IV. THE HIGHER LEARNING
We have now examined the external conditions under which American education operates. We have seen what the dilemmas of the higher learning are. We have seen that they may be resolved in part by developing a general education. We have seen what a general education is. Our object is now to discover what, given general education, the higher learning should be.
Let me make clear at the outset that I am here considering the university as an educational institution. I yield to no one in my admiration for and belief in the accumulation of data, the collection of facts, and the advance of the empirical sciences. These taken together constitute one of the grand activities of modern times. It must be. continued and encouraged. I wish merely to point out that this activity must be conducted in such a way as not to confuse or prevent that intellectual training and development which in my view are education. How this may be done I shall hope to show later.
I know, of course, that thinking cannot proceed go divorced from the facts and from experience. All questions of organization and management, however, are questions of emphasis. By emphasizing the intellectual content of education I do not mean to minimize the importance of the collection of data.1 I do mean to put it in its proper place. That place is, in any intelligible scheme of higher education, a subordinate one.
I beg to call attention in this connection to two meanings of the word research. Research in the sense of gathering data for the sake of gathering them has, as I shall show, no place in a university. Research in the sense of the development, elaboration, and refinement of principles together with the collection and use of empirical materials to aid in these processes is one of the highest activities of a university and one in which all its professors should be engaged.
Let me say, too, that I concede the probable necessity in some fields of practical training which the young man or woman should have before being permitted to engage in the independent practice of a profession. Since by definition this training cannot be intellectual, and since by definition a university must be intellectual, this type of specific preparation for specific jobs cannot be conducted as part of the university's work. How it may be conducted without interfering with university education I shall suggest as we proceed.
Under an intelligible program of general education, the student would come to the end of the sophomore year with a solid knowledge of the foundations of the intellectual disciplines. He would be able to distinguish and think about subject matters. He would be able to use language and reason. He would have some understanding of man and of what connects man with man. He would have acquired some degree of wisdom.
On his emergence from general education what would he find? He would find a vast number of departments and professional schools all anxious to give him the latest information about a tremendous variety of subjects, some important, some trivial, some indifferent. He would find that democracy, liberalism, and academic freedom meant that all these subjects and fractions of subjects must be regarded as equally valuable. It would not be democratic to hint that Scandinavian was not as significant as law or that methods of lumbering was not as fundamental as astronomy. He would find a complete and thoroughgoing disorder.
He would find, too, that we were proud of this disorder and resisted attempts to correct it by calling them undemocratic and authoritarian.' As the free elective system denies that there is content to education, so the organization of the modern university denies that there is rationality in the higher learning. The free elective system as applied to professors means that they can follow their own bents, gratify their own curiosity, and offer courses in the results. The accumulation of credits in these courses must lead, like those in any other courses, to the highest academic degrees. Discrimination among courses would be undemocratic. The student would, then, confront an enormous miscellany, composed principally of current or historical investigations in a terrifying multiplicity of fields.
He would find that these collections were offered him on either of two assumptions, or both: one, that they were good in themselves, or two, that they would train him for something. They are good in themselves because they are the results of the pursuit of truth for its own sake. They will train him for something because they are the latest reports from the front on which he will have to fight the battle of life. He would find, to his surprise, that the schools and departments offering to prepare him for the learned professions were somewhat less learned than the rest and that their courses of study did not indicate where or what the learning was that made the profession learned. He would find that the other departments that wanted to train him wanted to train him to be a technician or a practitioner or a person who knew how to make the observations, sci_ entific or historical, which they were making themselves.
He would find an especially strange mixture in the field of what might be called the productive arts. He would discover in the natural sciences that making a highly refined gadget to make highly refined measurements was as important as the development of a new theory of the cosmos. He would find that making music, sculpture, or painting was as much a university discipline as theology. But he would discover that the Fine Arts, under the influence of the empirical sciences and the popular notion of pursuing the truth for its own sake, had become an empirical, historical, and "scientific" discipline, too. The microscopic study of Byzantine mosaics to determine their age and lineage by looking at their teeth, as it were, is as important as understanding them; in fact it is more so, because such investigation is "scientific research," and understanding is not.
This is what the young man would see as he stood gazing across the threshold of the higher learning. It may be briefly described as chaos. Who would blame him if, after one look, he decided to go into the comparative order and sanity of the business world?
How can these things be? Why is it that the chief characteristic of the higher learning is disorder? It is because there is no ordering principle in it. Certainly the principle of freedom in the current sense of that word will not unify it. In the current use of freedom it is an end in itself. But it must be clear that if each person has the right to make and achieve his own choices the result is anarchy and the dissolution of the whole. Nor can we look to the pursuit of truth for its own sake to unify the higher learning. Philistines still ask, what is truth? And all truths cannot be equally important. It is true that a finite whole is greater than any of its parts. It is also true, in the common-sense use of the word, that the New Haven telephone book is smaller than that of Chicago. The first truth is infinitely more fertile and significant than the second. The common aim of all parts of a university may and should be the pursuit of truth for its own sake. But this common aim is not sufficiently precise to hold the university together while it is moving toward it. Real unity can be achieved only by a hierarchy of truths which shows us which are fundamental and which subsidiary, which significant and which not.
The modern university may be compared with an encyclopedia. The encyclopedia contains many truths. It may consist of nothing else. But its unity can be found only in its alphabetical arrangement. The university is in much the same case. It has departments running from art to zoology; but neither the students nor the professors know what is the relation of one departmental truth to another, or what the relation of departmental truths to those in the domain of another department may be.
The medieval university had a principle of unity. It was theology. The medieval theologians had worked out an elaborate statement in due proportion and emphasis of the truths relating to man and God, man and man, and man and nature. It was an orderly progression from truth to truth. As man's relations to God were the highest of which he could conceive; as all his knowledge came from God and all his truths, the truths concerning God and man were those which gave meaning and sequence to his knowledge. Theology ordered the truths concerning man and man; humanism was theocentric; man loved his brothers in God.3 Theology ordered the truths of man and nature, for God created the world; he created man to live in it, and placed him in definite relation to other creatures. The insight that governed the system of the medieval theologians was that as first principles order all truths in the speculative order, so last ends order all means and actions in the practical order. God is the first truth and the last end. The medieval university was rationally ordered, and, for its time, it was practically ordered, too.
But these are other times; and we are trying to discover a rational and practical order for the higher leaming of today. Theology is banned by law from some universities. It might as well be from the rest. Theology is based on revealed truth and on articles of faith. We are a faithless generation and take no stock in revelation. Theology implies orthodoxy and an orthodox church. We have neither. To look to theology to unify the modern university is futile and vain.
If we omit from theology faith and revelation, we are substantially in the position of the Greeks, who are thus, oddly enough, closer to us than are the Middle Ages. Now Greek thought was uni.4ied. It was unified by the study of first principles. Plato had a dialectic which was a method of exploring first principles. Aristotle made the knowledge of them into the science of metaphysics. Among the Greeks, then, metaphysics, rather than theology, is the ordering and proportioning discipline. It is in the light of metaphysics that the social sciences, dealing with man and man, and the physical sciences dealing with man and nature, take shape and illuminate one another. In metaphysics we are seeking the causes of the things that are. It is the highest science, the first science, and as first, universal. It considers being as being, both what it is and the attributes which belong to it as being.
The aim of higher education is wisdom. Wisdom is knowledge of principles and causes. Metaphysics deals with the highest principles and causes. Therefore metaphysics is the highest wisdom. So much is this the case that Aristotle feels called on to refer to the suggestion that this knowledge must be confined to God. He says:
But the divine power cannot be jealous, nor should any other science be thought more honorable than one of this sort. For the most divine science is also most honorable, and this science alone must be, in two ways, most divine. For the science which it would be most meet for God to have is a divine science, and so is any science that deals with divine objects; and this science alone has both these qualities; for (1) God is thought to be among the causes of all things and to be a first principle, and (2) such a science either God alone can have or God above all others.It is a science which is divine in the sense that Aristotle elsewhere concludes that happiness is divine: it is not beyond nature and reason; it is widely diffused and accessible to all who are capable of virtue.
Metaphysics, then, as the highest science, ordered the thought of the Greek world as theology ordered that of the Middle Ages. One or the other must be called upon to order the thought of modem times. If we cannot appeal to theology, we must turn to metaphysics. Without theology or metaphysics a unified university cannot exist.
Both are almost totally missing today. And with them has gone any intelligible basis for the study of man in his relations with other men. The truths of ethics, for example, are now merely common-sense teachings about how to get along in the world. Morals degenerate into the mores unless they have a higher meaning imparted to them by theology or metaphysics.4
A similar degeneration overtakes natural science. If the world has no meaning, if it presents itself to us as a mass of equivalent data, then the pursuit of truth for its own sake consists of the indiscriminate accumulation of data. We cannot understand it; there is no need to try. Whether we can understand the world or not, however, we can seek to master it. That is a useful and a popular thing to do. But its educational and scientific consequences are vocationalism, empiricism, and disorder; and its moral consequences are an immoral morality. As a contemporary has said:
In order to reign as a demi-urge over nature, man in his intelligence and in his life must in reality subordinate himself to inhuman and technical necessities and to the energies of the natural order which, originally placed in operation by him, are now invading the human mind. . . . Whatever the acquired gains may be from other points of view, the conditions of life of the human being are thus becoming more and more inhuman. . . . Behold man the center of the world, a world all the parts of which are inhuman and press against him. . . . In such a morality, not man nor human life as such, but agents exterior to man, material forces, instruments of human life, are subjected to reason. . . . This morality does not liberate man but on the contrary weakens him, dispossesses him, and makes him slave to all the atoms of the universe, and above all to his own misery and egoism. What remains of man? A consumer crowned with science. That is the last gift, the twentieth century gift of the Cartesian reformation.We believe, then, that if we can gather enough information about the world we can master it. Since we do not know precisely which facts will prove to be helpful, we gather them all and hope for the best. This is what is called the scientific spirit. From our study of man and nature this notion has extended to our study of man and man. Power becomes the great word in political science; and the prediction of what the courts will do takes the place of justice as the object of the lawyer and the legal scholar. The scientific spirit leads us to accumulate vast masses of data about crime, poverty, unemployment, political corruption, taxation, and the League of Nations in our quest for what is known as social control. A substantial part of what we call the social sciences is large chunks of such data, undigested, unrelated, and meaningless.
The study of man and nature and of man and man has thus sunk under waves of empiricism and vocationalism. Saddest of all is the fate that has overtaken theology itself. Displaced from its position as the queen of the sciences, it now finds itself a feeble imitator of all the rest. In general its students are its students in name only. They are actually studying history or languages or experimental psychology or the empirical social sciences or even the empirical natural sciences, trying to find a place for a church and a religion that know no theology. They employ the information thus gained for vocational purposes: they hope it may adjust them to their professional environment. The institutional church, religious education, and the training of various types of "leaders" for religious, semireligious, or nonreligious organizations occupy more and more of the attention of the divinity schools. How to Conduct a Business Men's Forum on Public Affairs may shortly be a more important section of the curriculum than theology. Theology has now been degraded to the bottom of the educational hierarchy. Its nominal followers, frightened out of their wits by the scientific spirit, have thrown theology overboard and have transferred their affections to those overdressed hoydens, the modern versions of the natural and social sciences.
With theology has gone metaphysics. It is now but a shrunken shadow of its former self. It makes an attenuated appearance in a department called philosophy, by the creation of which we apparently mean to indicate that philosophy has nothing to do with what is studied in the rest of the university. Yet it is impossible to keep metaphysics completely out of the consideration of any subject.' For example, the science of physics, as Newman has pointed out, requires the admission of certain metaphysical postulates, if it is to be more than a theory or hypothesis; as, for instance, that what happened yesterday will happen tomorrow; that there is such a thing as matter, that our senses are trustworthy, that there is a logic of induction, and so on. So metaphysics comes back all over the campus and in sadly mutilated condition. For example, a class studying Faust will engage in arguments about the metaphysical problems raised by the work. This discussion is objectionable because neither the teacher nor the class is competent to participate in it and because it results in failure to consider Faust as a poem, a drama, and a work of art. If the teacher and the class had had some metaphysical training they could, if they liked, discuss intelligently the metaphysics of Goethe; but what is more important, their knowledge of the first principles of Esthetics would enable them to consider the artistic merits of the play. You will have noticed, too, that it has become almost a tradition in this country for a natural scientist after he achieves eminence and leisure to employ some of both in metaphysical., and even theological, speculations. Without any particular training in these disciplines and with a healthy contempt for those who have he proceeds to confuse the public further about the greatest questions that have confronted the human mind.
The reception accorded the expressions of these gentlemen shows how much we feel the need of an orthodox theology or a systematic metaphysics. So strong is this feeling that not infrequently we find the nonfiction best seller of the year serving as a contemporary Holy Writ. Carrel's Man the Unknown seems to be taking this part at the moment, as Durant's Story of Philosophy did a few years ago.
In the one country in the modern world where God has been officially abolished as the basis of theology or as a first principle in metaphysics, we have seen a furious effort on the part of the government to supply something in His place. Karl Marx is the new God. Dialectical materialism is the new theology. We may say in behalf of the Marxists that they at least realize that there is no advance in the speculative realm which does not have practical consequences, and no change in the practical realm which need not be speculatively analyzed. They realize that it is impossible to have social order without intellectual order.6
I am not here arguing for any specific theological or metaphysical system. I am insisting that consciously or unconsciously we are always trying to get one. I suggest that we shall get a better one if we recognize explicitly the need for one and try to get the most rational one we can. We are, as a matter of fact, living today by the haphazard, accidental, shifting shreds of a theology and metaphysics to which we cling because we must cling to something. If we can revitalize metaphysics and restore it to its place in the higher learning, we may be able to establish rational order in the modem world as well as in the universities.
If this miracle could be performed, what would the educational content of the higher learning be, and what would a university be like? The student beginning with the junior year would study metaphysics, the science of first principles. He would study the social sciences, which are practical sciences, dealing with the relations of man and man. He would study natural science, which is the science of man and nature. He would study all three categories, with emphasis, if you like, on one of them. He would study them in relation to one another. It is clear that they deal with the same propositions and facts, but with different ultimate references. The student would study them without any vocational aim; that is, the subject matter would be the same for those who were planning to enter a learned profession and those who were not. The study would not proceed from the most recent observations back to first principles, but from first principles to whatever recent observations were significant in understanding them. I remind you of the distinction between the permanent and the progressive studies that we made in discussing general education. The higher learning is concerned primarily with thinking about fundamental problems. "A man who really participates in the progress of the sciences, must do so when the time of education is past." In the university he must come to grips with fundamental problems; for he can only do it there. He will have time enough later to keep up with current events.
The fundamental problems of metaphysics, the social sciences, and natural science are, then, the proper subject matter of the higher learning. These categories are exhaustive. I have used the word metaphysics to include not only the study of first principles, but also all that follows from it, about the principles of change in the physical world, which is the philosophy of nature, and about the analysis of man and his productions in the fine arts including literature. The social sciences embrace the practical sciences of ethics, politics, and economics, together with such historical and empirical materials as may be needed to supplement them for the guidance of human action. The theoretical principles of ethics, politics, and economics are, of course, principles of speculative philosophy. The principles of ethics, theoretically considered, are to be found in metaphysics. In ethics itself the same knowledge is viewed in the practical order. To speak of ethics, politics, and economics as practical philosophy is to indicate that they are philosophical knowledge organized for the sake of action. In the law we have a practical application of this body of practical principles. By the natural sciences I mean, of course, the study of nature. The natural sciences derive their principles from the philosophy of nature, which in turn depends on metaphysics. In the study of them such recent observations as serve to illustrate, exemplify, or confirm these principles must be included. Medicine and engineering are applications of this whole body of knowledge.
By constructing a university in this way it can be made intelligible. Metaphysics, the study of first principles, pervades the whole. Inseparably connected with it is the most generalized understanding of the nature of the world and the nature of man. Dependent on this and subordinate to it are the social and natural sciences. In due subordination in the teaching of these we include historical and current empirical material. Such material ceases to be the whole of these sciences as studied in a university and becomes instead an aid in understanding their principles. In a university like this it should be possible to get an education; it is possible to get one in no other way, for in no other way can the world of thought be presented as a comprehensible whole.
I should insist that a university is concerned with thought and that the collection of information, historical or current, had no place in it except as such data may illustrate or confirm principles or assist in their development. It is perfectly clear, however, that the mere collection of information is of great importance and that it must be carried on somewhere. It is useful and economical, perhaps even essential, to have it carried on in part under the auspices and protection of universities and in connection with them. Moreover, in dealing with social questions it is important to provide a refuge for men who can and will study them in as detached, objective, and impartial a manner as possible. The more acute and controversial the question is, the more important is the provision of a refuge for its discussion. Discussions of such questions cannot, however, occupy the central place in education at any of the levels we have been considering. They can enter it only as exemplifying or illuminating the principles of the social sciences.
So information on subjects important to the public should be gathered, analyzed, and published. Public administration, public education, social service, taxation, inflation, etc., are all subjects of this type. They are at what may be called the research level rather than the educational. They should be studied; they may be studied in connection with a university. But their inclusion in the university curriculum accomplishes, as we have seen, no contribution to it except to intensify its disorder.
In the same way men who are collecting information in the natural sciences, which is a highly desirable thing to do, should, though they have no place in the university proper, find a haven in connection with it. Industry is not now prepared, and probably never will be, to conduct or finance this work on any adequate scale. I sug-aest. therefore, that research institutes be established at Universities, in which all the current and historical facts now collected by professors, and more, can be assembled. The members of these institutes would not be members of the university faculties, unless they were also working on fundamental problems in metaphysics, social science, and natural science. Men working on such problems, and only these, would have a voice in matters affecting the conduct of the university and the content of its work.
If the learned professions cannot be trusted to communicate the practices of the professions to the young, it may be desirable in certain cases also to attach to the university on the same terms technical institutes in which the student may become familiar with these routines. Even here, of course, some care should be exercised to see to it that the routines are worthy and susceptible of communication.
The research institutes will be technical institutes to a certain extent; for they will train people to carry on research of the type that they carry on themselves. It is conceivable that some technical institutes will do some research, of the kind, naturally, that is thought to assist in technical training.
The departmental system, which has done so much to obstruct the advancement of education and the advancement of knowledge, will vanish. The three faculties will constitute the entire organization of the university. Members of existing departments who are exclusively concerned either with data collecting or vocational training will be transferred to research or technical institutes. Only those who are working on fundamental problems in the fields of the three faculties will remain as professors in the university.
The professional schools of the university would disappear as such. Education for the learned professions would be conducted in the three faculties of metaphysics, social science, and natural science, with prospective clergymen graduating under the faculty of metaphysics, lawyers under that of social science, and doctors and engineers under that of natural science. Studying under the faculty of metaphysics we should expect to find prospective philosophers, too; under that of the social sciences future administrators, judges, legislators, statesmen, and men Of affairs; and under that of natural science those des@. tined for a life of scientific investigation. Those professional schools which have no intellectual content in their own right would disappear altogether, except as their activities might be thought worthy of preservation in research or technical institutes.
To illustrate the possibilities of this type of education I may refer in greater detail to education for the learned professions. The prospective clergyman would come to the end of his sophomore year with a good general education derived from the classics and the liberal arts. In the university he would spend the greater part of his time under the faculty of metaphysics. But he would also study ethics, politics, economics, and law, though not in the same way nor to the same extent as the prospective lawyer. Although he would acquire some familiarity with the leading ideas of natural science, he would not need much in this field beyond what is supplied by metaphysics itself. If it were desirable or necessary for him to learn certain ministerial habits before he could be trusted with a congregation, he might acquire them either through a system of apprenticeship or in a. technical institute established near the university for the purpose.
The future doctor would come to the university with precisely the same general education as his clerical colleague. He would study metaphysics and the philosophy of nature. By this study he might be disciplined in such a way that he would not be given to sophomoric philosophical speculations in his idle hours. He would learn from it, too, to see the leading principles underlying all the experimental natural sciences. After this his predominant occupation would be with the physical and biological sciences as preclinical. Although he would also get an understanding of the social sciences and law, he would not study them in great detail. The necessary experience that he must have before he could be trusted with a patient should be secured in an institute attached to the university and to a hospital.
The prospective lawyer would have exactly the same general education as the clergyman and the doctor. He would study metaphysics, because without it ethics, politics, and economics are meaningless. He would get this philosophical training for the sake of his major occupation: the mastery of jurisprudence, which consists of ethics and politics and the philosophy of law based upon them. He would also study the empirical and historical knowledge of society, the history of law and legal institutions, economics and economic history. These he would need for the casuistical application of principles to legal cases. He would gain some knowledge of the physical world, but would require little more than he would get from metaphysics. Anything further that he needed for the practice of his profession, such as familiarity with the rules of a particular jurisdiction, with methods of using digests and reports, with drafting legal documents, with writing briefs, or with the tricks of the trade, he might acquire in a legal institute attached to the university.
The prospective teacher's general education would be identical with that of the lawyer, doctor, and clergyman. With a good education in the liberal arts, which are grammar, rhetoric, logic, and mathematics, he has learned the basic rules of pedagogy. The liberal arts are, after all, the arts of reducing the intellect from mere potentiality to act. And this is what teaching is. The liberal arts train the teacher in how to teach, that is, in how to organize, express, and communicate knowledge. In the university he should learn what to teach. He should study under all three faculties, and especially under that of metaphysics. If it then appears that he is destined for investigation or for vocational instruction he may learn the techniques of investigation or practice in a research or technical institute. If, for example, he seems likely to be a school administrator, and if a school administrator should know the number of janitors per cubic foot that school buildings require, and if a school administrator should not be trusted with a school unless he has this knowledge, then this knowledge should be gained in a technical institute.
It is only by educating teachers in this way that we shall ever break the vicious circle to which I have many times referred-the circle in which the products of a bad system grow up to the operators and perpetuators of it. If we can begin with the education of a few teachers we may hope that gradually through the years a general education and a university may emerge.
In summary, then, the university would consist of the three faculties, metaphysics, social science, and natural science. The professors would be those who were thinking about the fundamental problems in these fields. The teaching would be directed to understanding the ideas in these ,ields, and would have no vocational aim. The student would study all three subject matters, with emphasis upon one. He would enter upon this program at the beginning of the junior year and continue in it for about three years.
Since it is desirable that the collection of historical and current data should proceed in the vicinity of the university, research institutes in the social and natural sciences may be established in connection with it, though not as part of it. Technical institutes in the same relation to the university may also be created if needed to give practical training for occupations which require a background of special knowledge and facility in special techniques. Students should in no case be admitted to technical or research institutes until they have completed their general and higher education.
We see, then, that we may get order in the higher leaming by removing from it the elements which disorder it today, and these are vocationalism and unqualified empiricism. If when these elements are removed we pursue the truth for its own sake in the light of some principle of order, such as metaphysics, we shall have a rational plan for a university. We shall be able to make a university a true center of leaming; we shall be able to make it the home of creative thought.
We see, too, that in such a university the dilemmas of the' higher leaming are resolved. The dilemma of professionalism cannot obstruct us- because no distinction is made between the professional and nonprofessional disciplines. They are all studied in the three faculties and studied in the same way. Training in the techniques of the profession is left to the profession or, if necessary, to technical institutes so organized as not to confuse the university.
For somewhat similar reasons the dilemma of isolation will also cease from troubling. Disciplines will not be isolated from one another; they will be united, and by a rational principle. Professors and students will all be pursuing the truth for its own sake; they will know what truths to pursue and why. Since all students will study under all the faculties, the education they acquire will not be piecemeal or miscellaneous; it will be as unified as the university itself.
Even the dilemma of anti-intellectualism is easier to deal with. Anti-intellectualism is so much a part of the temper of the times that it will be difficult to meet this dilemma as squarely or satisfactorily as we can meet the other two. The university that I have been describing is intellectual. It is wholly and completely so. As such, it is the only kind of university worth having. I believe that it will accomplish greater political and professional results than one that is devoted to current events or vocational training.
If the country is not prepared to believe these things, it can get what it wants through the technical and research institutes I have proposed. They are so planned as to draw off the empiricism and vocationalism that have been strangling the universities and to leave them free to do their intellectual job.
If we can secure a real university in this country and a real program of general education upon which its work can rest, it may be that the character of our civilization may slowly change. It may be that we can outgrow the love of money,7 that we can get a saner conception of democracy, and that we can even understand the purposes of education. It may be that we can abandon our false notions of progress and utility and that we can come to prefer intelligible organization to the chaos that we mistake for liberty It is because these things may be that education is important. Upon education our country must pin its hopes of true progress, which involves scientific and technological advance, but under the direction of reason; of true prosperity, which includes external goods but does not overlook those of the soul; and of true liberty, which can exist only in society, and in a society rationally ordered.
Notes
1. De Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Part II, First Book, Ch. X, "In the present age the human mind must be coerced into theoretical studies; it runs of its own accord to practical applications; and, instead of perpetually referring it to the minute examination of secondary effects, it is well to divert it from them sometimes, in order to raise it up to the contemplation of primary causes."
2. Cf. the remarks of Judge Learned Hand to the Harvard alumni, June 18, 1936: "There is no democracy among human values, however each may cry out for an equal vote. It is the business of the soul to impose her own order upon the clamorous rout; to establish a hierarchy appropriate to the demands of her own nature . . . "
3. Summa Theologica, Part II, Q. 2, Art. 7, "But man is not to be loved for his own sake, but whatever is in man is to be loved for God's sake."
4. Kant, Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Ethics (10th ed.), p. 5, "A metaphysic of morals is therefore indispensably necessary, not merely for speculative reasons, in order to investigate the sources of the practical principles which are to be found a priori in our reason, but also because morals themselves are liable to all sorts of corruption, as long as we are without that clue and supreme canon by which to estimate them correctly."
5. Cf. the dilemma suggested by Aristotle: "You say one must philosophize. Then you must philosophize. You say one must not philosophize. Then (to prove your contention) you must philosophize. In any case you must philosophize."
6. Cf. the insistence of Lenin on the importance of theory, especially in Our Programme and What Is To Be Done? In the latter, P. 584 in The Handbook of Marxism, he says: "The case of the Russian Social-Democrats strikingly illustrates the fact observed in the whole of Europe . . . that the notorious freedom of criticism implies, not the substitution of one theory by another, but freedom from every complete and thought-out theory; it implies eclecticism and absence of principle."7. Aristotle, Politics, II, 7: "For it is not the possessions but the desires of mankind which require to be equalized, and this is impossible, unless a sufficient education is provided by the state."
