We have only to recall the recent literature of the subject in order to be convinced that these difficulties are real. Our experts are divided into two rival classes; and they are spending more energy in the pursuit of dialectical victories than in the search for truth. This battle of the experts has of course its amusing side; and we have been familiar with it for centuries under the name of the battle of Ancients and Moderns. But the public is growing weary of being amused. We want guidance; and instead of giving us what we want, such men as Mr. Abraham Flexner and Professor Shorey are exchanging eloquent abuse. That is the first difficulty; and it is serious enough. But if it becomes manifest that neither party to this quarrel has taken the trouble to found his programme of reform upon a confession of wrongdoing, then we shall have to request their resignation as guides, reduce them to the ranks, and proceed to think for ourselves.

Now, it is notorious that a confession of sin is not worth much unless it is personal, unless it is made by the man or the party or the nation that committed the sin. It does not require much humility to confess the sins which some one else has committed. And the Humanists and the Moderns are both engaged in the delightful task of confessing each other's sins. Examine Mr. Flexner, who is a typical Modern, and you will find that his writings are one long denunciation of the way in which Latin and Greek and mathematics and history are taught. Current teaching, says Mr. Flexner, is an abominable failure; and so is everything which is connected with it, subjects, schedule, and teachers—all these Mr. Flexner would have us throw away as rubbish. Afterwards, Mr. Flexner would have us

there are to be only new subjects, new methods, and new teachers; but we must not allow this part of the programme to distract our attention from the negative and abolitionary section. It may for a moment appear that the Modern is making a genuine confession of wrongdoing; but only for a moment. Fortunately there is a simple and sure test which we can apply to him.

Mr. Flexner and his fellow Moderns never by any accident begin their 'confessions' by saying, 'We have done wrong'; on the contrary, they always begin by enlarging upon the blackness of the sins which the Humanists have committed. And that is not a sign of humility; that is not a doctrine which is calculated to awaken us to a sense of our own failings. We are only too willing to listen to accusations which are brought, not against ourselves, but against some third party. We know that something indeed is wrong. Here is a world in chaos; and our need was never more bitter that the next generation of men should have more control over themselves and their destiny than we have attained. And in the face of these facts the Moderns come and proclaim to us that the trouble lies, not with us, but with the Humanists! The future will be secure, if only we will make the Humanists serve as the scapegoats of the present; and so the Modern, with the lash of his derisive satire, bids us drive from the City of Learning all the old and evil 'traditional' subjects, Latin and Greek, history and literature, and with the subjects those who are engaged in teaching them.

The Modern, therefore, is proudly confessing the sins of the Humanists; and the fact that some of the sins are real and others imaginary is no reason why we should accept the Modern as our guide to a better education. The Modern not only fails to point out to us

wherein we have erred: he does not even know that we have erred. He is literally telling us to reform by sinning harder; and to a world which has for ages suffered from the blind tendency of men to worship power and wealth for their own sake, a world whose chiefest sins are abuse of power, tyranny, and greed, in the very midst of a war in which science and industry have at man's bidding been combined into a single instrument for the destruction of men, the Modern proclaims that the proper thing to do is to make the education of the future exclusively scientific and industrial. That is Reform with a vengeance!

Until the brain of the Modern is stung sufficiently awake for him to realize that science and industry are not divine, being supreme over man, but are mere tools which man has made for his own service and which, like every tool, are susceptible of abuse, the Modern will continue not to deserve his reputation as an expert in education. He is so busy confessing the sins of the Humanist that he has lost all contact with the world about him. His doctrine sounded plausible enough in the years before the war; but to-day that gospel of the nineteenth century has an odd and pathetic ring. For how many years have men fought and suffered and died in the naïve faith that science would make them whole! Science, of course, is knowledge; and knowledge is not virtue. But what a terrible price we are paying for that simple lesson! And it would be ridiculous, if it were not tragic, that Mr. Flexner and his fellow worshipers of science should always be insisting that they and their doctrines are peculiarly modern. They were modern, in the last century; but they withered, let us hope forever, in 1914.

Before the Modern departs to the ranks, let us recall his one virtue. It

can scarcely be called an intellectual virtue, but it is none the less precious on that account. The Modern does at least believe that our education is susceptible of improvement; and the realization of this fact is an indispensable preliminary to reform.

II

Now let us turn to the Humanists. Let me say at once that I have the utmost sympathy with what the Humanist represents. It is the business of the Humanist to understand and to interpret the record of man's spiritual achievement, as it is presented in history and art and literature; and there is no nobler business than that, and none which ought to be a surer guaranty that the men who follow it should be able to give the public expert advice upon educational reform.

But unfortunately the Humanists have contracted a habit of never appearing in public except to damn the Modern. They confess the sins of the Modern with fully as much delight as the Modern confesses theirs; but we have seen reason to believe that this game of vicarious confession has been unduly prolonged. The Humanists must bear their share of the guilt. You cannot help a man to reform simply by telling him that you will be quite contented if he does not become any worse than he is now. And that is just what the Humanists are always doing; for their conception of reform is negative. They have been attacked so often by the Modern that they have come to associate the very idea of reform with the specific 'reform' which the Modern proposes. And because the Modern proposes to reform by abolishing humanism along with the Humanist, the Humanist very naturally-and very foolishly-dreads reform just as a child might shrink from eating bread if he

were constantly told that bread would poison him.

Examine Professor Shorey's brilliant essay "The Assault on Humanism,' and you will see that Professor Shorey is not unlike such a child. His essay is an excellent piece of polemic. He ruins all the so-called facts and figures and arguments presented by Mr. Flexner; and then he sits down in the midst of the wreckage and exults because another reform is dead. His choicest epithets are reserved for those who are silly enough to believe that any intentional improvement in education is' possible. All such people are 'impatient revolutionaries'; and they have always had the incredible folly of thinking that education, as it is, is a 'no less unsatisfactory and bungling makeshift than marriage, government, the distribution of property, or life itself.' In other words, Professor Shorey feels that it is just as stupid to believe that education is susceptible of improvement as it is to believe that the institution of marriage, government, the distribution of property, and life are also susceptible of improvement. And yet, if Professor Shorey is right, the human race is in a bad way, and we are doomed to perish with our sins upon us. If we cannot help ourselves, then surely the gods will not help us.

The only gleam of hope which Professor Shorey allows to penetrate is his reminder - addressed to the 'disdainful Humanist' - that 'these crudities are inseparable from the wasteful process of human evolution, and that the final outcome of agitation is sometimes a good unforeseen by the agitator.' Now, it may be all very well for the lower animals to put their faith in evolution and the passage of time, though I doubt if the lower animals find the results much to their liking. But surely the 'disdainful Humanist' goes too far when he ventures to give such advice to

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men. Let us have less disdain, and more humanism. It is not the summit of wisdom to deride all reform merely because Mr. Flexner is called a 'reformer'; and the policy of obstruction, which has too often been practiced by the Humanists, will prove, if they adhere to it, fatal both to them and to humanism. Change is sure to come, in education as in everything else; and the only question for the Humanist and the public is whether these changes shall be made in accordance with an intelligent plan or by the Mr. Flexners of this world. The Humanist therefore must abandon his complacency, which is a hard task, and set about the construction of an intelligent scheme of reform, which is a still harder task. But he may lighten these labors by reflecting that the alternative is suicide.

III

We have now examined the two principal classes of educational experts, and we have found that they are engaged in a stupid and distracting quarrel. Each of them is vaguely aware that our system of education is imperfect; but what remedy has either one of them to propose? The Humanist advises us to let things alone; and in so doing he forgets that neither humanism nor common sense has anything to say in praise of men who have let things alone. It would be difficult to imagine a remedy more frivolous, if it were not for the Moderns, who have surmounted the difficulty, and who advise us to sever our bonds with the past and to worship science and industry. The very magnitude of their error sheds some light upon the direction in which we must search for the truth; and it is the direction of the search which really matters, inasmuch as the absolute truth is and will remain inaccessible, and all that we can hope for is an

approximation. Let us therefore avoid condemning the Moderns and their proposals as useless. Their utility as a warning cannot be exaggerated.

The Modern is still dreaming. To every one except the Modern, it has become plain that science and industry are not panaceas. All men, except the Modern, are aware that knowledge is not virtue, and that our science, which has endowed us with vast powers over nature, has signally failed to enable us to control ourselves. This is the confession of sin which we must prefix to any scheme of reform: though masters of the world, we are not masters of ourselves. And therefore the problem of education is essentially the same as the problem of government: how shall men subdue their own desires and turn them into the channels of right action? If it is possible to discover some of the reasons why we have failed in this effort to attain self-mastery, then it will also be possible to suggest what new demands we must make of education, and in what ways the system that has broken down must be amended.

Fortunately there is no need to resort to abstruse metaphysical argument. The catastrophe which has overtaken the world has its origin in a sort of absent-mindedness; and it is precisely like the lesser catastrophes which penalize absent-mindedness in the individual. Between the ridiculous errors of action which we find in all the anecdotes of absent-minded men, and the tragic criminality which characterizes the actions of a Prussian autocrat, lies a kinship too close to be denied. Between the philosopher who walks with one foot in the gutter and the nation which invaded Belgium there are indeed many differences, but in this one respect they are alike: they do not know what they are doing. The Germans believed that they were so acting as to secure for themselves a glorious and

happy future; and the vast interval between their belief and the fact is the measure of their absent-mindedness.

Transpose and heighten the maladjustment of consciousness to action which makes the philosopher laughable; intoxicate a nation with power, drug it with self-worship, drill it into insensibility; and you will produce a nation which is far less aware of what it is doing than was the philosopher. But absent-mindedness which is so transposed and heightened becomes no laughing matter; and the maladjustment of consciousness to action which, on the lower plane, endangered only the individual, may, if it spreads through a whole nation or body of nations, endanger the world. In the present crisis, when hatred runs high, it is fatally easy to believe that Germany was the only nation which was thus infected. But the truth is that the rest of the western world was suffering from the same malady.

Examine the record of the nineteenth century, of the epoch which closed three years ago, and you will find that it is a record of increasing absentmindedness on the part of men and nations who imagined that they were doing one thing but who were actually engaged in doing something else. They imagined that they were making the future secure by their feverish activity; they imagined that they had only to devote themselves to science and to industry in order to be happy. But, as a matter of fact, the whole tendency of their activity was to make the future insecure; and their blind faith in science and industry is being repaid by the unspeakable misery of war. The relation between their former faith and their present misery is plainly one of cause and effect. How should a world which thought that it was already saved pay attention to what it was doing? Since men believed in automatic progress, it

was only natural that they should abandon themselves to the task of multiplying wealth and power in every form, and that they should cease to inquire whether these vast new powers were likely to be well and wisely employed. It was only natural that they should come to regard Germany, which was first in science and industry, as a model nation. But there is one respect in which their faith in automatic progress is startlingly unnatural. It is easy to comprehend the results of their faith. But how could their faith be so profound? How could an age which boasted of its knowledge of the past fail so completely to profit by human experience?

The nineteenth century failed because it refused to make the incessantly renewed effort of attention to past and present, the effort which is the price of consciousness; and the extent of its failure is measured in the most positive manner by the shock of the awakening in 1914. We are familiar enough with the fate which overtakes a man who fails to make this effort of attention to past and present; we say of him that he is incapable of learning by experience. But what shall excuse our folly if we refuse to apply this familiar lesson to the nineteenth century?

No power on earth or in heaven can save men from making mistakes. But there does exist a power which can save men, if they will but make the effort to use it, from making the same mistake over and over again. In the case of the individual, we call that power memory; and we say that in memory is stored the past experience of the individual. But we are always forgetting that the mere storage of past experience in memory does not in the slightest degree guarantee that the individual will not repeat the mistake he has already made, and therefore does not guarantee his self-control and his mas

tery over the impulse of the moment. On the contrary, it is notorious that all his memory and his experience will go for nothing, unless he puts forth an effort of voluntary attention. Without that effort to understand his past, to grasp it, and to carry it with him so that it may illuminate the decisions which life forces him to make in the present, he cannot be free and he cannot be master of himself; and just in the proportion that he relaxes that effort, he loses his hold upon his past experience and upon his humanity, and sinks back into an existence like that of the lower animals, bestial, dominated no longer by his own spirit, but unconscious, the slave of instinct and of impulse, mechanically carrying out activities of whose direction and tendency he is unaware.

Such was the fate of the nineteenth century. Lulled into a false security, it lost its hold upon the past experience of the human race; and men abandoned their minds to the oldest of all delusions- to the belief that the possession of power is the sufficient pledge of a happy and virtuous future. Under the influence of this delusion, they divinized every form of power; but most of all, they worshiped science and industry, in the blind assurance that science and industry would save the world. And thus they made once more an ancient and deadly error. How ancient an error this is, and how often men and nations have succumbed to it, it would be impossible to say. History, which is the memory of the race, records the irretrievable ruin which has overtaken those men and those nations; but the men of the nineteenth century suffered all the precious experience which is implicit in history to go to waste, and they relaxed the effort to comprehend and to vivify the past, until in the later decades before the war men came to regard the study of the past as frivo