Company (Incorporated) iSoc, Copyright 1899 by Thomas P. Bailey. Jr. Thou slialt love the Lord thy God with ;ill thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength. Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. There is none other commandment greater than these. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophet^.— Jesus. He that loveth his neighbor hath fulfilled the law. —SL Paul. The truth is, the whole life of man needs timing and tuning. — Plato. The general is not due to the order, but the order to the general. — Aristotle. Within its deeps I saw internalised Into one volume, bound with love, That which is outered in the universe. — Dante. How happy is he born and taught, That serveth not another's will; Whose armor is his honest thought. And simple truth his utmost skill! This man is freed from servile bonds, Of hope to rise, or fear to fall; Lord of himself, though not of lands; And having nothing, yet hath all. — Sir Henry Wot ton. Love is not love Which alters when it alteration finds. — Shakespeare. 906310 LOVE AND LAW An Essay "Based on Some Talks to Teachers and "Parents The title of this essay prevents you from accusing me of originality. No one can say anything essentially "Sources, new about love or law, or about love and law. Thou- sands of institute and convention platforms have resounded with the eloquent lore pertaining to "disci- pline" in the home and in the school. Let my origin- ality consist in declining to be original, and at the same time making an earnest effort to state your experience in such effective fashion as will not do violence to the truth of human nature. While there is nothing new under the sun, the same old truths must be kept in the sunlight of vital interest, if they are to stay sweet and wholesome. So let us air and sun some good, old-fashioned ideas. Before beginning our work, we shall acknowledge our obligations to the "Sources," for we are all studying sources nowadays. Our title is due to Mark Hopkins, of blessed memory, who was not an evolutionist, or some other good, modern thing, and yet who still teaches us. As for the rest, the thought comes (through a "sub- jective" and imperfect medium) from the New Testa- ment, which is tolerably old, flanked by the Anglo-Saxon tradition, which is deligiitfully vogue, and by some second-hand Hellinism, vvhatever that is. — 5 — Age Love and La7v. All the great writers and lecturers say this is the The Child's child's age, so we, not desiring to be original, say so too. We hazard the suggestion, withal tremblingly, that the other ages have also been the child's age. May we dare go further, and say that this is the woman's age — and the man's age — and the machine's age! Some irreverent folks have hinted that this is the age of talk about the child. Not more than a few weeks ago, I heard a young man say that the problem of the "Man with the Hoe " is further complicated by the equally difficult problem, "The Hoe with the Man." But we can best fulfil our purpose by admittifig that this is the child's age. So, "Parents, obey your children," for "The child is father to the man." All of which, being interpreted, does not mean smart sophistry — which is worse than originality, but rather, this: Parents, obey the law written in your children's members. Not that the children are to interpret this law — God forbid! We grown-ups are the best interpreters, if we have thought and lived deeply. In any event, we are better qualified than our children; for we are our own children — some of us, perhaps, our own great-grandchildren. The knowers of that deeper law are the child-/z7i:' fight to form or break their habits are the most human of animals and, therefore, best fitted to survive. Self-asser- tion, self-protection, self-preservation, are the normal lead- ing traits of young childhood. Their primacy, however, ought not to become a tyranny. Two other sets of habits ought to go along with the self-assertion set, and become coordinate with it. Let us call these the sympathetic and the psychical. The little child's sympathy is egoistic, and ought to be; and so its psychicality — its curiosity, love of sensation, power of preceptive analysis and synthesis. Each child ought to exercise self-assertion and at the same time to recognize and suffer it in other children. So sym- pathy and psychicality are to be had by self, and granted to others. The education of the mother's lap and the training of the nursery ought to train self-dependence most of all, without neglecting the other great habits. Self- assertion without psychical alertness and sympathy becomes stubbornness and other forms of " spoil." The egoistic habits become false and morbid without the close com- panionship of social imitation and psychical invention. Perpetual motion ought to alternate with Rip Van Winkle naps in the early stages of childhood. I do not intend to deny the existence of profound and far-reaching indi- vidual differences in little children. Some children need to be stimulated; others need repression. But the habit of prompt and effective self-assertion ought to underlie all else. Egoism need not be selfishness ; strength of desire need not mean unreasonableness. Nevertheless, strong strenuousness, self-activity (if you please), must come early — 13 — Love and Law. and become unobtrusively, unconsciously habitual. We ®P^"*- all agree that little children ought to have nothing to do with fear. Though they have very strong sympathetic and gregarious instincts, they know little of the fulness of love. Precocious emotional love is usually a deadly thing. But it is natural and seemly for the little ones to be angry and sin not. Self-control is possible only to those who have natural self-assertion. Note, however, as we have already insisted, that self-assertion is not normal unless going along with habitual sympathy and habitual psychical alert- ness. "Be a person and respect others as persons," is a maxim for the beginning of life. Love God with yourself and your neighbor a^ yourself, is the goal to be striven for. We want our little ones to be affectionate and alert, but also and especially spirited. Let us begin with spirit and strive to attain to spirituality. This is what the good folk may mean when they say, "Respect the individuality of the child." Yes, and he must have an individuality that can be respected. Surely we have had enough of the loving babe that develops into the adolescent egoist and cynic. Much of the storm and stress supposed character- istic of the youth ought to be healthily and regularly worked off in ihe nursery and the kindergarten. I confess to a dislike to the "angelic" forms of the just mentioned in titutions. The rhythm of work and play is the greatest of habits for distinct but social individuals. Old and well-established ought this rhythm to be when the child comes to the high-school age. New adjustments and new habits must come from the new forces operating at that time, but the new ought to be grafted on the old. The youth's new childhood ought to be helped for sanity by Love and Laiv. the father-self of his strenuous, well-habituated child- hood. Spontaneltf T) r- • ""'1 Habit. -By this time you probably see that I am advocating custom and generic habits of character, rather than the tricks of •«^>'Kion- muscle sometimes valued because facile. Habit ought to free life, not clog it. Mechanism is useful only as it serves spontaneity, which, in turn, must become habitual in order to become structural in character. Mechanical habit may enable us to correspond with a given environment ; char- acter habit sets us to taming nature, our fellow creatures and ourselves. Sometimes the parent and the teacher have to expend vast energy in trying to train the child's sympathetic habits or his psychical habits, but this he does without sacrificing the habit of self-assertiom. The little child is grasping, gregarious, playful; let him be himself, aye, make him be himself in all these phases of activity. Let love and law work together at the start under the form of spontaneity and habit. Religion is the key-note of this movement in life's symphony. Not craven religion, but reverence founded on self-assertion, sympathy and psychical sensitiveness. We assert ourselves in order that we may sacrifice ourselves ; and we do this — we "die daily" — that we may live in the freedom of the truth in knowing ourselves and others. The sympathy of the habit-stage tends to beget the reli- gion of the custom-stage. Just as by " habit" I do not mean muscle tricks only, so by " custom " I have in mind something larger and more generic than particular usages, maxims, rites and ceremonies. The life of custom is religious, proprietary and empirical. If you are not too much frightened by these terms — which are not of my Love and Laru. coining — I think I can make them clear. The sympathy The Primitive q( jhc habit-Stage bccomes the religion of the custom- View of Ljfe, Stage. Religion is self-conscious sympathy aware of its hopeless limitations. The world seems great and large ; we feel feeble and small. We feel that the self without is stronger and more significant than the self within us. The past means more than the present or the future. Our fathers were greater than we are, for all we have they gave us — and give us ; as we have other selves, so have they, and theirs are greater than ours, for they were before ours. In all this I am not trying to entice you into accepting any particular view of the origin of religion. All I want to do is to illustrate the animistic view of life that primitive self- consciousness everywhere seems to hold. Custom is pri- marily the product of animism, and religion is its soul. Religion may be agnostic, pantheistic, fetishistic, poly- theistic or what not, but it is always sympathetic reverence and dependence. Therefore, all men are religious. But let us turn to the "empirical " phase of custom. This is the outgrowth of " psychical " habits. Perception leads to explanation, and our empirical instincts try their hand at rough and ready explanations. Hence mythol- ogizing of all kinds. Post hoc ergo propter hoc is the favorite logic of childish minds. Animistic explanations of man and nature result therefrom, colored usually by the light from the dominant religious instincts. Strange it is, but true, that our much vaunted common sense is just a mythological reading of our experience, corrected by the corrected mythology or knowledge come to us from the past. Whether or not Greek mythology properly trains Anglo-Saxon common sense, is another question. I l.ove and Laiv. doubt not it performed that and other functions for Greek children. Religion and the rough thinking of common Hero-worship ° ° in the School. sense were born together, and a third form of animism came with them, I mean the proprietary instincts. Magic and private property seem to us little akin. Yet in each there is an attempt at control of the powers of nature by means of an imaginary extension of one's personality. Self-assertion, you see, ripens into self-conscious egohood. Here again, we normally find the religious instincts exert- ing strong pressure. It is the sacredness of property and personal rights, individual and communal, that attracts our attention. "Possession is nine-tenths of the law," is a proprietary maxim empirically expressed, but almost any primary grade child will show you that there is religion in it also. Indeed, the whole array of folk-lore maxims, saws and proverbs will show this close connection of the religious, the empirical and the proprietary instincts, with the accent normally on the religious. These instincts, then, mark out for us the main divisions of the realm of custom. Habit is a^^similated, and spontaneity becomes morality. A glance at our primary school curriculum will show that it expresses the custom-stage as a rule. Facts and principles tend to be received on authority; the honor I)rinciple, backed up by overwhelming public opinion, becomes the leading personal motive ; respect for sympa- thetic but strong and valid authority is the leading discip- linary agency. Historical and ethical hero-worship is perhaps the most striking result of good teaching in the primary school. Here, possibly, we find the civic form of that fear of the Lord which is the beginning of wisdom. — 17 — Love and Law. Yes, wisdom comes next, and self-respecting reverence Co-ordination jg the best preparation for it. The love that casts out fear in Character. IS a reverent love, and the law that fulfils and transcends custom is rational law. True wisdom is loving insight and rational love. The child must come to find out what is worth loving in himself and others; so he seeks the truth that shall make him free. " Secondary " education, wherever begun — and no one knows exactly where and when — ought to be the beginning of active search for truth. Call it "rediscovery " if you please, but it ought to be something more than the active reception of custom, no matter how rational the custom. With the new birth of the body in adolescence ought to come the new birth of the character. To think whole thoughts, to prepare for the freedom soon to come, that it may not turn into slavery to habit and custom, or caprice, sentimentality and lawlessness — this the task. The adolescent needs law and love — each and both. And yet the (we?) brain-stuf- fers are at hand. Fortunately, the content of the high school's work contains much orderly knowledge that trains for law. Then, too, even grind has an orderly element in it. Pity it is that the differentiation of the high school so often has so little integration to go with it. Habit and custom must be impressed in the high school and every- where else, but too much of them is depressing and deadening. Unintegrated departmentalism has little time for the enthusiasm of insight, hence the departmentally- minded freshman with the edge off his intellectual appe- tite is a common occurrence. Would that we had more coordination of teachers, of children, of parents, along with more coordination of studies. There ought to be — 18 — Love and Law. some way of hcli)ing the adolescent to gain a little real culture and wisdom, a little real rational autonomy, before Adolescence, the common school work is completed. And yet even university graduates are being turned out with pigeon-hole minds. This is said to be the "comparative age;" then why is the comparative mind so superlatively absent in the children we claim to be educating? But I must not scold, for our grandsires "drew long bows at Hastings." Even when we pay some attention to adolescence and the long preparation for it, we are too much inclined to talk about the adolescent as a single type. As a matter of fact, the adolescent may be loving or loveless, lawless or legalistic, or he may be incoordinate, unbalanced, incoher- ent. He needs to have the morality of custom become the spirituality of law, of principle. Equipped with guiding logical instincts, he should come into self-con- scious institutional life, and into a knowledge of personal and civil rights and duties. Rights and duties, institu- tions and constitutions, should htcovcvt significant to him. Citizenship and other responsibilities come to him soon enough, and he should find himself prepared for them. Mere academic responsibility is no fit preparation for life. — But I am scolding again, and what is worse, probably scolding evolution ! Our high schools and other schools, higher and lower, are no doubt as good as they can be — at this time and under the circumstances. At the risk of being obscure on account of excessive brevity, I want to sum up our discussion of development in orderliness by once more stating the oft-stated " object of education." Suppose, then, we put it this way: Edu- cation is a process of training, nurture and development. Love and Law. Personality. Man vs. Machine. The training is primarily for habit, then custom, then law. We nurture instincts, then interests ("many sided "), then principles. While we train and nurture, we also develop: (i). Spontaneity. (2). Morality. (3). Spirituality. Character-culture results in the broaden- ing, deepening and internalising of social, individual and rational personality. It unifies freedom, reason and grace; it coordinates the spiritual forces and pro- ducts of civilization, society and culture. Having said some things that sound rather vague even to me, I hasten to add that in some form or other they have been said again and again. I say them now because I do not want to be understood to confine education to the "law" side. The vagueness may be due partly to brevity, somewhat to the fact that the deepest ideals of the race must htfelt, and perhaps in some measure to the imminence of the other aspect of our subject the Law of Love. Before attempting our prosaic (but unhysteri- cal) telling of this old, old story, we may profitably glance at a very practical side of the theory of discipline — the teacher as a representative of law. The teacher is a representative of law eternal and law internal. He must himself be law-abiding. He must have been trained for habit, custom and law. He is responsible to the State and to Ciod, and should not be shorn of his representativeness by the machinery of school organization. The teacher who has to " govern " through the principal ought to be reformed, or turned out to graze. Machinery, however technically perfect, can do nothing for character unless its wheels do the bidding of persons. Now principals and superintendents and others in au- —20 — Love a7id Laiv. thority have about as much as they can do in managing the machinery, instead of being managed by it. The i-'^'mg stones. The Law of principal and the rod ought to be disciplinary last resorts — Love, perhaps alternative. Let the power of the State's full authority stand behind the teacher — and stay there. The only real educative agents are concrete persons. To dis- cipliney<7r the teacher and by machinery is to put a pre- mium on Moloch and materialism. By all means let us with Kipling put spiritual life into all the machinery we use, even into Board meetings, but let us be still more anxious to remember with Edwin Markham, our California schoolmaster poet, that " Nothing is Living Stone, nothing is sure, That is not whitened in the Social Fire," and with him careful not to forget that " Man is himself a fate, himself a cause. And he can change the destiny of things." Why does "love fulfilling the law" sum up the meaning of the highest things ? Love, like liberty, has many crimes committed in its name. Men have been known to improve on the Bible ethics by asking us to love our neighbors better than ourselves. Teachers have told me that their hearts have swelled with a great love for each little child in a class of forty. Mine never did, I have a right to my own taste and preferential choice. We WO)' emotionally love the children — all, some of the time; some, all of the time; but 7iot all, all of the time ! Nor ought we. Some of them ought to excite the heart-swell- ing of indignation, or of grief — at least, some of the time. Emotional, heart-swelling love is exhausting when too -21- Love and Law. continuous, and distracting when too indiscriminate, i^ove and Besides, there is such a thing as reciprocity. If it takes Worth. , . , two to make a quarrel, it ought to take two to make a loving. When I was a child, I often preferred teachers righteously indignant to the same stricken of sentimentality. Both phenomena made me uncomfort- able, but I saw some sense in the one, and couldn't see what the other was "up to." Perhaps the children of to-day are not so unregenerate. No; if I am to love my neighbor as myself, I must love myself. Yet I must respectfully decline to have my heart lovingly swell toward myself. The heart swells that way only after the head has swollen first. Evidently each one of Jus must have a self worth loving; or, as Bishop Hugh Miller Thomson says, a "soul w^rM saving." If we are sons .of God, made in His image, we ought to have ourselves amount to something — and not whine and cringe and shirk ! Let us have representative selves — individual, social, rational, and demand these of and for every one in proportion as he can show them forth. " Ideal peaks are possible to men." Love is based on worth. Love is the set of the soul in everlasting affirmation of a character's infinite pricelessness. My soul is come from God. Would it be worthy, let it keep close to Him, His Kingdom and His Righteousness. Because we know that the Kingdom of Heaven is within us, we seek to have it worthily spread; and as it is and spreads in us, so must it be and spread in our brother, and especially our younger brother, the little child. We caji love thus all the children all the time, for they are all treasures, precious, inestimable. We have 02ir likes and dis- — 22- Love and Law. likes, but our love has us through them all. We are angry with these little ones; we grieve over them; we fear intcest, " •' > b ' Sympathy for them; they surprise and shock us; they rejoice and and Tact, gladden us — and because we love them. So child-study, like man-study, is inevitable ; for we must be interested in the children, would we value them. Interest means "there is something between" us, and with interest goes sympathy, because we " feel with " those we know; there is something, 5t?w