III.The Absolute Process of Religious Culture.
§ 169. In comparing the stages of the theoretical and practical culture of the religious feeling their internal correspondence appears. Feeling, as immediate knowledge, and the consecration of the sense by means of piety; imagination with all its images, and the church services with their ceremonial observances; finally, the comprehending of religion as the reconciliation with destiny, as the internal emancipation from the dominion of external events—all these correspond to each other. If we seize this parallelism all together, we have the progress which religion must make in its historical process, in which it (1) begins as natural; (2) goes on to historical precision, and (3) elevates this to a rational faith. These stages await every man in as far as he lives through a complete religious culture, but this may be for the individual a question of chance.
§ 170. (1) A child has as yet no definite religious feeling. He is still only a possibility capable of manifold determinations. But, since he is a spirit, the essence of religion is active in him, though as yet in an unconscious form. The substance of spirit attests its presence in every individual, through his mysterious impulse toward the absolute and towards intercourse with God. This is the initiatory stage of natural religion, which must not be confounded with the religion which makes nature the object of worship (fetichism, &c.)
§ 171. (2) But while the child lives into this in his internal life, he comes in contact with definite forms of religion, and will naturally, through the mediation of the family, be introduced to some one of them. His religious feeling takes now a particular direction, and he accepts religion in one of its historical forms. This positive religion meets the precise want of the child, because it brings into his consciousness, by means of teaching and sacred rites, the principal elements which are found in the nature of religion.
§ 172. (3) In contradistinction to the natural basis of religious feeling, all historical religions rest on the authoritative basis of revelation from God to man. They address themselves to the imagination, and offer a system of objective forms of worship and ceremonies. But spirit, as eternal, as self-identical, cannot forbear as thinking activity to subject the traditional religion to criticism and to compare it as a phenomenal existence. From this criticism arises a religion which satisfies the demands of the reason, and which, by means of insight into the necessity of the historical process, leads to the exercise of a genuine toleration towards its many-sided forms. This religion mediates between the unity of the thinking consciousness and the religious content, while this content, in the history of religious feeling, appears theoretically as dogma, and practically as the command of an absolute and incomprehensible authority. It is just as simple as the unsophisticated natural religious feeling, but its simplicity is at the same time master of itself. It is just as specific in its determinations as the historical religion, but its determinateness is at the same time universal, since it is worked out by the thinking reason.
§ 173. Education must superintend the development of the religious consciousness towards an insight into the necessary consequence of its different stages. Nothing is more absurd than for the educator to desire to avoid the introduction of a positive religion, or a definite creed, as a middle stage between the natural beginning of religious feeling and its end in philosophical culture. Only when a man has lived through the entire range of one-sided phases—through the crudeness of such a concrete individualizing of religion, and has come to recognize the universal nature of religion in a special form of it which excludes other forms—only when the spirit of a congregation has taken him into its number, is he ripe to criticize religion in a conciliatory spirit, because he has then gained a religious character through that historical experience. The self-comprehending universality must have such a solid basis as this in the life of the man; it can never form the beginning of one's culture, but it may constitute the end which turns back again to the beginning. Most men remain at the historical stand-point. The religion of reason, as that of the minority, constitutes in the different religions the invisible church, which seeks by progressive reform to purify these religions from superstition and unbelief. It is the duty of the state, by making all churches equal in the sight of the law, to guard religion from the temptation of impure motives, and, through the granting of such freedom to religious individuality, to help forward the unity of a rational insight into religion which is distinct from the religious feeling only in its form, not in its content. Not a philosopher, but Jesus of Nazareth freed the world from all selfishness and all bondage.
§ 174. With this highest theoretical and practical emancipation, the general work of education ends. It remains now to be shown how the general idea of Education shapes its special elements into their appropriate forms. From the nature of Pedagogics, which concerns itself with man in his entirety, this exposition belongs partly to the history of culture in general, partly to the history of religion, partly to the philosophy of history. The pedagogical element in it always lies in the ideal which the spirit of a nation or of an age creates out of itself, and which it seeks to realize in its youth.
THIRD PART.
Particular Systems of Education.
§ 175. The definite actuality of Education originates in the fact that its general idea is individualized, according to its special elements, in a specific statement which we call a pedagogical principle. The number of these principles is not unlimited, but from the idea of Education contains only a certain number. If we derive them therefore, we derive at the same time the history of Pedagogics, which can from its very nature do nothing else than make actual in itself the possibilities involved in the idea of Education. Such a derivation may be called anà prioriconstruction of history, but it is different from what is generally denoted by this term in not pretending to deduce single events and characters. All empirical details are confirmation or illustration for it, but it does not attempt to seek this empirical elementà priori.
—The history of Pedagogics is still in the stage of infancy. At one time it is taken up into the sphere of Politics; at another, into that of the history of Culture. The productions of some of the most distinguished writers on the subject are now antiquated. Cramer of Stralsund made, in 1832, an excellent beginning in a comprehensive and thorough history of Pedagogy; but in the beginning of his second part he dwelt too long upon the Greeks, and lost himself in too wide an exposition of practical Philosophy in general. Alexander Kapp has given us excellent treatises on the Pedagogics of Aristotle and Plato. But with regard to modern Pedagogics we have relatively very little. Karl v. Raumer, in 1843, began to publish a history of Pedagogics since the time of the revival of classical studies, and has accomplished much of value on the biographical side. But the idea of the general connection and dependence of the several manifestations has not received much attention, and since the time of Pestalozzi books have assumed the character of biographical confessions.Strümpell, in 1843, developed the Pedagogics of Kant, Fichte, and Herbart.—
§ 176. Man is educated by man for humanity. This is the fundamental idea of all Pedagogics. But in the shaping of Pedagogics we cannot begin with the idea of humanity as such, but only with the natural form in which it primarily manifests itself—that of the nation. But the naturalness of this principle disappears in its development, since nations appear in interaction on each other and begin dimly to perceive their unity of species. The freedom of spirit over nature makes its appearance, but to the spirit explicitly in the transcendent form of abstract theistic religion, in which God appears as the ruler over Nature as merely dependent; and His chosen people plant the root of their nationality no longer in the earth, but in this belief. The unity of the abstractly natural and abstractly spiritual determinateness is the concrete unity of the spirit with nature, in which it recognizes nature as its necessary organ, and itself as in its nature divine. Spirit in this stage, as the internal presupposition of the two previously named, takes up into itself on one hand the phase of nationality, since this is the form of its immediate individualization; but it no longer distinguishes between nations as if they were abstractly severed the one from the other, as the Greeks shut out all other nations under the name of barbarians. It also takes up into itself the phase of spirituality, since it knows itself as spirit, and knows itself to be free from nature, and yet it does not estrange itself as the Jews did in their representation of pure spirit, in reference to which nature seems to be only the work of its caprice. Humanity knows nature as its own, because it knows the Divine spirit and its creative energy manifesting itself in nature and history, as also the essence of its own spirit. Education can be complete only with Christianity as the religion of humanity.
§ 177. We have thus three different systems of religion—(1) the National; (2) the Theocratic; and (3) the Humanitarian. The first works in harmony with nature since it educates the individual as a type of his species. The original nationality endeavors sharply to distinguish itself from others, and to impress on each person the stamp of its uniform type.One individual is like every other, or at least should be so. The second system in its manner of manifestation is identical with the first. It even marks the national difference more emphatically; but the ground of the uniformity of the individuals is with it not merely the natural common interest, but it is the consequence of the spiritual unity, which abstracts from nature, and as history, satisfied with no present, hovers continually outside of itself between past and future. The theocratic system educates the individual as the servant of God. He is the true Jew only in so far as he is this; the genealogical identity with the father Abraham is a condition but not the principle of the nationality. The third system liberates the individual to the enjoyment of freedom as his essence, and educates the human being within national limits which no longer separate but unite, and, in the consciousness that each individual, without any kind of mediation, has a direct relation to God, makes of him a man who knows himself to be a member of the spiritual world of humanity. We can have no fourth system beyond this. From the side of the State-Pedagogics we might characterize these systems as that of the nation-State, the God-State, and the humanity-State. From the time of the establishment of the last, no one nation can attain to any sovereignty over the others. By means of the world-religion of Christianity, the education of nations has come to the point of taking for its ideal, man as determining himself according to the demands of reason.
First Division.
THE SYSTEM OF NATIONAL EDUCATION.
§ 178. The National is the primitive system of education, since the family is the organic starting-point of all education, and is in its enlargement the basis of nationality.
—Education is always education of the mind. Even unorganized nations, those in a state of nature, the so-called savage nations, are possessed of something more than a mere education of the body; for, though they set much value upon gymnastic and warlike practice and give much time to them, they inculcate also respect for parents, for the aged, and for the decrees of the community. Education with them is essentially family training, and its content is natural loveand reverence. We cannot deny that the finer forms of those to which we are accustomed are wanting. Besides, education among all these people of nature is very simple and much the same, though great differences in its management may exist arising from differences of situation or from temperament of race.—
§ 179. National Education is divided into three special systems: (1) Passive, (2) Active, (3) Individual. It begins with the humility of an abstract subjection to nature, and ends with the arrogance of an abstract rejection of nature.
§ 180. Man yields at first to the natural authority of the family; he obeys unconditionally its behests. Then he substitutes for the family, as he goes on his culture, the artificial family of his caste, to whose rules he again unconditionally yields. To dispense with this artificialty and this tyranny, at last he abstracts himself from the family and from culture. He flees from both, and becoming a monk he again subjects himself to the tyranny of his order. The monks presents to us the mere type of his species.
§ 181. This absolute abstraction from nature and from culture, this quietism of spiritual isolation, is the ultimate result of the Passive system. In opposition to this, the Active system seeks the positive vanquishing of naturalness. Its people are courageous. They attack other nations in order to rule over them as conquerors. They live for the continuation of their life after death, and build for themselves on this account tombs of granite. They brave the dangers of the sea. The abstract prose of the patriarchal-state, the fantastic chimeras of the caste-state, the ascetic self-renunciation of the cloister-state, yield gradually to the recognition of actuality; and the fundamental principle of Persian education consisted in the inculcation of veracity.
§ 182. But the nationality which is occupied with simple, natural elements—other nations, death, the mystery of the ocean—may revert to the abstractions of the previous stage, which in education often take on cruel forms—nay, often truly horrible. First, when the spirit begins not only to suspect its true nature, but rather to recognize itself as the true essence; and when the God of Light places as the motto on his temple the command to self-knowledge, the natural individualitybecomes free. Neither the passive nor the active system understands the free self-distinction of the individual from the rest. In them, to be an individuality is a betrayal of the very idea of their existence, and even the suspicion of such a charge suffices utterly and mercilessly to destroy the one to whom it refers. Even the solitary individuality of the despot is not the one-ness of free individuality: he is only an example of his kind; only in his kind is he singular. Nationality rises to individuality through the free dialectic of its race, wherein it dissolves its own presupposition.
§ 183. Nevertheless individuality must always proceed from naturalness. Esthetically it seeks nature, but the nature of the activity itself, in order, by penetrating it with mind, to make of it a work of art; practically it seeks it, partly to disdain it in gloomy resignation, partly to enjoy it in excessive sensual ecstasy, demoniacally to heighten the extravagance of its own internal feeling in wild revels.
—The Germans were not savage in the common signification of this term. They were men each one of whom constituted himself willingly a centre for others, or, if this was not the case, renounced them in proud self-sufficiency. All the glory and all the disgrace of our race lies in the power of individualizing which is divinely breathed into our veins. As a natural element, if this be not controlled, it degenerates easily into intractableness, into violence. The Germans need therefore, in order to be educated, severe service, the imposition of difficult tasks; and for this reason they appropriate to themselves, now the Roman law, now the Greek philology, now Gallic usages, &c., in order to work off their superfluous strength in such opposition. The natural reserve of the German found its solvent in Christianity. By itself, as the history of the German race shows, it would have been destroyed in vain distraction. First of all, the German race, in the confidence of its immediate consciousness, ventured forth upon the sea, and managed the ship upon its waves as if they rode a charger.—
FIRST GROUP.
THE SYSTEM OF PASSIVE EDUCATION.
§ 184. All education desires to free man from his finitude, to make him ethical, to unite him with God. It begins thereforewith a negative relation to naturalness, but at once falls into a contradiction of its aim, which is to convert the opposition to nature into a natural necessity. Spirit subjects the individual (1) to the rule of the family as naturally spiritual; (2) to the rule of the caste as to a principle in itself spiritual, mediated through the division of labor, which it nevertheless, through its power of being inherited, joins again to the family; (3) to the abstract self-determination of the monkish quietism, which turns itself away as well from the family as from work, and constitutes this flight from nature and history, this absolute passivity, into an educational ideal.
—We shall not here enter into the details of this system, but simply endeavor to remove from their differences the want of clearness which is generally found involved in any mention of them, so that the phrases of hierarchical and theocratical education are used without any historical accuracy.—
I.Family Education.
§ 185. The Family, as the organic starting-point of all education, makes the beginning. The nation looks upon itself as a family. Among all unorganized people education is family-education, though they are not conscious of its necessity. Identical in principle with these people, but distinguished from them in its consciousness of it, the Chinese nation, in their laws, regulations, and customs, have constituted the family the absolute basis of their life and the only principle of their education.
§ 186. The natural element of the family is found in marriage and relationship; the spiritual, in love. We may call the nature of family feeling which is the immediate unity of both elements, by the name of Piety. In so far as this appears not merely as a substantial feeling but at the same time as law, there arises from it the subordination of the abstract obedience of the woman as wife to the husband, of children to the parents, of the younger children to the elder. In this obedience man first renounces his self-will and his natural roughness; he learns to master his passions, and to conduct himself with deferential gentleness.
—When the principle ruling the family is transferred to political relations, there arises the tyranny of the Chinesestate, which cannot be fully treated here. We find everywhere in it an analogical relation to that of parents and children. In China the ruler is the father and mother of the country; the civil officers are representatives of a paternal authority, &c. It follows that in school the children will be ranked according to their age. The authority of parents over children is according to the principle entirely unconditional, but in actuality very mild. The abandonment of daughters by the poorest classes in the great cities is not objected to, for the government rears the children in orphan asylums, where they are cared for by nurses appointed by the state.—
§ 187. The distinction of these relations which are conditioned by nature takes on the external shape of a definite ceremonial, the learning of which is a chief element of education. In conformity with the naturalness of the whole principle all crimes against it are punished by whipping, which does not necessarily entail dishonor. In order to lead man to the mastery of himself and to obedience to those who are naturally set over him, education develops an endless number of fragmentary maxims to keep attention ever watchful over himself, and his behavior always fenced in by a code of prescriptions.
—We find in such moral sentences the substance of what is called, in China, Philosophy.—
§ 188. The theoretical education includes Heading, Writing—i.e. painting the letters with a brush—Arithmetic, and the making of verses. But the ability to do these things is not looked at as means of culture but as ends in themselves, and to fit one therefore for the undertaking of state offices. The Chinese possess formally all the means for literary culture—printing, libraries, schools, and academies; but the worth of these is not great. Their value has been often over-rated because of their external resemblance to those found among us.
II.Caste Education.
§ 189. The members of the Family are certainly immediately distinguished among each other as to sex and age, but this difference is entirely immaterial as far as the nature of their employment goes. In China, therefore, every man can attain any position; he who is of humblest birth in the greatstate-family can climb to the highest honor. But the progress of spirit now becomes so mediated that the division of labor shall be made the principle on which a new distinction shall arise in the family: each one shall perfect himself only in that labor which was allotted to him as his own through his birth into a particular family. This fatalism (caste-distinction) breaks up the life, but increases its tension, for spirit works on the one hand towards the deepening of its distinctions; on the other, towards leading them back into the unity which the natural determining directly opposes.
§ 190. The chief work of education thus consists in teaching each one the rights and duties of his caste so that he shall act only exactly within their limits, and not pollute himself by passing beyond them. As the family-state concerns itself with fortifying the natural distinction by a far-reaching and vigorous ceremonial, so the caste-state must do the same with the distinction of class. A painful etiquette becomes more and more endless in its requisitions the higher the caste, in order to make the isolation more sharply defined and more perceptible.
—This feature penetrates all exclusively caste-education. The aristocracy exiles itself on this account from its native country, speaks a foreign language, loves its literature, adopts foreign customs, lives in foreign countries—in Italy, Paris, &c. In this way man becomes distinguished from others. But that man should strive thus to distinguish himself has its justification in the mystery of his birth, and this is assuredly always the principle of the caste-state in which it exists. The castes lead to genealogical records, which are of the greatest importance in determining the destiny of the individual. The Brahmin may strike down one of a lower caste who has defiled him by contact, without becoming thereby liable to punishment; rather would he be to blame if he did not commit the murder. Thus formerly was it with the officer who did not immediately kill the citizen or the common soldier who struck him a blow, &c.—
§ 191. The East Indian culture is far deeper and richer than the Chinese. The theoretical culture includes Reading, Writing, and Arithmetic; but these are subordinate, as mere means for the higher activities of Poetry, Speculation, Science,and Art. The practical education limits itself strictly by the lines of caste, and since the caste system constitutes a whole in itself, and each for its permanence needs the others, it cannot forbear giving utterance suggestively to what is universally human in the free soul, in a multitude of fables (Hitopadesa) and apothegms (sentences of Bartrihari). Especially for the education of princes is a minor of the world sketched out.
—Xenophon's Cyropedia is of Greek origin, but it is Indian in its thought.—
III.Monkish Education.
§ 192. Family Education demands unconditional obedience towards parents and towards all who stand in an analogous position. Caste Education demands unconditional obedience to the duties of the caste. The family punishes by whipping; the caste, by excommunication, by loss of honor. The opposition to nature appears in both systems in the form of a rigid ceremonial, distinguishing between the differences arising from nature. The family as well as the caste has within it a manifold fountain of activity, but it has also just as manifold a limitation of the individual. Spirit is forced, therefore, to turn against nature in general. It must become indifferent to the family. But it must also oppose history, and the fixed distinctions of division of labor as necessitated by nature. It must become indifferent to work and the pleasure derived from it. That it may not be conditioned either by nature or by history, it denies both, and makes its action to consist in producing an abstinence from all activity.
§ 193. Such an indifference towards nature and history produces the education which we have called monkish. Those who support this sect care for food, clothing, and shelter, and for these material contributions, as the laity, receive in return from those who live this contemplative life the spiritual contribution of confidence in the blessings which wait upon ascetic contemplation. The family institution as well as the institution of human labor is subordinated to abstract isolation, in which the individual lives only for the purification of his soul. All things are justified by this end. Castes are found no more; only those are boundto the observance of a special ceremonial who as nuns or monks subject themselves to the unconditional obedience to the rules of the cloister, these rules solemnly enjoining on the negative side celibacy and cessation from business, and on the positive side prayer and perfection.
§ 194. In the school of the Chinese Tao-tse, and in the command to the Brahmin after he has established a family to become a recluse, we find the transition as it actually exists to the Buddhistic Quietism which has covered the rocky heights of Thibet with countless cloisters, and reared the people who are dependent upon it into a childlike amiability, into a contented repose. Art and Science have here no value in themselves, and are regarded only as ministering to religion. To be able to read in order to mutter over the prayers is desirable. With the premeditated effort in the state of a monk to reduce self to nothing as the highest good, the system of passive education attains its highest point. But the spirit cannot content itself in this abstract and dreamy absence of all action, though it demands a high stage of culture, and it has recourse therefore to action, partly on the positive side to conquer nature, partly to double its own existence in making history. Inspired with affirmative courage, it descends triumphantly from the mountain heights, and fears secularization no more.
SECOND GROUP.
THE SYSTEM OF ACTIVE EDUCATION.
§ 195. Active Education elevates man from his abstract subjection to the family, the caste, asceticism, into a concrete activity with a definite aim which subjects those elements as phases of its mediation, and grants to each individual independence on the condition of his identity with it. These aims are the military state, the future after death, and industry. There is always an element of nature present from which the activity proceeds; but this no longer appears, like the family, the caste, the sensuous egotism, as immediately belonging to the individual, but as something outside of himself which limits him, and, as his future life, has an internal relation to him, yet is essential to him and assigns to him the object of his activity. The Persian has as anobject of conquest, other nations; the Egyptian, death; the Phœnician, the sea.
I.Military Education.
§ 196. That education which would emancipate a nation from the passivity of abstraction must throw it into the midst of an historical activity. A nation finds not its actual limits in its locality: it can forsake this and wander far away from it. Its true limit is made by another nation. The nation which knows itself to be actual, turns itself therefore against other nations in order to subject them and to reduce them to the condition of mere accidents of itself. It begins a system of conquest which has in itself no limitations, but goes from one nation to another, and extends its evil course indefinitely. The final result of this attack is that it finds itself attacked and conquered.
—The early history of the Persian is twofold: the patriarchal in the high valleys of Iran, and the religio-hierarchical among the Medes. We find under these circumstances a repetition of the principal characteristics of the Chinese, Indian, and Buddhist educations. In ancient Zend there were also castes. Among the Persians themselves, as they descended from their mountains to the conquest of other nations, there was properly only a military nobility. The priesthood was subjected to the royal power which represented the absolute power of actuality. Of the Persian kings, Cyrus attacked Western Asia; Cambyses, Africa; Darius and Xerxes, Europe; until the reaction of the spiritually higher nationality did not content itself with self-preservation, but under the Macedonian Alexander made the attack on Persia itself.—
§ 197. Education enjoined upon the Persians (1) to speak the truth; (2) to learn to ride and to use the bow and arrow. There is implied in the first command a recognition of actuality, the negation of all dreamy absorption, of all fantastical indetermination; and in this light the Persian, in distinction from the Hindoo, appears to be considerate and reasonable. In the second command is implied warlike practice, but not that of the nomadic tribes. The Persian fights on horseback, and thus appears in distinction from the Indianhermit seclusion and the quietism of the Lamas as restless and in constant motion.
—The Family increases in value as it rears a large number of warriors. Many children were a blessing. The king of Persia gave a premium for all children over a certain number. Nations were drawn in as nations by war; hence the immense multitude of a Persian army. Everything—family, business, possessions—must be regardlessly sacrificed to the one aim of war. Education, therefore, cultivated an unconditional, all-embracing obedience to the king, and the slightest inclination to assert an individual independence was high treason and was punished with death. In China, on the contrary, duty to the family is paramount to duty to the state, or rather is itself duty to the state. The civil officer who mourns the loss of one of his family is released during the period of mourning from the duties of his function.—
§ 198. The theoretical education, which was limited to reading, writing, and to instruction, was, in the usages of culture, in the hands of the Magians, the number of whom was estimated at eighty thousand, and who themselves had enjoyed the advantages of a careful education, as is shown by their gradation into Herbeds, Moheds, and Destur-Moheds; i.e. into apprentices, journeymen, and masters. The very fundamental idea of their religion was military; it demanded of men to fight on the side of the king of light, and guard against the prince of darkness and evil. It gave to him thus the honor of a free position between the world-moving powers and the possibility of a self-creative destiny, by which means vigor and chivalrous feeling were developed. Religion trained the activity of man into actualization on this planet, increasing by its means the dominion of the good, by purifying the water, by planting trees, by extirpating troublesome wild beasts. Thus it increased bodily comfort, and no longer, like the monk, treated this as a mere negative.
II.Priestly Education.
§ 199. War has in death its force. It produces this, and by its means decides who shall serve and who obey. But the nation that finds its activity in war, though it makes death its absolute means, yet finds its own limit in death. Othernations are only its boundaries, which it can overpass in fighting with and conquering them. But death itself it can never escape, whether it come in the sands of the desert—which buried for Cambyses an army which he sent to the oracle of the Libyan Ammon—or in the sea, that scorns the rod of the angry despot, or by the sword of the freeman who guards his household gods. On this account, that people stands higher that in the midst of life reflects on death, or rather lives for it. The education of such a nation must be priestly because death is the means of the transition to the future life, and consequently equivalent to a new birth, and becomes a religious act. Neither the family-state, nor the caste-state, nor the monkish nor military-state, are hierarchies in the sense that the leading of the national life by a priesthood produces. But in Egypt this was actually the case, because the chief educational tribunal was the death-court which concerned only the dead, in awarding to them or denying them the honor of burial as the result of their whole life, but in its award affected also the honor of the surviving family.
§ 200. General education here limited itself to imparting the ability to read, write, and calculate. Special education consisted properly only in an habitual living into a definite business within the circle of the Family. In this fruitful and warm land the expense of supporting children was very small. The division into classes was without the cruel features of the Indian civilization, and life itself in the narrow Nile valley was very social, very rich, very full of eating and drinking, while the familiarity with death heightened the force of enjoyment. In a stricter sense only, the warriors, the priests, and the kings, had, properly speaking, an education. The aim of life, which was to determine in death its eternal future, to secure for itself a passage into the still kingdom of Amenth, manifested itself externally in the care which they expended on the preservation of the dead shell of the immortal soul, and on this account worked itself out in building tombs which should last for ever. The Chinese builds a wall to secure his family-state from attack; the Hindoo builds pagodas for his gods; the Buddhist erects for himself monastic cells; the Persianconstructs in Persepolis the tomb of his kings, where they may retire in the evening of their lives after they have rioted in Ecbatana, Babylon, and Susa; but the Egyptian builds his own tomb, and carries on war only to protect it.
III.Industrial Education.
§ 201. The system of active education was to find its solution in a nation which wandered from the coast of the Red Sea to the foot of the Lebanon mountains on the Mediterranean, and ventured forth upon the sea which before that time all nations had avoided as a dangerous and destructive element. The Phœnician was industrial, and needed markets where he could dispose of the products of his skill. But while he sought for them he disdained neither force nor deceit; he planted colonies; he stipulated that he should have in the cities of other nations a portion for himself; he urged the nations to adopt his pleasures, and insensibly introduced among them his culture and even his religion. The education of such a nation must have seemed profane, because it fostered indifference towards family and one's native land, and made the restless and passionate activity subservient to gain. The understanding and usefulness rose to a higher dignity.
§ 202. Of the education of the Phœnicians we know only so much as to enable us to conclude that it was certainly various and extensive: among the Carthaginians, at least, that their children were practised in reading, writing, and arithmetic, in religious duties; secondly, in a trade; and, finally, in the use of arms, is not improbable. Commerce became with the Phœnicians a trade, the egotism of which makes men dare to plough the inhospitable sea, and to penetrate eagerly the horror of its vast distances, but yet to conceal from other nations their discoveries and to wrap them in a veil of fable.
—It is a beautiful testimony to the disposition of the Greeks, that Plato and others assign as a cause of the low state of Arithmetic and Mathematics among the Phœnicians and Egyptians the want of a free and disinterested seizing of them.—
THIRD GROUP.
THE SYSTEM OF INDIVIDUAL EDUCATION.
§ 203. One-sided passivity as well as one-sided activity is subsumed under Individuality, which makes itself into its own end and aim. The Phœnician made gain his aim; his activity was of a utilistic character. Individuality as a pedagogical principle is indeed egotistic in so far as it endeavors to achieve its own peculiarity, but it is at the same time noble. It desires not tohavebut tobe. Individuality also begins as natural, but it elevates nature by means of art to ideality. The solution of beauty is found in culture, since this renounces the charm of appearance for the knowledge of the True. The æsthetic individuality is followed by the practical, which has indeed no natural basis, but proceeds from an artificial basis as a state formed for a place of refuge. In order internally to create a unity in this, is framed a definite code of laws; in order externally to assure it, the invincible warrior is demanded. Education is therefore, more exactly speaking, juristic and military practice. The morality of the state is loosened as it reduces into its mechanism one nation after another, until the individuality, become dæmonic, makes its war-hardened legions tremble with weakness. We characterize this individuality as dæmonic because it desires recognition simply for its own sake. Not for its beauty and culture, not for its knowledge of business and its bravery, only for its peculiarity as such does it claim value, and in the effort to secure this it is ready to hazard life itself. In its naturally-growing existence this individuality is deep, but at the same time without self-limit. The nations educate themselves to this individuality when they destroy the world of Roman world—that of self-limit and balance—which they find.
I.Æsthetic Education.
§ 204. The system of individual education begins with the transfiguration of the immediate individuality into beauty. On the side of nature this system is passion, for individuality is given through nature; but on the side of spirit it is active, for spirit must determine itself to restrain its measure as the essence of beauty.
§ 205. Here the individual is of value only in so far as he is beautiful. At first beauty is apprehended as natural, but then it is carried over into the realm of spirit, and the Good is posited as identical with the Beautiful. The ideal of æsthetic education remains always that there shall be also an external unity of the Good with the Beautiful, of Spirit with Nature.
—We cannot here give in detail the history of Greek Education. It is the best known among us, and the literature in which it is worked out is very widely spread. Among the common abridged accounts we mention here only the works of Jacobs, of Cramer & Bekker's "Charinomos." We must content ourselves with mentioning the turning-points which follow from the nature of the principle.—
§ 206. Culture was in Greece thoroughly national. Education gave to the individual the consciousness that he was a Greek and no barbarian, a free man and so subject only to the laws of the state, and not to the caprice of any one person. Thus the nationality was freed at once from the abstract unity of the family and from the abstract distinction of caste, while it appeared with the manifold talents of individuals of different races. Thus the Dorian race held as essential, gymnastics; the Æolians, music; the Ionics, poetry. The Æolian individuality was subsumed in the history of the two others, so that these had to proceed in their development with an internal antagonism. The education of the Dorian race was national education in the fullest sense of the word; in it the education of all was the same, and was open to all, even including the young women; among the Ionic race it was also in its content truly national, but in its form it was varied and unlike, and, for those belonging to various great families, private. The former, reproducing the Oriental phase of abstract unity, educated all in one mould; the latter was the nursery of particular individualities.
§ 207. (1) Education in the heroic age, without any systematic arrangement on the subject, left each one perfectly free. The people related the histories of the adventures of others, and through their own gave material to others again to relate stories of them.
—The Greeks began where the last stage of the activesystem of education ended—with piracy and the seizure of women. Swimming was a universal practice among the sea-dwelling Greeks, just as in England—the mistress of the ocean—rowing is the most prominent exercise among the young men, and public regattas are held.—
§ 208. (2) In the period of state-culture proper, education developed itself systematically; and gymnastics, music, and grammatics, or literary culture, constituted the general pedagogical elements.
§ 209. Gymnastics aimed not alone to render the body strong and agile, but, far more, to produce in it a noble carriage, a dignified and graceful manner of appearance. Each one fashioned his body into a living, divine statue, and in the public games the nation crowned the victor.
—Their love of beautiful boys is explicable not merely by their interest in beautiful forms, but especially by their interest in individuality. The low condition of the women could not lie at the foundation of it, for among the Spartans they were educated as nearly as possible like the men, and yet among them and the Cretans the love of boys was recognized in their legislation. To be without a beloved (ἀïιτης), or a lover (εἴσπνηλας), was among them considered as disgraceful as the degradation of the love by unchastity was contemptible. What charm was there, then, in love? Manifestly only beauty and culture. But that a person should be attracted by one and not by another can be accounted for only by the peculiar character, and in so far the boy-love and the man-friendship which sprang from it, among the Greeks, are very characteristic and noteworthy phenomena.—
§ 210. It was the task of Music, by its rhythm and measure, to fill the soul with well-proportioned harmony. So highly did the Greeks prize music, and so variously did they practise it, that to be a musical man meant the same with them as to be a cultivated man with us. Education in this respect was very painstaking, inasmuch as music exercises a very powerful influence in developing discreet behavior and self-possession into a graceful naturalness.
—Among the Greeks we find an unrestricted delight in nature—a listening to her manifestations, the tone of which betrays the subjectivity of things as subjectivity. In comparison -with this tender sympathy with nature of the Greeks—who heard in the murmur of the fountains, in the dashing of the waves, in the rustling of the trees, and in the cry of animals, the voice of divine personality—the sight and hearing of the Eastern nations for nature is dull.—
§ 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 (γράμματα), i.e. the elements of literary culture, reading and writing. Much attention was given to correct expression. The Fables of Æsop, 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, theHetæræundertook the same revolution; in the place of the πότνια μήτηρ 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 asserted 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 institutions. 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 withinthe 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 assumes 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 æsthetic 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 identity 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 noble 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."