THE IDEAL OF EDUCATION
ART AND RELIGION
We have shown in the previous chapters the necessity of rigorously
maintaining the unity of education, of resisting every attempt at
separation, of opposing all systems which treat the various parts of
education as though they could be kept distinct in practice and theory.
There still remains a question which naturally arises at this juncture,
and which we must try to answer. For true it is, some one might say,
that moral and intellectual education are one and the same thing, and
true it may be that education of the mind and culture of the body work
for the same results; and it may also be admitted that education being
formation, or development, that is, the becoming of the spirit, and the
spirit consisting in its becoming or rather in becoming pure and simple,
it follows that education means spirit and nothing more. But granting
all this, was it really worth while? When we have attained this notion
of the unity which is always the same, no matter under how many aspects
it may present itself, what have we gained? Have we here anything more
than a word? One says "spirit," another might say "God," or "nature,"
or "matter," or some such thing, and there would not be much difference.
It might well be that in the course of the inquiry into the attributes
of the spirit, a way was found to invest our word with quite a different
meaning; but still, after we have defined and distinguished the concept
of the spirit from all the others, we have not progressed much. We may
have the satisfaction of continuing to see before us this concept, with
no possibility of ever ridding ourselves of its presence, but how much
will we know of the contents that this spirit is supposed to have? What
are the principles that should govern this education, which has been
clearly stated to be not a natural fact, but a free action, and
therefore a selection enlightened by consciousness, by reflection, and
by reason?
This suggested objection is not a purely imaginary one. Very often
superficial critics, forgetting that pedagogical problems pertain to
philosophy and are therefore problems of the spirit, awkwardly try to
solve them by the insufficient light of common sense. In so doing they
warn us that in idealistic pedagogics all particular and definite
concepts vanish, and what remains is a vague confused indistinctness of
no practical utility to the teacher.
And truly, if the only result obtained by idealistic pedagogics were the
demonstration that many concepts, ordinarily considered to be
substantially different, are in reality identical, we should not
hesitate to call such philosophical knowledge useless and ridiculous.
But in the first place we must notice that this assumed deficiency
charged against us has partially been shown to be non-existent by the
exposition of our doctrine, which reduces education to free spiritual
becoming, and resolves the apparent multiplicity of educational forms in
the immultiplicable unity of this becoming, outside of which nothing is
truly conceivable.
For the defect of our system was assumed in connection with an exigency
which divides itself into two parts, respectively corresponding to the
form and to the matter of education. For many of the pedagogical errors
which we have pointed out were seen to be imputable, not to the choice
of an unsuitable content of education, but to the criterion adopted in
treating this content. I have already spoken of my disinclination to
accomplish a mere negative task; and in the last chapter, while
denouncing the materialistic conception of physical education, I
certainly did not spare the ascetic view which knows of no body other
than the one which harasses the spirit and hinders its progress toward
the ultimate good; and thereupon I tried to show that physical culture
is spiritual education endowed with that self-same nature which belongs
to education when considered as formation of the will and of the
intellect. But this does not mean that our thesis reduces itself to a
mere theoretic transvaluation or to a new abstract interpretation of
our present educative system, which however in practice could not be
affected by this purely theoretical difference of interpretation. I
tried to make it clear that our conception is not devoid of practical
import, and that it does lead to a reform in education and to a new
orientation of the school. This was especially brought out in connection
with physical culture in the preceding chapter, when I insisted on the
necessity that physical instructors be trained in such a way that their
mental equipment shall not be limited to notions that refer exclusively
to the body in its physical limitations: but that in addition to
physiology, anatomy, and hygiene, they be made familiar also with those
studies and disciplines that are more intimately connected with
character, with the soul, and with the mind.
But besides this, our entire investigation dealing with the reasons for
an absolutely spiritualistic conception of education should have made it
very clear that it is not possible to entertain these new conceptions
without introducing in the school a new spirit, which will not yield to
the realistic vogue and to the materialistic, pedantic, old-fashioned
education,--a spirit which will bring before us a new duty in every
instant of our teaching life and in every word we utter, and which will
impress us with the necessity of acting differently from what has been
taught by the followers of traditional pedagogical routine. Whatever
the subject may be, the form of education has to be in accord with
something that should by now be the common possession of us all, namely,
the consciousness of the intimate spirituality and of the sacred freedom
of our work, which operates not in the material schools but within the
souls of our pupils. There it gives rise not to incidents that are
unessential to that greater world which is the aim of our religiously,
serious outlook on life, but to a process in which All is involved. The
speculative side then of this form of education is not a useless and
abstract theory, but a necessary moment of the moral improvement, of the
spiritual enhancement, and of the general regeneration of teaching.
Indifference to this reform, and the belief that men may continue to
educate without bothering with the subtle problems of philosophy, mean a
failure to understand the precise nature of education.
But the question of the content of education is a different one. Having
identified education with spiritual reality itself, it follows that the
two determinations of the content of the latter belong to the content of
the former. One of these determinations is historical in character; it
advances as the history of the human mind progresses, assuming now this
and now that aspect in accordance with the prevailing spiritual
interests. We who have censured the conception of pre-established
programmes, as being most dangerous prejudices of pedagogical realism,
could not very well presume to determine here in the abstract, the
content of every possible form of education for all places and all
times. The school, like every other form of education, develops; and as
it grows, it constantly changes its content, which again is nothing else
than the content that the spirit gives to itself at every moment of its
concrete development.
It would be just as irrational to expect a school to map out with
precision the limits and the scope of a pupil's culture. Of all the
culture carved out for him at school, a boy will absorb only that much
which is taken up by the autonomous growth of his personality. This will
be supplemented and integrated by the culture which he gets outside of
the classroom, in all possible walks of life, and will be so personal
and of such a character as to admit of no prevision or pre-determination
even on the part of the learner himself. Away with pre-established
programmes then of any description! Spiritual activity works only in the
plenitude of freedom. Horace asks: _Currente rota cur urceus exit?_ We
answer: Whether an _urceus_ or not, what always comes from the _rota_ is
something which cannot be foreseen, for the very simple reason that what
is foreseen is not the future but the past, which we (as in the case of
experimental sciences) project into the future, whereas the spirit is a
creation which occurs not in time but in a never-setting present.
So every abstract discussion of the possible content of education in
general, or of any given particular school, must appear crude and
absurd, if we recall that education reflects the historical development
of the spirit. What we need to do is to wait, observe, and have faith.
For God will reveal himself to us; and God is the very Spirit of ours
which at every moment prescribes its law to itself and thus determines
its own content.
The other of the two determinations mentioned above is the _ideal_, or,
as we perhaps might more precisely call it, the _transcendental_. It
pertains to that spiritual content which never changes as it passes
through the various historical determinations, and which might therefore
be styled the "determiner of the intrinsic and absolute essence of the
spirit." This content upon careful consideration reveals itself as form,
and more precisely as the form of the historically determined content of
the spirit; or again as the concreteness of that form which has been
attributed to the spirit considered in itself, which is a becoming. But
_qua_ becoming, and irrespective of all special aspects with which it
historically configures itself, the spirit has already a content of its
own, which cannot be absent from any of its historical configurations.
In them this content will manifest itself over and over again, but
constantly modified by the changes that are being historically produced.
Under these varying modes and presentations it permanently abides as
the indefectible substance of the spirit. This substance, this ideal
spirit which becomes actual in history, cannot be ignored by any kind of
pedagogics which aspires to a thorough knowledge of the essence of
education.
Having thus formulated the problem, and clinging firmly to the principle
of educational unity, we may distinguish the forms of education which
proceed from the ideal content of the spirit. But we must always
keep in mind that, as these forms are only distinguishable ideally,
they can in no way be effectively separated, and must be found in
every concrete educative act. So that their synthesis and their
complete immanence is the concreteness of educational unity in its
opposition to what I have called fragmentary education. Our distinction
then will turn out to be an exact logical analysis, which analyses only
the terms of a synthesis and cannot therefore be dissociated from the
synthesis. By analysing and by synthesising, by determining the
spiritual unity without disconnecting or in any way dissociating its
intrinsic ideal determinations, we strive to represent the ideal of
education.
In making a rapid survey of this analysis, I must refer back to what was
said of the attributes of the spirit,--that the spirit _is_ in that it
_becomes_, that it becomes in so far as it acquires self-consciousness,
that its being therefore is consciousness in the act of being acquired.
This act is surely self-consciousness, and it does mean cognition, but
a cognition which differs from all others in that it has for its object
that very one who cognises. And this is the meaning of "I," identity of
subject and object,--an identity, however, that because of its curious
nature needs to be carefully examined. It was shown in a preceding
chapter that two things, to be thought as two, must yet be thought as
one by virtue of the unique relationship which makes their duality
possible. Here we observe the inverse: identity of subject and object
means that in addition to the subject there is--nothing; it means
therefore unity. And yet this unity would in no manner be intelligible
if it were not also a duality, if, in other words, the identity of
subject and object were not also the difference between them.
To distinguish A from B, an initial, elementary minimum difference is
required. It is the difference, called _otherness_, by which B is other
than A. Without this otherness there would not be A and B, but either A
alone or B alone. The subject as it knows itself is certainly not
another from the subject alone. But if it did not become _other_ to
itself, if it were not object also, as well as subject, it would never
know itself. To be object as well as subject implies the necessity of
distinguishing these two terms, and shows that there is otherness
between them. If it sounds harsh to speak of something that first is
"_one_" and then is "_two_," we might state the situation in a
different and perhaps simpler way. We might say that the subject would
not know itself, if remaining always that one and self-same subject, it
were not both subject and object to itself.
Consciousness implies this self-alteration of the subject, which by
placing itself as an object in front of itself realises itself, it being
real only as self-consciousness. This is the import of the identity of
the two terms, subject and object; or of the difference intrinsic to the
one, which is but another way of stating it. We may insist as much as we
want on the identity of the "I," but it will always be true that this
"I" is real only in virtue of its intrinsic difference. And conversely
we may insist, as it is more often done, on the difference between the
subjective moment of the "I," whereby the "I" is set in opposition to
all its objects, and the objective moment in which the ego vanishes. But
behind the difference, identity is always to be found. Man, the more he
thinks, the more he alters himself, the more objective that reality
becomes which he realises by self-consciousness, the more fully he sees
the variation, the development, the growth, the enhancement of the
object--the world he knows.
The spirit's being is its alteration. The more it _is_,--that is, the
more it becomes, the more it lives,--the more difficult it is for it to
recognise itself in the object. It might therefore be said that he who
increases his knowledge also increases his ignorance, if he is unable
to trace this knowledge back to its origin, and if the spirit's rally
does not induce him to rediscover himself at the bottom of the object,
which has been allowed to alter and alienate itself more and more from
the secret source of its own becoming. Thus it happens, as was said of
old, that "He that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow." All human
sorrow proceeds from our incapacity to recognise ourselves in the
object, and consequently to feel our own infinite liberty.
Subject then and object, and in their synthesis, in their living unity,
the spirit, which therefore is neither a subject standing against an
object, nor its opposite. The two terms, each one for itself, isolated,
are equivalent. But every time human thought has isolated them, whether
striving to conceive itself, its own spiritual substance, objectively
(God), or as a simple subject (a particular man), it has ever reached
most desperate conclusions, now totally blocking its way to the
comprehension and justification of its own subjectivity, and now
secluding itself in an abstract subjectivity, removed from _all_ which
man theoretically and practically needs in order to live. The reality of
the spirit is not in the subject as opposed to the object, but in the
subject that has in itself the object as its actuality.
It is on account of this inseverable unity, by which the subject presses
to itself the object and becomes actual therein, that the progressive
alteration of the object is also the progressive alteration of the
subject. At every given moment, the subject, altered as it is, made into
the "other" or determined, is yet pure subject, and nothing else than
the subject which becomes conscious of itself, and therefore actual by
determining itself as subject of its object, in such a way that the
subject as well as the object is always new and always different. Not
because it is now one subject and now another, in which case succession
and enumeration would import multiplicity, and would therefore reduce
the spirit to a thing; but because it appears and cannot but appear
thus, if observed from the point of view which distinguishes one
individual from another, and in the same individual one instant from the
next, although from a rigorously idealistic point of view the spirit is
one, and its determinateness does not detract from its absolute
originality.
This dialectic in which the spiritual becoming unfolds itself (subject,
object, and unity of subject and object), this self-objectifying or
self-estrangement aiming at self-attainment,--this is the eternal life
of the spirit, which creates its immortal forms, and determines the
ideal contents of culture and education. The spirit's self-realisation
is the realisation of the subject, of the object, and of their
relationship. If of these three terms (the third being the synthesis of
the first and second) any one should fail, the spiritual reality would
cease to be.
This threefold realisation admits empirically of a separation that makes
it possible to have one without the others. On the strength of this
triple division we speak of art, of religion, and of philosophy, as
though each one of them could subsist by itself. So that commonly people
believe that it is possible to be a poet without in any way burdening
one's mind with religion or philosophy,--especially philosophy, which
appears to be the bugbear of most poets. In the same way many
philosophers, and among them one of the very greatest, held art to be
the negation of philosophy, to the point that it should be banished from
the kingdom where the latter was expected to reign. And how often has
religion taken up arms, now against poetry, and now against speculation!
All of these occurrences were possible because the three terms were
looked upon as separable, as though they were three material things,
each one of which could be what it was only on condition that it
excluded the others.
A superficial understanding of the differences intervening between these
three terms is the reason why they are often looked upon as separable.
But in reality they are so indissolubly conjoined, that separation would
destroy their spiritual character, and put in its place mechanism, which
is the property of all that is not spirit.
Art is the self-realisation of the spirit as subject. Man becomes
enfolded in his subjectivity, and hears but the voice of love or other
inward summons. Living without communication with the world, he refrains
from affirming and denying what exists and what does not exist. He
simply spreads out over his own abstract interior world, and dreams; and
as he dreams, he escapes from the outer bustle into the seclusion of his
enchanted realm, which is true in itself until he issues from it and
discovers it to be a figment of his phantasy. This man is the artist,
who, we might say, neither cognises nor acts, but sings.
His subjectivity appears empirically to us always as a determined
subjectivity, the determination of which proceeds from the object in
which the spirit, theoretically and practically, has previously
objectified itself. But this priority of the act, by which the artist is
considered a man of this objective world before he withdraws into
his dreams, is a mere empirical appearance. If we relied on it, we
could not preserve to the spirit in its artistic life that originality
and autonomy, that absolute spontaneity and freedom, which is the
essential character or, as we called it, the attribute of spiritual
activity. To become objective, the spirit must first be subject; and in
front of the object in which it objectifies itself, it again inevitably
becomes subject,--an ever determined one indeed, but nothing else than
a subject. That is why the contemporary theory of aesthetics holds that
form in art absorbs in itself the content, with no residuum. It
absorbs it _qua_ subjectivity; for whatever the object be which this
subjectivity, empirically considered, has enwrapped, it draws it
entirely over to itself, reassumes it, and as pure subjectivity it
cannot return to its object without passing through the moment of its
opposition to the object,--the moment in which the subject is
nothing else than subject, and finds in itself infinite gratification.
This is the realm of art, a realm from which the spirit, in consequence
of the very function of the subject, is compelled to issue; since
the subject is subject in that it issues from itself, becomes
self-conscious, objectifies itself. So the poet as he dreams breathes
life into the personages of his dreams, builds them up, and gives
them reality. What is his own abstract subjectivity he chooses as a
world in which he himself may live absolutely; and the ideas which
mature in that fantastic world of his--which is nothing more, as I
have said, than his abstract subjectivity--are affirmed by him without
any reserves, and are opposed to the ideas of philosophers and of
men who prefer concrete reality to phantasy.
This lyrical bent, peculiar to the artist who enhances himself by
exalting his own abstract individuality, is in direct contrast with the
tendency of the Saint, who crushes and annihilates this same
individuality in the face of his God,--that God who infinitely occupies
his consciousness as the "other" in absolute alterity to him, so that
the subject is hurled into the object in a total self-abstraction. It
sinks in the contemplation of its own self in its objective "otherness,"
of itself become the other, in which it no longer recognises itself. So
he deifies this other self, places it on the altar, and kneels before
it. Thus the saint's personality is nullified; or rather, it is
actualised and realised in this self-annulment, which is the theoretical
and practical characteristic of mysticism and the specific act of
religion.
It is not possible to tear art from the spirit's life, in as much as it
could not be the synthesis it actually is without being subjectivity. It
is equally impossible for the spirit to be completely devoid of
religiosity. The mystic flower of faith grows out of the bosom of
art,--a faith in an object which draws the soul to itself and conquers
it. The life of the spirit is an eternal crossing from art to religion,
from the subject to the object. It is impossible for the artist to
realise his art in unalloyed purity, since his world, the world he has
created for himself, is nevertheless the bigger world, out of which,
empirically speaking, he is driven only by the needs of practical life,
which awaken him and remind him of the existence of a wider world. In
the same way it is impossible to realise a pure religion in which the
subject completely and effectually might annihilate itself. For in the
measure that faith increases in intensity, and the sentiment of one's
own nothingness grows deeper, and the idea that the object is all
becomes more obsessing, in that same measure the energy of the spirit
increases, of the spirit as the subject that has been powerful enough to
create this situation. Altars must be built in order that people may
kneel in front of them. The concept of God, it, too, has a history. And
from this history no word can be taken away on the assumption that it
was immediately _revealed_. For there is no word which pre-exists as
such before the act of him who cognises it. And to fix a dogma, that is,
to rescue it from the flow of evolution, we should have to withdraw from
the course of evolution the men themselves who are to accept it.
Nothing therefore is more impious than the history of religion, in the
course of which man, now dragging his God down to the depths of his
apparent misery, now lifting him to the heights of his real greatness,
progresses from station to station along the unending way of sorrows and
joys. The process of mental development shows unwittingly, by the very
acts of man's innocent piety, that God is _his_ God, that the life of
the object is the same as the life of the subject.
The nature then both of art and of religion implies a flagrant
contradiction which comes to this,--that the subject to be subject is
object, and the object to be object is subject. Hence the torments of
the poet and the spasms of the mystic. A perfect art and a perfect
religion, that is, art which is not religion, and religion which is not
art, are two impossibilities. This does not mean that either art or
religion can ever be superseded and left behind as two illusions,
ancient and constant, if we will, but none the less devoid of all value.
The very contrary of this is true. Just because there is no pure art,
religion is eternal; and art is eternal, because religion cannot be
attained in its absolute purity.
The concrete spirit is neither subject nor object. It is a
self-objectifying subject, and an object which becomes the subject in
virtue of the subjectivity that alights on it as it realises it. The
spirit is therefore a becoming. It is the synthesis, the unity of these
two opposites, ever in conflict and yet always intimately joined. And
the spirit, as this unity, is the concreteness both of art (reality of
the abstract subject) and of religion (reality of the abstract object).
It is philosophy. Many definitions have been given of philosophy, and
all of them true, because directly or indirectly they may, on the
strength of what is expressed or what is understood, be reduced to the
following definition: that philosophy is the spirit. If we say that it
is the science of the spirit, we indulge in a useless pleonasm. For
science, unless we distinguish in an absolute manner (which is
impossible) one grade of determinateness from the other, is the same as
consciousness; and spirit is, as we have seen, self-consciousness. If we
say that philosophy is the science of reality in its universality, we
lose sight of the fact that reality, for those who do not stray off into
the maze of abstractness, _is_ the spirit. A definition which has never
lost its value is that one which makes philosophy consist in the
elaboration of concepts, that is, in the unification of all the concepts
(those we possess, of course) into a coherent concept. This is an
excellent definition, and it warns us that philosophy is not obtained by
stopping before abstractions, no matter what these abstractions may be.
All particular things are abstractions, each one of which yields a
concept, and all of them give a number of concepts, which must be
brought together and unified, if we ever intend to think all things that
are thought, and thus philosophise. The subject without the object as
the artist wants it is an abstraction; and similarly abstract is the
object which religion looks up to.
We are accustomed, not without reason, to distinguish the life of the
spirit from philosophy. But the reason, instead of destroying, confirms
the identity between spirit and philosophy, and for the following cause.
The spirit never being what it ought to be, we live acquiring
consciousness of ourselves. But when we pause to ask ourselves if we
have really obtained this consciousness, and turn to our life as to the
subject-matter of this problem, which is the problem of philosophy, we
discover that we cannot answer in the affirmative. For answering is
spiritual living, a living, therefore, which consists not in having
self-consciousness but in acquiring it. So that philosophy does not
arise from the need of understanding the life already lived, for the
past is the realm of death; but rather from the much keener desire of
living, of leading a better life, a true life, and of finally realising
this spiritual reality which is our ideal. But when?
Can we believe that there is ever going to be a philosophy which will
definitely fulfil the ideal? It is obvious that a pursuit of such
philosophy would lead the spirit into a race to death; whereas on the
contrary the spirit is life; it is an impulse to ever more intense
living.
This philosophy, it is evident, is not the exclusive, esoteric classroom
discipline, the professional privilege of a few specialists. It is
rather the source from which this professional speculation derives its
right to address all men who have an exalted sentiment of their human
dignity, who hearken to the deeper utterances of their souls, who are
able to see how much of their own self there is in this vast world which
is being disclosed to their eyes; who, even though vaguely and timidly,
are conscious of the divine power that resides in every human heart; who
feel that this human heart, prone though it be to all baseness, is also
capable of lifting itself to the most sublime heights, and of enjoying
the pure and lofty satisfactions which human phantasy ordinarily
relegates to heaven. In the depths of every mind there is a philosophy:
the mind itself is untiring speculation, which more or less successfully
scales the height, but which is always turned upward to the summit
whitened by the rising sun. Life is made human by the rays of this
philosophy. Man is really man when he recognises an object which is the
world, reality, law, and when he recalls that nothing absolves him from
the duty of being in this world; of seriously being in it, which means
working and cooperating towards reality by knowing reality and
fulfilling the law. For in his freedom and power he can never divest
himself of his own responsibility; he must therefore develop his
capacity to the utmost value, and to that end work and work, think, and
act as the centre of his world. This philosophy does not allow him
either to withdraw into the abstract retirement of his egoistic self, or
to deny and sacrifice this self to an imaginary reality. This philosophy
is never finished, never completed, for it is his own spirit, his very
self, which to live must grow, and which must constitute itself as it
develops. And therefore this philosophy cannot help being man's ideal,
which is always being realised and which is never fulfilled.
So, then, education, which aims at that concrete and truly real unity
which is the life of the spirit, must always be moral, always spiritual,
always philosophic. An invidious word, perhaps, for those who have had
the misfortune to fall into the mean and vulgar habit of grinning and
scoffing in retaliation for the unsparing censure inflicted by the ideal
on sloth, presumption, and cowardice. We might perhaps replace this word
by "integral," excepting that this adjective is generic and therefore
inappropriate.
I must add, however, that in speaking of philosophic education, I do not
mean any special course in philosophy. Though I believe that special
philosophical training has an essential function in the curriculum of
secondary schools which aim to prepare and direct towards higher studies
a matured mentality, scientifically trained and humanly inspired, I yet
hold that this special philosophical training can be effectual only if
all education, from its very beginning, wherever that may be, has been
philosophic. We must reflect that just as it is impossible for a man to
be moral only at certain hours of the day, and in certain particular
places, morality being the atmosphere without which the spirit cannot
live, so that ethical teaching is distorted and deflected as soon as it
is relegated to certain definite books, to be studied in connection with
certain definite courses; in the same way this philosophy which is for
us the ideal content of education, and therefore its ideal, cannot but
be present in every real educative act, cannot help reflecting itself in
every throb it gives to the soul of the pupil. This general philosophic
education naturally includes art and religion, which cannot be limited
subject-matters of special courses of instruction, co-ordinated or
subordinated to the other elements of the curriculum.
Only the particular sciences, that is, the sciences properly so called,
may be freely moved in a student's schedule; they may be added or taken
away, they may be grouped this or that way, and be variously distributed
in accordance with the needs of the moment and the particular exigencies
of the student or of man in general. For these sciences reflect in
themselves the fragmentary multiplicity of things which have been
abstractly cut off from the centre of the spirit, to which however they
too refer. And because they do refer to it, the teaching of them should
be spiritualised, moralised, humanised; it ought to acquire the
concreteness of philosophy, and therefore never ignore the exigencies of
art and of religion. For otherwise it will be merely material
instruction, "informative education," which in reality is no education
at all.
During the Revival of Learning education was humanistic. Its ideal was
art. The historical life which corresponded to this ideal was the
individualism of our Italian Renaissance. After the Counter Reformation,
art, which is individuality in abstract subjectivity, was abandoned to
itself, and inevitably decayed in the cult of lifeless form; it became
barren in the imitations of classical art considered as final
perfection, to which the individual might raise himself but beyond which
he could not possibly proceed. Art became thus the negation of
originality, and of that subjective autonomy of which it naturally
should be the most enhancing expression. So that classicism up to the
Romantic Revolt remained the cultural form of a society submissive to
the principle of authority and religiously oriented. These conditions
favoured the study of the science of nature, which to the extent that it
is governed by the naturalistic principle is a manifestation of
religiosity. The devotee of natural science speaks in fact of his Nature
with an agnostic reverence similar to that professed by the saint in the
worship of God. Nature, which alone he knows, becomes the object before
which the subject, Man, disappears. But as science progresses, the need
of shaking the principle of authority makes itself felt; the accepted
truths of nature are subjected to criticism; the power of doubting is
reintroduced, and the subject again reasserts itself. So the advancement
of natural science has gradually turned humanity away from the shrines
of naturalistic science. When naturalism opposed the claims of religion,
it ceased to be the science of nature, and became philosophy. This
influenced the scientific spirit in its clash with religious dogmas, and
restored to it the consciousness of the moment of subjectivity which had
been forgotten. The ideal of culture, which prevailed in the nineteenth
century with the triumph of positivism, was science, naturalism, and
therefore religion. It is now high time that the two opposed elements
be joined and united, and that the school be neither abstractly
humanistic in the pursuit of Art nor abstractly religious and
scientific, but that it be made what it is ideally, and what it is also
in practice when it efficaciously educates--the philosophic school.
* * * * *
As each one has a different path to follow in this world, each one will
accordingly have his own education. But all paths converge to one point,
where we all gather to lead in common that universal life which alone
makes us men. And as we meet at this centre, we must understand each
other, and should be able therefore to speak the same language, the
language of the spirit. We are compelled by an irresistible need to live
this common life, and together to constitute one sole spirit. But this
end we shall never attain if man, who ought to be entire and complete,
acts as a mere fragment,--such fragment, for example, as the aesthete, or
the superstitious worshipper, or the star gazer, always unaware of the
pit under his feet. If we continue in this state, in which one man
clings to the superstition of mathematics, another idolises entomology,
a third worships physics, and so on indefinitely, if man insists on
fencing off his little piece of this "thrashing-floor that makes us
cruel," knowing no other man but himself, feeling no needs other than
his own, then war will break out. Not a disciplined war, governed by a
law, by an idea, by reason, of which it is the life; but a war of every
man against his brother,--the anarchistic uprising, the disintegration
of the spirit, and the stern suffering which is true misery.
The dislike for the _purus mathematicus_[5] is traditional. But whether
he be a mathematician, or a priest, or an economist, or a dentist, or a
poet, or a street cleaner, man as a fragment of humanity is a nuisance.
We want mathematics, but we want it _in_ the man. And the same for
religion, economics, poetry, and all the rest. Otherwise we suffocate,
and die stifled. For all these are things, but there is no life; and
things oppress us and kill us. Therefore let us spiritualise things by
reviving the spirit. Let us release it, that it may freely move in the
organic unity of nature. Let us train it so that its strength, agility,
balance, and all around development shall be able to control all its
dependent functions, which can be successfully carried on only on
condition that they agree, and collaborate toward common life. And this
is what I call philosophy.
Or we may call it humanity, if the word philosophy suggests strangeness
and difficulty of attainment. For our demand for an educational reform,
in accordance with our renewed consciousness, is prompted by the old
but never ancient desire which put the lantern in the hand of the Greek
philosopher. Education is truly human when it has for its contents that
ideal which I have briefly touched upon in this chapter, the ideal of
the spirit, philosophy.
FOOTNOTES:
[5] Referring to the old phrase, _purus mathematicus, purus asinus_.