Cambridge Essays on Education. Various

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СКАЧАТЬ of education has no rational standard of good. When such a man intervenes in educational matters, he is sure to take the standpoint of the so-called practical man, because he is blind to the higher values of life. He will wish to make knowledge and wisdom instruments for the production of wealth, or the improvement of the material condition of the poor. But knowledge and wisdom refuse to be so treated. Like goodness and beauty, wisdom is one of the absolute values, the divine ideas. As one of the Cambridge Platonists said, we must not make our intellectual faculties Gibeonites, hewers of wood and drawers of water to the will and affections. Wisdom must be sought for its own sake or we shall not find it. Another effect of our misologia is the degradation of reasonable sympathy into sentimentalism, which regards pain as the worst of evils, and endeavours always to remove the effects of folly and wrong-doing, without investigating the causes. That such sentimentalism is often kind only to be cruel, and that it frequently robs honest Peter to pay dishonest Paul, needs no demonstration. Sentimentalism does not believe that prevention is better than cure, and practical politicians know too well that a scientific treatment of social maladies is out of the question in this country. Others become fanatics, that is to say, worldlings who are too narrow and violent to understand the world. The root of the evil is that a whole range of the higher values is inaccessible to the majority, because they know nothing of intellectual wealth. And yet the real wealth of a nation consists in its imponderable possessions—in those things wherein one man's gain is not another man's loss, and which are not proved incapable of increase by any laws of thermo-dynamics. An inexhaustible treasure is freely open to all who have passed through a good course of mental training, a treasure which we can make our own according to our capacities, and our share of which we would not barter for any goods which the law of the land can give or take away. "The intelligent man," says Plato, "will prize those studies which result in his soul getting soberness, righteousness and wisdom, and will less value the others." The studies which have this effect are those which teach us to admire and understand the good, the true and the beautiful. They are, may we not say, humanism and science, pursued in a spirit of "admiration, hope and love." The trained reason is disinterested and fearless. It is not afraid of public opinion, because it "counts it a small thing that it should be judged by man's judgment"; its interests are so much wider than the incidents of a private career that base self-centred indulgence and selfish ambition are impossible to it. It is saved from pettiness, from ignorance, and from bigotry. It will not fall a victim to those undisciplined and disproportioned enthusiasms which we call fads, and which are a peculiar feature of English and North American civilisation. Such reforms as are carried out in this country are usually effected not by the reason of the many, but by the fanaticism of the few. A just balance may on the whole be preserved, but there is not much balance in the judgments of individuals.

      Matthew Arnold, whose exhortations to his countrymen now seem almost prophetic, drew a strong contrast between the intellectual frivolity, or rather insensibility, of his countrymen and the earnestness of the Germans. He saw that England was saved a hundred years ago by the high spirit and proud resolution of a real aristocracy, which nevertheless was, like all aristocracies, "destitute of ideas." Our great families, he shows, could no longer save us, even if they had retained their influence, because power is now conferred by disciplined knowledge and applied science. It is the same warning which George Meredith reiterated with increasing earnestness in his late poems. What England needs, he says, is "brain.'

      Warn her, Bard, that Power is pressing

       Hotly for his dues this hour,

       Tell her that no drunken blessing

       Stops the onward march of Power,

       Has she ears to take forewarnings,

       She will cleanse her of her stains,

       Feed and speed for braver mornings

       Valorously the growth of brains.

       Power, the hard man knit for action

       Reads each nation on the brow;

       Cripple, fool, and petrifaction

       Fall to him—are falling now.

      And again:

      She impious to the Lord of hosts

       The valour of her off-spring boasts,

       Mindless that now on land and main

       His heeded prayer is active brain.

      These faithful prophets were not heeded, and we have had to learn our lesson in the school of experience. She is a good teacher but her fees are very high.

      The author of Friendship's Garland ended with a despairing appeal to the democracy, when his jeremiads evoked no response from the upper class, whom he called barbarians, or from the middle class, whom he regarded as incurably vulgar. The middle classes are apt to receive hard measure; they have few friends and many critics. We must go back to Euripides to find the bold statement that they are the best part of the community and "the salvation of the State"; but it is, on the whole, true. And our middle class is only superficially vulgar. Vulgarity, as Mr. Robert Bridges has lately said, "is blindness to values; it is spiritual death." The middle class in Matthew Arnold's time was no doubt deplorably blind to artistic values; its productions survive to convict it of what he called Philistinism; but it is no longer devoid of taste or indifferent to beauty. And it has never been a contemptible artist in life. Mr. Bridges describes the progress of vulgarity as an inverted Platonic progress. We descend, he says, from ugly forms to ugly conduct, and from ugly conduct to ugly principles, till we finally arrive at the absolute ugliness which is vulgarity. This identification of insensibility to beauty with moral baseness was something of a paradox even in Greece, and does not fit the English character at all. Our towns are ugly enough; our public buildings rouse no enthusiasm; and many of our monuments and stained glass windows seem to shout for a friendly Zeppelin to obliterate them. But we British have not descended to ugly conduct. Pericles and Plato would have found the bearing of this people in its supreme trial more "beautiful" than the Parthenon itself. The nation has shaken off its vulgarity even more easily and completely than its slackness and self-indulgence. We have borne ourselves with a courage, restraint, and dignity which, a Greek would say, could have only been expected of philosophers. And we certainly are not a nation of philosophers. We must not then be too hasty in calling all contempt for intellect vulgar. We have sinned by undervaluing the life of reason; but we are not really a vulgar people. Our secular faith, the real religion of the average Englishman, has its centre in the idea of a gentleman, which has of course no essential connection with heraldry or property in land. The upper classes, who live by it, are not vulgar, in spite of the absence of ideas with which Matthew Arnold twits them; the middle classes who also respect this ideal, are further protected by sound moral traditions; and the lower classes have a cheery sense of humour which is a great antiseptic against vulgarity. But though the Poet Laureate has not, in my opinion, hit the mark in calling vulgarity our national sin, he has done well in calling attention to the danger which may beset educational reform from what we may call democratism, the tendency to level down all superiorities in the name of equality and good fellowship. It is the opposite fault to the aristocraticism which beyond all else led to the decline of Greek culture—the assumption that the lower classes must remain excluded from intellectual and even from moral excellence. With us there is a tendency to condemn ideals of self-culture which can be called "aristocratic." But we need specialists in this as in every other field, and the populace must learn that there is such a thing as real superiority, which has the right and duty to claim a scope for its full exercise.

      The fashionable disparagement of reason, and exaltation of will, feeling or instinct would be more dangerous in a less scientific age. The Italian metaphysician Aliotta has lately brought together in one survey the numerous leaders in the great "reaction against science," and they are a formidable band. Pragmatists, voluntarists, activists, subjective idealists, СКАЧАТЬ