[Footnote 1: G. Lowes Dickinson: Greek View of Life, p. 248.]
Again, we know the many beautiful features of mediæval life through its painting and poetry and religion. We know Saint Francis and are familiar with the heroic records of saintliness and renunciation. We know, the great cathedrals, the pageantry and splendor, the exquisite handicraft, the tapestries and illuminated manuscripts, the vast learning and the incomparable dialectic. We know also the social injustices, the misery and squalor the ignorance in which the mass of the people lived.
We can stop, therefore, neither in perpetual adoration of nor perpetual caviling at the past. Each age had its special excellences and its special defects, both from the point of view of the ideals then current, and those current in our own day. In so far as the past is dead and over with, we cannot legitimately criticize it with standards of our own day. We cannot blame the Greeks for sanctioning slavery, nor criticize James I because he was not a thoroughgoing democrat. But in so far as the past still lives, it is open to critical examination and revision. Traditions, customs, ideas, and institutions inherited from the past, which still control us, are subject to modification. We are justified in welcoming changes and modifications which, after careful inquiry, seem clearly to promise betterment in the life of the group. Thus to welcome changes which upon experimental evidence show clearly the benefits that will accrue to the group, is not radicalism. Nor is opposition to changes on the ground that upon critical examination they give promise of harmful consequences, conservatism. Verdicts for or against change reached on such a basis reflect the spirit and technique of experimental science. They reflect the desire to settle a course of action on the basis of its results in practice rather than on any preconceived prejudices in favor either of stability or change. To the critical mind, neither stability nor change is an end in itself. There is no hypnotism about "things as they are"; no lure about things as they have not yet been. The problem is shifted to a detailed and thoroughgoing inquiry into the consequences of specific changes in social habits, ideas and institutions, education, business, and industry. Whether changes should or should not win critical approval depends on the kind of ideals or purposes we set ourselves and, secondly, on the practicability of the proposed changes. Change may thus be opposed or approved, in a given case, on the grounds of desirability or feasibility. Whether a change is or is not desirable depends on the ideals of the individual or the group. Whether it is or is not feasible is a matter open increasingly to scientific determination. Thus a city may hire experts to discover what kind of transportation or educational system will best serve the city's needs. But whether it will or will not spend the money necessary depends on the social interests current.
Education as the transmitter of the past. Education is the process by which society undertakes the transmission of its social heritage. Indeed the main function of education in static societies is the initiation of the young into already established customs and traditions. It is the method used to hand down those social habits which the influential and articulate classes in a society regard as important enough to have early fixed in its young members. The past is simply transmitted, handed down en masse. It is a set of patterns to be imitated, of ideals to be continued, of mechanisms for attaining the fixed purposes which are current in the group.
In progressive societies education may be used not simply to hand down habits of doing, feeling, and thinking, from the older generation to the younger, but to make habitual in the young reflective consideration of the ends which must be attained, and reflective inquiry into the means for attaining them. The past will not be handed down in indiscriminate completeness. The present and its problems are regarded as the standard of importance, and the past is considered as an incomparable reservoir of materials and methods which may contribute to the ends sought in the present. But there is so much material and so little time, that selection must be made. Many things in the past, interesting on their own merits, must be omitted in favor of those habits, traditions, and recorded files of knowledge which are most fruitful and enlightening in the attainment of contemporary purposes. What those purposes are depends, of course, on ideals of the group in control of the process of education. But these purposes of ideals may be derived from present situations and not taken merely because they have long been current in the group. Thus, in a predominantly industrial civilization, it may be found more advisable and important to transmit the scientific and technical methods of control which men have acquired in recent generations than the traditional liberal arts. Science may be found more important than the humanities, medicine than moral theory. Even such education that tends to call itself "liberal" or "cultural" is effective and genuine education just in so far as it does illuminate the world in which we live. The religion and art, the literature and life of the past broaden the meaning and the background of our lives. They are valuable just because they do enrich the lives of those who are exposed to their influence. If studying the great literature and the art of the past did not clarify the mind and emancipate the spirit, enabling men to live more richly in the present, they would hardly be as studiously cherished and transmitted as they are. We are, after all, living in the present. The culture of the past either does or does not illuminate it. If it does not it is a competing environment, a shadow world in which we may play truant from actuality, but which brings neither "sweetness nor light" to the actual world in which we live.
THE CAREER OF REASON
The foregoing analysis of human behavior might thus be briefly summarized. We found that man is born a creature with certain tendencies to act in certain definite ways, tendencies which he largely possesses in common with the lower animals. We found also that man could learn by trial and error, that his original instinctive equipment could be modified. Thus far in his mental life man is indistinguishable from the beasts. But man's peculiar capacity, it appeared, lay in his ability to think, to control his actions in the light of a future, to choose one response rather than another because of its consequences, which he could foresee and prefer. This capacity for reflection, for formulating a purpose and being able to obtain it, we found to be practical in its origins, but persisting on its own account in the disinterested inquiry of philosophy and science and the free imaginative construction of art. And in all man's behavior, whether on the plane of instinct, habit, or reflection, we found action to be accompanied by emotion, by love and hate, anger and awe, which might at once impede action by confusing it, or sustain it by giving it a vivid and compelling motive.
The second part of the book was devoted to an analysis of the various specific traits which human beings display and the consequences that these have in men's relations with one another. Under certain conditions, one or another of these may become predominant; in particular historical conditions, one or another of them may have a high social value or the reverse. These traits vary in different individuals; in any of them, a man may be totally defective or abnormally developed. But taken in general, they constitute the changeless pattern of human nature, and fix the conditions and the limits of action.
But while these universal traits determine what man may do, and fix definitively the boundaries of human possibility, within these limits the race has a wide choice of ideals and attainments. The standards of what man will and should do, within the boundaries of the nature which is his inheritance, are to be found not in his original impulses, but in his mind and imagination. The human being is gifted with the ability to imagine a future more desirable than the present, and to contrive ingeniously in behalf of anticipated or imagined goods.