THE AIM OF MODERN EDUCATION. 493 



end, we must set going adequate means. The machinery must be 

 competent to do the work. Here it is that the older methods 

 have been found wanting. They do not provide for life in its 

 totality. The answer may well be made that they were never 

 meant to. They attempted to deal only with one side of life — the 

 intellectual. The other side, the emotional, bodily life, was left 

 to the home. This division would not be amiss, if it were pos- 

 sible to so divide the child, and if both school and home were 

 equipped, to do their share of the work and received each its due 

 share of the child's time. But this is not the case, and, from the 

 very nature of our being, can not be the case. The child is not 

 divisible. It is a unit, a monistic child. The intellectual life 

 depends for its material upon the bodily sensations, and for its 

 motive and coloring upon the emotions. Separate these, and the 

 result is a crippling of the whole process of education. Separate 

 them very far, and the result is fatal. The emotions are the 

 inner springs of action, and upon the healthy life of the emotions 

 depend the joy and fullness of action. The poets have long 

 known this. It has been the burden of their singing. When we 

 love, then are we strong. It has been with them a divine intui- 

 tion. It might have been a direct induction, for it is not only the 

 teaching of the poets, but it is the teaching of life. The history 

 of all action is the history of expressed emotion. Every conflict 

 on the world's arena has been the drama of conflicting feeling. 

 Stint emotion, stifle feeling, and there comes the most dreadful of 

 all the soul's maladies — that fatal apathy which makes action im- 

 possible and life a stupid slumbering. And when action is gone, 

 when experience is curtailed, when sensations are limited, intel- 

 lection becomes feeble, for it has no stuff to work upon. Believe 

 me, the most terrible paralysis that can befall the human spirit 

 is the paralysis of feeling, the slow drying up of the emotions. 

 It is this that makes old age a tragedy and life a bitter, juiceless 

 thing. I would that we, who presume to teach children — for it is 

 a presumption — I would that we might early learn this lesson. 

 It would transform us into teachers of men. It is a truth beauti- 

 ful in its operation when we realize it and act upon it, terrible in 

 its operation when we lose sight of it and deny it. And this 

 same great truth, hit upon by poets and thinkers as they wan- 

 dered over the open fields or in the deep forests, under the hush 

 of the night or in the broad sunshine, is precisely the truth hit 

 upon by colder methods in the laboratory of the psychologist. 

 We have been discrediting "mere feeling," and asking for some- 

 thing more solid and enduring. It is much as if we scorned the 

 springs and brooks and still asked for broad rivers to float our 

 argosies upon. The emotions are the elements out of which is 

 built the whole life drama. They are the first terms in the syn- 



