reason rather than dogma hardened into formalism and a distrust of individualism. Again, in the seventeenth century, apparently as an outgrowth of the same forces, intellectual activity took the form of a search for 'real things.' The movement that culminated in 'sense realism' appeared, but this small and crude beginning of the modern scientific tendency was for some decades yet held within limits. Associated with this realistic tendency, on the religious and political sides also appeared a quickening in such forms as Puritanism and Pietism, which likewise degenerated eventually into fanaticism and hypocrisy. Thus was the way finally opened for the complete break with tradition and authority that occurred in the eighteenth century. in The present education make the rela tendencies in tion of the in dividual to the social whole the test of the value of his attempt to activities, and the individual The Harmonization of the Individual and Society. This destructive tendency, while in France at least most disastrous and costly, was the inevitable result of the unwillingness to reshape society and education accordance with changing ideals and conditions. Yet out of the attempts at destruction, as we have seen, has grown a nobler structure. For a time individualism triumphed and ground authority under its heel, but harmonize when this extremity had been passed, the problem be- interests with came how to harmonize the individual with society, and those of soci to develop personality progressively in keeping with its environment. Thus the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have put forth conscious efforts to justify the eighteenth and to bring out and develop the positions barely hinted at in its negations. It is not alone the individual as such that has been of interest in the modern period, but more and more the individual in relation to the social whole to which he belongs, as only in this way can the ety. value of his activities be estimated. This is revealed in the works of those who followed Rousseau, and, especially in the attempts of leading educational philosophers of the present day to frame a definition of education that shall recognize the importance of affording latitude to the individual without losing sight of the welfare of the social environment in connection with which his efforts are to function. Thus Butler, though recognizing the individual factor, especially stressed the social by declaring education to be "the gradual adjustment of the individual to the spiritual possessions of the race." Then he further declares: "When we hear it sometimes said, 'All education must start from the child,' we must add, 'Yes, and lead into human civilization;' and when it is said on the other hand that ‘all education must start from a traditional past,' we must add, 'Yes, and be adapted to the child."" And the balance between the two factors of the individual and society is even more explicitly preserved in Dewey's statement "that the psychological and social sides are organically related, and that education cannot be regarded as a compromise between the two, or a superimposition of one upon the other." In the same way Bagley has made 'social efficiency' the main aim in educating the individual to-day, and both elements are carefully considered by all modern writers in discussing educational values. Thus the central problem in education of the twentieth and succeeding centuries is to be a constant reconstruc 1 The Meaning of Education, p. 15. 2 My Pedagogic Creed, pp. 6f. 8 The Educative Process, pp. 58ff. tion of the curriculum and methods of teaching so as to harmonize a due regard for the progressive variations of the individual with the welfare of the conservative institutions of society, and a continual effort to hand on the intellectual possessions of the race, but also to stimulate all individuals to add some modification or new element to the product. In this way the succeeding centuries may prove an evolution from the revolutionary eighteenth and may reveal unending possibilities for the development of the individual and society through an education that recognizes both. |