only by producing better things can he
affirmatively elevate himself above his past. This active acknowledgment
of the necessity of freedom as the determining principle of destiny
gives the highest satisfaction to which practical religious feeling may
arrive, for blessedness develops itself in it--that blessedness which
does not know that it is circumscribed by finitude and transitoriness,
and which possesses the immortal courage to strive always anew for
perfection with free resignation at its non-realization, so that
happiness and misery, pleasure and pain, are conquered by the power of
disinterested self-sacrifice.

--The escape from action in an artificial absence of all events in
life, which often sinks to a veritable brutalizing of man, is the
distinguishing feature of all monkish pedagogics. In our time there is
especial need of a reconciliation between man and destiny, for all the
world is discontented. The worst form of discontent is when one is, as
the French say, _blase_; though the word is not, as many fancy, derived
originally from the French, but from the Greek [Greek: blazein], to
wither. It is true that all culture passes through phases, each of which
becomes momentarily and relatively wearisome, and that in so far one may
be _blase_ in any age. But in modern times this state of feeling has
increased to that of thorough disgust--disgust which nevertheless at the
same time demands enjoyment. The one who is _blase_ has enjoyed
everything, felt everything, mocked at everything. He has passed from
the enjoyment of pleasure to sentimentality, i.e. to rioting in feeling;
from sentimentality to irony with regard to feeling, and from this to
the torment of feeling his entire weakness and emptiness as opposed to
these. He ridicules this also, as if it were a consolation to him to
fling away the universe like a squeezed lemon, and to be able to assert
that in pure nothingness lies the truth of all things. And yet
nevertheless this irony furnishes the point on which Education can
fasten, in order to kindle anew in him the religious feeling, and to
lead him back to a loving recognition of actuality, to a respect for his
own history. The greatest difficulty which Education has to encounter
here is the coquetry, the miserable eminence and self-satisfaction which
have undermined the man and made him incapable of all simple and natural
enjoyment. It is not too much to assert that many pupils of our
_Gymnasia_ are affec