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UBRAXV

THE CONCEPT OF METHOD

,^ ■'.

BY

GERHARD R. LOMER, M.A.

Submitted in partial fulfilment of the require-
ments for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy, in
the Faculty of Philosophy, Columbia University

PUBLISHED BY

2I?arI|frfi (EoUfg?. (Unlttmbta IntopraMg
NEW YORK CITY

1910

THE CONCEPT OF METHOD

BY

GERHARD R. LOMER, M.A.

Submitted in partial fulfilment of the require-
ments for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy, in
the Faculty of Philosophy, Columbia University

PUBLISHED BY i

Q^rartfprB (EoUrgp, jglnlumbia llniarraitff l-rvCI^Ajo«- "- "^^^^
" NEW YORK CITY "^fc ^4—

1910

EDUC.
LIBRARY

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

226942

4 Th^ Concept of Method

and it approaches the problem, as far as may be, in the same
simplicity 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 concluding chapters cannot be more ap-
parent to the reader than they are to the writer "Orav o-uvrcAeo-?/ av

6poiiTO<; to'tc apteral, Kai orav Trava-rjTai Tore. aTroprjOi^cxcTaL. Their

Preface 5

justification lies in the fact that they are natural and inevitable
in the treatment of such a subject as the one under considera-
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 realisation 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 III. Descartes 32

Chapter IV. Comenius 3^

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, ohlatis ingeniosis inventis, quaercbam ipse per me
possemne invenire etiam non lecto auctore: iinde paulatim ani-
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 Hmita-
tions of time. In spite of the apparent multipHcity 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 clearly 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 differed at least as much in character as in
chronology. „

10 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 difiterent
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 tiie
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 ii

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 ot
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 — iravra TvXrjpri Oeutv. 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 w^ith 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 (Ao'yos ). 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 w^e 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 Nors 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.

Such 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 yvw^i a-eavrov 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 difference 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 Hfe, 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 summmn honiim, he held to be not mere
cvTvxia, in which passivity was over-emphasised, but rather
€VTrpa$La, 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 17

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 be*ing, 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 differ 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 difficulty 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 realisation 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 (tlKaata ), which has for its objects
images, such as shadows, and reflections from smooth bright
surfaces.

(2) Belief (TTto-Tts), 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 dififerent 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 lav/ or method of universal
principles: a conception of the world which implicitly underlies
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 (1561-1626).

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 iwji ratioue scd scnsit, criticised the
method of purely intellectual deduction which was one of the
chief epistemological 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 knoivledge.

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 organisation 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 intcllectnalis 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 honum, 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 usefuhiess 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.

n. Tlie Means or Materials of Knozvledge

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 offered 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

2 4 The Concept of Method

objects of human inquiry. Then a knowledge of the phenomena
of the world of nature should be gained, and in this process of
gradually becoming more and more familiar with the double
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 Knozvledge

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 his 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 Induction 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
major 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 efficacy 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 sinipUccm. This
antique method of Induction he considered " scanty and slovenly "
on account of its unscientific neglect of negative instances ; but,
while recognising the deficiencies of the logic of the 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 modern 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 JMethod 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 suh specie aeternitatis. In the next place, the 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 cluahsm between " general " and " special " method can
be solved.

IV. The Educational Implications of Bacon's Theory

In addition to the educational implications 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 problem without oitering 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
vi^as 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 reaHty. 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 nothini^ 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." In 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 intelligibilit\- 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 necessarv 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 Rationalist; 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 Urst 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 tJvird, 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 impHcations 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 general 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 zvhat and the zvh\.

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 of
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 praeludiuni. quo Sapientiae universalis necessitas, possi-
hilitas facilitasquc {si ratione certa ineatur) hreviter ac dUcuide
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 modern 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 mctJiod, 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 : Eniditio, Virtus seu Mores Honesti, and Religio
seu Pietas. 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, jncunde,
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, and mak-
ing the tgg 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. Canons 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
Padagogik (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 significance
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, ^j

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),
Leibnitz, Sulzer, jVIoses 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 ii<e have knowledge f The answer to this funda-
niiental problem of Epistemology he gave at length in " The
Critique of Pure Reason" (1781).

(2) Hoiv is human conduct to he influenced by man's knozvl-
edgef 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 believed 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

Action

Reason

Obligation

Morals

Kant's educational theory is set forth in an abbreviated form
in lecture notes Ueher Padagogik, 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." {U. 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 in 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 foihng 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 dunaiuis "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

50 The Concept of Method

meaning of terms we are able to bring together Spinoza's way
of looking at things suh specie aeternitatis with the modern func-
tional theory of concept.

We have here, too, a suggestion of the nature of continuity and
of the true nature of identity. For, given the proper environ-
mental conditions, or the proper experiential basis, these rela-
tions are permanent : they have in them the power of continuance,
of reproduction. Even the fire is capable of raising adjacent com-
bustible material 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 minds 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 human race is
best realised.

Again the nature of the thing, its true end, is its development,
its evolution, its self-realisation in the highest form to which
its potentiality is capable of reaching ; 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-
velopment is enabled to give the form that succeeds it. This can
be seen illustrated in the life of the individual, parent and child,
teacher and pupil ; or in society in the betterment of conditions ;
or in thought in the development of ideals.

So that the whole machinery of the universe is machinery only
to the mechanically-minded man. To the evolutionist it is a vast,
an infinitely vast, growing living organism. It is not pantheistic,
not panpsychic, both of which interpret the higher by the lower ;
but pan-organic, the activity of God, the realisation through
many ways and divers forms of what is ultimately Truth
and permanently Goodness, or Godness. For there is no a priori
necessity which compels us to liken the absolute Reality to any liv-
ing creature or to any force in nature, nor is there any moral
compulsion that forces us to say that He is in his manifestations

The Idea of Development 51

a perfect Being. That would be to close the circle and system and
to leave no place for evolution, no room for causation, no scope
for Will.

In so far as it deals with the facts of nature ; Evolution must
be included under what are natural laws, though from the broad-
est point of view all laws are natural laws. The " supernatural "
is merely descriptive of nature that has not yet been organ-
ised according to the forms of human intelligence. But the term
is essentially relative, and involves a wider glance at the facts
of nature than men can compass. The supernatural is but the
natural writ too large for men to take in its significance at a
glance. In the narrower sense, however, the term Evolution
refers to those distinct uniformities and necessities of organic
activity which can be realised by the mind and spirit of man.
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 must not only accord with all the facts of the
phenomena and be contrary to none, but it must also be subjec-
tively valid, in the sense of being intelligible and rational to the
mind of men. It does not follow that every fact in nature will
immediately be seen and thought of in evolutionary terms, but
it does involve a certain breadth of observation and of experi-
ment with the result that no negative instance can be discovered.
The various conceptions of Evolution that have up to this time
been worked out in extensive detail have in one respect or an-
other proved unsatisfactory either because the scope of observa-
tion has not been sufficiently wide, or because some personal
bias has entered in as a disturbing factor. Yet this individual
element that impairs the validity and renders uncertain the final
form of particular interpretations of Evolution in no way alters
the fundamental character of the principle itself. Our attitude
to the world does not afifect 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
thought bears a close relation to the scientific postulate of the
objective uniformity of nature, and brings it into 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 enumcrationem simpUcem, 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 Concept of Method

Theory of Knowledge has depended upon which of the elements
has been considered to be active and which passive. The oriental
type of mind exalted the activity of the not-self, the object, the
environment ; the occidental has emphasised and still emphasises
the activity of the self, the subject, the individual: a view which
found its completest expression in the synthetic unity of apper-
ception which lies at the basis of the Kantian philosophy. Evo-
lution seems to afford Epistemology the necessary two elements
which logical analysis has so widely separated ; and this funda-
mental relation between these two mutually necessary factors is
further strengthened when considered from the point of view of
Idealism.

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 epistemological inquiry, but that it adds to it much
more fundamental significance 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
teleologically. 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. It is the old fallacy 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, or drawn before its direction and sweep are fully realised
in part.

It is here maintained, on the contrary, that Evolution cannot
be conceived without teleology, for Evolution is considered as a
rational process of cosmical organisation. Teleology gives in
human terms the interpretation of this process, and it therefore
complements the contribution made by science to human knowl-
edge and belief, by placing these scientific facts in their necessary
causal relations to one another, and by showing their organic

The Idea of Development 55

relationship as parts of a 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 pervades 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 Idealism — suh specie aetcrnitatis, as Spinoza
would say ; and this involves a belief in what may be called, for
want of more explicit terms, a sort of spiritually universal
Theism, pervading and making real all things in heaven and
earth. This does not imply an objective anthropomorphism, nor
does it confine the nature of the Creator within the limits of
created things. It is what we mean when we speak of the world
as a realisation of creative Intelligence in the widest sense — it
is the conceivable 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, full-fronts me, and God is seen God in the
star, in the stone, in the flesh, in the soul and the clod."

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 — divine 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 operation of the 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 extension ; and so the process
continues and can end 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 nega-
tion for the sake of unity. Here we find the philosophical justi-
fication for the Greek view that Knowledge involves Virtue. In
fact, problems of Epistemology and of Ethics fuse when their
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 that when he is feehng 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

56

The Interpretation of Experience 5 7

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 stimulus 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
dififerent stimuli, and may be seen by considering the variety of
means adopted in the different religions of the world to attain

58 The Concept of Method

that state of spirit which we ordinarily designate by the term
" worship." The actual character of the content of experience has,
within certain limits, little methodological significance. 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 self-unconsciousness, through 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 cannot appropriate at
the level of self-consciousness the thoughts and beliefs and in-
terpretations of experience set forth by a man who has reached
the third stage wherein diverse elements are divested of their
opposition and are seen as the aspects of an ultimate unity. To
appropriate in this way the results of another's experience with-
out first having made them actual factors in his own is but to add
to the number of disparate un-unified particulars that must be
related before the third stage can be reached.

The Interpretation of Experience 59

One must, however, be on one's guard against supposing that
there is any hard and fast dividing line between self-unconscious-
ness and self-consciousness, or between the latter and the last
stage. They are all phases of the experience of one individual
who is a living being, and therefore the stages cannot be separated
one from another and marked off in sequence like the vertebrae
in a skeleton.

They are no more distinctly marked off from one another in
the whole process of the development of experience than are feel-
ing and thought and volition distinctly and vividly marked off
from one another in any particular experience that we may choose
to analyse.

Further, it must be borne in mind that, far from being clearly
defined, these stages mix and mingle with one another, overlap,
land leave ragged edges ; 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. Thus it happens that there is often such a wide discrep-
ancy between an individual's thought and action in commercial
affairs, in social relationships, and in religious belief. What is
true of the individual can also be seen writ large in the life of
society, where institutions attain different levels of development,
are actuated by different ideals and standards, and are character-
ised by greater or less unity in themselves and cooperation with
others.

It is difficult for one who has been trained in the average col-
lege classroom philosophy to look upon what he has come to
regard as the outside world except through coloured spectacles
of some special theory of knowledge. These spectacles continue
to be worn either because the wearer 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 person, who never bothers his
head about questions as to how we get to know anything or as to
how the self differs from those things that are not itself, to think
seriously of what after all his everyday experience is made up.
Both of these types of people, one finds, when they talk about
experience imply by their words some sort of dualism — implicit

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 fioor ; 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 enumerationem
Hmplicem? An absurd question, thinks he: a hill must have an-

The Interpretation of Experience 6 1

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 towaid 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 " beyond. 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 through 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 moon, which no one has
ever seen. As in the case of the other side of the hill before
the common-sense man had stood on its crest and seen what lay
beyond him; as in the case of the undiscovered America while
the Santa Maria was still out of sight of land, — so here in the
case of the moon, who throughout the centuries has never turned
her back upon the earth, we have the simplest instance of some-
thing of which we can think, and yet of which we can say noth-
ing else than that it exists, unless we go beyond our immediate
experience and take things on faith, and that is an attitude of
which the common-sense man will have none.

Yet — and here comes the crux of the question — hozv much
reality had it for 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 three levels of
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 mind or
emotions of man must discover the hitherto insignificant content.
Reality cannot be conceived of as otherwise than existing either
in a world of matter or in a world of ideas. To say that a thing
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 ; and in practical experi-
ence the mind never rests content with this colourless ineffectual
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) Potentiality

The mind soon discovers that if various phases of reality are

to form either a stimulus or a basis for its activity, they must

possess other qualities besides that of mere existence. The fact

of existence, being a necessary condition of all that comes within

The Interpretation of Experience 63

human experience, is taken for granted and is not consciously
realised through a process of logical analysis. Everywhere every-
thing seems to possess special qualities or characteristics which
differentiate it from everything else. The animals and flowers
are named, classes are formed, thoughts are organised into ideas.
This is a stage of differentiation, 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 meaning, 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 into some sort of a working system for its own use.
Science is based upon the systematisation of the potentialities
of matter, and it expresses its definitions in the form of equa-
tions and principles. This conception of particular human ex-
perience as conditioned by the qualities of things as modes of
existence is akin to Spinoza's idea of natura naturata. It is also
based upon Aristotle's conception of Awa/Ats.

(3) Activity

In this stage we have, so to speak, the fruition of the stage of
Potentiality. Here we have Function in operation ; Ivipyua
in the process of actualising the 8uva/x,ts latent in varying
degree in the vX-q. 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 manifesta-
tion of his activity as an energy which first of all underlies all
things and gives them existence ; and secondly differentiates it-
self into a manifold of particular potentialities capable of func-
tioning in harmony ; and finally the actualisation of these existent
potentialities in a universe of mutually interacting partial mani-
festations of divine energy, all striving towards a completer 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) TJie 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 zve do when ive 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 v^^hy 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 manner 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 tvpes
of activity ; and the process of education is the development of

66 The Concept of Method

the individual child's parsonaHty 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-matter 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 realms 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 Tlie 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} There 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

70 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 itfhat
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 7 1

(2) There is in the second place the question as to ivhy we
perform an action. From this point of view there is involved
the consideration of motive, impulse, habit, 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 hoiv 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 of 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 off 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 function.

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 sym-bolically 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 Experieyice 73

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, 5AF, 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 "x\," 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 exj>eriences
which I have to solve are to have any educational value their
solution is to be sought in some other w^ay. 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
personaUty? May it not be a principle of actiz-ity 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

(i) At each stage in the evohitionary 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 TJie 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

Hence, 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,
and only seem regress from the human point of view, which is
limited by the conditions of human intelligence. When the truth
of 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 condvict 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 teleological 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 solely upon the immature and developing child
on the one hand, nor on the other hand only upon the ideals of
education. The two must be realised in their organic relation,
for only then is education performing its true function. It is
through this process of interaction that social purposes gain
reality, and it is through the same process that the immature
potentialities of the children gain ideal value. The function of
education and the ultimate method of experience then is twofold :
it consists of the progressive interaction of real children and social
ideals — a process of interaction through which the original char-

.84 The Concept of Method

acters of the children become ideahsed and at the same thiie 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 dift"erences 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 suh 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 certain 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

86 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 w'hich make it an organic part of our
thought and at the same time give it significance in our experi-
ence as a whole.

The three great ideas that underlie a functional idealism have
already been stated to be (i) Unity, (2) Interaction, (3) De-
velopment. What concerns us now, therefore, is to show that
these fundamental ideas are necessary presuppositions to any
consideration of control as a function of method.

(i) 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 unity, 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 of 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, w'hich
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 instaibility 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 ultimate significance.

To sum up, 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 different 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 condition^ 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 wavs. 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 which, 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 permanent 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 phenomena
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
dualism 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 habit; the activity is almost entirely unconscious in
the sense that it is not intellectually regarded as a process through
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 which illumines 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 personality.
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
of 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 conformity 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 MetJiod

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
dififerences 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 seeing
the ideal and ultimate significance of those activities with which
we are endowed and which form the motive force of all 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 finest 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 in 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

functional 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 local and temporal
limitations which 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 imprisonment of the
material, and overtones of meaning which are too delicate or
evanescent for a material not finely tuned 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 real.

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 standard is an inspiration 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) Evolution. 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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VITA

Gerhard Richard Lomer, born 6 March, 1882, Montreal.

Montreal High School, 1889-1899; McGill University, Mon-
treal, Bachelor of Arts 1903 ; Master of Arts 1904. Academy
Diploma, McGill Normal School, 1904. Teachers College, Co-
lumbia University, New York, Graduate Scholar 1904-1906; ap-
pointed Fellow 1907; Graduate student 1908-1909.

Instructor in English, McGill University, 1903-1904, 1906-1907;
Lecturer in Education, McGill University and Normal School,
1906-1907 ; Instructor, Summer Session, Teachers College, Co-
lumbia University, 1909 ; Instructor in English, University of
Wisconsin, 1909 —

Publications : La Philosophic de Maupassant d'apres ses
Contes: La Patrie, June, 1901 ; Everyman, a Moral Play: Univer-
sity Magazine, 1902 ; The Graduate Study of Education : McGill
Outlook, Nov. 1906; Education as a University Study: Univer-
sity Magazine, 1906; The University Mosque of El-Azhar: Uni-
versity Magazine, Dec. 1908.

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