Chapter 9

§ 150. (_c_) The result of the practice in virtue, or, as it is commonly expressed, of the individual actualization of freedom, is the methodical determinateness of the individual will as Character. This conception of character is formal, for it contains only the identity which is implied in the ruling of a will on its external side as constant. As there are good, strong and beautiful characters, so there are also bad, weak, and detestable ones. When in Pedagogics, therefore, we speak so much of the building up of a character, we mean the making permanent of a direction of the individual will towards the actualization of the Good. Freedom ought to be the character of character. Education must therefore observe closely the inter-action of the factors which go to form character, viz., ([Greek: a]) the temperament, as the natural character of the man; ([Greek: b]) external events, the historical element; ([Greek: g]) the energy of the Will, by which, in its limits of nature and history, it realizes the idea of the Good in and for itself as the proper ethical character. Temperament determines the Rhythm of our external manifestation of ourselves; the events in which we live assign to us the ethical problem, but the Will in its sovereignty stamps its seal on the form given by these potentialities. Pedagogics aims at accustoming the youth to freedom, so that he shall always measure his deed by the idea of the Good. It does not desire a formal independence, which may also be called character, but a real independence resting upon the conception of freedom as that which is absolutely necessary. The pedagogical maxim is then: Be independent, but be so through doing Good.

--According to preconceived opinion, stubbornness and obstinacy claim that they are the foundation of character. But they may spring from weakness and indeterminateness, on which account one needs to be well on his guard. A gentle disposition, through enthusiasm for the Good, may attain to quite as great a firmness of will. Coarseness and meanness are on no account to be tolerated.--

§ 151. (3) We pass from the consideration of the culture of character to that of conscience. This is the relation which the moral agent makes between himself as manifestation and himself as idea. It compares itself, in its past or future, with its nature, and judges itself accordingly as good or bad. This independence of the ethical judgment is the soul proper of all morality, the negation of all self-deception and of all deception through another. The pedagogical maxim is: Be conscientious. Be in the last instance dependent only upon the conception which thou thyself hast of the idea of the Good!

--The self-criticism prompted by conscience hovers over all our historical actuality, and is the ground of all our rational progress. Fichte's stern words remain, therefore, eternally true: "He who has a bad character, must absolutely create for himself a better one."--

THIRD CHAPTER.

_Religious Culture._

§ 152. Social culture contains the formal phase, moral culture the real phase, of the practical mind. Conscience forms the transition to religious culture. In its apodeictic nature, it is the absoluteness of spirit. The individual discerns in the depths of its own consciousness the determinations of universality and of necessity to which it has to subject itself. They appear to it as the voice of God. Religion makes its appearance as soon as the individual distinguishes the Absolute from himself as personal, as a subject existing for itself and therefore for him. The atheist remains at the stage of insight into the absoluteness of the logical and physical, æsthetic and practical categories. He may, therefore, be perfectly moral. He lacks religion, though he loves to characterize his uprightness by this name, and to transfer the dogmatic determinations of positive religion into the ethical sphere. It belongs to the province of religion that I demean myself towards the Absolute not only as toward that which is my own substance, and that in relation to it not I alone am the subject, but that to me also the substance in itself is a personal subject for itself. If I look upon myself as the only absolute, I make myself devoid of spiritual essence. I am only absolute self-consciousness, for which, because it as idea relates only to itself, there remains only the impulse to a persistent conflict with every self-consciousness not identical with it. Were this the case, such a self-consciousness would be only theoretical irony. In religion I know the Absolute as essence, when I am known by him. Everything else, myself included, is finite and transitory, however significant it may be, however relatively and momentarily the Infinite may exist in it. As existence even, it is transitory. The Absolute, positing itself, distinguishing itself from itself in unity with itself, is always like to itself, and takes up all the unrest of the phenomenal world back again into its simple essence.

§ 153. This process of the individual spirit, in which it rises out of the multiplicity of all relations into union with the Absolute as the substantial subject, and in which nature and history are united, we may call, in a restricted sense, a change of heart [Gemuth]. In a wider sense of the word we give this name to a certain sentimental cheerfulness (light-heartedness), a sense of comfort--of little significance. The highest emotions of the heart culminate in religion, whose warmth is inspired by practical activity and conscientiousness.

§ 154. Education has to fit man for religion. (1) It gives him the conception of it; (2) it endeavors to have this conception actualized in him; (3) it subordinates the theoretical and practical process in fashioning him to a determinate stand-point of religious culture.

--In the _working out_ or detailed treatment of Pedagogics, the position which the conception of religion occupies is very uncertain. Many writers on Education place it at the beginning, while others reserve it for the end. Others naïvely bring it forward in the midst of heterogeneous surroundings, but know how to say very little concerning it, and urge teachers to kindle the fire of religious feeling in their pupils by teaching them to fear God. Through all their writing, we hear the cry that in Education nothing is so important as Religion. Rightly understood, this saying is quite true. The religious spirit, the consciousness of the Absolute, and the reverence for it, should permeate all. Not unfrequently, however, we find that what is meant by religion is theology, or the church ceremonial, and these are only one-sided phases of the total religious process. The Anglican High-Church presents in the colleges and universities of England a sad example of this error. What can be more deadening to the spirit, more foreign to religion, than the morning and evening prayers as they are carried on at Oxford and Cambridge with machine-like regularity! But also to England belongs the credit of the sad fact, that, according to Kohl's report, there live in Manchester, Liverpool, Birmingham, and London, thousands of men who have never enjoyed any teaching in religion, have never been baptized, who live absolutely without religion in brutal stupidity. Religion must form the culminating point of Education. It takes up into itself the didactical and practical elements, and rises through the force of its content to universality.--

I. _The Theoretical Process of Religious Culture._

§ 155. Religion, in common with every content of the spirit, must pass through three stages of feeling, conception, and comprehension. Whatever may be the special character of any religion it cannot avoid this psychological necessity, either in its general history or in the history of the individual consciousness. The teacher must understand this process, partly in order that he may make it easier to the youth, partly that he may guard against the malformation of the religious feeling which may arise through the fact of the youth's remaining in one stage after he is ready for another and needs it. Pedagogics must therefore lay out beforehand the philosophy of religion, on which alone can be found the complete discussion of this idea.

§ 156. (1) Religion exists first as religious feeling. The person is still immediately identical with the Divine, does not yet distinguish himself from the absoluteness of his being, and is in so far determined by it. In so far as he feels the divine, he is a mystery to himself. This beginning is necessary. Religion cannot be produced in men from the external side; its genesis belongs rather to the primitive depths in which God himself and the individual soul are essentially one.

--The educator must not allow himself to suppose that he is able to make a religion. Religion dwells originally in every individual soul, for every one is born of God. Education can only aid the religious feeling in its development. As far as regards the psychological form, it was quite correct for Schleiermacher and his followers to characterize the absoluteness of the religious feeling as the feeling of dependence, for feeling is determined by that which it feels; it depends upon its content. But in so far as God constitutes the content of the feeling, there appears the opposite of all dependence or absolute emancipation. I maintain this in opposition to Schleiermacher. Religion lifts man above the finite, temporal and transitory, and frees him from the control of the phenomenal world. Even the lowest form of religion does this; and when it is said that Schleiermacher has been unjustly criticized for this expression of dependence, this distinction is overlooked.--

§ 157. But religious feeling as such rises into something higher when the spirit distinguishes the content of this religious feeling from any other content which it also feels, represents it clearly to itself, and places itself over against it formally as a free individual.

--But we must not understand that the religious feeling is destroyed in this process; in rising to the form of distinct representation, it remains at the same time as a necessary form of the Intelligence.--

§ 158. If the spirit is held back and prevented from passing out of the simplicity of feeling into the act of distinguishing the perception from what it becomes, the conception--if its efforts towards the forming of this conception are continually re-dissolved into feeling, then feeling, which was as the first step perfectly healthy and correct, will become morbid and degenerate into a wretched mysticism. Education must, therefore, make sure that this feeling is not destroyed by the progress of its content into perception and conception on the side of psychological form, but rather that it attains truth thereby.

§ 159. (2) Conception as the ideally transformed perception dissects the religious content on its different sides, and follows each of these to its consequence. Imagination controls the individual conceptions, but by no means with that absoluteness which is often supposed; for each picture has in itself its logical consequence to which imagination must yield; e.g. if a religion represents God as an animal, or as half animal and half man, or as man, each of these conceptions has in its development its consequences for the imagination.

§ 160. We rise out of the stage of Conception when the spirit tries to determine the universality of its content according to its necessity, i.e. when it begins to think. The necessity of its pictures is a mere presupposition for the imagination. The thinking activity, however, recognizes not only the contradiction which exists between the sensuous, limited form of the individual conception, and the absolute nature of its content, but also the contradiction in which the conceptions find themselves with respect to each other.

§ 161. If the spirit is prevented from passing out of the varied pictures of conception to the supersensuous clearness and simplicity of the thinking activity--if the content which it already begins to seize as idea is again dissolved into the confusion of the picture-world, then the religion of imagination, which was a perfectly proper form as the second step, becomes perverted into some form of idolatry, either coarse or refined. Education must therefore not oppose the thinking activity if the latter undertakes to criticize religious conceptions; on the contrary, it must guide this so that the discovery of the contradictions which unavoidably adhere to sensuous form shall not mislead the youth into the folly of throwing away, with the relative untruth of the form, also the religious content in general.

--It is an error for educators to desire to keep the imagination apart from religious feeling, but it is also an error to detain the mind, which is on its formal side the activity of knowing, in the stage of imagination, and to desire to condemn it thence into the service of canonical allegories. The more, in opposition to this, it is possessed with the charm of thinking, the more is it in danger of condemning the content of religion itself as a mere fictitious conception. As a transition-stage the religion of imagination is perfectly normal, and it does not in the least impair freedom if, for example, one has personified evil as a living Devil. The error does not lie in this, but in the making absolute these determinate, æsthetic forms of religion. The reaction of the thinking activity against such æsthetic absolutism then undertakes in its negative absolutism to despise the content also, as if it were a mere conception.--

§ 162. (3) In the thinking activity the spirit attains that form of the religious content which is identical with that of its simple consciousness, and above which there is no other for the intelligence as theoretical. But we distinguish three varieties in this thinking activity: the abstract, the reflective, and the speculative. The Abstract gives us the religious content of consciousness in the form of abstractions or dogmas, i.e. propositions which set up a definition as a universal, and add to it another as the reason for its necessity. The Reflective stage busies itself with the relation of dogmas to each other, and with the search for the grounds on which their necessity must rest. It is essentially critical, and hence skeptical. The explanation of the dogmas, which is carried on in this process of reasoning and skeptical investigation, is completed alone in speculative thinking, which recognizes the free unity of the content and its form as its own proper self-determination of the content, creating its own differences. Education must know this stage of the intelligence, partly that it may in advance preserve, in the midst of its changes, that repose which it brings into the consciousness; partly that it may be able to lead to the process of change itself, in accordance with the organic connection of its phases. We should prevent the criticism of the abstract understanding by the reflective stage as little as we should that of the imagination by the thinking activity. But the stage of reflection is not the last possibility of the thinking activity, although, in the variety of its skepticism it often takes itself for such, and, with the emptiness of mere negation to which it holds, often brings itself forward into undesirable prominence. It becomes evident, in this view, how very necessary for man, with respect to religion, is a genuine philosophical culture, so that he may not lose the certainty of the existence of the Absolute in the midst of the obstinacy of dogmas and the changes of opinions.

§ 163. Education must then not fear the descent into dogmatic abstraction, since this is an indispensable means for theoretical culture in its totality, and the consciousness cannot dispense with it in its history. But Education has, in the concrete, carefully to discern in which of these stages of culture any particular consciousness may be. For if for mankind as a race the fostering of philosophy is absolutely necessary, it by no means follows that this necessity exists for each individual. To children, to women, e.g. for all kinds of simple and limited lives, the form of the religion of the imagination is well suited, and the form of comprehension can come only relatively to them. Education must not, then, desire powerfully and prematurely to develop the thinking activity before the intelligence is really fully grown.

--The superficial thinking which many teachers demand in the sphere of religion is no less impractical than the want of all guidance into rightly ordered meditations on religious subjects. It is natural that the lower form of intelligence should, in contrast with the higher, appear to be frivolous, because it has no need of change of form as the higher has, and on this account it looks upon the destruction of the form of a picture or a dogma as the destruction of religion itself. In our time the idea is very prevalent that the content itself must change with the changing of the psychological form, and that therefore a religion in the stage of feeling, of conception, and of comprehension, can no longer be the same in its essence. These suppositions, which are so popular, and are considered to be high philosophy, spring from the superficiality of psychological inquiry.--

§ 164. The theoretical culture of the religious feeling endeavors therefore with the freedom of philosophical criticism to elevate the presupposition of Reason in the religious content to self-assured insight by means of the proof of the necessity of its determinations. This is the only reasonable pedagogical way not only to prevent the degeneration of the religious consciousness into a miserable mysticism or into frivolity, but also to remove these if they are already existent.

--External seclusion avails nothing. The crises of the world-historical changes in the religious consciousness find their way through the thickest cloister walls; the philosopher Reinhold was a pupil of the Jesuits, the philosopher Schad of the Benedictines.--

II. _The Practical Process of Religious Culture._

§ 165. The theoretical culture is truly practical, for it gives man definite conceptions and thoughts of the Divine and his relation to him. But in a narrower sense that culture is practical which relates to the Will as such. Education has in this respect to distinguish (1) consecration--religious feeling in general,--(2) the induction of the youth into the forms of a positive religion, and (3) his reconciliation with his lot.

§ 166. (1) Religious feeling presupposes morality as an indispensable condition without which it cannot inculcate its ideas. But if man from a merely moral stand-point places himself in relation to the idea of Duty as such, the ethical religious stand-point differs from it in this, that it places the necessity of the Good as the self-determination of the divine Will and thus makes of practice a personal relation to God, changing the Good to the Holy and the Evil to Sin. Education must therefore first accustom the youth to the idea, that in doing the Good he unites himself with God as with the absolute Person, but that in doing Evil he separates himself from him. The feeling that he through his deed comes into contact with God himself, positively or negatively, deepens the moral conduct to an intense sensibility of the heart.

§ 167. (2) The religious sense which grows in the child that he has an uninterrupted personal relation to the Absolute as a person, constitutes the beginning of the practical forming of religion. The second step is the induction of the child into the objective forms of worship established in some positive religion. Through religious training the child learns to renounce his egotism; through attendance on religious services he learns to give expression to his religious feeling in prayer, in the use of symbols, and in church festivals. Education must, however, endeavor to retain freedom with regard to these forms, so that they shall not be confounded with Religion itself. Religion displays itself in these ceremonies, but they as mere forms are of value only in so far as they, while externalities, are manifestations of the spirit which produces them.

--If the mechanism of ceremonial forms is taken as religion itself, the service of God degenerates into the false service of religion, as Kant has designated it in _Religion within the Limits of Pure Reason_. Nothing is more destructive to the sensibility to all real religious culture than the want of earnestness with which prayers, readings from the Bible, attendance on church, the communion, &c., are often practised by teachers. But one must not conclude from this extreme that an ignorance of all sacred forms in general would be more desirable for the child.--