Trick Tracks Photo by U.S. Forest Service WINTER, 1943 LIFE IN LITERATURE by Leland H. Monson WE live in a world where international law, the laws of war and the laws of peace, have been replaced by international anarchy, in a world where barbarity appears in the form of unrestricted submarine warfare, of attacks on neutral nations without formal declarations of war, of bombing of civilian populations, and of inhumane treatment of prisoners of war and conquered peoples. We live in a world where the tendency is to substitute technology for enduring values of life in the interest of subduing the common enemies of mankind, who are responsible for our present turmoil and convulsions. Undoubtedly, justification can be found for placing our primary stress upon this effort to restore peace. The time will come, however, when the last soldier will have rolled his tank into battle on its mission of annihilation, when the last bombardier will have dropped from the bomb bay of his plane his cargo of destruction over a famous city, when the last gunner on a submarine will have released his torpedo to penetrate the bowels of an enemy troop transport. At that time, if we are to correct the conditions which are responsible for our recurrent periods of unrest, if we are to forestall recourse to violence and initiate a period wherein nations will recognize that they are giant souls who must accept the principle of the golden rule, we shall need men who know and appreciate the abiding values of life. Cognizant of this future need, we should now be assiduously engaged in creating activities which will develop men and women of judgment and foresight, men and women whose eyes are turned to these higher horizons of life. Sustained by the spiritual ideals which have nourished our civilization and supported by a populace committed to them, our representatives at the post-war peace conference will do much toward creating a sound world political organization which will provide for long time peace and security. Lacking the sustaining power of these spiritual ideals, they may assist in laying foundations for a still greater holocaust in the not too distant future. One of the sources of these spiritual ideals is to be found in the world's great literature. In the hope that a consideration of certain of its spiritual values, commonplace though they may be, may pro- voke the liklihood that educational leaders will make a greater effort to preserve for us courses of study which are vital needs of our day and that students will find encouragement to register for such courses, I undertake to develop a few of the abiding values of literature. Recognizing that the aesthetic pleasure derived from reading literature is "reward enough for any man's seeking", let us examine the spiritual power inherent in much of our literature. In the first place literature develops the emotions. And we must not consider lightly this problem of emotional behavior because psychologists consider it equally as important for the successful life as intellectual development. In the nineteenth century John Stuart Mill was used by the school of Philosophical Radicalism to demonstrate that intellectual training could produce the abundant life. At the age of twenty he passed through a spiritual crisis, which made him realize that his education had been too exclusively intel-intellectual. "Suppose," he asked himself, "that all your objects in life were realized; that all the changes in institutions and opinions which you are looking forward to could be completely effected at this very instant, would this be a great joy and happiness to you?" He answered his question in the negative, criticized his training as having been too restrictive, and sought to complete his education by developing his emotions. In order to make up his deficiency in emotional training, he studied the poetry of Wordsworth. Many of our leading psychologists today are teaching the significance of this conclusion reached by John Stuart Mill. They affirm that there are three important types of learning, the rational, the practice, and the aesthetic or appreciative. The tendency of many is to consider the aesthetic as perhaps of greater importance than either the rational or practice types. Aesthetic training, of course, is definitely linked up with the emotions. Emotional behavior is not inherited but developed. By training the mild emotions of love, we block out the violent emotions of hate, envy, revenge, and intolerance. A substitution of mild emotions for violent emotions promotes (Continued on page 34) 5