Congeniality

“ Thus things of the preferred class are those which have positive value, e.g. amongst mental qualities, natural ability, skill, moral improvement, and the like; among bodily qualities, life, health, strength, good condition, soundness of organs, beauty, and so forth; and in the sphere of external things, wealth, fame, noble birth, and the like. To the class of things "rejected" belong, of mental qualities, lack of ability, want of skill, and the like; among bodily qualities, death, disease, weakness, being out of condition, mutilation, ugliness, and the like ”

“ These processes of sensation, association, and volition constitute the simple basis of individual life upon which the complex structure of an active personality is built.
The individual will is moved to activity by many agencies. There is first the instinct. As a person inherits physical traits from his ancestors, so he gets certain mental traits. The demand for food is the cry of the instinct for self-preservation. The grimace of the infant in response to the mother's smile is an expression of the instinct for imitation. ”

“ My course of study had led me to believe, that all mental and moral feelings and qualities, whether of a good or of a bad kind, were the results of association; that we love one thing, and hate another, take pleasure in one sort of action or contemplation, and pain in another sort, through the clinging of pleasurable or painful ideas to those things, from the effect of education or of experience. ”

“ Such is spontaneity. To form a precise idea of the part it plays, we should have to determine, in a general way, and also in relation to temperament, education, social and other conditions, etc., the genesis and development of those faculties by which a given man of superior power is distinguished from his progenitors; we must group together and classify the characteristic elements which make up the very essence of the personality and individuality—those marvelous elements of free initiative and of total independence which stamp a man as a genius. ”

“ It would be interesting, if practicable, to trace the gradual development of such a character from infancy to old age, to discover, if possible, the circumstances which favoured its growth, and to draw philosophical deductions for the improvement of the present or succeeding generations. Such hopes are vain, or nearly so; man is born with his peculiarities, with specific and yet complex sensibilities, and however similar the circumstances of life and education of two or more individuals, entirely different characters result. ”

“ We feel them to be our fellow men, our kinsmen, with whom we constitute that person of whose existence I am aware every time I say We: the person we must take into account whenever we wish to affirm our personality in a concrete manner, the only person, the one subject, the true subject of human knowledge and of human activity. The subject which knows and acts as a universal in the interests of all men, or rather in behalf of the one man in whom all single individuals are united and with whom they are all identified. ”

“ As she grew older, her mind, enriched by cultivation, and developed by the ardour of her attachment, grew more on an equality with his experienced one, than could have been the case in mere childhood. ”

“ But the more the science of child psychology is perfected, and the more experience we acquire in nursery-schools, the more perfectly the new methods can be applied.
I have tried to bring before the reader the wonderful possibilities which are now open to us. Think what it would mean: health, freedom, happiness, kindness, intelligence, all nearly universal. In one generation, if we chose, we could bring the millennium.
But none of this can come about without love. [317] The knowledge exists; lack of love prevents it from being applied. ”

“ The study of character in these broader lines—the fundamental qualities or passions, the motives that bring about the action, the obvious results in personal and social ways of these actions—constitutes the utmost we should try to do in this direction, leaving for a later period, when the children's social interests are broadened, and when they have developed from within a deeper sense of moral experience, the more delicate and difficult matters of the evolution and interplay of character. ”

“ In fact, the habit of distinguishing between things as different, or of similar forms, colours, and characters, formed in infancy, and childhood, and boyhood, in a free intercourse and communion with Nature, while we are merely seeking and finding the divine joy of novelty and beauty, perpetually occurring before our eyes in all her haunts, may be made the foundation of an accuracy of judgment of inappreciable value as an intellectual endowment. ”

“ And every creature I watched, from the great soaring bird circling in the sky at a vast altitude to the little life at my feet, was brought into the argument, and was a type, representing a group marked by a family likeness not only in figure and colouring and language, but in mind as well, in habits and the most trivial traits and tricks of gesture and so on; the entire group in its turn related to another group, and to others, still further and further away, the likeness growing less and less. ”

“ Thus it is that shades of thinking, of feeling, and of judging, scarcely sufficiently palpable to form subjects of instruction, pass, unintentionally imparted, unconsciously imbibed, from father to son, from mother to daughter, till education in this enlarged sense, in other words refinement, becomes a kind of hereditary distinction, which must be possessed for several succeeding generations before it can well exist in its highest perfection. ”

“ More particularly, the sum of tendencies to act in a certain way, which we call 'character,' is often to be traced through a long series of progenitors and collaterals. So we may justly say that this 'character'—this moral and intellectual essence of a man—does veritably pass over from one fleshly tabernacle to another and does really transmigrate from generation to generation. In the new-born infant, the character of the stock lies latent and the Ego is little more than a bundle of potentialities. ”

“ We are to judge and discipline a child simply in reference to its own individual character and circumstances, and deal with it with the single view to the improvement of its individual character, rather than to our own comfort or even its external improvement. ”

“ Construction of Ideals.—The construction of such ideals through example, through precept, through appeal and through actual practise in self-denial and self-control on the part of the child, should be the foremost duty of the parent or teacher. Above all it should be remembered that imitation of teacher, of parents, of companions, is more of a factor than intellect in the moral action of children. ”

“ In a generation bred on these principles—a generation consisting only of babies who were loved before they were born—there would be a proportion of sympathy, of tender feeling, and of all those great, abstract, world-creating passions which are evolved from the tender emotion, such as no age hitherto has seen. ”

“ You will have noticed that though I began by pointing out that children differ as much as grown-up people do, and that the individual character and temperament of one child are not the character and temperament of another, yet I have throughout spoken of the needs of the child as though the needs of all children were the same. ”

“ One of these is the individual's congenital temperament, his talents, his strength of will, and the vividness or vagueness of his imagination. Education, understood in its more general sense, is the other. Now, men varying as they do in respect of their congenital characters, the strength of their romantic wishes bears naturally some proportion to their own capacities for attempting to satisfy these wishes for themselves. ”

“ She said that the personality was shaped mostly by one's environment, society, or culture. She believed that the relationships with other humans in one's childhood determine both the shape and functioning of one's personality. ”

“ When given freedom and self-activity and self-expression, the child's philosophy appears also. And it is the inner truth of the tale rather than the outer forms of sense and shapes of beauty which, when suited to the little child, appeals to this child-philosophy and makes the deepest impression upon him. ”

“ Thus after a while you may have a picture of the child's inward condition before you, an assemblage of characteristic traits, and by comparing one trait with another, you may find the clue to a deeper understanding of its nature.
What I have said about children applies equally to ourselves. I started out by saying that not [Pg 38] one parent in a thousand knows his child's character. I conclude by saying that not one man or woman in a thousand knows his or her own character. We go through life cherishing an unreal conception of ourselves which is often inspired by vanity. ”

“ Elements of character may be said to develop themselves when a child begins for the first time to be actuated by motives distinct from the operation of its senses. Thus, when it has learned to prefer the approbation of its mother, to the gratification of its own appetite, it has exhibited one of those elements of character, which, in all probability, will prove most important in its future life. ”

“ Can he do this well if he knows nothing of what the bent of the child's genius from ancestral influence is? I doubt very much if any of us realize how important it is that this individuality should have its proper share of attention. ”

“ When we wish to understand a personality we are in the habit of ascertaining the inherited characteristics, and investigating the influences exercised upon it by religion, family, environment, education, youthful impressions, experience, and so forth. ”

“ And this influence tends to promote the development not only of the soul and character, but also of the mind or spirit. Accordingly in this, the first and the most intimate of all unions, all the three principles of human existence—body, soul, and spirit, or mind—alike meet together, and partake of a common evolution. And the result of this mutual influence relatively to the different characters of the mental capacities and consciousness of the two sexes, and the development of each produced thereby, forms, merely in its psychological aspect, a remarkable and pregnant phenomenon. ”

“ The essential character of our doing is the internal will, which does not, properly speaking, modify things, but does modify us, by bringing out in us a personality which otherwise would not have been. This is the substance of the will, 180 which we cannot deny to thought, if thought is, as I have shown, development, and therefore continuous self-creation of the personality. ”

“ A great deal of my natural consciousness of myself depends upon certain habits that grow up in me in connexion with my early social experiences. Very early the child comes to recognise more or less dimly that there are in the world the experiences, intents, and interests of other people, — of his parents, of his nurses, of his play-mates. Now, the importance of all this recognition is of the vastest. For hereby the child comes to contrast his own inner self of bodily sensations and of emotions with the ideally conceived inner life of other people. ”

“ The mere introduction of one, born and educated in a low condition in life, into the society of those who are born into, or have been elevated into, a higher, more intelligent, and refined condition, would be rather an injury than a benefit, if she were not at the same time gifted with some portion of a corresponding intelligence and refinement. ”

“ The original impressions which sink into the heart and mind, and form the character, never change.—The objects of our attention vary in the different periods of life.—This is sometimes mistaken for a change of character, which in reality remains essentially the same.—He who is reserved, deceitful, cruel, or avaricious, when a boy, will not, in any future period of life, become open, faithful, compassionate, or generous. ”

“ And yet four beautiful little beings (who seem to be unusually well endowed physically and mentally) gladden the lives of all of us, and as I reflect how much of the good and true there is in their inheritance, I am hopeful that, with such training and [Pg 133] fortuitous environment as can be compassed, much can be done to counteract undesirable tendencies. ”

“ But during social evolution characters that are unfolding more and more loving and lovable traits have so largely subordinated Natural Selection as to permit the helpless, the old, the sick, and the unfit, to live, thus strengthening those highest attributes of the greatest minds, viz.: intelligent sympathy, pity and love. ”

“ Chapter 9 The Culture Of Character The Treatment of Defects
The Ultimate Object of Education––Suppose the parent see that the formation of character is the ultimate object of education; see, too, that character is, in the rough, the inherited tendencies of the child, modified by his surroundings, but that character may be debased or ennobled by education; that it is the parents' part to distinguish the first faint budding of family traits; to greet every fine trait as the highest sort of family possession to be nourished and tended with care ”

“ Whether the varieties which are apparent in the human character are to be traced up to the different methods employed in its formation, or to some inherent peculiarity in the constitution of the mind, is a much vexed question amongst philosophers. Education and example no doubt exercise a most material influence, but they do not operate in a uniform manner, as we have known the most opposite characters rise out of the same family. ”