ISTINE AND 
 GENIUS 
 
 BORIS SIDIS 
 
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WORKS BY BORIS SIDIS 
 
 Philistine and Genius 
 
 The Foundations of Normal and 
 
 Abnormal Psychology 
 Symptomatology, Psychognosis, and 
 
 Diagnosis of Psychopathic Diseases 
 The Causation and Treatment of 
 
 Psychopathic Diseases 
 The Psychology of Suggestion 
 Multiple Personality 
 The Psychology of Laughter 
 Psychopathological Researches 
 An Experimental Study of Sleep 
 A Study of Galvanometric Deflections 
 The Nature and Causation of the 
 
 Galvanic Phenomenon 
 
PHILISTINE AND 
 GENIUS 
 
 BY 
 BORIS SIDIS, A.M., PH.D., M.D. 
 
 Medical Director, Sidis Institute, Portsmouth, New Hampshire 
 
 BOSTON: RICHARD G. BADGER 
 
 TORONTO: THE COPP CLARK co., LIMITED 
 
COPYRIGHT, 1917, BY BORIS SIDIS 
 
 All Rights Reserved 
 
 , 
 \<\ 
 
 Made in the United States of America 
 The Gorham Press, Boston, U. S. A. 
 
TO 
 THE FATHERS AND MOTHERS 
 
 OF 
 THE UNITED STATES 
 
PREFACE 
 
 WHEN in 1909 "Philistine and Genius" 
 was delivered by me in the form of a 
 Commencement address before the Har- 
 vard Summer School, my prediction of 
 the coming European war storm was re- 
 garded by everybody as dream and fancy. 
 My best friends and sympathisers thought 
 my foreboding unjustified and ill-found- 
 ed. I was an alarmist, a Cassandra, when 
 I spoke of the coming catastrophe which 
 was to shake Europe to its very founda- 
 tion. When "Philistine and Genius" was 
 published in 1911 the American and 
 European press, dealing with the views 
 advanced in this little volume, completely 
 
vi PREFACE 
 
 ignored the following warning given by 
 me: 
 
 "About the middle of the nineteenth 
 century Buckle made the prediction that 
 no war was any more to occur among civ- 
 ilized nations. Henceforth peace was to 
 reign supreme. 'The wolf shall dwell with 
 the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down 
 with the kid; their young ones shall lie 
 down together, and the lion shall eat 
 straw like the ox. ... Nations shall beat 
 their swords into ploughshares, and their 
 spears into pruning hooks. Nations shall 
 not lift up swords against nations, nor 
 shall they learn war any more.' This 
 prophecy was rather hasty. We have had 
 since the Civil war, the Franco-Prussian 
 war, the Spanish- American war, the Boer 
 war, the Russo-Japanese war, not count- 
 ing the ceaseless wars of extermination 
 carried on by civilized nations among the 
 
PREFACE vii 
 
 various semi-civilized and primitive tribes. 
 Civilized nations do not as yet beat their 
 swords into ploughshares, but keep on in- 
 creasing the strength of their 'armed 
 peace,' and are ready to fight bloody 
 battles in the quest of new lands and the 
 conquest of new markets. 
 
 "In spite of the Hague conference, con- 
 voked by the peace-loving Czar, no other 
 age has had such large standing armies 
 provided with such costly and efficient 
 weapons of execution ready for instant 
 use. The red spectre still stalks abroad 
 claiming its victims. We still believe in 
 the baptism of fire and redemption by 
 blood. The dogma of blood redemption 
 is still at the basis of our faith, and, con- 
 sciously or unconsciously, we brand that 
 sacred creed on the minds of the young 
 generation." 
 
 The present European upheaval has 
 
viii PREFACE 
 
 finally disclosed to the impartial observer 
 the fearful state of Europe as the final 
 outcome of its "armed peace." Instead of 
 realizing the dangers of armed peace or 
 of "preparedness," we are ready to be- 
 come a military democracy in which every 
 able-bodied man is a soldier or a sailor, 
 every child is a scout, and every woman 
 a nurse or a munition worker. We are 
 anxious to waste our resources on prepar- 
 edness rather than on the education of the 
 young. We hanker for the greatest navy 
 in the world at a cost of several billions 
 of dollars. We aspire after a million 
 headed, billion armed navy and army. 
 We clamor for universal, compulsory, 
 military service in which our children 
 should be drilled for murder and slaugh- 
 ter at the decree of a few autocratic offi- 
 cials and officers. We imitate Europe 
 slavishly, in spite of the fact that the pol- 
 
PREFACE ix 
 
 icy of preparedness or of "armed peace" 
 has kept Europe in a state of turmoil for 
 generations, has brought her to the brink 
 of ruin, and has plunged her into the most 
 cruel and most destructive war ever waged 
 by man. 
 
 The recent estimate of Count von Roe- 
 dern, Secretary of the Imperial German 
 Treasury, puts the total cost of the war 
 to date, the end of 1916, for all the bel- 
 ligerents, at fifty-nine and a half billions 
 of dollars. The Mechanics and Metals 
 National Bank of New York City figures 
 that seventy-five billion dollars will be 
 spent for direct military purposes, if the 
 war lasts another year. The enormity of 
 that expenditure can only be realized if 
 we consider that the total wealth of Great 
 Britain and Ireland is eighty-five billions 
 of dollars, that of Germany eighty bil- 
 lions, that of France fifty billions, that of 
 
x PREFACE 
 
 Russia forty billions, that of Austria- 
 Hungary twenty-five billions, and that of 
 Italy twenty billions. Such waste is ap- 
 palling ! 
 
 According to the figures given by Mr. 
 Frank H. Simonds, eighteen and a half 
 million casualties, of which deaths make 
 up nearly one-quarter, is the toll already 
 levied on the fighting men of all the bel- 
 ligerent nations by twenty-six months of 
 war. More than any other war the pres- 
 ent European struggle squanders the 
 wealth of empires and sacrifices the lives 
 of nations. 
 
 Our social status is a reversion to sav- 
 agery of the most degenerate type, an 
 atavistic lapse towards the paleolithic and 
 eolithic man, only more brutal, on account 
 of the greater power for evil possessed by 
 modern man. What Hun or Vandal ever 
 dreamt of such colossal destruction! The 
 
PREFACE xi 
 
 fame of Attila, Jenghiz Khan, Batu, and 
 Tamerlane pales and fades before the 
 glory of the Kaiser. In a couple of years 
 the aggressive German "Kultur" has 
 caused more ruin to humanity than all the 
 invasions of the yellow peril in the history 
 of mankind. Can we take issue with the 
 late Professor Royce of Harvard when 
 he declares the German Empire to be "the 
 wilful and the deliberate enemy of the 
 human race"? 
 
 Some future historian in describing our 
 times will place us below the moral level 
 of our contemporaries, the Bushman and 
 the Hottentot. He may say: "Towards 
 the end of the nineteenth and at the begin- 
 ning of the twentieth century there took 
 place a vast accumulation of wealth, due 
 to a rapid development of science and 
 practical arts. Instead, however, of im- 
 proving their condition, European nations 
 
xii PREFACE 
 
 deteriorated morally and intellectually. 
 
 "Liberal education gave way to techni- 
 cal training. Science served greed. Edu- 
 cation became mechanical and military in 
 character. The successful banker, the 
 greedy usurer, the commonplace store- 
 keeper, the mediocre shopkeeper, the phi- 
 listine patriotic business man became the 
 patterns, the ideals, the guides, and lead- 
 ers of commercialized nations. Advertis- 
 ing and notoriety became the rage and the 
 bane of society. The thinker gave way to 
 the tinker, the scientist to the mechanic, 
 the artist to the artisan, the genius to the 
 philistine. False patriotism of the jingo 
 type, controlled and animated by indus- 
 trial and commercial interests, became the 
 standard of nations. An insane frenzy 
 of militarism seized on the minds of na- 
 tions. Blind obedience became a virtue. 
 
 "The state enslaved the individual. 
 
PREFACE xiii 
 
 Drill and discipline stupefied people. Na- 
 tions boasting of scientific efficiency and 
 'kultur' broke treaties, attacked, de- 
 stroyed, deported, enslaved whole popula- 
 tions of small, weak, neighboring coun- 
 tries. Women and babes were drowned 
 like rats in the middle of the ocean. Aero- 
 planes and Zeppelins showered explosive 
 missiles on defenceless people. For such 
 cowardly, inhuman, and diabolical acts the 
 miscreants were decorated and honored as 
 heroes by their alleged superiors. Man 
 could not have fallen to any lower level. 
 "The elements of nature were let loose 
 for the ruin of nations. Man gloried 
 in his devilish, military, inventive power 
 of destruction. Professors, carrying high 
 the banner of 'kultur,' exulted in the de- 
 grading, vicious process of training by 
 which the individual is hypnotized and 
 narcotized into submission to a brutal or- 
 
xiv PREFACE 
 
 ganization of military junkers, hallowed 
 by the name of State. All conception of 
 free, individual development was lost 
 among the Germanic tribes of Central 
 Europe. It was the darkest period in the 
 history of mankind. Assaults on coun- 
 tries, massacres of nations, deportation of 
 populations into slavery for powerful mu- 
 nition interests, all such outrages, digni- 
 fied by the name of war for the defense of 
 the Fatherland, had not their parallel even 
 in the most degrading period of the his- 
 tory of humanity. Man was crazed with 
 the lust of blood, frenzied with rapine and 
 slaughter." 
 
 Such will be the just estimate of our 
 times by a future impartial historian. 
 
 ,We possess indeed vast stores of wealth, 
 but we have not as yet learned their use. 
 Like silly upstarts, we use our wealth for 
 dissipation and ruin. Our greed and 
 
PREFACE xv 
 
 cruelty seem to grow with our possessions. 
 Greed with its army and navy is like the 
 Biblical horseleech that "hath two daugh- 
 ters crying, 'Give, give.' ' Human life, 
 man's genius, we hold in no esteem. We 
 sink the value of man in the price of his 
 product. We raise the value of stock, but 
 lower the worth of man. Our young gen- 
 eration is trained by fear into discipline 
 and obedience. We suppress the genius 
 in the child, raise mediocrity, and cultivate 
 the philistine. 
 
 "Obedience and discipline are the main- 
 stay of family and school," told me an 
 otherwise intelligent schoolmaster. "I 
 control my children with kindness, if pos- 
 sible, and if needs be, with force." The 
 child is trained to act not by the light of 
 reason, but by the command of superior 
 force. The child is ruled by fear! 
 
 As a protection against fear the child 
 
xvi PREFACE 
 
 learns to be secretive, evasive of truth, and 
 cowardly of action. These traits of char- 
 acter, acquired in early childhood, become 
 basic. The child will never fully rid him- 
 self of fear and its distressing conse- 
 quences. Fear will stay with him, and 
 dog his steps all his life long. 
 
 Fear is one of the most fundamental of 
 animal instincts, it is the companion of 
 the most primitive impulse of self-preser- 
 vation. Once this fear instinct is aroused, 
 it grows like an avalanche in its downward 
 course. In later life this fear instinct be- 
 comes manifested in various ways, giving 
 rise to the most distressing nervous and 
 mental symptoms. In my medical prac- 
 tice, as specialist of nervous and mental 
 diseases, I have traced again and again the 
 worst forms of maladies to the fear instinct 
 aroused in early childhood. 
 
 Training by fear, submission, and obe- 
 
PREFACE xvii 
 
 dience opens the door wide to all kinds of 
 nervous and mental germs, weakening the 
 mental and moral constitution of man. 
 Man becomes unreasonable, capricious, 
 driven by the impulse of self-preservation 
 and by the furies of the fear instinct. The 
 impulse of self-preservation with its satel- 
 lite the fear instinct becomes predominant 
 in character which lacks the stamina of 
 sturdiness, frankness, openmindedness 
 and independence. 
 
 A person brought up in the school of 
 fear and blind obedience lacks steadiness 
 of purpose, courage, independence, critical 
 judgment, becomes bigoted and intoler- 
 ant. He falls an easy prey to the sugges- 
 tions of his times and surroundings, suc- 
 cumbs to the influence of unscrupulous 
 leaders. Such a person lacks mental and 
 moral poise, he is wanting in the true cour- 
 age of reason, present in the fully devel- 
 
xviii PREFACE 
 
 oped man and woman. He can not with- 
 stand the pressure of social opinion, being 
 unable to stand by his post in the face of 
 threatening social opposition. Ruled by 
 fear at home, he is governed by terror in 
 society. He is afraid of social punish- 
 ment, "of losing face," as the Chinese say, 
 with his neighbors, gossips, circles and 
 clubs. He dreads above all the judgment 
 of the crowd, and is scared by the jeers and 
 ridicule of the mob. Human life interests 
 become limited by the narrow horizon of 
 a mob-ruled personality. The unceasing 
 obedience to the suggestions of the crowd 
 weakens and loosens the reasoning and 
 moral fibre, reduces the energies of the 
 mind to the animal level, controlled by 
 self-preservation and fear. 
 
 With reduced and impoverished ener- 
 gies, the person, in case of trouble and 
 misfortune, is unable to fall back on his 
 
PREFACE xix 
 
 inner resources, he falls a prey to worry, 
 fear, anxiety, and disease. In other cases 
 the intellectual and moral powers are en- 
 feebled by the rigid discipline and by the 
 course of enforced obedience, the person 
 falls a victim to all forms of temptations. 
 With no principle to guide him, with no 
 will to stay him, the person drifts help- 
 lessly on the stream of life. Lured by se- 
 ductive sirens, his life is finally wrecked 
 on the rocks and reefs of vice, sin, crime, 
 and disease. 
 
 Where stumbling on vice, disease, and 
 crime is avoided, the person inevitably 
 lands on the dull shores of the Lotophagi. 
 Ideas and ideals are forgotten and for- 
 saken in the routine of animal existence. 
 This is the land of Philistinism, a land 
 where all human, humane interests, inde- 
 pendent thought, and courageous action 
 are wanting. Philistines are uncritical, 
 
xx PREFACE 
 
 unconscious of defects and faults, living in 
 the mire of self-contented stupidity and 
 mediocrity. They cease to grow mentally 
 and morally. Their intellectual and moral 
 capacities become paralyzed, atrophied. 
 Man becomes the equal of the brute. 
 
 With a philistine education and train- 
 ing, man is fit to become one of those un- 
 fortunate and pitiful European pawns 
 and automata who obey blindly the com- 
 mands of their superior officers. Philis- 
 tines shoot, stab, poison, pillage, burn, 
 outrage, and murder at the command of 
 unscrupulous, self-seeking leaders, brutal 
 junkers, bloodhounds of empires. 
 
 Brought up in a school of fear, obedi- 
 ence, and suggestibility, the philistine, like 
 Cain, murders his brother without aim 
 and without understanding the full sig- 
 nificance of the awful deed. He is no more 
 responsible than is the machine gun which 
 
PREFACE xxi 
 
 he accurately trains and points at his sup- 
 posed enemies. Philistines are led to the 
 battlefield like cattle to the slaughter 
 house. Philistines have no personality, 
 no individuality, they are cogs in wheels, 
 links in chains of monster mechanisms. 
 
 The philistine, the product of our home 
 and school, is suggestible and gullible, he 
 is always on the lookout for authority, for 
 a leader whom he should worship, by whose 
 opinions and conviction he is ready to 
 swear, whose command he is ready and 
 proud to follow. The philistine is good 
 material for mobs, for mental epidemics, 
 for religious crazes, and for all kinds of 
 hysterical movements in which not reason 
 but emotional automatism is in the fore- 
 ground. Philistinism,, stupidity, and im- 
 plicit obedience of a mojistrons, efficient 
 Kar machine are intimately interrelated. 
 The individual becomes a private, the 
 
xxii PREFACE 
 
 nation an army, and the country a 
 camp. 
 
 Do we as parents wish to bring up our 
 children as soulless, willless machines ? Do 
 we wish them to be without good judg- 
 ment, without personal convictions? Do 
 we wish them to be led about like cattle? 
 We certainly wish them to be of strong 
 nature and sturdy character, able to stand 
 by their convictions, able to use their criti- 
 cal judgment, able to discriminate the 
 right from the wrong, able to love the good 
 and avoid the evil. 
 
 In The Psychology of Suggestion, pub- 
 lished by me in 1897, I arrive at the con- 
 clusion that "Personality is suppressed by 
 the rigidity of social organization; the 
 cultivated, civilized individual is an auto- 
 maton, a mere puppet." . . . Again, 
 "Under the enormous weight of the socio- 
 static press . . . the personal self sinks, 
 
PREFACE xxiii 
 
 the suggestible, subconscious, social, im- 
 personal self rises to the surface, gets 
 trained and cultivated, and becomes the 
 hysterical actor in all the tragedies of 
 historical life." ... In recent European 
 events the suggestible, social self plays the 
 chief role. 
 
 In the same work I come to the follow- 
 ing conclusion: "When social conditions 
 are of such a nature as to charge society 
 with strong emotional excitement, or when 
 institutions dwarf individuality, when 
 they arrest personal growth, when they 
 hinder the free development and exercise 
 of the personal, controlling consciousness, 
 then society falls into a hypnoid condi- 
 tion, the social mind gets disaggregated. 
 The gregarious self begins to move within 
 the bosom of the crowd, and becomes 
 active; the demon of the demos emerges 
 to the surface of social life, and throws 
 
xxiv PREFACE 
 
 the body politic into convulsions of 
 demoniac fury." 
 
 The European horrors, atrocities, and 
 brutalities, dignified by the stupefying 
 and hypnotizing slogan "Kultur, Pa- 
 triotism," are due to the early training, 
 by fear and force, of the individual into 
 submission to superior authority. Such 
 pernicious training sacrifices the genius 
 of the child, the originality of the man, 
 to a highly efficient, but brutal and blood- 
 thirsty Moloch State. The European 
 war is a mental plague which attacks gi- 
 gantic, social aggregates when their ulti- 
 mate constituent units, the individuals, 
 are deprived of independent thought and 
 liberty of decision and action, when men 
 are swayed by hypnotizing suggestions 
 of "superior leaders" who represent the 
 interests not of every individual at his 
 best, but of high noble castes and of com- 
 
PREFACE xxv 
 
 mercial classes. The organized murder of 
 European nations is due to the stifling 
 of human genius by the cultivation of 
 mob spirit which is the cause of all 
 forms of social insanity and mental epi- 
 demics. 
 
 In the stifling of the genius of the child 
 and the cultivation of the mob spirit 
 America does not lag behind Europe. 
 Mental epidemics, excited by the fear in- 
 stinct and by the impulse of self-preserva- 
 tion, are prevalent in the States. As de- 
 scribed by me in The Psychology of Sug- 
 gestion: "American society oscillates be- 
 tween acute financial mania and attacks 
 of religious insanity. No sooner is the 
 business fever over than the delirium 
 acutum of religious mania sets in. So- 
 ciety is thrown from Scylla into Charyb- 
 dis. From the heights of financial specu- 
 lation society sinks into the abyss of re- 
 
xx vi PREFACE 
 
 vivalism. American society seems to suf- 
 fer from circular insanity/" 
 
 Revivalism, a mental frenzy to which 
 the American mob mind is specially prone, 
 is a resurrection of Greek Bacchanalia 
 and Roman Saturnalia. Revivals are 
 emotional debauches, religious orgies. As 
 I had pointed out in the same work: "Re- 
 vivalism is far more dangerous to the life 
 of society than drunkenness. . . . As a 
 sot man falls below the brute ; as a revival- 
 ist he sinks lower than the sot." 
 
 If Europe is in violent convulsions of 
 war insanity, America suffers from no 
 less serious mental maladies, speculation 
 frenzies, revival manias, and preparedness 
 plagues. Mental epidemics are ineradi- 
 cable afflictions of the highly evolved mob 
 spirit characteristic of the philistine. The 
 evolution of the philistine is the involu- 
 tion of genius. Philistinism is social de- 
 
PREFACE xxvii 
 
 cay. The progress of humanity is 
 brute to man, from Philistine to Genius^ 
 
 BORIS SIDIS. 
 Sidis Institute, 
 Maplewood Farm, 
 
 Portsmouth, New Hampshire. 
 
PHILISTINE AND GENIUS 
 
PHILISTINE AND GENIUS 
 
 I ADDRESS myself to you, fathers and 
 mothers, and to you, open-minded read- 
 ers. I take it for granted that your life- 
 work is with you a serious matter and that 
 you put forth all your efforts to do your 
 best in the walk of life which you have 
 chosen. I assume that you want to de- 
 velop your energies to the highest effi- 
 ciency and bring out the best there is in 
 you. I assume that you earnestly wish and 
 strive to bring out and develop to the high- 
 est efficiency the faculties not only of your 
 children, but also those of your friends 
 
 and co-workers with whom you associate 
 
 i 
 
2 PHILISTINE AND GENIUS 
 
 in your daily vocation, and that you are 
 deeply interested in the education of your 
 countrymen and their children, who share 
 with you the duties, rights and privileges 
 of citizenship. I also assume that as men 
 and women of liberal education you are 
 not limited to the narrow interests of one 
 particular subject, to the exclusion of all 
 else. I assume that you are especially 
 interested in the development of person- 
 ality as a whole, the true aim of education. 
 I also assume* that you realize that what 
 is requisite is not some more routine, not 
 more desiccated, quasi-scientific methods 
 of educational psychology, not the saw- 
 dust of college-pseudagogics and philis- 
 tine, normal school-training, but more 
 light on the problems of life. What you 
 want is not the training of philistines, but 
 the education of genius. 
 
 We need more light, more information 
 
PHILISTINE AND GENIUS 3 
 
 on "the problems of life." Is it not 
 too big a phrase to employ? On a second 
 thought, however, I must say that your 
 problems are the problems of life. For 
 the problems of education are funda- 
 mental, they are at the bottom of all vital 
 problems. The ancient Greeks were 
 aware of it and paid special attention to 
 education. In rearing his revolutionary, 
 Utopian edifice, Plato insists on education 
 as the foundation of a new social, moral 
 and intellectual life. Plato in his Repub- 
 lic makes Socrates tell his interlocutor, 
 Adeimantus: "Then you are aware that 
 in every work the beginning is the most 
 important part, especially in dealing with 
 anything young and tender? For that is 
 the time, when any impression which one 
 may desire to communicate is most readily 
 stamped and taken." 
 
 We may say that all man's struggles, 
 
4 PHILISTINE AND GENIUS 
 
 religious, moral and economical, all the 
 combats and conflicts that fill the history 
 of mankind, can be traced finally to the 
 nature and vigor of the desires, beliefs 
 and strivings which have been cultivated 
 by the social environment in the early life 
 of the individual. The character of a na- 
 tion is moulded by the nature of its edu- 
 cation. The character of society depends 
 on the early training of its constituent 
 units. The fatalism, the submissiveness 
 of the Oriental; the sestheticism, the in- 
 dependence, love of innovations and in- 
 quisitiveness of the ancient Greek; the 
 ruggedness, sturdiness, harshness and 
 conservatism of the ancient Roman; the 
 emotionalism, the religious fervor of the 
 ancient Hebrew; the commercialism, rest- 
 lessness, speculation and scientific spirit 
 of modern times, are all the results of the 
 nature of the early education the individ- 
 
PHILISTINE AND GENIUS 5 
 
 ual gets in his respective social environ- 
 ment. We may say that the education 
 of early life forms the very foundation 
 of the social structure. 
 
 Like clay in the hands of the potter, 
 so is man in the hands of his community. 
 Society fashions the beliefs, the desires, 
 the aims, the strivings, the knowledge, 
 the ideals, the character, the minds, the 
 very selves of its constituent units. Who 
 has the control of this vital function of 
 moulding minds? Fathers and mothers, 
 the child is under your control. To your 
 hands, to your care is entrusted the fate 
 of young generations, the fate of the fu- 
 ture community, which, consciously or 
 unconsciously, you fashion according to 
 the accepted standards and traditions with 
 which you have been imbued in your own 
 education. 
 
 It is related, I think, in Plutarch's 
 
6 PHILISTINE AND GENIUS 
 
 Lives, of Themistocles telling with the 
 ironical frankness characteristic of the 
 Greek temperament that his son possessed 
 the greatest power in Greece: "For the 
 Athenians command the rest of Greece, I 
 command the Athenians, his mother com- 
 mands me, and he commands his mother." 
 This bit of Greek irony is not without its 
 significance. The mind of the growing 
 generation controls the future of nations. 
 The boy is father to the man, as the 
 proverb has it; he controls the future. 
 But who controls the boy? The home, 
 the mother and father, the guides of the 
 child's early life. For it is in early life 
 that the foundation of our mental edifice 
 is laid. All that is good, valid and solid 
 in man's mental structure depends on the 
 breadth, width, depth, and solidity of that 
 foundation. 
 
II 
 
 THAT the groundwork of man's character 
 is laid in his childhood appears as a triv- 
 ial platitude. I am almost ashamed to 
 bring it before you. And yet, as I look 
 round me and find how apt we are to for- 
 get this simple precept which is so funda- 
 mental in our life, I cannot help calling 
 your attention to it. If we consider the 
 matter, we can well understand the reason 
 why its full significance is not realized. 
 We must remember that all science begins 
 with axioms which are apparently truisms. 
 What is more of a truism than the axioms 
 of Geometry and Mechanics that the 
 whole is greater than the part, that things 
 which are equal to the same thing are 
 
8 PHILISTINE AND GENIUS 
 
 equal to one another, or that a body re- 
 mains in the same state unless an exter- 
 nal force changes it? And yet the whole 
 of Mathematics and Mechanics is built on 
 those simple axioms. 
 
 The elements of science are just such 
 obvious platitudes. What is needed is to 
 use them as efficient tools and by their 
 means draw the consequent effects. The 
 same holds true in the science of educa- 
 tion. The axiom or the law of early 
 training is not new, it is well known, but 
 it is unfortunately too often neglected 
 and forgotten, and its significance is al- 
 most completely lost. 
 
 It is certainly surprising how this law 
 of early training is so disregarded, so to- 
 tally ignored in the education of the child. 
 Not only do we neglect to lay the neces- 
 sary solid basis in the early life of the 
 child, a solid basis ready for the future 
 
PHILISTINE AND GENIUS 9 
 
 structure, we do not even take care to 
 clear the ground. In fact, we even make 
 the child's soul a dunghill, full of vermin 
 of superstitions, fears and prejudices, 
 a hideous heap saturated with the spirit of 
 credulity. 
 
 We regard the child's mind as a tabula 
 rasa, a vacant lot, and empty on it all our 
 rubbish and refuse. We labor under the 
 delusion that stories and fairy tales, myths 
 and deceptions about life and man are 
 good for the child's mind. Is it a won- 
 der that on such a foundation men can 
 only put up shacks and shanties? We 
 forget the simple fact that what is harm- 
 ful for the adult is still more harmful to 
 the child. Surely what is poisonous to 
 the grown-up mind cannot be useful food 
 to the young. If credulity in old wives' 
 tales, lack of individuality, sheepish sub- 
 missiveness, barrack-discipline, unques- 
 
10 PHILISTINE AND GENIUS 
 
 tioned and uncritical belief in authority, 
 meaningless imitation of jingles and gib- 
 berish, memorization of mother-goose wis- 
 dom, repetition of incomprehensible pray- 
 ers and articles of creed, unintelligent 
 aping of good manners, silly games, preju- 
 dices and superstitions and fears of the 
 supernormal and supernatural, are cen- 
 sured in adults, why should we approve 
 their cultivation in the young? 
 
 At home and at school we drill into the 
 child's mind uncritical beliefs in stories and 
 tales, fictions and figments, fables and 
 myths, creeds and dogmas which poison 
 the very sources of the child's mind. At 
 home and at school we give the child over 
 as a prey to all sorts of fatal germs of men- 
 tal diseases and moral depravity. We 
 leave the child's mind an open field to 
 be sown with dragon's teeth which bring 
 forth a whole crop of pernicious tenden- 
 
PHILISTINE AND GENIUS 11 
 
 cies, love and admiration of successful 
 evil, and adoration of the rule of brute 
 force. From the dragon's teeth sown in 
 early childhood there rises in later life a 
 whole brood of flint-hearted men who 
 blindly jostle and fight and mercilessly 
 tear one another, to obtain for some greedy 
 Jason, some witch of a Medea their cov- 
 eted golden fleece. 
 
Ill 
 
 WE regard with disapproval the bloody 
 combats of some savage tribe; we regard 
 with horror the sacrifice of children and 
 prisoners to some idol of a Phenician Mo- 
 loch or Mexican Huitzlio-Potchli ; we are 
 shocked at the criminal proceedings of the 
 infamous Torquemada with his inquisi- 
 tion glorying in its terrors and tortures 
 in the name of Christ; we are sickened as 
 we read of the religious wars in Europe; 
 we shudder at the horrors of the night 
 of St. Bartholomew; we are appalled by 
 the recent slaughters of the Jews in Rus- 
 sia, by the wholesale massacre of the 
 Christians in Turkey. 
 
 All such atrocities, we say, belong to 
 
PHILISTINE AND GENIUS 13 
 
 barbaric ages and are only committed in 
 semi-civilized countries. We flatter our- 
 selves that we are different in this age of 
 enlightenment and civilization. Are we 
 different? Have we changed? Have 
 we a right to fling stones at our older 
 brothers, the savage and the barbarian? 
 We are so used to our life that we do not 
 notice its evils and misery. We can easily 
 see the mote in the eye of our neighbor, 
 but do not notice the beam in our own. 
 
 We are still savage at heart. Our civi- 
 lization is mere gloss, a thin coating 
 of paint and varnish. Our methods of 
 inflicting pain are more refined than those 
 of the Indian, but no less cruel, while the 
 number of the victims sacrificed to our 
 greed and rapacity may even exceed the 
 numbers fallen by the sword of the barbar- 
 ian or by the torch of the fanatic. The 
 slums in our cities are foul and filthy, 
 
14 PHILISTINE AND GENIUS 
 
 teeming with deadly germs of disease 
 where the mortality of our infants and 
 children in some cases rises to the frightful 
 figure of 204 per thousand! 
 
 The sanitary conditions of our cities 
 are filthy and deadly. They carry in 
 their wake all forms of plagues, pests 
 and diseases, among which tuberculosis is 
 so well known to the laity. "Tubercu- 
 losis," reads a report of a Tenement 
 House Commission, "is one of the results 
 of our inhumane tenements; it follows in 
 the train of our inhumane sweatshops. 
 It comes where the hours of labor are 
 long and the wages are small; it afflicts 
 the children who are sent to labor when 
 they should yet be in school." 
 
 "The Consumers' League," says Mr. 
 John Graham Brooks, "long hesitated to 
 lay stress upon these aspects of filth and 
 disease, because of their alarmist and sen- 
 
PHILISTINE AND GENIUS 15 
 
 sational nature, and of the immediate and 
 grave risk to the consumer of the goods 
 manufactured in the sweatshop and the 
 tenement house. If the sweatshop spread 
 diphtheria and scarlet fever, there is the 
 hue and cry before personal danger. But 
 these diseases are the very slightest ele- 
 ments of the real risk to the general good. 
 It is the spoiled human life, with its 
 deadly legacy of enfeebled mind and 
 body, that reacts directly and indirectly 
 on the social whole." We do not realize 
 that we drift into national degeneracy. 
 We fail to realize that we raise a genera- 
 tion of stunted lives, of physical and 
 nervous wrecks, of mental invalids and 
 moral cripples. 
 
 We boast of our wealth unrivalled by 
 other countries and by former ages. We 
 should remember the great poverty of our 
 masses, the filthy conditions of our wealthy 
 
16 PHILISTINE AND GENIUS 
 
 cities, with their loathsome city-slums, in 
 which human beings live, breed and teem 
 like so many worms. 
 
 We spend on barracks and prisons 
 more than we do on schools and colleges. 
 What is the level of a civilization in 
 which the cost of crime and war far ex- 
 ceeds that of the education of its future 
 citizens? We spend on our army and 
 navy a quarter of a billion dollars, which 
 is found to be insufficient, while the "total 
 money burden of crime amounts in this 
 country to the enormous sum of 600 mil- 
 lion dollars a year!" 
 
 The cost of crime alone is so enormous 
 that a representative of the Board of 
 Charities of one of our Eastern states 
 considers "the entire abolition of all the 
 penal codes and the complete liberty of 
 the criminal class." Our civilization can 
 boast of the city-slum, the abode of mis- 
 
PHILISTINE AND GENIUS 17 
 
 ery and crime, the gift of our modern in- 
 dustrial progress, wealth and prosperity. 
 Professor James and myself were over 
 once on a visit to a charitable institution 
 for mentally defective. With his clear 
 eye for the incongruities and absurdities 
 of life, Professor James remarked to me 
 that idiots and imbeciles were given the 
 comforts, in fact, the luxuries of life, while 
 healthy children, able boys and girls, had 
 to struggle for a livelihood. Children 
 under fourteen work in factories, work at 
 a wage of about twenty-five cents a day, 
 and, according to the labor bureau, the 
 daily wage of the factory children of the 
 South is often as low as fifteen cents and 
 sometimes falls to nine cents. In many 
 of our colleges many a student has to live 
 on the verge of starvation, freeze in a 
 summer overcoat the whole winter and 
 warm his room by burning newspapers in 
 
18 PHILISTINE AND GENIUS 
 
 the grate. We are charitable and help 
 our mediocrities, imbeciles and idiots, 
 while we neglect our talent and genius. 
 We have a blind faith that genius, like 
 murder, will out. We know of success- 
 ful talent, but we do not know of the 
 great amount of unsuccessful talent and 
 genius that has gone to waste. We favor 
 imbecility and slight genius. 
 
 One of the physicians of the institution 
 overheard our conversation and attempted 
 to justify his work by an argument com- 
 monly advanced and uncritically ac- 
 cepted "Our civilization, our Christian 
 civilization values human life.'* Does 
 our civilization really value human life? 
 The infant mortality of the slums of our 
 large cities and the factory work of our 
 young children do not seem to justify 
 such a claim. 
 
 The loss of life on our railways is as 
 
PHILISTINE AND GENIUS 19 
 
 large as one caused by a national war. 
 Thus the number of persons killed on 
 American railways during a period of 
 three years ending June 30, 1900, was 
 about 22,000, while the mortality of 
 British forces, including death from dis- 
 ease, during three years of the South Af- 
 rican war amounted to 22,000. In 1901, 
 one out of every 400 railway employees 
 was killed and one out of every 26 was 
 injured. In 1902, 2,969 employees were 
 killed and 50,524 were injured. 
 
 Commenting on the statistics of rail- 
 way accidents, Mr. John Graham Brooks 
 says: "One has to read and re-read 
 these figures before their grewsome sig- 
 nificance is in the least clear. If we 
 add the mining, iron and lumbering in- 
 dustries, portions of which are more dan- 
 gerous than the railroad, some concep- 
 tion is possible of the mutilated life due 
 to machinery as it is now run." It may 
 
20 PHILISTINE AND GENIUS 
 
 also be of interest to learn that, according 
 to the calculation made by a representa- 
 tive of one of the insurance companies, 
 more than a million and a half are annu- 
 ally killed and injured in the United 
 States alone. 
 
 The waste of human life is in fact 
 greater than in any previous age. "Saul 
 hath slain his thousands, but David his 
 ten thousands." Think of our modern 
 warfare, with its infernal machines of 
 carnage, mowing down more men in a day 
 than the warlike Assyrians and Romans, 
 with their crude bows, arrows and cata- 
 pults, could destroy in a century. And 
 is not our country, our civilized Christian 
 society, with its high valuation of human 
 life, keeping on increasing its army and 
 navy, and perfecting deadly weapons of 
 slaughter and carnage? What about the 
 justice dealt out by Judge Lynch ? From 
 
PHILISTINE AND GENIUS 21 
 
 1882 to 1900 there were about three thou- 
 sand lynchings! What about our grand 
 imperial policy? What about our dom- 
 inance over weak and ignorant tribes, 
 treated in no gentle way by the armed 
 fist of their civilized masters, who send 
 to the benighted heathens their mission- 
 aries to preach religion and their soldiers 
 to enforce the sale of narcotics and other 
 civilizing goods? 
 
IV 
 
 WE are stock-blind to our own barbar- 
 ities; we do not realize the enormities of 
 our life and consider our age and country 
 as civilized and enlightened. We censure 
 the faults of other societies, but do not 
 notice our own. Thus Lecky, in describ- 
 ing Roman society, says: "The gladia- 
 torial games form indeed the one feature 
 which to a modern mind is almost in- 
 conceivable in its atrocity. That not only 
 men, but women, in an advanced period of 
 civilization, men and women who not 
 only professed, but very frequently acted 
 upon a high code of morals should have 
 made the carnage of men their habitual 
 amusement, that all this should have con- 
 
PHILISTINE AND GENIUS 23 
 
 tinned for centuries with scarcely a pro- 
 test, is one of the most startling facts in 
 moral history. It is, however, perfectly 
 normal, while it opens out fields of eth- 
 ical inquiry of a very deep, though pain- 
 ful, character." 
 
 As in modern times, oiir college author- 
 ities justify the brutalities of football 
 and prize-fights, so in ancient times the 
 great moralists of those ages justified 
 their gladiatorial games. Thus the great 
 orator, the moralizing philosopher, Cicero, 
 in speaking of the gladiatorial games, 
 tells us: "When guilty men are com- 
 pelled to fight, no better discipline against 
 suffering and death can be presented to 
 the eye." And it is certainly instructive 
 for us to learn that "the very men who 
 looked down with delight, when the sand 
 of the arena reddened with human blood, 
 made the theater ring with applause when 
 
24 PHILISTINE AND GENIUS 
 
 Terence in his famous line proclaimed the 
 brotherhood of men." 
 
 One feeble protest is on record, a protest 
 coming from the mother of civilization, 
 from ancient Athens. "When an attempt 
 was made to introduce the games into 
 Athens, the philosopher Demonax ap- 
 pealed successfully to the better feelings 
 of the people by exclaiming : "You must 
 first overthrow the altar of pity!" 
 
 The philosopher Demonax had not the 
 compromising spirit of the modern pro- 
 fessor. Although the brutal games of 
 our youth and populace need a Demonax, 
 we certainly should not look for one in our 
 colleges and universities. Our college au- 
 thorities assure us that athletic prestige is 
 indispensable to a good university. In 
 fact, according to some official statements, 
 football teams are supposed to express the 
 superior intellectual activities of our fore- 
 
PHILISTINE AND GENIUS 25 
 
 most colleges. Like Cicero of old, we 
 claim that "our games are good, they 
 train men, and no better discipline can be 
 presented to the eye." 
 
 The fact is, man is bat-blind to the evils 
 of the environment in which he is bred. 
 He takes those evils as a matter of course, 
 and even finds good reasons to justify 
 them as edifying and elevating. In re- 
 lation to his own surroundings, man is in 
 the primitive condition of the Biblical 
 Adam, he is not conscious of, his own 
 moral nakedness. Six days in the week 
 we witness and uphold the wholesale car- 
 nage, national and international, political, 
 economical, in shops, factories, mines, 
 railroads and on the battlefields, while on 
 the seventh we sing hymns to the God of 
 mercy, love and peace. 
 
 We pick up the first newspapers or 
 popular magazines that come to our hand, 
 
26 PHILISTINE AND GENIUS 
 
 and we read of wars, slaughters, murders, 
 lynchings, crimes and outrages on life and 
 liberty; we read of strikes, lockouts, of 
 tales of starvation and of frightful infant 
 mortality; we read of diseases and epi- 
 demics ravaging the homes of our working 
 population; we read of corporation in- 
 iquities, of frauds and corruption of our 
 legislative bodies, of the control of politics 
 by the criminal classes of the great me- 
 tropolis of our land. We read of all that 
 evil and corruption, but forget them next 
 moment. 
 
 Our social life is corrupt, our body pol- 
 itic is eaten through with cankers and 
 sores, "the whole head is sick and the 
 whole heart is faint. From the sole of 
 the foot even unto the head, there is no 
 soundness in it; but wounds, and bruises 
 and putrefying sores," and yet we think 
 we are a civilized people, superior to all 
 
PHILISTINE AND GENIUS 27 
 
 countries and to all ages. "The voice of 
 our brother's blood crieth unto us from 
 the ground." How can we be so callous? 
 How can we be so mole-blind and so stone- 
 deaf? 
 
 The truth is, we have but a thin varnish 
 of humaneness, glossing over a rude bar- 
 barism. With our lips we praise the God 
 of love, but in our hearts we adore the 
 God of force. How much physical force 
 is worshipped we can realize from the 
 crowds that throng the games of base- 
 ball, football, prize-fights and boxing ex- 
 hibitions. They go into tens of thou- 
 sands. How many would be drawn by a 
 St. Paul, an Epictetus, or a Socrates? 
 
 The newspaper, the mirror of our social 
 life, is filled with the names and exploits 
 of our magnates of high finance, our 
 money-mongers and usurers. Our jour- 
 nals teem with deeds and scandals of our 
 refined "smart set" set up as patterns, as 
 
28 PHILISTINE AND GENIUS 
 
 ideals, after which our middle class so 
 longingly craves. Like the Israelites of 
 old we worship golden calves and sa- 
 cred bulls. Our daughters yearn after 
 the barbaric shimmer and glitter of the 
 bejewelled, bespangled, empty-minded, 
 parasitic females of "the smart set." Our 
 college boys admire the feats of the 
 trained athlete and scorn the work of the 
 "grind." Our very schoolboys crave for 
 the fame of a Jeffries and a Johnson. If 
 in the depths of space there is some solar 
 system inhabited by really rational beings, 
 and if one of such beings should by some 
 miracle happen to visit our planet, he 
 would no doubt turn away in horror. 
 
WE press our children into the trium- 
 phant march of our industrial Jugger- 
 naut. Over 1,700,000 children under 15 
 years of age toil in fields, factories, mines 
 and workshops. The slums and the fac- 
 tory cripple the energies of our young 
 generation. The slaughter of the inno- 
 cents and the sacrifice of our children to 
 the insatiable Moloch of industry exclude 
 us from the rank of civilized society and 
 place us on the level of barbaric nations. 
 Our educators are narrow-minded ped- 
 ants. They are occupied with the dry 
 bones of text-books, the sawdust of peda- 
 gogics and the would-be scientific ex- 
 periments of educational psychology; they 
 
30 PHILISTINE AND GENIUS 
 
 are ignorant of the real vital problems of 
 human interests, a knowledge of which 
 goes to make the truly educated man. 
 
 About the middle of the nineteenth 
 century, Buckle made the prediction that 
 no war was any more to occur among civi- 
 lized nations. Henceforth peace was to 
 reign supreme. "The wolf shall dwell 
 with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie 
 down with the kid; their young ones shall 
 lie down together, and the lion shall eat 
 straw like the ox. ... Nations shall 
 beat their swords into ploughshares 
 and their spears into pruning hooks. Na- 
 tion shall not lift up sword against nation, 
 nor shall they learn war any more." This 
 prophecy was rather hasty. We have had 
 since the Civil war, the Franco-Prussian 
 war, the Spanish- American war, the Boer 
 war, the Russo-Japanese war, not count- 
 ing the ceaseless wars of extermination 
 
PHILISTINE AND GENIUS 31 
 
 carried on by civilized nations among 
 the various semi-civilized nations and 
 primitive tribes. Civilized nations do not 
 as yet beat their swords into ploughshares, 
 but keep on increasing the strength of 
 their "armed peace," and are ready to fight 
 bloody battles in the quest of new lands and 
 the conquest of new markets. 
 
 In spite of The Hague conference of 
 peace convoked by the peace-loving Czar, 
 no other age has had such large standing 
 armies provided with such costly and ef- 
 ficient weapons of execution ready for in- 
 stant use. The red spectre still stalks 
 abroad claiming its victims. We still be- 
 lieve in the baptism of fire and redemp- 
 tion by blood. The dogma of blood-re- 
 demption is still at the basis of our faith 
 and, consciously or unconsciously, we 
 brand that sacred creed on the minds of 
 the young generation. 
 
32 PHILISTINE AND GENIUS 
 
 We are not educated to see and under- 
 stand the wretchedness, the misery of our 
 life, the evil of the world falls on the 
 blind spot of our eye. In the name of 
 evolution and the survival of the fittest, 
 we justify the grasping arm of the strong, 
 and even glory in the extermination of 
 the weak. The weak, we say, must be 
 weeded out by the processes of natural 
 selection. The strong are the best; it is 
 right that they should survive and flourish 
 like a green bay tree. The fact is that we 
 are still dominated by the law of the 
 jungle, the den and the cave. We are 
 still wild at heart. We still harken to the 
 call of the wild; we are ruled by the fist, 
 the claw and the tooth. 
 
 Love, justice, gentleness, peace, reason, 
 sympathy and pity, all humane feelings 
 and promptings are with us sentiments of 
 4 'unnatural" or supernatural religion 
 
PHILISTINE AND GENIUS 33 
 
 which we profess in our churches, but in 
 which we really have no faith as good for 
 actual life. We mistake brutishness for 
 courage, and by fight and by war we train 
 the beast in man. 
 
 All humane feelings are regarded as so 
 many hindrances to progress ; they favor, 
 we claim, the survival of the weak. We 
 are, of course, evolutionists, and believe 
 most firmly in progress. We believe that 
 the luxuries and vices of the strong are 
 conducive to prosperity, and that the evils 
 of life by the automatic grinding of that 
 grind-organ known as the process of evo- 
 lution somehow lead to a higher civiliza- 
 tion. 
 
 When in the beginning of the eighteenth 
 century Bernard de Mandeville pro- 
 claimed the apparently paradoxical prin- 
 ciple that Private Vices are Public Bene- 
 fits, the academic moralists were shocked 
 
34 PHILISTINE AND GENIUS 
 
 at such profane brutality. Mandeville 
 only proclaimed the leading, the guiding 
 principle of the coming age of industrial 
 prosperity. We now know better. Are 
 we not evolutionists? Have we not 
 learned that progress and evolution and 
 the improvement of the race are brought 
 about by the fierce struggle for existence, 
 by the process of natural selection, by the 
 merciless elimination of the weak and by 
 the triumph of the strong and the fit? 
 What is the use of being sentimental? 
 Like Brennus, the Gaul, we throw our 
 sword on the scales of blinded justice and 
 shout triumphantly "Vce victisT 
 
VI 
 
 WE are confirmed optimists and sow op- 
 timism broadcast. We have optimistic 
 clubs and mental scientists and Christian 
 scientists, all afflicted with incurable 
 ophthalmia to surrounding evil and mis- 
 ery. We are scientific, we are evolution- 
 ists, we have faith in the sort of optimism 
 taught by Leibnitz in his famous Theo- 
 dicea. We are the Candides of our or- 
 acles, the Panglosses. You may possibly 
 remember what Voltaire writes of Pro- 
 fessor Pangloss. "Pangloss used to 
 teach the science of metaphysico-theolo- 
 go-cosmologo-noodleology. He demon- 
 strated to admiration that there is no effect 
 without a cause and that this is the best of 
 
 35 
 
36 PHILISTINE AND GENIUS 
 
 all possible worlds. It has been proved, 
 said Pangloss, that things cannot be other- 
 wise than they are; for everything, the 
 end for which everything is made, is nec- 
 essarily the best end. Observe how noses 
 are made to carry spectacles, and specta- 
 cles we have accordingly. Everything 
 that is, is the best that could possibly be." 
 It is such shallow optimism that now gains 
 currency. 
 
 Verily, we are afflicted with mental 
 cataract. "If we should bring clearly 
 to a man's sight," says Schopenhauer, 
 "the terrible sufferings and miseries to 
 which his life is constantly exposed, he 
 would be seized with horror, and if we 
 were to conduct the confirmed optimist 
 through the hospitals, infirmaries, and 
 surgical operating-rooms, through pris- 
 ons, asylums, torture-chambers and slave- 
 kennels, over battlefields and places of 
 execution; if we were to open to him all 
 
PHILISTINE AND GENIUS 37 
 
 the dark abodes of misery, where it hides 
 itself from the glance of cold curiosity, he 
 would understand at last the nature of 
 this best of possible worlds." 
 
 Schopenhauer is metaphysical, pessi- 
 mistic, but he is certainly not blinded by 
 a shallow optimism to the realities of life. 
 Drunk with the spirit of optimism, we 
 do not realize the degradation, the misery 
 and poverty of our life. Meanwhile the 
 human genius, the genius which all of us 
 possess, languishes, famishes, and perishes, 
 while the brute alone emerges in triumph. 
 We are so overcome by the faith in the 
 transcendent, optimistic evolution of the 
 good, that through the misty, heavenly, 
 angelic visions, we do not discern the 
 cloven hoof of the devil. 
 
 Professor James in a recent address 
 told the Radcliffe graduates that the aim 
 of a college-education is "to recognize the 
 good man'' when you see him. This ad- 
 
38 PHILISTINE AND GENIUS 
 
 vice may be good for Radcliffe young 
 ladies; but, fathers and mothers, the true 
 education of life is the recognition of evil 
 wherever it is met. 
 
 The Bible begins the story of man in a 
 paradise of ignorance and finishes it with 
 his tasting of the fruits of the forbidden 
 tree of knowledge of good and evil. 
 "And the eyes of them both were opened 
 and they knew that they were naked. 
 And the Lord God said, Behold, the 
 man is become as one of us to know good 
 and evil, and now, lest he put forth his 
 hand and take also of the tree of life and 
 eat and live for ever. Therefore, the 
 Lord God sent him forth from the garden 
 of Eden. So he drove out the man." 
 We prefer the sinful, mortal, but godlike 
 man with his knowledge of evil to the 
 brutish philistine in the bliss of Elysium. 
 
VII 
 
 IN the education of the young genera- 
 tion the purpose of the nation is to bring 
 up the child as a good man, as a liberal- 
 minded citizen, devoted soul and body to 
 the interests of social welfare. This pur- 
 pose in the education of the young citizen 
 is of the utmost importance in every so- 
 ciety, but it is a vital need in a democratic 
 society. We do not want narrow-minded 
 patriots devoted to party-factions, nor big- 
 oted sectarians, nor greedy entrepreneurs 
 fastening in trusts, like so many barnacles, 
 on the body-politic. We do not want 
 ringleaders and mobs, unscrupulous bosses 
 and easily led voters. What we need is 
 men having at heart the welfare of their 
 fellow-men. 
 
40 PHILISTINE AND GENIUS 
 
 The purpose of the education provided 
 by the nation for its young generation is 
 the rearing of healthy, talented, broad- 
 minded citizens. We need, above all, 
 good citizens, active and intelligent, with 
 a knowledge of life and with a delicate 
 sense of discrimination and detection of 
 evil in all its protean forms; we need 
 strong-minded citizens with grit and 
 courage to resist oppression and root out 
 evil wherever it is found. A strong sense 
 of recognition of evil should be the social 
 sense of every well-educated citizen as a 
 safeguard of social and national life. 
 The principle of recognition of evil under 
 all its guises is at the basis of the true edu- 
 cation of man. 
 
 Is it not strange that this vital prin- 
 ciple of education, the recognition of evil, 
 a fundamental principle with the great 
 thinkers of humanity, should remain so 
 
PHILISTINE AND GENIUS 41 
 
 sadly neglected by our educators and pub- 
 lic instructors? Our educators are owl- 
 wise, our teachers are pedants and all their 
 ambition is the turning out of smooth, 
 well-polished philistines. It is a sad case 
 of the blind leading the blind. 
 
 It is certainly unfortunate that the fa- 
 vored type of superintendent of our pub- 
 lic education should be such a hopeless 
 philistine, possessed of all the conceit of 
 the mediocre business man. Routine is 
 his ideal. Originality and genius are 
 spurned and suppressed. Our school- 
 superintendent with his well-organized 
 training-shop is proud of the fact that 
 there is no place for genius in our schools. 
 
 Unfortunate and degraded is the nation 
 that has handed over its childhood and 
 youth to guidance and control by hide- 
 bound mediocrity. Our school-managers 
 are respected by the laity as great educa- 
 
42 PHILISTINE AND GENIUS 
 
 tors and are looked up to by the teachers 
 as able business men. Their merit is 
 routine, discipline and the hiring of cheap 
 teaching-employees. 
 
 It is certainly a great misfortune to the 
 nation that a good number of our would- 
 be scientific pedagogues are such medioc- 
 rities, with so absurd an exaggeration of 
 their importance that they are well satis- 
 fied if the mass of their pupils turn out 
 exact reproductions of the silly peda- 
 gogue. What can be expected of a na- 
 tion that entrusts the fate of its young 
 generation to the care or carelessness of 
 young girls, to the ire of old maids, and 
 to pettifogging officials with their educa- 
 tional red tape, discipline and routine, 
 petty bureaucrats animated with a hatred 
 towards talent and genius? 
 
 The goody-goody schoolma'am, the 
 mand arin-schoolmaster, the philistine- 
 
PHILISTINE AND GENIUS 43 
 
 pedagogue, the pedant- administrator with 
 his business capacities, have proved them- 
 selves incompetent to deal with the edu- 
 cation of the young. They stifle talent, 
 they stupefy the intellect, they paralyze 
 the will, they suppress genius, they be- 
 numb the faculties of our children. The 
 educator, with his pseudo-scientific, 
 pseudo-psychological pseudogogics, can 
 only bring up a set of philistines with 
 firm, set habits, marionettes, dolls. 
 
 Business is put above learning, admin- 
 istration above education, discipline and 
 order above cultivation of genius and tal- 
 ent. Our schools and colleges are con- 
 trolled by business men. The school- 
 boards, the boards of trustees of almost 
 every school and college in the country 
 consist mainly of manufacturers, store- 
 keepers, tradesmen, bulls and bears of 
 Wall street and the market-place. What 
 
44 PHILISTINE AND GENIUS 
 
 wonder that they bring with them the 
 ideals and methods of the factory, the 
 store, the bank and the saloon. If the 
 saloon controls politics, the shop controls 
 education. 
 
 Business men are no more competent to 
 run schools and colleges than astronomers 
 are fit to run hotels and theaters. Our 
 whole educational system is vicious. A 
 popular scientific journal entered a pro- 
 test against the vulgarization of our col- 
 leges, the department-store trade methods 
 of our universities, but to no avail. The 
 popular hero, the administrative business 
 superintendent still holds sway, and poi- 
 sons the sources of our social life by de- 
 basing the very foundation of our na- 
 tional education. 
 
VIII 
 
 FROM time to time the " educational" 
 methods of our philistine teachers are 
 brought to light. A girl is forced by a 
 schoolma'am of one of our large cities to 
 stay in a corner for hours, because she 
 unintentionally transgressed against the 
 barrack-discipline of the school-regula- 
 tions. When the parents became afraid 
 of the girl's health and naturally took 
 her out of school, the little girl was 
 dragged before the court by the truant 
 officer. Fortunately "the judge turned to 
 the truant officer and asked him how the 
 girl could be a truant, if she had been sus- 
 pended. He didn't believe in breaking 
 children's wills." 
 
 45 
 
46 PHILISTINE AND GENIUS 
 
 In another city a pupil of genius was 
 excluded from school because "he did not 
 fall in with the system" laid out by the 
 "very able business-superintendent." A 
 schoolmistress conceives the happy idea of 
 converting two of her refractory pupils 
 into pin-cushions for the edification of 
 her class. An "educational" administra- 
 tive superintendent of a large, prosperous 
 community told a lady who brought to 
 him her son, an extraordinarily able boy, 
 "I shall not take your boy into my high- 
 school, in spite of his knowledge." When 
 the mother asked him to listen to her, he 
 lost patience and told her with all the 
 force of his school-authority, "Madam, 
 put a rope around his neck, weigh him 
 well down with bricks!" 
 
 A principal of a high school in one of 
 the prominent New England towns dis- 
 misses a highly talented pupil because, to 
 
PHILISTINE AND GENIUS 4-7 
 
 quote verbatim from the original school 
 document, "He is not amenable to the dis- 
 cipline of the school, as his school life has 
 been too short to establish him in the habit 
 of obedience." "His intellect," the prin- 
 cipal's official letter goes on to say, "re- 
 mains a marvel to us, but we do not feel, 
 and in this I think I speak for all, 
 that he is in the right place." In other 
 words, in the opinion of those remarkable 
 pedagogues, educators and teachers, the 
 school is not the right place for talent and 
 genius ! 
 
 A superintendent of schools in lectur- 
 ing before an audience of "subordinate 
 teachers" told them emphatically that 
 there was no place for genius in our 
 schools. Dear old fogies, one can well 
 understand your indignation! Here we 
 have worked out some fine methods, clever 
 rules, beautiful systems and then comes 
 
48 PHILISTINE AND GENIUS 
 
 genius and upsets the whole structure! 
 It is a shame! Genius cannot fit into the 
 pigeon-holes of the office desk. Choke 
 genius, and things will move smoothly in 
 the school and the office. 
 
 Not long ago we were informed by one 
 of those successful college-mandarins, 
 lionized by office-clerks, superintendents 
 and tradesmen, that he could measure ed- 
 ucation by the foot-rule! Our Regents 
 are supposed to raise the level of educa- 
 tion by a vicious system of examination 
 and coaching, a system which Professor 
 James, in a private conversation with 
 me, has aptly characterized as "idiotic." 
 
 Our schools brand their pupils by a sys- 
 tem of marks, while our foremost colleges 
 measure the knowledge and education of 
 their students by the number of "points" 
 passed. The student may pass either in 
 Logic or Blacksmithing. It does not 
 
PHILISTINE AND GENIUS 49 
 
 matter which, provided he makes up a cer- 
 tain number of "points"! 
 
 College-committees refuse admission 
 to young students of genius, because "it 
 is against the policy and the principles of 
 the university." College-professors ex- 
 pel promising students from the lecture- 
 room for "the good of the class as a 
 whole," because the students "happen to 
 handle their hats in the middle of a lec- 
 ture." This, you see, interferes with 
 class discipline. Fiat justitia, pereat 
 inundus. Let genius perish, provided the 
 system lives. Why not suppress all ge- 
 nius, as a disturbing element, for "the 
 good of the classes," for the weal of the 
 commonwealth? Education of man and 
 cultivation of genius, indeed! This is not 
 school policy. 
 
 We school and drill our children and 
 youth in schoolma'am mannerism, school- 
 
50 PHILISTINE AND GENIUS 
 
 master mind-ankylosis, school-superin- 
 tendent stiff -joint ceremonialism, factory 
 regulations and office-discipline. We give 
 our pupils and students artisan-inspira- 
 tion and business-spirituality. Original- 
 ity is suppressed. Individuality is crushed. 
 Mediocrity is at a premium. That is why 
 our country has such clever business men, 
 such cunning artisans, such resourceful 
 politicians, such adroit leaders of new 
 cults, but no scientists, no artists, no 
 philosophers, no statesmen, no genuine 
 talent and no true genius. 
 
 School-teachers have in all ages been 
 mediocre in intellect and incompetent. 
 Leibnitz is regarded as a dullard and 
 Newton is considered as a blockhead. 
 Never, however, in the history of mankind 
 have school teachers fallen to such a low 
 level of mediocrity as in our times and in 
 our country. For it is not the amount of 
 
PHILISTINE AND GENIUS 51 
 
 knowledge that counts in true education, 
 but originality and independence of 
 thought that are of importance in educa- 
 tion. But independence and originality 
 of thought are just the very elements that 
 are suppressed hy our modern barrack- 
 system of education. No wonder that 
 military men claim that the best "educa- 
 tion" is given in military schools. 
 
 We are not aware that the incubus of 
 officialdom, and the succubus of bureau- 
 cracy have taken possession of our schools. 
 The red tape of officialdom, like a poison- 
 ous weed, grows luxuriantly in our schools 
 and chokes the life of our young genera- 
 tion. Instead of growing into a people 
 of great independent thinkers, the nation 
 is in danger of fast becoming a crowd of 
 well-drilled, well-disciplined, commonplace 
 individuals, with strong philistine habits 
 and notions of hopeless mediocrity. 
 
52 PHILISTINE AND GENIUS 
 
 In levelling education to mediocrity we 
 imagine that we uphold the democratic 
 spirit of our institutions. Our American 
 sensibilities are shocked when the presi- 
 dent of one of our leading colleges dares 
 to recommend to his college that it should 
 cease catering to the average student. 
 We think it un-American, rank treason 
 to our democratic spirit when a college 
 president has the courage to proclaim the 
 principle that "To form the mind and 
 character of one man of marked talent, 
 not to say genius, would be worth more to 
 the community which he would serve than 
 the routine training of hundreds of un- 
 dergraduates." 
 
 We are optimistic, we believe in the 
 pernicious superstition that genius needs 
 no help, that talent will take care of it- 
 self. Our kitchen clocks and dollar time- 
 pieces need careful handling, but our 
 
PHILISTINE AND GENIUS 53 
 
 chronometers and astronomical clocks can 
 run by themselves. 
 
 The truth is, however, that the purpose 
 of the school and the college is not to cre- 
 ate an intellectual aristocracy, but to edu- 
 cate, to bring out the individuality, the 
 originality, the latent powers of talent 
 and genius present in what we unfortu- 
 nately regard as "the average student." 
 Follow Mill's advice. Instead of aiming 
 at athletics, social connections, vocations 
 and generally at the professional art of 
 money-making, "Aim at something noble. 
 Make your system such that a great man 
 may be formed by it, and there will be a 
 manhood in your little men, of which you 
 do not dream." 
 
 Awaken in early childhood the crit- 
 ical spirit of man; awaken, early in 
 the child's life, love of knowledge, love 
 of truth, of art and literature for their 
 
54, PHILISTINE AND GENIUS 
 
 own sake, and you arouse man's genius. 
 We have average mediocre students, be- 
 cause we have mediocre teachers, depart- 
 ment-store superintendents, clerkly prin- 
 cipals and deans with bookkeepers' souls, 
 because our schools and colleges deliber- 
 ately aim at mediocrity. 
 
 Bibot in describing the degenerated 
 Byzantine Greeks tells us that their lead- 
 ers were mediocrities and their great 
 men commonplace personalities. Is the 
 American nation drifting in the same di- 
 rection? It was the system of cultiva- 
 tion of independent thought that awak- 
 ened the Greek mind to its highest achieve- 
 ments in arts, science and philosophy; it 
 was the deadly Byzantine bureaucratic 
 red tape with its cut-and-dried theological 
 discipline that dried up the sources of 
 Greek genius. We are in danger of 
 building up a Byzantine empire with large 
 
PHILISTINE AND GENIUS 55 
 
 institutions and big corporations, but 
 with small minds and dwarfed individuali- 
 ties. Like the Byzantines we begin to 
 value administration above individuality 
 and official, red-tape ceremonialism above 
 originality. 
 
 We wish even to turn our schools into 
 practical school-shops. We shall in time 
 become a nation of well-trained clerks and 
 clever artisans. The time is at hand when 
 we shall be justified in writing over the 
 gates of our school-shops "mediocrity 
 made here!" 
 
IX 
 
 I ASSUME that as liberal men and women 
 you have no use for the process of cram- 
 ming and stuffing of college-geese and 
 mentally indolent, morally obtuse and 
 religiously "cultured" prigs and philis- 
 tines, but that you realize that your true 
 vocation is to get access to the latent ener- 
 gies of your children, to stimulate their re- 
 serve energies and educate, bring to light, 
 man's genius. The science of psychopath- 
 ology now sets forth a fundamental prin- 
 ciple which is not only of the utmost im- 
 portance in psychotherapeutics, but also 
 in the domain of education; it is the prin- 
 ciple of stored up, dormant, reserve- 
 energy, the principle of potential, sub- 
 conscious, reserve energy. 
 
 56 
 
PHILISTINE AND GENIUS 57 
 
 It is claimed on good evidence, biolog- 
 ical, physiological and psychopathological, 
 that man possesses large stores of unused 
 energy which the ordinary stimuli of life 
 are not only unable to reach, but even 
 tend to inhibit. Unusual combinations of 
 circumstances, however, radical changes 
 of the environment, often unloose the in- 
 hibitions brought about by the habitual 
 narrow range of man's interests and sur- 
 roundings. Such unloosening of inhibi- 
 tions helps to release fresh supplies of re- 
 serve energy. It is not the place here to 
 discuss this fundamental principle; I can 
 only state it in the most general way, and 
 give its general trend in the domain of 
 education. 
 
 You have heard the psychologizing ed- 
 ucator advise the formation of good, fixed, 
 stable habits in early life. Now I want 
 to warn you against the dangers of such 
 
58 PHILISTINE AND GENIUS 
 
 unrestricted advice. Fixed adaptations, 
 stable habits, tend to raise the thresholds 
 of mental life, tend to inhibit the libera- 
 tion, the output of reserve-energy. 
 Avoid routine. Do not let your pupils 
 fall into the ruts of habits and customs. 
 Do not let even the best of habits harden 
 beyond the point of further possible modi- 
 fication. 
 
 Where there is a tendency towards 
 formation of over-abundant mental car- 
 tilage, set your pupils to work under 
 widely different circumstances. Con- 
 front them with a changed set of condi- 
 tions. Keep them on the move. Sur- 
 prise them by some apparently paradoxi- 
 cal relations and strange phenomena. 
 Do not let them settle down to one definite 
 set of actions or reactions. Remember 
 that rigidity, like sclerosis, induration of 
 tissue, means decay of originality, destruc- 
 
PHILISTINE AND GENIUS 59 
 
 tion of man's genius. With solidified and 
 unvariable habits not only does the re- 
 serve energy become entirely inaccessible, 
 but the very individuality is extinguished. 
 
 Do not make of our children a nation of 
 philistines. Why say, you make man in 
 your own image? Do not make your 
 schools machine-shops, turning out on one 
 uniform pattern so much mediocrity per 
 year. Cultivate vanability. The tend- 
 ency towards variability is the most pre- 
 cious part of a good education. Beware 
 of the philistine with his set, stable habits. 
 
 The important principle in education is 
 not so much formation of habits as the 
 power of their re-formation. The power 
 of breaking up habits is by far the more 
 essential factor of a good education. It 
 is in this power of breaking down habits 
 that we can find the key for the unlock- 
 ing of the otherwise inaccessible stores of 
 
60 PHILISTINE AND GENIUS 
 
 subconscious reserve energy. The culti- 
 vation of the power of habit-disintegra- 
 tion is what constitutes the proper educa- 
 tion of man's genius* 
 
 *A well known editor of one of the academic Journals 
 on Educational Psychology writes to me as follows: 
 
 "Your remarks on the avoidance of routine would 
 be like a red rag to a bull for a number of educa- 
 tors who are emphasizing the importance of habit for- 
 mation in education at present." 
 
THE power of breaking down or dissolv- 
 ing habits depends on the amount and 
 strength of the aqua fortis of the intellect. 
 The logical and critical activities of the 
 individual should be cultivated with spe- 
 cial care. The critical self, as we may 
 put it, should have control over the auto- 
 matic and the subconscious. For the sub- 
 conscious has been shown to form the 
 fertile soil for the breeding of the most 
 dangerous germs of mental disease, epi- 
 demics, plagues and pestilences in their 
 worst forms. We should try to develop 
 the individual's critical abilities in early 
 childhood, not permitting the suggestible 
 subconsciousness to predominate, and to 
 
 61 
 
62 PHILISTINE AND GENIUS 
 
 become overrun with noxious weeds and 
 pests. 
 
 We should be very careful with the 
 child's critical self, as it is weak and has 
 little resistance. We should, therefore, 
 avoid all dominating authority and cate- 
 gorical imperative commands. Autocratic 
 authority cultivates in the child the predis- 
 position to abnormal suggestibility, to 
 hypnotic states, and leads towards the 
 dominance of the subconscious with its 
 train of pernicious tendencies and delete- 
 rious results. 
 
 There is a period in the child's life 
 between the ages of ^five and ten when 
 he is very inquisitive, asking all kinds 
 of questions. It is the age of discus- 
 sion in the child. This inquisitiveness 
 and discussion should by all means be en- 
 couraged and fostered. We should aid 
 the development of the spirit of inquisi- 
 
PHILISTINE AND GENIUS 63 
 
 tiveness and curiosity in the child. For 
 this is the acquisition of control over the 
 stored-up, latent energies of man's genius. 
 
 We should not arrest the child's ques- 
 tioning spirit, as we are often apt to do, 
 but should strongly encourage the appar- 
 ently meddlesome and troublesome search- 
 ing and prying and scrutinizing of what- 
 ever interests the child. Everything 
 should be open to the child's searching in- 
 terest; nothing should be suppressed and 
 tabooed as too sacred for examination. 
 The spirit of inquiry, the genius of man, 
 is more sacred than any abstract belief, 
 dogma and creed. 
 
 A rabbi came to ask my advice about 
 the education of his little boy. My ad- 
 vice was: "Teach him not to be a Jew." 
 The man of God departed and never came 
 again. The rabbi did not care for edu- 
 cation, but for faith. He did not wish 
 
64 PHILISTINE AND GENIUS 
 
 his boy to become a man, but to be a Jew. 
 The most central, the most crucial part 
 of the education of man's genius is the 
 knowledge, the recognition of evil in all 
 its protean forms and innumerable dis- 
 guises, intellectual, aesthetic and moral, 
 such as fallacies, sophisms, ugliness, de- 
 formity, prejudice, superstition, vice and 
 depravity. Do not be afraid to discuss 
 these matters with the child. For the 
 knowledge, the recognition of evil does 
 not only possess the virtue of immuniza- 
 tion of the child's mind against all evil, 
 but furnishes the main power for habit- 
 disintegration with consequent release and 
 control of potential reserve energy, of 
 manifestations of human genius. When 
 a man becomes contented and ceases to 
 notice the evils of life, as is done by some 
 modern religious sects, he loses his hold on 
 the powers of man's genius, he loses touch 
 
PHILISTINE AND GENIUS 65 
 
 with the throbbing pulse of humanity, he 
 loses hold on reality and falls into sub- 
 human groups. 
 
 The purpose of education, of a liberal 
 education, is not to live in a fool's paradise, 
 or to go through the world in a post-hyp- 
 notic state of negative hallucinations. 
 The true aim of a liberal education is, as 
 the Scriptures put it, to have the eyes 
 opened, to be free from all delusions, 
 illusions, from the fata morgana of life. 
 We prize a liberal education, because it 
 liberates us from subjection to supersti- 
 tious fears, delivers us from the narrow 
 bonds of prejudice, from the exalted or 
 depressing delusions of moral paresis, in- 
 tellectual dementia-praecox, and religious 
 paranoia^> A liberal education liberates 
 us from the enslavement to the degrading 
 influence of all idol-worship. 
 
 In the education of man do not play on 
 
66 PHILISTINE AND GENIUS 
 
 his subconscious sense by deluding him by 
 means of hypnotic and post-hypnotic sug- 
 gestions of positive and negative hallu- 
 cinations, with misty and mystic, beatific 
 visions. Open his eyes to undisguised re- 
 ality. Teach him, show him how to strip 
 the real from its unessential wrappings 
 and adornments and see things in their 
 nakedness. Open the eyes of your chil- 
 dren so that they shall see, understand 
 and face courageously the evils of life. 
 Then will you do your duty as parents, 
 then will you give your children the 
 proper education. 
 
XI 
 
 I HAVE spoken of the fundamental law 
 of early education. The question is "how 
 early?" There are, of course, children 
 who are backward in their development. 
 This backwardness may either be congen- 
 ital or may be due to some overlooked 
 pathological condition that may be easily 
 remedied by proper treatment. In the 
 large majority of children, however, the 
 beginning of education is between the 
 second and third year. It is at that time 
 that the child begins to form his interests. 
 It is at that critical period that we have 
 to seize the opportunity to guide the 
 child's formative energies in the right 
 channels. To delay is a mistake and a 
 
 67 
 
68 PHILISTINE AND GENIUS 
 
 wrong to the child. We can at that early 
 period awaken a love of knowledge which 
 will persist through life. The child will 
 as eagerly play in the game of knowledge 
 as he now spends the most of his energies 
 in meaningless games and objectless silly 
 sports. 
 
 We claim we are afraid to force the 
 child's mind. We claim we are afraid 
 to strain his brain prematurely. This is 
 an error. In directing the course of the 
 use of the child's energies we do not force 
 the child. If you do not direct the ener- 
 gies in the right course, the child will 
 waste them in the wrong direction. The 
 same amount of mental energy used in 
 those silly games, which we think are spe- 
 cially adapted for the childish mind, can 
 be directed, with lasting benefit, to the de- 
 velopment of his interests in intellectual 
 
PHILISTINE AND GENIUS 69 
 
 activity and love of knowledge. The 
 child will learn to play at the game of 
 knowledge-acquisition with the same ease, 
 grace and interest as he is showing now in 
 his nursery-games and physical exercises. 
 
XII 
 
 ARISTOTLE laid it down as a self-evident 
 proposition that all Hellenes love knowl- 
 edge. This was true of the national gen- 
 ius of the ancient Greeks. The love of wis- 
 dom is the pride of the ancient Greek in 
 contradistinction to the barbarian, who 
 does not prize knowledge. We still be- 
 long to the barbarians. Our children, our 
 pupils, our students have no love of knowl- 
 edge. 
 
 The ancient Greeks knew the value of 
 a good education and understood its 
 fundamental elements. They laid great 
 stress on early education and they knew 
 how to develop man's mental energies, 
 without fear of injury to the brain and 
 
 70 
 
PHILISTINE AND GENIUS 71 
 
 physical constitution. The Greeks were 
 not afraid of thought, that it might in- 
 jure the brain. They were strong men, 
 great thinkers. 
 
 The love of knowledge, the love of truth 
 for its own sake, is entirely neglected in 
 our modern schemes of education. In- 
 stead of training men we train mechanics, 
 artisans and shopkeepers. We turn our 
 national schools, high schools and univer- 
 sities into trade-schools and machine-shops. 
 The school, whether lower or higher, has 
 now one purpose in view, and that is the 
 training of the pupil in the art of money- 
 making. Is it a wonder that the result 
 is a low form of mediocrity, a dwarfed and 
 crippled specimen of humanity? 
 
 Open the reports of our school superin- 
 tendents and you find that the illustrations 
 setting forth the prominent work per- 
 formed by the school represent carpentry, 
 
72 PHILISTINE AND GENIUS 
 
 shoemaking, blacksmithing, bookkeeping, 
 typewriting, dressmaking, millinery and 
 cookery. One wonders whether it is the 
 report of a factory inspector, the "scien- 
 tific" advertisement of some instrument- 
 maker or machine-shop, a booklet of some 
 popular hotel, or an extensive circular of 
 some large department-store. Is this 
 what our modern education consists in? 
 Is the aim of the nation to form at its ex- 
 pense vast reserve armies of skilled me- 
 chanics, great numbers of well-trained 
 cooks and well-behaved clerks ?^Is the 
 purpose of the nation to form cheap 
 skilled labor for the manufacturer, or is 
 the aim of society to form intelligent, edu- 
 cated citizens ?V 
 
 The high-school and college courses 
 advised by the professors and elected by 
 the student are with reference to the voca- 
 tion in life, to business and to trade. Our 
 
PHILISTINE AND GENIUS 73 
 
 schools, our high schools, our colleges and 
 our universities are all animated with the 
 same sordid aim of giving electives for 
 early specialization in the art of money- 
 getting. We may say with Mill that our 
 schools and colleges give no true educa- 
 tion, no true culture. We drift to the 
 status of Egypt and India with their 
 castes of early trained mechanics, profes- 
 sionals and shopkeepers. Truly educated 
 men we shall have none. We shall be- 
 come a nation of narrow-minded philis- 
 tines, well contented with their mediocrity. 
 The savage compresses the skull of the in- 
 fant, while we flatten the brain and cramp 
 the mind of our young generation. 
 
XIII 
 
 THE great thinker, John Stuart Mill, 
 insists that "the great business of every 
 rational being is the strengthening and 
 enlarging of his own intellect and charac- 
 ter. The empirical knowledge which the 
 world demands, which is the stock in trade 
 of money-getting, we would leave the 
 world to provide for itself." We must 
 make our system of education such "that 
 a great man may be formed by it, and 
 there will be a manhood in your little men 
 of which you do not dream. We must 
 have a system of education capable of 
 forming great minds." Education must 
 aim at the bringing out of the genius in 
 man. Do we achieve such aim by the 
 
 74 
 
PHILISTINE AND GENIUS 75 
 
 formation of philistine-specialists and 
 young petty-minded artisans? 
 
 "The very cornerstone of an educa- 
 tion," Mill tells us, "intended to form 
 great minds, must be the recognition of 
 the principle, that the object is to call 
 forth the greatest possible quantity of in- 
 tellectual power, and to inspire the intens- 
 est love of truth; and this without a par- 
 ticle of regard to the results to which the 
 exercise of that power may lead." With 
 us the only love of truth is the one that 
 leads to the shop, the bank and the count- 
 ing-house. 
 
 The home controls the school and the 
 college. As long as the home is domi- 
 nated by commercial ideals, the school will 
 turn out mediocre tradesmen. 
 
 This, however, is one of the character- 
 istic types of the American home: the 
 mother thinks of dresses, .fashions and par- 
 
76 PHILISTINE AND GENIUS 
 
 ties. The daughter twangs and thrums 
 on the piano, makes violent attempts at 
 singing that sound as "the crackling of 
 thorns under a pot," is passionately fond 
 of shopping, dressing and visiting. Both, 
 mother and daughter, love society, show 
 and gossip. The father works in some 
 business or at some trade and loves sports 
 and games. Not a spark of refinement 
 and culture, not a redeeming ray of love 
 of knowledge and of art, lighting up the 
 commonplace and frivolous life of the 
 family. What wonder that the children 
 of ten and eleven can hardly read and 
 write, are little brutes and waste away 
 their precious life of childhood in the close, 
 dusty, overheated rooms * of the early 
 grades of some elementary school? Com- 
 mercial mediocrity is raised at home and 
 cultivated in the school. 
 
 "As a means of educating the many, 
 
PHILISTINE AND GENIUS 77 
 
 the universities are absolutely null," ex- 
 claims Mill. The attainments of any 
 kind required for taking all the de- 
 grees conferred by these bodies are, at 
 Cambridge, utterly contemptible." Our 
 American schools, with their ideals of 
 money-earning capacities, our colleges 
 glorying in their athletics, football teams 
 and courses for professional and business 
 specializations would have been regarded 
 by Mill as below contempt. 
 
 What indeed is the worth of an educa- 
 tion that does not create even as much as 
 an ordinary respect for learning and love 
 of truth, and that prizes knowledge in 
 terms of hard cash? What is the educa- 
 tional worth of a college or of a university 
 which suppresses its most gifted students 
 by putting them under the ban of disor- 
 derly behavior, because of not conforming 
 to commonplace mannerisms? What is 
 
78 PHILISTINE AND GENIUS 
 
 the educational value of a university which 
 is but a modern edition of a gladiatorial 
 school with a smattering of the humani- 
 ties? What is the educational value of an 
 institution of learning that expels its best 
 students because they "attract more at- 
 tention than their professors"? What is 
 the intellectual level of a college that 
 expels from its courses the ablest of its 
 students for some slight infringement, and 
 that an involuntary one, under the pre- 
 text that it is done for the sake of class- 
 discipline, "for the general good of the 
 class"? What travesty on education is a 
 system that suppresses genius in the inter- 
 est of mediocrity? What is the cultural, 
 the humanistic value of an education that 
 puts a prize on mediocrity? 
 
XIV 
 
 DISCIPLINE, fixed habits approved by the 
 pedagogue are specially enforced in our 
 schools. To this may be added some 
 "culture" in the art of money-getting in 
 the case of the boys, while in the case of 
 girls the sesthetic training of millinery 
 and dressmaking may be included. The 
 colleges, in addition to class-discipline 
 looked after by the professors and col- 
 lege-authorities, are essentially an organi- 
 zation of hasty-pudding clubs, football 
 associations and athletic corporations. 
 What is the use of a college if not for its 
 games? Many regard the college as use- 
 ful for the formation of business acquaint- 
 ances in later life. Others again consider 
 
 79 
 
80 PHILISTINE AND GENIUS 
 
 the college a good place for learning fine 
 manners. In other words, the college and 
 the school are for athletics, good manners, 
 business companionship, mechanical arts 
 and money-getting. They are for any- 
 thing but education. 
 
 We have become so used to college ath- 
 letics that it appears strange and possibly 
 absurd to demand of a college the culti- 
 vation of man's genius. Who expects to 
 find an intellectual atmosphere among the 
 great body of our college undergraduates? 
 Who expects of our schools and colleges 
 true culture and the cultivation of a taste 
 for literature, art and science? A dean, 
 an unusually able man, of one of the 
 prominent Eastern colleges tells me that 
 he and his friends are very pessimistic 
 about his students and especially about the 
 great body of undergraduate students. 
 Literature, art, science have no interest 
 
PHILISTINE AND GENIUS 81 
 
 for the student; games and athletics fill 
 his mental horizon. 
 
 In the training of our children, in the 
 education of our young, we think that 
 discipline, obedience to paternal and ma- 
 ternal commands, whether rational or ab- 
 surd, are of the utmost importance. We 
 do not realize that in such a scheme of 
 training we fail to cultivate the child's 
 critical faculties, but only succeed in sup- 
 pressing the child's individuality. We 
 only break his will-power and originality. 
 We also prepare the ground for future 
 nervous and mental maladies character- 
 ized by their fears, indecisions, hesitations, 
 diffidence, irritability, lack of individu- 
 ality and absence of self-control. 
 
 We laugh at the Chinese, because they 
 bandage the feet of their girls, we ridicule 
 those who cripple their chest and mutilate 
 their figure by the tight lacing of their cor- 
 
82 PHILISTINE AND GENIUS 
 
 sets, but we fail to realize the baneful ef- 
 fects of submitting the young minds to the 
 grindstone of our educational discipline. 
 I have known good fathers and mothers 
 who have unfortunately been so imbued 
 with the necessity of disciplining the child 
 that they have crushed the child's spirit in 
 the narrow bonds of routine and custom. 
 How can we expect to get great men and 
 women when from infancy we train our 
 children to conform to the philistine ways 
 of Mrs. Grundy? 
 
 In our schools and colleges, habits, dis- 
 cipline and behavior are specially empha- 
 sized by our teachers, instructors and pro- 
 fessors. Our deans and professors think 
 more of red tape, of "points," of discipline 
 than of study; they think more of author- 
 itative suggestion than of critical in- 
 struction. The pedagogue fashions the 
 pupil after his own image. The pro- 
 
PHILISTINE AND GENIUS 83 
 
 fessor, with his disciplinarian tactics, 
 forces the student into the imbecile mum- 
 my-like mannerism of Egyptian pedantry 
 and into the barrack-regulations of class- 
 etiquette. Well may professors of our 
 "war-schools" claim that the best educa- 
 tion is given in military academies. They 
 are right, if discipline is education. But 
 why not the reformatory, the asylum and 
 the prison? 
 
 We trust our unfortunate youth to the 
 Procrustean bed of the mentally obtuse, 
 hide-bound pedagogue. We desiccate, 
 sterilize, petrify and embalm our youth in 
 keeping with the rules of our Egyptian 
 code and in accordance with the Confucian 
 regulations of our school-clerks and col- 
 lege mandarins. Our children learn by 
 rote and are guided by routine. 
 
XV 
 
 BEING in a barbaric stage, we are afraid 
 of thought. We are under the errone- 
 ous belief that thinking, study, causes 
 nervousness and mental disorders. In my 
 practice as physician in nervous and men- 
 tal diseases, I can say without hesitation 
 that I have not met a single case of nerv- 
 ous or mental trouble caused by too 
 much thinking or overstudy. This is at 
 present the opinion of the best psycho- 
 pathologists. What produces nervous- 
 ness is worry, emotional excitement and 
 lack of interest in the work. But that 
 is precisely what we do with our children. 
 We do not take care to develop a love of 
 knowledge in their early life for fear of 
 brain injury, and then when it is late to 
 
 84 
 
PHILISTINE AND GENIUS 85 
 
 acquire the interest, we force them to study, 
 and we cram them and feed them and stuff 
 them like geese. What you often get is 
 fatty degeneration of the mental liver. 
 If, however, you do not neglect the 
 child between the second and third year, 
 and see to it that the brain should not be 
 starved, should have its proper function, 
 like the rest of the bodily organs, by de- 
 veloping an interest in intellectual activ- 
 ity and love of knowledge, no forcing of 
 the child to study is afterwards requisite. 
 The child will go on by himself, he 
 will derive intense enjoyment from his 
 intellectual activity, as he does from his 
 games and physical exercise. The child 
 will be stronger, healthier, sturdier than 
 the present average child, with its purely 
 animal activities and total neglect of brain- 
 function. His physical and mental de- 
 velopment will go apace. He will not be 
 
86 PHILISTINE AND GENIUS 
 
 a barbarian with animal proclivities and a 
 strong distaste for knowledge and mental 
 enjoyment, but he will be a strong, 
 healthy, thinking man. 
 
 Besides, many a mental trouble will be 
 prevented in adult-life. The child will 
 acquire knowledge with the same ease as 
 he learns to ride the bicycle or play ball. 
 By the tenth year, without almost any ef- 
 fort, the child will acquire the knowledge 
 which at present the best college-graduate 
 obtains with infinite labor and pain. 
 That this can be accomplished I can say 
 with authority; I know it as a fact from 
 my own experience with child-life. 
 
 From an economical standpoint alone, 
 think of the saving it would ensure for 
 society. Consider the fact that our chil- 
 dren spend nearly eight years in the com- 
 mon school, studying spelling and arith- 
 metic, and do not know them when they 
 graduate! Think of the eight years of 
 
PHILISTINE AND GENIUS 87 
 
 waste of school buildings and salaries for 
 the teaching force. However, our real 
 object is not economy, but the develop- 
 ment of a strong, healthy, great race of 
 genius. 
 
 As fathers and mothers it may interest 
 you to learn of one of those boys who were 
 brought up in the love and enjoyment of 
 knowledge for its own sake. At the age 
 of twelve, when other children of his age 
 are hardly able to read and spell, and drag 
 a miserable mental existence at the apron 
 strings of some antiquated school-dame, 
 the boy is intensely enjoying courses in 
 the highest branches of mathematics and 
 astronomy at one of our foremost univer- 
 sities. The Iliad and the Odyssey are 
 known to him by heart, and he is deeply 
 interested in the advanced work of Classi- 
 cal Philology. He is able to read He- 
 rodotus, ^Eschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, 
 Aristophanes, Lucian and other Greek 
 
88 PHILISTINE AND GENIUS 
 
 writers with the same zest and ease as our 
 schoolboy reads his Robinson Crusoe or 
 the productions of Cooper and Henty. 
 The boy has a fair understanding of Com- 
 parative Philology and Mythology. He 
 is well versed in Logic, Ancient History, 
 American History and has a general in- 
 sight into our politics and into the ground- 
 work of our Constitution. At the same 
 time he is of an extremely happy disposi- 
 tion, brimming over with humor and fun. 
 His physical condition is splendid, his 
 cheeks glow with health. Many a girl 
 would envy his complexion. Being above 
 five feet four he towers above the average 
 boy of his age. His physical constitution, 
 weight, form and hardihood of organs, far 
 surpasses that of the ordinary schoolboy. 
 He looks like a boy of sixteen. He is 
 healthy, strong and sturdy. 
 
 The philistine-pseudagogues, the self- 
 contented school-autocrats are so imbued 
 
PHILISTINE AND GENIUS 89 
 
 with the fear of intellectual activity and 
 with the superstitious dread of early men- 
 tal education, they are so obsessed with 
 the morbid phobia of human reflective 
 powers, they are so deluded by the belief 
 that study causes disease that they eagerly 
 adhere to the delusion, to quote from a 
 school-superintendent's letter, about the 
 boy being "in a sanitarium, old and worn- 
 out." No doubt, the cramming, the rou- 
 tine, the rote, the mental and moral tyr- 
 anny of the principal and school-superin- 
 tendent do tend to nervous degeneracy 
 and mental break-down. Poor old col- 
 lege owls, academic barn-yard-fowls and 
 worn-out sickly school-bats, you are panic- 
 stricken by the power of sunlight, you are 
 in agonizing, in mortal terror of critical, 
 reflective thought, you dread and suppress 
 the genius of the young. 
 
 We do not appreciate the genius har- 
 
90 PHILISTINE AND GENIUS 
 
 bored in the average child, and we let it 
 lie fallow. We are mentally poor, not 
 because we lack riches, but because we do 
 not know how to use the wealth of mines, 
 the hidden treasures, the now inaccessible 
 mental powers which we possess. 
 
 In speaking of our mental capacities, 
 Francis Galton, I think, says that we are 
 in relation to the ancient Greeks what the 
 Bushmen and Hottentots are in relation to 
 us. Galton and many other learned men 
 regard the modern European races as infe- 
 rior to the Hellenic race. They are wrong, 
 and I know from experience that they are 
 wrong. It rests in our hands either to 
 remain inferior barbarians or to rival and 
 even surpass in brilliancy the genius of 
 the ancient Hellenes. We can develop 
 into a great race by the proper education 
 of man's genius. 
 
XVI 
 
 ONE other important point claims our 
 attention in the process of education of 
 man's genius. We must immunize our 
 children against mental microbes, as we 
 vaccinate our babies against small-pox. 
 The cultivation of critical judgment and 
 the knowledge of evil are two powerful 
 constituents that form the antitoxin for 
 the neutralization of the virulent toxins 
 produced by mental microbes. At the 
 same time we should not neglect proper 
 conditions of mental hygiene. We should 
 not people the child's mind with ghost- 
 stories, with absurd beliefs in the super- 
 natural, and with articles of creed charged 
 with brimstone and pitch from the bowels 
 of hell. We must guard the child against 
 
 91 
 
92 PHILISTINE AND GENIUS 
 
 all evil fears, superstitions, prejudices and 
 credulity. 
 
 We should counteract the baneful in- 
 fluences of the pathogenic, pestiferous, 
 mental microbes which now infest our 
 social air, since the child, not having yet 
 formed the antitoxin of critical judgment 
 and knowledge of evil, has not the power 
 of resisting mental infection, and is thus 
 very susceptible to mental contagion on 
 account of his extreme suggestibility. 
 The cultivation of credulity, the absence 
 of critical judgment and of recognition 
 of evil, with consequent increase of sug- 
 gestibility, make man an easy prey to 
 all kinds of social delusions, mental epi- 
 demics, religious crazes, financial manias, 
 and political plagues, which have been the 
 baleful pest of aggregate humanity in all 
 ages. 
 
 The immunization of children, the de- 
 
PHILISTINE AND GENIUS 93 
 
 velopment of resistance to mental germs 
 whether moral, immoral or religious, can 
 only be effected by the medical man with 
 a psychological and psychopathological 
 training. Just as science, philosophy and 
 art have gradually passed out of the con- 
 trol of the priest, so now we find that the 
 control of mental and moral life is grad- 
 ually passing away from under the influ- 
 ence of the church into the hands of the 
 medical psychopathologist. 
 
 The physical life of the nation is now 
 gradually being regulated by medical sci- 
 ence with a consequent decrease of disease 
 and mortality. Gradually and slowly the 
 school begins to feel the need of medical 
 advice, both as to the health of the pupils 
 and their more efficient training. Gradu- 
 ally the medical man assumes the respon- 
 sibility of guiding the teacher and telling 
 him why the pupils are defective in their 
 
94 PHILISTINE AND GENIUS 
 
 studies and why the pedantic methods of 
 academic pedagogy are arid and sterile. 
 In some cases the doctor actually under- 
 takes the training of the young. Thus 
 the Italian doctor, Maria Montessori, 
 from the education of defective children 
 has finally undertaken, with immense, al- 
 most phenomenal, success, the training 
 and education of normal children. 
 
 As we look forward into the future 
 we begin to see that the school is com- 
 ing under the control of the medical 
 man. The medical man free from super- 
 stitions and prejudices, possessed of the 
 science of mind and body, is to assume 
 in the future the supervision of the educa- 
 tion of the nation. 
 
 The schoolmaster and the schoolma'am 
 with their narrow-minded, pedantic pseu- 
 dogogics are gradually losing prestige 
 and passing away, while the medical man 
 
PHILISTINE AND GENIUS 95 
 
 alone is able to cope with the serious 
 threatening danger of national mental 
 degeneration. Just as the medical pro- 
 fession now saves the nation from physi- 
 cal degeneration and works for the physi- 
 cal regeneration of the body-politic, so 
 will the medical profession of the fu- 
 ture assume the duty of saving the nation 
 from mental and moral decline, from de- 
 generation into a people of fear-pos- 
 sessed, mind-racked psychopathies and 
 neurotics, with broken wills and crushed 
 individualities on the one hand, accompan- 
 ied, on the other hand, by the still worse 
 affliction and incurable malady of a self- 
 contented mediocrity and a hopeless, Chi- 
 nese philistinism. 
 
 There are in the United States about 
 two hundred thousand insane, while the 
 victims of psychopathic, mental maladies 
 may be counted by the millions. Insan- 
 
96 PHILISTINE AND GENIUS 
 
 ity can be greatly alleviated, but much, 
 if not all, of that psychopathic mental 
 misery known as functional mental dis- 
 ease is entirely preventable. It is the 
 result of our pitiful, wretched, brain- 
 starving, mind-crippling methods of edu- 
 cation. 
 
XVII 
 
 IN my work of mental and nervous dis- 
 eases I become more and more convinced 
 of the preponderant influence of early 
 childhood in the causation of psychopathic 
 mental maladies. Most, in fact all, of 
 those functional mental diseases originate 
 in early childhood. A couple of concrete 
 cases will perhaps best illustrate my point : 
 The patient is a young man of 26. He 
 suffers from intense melancholic depres- 
 sion, often amounting to agony. He is 
 possessed by the fear of having committed 
 the unpardonable sin. He thinks that he 
 is damned to suffer tortures in hell for all 
 eternity. I cannot go here into the de- 
 tails of the case, but an examination of 
 
 97 
 
98 PHILISTINE AND GENIUS 
 
 the patient by the hypnoidal state clearly 
 traced his present condition to the influ- 
 ence of an old woman, a Sunday school 
 teacher, who infected him with those vir- 
 ulent germs in his very early childhood, 
 about the age of five. Let me read to you 
 a paragraph from the patient's own ac- 
 count: "It is difficult to place the begin- 
 ning of my abnormal fear. It certainly 
 originated from doctrines of hell which I 
 heard in early childhood, particularly from 
 a rather ignorant elderly woman, who 
 taught Sunday school. My early reli- 
 gious thought was chiefly concerned with 
 the direful eternity of torture that might 
 be awaiting me, if I was not good enough 
 to be saved." 
 
 Another patient of mine, a clergyman's 
 wife, was extremely nervous, depressed, 
 and suffered from insomnia, from night- 
 mares, from panophobia, general fear, 
 
PHILISTINE AND GENIUS 99 
 
 dread of the unknown, from claustro- 
 phobia, fear of remaining alone, fear of 
 darkness and numerous other fears and 
 insistent ideas, into the details of which I 
 cannot go here. By means of the hypnoi- 
 dal state the symptoms were traced to 
 impressions of early childhood; when at 
 the age of five, the patient was suddenly 
 confronted by a maniacal woman. The 
 child was greatly frightened, and since 
 that time she became possessed by the fear 
 of insanity. When the patient gave birth 
 to her child, she was afraid the child would 
 become insane ; many a time she even had 
 a feeling that the child was insane. Thus 
 the fear of insanity is traced to an expe- 
 rience of early childhood, an experience 
 which, having become subconscious, is 
 manifesting itself persistently in the pa- 
 tient's consciousness. 
 
 The patient's parents were very reli- 
 
100 PHILISTINE AND GENIUS 
 
 gious, and the child was brought up not 
 only in the fear of God, but also in the 
 fear of hell and the devil. Being sensi- 
 tive and imaginative, the devils of the 
 gospel were to her stern realities. She 
 had a firm belief in "diabolical posses- 
 sions" and "unclean spirits"; the legend 
 of Jesus exorcising in the country of the 
 Gadarenes unclean spirits, whose name 
 is Legion, was to her a tangible reality. 
 She was brought up on brimstone and 
 pitch, with everlasting fires of the "bot- 
 tomless pit" for sinners and unbelievers. 
 In the hypnoidal state she clearly remem- 
 bered the preacher, who used every Sun- 
 day to give her the horrors by his pictur- 
 esque descriptions of the tortures of the 
 "bottomless pit." She was in anguish 
 over the unsolved question: "Do little 
 sinner-girls go to hell?" This fear of hell 
 
PHILISTINE AND GENIUS 101 
 
 made the little girl feel depressed and 
 miserable and poisoned many a cheerful 
 moment of her life. 
 
 What a lasting effect and what a mel- 
 ancholy gloom this fear of ghosts and of 
 unclean spirits of the bottomless pit pro- 
 duced on this young life may be judged 
 from the following facts: When the pa- 
 tient was about eleven years old, a young 
 girl, a friend of hers, having noticed the 
 patient's fear of ghosts, played on her one 
 of those silly, practical jokes, the effect 
 of which on sensitive natures is often 
 disastrous and lasting. The girl dis- 
 guised herself as a ghost, in a white sheet, 
 and appeared to the patient, who was just 
 on the point of falling asleep. The child 
 shrieked in terror and fainted. Since 
 that time the patient suffered from night- 
 mares and was mortally afraid to sleep 
 
102 PHILISTINE AND GENIUS 
 
 alone ; she passed many a night in a state 
 of excitement, frenzied with the fear of 
 apparitions and ghosts. 
 
 When about the age of seventeen, she 
 apparently freed herself from the belief 
 in ghosts and unclean powers. But the 
 fear acquired in her childhood did not 
 lapse; it persisted subconsciously and 
 manifested itself in the form of uncon- 
 trollable fears. She was afraid to remain 
 alone in a room, especially in the evening. 
 Thus, once when she had to go upstairs, 
 alone to pack her trunks, a gauzy garment 
 called forth the experience of her ghost- 
 fright; she had the illusion of seeing a 
 ghost, and fell fainting to the floor. Un- 
 less specially treated, fears acquired in 
 childhood last through life. 
 
 "Every ugly thing," says Mosso, the 
 great Italian physiologist, "told to the 
 child, every shock, every fright given him, 
 
PHILISTINE AND GENIUS 103 
 
 will remain like minute splinters in the 
 flesh, to torture him all his life long. 
 
 "An old soldier whom I asked what his 
 greatest fears had been, answered me 
 thus: *I have only had one, but it pur- 
 sues me still. I am nearly seventy years 
 old, I have looked death in the face I do 
 not know how many times; I have never 
 lost heart in any danger, but when I pass 
 a little old church in the shades of the 
 forest, or a deserted chapel in the moun- 
 tains, I always remember a neglected ora- 
 tory in my native village, and I shiver and 
 look around, as though seeking the corpse 
 of a murdered man which I once saw car- 
 ried into it when a child, and with which 
 an old servant wanted to shut me up to 
 make me good.' ' Here, too, experiences 
 of early childhood have persisted subcon- 
 sciously throughout lifetime. 
 
XVIII 
 
 I APPEAL to you, fathers and mothers, 
 and to you, liberal-minded readers, asking 
 you to turn your attention to the educa- 
 tion of your children, to the training of 
 the young generation of future citizens. 
 I do not appeal to our official educators, 
 to our scientific, psychological pseuda- 
 gogues, to the clerks of our teaching shops, 
 for they are beyond all hope. From 
 that quarter I expect nothing but attacks 
 and abuse. We cannot possibly expect 
 of the philistine-educator and mandarin- 
 pseudagogue the adoption of different 
 views of education. We should not keep 
 new wine in old goat-skins. The present 
 school-system squanders the resources of 
 the country and wastes the energies, the 
 lives of our children. Like Cato our cry 
 
 104 
 
PHILISTINE AND GENIUS 105 
 
 should be Carthago delenda est, the 
 school-system should be abolished and 
 with it should go the present psychologi- 
 zing educator, the schoolmaster and the 
 schoolma'am. 
 
 Fathers and mothers, you keep in your 
 hands the fate of the young generation. 
 You are conscious of the great responsi- 
 bility, of the vast, important task laid upon 
 you by the education of your children. 
 For, according to the character of the 
 training and education given to the young, 
 they may be made a sickly host of nervous 
 wrecks and miserable wretches; or they 
 may be formed into a narrow-minded, 
 bigoted, mediocre crowd of self-contented 
 "cultured" philistines, bat-blind to evil; or 
 they may be made a great race of genius 
 with powers of rational control of their 
 latent, potential, reserve energy. The 
 choice remains with you. 
 
APPENDIX 
 
 PRECOCITY IN CHILDREN * 
 
 BY precocity I mean the manifestation of 
 the child's mental functions at a period 
 earlier than the one observed in the past 
 and present generations of children. 
 
 In the course of his growth and de- 
 velopment the individual unfolds his inner 
 powers through acquisition of the stored- 
 up experiences of previous generations. 
 The well known biogenetic law may, with 
 some modifications, be applied to mental 
 life. The development of the individual 
 
 * Reproduced in part, with the kind permission 
 of the publishers, from my contribution to the 
 forthcoming Encyclopaedia of Education, published 
 by Sir Isaac Pitman and Sons, London, England. 
 
 107 
 
108 PHILISTINE AND GENIUS 
 
 is an abbreviated reproduction of the evo- 
 lution of the species. Briefly put: Onto- 
 genesis is an epitome of Phylogenesis. 
 This biogenetic law holds true in the do- 
 main of education. The stored-up ex- 
 periences of the race are condensed, fore- 
 shortened, and recapitulated in the child's 
 life history. This process of progressive 
 "precocity," or of foreshortening of edu- 
 cation, has been going on unconsciously in 
 the course of human evolution. We have 
 reached a stage when man can be made 
 conscious of this fundamental process, 
 thus getting control over his own growth 
 and development. 
 
 Although the process of foreshortening 
 of education has been taking place 
 throughout the history of mankind, and 
 especially of civilized humanity, still the 
 process has remained imperceptible on ac- 
 count of its extremely slow rate of prog- 
 
PHILISTINE AND GENIUS 109 
 
 ress. Hence the fact of "precocity," or 
 of early development of children, has been 
 hitherto regarded as rare, as phenomenal. 
 Like all rare phenomena, precocity, or 
 early child development, is considered as 
 unique, as abnormal, and even as patho- 
 logical. In fact, many still regard pre- 
 cocity as some form of malady akin to 
 mental alienation. 
 
 It is well to bear in mind that phe- 
 nomena, at first scarce and rare, may 
 under favorable conditions become suf- 
 ficiently numerous to be quite common. 
 In fact, we may lay it down as a law that 
 all discoveries, inventions, and changes in 
 general, economical, political, social, men- 
 tal, moral, and religious, first appear on 
 a small scale in limited areas from which 
 they spread in various directions. Or- 
 ganisms start, as variations or mutations, 
 from minute nuclei of growth; species 
 
110 PHILISTINE AND GENIUS 
 
 have their origin in small centres and re- 
 stricted areas. A new species may begin 
 with some apparently insignificant varia- 
 tion which may grow and develop, and 
 which, from a certain standpoint, may be 
 regarded as an abnormality. 
 
 What at present is considered as "pre- 
 cocity," and hence as an abnormality, may 
 really be the foreshadowing of the future. 
 The apparently precocious variation may 
 and will turn out a normal phenomenon. 
 The stone which the builders refused is 
 become the head stone of the corner. 
 Early education, precocity, is to become 
 the corner stone of human life. At pres- 
 ent the preliminary period of child educa- 
 tion is unduly retarded to the detriment 
 of the individual and society. 
 
 The truth is, we do not realize the im- 
 portance of early training. We begin 
 education late in the child's life, when dis- 
 
PHILISTINE AND GENIUS 111 
 
 positions have become formed and habits 
 have become rigid. This delay seriously 
 injures the growth of the child by lower- 
 ing the level of mental activity. The 
 critical points of formation of mental in- 
 terests are allowed to slip by, leaving the 
 individual irresponsive to mental, aesthetic, 
 and moral interests. The critical turning 
 points, when the best energies could be 
 brought out, are not taken care of at the 
 right moment. 
 
 The mental functions become pre- 
 maturely atrophied and degenerated. 
 When we later on attempt to awaken 
 those functions, we are surprised to find 
 them absent. We labor under the false 
 impression that the child is naturally 
 inapt and deficient. To make up for this 
 apparent deficiency we force the child's 
 mind into narrow channels, crippling and 
 deforming it into mean mediocrity. The 
 
112 PHILISTINE AND GENIUS 
 
 child is run into the rigid moulds of home, 
 school, and college with the result of 
 permanent mutilation of originality and 
 genius. The individual is deformed, be- 
 cause the critical spirit of inquiry and 
 originality is racked on the Procrustes' 
 bed of home and school. The unfortunate 
 thing about it is the firm belief that the 
 crippled spirit of the child is a congenital 
 mediocrity. Instead of shouldering the 
 fault, we put the burden on Heredity. 
 Darwinism with its spontaneous variation 
 and hereditary transmission, Austro-Ger- 
 manic Mendelism, accompanied by a wide- 
 spread propaganda of Eugenics, have 
 blotted out from view the far more fun- 
 damental factors of environment and edu- 
 cation which play such a paramount role 
 in man's life. 
 
 We may profit by recent studies in 
 Psychopathology. In my investigations 
 
PHILISTINE AND GENIUS 113 
 
 I have shown the important role which 
 early child experience plays in the pa- 
 tient's life. Psychopathic affections can 
 be traced to child fears which become 
 afterwards reinforced by unfavorable con- 
 ditions of life. This is formulated in my 
 works on Psychopathology. Psychopa- 
 thology clearly brings out the significant 
 fact that a good start in early childhood 
 is of the utmost consequence to the in- 
 dividual. Only a good education in early 
 life can save man from the innumerable 
 psychopathic maladies to which he is sub- 
 ject. The seeds of vicious habits and of 
 criminal tendencies can be eliminated in 
 early childhood. 
 
 Early development or what is termed 
 "precocity" in children will not only pre- 
 vent vice, crime, and disease, but will 
 strengthen the individual along all lines, 
 physical, mental, and moral. We should 
 
114 PHILISTINE AND GENIUS 
 
 be careful not to cast the child's mind 
 into ready made moulds, not to subject 
 his mind, his character to the yoke of 
 meaningless mannerisms and rigid formal- 
 ities. We should have respect for the 
 child's personality. We should remem- 
 ber that there is genius in every healthy, 
 normal child. 
 
 We are blind to the child's latent genius, 
 because we look to brute force as our 
 standard. Like savages, we are afraid of 
 genius, especially when it is manifested 
 as "precocity in children." This abject 
 fear of genius and of precocity is one of 
 the most pernicious philistine supersti- 
 tions, causing the retardation of the prog- 
 ress of humanity. The fear of mental 
 precocity is essentially the phobia of the 
 inveterate philistine. 
 
 We should bear in mind that the phil- 
 istine is an insignificant, though exact 
 
PHILISTINE AND GENIUS 115 
 
 part of a huge social machine, of a Frank- 
 enstein "kultur" before which the phil- 
 istine prostrates himself in dust, a social 
 monster of which he is proud to form an 
 irresponsible mite. Whether he be an 
 atom of a political organization, of a na- 
 tion, or of a military kultur-system, the 
 philistine is trained to be content to play 
 the same ignoble, slavish role of submis- 
 sion, obedience, and irresponsibility. 
 Without personal conscience, without per- 
 sonal will, without personal initiative, the 
 impersonal philistine is like the stupid 
 genie of Aladdin's lamp who slavishly 
 obeys the master of the magic lamp. 
 
 The present horrible European war 
 (predicted in this volume several years 
 before the onset of the war. See pp. 30, 
 31) is the unfortunate, but natural out- 
 come of philistine education and philistine 
 life. The immediate cause of the war may 
 
116 PHILISTINE AND GENIUS 
 
 be traced to politics, greed, competition, to 
 commercial, industrial, cultural, national, 
 international, and racial complications. 
 At bottom, however, the present Euro- 
 pean war is ultimately due to our per- 
 nicious system of training, the bane of 
 our industrial, social life. Millions of men 
 are drilled and disciplined to act as autom- 
 ata; men are trained from childhood, 
 at home, school, college, and university 
 to surrender their individual judgment, 
 and follow blindly an alleged "social con- 
 / sciousness," entrusted, by a set of phil- 
 jistine bureaucrats, to superior leaders, to 
 / generals, admirals, and field-marshals. 
 Men are hypnotized by a pernicious and 
 vicious system of training and quasi-edu- 
 cation to consider it a high, sacred ideal 
 to obey implicitly the will of a few of- 
 ficials and diplomats, to attack, plunder 
 and slaughter at the command of gen- 
 
PHILISTINE AND GENIUS 117 
 
 erals and officers, in the interest of a 
 jplutocratic oligarchy, hallowed by the 
 vague shibboleth: "Flag, Country, Pa- 
 triotism." * The youth of nations is de- 
 bauched with the belief in the supreme 
 
 * "The cheapest form of pride/' says Schopen- 
 hauer, "is national pride; for if a man is proud 
 of his own nation it follows that he has no quali- 
 ties of his own of which he can be proud; other- 
 wise he would not have recourse to those which he 
 shares with his fellow-men. . . . Every miserable 
 fool who has nothing at all of which he can be 
 proud adopts as a last resource pride in the nation 
 to which he belongs; he is ready and glad to de- 
 fend all its faults and follies, tooth and nail, thus 
 reimbursing himself for his own inferiority. . . . 
 National character is only another name for the 
 particular form which the littleness, perversity, and 
 baseness of mankind take in every country." . . . 
 "Narrowness, prejudice, vanity, and self-interest 
 are the main elements of patriotism." . . . "Does 
 not all history show that whenever a king is firmly 
 established on the throne, and the people reach 
 some degree of prosperity, he uses it to lead an 
 army, like a band of robbers, against adjoining 
 countries? Are not almost all wars ultimately un- 
 dertaken for purpose of plunder?" . . . Schopen- 
 hauer prophetically warns his countrymen: "All 
 war is a matter of robbery, and the Germans 
 should take that as a warning." 
 
118 PHILISTINE AND GENIUS 
 
 grandeur of delivering their personal re- 
 sponsibility in the keeping of a handful 
 of Byzantine bureaucrats, irresponsible 
 junkers, and half -crazed Caesars. 
 
 The principle "Be Childlike" is para- 
 mount in the education of mankind. The 
 child represents the future, all the pos- 
 sibilities, all the coming greatness of the 
 human race. We, the adults, are con- 
 taminated by the brutal passions and vices 
 incident to the struggle for existence and 
 self-preservation. 
 
 Plasticity of mind is characteristic of 
 genius. Plasticity of mind and body is 
 preeminently characteristic of the child. 
 Adaptability and plasticity are found in 
 all young tissue, muscle, gland, and nerve. 
 As the organism ages, becomes differ- 
 entiated, and adapted to special functions 
 and conditions of life, it loses its original 
 plasticity. The tissues become fixed and 
 
PHILISTINE AND GENIUS 119 
 
 the functions set. The adult's brain and 
 mind begin to work in ruts. The child-is 
 superior to the adult. 
 
 The child looks at the world with eyes 
 simple, clear, bright, not blinded by the 
 heavy scales of traditions, superstitions, 
 and prejudices of remote ages. The in- 
 tricate worries, complex fears, selfish mo- 
 tives, brutal passions, greed, revenge, 
 malice, vice, enmity do not as yet mar the 
 soul of the child. Artificial needs, strong 
 animal passions have no firm hold on the 
 child's mind. The child's mind is purer,) 
 fresher, brighter, far more original than , 
 the adult intelligence with its philistine 
 notions and hide-bound habits of thought 
 and belief. 
 
 With age the mind becomes specialized 
 and degraded in quality. Unless checked 
 by a good education and by a persistent 
 course of mental activity, intellectual and 
 
120 PHILISTINE AND GENIUS 
 
 other mental interests, the adult mind is 
 apt to deteriorate. Unless controlled by 
 a good education and by intense mental 
 interests, free from service to animal 
 needs, the emotions of self-regard, the im- 
 pulse of self-preservation with its fear in- 
 stinct gradually gain in man the upper 
 hand.-<ln the child, on the contrary, the 
 personal interests are relatively weak, and 
 fluctuating, hence the possibility of pure 
 disinterestedness, pure curiosity, love of 
 learning, the root of all originality pres- 
 ent both in genius and the childN The 
 child presents the innocence and gentle- 
 ness of human genius, the adult philistine 
 is the embodiment of the force and cun- 
 ning of the brute.\ 
 
 We should not be scared by the bug- 
 bear of precocity. We should awaken 
 man's genius by giving the child an early, 
 a "precocious" education. We should 
 
PHILISTINE AND GENIUS 121 
 
 bear in mind that the knowledge of our 
 schoolboys and schoolgirls far surpasses 
 that of the ancient sages or of the medi- 
 eval doctors. We should learn to under- 
 stand and to utilize the process of pro- 
 gressive foreshortening of race acquisi- 
 tions in the history of the individual. 
 
 The great biologist, Professor C. S. 
 Minot, comes to a similar conclusion, as 
 the result of his profound biological in- 
 vestigations: "I believe," says Minot, "that 
 this principle of psychological develop- 
 ment, paralleling the career of physical 
 development, needs to be more considered 
 in arranging our educational plans. For 
 if it be true that the decline in the power 
 of learning is most rapid at first, it is evi- 
 dent that we want to make as much use 
 of the early years as possible that the 
 tendency, for instance, which has existed 
 in many of our universities, to postpone 
 
122 PHILISTINE AND GENIUS 
 
 the period of entrance into college, is 
 biologically an erroneous tendency. It 
 would be better to have the young man get 
 to college earlier, graduate earlier, get 
 into practical life or into professional 
 schools earlier, while the power of learning 
 is greater." 
 
 I may say that within my experience 
 children who had the advantage of an 
 early education and training manifested 
 a higher grade of intellectual and moral 
 life, a far better state of physical health 
 than children brought up under the pres- 
 ent retarding and crippling system of edu- 
 cation. In conclusion I may add that in 
 order to gain access to man's Reserve 
 Energy we must have recourse to early 
 child education, to the much maligned, 
 and greatly feared "Precocity in Chil- 
 dren," 
 
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