Part 18

The new kind of education, the education which is to liberate the mind, will make much of scientific methods. But let us notice what it is to set a mind free. Mind does not exist in a vacuum, nor in a world of "pure ideas." The free mind is the functioning mind, the mind which is not inhibited in its work by any conflict within itself. Thought is not made free by the mere substitution of naturalistic for theological dogma. It is possible to make a cult of science itself. Crowd-propaganda is often full of pseudoscientific jargon of this sort. Specialization in technical training may produce merely a high-class trained-animal man, of the purely reflex type, who simply performs a prescribed trick which he has learned, whenever an expected motor-cue appears. In the presence of the unexpected such a person may be as helpless as any other animal. It is possible to train circus dogs, horses, and even horned toads, to behave in this same way. Much so-called scientific training in our schools to-day is of this sort. It results not in freedom, but in what Bergson would call the triumph of mechanism over freedom.

Science, to be a means of freedom--that is, science as culture--may not be pursued as pure theorizing apart from practical application. Neither may a calculating utilitarianism gain freedom to us by ignoring, in the application of scientific knowledge to given ends, a consideration of the ends themselves and their value for enriching human experience. It is human interest which gives scientific knowledge any meaning. Science must be taught in the humanist spirit. It may not ignore this quality of human interest which exists in all knowledge. To do so is to cut off our relations with reality. And the result may become a negation of personality similar to that with which the crowd compensates itself for its unconscious ego-mania.

The reference just made to Humanism leads us next to a consideration of the humanities. It has long been the habit of traditional education to oppose to the teaching of science the teaching of the classic languages and the arts, as if there were two irreconcilable principles involved here. Dewey says that

Humanistic studies when set in opposition to study of nature are hampered. They tend to reduce themselves to exclusively literary and linguistic studies, which in turn tend to shrink to "the classics," to languages no longer spoken.... It would be hard to find anything in history more ironical than the educational practices which have identified the "humanities" exclusively with a knowledge of Greek and Latin. Greek and Roman art and institutions made such important contributions to our civilization that there should always be the amplest opportunities for making their acquaintance. But to regard them as _par excellence_ the humane studies involves a deliberate neglect of the possibilities of the subject-matter which is accessible in education to the masses, and tends to cultivate a narrow snobbery--that of a learned class whose insignia are the accidents of exclusive opportunity. Knowledge is humanistic in quality not because it is _about_ human products in the past, but because of what it _does_ in liberating human intelligence and human sympathy. Any subject-matter which accomplishes this result is humane and any subject-matter which does not accomplish it is not even educational.

The point is that it is precisely what a correct knowledge of ancient civilization through a study of the classics _does_ that our traditional educators most dread. William James once said that the good which came from such study was the ability to "know a good man when we see him." The student would thus become more capable of discriminating appreciation. He would grow to be a judge of values. He would acquire sharp likes and dislikes and thus set up his own standards of judgment. He would become an independent-thinker and therefore an enemy of crowds. Scholars of the Renaissance knew this well, and that is why in their revolt against the crowd-mindedness of their day they made use of the _litteræ humanores_ to smash to pieces the whole dogmatic system of the Middle Ages.

With the picture of ancient life before him the student could not help becoming more cosmopolitan in spirit. Here he got a glimpse of a manner of living in which the controlling ideas and fixations of his contemporary crowds were frankly challenged. Here were witnesses to values contrary to those in which his crowd had sought to bring him up in a docile spirit. Inevitably his thinking would wander into what his crowd considered forbidden paths. One cannot begin to know the ancients as they really were without receiving a tremendous intellectual stimulus. After becoming acquainted with the intellectual freedom and courage and love of life which are almost everywhere manifest in the literature of the ancients, something happens to a man. He becomes acquainted with himself as a valuing animal. Few things are better calculated to make free spirits than these very classics, once the student "catches on."

But that is just the trouble; from the Renaissance till now, the crowd-mind, whether interested politically, morally, or religiously; whether Catholic, or Protestant, or merely Rationalist, has done its level best to keep the student from "catching on." Educational tradition, which is for the most part only systematized crowd-thinking, has perverted the classics into instruments for producing spiritual results of the very opposite nature from the message which these literatures contain. Latin and Greek are taught for _purposes of discipline_. The task of learning them has been made as difficult and as uninteresting as possible, with the idea of forcing the student to do something he dislikes, of whipping his spirit into line and rendering him subservient to intellectual authority. Thus, while keeping up the external appearance of culture, the effect is to make the whole thing so meaningless and unpleasant that the student will never have the interest to try to find out what it is all about.

I have said that the sciences and classics should be approached in the "humanistic" spirit. The humanist method must be extended to the whole subject-matter of education, even to a revaluation of knowing itself. I should not say _even_, but _primarily_. It is impossible here to enter into an extended discussion of the humanist theories of knowledge as contrasted with the traditional or "intellectualist" theories. But since we have seen that the conscious thinking of the crowd-mind consists in the main of abstract and dogmatic logical systems, similar to the "rationalizations" of the paranoiac, it is important to note the bearing of humanism upon these logical systems wherever they are found.

A number of years ago, while discussing certain phases of this subject with one of the physicians in charge of a large hospital for the insane, the significance of education for healthy mental life was brought out with great emphasis. It was at the time when psychiatrists were just beginning to make use of analytical psychology in the treatment of mental and nervous disorders.

"The trouble with a great many of our patients," said my friend, "is the fact that they have been wrongly educated."

"Do you mean," I said, "that they have not received proper moral instruction?"

"Yes, but by the proper moral instruction I do not mean quite the same thing that most people mean by that. It all depends on the way in which the instruction is given. Many of these patients are the mental slaves of convention. They have been terrified by it; its weight crushes them; when they discover that their own impulses or behavior are in conflict with what they regard as absolute standards, they cannot bear the shock. They do not know how to use morality; they simply condemn themselves; they seek reconciliation by all sorts of crazy ideas which develop into the psychoneurosis. And the only hope there is of cure for them is re-education. The physician, when it is not too late, often to do any good has to become an educator."

The practice of psychoanalysis as a therapeutic method is really hardly anything more than re-education. The patient must first be led to face the fact of himself as he really is; then he must be taught to revalue conventional ideas in such a way that he can use these ideas as instruments with which he may adjust himself in the various relations of life. This process of education, in a word, is humanistic. It is pragmatic; the patient is taught that his thinking is a way of functioning; that ideas are instruments, ways of acting. He learns to value these tendencies to act and to find himself through the mastery of his own thinking.

Now we have seen that the neurosis is but one path of escape from this conflict of self with the imperatives and abstract ideas through which social control is exercised. The second way is to deny, unconsciously, the true meaning of these ideas, and this, as we have seen, is crowd-thinking. Here, as in the other case, the education which is needed is that which acquaints the subject with the functional nature of his own thinking, which directs his attention to results, which dissolves the fictions into which the unconscious takes refuge, by showing that systems of ideas have no other reality than what they do and no other meaning than the difference which their being true makes in actual experience somewhere.

We have previously noted the connection between the intellectualist philosophies with their closed systems of ideas, their absolutists, and the conscious thinking of crowds. The crowd finds these systems ready-made and merely backs into them and hides itself like a hermit crab in a deserted seashell. It follows that the humanist, however social he may be, cannot be a crowd-man. He, too, will have his ideals, but they are not made-in-advance goods which all must accept; they are good only as they may be made good in real experience, true only when verified in fact. To such a mind there is no unctuousness, by which ideas may be fastened upon others without their assent. Nothing is regarded as so final and settled that the spirit of inquiry should be discouraged from efforts to modify and improve it.

Generalizations, such as justice, truth, liberty, and all other intellectualist- and crowd-abstractions, become to the humanist not transcendental things in themselves, but descriptions of certain qualities of behavior, actual or possible, existing only where they are experienced and in definite situations. He will not be swept into a howling mob by these big words; he will stop to see what particular things are they which in a given instance are to be called just, what particular hypothesis is it which it is sought to verify and thus add to the established body of truth, whose liberty is demanded and what, to be definite, is it proposed that he shall do with the greater opportunity for action? Let the crowd yell itself hoarse, chanting its abstract nouns made out of adjectives, the humanist will know that these are but words and that the realities which they point to, if they have any meaning at all, are what "they are known as."

This humanist doctrine of the concreteness of the real is important. It is a reaffirmation of the reality of human experience. William James, who called himself a "radical empiricist," made much of this point. Experience may not be ruled out for the sake of an _a priori_ notion of what this world ought to be. As James used to say, we shall never know what this world really is or is to become until the last man's vote is in and counted. Here, of course, is an emphasis upon the significance of unique personality which no crowd will grant. Crowds will admit personality as an abstract principle, but not as an active will having something of its own to say about the ultimate outcome of things.

Another important point in which humanism corrects crowd-thinking is the fact that it regards intellect as an instrument of acting, and not as a mere copyist of realities earthly or supermundane. Dewey says:

If it be true that the self or subject of experience is part and parcel of the course of events, it follows that the self becomes a knower. It becomes a mind in virtue of a distinctive way of partaking in the course of events. The significant distinction is no longer between a knower _and_ the world, it is between different ways of being in and of the movement of things; between a physical way and a purposive way....

As a matter of fact the pragmatic theory of intelligence means that the function of mind is to project new and more complex ends to free experience from routine and caprice. Not the use of thought to accomplish purposes already given either in the mechanism of the body or in that of the existent state of society, but the use of intelligence to liberate and liberalize action, is the pragmatic lesson.... Intelligence as intelligence is inherently forward looking; only by ignoring its primary function does it become a means for an end already given. The latter is servile, even when the end is labeled moral, religious, esthetic. But action directed to ends to which the agent has not previously been attached inevitably carries with it a quickened and enlarged spirit. A pragmatic intelligence is a creative intelligence, not a routine mechanic.

Hence humanism breaks down the conformist spirit of crowds. From the simplest to the most complex, ideas are regarded as primarily motor, or, rather, as guides to our bodily movements among other things in our environment. James says that the stream of life which runs in at our eyes and ears is meant to run out at our lips, our feet, and our fingertips. Bergson says that ideas are like snapshots of a man running. However closely they are taken together, the movement always occurs between them. They cannot, therefore, give us reality, or the movement of life as such, but only cross-sections of it, which serve as guides in directing the conscious activity of life upon matter. According to James again, there are no permanently existing ideas, or impersonal ones; each idea is an individual activity, known only in the thinking, and is always thought _for a purpose_. As all thinking is purposive, and therefore partial, emphasizing just those aspects of things which are useful for our present problem, it follows that the sum total of partial views cannot give us the whole of reality or anything like a true copy of it. Existence as a whole cannot be reduced to any logical system. The One and the Absolute are therefore meaningless and are only logical fictions, useful, says James, by way of allowing us a sort of temporary irresponsibility, or "moral holiday."

From all this follows the humanist view of Truth. Truth is nothing complete and existing in itself independent of human purpose. The word is a noun made out of an adjective, as I have said. An idea becomes true, says James, when it fits into the totality of our experience; truth is what we say about an idea when it works. It must be made true, by ourselves--that is, verified. Truth is therefore of human origin, frankly, man-made. To Schiller it is the same as the good; it is the attainment of satisfactory relations within experience. Or, to quote the famous humanist creed of Protagoras, as Schiller is so fond of doing, "Man is the measure of all things." The meaning of the world is precisely, for all purposes, its meaning for us. Its worth, both logical and moral, is not something given, but just what we through our activity are able to assign to it.

The humanist is thus thrown upon his own responsibility in the midst of concrete realities of which he as a knowing, willing being is one. His task is to make such modifications within his environment, physical and social, as will make his own activity and that of others with him richer and more satisfactory in the future.

The question arises--it is a question commonly put by crowd-minded people and by intellectual philosophers; Plato asks it of the Protagoreans--how, if the individual man is the measure of all things, is there to be any common measure? How any agreement? May not a thing be good and true for one and not for another? How, then, shall there be any getting together without an outside authority and an absolute standard? The answer, as Schiller and James showed, is obvious; life is a matter of adjustment. We each constitute a part of the other's environment. At certain points our desires conflict, our valuations are different, and yet our experience at these points overlaps, as it were. It is to our common advantage to have agreement at these points. Out of our habitual adjustments to one another, a body of mutual understanding and agreement grows up which constitutes the intellectual and moral order of life. But this order, necessary as it is, is still in the making. It is not something given; it is not a copy of something transcendent, impersonal, and final which crowds may write upon their banners and use to gain uniform submission for anything which they may be able to express in terms which are general and abstract. This order of life is purely practical; it exists for us, not we for it, and because we have agreed that certain things shall be right and true, it does not follow that righteousness and truth are fixed and final and must be worshiped as pure ideas in such a way that the mere repetition of these words paralyzes our cerebral hemispheres.

Doubtless one of the greatest aids of the humanist way of thinking in bringing the individual to self-consciousness is the way in which it orients us in the world of present-day events. It inspires one to achieve a working harmony, not a fictitious haven of rest for the mind interested only in its relations to its own ideas. The unity which life demands of us is not that of a perfect rational system. It is rather the unity of a healthy organism all the parts of which can work together.

Cut up as we are into what Emerson called "fragments of men," I think we are particularly susceptible to crowd-thinking because we are so disintegrated. Thought and behavior must always be more or less automatic and compulsory where there is no conscious co-ordination of the several parts of it. It is partly because we are the heirs of such a patchwork of civilization that few people to-day are able to think their lives through. There can be little organic unity in the heterogeneous and unrelated aggregation of half-baked information, warring interests, and irreconcilable systems of valuation which are piled together in the modern man's thinking.

Life may not be reduced to a logical unity, but it is an organic whole for each of us, and we do not reach that organic unity by adding mutually exclusive partial views of it together.

Something happens to one who grasps the meaning of humanism; he becomes self-conscious in a new way. His psychic life becomes a fascinating adventure in a real world. He finds that his choices are real events. He is "set intellectually on fire," as one of our educators has correctly defined education. As Jung would doubtless say, he has "extroverted" himself; his libido, which in the crowd seeks to enhance the ego feeling by means of the mechanism which we have described, now is drawn out and attached to the outer world through the intellectual channel. Selfhood is realized in the satisfactoriness of the results which one is able to achieve in the very fullness of his activity and the richness of his interests.

Such a free spirit needs no crowds to keep up his faith, and he is truly social, for he approaches his social relationships with intelligent discrimination and judgments of worth which are his own. He contributes to the social, not a copy or an imitation, not a childish wish-fancy furtively disguised, but a psychic reality and a new creative energy. It is only in the fellowship of such spirits, whatever political or economic forms their association may take, that we may expect to see the Republic of the Free.

INDEX

Abelard, 153, 283.

Absolute, the, 143.

Absolutism, 133, 144.

Abstract ideas, 2, 49, 160.

---- function of, 154, 155.

Adler, Dr. Alfred, 59.

---- _The Neurotic Constitution_, 20, 61, 63. (Translated by Bernard Glueck and John A. Land; Moffat, Yard & Co., New York, 1917.)

Adventist, 211. (See also Messianism.)

Age of Reason, 209.

Agitators, 192.

Alcoholic neurosis, 86.

_Alice in Wonderland_, 2.

Ambition, 66.

America, conformist spirit in, 275.

---- crowd movements in, 53.

---- democracy in, 253, 280.

---- education in, 273, 280.

---- freedom of opinion in, 268.

---- leadership in, 275.

---- present condition, 189.

American colonists, 52.

---- Declaration of Independence, 196.

---- democracy, mental habits in, 272.

---- revolution, 225.

Americanism, 87.

Americanisation propaganda, 108.

Anabaptists, 225.

Analytical psychology, 12, 294. (See also Psychoanalysis, Freud, Jung, Adler, Brill, The Unconscious.)

Anselm, 153.

_a priori_ ideas in paranoia, 67.

Arbitrary power, limits of, 246.

Aristocrats, 182.

Armenians, persecution of, 107.

Armistice, the, 115.

Athletic contests, 82.

---- events, symbols of conflict, 113.

_Atlantic Monthly_, 258.

Attention, 36.

---- direction of, 29.

---- function of, 58.

Augustine, Saint, 153, 270.

Bacon, Francis, 153.

Baker, Secretary Newton D., 117, 119.

Beethoven, 175, 269.

Behavior, social, 5.

Belief, crowd a creature of, 31.

Beliefs, as ends in themselves, 33.

---- crowd professions of, 195.

Berger, Victor, 265.

Bergson, Henri, 153.

---- on sleep, 57.

---- _Creative Evolution_, 211, 299. (Translated by Arthur Mitchell; Henry Holt & Co., New York, 1911.)

---- _Time_ and _Free Will_, 290. (Translated by F. L. Pogson; George Allen & Co., London, 1912.)

Bible, 270.

Birth control, 239.

Boccaccio, 270.

Bolshevism, 166, 186, 207. (See also Soviets, Revolution, Russia.)

Bolshevist propaganda, 228.

Bourgeois, 170, 225.

Brill, Dr. A. A., 59.

---- _Psychoanalysis; Its Theories and Application_ (W. B. Saunders, Philadelphia, Pa.), 55, 61, 93, 133, 135.

British Labor Party, 226.

Butler, Samuel, 283.

Byron, 62.

Cæsar Borgia, 233.

Calvin, 225.

Capitalism, 177, 178.

Carlyle, 258.

---- _Heroes and Hero Worshipers_, 175.

---- _Sartor Resartus_, 46.

Cassanova, 270.

Categorical imperative, 90.

Catholics, 264.

---- in England, 225.

Censorships, 239.

Cervantes, 283.

Chautauqua, the, 272.

Chauvanism, 223.

Chesterton, G. K., 135.

Chicago, riot in, 107.

Child, egoism of, 62.

Christianity, primitive, 193, 209.

Church, the, 83, 114, 170, 234.

Cicero, 188.

Citizen, the, 248.

Civilization, continuity of, 216.

Class, the master, 177.

---- struggle, 43. (See also Revolution.)

Classics, the, 292.

Clergy of Middle Ages, 230.

Collective Mind, 15.

College students, egoism of, 78, 79.

Communion of the saints, 83.

Compensation, 120.

---- mechanisms of, 84.

Complex formations, causes of, 65.

Compromise mechanisms, 71.

Compulsive hatred, 112.

---- thinking, 71, 102.

Conflict, psychic, 3.

---- within the psyche, 70.

Conformist spirit, 275.

Conformity, insisted upon by crowds, 266.

Conscientious objector, 120.

Consciousness, 57.

Conservatism of the crowd-mind, 224.

Conservative crowds, 191.

Conspiracy, delusion of, 105. (See also Paranoia, Projection, Persecution.)

Constantine, 234.

Constituent assembly, French, 186.

Constitution, 247, 249.

Constitutional government, 235.

Convert, the, 86.

Conway, Sir Martin, 17, 181.

---- _The Crowd in Peace and War._ (Longmans, Green & Co., London, 1915.)

Co-operation, 226.

Co-operative commonwealth, 209.

Cooper Union Forum, 25, 26, 265, 240.