Day 32 Chart to Steer By

Gulf Stream, Winslow Homer 1899

                                                       (see also Authority)

“Three Ultimate Facts––Not open to Question. ––There are two directions in which we commit intellectual offences against the law, (natural or moral law) and oppose ourselves to authority. In the first place we are disposed to regard everything by turns as an open question. We forget that there are three ultimate postulates which the thought of man can neither prove nor disprove, though in every age it has played uneasily about one or the other. God, Self, and the World are the three fixed points of thought. The active Western mind, with each new evolution of scientific thought, finds again and again that there is no place for God in the world; nay, so active and pleasant is the conception of self that an important school of philosophy has demonstrated that the real world is no more than a simulacrum, a mirage, as it were, projected from the conscious self. The more passive Eastern mind, is, on the contrary, inclined to regard selfhood as a passing phase in a state of absorption or reabsorption by deity. But when we learn to realise that––God is, Self is, the World is, with all that these existences imply, quite untouched by any thinking of ours, unprovable, and self-proven, ––why, we are at once put into a more humble attitude of mind. We recognise that above us, about us, within us, there are "more things . . . than are dreamt of in our philosophy." We realise ourselves as persons, we have a local habitation, and we live and move and have our being in and under a supreme authority. It is not well we should take it for granted that everybody knows these things. Perhaps we all have a hearsay acquaintance with, but very few of us have a realising knowledge of, these ultimate facts.”
  
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But for the uneasy young soul, whose chief business in life is the navigation of an unknown craft, some knowledge of the carrying and sailing powers of the vessel is not only beneficent in itself, but is a relief from the obsession of that tiresome other self––the subjective self, we have called it––of which we become aware in that day when we eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge, and leave the paradise of the unconscious child. (This awakening must come to us all….” 

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“Do but watch the eagerness with which the young catch up every remark made by their elders on public affairs, books, men, and you will see they are really trying to construct a chart to steer by; they want to know what to do, it is true, but they also want to know what to think about everything.”  
 
                                                   *
 
“Somehow, in her presence, meanness and pettiness fell away, and one believed in and strove to reach the highest of which one was capable. And not only this—one learnt to believe in the goodness and joy of life. One felt that, at the back of all Miss Mason’s teaching, was a philosophy of life based on an intense conviction of the personal relationship of every individual soul with God—a relationship that was the basis of all joy in living.” 
 
 
 
Examen:  Does Mason help me connect my deepest values to my everyday living? Do I have a “realizing knowledge” of the ultimate facts and Christian philosophy? How am I scaffolding this understanding in the classroom, standing aside so my students can also construct a chart to steer by?

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Three Ultimate Facts:  Charlotte M. Mason, School Education, 3:114–15.
But for the uneasy:  Charlotte M. Mason, Ourselves, 4:Introduction.
Do but watch:  Charlotte M. Mason, Formation of Character,  5:228.
Somehow in her presence: Union, In Memoriam, 77.
 
Chart to Steer By meditation/100 Days copyright Laurie Bestvater 2025

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