The Growth of Thought | Page 9

and then it matters little to one whether himself advance, or others be kept back--since, in either case, the difference between him and them, the distinction chiefly enjoyed, is the same.
Now, the love of knowledge is prior in time to the love of distinction; it should seem then, that, with proper care, it might maintain the mastery over its rival. The child is delighted with the acquisition of new ideas, before it thinks of turning them to a vain-glorious account. It deserves to be considered, whether our modes of education, offering prizes and honors of scholarship, do not train into the ascendancy that love of distinction, which education ought and might keep subordinate; which in fact is one of the greatest hinderances to progress;--for when one's immediate aim is not truth itself, but the glory which attends the acquisition, he meets a thousand sidelong impulses from the straightforward search.
That knowledge is a good which grows by being shared, is a truth more fully apprehended, as the idea of knowledge is enlarged. It is measurably so, while taken for eminence in common studies and the received sciences. One's advance is facilitated by the advance of others.
Much more does this hold, when the distinction between intellectual culture and intellectual life is made, and the preference due to the latter apprehended.
When the missionary enterprize was a new thing, in favor of the missionary's being a married man was argued the advantage of having children trained up in a Christian way before the eyes of the heathen. But so completely has that expectation been disappointed, that now the missionaries send home their children to be educated; alleging the danger, lest their children become stumbling blocks, through the apparent little difference between them and the heathen children. And the difficulty is not, that they cannot there, as well as here, be taught Latin, Greek, Mathematics--all the received sciences-the branches of what is nominally education. It is not so much, that they cannot there be shielded from evil influences abroad; as that their children there want, what our children enjoy--the sight of magnificent enterprises; a spirit of inquiry and freedom breathing all around them; and the healthful contact and stimulus of multitudes of young minds, in the like process of intellectual and moral training. It is such nameless imperceptible influences, that awaken intellectual life, from the mind, and determine the future man more than the teaching, which is nominally education. Why else does the acknowledged excellence of the teaching in the Prussian schools do so little to quicken intellectual life--to form men of progressive thoughts?
We should be repaid the whole cost of the missionary enterprize, were it only in the clearness and importance of the lesson thus taught us, as otherwise we should hardly have suspected--the doctrine of our mutual dependencies and tendencies to a common average--how our intellectual life is subject to the law, "Whether one member suffer, all the members suffer with it."
We may hence take instruction, first, in the matter of educating our children. We have but half done our duty as parents, when we have joined with such of our neighbors as better appreciate, or readier furnish the means, of good instruction, to unite our children in a select school, furnished with competent masters and ample apparatus. The children of one neighborhood educate one another mainly. They receive from one another more of those impressions which form the mind and fix the after character, than all they get from their masters. The carefully trained will receive a deleterious impression from the neglected portion, despite of care to ward off evil influences. Or, however successfully care may be applied, that is but negative success. Our children still want the kindly stimulus to mental growth, to be realized in a whole community of young minds, all sharing the like wise training.
We may hence take occasion, secondly, to mark (what is not so obvious), that through life the same law binds us: the law, that our intellectual life depends more on the state of society in which we exist, than on our direct efforts at self-culture. Individual effort may give one great preeminence before his associates in any of the acknowledged sciences, though even in such their success facilitates his; and if he prizes the knowledge--the truth--for itself, rather than for the attending glory, he will find in another's success, that, "whether one member be honored, all the members rejoice with it." But distinctively is it so, in regard to the general progress of universal mind in justness of thought and sentiment--those new developed master ideas which mark the place of each successive age in the line of progression; and in regard to which, the masters in the received sciences are quite as often found lagging behind, as going before.
In regard to this, we are