Page:The Source and Aim of Human Progress.djvu/47

Rh most societies, however, good education on right principles is neglected, the people do as the Cyclops:


 * Each rules his race, his neighbor not his care
 * Heedless of others, to his own severe.

Society is not a community of living beings only (for the sake of making a living as we would say, for the sake of work and trade), society is a community of equals, aiming at the best life possible for each individual citizen. . . . Now in man reason is the end after which nature strives, so that the education of the citizen (in a good community under a good constitution) should be with a view to that end, namely, the cultivation of the mind, more especially of reason."

Thus Psychology, Sociology, and History go to confirm the principle that in a well ordered and progressive community the end, the telos, is the culture of the individual, a culture based on the cultivation of the rational mind, or the cultivation of the upper, controlling, critical, personal consciousness of the individual citizen; the welfare of the community being not imperial grandeur of war and trade, empire-building of the military Macedonian type, but entirely and solely the development of man and the happiness of each individual citizen. The true aim of progress is not a beautifully organized bureaucracy with well organized departments for all walks of life in some great capital, adorned by pomp and display, or by ostentation of wealth and luxuries, but the simple, happy life of a highly cultured citizen. Protagoras' dictum: Aristotle modifies into:. It is not man, as Protagoras claims, but the good man who is the measure of everything. It is not the citizen as a taxpayer, or voter, or office-holder, but the cultivated, free individual who is the true aim of all social progress.

This type of society, described by Aristotle as the result of his profound studies of various forms of social life, this type of society after which humanity strives in all its social metamorphoses, discarding one form after another as crude and inadequate for the purpose of a good social life, this type has for its sole object not the structure of society, the welfare of great institutions and the building of vast empires, but solely the highest development of the free, cultivated individual. Such a type of society the sole object of which is the happiness and cultivation of Man may be characterized as functional, or humanistic, based on the principle that in the universe there is