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At this point we may recall Goethe's reply to the botanist, Wolff, who had ascribed the metamorphosis of plant-organs from root to blossom to a gradual stunting or atrophy of their vegetative force, whereas it was clear to Goethe that simultaneously with a physical retrogression, there is a spiritual progress in the development of the plant.
After eight years of this dreary work of clearing the Fountain Lake farm, fencing it and getting it in perfect order, building a frame house and the necessary outbuildings for the cattle and horses, after all this had been victoriously accomplished, and we had made out to escape with life, father bought a half-section of wild land about four or five miles to the eastward and began all over again to clear and fence and break up other fields for a new farm, doubling all the stunting, heartbreaking chopping, grubbing, stump-digging, rail-splitting, fence-building, barn-building, house-building, and so forth.
Coming closer to the daily life of the people as individuals, we see that the character of each man, woman and child is degraded and weakened by a foreign administration, and this is most keenly felt by the best Indians. Speaking on the employment of Indians in the Public Services, Gopal Krishna Gokhale said: A kind of dwarfing or stunting of the Indian race is going on under the present system.
There have been accidents due to stunting by both inexperienced and experienced pilots. Generally it is a matter of altitude, for with sufficient height the greenest pilot can come out of anything, if he does not lose his head. He may sit in the cockpit of his machine, and ramble off mile after mile with little motion, and with as little effort as the driver of a railroad locomotive.
The most piteous form of industrial slavery is that of young children, who should be in school or out of doors, developing their minds and bodies into some measure of readiness for adult work and responsibility, instead of prematurely losing the joy of life and stunting their mental and physical growth. In 1910 some two million children under sixteen were earning their living in this country.
Myths are to be judged, as M. Sorel says, by their ability to express aspiration. They stand or fall by that. In such a test the Christian myth, for example, would be valued for its power of incarnating human desire. That it did not do so completely is the cause of its decline. From Aucassin to Nietzsche men have resented it as a partial and stunting dream.
Carlyle's ignorance in treating men who moved in spheres apart from his own, as the leaders of science, definite theological enlightenment, or even poetry and arts, was an intellectual rather than a moral flaw; but in the implied assertion, "what I can't do is not worth doing," we have to regret the influence of an enormous egotism stunting enormous powers, which, beginning with his student days, possessed him to the last.
Further, the Indian exports and imports at sea, which in 1858 were about Rs. x 40,000,000, amounted in 1891 to about Rs. x 200,000,000, and the produce thus exported has increased in quality and variety no less than in amount." What evidences of "a fatal and stunting arrestation of development"!
But what we both want, what we both hanker for, starve for, is just life! Who cares if there is pain with it? I don't, nor do you. And yet we keep on stunting and stultifying ourselves with these old-fashioned remedies for a disease we only half understand, when we might have all the world and then some. Oh, we're fools we're fools!" His voice rang wildly passionate.
Once let the springs of reverence be choked up, once let that window of the soul be overgrown with weeds and cobwebs, and your most careful training will only produce a character estimable in many respects, but for the most part without noble aspirations, without high ideals, with no great enthusiasms a character, to use Saint Beuve's expressive phrase, "tout en façade sur la rue," whose moral judgments are no better than street cries; the type of man that accepts the degradation of women with blank alacrity as a necessity of civilization, and would have it regulated, like any other commodity for the market; that very common type of character which, whatever its good qualities, spreads an atmosphere of blight around it, stunting all upward growing things and flattening down our life to the dead level of desert sands.
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