L.—EDUCATIONAL SCIENCE. 271 
people must be national in its general setting. Indeed, I venture to 
think that he sometimes carries this idea too far —appearing to advocate 
as an end in itself what should surely be only the means to a broader 
end, and to forget his noble declaration that the teacher must always 
stand for the universal. This is an error hard to be avoided by a philo- 
sopher whose inspiration is largely Hegelian; moreover, it is easily 
pardonable in a patriotic speaker with the glorious cultural history of 
Italy behind him and before him the elementary school teachers of 
Trieste redenta. But although I regret Signor Gentile’s adhesion to what 
I consider a false view of the relation between the individual soul and 
society, his book has high value, for it expresses a passionate conviction 
that during the last century the development of the great European 
neoples went in some respects sadly astray, and that their moral health 
can be restored only by education inspired from top to bottom by a true 
judgment of values. Here he is, I believe, fundamentally right. The 
last hundred years have greatly accentuated the gravity of a problem 
which was discerned by the poet Schiller and diagnosed in the famous 
‘Letters on Asthetic Education’ he published in 1795. ‘To this 
diagnosis Dr. C. G. Jung has devoted an interesting chapter in his 
book on ‘ Psychological Types.” In Schiller’s view the immense pro- 
gress of the modern nations has been purchased at the expense of the 
development of the individual soul, so that, in spite of the greatness of 
. 
| 
ae Say 
our achievements, we are, man for man, inferior to the various and well- 
_ rounded Athenians of the best days. It is the division of labour essential 
to a large scale organisation of society which has at once made general 
_ progress possible and individual impoverishment inevitable, for it has 
cut individual men off from experiences that are indispensable to the 
full well-being of mankind. If this was true in the days of the French 
Revolution, how much more true it is to-day, and how much more grave 
the evil. We are told that before the era of industrialism the great 
mass of our people enjoyed a culture which, though simple, was sincere 
and at least kept them in touch with the springs of beauty. What truth 
there is in the picture I do not know, but it is certain that with what is 
¢alled the industrial revolution the conditions that make it credible 
largely disappeared. Torn from the traditions of the old rural life and 
domestic industry and herded into towns where in the fight for mere 
existence they lost their hold on all that gave grace to the former life, 
and where the ancient institutions which might have helped them to 
bnild up a worthy new one were themselves submerged in the rising tide 
of featureless and monotonous industrial activity, the folk who now 
j constitute the bulk of our population were cut off effectually from 
Yi 
“ sweetness and light.’ That was the situation when the task of public 
education was taken seriously in hand, and that, notwithstanding a creat 
amelioration in details, is for far too many the situation to-day. There 
are some who think that the onlv remedv is to cry halt to the modern 
movement and return deliberatelv to mediwvalism. This is, I fear. a 
_ counsel of despair ; instead of indulging idle dreams it will be more profit- 
able, assuming the unalterable conditions of modern life. to consider 
how the rest may so be modified as to place the true dignity and grace 
_ of life within the reach of all who are qualified to achieve them. That 
Pu 1923 vu 
