The Reform of Education

by Giovanni Gentile

FOOTNOTES:

[3]

“Forest savage, rough, and stern.”—Dante, Inferno, i. 5.

[4]

Many speak of the universal and say that they conceive this universal as concrete and immanent. Few, however, effectively fix their thought on that universality which alone is such, which alone can be such, which has nothing outside of itself, not even the particular, and which is ideal on condition that the idea to which it belongs be reality itself in all its determinateness. And so in speaking of “universal” and of “individual” we must remember that the latter cannot be anything without being the former, since indeed the universal is not a merely abstract idea, but reality, the reality of thought. Therefore I have here used the expression “really universal”.—G. G.

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CHAPTER VII
THE BIAS OF REALISM

Educators of the modern school are bent on transforming its methods and institutions on the basis of the conception set forth in the previous chapters. The subtle discussions required to make this conception clear must have convinced the reader that this work of educational reform could only succeed if preceded by such philosophical doctrines as have recently been evolved in Italy and are now becoming the accepted faith of the newer generation. To this new belief the school must be converted, if it is ever going to conquer that freedom which has been its constant aspiration, and which seems to be an indispensable condition for its further growth.

The faith of the modern man cleaves to a life conceived and directed idealistically. He believes that life—true life—is man’s free creation; that in it, therefore, human aims should gain an ever fuller realisation; and that these aims, these ends will not be attained unless thought, which is man’s specific force, extends its sway so as to embrace nature, penetrate it, and resolve it into its own substance. He believes that nature, thus turned into an instrument of thought, 140 yields readily to its will, not being per se opposed or repugnant to the life and activity of the spirit, but rather homogeneous and identical with it. He believes, moreover, that this sway can only be obtained by amplifying, strengthening, and constantly potentiating our human energy, which means thinking, knowing, self-realising; and that self-realisation is not possible unless it is free, unless it be rescued from the prejudice of dependence upon external principles, and unless it affirms itself as absolute infinite activity. This is the Kingdom of Man prophesied at the dawn of modern thought. This is the work which science, art, religion, not less than political revolutions and social reforms, have gradually been accomplishing and perfecting in the last three hundred years. This new spiritual orientation has to a certain extent influenced teaching; and though without a general programme of substantial reforms, the ideal of education has been transformed along idealistic lines. This transformation, strange to say, has been effected in part by means of institutions which have arisen as a result of the recent development of industrial life and of the corresponding complexity in economic and social relations. These schools, because of their names, seem to be quite removed from the idealistic tendencies of modern civilisations. Whether they be called technical, business, or industrial schools, they seem to be and are in fact the result of a realistic conception of life. But such 141 realism, we must remember, is far from being opposed to our idealism, and should not be compared with the realism which we have objected to. We should rather consider it as the most effective demonstration of the idealistic trend of our times. For these institutions are founded on the theory that knowledge increases man’s power in the world by enabling him to overcome the obstacles by which nature, if ignored and unknown, would hinder the free development of civilisation in general, and of those individuals in particular in whom and through whom civilisation becomes actual.

Realism, on the other hand, as the opposite of the idealistic conception of life and culture, was shown to be based on a conception of reality which exists totally outside of human thought and of the civilisation which is produced by it,—of a reality existing per se in such a way that no end peculiar to man, no free human life, can be conceived which will have the power of bending this reality toward itself, of resolving it within itself. This realistic point of view is not different from the outlook of the primitive man who, awed by the might of nature, kneels submissively before its invisible power, which, he thinks, controls these forces. It is the accepted belief of the naïve and dreamy consciousness of child-like humanity; but it is none the less a conception which is opposed to the course constantly followed by civilisation. Its dangers must be made very clear and its menace removed from the path of its triumphant 142 enemy. To overcome this realistic point of view in the field of education is the duty of teachers, who must be in a position to recognise it, and to track it into whatever hiding places it may lurk. I intend therefore in this chapter to point out some of the most notable realistic prejudices which, though still tolerated by contemporary thought, ought to be definitely stamped out, if we are really convinced of the spiritual character of culture and of its essential attributes.

I shall here bring up again a consideration which I touched upon in the first chapter,—an idea which is the fundamental prejudice of the realistic theory of education in its antagonism to the profound exigencies of the free spiritual life which education should promote. I mean the idea of Science (with a capital S),—that Science which is imagined as towering over and above the men who toil and suffer, think and struggle in quest of its light and of its force; that Science which would be so beautiful, and majestic, and impressive, were it not for the fact that it does not exist. This Science is looked upon as infallible, without crises, without reverses, without vicissitudes of doctrines, without parties, and without nationality,—without history in short; for history is full of these baser occurrences; and men, without a single exception, even the greatest of scientists, even the lofty geniuses that have transformed or systematised knowledge, are all in some measure prone to err. The exceptions which 143 are adduced to contradict this statement are so few, so limited by restrictions and by hair-splitting distinctions, that we can hardly allow them; especially when we consider that even granting the infallible oracular character of some men’s utterances, the fact remains that his listeners must undergo the process of understanding him, and in so doing they may go astray. So that from superhuman unfailing verities, we slip back instantly to human fallibility. Infallible Science, then, is not known, cannot be known to mankind; for the simple reason that we who constitute it are subject to error, and being ourselves prone to fail, we expose science to the same danger. If it does exist somewhere it surely is not in this world in which we live, thinking, knowing, and—creating science.

This mythical science, unsullied and incorruptible, segregated from all possible intercourse with thought, ever soaring in the pure air of divine essences, is yet the mother of a numerous offspring, the parent of countless daughters as virginal and as infallible as the mother herself. These are the particular sciences, bearing various names, but all of them equally worthy of the distinction of the capital S in the eyes of their realistic worshippers.

This mythology is taught in the schools which too often are called, and without any figurative meaning, the shrines of learning. Conceived as divinely superlative, as something which, though revealed historically 144 by the successive discoveries of privileged minds, is none the less sharply distinct from the history of humanity, science descends into the school. There it manifests itself as human knowledge, and is communicated to the youthful minds eager to ascend to the heaven of truth. And so the school comes to be looked upon as a kind of temple, as the Church where the inspired Word of the Sacred Books is read and explained by those who have been chosen by the Divinity to act as its interpreters, as preachers of the Faith. With this religious conception of the school we connect the “mission” of the educator, whose task, when not ridiculed and lampooned by the same scoffers who at all times have jeered at the teachers of divinity, has been surrounded by a glamour of religiosity. We see them encircled by that halo of distant respect which we naturally connect with those who, acting as intermediaries between us and the deity, are themselves transfigured and deified.

The school then is looked upon as a temple in which the pupil receives his spiritual bread. But not so the home which the boy must leave, that he may satisfy his mysteriously innate craving for knowledge. Not so the street, where the small boys gather, drawn together by the irresistible need of pastime, by the sweet desire of frolicsome companionship, by the unconscious yearning after spiritual communion with the world which there makes its way into the child’s mind 145 far off from the classroom, and lavishes upon it its own light, its portion of thought, its share of new experiences, and the joy of an ever renewed outpouring of sympathetic spirituality.

The custodian of this temple, the schoolmaster, is regarded as a divine, as the minister who imparts the consecrated elements of Science, who leads the pupil to the “panem angelorum,” as Dante calls it. But our fathers and mothers are not so regarded,—they who were the first custodians of a greater temple, the world, to whose marvels they gradually initiated our growing minds; they who by the use of speech taught us, without being aware of it, infinitely more than the best of schools will ever be able to teach us in the future; not our elder brothers to whom we always looked up in emulation, and from whom, even more than from our parents, we learned the thoughts and the words suited to our needs; not our grandmother, who long before our eager phantasy might roam through the printed pages, gently led us into Fairyland, and there, in the enchantments of a magic world, disclosed to us that humanity which books and teachers later in life were to re-evoke for us. No! There are no altars to Science except in the Schoolhouse, and none but educators may minister to its cult.

This mythological lore is not merely a harmless form of imagery, against which it might be pedantic to rebel. It is a real superstition, which has its roots 146 deep down in the personality of the educator; it adheres parasitically to culture, climbs over its sturdy trunk, drains its sap, weakens it, deadens it. For when we have stripped this conception of education of its mythological exterior, there yet remains a clearly religious and realistic thought, which is professed with firm adhesion of the mind and complete devotion of the soul, as the inviolable norm of the whole activity which pertains to the object of this norm itself. Let us, for example, consider what is presupposed by the doctrine of methods, the so-called methodology, which is an important part of didactics, and a very considerable section in the whole field of pedagogics. The doctrine of methods comprises a general treatment, which corresponds to what we called the Mother-Science, and a particular treatment for the individual sciences. There is methodology of learning in general, and there are methodics for the several disciplines, or at least for each group of disciplines, into which learning is divided and subdivided in accordance with the logical processes adopted in any particular case, or in accordance with the objects of these disciplines. To each method of knowing, considered in itself, corresponds a teaching method, so that there is one general didactic method, and many special ones by which the general method is to be applied.

But what is the method of a science if not the logical scheme or the form of a certain scientific knowledge? 147 And, on the other hand, what can be known as to the form of anything, unless we have the thing itself before us in its form and with its contents? In order to define the form of a science, and say, for example, that it is deductive in mathematics and inductive in chemistry, we must first presuppose the existence of these sciences themselves. But in them form is never anything indifferent to content; it is the form of that content. This is made clear if we consider the methodologies which logicians presume to define in the abstract, and with no regard to the determined content of the corresponding sciences. We notice that they are able to present a successful exposition and formulation only by fixing the meaning of each formula by the use of examples, thereby passing from the abstract to the concrete, and showing the method to be within the concrete knowing out of which logic presumes to extract it. In the same way every philosophical system has its method; but whenever criticism has endeavoured to fix abstractly the method of a system, in order then to show how it has been applied in the construction of the system itself, it has been forced in every case to admit that the method already contained the system within itself, that it was the system itself. So that it would have no value whatsoever, it could not even be grasped by thought in its particular determinateness, if it were not presented as the natural form of that precise thought.

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No harmful results would follow, if this assumption merely implied the accepting of science and methods as existing by themselves previous to the learning of science by means of its respective method; if it resulted merely in the failure to recognise the impossibility of conceiving science and methods as existing outside of the human mind where they actually do live and exist. If this were all, we should merely take notice of it as a speculative error which affected only the solution of the particular problem in which it appeared. But in the life of thought, where everything is united and connected in an organic system, every point of which is in relation to every other point, there is no error limited to a single problem; its effects are felt in the whole system, and they react on thought as a whole. And since thought is activity itself,—life’s drama, as we called it,—every error infects the entire life. Let us then consider the consequences of this realistic conception of methodology.

Science, we are told, in its abstract objectivity is one, immutable, unaltered: it is removed from the danger of error and of human fallibility, and protected from the alternate succession of ignorance and discovery; incapable therefore of progressing and of developing because it was complete from the very beginning, and is eternally perfect. But such a Science is quite different from the one which grows in the life of culture, and is the free formation of the human personality. 149 This one is ever changing, always admitting all possible transformations, different from individual to individual, and different also in the mind of the same person. It lives only on condition that it never fix itself, that it never crystallise, that it place no limits to its development; it continues to be in virtue of its power to grow, to modify itself, to integrate itself and incessantly to develop. Science as culture, as personality, is free, perennially becoming, stirred by ethical impulses, multiple, varied. If we fix the method, it indicates that we are dealing with science realistically considered as pre-existing, and we can therefore have only one sole, definite, immutable method,—one for everybody, and devoid of freedom, not susceptible of development, refractory to all moral evaluation. We should have then a rigid law of the spirit, as compelling as the laws of nature. But by obedience to such a principle, the spirit could not affirm itself: such compliance is surrender and abdication, not the realisation of some good. The most that could be said of it is that perhaps it prevents or annuls an evil which alienates us from a primitive good which is not ours, and not being ours cannot truly be good.

A fixed method forces the spirit into this hopeless dilemma: (1) Either refuse to submit, and thus save life at the cost of all that makes life worth living—propter vitam vivendi perdere causas (which evidently would be the case, if we consider that the spirit lives 150 solely on condition that it recognise no pre-established laws, that it be free from the bondage of nature, that it create its own law, its own world, freely; and that, on the other hand, the cause of living, what constitutes the worth of life, is that enhancement of the spirit’s reality which realises itself in science, and therefore in the method of science).

(2) Or else submit, and kill life in the effort to save its worth—propter causas vivendi perdere vitam (which is absurd; for what is the worth of life if there is no life?).

However that may be, the type of education that presupposes a certain ideal of knowledge previously constituted and ready to be imparted by the teacher to the pupil in conformity with some suitable method, must follow a method, a unique one—the method of science, and therefore of the teacher, and therefore also of the pupil, whether the latter is capable of it or not. For it is tacitly assumed that science==method; science==teacher; science==pupil. On the strength of these equations the common term “science” should suffice to identify the first method, which is the one of science in itself, with the last, which is the method of science to be mastered by the pupil. But the above series of equations is false, because, admitting the first, the one namely on the basis of which we are now discussing, neither the second nor the third is possible without passing from realistic to idealistic science,—two 151 very different things, as I have shown. Even if we leave the teacher out of consideration, we shall have to remember that the pupil learns a science by making it his own,—a fallible science, which he may understand up to a certain point and no further. It will be one of the many sciences which have no one given method, but many of them, and the pupil can only avoid appropriating, individualising, subjectivising science by following that way which is very broad, very easy, and, alas, only too well beaten,—the royal road of non-learning, which is diligently upkept by all the schools which have to teach precise, well-defined science, and have a pre-established method by which to teach it.

But, it might be objected, if science, realistically conceived, is a fictitious entity in no way corresponding to reality, how is it possible to have a method which by its uniqueness and definiteness effectively corresponds to the unalterable unity of this non-existent science? And what teacher would ever arbitrarily impose on his students such an abstract and mechanical method? This is true enough; but man learns to compromise with all deities, Science included. This divinity, in order somehow to exist, must assume a few human traits without however renouncing her divine prerogatives. The fact that Apollo held no communion with the Pythian priestess did not remove the oracular sanctity from the Delphic response. For man knows 152 no deity other than the one which he is capable of conceiving with his soul, just as he knows no other red besides the one which he sees with his own eyes.

Science, which he considers as an object existing in itself, outside of his and other human minds, and therefore endowed with absolute validity in all its branches and in the articulations of these branches, is nothing but the science which he knows. And he knows it because he has constructed it in the form in which he knows it: fingit creditique. But this absence of consciousness from the constructing, and the consequent faith in the realistic value of science, determine the positions and the doctrines which produce the consequences I have deplored. For he who establishes a school and enacts its regulations takes as a model his own science, without at all being aware that it is only his own. It becomes therefore the content of the institution and determines its method. But a teacher who does not feel inclined to teach that given science and to adopt that special method creates his own ideal, which is but the projection of his personal culture; and unable to account critically for the intrinsic connection existing between his ideal and his personality, he too fingit creditique. He believes that the school authority has erred, and that Science, as he understands it, must be kept distinct from the official doctrines. But in his mind his science is not his own. It is, he is confident, that Sovereign Science 153 which by his method and through his cult must enlighten the school over which he rules. And so at the point of arrival where the realistic conception of methods must work, it is found to be effective notwithstanding the rebuffs of reality, and it works. It works and it acts in the only way that it is possible for it to act, namely, by going amiss. It fails and will always continue to fail, not so much because every pupil has his own personality and will have his own particular culture with its corresponding method, but especially because whatever the number of the pupils in a school, the human mind knows of no culture which is not also its own free development, its autonomous ethical becoming. A science, which is supposed to exist before the spirit, becomes a thing, and will never again be able to trace its way back to the spirit. By presupposing science, teachers materialise the culture in whose development education consists; and this materiality of a culture known to teachers renders impossible that other culture which is unknown to teachers, which is going to be not theirs, but the pupils’, for whom they work and in whose behalf the school was instituted.

Methods, programmes, and manuals most conspicuously reveal the realistic prejudices of school technique; and against these educators should constantly be on their guard. For these prejudices have, as Vico would put it, an eternal motive, which at times seems 154 to be definitely uprooted and completely done away with, only to reappear, alas! in a different form and with an ever renewed lease of life. The motive is the following: The school is created when people are conscious of a certain amount of knowledge already attained, well defined, and recognised as valuable. Likewise man’s value socially is estimated on the work done, and it is on the basis of this finished work that he is credited with the acquisition of a certain personality. This is assuredly no longer a becoming but a being; an existent thing, already realised, which, though a contradiction in terms for those of us who have mastered the concept of the attributes of the spirit, is not thereby condemned as accidental and disposed of once for all. For it is also true that culture, personality, science,—spiritual reality in short,—is a reality, and true it is that when we know it, we know it as already realised. We may indeed have a very keen and lively sentiment of the subjectivity, and inwardness, and newness or originality of our culture, in which, for example, Dante, Dante himself, is our Dante, is “We.” But yet this “We” looms before us as a truth which transcends our particular “we.” It is truth; it is science. And before this divine Truth, before this Science, we too fall on our knees, because it is no longer a mythology, but—our experience, our life.

Thus we think; thus, spiritually, we live. I meditate and inquire into the mystery of the universe unceasingly; 155 but in the background of my inquiry, from time to time a solution appears, a discovery which urges my exploring mind onward. Mystery itself is not mystery unless it be known as such, and then it becomes knowledge. Inquiry is therefore at once a research and a discovery. And this untiring activity, which knows neither sleep nor rest, is mirrored before its own eyes and lives in the fond contemplation of its reflected image, which image in its objectivity appears to it as fixed as it, the activity, is mobile. And no man ever felt so keenly the humility and meanness of his powers, no one ever presumed so little of himself, that he could not yet be drawn by his own nature to idolise himself, to see himself before himself, exactly as he is, as what he cannot but be. And on the other hand we cannot but affirm our immortal faith in the absolute truth of the ideals which impose upon us sentiments of humility.

The error which we must victoriously contend against is not this ingenuous and unconquered faith in the objectivity of thought (which is also the objectivity of all things). What we must fight against is mental torpor and the sloth of the heart, which induce us to stop in front of the object as soon as we get it. A deplorable failing indeed, since the object is lost in the very act by which we grasp it, and we must again resume our work and toil some more in order to attain it again. For the object, in short, does exist, but in 156 the subject; and in order to be a living and real object it must live on the life itself of the subject.

A textbook is a textbook: when it was written, and if its author was capable of thinking and of living in his thought, it too was a living thing; and a living thing, that is, spirit, it will continue to be for the instructor who does not through indolence allow himself to believe that all the thinking demanded by the subject was done once for all by the author of the manual. For the manual, as a book intended for the teacher, meant to be constantly awakened by teachers to an ever quickened life, the life of the spirit, can only be what the instructor makes it. He, therefore, must have culture enough to read it as his book; he must be able to restore it to life, to re-create it by the living process of his personal thought. This done, he will have done but one-half of the work needed to transform himself from a reader into a teacher. For his reading must lead up to the reading of the pupils; and they ought not to be confronted with the finished product of a culture turned out, all ready-made by the mechanism of the handbook. So that we should now complete our previous statement, and say that the teacher re-creates the book when he revives it in the mind of the one for whom the book was written; when author, teacher, and pupil constitute but one single spirit, whose life animates and inwardly vivifies the manual, which therefore ought not to be called, as it is, a 157 hand-book, but a spiritual guide for the mind. Unfortunately the oft-deplored indolence which freezes and stiffens spiritual life fastens the books to the hands of the teacher first, and then to those of the pupils.

Teachers should carefully watch themselves. If the book begins to feel heavy in their hands, it is a sign that it is becoming a burden on the pupils’ minds. It will end by stifling their mental life, unless its oppressive dulness is dispelled by the reawakened consciousness of the instructor. Teachers should never for an instant become remiss in their loving solicitude for their school. When their book, the book they selected for their pupils, as the means of imparting the culture for which the school stands, ceases to be the pupils’ book, cherished by them as a thing of their own, intimately bound up with their persons, then it is high time to throw it away. For the moment a book loses its power to attract it instantly begins to repel. It then becomes an instrument of torture and a menace for the life of the youthful minds entrusted to the teachers’ care.

Dictionaries and grammars go side by side with handbooks,—instruments of culture that are only too often converted into engines of torture. The abuse of these books, especially noticeable in the secondary schools, is not limited to them, but is infecting primary instruction too, and teachers should know what such books are, and be enlightened as to their limitations. 158 Otherwise the dictionary becomes the cemetery of speech, and grammar the annexed dissecting room. A lexicon is a burial ground for the mortal remains of those living beings which we call human words, each one of which always lives in a context, not because it is there in bodily company, in the society of other words, but because in every context it has a special signification, being the form of a precise thought or state of mind, as we may wish to call it. A word need not be joined to other words to form that complex which grammarians call a sentence. It may stand alone, all by itself, and constitute a discourse, and express a thought, even a very great thought. The “fiat” of the book of Genesis is an example. What is requisite is that the word, whether by itself or with others, should adhere to the personality, to the spiritual situation, and be the actual expression of a soul. When joined to the soul a word, which materially is identical with countless other words uttered by other souls, and with the peculiar accents of the respective personalities, reveals its particular expression, is a particular word not to be ever compared with any of those countless ones materially identical with it. The biblical “fiat,” repeated by men who feel within them the almighty Word of the Creator, is constantly taking on new shades of meaning, is always reinforced by richer tones, and will always continue to do so, as a result of the numerous ways that men have of picturing to themselves the deity, and in 159 accordance with the variety of doctrines, phantasies, and sentiments, or whatever other forms of activity may converge into the expression of a person’s spiritual life. So that if, abstractly considered, it is the word that we read, always the same, in the sublime passage of Genesis, in reality it lives in an infinite number of forms, as though an infinite number of words.

But in dictionaries, words are sundered from the minds, detached from the context, soulless and dead. A good lexicon—and those that are put in the hands of pupils are seldom satisfactory—should always in some way restore the word to the natural context, enchase it, so to speak, in the jewel from which it was torn. It should never presume to give meanings of abstracted words, but ought to point them out as they exist historically in the authors who are deemed worthy representatives of the language or of the literature. Dictionaries so compiled do away partly with the objectionable abstractness, but are yet unable to conjure the dead from their tombs. Their weakness and insufficiency lie first of all in the fact that the true context of a word, in which it lives concretely, and from which therefore it draws its meaning, is in reality not the brief phrase, which is all that historical dictionaries can quote, but rather the entire work of the author from which the quoted phrase derives whatever colours it may possess and its own peculiar shade. And the whole work in turn can be understood only in connection 160 with the boundless historical environments out of which it emerges, in which it lives, and where its thoughts receive their peculiar colouring and their special significance. The insufficiency of the dictionary comes out even more clearly from another and more important consideration. An historical dictionary of the Italian language will, for example, tell us how Machiavelli used the word “virtue” (virtù), and by the examples adduced we should see or perhaps surmise the meaning of that word, the knowledge of which is not just mere erudition, in as much as in the mind of the cultured reader the thought of Machiavelli is restored to life, and with it the concept which he was wont to express by the term “virtue.” But idealistically speaking, is this word Machiavelli’s or is it ours,—a word belonging to us who are inquiring into his thoughts? It is ours, by all means, and for the reason that it belongs to our Machiavelli. Unless we have then within us this our Machiavelli, it is useless for us to search for the meaning of the word in the dictionary. In it surely we may find it, but as a dead body to be resurrected only by remembering that its life is not in the printed page but in us, and only in us. In our life everything will have to be resuscitated that is to become part of our culture.

And the same applies to grammars. As people conceive them and use them, what are they if not a schematic arrangement of the forms by which words 161 are joined so as to constitute speech? And how can we cut the discourse to the quick and extract these schemes, without at the same time destroying its life? The scheme is a “part of speech,” and it is a rule. Grammar is a series of rules regarding the parts of speech, considered singly and collectively. But the grammatical scheme—part of speech or rule—abstracts a generic form from the particular expression in such a way that the paradigm of a conjugation, for example, shall be the conjugation of many verbs but not of any determined one. The rule governing the use of the conditional is in the same way referred to every verb which expresses a conditional act or occurrence, but to no one verb in a peculiar manner. But since no speech contains a verb which might present to us a verbal form which is not also the form of a determined verb, nor a conditional which does not point with precision to the action or occurrence subordinated to a condition, it is evident that the scheme places before us, not the living and concrete body of the speech, but a dissected and dead part of this body.

I shall not here recall the controversies occasioned by the difficulties inherent in the normative character ordinarily attributed to grammatical schemes. I shall simply note that a scheme becomes intelligible only if the example accompanies it; and the example always turns out to be a living discourse, within which therefore we meet again the scheme, but liberated from the 162 presumed abstractness to which it had been confined by the grammarian. And I shall merely add that the grammatical norm, which in the realistic conception of grammar is presented as a rule, anteceding actual speech both in time and ideally, has in reality no validity whatsoever excepting as a law internal to the speaking itself, which brings out its normative force only in the act itself of speaking. In spite of this, however, the majority of people consider grammar as an antecedent to speech and to thought, and therefore to the life of the spirit. It appears to them as a reef on which the freedom of the personality must be driven in the course of its becoming, bearing down as it does on a past which is believed to exist beneath the horizon of actuality and beyond the present life of the spirit. To them grammar is legislation passed by former writers and speakers, prescribing norms for those who intend to use the same language in the future. Against this myth, and the consequent idol of grammar worshipped as a thing which has not only the right, but the means also, of controlling and oppressing the creative spontaneity of speech, teachers should be constantly on their guard, if they feel bound to respect and protect the spirituality of culture.

Neither grammar then, nor rhetoric, nor any kind of misguided preceptive teaching should be allowed to introduce into the school the menace of realism which lurks naturally in the shadow of all prescriptive systems. 163 A precept is a mere historical indication, a sign which points to something that was done as to something that had to be done then and is to be done now. It was done and it was thought that it had to be done. But what was done cannot be done over again, and what was thought cannot again be thought. Life knows no past other than the one which it contains within its living present. The precept has no value excepting as that precept which we in every single instance intuit, and which we must intuit, being spiritually alive and free, as the peculiar form of our thought, of our speaking, of our doing, of our being, in short, which is our becoming. If we look upon a precept as transcending this becoming, and as an antecedent to it, we misapprehend and therefore imperil our indwelling freedom, which for us now ought to mean not simply the failure to foster the growth of the spirit, but a deliberate attempt to hinder and thwart its development and to blight the function of culture.

One more prejudice of those imputed to realistic instruction must still be pointed out, and it will be the last. It is one of those time-worn devices whose history, extending over a thousand years, reflects the entire life of the school—the composition. Teachers expect and demand that a predetermined and definite theme, as a nucleus of a thought organism, as leit-motif, so to speak, of a work of art, as a ruling principle for moral or speculative reflections, be developed 164 by pupils who may yet have never given the topic a single thought, who may possibly be not at all attuned to that definite spiritual vibration, who may in short be quite removed from the line along which the theme should be developed. In the lower grades the line itself is marked, the entire contour is given, and the pupil’s mind is arbitrarily encompassed within this fixed outline. These methods are now fortunately applied with diminished rigour and less crudely than before. But the fact remains that in all classes the teacher either assigns a theme at random, picking a topic from a casual reading or from among the whims of his rambling fancy, or else he conscientiously and carefully studies the possibilities of a subject, and develops it to a certain extent before he assigns it; so that he naturally expects the pupil’s treatment to conform to his own delineation; and he values the composition in proportion as it approaches the rough draft which he had previously sketched in his mind.

Here too, as elsewhere, we encounter the difficulty of a thought which is presupposed to thinking, which therefore binds it, strains it and racks it out of its healthy and fruitful growth; for thought cannot live without freedom. The dangers are many that beset us in the practice of theme-composition, and not all of them of a merely intellectual character. There is no intellectual deficiency which is not also at the same time a moral blemish; and a course of exercises, 165 such as we have considered, not only jeopardises the formation of the intelligence by urging it along a line of false and empty artificiality to the postiche and the appliqué, but it also, and far more seriously, threatens the moral character of the pupils in that it beguiles them into a sinful familiarity with insincerity, which might perhaps become downright cheating.

Composition however in itself is not taboo for the idealist. Like grammar and every other instrument of the teaching profession it must be converted from the abstract to the concrete. We should never demand of the pupil an inventiveness beyond his powers, never unfairly expect of his mind what it cannot yet give. The boy must not be given a subject drawn from a world with which he is unfamiliar. But when the subject springs naturally from the pupil’s own soul, in the atmosphere of the school, and as a part of the spiritual life which unites him to his teacher and to his classmates, then composition, like every other element of a freely developing culture, is a creation and an unfailing progress. For whatever has been frozen by the chill of realism, and has been consequently made unfit for the life of the spirit, may again be revived in the warmth of the living intelligence of the concrete, and be thence idealistically fused with the spontaneous and vigorous current of spiritual reality.

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CHAPTER VIII
THE UNITY OF EDUCATION

Having exemplified the prejudices of realism in the phases that are most harmful to education, I shall now proceed to discuss the fundamental corollary of the idealistic thesis as an effective remedy against the ravages of realism. For, as I have already shown, the realistic conception of life and culture is by no means a minor error which could be corrected as soon as discovered. Originating in a primitive tendency which impels the human spirit on through a realistic phase before it can freely emerge into the loftier consciousness of self and power (which is the conquest of idealism), this error again and again crops out of even the most convinced anti-realistic consciousness. So that if at any moment our higher reflection slackens its vigilance, the error creeps back into the midst of our ideas, gains control of our intelligence, and resumes its former sway over thought. It is not sufficient then to become aware of the faults of realism and of the prejudices in which it is mirrored; we must, in addition to all this, strengthen in our minds the intuition of the spirituality of culture, render it more subtle, more accurate, more certain, and bring to it the energy 167 of a faith which, after taking possession of our souls, shall become our life’s character.

We must therefore look intently at the significance of that principle which identifies culture with man’s personality, notice its most important consequences, and set these up as the laws of education, since by education we mean the creation of a living culture which shall be the life of the human mind. The first and foremost of these consequences, the direct corollary of our proposition, is the concept of the Unity of Education. Though often referred to, it has not yet been attained by pedagogical doctrines, nor has it been the aim of the work of teachers. Neither theory nor practice—more intimately connected than is ordinarily supposed—shows as yet that this concept is understood and adequately appreciated. It is opposed with full force by the realistic conception which, keeping man distinct from his culture, and materialising this culture, naturally attributes to it, and to education in which it is reflected, that multiplicity and fragmentariness which is the characteristic of things material.

This scrappiness of culture and of education is the error on which all the prejudices of realistic pedagogy are grounded. It is the enemy that must be vanquished in the course of the crusade that has been preached by idealism in its endeavour to liberate instruction from the deadly oppression of mechanism. 168 But in order to combat this foe we must first know it: and we must gain a clear understanding of that unity of education which it antagonises with uncompromising opposition.

If we open a treatise on pedagogy or examine a schedule of courses, if we look through a programme or stop to consider our every-day technical terminology, we cannot help noticing that education is broken up by divisions and subdivisions ad infinitum, exactly as though it were a material object, which because material possesses infinite divisibility. Textbooks tell us that education is (1) physical, (2) intellectual, (3) moral. Then narrowing the subject down to one section, the intellectual, which for good reasons has been treated more carefully and sympathetically by traditional pedagogy, we find some such subdivisions: artistic, scientific, literary, philosophical, religious, etc. Again, artistic education will be split up into as many sections as there are arts, and scientific instruction in the same way; for pedagogy assigns to each branch of the classification its corresponding method of teaching. It goes without saying that the sciences of any given branch are different among themselves, and the study of botany, for example, is not the study of zoology. And there are as many forms of culture to be promoted by education as there are sciences; which is clearly shown by school announcements assigning to certain years, and for definite days and hours, 169 the several courses of the curriculum, that is, the several educations.

It is taken for granted that Education, properly so called, will result from the ensemble of these particular educations—physical, intellectual, moral, etc.,—each one of which contributes its share to the final result, and is therefore a part of the entire education. And each field produces certain peculiar results which it would be idle to demand of another section, just as we never expect an olive grove to yield a crop of peaches. Every part, self-contained and quite distinct from the rest, absolutely excludes all other parts from itself. Therefore the subjects taught in a school are numerous, and there must accordingly be specialised teachers. And again each instructor must be careful not to mix up the several parts which compose his subject. The teacher of history, for example, when he takes up the French Revolution, must forget the unification of Italy, and treat each event in order and in turn; and the instructor of Italian will take up the history of literature on a certain day of the week, and devote some other hour to the study of the individual works themselves.

So also we never fail to distinguish and carefully separate the two parts of the teacher’s work, his ability as a disciplinarian and his skill in imparting information, for it is an accepted commonplace of school technique that ability to teach is one thing, and the power 170 to maintain discipline is another. It is one thing to be able to keep the class attentive to the discussion of a given subject, and quite another to treat this subject suitably for the needs and attainments of the pupils. Discipline is considered thus as a mere threshold; the real teaching comes after. For, it is argued, discipline has no cultural content; it is nothing more than the spiritual disposition and adaptation which should precede the acquisition, or if we so wish to call it, the development of real culture,—a disposition which is obtained when respect for the authority of the teacher is ensured.

The recognition of that authority simply means the establishment of a necessary condition; as for the real work of education, that is yet to come. And if we should stop at what we have called the threshold, we should have no school at all. There are teachers, in fact, who keep good discipline, but who are yet unable to teach, either through lack of culture or because they are deficient in methods.

All these are commonplaces to which we often resort without stopping to consider their validity. And, in truth, it is because of this lack of consideration that we are able to use them without noticing their absurdities and without therefore feeling the necessity of emending our ways. This lack of reflection resolves itself into a lack of precision in the handling of these concepts. They are formulated without much rigour 171 with a great deal of elasticity, and in the spirit of compromising with that truth against which they would otherwise too jarringly clash.

First of all, no one has ever conceived the possibility of separating discipline from education. What is often done is to distinguish discipline from that part of education which is called instruction, and to consider the two as integrating the total concept of education. Mention is often made of the educational value of discipline. But this kind of co-ordination of the two forms of education—discipline and instruction—and their subordination to the generic concept of education are more easily formulated than comprehended. For if we should distinguish them simply on the grounds that one is the necessary antecedent of the other, we should have a relationship similar to that which connects any part of instruction with the part which must be presupposed before it as an antecedent moment in the same process of development. But the relationship which exists between any two parts of instruction cannot serve to distinguish from instruction a thing which is different from it.

We might wish, perhaps, to consider as characteristic of this absolute antecedence the establishment of the authority without which teaching, properly so called, cannot begin. But the objection to this would be that every moment of the teaching process presupposes a new authority, which can never be considered as definitely 172 acquired, which is constantly being imposed anew, and which must proceed at every given instance from the effective spiritual action exercised by the teacher upon the pupil. In other words, I mean to say that no teacher is able independently of the merits of his teaching to maintain discipline simply and solely on the strength of his personal prestige, of his force of character, or any other suitable qualification. For whoever he may be, and whatever the power by which at the start he is able to attract the attention of his pupils and to keep it riveted on his words, the teacher as he begins to impart information ceases to be what he was immediately before, and becomes to the eyes of his pupils an ever changing individual,—bigger or smaller, stronger or weaker, and therefore more or less worthy of that attention and that respect of which boys are capable in their expectance of spiritual light and joy. The initial presentation is nothing more than a promise and an anticipation. In the course of teaching this anticipation must not be disappointed, this promise must be constantly fulfilled and more than fulfilled by the subsequent developments. The teacher’s personality as revealed at the beginning must be borne out by all that he does in the course of the lesson. Experience confirms this view, and the reason of it is to be found in the doctrine now familiar to us of the spirit that never is definitely, but is always constituting itself, always becoming. And every man is 173 esteemed and appreciated on the strength of what he shows himself to be at any given moment, and in virtue of the experience which we continue to have of his being,—a being which is the development in which he realises himself.

So, then, discipline is never enforced definitely and in such a way that the teacher may proceed to build on it as on a firm basis without any further concern. And it is therefore difficult to see how we could possibly sever with a clean cut the task of keeping discipline from the duty of imparting instruction.

Nor is it any more plausible to maintain that discipline, though it may not chronologically precede instruction, is its logical antecedent, in the sense that there are at every instant of the life of the school both discipline and instruction, the former as a condition of the latter. The difficulty here is that if we assumed this, we ought to be able to indicate the difference between the condition and the conditioned; which difference, unless we rest content with vague words, is not forthcoming, and cannot be found. I maintain that were it possible for the teacher definitely to enthrone, so to speak, discipline in his school, all his work were done. He would have fulfilled his entire duty, acquitted his obligation, and achieved the results of his mission, whether we look upon this mission in the complex of its development, or whether we consider it ideally in the instant of its determined act, which is yet 174 a process and therefore a development. For what, in fact, is discipline? Is it established authority? But this authority is the whole of education. For authority cannot be, as I have explained before, a mere claim: it must become actual in the effective action performed by the educating personality, and this action is education. And when this education consists, for example, in the imparting of a rule of syntax, education becomes actual when the pupil really apprehends that rule from his instructor exactly as it is taught to him, and thus appropriates the teacher’s manner of thinking and his intellectual behaviour on that special subject, and acts and does as the teacher wants him to. And from the point of view of discipline, this is all we want at that moment.

If in the course of education, considered as a whole or at any particular moment of it, we should separate discipline from instruction, now turning our attention to the one and now to the other, we know from experience that we should never get anywhere. As a matter of fact, the distinction thrusts itself to the fore only when the problem of discipline is erroneously formulated by treating it abstractly. For who is it that worries over discipline as such, and as though it were a thing different from teaching? Who is it that looks upon this problem as an insoluble one? Only the teacher who, unable to maintain discipline, frets over it and failing to discover it where it is naturally to be 175 found, desperately looks for it where it is not, where it could not possibly be. And so he is helplessly perturbed, like the man who, feeling upon himself the concentrated gaze of all the guests seated in a parlour, is no longer able to walk across the floor; it is the same difficulty and impediment we encounter every time we try to watch and study our movements. In the same way the spontaneous outburst of eloquent sentiments that flow from the fulness of our hearts is checked by the endeavour to analyse them, to study the words—to substitute art for nature.

The real teacher, the naturally gifted teacher, never bothers about these puzzling questions of pedagogical discipline. He teaches with such devotion; he is so close spiritually to his pupils, so sympathetic with their views; his work is so serious, so sincere, so eager, so full of life, that he is never compelled to face a recalcitrant, rebellious personality that could only be reduced by resorting to the peculiar means of discipline. The docility of the pupils in the eyes of the able teacher is neither an antecedent nor a consequent of his teachings; it is an aspect of it. It originates with the very act by which he begins to teach, and ceases with the end of his teaching. Concretely, the discipline which good teachers enforce in the classroom is the natural behaviour of the spirit which adheres to itself in the seriousness and inwardness of its own work. Discipline, authority, and respect for authority are absent 176 whenever it is impossible to establish that unique superior personality, in which the spiritual life of the pupils and of the teachers are together fused and united. Whenever the students fail to find their ideal in the teacher; when they are disappointed by his aspect, his gaze, his words, in the complex concreteness of his spiritual personality, which does not rise to the ideal which at every moment is present in their expectations, then the order of discipline is lacking. But when this actual unity obtains—this unity which is the task of the teacher, and the aim of all education—then discipline, authority, and respect are present as never failing elements.

This pedagogical problem of discipline would never have arisen if immature reflection had not distinguished two empirically different aspects of human personality, the practical and the theoretical, whereby it would appear that man, when he does things, should not be considered in the same light as when he thinks and understands, knows and learns. From this point of view, discipline of deportment is to be referred to the pupil as practical spiritual activity, while teaching aims at his theoretic activity. The former should guide the pupil, regulate his conduct as a member of that special community which we call the school, and facilitate the fulfilment of the obligations which he has toward the institution, toward his fellow-pupils, and toward himself. The latter, on the other hand, assuming the completion 177 of this practical edification, proceeds to the mental formation of the personality, considered as progressive acquirement of culture. Discipline in this system appears to be the morals of the school. I use the word morals in a very broad sense—just as morality might be considered as the discipline of society and of life in general. For everybody, it is argued, distinguishes between the character of man and his intelligence, between his conduct and his knowledge. The two terms may indeed be drawn together, but they also exist quite apart. So that a man devoid of character, or possessed with an indomitable will for evil, may nevertheless be extremely learned and shrewd, or as subtle as the serpent; whereas a moral man, through lack of understanding, may become the sport of rogues, and remain illiterate, devoid of all, even of the slightest accomplishments. For will is one thing, they say, and the intellect is another.

The question of the abstractness of discipline impels us now to examine the legitimacy of this broader distinction, which does not simply concern the problems of the school, but extends to the fundamental principles of the philosophy of the spirit. Under its influence, contemporary thought attacks all the surviving forms of this ancient distinction between will and intellect, which rested on a frankly realistic intuition of the world. The philosopher who crystallised this distinction, and fastened it so hard that it could not be broken 178 up completely in the course of all subsequent speculation, was Aristotle. A thoroughgoing realist, like all Greek philosophers, he conceived reality as something external and antecedent to the mind which thinks it and strives to know it. When thought, whose function is the knowing of reality, is thus placed outside of this reality, it is evident that the knowledge to which it aspired never could have been an activity which produces reality. It was accordingly maintained that knowledge could not be more than a mere survey, a view of reality (intuition, theory), almost like a reflected image, totally extrinsic to the essence of the real. But since it was evident that man as spiritual activity does produce a world of his own, for which he is praised if it is deemed good, but blamed if it is judged bad, it had to follow that there were two distinct aspects in human life: one by which man contemplates reality, the other by which he creates his own world,—a world, however, which is but a transformation of the true and original reality. These two aspects are the will and the intellect.

It should not now be necessary to criticise this concept of a reality assumed to exist, in antecedence to the activity of the spirit, and which is the sole support of this distinction between will and intellect. We might say perhaps that though everything does indeed depend from the spirit, and though all is spirit, yet this completely spiritual reality is on one hand what 179 is produced, the realisation of new realities (will), but on the other hand it is but the knowledge of its own reality, and by this knowledge gives no increment to its being. However, if we adopted this view, we would slip back to the position we abandoned as untenable, since a thought which propounds the problem of its essence and of the essence of the reality which it cognises can be but mere knowing. For it is again faced by a reality—even though it has in this case been arbitrarily presumed identical with it—a reality which is as an antecedent to it, and leaves to it only the task of looking on. So we must conclude that the life of the spirit is never mere contemplation. What seems to be contemplation—that consciousness which the spirit acquires of itself, and, acquiring which, realises itself—is a creation: a creation not of things but of its own self. For what are things but the spirit as it is looked at abstractly in the multiplicity of its manifestations?

We shall more easily understand that our knowing and our doing are indiscernible, if we recall that our doing is not what is also perceived externally, a motion in space caused by us. This external manifestation is quite subordinate and adventitious. The essential character of our doing is the internal will, which does not, properly speaking, modify things, but does modify us, by bringing out in us a personality which otherwise would not have been. This is the substance of the will, 180 which we cannot deny to thought, if thought is, as I have shown, development, and therefore continuous self-creation of the personality.

If intellect then and will are one and the same thing, to such an extent that there is no intellect which in its development is not development of personality, formation of character, realisation of a spiritual reality, we shall be able to understand that the ideas of two distinct spiritual activities, as the basis of the ordinary distinction between moral and intellectual training, are mere abstractions that tend to lead us away from the comprehension of the living reality of the spirit. This distinction appears to me exceedingly harmful, nothing being more deplorable, from the moral point of view, than to consider any part of the life we have to live as morally indifferent; and nothing being more harmful to the school than the conviction that the moral formation of man is not the entire purpose of education, but only a part of its content. It is indispensable, I maintain, that the educator have the reverent consciousness of the extremely delicate moral value of every single word which he addresses to his pupils and of the profoundly ethical essence of the instruction which he imparts to them. For the school which gives instruction with no moral training in reality gives no instruction at all. All the objections voiced on this score against education, which we try to meet by adding on to instruction all that ought to integrate the truly educational function, 181 are the result of this abstract way of looking upon instruction solely as the culture of an intellect which in some way differs from the will, from character, and from moral personality.

I wish here to call attention to one of the most controverted questions connected with popular education, because it brings out very clearly the impossibility of keeping moral education distinct from intellectual instruction. It is constantly asserted that the instruction of the common people, that real education which is the main purpose of the modern state, is not a question of mere reading and spelling; that these do not constitute culture, but are as means to an end, and ought never to be allowed to take the place of the end to which they are subservient. The school therefore, if it cannot shape men, should at least rough-hew them and give them a conscience, whereas now, it teaches but often does not educate: it gives to the learner the means of culture, and then abandons him to his own resources. The optimism of educators in the eighteenth century, their promise that marvels would come out of elementary instruction propagated and spread by popular schools devised for this purpose, was constantly met in the course of the last century by an ever-growing mistrust of instruction generally restricted to the notion of mere instrumentality. For in addition to other shortcomings it was felt that this instrument might be put to a very bad use; that elementary learning 182 might be a dangerous thing if it were not accompanied by something that instruction pure and simple cannot give, namely, soundness of heart, strength of mind, and conscience strong enough to uphold intelligence by the vigorous and uncompromising principles of moral rectitude. The hopefulness of that past optimism is fast yielding ground to the pessimistic denunciation of the insufficiency of mere instruction for the moral ends of life.

There is a serious error in this frequent indictment brought against mere instruction as a means of attaining what is called culture. It proceeds from the attempt to separate something that was not meant to be separated. “What God hath united together, man shall not put asunder.” And, in any event, a separation as illegitimate as this is not possible. Superficially we may distinguish and apparently sunder instruction from moral training, cut off the means from the end, and separate the ability to read and write from what we are thereby enabled to read and write. In fact the letters of the alphabet are taught without teaching the syllables which they compose, and without the words that are made up of these syllables, and the thoughts that are expressed by these words, and man’s life which becomes manifest and real in these thoughts. The elementary school is in fact, as it is in name, the teaching of the elements. Reading, writing, arithmetic, all subjects called for by the school programme are taken up as 183 mere elements with which the pupil is expected, later on, to compose his Book of Life, complete in all its sections. But in the meantime it is thought unwise to burden his youthful mind with the weighty and complicated problems that can be solved only by the experience of a more mature life. Of course after he has gone forth from the school into the outer world the young man will look upon this elementary knowledge as the raw material of his future mentality. As he carves out his path to this or that goal, in accordance with his spiritual interests and in compliance with the contingencies of life, he will avail himself of this initial instruction, use it to further his progress towards this or that end, good or evil as the case may be. For intellectual instruction, it is argued, can be made subservient either to noble impulses or to base motives.

Careful consideration, however, will show that the responsibility of a school for what is called moral insufficiency, but is in reality educational defectiveness, cannot be removed by this kind of considerations. The alphabet begins to be such when it ceases to be a series of physical marks corresponding to the sounds into which all the words of a language may be decomposed. The alphabetic symbol is effectively such when it is a sound, and it is sound when it is an image, or rather a concrete form of an internal vibration of the mind. The child begins to see the alphabet when he reads with it. Up to that time he simply draws images or 184 inwardly gazes at the semblance of the picture he intends to draw, but he does not read. As soon as the symbol is read, it becomes a word. That is why every spelling book presents the letters in the syllables and the syllables in the words. In this way they cease to be mere scrawls drawn on the paper, and become thoughts. They may be dim, vague, and mysterious; they may be sharply defined or they may blend and fuse into a suggestive haze; but they are in every given instance thoughts that are being awakened in the mind of the child. These thoughts have in them the power to develop, to organise themselves and become a discourse. From the simple sentences and the nursery rhymes of the primer, they grow into an ever-richer significance. From the sowing to the harvesting, from the green stalk to the sturdy trunk, it is one life and one sole process. The mind that will soar over the dizzy heights of thought begins its flight in the humble lowlands. And it first becomes conscious of its power to rise, when the life of thought is awakened by the words of the spelling book.

The moment the child begins reading, he must of necessity read something. There is no mere instrument without the material to which it is to be applied. The infant who opens his eyes and strives to look cannot but see something. The “picture,” insignificant for the teacher, has its own special colouring for the child’s mind. He fixes his gaze on it; he draws it 185 within himself, cherishes it, and fosters it with his fancies. Such is the law of the spirit! It may be violated, but the consequences of transgression are commensurate with the majesty of this law.

Grammars too, like spelling primers and rhetorics and logic and every kind of preceptive teaching, may be assumed as a form separated from its contents, as something empty and abstract. The child is taught for instance that the letter m in mamma does not belong to that word (we call it a “word,” and forget that to him at least it is not a word but his own mother). That letter m, we tell him, is found in other words, mat, meat, etc. We show him that it is in all of them, and yet in none of them. We therefore can and must abstract it from all concrete connections, isolate and fix it as that something which it is in itself—the letter m. In the same manner we abstract the rule of grammar from a number of individual examples. We exalt it over them, and give it an existence which is higher, and independent of theirs. And so for rhetoric, and so for logic.

But in this process of progressive abstraction, in this practice of considering the abstract as something substantial, and of reducing the concrete and the particular to the subordinate position of the accessory, life recedes and ebbs away. The differences between this and that word, between two images, two thoughts, two modes of thinking, of expressing, of behaving, at first 186 become slight, then negligible, then quite inexistent, and the soul becomes accustomed to the generic, to the empty, to the indifferent. It knows no longer how to fix the peculiarities of things, how to notice the different traits of men’s characters, their interests, their diverse values, until finally it becomes indifferent and sceptical. Words lose their meaning; they no longer smack of what they used to; their value is gone. Things lose their individuality, and men their physiognomies. This scepticism robs man of his own faith, of his character and personality. The fundamental aim of education ceases to exist. Abstract education is no education at all. It is not even instruction. For it does not teach the alphabet as it really exists, as something inseparable from the sound, and from the word, and from the human soul! All it gives is a new materialised and detached abstraction.

The alphabet is real and concrete, not abstract; it is not a means but an end; it is not mere form but also content. It is not a weapon which man may wield indifferently either for good purposes or for evil motives. It is man himself. It is the human soul, which should already flash in the very first word that is spelled, if it is read intelligently. And it ought to be a good word, worthy of the child and of the future man, a word in which the youthful pupil ought already to be able to discover himself,—not himself in general, but that better self which the school gradually and 187 progressively will teach him to find within himself. So considered, the alphabet is a powerful instrument of human formation and of moral shaping. It is education.

For this reason the school must have a library, and should adopt all possible means to encourage the habit and develop the taste of reading, since the word which truly expresses the soul of man is not that one word, nor the word of that one book. A word or a book will always be a mere fragment of life, and many of them therefore will be needed. Many, very many books, to satisfy the ever-growing needs of the child’s mind! Books that will spur his thought constantly towards more distant goals, and his heart and imagination with it. Thus the child grows to be a man.

Instruction then which is not education is not even instruction. It is a denuded abstraction, violently thrust like other abstractions into the life of the spirit where it generates that monstrosity which we have described as material culture, mechanical and devoid of spiritual vitality. That culture, being material, has no unity, is fragmentary, inorganic, capable of growing indefinitely without in any way transforming the recipient mind or becoming assimilated to the process of the personality to which it simply adheres extrinsically. This mechanical teaching is commensurate with things, and grows proportionately with them; but it has no intimate relation with the spirit. He who knows one 188 hundred things has not a greater nor a different intellectual value from him who knows ten, since the hundred and the ten are locked up in both in exactly the same way that two different sums of money are deposited in two different vaults. What merit is there in the safe which contains the greater sum? The merit would belong to the man who had accumulated the greater amount by a greater sum of labour, for it would then be commensurate with work, which is the developing process itself and the life of the human personality to which we must always have recourse when we endeavour to establish values. For as we have seen, nothing is, properly speaking, thinkable except in relation to the human spirit.

Whether one reads a single book or an entire library, the result is the same, if what is read fails to become the life of the reader—his feelings and his thoughts, his passions and his meditation, his experience and the extolment of his personality. The poet Giusti has said: “Writing a book is worse than useless, unless it is going to change people.” Reading a book with no effect is infinitely worse. Of course the people that have to be transformed, both for the writer and for the reader (who are not two very different persons after all), are not the others, but first of all the author himself. The mere reading of a page or even a word inwardly reconstitutes us, if it does consist in a new throb of our personality, which continuously renews 189 itself through the incessant vibrations of its becoming. This then is the all-important solution,—that the book or the word of a teacher arouse our souls and set them in motion; that it transform itself into our inner life; that it cease to be a thing, special and determinate, one of the many, and become transfused into our personality. And our personality in its act, in the act, I say, and not in the abstract concept which we may somehow form of it,—is absolute unity: that moving unity to which education can in no wise be referred, unless it is made identical with its movement, and therefore entirely conformant to its unity.

The man whose culture is limited, or, rather, entirely estranged from the understanding of life, is called homo unius libri. We might just as well call him homo omnium librorum. For he who would read all books need have a leaking brain like the perforated vessel of the daughters of Danaus,—a leak through which all ideas, all joys, all sorrows, and all hopes, everything that man may find in books, would have to flow unceasingly, without leaving any traces of their passage, without ever forming that personality which, having acquired a certain form or physiognomy, reacts and becomes selective, picks what it wants out of the congeries, and chooses, out of all possible experiences, only what it requires for the life that is suited to it. We should never add books upon books ad infinitum! It is not a question of quantity. What we need is the ability 190 to discover our world in books,—that sum total of interests which respond to all the vibrations of our spirit, which assuredly, as Herbart claimed, has a multiplicity of interests, but all of them radiating from a vital centre. And everything is in the centre, since everything originates there.

Education which strives to get at the centre of the personality, the sole spot whence it is possible to derive the spiritual value of a living culture, is essentially moral, and may never be hemmed in within the restricted bounds of an abstract intellectual training. There is in truth a kind of instruction which is not education; not because it is in no way educative, but because it gives a bad education and trains for evil. This realistic education, which is substantially materialistic, extinguishes the sentiment of freedom in man, debases his personality, and stifles in him the living consciousness of the spirituality of the world, and consequently of man’s responsibility.

The antithesis between instruction and education is the antithesis between realistic and idealistic culture, or again, that existing between a material and a spiritual conception of life. If the school means conquest of freedom, we must learn to loathe the scrappiness of education, the fractioning tendency which presumes to cut off one part from the rest of the body, as if education, that is, personality, could have many parts. We must learn to react against a 191 system of education which, conceiving its rôle to be merely intellectualistic, and such as to make of the human spirit a clear mirror of things, proceeds to an infinite subdivision to match the infinite multiplicity of things. Unity ought to be our constant aim. We should never look away from the living, that is, the person, the pupil into whose soul our loving solicitude should strive to gain access in order to help him create his own world.

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CHAPTER IX
CHARACTER AND PHYSICAL EDUCATION

The principle of educational unity which I have briefly tried to illustrate demands a further development in connection with the claims of physical culture. For after we have unified moral and intellectual discipline in the one concrete concept of the education of the spirit, whose activity cannot be cognitive without also being practical, and cannot realise any moral values except through cognition, it might yet seem that a complete and perfect system of education should aim at the physical development as well as at the spiritual. For the pupil is not solely mind. He has a body also; and these two terms, body and spirit, must be conceived in such close connection and in such intimate conjunction that the health of the one be dependent on the soundness of the other.

Before elucidating this argument, we must voice our appreciation of the pedagogical principle by virtue of which the ancient Greeks developed their athletic education, and which since the Renaissance has for a different motive been reintroduced into the theory of physical culture,—a theory which I do not at all oppose, but rather intend to reaffirm on the grounds of 193 educational unity. This pedagogical principle evidently originated in the mode of considering the function of the bodily organism in respect to the human mind, since every time we scrutinise the interest that has always guided men in the field of education, we find that at all times the aim of education has been the development of the mind. Nor could it have been otherwise; for whether or not in possession of a clear understanding of his spiritual essence, man spontaneously presents himself and is valued as a personality, which affirms itself, speaks even though dumb, and says “I.” Education begins as a relation between master and slave, between parent and children. The slave and the son are not supported and cared for—educated—as simple brutes, but as beings endowed with the same attributes as the master or the parent, beings who are therefore able to receive orders or instructions and build their will out of these,—the will which those in authority wish to be identical with their own. The superior commands and therefore demands; the inferior obeys by replying, and he replies in so far as he is a spiritual subject; and this reply will become gradually better in proportion as he more fully actualises that spiritual nature which the master wishes to be closely corresponding to his own. Philosophy, as well as naïve and primitive mentality, considers man to be such in so far as he is conscious of what he does, of what he says, of what he thinks; and also in that he is 194 able to present himself to others, because he has first been present to himself.

Man is man in that he is self-consciousness. Even the despicable tyrant who brutally domineers over the wretch who is forced to submit to his overbearing arrogance, even he wants his slave to be intelligent, capable of guessing his thoughts, and refuses to consider him as an unconscious tool of his whims. The mother who tenderly nurses her sick child is indeed anxious for the health of the body over which she worries, and she would like to see it vigorous and strong. But that body is so endeared to her, because by means of it the child is enabled to live happily with her; through it his fond soul can requite maternal love by filial devotion; or in it he may develop a powerful and beautiful personality worthy to be adored as the ideal creature of maternal affection. If in the bloom of physical health he were to reveal himself stupid and insensate, endowed with mere instinctive sensuality and bestial appetites, this son would cease to be the object of his mother’s fondness, nay, he would arouse in her a feeling of loathing and revulsion. It is this sense of loathing that we feel towards the brutes, to the extent that we never can be sympathetically drawn to them, and that we also feel for the human corpse from which life has departed; for life is the basis of every psychological relation, and therefore of every possible sympathy.

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Education is union, communion, inter-individual unification; and unity is possible only because men spiritually convene. Matter, we have seen, nature, things, the non-spirit is multiplicity. As soon as the multiplicity of natural elements begins to be organised, already in their organism spiritual activity shines forth. In the spirit is the root and possibility of every unification. It is spirit that unites men. Education therefore cannot be a social relationship and a link between men except by being a spiritual tie among human minds. Therefore it is now, and has at all times been, what it naturally ought to be, education of the spirit.

But as we aim at the education of the spirit, we may or we may not take care of the body; or again we may take care of it in this or that way. It all depends on what conception we have of the spirit. The ancients made a great deal of physical culture, and the Greek philosophers of antiquity considered gymnastics to be the essential complement of music, including in music all forms of spiritual cultivation. The ancients never divided the spirit from the physical reality of man: man as a whole (body and psychic activity) was conceived by them as a natural being subject to the mechanism which regulates and controls nature. When Greek psychology fell under the influence of that mystic outlook which is peculiar to religious belief, the soul, which was opposed to the body, and which was looked upon as chained and emprisoned in the body, was sharply distinguished 196 from another soul. That other soul was kept in contact with the materiality of all natural things, and together with them was governed by the law of mechanical becoming, that is, of the transformations caused by motion by which all the parts of matter are bestirred. This natural soul, susceptible of development, and capable of gradually rising to the height of the other, of the pure bodiless mind whose act is the contemplation of truth; this soul imbedded in the body, which does not therefore give to man a supernatural being, but like all things of nature comes into the world, grows and dies, incessantly passing from one mode of being to another, this soul is the one that can and ought to be educated. The soul which results from the organic process of the physical body, and which in its development proceeds side by side with the transformations of the latter, could not be educated except in connection with the development and improvement of the body. Human thought, which then had not yet secured the consciousness of its own irreducible opposition to nature,—the consciousness, in other words, of its own essential freedom,—seeing itself immersed even as spiritual substance in the indistinctness of nature, could not look upon education as upon a problem of freedom which can not admit of nature as limiting spiritual activity. It was accordingly reduced to conceive this activity, displayed in dealing with man, as being on the same plane with the 197 other forms of activity which propose to deal with things of nature. In a pedagogical naturalism of this sort, the mind could not be the mind without also being body, and therefore had to include physical development in its own process.

But with the advent of Christianity the spirit was sharply dissociated from nature. The original dualism of law of the spirit and law of the flesh, of grace and nature, rescued man at the very beginning from the tyranny of merely natural things, and announced a kingdom of the spirit which “is not of this world.” And it is not in fact “of this world,” if by world we mean what the word ordinarily implies,—the world which confronts us, and which we can point out to ourselves and to others; the world which, being the object of our experience, is the direct antithesis of what we are, subject of experience, free personality, spirit, Christian humanity. Man, in this Christian conception, in this opposition to nature and to the experimental world, overcomes what within his own self still belongs to nature, subdues that part of him which because natural appears as the enemy of freedom and of the finality of the spirit; as the seducer and the source of guilty wiles which clip the wing of man’s loftier aspirations and weigh him down into a beast-like subjection to instinct. He therefore tends to underrate physical education, and sacrifices it to the demands of the spirit. He does not completely neglect 198 the question of the behaviour of man towards physical nature; he could not, since his very dualism is possible only on condition that he correlate the two terms of the opposition. But finding that his attempt to attain freedom and realise his spiritual destiny is thwarted by the natural impulses of the senses, in which the life of the body is made manifest, he decides to remove these hindrances and to clear the way which leads to spiritual salvation. He does then take the body into consideration, but simply to check its instincts and control its sensuous appetites. By the discipline of self-mortification, under the guidance of an unbending will, he subdues the flesh, and subjects it to the exigencies of the spirit.

Evidently this subduing discipline is still physical exercise, but in its own way. The haircloth of St. Francis corresponds in fact to the club of Hercules, and serves the same purpose. The monsters which are knocked down by the weapon which Hercules alone could wield torment the saint of Assisi also; only, they are within him. He even tames the wolf, but without club or chains, by the mere exercise of his gentle meekness. These internal monsters are not, properly speaking, in the material body. If they were, the Saint would not need to worry about them any more than about the earth under his feet or the sack on his shoulder. But they are in that body which he feels; they are in that soul which, with the violence of its desires, the 199 din of its harsh and fiercely discordant voices, distracts him from the ideal where his life is. They are in that soul which thrusts so many claims on him, that were he to satisfy them he would have to part company with his Lady Poverty, and become once more the slave of things which are not in his power,—of wealth, which heaps up and blows away; of Fortune, which comes as a friend and departs as an enemy. He would, in other words, return to a materialistic conception of life. His Lernæan hydra is in the depths of his heart, where hundred-headed instinct, with its hundred mouths, tears the roots of his holy and magnanimous will, eager to resemble the Saviour in love and self-sacrifice.

This monster is strangled with the haircloth, when the body is hardened and trained to self-denial, to suffering, to the repression of all animal passions which would keep man away from his goal. This discipline, far from debilitating the body, gives it a new strength, an endurance which enables man to live on a higher plane than he would if he followed natural impulses. For this more difficult manner of living, a robustness and a hardihood are requisite which are beyond the natural means of the body. The system of physical culture which gives this stupendous endurance is called asceticism.

But this system is an abstract one. Man’s life is not poverty, since it is work and therefore wealth. And 200 the mind with its freedom cannot be conceived of as antagonistic to nature. For as body and as sense, in so far as we exist and know of our existence, we belong to this nature. Antagonism and duality import the limitation of each of the opposed terms and exclude freedom which is not to be found within fixed limits; for freedom, as we have said, means infinitude.

The spirit is free only if infinite. It cannot have any obstructing barrier in its path. It can be conceived as freedom only after it has overcome dualism, and when in nature itself and in the body we see the effect of the activity of the spirit. It has no need therefore of walls within which it might feel the necessity of cloistering itself in the effort to renounce the outer world. This is not the way to conquer freedom. A liberty won under such conditions would always be insecure, constantly threatened, always beleaguered, and therefore a mere shadow of freedom. The spirit, if it is free, that is, if it is spirit, must be conterminous with thought, it must extend its sway as far as there is any sign of life to the last point where a vestige of being can be revealed to it. Nothing thinkable can be external to it. Whatever presents itself to it, whether in the garb of an enemy or under the cloak of friendship, can only be one of its creatures, which it has placed at its own side, or in front of itself, or against itself.

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This new pedagogical and philosophical view, first disclosed to Humanism, then enlightened by the genius of the Italian Renaissance, appears now to us in the full light of modern thought. Superficially it might seem identical with the classical and naturalistic outlook. In reality, however, it has made its way back to it only in order to confirm and integrate the concept of Christian spiritualism and to bring out its truth. Greek athletics is the training of the body as an end in itself: it surely serves the cause of the spirit, but only in so far as the spirit is grafted on the trunk of the physical personality, and to the extent that it is able to absorb all its vital sap, thereby subjecting itself to generation and decay, the common destiny of all natural beings. The physical culture of the ancients is spiritual discipline, only to the extent that for them the mind too is essentially body. Modern physical education, at least from the time of Vittorino da Feltre, is spiritual formation of the body: it is bodily training for the benefit of the spirit, just as the mediæval ascetic would have it; but of a spirit which does not intend to bury itself in abstract self-seclusion away from the existential world, of a spirit which passing beyond the cloister walls soars over the realm of nature, induing it and subduing it instrumentally to its ends and as a mirror of its will. So that for moderns, too, physical culture is spiritual education, but for the reason that to us the body itself is spirit. Our science is not 202 merely a speculation of ultra-mundane truths, but rather a science of man and of man in the Universe, and therefore also of this nature which is dominated and spiritualised by becoming known, in the same way that every book that is read is spiritualised.

This concrete notion of a spirit which excludes nothing from itself gives concreteness to the Christian conception of physical discipline. For it aims to turn the body into an obedient tool of the will, not however of that will which renounces the world, but of that will which turns to the world as to the field where its battles are fought and won; to the world which it transforms by its work, constantly re-creating it, now modifying one part and now another, but always acting on the entire system, and renewing it as a whole in the intimate organic connection and interdependence of these parts; to the world which forever confronts it in a rebellious and challenging attitude, and which it laboriously subdues and turns into a mirror of its own becoming.

Modern idealism and ancient naturalism both emphasise, though for opposite motives, the importance of a positive education in distinction to the negative discipline inculcated by mediæval asceticism. We said that to-day we develop the body because the body is spirit. This proposition runs counter to common sense. But common sense as such cannot be respected by the thinker unless he first transforms its content. 203 Our body, we must remember, is not one body out of many. If it were actually mixed with and lost in the multitude of material things which surround it, we could no longer speak of any bodies. For all bodies, as psychologists say, are perceived in so far as they modify ours and are somehow related to it. Or to put it in a different and perhaps better way, all other bodies, which we possess as contents of our experience, form a system, a circle, which has its centre; and this centre is our body. These first of all occupy space, but a space which no one of us can think of or intuit otherwise than as a radiating infinity, the centre of which we occupy with our body. So that before we can speak of bodies, we must first cognise our own. It is the foundation and groundwork of all bodies. Justly, therefore, the immanent sense, profound and continuous, which we have of our body, and whose modifications constitute all our particular sensations, was called the fundamental sentiment by our Italian philosopher Rosmini. For our body is ours only in so far as we feel it; and we feel it, at first, confusedly or rather indistinctly, without discerning any differentiated part. We feel it as the limit, the other, the opposite, the object of our consciousness, which, were it not conscious of something (of itself as of something), would not be consciousness, would not realise itself. And it realises itself, in the first place, as consciousness of this object which is the body. Accurately, therefore, 204 was the body defined by Spinoza as objectum mentis, as object of consciousness. Objectless consciousness is not consciousness; and it is likewise obvious that the object of consciousness cannot be such without consciousness.

The two terms are inseparable, for the reason that they are produced simultaneously by one and the same act, from which they cannot be detached and this act is the free becoming of the spirit.

Our body, this first object of consciousness, as yet indistinct and therefore one and infinite, is not really in space, the realm of the distinct, of the multiple, of the finite. It is within our own consciousness. And it is only by recalling this inwardness that we are able to understand how it happens that we (“We”—spiritual activity) act upon our body, animating it, sustaining it, endowing it with our vigorous and buoyant vitality; constantly transforming it, in very much the same way that we act on what we easily conceive to be our moral personality. As we direct our thoughts, and bringing them out of the dark into the luminous setting of our consciousness, submit them to scrutiny and correction, to elimination and selection; when we stifle or feed the fire of our passions; when we cherish ideals, nourish them with our own life’s blood, and sustain them with our unbending resolve; and again when we quench them in the fickleness of our whims, are we not constantly creating and variously reshaping our spiritual 205 life, making it good or bad, that is, eagerly and scrupulously intent on the quest of Truth or slothfully plunged in ignorance and forgetfulness?

But our body, this inseparable companion, which is our own self, is no particular limb, which as such might be removed from us. We remain what we are, even though mutilated. Each part of our organism is ours, in that it is fused in the sole and indistinguishable totality of our living being,—our heart and our brain, as well as the phalanx of a finger, if perchance we should be unable to live without it, and it therefore effectively constituted our being. The distinction between organs that are vital and organs that are not is an empirical one, and relative to an observation which is true within the limits of ordinary occurrence.

If our body is the body which we perceive as ours, it is this one or that one in accordance with our perception; and this perception certainly is not arbitrary, but our own, subjective, to the point that, in an abnormal way, one may cease to be in possession of his body and thus to be no longer able to live in consequence of the loss of a finger, or even of a hair. This hair then is a vital part, not because it is a hair, but because it has been, insanely if you will, assumed and absorbed in the distinct unity of our body.

I shall try to make my thought clearer by the use of an example. The organ of organs, as a great 206 writer once said, is the hand, and we can look at it from two quite distinct points of view. We may place our hand on a table by the side of other hands, the hands of persons sitting around us. We see its shape, its colour, its size, etc.; we compare it with the others, and we almost forget it is ours, because then we do not, in act, distinguish it from the remaining ones. In these circumstances, it is evident that our hand is in our consciousness as a material object, separated from every essential relationship with us—with us as we are in the act of looking and comparing. This is the external point from which we may view our hand. But there is another one: the hand that picks up the pen as we are about to write is truly our hand, the instrument of which we avail ourselves in order to ply another tool which is needed for our work. In these circumstances our right hand, instead of being for us one in the midst of many, as it was in the case previously considered, is ours, the only one which we can possibly use, as we endeavour to carry out our intention of writing, which intention is our will to realise our personality in that determined way, since doing a thing always means realising that personality of ours which does that thing. Our hand in this case coalesces so completely with our being that without it—the hand already trained to write—we could not be ourselves. Abstractly, to be sure, we should be ourselves. But it is the same story over again. What exists is not 207 the abstract but the concrete. And in the concrete, we, who are about to write, are this determined personality, in which our will flows into the hand; and just as we could not in truth distinguish our Self from our will (we being nothing more and nothing less than this will of ours), in the same way it would be impossible to distinguish between “us” and our hand, between our will and our hand. Since the hand now wields the pen, having perfected its instrumentality by means of this latter, our will no longer leans upon and terminates in the hand, but it flows on and presses into the point of the pen itself, through which, if neither ink nor paper offers resistance, it empties into the stream of writing. This writing which is read is Thought, whereby the writer finds himself at the end in front of his own thinking, that is, in front of himself; that self, which, considering the act materially, he seemed to be leaving further and further behind, whereas in reality he was penetrating into it more and more deeply. But in such a case and by the act itself, can we effectively distinguish between thought, arm, hand, writing material, the written page, that same page when read, and the new thought? It is a circle made up of contiguous points, without gaps or interruptions. It is one sole process, wherein in consequence of a particular organisation of our personality, we place ourselves in front of ourselves, and thus realise ourselves. The hand is ours because it is not distinguished 208 from us, nor, consequently, from the remaining limbs of our body nor from its material surroundings.

This, our hand, knows how to write because we have learned how to write: in exactly the same way that our heart knows how to love, to dare and renounce, by striving earnestly to see ourselves in others, to repress the instinctive timidity of excessive prudence, and to break the force of desire prompted by natural egoism. We are then what we want to be; not merely in our passions and ideas, but in our limbs too, to the extent that their being depends from their functions, and their functions can be regulated by hygiene and exercise, which are our action and our will.

There is, of course, a natural datum which we cannot modify, which we have to accept as a basis for further construction. But this limitation, imposed on the truths I mentioned above, must be accepted without in any way renouncing the truth itself, and should be understood by virtue of both its scientific and moral values. This warning is not merely helpful in connection with the question now before us, but will always prove useful on account of its bearing on the many problems which arise from a spiritualistic conception of life and cause shiftless philosophasters to shy and balk. It is true that there is a body which we did not give to ourselves, which therefore is not a product of our spirit, nor part of its life and substance, but only if we think of the body of the individual, empirically considered 209 as such. In this sense I am not self-produced. The son can ascribe to his parents the imperfection that mars his whole existence, whatever kind of life he may decide to lead. The man who was born blind may blame his affliction upon cruel nature. But the child who calls his parents to account, and the man who complains of nature, is man as a particular; he is one of many men, one of the animals, one of the beings, one of the infinite things wielded by Man (that man to whom we must always refer, when we wish to recall that even if the world is not all spirit, there is at least a little corner therein set aside for it); he is one of the infinite things which Man gathers and unifies in his own thought because he is thought. The particular man is man as he is being thought, who refers us to the thinking man as to the true man. This true man is also an individual, not as a part but as the whole, and comprehends all within itself. And in this man, parents and children are the same man. In it men and nature are, likewise, one and the same, man or spirit in its universality. We (each one of us) are one and the other of these men; but we are one of them, the smaller one, only in that we are the other one, the larger one, and we ought not to expect the small to take the place of the large and to act in his stead. All our errors and all our sins are caused by substituting one in place of the other.

And what is more, the large, the all embracing, the 210 infinite, is present in the small with all his infinitude. Personality as such, in its actuality, does not shrink and restrict itself to the singular and particular man. Within those boundaries which are only visible from the outside, it internally expatiates to infinity, absorbing in itself and surmounting all limitations. The man born blind does not know the marvels and the wondrous beauties of nature which gladden the eyes and the soul of the seeing man. But his soul pours out none the less over the infinity of harmonies and of thought. And the blind man who once saw, in the consciousness of his sightlessness, cherishes the boundless image of the world once seen, and magnifies it indefinitely by the aid of the imagination. He even heals the wounds and soothes the pain of blindness by making it objective through reflection; and the personality, at any event, always victoriously breaks out of the narrow cell in which it might seem to be confined. So that in the depths of even the gloomiest dungeon a ray of light always peers through, to lighten and comfort the soul of man in misery, and to restore to him the entire and therefore infinite liberty of creating for himself a world of his own.

We can therefore say that man, he that lives—not the one which is seen from the outside, but the thinking and the willing man, who is a personality in the act—never submits to a nature which is not his own. He shapes his own nature, beginning with his body, 211 and gradually from it magnifying the effect of his power, and crowding the environing space, which is his, with the creatures he gives life to. We must not consider the smaller man whom we see confined to a few square feet and at the mercy of the passing instant. We must intently look upon that other one who has done and still continues to do all the beautiful things on which we thrive, on that one who is humanity, the spirit. We must consider his power, which is thought and work (work, that is, as thought); and ponder over this material world in which we live, all blocked out, as it is, measured, and traversed by forces which we bridle, accumulate and release, at pleasure,—this world which has been altered from its former state, and has been made as we now see it fit for human habitation, which has been joined to us, assimilated to our life, spiritualised. When we have done all this we shall see how impossible it is to disconnect nature from the spirit, and to think the former without the latter. Nature may be dissociated from the natural man, that is, one of its parts may be isolated from the remainder. But such man of nature is not the one who rules over nature: he is not Volta who clutches the electric current and transforms the earth; he is not Michel Angelo who transfigures marble and creates the Moses.

Physical education, then, is not superadded to the education of the spirit, but is itself education of the 212 spirit. It is the fundamental part of this education, in as much as the body is, in the sense we have used the words, the seat of our spiritual personality. Living means constructing one’s own body, because living is thinking, and thinking is self-consciousness; but this consciousness is possible only if we make it objective, and the object as such is the body (our body). For as consciousness is, so is the body. There is no thinking which is not also doing. Thinking not only builds up the brain, but the rest of the body besides. We may call it will, but then there is not one single act of thought which is not the mental activity indicated by this word “will.” Without will we should have no bodily substance, in as much as the body is always and primarily life, and living is impossible without willing. What are called involuntary movements are not really such; they differ from the so-called voluntary in that they are constant, immanent, so much so that we can after all interrupt them. Without the exercise of our will we could never hold ourselves erect and keep our feet, but would forever be stumbling and falling; unless we willed it, the power which keeps every organ in its place, and maintains all the organs in the circle of life, would be annihilated. Therefore morale, as they say, is a very considerable aid in curing the diseases of the body. It is on this account that societies and religious sects have arisen which make of moral faith an instrument of physical well-being. For the same 213 reason, also, it is impossible for the psychiatrists to draw a line separating mental troubles from bodily ailments. The force of the will, the vigour of the personality, the impulse of the spirit in its becoming, this is the wondrous power which galvanises matter and organically quickens it; which sustains life, equips it, and fits it for its march towards ever renewed, ever improved finalities. It is not temperament which is the basis of character, but character which is the basis of temperament. If we reverse this proposition, every moral conception of life becomes absurd, and every spiritual value appears ineffectual. Don Abbondio then ceases to be wrong, and Cardinal Federico Borromeo is no longer right.

Character too is an empirical concept, and like all such concepts, it has a truthfulness which is not clearly discernible, but dimly visible. Character signifies rational personality, using the term rationality to mean, not the movement or the becoming which belongs peculiarly to reason as the form of spiritual activity, but the coherence of the object on which this activity is fixed, which coherence in turn consists in the harmony whereby it is possible to think all the parts of objective thought as forming a single whole, in that there is no conflict or contradiction among them, and in as much as the object remains always the same throughout all these particulars. If in the course of reasoning we introduce conflicting statements which 214 cannot possibly be referred to the same thing, we cannot be said to reason. Rationality is the permanence of the being of which we think: it is firmness of conception, stability of a law which we apply to all particulars that come under its sway. For the object of consciousness is characterised, in respect to the act which constitutes it, by this stability and immutability. What we think is that and no other, whereas thought, by which we think it, is a becoming and a continuous change.

But the character of man is in the object, in the contents of his thought, in what he gradually builds himself up to, in the determined personality which he constitutes by thinking, or, in other words, in his body. But body, be it remembered, in an idealistic sense, body as a system, forming, with its law and its configuration, the solid basis of every ulterior development. This truth, vaguely accepted by common sense, which looks upon a strong constitution as a preliminary to a sound character, will appear in its full light only after it has been stripped of the fantastic and material attributes which it receives from a realistically vulgar way of conceiving the body materially. For it is evident that a feeble and sickly man may yet have a steel-like character. Farinata, who stands “erect with breast and brow,” as though he held Hell in contempt: Giordano Bruno, who amidst the flames that 215 already consume his flesh disdainfully turns his eyes from the symbol of the religion which had thrust him on the stake, are evident examples of a strength of mind with no relation to their physical powers, which were already destroyed or about to be scattered by an irresistible might. Leopardi is right when he scornfully protests that his ill health is not the cause of that sad pessimism which in his mind solemnly challenges “the unseemly hidden Power.”

Character is physical robustness to the extent that this latter is spiritual haleness, and in so far as it is compact, firm, steadfast thought. Thought in this respect appears externally as body, not subject to the hostile forces that perpetually beset it from without and from within; and on account of the intrinsic spirituality of its substance, it is a law rather than a fact, and a process or a tendency rather than a fixed and established manner of being. For organic endurance, which is really what we mean by health, does not consist in muscular development or in the bloom of an exuberant constitution, but rather in an indwelling power, in dynamically persistent and tenacious struggle and adaptation, in the capacity of self-preservation, of self-affirmation, which is the specific essence of spiritual being.

This body, in which thought organises and consolidates itself; this body, by means of which thought is 216 enabled to press on its vigorous development, reabsorbing in its actual present the past accomplishment, and to proceed on its ascent, scaling the height step by step, never sliding downward, because every grade it builds remains as a firm support of the next one;—this is man’s character, which is not an attribute of the will considered as practical activity in contra-distinction to theoretic activity. Character is an attribute of the spirit qua spirit, without any adjectives. We may, if we will, distinguish the practical from the theoretical man, the soundness of the will from intellectual originality. But just as it is not possible to conceive of a really fruitful and constructive practical activity without that coherence of design and self-supporting volitional continuity which constitute character, in the same way intelligence and ingenuity will not become manifest without firmness of purpose, without persevering reflection and study of the object, and without stability of this object of intellectual activity, which again constitute character. If character is set as the basis of morality, then every science and every form of culture, even those which aim at evil, considered in themselves, as the life of the intelligence must have a moral value, must be governed by an inviolable law. By spiritual steadfastness, which is the condition of spiritual productivity, man sacrifices himself to an ideal and constitutes his moral personality, whether he die for his country or whether he 217 labour to bring light amid his thoughts. Life in all its phases is the untiring fulfilment of duty.

To conclude then, physical education must be encouraged, but as spiritual training and as formation of character. Gymnastic exercise, therefore, far from being the only way to this end, may even lead in the opposite direction; and it will do so as long as it is considered apart from the remainder of education, with a particular scope of its own, and with heterogeneous contents in respect to spiritual education properly so-called. The teacher of physical education must always bear in mind that he is not dealing with bodies, bodies to be moved around, to be lined up, or rushed around a track. He too is training souls, and collaborates with all the other teachers in the moral preparation and advancement of mankind. If, in addition to his special qualifications, he does not possess culture enough to enable him to discern the spirit beyond the body, and to understand therefore the moral value of order, of precision, of gracefulness, of agility, by which man externally realises his personality, he will no doubt fulfil the ordinary demands of physical culture, but he will just as certainly antagonise and disgust those of his pupils who are most highly gifted and otherwise better trained, and he can therefore lay no claim to the title of educator.

Education then is either one or not effective. The assumption that there are many kinds of education 218 leads to very disastrous results. Education is one; and as a whole it appears unchanged in each one of the parts that we ordinarily distinguish in it, according as we approach the human spirit now from one side and now from the other.

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CHAPTER X
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 220 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 221 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 222 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 223 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 224 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.

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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 226 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 227 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 228 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 229 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 230 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.

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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. 232 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 233 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 234 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 235 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 236 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 237 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 238 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 239 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 coöperating 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 240 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 241 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 242 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 243 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.

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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 æsthete, 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 244 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 245 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.