The Task of Social Hygiene Part 10

"The provision under diet and regimen of columns for 'drug habits, if any'--tea, coffee, alcohol, nicotine, morphia, etc.--would have a suggestive value and operate in the direction of the simple life and a reverence for the body. Some good aphorisms might be strewed in, such as:

"'If anything is sacred, the human body is sacred' (Whitman).

"As young people circulate their 'Books of Likes and Dislikes,' etc., and thus in an entertaining way provide each other with insight into mutual character, so the Life-History need not be an _arcanum_--at least where people have nothing to be ashamed of. It would be a very trying ordeal, no doubt, to admit even intimate friends to this confidence.

_But as eugenics spread, concealment of taint will become almost impracticable_, and the facts may as well be confessed. But even then there will be limitations. There might be an esoteric book for the individual's own account of himself. Such important items as the incidence of p.u.b.erty (though notorious in some communities) could not well be included in a book open even to the family circle, for generations to come. The quiescence of the genital sense, the sedatives naturally occurring, important as these are, and occupying the consciousness in so large a degree, would find no place; nevertheless, a private journal of the facts would help to steady the individual, and prove a check against disrespect to his body.

"As the facts of individual evolution would be noted, so likewise would those of dissolution. The first signs of decay--the teeth, the elasticity of body and mind--would provide a valuable sphere for all who are disposed to the diary-habit. The journals of individuals with a gift for introspection would furnish valuable material for psychologists in the future. Life would be cleansed in many ways. Journals would not have to be bowdlerized, like Marie Bashkirtseff's, for the morbidity that gloats on the forbidden would have a lesser scope, much that is now regarded as disgraceful being then accepted as natural and right.

"The book might have several volumes, and that for the periods of infancy and childhood might need to be less private than the one for p.u.b.erty. More, in his _Utopia_, demands that lovers shall learn to know each other as they really are, i.e. naked. That is now the most Utopian thing in More's _Utopia_. But the lovers might communicate their life-histories to each other as a preliminary.

"The whole plan would, of course, finally have to be over-hauled by the so-called 'man of the world.'"

Not everyone may agree with this conception of the Life-History Alb.u.m and its uses. Some will prefer a severely dry and bald record of measurements. At the present time, however, there is room for very various types of such doc.u.ments. The important point is to realize that, in some form or another, a record of this kind from birth or earlier is practicable, and const.i.tutes a record which is highly desirable alike on personal, social, and scientific grounds.

FOOTNOTES:

[147] Dr. Scott Nearing, "Race Suicide _versus_ Over-Population," _Popular Science Monthly_, January, 1911. And from the biological side Professor Bateson concludes (_Biological Fact and the Structure of Society_, p.

23) that "it is in a decline in the birth-rate that the most promising omen exists for the happiness of future generations."

[148] Galton himself, the grandson of Erasmus Darwin, and the half-cousin of Charles Darwin, may be said to furnish a n.o.ble ill.u.s.tration of an unconscious process of eugenics. (He has set forth his ancestry in _Memories of My Life_.) On his death, the editor of the _Popular Science Monthly_ wrote, referring to the fact that Galton was nominated to succeed William James in the honorary members.h.i.+p of an Academy of Science: "These two men are the greatest whom he has known. James possessed the more complicated personality; but they had certain common traits--a combination of perfect aristocracy with complete democracy, directness, kindliness, generosity, and n.o.bility beyond all measure. It has been said that eugenics is futile because it cannot define its end.

The answer is simple--we want men like William James and Francis Galton"

(_Popular Science Monthly_, _March_, 1911.) Probably most of those who were brought, however slightly, in contact with these two fine personalities will subscribe to this conclusion.

[149] Galton chiefly studied the families to which men of intellectual ability belong, especially in his _Hereditary Genius_ and _English Men of Science_; various kinds of pathological families have since been investigated by Karl Pearson and his co-workers (see the series of _Biometrika_); the pedigrees of the defective cla.s.ses (especially the feeble-minded and epileptic) are now being accurately worked out, as by G.o.dden, at Vineland, New Jersey, and Davenport, in New York (see e.g.

_Eugenics Review_, April, 1911, and _Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease_, November, 1911).

[150] "When once more the importance of good birth comes to be recognized in a new sense," wrote W.C.D. Whetham and Mrs. Whetham (in _The Family and the Nation_, p. 222), "when the innate physical and mental qualities of different families are recorded in the central sociological department or scientifically reformed College of Arms, the pedigrees of all will be known to be of supreme interest. It would be understood to be more important to marry into a family with a good hereditary record of physical and mental and moral qualities than it ever has been considered to be allied to one with sixteen quarterings."

[151] The importance of such biographical records of apt.i.tude and character are so great that some, like Schallmayer (_Vererbung und Auslese_, 2nd ed., 1910, p. 389) believe that they must be made universally obligatory. This proposal, however, seems premature.

[152] In many undesigned and unforeseen ways these registers may be of immense value. They may even prove the means of overthrowing our pernicious and destructive system of so-called "education." A step in this direction has been suggested by Mr. R.T. Bodey, Inspector of Elementary Schools, at a meeting of the Liverpool branch of the Eugenics Education Society: "Education facilities should be carefully distributed with regard to the scientific likelihood of their utilization to the maximum of national advantage, and this not for economic reasons only, but because it was cruel to drag children from their own to a different sphere of life, and cruel to the cla.s.s they deserted. Since the activities of the nation and the powers of the children were alike varied in kind and degree, the most natural plan would be to sort them both out, and then design a school system expressly in order to fit one to the other. At present there was no fixed purpose, but a perpetual riot of changes, resulting in distraction of mind, discontinuity of purpose, and increase of cost, while happiness decayed because desires grew faster than possessions or the sense of achievement. The only really scientific basis for a national system of education would be a full knowledge of the family history of each child. With more perfect cla.s.sification of family talent the need of scholars.h.i.+ps of transplantation would become less, for each of them was the confession of an initial error in placing the child. Then there would be more money to be spared for industrial research, travelling and art students.h.i.+ps, and other aids to those who had the rare gift of original thought"

(_British Medical Journal_, November 18, 1911).

[153] I should add that there is one obstacle, viz. expense. When the present chapter was first published in its preliminary form as an article in the _Nineteenth Century and After_ (May, 1906), Galton, always alive to everything bearing on the study of Eugenics, wrote to me that he had been impressed by the generally sympathetic reception my paper had received, and that he felt encouraged to consider whether it was possible to begin giving such certificates at once. He asked for my views, among others, as to the ground which should be covered by such certificates. The programme I set forth was somewhat extensive, as I considered that the applicant must not only bring evidence of a sound ancestry, but also submit to anthropological, psychological, and medical examination. Galton eventually came to the conclusion that the expenses involved by the scheme rendered it for the present impracticable. My opinion was, and is, that though the charge for such a certificate might in the first place be prohibitive for most people, a few persons might find it desirable to seek, and advantageous to possess, such certificates, and that it is worth while at all events to make a beginning.

[154] Mannhardt, _Wald-und Feldkulte_, 1875, Vol. I, pp. 422 _et seq._ I have discussed seasonal erotic festivals in a study of "The Phenomena of s.e.xual Periodicity," _Studies in the Psychology of s.e.x_, Vol. I.

[155] Thus we read in a small popular periodical: "I am prepared to back human nature against all the cranks in Christendom. Human nature will endure a faddist so long as he does not interfere with things it prizes.

One of these things is the right to select its partner for life. If a man loves a girl he is not going to give her up because she happens to have an aunt in a lunatic asylum or an uncle who has epileptic fits,"

etc. In the same way it may be said that a man will allow nothing to interfere with his right to eat such food as he chooses, and is not going to give up a dish he likes because it happens to be peppered with a.r.s.enic. It may be so, let us grant, among savages. The growth of civilization lies in ever-extended self-control guided by foresight.

[156] I have summarized some of the evidence on these points, especially that showing that s.e.xual attraction tends to be towards like persons and not, as was formerly supposed, towards the unlike, in _Studies in the Psychology of s.e.x_, Vol. IV, "s.e.xual Selection in Man."

[157] In other words, the process of tumescence is gradual and complex.

See Havelock Ellis, _Studies in the Psychology of s.e.x_, Vol. III, "The a.n.a.lysis of the s.e.xual Impulse."

[158] As Roswell Johnson remarks ("The Evolution of Man and its Control,"

_Popular Science Monthly_, January, 1910): "While it is undeniable that love when once established defies rational considerations, yet we must remark that s.e.xual selection proceeds usually through two stages, the first being one of mere mutual attraction and interest. It is in this stage that the will and reason are operative, and here alone that any considerable elevation of standard may be effective."

[159] Galton looked upon eugenics as fitted to become a factor in religion (_Essays in Eugenics_, p. 68). It may, however, be questioned whether this consummation is either probable or desirable. The same religious claim has been made for socialism. But, as Dr. Eden Paul remarks in a recent pamphlet on _Socialism and Eugenics_, "Whereas both Socialism and Eugenics are concerned solely with the application of the knowledge gained by experience to the amelioration of the human lot, it seems preferable to dispense with religious terminology, and to regard the two doctrines as complementary parts of the great modern movement known by the name of Humanism." Personally, I do not consider that either Socialism or Eugenics can be regarded as coming within the legitimate sphere of religion, which I have elsewhere attempted to define (Conclusion to _The New Spirit_).

[160] J. Gra.s.set, in Dr. A. Marie's _Traite International de Psychologie Pathologique_, 1910, Vol. I, p. 25. Gra.s.set proceeds to discuss the principles which must guide the physician in such consultations.

[161] This has been clearly realized by the German Society of Eugenics or "Racial Hygiene," as it is usually termed in Germany (Internationale Gesellschaft fur Ra.s.sen-Hygiene), founded by Dr. Alfred Ploetz, with the co-operation of many distinguished physicians and men of science, "to further the theory and practice of racial hygiene." It is a chief aim of this Society to encourage the registration by the members of the biological and other physical and psychic characteristics of themselves and their families, in order to obtain a body of data on which conclusions may eventually be based; the members undertake not to enter on a marriage except they are a.s.sured by medical investigation of both parties that the union is not likely to cause disaster to either partner or to the offspring. The Society also admits a.s.sociates who only occupy themselves with the scientific aspects of its work and with propaganda.

In England the Eugenics Education Society (with its organ the _Eugenics Review_) has done much to stimulate an intelligent interest in eugenics.

[162] How influential public opinion may be in the selection of mates is indicated by the influence it already exerts--in less than a century--in the limitation of offspring. This is well marked in some parts of France. Thus, concerning a rural district near the Garonne, Dr. Belbeze, who knows it thoroughly, writes (_La Neurasthenie Rurale_, 1911): "Public opinion does not at present approve of multiple procreation.

Large families, there can be no doubt, are treated with contempt.

Couples who produce a numerous progeny are looked on, with a wink, as 'maladroits,' which in this region is perhaps the supreme term of abuse.... Public opinion is all-powerful, and alone suffices to produce restraint, when foresight is not adequate for this purpose."

VII

RELIGION AND THE CHILD

Religious Education in Relation to Social Hygiene and to Psychology--The Psychology of the Child--The Contents of Children's Minds--The Imagination of Children--How far may Religion be a.s.similated by Children?--Unfortunate Results of Early Religious Instruction--p.u.b.erty the Age for Religious Education--Religion as an Initiation into a Mystery--Initiation among Savages--The Christian Sacraments--The Modern Tendency as regards Religious Instruction--Its Advantages--Children and Fairy Tales--The Bible of Childhood--Moral Training.

It is a fact as strange as it is unfortunate that the much-debated question of the religious education of children is almost exclusively considered from the points of view of the sectarian and the secularist.

In a discussion of this question we are almost certain to be invited to take part in an unedifying wrangle between Church and Chapel, between religion and secularism. That is the strange part of it, that it should seem impossible to get away from this sectarian dispute as to the abstract claims of varying religious bodies. The unfortunate part of it is that in this quarrel the interests of the community, the interests of the child, even the interests of religion are alike disregarded.

If we really desire to reach a sound conclusion on a matter which is unquestionably of great moment, both for the child and for the community of which he will one day become a citizen, we must resolutely put into the background, as of secondary importance, the cries of contending sects, religious or irreligious. The first place here belongs to the psychologist, who is building up the already extensive edifice of knowledge concerning the real nature of the child and the contents and growth of the youthful mind, and to the practical teacher who is in touch with that knowledge and can bring it to the test of actual experience. Before considering what drugs are to be administered we must consider the nature of the organism they are to be thrust into.

The mind of the child is at once logical and extravagant, matter-of-fact and poetic or rather mytho-poeic. This combination of apparent opposites, though it often seems almost incomprehensible to the adult, is the inevitable outcome of the fact that the child's dawning intelligence is working, as it were, in a vacuum. In other words, the child has not acquired the two endowments which chiefly give character to the whole body of the adult's beliefs and feelings. He is without the p.u.b.ertal expansion which fills out the mind with new personal and altruistic impulses and transforms it with emotion that is often dazzling and sometimes distorting; and he has not yet absorbed, or even gained the power of absorbing, all those beliefs, opinions, and mental att.i.tudes which the race has slowly acquired and transmitted as the traditional outcome of its experiences.

The intellectual processes of children, the att.i.tude and contents of the child's mind, have been explored during recent years with a care and detail that have never been brought to that study before. This is not a matter of which the adult can be said to possess any instinctive or matter-of-course knowledge. Adults usually have a strange apt.i.tude to forget entirely the facts of their lives as children, and children are usually, like peoples of primitive race, very cautious in the deliberate communication of their mental operations, their emotions, and their ideas. That is to say that the child is equally without the internally acquired complex emotional nature which has its kernel in the s.e.xual impulse, and without the externally acquired mental equipment which may be summed up in the word tradition. But he possesses the vivid activities founded on the exercise of his senses and appet.i.tes, and he is able to reason with a relentless severity from which the traditionalized and complexly emotional adult shrinks back with horror.

The child creates the world for himself, and he creates it in his own image and the images of the persons he is familiar with. Nothing is sacred to him, and he pushes to the most daring extremities--as it seems to the adult--the arguments derived from his own personal experiences.

He is unable to see any distinction between the natural and the supernatural, and he is justified in this conviction because, as a matter of fact, he himself lives in what for most adults would be a supernatural atmosphere; most children see visions with closed and sometimes with open eyes;[163] they are not infrequently subject to colour-hearing and other synaesthetic sensations; and they occasionally hear hallucinatory voices. It is possible, indeed, that this is the case with all children in some slight degree, although the faculty dies out early and is easily forgotten because its extraordinary character was never recognized.

Of 48 Boston children, says Stanley Hall,[164] 20 believed the sun, moon, and stars to live, 16 thought flowers could feel, and 15 that dolls would feel pain if burnt. The sky was found the chief field in which the children exercise their philosophic minds. About three-quarters of them thought the world a plain with the sky like a bowl turned over it, sometimes believing that it was of such thin texture that one could easily break through, though so large that much floor-sweeping was necessary in Heaven. The sun may enter the ground when it sets, but half the children thought that at night it rolls or flies away, or is blown or walks, or G.o.d pulls it higher up out of sight, taking it up into Heaven, according to some putting it to bed, and even taking off its clothes and putting them on again in the morning, or again, it is believed to lie under the trees at night and the angels mind it. G.o.d, of whom the children always hear so much, plays a very large part in these conceptions, and is made directly responsible for all cosmic phenomena.

Thus thunder to these American children was G.o.d groaning or kicking or rolling barrels about, or turning a big handle, or grinding snow, or breaking something, or rattling a big hammer; while the lightning is due to G.o.d putting his finger out, or turning the gas on quick, or striking matches, or setting paper on fire. According to Boston children, G.o.d is a big, perhaps a blue, man, to be seen in the sky, on the clouds, in church, or even in the streets. They declare that G.o.d comes to see them sometimes, and they have seen him enter the gate. He makes lamps, babies, dogs, trees, money, etc., and the angels work for him. He looks like a priest, or a teacher, or papa, and the children like to look at him; a few would themselves like to be G.o.d. His house in the sky may be made of stone or brick; birds, children, and Santa Claus live with G.o.d.

Birds and beasts, their food and their furniture, as Burnham points out, all talk to children; when the dew is on the gra.s.s "the gra.s.s is crying," the stars are candles or lamps, perhaps cinders from G.o.d's stove, b.u.t.terflies are flying pansies, icicles are Christmas candy.

Children have imaginary play-brothers and sisters and friends, with whom they talk. Sometimes G.o.d talks with them. Even the prosiest things are vivified; the tracks of dirty feet on the floor are flowers; a creaking chair talks; the shoemaker's nails are children whom he is driving to school; a pedlar is Santa Claus.

Miss Miriam Levy once investigated the opinions of 560 children, boys and girls, between the ages of 4 and 14, as to how the man in the moon got there. Only 5 were unable to offer a serious explanation; 48 thought there was no man there at all; 50 offered a scientific explanation of the phenomena; but all the rest, the great majority, presented imaginative solutions which could be grouped into seventeen different cla.s.ses.

Such facts as these--which can easily be multiplied and are indeed familiar to all, though their significance is not usually realized--indicate the special tendencies of the child in the religious sphere. He is unable to follow the distinctions which the adult is pleased to make between "real," "spiritual" and "imaginary" beings. To him such distinctions do not exist. He may, if he so pleases, adopt the names or such characteristics as he chooses, of the beings he is told about, but he puts them into his own world, on a footing of more or less equality, and he decides himself what their fate is to be. The adult's supreme beings by no means always survive in the struggle for existence which takes place in the child's imaginative world. It was found among many thousand children entering the city schools of Berlin that Red Riding Hood was better known than G.o.d, and Cinderella than Christ. That is the result of the child's freedom from the burden of tradition.

Yet at the same time the opposite though allied peculiarity of childhood--the absence of the emotional developments of p.u.b.erty which deepen and often cloud the mind a few years later--is also making itself felt. Extravagant as his beliefs may appear, the child is an uncompromising rationalist and realist. His supposed imaginativeness is indeed merely the result of his logical insistence that all the new phenomena presented to him shall be thought of in terms of himself and his own environment. His wildest notions are based on precise, concrete, and personal facts of his own experience. That is why he is so keen a questioner of grown-up people's ideas, and a critic who may sometimes be as dangerous and destructive as Bishop Colenso's Zulus. Most children before the age of thirteen, as Earl Barnes states, are inquirers, if not sceptics.

If we clearly realize these characteristics of the childish mind, we cannot fail to understand the impression made on it by religious instruction. The statements and stories that are repeated to him are easily accepted by the child in so far, and in so far only, as they answer to his needs; and when accepted they are a.s.similated, which means that they are compelled to obey the laws of his own mental world. In so far as the statements and stories presented to him are not acceptable or cannot be a.s.similated, it happens either that they pa.s.s by him unnoticed, or else that he subjects them to a cold and matter-of-fact logic which exerts a dissolving influence upon them.

Now a few of the ideas of religion are a.s.similable by the child, and notably the idea of a G.o.d as the direct agent in cosmic phenomena; some of the childish notions I have quoted ill.u.s.trate the facility with which the child adopts this idea. He adopts, that is, what may be called the hard precise skeleton of the idea, and imagines a colossal magician, of anthropomorphic (if not paidomorphic) nature, whose operations are curious, though they altogether fail to arouse any mysterious reverence or awe for the agent. Even this is not very satisfactory, and Stanley Hall, in the spirit of Froebel, considers that the best result is attained when the child knows no G.o.d but his own mother.[165] But for the most part the ideas of religion cannot be accepted or a.s.similated by children at all; they were not made by children or for children, but represent the feelings, thoughts, and experiences of men, and sometimes even of very exceptional and abnormal men. "The child," it has been said, "no doubt has the psychical elements out of which the religious experience is evolved, just as the seed has the promise of the fruit which will come in the fullness of time. But to say, therefore, that the average child is religious, or capable of receiving the usual advanced religious instruction, is equivalent to saying that the seed is the fruit or capable of being converted into fruit before the fullness of time."[166] The child who grows devout and becomes anxious about the state of his soul is a morbid and unwholesome child; if he prefers praying for the conversion of his play-fellows to joining them in their games he is not so much an example of piety as a pathological case whose future must be viewed with anxiety; and to preach religious duties to children is exactly the same, it has been well said, as to exhort them to imagine themselves married people and to inculcate on them the duties of that relation. Fortunately the normal child is usually able to resist these influences. It is the healthy child's impulse either to let them fall with indifference or to apply to them the instrument of his unmerciful logic.

Naturally, the adult, in self-defence, is compelled to react against this indifferent or aggressive att.i.tude of the child. He may be no match for the child in logic, and even unspeakably shocked by his daring inquiries, like an amiable old clergyman I knew when a Public School teacher in Australia; he went to a school to give Bible lessons, and was one day explaining how King David was a man after G.o.d's own heart, when a small voice was heard making inquiries about Uriah's wife; the small boy was hushed down by the shocked clergyman, and the cause of religion was not furthered in that school. But the adult knows that he has on his side tradition which has not yet been acquired by the child, and the inner emotional expansion which still remains unliberated in the child.