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

intuition, reason, or conscience, which, upon command, always and unmistakably tells as what is right or true. In the last analysis, we must reserve a place for that transcendent spiritual experience which no power of self-consciousness can control, and to which no writer has ever done justice.

The co-operation of all our faculties guided, tested, and enlarged by many-sided, progressive experience can alone answer Pilate's question, "What is truth?" Even then it is open to the sceptic of sceptics to doubt whether our empirical constitution really corresponds to the reality of things. Such a one may at last say only "I believe it does," or "This is probably the truth."

It is philosophically justifiable to disbelieve as long as one can. "All will to believe is reason to doubt . . . all desire to doubt is reason to believe," says Recejac in his admirable essay on mystic symbolism.' Sometimes it seems as if we must for ever continue in search of truth, but never find it. "Ever not quite." Ever hypothesis, experiment, result; fresh observation, modified hypothesis, fresh experiment, new result, pointing to further modification ad infinitum. Such is at once the fate and the delight of the philosophical game.

We expect to understand experience. But we know only through contrast, and at present we cannot transcend experience to find somewhat with which to contrast it, although psychical research is

Bases of Mystic Knowledge, translated by S. C. Upton. Scribners, 1899.

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