Can virtue, approved excellence in any line, be learned, they
asked? What is learning? It has to do with knowledge. What,
then, is knowledge? How is it achieved? Through the senses, or by
apprenticeship in some form of doing, or by reason that has
undergone a preliminary logical discipline? Since learning is
coming to know, it involves a passage from ignorance to wisdom,
from privation to fullness from defect to perfection, from
non-being to being, in the Greek way of putting it. How is such
a transition possible? Is change, becoming, development really
possible and if so, how? And supposing such questions answered,
what is the relation of instruction, of knowledge, to virtue?
This last question led to opening the problem of the relation of
reason to action, of theory to practice, since virtue clearly
dwelt in action. Was not knowing, the activity of reason, the
noblest attribute of man? And consequently was not purely
intellectual activity itself the highest of all excellences,
compared with which the virtues of neighborliness and the
citizen's life were secondary? Or, on the other hand, was the
vaunted intellectual knowledge more than empty and vain pretense,
demoralizing to character and destructive of the social ties that
bound men together in their community life? Was not the only
true, because the only moral, life gained through obedient
habituation to the customary practices of the community? And was
not the new education an enemy to good citizenship, because it
set up a rival standard to the established traditions of the
community?
In the course of two or three generations such questions were cut
loose from their original practical bearing upon education and
were discussed on their own account; that is, as matters of
philosophy as an independent branch of inquiry.
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