1. The Logical and the Psychological. By science is meant, as already
stated, that knowledge which is the outcome of methods of observation,
reflection, and testing which are deliberately adopted to secure
a settled, assured subject matter. It involves an intelligent and
persistent endeavor to revise current beliefs so as to weed out what is
erroneous, to add to their accuracy, and, above all, to give them such
shape that the dependencies of the various facts upon one another may
be as obvious as possible. It is, like all knowledge, an outcome of
activity bringing about certain changes in the environment. But in its
case, the quality of the resulting knowledge is the controlling factor
and not an incident of the activity. Both logically and educationally,
science is the perfecting of knowing, its last stage.
Science, in short, signifies a realization of the logical implications
of any knowledge. Logical order is not a form imposed upon what is
known; it is the proper form of knowledge as perfected. For it means
that the statement of subject matter is of a nature to exhibit to
one who understands it the premises from which it follows and the
conclusions to which it points (See ante, p. 190). As from a few bones
the competent zoologist reconstructs an animal; so from the form of a
statement in mathematics or physics the specialist in the subject can
form an idea of the system of truths in which it has its place.
To the non-expert, however, this perfected form is a stumbling block.
Just because the material is stated with reference to the furtherance
of knowledge as an end in itself, its connections with the material of
everyday life are hidden. To the layman the bones are a mere curiosity.
Until he had mastered the principles of zoology, his efforts to make
anything out of them would be random and blind. From the standpoint of
the learner scientific form is an ideal to be achieved, not a starting
point from which to set out. It is, nevertheless, a frequent practice to
start in instruction with the rudiments of science somewhat simplified.
The necessary consequence is an isolation of science from significant
experience. The pupil learns symbols without the key to their meaning.
He acquires a technical body of information without ability to trace
its connections with the objects and operations with which he is
familiar--often he acquires simply a peculiar vocabulary. There is
a strong temptation to assume that presenting subject matter in its
perfected form provides a royal road to learning. What more natural
than to suppose that the immature can be saved time and energy, and be
protected from needless error by commencing where competent inquirers
have left off? The outcome is written large in the history of education.
Pupils begin their study of science with texts in which the subject
is organized into topics according to the order of the specialist.
Technical concepts, with their definitions, are introduced at the
outset. Laws are introduced at a very early stage, with at best a few
indications of the way in which they were arrived at. The pupils learn
a "science" instead of learning the scientific way of treating the
familiar material of ordinary experience. The method of the advanced
student dominates college teaching; the approach of the college is
transferred into the high school, and so down the line, with such
omissions as may make the subject easier.
The chronological method which begins with the experience of the learner
and develops from that the proper modes of scientific treatment is often
called the "psychological" method in distinction from the logical method
of the expert or specialist. The apparent loss of time involved is
more than made up for by the superior understanding and vital interest
secured. What the pupil learns he at least understands. Moreover by
following, in connection with problems selected from the material of
ordinary acquaintance, the methods by which scientific men have reached
their perfected knowledge, he gains independent power to deal with
material within his range, and avoids the mental confusion and
intellectual distaste attendant upon studying matter whose meaning
is only symbolic. Since the mass of pupils are never going to become
scientific specialists, it is much more important that they should get
some insight into what scientific method means than that they should
copy at long range and second hand the results which scientific men have
reached. Students will not go so far, perhaps, in the "ground covered,"
but they will be sure and intelligent as far as they do go. And it is
safe to say that the few who go on to be scientific experts will have
a better preparation than if they had been swamped with a large mass of
purely technical and symbolically stated information. In fact, those
who do become successful men of science are those who by their own power
manage to avoid the pitfalls of a traditional scholastic introduction
into it.
The contrast between the expectations of the men who a generation or
two ago strove, against great odds, to secure a place for science
in education, and the result generally achieved is painful. Herbert
Spencer, inquiring what knowledge is of most worth, concluded that
from all points of view scientific knowledge is most valuable. But
his argument unconsciously assumed that scientific knowledge could be
communicated in a ready-made form. Passing over the methods by which the
subject matter of our ordinary activities is transmuted into scientific
form, it ignored the method by which alone science is science.
Instruction has too often proceeded upon an analogous plan. But there is
no magic attached to material stated in technically correct scientific
form. When learned in this condition it remains a body of inert
information. Moreover its form of statement removes it further from
fruitful contact with everyday experiences than does the mode of
statement proper to literature. Nevertheless that the claims made for
instruction in science were unjustifiable does not follow. For material
so taught is not science to the pupil.
Contact with things and laboratory exercises, while a great improvement
upon textbooks arranged upon the deductive plan, do not of themselves
suffice to meet the need. While they are an indispensable portion
of scientific method, they do not as a matter of course constitute
scientific method. Physical materials may be manipulated with scientific
apparatus, but the materials may be disassociated in themselves and in
the ways in which they are handled, from the materials and processes
used out of school. The problems dealt with may be only problems of
science: problems, that is, which would occur to one already initiated
in the science of the subject. Our attention may be devoted to getting
skill in technical manipulation without reference to the connection of
laboratory exercises with a problem belonging to subject matter. There
is sometimes a ritual of laboratory instruction as well as of heathen
religion. 1 It has been mentioned, incidentally, that scientific
statements, or logical form, implies the use of signs or symbols.
The statement applies, of course, to all use of language. But in the
vernacular, the mind proceeds directly from the symbol to the thing
signified. Association with familiar material is so close that the mind
does not pause upon the sign. The signs are intended only to stand for
things and acts. But scientific terminology has an additional use. It is
designed, as we have seen, not to stand for the things directly in their
practical use in experience, but for the things placed in a cognitive
system. Ultimately, of course, they denote the things of our common
sense acquaintance. But immediately they do not designate them in their
common context, but translated into terms of scientific inquiry. Atoms,
molecules, chemical formulae, the mathematical propositions in the study
of physics--all these have primarily an intellectual value and only
indirectly an empirical value. They represent instruments for
the carrying on of science. As in the case of other tools, their
significance can be learned only by use. We cannot procure understanding
of their meaning by pointing to things, but only by pointing to their
work when they are employed as part of the technique of knowledge. Even
the circle, square, etc., of geometry exhibit a difference from the
squares and circles of familiar acquaintance, and the further one
proceeds in mathematical science the greater the remoteness from the
everyday empirical thing. Qualities which do not count for the pursuit
of knowledge about spatial relations are left out; those which are
important for this purpose are accentuated. If one carries his study
far enough, he will find even the properties which are significant for
spatial knowledge giving way to those which facilitate knowledge of
other things--perhaps a knowledge of the general relations of number.
There will be nothing in the conceptual definitions even to suggest
spatial form, size, or direction. This does not mean that they are
unreal mental inventions, but it indicates that direct physical
qualities have been transmuted into tools for a special end--the end
of intellectual organization. In every machine the primary state of
material has been modified by subordinating it to use for a purpose.
Not the stuff in its original form but in its adaptation to an end
is important. No one would have a knowledge of a machine who could
enumerate all the materials entering into its structure, but only he
who knew their uses and could tell why they are employed as they are. In
like fashion one has a knowledge of mathematical conceptions only when
he sees the problems in which they function and their specific utility
in dealing with these problems. "Knowing" the definitions, rules,
formulae, etc., is like knowing the names of parts of a machine without
knowing what they do. In one case, as in the other, the meaning, or
intellectual content, is what the element accomplishes in the system of
which it is a member.
2. Science and Social Progress. Assuming that the development of the
direct knowledge gained in occupations of social interest is carried
to a perfected logical form, the question arises as to its place in
experience. In general, the reply is that science marks the emancipation
of mind from devotion to customary purposes and makes possible the
systematic pursuit of new ends. It is the agency of progress in action.
Progress is sometimes thought of as consisting in getting nearer to ends
already sought. But this is a minor form of progress, for it requires
only improvement of the means of action or technical advance. More
important modes of progress consist in enriching prior purposes and in
forming new ones. Desires are not a fixed quantity, nor does progress
mean only an increased amount of satisfaction. With increased culture
and new mastery of nature, new desires, demands for new qualities
of satisfaction, show themselves, for intelligence perceives new
possibilities of action. This projection of new possibilities leads to
search for new means of execution, and progress takes place; while the
discovery of objects not already used leads to suggestion of new ends.
That science is the chief means of perfecting control of means of action
is witnessed by the great crop of inventions which followed intellectual
command of the secrets of nature. The wonderful transformation of
production and distribution known as the industrial revolution is the
fruit of experimental science. Railways, steamboats, electric motors,
telephone and telegraph, automobiles, aeroplanes and dirigibles are
conspicuous evidences of the application of science in life. But none
of them would be of much importance without the thousands of less
sensational inventions by means of which natural science has been
rendered tributary to our daily life.
It must be admitted that to a considerable extent the progress thus
procured has been only technical: it has provided more efficient means
for satisfying preexistent desires, rather than modified the quality of
human purposes. There is, for example, no modern civilization which is
the equal of Greek culture in all respects. Science is still too recent
to have been absorbed into imaginative and emotional disposition. Men
move more swiftly and surely to the realization of their ends, but
their ends too largely remain what they were prior to scientific
enlightenment. This fact places upon education the responsibility of
using science in a way to modify the habitual attitude of imagination
and feeling, not leave it just an extension of our physical arms and
legs.
The advance of science has already modified men's thoughts of the
purposes and goods of life to a sufficient extent to give some idea of
the nature of this responsibility and the ways of meeting it. Science
taking effect in human activity has broken down physical barriers
which formerly separated men; it has immensely widened the area of
intercourse. It has brought about interdependence of interests on an
enormous scale. It has brought with it an established conviction of the
possibility of control of nature in the interests of mankind and thus
has led men to look to the future, instead of the past. The coincidence
of the ideal of progress with the advance of science is not a mere
coincidence. Before this advance men placed the golden age in remote
antiquity. Now they face the future with a firm belief that intelligence
properly used can do away with evils once thought inevitable. To
subjugate devastating disease is no longer a dream; the hope of
abolishing poverty is not utopian. Science has familiarized men with
the idea of development, taking effect practically in persistent gradual
amelioration of the estate of our common humanity.
The problem of an educational use of science is then to create an
intelligence pregnant with belief in the possibility of the direction
of human affairs by itself. The method of science engrained through
education in habit means emancipation from rule of thumb and from the
routine generated by rule of thumb procedure. The word empirical in its
ordinary use does not mean "connected with experiment," but rather
crude and unrational. Under the influence of conditions created by the
non-existence of experimental science, experience was opposed in all
the ruling philosophies of the past to reason and the truly rational.
Empirical knowledge meant the knowledge accumulated by a multitude of
past instances without intelligent insight into the principles of any
of them. To say that medicine was empirical meant that it was not
scientific, but a mode of practice based upon accumulated observations
of diseases and of remedies used more or less at random. Such a mode of
practice is of necessity happy-go-lucky; success depends upon chance. It
lends itself to deception and quackery. Industry that is "empirically"
controlled forbids constructive applications of intelligence; it depends
upon following in an imitative slavish manner the models set in
the past. Experimental science means the possibility of using past
experiences as the servant, not the master, of mind. It means that
reason operates within experience, not beyond it, to give it an
intelligent or reasonable quality. Science is experience becoming
rational. The effect of science is thus to change men's idea of the
nature and inherent possibilities of experience. By the same token, it
changes the idea and the operation of reason. Instead of being something
beyond experience, remote, aloof, concerned with a sublime region
that has nothing to do with the experienced facts of life, it is found
indigenous in experience:--the factor by which past experiences are
purified and rendered into tools for discovery and advance.
The term "abstract" has a rather bad name in popular speech, being used
to signify not only that which is abstruse and hard to understand,
but also that which is far away from life. But abstraction is an
indispensable trait in reflective direction of activity. Situations do
not literally repeat themselves. Habit treats new occurrences as if
they were identical with old ones; it suffices, accordingly, when the
different or novel element is negligible for present purposes. But when
the new element requires especial attention, random reaction is the
sole recourse unless abstraction is brought into play. For abstraction
deliberately selects from the subject matter of former experiences that
which is thought helpful in dealing with the new. It signifies conscious
transfer of a meaning embedded in past experience for use in a new one.
It is the very artery of intelligence, of the intentional rendering of
one experience available for guidance of another.
Science carries on this working over of prior subject matter on a large
scale. It aims to free an experience from all which is purely personal
and strictly immediate; it aims to detach whatever it has in common with
the subject matter of other experiences, and which, being common, may
be saved for further use. It is, thus, an indispensable factor in social
progress. In any experience just as it occurs there is much which,
while it may be of precious import to the individual implicated in
the experience, is peculiar and unreduplicable. From the standpoint
of science, this material is accidental, while the features which are
widely shared are essential. Whatever is unique in the situation, since
dependent upon the peculiarities of the individual and the coincidence
of circumstance, is not available for others; so that unless what is
shared is abstracted and fixed by a suitable symbol, practically all the
value of the experience may perish in its passing. But abstraction
and the use of terms to record what is abstracted put the net value of
individual experience at the permanent disposal of mankind. No one
can foresee in detail when or how it may be of further use. The man of
science in developing his abstractions is like a manufacturer of tools
who does not know who will use them nor when. But intellectual tools
are indefinitely more flexible in their range of adaptation than other
mechanical tools.
Generalization is the counterpart of abstraction. It is the functioning
of an abstraction in its application to a new concrete experience,--its
extension to clarify and direct new situations. Reference to these
possible applications is necessary in order that the abstraction may be
fruitful, instead of a barren formalism ending in itself. Generalization
is essentially a social device. When men identified their interests
exclusively with the concerns of a narrow group, their generalizations
were correspondingly restricted. The viewpoint did not permit a wide and
free survey. Men's thoughts were tied down to a contracted space and a
short time,--limited to their own established customs as a measure
of all possible values. Scientific abstraction and generalization are
equivalent to taking the point of view of any man, whatever his location
in time and space. While this emancipation from the conditions and
episodes of concrete experiences accounts for the remoteness, the
"abstractness," of science, it also accounts for its wide and free
range of fruitful novel applications in practice. Terms and propositions
record, fix, and convey what is abstracted. A meaning detached from a
given experience cannot remain hanging in the air. It must acquire a
local habitation. Names give abstract meanings a physical locus and
body. Formulation is thus not an after-thought or by-product; it is
essential to the completion of the work of thought. Persons know many
things which they cannot express, but such knowledge remains practical,
direct, and personal. An individual can use it for himself; he may be
able to act upon it with efficiency. Artists and executives often have
their knowledge in this state. But it is personal, untransferable, and,
as it were, instinctive. To formulate the significance of an experience
a man must take into conscious account the experiences of others. He
must try to find a standpoint which includes the experience of others
as well as his own. Otherwise his communication cannot be understood. He
talks a language which no one else knows. While literary art furnishes
the supreme successes in stating of experiences so that they are vitally
significant to others, the vocabulary of science is designed, in another
fashion, to express the meaning of experienced things in symbols which
any one will know who studies the science. Aesthetic formulation reveals
and enhances the meaning of experiences one already has; scientific
formulation supplies one with tools for constructing new experiences
with transformed meanings.
To sum up: Science represents the office of intelligence, in projection
and control of new experiences, pursued systematically, intentionally,
and on a scale due to freedom from limitations of habit. It is the sole
instrumentality of conscious, as distinct from accidental, progress.
And if its generality, its remoteness from individual conditions, confer
upon it a certain technicality and aloofness, these qualities are very
different from those of merely speculative theorizing. The latter are in
permanent dislocation from practice; the former are temporarily detached
for the sake of wider and freer application in later concrete action.
There is a kind of idle theory which is antithetical to practice; but
genuinely scientific theory falls within practice as the agency of its
expansion and its direction to new possibilities.
3. Naturalism and Humanism in Education. There exists an educational
tradition which opposes science to literature and history in the
curriculum. The quarrel between the representatives of the two interests
is easily explicable historically. Literature and language and a
literary philosophy were entrenched in all higher institutions of
learning before experimental science came into being. The latter had
naturally to win its way. No fortified and protected interest readily
surrenders any monopoly it may possess. But the assumption, from
whichever side, that language and literary products are exclusively
humanistic in quality, and that science is purely physical in import,
is a false notion which tends to cripple the educational use of both
studies. Human life does not occur in a vacuum, nor is nature a mere
stage setting for the enactment of its drama (ante, p. 211). Man's
life is bound up in the processes of nature; his career, for success or
defeat, depends upon the way in which nature enters it. Man's power of
deliberate control of his own affairs depends upon ability to direct
natural energies to use: an ability which is in turn dependent upon
insight into nature's processes. Whatever natural science may be for the
specialist, for educational purposes it is knowledge of the conditions
of human action. To be aware of the medium in which social intercourse
goes on, and of the means and obstacles to its progressive development
is to be in command of a knowledge which is thoroughly humanistic in
quality. One who is ignorant of the history of science is ignorant of
the struggles by which mankind has passed from routine and caprice, from
superstitious subjection to nature, from efforts to use it magically,
to intellectual self-possession. That science may be taught as a set of
formal and technical exercises is only too true. This happens whenever
information about the world is made an end in itself. The failure of
such instruction to procure culture is not, however, evidence of the
antithesis of natural knowledge to humanistic concern, but evidence of a
wrong educational attitude. Dislike to employ scientific knowledge as it
functions in men's occupations is itself a survival of an aristocratic
culture. The notion that "applied" knowledge is somehow less worthy than
"pure" knowledge, was natural to a society in which all useful work was
performed by slaves and serfs, and in which industry was controlled by
the models set by custom rather than by intelligence. Science, or the
highest knowing, was then identified with pure theorizing, apart from
all application in the uses of life; and knowledge relating to useful
arts suffered the stigma attaching to the classes who engaged in them
(See below, Ch. XIX). The idea of science thus generated persisted after
science had itself adopted the appliances of the arts, using them for
the production of knowledge, and after the rise of democracy. Taking
theory just as theory, however, that which concerns humanity is of more
significance for man than that which concerns a merely physical world.
In adopting the criterion of knowledge laid down by a literary culture,
aloof from the practical needs of the mass of men, the educational
advocates of scientific education put themselves at a strategic
disadvantage. So far as they adopt the idea of science appropriate
to its experimental method and to the movements of a democratic and
industrial society, they have no difficulty in showing that natural
science is more humanistic than an alleged humanism which bases its
educational schemes upon the specialized interests of a leisure
class. For, as we have already stated, humanistic studies when set
in opposition to study of nature are hampered. They tend to reduce
themselves to exclusively literary and linguistic studies, which in turn
tend to shrink to "the classics," to languages no longer spoken. For
modern languages may evidently be put to use, and hence fall under the
ban. It would be hard to find anything in history more ironical than the
educational practices which have identified the "humanities"
exclusively with a knowledge of Greek and Latin. Greek and Roman art and
institutions made such important contributions to our civilization
that there should always be the amplest opportunities for making their
acquaintance. But to regard them as par excellence the humane studies
involves a deliberate neglect of the possibilities of the subject matter
which is accessible in education to the masses, and tends to cultivate
a narrow snobbery: that of a learned class whose insignia are the
accidents of exclusive opportunity. Knowledge is humanistic in quality
not because it is about human products in the past, but because of what
it does in liberating human intelligence and human sympathy. Any subject
matter which accomplishes this result is humane, and any subject matter
which does not accomplish it is not even educational.
Summary. Science represents the fruition of the cognitive factors in
experience. Instead of contenting itself with a mere statement of
what commends itself to personal or customary experience, it aims at a
statement which will reveal the sources, grounds, and consequences of
a belief. The achievement of this aim gives logical character to
the statements. Educationally, it has to be noted that logical
characteristics of method, since they belong to subject matter which has
reached a high degree of intellectual elaboration, are different from
the method of the learner--the chronological order of passing from a
cruder to a more refined intellectual quality of experience. When this
fact is ignored, science is treated as so much bare information, which
however is less interesting and more remote than ordinary information,
being stated in an unusual and technical vocabulary. The function which
science has to perform in the curriculum is that which it has performed
for the race: emancipation from local and temporary incidents of
experience, and the opening of intellectual vistas unobscured by the
accidents of personal habit and predilection. The logical traits of
abstraction, generalization, and definite formulation are all associated
with this function. In emancipating an idea from the particular context
in which it originated and giving it a wider reference the results of
the experience of any individual are put at the disposal of all men.
Thus ultimately and philosophically science is the organ of general
social progress. 1 Upon the positive side, the value of problems arising
in work in the garden, the shop, etc., may be referred to (See p.
200). The laboratory may be treated as an additional resource to supply
conditions and appliances for the better pursuit of these problems.