wn end. As against
it, or as compared with it, the conscious ideas and preference of
individuals are impotent. Or, rather, they are but the means by which
it works itself out. Social progress is an "organic growth," not an
experimental selection. Reason is all powerful, but only Absolute Reason
has any power.

The recognition (or rediscovery, for the idea was familiar to the
Greeks) that great historic institutions are active factors in the
intellectual nurture of mind was a great contribution to educational
philosophy. It indicated a genuine advance beyond Rousseau, who had
marred his assertion that education must be a natural development and
not something forced or grafted upon individuals from without, by the
notion that social conditions are not natural. But in its notion of
a complete and all-inclusive end of development, the Hegelian theory
swallowed up concrete individualities, though magnifying The Individual
in the abstract. Some of Hegel's followers sought to reconcile the
claims of the Whole and of individuality by the conception of society as
an organic whole, or organism. That social organization is presupposed
in the adequate exercise of individual capacity is not to be doubted.
But the social organism, interpreted after the relation of the organs of
the body to each other and to the whole body, means that each individual
has a certain limited place and function, requiring to be supplemented
by the place and functions of the other organs. As one portion of the
bodily tissue is differentiated so that it can be the hand and the
hand only, another, the eye, and so on, all taken together making the
organism, so one individual is supposed to be differentiated for the
exercise of the mechanical operations of society, another for those of
a statesman, another for those of a scholar, and so on. The notion
of "organism" is thus used to give a philosophic sanction to class
distinctions in social organization--a notion which in its educational
application again means external dictation instead of growth.

3. Education as Training of Faculties. A theory which has had great
vogue and which came into existence before the notion of growth had much
influence is known as the theory of "formal discipline." It has in view
a correct ideal; one outcome of education should be the creation of
specific powers of accomplishment. A trained person is one who can do
the chief things which it is important for him to do better than he