The education of the wage-earners; a contribution toward the solution of the educational problem of democracy

Front matter

g.. L(lS6/S

Book.

.JUA

Contents

Chapter Page I. Introductory : Thomas Davidson and his Philosophy. (By the Editor) 1

II. The Task of the Twentieth Century ... 24

III. The Educational Problems set by the ISTine-

Chapter I Introductory: Thomas Davidson And His Philosophy

By the Editor

When on the 14th of September, 1900, after an unsuccessful operation, Thomas Davidson died in a hospital at Montreal, the world lost a wise and good man whose work and influence were out of all proportion to his general reputation.^ A writer in the London

1 The list of Mr. Davidson's published books [which conveys no adequate impression of the scope of his powers and influence] includes : " The Philosophical System of Antonio Rosmini Serbati" (London, 1882) ; "The Parthenon Frieze and Other Essays" (Boston and New York, 1886) ; " Scartazzini's Handbook to Dante, with Notes and Additions " (Boston, 1887) ; "Prolegomena to Tennyson's 'In Memoriam ' " (Boston, 1889); "Aristotle and Ancient Educational Ideals" (New York, 1892) ; "The Education of the Greek People, and its Influence on Civilization" (New York, 1894); "Rousseau and Education according to Nature " (New York, 1898) ; " A History of Education " (New York, 1900). He contributed to Mind, The Philosophical Review, The International Journal of Ethics, The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, The Educational Review, The Forum, and other periodicals, numerous articles and reviews. At the time of his death he was engaged upon a history of Scholastic Philosophy in v^^hich he proposed to gather up the results of his lifelong study in this field. Unfortunately but two chapters had been completed.

Spectator recently declared that at the time of his death Thomas Davidson was one of the twelve most learned men in the world. How that may be I do not know. Certain it is that his profound and varied learning, his portentous memory, his skill in using all languages, and his familiarity with the best that is to be found in all languages — particularly in the lines of philosophy, social science, and literature — were to those of us younger men who came to know him almost appalling. He was learned, and knew that he was learned, above the measure even for learned men. Yet withal he was modest, avoiding rather than courting personal fame. Indeed, he might in truth have said, with Thomas Aquinas, that his motto was amo nesciri.

With all his learning Mr. Davidson w^as, however, the most human of men, approachable by all, old and young, high and low, learned and ignorant; generous to a degree in his relations with his fellow-men, giving of himself without stint to all who sought his help or counsel whenever he thought he could be of any use to them in helping them to a higher life. An Adirondack farmer, whose place he had bought, once remarked of him that his hand was stretched out to meet you farther away than that of any man he ever knew. This was true, literally as well as figuratively. Any one who has had the good fortune to visit him in his Adirondack home, where he conducted a summer school of the culture sciences, will ever remember with the glow of a larger human kindliness his reception at Gienmore. It was Mr. Davidson's custom to have the large lecture-hall bell rung to announce the arrival of an expected guest. At that signal he would at once drop all work and hasten down from his den in the birch grove some two hundred feet above the main buildings. I can see him now hurrying down the hill, his right hand stretched out to greet me when still a good fifty yards away, his left waving his tam-o'-shanter as he shouts his cheery welcome. The warm handshake that followed, the sincere welcome beaming from every feature of his honest, earnest, sunny, intelligent face, made one feel at once that Glenmore was home.

Mr. Davidson was the most intense man I have ever known, intense in his loves and in his hates, both for persons and for doctrines. It was part of his philosophy that morality consisted, as the Greeks had said, in knowing how rightly to love and how rightly to hate, and, he would have added, in having abundant affections to distribute. He firmly believed that the stronger a man's passions the greater were his possibilities for virtue and victory, if only they could be rightly directed. Eousseau once wrote, " II n'y a que les dmes de feu qui sachent vaincre.^' Mr. Davidson was one of those dmes de feu, and he held himself in check by an iron will, and knew how to conquer. No obstacles were for him insurmountable. Finding in the course of some of his investigations in Scholastic Philosophy that he needed a more thorough acquaintance with Arabic than he could acquire from the books, he dropped all other work and went to Cairo to live with the Arabs, that he might learn to speak their tongue. He was then just fifty-four years of age. His last published book was written at a time when he was unable to get more than three consecutive hours of sleep, and when every waking moment was filled with intense pain. Yet his cheerful but profound optimism finds in this book perhaps its noblest expression, and not once does his personal suffering break through to color a single phrase.

Mr. Davidson was absolutely unsparing of himself and of his friends, downright and straightforward and uncompromising. He could never quite forgive a man who had once told him a lie or proved himself ungenerous. He was ever bitter in his denunciation of all forms of Pharisaism and of the pride of mere respectability, wliich consisted, he held, solely of negative virtues. Comfort worshipers, sensuous dalliant souls, and all time-servers were his special aversion. But a keen sense of humor, a hearty, jovial nature, and a broad philosophy saved him from the snares of asceticism and left him, with all his vigorous and uncompromising standards, one of the most sociable of men. He always sought out in all men traces of genuine human worth, and he knew how to look behind appearances for the real substance of worth. Consequently his friends were frequently of rough exterior and rougher manner, and he was often found with publicans and sinners. And to his friends he remained ever loyal.

Mr. Davidson was born in Aberdeenshire, Scotland, October 25, 1840. He received his education in the common schools of his native town, and in the University of Aberdeen, where he acquired, as a second nature, the habit of exact scholarship. What this training meant for him may be inferred from the fact that he used to say, with a full knowledge of the school systems of all lands, that if he had to be educated over again and could choose his schools and masters, he would go through precisely the same training that he had enjoyed. When still a very young man he came to America and, after a brief sojourn in Canada, made his way to Boston. Later he removed to St. Louis, where he taught for a time in the public schools and where he made the acquaintance of the famous little group of St. Louis philosophers, most of whom became his life friends. But Mr. Davidson was a born dissenter who could not and would not fit into any niche. He chafed under all restraint, and was not entirely contented until he finally found his liberty in the life of a free lance, lecturing, writing, teaching private classes, and in this way earning his modest livelihood while holding himself responsible to himself alone and to his own lofty ideals. Opportunities for university preferment came, but he refused to surrender one jot of his freedom. His mode of life gave him a good six months of every year for leisurely study and frequent opportunities for long visits to Europe, as his studies might call for learning that could there best be pursued.

Besides, he had a decided distrust of our universities, which, he held, were still suffering from medisevalism in methods and habits, from formalism, and from an absence of entire freedom and candor. Moreover, he did not regard the students in the universities to-day as the most promising material to work with, holding that most of them were under the dominion of purely frivolous aims, and that even of the more serious students the majority were animated by no higher motive than the desire to fit themselves to find a comfortable berth for life. In few, if any, could he find an ardent desire for knowledge for its own sake and for the sake of the light it could throw on the purpose and meaning of life. Only in the last years of his life did he succeed in finding a class of students with whom he could work with entire satisfaction and enthusiasm. When he did find them, with characteristic fervor he gave the best of himself and of his time and energy in working for and with them,, asking no other compensation for his services than honest and faithful work on the part of his students. These were the students he found amongst the breadwinners in the East Side of New York. After working with them for two years he wrote : " No one who has ever taught a class of intelligent breadwinners will return willingly to academic teaching. It would be well if all college students were engaged in the practical duties of life." Of this work, which at last put his democratic philosophy to the test of practice, this book is the partial record. Before passing on to this record, let us consider briefly the philosophical attitude upon which that work was founded.

We cannot better approach the study of Mr. Davidson's philosophy than by noting in advance the temper of its author's mind as it revealed itself in strong antipathies to some of the more popular currents of contemporary thought. Hegel, with his denial of the principle of contradiction, he held to be the " prince of confusionists." Historically, Hegel's philosophy seemed to him mainly significant as the reductio ad absurdu7n of modern subjectivism, that is to say, of the modern effort to define the forms of thought so exhaustively that nothing is left for the material of thought. At the same time, however, he held that Kant had rendered inestimable service in pointing out that the real meaning of Hume's skepticism was that it had conclusively proved that the mind is essentially active and therefore does not receive any ready-made impressions, but exercises from the first a determining power in the very creation of the world that it^knows ; that, consequently, no concepts taken either from common sense or from time-hallowed philosophies can be accepted without being subjected to the most careful scrutiny. Hegel, however, had too easily concluded, from finding the importance of the part played by the thinking activity, that thought was the last term in the description of reality, and so his philosophy gave us a cobweb world, an arid and unreal system which, logically carried out, could but lead to pantheism, from which disastrous result it was saved in the letter but not in truth by Hegel's skill in juggling with such terms as freedom, God, Trinity, and the like, wherein was displayed his ingenuity in pouring new wine into old bottles rather than his zeal in the cause of truth.

The agnostic's position came in for equal condemnation. His whole difficulty comes from the fact that he starts out with a supernaturalistic notion of reality, with a conception, that is, of the absolutely real as, whatever else it may possibly be, never a possible object of experience. The agnostic's conclusion, therefore, that reality is unknowable, is a trivial one, or, to pnt it otherwise, is simply another way of stating his fundamental premise, which premise, in its turn, is a downright prejudice.

Those who gloried in the confusion of philosophies and philosophers, in order that they might point a moral as to the presumption and imbecility of mere reason, whether their Pyrrhonism were proclaimed in the interest, of piety, as a preparation for faith, or in the interest of a supposed freedom that could not brook even the constraint of reason, or in the interest of a nature worship like that which found expression in Rousseau in some of his more turgid moods, and frequently in Wordsworth in such passages as —

One impulse from a vernal wood

May teach you more of man, Of moral evil and of good,

Than all the sages can,

— in short, the defenders of all forms of mere sentimentalism and irrationalism were treated continually and effectually with the scorn that they deserve. After all, there is no blasphemy worse than that which spends itself in dragging in the mire the noblest faculty with which man is endowed, the faculty which distinguishes him from the animals and enables him to lead a moral life. Not that the doctrine to which one must give adherence is a " cold intellectualism," as it is called. No, the knowledge that is the aim of our rational endeavor is, as Mr. Davidson once wrote, " knowledge armed with moral efficiency, knowledge which commands respect and reverent submission. . . . What

THOMAS DAVIDSO:^^ AND HIS PHILOSOPHY 9

turns intellect into a spring of action and freedom is not its power of distinguishing things, but its power of seeing that things have different values, that one thing is better than another, and, therefore, to be preferred to another. . . . This is what is meant by the old saying that not only the thoughts of the head but the thoughts of the heart also must be pure." ^

Perhaps of all the irrationalists, the philistine misologists, the conventionally respectable men who are superior to philosophy, seemed to him the most immoral and pernicious influence of the time, — the men who contemptuously deny "that every man and woman ought to be a philosopher."

So much does the old habit of authority and convention in matters of intelligence and morals still prevail, so much are men still the slaves of these, that philosophy, which alone can make men free, is still looked upon with suspicion and ill-concealed contempt. One continually hears, " But you can't expect every man to be a philosopher. It takes a long time to learn philosophy, and people generally have other things to attend to. They must sow and reap, buy and sell, eat and drink, and they must have a good time. Philosophy is dull, solemn business." The implication, of course, is that sowing and reaping, buying and selling, and so on, are more important things than philosophy, and this, indeed, is what the world of our time practically believes. The general belief is that the end of life is to acquire material wealth and have a " good time," which means to satisfy the natural inclinations, which our education accordingly fosters and pampers. I say this is the result of a failure to recognize that the aim of man's life is man's perfection, and that perfection consists in perfect insight, perfect love, and perfect freedom. As

1 " Intellectual Piety," pp. 4, 5. (An address published separately in pamphlet form.)

soon as men see this clearly they will no longer look down upon philosophy, which is but another name for loving insight, one of the essential elements in human perfection. To despise philosophy is to despise spiritual perfection, for clear knowledge is one of the elements of that perfection. There is no duty more incumbent upon any human being than to know, unless it be the duty of loving with divine love everything known, in proportion to its worth, and sternly refusing to be guided by personal feelings and inclinations. A man or woman who is not a profound thinker, seeing the things of the world in their true ideal proportions, and acting accordingly, is a mere dependent, half -enslaved creature, whatever amount of so-called culture, refinement, and kindness he or she may have. Such a person is still a slave to authority and convention, a mere play actor in life, bound to play a traditional, unreal part, without any of the glorious liberty of the children of God, of them who see the ])ivine face to face, and, in the light thereof, all things in their true worth.i

We are dealing, it is plain, with the philosophy of a man who has banished entirely from his world thingsin-themselves and unknowables, and, therefore, materialism, supernaturalism, and all other forms of agnosticism, but who at the same time believes that modern idealisms, by singling out one aspect of experience, namely the formal or universal aspect, and regarding it exclusively, have thereby started upon a path that cannot but lead, when logically carried out, to pantheism and the evil type of mysticism.

We can now easily conclude this preliminary orientation of Mr. Davidson's philosophy by the mere enumeration of the objects of his special admiration. These were iEschylus, Socrates, Aristotle, Joachim of Flores, St. Thomas Aquinas, Dante, Kant (with reservations),

1 Op. cit.

Rosmini, Goethe (especially the "Faust"), and Tennyson (especially " In Memoriam "). And of all these undoubtedly the first place was held by Socrates, the genuinely religious dissenter, the confident believer in human reason and almost the only true individualist ; the man who, moreover, justified in his life as well as in his philosophy his claim to our reverence for these things. One more thing must be borne in mind in our effort to understand this philosophy, and that is the predominance of the practical interest throughout its author's life. He comes to his theoretical speculations because of vital practical needs, as could not but be the case with one of his intense temperament and strict Presbyterian upbringing. But he was a born dissenter, and he firmly believed that the times were religiously and socially out of joint, and that it was his duty, as it was that of every man, to do his best to set them right. With this end in view he took an active interest in the founding of the London Fabian Society. The name of the society is significant. Its determined aim was the gathering and disseminating of information that might lead to the amelioration of social conditions, but it was to be committed to no theory in advance. Later, as the organization drifted toward outright socialism, Mr. Davidson lost interest in it. Socialism seemed to him to be indeed the logical enough outcome of the view of life that places its highest values upon wealth, position, and physical comfort ; which is, however, a complete inversion of true values. Having its aim centered in these external goods, a reform that looks to them primarily must be mechanical and cramping to the life of the spirit. He saw, in other words, with profound truth that in social reform the end to begin with is always the individual, and, in the individual, his education; that, furthermore, the aim of this education should be to help its possessor to estimate things more nearly at their true worth and to give him the strength to rise above the rule of animality and rightly distribute his affections.

Mr. Davidson also founded the Fellowship of the New Life, first in London, afterward in New York. This society was organized for mutual help in the cultivation of the life of the spirit, for mutual aid in the discovery of real values, and in living accordingly. It was not a church, not even a Unitarian Church, for it had not the vestige of a creed, unless, indeed, it is having a creed to maintain that there is a higher life for man and that it behooves him earnestly to seek to know what that life is and then to lead it. This organization might be called a sort of Fabian Society of the Spirit. The difficulty with a society of this character is that it is apt to degenerate into sentimentalism, " to mistake " (in the strong language of a recent German writer) " fine feelings for argument, and the expanded bosom for the bellows of divinity." Therefore it, too, soon proved unsatisfactory, and both of these practical efforts toward reform convinced Mr. Davidson that the one thing needful above all else in our day is a definite gospel that rests upon, and needs, no authority save the approval of individual reason, a gospel that must therefore also be a philosophy.

Such a philosophy Mr. Davidson believed he had found through his fortunate discovery of Rosmini. It was a doctrine of radical, uncompromising individualism that was only saved from the chaos of atomism by including the belief in the absolute, divine, eternal worth of every member of the commonwealth of humanity. So intent was he upon saving his doctrine from any swamping monism that he insisted upon calling his view apeirotheism. Certainly there was no room in his philosophy for a God who works by special providence, or distributes rewards and punishments. "The God of the future," he writes, "the just God, gives to each one precisely what with his own efforts he has righteously won, neither more nor less. The man who asks for more is a miserable dependant, sycophant, and beggar; the man who is content with less is a fool." ^

The method whereby it was sought to establish this philosophy was the epistemological method. Every one who has studied the course of philosophy at all knows that always after the zeal of the first efforts has led to the facile construction of some system or other a rival view inevitably looms up that seems to have quite as strong a claim as the first, and yet contradicts it. So the two doctrines consume each other, and a period of doubt and skepticism supervenes. From the moment this stage is reached one can only make his escape from the intellectual slough of despond by asking, as a prior question in one's philosophy, what is knowledge, and how do we come by it ? Yet what one finds written in the history of philosophy is also always this: that, when this question is raised, forthwith it is assumed that two antithetical terms are somehow immediately given, and

1 Op. cit.

that knowledge consists in bringing these two terms to unite ; but as these terms are always taken to be mutually exclusive, philosophies are hard put to it to effect the union. These antithetical terms are, to take the most common instances, the fixed and the fleeting, subject and object, the universal and the particular, appearance and reality, reason and sense, mind and matter, sensitive tablet and external things. And the puzzle of knowledge is to get one of each of these pairs at its opposite. It is generally assumed that if only, by some sort of philosophical alchemy, one can transfuse these incompatibles, or forcibly collocate them, the problem of knowledge is solved. If this cannot be done, then one of the opposites is usually discarded in favor of the other. Now it is obvious that we should not begin with these terms, as if they themselves required no further scrutiny. We must begin by analyzing the act of cognition and the act of perception as they really appear in immediate experience, and not as they are interpreted by a ready-made theory, such as is implied in the very statement of the problem as it usually appears. Bacon said that our duty as scientists is to interpret nature and not to anticipate it. As philosophers, our task is to interpret experience and not to anticipate it.

The result that is reached by this method I can best give in Mr. Davidson's own words :

Instead of saying, as has been said heretofore, that the world starts with an inscrutable God, inscrutable atoms, or an inscrutable ether, not one of which can identify itself with our intelligence and so be known, our theory says that the world consists of a multitude of sentient individuals or atoms, whose unity is their sentience, and that these are essentially related to each other through desire. Sentience and desire are two aspects of the same fundamental fact. There is no desire without sentience and no sentience without desire. . . . Matter itself, so far as we could know it, would have to be groups of feelings. . . . The only possible completely intelligible and moral world is a world composed of essentially distinct feelings or sentiences . . . interrelated through action and passion, two forms of feeling, and yet fundamentally impenetrable to each other. And, indeed, this is the world that we really find ourselves in, or in ourselves. I can feel your action and you can feel mine ; but my feeling, or the feeling which I am, is utterly opaque to you, and the feeling which you are to me. I can learn that you have the toothache and even understand it, if I have had one as a modification of my own feeling ; but I can never feel the toothache which you feel. As sentient and desiring subjects we are absolutely impenetrable to each other, and, in so far, we are hypotheses to each other. That is the price we pay for being realities, eternal realities, if you will. If you could feel my feelings we should be merged into one and both cease to be individuals. This does not lead to agnosticism, as might seem at first sight. There is nothing in you that I may not know if you choose to be communicative ; but your feelings I can never feel. So far, happily, we must be eternally agnostics. That is the price we pay for being anything at all.^

Or consider, again, this statement :

Each has only to ask himself, What do I know myself to be ? And if he answers honestly he will, I think, say : " I am a feeling or sensibility, modified in innumerable ways by influences which I do not originate. These modifications, when grouped, are what I call the world, or my world, for I know no other. I am the sentient unity of a sensible world." 2

1 "American Democracy as a Religion," in International Journal of Ethics, Yol. X, pp. 30 ff.

2 "Education as World Building," in Educational Review for November, 1900, p. 327.

Just as Schopenhauer had tried to escape from the consequences of the omnivorous thought principle, upon which the German philosophy that preceded him bad rested, by emphasis upon the will, so Mr. Davidson tries to avoid the pantheism of both of these philosophies by making feeling the fundamental fact in experience. Now, this is just where one naturally seeks to lay the emphasis if one is intensely interested in developing a pluralistic philosophy, for it is as feeling that we are directly shut within our own worlds, and shut out from the worlds of other individuals.

This doctrine, moreover, in two ways seeks to ward off the charge of mere subjectivism: (1) In accepting as a fact the action, through desire, of one individual upon another, — an obvious fact^ but one which most idealisms have difficulty in adjusting to their systems. (2) In making room for a moral ideal. Life and education consist in world building, in ordering, classifying, grouping our sensations, and hypos tasizing them. "But there are worlds and worlds. Since the human being is a sentient desire, which from its very nature demands the highest and most varied satisfaction, the aim of education must be to enable him to construct a world capable of yielding such satisfaction. . . . The extent and richness of the world which any living being constructs depends upon two things: its capacity for manifold experience, and its power of arranging or classifying that experience. The former of these, again, depends upon the number and acuteness of the senses ; the latter upon the force of the primitive desire for satisfaction. . . . Ethical life depends upon the completeness and harmony of the world evolved in the individual consciousness." ^ A moral world would be one in which objects were stamped with their value for the satisfaction of desire, and loved and made motives for the will, in accordance with that stamping. The spring of all wrongdoing is, as ^schylus said, false coinage, irapaKOTrd. Some worlds are small but well ordered, the world of the ordinary respectable citizen ; some small and ill ordered, the world of the parasite and ordinary criminal ; some large and well ordered, the world of the saints, heroes, benefactors of humanity, thinkers, statesmen, and reformers, the introducers of ideals; some large but ill ordered, the world of the Macbeths and Napoleons, the great reprobates and criminals. Some worlds again are rigidly bounded, the worlds of the narrow conservative, ''old fogy," or of the fanatic of one idea; others are continually expanding, the worlds of the liberal and the reformer. The pessimist is simply the man who continually fails to organize a world satisfactory to his desires, and who proclaims himself a failure in world building. 1

To students of philosophy the view as thus stated will indeed suggest many doubts and queries. One will point out that this extreme emphasis of feeling, apparently at the expense of intellect and will, would completely shut the individual into his own private world, and, indeed, into the experience, if experience it could be called, of the present fleeting moment, — such expressions as " eternal feelings " being contradictions in terms, — and that we should thus be involved in a

1 Op. cit.

most hopeless form of agnosticism. Another will call attention to the fact that there is a striking resemblance between this doctrine and that of John Stuart Mill, with which Mr. Davidson elsewhere expresses his most emphatic disagreement; for, in speaking of "feelings grouping themselves," one seems to be gliding over the difficulties involved, even as Mill does with his "permanent possibilities of sensation"; and this gradation of values here set up as objectively valid is, after all, left vouched for merely by the individual subjective verdict of the man who has experienced the various forms of life, even as Mill would establish a gradation in the quality values of pleasures by the immediate affirmation of the man who has tried the different kinds. These and similar doubts that might be raised have not, I believe, been fully considered. I mention them not to refute them, nor yet in criticism of this philosophy, but rather to call attention to Mr. Davidson's manner, more like that of the poet than the philosopher, of presenting in strong relief that particular aspect of a situation that, for the time being, absorbed his interest. Such unity as the view possesses is to be sought mainly in the large and rich personality of the man, by holding together the different expressions of his different moods. And, in spite of the attempt to work out this philosophy through epistemological considerations and the analysis of experience, it was established in his own mind mainly by the results of his long and thorough study of sociology and of the history of civilization. The single thread of meaning that to him seemed to run through the drama of history was the independence of the individual.