and blossomed as the rose, of tired eyes that meeting yours saw something there that kindled anew the glow of gladness and the light of God's own Face. And then, mayhap, as your wearied limbs bear you down the sunset-crimsoned hill that leads into the valley of peace, you may sing of the feeling for literature as Petrarca sang of the voice of his beloved Laura:

"Let me but hear once more that breath of day
Sound in my ears as in my soul it sounds;

Singing, it surely wounds

And slays wrath and disdain; its brooding note

Quells all things vile and dark; Like frightened hounds,
Before that liquid gold they fly away."

ST. MARY'S College

OAKLAND, CALIFORNIA

BROTHER LEO

III

THE ULTIMATE AIM OF EDUCATION

It seems axiomatic that education is a means to human life itself. Obviously then the problem of education is identical with the problem of life, as the part is homologous to the whole. But the problem of human life has been the question of the ages. And the deepest need of this age is its solution anew, for man is his modern environment. For modern life, despite the brilliancy of its industrial and scientific achievements, fails to satisfy the deepest cravings of human nature. Indeed, there has seldom been a time in history when a larger proportion of lives were distraught with haste, conflicting purposes, aimlessness approaching despair, restlessness, discontentment, and resentful anger at injustices real or imagined. What we need is a new worldview, a more adequate insight into the essential values and aims of life. The old-religious formulas have ceased to convince and motivate us. We need a new concept of the pearl of the greatest price.

For the solution of this problem the first requisite is a criterion of values. This is to be found in man himself. Now the most elemental thing in human life, as in any living organism, is its biological needs. To deny life its needs is to repudiate life itself, a logical and biological absurdity. But in human life, as in all animal life, the instincts are the psychic counterparts of biological needs. To assert, therefore, that instincts must be gratified is to assert that biological needs must be satisfied. If all the instincts of a man were denied gratification the man would speedily die. If only part of his instincts are gratified his life is fractional and one-sided. And if certain vestigial instincts appear to be exceptions to this rule, a deeper insight will reveal the fact that their gratification, at least by sublimation, is still a subjective, if no longer an objective,

necessity. Now the gratification of an instinct brings pleasure. This is why William James approves Stevenson as saying: "For to miss the joy is to miss all." To act at the prompting of our instincts, to satisfy the instinctive wants of our own natures, this generates the joy that for each of us makes life worth the living. To this concept contemporaneous philosophy applies the term self-realization. Selfrealization is the ultimate aim of life.

This appeal to human nature furnishes a fixt point of departure for reasoning. While absolutely, of course, nothing is changeless, relatively speaking, human nature itself is the abiding entity. Biology teaches that the native equipment of man has not changed materially for thousands of years. So far then, as concerns the historic past, and the future that we are able to take a practical interest in, social evolution is essentially a matter of gradually adjusting the environment to the total human organism, so that what is native in the soul may express and realize itself. Be it understood then, once and for all, that human nature, not the social process, is the ultimate criterion of worth. To unfold the latent potentialities of the human spirit is the chief hope of social progress, and therefore a most important function of education.

The doctrine of self-realization is rescued from its apparent sensuality and selfishness by the range and diversity of the human instincts, and the necessity for satisfying them all in mutual proportion and harmonious variety. There is no instinct that should be supprest, as popularly supposed. Instead each instinct must be restrained to due proportions and guided to approved outlets, so as to afford opportunity for the like proportionate expression of all the other instincts. The sex instinct, for instance, if gratified in excess or in disapproved ways, thwarts all the best things in life, and ultimately destroys both itself and life. But rightly directed and related it not only performs its necessary function of reproduction, but gives rise to the sweetest and holiest of human experiences, and the noblest ideals of the spiritual life. Likewise, fighting had its function in an obsolescent

world, and, sublimated, may always be harnest to recreation and even reform; but if one allows himself to fight with housemates and friends presently the instincts of sociability and love will find no satisfaction. The present WorldWar is giving unlimited scope to the fighting instincts; but its very horror, psychologically stated, is that it frustrates so many other instincts of the peoples involved. The acquisitive and other instincts that prompt one to strive for business success assuredly have their place in life; but there are men who sacrifice on the altar of Mammon the companionship of their children, participation in community affairs, intellectual growth, and many other equally normal and important joys. But such antagonisms must all so far as possible be balanced in actual life. Indeed, oral self-restraint is nothing more nor less than the curbing of restive and impatient instincts, in order that others, equally important, if not so imperious, may have their opportunity. Only by securing this balance can the individual quell that war in his own members that has devastated so many lives.

But that self-realization is not a selfish, egoistic formula becomes most evident when one considers the so-called higher instincts. The whole matter becomes more concrete and real when we call these the social, rather than the higher, instincts. For such they are. This fact is brought into clear relief by the simple if not exhaustive classification of of the instincts suggested by Trotter,' namely: nutrition, reproduction, self-defense and herd-preservation. Falsom2 points out (and the concept is most illuminating) that conscience is the instinctive response to the voice of the herd. From this point of view the old self-calculating ethic is exploded, and it becomes obvious that our entire moral life is but an expression of the instincts of herd-preservation. This group of instincts accounts for all the heroic consecration, self-sacrifice and idealism that history and common life display. Who ever has observed the phenomena of human life aright, whether as revealed in history, literature, 1 Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War. 2 American Journal of Sociology, Jan., 1918.

religion, or the drab commonalities of the daily round, knows full well that an individual human unit is too shortlived and too insignificant to motivate itself. The grouppreserving instincts, being the latest acquisition of human nature, are less imperious and insistent than some of the impulses more universal in animal life. They are far more liable to be smothered under the crust of habits. But they are the distinctively human equipment, and life has always suffered vague unrest when they have been thwarted. The spiritual history of mankind abounds in illustrations of this fact. At an awful cost the Great War is teaching the world this ancient lesson again. All sorts of men and women have found their souls in its awful sacrifices for the safer, better world that is to be. The individualistic materialism, with which our prosperity cursed us till yesterday, is dying. The idealism latent in the modern soul is rising to unmeasurable power, and carries on. Thereby innumerable lives are experiencing the joy to miss which is, in the final appraisal of things human, to miss all. Thus almost without knowing it, we are finding a new world-view.

Such, then, is the doctrine of self-realization. Obviously the doctrine is an appeal to the divine rights of the individual life. Not a fraction of life, but the whole of it. It enfranchises the human personality, and glorifies that phase of it which is most distinctively human, and therefore most sublime. And when we generalize the principle, recognizing that in each and every individual inhere the same divine rights, we are arrived at the fundamental principle of both democracy and Christianity. Rousseau, the passion-ate prophet of modern democracy, declared that every individual has a right to be happy. Kant asserted that each individual has a right to be treated as an end in himself, and not as a means. Our forefathers paraphrased these dicta into the familiar words of the Declaration of Independence about every man's unalienable right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. And as for Christianity, Jesus placed the dignity and worth of individual life very close to the core of his system, for it is the inevitable in