The Reform of Education Part 5

I might without further thought say that this conception of becoming, referred to the plant as a plant, is improper, that in reality the plant does not _become_ for the very reason that we deny it its freedom. But I shall begin by stating that the becoming which we attribute to the spiritual reality must be specified and determined with greater accuracy, if we are to consider it as the characteristic of this reality. When so specified and determined, it will be found to coincide with the conception of freedom. Becoming, then, can be taken in two ways, which for brevity's sake we shall call the _autonomous_ and the _heteronomous_. That is, the being which becomes may have the law of its becoming either in itself or outside of itself. Becoming covers such cases as, for example, the filling of a vessel into which a liquid is poured. But this becoming takes place in a manner which has its law in the person that fills the vessel; and the filling therefore may be considered not so much a becoming as the effect of a becoming, that is, as the result of that act which is being performed by man. An heteronomous becoming is to be traced back to the becoming of the cause which produces it. The plant vegetates, and its vegetation is a development, a becoming. But could it grow without the rays of the sun, the moisture of the soil? The plant vegetates in consequence of its nature, that nature which in accord with our ordinary way of considering plant life it possessed from the time it was a green blade just sprouting; nay, from the time it was a seed in the ground, or rather when it was as yet in the plant that produced the seed, or better still when it was in its infinitely remote origin. It is evident therefore that we cannot think of the law of becoming as residing, so to speak, within a given plant. Whether we call it nature or name it G.o.d, this law transcends the becoming of the plant, its heteronomous becoming as we called it, and is properly the becoming of something else. But the becoming of man is autonomous. If he _becomes_ intelligent, that is, if he understands, he does so through a principle which is intrinsically his own; for no man can be made to comprehend what he himself will not grasp. If he becomes good, his perfected will can in no manner whatsoever be considered as determined by an outside cause, without at the same time being thereby deprived of all that is characteristic of goodness.

But in stating that man's becoming is autonomous (or true) we have simply formulated a problem without giving it a solution. What does this autonomous becoming consist in? Simply to notice its existence would never help us to understand it. Every fact is intelligible only as an effect of a cause. And a cause is a cause on condition that it be a thing other than the effect. In order to understand the autonomous becoming or freedom of the spirit, we must not consider it as a fact, that is, as something done. A thing made presupposes the making; and from the deed we must rise to the doing, but to a doing which shall not itself be a thing done, a fact, and similar therefore to the doings which we witness as mere spectators. The doing in which our autonomous becoming is detected is that one of which _We_ are not spectators but actors, we the spectators of every other doing, we as the thinking Activity.

This then is the becoming which rigorously may be called autonomous: the one which we know not as spectators but as actors, which comes forth as that reality which is produced by the act of knowing, and therefore is not known because it exists, but exists because it is known,--our existence. It is the existence of us who know, for example, that a==b, and who are such only in so far as we know and are conscious of knowing that a==b,--of us who suffer or rejoice, and who cannot be in this or that state except by knowing it, so that no cause could reduce us to such a state, unless we were conscious of such a cause and felt its valid application to us,--of us, above all, who are not ourselves unless we apperceive ourselves, by reflecting upon ourselves, and thus acquiring existence as a personality, as human self-consciousness, as thought. Thought in opposition to nature, with which it is constantly contrasted, is nothing but this self-reflection which establishes the personality, and that reality which, absolutely, is not, but becomes.

Every reality other than thought _becomes_ relatively; and its becoming is intelligible simply as the effect of another becoming. Only thought, only the Spirit, is absolute becoming, and its becoming is its liberty.

But whether it be called "freedom" or "becoming," the important thing is to avoid the mistake, which was general in the past and is still very common to-day, of separating this attribute of the spirit from the spirit itself, thus failing to understand exactly what is properly called the attribute. For example, we say that the triangle is a three-sided plane figure, and we seem to be able to distinguish and therefore to separate logically the idea of _triangle_ from the idea of _three-sided plane figure_. But a little reflection will make it evident that in thinking the idea of triangle, we think nothing unless we at least think the plane trilateral figure. So that we do not really have two ideas, which however closely connected may yet be separated to be conjoined again: what we have is one single idea. And such is the agreement of the becoming and of the spirit, and in general of every attribute and of the reality to which it belongs. When we begin inquiring whether the spirit is free or not, we set out on an erroneous track which will take us into a blind alley with no possibility of exit.

All the unsurmountable difficulties encountered at all times by the advocates of the doctrine of freedom arise in fact from the error of first thinking the spirit (or whatsoever that reality may be for which freedom is claimed) and of subsequently propounding the question of its properties. For the spirit is _free_ in as much as it is nothing else than _freedom_; and the spirit "becomes" in as much as it is nothing else than "becoming," and this becoming cannot therefore be considered as the husk enveloping the kernel--the spirit. There is no kernel to the spirit: it is in no manner comparable to a moving body in which the body itself could be distinguished from motion, and would admit therefore of being thought as in a state of rest even though rest is considered impossible. The spirit, continuing our simile and correcting it, is motion without a ma.s.s,--a motion surely that cannot be represented to our imagination, for the very reason that motion is peculiar to the body and does not belong to the spirit; and imagination is the thought of bodies, and not of the thought which thinks the bodies. This idea of motion without a ma.s.s, baffling as it is to our imagination, is perhaps the most effective warning that can be given to those who wish to fix in their minds the exact concept of the nature of the spirit. In order to avoid new terminology not sufficiently intelligible and therefore unpractical, we may resort to material expressions, and speak of the nature of the spirit as of a "thing" which becomes, and use such words as "kernel" and "husk." But we must never lose sight of the fact that this manner of speaking, which is appropriate for things, is not suitable for the spirit, and can be resorted to only with the understanding that the spirit is not a thing, and that therefore its whole being consists solely in its becoming.

We are now in a position to understand the meaning of the spirituality of culture, that is, of the reduction of culture to the human personality obtained in the preceding chapter, as well as the pedagogical interest of this reduction. Culture, as the entire content of education, because it must be sought within the personality, and because it resolves itself into the life of the spirit, is not a thing, and does not admit of being conceived statically either in books or in the mind: not before nor after it is apprehended. It does not exist in libraries or in schools, or in us before we go to school, or while we still remain within its walls, or after our nourished minds have taken leave of it. It is in no place, at no time, in no person. Culture _is not_, because if it _were_, it would have to be some "thing," whereas by definition it is the negation of that which is capable of being anything whatever. It is culture in so far as it _becomes_. Culture exists as it develops, and in no other manner. It is always in the course of being formed, it _lives_.

But to understand this _life_, and in order to grasp more firmly this "idea" of culture which is a spiritual banner to rally educators, I must again bring up a certain distinction. Culture, I said, lives (that is, it is culture) when it is endowed with a life that is entirely different from the life which biologically animates all living beings, ourselves included. The difference can be stated as follows: in the case of every other life, we can a.s.sert its existence in so far as we have knowledge of it either directly or indirectly. It is always, however, different from us and from our knowing it; so much so that the possibilities of going astray are very great. But for the life of culture, which is the life of our spirit, we have no need of being informed by the experience of others, or even of ourselves. We live it. It is our very thought,--this thought which may indeed err in respect to what is different from itself, as not tallying with it; but which cannot possibly deceive us in regard to itself, since it is unable not to be itself. The life of culture is not a spectacle but an activity. Nor is it activity for some and a spectacle for others. Culture is never a show for any one. No person can ever know for his fellow being. What, for me, Aristotle knows, is what I know of Aristotle.

Culture,--this untiring activity which never for a moment turns into a spectacle for any of us, which ever therefore demands effort and toil,--could not avoid becoming a show and being made up into a "thing," could not escape the danger of dying as culture by degenerating into something anti-spiritual, fruitless, and material, if, while yet being activity, it were not at the same time in some way a spectacle to itself. This point demands careful consideration. It is not sufficient to say that culture, that thought is life, and not the thought of life.

We will not attain the conception of culture by merely contrasting, as we have done, our life, the life we lead as actors, with the life of others which we behold as spectators, or by opposing the life of ourselves as thinking beings to the life we possess as organic beings, to the life of our senses by which we are on a par with the other animals. The life of thought, in its peculiar inwardness and subjectivity, is still conceived to-day by powerful thinkers, by a.n.a.logy with life in a biological sense, as irreflective and instinctive, or, as they say, as simple intuition. But thought which though living is irreflective becomes indeed an active performance, a drama without spectators, but it also remains as a drama represented for spectators who are absent, and who should be informed of those things which direct experience had not placed before their eyes. And it is difficult to surmise who would impart to them this information if the house were empty.

In other words, I mean to say that this would-be intuitive life of thought, fading away into the subconscious, melting into the naturality of the unconscious, is, like every form of natural life effectually a stranger to thought (that is _conceived_ as a stranger to thought), an object and nothing more than an object of thought, and therefore incapable of ever being a subject, of ever having value as subject, that is, as thought itself. For that reason we can never effectively think it; for never can we truly think any thing which is natural and thought of as natural. Who can say what the life of the plant is? To posit nature by thought is to posit something irreducible to thought and therefore unthinkable. This perhaps would not necessarily be a serious drawback for the life itself of thought if we lived it. For would it not be sufficient to live it? Why insist on _thinking_ its life? Why demand a head, so to speak, as a hood for the head? But there is a drawback, and a serious one, as a result of the fact that this life itself of thought does not now, never will in the future, come before us as that irreflective life which it is claimed to be: it comes to us as a philosophy which recommends it and advocates it as the only possible life of thought. In fact, in order to be able to speak of this life, we must first think it. But how could we think it, if the only possible life was that one which we intend to think, and not the one with which we think this irreflective life?

So then, in order that this life of ours (truly, intimately, spiritually ours) may not be confounded with the life of natural things, with that pseudo-life which is only an apparent becoming, an effect of another becoming by which it is transcended, it is not sufficient, as I started out to say, to call it a drama and not a spectacle. As a result of more careful determinations we may now say that it is not another man's spectacle, but our drama which is at the same time our spectacle too. In it the actors play to themselves. It is self-conscious activity. It is activity perpetually watching over itself.

And again: Just as the becoming of the spirit would cease to be that one sole becoming which it actually is, were we to distinguish the spirit from its becoming, so the consciousness of spiritual activity would also become unintelligible if we were to distinguish, as philosophers insistently do, between activity and awareness, between the performance and the show. The distinction here too arises from referring to the spirit, the mode of thinking which is suited for the thinking of things.

In the sphere of things, doing is one thing, watching the thing as it is done is another. But to us the spirit's becoming has shown itself to be the very negation of this distinction between actor and spectacle, so that in saying that the actor is his own spectator we cannot introduce, within the unity in which we had taken refuge, the dualism which is excluded from the concept of the spirit. I have spoken of "motion without ma.s.s," turning a deaf ear to the claims of our imagination. Now I shall add something that clashes even more violently against the laws which govern our image-making; and I shall do so in order to make it very clear that the spirit does not live in the world of things which is swept over by our imagination. I shall now call the spirit a gazing motion. The spirit's acting--its eternal process, its immanent becoming--is not an escort to thinking, but the very thinking itself, which is neither cause nor effect: neither the antecedent nor the consequent, nor yet the concomitant of the action by which the spirit goes on constantly impersonating itself. _It is this very acting._

In accordance with the popular point of view which, as I have said, is shared by great philosophers, a distinction is made between the spirit considered as will and the spirit regarded as intellect, or as consciousness, or as thought, or whatever term may be used to indicate the becoming aware of this spiritual activity. But if the spirit in that it wills did not also think, we should be thrust back to the position which we have shown above to be untenable, and be forced to admit that the irreflective life of the spirit cannot be fused with the reflective life, and is therefore unaccountable and unthinkable. The will which _qua_ will is not also thought, is in respect to thought which knows it a simple object, a spectacle and not a drama. It is nature and not spirit. And a thought which _qua_ thought is not will, is, in respect to the will which integrates it, a spectator without a spectacle. If there is to be a drama, and a drama which is the spirit, it is inevitable that the will be the thought, and that the thought be the will, over and beyond that distinction which serves if anything to characterise the opposition between nature and spirit.

Should we, returning to our comparison, demand of that motion which is spirit a moving ma.s.s; should we, grounded on the nave and primitive conception which identifies knowing with the seeing of external things, demand within the sphere of the spiritual activity itself a doing in which knowing should find its object all ready made, we should continue to wander helplessly in the maze of things, and to grope in the mystery of the multiplicity of things, which are many and yet are not many. We would be turning our eyes away from the lode star which is the supreme concept of the spirit, and thereby show ourselves incapable of rising to that point of view which is the peculiar one of culture.

Culture, as the spirit's life, which is a drama and self-awareness, is not simply effort and uneasy toil, it is not a tormenting restlessness which we may sometimes shake off, from which we would gladly be rescued.

Nor is it a feverish excitement that consumes our life-blood and tosses us restlessly on a sick-bed. The spirit's life is not vexation but liberation from care. For the greatest of sorrows, Leopardi tells us, is _ennui_, the inert tedious weariness of those who find nothing to do, and pine away in a wasting repose which is the very ant.i.thesis of the life of the spirit. The negation of this life,--the obstacles, the hindrances, the halts it encounters,--that is the source of woe. But life with its energy is joy; it is joy because it is activity, our activity. Another man's activity as the negation of our own is troublesome and exasperating. The music which we enjoy (and we are able to enjoy it by being active) is our enjoyment. But the musical entertainment in which we have no part disturbs us, interferes with our work, irritates us. Our neighbour's joys in which for some reason we are unable to partic.i.p.ate awaken envy in us, gall us, bring some manner of displeasure to our hearts.

Culture, then, as life of the spirit, is effort, and work, but never a drudgery. It would be toilsome labour if the spirit had lived its life before we began to work; if this life had blossomed forth, and had realised itself without our efforts. But our effort, our work is this very life of the spirit, its nature, in which culture develops. Work is not a burdensome yoke on our will and on our personality. It is liberation, freedom, the act by which liberty a.s.serts its being. Work may sometimes appear irksome because the freedom of its movement is checked by certain resistances which have to be overcome and removed.

But in such cases it is not work which vexes us, but rather its opposite, sloth, against which it must combat. It follows then that the more intensely we occupy ourselves, the less heavily we are burdened by pain. For as our efforts redouble and the resistance is proportionately reduced, the spirit, which perishes in enthralment, is enabled to live a richer life.

Culture then is the extolment of our being, the formation of our spirit, or better, its liberation and its beatification. As the realisation of the spirit's own nature, it is opposed to all suffering and is the source of blissfulness. But it must not be regarded as the fated, inevitable working out of an instinctive principle, or a natural law.

The building of a bird's nest, which is the necessary antecedent to generation and reproduction, cannot be looked upon as work; and it is fruitless to try to guess whether this act is a cause of pleasure to the bird or a source of suffering. Instinct leads the individual to self-sacrifice on behalf of the species. But not even this fact, vouched for solely by external inferences, authorises us to conclude that the fulfilment of an instinctive impulse is actually accompanied by pain. So that it seems wiser to keep off this slippery surface of conjecture. It will be sufficient to note here that an action prompted by instinct, conceived as merely instinctive and thoroughly unconscious of the end to which it is subservient, is in no way to be compared with man's work.

Human occupation is personality, will, consciousness. The animal does not work. But culture we have said is work. For it is liberty, self-formation, with no existence previous to the process; whereas the laws which govern the development of natural being pre-exist before the development itself. Culture exists only in so far as it is formed, and it is const.i.tuted solely by being developed. And what is more, as we shall see in the next chapter, culture does not even count on a pre-existing external matter ready to receive its informing imprint.

To conclude then: culture _is_ (in its becoming) only to the extent that the cultivated man feels its worth, desires it, and realises it. It is a value, but not in the sense that man first appreciates it and subsequently looks for it and strives to actualise it. The value which man a.s.signs to culture is that which he gradually goes on ascribing to _his_ own culture, and whose development coincides with the development of his own personality. What we ought to want is exactly what we do want; but we want just that which we ought to. The ideal, not the abstract, inadequate, and false one, but the true ideal of our personality, is that one toward whose realisation we are actually working. And the ideal of our culture is that self-same one towards which our busy person remains turned in the actuality of its becoming.

But work implies a programme, and spirit means "ideal;" and when we speak of culture we signify thereby the value of culture, of a culture which as yet is not but which must be. Life is the life of the spirit as a duty,--as a life which we live, feeling all along that it is our duty to live it, and that it depends on us whether it exists or not. And culture could not re-enter as it does in the life of the spirit, if it too were not a duty, that is, if it were not this culture to whose development our personality is pledged. So interpreted, culture, far from being a destiny to which we are bound, is the progressive triumph of our very freedom. On these terms only, culture is a growth, and the spirit a becoming.

This attribute, which is an ethical one, is not added to the attribute of Becoming any more than "becoming" was superadded to "freedom." For just as Becoming develops the concept of freedom, so does the ethical develop and accomplish the concept of becoming. Freedom is never true liberty unless it is a process, an absolute Becoming; but Becoming can only be absolute by being moral. And it is therefore impossible to speak of learning which is not ethical.

It has often been repeated for thousands and thousands of years that knowledge is neither good nor bad; that it is either true or false. But is the True a different category from the Good? Are they not rather one sole identical category? Truth could be maintained in a place quite distinct from the grounds of morality, only so long as the world clung to that conception of truth which was the agreement of the subject with an a.s.sumed external object. But now by truth we understand the value of thought in which the subject becomes an object to itself and thus realises itself; and in clarifying this new conception of truth, we discover that morality is identical with it. For knowing is acting, but an acting which being untrammelled conforms with an ideal--Duty. And in this manner we explain to ourselves why the mysterious and inspired voice of conscience has at all times admonished man to wors.h.i.+p Truth with that same intense earnestness, with those same scruples, with that identical personal energy, which we devote to every phase of our moral mission. The cult of truth is in fact what we otherwise call and understand to be morality, namely, the formation of our personality, which can be ours only by belonging to all men, and which, whether or not ours, is not immediate, not a given personality, but rather one which is intent on self-realisation, on that sacred and eternal task which is the Good.

If we now feel culture to be free, to be a process, and an ethical one at that, we have succeeded in grasping its spirituality, and we are in a position therefore to proceed with security on that way which opens before the educator's eyes, as he intently goes about his work of creation, or, if you so wish to call it, his task as a promoter of culture.

FOOTNOTES:

[3] "Forest savage, rough, and stern."--Dante, _Inferno_, i. 5.

[4] Many speak of the universal and say that they conceive this universal as concrete and immanent. Few, however, effectively fix their thought on that universality which alone is such, which alone can be such, which has nothing outside of itself, not even the particular, and which is ideal on condition that the idea to which it belongs be reality itself in all its determinateness. And so in speaking of "universal" and of "individual" we must remember that the latter cannot be anything without being the former, since indeed the universal is not a merely abstract idea, but reality, the reality of thought. Therefore I have here used the expression "really universal".--G. G.

CHAPTER VII

THE BIAS OF REALISM

Educators of the modern school are bent on transforming its methods and inst.i.tutions on the basis of the conception set forth in the previous chapters. The subtle discussions required to make this conception clear must have convinced the reader that this work of educational reform could only succeed if preceded by such philosophical doctrines as have recently been evolved in Italy and are now becoming the accepted faith of the newer generation. To this new belief the school must be converted, if it is ever going to conquer that freedom which has been its constant aspiration, and which seems to be an indispensable condition for its further growth.

The faith of the modern man cleaves to a life conceived and directed idealistically. He believes that life--true life--is man's free creation; that in it, therefore, human aims should gain an ever fuller realisation; and that these aims, these ends will not be attained unless thought, which is man's specific force, extends its sway so as to embrace nature, penetrate it, and resolve it into its own substance. He believes that nature, thus turned into an instrument of thought, yields readily to its will, not being _per se_ opposed or repugnant to the life and activity of the spirit, but rather h.o.m.ogeneous and identical with it. He believes, moreover, that this sway can only be obtained by amplifying, strengthening, and constantly potentiating our human energy, which means thinking, knowing, self-realising; and that self-realisation is not possible unless it is free, unless it be rescued from the prejudice of dependence upon external principles, and unless it affirms itself as absolute infinite activity. This is the _Kingdom of Man_ prophesied at the dawn of modern thought. This is the work which science, art, religion, not less than political revolutions and social reforms, have gradually been accomplis.h.i.+ng and perfecting in the last three hundred years. This new spiritual orientation has to a certain extent influenced teaching; and though without a general programme of substantial reforms, the ideal of education has been transformed along idealistic lines. This transformation, strange to say, has been effected in part by means of inst.i.tutions which have arisen as a result of the recent development of industrial life and of the corresponding complexity in economic and social relations. These schools, because of their names, seem to be quite removed from the idealistic tendencies of modern civilisations. Whether they be called technical, business, or industrial schools, they seem to be and are in fact the result of a realistic conception of life. But such realism, we must remember, is far from being opposed to our idealism, and should not be compared with the realism which we have objected to. We should rather consider it as the most effective demonstration of the idealistic trend of our times.

For these inst.i.tutions are founded on the theory that knowledge increases man's power in the world by enabling him to overcome the obstacles by which nature, if ignored and unknown, would hinder the free development of civilisation in general, and of those individuals in particular in whom and through whom civilisation becomes actual.

Realism, on the other hand, as the opposite of the idealistic conception of life and culture, was shown to be based on a conception of reality which exists totally outside of human thought and of the civilisation which is produced by it,--of a reality existing _per se_ in such a way that no end peculiar to man, no free human life, can be conceived which will have the power of bending this reality toward itself, of resolving it within itself. This realistic point of view is not different from the outlook of the primitive man who, awed by the might of nature, kneels submissively before its invisible power, which, he thinks, controls these forces. It is the accepted belief of the nave and dreamy consciousness of child-like humanity; but it is none the less a conception which is opposed to the course constantly followed by civilisation. Its dangers must be made very clear and its menace removed from the path of its triumphant enemy. To overcome this realistic point of view in the field of education is the duty of teachers, who must be in a position to recognise it, and to track it into whatever hiding places it may lurk. I intend therefore in this chapter to point out some of the most notable realistic prejudices which, though still tolerated by contemporary thought, ought to be definitely stamped out, if we are really convinced of the spiritual character of culture and of its essential attributes.

I shall here bring up again a consideration which I touched upon in the first chapter,--an idea which is the fundamental prejudice of the realistic theory of education in its antagonism to the profound exigencies of the free spiritual life which education should promote. I mean the idea of Science (with a capital S),--that Science which is imagined as towering over and above the men who toil and suffer, think and struggle in quest of its light and of its force; that Science which would be so beautiful, and majestic, and impressive, were it not for the fact that it does not exist. This Science is looked upon as infallible, without crises, without reverses, without vicissitudes of doctrines, without parties, and without nationality,--without history in short; for history is full of these baser occurrences; and men, without a single exception, even the greatest of scientists, even the lofty geniuses that have transformed or systematised knowledge, are all in some measure p.r.o.ne to err. The exceptions which are adduced to contradict this statement are so few, so limited by restrictions and by hair-splitting distinctions, that we can hardly allow them; especially when we consider that even granting the infallible oracular character of some men's utterances, the fact remains that his listeners must undergo the process of understanding him, and in so doing they may go astray. So that from superhuman unfailing verities, we slip back instantly to human fallibility. Infallible Science, then, is not known, cannot be known to mankind; for the simple reason that we who const.i.tute it are subject to error, and being ourselves p.r.o.ne to fail, we expose science to the same danger. If it does exist somewhere it surely is not in this world in which we live, thinking, knowing, and--creating science.

This mythical science, unsullied and incorruptible, segregated from all possible intercourse with thought, ever soaring in the pure air of divine essences, is yet the mother of a numerous offspring, the parent of countless daughters as virginal and as infallible as the mother herself. These are the particular sciences, bearing various names, but all of them equally worthy of the distinction of the capital S in the eyes of their realistic wors.h.i.+ppers.

This mythology is taught in the schools which too often are called, and without any figurative meaning, the shrines of learning. Conceived as divinely superlative, as something which, though revealed historically by the successive discoveries of privileged minds, is none the less sharply distinct from the history of humanity, science descends into the school. There it manifests itself as human knowledge, and is communicated to the youthful minds eager to ascend to the heaven of truth. And so the school comes to be looked upon as a kind of temple, as the Church where the inspired Word of the Sacred Books is read and explained by those who have been chosen by the Divinity to act as its interpreters, as preachers of the Faith. With this religious conception of the school we connect the "mission" of the educator, whose task, when not ridiculed and lampooned by the same scoffers who at all times have jeered at the teachers of divinity, has been surrounded by a glamour of religiosity. We see them encircled by that halo of distant respect which we naturally connect with those who, acting as intermediaries between us and the deity, are themselves transfigured and deified.

The school then is looked upon as a temple in which the pupil receives his spiritual bread. But not so the home which the boy must leave, that he may satisfy his mysteriously innate craving for knowledge. Not so the street, where the small boys gather, drawn together by the irresistible need of pastime, by the sweet desire of frolicsome companions.h.i.+p, by the unconscious yearning after spiritual communion with the world which there makes its way into the child's mind far off from the cla.s.sroom, and lavishes upon it its own light, its portion of thought, its share of new experiences, and the joy of an ever renewed outpouring of sympathetic spirituality.

The custodian of this temple, the schoolmaster, is regarded as a divine, as the minister who imparts the consecrated elements of Science, who leads the pupil to the "panem angelorum," as Dante calls it. But our fathers and mothers are not so regarded,--they who were the first custodians of a greater temple, the world, to whose marvels they gradually initiated our growing minds; they who by the use of speech taught us, without being aware of it, infinitely more than the best of schools will ever be able to teach us in the future; not our elder brothers to whom we always looked up in emulation, and from whom, even more than from our parents, we learned the thoughts and the words suited to our needs; not our grandmother, who long before our eager phantasy might roam through the printed pages, gently led us into Fairyland, and there, in the enchantments of a magic world, disclosed to us that humanity which books and teachers later in life were to re-evoke for us.

No! There are no altars to Science except in the Schoolhouse, and none but educators may minister to its cult.

This mythological lore is not merely a harmless form of imagery, against which it might be pedantic to rebel. It is a real superst.i.tion, which has its roots deep down in the personality of the educator; it adheres parasitically to culture, climbs over its st.u.r.dy trunk, drains its sap, weakens it, deadens it. For when we have stripped this conception of education of its mythological exterior, there yet remains a clearly religious and realistic thought, which is professed with firm adhesion of the mind and complete devotion of the soul, as the inviolable norm of the whole activity which pertains to the object of this norm itself. Let us, for example, consider what is presupposed by the doctrine of methods, the so-called methodology, which is an important part of didactics, and a very considerable section in the whole field of pedagogics. The doctrine of methods comprises a general treatment, which corresponds to what we called the Mother-Science, and a particular treatment for the individual sciences. There is methodology of learning in general, and there are methodics for the several disciplines, or at least for each group of disciplines, into which learning is divided and subdivided in accordance with the logical processes adopted in any particular case, or in accordance with the objects of these disciplines.

To each method of knowing, considered in itself, corresponds a teaching method, so that there is one general didactic method, and many special ones by which the general method is to be applied.

But what is the method of a science if not the logical scheme or the form of a certain scientific knowledge? And, on the other hand, what can be known as to the form of anything, unless we have the thing itself before us in its form and with its contents? In order to define the form of a science, and say, for example, that it is deductive in mathematics and inductive in chemistry, we must first presuppose the existence of these sciences themselves. But in them form is never anything indifferent to content; it is the form of that content. This is made clear if we consider the methodologies which logicians presume to define in the abstract, and with no regard to the determined content of the corresponding sciences. We notice that they are able to present a successful exposition and formulation only by fixing the meaning of each formula by the use of examples, thereby pa.s.sing from the abstract to the concrete, and showing the method to be within the concrete knowing out of which logic presumes to extract it. In the same way every philosophical system has its method; but whenever criticism has endeavoured to fix abstractly the method of a system, in order then to show how it has been applied in the construction of the system itself, it has been forced in every case to admit that the method already contained the system within itself, that it was the system itself. So that it would have no value whatsoever, it could not even be grasped by thought in its particular determinateness, if it were not presented as the natural form of that precise thought.

No harmful results would follow, if this a.s.sumption merely implied the accepting of science and methods as existing by themselves previous to the learning of science by means of its respective method; if it resulted merely in the failure to recognise the impossibility of conceiving science and methods as existing outside of the human mind where they actually do live and exist. If this were all, we should merely take notice of it as a speculative error which affected only the solution of the particular problem in which it appeared. But in the life of thought, where everything is united and connected in an organic system, every point of which is in relation to every other point, there is no error limited to a single problem; its effects are felt in the whole system, and they react on thought as a whole. And since thought is activity itself,--life's drama, as we called it,--every error infects the entire life. Let us then consider the consequences of this realistic conception of methodology.

Science, we are told, in its abstract objectivity is one, immutable, unaltered: it is removed from the danger of error and of human fallibility, and protected from the alternate succession of ignorance and discovery; incapable therefore of progressing and of developing because it was complete from the very beginning, and is eternally perfect. But such a Science is quite different from the one which grows in the life of culture, and is the free formation of the human personality. This one is ever changing, always admitting all possible transformations, different from individual to individual, and different also in the mind of the same person. It lives only on condition that it never fix itself, that it never crystallise, that it place no limits to its development; it continues to be in virtue of its power to grow, to modify itself, to integrate itself and incessantly to develop. Science as culture, as personality, is free, perennially becoming, stirred by ethical impulses, multiple, varied.

If we fix the method, it indicates that we are dealing with science realistically considered as pre-existing, and we can therefore have only one sole, definite, immutable method,--one for everybody, and devoid of freedom, not susceptible of development, refractory to all moral evaluation. We should have then a rigid law of the spirit, as compelling as the laws of nature. But by obedience to such a principle, the spirit could not affirm itself: such compliance is surrender and abdication, not the realisation of some good. The most that could be said of it is that perhaps it prevents or annuls an evil which alienates us from a primitive good which is not ours, and not being ours cannot truly be good.

A fixed method forces the spirit into this hopeless dilemma: (1) Either refuse to submit, and thus save life at the cost of all that makes life worth living--_propter vitam vivendi perdere causas_ (which evidently would be the case, if we consider that the spirit lives solely on condition that it recognise no pre-established laws, that it be free from the bondage of nature, that it create its own law, its own world, freely; and that, on the other hand, the _cause_ of living, what const.i.tutes the worth of life, is that enhancement of the spirit's reality which realises itself in science, and therefore in the method of science).

(2) Or else submit, and kill life in the effort to save its worth--_propter causas vivendi perdere vitam_ (which is absurd; for what is the worth of life if there is no life?).

However that may be, the type of education that presupposes a certain ideal of knowledge previously const.i.tuted and ready to be imparted by the teacher to the pupil in conformity with some suitable method, must follow a method, a unique one--the method of science, and therefore of the teacher, and therefore also of the pupil, whether the latter is capable of it or not. For it is tacitly a.s.sumed that science==method; science==teacher; science==pupil. On the strength of these equations the common term "science" should suffice to identify the first method, which is the one of science in itself, with the last, which is the method of science to be mastered by the pupil. But the above series of equations is false, because, admitting the first, the one namely on the basis of which we are now discussing, neither the second nor the third is possible without pa.s.sing from realistic to idealistic science,--two very different things, as I have shown. Even if we leave the teacher out of consideration, we shall have to remember that the pupil learns a science by making it his own,--a fallible science, which he may understand up to a certain point and no further. It will be one of the many sciences which have no one given method, but many of them, and the pupil can only avoid appropriating, individualising, subjectivising science by following that way which is very broad, very easy, and, alas, only too well beaten,--the royal road of non-learning, which is diligently upkept by all the schools which have to teach precise, well-defined science, and have a pre-established method by which to teach it.

But, it might be objected, if science, realistically conceived, is a fict.i.tious ent.i.ty in no way corresponding to reality, how is it possible to have a method which by its uniqueness and definiteness effectively corresponds to the unalterable unity of this non-existent science? And what teacher would ever arbitrarily impose on his students such an abstract and mechanical method? This is true enough; but man learns to compromise with all deities, Science included. This divinity, in order somehow to exist, must a.s.sume a few human traits without however renouncing her divine prerogatives. The fact that Apollo held no communion with the Pythian priestess did not remove the oracular sanct.i.ty from the Delphic response. For man knows no deity other than the one which he is capable of conceiving with his soul, just as he knows no other red besides the one which he sees with his own eyes.

Science, which he considers as an object existing in itself, outside of his and other human minds, and therefore endowed with absolute validity in all its branches and in the articulations of these branches, is nothing but the science which _he_ knows. And he knows it because he has constructed it in the form in which he knows it: _fingit creditique_.

But this absence of consciousness from the constructing, and the consequent faith in the realistic value of science, determine the positions and the doctrines which produce the consequences I have deplored. For he who establishes a school and enacts its regulations takes as a model his own science, without at all being aware that it is only his own. It becomes therefore the content of the inst.i.tution and determines its method. But a teacher who does not feel inclined to teach that given science and to adopt that special method creates his own ideal, which is but the projection of his personal culture; and unable to account critically for the intrinsic connection existing between his ideal and his personality, he too _fingit creditique_. He believes that the school authority has erred, and that Science, as he understands it, must be kept distinct from the official doctrines.