. The student of philosophy "in
itself" is always in danger of taking it as so much nimble or severe
intellectual exercise--as something said by philosophers and concerning
them alone. But when philosophic issues are approached from the side
of the kind of mental disposition to which they correspond, or the
differences in educational practice they make when acted upon, the
life-situations which they formulate can never be far from view. If
a theory makes no difference in educational endeavor, it must be
artificial. The educational point of view enables one to envisage the
philosophic problems where they arise and thrive, where they are at
home, and where acceptance or rejection makes a difference in practice.
If we are willing to conceive education as the process of forming
fundamental dispositions, intellectual and emotional, toward nature
and fellow men, philosophy may even be defined as the general theory of
education. Unless a philosophy is to remain symbolic--or verbal--or
a sentimental indulgence for a few, or else mere arbitrary dogma, its
auditing of past experience and its program of values must take effect
in conduct. Public agitation, propaganda, legislative and administrative
action are effective in producing the change of disposition which a
philosophy indicates as desirable, but only in the degree in which they
are educative--that is to say, in the degree in which they modify mental
and moral attitudes. And at the best, such methods are compromised by
the fact they are used with those whose habits are already largely set,
while education of youth has a fairer and freer field of operation.
On the other side, the business of schooling tends to become a routine
empirical affair unless its aims and methods are animated by such a
broad and sympathetic survey of its place in contemporary life as it is
the business of philosophy to provide. Positive science always implies
practically the ends which the community is concerned to achieve.
Isolated from such ends, it is matter of indifference whether its
disclosures are used to cure disease or to spread it; to increase the
means of sustenance of life or to manufacture war material to wipe
life out. If society is interested in one of these things rather than
another, science shows the way of attainment. Philosophy thus has a
double task: that of criticizing existing aims with respect to the
existing state of science, pointing out values which have become
obsolete with