§ 137. Both Physical and Intellectual Education are in the highest
degree practical. The first reduces the merely natural to a tool which
mind shall use for its own ends; the second guides the intelligence, by
ways conformable to its nature, to the necessary method of the act of
teaching and learning, which finally branches out into an objective
national life, into a system of mutually dependent school organizations.
But in a narrower sense we mean by practical education the methodical
development of the Will. This phrase more clearly expresses the topic to
be considered in this division than others sometimes used in Pedagogics
[_Bestrebungs vermögen_, conative power]. The will is already the
subject of a science of its own, i.e. of Ethics; and if Pedagogics would
proceed in anywise scientifically, it must recognize and presuppose the
idea and the existence of this science. It should not restate in full
the doctrines of freedom of duty, of virtue, and of conscience, although
we have often seen this done in empirical works on Pedagogics.
Pedagogics has to deal with the idea of freedom and morality only so far
as it fixes the technique of their process, and at the same time it
confesses itself to be weakest just here, where nothing is of any worth
without a pure self-determination.
§ 138. The pupil must (1) become civilized; i.e. he must learn to
govern, as a thing external to him, his natural egotism, and to make the
forms which civilized society has adopted his own. (2) He must become
imbued with morality; i.e. he must learn to determine his actions, not
only with reference to what is agreeable and useful, but according to
the principle of the Good; he must become virtually free, form a
character, and must habitually look upon the necessity of freedom as the
absolute measure of his actions. (3) He must become religious; i.e. he
must discern that the world, with all its changes, himself included, is
only phenomenal; the affirmative side of this insight into the emptiness
of the finite and transitory, which man would so willingly make
everlasting, is the consciousness of the _absolute_ existing in and for
itself, which, in its certainty of its truth, not torn asunder through
the process of manifestation, constitutes no part of its changes, but,
while it actually presents them, permeates them all, and freely
distinguishes itself from them. In so far as man relates himself to God,
he cancels all finitude and transitoriness, and by this feeling frees
himself from the externality of phenomena. Virtue on the side of
civilization is Politeness; on that of morality, Conscientiousness; and
on that of religion, Humility.