Page:Addresses to the German nation.djvu/67

 of the pupil’s life and the ever-burning lamp of his moral love. However great or small the total knowledge which he may have obtained from education, he will certainly have brought away from it a mind which, during the whole of his life, will be able to grasp every truth, the knowledge of which is essential to him, and which will remain continually susceptible to instruction from others, as well as capable of reflecting for itself.

This was the point we reached in the last address in the description of the new education. At the end of it we remarked that thereby it was not yet completed, but that it had still to solve another problem different from those already set. We proceed now to the task of defining this problem more clearly.

29. The pupil of this education is not merely a member of human society here on this earth and for the short span of life which is permitted him on it. He is also, and is undoubtedly acknowledged by education to be, a link in the eternal chain of spiritual life in a higher social order. A training which has undertaken to include the whole of his being should undoubtedly lead him to a knowledge of this higher order also. Just as it led him to sketch out for himself by his own activity an image of that moral world-order which never is, but always is to be, so must it lead him to create in thought by the same self-activity an image of that supersensuous world-order in which nothing becomes, and which never has become, but which simply is for ever; all this in such a way that he intimately understands and perceives that it could not be otherwise. Under proper guidance he will complete his attempts at such an image, and find at the end that nothing really exists but life, the spiritual life which lives in thought, and that everything else does not really exist, but only appears to exist. The