Pedagogics as a System Part 9

-- 211. The stringed instrument, the cithern, was preferred by the Greeks to all wind instruments because it was not exciting, and allowed the accompaniment of recitation or song, i.e. the contemporaneous activity of the spirit in poetry. Flute-playing was first brought from Asia Minor after the victorious progress of the Persian war, and was especially cultivated in Thebes. They sought in vain afterwards to oppose the wild excitement raised by its influence.

-- 212. Grammar comprehended Letters (???ata), i.e. the elements of literary culture, reading and writing. Much attention was given to correct expression. The Fables of aesop, the Iliad, and the Odyssey, and later the tragic poets, were read, and partly learned by heart. The orators borrowed from them often the ornament of their commonplace remarks.

-- 213. (3) The internal growth of what was peculiar to the Grecian State came to an end with the war for the Hegemony. Its dissolution began, and the philosophical period followed the political. The beautiful ethical life was resolved into thoughts of the True, Good, and Beautiful.

Individuality turned more towards the internal, and undertook to subject freedom, the existing regulations, laws and customs, to the criticism of reason as to whether these were in and for themselves universal and necessary. The Sophists, as teachers of Grammar, Rhetoric, and Philosophy, undertook to extend the cultivation of Reflection; and this introduced instability in the place of the immediate fixed state of moral customs. Among the women, the _Hetaerae_ undertook the same revolution; in the place of the p?t??a ?t?? appeared the beauty, who isolated herself in the consciousness of her charms and in the perfection of her varied culture, and exhibited herself to the public admiration. The tendency to idiosyncrasy often approached wilfulness, caprice and whimsicality, and opposition to the national moral sense. A Diogenes in a tub became possible; the soulless but graceful frivolity of an Alcibiades charmed, even though it was externally condemned; a Socrates completed the break in consciousness, and urged upon the system of the old morality the pregnant question, whether Virtue could be taught? Socrates worked as a philosopher who was to educate. Pythagoras had imposed upon his pupils the abstraction of a common, exactly-defined manner of living. Socrates, on the contrary, freed his disciples--in general, those who had intercourse with him--leading them to the consciousness of their own individuality. He revolutionized the youth in that he taught them, instead of a thoughtless obedience to moral customs, to seek to comprehend their purpose in the world, and to rule their actions according to it. Outwardly he conformed in politics, and in war as at Marathon; but in the direction of his teaching he was subjective and modern.

-- 214. This idea, that Virtue could be taught, was realized especially by Plato and Aristotle; the former inclining to Dorianism, the latter holding to the principle of individuality in nearly the modern sense. As regards the pedagogical means--Gymnastics, Music, and Grammar--both philosophers entirely agreed. But, in the seizing of the pedagogical development in general, Plato a.s.serted that the education of the individual belonged to the state alone, because the individual was to act wholly in the state. On the other hand, Aristotle also holds that the state should conduct the education of its citizens, and that the individual should be trained for the interest of the state; but he recognizes also the family, and the peculiarity of the individual, as positive powers, to which the state must accord relative freedom. Plato sacrificed the family to the state, and must therefore have sacred marriages, nurseries, and common and public educational inst.i.tutions.

Each one shall do only that which he is fitted to do, and shall work at this only for the sake of perfecting it: to what he shall direct his energies, and in what he shall be instructed, shall be determined by the government, and the individuality consequently is not left free.

Aristotle also will have for all the citizens the same education, which shall be common and public; but he allows, at the same time, an independence to the family and self-determination to the individual, so that a sphere of private life presents itself within the state: a difference by means of which a much broader sway of individuality is possible.

--These two philosophers have come to represent two very different directions in Pedagogics, which at intervals, in certain stages of culture, reappear--the tyrannical guardianship of the state which a.s.sumes the work of education, tyrannical to the individual, and the free development of the liberal state-education, in opposition to idiosyncrasy and fate.--

-- 215. The principle of aesthetic individuality reaches its highest manifestation when the individual, in the decay of public life, in the disappearance of all beautiful morality, isolates himself, and seeks to gain in his isolation such strength that he can bear the changes of external history around him with composure--"ataraxy." The Stoics sought to attain this end by turning their attention inward into pure internality, and thus, by preserving the self-determination of abstract thinking and willing, maintaining an ident.i.ty with themselves: the Epicureans endeavored to do the same, with this difference however, that they strove after a positive satisfaction of the senses by filling them with concrete pleasurable sensations. As a consequence of this, the Stoics isolated themselves in order to maintain themselves in the exclusiveness of their internal unconditioned relation to themselves, while the Epicureans lived in companies, because they achieved the reality of their pleasure-seeking principle through harmony of feeling and through the sweetness of friendship. In so far the Epicureans were Greeks and the Stoics Romans. With both, however, the beauty of manifestation was secondary to the immobility of the inner feeling. The plastic attainment of the Good and the Beautiful was cancelled in the abstraction of thinking and feeling. This was the advent of the Roman principle among the Greeks.

-- 216. The pedagogical significance of Stoicism and Epicureanism consists in this, that, after the moral life in public and in private were sundered from each other, the individual began to educate himself, through philosophical culture, into stability of character, for which reason the Roman emperors particularly disliked the Stoics. At many times, a resignation to the Stoic philosophy was sufficient to make one suspected. But, at last, the n.o.ble emperor, in order to win himself a hold in the chaos of things, was forced himself to become a Stoic and to flee to the inaccessible stillness of the self-thinking activity and the self-moving will. Stoics and Epicureans had both what we call an ideal.

The Stoics used the expression "kingdom"; as Horace says, sarcastically, "_Sapiens rex est nisi--pituita molesta est_."

II. _Practical Education._

-- 217. The truth of the solution of the beautiful individuality is the promise of the activity conformable to its purpose [i.e. teleological activity], which on the one hand considers carefully end and means, and on the other hand seeks to realize the end through the corresponding means, and in this deed subjects mere beauty of form. The practical individuality is therefore externally conditioned, since it is not its own end like the Beautiful, whether Stoical or Epicurean, but has an end, and finds its satisfaction not so much in this after it is attained as in the striving for its attainment.

-- 218. The education of this system begins with very great simplicity.

But after it has attained its object, it abandons itself to using the results of aesthetic culture as a recreation without any specific object.

What was to the Greeks a real delight in the Beautiful became therefore with the Romans simply an aesthetic amus.e.m.e.nt, and as such must finally be wearisome. The earnestness of individuality made itself in mysticism into a new aim, which was distinguished from the original one in that it concealed in itself a mystery and exacted a theoretically aesthetic practice.

-- 219. (1) The first epoch of Roman education, as properly Roman, was the juristic-military education of the republic. The end and aim of the Roman was Rome; and Rome, as from the beginning an eclectic state, could endure only while its laws and external politics were conformable to some end. It bore the same contradiction within itself as in its external att.i.tude. This forced it into robbery, and the plebeians were related to the patricians in the same way, for they robbed them gradually of all their privileges. On this account education directed itself partly to giving a knowledge of the Law, partly to communicating a capacity for war. The boys were obliged to commit to memory and recite the laws of the twelve tables, and all the youths were subject to military service. The Roman possessed no individuality of native growth, but one mediated through the intermingling of various fugitives, which developed a very great energy. Hence from the first he was attentive to himself, he watched jealously over the limits of his rights and the rights of others, measured his strength, moderated himself, and constantly guarded himself. In contrast with the careless cheerfulness of the Greeks, he therefore appears gloomy.

--The Latin tongue is crowded with expressions which paint presence of mind, effort at reflection, a critical att.i.tude of mind, the importance of personal control: as _gravitas morum, sui compos esse, sibi constare, austeritas, vir strenuus, vir probus, vitam honestam gerere, sibimet ipse imperare_, &c. The Etruscan element imparted to this earnestness an especially solemn character. The Roman was no more, like the Greek, unembarra.s.sed at naturalness. He was ashamed of nakedness; _verecundia, pudor_, were genuinely Roman. _Vitam praeferre pudori_ was shameful. On the contrary, the Greek gave to Greeks a festival in exhibiting the splendor of his naked body, and the inhabitants of Crotona erected a statue to Philip only because he was so perfectly beautiful. Simply to be beautiful, only beautiful, was enough for the Greek. But a Roman, in order to be recognized, must have done something for Rome: _se bene de republica mereri_.--

-- 220. In the first education of children the agency of the mother is especially influential, so that woman with the Romans took generally a more moral, a higher, and a freer position. It is worthy of remark that while, as the beautiful, she set the Greeks at variance, among the Romans, through her ethical authority, she acted as reconciler.

-- 221. The mother of the Roman helped to form his character; the father undertook the work of instruction. When in his fifteenth year the boy exchanged the _toga praetextata_ for the _toga virilis_, he was usually sent to some relative, or to some jurist, as his guardian, to learn thoroughly, under his guidance, of the laws and of the state; with the seventeenth began military service. All education was for a long time entirely a private affair. On account of the necessity of a mechanical unity in work which war demands, the greatest stress was laid upon obedience. In its restricted sense education comprised Reading, Writing, and Arithmetic; the last being, on account of its usefulness, more esteemed by the Romans than by the Greeks, who gave more time to Geometry. The schools, very characteristically, were called _Ludi_, because their work was, in distinction from other practice, regarded simply as a recreation, as play.

--The Roman recognized with pride this distinction between the Greek and himself; Cicero's Introduction to his Essay on Oratory expresses it. To be practical was always the effort of the reflective character of the Romans, which was always placing new ends and seeking the means for their attainment; which loved moderation, not to secure beauty thereby, but respected it as a means for a happy success (_medium tenuere beati_); which did not possess serene self-limitation, or s?f??s???, but calculation _quid valeant humeri, quid ferre recusent_; but which, in general, went far beyond the Greeks in persistency of will, in _constantia animi_. The schools were at first held publicly in shops; hence the name _trivium_. Very significant for the Roman is the predicate which he conferred upon theoretical subjects when he called them _artes bonae_, _optimae_, _liberales_, _ingenuae_, &c., and brought forth the practical element in them.--

-- 222. (2) But the practical education could no longer keep its ground after it had become acquainted with the aesthetic. The conquest of Greece, Asia Minor, and Egypt, made necessary, in a practical point of view, the acquisition of the Grecian tongue, so that these lands, so permeated with Grecian culture, might be thoroughly ruled. The Roman of family and property, therefore, took into his service Greek nurses and teachers who should give to his children, from their earliest years, Greek culture. It is, in the history of education, a great evil when a nation undertakes to teach a foreign tongue to its youth. Then the necessity of trade with the Greeks caused the study of Rhetoric, so that not only in the deliberations of the senate and people, but in law, the ends might be better attained. Whatever effort the Roman government made to prevent the invasion of the Greek rhetorician was all in vain. The Roman youth sought for this knowledge, which was so necessary to them in foreign lands, e.g. in the flourishing school of rhetoric on the island of Rhodes. At last, even the study of Philosophy commended itself to the practical Roman, in order that he might recover for himself confidence amid the disappointments of life. When his practical life did not bring him any result, he devoted himself in his poverty to abstract contemplation. The Greeks would have Philosophy for its own sake; the ataraxy of the Stoics, Epicureans, and Skeptics even, desired the result of a necessary principle; but the Roman, on the contrary, wished to lift himself by philosophemes above trouble and misfortune.

--This direction which Philosophy took is noteworthy, not alone in Cicero and Seneca, but at the fall of the Roman empire, when Boethius wrote in his prison his immortal work on the consolations of Philosophy.--

-- 223. The earnestness which sought a definite end degenerated in the very opposite of activity with him who had no definite aim. The idleness of the wealthy Roman, who felt himself to be the lord of a limitless world, devoted itself to dissipation and desire for enjoyment, which, in its entire want of moderation, abused nature. The finest form of the extant education was that in _belles-lettres_, which also for the first time came to belong to the sphere of Pedagogics. There had been a degeneration of art in India and Greece, and also an artistic trifling.

But in Rome there arose a pursuit of art in order to win a certain consideration in social position, and to create for one's self a recreation in the emptiness of a soul satiated with sensual debauchery.

Such a seizing of art is frivolous, for it no longer recognizes its absoluteness, and subordinates it as a means to subjective egotism.

Literary _salons_ then appear.

--In the introduction to his _Cataline_, Sall.u.s.t has painted excellently this complete revolution in the Roman education. The younger Pliny in his letters furnishes ample material to ill.u.s.trate to us this pursuit of _belles-lettres_. In Nero it became idiotic. We should transgress our prescribed limits did we enter here into particulars. An a.n.a.lysis would show the perversion of the aesthetic into the practical, the aesthetic losing thereby its proper nature. But the Roman could not avoid this perversion, because, according to his original aim, he could not move except towards the _utile et honestum_.--

-- 224. (3) But this pursuit of fine art, this aimless parade, must at last weary the Roman. He sought for himself again an object to which he could vigorously devote himself. His sovereignty was a.s.sured, and conquest as an object could no more charm him. The national religion had fallen with the destruction of the national individuality. The soul looked out over its historical life into an empty void. It sought to establish a relation between itself and the next world by means of daemonic forces, and in place of the depreciated nationality and its religion we find the eclecticism of the mystic society. There were, it is true, in national religions certain secret signs, rites, words, and meanings; but now, for the first time in the history of the world, there appeared mysteries as pedagogical societies, which concerned themselves only with private things and were indifferent to nationality. Everything was profaned by the roughness of violence. Man believed no longer in the old G.o.ds, and the superst.i.tious faith in ghosts became only a thing fit to frighten children with. Thus man took refuge in secrecy, which had for his satiety a piquant charm.

-- 225. The education of the mysteries was twofold, theoretical and practical. In the theoretical we find a regular gradation of symbols and symbolical acts through which one seemed gradually to attain to the revelation of the secret; the practical contained a regular gradation of ascetic actions alternating with an abandonment to wild orgies. Both raised one from the rank of the novice to that of the initiated. In the higher orders they formed an ethical code of laws, and this form Pedagogics has retained in all such secret culture, _mutatis mutandis_, down to the Illuminati.

--In the Roman empire, its Persian element was the worship of Mithras; its Egyptian, that of Isis; its Grecian, the Pythagorean doctrines. All these three, however, were much mingled with each other. The Roman legions, who really no longer had any native country, bore these artificial religions throughout the whole world. The confusion of excitement led often to Somnambulism, which was not yet understood, and to belief in miracles. Apollonius of Tyana, the messiah of Ethnicism, is the princ.i.p.al figure in this group; and, in comparison with him, Jamblichus appears only as an enthusiast and Alexander of Abonoteichos as an impostor.--

III. _Abstract Individual Education._

-- 226. What the despair of the declining nations sought for in these mysteries was Individuality, which in its singularity is conscious of the universality of the rational spirit, as its own essence. This individuality existed more immediately in the Germanic race, which nevertheless, on account of its nature, formed first in Christianity its true actualization. It can be here only pointed out that they most thoroughly, in opposition to nature, to men, and to the G.o.ds, felt themselves to be independent; as Tacitus says, "_Securi adversus homines, securi adversus Deos_." This individuality, which had only itself for an end, must necessarily be destroyed, and was saved only by Christianity, which overcame and enlightened its daemonic and defiant spirit. We cannot speak here of a system of Education. Respect for personality, the free acknowledgment of the claims of woman, the loyalty to the leader chosen by themselves, loyalty to their friends (the idea of fellowship),--these features should all be well-noted, because from them arose the feudalism of the middle ages. What Caesar and Tacitus tell us of the education of the Germans expresses only the emanc.i.p.ation of individuality, which in its immediate crudeness had no other form in which to manifest itself than wars of conquest.

--To the Roman there was something daemonic in the German. He perceived dimly in him his future, his master. When the Romans were to meet the Cimbri and Teutons in the field, their commander had first to accustom them for a whole day to the fearful sight of the wild, giant-like forms.--

SECOND DIVISION.

THE SYSTEM OF THEOCRATIC EDUCATION.

-- 227. The system of National Education founded its first stage on the substantial basis of the family-spirit; its second stage on the division of the nation by means of division of labor which it makes permanent in castes; its third stage presents the free opposition of the laity and clergy; in its next phase it makes war, immortality, and trade, by turns, its end; thirdly, it posits beauty, patriotic youth, and the immediateness of individuality, as the essence of mankind, and at last dissolves the unity of nationality in the consciousness that all nations are really one since they are all human beings. In the intermixture of races in the Roman world arises the conception of the human race, the _genus humanum_. Education had become eclectic: the Roman legions levelled the national distinctions. In the wavering of all objective morality, the necessity of self-education in order to the formation of character appeared ever more and more clearly; but the conception, which lay at the foundation, was always, nevertheless, that of Roman, Greek, or German education. But in the midst of these nations another system had striven for development, and this did not base itself on the natural connection of nationality, but made this, for the first time, only a secondary thing, and made the direct relation of man to G.o.d its chief idea. In this system G.o.d himself is the teacher. He manifests to man His will as law, to which he must unconditionally conform for no other reason than that He is the Lord, and man His servant, who can have no other will than His. The obedience of man is therefore, in this system, abstract until through experience he gradually attains to the knowledge that the will of G.o.d has in it the very essence of his own will.

Descent, Talent, Events, Work, Beauty, Courage,--all these are indifferent things compared with the subjection of the human to the divine will. To be well-pleasing to G.o.d is almost the same as belief in Him. Without this ident.i.ty, what is natural in national descent is of no value. According to its form of manifestation, Judaism is below the Greek spirit. It is not beautiful, but rather grotesque. But in its essence, as the religion of the contradiction between the idea and its existence, it goes beyond nature, which it perceives to be established by an absolute, conscious, and reasonable Will; while the Greek concealed from himself only mythically his dependence on nature, on his mother-earth. The Jews have been preserved in the midst of all other culture by the elastic power of the thought of G.o.d as One who was free from the control of nature. The Jews have a patriotism in common with the Romans. The Maccabees, for example, were not inferior to the Romans in greatness.

--Abraham is the genuine Jew because he is the genuinely faithful man.

He does not hesitate to obey the horrible and inhuman command of his G.o.d. Circ.u.mcision was made the token of the national unity, but the nation may a.s.similate members to itself from other nations through this rite. The condition always lies in belief in a spiritual relation to which the relation of nationality is secondary. The Jewish nation makes proselytes, and these are widely different from the _Socii_ of the Romans or the _Metoeci_ of the Athenians.--

-- 228. To the man who knows Nature to be the work of a single, incomparable, rational Creator, she loses independence. He is negatively freed from her control, and sees in her only an absolute means. As opposed to the fanciful sensuous intuitions of Ethnicism, this seems to be a backward step, but for the emanc.i.p.ation of man it is a progress. He no longer fears Nature but her Lord, and admires Him so much that prose rises to the dignity of poetry in his telological contemplation. Since man stands over and beyond nature, education is directed to morality as such, and spreads itself out in innumerable limitations, by means of which the distinction of man from nature is expressly a.s.serted as a difference. The ceremonial law appears often arbitrary, but in its prescriptions it gives man the satisfaction of placing himself as will in relation to will. For example, if he is forbidden to eat any specified part of an animal, the ground of this command is not merely natural--it is the will of the Deity. Man learns therefore, in his obedience to such directions, to free himself from his self-will, from his natural desires. This exact outward conformity to subjectivity is the beginning of wisdom, the purification of the will from all individual egotism.

--The rational substance of the Law is found always in the Decalogue.

Many of our modern much-admired authors exhibit a superficiality bordering on shallowness when they comment alone on the absurdity of the miracles, and abstract from the profound depth of the moral struggle, and from the practical rationality of the ten commandments.--

-- 229. Education in this theocratical system is on one side patriarchal.

The Family is very prominent, because it is considered to be a great happiness for the individual to belong from his very earliest life to the company of those who believe in the true G.o.d. On its other side it is hierarchical, as its ceremonial law develops a special office, which is to see that obedience is paid to its multifarious regulations. And, because these are often perfectly arbitrary, Education must, above all, practise the memory in learning them all, so that they may always be remembered. The Jewish monotheism shares this necessity with the superst.i.tion of ethnicism.

-- 230. But the technique proper of the mechanism is not the most important pedagogical element of the theocracy. We find this in its historical significance, since its history throughout has a pedagogical character. For the people of G.o.d show us always, in their changing intercourse with their G.o.d, a progress from the external to the internal, from the lower to the higher, from the past to the future. Its history, therefore, abounds in situations very interesting in a pedagogical point of view, and in characters which are eternal models.

-- 231. (1) The will of G.o.d as the absolute authority is at first to them, as law, external. But soon G.o.d adds to the command to obedience, on one hand, the inducement of a promise of material prosperity, and on the other hand the threat of material punishment. The fulfilment of the law is also encouraged by reflection on the profit which it brings. But, since these motives are all external, they rise finally into the insight that the law is to be fulfilled, not on their account, but because it is the will of the Lord; not alone because it is conducive to our happiness, but also because it is in itself holy, and written in our hearts: in other words, man proceeds from the abstract legality, through the reflection of eudaemonism, to the internality of moral sentiment--the course of all education.

--This last stand-point is especially represented in the excellent Gnomic of Jesus Sirach--a book so rich in pedagogical insight, which paints with master-strokes the relations of husband and wife, parents and children, master and servants, friend and friend, enemy and enemy, and the dignity of labor as well as the necessity of its division. This priceless book forms a side-piece from the theocratic stand-point to the _Republic_ of Plato and his laws on ethical government.--

-- 232. (2) The progress from the lower to the higher appeared in the conquering of the natural individuality. Man, as the servant of Jehovah, must have no will of his own; but selfish naturalness arrayed itself so much the more vigorously against the abstract "Thou shalt," allowed itself to descend into an abstraction from the Law, and often reached the most unbridled extravagance. But since the Law in inexorable might always remained the same, always persistent, in distinction from the inequalities of the deed of man, it forced him to come back to it, and to conform himself to its demands. Thus he learned criticism, thus he rose from naturalness into spirit. This progress is at the same time a progress from necessity to freedom, because criticism always gradually opens a way for man into insight, so that he finds the will of G.o.d to be the truth of his own self-determination. Because G.o.d is one and absolute, there arises the expectation that His Will will become the basis for the will of all nations and men. The criticism of the understanding must recognize a contradiction in the fact that the will of the true G.o.d is the law of only one nation; feared by other nations, moreover, by reason of their very worship of G.o.d as a gloomy mystery, and detested as _odium generis humani_. And thus is developed the thought that the isolation of the believers will come to an end as soon as the other nations recognize their faith as the true one, and are received into it. Thus here, out of the deepest penetration of the soul into itself, as among the Romans out of the fusion of nations, we see appear the idea of the human race.

-- 233. (3) The progress from the past to the future unfolded the ideal servant of G.o.d who fulfils all the Law, and so blots out the empirical contradiction that the "Thou shalt" of the Law attains no adequate actuality. This Prince of Peace, who shall gather all nations under his banner, can therefore have no other thing predicated of him than Holiness. He is not beautiful as the Greeks represented their ideal, not brave and practical as was the venerated _Virtus_ of the Romans; he does not place an infinite value on his individuality as the German does: but he is represented as insignificant in appearance, as patient, as humble, as he who, in order to reconcile the world, takes upon himself the infirmities and disgrace of all others. The ethnical nations have only a lost Paradise behind them; the Jews have one also before them. From this belief in the Messiah who is to come, from the certainty which they have of conquering with him, from the power of esteeming all things of small importance in view of such a future, springs the indestructible nature of the Jews. They ignore the fact that Christianity is the necessary result of their own history. As the nation that is to be (_des Seinsollens_), they are merely a historical nation, the nation among nations, whose education--whenever the Jew has not changed and corrupted its nature through modern culture--is still always patriarchal, hierarchal, and mnemonic.

THIRD DIVISION.

THE SYSTEM OF HUMANITARIAN EDUCATION

-- 234. The systems of national and theocratic education came to the same result, though by different ways, and this result is the conception of a human race in the unity of which the distinctions of different nations find their Truth. But with them this result is only a conception, being a thing external to their actuality. They arrive at the painting of an ideal of the way in which the Messiah shall come. But these ideals exist only in the mind, and the actual condition of the people sometimes does not correspond to them at all, and sometimes only very relatively. The idea of spirit had in these presuppositions the possibility of its concrete actualization; one individual man must become conscious of the universality and necessity of the will as being the very essence of his own freedom, so that all heteronomy should be cancelled in the autonomy of spirit. Natural individuality appearing as national determinateness was still acknowledged, but was deprived of its abstract isolation. The divine authority of the truth of the individual will is to be recognized, but at the same time freed from its estrangement towards itself. While Christ was a Jew and obedient to the divine Law, he knew himself as the universal man who determines himself to his own destiny; and while only distinguishing G.o.d, as subject, from himself, yet holds fast to the unity of man and G.o.d. The system of humanitarian education began to unfold from this principle, which no longer accords the highest place to the natural unity of national individuality, nor to the abstract obedience of the command of G.o.d, but to that freedom of the soul which knows itself to be absolute necessity.

Christ is not a mere ideal of the thought, but is known as a living member of actual history, whose life, sufferings and death for freedom form the security as to its absolute justification and truth. The aesthetic, philosophical, and political ideal are all found in the universal nature of the Christian ideal, on which account no one of them appears one-sided in the life of Christ. The principle of Human Freedom excludes neither art, nor science, nor political feeling.

-- 235. In its conception of man the humanitarian education includes both the national divisions and the subjection of all men to the divine law, but it will no longer endure that one should grow into an isolating exclusiveness, and another into a despotism which includes in it somewhat of the accidental. But this principle of humanity and human nature took root so slowly that its presuppositions were repeated within itself and were really conquered in this reproduction. These stages of culture were the Greek, the Roman, and the Protestant churches, and education was metamorphosed to suit the formation of each of these.