Pedagogics as a System Part 10

--For the sake of brevity we would wish to close with these general definitions; the unfolding of their details is intimately bound up with the history of politics and of civilization. We shall be contented if we give correctly the general whole.--

-- 236. Within education we can distinguish three epochs: the monkish, the chivalric, and that education which is to fit one for civil life.

Each of these endeavored to express all that belonged to humanity as such; but it was only after the recognition of the moral nature of the Family, of Labor, of Culture, and of the conscious equal t.i.tle of all men to their rights, that this became really possible.

I. _The Epoch of Monkish Education._

-- 237. The Greek Church seized the Christian principle still abstractly as deliverance from the world, and therefore, in the education proceeding from it, it arrived only at the negative form, positing the universality of the individual man as the renunciation of self. In the dogmatism of its teaching, as well as in the ascetic severity of its practical conduct, it was a reproduction of the theocratic principle.

But when this had a.s.sumed the form of national centralization, the Greek Church dispensed with this, and, as far as regards its form, it returned again to the quietism of the Orient.

-- 238. The monkish education is in general identical in all religions, in that, through the egotism of its way of living and the stoicism of its way of thinking, through the separation of its external existence and the mechanism of a thoughtless subjection to a general rule as well as to the special command of superiors, it fosters a spiritual and bodily dulness. The Christian monachism, therefore, as the fulfilment of monachism in general, is at the same time its absolute dissolution, because, in its merely abstracting itself from the world instead of affirmatively conquering it, it contradicts the very principle of Christianity.

-- 239. We must notice as the fundamental error of this whole system, that it does not in free individuality seek to produce the ideal of divine-humanity, but to copy in external reproduction its historical manifestation. Each human being must individually offer up as sacrifice his own individuality. Each biography has its Bethlehem, its Tabor, and its Golgotha.

-- 240. Monachism looks upon freedom from one's self and from the world which Christianity demands only as an abstract renunciation of self, which it seeks to compa.s.s, like Buddhism, by the vow of poverty, chast.i.ty, and obedience, which must be taken by each individual for all time.

--This rejection of property, of marriage, and of self-will, is at the same time the negation of work, of the family, and of responsibility for one's actions. In order to avoid the danger of avarice and covetousness, of sensuality and of nepotism, of error and of guilt, monachism seizes the convenient way of abstract severance from all the objective world without being able fully to carry out this negation. Monkish Pedagogics must, in consequence, be very particular about an external separation of their disciples from the world, so as to make the work of abstraction from the world easier and more decided. It therefore builds cloisters in the solitude of deserts, in the depth of forests, on the summits of mountains, and surrounds them with high walls having no apertures; and then, so as to carry the isolation of the individual to its farthest possible extreme it constructs, within these cloisters, cells, in imitation of the ancient hermits--a seclusion the immediate consequence of which is the most limitless and most paltry curiosity.--

-- 241. Theoretically the monkish Pedagogics seeks, by means of the greatest possible silence, to place the soul in a state of spiritual immobility, which at last, through the want of all variety of thought, goes over into entire apathy, and antipathy towards all intellectual culture. The princ.i.p.al feature of the practical culture consists in the misapprehension that one should ignore Nature, instead of morally freeing himself from her control. As she, again and again a.s.serts herself, the monkish discipline proceeds to misuse her, and strives through fasting, through sleeplessness, through voluntary self-inflicted pain and martyrdom, not only to subdue the wantonness of the flesh, but to destroy the love of life till it shall become a positive loathing of existence. In and for itself the object of the monkish vow--property, the family, and will--is not immoral. The vow is, on this account, very easy to violate. In order to prevent all temptation to this, monkish Pedagogics invents a system of supervision, partly open, partly secret, which deprives one of all freedom of action, all freshness of thinking and of willing, and all poetry of feeling, by means of the perpetual shadow of spies and informers. The monks are well versed in all police-arts, and the regular succession of the hierarchy spurs them on always to distinguish themselves in them.

-- 242. The gloomy breath of this education penetrated all the relations of the Byzantine State. Even the education of the emperor was infected by it; and in the strife for freedom waged by the modern Greeks against the Turks, the _Igumeni_ of the cloisters were the real leaders of the insurrection. The independence of individuality, as opposed to monkish abstraction, more or less degenerates into the crude form of soldier and pirate life. And thus it happened that this principle was not left to appear merely as an exception, but to be built up positively into humanity; and this the German world, under the guidance of the Roman Church, undertook to accomplish.

II. _The Epoch of Chivalric Education._

-- 243. The Romish Church negated the abstract substantiality of the Greeks through the practical aim which she in her sanct.i.ty in works founded, and by means of which she raised up German individuality to the idealism of chivalry, i.e. a free military service in behalf of Christendom.

-- 244. It is evident that the system of monkish education was taken up into this epoch as one of its elements, being modified to conform to it: e.g. the Benedictines were accustomed to labor in agriculture and in the transcribing of books, and this contradicted the idea of monachism, since that in and for itself tends to an absolute forgetfulness of the world and a perfect absence of all activity in the individual. The begging orders were public preachers, and made popular the idea of love and unselfish devotion to others. They labored toward self-education, especially by means of the ideal of the life of Christ; e.g. in Tauler's cla.s.sical book on the Imitation of Jesus, and in the work of Thomas-a-Kempis which resembles it. Through a fixed contemplative communion with the conception of the Christ who suffered and died for Love, they sought to find content in divine rest and self-abandonment.

-- 245. German chivalry sprang from Feudalism. The education of those pledged to military duty had become confined to practice in the use of arms. The education of the chivalric va.s.sals pursued the same course, refining it gradually through the influence of court society and through poetry, which devoted itself either to the relating of graceful tales which were really works of art, or to the glorification of woman. Girls were brought up without especial care. The boy until he was seven years old remained in the hands of women; then he became a lad (a young gentleman), and learned the manner of offensive and defensive warfare, on foot and on horseback; between his sixteenth and eighteenth year, through a formal ceremony (the laying on of the sword), he was duly authorized to bear arms. But whatever besides this he might wish to learn was left to his own caprice.

-- 246. In contradistinction to the monkish education, Chivalry placed an infinite value on individuality, and this it expressed in its extreme sensibility to the feeling of honor. Education, on this account, endeavored to foster this reflection of the self upon itself by means of the social isolation in which it placed knighthood. The knight did not delight himself with common possessions, but he sought for him who had been wronged, since with him he could find enjoyment as a conqueror. He did not live in simple marriage, but strove for the piquant pleasure of making the wife of another the lady of his heart, and this often led to moral and physical infidelity. And, finally, the knight did not obey alone the general laws of knightly honor, but he strove, besides, to discover for himself strange things, which he should undertake with his sword, in defiance of all criticism, simply because it pleased his caprice so to do. He _sought adventures_.

-- 247. The reaction against the innumerable number of fantastic extravagancies arising from chivalry was the idea of the spiritual chivalry which was to unite the cloister and the town, abstract self-denial and military life, separation from the world and the sovereignty of the world--an undeniable advance, but an untenable synthesis which could not prevent the dissolution of chivalry--this chivalry, which, as the rule of the stronger, induced for a long time the destruction of all regular culture founded on principles, and brought a period of absence of all education. In this perversion of chivalry to a grand vagabondism, and even to robbery, n.o.ble souls often rushed into ridiculous excesses. This decline of chivalry found its truth in Citizens.h.i.+p, whose education, however, did not, like the p???? and the _civitas_ of the ancients, limit itself to itself, but, through the presence of the principle of Christianity, accepted the whole circle of humanity as the aim of its culture.

III. _The Epoch of Education fitting one for Civil Life._

-- 248. The idea of the State had gradually worked itself up to a higher plane with trade and industry, and found in Protestantism its spiritual confirmation. Protestantism, as the self a.s.surance of the individual that he was directly related to G.o.d without any dependence on the mediation of any man, rose to the truth in the autonomy of the soul, and began out of the abstract phantasmagoria of monachism and chivalry to develope Christianity, as the principle of humanitarian education, into concrete actuality. The cities were not merely, in comparison with the clergy and the n.o.bility, the "third estate"; but the citizen who himself managed his commonwealth, and defended its interests with arms, developed into the citizen of a state which absorbed the clergy and n.o.bility, and the state-citizen found his ultimate ideal in pure Humanity as cognized through reason.

-- 249. The phases of this development are (1) Civil education as such, in which we find chivalric education metamorphosed into the so-called n.o.ble, both however being controlled as to education, within Catholicism by Jesuitism, within Protestantism by Pietism. (2) Against this tendency to the church, we find reacting on the one hand the devotion to a study of antiquity, and on the other the friendly alliance to immediate actuality, i.e. with Nature. We can name these periods of Pedagogics those of its ideals of culture. (3) But the truth of all culture must forever remain moral freedom. After Education had arrived at a knowledge of the meaning of Idealism and Realism, it must seize as its absolute aim the moral emanc.i.p.ation of man into Humanity; and it must conform its culture by this aim, since technical dexterity, friendly adroitness, proficiency in the arts, and scientific insight, can attain to their proper rank only through moral purity.

_1. Civil Education as such._

-- 250. The one-sidedness of monkish and chivalric education was cancelled by civil education inasmuch as it destroyed the celibacy of the monk and the estrangement of the knight from his family, doing this by means of the inner life of the family; for it subst.i.tuted, in the place of the negative emptiness of the duty of holiness of the celibate, the positive morality of marriage and the family; while, instead of the abstract poverty and the idleness of the monkish piety and of knighthood, it a.s.serted that property was the object of labor, i.e. it a.s.serted the self-governed morality of civil society and of commerce; and, finally, instead of the servitude of the conscience in unquestioning obedience to the command of others, and instead of the freakish self-sufficiency of the caprice of the knights, it demanded obedience to the laws of the commonwealth as representing his own self-conscious, actualized, practical Reason, in which laws the individual can recognize and acknowledge himself.

--As this civil education left free the sensuous enjoyment, freedom in this was without bounds for a time, until, after men became accustomed to labor and to their freedom of action, the possibility of enjoyment created from within outward a moderation which sumptuary laws and prohibitions of gluttony, drunkenness, &c., could never create from the external side. What the monk inconsistently enjoyed with a bad conscience, the citizen and the clergyman could take possession of as a gift of G.o.d. After the first millennium of Christianity, when the earth had not, according to the current prophecies, been destroyed, and after the great plague in the fourteenth century, there was felt an immense pleasure in living, which manifested itself externally in the fifteenth century in delicate wines, dainty food, great eating of meat, drinking of beer, and, in the domain of dress, in peaked shoes, plumes, golden chains, bells, &c. There was much venison, but, as yet, no potatoes, tea and coffee, &c. The feeling of men was quarrelsome. For a more exact painting of the Education of this time, very valuable authors are Sebastian Brant, Th. Murner, Ulrich von Hutten, Fischart, and Hans Sachs. Gervinus is almost the only one who has understood how to make this material useful in its relation to spirit.--

-- 251. In contrast with the heaven-seeking of the monks and the sentimental love-making of the knight, civil education established, as its principle, Usefulness, which traced out in things their conformity to a proposed end in order to gain as great a mastery over them as possible. The understanding was trained with all exactness that it might clearly seize all the circ.u.mstances. But since family-life did not allow the egotism of the individual ever to become as great as was the case with the monk and the knight, and since the cheer of a sensuous enjoyment in cellar and kitchen, in clothing and furniture, in common games and in picturesque parades, penetrated the whole being with soft pleasure, there was developed with all propriety and sobriety a house-morality, and, with all the prose of labor, a warm and kindly disposition, which left room for innocent merriment and roguery, and found, in conformity to religious services, its serious transfiguration.

Beautiful burgher-state, thou wast weakened by the thirty years' war, and hast been only accidentally preserved sporadically in Old England and in some places in Germany, only to be at last swept away by the flood of modern world-pain, political sophistry, and anxiety for the future!

-- 252. The citizen paid special attention to public education, heretofore wholly dependent upon the church and the cloister; he organized city schools, whose teachers, it is true, for a long time compa.s.sed only accidental culture, and were often employed only for tumultuous and short terms. The society of the brotherhood of the Hieronymites introduced a better system of instruction before the close of the fourteenth century, but education had often to be obtained from the so-called travelling scholars (_vagantes_, _bacchantes_, _scholastici_, _goliardi_). The teachers of the so-called _scholae exteriores_, in distinction from the schools of the cathedral and cloister, were called now _locati_, then _stampuales_--in German, _Kinder-Meister_. The inst.i.tution of German schools soon followed the Latin city schools. In order to remove the anarchy in school matters, the citizens aided the rise of universities by donations and well-invested funds, and sustained the street-singing of the city scholars (_currende_), an inst.i.tution which was well-meant, but which often failed of its end because on the one hand it was often misused as a mere means of subsistence, and on the other hand the sense of honor of those to whom it was devoted not unfrequently became, through their manner of living, lowered to humiliation. The defect of the monkish method of instruction became ever more apparent, e.g. the silly tricks of their mnemotechnique, the utter lack of anything which deserved the name of any practical knowledge, &c. The necessity of instruction in the use of arms led to democratic forms. Printing favored the same. Men began to concern themselves about good text-books. Melanchthon was the hero of the Protestant world, and as a pattern was beyond his time. His Dialectics, Rhetoric, Physics, and Ethics, were reprinted innumerable times, commented upon, and imitated. After him Amos Comenius, in the seventeenth century, had the greatest influence through his _Didactica Magna_ and his _Janua Reserta_. In a narrower sphere, treating of the foundation of Gymnasial Philology, the most noticeable is Sturm of Strasburg. The universities in Catholic countries limited themselves to the Scholastic Philosophy and Theology, together with which we find slowly struggling up the Roman Law and the system of Medicine from Bologna and Salerno. But Protestantism first raised the university to any real universality. Tubingen, Konigsberg, Wittenberg, Jena, Leipzic, Halle, Gottingen, &c., were the first schools for the study of all sciences, and for their free and productive pursuit.

-- 253. The Commons, which at first appeared with the clergy and the n.o.bility as the Third Estate, formed an alliance with monarchy, and both together produced a transformation of the chivalric education.

Absolutism reduced the knights to mere n.o.bles, to whom it truly conceded the prerogative of appointment as spiritual prelates as well as officers and counsellors of state, but only on the condition of the most complete submission; and then, to satisfy them, it invented the artificial drinking festivals, of a splendid life at court, and a temptingly-impressive sovereignty of beauty. In this condition, the education of the n.o.bles was essentially changed in so far as to cease to be alone military. To the art of war, which moreover was made so very much milder by the invention of fire-arms, must be now added an activity of the mind which could no longer dispense with some knowledge of History, Heraldry, Genealogy, Literature, and Mythology. Since the French nation soon enough gave tone to the style of conversation, and after the time of Louis XIV. controlled the politics of the continent, the French language, as conventional and diplomatic, became a constant element in the education of the n.o.bility in all the other countries of Europe.

--Practically the education of the n.o.ble endeavored to make the individual quite independent, so that he should, by means of the important quality of an advantageous personal appearance and the prudence of his agreeable behavior, make himself into a ruler of all other men, capable of enjoying his own position, i.e. he should copy in miniature the manners of an absolute sovereign. To this was added an empirical knowledge of men by means of ethical maxims, so that they might discover the weak side of every man, and so be able to outwit him.

_Mundus vult decipi, ergo decipiatur._ According to this, every man had his price. They did not believe in the Nemesis of a divine destiny; on the contrary, disbelief in the higher justice was taught. One must be so elastic as to suit himself to all situations, and, as a caricature of the ancient ataraxy, he must acquire as a second nature a manner perfectly indifferent to all changes, the impa.s.sibility of an aristocratic repose, the amphibious _sang-froid_ of the "gentleman." The man in the world as the man of the world sought his ideal in endless dissimulation, and in this, as the flowering of his culture, he took the highest interest. Intrigue, in love as well as in politics, was the soul of the n.o.bleman's existence.--

--They endeavored to complete the refinement of manners by sending the young man away with a travelling tutor. This was very good, but degenerated at last into the mechanism of the foolish travelling of the tourist. The n.o.ble was made a foreigner, a stranger to his own country, by means of his abode at Paris or Venice, while the citizen gradually outstripped him in genuine culture.--

-- 254. The education of the citizen as well as that of the n.o.ble was taken possession of, in Catholic countries by the Jesuits, in Protestant countries by the Pietists: by the first, with a military strictness; by the second, in a social and effeminate form. Both, however, agreed in destroying individuality, inasmuch as the one degraded man into a will-less machine for executing the commands of others, and the other deadened him in cultivating the feeling of his sinful worthlessness.

(_a_) _Jesuitic Education._

-- 255. Jesuitism combined the maximum of worldly freedom with an appearance of the greatest piety. Proceeding from this stand-point, it devoted itself in education to elegance and showy knowledge, to diplomacy and what was suitable and convenient in morals. To bring the future more into its power, it adapted itself not only to youth in general, but especially to the youth of the n.o.bler cla.s.ses. To please these, the Jesuits laid great stress upon a fine deportment. In their colleges dancing and fencing were well-taught. They knew how well they should by this course content the n.o.ble, who had by preference usurped the name of Education for this technical way of giving formal expression to personality.

--In instruction they developed so exact a mechanism that they gained the reputation of having model school regulations, and even Protestants sent their children to them. From the close of the sixteenth century to the present time they have based their teaching upon the _ratio et inst.i.tutio Studiorum Societatis Jesu_ of Claudius Aquaviva, and, following that, they distinguish two courses of teaching, a higher and a lower. The lower included nothing but an external knowledge of the Latin language, and some fortuitous knowledge of History, of Antiquities, and of Mythology. The memory was cultivated as a means of keeping down free activity of thought and clearness of judgment. The higher course comprehended Dialectics, Rhetoric, Physics, and Morals. Dialectics appeared in the form of Sophistry. In Rhetoric, they favored the polemical-emphatic style of the African fathers of the Church and their pompous phraseology; in Physics, they stopped with Aristotle, and especially advised the reading of the books _De Generatione et Corruptione_, and _De Coelo_, on which they commented after their fas.h.i.+on; finally, in Morals casuistic skepticism was their central point. They made much of Rhetoric on account of their sermons, giving to it much attention, and introduced especially Declamation. Contriving showy public examinations under the guise of Latin School Comedies, they thus amused the public, disposed them to approval, and at the same time quite innocently practised the pupil in dissimulation.--

--Diplomacy in behavior was made necessary to the Jesuits as well by their strict military discipline as by their system of reciprocal mistrust, espionage, and informing. Abstract obedience was a reason for any act of the pupils, and they were freed from all responsibility as to its moral justification. This empirical exact following out of all commands, and refraining from any criticism as to principles, created a moral indifference, and, from the necessity of having consideration for the peculiarities and caprices of the superior on whom all others were dependent, arose eye-service, and the coldness of isolation sprang from the necessity which each felt of being on his guard against every other as against a tale-bearer. The most deliberate hypocrisy and pleasure in intrigue merely for the sake of intrigue--this most refined poison of moral corruption--were the result. Jesuitism had not only an interest in the material profit, which, when it had corrupted souls, fell to its share, but it also had an interest in the process of corruption. With absolute indifference as to the idea of morality, and absolute indifference as to the moral quality of the means used to attain its end, it rejoiced in the superiority of secrecy, of the accomplished and calculating understanding, and in deceiving the credulous by means of its graceful, seemingly-perfect, moral language.--

--It is not necessary to speak here of the morality of the Order. It is sufficiently recognized as the contradiction, that the idea of morality insists upon the eternal necessity of every deed, but that in the realizing of the action all determinations should be made relative and should vary with the circ.u.mstances. As to discipline, they were always guided by their fundamental principle, that body and soul, as in and for themselves one, could vicariously suffer for each other. Thus penitence and contrition were transformed into a perfect materialism of outward actions, and hence arose the punishments of the Order, in which fasting, scourging, imprisonment, mortification, and death, were formed into a mechanical artificial system.--

(_b_) _Pietistic Education._

-- 256. Jesuitism would make machines of man, Pietism would dissolve him in the feeling of his sinfulness: either would destroy his individuality. Pietism proceeded from the principle of Protestantism, as, in the place of the Catholic Pelagianism with its sanctification by works, it offered justication by faith alone. In its tendency to internality was its just claim. It would have even the letters of the Bible translated into the vivacity of sentiment. But in its execution it fell into the error of one-sidedness in that it placed, instead of the actuality of the spirit and its freedom, the confusion of a limited personality, placing in its stead the personality of Christ in an external manner, and thus brought back into the very midst of Protestantism the principle of monachism--an abstract renunciation of the world. Since Protestantism has destroyed the idea of the cloister, it could produce estrangement from the world only by exciting public opinion against such elements of society and culture which it stigmatized as _worldly_ for its members, e.g. card-playing, dancing, the theatre, &c. Thus it became negatively dependent upon works; for since its followers remained in reciprocal action with the world, so that the temptation to backsliding was a permanent one, it must watch over them, exercise an indispensable moral-police control over them, and thus, by the suspicion of each other which was involved, take up into itself the Jesuitical practice, although in a very mild and affectionate way. Instead of the forbidden secrecy of the cloister, it organized a separate company, which we, in its regularly const.i.tuted a.s.sembly, call a conventicle. Instead of the cowl, it put on its youth a dress like that of the world, but scant and ashen-colored; it subst.i.tuted for the tonsure closely-cut hair and shaven beard, and it often went beyond the obedience of the monks in its expression of pining humility and prudish composure. Education within such a circle could not well recognize nature and history as manifestations of G.o.d, but it must consider them to be limitations to their union with G.o.d, from which death can first then completely release them. The soul which knew that its home could be found only in the future world, must feel itself to be a stranger upon the earth, and from such an opinion there must arise an indifference and even a contempt for science and art, as well as an aversion for a life of active labor, though an unwilling and forced tribute might be paid to it. Philosophy especially was to be shunned as dangerous. Bible lectures, the catechism and the hymn-book, were the one thing needful to the "poor in spirit." Religious poetry and music were, of all the arts, the only ones deserving of any cultivation. The education of Pietism endeavored, by means of a carefully arranged series of representations, to create in its disciples the feeling of their absolute nothingness, vileness, G.o.dlessness, and abandonment by G.o.d, in order to displace the torment of despair as to themselves and the world by a warm, dramatic, and living relation to Christ--a relation in which all the Eroticism of the mystical pa.s.sion of the begging-friars was renewed in a somewhat milder form and with a strong tendency to a sentimental sweetishness.

_2. The Ideal of Culture._

-- 257. Civil Education arose from the recognition of marriage and the family, of labor and enjoyment, of the equality of all before the Law, and of the duty of self-determination. Jesuitism in the Catholic world and Pietism in the Protestant were the reaction against this recognition--a return into the abstract asceticism of the middle ages, not however in its purity, but mixed with some regard for worldly possessions. In opposition to this reaction the commonwealth produced another, in which it undertook to deliver individuality by means of a reversed alienation. On the one hand, it absorbed itself in the conception of the Greek-Roman world. In the practical interests of the present, it externalized man in a past which held to the present no immediate relation, or it externalized him in the affairs which were to serve him as means of his comfort and enjoyment; it created an abstract idealism--a reproduction of the old view of the world--or an abstract Realism in a high appreciation of things which should be considered of value only as a means. In one direction, Individuality proceeded towards a dead nationality; in the other, towards an unlimited world-commonwealth. In one case, the ideal was the aesthetic republicanism of the Greeks; in the other, the utilitarian cosmopolitanism of the Romans. But, in considering the given circ.u.mstances, both united in the feeling of humanity, with its reconciliatory and pitying gentleness toward the beggar or the criminal.

(_a_) _The Humanitarian Ideal._

-- 258. The Oriental-theocratic education is immanent in Christian education through the Bible. Through the mediation of the Greek and Roman churches the views of the ancient world were subsumed but not entirely subdued. To accomplish this was the problem of humanitarian education. It aimed to teach the Latin and Greek languages, expecting thus to secure the action of a purely humane disposition. The Greeks and Romans being sharply marked nationalities, how could one cherish such expectations? It was possible only relatively in contradiction, partly to a provincial population from whom all genuine political sense had departed, partly to a church limited by a confessional, to which the idea of humanity as such had become almost lost in dogmatic fault-findings. The spirit was refreshed in the first by the contemplation of the pure patriotism of the ancients, and in the second by the discovery of Reason among the heathen. In contrast to formlessness distracted by the want of all ideal of culture of provincialism and dogmatic confusions, we find the power of representation of ancient art. The so-called uselessness of learning dead languages imparted to the mind, it knew not how, an ideal drift.

The very fact that it could not find immediate profit in its knowledge gave it the consciousness of a higher value than material profit. The ideal of the Humanities was the truth to Nature which was found in the thought-painters of the ancient world. The study of language merely with regard to its form, must lead one involuntarily to the actual seizing of its content. The Latin schools were fas.h.i.+oned into _Gymnasia_, and the universities contained not merely professors of Eloquence, but also teachers of Philology.

(_b_) _The Philanthropic Ideal._

-- 259. The humanitarian tendency reached its extreme in the abstract forgetting of the present, and the omitting to notice its just claim.

Man discovered at last that he was not at home with himself in Rome and Athens. He spoke and wrote Latin, if not like Cicero, at least like Muretius, but he often found himself awkward in expressing his meaning in his mother-tongue. He was often very learned, but he lacked judgment.

He was filled with enthusiasm for the republicanism of Greece and Rome, and yet at the same time was himself exceedingly servile to his excellent and august lords. Against this gradual deadening of active individuality, the result of a perverted study of the cla.s.sics, we find now reacting the education of enlightenment, which we generally call the philanthropic. It sought to make men friendly to the immediate course of the world. It placed over against the learning of the ancient languages for their own sake, the acquisition of the more needful branches of Mathematics, Physics, Geography, History, and the modern languages, calling these the real studies. Nevertheless it often retained the instruction in the Latin language because the Romance languages have sprung from it, and because, through its long domination, the universal terminology of Science, Art, and Law, is rooted in it. Philanthropy desired to develope the social side of its disciple through an abstract of practical knowledge and personal accomplishments, and to lead him again, in opposition to the hermit-like sedentary life of the book-pedant, out into the fields and the woods. It desired to imitate life even in its method, and to instruct pleasantly in the way of play or by dialogue. It would add to the simple letters and names the contemplation of the object itself, or at least of its representation by pictures; and in this direction, in the conversation-literature which it prepared for children, it sometimes fell into childishness. It performed a great service when it gave to the body its due, and introduced simple, natural dress, bathing, gymnastics, pedestrian excursions, and a hardening against the influences of wind and weather. As this Pedagogics, so friendly to children, deemed that it could not soon enough begin to honor them as citizens of the world, it was guilty in general of the error of presupposing as already finished in its children much that it itself should have gradually developed; and as it wished to educate the European as such, or rather man as such, it came into an indifference concerning the concrete distinctions of nationality and religion. It coincided with the philologists in placing, in a concealed way, Socrates above Christ, because he had worked no miracles, and taught only morality. In such a dead cosmopolitanism, individuality disappeared in the indeterminateness of a general humanity, and saw itself forced to agree with the humanistic education in proclaiming the truth of Nature as the pedagogical ideal, with the distinction, that while Humanism believed this ideal realized in the Greeks and Romans, Philanthropism found itself compelled to presuppose an abstract notion, and often manifested a not unjustifiable pleasure in recognizing in the Indians of North America, or of Otaheite, the genuine man of nature.

Philosophy first raised these conceptions to the idea of the State, which fas.h.i.+oned the cognition of Reason and of the reform which follows from its idea, into an organic element in itself.