Education and the Philosophical Ideal by Horatio W. Dresser - Read the Complete Text for free at NewThoughtLibrary.com

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Horatio W. Dresser's

Education and the Philosophical Ideal

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Preface - Introduction - The New Point of View - Educational Ideals - Equanimity - The Subconscious Mind - The Spiritual Ideal in Childhood - An Experiment in Education - The Expression of the Spirit - An Ideal Summer Conference - The Ministry of the Spirit - The Mystery of Pain and Evil - The Philosophical Ideal - The Criteria of Truth - Organic Perfection - Immortality - Index - p. 247

appearance of entirely new combinations of events, both mental and physical.

Self-consistency is another accepted test.¹ Yet although Reality most surely be self-consistent, also the system which adequately describes it, no thinker has yet been able to rise to the plane of this far-reaching consistency and avoid in his statements the obviously inconsistent. Systems which do justice to the self-consistency of the whole, as such, fail to do equal justice to the parts. On the other hand, pluralistic systems fall equally short of attaining satisfactory unity. Every philosopher believes that the total whole is somehow one, but the problem of the one and the any—the ultimate relation of free, finite, ethical individuals to the Supreme Spirit — is still unsolved. The spiritual vision perceives this diversity in unity as an organically perfect whole, but the intellect is not yet able to rationalise all that the spirit sees.

Objective evidence has been proposed. But that meets the demands of the realist only, and realism has been again and again refuted.² Subjective evidence is the criterion of some, but obviously both objective and subjective demands must be met. It is hard to refute some forms of subjectivism. But no philosophic task is easier than to riddle the claims of mysticism. On the face of it, the mystic's subjective claim is illogical and finite; he mistakes his own spiritual emotion for the great whole; he

(1) See Bradley, Appearance and Reality, p. 136.
(2) See Royce, The World and the Individual, Lecture III. Macmillan, & Co., 1900.

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