Nature in her own kindly manner trains us to all that we
require to be ! strange demands of civil society, which first
perplexes and misleads us, then asks of us more than Nature

n lbid., pp. 366-367.

M< 'Conversations," Weimar, 1806, etc., Vol. I., p. 470.



ACCORDING TO GOETHE 269

herself ! Woe to every sort of culture which destroys the most
effectual means of all true culture, and directs us to the end,
instead of rendering us happy on the way."**

Persevere in direct observance of the day's duty, and
thereby test the purity of your heart, and the safety of your
soul. If thus in unoccupied hours you aspire, and find op-
portunity to elevate yourself, you will so gain a right attitude
towards the sublime, to which we must in every way rever-
ently surrender ourselves, regard every occurrence with ven-
eration, and acknowledge therein a higher guidance. 24

Yes, he has the noble searching and striving for the Bet-
ter, whereby we of ourselves produce the Good which we
suppose we find. How often have I blamed thee, not in
silence, for treating this or that person, for acting in this
or that case, otherwise than I should have done! and yet
in general the issue showed that thou wert right. "When
we take people," thou wouldst say, "merely as they are, we
make them worse; when we treat them as if they were what
they should be, we improve them as far as they can be
improved." 2 *

A great contemporary of Goethe, and an out-
standing educationist, was Rousseau. It is easy
to draw certain parallels and certain contrasts be-
tween the two. Goethe 's works are a revelation of
the future, those of the sage of Geneva a creed of
the eighteenth century. Goethe is not the son of
a new culture, like Rousseau, but its creator. In

Wilhelm Meister's "Lehrjahre," etc., Vol. II., p. 82.
"Wilhelm Meister's " Wanderjahre, " etc., p. 403.
Wilhelm Meister's "Lehrjahre," etc., Vol. II., p. 111.



270 EDUCATION

personality especially they are very diverse. In
the one we have feminine sensibility in perception
and feeling; in the other the self-conscious pre-
cision of a self-sufficient man. In the one are found
subjective, in the other objective, thoughts. Rous-
seau, arrogant, sets himself against the influence
of the world about him; Goethe, scientifically
trained, uses scientific methods and the greatest
objectivity in his examination of life. In the one
we have a unique and mighty striving for inde-
pendence, the yearning for freedom from every
fetter; in the other a real respect for the histori-
cally established regulations and institutions of
state and church. Also in religion are they oppo-
sites. To the theism of the Frenchman stands op-
posed the pantheism of the German. But in the
main idea of education, in what Rousseau calls the
Return to Nature, they join hands. For Goethe
also, nature is the great and eternal teacher, which
alone gives us the right measuring rule for man-
kind. Both see the pettiness of human culture and
both value the virtues of simplicity and truth.
Social conditions are condemned by Goethe no
less than by Rousseau. Both learned to know the
conflict of nature and moral law, both stand for the
principle of the renunciation of personality at



ACCORDING TO GOETHE 271

times, and both fight together for a noble exist-
ence, with a worthy culture as the normal condition
of all. Both hold the highest view of mankind,
each seeks, according to his ability, to bring man
back to original nature, and both begin with the
child. So one becomes the defender of the rights of
children, according as the other reveals them.
Both are active in a practical way as educators, and
both exchange their educational ideas with women.
Both lack the historical point of view. In Rous-
seau's view "Robinson Crusoe" comprises the
most admirable dissertation on the natural educa-
tion, while Goethe turns to the " Chronicle of
Tschudis" for a picture of a worthy type of man.
In the same manner each tries to illustrate in a
definite individual the idea of education in which
they believe. In Wilhelm Meister, as in Emil, poet
and philosopher dress their theories in the colors
of life. The method in both is fresh and living.
In both exists the danger that the example may be
taken for the thing itself and the single case con-
fused with the general rule. But let it be remem-
bered that while Goethe planned to write a philo-
sophical compendium for teachers' seminaries,
Rousseau declares that the child should be the ob-
ject of the teacher's most ardent studies; so that,



272 EDUCATION

though his whole method must be interpreted as
phantastic and partially false, one can neverthe-
less always draw useful inferences from his obser-
vations. 26

This interpretation of the educational beliefs of
one of the greatest of men I shall close with a gen-
eral selection which might be vastly enlarged
from his writings. These selections do represent
certain practical axioms. They are pregnant, too,
with great meanings.

We retain of our studies, in the end, only that which we
apply practically.

There is in our universities, a pursuit of too many things,
and of too much that is useless. The individual teachers teach
their subjects too extensively, much beyond the needs of
their hearers. Formerly chemistry and botany were pre-
sented as belonging to pharmacology and they gave the
medical student enough to do, but now chemistry and botany
have become distinct, limitless sciences, each of which makes
claim upon a whole lifetime.

He who is wise, will reject all diverting demands on him-
self and limit himself to one subject and become proficient
in that.

There are some excellent persons who can do nothing off-
hand, perfunctorily, but whose natures demand that in every
case they penetrate in quiet to deep perception of the subject
in hand. Such persons often make us impatient, because

"See Adolph Langguth's "Goethe's Padagogik," p. 312 ff.



ACCORDING TO GOETHE 273

one seldom obtains from them what one immediately desires,
and yet in this way, the highest things are achieved.

Character does not take the place of knowledge, but sup-
plies it.

Children are the best preceptors because they are all dis-
posed to lend to each other an attentive ear, and because they
speak to each other in a language more intelligible than
ours.

Avoid dividing your energies. Hold your powers together.
Had I been so wise thirty years ago (December 3, 1824), I
should have done far different things. What time did I not
waste ! I cannot think back without vexation to those under-
takings in which the world misused us, and which were
entirely without result for us.

All depends on your building up a capital for yourself
which will never give out. This you will attain in the studies
you have begun in the English language and literature. The
old languages for the most part, you nursed in youth, there-
fore seek a basis in the literature of so able a nation as the
English. Our own literature is in the largest measure to
come from theirs. Our novels, . . . whence do we have
them, if not from Goldsmith, Fielding and Shakespeare,
and even to-day, where will you find in Germany three heroes
in literature who might be placed beside Byron, Moore and
Walter Scott? Therefore, ground yourself firmly in Eng-
lish. Hold your powers together, to some excelling purpose,
and let all go that has no result for you and is not conform-
able to you.

As for the Greek, Latin, Italian and Spanish languages, it
is possible for us to read the finest works of these countries in
such good German translations that we have no grounds ex-
cept for very special reasons to spend much time on the labori-



274 EDUCATION

ous learning on these languages. It is of the German nature
to honor everything foreign in its own kind, and to conform
to its peculiarities. It is not to be denied that in general
one can do a great deal with a good translation. Frederick
the Great knew no Latin, but he read his Cicero in a French
translation just as well as we in the original.

The universal development of human powers is desirable
and most excellent, but man is not born for it. Each one
must form himself as a distinct being, yet seek to attain a
conception of what all, together, are.

One ought to beware of setting the frontiers of his cultiva-
tion too far.

Fix upon reality and seek to express it. That is what the
ancients did.

Even though the world as a whole progresses, youth must
always begin again at the beginning, and live through the
epochs of culture, as an individual.

Kevere something that is above us, for in revering it, we
lift ourselves to it, and manifest through our recognition of
it, that we bear this higher thing within ourselves and are
worthy of being its peers.

I have every respect for the categorical imperative. I
know how much good may issue from it. But, we must not
go too far with it, or this idea of the freedom of idea will lead
to no good.

National literature has no great meaning now (1827). The
epoch of world literature has come, and each must labor to
hasten this epoch. . . . We must not think it is Chinese litera-
ture, or Servian, or Calderon, or the Nibelungen, or rather in
our need of some exemplary thing, we must always go back
again to the ancient Greeks, in whose works the beauty of man



ACCORDING TO GOETHE 275

is represented. All else we must regard as merely historical,
and make the good in it, so far as may be, ours.

The truly excellent is distinguished by this, that it belongs
to all mankind.

It remains always a heart-lifting sensation to win from
the impenetrable a few illumined spaces.

If lithesome youth may legitimately form a wish, it were
surely this, to discern in every performance, what is praise-
worthy, good, fair, aspiring, in a word, the ideal, and even
in what is not difficult, to discern the universal type and ex-
emplar of man.

Mathematicians are foolish people, and so far from pos-
sessing even a notion of the main point, that one has to be
indulgent to their conceit. ... I have become more and more
conscious of the fact, which I had quietly recognized long ago,
that the training given to the mind by mathematicians is
extremely one-sided and limited. Voltaire even ventures to
say somewhere: "J'ai toujours remarque que la Geometric
laisse 1'esprit ou elle le trouve." Franklin also has a peculiar
aversion to mathematicians, and expresses this plainly and
clearly in reference to social intercourse, when he speaks of
their spirit of littleness and contradiction, as being in-
tolerable.

How did moral feeling come into the world ? Through God
himself, like every other good.

We ought to study not our contemporaries and fellow
aspirants, but great men of the past, whose works have held
for centuries an equal worth and an equal estimation. A
really highly gifted person will in any case feel the need
of this within himself, and just this need of communion with
great predecessors is the sign of a higher tendency.

The spirit of the real is the truly ideal.



276 EDUCATION

I am sure that many a dialectically sick spirit, might find
in the study of nature, a beneficent feeling.

It were well to think in, as well as to read or write, a
foreign language.

That divine illumination whereby the extraordinary comes
to be, we shall always find in league with youth and pro-
ductivity.

For what is genius other than that productive power
whereby deeds arise which may be shown before God and
nature, and which even therefore have consequences and are
permanent ?

It is not enough to be gifted; it takes more than that to
be sagacious; one must be in great relationships, and have
a chance to look at the cards of the playing figures of the
time, and himself play with them for gain and loss.

The good world does not know what it costs in time and
in pains to learn to read and to profit from one's reading:
I have put into it eighty years.

The more one has deepened his own study of any subject
whatever, the more he is in a position to teach well its ele-
ments.

The secret [with persons] lies not in birth or wealth ; but it
lies in this, that they have the courage to be what nature has
made them. There is about them nothing perverted or warped,
there are in them no incompleteness and obliquities ; but, how-
ever they are, they are always thoroughly complete beings.

Goethe illustrates, in both his character and
his writings, the two fundamental elements of
education, self-culture and comprehensiveness of
learning. He aimed at the enlargement and en-



ACCORDING TO GOETHE 277

richment of his own being and also at the posses-
sion of universal knowledge. Above most did he
succeed in gaining these ends. In his moral rela-
tions his culture was selfish, but in the intellectual
elements it was ministered unto by the sciences, the
literatures and the philosophies of all races and of
both worlds, ancient and modern. His mind was a
vast reservoir which received streams of influence
from many sources, and which, in turn, sent forth
streams to make glad the heart of men. His mind
was as a great lens which receives the light, which
seems to be vitally eager for more light, and which
sheds forth that light unto measureless distances.
He was among the greatest of the great.

Education indeed is designed to give enlarge-
ment and enrichment to the individual and to the
race. It recognizes that the center of its service is
personality, but, despite the natural and inevitable
charge of selfishness, it also seeks to know all that
can be known. Its horizon is limited only by its
own power of seeing. Under this limitation, how-
ever, a sense of over-yonderness rules and inspires.
The infinite touches and embraces the finite.

Education, therefore, is as narrow as the indi-
vidual. Education also is as broad as nature, as
humanity and as human appreciation of divinity.



278 EDUCATION

In one relation it stands pre-eminently for power
and in the other for sympathy. Through power
and sympathy, it fulfills apparently the supreme
purposes of life and of all being.



IX

SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS

THE preceding chapters are devoted to an
interpretation of the gospel of education as
set forth by eight human and humanistic masters.
Six of the eight belong to a single race and to the
Mid- Victorian age. By the influence of this age,
because of distance in both space and time, Goethe,
the last of the eight, was untouched. But Emerson,
the first of the number, was deeply filled by its
spirit. The period in which these men lived and
wrought was a time of rationalism. It was be-
lieved that the intellect of man was the chief tool
for carving out a perfect civilization. Truth was
to be known. It was to be translated into thought.
Thought was to be confirmed into belief, belief
was to be transmuted into action, and action was
to be solidified into character, both individual and
communal. "We needs must love the highest when
we see it," sang Tennyson.

Each of these masters, including Emerson and
Goethe, sympathetic with and eager to serve his

279



280 SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS

age, interpreted education as rational in its nature,
forces and conditions. Education was, as has been
made evident in the preceding chapters, at least
rational. Education was also something other and
possibly higher than rational. But to them each it
was first a rational process.

For to Newman even, the ecclesiastic, the theo-
logian, education had to do with reason, to Mill it
spelled reasoning, and to Emerson it meant truth,
both as a creative cause, as a process and as a re-
sult. Reason gains knowledge, it was held, by im-
mediate perception. It builds up its own world out
of the bricks of experience and of observation. In
accordance with a plan which has been impressed
upon it from the beginning, it creates principles, it
accumulates facts, it accentuates relations, it makes
inferences, it points out duties. It analyzes, syn-
thesizes, draws inductions and deductions, philoso-
phizes, even geometrizes as says Plato of the
Divine Being. The use of reason may be either
good or ill, false or true, logical or illogical, but it
does use itself. Truth is its food, truth the atmos-
phere in which it moves, truth the ground on which
it stands. Its worthy use is promoted by educa-
tion, and the more thorough and profound the
education, the more complete is the evidence that



SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS 281

its use is worthy. The place given to the reason in
the education of these masters was the extension
and the elaboration of the doctrine of John Locke
and of the light-bearers of the French Revolution.
Yet, although education is intellectual and ra-
tional, it is still more essential that it be interpreted
and applied as moral. In an age rational, the
emphasis is put on a side of education other than
rational. To educate the feelings is, in the judg-
ment of Matthew Arnold a school master and the
son of a school master quite as important as the
elevation of the intellect, and the lifting of both is
the comprehensive aim and work of the whole edu-
cational service. Character, says Goethe, is the
sum of the primal human impulses of self-pres-
ervation and of self-respect ; from it other spiritual
powers take their origin, and on it they rest. The
intellect enriches the feelings, the feelings quicken
the intellect, and both move on, and are moved by,
the will. If the heart without the intellect be blind
and quite as sure to work destruction as edification,
the intellect without the heart is dumb and dead.
The affections, declares the virile prophet of
Cheyne Row, have the supreme place in teaching,
and sincerity and honesty are the lasting worths of
education. John Ruskin confesses that one of the



282 SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS

great lacks in his own education was the lack of the
element of love. "The intellect sees by moral
obedience," declares Emerson. "Pure intellect is
the pure devil when you have got off all the marks
of Mephistopheles. ' ' Real moral instruction in the
public schools, says Mill, would do more than all
else in attaining the highest aims. Indeed, the tes-
timony of Solomon is still sound, that the moral
affections and appreciations lead to, as well as
arise from, intellectual valuations, and that the
wisdom of the heart is not to be separated from
the wisdom of the mind.

In this composite interpretation of education,
religion assumes as many types, both formal and
informal, as are the races of men. But of any type,
whether as a conscious relation to the divine or as
simple reverence, it takes its place as among the
most potent of all forces. For these educationists,
the type is very general. It is devoid of creeds and
of articles of specific faith. Its altar is as broad as
the earth, its cathedral as wide-reaching as the
sky, its incense of worship nothing less than the
twilight of the rising or setting sun. Reverence is
the one religious virtue and grace of fundamental
significance. In education should abide, and from
education should come forth, an infallible religion,



SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS 283

a religion which is an unconquerable faith, an un-
quenchable hope and an abiding charity. To Glad-
stone religion as a force in education is direct, com-
pact, forcible. " A great Christian," as Lord Salis-
bury called him after his death, he holds the Chris-
tian faith, historically and dogmatically inter-
preted, to be an essential and necessary part of
university education. To his children and to the
nation, he declares that he prefers to see Oxford
leveled to the ground, rather than see loose notions
of the truth and of the inspiration of the Bible
prevail. To his family he gives direct counsel
respecting nurture in religion and in the church.
To Newman, likewise, religion represents one of
the most formative of all educative forces. The
new birth of the heart produces a new birth of the
intellect, and the new direction, under the spiritual
quickening of the will, adds stimuli to both intel-
lect and heart. What is called conversion in the
Christian church has a value to some personalities
equivalent to that of a liberal education as weighed
in academic scales. As an exponent and force in
the Christian religion, the Bible receives emphatic
commendation from Ruskin. Again and again in
strongest terms he acknowledges the debt which he
owes to it. The English of its King James ' version,



284 SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS

as well as the exaltation of its moral precepts and
religious truths, cause it to be regarded as one of
the most potent of all educative instruments.

Yet the question recurs again and again in these
pages, as it is ever recurring in life itself, how can
religion be taught? Carlyle specifically considers
the question and is content with passing it on to
those " whose duty it is," he declares, "to teach re-
ligion." "Those entrusted with this duty will find
their own way," he says. Of course theology,
which is theory, can be taught, but religion, which
represents life, cannot be taught any more than
life can be taught, though helps for understanding
its nature, for apprehending its truths, for appre-
ciating its relationships, for doing its duties, may
be taught.

It is also not a little significant that among
our masters there is found a general agreement
in the belief that education should be fitted into
the character and influence of the individual. It
should be made personal. The peril is that educa-
tion will be a mold into which the melted metal of
common humanity will be flung and from which
the people shall come out bearing identical forms
and a similar likeness. Such is the peril, declares
Mill, existing especially in public education. The



SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS 285

danger is less menacing in education based more
directly on the voluntary principle. Differences in
nature begin with birth and are continued and
deepened with the unfolding and development of
character. These differences are to be respected.
That knowledge which is most worth acquiring and
having, that training which is most worth securing
and using, is to be sought after. Life is short. The
stores to be accumulated are immense, the work to
be done is hard and great. Our faculties are lim-
ited and the results which, it is hoped, they may
win are beyond their abilities. The college student
who consoles himself with Plato would in trigo-
nometry find only the unrational and the irritating.
All education is to have respect unto the student.
He is the subject to be educated, not the victim
waiting for the pedagogic altar. Yet, though edu-
cation is ever to be individualistic, it does possess
certain great common underlying, over-arching
elements. It is to create and to promote lucidity,
to nourish the flexibility of the mind, to give free-
dom from prejudice, to foster the good without the
evil of passion, and to give a sense of humanity in
every person. At what point in the process indi-
vidualism becomes narrowness, and breadth and
liberality vagueness, is the critical problem a



286 SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS

problem ever before us, ever seeking and never
finding a wholly satisfactory solution.

This educational movement in the individual and
the community is carried forward by certain great
tools or instruments or forces. They form what
are called the studies or the content of studies or,
in awkward term, the curriculum. They are sup-
posed to represent what we denominate the truth,
and truth is presumed to be, not only the mother of
freedom, but also the creator of personal power.
Diverse are the credits given to these diverse agen-
cies. Carlyle commends the study of history as the
most profitable, being the one "articulate connec-
tion" which the past can have with the present. It
is a letter of instruction given by the older genera-
tions to the new. It is good and profitable to know
what the family of man has done. But for those
extremes of subjects, the sciences and logic, he has
characteristic contempt. Toward Latin and Greek,
Carlyle 's friend and correspondent, Emerson, has
much the same feeling which Carlyle himself has
toward chemistry and logic. The ancient classics
to him are as dead and as dry as the autumnal
leaves. The antagonist of the ancient literatures
as a part of the education of the American youth
finds in the man of Concord an associate as virile



SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS 287

as he can desire. But the same literatures and
languages as given to English youth do discover
in Emerson a stout defender. For these studies