the command of new resources, showing what values are
merely sentimental because there are no means for their realization; and
also that of interpreting the results of specialized science in their
bearing on future social endeavor. It is impossible that it should have
any success in these tasks without educational equivalents as to what to
do and what not to do. For philosophic theory has no Aladdin's lamp
to summon into immediate existence the values which it intellectually
constructs. In the mechanical arts, the sciences become methods of
managing things so as to utilize their energies for recognized aims.
By the educative arts philosophy may generate methods of utilizing
the energies of human beings in accord with serious and thoughtful
conceptions of life. Education is the laboratory in which philosophic
distinctions become concrete and are tested.

It is suggestive that European philosophy originated (among the
Athenians) under the direct pressure of educational questions. The
earlier history of philosophy, developed by the Greeks in Asia Minor and
Italy, so far as its range of topics is concerned, is mainly a chapter
in the history of science rather than of philosophy as that word is
understood to-day. It had nature for its subject, and speculated as to
how things are made and changed. Later the traveling teachers, known as
the Sophists, began to apply the results and the methods of the natural
philosophers to human conduct.

When the Sophists, the first body of professional educators in Europe,
instructed the youth in virtue, the political arts, and the management
of city and household, philosophy began to deal with the relation of
the individual to the universal, to some comprehensive class, or to some
group; the relation of man and nature, of tradition and reflection, of
knowledge and action. Can virtue, approved excellence in any line, be
learned, they asked? What is learning? It has to do with knowledge.
What, then, is knowledge? How is it achieved? Through the senses, or by
apprenticeship in some form of doing, or by reason that has undergone
a preliminary logical discipline? Since learning is coming to know, it
involves a passage from ignorance to wisdom, from privation to fullness
from defect to perfection, from non-being to being, in the Greek way
of putting it. How is such a transition possible? Is change, becoming,
development really possible and if so, how? And supposing such questions
answered, what