osals for dealing with it; if, that is,
the conflict of interests is more or less embodied in different sets of
persons, there must be divergent competing philosophies. With respect
to what has happened, sufficient evidence is all that is needed to bring
agreement and certainty. The thing itself is sure. But with reference
to what it is wise to do in a complicated situation, discussion is
inevitable precisely because the thing itself is still indeterminate.
One would not expect a ruling class living at ease to have the same
philosophy of life as those who were having a hard struggle for
existence. If the possessing and the dispossessed had the same
fundamental disposition toward the world, it would argue either
insincerity or lack of seriousness. A community devoted to industrial
pursuits, active in business and commerce, is not likely to see the
needs and possibilities of life in the same way as a country with high
aesthetic culture and little enterprise in turning the energies of
nature to mechanical account. A social group with a fairly continuous
history will respond mentally to a crisis in a very different way from
one which has felt the shock of abrupt breaks. Even if the same data
were present, they would be evaluated differently. But the different
sorts of experience attending different types of life prevent just the
same data from presenting themselves, as well as lead to a different
scheme of values. As for the similarity of problems, this is often
more a matter of appearance than of fact, due to old discussions being
translated into the terms of contemporary perplexities. But in certain
fundamental respects the same predicaments of life recur from time to
time with only such changes as are due to change of social context,
including the growth of the sciences.

The fact that philosophic problems arise because of widespread and
widely felt difficulties in social practice is disguised because
philosophers become a specialized class which uses a technical language,
unlike the vocabulary in which the direct difficulties are stated. But
where a system becomes influential, its connection with a conflict of
interests calling for some program of social adjustment may always be
discovered. At this point, the intimate connection between philosophy
and education appears. In fact, education offers a vantage ground
from which to penetrate to the human, as distinct from the technical,
significance of philosophic discussions