Pedagogics as a System

by Karl Rosenkranz

Education presupposes the stage of mind reached in productive memory; it deals with reflection; four stages of reflection: (a) sensuous ideas perceive things; (b) abstract ideas perceive forces or elements of a process; (c) concrete idea perceives one process, a pantheistic first principle, persistent force; (d) absolute idea perceives a conscious first principle, absolute person.

We have considered in our psychological study thus far the forms of life and cognition, contrasting the phase of nutrition with that of feeling, or sensibility. We have seen the various forms of feeling in sense-perception, and the various forms of representation as the second phase of intellectual activity—the forms of recollection, fancy, imagination, attention, and memory. We draw the line between the animals capable of education and those not capable of it, at the point of memory defined—not as recollection, but as the faculty of general ideas or conceptions, to which the significant words of language correspond.

With the arrival at language, we arrive at education in the human sense of the term; with the arrival at language, we arrive at the view of the world at which thought as a mental process begins. As sense-perception has before it a world of present objects, so thought has before it a world of general concepts, which language has defined and fixed.

It is true that few persons are aware that language stands for a world of general ideas, and that reflection has to do with this world of universals. Hence it is, too, that so much of the so-called science of education is very crude and impractical. Much of it is materialistic, and does not recognize the self-activity of mind; but makes it out to be a correlation of physical energies—derived from the transmutation of food by the process of digestion, and then by the brain converted into thought.

Let us consider now the psychology of thinking, or reflection, and at first in its most inadequate forms. As a human process, the knowing is always a knowing by universals—a re-cognition, and not simple apprehension, such as the animals, or such as beings have that do not use language. The process of development of stages of thought begins with sensuous ideas, which perceive mere individual, concrete, real objects, as it supposes. In conceiving these, it uses language and thinks general ideas, but it does not know it, nor is it conscious of the relations involved in such objects. This is the first stage of reflection. The world exists for it as an innumerable congeries of things, each one independent of the other, and possessing self-existence. It is the stand-point from which atomism would be adopted as the philosophic system. Ask it what the ultimate principle of existence is, and it would reply, "Atoms."

But this view of the world is a very unstable one, and requires very little reflection to overturn it, and bring one to the next basis—that of abstract ideas. When the mind looks carefully at the world of things, it finds that there is dependence and interdependence. Each object is related to something else, and changes when that changes. Each object is a part of a process that is going on. The process produced it, and the process will destroy it—nay, it is destroying it now, while we look at it. We find, therefore, that things are not the true beings which we thought them to be, but processes are the reality. Science takes this attitude, and studies out the history of each thing in its rise and its disappearance, and it calls this history the truth. This stage of thinking does not believe in atoms or in things; it believes in forces and processes—"abstract ideas"—because they are negative, and cannot be seen by the senses. This is the dynamic stand-point in philosophy.

Reflection knows that these abstract ideas possess more truth, more reality, than the "things" of sense-perception; the force is more real than the thing, because it outlasts a thing,—it causes things to originate, and to change, and disappear.

This stage of abstract ideas or of negative powers or forces finally becomes convinced of the essential unity of all processes and of all forces; it sets up the doctrine of the correlation of forces, and believes that persistent force is the ultimate truth, the fundamental reality of the world. This we may call a concrete idea, for it sets up a principle which is the origin of all things and forces, and also the destroyer of all things, and hence more real than the world of things and forces; and because this idea, when carefully thought out, proves to be the idea of self-determination—self-activity.

Persistent force, as taught us by the scientific men of our day, is the sole ultimate principle, and as such it gives rise to all existence by its self-activity, for there is nothing else for it to act upon. It causes all origins, all changes, and all evanescence. It gives rise to the particular forces—heat, light, electricity, magnetism, etc.—which in their turn cause the evanescent forms which sense-perception sees as "things."

We have described three phases:—