Page:Addresses to the German nation.djvu/44

 of self-seeking which developed in them spontaneously and without any assistance from education. This proves beyond dispute that the system may, indeed, have been able to fill the memory with some words and phrases and the cold and indifferent imagination with some faint and feeble pictures; but that it has never succeeded in making its picture of a moral world-order so vivid that the pupil was filled with passionate love and yearning for that order, and with such glowing emotion as to incite him to realize it in his life—emotion before which self-seeking falls to the ground like withered leaves. It also proves this education to have been far from reaching right down to the roots of real impulse and action in life, and from training them; for these roots, neglected by this blind and impotent system, have everywhere developed wild, as best they could, yielding good fruit in a few who were inspired by God, but evil fruit in the majority. It is for the present, then, quite sufficient to describe this education by these its results, and for our purpose we can spare ourselves the wearisome task of analysing the inner sap and fibre of a tree whose fruit is now fully ripe and lies fallen before the eyes of all, proclaiming most clearly and distinctly the inner nature of its creator. Strictly speaking, according to this view, the present system has been by no means the art of educating men. This, indeed, it has not boasted of doing, but has very often frankly acknowledged its impotence by demanding to be given natural talent or genius as the condition of its success. Rather does such an art remain to be discovered, and this discovery should be the real task of the new education. What was lacking in the old system—namely, an influence penetrating to the roots of vital impulse and action—the new education must supply. Accordingly, as the old system was able at best to train