William Torrey Harris

“ This category of self-activity is the fundamental form of our inward sense—i.e., of introspection—just as quality is the form of our external sense—i.e., sense-perception. Quality is the form of fate, and its insight sees that all things are what they are because the totality of conditions has necessitated them to be so. The category of self-activity is the form of freedom, and its insight sees that the supreme condition of everything is freedom, and that there is no fate except as secondary or derivative from freedom. In other words, the ultimate motive power in all force is will. ”

“ THE EDUCATION OF THE NEGRO. [1]
Hon. Robert C. Winthrop, the president of the board of trustees of the Peabody fund, said in his address, October 1, 1890, at the twenty-ninth meeting of that board: "If there be a race problem anywhere, time and education can alone supply its solution. But time without education will only render it the more insoluble. Continued ignorance is a remedy for nothing. It is itself the disease to be cured and eradicated. ”

“ The realm of religion, finally, implies the same fundamental category of free personality as all in all. For it looks upon all things as creations of an absolute Person who has made all things for the sake of the manifestation of His infinite freedom. ”

“ For the most fruitful part of all intellectual education is the acquisition of the general outline and the basal idea,—the categories, so to speak, of the provinces of human learning. This intellectual part of school education could not well be more accurately directed to aid the cause of civilization. For the kind of knowledge and mental discipline that conserves civil life is the knowledge that gives an insight into the dependence of the individual upon society. The school is busied with giving the pupil a knowledge of the conditions of physical nature and human nature ”

“ FICHTE'S system of philosophy is pre-eminently a philosophy of the free will. Free will is certainly not an object of external perception, but rather of introspection. When we look outwardly, and behold things and events in time and space, we contemplate each thing limited on all sides by other things; each event limited before and after by other events. Such limitation, according to the philosophy of Kant and Fichte, belongs to the category of quality. ”

“ Literature may be said, therefore, to reveal human nature. Its very elementary study in school makes the pupil acquainted with a hundred or more pieces of literary art, expressing for him with felicity his rarer and higher moods of feeling and thought. When, in mature age, we look back over our lives and recall to mind the influence that our schooldays brought us, the time spent over the school readers seems quite naturally to have been the most valuable part of our education. ”

“ Fichte's system of philosophy sets out from the category of quality and proceeds towards the category of freedom, demonstrating at every step that self-activity is the foundation of the qualitative and showing how the qualitative comes to arise from the self-active. Being or existence is not a sort of quiescent substrate underlying all manner of activity, but the very substance of being itself is pure activity. ”

“ In the case of the Southern slave there was none of this alternation between idleness and industry, plenty and want, that comes to the poor white at the North and South by reason of his freedom. But his will and intellect were obsessed more effectually because the slave could not be allowed the development of spontaneous, independent self-activity. Since the civil war, however, the condition of the negro has changed, and in the agricultural regions it now resembles more nearly the status above described as that of the poor white in rural in contradistinction from urban surroundings. ”

“ These categories can have no significance in regard to inanimate things and none in regard to living beings which have not developed self-activity to the point of freedom and responsibility.
The realm of art and literature is governed by the category of the beautiful, another sub-category of freedom. For the beautiful is the manifestation of free personality, and the epochs of art take rank in accordance with the adequacy of their manifestation of this attribute. Homer taught the world how to recognize freedom under all phases of nature ”

“ What we call directive power on the part of man, his combining and organizing capacity, all rests on this ability to see beyond the real things before the senses to the ideal possibilities invisible to the brute. The more clearly man sees these ideals, the more perfectly he can construct for his behoof another set of conditions than those in which he finds himself.
The school, in so far as it gives intellectual education, aids the pupil by science and literature. Science collects about each subject all its phases of existence under different conditions ”

“ The reflections of a Kant, a Fichte, or a Hegel will doubtless provoke dissent in the reader's mind. But they will already have served a good purpose when they have been the occasion for so much study as dissent implies. There is one thing that their study will surely produce. This is the conviction that the progress of the world moves from the consolidation of the three powers of government in one person to the co-ordination of those powers in separate departments ”

“ A mastery of the "conventionalities of intelligence," as the "three R's" are called by a thoughtful observer, characterizes in like manner the ideal of its intellectual training.
From these considerations we can see how the common school may work, and does necessarily work, to civilize the intellect and will of the child, and how it must affect any lower race struggling to master the elements of civilization. For this scholastic training gives one the power to comprehend the springs of action that move the races which possess the directive power, and thus he can govern himself. ”

“ The laborer in the "mill" recognizes his right to choose his employer and his place of labor, and exercises it to a far greater degree than the farm laborer. He migrates from village to village; in the city he has before him a bewildering variety of employers to choose from. The city employer does not act as patriarch, nor permit his laborers to approach him as head of a clan. The urban life protects the laborer from the obsessing influence of the employer, and throws a far greater weight of responsibility on the individual. ”

“ All the people as people must be educated in schools, in order to secure that directive power over nature requisite for national safety in a military as well as in an industrial sense.
Thus religion, which states the deepest principle of our civilization, is confirmed by the scientific, political, and social movements of our age, and all agree in this supreme doctrine, that the lowest must be lifted up by the highest,—lifted up into self-activity and full development of individuality. ”

“ The increased use of machinery multiplies wealth, so that production doubles twice as often as the population in the United States.
This is the significance of manual training in our schools. The youth learns how to shape wood and iron into machines, and thus how to construct and manage machines. The hand worker is to be turned into a brain worker; for the machine does the work of the hand, but requires a brain to direct it. ”

“ There is taught in the humblest of schools something of arithmetic, the science and art of numbers, by whose aid material nature is divided and combined,—the most practical of all knowledge of nature because it relates to the fundamental conditions of the existence of nature, the quantitative structure of time and space themselves. A little geography, also, is taught; the pupil acquires the idea of the interrelation of each locality with every other. ”

“ The school is a small community, in which many immature wills are combined in such a way as to prevent one from standing in the way of another, while each helps all and all help each. For the pupil learns more by seeing the efforts of his fellows at mastering the lesson than he does by hearing the teacher's explanations. In order to secure concert of action, the semi-mechanical moral habits of regularity, punctuality, silence, and industry are insisted on. Moral education is not accomplished by lectures on morals so much as by a strict training in moral habits. ”

“ The remedy for evils incident to these changes is, as before said, school education, provided it is inclusive enough to furnish industrial and moral as well as intellectual training.
Education, intellectual and moral, is the only means yet discovered that is always sure to help people to help themselves. Any other species of aid may enervate the beneficiary, and lead to a habit of dependence on outside help. But intellectual and moral education develops self-respect, fertility of resources, knowledge of human nature, and aspiration for a better condition in life. ”

“ Human productive industry needs more and more directive power, but less and less mere sleight of hand. The negro, educated in manual training, will find himself at home in a civilization which is accumulating inventions of all sorts and descriptions to perform the work necessary to supply the people with food, clothing, and shelter at so cheap a rate as to have a large surplus of income to purchase the means of luxury, amusement, and culture.
The friends of the education of the negro, North and South, have seen the importance of providing industrial education for him. ”

“ The scientifically educated laborer, therefore, is of a higher type than the mere "hand laborer," because he has learned to see in each thing its possibilities. He sees each thing in the perspective of its history. Here, then, in the educated laborer, we have a hand belonging to a brain that directs, or that can intelligently comprehend, a detailed statement of an ideal to be worked out. The laborer and the overseer, or "boss," are united in one man. ”

“ Outside of religious movements, the other activities of man in modern civilization all emphasize the same idea with the strangest unanimity. Science comes to say through Darwin that all nature in time and space is a process of nurturing individuality,—the principle of survival of that which develops the most intelligence and will-power. Nature is a process for the creation of souls. ”

“ All school studies, moreover, deal with language, the embodiment of the reason, not of the individual, but of the Anglo-Saxon stock or people. The most elementary language study begins by isolating the words of a sentence, and making the pupil conscious of their separate articulation, spelling, and meaning. The savage does not quite arrive at a consciousness of the separate words of the language, but knows only whole sentences. ”

“ The skilled white mechanic protects himself by his trade union; into that he is not likely to admit the negro mechanic. If the skilled negro mechanics form their own trade unions, the superiority of the members must be of the most striking character to create a preponderating influence in their favor in the mind of the employer, who naturally leans towards individuals of his own race. Let the negro unions work at cheaper rates and the white mechanics be forced to come down to the same wages, the former would at once be exposed to those destructive conditions to which I have referred. ”