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XXI.

THE SPIRITUAL PROCESS: MIND

THE logical process traces the absolute intelligence in its movement to self-consciousness, separating itself from itself and returning to itself in order to know and understand itself. The cosmic process reveals the mind principle in nature and unfolds the process by which nature loses its identity and becomes spirit. The spiritual process explains how this estrangement is removed, how spirit identifies itself with itself and how it attains its formal essence, freedom. The mind buried in nature gradually unfolds itself into consciousness, selfconsciousness and reason. This awakening from its bondage, by which it identifies itself with the object immediately, by which it knows itself in determining the object and by which it knows the object as its own process is an act of spiritual creativity. The mind in its final evolution becomes rational and universal by completing the cycle and recognizing in its otherness a spiritual principle akin to itself. The mind's impulse to think and to act, splits itself into a scission of the real and the ideal. The primal activity of spirit is to assert itself in contradistinction to the notself, to separate itself from itself, and to return from this estrangement to itself, enriched and enlarged.

Mind Free

Self

Self-activity which is self-conscious activity and which is the fundamental principle in every educational process is the basis of all knowledge and freedom. Prof. Ormond says the soul is Activity not pure actuality, but rather a spiritual energy constantly passing from potence to actuality. According to this statement all education is a process in the unfolding of self-conscious activity. The self-activity of spirit is the basis of all knowledge and the origin and explanation of every process in education. The fundamental process in education, in the school, in teaching, in thinking, in life, is ground in a universal process, having as its elements a logical, a cosmic and a spiritual factor. The final purpose and aim in every process in education is freedom; individual freedom, race freedom, spiritual freedom.

Spiritual Freedom. This doctrine doctrine of education has attempted to prove that the school is a spiritual organism, that teaching is a spiritual process and that the purpose of thought and life is to unfold spirit in and through the world process. The final problem in education-spiritual freedom -will now be solved by making a close study of Hegel's Philosophy of History. According to this thinker universal history is the progress in the consciousness of freedom. It shows successively that "one is free," that "some are free" and "man as man is free" and finally that "it is the freedom of spirit which constitutes its essence." The Orientals know that one is free, but this freedom

is mere caprice. The consciousness of Evolution of freedom first arose among the Greeks, Freedom but their freedom was conditioned by the natural. The Greeks and Romans knew that some are free, but did not realize that man as such is free. The Germans influenced by Christianity attained the consciousness that man, as such, is free. History traces the process by which the consciousness of freedom is realized.

ESSENTIALS IN SPIRITUAL FREEDOM.-Anaxagoras was the first thinker to set forth the doctrine that nous governs the world. He did not have the ability and insight to apply this principle to the concrete world, but left it to Socrates, Plato and Aristotle to explain the immanence of the universal in the individual. Hegel uses the world spirit as the guiding force in the development and explanation of the historic process. To him each nation represents a particular element in the progress of the universal spirit. When a nation accomplishes the highest mission possible, it yields up the universal principle to another one higher in the scale of freedom. Each nation represents a phase or moment in the progress of the consciousness of freedom.

Reason Governs The World

The material used in universal history to explain the progress of freedom, is law, principle, purpose, personality, subjectivity and the cunning of reason. These inner, human activities

The State

are externalized in human deeds, human events, human constitutions, and states. "The state is

the divine idea as it exists on earth." In Hegelian terminology, society and the state are the very conditions in which freedom is realized. It is only by a constitution that the abstraction, the state attains life and reality. The state is the idea of spirit in the external manifestation of human will and its freedom. — Universal history exhibits the gradation in the development of that principle whose substantial purport is the consciousness of freedom.

The aims, the principles and laws, found in the the inner essence of history, are subjective and have no objective existence in the external world until the activity of man transforms these subjective relations into objective deeds. The so-called historical personages are means to freedom because they represent the advanced margin of human life and civilization. A world historical individual is devoted to a single purpose in life. In the deeds of such men universal reason realizes itself.

An
Historical
Personality

In the progress of nations, spirit is at war with itself, it separates itself from itself, overcomes itself and works out its freedom through its own creative energy. Spirit begins with a germ of potentiality, an undeveloped form and progresses toward actuality. The evolution of the individual parallels the evolution of the race. The child with stored-up energy is developed into an actual, ideal spiritual being, in the same manner that nations are gradually unfolded into higher forms of life and civilization. The edu

The
Individual

And the
Race

cative process of the individual pupil harmonizes with the race process in history. According to this theory of culture epochs the child in its development parallels the race in its development toward freedom. The Orientals are the child race of unreflected consciousness and have only objective spiritual existence. They represent the dawn of human consciousness which is gradually unfolded by passing through the various stages of human progress and racial evolution.

No

Dualism

China. History begins with China, at the same time the oldest and the newest nation in the world. It is the oldest, because early in time China attained the present state of advancement. It is also the newest nation because subjectivity and inner life now begins to dawn upon the nation. As yet there is no distinction between the natural and the spiritual, the individual and substantial. The substantial, the Emperor, rules not from a moral disposition, but as a despot. There is no reflection on the part of the subject, nor no thought splitting into the real and ideal. In this grade of civilization, the person ruled does not recognize in the ruler a being in harmony with himself, "one with its own essential being. The universal will, the Emperor, rules, and the individual subject obeys. He does not think, he does not reflect, he does not question the motive of the ruler, but simply obeys. If he does not obey, if he separates himself from the ruler, he receives objective punishment (bastinadoed) rather than subjective

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