§ 91. The activity of Perception results in the formation of an internal
picture or image of its ideas which intelligence can call up at any time
without the sensuous, immediate presence of its object, and thus,
through abstraction and generalization, arises the conception. The
mental image may (1) be compared with the perception from which it
sprang, or (2) it may be arbitrarily altered and combined with other
images, or (3) it may be held fast in the form of abstract signs or
symbols which intelligence invents for it. Thus originate the functions
(1) of the verification of conceptions, (2) of the creative imagination,
and (3) of memory; but for their full development we must refer to
Psychology.
§ 92. (1) The mental image which we form of an object may be correct;
again, it may be partly or wholly defective, if we have neglected some
of the predicates of the perception which presented themselves, or in so
far as we have added to it other predicates which only seemingly
belonged to it, and which were attached to it only by its accidental
empirical connection with other existences. Education must, therefore,
foster the habit of comparing our conceptions with the perceptions from
which they arose; and these perceptions, since they are liable to change
by reason of their empirical connection with other objects, must be
frequently compared with our conceptions previously formed by
abstractions from them.
§ 93. (2) We are thus limited in our conceptions by our perceptions, but
we exercise a free control over our conceptions. We can create out of
them, as simple elements, the manifold mental shapes which we do not
treat as given to us, but as essentially our own work. In Pedagogics, we
must not only look upon this freedom as if it were only to afford
gratification, but as the reaction of the absolute ideal native mind
against the dependence in which the empirical reception of impressions
from without, and their reproduction in conceptions, place it. In this
process, it does not only fashion in itself the phenomenal world, but it
rather fashions out of itself a world which is all its own.
§ 94. The study of Art comes here to the aid of Pedagogics, especially
with Poetry, the highest and at the same time the most easily
communicated. The imagination of the pupil can be led by means of the
classical works of creative imagination to the formation of a good taste
both as regards ethical value and beauty of form. The proper classical
works for youth are those which nations have produced in the earliest
stages of their culture. These works bring children face to face with
the picture which mind has sketched for itself in one of the necessary
stages of its development. This is the real reason why our children
never weary of reading Homer and the stories of the Old Testament.
Polytheism and the heroism which belongs to it are just as substantial
an element of childish conception as monotheism with its prophets and
patriarchs. We stand beyond both, because we are mediated by both, and
embrace both in our stand-point.
--The purest stories of literature designed for the amusement of
children from their seventh to their fourteenth year, consist always of
those which were honored by nations and the world at large. One has only
to notice in how many thousand forms the stories of Ulysses are
reproduced by the writers of children's tales. Becker's "Tales of
Ancient Times," Gustav Schwab's most admirable "Sagas of Antiquity,"
Karl Grimm's "Tales of Olden Times," &c., what were they without the
well-talking, wily favorite of Pallas, and the divine swine-herd? And
just as indestructible are the stories of the Old Testament up to the
separation of Judah and Israel. These patriarchs with their wives and
children, these judges and prophets, these kings and priests, are by no
means ideals of virtue in the notion of our modern lifeless morality,
which would smooth out of its pattern-stories for the "dear children"
everything that is hard and uncouth. For the very reason that the
shadow-side is not wanting here, and that we find envy, vanity, evil
desire, ingratitude, craftiness, and deceit, among these fathers of the
race and leaders of "God's chosen people," have these stories so great
an educational value. Adam, Cain, Abraham, Joseph, Samson, and David,
have justly become as truly world-historical types as Achilles and
Patroclus, Agamemnon and Iphigenia, Hector and Andromache, Ulysses and
Penelope.--
§ 95. There may be produced also, out of the simplest and most primitive
phases of different epochs of culture of one and the same people,
stories which answer to the imagination of children, and represent to
them the characteristic features of the past of their people.
--The Germans possess such a collection of their stories in their
popular books of the "Horny Sigfried," of the "Heymon Children," of
"Beautiful _Magelone_," "Fortunatus," "The Wandering Jew," "Faust," "The
Adventurous Simplicissimus," "The _Schildbürger_," "The Island of
Felsenburg," "Lienhard and Gertrude," &c. Also, the art works of the
great masters which possess national significance must be spoken of
here, as the Don Quixote of Cervantes.--
§ 96. The most general form in which the childish imagination finds
exercise is that of fairy-tales; but Education must take care that it
has these in their proper shape as national productions, and that they
are not of the morbid kind which poetry so often gives us in this
species of literature, and which not seldom degenerate to sentimental
caricatures and silliness.
--The East Indian stories are most excellent because they have their
origin with a childlike people who live wholly in the imagination. By
means of the Arabian filtration, which took place in Cairo in the
flourishing period of the Egyptian caliphs, all that was too
characteristically Indian was excluded, and they were made in the "Tales
of Scheherezade," a book for all peoples, with whose far-reaching power
in child-literature, the local stories of a race, as e.g. Grimm's
admirable ones of German tradition, cannot compare. Fairy-tales made to
order, as we often see them, with a mediæval Catholic tendency, or very
moral and dry, are a bane to the youthful imagination in their stale
sweetness. We must here add, however, that lately we have had some
better success in our attempts since we have learned to distinguish
between the naïve natural poetry, which is without reflection, and the
poetry of art, which is conditioned by criticism and an ideal. This
distinction has produced good fruits even in the picture-books of
children. The pretensions of the gentlemen who printed illustrated books
containing nothing more solid than the alphabet and the multiplication
table have become less prominent since such men as Speckter, Fröhlich,
Gutsmuths, Hofman (the writer of "Slovenly Peter"), and others, have
shown that seemingly trivial things can be handled with intellectual
power, if one is blessed with it, and that nothing is more opposed to
the child's imagination than the _childishness_ with which so many
writers for children have fallen when they attempted to descend with
dignity from their presumably lofty stand-point. Men are beginning to
understand that Christ promised the kingdom of heaven to little children
on other grounds than because they had as it were the privilege of being
thoughtless and foolish.--
§ 97. For youth and maidens, especially as they approach manhood and
womanhood, the cultivation of the imagination must allow the earnestness
of actuality to manifest itself in its undisguised energy. This
earnestness, no longer through the symbolism of play but in its
objective reality, must now thoroughly penetrate the conceptions of the
youth so that it shall prepare him to seize hold of the machinery of
active life. Instead of the all-embracing Epos they should now read
Tragedy, whose purifying process, through the alternation of fear and
pity, unfolds to the youth the secret of all human destiny, sin and its
expiation. The works best adapted to lead to history on this side are
those of biography--of ancient times, Plutarch; of modern times, the
autobiographies of Augustine, Cellini, Rousseau, Goethe, Varnhagen, Jung
Stilling, Moritz, Arndt, &c. These autobiographies contain a view of the
growth of individuality through its inter-action with the influences of
its time, and, together with the letters and memoirs of great or at
least noteworthy men, tend to produce a healthy excitement in the
youth, who must learn to fight his own battles through a knowledge of
the battles of others. To introduce the youth to a knowledge of Nature
and Ethnography no means are better than those of books of travel which
give the charm of first contact, the joy of discovery, instead of the
general consciousness of the conquests of mind.
--If educative literature on the one hand broadens the field of
knowledge, on the other it may also promote its elaboration into ideal
forms. This happens, in a strict sense, through philosophical
literature. But only two different species of this are to be recommended
to youth: (1) well-written treatises which endeavor to solve a single
problem with spirit and thoroughness; or, (2) when the intelligence has
grown strong enough for it, the classical works of a real philosopher.
German literature is fortunately very rich in treatises of this kind in
the works of Lessing, Herder, Kant, Fichte, Schleiermacher, Humboldt,
and Schiller. But nothing does more harm to youth than the study of
works of mediocrity, or those of a still lower rank. They stupefy and
narrow the mind by their empty, hollow, and constrained style. It is
generally supposed that these standard works are too difficult, and that
one must first seize them in this trivial and diluted form in order to
understand them. This is one of the most prevalent and most dangerous
errors, for these Introductions or Explanations, easily-comprehended
Treatises, Summary Abstracts, are, because of their want of originality
and of the acuteness which belongs to it, much more difficult to
understand than the standard work itself from which they drain their
supplies. Education must train the youth to the courage which will
attempt standard works, and it must not allow any such miserable
preconceived opinions to grow up in his mind as that his understanding
is totally unable to comprehend works like Fichte's "Science of
Knowledge," the "Metaphysics" of Aristotle, or Hegel's "Phenomenology."
No science suffers so much as Philosophy from this false popular
opinion, which understands neither itself nor its authority. The youth
must _learn how to learn to understand_, and, in order to do this, he
must know that one cannot immediately understand everything in its
finest subdivisions, and that on this account he must have patience, and
must resolve to read over and over again, and to think over what he has
read.--
§ 98. (3) Imagination returns again within itself to perception in that
it replaces, for conceptions, perceptions themselves, which are to
remind it of the previous conception. These perceptions may resemble in
some way the perception which lies at the basis of the conception, and
be thus more or less symbolical; or they may be merely arbitrary
creations of the creative imagination, and are in this case pure signs.
In common speech and writing, we call the free retaining of these
perceptions created by imagination, and the recalling of the conceptions
denoted by them, _Memory_. It is by no means a particular faculty of the
mind, which is again subdivided into memory of persons, names, numbers,
&c. As to its form, memory is the stage of the dissolution of
conception; but as to its content, it arises from the interest which we
take in a subject-matter. From this interest results, moreover, careful
attention, and from this latter, facility in the reproductive
imagination. If these acts have preceded, the fixing of a name, or of a
number, in which the content interesting us is as it were summed up, is
not difficult. When interest and attention animate us, it seems as if we
did not need to be at all troubled about remembering anything. All the
so-called mnemonic helps only serve to make more difficult the act of
memory. This act is in itself a double function, consisting of, first,
the fixing of the sign, and second, the fixing of the conception
subsumed under it. Since the mnemonic technique adds to these one more
conception, through whose means the things with which we have to deal
are to be fixed in order to be able freely to express them in us, it
trebles the functions of remembering, and forgets that the mediation of
these and their relation--wholly arbitrary and highly artificial--must
also be remembered. The true help of memory consists in not helping it
at all, but in simply taking up the object into the ideal regions of the
mind by the force of the infinite self-determination which mind
possesses.
--Lists of names, as e.g. of the Roman emperors, of the popes, of the
caliphs, of rivers, mountains, authors, cities, &c.; also numbers, as
e.g. the multiplication table, the melting points of minerals, the dates
of battles, of births and deaths, &c., must be learned without aid. All
indirect means only serve to do harm here, and are required as
self-discovered mediation only in case that interest or attention has
become weakened.--
§ 99. The means to be used, which result from the nature of memory
itself, are on the one hand the pronouncing and writing of the names and
numbers, and on the other, repetition; by these we gain distinctness and
certainty.
--All artificial contrivances for quickening the memory vanish in
comparison with the art of writing, in so far as this is not looked at
as a means of relieving the memory. That a name or a number should be
this or that, is a mere chance for the intelligence, an entirely
meaningless accident to which we have unconditionally to submit
ourselves as unalterable. The intelligence must be accustomed to put
upon itself this constraint. In science proper, especially in
Philosophy, our reason helps to produce one thought from others by means
of the context, and we can discover names for the ideas from them.--