Excerpt from The Montessori Principles and Practice<br><br>Plato did a great disservice to humanity when, by banishing from geometry. All instruments save the ruler and compass, he crystallised a new distinction between the real and the ideal, between the practical and the intellectual life. In this he was but following, in his own aristocratic way, the highest conceptions of the Greek mind - for the Greeks were a slave owning race. Thus arose the unhappy divorce between thought and action, between liberal knowledge and useful knowledge, which has always, sooner or later, sapped the vitality of thought itself. And although the renaissances of European thought have in every case been due to the influence of the Greek writings, inspiring great minds with the Greek passion for the exercise of the pure intellect, yet they have always occurred in connection with an intense interest in the actual problems of life. And even in the Universities them selves, in proportion as that interest has declined, and the curriculum has been given a purely disciplinary character, there also thought has lost its vitality.<br><br>About the Publisher<br><br>Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com<br><br>This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.