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

The part is, sooner or later, to find its full glory, adequate self-expression, and complete development through the service of its fellow parts; otherwise the universe is unfair and perfection wears a cruel blemish. It is just because the social problem is not yet solved that we cannot say "perfection now is."

The individual is to be understood in relation to the universal, but the universal is also qualified by the individual. The temporal is organically related to the eternal; the eternal is nothing without the temporal. The eternal is made up of the temporal, the universal of the individual: there is no absolute in-itself. The temporal retains its specific meaning, as for instance, the dates, 1453, 1492, 1876. Likewise, the glory of man is that he is continuously an unabsorbed historical individual, as, for example, Socrates, Jesus, Shakespeare, Darwin, and those who contributed to the evolution and life-work of these, without whom, because they were organs only, their work would have been impossible.

From another point of view, the eternal is the great unattained. As typical of absolute perfection, it is ideally true, but not actually real. It is ever the goal which the universe seeks, yet the pleasure of the game consists in never making it. It is the sword of Damocles which must not fall. If anything were absolute in itself there could be no organic perfection.

I need not, however, dwell on these general limitations of organic perfection, since our chief concern is to discover how our own limitations make it

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