Journal of Moral Education, Vol. 32, No.

4, 2003

Moral Development as the Personal Education of Feeling and Reason: from James to Piaget
MICHEL FERRARI & CAROL M. OKAMOTO
University of Toronto, Canada

ABSTRACT This article traces the connection between William Jamess writings in The Varieties of Religious Experience and Jean Piagets work on moral development through Piagets early work on religious experience. James characterises religious experience as unlocking deep personal power that can sustain a strenuous mood. These ideas impacted the early work of Piaget on religious experience through the inuence of Henri Bergson and Theodore Flournoy, both friends of James. The shared depth-psychology approach to religious experience of James and Piaget is important to current debates on spiritual and moral education.

Dans ses grandes lignes, le probleme de la science et de la religion peut etre ` considere come resolu, grace surtout aux efforts convergents de philoso phies de Boutroux, de Hffding, et du pragmatisme de W. James et de Flournoy (Piaget, 1923, p. 38). [1] William Jamess writings in The Varieties of Religious Experience inuenced Jean Piagets work on moral development through its indirect impact on Piagets own early study of religious experiences. This is not surprising. In fact, James and Piaget both shared an intellectual milieu that included Henri Bergson and Theodore Flournoy and agreed that personal religious experience informs moral development and education. Their shared depth-psychology approach to religious experience and moral development is more than of mere historical interest; it remains critical to current discussions about spiritual and moral education. Moral Development as the Personal Education of Feeling In The Varieties of Religious Experience and other writings on values, William James (1902) expressed his view that moral behaviour must be grounded in moral emotionsin our most profound loves, hopes, and faithsand not simply in conceptually intricate, but emotionally barren, moral reasoning. From this personal centre, we can do our part to create a moral universe (James, 1890, 1891, 1899, 1907a, 1907b, 1910). According to James, feelingsespecially religious feelings of mystical
ISSN 0305-7240 print; ISSN 1465-3877 online/03/040341-15 2003 Journal of Moral Education Ltd DOI: 10.1080/0305724032000161???

342 M. Ferrari & C. M. Okamoto unity or of communication with a higher powerare our deepest sources of morality. However, reason (or intellect) is needed to interpret our religious experiences, discuss them with one another, and mediate clashes between different sorts of experiences. James bases his entire exposition in The Varieties on the profound experiences of religious geniuses who inspired followers to found religions or sects, and on ordinary experiences like personal prayer, but he marginalises the religious dogma and ritual associated with organised religion as a social and communal force (C. Taylor, 2002). James (1902, 1907a, 1907b) held that our lives are guided by religious experiences, considered in the broad sense of dynamic powers that are a source of strength and conviction. These experiences sustain a strenuous mood in the face of obstacles that would derail mere reasoned convictions or intentions. Individuals can be transformed by such experiencesconvertedto a new habitual centre of personal energy, which also changes its fringe, such that ethical concerns and compassion become our central interests. Argyle (2000; see also Spilka et al., 2003) describes many recent studies that support James, showing the power of religious experiences to transform a persons moral convictions. For example, people have been transformed by near-death experiences in which they experience meeting long-lost relatives or spiritual beings and then return to this life to become more religious and more moral individuals, their personalities radically altered by these deeply emotional brushes with death (Bemmer, 2002). Similarly, therapy can lead to personal transformation, and it is in this sense that Jung considered analytical psychology a religious attitude of mind, but not a creed (Shamdasani, 1999). Jamess claims are supported by recent narrative studies of moral identity and supporting moral behaviour. Like James (1902), Tappan (2000) used autobiographical narratives to study moral identity and behaviour. For Tappan, individuals naturally structure their moral lives through narratives. Narratives allow descriptions of both justice and care central to peoples sense of themselves, and so present a more complete picture of peoples moral experiencesunlike Kohlbergian moral dilemmas that rely mainly on reasoning. Indeed, highly moral people do not necessarily excel at moral reasoning tasks (Arnold, 2000). Instead, moral identity develops through dialogical, mediated action (i.e. by trying on different moral identities), not mere self-reectiona point not emphasised by Jamess focus on individual experience. Rooting our moral identity and personality in our deepest feelings rather than in conceptual understanding has a long history in the Christian tradition (C. Taylor, 2002). For James, that history included the writings of Emerson and Swedenbourg, both also important to his father (Reed, 1997); but it is also situated within an increasingly well-documented research tradition in the history of psychology that combined clinical and experimental approaches, with an emphasis on the subconscious as a mythopoetic well-spring of psychological growth as well as pathology. The main research methods in this tradition were hypnosis and human documents of experience such as questionnaires and autobiographies (Shamdasani, 1999; E. Taylor, 1999, 2002). Scholars often considered marginal in their respective elds

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such as James or Piaget among experimental psychologists and Janet or Jung among psychoanalystsare best seen as mainstream members of a loose intellectual alliance that included the Boston School of Abnormal Psychology, British and American Societies for Psychical Research, French experimental psychology of the unconscious, and various schools in Switzerland, principally in Geneva and Zurich (Shamdasani, 1999; E. Taylor, 1999, 2002).

Piaget and Flournoy at Sainte Croix Within this tradition, we also nd a clear connection between the works of James and Piaget through their mutual admiration of French philosophers and scientists such as Janet, Flournoy and Bergson, all of whom were friends and associates of James and mentors or inspirations to Piaget. This article will focus on the importance of Flournoy to developing the Swiss branch of this tradition, which was formative for the young Piaget. James had met Flournoy at the International Congress of Physiological Psychology in 1889, and the two quickly became good friends for the rest of Jamess life. Both were key in spearheading the scientic study of religious experience as part of a science of psychology designed to span and integrate clinical and experimental approaches through its focus on pure experience. In this way their science is distinct both from Halls experimental psychology of religion and Freuds clinical psychology of religion, which saw religious experience as either nave or pathological. James so valued Flournoys work on religious experience that in a letter dated 16 May 1902 James says that he wishes they had prepared their lectures together (Jamess Gifford Lectures published as The Varieties of Religious Experience [1902] and Flournoys largely unpublished course lectures on religion) because now the public would get two half rations. In his courses on religious psychology, Flournoy (1902) emphasised studies of religious experience, referring to many of the same studies as in Jamess The Varieties. Like James, Flournoy also made detailed studies of exceptional mental states in otherwise normal healthy people. He is most well known for his study of the psychic Elise-Catherine Muller (known as Helene Smith), counterpart to Jamess ` Mrs Piper (Flournoy, 1900), and for his study of Mlle Ve, a modern mystic, through clinical interviews and a detailed analysis of her letters and diaries (Flournoy, 1915). He also conducted some of the rst scientic studies of synesthesia (Clararede, 1921). Flournoy (1902) provided a clear philosophical framework for ` the budding science of religion by proposing two pragmatic principles, (1) exclusion of the transcendenta negative and defensive principle, leaving people free to believe in whatever metaphysics they choose without bogging down the new science of psychology in its infancy and (2) biological interpretation of religious phenomenaa positive and heuristic appeal to vital biological processes. Flournoy promoted this approach within the Association chretienne detudiants de la Suisse romande (the Swiss Christians Students Association, SCSA), of which he was a senior member. This group held annual meetings at Sainte Croix, which

344 M. Ferrari & C. M. Okamoto pastors, theologians, writers, scientists and philosophers attended, and which were formative spiritual moments for Piaget and his generation (Vidal, 1987, 1994a). Discussions mixed a liberal theology and an evangelical religiosity that was highly psychologised (Vidal, 1994a, 1994b). James was scheduled to speak at Sainte Croix in 1910due probably to his personal friendship with Flournoybut tragically, this was not to be; although James did spend eight days in Geneva in 1910, he was too ill even to see his old friend. He returned to America and died just months later. Instead, Flournoy spoke on Jamess work at Sainte Croix, in memorium, and the talk was expanded and published as a widely read book (Flournoy, 1911). Piaget probably did not attend that talk (he would have been only 13), but Vidal (1994a) documents that Piaget did attend Flournoys talk on Religion et Psycho-analyse at the 1916 meetingper haps the rst time Piaget heard psychoanalysis discussed authoritatively. Around this time, Piaget began to write about reconciling science, values and religious experience. Inuences critical into Piagets early thinking on these issues also included Auguste Sabatier and Henri Bergson (Piaget, 1914, 1932; Voneche, 2001). The ` most important expression of Piagets Bergsonian Protestantism is The Mission of the Idea (19151916), from which grew Piagets project to base morality on science through biology (Vidal, 1987, 1994a). Piaget wrote even more poignantly about his spiritual beliefs and moral concerns in 1916 in The Mystery of Divine Suffering (see Vidal, 1994b), alluding to his own teenage mystical experienceone more vivid than Jamess mystical germ. Piaget also followed Flournoy (1904, 1911) in considering Jesus Christ a religious genius who embodied religious feelings and ideas about morality all could aspire to emulatean idea Flournoy discussed in his lectures to the SCSA and held by many others, notably Hall (1917). Perhaps the pragmatic position on religious psychology is best summed up by Flournoys (1902) discussion of one of Sabatiers (1893) last texts in which Sabatier writes that Le fond des dogmes et des symboles, cest la realite religieuse elle meme, cest le processus vital (que cree lEsprit inni et eternel, se relevant) dans lesprit de lhomme et dans les experiences memes de sa piete [2] (cited in Flournoy, 1902, p. 48). Flournoy comments that this quote captures perfectly the spirit of the science of religious experience, if only we remove what he has put in brackets and add the biological component proper to science. The rest is metaphysics that is not bad in itself, but goes beyond science: an approach clearly echoed in The Varieties and in the early work of Piaget. Ironically, Piaget seems closer in spirit to James than to Flournoy. Flournoy detested Bergsons writings and could not see what value James found in his ideas (Clararede, 1921). As it did for James, Bergsons notion of a biological elan vitale, ` which he saw as a natural expression of the divine, resonated with Piagetbut ultimately, like Flournoy, Piaget was disappointed in Bergsons lack of scientic evidence in support of his ideas (Piaget, 1932). When hired by Claparede in 1921 to work at the Jean Jacques Rousseau Institute, ` Piaget devoted his rst laboratory to the study of religious experiences and lectured on his results and their implications at Sainte Croix (1923, 1928, 1930). Vidal

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(1998) makes a strong case that Piagets early empirical work on religious experience aimed to provide empirical evidence for his own metaphysical framework, centred around the idea of the immanence of the divine in human experience. Immanence, we suggest, bears a very strong resemblance both to Bergsons elan vitale and to Jamess notion of pure experience. But following Flournoys principles, Piagets work emphasised what can be known scientically through biology and sociology, leaving aside any appeal to metaphysics (even if the metaphysical notion of immanence was central to his own theoretical underpinning of this work). Piaget shared other connections to Jamesian psychology. He went to Zurich in 19181919 to work with Lipps and Wreschner, as well as to work in Eugen Bleulers psychiatric clinic, where he attended lectures by Jung and Pster. He took courses with Bleuler and considered himself Bleulers student (Vidal, 1998); he also engaged in a training analysis with Sabina Spielrein. Partly through Bleulers inuence, Piaget claimed that childrens spontaneous thought resembles not only that of primitive tribes but autistic thought described by Bleulerfor whom schizophrenic thought involved a loss of contact with reality and a lack of succession in ones judgements, seen not only in pathology but also in dreams and mystical experience. Piaget was concerned with his own autistic tendencies. Moving to Paris (19191921) to work for Simon in Binets laboratory, Piaget attended lectures by Pierre Janet, who introduced him to Baldwin (Piaget, 1982). Piaget (1920) was perhaps the rst to introduce psychoanalysis to Binets group and was considered an expert on dynamic psychology. Many of the characteristics of Piagets later genetic epistemology can be traced to a Jamesian pragmatic study of experience. For example, his clinical method, broadly speaking, remains in this tradition, even if Piagets aim is not clinical, in the therapeutic sense, but concerns the creative growth and renement of knowledge topics critical to James (1890, 1910). James, Flournoy and Piaget thus all share an immanent humanism centred on the scientic study of human experience and broadly motivated within a Liberal Protestant framework (Vidal, 1997); but all three were also deeply existentialist and sometimes seem closer to current Buddhist psychologists, such as Varela and Flanagan, than to work on moral reasoning inspired by Kohlberg (Colby & Kohlberg, 1987a, 1987b; Johnson, 2002). In fact, Jamess radical empiricism and Flournoys two principles are integral to Varelas science of neurophenomenology, even if for Buddhists such as Rosch (2002) mystical experience is not in an expanded eld of consciousness, but an unnoticed aspect of our everyday awareness. Varela (1992/1999) and Flanagan (2002) both propose frameworks in which a moral sense of self or identity is motivated by a deep insight into the nature of experience that becomes a source of compassion. For Varela (1992/1999), we are born skilful and have to practise to remove habits that mask a natural wisdom that issues spontaneously from our total experience. In this sense, moral development is a return to the ineffable source of all experience. This sort of ethical expertise is not developed through moral rules (even if codied in such rules). In fact, unless such rules are informed by the wisdom that enables them to be dissolved in the demands of responsivity to the particularity and immediacy of lived situations, the

346 M. Ferrari & C. M. Okamoto rules will become sterile, scholastic hindrances to compassionate action rather than conduits for its manifestation (Varela, 1992/1999, p. 74). Yet despite the emotional basis of this spontaneous response, action becomes increasingly expert and appropriate precisely because of the deep intuitive understanding of human experience that generates it. The Problem with an Emotional Foundation to Moral Development and Behaviour James (1902) and Flournoy (1902) acknowledge that rst-person mystical experiences of a transcendent reality, while authoritative for any person who experiences them, need not be authoritative for others. However, this sets up a recurring tension between an appeal to a radically empirical (rst-person) assessment of knowledge through direct experienceincluding mystical experiencesand the need for philosophy and science to construct (third-person) systems of explanation that co-ordinate disparate points of view (James, 1902, 1910). A recent functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) study by Greene et al. (2001) highlights the difculty. The study shows that people given two moral problems with an identical logical structure and complexity decide them differently, depending on their emotional resonance with the problem. While James (1902) might consider such a brain-based study examples of medical materialism, it shows the difculty of grounding moral identity just in our most profound feelings. If we ground our knowledge ultimately on feelings of faith and hope (Derrida, 2002; James, 1902, 1907a, 1910), what can we say when deep moral convictions conict? Piaget (1923) cites research (recently replicated; see Argyle, 2000) showing that unconscious and affective attachment to different religious experiences of God (transcendent or immanent) depends in part on the type of parenting one receives and the general sociopolitical cultural environment of ones upbringing. The same can be said for situations that ought to generate moral outrage, but do not. These ndings left Piaget dissatised with the live-and-let-live attitude toward religious experience advocated by James and Flournoy. Piagets (1923, 1928, 1930) mature thoughts on religious experience led him to believe that the issue could be resolved developmentally. Specically, he claims that an immanent conception of the divine (i.e. God as intrinsic to our lived experience) was a more developed stage of religious experience than one of a separate, transcendent God. While stage theories of religious experience have been challenged (Spilka et al., 2003), recent studies seem to conrm that immanent experience of the divine is indeed much rarer and develops later than transcendent experiences documented in children as young as age six (Argyle, 2000). (Similarly, the idea of immanence develops later historically.) For Piaget, our developing understanding religious experience is no different than our developing understanding of mathematics, which was also originally considered transcendent and only later understood to emerge dialectically from human experience in the world. It is difcult to know what James would have made of the claim that immanent experience is more developed than an acknowledgment of transcendent powers. Certainly, James (1891, 1902, 1910) claims that we have the right to believe in a

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transcendent power with which we can communicate (for example, through prayer) and that historically this experience is universal; in recent times the late Mother Theresa famously claimed, I am Gods pencil. But for James, too, moral development involves the active participation of the subject in constructing an understanding of experience, including religious experience. He claims each age gets that the gods it deserves, in accordance with its deepest values and understandings (James, 1902). We believe that both James and Piaget would converge on the need to build from personal experience to the most sophisticated and pragmatically useful conception possible; one that satises both feeling and reason. We also believe that immanence of the divine, as pure experience, concords more fully with modern science, as contemporary Buddhist psychologists claim. More broadly, all agree that deep moral engagement must develop from an existential appreciation of the human condition that provides a (radically empirical) foundation for human morality, one that need not appeal to an external God: as human beings we all want to be free to speak, to move, to experience pleasure and not pain (Eco & Martini, 1997). Moral Development as the Personal Marriage of Feeling and Reason For many people, still, moral development is the development of moral reasoning, albeit one that best adopts a domain approach to the study of moral development and social reasoning. On this view, three main domains of social reasoning are moral reasoning about justice, rights and welfare, conventional reasoning about rules by authority or traditions, and personal-choice reasoning about duties and responsibilities. The emphasis or balance among these domains will depend on the specic circumstances of how a case is framed and how its concerns are coordinated (Nucci, 2001; Turiel, 2002). In a series of elegant studies spanning America, China and India, Helwig and colleagues (see Neff & Helwig, 2002) have shown, for example, that cultural practices and personal choices are evaluated in light of authority, tradition, rights and prerogative. However, this approach misses an important theme in the writings of both James and Piagetthat moral identity is essentially affective, although structured and informed by reason. Rather than concluding that morality has a purely rational basis, one can endorse Spinozas marriage of love and reason (Damasio, 2003; Piaget, 1928). Piaget expresses it in a way that appeals essentially to a Jamesian radical empiricism in which moral development relies on an access to more of our experience as a source of tolerance and compassion as well as of rational norms of conduct: Bref, ce nest pas en les cherchant commes telles quon atteint les normes rationnelles. Cest en travaillant scientiquement quon les decouvre et quon les sent simposer a soi. In en est de meme avec le divin. Ce nest pas ` en le cherchant pour lui-meme que nous le saisissons, car nous ne rencon trons alors quun moyen de nous rassurer, quune idole fabriquee a notre ` usage. Cest en agissant dans la direction ou, psychologiquement et soci` ologiquement, la conscience sepanouit. Partout ou il y a libre recherche `

348 M. Ferrari & C. M. Okamoto intellectuelle, sincerite absolu, oubli de lafrmation individuelle au prot de la verite, il y a participation a lactivite normatrice de la pensee. [] ` Lidentication spinoziste de lamour et de la raison veut etre reellement vecue. Alors la conscience fait cette experience sui generis de laccord avec la Pensee, qui est lexperience mystique supreme. Au hesitations de la recherche et de la conduite succedent ainsi, detapes en etapes, ces mo` ments dillumination durant lesquelles la plenitude de lequilibre interieur donne la certitude de la participation au Vrai. March en avant et regression vers la source apparaissent des lors a la conscience comme une seule et ` ` meme chose (Piaget, 1928, pp. 3940) [3]. In his later writings on affective and moral development, Piaget (1962a, 1973) rened this view. Consistent with his general theory, Piaget (1962a) identies four stages of affective moral development: 1. Sensorimotor-affect, in which affect is tied to immediate affective responses, for example, the attachment relations between parent and child; 2. Context-bound affective representations, in which there appear representative feelings tied to inter-individual values not immediately perceived (e.g., sympathy and antipathy). But these are engaged in direct interaction with others, e.g. parents, where we nd them appearing as the expression of moral feelings, e.g. truth telling to adults (but not necessarily to peers). 3. Concrete affective operations, in which moral feelings are now conserved, and a morality of reciprocity appears. The equivalent of cognitive operations in the affective eld is any act of willan elegant reconciliation of the theories of James and Wundt on the will (see Piaget, 1962b). 4. Formal affective operations which, in the moral domain, allow the emergence of new ideological feelings attached to social and ideal realities such as love of ones country or way of life. Only at this stage can we talk of personality forming (as distinct from the ego) which, for Piaget, is the superior synthesis of affective life (1962a, p. 137). Only now does one freely join an existing society of adults and regulate his own behaviour through what C. Taylor (2002) calls strong evaluations; that is, second-order desires to embody values that express a certain way of life. An interesting piece of corroborative evidence to the claimsechoed by C. Taylor, Tappan and Brunerthat moral identity is itself a product of development is the nding by Habermas & Bluck (2000) that only in early adolescence do people develop a lifestory by which they evaluate their actions. This view has been further rened in Kurt Fischers recent work on affective development (Fischer & Bidell, 1998; Mascolo et al., 2003). For Piaget, important cognitive or affective operations remain implicit and hence not conceptualised until we become explicitly aware of them through reected abstractions that require a prise de conscience of ones own activity (Ferrari et al., 2001). Our original implicit experiences are not unconscious in the

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sense of being repressed, but they may not be noticed and so remain subliminal, part of what James called the more to experience what Bruner (2002) calls the narrative unconscious. This means that there will always be profoundly more to our existence and to our moral identity than that of which we are explicitly awarealthough the potential for us or others to gain deeper insight into our moral identity remains (Rosch, 2002). Similarly, any personality change or conversion must reach us at this profound level, and that is why religious experience is so critical to James, Piaget and Varela. Granting the emotional basis of moral identityso important for the growthoriented approach to moral development that characterises the writings of James, Piaget and contemporary Buddhist psychologistshow does one develop a strong sense of moral identity (and spirituality) in modern educational settings? This question was critical to James (1899), but especially to Piaget (1998) and, in fact, was central to many in Geneva who sought to foster the political implications of pragmatism for democracy (Vidal, 1997).

Implications for Education Educating for Moral Insight and Wisdom Jamess emphasis on pure experience has signicant implications for public education, as developed in his Talks to Teachers (1899; see also Garrison et al., 2002). In Europe, similar ideas were developed through Flournoys inuence on his cousin Edouard Claparede, Pierre Bovet, and others at the Jean Jacques Rousseau ` Institutemost notably Jean Piaget. All saw themselves as part of a much larger movement of educational reform, spearheaded by the Genevan Adolphe Ferriere, ` designed to bring democracy to the classroom through new schools that prepared students not for the world as it was, but to create a better world for the future (Vidal, 1997). In fact, James (1899) and Piaget (1998) seem to speak as one voice in their recommendations to teachers. Both emphasise the need for curricula in which students work together democratically to foster mutual respect, de-center to adopt others perspectives, and engage in independent discovery or assessment of social rules about tasks that emotionally engage their interests about live issues or real importance to them, not in rote memorisation or seatwork. Both also linked the discovery of intellectual truths and moral identity through the direct re-discovery and re-verication of social rules freely accepted, not imposed by an outside authority (James, 1899; Piaget, 1998). The image is of children as masters of their own education. For example, Piaget advocated self-government not only of children themselves in classrooms, but as the spirit of the entire school, including administrative aspects and classroom instruction within a broad view of education (Piaget, 1998). Piagets (1998) opinions on educational programming for peace echo Jamess (1910) urging for a moral equivalent of war. Like James, Piaget (1998) believed that a true education for peace is not the mere teaching of pacist ideas. Instead, it

350 M. Ferrari & C. M. Okamoto depends on training the whole mind from childhood onwards to adapt the whole person to peace, not as a mere luxury, but as a necessity for life that is worth heroically ghting for. Perhaps as importantly, children must learn to regard the pain of others, for example by considering photographs of war (Sontag, 2003) or through an in-depth study of the Holocaust (Gardner, 1999). Certainly, this is the essential point also made by Varela (1992/1999). It also echoes Jamess pragmatic melioristic approach to developing a better quality of life by emphasising the cultural effects of personal striving for good. For both James and Piaget, real truths are built from ones pragmatic experience, and what counts as the greatest moral good cannot be decided until the last person has spoken (Flournoy, 1911; James, 1907a). Engaging Students in Moral Exercises In The Varieties of Religious Experience, James (1902) suggests that we access the increased personal energy that sustains moral conviction through grace, not by effort. Similarly, many proponents of moral development rely on insight that is gleaned from the right social conditions or reection on moral dilemmas. However, in Principles of Psychology (1890) and in Talks To Teachers (1899) James gives some concrete advice on how teachers can set up conditions that develop moral character. As he writes in Principles: gradually our will can lead us to the same results [as spontaneous insight] by a very simple method: we need only in cold blood ACT as if the thing in question were real, and keep acting as if it were real, and it infallibly end by growing into such a connection with our life that it will become real. It will become so knit with habit and emotion that our interests in it will be those which characterize belief (James, 1890/1981, pp. 948949). James attests to the power of these techniques or practices of self even more clearly in Energies of Men (1907b) as ways to overcome a certain blindness (James, 1899) to the central personal experience of others. To James (1907b) practices to best foster this sort of understanding are perhaps those of the Eastern wisdom-traditions such as yoga and mindfulness meditation. More recently, Varela (1992/1999) proposes that ethical expertise, the mark of moral development, must be developed and embodied through disciplines that facilitate the letting go of ego-centered habits and enable compassion to become spontaneous and self-sustaining (p. 73). Without pretending any direct link to the work of James, Piaget or Varela, a few educational programmes seem very much in their spirit. The closest in North American public schools today are programmes for Peace Education, Education for Democracy, and Deep Green education concerning ecology and sustainable development. Selby (2001) emphasises experientialtransformative learning, believing that educational programmes that teach conict resolution deny students inner journey. Instead, moral education must balance not only rational perspectives on moral problems, but also our most profound understanding of the value of human

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lifewhat James and the young Piaget, among others considered an immanent expression of the divine. In a very Buddhist way, Selby (2001) proposed exploring students inner ecology and their attunement to the senses and bodily rhythms as ways to promote spirituality in the curricula. This new paradigm of religious or spiritual belonging that is slowly entering public education inherently involves social responsibility (Capra and Steindl-Rast, 1991). Concretely, these programmes include simple ecological practices, such as recycling, that are a form of asceticism or moral discipline that seems consonant with Jamess proposal to foster saintliness and a moral equivalent to war (James, 1899, 1902, 1910). Selby also suggests that we learn from indigenous education and, for example, discuss death in the classroomthe all-encompassing blackness, as James (1902, p. 97) calls it. More simply, we can teach children in ways that emphasise the good, the true and the beautiful through any detailed case study that engages deep concerns. As Gardner (1999) shows elegantly, these educational goals are best approached through multiple pathways into a discipline that engage students intelligences in different ways.

Microdevelopment of Compassionate Understanding We believe that an important implication [for moral education] of Jamess meliorism and of Piagets stages of affective development comes from recent microgenetic studies of how individuals develop knowledge in new areas of inquiry (Granott & Parziale, 2002). Microgenetic studies of learning show that individualschildren or adultswho are novices in a particular domain of inquiry revert to their most primitive knowledge structures and stages in dealing with new tasks. Similarly, we all reason at different levels of abstraction under different task conditions (Granott & Parziale, 2002; Mascolo et al., 2003). This fact invites tolerance and compassion in the face of moral weakness under extreme or unusual conditions. It also invites a respect for institutions and practices that develop and sustain the most rened fruits of moral education built out of our pragmatic experience and activity. While the ideas of Selby and others in transformative education some times sound extremealmost evangelicalthey can be fostered and built upon microgenetically from an early age through very simple school programmes that allow children to experience personally and repeatedly their relationship to their immediate environment. For example, children can consider how to improve the state of their schoolyards, write environmental poetry or consider how we should treat animals as pets or for medical research. All these activities involve childrens direct and personal experiences of moral concerns and call for repeated and sustained action, not just understanding (Ferrari et al., 2003).

Conclusions The pathos of death is this, that when the days of ones life are ended, those days that were so crowded with business and felt heavy in their

352 M. Ferrari & C. M. Okamoto passing, what remains of one in memory should usually be so slight a thing. The phantom of an attitude, the echo of a certain mode of thought, a few pages of print, some invention, or some victory we gained in a brief critical hour, are all that can survive the best of us. It is as if the whole of a mans signicance had now shrunk into the phantom of an attitude, into a mere musical note or phrase suggestive of his singularityhappy are those whose singularity gives a note so clear as to be victorious over the inevitable pity of such a diminution and abridgment. So begins William Jamess address at the Emerson Centenary in Concord, May 25, 1903, but his words apply as well to a centenary for James himself and to the writings of Piaget and Varelaintellectual giants whose memory we continue to honour by sustaining their hope for a science of experience and its implications for education. Each was a genius in his own right who creatively assimilated and adapted the ideas they encountered to generate a body of work with its own distinct and beautiful note. Promoting microgenetic moral development by focusing on childrens experiential understanding of their lived ecologies is not the last word in either values or educational practice. The point we wish to make for moral education simply echoes Kitcher (2001), who says we need an education that develops citizens who will engage science and politics in terms of deeply considered and communally informed moral values. The aim is to develop wisdom and ethical expertise that instil a passion to follow personal interests and act melioristicallywithout the need for authoritarian moral rules imposed by law. The guiding question then becomes: does my way of living promise a better quality of lifeand most ambitiously, a better world? Correspondence: Michel Ferrari and Carol M. Okamoto, Department of Human Development and Applied Psychology, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto, 252 Bloor Street West, 9th Floor, Toronto, ON, M5S 1V6, Canada. E-mail: mferrari@oise.utoronto.ca
NOTES [1] In broad strokes, the problem of science and religion can be considered resolved, due especially to the convergent efforts of the philosophies of Boutraux, Hoeffding, and the pragmatism of W. James and Flournoy (Piaget, 1923, p. 38). [2] The root of dogmas and symbols is religious reality itself, its the vital process (that the innite and eternal Spirit creates, revealing itself) in mans spirit and in the very experiences of his piety. [3] In sum, it is not in searching for them, as such, that we achieve rational norms. It is working scientically that we discover them and feel them impose themselves upon us. It is the same with the divine. It is not in seeking it for itself that we lay hold of it, since that only provides a way to reassure ourselvesjust an idol fabricated for our own use. It is in acting in a way that, psychologically and sociologically, conscience/consciousness [conscience] blossoms. Wherever there exists free intellectual inquiry, absolute sincerity, forgetting of individual afrmation to prot truth, one participates in the normative activity of thought. [] The Spinozist identication of love and reason must be really lived. Then conscience/consciousness has the sui generis experience of agreeing with Thought, that is the supreme mystical experience. From hesitations of inquiry and conduct there

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thus follows, step by step, those moments of illumination during which a plenitude of inner equilibrium provides a certainty of participating in the Real. Going forward and regression towards the source then seem to conscience/consciousness as one and the same [note that, as in old English, the French word conscience means both conscience and consciousnessMF].

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