Small Is Beautiful: A Study of Economics as if People Mattered by E F Schumacher Page B

that science is knowledge, and practical results but its by-products .... Before their unexpected success in finding conclusive explanations of the material world, men had begun either to despise all disciplines in which such demonstrations could not be found, or to rebuild those disciplines after the pattern of the physical sciences. As a consequence, metaphysics and ethics had to be either ignored or, at least, replaced by new positive sciences; in either case, they would be eliminated. A very dangerous move indeed, which accounts for the perilous position in which western culture has now found itself.'

    It is not even true the metaphysics and ethics would be eliminated. On the contrary, all we got was bad metaphysic sand appalling ethics.

    Historians know that metaphysical errors can lead to death. R. G.
    Collingwood wrote:

    The Patristic diagnosis of the decay of Greco-Roman civilisation ascribes that event to a metaphysical disease .... It was not barbarian attacks that destroyed the Greco-Roman world .... The cause was a metaphysical cause.
    The "pagan" world was failing to keep alive its own fundamental convictions, they (the patriotic writers) said, because owing to faults in metaphysical analysis it had become confused as to what these convictions were .... If metaphysics had been a mere luxury of the intellect, this would not have mattered.'

    This passage can be applied. without change, to present-day civilisation.
    We have become confused as to what our convictions really are. The great ideas of the nineteenth century may fill our minds in one way or another, but our hearts do not believe in them all the same. Mind and heart are at war with one another, nor as is commonly asserted, reason and faith. Our reason has become beclouded by an extraordinary, blind and unreasonable faith in a set of fantastic and life-destroying ideas inherited from the nineteenth century. It is the foremost task of our reason to recover a truer faith than that, Education cannot help us as long as it accords no place to meta- physics.
    Whether the subjects taught are subjects of science or of the humanities, if the teaching does not lead to a clarification of metaphysics. that is to say, of our fundamental convictions, it cannot educate a man and, consequently, cannot be of real value to society.

    It is often asserted that education is breaking down because of over-specialisation. But this is only a partial and misleading diagnosis.
    Specialisation is not in itself a faulty principle of education. What would be the alternative - an amateurish smattering of all major subjects? Or a lengthy studium generale in which men are forced to spend their time sniffing at subjects which they do not wish to pursue, while they are being kept away from what they want to learn? This cannot be the right answer, since it can only lead to the type of intellectual man, whom Cardinal Newman castigated
    -'an intellectual man, as the world now conceives of him. ,..one who is full of "views" on all subjects of philosophy, on all matters of the day'. Such
    'viewiness' is a sign of ignorance rather than knowledge. 'Shall I teach you the meaning of knowledge?' said Confucius. 'When you know a thing to recognise that you know it, and when you do not, to know that you do not know - that is knowledge.'

    What is at fault is not specialisation, but the lack of depth with which the subjects are usually presented, and the absence of meta- physical awareness.
    The sciences are being taught without any awareness of the presuppositions of science, of the meaning and significance of scientific laws, and of the place occupied by the natural sciences within the whole cosmos of human thought. The result is that the presuppositions of science are normally mistaken for its findings. Economics is being taught without any awareness of the view of human nature that underlies present-day economic theory. In fact, many economists are themselves unaware of the fact that such a view