As each one has a different path to follow in this world, each one will accordingly have his own education. But all paths converge to one point, where we all gather to lead in common that universal life which alone makes us men. And as we meet at this centre, we must understand each other, and should be able therefore to speak the same language, the language of the spirit. We are compelled by an irresistible need to live this common life, and together to constitute one sole spirit. But this end we shall never attain if man, who ought to be entire and complete, acts as a mere fragment,--such fragment, for example, as the æsthete, or the superstitious worshipper, or the star gazer, always unaware of the pit under his feet. If we continue in this state, in which one man clings to the superstition of mathematics, another idolises entomology, a third worships physics, and so on indefinitely, if man insists on fencing off his little piece of this "thrashing-floor that makes us cruel," knowing no other man but himself, feeling no needs other than his own, then war will break out. Not a disciplined war, governed by a law, by an idea, by reason, of which it is the life; but a war of every man against his brother,--the anarchistic uprising, the disintegration of the spirit, and the stern suffering which is true misery. The dislike for the _purus mathematicus_[5] is traditional. But whether he be a mathematician, or a priest, or an economist, or a dentist, or a poet, or a street cleaner, man as a fragment of humanity is a nuisance. We want mathematics, but we want it _in_ the man. And the same for religion, economics, poetry, and all the rest. Otherwise we suffocate, and die stifled. For all these are things, but there is no life; and things oppress us and kill us. Therefore let us spiritualise things by reviving the spirit. Let us release it, that it may freely move in the organic unity of nature. Let us train it so that its strength, agility, balance, and all around development shall be able to control all its dependent functions, which can be successfully carried on only on condition that they agree, and collaborate toward common life. And this is what I call philosophy. Or we may call it humanity, if the word philosophy suggests strangeness and difficulty of attainment. For our demand for an educational reform, in accordance with our renewed consciousness, is prompted by the old but never ancient desire which put the lantern in the hand of the Greek philosopher. Education is truly human when it has for its contents that ideal which I have briefly touched upon in this chapter, the ideal of the spirit, philosophy. FOOTNOTES: [5] Referring to the old phrase, _purus mathematicus, purus asinus_. CHAPTER XI CONCLUSION