ely and to look for some other
source of authority in life and belief. Since they desired a rational
standard for the latter, and had identified with experience the customs
which had proved unsatisfactory supports, they were led to a flat
opposition of reason and experience. The more the former was exalted,
the more the latter was depreciated. Since experience was identified
with what men do and suffer in particular and changing situations of
life, doing shared in the philosophic depreciation. This influence fell
in with many others to magnify, in higher education, all the methods
and topics which involved the least use of sense-observation and bodily
activity. The modern age began with a revolt against this point of
view, with an appeal to experience, and an attack upon so-called purely
rational concepts on the ground that they either needed to be ballasted
by the results of concrete experiences, or else were mere expressions
of prejudice and institutionalized class interest, calling themselves
rational for protection. But various circumstances led to considering
experience as pure cognition, leaving out of account its intrinsic
active and emotional phases, and to identifying it with a passive
reception of isolated "sensations." Hence the education reform effected
by the new theory was confined mainly to doing away with some of
the bookishness of prior methods; it did not accomplish a consistent
reorganization.

Meantime, the advance of psychology, of industrial methods, and of the
experimental method in science makes another conception of experience
explicitly desirable and possible. This theory reinstates the idea of
the ancients that experience is primarily practical, not cognitive--a
matter of doing and undergoing the consequences of doing. But the
ancient theory is transformed by realizing that doing may be directed so
as to take up into its own content all which thought suggests, and so as
to result in securely tested knowledge. "Experience" then ceases to be
empirical and becomes experimental. Reason ceases to be a remote and
ideal faculty, and signifies all the resources by which activity is made
fruitful in meaning. Educationally, this change denotes such a plan
for the studies and method of instruction as has been developed in the
previous chapters.

Chapter Twenty-one: Physical and Social Studies: Naturalism and Humanism

ALLUSION has already been made to the conflict of natural science with
literar