ke to
intensifying and enlarging the scope of conscious experience. It also
did much to rescue work, industry, and mechanical devices from the
contempt in which they had been held in communities founded upon the
control of a leisure class. In both ways, this philosophy promoted a
wider and more democratic social concern. But it was tainted by
the narrowness of its fundamental premise: the doctrine that every
individual acts only from regard for his own pleasures and pains, and
that so-called generous and sympathetic acts are only indirect ways
of procuring and assuring one's own comfort. In other words, it made
explicit the consequences inhering in any doctrine which makes mental
life a self-inclosed thing, instead of an attempt to redirect and
readapt common concerns. It made union among men a matter of calculation
of externals. It lent itself to the contemptuous assertions of Carlyle
that it was a doctrine of anarchy plus a constable, and recognized only
a "cash nexus" among men. The educational equivalents of this doctrine
in the uses made of pleasurable rewards and painful penalties are only
too obvious. (iv) Typical German philosophy followed another path.
It started from what was essentially the rationalistic philosophy of
Descartes and his French successors. But while French thought upon
the whole developed the idea of reason in opposition to the religious
conception of a divine mind residing in individuals, German thought (as
in Hegel) made a synthesis of the two. Reason is absolute. Nature is
incarnate reason. History is reason in its progressive unfolding in
man. An individual becomes rational only as he absorbs into himself
the content of rationality in nature and in social institutions. For an
absolute reason is not, like the reason of rationalism, purely formal
and empty; as absolute it must include all content within itself. Thus
the real problem is not that of controlling individual freedom so that
some measure of social order and concord may result, but of achieving
individual freedom through developing individual convictions in accord
with the universal law found in the organization of the state as
objective Reason. While this philosophy is usually termed absolute or
objective idealism, it might better be termed, for educational purposes
at least, institutional idealism. (See ante, p. 59.) It idealized
historical institutions by conceiving them as incarnations of an
immanent absolute mind. There can be n