man, the language-symbols of the early Aryans, and the multiform and complicated tongues of modern Europe, all so seemingly diverse to the ear and to the eye, have been the foundation for the sure laws of comparative philology that the labors and insight of Bopp and Grimm and Verner have built upon them. All these, and the many triumphs like them, are victories of insight; each marks a new stage in the conquering progress of the reason, by which it finds itself in every part and phase of the cosmos and its life. I regard this insight as to self-activity and the primacy of reflective thought as the profoundest that philosophy has to offer; and, instead of being urged, as in centuries past, in antagonism to the teachings of science, it is now becoming the joint conclusion of philosophy and science together. It pulsates, too, in the world's grandest poetry and most exquisite art. It is the very soul of the verse of Homer and of Dante, of Shakespeare and of Goethe. It makes the marble of Phidias glow with life, and it guides the hand of Raphael and Michael Angelo as they trace their wondrous figures with the brush. It gives immortality to the most beautiful of temples, the Parthenon, that friend to man, to whom thou sayest, It is also the inspiration of that superb medieval architecture that bears the name of the conquerer of Rome, which has given to Northern Europe its grandest monuments to the religious aspiration and devotion of the Middle Ages. What, then, does this insight signify, and what is its bearing upon our educational ideals? Obviously the possession of an insight such as this, wrested from nature by the hand of science and from history by that of philosophy, must serve in many ways to guide us in estimating the importance of human institutions and educational instruments. We cannot accept either of these without question from the hands of a tradition to which our modern philosophy and our modern science were wholly unknown; nor can we blindly follow those believ ers in a crude psychology who would present us with so many mental faculties to be trained, each by its appropriate formal exercise, as if they were sticks of wood to be shaped and reduced to symmetry and order. Mental life, as Wundt so forcibly says,* "does not consist in the connection of unalterable objects and varying conditions. In all its phases it is process; an active, not a passive, existence; development, not stagnation." Herein is the mental life true to nature. Like nature, it is not fixed, but ever changing. This unceasing Lectures on Human and Animal Psychology (New York, 1894), p. 454. change, necessary to both growth and development, gives to life its reality and its pathos. It gives also to education its unending character, and the clew to its wisest processes. The question that I am asking, What knowledge is of most worth? is a very old one, and the answers to it that have been handed down through the centuries are many and various. It is a question that each age must put to itself, and answer from the standpoint of its deepest and widest knowledge. The wisest philosophers have always seen, more or less clearly, the far-reaching character of the question and the great importance of the answer. Socrates and Plato, Augustine and Aquinas, were under no illusions as to it; but often in later years the deeper questions relating to educational values have been either lost sight of entirely or very superficially dealt with. Bacon clothes in attractive axiomatic form some very crude judgments as to the relative worth of studies. Rousseau risks his reputation for sobriety of judgment in outlining an educational program. Herbert Spencer turns aside for a moment from his life-work to apotheosize science in education, although science is, by his own definition, only partially unified knowledge. Whewell exalts mathematics in language only less extravagant than that in which Sir William Hamilton decries it. In similar fashion, others, holding a brief for some particular phase or department of knowledge, have come forward crying, Eureka! and proclaiming that the value of all studies must be measured in terms of their newly-discovered standard. The very latest cry is that studies and intellectual exercises are valuable in proportion as they stimulate enlarged brain areas; thus making the appreciation of Shakespeare, of Beethoven, and of Leonardo da Vinci solely a function of the circulation of the blood. But to sciolists of this type philosophy and science can now make common answer. If it be true that spirit and reason rule the universe, then the highest and most enduring knowledge is of the things of the spirit. This subtle sense of the beautiful and the sublime which accompanies spiritual insight, and is part of it, is the highest achievement of which humanity is capable. This sense is typified, in various forms, in the verse of Dante and the prose outpourings of Thomas á Kempis, in the Sistine Madonna of Raphael, and in Mozart's "Requiem." To develop this sense in education is the task of art and literature, to interpret it is the work of philosophy, and to nourish it the function of religion. Because it most fully represents the higher nature of man, it is man's highest possession, and those studies that directly appeal to it and instruct it are beyond compare the most valuable. This has been eloquently and beautifully illustrated by Brother Azarias, that profound scholar who was taken from us all too soon. "Take a Raphael or a Murillo," he says. "We *Phases of Thought and Criticism" (New York, 1892), pp. 57, 58. * gaze upon the painted canvas till its beauty has entered our soul. The splendor of the beauty lights up within us depths unrevealed, and far down in our inner consciousness we discover something that responds to the beauty on which we have been gazing. It is as though a former friend revealed himself to us. There is here a recognition. The more careful has been our sense-culture, the more delicately have our feelings been attuned to respond to a thing of beauty and find in it a joy forever, all the sooner and the more intensely do we experience this recognition. And therewith comes a vague yearning, a longing as for something. What does it all mean? The recognition is of the ideal." Toward the full recognition and appreciation of this insight into the great works of the Spirit, whether recorded in literature, in art, or in institutional life, higher education should bend all its energies. The study of philosophy itself, or the truly philosophic study of any department of knowledge-however remote its beginnings may seem to be-will accomplish this end. The ways of approach to this goal are as many as there are human interests, for they are all bound together in the bonds of a common origin and a common purpose. The attainment of it is true culture, as Mr. Matthew Arnold has defined it,* "the acquainting ourselves with the best that has been known and said in the world, and thus with the history of the human spirit." We now come in sight of the element of truth and permanence in that humanism which Petrarch and Erasmus spread over Europe with such high hopes and excellent intentions; but which Sturm, the Strassburg schoolmaster, reduced to the dead, mechanical forms and the crude verbalism that bound the schools in fetters for centuries. Of Humanism itself we may say, as Mr. Pater says of the Renaissance of the fifteenth century, that "it was great rather by what it designed than by what it achieved. Much which it aspired to do, and did but imperfectly or mistakenly, was accomplished in what is called the éclairissement of the eighteenth century or in our own generation; and what really belongs to the revival of the fifteenth century is but the leading instinct, the curiosity, the initiatory idea." Many of the representative humanists were broad-minded men whose sympathies were with learning of every kind. Erasmus himself writes with enthusiasm of other branches of knowledge than literature. "Learning," he says, "is springing up all around out of the soillanguages, physics, mathematics, each department thriving. Even theology is showing signs of improvement." But unfortunately this broad sympathy with every field of knowledge was not yet widespread. The wonders and splendor of nature that had brought into Preface to "Literature and Dogma" (New York, 1889), p. xi. Pater, "The Renaissance" (New York, 1888), p. 34. Froude, "Life and Letters of Erasmus" (New York, 1894), p. 186. existence the earliest religions and the earliest philosophies were now feared and despised as the basis of paganism; and on wholly false grounds a controversy was precipitated as to the relative worth of literature and of science that in one form or another has continued down to our own day. The bitterness with which the controversy has been carried on, and the extreme positions assumed by the partisans of the one side or the other, have concealed from view the truth that we are now able to perceive clearly-the truth that the indwelling Reason by whom all things are made is as truly present, though in a different order of manifestation, in the world of nature as in the world of spirit. One side of this truth was expressed by Schelling when he taught that nature is the embryonic life of spirit, and by Froebel when he wrote,* "The spirit of God rests in nature, lives and reigns in nature, is expressed in nature, is communicated by nature, is developed and cultivated in nature." The controversy as to the educational value of science, so far, at least, as it concerns educational standards and ideals, is, then, an illusory one. It is a mimic war, with words alone as weapons, that is fought either to expel nature from education or to subordinate all else in education to it. We should rather say, in the stately verse of Milton, Accuse not Nature; she hath done her part; And that part is surely to study nature joyfully, earnestly, reverently, as a mighty manifestation of the power and grandeur of the same Spirit that finds expression in human achievement. We must enlarge, then, our conception of the humanities, for humanity is broader and deeper than we have hitherto suspected. It touches the universe at many more points than one; and, properly interpreted, the study of nature may be classed among the humanities as truly as the study of language itself. This conclusion, which would welcome science with open arms into the school and utilize its opportunities and advantages at every stage of education, does not mean that all studies are of equal educational value or that they are mutually and indifferently interchangeable, as are the parts of some machines. It means rather that the study of nature is entitled to recognition on grounds similar to those put forward for the study of literature, of art, and of history. But among themselves these divisions of knowledge fall into an order of excellence as educational material that is determined by their respective relations to the development of the reflective reason. The application of this test must inevitably lead us, while honoring science and insisting upon its study, to place above it the study of *"Education of Man" tr. by W. N. Hailmann, New York, 1888), p. 154. history, of literature, of art, and of institutional life. But these studies may not for a moment be carried on without the study of nature or in neglect of it. They are all humanities in the truest sense, and it is a false philosophy of education that would cut us off from any one of them or that would deny the common ground on which they rest. In every field of knowledge which we are studying is some law or phrase of energy, and the original as well as the highest energy is Will. In the world of nature it is exhibited in one series of forms that produce the results known to us as chemical, physical, biological; in the history of mankind, it is manifested in the forms of feelings, thoughts, deeds, institutions. Because the elements of self-consciousness and reflection are present in the latter series and absent in the former, it is to these and the knowledge of them that we must accord the first place in any table of educational values. But education, as Mr. Froude has reminded us,* has two aspects. "On one side it is the cultivation of man's reason, the development of his spiritual nature. It elevates him above the pressure of material interests. It makes him superior to the pleasures and pains of a world which is but his temporary home, in filling his mind with higher subjects than the occupations of life would themselves provide him with." It is this aspect of education that I have been considering, for it is from this aspect that we derive our inspiration and our ideals. "But," continues Mr. Froude, "a life of speculation to the multitude would be a life of idleness and uselessness. They have to maintain themselves in industrious independence in a world in which it has been said there are but three possible modes of existence-begging, stealing, and working; and education means also the equipping a man with means to earn his own living." It is this latter and very practical aspect of education that causes us to feel at times the full force of the question of educational values. Immediate utility makes demands upon the school which it is unable wholly to neglect. If the school is to be the training ground for citizenship, its products must be usefully and soundly equipped as well as well disciplined and well informed. An educated proletariat-to use the forcible paradox of Bismarck-is a continual source of disturbance and danger to any nation. Acting upon this conviction the great modern democracies-and the time seems to have come when a democracy may be defined as a government, of any form, in which public opinion habitually rules-are everywhere having a care that provision be made for the practical, or immediately useful, in education. This is as it should be, but it exposes the school to a new series of dangers against which it must guard. Utility is a term that may be given either a very broad or a very narrow mean "Short Studies on Great Subjects" (New York, 1872), II; p. 257. |