This spiritual explosion was telegraphed to the mind, the mind, in turn,
issued a command to the body, and the sound that was noted was the final
result. In a general way, education is the process of training mind and
body to obey and execute right commands of the spirit. This definition
will justify our characterization of education as a spiritual process.
Seeing, then, that the body is but a helper whose function is to execute
the mandates of the spirit, and seeing, too, that education is a process
of the spirit, it follows that our concern must be primarily and always
with the spirit as major. It is the spirit that reacts, not the mind or
the body, and education is, therefore, the process of inducing right
reactions of the spirit. The nature of these reactions depends upon the
quality of the external stimuli. If we provide the right sort of stimuli
the reactions will be right. If, today, the spirit reacts to a beautiful
picture, tomorrow, to the tree in bloom, the next day to an alluring
landscape, and the next to the glory of a sunrise, in time its reactions
to beauty in every form will become habitual. If we can induce reactions,
day by day, to beautiful or sublime passages in literature, in due time
the spirit will refuse to react to what is shoddy and commonplace. By
inducing reactions to increasingly better musical compositions, day after
day, we finally inculcate the habit of reacting only to high-grade music,
and the lower type makes no appeal.
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