L E V A N A; THE DOCTRINE OF EDUCATION. TRANSLATED FROM THE GERMAN OF WAN PAUL TEIEDEICH EICHTEE, AUTHOR OF "flower, FRUIT, AND THORN PIECES," " TITAN," ETC., BrC ^Blii^ BOSTON: JAMES R. OSGOOD AND COMPANY, Late Tickxor & Fields, and Fields, Osgood, & Co. 1874. University Press : Welch, Bigelow, & Co., Cambridge. FOURTH EDITION. " 18 1929 rmr and Hai^ oItA To Her Majesty, CAROLINE, QUEEN OF BAVARIA, WITH THE PROFOUNDEST RESPECT OF THE AUTHOR. Most Gracious Queen ! — THE author would consecrate Levana to mothers by your royal name, as the banners which a princess has worked receive fresh victorious power. Your Majesty will graciously pardon the dedication of a work which Germany, by the approbation expressed in the demand for a new, improved edition, has already dedicated to a Princess, who, in its best parts, will but find her own recollections. If, even in the lowest ranks, a mother's heart is woman's honor, — the sun which gently warms and dries the dew-drops of early tears, — this sun delights the beholder most when it stands highest and cherishes the distant future, and when a noble mother multi- plies her heart as well as her beauty, and blesses distant ages and countries wath her image. This delight becomes still greater if the mother also is the mother of her country, and raises her sceptre like a magic wand which converts tears of sorrow into tears of joy ere it dries them. Should the profound respect of a subject forbid him to express this joy in a Dedication ? Witli most profound respect. Your Majesty's Most obedient, humble servant, JEAN PAUL FR. RICHTER. W'^^ TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE, T a time when the public mind is so fully awakened to the importance of educa- tion, it appeared to the Translator that the thoughts of one of the greatest Germans on the subject were worthy of deep consideration ; and he offers them with the more satisfaction, because he believes it impossible either for the advocates or for the opponents for the government scheme of education to draw offensive weapons from this arsenal. For Levana treats neither of national nor congregational education : it elevates neither state nor priest into educator ; but it devolves that duty, where the interest ever ought to be, on the parents, and particularly on the mother. It is far from the Translator's object to dispar- age the great efforts now making to improve the state of popular education ; but he believes that, in propounding general systems, it is too much for- vi TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE. gotten that real education is the work of individu- als on individuals. It may be necessary — it is necessary — to provide instruction, and, as far as possible, education, for the classes who tvre too ignorant to seek it for themselves. But let us not, in tli^ mania for systems, forget how little these alone can effect. And, further, we would ask, is the education of the upper classes so perfect that they may leave all care for it, to watch only over that of the lower ? If there be much of crime — the acknowledged consequence of ignorance — among the masses, is there less of vice — the equally sure accompaniment of bad education- — among the higher grades of society ? In the belief that Levana may tend much lo ameliorate that department of education which is most neglected, and needs most care, — home training, — the Translator makes no apology for clothing it in an English dress. He is, indeed, surprised that it lias not previously been presented to tlie English reader. But, like all Richter's writ- ings, Levana is peculiarly characterized by that union of qualities called in England " German." This feature, especially when displayed in a work on so serious a subject as education, and being most strongly marked, in the introductory chapters, TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE. vii on which the reception of a book so much depends, may have led to its being considered unsuitable to English taste. The early part, indeed, may cause many to close the book, who would find much both to interest and instruct in a patient perusal of the whole work, combining as it does, in a remarkable degree, sound practical sense with fanciful and varied illustration. The acknowledged difficulty of Richter's style has also, doubtless, had a deter- ring effect. Those who are acquainted with his writings will be able to appreciate the difficulties which have beset the Translator, and will be the least inclined to judge harshly the shortcomings of the translation, as compared with its great origi- nal. For who — save Carlyle — can hope to do justice to the humorous, pathetic, poetic E-ichter ; to him whom his countrymen call '' Jean Paul, der Einzige " ? The Translator thinks it right to add, that he has occasionally omitted, or compressed, a few sen- tences, where the general usefulness of the work was obviously increased by so doing. This discre- tion has, however, been very sparingly used, and in no case so as to interfere with the scope of the rrigiiial. AUTHOR'S PREFACE. OYERRE only required from a good di- rector of the ballet — besides the art. of dancing — geometry, music, poetry, painting, and anatomy. But to write upon education, means to write upon almost every- thing at once ; for it has to care for, and watch over, the development of an entire, tliough minia- ture, world in little, — a microcosm of the micro- cosm. All the energies with which nations liave labored and signalized themselves once existed as germs in the hand of the educator. If we carried the subject still further, every century, every na- tion, and even every boy and every girl, would require a distinct system of education, a differeut primer, and domestic French governess, etc. If, consequently, on a subject like this, only acta sanctorum^ or, more correctly, sanctifi candor um (acts less of saints than of those to be made saints), can be written, and if a folio be nothing more than a fragment, there cannot be, on sucli an inexhaustible subject, one book too much, even after the best, except the worst ; and where frag- X AUTHOR'S PREFACE. ments alone are possible, all that arc possible com* pletc tlie whole. The Author trusts thus to excuse his boldness as well as his poverty ; for both, as in the state, are nearly connected. He has not read every tiling wliich has been written upon education, but here and there something. First and last he names Rousseau's Emile. No preceding work can be compared to his ; the succeeding imitators and transcribers seem to resemble him more. Not Rousseau's individual rules, many of which may be erroneous without injury to the whole, but the spirit of education which fills and animates the work, has shaken to their foundations and purified all the school-rooms and even the nurseries in Europe. In no previous work on education was the ideal so richly and beautifully combined with actual observation as in his. He was a man, could therefore easily become a child, and so he mani- fested and saved the nature of children. Basedow was his intelligent translator and publisher in Germany, — this land of pedagogopsedists (of edu- cation of children's educators) and of love of children, — and Pestalozzi is now confirming Rousseau among the people. Individual rules, without the spirit of education, rcsoinhle a dictionary without a grammar of the language.. A book of rules is not merely incapable of exhausting and distinguishing tlie infinite vari- ety of individual dispositions and circumstances ; but, even granting it were perfect itself, and able AUTHOR'S PREFACE. XI to make others perfect, it yet would but be like a system of remedies laboring to counteract some one symptom of a disease ; recommending, for in- stance, something of a reducing nature, to be taken before fainting, and to prevent tingling in tlic ears, and unnatural brilliancy of eye ; a tonic to cure paleness and coldness of the face ; an aperient for nausea. But this is worthless ! Do not, like com- mon educators, water tlie individual branches, but the roots, and they will moisten and unfold the rest. Wisdom and morality are no ants' colonies of separate, co-operating workmen, but organic parents of the mental future, which only require animating nourishment. We merely reverse the ignorance of the savages, who sowed gunpowder instead of making it, when we attempt to com- pound what can only be developed. But although the spirit of education, always watching over the ^hole, is nothing more thain an endeavor to liberate, by means of a freeman, the ideal human being which lies concealed in every child ; and though, in the application of the divine to the cliild's nature, it must scorn some iiseful things, some seasonable, individual, or immediate ends ; yet it must incorporate itself in the most definite applications, in order to be clearly mani- fested. Here the Author diffei^ — but to his phi/osoph- ical disadvantage — from those transcende^^tal su- perintendents of the school-room slopes. -v^l>o write thereon with so round a piece '^f ^^ 'k^h^ that one xii AUTHOR'S TEEFACE. may find in their broad strokes wliatev er he de- sires, and who lay down a complete Brownian system of education in the two words, — strong, weak ; though, indeed, Brown's disciple, Schmidt, only uttered one word, — strong. Dr. Tamponet declared that he would trace heresies in the Lord's Prayer, if any one desired it ; our age, on the con- trary, knows how to find, a Lord's Prayer in every heresy. A mother who has a particular child to educate can certainly extract no advantage from such philosophical indifierentism ; although that class of fine, high-sounding compilations always hears witness to a certain amount of artistic talent in their sonorousness and. their theft ; hence. Gall justly found for this sense a place between the organs of music and purloining. But this language docs not belong to the Pref- ace, and the object of this work has forbidden it to find a place in the book itself; wherefore, this may be regarded in form as my most serious produc- tion, to which only a short, occasional, comic Appendix shall be added. The reader will please to take it patiently if he find what has been already printed again printed here. What has been printed is necessary as the bond and bast-matting of what has not been printed ; but the bast-matting must not cover the whole garden, instead of merely tying up the trees. But there are two still better excuses. Known rules in education gain new force if new expe- rience verifies them. The Author has three times AUTHOR'S PREFACE. xiii been in the position of trying them upon different children of all ages and talents ; and he now en- joys with his own the pedagogic jus trium libero- rum (law of three children) ; and every other person's experience related in this book has been made his own. Secondly, printing-ink now is like sympathetic ink, it becomes as quickly invisible as visible ; wherefore it is good to repeat old thoughts in the newest books, because the old works in which they stand are not read. New translations of many truths, as of foreign standard works, must be given forth every half-century. And, indeed, I wish that even old German standard books were turned into new German from time to time, and so could find their way into the circulating libra- ries. Why are there flower and weed gleanings of everything, but no wine or corn gleanings of the innumerable works on education ? Why should one single good observation or rule be lost because it is imprisoned in some monstrous folio, or blown away in some single sheet ? For dwarfs and giants, even in books, do not live long. Our age, this balloon, or air-ship, which, by simultaneous lighting of new lamps, and throwing out of old iiallast, has constantly mounted higher and higher, might now, I should think, cease to throw out, and rather lovingly endeavor to collect than to disperse the old. However little so disjointed a collection of thoughts could teach rules, it would yet arouse xiv AUTHOR'S TREFACE. and sliarpen the educational sense, from which they originally sprung. Therefore every mother — still better every bride — ought to read the many-volumed and, in another sense, many-sided revision of education, to which no nation can op- pose anything similar ; slie should read it, and cut and polish herself, like a precious stone, by it on every side, so that her individuality of character may all the more readily discover, protect, revere, and cherish the dim manifestations of it in her child. Something very different from such a progres- sive cabinet of noble thoughts, or even from my weak Levana, with her fragments in her arms, is the usual kind of complete system of education which one person after another has written, and will write. It is difficult, — I mean the end, not the means. For it is very easy to proceed with bookbinder's and bookmaker's paste, and fasten together a thousand selected thoughts with five of your own, especially if you conscientiously remark in the Preface that you have availed yourself of the labors of your predecessors, yet make no men- tion of one in the work itself, but sell such a min iatiiro library in one volume to the reader as a nientnl facsimile of yourself. How much better in this case were a hole-maker than a liolc-hider ! How much better were it if associated authors (I mean those friendly hundreds who move along one ])ath, uttering precisely the same sound) entirely died out, — as Humboldt tells us that in the tropi- AUTHOR'S PREFACE. XV cal regions there are none of those sociable plants which make our forests monotonous, but next each tree a perfectly different one grows. A diary about an ordinary child would be much better than a book upon children by an ordinary writer. Yes, every man's opinions about education would be valuable if he only wrote what he did not copy. The author, unlike a partner, should always only say " I," and no other word. The first part of this work treats at large of the budding — the second and third of the blossoming — season of childhood. In the first, tlie three early years, like the academic triennium, after which the gate of the soul, language, is opened, are the object of care and observation. Here, edu- cators are the Hours who open or close the gates of heaven. Here, true education, the developing-, is yet possible ; by whose means the long second, the curative, may be spared. For the child, — yet in native innocence, before his parents have become his serpents on the tree, — speechless, still unsus- ceptible of verbal empoisonment, — led by customs, not by words and reasons, therefore all the more easily moved on the narrow and small pinnacle of sensuous experience ; — for the child, I say, on this boundary-line between the monkey and the man, the most important era of life is contained in the years which immediately follow his non-exist- ence, in which, for the first time, he colors and moulds himself by companionship with others. The parent's hand may cover and shelter the ger- xvi AUTHOR'S PREFACE. minating seed, but not the luxuriant tree : conse- quently, first faults are the greatest ; and mental maladies, unlike the small-pox, are the more dan- gerous the earlier they are taken. Every new educator effects less than his predecessor ; until at last, if we regard all life as an educational institu- tion, a circumnavigator of the world is less in- fluenced by all the nations he has seen than by his nurse. At least this book has been composed with warm- est love for the little beings, the delicate flower- gods of a soon fading Eden. May Levana, the motherly goddess, who was formerly entreated to give a father's heart to fathers, hear tlie prayer which the title of this book addresses to her, and, in doing so, justify both it and this. The demands of the state or of learning, unfortunately, rob the child of half its father. The education of most fathers is but a system of rules to keep the child at a respectful distance from them, and to form him more with regard to their quiet than his powers ; or, at most, under a tornado of wrath, to impart as much meal of instruction as he can scatter. But I would ask men of business what education of souls rewards more delightfully and more immediately than that of the innocent, who resemble rosewood, which imparts its odor even while being carved and shaped ? Or what now remains to the decaying world — among so many ruins of what is noblest and ancicntcst — except children, the pure beings yet unfalsificd by the age and the world ? Only AUTHOR'S PREFACE. xvii they, with a higher object than that for which they were formerly used, can behold futurity and truth in the magic mirror, and with bandaged eyes draw the precious lot from the wheel of chance. The words that the father speaks to his children in the privacy of home are not heard by the world ; but, as in whispering-galleries, they are clearly heard at the end, and by posterity. It would be my greatest reward if, at the end of twenty years, some reader as many years old should return thanks to me, that the book which he is then reading was read by his parents. JEAN PAUL FR. KICHTER. Baikeuth, May 2, 1806. Contents. FIRST FRAGMENT. Chap. Pagb I. Importakce of Education 1 11. Inaugural Discourse at the Johanneum-Paullinum ; OR, Proof that Education effects little * . . 5 III. Importance of Education 20 SECOND FRAGMENT. I. Spirit and Principle of Education .... 29 II. To Discover and to Appreciate the Individuality of the Ideal Man 36 III. On the Spirit of the Age 42 IV. Religious Education 53 THIRD FRAGMENT. L The Beginning of Education 67 II. The Joyousness of Children 7G III. Games of Children 82 IV. Children's Dances 95 V. Music 98 VI. Commands, Prohibitions, Punishments, and Crying 100 VII. Punishments 109 XX CONTENTS. VIII. Screaming and Ckying of Children . . . 117 IX. On the Trustfulness of Children .... 122 APPENDIX TO THE THIRD FRAGMENT. On Physical Education 127 COMIC APPENDIX AND EPILOGUE TO THE FIRST YOLUilE. A DREAMED Letter to the late Professor Gellert, in which the Author begs for a Tutor .... 148 FOURTH FRAGMENT. ON FEMALE EDUCATION. I .161 TI. On the Destination of the Female Sex . . 168 III. Nature of Women 175 IV. Education of Girls 188 I V. Private Instructions of a Prince to the Gov- i euness of his Daughter 226 J FIFTH FRAGMENT. I. On the Education of a Prince 241 SIXTH FRAGMENT. ox THE MORAL EDUCATION OF BOYS. 1 277 II. Truthfulness 299 III. Education «»k the Affections 310 IV Suri'LEMKNTARV APPENDIX TO MoRAL EDUCATION . 325 CONTEXTS. xxi SEVENTH FRAGMENT. I. On the Development of the Desire for Intellec- tual Proghess 342 II. Speech and Writing 345 III. Attention, and the Power of Adaptive Combina- tion 353 IV. Development of Wit 362 V. Development of Reflection, Abstraction, and Self-Knowledge; together with an extra Para- graph ON the Powers of Action and Business . 368 VI. On the IZducation of the Recollection, — not of the Memory 370 EIGHTH FRAGMENT. I. Development of the Sense of Beauty . . . 378 U. Classical Education 384 NINTH FRAGMENT, ok Conclusion .... 390 LEVANA THE DOCTRINE OF EDUCATION. FIRST FRAGMENT, Chap. I. Importance of Education, §§ 1-3. — Chap. IT. Discourse against its Influence, §§ 4-15. — Chap. III. Discourse for the same, H 16-20. CHAPTER I. IMPORTANCE OF EDUCATION. § 1. HEN Antipater demanded fifty children as hostages from the Spartans, they offered him, in their stead, a hundred men of distmction ; unhke ordinary educators, who precisely re- verse the offering. The Spartans thought rightly and nobly. In the world of childhood all posterity stands be- fore us, upon which we, like Moses upon the promised land, may only gaze, but not enter ; and at the same time it renews for us the ages of the young world, behind which we must appear ; for the child of the most civil- ized capital is a born Otaheitan, and the one-year-old Sans-culotte a first Christian, and the last children of the earth came upon the world with the paradise of our first parents. So, according to Bruyn, the children of the 1 A 2 LEVANA. Samojeds are beautiful, and only the parents ugly. If there were a perfect and all-powerful system of education, and a unity of educators with themselves and with one another ; then, since each generation of children begins the history of the world anew, the immediate, and through it the distant future, into which we can now gaze and grasp so little, would stand much more fairly in our power. For deeds and books — the means by which we have hitherto been able to work upon the world — al- ways find it already defined, and hardened and full of people like ourselves ; only by education can we sow upon a pure, soft soil the seeds of poison or of honey- bearing flowers ; and as the gods to the first men, so do we, physical and spiritual giants to children, descend to these little ones, and form them to be great or small. It is a touching and a mighty thought that now, before their educator, the great spirits and teachers of our immediate posterity creep, as the sucklings of his milk-store, — that he guides future suns, hke little wandering stars, in his leading-strings. And it is all the more important because he can neither know whether he has before him, to un- fold to good or evil, a hell-god for humanity, or a pro- tecting and light-giving angel ; nor can foresee at what dangerous moment of futurity the magician, who, trans- formed into a little child, now plays before him, will rise up a giant. §2. Our immediate future demands thought : our earth is filled with gunpowder, — like the age of the migration of nations, ours prepares itself for spiritual and political wanderings, and under all state buildings, professorial chairs, and temples the earth quakes. Do you know IMPORTANCE OF EDUCATION. 3 whether the little boy who plucks flowers at your side may not one day, from his island Corsica, descend as a war-god, into a stormy universe, to play with storms and to destroy, or to purify and to sow ? Would it then be indifferent whethei', in educating him, you had been his Fenelon, his Cornelia, or his Dubois ? For, although you might not be able to break or bend the power of genius, — tlie deeper the sea, the more precipitous the coast, — yet in the most important initiatory decade of life, in the first, at the opening dawn of all feelings, you might surround and overlay the slumbering lion energies with all the tender habits of a gentle heart and all the bands of love. Whether an angel or a devil educate that great genius is of far more importance than whether a learned doctor or a Charles the Simple teach him. Although a system of education must, in the first in- stance, provide for the beings endowed wnth genius ; since these, though they seldom arise, yet alone rule the world's history, either as leaders of souls, or of bodies, or of both ; yet would such a system too much resemble a practical exposition of how to conduct one's self in case of winning the great prize, if it did not observe that the multitude of mediocre talents on which a great one can act are quite as important in the mass as the man of genius is in the individuah And therefore, since, on the one hand, you give to posterity, as alms to a beggar, through children ; and, on the other, must send these last, like unarmed men, into a hidden period whose poisonous gales you know not ; so there is nothing more important to pos- terity, than whether you send forth your pupil as the seed-corn of a harvest, or the powder-train of a mine, which destroys itself and everything with it : and nothing is more important to the child, than whether you have or 4 LEVANA. have not given him a magic jewel which may preserve and conduct him uninjured. Let a chikl be more holy to you than the present, which consists of things and matured men. By means of the child, — although with difficulty, — by means of the short lever-arm of humanity, you set in motion the long one, whose mighty arc you can scarcely define in the height and depth of time. But there is something else you certainly know, — namely, that the moral develop- ment — which is education, as the intellectual is instruc- tion — knows and fears no time nor futurity. In this you give to the child a heaven wuth a pole star, wdiich may ever guide him in whatever new countries he may after- wards reach. §3. A perfect child w^ould be a heavenly aurora of the soul ; at least its appearance would not be so variously restrained and so difficult as that of a perfect man. On him everything, from the state down to himself, exercises a forming influence ; but on the fresh child, parents repeat with full power the lawgiving, moulding, character of Lycurgus and of Moses ; they can separate their pupil from others, and form liim without interference, better than a Spartan or Jew^ish state could do. Consequently one ought to expect more from the unlimited monarchy of parents. Children living in this kingdom, without Salic law^, and in such an overflow of laws and lawgivers that the rulers are often more numerous than the ruled, and the governing house larger than the governed, — hav- ing everywhere before them cabinet orders, and offended majesties, and most rapid mandata sine clausula, and be- hind the glass the exalted sceptre of the re 1, — possessing PRESENT INEFFICIENCY OF EDUCATION. 5 in their sovereign their bread-master, as well as their pain and pleasure master, and protected against him by no foreign power ; for maltreatment of slaves is pun- ished in many countries, even of cattle in England, but nowhere of children, — children, then, thus absolutely governed without opposition party, or anti-ministerial gazette, and without representatives, should issue, one would think, out of this smallest state within the state, lar better educated than grown-up persons educated in the greatest of all educational establishments, the state itself Nevertheless, both educational establishments and states seem to work so uniformly, that it is worth while, next to the necessity of education, to consider, in the two fol- lowing discourses, its possibility. CHAPTER II INAUGURAL DISCOURSE AT THE JOHANNEUM-PAULLINUM ; OR, PROOF THAT EDUCATION EFFECTS LITTLE. §4. MOST honored Inspector of Schools, Rector, Con- and Sub-rector, master of the third class ! most worthy teacher of the lower classes and fellow-laborers ! I hope I shall, to the best of my abilities, express my pleasure at being inducted as lowest teacher into your educational establishment, by entering on my post of honor with the proof that school education, as well as home education, has neither evil conse ;[uences, nor any 6 LEVANA. other. If I am so fortunate as to lead us all to a quiet conviction of this absence of consequences, I may also possibly obtain that we shall all fill our laborious offices easily and cheerfully, without boasting, and with a cer- tain confidence that needs fear nothing ; every day we shall walk in and out among the pupils, sit on our teach- ing-chair as on an easy-chair, and let everything take its own course. Fu-st, I believe, I must set forth who are the educators and complete fashioners of children, — for fashioned, in one way or another, they are ; and in which way, rests with and in us ; — and afterwards I will naturally touch upon ourselves, and point out the easy change which may be effected. §5. Whence comes it that hitherto no age has spoken, coun- selled, and done so much about education as our own; and again, among nations, none so much as Germany, into which Rousseau's winged seeds have been blown out of France and ploughed in ? The ancients wrote and did little for it ; their schools were rather for young men than children, and in the philosophical schools of Athens, the learner frequently was, or might be, older than the teacher. Sparta was a Stoa, or garrison-school, at once for parents and children. The Romans had Grecian slaves for their schoolmasters, and yet their children be- came neither Greeks nor slaves. In the ages when the great and glorious deeds of Christendom, and knighthood, and freedom rose like stars on the dark horizon of Europe, school buildings lay scattered around as mere dull, little, dark, savage huts, or monks' cells. And what have the political vowels of Europe, the English, whose island I RESENT INEFFICIENCY OF EDUCATION. 7 is a school of citizens, and whose election every seven years is a wandering seven-day Sunday school ? — what have they hitherto better than mere estabhshments for mal-education ? Where do the children more resemble the parents — and to anything else than a mirror of him- self, be it a flat, a concave, or a convex one, the teacher cannot wish to mould and polish his pupil — than even m those places where the educators are silent, among sav- ages, Greenlanders, and Quakers ? And the further one looks back through past ages, to the hoary nations of antiquity, the fewer school-books and Cyropedias — in fact, from want of all books — were there : all the more was the man lost in the state ; all the less was the woman, who might have educated, formed for it : nevertheless, every child was the image of its par- ents, which is more than the best ought to desire, since God can only behold his own image in men as a carica- ture. And are not our present improved educational in- stitutions a proof that men can raise themselves freely and without aid from bad to better, and, consequently, to all other establishments of a similar kind ? §6. But who then educates in nations and ages ? — Both ! — The living time, which, for twenty or thirty years struggles unceasingly with men through actions and opin- ions, tossing them to and fro as with a sea of waves, must soon wash away or cover the precipitate of the short school years, in which only one man, and only words taught. The century is the spiritual climate of man, mere education the hot-house and forcing-pit, out of which he is taken and planted forever in the other. By centurv is here meant the real century, wliich may as often truly 8 LEVANA. consist of ten years, as of ten tliousand, and which is dated, hke religious eras, only from great men. What can insulated words do against hving present action ? The present has for new deeds also new words ; the teacher has only dead languages for the, to all appear- ance, dead bodies of his examples. The educator has himself been educated, and is already possessed, even without his knowledge, by the spirit of the age, which he assiduously labors to banish out of the youth (as a whole city criticises the spirit of the whole city). Only, alas ! every one believes himself to stand so precisely and accurately in the zenith of the universe, that, according to his calculation, all suns and nations must culminate over his head ; and he himself, like the countries at the equator, cast no shadow save into himself alone. For were this not so, how could so many — as I also hereafter propose to do — speak of the spirit of the age, when every word implies a rescue from, and eleva- tion above it ; just as we cannot perceive the ebb and flow of the tide in the ocean, but only at its boundaries, the coasts. In like manner, a savage cannot depict a sav- age so clearly as a civilized man can do. But in truth, the painters of the spirit of the age have for the most part represented the last one, nothing more. The great man, the poet and thinker, has never been so clearly known to himself, that the crystal light-holder and the light have become one ; much less then have other men. However easily blooming every man may open towards the sky, he is yet drawn down by a root into the dark, fast earth. §7. The spirit of the nation and of the age decides, and is at once the schoolmaster and the school ; for it seizes on PRESEXT INEFFICIENCY OF EDUCATION. 9 the pupil to form him with two vigorous hands and pow- ers ; with the living lesson of action, and with its unalter- able unity. If — to begin with unity — education must be, like the Testament, a continuous endeavor to withdraw the force of interrupting mixtures, then nothing builds up so strong as the present, which ceases not for a moment, and eternally repeats itself; and which, with joy and sor- row, with towns and books, with friends and enemies, in short, with thousand-handed life, presses and seizes on us. No teacher of the people continues so uniformly one with himself as the teaching people. Minds molten into masses lose something of their free movements : which bodies, for instance, that of the world, perhaps that of the universe, seem to gain by their very massiveness, and, like a heavy colossus, to move all the more easily along the old, iron-covered track. For however much mar- riage?, old age, deaths and enmities, are in the individual case subject to the law of freedom, yet in a whole nation, lists of births and deaths can be made, by which it may be shown that in the Canton of Berne (according to Mad. de Stael) the number of divorces, as in Italy that of mur- ders, is the same from year to year. Must not, now, the little human being placed on such an eternally and ever similarly acting world, be borne as upon a flying earth, where the only directions that a teacher can give avail nothing, because he has first unconsciously received his line of movement upon it ? Thence, in spite of all re- formers and informers, nations, like meadows, reach ever a similar verdure ; thence, even in capital cities, where all school-books and schoolmasters, and even parents of every kind, educate, the spirit maintains itself unalterably the same. Repetition is the mother not only ot study, but also of I* lo LEVANA. education. Like the fresco-painter, the teacher lays col- ors on tlie wet plaster which ever fade away, and which he must ever renew until they remain and brightly shine. "VVho then, at Naples for instance, Liys the colors most frequently on the spiritual tablet of one individual, the one tutor, or the multitude of 30,000 advocates, 30,000 lazzaroni, and 30,000 monks; a threefold company of fates, or ninefold one of nine murderers, compared with which Vesuvius is a quiet man who suffers himself to be entreated by Saint Januarius * (although not in January) ? Certainly one might say that also in fixmilies there educates, besides the ])opular ma>ses, a pedagogic crowd of people ; at least, ibr instance, aunts, grandfathers, grandmothers, father, mother, godparents, friends of the family, the yearly domestics, and at the end of all the in- structor beckons with his forefinger, so that — could this force continue as long as it would gladly be maintained — a child, under these many masters, would resemble, much more than one thinks, an Indian slave, wdio wanders about with the inburnt stamps of his various masters. But how does the multitude disappear compared with the higher one, by which it was colored ; just as all the burnt marks of the slave yet cannot overcome the hot black coloring of the sun, but receive it as a coat of arms in a sable field? §8. The second mighty power by which the spirit of the age and people teaches and conquers is the living action. Not the cry, says a Chinese author, but the rising, of a wild duck impels the flock to follow him in upward flight. One war fought against a Xerxes inflames the heart quite differently, more purely and more strongly, than the pe- * The protecting saint of the Neapolitan.'' against Vesuvius. PKESENT INEFFICIENCY OF EDUCATION. II rusal of it three times in Cornelius, Plutarch, and Herodo- tus : for this last, along with the whole teaching of school phrases, is merely an intellectual imitation in cork (a phelloplastic, according to Bottiger's re translation into the Greek) in order easily to represent ancient temples and magnificent buildings in light cork forms. Yea, the mere ancestral images of deeds in Plutarch's Westminster Ab- bey cast the seeds of the divine word more deeply into the heart than one or a few thousand volumes of sermons full of true pulpit eloquence. Heaven ! if words could be compressed to deeds, only a thousand to one, could they yet arouse upon an earth in which pulpits, profes- sors' chairs, and libraries of all ages snow down unceas- ingly their most pure cold exhortations, one single passion to hurl forth volcanic fire ? Would not history then be surrounded with mere snow craters and icebergs ? Ah ! most respected teachers, if even we, with our great col- lege libraries, that preach to us for tens of years, have never once been brought so far as to become holy men for a month, nay for a week, what dare we expect from the few volumes of words which we let fall in school- hours? Or what more should the parents at home ex- pect ? The pedagogic powerlessness of words is unfortunately confessed in a peculiar manner, which is daily renewed in each of us. Namely, every individual being is divided into a teacher and his scholars ; or is split up into the teacher's chair and the scholars' form. Should you row beheve that this perpetual house-tutor in the four cham- bers of the brain, — who daily gives private lessons to the sharer of his apartment, philanthropist, and boarder, — who is a morning, evening, and night preacher, — who never cease? with his conversatorium and repetitoriura, — 12 LEVANA. who accompanies the pupil, whom he loves as himself and conversely, everywhere with notes of instruction as tutor on his travels, in idle hours and wine-drinkings, by- seats on the throne, by the chair of instruction and else- where, — who, as the most unlimited head-master to be found under the skull, ever sleeps with his scholar, as a sergeant with a recruit, in the same bed, and from time to time reminds him of much when a man has forgotten himself, — in short, could you believe that this so ex- tremely rare Mentor, who from the pineal-gland, as the lodging-place of the high light, eternally teaches down- ward ; nevertheless, after fifty and more judgments and years, has experienced nothing better in his Telema- chus, than what the pure Minerva (the well-known and anonymous Mentor in the Telemachus), with all her modesty, in the greatest head of the world, in that of Jupiter, also had to experience, namely, that she could not spare her pupil a single one of his animal transfor- mations ? This, indeed, were scarcely to be believed, if we did not daily see the most lamentable instances of it in ourselves. There is, for example, in the history of the learned something very usual and very pitiful : — that excellent men have resolved for many years to rise earlier in a morning, without much coming of it, — unless they may perhaps break through the habit at the last day. §9. Permit us to return : and since we have easily asked whether a man may be more effectually moved by a thousand outward foreign words, than by a billion of his own inward ones, let us not be very much astonished if the stream of words which is given to the youth, in order that he may thereby guide and bear himself up in tho PKESEXT INEFFICIENCY OF EDUCATION. 13 ocean, should be dissipated by the winds and waves on every side. But give us leave to remark, that we lay many things to the account of school-rooms, that is, of words, which have in fact had their sole origin on the common teaching-ground of action ; just as, in former times, general pestilences were ascribed to the poisoning of particular wells by the Jews. The school-house of the young soul does not merely consist of lecture and lesson rooms, but also of the school-ground, the sleeping-room, the eating-room, the play-ground, the staircase, and of eveiy place. Heaven ! what intermixture of other influ- ences, always either to the advantage or prejudice of education ! The physical growth of the pupil nourishes and draws forth a mental one ! Nevertheless, this is ascribed to the pedagogic tan-bed ; just as if one must net necessarily grow cleverer and taller at the same time I One might quite as properly attribute the service of the muscles to the leading-strings. Parents very often in their own children regard that as the effect of educational care and attention which in strangers they would merely consider the consequence of human grov^^h. There are so many illusions ! If a great man have gone through any one educational establishment, he is ever after ex- plained by that : either he did not resemble it, and then it is held to have been a moulding counter-irritation ; or he did, and then it acted as an incitement to life. In the same way one might regard the blue library, whose bind- ing taught the librarian Duval his first lessons in arith- metic, as an arithmetical book, and school for arithmetic. If parents, or men in general, in all their education seek nothing else than to make their physical image into their more perfect mental one, and consequently to varnish over this copy with the departed brightness of the origi- 14 LEVANA. nal, then must they readily fall into the mistake of esteeming an inborn resemblance an acquired one, and physical fathers spiritual ones, and nature freedom. But in this and the former consideration, that holds true of children which does of nations : there were found in the new world ten customs of the old, — six Chinese in Peru, four Hottentotish in Western America,* — without any other nearer descent to account for these resemblances than the general one from Adam, or humanity. § 10. We may, excellent fellow-workers, especially flatter ourselves with services to humanity, when the position is )M-oved true, that we effect little, or nothing, by education. As in the mechanical world every motion, if the oppo- sition of friction were removed, Avould be unceasingly continued, and every change become eternal ; so, in the spiritual world, if the pupil less bravely opposed and vanquished the teacher, a more beggarly life would be eternally repeated than we can at all picture to ourselves. I mean this : if all the streets and times of this poor earth were to be filled with dull, stiff images from the pedagogic princely mirrors, that is, with counterfeits of school-men, so that every age might be impressed by the other, manikin on manikin ; what else is wanted for this tedious misery, but that education should succeed beyond our expectations, and a tutor and schoolmaster allow his head, like a crowned one, to pass stam|ied in all hands and corners ? And a whole bench of knights might become an assembly of candidates fit for the tournament, because they had been previously clean and well copied after the quiet burgher's pattern ? * Zimmevmamrs Ilistoiy of M;in, b. 3. PRESENT INEFFICIENCY OF EDUCATION. 15 But we will venture to hope the opposite ; the school- master and tutor is ever afterwards connected with the nobleman, as God with nature ; concerning which Sen- eca justly writes, Semel jussit, semper paret, — i. e. the tutor's study is very soon closed, and the antechamber and audience-hall opened. In order not to fall into the error of those who intro- duce the bird Phoenix, and the man in the moon uuwived, I have here in my thoughts girls also, on whom, as on doves and canary-birds, false colors are painted by gov- ernesses, as well as by tutors, which the first rain or moulting removes. But, as has been said, every woman becomes in time something peculiar ; a beautiful Idioticon of her many provinces of language. §11. Through long teaching, to which no advance of the pupil is sufficiently proportioned, schoolmasters of under- standing may arrive at the question : " How will the poor scholar be able to walk in the right path without our leading-strings, since even with them he runs into error ? " — and also at this wish : " God ! that we could but wind him up, and fix him, exactly like an astronomical hun- dred-yeared chronometer, so that he might show the hours, and positions of the planets and everything quite accurately, long after our death ! " — and consequently at this opinion : " that they were in fact the soul of his inner man, and had to raise his every limb, or were at least, his supporting mould, in which he ought not merely to carry his broken arm, as in a gentle bandage, but also his leg, his head, and his entrails, so as to be completely strengthened." If the tutor accompany his young master to the university, the one goes into much good society l6 LEVANA. Avithout the other : and if thej both at last set off on tlieir travels, the young gentleman goes into much of a suspicious nature, and the tutor ends his anxiety, — which resembles the anxiety of a mother, as to how the poor naked fostus can exist, when it comes into this cold blowing world, and is no longer nourished by her blood. Truly your singing-bird of a pupil will continue to whistle for you through the night ; because, by a night- light, that is, by an education out of season, you delude him into the belief of an artificial daylight; but when he once flies into the open air, he will then only arrange his notes and sound them at the general break of day. If we place ourselves on another eminence, to contem- plate thence the directions, fears, and demands of teachers, we almost feel tempted to drive them down, especially because they, the educators, assume and presume so much ; that is, they do not take and set before them the great world-plan as their school-plan, nor the all-educator as an example to the poor hedge-schoolmaster man, — but do so anxiously endeavor, with their narrow views, to assist the infinite Pedagogiarch (Prince of teachers), — who per- mits sun to revolve round sun, and child round father, and so the child's and father's father are alike, — as if human- ity, neglected for thousands of years, were laid before them, hidden nook creators, like warm wax, on which they had to impress their own individual induration, to produce future indurations ; so that they might as re-cre- ators agreeably surprise the creator with a living sf'xl and paste cabinet of their coats of arms and heads. A long period, and here again a long period. § 12. None of all my hearers, of whom I am the nearest, can PRESENT INEi^FICIENCY OF EDUCATION. 17 have forgotten that at the commencement I asked why so much at present in Germany is written about education, and grounded upon it, as I also myself intend to lay some printed ideas on the subject before the public. I answer, for this reason ; because by cultivation all humanity has become a speaking machine, and the flesh a word. The more education, the more notions ; the less action, the more speech ; man is becoming a man by profession, as there were formerly Christians by profession ; and the ear his sensorium comynune. The beggar, for instance, passes by the great citizen unnoticed ; the one has fled from the other, not merely in dee clcisf "r SPIRIT AND PRINCIPLE OF EDUCATION. 33 novices. For the human being is not formed to grow altogether upwards, like plants and deer's horns ; nor yet altogether downwards, like feathers and teeth ; but, like muscles, at both ends at once: so that Bacon's double motto for kings, " Remember that thou art a man, remem- ber that thou art a god, or vice-god," may serve also for children ! Education can neither entirely consist of mere unfold- ing in general, or, as it is now better called, excitement, — for every continued existence unfolds, and every bad education excites, just as oxygen positively irritates, — nor in the unfolding of all the powers, because we cati never act upon the whole amount of them at once ; as little as in the body susceptibility and spontaneity, or the muscular and nervous system, can be strengthened at the same time. §23. A purely negative education, such as that of Rousseau only seems to be, would at once contradict itself and reality, as much as an organic living body full of powers of growth without means of excitement : even the few wild children who have been captured received a positive education from the raging and flying animals around them. A child's coffin only can represent a negative hedge-school, prince's school, and school-door. The pure- ly natural man — whom Rousseau sometimes, indeed very often, confounds with the ideal man, because both are equally pure and distinct from the mere worldly man — grows entirely by excitement. Rousseau, in the first place, prefers arousing and influencing the child by things rather than by men, by impressions rather than by dis- courses ; and, in the second, recommends a more healthy and useful series of excitements, whilst his predecessors 2* c 34 LEVANA. in teaching had hastened to use upon the susceptible nature of children the most powerful excitements, such as God, Hell, and the Rod ! Only give the souls of children free passage from the limhus patrum et infantum, and Nature, he seems to think, will unfold herself. This, indeed, she does everywhere, and at all times, but only in ages, countries, and souls which possess a marked individuality. §24. Perhaps we may find the centre and focus of these crossing lines and beams from this point of view : — If a modern Greek, without any knowledge of the mighty past, were depicting the present condition of his enslaved race, he would find it approaching the highest step of civiliza- tion, morality, and other excellences, until a magic stroke revealed to his astonished eye Greece in the Persian war, or Athens in its glory, or fruitful Sparta, like an empire of the dead, like Elysian fields. What a differ- ence in the same nation, vast as that between gods and men ! Nevertheless, those gods are not genii, nor in any way exceptions, but a people, consequently the majority and average of talents. When in history we look round on the heights and mountain ranges where glorified nations dwell, and then down into the abysses where others lie enchained, we say to ourselves. The heights that a multitude has reached thou also ^anst reach, if thou canst not descend into the depths. The spiritual existence that a nation, a majority of any people, has embodied and showed forth in glory must dwell and breathe in every individual, else could he not recognize in it a kindred being. And so, indeed, it is. Every one of us has within him an ideal man, which he strives, from his youth upwards, SPIRIT AND PRINCIPLE OF EDUCATION. 35 to cherish or to subdue. This holy soul-spirit every one beholds most clearly in the blooming time of all his pow- ers, — in the season of youth. If only every one were distinctly conscious of what he once wished to become, of how different and much nobler a path and goal his open- ing eye, compared with his fading one, beheld ! For so soon as we believe in any contemporaneous growth of the physical and spiritual man, we must also let the blooming season of both occur simultaneously. Consequently, his own ideal being will appear most clearly to the man (though it be only in vague desires and dreams) in the full bloom of youth. And does not this show itself in the meanest soul, which, though sunk during its pilgrim- age through sensual and covetous affections, yet once attained a higher hope, and stood within the gates of heaven ? At a later period, in the multitude, the ideal being fades day by day, and the man becomes, sinking and overpowered, the mere present, a creature of neces- sity and neighborhood. But the universal complaint, " What might I not have become ! " confesses the present existence, or the past existence, of an older Adam in paradise, along with and before the old Adam. But the ideal man comes upon the earth as an anthro- pohthe (a petrified man) : to break this stony covering away from so many limbs, that the rest can liberate them- selves, — this is, or should be, education. The same normal being who, in every noble soul, re- mains as house-tutor, and silently teaches, should be outwardly manifested in the child, and make itself inde- pendent, free, and strong. But first of all we must discover what it is. The ideal man of Fenelon, — so full of love and full of strength, — the ideal man of Cato the younger, — so full of strength and full of love, — could 36 LEVANA. never exchange or metamorphose themselves hito jach other without spiritual suicide. Consequently, «rotii'*ation has in CHAPTER II. TO DISCOVER AND TO APPRECIATE THE INDIVIDUi t TTY Oi THE IDEAL MAN. §25. LET a needful breathing-space be granted here ! I» most languages, like a symbol, the adjective and verb " good " and " be " are irregular. Physical powei expresses its superfluity in the variety of genera ; hence the temperate zone maintains only 130 distinct quadru- peds, but the torrid 220. The higher kinds of life sepa- rate, according to Zimmermann, into more species ; thus, beyond the five hundred species of the mineral kiigdom, lies the animal world with seven million. It is £0 with minds. Instead of the uniformity of savage nations in different ages and countries, for instance, of the American Indians and the ancient Germans, is seen the ntiany- branched, varied forms of civilized people in the same climate and period : just as the art of gardening multi- plies sorts of flowers in different colors, or time separate* a long strip of land in the ocean into islands. In so fa* a meaning may be attached to the saying of the school men, that every angel is its own species. §26. Every educator, even the dullest, admits this, and imprints on his pupils this reverence for peculiarities, that is, for his own ; at the same time he laboi^s i idustri- INDIVIDUALITY OF THE IDEAL MAN 37 oaslj to secure this point, — that each be nothing else than his own step-son or bastard self. He allows himself as much individuality as is necessary to eradicate that of others, and plant bis own in its stead. If, in general, every man is secretly his own copying-machine, which he applies to others, and if he willingly draws all into ghostly and spiritual relationship with himself as soul's cousins, — iunced in itself the sufferings. On the contrary, SPIRIT OF THE AGE. 51 our age has, before every other, besides a certain human- ity of war, in respect to life, also a growing insiglit into its unhiwfulncss. Among nations the head has at all times preceded the lieart by centuries, as in the slave-trade ; yes, by tliou- sands of years, as will perhaps be the case in war. Since modes of life beget modes of thought, and opin- ions actions, and head and heart, spiritually as well as physically, mutually improve or injure each other, so has fate, when both are to be healed at once, only one cure, and that a long one; the harsh viper-like cure of affliction. If sorrow purifies men, why not nations ? Certainly, and it is for this reason that men perceive it less, if wounds and fast-days improve the one, battle-fields and centuries of penance do the other, and generations must sink sadly and sorrowfully to destruction. Not by a splendid martial funeral with firing of cannon, but by a battle of the ele- ments, is the sky made blue and the earth fruitful. At the same time in histoiy, as in the almanac, the thick, dull St. Thomas's day is shorter than the bright, warm St. John's day, although both conduct into new seasons of the year. But until, and in order that, our children and children's children may pass through the winter centuries, this it is that nearly affects us and education. We must meet the great entanglement by partial unravellings. The child must be armed against the future; yes, even against the close-pressing present, with a counterbalancing weight of three powers against the three weaknesses of the will, of love, and of religion. Our age has only a passionate power of desire, like animals, the mad, the sick, and 52 LEVANA. every weakling ; but not that energy of will which was most nobly displayed in Sparta and Rome, — in the Stoa, and in the early Church. And now the arts, as the state formerly did, must harden the young spirit, and subdue the will. The uniform color of a stoic oneness must extinguish the common praise of the various tiger-spots and serpent brilliancy of passionate agitation ; the girl and the boy must learn that there is something in the ocean higher than its waves ; namely, a Christ who calls upon them. When the stoic energy of will is formed, there is then a loving spii'it made free. Fear is more egoistic than cour- age, because it is more needy ; the exhausting parasitical plants of selfishness only attach themselves to decayed trunks. But power kills what is feeble, as strong decoc- tion of quassia kills flies. If man, created more for love than for opposition, can only attain a free, clear space, he possesses love ; and that is love of the strongest kind, which builds on rocks, not on waves. Let the bodily heart be the pattern of the spiritual ; easily injured, sen- sitive, lively, and warm, but yet a tough, free-beating muscle, behind the lattice-work of bones, and its tender nerves are difficult to find. As there is no contest about the nature of power and love, but only of the ways to attain them (these, however, penetrate deep into the matter) ; but, as about religion, on the contrary, the doubts of many must first be solved as to whether there be only one, and whether different paths lead to it, so the third point in which the child is to be educated against the age, must endeavor to estnbli>h first, instead of the means, the right to educate religiously Power and love are two op ^^osing forces of the inner man but religion is the equal union of both, the man within the man. R RELIGIOUS EDUCATION. 5^ CHAPTER IV. RELIGIOUS EDUCATION. §36. ELIGION is now no longer a national, but a house- hold goddess. Our little age is a magnifjing-glass, through which, as is well known, the exalted appears flat and level. Since we now send all our children out into a townlike futurity, in which the broken church-bells only dully call the populous market-place to the silent church, we must, more anxiously than ever, seek to give them a house of prayer in the heart, and folded hands, and humil- ity before the invisible world, if we beheve in a religion and distinguish it from morality. The history of nations determines that there is this separation. There have been many rehgions, but there is only one code of morals ; in those a god has always become a man, and therefore been concealed under many folds ; in this a man has become God, and been clearly manifested. The middle ages had, along with moral churchyards full of dead bodies and rank vegetation, full of cruelty and lust, also churches and spires for the relig- ious sentiment. In our times, on the contrary, the sacred groves of religion are cleared and trodden down, and the public roads of morality made straighter and more sure. Ah ! a contemporaneous decline of religion and morality would be too sad ! The age will conceal the departure of the sense for the heavenly by the greater sharpness and severity of that for the moral ; and at least by small, delicate, and therefore more numerous, sides acquire a moral breadth. As men in towns, where they canno* 54 LEVANA. build in width build in height, so we, reversing the mat- ter, build in width instead of in height ; more over the earth than into the skj. "We may truly say that France, in general, with its chemical, physical, mathematical, and warlike noonday lights, can hardly behold in the starry heaven of religion more than a last shadowy quarter of the moon, resembling rather a cloud than a star ; whilst in England and Germany religion is still at least seen as a distant milky-way, and on paper as a star-chart ; but one could not, without injustice, describe the religious dif- ference of these countries as a moral one. And was and is stoicism, this noble son of morahty, as love is its daugh- ter, in and by itself religion ? If the difference between religion and morality were not founded on something true, it w^ere incomprehensible how so many fanatical sects of the early and later centuries — for instance, the Quietists — could have arrived at the illusive belief that in the inmost enthusiastic love of God enduring sinfulness con- sumes itself, so that none remains as it does in the worldly man. It is true, that religiousness, in its highest degree, is identical with morality, and this wdth that ; but that equally pertains to the highest degree of every power ; and every sun wanders only through the heavenly ether. All that is divine must as certainly meet and unite with morality, as science and art, so that in every soul rescued from sin there must as certainly be religious Tabors as there are hills in the crater of ^tna. It must be understood that we do not here speak of that beggar religion which only prays and sings before the gates of heaven, until the Peter's pence are bestowed upon it. §37. "What, then, is religion? Prayerfully pronounce the RELIGIOUS EDUCATION. 55 answer. The belief in God ; for it is not only a sense for the holy, and a belief in the invisible, but a presenti- ment of it, without which no kingdom of the incompre- hensible were conceivable. Efface God from the heart, and everything which lies above or below the earth is only a recurring enlargement of it ; that which is above the earth would become only a higher grade of mechan- ism, and consequently, earthly. If the question is put, What do you mean by the word God? I will let an old German, Sebastian Frank, answer: " God is an unutterable sigh lying in the depths of the soul." A beautiful, profound saying ! But as the unut- terable dwells in every soul, it must be manifested to every stranger by words. Let me give to the God-fear- ing spirit of every age, the woi"ds of our times, and listen to what it says of religion. " Religion is, in the beginning, the learning of God ; — hence the great name divine, one learned about God, — truly religion is the blessedness arising from a knowledge of God. Without God we are lonely throughout eternity; but if we have God we are more warmly, more intimately, more steadfastly united than by friendship and love. I am then no longer alone with my spirit. Its great first friend, the Everlasting, whom it recognizes, the inborn friend of its innermost soul, will abandon it as little as it can do itself, and in the midst of the impure or empty whirl of trifles and of sins, on the market-place, and the battle-field, I stand with closed breast in which the Al- mighty and All-holy speaks to me, and reposes before me like a near sun, behind which the outer world lies in darkness. I have entered into his church, the temple of the universe, and remain therein blessed, devout, pious, ' .-en if the temple should become dark, or cold, or under- 56 Li:VANA. mined by p^ravcs. What I do, or suffer, is as little a sacrifice to him as I can offer one to myself; I love him whether I suffer or not. The flame from heaven falls on the altar of sacrifice, and consumes the beast, but the flame and the priest remain. If my great friend demand something from me, the heaven and the earth seem glori- ous to me, and I am happy as he is ; if he deny me any- thing, it is a storm on the ocean, but it is spanned by rainbows, and I recognize above it the kindly sun which has no tempestuous sides, but only sunshiny ones. A code of morality only rules bad, unloving souls, in order that they may first become better and afterwards good. But the loving contemplation of the soul's first friend, who abundantly animates those laws, banishes not merely the bad thoughts which conquer, but those al