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True and False Subjectivism 45from the subjective standpoint. In education our object is toknow the psychology of the child as he grows into man andto found our systems of teaching and training upon that basis.The new aim is to help the child to develop his intellectual,aesthetic, emotional, moral, spiritual being and his communallife and impulses out of his own temperament and capacities, —a very different object from that of the old education which wassimply to pack so much stereotyped knowledge into his resistingbrain and impose a stereotyped rule of conduct on his strugglingand dominated impulses. 1 In dealing with the criminal the mostadvanced societies are no longer altogether satisfied with regardinghim as a law-breaker to be punished, imprisoned, terrified,hanged or else tortured physically and morally, whether as arevenge for his revolt or as an example to others; there is agrowing attempt to understand him, to make allowance for hisheredity, environment and inner deficiencies and to change himfrom within rather than crush him from without. In the generalview of society itself, we begin to regard the community, thenation or any other fixed grouping of men as a living organismwith a subjective being of its own and a corresponding growthand natural development which it is its business to bring toperfection and fruition. So far, good; the greater knowledge, thetruer depth, the wiser humanity of this new view of things areobvious. But so also are the limitations of our knowledge andexperience on this new path and the possibility of serious errorsand stumblings.If we look at the new attempt of nations, whether subjector imperial, to fulfil themselves consciously and especially atthe momentous experiment of the subjective German nationality,we shall see the starting-point of these possible errors.The first danger arises from the historical fact of the evolutionof the subjective age out of the individualistic; and the firstenormous stumble has accordingly been to transform the error1 There has been a rude set-back to this development in totalitarian States whose theoryis that the individual does not exist and only the life of the community matters, but thisnew larger view still holds its own in freer countries.