Part 20 (2/2)

Beauty lies in harmony, not in contrast; and harmony is refinement; therefore, there must be a fineness of the senses if we are to appreciate harmony. The aesthetic harmony of nature is lost upon him who has coa.r.s.e senses. The world to him is narrow and barren. In life about us, there exist inexhaustible fonts of aesthetic enjoyment, before which men pa.s.s as insensible as the brutes seeking their enjoyment in those sensations which are crude and showy, since they are the only ones accessible to them.

Now, from the enjoyment of gross pleasures, vicious habits very often spring. Strong stimuli, indeed, do not render acute, but blunt the senses, so that they require stimuli more and more accentuated and more and more gross.

_Onanism_, so often found among normal children of the lower cla.s.ses, alcoholism, fondness for watching sensual acts of adults--these things represent the enjoyment of those unfortunate ones whose intellectual pleasures are few, and whose senses are blunted and dulled. Such pleasures kill the man within the individual, and call to life the beast.

[Ill.u.s.tration: _S_--Sense, _C_--Nerve centre, _M_--Motor.]

Indeed from the physiological point of view, the importance of the education of the senses is evident from an observation of the scheme of the diagrammatic arc which represents the functions of the nervous system. The external stimulus acts upon the organ of sense, and the impression is transmitted along the centripetal way to the nerve centre--the corresponding motor impulse is elaborated, and is transmitted along the centrifugal path to the organ of motion, provoking a movement. Although the arc represents diagrammatically the mechanism of reflex spinal actions, it may still be considered as a fundamental key explaining the phenomena of the more complex nervous mechanisms.

Man, with the peripheral sensory system, gathers various stimuli from his environment. He puts himself thus in direct communication with his surroundings. The psychic life develops, therefore, in relation to the system of nerve centres; and human activity which is eminently social activity, manifests itself through acts of the individual--manual work, writing, spoken language, etc.--by means of the psych.o.m.otor organs.

Education should guide and perfect the development of the three periods, the two peripheral and the central; or, better still, since the process fundamentally reduces itself to the nerve centres, education should give to psychosensory exercises the same importance which it gives to psych.o.m.otor exercises.

Otherwise, we _isolate_ man from his _environment_. Indeed, when with _intellectual culture_ we believe ourselves to have completed education, we have but made thinkers, whose tendency will be to live without the world. We have not made practical men. If, on the other hand, wis.h.i.+ng through education to prepare for practical life; we limit ourselves to exercising the psych.o.m.otor phase, we lose sight of the chief end of education, which is to put man in direct communication with the external world.

Since _professional work_ almost always requires man to make _use of his surroundings_, the technical schools are not forced to return to the very beginnings of education, sense exercises, in order to supply the great and universal lack.

CHAPTER XV

INTELLECTUAL EDUCATION

”... To lead the child from the education of the senses to ideas.”

_Edward Seguin._

The sense exercises const.i.tute a species of auto-education, which, if these exercises be many times repeated, leads to a perfecting of the child's psychosensory processes. The directress must intervene to lead the child from sensations to ideas--from the concrete to the abstract, and to the a.s.sociation of ideas. For this, she should use a method tending to isolate the inner attention of the child and to fix it upon the perceptions--as in the first lessons his objective attention was fixed, through isolation, upon single stimuli.

The teacher, in other words, when she gives a lesson must seek to limit the field of the child's consciousness to the object of the lesson, as, for example, during sense education she isolated the sense which she wished the child to exercise.

For this, knowledge of a special technique is necessary. The educator must, ”_to the greatest possible extent, limit his intervention; yet he must not allow the child to weary himself in an undue effort of auto-education_.”

It is here, that the factor of individual limitation and differing degrees of perception are most keenly felt in the teacher. In other words, in the quality of this intervention lies the art which makes up the individuality of the teacher.

A definite and undoubted part of the teacher's work is that of teaching an exact nomenclature.

She should, in most cases, p.r.o.nounce the necessary names and adjectives without adding anything further. These words she should p.r.o.nounce distinctly, and in a clear strong voice, so that the _various sounds_ composing the word may be distinctly and plainly perceived by the child.

So, for example, touching the smooth and rough cards in the first tactile exercise, she should say, ”This is smooth. This is rough,”

repeating the words with varying modulations of the voice, always letting the tones be clear and the enunciation very distinct. ”Smooth, smooth, smooth. Rough, rough, rough.”

In the same way, when treating of the sensations of heat and cold, she must say, ”This is cold.” ”This is hot.” ”This is ice-cold.” ”This is tepid.” She may then begin to use the generic terms, ”heat,” ”more heat,” ”less heat,” etc.

_First._ ”The lessons in nomenclature must consist simply in provoking the a.s.sociation of the name with the object, or with the abstract idea which the name represents.” Thus the _object_ and the _name_ must be united when they are received by the child's mind, and this makes it most necessary that no other word besides the name be spoken.

_Second._ The teacher must always _test_ whether or not her lesson has attained the end she had in view, and her tests must be made to come within the restricted field of consciousness, provoked by the lesson on nomenclature.

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