Buchanan's Journal of Man, June 1887 Part 2

In all ages, the human understanding, the reasoning faculties, have ever been considered to hold the supremacy in the scale of development, of culture, and of advance toward a higher form of civilization; the moral faculties were thought next in order, and then the propensities common to all animal natures held the third or inferior position. This view of human nature has been handed down from an elder antiquity and still retains its hold largely in the universities and great public schools of the present day.

If this view of the nature of man be a correct one, there ought to be a vast intellectual brotherhood of mankind; but it is not so. From the days of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, this culture of the intellectual power has been continuously pursued, but with very slender results; for were this kind of education pursued for 100,000 years, the morale of society would be little better than it is at the present time.

Dr. Buchanan takes quite a different view and makes the moral or ethical faculties supreme, in development and culture, the intellect being the instruments for acquiring facts and the propensities the steam to bring about the desired results. According to his views of man, our emotional faculties are of a higher or more G.o.d-like order than our intellectual powers. The intellect being the hand-maid to the emotions, to _feel_ the force of truth is higher in mental excellence than to _perceive_ it. Depth of emotions is the climax of spiritual power.

The ethical and aesthetic being the foundation of the New Education, Dr. Buchanan, in a series of beautifully written chapters, enters into details in reference to what teachers should be, what the subjects taught ought to be, and what are the sh.e.l.ls and what the kernels of knowledge. He shows clearly that woman will ultimately be the regenerator of humanity, that education so far has been merely fractional and one-sided--that true development consists in the co-education of soul and body, the co-education of man and woman, the co-education of the material and spiritual worlds.

There are a million of teachers, and every one should have a copy of this work. No man is fit to teach in the high sense advocated by this author unless he has thoroughly mastered this work. It is easy to pull down a system, but not so easy to build it up; but in the New Education the follies of the old educational systems are not only levelled to the dust, but a higher and more practical, industrious, and crime-preventing system of training and teaching takes its place.

This book will become the grand educational Bible for teachers in all countries where the English language is spoken.

Nor should it be in the hands of teachers only. Every intelligent father and mother, anxious for the development of their sons and daughters should study this book night and day. It should be translated into every European language, and also into Chinese and other Eastern tongues; the refined, aesthetic, and knowledge-loving people of j.a.pan, were the work translated into their language, would enjoy it intensely.

HAMBROOK COURT, near Bristol, England.

A j.a.panese scholar has already undertaken the translation of the "New Education" in j.a.pan. The JOURNAL has not room at present for the essays of correspondents, and I have only given a small portion of the essay of the learned Dr. Eadon, who is the most progressive member of the medical profession in England.

VICTORIA'S HALF CENTURY

We are nearing the fiftieth anniversary of the beginning of Queen Victoria's reign. A London writer, reviewing the changes which have taken place in the period marks these notable points: A strange country was England in those far-off days; there was but little difference between the general state of society under William and the general state of society under George II. If we compared the courts of George IV. and William with the company of a low tap-room, we should not flatter the tap-room. Broad-blown coa.r.s.eness, rank debauchery, reckless prodigality, were seen at their worst in the abode of English monarchs. A decent woman was out of place amid the stupid horrors of the Pavilion or of Windsor; and we do not wonder at the sedulous care which the Queen's guardians employed to keep her beyond reach of the prevailing corruption. A man like the Duke of c.u.mberland would not now be permitted to show his face in public save in the dock; but in those times his peculiar habits were regarded as quite royal and quite natural. Jockeys, blacklegs, gamblers, prize-fighters were esteemed as the natural companions of princes; and when England's king drove up to the verge of a prize-ring in the company of a burly rough who was about to exchange buffets with another rough, the proceeding was considered as quite manly and orthodox. Imagine the Prince of Wales driving in the park with a champion boxer!

A strange country indeed was England in those times; and to look through the newspapers and memoirs of fifty years ago is an amus.e.m.e.nt at once instructive and humiliating. The king dines with the premier duke, makes him drunk, and has him carefully driven round the streets, so that the public may see what an intoxicated n.o.bleman is like. The same king pushes a statesman into a pond, and screams with laughter as the drenched victim crawls out. Morning after morning the chief man of the realm visits the boxing-saloon, and learns to batter the faces and ribs of other n.o.ble gentlemen. We hear of visits paid by royalty to an obscure Holborn tavern, where, after noisy suppers, the fighting-men were wont to roar their hurricane choruses and talk with many blasphemies of by-gone combats. Think of that succession of ugly and foul sports compared with the peace, the refinement, the gentle and subdued manners of Victoria's court, and we see how far England has travelled since 1837.

Fifty years ago our myriads of kinsmen across the seas were strangers to us, and the amazing friends.h.i.+p which has sprung up between the subjects of Victoria and the citizens of the vast republic was represented fifty years ago by a kind of sheepish, good-humored ignorance, tempered by jealousy. The smart packets left London and Liverpool to thrash their way across the Atlantic swell, and they were lucky if they managed to complete the voyage in a month--Charles d.i.c.kens sailed in a vessel which took twenty-two days for the trip, and she was a steamer, no less! For all practical purposes England and America are now one country. The trifling distance of 3,000 miles across the Atlantic seems hardly worth counting, according to our modern notions; and the American gentleman talks quite easily and naturally about running over to London or Paris to see a series of dramatic performances or an exhibition of pictures. When Victoria began to reign the English people mostly regarded America as a dim region, and the voyage thither was a fearsome understanding.

There is something in the catalogue of mechanical devices which almost affects the mind with fatigue. Fifty years ago the ordinary citizen picked up his ideas of all that was going on in the world from a sorely-taxed news-sheet; and a very blurred idea he managed to get at the best. Poor folk had to do without the luxury of the news, and they were as much circ.u.mscribed mentally as though they had been cattle; we remember a village where even in 1852 the common people did not know who the Duke of Wellington was. No such thing as a newspaper had been seen there within the memory of man; only one or two of the natives had seen a railway engine, and n.o.body in the whole village row had been known to visit a town. But now-a-days the villager has his high-cla.s.s news-sheet; and he is very much discontented indeed if he does not see the latest intelligence from America, India, Australia, China--everywhere. An American statesman's conversation of Monday afternoon is reported accurately in the London journals on Tuesday morning; a speech of Mr. Gladstone's delivered at midnight on one day is summarized in New York and San Francisco the next day; the result of a race run at Epsom is known in Bombay within forty minutes. We use no paradox when we say that every man in the civilized world now lives next door to everybody else; oceans are merely convenient pathways, howling deserts are merely handy places for planting telegraph poles and for swinging wires along which thoughts travel between country and country with the velocity of lightning. We see that the world with its swarming populations is growing more and more like some great organism whereof the nerve-centres are subtly, delicately connected by sensitive nerve-tissues. Even now, using a lady's thimble, two pieces of metal, and a little acid, we can speak to a friend across the Atlantic gulf, and before ten years are over, a gentleman in London will doubtless be able to sit in his office and hear the actual tones of some speaker in New York.

So much has the magic half century brought about.

If we think of the scientific knowledge possessed by the most intelligent men when the Queen ascended the throne, we can hardly refrain from smiling, for it seems as though we were studying the mental endowment of a race of children. The science of electricity was in its infancy; the laws of force were misunderstood; men did not know what heat really was. They knew next to nothing of the history of the globe, and they accounted for the existence of varying species of plants and animals by means of the most infantine hypotheses. A complete revolution--vital and all-embracing--has altered our modes of thought, so that the man of 1887 can scarcely bring himself to conceive the state of mind which contented the man of 1837. We have dark doubts now, perplexing misgivings, weary uncertainties, painful consciousness of limited powers; but along with these weaknesses we have our share of certainties. Are we happier? Nay, not in mind. A quiet melancholy marks the words of all the men who have thought most deeply and learned most. The wise no longer cry out or complain--they accept life and fate with calm sadness, and perhaps with prayerful resignation. We have learned to know how little we can know, and we see with composure that even the miracles already achieved by the restless mind of man are as nothing.

There is a far better reason than this for the sadness of thinking men. It is that, with all the progress of science, art, and education, poverty, misery, disease, and crime still afflict society as they did in ruder ages, and our progress is _onward_, but not _upward_. It is _upward_ progress to which the JOURNAL OF MAN is devoted.

In the foregoing sketch very little is said of the real progress of the age--the increase of education, the uprising of the people into greater political power and liberty, the prostration of the power of the church, which is destined to disestablishment, and the uprising of spiritual science.

What is there in the reign of Victoria to be celebrated? Was there ever a more perfect specimen of barely respectable commonplace than the reign of Victoria? What generous impulse, or what notable wisdom has she ever shown? What has she done for the relief of Ireland, for the improvement of a society full of pauperism, crime and suffering, or for the prevention of unjust foreign wars? When has she ever given even a respectable gift to any good object from her enormous income?

But virtue is not expected in sovereigns; they are expected only to enjoy themselves hugely, to make an ostentatious display, and consume all their benighted subjects give them.

Mrs. Stanton says:--"The two great questions now agitating Great Britain are 'Coercion for Ireland,' and the 'Queen's Jubilee,' a tragedy and a comedy in the same hour."

Speaking of the Queen's Jubilee she says:

"In this supreme moment of the nation's political crisis, the Queen and her suite are junketing around in their royal yachts on the coast of France, while proposing to celebrate her year of Jubilee by levying new taxes on her people, in the form of penny and pound contributions to build a monument to Prince Albert.

The year of Jubilee! While under the eyes of the Queen her Irish subjects are being evicted from their holdings at the point of the bayonet; their cottages burned to the ground; aged and helpless men and women and newborn children, alike left crouching on the highways, under bridges, hayricks and hedges, crowded into poorhouses, jails and prisons, to expiate their crimes growing out of poverty on the one hand and patriotism on the other.

"A far more fitting way to celebrate the year of Jubilee would be for the Queen to scatter the millions h.o.a.rded in her private vaults among her needy subjects, to mitigate, in some measure, the miseries they have endured from generation to generation; to inaugurate some grand improvement in her system of education; to extend still further the civil and political rights of her people; to suggest, perchance, an Inviolable Homestead Bill for Ireland, and to open the prison doors to her n.o.ble priests and patriots.

"But instead of such worthy ambitions in the fiftieth year of her reign, what does the Queen propose? With her knowledge and consent, committees of ladies are formed in every county, town and village in all the colonies under her flag, to solicit these penny and pound contributions, to be placed at her disposal.

"Ladies go from house to house, not only to the residences of the rich, but to the cottages of the poor, through all the marts of trade, the fields, the factories, begging pennies for the Queen from servants and day-laborers."

These forced collections are not entirely for the benefit of the Queen, but are to be appropriated also to a vast variety of local objects and inst.i.tutions.

THE OUTLOOK OF DIOGENES.

The ancient philosopher Diogenes, whom even the presence of Alexander could not overawe, is one of the most marked and heroic figures of ancient history. It is said "The Athenians admired his contempt for comfort, and allowed him a wide lat.i.tude of comment and rebuke.

Practical good was the chief aim of his philosophy; for literature and the fine arts he did not conceal his disdain. He laughed at men of letters for reading the sufferings of Ulysses while neglecting their own; at musicians who spent in stringing their lyres the time which would have been much better employed in making their own discordant natures harmonious; at savants for gazing at the heavenly bodies while sublimely incognizant of earthly ones; at orators who studied how to enforce truth, but not how to practice it. * * * When asked what business he was proficient in, he answered, 'to command men.'"

Psychometry brings up these ancient characters as vividly and truthfully as history. Such psychometric descriptions are a continual miracle. How the psychometers, knowing not of whom they are speaking, guided only by a mysterious intuition, should speak of the most ancient characters as familiarly and truly as of our acquaintances to-day, will ever stand as a psychic miracle, to ill.u.s.trate the Divine Wisdom that established such a power in man. This is the daily experience of Mrs. Buchanan. Her description of Diogenes was as follows:

"I think this is an ancient. There is something quaint about him. He does not seem to follow anything or anybody. He lived a natural life, indifferent to current teachings. He had peculiar original ideas of his own as to life and its purposes, and seems to be a man of philanthropic nature, not aesthetic, but very indifferent as to personal appearance and habits, or as to pleasing people, not at all fastidious. He did not mind people's opinions in the least. They never disturbed him.

"He had enough combativeness to fight his way through difficulties. He had great self-reliance, and did not mind obstacles. If he had to take part in disturbances, he was ready, and had tact and tactics. He had a peculiar power of governing men, and a peculiar way of gaining confidence and esteem. He did not show off at all, and was not at all condescending. He had a great deal of sagacity. He regarded as trifles things people considered as momentous.

"(To what country did he belong?) He was probably a Greek, but he did not accord with anything of his time. He lived in the future and antic.i.p.ated great changes. He did not agree with any contemporary religion, politics, fas.h.i.+ons or manners, but was very sarcastic upon them. He was a philosopher, devoted to the useful, and cared nothing for the ornamental, either in architecture, fas.h.i.+ons or anything else. He might not make war on the religion as he was not rancorous or rebellious, but he had different ideas in himself, and was candid in expressing them. He does not give much attention to modern times, but if he were here he would enjoy modern improvements and benevolence, but would denounce our fas.h.i.+ons and our bigotry, and teach a primitive style of living."

Let us invoke the strong spirit of Diogenes whose st.u.r.dy freedom of thought was like that of Walt Whitman, to cooperate in the review of modern life. Such men are greatly needed to review a corrupt civilization; and where is the civilization now, where was there ever a civilization that was not corrupt? The function of Diogenes is not performed either by the pulpit or the press. A few special journals are terribly severe on special evils, but the reformatory words of the press generally are few and far between, in comparison to what is needed. The JOURNAL OF MAN does not propose to fill the hiatus and make war upon the myriad evils of society, but it must speak out, now and then, like Diogenes, especially when others neglect their duty.

What is the condition of our legislative bodies? Where is there one that does not provoke sharp criticism? The Albany correspondent of the _N. Y. Sun_, speaking of the legislative adjournment, says; "Mr. William F. Sheehan, leader of the Democratic minority to the a.s.sembly, summed up the work of the Legislature of 1887 when in his address on the floor of the a.s.sembly on the day of final adjournment, he said: 'Prayer will ascend from thousands of hearts of the citizens of this State at noon to-day for their deliverance from this Legislature. It began its session with the corrupt election of a United States Senator. It lived in bribery, and it dies a farce.'

No one here regrets the adjournment except the gamblers and the lobbyists. Even the lobbyists would be glad for a vacation, as their labors in bidding for the legislative cattle the last month have been most arduous. The people of Albany look on the Legislature as a pestilence to which they must yearly submit, and they welcome its departure as a farmer does the going of a swarm of locusts from his fields.

"Whatever else may be said about the Legislature of 1887, no one ever accused it of being honest, and there is no doubt that it was industrious."

This corrupt Legislature pa.s.sed two very discreditable bills which would have been made positively infamous if it had not been for the active opposition of a few friends of liberty. One of these bills was designed to add to the stringency of the present obstructive medical law; the other was designed to a.s.sist the labors of Anthony Comstock in interrupting the circulation of popular physiological literature, under pretence of suppressing obscenity.

In the Legislature of Pennsylvania, the law designed to suppress the cultivation of spiritual science by severe penalties, was favorably reported by a committee but prevented by popular indignation from pa.s.sing. Yet the people were not sufficiently alert to prevent legislation in favor of that monopoly the Standard Oil Company, which is considered a betrayal of justice.

In Illinois a bill was pa.s.sed in the Senate and came near pa.s.sing in the House, which would have abolished all medical freedom and made it a crime for any one but a licensed doctor to help the sick in any way, even by a prayer. Verily the spirit of American liberty does not pervade American communities and American legislatures.

In Ma.s.sachusetts the Old Puritanic Sunday Laws having fallen into "_innocuous desuetude_," an attempt to give them a partial enforcement in Boston compelled a little legislative action and the result was what might have been expected in a State in which religious opinions are allowed to interfere with the credibility of a witness, and in which Diogenes, if he were here, would be struck with the vast inconsistency between the creed of Christendom and its practice, and the vast disparity between the progress of modern knowledge and the effete system of education in our Universities. He would wonder why modern colleges are more interested in the details of Greek life and letters than in the beneficent sciences of to-day of which the Greeks knew nothing.

He would wonder why the edicts of the Pagan emperor, Constantine, concerning the observance of Sunday are observed and enforced as a religious duty, while the Divine love inculcated by Jesus Christ, which forbids all strife and war, is no more regarded by Christian nations than by the rulers of ancient Rome.

He would look into the schools and universities professedly devoted to science and literature, and ask why they have even less freedom of discussion and thought than the schools of Athens, every professor being interested to discourage the investigation of novelties in philosophy instead of being ready to welcome original investigation.

Under the new Sunday law of Ma.s.sachusetts, Sunday trains and steamboat lines are at the mercy of the railroad commissioners, who can stop every one of them; but boating, yachting, and carriage driving on Sunday are free to all who have the money to pay for them. But while outdoor frolic is free-and-easy, indoor enjoyment is prohibited.

Everybody is liable to five dollar fines for _attending_ "any sport, game, or play" on Sunday, unless it has been licensed, and private families never ask a license for their own amus.e.m.e.nts. But _to be present_ on Sunday "_at any dancing_," brings a liability to a $50 fine for each offence! What a terrible thing dancing is to be sure, that looking on should cost $50, while a frolic in boating and yachting is unexceptionably holy, and the fast young men may kick up a dust, kill the horses, and smash the buggies with impunity, or kill themselves by rowing in the hot sun, under whiskey stimulus on Sunday.