Indeed, we owe it to Gentile that Italian pedagogy has attained in the present day a simplicity and a depth of concepts unknown elsewhere. In Italy, not educational science alone, but the practice of it and its political aspects have been thoroughly recast and amply developed. And this, too, is due pre-eminently to the work of Gentile. His authority therefore is powerfully felt in schools of all grades, for he has lived intensely the life of the school and loves it dearly.
In addition to these differences arising from our division of labour, others may of course be noticed, and they are to be found in the form that philosophical doctrines have taken on in each of us. Identity is impossible in this field, for philosophy, like art, is closely bound up with the personality of the thinker, with his spiritual interests, and with his experiences of life. There is never true identity except in the so-called “philosophical school,” which indicates the death of a philosophy, in the same way that the poetical school proclaims death in poetry.
And so it has come about that our general conception of philosophy as simple philosophy of the spirit—of the subject, and never of nature, or of the object—has developed a peculiar stress in Gentile, for whom philosophy is above all that point in which every abstraction is overcome and submerged in the concreteness of the act of Thought; whereas for me philosophy is essentially methodology of the one real and concrete Thinking—of historical Thinking. So that while he strongly emphasises unity, I no less energetically insist on the distinction and dialectics of the forms of the spirit as a necessary formation of the methodology of historical judgment. But of this enough, especially since the reader can only become interested in these differences after he has acquired a more advanced knowledge of contemporary Italian philosophy.
I am convinced that the translation and popularisation of Gentile’s work will contribute to the toilsome formation of that consciousness, of that system of convictions, of that moral and mental faith which is the profound need of our times. For our age, eager and anxious for Faith, is perhaps not yet completely resigned to look for the new creed of humanity there where alone it may be found, where by firm resolve it may be secured—in pure Thought. Clear-sighted observers have perhaps not failed to notice that the World War, in addition to every thing else, has been a strife of religions, a clash of conflicting conceptions of life, a struggle of opposed philosophies. It is surely not the duty of thinkers to settle economic and political contentions by ineffective appeals to the universal brotherhood of man; but it is rather their duty to compose mental differences and antagonisms, and thus form the new faith of humanity—a new Christianity or a new Humanism, as we may wish to call it. Such a faith will certainly not be spared the conflicts from which ancient Christianity itself was not free; but it may reasonably be hoped that it will rescue us from intellectual anarchy, from unbridled individualism, from sensualism, from scepticism, from pessimism, from every aberration which for a century and a half has been harassing the soul of man and the society of mankind under the name of Romanticism.
Benedetto Croce.
Rome, April, 1921.
CHAPTER I
EDUCATION AND NATIONALITY
Participation on the part of elementary school teachers in the work and studies of the Universities has always seemed to me to constitute a real need of culture and of primary education. For the elementary school, by the very nature of the professional training of its teachers, is exposed to a grave danger from which it must be rescued if we mean to keep it alive.
The training of the elementary school teacher tends to be dogmatic. True it is that vigilant individuality and passionate love for his exquisitely spiritual calling impel the school teacher to an untiring criticism of his methods, of his actual teaching, and of the life of the school which he directs and promotes. But nevertheless in consequence of those very studies by which he has prepared himself to be an elementary instructor, he is led to look upon that learning which constitutes his mental equipment and the foundation of all his future teaching, as something quite finished, rounded out, enclosed in definite formulas, rules, and laws, all of which have been ascertained once for all and are no longer susceptible of ulterior revision. He looks upon this learning not as a developing organism, but as 4 something definitely moulded and stereotyped. From this the conclusion is drawn that a certain kind of knowledge may serve as a corner stone for the whole school edifice. Since his discipline and his teaching consist mainly of elements which because of their abstractness miss the renovating flow of spiritual life, the teacher slowly but surely ends by shutting himself up in a certain number of ideas, which are final as far as he is concerned. They are never corrected or transformed; in their mechanical fixity they cease to live; and the mind which cherishes and preserves them loses its natural tendency to doubt. Yet what is doubt but dissatisfaction with what is known and with the manner of knowing, and a spur to further inquiry, to better and fuller learning, to self scrutiny, to an examination of one’s own sentiments, one’s own character, and an inducement to broadmindedness, to a welcoming receptiveness of all the suggestions and all the teachings which life at all moments generously showers on us?