The Vitalized School | Page 2

that some people have more of life in a given time than others in the same time. In this sense, life may be measured by the number of reactions to objectives. These reactions may be increased by training. Two persons, in passing a shop-window, may not see the same objects; or one may see twice as many as the other, according to their ability to react. The man who was locked in a vault at the cemetery by accident, and was not discovered for an hour, thought he had spent four days in his imprisonment. He had really lived four days in a single hour by reason of the intensity of life during that hour.
=Illustrations.=--In the case of dreams, we are told that years may be condensed into minutes, or even seconds, by reason of the rapidity of reactions. The rapidity and intensity of these reactions make themselves manifest on the face of the dreamer. Beads of perspiration and facial contortions betoken intensity of feeling. In such an experience life is intense. If a mental or spiritual cyclometer could be used in such a case, it would make a high record of speed. Life sometimes touches bottom, and sometimes scales the heights. But the distance between these extremes varies greatly in different persons. The life of one may have but a single octave; of the other, eight, or a hundred, or a thousand. The life of Job is an apt illustration. No one has been able to sound the depths of his suffering, nor has any one been able to measure the heights of his exaltation. We may not readily compute the octaves in such a life as his.
=The complexity of life.=--It is not easy to think life, much less define it. The elements are so numerous as to baffle and bewilder the mind. It looks out at one from so many corners that it seems Argus-eyed. At one moment we see it on the Stock Exchange where men struggle and strive in a mad frenzy of competition; at another, in a quiet home, where a mother soothes her baby to sleep, where there is no competition but, rather, a sublime monopoly. Again, it manifests itself in the clanking of machinery where men are tunneling the mountain or constructing a canal to unite oceans; or, again, in the laboratory where the microscope is revealing the form of the snow crystal. One man is watching the movements of the heavenly bodies as they file by his telescope, while another writes a proclamation that makes free a race of people. Another man is leading an army into battle, while some Doctor MacClure is breasting the storm in the darkness as he goes forth on his mission of mercy.
=Manifestations of life.=--These manifestations of life men call trade, commerce, history, mathematics, science, nature, and philanthropy. And men write these words in books, and other men write other books trying to explain their meaning. Then, still others divide and subdivide, and science becomes the sciences, and mathematics becomes arithmetic, and algebra, and geometry, and trigonometry, and calculus, and astronomy. Here mathematics and science seem to merge. And, in time, history and geography come together, and sometimes strive for precedence.
Thus, books accumulate into libraries and so add another to the many elements of life. Then magazines are written to explain the books and their authors. The motive behind the book is analyzed in an effort to discover the workings of the author's mind and heart. In these revelations we sometimes hear the rippling of the brook, and sometimes the moan of the sea; sometimes the cooing of the dove, and sometimes the scream of the eagle; sometimes the bleating of the lamb, and sometimes the roaring of the lion. In them we see the moonbeams that play among the flowers and the lightning that rends the forest; the blossoms that filter from the trees and the avalanche that carries destruction; the rain that fructifies the earth and the hurricane that destroys.
=Life in literature.=--Back of these sights and sounds we discover men--Cicero, Demosthenes, Homer, Isaiah, Shakespeare, Milton, Dante. We trace the thoughts and emotions of these men and find literature. And in literature, again, we come upon another manifestation of life. Literature is what it is because these men were what they were. They saw and felt life to be large and so wrote it down large; and because they wrote it thus, what they wrote endures. They stood upon the heights and saw the struggles of man with himself, with other men, and with nature. This panorama generated thoughts and feelings in them, and these they could not but portray. And so literature and life are identical and not co?rdinates, as some would have us think.
=Life as subject matter in teaching.=--In teaching school, therefore, the subject