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 THE LEARNING PROCESS 
 
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 J- / W> 
 
 Educational Theory Implied in Theory of 
 
 Knowledge 
 
 BY 
 
 V 
 
 Jesse H. Coursault 
 
 Submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements 
 for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, in the 
 Faculty of Philosophy, Columbia University 
 
 1907 
 
t-3 Z-] 5 
 ' C 1 4 
 
 Copyright 1907 
 
 BY 
 
 TEACHERS COLLEGE, COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 
 
PREFACE 
 
 Education as a conscious effort towards human evolution 
 involves the most difficult problems of life. The school, like 
 other institutions, has arisen out of practical needs, at first 
 narrowly conceived, and the idea of its aim and methods has 
 been of gradual development. The meaning of a thing is its 
 relations (p. 44) and naturally the narrow abstract relations 
 involved in immediate ends and rule of thumb methods have been 
 made prominent in educational theory, and often have been 
 perpetuated by tradition long after their usefulness has been 
 outgrown in the progressive discovery of remoter needs involving 
 wider relations. The true meaning of education and conse- 
 quently its aims and methods will be understood only when its- 
 fullest and completest relations to the life process have been 
 discovered. It is the purpose of this essay to discover in the - 
 light of epistemology some of these wider relations and in them 
 to find some formal principle or norm that may be of value in 
 selecting from a confusion of educational aims and methods 
 those which are more in harmony with the evolutionary progress. 
 
 The discussion in the first eight chapters presupposes on the 
 part of the reader some familiarity with the theories of knowledge 
 concerned. While an attempt has been made to develop the 
 essay as an organic whole, some, who may not be especially 
 interested in the critical discussion in the first eight chapters,, 
 may wish to begin with the constructive theory given in chapter 
 nine, while others may wish to read only the educational impli- 
 cations discussed in the tenth chapter. The last chapter con- 
 tains a brief summary of the whole. 
 
 Acknowledgements should be made both for inspiration and 
 guidance to the writer's teachers, including Professors MacVan- 
 nel, Dewey, Thorndike and McMurry in Columbia University; 
 Professors Hanus, Munsterberg and Royce in Harvard Univer- 
 sity; and Professor Gordy in Ohio State University. Especial 
 acknowledgement is due Professor MacVannel, under whose 
 supervision this dissertation was written, the beneficent influence 
 of whose personality and teaching cannot be forgotten. 
 
4 Preface 
 
 Owing to the nature of the problem, much that is here given 
 must be faulty. Life as a self -differentiating unity ever presents 
 more and more complex relations, so that thought, which must 
 take them into account, can only progressively approximate 
 the truth. Indeed, most of one's activities must be guided by 
 theory, or opinion, which consists of hypotheses in process of 
 becoming facts, and ever subject to modification. It is hoped 
 that what is here given will be suggestive to the reader, and the 
 correction of error, where he can discover it, is left to him. The 
 solution of the educational problem will have to be done over 
 many times, each time more closely approximating the truth 
 and becoming a more definite guide in the most difficult of all 
 activities, the progressive realization of human nature. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Introduction 7 
 
 Chapter I. 
 The Theories of Socrates and Plato 1 1 
 
 Chapter II. 
 The Theory of Aristotle 17 
 
 Chapter III. 
 The Theory of Mediaeval Writers 22 
 
 Chapter IV. 
 The Theory of Descartes 24 
 
 Chapter V. 
 The Theory of Locke 27 
 
 Chapter VI. 
 The Theory of Leibniz , 30 
 
 Chapter VII. 
 The Theory of Kant 32 
 
 Chapter VIII. 
 The Theory of Descriptive Science 35 
 
 Chapter IX. 
 Modern Voluntaristic Monistic Theory 40 
 
 Chapter X. 
 Educational Implications . . . , Si 
 
 Chapter XI. 
 Summary 94 
 
 * * * 
 Bibliography 98 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 In the growth of the tree of knowledge new branches spring 
 from the old. Educational theory, while it develops in a direc- 
 tion distinctively its own, has its basis in other more fundamental 
 branches of thought. That the theory of knowledge and educa- 
 tional theory are most intimately connected is at once evident. 
 Both are nourished by the problems arising in the study of the 
 knowing process ; the one for the purpose of giving some criterion 
 of the validity of the product, or knowledge, the other to reveal 
 a method whereby the process may be controlled in reproducing 
 knowledge. Especially in the early stages of a new development 
 must that which is vital in the older stock be adapted to strength- 
 en the one which is budding. Accordingly, it is the purpose of 
 this essay to consider certain typical theories of knowledge with 
 the hope that some truths may be revealed which will tend to 
 strengthen that movement of thought which is rapidly making 
 the work of the teacher a rationalized endeavor rather than a 
 mere routine. 
 
 A theory of knowledge is itself a product of the knowing proc- 
 ess and therefore subject to the limitations of thought. Accord- 
 ingly, it is not immediately given but must involve presupposi- 
 tions, without which nothing can be known. The consciousness 
 of immediacy arises through a differentiation of experience into 
 subjective and objective phases, which can be separated only as 
 logical abstractions, and, in this differentiation, the objective 
 phase to a degree loses its immediacy and receives meaning 
 only in the light of presuppositions. Therefore, to limit oneself 
 to immediacy is to join the Eastern mystic in abandoning 
 knowledge and seeking annihilation. Schools of philosophy 
 then must begin with unproved assumptions; and, according as 
 these assumptions differ, there result types of theory which vary 
 in important particulars. In order to judge the relative value of 
 various theories, the assumptions on which they are based must 
 be considered. The cause of difference in assumptions is due 
 to abstraction, or viewing one phase of experience out of relation 
 to the others. This is done when one phase is regarded to be 
 
8 Introduction 
 
 independently real, as in subjective idealism, materialism or 
 pluralism; or when one phase is used to interpret another in 
 aspects in which the two are not analogous, as when mental 
 phenomena are interpreted in the light of space concepts. To 
 comprehend the truth free from all abstraction, to see everything 
 in its relations, is the ultimate goal of knowledge, a goal infinitely 
 removed but gradually being approximated. Often conclusions 
 derived from narrow abstractions are useful for certain limited 
 practical purposes and therefore justifiable, as in the case of 
 the special sciences; but, when in relation to some wider purpose 
 conclusions conflict, those which involve the less abstraction are 
 nearer to the truth. The Ptolemaic astronomy is useful for many 
 ordinary purposes of life; but, for the wider purposes of the 
 astronomer, it must give way to the teachings of Copernicus, 
 which explain it and at the same time give a more comprehensive 
 and valuable account of the facts. The common dualistic view 
 of the world is a satisfactory hypothesis to guide many ordinary 
 activities, but its inadequacy to guide the more comprehensive 
 activities of teaching is no less than that of the old astronomy 
 to predict stellar phenomena. Accordingly, the method to be 
 attempted in this essay in considering typical theories of knowl- 
 edge is to trace apparent inconsistencies and conflicts to the 
 partial points of view from which theories have been made, and, 
 in doing so, to present a more comprehensive point of view which 
 will explain the narrower ones and at the same time make 
 possible a theory of knowledge which will offer truths of vital 
 importance to the theory of education. 
 
 The immediate practical value of the result hoped for should 
 not be misunderstood. The mere knowledge of educational 
 theory will not make a good teacher for the same reason that the 
 mere knowledge of logic will not make a good dialectician; or 
 of ethics, a just man. Because the concrete situations to which 
 they apply, although having some common aspects, are in essen- 
 tial particulars infinitely variable and involve appreciation of 
 worth more than description of fact, normative disciplines con- 
 sist of generalizations which are regulative rather than creative 
 and should furnish in a concrete situation a general basis for the 
 selection of the best of several courses of action; but, although 
 suggestive, they do not, like the descriptive sciences, independ- 
 
Introduction 9 
 
 ently tell precisely what must be done in order to realize the 
 desired end (cf. pp. 53-54). While practice without theory is. 
 blind, theory without practice is empty. 
 
 At best a theory of education is only a general idea, a hypo- 
 thetical plan of action, which has been abstracted from a long 
 process of experience and which must be further tested, corrected 
 and elaborated through its application to the actual process of 
 teaching. Thus may education repay its debt to the theory of 
 knowledge by testing epistemological principles in the court of 
 action, the final court of appeal in the determination of truth. 
 
 
CHAPTER I 
 
 The Theories of Socrates and Plato 
 
 Thought arises from conflict, from unstable adjustment. 
 (cf. pp. 4 2_ 43.) In earliest times the conditions that make 
 thought self-centered did not exist. It was turned outward in 
 an attempt to find unity in the unstable manifoldness of nature, 
 and the first attempts of philosophy were to reduce all to one 
 element, whether it be air, fire or water. 
 
 As a tribe developed, the most satisfactory forms of activity 
 which it had experienced were preserved by gradual and imper- 
 ceptible natural selection and embodied in tradition. This 
 tradition was followed naively and without question, and thus, 
 in each tribe, so complete a connection between the self and 
 nature existed that the difference between them was unnoticed. 
 Naturally the experiences and consequently the traditions of 
 various tribes differed. When, however, through war and 
 commerce tribes met, conflicting traditions tended to become 
 mutually destructive; and, with the destruction of habitual 
 paths of self-expression, a hiatus yawned between the self and 
 the world; and, in the consequent mal-adjustment, the idea 
 of subject was born into consciousness. From now on, phil- 
 osophy had two terms with which to deal, nature and self, the 
 world and the individual, the subject and the object, and, from 
 the early problem of harmonizing the unstable manifoldness of 
 nature, it was brought face to face with the infinitely more com- 
 plex one of harmonizing the self and nature. Thus arose the 
 conditions of the problem of knowledge. 
 
 With faith in outward authority weakened and nothing ap- 
 parent to take its place, an age of skepticism naturally followed. 
 Traditional uniformity gave way to individual caprice. The 
 individual man was held to be the measure of all things; his 
 belief was for him the standard of truth; his pleasure, the stand- 
 ard of right; and, in the consequent self-seeking, justice was the 
 interest of the stronger. Skepticism may be the pre-condition 
 of a better founded faith, but it is not itself creative. Therefore 
 
12 The Learning Process 
 
 the skeptics, to whom the name Sophists is generally applied r r 
 formulated no positive general theory of knowledge. The 
 method of their educational practice was guided by a narrow 
 empiricism, and, consistent with a belief in the homo-mensura 
 tenet, they were concerned with opinion rather than knowledge ,. 
 and consequently emphasized rhetorical persuasion rather than 
 logical conviction. A world of individuals whose opinions, 
 regarded as truth, could be externally determined would imply 
 a somewhat mechanical theory of knowledge. 
 
 The authority of the world without had been denied for 
 definite reasons; but that of the world within, only through 
 ignorance of it. Therefore, when positive philosophy again 
 arose, its attention was naturally centered on the latter. " Know 
 thyself" was the maxim. With a philosophic faith in some 
 ultimate reconciliation in a world of apparent conflicting indi- 
 vidualism, Socrates began the investigation of the ideas of those 
 about him; and, by a process of definition stimulated and 
 refined through argument, he attempted to discover the common 
 essence of concepts. The problem was too great for one man 
 and he confessed his inability to solve it. While in Socrates 
 the theory of knowledge began to germinate, modern students r 
 whose minds have developed in a social medium enriched by 
 more than two thousand years of philosophic thought, are prone 
 to read into the Socratic position more than was ever distinctly 
 differentiated in the mind of the great teacher. 
 
 An adequate theory of knowledge must give some reasonable 
 account of the development of concepts. But Socrates did not 
 do this. While the so-called Socratic method, that of question- 
 ing, conforms to the method of creating tensions (discussed in 
 chapter nine), Socrates does not seem to have appreciated its 
 vital significance in the development of knowledge. He was 
 interested in the meanings of ideas as products, rather than in 
 the formal process out of which they develop, and, assuming 
 the existence of concepts in the mind and their essential uniform- 
 ity, in positive doctrine he advanced no farther than his so-called 
 intellectual "midwifery". To bring already formed ideas to 
 light was his mission as he conceived it. As they could be 
 brought to light only in intellectual form, he failed to recognize 
 
 i Some Sophists may have advanced from the position of skepticism. Cf. Gomperz, Greek 
 Thinkers, Vol. I, pp. 451 ff. (Auth. Edition, London, 190 1); also, Grote, Plato and the 
 other Companions of Sokrates. 
 
The Theories of Socrates and Plato 13 
 
 their underlying volitional and emotional nature. This is most 
 noticeable in his ethical doctrine that one who knows the right 
 will do it. The theory of knowledge here, at its very beginning, 
 received an intellectualistic turn which has in a large measure 
 affected its further development. The results of this are notice- 
 able in education even at the present time. 
 
 The Sophistic and Socratic types of thought were the heritage 
 of Plato and the solution of the problem which arose from 
 practical needs became from now on the special work of the 
 philosopher. 
 
 Socrates had directed attention to the mind as the source of 
 true and authoritative concepts. For further investigation two 
 problems naturally arose: (1) to discover the basis of the truth 
 or validity of concepts, (2) to systematize them according to 
 their meaning. Plato attempted to solve both. 
 
 The universe of experience is infinitely manifold and the 
 phases of it to which one human mind is strongly attracted are 
 limited; consequently, individual thinkers tend either to be 
 satisfied with the account of a part, neglecting the rest; or else 
 to interpret all in the light of a few phases of it. To understand 
 a philosopher and his relation to thought as a wider social 
 product, one must know his point of view. Plato had a natural 
 interest in mathematics and ethics ; and thought previous to him 
 had made prominent two views of the nature of reality: the 
 Eleatics believed it to be static and permanent; the school of 
 Heraclitus viewed it as a ceaseless becoming. The influence of 
 these four phases of thought upon Plato is evident, (a) His 
 interest in mathematics influenced him to look upon ideas as 
 independent of the concrete manifestations of nature. Math- 
 ematics deals with the forms, space and time, abstracted from 
 the content of experience. Since the forms are universal, after 
 the abstraction has once been made and mathematics has begun 
 its work of analysis, no further attention to nature is necessary; 
 the mental vision — the eye of the soul or sixth sense as Plato 
 calls it — sees the relations within the abstraction. With an 
 inclination naturally to use this class of ideas in which he was 
 so strongly interested as typical of all ideas, it was easy for him 
 to follow Socrates in placing entire emphasis upon the concept 
 as the fundamental basis of knowledge, although in reality a 
 
14 The Learning Process 
 
 concept is an abstraction which marks an advanced stage in 
 the knowing process, (b) Again, because of the universality of 
 space and time, concepts based upon these abstract forms have 
 a peculiar permanence and finality. Accordingly, the natural 
 trend of Plato's mathematical bias led him to the Eleatic position 
 in his doctrine of ideas, (c) Then too since these concepts are 
 independent of any particular mind at any particular moment, 
 it is easy to imagine them to be independent of all mind. With 
 poetic imagery the permanent and static ideas were hypostasized 
 and viewed as reals of which the changing phases of experience 
 were mere copies. Seeing in the latter the Heracleitean principle 
 of change, he turned to the realm of ideas as more worthy of 
 study ; for a world in flux did not offer the promise of that definite 
 universal truth which Socrates sought. The universal and 
 particular, which can be separated only through abstraction, 
 Plato here practically sundered, although the statement that 
 particulars are copies of universals seems vaguely to refer to 
 some relationship. As a matter of fact, universal and particular 
 are two aspects of a unitary reality and neither can exist nor have 
 any meaning absolutely sundered from the other. "Perception 
 without conception is blind, conception without perception is 
 empty." Thus in two ways did he become the victim of his 
 mental bent; he viewed all ideas in the light of mathematical 
 concepts and neglected one phase of reality to center his attention 
 on another. 
 
 While the practical need which gave rise to Plato's philosophy 
 was primarily a moral one, the purely intellectualistic position 
 which he had inherited from Socrates had no place for genuine 
 ethics. Using the concept "good" in a fancied analogy, which 
 destroyed its ethical sense, he made it serve to relate ideas and 
 phenomena. Things in the phenomenal world of change were 
 "good" to the extent that they gave adequate expression to 
 the reality embodied in the world of ideas. Again, complete 
 thinking involves both abstraction and synthesis or conscious 
 restoration of the abstraction to the unity from which it was 
 taken. Plato, following the tangent of abstraction, attributed 
 deepest reality to the most empty abstractions, arranged his 
 "ideas" in a system with "the good" as supreme, and then 
 considered the highest aim of life to be the passive contempla- 
 
The Theories of Socrates and Plato 15 
 
 tion of this. Here, indeed, is the irony of a philosophy that 
 takes a partial point of view. When activity inquired for a 
 guide, it was made passive: the search begun for the sake of 
 goodness ended by making it either an empty abstraction or a 
 mere link of relation to a realm considered too unreal for serious 
 study. 
 
 Plato was an artist; consequently, it was natural for him to be 
 synthetic rather than analytic in the sense of treating ideas only 
 as they are involved in wider relations rather than probing into 
 the processes out of which they develop. The same tendency 
 that inclined him to order them in a system according to their 
 meaning, influenced him to account for their origin and develop- 
 ment by the somewhat poetic doctrine of reminiscence. This 
 doctrine is based only upon an analogy with implications favor- 
 able to poetic interpretation. Ultimately any analysis must 
 face the same limit of facts which Plato sought to transcend in 
 the myth. The human mind cannot primarily create: it is 
 limited in its investigations to the description of experience, 
 which cannot be transcended. In this description, however, 
 it can to a greater or less extent trace the process in which 
 knowledge develops. And in this very description is the promise 
 of an answer to the problems of both epistemology and educa- 
 tion. 
 
 Even with analytic insight, only a very partial answer could 
 have been given by Plato, because his attention was limited to 
 abstract phases of the knowing process. Therefore, he was soon 
 compelled to take recourse to the myth. In fact, in this matter, 
 he made no advance upon the Socratic doctrine of "midwifery". 
 Ideas were born with difficulty, with the assistance of dialectic. 
 Other than this he told nothing of the process through which 
 they got their highly organized blood and sinew and the breath 
 that made them vital. The limited view to which he gave atten- 
 tion — and this was the view of Socrates also — was intellect ab- 
 stracted from feeling and will. In dialectic, the emotional ap- 
 preciation of worth and the exercise of will are involved; and, if 
 Socrates and Plato had analyzed this very process, they would 
 lave found a cue to the method of knowledge, but they were inter- 
 sted in knowledge as a product, and so failed to discover that 
 heir very practice of philosophy reveals the inadequacy of their 
 
1 6 The Learning Process 
 
 intellectualistic position. Indeed, the activity of the philosopher 
 to find amid conflicting traditions the right form of self-expres- 
 sion, itself became a form of self-expression, and, when fixed by 
 habit, was felt under tension to be the worthful thing to do. 1 
 Activity, which when consciously directed becomes the expres- 
 sion of will, is fundamental in life, and out of this activity in 
 the service of further activity does knowledge develop. The 
 intellectualist makes contemplation the highest good because his 
 view -point has excluded everything else, but even in contempla- 
 tion has he unconsciously slipped in feeling and will: the highest 
 goal even here is inconceivable apart from activity. Neither 
 the epistemological problem of the validity of knowledge nor 
 the educational problem of the control of knowledge can be 
 solved from the intellectualistic position, for the validity of an 
 idea can be determined only by reference to something else and 
 control takes place only in the direction of a process where 
 certain causes condition certain results. The final answer to 
 these problems from the intellectualistic position, as is clearly 
 evident in later writings, must assume an illogical dualism where 
 validity is made a correspondence between an idea and some- 
 thing else independent of it, and therefore without the pale of 
 consciousness and unknowable ; and the method of education by 
 mechanical analogies descriptive of how that which is out of 
 the pale of consciousness builds up in the mind ideas which 
 correspond to it, bridging an imaginary chasm the existence of 
 which could never be known. Even this theory would be im- 
 possible without reference to will, for the very mechanical 
 analogies involving force are themselves analogies derived from 
 the ejection of the subjective experience of will into objective 
 phenomena as a means of interpreting them (pp. 47 and 53). 
 Intellectualism views only a product as static, and, after shatter- 
 ing the crystal of knowledge into fragments, it is powerless to 
 get them together again: a test of validity and a method of con- 
 trol demand uniting relations, and relations are fundamentally 
 dynamic, existing in a process. 
 
 1 Cf . p. 44. — To use a psychological analogy, as the world of "external" vibration is 
 revealed in color, sound and other qualitative sensations, so the tensions in our habits are 
 revealed in feelings of worth. 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 The Theory of Aristotle 
 
 With Plato's problem, Aristotle inherited his master's point 
 of view. But Aristotle's interest was biological rather than 
 ethico-teleological and mathematical. This naturally led him 
 to a more comprehensive view -point. The demands of biology 
 could not be satisfied with only a formal, static realm of ideas 
 as a working basis, while nature with its rich variety of content 
 was neglected; and, as soon as nature was taken into serious 
 account, a unitary dynamic conception of reality was the result. 
 It was dynamic because nature involves change and growth: 
 it was unitary because both matter and mind are involved in 
 the life process. In Aristotle's thinking, the narrower view- 
 point which he inherited was never brought into complete 
 harmonious relation to the wider one to which his interest led 
 him; and, consequently, the effect of two conflicting principles 
 is very evident in his philosophy. The one principle made 
 him at times an unconscious victim of the Platonic dualism and 
 reached its culmination in his theology, where God is represented 
 to be pure, immovable form, and in his ethics, where contempla- 
 tion is regarded to be the crowning aim of life: the other made 
 an evolutionary interpretation everywhere prominent. Aris- 
 totle's statements which have direct bearing upon the theory 
 of knowledge are fragmentary, and the fact that he was influenced 
 by two conflicting principles makes their interpretation difficult ; 
 for inferences drawn in the light of one principle differ from 
 those made in the light of the other. However, his real con- 
 tribution to thought is included in his conception of reality as a 
 unitary process; and, to appreciate in its purity the advance 
 which he made upon Plato, it is necessar}^ to eliminate the 
 effects of an occasional unconscious influence of the static- 
 dualistic position, against which he openly contended in so 
 masterly a manner. 
 
 The biological point of view reveals an organic unitary process 
 of development. This process from the lowest to the highest 
 
18 The Learning Process 
 
 manifestations of life presents two fundamental aspects, which 
 Aristotle called "dunamis" and "energeia". The "dunamis" 
 is the basis out of which the life principle rises to a completer 
 realization. The "energeia" is the realizing viewed in its rela- 
 tion to the "dunamis". As the life principle advances in its 
 realization, the "energeia" for the lower stage becomes the 
 "dunamis" for the higher. A possible translation for these 
 terms is situation and agent, at least when applied to higher 
 forms of life. In the life of man, the process is a conscious one. 
 Based upon a present situation (dunamis), a purpose is formed 
 with a view to a better situation : through the activity (energeia) 
 to realize the purpose, new experience is gained: this experience 
 in turn integrates with the old as a situation (dunamis) for new pur- 
 poses and activities (energeia). Thus does experience ever widen, 
 making possible an increasing number of purposes, while the 
 greater number of purposes lead to activities which bring about 
 a further increase in experience. A little child, comparatively 
 speaking, is merely a "dunamis", a possibility, a situation, out 
 of which through self-activity a gradual development comes. 
 In this process of self-realization, as each individual progresses 
 in experience, he builds throughout his life the world in which 
 he consciously lives. 
 
 Of this conscious life process there are two fundamental 
 phases. The essence of purpose is its view to a better situation: 
 this involves an appreciation of relative worth, an evaluation. 
 The purpose can be realized through activity only in so far as 
 experience is under control. Plato, with his ethical bent, was 
 interested in evaluation; while Aristotle advanced to the investi- 
 gation of the complementary phase of the process and sought a 
 method of control. Accordingly, while Plato's philosophy cul- 
 minated in the classification according to worth of ethical concepts, 
 Aristotle developed a system of logic. Control must be exercised 
 in a world of changing particulars and its task can be accom- 
 plished only in so far as this world of particulars is amenable to 
 thought, is rational. The relation of thought to its object at 
 once became a question of fundamental importance and here 
 Aristotle took issue with the Platonic dualism. In developing 
 the syllogism, he pointed out the unitary logical process, which 
 involves both the particular and the general, a process by 
 
The Theory of Aristotle 19 
 
 which advancing control is gained over experience, whether it 
 be through the unconscious forming and use of simpler concepts, 
 the uncritical reasoning of every-day life or the application of 
 the more refined methods of exact science. In analyzing this 
 process, he gave attention chiefly to the deductive phase, tracing 
 premises back to the categories and showing how the individual 
 is subsumed under the general. Turning from Plato's doctrine 
 of reminiscence, he held that, by a process the potentiality of 
 which is innate, these premises, or principia, develop out of 
 particular judgments of sense, remembered, compared, and 
 through resemblances unified; but he did not further analyze 
 the method of induction, a problem which was left unsolved 
 until the Baconian movement. 
 
 That to Aristotle the knowing process was regarded as unitary 
 is evident not only as a logical conclusion from his presupposi- 
 tions, but also because in his analysis he has revealed both sub- 
 jective and objective phases throughout it. He held that there 
 can be interaction only where there is something in common 
 and this precludes dualism: for two "things" are the same in 
 respect to what they have in common; and, however they may 
 differ in other respects, these differences must be organic with 
 the common element, else a repeated dualism would break out 
 in both and destroy them. The world cannot be abstracted 
 without including, in a measure, reason: reason cannot be 
 abstracted without, in a measure, including the world. It is 
 true that Aristotle points now to sense and now to intellect as 
 the origin of knowledge, but either the greatest of logicians must 
 be accused of the most apparent inconsistency or his statements 
 must be interpreted to give only greater relative emphasis to 
 one phase or the other. There is little probability that the 
 Platonic position influenced him in the analysis of ordinary 
 everyday experience, for the very purpose in making the analysis 
 was to bridge the chasm which his master had made between 
 ideas and the phenomenal world; in a word, to show that the 
 universal exists in the thing. The common element in subject 
 and object, that which unifies them is, according to Aristotle, 
 the form, the universal. In the process of knowledge in appre- 
 hending the forms of things, reason finds itself in the world. 
 Reason is potentially in the world; the world is potentially in 
 
20 The Learning Process 
 
 reason. In the realization of its potentiality, reason presents 
 two aspects which Aristotle calls creative and passive, and which, 
 in mental evolution, seem to correspond to the "dunamis" and 
 "energeia" of the wider process of development of which reason 
 and the world are but phases. 
 
 The problems implied in Aristotle's newly discovered concep- 
 tion of unitary development are infinite both in number and 
 complexity. In consequence, he suffered the limitations of a 
 pioneer: it was impossible for one man or one age to cover the 
 whole field. However much social considerations affected his 
 solution of other problems, in the theory of knowledge it has 
 remained for later generations to account for the logical norms 
 or habits as a social product and to show that reason finds 
 itself in the world because in social progress it has been vicari- 
 ously put there; for each generation has helped to build the 
 world in which future generations are to live. The world is 
 rational because the world is built out of judgments. Aside 
 from the sense symbol, a thing (e. g. a chair) which one seems to 
 see directly is a product of judgments formed in previous ex- 
 perience and ejected into the symbol; indeed, even the symbol 
 itself is not differentiated independently of the judgment. 
 Thus every new judgment, naive or critical, to which one be- 
 comes habituated is built into his world: the proved theories of 
 one generation become mental habits and consequently parts of 
 the world of the next. Thus every hypothesis proved by science 
 is a step in the creation of things. With a knowledge of physical 
 and chemical theory, for instance, one puts into the world and 
 then seems to see immediately that which another, ignorant of 
 these sciences, cannot see. The idea is not only in the thing: it 
 is the thing. Logical norms are the essential forms of this 
 creative process having become conscious of themselves, their 
 development and habituation being a social product in accord- 
 ance with the principles under which any advanced experience 
 is socially developed. 
 
 The Platonic conception of reality influenced him especially 
 when, in an attempt to transcend human experience, he ima- 
 gined the process as a completed whole. The line of progress, 
 as completed, naturally appeared to be static and presented 
 terminal aspects easily amenable to abstraction. Thus, at one 
 
The Theory of Aristotle 21 
 
 terminal, there appeared to be pure matter without form; and, 
 at the other, pure form without matter. In relation to thought, 
 the most prominent aspect of which is formal, matter seemed to 
 have a recalcitrant element; while, as pure form, God appeared 
 to be static. These speculations, at first transcending human 
 experience, in turn exerted an influence within it. Thus Aris- 
 totle's conception of God had a tendency to make his theory of 
 knowledge intellectualistic rather than voluntaristic ; for it intro- 
 duced an inconsistent static principle into his ethics, where 
 undue emphasis was given to the ethical value of contemplation : 
 his conception of pure matter constantly threatened his doc- 
 trine of knowledge with an inconsistent dualism; for abstracted 
 matter seemed to be irrational and liable to chance. 
 
 When reality is viewed as an evolutionary process, as a self- 
 differentiating unity, all progress in the understanding of it 
 must be made by separating the various phases through abstrac- 
 tion and then viewing them together in their unitary relation — 
 in other words, in analysis and synthesis. Dualism is the 
 result of incomplete thinking. Within a unitary experience a 
 separation has been made. Thought has done its perfect work 
 only when the abstracted phases have been consciously restored 
 to the unitary experience; when, in a word, their essential re- 
 lationship has been discovered. Plato had separated ideas on 
 the one hand and the phenomena of nature on the other. Aris- 
 totle advanced towards the completion of his master's thought 
 by forming a synthesis of these abstractions through a more or 
 less definite discovery of the relation between idea and concrete 
 object, concept and percept, universal and particular. The 
 knowledge of this relation becomes more definite only as reason 
 advances in its infinite work of making ever more refined dif- 
 ferentiations and integrations. Thus did Aristotle, by discover- 
 ing a wider point of view in relation to which the narrower ones 
 could be unified, give to thought a vantage ground in the solu- 
 tion of its problems. This wider view -point makes it possible 
 to unify the valuable contributions which individual thinkers 
 have added to the social stream of thought; and, in consequence, 
 it furnishes a norm by which these contributions may be judged. 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 The Theory of Mediaeval Writers 
 
 After Aristotle there was no important advance in the theory 
 of knowledge for two thousand years. A current of religious 
 and mystical thought from the East intermingled with Greek 
 philosophy and gave to it a theological turn, which, however 
 valuable it may have been for the world in other ways, did not 
 present the problem of knowledge in a form to advance to any 
 great extent its solution. In the early centuries of the Christian 
 era, the religious phase of thought began to dominate to such 
 an extent that the Roman Catholic Church developed as the 
 institution for its expression. The dogmas of the church were 
 presented as the truth. This was necessary, for the conquering 
 hordes which swept over Europe were not prepared to under- 
 stand the advanced conceptions of an older civilization. Thought 
 must stop its absolute advance until the new civilization caught 
 up with it. But when the new civilization had lived through the 
 types of experience conserved for it in the church and was ready 
 to advance, the institution which had found its justification in 
 the conservation of thought, now tended to suppress the thinker. 
 Thought lives in the solving of its problems, the comprehension 
 of its doubts. The traditional relation of church and indi- 
 vidual, no longer justifiable, was not easily dissolved; and, 
 when the church gave dogmatic solutions for problems and an 
 implicit faith in its infallibility dispelled doubts, there was no 
 occasion for thinking. 
 
 But this situation could not long endure. Nature's creed is 
 not "Believe or be condemned", but "Act rightly or be con- 
 demned", and to determine how to act requires thinking. Now 
 that the new civilization had overtaken the old, problems within 
 the teaching of the church inevitably arose. To strengthen the 
 dogma, belief made an alliance with reason, an act which sealed 
 the doom of an institution that, as a dogmatic teacher, had, so 
 far as the thinking world is concerned, fulfilled its mission. 
 The old problem of the relation of the universal to the particular 
 
The Theory of Mediaeval Writers 23 
 
 now took the forms of realism and nominalism. Since the 
 church claimed to be a reality greater than individuals and the 
 doctrines of the Trinity and original sin involved a similar 
 conception, an appeal was made to Plato's thesis that the real 
 is the universal. The Platonic conception universalia ante rem 
 prevailed in the twelfth century and was taken up into the 
 Aristotelian universalia in re in the thirteenth : but the pendulum 
 did not stop here, and, in the following two centuries, the par- 
 ticular was viewed as the only real for knowledge, for uni- 
 versalia post rem and nominalism prevailed. Since the objects 
 of faith were universal, nominalism divorced faith and knowl- 
 edge. Further development must then come from reason 
 independent of faith — a fact which destroyed the basis of schol- 
 asticism. As a last resort the church made an appeal to force, 
 the final evidence that its authoritative mission as infallible 
 dispenser of truth was at an end. Man is greater than insti- 
 tutions. 
 
 An external influence also came to hasten its dissolution. 
 Greek philosophy preserved in the East and free from the Pro- 
 crustean bed of religious dogma was introduced into the western 
 world through the Crusades and the flight of scholars at the 
 fall of Constantinople, while the newly invented printing press 
 made its wide dissemination possible. Then, too, a new astron- 
 omy and a new continent stimulated interest in nature. The 
 story of the Grecian movement of thought was now repeated in 
 that conflicting traditions became mutually destructive, an 
 age of skepticism arose and an appeal was made to reason as 
 arbiter. 
 
 At this point, Descartes began the problem. The phases of 
 rationalism and empiricism were differentiated in Leibniz and 
 Locke, integrated in the Kantian movement, given a functional 
 turn under the influence of modern biological conceptions and 
 are being socially interpreted by thinkers of the present. 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 The Theory of Descartes 
 
 An age of conflicting tradition naturally leads to an age of 
 skepticism. When skepticism has removed the authority of the 
 outer world, thought must seek a new foundation in the inner. 
 The world had completed a cycle of thought from Socrates to 
 Descartes; and, generally speaking, similar conditions led both 
 to begin anew with a rationalistic philosophy. But no thinker 
 is independent of his past. He is educated in a social medium 
 which is a product of the past and unconsciously grows into 
 habits of thought, ways of looking at things, from which he 
 cannot escape because they constitute his very mental equip- 
 ment. So, when Descartes attempted to ignore the past and 
 begin philosophy anew, he was still limited by traditional con- 
 ceptions. Both his problem and its solution were in a great 
 measure influenced by the beliefs of the church of the Middle 
 Ages, which through force of tradition formed a vital part of 
 his environment. In religious teaching, the distinction between 
 soul and body, the mind and nature, had been sharply drawn: 
 the soul was immortal, the body perishable; the spirit was 
 divine, the world evil. Descartes began with the dualistic 
 conception of reality in a most acute form: mind and matter 
 in themselves were defined as two substances so essentially 
 different as logically to preclude any anahyzable common basis 
 upon which an interaction could be explained. His rationalistic 
 view-point led him to begin with mind. His problem was to 
 find a means through which matter also could be comprehended. 
 
 With a strong mathematical interest, Descartes assumed as 
 a criterion of truth the certainty which attaches to mathematical 
 axioms. This certainty he claimed to find in the judgment, 
 "I think, therefore I exist", which forms the starting point of 
 his argument. But even here an assumption has crept in, for 
 the two pronouns are not the same in meaning, the one being 
 the real and the other the logical subject, or the real subject 
 objectified. Mathematics deals with relations in the objective 
 
The Theory of Descartes 25 
 
 phase of experience : Descartes' proposition transforms the 
 subjective into the objective. Thought proceeds by a process 
 of hypothesis and proof. The teaching of the church now sup- 
 plied him with the hypothesis that God mediates between 
 mind and matter. This inference is valueless so far as positive 
 knowledge is concerned, for the finite mind cannot understand 
 how God performs such mediation and it is the understanding of 
 the method, the "how," that increases control of experience. 
 While mankind cannot understand the ultimate constitution 
 of the universe, yet many problems can be solved in ways which 
 do increase such control. To refer the difficulties of a problem 
 to a Supreme Being is to preclude other hypotheses practically 
 valuable which may be capable of demonstration. Had Des- 
 cartes not been satisfied with his hypothesis, it would have 
 been a mental necessity for him to have investigated the assump- 
 tions which led to the problem and this investigation might 
 have brought him nearer to the truth. But he believed that 
 his solution could be demonstrated. Here again he was under 
 religious influence ; for when inference involves the close personal 
 relation of religious conviction, one may be blind to flaws in the 
 proof. Assuming that there are innate ideas existing in a way 
 independently of an external reality to which they refer, he 
 attempted to complicate these ideas so as to prove the existence 
 of the external reality. In one argument, he assumed that the 
 idea of causation involves the independent existence of such a 
 law and also that there is a positive innate idea of a Perfect 
 Being: from these assumptions it follows that there must be a 
 being as great as the idea to have caused it. In the other 
 argument, he asserted that the idea of a Perfect Being requires 
 His existence, because existence is one of the qualities of perfec- 
 tion. A Perfect Being would not deceive : therefore, the material 
 world corresponds to man's idea of it, providing he accepts only 
 that which is clear and distinct : otherwise he himself is responsi- 
 ble for error. 
 
 The fundamental fallacy of Descartes' thinking is the assump- 
 tion that by complicating universal ideas he can reach the 
 particular of experience. The cycle of universal ideas can never 
 lead beyond itself, for it is essentially an abstract view of experi- 
 ence which neglects the particular. But a deeper fallacy lies in 
 
26 The Learning Process 
 
 the very statement of his problem. There is no realm of ideas, 
 there is no mind, wholly apart from the world of extension, and 
 there is no world of extension wholly apart from mind, so far as 
 human beings are concerned. To say "I think" without saying 
 "I think something" is meaningless. Both the mind and the 
 realm of ideas of which Descartes speaks are empty abstractions 
 and his problem has no significance. As did Socrates and 
 Plato, he took a partial point of view, but dealt with abstrac- 
 tions that had been more sharply defined by centuries of acute 
 thinking. He has abstracted the mature individual from 
 society and the intellect from the other phases of the individual 
 mind. There can be no rational theory of knowledge consistent 
 with his doctrine. Thought lives upon its own problems and the 
 chief value of Descartes' philosophy is that it gave to subsequent 
 thinking the basis for a most vigorous life. 
 
CHAPTER V 
 The Theory of Locke 
 
 Now that Descartes had so clearly sundered the self and the 
 world, it was possible to look upon either the external world or 
 mind as the primary basis of knowledge. Of these opposing 
 views, the philosophies of Locke and Leibniz may be regarded as 
 typical. A simple way to deal with the problem was to assume 
 the dualism which Descartes had made, disregard its metaphys- 
 ical difficulties, and, in an empirical way, trace the process of know- 
 ing. This was the task undertaken by Locke. With the world 
 to be known and the knower considered to be separate realities, 
 the problem was to discover how the knowledge of the world 
 gets into the mind. Locke, accordingly, regarded the mind to 
 be a blank tablet and held that nothing can be in the intellect 
 which did not come through the senses. According to this view, 
 the external world affects the mind through the senses and the 
 mind thus affected becomes aware not only of the world but 
 also of its own states, all knowledge thus arising from sensation 
 and reflection. The external world, however, is not in this way 
 directly presented as it actually exists, for essentially it is 
 extension and motion, which sensation presents to the mind in 
 an enriched form. As Helmholz says: "We should be grateful 
 to our senses for conjuring up colors and sounds out of vibrations, 
 and for bringing us in sensations, as in a symbolic language, news 
 of the external world". Knowledge, then, begins with simple 
 ideas which come through a single sense, as sounds and colors; 
 through the combined product of two or more senses, as ideas 
 of extension and motion; through reflection, as those of feeling 
 and will; and through reflection and sensation together, as 
 those of succession and power. Out of this material, complex 
 ideas are formed referring to temporal, spacial and mental 
 modifications or modes, to substance and relations. 
 
 Locke's point of view is that of naive realism. Like the view- 
 point of the Ptolemaic astronomy, it is fixed by habit upon 
 people in general and is apparently a practical working basis for 
 
28 The Learning Process 
 
 every-day purposes. Unfortunately, it is more firmly fixed 
 than the old astronomy, because there is no uniform teaching of 
 thoughtful men to oppose it. Therefore it is regarded as the 
 view of common sense. But the theory does not adequately 
 explain the facts. A true explanation of a process may be 
 refined without limit, but a false one is soon blocked; for, when 
 a process is properly viewed, ever finer differentiations may be 
 directly seen within experience, but when it is falsely viewed, 
 that which is not seen must be built up constructively out of 
 inadequate material, judged to be analogous and got elsewhere 
 in experience. In three most fundamental parts of his doctrine, 
 Locke has no experience, either direct or constructed, to support 
 him. Further analysis is hopeless because the illusion fails so 
 completely that there is nothing to analyze. First, if the world 
 is completely sundered from the mind, how does it ever become 
 known? Locke refers this difficulty to the wisdom of a Divine 
 Being. Second, how do a multiplicity of sensations received 
 from without become related and organized into the intelligible 
 world which the mind does know? With naive inconsistency he 
 assumes mental self-activity to account for this, but self -activity 
 is an empty abstraction which explains nothing. Third, how 
 does a material world acting upon a tabula rasa ever give rise to 
 those known subjective phases of mind — emotions and attitudes 
 — which may be included in the word personality? Locke does 
 not seem to appreciate the real significance of this problem. 
 Locke is right when he says that all knowledge arises out of ex- 
 perience, but wrong in his theory of the nature of that exper- 
 ience ; and these difficulties arise from the fact that he deals with 
 two abstractions from a wider process of experience as though 
 they were independent realities. One is a highly differentiated 
 abstract phase of human experience — i. e. the material world — 
 which he imagines to act upon a meaningless abstraction — i. e. 
 an empty mind — through the medium of the senses. Indeed, 
 he deserts experience at the outset. An independent material 
 world of which ideas are copies is an unnecessary assumption 
 wholly impossible to prove, for all the mind knows is its ideas. 
 Furthermore the known world is not composed of things known 
 separately and then unified. They could never have been 
 known as separate objects if they had not first been known in 
 
The Theory of Locke 29 
 
 ■unity, for the meaning of a thing grows out of its relations: a 
 thing is indeed a focus point for a number of relations. The 
 association of ideas in thinking, which is too often viewed as 
 mechanical, is possible just because the meaning of one thing 
 does include the meaning of another. A conscious unitary 
 relationship is the precondition of all thinking and through 
 thought is the world of things built up. Locke can appear to 
 derive relations from things, the general from the particular, 
 because in thought the particular has been developed out of 
 the general and means it plus certain differentiations. Accord- 
 ingly, what he assumed to be the primary elements of knowledge 
 appear to be in fact its final product: he has made an attempt 
 to work the problem of knowledge backwards. Again, an 
 empty mind is nothing, but Locke imagines it to be a sort of 
 magic receptacle in which can be found, when needed, modes of 
 feeling and will and relations, which his basal assumptions fail to 
 provide. It would be absurd to attempt to explain an oak tree 
 on the basis of a soil, of leaves and of the empty space which the 
 tree is to fill and refer the difficulties of the problem to the 
 wisdom of God and the self -activity of the tree: it is equally 
 absurd to attempt to explain knowledge from the Lockean 
 basal assumptions. 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 The Theory of Leibniz 
 
 The nature of relations, which Locke seemed so little to appre- 
 ciate and the neglect of which resulted in fundamental incon- 
 sistencies in his doctrine, had a determining influence upon the 
 theory of Leibniz. The substances of Descartes, one of which 
 Locke assumed to be the primary basis of knowledge, were quan- 
 titative abstractions — thought and extension. Leibniz, with his 
 genius for mathematics, saw that Descartes' view of material 
 substance presented insuperable difficulties to any attempt to 
 determine the relations of parts to the whole. Infinite divisi- 
 bility and a continuum are inconsistent concepts; for, when an 
 ultimate indivisible point is reached, it ceases to be real: further- 
 more, a part is not a part, except in relation to a whole, and a 
 whole is not a whole, except in relation to its parts, while in mere 
 extension there are no intrinsic relations. Furthermore, mere 
 extension is inert, while activity is everywhere evident in the 
 world. To avoid these difficulties, Leibniz represented the 
 world, not as a static continuum essentially quantitative, but 
 as made up of an infinite number of dynamic units qualitatively 
 different, each of which included the world in a representative 
 way. Since these units or monads are essentially qualitative, 
 each is simple or indivisible and completely isolated. To sus- 
 tain its relation to the whole, each is potentially able to ideally 
 represent the whole: if it actually contained the whole, there 
 could be no distinction between whole and parts. Each, fur- 
 thermore, must represent the whole from its own point of view, 
 which must differ from that of every other monad, else those 
 having the same view -point would be identical. Since there is 
 change in the whole, the monads, to keep pace with it, must be 
 dynamic, have appetition. From the lowest matter to the 
 highest intelligence, each monad mirrors the universe about it, 
 and all are kept in accord because of a harmony divinely pre- 
 established. In lower forms this mirroring is unconscious per- 
 ception; in higher forms it becomes conscious and is called apper- 
 
The Theory of Leibniz 31 
 
 ception; when self-consciousness and reason are attained, the 
 monads become "rational souls" or "spirits." As with Des- 
 cartes, clearness and distinctness mark the perfection of ideas. 
 At first there is a confused mass of perceptions, which, as the 
 monad evolves within itself, become clarified. Matter is con- 
 fused perception. The human mind is a monad with great ad- 
 vantages for the forming of clear and distinct ideas, because 
 of the peculiar organization of other monads with it to form a 
 body. 
 
 The theory of Leibniz may be satisfactory in the realm of 
 mathematics; but, in a most fundamental way, it is at fault. If 
 each monad is completely sundered from all the rest and evolves 
 its perceptions from within, how can it know whether other 
 monads exist or not? To assume that the human mind is a 
 monad leads logically only to solipsism. Leibniz has made 
 unprovable assumptions to serve his mathematical interests and 
 then, when insurmountable difficulties arose elsewhere in his 
 system, found satisfaction after the manner of Descartes in 
 referring them to an All-powerful Being. 
 
 The partial point of view which Leibniz has taken in his 
 monadology is the individual abstracted from society; the mind, 
 from the world; and the intellect, from feeling and will. The 
 first abstraction may be traced to that strong individualistic 
 trend of thought which found its educational expression in the 
 writings of Rousseau; the second distinction was prominent in 
 the religious doctrine of the time; and the third is the point of 
 view of mathematics, in which Leibniz was strongly interested. 
 The underlying idea of development, of self -differentiation, 
 when applied to experience as a whole rather than to abstract 
 phases of it, and, accordingly, with the assumption of a social 
 plasm rather than an isolated monad as the basis of develop- 
 ment, has later proved to be very fruitful in its results. 
 
CHAPTER VII 
 The Theory of Kant 
 
 Thought lives upon problems arising in the reconciling of 
 apparent differences. To bring together the opposed views 
 presented by Locke and Leibniz now became the task of Kant. 
 His problem, accordingly, was to determine what is contributed 
 by the subject, what by the object, and how these contributions 
 are interrelated. In an analysis of perception, he shows that the 
 particular matter of sense, the manifold variable, is contributed 
 by the object, while the subject contributes the universal forms 
 of space and time under which it is known. These forms are 
 subjective because that which is external presupposes space as 
 the possibility of its existence, while sensations coming one after 
 another presuppose time. Mathematics, which is a science of 
 necessary and universal validity, is based upon space and time 
 and therefore they too must transcend particular experiences. 
 When these forms are abstracted, whatever remains in percep- 
 tion is the matter of sense, which is never known in its purity 
 apart from form. Analogous to the transcendental ego, which 
 is felt to be at the basis of subjective manifestations of mind, 
 Kant infers that the matter of sense has a transcendental basis 
 in a so-called thing-in-itself. In an analysis of the understand- 
 ing, the forms of logical judgment are examined and the pure 
 formal notions, the categories, are deduced by abstracting from 
 the concepts made by these judgments whatever is contributed 
 by perception. Thus are found twelve categories, by a combi- 
 nation of which all other a priori intelligible forms are produced. 
 The sense and understanding, perception and conception, are 
 related by space and especially time, which form an integral 
 part of the perception and also have the nature of the categories. 
 For instance, time and space are involved in the categories of 
 relation. After the Critique of the Theoretical Reason has 
 thus analyzed pure reason, the Critiques of the Practical Reason 
 and Judgment relate reason to will and feeling by showing it to 
 contain the principles of conduct and of the emotion of pleasure 
 
The Theory of Kant 33 
 
 and pain. Kant then is concerned with one phase of the old 
 problem of the universal and particular. He has dissected them 
 apart cleanly with the skill of a master hand, but the great 
 difficulty in the problem of knowledge is to get them together 
 again. Kant does not show how this is done, but merely as- 
 sumes that in the awakening of thought the particular matter 
 takes the initiative. 
 
 The difficulties in Kant's doctrine grow out of its presuppo- 
 sitions. In an attempt to discover their respective contribu- 
 tions to knowledge, he regards the subject and object as dis- 
 parate and attributes to one the universal and to the other the 
 particular in knowledge. Just as the ego is regarded as the 
 basis of the universal, he is led by the principle of analogy to 
 posit a thing-in-itself as the essential basis of the particular or 
 matter of sense, an assumption which can never be proved and 
 which therefore has no legitimate place in a theory of knowledge. 
 
 While the Kantian analysis has revealed full well the interre- 
 lations among the forms of thought, it has not revealed the 
 most essential nature of the bridges across the chasms between 
 the ego and forms, between the thing-in-itself and matter of 
 sense and between form and matter. To do so is impossible, 
 because the ego and thing-in-itself are held to be transcendental 
 and therefore not objects of thought, while form and matter 
 have been assumed to be disparate in the conditions of the 
 problem, so that there is provided no wider unity including 
 both, in such a way as to reveal the basis of relation. To state 
 that the ego is the basis of form, the thing-in-itself the basis of 
 matter and that the thing combines in a unitary way both form 
 and matter , is to point to the fact that there must be a connection, 
 but not to make directly evident its nature. The connection is 
 most essentially a dynamic one and consequently not directly 
 revealed in a static cross section of experience, but in the dif- 
 ferentiation of these apparently contrasting phases of experience 
 out of a unitary active process. Then, too, in the Kantian 
 theory, the object starts the process in the development of 
 knowledge. It awakens the subject to use the categories. But 
 subject and object are characteristic of a well-developed knowl- 
 edge and prior to knowledge they do not exist. A non-existent 
 object cannot act upon a non-existent subject and therefore 
 3 I 
 
34 The Learning Process 
 
 knowledge cannot be accounted for in this way. This is the 
 fundamental difficulty in any intellectualistic theory of knowl- 
 edge. The very experience whose origin is to be accounted for 
 is assumed to begin with. Before subject and object exist, 
 there is activity out of which they differentiate, and in this very 
 differentiation does knowledge develop. Each stage of differen- 
 tiation is a situation or basis from which a new ideal is projected, 
 and, in the active realization of this new ideal, is there further 
 differentiation, i. e. new knowledge developed. The essential 
 activity is not between subject and object, even where these 
 exist in consciousness, but between a present situation, of which 
 subject and object are terminal aspects, and a projected ideal 
 situation. Accordingly, to analyze the relation of subject and 
 object is not to analyze the essential dynamic process in which 
 knowledge is developed. 
 
 Kant's point of view is that of the mature individual ab- 
 stracted from society and the intellect abstracted from feeling 
 and will: he gives a mechanical analysis of knowledge as a 
 product rather than an account of the process through which it 
 developed. The unity between knower and known, subject 
 and object, in a unity in the development process and to neglect 
 this fact is to be involved at once in an insoluble dualism. 
 
CHAPTER VIII 
 The Theory of Descriptive Science 
 
 The Cartesian dualism of mind and matter is at the basis of 
 the descriptive sciences, the purpose of which is to analyze 
 objective experience into its elements and to determine the 
 causal value of these elements so that they may be used in the 
 control of the future. Descriptive science, accordingly, deals 
 with abstractions, and therefore can be justified only to the 
 extent that it realizes its purpose by being of practical value in 
 the control of experience. 
 
 The descriptive science of mind may be designated as psy- 
 chology, but this word varies in meaning. In the widest sense it 
 includes any study of mind and thus to the idealist may mean his 
 philosophy. It is here used, however, to designate rather a 
 special science which aims at exactitude in dealing with mental 
 phenomena regarded as facts to be described and measured, 
 and to be explained according to efficient causation. This dis- 
 tinction must be continually kept in mind in the following dis- 
 cussion. Psychology then as a special science must objectify, 
 analyze and measure. At the outset, two difficulties which do 
 not exist for the physical sciences are met with by those who 
 uphold this view, (i) The subjective aspect of experience, 
 the will attitudes, cannot be objectified, because its essential 
 nature is subjective. Any attempt to make the will an object 
 reveals it still to be a subject taking attitudes towards an inade- 
 quate idea of itself. (2) Mental phenomena, as opposed to 
 physical, to make a practical distinction, is the term given to 
 those phases of experience which cannot be shared in common 
 by all persons, but are only for an individual, and cannot be 
 regarded as a basis of causation, which is inconceivable apart 
 from matter and motion. To surmount these difficulties, 
 psychology must substitute for the real person the psycho- 
 physical organism. Then mental phenomena, regarded as facts 
 to be described and explained rather than meanings to be under- 
 stood, are supposed to be in the head and to parallel certain 
 
36 The Learning Process 
 
 molecular changes in the brain. Thus can a person be treated 
 as an object, while the brain and nervous system, together with 
 their interaction with the rest of the organism, give a common 
 basis for the description, causal explanation and measurement 
 of mental facts. While physical science, aiming to analyze 
 objects into elements and determine their causal values, pre- 
 supposes an atomism in which all atoms are alike because 
 quantitative, psychology seems logically to presuppose, as 
 paralleling physical changes in the organism, a psychic atomism 
 in which the atoms are all different because qualitative. 
 
 Though psychology, justified by the usefulness of its results, 
 regards the mind as being in the head, in reality the head and 
 external world are in the mind, if the word mind is used synon- 
 ymously with experience. The word external does not mean 
 external to mind: it has reference only to relations of things 
 within the mind, which may be external to one another. To 
 ask the location of mind is a question without meaning, for the 
 mind is not anywhere: the spacial relations are within its knowl- 
 edge, but the mind itself is not spacial. The difference between 
 a fact and an idea is not that one is an external reality and the 
 other an internal copy of it. An idea is an hypothesis which, 
 when verified by being found to be a satisfactory guide for con- 
 duct, becomes a fact: there is no dualism between the two. 
 Matter is a permanent possibility of experience. The history of 
 world building is the history of ideas becoming facts. What to 
 one generation seems to be sufficiently verified to be regarded 
 as a fact, may, in the light of the further experience of the 
 next, prove itself to be only an idea. A mere idea or hypothesis 
 is individual because of the possibility of infinite variation: a 
 fact is social because verification has limited its variation and 
 thus made it, when abstracted from will attitudes, one truth for 
 many knowers. Science finds it advantageous for the sake of 
 distinctness to deal with terminal aspects of a process as though 
 they were independent realities and to regard them under the 
 analogy of space concepts: accordingly, psychology looks upon 
 the idea as a reality within the mind imagined to be in an indi- 
 vidual organism, and upon facts as realities without the mind 
 and existing whether they are known or not. The only account 
 which psychology can give of the development of knowledge is 
 
The Theory of Descriptive Science 37 
 
 to trace in a mechanical way how representative ideas are 
 brought about in the head of the organism. A stimulus from 
 the external world affects the sense organ and is carried to the 
 brain by the afferent nerves, there certain molecular brain 
 changes are accompanied by sensation, a reaction takes place 
 through the medium of the efferent nerves and the brain matter 
 is further disturbed. Upon such a basis does psychology account 
 for the origin and development of knowledge, from the simplest 
 sensation to the most complex idea. Since it regards only 
 efficient causal values, psychology naturally views knowledge 
 as a mechanical construct. In the complete knowing process, 
 ethical values as well as efficient causal values are involved. 
 Psychology therefore may analyze, describe, explain and measure 
 mental phenomena at various stages, but it cannot give the 
 truest genetic account of the development of knowledge, since 
 the truest genetic account must take into consideration ethical 
 factors to which the limited purpose of psychology makes it 
 blind. The expression "purpose of psychology" itself points 
 to the ethical factor in the development of knowledge which 
 gives meaning to the very science that denies it. The develop- 
 ment of knowledge is in the growth of meanings, and meanings 
 have their subjective as well as their objective reference: they are 
 meanings for somebody as well as objective relations. The mean- 
 ing is not complete without its worth to be appreciated as well as 
 its causal value to be measured. Therefore, the subjective will 
 and emotions as factors of meaning cannot be neglected in ac- 
 counting for knowledge: and, as these are manifested only in the 
 active life of a real person, the knowledge process must be studied 
 as a phase of the life process of a person, not of a fictitious psy- 
 cho-physical organism. Indeed, a meaning, or idea, objectified as 
 a fact for scientific dissection differs as much from the real 
 essence of the meaning as a psycho-physical organism differs 
 from a real person, and for the same reason. The psychological 
 account of the development of knowledge is justifiable for the 
 sake of certain practical purposes, but it does not take so wide 
 a point of view as epistemology, and, consequently, when con- 
 clusions conflict, those of epistemology are to be given the 
 preference. However, the wider view does not destroy the 
 narrower one, but, on the contrary, includes it in such a way as 
 
38 The Learning Process 
 
 to reveal it in wider relations, which, when understood, give its 
 conclusions a deeper significance and harmonize them with the 
 deeper truth. Epistemology does not refute psychology, but, 
 by revealing its purposes and limitations, includes it; and, ac- 
 cordingly, in the solution of epistemological problems, may use 
 psychological conclusions thus known in a truer light. 1 The 
 value of psychology in the control of the knowing process is not 
 to directly reveal the elements of control and their values, so 
 much as to afford certain practical tests of the values of other 
 processes of control. The teacher has an ethical rather than a 
 scientific attitude toward the pupil. The pupil is not regarded 
 as a psycho-physical organism and his ideas as objective facts. 
 Both teacher and pupil in the teaching process (cf. pp. 55-57) 
 must be absorbed in the appreciation of purposes and the mean- 
 ing of elements of control within the study. Not the ideas as 
 facts, but the meaning of the ideas are the important elements 
 of control here. The problems in the school are how to differen- 
 tiate the pupil's experience through the interrelation of mean- 
 ings in the subject matter studied. A consciousness of psy- 
 chology is no more useful in teaching a problem in geometry 
 than a consciousness of the anatomy and physiology of the legs 
 is useful in teaching a child to walk: desires and mathematical 
 relations are the conscious elements of control in the one case, 
 and desires and sensations in the other. A descriptive science 
 in its great complexity centers attention upon its own elements 
 as means of control: a normative science, as that of education 
 must be, points beyond itself, offering a simple principle for the 
 selection of other elements of control. This distinction, it 
 must be remembered, is not absolute, but one of degree. Psy- 
 chology, as it is interpreted in the present chapter, furthermore, 
 assumes to begin with as a basis of explanation that which it is 
 the province of the theory of knowledge to explain, and seeks 
 to further differentiate this by experimental analysis : it assumes 
 a psycho-physical organism and disregards as foreign to its 
 purpose the reconciliation of the illogical dualism between mind 
 and matter. Unfortunately, the application of this psychologi- 
 cal dualism to educational theory without discrimination of its 
 peculiar province and limitations as the basis of a descriptive 
 
 1 With this justification, some psychological conclusions are made use of in the tenth 
 chapter of this essay. 
 
The Theory of Descriptive Science 39 
 
 science, justified only by the practical needs which it serves, 
 has emphasized a mechanical theory of knowledge which makes 
 prominent the giving of information, the getting of facts through 
 the "windows of the soul" into the memory rather than the 
 logical building of a world. This to some extent has been 
 mitigated unconsciously by an inconsistent mixture of norma- 
 tive disciplines with psychology and through its application by 
 teachers who are not wholly given over to the scientific abstrac- 
 tion, but the scientific dualism is still widely used as a basis of 
 educational theorv. 
 
CHAPTER IX 
 Modern Voluntaristic Monistic Theory 
 
 The development of modern theory corresponds to that of 
 the Greek not only in that it began with rationalism following a 
 period of skepticism; but also in that, under the influence of 
 biology, it has come to have much in common with the later 
 development of Greek thought as embodied in the writings of 
 Aristotle. Naturally, it has made an advance both in the 
 refinement of problems and in the extent of the field studied. 
 An individual in the stream of thought finds it practically im- 
 possible to get a comprehensive view of the whole contemporary 
 movement and to appreciate the many currents and counter- 
 currents beyond the particular eddy which is encircling him. 
 The discussion in this chapter, accordingly, is merely an attempt 
 to give expression to some modern tendencies of thought which 
 appear to deal with the problem of knowledge in a way that 
 promises to be most satisfactory and which may offer some- 
 thing of value to educational theory. The theory of knowledge 
 is a product of knowledge and consequently a construct of 
 judgments based upon observed data. It is necessary first to 
 see clearly the data, to get a right point of view. The data 
 themselves in turn are the product of knowledge, of judgments 
 made so habitually that they have become unconscious : accord- 
 ingly, what seems to be a fact immediately given is, in truth, a 
 complex mental construct. To make over old conceptions into 
 truer ones, judgments naively formed and fixed by habit must 
 be brought again to consciousness and tested in the light of 
 later judgments. One fact gets its meaning in the light of all 
 the rest: its meaning is its true relation to the whole. Conse- 
 quently, when a theory of knowledge is made from a point of 
 view which neglects some of the facts, the conclusions, as in 
 most typical cases already considered in this essay, are open to 
 criticism. A point of view which includes all the facts must 
 take in experience as a whole: if there is anything which does 
 not lie within experience, it is not known and cannot be a factor 
 in the theory of knowledge. 
 
Modem Voluntaristic Monistic Theory 41 
 
 Experience, as known in its widest form, is individual. The 
 experience of other persons must always find its interpreta- 
 tion in terms of the self. To read or eject this interpretation 
 into another person regarded objectively as being within a 
 physical body , is to make him one of the many objects of knowl- 
 edge for the self: the world then appears to be duplicated and 
 truth to be the correspondence between this experience which 
 is read into him and the world in which he appears to be only 
 one of the objects. Only a little reflection is necessary to reveal 
 the fact that the mind is not, in reality, within the human body, 
 but that the human body, as well as other objects of experience, 
 is within the mind. The duplicating of one's own experience 
 in considering it both within and without another individual, 
 or even one's self regarded objectively, is the fundamental 
 fallacy of dualistic theories of knowledge. This dualism can 
 occur only among objects of knowledge and therefore is a 
 partial view because it neglects the individuality that unifies 
 them. Unity or individuality is one phase of all experience 
 just as truly as diversity or plurality is another. The idea of 
 diversity or plurality could never occur unless it were experienced 
 in a unity, for diversity or plurality is a relation and there can 
 be no relation where there is no unity. If things are not unified, 
 they cannot be separate. Without individuality to unify it, 
 the world vanishes into meaningless unrelated atoms just as 
 truly as individuality without a diversity to give it character 
 becomes an empty abstraction. The self can use individual 
 experience to interpret that of others, and, in turn, the interpre- 
 tation of other's experience may throw light upon one's own, 
 but no satisfactory account of knowledge can be obtained by 
 ejecting one's experience both within and without another 
 individual and attempting to find a direct causal relation between 
 these ejects. 
 
 Although the widest point of view is individual experience, 
 this individual experience is also social. I am in others and 
 others are in me. This is a necessary interpretation of exper- 
 ience, the only alternatives of which lead to pluralism, which 
 has been found to be illogical, and to solipsism, in which no one 
 can believe. Therefore , while the widest experience is individual, 
 it contains within itself society, which can in turn be made a 
 
42 The Learning Process 
 
 basis to explain how the individual experience came to be what 
 it is. Thus does individual experience reveal itself to be the 
 product of social realization. And, since society is interpreted 
 by ejecting within objects in individual consciousness the ex- 
 perience which is first felt to be individual, nothing can be 
 known as characteristic of society which is not first received as 
 an individual experience : society is a construct out of individual 
 experience as a necessary interpretation of itself. Therefore, 
 the problem of knowledge in its primary form is a problem to 
 be solved within experience considered as individual, for it must 
 first be determined how I know in order to understand how any- 
 body else knows. 
 
 Since nothing without experience can be used to explain it, 
 the growth of knowledge is in the evolution of experience and 
 all that can be known regarding it is the process by which this 
 evolution takes place, the internal law of its development. 
 Even the question of the validity of knowledge involves no 
 idea of " copy " or " correspondence " to some independent 
 reality, but can be answered only in relation to this internal 
 development. To present the problem in its simplest form, an: 
 account should be given of the beginning of knowledge in any 
 individual. The conditions underlying the beginning of his 
 conscious experience are not directly known by an individual, 
 of course, because they precede whatever he knows. An account 
 of these conditions, therefore, can be based only upon impli- 
 cations in the analysis of mature experience where the expla- 
 nation of the conscious life of others gives ground for the expla- 
 nation of that of the self. 
 
 An interpretation of others makes it appear that at first there 
 is activity which is not consciously directed ; movements are made 
 at random. In this way by repetition certain movement 
 complexes become habitual, especially those which give expres- 
 sion to instincts. There is no direct consciousness of movements 
 which are completely controlled by habit; but, when habitual 
 co-ordinations are interfered with, consciousness is born. Out 
 of this consciousness, as it develops in connection with activity, 
 all the various phases of mental life appear to be differentiated, 
 from the simplest to the most complex. An apple is placed 
 before a child. The instinctive act fixed by habit, in such a 
 
Modem Voluntaristic Monistic Theory 43 
 
 situation, is for the child to reach for the apple. If the activity, 
 which is a very complex one involving eye and other co-ordina- 
 tions together with those of the arm and hand, is impeded or 
 unsuccessful, there arises in the child's consciousness sensation 
 together with desire, and these are accompanied by random 
 movements that may through indirection, through some "means" 
 get satisfaction. Crying is perhaps the first means experienced. 
 Out of a great multiplicity and variety of such experiences is 
 differentiated the consciousness of means for satisfying desires. 
 Out of this arise problems of control, and thought with its 
 logical method of dealing with experience in solving them. 
 Thought is essentially the trying of actions in imagination in 
 order to discover which is best adapted to realize a conscious 
 desire. An advantage which thought has over random activity 
 in finding the more satisfactory adjustment, aside from imaginary 
 action, comparatively speaking, being practically immune from 
 consequences, is due to the fact that, by dealing with abstract 
 phases of situations, only essential features may be attended to: 
 this, at once, makes it possible to eliminate countless useless 
 reactions, and, because the abstract feature is common to many 
 familiar situations, if essential, it suggests valuable tried ele- 
 ments of activities from which a selection can be made. Thought 
 is developed in the activities of life through the process of realiz- 
 ing purposes, and derives its whole significance from the fact 
 that it is an intermediary stage between obstructed or conflicting 
 habits and successful harmonious action. In this connection, 
 it is worthy to note that many of the terms which mean thought- 
 ful, such as crafty, cunning, clever, wise as a serpent, etc., have 
 in them the idea of indirection, of getting around impediments 
 which stand in the way of direct or habitual activity. Out of 
 impeded activity apparently, then, in the process of making 
 over old habits into new ones, are differentiated in consciousness 
 the self and the world, purpose, desire including emotions, and 
 thought. This differentiation is gradual. The world of the 
 child and the world of the adult are not the same. The child 
 does not see or hear or feel all at once the world as it appears to 
 the adult, but must slowly learn to see, hear, feel, taste, smell 
 and also to desire, purpose and think. The direction of this 
 learning is guided by attention and attention is selective in the 
 
44 The Learning Process 
 
 service of his activity. As a child develops his world, he devel- 
 ops also his individuality. The self and nature develop from a 
 social plasm and individuality is a final stage in the process of 
 this development. 
 
 So far as a general distinction can be made, desire (feeling) 
 is the basis of the appreciation of worth and out of it come ethical 
 values; thought is concerned essentially with efficient causal 
 values. One sets the aim for the activity and the other gives 
 the means of control whereby the aim may be reached. 
 The aim and means however are not disparate but com- 
 plementary. They are terminal aspects which the finest 
 analysis cannot completely separate: the aim always contains 
 some thought and the means some appreciation. In knowledge 
 as socially accumulated, the one is emphasized in religion, 
 literature, art and history, and the other in science. Even 
 whole social movements in the history of mental progress may 
 be characterized by the dominancy of one or the other of these 
 in their natural order. The Renaissance, or humanistic move- 
 ment, was one of appreciation; it established ideals: the Baconian 
 or scientific movement was one of control ; it furnished a method 
 for controlling experience in the realization of ideals. 
 
 Appreciation is immediate and emotional and therefore cannot 
 be objectified and analyzed. It is the conscious thrill of the 
 self realizing its true nature. To use a psychological analogy, as 
 the world of "external" vibration is revealed in color, sound 
 and other qualitative sensations, so the tensions in our habits 
 are revealed in feelings of worth. The validity of knowledge 
 can have no higher sanction than its ability to guide to the 
 realization of that which is appreciated. 
 
 Means to these appreciated ends become conceptually sepa- 
 rated into things; thinking indeed is etymologically thing- 
 ing — it constitutes the values of things as means by putting 
 meaning into them, and, since a means gets its values or signifi- 
 cance by relations to the ends, the meaning of a thing is its 
 relations. In the service of any particular activity, the essential 
 meaning of a thing is its causal relation in that activity. By 
 virtue of its relations to ends from which it can be separated 
 only conceptually, a thing involves in its meaning also some 
 appreciation. Since the idea, or accepted meaning of a thing, 
 
Modern Voluntanstic Monistic Theory 45 
 
 is nothing apart from the ends for which it has value, the com- 
 plete idea of a thing is a plan of action or a composite of plans 
 of action. Things are the product of thought in the service of 
 action; and, in their relation to thought, they may be viewed 
 either as to their use as products or to the process by which they 
 are formed, although these two phases cannot be sharply sepa- 
 rated. 
 
 As products, things become elements for the understanding 
 of the meanings of situations of which they are component 
 parts. Thought consists of both analysis and synthesis. By a 
 process of analysis, situations are reduced to simpler facts 
 through the noting of similarities, of immediate or remote 
 practical value, in various situations and abstracting them from 
 the phases which are unlike, and these facts are reduced to still 
 simpler ones by the same process more refined, until the ele- 
 ments, or facts which cannot be further analyzed, are reached. 
 Then, to understand any situation is to see how these facts or 
 things synthetically make it. When the elements have been 
 thus taken into consideration, the completest possible knowledge 
 has been reached. At any stage in this process of analysis, 
 what is attended to may be regarded as a thing, so long as, for 
 the purpose in view, it has one whole of meaning. Thus a town, 
 a house, a brick or a molecule of the brick may be regarded as a 
 thing. Each thing has a number of meanings of its own 
 according to the relations in which it has been found valuable, 
 but all of these meanings are not pertinent to one situation. 
 The ringing of an electric bell may mean that someone is at the 
 door or at the telephone or at the dumb-waiter shaft. Other 
 things must be considered and a selection of meanings made. 
 In combination with other things, or meaningful aspects, of the 
 situation, some meanings are neutralized and the meaning that is 
 left which is harmonious to all things in the situation, is the 
 meaning of the situation. For instance, when the ringing of a 
 bell, according to the analysis of previous situations, may mean 
 that someone is at the door or at the telephone or at the dumb- 
 waiter shaft, the thought that a caller is expected and the 
 sound of someone in the hall may suggest which hypothesis is 
 probably true and indicate what else within the situation should 
 be observed in order to make the hypothesis a fact and reveal 
 
46 The Learning Process 
 
 the meaning of the situation. If, when the door is opened, the 
 hall is seen to be empty, a new fact is discovered which has, 
 roughly speaking, no meaning consistent with the hypothesis, 
 and thus neutralizes for this situation one meaning of the ring- 
 ing of the bell and destroys the hypothesis suggested. The 
 thought then that the caller might telephone to explain his 
 failure to come may make another meaning for the situation 
 seem probable. If a voice is heard through the receiver, the 
 hypothesis that the telephone bell was ringing becomes practi- 
 cally a fact and the meaning of the telephone call comes as a new 
 problem, the old situation merging into a new one, the meaning 
 of which is now to be determined. This is the general logical 
 procedure in synthetically forming the meaning of a situation, 
 whether in the thinking of the common every-day life or in the 
 professionally refined thinking of the chemist and astronomer. 
 By threads of abstraction, every fact is connected with every 
 other fact, and the task of thought in its synthetic use of hypothe- 
 sis and proof is to find the thread directly common to all the 
 facts of any given situation. The recognizing of separate 
 things, the analysis into elements, is for the sake of again com- 
 bining them to make larger wholes explainable. When the 
 meaning of a situation is determined, one's active adjustment 
 to it is revealed to be inharmonious, and further activity is 
 called forth in the interest of a more harmonious adjustment. 
 How to control the elements of a situation so as to bring about 
 a suggested new situation with a more harmonious adjustment 
 becomes a problem for thought. The elements or things are 
 adjusted in the imagination through logical processes and syn- 
 thetically formed into a new idea, a plan of action, which nor- 
 mally, when definitely formed, is actively realized. This pro- 
 cess of more harmonious adaptation is unending and the funda- 
 mental condition of conscious life. The methods of activity 
 involved in realized ideas are conserved as unconscious habits, 
 and consciousness is thus freed to progress by actively engaging 
 in solving new problems necessary to new and finer adjust- 
 ments. The ringing of the bell causes readjustment to answer 
 the telephone, answering the telephone causes readjustment to 
 prepare to entertain the speaker at dinner with the many ad- 
 justments involved in this, as ordering food, having it served, 
 
Modem Voluntaristic Monistic Theory 47 
 
 etc. How to answer the telephone may have become a habit, 
 but many activities necessary in preparing to entertain the 
 guest would probably not be habitual, and, accordingly, require 
 thought. The readjustment progresses socially, the activities 
 of other persons being involved, each with his own related 
 tensions and problems. Situations, like things, are not separate 
 and distinct in themselves, but merely aspects of an infinitely 
 complex social movement. Not only does the whole situation 
 find its meaning in the elements which by synthesis make it, 
 but the meaning of the whole is reflected so as to more closely 
 determine the meanings of the elements. What is a situation 
 to one class of facts may become a fact as an element of a wider 
 situation. Thus does social experience become a whole of 
 interrelated meanings, into the ultimate, most inclusive mean- 
 ing of which it is the purpose of philosophy and religion to gain 
 insight. 
 
 In the process of developing meanings, of making things, 
 analogy is the fundamental principle of procedure. The world 
 of knowledge is full of analogies, whether it be that of the ancient 
 philosophers who viewed the universe as essentially air, fire or 
 water, or whether it be that of the modern scientist with his 
 atoms and etherial vibrations. The early animistic interpre- 
 tation of material objects is due to the same principle which 
 later led to a materialistic interpretation of mind. The present 
 meaning of matter is shot through with subjective qualities. 
 No one by analysis can find cause or force, substance or individ- 
 uality in a material object. These categories can come to 
 consciousness only through experience and they are experienced 
 only in manifestations of will, in activity of a person. The 
 analogy is so habitually made that there seems to be given in 
 immediate experience of the object that which could come only 
 indirectly through being read into it from another phase of 
 experience. This debt is repaid by material analogies in the 
 mental world, where there are bright ideas, deep thought, sharp 
 wit, caustic criticism and dull comprehension. Again, in the 
 development of science, each is interpreted in the light of the 
 one developed earlier. The matter and motion of physics are 
 read into chemistry; the concepts of chemistry, into biology 
 and physiology; and the concepts of biology and physiology, 
 
48 The Learning Process 
 
 into psychology. Furthermore, we have no direct knowledge 
 of other persons: our whole understanding of them is through 
 analogy based upon our own experience. In fact, it is the very 
 nature of thought to use images and schemes 1 , so that the 
 world of knowledge becomes an intricate symbolic construct 
 the highest justification of which is that it works, that it gives 
 control of experience. Here the particular sciences have an 
 advantage over philosophy and religion; for, while the former 
 interpret one phase of experience in terms of another, the latter 
 try to interpret all in terms of a part; and while the value of a 
 scientific interpretation can easily be tested, that of a philosophic 
 or religious one cannot. Again, in science, causal necessity — 
 a relation in time — is treated as logical necessity — a relation 
 in meaning. Science has a greater certainty than philosophy 
 or religion because it can treat qualitative differences in experi- 
 ence as quantitative, and thus, by regarding them as due to 
 matter and motion and under a numerical scheme, can accurately 
 predict the future. Progress then in the building of a world in 
 consciousness is by interpreting one phase of experience in terms 
 of another, the development of symbolism, in which, through 
 habitual use, the fact that the interpretation is through analogy 
 is lost sight of. The use of symbolism in the play of children, 
 when ideas are fast forming, is especially noticeable. In "the 
 figurative expression of the deeper insight of the poet and in 
 hypotheses in process of verification, the fact of analogy is more 
 or less consciously present. When, in the interpretation of 
 some fact, the inference or hypothesis suggested by analogy 
 with some phase of experience where the relations are similar 
 has been tested and proved valid, then habit makes it a part 
 of the meaning of the fact itself. The ways in which inferences 
 are deliberately formed and tested belong to the province of 
 logic. In the logical process, hypotheses are formed through 
 following abstract threads of similarity in experiences. Hypoth- 
 eses in turn become facts when they are known to be effective 
 in giving control over experience. The falling of an apple may 
 suggest a new hypothesis, which, when established, becomes the 
 fact of gravitation. When a new hypothesis is proved, it natur- 
 ally gives a deeper meaning to the facts involved; for it reveals 
 
 1 This fact affects the problem of the disciplinary value of a study. 
 
Modem V oluntaristic Monistic Theory 49 
 
 new relations, and facts or things are but focus points of relations. 
 The phenomena of the sun and planets receive a new meaning 
 when the hypothesis that the planets revolve about the sun is 
 proved to be true. Through the combination and refinement of 
 cross-interpretations, meanings become more and more complex, 
 and, in turn, furnish an ever more differentiated and therefore 
 more adequate basis for the development of further meanings. 
 Reality, therefore, is not static, but in a constant process of 
 growth from simple to more complex forms: it is a self-differ- 
 entiating unity. 
 
 Vitally connected with the development of control is the devel- 
 opment of appreciation. Indeed, control is for the sake of realiz- 
 ing that which is appreciated, that which is the object of desire 
 and interest. The means gets its value only by virtue of the 
 relation which it bears to the end. Appreciation, which ulti- 
 mately is an immediate emotional judgment of the value of an 
 experience, develops through the experiencing of valuable situa- 
 tions either actually or dramatically in imagination. The 
 restricted opportunities of ordinary every-day life become very 
 much widened through conversation with others and through 
 the imaginative experiences offered by religion, art, literature 
 and history. When the situation is reproduced in imagination, 
 the appreciation is immediate. The difficulties which must be 
 controlled in order to have such experiences are those of creating 
 the proper imagery. However, the appreciation as well as the 
 control phase of knowledge gradually develops with greater and 
 greater refinement so that one cannot get the proper apprecia- 
 tion of a situation — indeed, the situation does not exist for 
 him — if his past experience has not prepared him for it. 
 
 As a person advances in knowledge, his individuality becomes 
 more clearly defined; through increased control over his experi- 
 ences, the ability to get what he desires, he gains in freedom; 
 and, by the widening of his experience, higher, more remote and 
 more differentiated ends present themselves, constructive 
 imagination picturing desirable experiences which in themselves 
 have never before been realized by him. 
 
 Thus far the individual aspect of the development of knowledge 
 has been presented. But this development is possible because 
 the individual is a social individual. He is in others and others 
 
50 The Learning Process 
 
 are in him. The same situation is, in a way, common both to 
 him and to others. In this community, there is correspondence 
 rather than identity, because different individuals have different 
 degrees of realization. Biology expresses a similar truth by 
 saying that the environment is relative to the organism. But 
 not only is a situation known, in a way, in common: it is also 
 controlled in common. One individual, by changing his own sit- 
 uation, also changes that of another, whose habits are thus inter- 
 fered with. The meaning of the change may not be the same 
 to both: its interpretation in either case depends upon the past 
 experience of each individual. This community of knowledge 
 and control is the basis of the accumulation of knowledge. 
 This accumulation has come very slowly. Even the simplest 
 ideas have been ages in the making, each generation vicariously 
 helping to create the world in which the next is to live. And 
 this has been possible because, through changing the common 
 situation or environment, one person can, whether purposely or 
 not, direct the experience of another. As the inner experiences 
 of individuals find their expression in outer form, matter, that 
 which is in a degree common to all as a permanent possibility 
 of experience, is made the bearer of purposes and ever becomes 
 more spiritualized. The adjustment to this spiritualized en- 
 vironment and consequent realization of its meaning is always 
 a result of individual activity on the part of others, whereby the 
 outer form becomes the condition of inner experience of 
 which it was originally the expression. As a medium in which 
 individuals' experiences may be registered so as to exist in 
 possibility for others, matter is the ultimate social bond and the 
 bearer of social purpose. In this way each generation has been 
 taken through those types of experience which the race has 
 found to be most valuable, and, after adding its own small con- 
 tribution, has passed it on as an inheritance to the next. This 
 inheritance, again, is never something to be given from without 
 but comes to the individual only when he actively passes through 
 types of racial experience, society making this possible by 
 determining the situations in relation to which he acts. In the 
 service of accumulating, conserving and transmitting this 
 inheritance, institutions have arisen as social habits, including 
 language, home, civil society, state, church and school. 
 
CHAPTER X 
 Educational Implications 
 
 For countless generations, education was the result only of 
 imitative play and active participation in the community life; 
 but, as the race developed and its experience became very wide 
 and very complex, there arose from necessity a special institu- 
 tion the purpose of which is to consciously direct the activities 
 of the younger generations in such a way that typical forms of 
 experience which the race has found most valuable are repeated 
 in their experience. Thus the school, as a conscious attempt to 
 promote human evolution, economizes energy and makes a 
 greater development possible. The problem of this chapter is 
 to give, in the light of the theory of knowledge accepted, some 
 general interpretation of the working of the school. 
 
 The three most essential features of the school may be con- 
 ceptually separated into the curriculum, which represents the 
 social phase and gives values; the nature of the child, or individ- 
 ual agent through which values socially determined are realized ; 
 and the method of teaching, or the process by which the child is 
 influenced to repeat selected typical experiences. 
 
 The Curriculum. The curriculum is for the teacher and 
 indicates the direction which the child's experience is to take. 
 It should represent those types of experience which have been 
 found by the race to include the most satisfactory ends and the 
 best means of control for attaining these ends: in other words, 
 to develop the truest sense of values and a knowledge of laws 
 necessary to their realization. Under the guidance of this 
 formal principle, the actual content of the curriculum must be 
 determined empirically. 
 
 In the school there is much of educative value that is not 
 mapped out in the curriculum. Aside from any special studies, 
 a child's social intercourse with teachers and pupils exercises a 
 most powerful influence in the development of his sense of 
 worth. As he can understand others only by putting himself in 
 their places in imitative play or in a more or less imaginative 
 
52 The Learning Process 
 
 way and then ejecting his experience into his ideas of them, by 
 understanding them he widens his own experience, and, by 
 solving the little problems which arise in his own situations 
 every day, he gains in control; but all this is characteristic of 
 the life process everywhere. The distinctive work of the school 
 is to consciously direct this by means of selected branches of 
 study; or, in other words, selected typical experiences. Those 
 studies in which the appreciation aspect is more prominent are 
 called humanistic; those in which the control aspect is more 
 prominent, scientific. 
 
 The humanistic branches are literature, art, history and 
 religion. Among these no hard and fast distinctions can be 
 drawn. They .agree in that they are essentially understood 
 subjectively through emotional attitudes, whether ethical or 
 aesthetic. In history and religion, the will attitudes are more 
 prominent; in art, the aesthetic, or the feeling of pure worth 
 with the will or activity minimized; and in literature both. 
 While art and literature include many experiences more or less 
 complete and satisfactory in themselves, history and religion 
 look to an all-inclusive unity from the subjective side. Religion 
 tends to become the attitude taken towards reality as a whole, 
 while history works toward a unity in men's will attitudes or 
 purposes, showing how one will attitude or purpose binds another 
 so that all may be viewed in relation to a subjective unified 
 whole. The belief in a world purpose is essential to religion; 
 and, too, purpose is essential to history, for this category alone 
 can unify the multiplicity of human acts by giving meaning to 
 them. The objective facts of religion and history are the 
 symbolic guides in this interpretation. Thus do these human- 
 istic subjects include the best of the world's experience in which 
 the appreciation aspect is more prominent. To be understood 
 they must be relived ; and, in the reliving of them, is an individual 
 taken from a narrow and mean life to one of world-wide signifi- 
 cance, in which the ambitions of rulers, the ecstasy of artists and 
 the devotion of saints may to a greater or less extent become a 
 part of his own experience. 
 
 In the earliest experience of the race, all interpretation was 
 of this subjective character; for an animistic interpretation of 
 nature consisted of reading or ejecting into natural objects 
 
Educational Implications 55 
 
 subjective phases of experience. But gradually, from the 
 animistic interpretation, one personal element after another 
 has been eliminated by abstraction until there is left only such 
 ideas as force, individuality and substance which are of subjec- 
 tive origin. With the elimination of such characteristics of 
 personality as purpose, feeling, freedom, the objective phenomena 
 became strongly contrasted with the subjective. Objects were 
 no longer emotionally appreciated in order to be understood, 
 for there was no love nor hate nor any other form of personal 
 relationship. It then became possible to abstract the objective 
 phenomena from all subjectivity and unemotionally regard 
 them as constituting a purely fatalistic realm, in order to discover 
 their independent value in the realization of purpose, in deter- 
 mining the future — their value in efficient causation. This was 
 found by the discovery of uniformities in causal values, when, 
 in the interest of particular problems of control, observations 
 were made and hypotheses formed and proved. Thus was science 
 born. The mental process through which it develops has been 
 analyzed so as to give a scientific method; and, in the service of 
 this, a more and more elaborate technique is being devised. 
 Scientific method is never more than a means of controlling 
 experience in the interest of some purpose, some end, ideologic- 
 ally and not efficiently determined. It is therefore always a 
 servant and never a master. Therefore it can never exhaust 
 the essence of personality, of will, although by substituting the 
 psycho-physical organism for the real person, some natural 
 law may be discovered in the spiritual realm to be used in the 
 interest of control. 
 
 Every fact has its worth to be appreciated as well as its 
 causal value to be understood. The sciences which deal with 
 object matter, the meaning of which involves more prominently 
 efficient causal values, give exactitude and are merely descrip- 
 tive; the sciences which deal with subject matter, the meaning 
 of which involves more prominently the appreciation of worth, 
 or final causal values, give insight rather than exactitude and 
 are normative. The one is chiefly concerned with what is; the 
 other, with what ought to be. The one tells directly and pre- 
 cisely what must be done in order to accomplish a desired 
 result; for instance, if one wishes to make oxygen, he must 
 
54 The Learning Process 
 
 treat potassium chlorate under accurately denned conditions: 
 the other reveals a criterion whereby the more teleological values 
 of possible courses of action may be objectively judged in the 
 interest of a remoter end the worth of which is only immediately 
 felt; for instance, if a person has in mind some objective act, 
 the golden rule of the Bible or the golden mean of Aristotle or 
 the categorical imperative of Kant is intended to give a means 
 whereby its relative worth may be determined. In grammar, 
 logic, ethics, aesthetics and education, normative principles are 
 revealed by an objective study of the concrete data of what 
 is felt ought to be. The distinction between the descriptive 
 and normative phases of a science is relative rather than absolute : 
 ethics, for instance, is more normative than grammar, and physics 
 more descriptive than sociology. Descriptive sciences are in a 
 degree normative, and normative sciences are in a degree descrip- 
 tive. In the control of experience, a mere knowledge of norma- 
 tive science is comparatively valueless, except as a guide in the 
 choice of activities otherwise determined. Apart from origin- 
 ality in arguments, conduct, or methods of teaching, logic 
 never made a good debater ; ethics, a just man ; or theory of educa- 
 tion, a good teacher. Progress here is made by eliminating the 
 worse and following the better activities, as revealed by the 
 criteria of judgment given in these sciences. In science, either 
 the form or the content of objective experience may be empha- 
 sized. In mathematics, the quantitative forms of time and 
 space are abstracted, and, accordingly, single observations are 
 of universal validity. In the so-called natural sciences, the 
 particular qualitative content is regarded and thus a large number 
 of observations becomes an important factor. If the two are 
 united, the qualitative facts being translated into temporal 
 and spacial and therefore mathematical schemes, an exactitude 
 is reached which greatly increases control. Biology, psychology 
 and sociology are less precise than physics and chemistry, because 
 such translation has not, to any great extent, been made. How- 
 ever, in the development of scientific technique, mathematical 
 schemes for the measurement of variable quantities have been 
 devised, so that the less exact sciences are becoming more 
 precise. 
 
Educational Implications 55 
 
 Appreciation and control are but phases of one process. 
 Means and end are distinguished only by greater emphasis on 
 one or another aspect of a unitary process or plan of action. 
 There is no means wholly without worth and no product inde- 
 pendent of the process out of which it came. Every purpose, 
 no matter how immediate and insignificant, involves both of 
 them. What is means for a more remote purpose involves an 
 end for a more immediate one. Thus does every activity bring 
 a realization of worth, so that the work of the school not only 
 prepares the child for higher realization later, but is a part of the 
 child's life worthy for its own sake. Both control and apprecia- 
 tion should receive normal emphasis in this moral development. 
 The humanistic subjects may awaken the judgment of ideals, 
 which reveal the deeper significance of daily activities, but the 
 worth of these ideals does not become in any degree realized in 
 the life of the child until his daily activities are controlled with 
 reference to them. However remote the ideal may be, if it is a 
 worthy one, conduct with reference to it is registered in moral 
 habits, or, in other words, good character. If control is neg- 
 lected, mere appreciation degenerates into vapid sentimental- 
 ism, injurious because it develops habitual tendencies opposed to 
 worthful activity; and, if appreciation is neglected, activity loses 
 the meaning which makes it worthful. Both scientific and 
 humanistic phases, in some degree, are inseparably involved in 
 every experience of the child. One is essentially the expression 
 of intellect and the other of feeling, while will is their active 
 realization in the unity of experience. As complementary 
 aspects united in will, they exhaust social experience, and con- 
 sequently there is no dualism in the curriculum. 
 
 The Child. The learning experience of the child is a con- 
 tinuous process which originates, exists and ends in activity. 
 It begins when habits of action are obstructed or conflict and 
 has as its end successful harmonious action. The conscious 
 process involving the tension on the one hand and the successful 
 action on the other has four prominent aspects: — 
 
 (a) A purpose growing out of a tendency to act and present- 
 ing as its terminal aspects an actual situation felt to be unsatis- 
 factory and a desired ideal state partially at least defined in the 
 light of past experience. The tendency to act is primarily 
 
56 The Learning Process 
 
 determined by an instinctive equipment, which varies in differ- 
 ent children and in the same child at different ages. The 
 child's interests are relative to these instincts, the significance 
 and worth of which can be determined only in the light of the 
 curriculum, for it embodies the best forms of expression that 
 social experience has found for them. 
 
 (b) A logical process of thinking, an imaginary constructing 
 and testing, which determines the plan of control by which the 
 present may be transformed into the ideal situation. It is true 
 that the mere solution of a thought problem may itself be the 
 immediate end desired, as in the case of a student of descriptive 
 science or of ethics; yet normally this end is never ultimate, but 
 rather a means to the satisfaction of needs which have arisen in 
 social experience. Thought, as other activities, may be advanced 
 through co-operation where individuals become specialists, 
 attending to particular phases of it. But even in this special- 
 ization, however narrow it may be, whatever thinking is done 
 has all of the features of thought in its wider significance. 
 
 (c) An activity which is guided by the knowledge resulting 
 from the logical process of thinking, and which controls the 
 child's experience so that, if the logical process is true, the 
 tension which gave rise to his purpose is removed, and, in so far 
 as this particular tension is concerned, the situation becomes 
 harmonious and satisfactory. The successful activity is con- 
 served by habit, and, in the process of repetition, tends to become 
 unconscious. In this activity new experience is gained. 
 
 (d) The organization of the new experience with the old, the 
 unitary result as habit giving meaning to a new situation. In 
 this new situation tensions at once arise, leading to a new ideal 
 and thus forming a new purpose. 
 
 This process continues during conscious life. The four 
 aspects which have been conceptually abstracted do not occur 
 one after another, each being completed before the subsequent 
 one appears; but they involve one another in such a way that 
 there is a constant movement back and forth among them, 
 each being more or less defined by the others. This process is 
 always one of self-activity from its origin in instinctive impulse 
 to the accumulation, through habit, of appreciations of worth 
 and plans of control, forming continuously an apperceptive 
 
Educational Implications 57 
 
 mass which gradually creates the child's world, defines his 
 individuality; and, by gradually making him master of his situa- 
 tions, gives him an ever-increasing freedom. 
 
 The Teacher. The school-room life is normal for the teacher 
 as well as for the pupil; and, accordingly, he grows in experience 
 through his own purposes, thought, activities and organization 
 of habits: but the peculiar function of the teacher in the school 
 room process is to mediate between the child and the curriculum.. 
 The further problem has to do with the nature of this mediation. 
 
 The teacher, naturally, must have a knowledge of both terms 
 of the mediation and the ability to interrelate them; in other 
 words, he must have (a) a full and rich experience of the nature 
 of that selected in the curriculum, (b) insight into the nature and 
 degree of the realization of the mind of the pupil and its instinc- 
 tive tendencies, and (c) ability to create those situations the 
 active responses to which will cause the child to pass through 
 the desirable types of experience indicated in the curriculum. 
 
 (a) Since the curriculum is not something apart to be mechan- 
 ically transmitted, but types of being which exist only in active 
 experience, the teacher, first of all, must have sound scholarship. 
 The character of his scholarship determines the degree and 
 definiteness to which the curriculum exists for him, and only as 
 the curriculum exists in his own experience can he see the poten- 
 tial values in the child's activities or guide them to desirable 
 forms of realization. Since every new and richer experience 
 enriches the meaning of all the rest, the better the teacher's 
 scholarship, the more definite and exact become his understand- 
 ing of the meaning of the curriculum, even in its more elementary 
 forms. Unfortunately, what often stands for sound scholarship 
 involves pedantic, or perverted, types of experience which have 
 grown out of the school itself and which have no real worth in 
 genuine education. The purpose of the school is not to condi- 
 tion new kinds of experience peculiarly its own, but to condition 
 experience valuable independently of it. Thus only by losing 
 itself does the school find salvation. Much of the teaching 
 today is tainted by this perverted scholarship, which persists 
 through tradition and which can be eliminated only through a 
 deeper insight into the real meaning of education. 
 
58 The Learning Process 
 
 (b) Again, since the curriculum is not something apart to be- 
 mechanically transmitted, but types of being which exist only 
 in active experience, the teacher must have an insight into the 
 nature and degree of realization of the child's mind together 
 with its instinctive tendencies. New experience grows out of 
 the old. A situation for the teacher is not the same for the child, 
 because a situation depends upon past experience and much that 
 the teacher sees and feels is not there for the child, while some 
 aspects which are not present for the teacher are experienced by 
 the child. Interest, which is essentially related to instinctive 
 tendency, is a determining factor in defining a situation. Now 
 only that which is a conscious situation for the child is effective 
 in his education. Since one person understands another by eject- 
 ing his own experience into his idea of that person, a teacher 
 may be prone to deal with a situation as though it were identical 
 for both him and his pupil. Conditions which make a typically 
 valuable situation for the teacher may make a comparatively 
 worthless situation for the child and produce a comparatively 
 worthless activity. A child brought up in the slums and one 
 educated in a refined community may have neither the same 
 appreciations nor the same problems under what for the teacher 
 is a unitary situation. Between these two extremes, there are 
 numerous social classes, the children of each of which have a 
 more or less different character of realization; and, even in the 
 same class, the experiences of no two individuals are identical. 
 Interests and appreciations, too, vary with instinctive equip- 
 ment. For instance, a genuinely romantic experience cannot 
 be had before the adolescent instincts have appeared. To 
 analyze one's own experience, and, through sympathetic insight, 
 to imaginatively construct the world of problems and apprecia- 
 tion as it appears to the child, is the starting point for rational- 
 ized teaching; for, while the curriculum gives an ideal copy in 
 accordance with which the child's experience is to be directed, 
 the only material with which the teacher has to work is the child's 
 realized world of appreciations and problems, which for the 
 teacher must exist as an imaginative construct. 
 
 (c) For the third time, since the curriculum is not something 
 apart to be mechanically transmitted, but types of being which 
 exist only in active experience, the teacher must have ability to 
 
Educational Implications 59 
 
 create in the child's experience those situations, the apprecia- 
 tions and problems of which condition active responses that 
 constitute a gradual realization of the curriculum. Since the 
 purpose of the school is to condition the repetition of types of 
 experience which the race has found to be valuable, the method 
 of teaching is not discovered merely within the walls of the school 
 room, but is revealed through an examination of the way in 
 which particular experiences to be repeated first came into 
 existence. The essentials of the situation in reaction to which 
 the desired experience was originally brought about must be 
 reproduced in the school. Many situations typically valuable 
 can be produced directly in the school. The teacher may be 
 of that moral character which socially has been pronounced 
 worthful. The school building and its furnishings, especially the 
 mural decorations, may represent what socially have been judged 
 to be the highest expressions of art. In the laboratory, materials 
 may be manipulated so as to produce directly the very tensions 
 or problems that stimulated scientific discoverers. Other direct 
 situations may be found in museums and on excursions from the 
 school building. But the cycles of history cannot be made to 
 repeat themselves in the school room, situations in literary 
 creations cannot be directly reproduced, excursions cannot be 
 made to far away parts of the world. Nature, however, pro- 
 vides vivid imagination in which can be reproduced situations, 
 the material basis of which cannot be directly presented. As a 
 matter of fact, situations consist mostly of imaginary elements 
 in any instance. A chief function of the teacher, then, is to 
 cause symbols, whether written or spoken, to be translated into 
 imagery, and, within that imagery, to create those tensions 
 which condition appreciation and thought. Even to the extent 
 of becoming unconscious of desks and black-board, the pupil 
 must be led in imagination to kneel with Charlemagne and feel 
 the thrill of meaning when the king is adorned with the crown 
 of the Caesars, to struggle as Hamlet with the opposing motives 
 of avenging a father and preserving a mother's honor, to see 
 vividly the busy movement of industry in the great cities of 
 New York, London and Chicago. Otherwise, his history and 
 literature become the mere manipulation of symbols without 
 the vital thrill of appreciation; and his geography, the memoriz- 
 ing of little colored spots on the map. 
 
60 The Learning Process 
 
 The failure of the teacher to fully perform his function as has 
 been described is liable to result in a predominance of (i) mere 
 memory work on the part of the pupils and a consequent (2) lack 
 of interest in study, both of which indicate an inferior kind of 
 activity. 
 
 (1) As has been shown (p. 51), the school does not exist for 
 the purpose of creating experience peculiarly its own, but for the 
 purpose of conditioning typical forms of experience which the race 
 has found to be most valuable. A study is a typical form of valu- 
 able experience, and, unless the child goes through it identically 
 in the way in which it was gone through when found to be 
 socially valuable, he does not get that experience, but uses the 
 symbols intended for it in getting some other experience. The 
 use of and knowledge of identical symbols by no means necessi- 
 tate identical experiences. As a conscious effort to memorize 
 is not generally an important factor in experience as realized 
 independently of the school, but rather a by-product of it, a 
 predominance of memory work in the school is evidence of a 
 perversion of study; it is using the symbols in a way to get a 
 different kind of experience from that for which they were prim- 
 arily intended. Memorizing as a conscious effort on the part 
 of the student is a peculiar kind of experience with ideals and 
 problems different from those of the study with which it is con- 
 cerned. 
 
 The conscious life process is one of progressive adaptations 
 (pp. 42 et seq.) through effort to remove tensions in the individ- 
 ual's present situations by realizing ideally projected situations 
 through the control of experience. This is the process through 
 which knowledge is acquired, through which both the self and 
 the world are realized. In the economy of nature, when a new 
 and useful adaptation has consciously been made, it is in a 
 greater or less degree preserved by habit, so that consciousness 
 is more or less freed for the projecting of new ideal situations 
 and the solving of problems necessary to their realization. The 
 strength and permanence of a habit depends upon the vigor and 
 frequency of the adaptation. Now memory is a habit of con- 
 sciousness whereby experiences are retained. Unquestionably, 
 to fix by habit some physical act copied from another, the act 
 must be performed in the exact manner in which the other per- 
 
Educational Implications 61 
 
 formed it. In no less degree is this true of memory; but, in the 
 case of the latter, the fact that thought deals with symbols is 
 responsible for misconception. These are looked upon as things 
 involving facts to be mechanically impressed upon the memory. 
 The reproduction of the symbol may be one experience while the 
 reproduction of the meaning for which the symbol stands in the 
 study may be another experience, and the failure to recognize 
 this leads to confusion. It is indeed impossible to violate the 
 law of habit here. Whatever is actually gone through is what 
 is remembered, whether it be the manipulation of a symbol so 
 as to impress it upon the mind or the more meaningful active 
 experience for which the symbol stands; and, since the symbol is 
 valueless without the worthful experience symbolized, to the 
 extent that memory becomes a conscious effort, to that extent 
 is it perverted, to that extent is it aimed not at the goal of the 
 original experience, but at a new goal of remembering symbols. 
 When an experience is gone through without effort to memorize, 
 consciousness is centered upon purposes intrinsic in this expe- 
 rience, it projects an ideal and controls experience in the realiza- 
 tion of this ideal; but when the pupil consciously makes an 
 attempt to memorize that experience, there cannot be two 
 goals and two processes of control at the same time, while 
 memory superimposes upon the intrinsic experience the ideal of 
 fixing it upon the mind and makes the problems of control those 
 of how to remember. Accordingly, instead of a valuable and 
 complete repetition of the original experience, there are in 
 consciousness ideas which symbolize it, which say "I mean 
 that" instead of actually being it. This symbolic reference 
 is always more or less indefinite, very much so if the original 
 experience has not been previously gone through with in a com- 
 plete way. The memory experience, therefore, is not the original 
 adaptation, but the fixing in consciousness of symbolic ideas 
 which have reference to the valuable experience intended. Of 
 course, with the symbol there may be associated, more or less, 
 the meaning symbolized, as previously learned, so that the 
 presence of the symbol carries with it some idea of the meaning, 
 and for this reason memory work sometimes brings valuable 
 results, but this is in spite of the fact that in the degree that 
 memory is made a conscious effort, in that degree the aims of 
 
62 The Learning Process 
 
 the original experience are neglected and the experience is 
 inadequately repeated. A complete idea is a plan of action, 
 but in so much as it becomes secondary to another purpose, a 
 mere object used in another plan of action, in that degree it is a 
 less intensive realization of its complete intrinsic meaning and 
 more a mere symbol. Accordingly, when the conscious purpose 
 is to memorize, the experience to be memorized is less adequately 
 gone through. If the memory experience is the valuable one 
 intended, then all is well. Not only does observation reveal 
 the fact that mere effort to memorize is not so common out of 
 school as in it, but the economy of nature demands that a 
 valuable adjustment be remembered per se, rather than through 
 another experience superimposed upon it, a supposition which 
 psychological investigation seems to support. 
 
 Memory as a habit is a storage of adaptations. The nature 
 and value of this storage may be examined still further by 
 attending to each of the three phases of the memory process 
 — retention, reproduction and recognition. 
 
 By retention is meant the creation of a predisposition to the 
 activity, the fixing of the habit. The activity realized is the 
 one which becomes a habit and not some other activity — a 
 fundamental and obvious principle of habit formation, which 
 is of great importance in the understanding of the process of 
 memory. Nature economically provides that the more intense 
 the activity and the greater the frequency of repetition, the more 
 strongly is the habit fixed. These are well-known matters of fact 
 established by psychological experiment and need no proof here. 
 
 Any self-active experience consists of the realization of an 
 ideal through some means of control, the latter of which may be 
 sub-divided into objects of control and methods of controlling 
 them. The objects are already in one's situation, they are the 
 result of past experience and thus become the basis for further 
 activity. The mental activity leading to the realization of the 
 ideal is always concerned with the method of control, the ways 
 in which these objects may be used to bring about the ideal 
 situation. It is true that often other objects of control than 
 those immediately present in consciousness must be sought, 
 but here again the activity is concerned with method, with how 
 to use what is present in order to gain what is needed. The 
 
Educational Implications 63 
 
 vital flash of activity, the very exertion of will, the essence of 
 self-activity, is manifested in the managing of these objects. 
 In this process, new objects may be created in experience and 
 become the basis of control for further activities, but, in every 
 case, objects of control are data to begin with and the essence of 
 active experience is in the control of them. Thus is new expe- 
 rience realized. As the meaning of a thing is its relations, new 
 relations discovered in the interest of control create new mean- 
 ings. Now, when the experience which a study represents is 
 gone through in the normal way, i. e. in the way in which it was 
 first gone through when chosen as a valuable type of experience , 
 the method of control creating new meanings is actively relived 
 and burned into consciousness by a flash of will, thus taking on 
 the nature of habit ; but when the ideal or purpose of the student 
 becomes the remembering of this experience, then the method 
 involved actively in the original experience, the essential part of 
 it, becomes an object to be controlled by a new method which 
 gets the flash of will, i.e. the method of using this object in order 
 that it be remembered. The activity then leaves as habit not 
 the essential experience for which the study stands, but the ex- 
 perience of how to remember it, which, in this case, is of no 
 essential value. No lesson involving new experience other than 
 that of the memory process can be learned by pure memory 
 work, for the objects to be remembered must be created by 
 self -active experience involving judgment before they become 
 objects of memory. Otherwise, memory effort connects symbols 
 not by the new valuable meaning intended, but by some pre- 
 viously experienced and remembered meaning, perhaps remotely 
 analogical and without practical significance. There is always 
 a danger of this when the symbol is given before the meaning is 
 felt. If the new meaning in its fulness is present in consciousness, 
 the study has been realized, and a more lasting memory habit 
 involving it can be made by repeating the experience in all its 
 essential phases. Memory work is usually compromised with 
 inadequate experience of what is to be remembered, in which 
 the student deals with symbols the full meaning of which he has 
 not experienced, so that his energies are divided between a more 
 or less vague realization of the study and memory effort. The 
 energy used in memorizing is not only wasted, but is diverted 
 
64 The Learning Process 
 
 from that use which would best cause the memory desired. Just 
 as there is a difference between pleasure in desire and desire of 
 pleasure 1 , so it is evident that there is a difference between the 
 memory involved in an experience and the conscious pursuit 
 of a memory experience; for, as in ethics against all those who 
 make pleasure the end of action stands the paradox that to aim 
 at pleasure is to miss it, that to find happiness one must seek 
 something else, so against all who make memory an end in study 
 stands the paradox that to aim at memory is to miss it, to store 
 up rich experiences in the mind, one must seek something else. 
 As has been said, the retention of an experience depends upon 
 its intensity. The intensity of a conscious activity depends 
 upon the degree to which the end in view is desired. This re- 
 quires that the value of the end be felt, its immediate realization 
 being obstructed. The ideal of memorizing an experience in 
 connection with the study of it is usually not sufficiently attrac- 
 tive to arouse a very high degree of activity, so that, if the real 
 valuable ideal in the study itself is lost sight of in an effort to 
 memorize, the amount of activity is decreased and the memory 
 consequently weakened. To strengthen this effort, ideals 
 extrinsic to the study, such as getting rewards, pleasing the teach- 
 er, passing examinations, etc., are forced upon the student. 
 Now, a study is selected as a valuable type of experience because 
 of some intrinsic ideal, and not because in a schoolroom the 
 memorizing of that study will please the teacher or enable the 
 student to pass an examination. To the extent that extrinsic 
 ideals are employed, to that extent the experience in the study 
 is merged into a situation in which it has no value of adaptation 
 to normal situations of life, and to that extent does it lose its 
 value as a study. Indeed, if extrinsic motives to memorize were 
 removed, effort to memorize would in most cases disappear 
 and, where it did remain, it would be legitimate as a necessary 
 part of the study and would not be something created extrinsic 
 to the study by school conditions. Again, repetition more 
 strongly fixes an idea in memory. But in repetition only the 
 conscious activity is impressed by the law of habit; and, just as 
 in shorthand the beginner may spell all the sounds of a word, 
 but later through repetition can omit the vowels and even many 
 
 iCf. Sidgwick: The Methods of Ethics, Book I, Chap. IV (Fifth Edition). 
 
Educational Implications 65 
 
 of the consonants, so that a slight sign at once means the whole 
 word ; so, in remembering anything, certain phases of it or feelings 
 connected with it become symbolic of the whole, and through 
 repetition these representative ideas become more and more 
 symbolic, involving fewer and fewer characteristics of the objects. 
 Therefore, the more an idea having a certain experience as its 
 object is repeated for the sake of memory, the less is the typical 
 experience realized. 
 
 The second phase of the memory process is reproduction. 
 While some experiences may be so deeply impressed upon the 
 mind that they become conscious without apparently any 
 associations, just as one may make some very habitual move- 
 ment where there is no situation to call it forth, yet ordinarily 
 ideas of objects remembered come to consciousness through 
 association 1 , there must be some cue to bring them into con- 
 sciousness. Activity adapts the individual to his environment, 
 takes him from an unsatisfactory situation to a more satisfactory 
 one through the control of means. The value of memory is 
 that, when any such useful adaptation has once been worked 
 out, the essential phases of the situation, when they recur, bring 
 into consciousness both the ideal and the means of realizing it. 
 One's whole life is an interrelated chain of purposive experiences 
 in which what is an end in one experience is a means in another, 
 so there is a running flash of will burning into consciousness 
 experiences in organic relations, ideals as well as means of con- 
 trol. To be of value, then, memory must associate things in 
 useful relations so that a situation is a cue for further activity. 
 Now, that which marks an experience to be of value for repeti- 
 tion in typical form as a study is the original active relation, in 
 which there is no conscious effort to remember, but to realize 
 some other ideal. This relation of situation, ideal and means 
 of control within the study constitutes the value of the study, 
 and, to the extent that any other situation or any other ideal 
 or any other means of control is in consciousness, to that extent 
 is the study sacrificed for the sake of something foreign to it. 
 If the original experience selected as a study involved no con- 
 scious effort to memorize, then the repetition of that experience 
 in the school should involve no conscious effort to memorize. 
 
 I Cf. James: The Principles of Psychology, Vol. I, Chap. XVI. 
 
 5 
 
66 The Learning Process 
 
 Furthermore, there is a tendency in psychological analysis to 
 deal with only the intellectual phases; and, accordingly, in the 
 analysis of memory, the emotional phases are apt to be neglected. 
 Not only is there association within objective experience so 
 that one phase will act as a cue to call up another, but there is 
 also an association between objective experience and feeling. 
 Indeed, a feeling of depression due to ill health is apt to be 
 accompanied by gloomy ideas. The feeling that one has in a 
 situation may call up objects that were formerly associated 
 with a similar situation. Now, feeling is generated normally 
 when the attainment of a greatly desired ideal is delayed, and, 
 psychologically speaking, presumably results from the overflow 
 of energy, normally for the purpose of control, into various 
 organs of the body. Accordingly, to produce a valuable feeling 
 in the study, the situation and ideal of the study must engross 
 consciousness so that the realization of the ideal within the 
 study is identified with the personal well being: if the ideal 
 which does affect consciousness is not that of the study but 
 rather the purpose of remembering, not only is a different feeling 
 engendered from that which is vital to the study, but the in- 
 trinsic matter of the study becomes from the self a thing apart 
 rather than the self's very existence, so that the feeling phase 
 of the intended experience is lost. 
 
 The third phase revealed in the analysis of the memory process 
 is that of recognition. From the intellectual standpoint, recog- 
 nition is explained by the fact that through association any 
 phase of experience finds its place in the continuity of the in- 
 dividual's past experience. In connection with this, it is evi- 
 dent that the experience of a study stands in more definite 
 relation to the continuous life experience when the study is 
 relived in a normal way and engrosses consciousness so as to 
 form for the time being the whole of conscious experience, 
 rather than when a remembering purpose engrosses conscious- 
 ness and the content of the study exists as an objective meaning 
 symbolized instead of being actually relived in time. Here 
 again the emotional phase is worthy of consideration. Since 
 memory is a habit, an experience is impressed upon conscious- 
 ness just as it occurs. As has been said, when a desired ideal 
 identified with one's personal well-being is realized through a 
 
Educational Implications 67 
 
 process of control, there is an accompanying emotion. When 
 the experience is reproduced in memory, this emotion is to a 
 greater or less extent reproduced with the other phases of the 
 experience, which makes in the remembered past a feeling of 
 familiarity that is not present in a mere creation of fancy. 
 Indeed, in extreme cases, a memory of harrowing experiences 
 will quicken the heart -beats and affect the rate of breathing — 
 evidences of emotion — when the recall of the same kind of 
 experience objectively learned from the words of another would 
 not have such an effect. Intellectual and emotional associations 
 develop together: with new ideas recalled are new feelings that 
 blend to make the feeling of recognition stronger, while this 
 stronger feeling by association tends to recall other ideas. 
 
 To sum up, the best conditions for retention, the creating of 
 the strongest and most useful associations for reproduction and 
 the nature of recognition demand that the ideal within the 
 experience be made for the time being the student's own ideal 
 and the logical process involved in the realization of it be made 
 his active process, to the end that the study be normally relived, 
 in which case the memory of it would result as a by-product. 
 The study of spelling, which apparently depends most upon 
 memory, may be chosen for illustration. The general principle 
 of method (p. 59) is that the essentials of the situation in reac- 
 tion to which the desired experience was originally brought 
 about must be reproduced in the school. The normal use of 
 spelling is in recording, for the sake of communicating to another 
 or to the self at another time, a past experience in accordance 
 with some desired end. The experience of spelling ordinarily 
 arises when someone, in writing, senses the difference between 
 the correct and incorrect spelling of a word to the degree of 
 feeling uncertain in regard to the matter. Satisfaction may 
 then be got by analysis of the word into its roots the spelling of 
 which is known, use of the laws of memory reproduction in 
 recalling past experiences of the word, the application of a rule 
 previously experienced in a logical way, reference to some 
 objective standard, or other means. Accordingly, there is a 
 present situation involving uncertainty in regard to the spelling 
 of a word which is being used in accordance with some desired 
 end, an ideal situation which is subordinate to the main end 
 
68 The Learning Process 
 
 desired and involves the satisfaction of certainty, and the means 
 of control as indicated above. Now, the primary condition of 
 the normal teaching of spelling as a valuable type of experience 
 to be repeated is a consciousness on the part of the student of a 
 tension in the present situation and the projection of an ideal 
 as indicated. If this is not present, then he must be put under 
 conditions in his reaction to which this consciousness will be 
 produced, but these new and more or less foreign conditions 
 should be the least possible to start the desired process, which, 
 when well started, may continue without such assistance: their 
 function in this respect is analogous to that of medicine in pro- 
 ducing proper functioning of physical organs. Often teachers 
 underscore misspelled words and sometimes even correct them. 
 If the misspelled words are indicated to the student, the funda- 
 mentally valuable ability to sense certainty and uncertainty in 
 regard to the spelling of words is neglected and the basis for 
 self -development in this direction is not strengthened as it 
 should be. When the correction of words is made by the 
 teacher, training in normal means of control also is neglected. 
 It would be better merely to indicate that a certain number of 
 words are misspelled. Then the student, either of his own 
 initiative or through influence of the teacher, may separate the 
 certain from the uncertain and the more certain from the less 
 certain, and remove these tensions of uncertainty by further 
 logical procedure, acquiring thereby those habits of judgment 
 which are essential to the experience for which the study was 
 selected. Thus would correct spelling be better retained, 
 recalled and recognized. The essential process, that leading 
 to certainty, would be retained. Since the essence of self- 
 activity is in the realization of the method of control (p. 65) 
 and since only this self-activity is retained through memory as a 
 form of habit, whenever the situation of the misspelled word is 
 experienced, the remembered process of control bridges to the 
 correct spelling with its accompanying feeling of certainty. As 
 this process becomes more habitual, the bridging is done more 
 quickly until the one situation is merged into the other; and, 
 when this occurs, the correct spelling is completely learned. 
 Again, when the end in view is not some extrinsic reward, but 
 the removal of a feeling of uncertainty in regard to the word in 
 
Educational Implications 69 
 
 question, the ideal is intrinsic to the experience of the study and 
 the interest is more centered in the active process of that ex- 
 perience, both of which facts increase the intensity of the essen- 
 tial experience desired and therefore increase the retention of it. 
 When the spelling experience is repeated in this way, in so far 
 as correct habit has been formed, it tends to become less and 
 less conscious, so that consciousness is further occupied with 
 those phases of the habit which are not properly fixed. Thus 
 does the whole consciousness focus upon removing smaller and 
 smaller tensions, intensifying the very activity which is most 
 needed. When there is no further tension, when there is cer- 
 tainty, repetition has done its work and retention is perfected. 
 Reproduction, as has been said, is through association, which is 
 merely the organic relation of various phases in the process of an 
 activity. When the study is realized in the way suggested, 
 this activity leads directly from the unsatisfactory spelling 
 through a process of control to the corrected spelling with its 
 intrinsic satisfaction. The associations, therefore, are made 
 along the line which leads directly out of the difficulty to the 
 desired goal, and, consequently, are useful associations, which 
 would not be the case if they ran off on tangents to ends which 
 are foreign to the study. In a spelling lesson or any other 
 lesson, to the extent that there is given what activity would 
 normally be called upon to work out, to that extent is the activ- 
 ity of consciousness directed elsewhere, beyond the confines of 
 the study where useless associations are built up. As has been 
 indicated, feeling is due to a tension between a present and an 
 ideal situation. Accordingly, when the study is repeated with- 
 out extrinsic ends, the feeling is organically connected with the 
 more or less prolonged process through which the ideal in the 
 study is reached; but, when an extrinsic end, as reward for 
 remembering a study, gives motive to the active experience, the 
 feeling is centered elsewhere. Instead of arising from the 
 process leading from the incorrect to the correct spelling, it is 
 centered in the tension between the present situation and the 
 reward for memorizing. As feelings, through association, have 
 value in the process of reproduction, those feelings which arise 
 from the tensions intrinsic in the study are the ones most advan- 
 tageous to memory. Again, since recognition depends more or 
 
yo The Learning Process 
 
 less upon the experience finding its place in the continuity of 
 past associations, if the process leading from the incorrect to the 
 correct spelling engrosses the whole consciousness for the time 
 being, the experience stands in more definite relation to the 
 continuous life experience than if consciousness were occupied 
 to a greater or less extent with a memory purpose. Then, too, 
 when the tension is between the correct and the incorrect spell- 
 ing, the feeling of uncertainty growing into certainty is more 
 intense and therefore better retained, so that, when the correct 
 spelling is again met with, it is accompanied by a strong feeling 
 of certainty, of familiarity with the correct spelling. Indeed, 
 the development of this feeling is of greatest importance in the 
 learning of spelling, for its presence marks the words that are 
 known. One does not depend so much, in recognizing correct 
 spelling of a word, upon placing it definitely in the continuity 
 of past experience as upon that feeling of certainty which is an 
 immediate accompaniment of the word and marks it as familiar. 
 Indeed, when this stage has been reached, memory has done its 
 perfect work, habit has been completely formed, feeling dis- 
 appears to return only when needed in a tension, and what was 
 once mediately remembered is now immediately perceived to be 
 a fact. Finally, when memory is made only a by-product of the 
 repetition of the intrinsic experience of spelling as a study, not 
 only is the spelling better remembered, but there is developed 
 that sensing of correctness and incorrectness of words and that 
 method of control in correcting them which would naturally 
 bring further improvement independently of the school. The 
 medicine of school-room method thus effects a cure in making 
 the spelling activity function properly and eventually is needed 
 no longer. Implied in this discussion is the fact that training 
 in spelling properly given involves training in penmanship, 
 composition, meaning of words and in thinking. From memor- 
 izing a poem to learning a geometry lesson, these general prin- 
 ciples are applicable, whether in individual study or in class 
 recitation. 
 
 (2) The lack of interest due to the failure of the teacher to 
 fully perform his function remains for consideration. Life 
 independent of the school is throbbing with interest for normal 
 people. If the school causes the repetition of the most valuable 
 
Educational Implications 71 
 
 types of this experience, the work of the school also should be 
 interesting. The nature of this phase of mental life must find 
 its meaning in relation to the wider life process. In the typical 
 illustration of the rise of conscious life (p. 43), when the child 
 cannot carry out his habitual tendency to reach the apple, 
 there is a tension out of which originates feeling, involved in 
 desire with its appreciation of worth of the end or ideal of 
 getting the apple, and thought as a means of control in realizing 
 this end. A similar tension exists between any present and 
 ideal situation. Now, interest is primarily emotional and 
 therefore is concerned with the appreciation of worth, getting 
 its vitality from the end which the individual is delayed in 
 realizing, and manifests itself together with attention, its objec- 
 tive counterpart, while the agent is in process of bringing about 
 the realization. When this particular tension ceases, because 
 the ideal is attained or because it is superseded by a tension 
 between the present situation and some other ideal situation, 
 the particular interest vanishes. That an emotion called forth 
 by the appreciated worth of an ideal should attach itself to the 
 means of control is not strange, for nothing is commoner than 
 the transference of feeling to that which is associated with its 
 primary cause. A mound of earth that otherwise would be 
 regarded indifferently, if it marks the grave of a friend, itself 
 affects one as though it were sacred. The warmth of feeling 
 hidden in the concepts of home and country is a composite of 
 the emotional phases of all experiences associated with them, 
 constituting their meaning. In interest this association is a 
 very organic one, for the end as product is not really separable 
 from the controlled process out of which it comes. The general 
 application of this to teaching is simple. For a study to be 
 genuinely interesting, the intrinsic ideal of the study must be 
 identified with the student's own well-being and the problems 
 of control must be made his problems. Effort is sometimes con- 
 sidered to be the opposite of interest, and, as opposing earlier 
 interest, this is in a sense true, but there can be no effort without 
 interest, for it is due to a conflict of interests. In the process 
 of realizing a more or less remote ideal situation, other ideals 
 become conscious, together with tendencies to actively bring 
 about their realization, so that the way to overcome the digress- 
 
72 The Learning Process 
 
 ing interests is to strengthen the remote ideal, which may be 
 done by bringing into consciousness ideas of well-being that 
 would come as a consequence of it. Conditions should be con- 
 trolled as much as possible so as not to suggest conflicting ideals. 
 The value of effort consists in the fact that its presence signifies 
 that a habit is being formed of creating conditions which lead 
 to the predominance of an original ideal, for the absence of 
 effort may indicate that the individual is pursuing now this ideal 
 and now that, as they have happened to come to consciousness, 
 without accomplishing anything worth while. Aside from 
 this, however, effort indicates a waste of energy, a conflict of 
 activities rather than a direct realization of the original ideal. 
 Greater freedom arising from control results when direct activi- 
 ties involving no useless digressions are made habitual. Accord- 
 ingly, a study as a typical experience provides no intrinsic con- 
 ditions to cause effort, but these conditions spring from the 
 other experience of the student brought into consciousness 
 together with the study, and may be merely the purpose of con- 
 tinuing a feeling of repose rather than engaging in aggressive 
 activity. Effort is a friction, greater in some individuals than 
 in others, which indicates that one is moving towards the goal 
 selected despite opposing forces; but, if he can go forward 
 without friction, so much the better. If the school reproduces 
 the variety of typical experiences it should, the ordinary possible 
 frictions in the individual's activity will be corrected; if they 
 do not come, there is no use for them. The goal of effort is to 
 prevent useless digressive activities and thus to destroy itself. 
 In humanistic studies, literature for instance, there must be 
 conflicting ideals presented, for value is a relation and the value 
 of ideals are brought out by contrast with others, but here there 
 is no place for effort, since, as in play, the means of control are 
 neglected, so that the interest quickly changes from one ideal 
 to another, their values being immediately appreciated. Inter- 
 est itself is of no value unless it is conditioned by valuable ends. 
 Since the function of interest is to lead to better states of well- 
 being, natural selection in the evolutionary process has brought 
 it about that what is active, i. e. changing or new in one's situa- 
 tion, since it is liable to affect his well-being, is interesting, but 
 only temporarily so, unless it appears to be of value in relation 
 
Educational Implications 73 
 
 to one's purposes. These temporary interests may be stimu- 
 lated in the school room, but they alone do not condition gen- 
 uine study; for this a permanent interest is needed, one called 
 forth not by novelty but by appreciated value. When an 
 attempt is made to treat knowledge as something to be got into 
 the memory rather than experiences to be lived, the interest 
 conditioned is inferior in kind and ordinarily in degree. When 
 a study is genuinely experienced, the interest is intrinsic and is 
 conditioned by the ideal within the study being identified with 
 the well-being of the student; when memory is consciously 
 considered, the interest is conditioned by some ideal extrinsic 
 to the study being identified with the well-being of the student. 
 Interest gets its value from the process including the ideal which 
 conditions it; and, if intrinsic, it indicates activity through the 
 process which leads to the realization of the ideal within the 
 valuable selected type of experience, or study, as a product. 
 This activity marks the experiencing of the study in the fullest 
 way; for the product is conditioned only through the complete 
 realization of the process, which, for the time being, occupies 
 the whole activity of the individual and becomes a vital part of 
 his life process. The various phases or facts of the study are 
 then known in the best way, for a thing is a focus point of rela- 
 tions; and, in such an experience, the facts are experienced in 
 their complete normal relation in the process. When to remem- 
 ber a study is the conscious aim, the study is objectified, becom- 
 ing from the self a thing apart rather than its own existence, 
 and, accordingly, the phases, or facts, of the study exist as the 
 objective and more or less indefinite meaning of symbolizing 
 ideas which are to be remembered. This is conspicuously evi- 
 dent in learning by rote and has led to verbatim learning being 
 put under the ban, but ideas are quite as symbolic in nature as 
 words, for one phase of the meaning, and that often an unim- 
 portant one, vaguely indicates the whole, a truth which is not 
 quite so patent and consequently overlooked. In a conscious 
 effort to remember, the interest is not centered in the meaning 
 of the ideas, but in the reward of remembering, and indicates an 
 active process in which the ideas referring to the study are 
 objects of control in securing this reward. Now, the facts of the 
 study find their complete genuine relations, their true meaning, 
 
74 The Learning Process 
 
 in the study, and become useful knowledge only when their 
 product is experienced as an ideal growing out of them, when 
 they assume their normal relations in the active process. When 
 the interest makes memorizing a conscious effort, the ideas 
 referring to these facts are related in more or less mechanical 
 way in associations which would most easily fix them in memory. 
 Now, it is always true that to remember, the truth must have 
 been lived in a normal way without effort to memorize: other- 
 wise, the ideas which are instruments in memory would have no 
 meaning. When an effort is made to remember symbolic ideas, 
 they are related according as their meaning has been experienced 
 in former activities, these associations, which may be of practi- 
 cally no value, being recalled. Mechanical associations in 
 memory, a factual knowledge, means that the facts of the study 
 are related according to some other experiences, and, since the 
 meaning of a fact is its relations, the new meaning, which gives 
 the study its value, is missed. This is especially noticeable in 
 what is called "cramming". However intense an extrinsic 
 interest may be, it marks an inferior experience, because the 
 ideas symbolizing facts of the study are to a greater or less 
 degree put into relations which are not those in which they 
 exist in the study, but which nevertheless lead to the extrinsic 
 end sought. Since these facts as facts of the study are known 
 only when their true relations within the study are experienced, 
 the extrinsic interest, however strong it may be, and however 
 good the memory of facts may appear, indicates an activity 
 that has run aside from that which would produce the knowledge 
 intended by the study. To the degree that school life repeats 
 valuable types of experience selected from those of society at 
 large, the school conditions experiences identified with the 
 highest well-being of the individual and therefore intrinsically 
 interesting. 
 
 For the selection of a curriculum, the culture epoch theory 
 offers the hypothesis that the interests of the individual in their 
 development correspond to the interests of the race in its suc- 
 cessive stages of development. The social environment of the 
 present time, to which the new-born individual is to be adjusted, 
 is not a creation independent of his nature, but the highest 
 expressions of his nature that have been experienced. By a 
 
Educational Implications 75 
 
 vicarious process, each generation, as a result of numberless 
 endeavors, most of which have been useless, has come upon some 
 valuable new experiences which have been added to the fund 
 it has received through education as an inheritance from pre- 
 ceding generations. Any experience which gives ideals felt to 
 be more satisfactory than those previously experienced or 
 means of control which give greater freedom is marked for 
 preservation in the social environment. In this way nature 
 becomes the greatest experimental psychologist, discovering and 
 recording those activities which the human mind has found to 
 be the most satisfactory expressions of itself. When old activi- 
 ties are no longer repeated, it is because a better expression of 
 human nature has been found. It is true that many older and 
 less valuable forms of experience are retained in various social 
 classes that do not represent the highest advancement of their 
 times. Many enjoy crudities in art which represent the attain- 
 ment of a more or less primitive people, and, in ethics, criminals 
 are those who practice forms of active expression which con- 
 form to ethical standards at one time or another the highest in 
 the race, but now superseded by higher ones. The culture 
 epoch theory is based upon analogy with the recapitulation 
 theory, which holds that individual embryonic development 
 recapitulates the phylogenetic series out of which it has evolved, 
 a theory which was made in the service of interpreting the past 
 in the light of the present, rather than the present in the light of 
 the past. Several important phases in which the analogy is at 
 fault should be considered, (a) The spiritual development of 
 the race has been far more rapid than its physical development, 
 because tools can be invented more quickly than physical 
 organs evolved for accomplishing the same results, and the 
 imaginary construction of ideals reveals higher worths much 
 more rapidly than the organism could have blundered upon 
 them. The appearance of mind in the evolutionary process 
 does not eliminate chance variation: since thought is dramatic 
 acting in imagination without the time, effort and physical 
 results which physical activity brings, it greatly multiplies the 
 number of variations and therefore the number of successful 
 ones. This rapidity of social development would seem to 
 preclude naturally selected physical changes which are the basis 
 
j6 The Learning Process 
 
 of explanation of inherited tendencies, out of which interests 
 would grow, (b) While physical characteristics can be trans- 
 mitted only through direct physical inheritance, new mental 
 activities can be transmitted through a social copy to those who 
 coexist with the one who first experienced them. This indicates 
 that the new experiences are potentially in other individuals 
 to be brought to realization by proper conditions; and, if they 
 are expressions of the nature of these individuals, they would be 
 interesting to them, (c) While past experiences which form a 
 part of present social life can be repeated, to realize the essential 
 experiences of a more primitive people whose ideas have been 
 outgrown is incompatible with the present situations in which 
 the child is placed. The ideal gets its meaning, its value, and 
 consequently its interest, in relation to the present situation 
 with which it is contrasted. To the well-kept child of to-day, 
 tent -making and hunting do not get their interest because of 
 protection from cold and satisfaction of hunger, that which made 
 them interesting to the savage. Again, the literature of a primi- 
 tive people is an expression of idealized forms of their expe- 
 riences rather than the common daily life of the tribe. The child 
 may be interested in it just as he may be interested in a colored 
 cartoon without knowing what it symbolizes. There is one 
 symbolization with two interests rather than the repetition of 
 an earlier interest. Such studies are inclined to become the 
 symbolization, through that which is connected with the lives 
 of earlier peoples, of worths which are appreciated only in 
 modern civilization. Finally, the literary expression of a 
 primitive people has reference to the experience of adults and 
 finds much of its interest because of adolescent instincts, which 
 do not appear in the nature of the young child. 
 
 The tensions in the experience of any individual develop out 
 of the situations in which he is placed, and these situations are 
 determined, in a large measure, by his social environment, 
 which he has in common with others and which changes with 
 each succeeding generation. Matter, that which is in a measure 
 common in social experience, is constantly changing in form so 
 as to be the bearer of new social purposes, and it is this thought 
 which vitalizes the present material world with which his ad- 
 justment must be made. The purpose of education is to pro- 
 
Educational Implications jj 
 
 mote the adjustment of the child to his present environment, to 
 make more harmonious his experience of those situations which 
 he has in common with others. He meets situations different 
 from those in more primitive society and consequently his ten- 
 sions are different. Not because of its interest alone, but be- 
 cause of its usefulness in promoting this adjustment, does a 
 study get its value. This would mark many of the ancient 
 superstitions as useless in present education, because they have 
 been superseded by more satisfactory ideas which are quite as 
 easily comprehended. The culture epoch theory, indeed, has 
 some basis in truth in that the child must go from the simple to 
 the complex, and more primitive conceptions are frequently 
 simpler; but, in every case, the child in relation to his present 
 situation is the determining factor of the advance and not the 
 length or prominence of any cultural stages in the development 
 of the race. Primitive life suggests many useful activities so 
 simple that a child can do them — and in the bringing forward of 
 such activities is the greatest value of the work of the culture 
 epoch advocates — , but his satisfaction is in doing something 
 rather than in the ideals which gave motives to earlier peoples; 
 and, consequently, his actions have a different meaning to him. 
 He can make a tent or weave by hand when he cannot build a 
 house or use complicated machinery, and out of this come ele- 
 mentary ideas as a basis for more complex activities, but his 
 interest is in the situation of doing something rather than in the 
 usefulness of the product. He can take quite as much interest 
 in playing motorman or teacher as he can in imitating an Indian 
 medicine man or a Greek warrior. There are many short cuts 
 in the formation of habits which better adjust him to the present; 
 and, in such cases, there is a waste of energy in traversing the 
 tortuous paths marked by the race in its gropings. The ex- 
 perience of the past is made vicarious when later generations 
 avoid its round-about paths as well as those which lead to no 
 desirable end. 
 
 Since the purpose of the school is not to create situations 
 peculiarly its own, but to organize and develop the wider life of 
 responsibility, life with its interests as experienced by the child 
 without the school should vitalize the activities of the school. 
 Reality as it differentiates in experience is an organic unity, so 
 
78 The Learning Process 
 
 that every phase of experience gets its full meaning only in the 
 light of all the rest. Consequently, the studies of the school are 
 a fuller expression of that very experience which the child has 
 realized throughout his life. An ideal is not an ideal for an 
 individual unless it is identified with his own well-being, and, 
 therefore, the ideal in a study must be vitally connected with 
 the pupil's living interests. His whole situation, in any in- 
 stance, is the product of his total experience, including his life 
 without the school as well as that within it. If, in this situation, 
 the tensions conditioned by the teacher to bring about an 
 experiencing of the study are extrinsic rewards and punishments 
 peculiar to the school and having no value beyond it, the rela- 
 tions established between the child's previous experience and 
 the ideal of the study are liable to have but little significance for 
 the child's wider life of responsibility, in the interest of which 
 the school exists. Since the interests without the school are 
 largely intrinsic, the activities involving them are felt to be 
 more closely identified with the life of the child to a degree that 
 school studies with their extrinsic interests may seem to be 
 something from his life apart. This partial dualism perhaps 
 can never be wholly removed, but it should be minimized as 
 much as possible. By its fruits in life as a whole is the school 
 to be judged, and, if any activity belongs only to school situa- 
 tions and is no longer of use when a child has finished his school 
 education, in the economy of nature whereby only that which 
 is permanently useful remains, this school activity is fortu- 
 nately forgotten. To measure the efficiency of the school in the 
 light of this principle would certainly make startling revelations 
 of its inadequacy in many instances as it is at present adminis- 
 tered. When such inadequacy prevails, the pupil, having 
 failed of guidance in the development of his life of responsibility, 
 ceases to progress as he should, settles down in a narrow circle 
 of habits forced upon him by his immediate environment and 
 lives in the process of removing small tensions in his immediate 
 surroundings rather than aggressively adjusting himself to a 
 spiritual environment as wide as the experience of the race. 
 This spiritual environment is potentially involved in whatever 
 little experience he may have, and, in the light of it, the other- 
 wise unimportant daily acts get their highest significance and 
 
Educational Implications 79 
 
 are raised above the plane of drudgery, which results from work 
 when its higher ideal significance is not appreciated. Indeed, 
 the only ultimate wealth or poverty is wealth or poverty in the 
 realization of this richer experience. Since habits become 
 unconscious, conscious life itself loses much of its intensity when 
 only small new adjustments are being made, for the intensity of 
 conscious life depends upon its progressive adjustments. Mod- 
 ern machinery and division of labor by simplifying adjustments 
 has no small influence in deadening experience, when the school 
 has not revealed a wider experience and given the individual a 
 genuine and vigorous start in its realization. Indeed, not only 
 should the school be more closely related to the home so that 
 teachers may know more of the experience of their pupils, but 
 it should become more the center of community life as a com- 
 stant source of opportunity, inspiration and direction to those 
 who have passed the so-called school age without having become 
 independently successful in directing themselves to their highest 
 realization. 
 
 At first, the pupil is capable of very little self direction. 
 Simple forms of manual training are of special value here; for 
 such tensions in the material environment, the bearer of the 
 social purpose, which is in a sense common to both pupil and 
 teacher, are easily made and understood. While manual train- 
 ing is sometimes considered to have its chief value in mtiscular 
 coordination, it may become a most valuable medium for the 
 normal development of knowledge through the creation of 
 desired ends, ideas of more satisfactory adjustments, and the 
 realization of logical processes in the interest of control, which 
 constitutes formal discipline. The whole self -active process is 
 here involved in a valuable way. Out of the present situation 
 grows an ideal situation which, conceived in imagination, is felt 
 by the pupil to be more satisfactory; a logical process, which, in 
 seeking to remove the tension and secure harmony, draws upon 
 other experience, builds hypothetical bridges to the desired 
 situation and tries them at first in imagination ; a final testing of 
 the chosen hypotheses in actually realizing what is desired, 
 whereby the hypotheses become facts. Judgments are the 
 atoms out of which the world is built, and, in such a process, the 
 pupil is in a very real sense creating his world — and peopling it, 
 
80 The Learning Process 
 
 too, through his power to eject his experience into his ideas of 
 other persons. Too much imitation perverts the process so as 
 to seriously affect its value. Imitation enables one to take 
 advantage of the product of another's experience without going 
 through with the complete process. For objective effects, it is 
 very valuable in giving both ideals and means of control, and 
 determines most of our lives, but education can develop genuine 
 knowledge only through the development of the process. As 
 the appreciation of ideals is immediate, involving no process 
 which can be objectified and analyzed, there is no opportunity 
 for formal training here. The appreciation does not depend 
 upon how the ideal is got, but upon its value. If a process is 
 gone through with in getting the ideals, that is a process of con- 
 trol and not of appreciation; and, on the formal side, all proc- 
 esses of control are alike. To the extent that imitation con- 
 trols manual training work, to that extent a factual knowledge 
 corresponding to the learning of definitions from a book is got 
 at the expense of the pupil's learning how to direct his own activi- 
 ties. Manual training is more valuable for beginners than book 
 work, because a poverty of experience has not enriched 
 the meanings of book symbols sufficiently to make them vital 
 realities in the pupil's situation. Indeed, for this very reason, 
 it is often true in secondary school work that boys and girls who 
 are indifferent to mere book study manifest a lively interest in 
 manual training to a degree that when these direct physical 
 situations are connected with the book symbols, giving them a 
 vital meaning, a vigorous interest may be developed in the 
 latter. As the meaning of everything in the world involves the 
 meaning of everything else, this interest. may gradually be led 
 to extend to reading matter which at first glimpse would seem 
 to be wholly removed from the original source of interest. An 
 attempt to force pupils to study books in which no interest is 
 felt by them is apt to make a feeling of aversion an habitual 
 attitude of mind in relation to books and school work generally 
 to a degree that their student interests may be unnecessarily 
 destroyed. The material handled in manual training is as truly 
 symbolic as the words of the book, for the meaning of the thing 
 is its relations, which are symbolized by what is sensed, so that 
 every new relation discovered enriches the meaning of the latter. 
 
Educational Implications 81 
 
 Accordingly, daily activity with this material has given it very 
 rich meanings that have become of vital interest through asso- 
 ciations with the realization of ideals, with the better adjustment 
 and consequent well-being of the self. Because of the fuller 
 realization of this kind of experience in the life of the pupil, 
 since the matter involved bears for him a richer content of social 
 purpose, or meaning, it becomes a better medium for mutual 
 understanding between pupil and teacher, as a consequence of 
 which the teacher can make tensions more valuable for the pupil. 
 Because of this better mutual understanding of the symbolic 
 material, the pupil's ideals become clearer, his situations more 
 vivid, his tensions more specific, his interests keener, his logical 
 processes more definite and the testing of conclusions more 
 accurate. Such conditions are of greatest value in developing 
 the self-active process. There is a tendency to magnify the 
 contrast between manual work and book work even to the point 
 of dualism, where the so-called material and spiritual environ- 
 ments are considered to be fundamentally different. Analysis 
 seems to indicate that no such dualism exists. A percept is a 
 blur of sensation definitely distinguished and given a meaning 
 by remembered past experiences with which it is associated. 
 From habituation, the memory process immediately presents 
 these past experiences so that they seem to be known in the 
 sensation itself. Just as a composite photograph makes vivid 
 the common and obscures variation, so here the strongly im- 
 pressed composite out of many experiences is felt to be the thing 
 directly perceived. Where the recall is not immediate or where 
 a particular past experience comes clearly to mind, the failure to 
 completely merge into the percept marks something remembered. 
 Now, in words both spoken and written, the sense symbol of the 
 so-called material experience has substituted for it the sense 
 symbol of the word with which the relations involved in the 
 "thing" are associated by memory. In so far as the associa- 
 tions exist, they are as valid in one case as in the other, the 
 difference being that in the one case nature furnishes the symbol 
 along with the experience, while in the other an arbitrary symbol 
 is chosen, which may be copied after the natural symbol as in 
 picture writing or the sound of a word. As various sensations, 
 usually those of sight, hearing or touch, may separately sym- 
 6 
 
&2 The Learning Process 
 
 bolize the same thing, so a word may be seen or heard or, as in 
 the case of raised print for the blind, felt, each sensation meaning 
 the same thing. There is this difference, however; one or more 
 of the natural sense symbols is always present with the expe- 
 rience involving the "thing" and seldom or never without it, 
 while of the various sensations of the arbitrary word symbol 
 none may be present with the experience and all are usually 
 used without it, so that, according to the law of habit, the asso- 
 ciation in the instance of the natural symbol becomes stronger 
 than in the instance of the arbitrary one. If what is at first the 
 natural symbol of a "thing" occurs without the experience 
 associated with it, an illusion results. This may lead to a 
 weakening of some associations whereby the symbol comes to 
 stand for only that part of the original experience with which 
 it always occurs. Indeed, this indicates how separate "things" 
 are formed, (cf. pp. 45 ff.) It seems to be evident on intro- 
 spection that there can be no idea without its sensation symbol, 
 even though the sensation be due only to muscular tensions of 
 the organs of speech when words are thought, or to still simpler 
 muscular feelings in attention. The reason why an arbitrary 
 symbol is used in preference to producing a natural one is that it 
 can be easily created at will and presents the element of past 
 experience in the meaning of the thing without the direct rela- 
 tion of the thing to the will as a dynamic factor in the environ- 
 ment and the consequences arising therefrom. Instead of there 
 being a material adjustment and then a spiritual adjustment, 
 every material adjustment has value and meaning only to the 
 degree that it is spiritualized. Words generally are the most 
 spiritualized phases of the so-called material environment and 
 the adjustment to, or, in other words, the realization of their 
 meaning is ultimately of the same practical consequence as any 
 adjustment. The most theoretical studies of science, philosophy 
 and religion have arisen from practical needs in the interest of 
 control and are valuable to the degree that the understanding 
 of them makes a better adjustment possible. A misunderstand- 
 ing is apt to occur by looking upon the object of the percept as 
 something separate and apart from the self to which the self 
 must be adjusted, rather than as essentially a meaning which 
 has grown out of the experience of the self. The sensation 
 
Educational Implications 83 
 
 symbol is a terminal objective aspect of experience in relation 
 to the subjective aspect, but the adjustment is an adjustment 
 not to a symbol but to a meaning, and this meaning is always 
 spiritual. Matter exists for one only in the degree that it has 
 meaning. The same form characterizes all experience, which 
 consists of a present situation symbolically represented and 
 existing for the individual only in so far as it has meaning, a 
 more or less definite idea symbolically represented of a situation 
 in which the adjustment is more harmonious, and the discovery 
 and use of a means of control to realize this ideal. The student 
 of ethics and the farmer, in accordance with the same formal 
 process, both employ "material" symbols through the compre- 
 hension of the meaning of which they secure better adjustments, 
 in both cases the process being divided into the securing of 
 minor adjustments which must be made in the realization of the 
 more remote ones, but the process of realizing each of the minor 
 adjustments is formally the same as the whole process involving 
 the widest and most remote adjustment. There is no dualism 
 between ethical and scientific activity; for every adjustment 
 involves both, one setting the worth of the end and the other 
 the means of control for realizing it: there is a science in every 
 ethical activity and an ethics in every scientific activity. By 
 the use of arbitrary symbols as in language, situations can be 
 built at will in the imagination. This is of great importance in 
 learning, because it makes valuable types of racial experience 
 possible which would not otherwise come into the life of the 
 pupil; and, furthermore, it makes thinking possible. Thought 
 is a bridge built in the imagination to the ideal, its material 
 being the ideas of things as factors of control. If a dog or a cat 
 put into a box is dissatisfied with its confinement, it will act in 
 all sorts of ways, each act more or less seriously affecting the 
 self, until by chance some movement may release it; this move- 
 ment giving satisfaction tends to be associated thereafter with 
 the situation "being in a box". A man confined in a prison 
 and wishing to escape will merely imagine various acts and their 
 consequences, his imagination being guided through association 
 by generalizations and analogies until some act is found which 
 in imagination seems to bring the desired situation as its con- 
 sequence. This act is then realized. The man thus saves his 
 
84 The Learning Process 
 
 energy by realizing only the act most likely to prove successful; 
 and, moreover, his imaginary acts, in the light of previous 
 experiences, are limited to those more likely to be successful, 
 for such are suggested by elements in the present situation 
 which have also been elements in other situations to which he 
 has learned the satisfactory responses. When his conclusions 
 are not verified by the act, it is because he has taken a limited 
 point of view, omitting some essential phases of the situation, 
 or has imagined phases present which did not exist. 
 
 Reality is a differentiating unity. Words are arbitrary 
 symbols in the interest of this differentiation, but everywhere 
 the differentiation is one of meaning, whether the symbols be 
 natural or arbitrary. A book is a part of the symbolic environ- 
 ment, which, under proper conditions, will bring about new 
 differentiations in the experience of the pupil. What these 
 proper conditions are should be the object of further analysis. 
 Since the book learning process is essentially the same as the 
 manual learning process, the latter may guide in the analysis of 
 the former. The first essential in both is that the symbol must 
 have some particular meaning that is significant in the new type 
 of experience which the pupil is to get; in other words, the sym- 
 bols are valuable only to the degree that they bear particular 
 meanings. A symbol must have some meaning, else it cannot 
 be in consciousness, but it may have a variety of meanings. 
 The blur of bright color of a gold watch may mean to the child 
 only something that gives a pleasant sensation and is to be 
 reached for; to the machinist, a mechanism of springs and 
 wheels ; to the day laborer, the indicator of his hours of toil and 
 rest; to the astronomer, his whole theory of the universe. This 
 truth is elaborated in the doctrine of apperception. Since the 
 words of a book are arbitrarily chosen, the greatest variation in 
 meaning is possible. Too often to pupils, even in secondary 
 schools, do ma.n}r of the words of a book signify only certain 
 sounds to be uttered or certain tensions of the vocal organs to be 
 made; and, when more than this, they often fall far short of 
 giving the meanings valuable in the type of experience which 
 the book is intended to condition. If nature is the best psy- 
 chologist, the method which nature uses to connect symbols and 
 meanings should be taken advantage of in the use of arbitrary 
 
Educational Implications 85 
 
 symbols. The natural symbol occurs with the experience 
 of its meanings; indeed, the symbol is differentiated with the 
 meaning and both develop together in accordance with the laws 
 of habit formation: thus it is that in a percept the two are so 
 intimately related that the meaning apparently is directly seen 
 in the symbol. Since art can only approximate nature by 
 following its laws, the meaning of arbitrary symbols is less 
 vivid than that of the natural ones. If the printed words 
 "table", "hat" and "Charles" are pinned respectively on a 
 table, a hat, and a boy with the name indicated, and the teacher 
 prints on the board, "Charles put the hat on the table," having 
 the boy perform the action when he discovers the meaning of the 
 sentence, the method will correspond in some essential features 
 with that of nature, especially if the activity involved is of vital 
 interest to the pupil; i.e. identified in some way with his own 
 satisfaction or well-being. 1 The whole philosophy of the success- 
 ful teaching of language is involved in the development of sym- 
 bol and meaning in the percept; and, while the result is always 
 the final test of any method, the analysis of the percept is not 
 only suggestive, but gives a criterion by which invented ways 
 of teaching such matter may be judged. Since the concept, 
 judgment and reasoning begin and end in a growing perception, 
 the complete analysis of the percept involves the whole intellect- 
 ual process and consequently the theory of knowledge. The 
 illustration given above in regard to the teaching of reading 
 points only to one of the most obvious principles, that of associa- 
 tion. As the simpler experiences of such lessons grow into more 
 complex, the same principle holds good; the meaning involved 
 must be experienced in connection with the symbol. In the 
 teaching of reading, the meaning is too often sacrificed for the 
 less valuable artificialities of tone and inflection, thus making 
 the less valuable associations the strong ones. The vocal ex- 
 pression should be developed in connection with the meaning 
 rather than with printed words and punctuation points. Vocal 
 expression finds its essential value in being the symbol of mean- 
 ings and not the meaning of symbols. The teacher's work 
 then, in a very important sense, is the translating of symbols 
 
 iThe fact that natural symbols are grasped first as wholes and then differentiated, or 
 analyzed, only in the realization of new purposes, has important implications opposed to 
 the so-called "logical" methods of teaching. In learning to read or write, for instance, 
 the pupil should begin with whole words rather than with syllables or letters. 
 
86 The Learning Process 
 
 into meanings and connecting with symbols the new meanings 
 developed. Since the schools of to-day generally are overridden 
 by symbolism, though not so much as formerly, this function 
 of the teacher should be emphasized more than it is, from the 
 first simple tasks of manual training to the most abstract think- 
 ing; for only in this way can a vocabulary be built up in which 
 the symbolic words have vivid definite meanings and thus serve 
 the ptirpose for which the institution of language came into 
 existence. 
 
 A book is a symbolic record of meaning which someone has 
 experienced and judged worthy to be perpetuated. In the study 
 of a book, two processes must be distinguished, the process of the 
 experience recorded in the book and the process of the pupil in 
 re-experiencing this. The ideals in humanistic literature are 
 appreciated immediately when the reader's previous experience 
 enables him to understand it at all, and, consequently, are the 
 fountain of their own interest. In the pupil's process, the 
 humanistic book, however prominent its ideals, must always be 
 regarded as a means of control in relation to some purpose in his 
 own life, else he would not undertake to read it; but this pur- 
 pose need not be very strong or the relation of the book to it very 
 clearly defined. His end to which the book is subservient may 
 be so general as to find pleasure or culture. When he once 
 begins to read, the ideals of the book take possession of him; 
 for, as in the case of the motives cited, humanistic studies require 
 that ulterior purposes be forgotten and realized only through 
 aiming at something else, the ideal in the study. Indeed, it is 
 this absence in consciousness of adjustment beyond itself that 
 gives a certain satisfaction to art. In teaching such literature, 
 the effort of the teacher is to direct the pupil in building syn- 
 thetically out of his past experience the meaning of the ideals 
 presented in the book. While no absolute statement can be 
 made, since the distinctions are of greater or less rather than of 
 what is and is not, the experience recorded in the beok and the 
 student's experience as he reads it should give identical sources 
 of interest so that the pupil need not be pointed to something 
 beyond. In the degree that some end beyond is made promi- 
 nent is the appreciation of the book interfered with. This may 
 in part account for the fact that often the most dust-covered 
 
Educational Implications 87 
 
 books in an individual's library are those he read in "literature" 
 courses in his former school days. Contrasted with the hu- 
 manistic, the scientific aspect of a book is not an end in expe- 
 rience, but a means in relation to an end; and, accordingly, when 
 scientific books are devoted to the control aspect without them- 
 selves giving ideals to vitalize the control process, the teacher 
 should closely relate the thought of the book to the purpose of 
 the pupil so as to give it vital significance. The importance of 
 this can be seen in life without the school, where the book of 
 science is not consulted, except when one desires to make a cake, 
 repair an electric bell, carpet a room, vote on a political issue, 
 or control his activity in some other way in accordance with a 
 purpose which was formed before the book was selected. There 
 is a self realization, a satisfaction, and consequent interest in the 
 activity of acquiring knowledge, and this alone may be the goal 
 of the scientist, but his problems arise primarily out of other 
 human needs and gain their significance in the light of a social 
 ideal to the realization of which this knowledge is a means. 
 The mere knowing ideal lives upon the problems of a wider life 
 and dies without them. Everyone has many problems which 
 he has been unable to solve and the art of selecting reading 
 matter of the scientific sort is to choose under the guidance of 
 titles and indices of books those volumes or parts of volumes 
 which promise to solve the problems already vital. When no 
 problems in some work of science to be studied are vital to the 
 pupil, the teacher should bring into the consciousness of the 
 pupil ideals, vividly felt by the latter to be identified with his 
 own well-being, the realization of which condition these prob- 
 lems. Thus is genuine interest developed through motivation. 
 Science, furthermore, is realized through an intellectual process, 
 some of the leading principles of which have already been 
 pointed out. The process of control has a main problem which 
 is analyzed into smaller ones that individually, for the time 
 being, become the objects of study and the solution of these give 
 the solution of the main problem. The finer the differentiation 
 of problems, if the view-point be sufficiently wide, the more 
 accurate is the solution, as it involves less opinion and more fact, 
 until problems are reached the solutions of which have already 
 become facts. In a book the scientific writer recounts only the 
 
88 The Learning Process 
 
 essential part of his experience in solving a problem, in an organ- 
 ized way, so that the subordinate problems are indicated in 
 chapters and paragraphs. One cannot intelligently read a 
 scientific book unless he has some idea of the problem it is to 
 solve and realizes that problem to be in some degree vital in the 
 realization of his own ideals: then he must understand the 
 subordinate problems into which the main one is divided. Thus 
 is he directed to a fuller understanding of the significance of the 
 thoughts of the book so as to appreciate their relative importance. 
 A book which claims to be science and cannot be analyzed in this 
 way is not the complete record of any scientific experience, but 
 factual, which means that elements of control value involved in 
 various problems are given without reference to any particular 
 problem. Lack of organization here is lack of relation to a 
 particular problem and means that a very essential part of a 
 scientific experience is neglected. An enormous amount of 
 time and energy is wasted in school where "so many pages are 
 assigned in advance" without this perspective, as the pupil, in 
 consequence, regards a fact as a fact, often dwells upon those 
 which are of little significance and gives insufficient attention to 
 those which are of greatest importance. Again, there can be 
 much economy in reading by skipping those subordinate prob- 
 lems the solution of which the reader understands and centering 
 attention upon those which he has not yet solved. At the 
 beginning, the pupil needs direction in how to study a book, and 
 the first step in supplying this need is in the assignment of 
 lessons. Instead of having assigned a certain number of pages 
 to be read and the facts given thereon to be memorized, the 
 pupil should, at the beginning with the assistance of the teacher, 
 and, later on when the formal habit has been established, of his 
 own initiative, get an idea of the general problem of the book 
 and the minor problems into which it is divided. Then, in the 
 solution of the main problem, each lesson has its own little 
 hierarchy of problems, which should be appreciated. Control 
 is through the solution of problems and a problem must be appre- 
 ciated before its solution is attempted, else the pupil works to no 
 intrinsic purpose in the study. Not only the method of study- 
 ing a book, but also the method of the recitation should be 
 guided by the general principles here presented, for a recitation 
 
Educational Implications 89 
 
 is only a study under the supervision of the teacher. It is 
 desirable, as the pupil advances, to make accessible a wider 
 variety of recorded experience by means of a library. Thus 
 can problems more closely identified with his personal interests 
 be dealt with and he can learn how to bring the experience of the 
 race more fully into the realization of his own particular pur- 
 poses. While at first book and page may be cited with advan- 
 tage by the teacher, the pupil should gradually acquire that 
 formal process of investigation which will make him independent 
 in finding the information he desires, and thus self-directive in 
 his activity. Useless mechanical difficulties in library work 
 should be reduced to a minimum. A fault of teaching, which 
 becomes conspicuous in such work, is a failure to have the pupil 
 organize the results of his reading. In the first place, the read- 
 ing should be for the purpose of solving some problem and this 
 purpose should be a basis of selection in reading. No book may 
 give a solution of the main problem of the pupil; but, when a 
 division has been made into subordinate problems, the answers 
 to these may be found. A mere fact, which has been stated 
 (p. 48) to be an hypothesis which works, is, accordingly, the 
 solution of some particular problem, which may be made an 
 element of control in the solution of a larger problem. One's 
 own problem, then, may be solved by reading the experience of 
 others in the solution of different problems which, however, 
 have some subordinate elements in common with his own. To 
 pick out a number of facts without relation to some purpose of 
 one's own is analogous to heaping up a pile of window frames, 
 doors, bricks and other elements taken from various houses. 
 They are mere debris unless again built into some useful struc- 
 ture. A fact as a fact is potentially valuable, for it may some- 
 time be used; but, until it is used in the realization of some pur- 
 pose, it has no real value. When library work is merely factual, 
 it fails to develop those formal habits of purposive relationing 
 which alone make reading of greatest value, for thus do facts 
 become an essential part of the life of the reader. Control of 
 experience, in the interest of which science has developed, 
 requires constructiveness. This factor, which is the essence of 
 self-direction in activity, is necessary to the efficiency of the 
 pupil and yet is often neglected. The results of reading should 
 
90 The Learning Process 
 
 be worked out more artistically — indeed, more artistic work is 
 needed in all activities of the school — and by artistic work is 
 meant the copying of nature's process of learning by a close 
 organization of material in the interest of some purpose with the 
 elimination of all that is useless. Since meanings are relations, 
 only thus can they be accurately conceived. In this age of 
 hasty work, too many books are poor models of clean-cut, clear 
 relationing. They are factual in giving material foreign to the 
 purpose of the book and in failing to reveal those vital relation- 
 ships in the logical process of development which prevent its 
 elements from becoming disintegrated into mere facts. The 
 critical organization of such books is good training for advanced 
 students, but the books serve as poor studies and condition 
 faulty mental habits in the less mature pupil. In training a 
 colt for speed, he should be required to do his best for his dis- 
 tance: for the same formal reason, a pupil, to develop the high- 
 est mental efficiency, should form the habit of doing his best, of 
 making his work the most artistic within the bounds of those 
 limited purposes which his previous experience determines. 
 Quality rather than quantity of work should be emphasized, 
 and here, if anywhere, does the principle hold that if the little 
 things are attended to, the great things will take care of them- 
 selves. Crude unfinished results in work, without clear and 
 definite organization, may seem to the teacher who prizes factual 
 knowledge to be a saving of time, but it does so at the expense 
 of efficiency in thinking and consequently in the development of 
 genuine knowledge. The ability to see a problem clearly and 
 to use in controlling its solution only those elements which are 
 vital to it is a rare virtue in every department of life and a virtue 
 which it is the duty of the school to develop. So long as the 
 school imposes such artificial conditions that the main purpose 
 of the pupils is to pass, whether in recitation or more formal way, 
 examinations that require factual memory rather than efficient 
 thinking, so long will it develop the knowledge that has value 
 in realizing this inferior purpose which the school has made vital 
 to the pupil, but, so far as more valuable purposes are concerned, 
 disintegrates into relatively useless facts and a consequent 
 failure to know those vital meanings which are signified by the 
 symbols standing for the facts and which must exist as experi- 
 enced relations in the life process before they can be understood. 
 
Educational Implications 91 
 
 The so-called crowded curriculum is responsible in some 
 degree for the artificial requirements and consequent inferior 
 interests of the school. It should be remembered that a pupil's 
 experience is always unitary, developing from a tension in his 
 present situation to the realization of an ideal situation, and 
 that the amount of experience which can be given in a limited 
 time is limited. The curriculum makes a logical classification 
 of phases of experience as a product rather than as a process 
 and is for the purpose of better defining for the teacher the 
 various phases of experience, or studies, to be developed. The 
 finer tensions, problems and consequent intrinsic interests of a 
 study must grow out of the broader ones; and, when a greater 
 number of differentiations are mapped out in the curriculum 
 than the time devoted to them will permit to be normally 
 developed in the experience of the pupil, the inner organic rela- 
 tions are neglected and the contrast between these possible 
 deeper relations and the superficial ones which take their place 
 makes an overcrowded condition of the curriculum apparent. 
 Superficial relations involve memorizing of the symbols of 
 deeper ones without experiencing the full meaning symbolized; 
 and, consequently, the inner organic connection with the source 
 of intrinsic interest being neglected, the activity must be guided 
 by interests extrinsic to the study. The ground is apparently 
 covered; but, as in "cramming", those relations which constitute 
 the valuable knowledge the curriculum intended are not realized 
 in the life of the pupil. A fine sense of relative values, which 
 is too often lacking, is here demanded both in the choice of the 
 general curriculum and the great variety of often more im- 
 portant choices which must be made by the teacher in teaching 
 it. The crowded condition may be relieved in three ways : viz., 
 by decreasing the number of subjects studied, by decreasing the 
 attempted differentiations within each subject and by a closer 
 correlation of studies. To decrease the number of subjects or 
 differentiations, there must be some criterion of choice. The 
 worth of a study is determined categorically by the ideal which 
 it serves. Divisions of subject matter are not absolute, but 
 mere aspects of a unitary experience and are determined teleo- 
 logically in accordance with problems arising in the service of 
 the more valuable ideals of life's activity. Not pedantic stand- 
 
92 The Learning Process 
 
 ards belonging only to the school but the social ideals of what 
 the pupil ought to do in life, limited, of course, by the pupil's 
 instinctive tendencies and capabilities, are the ultimate guides 
 for the teacher in determining the proper relative emphasis to be 
 given among subjects or among differentiations within a sub- 
 ject. Nothing should be taught to the child simply because it 
 is valuable, but because it is more valuable for him than any- 
 thing else which the experiencing of it will preclude. The fail- 
 ure to sense a scale of relative values is the fundamental fault 
 that permits an over-crowded curriculum. Furthermore, since 
 the meaning of a thing is its relations, a lack of correlation brings 
 poverty of meaning. One tension in a pupil's situation may 
 involve the essential truths of several studies, one making the 
 meaning of another clearer. Indeed, this is the natural way of 
 development, for studies have developed out of a unitary ex- 
 perience, and were not at first separate and afterwards to be 
 united. That different subjects should be taught at different 
 times and out of relation to others is a fiction that has grown 
 from the logical classification of the curriculum and leads to 
 waste both in time and energy. Complete thought is synthetic 
 as well as analytic, so that logical classification is the separation 
 of phases of experience only in the service of their recombina- 
 tion in directing life's unitary activity; and, apart from their 
 interrelations, the} 7 " lose their true significance as well as their 
 deepest intrinsic interest. 
 
 In the activity of the school generally, there is too little 
 thinking of the nature demanded by the curriculum, another 
 result of extrinsic interest. The constructive, synthetic aspect 
 of thought, whereby facts are built into the living unity of the 
 pupil's experience with such organic relations as make them 
 truly significant, is conspicuously neglected. Too often are 
 attempts made to work from the curriculum back to the ex- 
 perience of the pupil rather than from the present experience of 
 the pupil to the realization of the curriculum, as when generaliza- 
 tions are given and then illustrated. This results in connecting 
 the symbols of the curriculum with any extrinsic interests that 
 happen to be active rather than finding first a genuine interest 
 and developing it through the study. In preparing for recita- 
 tions or examinations or for writing papers, pupils read or are 
 
Educational Implications 93 
 
 given information by the teacher before having worked over 
 their own experience so as to develop appreciations and prob- 
 lems which would make the reading or lecture genuinely sig- 
 nificant. The appreciation of ideals and the solution of prob- 
 lems for which the pupil has not been prepared are thus under- 
 taken, and mere memory of symbols, with sometimes only enough 
 meaning to differentiate them, takes the place of that genuine ex- 
 periencing which is essential to real knowledge. That knowledge 
 which is power is the product of much thinking and this thinking 
 must be done by the pupil himself. He must live the process in 
 order to learn. Interference on the part of the teacher is justifi- 
 able only when the pupil's activity takes a path of realization 
 different from that intended by the curriculum and should be so 
 directed as eventually to make such interference unnecessary. 
 As knowledge is the product of the logical process, if proper 
 habits of thinking are formed, the knowing will take care of 
 itself. The teacher has done his perfect work when the pupil 
 has acquired those norms of experience which enable him to 
 continue his education during the remainder of his life, without 
 purposive direction by others, when his self -activity on the 
 basis of school experience, both concrete and formal, finds in the 
 daily activities of life its own best realization. 
 
CHAPTER XI 
 
 Summary 
 
 The fundamental thought which it has been the purpose of 
 this dissertation to emphasize is that learning is an essential 
 phase of conscious living and can be neither understood nor con- 
 trolled without involving the whole life process. This life 
 process, in so far as it is conscious, is essentially activity con- 
 tinuously directed to the realization of appreciated worths 
 through the control of experience. In the consideration of 
 historical typical theories of knowledge, an attempt has been 
 made to show that the inadequacy of theories to solve the 
 epistemological problem by revealing a criterion of truth or the 
 educational problem by revealing the method whereby learning 
 may be controlled, is due to abstracting from the conscious life 
 process certain phases to the neglect of other phases which are 
 data essential to the solution of the problem. The criterion of 
 adequacy is consistency with all facts relating to the problem; 
 and, since thought proceeds by the forming and testing of 
 hypotheses, naturally the wider the view the more will conflicts 
 annul untrue hypotheses and compel the thinker to devise others 
 more satisfactory. 
 
 The problem of knowledge arose when tribal traditions once 
 naively followed were found to conflict. The consciousness of 
 this conflict precipitated the sophistic age of skepticism, the 
 precondition of a better founded faith. In this conflict of tribal 
 habits interfering with harmonious activity, Socrates and Plato 
 attempted to discover some principle of harmony which would 
 determine the right form of active expression and turned from 
 the realm of conflicting tradition to seek this principle of har- 
 mony in the nature of the intellectual aspect of the self. Thus 
 did they abstract the intellectual aspect of the self from active 
 realization or the world of nature. Centering their attention 
 upon the concepts, which mark an advanced stage in the know- 
 ing process, they failed to indicate how these concepts developed 
 out of active life with its emotional and volitional as well as 
 
Summary 95 
 
 intellectual aspects. While they found a formal principle of 
 harmony in the universal character of truth as common to all 
 knowers, they, in common with other intellectualists, neglected 
 the fact that life is essentially activity, and, in solving problems 
 in the interest of this activity, thought finds its basis of existence : 
 by limiting thought to itself, they would direct consciousness to 
 its own destruction. Aristotle was interested in life as a whole, 
 including both the knowing self and nature, and, except for the 
 occasional influence of the abstract point of view of his illus- 
 trious teachers, took a wider view-point, developing from it a 
 doctrine with which much of modern theory is remarkably con- 
 sistent. In the Middle Ages, during which time the church 
 acting as authoritative dispenser of truth saved much of the 
 ancient learning until a newer civilization could grow up to a 
 comprehension of it, the problem of knowledge was not felt in a 
 degree to cause much advance towards its solution. The re- 
 ligious dogma, however, affected the further development of the 
 problem by making an acute separation of body and soul, mind 
 and matter. When conflicting doctrines grew up in the church 
 and the further conflicting learning of the East spread over 
 Europe, opposing traditions again precipitated an age of skepti- 
 cism making the problem of knowledge once more vital, and 
 Descartes, as did Socrates and Plato many centuries before, 
 turned from the active realization of the self, or nature, to the 
 concept, an abstraction from it, in an attempt to find some 
 principle of harmony. The dualism which religious dogma had 
 created between mind and matter limited him to one aspect of 
 reality so as to make it impossible for him to discover the rela- 
 tion between the general and particular of experience as phases 
 of a unitary process. Accordingly, he abandoned what is most 
 essential in the problem by concluding that the Divine Being 
 mediates between mind and matter, a doctrina ignorantiae. Of 
 the two terms of the dualism in one of which Descartes attempt- 
 ed to find a principle of reconciliation, Locke abstracted one 
 and Leibniz the other as bases of further attempts to solve the 
 problem of knowledge. Locke, centering his attention upon 
 the world of nature, the product of active realizing of the self, 
 made knowledge a mechanical construct the method of which 
 he could not explain without the assumption of mental self- 
 
96 The Learning Process 
 
 activity and the intervention of God, the one foreign to his point 
 of view and the other, as in the case of Descartes, a doctrina 
 ignorantiae. Leibniz, centering his attention upon the mind, 
 could connect what is known with the objects of knowledge only 
 by the assumption of a harmony divinely preestablished, the 
 method of which is beyond human ken. Kant, attempting to 
 harmonize the opposed views represented by Locke and Leibniz, 
 centered his attention upon the intellectual aspect of experience 
 and analyzed knowledge as a product : by neglecting self -activity 
 or will, he accounted for the development of knowledge in a 
 rather mechanical way as the result of the interaction of object 
 and subject, when object and subject do not exist prior to 
 knowledge. Furthermore, psychology, in so far as the explana- 
 tion of knowledge is attempted on the basis of psycho-physical 
 parallelism, neglects the will and emotions as factors of it and 
 views knowledge as a mechanical construct. In each of these 
 theories, then, in so far as abstraction is made, neglecting the 
 emotions and will, there results a mechanical theory of knowl- 
 edge, or a doctrina ignorantiae, or a combination of the two. 
 As the Greek school of thought found its completest expression 
 in the writings of Aristotle, in which activity is recognized to be 
 most fundamental to the problem, so modern thought, after 
 unsuccessful efforts to satisfactorily solve the problem from an 
 intellectualistic basis, has returned to a voluntaristic position. 
 The monistic voluntaristic theory takes into consideration the 
 whole active process of social realization. It accounts for the 
 differentiation of the individual out of a social plasm in the 
 vicarious guiding of his activity through valuable forms of 
 experience. There differentiates out of his activity a conscious- 
 ness of a present situation conditioned by his realization through 
 past experience, an ideal situation viewed to be more satisfactory, 
 and an activity exercising control of means, directed by a logical 
 process, in the realizing of this ideal. In this individual active 
 process alone are the phases of intellect, emotion and volition 
 essentially related so as to reveal their true meanings, which are 
 these very relations. Here learning is revealed to be a phase of 
 the wider life process; in truth, to be the self-conscious direction 
 of this process. The function of the school, accordingly, as a 
 social institution is to reproduce in the lives of pupils those 
 
Summary 97 
 
 typical situations that condition the most valuable experiences 
 through which individuals in the race have lived. The funda- 
 mental principle of the method of teaching is to reproduce the 
 essential elements of these typical situations as they have been 
 experienced independently of the school. As the work of 
 education becomes more a rationalized endeavor, the school 
 will less impose upon the pupil conditions peculiarly its own; 
 for it realizes its true function and therefore finds salvation only 
 when it loses itself in the service of a wider life and makes 
 learning the repeating of the best types of self-conscious living. 
 
BIBLIOGRAPHY 
 
 Abbott: 
 Adamson: 
 Aristotle : 
 Bagley: 
 Baldwin: 
 
 Balfour : 
 Bosanquet: 
 Bradley : 
 Butler : 
 Caird : 
 Clifford: 
 Darwin: 
 Davidson: 
 Veitch: 
 
 Dewey: 
 
 Dutton: 
 Erdmann : 
 Fischer : 
 Fiske : 
 Fitch: 
 Froebel: 
 Gomperz : 
 Grant: 
 Green: 
 Grote : 
 Hamilton : 
 Hammond : 
 Hanus : 
 Harris: 
 Hegel : 
 Hobhouse : 
 Hoffding: 
 James : 
 Janet : 
 Kant: 
 Kidd: 
 Latta : 
 Laurie : 
 LeConte : 
 Lotze : 
 Locke : 
 Mach: 
 
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 Ormond: Foundations of Knowledge. 
 
 Pater: Plato and Platonism. 
 
 Paulsen: System of Ethics'; Introduction to Philosophy. 
 
 Plato: Dialogues (Jowett's translation). 
 
 Ritchie: Plato. 
 
 Robertson: Elements of General Philosophy. 
 
 Rosenkranz: Philosophy of Education. 
 
 Royce: Conception of Immortality; Outlines of Psychology; Spirit 
 
 of Modern Philosophy; World and the Individual. 
 
 Russell: Critical Exposition of the Philosophy of Leibniz. 
 
 Schiller : Humanism. 
 
 Schwegler: History of Philosophy. 
 
 Sidgwick: Methods of Ethics. 
 
 Smith: Methods of Knowledge. 
 
 Spencer: Principles of Ethics; Education. 
 
 Stephen: Science of Ethics. 
 
 Stout: Analytic Psychology. 
 
 Strong: Why the Mind Has a Body. 
 
 Thorndike: Educational Psychology; Elements of Psychology; Princi- 
 ples of Teaching. 
 
 Wallace: Aristotle; Psychology in Greek and English. 
 
 Ward: Naturalism and Agnosticism. 
 
 Watson: Christianity and Idealism; Kant; Outlines of Philosophy. 
 
 Welton: Logical Bases of Education. 
 
 Wenley: Socrates and Christ. 
 
 Windelband: History of Philosophy. 
 
 Wundt: Psychology. 
 
 Xenophon : Memorabilia. 
 
 Zeller: Aristotle and the Earlier Peripatetics; History of Greek 
 
 Philosophy; Plato and the Older Academy; Stoics, 
 Epicureans and Sceptics; Socrates and the Socratic 
 Schools. 
 

 VITA "*' 
 
 Jesse Harliaman Coursault 
 
 Born in Bellaire, Ohio, March 23, 1871. 
 
 Attended the Douglass and Garfield elementary schools of 
 Columbus, Ohio, and in 1889 was graduated from the Columbus 
 Central High School. 
 
 Entered the Ohio State University in 1889 and received from 
 this institution the degrees A. B. in 1893 and A. M. in 1898. 
 
 Graduate student in Harvard University during the year 1899- 
 1900 and received from this institution the degree A. M. 
 
 Special scholar in Teachers College, Columbia University, 
 during the year 1 903-1 904, and fellow during 1 904-1 905. Re- 
 ceived the Masters Diploma in 1904. 
 
 Teacher in the Columbus Central High School during the 
 years 1 894-1 899 and in the Columbus South High School during 
 the years 1 900-1 903. 
 
 Assistant Professor of the Philosophy of Education, Missouri 
 State University, 1905 — 
 
THE LEARNING PROCESS 
 
 Educational Theory Implied in Theory 01 
 
 Knowledge 
 
 Jesse H. Coursault 
 
 Submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements 
 for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, in the 
 Faculty of Philosophy, Columbia University 
 
 1907 
 
 i 
 
LB Mr '03