capacity to share in a worthy life. He was permanently right also when
he went on to say that "all mercenary employments as well as those which
degrade the condition of the body are mechanical, since they deprive
the intellect of leisure and dignity,"--permanently right, that is,
if gainful pursuits as matter of fact deprive the intellect of the
conditions of its exercise and so of its dignity. If his statements
are false, it is because they identify a phase of social custom with
a natural necessity. But a different view of the relations of mind and
matter, mind and body, intelligence and social service, is better than
Aristotle's conception only if it helps render the old idea obsolete
in fact--in the actual conduct of life and education. Aristotle was
permanently right in assuming the inferiority and subordination of
mere skill in performance and mere accumulation of external products to
understanding, sympathy of appreciation, and the free play of ideas. If
there was an error, it lay in assuming the necessary separation of the
two: in supposing that there is a natural divorce between efficiency in
producing commodities and rendering service, and self-directive thought;
between significant knowledge and practical achievement. We hardly
better matters if we just correct his theoretical misapprehension, and
tolerate the social state of affairs which generated and sanctioned
his conception. We lose rather than gain in change from serfdom to
free citizenship if the most prized result of the change is simply an
increase in the mechanical efficiency of the human tools of production.
So we lose rather than gain in coming to think of intelligence as an
organ of control of nature through action, if we are content that an
unintelligent, unfree state persists in those who engage directly in
turning nature to use, and leave the intelligence which controls to be
the exclusive possession of remote scientists and captains of industry.
We are in a position honestly to criticize the division of life into
separate functions and of society into separate classes only so far
as we are free from responsibility for perpetuating the educational
practices which train the many for pursuits involving mere skill in
production, and the few for a knowledge that is an ornament and a
cultural embellishment. In short, ability to transcend the Greek
philosophy of life and education is not secured by a mere shifting about
of the theoretical symbols mea