Three typical historic philosophies of education were considered
from this point of view. The Platonic was found to have an ideal
formally quite similar to that stated, but which was compromised
in its working out by making a class rather than an individual
the social unit. The so-called individualism of the eighteenth-
century enlightenment was found to involve the notion of a
society as broad as humanity, of whose progress the individual
was to be the organ. But it lacked any agency for securing the
development of its ideal as was evidenced in its falling back
upon Nature. The institutional idealistic philosophies of the
nineteenth century supplied this lack by making the national
state the agency, but in so doing narrowed the conception of the
social aim to those who were members of the same political unit,
and reintroduced the idea of the subordination of the individual
to the institution. 1 There is a much neglected strain in
Rousseau tending intellectually in this direction. He opposed
the existing state of affairs on the ground that it formed
neither the citizen nor the man. Under existing conditions, he
preferred to try for the latter rather than for the former. But
there are many sayings of his which point to the formation of the
citizen as ideally the higher, and which indicate that his own
endeavor, as embodied in the Emile, was simply the best makeshift
the corruption of the times permitted him to sketch.
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