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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Reform of Education, by Giovanni Gentile
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Reform of Education
+
+Author: Giovanni Gentile
+
+Translator: Dino Bigongiari
+
+Release Date: July 17, 2011 [EBook #36762]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE REFORM OF EDUCATION ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Katherine Ward, Jonathan Ingram, and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This
+file was produced from images generously made available
+by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.)
+
+
+
+
+
+THE REFORM OF EDUCATION
+
+
+BY GIOVANNI GENTILE
+
+
+AUTHORIZED TRANSLATION BY DINO BIGONGIARI
+
+With an Introduction by BENEDETTO CROCE
+
+
+  NEW YORK
+  HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY
+  1922
+
+
+  COPYRIGHT, 1922, BY
+  HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY, INC.
+
+  PRINTED IN THE U. S. A. BY
+  THE QUINN & BODEN COMPANY
+  RAHWAY, N.J.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+                                                                  PAGE
+        Introduction                                               vii
+     I. Education and Nationality                                    3
+    II. Education and Personality                                   18
+   III. The Fundamental Antinomy of Education                       40
+    IV. Realism and Idealism in the Concept of Culture              63
+     V. The Spirituality of Culture                                 85
+    VI. The Attributes of Culture                                  110
+   VII. The Bias of Realism                                        139
+  VIII. The Unity of Education                                     166
+    IX. Character and Physical Education                           192
+     X. The Ideal of Education                                     219
+    XI. Conclusion                                                 246
+
+
+
+
+NOTE
+
+
+Shortly after Trieste fell into Italian hands, a series of lectures was
+arranged for the school teachers of the city, in order to welcome them
+to their new duties as citizens and officials of Italy. The task of
+opening the series was assigned to Giovanni Gentile, Professor of
+Philosophy in the University of Rome, who delivered the lectures which
+constitute the present volume. At my request Signor Gentile has
+rewritten the first chapter, eliminating some of the more local of the
+allusions which the nature of the original occasion called forth, and
+Senatore Croce has very generously contributed his illuminating
+Introduction. The volume as it stands is more than a treatise on
+education: it is at one and the same time an introduction to the thought
+of one of the greatest of living philosophers, and an introduction to
+the study of all philosophy. If the teachers of Trieste were able to
+understand and to enjoy a philosophic discussion of their chosen work,
+why should not the teachers of America?
+
+J. E. S.
+
+
+
+
+INTRODUCTION
+
+
+The author of this book has been working in the same field with me for
+over a quarter of a century, ever since the time when we undertook--he a
+very young man, and I somewhat his senior--to shake Italy out of the
+doze of naturalism and positivism back to idealistic philosophy; or, as
+it would be better to say, to philosophy pure and simple, if indeed
+philosophy is always idealism.
+
+Together we founded a review, the _Critica_, and kept it going by our
+contributions; together we edited collections of classical authors; and
+together we engaged in many lively controversies. And it seems indeed as
+though we really succeeded in laying hold of and again firmly
+re-establishing in Italy the tradition of philosophical studies, thus
+welding a chain which evidently has withstood the strain and destructive
+fury of the war and its afterclaps.
+
+By this I do not mean to imply that our gradual achievements were the
+result of a definite preconcerted plan. Our work was the spontaneous
+consequence of our spontaneous mental development and of the spontaneous
+agreement of our minds. And therefore this common task, too, gradually
+becoming differentiated in accordance with the peculiarities of our
+temperaments, our tendencies, and our attitudes, resulted in a kind of
+division of labour between us. So that whereas I by preference have
+devoted my attention to the history of literature, Gentile has
+dedicated himself more particularly to the history of philosophy and
+especially of Italian philosophy, not only as a thinker but as a
+scholar too, and as a philologist. He may be said to have covered the
+entire field from the Middle Ages to the present time by his works on
+Scholasticism in Italy, on Bruno, on Telesio, on Renaissance
+philosophy, on Neapolitan philosophy from Genovesi to Galluppi, on
+Rosmini, on Gioberti, and on the philosophical writers from 1850 to
+1900. And though his comprehensive _History of Italian Philosophy_,
+published in parts, is far from being finished, the several sections
+of it have been elaborated and cast in the various monographs which I
+have just mentioned.
+
+In addition to this, Gentile has been devoting special attention to
+religious problems. He took a very important part in the inquiry into
+and criticism of "modernism," the hybrid nature of which he laid bare,
+exposing both the inner contradictions and the scanty sincerity of the
+movement. His handling of this question was shown to be effective by the
+fact, among others, that the authors of the encyclical _Pascendi_, which
+brought upon Modernism the condemnation of the Church, availed
+themselves of the sharp edge of Gentile's logical arguments, prompted
+by scientific loyalty and dictated by moral righteousness.
+
+Finally, and in a more close connection with the present work, it will
+be remembered that Gentile has done away with the chaotic pedagogy of
+the positivistic school, and has also definitely criticised the
+educational theory of Herbart. As far back as 1900 he published a
+monograph of capital importance, in which he showed that pedagogy in so
+far as it is philosophical resolves itself without residuum into the
+philosophy of the spirit; for the science of the spirit's education can
+not but be the science of the spirit's development,--of its dialectics,
+of its necessity.
+
+Indeed, we owe it to Gentile that Italian pedagogy has attained in the
+present day a simplicity and a depth of concepts unknown elsewhere. In
+Italy, not educational science alone, but the practice of it and its
+political aspects have been thoroughly recast and amply developed. And
+this, too, is due pre-eminently to the work of Gentile. His authority
+therefore is powerfully felt in schools of all grades, for he has lived
+intensely the life of the school and loves it dearly.
+
+In addition to these differences arising from our division of labour,
+others may of course be noticed, and they are to be found in the form
+that philosophical doctrines have taken on in each of us. Identity is
+impossible in this field, for philosophy, like art, is closely bound up
+with the personality of the thinker, with his spiritual interests, and
+with his experiences of life. There is never true identity except in the
+so-called "philosophical school," which indicates the death of a
+philosophy, in the same way that the poetical school proclaims death in
+poetry.
+
+And so it has come about that our general conception of philosophy as
+simple philosophy of the spirit--of the subject, and never of nature, or
+of the object--has developed a peculiar stress in Gentile, for whom
+philosophy is above all that point in which every abstraction is
+overcome and submerged in the concreteness of the act of Thought;
+whereas for me philosophy is essentially methodology of the one real and
+concrete Thinking--of historical Thinking. So that while he strongly
+emphasises unity, I no less energetically insist on the distinction and
+dialectics of the forms of the spirit as a necessary formation of the
+methodology of historical judgment. But of this enough, especially since
+the reader can only become interested in these differences after he has
+acquired a more advanced knowledge of contemporary Italian philosophy.
+
+I am convinced that the translation and popularisation of Gentile's work
+will contribute to the toilsome formation of that consciousness, of that
+system of convictions, of that moral and mental faith which is the
+profound need of our times. For our age, eager and anxious for Faith, is
+perhaps not yet completely resigned to look for the new creed of
+humanity there where alone it may be found, where by firm resolve it
+may be secured--in pure Thought. Clear-sighted observers have perhaps
+not failed to notice that the World War, in addition to every thing
+else, has been a strife of religions, a clash of conflicting conceptions
+of life, a struggle of opposed philosophies. It is surely not the duty
+of thinkers to settle economic and political contentions by ineffective
+appeals to the universal brotherhood of man; but it is rather their duty
+to compose mental differences and antagonisms, and thus form the new
+faith of humanity--a new Christianity or a new Humanism, as we may wish
+to call it. Such a faith will certainly not be spared the conflicts from
+which ancient Christianity itself was not free; but it may reasonably be
+hoped that it will rescue us from intellectual anarchy, from unbridled
+individualism, from sensualism, from scepticism, from pessimism, from
+every aberration which for a century and a half has been harassing the
+soul of man and the society of mankind under the name of Romanticism.
+
+BENEDETTO CROCE.
+
+ROME, April, 1921.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+EDUCATION AND NATIONALITY
+
+
+Participation on the part of elementary school teachers in the work and
+studies of the Universities has always seemed to me to constitute a real
+need of culture and of primary education. For the elementary school, by
+the very nature of the professional training of its teachers, is exposed
+to a grave danger from which it must be rescued if we mean to keep it
+alive.
+
+The training of the elementary school teacher tends to be dogmatic. True
+it is that vigilant individuality and passionate love for his
+exquisitely spiritual calling impel the school teacher to an untiring
+criticism of his methods, of his actual teaching, and of the life of the
+school which he directs and promotes. But nevertheless in consequence of
+those very studies by which he has prepared himself to be an elementary
+instructor, he is led to look upon that learning which constitutes his
+mental equipment and the foundation of all his future teaching, as
+something quite finished, rounded out, enclosed in definite formulas,
+rules, and laws, all of which have been ascertained once for all and are
+no longer susceptible of ulterior revision. He looks upon this learning
+not as a developing organism, but as something definitely moulded and
+stereotyped. From this the conclusion is drawn that a certain kind of
+knowledge may serve as a corner stone for the whole school edifice.
+Since his discipline and his teaching consist mainly of elements which
+because of their abstractness miss the renovating flow of spiritual
+life, the teacher slowly but surely ends by shutting himself up in a
+certain number of ideas, which are final as far as he is concerned. They
+are never corrected or transformed; in their mechanical fixity they
+cease to live; and the mind which cherishes and preserves them loses its
+natural tendency to doubt. Yet what is doubt but dissatisfaction with
+what is known and with the manner of knowing, and a spur to further
+inquiry, to better and fuller learning, to self scrutiny, to an
+examination of one's own sentiments, one's own character, and an
+inducement to broadmindedness, to a welcoming receptiveness of all the
+suggestions and all the teachings which life at all moments generously
+showers on us?
+
+The remedy against this natural tendency of the teacher's mind is to be
+found in the University, where in theory, and so far as is possible, in
+practice too, science is presented not as ready-made, definitely turned
+out in final theories, enclosed in consecrated manuals; but as inquiry,
+as research, as spiritual activity which does not rest satisfied with
+its accomplishments, but for ever feels that it does not yet know or
+does not know enough, aware of the difficulties which threaten every
+attained position, and ready unrestingly to track them, to reveal them,
+and meet them squarely. This life, which is perpetual criticism, and
+unceasing progress in a learning which is never completed, which never
+aspires to be complete, is the serious and fruitful purpose of the
+University. Here we must come, to restore freshness to our spiritual
+activities, which alone give value to knowledge, and wrest it from
+deadening crystallisation, from mechanical rigidity. For this reason, it
+seems to me, special provision should be made in the University to
+satisfy the needs of school teachers. It is not a question of merely
+furnishing them with additional information which they might just as
+well get out of books. The University must act on their minds, shake
+them, start them going, instil in them salutary doubt by criticism, and
+develop a taste for true knowledge.
+
+The following chapters contain a series of University lectures, in
+accordance with these criteria, and delivered originally to the
+elementary teachers of Trieste, now for the first time again an Italian
+city. They constitute a course which aims not to increase the quantity
+of culture, but to change its character. It is an attempt to introduce
+the elementary teacher into those spiritual workshops which are the
+halls of a University, to induce him to take part in the original
+investigations which constantly contribute to the formation of our
+national learning; which forever make and reshape our ideas and our
+convictions as to what we should want Italian science to be, the Italian
+concepts of life and literature; as to what constitute the heirloom of
+our school, that sacred possession bequeathed to us by our forefathers
+which makes us what we are, which gives us a name and endows us with a
+personality, by which we are enabled to look forward to a future of
+Italy which is not solely economic and political, but moral and
+intellectual as well.
+
+And thus, because of the time, the place, the audience, and the subject,
+we are from the start brought face to face with a serious question,--a
+question which has often been debated, and which in the last few years,
+on account of the exasperation of national sentiment brought about by
+the World War, has become the object of passionate controversies. For if
+it has been frequently argued on one side that science is by nature and
+ought to be national, there has been no lack of warning from the other
+side as to the dangers of this position. For war, it was said, would,
+sooner or later, come to an end and be a thing of the past; whereas
+truth never sets, never becomes a thing of the past; it is error alone
+that is destined to pass and disappear. We were reminded of the fact
+that what is scientifically true and artistically beautiful is beautiful
+and true beyond no less than within the national frontier; and that only
+on this condition is it worthy of its name. This question therefore
+presents itself as a preliminary to our investigation, and it is for us
+to examine it. We shall do so in as brief a manner as the subject will
+allow.
+
+We shall first point out the inutility of distinguishing science from
+culture, education from instruction. Those who insist on these
+distinctions maintain that though a school is never national in virtue
+of the content of its scientific teaching, it must nevertheless be
+national in that it transforms science into culture, makes it over into
+an instrument with which to shape consciousness and conscience, and uses
+it as a tool for the making of men and for the training of citizens.
+Thus we have as an integral part of science a form of action directed on
+the character and the will of the young generations that are being
+nurtured and raised in accordance with national traditions and in view
+of the ends which the state wants to attain. Such distinctions however
+complicate but do not resolve the controversy. They entangle it with
+other questions which it were better to leave untouched at this
+juncture. For it might be said of questions what Manzoni said of books:
+one at a time is enough--if it isn't too much.
+
+We shall therefore try to simplify matters, and begin by clarifying the
+two concepts of nationality and of knowledge, in order to define the
+concept of the "nationality of knowledge." What, then, is the nation? A
+very intricate question, indeed, over which violent discussions are
+raging, and all the more passionately because the premises and
+conclusions of this controversy are never maintained in the peaceful
+seclusion of abstract speculative theories, but are dragged at every
+moment in the very midst of the concrete interests of the men themselves
+who affirm or deny the value of nationalities. So that serious
+difficulties are encountered every time an attempt is made to determine
+the specific and concrete content of this concept of the nation, which
+is ever present, and yet ever elusive. Proteus-like, it appears before
+us, but as we try to grasp it, it changes semblance and breaks away. It
+is visible to the immediate intuition of every national consciousness,
+but it slips from thought as we strive to fix its essence.
+
+Is it common territory that constitutes nationality? or is it common
+language? or political life led in common? or the accumulation of
+memories, of traditions, and of customs by which a people looks back to
+_one_ past where it never fails to find itself? Or is it perhaps the
+relationship which binds together all the individuals of a community
+into a strong and compact structure, assigning a mission and an
+apostolate to a people's faith? One or the other of these elements, or
+all of them together, have in turn been proposed and rejected with
+equally strong arguments. For in each case it may be true or it may be
+false that the given element constitutes the essence of a people's
+nationality, or of any historical association whatsoever. All these
+elements, whether separately or jointly, may have two different
+meanings, one of which makes them a mere accidental content of the
+national consciousness, whereas the other establishes them as necessary,
+essential, and unfailing constituents. For they may have a merely
+natural value, or they may have a moral and spiritual one. Our
+birth-land, which nourished us in our infancy, and now shelters the
+bodies of our parents, the mountains and the shores that surround it and
+individualise it, these are natural entities. They are not man-made; we
+cannot claim them, nor can we fasten our existence to them. Even our
+speech, our religion itself, which do indeed live in the human mind, may
+yet be considered as natural facts similar to the geographical accidents
+which give boundaries and elevation to the land of a people. We may,
+abstractly, look upon our language as that one which was spoken before
+we were born, by our departed ancestors who somehow produced this
+spiritual patrimony of which we now have the use and enjoyment, very
+much in the same way that we enjoy the sunlight showered upon us by
+nature. In this same way a few, perhaps many, conceive of religion: they
+look upon it as something bequeathed and inherited, and not therefore as
+the fruit of our own untiring faith and the correlate of our actual
+personality. All these elements in so far as they are natural are
+evidently extraneous to our personality. We do dwell within this
+peninsula cloistered by the Alps; we delight in this luminous sky, in
+our charming shores smiled upon by the waters of the Mediterranean. But
+if we emigrate from this lovely abode, if under the stress of economic
+motives we traverse the ocean and gather, a number of us, somewhere
+across the Atlantic; and there, united by the natural tie of common
+origin, and fastened by the identity of speech, we maintain ourselves as
+a special community, with common interests and peculiar moral
+affinities, then, in spite of the severance from our native peninsula,
+we have preserved our nationality: Italy has crossed the ocean in our
+wake. Not only can we sunder ourselves from our land, but we may even
+relinquish our customs, forget our language, abandon our religion; or we
+may, within our own fatherland, be kept separate by peculiar historical
+traditions, by differences of dialects or even of language, by religion,
+by clashing interests, and yet respond with the same sentiment and the
+same soul to the sound of one Name, to the colours of one flag, to the
+summons of common hopes, to the alarm of common dangers.
+
+And it is then that we feel ourselves to be a people; then are we a
+nation. It is not what we put within this concept that gives consistency
+and reality to the concept itself; it is the act of spiritual energy
+whereby we cling to a certain element or elements in the consciousness
+of that collective personality to which we feel we belong. Nationality
+consists not in content which may vary, but in the form which a certain
+content of human consciousness assumes when it is felt to constitute a
+nation's character.
+
+But this truth is still far from being recognised. Its existence is not
+even suspected by those who utilise a materially constituted nationality
+as a title, that is, an antecedent, and a support for political rights
+claimed by more or less considerable ethnical aggregates that are more
+or less developed and more or less prepared to take on the form of free
+and independent states and to secure recognition of a _de facto_
+political personality on the strength of an assumed _de jure_
+existence.
+
+This truth, however, was grasped by the profound intuition of Mazzini,
+the apostle of nationalities, the man who roused our national energies,
+and whose irresistible call awakened Italy and powerfully impelled her
+to affirm her national being. Even from the first years of the _Giovine
+Italia_ he insisted that Italy, when still merely an idea, prior to her
+taking on a concrete and actual political reality, was not a people and
+was not a nation. For a nation, he maintained, is not something existing
+in nature; but a great spiritual reality. Therefore like all that is in
+and for the spirit, it is never a fact ready to be ascertained, but
+always a mission, a purpose, something that has to be realised--an
+action.
+
+The Italians to whom Mazzini spoke were not the people around him. He
+was addressing that future people which the Italians themselves had to
+create. And they would create it by fixing their souls on one idea--the
+idea of a fatherland to be conquered--a sacred idea, so noble that
+people would live and die for it, as for that sovereign and ultimate
+Good for which all sacrifices are gladly borne, without which man can
+not live, outside of which he finds nothing that satisfies him, nothing
+that is conducive to a life's work. For Mazzini nationality is not
+inherited wealth, but it is man's own conquest. A people can not
+faint-heartedly claim from others recognition of their nation, but must
+themselves demonstrate its existence, realise it by their willingness to
+fight and die for its independence: independence which is freedom and
+unity and constitutes the nation. It is not true that first comes the
+nation and then follows the state; the nation is the state when it has
+triumphed over the enemy, and has overcome the oppression, which till
+then were hindering its formation. It is not therefore a vague
+aspiration or a faint wish, but an active faith, an energetic volition
+which creates, in the freed political Power, the reality of its own
+moral personality and of its collective consciousness. Hence the lofty
+aim of Mazzini in insisting that Italy should not be made with the help
+of foreigners but should be a product of the revolution, that is, of its
+own will.
+
+And truly the nation is, substantially, as Mazzini saw and firmly
+believed, the common will of a people which affirms itself and thus
+secures self-realisation. A nation is a nation only when it wills to be
+one. I said, when it really wills, not when it merely says it does. It
+must therefore act in such a manner as to realise its own personality in
+the form of the State beyond which there is no collective will, no
+common personality of the people. And it must act seriously, sacrificing
+the individual to the collective whole, and welcoming martyrdom, which
+in every case is but the sacrifice of the individual to the universal,
+the lavishing of our own self to the ideal for which we toil.
+
+From this we are not, however, to infer that a nation can under no
+circumstances exist prior to the formation of its State. For if this
+formation means the formal proclamation or the recognition by other
+States, it surely does pre-exist. But it does not if we consider that
+the proclamation of sovereignty is a moment in a previously initiated
+process, and the effect of pre-existing forces already at work; which
+effect is never definite because a State, even after it has been
+constituted, continues to develop in virtue of those very forces which
+produced it; so that it is constantly renewing and continually
+reconstituting itself. Hence a State is always a future. It is that
+state which this very day we must set up, or rather at this very
+instant, and with all our future efforts bent to that political ideal
+which gleams before us, not only in the light of a beautiful thought,
+but as the irresistible need of our own personality.
+
+The nation therefore is as intimately pertinent and native to our own
+being as the State, considered as Universal Will, is one with our
+concrete and actual ethical personality. Italy for us is the fatherland
+which lives in our souls as that complex and lofty moral idea which we
+are realising. We realise it in every instant of our lives, by our
+feelings, and by our thoughts, by our speech and by our imagination,
+indeed, by our whole life which concretely flows into that Will which is
+the State and which thus makes itself felt in the world. And this Will,
+this State is Italy, which has fought and won; which has struggled for a
+long time amid errors and sorrows, hopes and dejection, manifestations
+of strength and confessions of weakness, but always with a secret
+thought, with a deep-seated aspiration which sustained her throughout
+her entire ordeal, now exalting her in the flush of action, now, in the
+critical moment of resistance, confirming and fortifying her by the
+undying faith in ultimate triumph. This nation, which we all wish to
+raise to an ever loftier station of honour and of beauty, even though we
+differ as to the means of attaining this end, is it not the substance of
+our personality,--of that personality which we possess not as
+individuals who drift with the current, but as men who have a powerful
+self-consciousness and who look upward for their destiny?
+
+If we thus understand the nation, it follows that not only every man
+must bear the imprint of his nationality, but that also there is no true
+science, no man's science, which is not national. The ancients believed,
+in conformity with the teachings of the Greeks, that science soars
+outside of the human life, above the vicissitudes of mortals, beyond the
+current of history, which is troubled by the fatal conflicts of error,
+by falterings and doubts, and by the unsatisfied thirst for knowledge.
+Truth, lofty, pure, motionless, and unchangeable, was to them the fixed
+goal toward which the human mind moved, but completely severed from it
+and transcendent. This concept, after two thousand years of speculation,
+was to reveal itself as abstract and therefore fallacious,--abstract
+from the human mind, which at every given instance mirrors itself in
+such an image of truth, ever gazing upon an eternal ideal but always
+intent on reshaping it in a new and more adequate form. The modern
+world, at first with dim consciousness, and guided rather by a fortunate
+intuition than by a clear concept of its own real orientation, then with
+an ever clearer, ever more critical conviction, has elaborated a concept
+which is directly antithetical to the classical idea of a celestial
+truth removed from the turmoil of earthly things. It has accordingly and
+by many ways reached the conclusion that reality, lofty though it be,
+and truth itself, which nourishes the mind and alone gives validity to
+human thought, are in life itself, in the development of the mind, in
+the growth of the human personality, and that this personality, though
+ideally beyond our grasp, is yet in the concrete always historical and
+actual, and realises itself in its immanent value. It therefore creates
+its truth and its world. Modern philosophy and modern consciousness no
+longer point to values which, transcending history, determine its
+movement and its direction by external finalities: they show to man that
+the lofty aim which is his law is within himself; that it is in his ever
+unsatisfied personality as it unceasingly strains upward towards its own
+ideal.
+
+Science is no longer conceived to-day as the indifferent pure matter of
+the intellect. It is an interest which invests the entire person, extols
+it and with it moves onward in the eternal rhythm of an infinite
+development. Science is not for us the abstract contemplation of yore;
+it is self-consciousness that man acquires, and by means of which he
+actuates his own humanity. And therefore science is no longer an
+adornment or an equipment of the mind, considered as diverse to its
+content; it is culture, and the formation of this very mind. So that
+whenever science is as yet so abstract that it seems not to touch the
+person and fails to form it or transform it, it is an indication that it
+is not as yet true science.
+
+So we conclude thus: he who distinguishes his person from his knowledge
+is ignorant of the nature of knowledge. The modern teacher knows of no
+science which is not an act of a personality. It knows no personality
+which admits of being sequestered from its ideas, from its ways of
+thinking and of feeling, from that greater life which is the nation.
+Concrete personality then is nationality, and therefore neither the
+school nor science possesses a learning which is not national.
+
+And for this reason therefore our educational reforms which are inspired
+by the teachings of modern idealistic philosophy demand that the school
+be animated and vivified by the spiritual breath of the fatherland.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+EDUCATION AND PERSONALITY
+
+
+It is essential at the very outset to understand clearly what is meant
+by _concrete personality_, and why the particular or empirical
+personality, as we are usually accustomed to consider it, is nothing
+more than an abstraction.
+
+Ordinarily, relying on the most obvious data of experience, we are led
+to believe that the sphere of our moral personality coincides exactly
+with the sphere of our physical person, and is therefore limited and
+contained by the surface of our material body. We consider this body in
+itself as an indivisible whole, with such reciprocal correspondence and
+interdependence of its parts as to become a veritable system. It seems
+to us also that this system moves in space as a whole when the body is
+displaced, continuing to remain united as long as it exists. We look
+upon it as though it were separated from all other bodies, whether of
+the same or of different kinds, in such a manner that it excludes others
+from the place it occupies, and is itself in turn excluded by them. One
+body then, one physical person, one moral personality--that moral
+personality which each one of us recognises and affirms by the
+consciousness of the ego.
+
+And in fact when I walk I am not a different person from when I think.
+My ego remains the same whether my body moves through space or whether
+my mind inwardly meditates. Impenetrability, which is possessed by
+matter, seems to be also a property of human individualism.
+
+From my ego every other ego is apparently excluded. What I am no one
+else can be, and I in turn cannot be confused with another person. Those
+of my fellow beings that are most intimately, most closely related to me
+seem yet as completely external to me, as thoroughly sundered from my
+spirit, as their bodies are from mine. My father, my brother are dead.
+They have vanished from this world in which I nevertheless continue to
+exist; just as a stone remains in its place and is in no way affected
+when another stone near by is removed; or as a mutilated pedestal may
+still remain to remind the onlooker of the statue that was torn away.
+
+Hundreds of individuals assemble to listen to the words of an orator.
+But no necessary ties exist between the various persons; and when the
+speaking is over, each one goes his way confident that he has lost no
+part of himself and that he has maintained his individuality absolutely
+unaltered.
+
+Our elders lived on this planet when we had not yet arrived. After we
+came, they gradually withdrew, one after the other. And just as they had
+been able to exist without us, so shall we continue to live without
+them, and away from them develop our personality. For each one of us,
+according to this point of view, has his own being within himself, his
+own particular destiny. Every man makes of himself the centre of his
+world, of that universe which he has created with deeds and thoughts: a
+universe of ideas, of images, of concepts, of systems, which are all in
+his brain; a universe of values, of desirable goods and of abhorred
+evils, all of which are rooted in his own individual will, in his
+character, and originate from the peculiar manner in which he personally
+colours this world and conceives the universe.
+
+What is another man's sorrow to me? What part have I in his joys? And
+how can the science of Aristotle or of Galileo be anything to me, since
+I do not know them, since I cannot read their books, and am totally
+unfamiliar with their teachings? And the unknown wayfarer who passes by,
+wrapped in his thoughts, what does he care for my loftiest conceptions,
+for the songs that well forth from the depths of my soul? The hero's
+exploit brings no glory to us; the heinous deed of the criminal makes us
+shudder indeed, but drives no pangs of remorse through our conscience.
+For every one of us has his own body and his own particular soul. Every
+one, in short, is himself independently of what others may be.
+
+This conception, which we ordinarily form of our personality, and on
+which we erect the system of our practical life in all our manifold
+relations with other individuals, is an abstract concept. For when we
+thus conceive our being, we see but a single side of it and that the
+least important: we fail to grasp that part which reveals all that is
+spiritual, and human, and truly and peculiarly ours. I shall not here
+investigate how the human personality has two aspects so totally
+different one from the other; and in what remote depths we must
+search for the common root of these two contrasting and apparently
+contradictory manifestations. Our task for the moment is to establish
+within ourselves through reflection the firm conviction that we are
+not lone individualities: that there is another and a better part of
+us, an element which is the very antithesis of the particular, that
+one, namely, which is the deep-seated source of our nature, by which
+we cease, each one of us, to be in irreducible opposition to the rest of
+humanity, and become instead what all the others are or what we want
+them to be.
+
+In order to fix our attention on this more profound aspect of our inner
+life, I shall take as an example one of those elements which are
+contained in the concept of nationality, Language. Language it must be
+remembered does not belong _per se_ to nationality; it belongs to it in
+virtue of an act by which a will, a personality, affirms itself with a
+determined content. We must now point out the abstract character of
+that concept by which language, which is a constituent element of our
+personality, is usually ascribed to what is merely particular in it.
+
+That language is a peculiar and constituent element of personality is
+quite obvious. Through language we speak not to others only, but to
+ourselves also. Speaking to ourselves means seeing within ourselves
+our own ideas, our soul, our very self in short,--it means
+self-consciousness, as the philosophers say, and therefore
+self-control, clear vision of our acts, knowledge of what stirs within
+us; it means, therefore, living not after the manner of dumb
+animals, but as rational beings, as men. Man cannot think, have
+consciousness of himself, reason, without first expressing all that to
+himself. Man has been defined as a rational animal; he may also be
+defined as the speaking animal. The remark is as old as Aristotle.
+
+Man, however, this animal endowed with the faculty of speaking, is not
+man in general who never was, but the real man, the historical man,
+actually existing. And he does not speak a general language, but a
+certain definite one.
+
+When I speak before a public, I can but use my language, the Italian
+language. And I exist, that is I affirm myself, I come into real being,
+by thinking in conformity with my real personality, in so far as I
+speak, and speak this language of mine. _My_ language, the _Italian_
+language. Here lies the problem. Were I not to speak, or were I to
+speak otherwise than I know how, I would not be myself. This manner of
+expressing myself is then an intrinsic trait of my personality. But this
+speech which makes me what I am, and which therefore intimately belongs
+to me, could it possibly be mine, could I use it, mould it into my own
+life-substance, if, mine though it be, it were yet enclosed within me in
+the manner that every particle of my flesh is contained within my body,
+having nothing in common with any other part of matter co-existing in
+space? Could my language in short really be my language, if it belonged
+exclusively to me, to what I have called my particular or empirical
+personality?
+
+A simple reflection will suffice to show that my language, like a beacon
+of light, inwardly illumines my Thought, and renders visible to me every
+movement and every sense, only because this language is not exclusively
+my own. It is that same language through which I grasp the ancient
+authors of Italy. I read about Francesca da Rimini and Count Ugolino,
+and find them within me in the emotion of my throbbing soul. I read of
+Petrarch's golden-haired Laura, of Ariosto's Angelica, fair love of
+chivalrous men and the unhappy friend of youthful Medoro. I read of the
+cunning art whereby the Florentine secretary, in his keen speculative
+discourses, sought to establish the principalities and the state of
+Italy. I read of the many loves, sorrows, discoveries and sublime
+concepts which did not blossom forth from my spirit, but which, once
+expressed by the great men of my country, have, because of their merits,
+continued to exist in the imagination, in the intellect, in the hearts
+of Italians, and have thus constituted a literature, a light-shedding
+history which is the life of language, varied indeed and restless, but
+ever the same. This is the language which I first heard from the dear
+lips of my mother, which gradually and constantly I made my own by
+studying and reflecting on the books and on the conversations of those
+who for years, or days, or instants, were with me in my native town and
+exchanged with me their thoughts and their sentiments; the language
+which unites to me all those who, living or dead, together constitute
+this which I call and feel to be my own people.
+
+Yet I might want to break away with my speech from this glorious
+communion. I might try to demonstrate to myself that my speech is
+exclusively mine, and surely I would thus accomplish something. I would
+produce an exception which in this case too would serve to confirm the
+rule.
+
+For surely a man may devise a cryptic language, a cipher, a jargon.
+Secret codes and conventional cants are resorted to by individuals who
+have some reason to conceal their meaning from others. Such individuals,
+however, can form but very small groups, and because of the artificial
+character of their communications never may constitute a nation. An
+artificial jargon of this sort is however a language of some kind: it
+must be, since art imitates nature. It complies with the law that is
+immanent in the peculiar nature of language, namely, that there be
+nothing secret or hidden in it, for speech and in general every form of
+spiritual activity invests a community and aims at universality. The
+jargon is possible only because of the key by which it may be translated
+back into the common language. Give a ciphered document to the
+cryptographer; by study and ingenuity--that is by the use of that very
+intelligence which arbitrarily combined the cipher--he discovers the
+key; thus he too breaks up the artificial form, and draws from it the
+natural flow of a speech that is intelligible to all those who speak the
+same national tongue. And again, words as they flow from the inspired
+bosom of the poet, when they first appear in the freshness of the new
+artistic creation, do have something that is cryptic. That language is
+the poet's own; it never had been used by another; a jargon before it is
+deciphered may be and is the language of a particular personality. But
+if we look more attentively, we shall see that in both cases the
+language is the language of the community. The inspired poet does indeed
+speak to himself, but with the consciousness of a potential audience, he
+utters a word to himself which must eventually be intelligible to others
+because it is by its nature intelligible. In the conditions in which the
+poet finds himself when speaking, he must use that word and no other,
+and any other person in those same spiritual conditions would use, could
+not help using, the same word. For his word is the Word, the one that is
+required by the circumstances. And since he is a poet, a serious mind
+uttering a word which needs no translation, it will be the word of his
+own people first and then of humanity at large, in so far as its beauty
+will inspire men of different nations and of diverse speech with the
+desire of learning the poet's own intimate language.
+
+All this is true because the spirit is universal activity, which, far
+from separating men, unites them. It realises historically its
+universality in the community of the family, of the city, of the
+district, and of the nation, and in every form of intimate aggregation
+and of fusion which history may call into being.
+
+Language may or may not be in the formation of a man's nationality. What
+however must be ever present is the Will by which man every moment of
+his life renovates his own personality. Can the Will, by which each one
+of us is what he is, be his own Will, exclusively his own? Or is the
+Will itself, like language, not perhaps a national heirloom, but surely
+a common act, a communion of life, in such a way that we live our own
+life while living the life of the nation?
+
+Of course, in the abstract, as I have explained above, my will is
+particular. But we must be reminded that Will is one thing, and
+faint wishing another. There is such a thing as real effective
+volition, and there is something which strives to be such and fails;
+this latter we might call "velleity." Real will does not rest
+satisfied with intentions, designs, or sterile desires; it acts, and
+by its effectiveness it reveals itself, and by its value shows its
+reality. And our being results not from velleities but from the real
+will. We are not what we might conditionally desire to be, but what we
+actually will to be. A velleity we might say is the will directed to
+an end which is either relatively or absolutely impossible; will is
+that which becomes effective.
+
+But, then, when is it that my will really is effective, really
+_wills_? I am a citizen of a state which has power; this power, this
+will of the state expresses itself to me in laws which I must obey. The
+transgression of laws, if the state is in existence, bears with it the
+inevitable punishment of the transgressor, that is, the application of
+that law which the offender has refused to recognise. The state is
+supported by the inviolability of laws, of those sacred laws of the
+land which Socrates, as Plato tells us, taught his pupils to revere. I,
+then, as a citizen of my country, am bound by its Law in such a
+manner that to will its transgression is to aim at the impossible.
+If I did so, I should be indulging in vain velleities, in which my
+personality, far from realising itself, would on the contrary be
+disintegrated and scattered. I then want what the law wants me to
+will.
+
+It makes no difference that, from a material and explicit point of view,
+a system of positive law does not coincide throughout with the sphere of
+my activity, and that therefore the major part of the standards of my
+conduct must be determined by the inner dictates of my particular
+conscience. For it is the Will of the State that determines the limits
+between the moral and the juridical, between what is imposed by the law
+of the land and what is demanded by the ethical conscience of the
+individual. And there is no limit which pre-exists to the line by which
+the constituent and legislative power of the State delimits the sphere
+subject to its sanctions. So that positively or negatively, either by
+command or by permission, our whole conduct is subject to that will by
+which the State establishes its reality.
+
+But the Will of the State does not manifest itself solely by the
+enactments of positive legislation. It opens to private initiative such
+courses of action as may presumably be carried on satisfactorily without
+the impulse and the direct control of the sovereign power. But this
+concession has a temporary character, and the State is ever ready to
+intervene as soon as the private management ceases to be effective. So
+that even in the exercise of what seems the untrammelled will of the
+individual we discern the power of the State; and the individual is free
+to will something only because the sovereign power wants him to. So
+that in reality this apparently autonomous particular will is the will
+of the state not expressed in terms of positive legislation, there being
+no need of such an expression. But since the essence of law is not in
+the expression of it, but in the will which dictates it, or observes it,
+or enforces the observance of it, in the will, in short, that wills it,
+it follows that the law exists even though unwritten.
+
+In the way of conclusion, then, it may be said that I, as a citizen,
+have indeed a will of my own; but that upon further investigation my
+will is found to coincide exactly with the will of the State, and I want
+anything only in so far as the State wants me to want it.
+
+Could it possibly be otherwise? Such an hypothesis overwhelms me at the
+very thought of it. For it would come to this,--that I exist and my
+state does not:--the state in which I was born, which sustained and
+protected me before I saw the light of day, which formed and guaranteed
+to me this communion of life; the state in which I have always lived,
+which has constituted this spiritual substance, this world in which I
+support myself, and which I trust will never fail me even though it does
+change constantly. I could, it is true, ignore this close bond by which
+I am tied and united to that great will which is the will of my country.
+I might balk and refuse to obey its laws. But acting thus, I would be
+indulging in what I have called velleities. My personality, unable to
+transform the will of the state, would be overcome and suppressed by
+it.
+
+Let us however assume for a moment that I might in the innermost depths
+of my being segregate myself. Averse to the common will and to the law
+of the land, I decide to proclaim over the boundless expanse of my
+thought the proud independence of my ego, as a lone, inaccessible summit
+rising out of the solitude. Up to a certain point this hypothesis is
+verified constantly by the manner in which my personality freely becomes
+actual. But even then I do not act as a particular being: it is the
+universal power that acts through my personal will.
+
+For when we effectively observe the law, with true moral adhesion and
+in thorough sincerity, the law becomes part of ourselves, and our
+actions are the direct results of our convictions,--of the necessity of
+our convictions. For every time we act, inwardly we see that such must
+be our course; we must have a clear intuition of this necessity. The
+Saint who has no will but the will of God intuitively sees necessity in
+his norm. So does the sinner in his own way: but his norm is erroneous
+and therefore destined to fail. Every criminal in transgressing the
+law obeys a precept of his own making which is in opposition to the
+enactments of the state. And in so doing he creates almost a state
+of his own, different from the one which historically exists and must
+exist because of certain good reasons, the excellence of which the
+criminal himself will subsequently realise. From the unfortunate point
+of view which he has taken, the transgressor is justified in acting as
+he does, and to such an extent that no one in his position, as he
+thinks, could possibly take exception to it. His will is also
+universal; if he were allowed to, if it were possible for him, he
+would establish new laws in place of the old ones: he would set up
+another state over the ruins of the one which he undermines. And what
+else does the tyrant when he destroys the freedom of the land and
+substitutes a new state for the crushed Commonwealth? In the same
+manner the rebel does away with the despot, starts a revolution and
+establishes liberty if he is successful; if not, he is overcome and must
+again conform his will to the will of that state which he has not been
+able to overthrow. So then, I exercise my true volition whenever the
+will of my state acts in my personal will, or rather when my will is
+the realisation of the will of a super-national group in which my state
+co-exists with other states, acting upon them, and being re-acted upon
+in reciprocal determinations. Or perhaps better still, when the
+entire world wills in me. For my will, I shall say it once again, is
+not individual but universal, and in the political community by which
+individuals are united into a higher individuality, historically
+distinct from other similar ones, we must see a form of universality.
+
+For this reason, then, we are justified in saying that our personality
+is particular when we consider it abstractly, but that concretely it
+realises itself as a universal and therefore also as a national
+personality. This conception is of fundamental importance for those of
+us who live in the class-room and have made of teaching our life's
+occupation, our ultimate end, and the real purpose of our existence. For
+in this conception of human activities we find the solution of a problem
+that has been present in the minds of thinking men ever since they began
+to reflect on the subject of education, or, in other words, from time
+immemorial. Education, we must remember, is not a fact, if by fact we
+mean, as we should, something that has happened, or is wont to happen,
+or must inevitably take place in virtue of the constancy of the law
+which governs it. We teachers are all sincerely convinced that
+education, as we speak of it, as it draws our interests, for which we
+work, and which we strive to improve, is not now what it was before. For
+there is no education that works out in conformity with natural laws. It
+is a free act of ours, the vocation of our souls, our duty as men. By it
+more nobly than by any other action man is enabled to actualise his
+superior nature. Animals do not educate: even though they do raise their
+young ones they yet form no family, no ethical organism with members
+differentiated and reciprocally correlated. But we freely, by an act of
+our conscience, recognise our children, as we do our parents and our
+brothers; and we discern our fellow-beings in ourselves and ourselves in
+others; and by the growth of our own we unconsciously develop the
+personality of others; and therefore in the family, in the city, in any
+community, we constitute one spirit, with common needs that are
+satisfied by the operations of individual activity which is a social
+activity.
+
+Man has been called a political or a social animal. He might therefore
+be considered also as an educating animal. For we do not merely educate
+the young ones, our young ones. Education being spiritual action bearing
+on the spirit, we really educate all those that are in any way and by
+any relations whatsoever connected with us, whether or not they belong
+to our family or to our school, as long as they concur with us in
+constituting a complete social entity. And we not only train those of
+minor age, who are as yet under tutelage, and still frequent the schools
+and are busily intent upon developing and improving their skill, their
+character, their culture. We also educate the adults, the grown-up men
+and women, the aged; for there is no man alive who does not daily add to
+his intellectual equipment, who does not derive some advantage from his
+human associations, who could not appropriately repeat the statement of
+the Roman emperor--_nulla dies sine linea_. Man always educates.
+
+But here, as in every other manifestation of his spiritual activity, man
+does not behave in sole conformity with instinct; he does not teach by
+abandoning himself, so to speak, to the force of natural determinism. He
+is fully aware of his own doings. He keeps his eyes open on his own
+function, so that he may attain the end by the shortest course, that he
+may without wasting his energies derive from them the best possible
+results. For man reflects.
+
+It is evident then that education is not a scheme which permits
+pedagogues and pedants to interfere with their theories and lucubrations
+in this sacred task of love, which binds the parents to the children,
+brings old and young together, and keeps mankind united in its never
+ceasing ascent. Before the word came into being, the thing, as is
+usually the case, already existed. Before there was a science and an
+incumbent for the chair, there existed something that was the life of
+this science and therefore the justification of the chair. There was the
+intent reflectiveness of man, who in compliance with the divine saying,
+"Know thyself," was becoming conscious of his own work, and therefore,
+unwilling to abandon his actions to external impulses, began to question
+everything. What the lower animal does naturally and unerringly through
+its infallible instinct, man achieves by the restless scrutiny of his
+mind. Ever thoughtful, always yearning for the better, he searches and
+explores, often stumbling in error, but ever rising out of it to a
+higher station of learning and of art. Our education is human, because
+it is an action and not a fact; because it is a problem that we always
+solve and have to keep solving for ever.
+
+This intuitive truth is demonstrated experimentally to us by the very
+lives we live as educators. As long as the freshness of our vocation
+lasts, as long as we can remain free from mechanical routine and from
+the impositions of fixed habits; as long as we are able to consider
+every new pupil with renewed interest, discover in him a different soul,
+unlike that of any other that we have previously come in contact with,
+and differing within itself from day to day; as long as it is still
+possible for us to enter the class-room thrilled and throbbing in the
+anticipation of new truths to reveal, of novel experiments to perform,
+of unexpected difficulties to overcome, in the full consciousness of the
+rapid motion of a life ever renewed in us and around us by the incoming
+generations, that flow to us and ebb away unceasingly towards life and
+death; so long shall we really live and love the teacher's life, so long
+shall we demonstrate to ourselves and to others the truth I have already
+affirmed.
+
+We teachers should be constantly on our guard against the dangers of
+routine, against the belief that we have but to repeat the same old
+story in the same class-room, to the same kind of distant, blank faces,
+staring at us in dreary uniformity from the same benches. We shall
+continue to be educators only as long as we are able to feel that every
+instant of our life's work is a new instant, and that education
+therefore is a problem that insistently stimulates our ingenuity to an
+ever renewed solution.
+
+Now the most important of all tasks, ancient and modern, in the field of
+education is this,--the task of the teacher to represent the Universal
+to his pupils, the Universal, of course, as historically determined.
+Scientific thought, customs, laws, religious beliefs are brought before
+the pupil's mind, not as the science, the laws, the religion of the
+teacher, but as those of humanity, of his country, of his period. And
+the pupil is the particular individual who, having entered upon the
+process of education, and being submitted, so to speak, to the yoke of
+the school, ceases to enjoy his former liberty in the pursuit of a
+spiritual endowment and in the formation of his character, and, in
+consequence of this educational pressure, bends compliantly before the
+common law. Hence the world-old opposition to the coercive power of the
+school, and the outcry raised from time to time against the privilege
+demanded by the educator, who on the strength of the assumedly higher
+quality of his beliefs, his learning, his taste, or his moral
+conscience, claims to interfere with the spontaneous development of a
+personality in quest of itself.
+
+On one side education undoubtedly assumes the task of developing
+freedom, for the aim of education is to produce men; and man is worthy
+of this name only when he is a master of himself, capable of initiating
+his own acts, responsible for his deeds, able to discern and assimilate
+the ideas which he accepts and professes, affirms and propagates, so
+that whatever he says, thinks, or does, really comes from him. Our
+children are said to be properly raised when they give evidence of being
+able to take care of themselves without the help of our guidance and
+advice. And we trust that we have accomplished our task as educators
+when our pupils have made our language their own and are able to tell us
+new things originally thought out by them. Freedom then must be the
+result of education.
+
+But on the other hand, teaching implies an action exercised on another
+mind, and education cannot therefore result in the relinquishment and
+abandonment of the pupil. The educator must awaken interests that
+without him would for ever lie dormant. He must direct the learner
+towards an end which he would be unable to estimate properly if left
+alone, and must help him to overcome the otherwise unsurmountable
+obstacles that beset his progress. He must, in short, transfuse into the
+pupil something of himself, and out of his own spiritual substance
+create elements of the pupil's character, mind, and will. But the acts
+which the pupil performs in consequence of his training will, in a
+certain measure, be those of his teacher; and education will therefore
+have proved destructive of that very liberty with which the pupil was
+originally endowed. Is it not true that people constantly attribute to
+early family influences and to environment--that is, to education--the
+good and the bad in the deeds of the mature man?
+
+This is the form in which the problem usually presents itself. The mind
+of the educator is therefore torn by two conflicting forces: the desire
+zealously to watch and control the pupil's growth and direct his
+evolution along the course that seems quickest and surest for his
+complete development; and, on the other hand, the fear that he may kill
+fertile seeds, stifle with presumptuous interference the spontaneous
+life of the spirit in its personal impulses, and clothe the individual
+with a garment that is not adapted for him,--crush him under the weight
+of a leaden cape.
+
+The solution of this problem must be sought in the concrete conception
+of individual personality; and this will be the theme of the next
+chapter. But I must at the very outset utter an emphatic word of
+warning. My solution does not remove all difficulties; it cannot be used
+as a key to open all doors. For as I have repeatedly stated, the value
+of education consists in the persistence of the problems, ever solved
+and yet ever clamouring for a new solution, so that we may never feel
+released from the obligation of thinking.
+
+My solution must be simply accepted as affording a guidance by which
+different people may, along more or less converging lines, approach
+their particular objectives. For the problem presents itself under
+ever-changing forms, and demands a continuous development, and almost a
+progressive interpretation of the concept which I am going to offer as
+an aid to its solution. No effort of thinking, once completed, will ever
+exonerate us from thinking, from thinking unceasingly, from thinking
+more and more intensively.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+THE FUNDAMENTAL ANTIMONY OF EDUCATION
+
+
+A more precise determination must now be given to the problem, touched
+upon in the preceding chapter, which might be called the _fundamental
+antinomy of education_, understanding by "antinomy" the conflict of two
+contradictory affirmations, either one of which appears to be true and
+irrefutable.
+
+The two contradictory affirmations are (1) that man as the object of
+education is and must be free, and (2) that education denies man's
+freedom. They might perhaps be better re-stated in this way: (1)
+Education presupposes freedom in man and strives to increase it. (2)
+Education treats man by ignoring the freedom he may originally be
+endowed with, and acts in such a way as to strip him entirely of it.
+
+Each of the two propositions must be taken, not as an approximate
+affirmation, but as an exact enunciation of an irrefutable truth.
+Therefore freedom here means full and absolute liberty; and when we
+speak of the negation of freedom, we mean that education as such, and as
+far as it is carried, destroys the freedom of the pupil.
+
+Let us first see precisely what is meant by this _freedom_ which we
+attribute to man. Each one of us firmly even though obscurely possesses
+some conception of it. Every one of us, even though unfamiliar with the
+controversies that have raged for centuries on the question of free
+will, must have sometimes been compelled by the conditions of human life
+to face the difficulties that beset the concept of man's freedom, and
+must have been led to question, if not to deny outright, the proposition
+that man is free. But on the other hand, every one of us has to admit
+that the experience of life has confirmed the belief in our freedom
+which for a moment had been shaken by doubt and perplexity; and that
+faith, instinctive and incoercible, outlives every time the onslaughts
+of negation.
+
+By liberty we mean that power peculiar to man by which he moulds himself
+into his actual being and originates the series of facts in which every
+one of his actions becomes manifest. In nature, all facts, or, as they
+are called, all phenomena appear to us to be so interrelated as to
+constitute a universal system in which no phenomenon can ever be
+considered as absolutely beginning, but can in each case be traced back
+to a preceding phenomenon as its cause, or at any rate as the condition
+of its intelligibility. The condensation of the aqueous vapour in the
+cloud produces rain; but vapour would not condense without the action
+of temperature, nor again would temperature be lowered without the
+concurrence of certain meteorological facts which modify it, etc.
+
+But we believe on the other hand that man derives from no one but
+himself the principles and the causes of his actions. So that whenever
+we see in his conduct the necessary effects of causes that have acted on
+his character or momentarily on his will, we cease to consider such acts
+as partaking of that moral value through which man's conduct is really
+human and completely sundered from the instinctive impulses of the lower
+animal, and even more so from the behaviour of the forces of inanimate
+matter.
+
+We may in certain moments deny a man's humanity, and see in his conduct
+only brutal impulse, fierce cruelty, and unreasoning bestiality. In such
+moments we cannot stop either to praise or to blame him. We do not even
+strive to reason with him, for we feel that arguments would produce no
+impression on his obdurate consciousness. Only through force can we
+defend ourselves from his violence; against him we must use the same
+weapon that we rely upon in our struggle with the wild beasts and the
+blind forces of nature. We then become aware that our soul refuses to
+recognise such an individual as a man. We esteem man to be such only
+when we believe that we can influence him by words, by arguments that
+are directed to reason, which is the birthright of man, and when we are
+able to prevail upon those sentiments of his which, as peculiarly human,
+appear to be almost the foundation and the understructure of rational
+activity. This reason and these sentiments it must be remembered are the
+peculiar constituents of human personality. They cannot be imparted to
+man from the outside. They are in him from the very start even if only
+as germs which he must himself cultivate, and which will, when
+developed, enable him to act consciously, that is, with full knowledge
+of his acts. This knowledge is twofold, for he knows what he is doing,
+and he knows also how his actions must be judged. And so all the causes
+that bear on him are practically of no weight in determining a course
+which he will take, if he is a man, only after the approval of his own
+judgment. What is more natural than to avenge an insult, and to harbour
+hatred against an enemy? And yet from the viewpoint of morals, man is
+worthy of this name only in so far as he is able to resist his
+overpowering passions and to release himself from that force which
+compels him to offset harm with more harm, and meet hatred with hatred.
+He must pardon; he must love the enemy who harms him. Only when a man is
+capable of understanding the beauty of this pardon and of such love,
+only when, attracted by their beauty, he acts no longer in compliance
+with the force of instinctive nature, does he cease to count as a purely
+natural being, and lift himself to a higher level into that moral world
+where he must progressively exhibit his human activities. Whether man is
+equal to this task or not, we must demand that he satisfy this
+requirement before we admit him into the society of mankind. He must
+have in himself the strength to withstand the pressure of external
+forces which may act on his will, on his personality, on that inner
+centre from which his personality moves towards us, speaks to us, and
+thus affirms its existence. We make these demands on him; and as we
+extol him when by his deeds he shows sufficient capacity for his human
+role, so we also blame him every time we find him through weakness
+yielding to these forces. And the import of our blame is that he is
+responsible for not having the power which he should have had.
+
+It is of no importance that out of compassion, or through sympathy
+for human frailty, we lighten or even entirely remove the burden of our
+censure. Our disapproval of the deficiency, even though unexpressed,
+remains within us side by side with the conviction that the delinquent
+may do a great deal, nay, must, aided by us in the future, do
+everything in his power to meet successfully the opposing forces of
+evil. We surely cannot abandon the unfortunate wretch who through
+moral impotence--whether it be the craven submissiveness of the
+coward, or the undaunted violence of the overbearing brute--commits an
+evil deed. We feel it our duty to watch over him and help him on
+the road to redemption, because of our firm conviction that he will
+eventually redeem himself; for he is after all a man like the rest of
+us, and possesses therefore within himself the source and principle
+of a life which will raise him from the slough in which he lies
+immersed.
+
+There is, however, a pseudo-science which, on the basis of superficial
+and inaccurate observations, dogmatically asserts that certain forms of
+criminality give evidence of original and irremediable moral depravity;
+and that therefore persons tainted with it are fatally condemned never
+to heed sufficiently the voice of duty and ever to yield to their
+perverted instinct, which presses unrestrained from the depths of their
+being at the slightest provocation and on the occasion of the most
+insignificant clash with other human beings.
+
+This is the doctrine of the modern school of criminal anthropology which
+has spread throughout the world the fame of some Italian writers. Though
+their influence is now on the wane, their observations on the
+pathological nature of criminal acts have contributed to establish the
+need of a more humane treatment of offenders,--more humane because
+rational and effective.
+
+Their doctrine falls in with a series of systems which at all times, and
+always for materialistic motives,--materialistic even though disguised
+under religious and theological robes,--have denied to man that power
+which we call liberty, compelling him therefore to bend down under the
+stress of universal determinism, and to behave as the drop that forever
+moves with the motion of the boundless ocean, an insignificant particle
+of the entire watery mass. What force intrinsic to this drop could ever
+stop it on the crest of the wave which hurls it forward? Man, they say,
+is no different from this drop: from the time of his birth to the
+instant of his death, hemmed in by all the beings of nature, acted upon
+by innumerable concurrent causes, he is pushed and dragged at every
+moment by the irresistible current of all the forces of the entire mass
+of the universe. At times he may delude himself into believing that he
+has lifted his consciousness out of the huge flood, that it is within
+his power to resist, to stop it as far as he is concerned, and to
+control it; that, in short, it rests with him to fashion his own
+destiny. But alas! this very belief, this illusion is the determined
+result of the forces acting upon him: it is the inevitable effect of the
+play of his representations,--representations which have not their
+origin in him, but have been impressed upon him by outside forces. So
+that the illusion of independence is but a mocking confirmation of the
+impossibility of escaping the rush of fatal currents.
+
+I shall not here give a critical presentation of the arguments by which
+systems such as these have established the absence of freedom in man.
+In our present need, a single remark will suffice, and will permit us,
+I believe, to cut the discussion short. A great German philosopher,
+who had conceived science and reality, which is the object of
+science, in such a way as to preclude the possibility of finding in
+reality a place for man's freedom, noticed that freedom, in spite of all
+the difficulties which science encounters in accounting for it,
+corresponds and answers to an invincible certitude in our soul,
+invincible because a postulate of our moral conscience. That is to
+say, that whatever our scientific theories and ideas, we have a
+conscience which imposes a law upon us,--a law which, though not
+promulgated and sustained by any external force, or rather because of
+it, compels us in a manner which is absolute. This law is the moral
+law. It requires no speculative demonstration. The scrutiny of
+philosophers might not be helpful to it. It rises spontaneously and
+naturally from the intimate recesses of our spirit; and it demands from
+our will, from the will of the most uncouth man, an unconditional
+respect. What sense would there be in the word duty, if man were able to
+do only those things which his own nature, or worse still, nature in
+general, compelled him to do? The existence of duty implies a power to
+fulfil it. And the certitude of our moral obligations rests on the
+conviction that we have within us the power to meet them. We can
+answer the call of duty because we are free.
+
+This consideration, important as it is, cannot however be considered as
+sufficient. For this moral conscience, this certitude with which the
+moral conscience affirms the existence of an unavoidable duty, might
+also be an illusion determined in us by natural causes. Nothing hinders
+us from thinking thus, and surely there is no contradiction implied in
+this explanation, which in fact because of its possibilities is offered
+by the philosophers of materialism.
+
+But the need of liberty is not solely felt when we strive to conceive
+our moral obligations; freedom is not only the ground for existence, the
+_raison d'etre_ of moral law, as Kant thought--for he is the philosopher
+to whom I alluded above;--no! freedom is the condition of the entire
+life of the spirit. And the materialist who, having destroyed liberty as
+a condition of moral conduct, believes that he is still able to think,
+that his intellectual activity can proceed undisturbed after his faith
+in the objective value and in the reality of moral laws has been
+abandoned, such a materialistic thinker is totally mistaken. For without
+freedom, man not only is unable to speak of duty, but he cannot speak at
+all,--not even of his materialistic views. This is the same as saying
+that the negation of liberty is unthinkable.
+
+A brief reflection will make this clearer. We speak to others or to
+ourselves in so far as we think, or say something or make affirmations.
+Let us suppose that ideas be present to our minds (as people have
+sometimes imagined) without our looking at them, without our noticing
+them. Such ideas would have offered themselves in vain, in the same way
+that many material objects remain unseen before us, because we do not
+turn our gaze toward them. Every object of the mind, that is, every
+thought, can only be thought because in addition to it we too are in the
+mind: our mental activity is there, the ego of the thinking man, the
+subject which is ready to affirm the object. And thought proper consists
+in this affirmation of the object by the subject. Now, the subject, that
+is, man, must be as free in the affirmation of his thought, by which he
+thinks something, as he must be free in every one of his actions in
+order that his action be truly his, and really human. In fact, we demand
+of man that he give an account of his thoughts as well as of his deeds.
+We evaluate not only what he does, but also what he thinks; we praise
+him or we disapprove of him because of his sayings, that is, his
+thoughts, and we call upon him to correct those thoughts which he should
+not entertain. In this way we indicate our conviction that the thought
+of each one of us is not simply a logical consequence of its premises,
+not an effect determined by a psychic mechanism set in motion by the
+universal mechanism of which our individual psyche is a part; we are
+convinced that thought depends upon man, upon his capacity, upon his
+personality, which is not controlled by any mechanical forces, nor
+subject to premises which he may no longer modify once he has accepted
+them. We are the masters of our thinking; and if the vigour of the human
+personality is indeed shown by the steadfast constancy whereby in
+practical life we pursue a hard and toilsome course toward an arduous
+goal, it is revealed just as much by the quickness, the readiness, the
+assiduousness, the lack of prejudice, the love which we manifest in our
+search after truth.
+
+It has therefore been said that cognition in man has moral value, and
+that on the other hand the will is operative in the act of the
+intellect. Such distinctions are dangerous. But whether we call it will
+or intellect, the activity which makes us what we are, by which we
+actualise our personality, also by thinking, it is certain that it is a
+conscious and discriminating activity, through no force of gravity
+precipitating on its object, but approaching it with selective freedom
+of determination. And in the manner that every action aims at the good,
+because it seems good, and appears in contrast with evil, so every
+cognition is the affirmation of what to us is or seems to be a truth in
+opposition to error and falseness. Without the antithesis of good to
+evil there would be no moral action: without the antithesis of the true
+to the false there would be no cognition. But the existence of this
+antithesis implies a choice and therefore the liberty of choosing.
+
+Should we deny freedom, and consequently abandon man to the determinism
+of the causes acting upon him, we should deny the possibility of
+distinguishing between good and evil, between true and false. The
+materialist, therefore, when he rejects freedom, is compelled to affirm
+that the value which moral conscience attributes to goodness is devoid
+of any real grounds, and what is worse, that his very statement is
+thereby stripped of all the value of truth. For he must be inwardly
+convinced that what he thinks has no reason to be thought and therefore
+cannot be thought.
+
+The negation of freedom leads to this _absurdum_, to this impossible
+thought, which is the Thought that is being thought as such, and yet
+does not admit of being thought. Man, in so far as he thinks, affirms
+his faith in freedom, and every attempt on his part to uproot this faith
+from his soul is but a glaring confirmation of its existence. This
+observation, properly grasped, is sufficient to establish human freedom
+on a solid ground.
+
+Freedom, moreover, which man needs in order to be human, cannot be, as
+some have supposed, a relative liberty, limited and restricted by
+certain conditions, for conditional liberty does not differ from
+slavery. Here indeed is the very crux of the problem. Every one would
+readily admit the existence of a limited freedom, and the divergence
+would then be reduced to a question of degree. But the fact is that
+freedom must be absolute or not be at all. Matter, that is, every
+material object, is not free for the very reason that it is limited;
+whereas the spirit--every spiritual act--is free because it is infinite,
+and as such not relative to any thing, and therefore absolute.
+
+Any limitation of the spirit would annihilate its liberty. The slave is
+such because his will is constrained within the bounds imposed upon it
+by the master's volition. The human spirit is not free in the presence
+of nature because nature envelops it and enfolds it within narrow
+confines, which allow only a certain development; and this development
+therefore cannot be looked upon as a grant of nature but rather as a
+condemnation, in that it marks out boundaries which cannot be
+trespassed. The lower animal is not free because even if its actions
+seem to imply a rationality not very different from that of man, yet in
+reality its acts, differently from the doings of man, follow the
+straight line pre-established by instinct, which admits of no original
+power and allows no individual creation. If there is a limit, there must
+be something limiting and something limited; there must be a necessary
+relationship of one to the other, so that the thing limited can in no
+way free itself from the consequences of this relationship. These
+consequences are summed up in the impossibility of _being all_, or in
+other words in the necessity of remaining within limits, and to obey
+therefore the untransgressable laws set by one's own nature. This
+necessity which binds every natural being to the laws of its own nature,
+this impossibility of being aught else than what is appointed by nature,
+to be a wolf of necessity, and of necessity to be a lamb; this is the
+hard lot of natural beings, this is the destiny from which man is
+ransomed by the power of his freedom.
+
+The sculptor in the fervour of his inspiration, which proceeds from the
+image that lives in his phantasy, searches eagerly for the marble with
+which, as though from the very bosom of nature, he may call to life the
+phantom of his mind. He fails in his search, and his chisel remains,
+must need remain, inactive. The artist then in the utmost intensity of
+his creation is baffled by an external impediment, by an obstacle of
+nature which therefore seems to have the power of limiting his creative
+power. But when we consider what the artist has created in the statue
+itself, in this living image of marble, we find nothing that is
+material. The artist has transfused into the stone an idea, a sentiment,
+a soul, which we, under the influence of the ravishing power of artistic
+beauty, are able to seize to the exclusion of all material attributes;
+as though we no longer possessed eyes for the whiteness of the marble
+and were deprived of the muscle which gives us the impression of its
+physical weight. When we are able thus to spiritualise the statue--and
+we do so every time we get to know it as a work of art--then all
+limitations that might be imposed on the creative power of the artist
+disappear. For we see no longer the artist's phantasy, and then his arm,
+and then his hand, his chisel, the block which he is carving; all we see
+is the phantasy soaring untrammelled in the infinite world of the
+artist, with his arm, his hand, his marble, his universe which is
+totally different from the universe in which the men live who quarry the
+marble and move it and sell it.
+
+There is a point of view from which we see the spirit limited and
+enslaved by the conditions in which its life is unfolded. But there is a
+higher point of view to which we must ascend if we are bent on
+discovering our freedom. If we say, as the psychologists do, this is a
+soul and this is a body, here are sensations, there is motion, this is
+thought within us and that is the world outside of us, then we are
+obliged to consider the spirit as conditioned by physical happenings to
+which in some manner our internal determinations correspond. It is not
+possible to see without eyes and without the light that strikes them. It
+is equally impossible not to see when we have eyes and are surrounded by
+light, and according to the greater or lesser velocity of the luminous
+waves, we shall of necessity discern now one colour and now another. And
+the objects thus seen by us will determine our thoughts; and in turn our
+volitions will depend upon these thoughts; and our characters will be
+shaped accordingly, and we shall be this or that man in conformity with
+the determination of circumstances. Man, according to this conception,
+will be the result of time, of place, of environment, of everything
+except of his own self.
+
+But there is a higher point of view than the one I have just described,
+and to it we must rise, if we mean to understand our nature,--this
+marvellous human nature which was first disclosed to our consciousness
+at the advent of Christianity and in the course of time made more and
+more manifest, until it now loudly proclaims in us our human dignity
+exalted above the forces of nature, and is empowered by its cognitive
+faculty to dominate these forces, which must bend to man's purposes
+without ever blocking or obstructing his progress. Whosoever says: here
+is a body and there is a soul--two things, one outside of the
+other--such a man does not consider that these two things are two terms
+distinguished and differentiated by thought in the bosom of thought,
+that is to say, of the soul: of that soul which is truer than the other
+for the obvious reason that the latter thinks and therefore reveals its
+soul-nature by its own acts, whereas the former is the object of
+thinking, is a thing thought, and may therefore be a fallacious entity,
+an idolon, and a simple _ens rationis_, like so many other things that
+are thought and are subsequently found to have no kind of subsistence.
+In speaking of sensation and of motion which generates or somehow
+conditions sensation, we lose sight of the fact that sensation is truly
+enough a determination of consciousness, but in the same manner as the
+motion which is encountered in consciousness when the latter, in
+thinking, among other things thinks the displacement of objects in
+space.
+
+For everything is within consciousness, and no way can be devised of
+issuing forth from it. We say that the brain is external to
+consciousness, and that the cranium encloses the brain, which in turn is
+enveloped by space luminous and airy, space filled with beautiful plants
+and beautiful animals; yet the fact remains that brain and skull and
+everything else are the potential or actual object of our thinking
+faculty, and cannot but remain therefore within that consciousness to
+which for a moment we supposed them to be external. We may start
+thinking, keeping in mind this indestructible substance of our thought;
+and as we proceed from this centre in which we have placed ourselves as
+subjects of thinking, and advance towards an ever-receding horizon, do
+we ever come in sight of the point where we must pause and say: "Here my
+thought ends; here something begins that is other than my thought"?
+Thought halts only before mystery. But even then it thinks it as
+mystery, and thinking it, transforms it, and then proceeds, and so never
+really stops.
+
+Such being the true life of the spirit, rightly have we called it
+universal. At every throb it soars through the infinite, without ever
+encountering aught else than its own spiritual actualisations. In this
+life, such as we see it from the interior when we do not fantastically
+materialise it with our imaginations, the spirit is free because it is
+infinite.
+
+Education then posits this liberty in the pupil, for it presupposes in
+him a susceptibility of development,--educability, as we may call it.
+The learner could not possibly be educable, that is, susceptible of
+receiving instruction, unless he were able to think. But thinking, we
+have already seen, signifies freedom. And not only is freedom
+presupposed by the educator, but it is the very thing he is aiming at in
+his work. As a result of his teaching, liberty must be developed in the
+same manner that the capacity for thinking and all modes of spiritual
+activity are developed. For the development of thought is a development
+of reflection, a constant increase of control over our own ideas, over
+the content of our consciousness, over our character, over our whole
+being in relation to every other being. And this growth of power is what
+we mean when we speak of the development of our freedom. It has been
+said, in fact, that education consists in liberating the individual from
+his instincts. Surely, education is the formation of man, and when we
+say man we mean liberty.
+
+Here we stumble upon our antinomy. How are we to reconcile this
+presupposition and this aim of the educator with his interference in the
+personality of the pupil? This interposition surely signifies that the
+disciple must not be left to himself and to his own resources; that he
+has to clash with something or somebody that is not his own personality.
+Education implies a dualism of terms, the teacher and the learner; and
+it is this dualism which destroys the freedom, which sets a limit, and
+therefore annihilates infinity in which freedom consists. The disciple
+who encounters a stronger mastering will, an intellect equipped with a
+multitude of ideas, with an experience which forestalls his own powers
+of observation, and his innate zeal for investigation, sees in this more
+potent personality either a barrier obstructing his progress towards a
+goal which he spontaneously would attain; or else a goad which hurries
+him along the way which he would have indeed chosen of his own accord,
+but along which he would have liked to advance freely, calmly, joyously,
+as our Vittorino da Feltre would have it, and without any unwelcome
+compulsion. This pupil then would want to be left alone in order that he
+might be free, as free as God when as yet the world was not and he
+created it out of nothing by his joyous _fiat_, symbol of the loftiest
+spiritual liberty.
+
+For these reasons we have come to believe that the most serious problem
+of education is the agreement between the liberty of the pupil and the
+authority of the teacher. Therefore great masters who meditated on the
+subject of education, from Rousseau to Tolstoi, have exalted the rights
+of liberty, but have fallen into the opposite extreme of denying the
+duty to authority, and have pursued in their abstractions a vague and
+unrealisable ideal of negative education.
+
+But we must not cling to negatives. It should be our purpose to
+construct, not to destroy. The school, this glorious inheritance of
+human experiences, this ever-glowing hearth where the human spirit
+kindles and sublimates life as an object of constant criticism and of
+undying love, may be transformed, but cannot be destroyed. Let the
+school live, and let us cling to the teacher and maintain his authority,
+which limits the spontaneity and the liberty of the pupil. For this
+limitation is only apparent.
+
+Apparent, however, when we deal with true education. For the school has
+for centuries been the victim of a grave injustice. People have been led
+to consider the classroom as a place of confinement and of punishment,
+and teachers have been cruelly lashed by the scourge of ridicule cracked
+in the face of pedantry. Through this injustice, the school has been
+burdened with faults that are not its own, and teachers, genuine
+educators, have been confused with the pedantic drill-masters that are
+the negation of intelligent education and of inspired ethical
+discipline. In order to see whether education really limits the free
+activity of the pupil, we must not consider abstractly any school, which
+may not be after all a school. We must examine an institution at the
+moment and in the act which realises its significance--when the
+instructor teaches and the pupils are learning. Such a moment should at
+least hypothetically be granted to exist.
+
+Let us take a concrete example and consider a teacher in the act of
+giving lessons in Italian. Where is this something which I have called
+the Italian language? In the grammar, perchance? Or in the dictionary?
+Yes, partly. Provided grammar can invest its rules with the life of the
+individual examples that together constitute the expressive power of the
+living language; and provided the dictionary does not wither up all
+words in the arid abstraction of alphabetical classification; does not
+hang each of them by itself as limbs torn from the living body of the
+speech in which they had so often resounded and to which they will be
+joined again in the fulness of life and expressiveness; but does instead
+incorporate, as every good dictionary should, complete phrases, living
+utterances of great authors or perhaps of that nameless many-souled
+writer that somewhat confusedly is called the people.
+
+But more than in the grammar and more than in the dictionary, the word
+is and exists in the writers themselves. The teacher should there point
+it out, as he guides his pupils through the authors who were able to
+express most powerfully our common thoughts. To his students who are
+striving to learn the language--that is the writers--he reads for
+example the poems of Leopardi. The poet's word, his soul hovers over
+the classroom, as the master reads. It penetrates into the minds of the
+pupils, hushes every other sentiment, removes every other thought, and
+throbs within them, stirs them, arouses them. It becomes one with the
+soul of each pupil, which speaks to itself a language of its own, using,
+truly enough, the words of Leopardi, but of a Leopardi who is peculiar
+to each of the listeners. Under this spell, the pupil who hears the
+poet's word echoing in the depths of his being, will he stop to reflect
+that this word is the echo of an echo? That he is under the influence of
+something repeated after a first utterance? Our own experience answers:
+No! But if any of the audience become absent-minded, if they should lose
+the rapt delight of poetical exaltation communicated to their soul by
+the teacher's voice, and should say that the word they hear is not their
+own but the master's, or rather, the poet's, then they would commit a
+serious blunder. For the word they intently listen to in their soul is
+their own, exclusively their own. Leopardi does not impart any poesy to
+him who, through his love, his study, and the intensity of his feelings,
+is unable to live his own poetry. And Leopardi (or the teacher who reads
+him) is not materially external to the enraptured listener; he is his
+own Leopardi, such as he has been able to create for himself. The
+master, as St. Augustine long ago warned us, is within us.
+
+He is within us even if we see him in front of us, away from us seated
+in his chair. For in so far as he is a real teacher, he is ever the
+object of our consciousness, surrounded and uplifted in our spirit by
+the reverence of our feelings and by our trustful affection. He is _our_
+teacher, he is our very soul.
+
+The dualism then is non-existent when we are educating. We do notice it
+before, and we are thus brought to examine the antinomy; but the
+difficulty is removed by the very act of education itself, by the first
+word that comes to the pupils' ears from the lips of the teacher. The
+dualism however cannot be resolved if the master's word fails to reach
+the pupils' soul, but then under those circumstances there is no
+education. But even in such cases, if the teacher is not sluggish, if he
+displays a real spiritual power, the abiding existence of the barrier
+between the two minds proves helpful to the spiritual growth of the
+learner, who, because of his incoercible freedom, is impelled by the
+insufficiency of the master to affirm his personality with increased
+vigour. So that the school is a hearth of liberty, even in spite of the
+intentions of the teacher. A school without freedom is a lifeless
+institution.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+REALISM AND IDEALISM IN THE CONCEPT OF CULTURE
+
+
+We found it necessary in the previous chapter to pass from the abstract
+to the concrete in order to arrive at the truth. The universality of the
+individual was made clear when for the empirical concept of the
+individual, abstractly considered, we substituted the deeper and more
+speculative one of the individual himself in the concreteness of his
+relationships. In like manner, the fundamental antinomy of education was
+resolved as soon as we replaced the abstract idea of the dualism of
+teacher and pupil, by the idea of their intrinsic, profound, unseverable
+unity as it gradually works out and is actualised in the process of
+education. We were enabled therefore to conclude that the real teacher
+is within the soul of the pupil, or, better still, the teacher is the
+pupil himself in the dynamism of his development. So that, far from
+limiting the autonomy of the disciple, the master, as the propulsive
+element of the pupil's spontaneity, penetrates his personality, not to
+suppress it, but to help its impulses and facilitate its infinite
+development.
+
+The same method of resorting to the concrete now leads us to the
+determination of a third essential element in the process of education.
+We have spoken of the master, and we have spoken of the pupil,--of the
+latter as becoming actual as universal personality, of the former as
+becoming identical with this same personality. We must now take up the
+connecting link between the two, that is, culture. By culture we mean
+the content of education, the presupposed heirloom which in the course
+of time must pass from the teacher to the pupil. This spiritual content,
+in being apprehended, appears under different aspects: as erudition and
+information; as formation of personal capacities and training of
+spiritual activities; as art and science; as experience of life and as
+concept and ideal of existence; as simple cognition and as a norm of
+conduct. It includes everything that comes within the scope of teaching,
+and from whose value education derives its peculiar worth.
+
+Culture, so defined, may be conceived of in two ways; and in as much as
+their differences are highly significant in the sphere of education as
+elsewhere, we must now somewhat carefully consider them.
+
+These two ways correspond to two opposite conceptions of reality, and as
+such they pertain to philosophy. But men in general constantly have
+recourse to them, and so it happens that people frequently indulge in
+philosophic speculations without knowing it; and much philosophising
+goes on outside of the schools of the specialists, who are few compared
+to the great number of those who in their own way handle genuine
+concepts of philosophy.
+
+Let us begin from the most obvious of these concepts, from the one which
+is fundamental and original to the human mind. Our whole life, if we
+consider the data of experience, seems to unfold itself on the
+substratum of a natural world, which therefore, far from depending on
+human life, represents the very condition of it. In order to live, to
+act, to produce, or in any way to exercise an influence on the external
+world, we must, first of all, be born. Our birth is the effect of a life
+which is not our life, which step by step rises and grows and spreads
+until it gathers all nature within itself. This nature existed before we
+were born, it will continue to be after we are all dead. Men draw their
+life from an organic and inorganic nature which had to exist in order
+that they might come into being. When nature will cease to provide these
+conditions, human life, according to this point of view, will come to an
+end; but nature, transformed, chilled, darkened, dead, will yet continue
+to be.
+
+On this living trunk of nature our own life is grafted; animals come
+into existence, and among animals the human species. Each of us, as he
+comes into the world, finds this nature, developed, abundant,
+diversified in millions of forms, traversed by innumerable forces,
+organised up to the most highly developed structures, man included. We
+find this nature, and we begin to study it. We examine its parts one by
+one, their complexity, and the difference of their functioning. For each
+one of them has its peculiar way of being and of acting; it has its
+"laws." The aggregate of these laws, mutually corresponding, and
+integrating one another, constitutes the natural world--reality--as it
+stands before us. With this external reality we strive to become
+acquainted; and in order that we may live in it we either adapt
+ourselves to it, or adapt its conditions to ourselves. In this reality
+too we acquire the knowledge of the needs of our organism and of the
+means by which they may be satisfied,--the ratio, so to speak, between
+natural desires and controlled resources.
+
+We are also told that our organism is in constant change and hurries on
+to its destination, to our death, which we abhor as passionately as we
+cherish life, but which we accept because such is the law of human life,
+fatal and inexorable; for reality is what it is, and we must adapt
+ourselves to it.
+
+But if reality appears as constituted before us, as therefore
+conditioning our existence, and as existing independently of us; if it
+is indifferent to reality whether we be in it or not; if we are truly
+extraneous to it, the conclusion must then be drawn that we, from the
+outside, presume to know reality and to move about it without being this
+reality itself or any part of it. For all reality is thought by us as a
+connected whole, though indeed vaguely; in its totality it is regarded
+as an object known to us, but existing in utter independence of this
+knowledge of ours. Its whole process is therefore complete in objective
+nature, which conditions our spiritual life, and this in turn can mirror
+reality but can never be a part of it.
+
+This then is the primitive and fundamental concept that the human mind
+forms of reality. In consequence of it man feels that he is enclosed
+within himself: he knows he is producing the dreams and the fair images
+of art; that he can construct inwardly abstract geometrical figures and
+numbers; that he can generate ideas. But he also feels that between
+these ideal creations of his own, and the solid, sound, real living
+forms of nature, there is an abyss. He must, indeed, fall in with
+nature, in the process of generating other living beings of flesh and
+blood. He must avail himself of nature by first submitting to its
+unfailing laws, if he intends to give body, that is, real existence, to
+the ideal conceptions of his intelligence. On one side then we have
+thought; on the opposite side reality,--that reality, Nature.
+
+This conception at a certain moment is transformed but not substantially
+changed. As we begin to reflect, we notice that this nature, as known to
+us, is not the real external nature, the nature which is unfolded in
+time and space, which we see before our eyes, an object perceptible by
+our bodily senses. We conclude then, that nature as known to us is an
+_idea_; that Nature is one thing and the idea of nature another. And if
+we think this perceptible nature and have faith in its reality and in
+the reality of its determinations, this nature in which reality is made
+to consist is the nature which is within our thought,--the idea of
+nature; or in other words, thought considered as the content of our
+mind. This thought is the aim of all the inquiries by which we strive to
+become thoroughly acquainted with nature, and which we finally discover
+or at least ought to discover when we succeed in attaining true
+knowledge. We say that we know nature only when we are able to recognise
+an idea in nature: that is, an idea in each of its elements, and a
+system of ideas in the whole of nature. So that what we know is not
+really nature as it presents itself to our senses, still less nature as
+it is, before it has impressed our senses; but nature as disclosed to us
+by thought, as it exists in thought--i.e., the idea. And this idea must
+be real, otherwise nature, which has its truth in the idea, could not be
+real. Not only is it real, it is that reality itself which a moment ago
+we were led to think of as consisting in external perceptible nature.
+
+This reality makes the life of our thought possible, but it is not a
+product of this life. It is a condition and a prerequisite of
+thought, and as such it does not exist because we think it: but
+rather we are able to think it because it exists. It is eternal
+truth, at first unknown to man, then by him desired. In quest of it
+he gradually lifts on all sides the veil which hides it from his eyes,
+without however hoping that it will ever entirely disclose to him its
+divine countenance.
+
+According to this transformed point of view, then, reality, which in the
+first instance appeared to be natural, that is physical or material, has
+now become ideal. But even thus it remains extraneous to thought, and
+unconcerned with the presence or the absence of it; transcending the
+entire life of the human spirit, and incessantly subject to the danger
+of error. Whereas the idea as a complexus of all ideas that can be
+thought (but have not been thought, or rather have not all been thought)
+is the beacon of light that guides the way of man in the ocean of life;
+it is Truth pure and perfect.
+
+This idea evidently must not be confused with the purely subjective
+ideas which we spoke of above, and which as such are extraneous to
+reality. This idea is reality itself idealised. It is to this idea, for
+instance, that we all appeal when we affirm the existence of a justice
+superior to that of which man is capable, of a justice in behalf of
+which man is in duty bound to sacrifice his private interests, and even
+his life. This idea we have in mind when we speak of a sacred and
+inviolable right, whereas in daily practice there is perhaps no right
+which is not more or less trampled upon. This idea is before us when we
+consider truth in general: truth which is indeed real, even though it
+may not be seen or felt, much more real than physical nature, for nature
+comes to life and dies and constantly changes, while truth is
+motionless, impassible, eternal. In its bosom then we must try to find
+everything that we want to accept as not illusory.
+
+But in substituting the conception of an ideal reality for the
+conception of a material one, reality as a whole continues to be
+something contradistinguished from us, an object indeed of our thoughts,
+but one which cannot be conceived as it is in itself except by
+abstracting it from our own thought.
+
+We, then, who open our eager eyes in the endeavour to discover, to know,
+to orient ourselves, to live in the midst of a known and familiar world;
+we, thinking beings, and not simply things of nature, beings who as such
+affirm our personality in the very act of saying _We_, we then are of
+less account than the earthworms which crawl along until they die
+unknown to the foot that crushes them. We are nothing because we do not
+belong to reality; we deceive ourselves into believing that we are doing
+something on our own account, but in truth we renounce every desire of
+doing or creating something original, something we might really call
+ours; and we abandon ourselves, we drift away confused with external
+reality and submerged under the irresistible current of its laws.
+
+This conception of life, which I have given only in its barest outline,
+is a very common one. For thousands of years it has persisted in the
+philosophical field, the nourishment and the torment of the greatest
+intellects of humanity. But humanity could not rest satisfied with a
+world conceived in such a manner; with a world which, whether we call it
+nature or idea, is at bottom always nature. For by nature we understand
+not only that reality which is in space and time, but also every reality
+which is not the product of our will, nor the result in general of that
+spiritual activity, which in a manner peculiar to all human acts reveals
+a diversity of values, extending from the sublimity of heroism and of
+genius to the lowest depths of cowardice and to the gloom of sloth. Nor
+can it be considered as the product or result of a process; for it is
+immediate reality, original and immutable. In a world which is Nature,
+man is an intruder, a stranger without rights, without even real
+existence. As a being, he is destined to be suppressed; nay, he does not
+even exist. And his life, with all his aspirations, his needs, his
+claims, is but a fallacious illusion which will sooner or later
+collapse. Man cannot help succumbing in a world where there is no place
+for him. Therefore a more or less cloudy gust of pessimism lowers over
+the consciousness that has stopped at this conception of reality.
+Leopardi is the most eloquent expression of the intense misery to which
+man is condemned in such circumstances, or to which rather he condemns
+himself. He condemns himself because he has it in his power to conceive
+reality otherwise. For let him ponder seriously and he will succeed in
+convincing himself that the naturalistic conception of reality is
+absurd. Philosophy has so demonstrated this truth, that he who now
+strives eagerly to attain a moral point of view in harmony with
+established principles can no longer repeat that note of pessimism, can
+no longer assert that the world is nature, or that it is the eternal
+idea from which nature is derived and by which it is made intelligible.
+Such views are no longer tenable.
+
+The teacher who, because of his lofty mission, claims the right of
+forming souls, of arousing those powerful moral energies which alone
+empower man to live as a human being, may not, must not be ignorant of
+the fact that the contention of naturalism, which makes of the world an
+abstract reality, presupposed by the human spirit and therefore anterior
+and indifferent to it, is a belief that has been superseded and
+surpassed by modern thought. The teacher too can easily grasp this view,
+for in gathering all the arguments by which, along different lines, the
+new conception of reality has been attained, we find that the whole
+matter reduces itself to a simple and very easy reflection. Very easy in
+itself, though it may seem difficult to the greater part of us,--to the
+superficial thinkers, to the absent-minded, to those who lack the
+strength necessary to face the great responsibility imposed upon us by
+the truth which is derived from this reflection.
+
+For naturalism reduces itself to the affirmation that we think nature,
+but do not ourselves exist; nature alone exists. We do not exist and yet
+we think, and we think of nature as existing. We do not exist and yet
+nature exists, of whose existence we have no other testimony than our
+thoughts. And if thought is a shadow, what will reality then be? The
+"dream of a shadow," in the words of the Greek poet. Is it possible for
+us to stop at this conclusion? Is it possible for an inexistent thing to
+vouch for the existence of something which we know only from its
+attestations? Such is the absurd position we are forced into when we
+assume that Thought, in equipoise with reality, remains outside of it
+and leaves it out of its own self.
+
+We give the name of realism to that manner of thinking which makes all
+reality consist in an external existence, abstract and separate from
+thought, and makes real knowledge consist in the conforming of our ideas
+to external things. By idealism on the other hand we mean that higher
+point of view from which we discover the impossibility of conceiving a
+reality which is not the reality of thought itself. For it reality is
+not the idea as a mere object of the mind, which therefore can exist
+outside of the mind, and must exist there in order that the mind may
+eventually have the means of thinking it. Reality is this very thought
+itself by which we think all things, and which surely must be something
+if by means of it we want somehow to affirm any reality whatsoever, and
+must be a real activity if, in the act of thinking, it will not entangle
+itself in the enchanted web of dreams, but will instead give us the life
+of the real world. If it is not conceivable that such activity could
+ever go forth from itself and penetrate the presumably existent world of
+matter, then it means that it has no need of issuing from itself, in
+order to come in contact with real existence; it means that the reality
+which we call material and assume to be external to thought is in some
+way illusory; and that the true reality is that which is being realised
+by the activity of thought itself. For there is no way of thinking any
+reality except by setting thought as the basis of it.
+
+This is the conception, or, if you will, the faith, not only of modern
+philosophy, but of consciousness itself in general, of that
+consciousness which was gradually formed and moulded under the influence
+of the deeply moral sentiment of life fostered by Christianity. For it
+was Christ that first opposed to nature and to the flesh a truer
+reality,--not the world in which man is born, but that world to which he
+must uplift himself: that world in which he has to live, not because it
+is anterior to him, but because he must create it by his will: and this
+world is the kingdom of the spirit.
+
+In accordance with this conception there is, properly speaking, no
+reality: there is a spirit which creates reality, which therefore is
+self-made and not the product of nature. The realist speaks of external
+existence, of a world into which man is admitted and to which he must
+adapt himself. But the idealist knows only what the spirit does, what
+man acts. A nature, ever at work in the progress of the spirit, throbs
+in the soul of man, who with his intellect and his will re-creates it by
+its restless, unceasing motion. It is a world which is never created,
+because the entire past flows and becomes actual in that form which is
+peculiar to it and in which it exists, namely, the present,--history in
+the incessant rhythm of its becoming, in the ever-living act of
+self-production.
+
+On what side of the controversy should the teacher stand who means to
+absorb into his soul the life of the school? Will he with the realists
+believe in a reality which must be observed and verified? Or will he as
+an idealist trust that the only world is the one which is to be
+constructed by him; that in all this task he can rely only on the
+creative activity of the spirit that moves within us, ever unsatisfied
+with what is, incessantly aspiring for what does not yet exist, for what
+must come to be as being the only thing which deserves to exist and to
+fulfil life?
+
+There are then these two ways of conceiving culture, the realistic and
+the idealistic. By the former we are led to imagine that man's spirit
+is empty, and that no nourishment can come to it except from the outside
+world, from those external elements which he can acquire because they
+exist prior to the activity by which he assimilates them. The latter,
+admitting only what is derived from the developing life of the spirit,
+can conceive of culture solely as an immanent product of this very life,
+and separable from it only by abstraction.
+
+It is evident that the ordinarily accepted view of educators to-day is
+realistic rather than otherwise. The ideal and therefore the historical
+origin of the school itself is intimately connected with the realistic
+presupposition. For the school begins when man for the first time
+becomes aware of the existence of a store of accumulated culture which
+should be protected from dispersion. Grammar, for instance, exists
+before the notion of teaching it arises. Men already possess a language
+when they make up their minds to teach it to their children. Self-taught
+and inventive genius, by new observation and discoveries, gives rise to
+new disciplines; and men, discovering the value of such disciplines,
+determine to institute a school where they may be cultivated and handed
+down to the coming generations. In general then, first comes knowledge;
+then the school as a depository of it. It may be granted that the
+progress of learning is made possible or at least accentuated by
+educational institutions; but the fact remains that the school is
+founded on pre-existing knowledge. Science, arts, customs must exist
+before they can be taught to others, and they do exist, but not in the
+spirit of the one who is to acquire them, who must appropriate them as
+they are in themselves. The _Iliad_ exists: Homer sang: the poems
+attributed to him were collected into an epic from which we learn of the
+beliefs, of the aspirations, and of the memories that were dear to the
+ancient Greeks, and every cultivated person to-day must derive from them
+his own spiritual substance. The teacher shows to his pupils how best to
+read, how to understand that epic which is a treasure of the past
+bequeathed not only to the modern Greeks but to humanity in general. For
+we all profit from this inherited spiritual wealth in the same manner
+that every man that comes into the world enjoys the light and the heat
+of the sun which he surely did not kindle in heaven.
+
+The fact that culture, as the subject matter of education, exists before
+the exercise of that spiritual activity which can be educated only
+through its means, seems to the realist a condition without which the
+school cannot arise. Only as culture develops and spreads does the
+school grow and expand; and, in the progress of civilisation, as culture
+becomes specialised, the school is correspondingly differentiated into
+institutions of ever-growing specialisation. For the school can but
+follow and reflect the advance of science, of letters, of art,--of
+humanity in general in all it strives to perpetuate.
+
+All this evidently can be maintained only from the point of view of the
+realist. For him the school is concerned not with those that already
+know and therefore have no need of it, but for those who are still
+ignorant. For them it is instituted; it ministers to their needs, and is
+therefore adjusted in the direction in which it believes their spirit
+should be oriented. In the school of physicians, there is not medicine
+but the learning of it, for if the art of healing were already mastered
+as it seems to be in the case of the professors, there would be no need
+of a medical school. There is indeed the professor in the lecture room;
+but he is there only for the learners, and his role has no meaning
+except in relation to their needs. He is the possessor of science, and
+as such he teaches and does not learn. The school then is not the
+possession of culture, but the development of a spiritual life aspiring
+to this possession; and this aspiration is possible because of the
+existence of the teacher who has already mastered it, who possesses it,
+not as his own property, but as social wealth entrusted to him for the
+use of everybody. He himself is only an instrument of communication.
+Culture antedates him; it does so even when he is the author of it. For
+it is not possible for him to impart it to others until he has first
+elaborated it himself, and not until the merits of his contributions
+have been in part at least recognised by the world.
+
+The school to the realist presupposes the library. The teacher needs
+books, plenty of books in order to increase his knowledge and thus
+become better acquainted with that world through which he has to pilot
+his pupils. In the books, then, in the long shelves, culture lives: in
+the innumerable volumes that no one ever hopes to read; in the shelves
+which contain a world of beautiful things, and so valuable that man, as
+Horace says, should spend sleepless nights in order to acquire them,
+should endure cold and heat, fatigue and sacrifice. For humanity, we are
+told, lives in those volumes to which the teacher must somehow link
+himself if he intends to advance properly, to live the life which our
+forefathers have generously endowed for us, and to protect our spiritual
+inheritance from dispersion. In this atmosphere he must live; he must
+plunge in that spiritual sea which rolls limitless across the centuries.
+The pupil looks out upon this ocean which allures every man who is born
+to the life of culture. At first he clings to the shore, dreads the
+water, and asks to be helped until he has at least become familiar with
+the element. Who will encourage the beginner to leave the dry land and
+plunge into the deep where he would meet sure destruction? He must first
+be trained in some sheltered cove, where protected from the violence of
+the tumultuous surf, from the might of the indivisible mass of the
+ocean, he may gradually learn the ways of the deep.
+
+The student must accordingly begin with a definite book; he must be
+saved from the haunting power of the library, which draws the youthful
+mind towards every volume, towards every subject. In the multitude of
+books, not all of them read, not all of them readable, thought founders,
+sees nothing, thinks nothing, is unable to rest in any of the things
+which he imagines exist in the vast library shelves. He must choose. Let
+him select, say, Dante. He reads the _Divine Comedy_, the poem written
+by that great Italian who has been dead these six centuries and now
+rests at Ravenna, no longer mindful of his Francesca, of his magnanimous
+Farinata, of his kindly master Brunetto, or of Beatrice. Dante created
+his miraculous world, he breathed life into his characters, wrote the
+last line of his last canto, smiled in rapture at the divine beauty of
+his creation, now complete and perfect, and died. His manuscript was
+copied thousands of times; and after the discovery of printing, millions
+of copies were made. In one of these we now are able to find it, this
+divine poem, just as it was written,--for we want it exactly as it
+flowed from his pen without the change of a letter, without the omission
+of a comma. And this volume is an example of what exists in a
+library,--of the culture that teachers strive to find there, and thence
+communicate to their pupils!--something that belongs to the world,
+something which is a part of reality, which men therefore can grasp, if
+they want to, just as they can get to know the stars and the plants,
+and all things of nature. The _Divine Comedy_ can be realistically
+conceived in respect to us who open the volume and prepare to read it,
+for the reason that it already exists and arouses our desire. If we had
+left it on the shelf where it was resting, it would have had exactly the
+same existence. What we find in the volume, as we read of that land of
+the dead which is much more living than all the living beings who
+surround us in our daily life, would all of it have been in that book,
+would have continued to be there, even if we had never opened it.
+
+But is it really so? If we reflect a while we shall see that this is not
+the case. The book contains exactly what we find there, what we are
+capable of finding there, nothing more, nothing less. Different persons
+discover in it different things, but it is nevertheless obvious that for
+each individual the book contains only what he finds in it; and in order
+to be able to say that the book contains more than what a given reader
+discovers in it, it is necessary that some other person should find that
+something more; and that the text contains this additional beauty is
+only true for him who discovered it and for those who seek it after
+him.
+
+Dante waited for centuries for De Sanctis[1] to appear and to
+disclose the meaning of Francesca's words. Therefore it has been
+said that to understand Dante is a sign of greatness. Abstractly
+considered, of course, the poet is what he is, but only in the
+abstract. In the concrete, Dante is the author whom we admire and
+appreciate proportionately to our power. For as we read the poem in
+accordance with our training, and the development of our personality,
+Dante is grafted on a trunk which did not exist before us, which, on
+the contrary, is our very life; and before this life is realised,
+evidently none of those things can be found there which actually come
+into being in the process of its realisation. So that if we had not
+read the book, far from its being true that everything we found in it
+would still continue to be there, nothing would remain of what we find
+in it, absolutely nothing.
+
+We have said nothing of "what _we_ find." But if we consider the matter
+we shall see that what we find is everything; everything for me;
+everything for everybody. Only that can come out of a book which the
+reader with his soul and with his labours is capable of getting out of
+it; and in consequence of these labours and in virtue of his soul he is
+able to say that a certain book has a content. In fact, to return to our
+example, the _Divine Comedy_ which we know, the only one which we can
+know, the only one which exists, is the one which lives in our souls,
+and which is a function of the criticism that interprets it, understands
+it, and appreciates it. That _Divine Comedy_ therefore did not close
+the circle of its life on the day when Dante wrote the last line of the
+last canto; it continued to live, still continues to exist in the
+history, in the life of the spirit. Its life never draws to a close. The
+poem is never finished.
+
+This is true of the poem of Dante; it is true of everything which we
+conceive of as inherited from our great predecessors, from those who
+built up the patrimony of human culture. Culture then is not before us,
+a treasure ready to be excavated from the depths of the earth, awaiting
+to be revealed to us. Culture is what we ourselves are making; it is the
+life of our spirit.
+
+Abstract culture, on the contrary, is merely as realistically conceived.
+It slumbers in the libraries, in the sepulchres of those who lived, who
+passed away and created it once for all. It belongs to the past, to the
+things that have died. But the past, if we really mean to grasp it, if
+we want to see it close by as something that is and not merely as an
+abstraction, the past itself, becoming the present, made into that
+actuality which we call living memory, is history,--history constructed
+by us, meditated by us, re-created by us, in accordance with our
+abilities;--and with our powers of evocation we awaken the past from its
+slumber and breathe into it the life of the spiritual interests, of the
+ideas, of the sentiments that are, after all, the living substance in
+which the past really survives, in which it is real. In the same way the
+only culture that can be bestowed upon the spirit, the only one that
+admits of being concretely taught and learned, the only one that can be
+sought, because it is the only one that really exists, is idealistic
+culture. It is not in books, nor in the brains of others. It exists in
+our own souls as it is gradually being formed there. It cannot therefore
+be an antecedent to the activity of the spirit, since it consists in
+this very activity.
+
+This must be the faith of all those who cannot bring themselves to
+believe that they are strangers in this world, and that they have come
+here to exercise a function which is not their own. For the world in
+general, and the sphere of culture in particular, is not completed when
+we arrive upon the scene. This is why human life has a value, why
+education is a mission.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+  [1] Francesco de Sanctis, a great Italian critic, whose "History of
+      Italian Literature" is still unfortunately inaccessible in
+      English.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+THE SPIRITUALITY OF CULTURE
+
+
+The idealistic conception of culture enables us to get an initial
+understanding of the spirituality of the school. This spirituality is
+surely felt by all those who live within the class-room; but it should
+be understood in the most rigorous and absolute manner by those who wish
+to have a deeper consciousness of the extreme delicacy of the tasks
+performed and the words uttered by those who enter it with the sincere
+heart and the pure soul of the teacher.
+
+The school is obviously not the hall which contains the teacher and the
+pupils. These may have a hall, may even have the teacher, without yet
+possessing the school, which consists in the communication of culture.
+This culture, we have seen, is not really pre-existent to the act which
+communicates it; it is not to be found in books, not to be looked for in
+an ideal transcendent world, not to be demanded of the teacher. It is
+only in the spirit of the person who is in the act of learning. It is
+there in the manner in which it is possible for it to be there, not
+comparable to any presumed form of pre-existing culture. The school
+gains its existence entirely in the soul of the learner.
+
+Knowledge is not to be found beyond the bounds of the human spirit. I
+insist on this conception because I am well aware that the minds of many
+rebel against this conclusion, no matter how irrefutable its grounds may
+be. For they ask: what then is the learning which we ascribe to the
+master minds of humanity, now indeed dead but still active in their
+works? They also ask how we are able to think and account for that
+learning which we feel we are not originating, which we know we are
+re-acquiring for ourselves after it has many times been in the domain of
+others.
+
+Can we really consider as non-existent what we as yet do not know, may
+perhaps never know, but which is none the less capable of being known?
+When we are filled with reverence for the glory of men whose learning
+surpasses our powers, are we the victims of an illusion? Are we
+prevailed upon by ignorance and lack of reflection? And how then can we
+justify the cult which every civilised man consecrates to the mighty
+spirits--philosophers, poets, artists, and heroes--who added so much to
+the moral fund of humanity? Was there not a Dante six centuries back,
+who composed a lofty poem, which was admired by everybody, at a time
+when we, who now read it and bring it to life in our souls, were still
+so far removed from the entrance of this life?
+
+The answer to all these questions is very simple, so simple that we must
+be careful lest we miss its significance. All this lore of the past
+which we strive to preserve surely does exist; it does contain all the
+names which are sacred to the memory of humankind. The _Divine Comedy_
+has been written and no longer awaits its Dante. But this lore of the
+past, as we for brevity's sake call it, is nothing else than what _we
+think_ as such. History, as it unfolds itself from century to century,
+is never compressed within a past which because of its completeness
+might be made to exist beyond the present and in opposition to it; but
+it exists in a past which is in the present as a plant that grows or an
+animal that lives, never adding anything new to the old, always
+transforming the old into the new; at no time, therefore, having
+anything but what is new, never being anything else but the new. In
+history, thus comprehended, we to-day are but one person with the men
+who thought before us, with the poets, the philosophers, the spiritual
+creators of the past. With them we are a person that grows and develops,
+ever acquiring, never losing; a single being that apprehends and recalls
+and constantly makes all his past bear fruit in the present. Our
+childhood has not completely passed away into nothing: it keeps
+returning to the ever-busy phantasy that tenderly fondles it, cherishes
+it, idealises it into poetry. If we consider this childhood as something
+that once was, that existed in utter ignorance of this poetry that was
+yet to be written, that could not then be written, surely this infancy
+is quite dead; we should rather say that it never existed. But it does
+live as the childhood which is a recollection, which arouses feelings,
+and such feelings as are at a given moment the actual sentiment of the
+adult. Once in the years long gone by a kindly word reached the depths
+of my soul. We all have heard in the years long gone by some such kindly
+words that in the mystery of our childish mind appeared as a revelation.
+Such words as fall from the lips of a mother and inspired by her tender
+affection have the secret power of appeasing us in a moment of rage, and
+of making us feel the gentle sweetness of that goodness which is made of
+love. We may since have forgotten that word, and the circumstances in
+which it was uttered: but it is none the less true that on that day our
+soul was modified and became endowed almost with a sixth sense. This
+sense has enabled us subsequently to perceive so many things that are
+beautiful in life, and it in turn grew stronger because of frequent use
+and increasing exercise, until it finally became the most potent organ
+of our moral personality. Here too our development has been a constant
+acquiring with no losing: a preserving of the past by which it was
+converted into the present, and therefore annulled as past pure and
+simple.
+
+Such is the moral development of man, who believes himself an
+individual, but is in truth humanity considered momentarily in one of
+its fragments. Such is history: the unfolding of the spirit in its
+universality. It is not therefore difficult to determine what is the
+past culture in which we desire to graft our present one. It is our own
+actual culture in so far as it is not the patrimony, not the spiritual
+life of the isolated individual, of a particular being; but is instead
+the life of the spirit in its universality, the development of the human
+personality taken in its effective, historical concreteness.
+
+The past with its entire content is a projection of our actual
+consciousness, i.e., of the present. But we must not give this
+proposition a sceptical sense. As I have already pointed out, the
+present neither in the particular individual nor in the universal
+history of the spirit, is sundered from the past by that abyss which is
+ordinarily seen from a materialistic point of view. The past is one and
+the same thing with the present. The past _is_ the present in its inmost
+substance; and the present is the past that has matured. The grain of
+wheat which was buried in the furrow is now no longer to be found under
+the glebe. It lives, multiplied in the ear of wheat. The seed as such
+was decomposed and destroyed in the soil; it is there no more, it sprung
+thence as a blade of grass, it grew, was transformed, still is, still
+lasts, and will continue to endure in other forms. Where is it now? Why,
+in whatever form it may now have assumed. It is the past in the present,
+as the present.
+
+So then, what is Dante the poet who towers over the centuries, the
+object of our admiration, the master of all who speak and use the
+Italian language? He is the lordly poet of the fourteenth century, not
+because he then lived his own individual life, but because he survives
+to-day in us who think him, who appreciate him even when we are not
+fully acquainted with him. In this sense he lives in us, as the seed
+does in the ear of corn.
+
+I have just hinted at the possibility of appreciating something without
+fully understanding it. I wanted to make clear how impossible it is to
+separate, with a clean cut, knowledge from ignorance. It is far from
+true that before taking up a certain science we know absolutely nothing
+about it,--that the boy who goes to school for the first time is
+completely devoid of all knowledge, or that he who is in quest of a book
+which he has never read can in no way whatever speak about it.
+
+For fair renown begets love for the unseen person, as the poet reminds
+us and as experience often teaches. Frequently we know of the existence
+and the beauty of a woman whom we have never seen, but who is not
+therefore completely unknown to us. So also many of us desired to go to
+school long before we had seen the inside of a classroom. What is dearer
+than the joy foretasted at the first imaginings of school? We look
+forward to that new life upon which we are about to enter in the company
+of our bigger brothers and of our older playmates. They have told us so
+many things about it. From their accounts and from the fond memories of
+our parents we already know the school before we approach it, and its
+pleasing aspects invite us into the classroom.
+
+For the same reason we search for books we have never seen, and we are
+drawn towards new studies and pursuits. There is no leaping from
+ignorance to knowledge, as from pitch darkness to noon-tide brilliancy.
+The transition is imperceptible, as when the dim morning twilight merges
+into the first glimmerings of dawn, which in turn fade away under the
+dazzling flashes of sunrise. And even from the midst of darkness we
+yearn for a world which though unseen is somehow present to our
+consciousness, already illumined by our thought, warmed by our
+sentiments. Or, in other words, the culture which we do not yet possess,
+and which we expect to get at school, is already implanted in our mind,
+where it will sprout and grow and bear fruit, fused and confused with
+the life of our spirit.
+
+Having now reached this point, can we define culture? I am inclined for
+a moment to assume the role of Don Ferrante in Manzoni's novel.[2] By
+pedantic ratiocinations he proved that the plague could not be a
+contagious disease: "for," he said, "in nature everything is either a
+substance or an accident." Contagion, he then went on to prove, could
+neither be the one nor the other; therefore the plague was but an influx
+of the stars, and there could be no use in taking precautions; and
+having proved this, he fell a victim to the epidemic, and died cursing
+the stars like an operatic hero. Let us follow for a moment in the
+footsteps of this pedant, whose method, ridiculous as it may seem, has
+had nevertheless a glorious history, and one which Manzoni himself
+admired.
+
+I say: We can think only and we do think only two kinds of
+reality,--person or thing. Every one of us is naturally drawn to this
+distinction; and when we have formulated it, we feel more or less
+vaguely, more or less clearly, that every possibility is comprised
+within these two terms, that outside of them it is impossible to think
+any reality whatsoever. The reason is this: if we think, if we act, if
+we live, we inevitably place ourselves in a situation such that we on
+one side are as centre, as beginning, or as subject of our activity; and
+on the other side are the objects toward which our activity is directed
+and by which it is terminated. _We_ therefore as subject of the entire
+surrounding world; and _this world_ as the end of our thoughts and of
+our scientific inquiries, end of our desires and of our practical
+activity; the world which is represented in our consciousness, and which
+we strive to dominate by our labours, and our reason. Can there be
+anything else beside _us_ and what _we_ think?
+
+The world which we think and which we oppose to ourselves seems at first
+to contain different kinds of objects. There seem to be both persons and
+things; simple objects of cognition which we ordinarily call _things_
+which can never become subjects; and persons who at first are
+represented to us as objects of our knowing, of our love, and of our
+hatred, as ends of our activity; but who under a closer scrutiny are
+transformed before our eyes into knowing and acting subjects, who, in
+other words, become just exactly what we are. But when we really get to
+know these beings that surround us as subjects on an equal basis, then
+we cease to consider them as objects of our cognition, and as solely
+endowed with that material objectivity which at first put them in the
+same category with the inanimate things, with plants and animals. We
+then find them close to us, very close: fused with our own spiritual
+substance. We feel them to be our fellow men, our kinsmen, with whom we
+constitute that person of whose existence I am aware every time I say
+_We_: the person we must take into account whenever we wish to affirm
+our personality in a concrete manner, the only person, the one subject,
+the true subject of human knowledge and of human activity. The subject
+which knows and acts as a universal in the interests of all men, or
+rather in behalf of the _one man_ in whom all single individuals are
+united and with whom they are all identified.
+
+Then if we give a rigorous and exact meaning to the expressions, "We and
+what is before us," "We and the objects," "We and the World," we have a
+correct classification of all thinkable reality differentiated into
+persons and things, but with the understanding that all persons are in
+reality one Person.
+
+One _person_, and things innumerable! As we look about us, we find the
+horizon peopled with thousands and millions and infinite quantities of
+objects, which may one by one attract our attention, and may be gathered
+up in the vast, unbounded picture surveyed by the eye as it moves on
+from thing to thing, incessantly, without ever reaching the last. The
+world which we first discover is the world of matter, of things which
+strike our senses. This world rushes impetuously into our mind at the
+beginning of our natural experience. And these material objects are many
+not only _de facto_ but also _de jure_. They must be, they cannot but be
+many if we are to consider them as material things. It is their peculiar
+nature, it is their very essence to be an indefinite multitude.
+
+A material thing means a thing occupying space. And space is made up of
+elements, each one of which excludes all the others and is therefore
+conceived independently of the others, must so be conceived. For it is
+the very nature of space to be divisible. When it is narrowed down to a
+point and cannot be further subdivided, then it ceases to be space. Its
+divisibility signifies that space is nothing more than the sum of its
+parts; that it contains nothing in addition to these parts; that it
+therefore resolves itself into them without at all losing its being and
+without any of the parts being deprived of anything which was theirs in
+the whole. In fact, if anything were lost of the entire whole, this loss
+could not but be felt in each single part. A book, considered as a
+material thing, is composed of a certain number of printed leaves
+stitched together; and if the leaves fall apart, they may be brought
+together again so that they will compose the same book as before. An
+iron rod weighs the same before and after it has been broken up into
+parts.
+
+Things cease to be exclusively and solely material when, though they may
+be divisible in a certain respect, they are nevertheless indivisible in
+another respect. Plants, animals, all living organisms, considered
+simply as objects occupying space and as therefore having certain
+dimensions, admit surely of being separated into parts. Trees are cut
+into logs, sawed into boards; animals are slaughtered and quartered. But
+considered from the point of view of its peculiar quality, of the
+essential property which distinguishes it from all other bodies, an
+organism is not divisible. If we do divide it, each component part
+ceases to be what it previously was when conjoined with the others. Such
+a part cannot be preserved; it withers, it decays, and is dispersed, so
+that the whole can never be reconstituted. The various parts of an
+organism, considered as such, are inseparable, because each of them is
+and maintains itself on the strength of its relations to the others,
+forming with them a true and essential unity. If we however try to find
+out what this unity is by which all the limbs are indissolubly held
+together, we shall discover nothing which can be observed and
+represented spatially, nothing endowed with dimensions, however small,
+after the manner of the several limbs which this unity fuses within
+itself and vivifies.
+
+If unity which is the life-giving principle of every organism could be
+spatially represented, or in other words, if it were something material,
+it would be one of those very limbs that have to be unified, and could
+not then be the unifying principle itself. Hence the vanity of the
+efforts on the part of materialistic physiologists who obstinately
+strive to explain life by observing the parts which compose the organic
+mass, by studying the concurrence of their processes, their chemical
+relationships, and their mechanism. A material being, organically
+constituted, is something more than a material thing pure and simple: it
+announces already a higher principle; it presages the spirit.
+
+But the things that we all agree to regard as spiritual defy absolutely
+every attempt at division. A poem may be considered in a certain way as
+material, and may accordingly be divided into various parts,--stanzas,
+lines, words. But it is clear that such a separation cannot have the
+value which we assign to the divisions of things material. For in their
+case every part can stand by itself, and is in no way deprived of its
+characteristic being; whereas every part of a poem, stanza, verse, word,
+calls out and responds to every other part; and if isolated from them,
+loses the meaning which it had in the context; or rather it loses every
+meaning, and consequently perishes. It is true that by conjectures we
+interpret even very small fragments of ancient poems. But we do so only
+in so far as we claim the possibility of restoring approximately the
+entire poem in which the given fragment may live, by which it may be
+restored to life. Likewise all the words lined up in dictionaries are as
+so many bleeding limbs of living discourses, to which they must somehow
+or other be ideally reconnected, if we are to understand what they
+really were and what functions they had. Multiplicity of parts in things
+of the spirit is only apparent: it must be reduced to indivisible unity,
+from which every element of the multiplicity derives its origin, its
+substance, and its life, so that we may give to it a real meaning and a
+foundation.
+
+Nor is this the only unity possessed by the things that are assumed to
+be spiritual. We have already considered the unity whereby, for example,
+the words of a poem cannot be separated from the poem itself, in which
+each of them acquires a particular accent, a particular expression, and
+therefore a particular individuality. We shall now consider another
+unity. He who really perceives a poem is not confronted by an observable
+thing, compact if you will, unseverable and united, but none the less
+independent of human personality. Poetry is only understood when in the
+flowing unity of its verses and in the continuous rhythm of its words we
+grasp a sentiment in its development, a soul's throb in a moment of its
+life, a man, a personality. The poetry of Dante is very different from
+that of Petrarch, because each is the expression of a powerfully
+distinct personality. Any composition of these poets is understood and
+enjoyed only when we feel in it the personal accent which distinguishes
+one poetical personality from the other. A poet without individuality
+has no significance whatsoever, and therefore no existence as a poet.
+But the real artist leaves his imprint more or less markedly in all his
+productions, so that in every given instance, over and beyond the
+variety of the subject matter, we feel the living soul of the poet. A
+poem then is the poet; it is a person and not a thing. And the same can
+be said, as we can easily see, of all things that are commonly called
+spiritual.
+
+But in addition to things material, it seems that there are immaterial
+ones which do not pertain as one's own to any particular person. The
+ideas of which we had occasion to speak before,--immaterial entities,
+not perceptible by the senses, but thinkable by the intellect, and
+which severally correspond to all sorts or species of the various
+material things,--were once conceived as things by philosophers, and
+they are still so conceived to-day by the majority of men. It is
+not requisite that one actually think them; it is sufficient that they
+be in themselves thinkable. As a matter of fact, they may or may not
+be thought, no differently therefore from any of the material objects
+which are not created by our senses, but must already exist in order
+that our senses may perceive them. These ideas are many, in a manner
+corresponding to the material objects; and they are all different.
+They mirror, so to speak, the multiplicity of material things in
+whose semblance and likeness they were devised. There are horses in
+nature, and there is the idea of the horse by which we are able to
+recognise all the animals that belong to that species. There are
+dogs, and there is the dog which we rediscover in every one of them.
+And there are flowers and the flower; and pinks, roses, and lilies,
+as well as the pink, the rose, and the lily; and likewise iron,
+copper, silver, gold, lime, water, and so on, to infinity. It is
+impossible to set a limit to ideas, because it is not possible ever to
+stop dividing, distinguishing, subdividing that nature which unfolds
+itself throughout space.
+
+This boundless multitude of ideas, through which our mind can rove,
+surely has no spatial extension. But because of the necessity of
+conceiving any multitude as existing in some kind of space, it was
+thought proper to posit an ideal space in addition to the physical one.
+In other words, metaphorical dimensions were added to dimensions
+properly so called. But whether spatially or not, we strive to conceive
+ideas as many, each one of them existing by itself, and susceptible of
+being thought independently of the others. In reality however we never
+succeed in thinking them except as bound together and forming a system,
+in such a way that no single one of them can be thought except by
+thinking the others with it. Take man as an instance: each one of us has
+intuitively the idea of man, but this idea is not possessed like a word
+of which we may not even know the meaning. In thinking the idea we must
+think something which is its content. If we know what man is, we must be
+able to attribute a content to the idea of man. We may say, as the
+ancients did, that man is the laughing animal, or the speaking animal,
+because he is the only animal capable of expressing the emotions of his
+soul by laughter or by the inflection of his voice; because, in other
+words, he is the only animal who is conscious of what goes on within
+him. Or perhaps we might say that man is the reasoning animal, and we
+think this idea when we have thought the idea of _animal_ and the idea
+of _reason_. But can the idea of animal be thought by itself alone? It,
+as well as the idea of reason, must have a content; that is, each must
+be connected with other ideas, without which it would be deprived of all
+consistency.
+
+And so the mind that begins to think one single idea is compelled,
+almost dragged, to pass on to another, then to a third, and so on
+indefinitely. It finds itself in the condition of the man who tried to
+grasp a single link of a chain, just one, and found that he could not
+have it except on condition of taking the whole chain. So it is with
+ideas. We may not be capable of encompassing all of them in one single
+thought; but whenever we try to fix any one of them in our mind, it
+presents itself to us as a knot in which many other ideas are
+interlaced, twisted, and entangled. They form an infinite chain, in
+which it is not possible to think the first link or the last one,
+because the beginning is welded to the end, and we turn and turn and
+never reach the last. Is not this the nature of the ideas as we see
+them, as they constitute the field from which we must harvest all our
+possible thoughts?
+
+Ideas are not, therefore, a true multiplicity, because they are not
+things, either material or ideal, and because they do not occupy any
+space whatsoever. Our imagination may present them to us as so many
+lights of an ideal sky; but our intelligence warns us that they cannot
+be separated one from the other and placed side by side. As I have
+already said: when we think one, we think them all. Or in any event we
+should, if we had mastered all that there is to be known. So that to our
+thought ideas appear as constituting one unique whole, a unity, that
+something which we call science, truth, knowledge. They are not a
+multitude, for the simple reason that in multiplicity they would be
+unthinkable. Their connection with and participation in an absolute
+unity come from the fact that they are the object of thought, and are
+therefore submitted to its activity, whereby they are ordered,
+correlated, organised, unified. In order that we may say that one idea
+contains another, or many others, we must analyse this first idea and
+define it. This first idea must be distinguished from the others, and
+they likewise among themselves. It is not therefore sufficient to say
+that there are these ideas, motionless, inert, lifeless, as they
+necessarily would be if they existed _per se_, as objects of mere
+possible contemplation. There must also be some one to analyse them,
+define them, and distinguish them. It is not enough to have the material
+of thought, we need thought also to mould and fashion this material,
+turn it effectively into thought stuff, reduce it to something
+susceptible of being thought. Ideas as things would in no way be related
+among themselves. But they do have that relationship which is generated
+by thought as it thinks them. Thought generates this relationship not as
+a fixed one, as would be the case if it were inherent in the things
+themselves; but as a relationship which is being formed by degrees, and
+which is continuously changing and developing. No ideal, abiding
+science, existing only as the object of a vague phantasy, can therefore
+result from this relationship. It constitutes instead a science which is
+ever re-formed and is never formed; it gives to the ideas an ever
+renewed aspect: it matures them, elaborates them, perfects them, by
+concentrating on each one of them the constantly increasing light of the
+system into which it closely binds them.
+
+Ideas, then, as we really think them, are not a minutely fractioned and
+scattered multiplicity. Nor are they a mass of concurrent elements. They
+are Thought as it becomes articulate, and gains distinctness by these
+many Limbs, by these ideas, which exist, all of them, in the process by
+which they are gradually formed, developed, and complicated, and arrayed
+in an order which is constantly being renewed and which is never
+definitely perfected.
+
+There are not then many ideas; there is one Idea, which is Thought. Only
+in a metaphorical sense can we consider them as things; and, properly
+speaking, they are the human person itself as actualised in thought,
+which is busily occupied in the construction of knowledge. They are an
+indivisible unity, in which each idea is found collaborating with every
+other one so as to answer the questions which Thought constantly
+propounds. They are the human person, not the persons; for we have
+already concluded that only in an abstract sense is it possible to speak
+of many persons; concretely there is but one universal Person which is
+not multiplicable.
+
+There are not, then, going back to our original division, persons and
+things, material and spiritual. At the most there is one person, Man,
+and there are the material things which constitute this nature, as it
+occupies space, and in which we too believe we have a place, in as much
+as we consider ourselves beings of nature. Nothing beyond this can be
+conceived: on one side a sole immultiplicable reality, on the other a
+manifold reality, indefinitely divisible.
+
+Here we might perhaps stop considering the special interest that called
+forth this inquiry. For no one could possibly suppose for a moment that
+culture could be placed in the midst of material things rather than in
+the spiritual reality which is a person. However, since the intimate
+nature of this spiritual reality which we call culture is not yet
+clearly revealed, we must continue our investigations, and give more
+attention to this division which for a moment we thought might be final.
+I mean the division of the world into persons and things: the equipoise
+of spirit and matter.
+
+Do we really _think_ this matter as we say we do, and which we believe
+we are justified in opposing to the spirit, in as much as the spirit is
+unity or universality, and matter, in its entirety, in every one of its
+parts, in everything, is an indefinite multiplicity? Matter can in truth
+be thought only on condition that it be possible to think multiplicity,
+that pure multiplicity which is the characteristic quality of matter.
+
+What then is the meaning of multiplicity? In absolute terms we call
+multiple that which consists of elements each one of which is quite
+independent of all the others, and absolutely devoid of any and every
+relationship with them. The materialist conceived the world as an
+aggregate of atoms, separated one from the other and having no
+reciprocal relevance of any sort whatsoever. In the world of pure
+quantity, which is the same as absolute multiplicity, mathematical
+science claims the knowledge of units indifferent to their nexus, and
+therefore susceptible of being united and separated, of being summed up
+and divided, without any alteration taking place within the individual
+unit itself. Numerical units are therefore pre-eminently irrelative.
+
+But the concept itself of the multiplicity of irrelative elements is an
+absurd one. In order that we may conceive many unrelated elements we
+must, to start with, be able to conceive a couple of such elements. Let
+us take A and B, absolutely unrelated, and such that the concept of one
+will contain nothing of the other's, and will therefore exclude it from
+itself. If A did not so exclude B, something of B would be found in A,
+and we could no longer speak of the two elements as irrelative.
+Irrelativity means reciprocal exclusion, a capacity by which each term
+is opposed to the other, and prevents the other from having anything in
+common with it. Without this reciprocal action whereby each term turns
+to the other and excludes it from itself, establishing itself as a
+negation of it, there would be no irrelativity. But this action by which
+each term is referred to the other so as to deny it, what is it but a
+relationship? Every effort therefore tending to break up reality into
+parts completely repugnant amongst themselves, mutually excluding one
+another, and therefore reciprocally indifferent, results in the very
+opposite of what was intended, viz.: the relative in place of the
+irrelative, unity instead of multiplicity.
+
+Neither duality nor multiplicity is conceivable without that unity
+whereby the two engender that whole in which the two units are
+connected, even though they mutually exclude one another: without that
+unity which fuses and unifies every multiplicity determined in a number,
+which correlates among themselves the units which constitute the number.
+We could strip multiplicity of all unity only by not thinking it. But
+then in the gloom of what is not thought, multiplicity truly enough
+would not be unity, but it would not even be multiplicity, because it
+could not be anything at all. Or, if we prefer, it would be absolutely
+unthinkable.
+
+Thought then establishes relationships among the units of the multiple,
+and thus constitutes them as the units of the manifold, and as forming
+multiplicity. It adds and divides, composes and decomposes, and
+variously distributes, materialising and dematerialising, so to speak,
+the reality which it thinks. For it materialises the reality when it
+conceives it as manifold: but it can conceive it as such only by
+unifying it, and therefore by dematerialising it and reabsorbing it into
+its own spiritual substance.
+
+Matter is a manifold reality, without unity. What it is we already have
+seen: a material reality, and as such divisible into parts, placed in
+the world in the midst of a congeneric multitude. Now, since pure
+multiplicity is not conceivable except on condition that we abstract
+from that relationship to which the reciprocal exclusiveness of manifold
+elements is reduced, it is evident that matter and things are abstract
+entities. Thought stops to consider them, and regards them as existent,
+only because it withdraws the attention from that part of itself which
+it contributes to the making of the object represented. Thought
+therefore prescinds from that unity which material things could not by
+themselves contain, but from which it is impossible to prescind
+absolutely unless we wish to be reduced to an absurd conception.
+
+Objective things then, the world of matter itself which we are wont to
+oppose in equipoise to the person, are in truth not separable from it.
+For matter has its foundation in thought by which the personality is
+actualised. Things are what we in our own thought counterpose to
+ourselves who think them. Outside of our thought they are absolutely
+nothing. Their material hardness itself has to be lent to them by us,
+for it ultimately is to be resolved into multiplicity, and multiplicity
+implies spiritual unity.
+
+This then is the world: an infinity of things all of which have however
+their root in us. Not in "us" as we are represented ordinarily in the
+midst of things; not in the empirical and abstract "us" which feeds the
+vanity of the empty-headed egoist, of him who has not the faintest
+notion of what he really is, who can therefore think of himself only as
+enclosed within the tight husk of his own flesh and of his particular
+passions. No! they are rooted in that true "us" by which we think, and
+agree in one same thought, while thinking all things, including
+ourselves as opposed to things. And he who fails to reach this profound
+source, this root from which all reality receives its vitalising sap,
+may indeed get a blurred glimpse of a blind, inert, material mechanism,
+but he cannot even fix and determine this mechanism. He cannot upon
+further reflection stop at the conviction that it is in truth, as it
+appears in semblance, something real, for it reveals itself to him as so
+absurd as to become unthinkable. The world then is in us; it is our
+world, and it lives in the spirit. It lives the very life of that person
+which we strive to realise, sometimes satisfied with our work, but
+oftener unsatisfied and restless. And there is the life of culture.
+
+It is not possible to conceive knowledge otherwise than as living
+knowledge, and as the extolment of our own personality. This is our
+conclusion. We shall, later on, derive from it two corollaries that are
+very important for teachers, in as much as they bear directly on the
+problems of education.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+  [2] _I Promessi Sposi_ ("The Betrothed").
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+THE ATTRIBUTES OF CULTURE
+
+
+From the concept of the spirituality of culture, we derive all the
+fundamental propositions of pedagogy. But in as much as this conception
+of culture coincides with that of personality, or of the spirit, it is
+evident that all the fundamental propositions of the philosophy of the
+spirit are also derived from it. In fact, we separate pedagogy from the
+philosophy of the spirit only because of didactic convenience. To
+determine, then, the attributes of culture, by which education becomes
+actual, we have but to consider the nature of the spirit and endeavour
+to define its attributes. This way we must follow if we are ever to
+acquire a thorough comprehension of the principles of the several
+theories of education, principles which are but the laws immanent to the
+life of education itself in its effective development.
+
+The assertion that "culture is the human spirit" means nothing unless we
+first define this spirit and understand its attributes. We cannot
+possess a concept which is not determined; and the determinations of a
+concept are the constituent attributes of the reality which we strive to
+conceive, and which is not thinkable if deprived of any of these
+attributes. The following example, appropriate even though trite, will
+make my meaning clearer. Physical bodies cannot be conceived without
+also conceiving gravity. Gravity is then an attribute of the physical
+body, and as such it determines the concept of it. In the same way, to
+conceive the spirit is to embrace with thought the concepts which are
+absolutely inseparable from the concept of the spirit.
+
+This inquiry into the nature of the attributes of culture, though it
+constantly progresses towards a satisfactory solution, yet seems at
+times to be losing ground on account of the ever-increasing difficulties
+that beset its advance. It is true, no doubt, that human thought, driven
+by the irresistible desire to know itself, has made some headway towards
+mastering the concept of itself. Philosophy has indeed progressed, and
+the modern world can proudly point to truths unsuspected by the thinkers
+of antiquity. But the assiduous and prolonged toil of thought engaged in
+this task has at all moments disclosed new difficulties; it has ever
+been busy sketching new concepts which subsequently prove immature and
+in need of further elaboration, and has been pushing its investigations
+to such depths as to make it difficult to follow its lead without
+sometimes going astray, without frequently stopping in utter weariness
+at the roadside.
+
+Men talk learnedly nowadays of the human spirit, but with a doctrine
+which is often insufficient or, as we say, not up to date. They have
+stopped at one of those wayside concepts where thought no doubt passed
+and temporarily halted, but from which it moved on towards a more
+distant goal. For while this long history of the endeavours by which man
+struggles onward towards the understanding of his own nature is the
+basis on which modern philosophy builds its firm concept of the spirit,
+yet for those who have not attained the vantage ground of this modern
+philosophy, this history is unfortunately a very intricate maze; it is
+the bewildering
+
+  "selva selvaggia ed aspra e forte"[3]
+
+from which it is difficult ever to issue. And therefore it is much
+easier, as Dante once remarked, to teach those who are completely
+ignorant than those who have a smattering of philosophy. But to-day
+culture is so intimately connected with philosophical speculation that
+the greater part of educated men profess this or that system without
+being aware of it. And when such men do take up the study of philosophy
+_per se_, they no longer possess the mental ingenuousness, the
+speculative candour, which would enable them to grasp the obvious,
+evident, incontrovertible truth of the most profound philosophical
+proposition.
+
+This inquiry then is difficult. It demands either a long, methodic,
+laborious study of the history of philosophy conducted with critical
+vigour, or that unyielding tenacity of the mind which is the surest sign
+of sound spiritual character; that steadfast firmness by which man, once
+in possession of a clearly irrefutable, truly fundamental truth,
+rigorously excludes from his soul all the allurements of prejudice, all
+convictions formerly entertained, even though extremely plausible, if
+they contradict his Truth. For he trusts that these perplexities, these
+difficulties which he is not now in condition to explain, will be
+removed in virtue of that very thought to which he has confidently
+committed himself.
+
+This unflinching resolve is the courage of the philosopher, who has
+never feared to brave common sense, and single-handed to marshal against
+the multitude the array of his seemingly absurd assertions, which
+however, in the progress of their reciprocal integrations, have
+subsequently contributed to redeem this very multitude from error,--from
+that error which is intellectual misery, social wretchedness, economic,
+political, and moral destitution. Because of this inflexible firmness
+the philosopher has never dreaded that boundless solitude, that thin
+atmosphere to which he is uplifted by thought, and where at first he has
+the sensation of fainting away into the rarefied air.
+
+We must then muster up courage and relinquish all the ideas which we
+once accepted, even though they still tempt us with superficial
+glitterings of truth, when once they have proved themselves to be in
+contradiction with experience. For I too hold experience to be the
+touchstone of all our thoughts, philosophy not excluded. But I insist
+that we be careful lest we confound the mockery of the first puppet that
+dupes our imagination with genuine experience; that in as much as every
+man speaks of experience in exclusive accordance with whatever concept
+he has been able to form of it, we too determine beforehand what our
+conception of it is. Now I say that no concept of experience can be
+validly entertained which does not take into account that truth which
+presents itself to us as truly fundamental and therefore to be used as
+an indispensable basis for all subsequent conceptual constructions.
+
+Such fundamental truth we have previously attained when we established
+that "We" are not what we seem to be in the dim empirical representation
+of our personality, a thing among things. Our "Self" is the deeper one
+by means of which we see all things in whose midst our other self too is
+discernible. The reality of this, our deeper "self" which cannot be
+conceived as a thing, without which nothing can be conceived, in the
+same way that the trunk, the branches, and the boughs are not possible
+without the root from which the tree issues, is a truth which we may
+never grasp, but if we do, we shall forever be compelled to see in it
+the source of all other possible truths, including the concept of
+experience. For once we have securely mastered it, we will be convinced
+that it is impossible to conceive whatever is considered and thought of
+as constituting this world otherwise than as this world which _we_ see,
+which _we_ touch, and which, in short, we look upon as the contents of
+_our_ experience: and that it is also impossible to conceive this
+experience without referring it to _us_ who have it not as an object of
+possession but as an activity which we exercise. So that nothing,
+absolutely nothing, can be thought when the relationship between things
+and experience, and again the rapport between experience and ourselves
+is obtained, without thinking the deep reality of this our "self." We
+may again close our eyes to this reality or hold it in abeyance, but we
+can do so only after we have effaced every notion of the two
+relationships just mentioned, and when we again have immersed ourselves
+in the mystery of things, in the gloom of their apparent independent
+existence, of their ever self-defeating multiplicity.
+
+Against this reality of the profound "us" which is the genuine spiritual
+reality, there are innumerable and awe-inspiring difficulties. They are
+difficulties that so violently oppress our minds and our hearts as to
+dismay us, and almost force us to give up this concept of a reality on
+which all other realities depend, and which cannot but be one alone, and
+infinite, and really universal.[4] Alone, because in it all opposites
+must coincide: the good and the evil, what is true and what is false,
+life and death, peace and war, pleasure and pain, yours and mine,--all
+things, in short, that we have been obliged to sunder and distinguish in
+order to take our bearings and meet the exigencies of life. Formidable
+difficulties indeed! And they are the problems of philosophy. It would
+be childish and senseless to dispose of them by ignoring that concept
+from which they derive. It is the philosopher's task, it is the strict
+duty of human thought to face the problems as they rise out of the
+positions which it has captured in its onward march. For to yield
+ground, to turn the back to a truth which has been demonstrated to be
+indispensable, that is impossible.
+
+Those who wish to orient themselves in the world to-day must, before
+all, cling to this: that the basis of every thinkable reality is our
+spiritual reality, one, infinite, universal,--the reality which unites
+us all in one sole spiritual life; the reality in which teacher and
+pupils meet when by their reciprocal comprehensions they constitute a
+real school.
+
+What then is this one, infinite, universal reality? Is this question
+truly unanswerable as it seems to be, as it has often in the past
+been declared to be? For, it has been argued, in order to give an
+answer, whether here or elsewhere, we must somehow think the reality
+to which the answer is referred. We must think it and therefore
+distinguish it from all the others, and so presuppose it as one
+existing among many and as forming with them a multiplicity; and this is
+the very opposite of that reality which we are striving to think.
+Or, in other words, when we try to say what the subject is, we must,
+somehow, set it as the object, and thus convert it into what is the
+opposite of the subject. Or again: the subject cannot think itself,
+because if it did, it would split into the duality of itself as
+thinking and itself as thought, and what is thinking is not what is
+thought. But all these objections together with many others of the
+same force that are ordinarily raised against radical idealism have but
+one single defect; which is such, however, as to make it hopeless for
+the idealist ever to succeed in being understood by those that resort
+to this kind of argument. These opponents, strangely enough, miss the
+most elementary meaning of the terms with which they claim to be
+familiar. They fail to see that when the idealist says "subject," he
+cannot possibly mean by it one abstract term of the relationship
+_subject-object_, which, because of this very abstractness, is
+devoid of all consistency. The _ego_ is called "subject," because it
+contains within itself an object which is not diverse but identical
+with it. As a pure subject it is already a relationship; it is
+self-affirmation and therefore affirmation of an object, but of an
+object, be it remembered, in which the subject is not alienated from
+itself; by which, rather, it truly returns to itself, embraces itself,
+and thus originatively realises itself. In order to be _I_, I must
+know myself, I must set my own self in front of myself. Only thus I am
+I, a personality, and "subject," the centre of my world or of my
+thought. For if I should not objectify myself to myself, if in the
+endeavour to free myself completely from all objectivity, I were to
+retreat into the first term,--a purely abstract one,--of this
+relationship by which I posit myself, I should remain on the hither side
+of this relationship, that is of that very reality in which I am to
+realise myself. So then by this inner objectification the subject
+does not at all depart from itself. It rather enters into its own
+subjectivity, and constitutes it. Surely man may, Narcissus-like,
+make an idol of his own self: he may worship himself in a fixed
+semblance already determined and crystallised. But in so doing, he
+materialises himself, makes his person into a thing, looks away from
+his true spiritual life, misses self-consciousness, averts his thought
+from his own intimate being. This self-conversion from person into
+thing takes place, not when we think of ourselves, but rather when we
+fail to do so.
+
+Philosophy then, as the thinking of the Spirit in its absolute
+subjectivity, is the Spirit's own life. For the spirit lives by
+constituting itself as the ego, and it does this by thinking itself, by
+acquiring consciousness of itself. And while philosophising then, we
+cannot but ask what is this one infinite universal reality which is our
+_Self_ and is called the spirit. We cannot dispense with this inquiry
+into the attributes of the spirit, which is at the same time the inquiry
+into the attributes of culture.
+
+The examination of the possibility of this investigation has carried us,
+without our being aware of it, into the very midst of the inquiry
+itself. For what we considered as an elementary meaning of the word
+"spirit," the _ego_, which is not something in unrelated immediacy, but
+which constitutes itself, posits itself, realises itself in that it
+thinks itself and becomes self-consciousness,--this is also the ultimate
+characteristic which can be assigned to the spirit, or to man himself,
+that is, to what in man is essentially human. If we examine all the
+other differences that have been assigned or could be found by which the
+spirit is distinguishable from things, we shall find, after due
+reflection, that they all cease to have a real meaning as soon as we
+neglect the most profound characteristic of spiritual reality, viz.,
+that this reality is generated by virtue of consciousness. Every form of
+reality other than spiritual, not only is presented to thought as not
+conditioned by consciousness, but seems to afford no possibility of
+being thought (in relation to consciousness) otherwise than as
+conditioning this very consciousness. And when we say of the spiritual
+being that it does not know what it is, that it is not acquainted with
+itself, that it therefore remains concealed from itself, we conceive
+then its spiritual being in a manner analogous to that by which we
+conceive material or bodily being,--externally visible, but internally
+unknown. And we say that the individual fails to grasp his own moral
+nature, because in fact we make this moral being into something natural,
+similar to that which is attributed to each one of the things that the
+spirit sets in opposition to itself.
+
+But the spirit has no nature of its own, no destiny to direct its
+course, no predetermined inevitable lot. It has no fixed qualities, no
+set mode of being, such as constitute, from the birth to the death of an
+individual, the species to which it belongs, to whose law it is
+compelled by nature to submit, whose tyrannical limits and bounds he can
+never trespass. The spirit, we have seen, cannot but be conceived as
+free, and its freedom is this privileged attitude to be what it wants
+to,--angel or beast, as the ancients said; good or evil, true or false,
+or, generally speaking, to be or not to be. To be or not to be
+man,--the spirit, that which he is, and which he would not be if he did
+not _become_.
+
+Man is not man by virtue of natural laws. He _becomes_ man. By man I do
+not mean an animal among animals, held to no accounting of his deeds,
+who comes into the world, grows, lives, and dies, unaware. Man from the
+time he considers himself such, and in so far as he considers himself
+such, _becomes_ through his own efforts. He makes himself what he is the
+first time he opens his eyes on his inner consciousness and says
+"_I_,"--the "I" which never would have been uttered, had he not been
+aroused from the sluggish torpor of natural beings (such as our phantasy
+represents them) and had not started thinking under his own power and
+through his own determination.
+
+This freedom which is man's prerogative offers merely an external view,
+has a very hazy consistency, and appears as something illusory, only
+because we do not define it exclusively as autonomous becoming or
+self-making. For in fact "becoming" is ordinarily understood in a way
+which does not admit of being considered as man's prerogative. Does not
+every living being _become_? The plant vegetates only because it too has
+an inborn potency by which it is forced from one stage of development to
+the next, from which in this process it acquires the mode of being which
+is peculiarly its own, which it did not have before, which no other
+being could from the outside have conferred upon it. And yet the plant
+is not a person but a thing: it is not spirit, but a simple object, and
+as such it is endowed with a definite nature and moved by a definite
+law, which is the very antithesis of the freedom which is peculiar to
+the spirit.
+
+I might without further thought say that this conception of becoming,
+referred to the plant as a plant, is improper, that in reality the plant
+does not _become_ for the very reason that we deny it its freedom. But I
+shall begin by stating that the becoming which we attribute to the
+spiritual reality must be specified and determined with greater
+accuracy, if we are to consider it as the characteristic of this
+reality. When so specified and determined, it will be found to coincide
+with the conception of freedom. Becoming, then, can be taken in two
+ways, which for brevity's sake we shall call the _autonomous_ and the
+_heteronomous_. That is, the being which becomes may have the law of its
+becoming either in itself or outside of itself. Becoming covers such
+cases as, for example, the filling of a vessel into which a liquid is
+poured. But this becoming takes place in a manner which has its law in
+the person that fills the vessel; and the filling therefore may be
+considered not so much a becoming as the effect of a becoming, that is,
+as the result of that act which is being performed by man. An
+heteronomous becoming is to be traced back to the becoming of the cause
+which produces it. The plant vegetates, and its vegetation is a
+development, a becoming. But could it grow without the rays of the sun,
+the moisture of the soil? The plant vegetates in consequence of its
+nature, that nature which in accord with our ordinary way of considering
+plant life it possessed from the time it was a green blade just
+sprouting; nay, from the time it was a seed in the ground, or rather
+when it was as yet in the plant that produced the seed, or better still
+when it was in its infinitely remote origin. It is evident therefore
+that we cannot think of the law of becoming as residing, so to speak,
+within a given plant. Whether we call it nature or name it God, this law
+transcends the becoming of the plant, its heteronomous becoming as we
+called it, and is properly the becoming of something else. But the
+becoming of man is autonomous. If he _becomes_ intelligent, that is, if
+he understands, he does so through a principle which is intrinsically
+his own; for no man can be made to comprehend what he himself will not
+grasp. If he becomes good, his perfected will can in no manner
+whatsoever be considered as determined by an outside cause, without at
+the same time being thereby deprived of all that is characteristic of
+goodness.
+
+But in stating that man's becoming is autonomous (or true) we have
+simply formulated a problem without giving it a solution. What does this
+autonomous becoming consist in? Simply to notice its existence would
+never help us to understand it. Every fact is intelligible only as an
+effect of a cause. And a cause is a cause on condition that it be a
+thing other than the effect. In order to understand the autonomous
+becoming or freedom of the spirit, we must not consider it as a fact,
+that is, as something done. A thing made presupposes the making; and
+from the deed we must rise to the doing, but to a doing which shall not
+itself be a thing done, a fact, and similar therefore to the doings
+which we witness as mere spectators. The doing in which our autonomous
+becoming is detected is that one of which _We_ are not spectators but
+actors, we the spectators of every other doing, we as the thinking
+Activity.
+
+This then is the becoming which rigorously may be called autonomous: the
+one which we know not as spectators but as actors, which comes forth as
+that reality which is produced by the act of knowing, and therefore is
+not known because it exists, but exists because it is known,--our
+existence. It is the existence of us who know, for example, that a==b,
+and who are such only in so far as we know and are conscious of knowing
+that a==b,--of us who suffer or rejoice, and who cannot be in this or
+that state except by knowing it, so that no cause could reduce us to
+such a state, unless we were conscious of such a cause and felt its
+valid application to us,--of us, above all, who are not ourselves unless
+we apperceive ourselves, by reflecting upon ourselves, and thus
+acquiring existence as a personality, as human self-consciousness, as
+thought. Thought in opposition to nature, with which it is constantly
+contrasted, is nothing but this self-reflection which establishes the
+personality, and that reality which, absolutely, is not, but becomes.
+Every reality other than thought _becomes_ relatively; and its becoming
+is intelligible simply as the effect of another becoming. Only thought,
+only the Spirit, is absolute becoming, and its becoming is its liberty.
+
+But whether it be called "freedom" or "becoming," the important thing is
+to avoid the mistake, which was general in the past and is still very
+common to-day, of separating this attribute of the spirit from the
+spirit itself, thus failing to understand exactly what is properly
+called the attribute. For example, we say that the triangle is a
+three-sided plane figure, and we seem to be able to distinguish and
+therefore to separate logically the idea of _triangle_ from the idea of
+_three-sided plane figure_. But a little reflection will make it evident
+that in thinking the idea of triangle, we think nothing unless we at
+least think the plane trilateral figure. So that we do not really have
+two ideas, which however closely connected may yet be separated to be
+conjoined again: what we have is one single idea. And such is the
+agreement of the becoming and of the spirit, and in general of every
+attribute and of the reality to which it belongs. When we begin
+inquiring whether the spirit is free or not, we set out on an erroneous
+track which will take us into a blind alley with no possibility of exit.
+All the unsurmountable difficulties encountered at all times by the
+advocates of the doctrine of freedom arise in fact from the error of
+first thinking the spirit (or whatsoever that reality may be for which
+freedom is claimed) and of subsequently propounding the question of its
+properties. For the spirit is _free_ in as much as it is nothing else
+than _freedom_; and the spirit "becomes" in as much as it is nothing
+else than "becoming," and this becoming cannot therefore be considered
+as the husk enveloping the kernel--the spirit. There is no kernel to the
+spirit: it is in no manner comparable to a moving body in which the body
+itself could be distinguished from motion, and would admit therefore of
+being thought as in a state of rest even though rest is considered
+impossible. The spirit, continuing our simile and correcting it, is
+motion without a mass,--a motion surely that cannot be represented to
+our imagination, for the very reason that motion is peculiar to the body
+and does not belong to the spirit; and imagination is the thought of
+bodies, and not of the thought which thinks the bodies. This idea of
+motion without a mass, baffling as it is to our imagination, is perhaps
+the most effective warning that can be given to those who wish to fix in
+their minds the exact concept of the nature of the spirit. In order to
+avoid new terminology not sufficiently intelligible and therefore
+unpractical, we may resort to material expressions, and speak of the
+nature of the spirit as of a "thing" which becomes, and use such words
+as "kernel" and "husk." But we must never lose sight of the fact that
+this manner of speaking, which is appropriate for things, is not
+suitable for the spirit, and can be resorted to only with the
+understanding that the spirit is not a thing, and that therefore its
+whole being consists solely in its becoming.
+
+We are now in a position to understand the meaning of the spirituality
+of culture, that is, of the reduction of culture to the human
+personality obtained in the preceding chapter, as well as the
+pedagogical interest of this reduction. Culture, as the entire content
+of education, because it must be sought within the personality, and
+because it resolves itself into the life of the spirit, is not a thing,
+and does not admit of being conceived statically either in books or in
+the mind: not before nor after it is apprehended. It does not exist in
+libraries or in schools, or in us before we go to school, or while we
+still remain within its walls, or after our nourished minds have taken
+leave of it. It is in no place, at no time, in no person. Culture _is
+not_, because if it _were_, it would have to be some "thing," whereas by
+definition it is the negation of that which is capable of being anything
+whatever. It is culture in so far as it _becomes_. Culture exists as it
+develops, and in no other manner. It is always in the course of being
+formed, it _lives_.
+
+But to understand this _life_, and in order to grasp more firmly this
+"idea" of culture which is a spiritual banner to rally educators, I
+must again bring up a certain distinction. Culture, I said, lives
+(that is, it is culture) when it is endowed with a life that is
+entirely different from the life which biologically animates all
+living beings, ourselves included. The difference can be stated as
+follows: in the case of every other life, we can assert its existence
+in so far as we have knowledge of it either directly or indirectly. It
+is always, however, different from us and from our knowing it; so
+much so that the possibilities of going astray are very great. But
+for the life of culture, which is the life of our spirit, we have no
+need of being informed by the experience of others, or even of
+ourselves. We live it. It is our very thought,--this thought which
+may indeed err in respect to what is different from itself, as not
+tallying with it; but which cannot possibly deceive us in regard to
+itself, since it is unable not to be itself. The life of culture is
+not a spectacle but an activity. Nor is it activity for some and a
+spectacle for others. Culture is never a show for any one. No person can
+ever know for his fellow being. What, for me, Aristotle knows, is
+what I know of Aristotle.
+
+Culture,--this untiring activity which never for a moment turns into a
+spectacle for any of us, which ever therefore demands effort and
+toil,--could not avoid becoming a show and being made up into a
+"thing," could not escape the danger of dying as culture by degenerating
+into something anti-spiritual, fruitless, and material, if, while yet
+being activity, it were not at the same time in some way a spectacle to
+itself. This point demands careful consideration. It is not sufficient
+to say that culture, that thought is life, and not the thought of life.
+We will not attain the conception of culture by merely contrasting, as
+we have done, our life, the life we lead as actors, with the life of
+others which we behold as spectators, or by opposing the life of
+ourselves as thinking beings to the life we possess as organic beings,
+to the life of our senses by which we are on a par with the other
+animals. The life of thought, in its peculiar inwardness and
+subjectivity, is still conceived to-day by powerful thinkers, by analogy
+with life in a biological sense, as irreflective and instinctive, or, as
+they say, as simple intuition. But thought which though living is
+irreflective becomes indeed an active performance, a drama without
+spectators, but it also remains as a drama represented for spectators
+who are absent, and who should be informed of those things which direct
+experience had not placed before their eyes. And it is difficult to
+surmise who would impart to them this information if the house were
+empty.
+
+In other words, I mean to say that this would-be intuitive life of
+thought, fading away into the subconscious, melting into the naturality
+of the unconscious, is, like every form of natural life effectually a
+stranger to thought (that is _conceived_ as a stranger to thought), an
+object and nothing more than an object of thought, and therefore
+incapable of ever being a subject, of ever having value as subject, that
+is, as thought itself. For that reason we can never effectively think
+it; for never can we truly think any thing which is natural and thought
+of as natural. Who can say what the life of the plant is? To posit
+nature by thought is to posit something irreducible to thought and
+therefore unthinkable. This perhaps would not necessarily be a serious
+drawback for the life itself of thought if we lived it. For would it not
+be sufficient to live it? Why insist on _thinking_ its life? Why demand
+a head, so to speak, as a hood for the head? But there is a drawback,
+and a serious one, as a result of the fact that this life itself of
+thought does not now, never will in the future, come before us as that
+irreflective life which it is claimed to be: it comes to us as a
+philosophy which recommends it and advocates it as the only possible
+life of thought. In fact, in order to be able to speak of this life, we
+must first think it. But how could we think it, if the only possible
+life was that one which we intend to think, and not the one with which
+we think this irreflective life?
+
+So then, in order that this life of ours (truly, intimately, spiritually
+ours) may not be confounded with the life of natural things, with that
+pseudo-life which is only an apparent becoming, an effect of another
+becoming by which it is transcended, it is not sufficient, as I started
+out to say, to call it a drama and not a spectacle. As a result of more
+careful determinations we may now say that it is not another man's
+spectacle, but our drama which is at the same time our spectacle too. In
+it the actors play to themselves. It is self-conscious activity. It is
+activity perpetually watching over itself.
+
+And again: Just as the becoming of the spirit would cease to be that one
+sole becoming which it actually is, were we to distinguish the spirit
+from its becoming, so the consciousness of spiritual activity would also
+become unintelligible if we were to distinguish, as philosophers
+insistently do, between activity and awareness, between the performance
+and the show. The distinction here too arises from referring to the
+spirit, the mode of thinking which is suited for the thinking of things.
+In the sphere of things, doing is one thing, watching the thing as it is
+done is another. But to us the spirit's becoming has shown itself to be
+the very negation of this distinction between actor and spectacle, so
+that in saying that the actor is his own spectator we cannot introduce,
+within the unity in which we had taken refuge, the dualism which is
+excluded from the concept of the spirit. I have spoken of "motion
+without mass," turning a deaf ear to the claims of our imagination. Now
+I shall add something that clashes even more violently against the laws
+which govern our image-making; and I shall do so in order to make it
+very clear that the spirit does not live in the world of things which is
+swept over by our imagination. I shall now call the spirit a gazing
+motion. The spirit's acting--its eternal process, its immanent
+becoming--is not an escort to thinking, but the very thinking itself,
+which is neither cause nor effect: neither the antecedent nor the
+consequent, nor yet the concomitant of the action by which the spirit
+goes on constantly impersonating itself. _It is this very acting._
+
+In accordance with the popular point of view which, as I have said, is
+shared by great philosophers, a distinction is made between the spirit
+considered as will and the spirit regarded as intellect, or as
+consciousness, or as thought, or whatever term may be used to indicate
+the becoming aware of this spiritual activity. But if the spirit in that
+it wills did not also think, we should be thrust back to the position
+which we have shown above to be untenable, and be forced to admit that
+the irreflective life of the spirit cannot be fused with the reflective
+life, and is therefore unaccountable and unthinkable. The will which
+_qua_ will is not also thought, is in respect to thought which knows it
+a simple object, a spectacle and not a drama. It is nature and not
+spirit. And a thought which _qua_ thought is not will, is, in respect
+to the will which integrates it, a spectator without a spectacle. If
+there is to be a drama, and a drama which is the spirit, it is
+inevitable that the will be the thought, and that the thought be the
+will, over and beyond that distinction which serves if anything to
+characterise the opposition between nature and spirit.
+
+Should we, returning to our comparison, demand of that motion which is
+spirit a moving mass; should we, grounded on the naive and primitive
+conception which identifies knowing with the seeing of external things,
+demand within the sphere of the spiritual activity itself a doing in
+which knowing should find its object all ready made, we should continue
+to wander helplessly in the maze of things, and to grope in the mystery
+of the multiplicity of things, which are many and yet are not many. We
+would be turning our eyes away from the lode star which is the supreme
+concept of the spirit, and thereby show ourselves incapable of rising to
+that point of view which is the peculiar one of culture.
+
+Culture, as the spirit's life, which is a drama and self-awareness, is
+not simply effort and uneasy toil, it is not a tormenting restlessness
+which we may sometimes shake off, from which we would gladly be rescued.
+Nor is it a feverish excitement that consumes our life-blood and tosses
+us restlessly on a sick-bed. The spirit's life is not vexation but
+liberation from care. For the greatest of sorrows, Leopardi tells us,
+is _ennui_, the inert tedious weariness of those who find nothing to do,
+and pine away in a wasting repose which is the very antithesis of the
+life of the spirit. The negation of this life,--the obstacles, the
+hindrances, the halts it encounters,--that is the source of woe. But
+life with its energy is joy; it is joy because it is activity, our
+activity. Another man's activity as the negation of our own is
+troublesome and exasperating. The music which we enjoy (and we are able
+to enjoy it by being active) is our enjoyment. But the musical
+entertainment in which we have no part disturbs us, interferes with our
+work, irritates us. Our neighbour's joys in which for some reason we are
+unable to participate awaken envy in us, gall us, bring some manner of
+displeasure to our hearts.
+
+Culture, then, as life of the spirit, is effort, and work, but never a
+drudgery. It would be toilsome labour if the spirit had lived its life
+before we began to work; if this life had blossomed forth, and had
+realised itself without our efforts. But our effort, our work is this
+very life of the spirit, its nature, in which culture develops. Work is
+not a burdensome yoke on our will and on our personality. It is
+liberation, freedom, the act by which liberty asserts its being. Work
+may sometimes appear irksome because the freedom of its movement is
+checked by certain resistances which have to be overcome and removed.
+But in such cases it is not work which vexes us, but rather its
+opposite, sloth, against which it must combat. It follows then that the
+more intensely we occupy ourselves, the less heavily we are burdened by
+pain. For as our efforts redouble and the resistance is proportionately
+reduced, the spirit, which perishes in enthralment, is enabled to live a
+richer life.
+
+Culture then is the extolment of our being, the formation of our spirit,
+or better, its liberation and its beatification. As the realisation of
+the spirit's own nature, it is opposed to all suffering and is the
+source of blissfulness. But it must not be regarded as the fated,
+inevitable working out of an instinctive principle, or a natural law.
+The building of a bird's nest, which is the necessary antecedent to
+generation and reproduction, cannot be looked upon as work; and it is
+fruitless to try to guess whether this act is a cause of pleasure to the
+bird or a source of suffering. Instinct leads the individual to
+self-sacrifice on behalf of the species. But not even this fact, vouched
+for solely by external inferences, authorises us to conclude that the
+fulfilment of an instinctive impulse is actually accompanied by pain. So
+that it seems wiser to keep off this slippery surface of conjecture. It
+will be sufficient to note here that an action prompted by instinct,
+conceived as merely instinctive and thoroughly unconscious of the end to
+which it is subservient, is in no way to be compared with man's work.
+Human occupation is personality, will, consciousness. The animal does
+not work. But culture we have said is work. For it is liberty,
+self-formation, with no existence previous to the process; whereas the
+laws which govern the development of natural being pre-exist before the
+development itself. Culture exists only in so far as it is formed, and
+it is constituted solely by being developed. And what is more, as we
+shall see in the next chapter, culture does not even count on a
+pre-existing external matter ready to receive its informing imprint.
+
+To conclude then: culture _is_ (in its becoming) only to the extent that
+the cultivated man feels its worth, desires it, and realises it. It is a
+value, but not in the sense that man first appreciates it and
+subsequently looks for it and strives to actualise it. The value which
+man assigns to culture is that which he gradually goes on ascribing to
+_his_ own culture, and whose development coincides with the development
+of his own personality. What we ought to want is exactly what we do
+want; but we want just that which we ought to. The ideal, not the
+abstract, inadequate, and false one, but the true ideal of our
+personality, is that one toward whose realisation we are actually
+working. And the ideal of our culture is that self-same one towards
+which our busy person remains turned in the actuality of its becoming.
+But work implies a programme, and spirit means "ideal;" and when we
+speak of culture we signify thereby the value of culture, of a culture
+which as yet is not but which must be. Life is the life of the spirit as
+a duty,--as a life which we live, feeling all along that it is our duty
+to live it, and that it depends on us whether it exists or not. And
+culture could not re-enter as it does in the life of the spirit, if it
+too were not a duty, that is, if it were not this culture to whose
+development our personality is pledged. So interpreted, culture, far
+from being a destiny to which we are bound, is the progressive triumph
+of our very freedom. On these terms only, culture is a growth, and the
+spirit a becoming.
+
+This attribute, which is an ethical one, is not added to the attribute
+of Becoming any more than "becoming" was superadded to "freedom." For
+just as Becoming develops the concept of freedom, so does the ethical
+develop and accomplish the concept of becoming. Freedom is never true
+liberty unless it is a process, an absolute Becoming; but Becoming can
+only be absolute by being moral. And it is therefore impossible to speak
+of learning which is not ethical.
+
+It has often been repeated for thousands and thousands of years that
+knowledge is neither good nor bad; that it is either true or false. But
+is the True a different category from the Good? Are they not rather one
+sole identical category? Truth could be maintained in a place quite
+distinct from the grounds of morality, only so long as the world clung
+to that conception of truth which was the agreement of the subject with
+an assumed external object. But now by truth we understand the value of
+thought in which the subject becomes an object to itself and thus
+realises itself; and in clarifying this new conception of truth, we
+discover that morality is identical with it. For knowing is acting, but
+an acting which being untrammelled conforms with an ideal--Duty. And in
+this manner we explain to ourselves why the mysterious and inspired
+voice of conscience has at all times admonished man to worship Truth
+with that same intense earnestness, with those same scruples, with that
+identical personal energy, which we devote to every phase of our moral
+mission. The cult of truth is in fact what we otherwise call and
+understand to be morality, namely, the formation of our personality,
+which can be ours only by belonging to all men, and which, whether or
+not ours, is not immediate, not a given personality, but rather one
+which is intent on self-realisation, on that sacred and eternal task
+which is the Good.
+
+If we now feel culture to be free, to be a process, and an ethical one
+at that, we have succeeded in grasping its spirituality, and we are in a
+position therefore to proceed with security on that way which opens
+before the educator's eyes, as he intently goes about his work of
+creation, or, if you so wish to call it, his task as a promoter of
+culture.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+  [3] "Forest savage, rough, and stern."--Dante, _Inferno_, i. 5.
+
+  [4] Many speak of the universal and say that they conceive this
+      universal as concrete and immanent. Few, however, effectively fix
+      their thought on that universality which alone is such, which
+      alone can be such, which has nothing outside of itself, not even
+      the particular, and which is ideal on condition that the idea to
+      which it belongs be reality itself in all its determinateness. And
+      so in speaking of "universal" and of "individual" we must remember
+      that the latter cannot be anything without being the former, since
+      indeed the universal is not a merely abstract idea, but reality,
+      the reality of thought. Therefore I have here used the expression
+      "really universal".--G. G.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+THE BIAS OF REALISM
+
+
+Educators of the modern school are bent on transforming its methods and
+institutions on the basis of the conception set forth in the previous
+chapters. The subtle discussions required to make this conception clear
+must have convinced the reader that this work of educational reform
+could only succeed if preceded by such philosophical doctrines as have
+recently been evolved in Italy and are now becoming the accepted faith
+of the newer generation. To this new belief the school must be
+converted, if it is ever going to conquer that freedom which has been
+its constant aspiration, and which seems to be an indispensable
+condition for its further growth.
+
+The faith of the modern man cleaves to a life conceived and directed
+idealistically. He believes that life--true life--is man's free
+creation; that in it, therefore, human aims should gain an ever fuller
+realisation; and that these aims, these ends will not be attained unless
+thought, which is man's specific force, extends its sway so as to
+embrace nature, penetrate it, and resolve it into its own substance. He
+believes that nature, thus turned into an instrument of thought, yields
+readily to its will, not being _per se_ opposed or repugnant to the life
+and activity of the spirit, but rather homogeneous and identical with
+it. He believes, moreover, that this sway can only be obtained by
+amplifying, strengthening, and constantly potentiating our human energy,
+which means thinking, knowing, self-realising; and that self-realisation
+is not possible unless it is free, unless it be rescued from the
+prejudice of dependence upon external principles, and unless it affirms
+itself as absolute infinite activity. This is the _Kingdom of Man_
+prophesied at the dawn of modern thought. This is the work which
+science, art, religion, not less than political revolutions and social
+reforms, have gradually been accomplishing and perfecting in the last
+three hundred years. This new spiritual orientation has to a certain
+extent influenced teaching; and though without a general programme of
+substantial reforms, the ideal of education has been transformed along
+idealistic lines. This transformation, strange to say, has been effected
+in part by means of institutions which have arisen as a result of the
+recent development of industrial life and of the corresponding
+complexity in economic and social relations. These schools, because of
+their names, seem to be quite removed from the idealistic tendencies of
+modern civilisations. Whether they be called technical, business, or
+industrial schools, they seem to be and are in fact the result of a
+realistic conception of life. But such realism, we must remember, is
+far from being opposed to our idealism, and should not be compared with
+the realism which we have objected to. We should rather consider it as
+the most effective demonstration of the idealistic trend of our times.
+For these institutions are founded on the theory that knowledge
+increases man's power in the world by enabling him to overcome the
+obstacles by which nature, if ignored and unknown, would hinder the free
+development of civilisation in general, and of those individuals in
+particular in whom and through whom civilisation becomes actual.
+
+Realism, on the other hand, as the opposite of the idealistic conception
+of life and culture, was shown to be based on a conception of reality
+which exists totally outside of human thought and of the civilisation
+which is produced by it,--of a reality existing _per se_ in such a way
+that no end peculiar to man, no free human life, can be conceived which
+will have the power of bending this reality toward itself, of resolving
+it within itself. This realistic point of view is not different from the
+outlook of the primitive man who, awed by the might of nature, kneels
+submissively before its invisible power, which, he thinks, controls
+these forces. It is the accepted belief of the naive and dreamy
+consciousness of child-like humanity; but it is none the less a
+conception which is opposed to the course constantly followed by
+civilisation. Its dangers must be made very clear and its menace removed
+from the path of its triumphant enemy. To overcome this realistic point
+of view in the field of education is the duty of teachers, who must be
+in a position to recognise it, and to track it into whatever hiding
+places it may lurk. I intend therefore in this chapter to point out some
+of the most notable realistic prejudices which, though still tolerated
+by contemporary thought, ought to be definitely stamped out, if we are
+really convinced of the spiritual character of culture and of its
+essential attributes.
+
+I shall here bring up again a consideration which I touched upon in the
+first chapter,--an idea which is the fundamental prejudice of the
+realistic theory of education in its antagonism to the profound
+exigencies of the free spiritual life which education should promote. I
+mean the idea of Science (with a capital S),--that Science which is
+imagined as towering over and above the men who toil and suffer, think
+and struggle in quest of its light and of its force; that Science which
+would be so beautiful, and majestic, and impressive, were it not for the
+fact that it does not exist. This Science is looked upon as infallible,
+without crises, without reverses, without vicissitudes of doctrines,
+without parties, and without nationality,--without history in short; for
+history is full of these baser occurrences; and men, without a single
+exception, even the greatest of scientists, even the lofty geniuses that
+have transformed or systematised knowledge, are all in some measure
+prone to err. The exceptions which are adduced to contradict this
+statement are so few, so limited by restrictions and by hair-splitting
+distinctions, that we can hardly allow them; especially when we consider
+that even granting the infallible oracular character of some men's
+utterances, the fact remains that his listeners must undergo the process
+of understanding him, and in so doing they may go astray. So that from
+superhuman unfailing verities, we slip back instantly to human
+fallibility. Infallible Science, then, is not known, cannot be known to
+mankind; for the simple reason that we who constitute it are subject to
+error, and being ourselves prone to fail, we expose science to the same
+danger. If it does exist somewhere it surely is not in this world in
+which we live, thinking, knowing, and--creating science.
+
+This mythical science, unsullied and incorruptible, segregated from all
+possible intercourse with thought, ever soaring in the pure air of
+divine essences, is yet the mother of a numerous offspring, the parent
+of countless daughters as virginal and as infallible as the mother
+herself. These are the particular sciences, bearing various names, but
+all of them equally worthy of the distinction of the capital S in the
+eyes of their realistic worshippers.
+
+This mythology is taught in the schools which too often are called, and
+without any figurative meaning, the shrines of learning. Conceived as
+divinely superlative, as something which, though revealed historically
+by the successive discoveries of privileged minds, is none the less
+sharply distinct from the history of humanity, science descends into the
+school. There it manifests itself as human knowledge, and is
+communicated to the youthful minds eager to ascend to the heaven of
+truth. And so the school comes to be looked upon as a kind of temple, as
+the Church where the inspired Word of the Sacred Books is read and
+explained by those who have been chosen by the Divinity to act as its
+interpreters, as preachers of the Faith. With this religious conception
+of the school we connect the "mission" of the educator, whose task, when
+not ridiculed and lampooned by the same scoffers who at all times have
+jeered at the teachers of divinity, has been surrounded by a glamour of
+religiosity. We see them encircled by that halo of distant respect which
+we naturally connect with those who, acting as intermediaries between us
+and the deity, are themselves transfigured and deified.
+
+The school then is looked upon as a temple in which the pupil receives
+his spiritual bread. But not so the home which the boy must leave, that
+he may satisfy his mysteriously innate craving for knowledge. Not so the
+street, where the small boys gather, drawn together by the irresistible
+need of pastime, by the sweet desire of frolicsome companionship, by the
+unconscious yearning after spiritual communion with the world which
+there makes its way into the child's mind far off from the classroom,
+and lavishes upon it its own light, its portion of thought, its share of
+new experiences, and the joy of an ever renewed outpouring of
+sympathetic spirituality.
+
+The custodian of this temple, the schoolmaster, is regarded as a divine,
+as the minister who imparts the consecrated elements of Science, who
+leads the pupil to the "panem angelorum," as Dante calls it. But our
+fathers and mothers are not so regarded,--they who were the first
+custodians of a greater temple, the world, to whose marvels they
+gradually initiated our growing minds; they who by the use of speech
+taught us, without being aware of it, infinitely more than the best of
+schools will ever be able to teach us in the future; not our elder
+brothers to whom we always looked up in emulation, and from whom, even
+more than from our parents, we learned the thoughts and the words suited
+to our needs; not our grandmother, who long before our eager phantasy
+might roam through the printed pages, gently led us into Fairyland, and
+there, in the enchantments of a magic world, disclosed to us that
+humanity which books and teachers later in life were to re-evoke for us.
+No! There are no altars to Science except in the Schoolhouse, and none
+but educators may minister to its cult.
+
+This mythological lore is not merely a harmless form of imagery, against
+which it might be pedantic to rebel. It is a real superstition, which
+has its roots deep down in the personality of the educator; it adheres
+parasitically to culture, climbs over its sturdy trunk, drains its sap,
+weakens it, deadens it. For when we have stripped this conception of
+education of its mythological exterior, there yet remains a clearly
+religious and realistic thought, which is professed with firm adhesion
+of the mind and complete devotion of the soul, as the inviolable norm of
+the whole activity which pertains to the object of this norm itself. Let
+us, for example, consider what is presupposed by the doctrine of
+methods, the so-called methodology, which is an important part of
+didactics, and a very considerable section in the whole field of
+pedagogics. The doctrine of methods comprises a general treatment, which
+corresponds to what we called the Mother-Science, and a particular
+treatment for the individual sciences. There is methodology of learning
+in general, and there are methodics for the several disciplines, or at
+least for each group of disciplines, into which learning is divided and
+subdivided in accordance with the logical processes adopted in any
+particular case, or in accordance with the objects of these disciplines.
+To each method of knowing, considered in itself, corresponds a teaching
+method, so that there is one general didactic method, and many special
+ones by which the general method is to be applied.
+
+But what is the method of a science if not the logical scheme or the
+form of a certain scientific knowledge? And, on the other hand,
+what can be known as to the form of anything, unless we have the thing
+itself before us in its form and with its contents? In order to define
+the form of a science, and say, for example, that it is deductive in
+mathematics and inductive in chemistry, we must first presuppose the
+existence of these sciences themselves. But in them form is never
+anything indifferent to content; it is the form of that content. This is
+made clear if we consider the methodologies which logicians presume to
+define in the abstract, and with no regard to the determined content of
+the corresponding sciences. We notice that they are able to present a
+successful exposition and formulation only by fixing the meaning of
+each formula by the use of examples, thereby passing from the
+abstract to the concrete, and showing the method to be within the
+concrete knowing out of which logic presumes to extract it. In the same
+way every philosophical system has its method; but whenever criticism
+has endeavoured to fix abstractly the method of a system, in order
+then to show how it has been applied in the construction of the
+system itself, it has been forced in every case to admit that the
+method already contained the system within itself, that it was the
+system itself. So that it would have no value whatsoever, it could
+not even be grasped by thought in its particular determinateness, if
+it were not presented as the natural form of that precise thought.
+
+No harmful results would follow, if this assumption merely implied the
+accepting of science and methods as existing by themselves previous to
+the learning of science by means of its respective method; if it
+resulted merely in the failure to recognise the impossibility of
+conceiving science and methods as existing outside of the human mind
+where they actually do live and exist. If this were all, we should
+merely take notice of it as a speculative error which affected only the
+solution of the particular problem in which it appeared. But in the life
+of thought, where everything is united and connected in an organic
+system, every point of which is in relation to every other point, there
+is no error limited to a single problem; its effects are felt in the
+whole system, and they react on thought as a whole. And since thought is
+activity itself,--life's drama, as we called it,--every error infects
+the entire life. Let us then consider the consequences of this realistic
+conception of methodology.
+
+Science, we are told, in its abstract objectivity is one, immutable,
+unaltered: it is removed from the danger of error and of human
+fallibility, and protected from the alternate succession of ignorance
+and discovery; incapable therefore of progressing and of developing
+because it was complete from the very beginning, and is eternally
+perfect. But such a Science is quite different from the one which
+grows in the life of culture, and is the free formation of the human
+personality. This one is ever changing, always admitting all
+possible transformations, different from individual to individual, and
+different also in the mind of the same person. It lives only on
+condition that it never fix itself, that it never crystallise, that
+it place no limits to its development; it continues to be in virtue
+of its power to grow, to modify itself, to integrate itself and
+incessantly to develop. Science as culture, as personality, is free,
+perennially becoming, stirred by ethical impulses, multiple, varied.
+If we fix the method, it indicates that we are dealing with science
+realistically considered as pre-existing, and we can therefore have only
+one sole, definite, immutable method,--one for everybody, and devoid of
+freedom, not susceptible of development, refractory to all moral
+evaluation. We should have then a rigid law of the spirit, as
+compelling as the laws of nature. But by obedience to such a principle,
+the spirit could not affirm itself: such compliance is surrender and
+abdication, not the realisation of some good. The most that could be
+said of it is that perhaps it prevents or annuls an evil which alienates
+us from a primitive good which is not ours, and not being ours cannot
+truly be good.
+
+A fixed method forces the spirit into this hopeless dilemma: (1) Either
+refuse to submit, and thus save life at the cost of all that makes life
+worth living--_propter vitam vivendi perdere causas_ (which evidently
+would be the case, if we consider that the spirit lives solely on
+condition that it recognise no pre-established laws, that it be free
+from the bondage of nature, that it create its own law, its own world,
+freely; and that, on the other hand, the _cause_ of living, what
+constitutes the worth of life, is that enhancement of the spirit's
+reality which realises itself in science, and therefore in the method of
+science).
+
+(2) Or else submit, and kill life in the effort to save its
+worth--_propter causas vivendi perdere vitam_ (which is absurd; for what
+is the worth of life if there is no life?).
+
+However that may be, the type of education that presupposes a certain
+ideal of knowledge previously constituted and ready to be imparted by
+the teacher to the pupil in conformity with some suitable method, must
+follow a method, a unique one--the method of science, and therefore of
+the teacher, and therefore also of the pupil, whether the latter is
+capable of it or not. For it is tacitly assumed that science==method;
+science==teacher; science==pupil. On the strength of these equations the
+common term "science" should suffice to identify the first method, which
+is the one of science in itself, with the last, which is the method of
+science to be mastered by the pupil. But the above series of equations
+is false, because, admitting the first, the one namely on the basis of
+which we are now discussing, neither the second nor the third is
+possible without passing from realistic to idealistic science,--two
+very different things, as I have shown. Even if we leave the teacher out
+of consideration, we shall have to remember that the pupil learns a
+science by making it his own,--a fallible science, which he may
+understand up to a certain point and no further. It will be one of the
+many sciences which have no one given method, but many of them, and the
+pupil can only avoid appropriating, individualising, subjectivising
+science by following that way which is very broad, very easy, and, alas,
+only too well beaten,--the royal road of non-learning, which is
+diligently upkept by all the schools which have to teach precise,
+well-defined science, and have a pre-established method by which to
+teach it.
+
+But, it might be objected, if science, realistically conceived, is a
+fictitious entity in no way corresponding to reality, how is it possible
+to have a method which by its uniqueness and definiteness effectively
+corresponds to the unalterable unity of this non-existent science? And
+what teacher would ever arbitrarily impose on his students such an
+abstract and mechanical method? This is true enough; but man learns to
+compromise with all deities, Science included. This divinity, in order
+somehow to exist, must assume a few human traits without however
+renouncing her divine prerogatives. The fact that Apollo held no
+communion with the Pythian priestess did not remove the oracular
+sanctity from the Delphic response. For man knows no deity other than
+the one which he is capable of conceiving with his soul, just as he
+knows no other red besides the one which he sees with his own eyes.
+
+Science, which he considers as an object existing in itself, outside of
+his and other human minds, and therefore endowed with absolute validity
+in all its branches and in the articulations of these branches, is
+nothing but the science which _he_ knows. And he knows it because he has
+constructed it in the form in which he knows it: _fingit creditique_.
+But this absence of consciousness from the constructing, and the
+consequent faith in the realistic value of science, determine the
+positions and the doctrines which produce the consequences I have
+deplored. For he who establishes a school and enacts its regulations
+takes as a model his own science, without at all being aware that it is
+only his own. It becomes therefore the content of the institution and
+determines its method. But a teacher who does not feel inclined to
+teach that given science and to adopt that special method creates his
+own ideal, which is but the projection of his personal culture; and
+unable to account critically for the intrinsic connection existing
+between his ideal and his personality, he too _fingit creditique_. He
+believes that the school authority has erred, and that Science, as
+he understands it, must be kept distinct from the official doctrines.
+But in his mind his science is not his own. It is, he is confident,
+that Sovereign Science which by his method and through his cult must
+enlighten the school over which he rules. And so at the point of
+arrival where the realistic conception of methods must work, it is found
+to be effective notwithstanding the rebuffs of reality, and it works. It
+works and it acts in the only way that it is possible for it to act,
+namely, by going amiss. It fails and will always continue to fail, not
+so much because every pupil has his own personality and will have his
+own particular culture with its corresponding method, but especially
+because whatever the number of the pupils in a school, the human mind
+knows of no culture which is not also its own free development, its
+autonomous ethical becoming. A science, which is supposed to exist
+before the spirit, becomes a thing, and will never again be able to
+trace its way back to the spirit. By presupposing science, teachers
+materialise the culture in whose development education consists; and
+this materiality of a culture known to teachers renders impossible
+that other culture which is unknown to teachers, which is going to
+be not theirs, but the pupils', for whom they work and in whose behalf
+the school was instituted.
+
+Methods, programmes, and manuals most conspicuously reveal the realistic
+prejudices of school technique; and against these educators should
+constantly be on their guard. For these prejudices have, as Vico would
+put it, an eternal motive, which at times seems to be definitely
+uprooted and completely done away with, only to reappear, alas! in a
+different form and with an ever renewed lease of life. The motive is the
+following: The school is created when people are conscious of a certain
+amount of knowledge already attained, well defined, and recognised as
+valuable. Likewise man's value socially is estimated on the work done,
+and it is on the basis of this finished work that he is credited with
+the acquisition of a certain personality. This is assuredly no longer a
+becoming but a being; an existent thing, already realised, which, though
+a contradiction in terms for those of us who have mastered the concept
+of the attributes of the spirit, is not thereby condemned as accidental
+and disposed of once for all. For it is also true that culture,
+personality, science,--spiritual reality in short,--is a reality, and
+true it is that when we know it, we know it as already realised. We may
+indeed have a very keen and lively sentiment of the subjectivity, and
+inwardness, and newness or originality of our culture, in which, for
+example, Dante, Dante himself, is _our_ Dante, is "We." But yet this
+"We" looms before us as a truth which transcends our particular "we." It
+is truth; it is science. And before this divine Truth, before this
+Science, we too fall on our knees, because it is no longer a mythology,
+but--our experience, our life.
+
+Thus we think; thus, spiritually, we live. I meditate and inquire into
+the mystery of the universe unceasingly; but in the background of my
+inquiry, from time to time a solution appears, a discovery which urges
+my exploring mind onward. Mystery itself is not mystery unless it be
+known as such, and then it becomes knowledge. Inquiry is therefore at
+once a research and a discovery. And this untiring activity, which knows
+neither sleep nor rest, is mirrored before its own eyes and lives in the
+fond contemplation of its reflected image, which image in its
+objectivity appears to it as fixed as it, the activity, is mobile. And
+no man ever felt so keenly the humility and meanness of his powers, no
+one ever presumed so little of himself, that he could not yet be drawn
+by his own nature to idolise himself, to see himself before himself,
+exactly as he is, as what he cannot but be. And on the other hand we
+cannot but affirm our immortal faith in the absolute truth of the ideals
+which impose upon us sentiments of humility.
+
+The error which we must victoriously contend against is not this
+ingenuous and unconquered faith in the objectivity of thought (which is
+also the objectivity of all things). What we must fight against is
+mental torpor and the sloth of the heart, which induce us to stop in
+front of the object as soon as we get it. A deplorable failing indeed,
+since the object is lost in the very act by which we grasp it, and we
+must again resume our work and toil some more in order to attain it
+again. For the object, in short, does exist, but in the subject; and in
+order to be a living and real object it must live on the life itself of
+the subject.
+
+A textbook is a textbook: when it was written, and if its author was
+capable of thinking and of living in his thought, it too was a living
+thing; and a living thing, that is, _spirit_, it will continue to be for
+the instructor who does not through indolence allow himself to believe
+that all the thinking demanded by the subject was done once for all by
+the author of the manual. For the manual, as a book intended for the
+teacher, meant to be constantly awakened by teachers to an ever
+quickened life, the life of the spirit, can only be what the instructor
+makes it. He, therefore, must have culture enough to read it as _his_
+book; he must be able to restore it to life, to re-create it by the
+living process of his personal thought. This done, he will have done but
+one-half of the work needed to transform himself from a reader into a
+teacher. For his reading must lead up to the reading of the pupils; and
+they ought not to be confronted with the finished product of a culture
+turned out, all ready-made by the mechanism of the handbook. So that we
+should now complete our previous statement, and say that the teacher
+re-creates the book when he revives it in the mind of the one for whom
+the book was written; when author, teacher, and pupil constitute but one
+single spirit, whose life animates and inwardly vivifies the manual,
+which therefore ought not to be called, as it is, a _hand_-book, but a
+spiritual guide for the _mind_. Unfortunately the oft-deplored indolence
+which freezes and stiffens spiritual life fastens the books to the hands
+of the teacher first, and then to those of the pupils.
+
+Teachers should carefully watch themselves. If the book begins to feel
+heavy in their hands, it is a sign that it is becoming a burden on the
+pupils' minds. It will end by stifling their mental life, unless its
+oppressive dulness is dispelled by the reawakened consciousness of the
+instructor. Teachers should never for an instant become remiss in their
+loving solicitude for their school. When their book, the book they
+selected for their pupils, as the means of imparting the culture for
+which the school stands, ceases to be the pupils' book, cherished by
+them as a thing of their own, intimately bound up with their persons,
+then it is high time to throw it away. For the moment a book loses its
+power to attract it instantly begins to repel. It then becomes an
+instrument of torture and a menace for the life of the youthful minds
+entrusted to the teachers' care.
+
+Dictionaries and grammars go side by side with handbooks,--instruments
+of culture that are only too often converted into engines of torture.
+The abuse of these books, especially noticeable in the secondary
+schools, is not limited to them, but is infecting primary instruction
+too, and teachers should know what such books are, and be enlightened as
+to their limitations. Otherwise the dictionary becomes the cemetery of
+speech, and grammar the annexed dissecting room. A lexicon is a burial
+ground for the mortal remains of those living beings which we call human
+words, each one of which always lives in a context, not because it is
+there in bodily company, in the society of other words, but because in
+every context it has a special signification, being the form of a
+precise thought or state of mind, as we may wish to call it. A word need
+not be joined to other words to form that complex which grammarians call
+a sentence. It may stand alone, all by itself, and constitute a
+discourse, and express a thought, even a very great thought. The
+"_fiat_" of the book of Genesis is an example. What is requisite is that
+the word, whether by itself or with others, should adhere to the
+personality, to the spiritual situation, and be the actual expression of
+a soul. When joined to the soul a word, which materially is identical
+with countless other words uttered by other souls, and with the peculiar
+accents of the respective personalities, reveals its particular
+expression, is a particular word not to be ever compared with any of
+those countless ones materially identical with it. The biblical
+"_fiat_," repeated by men who feel within them the almighty Word of the
+Creator, is constantly taking on new shades of meaning, is always
+reinforced by richer tones, and will always continue to do so, as a
+result of the numerous ways that men have of picturing to themselves the
+deity, and in accordance with the variety of doctrines, phantasies, and
+sentiments, or whatever other forms of activity may converge into the
+expression of a person's spiritual life. So that if, abstractly
+considered, it is the word that we read, always the same, in the sublime
+passage of Genesis, in reality it lives in an infinite number of forms,
+as though an infinite number of words.
+
+But in dictionaries, words are sundered from the minds, detached from
+the context, soulless and dead. A good lexicon--and those that are
+put in the hands of pupils are seldom satisfactory--should always in
+some way restore the word to the natural context, enchase it, so to
+speak, in the jewel from which it was torn. It should never presume
+to give meanings of abstracted words, but ought to point them out as
+they exist historically in the authors who are deemed worthy
+representatives of the language or of the literature. Dictionaries so
+compiled do away partly with the objectionable abstractness, but are yet
+unable to conjure the dead from their tombs. Their weakness and
+insufficiency lie first of all in the fact that the true context of a
+word, in which it lives concretely, and from which therefore it draws
+its meaning, is in reality not the brief phrase, which is all that
+historical dictionaries can quote, but rather the entire work of the
+author from which the quoted phrase derives whatever colours it may
+possess and its own peculiar shade. And the whole work in turn can be
+understood only in connection with the boundless historical
+environments out of which it emerges, in which it lives, and where
+its thoughts receive their peculiar colouring and their special
+significance. The insufficiency of the dictionary comes out even more
+clearly from another and more important consideration. An historical
+dictionary of the Italian language will, for example, tell us how
+Machiavelli used the word "virtue" (_virtu_), and by the examples
+adduced we should see or perhaps surmise the meaning of that word,
+the knowledge of which is not just mere erudition, in as much as in the
+mind of the cultured reader the thought of Machiavelli is restored to
+life, and with it the concept which he was wont to express by the term
+"virtue." But idealistically speaking, is this word Machiavelli's or is
+it ours,--a word belonging to us who are inquiring into his thoughts?
+It is ours, by all means, and for the reason that it belongs to _our_
+Machiavelli. Unless we have then within us this our Machiavelli, it is
+useless for us to search for the meaning of the word in the dictionary.
+In it surely we may find it, but as a dead body to be resurrected only
+by remembering that its life is not in the printed page but in _us_, and
+only in us. In our life everything will have to be resuscitated that is
+to become part of our culture.
+
+And the same applies to grammars. As people conceive them and use them,
+what are they if not a schematic arrangement of the forms by which
+words are joined so as to constitute speech? And how can we cut the
+discourse to the quick and extract these schemes, without at the same
+time destroying its life? The scheme is a "part of speech," and it is a
+rule. Grammar is a series of rules regarding the parts of speech,
+considered singly and collectively. But the grammatical scheme--part of
+speech or rule--abstracts a generic form from the particular expression
+in such a way that the paradigm of a conjugation, for example, shall be
+the conjugation of many verbs but not of any determined one. The rule
+governing the use of the conditional is in the same way referred to
+every verb which expresses a conditional act or occurrence, but to no
+one verb in a peculiar manner. But since no speech contains a verb which
+might present to us a verbal form which is not also the form of a
+determined verb, nor a conditional which does not point with precision
+to the action or occurrence subordinated to a condition, it is evident
+that the scheme places before us, not the living and concrete body of
+the speech, but a dissected and dead part of this body.
+
+I shall not here recall the controversies occasioned by the difficulties
+inherent in the normative character ordinarily attributed to grammatical
+schemes. I shall simply note that a scheme becomes intelligible only if
+the example accompanies it; and the example always turns out to be a
+living discourse, within which therefore we meet again the scheme, but
+liberated from the presumed abstractness to which it had been confined
+by the grammarian. And I shall merely add that the grammatical norm,
+which in the realistic conception of grammar is presented as a rule,
+anteceding actual speech both in time and ideally, has in reality no
+validity whatsoever excepting as a law internal to the speaking itself,
+which brings out its normative force only in the act itself of speaking.
+In spite of this, however, the majority of people consider grammar as an
+antecedent to speech and to thought, and therefore to the life of the
+spirit. It appears to them as a reef on which the freedom of the
+personality must be driven in the course of its becoming, bearing down
+as it does on a past which is believed to exist beneath the horizon of
+actuality and beyond the present life of the spirit. To them grammar is
+legislation passed by former writers and speakers, prescribing norms for
+those who intend to use the same language in the future. Against this
+myth, and the consequent idol of grammar worshipped as a thing which has
+not only the right, but the means also, of controlling and oppressing
+the creative spontaneity of speech, teachers should be constantly on
+their guard, if they feel bound to respect and protect the spirituality
+of culture.
+
+Neither grammar then, nor rhetoric, nor any kind of misguided preceptive
+teaching should be allowed to introduce into the school the menace of
+realism which lurks naturally in the shadow of all prescriptive
+systems. A precept is a mere historical indication, a sign which points
+to something that was done as to something that had to be done then and
+is to be done now. It was done and it was thought that it had to be
+done. But what was done cannot be done over again, and what was thought
+cannot again be thought. Life knows no past other than the one which it
+contains within its living present. The precept has no value excepting
+as that precept which we in every single instance intuit, and which we
+must intuit, being spiritually alive and free, as the peculiar form of
+_our_ thought, of our speaking, of our doing, of our being, in short,
+which is our becoming. If we look upon a precept as transcending this
+becoming, and as an antecedent to it, we misapprehend and therefore
+imperil our indwelling freedom, which for us now ought to mean not
+simply the failure to foster the growth of the spirit, but a deliberate
+attempt to hinder and thwart its development and to blight the function
+of culture.
+
+One more prejudice of those imputed to realistic instruction must still
+be pointed out, and it will be the last. It is one of those time-worn
+devices whose history, extending over a thousand years, reflects the
+entire life of the school--the composition. Teachers expect and demand
+that a predetermined and definite theme, as a nucleus of a thought
+organism, as _leit-motif_, so to speak, of a work of art, as a ruling
+principle for moral or speculative reflections, be developed by pupils
+who may yet have never given the topic a single thought, who may
+possibly be not at all attuned to that definite spiritual vibration, who
+may in short be quite removed from the line along which the theme should
+be developed. In the lower grades the line itself is marked, the entire
+contour is given, and the pupil's mind is arbitrarily encompassed within
+this fixed outline. These methods are now fortunately applied with
+diminished rigour and less crudely than before. But the fact remains
+that in all classes the teacher either assigns a theme at random,
+picking a topic from a casual reading or from among the whims of his
+rambling fancy, or else he conscientiously and carefully studies the
+possibilities of a subject, and develops it to a certain extent before
+he assigns it; so that he naturally expects the pupil's treatment to
+conform to his own delineation; and he values the composition in
+proportion as it approaches the rough draft which he had previously
+sketched in his mind.
+
+Here too, as elsewhere, we encounter the difficulty of a thought which
+is presupposed to thinking, which therefore binds it, strains it and
+racks it out of its healthy and fruitful growth; for thought cannot live
+without freedom. The dangers are many that beset us in the practice of
+theme-composition, and not all of them of a merely intellectual
+character. There is no intellectual deficiency which is not also at the
+same time a moral blemish; and a course of exercises, such as we have
+considered, not only jeopardises the formation of the intelligence by
+urging it along a line of false and empty artificiality to the postiche
+and the applique, but it also, and far more seriously, threatens the
+moral character of the pupils in that it beguiles them into a sinful
+familiarity with insincerity, which might perhaps become downright
+cheating.
+
+Composition however in itself is not taboo for the idealist. Like
+grammar and every other instrument of the teaching profession it must be
+converted from the abstract to the concrete. We should never demand of
+the pupil an inventiveness beyond his powers, never unfairly expect of
+his mind what it cannot yet give. The boy must not be given a subject
+drawn from a world with which he is unfamiliar. But when the subject
+springs naturally from the pupil's own soul, in the atmosphere of the
+school, and as a part of the spiritual life which unites him to his
+teacher and to his classmates, then composition, like every other
+element of a freely developing culture, is a creation and an unfailing
+progress. For whatever has been frozen by the chill of realism, and has
+been consequently made unfit for the life of the spirit, may again be
+revived in the warmth of the living intelligence of the concrete, and be
+thence idealistically fused with the spontaneous and vigorous current of
+spiritual reality.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+THE UNITY OF EDUCATION
+
+
+Having exemplified the prejudices of realism in the phases that are most
+harmful to education, I shall now proceed to discuss the fundamental
+corollary of the idealistic thesis as an effective remedy against the
+ravages of realism. For, as I have already shown, the realistic
+conception of life and culture is by no means a minor error which could
+be corrected as soon as discovered. Originating in a primitive tendency
+which impels the human spirit on through a realistic phase before it can
+freely emerge into the loftier consciousness of self and power (which is
+the conquest of idealism), this error again and again crops out of even
+the most convinced anti-realistic consciousness. So that if at any
+moment our higher reflection slackens its vigilance, the error creeps
+back into the midst of our ideas, gains control of our intelligence, and
+resumes its former sway over thought. It is not sufficient then to
+become aware of the faults of realism and of the prejudices in which it
+is mirrored; we must, in addition to all this, strengthen in our minds
+the intuition of the spirituality of culture, render it more subtle,
+more accurate, more certain, and bring to it the energy of a faith
+which, after taking possession of our souls, shall become our life's
+character.
+
+We must therefore look intently at the significance of that principle
+which identifies culture with man's personality, notice its most
+important consequences, and set these up as the laws of education,
+since by education we mean the creation of a living culture which
+shall be the life of the human mind. The first and foremost of these
+consequences, the direct corollary of our proposition, is the
+concept of the _Unity of Education_. Though often referred to, it has
+not yet been attained by pedagogical doctrines, nor has it been the aim
+of the work of teachers. Neither theory nor practice--more intimately
+connected than is ordinarily supposed--shows as yet that this concept
+is understood and adequately appreciated. It is opposed with full
+force by the realistic conception which, keeping man distinct from
+his culture, and materialising this culture, naturally attributes to
+it, and to education in which it is reflected, that multiplicity and
+fragmentariness which is the characteristic of things material.
+
+This scrappiness of culture and of education is the error on which all
+the prejudices of realistic pedagogy are grounded. It is the enemy that
+must be vanquished in the course of the crusade that has been preached
+by idealism in its endeavour to liberate instruction from the deadly
+oppression of mechanism. But in order to combat this foe we must first
+know it: and we must gain a clear understanding of that unity of
+education which it antagonises with uncompromising opposition.
+
+If we open a treatise on pedagogy or examine a schedule of courses,
+if we look through a programme or stop to consider our every-day
+technical terminology, we cannot help noticing that education is
+broken up by divisions and subdivisions _ad infinitum_, exactly as
+though it were a material object, which because material possesses
+infinite divisibility. Textbooks tell us that education is (1)
+physical, (2) intellectual, (3) moral. Then narrowing the subject
+down to one section, the intellectual, which for good reasons has
+been treated more carefully and sympathetically by traditional
+pedagogy, we find some such subdivisions: artistic, scientific,
+literary, philosophical, religious, etc. Again, artistic education will
+be split up into as many sections as there are arts, and scientific
+instruction in the same way; for pedagogy assigns to each branch of
+the classification its corresponding method of teaching. It goes without
+saying that the sciences of any given branch are different among
+themselves, and the study of botany, for example, is not the study
+of zoology. And there are as many forms of culture to be promoted by
+education as there are sciences; which is clearly shown by school
+announcements assigning to certain years, and for definite days and
+hours, the several courses of the curriculum, that is, the several
+educations.
+
+It is taken for granted that Education, properly so called, will
+result from the ensemble of these particular educations--physical,
+intellectual, moral, etc.,--each one of which contributes its share to
+the final result, and is therefore a part of the entire education. And
+each field produces certain peculiar results which it would be idle
+to demand of another section, just as we never expect an olive grove
+to yield a crop of peaches. Every part, self-contained and quite
+distinct from the rest, absolutely excludes all other parts from
+itself. Therefore the subjects taught in a school are numerous, and
+there must accordingly be specialised teachers. And again each
+instructor must be careful not to mix up the several parts which
+compose his subject. The teacher of history, for example, when he takes
+up the French Revolution, must forget the unification of Italy, and
+treat each event in order and in turn; and the instructor of Italian
+will take up the history of literature on a certain day of the week,
+and devote some other hour to the study of the individual works
+themselves.
+
+So also we never fail to distinguish and carefully separate the two
+parts of the teacher's work, his ability as a disciplinarian and his
+skill in imparting information, for it is an accepted commonplace of
+school technique that ability to teach is one thing, and the power to
+maintain discipline is another. It is one thing to be able to keep the
+class attentive to the discussion of a given subject, and quite another
+to treat this subject suitably for the needs and attainments of the
+pupils. Discipline is considered thus as a mere threshold; the real
+teaching comes after. For, it is argued, discipline has no cultural
+content; it is nothing more than the spiritual disposition and
+adaptation which should precede the acquisition, or if we so wish to
+call it, the development of real culture,--a disposition which is
+obtained when respect for the authority of the teacher is ensured.
+
+The recognition of that authority simply means the establishment of a
+necessary condition; as for the real work of education, that is yet to
+come. And if we should stop at what we have called the threshold, we
+should have no school at all. There are teachers, in fact, who keep good
+discipline, but who are yet unable to teach, either through lack of
+culture or because they are deficient in methods.
+
+All these are commonplaces to which we often resort without stopping to
+consider their validity. And, in truth, it is because of this lack of
+consideration that we are able to use them without noticing their
+absurdities and without therefore feeling the necessity of emending our
+ways. This lack of reflection resolves itself into a lack of precision
+in the handling of these concepts. They are formulated without much
+rigour with a great deal of elasticity, and in the spirit of
+compromising with that truth against which they would otherwise too
+jarringly clash.
+
+First of all, no one has ever conceived the possibility of separating
+discipline from education. What is often done is to distinguish
+discipline from that part of education which is called instruction, and
+to consider the two as integrating the total concept of education.
+Mention is often made of the educational value of discipline. But this
+kind of co-ordination of the two forms of education--discipline and
+instruction--and their subordination to the generic concept of education
+are more easily formulated than comprehended. For if we should
+distinguish them simply on the grounds that one is the necessary
+antecedent of the other, we should have a relationship similar to that
+which connects any part of instruction with the part which must be
+presupposed before it as an antecedent moment in the same process of
+development. But the relationship which exists between any two parts of
+instruction cannot serve to distinguish from instruction a thing which
+is different from it.
+
+We might wish, perhaps, to consider as characteristic of this absolute
+antecedence the establishment of the authority without which teaching,
+properly so called, cannot begin. But the objection to this would be
+that every moment of the teaching process presupposes a new authority,
+which can never be considered as definitely acquired, which is
+constantly being imposed anew, and which must proceed at every given
+instance from the effective spiritual action exercised by the teacher
+upon the pupil. In other words, I mean to say that no teacher is able
+independently of the merits of his teaching to maintain discipline
+simply and solely on the strength of his personal prestige, of his force
+of character, or any other suitable qualification. For whoever he may
+be, and whatever the power by which at the start he is able to attract
+the attention of his pupils and to keep it riveted on his words, the
+teacher as he begins to impart information ceases to be what he was
+immediately before, and becomes to the eyes of his pupils an ever
+changing individual,--bigger or smaller, stronger or weaker, and
+therefore more or less worthy of that attention and that respect of
+which boys are capable in their expectance of spiritual light and joy.
+The initial presentation is nothing more than a promise and an
+anticipation. In the course of teaching this anticipation must not be
+disappointed, this promise must be constantly fulfilled and more than
+fulfilled by the subsequent developments. The teacher's personality as
+revealed at the beginning must be borne out by all that he does in the
+course of the lesson. Experience confirms this view, and the reason of
+it is to be found in the doctrine now familiar to us of the spirit that
+never _is_ definitely, but is always constituting itself, always
+_becoming_. And every man is esteemed and appreciated on the strength
+of what he shows himself to be at any given moment, and in virtue of the
+experience which we continue to have of his being,--a being which is the
+development in which he realises himself.
+
+So, then, discipline is never enforced definitely and in such a way that
+the teacher may proceed to build on it as on a firm basis without any
+further concern. And it is therefore difficult to see how we could
+possibly sever with a clean cut the task of keeping discipline from the
+duty of imparting instruction.
+
+Nor is it any more plausible to maintain that discipline, though it may
+not chronologically precede instruction, is its logical antecedent, in
+the sense that there are at every instant of the life of the school both
+discipline and instruction, the former as a condition of the latter. The
+difficulty here is that if we assumed this, we ought to be able to
+indicate the difference between the condition and the conditioned; which
+difference, unless we rest content with vague words, is not forthcoming,
+and cannot be found. I maintain that were it possible for the teacher
+definitely to enthrone, so to speak, discipline in his school, all his
+work were done. He would have fulfilled his entire duty, acquitted his
+obligation, and achieved the results of his mission, whether we look
+upon this mission in the complex of its development, or whether we
+consider it ideally in the instant of its determined act, which is yet
+a process and therefore a development. For what, in fact, is discipline?
+Is it established authority? But this authority is the whole of
+education. For authority cannot be, as I have explained before, a mere
+claim: it must become actual in the effective action performed by the
+educating personality, and this action _is_ education. And when this
+education consists, for example, in the imparting of a rule of syntax,
+education becomes actual when the pupil really apprehends that rule from
+his instructor exactly as it is taught to him, and thus appropriates the
+teacher's manner of thinking and his intellectual behaviour on that
+special subject, and acts and does as the teacher wants him to. And from
+the point of view of discipline, this is all we want at that moment.
+
+If in the course of education, considered as a whole or at any
+particular moment of it, we should separate discipline from instruction,
+now turning our attention to the one and now to the other, we know from
+experience that we should never get anywhere. As a matter of fact, the
+distinction thrusts itself to the fore only when the problem of
+discipline is erroneously formulated by treating it abstractly. For who
+is it that worries over discipline as such, and as though it were a
+thing different from teaching? Who is it that looks upon this problem as
+an insoluble one? Only the teacher who, unable to maintain discipline,
+frets over it and failing to discover it where it is naturally to be
+found, desperately looks for it where it is not, where it could not
+possibly be. And so he is helplessly perturbed, like the man who,
+feeling upon himself the concentrated gaze of all the guests seated in a
+parlour, is no longer able to walk across the floor; it is the same
+difficulty and impediment we encounter every time we try to watch and
+study our movements. In the same way the spontaneous outburst of
+eloquent sentiments that flow from the fulness of our hearts is checked
+by the endeavour to analyse them, to study the words--to substitute art
+for nature.
+
+The real teacher, the naturally gifted teacher, never bothers about
+these puzzling questions of pedagogical discipline. He teaches with such
+devotion; he is so close spiritually to his pupils, so sympathetic with
+their views; his work is so serious, so sincere, so eager, so full of
+life, that he is never compelled to face a recalcitrant, rebellious
+personality that could only be reduced by resorting to the peculiar
+means of discipline. The docility of the pupils in the eyes of the able
+teacher is neither an antecedent nor a consequent of his teachings; it
+is an aspect of it. It originates with the very act by which he begins
+to teach, and ceases with the end of his teaching. Concretely, the
+discipline which good teachers enforce in the classroom is the natural
+behaviour of the spirit which adheres to itself in the seriousness and
+inwardness of its own work. Discipline, authority, and respect for
+authority are absent whenever it is impossible to establish that unique
+superior personality, in which the spiritual life of the pupils and of
+the teachers are together fused and united. Whenever the students fail
+to find their ideal in the teacher; when they are disappointed by his
+aspect, his gaze, his words, in the complex concreteness of his
+spiritual personality, which does not rise to the ideal which at every
+moment is present in their expectations, then the order of discipline is
+lacking. But when this actual unity obtains--this unity which is the
+task of the teacher, and the aim of all education--then discipline,
+authority, and respect are present as never failing elements.
+
+This pedagogical problem of discipline would never have arisen if
+immature reflection had not distinguished two empirically different
+aspects of human personality, the practical and the theoretical, whereby
+it would appear that man, when he does things, should not be considered
+in the same light as when he thinks and understands, knows and learns.
+From this point of view, discipline of deportment is to be referred to
+the pupil as practical spiritual activity, while teaching aims at his
+theoretic activity. The former should guide the pupil, regulate his
+conduct as a member of that special community which we call the school,
+and facilitate the fulfilment of the obligations which he has toward the
+institution, toward his fellow-pupils, and toward himself. The latter,
+on the other hand, assuming the completion of this practical
+edification, proceeds to the mental formation of the personality,
+considered as progressive acquirement of culture. Discipline in this
+system appears to be the morals of the school. I use the word morals in
+a very broad sense--just as morality might be considered as the
+discipline of society and of life in general. For everybody, it is
+argued, distinguishes between the character of man and his intelligence,
+between his conduct and his knowledge. The two terms may indeed be drawn
+together, but they also exist quite apart. So that a man devoid of
+character, or possessed with an indomitable will for evil, may
+nevertheless be extremely learned and shrewd, or as subtle as the
+serpent; whereas a moral man, through lack of understanding, may become
+the sport of rogues, and remain illiterate, devoid of all, even of the
+slightest accomplishments. For will is one thing, they say, and the
+intellect is another.
+
+The question of the abstractness of discipline impels us now to examine
+the legitimacy of this broader distinction, which does not simply
+concern the problems of the school, but extends to the fundamental
+principles of the philosophy of the spirit. Under its influence,
+contemporary thought attacks all the surviving forms of this ancient
+distinction between will and intellect, which rested on a frankly
+realistic intuition of the world. The philosopher who crystallised this
+distinction, and fastened it so hard that it could not be broken up
+completely in the course of all subsequent speculation, was Aristotle. A
+thoroughgoing realist, like all Greek philosophers, he conceived reality
+as something external and antecedent to the mind which thinks it and
+strives to know it. When thought, whose function is the knowing of
+reality, is thus placed outside of this reality, it is evident that the
+knowledge to which it aspired never could have been an activity which
+produces reality. It was accordingly maintained that knowledge could not
+be more than a mere survey, a view of reality (intuition, theory),
+almost like a reflected image, totally extrinsic to the essence of the
+real. But since it was evident that man as spiritual activity does
+produce a world of his own, for which he is praised if it is deemed
+good, but blamed if it is judged bad, it had to follow that there were
+two distinct aspects in human life: one by which man contemplates
+reality, the other by which he creates his own world,--a world, however,
+which is but a transformation of the true and original reality. These
+two aspects are the will and the intellect.
+
+It should not now be necessary to criticise this concept of a reality
+assumed to exist, in antecedence to the activity of the spirit, and
+which is the sole support of this distinction between will and
+intellect. We might say perhaps that though everything does indeed
+depend from the spirit, and though all is spirit, yet this completely
+spiritual reality is on one hand what is produced, the realisation of
+new realities (will), but on the other hand it is but the knowledge of
+its own reality, and by this knowledge gives no increment to its being.
+However, if we adopted this view, we would slip back to the position we
+abandoned as untenable, since a thought which propounds the problem of
+its essence and of the essence of the reality which it cognises can be
+but mere knowing. For it is again faced by a reality--even though it has
+in this case been arbitrarily presumed identical with it--a reality
+which is as an antecedent to it, and leaves to it only the task of
+looking on. So we must conclude that the life of the spirit is never
+mere contemplation. What seems to be contemplation--that consciousness
+which the spirit acquires of itself, and, acquiring which, realises
+itself--is a creation: a creation not of things but of its own self. For
+what are things but the spirit as it is looked at abstractly in the
+multiplicity of its manifestations?
+
+We shall more easily understand that our knowing and our doing are
+indiscernible, if we recall that our doing is not what is also perceived
+externally, a motion in space caused by us. This external manifestation
+is quite subordinate and adventitious. The essential character of our
+doing is the internal will, which does not, properly speaking, modify
+things, but does modify us, by bringing out in us a personality which
+otherwise would not have been. This is the substance of the will, which
+we cannot deny to thought, if thought is, as I have shown, development,
+and therefore continuous self-creation of the personality.
+
+If intellect then and will are one and the same thing, to such an extent
+that there is no intellect which in its development is not development
+of personality, formation of character, realisation of a spiritual
+reality, we shall be able to understand that the ideas of two distinct
+spiritual activities, as the basis of the ordinary distinction between
+moral and intellectual training, are mere abstractions that tend to lead
+us away from the comprehension of the living reality of the spirit. This
+distinction appears to me exceedingly harmful, nothing being more
+deplorable, from the moral point of view, than to consider any part of
+the life we have to live as morally indifferent; and nothing being more
+harmful to the school than the conviction that the moral formation of
+man is not the entire purpose of education, but only a part of its
+content. It is indispensable, I maintain, that the educator have the
+reverent consciousness of the extremely delicate moral value of every
+single word which he addresses to his pupils and of the profoundly
+ethical essence of the instruction which he imparts to them. For the
+school which gives instruction with no moral training in reality gives
+no instruction at all. All the objections voiced on this score against
+education, which we try to meet by adding on to instruction all that
+ought to integrate the truly educational function, are the result of
+this abstract way of looking upon instruction solely as the culture of
+an intellect which in some way differs from the will, from character,
+and from moral personality.
+
+I wish here to call attention to one of the most controverted questions
+connected with popular education, because it brings out very clearly the
+impossibility of keeping moral education distinct from intellectual
+instruction. It is constantly asserted that the instruction of the
+common people, that real education which is the main purpose of the
+modern state, is not a question of mere reading and spelling; that
+these do not constitute culture, but are as means to an end, and
+ought never to be allowed to take the place of the end to which they
+are subservient. The school therefore, if it cannot shape men, should
+at least rough-hew them and give them a conscience, whereas now, it
+teaches but often does not educate: it gives to the learner the means of
+culture, and then abandons him to his own resources. The optimism of
+educators in the eighteenth century, their promise that marvels would
+come out of elementary instruction propagated and spread by popular
+schools devised for this purpose, was constantly met in the course
+of the last century by an ever-growing mistrust of instruction generally
+restricted to the notion of mere instrumentality. For in addition to
+other shortcomings it was felt that this instrument might be put to a
+very bad use; that elementary learning might be a dangerous thing if
+it were not accompanied by something that instruction pure and simple
+cannot give, namely, soundness of heart, strength of mind, and
+conscience strong enough to uphold intelligence by the vigorous and
+uncompromising principles of moral rectitude. The hopefulness of that
+past optimism is fast yielding ground to the pessimistic denunciation
+of the insufficiency of mere instruction for the moral ends of life.
+
+There is a serious error in this frequent indictment brought against
+mere instruction as a means of attaining what is called culture. It
+proceeds from the attempt to separate something that was not meant to be
+separated. "What God hath united together, man shall not put asunder."
+And, in any event, a separation as illegitimate as this is not possible.
+Superficially we may distinguish and apparently sunder instruction from
+moral training, cut off the means from the end, and separate the ability
+to read and write from what we are thereby enabled to read and write. In
+fact the letters of the alphabet are taught without teaching the
+syllables which they compose, and without the words that are made up of
+these syllables, and the thoughts that are expressed by these words, and
+man's life which becomes manifest and real in these thoughts. The
+elementary school is in fact, as it is in name, the teaching of the
+elements. Reading, writing, arithmetic, all subjects called for by the
+school programme are taken up as mere elements with which the pupil is
+expected, later on, to compose his Book of Life, complete in all its
+sections. But in the meantime it is thought unwise to burden his
+youthful mind with the weighty and complicated problems that can be
+solved only by the experience of a more mature life. Of course after he
+has gone forth from the school into the outer world the young man will
+look upon this elementary knowledge as the raw material of his future
+mentality. As he carves out his path to this or that goal, in accordance
+with his spiritual interests and in compliance with the contingencies of
+life, he will avail himself of this initial instruction, use it to
+further his progress towards this or that end, good or evil as the case
+may be. For intellectual instruction, it is argued, can be made
+subservient either to noble impulses or to base motives.
+
+Careful consideration, however, will show that the responsibility of a
+school for what is called moral insufficiency, but is in reality
+educational defectiveness, cannot be removed by this kind of
+considerations. The alphabet begins to be such when it ceases to be a
+series of physical marks corresponding to the sounds into which all the
+words of a language may be decomposed. The alphabetic symbol is
+effectively such when it is a sound, and it is sound when it is an
+image, or rather a concrete form of an internal vibration of the mind.
+The child begins to see the alphabet when he reads with it. Up to that
+time he simply draws images or inwardly gazes at the semblance of
+the picture he intends to draw, but he does not read. As soon as the
+symbol is read, it becomes a word. That is why every spelling book
+presents the letters in the syllables and the syllables in the words. In
+this way they cease to be mere scrawls drawn on the paper, and become
+thoughts. They may be dim, vague, and mysterious; they may be sharply
+defined or they may blend and fuse into a suggestive haze; but they are
+in every given instance thoughts that are being awakened in the mind
+of the child. These thoughts have in them the power to develop, to
+organise themselves and become a discourse. From the simple sentences
+and the nursery rhymes of the primer, they grow into an ever-richer
+significance. From the sowing to the harvesting, from the green stalk to
+the sturdy trunk, it is _one_ life and one sole process. The mind that
+will soar over the dizzy heights of thought begins its flight in the
+humble lowlands. And it first becomes conscious of its power to rise,
+when the life of thought is awakened by the words of the spelling book.
+
+The moment the child begins reading, he must of necessity read
+_something_. There is no mere instrument without the material to which
+it is to be applied. The infant who opens his eyes and strives to look
+cannot but see something. The "picture," insignificant for the teacher,
+has its own special colouring for the child's mind. He fixes his gaze on
+it; he draws it within himself, cherishes it, and fosters it with his
+fancies. Such is the law of the spirit! It may be violated, but the
+consequences of transgression are commensurate with the majesty of this
+law.
+
+Grammars too, like spelling primers and rhetorics and logic and every
+kind of preceptive teaching, may be assumed as a form separated from its
+contents, as something empty and abstract. The child is taught for
+instance that the letter _m_ in _mamma_ does not belong to that word (we
+call it a "word," and forget that to him at least it is not a word but
+his own mother). That letter _m_, we tell him, is found in other words,
+_mat_, _meat_, etc. We show him that it is in all of them, and yet in
+none of them. We therefore can and must abstract it from all concrete
+connections, isolate and fix it as that something which it is in
+itself--the letter _m_. In the same manner we abstract the rule of
+grammar from a number of individual examples. We exalt it over them, and
+give it an existence which is higher, and independent of theirs. And so
+for rhetoric, and so for logic.
+
+But in this process of progressive abstraction, in this practice of
+considering the abstract as something substantial, and of reducing
+the concrete and the particular to the subordinate position of the
+accessory, life recedes and ebbs away. The differences between this and
+that word, between two images, two thoughts, two modes of thinking, of
+expressing, of behaving, at first become slight, then negligible,
+then quite inexistent, and the soul becomes accustomed to the generic,
+to the empty, to the indifferent. It knows no longer how to fix the
+peculiarities of things, how to notice the different traits of men's
+characters, their interests, their diverse values, until finally it
+becomes indifferent and sceptical. Words lose their meaning; they no
+longer smack of what they used to; their value is gone. Things lose
+their individuality, and men their physiognomies. This scepticism
+robs man of his own faith, of his character and personality. The
+fundamental aim of education ceases to exist. Abstract education is
+no education at all. It is not even instruction. For it does not teach
+the alphabet as it really exists, as something inseparable from the
+sound, and from the word, and from the human soul! All it gives is a new
+materialised and detached abstraction.
+
+The alphabet is real and concrete, not abstract; it is not a means
+but an end; it is not mere form but also content. It is not a weapon
+which man may wield indifferently either for good purposes or for
+evil motives. It is man himself. It is the human soul, which should
+already flash in the very first word that is spelled, if it is read
+intelligently. And it ought to be a good word, worthy of the child and
+of the future man, a word in which the youthful pupil ought already to
+be able to discover himself,--not himself in general, but that better
+self which the school gradually and progressively will teach him to
+find within himself. So considered, the alphabet is a powerful
+instrument of human formation and of moral shaping. It is education.
+
+For this reason the school must have a library, and should adopt all
+possible means to encourage the habit and develop the taste of reading,
+since the word which truly expresses the soul of man is not _that_ one
+word, nor the word of _that_ one book. A word or a book will always be a
+mere fragment of life, and many of them therefore will be needed. Many,
+very many books, to satisfy the ever-growing needs of the child's mind!
+Books that will spur his thought constantly towards more distant goals,
+and his heart and imagination with it. Thus the child grows to be a
+man.
+
+Instruction then which is not education is not even instruction. It
+is a denuded abstraction, violently thrust like other abstractions
+into the life of the spirit where it generates that monstrosity
+which we have described as material culture, mechanical and devoid of
+spiritual vitality. That culture, being material, has no unity, is
+fragmentary, inorganic, capable of growing indefinitely without in any
+way transforming the recipient mind or becoming assimilated to the
+process of the personality to which it simply adheres extrinsically.
+This mechanical teaching is commensurate with things, and grows
+proportionately with them; but it has no intimate relation with the
+spirit. He who knows one hundred things has not a greater nor a
+different intellectual value from him who knows ten, since the hundred
+and the ten are locked up in both in exactly the same way that two
+different sums of money are deposited in two different vaults. What
+merit is there in the safe which contains the greater sum? The merit
+would belong to the man who had accumulated the greater amount by a
+greater sum of labour, for it would then be commensurate with work,
+which is the developing process itself and the life of the human
+personality to which we must always have recourse when we endeavour
+to establish values. For as we have seen, nothing is, properly
+speaking, thinkable except in relation to the human spirit.
+
+Whether one reads a single book or an entire library, the result is the
+same, if what is read fails to become the life of the reader--his
+feelings and his thoughts, his passions and his meditation, his
+experience and the extolment of his personality. The poet Giusti has
+said: "Writing a book is worse than useless, unless it is going to
+change people." Reading a book with no effect is infinitely worse. Of
+course the people that have to be transformed, both for the writer and
+for the reader (who are not two very different persons after all), are
+not the others, but first of all the author himself. The mere reading of
+a page or even a word inwardly reconstitutes us, if it does consist in a
+new throb of our personality, which continuously renews itself through
+the incessant vibrations of its becoming. This then is the all-important
+solution,--that the book or the word of a teacher arouse our souls and
+set them in motion; that it transform itself into our inner life; that
+it cease to be a thing, special and determinate, one of the many, and
+become transfused into our personality. And our personality in its act,
+in the act, I say, and not in the abstract concept which we may somehow
+form of it,--is absolute unity: that moving unity to which education can
+in no wise be referred, unless it is made identical with its movement,
+and therefore entirely conformant to its unity.
+
+The man whose culture is limited, or, rather, entirely estranged from
+the understanding of life, is called _homo unius libri_. We might just
+as well call him _homo omnium librorum_. For he who would read all books
+need have a leaking brain like the perforated vessel of the daughters of
+Danaus,--a leak through which all ideas, all joys, all sorrows, and all
+hopes, everything that man may find in books, would have to flow
+unceasingly, without leaving any traces of their passage, without ever
+forming that personality which, having acquired a certain form or
+physiognomy, reacts and becomes selective, picks what it wants out of
+the congeries, and chooses, out of all possible experiences, only what
+it requires for the life that is suited to it. We should never add books
+upon books _ad infinitum_! It is not a question of quantity. What we
+need is the ability to discover our world in books,--that sum total of
+interests which respond to all the vibrations of our spirit, which
+assuredly, as Herbart claimed, has a multiplicity of interests, but all
+of them radiating from a vital centre. And everything is in the centre,
+since everything originates there.
+
+Education which strives to get at the centre of the personality, the
+sole spot whence it is possible to derive the spiritual value of a
+living culture, is essentially moral, and may never be hemmed in within
+the restricted bounds of an abstract intellectual training. There is in
+truth a kind of instruction which is not education; not because it is in
+no way educative, but because it gives a bad education and trains for
+evil. This realistic education, which is substantially materialistic,
+extinguishes the sentiment of freedom in man, debases his personality,
+and stifles in him the living consciousness of the spirituality of the
+world, and consequently of man's responsibility.
+
+The antithesis between instruction and education is the antithesis
+between realistic and idealistic culture, or again, that existing
+between a material and a spiritual conception of life. If the school
+means conquest of freedom, we must learn to loathe the scrappiness of
+education, the fractioning tendency which presumes to cut off one part
+from the rest of the body, as if education, that is, personality, could
+have many parts. We must learn to react against a system of education
+which, conceiving its role to be merely intellectualistic, and such as
+to make of the human spirit a clear mirror of things, proceeds to an
+infinite subdivision to match the infinite multiplicity of things. Unity
+ought to be our constant aim. We should never look away from the living,
+that is, the person, the pupil into whose soul our loving solicitude
+should strive to gain access in order to help him create his own
+world.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+CHARACTER AND PHYSICAL EDUCATION
+
+
+The principle of educational unity which I have briefly tried to
+illustrate demands a further development in connection with the claims
+of physical culture. For after we have unified moral and intellectual
+discipline in the one concrete concept of the education of the spirit,
+whose activity cannot be cognitive without also being practical, and
+cannot realise any moral values except through cognition, it might yet
+seem that a complete and perfect system of education should aim at the
+physical development as well as at the spiritual. For the pupil is not
+solely mind. He has a body also; and these two terms, body and spirit,
+must be conceived in such close connection and in such intimate
+conjunction that the health of the one be dependent on the soundness of
+the other.
+
+Before elucidating this argument, we must voice our appreciation of the
+pedagogical principle by virtue of which the ancient Greeks developed
+their athletic education, and which since the Renaissance has for a
+different motive been reintroduced into the theory of physical
+culture,--a theory which I do not at all oppose, but rather intend to
+reaffirm on the grounds of educational unity. This pedagogical
+principle evidently originated in the mode of considering the function
+of the bodily organism in respect to the human mind, since every time we
+scrutinise the interest that has always guided men in the field of
+education, we find that at all times the aim of education has been the
+development of the mind. Nor could it have been otherwise; for whether
+or not in possession of a clear understanding of his spiritual essence,
+man spontaneously presents himself and is valued as a personality, which
+affirms itself, speaks even though dumb, and says "I." Education begins
+as a relation between master and slave, between parent and children. The
+slave and the son are not supported and cared for--educated--as simple
+brutes, but as beings endowed with the same attributes as the master or
+the parent, beings who are therefore able to receive orders or
+instructions and build their will out of these,--the will which those in
+authority wish to be identical with their own. The superior commands and
+therefore demands; the inferior obeys by replying, and he replies in so
+far as he is a spiritual subject; and this reply will become gradually
+better in proportion as he more fully actualises that spiritual nature
+which the master wishes to be closely corresponding to his own.
+Philosophy, as well as naive and primitive mentality, considers man to
+be such in so far as he is conscious of what he does, of what he says,
+of what he thinks; and also in that he is able to present himself to
+others, because he has first been present to himself.
+
+Man is man in that he is self-consciousness. Even the despicable tyrant
+who brutally domineers over the wretch who is forced to submit to his
+overbearing arrogance, even he wants his slave to be intelligent,
+capable of guessing his thoughts, and refuses to consider him as an
+unconscious tool of his whims. The mother who tenderly nurses her sick
+child is indeed anxious for the health of the body over which she
+worries, and she would like to see it vigorous and strong. But that body
+is so endeared to her, because by means of it the child is enabled to
+live happily with her; through it his fond soul can requite maternal
+love by filial devotion; or in it he may develop a powerful and
+beautiful personality worthy to be adored as the ideal creature of
+maternal affection. If in the bloom of physical health he were to reveal
+himself stupid and insensate, endowed with mere instinctive sensuality
+and bestial appetites, this son would cease to be the object of his
+mother's fondness, nay, he would arouse in her a feeling of loathing and
+revulsion. It is this sense of loathing that we feel towards the brutes,
+to the extent that we never can be sympathetically drawn to them, and
+that we also feel for the human corpse from which life has departed; for
+life is the basis of every psychological relation, and therefore of
+every possible sympathy.
+
+Education is union, communion, inter-individual unification; and unity
+is possible only because men spiritually convene. Matter, we have seen,
+nature, things, the non-spirit is multiplicity. As soon as the
+multiplicity of natural elements begins to be organised, already in
+their organism spiritual activity shines forth. In the spirit is the
+root and possibility of every unification. It is spirit that unites men.
+Education therefore cannot be a social relationship and a link between
+men except by being a spiritual tie among human minds. Therefore it is
+now, and has at all times been, what it naturally ought to be, education
+of the spirit.
+
+But as we aim at the education of the spirit, we may or we may not take
+care of the body; or again we may take care of it in this or that way.
+It all depends on what conception we have of the spirit. The ancients
+made a great deal of physical culture, and the Greek philosophers of
+antiquity considered gymnastics to be the essential complement of music,
+including in music all forms of spiritual cultivation. The ancients
+never divided the spirit from the physical reality of man: man as a
+whole (body and psychic activity) was conceived by them as a natural
+being subject to the mechanism which regulates and controls nature. When
+Greek psychology fell under the influence of that mystic outlook which
+is peculiar to religious belief, the soul, which was opposed to the
+body, and which was looked upon as chained and emprisoned in the body,
+was sharply distinguished from another soul. That other soul was kept
+in contact with the materiality of all natural things, and together with
+them was governed by the law of mechanical becoming, that is, of the
+transformations caused by motion by which all the parts of matter are
+bestirred. This natural soul, susceptible of development, and capable of
+gradually rising to the height of the other, of the pure bodiless mind
+whose act is the contemplation of truth; this soul imbedded in the body,
+which does not therefore give to man a supernatural being, but like all
+things of nature comes into the world, grows and dies, incessantly
+passing from one mode of being to another, this soul is the one that can
+and ought to be educated. The soul which results from the organic
+process of the physical body, and which in its development proceeds side
+by side with the transformations of the latter, could not be educated
+except in connection with the development and improvement of the body.
+Human thought, which then had not yet secured the consciousness of its
+own irreducible opposition to nature,--the consciousness, in other
+words, of its own essential freedom,--seeing itself immersed even as
+spiritual substance in the indistinctness of nature, could not look upon
+education as upon a problem of freedom which can not admit of nature as
+limiting spiritual activity. It was accordingly reduced to conceive this
+activity, displayed in dealing with man, as being on the same plane with
+the other forms of activity which propose to deal with things of
+nature. In a pedagogical naturalism of this sort, the mind could not be
+the mind without also being body, and therefore had to include physical
+development in its own process.
+
+But with the advent of Christianity the spirit was sharply dissociated
+from nature. The original dualism of law of the spirit and law of the
+flesh, of grace and nature, rescued man at the very beginning from the
+tyranny of merely natural things, and announced a kingdom of the spirit
+which "is not of this world." And it is not in fact "of this world," if
+by world we mean what the word ordinarily implies,--the world which
+confronts us, and which we can point out to ourselves and to others; the
+world which, being the object of our experience, is the direct
+antithesis of what we are, subject of experience, free personality,
+spirit, Christian humanity. Man, in this Christian conception, in this
+opposition to nature and to the experimental world, overcomes what
+within his own self still belongs to nature, subdues that part of him
+which because natural appears as the enemy of freedom and of the
+finality of the spirit; as the seducer and the source of guilty wiles
+which clip the wing of man's loftier aspirations and weigh him down into
+a beast-like subjection to instinct. He therefore tends to underrate
+physical education, and sacrifices it to the demands of the spirit. He
+does not completely neglect the question of the behaviour of man
+towards physical nature; he could not, since his very dualism is
+possible only on condition that he correlate the two terms of the
+opposition. But finding that his attempt to attain freedom and realise
+his spiritual destiny is thwarted by the natural impulses of the senses,
+in which the life of the body is made manifest, he decides to remove
+these hindrances and to clear the way which leads to spiritual
+salvation. He does then take the body into consideration, but simply to
+check its instincts and control its sensuous appetites. By the
+discipline of self-mortification, under the guidance of an unbending
+will, he subdues the flesh, and subjects it to the exigencies of the
+spirit.
+
+Evidently this subduing discipline is still physical exercise, but in
+its own way. The haircloth of St. Francis corresponds in fact to the
+club of Hercules, and serves the same purpose. The monsters which are
+knocked down by the weapon which Hercules alone could wield torment the
+saint of Assisi also; only, they are within him. He even tames the wolf,
+but without club or chains, by the mere exercise of his gentle meekness.
+These internal monsters are not, properly speaking, in the material
+body. If they were, the Saint would not need to worry about them any
+more than about the earth under his feet or the sack on his shoulder.
+But they are in that body which he feels; they are in that soul which,
+with the violence of its desires, the din of its harsh and fiercely
+discordant voices, distracts him from the ideal where his life is. They
+are in that soul which thrusts so many claims on him, that were he to
+satisfy them he would have to part company with his Lady Poverty, and
+become once more the slave of things which are not in his power,--of
+wealth, which heaps up and blows away; of Fortune, which comes as a
+friend and departs as an enemy. He would, in other words, return to a
+materialistic conception of life. His Lernaean hydra is in the depths of
+his heart, where hundred-headed instinct, with its hundred mouths, tears
+the roots of his holy and magnanimous will, eager to resemble the
+Saviour in love and self-sacrifice.
+
+This monster is strangled with the haircloth, when the body is hardened
+and trained to self-denial, to suffering, to the repression of all
+animal passions which would keep man away from his goal. This
+discipline, far from debilitating the body, gives it a new strength, an
+endurance which enables man to live on a higher plane than he would if
+he followed natural impulses. For this more difficult manner of living,
+a robustness and a hardihood are requisite which are beyond the natural
+means of the body. The system of physical culture which gives this
+stupendous endurance is called asceticism.
+
+But this system is an abstract one. Man's life is not poverty, since it
+is work and therefore wealth. And the mind with its freedom cannot be
+conceived of as antagonistic to nature. For as body and as sense, in so
+far as we exist and know of our existence, we belong to this nature.
+Antagonism and duality import the limitation of each of the opposed
+terms and exclude freedom which is not to be found within fixed limits;
+for freedom, as we have said, means infinitude.
+
+The spirit is free only if infinite. It cannot have any obstructing
+barrier in its path. It can be conceived as freedom only after it has
+overcome dualism, and when in nature itself and in the body we see the
+effect of the activity of the spirit. It has no need therefore of walls
+within which it might feel the necessity of cloistering itself in the
+effort to renounce the outer world. This is not the way to conquer
+freedom. A liberty won under such conditions would always be insecure,
+constantly threatened, always beleaguered, and therefore a mere shadow
+of freedom. The spirit, if it is free, that is, if it is spirit, must be
+conterminous with thought, it must extend its sway as far as there is
+any sign of life to the last point where a vestige of being can be
+revealed to it. Nothing thinkable can be external to it. Whatever
+presents itself to it, whether in the garb of an enemy or under the
+cloak of friendship, can only be one of its creatures, which it has
+placed at its own side, or in front of itself, or against itself.
+
+This new pedagogical and philosophical view, first disclosed to
+Humanism, then enlightened by the genius of the Italian Renaissance,
+appears now to us in the full light of modern thought. Superficially it
+might seem identical with the classical and naturalistic outlook. In
+reality, however, it has made its way back to it only in order to
+confirm and integrate the concept of Christian spiritualism and to bring
+out its truth. Greek athletics is the training of the body as an end in
+itself: it surely serves the cause of the spirit, but only in so far as
+the spirit is grafted on the trunk of the physical personality, and to
+the extent that it is able to absorb all its vital sap, thereby
+subjecting itself to generation and decay, the common destiny of all
+natural beings. The physical culture of the ancients is spiritual
+discipline, only to the extent that for them the mind too is essentially
+body. Modern physical education, at least from the time of Vittorino da
+Feltre, is spiritual formation of the body: it is bodily training for
+the benefit of the spirit, just as the mediaeval ascetic would have it;
+but of a spirit which does not intend to bury itself in abstract
+self-seclusion away from the existential world, of a spirit which
+passing beyond the cloister walls soars over the realm of nature,
+induing it and subduing it instrumentally to its ends and as a mirror of
+its will. So that for moderns, too, physical culture is spiritual
+education, but for the reason that to us the body itself is spirit. Our
+science is not merely a speculation of ultra-mundane truths, but rather
+a science of man and of man in the Universe, and therefore also of this
+nature which is dominated and spiritualised by becoming known, in the
+same way that every book that is read is spiritualised.
+
+This concrete notion of a spirit which excludes nothing from itself
+gives concreteness to the Christian conception of physical discipline.
+For it aims to turn the body into an obedient tool of the will, not
+however of that will which renounces the world, but of that will which
+turns to the world as to the field where its battles are fought and won;
+to the world which it transforms by its work, constantly re-creating it,
+now modifying one part and now another, but always acting on the entire
+system, and renewing it as a whole in the intimate organic connection
+and interdependence of these parts; to the world which forever confronts
+it in a rebellious and challenging attitude, and which it laboriously
+subdues and turns into a mirror of its own becoming.
+
+Modern idealism and ancient naturalism both emphasise, though for
+opposite motives, the importance of a positive education in distinction
+to the negative discipline inculcated by mediaeval asceticism. We said
+that to-day we develop the body because the body is spirit. This
+proposition runs counter to common sense. But common sense as such
+cannot be respected by the thinker unless he first transforms its
+content. Our body, we must remember, is not one body out of many. If it
+were actually mixed with and lost in the multitude of material things
+which surround it, we could no longer speak of any bodies. For all
+bodies, as psychologists say, are perceived in so far as they modify
+ours and are somehow related to it. Or to put it in a different and
+perhaps better way, all other bodies, which we possess as contents of
+our experience, form a system, a circle, which has its centre; and this
+centre is our body. These first of all occupy space, but a space which
+no one of us can think of or intuit otherwise than as a radiating
+infinity, the centre of which we occupy with our body. So that before we
+can speak of bodies, we must first cognise our own. It is the foundation
+and groundwork of all bodies. Justly, therefore, the immanent sense,
+profound and continuous, which we have of our body, and whose
+modifications constitute all our particular sensations, was called the
+_fundamental sentiment_ by our Italian philosopher Rosmini. For our body
+is ours only in so far as we feel it; and we feel it, at first,
+confusedly or rather indistinctly, without discerning any differentiated
+part. We feel it as the limit, the other, the opposite, the object of
+our consciousness, which, were it not conscious of something (of itself
+as of something), would not be consciousness, would not realise itself.
+And it realises itself, in the first place, as consciousness of this
+object which is the body. Accurately, therefore, was the body defined
+by Spinoza as _objectum mentis_, as object of consciousness. Objectless
+consciousness is not consciousness; and it is likewise obvious that the
+object of consciousness cannot be such without consciousness.
+
+The two terms are inseparable, for the reason that they are produced
+simultaneously by one and the same act, from which they cannot be
+detached and this act is the free becoming of the spirit.
+
+Our body, this first object of consciousness, as yet indistinct and
+therefore one and infinite, is not really in space, the realm of the
+distinct, of the multiple, of the finite. It is within our own
+consciousness. And it is only by recalling this inwardness that we are
+able to understand how it happens that we ("We"--spiritual activity) act
+upon our body, animating it, sustaining it, endowing it with our
+vigorous and buoyant vitality; constantly transforming it, in very much
+the same way that we act on what we easily conceive to be our moral
+personality. As we direct our thoughts, and bringing them out of the
+dark into the luminous setting of our consciousness, submit them to
+scrutiny and correction, to elimination and selection; when we stifle or
+feed the fire of our passions; when we cherish ideals, nourish them with
+our own life's blood, and sustain them with our unbending resolve; and
+again when we quench them in the fickleness of our whims, are we not
+constantly creating and variously reshaping our spiritual life, making
+it good or bad, that is, eagerly and scrupulously intent on the quest of
+Truth or slothfully plunged in ignorance and forgetfulness?
+
+But our body, this inseparable companion, which is our own self, is no
+particular limb, which as such might be removed from us. We remain what
+we are, even though mutilated. Each part of our organism is ours, in
+that it is fused in the sole and indistinguishable totality of our
+living being,--our heart and our brain, as well as the phalanx of a
+finger, if perchance we should be unable to live without it, and it
+therefore effectively constituted our being. The distinction between
+organs that are vital and organs that are not is an empirical one, and
+relative to an observation which is true within the limits of ordinary
+occurrence.
+
+If our body is the body which we perceive as ours, it is this one or
+that one in accordance with our perception; and this perception
+certainly is not arbitrary, but our own, subjective, to the point that,
+in an abnormal way, one may cease to be in possession of his body and
+thus to be no longer able to live in consequence of the loss of a
+finger, or even of a hair. This hair then is a vital part, not because
+it is a hair, but because it has been, insanely if you will, assumed and
+absorbed in the distinct unity of our body.
+
+I shall try to make my thought clearer by the use of an example. The
+organ of organs, as a great writer once said, is the hand, and we can
+look at it from two quite distinct points of view. We may place our hand
+on a table by the side of other hands, the hands of persons sitting
+around us. We see its shape, its colour, its size, etc.; we compare it
+with the others, and we almost forget it is ours, because then we do
+not, in act, distinguish it from the remaining ones. In these
+circumstances, it is evident that our hand is in our consciousness as a
+material object, separated from every essential relationship with
+us--with us as we are in the act of looking and comparing. This is the
+external point from which we may view our hand. But there is another
+one: the hand that picks up the pen as we are about to write is truly
+our hand, the instrument of which we avail ourselves in order to ply
+another tool which is needed for our work. In these circumstances our
+right hand, instead of being for us one in the midst of many, as it was
+in the case previously considered, is ours, the only one which we can
+possibly use, as we endeavour to carry out our intention of writing,
+which intention is our will to realise our personality in that
+determined way, since doing a thing always means realising that
+personality of ours which does that thing. Our hand in this case
+coalesces so completely with our being that without it--the hand already
+trained to write--we could not be ourselves. Abstractly, to be sure, we
+should be ourselves. But it is the same story over again. What exists is
+not the abstract but the concrete. And in the concrete, we, who are
+about to write, are this determined personality, in which our will flows
+into the hand; and just as we could not in truth distinguish our Self
+from our will (we being nothing more and nothing less than this will of
+ours), in the same way it would be impossible to distinguish between
+"us" and our hand, between our will and our hand. Since the hand now
+wields the pen, having perfected its instrumentality by means of this
+latter, our will no longer leans upon and terminates in the hand, but it
+flows on and presses into the point of the pen itself, through which, if
+neither ink nor paper offers resistance, it empties into the stream of
+writing. This writing which is read is Thought, whereby the writer finds
+himself at the end in front of his own thinking, that is, in front of
+himself; that self, which, considering the act materially, he seemed to
+be leaving further and further behind, whereas in reality he was
+penetrating into it more and more deeply. But in such a case and by the
+act itself, can we effectively distinguish between thought, arm, hand,
+writing material, the written page, that same page when read, and the
+new thought? It is a circle made up of contiguous points, without gaps
+or interruptions. It is one sole process, wherein in consequence of a
+particular organisation of our personality, we place ourselves in front
+of ourselves, and thus realise ourselves. The hand is ours because it is
+not distinguished from us, nor, consequently, from the remaining limbs
+of our body nor from its material surroundings.
+
+This, our hand, knows how to write because we have learned how to write:
+in exactly the same way that our heart knows how to love, to dare and
+renounce, by striving earnestly to see ourselves in others, to repress
+the instinctive timidity of excessive prudence, and to break the force
+of desire prompted by natural egoism. We are then what we want to be;
+not merely in our passions and ideas, but in our limbs too, to the
+extent that their being depends from their functions, and their
+functions can be regulated by hygiene and exercise, which are our action
+and our will.
+
+There is, of course, a natural datum which we cannot modify, which we
+have to accept as a basis for further construction. But this limitation,
+imposed on the truths I mentioned above, must be accepted without in any
+way renouncing the truth itself, and should be understood by virtue of
+both its scientific and moral values. This warning is not merely helpful
+in connection with the question now before us, but will always prove
+useful on account of its bearing on the many problems which arise from a
+spiritualistic conception of life and cause shiftless philosophasters to
+shy and balk. It is true that there is a body which we did not give to
+ourselves, which therefore is not a product of our spirit, nor part of
+its life and substance, but only if we think of the body of the
+individual, empirically considered as such. In this sense I am not
+self-produced. The son can ascribe to his parents the imperfection that
+mars his whole existence, whatever kind of life he may decide to lead.
+The man who was born blind may blame his affliction upon cruel nature.
+But the child who calls his parents to account, and the man who
+complains of nature, is man as a particular; he is one of many men, one
+of the animals, one of the beings, one of the infinite things wielded by
+_Man_ (that man to whom we must always refer, when we wish to recall
+that even if the world is not all spirit, there is at least a little
+corner therein set aside for it); he is one of the infinite things which
+Man gathers and unifies in his own thought because he is thought. The
+particular man is man as he is being _thought_, who refers us to the
+_thinking_ man as to the true man. This true man is also an individual,
+not as a part but as the whole, and comprehends all within itself. And
+in this man, parents and children are the same man. In it men and nature
+are, likewise, one and the same, man or spirit in its universality. We
+(each one of us) are one and the other of these men; but we are one of
+them, the smaller one, only in that we are the other one, the larger
+one, and we ought not to expect the small to take the place of the large
+and to act in his stead. All our errors and all our sins are caused by
+substituting one in place of the other.
+
+And what is more, the large, the all embracing, the infinite, is
+present in the small with all his infinitude. Personality as such, in
+its actuality, does not shrink and restrict itself to the singular and
+particular man. Within those boundaries which are only visible from
+the outside, it internally expatiates to infinity, absorbing in
+itself and surmounting all limitations. The man born blind does not
+know the marvels and the wondrous beauties of nature which gladden the
+eyes and the soul of the seeing man. But his soul pours out none the
+less over the infinity of harmonies and of thought. And the blind man
+who once saw, in the consciousness of his sightlessness, cherishes the
+boundless image of the world once seen, and magnifies it indefinitely
+by the aid of the imagination. He even heals the wounds and soothes
+the pain of blindness by making it objective through reflection; and
+the personality, at any event, always victoriously breaks out of the
+narrow cell in which it might seem to be confined. So that in the
+depths of even the gloomiest dungeon a ray of light always peers
+through, to lighten and comfort the soul of man in misery, and to
+restore to him the entire and therefore infinite liberty of creating
+for himself a world of his own.
+
+We can therefore say that man, he that lives--not the one which is seen
+from the outside, but the thinking and the willing man, who is a
+personality in the act--never submits to a nature which is not his own.
+He shapes his own nature, beginning with his body, and gradually from
+it magnifying the effect of his power, and crowding the environing
+space, which is his, with the creatures he gives life to. We must not
+consider the smaller man whom we see confined to a few square feet and
+at the mercy of the passing instant. We must intently look upon that
+other one who has done and still continues to do all the beautiful
+things on which we thrive, on that one who is humanity, the spirit. We
+must consider his power, which is thought and work (work, that is, as
+thought); and ponder over this material world in which we live, all
+blocked out, as it is, measured, and traversed by forces which we
+bridle, accumulate and release, at pleasure,--this world which has been
+altered from its former state, and has been made as we now see it fit
+for human habitation, which has been joined to us, assimilated to our
+life, spiritualised. When we have done all this we shall see how
+impossible it is to disconnect nature from the spirit, and to think the
+former without the latter. Nature may be dissociated from the natural
+man, that is, one of its parts may be isolated from the remainder. But
+such man of nature is not the one who rules over nature: he is not Volta
+who clutches the electric current and transforms the earth; he is not
+Michel Angelo who transfigures marble and creates the Moses.
+
+Physical education, then, is not superadded to the education of the
+spirit, but is itself education of the spirit. It is the fundamental
+part of this education, in as much as the body is, in the sense we have
+used the words, the seat of our spiritual personality. Living means
+constructing one's own body, because living is thinking, and thinking is
+self-consciousness; but this consciousness is possible only if we make
+it objective, and the object as such is the body (our body). For as
+consciousness is, so is the body. There is no thinking which is not also
+doing. Thinking not only builds up the brain, but the rest of the body
+besides. We may call it will, but then there is not one single act of
+thought which is not the mental activity indicated by this word "will."
+Without will we should have no bodily substance, in as much as the body
+is always and primarily life, and living is impossible without willing.
+What are called involuntary movements are not really such; they differ
+from the so-called voluntary in that they are constant, immanent, so
+much so that we can after all interrupt them. Without the exercise of
+our will we could never hold ourselves erect and keep our feet, but
+would forever be stumbling and falling; unless we willed it, the power
+which keeps every organ in its place, and maintains all the organs in
+the circle of life, would be annihilated. Therefore _morale_, as they
+say, is a very considerable aid in curing the diseases of the body. It
+is on this account that societies and religious sects have arisen which
+make of moral faith an instrument of physical well-being. For the same
+reason, also, it is impossible for the psychiatrists to draw a line
+separating mental troubles from bodily ailments. The force of the will,
+the vigour of the personality, the impulse of the spirit in its
+becoming, this is the wondrous power which galvanises matter and
+organically quickens it; which sustains life, equips it, and fits it for
+its march towards ever renewed, ever improved finalities. It is not
+temperament which is the basis of character, but character which is the
+basis of temperament. If we reverse this proposition, every moral
+conception of life becomes absurd, and every spiritual value appears
+ineffectual. Don Abbondio then ceases to be wrong, and Cardinal Federico
+Borromeo is no longer right.
+
+Character too is an empirical concept, and like all such concepts, it
+has a truthfulness which is not clearly discernible, but dimly visible.
+Character signifies rational personality, using the term rationality to
+mean, not the movement or the becoming which belongs peculiarly to
+reason as the form of spiritual activity, but the coherence of the
+object on which this activity is fixed, which coherence in turn consists
+in the harmony whereby it is possible to think all the parts of
+objective thought as forming a single whole, in that there is no
+conflict or contradiction among them, and in as much as the object
+remains always the same throughout all these particulars. If in the
+course of reasoning we introduce conflicting statements which cannot
+possibly be referred to the same thing, we cannot be said to reason.
+Rationality is the permanence of the being of which we think: it is
+firmness of conception, stability of a law which we apply to all
+particulars that come under its sway. For the object of consciousness is
+characterised, in respect to the act which constitutes it, by this
+stability and immutability. What we think is _that_ and no other,
+whereas thought, by which we think it, is a becoming and a continuous
+change.
+
+But the character of man is in the object, in the contents of his
+thought, in what he gradually builds himself up to, in the determined
+personality which he constitutes by thinking, or, in other words, _in
+his body_. But body, be it remembered, in an idealistic sense, body as a
+system, forming, with its law and its configuration, the solid basis of
+every ulterior development. This truth, vaguely accepted by common
+sense, which looks upon a strong constitution as a preliminary to a
+sound character, will appear in its full light only after it has been
+stripped of the fantastic and material attributes which it receives from
+a realistically vulgar way of conceiving the body materially. For it is
+evident that a feeble and sickly man may yet have a steel-like
+character. Farinata, who stands "erect with breast and brow," as though
+he held Hell in contempt: Giordano Bruno, who amidst the flames that
+already consume his flesh disdainfully turns his eyes from the symbol of
+the religion which had thrust him on the stake, are evident examples of
+a strength of mind with no relation to their physical powers, which were
+already destroyed or about to be scattered by an irresistible might.
+Leopardi is right when he scornfully protests that his ill health is not
+the cause of that sad pessimism which in his mind solemnly challenges
+"the unseemly hidden Power."
+
+Character is physical robustness to the extent that this latter is
+spiritual haleness, and in so far as it is compact, firm, steadfast
+thought. Thought in this respect appears externally as body, not subject
+to the hostile forces that perpetually beset it from without and from
+within; and on account of the intrinsic spirituality of its substance,
+it is a law rather than a fact, and a process or a tendency rather than
+a fixed and established manner of being. For organic endurance, which is
+really what we mean by health, does not consist in muscular development
+or in the bloom of an exuberant constitution, but rather in an
+indwelling power, in dynamically persistent and tenacious struggle and
+adaptation, in the capacity of self-preservation, of self-affirmation,
+which is the specific essence of spiritual being.
+
+This body, in which thought organises and consolidates itself; this
+body, by means of which thought is enabled to press on its vigorous
+development, reabsorbing in its actual present the past accomplishment,
+and to proceed on its ascent, scaling the height step by step, never
+sliding downward, because every grade it builds remains as a firm
+support of the next one;--this is man's character, which is not an
+attribute of the will considered as practical activity in
+contra-distinction to theoretic activity. Character is an attribute of
+the spirit _qua_ spirit, without any adjectives. We may, if we will,
+distinguish the practical from the theoretical man, the soundness of the
+will from intellectual originality. But just as it is not possible to
+conceive of a really fruitful and constructive practical activity
+without that coherence of design and self-supporting volitional
+continuity which constitute character, in the same way intelligence and
+ingenuity will not become manifest without firmness of purpose, without
+persevering reflection and study of the object, and without stability of
+this object of intellectual activity, which again constitute character.
+If character is set as the basis of morality, then every science and
+every form of culture, even those which aim at evil, considered in
+themselves, as the life of the intelligence must have a moral value,
+must be governed by an inviolable law. By spiritual steadfastness, which
+is the condition of spiritual productivity, man sacrifices himself to an
+ideal and constitutes his moral personality, whether he die for his
+country or whether he labour to bring light amid his thoughts. Life in
+all its phases is the untiring fulfilment of duty.
+
+To conclude then, physical education must be encouraged, but as
+spiritual training and as formation of character. Gymnastic exercise,
+therefore, far from being the only way to this end, may even lead in the
+opposite direction; and it will do so as long as it is considered apart
+from the remainder of education, with a particular scope of its own, and
+with heterogeneous contents in respect to spiritual education properly
+so-called. The teacher of physical education must always bear in mind
+that he is not dealing with _bodies_, bodies to be moved around, to be
+lined up, or rushed around a track. He too is training souls, and
+collaborates with all the other teachers in the moral preparation and
+advancement of mankind. If, in addition to his special qualifications,
+he does not possess culture enough to enable him to discern the spirit
+beyond the body, and to understand therefore the moral value of order,
+of precision, of gracefulness, of agility, by which man externally
+realises his personality, he will no doubt fulfil the ordinary demands
+of physical culture, but he will just as certainly antagonise and
+disgust those of his pupils who are most highly gifted and otherwise
+better trained, and he can therefore lay no claim to the title of
+educator.
+
+Education then is either one or not effective. The assumption that there
+are many kinds of education leads to very disastrous results. Education
+is one; and as a whole it appears unchanged in each one of the parts
+that we ordinarily distinguish in it, according as we approach the human
+spirit now from one side and now from the other.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+THE IDEAL OF EDUCATION
+
+ART AND RELIGION
+
+
+We have shown in the previous chapters the necessity of rigorously
+maintaining the unity of education, of resisting every attempt at
+separation, of opposing all systems which treat the various parts of
+education as though they could be kept distinct in practice and theory.
+There still remains a question which naturally arises at this juncture,
+and which we must try to answer. For true it is, some one might say,
+that moral and intellectual education are one and the same thing, and
+true it may be that education of the mind and culture of the body work
+for the same results; and it may also be admitted that education being
+formation, or development, that is, the becoming of the spirit, and the
+spirit consisting in its becoming or rather in becoming pure and simple,
+it follows that education means spirit and nothing more. But granting
+all this, was it really worth while? When we have attained this notion
+of the unity which is always the same, no matter under how many aspects
+it may present itself, what have we gained? Have we here anything more
+than a word? One says "spirit," another might say "God," or "nature,"
+or "matter," or some such thing, and there would not be much difference.
+It might well be that in the course of the inquiry into the attributes
+of the spirit, a way was found to invest our word with quite a different
+meaning; but still, after we have defined and distinguished the concept
+of the spirit from all the others, we have not progressed much. We may
+have the satisfaction of continuing to see before us this concept, with
+no possibility of ever ridding ourselves of its presence, but how much
+will we know of the contents that this spirit is supposed to have? What
+are the principles that should govern this education, which has been
+clearly stated to be not a natural fact, but a free action, and
+therefore a selection enlightened by consciousness, by reflection, and
+by reason?
+
+This suggested objection is not a purely imaginary one. Very often
+superficial critics, forgetting that pedagogical problems pertain to
+philosophy and are therefore problems of the spirit, awkwardly try to
+solve them by the insufficient light of common sense. In so doing they
+warn us that in idealistic pedagogics all particular and definite
+concepts vanish, and what remains is a vague confused indistinctness of
+no practical utility to the teacher.
+
+And truly, if the only result obtained by idealistic pedagogics were the
+demonstration that many concepts, ordinarily considered to be
+substantially different, are in reality identical, we should not
+hesitate to call such philosophical knowledge useless and ridiculous.
+But in the first place we must notice that this assumed deficiency
+charged against us has partially been shown to be non-existent by the
+exposition of our doctrine, which reduces education to free spiritual
+becoming, and resolves the apparent multiplicity of educational forms in
+the immultiplicable unity of this becoming, outside of which nothing is
+truly conceivable.
+
+For the defect of our system was assumed in connection with an exigency
+which divides itself into two parts, respectively corresponding to the
+form and to the matter of education. For many of the pedagogical errors
+which we have pointed out were seen to be imputable, not to the choice
+of an unsuitable content of education, but to the criterion adopted in
+treating this content. I have already spoken of my disinclination to
+accomplish a mere negative task; and in the last chapter, while
+denouncing the materialistic conception of physical education, I
+certainly did not spare the ascetic view which knows of no body other
+than the one which harasses the spirit and hinders its progress toward
+the ultimate good; and thereupon I tried to show that physical culture
+is spiritual education endowed with that self-same nature which belongs
+to education when considered as formation of the will and of the
+intellect. But this does not mean that our thesis reduces itself to a
+mere theoretic transvaluation or to a new abstract interpretation of
+our present educative system, which however in practice could not be
+affected by this purely theoretical difference of interpretation. I
+tried to make it clear that our conception is not devoid of practical
+import, and that it does lead to a reform in education and to a new
+orientation of the school. This was especially brought out in connection
+with physical culture in the preceding chapter, when I insisted on the
+necessity that physical instructors be trained in such a way that their
+mental equipment shall not be limited to notions that refer exclusively
+to the body in its physical limitations: but that in addition to
+physiology, anatomy, and hygiene, they be made familiar also with those
+studies and disciplines that are more intimately connected with
+character, with the soul, and with the mind.
+
+But besides this, our entire investigation dealing with the reasons for
+an absolutely spiritualistic conception of education should have made it
+very clear that it is not possible to entertain these new conceptions
+without introducing in the school a new spirit, which will not yield to
+the realistic vogue and to the materialistic, pedantic, old-fashioned
+education,--a spirit which will bring before us a new duty in every
+instant of our teaching life and in every word we utter, and which will
+impress us with the necessity of acting differently from what has been
+taught by the followers of traditional pedagogical routine. Whatever
+the subject may be, the form of education has to be in accord with
+something that should by now be the common possession of us all, namely,
+the consciousness of the intimate spirituality and of the sacred freedom
+of our work, which operates not in the material schools but within the
+souls of our pupils. There it gives rise not to incidents that are
+unessential to that greater world which is the aim of our religiously,
+serious outlook on life, but to a process in which All is involved. The
+speculative side then of this form of education is not a useless and
+abstract theory, but a necessary moment of the moral improvement, of the
+spiritual enhancement, and of the general regeneration of teaching.
+Indifference to this reform, and the belief that men may continue to
+educate without bothering with the subtle problems of philosophy, mean a
+failure to understand the precise nature of education.
+
+But the question of the content of education is a different one. Having
+identified education with spiritual reality itself, it follows that the
+two determinations of the content of the latter belong to the content of
+the former. One of these determinations is historical in character; it
+advances as the history of the human mind progresses, assuming now this
+and now that aspect in accordance with the prevailing spiritual
+interests. We who have censured the conception of pre-established
+programmes, as being most dangerous prejudices of pedagogical realism,
+could not very well presume to determine here in the abstract, the
+content of every possible form of education for all places and all
+times. The school, like every other form of education, develops; and as
+it grows, it constantly changes its content, which again is nothing else
+than the content that the spirit gives to itself at every moment of its
+concrete development.
+
+It would be just as irrational to expect a school to map out with
+precision the limits and the scope of a pupil's culture. Of all the
+culture carved out for him at school, a boy will absorb only that much
+which is taken up by the autonomous growth of his personality. This will
+be supplemented and integrated by the culture which he gets outside of
+the classroom, in all possible walks of life, and will be so personal
+and of such a character as to admit of no prevision or pre-determination
+even on the part of the learner himself. Away with pre-established
+programmes then of any description! Spiritual activity works only in the
+plenitude of freedom. Horace asks: _Currente rota cur urceus exit?_ We
+answer: Whether an _urceus_ or not, what always comes from the _rota_ is
+something which cannot be foreseen, for the very simple reason that what
+is foreseen is not the future but the past, which we (as in the case of
+experimental sciences) project into the future, whereas the spirit is a
+creation which occurs not in time but in a never-setting present.
+
+So every abstract discussion of the possible content of education in
+general, or of any given particular school, must appear crude and
+absurd, if we recall that education reflects the historical development
+of the spirit. What we need to do is to wait, observe, and have faith.
+For God will reveal himself to us; and God is the very Spirit of ours
+which at every moment prescribes its law to itself and thus determines
+its own content.
+
+The other of the two determinations mentioned above is the _ideal_, or,
+as we perhaps might more precisely call it, the _transcendental_. It
+pertains to that spiritual content which never changes as it passes
+through the various historical determinations, and which might therefore
+be styled the "determiner of the intrinsic and absolute essence of the
+spirit." This content upon careful consideration reveals itself as form,
+and more precisely as the form of the historically determined content of
+the spirit; or again as the concreteness of that form which has been
+attributed to the spirit considered in itself, which is a becoming. But
+_qua_ becoming, and irrespective of all special aspects with which it
+historically configures itself, the spirit has already a content of its
+own, which cannot be absent from any of its historical configurations.
+In them this content will manifest itself over and over again, but
+constantly modified by the changes that are being historically produced.
+Under these varying modes and presentations it permanently abides as
+the indefectible substance of the spirit. This substance, this ideal
+spirit which becomes actual in history, cannot be ignored by any kind of
+pedagogics which aspires to a thorough knowledge of the essence of
+education.
+
+Having thus formulated the problem, and clinging firmly to the principle
+of educational unity, we may distinguish the forms of education which
+proceed from the ideal content of the spirit. But we must always
+keep in mind that, as these forms are only distinguishable ideally,
+they can in no way be effectively separated, and must be found in
+every concrete educative act. So that their synthesis and their
+complete immanence is the concreteness of educational unity in its
+opposition to what I have called fragmentary education. Our distinction
+then will turn out to be an exact logical analysis, which analyses only
+the terms of a synthesis and cannot therefore be dissociated from the
+synthesis. By analysing and by synthesising, by determining the
+spiritual unity without disconnecting or in any way dissociating its
+intrinsic ideal determinations, we strive to represent the ideal of
+education.
+
+In making a rapid survey of this analysis, I must refer back to what was
+said of the attributes of the spirit,--that the spirit _is_ in that it
+_becomes_, that it becomes in so far as it acquires self-consciousness,
+that its being therefore is consciousness in the act of being acquired.
+This act is surely self-consciousness, and it does mean cognition, but
+a cognition which differs from all others in that it has for its object
+that very one who cognises. And this is the meaning of "I," identity of
+subject and object,--an identity, however, that because of its curious
+nature needs to be carefully examined. It was shown in a preceding
+chapter that two things, to be thought as two, must yet be thought as
+one by virtue of the unique relationship which makes their duality
+possible. Here we observe the inverse: identity of subject and object
+means that in addition to the subject there is--nothing; it means
+therefore unity. And yet this unity would in no manner be intelligible
+if it were not also a duality, if, in other words, the identity of
+subject and object were not also the difference between them.
+
+To distinguish A from B, an initial, elementary minimum difference is
+required. It is the difference, called _otherness_, by which B is other
+than A. Without this otherness there would not be A and B, but either A
+alone or B alone. The subject as it knows itself is certainly not
+another from the subject alone. But if it did not become _other_ to
+itself, if it were not object also, as well as subject, it would never
+know itself. To be object as well as subject implies the necessity of
+distinguishing these two terms, and shows that there is otherness
+between them. If it sounds harsh to speak of something that first is
+"_one_" and then is "_two_," we might state the situation in a
+different and perhaps simpler way. We might say that the subject would
+not know itself, if remaining always that one and self-same subject, it
+were not both subject and object to itself.
+
+Consciousness implies this self-alteration of the subject, which by
+placing itself as an object in front of itself realises itself, it being
+real only as self-consciousness. This is the import of the identity of
+the two terms, subject and object; or of the difference intrinsic to the
+one, which is but another way of stating it. We may insist as much as we
+want on the identity of the "I," but it will always be true that this
+"I" is real only in virtue of its intrinsic difference. And conversely
+we may insist, as it is more often done, on the difference between the
+subjective moment of the "I," whereby the "I" is set in opposition to
+all its objects, and the objective moment in which the ego vanishes. But
+behind the difference, identity is always to be found. Man, the more he
+thinks, the more he alters himself, the more objective that reality
+becomes which he realises by self-consciousness, the more fully he sees
+the variation, the development, the growth, the enhancement of the
+object--the world he knows.
+
+The spirit's being is its alteration. The more it _is_,--that is, the
+more it becomes, the more it lives,--the more difficult it is for it to
+recognise itself in the object. It might therefore be said that he who
+increases his knowledge also increases his ignorance, if he is unable
+to trace this knowledge back to its origin, and if the spirit's rally
+does not induce him to rediscover himself at the bottom of the object,
+which has been allowed to alter and alienate itself more and more from
+the secret source of its own becoming. Thus it happens, as was said of
+old, that "He that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow." All human
+sorrow proceeds from our incapacity to recognise ourselves in the
+object, and consequently to feel our own infinite liberty.
+
+Subject then and object, and in their synthesis, in their living unity,
+the spirit, which therefore is neither a subject standing against an
+object, nor its opposite. The two terms, each one for itself, isolated,
+are equivalent. But every time human thought has isolated them, whether
+striving to conceive itself, its own spiritual substance, objectively
+(God), or as a simple subject (a particular man), it has ever reached
+most desperate conclusions, now totally blocking its way to the
+comprehension and justification of its own subjectivity, and now
+secluding itself in an abstract subjectivity, removed from _all_ which
+man theoretically and practically needs in order to live. The reality of
+the spirit is not in the subject as opposed to the object, but in the
+subject that has in itself the object as its actuality.
+
+It is on account of this inseverable unity, by which the subject presses
+to itself the object and becomes actual therein, that the progressive
+alteration of the object is also the progressive alteration of the
+subject. At every given moment, the subject, altered as it is, made into
+the "other" or determined, is yet pure subject, and nothing else than
+the subject which becomes conscious of itself, and therefore actual by
+determining itself as subject of its object, in such a way that the
+subject as well as the object is always new and always different. Not
+because it is now one subject and now another, in which case succession
+and enumeration would import multiplicity, and would therefore reduce
+the spirit to a thing; but because it appears and cannot but appear
+thus, if observed from the point of view which distinguishes one
+individual from another, and in the same individual one instant from the
+next, although from a rigorously idealistic point of view the spirit is
+one, and its determinateness does not detract from its absolute
+originality.
+
+This dialectic in which the spiritual becoming unfolds itself (subject,
+object, and unity of subject and object), this self-objectifying or
+self-estrangement aiming at self-attainment,--this is the eternal life
+of the spirit, which creates its immortal forms, and determines the
+ideal contents of culture and education. The spirit's self-realisation
+is the realisation of the subject, of the object, and of their
+relationship. If of these three terms (the third being the synthesis of
+the first and second) any one should fail, the spiritual reality would
+cease to be.
+
+This threefold realisation admits empirically of a separation that makes
+it possible to have one without the others. On the strength of this
+triple division we speak of art, of religion, and of philosophy, as
+though each one of them could subsist by itself. So that commonly people
+believe that it is possible to be a poet without in any way burdening
+one's mind with religion or philosophy,--especially philosophy, which
+appears to be the bugbear of most poets. In the same way many
+philosophers, and among them one of the very greatest, held art to be
+the negation of philosophy, to the point that it should be banished from
+the kingdom where the latter was expected to reign. And how often has
+religion taken up arms, now against poetry, and now against speculation!
+All of these occurrences were possible because the three terms were
+looked upon as separable, as though they were three material things,
+each one of which could be what it was only on condition that it
+excluded the others.
+
+A superficial understanding of the differences intervening between these
+three terms is the reason why they are often looked upon as separable.
+But in reality they are so indissolubly conjoined, that separation would
+destroy their spiritual character, and put in its place mechanism, which
+is the property of all that is not spirit.
+
+Art is the self-realisation of the spirit as subject. Man becomes
+enfolded in his subjectivity, and hears but the voice of love or other
+inward summons. Living without communication with the world, he refrains
+from affirming and denying what exists and what does not exist. He
+simply spreads out over his own abstract interior world, and dreams; and
+as he dreams, he escapes from the outer bustle into the seclusion of his
+enchanted realm, which is true in itself until he issues from it and
+discovers it to be a figment of his phantasy. This man is the artist,
+who, we might say, neither cognises nor acts, but sings.
+
+His subjectivity appears empirically to us always as a determined
+subjectivity, the determination of which proceeds from the object in
+which the spirit, theoretically and practically, has previously
+objectified itself. But this priority of the act, by which the artist is
+considered a man of this objective world before he withdraws into
+his dreams, is a mere empirical appearance. If we relied on it, we
+could not preserve to the spirit in its artistic life that originality
+and autonomy, that absolute spontaneity and freedom, which is the
+essential character or, as we called it, the attribute of spiritual
+activity. To become objective, the spirit must first be subject; and in
+front of the object in which it objectifies itself, it again inevitably
+becomes subject,--an ever determined one indeed, but nothing else than
+a subject. That is why the contemporary theory of aesthetics holds that
+form in art absorbs in itself the content, with no residuum. It
+absorbs it _qua_ subjectivity; for whatever the object be which this
+subjectivity, empirically considered, has enwrapped, it draws it
+entirely over to itself, reassumes it, and as pure subjectivity it
+cannot return to its object without passing through the moment of its
+opposition to the object,--the moment in which the subject is
+nothing else than subject, and finds in itself infinite gratification.
+This is the realm of art, a realm from which the spirit, in consequence
+of the very function of the subject, is compelled to issue; since
+the subject is subject in that it issues from itself, becomes
+self-conscious, objectifies itself. So the poet as he dreams breathes
+life into the personages of his dreams, builds them up, and gives
+them reality. What is his own abstract subjectivity he chooses as a
+world in which he himself may live absolutely; and the ideas which
+mature in that fantastic world of his--which is nothing more, as I
+have said, than his abstract subjectivity--are affirmed by him without
+any reserves, and are opposed to the ideas of philosophers and of
+men who prefer concrete reality to phantasy.
+
+This lyrical bent, peculiar to the artist who enhances himself by
+exalting his own abstract individuality, is in direct contrast with the
+tendency of the Saint, who crushes and annihilates this same
+individuality in the face of his God,--that God who infinitely occupies
+his consciousness as the "other" in absolute alterity to him, so that
+the subject is hurled into the object in a total self-abstraction. It
+sinks in the contemplation of its own self in its objective "otherness,"
+of itself become the other, in which it no longer recognises itself. So
+he deifies this other self, places it on the altar, and kneels before
+it. Thus the saint's personality is nullified; or rather, it is
+actualised and realised in this self-annulment, which is the theoretical
+and practical characteristic of mysticism and the specific act of
+religion.
+
+It is not possible to tear art from the spirit's life, in as much as it
+could not be the synthesis it actually is without being subjectivity. It
+is equally impossible for the spirit to be completely devoid of
+religiosity. The mystic flower of faith grows out of the bosom of
+art,--a faith in an object which draws the soul to itself and conquers
+it. The life of the spirit is an eternal crossing from art to religion,
+from the subject to the object. It is impossible for the artist to
+realise his art in unalloyed purity, since his world, the world he has
+created for himself, is nevertheless the bigger world, out of which,
+empirically speaking, he is driven only by the needs of practical life,
+which awaken him and remind him of the existence of a wider world. In
+the same way it is impossible to realise a pure religion in which the
+subject completely and effectually might annihilate itself. For in the
+measure that faith increases in intensity, and the sentiment of one's
+own nothingness grows deeper, and the idea that the object is all
+becomes more obsessing, in that same measure the energy of the spirit
+increases, of the spirit as the subject that has been powerful enough to
+create this situation. Altars must be built in order that people may
+kneel in front of them. The concept of God, it, too, has a history. And
+from this history no word can be taken away on the assumption that it
+was immediately _revealed_. For there is no word which pre-exists as
+such before the act of him who cognises it. And to fix a dogma, that is,
+to rescue it from the flow of evolution, we should have to withdraw from
+the course of evolution the men themselves who are to accept it.
+
+Nothing therefore is more impious than the history of religion, in the
+course of which man, now dragging his God down to the depths of his
+apparent misery, now lifting him to the heights of his real greatness,
+progresses from station to station along the unending way of sorrows and
+joys. The process of mental development shows unwittingly, by the very
+acts of man's innocent piety, that God is _his_ God, that the life of
+the object is the same as the life of the subject.
+
+The nature then both of art and of religion implies a flagrant
+contradiction which comes to this,--that the subject to be subject is
+object, and the object to be object is subject. Hence the torments of
+the poet and the spasms of the mystic. A perfect art and a perfect
+religion, that is, art which is not religion, and religion which is not
+art, are two impossibilities. This does not mean that either art or
+religion can ever be superseded and left behind as two illusions,
+ancient and constant, if we will, but none the less devoid of all value.
+The very contrary of this is true. Just because there is no pure art,
+religion is eternal; and art is eternal, because religion cannot be
+attained in its absolute purity.
+
+The concrete spirit is neither subject nor object. It is a
+self-objectifying subject, and an object which becomes the subject in
+virtue of the subjectivity that alights on it as it realises it. The
+spirit is therefore a becoming. It is the synthesis, the unity of these
+two opposites, ever in conflict and yet always intimately joined. And
+the spirit, as this unity, is the concreteness both of art (reality of
+the abstract subject) and of religion (reality of the abstract object).
+It is philosophy. Many definitions have been given of philosophy, and
+all of them true, because directly or indirectly they may, on the
+strength of what is expressed or what is understood, be reduced to the
+following definition: that philosophy is the spirit. If we say that it
+is the science of the spirit, we indulge in a useless pleonasm. For
+science, unless we distinguish in an absolute manner (which is
+impossible) one grade of determinateness from the other, is the same as
+consciousness; and spirit is, as we have seen, self-consciousness. If we
+say that philosophy is the science of reality in its universality, we
+lose sight of the fact that reality, for those who do not stray off into
+the maze of abstractness, _is_ the spirit. A definition which has never
+lost its value is that one which makes philosophy consist in the
+elaboration of concepts, that is, in the unification of all the concepts
+(those we possess, of course) into a coherent concept. This is an
+excellent definition, and it warns us that philosophy is not obtained by
+stopping before abstractions, no matter what these abstractions may be.
+All particular things are abstractions, each one of which yields a
+concept, and all of them give a number of concepts, which must be
+brought together and unified, if we ever intend to think all things that
+are thought, and thus philosophise. The subject without the object as
+the artist wants it is an abstraction; and similarly abstract is the
+object which religion looks up to.
+
+We are accustomed, not without reason, to distinguish the life of the
+spirit from philosophy. But the reason, instead of destroying, confirms
+the identity between spirit and philosophy, and for the following cause.
+The spirit never being what it ought to be, we live acquiring
+consciousness of ourselves. But when we pause to ask ourselves if we
+have really obtained this consciousness, and turn to our life as to the
+subject-matter of this problem, which is the problem of philosophy, we
+discover that we cannot answer in the affirmative. For answering is
+spiritual living, a living, therefore, which consists not in having
+self-consciousness but in acquiring it. So that philosophy does not
+arise from the need of understanding the life already lived, for the
+past is the realm of death; but rather from the much keener desire of
+living, of leading a better life, a true life, and of finally realising
+this spiritual reality which is our ideal. But when?
+
+Can we believe that there is ever going to be a philosophy which will
+definitely fulfil the ideal? It is obvious that a pursuit of such
+philosophy would lead the spirit into a race to death; whereas on the
+contrary the spirit is life; it is an impulse to ever more intense
+living.
+
+This philosophy, it is evident, is not the exclusive, esoteric classroom
+discipline, the professional privilege of a few specialists. It is
+rather the source from which this professional speculation derives its
+right to address all men who have an exalted sentiment of their human
+dignity, who hearken to the deeper utterances of their souls, who are
+able to see how much of their own self there is in this vast world which
+is being disclosed to their eyes; who, even though vaguely and timidly,
+are conscious of the divine power that resides in every human heart; who
+feel that this human heart, prone though it be to all baseness, is also
+capable of lifting itself to the most sublime heights, and of enjoying
+the pure and lofty satisfactions which human phantasy ordinarily
+relegates to heaven. In the depths of every mind there is a philosophy:
+the mind itself is untiring speculation, which more or less successfully
+scales the height, but which is always turned upward to the summit
+whitened by the rising sun. Life is made human by the rays of this
+philosophy. Man is really man when he recognises an object which is the
+world, reality, law, and when he recalls that nothing absolves him from
+the duty of being in this world; of seriously being in it, which means
+working and cooperating towards reality by knowing reality and
+fulfilling the law. For in his freedom and power he can never divest
+himself of his own responsibility; he must therefore develop his
+capacity to the utmost value, and to that end work and work, think, and
+act as the centre of his world. This philosophy does not allow him
+either to withdraw into the abstract retirement of his egoistic self, or
+to deny and sacrifice this self to an imaginary reality. This philosophy
+is never finished, never completed, for it is his own spirit, his very
+self, which to live must grow, and which must constitute itself as it
+develops. And therefore this philosophy cannot help being man's ideal,
+which is always being realised and which is never fulfilled.
+
+So, then, education, which aims at that concrete and truly real unity
+which is the life of the spirit, must always be moral, always spiritual,
+always philosophic. An invidious word, perhaps, for those who have had
+the misfortune to fall into the mean and vulgar habit of grinning and
+scoffing in retaliation for the unsparing censure inflicted by the ideal
+on sloth, presumption, and cowardice. We might perhaps replace this word
+by "integral," excepting that this adjective is generic and therefore
+inappropriate.
+
+I must add, however, that in speaking of philosophic education, I do not
+mean any special course in philosophy. Though I believe that special
+philosophical training has an essential function in the curriculum of
+secondary schools which aim to prepare and direct towards higher studies
+a matured mentality, scientifically trained and humanly inspired, I yet
+hold that this special philosophical training can be effectual only if
+all education, from its very beginning, wherever that may be, has been
+philosophic. We must reflect that just as it is impossible for a man to
+be moral only at certain hours of the day, and in certain particular
+places, morality being the atmosphere without which the spirit cannot
+live, so that ethical teaching is distorted and deflected as soon as it
+is relegated to certain definite books, to be studied in connection with
+certain definite courses; in the same way this philosophy which is for
+us the ideal content of education, and therefore its ideal, cannot but
+be present in every real educative act, cannot help reflecting itself in
+every throb it gives to the soul of the pupil. This general philosophic
+education naturally includes art and religion, which cannot be limited
+subject-matters of special courses of instruction, co-ordinated or
+subordinated to the other elements of the curriculum.
+
+Only the particular sciences, that is, the sciences properly so called,
+may be freely moved in a student's schedule; they may be added or taken
+away, they may be grouped this or that way, and be variously distributed
+in accordance with the needs of the moment and the particular exigencies
+of the student or of man in general. For these sciences reflect in
+themselves the fragmentary multiplicity of things which have been
+abstractly cut off from the centre of the spirit, to which however they
+too refer. And because they do refer to it, the teaching of them should
+be spiritualised, moralised, humanised; it ought to acquire the
+concreteness of philosophy, and therefore never ignore the exigencies of
+art and of religion. For otherwise it will be merely material
+instruction, "informative education," which in reality is no education
+at all.
+
+During the Revival of Learning education was humanistic. Its ideal was
+art. The historical life which corresponded to this ideal was the
+individualism of our Italian Renaissance. After the Counter Reformation,
+art, which is individuality in abstract subjectivity, was abandoned to
+itself, and inevitably decayed in the cult of lifeless form; it became
+barren in the imitations of classical art considered as final
+perfection, to which the individual might raise himself but beyond which
+he could not possibly proceed. Art became thus the negation of
+originality, and of that subjective autonomy of which it naturally
+should be the most enhancing expression. So that classicism up to the
+Romantic Revolt remained the cultural form of a society submissive to
+the principle of authority and religiously oriented. These conditions
+favoured the study of the science of nature, which to the extent that it
+is governed by the naturalistic principle is a manifestation of
+religiosity. The devotee of natural science speaks in fact of his Nature
+with an agnostic reverence similar to that professed by the saint in the
+worship of God. Nature, which alone he knows, becomes the object before
+which the subject, Man, disappears. But as science progresses, the need
+of shaking the principle of authority makes itself felt; the accepted
+truths of nature are subjected to criticism; the power of doubting is
+reintroduced, and the subject again reasserts itself. So the advancement
+of natural science has gradually turned humanity away from the shrines
+of naturalistic science. When naturalism opposed the claims of religion,
+it ceased to be the science of nature, and became philosophy. This
+influenced the scientific spirit in its clash with religious dogmas, and
+restored to it the consciousness of the moment of subjectivity which had
+been forgotten. The ideal of culture, which prevailed in the nineteenth
+century with the triumph of positivism, was science, naturalism, and
+therefore religion. It is now high time that the two opposed elements
+be joined and united, and that the school be neither abstractly
+humanistic in the pursuit of Art nor abstractly religious and
+scientific, but that it be made what it is ideally, and what it is also
+in practice when it efficaciously educates--the philosophic school.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+As each one has a different path to follow in this world, each one will
+accordingly have his own education. But all paths converge to one point,
+where we all gather to lead in common that universal life which alone
+makes us men. And as we meet at this centre, we must understand each
+other, and should be able therefore to speak the same language, the
+language of the spirit. We are compelled by an irresistible need to live
+this common life, and together to constitute one sole spirit. But this
+end we shall never attain if man, who ought to be entire and complete,
+acts as a mere fragment,--such fragment, for example, as the aesthete, or
+the superstitious worshipper, or the star gazer, always unaware of the
+pit under his feet. If we continue in this state, in which one man
+clings to the superstition of mathematics, another idolises entomology,
+a third worships physics, and so on indefinitely, if man insists on
+fencing off his little piece of this "thrashing-floor that makes us
+cruel," knowing no other man but himself, feeling no needs other than
+his own, then war will break out. Not a disciplined war, governed by a
+law, by an idea, by reason, of which it is the life; but a war of every
+man against his brother,--the anarchistic uprising, the disintegration
+of the spirit, and the stern suffering which is true misery.
+
+The dislike for the _purus mathematicus_[5] is traditional. But whether
+he be a mathematician, or a priest, or an economist, or a dentist, or a
+poet, or a street cleaner, man as a fragment of humanity is a nuisance.
+
+We want mathematics, but we want it _in_ the man. And the same for
+religion, economics, poetry, and all the rest. Otherwise we suffocate,
+and die stifled. For all these are things, but there is no life; and
+things oppress us and kill us. Therefore let us spiritualise things by
+reviving the spirit. Let us release it, that it may freely move in the
+organic unity of nature. Let us train it so that its strength, agility,
+balance, and all around development shall be able to control all its
+dependent functions, which can be successfully carried on only on
+condition that they agree, and collaborate toward common life. And this
+is what I call philosophy.
+
+Or we may call it humanity, if the word philosophy suggests strangeness
+and difficulty of attainment. For our demand for an educational reform,
+in accordance with our renewed consciousness, is prompted by the old
+but never ancient desire which put the lantern in the hand of the Greek
+philosopher. Education is truly human when it has for its contents that
+ideal which I have briefly touched upon in this chapter, the ideal of
+the spirit, philosophy.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+  [5] Referring to the old phrase, _purus mathematicus, purus asinus_.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+CONCLUSION
+
+
+We may look upon the preceding chapters as a kind of general examination
+to which we submitted our consciences, by reflecting on the way we have
+always performed our duty as teachers, by considering our purposes, and
+by scrutinising the internal logic of our task. And our investigation
+has been eminently human, since indeed man's essence, we have now come
+to understand, is to acquire self-consciousness.
+
+The patriotic character of the event which was the immediate cause of
+this work induced me to show that the common spirit which brought us
+together was not a mere political sentiment, of which we should rid
+ourselves in crossing the threshold of the school. For we could not but
+bring into the classroom our own humanity and our living personality, in
+which the content of our teaching and of all education must live. This
+personality, however it may be considered, from whatever point of view
+it may be regarded, has no particular substance which is not also at the
+same time universal,--domestic as the case may be, or social, political,
+or whatever may be the phase in which it is determined in its historical
+development. And since, in this historical development of our universal
+personality, there is Italy with her memories perpetuated by our
+immanent sentiment, by our immanent consciousness and by our immanent
+will, we could not possibly be ourselves were we not at the same time
+Italian educators.
+
+And looking attentively at this universal foundation on which our own
+human value is supported--call it language, logic, law,--we were led to
+study the relationship existing between individuality, which is the aim
+of all forms of education, and this universal spirit which here
+intervenes as it does in every moment of the human life. It intervenes
+in education, as the science and the conscience and the entire
+personality of the teacher. This personality seems to be violently
+imposed upon the pupil in such a way as to check or hinder his
+spontaneous development; but we saw that the immediate logical
+opposition between teacher and learner gradually resolves itself into
+the unity of the spiritual process in which education becomes actual.
+
+Education therefore appeared to us, not as a fact which is empirically
+observable, and which may be fixed and looked upon as subject to natural
+laws, but rather as a mystical formation of a super-individual
+spirituality, which is the only real, concrete personality actualised by
+the individual. In order to understand it, we had to liberate it from
+every kind of contact with culture in its materialistic acceptance; and
+we therefore insisted on the speculative inquiry into what we called the
+realistic point of view. We endeavoured to explain how and why culture
+is the very process of education, and the very process of the
+personality in which education takes place. This conception would have
+lacked the necessary support, had we not carried our investigation
+further, and shown that this culture in which the spirit unfolds itself
+is not the attribute of a mind existing amidst other minds and face to
+face with surrounding nature, but is instead the most genuine
+signification of All. For it is the life of the spirit in which
+everything gathers to find its support and become thinkable. Man, as he
+is educated, is man rigorously considered as spirit,--spirit which is
+free, because infinite and truly universal in every one of its moments
+and attitudes. This the educator must intently consider if he wants to
+conceive adequately his task and its enormous responsibilities, which
+become evident when he reflects how in the monad of the individual, in
+the simple soul of the child entrusted to his creative care, the
+infinite vibrates, and a life is born at every instant, which thence
+throbs over the boundless expanse of space, of time, and of all
+reality.
+
+This adequate conception need not be elaborated into a complete system
+of philosophy. The educator must sense and grasp this infinite over
+which every word of his is carried, every glance of his, every gesture.
+As he enters the classroom, as he approaches the child, to whom not only
+_magna reverentia_ is due, but the very cult which is shown to things
+divine, he cannot but feel himself exalted; he cannot but be fully
+conscious of the difficulties of his lofty station, and of the duty of
+overcoming them. He must therefore dismiss from within himself all that
+is petty in his particular personality, all his preoccupations and
+passions, all his commonplace everyday thoughts. He must shake off the
+depressing burden of the flesh, which pulls him downward; and he will
+then open his soul to fortifying Faith, to the ruling and inspiring
+Deity. The man who is not capable of feeling in the School the sanctity
+of the place and of his work is not fit to be an educator.
+
+The spirituality of education becomes however an empty formula, and a
+motif for rhetorical variations, if on the one hand we do not possess
+the concept of the essence or of the attributes of the spirit, and if on
+the other we do not sharply expose those realistic prejudices of
+pedagogy which have been maintained in the field of education by the
+materialistic conception of man and by a tradition which is both
+unreflecting and alien to all radical criticism. I tried to satisfy both
+these exigencies rather by arousing the reflection and impelling it on
+its way than by escorting it on a journey which must be undertaken with
+due preparation.
+
+And finally, in the effort to provide ourselves with a motto, so to
+speak, and a rallying banner, I set forth the doctrine of educational
+unity--of the education which is always at all moments education of the
+spirit. For even physical culture is conceivable only as formation of
+the mind, and more properly of character. Education, we saw, may be made
+actual in a thousand different ways, only always on condition that we
+observe the law which proceeds from its innermost essence and
+constitutes its immanent ideal. Every education is good, provided it is
+education--philosophical, human, mind-stirring education; provided it
+does not bring atrophy to any necessary function of the spirit, does not
+crush the spirit under the weight either of things or of the divinity,
+nor excessively exalt it in the consciousness of its own personal power;
+provided it neither hurls it into the free abstract world of dreams nor
+fetters it in the iron chains of an inhuman reality; and provided it
+does not shatter it and scatter its fragments by the multiple
+investigations of things innumerable, the knowledge of which can never
+bring satisfaction. For it is the function of education to enable the
+centralising unity of the reflective spirit to become articulate and
+varied through the multiplicity of life and of experience, which is the
+actuality of the spirit itself. Opposition to all abstractions, in
+behalf of the concrete spirit and of liberty--that is our educational
+ideal.
+
+
+
+
+THE EUROPEAN LIBRARY
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+THE WORLD'S ILLUSION. By JACOB WASSERMANN. Translated by Ludwig
+Lewisohn. Two volumes.
+
+  One of the most remarkable creative works of our time, revolving
+  about the experiences of a man who sums up the wealth and culture of
+  our age yet finds them wanting.
+
+PEOPLE. By PIERRE HAMP. Translated by James Whitall. With Introduction
+by Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant.
+
+  Introducing one of the most significant writers of France, himself a
+  working man, in whom is incarnated the new self-consciousness of the
+  worker's world.
+
+DECADENCE, AND OTHER ESSAYS ON THE CULTURE OF IDEAS. By REMY DE
+GOURMONT. Translated by William Aspenwall Bradley.
+
+  The critical work of one of the great aesthetic thinkers of France,
+  for the first time made accessible in an authorized English
+  version.
+
+HISTORY: ITS THEORY AND PRACTICE. By BENEDETTO CROCE. Translated by
+Douglas Ainslie.
+
+  A new interpretation of the meaning of history, and a survey of the
+  great historians, by one of the leaders of European thought.
+
+THE NEW SOCIETY. By WALTER RATHENAU. Translated by Arthur Windham.
+
+  One of Germany's most influential thinkers and men of action
+  presents his vision of the new society emerging out of the War.
+
+THE PATRIOTEER. By HEINRICH MANN. Translated by Ernest Boyd.
+
+  A German "Main Street," describing the career of a typical product
+  of militarism, in school, university, business, and love.
+
+MODERN RUSSIAN POETRY: AN ANTHOLOGY. Translated by Babette Deutsch and
+A. Yarmolinsky.
+
+  Covers the whole field of Russian verse since Pushkin, with the
+  emphasis on contemporary poets.
+
+THE REFORM OF EDUCATION. By GIOVANNI GENTILE. With an Introduction by
+Benedetto Croce. Translated by Dino Bigongiari.
+
+  A new interpretation of the meaning of education, by one who shares
+  with Croce the leadership of Italian thought to-day.
+
+CHRIST. By GIOVANNI PAPINI. Translated by Dorothy Canfield Fisher. _In
+preparation._
+
+  The first biography of Christ by a great man of letters since
+  Renan's.
+
+RUBE. By G. A. BORGESE. Translated by Isaac Goldberg. _In preparation._
+
+  An Italian novel of unusual insight, centering on the spiritual
+  collapse since the War.
+
+THE REIGN OF THE EVIL SPIRIT. By C. P. RAMUZ. Translated by James
+Whitall. _In preparation._
+
+  A charming and fantastic tale, introducing an interesting
+  French-Swiss novelist.
+
+  HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY
+  Publishers        New York
+
+
+
+
+
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