Excerpt from The Misinterpretation of Locke as a Formalist in Educational Philosophy, Vol. 3
What constitutes the significance of a thinker? Does it consist alone in the truths which he creates and hands on to posterity as a fixed and unchangeable inheritance? Or, does it rest as well in his capacity to stimulate his followers to advance into promised lands where he himself can plant no seed and consequently reap no harvests? Perhaps as science becomes less static and dogmatic we incline to recognize a mans importance more and more in terms of the problems which he sets for others to solve and less as regards his definite and tangible contribution to the fund of human knowledge. Hume in metaphysics is, of course, an illustration of this latter type. His destructive analysis of the metaphysical presuppositions of his day forced a right-about-face in theories of knowledge and a new attempt to describe the nature of the human understanding.
So, too, Herbart in his psychology. Herbart"s ideas bear much the same relation to the concept of mind as do Hume"s impressions of memory to an external world. Educational theory after the advent of Pestalozzi was synthesizing a mixture of philosophical conceptions. The human understanding which Kant reconstructed was a much more formidable and complex affair than that which Hume destroyed. But this in turn became identified with an organizing and self-developing will. This conception of the mind as a self-revealing entity harmonized well with Rousseau"s doctrine of ripening instincts and capacities. And, consequently, in the writings of the Pestalozzians and, later, the Froebelians, we have clearly enunciated theories of inner development, and the business of the educator conceived to be more or less exclusively, as Pestalozzi puts it, that of assisting "the child"s nature in the effort which it makes for its own development".
About the Publisher
Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com
This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works. Это и многое другое вы найдете в книге The Misinterpretation of Locke as a Formalist in Educational Philosophy, Vol. 3 (Classic Reprint) (Vivian Trow Thayer)