The Reform of Education Part 8

CHAPTER X

THE IDEAL OF EDUCATION

ART AND RELIGION

We have shown in the previous chapters the necessity of rigorously maintaining the unity of education, of resisting every attempt at separation, of opposing all systems which treat the various parts of education as though they could be kept distinct in practice and theory.

There still remains a question which naturally arises at this juncture, and which we must try to answer. For true it is, some one might say, that moral and intellectual education are one and the same thing, and true it may be that education of the mind and culture of the body work for the same results; and it may also be admitted that education being formation, or development, that is, the becoming of the spirit, and the spirit consisting in its becoming or rather in becoming pure and simple, it follows that education means spirit and nothing more. But granting all this, was it really worth while? When we have attained this notion of the unity which is always the same, no matter under how many aspects it may present itself, what have we gained? Have we here anything more than a word? One says "spirit," another might say "G.o.d," or "nature,"

or "matter," or some such thing, and there would not be much difference.

It might well be that in the course of the inquiry into the attributes of the spirit, a way was found to invest our word with quite a different meaning; but still, after we have defined and distinguished the concept of the spirit from all the others, we have not progressed much. We may have the satisfaction of continuing to see before us this concept, with no possibility of ever ridding ourselves of its presence, but how much will we know of the contents that this spirit is supposed to have? What are the principles that should govern this education, which has been clearly stated to be not a natural fact, but a free action, and therefore a selection enlightened by consciousness, by reflection, and by reason?

This suggested objection is not a purely imaginary one. Very often superficial critics, forgetting that pedagogical problems pertain to philosophy and are therefore problems of the spirit, awkwardly try to solve them by the insufficient light of common sense. In so doing they warn us that in idealistic pedagogics all particular and definite concepts vanish, and what remains is a vague confused indistinctness of no practical utility to the teacher.

And truly, if the only result obtained by idealistic pedagogics were the demonstration that many concepts, ordinarily considered to be substantially different, are in reality identical, we should not hesitate to call such philosophical knowledge useless and ridiculous.

But in the first place we must notice that this a.s.sumed deficiency charged against us has partially been shown to be non-existent by the exposition of our doctrine, which reduces education to free spiritual becoming, and resolves the apparent multiplicity of educational forms in the immultiplicable unity of this becoming, outside of which nothing is truly conceivable.

For the defect of our system was a.s.sumed in connection with an exigency which divides itself into two parts, respectively corresponding to the form and to the matter of education. For many of the pedagogical errors which we have pointed out were seen to be imputable, not to the choice of an unsuitable content of education, but to the criterion adopted in treating this content. I have already spoken of my disinclination to accomplish a mere negative task; and in the last chapter, while denouncing the materialistic conception of physical education, I certainly did not spare the ascetic view which knows of no body other than the one which hara.s.ses the spirit and hinders its progress toward the ultimate good; and thereupon I tried to show that physical culture is spiritual education endowed with that self-same nature which belongs to education when considered as formation of the will and of the intellect. But this does not mean that our thesis reduces itself to a mere theoretic transvaluation or to a new abstract interpretation of our present educative system, which however in practice could not be affected by this purely theoretical difference of interpretation. I tried to make it clear that our conception is not devoid of practical import, and that it does lead to a reform in education and to a new orientation of the school. This was especially brought out in connection with physical culture in the preceding chapter, when I insisted on the necessity that physical instructors be trained in such a way that their mental equipment shall not be limited to notions that refer exclusively to the body in its physical limitations: but that in addition to physiology, anatomy, and hygiene, they be made familiar also with those studies and disciplines that are more intimately connected with character, with the soul, and with the mind.

But besides this, our entire investigation dealing with the reasons for an absolutely spiritualistic conception of education should have made it very clear that it is not possible to entertain these new conceptions without introducing in the school a new spirit, which will not yield to the realistic vogue and to the materialistic, pedantic, old-fashioned education,--a spirit which will bring before us a new duty in every instant of our teaching life and in every word we utter, and which will impress us with the necessity of acting differently from what has been taught by the followers of traditional pedagogical routine. Whatever the subject may be, the form of education has to be in accord with something that should by now be the common possession of us all, namely, the consciousness of the intimate spirituality and of the sacred freedom of our work, which operates not in the material schools but within the souls of our pupils. There it gives rise not to incidents that are unessential to that greater world which is the aim of our religiously, serious outlook on life, but to a process in which All is involved. The speculative side then of this form of education is not a useless and abstract theory, but a necessary moment of the moral improvement, of the spiritual enhancement, and of the general regeneration of teaching.

Indifference to this reform, and the belief that men may continue to educate without bothering with the subtle problems of philosophy, mean a failure to understand the precise nature of education.

But the question of the content of education is a different one. Having identified education with spiritual reality itself, it follows that the two determinations of the content of the latter belong to the content of the former. One of these determinations is historical in character; it advances as the history of the human mind progresses, a.s.suming now this and now that aspect in accordance with the prevailing spiritual interests. We who have censured the conception of pre-established programmes, as being most dangerous prejudices of pedagogical realism, could not very well presume to determine here in the abstract, the content of every possible form of education for all places and all times. The school, like every other form of education, develops; and as it grows, it constantly changes its content, which again is nothing else than the content that the spirit gives to itself at every moment of its concrete development.

It would be just as irrational to expect a school to map out with precision the limits and the scope of a pupil's culture. Of all the culture carved out for him at school, a boy will absorb only that much which is taken up by the autonomous growth of his personality. This will be supplemented and integrated by the culture which he gets outside of the cla.s.sroom, in all possible walks of life, and will be so personal and of such a character as to admit of no prevision or pre-determination even on the part of the learner himself. Away with pre-established programmes then of any description! Spiritual activity works only in the plenitude of freedom. Horace asks: _Currente rota cur urceus exit?_ We answer: Whether an _urceus_ or not, what always comes from the _rota_ is something which cannot be foreseen, for the very simple reason that what is foreseen is not the future but the past, which we (as in the case of experimental sciences) project into the future, whereas the spirit is a creation which occurs not in time but in a never-setting present.

So every abstract discussion of the possible content of education in general, or of any given particular school, must appear crude and absurd, if we recall that education reflects the historical development of the spirit. What we need to do is to wait, observe, and have faith.

For G.o.d will reveal himself to us; and G.o.d is the very Spirit of ours which at every moment prescribes its law to itself and thus determines its own content.

The other of the two determinations mentioned above is the _ideal_, or, as we perhaps might more precisely call it, the _transcendental_. It pertains to that spiritual content which never changes as it pa.s.ses through the various historical determinations, and which might therefore be styled the "determiner of the intrinsic and absolute essence of the spirit." This content upon careful consideration reveals itself as form, and more precisely as the form of the historically determined content of the spirit; or again as the concreteness of that form which has been attributed to the spirit considered in itself, which is a becoming. But _qua_ becoming, and irrespective of all special aspects with which it historically configures itself, the spirit has already a content of its own, which cannot be absent from any of its historical configurations.

In them this content will manifest itself over and over again, but constantly modified by the changes that are being historically produced.

Under these varying modes and presentations it permanently abides as the indefectible substance of the spirit. This substance, this ideal spirit which becomes actual in history, cannot be ignored by any kind of pedagogics which aspires to a thorough knowledge of the essence of education.

Having thus formulated the problem, and clinging firmly to the principle of educational unity, we may distinguish the forms of education which proceed from the ideal content of the spirit. But we must always keep in mind that, as these forms are only distinguishable ideally, they can in no way be effectively separated, and must be found in every concrete educative act. So that their synthesis and their complete immanence is the concreteness of educational unity in its opposition to what I have called fragmentary education. Our distinction then will turn out to be an exact logical a.n.a.lysis, which a.n.a.lyses only the terms of a synthesis and cannot therefore be dissociated from the synthesis. By a.n.a.lysing and by synthesising, by determining the spiritual unity without disconnecting or in any way dissociating its intrinsic ideal determinations, we strive to represent the ideal of education.

In making a rapid survey of this a.n.a.lysis, I must refer back to what was said of the attributes of the spirit,--that the spirit _is_ in that it _becomes_, that it becomes in so far as it acquires self-consciousness, that its being therefore is consciousness in the act of being acquired.

This act is surely self-consciousness, and it does mean cognition, but a cognition which differs from all others in that it has for its object that very one who cognises. And this is the meaning of "I," ident.i.ty of subject and object,--an ident.i.ty, however, that because of its curious nature needs to be carefully examined. It was shown in a preceding chapter that two things, to be thought as two, must yet be thought as one by virtue of the unique relationship which makes their duality possible. Here we observe the inverse: ident.i.ty of subject and object means that in addition to the subject there is--nothing; it means therefore unity. And yet this unity would in no manner be intelligible if it were not also a duality, if, in other words, the ident.i.ty of subject and object were not also the difference between them.

To distinguish A from B, an initial, elementary minimum difference is required. It is the difference, called _otherness_, by which B is other than A. Without this otherness there would not be A and B, but either A alone or B alone. The subject as it knows itself is certainly not another from the subject alone. But if it did not become _other_ to itself, if it were not object also, as well as subject, it would never know itself. To be object as well as subject implies the necessity of distinguishing these two terms, and shows that there is otherness between them. If it sounds harsh to speak of something that first is "_one_" and then is "_two_," we might state the situation in a different and perhaps simpler way. We might say that the subject would not know itself, if remaining always that one and self-same subject, it were not both subject and object to itself.

Consciousness implies this self-alteration of the subject, which by placing itself as an object in front of itself realises itself, it being real only as self-consciousness. This is the import of the ident.i.ty of the two terms, subject and object; or of the difference intrinsic to the one, which is but another way of stating it. We may insist as much as we want on the ident.i.ty of the "I," but it will always be true that this "I" is real only in virtue of its intrinsic difference. And conversely we may insist, as it is more often done, on the difference between the subjective moment of the "I," whereby the "I" is set in opposition to all its objects, and the objective moment in which the ego vanishes. But behind the difference, ident.i.ty is always to be found. Man, the more he thinks, the more he alters himself, the more objective that reality becomes which he realises by self-consciousness, the more fully he sees the variation, the development, the growth, the enhancement of the object--the world he knows.

The spirit's being is its alteration. The more it _is_,--that is, the more it becomes, the more it lives,--the more difficult it is for it to recognise itself in the object. It might therefore be said that he who increases his knowledge also increases his ignorance, if he is unable to trace this knowledge back to its origin, and if the spirit's rally does not induce him to rediscover himself at the bottom of the object, which has been allowed to alter and alienate itself more and more from the secret source of its own becoming. Thus it happens, as was said of old, that "He that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow." All human sorrow proceeds from our incapacity to recognise ourselves in the object, and consequently to feel our own infinite liberty.

Subject then and object, and in their synthesis, in their living unity, the spirit, which therefore is neither a subject standing against an object, nor its opposite. The two terms, each one for itself, isolated, are equivalent. But every time human thought has isolated them, whether striving to conceive itself, its own spiritual substance, objectively (G.o.d), or as a simple subject (a particular man), it has ever reached most desperate conclusions, now totally blocking its way to the comprehension and justification of its own subjectivity, and now secluding itself in an abstract subjectivity, removed from _all_ which man theoretically and practically needs in order to live. The reality of the spirit is not in the subject as opposed to the object, but in the subject that has in itself the object as its actuality.

It is on account of this inseverable unity, by which the subject presses to itself the object and becomes actual therein, that the progressive alteration of the object is also the progressive alteration of the subject. At every given moment, the subject, altered as it is, made into the "other" or determined, is yet pure subject, and nothing else than the subject which becomes conscious of itself, and therefore actual by determining itself as subject of its object, in such a way that the subject as well as the object is always new and always different. Not because it is now one subject and now another, in which case succession and enumeration would import multiplicity, and would therefore reduce the spirit to a thing; but because it appears and cannot but appear thus, if observed from the point of view which distinguishes one individual from another, and in the same individual one instant from the next, although from a rigorously idealistic point of view the spirit is one, and its determinateness does not detract from its absolute originality.

This dialectic in which the spiritual becoming unfolds itself (subject, object, and unity of subject and object), this self-objectifying or self-estrangement aiming at self-attainment,--this is the eternal life of the spirit, which creates its immortal forms, and determines the ideal contents of culture and education. The spirit's self-realisation is the realisation of the subject, of the object, and of their relationship. If of these three terms (the third being the synthesis of the first and second) any one should fail, the spiritual reality would cease to be.

This threefold realisation admits empirically of a separation that makes it possible to have one without the others. On the strength of this triple division we speak of art, of religion, and of philosophy, as though each one of them could subsist by itself. So that commonly people believe that it is possible to be a poet without in any way burdening one's mind with religion or philosophy,--especially philosophy, which appears to be the bugbear of most poets. In the same way many philosophers, and among them one of the very greatest, held art to be the negation of philosophy, to the point that it should be banished from the kingdom where the latter was expected to reign. And how often has religion taken up arms, now against poetry, and now against speculation!

All of these occurrences were possible because the three terms were looked upon as separable, as though they were three material things, each one of which could be what it was only on condition that it excluded the others.

A superficial understanding of the differences intervening between these three terms is the reason why they are often looked upon as separable.

But in reality they are so indissolubly conjoined, that separation would destroy their spiritual character, and put in its place mechanism, which is the property of all that is not spirit.

Art is the self-realisation of the spirit as subject. Man becomes enfolded in his subjectivity, and hears but the voice of love or other inward summons. Living without communication with the world, he refrains from affirming and denying what exists and what does not exist. He simply spreads out over his own abstract interior world, and dreams; and as he dreams, he escapes from the outer bustle into the seclusion of his enchanted realm, which is true in itself until he issues from it and discovers it to be a figment of his phantasy. This man is the artist, who, we might say, neither cognises nor acts, but sings.

His subjectivity appears empirically to us always as a determined subjectivity, the determination of which proceeds from the object in which the spirit, theoretically and practically, has previously objectified itself. But this priority of the act, by which the artist is considered a man of this objective world before he withdraws into his dreams, is a mere empirical appearance. If we relied on it, we could not preserve to the spirit in its artistic life that originality and autonomy, that absolute spontaneity and freedom, which is the essential character or, as we called it, the attribute of spiritual activity. To become objective, the spirit must first be subject; and in front of the object in which it objectifies itself, it again inevitably becomes subject,--an ever determined one indeed, but nothing else than a subject. That is why the contemporary theory of aesthetics holds that form in art absorbs in itself the content, with no residuum. It absorbs it _qua_ subjectivity; for whatever the object be which this subjectivity, empirically considered, has enwrapped, it draws it entirely over to itself, rea.s.sumes it, and as pure subjectivity it cannot return to its object without pa.s.sing through the moment of its opposition to the object,--the moment in which the subject is nothing else than subject, and finds in itself infinite gratification.

This is the realm of art, a realm from which the spirit, in consequence of the very function of the subject, is compelled to issue; since the subject is subject in that it issues from itself, becomes self-conscious, objectifies itself. So the poet as he dreams breathes life into the personages of his dreams, builds them up, and gives them reality. What is his own abstract subjectivity he chooses as a world in which he himself may live absolutely; and the ideas which mature in that fantastic world of his--which is nothing more, as I have said, than his abstract subjectivity--are affirmed by him without any reserves, and are opposed to the ideas of philosophers and of men who prefer concrete reality to phantasy.

This lyrical bent, peculiar to the artist who enhances himself by exalting his own abstract individuality, is in direct contrast with the tendency of the Saint, who crushes and annihilates this same individuality in the face of his G.o.d,--that G.o.d who infinitely occupies his consciousness as the "other" in absolute alterity to him, so that the subject is hurled into the object in a total self-abstraction. It sinks in the contemplation of its own self in its objective "otherness,"

of itself become the other, in which it no longer recognises itself. So he deifies this other self, places it on the altar, and kneels before it. Thus the saint's personality is nullified; or rather, it is actualised and realised in this self-annulment, which is the theoretical and practical characteristic of mysticism and the specific act of religion.

It is not possible to tear art from the spirit's life, in as much as it could not be the synthesis it actually is without being subjectivity. It is equally impossible for the spirit to be completely devoid of religiosity. The mystic flower of faith grows out of the bosom of art,--a faith in an object which draws the soul to itself and conquers it. The life of the spirit is an eternal crossing from art to religion, from the subject to the object. It is impossible for the artist to realise his art in unalloyed purity, since his world, the world he has created for himself, is nevertheless the bigger world, out of which, empirically speaking, he is driven only by the needs of practical life, which awaken him and remind him of the existence of a wider world. In the same way it is impossible to realise a pure religion in which the subject completely and effectually might annihilate itself. For in the measure that faith increases in intensity, and the sentiment of one's own nothingness grows deeper, and the idea that the object is all becomes more obsessing, in that same measure the energy of the spirit increases, of the spirit as the subject that has been powerful enough to create this situation. Altars must be built in order that people may kneel in front of them. The concept of G.o.d, it, too, has a history. And from this history no word can be taken away on the a.s.sumption that it was immediately _revealed_. For there is no word which pre-exists as such before the act of him who cognises it. And to fix a dogma, that is, to rescue it from the flow of evolution, we should have to withdraw from the course of evolution the men themselves who are to accept it.

Nothing therefore is more impious than the history of religion, in the course of which man, now dragging his G.o.d down to the depths of his apparent misery, now lifting him to the heights of his real greatness, progresses from station to station along the unending way of sorrows and joys. The process of mental development shows unwittingly, by the very acts of man's innocent piety, that G.o.d is _his_ G.o.d, that the life of the object is the same as the life of the subject.

The nature then both of art and of religion implies a flagrant contradiction which comes to this,--that the subject to be subject is object, and the object to be object is subject. Hence the torments of the poet and the spasms of the mystic. A perfect art and a perfect religion, that is, art which is not religion, and religion which is not art, are two impossibilities. This does not mean that either art or religion can ever be superseded and left behind as two illusions, ancient and constant, if we will, but none the less devoid of all value.

The very contrary of this is true. Just because there is no pure art, religion is eternal; and art is eternal, because religion cannot be attained in its absolute purity.

The concrete spirit is neither subject nor object. It is a self-objectifying subject, and an object which becomes the subject in virtue of the subjectivity that alights on it as it realises it. The spirit is therefore a becoming. It is the synthesis, the unity of these two opposites, ever in conflict and yet always intimately joined. And the spirit, as this unity, is the concreteness both of art (reality of the abstract subject) and of religion (reality of the abstract object).

It is philosophy. Many definitions have been given of philosophy, and all of them true, because directly or indirectly they may, on the strength of what is expressed or what is understood, be reduced to the following definition: that philosophy is the spirit. If we say that it is the science of the spirit, we indulge in a useless pleonasm. For science, unless we distinguish in an absolute manner (which is impossible) one grade of determinateness from the other, is the same as consciousness; and spirit is, as we have seen, self-consciousness. If we say that philosophy is the science of reality in its universality, we lose sight of the fact that reality, for those who do not stray off into the maze of abstractness, _is_ the spirit. A definition which has never lost its value is that one which makes philosophy consist in the elaboration of concepts, that is, in the unification of all the concepts (those we possess, of course) into a coherent concept. This is an excellent definition, and it warns us that philosophy is not obtained by stopping before abstractions, no matter what these abstractions may be.

All particular things are abstractions, each one of which yields a concept, and all of them give a number of concepts, which must be brought together and unified, if we ever intend to think all things that are thought, and thus philosophise. The subject without the object as the artist wants it is an abstraction; and similarly abstract is the object which religion looks up to.

We are accustomed, not without reason, to distinguish the life of the spirit from philosophy. But the reason, instead of destroying, confirms the ident.i.ty between spirit and philosophy, and for the following cause.

The spirit never being what it ought to be, we live acquiring consciousness of ourselves. But when we pause to ask ourselves if we have really obtained this consciousness, and turn to our life as to the subject-matter of this problem, which is the problem of philosophy, we discover that we cannot answer in the affirmative. For answering is spiritual living, a living, therefore, which consists not in having self-consciousness but in acquiring it. So that philosophy does not arise from the need of understanding the life already lived, for the past is the realm of death; but rather from the much keener desire of living, of leading a better life, a true life, and of finally realising this spiritual reality which is our ideal. But when?

Can we believe that there is ever going to be a philosophy which will definitely fulfil the ideal? It is obvious that a pursuit of such philosophy would lead the spirit into a race to death; whereas on the contrary the spirit is life; it is an impulse to ever more intense living.

This philosophy, it is evident, is not the exclusive, esoteric cla.s.sroom discipline, the professional privilege of a few specialists. It is rather the source from which this professional speculation derives its right to address all men who have an exalted sentiment of their human dignity, who hearken to the deeper utterances of their souls, who are able to see how much of their own self there is in this vast world which is being disclosed to their eyes; who, even though vaguely and timidly, are conscious of the divine power that resides in every human heart; who feel that this human heart, p.r.o.ne though it be to all baseness, is also capable of lifting itself to the most sublime heights, and of enjoying the pure and lofty satisfactions which human phantasy ordinarily relegates to heaven. In the depths of every mind there is a philosophy: the mind itself is untiring speculation, which more or less successfully scales the height, but which is always turned upward to the summit whitened by the rising sun. Life is made human by the rays of this philosophy. Man is really man when he recognises an object which is the world, reality, law, and when he recalls that nothing absolves him from the duty of being in this world; of seriously being in it, which means working and cooperating towards reality by knowing reality and fulfilling the law. For in his freedom and power he can never divest himself of his own responsibility; he must therefore develop his capacity to the utmost value, and to that end work and work, think, and act as the centre of his world. This philosophy does not allow him either to withdraw into the abstract retirement of his egoistic self, or to deny and sacrifice this self to an imaginary reality. This philosophy is never finished, never completed, for it is his own spirit, his very self, which to live must grow, and which must const.i.tute itself as it develops. And therefore this philosophy cannot help being man's ideal, which is always being realised and which is never fulfilled.

So, then, education, which aims at that concrete and truly real unity which is the life of the spirit, must always be moral, always spiritual, always philosophic. An invidious word, perhaps, for those who have had the misfortune to fall into the mean and vulgar habit of grinning and scoffing in retaliation for the unsparing censure inflicted by the ideal on sloth, presumption, and cowardice. We might perhaps replace this word by "integral," excepting that this adjective is generic and therefore inappropriate.

I must add, however, that in speaking of philosophic education, I do not mean any special course in philosophy. Though I believe that special philosophical training has an essential function in the curriculum of secondary schools which aim to prepare and direct towards higher studies a matured mentality, scientifically trained and humanly inspired, I yet hold that this special philosophical training can be effectual only if all education, from its very beginning, wherever that may be, has been philosophic. We must reflect that just as it is impossible for a man to be moral only at certain hours of the day, and in certain particular places, morality being the atmosphere without which the spirit cannot live, so that ethical teaching is distorted and deflected as soon as it is relegated to certain definite books, to be studied in connection with certain definite courses; in the same way this philosophy which is for us the ideal content of education, and therefore its ideal, cannot but be present in every real educative act, cannot help reflecting itself in every throb it gives to the soul of the pupil. This general philosophic education naturally includes art and religion, which cannot be limited subject-matters of special courses of instruction, co-ordinated or subordinated to the other elements of the curriculum.

Only the particular sciences, that is, the sciences properly so called, may be freely moved in a student's schedule; they may be added or taken away, they may be grouped this or that way, and be variously distributed in accordance with the needs of the moment and the particular exigencies of the student or of man in general. For these sciences reflect in themselves the fragmentary multiplicity of things which have been abstractly cut off from the centre of the spirit, to which however they too refer. And because they do refer to it, the teaching of them should be spiritualised, moralised, humanised; it ought to acquire the concreteness of philosophy, and therefore never ignore the exigencies of art and of religion. For otherwise it will be merely material instruction, "informative education," which in reality is no education at all.

During the Revival of Learning education was humanistic. Its ideal was art. The historical life which corresponded to this ideal was the individualism of our Italian Renaissance. After the Counter Reformation, art, which is individuality in abstract subjectivity, was abandoned to itself, and inevitably decayed in the cult of lifeless form; it became barren in the imitations of cla.s.sical art considered as final perfection, to which the individual might raise himself but beyond which he could not possibly proceed. Art became thus the negation of originality, and of that subjective autonomy of which it naturally should be the most enhancing expression. So that cla.s.sicism up to the Romantic Revolt remained the cultural form of a society submissive to the principle of authority and religiously oriented. These conditions favoured the study of the science of nature, which to the extent that it is governed by the naturalistic principle is a manifestation of religiosity. The devotee of natural science speaks in fact of his Nature with an agnostic reverence similar to that professed by the saint in the worship of G.o.d. Nature, which alone he knows, becomes the object before which the subject, Man, disappears. But as science progresses, the need of shaking the principle of authority makes itself felt; the accepted truths of nature are subjected to criticism; the power of doubting is reintroduced, and the subject again rea.s.serts itself. So the advancement of natural science has gradually turned humanity away from the shrines of naturalistic science. When naturalism opposed the claims of religion, it ceased to be the science of nature, and became philosophy. This influenced the scientific spirit in its clash with religious dogmas, and restored to it the consciousness of the moment of subjectivity which had been forgotten. The ideal of culture, which prevailed in the nineteenth century with the triumph of positivism, was science, naturalism, and therefore religion. It is now high time that the two opposed elements be joined and united, and that the school be neither abstractly humanistic in the pursuit of Art nor abstractly religious and scientific, but that it be made what it is ideally, and what it is also in practice when it efficaciously educates--the philosophic school.

As each one has a different path to follow in this world, each one will accordingly have his own education. But all paths converge to one point, where we all gather to lead in common that universal life which alone makes us men. And as we meet at this centre, we must understand each other, and should be able therefore to speak the same language, the language of the spirit. We are compelled by an irresistible need to live this common life, and together to const.i.tute one sole spirit. But this end we shall never attain if man, who ought to be entire and complete, acts as a mere fragment,--such fragment, for example, as the aesthete, or the superst.i.tious worshipper, or the star gazer, always unaware of the pit under his feet. If we continue in this state, in which one man clings to the superst.i.tion of mathematics, another idolises entomology, a third worships physics, and so on indefinitely, if man insists on fencing off his little piece of this "thrashing-floor that makes us cruel," knowing no other man but himself, feeling no needs other than his own, then war will break out. Not a disciplined war, governed by a law, by an idea, by reason, of which it is the life; but a war of every man against his brother,--the anarchistic uprising, the disintegration of the spirit, and the stern suffering which is true misery.

The dislike for the _purus mathematicus_[5] is traditional. But whether he be a mathematician, or a priest, or an economist, or a dentist, or a poet, or a street cleaner, man as a fragment of humanity is a nuisance.

We want mathematics, but we want it _in_ the man. And the same for religion, economics, poetry, and all the rest. Otherwise we suffocate, and die stifled. For all these are things, but there is no life; and things oppress us and kill us. Therefore let us spiritualise things by reviving the spirit. Let us release it, that it may freely move in the organic unity of nature. Let us train it so that its strength, agility, balance, and all around development shall be able to control all its dependent functions, which can be successfully carried on only on condition that they agree, and collaborate toward common life. And this is what I call philosophy.

Or we may call it humanity, if the word philosophy suggests strangeness and difficulty of attainment. For our demand for an educational reform, in accordance with our renewed consciousness, is prompted by the old but never ancient desire which put the lantern in the hand of the Greek philosopher. Education is truly human when it has for its contents that ideal which I have briefly touched upon in this chapter, the ideal of the spirit, philosophy.