THE FRUIT OF THE TREE OF KNOWLEDGE
Finally, with what appraisement may the seeker for knowledge view
education itself? In the course of our study we have cast aside
numerous idols and comforting fictions. We have seen that in the
process of a liberal education old dilemmas are outgrown; that the
habit is formed of questioning all things; that the educated mind
becomes capable of amused self-criticism, attains urbanity of spirit
and tolerant scepticism of the crowd and its partisan controversies,
and with civilized resignation learns that it may not possess finality
in matters of truth and right, but that a man must order his life
according to the wisest discrimination of value of which he is capable.
Now, I believe, the wise man will pursue his education always viewing
it with a certain light-heartedness and detachment. Wisdom itself will
not be taken too seriously by one who sees that in the best of it there
is an entertaining amount of human folly. Like Falstaff’s confession,
“I am not much better than one of the wicked,” Socrates, the wisest,
knows he is not much better than one of the foolish. People who
solemnly try to improve their minds, with groanings of the spirit that
cannot be uttered, determined to reach some cultural “Pike’s peak or
bust,” do not often become educated; they become intellectual bores.
Education is a way of living, but it is never a substitute for life.
Rational living does not mean that interest, feeling, love, respect,
practical achievement, do not count, or that in the end education
should make of life a mere _knowledge affair_. One does not pursue
scholarship merely for the sake of philosophical contemplation, or as
an intellectual trick. And there is no magic about education, but plain
common sense. I think we may safely say that a life guided by reason
and good taste is better than one enslaved to tradition, tabu, narrow
utilitarianism, conventionalism and passion. But surely education is
not a hair shirt to be worn in order to discipline the spirit and
achieve the modern idea of salvation. Neither is it something to be
attained by practicing before the mirror. It is nothing ostentatious.
Nor is it to be made a cult of. It does not work miracles, nor can it
create out of airy nothingness an intelligence that does not exist.
I think much of the criticism of education that one frequently hears
these days grows out of an exaggerated notion of the transformation
which some people expect a few years of education to work. I know a
number of college graduates who are very bitter in their criticism of
college education, protesting that they did not learn anything that did
them any good. Perhaps they expected too much for the amount of effort
put forth and tried to do too great a business on a small intellectual
capital. Or perhaps such criticism is in part a pose; in certain
circles it is now “the thing.”
An article which recently appeared in a student’s journal is typical
of this attitude toward College education. The writer asks, “Are the
American colleges worth their keep?” They have not, he says, given to
the nation the trained leadership which we had the right to expect of
them. Enter any University Club and you will find yourself far removed
from that intellectual atmosphere which should be characteristic of
education in a great democracy. Few college men may be found fighting
on the side of social justice. Few have the courage to deviate in any
way from the totums and tabus of a plutocratic, materialistic society.
Few have any very different ideas from those of their chauffeurs of
what constitutes success in life. Men’s colleges are no different
from girl’s finishing schools; they are not educational institutions,
but exist merely to impart information of the ways and manners of
upper-class society. Instructors are devitalized, for none but a
devitalized person could endure the system. Trustees have the habit
of judging colleges by the same standards they apply to business, yet
judged even by such standards, the author thinks higher education is a
failure. If Mr. Henry Ford turned out motor cars as bad as the products
the colleges turn out, he would soon be bankrupt!
In so far as such sweeping indictments are inspired by a feeling of
antipathy toward the so-called upper classes, it is not necessary for
us to discuss them. But I think that criticisms of this sort also
reveal a tendency to expect too much of education. We become more
charitable when we pause to consider how small a part, even at best,
intelligence plays in the control of human behavior. We have seen what
Erasmus thought about this subject. Most of those who call attention to
the general lack of intelligence, draw a distinction between the amount
of it in existence and the amount in common use. This is a democratic
view of the matter. It flatters the average man if you tell him that he
possesses more intelligence than he is using. A more correct view is
perhaps that of Freud, who says that most of us in modern civilization
are living “psychologically beyond our means.”
A good example of this democratic view may be found in a discussion
of “Intelligence in Our Time,” by a very able professor in one of
the Eastern colleges. “The general state of intelligence in our time
is of the strangest. It is richly and splendidly equipped and it is
tragically unsuccessful,--unsuccessful, that is, in the conduct of
life, both personal and social.” You may test it, broadly speaking,
by the troubles of the world. “One of the foremost failures of human
intelligence is not to remember its own importance.” In other words,
I suppose we haven’t enough intelligence to use our intelligence. We
live in “a sea of loose and floating ideas, more of them produced
daily, and no clearly recognized way of deciding, to the coercion of
all trained minds, which is right.... When people go wrong in reasoning
they usually do so in obvious ways, by violating obvious rules.”
Intelligence has its standards, but does not enforce them; it “lacks
confidence in itself.... On most important subjects opinions differ. In
each case something else appears as more important than intelligence,
something else has the right of way.”
In other words, we know better than to believe and behave as we do
most of the time. But I doubt if this unfortunate state of man is a
peculiarity of our times. I suspect that there has long been more
knowledge than intelligence in the world. The difficulty is that we
frequently do not know how to use the knowledge we possess, for to
use knowledge well requires wisdom, and no one can give us wisdom.
I can see no gain in condemning the human race for not using its
intelligence. I suspect that the beliefs we entertain and the deeds
we perform or leave undone are the best measure of the intelligence
we possess. Let us each own up to a certain native stupidity and
deceitfulness of heart which no amount of education can wholly cure or
even successfully disguise. The admission will to some extent save us
from that childish pride of intellect which is a common affliction of
those who “go in” for education.
Sometimes pride of intellect disguises itself with a holy tone and
reverential mien, as if education were a very solemn affair. When I
was a school boy, there was in our town a woman librarian who presided
over our little public library with deadly seriousness. She filled the
place with a crushing and awesome silence, as with reverential whispers
she quietly moved on tiptoe among the books like one ministering in the
house of the dead. I have known people to behave in this spirit toward
literature. I have seen school teachers and professors take such an
attitude toward education. It characterizes the average baccalaureate
address and is discernible in much that is said and written about
education. I know several “prophets” of adult education who succeed in
giving a similar impression. Their very souls creak under the weight of
the world-mending “spiritual values” of adult education. If people will
take their education as hard as the Kantians take morality, they are
welcome to their “sublimities.” There are minds which seem to have been
formed only for the service of the sublime and do not work well except
when closeted in its presence. But I would rather dwell in the tents of
the wicked than be a door-keeper in such a house of serious thinkers.
Extravagant claims for education lead to pretense, to painful efforts
at keeping up appearances, to exposure and ultimate disillusionment.
Several times in history there has occurred a wide-spread reaction
against education, followed by a long period of decline of interest
in it. Usually such reactions have taken the form of a revival of
religion and have followed upon a period of general intellectual
awakening. The Augustan age is followed by primitive Christianity, the
Renaissance by the Reformation, the eighteenth century, the age of “the
Enlightenment,” by those distinctly anti-intellectualist movements, the
Revival, the Revolution and Romanticism. May not one of the causes of
such reactions be the fact that people have been led to expect too much
of the prevailing education? Men for a time believe that education will
disclose some wonderful secret which is about to transform the world,
and when they find that the learned doctors do not reveal the secret
because they have none to reveal, and that the world does not at once
proceed to transform itself, they turn from learning to religion where
the secret is kept from the wise and revealed unto babes. No one is
more concerned than I that the interest in education be as wide-spread
and as genuine as possible. But I would not force its growth lest we
get all foliage and no fruit. It is better that in its due season the
tree be known by the fruit it bears.
Just as some believe that education is a sort of gospel, there are
others who contend that knowledge makes for unhappiness. One evening
at an informal dinner in New York a small group of thoughtful people,
all of middle age, were discussing in a rather desultory manner the
education of the younger generation. Suddenly the conversation became
serious. One of the women said, “They are hard, disillusioned young
realists. What else could we expect? It is the result of the education
we are giving them. They know too much.” She continued, “I wish, though
I do not see how it could have been done, that we could have retained
the simple beliefs of our parents. It was very comforting to believe
those things. It seems to me that everything I learn robs me of some
consoling ideal and makes the world appear cruel and terrible.”
To the question, what shall we put in the place of the old faiths which
education leads us to doubt, there is perhaps no other answer than
that we shall _exchange an infantile mentality for a mature one_. Most
people will agree that it is better to grow up, but as to whether we
are happier without our childish illusions, opinions differ.
Much of the tenderness which people show for small children is a
mixture of pity and envy. The other day I saw a business man about
fifty years old gaze long and wistfully at an infant playing with his
toys. He said as he turned away, “I wish I could remember what it feels
like to be his age. Can you imagine what this world must look like to
him?” There is my own small son who is now just learning to stand on
his feet and speak a word or two. How trusting and sweet he is. He is
not afraid of any one or any thing. No one would of course wish him to
live always surrounded only by pretty pictures and parental kindness.
But it is easy to understand how one in moments of weariness and doubt
might envy him his brief day of blessed ignorance. Think of it, he does
not even know that people have to work, and that it is the common lot
of mankind both to endure and inflict suffering. He does not suspect
the existence of such things as hospitals, slaughter houses, war,
slums, jails, policemen or Congress. He does not know that he is not
immortal, or that he must ever part with those he loves. He must know
these things since they exist, and must learn about many other facts
equally hard to endure. And as he grows up I want him to learn to cut
his way through the fictions with which men strive to disguise the
significance of many painful realities from which there is no escape.
Such is knowledge, and such is the price we pay for it. One reason
why mankind persistently resists the introduction of knowledge is the
disinclination to pay the price. It is not altogether easy, as James
said, to “stand this universe.” The longing for the irresponsibility
of childhood is very common among mankind, and it gives rise to many
comforting fictions which yield reluctantly to knowledge of fact. The
general attitude toward wisdom has in it always a touch of the dread
of the unknown. There is a very old legend that our first parents
were expelled from paradise after eating of the fruit of the tree of
knowledge.
Even our boasted practical knowledge of nature and of mechanics can
hardly be said to be an unmixed blessing. We are not quite so utopian
in our enthusiasm over applied science as we were twenty years ago. I
once burst into eloquence with an entertaining peroration something
like the following: “Everywhere as science displaces the hallowed
survivals of primitive magic and superstition, man emerges from
darkness with dignity and freedom in his bearing and titanic power in
his hands. The great friend for whom humanity has waited is the quiet
man in the laboratory amongst his test tubes and apparatus. What kings
could not command, nor priests call down from an unanswering heaven, he
can command and bring into being to enrich the heritage of happiness
for all. The earth blossoms for science. Where the medicine man in the
desert once vainly prayed for rain, science digs an irrigation ditch
and waste lands turn into fields of grain. Since the beginning of time
men have cringed in the shadow of death as the specter of plague
walked in their midst heedless of the prayers of faith. Science offers
no sacrifice to propitiate revengeful gods: it drains the swamps: it
resorts to such mundane devices as screens, vaccine and the quarantine,
and for the first time in all history the human race is freed of its
most terrifying scourge. Science has drawn the nations together as
its lines of mechanical communication have annihilated the spacial
distances which have hitherto isolated man from man. It has lightened
the burden of toil and has multiplied the productive force of labor a
hundredfold. It has lengthened the span of the average human life by
nearly a decade.
“And with what a wealth of unforeseen goods it has supplied us, motor
cars, and aëroplanes, and talking machines, and a countless variety of
new chemical products. What indeed can we not achieve with its aid; we
can send our messages around the world, dig the Panama Canal, throw a
dam across the Mississippi and turn the wheels and light the homes of
distant cities. We can make the lightning our household servant, we
can fly through the clouds, we can weigh distant suns, and by throwing
their light waves through a spectroscope, analyze them chemically and
tell whether they are composed of gas or solid matter and whether they
are moving towards us or receding. As science is giving us mastery
over nature, why should it not likewise give man control over his own
nature? The existence in a scientific age of poverty and crime and
injustice and corruption is an anachronism. Human reason has at last
decided to make itself at home and put the house of life in order, and
all nature smilingly welcomes it. It is flushed with success and well
it may be, for in it is the promise of the final triumph of man on the
earth.”
We are not so sanguine now. We have seen the destructive uses to which
scientific knowledge may be put in warfare. We are not so hopeful about
the easy control of human nature by means of it. It cannot be said that
there has been a general gain in intelligence, corresponding to the
increase of specialized scientific knowledge. The disturbing thought
has been expressed that the tremendous power of the engines created
by applied science for our generation is something like dangerous
explosives in the hands of young children. We are like passengers on a
steamship speeding through fog with an empty pilot house.
We move swiftly from one place to another, but it is doubtful if we
find more happiness or good when we reach our destination, or if we
behave more wisely than do men who know nothing of the fruits of
science. Those who are acquainted with China, a country in which a vast
population has maintained the oldest civilization extant without any
science at all, say that the cultural level of that nation has not been
raised by the occasional importation of western methods of sanitation,
military science, electric lights and chewing gum.
Medical research has saved the lives of countless numbers of children,
so that infant mortality is negligible now as compared with that of the
ages that had no science. I am sure no one would wish to give up such
a splendid application of modern knowledge to human welfare. Yet even
this has its price. There are biologists who doubt if the amount of
human suffering has been so greatly reduced as we at first supposed.
They say that many physically unfit persons are thus preserved, only to
suffer in later life, and that the survival to maturity, of such poorly
equipped organisms and their reproduction lowers the quality of the
racial stock of the nation. This is an extreme position and is perhaps
a premature conclusion, but it illustrates my point that at best our
modern knowledge may not be had without paying some price for it.
Theoretical knowledge of nature may be said to be no less costly than
applied science. In the sixteenth century man could without fear of
contradiction proclaim the earth to be the center of the Universe and
his own welfare and salvation the purpose of creation. Every step in
the progress of science from Newton to Einstein has tended to rebuke
the egotism of man--unless perchance he could find compensation in
the fact that he is a creature who has the intellectual courage to
saw off the bough of sustaining belief that he is sitting on. Early
astronomy revealed to man that his earth, far from being “the Center”
was but a perishable and relatively very small kind of moon whirling
about a slowing cooling sun, by no means the best of a galaxy of bigger
and brighter suns all moving by necessity through freezing space in
utter indifference to the inhabitants of this little planet. Chemistry
showed man that his glowing life was a molecular process. Physics
taught him that all change and movement were but the redistribution of
a meaningless and purposeless energy the quantity of which remained
forever constant. Geology reminded him that he was but a newcomer among
the forms of life which had lived and left their remains in the crust
of the earth. Biology revealed to him his kinship with other animals
and his lowly origin. Psychology sought to find his soul, and gave up
the search, finding it easier to account for his behavior in terms
of animal impulse and reflex action. Anthropology discovered for him
the origin of his cherished beliefs in the customs of primitive man.
Sociology reduced his individual existence to that of a statistical
unit in the mass.
It now appears probable that science may abandon in time its
traditional mechanistic conceptions of the cosmos and of life, but
there is little likelihood that such a change of outlook will restore
man to the place in nature which he once thought he occupied. Nor may
we expect it to envisage for him a world more conducive to his wishes
than that pictured by the science of the nineteenth century. Indeed,
it is possible that he may have to learn to live without even those
fictions of security which were features of the older rationalism of
science.
Now I have tried to state the situation in its bold harshness, for the
educated mind today must know all this and must wrestle with it. The
knowledge cannot of itself lead to happiness, nor do I think that it
necessarily leads to unhappiness. All depends upon what we are able to
make of our existence in such a world. Although we possess different
and more precise instruments of knowledge, I do not think this is the
first time that thoughtful minds have seen through popular fancy and
the shows of things. I believe wise men of all times have suspected
that existence is different from what people naïvely imagine it to be.
And it is precisely because they wrestled with such suspicions, asked,
“what then?”, and have sought to give their existence some meaning and
worth, that their words are precious. Now that education is general,
and vast numbers seek it, it is well to remind ourselves that no one of
us can really find wisdom until he has alone struggled for value with
destiny and naked fact.
The fear that most men cannot do this, and that they will turn aside
with some substitute for knowledge or with that “little learning
which is a dangerous thing” has led some writers, wrongly I think, to
question that any good may come of universal education. This esoteric
point of view is dramatically stated by Dostoevsky in “The Brothers
Karamazov,” in the person of the Grand Inquisitor who rebukes the
Christ on the occasion of his return to Seville to comfort the victims
of the Inquisition. The Inquisitor tells the Christ that he has
demanded too much of mankind. What the masses need is not freedom of
the spirit, but mystery, miracle, and authority; someone to take their
bread from their hands, bless it and give it back to them; someone who
will permit them to sin, and take the responsibility on his own soul,
someone who will _guard the secret_ and deceive mankind every step of
the way as he leads it down to death. The old Inquisitor says to the
Christ, “If at the last day you condemn me, I will defy you to your
face, for I too have eaten bitter roots in the wilderness.”
Nietzsche in his lectures on “The Future of our Educational
Institutions” at Bâle, takes a similar position. Nietzsche believed
that to the degree that education is extended it is weakened and
minimized. The masses think they can reach at a single bound what the
wise man has had to win for himself only after long and determined
struggles to live like a philosopher.
“And do you not fear that solitude will wreak its vengeance upon you?
Just try living the life of a hermit of culture. One must be blessed
with overflowing wealth in order to live for the good of all on one’s
own resources! Extraordinary youngsters! They felt it incumbent upon
them to imitate what is precisely most difficult and most high,--what
is possible only to the master, when they, above all, should know
how difficult and dangerous this is, and how many excellent gifts
may be ruined by attempting it!... No one would strive to attain to
culture if he knew how incredibly small the number of really cultured
people actually is, and can ever be.”
“... those blatant heralds of educational needs, when examined at
close quarters, are suddenly seen to be transformed into zealous,
yea, fanatical opponents of true culture, i. e., all those who
hold fast to the aristocratic nature of the mind; for, at bottom,
they regard as their goal the emancipation of the masses from the
mastery of the great few; they seek to overthrow the most sacred
hierarchy in the kingdom of the intellect--the servitude of the
masses, their submissive obedience, their instinct of loyalty to the
rule of genius.... The education of the masses cannot, therefore,
be our aim; but rather the education of a few picked men for great
and lasting works. We well know that a just posterity judges the
collective intellectual state of a time only by those few great and
lonely figures of the period.... What is called the ‘education of the
masses’ cannot be accomplished except with difficulty; and even if a
system of universal compulsory education be applied, they can only be
reached outwardly....
“We know, however, what the aspiration is of those who would disturb
the healthy slumber of the people, and continually call out to them:
‘Keep your eyes open! Be sensible! Be wise!’ we know the aim of those
who profess to satisfy excessive educational requirements by means of
an extraordinary increase in the number of educational institutions
and the conceited tribe of teachers originated thereby. These very
people, using these very means, are fighting against the natural
hierarchy in the realm of the intellect, and destroying the roots of
all those noble and sublime plastic forces which have their material
origin in the unconsciousness of the people.”
“This eternal hierarchy, towards which all things naturally tend, is
always threatened by that pseudo-culture which now sits on the throne
of the present. It endeavors either to bring the leaders down to the
level of its own servitude or else to cast them out altogether.”
Whether Nietzsche’s theories of education were derived from his
political philosophy, or the reverse, I do not know. We are not,
however, interested in discussing political and sociological theories.
The point is that Nietzsche held that education is difficult and
dangerous, and that only the rare, strong, courageous spirits may
attain it. The many really do not want education at all, he thinks, but
only that cheaper knowledge which will give them success and enable
them to take their places in the rank and file; seeking such education
the herd tramples culture under foot, like cattle in growing corn when
the fences are down. Difficult and dangerous as knowledge is, it is
to Nietzsche the most precious possession of man. All his writing on
this subject is a warning cry that the cultural values of civilization
are in danger of being lost in an education for democracy. I think he
had a real issue, although I wish he had possessed more self-control
in arguing his case; he had always something of the intemperance and
over-excited gestures of a religious evangelist or soap-box orator.
A much more sane statement of the true aims of education in conflict
with Philistinism is that of Matthew Arnold. I hesitate to mention
Arnold because those who are still guilty of the errors he exposed will
say he was a Victorian, and how could his ideas of education have any
value for a progressive twentieth century population? I doubt if many
men of today, advocates of advanced theories of education included, are
as far removed from the vulgarities and pseudo-culture of the Victorian
age as Arnold was. Like Nietzsche, he holds that the multitude gives
evidence that it does not really want education. Unlike Nietzsche, he
does not think that knowledge is some grim secret which only a few
heroic supermen may attain. The fruits of knowledge are not merely
ideas about life and reality which men may or may not believe in, but
are to be known in the quality of life and thought which characterize
the educated mind.
Arnold’s phrase “sweetness and light” is a little suggestive of a
Unitarian sermon, or of some cult of the “higher life.” It is obvious
that if a man deliberately set out to drill his soul in the ways of
sweetness and light he might become a very lady-like individual; he
would not necessarily become an educated person. All such deliberate
efforts at self-improvement, if they are not characterized by a
sentimental insincerity which is content with imitation and appearance,
are at least a little like the effort of Benjamin Franklin to school
himself in the moral virtues, who, finding the task too great, decided
that he could best gain proficiency by practicing his desired virtues
one at a time.
You may rest assured that Arnold had nothing of this sort in mind,
much as he seems at one time to have admired the wisdom of Franklin.
He meant that certain mental traits are sufficiently characteristic
of educated minds generally to be the distinguishing marks which
differentiate them from the uneducated. To be sure, it is a thankless
task to call attention to such traits, and no one who does it may
expect to be very popular, but sometimes, when the culture of a
nation is in danger, it has to be done. Arnold has in mind characters
like Socrates, Erasmus, Montaigne--no muddle-headed, opinionated or
narrow-minded men, but men who had attained clarity of thought and the
insight which pierces the glamour of things and the follies of men, and
yet could speak and write without bitterness or rancor or malice.
“Here culture goes beyond religion, as religion is generally
conceived by us.
“If culture, then, is a study of perfection, and of harmonious
perfection, general perfection, and perfection which consists
in becoming something rather than in having something, in an
inward condition of the mind and spirit, not in an outward set of
circumstances,--it is clear that culture, instead of being the
frivolous and useless thing which Mr. Bright, and Mr. Frederic
Harrison, and many other Liberals are apt to call it, has a very
important function to fulfill for mankind. And this function is
particularly important in our modern world, of which the whole
civilisation is, to a much greater degree than the civilisation
of Greece and Rome, mechanical and external, and tends constantly
to become more so. But above all in our own country has culture a
weighty part to perform, because here that mechanical character,
which civilization tends to take everywhere, is shown in the most
eminent degree. Indeed nearly all the characters of perfection,
as culture teaches us to fix them, meet in this country with some
powerful tendency which thwarts them and sets them at defiance.... So
culture has a rough task to achieve in this country. Its preachers
have, and are likely to long have, a hard time of it, and they will
much oftener be regarded, for a great while to come, as elegant or
spurious Jeremiahs than as friends and benefactors....
“Faith in machinery is, I said, our besetting danger; often in
machinery most absurdly disproportioned to the end which this
machinery, if it is to do any good at all, is to serve; but always in
machinery, as if it had a value in and for itself. What is freedom
but machinery? what is population but machinery? what is coal but
machinery? what are railroads but machinery? what is wealth but
machinery? what are, even, religious organisations but machinery? Now
almost every voice in England is accustomed to speak of these things
as if they were precious ends in themselves, and therefore had some
of the characters of perfection indisputably joined to them.... But
culture indefatigably tries, not to make what each raw person may
like the rule by which he fashions himself; but to draw ever nearer
to a sense of what is indeed beautiful, graceful, and becoming, and
to get the raw person to like that....
“The people who believe most that our greatness and welfare are
proved by our being very rich, and who most give their lives and
thoughts to becoming rich, are just the very people whom we call
Philistines. Culture says, ‘Consider these people, then, their way of
life, their habits, their manners, the very tones of their voices;
look at them attentively; observe the literature they read, the
things which give them pleasure, the words which come forth out of
their mouths, the thoughts which make the furniture of their minds;
would any amount of wealth be worth having with the condition that
one was to become just like these people by having it?’”
As Nietzsche sees that education must struggle for its values if it is
to survive in a democracy, Arnold is equally aware of its conflict with
middle-class English Puritanism. He will give the Puritan credit for
his moral earnestness, but--
“the Puritan’s ideal of perfection remains narrow and inadequate,
although for what he did well he has been richly rewarded.
Notwithstanding the mighty results of the Pilgrim Fathers’ voyage,
they and their standard of perfection are rightly judged when
we figure to ourselves Shakespeare or Virgil,--souls in whom
sweetness and light, and all that in human nature is most humane,
were eminent,--accompanying them on their voyage, and think what
intolerable company Shakespeare and Virgil would have found them! In
the same way let us judge the religious organizations which we see
all around us. Do not let us deny the good and the happiness which
they have accomplished; but do not let us fail to see clearly that
their idea of human perfection is narrow and inadequate, and that
the Dissidence of Dissent and the Protestantism of the Protestant
religion will never bring humanity to its true goal.”
Of the relation of education to the growing power of nineteenth century
democracy, Arnold says,
“Other well-meaning friends of this new power are for leading it,
not in the old ruts of middle-class Philistinism, but in ways which
are naturally alluring to the feet of democracy, though in this
country they are novel and untried ways. I may call them the ways of
Jacobinism. Violent indignation with the past, abstract systems of
renovation applied wholesale, a new doctrine drawn up in black and
white for elaborating down to the very smallest details a rational
society for the future.... Culture is the eternal opponent of the two
things which are the signal marks of Jacobinism,--its fierceness,
and its addiction to an abstract system. Culture is always assigning
to system-makers and systems a smaller share in the bent of human
destiny than their friends like.”
The following is as truly the problem of education today as it was on
the day it was written, and the answer that our generation gives to the
problem will determine the whole quality of the fruit of knowledge for
our lives.
“... Plenty of people will try to give the masses, as they call them,
an intellectual food prepared and adapted in the way they think
proper for the actual condition of the masses. The ordinary popular
literature is an example of this way of working on the masses.
Plenty of people will try to indoctrinate the masses with the set of
ideas and judgments constituting the creed of their own profession
or party. Our religious and political organisations give an example
of this way of working on the masses. I condemn neither way; but
culture works differently. It does not try to teach down to the level
of inferior classes; it does not try to win them for this or that
sect of its own, with ready-made judgments and watchwords. It seeks
to do away with classes; to make the best that has been thought and
known in the world current everywhere; to make all men live in an
atmosphere of sweetness and light, where they may use ideas, as it
uses them itself, freely,--nourished, and not bound by them.
“The great men of culture are those who have had a passion for
diffusing, for making prevail, for carrying from one end of society
to the other, the best knowledge, the best ideas of their time; who
have laboured to divest knowledge of all that was harsh, uncouth,
difficult, abstract, professional, exclusive; to humanise it, to
make it efficient outside the clique of the cultivated and learned,
yet still remaining the _best_ knowledge and thought of the time,
and a true source, therefore, of sweetness and light. Such a man was
Abelard in the Middle Ages, in spite of all his imperfections; and
thence the boundless emotion and enthusiasm which Abelard excited.
Such were Lessing and Herder in Germany, at the end of the last
century; and their services to Germany were in this way inestimably
precious.... And why? Because they _humanized_ knowledge; because
they broadened the basis of life and intelligence.”
The human race has demonstrated how it can get along without knowledge;
it has not on any general scale demonstrated how it can get along with
knowledge. Ignorance and vulgarity have amazing survival value in human
society. Knowledge has its dangers. One may lose one’s faith in the
pursuit of it or expend much effort, and never attain it; and, what is
worse, never know that one has not attained it. Or having gained some
bit of knowledge, one may not store it up as final truth and abide with
it, but having seen must pass on to other knowledge. The pursuit of
knowledge is an open road.
All, or nearly all, who have pursued knowledge will say that such a
pursuit is a great adventure. It is an adventure which never goes
stale, nor loses its lure, nor grows old, and there are indirect
results of such an adventure which cannot be measured. Just as he who
has traveled in many lands returns and views his home with new eyes
never really having seen it before, so he who follows knowledge in time
sees the things about him in new light. They have a richer meaning and
better perspective for they have a wider reference.
What might happen if a considerable portion of the population should,
or could, become devoted to education in the way that men have engaged
themselves in religion, war, and commerce, we perhaps can never know.
Men have been converted to religion and have “back-slid” or have
outgrown their faith. Men have gaily marched off to war and before
the conflict ended have grown sick of it. Men have given up commerce,
finding that it does not satisfy some deep longing in their natures.
Most of those who begin their education leave off before they learn
what it is about. But the few who have remained to taste the fruit of
knowledge as a rule become addicted to it, and never leave off, being
never satisfied with what they have yet attained. If for eating this
fruit they find themselves outside the paradise of childish innocence
and popular belief, they do by their bearing give us the impression
that the experience is worth its cost. It is only the half-educated,
those who would follow wisdom and at the same time look back over their
shoulders casting longing glances at comforting ignorance, unable to
say farewell, who dwell upon the painfulness of knowledge. I have the
suspicion that those who wear a long face as if they knew some dreadful
secret that would break the heart of the world if the rest of mankind
knew it, are men who find in the Byronic attitude a convenient way of
convincing themselves that they are intellectual heroes. Or they are
romanticists who enjoy the sorrows of Werther.
For the encouragement of those who might wish to continue their
education or assist in the education of another, I have tried to
present certain historical examples of men who have attained wisdom.
They are brave men and true; they do not make us ashamed of our race.
It is a pleasure to try to understand such minds, and I trust that in
these times when every fence is down and there are in the field of
education many strange animals and much shouting and confusion, we
may have been able to gain something, from turning our attention to
Socrates and Plato and Aristotle and Erasmus and Montaigne and Huxley
and Nietzsche and Arnold, that will help us to see the meaning of
education. But we can never be sure whether we like its fruits until we
taste them.