Page:Addresses to the German nation.djvu/78

 privilege not to be extended to everyone, and which was quite silent concerning any supersensuous world, and strove merely to produce some skill in the affairs of the sensuous world. It was obviously the worse kind of education. But I will look only at what was popular education and could also, in a certain very limited sense, be called national education, which did not preserve complete silence concerning a supersensuous world. What were the doctrines of this education? We put forward as the fundamental assumption of the new education that there is at the root of man’s nature a pure pleasure in the good, which can be developed to such an extent that it becomes impossible for him to leave undone what he knows to be good and to do instead what he knows to be evil. The existing education, on the other hand, has not only assumed, but has also taught its pupils from early youth onwards, that man has a natural aversion from God’s commandments, and, further, that it is absolutely impossible for him to keep them. What else can be expected of such instruction, if it is taken seriously and believed, than that each individual should yield to his absolutely unchangeable nature, should not try to achieve what has once been represented to him as impossible, and should not desire to be better than he and all others can be? Indeed, he accepts the baseness attributed to him, the baseness of acknowledging his natural sinfulness and wickedness, because such baseness in God’s sight is represented to him as the sole means of coming to terms with Him. If perchance such a statement as ours comes to his ears, he cannot but think that someone merely wants to play a bad joke on him, because he has an ever-present inward feeling, which to him is perfectly clear, that this statement is not true, and that the opposite alone is true. We presuppose a knowledge, not dependent