Thoughts on Ourselves

I finished Charlotte Mason’s fourth volume, Ourselves, on Thursday. She wrote it for young people, but it really is a book that anyone from about the age of twelve and up can benefit from. I can see that reading it as a teenager might have helped me be more careful about the habits and thought patterns that I allowed myself to form. But then again, I might not have been so open to her advice and cautions at that age. 😉

Ourselves is also an excellent book to read if you need clarification about her views on “The Way of the Will” and “The Way of Reason”, two of her 20 Principles that I personally have struggled to understand. She really fleshes them out in Book Two of Ourselves, and also helps us to understand how a liberal education assists the Will and Reason to act rightly:

It is well to remember that in all our relations of life, our books and friends, our politics and our religion, the act of choice, the one possible act of the Will, has always to be performed between ideas. It is not that ideas stand for things; but things stand for ideas, and we have to ask ourselves what we really mean by allowing this and that, by choosing the one or the other. […] We must bring wide reading, reflection, conscience, and judgment to bear upon our opinions, if it be only an opinion concerning a novel or a sermon – upon our principles, if they affect only the ordering of our day. (Ourselves, Book II, pg 150)

I also appreciate how she keeps the focus on the “objective self” rather than the “subjective self” – we learn about the powers and perils of Mansoul in general, but are not encouraged to either use this knowledge for self-aggrandizement, or as a tool for introspection and self-reproach. In the area of art appreciation, for example:

In this, as in all the labours of the conscience seeking for instruction, we are enriched by our efforts; but self-culture should not be our object. Let us approach Art with the modest intention to pay a debt that we owe in learning to appreciate. So shall we escape the irritating ways of the connoisseur!

And concerning self-focus vs. an outward focus:

Give the Will an object outside itself, and it will leap to service, even to that most difficult of all service, the control of the forces of Mansoul. It is not by one grand fiat, but by many ordered efforts of Will, that we overcome those failures in self-restraint, self-control, self-denial, which are the misery of our lives, and which we know to be sin by the wretchedness they bring upon ourselves and others, and the separateness from others which they set up in our hearts. It is not self-ordering, but an object outside of ourselves, leading to self-forgetfulness and a certain valiant rising of the will, to which we must look for a cure for the maladies that vex us.

Miss Mason and I do not see eye-to-eye on everything, of course. The influence of the Higher Criticism of Scripture in her day is seen in the chapters about the Bible and Theology. I think she was doing the best she knew how to defend Scripture in light of those attacks, and she does appear to be sound in the essentials of the faith, but I found her arguments and conclusions in those chapters often unsatisfactory. And her questioning of the moral fiber of expats in the chapter on Loyalty in Book I felt, quite frankly, like a slap in the face. It’s probably a subject for another post that I have yet had the courage to write, but although I can see the drawbacks to living in a “foreign” country, I have also seen how God has used that (often difficult) situation to grow my faith in Him and stretch me in ways I would not have been had I not moved so far from the place in which I was born and raised.

But overall, it was an excellent, thought-provoking book that I will probably read again myself, and that will be on my children’s reading lists during their teenage years.

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