extent, given up thinking of this life as merely a preparation for another life.[1] Very largely, however, we think of some parts of this life as merely preparatory to other later stages of it. It is so very largely as to the process of education; and if I were asked to name the most needed of all reforms in the spirit of education, I should say: “Cease conceiving of education as mere preparation for later life, and make of it the full meaning of the present life.” And to add that only in this case does it become truly a preparation for after life is not the paradox it seems. An activity which does not have worth enough to be carried on for its own sake cannot be very effective as a preparation for something else. By making the present activity the expression of the full meaning of the case, that activity is, indeed, an end in itself, not a mere means to something beyond itself; but, in being a totality, it is also the condition of all future integral action. It forms the habit of requiring that every act be an outlet of the whole self, and it provides the instruments of such complete functioning.
To suppose that an infant cannot take a complete and present interest in learning to babble simple words because this is not the same as rolling off ponderous polysyllables, or that there is any way for him to attain the mastery of the complexities of language save as his attention is completely taken up at the proper time with his babbling, is equivalent to that conception of the realization of capacity which makes it a possibility, with reference to some ‘infinite’ ideal in general.
- ↑ This separation of ‘this’ world and the ‘other’ world serves itself to illustrate the point. The conception of the other world arose with the dawning conception of spiritual meanings beyond those as yet realized in life. But life had been identified with the previous conceptions of it and thus hardened into a rigid fact which resisted change; the new meaning could not, therefore, be put into life (or this world), and so was dislocated into another life. But the value of the spiritual ideal thus set off was in deepening the insight into the significance of actual life, until it was read back into this actual existence, transforming its meaning. So far as we are yet half way between the complete separation and the complete identification, we consider this world as preparation, or capacity, for the next. We thus attempt to retain the separateness of the two activities while at the same time we recognize the facts which point to their identity. The conception of capacity, when analyzed, will be found in every case to be just this go-between in our understanding of an activity.
