most people, whether because of nature or nurture, generally put their own interests ahead of others’. This doesn’t make them bad people; it just makes them human.
BUSHNELL, HORACE (1802-1876), American theologian, was born in the village of Bantam, township of Litchfield, Connecticut, on the 14th of April 1802. He graduated at Yale in 1827, was associate editor of the New York _Journal of Commerce_ in 1828-1829, and in 1829 became a tutor at Yale. Here he at first took up the study of law, but in 1831 he entered the theological department of Yale College, and in 1833 was ordained pastor of the North Congregational church in Hartford, Conn., where he remained until 1859, when on account of long-continued ill-health he resigned his pastorate. Thereafter he had no settled charge, but, until his death at Hartford on the 17th of February 1876, he occasionally preached and was diligently employed as an author. While in California in 1856, for the restoration of his health, he took an active interest in the organization, at Oakland, of the college of California (chartered in 1855 and merged in the university of California in 1869), the presidency of which he declined. As a preacher, Dr Bushnell was a man of remarkable power. Not a dramatic orator, he was in high degree original, thoughtful and impressive in the pulpit. His theological position may be said to have been one of qualified revolt against the Calvinistic orthodoxy of his day. He criticized prevailing conceptions of the Trinity, the atonement, conversion, and the relations of the natural and the supernatural. Above all, he broke with the prevalent view which regarded theology as essentially intellectual in its appeal and demonstrable by processes of exact logical deduction. To his thinking its proper basis is to be found in the feelings and intuitions of man's spiritual nature. He had a vast influence upon theology in America, an influence not so much, possibly, in the direction of the modification of specific doctrines as in "the impulse and tendency and general spirit which he imparted to theological thought." Dr Munger's estimate may be accepted, with reservations, as the true one: "He was a theologian as Copernicus was an astronomer; he changed the point of view, and thus not only changed everything, but pointed the way toward unity in theological thought. He was not exact, but he put God and man and the world into a relation that thought can accept while it goes on to state it more fully with ever growing knowledge. Other thinkers were moving in the same direction; he led the movement in New England, and wrought out a great deliverance. It was a work of superb courage. Hardly a theologian in his denomination stood by him, and nearly all pronounced against him." Four of his books were of particular importance: _Christian Nurture_ (1847), in which he virtually opposed revivalism and "effectively turned the current of Christian thought toward the young"; _Nature and the Supernatural_ (1858), in which he discussed miracles and endeavoured to "lift the natural into the supernatural" by emphasizing the super-naturalness of man; _The Vicarious Sacrifice_ (1866), in which he contended for what has come to be known as the "moral view" of the atonement in distinction from the "governmental" and the "penal" or "satisfaction" theories; and _God in Christ_ (1849) (with an introductory "Dissertation on Language as related to Thought"), in which he expressed, it was charged, heretical views as to the Trinity, holding, among other things, that the Godhead is "instrumentally three--three simply as related to our finite apprehension, and the communication of God's incommunicable nature." Attempts, indeed, were made to bring him to trial, but they were unsuccessful, and in 1852 his church unanimously withdrew from the local "consociation," thus removing any possibility of further action against him. To his critics Bushnell formally replied by writing _Christ in Theology_ (1851), in which he employs the important argument that spiritual facts can be expressed only in approximate and poetical language, and concludes that an adequate dogmatic theology cannot exist. That he did not deny the divinity of Christ he proved in _The Character of Jesus, forbidding his possible Classification with Men_ (1861). He also published _Sermons for the New Life_ (1858); _Christ and his Salvation_ (1864); _Work and Play_ (1864); _Moral Uses of Dark Things_ (1868); _Women's Suffrage, the Reform against Nature_ (1869); _Sermons on Living Subjects_ (1872); and _Forgiveness and Law_ (1874). Dr Bushnell was greatly interested in the civic interests of Hartford, and was the chief agent in procuring the establishment of the public park named in his honour by that city. Entry: BUSHNELL
It is the custom of studying and copying the forms of the finest of the young athletes, combined with the Greek habit of complete nudity during the sports, which lies at the basis of Greek excellence in sculpture. Every sculptor had unlimited opportunities for observing young vigorous bodies in every pose and in every variety of strain. The natural sense of beauty which was an endowment of the Greek race impelled him to copy and preserve what was excellent, and to omit what was ungainly or poor. Thus there existed, and in fact there was constantly accumulating, a vast series of types of male beauty, and the public taste was cultivated to an extreme delicacy. And of course this taste, though it took its start from athletic customs, and was mainly nurtured by them, spread to all branches of portraiture, so that elderly men, women, and at last even children, were represented in art with a mixture of ideality and fidelity to nature such as has not been reached by the sculpture of any other people. Entry: FIG
The prominence which Froebel gave to action, his doctrine that man is primarily a doer and even a creator, and that he learns only through "self-activity," has its importance all through education. But it was to the first stage of life that Froebel paid the greatest attention. He held with Rousseau that each age has a completeness of its own, and that the perfection of the later stage can be attained only through the perfection of the earlier. If the infant is what he should be as an infant, and the child as a child, he will become what he should be as a boy, just as naturally as new shoots spring from the healthy plant. Every stage, then, must be cared for and tended in such a way that it may attain its own perfection. Impressed with the immense importance of the first stage, Froebel like Pestalozzi devoted himself to the instruction of mothers. But he would not, like Pestalozzi, leave the children entirely in the mother's hands. Pestalozzi held that the child belonged to the family; Fichte, on the other hand, claimed it for society and the state. Froebel, whose mind delighted in harmonizing apparent contradictions, and who taught that "all progress lay through opposites to their reconciliation," maintained that the child belonged both to the family and to society, and he would therefore have children spend some hours of the day in a common life and in well-organized common employments. These assemblies of children he would not call schools, for the children in them ought not to be old enough for schooling. So he invented the name _Kindergarten_, garden of children, and called the superintendents "children's gardeners." He laid great stress on every child cultivating its own plot of ground, but this was not his reason for the choice of the name. It was rather that he thought of these institutions as enclosures in which young human plants are nurtured. In the Kindergarten the children's employment should be _play_. But any occupation in which children delight is play to them; and Froebel invented a series of employments, which, while they are in this sense play to the children, have nevertheless, as seen from the adult point of view, a distinct educational object. This object, as Froebel himself describes it, is "to give the children employment in agreement with their whole nature, to strengthen their bodies, to exercise their senses, to engage their awakening mind, and through their senses to bring them acquainted with nature and their fellow creatures; it is especially to guide aright the heart and the affections, and to lead them to the original ground of all life, to unity with themselves." Entry: FROEBEL
Had classical culture been less formal than it was during the early centuries of Christianity, the innate antagonism of the Pagan and Christian views of life and character must have been so apparent that the education which prepared for the one could not have been accepted by the other. It was only because rhetorical culture was so emphatically intellectual, and so little, if at all, moral in its aims, that its inherent opposition to the Christian conception of character was not obvious. That its antagonistic influence was not inoperative is shown by the not infrequent perversions of cultured Christians to Paganism. But generally the opposition was so obscured that the ethical writings of St Ambrose (340-397) are largely Stoic in conception and reasoning. Yet the Pagan ideal of life, especially as it had been developed in the individualistic ethics which had prevailed for more than six centuries, was antithetical in essence to that of the Christian Church. The former was essentially an ethics of self-reliance and self-control showing itself in moderation and proportion in all expressions of life. An essential feature in such a character was high-mindedness and a self-respect which was of the nature of pride. On the contrary, Christian teaching exalted humility as one of the highest virtues, and regarded pride and self-confidence as the deadliest of sins. It recognized no doctrine of limitation; what was to be condemned could not be abhorred too violently, nor could what was good be too strongly desired or too ardently sought. The highest state attainable by man was absorption in loving ecstasy in the mystic contemplation of God. The practical attempt to realize this gave rise to monasticism, with its minutely regulated life expressing unlimited obedience and the renunciation of private will at every moment. The monastic life was regarded as the nearest approach to the ideal which a Christian could make on earth. Naturally, as this conception gathered strength in generations nurtured in it, the value of classical culture became less and less apparent, and by the time of St Gregory the Great (d. 604) the use of classical literature except as means of an education having quite another end than classical culture was discouraged. Entry: I
Before 1886 the custody of an infant belonged in the first place, and against all other persons, to the father, who was said to be "the guardian of his children by nature and nurture"; and the father might by deed or will dispose of the custody or tuition of his children until the age of twenty-one. Entry: INFANT
GALTON, SIR FRANCIS (1822- ), English anthropologist, son of S.T. Galton, of Duddeston, Warwickshire, was born on the 16th of February 1822. His grandfather was the poet-naturalist Erasmus Darwin, and Charles Darwin was his cousin. After attending King Edward VI.'s grammar school, Birmingham, he studied at Birmingham hospital, and afterwards at King's College, London, with the intention of making medicine his profession; but after taking his degree at Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1843 he changed his mind. The years 1845-1846 he spent in travelling in the Sudan, and in 1850 he made an exploration, with Dr John Anderson, of Damaraland and the Ovampo country in south-west Africa, starting from Walfisch Bay. These tracts had practically never been traversed before, and on the appearance of the published account of his journey and experiences under the title of _Narrative of an Explorer in Tropical South Africa_ (1853) Galton was awarded the gold medal of the Royal Geographical Society. His _Art of Travel; or, Shifts and Contrivances in Wild Countries_ was first published in 1855. In 1860 he visited the north of Spain, and published the fruits of his observations of the country and the people in the first of a series of volumes, which he edited, entitled _Vacation Tourists_. He then turned to meteorology, the result of his investigations appearing in _Meteorographica_, published in 1863. This work was the first serious attempt to chart the weather on an extensive scale, and in it also the author first established the existence and theory of anti-cyclones. Galton was a member of the meteorological committee (1868), and of the Meteorological Council which succeeded it, for over thirty years. But his name is most closely associated with studies in anthropology and especially in heredity. In 1869 appeared his _Hereditary Genius, its Laws and Consequences_, a work which excited much interest in scientific and medical circles. This was followed by _English Men of Science, their Nature and Nurture_, published in 1874; _Inquiries into Human Faculty and its Development_, issued in 1883; _Life-History Album_ (1884); _Record of Family Faculties_ (1884) (tabular forms and directions for entering data, with a preface); and _Natural Inheritance_ (1889). The idea that systematic efforts should be made to improve the breed of mankind by checking the birth-rate of the unfit and furthering the productivity of the fit was first put forward by him In 1865; he mooted it again in 1884, using the term "eugenics" for the first time in _Human Faculty_, and in 1904 he endowed a research fellowship in the university of London for the promotion of knowledge of that subject, which was defined as "the study of agencies under social control that may improve or impair the racial qualities of future generations, either physically or mentally." Galton was the author of memoirs on various anthropometric subjects; he originated the process of composite portraiture, and paid much attention to finger-prints and their employment for the identification of criminals, his publications on this subject including _Finger Prints_ (1892), _Decipherment of Blurred Finger Prints_ (1893) and _Finger Print Directories_ (1895). From the Royal Society, of which he was elected a fellow in 1860, he received a royal medal in 1886 and the Darwin medal in 1902, and honorary degrees were bestowed on him by Oxford (1894) and Cambridge (1895). In 1908 he published _Memories of My Life_, and in 1909 he received a knighthood. Entry: GALTON
Education is, thus, a definitely personal work, and will vary between wide extremes of effectiveness and worth in any given society. For in all times and places there are wide differences in virtue, wisdom and capacity among those who have in their hands the care and nurture of the young. But the inference that, therefore, no comparative estimate of the education of different times and places can be made would be fallacious. For, despite all differences in conception and efficiency among individual educators, each expresses, more or less perfectly and clearly, the common conception and energy of his age and country. As these rise or fall the general level of the actual educative practice rises or sinks with them. The first essential for successful educative effort is, then, that the community as a whole should have a true estimate of the nature and value of education. Entry: EDUCATION
In tropical forests primitive tribes depend on the collection of wild fruits, and in a minor degree on the chase of wild animals, for their food. Clothing is unnecessary; hence there is little occasion for exercising the mental faculties beyond the sense of perception to avoid enemies, or the inventive arts beyond what is required for the simplest weapons and the most primitive fortifications. When the pursuit of game becomes the chief occupation of a people there is of necessity a higher development of courage, skill, powers of observation and invention; and these qualities are still further enhanced in predatory tribes who take by force the food, clothing and other property prepared or collected by a feebler people. The fruit-eating savage cannot stray beyond his woods which bound his life as the water bounds that of a fish; the hunter is free to live on the margin of forests or in open country, while the robber or warrior from some natural stronghold of the mountains sweeps over the adjacent plains and carries his raids into distant lands. Wide grassy steppes lead to the organization of the people as nomads whose wealth consists in flocks and herds, and their dwellings are tents. The nomad not only domesticates and turns to his own use the gentler and more powerful animals, such as sheep, cattle, horses, camels, but even turns some predatory creatures, like the dog, into a means of defending their natural prey. They hunt the beasts of prey destructive to their flocks, and form armed bands for protection against marauders or for purposes of aggression on weaker sedentary neighbours. On the fertile low grounds along the margins of rivers or in clearings of forests, agricultural communities naturally take their rise, dwelling in villages and cultivating the wild grains, which by careful nurture and selection have been turned into rich cereals. The agriculturist as a rule is rooted to the soil. The land he tills he holds, and acquires a closer connexion with a particular patch of ground than either the hunter or the herdsman. In the temperate zone, where the seasons are sharply contrasted, but follow each other with regularity, foresight and self-denial were fostered, because if men did not exercise these qualities seed-time or harvest might pass into lost opportunities and the tribes would suffer. The more extreme climates of arid regions on the margins of the tropics, by the unpredictable succession of droughts and floods, confound the prevision of uninstructed people, and make prudence and industry qualities too uncertain in their results to be worth cultivating. Thus the civilization of agricultural peoples of the temperate zone grew rapidly, yet in each community a special type arose adapted to the soil, the crop and the climate. On the seashore fishing naturally became a means of livelihood, and dwellers by the sea, in virtue of the dangers to which they are exposed from storm and unseaworthy craft, are stimulated to a higher degree of foresight, quicker observation, prompter decision and more energetic action in emergencies than those who live inland. The building and handling of vessels also, and the utilization of such uncontrollable powers of nature as wind and tide, helped forward mechanical invention. To every type of coast there may be related a special type of occupation and even of character; the deep and gloomy fjord, backed by almost impassable mountains, bred bold mariners whose only outlet for enterprise was seawards towards other lands--the _viks_ created the vikings. On the gently sloping margin of the estuary of a great river a view of tranquil inland life was equally presented to the shore-dweller, and the ocean did not present the only prospect of a career. Finally the mountain valley, with its patches of cultivable soil on the alluvial fans of tributary torrents, its narrow pastures on the uplands only left clear of snow in summer, its intensified extremes of climates and its isolation, almost equal to that of an island, has in all countries produced a special type of brave and hardy people, whose utmost effort may bring them comfort, but not wealth, by honest toil, who know little of the outer world, and to whom the natural outlet for ambition is marauding on the fertile plains. The highlander and viking, products of the valleys raised high amid the mountains or half-drowned in the sea, are everywhere of kindred spirit. Entry: VI