Education presupposes the stage of mind reached in
productive memory; it deals with reflection; four stages
of reflection: (_a_) sensuous ideas perceive things; (_b_)
abstract ideas perceive forces or elements of a process;
(_c_) concrete idea perceives one process, a pantheistic
first principle, persistent force; (_d_) absolute idea
perceives a conscious first principle, absolute person.
We have considered in our psychological study thus far the forms of life
and cognition, contrasting the phase of nutrition with that of feeling,
or sensibility. We have seen the various forms of feeling in
sense-perception, and the various forms of representation as the second
phase of intellectual activity--the forms of recollection, fancy,
imagination, attention, and memory. We draw the line between the animals
capable of education and those not capable of it, at the point of memory
defined--not as recollection, but as the faculty of general ideas or
conceptions, to which the significant words of language correspond.
With the arrival at language, we arrive at education in the human sense
of the term; with the arrival at language, we arrive at the view of the
world at which thought as a mental process begins. As sense-perception
has before it a world of _present_ objects, so thought has before it a
world of general concepts, which language has defined and fixed.
It is true that few persons are aware that language stands for a world
of general ideas, and that reflection has to do with this world of
universals. Hence it is, too, that so much of the so-called science of
education is very crude and impractical. Much of it is materialistic,
and does not recognize the self-activity of mind; but makes it out to be
a correlation of physical energies--derived from the transmutation of
food by the process of digestion, and then by the brain converted into
thought.
Let us consider now the psychology of thinking, or reflection, and at
first in its most inadequate forms. As a human process, the knowing is
always a knowing by universals--a re-cognition, and not simple
apprehension, such as the animals, or such as beings have that do not
use language. The process of development of stages of thought begins
with sensuous ideas, which perceive mere individual, concrete, real
objects, as it supposes. In conceiving these, it uses language and
thinks general ideas, but it does not know it, nor is it conscious of
the relations involved in such objects. This is the first stage of
reflection. The world exists for it as an innumerable congeries of
things, each one independent of the other, and possessing
self-existence. It is the stand-point from which atomism would be
adopted as the philosophic system. Ask it what the ultimate principle of
existence is, and it would reply, "Atoms."
But this view of the world is a very unstable one, and requires very
little reflection to overturn it, and bring one to the next basis--that
of _abstract ideas_. When the mind looks carefully at the world of
things, it finds that there is dependence and interdependence. Each
object is related to something else, and changes when that changes. Each
object is a part of a process that is going on. The process produced it,
and the process will destroy it--nay, it is destroying it now, while we
look at it. We find, therefore, that things are not the true beings
which we thought them to be, but processes _are_ the reality. Science
takes this attitude, and studies out the history of each thing in its
rise and its disappearance, and it calls this history the truth. This
stage of thinking does not believe in _atoms_ or in _things_; it
believes in _forces_ and _processes_--"abstract ideas"--because they are
negative, and cannot be seen by the senses. This is the dynamic
stand-point in philosophy.
Reflection knows that these abstract ideas possess more truth, more
reality, than the "things" of sense-perception; the force is more real
than the thing, because it outlasts a thing,--it causes things to
originate, and to change, and disappear.
This stage of abstract ideas or of negative powers or forces finally
becomes convinced of the essential unity of all processes and of all
forces; it sets up the doctrine of the _correlation of forces_, and
believes that persistent force is the ultimate truth, the fundamental
reality of the world. This we may call a concrete idea, for it sets up a
principle which is the origin of all things and forces, and also the
destroyer of all things, and hence more real than the world of things
and forces; and because this idea, when carefully thought out, proves to
be the idea of self-determination--self-activity.
Persistent force, as taught us by the scientific men of our day, is the
sole ultimate principle, and as such it gives rise to all existence by
its self-activity, for there is nothing else for it to act upon. It
causes all origins, all changes, and all evanescence. It gives rise to
the particular forces--heat, light, electricity, magnetism, etc.--which
in their turn cause the evanescent forms which sense-perception sees as
"things."