Page:Addresses to the German nation.djvu/54

 beg you during the consideration of it not to forget that an image created by this power can please simply as an image, and as one in which we feel our creative energy, without being for that reason taken as a prototype of reality and without pleasing to such a degree that it stimulates to realization. The latter is quite a different and our own special goal, of which we shall not fail to speak later; but the former is simply the preliminary condition for the attainment of the true ultimate aim of education.

18. That power to create spontaneously images, which are not simply copies of reality, but can become its prototypes, should be the starting-point for the moulding of the race by means of the new education. To create images spontaneously, I said, and in such a way that the pupil will produce them by his own power; but not indeed that he will merely be capable of receiving passively the image presented to him by education, of understanding it sufficiently, and of reproducing it just as it is presented to him, as if it were a question simply of the existence of such an image. The reason for demanding self-activity in regard to that image is this; only on that condition can the image created engage the active pleasure of the pupil. For it is one thing merely to allow oneself to be pleased at something and to have nothing against it; such passive pleasure can arise at best only from passive submission. But it is quite another thing to be so affected by pleasure at something that this pleasure becomes productive and stirs up all our energy to the act of creation. We speak not of the former, which happened no doubt even in the old education, but of the latter. Now, this pleasure will be kindled only by the pupil’s self-activity being stimulated at the same time and becoming manifest to him in the given object,