THE PHILOSOPHY OF MANUAL TRAINING. 647 



seven months of treatment in Group 2 he was graduated, and has for 

 the past three months been filling one of the most honorable positions 

 attainable in the walls of the prison, and is on a fair road to ultimate 

 parole release. 



" Our third division, Group 3, is one to which men are assigned 

 for general * mental quickening.' These pupils are nonsusceptible to 

 our parole regulations. They have failed habitually in trade school, 

 school of letters, and in some cases in demeanor markings. For this 

 group, out of fifty-one actual pupils we can show twenty-nine per 

 cent who have been sufficiently awakened mentally and physically 

 to be susceptible to reformatory measures and conditions governing 

 their parole release." 



According to the philosophy of life which I have tried to present 

 to you, evil is the absence of goodness, cold as opposed to heat, igno- 

 rance as contrasted with knowledge. It is a negative quality, and is 

 to be fought as such — not something to be met and dealt with in 

 itself, but something to be met and dealt with through its opposites. 

 This was the view of Socrates, as it was later of Emerson and many 

 other earnest souls. When carried out in any thoroughgoing way, 

 it changes the whole aspect of things. Evil ceases to be the great 

 central fact of philosophy and religion. Ahriman gives up his eternal 

 conflict with Ormuzd. The dualism of the moral world becomes a 

 strict monism; the one force of religion and morality is seen to be 

 righteousness. The voice of religion directs itself less and less against 

 evil — with only the good listening — and more and more to the reali- 

 zation of good. Morality concerns itself less with the things we 

 must not do, and more with the things we must do. It gives us no 

 longer the chill pictures of renunciation, of Anthony, and Simon 

 Stylites, and the rest, li\dng in caves and standing on pillars and 

 doing other useless and foolish things, but glowing pictures of a posi- 

 tive life, warmed with wholesome human passion, and directed to 

 wholesome human ends. 



" Whom man delights in, God delights in, too." 



And when this morality becomes touched with emotion, when this 

 passion for the perfect life has mixed with it the sentiment of rever- 

 ence for that goodly company of men and women who have passed 

 toward the same ideal, has mixed with it a sublime faith in the un- 

 seen world, in the eternal things that are yet to be — a faith still more 

 the child of knowledge and insight than of ignorance and superstition 

 ■ — then morality becomes religion and the human heart finds peace. 



It is in this spirit that manual training accomplishes its moral 

 work. It fights disease by setting free the forces that are health-giv- 

 ing. It conquers evil by the establishment of good. Such a moral 

 betterment results from the betterment of the organic tissue of the 



