L.—EDUCATIONAL SCIENCE 193 
the imperative obligation to ensure the freedom and security of the 
individual under a reign of law resting upon the consent of those who obey 
it and who co-operate for those common ends which all feel to be also their 
own—like players in an orchestra, each making his own contribution and 
playing his own part, and yet sharing fully in the combined result, the 
perfection of the whole. The whole trend of what is called progress has 
been an advance from a condition in which the individual has been under 
domination or cruelly hindered by his environment to one in which he has . 
been at liberty to express himself, to act upon his own understanding, and give 
his co-operation by his own free consent. It is to this end that men have 
striven for and to a great extent attained equality before the law ; safety 
of person and life ; freedom from arbitrary arrest and espionage and toler- 
able material conditions of existence ; and to this end, in so far as it is not 
yet secured, reformers are striving, when they seek to remove adverse 
conditions of every kind. It is a reversal of all that has been accounted 
progress hitherto, when liberty is denied and overthrown by force as in 
some continental countries, or when the faint-hearted, or those who 
would avoid the responsibilities which freedom carries with it, take refuge 
in submission to the authority of a person or an organisation without con- 
sidering whether they can rationally do so. For my own part, I can only 
express complete agreement with the sentence which sums up the spirit 
of Sir Percy Nunn’s well-known text-book (Hducation: its Data and First 
Principles, p. 4): ‘ Nothing good enters into the human world, except in and 
through the free activities of men and women, and educational practice 
must be shaped to accord with that truth.’ 
But the desired freedom of the individual has to encounter obstacles of 
more than one kind, and it is in a great measure with these that education 
has to deal. The obstacles are partly in himself, partly in the community. 
It is obvious at once that no one, as he is, is completely free. It is indeed 
the assumption of almost all educational theory and practice that everyone 
has some degree of freedom to accept or reject the good, in whatever 
sphere ; to act or refuse to act in accordance with an ideal ; to use what 
education may give him well or ill—just as it is the working assumption 
of the Law Courts, and indeed of everyone in his actual dealings with 
others, and in his judgments on their conduct and his own. If the 
assumption were not true, a great deal of our conscious experience 
would have to be explained away ; and if it were not made, the whole 
of the practical life of men in communities would have to be reorganised 
from top to bottom. At least the burden of proof may be laid upon 
those who deny it; and (though this is not the place, nor would the 
time suffice, to argue the matter) the conventional objections raised 
by the determinist against the reality of human freedom have become 
much more unconvincing than they used to be found by some 
philosophers. Nevertheless, it remains undoubtedly true that no one’s 
freedom to realise good in any sphere is complete. It is agreed that 
everyone is greatly hampered by the effects of heredity, which, whatever 
the mechanism, seem to be mental as well as physical ; by the influence of 
body upon mind ; by the tendencies imparted by early environment and 
habituation, largely unconscious, yet so powerful as often to fill the well- 
H 
