Behold a forest ecosystem, in which all things are connected
If you remember, which you might not, because I didn't quote it in full last time, Principle 11 says:
Here we have another set of principles which, like Principle 3 and Principle 4, essentially constitute a single sentence, a thought completing itself. I chose, in my discussion of Principle 11, to focus on the idea of the child's "powers of mind" which equip him "to deal with all knowledge proper to him," and with the idea of "vital" knowledge, which is to say living ideas, rather than mere information. Meanwhile, Principle 12 completes this thought trajectory as follows:
"Education is the Science of Relations"; that is, that a child has natural relations with a vast number of things and thoughts: so we train him upon physical exercises, nature lore, handicrafts, science and art, and upon many living books, for we know that our business is not to teach him all about anything, but to help him to make valid as many as may be of--
"Those first-born affinities
"That fit our new existence to existing things." (source)
So what the heck does all this mean?
First of all, we might connect the thought which both these principles encompass. We might translate it thus:
"Because it's normal for a child to be able to make sense of things for himself (as long as those things aren't too far outside the reach of his stage of cognitive development), we offer him a range of diverse ideas, touching on as many things in the created universe as possible, and his education consists of the connections his able mind makes among those things."
I think this is really what she means here. When she says, "Education is the Science of Relations," which is the thrust of Principle 12, what she means is that to learn is to discern those relations, to synthesize and order the ideas which you the learner encounter, so that your mind becomes a living library of those ideas. At any time, you can take idaes off the shelf and talk or write about them, or use them as frameworks for evaluating other ideas. The ideas you assimilate become not only part of your working knowledge, but of your faculties of discernment as well.
This is something like T.S. Eliot's description of the way the literary canon works, in his essay "Tradition and the Individual Talent." Eliot says, in essence, that the literary canon – in other words, the array of poems, novels, and stories recognized as great and worthy reading, and furthermore as standards for evaluating greatness – is hierarchical and ordered, but that that order changes every time a new work is admitted to it, being recognized as also great. In other words, it's not static. Every time some new work enters the canon, it reorganizes the whole thing, altering and renewing all the existing relationships between its members. To include, say, Toni Morrison's novel Beloved in the literary canon is to change – and, I think, to expand – the way we might read Euripides' Medea, for I guess the most obvious comparison. It changes the whole conversation about any number of things in literature, including but certainly not limited to the trope of mothers who kill their children. And again, the word I think of is expand. Not cancel or erase. You don't take Euripides out of the canon in order to let Toni Morrison in, because contra a lot of critical-theory-driven conversation about literary canons, this is not a zero-sum game. Literary tradition is – must be! – a spacious place.
Anyway, that's how our minds seem to work. We expand our interior conversation and our ability to interact with other people and all of reality by adding ideas to the canon of our minds. And, in case I haven't said it enough times already, this is what our minds are made to do.
How does the mind do this work of adding ideas to its canon? By the formation of relationships with those ideas. "The child has natural relations (emphasis mine) with a vast number of things and thoughts." Not that he has memorized them. Not that he can recite them. Not that he knows all that can be known about them. But that he has developed "natural" relationships with those "things and thoughts."
Here again, Charlotte Mason is acknowledging the reality of the human intellect in what seems to be to be a very Thomistic way. When she grants that "our business is not to teach him all about anything," she is asserting, with Thomas, that there are things our minds can't know. There is mystery. Even the material world is freighted with mystery. We don't really know how it all began. We don't really know how it all works. Our bodies remain mysterious to us, and so do other people. No matter how many times I read King Lear or The Lord of the Rings or sacred scripture, there is always something else to see that I didn't see before. "Our business is not to teach him all about anything," because our business is not to delude ourselves that we can do the impossible, or that our child is capable of the impossible, i.e., knowing everything. In humility, and with the aim of nurturing humility in our children, we really have to assent to this basic truth.
The quotation at the end of this little section, meanwhile, comes from Wordsworth's long poem, The Prelude, which concerns itself with the mystery of the human person, how the "I" of the poem has come to be and to be formed as an individual by his interactions with and sensations of the human and natural worlds. Here in its entirety is the stanza containing these lines:
Nor, sedulous as I have been to trace
How Nature by extrinsic passion first
Peopled my mind with beauteous forms or grand,
And made me love them, may I well forget
How other pleasures have been mine, and joys
Of subtler origin; how I have felt,
Not seldom, even in that tempestuous time,
Those hallow'd and pure motions of the sense
Which seem, in their simplicity, to own
An intellectual charm, that calm delight
Which, if I err not, surely must belong
To those first-born affinities that fit
Our new existence to existing things,
And, in our dawn of being, constitute
The bond of union betwixt life and joy.
Affinity, of course, simply means a relationship. A rough paraphrase of this stanza might say that the speaker, remembering the images of beauty first imprinted on his mind and soul by his experience of the natural world, considers how that imagery in his mind has ordered other, later experiences as he has encountered them – that a human life, a "new existence" begins to know its own place in the world of "existing things" through its encounters with (as he has said earlier) both beauty and fear, as in awe of the sublime. Thus, from the beginning, he learns to understand the joy of existing.
Wordsworth, of course, was a late-eighteenth-century Romantic reacting against Enlightenment-era Rationalism. He wasn't trying to articulate orthodox Christianity, and certainly wasn't a conscious Thomist. But in The Prelude, he is intuiting the sacramentality of the created world and the formative power of the divine presence in which that world exists. It is formative to the human soul, in other words, to form relations with that world: with nature, with other people. The proper pose of the human soul, in fact, is openness to those relations. When I think of what Charlotte Mason might mean by "natural relations," I think of that kind of open-heartedness, that "bond of union betwixt life and joy."
Thomas would not fundamentally disagree with any of this, I don't think. He would fundamentally agree that the created universe is sacramental, that God's life exists in all things, and that we know Him better as we apprehend His presence in all the world. He would also fundamentally agree that it's impossible to know everything by way of naked human reason. I think our capacity to know God presents something of a paradigm here, for what we might understand about our capacity to know, and our ways of knowing, anything. As Herbert McCabe, OP, paraphrases him:
As Thomas himself says:
Our natural knowledge starts from sense-perception and reaches only as far as things so perceived can lead us, which is not far enough to see God in himself. For the things we sense, though effects of God, are not effects fully expressing his power. But because they do depend on him as their cause, they can lead us to know that he exists, and reveal to us whatever is true of him as first cause of all such things, surpassingly different from all of them . . . God's gracious revelation . . . strengthens our natural light of intelligence . . . Although in this life revelation cannot show us what God is in himself, but joins us to him as unknown, nevertheless it helps us to know him better, showing us more and greater works of his (ST la, 12, 12 and 12, 13).
So . . . if the most important thing we can possibly know is our faith, let's just cancel from our minds the notion that we're going to know it by memorizing the catechism, going to apologetics camp, and knowing the answers. We can't. We won't. We don't. Yes, it's important to know what the Church teaches. It's crucial for a Catholic to affirm what the Church teaches. But that, in itself, is not faith. It's not knowing God. We know God by seeing His "effects" – all the ways He reveals Himself to us in the world He created and through the story of His saving love for us. We know God by loving what we can see of Him, knowing that it's only the minutest fragment of what is real.
If this is the way we approach the most important thing we'll ever know – or not know, which Thomas suggests is truer – then it seems a good template for everything else we might come to know. We know things not by memorizing them, but by loving them. The things we love are the things we know. If we love them, they enter our canon of ideas and experiences and exert their power to reorganize relationships among all those things, and to expand what we are able to say about everything. We still don't know everything. But the more we love, the more we can say about it all.
What, then, is the point of this "full and generous curriculum?" It is, first and above all other considerations, to offer our children things to love.