THE CHAOS IN MORAL TRAINING. 441 



what not to do. We do not have to take any position regarding 

 the intuitive character of moral distinctions or the a priori charac- 

 ter of moral laws to be sure that a child is intensely interested in 

 everything that concerns himself, and that what he does and how 

 other people react to it is a very intimate part of himself. To 

 decline to show the child the meaning of his acts, to hold that his 

 desire to know their reasons (that is, their meaning) is a sign of 

 depravity, is to insult his intelligence and deaden his spontaneous 

 interest in the whys and wherefores of life an interest which is 

 the parent's strongest natural ally in moral training. 



Secondly, in and so far as the child can not see the meaning 

 and value of his acts and value them for himself, it becomes ab- 

 surd to insist upon questions of morality in connection with 

 them. Make the widest possible allowance for the necessity that 

 a child perform acts, the bearing of which he can not realize for 

 himself, and the contradiction in the present method is only em- 

 phasized as long as parents impress upon the children strictly 

 moral considerations in connection with such acts. Surely, if 

 morality means (as all moralists are agreed) not simply doing 

 certain acts, but doing them with certain motives and disposition, 

 rational training would emphasize the moral features of acts 

 only when it is possible for the child to appreciate something of 

 their meaning, and in other cases simply manage somehow to 

 get the acts done without saying anything about questions of 

 right and wrong. To continue the present method of holding, on 

 one side, that a child is so irrational that he can not see for him- 

 self the significance of his conduct, while, on the other, with re- 

 gard to these self-same acts, the child is punished as a moral de- 

 linquent, and has urged upon him, on moral grounds, the necessity 

 for doing them, is the height of theoretical absurdity and of prac- 

 tical confusion. Present methods seem to take both the intuitive 

 and utilitarian positions in their extreme forms, and then attempt 

 the combination of both. It is virtually assumed that prior to 

 instruction the child knows well enough what he should and 

 should not do ; that his acts have a conscious moral quality from 

 the first ; it is also assumed, to a large extent, that only by ap- 

 peal to external punishments and rewards can the child be got to 

 see any reason for doing the right and avoiding the wrong. Now 

 these two propositions are so related that they can not possibly 

 both be true, while both may be false and are both false unless 

 all contemporaneous tendencies in ethics are in a wrong direc- 

 tion.* 



* There is one basis upon which both views may be logically held total depravity. It 

 may then be assumed that the child knows the rigl t in advance, but can be got to do it 

 only through punishment. 

 VOL. XLV. 34 



