§ 199. War has in death its force. It produces this, and by its means
decides who shall serve and who obey. But the nation that finds its
activity in war, though it makes death its absolute means, yet finds its
own limit in death. Other nations are only its boundaries, which it can
overpass in fighting with and conquering them. But death itself it can
never escape, whether it come in the sands of the desert--which buried
for Cambyses an army which he sent to the oracle of the Libyan Ammon--or
in the sea, that scorns the rod of the angry despot, or by the sword of
the freeman who guards his household gods. On this account, that people
stands higher that in the midst of life reflects on death, or rather
lives for it. The education of such a nation must be priestly because
death is the means of the transition to the future life, and
consequently equivalent to a new birth, and becomes a religious act.
Neither the family-state, nor the caste-state, nor the monkish nor
military-state, are hierarchies in the sense that the leading of the
national life by a priesthood produces. But in Egypt this was actually
the case, because the chief educational tribunal was the death-court
which concerned only the dead, in awarding to them or denying them the
honor of burial as the result of their whole life, but in its award
affected also the honor of the surviving family.
§ 200. General education here limited itself to imparting the ability
to read, write, and calculate. Special education consisted properly only
in an habitual living into a definite business within the circle of the
Family. In this fruitful and warm land the expense of supporting
children was very small. The division into classes was without the cruel
features of the Indian civilization, and life itself in the narrow Nile
valley was very social, very rich, very full of eating and drinking,
while the familiarity with death heightened the force of enjoyment. In a
stricter sense only, the warriors, the priests, and the kings, had,
properly speaking, an education. The aim of life, which was to determine
in death its eternal future, to secure for itself a passage into the
still kingdom of Amenth, manifested itself externally in the care which
they expended on the preservation of the dead shell of the immortal
soul, and on this account worked itself out in building tombs which
should last for ever. The Chinese builds a wall to secure his
family-state from attack; the Hindoo builds pagodas for his gods; the
Buddhist erects for himself monastic cells; the Persian constructs in
Persepolis the tomb of his kings, where they may retire in the evening
of their lives after they have rioted in Ecbatana, Babylon, and Susa;
but the Egyptian builds his own tomb, and carries on war only to protect
it.