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.
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.
FOOTNOTES:
Referring to the old phrase, purus mathematicus, purus asinus.