This paper considers several philosophers’ efforts to explain the metaphysical orientations of historical narratives, ones which expose the lack of common ground in modes of establishing truth and documenting change. Although philosophers have been writing about history since before Plato’s time, this brief inquiry is primarily restricted to Hegel, Maritain, R. G. Collingwood, and W. H. Walsh. The relation between history and the concept of civilization reveals a major complication for establishing historical truth – the fact of multiple meanings for the concept of civilization.

Jacques Maritain's concern for the intellect and everything it implies is evident everywhere in his work from the very outset It would be presumptuous and in any case impossible to sketch in one short talk even an outline of such a fundamental theme of his thought or indeed of philosophy. Still, it has become probably more vital today than ever before to awake to what intellect means. This brief paper attempts merely to indicate a few questions worth pursuing anew in the spirit both of Maritain and the chief sources of his thought on the matter. The questions include the following. Why invariably link together human dignity and intellect, as our tradition, no less theological than philosophical, undoubtedly seems to? Objections to this are, prima facie, rather obvious: an excessive cult of rationality; an implicit neglect of other, far more important, values; apparent scorn for the ignorant or the uninstructed; most plainly, forgetting love and the human heart. We face again the question: whence the dignity of intellect? What light can we expect the neurosciences and similar disciplies to shed on the nature of the mind? Are reason and intellect quite the same thing? What is intellectualknow ledge; its relation to existence and the existent; its relation to beauty and to the transcendentals; and its role in creativity? In a word, how is one to interpret Augustine's Intellectum vero valdeama? Or to face the greatest interpretive challenge of all, the famous saying of StJohn of the Cross: "One thought alone of man is worth more than the entire world; hence God alone is worthy of it"?

For John Dewey, philosophy is "the theory of education in its most general aspects." Throughout history we see a close tie between an author's philosophical thought and his educational principles. Jacques Maritain is quite aware of this, and manifests it in his own writing. In Maritain the educational theorist is Maritain the metaphysician. His metaphysics of the human person and of human action, of knowledge and free will, treated in Existence and the Existent, are at the heart of Towards a Philosophy of Education, not only in a general way but even in its practical application, such as the choice of a curriculum and the pedagogical methods used.