Page:Addresses to the German nation.djvu/207

 conscience, the ratification of his satisfaction with himself and of his self-respect, and the encouragement to rely still further on himself. The following arrangement would promote admirably the advantages hereby intended. Where there are several male and female teachers, which we assume will be the rule, let each child choose freely, and as his feelings and confidence move him, one of them as a special friend and, as it were, adviser in matters of conscience. Let him seek his advice whenever it is difficult for him to do right. Let the teacher help him by friendly exhortation; let him be the confidant of the voluntary acts which he undertakes; and, finally, let him be the person who crowns excellence with his approval. Now, through these advisers in matters of conscience education would inevitably be of systematic aid to each individual in his own rise to ever greater power of self-control and self-possession. In this way steadiness and independence will gradually arise; with their production, education comes to an end and ceases. By our own deeds and actions is the sphere of the moral world most clearly opened to us; when it is thus opened to anyone, it is in truth opened to him. Such a person himself now knows what is contained in the moral world, and no longer needs the testimony of others concerning himself; he can sit properly in judgment on himself, and is from now onwards an adult.

152. By means of what has just been said we have closed a gap that remained in our previous lecture and have, for the first time, made our proposal really practicable. Pleasure in the right and good for its own sake ought to be set, by means of the new education, in the place of the material hope or fear that has been employed hitherto; this pleasure, as the sole existing motive, ought to set all future life in motion; this is the essential feature of our proposal. But the first question that arises here is this;