Early Education and Spiritualism
75 Art. IV.? :Author: Mrs. Burnt, Crimplesliam, Dowriliam Market. The spread of Spiritualism, and the grave importance given to the subject by the discussion of it at the recent Church Congress, are startling facts in this ninth decade of our boasted nineteenth century civilisation. A craving after some visible apparition, or palpable evidence of a spirit world, may be justly deemed one of the most irresistible and deeply-seated yearnings in the hearts of all. So passionate does the longing become in some whose loved relatives have passed the bourne whence no traveller returns, that life seems to them unendurable, almost impossible, without the touch of a vanished hand, and the sound of a voice that is still. Spiritualism has for all such a wondrous fascination. They approach the subject with a desire to know that it is true, rather than to know the truth about it, their minds already biased, and full of pre-conceived ideas of such a nature as to allow them to fall facile victims of the false sensorial impressions, from which men of the highest intellectual attainments are by no means exempted, and which will, perhaps, never be safely guarded against until a wise system of careful education of the several senses has been devised for the young.
One by one, many of the children of the present generation are drifting from the old moorings. The faith of their fathers is no longer their faith, even if they do not make their boast of being altogether emancipated from the thraldom of anything so effete as Christianity. The parents of many of these were taught to lisp catechisms of dogma so soon as they were able to speak, instead of having had their faculties developed in a natural order. It is possible that the ranks of Spiritualism would not have been so rapidly recruited, especially in America, but for the reaction inevitably resulting from this very defective system of early education, which was formerly carried out there even more extensively than in England.
It may be well in elucidation of our subject to take a rapid glance at some of the leading features of Spiritualism. The first thing which strikes us is the intense selfishness on the part of the living which underlies the whole creed. How strange the life beyond the grave, revealed to us through the medium, for the soul freed from the trammels of sense and flesh appears to have no glorious faculties, no celestial pursuits. Can we conceive a much more gross and materialistic doom for a disembodied spirit than that of being forced to appear, perhaps night after night, and year after year, at the bidding of Brown, Jones, and Kobinson, to twist tables about, and sprinkle water on bouquets of flowers ? We can only stand aghast at the inglorious conception of Anglican divines who uphold the worth of such testimony against atheism, and can from the heart re-echo Professor Huxley’s remark, that if such be our future life, it adds a new terror to death. Human souis vary infinitely; the logic of one man’s mind is not the logic of another’s, so with the heart’s profoundest yearnings; there must be some so constituted as to be comforted at the thought of a table-leg incited to give a sympathetic stroke by the vital magnetic power of the medium, at the instance of a departed relative; to others, who have never learnt to look on these wooden emblems as possible sacred channels of some mystical psychic force, but have only regarded them as convenient for holding viands, such comfort savours of direst mockery and the rankest materialism. Again we are asked to carefully bear in mind that no medium guarantees any manifestations, that everything depends upon the ” conditions” which are dictated by nature. The manifestations are always mysterious in their coming and going, acutely sensitive to the presence of any hostile influence, and it is not unusual for an earnest inquirer to find that his presence is alivays calculated to interfere with the free development of the powers of the spirits. Does an associated body like the Dialectical Society attempt an investigation, then their sense of responsibility produces positive magnetism, and thus tends to neutralise spiritual influence. Has some ” embodied spirit” received in the person of the medium a cochineal brand from a daring unbeliever, no one’s faith is staggered, an impress made on an embodied spirit is only transferred, according to a well-known law of Spiritualism, to the medium. If it had fallen to the lot of equally scientific persona to make the first experiments in photography, that art might have been still in its infancy, and a glorious pecuniary harvest in the hands of the monopolists of spirit-pictures. What a furore there would have been for a glimpse of them! What terrible denunciations would have been hurled by unbelievers against those who had anything to do with what some feeble folk, when first the marvels of sunpictures came before the public, were wont to ascribe to diabolical agency; whilst others would have recognised a blasphemous infraction of the divine command to abstain from making the likeness of anything that is in heaven or earth. Yet how different from the ” conditions” of the modern spiritualist were those of the early experimentalists in the photographic art. They, too, were only able at first to preserve the picture in darkness, and their efforts to find chemicals which should fix the image were for a while futile. But no dark seances were convened to gaze upon the marvels said to have been produced by spirits. Persons might easily then have been foun,d, who after a long wearisome waiting time of anxious expectancy, would have recognised in their own likeness that of some dead relative. Darkness, excepting to those intending to sleep, is certainly favourable to mental confusion and dazed sight; even a rather tottering judgment may readily follow prolonged idleness in a dark room.
There seems no reason to doubt that all persons commonly described as of a nervous temperament are, even when highly intelligent and cultivated, peculiarly liable to have the evidence of their senses falsified, these false impressions being especiallylikely to follow a prolonged concentration of expectant attention. Only by that ” systematic culture of the powers of observation,” from the earliest dawn of intelligence, which Mr. Herbert Spencer long ago recognised as ” the process of acquiring a knowledge on which all after knowledge is based,” can such be guarded against the dangers of rash exposure to spiritualistic influence. The immense importance of rightly fashioning and directing the infant’s mind from the cradle, of surrounding it by wise, qualifying, and controlling influences, whilst letting it as far as possible acquire facts for itself, that they may take a deeper hold upon its mind, is well exemplified, if we notice how early it will register an experience and originate from it a very false inference; as, for instance, that all flat things are heavy, because money is flat, and though so small very heavy for its size ; and books are flat, and some that it has tried to lift are very heavy. Great attention should be given to the physical education of the child, with a view to counteracting any morbid irritability of the nervous system by sufficient muscular force, thus promoting the growth of a large district of the brain, on the imperfect development of which much one-sidedness of belief, and incapacity for forming a sound judgment in after life may probably depend. Very important, too, that the little fluttering, bewildered soul, longing and struggling for light, eager to drink in knowledge on all sides, and to bring out its own quaint deductions and comparisons, shall never be allowed to feel the want of a responsive, intelligent and appreciative mind. For a peculiar difficulty in dealing with children when very young often arises from the parents’ inability to know or sympathise with their deepest thoughts and feelings. Instead of resembling the parents, the child may revert for moral sentiments and affections to some near or distant ancestral type which is comparatively unknown to them. And even when a likeness to them exists, how hard all must feel it to be to recognise as failings those weak points of character whose reproduction is both amusing and fascinating. Thus sympathetic interest too often leads to the intensifying of palpable defects, instead of to the seeking for a truer equilibrium of character by systematic strivings after the development of counteracting qualities and emotions. It is far easier, for instance, for the parent who finds his counterpart in the highly impressionable, too emotional child, to encourage with suggestive questions the wistful infant who is just opening its tiny soul to wonder, than to give it scant sympathy by putting into a swing, or inciting it to a merry dance, with a consolatory promise of much future knowledge in store for it by-and-by. Let anyone deeply interested in the question of intuitive beliefs only make the experiment, and he may find that any child endowed with a fair power of inferring an ordinary cause from an ordinary event, will, whilst yet an infant untaught, seek to trace back all to a First Cause if it has been trained to regular intercourse with the realities of nature. Such a child will be no more capable of looking upon death as annihilation than upon sleep as death. The thought of not waking next morning is to it impossible, and as it can remember having once seen the spring time of the flowers after their long winter sleep, its conviction of its own individuality is too strong to allow it to do other than believe that “nothing can keep on being dead, it must come alive again next summer or some other summer.” Evidently there can be no idea of a soul distinct from the body; body, mind, and soul are to the infant one being, the being that breathes and wills, that may lie dormant for awhile, but cannot perish utterly. Also the idea of retribution comes very early to a child. In vain may we give it its ” Eed Hiding Hood,” with the wolf changed into an affectionate dog, fond of practical jokes, for it will still invent an embodiment of punishment awaiting the evil-doer; a boy may choose a lion or a tiger, a girl a great monkey, and if as yet in ignorance of any definite wickedness, such as lying or stealing, she will, when about two years old perhaps, put on a pedestal her earliest innate conception of virtue, self-respect, and narrate to her doll such a warning history as the following: “There was a naughty doll who did not care at all about herself, and threw herself quite away into a deep ditch, where there was no water, and a great many stinging nettles, and a big monkey came by that way, and when he saw the naughty doll who did not care at all about herEARLY EDUCATION AND SPIRITUALISM. 79 self, he bited and bited her away until there was not any of her left, and that was the end of the naughty doll.” Here perhaps is the germ innate in the mind of every infant and untaught savage which first leads the latter to acts of cannibalism as the most complete, sure, and perfect vengeance on his enemy; dead he may come to life again like the flowers, but eaten up he is truly annihilated. This thought, too, it is which for the infant gives such terrific and undesirable reality to the nursery tales of ogres. Again, another epoch in the mental history of an infant, and one fraught with mighty importance for its future, may be the time when it first shows vague fear at an unknown sound, terror at the sight of a dark cloud over the moon, or any sombre shadow. If no attempt be made to explain the source of the sound, to at once initiate the young mind into the difference between substance and shadow, and the very varying aspects under which the same objects may be seen, a golden opportunity has been ruthlessly lost for forming and strengthening the infant’s mind. Since, then, children come into the world with such marvellous aptitudes for reasoning belief, what grievous wrong may be done to their faculties, and more serious harm still to those of their descendants, by the too early sounding in their ears that things are thus and thus, instead of carefully training their powers of observation and perception, and so leading up to true conceptions. However stunting and dwarfing to the harmonious development of the brain may be the practice of too early instilling artificial knowledge into the mind, it can hardly be as dangerous as the pernicious one of questioning in and questioning out profound problems of dogma.
The question of how the infant is to be brought up in close communion with nature is a broad one, and admits of an almost infinite variety of interpretation. Very forcibly has Mr. Herbert Spencer shown the importance attaching to such training, and plainly indicated various plans to be pursued with the older child. He says :* ” Here again we have but to follow Nature’s leadings. Where can be seen an intenser delight than that of children picking up new flowers and watching new insects; or hoarding pebbles and shells ? And who is there but perceives, that by sympathising with them they may be led on to any extent of inquiry into the qualities and structures of these things ? Every botanist who has had children with him in the woods and lanes, must have noticed how eagerly they joined in his pursuits, how keenly they searched out plants for him, how intently they watched whilst he examined them, how they over* Education, p. 86, by Herbert Spencer. London, 18G1. whelmed him with questions. The consistent follower of Bacon ?the ‘servant and interpreter of nature’?will see that we ought modestly to adopt the course of culture thus indicated. Having become familiar with the simple properties of inorganic objects, the child should by the same process be led on to an exhaustive examination of the things it picks up in its daily walks?the less complex facts they present being alone noticed at first; in plants, the colours, numbers, and forms of the petals, and shapes of the stalks and leaves; in insects the numbers of the wings, legs, antennas, and their colours. As these become fully appreciated and invariably observed, further facts may be successively introduced: in the one case, the numbers of stamens and pistils, the forms of the flowers, whether radial or bilateral in symmetry, the arrangement and character of the leaves, whether opposite or alternate, stalked or sessile, smooth or hairy, serrated, toothed, or crenate; in the other, the divisions of the body, the segments of the abdomen, the markings of the wings, the number of joints in the legs, and the forms of the smaller organs?the system pursued throughout being that of making it the child’s ambition to say, respecting everything it finds, all that can be said.”
With what interest will a mere infant watch the bulb and the seed put into the ground. If it be shown the tiny blade first bursting from its prison-house, it will get some faint conception of the lapse of time during its slow evolution under the ground, thus satisfying itself for a while with a vague idea of derived life drawn from this image of the seeds and flowers; by-and-by the question of the origin of evil things will come before it, and it will ask where did the first wasp and the first gnat come from ? Who made them ? Then it will be taught there is a great and loving God who made all bright things in the world around it; if it just knows this, utters the precious Name, and learns that it was made his little lamb by Baptism, and marked with his sign in earliest infancy, seed enough has been sown, it must germinate. Parents little realise how utterly faithless and selfish they are, when for their own comfort they love to hear from the lips of their cherished weaklings unearthly, unchildlike longings for death. Surely the thought of death should be put far away from the infant as long as possible. It must inevitably know of it sooner or later; probably a dead bird, found and tenderly taken into the hand, will send a strange look of sudden revelation and sad wisdom into the child-face, although it may not say anything. But the worst terror of death will be gone if it has previously communed with nature. There will flash into its mind the grand truth of resurrection ; that as with the flowers, so with the bird, it must come alive some day when the weather is warm; till then the infant fancies its companion birds may lodge it safely in a tree, and shelter it with their wings.
It may be objected that close communing with nature is not possible to dwellers in towns, hardly, perhaps, in its fullest sense ; as some of the lessons will vary and be trammelled by the surroundings and altered by art. Yet the town can yield many more opportunities of the kind than might be, at first sight, supposed; for, after all, original endowment, so far as capacity for education and happiness goes, determines so much more than aught else what our life shall be. In this the children of the very poor in the heart of London need so often our tenderest pity in that they are born weary, with an inherent inability to draw any real education and enjoyment from much that would yield it had they the power or heart to appreciate it. What a lifetime of future happiness might not a child of this type owe to the fostering care of a beneficent Creche to take the place, to some extent, of the sunshine of its poor mother’s smiles, which her heart so often aches with a great longing only to have time to give, and without which she vaguely half divines how joyless and aimless a being her child may become. For the infinite sadness of the fate of this true city child, as well as that of the most to-be-pitied type of gutter-child, lies not in the fact that it has only the gutter to play in, for a good gutter must doubtless furnish much interesting matter for exploration ; but that, by reason of being born so near the gutter amidst so many foetid emanations, it has been from birth bereft of that organic life and aptitude for accommodating itself to its surroundings, without which no true education, no gladness, nor any light-hearted joyousness can be possible, and endowed with which, despite the most adverse circumstances, any life can seem well worth living.
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