geography of life which it puts at the service of the new travelers who are setting out upon the journey. As each one of them must choose the course he will take and as each one will choose a course which is different from that of his fellows, these directions are not put in the imperative form,"Take this baggage and march ten parasangs to the west, then four to the south, and you will come to the city of Delight," but are stated declaratively, - "Two and two make four," "Blankets keep out the cold," "The very principle of ethics lies in the effort to think well." Though these things are not said in the imperative form, there is no value in saying them unless those to whom they are addressed hear them, feel their force, and shape their conduct accordingly. They are indeed hypothetical injunctions, carefully tested systems of advice worked out by our elders in the hope that we will use them. They do not ask us merely to acknowledge the existence of their experience, but to feel it and, having an inward persuasion of its force, to use it.

Now of all this stored-up experience of the race, some parts are so indispensable that all must learn to use them no matter what the particular form their lives may take. These are the elementary doings of the race-using language, reading, writing, numbering, building up a notion of the space

relations in which men exist, and of the time relations which have conditioned and limited them and those who went before them, and learning how to live with their fellows by both outer and selfimposed control. Every one of these elementary subjects is a doing on the part of the student. The so-called higher courses of the secondary school, the college, and the university are only further doings, longer apprenticeships undertaken for a more complete mastery of these same racial tools. Having acquired some degree of skill in using these tools which all must use, the student goes in most cases from the elementary school, in some from the high school, and in a few from the college, either to the trade school or into an apprentice grade in life to acquire a special degree of skill in performing the work of some one occupation, the product of which has an exchange value. But doing is no less his object in the case of the fundamental arts than in the case of the trade which he learns. When I was a student in the law school, the professor used to say: "Our object is not to teach you the law so that you will know it. There is far too much of it for that. Our task is simply to help you to learn how to find it." So is that of the teacher of reading, spelling, numbering, history, literature, science, and philosophy. We cannot be taught any of these subjects in their completeness.

In fact no one of them is complete, but we can be given such a familiarity with them that we shall find them indispensable henceforth and by means of this familiarity with them go on finding them out for ourselves as the need for them arises.

Even culture is a doing. "Culture or education is, as we may thus conclude," says Hegel, "in its ultimate sense a liberation, and that of a high kind. Its task is to make possible the infinitely subjective substantiality of the ethical life.... In the individual agent this liberation involves a struggle against mere subjectivity, immediate desire, subjective vanity, and capricious liking. The hardness of the task is in part the cause of the disfavor under which it falls. None the less it is through the labor of education that the subjective will wins possession of the objectivity, in which alone it is able and worthy to be the embodiment of the idea." And again: "Culture is certainly an indefinite expression. It has, however, this meaning, that what free thought is to attain must come out of itself and be personal conviction; it is then no longer believed but investigated. . . . In culture it is requisite that men should be acquainted with the universal points of view which belong to a transaction, event, etc., that this point of view, and thereby the thing, should be grasped in a universal

1 Hegel, Philosophy of Right (Dyde's translation), sect. 187 note.

way, in order to afford a present knowledge of what is in question. A judge knows the various laws, that is, the various legal points of view under which a thing is to be considered.... A man of culture thus knows how to say something of everything, to find points of view in all."1

Education, then, is the process by which the learner in his own person comes to take the universal points of view and begins by their aid to investigate his experience and to shape it to fit his need. The circle of knowledge through which he is led to the universal viewpoints by which the race has found it profitable to take and organize its experience of inorganic and organic nature, and the thinking, willing, and æsthetic activity of the human spirit, is but a guide to help him to exercise this same mastery for himself.

1 Hegel, History of Philosophy, Vol. I, p. 356. London, 1892.

CHAPTER VII

THE PLACE OF METHOD IN EDUCATION

Comprehensibility a test of knowledge. Professor Keyser begins his illuminating discussion of mathematics1 by citing the conviction of the French mathematician, Gergonne, that a given scientific theory cannot be said to have been perfected until it is comprehensible to the man in the street. Plato seems to have reached this same conclusion, for he regarded dialectic as the coping stone of the sciences and described it as the art of asking and answering questions; and in the "Theætetus he made Socrates say: "And is it not shameless when we do not know what knowledge is, to be explaining the verb, 'to know'? The truth is, Theætetus, that we have long been infected with logical impurity. Thousands of times, have we repeated the words 'we know' and 'do not know' and we have or have not science or knowledge,' as if we could understand what we are saying to one another, so long as we remain ignorant about knowledge; and at this moment we are using the

1 Cassius J. Keyser, Mathematics. The Columbia University Press,

1907,