this state of feeling has increased to that of thorough disgust -disgust which nevertheless at the same time demands enjoyment. The one who is blasé has enjoyed everything, felt everything, mocked at everything. He has passed from the enjoyment of pleasure to sentimentality. i.e. to rioting in feeling; from sentimentality to irony with regard to feeling, and from this to the torment of feeling his entire weakness and emptiness as opposed to these. He ridicules this also, as if if it were a consolation to him to fling away the universe like a squeezed lemon, and to be able to assert that in pure nothingness lies the truth of all things. And yet nevertheless this irony furnishes the point on which Education can fasten, in order to kindle anew in him the religious feeling, and to lead him back to a loving recognition of actuality, to a respect for his own history. The greatest difficulty which Education has to encounter here is the coquetry, the miserable eminence and self-satisfaction which have undermined the man and made him incapable of all simple and natural enjoyment. It is not too much to assert that many pupils of our Gymnasia are affected with this malady. Our literature is full of its products. It inveighs against its dissipation, and nevertheless at the same time cannot resist a certain kind of pleasure in it. Diabolical sentimentality!

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.

ence.

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 experiThe 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 an à priori construction 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 element à 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 confes

sions. 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.