THE BIAS OF REALISM
Educators of the modern school are bent on transforming its methods and
institutions 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 homogeneous 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 accomplishing 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 institutions 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 institutions 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 naive 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
prone 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 constitute it are subject to
error, and being ourselves prone 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 worshippers.
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 companionship, by the
unconscious yearning after spiritual communion with the world which
there makes its way into the child's mind far off from the classroom,
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 superstition, which
has its roots deep down in the personality of the educator; it adheres
parasitically to culture, climbs over its sturdy 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 passing 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 assumption 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
constitutes 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 constituted 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 assumed 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 passing 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
fictitious entity 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 assume 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
sanctity 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 institution 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.
But in his mind his science is not his own. It is, he is confident,
that Sovereign Science which by his method and through his cult must
enlighten the school over which he rules. And so at the point of
arrival where the realistic conception of methods must work, it is found
to be effective notwithstanding the rebuffs of reality, and it works. It
works and it acts in the only way that it is possible for it to act,
namely, by going amiss. It fails and will always continue to fail, not
so much because every pupil has his own personality and will have his
own particular culture with its corresponding method, but especially
because whatever the number of the pupils in a school, the human mind
knows of no culture which is not also its own free development, its
autonomous ethical becoming. A science, which is supposed to exist
before the spirit, becomes a thing, and will never again be able to
trace its way back to the spirit. By presupposing science, teachers
materialise the culture in whose development education consists; and
this materiality of a culture known to teachers renders impossible
that other culture which is unknown to teachers, which is going to
be not theirs, but the pupils', for whom they work and in whose behalf
the school was instituted.
Methods, programmes, and manuals most conspicuously reveal the realistic
prejudices of school technique; and against these educators should
constantly be on their guard. For these prejudices have, as Vico would
put it, an eternal motive, which at times seems to be definitely
uprooted and completely done away with, only to reappear, alas! in a
different form and with an ever renewed lease of life. The motive is the
following: The school is created when people are conscious of a certain
amount of knowledge already attained, well defined, and recognised as
valuable. Likewise man's value socially is estimated on the work done,
and it is on the basis of this finished work that he is credited with
the acquisition of a certain personality. This is assuredly no longer a
becoming but a being; an existent thing, already realised, which, though
a contradiction in terms for those of us who have mastered the concept
of the attributes of the spirit, is not thereby condemned as accidental
and disposed of once for all. For it is also true that culture,
personality, science,--spiritual reality in short,--is a reality, and
true it is that when we know it, we know it as already realised. We may
indeed have a very keen and lively sentiment of the subjectivity, and
inwardness, and newness or originality of our culture, in which, for
example, Dante, Dante himself, is _our_ Dante, is "We." But yet this
"We" looms before us as a truth which transcends our particular "we." It
is truth; it is science. And before this divine Truth, before this
Science, we too fall on our knees, because it is no longer a mythology,
but--our experience, our life.
Thus we think; thus, spiritually, we live. I meditate and inquire into
the mystery of the universe unceasingly; but in the background of my
inquiry, from time to time a solution appears, a discovery which urges
my exploring mind onward. Mystery itself is not mystery unless it be
known as such, and then it becomes knowledge. Inquiry is therefore at
once a research and a discovery. And this untiring activity, which knows
neither sleep nor rest, is mirrored before its own eyes and lives in the
fond contemplation of its reflected image, which image in its
objectivity appears to it as fixed as it, the activity, is mobile. And
no man ever felt so keenly the humility and meanness of his powers, no
one ever presumed so little of himself, that he could not yet be drawn
by his own nature to idolise himself, to see himself before himself,
exactly as he is, as what he cannot but be. And on the other hand we
cannot but affirm our immortal faith in the absolute truth of the ideals
which impose upon us sentiments of humility.
The error which we must victoriously contend against is not this
ingenuous and unconquered faith in the objectivity of thought (which is
also the objectivity of all things). What we must fight against is
mental torpor and the sloth of the heart, which induce us to stop in
front of the object as soon as we get it. A deplorable failing indeed,
since the object is lost in the very act by which we grasp it, and we
must again resume our work and toil some more in order to attain it
again. For the object, in short, does exist, but in the subject; and in
order to be a living and real object it must live on the life itself of
the subject.
A textbook is a textbook: when it was written, and if its author was
capable of thinking and of living in his thought, it too was a living
thing; and a living thing, that is, _spirit_, it will continue to be for
the instructor who does not through indolence allow himself to believe
that all the thinking demanded by the subject was done once for all by
the author of the manual. For the manual, as a book intended for the
teacher, meant to be constantly awakened by teachers to an ever
quickened life, the life of the spirit, can only be what the instructor
makes it. He, therefore, must have culture enough to read it as _his_
book; he must be able to restore it to life, to re-create it by the
living process of his personal thought. This done, he will have done but
one-half of the work needed to transform himself from a reader into a
teacher. For his reading must lead up to the reading of the pupils; and
they ought not to be confronted with the finished product of a culture
turned out, all ready-made by the mechanism of the handbook. So that we
should now complete our previous statement, and say that the teacher
re-creates the book when he revives it in the mind of the one for whom
the book was written; when author, teacher, and pupil constitute but one
single spirit, whose life animates and inwardly vivifies the manual,
which therefore ought not to be called, as it is, a _hand_-book, but a
spiritual guide for the _mind_. Unfortunately the oft-deplored indolence
which freezes and stiffens spiritual life fastens the books to the hands
of the teacher first, and then to those of the pupils.
Teachers should carefully watch themselves. If the book begins to feel
heavy in their hands, it is a sign that it is becoming a burden on the
pupils' minds. It will end by stifling their mental life, unless its
oppressive dulness is dispelled by the reawakened consciousness of the
instructor. Teachers should never for an instant become remiss in their
loving solicitude for their school. When their book, the book they
selected for their pupils, as the means of imparting the culture for
which the school stands, ceases to be the pupils' book, cherished by
them as a thing of their own, intimately bound up with their persons,
then it is high time to throw it away. For the moment a book loses its
power to attract it instantly begins to repel. It then becomes an
instrument of torture and a menace for the life of the youthful minds
entrusted to the teachers' care.
Dictionaries and grammars go side by side with handbooks,--instruments
of culture that are only too often converted into engines of torture.
The abuse of these books, especially noticeable in the secondary
schools, is not limited to them, but is infecting primary instruction
too, and teachers should know what such books are, and be enlightened as
to their limitations. Otherwise the dictionary becomes the cemetery of
speech, and grammar the annexed dissecting room. A lexicon is a burial
ground for the mortal remains of those living beings which we call human
words, each one of which always lives in a context, not because it is
there in bodily company, in the society of other words, but because in
every context it has a special signification, being the form of a
precise thought or state of mind, as we may wish to call it. A word need
not be joined to other words to form that complex which grammarians call
a sentence. It may stand alone, all by itself, and constitute a
discourse, and express a thought, even a very great thought. The
"_fiat_" of the book of Genesis is an example. What is requisite is that
the word, whether by itself or with others, should adhere to the
personality, to the spiritual situation, and be the actual expression of
a soul. When joined to the soul a word, which materially is identical
with countless other words uttered by other souls, and with the peculiar
accents of the respective personalities, reveals its particular
expression, is a particular word not to be ever compared with any of
those countless ones materially identical with it. The biblical
"_fiat_," repeated by men who feel within them the almighty Word of the
Creator, is constantly taking on new shades of meaning, is always
reinforced by richer tones, and will always continue to do so, as a
result of the numerous ways that men have of picturing to themselves the
deity, and in accordance with the variety of doctrines, phantasies, and
sentiments, or whatever other forms of activity may converge into the
expression of a person's spiritual life. So that if, abstractly
considered, it is the word that we read, always the same, in the sublime
passage of Genesis, in reality it lives in an infinite number of forms,
as though an infinite number of words.
But in dictionaries, words are sundered from the minds, detached from
the context, soulless and dead. A good lexicon--and those that are
put in the hands of pupils are seldom satisfactory--should always in
some way restore the word to the natural context, enchase it, so to
speak, in the jewel from which it was torn. It should never presume
to give meanings of abstracted words, but ought to point them out as
they exist historically in the authors who are deemed worthy
representatives of the language or of the literature. Dictionaries so
compiled do away partly with the objectionable abstractness, but are yet
unable to conjure the dead from their tombs. Their weakness and
insufficiency lie first of all in the fact that the true context of a
word, in which it lives concretely, and from which therefore it draws
its meaning, is in reality not the brief phrase, which is all that
historical dictionaries can quote, but rather the entire work of the
author from which the quoted phrase derives whatever colours it may
possess and its own peculiar shade. And the whole work in turn can be
understood only in connection with the boundless historical
environments out of which it emerges, in which it lives, and where
its thoughts receive their peculiar colouring and their special
significance. The insufficiency of the dictionary comes out even more
clearly from another and more important consideration. An historical
dictionary of the Italian language will, for example, tell us how
Machiavelli used the word "virtue" (_virtu_), and by the examples
adduced we should see or perhaps surmise the meaning of that word,
the knowledge of which is not just mere erudition, in as much as in the
mind of the cultured reader the thought of Machiavelli is restored to
life, and with it the concept which he was wont to express by the term
"virtue." But idealistically speaking, is this word Machiavelli's or is
it ours,--a word belonging to us who are inquiring into his thoughts?
It is ours, by all means, and for the reason that it belongs to _our_
Machiavelli. Unless we have then within us this our Machiavelli, it is
useless for us to search for the meaning of the word in the dictionary.
In it surely we may find it, but as a dead body to be resurrected only
by remembering that its life is not in the printed page but in _us_, and
only in us. In our life everything will have to be resuscitated that is
to become part of our culture.
And the same applies to grammars. As people conceive them and use them,
what are they if not a schematic arrangement of the forms by which
words are joined so as to constitute speech? And how can we cut the
discourse to the quick and extract these schemes, without at the same
time destroying its life? The scheme is a "part of speech," and it is a
rule. Grammar is a series of rules regarding the parts of speech,
considered singly and collectively. But the grammatical scheme--part of
speech or rule--abstracts a generic form from the particular expression
in such a way that the paradigm of a conjugation, for example, shall be
the conjugation of many verbs but not of any determined one. The rule
governing the use of the conditional is in the same way referred to
every verb which expresses a conditional act or occurrence, but to no
one verb in a peculiar manner. But since no speech contains a verb which
might present to us a verbal form which is not also the form of a
determined verb, nor a conditional which does not point with precision
to the action or occurrence subordinated to a condition, it is evident
that the scheme places before us, not the living and concrete body of
the speech, but a dissected and dead part of this body.
I shall not here recall the controversies occasioned by the difficulties
inherent in the normative character ordinarily attributed to grammatical
schemes. I shall simply note that a scheme becomes intelligible only if
the example accompanies it; and the example always turns out to be a
living discourse, within which therefore we meet again the scheme, but
liberated from the presumed abstractness to which it had been confined
by the grammarian. And I shall merely add that the grammatical norm,
which in the realistic conception of grammar is presented as a rule,
anteceding actual speech both in time and ideally, has in reality no
validity whatsoever excepting as a law internal to the speaking itself,
which brings out its normative force only in the act itself of speaking.
In spite of this, however, the majority of people consider grammar as an
antecedent to speech and to thought, and therefore to the life of the
spirit. It appears to them as a reef on which the freedom of the
personality must be driven in the course of its becoming, bearing down
as it does on a past which is believed to exist beneath the horizon of
actuality and beyond the present life of the spirit. To them grammar is
legislation passed by former writers and speakers, prescribing norms for
those who intend to use the same language in the future. Against this
myth, and the consequent idol of grammar worshipped as a thing which has
not only the right, but the means also, of controlling and oppressing
the creative spontaneity of speech, teachers should be constantly on
their guard, if they feel bound to respect and protect the spirituality
of culture.
Neither grammar then, nor rhetoric, nor any kind of misguided preceptive
teaching should be allowed to introduce into the school the menace of
realism which lurks naturally in the shadow of all prescriptive
systems. A precept is a mere historical indication, a sign which points
to something that was done as to something that had to be done then and
is to be done now. It was done and it was thought that it had to be
done. But what was done cannot be done over again, and what was thought
cannot again be thought. Life knows no past other than the one which it
contains within its living present. The precept has no value excepting
as that precept which we in every single instance intuit, and which we
must intuit, being spiritually alive and free, as the peculiar form of
_our_ thought, of our speaking, of our doing, of our being, in short,
which is our becoming. If we look upon a precept as transcending this
becoming, and as an antecedent to it, we misapprehend and therefore
imperil our indwelling freedom, which for us now ought to mean not
simply the failure to foster the growth of the spirit, but a deliberate
attempt to hinder and thwart its development and to blight the function
of culture.
One more prejudice of those imputed to realistic instruction must still
be pointed out, and it will be the last. It is one of those time-worn
devices whose history, extending over a thousand years, reflects the
entire life of the school--the composition. Teachers expect and demand
that a predetermined and definite theme, as a nucleus of a thought
organism, as _leit-motif_, so to speak, of a work of art, as a ruling
principle for moral or speculative reflections, be developed by pupils
who may yet have never given the topic a single thought, who may
possibly be not at all attuned to that definite spiritual vibration, who
may in short be quite removed from the line along which the theme should
be developed. In the lower grades the line itself is marked, the entire
contour is given, and the pupil's mind is arbitrarily encompassed within
this fixed outline. These methods are now fortunately applied with
diminished rigour and less crudely than before. But the fact remains
that in all classes the teacher either assigns a theme at random,
picking a topic from a casual reading or from among the whims of his
rambling fancy, or else he conscientiously and carefully studies the
possibilities of a subject, and develops it to a certain extent before
he assigns it; so that he naturally expects the pupil's treatment to
conform to his own delineation; and he values the composition in
proportion as it approaches the rough draft which he had previously
sketched in his mind.
Here too, as elsewhere, we encounter the difficulty of a thought which
is presupposed to thinking, which therefore binds it, strains it and
racks it out of its healthy and fruitful growth; for thought cannot live
without freedom. The dangers are many that beset us in the practice of
theme-composition, and not all of them of a merely intellectual
character. There is no intellectual deficiency which is not also at the
same time a moral blemish; and a course of exercises, such as we have
considered, not only jeopardises the formation of the intelligence by
urging it along a line of false and empty artificiality to the postiche
and the applique, but it also, and far more seriously, threatens the
moral character of the pupils in that it beguiles them into a sinful
familiarity with insincerity, which might perhaps become downright
cheating.
Composition however in itself is not taboo for the idealist. Like
grammar and every other instrument of the teaching profession it must be
converted from the abstract to the concrete. We should never demand of
the pupil an inventiveness beyond his powers, never unfairly expect of
his mind what it cannot yet give. The boy must not be given a subject
drawn from a world with which he is unfamiliar. But when the subject
springs naturally from the pupil's own soul, in the atmosphere of the
school, and as a part of the spiritual life which unites him to his
teacher and to his classmates, then composition, like every other
element of a freely developing culture, is a creation and an unfailing
progress. For whatever has been frozen by the chill of realism, and has
been consequently made unfit for the life of the spirit, may again be
revived in the warmth of the living intelligence of the concrete, and be
thence idealistically fused with the spontaneous and vigorous current of
spiritual reality.