CHAPTER II

EDUCATION AND PERSONALITY

It is essential at the very outset to understand clearly what is meant by _concrete personality_, and why the particular or empirical personality, as we are usually accustomed to consider it, is nothing more than an abstraction.

Ordinarily, relying on the most obvious data of experience, we are led to believe that the sphere of our moral personality coincides exactly with the sphere of our physical person, and is therefore limited and contained by the surface of our material body. We consider this body in itself as an indivisible whole, with such reciprocal correspondence and interdependence of its parts as to become a veritable system. It seems to us also that this system moves in space as a whole when the body is displaced, continuing to remain united as long as it exists. We look upon it as though it were separated from all other bodies, whether of the same or of different kinds, in such a manner that it excludes others from the place it occupies, and is itself in turn excluded by them. One body then, one physical person, one moral personality--that moral personality which each one of us recognises and affirms by the consciousness of the ego.

And in fact when I walk I am not a different person from when I think. My ego remains the same whether my body moves through space or whether my mind inwardly meditates. Impenetrability, which is possessed by matter, seems to be also a property of human individualism.

From my ego every other ego is apparently excluded. What I am no one else can be, and I in turn cannot be confused with another person. Those of my fellow beings that are most intimately, most closely related to me seem yet as completely external to me, as thoroughly sundered from my spirit, as their bodies are from mine. My father, my brother are dead. They have vanished from this world in which I nevertheless continue to exist; just as a stone remains in its place and is in no way affected when another stone near by is removed; or as a mutilated pedestal may still remain to remind the onlooker of the statue that was torn away.

Hundreds of individuals assemble to listen to the words of an orator. But no necessary ties exist between the various persons; and when the speaking is over, each one goes his way confident that he has lost no part of himself and that he has maintained his individuality absolutely unaltered.

Our elders lived on this planet when we had not yet arrived. After we came, they gradually withdrew, one after the other. And just as they had been able to exist without us, so shall we continue to live without them, and away from them develop our personality. For each one of us, according to this point of view, has his own being within himself, his own particular destiny. Every man makes of himself the centre of his world, of that universe which he has created with deeds and thoughts: a universe of ideas, of images, of concepts, of systems, which are all in his brain; a universe of values, of desirable goods and of abhorred evils, all of which are rooted in his own individual will, in his character, and originate from the peculiar manner in which he personally colours this world and conceives the universe.

What is another man's sorrow to me? What part have I in his joys? And how can the science of Aristotle or of Galileo be anything to me, since I do not know them, since I cannot read their books, and am totally unfamiliar with their teachings? And the unknown wayfarer who passes by, wrapped in his thoughts, what does he care for my loftiest conceptions, for the songs that well forth from the depths of my soul? The hero's exploit brings no glory to us; the heinous deed of the criminal makes us shudder indeed, but drives no pangs of remorse through our conscience. For every one of us has his own body and his own particular soul. Every one, in short, is himself independently of what others may be.

This conception, which we ordinarily form of our personality, and on which we erect the system of our practical life in all our manifold relations with other individuals, is an abstract concept. For when we thus conceive our being, we see but a single side of it and that the least important: we fail to grasp that part which reveals all that is spiritual, and human, and truly and peculiarly ours. I shall not here investigate how the human personality has two aspects so totally different one from the other; and in what remote depths we must search for the common root of these two contrasting and apparently contradictory manifestations. Our task for the moment is to establish within ourselves through reflection the firm conviction that we are not lone individualities: that there is another and a better part of us, an element which is the very antithesis of the particular, that one, namely, which is the deep-seated source of our nature, by which we cease, each one of us, to be in irreducible opposition to the rest of humanity, and become instead what all the others are or what we want them to be.

In order to fix our attention on this more profound aspect of our inner life, I shall take as an example one of those elements which are contained in the concept of nationality, Language. Language it must be remembered does not belong _per se_ to nationality; it belongs to it in virtue of an act by which a will, a personality, affirms itself with a determined content. We must now point out the abstract character of that concept by which language, which is a constituent element of our personality, is usually ascribed to what is merely particular in it.

That language is a peculiar and constituent element of personality is quite obvious. Through language we speak not to others only, but to ourselves also. Speaking to ourselves means seeing within ourselves our own ideas, our soul, our very self in short,--it means self-consciousness, as the philosophers say, and therefore self-control, clear vision of our acts, knowledge of what stirs within us; it means, therefore, living not after the manner of dumb animals, but as rational beings, as men. Man cannot think, have consciousness of himself, reason, without first expressing all that to himself. Man has been defined as a rational animal; he may also be defined as the speaking animal. The remark is as old as Aristotle.

Man, however, this animal endowed with the faculty of speaking, is not man in general who never was, but the real man, the historical man, actually existing. And he does not speak a general language, but a certain definite one.

When I speak before a public, I can but use my language, the Italian language. And I exist, that is I affirm myself, I come into real being, by thinking in conformity with my real personality, in so far as I speak, and speak this language of mine. _My_ language, the _Italian_ language. Here lies the problem. Were I not to speak, or were I to speak otherwise than I know how, I would not be myself. This manner of expressing myself is then an intrinsic trait of my personality. But this speech which makes me what I am, and which therefore intimately belongs to me, could it possibly be mine, could I use it, mould it into my own life-substance, if, mine though it be, it were yet enclosed within me in the manner that every particle of my flesh is contained within my body, having nothing in common with any other part of matter co-existing in space? Could my language in short really be my language, if it belonged exclusively to me, to what I have called my particular or empirical personality?

A simple reflection will suffice to show that my language, like a beacon of light, inwardly illumines my Thought, and renders visible to me every movement and every sense, only because this language is not exclusively my own. It is that same language through which I grasp the ancient authors of Italy. I read about Francesca da Rimini and Count Ugolino, and find them within me in the emotion of my throbbing soul. I read of Petrarch's golden-haired Laura, of Ariosto's Angelica, fair love of chivalrous men and the unhappy friend of youthful Medoro. I read of the cunning art whereby the Florentine secretary, in his keen speculative discourses, sought to establish the principalities and the state of Italy. I read of the many loves, sorrows, discoveries and sublime concepts which did not blossom forth from my spirit, but which, once expressed by the great men of my country, have, because of their merits, continued to exist in the imagination, in the intellect, in the hearts of Italians, and have thus constituted a literature, a light-shedding history which is the life of language, varied indeed and restless, but ever the same. This is the language which I first heard from the dear lips of my mother, which gradually and constantly I made my own by studying and reflecting on the books and on the conversations of those who for years, or days, or instants, were with me in my native town and exchanged with me their thoughts and their sentiments; the language which unites to me all those who, living or dead, together constitute this which I call and feel to be my own people.

Yet I might want to break away with my speech from this glorious communion. I might try to demonstrate to myself that my speech is exclusively mine, and surely I would thus accomplish something. I would produce an exception which in this case too would serve to confirm the rule.

For surely a man may devise a cryptic language, a cipher, a jargon. Secret codes and conventional cants are resorted to by individuals who have some reason to conceal their meaning from others. Such individuals, however, can form but very small groups, and because of the artificial character of their communications never may constitute a nation. An artificial jargon of this sort is however a language of some kind: it must be, since art imitates nature. It complies with the law that is immanent in the peculiar nature of language, namely, that there be nothing secret or hidden in it, for speech and in general every form of spiritual activity invests a community and aims at universality. The jargon is possible only because of the key by which it may be translated back into the common language. Give a ciphered document to the cryptographer; by study and ingenuity--that is by the use of that very intelligence which arbitrarily combined the cipher--he discovers the key; thus he too breaks up the artificial form, and draws from it the natural flow of a speech that is intelligible to all those who speak the same national tongue. And again, words as they flow from the inspired bosom of the poet, when they first appear in the freshness of the new artistic creation, do have something that is cryptic. That language is the poet's own; it never had been used by another; a jargon before it is deciphered may be and is the language of a particular personality. But if we look more attentively, we shall see that in both cases the language is the language of the community. The inspired poet does indeed speak to himself, but with the consciousness of a potential audience, he utters a word to himself which must eventually be intelligible to others because it is by its nature intelligible. In the conditions in which the poet finds himself when speaking, he must use that word and no other, and any other person in those same spiritual conditions would use, could not help using, the same word. For his word is the Word, the one that is required by the circumstances. And since he is a poet, a serious mind uttering a word which needs no translation, it will be the word of his own people first and then of humanity at large, in so far as its beauty will inspire men of different nations and of diverse speech with the desire of learning the poet's own intimate language.

All this is true because the spirit is universal activity, which, far from separating men, unites them. It realises historically its universality in the community of the family, of the city, of the district, and of the nation, and in every form of intimate aggregation and of fusion which history may call into being.

Language may or may not be in the formation of a man's nationality. What however must be ever present is the Will by which man every moment of his life renovates his own personality. Can the Will, by which each one of us is what he is, be his own Will, exclusively his own? Or is the Will itself, like language, not perhaps a national heirloom, but surely a common act, a communion of life, in such a way that we live our own life while living the life of the nation?

Of course, in the abstract, as I have explained above, my will is

## particular. But we must be reminded that Will is one thing, and

faint wishing another. There is such a thing as real effective volition, and there is something which strives to be such and fails; this latter we might call "velleity." Real will does not rest satisfied with intentions, designs, or sterile desires; it acts, and by its effectiveness it reveals itself, and by its value shows its reality. And our being results not from velleities but from the real will. We are not what we might conditionally desire to be, but what we actually will to be. A velleity we might say is the will directed to an end which is either relatively or absolutely impossible; will is that which becomes effective.

But, then, when is it that my will really is effective, really _wills_? I am a citizen of a state which has power; this power, this will of the state expresses itself to me in laws which I must obey. The transgression of laws, if the state is in existence, bears with it the inevitable punishment of the transgressor, that is, the application of that law which the offender has refused to recognise. The state is supported by the inviolability of laws, of those sacred laws of the land which Socrates, as Plato tells us, taught his pupils to revere. I, then, as a citizen of my country, am bound by its Law in such a manner that to will its transgression is to aim at the impossible. If I did so, I should be indulging in vain velleities, in which my personality, far from realising itself, would on the contrary be disintegrated and scattered. I then want what the law wants me to will.

It makes no difference that, from a material and explicit point of view, a system of positive law does not coincide throughout with the sphere of my activity, and that therefore the major part of the standards of my conduct must be determined by the inner dictates of my particular conscience. For it is the Will of the State that determines the limits between the moral and the juridical, between what is imposed by the law of the land and what is demanded by the ethical conscience of the individual. And there is no limit which pre-exists to the line by which the constituent and legislative power of the State delimits the sphere subject to its sanctions. So that positively or negatively, either by command or by permission, our whole conduct is subject to that will by which the State establishes its reality.

But the Will of the State does not manifest itself solely by the enactments of positive legislation. It opens to private initiative such courses of action as may presumably be carried on satisfactorily without the impulse and the direct control of the sovereign power. But this concession has a temporary character, and the State is ever ready to intervene as soon as the private management ceases to be effective. So that even in the exercise of what seems the untrammelled will of the individual we discern the power of the State; and the individual is free to will something only because the sovereign power wants him to. So that in reality this apparently autonomous particular will is the will of the state not expressed in terms of positive legislation, there being no need of such an expression. But since the essence of law is not in the expression of it, but in the will which dictates it, or observes it, or enforces the observance of it, in the will, in short, that wills it, it follows that the law exists even though unwritten.

In the way of conclusion, then, it may be said that I, as a citizen, have indeed a will of my own; but that upon further investigation my will is found to coincide exactly with the will of the State, and I want anything only in so far as the State wants me to want it.

Could it possibly be otherwise? Such an hypothesis overwhelms me at the very thought of it. For it would come to this,--that I exist and my state does not:--the state in which I was born, which sustained and protected me before I saw the light of day, which formed and guaranteed to me this communion of life; the state in which I have always lived, which has constituted this spiritual substance, this world in which I support myself, and which I trust will never fail me even though it does change constantly. I could, it is true, ignore this close bond by which I am tied and united to that great will which is the will of my country. I might balk and refuse to obey its laws. But acting thus, I would be indulging in what I have called velleities. My personality, unable to transform the will of the state, would be overcome and suppressed by it.

Let us however assume for a moment that I might in the innermost depths of my being segregate myself. Averse to the common will and to the law of the land, I decide to proclaim over the boundless expanse of my thought the proud independence of my ego, as a lone, inaccessible summit rising out of the solitude. Up to a certain point this hypothesis is verified constantly by the manner in which my personality freely becomes actual. But even then I do not act as a particular being: it is the universal power that acts through my personal will.

For when we effectively observe the law, with true moral adhesion and in thorough sincerity, the law becomes part of ourselves, and our

## actions are the direct results of our convictions,--of the necessity of

our convictions. For every time we act, inwardly we see that such must be our course; we must have a clear intuition of this necessity. The Saint who has no will but the will of God intuitively sees necessity in his norm. So does the sinner in his own way: but his norm is erroneous and therefore destined to fail. Every criminal in transgressing the law obeys a precept of his own making which is in opposition to the enactments of the state. And in so doing he creates almost a state of his own, different from the one which historically exists and must exist because of certain good reasons, the excellence of which the criminal himself will subsequently realise. From the unfortunate point of view which he has taken, the transgressor is justified in acting as he does, and to such an extent that no one in his position, as he thinks, could possibly take exception to it. His will is also universal; if he were allowed to, if it were possible for him, he would establish new laws in place of the old ones: he would set up another state over the ruins of the one which he undermines. And what else does the tyrant when he destroys the freedom of the land and substitutes a new state for the crushed Commonwealth? In the same manner the rebel does away with the despot, starts a revolution and establishes liberty if he is successful; if not, he is overcome and must again conform his will to the will of that state which he has not been able to overthrow. So then, I exercise my true volition whenever the will of my state acts in my personal will, or rather when my will is the realisation of the will of a super-national group in which my state co-exists with other states, acting upon them, and being re-acted upon in reciprocal determinations. Or perhaps better still, when the entire world wills in me. For my will, I shall say it once again, is not individual but universal, and in the political community by which individuals are united into a higher individuality, historically distinct from other similar ones, we must see a form of universality.

For this reason, then, we are justified in saying that our personality is particular when we consider it abstractly, but that concretely it realises itself as a universal and therefore also as a national personality. This conception is of fundamental importance for those of us who live in the class-room and have made of teaching our life's occupation, our ultimate end, and the real purpose of our existence. For in this conception of human activities we find the solution of a problem that has been present in the minds of thinking men ever since they began to reflect on the subject of education, or, in other words, from time immemorial. Education, we must remember, is not a fact, if by fact we mean, as we should, something that has happened, or is wont to happen, or must inevitably take place in virtue of the constancy of the law which governs it. We teachers are all sincerely convinced that education, as we speak of it, as it draws our interests, for which we work, and which we strive to improve, is not now what it was before. For there is no education that works out in conformity with natural laws. It is a free act of ours, the vocation of our souls, our duty as men. By it more nobly than by any other action man is enabled to actualise his superior nature. Animals do not educate: even though they do raise their young ones they yet form no family, no ethical organism with members differentiated and reciprocally correlated. But we freely, by an act of our conscience, recognise our children, as we do our parents and our brothers; and we discern our fellow-beings in ourselves and ourselves in others; and by the growth of our own we unconsciously develop the personality of others; and therefore in the family, in the city, in any community, we constitute one spirit, with common needs that are satisfied by the operations of individual activity which is a social

## activity.

Man has been called a political or a social animal. He might therefore be considered also as an educating animal. For we do not merely educate the young ones, our young ones. Education being spiritual action bearing on the spirit, we really educate all those that are in any way and by any relations whatsoever connected with us, whether or not they belong to our family or to our school, as long as they concur with us in constituting a complete social entity. And we not only train those of minor age, who are as yet under tutelage, and still frequent the schools and are busily intent upon developing and improving their skill, their character, their culture. We also educate the adults, the grown-up men and women, the aged; for there is no man alive who does not daily add to his intellectual equipment, who does not derive some advantage from his human associations, who could not appropriately repeat the statement of the Roman emperor--_nulla dies sine linea_. Man always educates.

But here, as in every other manifestation of his spiritual activity, man does not behave in sole conformity with instinct; he does not teach by abandoning himself, so to speak, to the force of natural determinism. He is fully aware of his own doings. He keeps his eyes open on his own function, so that he may attain the end by the shortest course, that he may without wasting his energies derive from them the best possible results. For man reflects.

It is evident then that education is not a scheme which permits pedagogues and pedants to interfere with their theories and lucubrations in this sacred task of love, which binds the parents to the children, brings old and young together, and keeps mankind united in its never ceasing ascent. Before the word came into being, the thing, as is usually the case, already existed. Before there was a science and an incumbent for the chair, there existed something that was the life of this science and therefore the justification of the chair. There was the intent reflectiveness of man, who in compliance with the divine saying, "Know thyself," was becoming conscious of his own work, and therefore, unwilling to abandon his actions to external impulses, began to question everything. What the lower animal does naturally and unerringly through its infallible instinct, man achieves by the restless scrutiny of his mind. Ever thoughtful, always yearning for the better, he searches and explores, often stumbling in error, but ever rising out of it to a higher station of learning and of art. Our education is human, because it is an action and not a fact; because it is a problem that we always solve and have to keep solving for ever.

This intuitive truth is demonstrated experimentally to us by the very lives we live as educators. As long as the freshness of our vocation lasts, as long as we can remain free from mechanical routine and from the impositions of fixed habits; as long as we are able to consider every new pupil with renewed interest, discover in him a different soul, unlike that of any other that we have previously come in contact with, and differing within itself from day to day; as long as it is still possible for us to enter the class-room thrilled and throbbing in the anticipation of new truths to reveal, of novel experiments to perform, of unexpected difficulties to overcome, in the full consciousness of the rapid motion of a life ever renewed in us and around us by the incoming generations, that flow to us and ebb away unceasingly towards life and death; so long shall we really live and love the teacher's life, so long shall we demonstrate to ourselves and to others the truth I have already affirmed.

We teachers should be constantly on our guard against the dangers of routine, against the belief that we have but to repeat the same old story in the same class-room, to the same kind of distant, blank faces, staring at us in dreary uniformity from the same benches. We shall continue to be educators only as long as we are able to feel that every instant of our life's work is a new instant, and that education therefore is a problem that insistently stimulates our ingenuity to an ever renewed solution.

Now the most important of all tasks, ancient and modern, in the field of education is this,--the task of the teacher to represent the Universal to his pupils, the Universal, of course, as historically determined. Scientific thought, customs, laws, religious beliefs are brought before the pupil's mind, not as the science, the laws, the religion of the teacher, but as those of humanity, of his country, of his period. And the pupil is the particular individual who, having entered upon the process of education, and being submitted, so to speak, to the yoke of the school, ceases to enjoy his former liberty in the pursuit of a spiritual endowment and in the formation of his character, and, in consequence of this educational pressure, bends compliantly before the common law. Hence the world-old opposition to the coercive power of the school, and the outcry raised from time to time against the privilege demanded by the educator, who on the strength of the assumedly higher quality of his beliefs, his learning, his taste, or his moral conscience, claims to interfere with the spontaneous development of a personality in quest of itself.

On one side education undoubtedly assumes the task of developing freedom, for the aim of education is to produce men; and man is worthy of this name only when he is a master of himself, capable of initiating his own acts, responsible for his deeds, able to discern and assimilate the ideas which he accepts and professes, affirms and propagates, so that whatever he says, thinks, or does, really comes from him. Our children are said to be properly raised when they give evidence of being able to take care of themselves without the help of our guidance and advice. And we trust that we have accomplished our task as educators when our pupils have made our language their own and are able to tell us new things originally thought out by them. Freedom then must be the result of education.

But on the other hand, teaching implies an action exercised on another mind, and education cannot therefore result in the relinquishment and abandonment of the pupil. The educator must awaken interests that without him would for ever lie dormant. He must direct the learner towards an end which he would be unable to estimate properly if left alone, and must help him to overcome the otherwise unsurmountable obstacles that beset his progress. He must, in short, transfuse into the pupil something of himself, and out of his own spiritual substance create elements of the pupil's character, mind, and will. But the acts which the pupil performs in consequence of his training will, in a certain measure, be those of his teacher; and education will therefore have proved destructive of that very liberty with which the pupil was originally endowed. Is it not true that people constantly attribute to early family influences and to environment--that is, to education--the good and the bad in the deeds of the mature man?

This is the form in which the problem usually presents itself. The mind of the educator is therefore torn by two conflicting forces: the desire zealously to watch and control the pupil's growth and direct his evolution along the course that seems quickest and surest for his complete development; and, on the other hand, the fear that he may kill fertile seeds, stifle with presumptuous interference the spontaneous life of the spirit in its personal impulses, and clothe the individual with a garment that is not adapted for him,--crush him under the weight of a leaden cape.

The solution of this problem must be sought in the concrete conception of individual personality; and this will be the theme of the next chapter. But I must at the very outset utter an emphatic word of warning. My solution does not remove all difficulties; it cannot be used as a key to open all doors. For as I have repeatedly stated, the value of education consists in the persistence of the problems, ever solved and yet ever clamouring for a new solution, so that we may never feel released from the obligation of thinking.

My solution must be simply accepted as affording a guidance by which different people may, along more or less converging lines, approach their particular objectives. For the problem presents itself under ever-changing forms, and demands a continuous development, and almost a progressive interpretation of the concept which I am going to offer as an aid to its solution. No effort of thinking, once completed, will ever exonerate us from thinking, from thinking unceasingly, from thinking more and more intensively.

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