A healthily constituted family it is the mother who
first cares for, watches over, and develops the child, teaches him to
"read, mark,
learn, and inwardly digest," deriving everything she teaches from its
central unity, and gathering up her teaching into that unity again. The
father receives his son from the hand and the heart of the mother; with
his soul already full of true active life, of desire for the knowledge
of causes and effects, for the understanding of the whole
and its ramifications; with his mind open to the truth
and his eyes to the light, and with
a perpetually nourished yearning for creative activity, able to observe
while building up, and to recognise while taking apart; such in himself
and his surroundings, always active, creative, full of thought and
endeavour, does the father receive his son in
his home, to train and teach him for the wider life outside. Thus
should it be with my educational institute and
the universities; as regards the growth and development of man I only
desire to take the place of the silently working, tenderly cherishing
mother. The life, the will, the understanding, these three must form
the
common chord or triad of the harmony of human life, now one tone, now
another, now two
of the three, rising powerfully above the rest. But where these tones
are separate
and inharmonious there they work to
discord, as we see but too clearly in daily life:-- "Wrestling with
life and with death, suspended between
them we hang." In whatever family this chord is from the first set
sweetly in tune, its pure concords uniting to form the fundamental
harmony of existence,
there all the hobgoblins of ordinary
life, which even yet of
