The scientific development of education is one of the greatest tasks of modern civilization. The ideas that are impressed on the mind in early youth are most persistent, and generally determine the direction of thought and conduct for the whole of life. Hence we find the struggle between the two philosophic tendencies assuming the greatest practical importance in this department. As the priests were, thousands of years ago, in the first stages of civilization, the sole trainers of the growing mind, they had charge of the school as well as of medicine. Religion was made the chief foundation of instruction, and its doctrines were the moral guide for the whole of life. The isolated attempts that were made by monistic philosophy in ancient times to destroy this theistic superstition had no effect on the education of the young. In this the dualistic principles of Plato and Aristotle prevailed, their metaphysical theories being blended with the teaching of the Church. In the Middle Ages the power of the Roman priesthood enforced them everywhere. And, although a good deal of this teaching lost its prestige at the Reformation, the influence of the Church on the school was maintained down to our own time. The spiritual power of the Church finds a useful ally in this in the conservative attitude of most governments. Throne and altar support each other; both dread the advance of scientific inquiry. In face of this powerful dualistic alliance, supported by the mental apathy of the masses and a convenient blind submission to authority, the monistic system has a difficult position to maintain. It will only gain solid ground in education when the school is divorced from the Church and scientific knowledge is made the foundation of the curriculum. I have pointed out in the nineteenth chapter of the Riddle the guiding principles to be followed in this reform of education in opposition to the influence of Church and state.
As we have dealt in the eighteenth chapter with morals and their development from habit and adaptation, we need only mention here the contradiction that we still find between the monistic claims of pure reason and the dualistic claims of practical reason. This has been largely sustained by Kant's teaching, but his categorical imperative has been completely refuted by modern science. The metaphysical grounding of morality on free will and ethical intuitions (a priori) must be replaced by a physiological ethic, based on monistic psychology. As this can no more recognize a moral order of the world in history than a loving Providence in the life of the individual, the monistic morality of the future must be reducible to the laws of biology, and especially of evolution.
The great importance that attaches to the new science of sociology is due to its close relations to theoretical anthropology and psychology on the one hand, and to practical politics and law on the other. When we take it in the wider sense, human sociology joins on to that of the nearest mammals. The family life, marriage, and care of the young in the mammals, the formation of herds in the carnivora and ungulates and of troops in the social apes, lead on to the looser associations of savages and barbarians, and from these to the beginnings of civilization. The history of these associations is connected with the social rules that govern the intercourse of smaller and larger communities. In the biological reduction of social rules to the natural laws of heredity and adaptation, dynamic sociology (as Lester Ward has called it) proceeds on purely monistic lines, while in social intercourse itself we still find a good deal of dualism. How little truth and nature count for in our cultured society, how much hypocrisy and insincerity have to do with social rules, has been well shown by Max Nordau in his Conventional Lies of Civilization.
Politics is closely connected with sociology on the one hand and law on the other. As internal politics it controls the organization of the state by a constitution; as external or foreign politics it directs the relations of states to each other. In my opinion, pure reason should prevail in both departments; the relations of the citizens to each other and to the whole should be regulated by the same ethical principles that we recognize in personal intercourse. We are, unfortunately, very far from this ideal in the life of a modern state. Brutal egoism rules in foreign politics; every nation thinks only of its own advantage, and furthers it with all its military and other resources. Domestic politics is still largely directed by the barbaric prejudices of the Middle Ages. Great struggles are in progress between the central government and the mass of the people. Both parties spend themselves in fruitless conflicts; yet reason in the life of the state suffers more than its special political complexion. "Whether the state shall be a monarchy or a republic, aristocratic or democratic, are subordinate questions. The great question is: Shall the modern state be spiritual or secular? Shall it be governed theocratically by irrational beliefs and clerical arbitrariness, or nomocratically by rational laws and civic right?" (Riddle, chapter i.).
In the science of law, too, we find the prevalence of the dualistic principles that have come down from the Middle Ages and antiquity, and have acquired a certain sacredness by blending with the teaching of the Church. Kant's dualism is again found to be at work, influencing the ideas of jurists and statesmen. With it we find in our codes many carefully preserved relics of mediæval superstition. A great deal of harm is done by this religious influence. Every day we read in the papers of curious deliverances in the lower and higher courts at which every thoughtful man can only shake his head. Here also there will be no solid improvement until the education of jurists includes a thorough training in anthropology and psychology as well as in the code.
Theology has stood at the head of the four venerable "faculties" at our universities for centuries. It still holds this place of honor, as the Church, the organ of practical theology, continues to exercise a profound influence on life. In fact, most of the other branches of applied science—especially jurisprudence, politics, ethics, and pedagogics—are still more or less affected by religious prejudices. The chief of these is the idea of God conceived in some form or other as the Supreme Being; as Goethe says, "Every one calls the best he knows his God." However, the idea of God is not the chief feature of all religions. The three greatest Asiatic religions—Buddhism, Brahmanism, and Confucianism—were at first purely atheistic; Buddhism was at once idealistic and pessimistic, whence Schopenhauer regarded it as the highest of all religions. On the other hand, belief in a personal God is the central feature of the three great Mediterranean religions. This anthropomorphic God is conceived in a hundred forms in the various sects of the Mosaic, Christian, and Mohammedan religions, but his existence remains one of the chief articles of faith. No evidence of his existence is to be found; this was very ably shown by Kant, although he thought that practical reason postulated it. All that revelation is supposed to teach us on the matter belongs to the region of fiction. The whole field of theology, especially dogmatic theology, and the whole of the Church teaching based on it, are based on dualistic metaphysics and superstitious traditions. It is no longer a serious subject of scientific treatment. On the other hand, comparative religion is a very important branch of theoretical theology. It deals with the origin, development, and significance of religion on the basis of modern anthropology, ethnology, psychology, and history. When we study without prejudice the results of these sciences bearing on religion, theology turns out to be pantheism, in the sense of Spinoza and Goethe, and thus monism becomes a connecting link between religion and science.
This brief survey of the twenty chief branches of modern science and their relation to monism and dualism shows that we are face to face with great contradictions, and that we are still far from the harmonious and successful adjustment of these differences. They are partly due to a real antinomy of reason in the Kantist sense—an antithesis in ideas, in which the positive seems to be just as capable of proof as its contradictory. But, for the most part, this unfortunate antinomy in the sciences is connected with their historical development. Pure reason, the highest quality of civilized man, was gradually evolved from the intelligence of the savage, and this in turn from the instincts of the apes and lower mammals; and many relics of its former lower condition remain to-day, and have, through practical reason, a most prejudicial influence on science. These dualistic prejudices and irrational dogmas—intellectual residua of the primitive condition of the race, fossil ideas and rudimentary instincts—still pervade the whole of modern theology, jurisprudence, politics, ethics, psychology, and anthropology. If we glance at the whole field of modern science at the beginning of the twentieth century in this connection, we can distribute its twenty sections into three groups—rational (purely monistic), semi-dogmatic (half-monistic), and dogmatic (predominantly dualistic) disciplines.
The following may be classed as rational or purely monistic sciences, in which no competent and thoroughly expert representative now admits dualistic considerations: of the pure or theoretical sciences, physics, chemistry, mathematics, astronomy, and geology; of the applied or practical sciences, medicine, hygiene, and technology. On the other hand, in the semi-dogmatic sciences we still find a mixture of monistic and dualistic ideas in the appreciation of their aims and objects, one or the other prevailing according to the party position or personal training of the individual representative. This is the case with most of the biological sciences, biology (in the broadest sense), anthropology, psychology, philology, history, psychiatry; and of the applied sciences, pedagogics and ethics. The two latter sciences form a transition to the four purely dogmatic sciences in which the traditional dualism is still paramount: sociology, politics, jurisprudence, and theology. In these branches of science mediæval traditions retain a good deal of their power. Most of their official representatives cling to prejudices and superstitions of all sorts, and very slowly and gradually admit the acquisitions of pure reason as embodied in monistic anthropology and psychology. The intellectual life was in many respects more advanced at the beginning of the nineteenth than of the twentieth century.
This classification of the chief branches of knowledge in their relation to philosophy, the comprehensive science of general truths, is naturally only a provisional and personal sketch. It is especially difficult from the circumstance that all the sciences have very complex relations to each other, and have undergone many changes as to their aims and subjects in the course of their historical development. I will only point out that a good deal of science—in fact, the rational sciences with exact mathematical basis—have now been completely won over to monism; and in the semi-dogmatic sciences it is gaining ground from day to day, so that we may hope sooner or later to see the four dogmatic sciences also, the strong bulwarks of dualism—sociology, politics, jurisprudence, and theology—succumb to monism. For the ultimate aim of all the sciences can only be the unity of their underlying principles, or their harmonious unification by pure reason.
It is now more and more generally acknowledged in educated countries that a complete reform of our educational curriculum is needed, both in elementary and secondary schools and at the universities. The great struggle between two different tendencies assumes larger proportions every day. On the one hand, most governments, following their conservative instinct, cling as far as possible to mediæval traditions, and find support in the dogmatic teaching of theology and jurisprudence. On the other hand, the representatives of pure reason seek to get rid of these fetters, and to introduce the empirical and critical methods of modern science and medicine into what are called the mental sciences. The opposition between the two parties is accentuated by their different sociological tendencies. Liberal humanists claim that the freedom and education of all men is the aim of progressive evolution, in the conviction that the free development of the personality of each individual is the surest guarantee of happiness. To conservative governments this is a matter of indifference; they look on the individual citizens, in accordance with the manifold division of labor, merely as so many screws and wheels in the great organism of the state. The "upper ten thousand" naturally think of their own welfare first, and desire to keep all higher education to themselves. But in the light of pure reason the state is not an end in itself; it is a means to insure the prosperity of the citizens. To each of these, whatever their condition, the opportunity should be afforded of acquiring the higher education and developing their talents. Hence in education we should impart a general outlook on all the sides of human life. Each should acquire the elements of science, not only of physics and chemistry, but also of biology and anthropology. On the other hand, the predominance of the classical training over modern ought to be restricted. Every student and every faculty should be occupied with only philosophy and science in the first sessions, and not take up special studies until afterwards.