RECONSTRUCTION IN MORAL CONCEPTIONS
The impact of the alteration in methods of scientific thinking upon
moral ideas is, in general, obvious. Goods, ends are multiplied. Rules
are softened into principles, and principles are modified into methods
of understanding. Ethical theory began among the Greeks as an attempt to
find a regulation for the conduct of life which should have a rational
basis and purpose instead of being derived from custom. But reason as a
substitute for custom was under the obligation of supplying objects and
laws as fixed as those of custom had been. Ethical theory ever since has
been singularly hypnotized by the notion that its business is to
discover some final end or good or some ultimate and supreme law. This
is the common element among the diversity of theories. Some have held
that the end is loyalty or obedience to a higher power or authority; and
they have variously found this higher principle in Divine Will, the will
of the secular ruler, the maintenance of institutions in which the
purpose of superiors is embodied, and the rational consciousness of
duty. But they have differed from one another because there was one
point in which they were agreed: a single and final source of law.
Others have asserted that it is impossible to locate morality in
conformity to law-giving power, and that it must be sought in ends that
are goods. And some have sought the good in self-realization, some in
holiness, some in happiness, some in the greatest possible aggregate of
pleasures. And yet these schools have agreed in the assumption that
there is a single, fixed and final good. They have been able to dispute
with one another only because of their common premise.
The question arises whether the way out of the confusion and conflict is
not to go to the root of the matter by questioning this common element.
Is not the belief in the single, final and ultimate (whether conceived
as good or as authoritative law) an intellectual product of that feudal
organization which is disappearing historically and of that belief in a
bounded, ordered cosmos, wherein rest is higher than motion, which has
disappeared from natural science? It has been repeatedly suggested that
the present limit of intellectual reconstruction lies in the fact that
it has not as yet been seriously applied in the moral and social
disciplines. Would not this further application demand precisely that we
advance to a belief in a plurality of changing, moving, individualized
goods and ends, and to a belief that principles, criteria, laws are
intellectual instruments for analyzing individual or unique situations?
The blunt assertion that every moral situation is a unique situation
having its own irreplaceable good may seem not merely blunt but
preposterous. For the established tradition teaches that it is precisely
the irregularity of special cases which makes necessary the guidance of
conduct by universals, and that the essence of the virtuous disposition
is willingness to subordinate every particular case to adjudication by a
fixed principle. It would then follow that submission of a generic end
and law to determination by the concrete situation entails complete
confusion and unrestrained licentiousness. Let us, however, follow the
pragmatic rule, and in order to discover the meaning of the idea ask for
its consequences. Then it surprisingly turns out that the primary
significance of the unique and morally ultimate character of the
concrete situation is to transfer the weight and burden of morality to
intelligence. It does not destroy responsibility; it only locates it. A
moral situation is one in which judgment and choice are required
antecedently to overt action. The practical meaning of the
situation--that is to say the action needed to satisfy it--is not
self-evident. It has to be searched for. There are conflicting desires
and alternative apparent goods. What is needed is to find the right
course of action, the right good. Hence, inquiry is exacted:
observation of the detailed makeup of the situation; analysis into its
diverse factors; clarification of what is obscure; discounting of the
more insistent and vivid traits; tracing the consequences of the various
modes of action that suggest themselves; regarding the decision reached
as hypothetical and tentative until the anticipated or supposed
consequences which led to its adoption have been squared with actual
consequences. This inquiry is intelligence. Our moral failures go back
to some weakness of disposition, some absence of sympathy, some
one-sided bias that makes us perform the judgment of the concrete case
carelessly or perversely. Wide sympathy, keen sensitiveness, persistence
in the face of the disagreeable, balance of interests enabling us to
undertake the work of analysis and decision intelligently are the
distinctively moral traits--the virtues or moral excellencies.
It is worth noting once more that the underlying issue is, after all,
only the same as that which has been already threshed out in physical
inquiry. There too it long seemed as if rational assurance and
demonstration could be attained only if we began with universal
conceptions and subsumed particular cases under them. The men who
initiated the methods of inquiry that are now everywhere adopted were
denounced in their day (and sincerely) as subverters of truth and foes
of science. If they have won in the end, it is because, as has already
been pointed out, the method of universals confirmed prejudices and
sanctioned ideas that had gained currency irrespective of evidence for
them; while placing the initial and final weight upon the individual
case, stimulated painstaking inquiry into facts and examination of
principles. In the end, loss of eternal truths was more than compensated
for in the accession of quotidian facts. The loss of the system of
superior and fixed definitions and kinds was more than made up for by
the growing system of hypotheses and laws used in classifying facts.
After all, then, we are only pleading for the adoption in moral
reflection of the logic that has been proved to make for security,
stringency and fertility in passing judgments upon physical phenomena.
And the reason is the same. The old method in spite of its nominal and
esthetic worship of reason discouraged reason, because it hindered the
operation of scrupulous and unremitting inquiry.
More definitely, the transfer of the burden of the moral life from
following rules or pursuing fixed ends over to the detection of the ills
that need remedy in a special case and the formation of plans and
methods for dealing with them, eliminates the causes which have kept
moral theory controversial, and which have also kept it remote from
helpful contact with the exigencies of practice. The theory of fixed
ends inevitably leads thought into the bog of disputes that cannot be
settled. If there is one _summum bonum_, one supreme end, what is it? To
consider this problem is to place ourselves in the midst of
controversies that are as acute now as they were two thousand years ago.
Suppose we take a seemingly more empirical view, and say that while
there is not a single end, there also are not as many as there are
specific situations that require amelioration; but there are a number of
such natural goods as health, wealth, honor or good name, friendship,
esthetic appreciation, learning and such moral goods as justice,
temperance, benevolence, etc. What or who is to decide the right of way
when these ends conflict with one another, as they are sure to do? Shall
we resort to the method that once brought such disrepute upon the whole
business of ethics: Casuistry? Or shall we have recourse to what Bentham
well called the _ipse dixit_ method: the arbitrary preference of this or
that person for this or that end? Or shall we be forced to arrange them
all in an order of degrees from the highest good down to the least
precious? Again we find ourselves in the middle of unreconciled disputes
with no indication of the way out.
Meantime, the special moral perplexities where the aid of intelligence
is required go unenlightened. We cannot seek or attain health, wealth,
learning, justice or kindness in general. Action is always specific,
concrete, individualized, unique. And consequently judgments as to acts
to be performed must be similarly specific. To say that a man seeks
health or justice is only to say that he seeks to live healthily or
justly. These things, like truth, are adverbial. They are modifiers of
action in special cases. How to live healthily or justly is a matter
which differs with every person. It varies with his past experience, his
opportunities, his temperamental and acquired weaknesses and abilities.
Not man in general but a particular man suffering from some particular
disability aims to live healthily, and consequently health cannot mean
for him exactly what it means for any other mortal. Healthy living is
not something to be attained by itself apart from other ways of living.
A man needs to be healthy _in_ his life, not apart from it, and what
does life mean except the aggregate of his pursuits and activities? A
man who aims at health as a distinct end becomes a valetudinarian, or a
fanatic, or a mechanical performer of exercises, or an athlete so
one-sided that his pursuit of bodily development injures his heart. When
the endeavor to realize a so-called end does not temper and color all
other activities, life is portioned out into strips and fractions.
Certain acts and times are devoted to getting health, others to
cultivating religion, others to seeking learning, to being a good
citizen, a devotee of fine art and so on. This is the only logical
alternative to subordinating all aims to the accomplishment of one
alone--fanaticism. This is out of fashion at present, but who can say
how much of distraction and dissipation in life, and how much of its
hard and narrow rigidity is the outcome of men's failure to realize that
each situation has its own unique end and that the whole personality
should be concerned with it? Surely, once more, what a man needs is to
live healthily, and this result so affects all the activities of his
life that it cannot be set up as a separate and independent good.
Nevertheless the general notions of health, disease, justice, artistic
culture are of great importance: Not, however, because this or that case
may be brought exhaustively under a single head and its specific traits
shut out, but because generalized science provides a man as physician
and artist and citizen, with questions to ask, investigations to make,
and enables him to understand the meaning of what he sees. Just in the
degree in which a physician is an artist in his work he uses his
science, no matter how extensive and accurate, to furnish him with tools
of inquiry into the individual case, and with methods of forecasting a
method of dealing with it. Just in the degree in which, no matter how
great his learning, he subordinates the individual case to some
classification of diseases and some generic rule of treatment, he sinks
to the level of the routine mechanic. His intelligence and his action
become rigid, dogmatic, instead of free and flexible.
_Moral_ goods and ends exist only when something has to be done. The
fact that something has to be done proves that there are deficiencies,
evils in the existent situation. This ill is just the specific ill that
it is. It never is an exact duplicate of anything else. Consequently the
good of the situation has to be discovered, projected and attained on
the basis of the exact defect and trouble to be rectified. It cannot
intelligently be injected into the situation from without. Yet it is the
part of wisdom to compare different cases, to gather together the ills
from which humanity suffers, and to generalize the corresponding goods
into classes. Health, wealth, industry, temperance, amiability,
courtesy, learning, esthetic capacity, initiative, courage, patience,
enterprise, thoroughness and a multitude of other generalized ends are
acknowledged as goods. But the _value_ of this systematization is
intellectual or analytic. Classifications _suggest_ possible traits to
be on the lookout for in studying a particular case; they suggest
methods of action to be tried in removing the inferred causes of ill.
They are tools of insight; their value is in promoting an individualized
response in the individual situation.
Morals is not a catalogue of acts nor a set of rules to be applied like
drugstore prescriptions or cook-book recipes. The need in morals is for
specific methods of inquiry and of contrivance: Methods of inquiry to
locate difficulties and evils; methods of contrivance to form plans to
be used as working hypotheses in dealing with them. And the pragmatic
import of the logic of individualized situations, each having its own
irreplaceable good and principle, is to transfer the attention of theory
from preoccupation with general conceptions to the problem of developing
effective methods of inquiry.
Two ethical consequences of great moment should be remarked. The belief
in fixed values has bred a division of ends into intrinsic and
instrumental, of those that are really worth while in themselves and
those that are of importance only as means to intrinsic goods. Indeed,
it is often thought to be the very beginning of wisdom, of moral
discrimination, to make this distinction. Dialectically, the distinction
is interesting and seems harmless. But carried into practice it has an
import that is tragic. Historically, it has been the source and
justification of a hard and fast difference between ideal goods on one
side and material goods on the other. At present those who would be
liberal conceive intrinsic goods as esthetic in nature rather than as
exclusively religious or as intellectually contemplative. But the effect
is the same. So-called intrinsic goods, whether religious or esthetic,
are divorced from those interests of daily life which because of their
constancy and urgency form the preoccupation of the great mass.
Aristotle used this distinction to declare that slaves and the working
class though they are necessary _for_ the state--the commonweal--are not
constituents _of_ it. That which is regarded as _merely_ instrumental
must approach drudgery; it cannot command either intellectual, artistic
or moral attention and respect. Anything becomes _unworthy_ whenever it
is thought of as intrinsically lacking worth. So men of "ideal"
interests have chosen for the most part the way of neglect and escape.
The urgency and pressure of "lower" ends have been covered up by polite
conventions. Or, they have been relegated to a baser class of mortals in
order that the few might be free to attend to the goods that are really
or intrinsically worth while. This withdrawal, in the name of higher
ends, has left, for mankind at large and especially for energetic
"practical" people the lower activities in complete command.
No one can possibly estimate how much of the obnoxious materialism and
brutality of our economic life is due to the fact that economic ends
have been regarded as _merely_ instrumental. When they are recognized to
be as intrinsic and final in their place as any others, then it will be
seen that they are capable of idealization, and that if life is to be
worth while, they must acquire ideal and intrinsic value. Esthetic,
religious and other "ideal" ends are now thin and meagre or else idle
and luxurious because of the separation from "instrumental" or economic
ends. Only in connection with the latter can they be woven into the
texture of daily life and made substantial and pervasive. The vanity and
irresponsibility of values that are merely final and not also in turn
means to the enrichment of other occupations of life ought to be
obvious. But now the doctrine of "higher" ends gives aid, comfort and
support to every socially isolated and socially irresponsible scholar,
specialist, esthete and religionist. It protects the vanity and
irresponsibility of his calling from observation by others and by
himself. The moral deficiency of the calling is transformed into a cause
of admiration and gratulation.
The other generic change lies in doing away once for all with the
traditional distinction between moral goods, like the virtues, and
natural goods like health, economic security, art, science and the like.
The point of view under discussion is not the only one which has
deplored this rigid distinction and endeavored to abolish it. Some
schools have even gone so far as to regard moral excellencies, qualities
of character as of value only because they promote natural goods. But
the experimental logic when carried into morals makes every quality that
is judged to be good according as it contributes to amelioration of
existing ills. And in so doing, it enforces the moral meaning of
natural science. When all is said and done in criticism of present
social deficiencies, one may well wonder whether the root difficulty
does not lie in the separation of natural and moral science. When
physics, chemistry, biology, medicine, contribute to the detection of
concrete human woes and to the development of plans for remedying them
and relieving the human estate, they become moral; they become part of
the apparatus of moral inquiry or science. The latter then loses its
peculiar flavor of the didactic and pedantic; its ultra-moralistic and
hortatory tone. It loses its thinness and shrillness as well as its
vagueness. It gains agencies that are efficacious. But the gain is not
confined to the side of moral science. Natural science loses its divorce
from humanity; it becomes itself humanistic in quality. It is something
to be pursued not in a technical and specialized way for what is called
truth for its own sake, but with the sense of its social bearing, its
intellectual indispensableness. It is technical only in the sense that
it provides the technique of social and moral engineering.
When the consciousness of science is fully impregnated with the
consciousness of human value, the greatest dualism which now weighs
humanity down, the split between the material, the mechanical, the
scientific and the moral and ideal will be destroyed. Human forces that
now waver because of this division will be unified and reinforced. As
long as ends are not thought of as individualized according to specific
needs and opportunities, the mind will be content with abstractions, and
the adequate stimulus to the moral or social use of natural science and
historical data will be lacking. But when attention is concentrated upon
the diversified concretes, recourse to all intellectual materials needed
to clear up the special cases will be imperative. At the same time that
morals are made to focus in intelligence, things intellectual are
moralized. The vexatious and wasteful conflict between naturalism and
humanism is terminated.
These general considerations may be amplified. First: Inquiry, discovery
take the same place in morals that they have come to occupy in sciences
of nature. Validation, demonstration become experimental, a matter of
consequences. Reason, always an honorific term in ethics, becomes
actualized in the methods by which the needs and conditions, the
obstacles and resources, of situations are scrutinized in detail, and
intelligent plans of improvement are worked out. Remote and abstract
generalities promote jumping at conclusions, "anticipations of nature."
Bad consequences are then deplored as due to natural perversity and
untoward fate. But shifting the issue to analysis of a specific
situation makes inquiry obligatory and alert observation of consequences
imperative. No past decision nor old principle can ever be wholly
relied upon to justify a course of action. No amount of pains taken in
forming a purpose in a definite case is final; the consequences of its
adoption must be carefully noted, and a purpose held only as a working
hypothesis until results confirm its rightness. Mistakes are no longer
either mere unavoidable accidents to be mourned or moral sins to be
expiated and forgiven. They are lessons in wrong methods of using
intelligence and instructions as to a better course in the future. They
are indications of the need of revision, development, readjustment. Ends
grow, standards of judgment are improved. Man is under just as much
obligation to develop his most advanced standards and ideals as to use
conscientiously those which he already possesses. Moral life is
protected from falling into formalism and rigid repetition. It is
rendered flexible, vital, growing.
In the second place, every case where moral action is required becomes
of equal moral importance and urgency with every other. If the need and
deficiencies of a specific situation indicate improvement of health as
the end and good, then for that situation health is the ultimate and
supreme good. It is no means to something else. It is a final and
intrinsic value. The same thing is true of improvement of economic
status, of making a living, of attending to business and family
demands--all of the things which under the sanction of fixed ends have
been rendered of secondary and merely instrumental value, and so
relatively base and unimportant. Anything that in a given situation is
an end and good at all is of equal worth, rank and dignity with every
other good of any other situation, and deserves the same intelligent
attention.
We note thirdly the effect in destroying the roots of Phariseeism. We
are so accustomed to thinking of this as deliberate hypocrisy that we
overlook its intellectual premises. The conception which looks for the
end of action within the circumstances of the actual situation will not
have the same measure of judgment for all cases. When one factor of the
situation is a person of trained mind and large resources, more will be
expected than with a person of backward mind and uncultured experience.
The absurdity of applying the same standard of moral judgment to savage
peoples that is used with civilized will be apparent. No individual or
group will be judged by whether they come up to or fall short of some
fixed result, but by the direction in which they are moving. The bad man
is the man who no matter how good he _has_ been is beginning to
deteriorate, to grow less good. The good man is the man who no matter
how morally unworthy he _has_ been is moving to become better. Such a
conception makes one severe in judging himself and humane in judging
others. It excludes that arrogance which always accompanies judgment
based on degree of approximation to fixed ends.
In the fourth place, the process of growth, of improvement and progress,
rather than the static outcome and result, becomes the significant
thing. Not health as an end fixed once and for all, but the needed
improvement in health--a continual process--is the end and good. The end
is no longer a terminus or limit to be reached. It is the active process
of transforming the existent situation. Not perfection as a final goal,
but the ever-enduring process of perfecting, maturing, refining is the
aim in living. Honesty, industry, temperance, justice, like health,
wealth and learning, are not goods to be possessed as they would be if
they expressed fixed ends to be attained. They are directions of change
in the quality of experience. Growth itself is the only moral "end."
Although the bearing of this idea upon the problem of evil and the
controversy between optimism and pessimism is too vast to be here
discussed, it may be worth while to touch upon it superficially. The
problem of evil ceases to be a theological and metaphysical one, and is
perceived to be the practical problem of reducing, alleviating, as far
as may be removing, the evils of life. Philosophy is no longer under
obligation to find ingenious methods for proving that evils are only
apparent, not real, or to elaborate schemes for explaining them away
or, worse yet, for justifying them. It assumes another obligation:--That
of contributing in however humble a way to methods that will assist us
in discovering the causes of humanity's ills. Pessimism is a paralyzing
doctrine. In declaring that the world is evil wholesale, it makes futile
all efforts to discover the remediable causes of specific evils and
thereby destroys at the root every attempt to make the world better and
happier. Wholesale optimism, which has been the consequence of the
attempt to explain evil away, is, however, equally an incubus.
After all, the optimism that says that the world is already the best
possible of all worlds might be regarded as the most cynical of
pessimisms. If this is the best possible, what would a world which was
fundamentally bad be like? Meliorism is the belief that the specific
conditions which exist at one moment, be they comparatively bad or
comparatively good, in any event may be bettered. It encourages
intelligence to study the positive means of good and the obstructions to
their realization, and to put forth endeavor for the improvement of
conditions. It arouses confidence and a reasonable hopefulness as
optimism does not. For the latter in declaring that good is already
realized in ultimate reality tends to make us gloss over the evils that
concretely exist. It becomes too readily the creed of those who live at
ease, in comfort, of those who have been successful in obtaining this
world's rewards. Too readily optimism makes the men who hold it callous
and blind to the sufferings of the less fortunate, or ready to find the
cause of troubles of others in their personal viciousness. It thus
co-operates with pessimism, in spite of the extreme nominal differences
between the two, in benumbing sympathetic insight and intelligent effort
in reform. It beckons men away from the world of relativity and change
into the calm of the absolute and eternal.
The import of many of these changes in moral attitude focusses in the
idea of happiness. Happiness has often been made the object of the
moralists' contempt. Yet the most ascetic moralist has usually restored
the idea of happiness under some other name, such as bliss. Goodness
without happiness, valor and virtue without satisfaction, ends without
conscious enjoyment--these things are as intolerable practically as they
are self-contradictory in conception. Happiness is not, however, a bare
possession; it is not a fixed attainment. Such a happiness is either the
unworthy selfishness which moralists have so bitterly condemned, or it
is, even if labelled bliss, an insipid tedium, a millennium of ease in
relief from all struggle and labor. It could satisfy only the most
delicate of molly-coddles. Happiness is found only in success; but
success means succeeding, getting forward, moving in advance. It is an
active process, not a passive outcome. Accordingly it includes the
overcoming of obstacles, the elimination of sources of defect and ill.
Esthetic sensitiveness and enjoyment are a large constituent in any
worthy happiness. But the esthetic appreciation which is totally
separated from renewal of spirit, from re-creation of mind and
purification of emotion is a weak and sickly thing, destined to speedy
death from starvation. That the renewal and re-creation come
unconsciously not by set intention but makes them the more genuine.
Upon the whole, utilitarianism has marked the best in the transition
from the classic theory of ends and goods to that which is now possible.
It had definite merits. It insisted upon getting away from vague
generalities, and down to the specific and concrete. It subordinated law
to human achievement instead of subordinating humanity to external law.
It taught that institutions are made for man and not man for
institutions; it actively promoted all issues of reform. It made moral
good natural, humane, in touch with the natural goods of life. It
opposed unearthly and other worldly morality. Above all, it acclimatized
in human imagination the idea of social welfare as a supreme test. But
it was still profoundly affected in fundamental points by old ways of
thinking. It never questioned the idea of a fixed, final and supreme
end. It only questioned the current notions as to the nature of this
end; and then inserted pleasure and the greatest possible aggregate of
pleasures in the position of the fixed end.
Such a point of view treats concrete activities and specific interests
not as worth while in themselves, or as constituents of happiness, but
as mere external means to getting pleasures. The upholders of the old
tradition could therefore easily accuse utilitarianism of making not
only virtue but art, poetry, religion and the state into mere servile
means of attaining sensuous enjoyments. Since pleasure was an outcome, a
result valuable on its own account independently of the active processes
that achieve it, happiness was a thing to be possessed and held onto.
The acquisitive instincts of man were exaggerated at the expense of the
creative. Production was of importance not because of the intrinsic
worth of invention and reshaping the world, but because its external
results feed pleasure. Like every theory that sets up fixed and final
aims, in making the end passive and possessive, it made all active
operations _mere_ tools. Labor was an unavoidable evil to be minimized.
Security in possession was the chief thing practically. Material comfort
and ease were magnified in contrast with the pains and risk of
experimental creation.
These deficiencies, under certain conceivable conditions, might have
remained merely theoretical. But the disposition of the times and the
interests of those who propagated the utilitarian ideas, endowed them
with power for social harm. In spite of the power of the new ideas in
attacking old social abuses, there were elements in the teaching which
operated or protected to sanction new social abuses. The reforming zeal
was shown in criticism of the evils inherited from the class system of
feudalism, evils economic, legal and political. But the new economic
order of capitalism that was superseding feudalism brought its own
social evils with it, and some of these ills utilitarianism tended to
cover up or defend. The emphasis upon acquisition and possession of
enjoyments took on an untoward color in connection with the contemporary
enormous desire for wealth and the enjoyments it makes possible.
If utilitarianism did not actively promote the new economic materialism,
it had no means of combating it. Its general spirit of subordinating
productive activity to the bare product was indirectly favorable to the
cause of an unadorned commercialism. In spite of its interest in a
thoroughly social aim, utilitarianism fostered a new class interest,
that of the capitalistic property-owning interests, provided only
property was obtained through free competition and not by governmental
favor. The stress that Bentham put on security tended to consecrate the
legal institution of private property provided only certain legal abuses
in connection with its acquisition and transfer were abolished. _Beati
possidentes_--provided possessions had been obtained in accord with the
rules of the competitive game--without, that is, extraneous favors from
government. Thus utilitarianism gave intellectual confirmation to all
those tendencies which make "business" not a means of social service and
an opportunity for personal growth in creative power but a way of
accumulating the means of private enjoyments. Utilitarian ethics thus
afford a remarkable example of the need of philosophic reconstruction
which these lectures have been presenting. Up to a certain point, it
reflected the meaning of modern thought and aspirations. But it was
still tied down by fundamental ideas of that very order which it thought
it had completely left behind: The idea of a fixed and single end lying
beyond the diversity of human needs and acts rendered utilitarianism
incapable of being an adequate representative of the modern spirit. It
has to be reconstructed through emancipation from its inherited
elements.
If a few words are added upon the topic of education, it is only for the
sake of suggesting that the educative process is all one with the moral
process, since the latter is a continuous passage of experience from
worse to better. Education has been traditionally thought of as
preparation: as learning, acquiring certain things because they will
later be useful. The end is remote, and education is getting ready, is a
preliminary to something more important to happen later on. Childhood
is only a preparation for adult life, and adult life for another life.
Always the future, not the present, has been the significant thing in
education: Acquisition of knowledge and skill for future use and
enjoyment; formation of habits required later in life in business, good
citizenship and pursuit of science. Education is thought of also as
something needed by some human beings merely because of their dependence
upon others. We are born ignorant, unversed, unskilled, immature, and
consequently in a state of social dependence. Instruction, training,
moral discipline are processes by which the mature, the adult, gradually
raise the helpless to the point where they can look out for themselves.
The business of childhood is to grow into the independence of adulthood
by means of the guidance of those who have already attained it. Thus the
process of education as the main business of life ends when the young
have arrived at emancipation from social dependence.
These two ideas, generally assumed but rarely explicitly reasoned out,
contravene the conception that growing, or the continuous reconstruction
of experience, is the only end. If at whatever period we choose to take
a person, he is still in process of growth, then education is not, save
as a by-product, a preparation for something coming later. Getting from
the present the degree and kind of growth there is in it is education.
This is a constant function, independent of age. The best thing that can
be said about any special process of education, like that of the formal
school period, is that it renders its subject capable of further
education: more sensitive to conditions of growth and more able to take
advantage of them. Acquisition of skill, possession of knowledge,
attainment of culture are not ends: they are marks of growth and means
to its continuing.
The contrast usually assumed between the period of education as one of
social dependence and of maturity as one of social independence does
harm. We repeat over and over that man is a social animal, and then
confine the significance of this statement to the sphere in which
sociality usually seems least evident, politics. The heart of the
sociality of man is in education. The idea of education as preparation
and of adulthood as a fixed limit of growth are two sides of the same
obnoxious untruth. If the moral business of the adult as well as the
young is a growing and developing experience, then the instruction that
comes from social dependencies and interdependencies are as important
for the adult as for the child. Moral independence for the adult means
arrest of growth, isolation means induration. We exaggerate the
intellectual dependence of childhood so that children are too much kept
in leading strings, and then we exaggerate the independence of adult
life from intimacy of contacts and communication with others. When the
identity of the moral process with the processes of specific growth is
realized, the more conscious and formal education of childhood will be
seen to be the most economical and efficient means of social advance and
reorganization, and it will also be evident that the test of all the
institutions of adult life is their effect in furthering continued
education. Government, business, art, religion, all social institutions
have a meaning, a purpose. That purpose is to set free and to develop
the capacities of human individuals without respect to race, sex, class
or economic status. And this is all one with saying that the test of
their value is the extent to which they educate every individual into
the full stature of his possibility. Democracy has many meanings, but if
it has a moral meaning, it is found in resolving that the supreme test
of all political institutions and industrial arrangements shall be the
contribution they make to the all-around growth of every member of
society.