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THE CONCEPT OF METHOD 
 
 BY 
 
 GERHARD R. LOMER, Ph.D. 
 
 TEACHERS COLLEGE, COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 
 CONTRIBUTIONS TO EDUCATION, NO. 34 
 
 PUBLISHED BY 
 
 ®rarIfW0 ClnlUg*. ffloltnnbta MnixtetaM^ 
 
 NEW YORK CITY 
 
 1910 
 
Copyright, 1910, by Gerhard R. Lomer 
 
PREFACE 
 
 There is in much of the philosophical writing of the present 
 day a tendency to indulge in a sophisticated consideration of the 
 minutiae of various aspects of experience, rather than an attempt 
 to attain an organic view of the method of experience itself. 
 The somewhat sudden introduction of scientific method into 
 educational work and its widespread application to the phe- 
 nomena of the school have necessarily involved a corresponding 
 temporary neglect of the great body of intellectual and spiritual 
 tradition which, after all, is the life of the school as an institu- 
 tion. The fundamental problem of education must always be, 
 in its broadest terms, the character of the process of interaction 
 between an immature developing individual on the one hand and 
 a more or less permanent organisation of social ideals and habits 
 on the other hand. Historically the tendency has been to em- 
 phasise either of what we may call these " terminal aspects " 
 of the educational process to the comparative exclusion of the 
 other; and the problem of the educational theory of the present 
 day, if it is to take advantage of current conceptions of organic 
 unity and of functional activity, will be to examine more closely 
 this process of interaction between children, with all their in- 
 finite promises and their unrealised potencies, and the social 
 media through which alone they can reach their fullest and 
 highest development. It is this interaction which is the method 
 of education. 
 
 With regard to the spirit in which the problem is to be ap- 
 proached, a word or two of explanation may not be out of 
 place. Children themselves draw near to the multiplicity of 
 their juvenile experiences with the unconscious though implicit 
 purpose of developing and of organising their little world. 
 What they seek to do this consideration also attempts: the 
 organisation and the interpretation of the method of experience; 
 
 3 
 
4 The Concept of Method 
 
 and it approaches the problem, as far as may be, in the same 
 simpHcity of spirit, seeking to find in the " blooming buzzing 
 confusion " of the complications of experience some unity, some 
 coherent process of development, some idea of method. In 
 view of some of the tendencies of contemporary education, there 
 is need to repeat those wise words which were uttered by Francis 
 Bacon three centuries ago, and which contain the key to the 
 whole problem of method : " Nay, it is a point fit and neces- 
 sary in the front and beginning of this work, without hesitation 
 or reservation to be professed, that it is no less true in this 
 human kingdom of knowledge, than in God's kingdom of 
 heaven, that no man shall enter into it ' except he become first 
 as a little child.' " 
 
 The general course followed in this consideration of the his- 
 torical significance and of the epistemological interpretation of 
 the method of experience corresponds, as nearly as the limita- 
 tions of material and of subject allow, with the general course 
 of experience itself, no matter in what particular form or phase 
 that experience may present itself. Whatever unity there is, 
 therefore, in the following pages will be due in the first place 
 to the purpose underlying them : the tracing out of the implica- 
 tions of a too often uncritically accepted course of experience; 
 and, in the second place, to the identity of the method employed 
 in approaching each of the particular problems that present 
 themselves. For it is true that when method is realised in its 
 character of organic unity, it can be seen as well and as thor- 
 oughly in microcosm as in macrocosm, in typical instances as well 
 as in a detailed chronological conspectus. 
 
 A word of explanation may seem to be necessary in connec- 
 tion with the selection of the various types which have been 
 chosen for consideration in the historical chapters, and which 
 form the basis for the later interpretation. Other and more 
 numerous philosophers and scientists might well have been in- 
 cluded had the aim been historical completeness and not merely 
 the review of a few typical instances of thinkers whose main 
 object was to examine and to organise the method of experience. 
 
 The lacunae in the concliiding chapters cannot be more ap- 
 parent to the reader than they are to the writer "OTav avvrekemj &v 
 dpumo<i Ton a.pyf.rox, kox otov irava-tfrai ToVe airopTj6i^(TeTai. Their 
 
Preface 5 
 
 justification lies in the fact tiiat they are natural and inevitable 
 in the treatment of such a subject as the one under consideta- 
 tion. All that is teleologically implied in any process is rarely 
 genetically realised in the more or less fortuitous course of 
 temporal development. There must always be aspects of a 
 subject which will be part seen but never wholly realised, for 
 that prospective power of vision which the spirit exercises is 
 one phase of the method of our experience itself. 
 
 Hence, while this treatment of the Concept of Method seeks 
 to preserve a unity which comes alone from the organic nature 
 of its thought, it must suffer at the same time from an incom- 
 pleteness which is characteristic of all that is organic when re- 
 garded from the point of view of the immediate reaUsation of 
 all the implications that are latent in it. But since a certain 
 organic unity and the possibility of further development are char- 
 acteristic of every subject which is regarded from the functional 
 point of view, the non-appearance of these qualities would in- 
 dicate a lack in the method of treatment itself. 
 
 Whether these notes — for they are little more — will even 
 prove suggestive to those whose thoughts tend in the same di- 
 rection has scarcely been anticipated. Their main purpose is 
 to emphasise the strong necessity in the educational theory of 
 the present day for an analysis of the process of experience itself 
 with a view to realising its organic character, to making ap- 
 parent its implications, and to maintaining its ultimate reality, 
 in idea, as the method of our existence. 
 
 The obligations of this treatment of the subject of method 
 to the general body of philosophical writing can be only imper- 
 fectly indicated in the Bibliography appended it is indebted for 
 its original suggestion and for its final form to Dr. John Angus 
 MacVannel, under whose supervision this dissertation has been 
 written. 
 
 G. R. L. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 Page 
 
 Introduction 9 
 
 Part I: Historical Types of Method 
 
 Chapter I. The Greeks 12 
 
 Chapter II. Bacon 20 
 
 Chapter HI. Descartes 32 
 
 Chapter IV. Comenius 36 
 
 Chapter V. Kant 41 
 
 Part II: The Function and Interpretation of Method 
 
 Chapter VI. The Idea of Development 47 
 
 Chapter VII. The Interpretation of Experience 56 
 
 Chapter VIII. The Function of Method 80 
 
 Bibliography 97 
 
THE CONCEPT OF METHOD 
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 Juvenis, oblatis ingeniosis inventis, quaerebam ipse per me 
 possemne iniKnire etiam non lecto auctore: unde pamlatim ami- 
 madverti me certis regulis uti. 
 
 — Cartesii Cogitationes Privatae. 
 
 There is a fundamental community in the method of human 
 experience which transcends the bounds of space or the limita- 
 tions of time. In spite of the apparent multiplicity, of the mate- 
 rials and notwithstanding the obvious variety of ways of teach- 
 ing and learning, the underlying process of education is 
 essentially the same, for it involves the organization, the control, 
 and the interpretation of the experience of an individual who 
 is developing his personality in a human environment. When, 
 from the point of view of the race, this process of development 
 is raised to social consciousness. Education comes into being as 
 an organised social process of personal development. 
 
 Since it is conditioned on the one hand by the limitations of 
 the so-called educational materials, and since it is ckarly de- 
 pendent, on the other hand, upon the progressive develop- 
 ment of philosophical thought, the method of education has had 
 a varied history and has, at different times, emphasised now 
 one and now another aspect of experience. One has but to 
 glance at the history of education in China, in Greece, in medi- 
 eval Europe, and in present-day America, to realise the great 
 changes that have taken place in the materials of education, and 
 one has only to mention at random such names as Socrates, 
 Milton, Rousseau, and Spencer, to realise that the methods of 
 teaching have dififered at least as much in character as in 
 chronology. 
 
lo The Concept of Method 
 
 The greater emphasis in educational thought has hitherto 
 been placed upon the materials of education or upon special 
 details of educational procedure from a purely formal stand- 
 point, rather than upon the materials in their relation to the 
 process. This tendency has manifested itself in two different 
 ways: 
 
 (i) In the course of study, the program, or the curriculum 
 there has been inquiry into the nature of the materials and a 
 reorganisation of these upon the basis of recent psychological 
 study of the needs and capacities of the child. 
 
 (2) There has been an attempt to psychologise material, but 
 in such a way that the point of view of the child has tended to 
 prevail over the social aspect of education, and method has been 
 conceived of as something which the teacher can apply to the 
 material she gives the child, instead of being regarded as the 
 very process of interaction between herself and the child and 
 the material, all in one process of experience. 
 
 There is, however, in educational thought, as in all other 
 branches of scientific and philosophical inquiry, especially when 
 the materials are in process of reorganization, the tendency to 
 overlook characteristic underlying ideas. It is these very ideas 
 which give significance to the materials by showing their or- 
 ganic interrelation as factors in the experience process, be it 
 individual, social, or racial. It is these dominant ideas of prin- 
 ciples which give unity and form to all activity, whether it be 
 in what we call the world of nature or in the world of social 
 action. 
 
 If, then, we take on the one hand the materials that are selected 
 as having educational value in the school course, and on the 
 other hand take into consideration the child with his impulses, 
 instincts, and activities or energies, we find that we have what 
 we may call the two terminal aspects in the process of educa- 
 tion. The problem before us is to see how these two elements 
 are related to each other in actual experience. In other words, 
 we have to see how the school affords material for the social 
 direction, distribution, and transmission of the potential energy 
 possessed by the child : how, in a word, education is a method of 
 giving form to the experience of the child. 
 
Introduction 1 1 
 
 The purpose of this consideration of the concept of method 
 is therefore a twofold one: it attempts, in the first place, by a 
 consideration of typical examples, to analyse the process of ex- 
 perience, both individual and social, in such a way as to show 
 that its fundamental characteristics are Unity, Interaction, and 
 Development; and it seeks, in the second place, to indicate the 
 method of experience, the function of knowledge in raising ac- 
 tivity to consciousness, and the method of the education of the 
 individual through the social selection of materials and the 
 social control of individual activities by means of the function of 
 a standard of method. 
 
CHAPTER I 
 THE GREEKS 
 
 There are three fundamental intellectual interests that mani- 
 fest themselves in divers forms at all times in the history of 
 philosophy. The first of these is man's knowledge of the uni- 
 verse in which he finds himself; the next is the nature of his 
 own experience; and the last is the problem of human conduct. 
 
 It is not unnatural that among the Greeks, who were the first 
 European people to raise to consciousness the problems of ex- 
 perience, we find the genesis of these three fundamental aspects 
 of philosophical inquiry. Hence a brief sketch of the Greek 
 attitude to these typical phases of experience forms a natural 
 starting-point for a consideration of the later development of 
 the concept of method, and it has the additional advantage of 
 emphasising the aspects of genesis, interaction, and teleology 
 which are involved in all interpretations of experience. 
 
 In the first place, the problems of the organisation and of 
 the interpretation of nature which exercised the ingenuity oi 
 Thales (b. circ. 620 B.C.), Anaximander (b. circ. 610 B.C.) 
 and Anaximenes (b. circ. 528 B. C.) were practically the same 
 problems for which Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, and Bacon 
 subsequently sought a new solution. In the second place, the 
 distinction between sensation and reason, how the senses and 
 the judgment are related to one another in the experience of 
 the individual, and how far knowledge of reality was possible, 
 are philosophical problems which have persisted from the time 
 of the Sophists, through Scholasticism, Descartes, Locke, 
 Hume, and Kant down to the present day. Finally, the ques- 
 tion as to what the ends of human conduct are, and as to how 
 far knowledge is capable of realising that standard, is the great 
 ethical problem for Socrates and Plato as it is for Kant and 
 modern teleology. 
 
The Greeks 13 
 
 These three phases of philosophical inquiry, then, exist in 
 more or less conscious form in Greek thought, suggest prob- 
 lems which are solved variously by different schools, and per- 
 sist throughout the whole course of the later development of 
 European thought. They reach definite organised expression 
 in Bacon, in Descartes, and in Kant, who may be taken as per- 
 haps the most significant types of, first, the scientific and cos- 
 mological investigations of the human mind into the materials 
 of experience; second, of the examination of experience itself, 
 with a view to ascertaining the relation of the sensory and of 
 the rational elements whose interaction makes up the course 
 of experience; and third, of the criticism of the processes and 
 standards of knowledge, with a view to the determination of the 
 ultimate validity of human experience. 
 
 The aspects of the history of the concept of method which 
 call for immediate consideration are, therefore, (i) the manner 
 in which the Greeks interpreted the phenomena of nature and 
 formulated their scientific beliefs in a cosmology; (2) the way 
 in which they attempted to relate the phenomenon of sense, 
 experience, and the idea; and (3) the theory which they formu- 
 lated with regard to the function of knowledge as a guide to 
 conduct, and of philosophy as the way or method of the highest 
 human experience. 
 
 The investigation of nature with a view to an organisation 
 and interpretation of its phenomena was first undertaken among 
 the Greeks by the Ionian school. As Aristotle afterwards said, 
 they found everything full of life — irdvra wXi^fyrf BeZv- Their 
 main object of inquiry was genetic ; they were chiefly concerned 
 with the origin of things, and tried to reduce the multiplicity of 
 the phenomena of the universe to a single principle or simple 
 original substance, such as water, or vapor, or something un- 
 limited and infinite, endowed with life. Following the early 
 lonians, came the Pythagoreans (fl. 530 B. C.), with their in- 
 terest in mathematics, and reduced all things to number. They 
 had a higher conception of the nature of reality than their 
 predecessors, and in their abstract conception of quantity, and 
 of the harmony of opposites, which they applied in their ethics 
 as well as in their physics and cosmology, they emphasised the 
 function of philosophy as a guide to the moral consciousness 
 
14 The Concept of Method 
 
 of the individual. They thus prepared the way for a later meta- 
 physical inquiry and for the ethical emphasis of later Greek 
 philosophy. They were followed by the Eleatics, who gave a 
 metaphysical interpretation to the phenomena of the world. 
 While recognising the problem of change and realising the re- 
 lation of being and becoming, they attempted to formulate a 
 synthesis of these two aspects in the conception of the ultimate 
 unity and unchangeableness of reality, so that they, either ex- 
 plicitly or implicitly, identify the natural and the divine. Xeno- 
 phanes (b. 570 B.C.), whose interests were chiefly theological, 
 criticised the Greek anthropomorphic conceptions of what is 
 divine, and emphasised the unity of all things. Parmenides 
 {circ. 490 B. C.), more metaphysical in the trend of his thought, 
 chiefly concerned himself with the distinction between not-being 
 and being, the knowledge of which is truth. The senses lead 
 men into error and give rise to common Opinion ( So'|a) which 
 is to be distinguished from right reason (Xoyos ). We have here, 
 then, the clear suggestion of the problem which the Sophists 
 were to give up as hopeless and which Socrates was to solve. 
 
 So far the trend of Greek thought has been to attempt to 
 reduce the multiplicity of the phenomena of experience to some 
 fundamental unity which is ultimately true and real, and the 
 knowledge of which should constitute the aim of human thought. 
 With the Later Ionian philosophers, however, experience seems 
 to involve two elements that cannot be reconciled, and we have 
 the formulation of a dualistic and mechanical conception of the 
 nature of reality. In opposition to the immutability which the 
 Eleatics conceived to be the true reality, Heraclitus (b. circ. 
 530 B. C.) found universal change to be characteristic of ex- 
 perience. Nothing actually is, but all things are in a process 
 of becoming. Hence, the evidence of the senses cannot be con- 
 sidered as true; only rational knowledge is valuable, and this 
 rational knowledge ( Wyos ) is the power that governs the world. 
 Anaxagoras (b. circ. 500 B. C.) emphasises his belief that the 
 world was developed by NoCs out of an original mixture of the 
 particles of all kinds of matter. Mind, itself, is above this mate- 
 rial, from which it is distinguished by being simple and unmixed, 
 by being self-governed, and by having power over all the other 
 things. 
 
The Greeks 15 
 
 This dualism of the Later lonians was carried further by the 
 Atomists, except that they rejected the behef in the intellectual 
 direction of the universe, and put in its place a blind necessity. 
 Democritus (b. circ. 460 B. C.) believed the world was made up 
 of atoms which had shape, order, position, size, and weight, and 
 which were in motion through natural necessity. In this pure 
 materialism there was neither room nor need for mind or pur- 
 pose. Even the soul itself is a rarer kind of matter. It follows, 
 necessarily, that the process of perception must consist of a 
 series of material contacts, and that there is no essential dif- 
 ference between thought and sensation. 
 
 Stlch an interpretation of experience naturally prepares the 
 way for the Sophists (fl. 450-400 B. C.) who finding as little 
 validity in the reason as in the senses, came to despise knowl- 
 edge itself. They were chiefly concerned with an examination 
 of the conditions and the limits of knowledge, and, because of 
 their attitude, were the earliest of the European sceptics. Pro- 
 tagoras (b. circ. 480 B. C.) held that things existed only for 
 the individual who perceived them, and that therefore truth 
 could be only subjective. Hence man must be the measure of 
 all things, and knowledge can be only relative. There is no such 
 thing as objective truth, and all knowledge is merely a matter 
 of opinion, which is developed by the eristic method. This 
 negative interpretation of experience was given its extreme ex- 
 pression in Gorgias, who held that nothing exists, that even if 
 it did exist we could not know anything about it, and that even 
 if we could know something about it, we could not communicate 
 our knowledge to others. 
 
 Such was the condition of the problem of the interpretation 
 of experience when Socrates (469-399 B. C.) took it up. The 
 Sophists had given up the search for truth, being unable to find 
 it either in the world around them or in their own minds. 
 Socrates found his method through the examination of his own 
 experience, and, with the motto yvlodi a-eavTo'v ever before him, 
 he developed his distinctly individual heuristic method. Start- 
 ing with the assumption that he knew nothing, Socrates aimed at 
 self-control through self-knowledge. There was therefore a 
 negative and a positive aspect to his method: the former con- 
 cerns itself with the process of conviction of ignorance as a 
 
1 6 The Concept of Method 
 
 necessary preliminary stage in the development of knowledge; 
 and the latter had for its aim the inductive formulation of con- 
 cepts or definitions, by means of a prolonged process of inter- 
 rogation of experience, in which master and pupil both take part 
 as mutually interacting forces. 
 
 The earlier Greek thinkers had realised the difiference between 
 sense-impression and the ideas of reason, and the Sophists had 
 attempted to show that both were untrustworthy. Socrates took 
 these two elements in knowledge and demonstrated that though 
 sense-impression and common opinion are only partial glimpses 
 of reality and need to be tested and regulated by criticism, yet 
 when they are organised according to logical method they do 
 ultimately give us true knowledge. This true knowledge when 
 adequately realised in human life is synonymous with virtue. It 
 is clear then that the interest of Socrates was primarily ethical. 
 He applied his method not to the phenomena of the physical 
 universe but to the sphere of man's moral activity, to the prob- 
 lem of the conduct of life. His significance as an early inter- 
 preter of the method of experience is, therefore, that he con- 
 nected the speculative activity of the mind with the practical 
 affairs of everyday life, and that he analysed the teleological con- 
 ceptions that had been more or less unconsciously existent in 
 the background of earlier speculations. Happiness and virtue 
 which constituted the summum bonum, he held to be not mere 
 evTvxM, in which passivity was over-emphasised, but rather 
 cimpa^ia, in which the subjective state was conditioned by the 
 quality of the activity which it manifested and which was essen- 
 tial to its functional reality as an ideal moral condition. 
 
 It is an indication of the universality of Socrates' philosophic 
 interests that he should have been claimed as the intellectual 
 starting-point of three contrasted lines of philosophical develop- 
 ment: his habitual disregard of the luxuries and even of the 
 conveniences of physical existence was diversely embodied sub- 
 sequently in the theories of the Cynics and the Stoics; his habit 
 of suiting himself to his social environment and of being all 
 things to all men was reflected in the experiential philosophy 
 of both Cyrenaics and Epicureans; and his high moral purpose 
 and spiritual insight was idealised in Plato and interpreted in 
 Epictetus, Seneca, Dio Chrysostom, Marcus Aurelius, and others 
 
The Greeks ly 
 
 of the same philosophic temper. His significance in the his- 
 torical interpretation of experience lies in the fact that he was 
 the earliest to develop the inductive method, that his critical 
 analysis of the process of knowledge marked the genesis of 
 epistemology, and that he was the first to formulate a complete 
 system of ethics, based upon the phenomena of actual experi- 
 ence and interpreted in the light of the highest ideals of human 
 activity. 
 
 The work of Plato (427-347 B. C.) was an organisation and 
 an extension of the theory of Socrates. The knowledge that 
 Socrates conceived to be the truth that governed all virtuous 
 action Plato interpreted more fundamentally as after all the 
 true nature of bdng, as the ultimate reality. The relation between 
 Socrates and Plato is no less clear in epistemology and meta- 
 physics. The concept at which Socrates arrived through his in- 
 dividual method of interrogation, of the elimination of unessen- 
 tial elements, and the inductive formulation of a complete defi- 
 nition, Plato expressed metaphysically in his theory of the Idea. 
 
 Such being the general course of the Platonic interpretation 
 of experience, it is necessary to go back to the point at which 
 he took up the problem left by Socrates, in order to realise the 
 manner in which Plato developed his theory and embodied in 
 it elements that had been gradually developing from the time 
 of the earliest Greek speculation. 
 
 All philosophy, according to Plato, begins with the recog- 
 nition of a problem, with the realisation of some phase of exist- 
 ence that has not yet been organised as a part of our rational- 
 ised experience. This doubt or difficulty arouses in us a desire 
 to understand and to solve the problem which our experience 
 presents to us, and the process of solution is a discipline that is 
 moral as well as intellectual, for virtue and knowledge have no 
 teleological distinction, however much they may differ in their 
 genesis. There seems to be in man an instinct to attain virtue 
 and knowledge, to realise his true nature in the functional inter- 
 action of these two aspects of his experience, and until that ideal 
 is accomplished the soul's true nature is not realised, and the 
 spirit of man can find no rest. The passionate desire for truth, 
 the insatiable urging towards full insight into the nature of vir- 
 
1 8 The Concept of Method 
 
 tuous action are the twofold source of all human activity that 
 has ultimate spiritual significance. 
 
 How then is the soul of man to realise this perfect activity — 
 how is it to become self-active in a true sense, and independent 
 of the misleading idola of daily experience ? The answer to this 
 question involves the consideration of Plato's conception of 
 knowledge and a brief statement of his epistemological theory. 
 His problem is ultimately the same as that of Kant, though the 
 Greek and the German solution dififer considerably. Both start 
 with that very apparent distinction between the phenomena of 
 sense-perception and the logical ideas of the reason, which had 
 exercised the mind of Heraclitus, of Anaxagoras, of Democritus, 
 and the Sophists. There is on the one hand the actually exist- 
 ing multiplicity of impressions and common opinions: con- 
 trasted with that unorganized and apparently heterogeneous ex- 
 perience, there is in man's mind a constant urging toward the 
 discovery of something permanent among the changes and 
 chances of this mortal life, of something unified among the 
 variety, of something spiritual which is the reality behind the 
 deceptions of the purely physical. 
 
 The solution of the difificulty involved in this apparently uni- 
 versal contrast in experience Plato explained in his " Theory of 
 Ideas." The Heraclitean flux and the Socratic insistence upon 
 universal truths Plato combined, and held that these universal 
 truths, which are permanent entities, manifest certain phases of 
 themselves through material things. But on account of the phy- 
 sical limitations of the material, it can never fully express the 
 complete reality which exists in the " Idea " ; nor from a purely 
 logical standpoint can a concept which is universal be adequately 
 realised in a form which is particular, individual, and subject to 
 the limitations of time, space, and material, and which after all 
 only partially participates in the nature of the " Idea " which is 
 the ultimate reality. The logical can never be synonymous with 
 the sensible, nor the teleological with the genetic. 
 
 The striving to realise the nature of the " Ideas " constitutes 
 the process of experience and of education, but the method is 
 difficult and involves many degrees ranging from ignorance and 
 error up to the perfect reahsation of the principle or " Idea " 
 of humanity. At the end of the sixth book of the " Republic," 
 
The Greeks 19 
 
 Plato divides the objects of our experience into four progressive 
 stages of which the two lower deal with the phenomena of the 
 visible or sensible world and opinion, and the two higher with 
 the aspects of the intelligible world and knowledge. To each of 
 these classes of objects there is a corresponding stage in the de- 
 velopment of human intelligence: 
 
 (i) Opinion or conjecture {tSxcurla ), which has for its objects 
 images, such as shadows, and reflections from smooth bright 
 surfaces. 
 
 (2) Belief (iriWis), which deals with the objects which are the 
 originals of the images which resemble them, and which include 
 animals, everything that grows, and all kinds of workmanship. 
 
 (3) Understanding ( Stavota'), which has for its objects sym- 
 bols, diagrams, and models, and which proceeds from hypothesis 
 downward to conclusion, and logically involves the process of 
 deduction. 
 
 ' (4) Pure Intelligence or Dialectic, which deals with the Ideas 
 or Forms themselves, which involves no sensuous representation, 
 and which proceeds from hypothesis upward to first principles 
 inductively by means of ideas alone. 
 
 This classification of the different stages involved in the method 
 of knowledge is further illustrated in the analogy of the Cave in 
 the seventh book of the " Republic," and its general nature is 
 emphasised throughout those of Plato's dialogues whose primary 
 interest is epistemological. 
 
 Plato's historical significance in the philosophical interpreta- 
 tion of the method of experience lies first in the fact that in his 
 " Theory of Ideas " he involves the conception of a rational 
 universe whose ideas and forms can be realised through the 
 phenomena of common experience which partially conform to 
 the idea, and imperfectly embody the law or method of universal 
 principles : a conception of the world which implicitly undeiHes 
 the later investigations of Bacon. Further, Plato analyses the 
 process of experience and seeks to determine the validity of sen- 
 sation and the limitations of knowledge, thus laying the basis for 
 the epistemological critique of experience which was to be the 
 work of Kant. 
 
CHAPTER II 
 FRANCIS BACON 
 
 Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519), himself a man of most varied 
 and active experience, stated that " the interpreter of the arti- 
 fices of Nature is Experience, who is never deceived. We must 
 begin from experiment and try to discover the reason " ; and 
 Bernardino Telesio (1508-1588), led by the study of nature to 
 react against the traditional doctrines of Scholasticism, believed 
 that " the construction of the world and the magnitude and nature 
 of the bodies in it are not to be investigated by reasoning, as 
 was done by the ancients ; but they are to be apprehended by the 
 sense and collected from the things themselves." These two 
 intellectual tendencies thus clearly expressed by so diverse men 
 as da Vinci and Telesio were combined in the work of Francis 
 Bacon (i 561 -1626). 
 
 The first insisted upon the primacy of experience as the method 
 for the attainment of knowledge in the interpretation of nature ; 
 the second with his motto non ratione sed sensu, criticised the 
 method of purely intellectual deduction which was one of the 
 chief episteraological instruments of the scholastic logic; and 
 the third related these two canons, both in his scientific practice 
 and in his philosophical theory, in such a way that for him the 
 great problem of experience became the investigation of the 
 method of knowledge. 
 
 There is a peculiar necessity in scientific and in educational 
 investigation for the individual to develop in himself a breadth 
 of mind which enables him to see the large problems which under- 
 lie the more obvious and easily grasped details, to look at pro- 
 cesses and the materials involved, in their proper perspective, and 
 to emphasise, somewhat more consciously than hitherto, the 
 problem of method. Both by nature and by force of circum- 
 
Francis Bacon 21 
 
 stances Francis Bacon was peculiarly suited for such an inclusive 
 consideration of the processes of thought and nature, and for the 
 expression in permanent literary form of many of the intel- 
 lectual tendencies which were beginning to make themselves 
 manifest on the one hand in the philosophical reaction against 
 the barren intellectualism into which the later scholasticism had 
 degenerated, and on the other hand in the organisaition of the 
 new objective worlds which had been disclosed to science by the 
 work of such men as Copernicus, Vives, da Vinci, and, in Bacon's 
 own time, Galileo, Descartes, Kepler, Grotius, and Boyle. 
 
 Possessed of a literary skill that has made him, both by his 
 " Essays " and by his " New Atlantis," one of the prominent 
 figures of late Elizabethan and of early Jacobean literature. Bacon 
 ranks none the less high among the earlier of the English phil- 
 osophers. With an ambitious daring as characteristic of the 
 writer as of the seamen of " the spacious times of great Eliza- 
 beth," Bacon sketched out in the plan for the Instauratio Magna 
 a globus intellectualis which he could not circumnavigate and 
 whose bournes were beyond even his ken. Yet such was the 
 prospective power of his mind, and so great was his ability in 
 the intellectual preconstruction of experience that he anticipated 
 many of the methods and processes of later science. With a 
 characteristic philosophical contempt for the simplicity of the 
 vulgar tongue. Bacon sought to give his work greater perma- 
 nence by the use of the Latin language; and it is only further 
 proof of the vitality of his thought that his work still stands 
 translation and still continues to hold suggestions for the modern 
 thinker. 
 
 In considering Bacon as one of those philosophers who have 
 concerned themselves with the problem of the method of knowl- 
 edge, and in attempting to estimate the value of his contribution 
 as a basis for the subsequent development of epistemology, it 
 seems convenient to group his ideas under these four heads : 
 
 I. The purpose or end of knowledge. 
 II. The means or materials of knowledge. 
 III. The method of knowledge. 
 IV. The educational implications of Bacon's method. 
 
2 2 The Concept of Method 
 
 I. The Purpose or End of Knowledge 
 
 Historically the question of the true end of knowledge has 
 always been more or less closely bound up with the problem of 
 the summum bonum, and sometimes so intimately that the two 
 become synonymous. In all cases the end of knowledge has de- 
 pended directly or indirectly upon the particular ethical and in- 
 tellectual atmosphere of the age in which the question has been 
 consciously asked. With the Greeks the end of knowledge was 
 conditioned by their peculiar conception of the development of 
 an ethical personality, and the end of knowledge became the real- 
 isation of the Greek ideal of the moral life; with the medieval 
 Christian the purpose of knowledge was to subserve divine ends 
 and to assure the attainment of everlasting salvation; with the 
 modern scientists, of whom Bacon stands as one of the earliest, 
 the purpose of knowledge becomes more immediately utilitarian 
 and pragmatic in character, and its mission primarily the amelio- 
 ration of the physical conditions of the life of man. 
 
 Bacon frequently expresses his belief in the immediate prac- 
 tical character of human knowledge. In the " Valerius Termi- 
 nus," one of his earliest philosophical works, he says that " the 
 true end, scope, and office of knowledge " consists not in dis- 
 course or in arguments ; but in effecting and working, and in dis- 
 covery of particulars not revealed before, for the better endow- 
 ment and help of man's life; and throughout his writings and 
 his life he has ever before him the aim of attaining knowledge 
 that will be of practical value to mankind. It is perhaps well to 
 remember in this connection that he met his death in experiment- 
 ing with the principles of cold storage. 
 
 Bacon realised very clearly that there is a correspondence be- 
 tween the thought of man and the course of Nature, and that 
 man can command and interpret the forces and materials of 
 nature while himself remaining subservient to the laws of this 
 same nature of which he is a part. The only limit to his knowl- 
 edge is that imposed by the character of the faculties with which 
 he is endowed. In addition to the actual physical imperfections 
 of the senses as instruments for the discovery of true scientific 
 knowledge, " facility to believe, impatience to doubt, temerity to 
 answer, glory to know, doubt to contradict, end to gain, sloth to 
 search, .seeking things in words, resting in part of nature," all 
 
Francis Bacon 23 
 
 contribute to the restriction of the true usefulness of the force 
 of nature. Man's moral and physical imperfections and limita- 
 tions, nevertheless, do not affect the character of knowledge it- 
 self. However oblique the sense or alien the mind of man, the 
 truth of being and the truth of knowing are one and the same. 
 Epistemology and ontology meet on the same ground, and we 
 have in Bacon a foreshadowing of the Cartesian dictum of the 
 necessary interrelation of thought and existence. Descartes says 
 " Cogito ergo sum " ; Bacon had said "A man is but what he 
 knoweth. The mind itself is but an accident of knowledge, for 
 knowledge is a double of that which is." (Works, Lond. 
 MDCCLX. V. 5. p. 69.) True knowledge therefore cannot be 
 gained from the works of the ancients or from any purely sub- 
 jective method of reasoning with the symbols of thought, but 
 is to be obtained from an examination of nature; and even then 
 the chief attention of the scientist should be directed not to what 
 has already been done but rather forward to what may yet be 
 accomplished with the materials and forces which nature pro- 
 vides. Bacon manifests the prospective practical character of 
 the man of science rather than the retrospective conservatism of 
 the typical scholar of his day. His purpose in writing the 
 " Novum Organum " was to cover the whole field of science 
 known at that time and to discover its limitations, and then on 
 the basis of that investigation to proceed to fill up the lacunae 
 and to remedy the deficiencies. Such was the Great Renewal 
 which he planned for man's empire over the universe; and the 
 progressive identification of science and nature, of experience 
 and reality, formed for him the end and purpose of knowledge. 
 
 II. The Means or Materials of Knowledge 
 
 Since man is endowed with capacities to receive impressions 
 from the world of nature and with the powers for the organisa- 
 tion of these impressions and for the modification of the mate- 
 rials of nature, and for the transformation of natural forces, one 
 of his chief occupations is to become familiar with the materials 
 and opportunities which are ofifered to him by his environment. 
 Knowledge of divine things is beyond the sphere of scientific 
 investigation, according to Bacon; but familiarity with his own 
 nature and with social phenomena should be among the first 
 
24 The Concept of Method 
 
 objects of human ittquiry. Then a knowledge O'f the phenomena 
 of the world of nature should be gained, and in this process of 
 gradually becoming more and more familiar with the doable 
 world of man and of nature the problem of adjusting the latter 
 to meet the conscious needs of the former will suggest itself to 
 the scientist and to the true lover of knowledge. To give a de- 
 tailed account of the materials that Bacon considered to be the 
 means for the gaining of knowledge would be outside the purpose 
 of the present consideration: long lists of the subjects of his in- 
 vestigations and of the problems which he had set himself to 
 solve may easily be found scattered throughout his writings. 
 
 III. The Method of Knowledge 
 
 It is when we come to consider the method of knowledge that 
 we realise more strongly than ever the empirical character of the 
 philosophy of Bacon. The purpose and aim was distinctly utili- 
 tarian ; the means are the actual real phenomena of the world of 
 nature round about him, and not the words and symbols of school- 
 men ; the method throughout the course of his investigation has 
 to deal with actual objects or phenomena that have a real sig- 
 nificance in the life of men of the present day. 
 
 In the interpretations of Bacon's writings too much emphasis 
 has been placed upon his championship of the method of Induc- 
 tion and his criticism of the logical process of Deduction. In 
 the histories of philosophy and in popular interpretations it is 
 customary to make a writer stand for some theory which per- 
 haps is new in his work or which places a new emphasis upon 
 a widely prevalent though unconsciously accepted process. Such 
 seems to have been the fate of Bacon with the less judicious of 
 his critics, and this fate seems to coincide with Bacon's own 
 estimate of his work. However, since Induction as a method of 
 practical experience has always been part of the means used by 
 man for the control of nature, and was so recognised, partially 
 at least, by the ancients, and as later investigators seem to agree 
 that Bacon's extravagant claims for the efficacy of hrs new ars 
 inveniendi have not been justified by practical results, it would 
 seem advisable, from the vantage point of the' perspective af- 
 forded by time, to place Inducti<Mi more in the relative position 
 which it really occupies in Bacon's system. That it is not after 
 
Francis Bacon 25 
 
 all the sole instrument of science is abundantly evident when we 
 consider the methods of knowledge which he elaborates in his 
 ^'Advancement of Learning." It is natural that a writer whose 
 first purpose is to consider the deficiencies of the then existing 
 body and processes of scientific knowledge should emphasise the 
 lack of practical results derived from deductive or syllogistic 
 reasoning, which he criticises as " being too confused, and letting 
 nature escape from our hands." Bacon realised that in syllogism 
 the conclusion was logically and epistemologically inherent in the 
 noajor and minor premiss, and that the major premiss itself was 
 a conception the truth of which depended ultimately upon Induc- 
 tion, — a method which up to that time had not been critically 
 examined. Hence, while granting the efiicacy of the deductive 
 process for guaranteeing the reality of particular propositions, he 
 questioned the validity of assuming the major premiss merely 
 upon the unscientific process per enumerationem simpUcem. This 
 antique method of Induction he considered " scanty and slovenly " 
 on account of its unscientific n^lect of negative instances ; but, 
 while recognisii^ the deficiencies of the logic of Ibe scientific 
 method of his own day, Bacon was forced to leave its complete 
 working out to the epistemology of the nineteenth century. 
 
 In the attempt to obtain a fair and well-proportioned conception 
 of Bacon's theory of method, there seems therefore to be de- 
 manded a consideration, first, of what he means by the term 
 " method " ; second, of the four great methods of knowledge or 
 experience ; and, third, of various conditions which determine the 
 operation of method. 
 
 (i) Bacon's conception of method, though narrow in com- 
 parison with the modem interpretation of the term, is neverthe- 
 less a great advance upon the earlier restricted use of the word 
 to indicate solely a logical process. Method for Bacon means, 
 in its widest sense, the interpretation of nature, and hence differs 
 from the logical use of the term both genetically and teleologi- 
 cally. Deductive logic begins where Bacon's method ends: it 
 starts with a generalisation; Bacon ends with a generalisation. 
 Logic ends with the recognition of the nature of a particular; 
 Bacon begins with particulars. He practically anticipates Kant's 
 recognition of the relation between the particular and the uni- 
 versal as represented in the mutual epistemological necessity of 
 
2 6 The Concept of Method 
 
 Conception and Perception, when he recognises the logical de- 
 pendence of Deduction upon Induction for its validity. In its 
 narrower sense Method has its proper place in the organisation 
 of experience, between the perception of individual phenomena 
 and the expression of that experience to others. It involves judg- 
 ment, which requires as its material certain phenomena, and as 
 its justification or end the transmission of the judgment of value 
 to others or its recognition as a basis for further scientific prog- 
 ress. For Bacon recognises that the practical value of method 
 is twofold : on the one hand it is to be directly put to utilitarian 
 ends, and therefore corresponds to applied science and all the 
 branches of the practical arts ; and on the other hand, it is to form 
 the basis for further progress in knowledge, in which capacity 
 it corresponds to pure science. When he comes actually to apply 
 his conception of method as the organisation of experience for 
 practical or purely scientific purposes. Bacon, with one eye on 
 the nature of things and the other on the uses of mankind, recog- 
 nises four distinct stages which are involved in his method: (a) 
 the construction of a chart of civilisation and science, with their 
 practical contributions to human welfare; (b) the formulation of 
 the possible demands that may justly be made upon the various 
 branches of the sciences and arts; (c) the estimation of the de- 
 gree to which each has attained or has come short of the measure 
 of usefulness demanded; and (d) an indication of the means and 
 materials by which deficiencies can be remedied. 
 
 Though formulated with regard only to science, these stages in 
 method have important educational implications which will be 
 considered subsequently. 
 
 (2) The application of Bacon's general conception of method 
 to the process of experience is no less important than his explan- 
 ation of the term itself, and it is no less fraught with educa- 
 tional implications. It is plainly evident here that, though he 
 draws his illustrations mainly from science. Bacon continually 
 has in mind his former identification of knowledge with reality, 
 or experience in general. The method of knowledge is, first, to 
 discover or invent what is sought; second, to judge whether the 
 means, material, or process actually meets the need; third, to 
 retain this new scientific knowledge by embodying it in some 
 permanent form; and fourth, to transmit the practical results of 
 
Francis Bacon 27 
 
 scientific investigation to the world at large. Corresponding to 
 these four stages in methodical procedure, therefore, there have 
 grown up four intellectual arts or processes, which may be 
 briefly described as: (a) Inquiry or Invention^ which may deal 
 either with the arts and sciences, or with speech and arguments, 
 the great instrument of the former being Induction and of the 
 latter. Rhetoric, (b) Examination or Judgment, whose chief 
 basis is the social recognition of general propositions, and its 
 chief instrument logical demonstration and the detection of fal- 
 lacies, (c) Custody or Memory, which involves the preservation 
 of the results of inquiry by the memories of men or by some 
 system of written record, (d) Elocution or Tradition, which 
 consists of the expression or transferring of our knowledge to 
 others, and which involves the use of both speech and writing. 
 It is this last which is most directly concerned with the process 
 of teaching, though all four stages are involved in the process 
 of learning. 
 
 (3) There are certain conditions which determine the process 
 of knowledge, or the development of experience, which either 
 are involved in the general conception of method held by Bacon 
 or grow out of the nature of the materials and persons with 
 whom he had to deal. He has in mind in this part of his work 
 chiefly the method by which knowledge is communicated to 
 others as illustrated in the writing of scientific and philosophical 
 treatises or in the process of education. In holding that knowl- 
 edge ought to be passed on to others in the same order in which 
 it was obtained, Bacon seems to realise the difference between 
 the logical and psychological in the organisation of educational 
 material is one that has no counterpart in the learning process 
 itself. That which is the natural way for the investigator to 
 pursue will also be the easiest way for those who follow in his 
 footsteps, thinking over his thoughts after him. The logical 
 organisation of material is something that each one must do for 
 himself if the process is to be of any value to him ; such organisa- 
 tion is a totally different process from that involved in the ef- 
 fective transmission of knowledge to another, in writing or by 
 word of mouth, both of which must have due regard to the 
 psychological processes of the learner, whose end, however, is 
 the better organisation of his experience. It is only through the 
 
2 8 The Concept of Method 
 
 psychological that we reach the logical, as the standards and the 
 norms are, from the point of view of human experience, geneti- 
 cally later in conscious experience, however implicitly they may 
 underlie every step in the development of that experience when 
 regarded sub specie aeternitatis. In the next place, tlie process 
 of the transmission of knowledge ought to be made as simple 
 as possible, not furbished up in antique terms, nor making use 
 of vague and high-sounding language which is enigmatical to all 
 but the initiated. Quite opposed to mysticism in thought and 
 expression. Bacon is one of the earliest to seek to make science 
 a popular possession, and to wish to enable whoever would to 
 enter into the scientific inheritance which forms part of his social 
 birthright It follows that in dealing with any scientific subject, 
 the writer or teacher has to bear in, mind the nature of his 
 audience, and must have due regard for the familiarity with, or 
 ignorance of, the subject-matter in question upon which he can 
 depend as a presupposition to his discussion. In the actual 
 process of exposition or teaching, one ought not to hide a few 
 axioms or principles under a bushel of illustrations, and thereby 
 give a false impression of method; but one ought rather to pro- 
 ceed by the proof of assertions, remembering that illustrations 
 do not prove, and that the solution of minor questions should be 
 involved in the consideration of larger principles instead of being 
 considered as separate problems. In conclusion, it is to be re- 
 membered that in a sense the method of procedure differs in 
 different subjects according to the material involved. The 
 method of experience as a whole is the same, the process of 
 thought is unitary, whatever the subject under consideration; but 
 the organisation of the various materials must proceed in accord- 
 ance with the laws of their own constitution, just as the mind 
 must proceed in accordance with the method of its own nature. 
 Bacon here suggests the educational problem of the relation of 
 " general " and " special " method, which is responsible for so 
 much confusion in later pedagogical writing. .We are reminded 
 again, however, of the distinction between the psychological and 
 the logical in the organisation of our experience, and of the 
 difference between a process as it exists objectively in the rela- 
 tion of material things, and the reinterpretation of that process 
 in terms of human experience through the method of human 
 
Francis Bacon 29 
 
 thought. It is in the realisation of this distinction that the ap- 
 parent duahsm between " general " and " special " method can 
 be solved. 
 
 IV. The Educational Implications of Bacon's Theory 
 
 In addition to the educational impHcations that have already 
 been suggested in the preceding sections, there are a few addi- 
 tional aspects of the method of knowledge that are significant 
 for educational practice. Bacon's consideration divides itself 
 into two parts in this connection, the former being critical in 
 character and dealing with the proper preparation of text-books, 
 and the latter concerning itself with practical hints regarding the 
 actual process of teaching. Much of what Bacon has written 
 on these closely related subjects is now embodied in practice, 
 but it is significant of the character of his work that he should 
 have been able to foresee so many of the problems that have 
 since occupied literary exegesis and criticism on the one hand, 
 and educational theory and practice on the other hand. 
 
 (a) Critical. In connection with the preservation of knowl- 
 edge and its transmission to future generations, books have been 
 of supreme importance, and the problems connected with this 
 means of widening knowledge are numerous. Among them are 
 the determination of correct readings from manuscripts and 
 faulty texts ; the proper and judicious preparation of annotated 
 editions and commentaries, the interpretation of an author in the 
 light of the times in which he wrote — ^a canon whose neglect in 
 a later age led even so great a litterateur as Voltaire to Con- 
 demn Hamlet as comparable to the " work of a drunken savage," 
 and whose critical significance received due recognition in the 
 work of Taine; the critical estimation of the writings of an 
 author in such a way as to enable a reader to choose that which 
 is of permanent value; and finally, some suggestion as to the 
 order in which the works of a writer may most advantageously 
 be read. 
 
 (b) Educational. Brought up in the Elizabethan manner by 
 an educational system whose mainstay was the study of the clas- 
 sics, and at the same time endowed with an intense interest in 
 natural phenomena. Bacon not unnaturally may be expected to 
 assume a middle ground in his educational theory and to ex- 
 
30 The Concept of Method 
 
 press himself on the problem of method rather than on the ques- 
 tion of materials. The whole world was the province of his 
 knowledge, and the " Novum Organum " contemplated the whole 
 sphere of man's experience, so that it mattered not so much what 
 one had as how one did it. The problem that Bacon first sug- 
 gests is the one that comes first genetically and psychologically 
 in education, and it is one which three centuries of experience 
 have not yet solved satisfactorily, though perhaps Froebel did 
 most to raise the method itself to consciousness. When is the 
 process of imparting knowledge to others to start? With what 
 is it to start, and which subjects should be withheld to a more 
 convenient season? It is to be noted here that Bacon contents 
 himself with settling the proiblem without offering any solution, 
 leaving the working out to future generations and contenting 
 himself with the belief that " a faculty of wise interrogating is 
 half a knowledge." Further, it is to be decided whether it is 
 best to begin with the easiest and proceed to the hardest, or vice 
 versa, " for it is one method to practice swimming with bladders, 
 and another to practice dancing with heavy shoes." The whole 
 question of the function of the teacher in the educational process 
 is involved here, as well as the problem of learning to study. In 
 the next place. Bacon suggests the question as to the corrective 
 value of certain studies and the disciplinary intellectual function 
 of mathematics and the various branches of science. He raises 
 to consciousness here the whole problem of the curriculum: can 
 there be a similar course of study for children temperamentally 
 heterogeneous ? Ought a mediocre well-rounded personality to be 
 the aim of education, or ought specialism and individuality to be 
 encouraged? The questions suggested by Bacon are questions, 
 not of materials, so much as of aims and methods, and their solu- 
 tion is a development not yet complete. Finally, after the selec- 
 tion of studies has been made, there arises the problem of their 
 proper arrangement and of their mutual relation. For instance, 
 should studies be continued for long periods, or should there be 
 frequent variation? Bacon seems to have anticipated the inves- 
 tigations of modern psychology regarding habit, fatigue, and 
 variation of attention, and to have regarded the process of school 
 work as one of infinite significance in the development of the 
 individual, " for as the wronging or cherishing of seeds or young 
 
Francis Bacon 31 
 
 plants is that that is most important to their thriving, 
 
 so the culture and manurance of minds in youth hath such a 
 forcible, though unseen, operation, as hardly any length of time 
 or contention of labour can countervail it afterwards." (Ad. 
 of L. Bk. 2.) 
 
 To sum up : Bacon stands as one of the first of modern phil- 
 osophers to raise the problem of method to consciousness. He 
 was not interested in the materials of knowledge so much as in 
 the process of experience itself and, when he does deal with 
 materials, he considers them only as means towards the develop- 
 ment and organisation of experience. He insists upon the unity 
 of the method or process of knowledge, and seeks throughout his 
 work to free himself from the apprehension of things ex analogia 
 hominis and to see the various aspects of experience ex analogia 
 universi, thus foreshadowing the monistic interpretation of the 
 world set forth by Spinoza. Bacon's insistence upon this epis- 
 temological unity is all the more significant because he stands as 
 one of the world's greatest empiricists. His empiricism, how- 
 ever, is in the cause of the discovery of the method of experience, 
 and hence is to be distinguished from the merely reactionary 
 empiricism that led to an uninspired and unintelligent realism 
 on the one hand, or to an emotional sensationalism on the other 
 hand. The unity of knowledge is to be found in its character 
 as a method of experience, and its validity in virtue of its unity 
 and reality. Finally, Bacon is significant for modern educational 
 theory for having conceived of the nature of children from the 
 organic point of view, as comparable to seeds and flowers, in 
 an age antedating the time even when the mind was regarded as 
 a " tabula rasa " for the handwriting of nature, or the soul as a 
 darkened room whose windows could be opened to the light of 
 heaven. 
 
 From the point of view of the purpose of this present discus- 
 sion, Bacon is significant as having emphasised the method of 
 experience as based upon an empirical knowledge of the phe- 
 nomena of nature. He, therefore, paves the way for a considera- 
 tion of Descartes, who emphasises the rationalistic interpretation 
 of experience, and of Kant, who seeks in his critical philosophy 
 to relate the two elements of empiricism and rationalism into a 
 unitary process which will fitly represent both sides of the method 
 of experience. 
 
CHAPTER III 
 DESCARTES 
 
 With the early Greeks the main purpose of their search for 
 method was cosmological : they tried to find the principles under- 
 lying the universe and to express those principles in terms com- 
 prehensible to man. With Bacon the prime object of his inves- 
 tigations was the organisation of science, and the formulation of 
 a method that would be at once universal in its application and 
 certain in its results. With Descartes (1596-1650) the goal of 
 his thought is the discovery, not of the method of a cosmology, 
 not of a universal scientific procedure, but of the method of 
 personal experience. With the Greeks and with Bacon, Descartes 
 is a realist, but he goes beyond either the Greeks or Bacon in 
 his thoroughgoing analysis of the epistemological process. The 
 former had assumed the possibility of a human explanation of 
 the phenomena of the universe; the latter had accepted uncriti- 
 cally the validity of such human intellectual organisations of 
 nature as are made by science; but Descartes took neither of 
 these attitudes as valid per se. He questions the very act of 
 experience itself, which is the most intimate knowledge that we 
 have and which underlies and conditions Greek cosmology and 
 Baconian method alike. How can one be certain of the validity 
 of his interpretation of the universe, how can he be sure of the 
 correctness of his scientific results until he has examined the 
 mind which interprets the universe or which seeks to attain true 
 results ? 
 
 All phases of experience have aspects that are misleading, and 
 Descartes, like Bacon in his consideration of the Idola, starts out 
 by resolving to accept nothing on its mere appearance or on the 
 guarantee of tradition. As he says in a letter to Clerselier, " In 
 order to rid one's self of all sorts of prejudices, it is necessary 
 32 
 
Descartes 33 
 
 only to resolve to affirm or deny nothing of all we had formerly 
 affirmed or denied, until this has been examined anew, although 
 we are not on this account prevented from retaining in the 
 memory the whole of the notions themselves." Inl thus deciding 
 to begin by doubting the evidence of experience, Descartes must 
 not be understood to be making scepticism the end of knowledge. 
 For him doubt is not the end but the beginning of knowledge. 
 It is a means for the attainment of certainty. It is the preliminary 
 condition which involves some method of experience. 
 
 The necessity of approaching experience, not in hostile sus- 
 picion, but with an openminded suspension of judgment, with an 
 absence of decision until due reason shall have been found, was 
 recognised by Bacon, and is emphasised by Descartes as the 
 starting-point of methodology. The former, in his tract " Of the 
 Interpretation of Nature," had written as follows : " Whoever, 
 unable to doubt, and eager to affirm, shall establish principles 
 proved (as he believes), conceded, and manifest, and, according 
 to the universal truth of these, shall reject or receive others as 
 repugnant or favourable; he shall exchange things for words, 
 reason for insanity, the world for a fable. . . He who hath 
 not first, and before all, intimately explored the movements of 
 the human mind, and therein most accurately distinguished the 
 course of knowledge and the seats of error, shall find all things 
 masked and, as it were, enchanted, and, until he undo the charm, 
 shall be unable to interpret." Descartes applies this counsel of 
 Bacon in a very thoroughgoing manner to the method of per- 
 sonal experience as being involved in the wider process of 
 scientific investigation which was Bacon's chief interest. 
 
 Descartes therefore starts with immediate experience, and, by 
 the simple investigation and analysis of the process of knowl- 
 edge itself, seeks to arrive at a true method for the organisation, 
 interpretation, and valuation of experience. 
 
 Knowledge and reality, when thus based upon experience, 
 cannot be separated. Epistemology and ontology have the same 
 experiential basis and are genetically identical. This unity 
 gives reality to thought and intelligibility to reality. " I think " 
 and " I exist " both lose meaning and reality when any analysis 
 is made which severs their functional interaction. The essential 
 and necessary relation between the " cogito " and the " sum " is 
 
34 The Concept of Method 
 
 analogous to that subsequently stated by Kant to exist between 
 concept and percept in epistemological theory. 
 
 Descartes, however, must not be understood to interpret the 
 term " thought " in any narrow sense. In cogitatio he compre- 
 hends " all that is in us of which we are immediately conscious. 
 Thus all the operations of the will, of the intellect, of the imagina- 
 tion and senses are thoughts" (Resp. ad. sec. Object.) ; and by 
 the thinking subject he understands " a thing that doubts, under- 
 stands, conceives, affirms, desires, wills, refuses, that imagines 
 also, and perceives." (Medit. II.) Hence the whole breadth of 
 experience in cross-section is the basis for Descartes' assurance 
 of his existential truth as a reality, and as a reality which is the 
 necessary starting-point and centre for the organisation of the 
 series of realities which go to make up the world of our experi- 
 ence. The existential validity of the thought-process is the 
 starting-point for Descartes' method, as it must be for all subse- 
 quent considerations of the method of experience. Reality for 
 Descartes, then, is primarily a reality of process, rather than of 
 fact. The function of thought involves the reality of existence, 
 and not vice versa. It is this central idea in his philosophy that 
 stamps Descartes as a RationaUst; but he is a Rationalist from 
 the genetic rather than from the teleological standpoint, and that 
 is a distinction that is highly significant when we consider the 
 subsequent development of Rationalism, with its variation in em- 
 phasis and its change in point of view. 
 
 There are four laws which Descartes undertook to apply in 
 his search for the valid method of experience: 
 
 " The ftrst was never to accept anything for true which I did 
 not clearly know to be such ; that is to say, carefully to avoid pre- 
 cipitancy and prejudice, and to comprise nothing more in my 
 judgment than what was presented to my mind so clearly and 
 distinctly as to exclude all ground of doubt. 
 
 " The second, to divide each of the difficulties under examina- 
 tion into as many parts as possible, and as might be necessary 
 for its adequate solution. 
 
 " The third, to conduct my thoughts in such order that, by 
 commencing with objects the easiest and simplest to know, I 
 might ascend by little and little, and, as it were, step by step, to 
 the knowledge of the more complex; assigning in thought a 
 certain order even to those objects which in their own nature 
 do not stand in relation of antecedence and sequence. 
 
Descartes 35 
 
 "And the last, in every case to make enumerations so complete, 
 and reviews so general, that I might be assured that nothing was 
 omitted." (Discourse on Method: Part II.) 
 
 The first concerns our general attitude towards experience and 
 confirms Descartes' rationalistic insistence upon the character of 
 true knowledge and, consequently, of reality. The second is a 
 canon of the genesis of procedure in the statement of problems, 
 an admirable instance of which is to be found in the Discourse 
 itself. The third deals with the development of reality, and in- 
 volves implications of which Descartes himself was perhaps not 
 fully conscious. The fourth concerns itself with the means neces- 
 sary to insure accuracy and proof. 
 
 Such being the genesis of Descartes' method, its aim was the 
 discovery of truth or vera cognitio — but not in such a way as to 
 make truth the slave of an utilitarian science, as Bacon conceived 
 its function to be. Descartes, practical as his researches in mathe- 
 matics have proved in their outcome, was a thorough rationalist 
 in his method. By this last term he understands " rules certain 
 and easy, such as to prevent anyone who shall have accurately 
 observed them from ever assuming what is false for what is true, 
 and by which, with no effort of mind uselessly consumed, but 
 always by degrees increasing science, a person will arrive at a 
 true knowledge of all those things which he will be capable of 
 knowing." (Regulae ad Directionem Ingenii: IV.) It is evi- 
 dent, then, that Descartes is seeking to discover the true method 
 of experience, which will enable him to attain that true knowl- 
 edge or vera cognitio that was alike the end of philosophical 
 thought and of scientific research. 
 
 In the process of knowledge, he finds the basis of reality in 
 his own experience. The aim of the process is the discovery of 
 those elements in experience which are true. The method by 
 which such knowledge is obtained consists in the transformation 
 of what is originally an ontological element into an epistemolog- 
 ical factor by the application of certain standards or canons regu- 
 lative of the igeneral experience-process. If carried out con- 
 sistently and on a large scale, such a method would go farther 
 than the Baconian organisation of science, and would give a ra- 
 tional account of the phenomena of the universe. It would com- 
 bine science and philosophy by making truth and meaning ulti- 
 mately the same thing, by showing the organic relation which 
 must exist between the what and the why. 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 
 COMENIUS 
 
 A quarter of a century after Francis Bacon was working at 
 his encyclopaedic attempt to cover the whole field of knowledge 
 and of scientific investigation, John Amos Comenius (1592- 1670) 
 was seeking to accomplish somewhat the same thing in education. 
 Bacon tried to make science universal in its service to humanity ; 
 Comenius aimed at a no less universal service on the part t>£ 
 education. In this movement he was not alone : Wolfgang Ratke 
 (1571-1635), John Valentine Andreae with his " Reipublicae 
 Christiano-Politicae Descriptio," and John Alsted with his " En- 
 cyclopaedia Scientium Omnium" (1630), were all exponents of 
 this same pansophic idea. 
 
 Previous to the development of the schools of the Jesuits, 
 method in the education offered by the schools of Europe had 
 not been a conscious process. Bacon's "Advancement of Learn- 
 ing" (1605) and his " Novum Organum " (1620), together with 
 some influence from Vives (1492-1540) and Campanella (1568- 
 1639) with their insistence upon scientific method, gave an im- 
 pulse to educational thought which bore fruit in the work of 
 Comenius. Just as Bacon, in his "New Atlantis" (1617), had 
 dreamed of a " Salomon's House " devoted to the knowledge of 
 causes, to the enlargement of the bounds of human thought, and 
 to the effecting of all things possible, so Comenius in his Panso- 
 phiae praeludium, quo Sapientiae universalis necessitas, possi- 
 bilitas facilitasque (si ratione certa ineatur) breviter ac dilcuide 
 demonstratur (1639), expresses his belief in the necessity 
 of a systematisation of human learning, and for the or- 
 ganisation of a Pansophic College, which would be an in- 
 stitution of universal knowledge. The two streams of medieval 
 Humanism and of modem Realism united to form the current of 
 36 
 
Comenius 37 
 
 Sense-Realism in education which flowed through Ratke, 
 Andreae, and Alsted to Comenius, and on through him to 
 Francke, Spener, and Hecker in Germany, and to Newton, 
 Bentley, Spencer, and Huxley in England. However much 
 Comenius may have been inspired by Bacon, and in spite of the 
 fact that he considered the " Instauratio Magna " the most phil- 
 osophical work of the century, he felt that Bacon " while giving 
 the true key of Nature, did not unlock her secrets, but only 
 showed, by a few examples, how they should be unlocked, and 
 left the rest to future observations to be extended through cen- 
 turies." In the preface to his " Physics " Comenius further in- 
 sists upon the necessity of going to Nature rather than to books 
 for our information. The senses are, before all, the great means 
 of knowing. Throughout his "Didactica Magna" (circ. 1631) 
 his great teacher is Nature, and her operations determine the 
 character of the educational process which he outlines. This 
 parallelism with the course of Nature constitutes what he calls 
 the Syncretic method, by which, together with the analytic and 
 synthetic modes, mankind learns to attain and to comprehend 
 true knowledge. 
 
 For Comenius the aim of education summed itself up under 
 three heads: Eruditio, Virtus seu Mores Honesti, and Religio 
 seu Piettts. Genetically, the seeds of Knowledge, Virtue, and 
 Religion are implanted in human nature, but not these qualities 
 themselves. Their development is the task of education. The 
 process of education if it is to proceed compendiose, jucunde, 
 solide, must follow the guidance of Nature, and must fulfil the 
 following conditions : 
 
 1. It must begin early before the mind is corrupted. 
 
 2. The mind must be duly prepared to receive it. 
 
 3. We must proceed from the general to the particular. 
 
 4. And from what is easy to what is more difficult. 
 
 5. The pupil must not be overburdened by too many subjects. 
 
 6. Progress must be slow in every case. 
 
 7. The intellect must be forced to nothing to which its natural 
 
 bent does not incline it, in accordance with its age and 
 with the right method. 
 9. Everything must be taught through the medium of the 
 senses. 
 
38 The Concept of Method 
 
 10. Everything must be taught according to one and the same 
 method. (Didactica Magna: XVII.) 
 
 Drawing his illustrations always from organic nature, anc mak- 
 ing the egg and the growing plant his favorite analogies, Co- 
 menius summarises his method as follows : 
 
 I. Principles of Method 
 
 (i) Begin by a careful selection of materials (2) Prepare the 
 materials so that they actually strive to attain the form (3) De- 
 velop everything from beginnings which, though insignificant in 
 appearance, possess great potential strength (4) Advance from 
 what is easy to what is more difficult (5) Do not overburden 
 yourself, but be content with a little (6) Do not hurry, but ad- 
 vance slowly (7) Compel nothing to advance that is not driven 
 forward by its own mature strength (8) Assist the operation in 
 every possible manner (9) Only those things should be taught 
 whose application can be easily demonstrated ■ ( 10) Be uniform 
 in all operations. (Didactica Magna: XVII.) 
 
 II. CoMons of Practice 
 
 (i) Only those subjects that are of real use are to be taken 
 in hand (2) These are to be taught without digression or inter- 
 ruption (3) A thorough grounding must precede instruction in 
 detail (4) This grounding must be carefully given (5) All that 
 follows must be based on this grounding, and on nothing else 
 (6) In every subject that consists of several parts, these parts 
 must be linked together as much as possible (7) All that comes 
 later must be based on what has gone before (&) Great stress 
 must be laid on the points of resemblance between cognate sub- 
 jects (9) All studies must be arranged with reference to the 
 intelligence and memory of the pupils and the nature of the 
 language (10) Knowledge must be fixed in the memory by con- 
 stant practice. (Didactica Magna: XVIII.) 
 
 III. The Function of the Senses 
 
 ( I ) The commencement of knowledge must always come from 
 the senses (for the understanding possesses nothing that it has 
 not first derived from the senses). 
 
Comenius 
 
 39 
 
 (2) The truth and certainty of science depend more on the 
 witness of the senses than on anything else, for things impress 
 themselves directly on the senses, but on the understanding only 
 mediately and through the senses. . . It follows, therefore, 
 that if we wish to implant a true and certain knowledge of things 
 in our pupils, we must take special care that everything can be 
 learned by means of actual observation and sensuous perception. 
 
 (3) Since the senses are the most trusty servants of the 
 memory, this method of sensuous perception, if universally ap- 
 plied, will lead to the permanent retention of knowledge that has 
 once been acquired. (Didactica Magna: XX.) 
 
 There are obviously for Comenius two very significant aspects 
 of the method of education, one dealing with materials, and the 
 other concerned with processes. In his other works, such as the 
 " Janua Linguarum," the " Janua Rerum," and the " Orbis Pic- 
 tus," Comenius had fully considered the material of education, as 
 well as in the specific chapters of the " Didactica Magna " which 
 deal with the sciences, the arts, languages, and morals. In every 
 case the processes of nature are to be paralleled, so that the 
 theory of education requires as an introductory discipline on the 
 part of the teacher a knowledge of the phenomena of nature. 
 Comenius embodies in an admirable way the first tentative efforts 
 towards the functional conception of education as a phase of 
 human experience. 
 
 " Perfect knowledge of an object," he says, when speaking of 
 the method of the sciences, " can only be obtained by acquiring 
 a knowledge of the nature and 'function of each of its parts." 
 He insists throughout his works upon the importance of knowl- 
 edge in the experience of the individual, and his interpretation 
 of the method of the learning process involves both the genetic 
 and the teleological points of view. From the former, he em- 
 phasises the necessity of teaching all things through their causal 
 relations, and especially through a knowledge of the genetic 
 stages in the process of their development. From the latter 
 point of view Comenius holds that before anything can be truly 
 known the general principles underlying it must be understood. 
 Such knowledge we arrive at by answering the questions What? 
 Of what kind? and Why? The answer to the first gives us the 
 fact or function under consideration ; the second gives us the 
 
40 The Concept of Method 
 
 form or mode ; and the third, the efficient or causal force which 
 enables the object to realise its end or function. 
 
 Comenius is, therefore, very closely related to Bacon in the 
 universality of the aim which he set before himself. He resembles 
 Descartes in his starting-point, for " putting on one side the dis- 
 coveries, thoughts, observations, and admonitions of others," he 
 began "to investigate the matter thoughtfully, and to seek out 
 the causes, the principles, the methods, and the objects of the art 
 of teaching." (Didactica Magna: Greeting to the Reader.) He 
 finally, by his excellent organisation of the method of education, 
 prepares the way for the critical examination of experience which 
 was the chief work of Immanuel Kant. 
 
CHAPTER V 
 KANT 
 
 The problem of Bacon and of Descartes had been the exam- 
 ination of experience and the discovery of knowledge. The 
 problem that confronted Kant (1724-1804) was no less funda- 
 mental in its implications and no less universal in its scope: it 
 involved a criticism of the process of experience itself, with the 
 elimination of error as its negative aspect, and with the deter- 
 mination of the relation of the subjective and the objective ele- 
 ments of knowledge as its positive function. 
 
 Kant himself gives philosophical expression to an attitude 
 toward experience which had long been developing. Comenius, 
 Locke, Voltaire, and Rousseau were all to some degree his prede- 
 cessors in the criticism of the process of knowledge. The in- 
 fluence of Rousseau (Emile, 1762) is widely visible in Kant, im- 
 plicit or explicit, positive or negative, especially in the Ueber 
 Pddagogik (lectures, 1776: published, 1803). The problem which 
 Locke had set himself to solve, and which had been worked out 
 in one way by Hume (1711-1776) was given a deeper significanoe 
 by the treatment which it received from the mind of Kant. 
 Locke, in the ^beginning of his " Essay " has said : " If, by this 
 inquiry into the nature of the understanding, I can discover the 
 powers thereof, how far they reach, to what things they are in 
 any degree proportionate, and where they fail us, I suppose it 
 may be of use to prevail with the busy mind of man, to be more 
 cautious in meddling with things exceeding its comprehension, 
 to stop when it is at the utmost extent of its tether, and to sit 
 down in a quiet ignorance of things which, upon examination, 
 are found to be beyond the reach of our capacities." It was this 
 same task that Kant set himself to do, and he carried his inves- 
 tigation much further and much deeper than Locke ever con- 
 templated doing. 41 
 
42 The Concept of Method 
 
 Among the later writers to whom Kant owed much, both for 
 his point of view and for his method, were Christian Wolff 
 (Psychologia Empirica, 1732; Psyschologia Rationalis, 1734)1 
 Leibnitz, Sulzer, Moses Mendelssohn, and Tetens; but, whatever 
 the philosophical materials which Kant found at his disposal, he 
 made an entirely original use of them, and gave them an inter- 
 pretation which is perhaps the most significant philosophical con- 
 tribution which the eighteenth century has made to epistemology. 
 
 Kant began his critical investigation of the process of experi- 
 ence with the object of finding answers to three questions : 
 
 (i) How can we have knowledge? The answer to this funda- 
 mental problem of Epistemology he gave at length in " The 
 Critique of Pure Reason" (1781). 
 
 (2) How is human conduct to he influenced by man's knowl- 
 edge? This problem, which has been the centre of ethical dis- 
 cussion from the time of the Sophist to that of the Pragmatist, 
 Kant considered in " The Critique of Practical Reason" (1788). 
 
 (3) How are knowledge and conduct to he related in the uni- 
 tary experience of every individual? This aesthetic and teleo- 
 logical problem Kant attempted to solve in the third of his great 
 critical Works, "The Critique of Judgment" (1790). 
 
 Kant's main object, throughout his teaching and his writing, 
 was an investigation of the method of knowledge. The particular 
 questions in which the problem presented itself to him for solu- 
 tion were : How far does knowledge depend on the materials 
 of sense experience? How far can reason go toward the dis- 
 covery of truth? What, ultimately, is the range of a priori 
 knowledge? In asking these questions Kant clearly makes the 
 distinction between the genetic and the teleological, between 
 origin and validity, between the fact of experience, which is for- 
 tuitous and conditioned, and the judgment of reason, which is 
 necessary and universal. Previous to Kant, the emphasis in 
 philosophical inquiry had been placed on sense perception as the 
 basis of knowledge. The motto of philosophy had been : Nihil 
 est in intellectu quod non prius fuit in sensu. Philosophy is ex- 
 periential, a posteriori, and must conform to the nature of the 
 objects known. 
 
 From his critical standpoint, which was the necessary develop- 
 ment of the combination of Naturalism and of Rationalism in 
 philosophic thought, Kant gave to the process of experience a 
 
Kant 43 
 
 new interpretation, by emphasising the function of Reason as 
 giving validity to the impression of the senses. Instead of mak- 
 ing thought conform to the objects, Kant beUeved that objects 
 must conform to thought, and that consequently a priori judg- 
 ments were possible. It must be borne in mind at this point, 
 however, that Kant really takes the term object in two different 
 senses : ( i ) as a thing existing by itself outside of the mind and 
 independent of it; (2) as an object of perception existing in and 
 for the mind. It is this double significance of object that makes 
 it so difficult to relate in a consistent manner the doctrine of the 
 " ding an sich " to the rest of Kant's epistemological system. 
 
 It is to be noted, too, that Kant questions the truth of facts 
 rather than the truth of processes, which is in reality just as 
 much involved in any thorough-going theory of knowledge. 
 There is the danger of attributing reality to objects of sense- 
 perception and not to concepts themselves. Ideas have reality; 
 and Kant does not always make clear the relation of ideas, 
 things-in-themselves, and the phenomena of sense-experience. 
 
 In his detailed treatment of the process and the objects of 
 knowledge, Kant arbitrarily makes a distinction between " two 
 stems of human knowledge, which perhaps spring from a com- 
 mon 'but to us unknown root, namely sensibility and under- 
 standing " : 
 
 (i) Sensibility — receptivity for impressions. 
 (2) Understanding — spontaneity of conception. 
 
 The necessity of the interaction of these two is emphasised: 
 " Neither conceptions without a perception in some way corre- 
 sponding to them, nor perception without conceptions can yield 
 any knowledge . . . without sensibility no object would be 
 given to us, and without understanding no object would be 
 thought. Thoughts without content are empty, perceptions with- 
 out conceptions are blind . . . only by their union can knowl- 
 edge arise." 
 
 With these two aspects of knowledge realised, the problem still 
 remains as to the possibility of a priori synthetic judgments. The 
 objects of knowledge will be those which conform to this dual 
 nature of the mind: they will be those aspects of reality which 
 become phenomena of experience by conforming to the neces- 
 sities of man's perceptual and conceptual mind. The correspon- 
 
44 
 
 The Concept of Method 
 
 dence between the course of nature and the mind of man is 
 therefore regarded by Kant from the point of view of the limita- 
 tions of a human theory of knowledge, rather than from the 
 standpoint of the experiential universality and potentiality which 
 the world offers. The problems of a priori judgments in their 
 relation to the sensibility are treated in the " Transcendental 
 Aesthetic " ; and in their relation to the understanding are con- 
 sidered in the Transcendental Analytic." 
 
 As a summary of the preceding consideration and as a transi- 
 tion to his theory of education and the implications involved in 
 his epistemology, the following table, prepared by Kant himself, 
 is suggestive: 
 
 Mental powers 
 
 Higher 
 faculties of 
 knowledge 
 
 A priori principles 
 
 Products 
 
 Knowledge 
 
 Understanding. . 
 
 Conformity to law . . . 
 
 Nature 
 
 Pleasure and Pain 
 
 Judgment 
 
 Conformity to purpose 
 
 Art 
 
 
 Reason 
 
 Obligation 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 Kant's educational theory is set forth in an abbreviated form 
 in lecture notes Ueber P'ddagogik, which are not always organ- 
 ically related to the epistemological theory set forth in the three 
 Critiques. Believing that man can truly become man only 
 through education, and that he is ultimately only what education 
 makes him, Kant divides the process into two chief aspects: 
 
 (i) Physical, in which the main emphasis is placed upon the 
 cultivation of the individual, upon the proper nurture of his 
 body (cp. Rousseau), upon discipline (Zucht), training and 
 culture (Bildung) . 
 
 The idea of education, as a process, depends on the realisation 
 that perfection of human development has not yet been attained. 
 But there are in man the undeveloped germs which, when en- 
 couraged in the proper manner, will grow until man fulfils his 
 destiny. In this process of development man cannot become a 
 true individual except as a member of society, and in attaining 
 the end of education the co-operation of the whole human race 
 
Kant 45 
 
 is required. Education as a theory must be based upon the prac- 
 tice of many generations. 
 
 (2) Moral, in ■which the aim is the development of character, 
 through the reahsation of a sense of duty within and a recogni- 
 tion of law without. The purpose of this phase of education is 
 conscientious obedience to a moral law whose universal necessity 
 to human development is clearly realised. Since the ultimate aim 
 of the process of education is the formation of character, and 
 since character involves the two elements of recognised purpose 
 and determined will, it follows that there must be developed in 
 the child the realisation of some method by which he may relate 
 the ideal of his activity and the various steps involved in the 
 physical realisation of that ideal. This process of moral train- 
 ing (Civilisierung) involves the problem of the freedom of the 
 will and the function of restraint, the necessity of a social medium 
 for moral self-expression, and finally the realisation of true 
 liberty only through restraint, of freedom through the law. 
 
 The process of education as a phase of experience, has two 
 aspects: in the first place, it is to a certain extent mechanical 
 and experimental in character; and, in the second place, it in- 
 volves judgment, and the organisation of experience upon some 
 sure principle of procedure. The negative aspect, then, involves 
 the discipline of the physical ; the positive includes acquisition of 
 information and instruction, the development of discretion and 
 refinement, and the realisation of one's inner moral nature. 
 
 With regard to the actual method of teaching, Kant makes per- 
 fectly clear the relation that ought to exist between Theory and 
 Practice. " In teaching children we must seek insensibly to unite 
 knowledge with the carrying out of that knowledge into prac- 
 tice." (U. P. 70.) ; and " the best way of cultivating the mental 
 faculties is to do ourselves all that we wish to accomplish. . . . 
 The best way to understand is to do." ([/. P. 75.) Again, in 
 his Announcement of the Arrangement of his Lectures for the 
 Winter Semester 1765-6, Kant further emphasises the functional 
 character of education by saying that the student is " to learn, 
 not thoughts but thinking " ; and in the same article he sums up 
 the whole duty of the teacher as follows : " Since the natural 
 progress of human knowledge is this, that the understanding is 
 first developed by arriving, through experience, at intuitive judg- 
 
46 The Concept of Method 
 
 ments, and, through these at concepts, that thereupon these con- 
 cepts are recognised in relation to their grounds and results by 
 reason, and finally in a well-arranged whole by means of science, 
 so instruction must go the same way. Hence a teacher is ex- 
 pected to make of his hearer first an intelligent, then a reasonable, 
 and finally a learned man." 
 
 To sum up the chief implications which Kant's writings have 
 for the problem of method, they may be stated briefly as follows : 
 
 (i) His analysis of the character and nature of human knowl- 
 edge, though it is carried on rather from the structural point of 
 view, does involve a consideration of the method of knowledge 
 as an essential phase. Knowledge must be related to virtuous 
 action ; Theory and Practice are interrelated phases of experience. 
 
 (2) Kant emphasises the fundamental creative power of the 
 human mind. Method is a phase of an evolutionary experience. 
 Education is genetic only if it is at the same time teleological. 
 Self-activity is the fundamental method of education, (cp. 
 Froebel.) 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 THE IDEA OF DEVELOPMENT 
 
 When we think of Evolution, and when we use that term to 
 describe a process, we must be very careful that there does not 
 cling to it in our minds some little vestige of that early garment 
 of words with which the idea was clothed in its infancy. When 
 we speak of Evolution, vague ideas, for instance, of design, of 
 survival of the fittest, of nature's carelessness of the single life, 
 etc., may lurk behind our thoughts and quite unconsciously to 
 ourselves prevent us from realising the .full import of the term. 
 
 There is little danger of speaking as if there were no such 
 power as that of personality, which forces its own way whether 
 we will or not, which breaks the strongest custom as freezing 
 water bursts the hardest iron, which defies mere ordinary con- 
 vention, ignores those subjective barriers of caste which do so 
 much to retard conscious evolution, and which, with the merest 
 clay at all men's feet, and the words in all men's mouths, opens 
 the eyes of all future generations. 
 
 With institutions this fact is also true, and we find that con- 
 ceptions or conditions only incidental in their origin still survive 
 and come from sheer age to be considered as essential parts of 
 an institution, when in reality they are no more than the acci- 
 dental concomitants of its genesis. So that we are not surprised 
 to find the idea of force still lurking in our conception of the 
 state, the belief ia future reward and punishment still under- 
 lying many theologies, and to find the weeds of tradition choking 
 the educational field. 
 
 With terms, too, or ideas we find that some of the denotation 
 of the term when first used has, through careless thinking or in- 
 accurate usage, crept into the connotation and has to a certain 
 degree vitiated subsequent thought and has sometimes given a 
 
 47 
 
48 The Concept of Method 
 
 twist to men's investigation, often turning it off from the high- 
 way of thought just at the critical turning of the roads. This 
 curious foiling of humanity just as it is about to discover one of 
 the secrets of nature is illustrated throughout the entire philo- 
 sophical and scientific history of mankind. It is this very mis- 
 conception of ontological significance that in the last century 
 caused the Darwinian interpretation of Evolution to be for so 
 long held in ill-repute by so many truly religious people. These 
 persons had an anthropomorphic conception of what was to be 
 understood by creation or the origin of things, which they had 
 imagined by looking at their own process of mechanical con- 
 struction as they made a table or a book, and then they had mag- 
 nified this power beyond their own imagination, adding thereto 
 the conception of something coming out of nothing. From this 
 magnified activity of human beings they then arrived at the meta- 
 physical impossibility of having created a God whom they made 
 do thus and so. And yet, just because human nature can never 
 go wrong, this conception was a wonderfully grand one and was 
 in some respects a permanently true conception. 
 
 It is small wonder then that when the conception of Evolution 
 had so grown throughout the ages and had so developed in the 
 quietness of men's minds that when it forced itself to definite ex- 
 pression in the nineteenth century, it should be so misconstrued 
 and charged with all the heresies that put to death Socrates and 
 Christ and philosophers and scientists without number. There 
 is a curious commentary upon the history of man in the fact 
 that those very ideas for which men once were killed and cruci- 
 fied and burned at the stake have in turn in later ages put to death 
 those very ideas that were the executioners of the early martyrs. 
 
 The most casual examination of our experience or of the order 
 of nature indicates a relation to which we have given the name 
 Causation, and which consists in the necessary relation of two 
 phenomena. The old conception of Causation involved temporal 
 considerations such as the priority of the cause, with its attendant 
 logical fallacy post hoc ergo propter hoc. Subsequent philo- 
 sophical discussion of the subject was thus confused by the inter- 
 pretation of a merely formal element as an essential one. 
 
 From the point of view of Evolution, there are no specific acts 
 of causation, no fact of creation in time and space: such views 
 
The Idea of Development 49 
 
 are saturated with the merely mechanical and static conceptions 
 of the universe engendered by an anthropomorphic design. 
 
 Evolution is another term for " universal " experience — it is 
 Causation in activity. It is the active manifestation in the world 
 of what we mean when we speak of Causation. Causation is a 
 principle, and it can therefore have no reality unless it is re- 
 garded as a function. We cannot get outside it and look upon it 
 with categories of the mind. It is an essential part of the consti- 
 tution of the universe, and we can no more tell why it is or ex- 
 plain how it operates than we can tell why we speak of matter 
 and of mind as existing, or say how they operate (ontologically) 
 upon each other. 
 
 Causation is the method by which a universe of powers, poten- 
 tialities and promises realises itself. Causation is the potentiality, 
 the dunamis " energising," actualising itself, making reality ; 
 and it would be far better to use the word " cause " in its old 
 restricted logical sense and to carry over this meaning of uni- 
 versal causation into our idea of the process of Evolution, where 
 it properly belongs, and with which, metaphysically, it is synony- 
 mous. 
 
 Besides, this is a position to which the consistent thinker is 
 ultimately forced, if he accept Evolution even in its baldest state- 
 ment. For, if we say that one thing " causes " another, or that 
 retrospectively one thing is due to another, how does it happen 
 that from one thing comes another of a different kind? It is 
 useless to argue, as has so often been done, that a thing produces 
 an effect like itself. We know that this is not so. The heat is 
 not like fire; the plant is not like seed; the child is not like his 
 parents. Nor again, strictly speaking, does the fire cause the 
 heat ; or the seed, the plant ; or the parents, the child. Fire, plant, 
 ■child are the realisation, the actualisation of fire as fire, of seed 
 as seed, of parents as parents. They are part of the conception 
 of fire, seed, and parent. They are the potentiality of combustible, 
 material, of vegetable cells, and of human beings made manifest^ 
 expressed, realised, evolved. We cannot have fire without in- 
 volving, both in idea and in actuality, heat; nor can we really 
 mean seed without seeing in our mind's eye its full fruition as 
 plant; nor does the relation of parents mean aught save as it is 
 realised in the existence .of children. In this conception of the 
 
go The Gene^pl of Method 
 
 meaning of tertns we are able to bring together Spinoza's way 
 of looking at things sub speeie aeternitatii with the modern func- 
 tional theory of corieept. 
 
 We hilve here, tooj a suggestion of the nature hi continuity and 
 of the true nature of identity.- For, given the proper environ- 
 mental conditions^ or the proper experiential basis, thdse rela- 
 tions are permanent ! they have in them the power of contihuanee, 
 of reproduction; Even the fire is capable of raising adjacent com- 
 bustible matetial to the point of combustion and of thus prolong- 
 ing its characteristic activity. The seed, when it becomes a 
 plant, has in itself the power of bringing forth twenty or a 
 hundred-fold; and man has not only the power of reproducing 
 himself on the purely physical level, but also of making his 
 thought and his spirit live in other rriinds and spirits, so that 
 great fruitful ideas are sown throughout the ages and never die. 
 From this point of view our schools and libraries are great store- 
 houses of seed, reservoirs of potentiality, which keep the process 
 of spiritual evolution at its highest level. This is where the sig- 
 nificance of institutions in the evolution of the hutaan race is 
 best realised. 
 
 Again the nature of the thing, its true end, is its developrnent, 
 its evolntioh, its self^feaiis&tion in the highest form to which 
 its potentiality is capable of f caching; and its nature also in- 
 volves the handing On of its power with the germ of greater 
 potentiality dUe to the impetus Which its own relative higher de- 
 veloprnent is Enabled to give the form that succeeds it: This can 
 be seen illustrated in the life of the individual^ parent and child, 
 Ifikchef and pupil ; or in society in the betterment Of Gbnditidns ; 
 6r in thought in the developiiient of ideals. 
 
 So that the whole machifl^fy of the Universe is machinery only 
 to the mechariically-mirided man. To the eVolUtioflist it is a vast, 
 an ihfinitely vast, growing living ofgahisth. It is not t)antheisti6, 
 not pahpsychic, both of Which interpret the higher by the lower ; 
 but part-organic, the activity of God, the realisation through 
 iftany Ways and divers forms of what is ultimately Truth 
 and permanently Goodness, or Godness. For there is rio a priori 
 necessity Which compels us to liken the absolute Reality to any liv^ 
 ing creature or to any force in naturej hor is thei?fe any moral 
 compulsion that fofcfes tis to say that He is in his riianifgstatiens 
 
The idea of DeHdopftieM 5 1 
 
 a perf feet Bglhg. That would be to close the circle and system and 
 to leave ho plac€ fot evolution, rio tooftl fof cdiisatiott, rid scope 
 for Will. 
 
 In so far as it deals with the facts df nature; Evolutidtl must 
 be included uilder what are riatiirftl laws, thdttgh froiii the broad- 
 est point of view all laW^ are riaturil laWs. The " supernatural " 
 is merely descfiptife of ridttire that has not yet been drgan- 
 ised according to the fdrriis df huttian iftt-feUigerice. But the terrti 
 is essehtially relative, and involves a wider glance at the facts 
 of nature than nien can compass. The supernatural is but the 
 hatural writ tod large for ttieri to take in its significance at a 
 glance. In the flarrower sense, however, the term Evolution 
 refers to thdse distinct uriiformities and necessities df ofgariic 
 activity which can be realised by the mind and spirit of Mail. 
 If it is to be a law of Nature, Evolution must be universally 
 valid as the description of a general process of development. 
 In other words it rtiust riot only accord with all the facts of the 
 phenomena and be cdntrary to ridne, but it must also be subjec- 
 tively valid, in the sense of being intelligible and rational to the 
 mind of men. It ddes riot follow that every fact in nature will 
 immediately be seen and thought of in evolutionary terms, but 
 it does involve a certairi breadth of observation and df experi- 
 riient with the result that no negative instance caft be discdvered. 
 The various coffteeptions df fevdlution that haVe up td this time 
 beefi wdrked dtit in extensive detail have ift one respect or an- 
 other proved unsatisfactory either because the scope of observa- 
 tion has not beett sufficiently wide, or because some persohal 
 bias has entered Iri as a disttlrbirig factor. Vet this individual 
 element that ihi|>airs the validity and renders uncertain the final 
 form of particular interpretations of Evolution in no way alters 
 the fundamental character df the principle itself. Our attitude 
 to the world does not affect its constitution except from the 
 point of view of intellectual reorganisation and voluntary reaction 
 to situations. The Copernican revolution in astronomy furnished 
 the basis for a generalisation regarding philosophical attitude 
 which men have been rather slow to make. The fact that Evolu- 
 tion in its broadest conception is a constitutive principle of our 
 thdught bears a close relation to the scientific postulate of the 
 objective uniformity of nature, and brings it intd relation with 
 
52 The Concept of Method 
 
 the principle of Causation. The old method of science had for 
 its goal the collection and classification of an infinite number of 
 particular phenomena per enumerationem simplicem, their sub- 
 sumption under more or less general concepts, and the consequent 
 deduction of the validity of particulars. Such activity has its 
 value as a necessary step in scientific procedure, but it is neither 
 the beginning nor the end of scientific or philosophical investiga- 
 tion. The modern philosophy of science goes farther, and at- 
 tempts to relate these various classifications of concepts in a sys- 
 tem of laws based upon the general principle of Causation, which 
 is regarded as a necessary condition of existence and a criterion 
 of the possibility of human experience. Hitherto the conception 
 of Causation has been worked out with greatest definiteness and 
 with mathematical accuracy in the mechanical sciences, but it 
 is no less a fundamental principle in Biology, Psychology, Soci- 
 ology, Education, and Ethics, though in each of these the par- 
 ticular form in which the principle manifests itself varies. This 
 much may be postulated without involving the mechanism of a 
 fatalistic interpretation of experience, nor limiting the definite 
 sphere within which the alternatives of human choice must lie, 
 while at the same time preserving that freedom of the social per- 
 sonality which Idealism demands. Evolution from one point of 
 view receives philosophical justification in that it is one mani- 
 festation of causality, and is therefore a necessary condition of 
 experience. It scarcely admits of exact expression as a mathe- 
 matical formula because, though the antecedent and consequent 
 conditions can perhaps be represented quantitatively with more 
 or less adequacy, it is impossible to express their actual relation 
 and at the same time include all the conditions of variation in the 
 equation. 
 
 Since, therefore, Evolution has a philosophical basis and justi- 
 fication as a condition of the possibility of experience, its signifi- 
 cance as a subjective regulative principle has an obvious im- 
 portance for education. The principle is brought still more into 
 relation with the general aim of our philosophy when we regard 
 it as a method of bringing inherent order out of apparent chaos, 
 for that is what philosophers in every age have been trying to 
 accomplish from time immemorial, searching in a veritable in- 
 tellectual Slough of Despond for a unity in diversity, the one in 
 the many, or the universal in a bewildering muddle of particulars.. 
 
The Idea of Development 53 
 
 The contribution to the problem of Philosophy which is made 
 by Evolution results in a readjustment of the point of view, by 
 making the relation of subject and object organic as well as 
 logical. It thus gives life to Epistemology and epistemological 
 significance to life. It also takes the ground from under the feet 
 of the materialist and helps to establish the idealist's position, for 
 the materialist can never describe his matter in terms that do 
 not necessarily imply mind, or which do not result in the belief in 
 an actual dualism in Nature, without explaining how two such 
 disparate elements as the materialistic position presupposes could 
 ever have come into relation. Because our experience is physical 
 our world cannot be dualistic. The thing known and the method 
 of knowledge may be different, but the experience qua experience 
 is unitary. 
 
 Evolution is, therefore, not only not opposed to a Theory of 
 Knowledge but it adds to it a new element of great epistemo- 
 logical significance, for instead of making knowledge a more or 
 less stable concrete acquisition and emphasising its terminal as- 
 pects as " knower " and " known," Evolution lays stress on the 
 functional aspect of Knowledge as an activity. It no longer 
 tries, as before, to reconcile static elements of objective experience 
 with the recognised dynamic character of the mental process 
 which is taking place in the mind. Neither is static, and when 
 the epistemological significance of Evolution is realised, the possi- 
 bility of an absolutely dualistic conception of the process of 
 knowledge is reduced to a minimum and is regarded only as a 
 convenient relative logical distinction, in which the elements exist 
 only when, and for as long as, the logical opposition is con- 
 sciously made. 
 
 This must not be taken to mean that there is no need for em- 
 phasising the terminal aspects of the process of Evolution, for 
 it is obvious enough that the distinction between the individual 
 and his environment, or between the agent and his situation, 
 corresponds to the logical opposition of self and not-self or sub- 
 ject and object. But in looking at it from the evolutionary point 
 of view, it is not the opposition that is emphasised, but the mutual 
 interdependence and the logical and organic unity of the elements 
 in the one process. Philosophies have at various times laid stress 
 upon one or the other of these two, and the character of their 
 
54 The CQwep pj Method 
 
 Theory of JCoowJedgP h»s (i'epiep(i(?4 WPOP whiph pf the eleflients 
 has been considered to be active and which pagsjve, Thf orient^} 
 type of mind e?:alted the activity of the notxself, the object, the 
 environment ; the occideptal has emphasised ^nd still emphasises 
 the activity of the self, the subject, the individua}: a view which 
 found its completest expre;ssipn in the synthetic unity of apper- 
 peption which lies at the basis of the Kantian philosophy. EvGt 
 lutipn seems to afford EpigtgRiplpgy the necessary two elements 
 which logical analysis has sp ^videly separated; ajid this fupda=- 
 jngntal relatjen between these two mutually necessary factors is 
 further strengthenfd when considered from the point of view of 
 Jdealism, 
 
 It is an important argument in favor of the validity of the 
 evolutionary theory that it not only falls in so well with the gen-- 
 eral trend of epistemolfigieal inquiry, but that it adds to it much 
 more fundamental signifieanee from the theoretical point of 
 view, as well as at the same time broadening its relations on the 
 practical side. 
 
 One thing more must be borne in mind : from the philosophical 
 standpoint. Evolution cannot be interpreted otherwise than 
 teleologieally. Evolution is teleology made manifest in the cosmic 
 process. It is because some thinkers fail to take this view of 
 evolution that they fail to justify the ways of God to man and 
 beast. In every sense of the term, it is a narrow interpretation 
 of teleology which confines itself to those series of phenomena 
 which we interpret anthropomorphically as " the struggle for 
 existence," or which goes farther only to find no God because it 
 imagines that it can find no freedom. If is the old fall^-cy of 
 jumping at conclusions in the dark, and the old desire to draw the 
 whole curve somehow, even though its outline be drawn half 
 false, pr dr^wn before its direction and sweep ^re fully realised 
 in part. 
 
 It is here mp,intained, on the contrary, that Evolution cannot 
 be conceived without teleology, fpr Evolution is considered as a 
 rational process of posniieal organisation. Teleolpgy gives in 
 human terms the interpretation pf this prpcess, and it therefpr^ 
 cpmplements the epntributipn made by science to human knowl- 
 edge and belief, by placing^ these scientific facts in their necessary 
 
 causal relations tP pne another, and by showing their organic 
 
The Idea of Development 55 
 
 relationship as parts of ia rational scheme of development, as 
 parts in the operation of Law. 
 
 There follows naturally from this position the conception of 
 teleology as immanent in the universe. The world is regarded 
 as the realisation of a creative Intelligence. From this point of 
 view of personal idealism, the world exists for us in so far as 
 we realise in it, and through it, the rational and beneficent Intel- 
 ligence or Spirituality which j>ervades it and is its essence, with- 
 out which there would be nothing to be perceived, no objects to 
 be realised, and no one to realise them. From the complementary 
 point of view, the universe must be regarded from the stand- 
 point of divine Idealisni — sub specie aeternitatis, as Spinoza 
 woyid say ; and this involves a belief in what may be called, for 
 want of more explicit terms^ a sert of spiritually universal 
 Theism, pervading and making real all things in heaven and 
 earth. This does not imply an objective anthropomorphism, nor 
 dees it confine the nature of the Creator within the limits of 
 created things. It is what yve mean when we speak of the world 
 as a realisation of creative Intelligence in the widest senserTrrit 
 is the eoneeivable absolute view of Nature which finds a partial 
 reflection or interpretation in the idealistic reconstruction of the 
 human intelligence, " and perfection, no more and no less, in 
 the kind I imagined, fullT-fronts me, and God is seen God in the 
 star, in the stone, in the flesh, in the soul and the elod." 
 
 From this wider point of view there can be no contradictions 
 in Nature and no antagonisms that do not ultimately resolve 
 themselves into illusions of the human standpoint-rrdivine ideas 
 that in the cavern of the mind seem dark and distorted. Human 
 thought is possible only through contrasts, and positive advance- 
 takes place only through negation-; opposites become, through 
 the ©peratiop of tlie mind, reconciled in a higher unity which for 
 the moment appears to be ultimate, but it is subsequently realised 
 to be but a part of a unity of greater e^gtension ; and so the process 
 continues and can Mid only with the ultimate realisation of the 
 knowledge of good and evil. The very fact of relativity involves 
 negation in the reconciliation of the elements involved, but negav 
 tion for the sake of unity. Here we find the philosophical justiT 
 fieation for the Greek view that Knowledge involves Vipt-ue. In 
 fact, problems of Epistemology and of Ethics i\xse. when theiiF 
 ideal becomes an amor intellectualis Dei. 
 
CHAPTER VII 
 
 THE INTERPRETATION OF EXPERIENCE 
 
 I. Experience 
 
 The most naive and unphilosophical of persons makes certain 
 distinctions in experience, whether he gives names to them or not. 
 He knows ithat when he is feeling satisfied or sad he is hav- 
 ing an experience that is different in some way or an- 
 other from that which occupies his attention when he is think- 
 ing how to solve some question that puzzles him ; and he knows 
 that to imagine what might happen in certain circumstances is 
 quite different from wishing that he had acted otherwise than 
 he did yesterday. The average individual habitually makes these 
 distinctions and is apt to regard thinking and feeling and wish- 
 ing and imagining, quite as distinct from one another as tea and 
 sugar and bread and butter are, all the former being kinds of 
 experience much in the same way that all the latter are kinds 
 of food. 
 
 Yet neither genetically nor ultimately is this analysis of ex- 
 perience into hard and fast and sharply separated kinds justified. 
 James has reminded us — and our own memories corroborate him 
 — that the child's experience is a blooming buzzing confusion, 
 in which there is such a wealth of material, such a profusion of 
 possibilities of new and intensely interesting experiences that even 
 the great and blatant distinction between one's self and the things 
 about one is not made. This closeness to nature, this unification 
 with the things of experience is one of the first of those beauties 
 of the innocence of childhood to succumb to the dangers of a 
 little knowledge. It is only as one passes through the stage of 
 the sharp distinction between the self and the world, and con- 
 scientiously thinks away this dualism that seems a necessary 
 
 S6 
 
The Interpretation of Experience 57 
 
 part of our intellectual development, that he becomes again like 
 a little child, at one with the world. No longer self-conscious 
 in the adolescent discovery of the sharp contrasts in experience 
 and yet self-unconscious as the child who has not yet discovered 
 himself, and has not defined his distinctions, the individual in 
 this third and highest stage again finds in his experience a unity, 
 having transcended the seeming distinctions between self and 
 the world. Having become self-forgetful, he loses himself in 
 experience only to find that he and his experience are part of the 
 same thing. What he is, is experience in some form or other, 
 and his experience is surely some part of him. He cannot help 
 being part of all he has met. Were he otherwise, he would be 
 nothing. 
 
 The distinctions to be made in experience, then, are not cross- 
 section divisions into faculties, or even into ultimately distinguish- 
 able activities such as thought, and feeling and will, but they are 
 to be considered rather from the genetic point of view and to be 
 regarded as necessary stages in the development from juvenile 
 and naive self-unconsciousness, through a period of intellectual 
 and moral tension in which distinctions and oppositions are para- 
 mount, self against the world, good against evil, desire against 
 conscience, to a third period of conviction and character in which 
 the nature of one's experience, like one's body, becomes unified, 
 fixed and stable in form and function. 
 
 In the process of individual development these three stages 
 discerned by philosophical analysis are not sharply distinguished 
 either by their content or by the particular time at which they 
 predominate. The reason is that we cannot say that all persons 
 who think thus and so are in the unconscious stage, or in the self- 
 conscious stage, or in the last and highest stage of unity with 
 self. For, in the first place, the same stinjulus to experience may 
 cause in individuals reactions that have nothing in common in 
 the nature of their content, so that in the same rock the savage 
 may worship a fetich, the explorer may see a convenient shelter 
 against the inclemency of the weather, and the geologist, a long 
 sought specimen adding one lost link in the chain of proof of a 
 scientific hypothesis. And again, in the second place, the same 
 state of mind or the same experience may be caused by very 
 different stimuli, and may be seen by considering the variety of 
 means adopted in the different religions of the world to attain 
 
S3 The Concept »f M^ihoi 
 
 thftt state of spirit which we ordinaFily designate by the term 
 " worship." The actual eharaeter of the eontent of experienee has, 
 within certain limits, little mfithodological significanee. Nor can 
 we say that this threefold sequence of stages corresponds to that 
 of infancy, youth, and maturity, since savages never get beyond 
 the first stage and a very large number of civilised and mature 
 individuals are content to rest in the second. 
 
 Since, therefore, this threefold character of the experience of 
 any individual cannot be explained by an examination of the par- 
 ticular content of this or that mind, nor by the widely varying ex- 
 periences of many persons, and since it cannot be regarded as 
 the necessary concomitant of advancing years, this triune char- 
 acter of experience must be regarded as inherent in the process 
 of experience itself. That is, the three stages of self-unconscious- 
 ness, self-consciousness, and self-realisation are modes of experi- 
 ence according to which each individual lives until each stage is 
 so developed in that individual that he unconsciously grows into 
 the next. There is no inherent necessity that an individual 
 should actually grow from the earliest to the latest stage, nor 
 is there anything in the nature of each stage to determine what 
 the character of the experience to which it refers shall be. The 
 only necessity that there is must be found, in the first place, in the 
 continuity of the process, which determines that, if an individual 
 develop his experience or his experience develop him, the de- 
 velopment must proceed from splf-unconsciousness, throvigh self- 
 consciousness to self-realisation, and in no other order. In the 
 second place, there is the necessity involved by the unity of the 
 process of experience which determines that the development 
 shall be that of one individual, and that here, at least, there can 
 be no element of vicariousness. If the experience of a person 
 is to be an organic unity, that individual caijnot appropriate at 
 the level of self-consciousness the thoughts and beliefs and in- 
 terpretations of experience set forth by a man v^ho has reached 
 the third stage whprein diyerse elements are divesjie^ of their 
 opposition and are seen as the aspects of an ultimate ynjty, Tq 
 appropriate iii thjs way the results of another's gxpej-jgnce with- 
 PHt first haying made then] aptual factors in his pwij is \iM% fo ad4 
 to the numljer of disparate jiijrjjnifipd partigijlaFs that naust be 
 related before t.he thifd stage pan be reaphec}, 
 
The Interpretation of Experience 59 
 
 Qjie must, hovyevpr, be on one's guard against supposing that 
 tl^re if any har4 and f^st dividing lifijE between self-uricorjsciousT 
 ness and self-consciousness, or between the latter and the last 
 stage. They are all phases of the experience of one individual 
 yljP is a living being, and therefore j;hg stages carjfipt be separated 
 one from anotljer and marked pff in sequeiicg like the vertebrae 
 in a skeleton. 
 
 They are np mpre distinctly marked off from one another in 
 iJip whole process of the d&vplpprnept of experience than are feel- 
 ing ^nd thought and volition distinctly arid vividly marked ofiE 
 from one anotjier in any particular experience that we fnay choose 
 tp analyse. 
 
 Further, it must be borne in mind that, far from being clearly 
 defined, thpse stagps mix and mingle with one another, overlap, 
 and leave ragged edggs ; so that it frequently happens that one 
 aspect of a man's experience will leap far ahead of others and 
 reach perhaps the third stage, while some other unconsidered 
 aspect of his experience remains far behind, atrophied at the first 
 stage. Thws it happens that there is often such a wide discrep- 
 ancy between an individual's thought and action in commercial 
 affairs, in social fel.atipn«hip.s, and in religious belief. What is 
 true of thp individual ean also be seen writ large in the life of 
 soeiety, where institutions attain different levels of development, 
 are actuated by different ideals and standards, and are characterr 
 i.sed by greater or less unity in themselves and cooperation with 
 Qfhgrs. 
 
 It is diigpult for one who has been trained in the average col- 
 lege classroom philosophy to look upon what he has come to 
 regard as the putsjde world except through coloured spectacles 
 of sonie special theory of knowledge. These spectacles continue 
 tp be worn either because the weargr constitutionally prefers the 
 world to appear golden or blue, or because some master of his 
 thought wears them and the imitation has become habitual. It 
 is also difficult for the average perspn, yvho never bothers his 
 hfijid about questions gis to bpw we get to kfjpw anything or as to 
 hosy the self liifffirs from those tMpgs thgt gre not itself, to think 
 sgrJGUsly of what after ftU his everyday experience is made up. 
 gfith of tjies^ types pf ggpple, pne finds, wh.en thjey talk about 
 ejjperifjipe jfnply by their words some sort pf dualism^mplicit 
 
6o The Concept of Method 
 
 perhaps unconsciously in the student of philosophy, but accepted 
 as quite obvious and necessary by the so-called common sense 
 man. 
 
 Let us take first of all this latter outlook upon the world, be- 
 cause it is one that appeals to the great majority of people in their 
 everyday life, and because it has formed a kind of starting-point 
 for many philosophers who have sought to do away with the 
 separation, so blatant and obvious, between the man who thinks 
 and works, and the things he thinks about or works with. Then 
 we shall be in a better position to consider the manner in which 
 the philosopher has attacked the problem and to see that, after 
 all, he has in many cases only refined it, or at best cleared away 
 certain difficulties and has gone a few steps toward the result, 
 but has still left the dualism existent in some part of his experi- 
 ence, for Dualism is the Hydra of philosophy. 
 
 The average person of common sense, who is not deaf or 
 blind, looks upon the world as something solid and enduring, 
 shot through with varying colours and full of sound, and cap- 
 able of more or less permanent modification by creatures like 
 himself: this he knows for he has daily and hourly proof of it. 
 The paper upon which he writes was white but is through his 
 agency rapidly becoming scrawled over with irregular black 
 marks; the sunlight striking through the window creeps across 
 the floor ; the horses passing in the street resound upon the hard 
 pavement, giving one a comfortable sense of solidity and of 
 permanence; and so on, from breakfast to bedtime, the world is 
 there, in some way stable and enduring in spite of the changing 
 seasons and the vicissitudes of men. 
 
 It is through this sense of the existence of the world as he 
 knows it that the average man is led unconsciously into the 
 mazes of Dualism. He exists because he thinks and feels and 
 acts; the street- exists because he sees it, hears its noises, and if 
 need be he can go out and walk upon the pavement or test the con- 
 sistency of its surface ; and yonder hill exists because he sees it, 
 and knows that he has but to go and walk thither for his feet 
 to feel its upward slope. But the other side — does it exist? 
 What ground has the common-sense man for affirming its exist- 
 ence ? Have we here a subtle form of Bacon's per enumerafionem 
 iimplicem? An absurd question, thinks he: a hill must have an- 
 
The Interpretation of Experience 6i 
 
 other side. But let us suppose that the hill-top that we see yon- 
 der be regarded with childish naivete as the end — that there is 
 just jagged skyline and no more. Logically that is quite con- 
 ceivable; and our actual experience in this case has told us noth- 
 ing that will contradict this supposition. To that, however, he 
 will not agree. Every hill he has yet climbed has been some- 
 thing more substantial than stage property, kept standing by a 
 flimsy framework of cheap wood. And so he climbs this hill 
 and, it may be, finds that he was right — that there is another 
 side, and having thus by an unconscious logical fallacy vindi- 
 cated his pragmatic attitude, he unconsciously confirms himself 
 in his dualism. 
 
 But suppose, through a variation in the course of nature that 
 proves a happy chance for the sake of argument, that the other 
 side of the hill does not slope downward at the expected or ac- 
 customed angle, but leads onward to a level plateau, as sometimes 
 happens. Does that alter the common-sense attitude toward the 
 hill? Can Pizarro be sure that there will be a Pacific Ocean be- 
 yond the hills ? This discovery that the other side of the hill is 
 not a side after all involves some modification in our attitude to 
 hills. It involves some reconstruction in our concept. We are 
 no longer entitled to say that the hill has another side, but, in 
 view of the fact that it may either slope downward, or continue 
 on a level, or slope upward to higher hills hidden from our sight, 
 we must confine our statement to saying that there is " some- 
 thing " ibeyond. What that may be, what its quality or kind is 
 we know not; all we know is that it exists; and if we wish 
 to know more about it than the mere fact of its existence, we 
 must either go and find out ourselves, or else discover its char- 
 acter from some one who has been there and seen for himself. 
 
 Bearing in mind, then, this fact of existence, let us see whether 
 it holds true in other instances. The region beyond the hill 
 exists, and its existence is easy of proof; something beyond the 
 sea existed for Columbus, but colour, shape, and content could 
 only be imperfectly imagined throug'h analogy before the first 
 Spaniard set foot upon the shore. It was only then that this 
 unknown something became defined, had life breathed into it, 
 and took on colour and character. To go farther afield, and to 
 take an instance where our physical limitations prevent us from 
 adding this varied content to the hollow form of existence, let 
 
62 The Concept of Method 
 
 us take the case of the other side of the mooiij which no one hSs 
 ever seen. As in the case of the other side of the hill befdffe 
 the common-sense man had stobd on its crest atid seeti vyhat Idy 
 beyond him; as in the ease of the tindiseovei-ed AttiericEl Ivhile 
 the Santa Matia was still out of sight of land,-^so her6 in the 
 case of the moon, who throughout the centuries hais never turned 
 her back upon the eafth; we have the simplest instance of sottit- 
 thing of which we can think, and yet of which we can say ftoth- 
 ing else than that it exists, unless we go beyond our immediate 
 experience and take thitlgs oii faith, and that is an attitude of 
 which the common-setlse man will have none. 
 
 Yet — and here comes the crux of the questiort^^^dt*/ inueh. 
 reality had it fat us? Is the mere fact of existence sufficient to 
 make it a real part of our experience and of our activity ? What 
 must things possess besides mere existence to be of value in 
 human life and in the development of the individual's experi- 
 ence? It follows from this that there must be thtee levels df 
 existence, which may be characterised as follows: 
 
 (i) Mere Existence 
 Here we have the simplest form of reality in relation to human 
 experience. Existence is a category of the possibility of experi- 
 ence. It is a significant Form of reality in which the rtiind or 
 emotions of man rriUst discover the hitherto insignificant conteflt. 
 Reality cannot be conceived of as otherwise than existing eithet 
 in a worid of matter or in a world of ideas. To say that a thiiig 
 is non-existent is to destroy its reality and render it meaningless 
 except as the negation of a logical concept. Existence therefore 
 means reality for some consciousness; arid in practical experi- 
 ence the mind never rests cofaterit with this colourfess ifleffe^ttial 
 form of reality, but continually strives through its activity to 
 pass onward to the next higher stage. Existence involves some 
 sort of material vXrj) as the basis of human, experience. This 
 level necessarily leads to the higher levels of reality. 
 
 (2) Potetitiality 
 
 The mind soG>h discovers that if various phases of reality afe 
 
 to form either a stimulus or a basis for its aetivity, they inUst 
 
 possess other qualities besides that of fnere ekistettcg.- Th§ fact 
 
 of existence, being a necessary cohditiori of dll that cotnis within 
 
The Inierpretattdn of Experience 63 
 
 human experience, is taken for granted and is not consgidusly 
 realised through a process of logical analysis. Everywhere evfery- 
 thing seems to possess special qualities or characteristics which 
 diflferentiate it from everything else. The animals and flowers 
 are named, classes are formed, thoughts are organised into ideas. 
 This is a stage of diflferentiation, a process of individualisation. 
 Instead of the mere dead level of existence, in the experience 
 of each individual certain parts seem to rise to actuality, certain 
 spots seem to become foci of meanings centres of potentiality or 
 power. When represented in the theory of the concept and the 
 definition, this idea of potentiality involves the use of language 
 or symbols which express the idea in terms of activity, and 
 therefore as a basis for its complete realisation or actualisation 
 as indicated in the third stage. This conception is the functional 
 interpretation of the concept. The qualities which in this process 
 of experience the mind discovers in nature are in reality modes 
 of existence, categories of experience, which the mind seeks to 
 organise liritd some sort of a working system for its own use. 
 Science is based Upoh the systeriiatisation of the potentialities 
 of matter, and it expresses its definitions in the form of equa- 
 tions aiid principles. This conception of particular human ex- 
 perience as conditioned by the qualities of things as modes of 
 existence is akiri to Spinoza's idea of natura naturata. It is also 
 based upon Aristotle's conception of Awa/iis. 
 
 (3) Activity 
 
 In this stage we have, so t© spealf, the fruition of the stage of 
 Potentiality. Here we have Function in operation; ivipyeia 
 in the process of aetualising the Swd/^w latent in varying 
 degree in the vXr;; Here the divine energy is not passive but 
 active, and manifests itself as natura naturans. It involves 
 literally speaking; the realisation of God, that is^ the ihanifesta- 
 tion of his activity as an energy which first of all Underlies all 
 things and gives them existence; and secondly dififerentiates it- 
 self into a manifold of particular potentialities capable of func- 
 tioning in harmony ; aiid finally the actualisation of these existent 
 potentialities in a universe of mutilstlly interacting partial mani- 
 festations of divine energy, all striving towards a complete*- self- 
 realisation. 
 
64 The Concept of Method 
 
 What goes on in the macrocosm of the universe is paralleled 
 in the process of development of: 
 
 (a) The Individual 
 
 First, there is the passive stage of mere existence, in which 
 the child, scarcely yet an individual, is played upon by the active 
 forces in his environment. Then, in the second place, he begins 
 to realise his powers and potentialities and certain more or less 
 obvious qualities and potentialities in the objects he is grow- 
 ing to know. Finally, he realises that there is some connection 
 between himself and things, and that these objective powers and 
 his own personal capacities can be made to work together, and 
 through a process of interaction to develop one another to a 
 level that otherwise could not be attained through isolated 
 activity. 
 
 (b) Society 
 
 In the first stage there is an undifferentiated level of mere 
 existence, when social functions are not apparent or are present 
 only in embryonic form. In the second place, there is differen- 
 tiation of function and the growing consciousness of certain fun- 
 damental types of activity or potentialities of corporate experi- 
 ence. In the third stage these potentialities are raised to the 
 level of an idea and have a twofold function: (i) they give 
 social form and control to individual experience; (2) they give 
 wider content to the narrower individual course of development. 
 Hence, in this third stage, we have the individual's activity and 
 the social idea in synthesis through functional interaction. 
 
 The prevalent tendency on the part of teachers to be imposed 
 upon by the external factors in experience amounts almost to 
 a fallacy of the material, and leads us to ask ourselves, in a re- 
 actionary mood, "What do we do when we think?" It is a 
 question that teachers need to ask themselves, and the more one 
 considers its possible answer the more convinced does one be- 
 come not only of the practical necessity of such an interrogation 
 of experience, but also of its numerous and fundamental implica- 
 tions in any philosophical education. There are perhaps two 
 great reasons why we should consider the problem that is sug- 
 gested by the question, "-What do we do when we think?" In 
 the first place, we are apt to over-emphasise the significance and 
 
The Interpretation of Experience 65 
 
 finality of environment as a something or a system existing apart 
 from us and operating on a fundamentally different basis. 
 
 There is a tendency on the part of the average human being, 
 owing largely to the maimer in which the sense of sight domi- 
 nates his thought, to regard the persons and things he sees as, 
 in a sense, walking into his mind or swimming into his ken in 
 quite a material way and with apparently no volition on his part. 
 The man to whom the colour and form of the world make merely 
 perceptual appeal and who has no thoughtful under-current to 
 his experience, is forgetful of that selective contol which interest 
 and the whole background of his previous experience uncon- 
 sciously exert upon the activity of even the sense at every moment 
 of his life. In order to counteract the dualism implied in this 
 common attitude to environment and the prevalent conception 
 of environment as a unity in itself, there is no surer discipline 
 than that of an earnest and sincere effort to discover what we do 
 when we think. In other words, what we have to do is try to 
 realise just how the sights and sound and things that make up the 
 mobile environment of each day's experience act upon us and 
 we upon them : how, indeed, they are actually part of our think- 
 ing and feeling, and are not so many sights and sounds passing 
 by us, as it were, in a more or less orderly and not always inter- 
 esting procession to which we .stand as onlookers. From the 
 point of view of the child who is being educated this attitude of 
 ours to the world of experience has its very significant implica- 
 tion for both theory and practice. These will be considered in 
 greater detail later, but it will be realised even from the outset 
 that from one point of view the child and his environment are 
 to be regarded as two separate entities and that various aspects 
 of a classified environment are to be gotten into his mind by a 
 process of formal instruction — ^that the form is given by the 
 teacher to the material and that the process of education consists 
 in the assimilation of this already organised system of inter- 
 pretation of the world. From the other point of view and the 
 one that is here advocated, the child's activity is made the motive 
 force in education ; the world is regarded as a universe of possi- 
 bilities out of which in the process of human and social develop- 
 ment certain phases have been selected as the most valuable types 
 of activity; and the process of education is the development of 
 
66 The Concept of Method 
 
 the individual child's personality through the method of gradually- 
 giving form to it in accordance with these fundamental types of 
 social experience, in such a way as to make, the child a free 
 personality, and at the same time an active and responsible mem- 
 ber of the social whole. There is then this more or less external 
 or objective attitude to the world of experience implied in the 
 former method of considering the question as to what we do when 
 we think ; but there is also a corresponding subjective side, which 
 is equally fundamental in its implications for educational thought. 
 The fact that we ask the questions at all really suggests this new 
 point of view. Hitherto psychology and educational method 
 have contented themselves chiefly with the analysis of the ob- 
 jects of thought and the materials of instruction, or with the 
 mental processes themselves. As a result of this activity we 
 have been given a classification of the subject-maitter of the 
 various elements that constitute the program of the course of 
 study, and a description of the various functions of the mind, 
 such as perception, memory, association, etc. In other words, 
 the attempt has been made to describe our environment and our 
 minds from two different points of view, one objective and one 
 subjective, and there has been this dualism more or less apparent 
 in educational method as a direct result. This is partly due to a 
 failure to work out the psychology of the various educational 
 materials; and partly to the character of the psychological 
 method employed by the investigators, who collect and arrange 
 facts without having fully become conscious of the standards 
 which underlie their selection, and without being conscious of 
 the philosophical implications which underlie all definite formula- 
 tions of phases of experience and which alone can give them 
 practical value. 
 
 What then do we do when we think? Does or does not the 
 question involve more than a mere analysis of mind and material, 
 ■ — of the individual and his environment? Can it be answered 
 by considering both elements as interacting factors in a process 
 of development? 
 
 The most satisfactory way of answering the question is actu- 
 ally to put it to the test: to take our own experience and see 
 whether it will not yield its secret when we ask the question in 
 the right way. For we currently speak of the world as being 
 full of secrets. The scientist is said to be engaged in discover- 
 
The Interpretation of Experience 67 
 
 ing what we call the secrets of nature ; the physician is daily face 
 to face with the mysteries of the human body, and yet the 
 teacher, who is not dealing with mere stocks and stones, nor yet 
 with the physical body, but with the intangible intellectual and 
 spiritual nature of the child, is so seldom conscious of the fact 
 that he is face to face with a greater mystery than those of 
 either scientist or the physician — with the mystery of human 
 personality — which is one that will yield itself only to the same 
 patient, conscientious, and devoted self-sacrifice that is cheer- 
 fully given to the discovery of the secrets of the inorganic and 
 the organic realm,s of nature. 
 
 If, then, we take our experience as it is, here and now, we 
 find that it includes far more than appears on the surface — more 
 than actual paper and pen and thoughts that constitute the super- 
 ficial activity of the present moment. There is, as it were, a 
 psychic background, a margin of consciousness, that is crowded 
 with a moving throng of ideas and feelings, some of them past 
 experiences, others anticipations, hopes, beliefs, attitudes to fu- 
 ture experiences ; yet all, past, present, and future, are part of 
 my thinking and feeling, are part of me, of my experience, and 
 all take part in the conscious or unconscious modification and 
 regulation of the particular activity of the moment. 
 
 There is then a twofold unity in my experience : there is on 
 the one hand this more or less external unity of activity in which 
 all that I do, express, or actually control and take part in, is the 
 deed and the expression of my own individual activity ; and there 
 is on the other hand that inner psychic intellectual or spiritual 
 unity of thought which is but another aspect of the same unitary 
 experience. 
 
 Space and Time are two concepts whose regulative control of 
 our activities has been somewhat misrepresented since the time 
 of Kant, owing to a proper idealistic interpretation of them as 
 forms of experience. Space and Time are not to be regarded as 
 self-existent entities apart from human experience but rather 
 as regulative phases of the thought-process, and of the method 
 of our experience. The failure to regard them as merely regu- 
 lative and not constitutive of experience has been to some extent 
 responsible for the conception of our mental life as consisting of 
 the actual perceptual content (Space) of the mind at a given 
 moment (Time) and not as a psychic continuum stretching back 
 
68 The Concept of Method 
 
 into the past and forward into the future, integrating the past 
 in the present experience, and shaping future aims and actions 
 upon that basis. And yet in my experience, anterior and pos- 
 terior elements are involved. Thought is no more actually con- 
 cerned with mere perception as a material for its activity than 
 it is with memory which brings past experience up to date, and 
 with imagination which deals with possible experience in the 
 future. The comparatively unrelated elements in our present ex- 
 perience have little educational value: they must be organised 
 into the experience of some particular personality. One of the 
 characteristics of our minds is this organising psychic activity 
 which binds together past, present, and future into one expression 
 of a threefold temporal unity — three times in one time. And this 
 same is true of Space: for the activity of the imagination in 
 thought brings together in one unitary experience the uttermost 
 parts of the earth with at the same time the realisation that one 
 is sitting in a chair here and now. 
 
 To sum up, then, there is this threefold aspect of experience, 
 past, present and future, which finds its psychic coordinate in 
 memory, perception, and imagination, which are in turn but con- 
 sciously analysed aspects of one unitary process of thought. One 
 of the things, therefore, that we do when we think is the sub- 
 sumption or organisation of the diversity of phenomenal percep- 
 tion under the unity of thought through the activity manifested 
 by a living personality in his experience. 
 
 There are several implications of the organising activity of 
 thinking that require consideration: 
 
 (i) There must be some community between the mind that 
 thinks and the object thought about — i. e. some correspondence 
 between the course of nature and the mind of man. Disparate 
 elements, unhomogeneous particulars, cannot be organically re- 
 lated in the unity of conception. There must be a certain mutual 
 adaptation between the mind that thinks and that material about 
 which it thinks. A thought can have no human signification 
 apart from the thinking process. 
 
 (2) Hence, the distinction between the subjective and objec- 
 tive is never made in the actual process of thinking. It is a 
 psychological impossibility to place the thought as a reality self- 
 existent outside the mind. Thought is thinking, and is a form 
 of experience; and part of our experience is thought. Exter- 
 
The Interpretation of Experience 69 
 
 nality, objectivity are not qualities of thought, but of its mani- 
 festation in a material world. The distinction between subject 
 and object may be made retrospectively or prospectively, but 
 never in actual present experience of materials, for this experi- 
 ence implies by its very nature the unity of the subject and object. 
 
 (3) All thought has an undertone of emotion, ranging from 
 feeling so faint as to be an unconscious accompaniment of the 
 mental activity (e. g. in doing a mathematical example) up to 
 emotion so intense that it interferes with, colours, or directs and 
 controls the intellectual part of the activity-experience. Thought 
 is therefore accompanied by a varying degree of self-conscious- 
 ness. 
 
 (4) Th€re is involved in all thought, either consciously or 
 leading to later awareness of it, some element of purpose or aim 
 or end. The variously interrelated system of purposes which 
 makes up our experience depends for its variations in detail upon 
 accident, conscious aims, and ends unconsciously involved and 
 only later coming to consciousness. 
 
 II. Standard 
 
 No matter at what point we take up questions of educational 
 theory and practice we find involved either directly or indirectly 
 the idea of standard. " Standards of education " is a favourite 
 topic for professional discussion; pupils and students are re- 
 quired to attain a certain " standard " before they are promoted 
 through the grades or admitted to college; and certain text- 
 books in each subject are qualified as " standard." The varia- 
 tion in the popular use of the term and the differences of mean- 
 ing attached to it in educational discussion involve a somewhat 
 careful consideration of the meaning of the word " standard " 
 and of its implications for a philosophy of education. 
 
 In considering the problem of the standard, we have to resolve 
 it into its component parts to discover the questions that are 
 implied in the general term. Such a treatment necessarily in- 
 volves aspects that are essentially ethical in their character and 
 some that are epistemological ; but such phases are naturally 
 implied in the general process of experience, and especially when 
 this process is regarded from the point of view of the method 
 of education. Some of the questions that suggest themselves are 
 
yo The Concept of Method 
 
 the following: (i) Is the need of a standard instinctive? Is 
 it a category of the possibility of progressive activity? (2) Does 
 the realisation of the idea or concept of standard grow up as a 
 distinction within experience, or is it imported from outside, and 
 imposed by maturer persons or by society? (3) Is the standard 
 a material thing, — a form? or is it a spiritual idea by means of 
 which one interprets the material? (4) Is the problem to be re- 
 garded from the functional point of view as a process of stand- 
 ardising the experience of the individual? (5) Are judgments 
 of value one aspect, conscious or unconscious, of every phase of 
 experience, or are they a special phase of the operation of the 
 mind ? 
 
 The solution of these questions will be implied in the considera- 
 tion which follows, rather than explicitly stated. They are 
 problems which rise to consciousness when the function of stand- 
 ard is first consciously realised as part of the method of educa- 
 tion. The character of the solution offered has varied alike with 
 the time and the prevailing temper of the age in which the prob- 
 lem has suggested itself. At the present day in America, where 
 the method of education is one of the loci critici of both Sociology 
 and Philosophy, an analysis of the elements involved seems to be 
 required, especially since tot homines tot sententiae still remains 
 true of education. 
 
 Standards concern themselves with three aspects of our ex- 
 perience : 
 
 (i) They deal in the first place with the problem of what 
 we do. Certain things are to be done ; others are not to be done. 
 The sphere of activity, moral or educational is more or less defi- 
 nitely marked off and bounded; a list of habitual acts and of 
 conventional activities is prescribed ; penalties of varying de- 
 grees are attached to faults of omission or of direct violation. 
 There are unwritten laws, codes of laws which an older psychol- 
 ogy would see graven on the tablets of the mind ; there are vague 
 popular ideas of better and worse, higher and lower, right and 
 wrong; there are group standards and the consciousness of cer- 
 tain "things no fellow can do"; and there is a constantly 
 fluctuating process of adjustment between material and ideal in- 
 terests. Such problems come within the scope of Ethics, So- 
 ciology, and Education. 
 
The Interpretation of Experience 71 
 
 (2) There is in the second place the question as to why we 
 perform an action. From this point of view there is involved 
 the consideration of motive, impulse, ha1>it, and the adjust- 
 ment of ideas for and against a certain course of action or the 
 formation of a particular habit. Such a series of problems comes 
 partly within the sphere of Ethics and partly within that of 
 Metaphysics. 
 
 (3) Lastly there is the problem of how we do anything. Be- 
 yond the fact of the action, there is the question of its method. 
 It is not always enough to do a thing: it must be done in a cer- 
 tain way. There are questions of technique, of the selection of 
 one standard method from various possible activities, of the 
 subordination of means, of the formation of habits of skill, ac- 
 curacy, precision, rapidity, of the function of facility, beauty, 
 and truth in the doing of anything, and the development of power 
 and control. Such are some of the problems which belong to 
 the sphere ai Methodology. 
 
 It makes no difference at what point we take our experience: 
 we will always find some aspect of it that presents itself in the 
 form of a problem to be solved. Were this not so, our whole 
 existence would be passed upon the level of the mere instinctive 
 performance of certain physical actions and in the habitual repe- 
 tition of a limited number of comparatively simple psychological 
 states. There would be no necessity for thought in the daily 
 round and in the common task. To-day would repeat yesterday 
 with no appreciable alteration. To-morrow would require no 
 thought, for it would be but the replica of to-day. Thus the dull 
 monotony of existence would run its course. 
 
 But that is not the character of our daily lives. We have but 
 to stop to analyse any of the thousand and one situations in which 
 we find ourselves between sunrise and sunset to realise that our 
 doings are not all regulated and decided beforehand; that we 
 cannot predict with certainty that such and such a situation will 
 prove to be of such and such a character and have a result which 
 we can accurately prophesy. Every hour of the day has its un- 
 known factors of experience, upon which we cannot depend, and 
 which will modify our actions in ways which cannot be foreseen. 
 Just as on a large scale the decisive situations in our lives cannot 
 be seen afar ofiE like tiny clouds on the horizon, so in a more 
 
72 The Concept of Method 
 
 limited scene, we cannot say what the hour will bring forth, nor 
 say with assurance that we shall actually do thus and so because 
 thus and so are what we would like to do or think we ought to 
 do. There is always some unknown phase of the general situa- 
 tion, some aspect of the environment that we have overlooked or 
 have been unable to calculate — some factor that is not a constant 
 but a ifunction. 
 
 What then is the individual to do in the face of such uncer- 
 tainty ? Is he to be absolutely without guidance ? Are there no 
 rules to help him to meet the difficulty and solve the problem? 
 That is the first thought that enters one's head. Here is a 
 problem in arithmetic which can be solved by remembering a 
 certain formula or rule. Here is a problem that arises in actual 
 teaching in my classroom; I want something that will solve the 
 problem. What is more natural than that I should seek some rule 
 that will give me the key to the situation with the same ease 
 with which the formula gave me the answer to the mathematical 
 difficulty. 
 
 Let us see, however, whether, like the old woman in the fairy- 
 tale, we are not in our unthinking haste wishing something we 
 shall later have to wish undone. What would such a method of 
 getting answers to our problems involve? Would it not mean 
 that each situation would have its rule? I symbolically represent 
 the first twenty-six of to-day's experiences by the letters of the 
 alphabet, and find that of these A, B, D, F, G, H, I, etc., repre- 
 sent experiences in which there is some element of problematic 
 uncertainty. Suppose that I believe the best method of solving 
 such problems is by rule. What is the result? Will I not have 
 to know the rules for solving situations A, B, D, F, G, H, I, etc. ? 
 But how am I to know that I have really situation A or D or H ? 
 Will not that involve a multiplicity of minute rules which, simply 
 because life is so complex, I can never hope to learn? Further, 
 if I represent to-morrow's experiences by A'^, B^, C^, D^, E^, F^, 
 G^, H^, P, etc., how can I know that the rules which solved situa- 
 tions A, D and H, will also solve A\ D^ and H^ ? The very fact 
 that in the course of a week's experience I find myself in situa- 
 tions A, A^ A^ A^ A*, etc., is in itself a proof that the exact 
 situation never twice confronts me. Therefore I should have to 
 have a rule for every situation, or else a formula so general that 
 
The Interpretation of Experience 7 3 
 
 it could be applied to all "A " situations. But it is not the ele- 
 ment of similarity, the common "A " in these situations that 
 causes me trouble. It is the new, the accidental elements, the 
 unexpected variations, the overtones of significance which pre- 
 vent me from seeing the similar points and from applying the 
 formula prescribed for situation A. Further, the very fact that 
 there are these new elements in the situation make it a new 
 situation, for there is no reason why the elements of difference 
 from situation A represented by A^ and A' should not be the 
 determining factors in my reaction to these latter situations. As 
 far as my graphic representation of these experiences is con- 
 cerned there is no justification for representing them simply as 
 
 A, A^, A^, etc. They are more adequately represented as : lAB, 
 2AC, 3AD, 4AE, sAF, in ' which the numbers represent the 
 sequence of situations and A, one common element in all, while 
 
 B, C, D, E, and F represent symbolically and in summarized form 
 the totality of differing concomitants of A. Further, suppose 
 that I do have a rule for "A " situations and apply it conscien- 
 tiously whenever I recognise such a situation. Three difficulties 
 arise : 
 
 (i) The element A may be so insignificant in the situation 
 3XAC in comparison with the elements represented by CX that 
 I fail to recognise it as an "A " situation and take it instead as 
 a C situation in which the elements are more complex — C (17A) 
 PQRZ. 
 
 (2) I am bound by the rule to react in a prescribed, author- 
 ised, predestined manner to a situation, only one of whose ele- 
 ments is regarded as definitely fixed. As a result of this a mul- 
 tiplicity of other reactions are deliberately rejected and one 
 chosen as the necessary one. I say my experiential creed, " I 
 believe this situation to be thus and so." I have, therefore, not re- 
 acted to the actual situation, but have created an artificial situation 
 to which my formula will give me a solution of some sort. But 
 I am distinctly shutting my eyes to some of the elements in- 
 volved. I am considering situation "A," because I have a " rule 
 for situation A " — but I am not considering the actual situation 
 AXC because I have no rule for so complicated a situation, and 
 still less so for an experience whose elements may be represented 
 as CAPQRZ. 
 
74 The Concept of Method 
 
 (3) The moment I deliberately shut my eyes to part of the situ- 
 ation, the moment I set bounds to my vision by any creed which 
 narrows me down to the single aspect A, that moment I cease 
 to be free^ but am constrained by the laws of the situation, by 
 the rule which not only tells me what to do in that particular situ- 
 ation, but which makes me close my eyes to the richness and 
 variety of my experience and say that it consists of only this 
 paltry aspect "A " which can be confined within the narrow limits 
 of a rule of conduct or a maxim of the most efficient reaction. 
 
 To sum up; our experience continually presents for our solu- 
 tion rather complicated problematic situations. By analogy we 
 seek to solve the problem by the application of some rule. Such 
 a procedure has the obvious advantages of being simple, safe, 
 and speedy. But its simplicity is gained only through the wilful 
 neglect of the difficulties, and its safety is only hypothetical. The 
 disadvantages of any such short and swift method are: (i) It 
 often emphasises the unessential element in a complex situation 
 and overlooks another factor that is really determinant; (2) it 
 creates an artificially simple situation to which it is applicable, 
 by the deliberate rejection of certain actually existing elements; 
 and (3) it limits my freedom and makes me the slave of a rule 
 and the second determined factor in the solution of a situation. 
 
 It would seem, therefore, that if the problematic experiences 
 which I have to solve are to have any educational value their 
 solution is to be sought in some other way. If the solution can- 
 not be found in the materials or elements in the situation, may it 
 not be found in the other factor — ^the personality of the indi- 
 vidual who has the experience? If it is not a mechanical matter 
 of static elements, may not a clue be found in the processes of 
 personality? May it not be a principle of activity that we are 
 really in search of, when we try to solve a problematic Situation? 
 
 The search for standards is universal. It is one of the com- 
 mon needs of our common life, however unconsciously it may lie 
 hidden beneath the variations of daily experience. The need of 
 food, shelter, and clothing which impels much of our activity that 
 is physical is paralleled in the ethical sphere by the search for 
 standards, which may spring out of the physical and which cer- 
 tainly react upon the material of our common experience. 
 
 This impulse to discover standards is of great significance for 
 education. Its appearance marks the time when man becomes 
 
The Interpretation of Experience 7 5 
 
 conscious of his humanity. life is now raised to the level of an 
 idea. The significance of human everyday acts is seen, not in 
 reference to the stubborn material with which we have to strive, 
 but in relation to the ideal which we are seeking to realise. It 
 is this spiritualising of materials which is the objective task of 
 education: it is the revelation of the pantheism of nature which 
 is the first step towards the realisation of the divinity in man. 
 
 III. The Philosophical Significance of Ends 
 
 As soon as an end or purpose is thought of merely as end, i. e., 
 as finish, conclusion, something shut up and closed, from that 
 moment does it lose all pragmatic vitality and all energetic sig- 
 nificance for a functional theory of education. In this sense, 
 " end " has no teleological significance, for its reference is purely 
 retrospective. It can be interpreted only as the conclusion or 
 completion of a process which had such and such a beginning, 
 and its significance is only that it is the end of that beginning. 
 
 In any case of this simplified process whose end is merely 
 conclusion, there is no loss of energy even in the ideal sense. 
 What was kinetic, so to speak, now becomes potential. That 
 power which the process had in it with reference to end, it now 
 has in another way with reference to means — i. e., the phenomena 
 which were the conclusion of that process become in turn by 
 virtue of their character of finality in respect to the first process, 
 the starting-point of a second, a third, etc., so that we get a 
 series of hierarchy of " ends " which when viewed from the 
 standpoint of evolutionary Idealism are but microscopic phases of 
 the cosmic development. Of this the ordinary experience of 
 every individual furnishes abundant illustration, which has 
 been to some degree systematised in the various moral theories 
 that have been evolved in the course of the history of human 
 thought. 
 
 Again, from another point of view and elaborating this simple 
 phase, we find that, especially in the complex of phenomena that 
 go to make up social life, a phenomenon may occupy at the same 
 time several positions, more or less genetic or final in several 
 sets or series of processes, each of which is genetically inter- 
 related and each of which is teleologically potential, (e. g., the 
 average human being in his daily relations.) 
 
76 The Concept of Method 
 
 A process itself ceases to exist as such when it has accom- 
 plished its end — i. e., realised its idea. But inasmuch as a process 
 is not concerned primarily with the individual, but is logically 
 related to the universal, both in experience and in its reflex in 
 language, the process gains a new realtiy. If it ceases to exist as 
 a phenomenon in the realm of fact, it nevertheless has its reality 
 lifted to a higher sphere of idea, where it exists as a formula, a 
 definition, a law, hereafter determinative but not constitutive of 
 reality. From this point of view, formulae, definitions, and laws 
 have a peculiar kind of reality, since they are ontologically condi- 
 tioned by complexes of phenomena upon which, however, they 
 do not depend for their epistemological significance. This is 
 where the danger comes in of applying too rigorously the Prag- 
 matic canon of efficiency, inasmuch as the validity of a phe- 
 nomenon or a process does not depend upon existential condi- 
 tions, any more than the validity of a universal proposition in 
 a syllogism depends upon an enumeration of particulars. 
 
 In so far as process does realise its ends it is a true process — 
 i. e., it is one with its ideal, without any teleological interpreta- 
 tion from a human standpoint being at all necessary, though from 
 the absolute point of view a process which is actualising itself is 
 teleology made manifest. It is conceivable that an idea, in the 
 sense of a potential concept or a series or system of purposes, 
 may be realised in a process without ever being existent as a 
 percept in a human mind. Only so far as the mind of man cor- 
 responds to the order of nature does this experiential reproduc- 
 tion of the idea of the process occur — i. e., it becomes a part of 
 his world, not merely of the world or cosmos in which it exists 
 already necessarily as an idea. 
 
 When this correspondence of the phenomena of nature with 
 the mind of man happens also to have an emotional correspon- 
 dence at the same time with human conceptions of what is good, 
 then popularly nature is said to be teleological. This tendency 
 on the part of the human mind has done a great deal to obscure 
 the real question at issue and to complicate the problem by the 
 introduction of purely accidental and analogical elements. There 
 must be borne in mind the danger of interpreting what may be 
 called cosmic teleology in the terms of human moral concepts 
 and from the point of view of human analogy, for the following 
 reasons : 
 
The Interpretation of Experience 7 7 
 
 (1) At each stage in the evolutionary process the idea of 
 teleology has a different content. The teleology of the amoeba, 
 worm, fish, carnivorous and herbivorous animals and man is 
 different and may be contradictory. From this point of view 
 the human conception of Teleology is genetically conditioned by 
 the process of development of which it is a part. 
 
 (2) The process of Evolution affords no genetic or logical rea- 
 son for the ultimate validity of human ideas of moral purpose. 
 
 (3) There is no general agreement among mankind as to 
 ultimate conceptions or standards, and no man has a priori 
 concept of purpose. 
 
 The mechanical and teleological interpretations of Nature are 
 in need of a synthesis. The fact that they are not mutually ex- 
 clusive or contradictory implies that they are specialised points 
 of view and suggests that possibly a common basis can be found 
 for their interpretation. It would seem as if the mechanical view 
 involved the interpretation of the phenomena of nature from the 
 physical level and in the terms of the concepts of mechanical 
 science. Even in biology, where we have to deal with matter 
 in an organic form, we still find the attempt made to interpret 
 the phenomena of life in mechanical terms. In similar fashion, 
 the teleological interpretation of Nature is a purposive explana- 
 tion, generally in terms of human concepts of end and volition. 
 
 Both of these partial and complementary views can be har- 
 monised only in the light of some principle of idealistic inter- 
 pretation from the cosmic point of view. Then the mechanical 
 fact and the ideal significance become one. 
 
 It would seem meaningless to apply the concept of human 
 Teleology in a wholesale way to the cosmic process. To do so 
 means that we are applying it to phenomena of various qualities 
 with which it is not homogeneous, and consequently the argu- 
 ments based thereon are possibly fallacious. If we do wish to 
 make this cosmic application of teleology, we shall have to sub- 
 stitute for our human teleology the conception of cosmic teleology : 
 and the two are by no means synonymous, any more than human 
 good and evil and cosmic good and evil are necessarily identical. 
 
 There is frequently a confusion between the meaning of a 
 thing and its origin. A thing cannot from the same point of 
 view be interpreted both in terms of its origin and of its mean- 
 
78 The Concept of Method 
 
 ing, purpose or end. The ontological inquiry is only regulative ; 
 the epistemological is constructive. 
 
 From the mechanical point of view we cannot properly speak 
 of purpose, which is an idea that belongs to the volitional level 
 of existence. Teleology cannot apply to facts as facts^ but only 
 to the idea of which they are the manifestation, embodiment, or 
 realisation. Mechanism deals with forms; Teleology deals with 
 ideas and principles. 
 
 The conception of process implies, in the first place, elements 
 in relation, and, in the second place, ideas becoming realised. 
 The former constitutes the mechanical, and the latter the teleo- 
 logical aspect. From the point of view of the process, into which 
 the moral element does not enter, the idea becomes realised 
 through the interaction of the elements, and we have a progressive 
 relation which depends for its actuality upon the mechanical con- 
 ditions which it presupposes, and for its reality upon the idea 
 which it involves as the epistemological condition of its appear- 
 ance. 
 
 Relativity is a controlling idea that has been too little em- 
 phasised in teleological thought ; and the various meanings given 
 to the term Teleology by the physicist, the biologist, and the 
 ethical theorist have been overlooked, though it is just these 
 small additional elements that enter into the concept as held by 
 each which cause the real confusion and involve all the logical 
 difficulties in discussion. Purposes or ends in the mechanical and 
 in the biological sphere are obviously different from purposes or 
 ends in the moral sphere, so that the whole question of teleology 
 has been complicated by the confusion of merely mechanical 
 elements with those that are purely volitional in character. In 
 addition to this, the discussion has been colored on both sides 
 by emotion, and has been biased by mutual exclusion on the part 
 of both the scientist and the moralist. 
 
 The conception of purpose does not imply an a priori deter- 
 mination of the means. The distinction between logical neces- 
 sity with regard to form and psychological reality with regard 
 to content must be borne in mind. The fact that the form ap- 
 plies to various kinds of content involves the existence of ten- 
 tative solutions to problematic situations, either physical or in- 
 tellectual or ethical. 
 
The Interpretation of Experience 79 
 
 Henc€, though Evolution may give the form to the process 
 of cosmic development, the content may either progress or re- 
 gress, may be " right and good " or " wrong and bad " from the 
 point of view of formal perfection or complete adjustment, 
 merely qua process. Evolution works either way. It does not 
 follow, however, that what seems to us as regression may not 
 after all be a part of the general process of nature's advance,i 
 and only seem regress from the human point of view, which is 
 limited by the conditions of human intelligence. When the truth 
 ol form and the truth of facts are synonymous then the condi- 
 tions of ideal teleology are fulfilled. There is then no popular 
 distinction of phenomena and processes into " artificial " and 
 " natural," of which the former relate to the operations and pro- 
 ductions of man, while the latter refer to nature and to God. The 
 world of nature possesses potentialities which man may actualise, 
 create, develop, or liberate, much as the chemist liberates chemical 
 substances and discovers, literally, new elements. The principle 
 of the conservation of energy demands a belief in the potentiality 
 of nature. Idealism demands a belief in the interpretative power 
 of humanity. 
 
 So long as we have the phenomena of the world as elements 
 in the problem, so long will mechanical terms have to enter into 
 our interpretation. But so long as we have faith in the ultimate 
 purposes of the universe, so long will idealistic method interpret 
 the results of our experience. The fact is determined mechanic- 
 ally in many instances but the end or purpose or result is deter- 
 mined teleologically. This may apply only to certain cases, e. g., 
 my walking to a certain destination is determined by the direc- 
 tion of the streets, by the number of the people in the way, by 
 wind, rain, etc., but my destination, which logically precedes my 
 action, is itself determined only by my idea, or by the system of 
 purposes which constitute the directive element in my experience. 
 The whole process of experience consists in the constantly pro- 
 gressive interrelation of the mechanical conditions of experience 
 and the conscious recognition of the teleological ideas that are 
 involved in any process of human thought. 
 
CHAPTER VIII 
 THE FUNCTION OF METHOD 
 
 The problem before us is to show that theory and practice are 
 not two separate entities brought into relation in the course of 
 experience, but are essentially phases of a single and unitary 
 activity — differentiated aspects in every phase of individual and 
 social activity. Theory and practice are complementary phases 
 of the larger concept of method or of the function of intelligence 
 in experience. 
 
 It is natural that, in the genetic process of historical develop- 
 ment, these two phases, which are in quality so different, should 
 be regarded as separate and self-existent in a very dualistic man- 
 ner. The knowledge of how a thing should be done was regarded 
 as something very different from the ability to produce the result 
 in question, and this divorce between head and hand was all the 
 more emphasised when one class of persons planned and directed 
 work which another class of men carried out in a more or less 
 blind and unconscious, though technically skillful manner. To 
 know what was to be done was quite a different kind of knowl- 
 edge from the knowledge that comes from the power of being 
 able to do. 
 
 In education, even, where this dualistic basis of work is more 
 uncritically accepted than in other branches of activity because it 
 is less apparent, there is often to be found ample illustration of 
 this mechancal conception of the relation of theory and practice. 
 Courses in " theory " in normal schools and colleges are often 
 complete in themselves, neither growing out of the student's ex- 
 perience nor leading to a reconstruction of it ; while on the other 
 hand their " practical " work, dealing with the actual problems 
 of class-room experience and with their own very vital relations 
 to their pupils, seems to have a warmth and vitality and a near- 
 80 
 
The Function of Method 8i 
 
 ness to them that abstracted lectures on theory do not possess. In 
 the same way in the religious life of many individuals there is, 
 perhaps unconsciously in many cases, this separation between 
 the thoughts that they have about conduct, about ideals, about the 
 things that they ought to do, on the one hand, and the this and 
 the that of the daily round and common task, with its manifold 
 of petty commissions and omissions. 
 
 If we attempt to discuss this dualism between theory and prac- 
 tice we find two general attitudes among men. 
 
 There is in the first place one common among men who are 
 engaged in work which deals largely with the materials of the 
 earth and which requires little thought save that involved in tradi- 
 tion, inherited custom, and the performance of a series of annual 
 habits that together approximate a personality. These are they 
 who are content to toil, without asking why or how. Their 
 fathers have done so ; why should they do otherwise ? Thus they 
 were taught ; why should they better the instruction ? It is harder 
 for the mind of one of these to entertain the new idea than for 
 the nerves and muscles of the body to go regularly through the 
 accustomed occupations of the circling year. The mechanics of 
 habit have become to them all in all. They have a mental inertia 
 and a momentum of bodily habit neither of which can be changed. 
 There are teachers of this type, who teach as they have been 
 taught and who feel uncomfortable and in strange places and 
 unfamiliar ways if circumstances oblige them to take up new 
 material or to use old material in new ways. They are those who 
 always come back. " Fresh fields and pastures new " have no 
 attractions for them. The practice of the good old days in the 
 good, old-fashioned way is their very life, and any theory which 
 would cause a break in the regular course of long-standing habits 
 is not taken kindly to. 
 
 In addition to the class of people and teachers who dislike any 
 modifications of practice and who leave theory as an unconscious 
 part of their experience, there are those who believe that theory 
 is something that is acquired " en bloc," and is put into the mind 
 much as a Lockean idea, by being written upon a tabula rasa. 
 Theory from this point of view is a certain mass of precepts, rules 
 and recipes for behaviour, for the conduct of classes, for teach- 
 ing lessons, and for rightly and duly administering all the details 
 of school life. This view is perhaps more prevalent among those 
 
82 The Concept of Method 
 
 who are being trained for teaching than it is among those who 
 are training them. The young teacher comes too quickly upon 
 materials and methods which he has not time properly to organise 
 as parts of his own experience, and in his haste to get command 
 over these new materials and activities unconsciously asserts this 
 dualism by seeking to regulate his experience by precepts instead 
 of by principles. 
 
 In these two attitudes to theory and practice — the first ignoring 
 any conscious theory, and the second making theory something 
 external to and imposed upon practice — we have two stages in the 
 genetic process which culminates in the realisation that theory 
 and practice are both aspects of the one process of experience, 
 though the emphasis placed upon either may be infinitely varied in 
 diverse times and places. Instead of having as theory what 
 someone else thinks and as practice that which you do; or theory 
 something you think and practice that which you do, however un- 
 connected with that part of your experience which is thought — 
 instead of this, theory and practice are one ; they are experience ; 
 they are acting one upon the other in everything we do, in every 
 lesson we teach, in all we think, and say, and write. Our experi- 
 ence is an organic part of our personality, and our theory and 
 our practice are organic parts of our experience. They grow, 
 develop, change, modify in many ways and from various causes, 
 but they are always organically related to our experience and 
 always are interrelated, terminal aspects, so to speak, in con- 
 sciousness. 
 
 The discovery of laws of nature and the formulation of prin- 
 ciples of human activity are two of the latest and highest achieve- 
 ments of thought. Both stand at the upper end of a long line 
 of development from beginnings so simple, crude, and unformed 
 that it is only a retrospective interpretation of thought that dis- 
 covers in the apparent simplicity of these genetic conditions the 
 "promise and potency" of later, development. 
 
 It is possible for the investigator to consider anything that 
 grows from simple beginnings and develops into a relatively 
 higher and more organised thing from two different and con- 
 trasted points of view. We shall find that, in every one of the 
 sciences and spheres of investigation which have to deal with 
 phenomena subject to the general process of evolution, these two 
 points of view are involved. Sometimes one is emphasised, some- 
 
The Function of Method 83 
 
 times the other; but in every instance each point of view will be 
 seen to imply and involve the other two if we think consistently 
 and in an organised manner, for nowhere more than in the realm 
 of thought are relations more certain to make themselves felt 
 by those whose minds are open to the light and faithful to the 
 truth. 
 
 (i) Briefly in considering the process of development of any- 
 thing organic in character, we may look upon it in its simplest 
 and original form, in the embryo, so to speak,, from which the 
 later organism is to develop. Such a point of view may con- 
 veniently be called Genetic. (2) Or,, instead of looking at the 
 past origin of the organism, we may try to discover what the pur- 
 pose of its existence is, what aim and ultimate end is realising 
 itself in and through the various activities of this developing 
 organism. Such a point of view is known as Teleological. 
 
 Neither of these two methods of interpretation, however, is 
 complete in itself, or ultimately valuable if separated from the 
 other. Uniting the genetic fact and the teleological interpreta- 
 tion, both of which are legitimate inquiries for the scientist and 
 for the philosopher, there is the functional point of view, which 
 partakes of the nature of both of the others. It emphasises the 
 process of the experience of the organism, and considers the 
 manner in which it grows, acts, and reacts, and the different 
 processes that are involved in the gradual organisation of its 
 various activities. In a word, it deals with the method of the 
 organism. Of this method the primary genetic conditions and 
 the ultimate teleologicaJ idea of purpose are but phases : the reality 
 of the organism lies in the functional interaction of the idea which 
 is seeking realisation, and the form which is demanding some 
 kind of idealisation. In Education, therefore, the emphasis can- 
 not be placed siolely upon the immature and developing child 
 on the one kamtf, nor on the other hand only upon the ideals of 
 education. The two must be realised in their organic relation, 
 for only then Js education performimg its true functiom. It is 
 throughf this process of interaction that social purposes gain 
 reaiHty,, and it is: through the same process that the immatmr 
 pDtentialiti€s oi the children gaim- ideal' valtte. The fiinction of 
 education- andj the ultimate method of experiemce then fe twoloid : 
 it consists ©£ the pcogressive inteuactioni of real children, and social 
 idealsi — ^a; process^ of interaction through which the original cfaaar- 
 
84 The Concept of Method 
 
 acters of the children become idealised and at the same time the 
 ends and purposes of society become realised. 
 
 Historically these three aspects have at different times domi- 
 nated philosophical thought. Each has its distinct outlook upon 
 the phenomena of experience, and the differences that exist 
 among the three are fraught with great differences in implication 
 from the point of view of educational theory. One has only to 
 consider obvious cases where educational theory emphasised the 
 teleological while educational practice based itself upon the 
 genetic, to realise that there can be no permanent truth or value 
 in education as a social process or as a method of individual de- 
 velopment until these two points of view are properly realised 
 in their functional interrelation. 
 
 The necessity for placing due emphasis upon this interaction 
 between genetic conditions and teleological ideals will be all the 
 more evident from the analysis of experience which follows. 
 Together the three form a unity : they constitute the only organic 
 unity which education can have as a method of human experience. 
 This unity lies at the basis of the functional interpretation of 
 any of the phenomena of experience. The thing considered is 
 one, a unity, having many sides or aspects, any one of which 
 may be emphasised and made central for the time being, and in 
 so far as any particular purpose is realised at any particular stage 
 in experience, in so far do genetic and teleological aspects come 
 into functional relation, and the reality of the method is mani- 
 fested. One has only to consider the different aspects under 
 which the tree may be regarded by the farmer, lumberman, and 
 botanist ; the child, by parent, teacher, or another child ; the home 
 by government, father, mother, or servant ; to see that the reality 
 depends upon the completeness with which the particular phe- 
 nomenon, organism, or process, embodies in its function the teleo- 
 logical ideals which, from any particular point of view, have been 
 discovered to be latent in it. In each case, whether the condi- 
 tions under consideration be regarded primarily from the genetic 
 or from the teleological point of view, there is underneath all 
 partial manifestations, all aspects and forms, an underlying prin- 
 ciple of development, which gives them unity, and is in reality 
 the method of the process. This principle binds together the three 
 points of view, because the organism in the course of its develop- 
 ment at different steps involves the characteristic elements in 
 
The Function of Method 85 
 
 each of these three fundamental points of view. There is, there- 
 fore, this objective unity which is characteristic of anything 
 which conforms to the principle of evolution, quite independent 
 of relationship to human experience. 
 
 This objective unity has its subjective aspect in the fact that 
 these three possible ways of interpreting experience are in reality 
 phases of the method of the mind's operation. Once the funda- 
 mental psychic unity of mental processes is realised, it follows 
 that there can be no ultimate opposition between these phases as 
 special branches of method, whether or not we use the terms 
 Feeling, Thought, and Volition in Psychology, or Genesis, 
 Function, and Teleology in Epistemology. As our thought de- 
 velopes, they will be seen more and more to be in organic rela- 
 tion and ultimately to be in complete unity. If we could at one 
 and the same time see the manifold of experience from this three- 
 fold point of view, we would approach the realisation of that 
 vision of the universe sub specie aeternitatis towards which 
 Spinoza was unconsciously working. 
 
 This threefold character of the process of the mind's organisa- 
 tion of experience constitutes a subjective unity which is the 
 counterpart of the objective unity found in the material of ex- 
 perience. The correspondence between the course of nature and 
 the mind of man is here seen from the point of view of method. 
 The method of experience consists in the progressive inter- 
 action of these two unities, in their conscious organisation in the 
 process of experience, and in their subsequent elevation through 
 the conceptual power of the mind, to the level of idea, concept, 
 law, or principle. 
 
 Control as a Function of Method 
 
 In every branch of human knowledge or other department of 
 thought that we break off from its organic connection for pur- 
 poses of closer examination, we find certaiif specific things that 
 inevitably suggest the relationship of this particular branch with 
 the parent trunk to which it properly belongs. But in addition 
 to these special close connections there are to be found in any part 
 of the universe of thought certain general similarities and great 
 underlying uniformities which necessarily characterise whatever 
 in its constitution is organic. Consequently in attempting any 
 
&6 The Concept of Method 
 
 consideration of such a partial aspect of the whole field of ex- 
 perience aS' that of control as a function of method, we are 
 obliged in the way of prolegomena, to pay some attention to 
 those fundamental ideas which make it an organic part of our 
 thougJit and at the same time give it significasnce in our experi- 
 ence as a whole. 
 
 The three great ideas that underlie a functional idealism have 
 already been stated to be (i) Umty, (2) Interaction, (3) De- 
 velopment. What concerns us now, therefore, is to show that 
 these fundamental ideas are necessary presuppositions to amy 
 consideration of control as a function of method. 
 
 ( 1 ) In the first place, in order to have any philosophy at all 
 there must be recognised, either explicitly or implicitly, some 
 kind of unity. The discovery of this unity has always been the 
 goal of philosophic inquiry, whether objectively in the field of 
 science, or subjectively in the realm of psychology and meta- 
 physics. Every advance that has been made in or through thought 
 has been due to a closer approximation to such a tmity, for even 
 the recognition of differences is indirect evidence of a unity. In 
 that aspect of the general process of method to which we have 
 given the name control, this same quality of unity is a prere- 
 quisite to its existence, either as a concept in the mind, or as a 
 process objectively realising itself in experience. Control neces- 
 sarily implies conformity to a standard, and therefore uniformity 
 and ultimate unity. It involves, not ultimate disparates and per- 
 manently separable entities — for between these there could be no 
 function of control — but an ideal of uniformity which involves, 
 fundamentally and essentially, permanence as its principle. With- 
 out permanence there can be no control, and without control there 
 can be no method, for in the largest sense method is the control 
 of experience by principles. 
 
 (2) In the second place, however, the very fact that we have 
 to search for this element of permanence and unity, and that it 
 continually influences our thought, indicates that there is some 
 sort of interaction between the standard that we set up as the 
 goal or ideal of our thinking and the activity of thought itself. 
 This interaction depends upon the general correspondence be- 
 tween the mind of man and the universe cff possible experience 
 which is one of the conditions of thought. At the same time it 
 implies that this correspondence is at present only imperfectly 
 
The Function of Method 87 
 
 realised in our science and philosophy, and it indicates that in 
 every fact we state, in every thought we think, and in everything 
 which we believe, though not having seen, there is the continual 
 interaction between this standard of unity on the one hand, be 
 it expressed as truth, or beauty, or conviction, and the various 
 phenomena of our experience which we sift and mould and train 
 in various ways, even to remaking our personal world, in order 
 to bring it more into harmony with this ideal of unity, wdlcb 
 alone gives permanence. 
 
 (3) For, in the third place, were there universal permanence 
 in fact as well as in principle, there could be no experience, 
 which by its very nature implies an element that is not perma- 
 nent. It is out of this manifold of changing manifestations that 
 the method of human experience, through its functions of con- 
 trol, developes a unity. It realises the permanent despite the 
 fluctuating instalbility of its confines, much as we realise the 
 permanence of the ocean behind and beneath the ebb and flow 
 of tide and waves which unceasingly change its limits. It is 
 curious that this variability in phenomena, this multitude of ap- 
 parent particulars should have been regarded by some as the 
 strongest argument against the unity which philosophy postulates, 
 when in reality it is a necessary condition of our experience as 
 individuals and of the very possibility of our conception of unity 
 and permanence. It is not only in metaphysics that the prac- 
 tical opposition between the one and the many is a criterion of 
 the possibility of experience, but in psychology, where the whole 
 treatment of perception, association, and memory depends on this 
 element of disparity and change; in logic, where the whole 
 process of deductive and inductive reasoning depends upon the re- 
 lationship of the one and the many ; and in theology, where, per- 
 haps more than in any other branch of thought, questions of unity 
 and plurality, and of the relation of the temporal and the indi- 
 vidual to the permanent and universal, have appeared fraught 
 with tultimiate significaince. 
 
 To sum lap, it appears that we cannot have any experience 
 without something fundamentally permanent as a basis ; nor can 
 we have experience without certain variations from this per- 
 manent, the disparity between which, when consciously realised in 
 our experiences, forces us by the very constitution of our thought 
 to make use of the permanent to control the transient and acci- 
 
88 The Concept of Method 
 
 dental. This process is not only the method of experience but it 
 is that by which we develop, for it is through the progressive 
 reconciliation of the partial and the particular with the perma- 
 nent that we realise in ourselves this very permanence that under- 
 lies all things, and therefore become ourselves more and more 
 identified with the organic unity which we conceive the universe 
 to be. It is this progressive self-development through interaction 
 with dififerent aspects of the fundamental unity of the world that 
 forms the ideal, not only of a philosophy of education, but also 
 of psychology, logic, ethics, aesthetics, and theology. 
 
 In addition to these presuppositions of control from the point 
 of view of Idealism, there are certain fundamental conditions in- 
 volved by the evolutionary method which also underlies this con- 
 sideration of the elements of experience. In the actual process 
 of control these aspects are not apparent in a consciously differ- 
 entiated manner, but when the method of this control is realised 
 as an idea, then it becomes evident that we have on the one hand 
 a multitude of immature forms, of embryonic organisms, of par- 
 tial manifestations, and on the other hand the ideal of the fully 
 developed organism, the standard or ideal to be realised, the prin- 
 ciple that is organising the diversity of manifestations into a 
 unity, either in the phenomena of nature or in the realm of indi- 
 vidual thought or social experience. There is the physical em- 
 bryo in the process of evolution, gradually approximating the 
 form of its highest organisation, — there is the feeblest evanescent 
 impulse and instinct of the child flashing forth momentarily, op- 
 portunely seized upon, made a habit, and raised to consciousness 
 through encouragement, direction, and control by those who are 
 more mature; and there are all the social phases of the child's 
 experience which require reinforcement and development through 
 association with, and organisation in, the institutionalised life of 
 the community and the race. The concept of control, therefore, 
 from the evolutionary point of view, involves the interaction of 
 the immature and the mature, of the lower with the higher, of 
 the manifold and diversified possibilities of the developing indi- 
 vidual organism with those habitual methods of control which 
 form the standards of social activity. 
 
 When we ask what anything is, we can be answered in a variety 
 of ways. We may have the object of phenomenon or process 
 described to us, we may be told of what parts and elements it 
 
The Function of Method 89 
 
 consists, we may have its use or function explained, or we may be 
 given a definition of it. Of all these meanings of a phenomenon 
 or process perhaps the least satisfactory is the definition. There 
 is something about beginning with a definition that seems contrary 
 to the natural order of thought. Definitions are really the farther 
 end of the process of thought. If concepts are to be organic parts 
 of our thought they cannot be given to us ready-made as moulds 
 out of w'hich, by the simple process of filling in a content, we can 
 turn ideas. They are forms of thought in the sense that there 
 must be certain characteristic and essential ways in which the 
 mind's activity functions, but these are subjective conditions of 
 thought and not the formulae, concepts, or definitions in which 
 we register the results of thought. 
 
 In the natural order of the mind's working we can only form 
 a true definition at the end of our consideration of a given aspect 
 of experience, when we have thoroughly become acquainted with 
 the aspect or phenomenon and have separated the essential from 
 the accidental, the permianent from the evanescent. Hence in seek- 
 ing to understand the meaning of control as a function of method, 
 we will attempt to work towards the possibility of a definition 
 through an analysis of various uses of the term that are implied 
 in different spheres of experience, rather than, in a more dogmatic 
 and deductive fashion, to start from the definition and elaborate 
 its implications. 
 
 A brief glance at the obvious and familiar instances of control 
 of one kind or another that we meet in everyday experience in- 
 dicates two broad general classes into which the concept divides 
 itself: one of these is objective, external, and mechanical in char- 
 acter ; and the other is subjective, internal, and organic. A closer 
 examination will indicate the specific points of difference between 
 these two phases of control, and will emphasise the significance 
 of the latter in the method of experience. 
 
 (i) Perhaps the most prevalent, as well as the popular, con- 
 ception of control is that of a more or less arbitrary imposition 
 of superior power from an external source. From this point of 
 view we are controlled in a large number of ways every day of 
 our lives : the regular sequence of day and night, the vagaries of 
 the weather and the variations of climatic conditions, the avail- 
 able supply of food, the unavoidable routine of business, and 
 travel — all these, to a greater or less degree, control our actions. 
 
90 The Concept of Method 
 
 and control them in a way that admits of little interference 
 from us. 
 
 But in addition to the control of these external plaenoraema 
 which constrain us in a physical way, there is the control which 
 is exercised by human, as opposed to natural, law. This jural 
 aspect represents a higher phase than that of control by physical 
 phenomena, because here the element of human .consciousness 
 enters in as a dominating element. Here, too, the moral element 
 first appears, in so far as any individual is .at liberty to act con- 
 trary to the law. Yet this factor of choice and freedom of action 
 is by the nature of the control imposed, reduced, in ideal at least, 
 to its minimum, either through the elimination of the conditions 
 necessary to the realisation of activity contrary to that legally de- 
 manded, or through the deterrent influences of predetermined 
 consequences that are practically prohibitive of transgression. 
 
 We reach a higher ethical, though not so universal a stage 
 from the point of view of the content of the control involved, 
 when we come to that exercised in our experience by rules, pre- 
 cepts, maxims of action, conduct or thought. Here the range 
 of the control varies in strength from conditions where these 
 habitual rules and maxims take the place of organised legal en- 
 actments, as in the case of some savage tribes, down to the merest 
 counsels of expediency which guide many trivial daily acts. 
 
 Here, however, the control is still imposed upon the individual 
 from without, and from a moral point of view conformity to 
 rule or precept has little to check our estimates of moral strength. 
 As the criterion by which we judge is still an external one, there 
 must always be the conscious reference to the standard before the 
 extent of the conformity can be estimated. There is still the 
 dualism, then, that existed in the case of legal prescription be- 
 tween the element that controls conduct and the individual whose 
 act is to be judged or estimated; and as long as there is this 
 dtialism there cannot be true freedom nor the highest kind of ac- 
 tivity. The conduct of life has not yet reached the level of an 
 art. Human spiritual life has not yet become a conscious process ; 
 its idea has not emerged as the motive force in experience. This 
 is realised only in the stage represented in the next and last con- 
 ception of control as a function of the method of experience. 
 
 (2) There is, in any phase of common experience, a threefold 
 phase of development through which it is possible to pass. In the 
 
The Function of Method 91 
 
 lowest stage the child or the individual performs actions through 
 instinct or ibabit; the activity is almost entirely unconscious in 
 the sense that it is not intellectually regarded as a iprooess thcough 
 which the individual may express himself; and consequently it 
 corresponds to that level of conduct which is controlled by law, 
 where there is the same blind, unquestioning obedience to objec- 
 tive authority. In the second of these phases of personal develop- 
 ment there is the birth of self-consciousness. The child or the 
 individual begins to objectify the activity in which he is engaged, 
 begins to see himself as others see him, and for the first time 
 realises, with a flash of that inspiration wbich iUumines the birth 
 of personality, the ever-widening gap between the real and the 
 ideal. Shortcomings from the attainment of the standard set 
 before one are apt to loom disproportionately large, for this is 
 the stage of self-criticism, where all one's activities are subjected 
 to a control that is more direct, supervisory, and immediate than 
 in the earlier stage of being under the law. Each action is 
 measured by a standard of conformity, social, intellectual, and 
 ethical, showing that the individual is in a transition stage, repre- 
 sented psychologically in the development of self-consciousness, 
 socially, in the adjustment of personality to the manifold aspects 
 of institutional life, and ethically, in the temporary adoption of 
 a scheme of utilitarian morality strangely shot through with 
 prophesies of pessimism and idealism. 
 
 Both these stages, which correspond exactly to those phases of 
 external control that we have been considering, lead on, in the 
 ordinary course of development to the third and last stage, which 
 involves on the one hand inner and organic control by principle, 
 instead of outwardly by law and rule, and on the other hand the 
 fullest self-realisation as a spiritual self-controlled personaility. 
 How this final stage differs from those which genetically precede 
 it now remains to be seen. 
 
 The species of control exercised by law, whether of nature or 
 xA the state, and by the conventions and rules of social and voca- 
 tional activity, are to a greater or less degree a restraint upon 
 individual activity, and yet at the same time ccmformity with 
 what is demanded assures to the individual an ever-increasing 
 degree of freedom. The observation of laws and social customs 
 introduces an element of regularity, uniformity, or unity into the 
 actions of men, so that one's plans of action can be the more 
 
92 The Concept of Method 
 
 definitely made and freed from much of that uncertainty which 
 the personal equation always introduces. Still, from the indi- 
 vidual's point of view, as long as there is external or objective 
 control, there can be no true freedom. This comes only when we 
 have passed from the stage of self-consciousness and criticism 
 to that of guidance by principle, in which each act of ours is the 
 manifestation or realisation of the spirit that is within us. Prac- 
 tice and theory are in organic interaction, and this interaction is 
 synonymous with the method of individual experience. Activity 
 that is thus directed by the control of inner principle is truly 
 free, for now the antithesis between individual and the law, be- 
 tween the actual and the ideal is reconciled in a unity which is 
 nothing else than the spiritual life of man. The individual is 
 now a self-controlled personality — an organism in which there is 
 the possibility of perfect harmony, and in which at the same 
 time there is going on in miniature that reconciliation of the many 
 changing manifestations with the unity of principles which we 
 see going on in all the phases of the life of the world. This 
 freedom of personality is then one of the characteristics of the 
 method of individual experience at the highest stage of its de- 
 velopment. Control that was external has now become self- 
 control. The standard once external, mechanical, and objective, 
 has now become internal, organic, subjective, and exercises its 
 control only in being the form in which individual activity realises 
 itself. In the ideal of method, the ideal and the real of individual 
 experience form a unity; the method and the standard become 
 one, or are at least but terminal aspects of a unified activity, the 
 content and the form giving reality to one another in the actual 
 process of interaction. The standard then is the method, and 
 the method is the standard; in the activity of a self-controlled 
 spiritual personality the distinction between the two terms loses 
 its meaning. That is the reason why it is difficult, if not impos- 
 sible, to give an adequate definition of control. The relativity of 
 the terms of the definition corresponds to the degree of our per- 
 sonal realisation of the factor of control in the method of our 
 own experience. 
 
 In the control of our activities by standards or criteria, there 
 are three stages which may be distinguished : 
 
 ( I ) Instinctive or unconscious control by physical instincts and 
 needs. The control in this case is inherent in the nature of the 
 
The Function of Method 93 
 
 function itself, or is consciously expressed, in education for in- 
 stance, in the social control exercised apparently arbitrarily by 
 the mature members of society over the potential activities of 
 their children. 
 
 (2) Conscious or attentive control. In this stage in the pro- 
 gressive socialisation of the individual there is a conscious and 
 individual reorganisation or reconstruction of his experience. He 
 has reached a stage in his development in which he can perceive 
 differences in action and can realise the disparity between fact 
 and ideal ; he finds his actions involving deliberation, a balancing 
 of motives and situations, determination and choice. Here the 
 individual finds himself in a stage of transition, midway between 
 the bondage to physical law and the freedom which comes from 
 the active expression of a moral principle within. 
 
 (3) Habitual control. At this stage the individual realises his 
 freedom through the law. He expresses the general principles 
 of human activity at large. He has developed the method of his 
 experience. He has realised how physical control and social sanc- 
 tion may be rationalised in individual thought, and he has formed 
 a basis for further moral development. The aim of this stage is 
 the functional expression of developed character, and the pro- 
 gressive organisation and valuation of experience. The educa- 
 tional implications of these three stages are well summed up by 
 Aristotle when he says that " in the case of the virtues, a man is 
 not said to act justly or temperately (or like a just or temperate 
 man) if what he does merely be of a certain sort — ^he must also 
 be in a certain state of mind when he does it : therefore, first of 
 all, he must know what he is doing; secondly, he must choose it, 
 and choose it for itself ; and, thirdly, his act must be the expres- 
 sion of a formed and stable character." The interpretation of 
 the process of experience from the point of view of activity al- 
 ways gives more significance to the materials involved. Education 
 is always a process of giving meaning to the environment. The 
 blacksmith hammers meaning into the iron as he hammers shape 
 into the horseshoe. The carpenter builds an idea at the same 
 time that he constructs a table or chair. Teaching in the same 
 way adds to the significance and value and reality of the daily 
 world in which the child is developing. The world grows as the 
 child develops, and there is continual proof of correspondence 
 and mutual influence between nature and the mind of man. Edu- 
 
94 The Concept of Method 
 
 cation, therefore, becomes a continuous process of realising the 
 possibilities of the materials which nature provides and of seeaJJg 
 the ideal and ultimate significance of those activities w^ith which 
 we are endowed and which form the motive force of ail educa- 
 tional progress. 
 
 Yet human activity rarely attains such perfection of technique 
 or realises the ideal of method. Consequently it seldom truly 
 bodies forth the ideal, the divine idea, the logical concept, the defi- 
 nition, the method, in anything but a partial, one-sided, incom- 
 plete manifestation. This is true both of the fine and of the 
 constructive arts, and of that fines't and most constructive of all 
 arts, the art of human life itself. 
 
 From the point of view of the material, there are two sides that 
 have to be kept in mind in any consideration of the function of 
 method. The first of these concerns itself with the possibilities 
 which any material involves. These have to be recognised and 
 liberated before they can become functional realities, before the 
 potential energy involved can become dynamic in any sense sig- 
 nificant for education. In the wood lie possibilities which when 
 liberated become functional elements in human life as chair, table, 
 oar, or pencil ; in the boy lie possibilities which may realise them- 
 selves as butcher, baker, or candlestick-maker. The purpose in 
 education, in this respect, is a twofold one: it has to recognize 
 the further possibilities of both the conventional materials of 
 education, and it has to become more deeply conscious of the 
 human possibilities and the social significance of the child. It is 
 only when the possibilities are recognised and then freed from 
 limitations through the liberating process of education, that the 
 ultimate significance of materials can be realised or their func- 
 tion apprehended in the general process of experience. 
 
 The second aspect that has to be kept in mind in any considera- 
 tion of the materials of education is complementary to the one 
 already examined. If the recognition of the possibilities of the 
 materials is the positive side of the process, there is also the 
 negative aspect which involves the clear realisation of the limita- 
 tions of materials dn their attempt to body forth something that 
 is not material. There is a certain incompatibility between the 
 material and the idea or ideal to be embodied, an inherent impos- 
 sibility of the complete and permanent realisation of an idea in a 
 material, unless these terminal aspects be disregarded, and the 
 
The Function of Method 95 
 
 funGtioiial interaction of the two be emphasised. If, to make the 
 matter clearer, we think of the conventional limitations familiar 
 to us in the pictorial representations' of reality; of the temporal 
 limitations in the subjective impression of music, or in the objec- 
 tive representation of sculpture; or of the liocal' and temporal 
 limitations whicfc are forever conditioning man's realisations of 
 his ethical ideals, we are forced to recognise the fact that there 
 are aspects of reality which escape the impiisonment of the 
 material, and overtones of meaning which are too delicate or 
 evanescent for a material not finely tun^d to respond to such 
 harmony. 
 
 It is this very uncertainty as to how far he has attained insight 
 into the real meaning of things, this lack of accuracy and com- 
 pleteness in the way in which humanity reveals or attains its ends 
 and purposes, that leads man to seek something other than the 
 material by means of which he may estimate the success of his 
 endeavour or measure up his attainment with the ideal that he 
 has set up before himself to realise. Hence it comes about in 
 every sphere of life our activity is ultimately regulated by some 
 standard, is directed to some end, and is, by the very nature of 
 experience, bound to deal with material more or less inadequate 
 for the purpose. In every phase of the common experiences of 
 our common life there is the search for the permanent in the 
 changing, for the universal underlying the particular, for the 
 truth that is the core of fact, for the ideal that is at the heart of 
 the reaJi. 
 
 The function of standard is closely connected with this Janus- 
 like activity of finding the ideal in the real and the real in the 
 ideal. Retrospectively, a standard is a basis for the criticism of 
 our achievement; from: the point of view of present experience, 
 it is an instrument for the control of our activity; and prospec- 
 tively, the staindard is an iflspiratioo for the shaping of our ideals 
 and purposes. 
 
 There remains the consideration of the question of the rela- 
 tion of standards of the two great philosophical ideas underlying 
 this whole treatment of method and materials. 
 
 (i) Ezrahttiom. Genetically, a standard emerges as soon as an 
 activity is raised to the level of an idea, as soon as the material 
 becomes spiritualised, as soon as practice is idealised and recon- 
 structed into theory. The necessity of standard-seeking and of 
 
96 The Concept of Method 
 
 standard-forming can never be explained genetically ; the study 
 of the evolution of standards is a study of facts, and is neither 
 a justification nor an explanation of them. At most, from the 
 evolutionary point of view, standards are categories of activity. 
 They are functional points of interaction between the ethical and 
 the non-ethical, between conscience and impulse. Consequently 
 the evolutionary significance of a standard is twofold: in the 
 first place, the very fact of its existence at all implies a relatively 
 high type of activity with a corresponding intellectual and moral 
 development. In the second place, its organic character, in com- 
 mon with all other factors of mind, indicates an inherent possi- 
 bility of development. The level of experience is raised from 
 the physical to the spiritual and spiritual laws are of a higher 
 order than physical laws. 
 
 (2) Idealism. The existence of a standard is synonymous with 
 the possibility of idealism in any form. As long as there is a 
 distinction between the actual and the real, between the existent 
 and the ideal, there is implied some standard by which the differ- 
 ence is determined. There are standards of various qualities 
 corresponding to the various levels of evolutionary development, 
 and one may have, for instance, a standard which is little more 
 than a material copy or model, or an ideal to be realised in a given 
 material and through a special activity, or finally an archetype or 
 divine idea which can never be fully realised in the limitations of 
 earthly material or human mundane activities. As a standard- 
 ising method. Idealism has two functions: in the first place, 
 retrospectively and negatively, it indicates the disabilities of the 
 material, and its unsuitability for the realisation of the idea or con- 
 ception in question. It thus cuts off and eliminates the extraneous, 
 insignificant, meaningless elements, the logically and materially 
 accidental, and concentrates, so to speak, the essentials in a posi- 
 tive way by the very negative process of critical elimination. 
 In the second place, prospectively and positively. Idealism then 
 takes this nearest approximation to the ideal as the basis for fur- 
 ther idealisation and carries the standard to a higher level, from 
 which it will in turn react upon the earlier temporal material 
 realisation, and will lift it to a higher level of reality, and so 
 onward and upward in that continuous process of interaction be- 
 tween the ideal and the real which is the method of experience. 
 
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