Page:The Story of Philosophy.pdf/61

 Without these Ideas—these generalizations, regularities and ideals—the world would be to us as it must seem to the first-opened eyes of the child, a mass of unclassified and un- meaning particulars of sensation; for meaning can be given to things only by classifying and generalizing them, by find- ing the laws of their beings, and the purposes and goals of their activity. Or the world without Ideas would be a heap of book-titles fallen haphazard out of the catalogue, as com- pared to the same titles arranged in order according to their classes, their sequences and their purposes; it would be the shadows in a cave as compared with the sunlit realities without, which cast those fantastic and deceptive shadows within (514). Therefore the essence of a higher education is the search for Ideas: for generalizations, laws of sequence, and ideals of development; behind things we must discover their relation and meaning, their mode and law of operation, the function and ideal they serve or adumbrate; we must classify and co- ordinate our sense experience in terms of law and purpose; only for lack of this does the mind of the imbecile differ from the mind of Cæsar.

Well, after five years of training in this recondite doctrine of Ideas, this art of perceiving significant forms and causal sequences and ideal potentialities amid the welter and hazard of sensation; after five years of training in the appli- cation of this principle to the behavior of men and the con- duct of states; after this long preparation from childhood through youth and into the maturity of thirty-five; surely now these perfect products are ready to assume the royal purple and the highest functions of public life?—surely they are at last the philosopher-kings who are to rule and to free the human race?

Alas! not yet. Their education is still unfinished. For after all it has been, in the main, a theoretical education; something else is needed. Let these Ph.D.'s pass down now from the heights of philosophy into the "cave" of the world of men and things; generalizations and abstractions are worth-