XIV
THE TEACHING OF PHILOSOPHY
The study of philosophy covers such a wide range of subjects that it is difficult to generalize in attempting to answer the basal questions which call for consideration in a book like this. In the great European universities it includes psychology, logic, ethics, æsthetics, epistemology, metaphysics, the history of philosophy, and sometimes even the philosophy of religion, the philosophy of history, the philosophy of law, and the philosophy of the State. Although special courses may not be offered in every one of these fields in our American colleges, their philosophical territory is sufficiently extensive and the separate provinces sufficiently unlike to baffle any one seeking to describe the educational aims and methods of the domain as a whole. In order, therefore, to do full justice to our task it would be necessary to treat each one of the various philosophical branches separately and to expand the space assigned to us into a fair-sized volume. Since this is not to be thought of, we shall have to confine ourselves to a consideration of the traits common to all the subjects, without forgetting, however, such differences as may call for different educational treatment.
The unified college course in philosophy
The difficulty of which we have spoken becomes less formidable when the teacher of the traditional philosophical subjects regards them not as so many independent and disconnected fields of study, but as parts of a larger whole held together by some central idea. The great systematic thinkers, from Plato down to Herbert Spencer, have aimed at "completely unified knowledge" and have sought to bring order and coherence into what may seem to the casual onlooker as a disunited array of phenomena. Philosophical teaching will be the more fruitful, the more it is inspired by the thought of unity of aim, and the more consciously the teachers of the different disciplines keep this idea in mind. That is the reason why philosophical instruction given in a small college and by one man is, in some respects, often more satisfactory than in the large university with its numberless specialists, in which the beginning student frequently does not see the forest for the trees. It is not essential that the teacher present a thoroughly worked-out and definitive system of thought, but it is important that he constantly keep in mind the interrelatedness of the various parts of his subject and the notion of unity which binds them together,—at least as an ideal.
And perhaps this notion of the unity of knowledge ought to be made one of the chief aims of philosophical instruction in the college. The ideal of philosophy in the sense of metaphysics is to see things whole, to understand the interrelations not only of the branches taught in the department of philosophy but of all the diverse subjects studied throughout the university. The student obtains glimpses of various pictures presented by different departments and different men, and from different points of view. Each teacher offers him fragments of knowledge, the meaning of which, as parts of an all-inclusive system, the pupil does not comprehend. Indeed, it frequently happens that the different pieces do not fit into one another; and he is mystified and bewildered by the seemingly disparate array of facts and theories crowding his brain which he cannot correlate and generally does not even suspect of being capable of correlation. To be sure, every teacher ought to be philosophical, if not a philosopher, and indicate the place of his specialty in the universe of knowledge; but that is an ideal which has not yet been realized. In the meanwhile, the study of philosophy ought to make plain that knowledge is not a mere heap of broken fragments, that the inorganic, organic, and mental realms are not detached and independent principalities but kingdoms in a larger empire, and that the world in which we live is not a chaos but a cosmos. An introductory course in philosophy, the type of course given in many German universities under the title "Einleitung in die Philosophie" and attended by students from all sections of the university, will help the young student to find his bearings in the multifarious thought-world unfolded before him and will, at the same time, put him in the way of developing some sort of world-view later on.
Philosophical instruction that succeeds in the task outlined above will have accomplished much. Nevertheless, it cannot attain its goal unless the student is introduced to the study of the human-mental world which constitutes a large portion of the field assigned to the philosophical department: the study of psychology, logic, ethics, and the history of philosophy. These branches deal with things in which the human race has been interested from its early civilized beginnings and with which the young persons entering college have had little or no opportunity of becoming acquainted. And they deal with a world which no man can ignore who seeks to understand himself and his relation to the natural and social environment in which his lot is cast. A knowledge of the processes of mind (psychology), of the laws of thought (logic), of the principles of conduct (ethics), and of the development of man's interpretation of reality (history of philosophy) will supplement the knowledge acquired by the study of physical nature, preventing a one-sided and narrow world-view, and will serve as a preparation for intelligent reflection upon the meaning of reality (philosophy in the sense of metaphysics).
Controlling aims in the teaching of philosophy