IT was about a year ago that Professor Dewey and I were discussing the question whether it is possible to demonstrate that the order of progress in getting the power for an artistic creation in the mind of a single individual-and therefore the psychological order of development of the artist's powers-is practically identical with the historical order of the development of the art powers in the human race. If that could be shown-that the very steps in which in our education today we are training ourselves to get power, mastery, more and more creative ability, are practically identical with the order in which the various races of men have attained that power-we then should get the broadest possible inductive basis for something like a scientific view of education. I know, of course, that it requires a great deal of material, so that I can merely hint at the line of argument; but what I wish to show is that there is such a parallelism. Of course, when I speak of historical order I do not mean only one order, but that among the several artistic races which have had centuries in which to develop their powers there is practically a unity-among the Europeans in their development from the Middle Age, or the Chinese or Japanese in the order of developing their own powers. I think we shall find substantially the same steps; and just the most general aspect of that is what I am going to try to show, not especially ot technical problems of just what we should do, or the application of problems to any school, but a general theoretical foundation, if it can be established, which gives us a valuable starting-point in all special lines of education. It has been held by some people in America, and I think it is held by the majority of the public, that the real root of art
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.