§ 109. The pupil is the apprentice, the teacher the master, whether in
the practice of any craft or art, or in the exposition of any systematic
knowledge. The pupil passes from the state of the apprentice to that of
the master through that of the journeyman. The apprentice has to
appropriate to himself the elements; journeymanship begins as he, by
means of their possession, becomes independent; the master combines with
his technical skill the freedom of production. His authority over his
pupil consists only in his knowledge and power. If he has not these, no
external support, no trick of false appearances which he may put on,
will serve to create it for him.
§ 110. These stages--(1) apprenticeship, (2) journeymanship, (3)
mastership--are fixed limitations in the didactic process; they are
relative only in the concrete. The standard of special excellence varies
with the different grades of culture, and must be varied that it may
have any historical value. The master is complete only in relation to
the journeyman and apprentice; to them he is superior. But on the other
hand, in relation to the infinity of the problems of his art or science,
he is by no means complete; to himself he must always appear as one who
begins ever anew, one who is ever striving, one to whom a new problem
ever rises from every achieved result. He cannot discharge himself from
work, he must never desire to rest on his laurels. He is the truest
master whose finished performances only force him on to never-resting
progress.
§ 111. The real possibility of culture is found in general, it is true,
in every human being; nevertheless, empirically, there are
distinguished: (1) Incapacity, as the want of all gifts; (2) Mediocrity;
(3) Talent and Genius. It is the part of Psychology to give an account
of all these. Mediocrity characterizes the great mass of mechanical
intelligences, those who wait for external impulse as to what direction
their endeavors shall take. Not without truth, perhaps, may we say, that
hypothetically a special talent is given to each individual, but this
special talent in many men never makes its appearance, because under the
circumstances in which it finds itself placed it fails to find the
exciting occasion which shall give him the knowledge of its existence.
The majority of mankind are contented with the mechanical impulse which
makes them into something and impresses upon them certain
determinations.--Talent shows itself by means of the confidence in its
own especial productive possibility, which manifests itself as an
inclination, as a strong impulse, to occupy itself with the special
object which constitutes its content. Pedagogics has no difficulty in
dealing with mechanical natures, because their passivity is only too
ready to follow prescribed patterns. It is more difficult to manage
talent, because it lies between mediocrity and genius, and is therefore
uncertain, and not only unequal to itself, but also is tossed now too
low, now too high, is by turns despondent and over-excited. The general
maxim for dealing with it is to remove no difficulty from the subject to
which its efforts are directed.--Genius must be treated much in the same
way as Talent. The difference consists only in this, that Genius, with a
foreknowledge of its creative power, usually manifests its confidence
with less doubt in a special vocation, and, with a more intense thirst
for culture, subjects itself more willingly to the demands of
instruction. Genius is in its nature the purest self-determination, in
that it lives, in its own inner existence, the necessity which exists in
the thing. But it can assign to the New, which is in it already
immediately and subjectively, no value if this has not united itself to
the already existing culture as its objective presupposition, and on
this ground it thankfully receives instruction.
§ 112. But Talent and Genius offer a special difficulty to education in
the precocity which often accompanies them. But by precocity we do not
mean that they early render themselves perceptible, since the early
manifestation of gifts by talent and genius, through their intense
confidence, is to be looked at as perfectly legitimate. But precocity is
rather the hastening forward of the human being in feeling and moral
sense, so that where in the ordinary course of nature we should have a
child, we have a youth, and a man in the place of a youth. We may find
precocity among those who belong to the class of mediocrity, but it is
developed most readily among those possessed of talent and genius,
because with them the early appearance of superior gifts may very easily
bring in its train a perversion of the feelings and the moral nature.
Education must deal with it in so far as it is inharmonious, so that it
shall be stronger than the demands made on it from without, so that it
shall not minister to vanity; and must take care, in order to accomplish
this, that social naturalness and lack of affectation be preserved in
the pupil.
--Our age has to combat this precocity much more than others. We find
e.g. authors who, at the age of thirty years, in which they publish
their collected works or write their biography, are chilly with the
feelings of old age. Music has been the sphere in which the earliest
development of talent has shown itself, and here we find the absurdity
that the cupidity of parents has so forced precocious talents that
children of four or five years of age have been made to appear in
public.--
§ 113. Every sphere of culture contains a certain quantity of
knowledge and ready skill which may be looked at, as it were, as the
created result of the culture. It is to be wished that every one who
turns his attention to a certain line of culture could take up into
himself the gathered learning which controls it. In so far as he does
this, he is professional. The consciousness that one has in the usual
way gone through a school of art or science, and has, with the general
inheritance of acquisition, been handed over to a special department,
creates externally a beneficial composure which is very favorable to
internal progress. We must distinguish from the professional the amateur
and the self-taught man. The amateur busies himself with an art, a
science, or a trade, without having gone through any strict training in
it. As a rule, he dispenses with elementary thoroughness, and hastens
towards the pleasure which the joy of production gives. The conscious
amateur confesses this himself, makes no pretension to mastership, and
calls himself--in distinction from the professional, who subjects
himself to rules--an unlearned person. But sometimes the amateur, on the
contrary, covers over his weakness, cherishes in himself the
self-conceit that he is equal to the heroes of his art or science,
constitutes himself the first admirer of his own performances, seeks for
their want of recognition in external motives, never in their own want
of excellence; and, if he has money, or edits a paper, is intoxicated
with being the patron of talent which produces such works as he would
willingly produce or pretends to produce. The self-taught man has often
true talent, or even genius, to whose development nevertheless the
inherited culture has been denied, and who by good fortune has through
his own strength worked his way into a field of effort. The self-taught
man is distinguished from the amateur by the thoroughness and the
industry with which he acts; he is not only equally unfortunate with him
in the absence of school-training, but is much less endowed. Even if the
self-taught man has for years studied and practised much, he is still
haunted by a feeling of uncertainty as to whether he has yet reached the
stand-point at which a science, an art, or a trade, will receive him
publicly--of so very great consequence is it that man should be
comprehended and recognized by man. The self-taught man therefore
remains embarrassed, and does not free himself from the apprehension
that he may expose some weak point to a professional, or he falls into
the other extreme--he becomes presumptuous, steps forth as a reformer,
and, if he accomplishes nothing, or earns only ridicule, he sets himself
down as an unrecognized martyr by an unappreciative and unjust world.
--It is possible that the amateur may transcend the stage of
superficiality and subject himself to a thorough training; then he
ceases to be an amateur. It is also possible that the self-taught man
may be on the right track, and may accomplish as much or even more than
one trained in the usual way. In general, however, it is very desirable
that every one should go through the regular course of the inherited
means of education, partly that he may be thorough in the elements,
partly to free him from the anxiety which he may feel lest he in his
solitary efforts spend labor on some superfluous work--superfluous
because done long before, and of which he, through the accident of his
want of culture, had not heard. We must all learn by ourselves, but we
cannot teach ourselves. Only Genius can do this, for it must be its own
leader in the new paths which it opens. Genius alone passes beyond where
inherited culture ceases. It bears this in itself as of the past, and
which it uses as material for its new creation; but the self-taught man,
who would very willingly be a genius, puts himself in an attitude of
opposition to things already accomplished, or sinks into oddity, into
secret arts and sciences, &c.--
§ 114. These ideas of the general steps of culture, of special gifts,
and of the ways of culture appropriate to each, which we have above
distinguished, have a manifold connection among themselves which cannot
be established _à priori_. We can however remark that Apprenticeship,
the Mechanical Intelligence, and the Professional life; secondly,
Journeymanship, Talent, and Amateurship; and, finally, Mastership,
Genius, and Self Education, have a relationship to each other.