Summary.
—The philosophic dualism between man and nature is reflected in
the division of studies between the naturalistic and the humanistic with
a tendency to reduce the latter to the literary records of the past.
This dualism is not characteristic (as were the others which we have
noted) of Greek thought. It arose partly because of the fact that the
culture of Rome and of barbarian Europe was not a native product, being
borrowed directly or indirectly from Greece, and partly because
political and ecclesiastic conditions emphasized dependence upon the
authority of past knowledge as that was transmitted in literary
documents.
At the outset, the rise of modern science prophesied a restoration of
the intimate connection of nature and humanity, for it viewed knowledge
of nature as the means of securing human progress and well-being. But
the more immediate applications of science were in the interests of a
class rather than of men in common; and the received philosophic
formulations of scientific doctrine tended either to mark it off as
merely material from man as spiritual and immaterial, or else to reduce
mind to a subjective illusion. In education, accordingly, the tendency
was to treat the sciences as a separate body of studies, consisting of
technical information regarding the physical world, and to reserve the
older literary studies as distinctively humanistic. The account
previously given of the evolution of knowledge, and of the educational
scheme of studies based upon it, are designed to overcome the
separation, and to secure recognition of the place occupied by the
subject matter of the natural sciences in human affairs.
