Page:Addresses to the German nation.djvu/188

 is first of all to point out what already exists in the actual world with which the realization of this should be connected.

We give this answer to the question: it ought to be connected with the system of instruction invented and proposed by Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, and already successfully practised under his eyes. We intend to give good reasons for this decision of ours and to define it clearly.

First of all, we have read and reflected over the man’s own writings, from which we have formed our conception of his art of instruction and education. We have taken no notice of the reports and opinions of the current literary periodicals, nor of their further opinions upon those opinions. We observe this in order to recommend this method and the complete avoidance of its opposite to everyone who wishes likewise to have a conception of this subject. Similarly, up to the present we have not desired to see anything of it in actual practice; not from disrespect, but because we wanted first to provide ourselves with a definite and clear conception of the inventor’s true intention. The application may often fall short of the intention, but from that conception the conception of the application and of the inevitable result follows without any experiment, and, equipped with this alone, one can truly understand the application and judge it correctly. If, as some believe, even this system of instruction has already degenerated here and there into blind, empirical groping and into empty play and show, for that the author’s fundamental conception, at least, is in my opinion quite blameless.

134. Now this fundamental conception is warranted for me, first of all by the individuality of the man himself, as he shows it in his writings with the truest and most