not parallel. We pretend to make little men and women out of our children,
and we make little dwarfs and hobgoblins out of them. Moreover, we should
not diminish even the practical efficiency of the coming generation by
rejecting their unpractical side. Whether this boy's worldly destination
be to clean a stable or to represent his country at a foreign court, he
will do his work all the better, instead of worse, for having been allowed
freedom of expansion on the ideal plane. He will do it comprehensively, or
as from above downward, instead of blindly, or as from below upward. To a
certain extent, this position is very generally admitted by instructors
nowadays; but the admission bears little or no fruit. The ideality and
imagination which they have in mind are but a partial and feeble imitation
of what is really signified by those terms. Ideality and imagination are
themselves merely the symptom or expression of the faculty and habit of
spiritual or subjective intuition--a faculty of paramount value in life,
though of late years, in the rush of rational knowledge and discovery, it
has fallen into neglect. But it is by means of this faculty alone that the
great religion of India was constructed--the most elaborate and seductive
of all systems; and although as a faith Buddhism is also the most
treacherous and dangerous attack ever made upon the immortal welfare of
mankind, that circumstance certainly does not discredit or invalidate the
claim to importance of spiritual intuition itself. It may be objected that
spiritual intuition is a vague term. It undoubtedly belongs to an abstruse
region of psychology; but its meaning for our present purpose is simply
the act of testing questions of the moral consciousness by an inward
touchstone of truth, instead of by external experience or information.
That the existence of such a touchstone should be ridiculed by those who
are accustomed to depend for their belief upon palpable or logical
evidence, goes without saying; but, on the other hand, there need be no
collision or argument on the point, since no question with which intuition
is concerned can ever present itself to persons who pin their faith to the