I must remind myself that my purpose does not conclude with a statement
of the auxiliary relation of psychology to education; but that we are
concerned with this as a type case of a wider problem--the relation of
psychology to social practice in general. So far I have tried to show
that it is not in spite of its statement of personal aims and social
relations in terms of mechanism that psychology is useful, but because
of this transformation and abstraction. Through reduction of ethical
relations to presented objects we are enabled to get outside of the
existing situation; to see it objectively, not merely in relation to our
traditional habits, vague aspirations, and capricious desires. We are
able to see clearly the factors which shape it, and therefore to get an
idea of how it may be modified. The assumption of an identical
relationship of physics and psychology to practical life is justified.
Our freedom of action comes through its statement in terms of necessity.
By this translation our control is enlarged, our powers are directed,
our energy conserved, our aims illuminated.
The school is an especially favorable place in which to study the
availability of psychology for social practice; because in the school
the formation of a certain type of social personality, with a certain
attitude and equipment of working powers, is the express aim. In idea,
at least, no other purpose restricts or compromises the dominance of the
single purpose. Such is not the case in business, politics, and the
professions. All these have upon their surface, taken directly, other
ends to serve. In many instances these other aims are of far greater
immediate importance; the ethical result is subordinate or even
incidental. Yet as it profiteth a man nothing to gain the whole world
and lose his own self, so indirectly and ultimately all these other
social institutions must be judged by the contribution which they make
to the value of human life. Other ends may be immediately uppermost, but
these ends must in turn be means; they must subserve the interests of
conscious life or else stand condemned.
In other words, the moment we apply an ethical standard to the
consideration of social institutions, that moment they stand on exactly
the same level as does the school, viz., as organs for the increase in
depth and area of the realized values of life. In both cases the
statement of the mechanism, through which the ethical ends are realized,
is not only permissible, but absolutely required. It is not merely
incidentally, as a grateful addition to its normal task, that
psychology serves us. The essential nature of the standpoint which calls
it into existence, and of the abstraction which it performs, is to put
in our possession the method by which values are introduced and effected
in life. The statement of personality as an object, of social relations
as a mechanism of stimuli and inhibitions, is precisely the statement
of ends in terms of the method of their realization.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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