beautiful subjects which Homer undertakes to treat, such as war, and the conduct of campaigns, and the administration of cities, and the education of man, it is surely just to institute an inquiry, and ask the question, thus: 'My dear Homer, if you are really only once removed from the truth, instead of being twice removed and the manufacturer of a phantom, according to our definition of an imitator; and if you used to be able to distinguish between the pursuits which make men better or worse, in private and public; tell us what city owes a better constitution to you, as Sparta owes hers to Lycurgus, and as many cities, great and small, owe theirs to other legislators? What state attributes to you the benefits derived from a good code of laws?'. . . Does the story go that any war in Homer's time was brought to a happy termination under his command, or by his advice? Is he reputed to have been... the author of a number of ingenious inventions bearing upon the useful arts or other practical matters, which would show that he was a man of wisdom in the affairs of life? . . . Or did he personally conduct the education of disciples who benefited society and teach mankind a way of life?" "... ... Does the painter understand how the bit and bridle ought to be shaped? Is it not the case that even the makers, the smith and the saddler, are ignorant on this subject, and only the

rider who knows how to use the things in question knows and understands it? . . . The imitative person knows nothing of importance about the things which he imitates, and therefore imitation is an amusement and not a serious business." Knowing, then, for Plato arises from use and is for use.

But the heart of Plato's pragmatism is found in a passage in the Euthydemus: "And what knowledge ought we to acquire?' May we not answer with absolute truth-'A knowledge which will do us good'? Certainly,' he said.

"And should we be any the better if we went about having a knowledge of the places where most gold was hidden in the earth? Perhaps we should,' he said.

But have we not already proved,' I said, 'that we should be none the better off, even if without trouble and digging all the gold which there is in the earth were ours? And if we knew how to convert stones into gold the knowledge would be of no value to us, unless we knew how to use the gold? Do you not remember?' I said, 'I quite remember,' he said.

"Nor would any other knowledge, whether of money-making, or of medicine, or of any other art which knows only how to make a thing, and not to use it when made, be of any good to us. Am I not right?' He agreed.

"And if there were a knowledge which was able to make men immortal, without giving them the knowledge of the way to use the immortality, neither would there be any use in that, if we may argue from the analogy of the previous instances?' To all this he agreed.

"Then, my dear boy,' I said, 'the knowledge which we want is one that uses as well as makes.'

1 Plato, Euthydemus (Jowett's translation), 288, 289.

"1

CHAPTER III

THE DOCTRINE OF GENERAL DISCIPLINE1

What this doctrine has cost and why it sticks. If knowledge-getting is the wise and purposeful selection from the infinity of facts and relations which exist of those which make a serious difference to life, it would seem that education owes its greatest duty to that process. But no, says one army of educators; education's first duty is to form and not to inform the mind. This is the centuries-old doctrine of formal discipline. Of it we are indeed justified in complaining, as did John of Salisbury of the Nominalist-Realist controversy which absorbed the scholars of his day, that " more time has been consumed [by it] than the Cæsars gave to the conquest and dominion of the globe, more money wasted than Croesus counted in all his wealth."

We are told in the Scriptures that we should not put new wine into old wine skins, lest the wine skins burst and the wine be spilled, but there is another and even a better reason the old wine

1 For an extended discussion of this subject, see Thorndike, Educational Psychology, Vol. II (Teachers College, New York), and Heck, Mental Discipline (John Lane Company, New York).

skins are not sanitary. They contain the elements of decay. The new wine that goes into them will be poisoned, and we who drink of it will die. Nevertheless, this pouring of new wine into old bottles is one of the chief activities of education. This is due, it would seem, to the fact that those who so zealously pour their life work in the service of education into the old and time-infected wine skins of formal discipline have no other bottles into which to pour it. Strangely enough, even that hardy company of critics who a few years ago set about liberating the spirit of youth from the contamination of this process did its work so imperfectly that the more unthinking lovers of the old bottles still conceive themselves to be justified in using them. Indeed, they are reassured by a belief that "recent careful investigations have shown that there is much in the doctrine of formal discipline." Nothing could be farther from the truth. But the critics of the doctrine, rather than its friends, are to blame for this, for they have stated their findings in such a way as to invite just this misuse of them. When Herbart undertook to reform psychology by casting out the hypostatized entities called faculties of the mind, which scholastic ignorance, traditionalized by centuries, had erected to explain mental life, he made the mistake of continuing to use the old terminology of faculties to designate the new-found