128. Now whether this proof, closely though its parts hang together, will affect others and stimulate them to activity, depends first of all upon whether there is such a thing as the German individuality and German love of fatherland which we have described, and whether it is worth preserving and striving after or not. That the foreigner, abroad or at home, denies this may be taken for granted; but his advice is not asked for. Besides, it is to be noted here that the deciding of this question does not depend at all upon proof by conceptions; these can certainly make us clear in this matter, but can give no information about real existence or value, which can be proved only by the immediate experience of each individual. In a case like this, though millions may say that it does not exist, that can never mean more than that it does not exist in them; by no means, however, that it does not exist at all; and if a single person rises against these millions and declares that it does exist, he carries his point against them all. Nothing prevents me, as I now speak, from being in the given case that one person who asserts that he knows from immediate experience that there is such a thing as German love of fatherland, that he knows the infinite value of its object, that this love alone has driven him, in spite of every danger, to say what he has said and will still say, since nothing else 156 ADDRESSES TO THE GERMAN NATION is left to us now but speech, and even it is checked and restrained in every way. Whoever feels this within him will be convinced; whoever does not feel it cannot be convinced, for my proof rests entirely on that supposition; on him my words are lost; but who would not stake something so insignificant as words?
129. That definite education, from which we expect the salvation of the German nation, has been described in general terms in our second and third addresses. We described it as a complete regeneration of the human race, and it will be appropriate to link up with this description a repetition of the general survey.
130. As a rule, the world of the senses was formerly accepted as the only true and really existing world; it was the first that was brought before the pupil in educa tion. From it alone was he led on to thought and, for the most part, to thought that was about it and in its service. The new education exactly reverses this order. For it the world that is comprehended by thought is the only true and really existing world, and into this it wishes to introduce the pupil from the very beginning. It is only to this world of the spirit that it wishes to link his whole love and his whole pleasure, so that with him there will inevitably begin and develop a life in it alone. Formerly there lived in the majority naught but flesh, matter, and nature; through the new education spirit alone shall live in the majority, yea, very soon in all, and spur them on; the stable and certain spirit, which was mentioned before as the only possible foundation of a well-organized State, shall be produced everywhere.
131. Such an education undoubtedly achieves the object which we have specially set before us and from which our addresses started. That spirit which is to be produced includes the higher love of fatherland, the STARTING-POINT FOR NEW EDUCATION 157 conception of its earthly life as eternal and of the father land as the support of that eternity. If it is produced in the Germans, it will include love of the German father land as one of its essential elements, and from that love there spring of themselves the courageous defender of his country and the peaceful and honest citizen. Such an education, indeed, achieves even more than that immediate object; that is always the case when thorough going measures are willed for a great purpose; the whole man is inwardly perfected and completed in every part, and outwardly equipped with perfect fitness for all his purposes in time and eternity. Spiritual nature has inseparably connected our complete cure from all the evils that oppress us with our recovery as a nation and fatherland.
132. We have nothing more to do here with the stupid surprise of some, when we assert such a world of pure thought, and assert it, indeed, as the only possible world, and reject the world of sense; nor have we anything more to do with those who deny the former world altogether, or deny only the possibility that the majority of the people at large can be brought into it. We have already completely rejected these things. He who does not yet know that there is a world of thought can instruct himself meanwhile about it elsewhere by the available means; we have no time for that instruction here. But we do intend just this; to show how even the majority of the people at large can be raised into that world.
133. Now, in our deliberate opinion the idea of such a new education is not to ' be considered as simply a picture set up for the exercise of ingenuity of mind or of skill in argument, but is rather to be put into practice at once and introduced into life. Our task, therefore, 158 ADDRESSES TO THE GERMAN NATION is first of all to point out what already exists in the actual world with which the realization of this should be con nected.
We give this answer to the question: it ought to be connected with the system of instruction invented and proposed by Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, and already successfully practised under his eyes. We intend to give good reasons for this decision of ours and to define it clearly.
First of all, we have read and reflected over the man's own writings, from which we have formed our conception of his art of instruction and education. We have taken no notice of the reports and opinions of the current literary periodicals, nor of their further opinions upon those opinions. We observe this in order to recommend this method and the complete avoidance of its opposite to everyone who wishes likewise to have a conception of this subject. Similarly, up to the present we have not desired to see anything of it in actual practice; not from disrespect, but because we wanted first to provide our selves with a definite and clear conception of the inventor's true intention. The application may often fall short of the intention, but from that conception the conception of the application and of the inevitable result follows without any experiment, and, equipped with this alone, one can truly understand the application and judge it correctly. If, as some believe, even this system of instruction has already degenerated here and there into blind, empirical groping and into empty play and show, for that the author's fundamental conception, at least, is in my opinion quite blameless.
134. Now this fundamental conception is warranted for me, first of all by the individuality of the man himself, as he shows it in his writings with the truest and most STARTING-POINT FOR NEW EDUCATION 159 hearty frankness. I could have used him, just as well as I used Luther or as I might use anyone else if there have been others like them, to demonstrate the char acteristics of the German spirit and to give the gratifying proof that this spirit, in all its miraculous power, reigned down to the present day within the range of the German tongue. He, also, has spent a laborious life struggling with every possible obstacle; within, with his own stubborn obscurity and awkwardness and his very scanty supply of the most ordinary aids to scholarly education; without, with continual misunderstanding. Towards an end, which he simply surmised and which was quite unknown to him, he has struggled, upheld and stimulated by an unconquerable and all-powerful and German impulse, a love of the poor neglected people. As in the case of Luther, only in another connection and one more in keeping with his age, this all-powerful love had made him its instrument and had become the life of his life. It was the unknown but definite and unchanging guide which led his life through the all-enveloping night, and, because it was impossible for such a love to leave the earth unrewarded, crowned its evening with his truly spiritual invention, which achieved far more than he had ever longed for in his boldest wishes. He wished simply to help the people; but his invention, when developed to the full, raises the people, removes every difference between them and an educated class, provides national education instead of the desired popular education, and might, indeed, have the power of helping peoples and the whole human race to rise from the depths of their present misery.
135. This fundamental conception of his appears in his writings with complete clearness and unmistakable precision. First of all, in regard to the form, he desires, 160 ADDRESSES TO THE GERMAN NATION not the caprice and blind groping that has hitherto existed, but a definite and deliberate art of education; that is what we, too, wish and what German thoroughness must necessarily wish. He relates 1 very frankly how a French phrase, that he wanted to make education mecha nical, made his mind clear concerning this aim of his. In regard to the content, the first step in the new educa tion described by me is that it shall stimulate and train the free activity of the pupil's mind, his thought, in which later the world of his love shall dawn for him. With this first step Pestalozzi's writings deal excellently; our examination of his fundamental conception treats this subject first of all. In this regard his censure of the previous system of instruction, that it has only plunged the pupil in mist and shadow and has never let him reach actual truth and reality, agrees with ours, that this system has never been able to influence life, nor to form the root of life. Pestalozzi's proposed remedy for this, to lead the pupil to direct perception, is synony mous with ours, to stimulate his mental activity to the creation of images and to let him learn everything just by this free formation; for perception of what has been freely created is the only possible perception. The application, to be mentioned later, proves that the inventor really means this, and does not understand by perception that blindly groping and fumbling sense- impression. Quite rightly, too, this general and very far- reaching law is laid down for the stimulation of the pupil's perception by education: from the beginning keep pace exactly with the evolution of the child's powers that are to be developed.
136. On the other hand, in Pestalozzi's system of instruction all the mistakes in terms and proposals have 1 [See De Guimps,Life of Pestalozzi, Sonnenschein & Co., 1903, p. 183.]
STARTING-POINT FOR NEW EDUCATION 161 one common source, the confusion and opposition of two things; on one side, the paltry and limited end originally aimed at, namely, to lend such aid as is abso lutely necessary to those children from among the people who are the most neglected, on the supposition that the whole people will remain as it is; and on the other side, the means leading to a far higher end. One is saved from all error and obtains a completely consistent conception by dropping the former and everything that results from its consideration, and keeping only to the latter and carry ing it out consistently. Undoubtedly it was solely the desire to release from school as soon as possible the very poorest children for bread-winning, and yet to provide them with a means of making up for the interrupted instruction, that gave rise in Pestalozzi's loving heart to the over-estimation of reading and writing, to the setting up of these as almost the aim and climax of popular education, and to his simple belief in the testimony of past centuries, that this is the best aid to instruction. For otherwise he would have found that reading and writing have been hitherto just the very instruments for envelop ing men in mist and shadow and for making them con ceited. That same desire of his is undoubtedly the source of several other proposals that are in contradiction to his priru:ipla^ol_direct: perception, and especially his utterly false notion of language as a means of raising our race from dim perception to clear ideas. For our part, we have not spoken of the education of the people in opposi tion to that of the higher classes, because we no longer want to have the word " people " used in the sense of vulgar common populace, nor can German national interests tolerate this sense of the word any longer; but we have spoken of national education. If it shall ever come to this, the miserable wish that education shall ii 162 ADDRESSES TO THE GERMAN NATION be finished very soon and the child again set to work must not be breathed any longer, but given up right at the beginning of the consideration of this matter. In my opinion, indeed, this education will not be expensive, the institutions will be able to maintain themselves to a great extent, and work will not suffer. I shall state my thoughts about this in due course; but even if it were not so, the pupil must unconditionally, and at any cost, remain until education is and can be finished. That half- education is not a bit better than none at all; it leaves matters as they were; and if anyone desires this, he had better dispense also with the half and declare plainly at the very beginning that he does not want mankind to be helped. Now, assuming that the pupil is to remain until education is finished, reading and writing can be of no use in the purely national education, so long as this education continues. But it can, indeed, be very harm- Vul; because, as it has hitherto so often done, it may easily Jjead the pupil astray from direct perception to mere signs, and from attention, which knows that it grasps nothing if it does not grasp it now and here, to distrac tion, which consoles itself by writing things down and wants to learn some day from paper what it will probably never learn, and, in general, to the dreaming which so often accompanies dealings with the letters of the alphabet. Not until the very end of education, and as its last gift for the journey, should these arts be imparted and the pupil led by analysis of the language, of which he has been completely master for a long time, to discover and use the letters. After the rest of the training he has already acquired, this would be play.
137. So much for the purely universal national educa tion. It is a different matter with the future scholar. Some day he shall not only express his feelings about what is STARTING-POINT FOR NEW EDUCATION 163 universally valid, but also by solitary reflection lift up into the light of language the hidden and real depths of his heart, of which he is unconscious. He must, therefore, get into his hands sooner, in the form of writing, the instru ment of this solitary yet audible thought, and learn to create; yet even in his case there will be less need of haste than there has been in the past. This will become distinctly clearer in due course, when we distinguish between purely national and scholarly education.
138. Everything that Pestalozzi says about sound and word as means for the development of mental power is to be corrected and limited in accordance with this view. The scope of these addresses does not permit me to go into details. I make, however, just the following remark which profoundly affects the whole matter. His book for mothers contains the foundation of his development of all knowledge; for, among other things, he relies very much on home education. First of all, so far as this home education itself is concerned, we have certainly no desire to quarrel with him over the hopes that he forms of mothers. But, so far as our higher conception of a national education is concerned, we are firmly con vinced that, especially among the working classes, it cannot be either begun, continued, or ended in the parents' house, nor, indeed, without the complete separation of the children from them. The hardship, the daily anxiety about making ends meet, the petty meanness and avarice, which occur here, would inevitably infect the children, drag them down, and prevent them from making a free flight into the world of thought. This also is one of the absolute and indispensable conditions for the realization of our scheme. We have seen enough of what will happen if mankind as a whole repeats itself in each successive generation as it was in the previous one. If its complete 1 64 ADDRESSES TO THE GERMAN NATION reformation is intended, it must once for all be entirely separated from itself and cut off altogether from its old life. Not until a generation has passed through the new education can the question be considered, as to what part of the national education shall be entrusted to the home.
1 39. Setting that aside, and considering Pestalozzi's book for mothers simply as the first foundation of instruction; to take, as the book does, the child's body as the subject of instruction is also a complete mistake. He starts with the very correct statement, that the first object of the child's knowledge must be the child himself. But is the child's body, then, the child himself? If it must be a human body, would not the mother's body be far closer and more visible to him? And how can the child obtain a perceptual knowledge of his body, without first having learnt to use it? That information is not know ledge, but simply the learning by heart of arbitrary word-symbols, brought about by the over-estimation of speaking. The true foundation of instruction and knowledge wrould be, to use Pestalozzi's language, an A B C of the sensations. When the child begins to understand, and imperfectly to make, speech sounds, he should be led to make himself quite clear, whether he is hungry or sleepy, whether he sees or hears the actual sensation denoted by this or that expression, or, indeed, simply imagines it. He should be clear, too, as to the differences and degrees of difference of the various impressions on the same sense that are denoted by special words, e.g., the colours and the sounds of different bodies, etc. All this should take place in succession, developing properly and regularly the power of sensation. By this means the child first obtains an ego, which he abstracts in free and conscious conception, and which he scrutinizes STARTING-POINT FOR NEW EDUCATION 165 by its aid; as soon as it awakes to life, a mental eye is set in life, and from that time onward never leaves it. Thus, also, measure and number, in themselves empty forms, obtain for the succeeding exercises of perception their clearly recognized inner content which, according to Pestalozzi's method, can be given them only by obscure tendency and compulsion. In Pestalozzi's writ ings a confession, which is remarkable from this point of view, is made by one of his teachers who, when initiated into this method, began to perceive only empty geometrical bodies. This would happen to all pupils of that method if spiritual nature did not, unnoticed, guard against it. It is at this stage, too, when what is really perceived is thus clearly grasped, that not language signs, indeed, but speech itself and the need for expressing oneself to others trains man, and raises him out of darkness and confusion to clearness and definiteness. When the child first awakes to consciousness, all the impressions of surrounding nature immediately crowd upon him and are mingled to a vague chaos, in which no single thing stands out from among the general confusion. How is he ever to emerge from this stage of vagueness? He needs the help of others; he cannot get it except by definitely expressing his need and distinguishing it from similar needs which are already denoted in the language. Under the guidance of those distinctions he is compelled to reflect and to collect his thoughts, to notice what he actually feels, to compare it with, and differentiate it from, something else which he already knows but does not at present feel. Thus a conscious and free ego begins to be separated off in him. Now, education ought with deliberate and free art to continue the course which necessity and nature begin with us.
140. In the field of objective knowledge, which is 1 66 ADDRESSES TO THE GERMAN NATION