Page:Addresses to the German nation.djvu/58

 at knowledge, and at a certain amount of some subject of knowledge. Besides, there is a great difference between that kind of knowledge which results incidentally from the new education and that at which the old education aimed. The former results in knowledge of the laws which condition all possible mental activity. For instance, if the pupil tries in free fancy to enclose a space with straight lines, this is the first stimulation of his mental activity. If in these attempts he discovers that he cannot enclose a space with fewer than three straight lines, this is the incidental knowledge resulting from another quite different activity, that of the faculty of knowledge, which restricts the free power first stimulated. This education, therefore, results at the very outset in knowledge which transcends all experience, which is abstract, absolute, and strictly universal, and which includes within itself beforehand all subsequently possible experience. On the other hand, the old education was concerned, as a rule, only with the actual qualities of things as they are and as they should be believed and noted, without anyone being able to assign a reason for them. It aimed, therefore, at purely passive reception by means of the power of memory, which was completely at the service of things. It was, therefore, impossible to have any idea of the mind as an independent original principle of things themselves. Modern education must not think it can defend itself against this reproach by appealing to its oft-declared contempt for mechanical rote-learning and to its well-known masterpieces in the Socratic manner. On this point it was fully informed long ago from another source that these Socratic reasonings are also learned by heart purely mechanically, and that this is a much more dangerous form of rote-learning, because it makes the pupil who does not think appear capable of thinking. It was