[Footnote 50: Gesammelte Werke. Vierter
Band. Wilhelm Hertz, Berlin, 1897.]
[Footnote 51: My Autobiography, p. 106.
Chas. Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1901.]
[Footnote 52: Wagner and His Works. By Henry
T. Finck. Chas. Scribner’s Sons, New York,
1893.]
[Footnote 53: Les Confessions. Oeuvres Completes,
vols. 8 and 9. Hachette et Cie., Paris, 1903.]
[Footnote 54: Translated from the French by C.F.
Smith. C.C. Birchard and Co., Boston, 1901.]
* * * * *
THE GROWTH OF SOCIAL IDEALS
Change from childish to adult friends—Influence
of favorite teachers—What children wish
or plan to do or be—Property and the money
sense—Social judgments—The only
child—First social organizations—Student
life—Associations for youth, controlled
by adults.
In a few aspects we are already able to trace the
normal psychic outgrowing of the home of childhood
as its interests irradiate into an ever enlarging
environment. Almost the only duty of small children
is habitual and prompt obedience. Our very presence
enforces one general law—that of keeping
our good-will and avoiding our displeasure. They
respect all we smile at or even notice, and grow to
it like the plant toward the light. Their early
lies are often saying what they think will please.
At bottom, the most restless child admires and loves
those who save him from too great fluctuations by coercion,
provided the means be rightly chosen and the ascendency
extend over heart and mind. But the time comes
when parents are often shocked at the lack of respect
suddenly shown by the child. They have ceased
to be the highest ideals. The period of habituating
morality and making it habitual is ceasing; and the
passion to realize freedom, to act on personal experience,
and to keep a private conscience is in order.
To act occasionally with independence from the highest
possible ideal motives develops the impulse and the
joy of pure obligation, and thus brings some new and
original force into the world and makes habitual guidance
by the highest and best, or by inner as opposed to
outer constraint, the practical rule of life.
To bring the richest streams of thought to bear in
interpreting the ethical instincts, so that the youth
shall cease to live in a moral interregnum, is the
real goal of self-knowledge. This is true education
of the will and prepares the way for love of overcoming
obstacles of difficulty, perhaps even of conflict.
This impulse is often the secret of obstinacy.[1] And
yet, “at no time in life will a human being
respond So heartily if treated by older and wiser
people as if he were an equal or even a superior.
The attempt to treat a child at adolescence as you
would treat an inferior is instantly fatal to good
discipline."[2] Parents still think of their offspring
as mere children, and tighten the rein when they should
