ot, since the want of the power of
generalizing and of ideality of conscious personality leaves to such an
unfortunate only the possibility of a mechanical training.

--Saegert, the teacher of the deaf mutes in Berlin, has made laudable
efforts to educate idiots, but the account as given in his publication,
"Cure of Idiots by an Intellectual Method, Berlin, 1846," shows that the
result obtained was only external; and though we do not desire to be
understood as denying or refusing to this class the possession of a mind
_in potentia_, it appears in them to be confined to an embryonic
state.--

II.

_The Form of Education._

Sec. 23. The general form of Education is determined by the nature of the
mind, that it really is nothing but what it makes itself to be. The mind
is (1) immediate (or potential), but (2) it must estrange itself from
itself as it were, so that it may place itself over against itself as a
special object of attention; (3) this estrangement is finally removed
through a further acquaintance with the object--it feels itself at home
in that on which it looks, and returns again enriched to the form of
immediateness. That which at first appeared to be another than itself is
now seen to be itself. Education cannot create; it can only help to
develop to reality the previously existent possibility; it can only help
to bring forth to light the hidden life.

Sec. 24. All culture, whatever may be its special purport, must pass
through these two stages--of estrangement, and its removal. Culture must
hold fast to the distinction between the subject and the object
considered immediately, though it has again to absorb this distinction
into itself, in order that the union of the two may be more complete and
lasting. The subject recognizes then all the more certainly that what at
first appeared to it as a foreign existence, belongs to it as its own
property, and that it holds it as its own all the more by means of
culture.

--Plato, as is known, calls the feeling with which knowledge must begin,
wonder; but this can serve as a beginning only, for wonder itself can
only express the tension between the subject and the object at their
first encounter--a tension which would be impossible if they were not in
themselves identical. Children have a longing for the far-off, the
strange, and the wonderful, as if they hoped to find in these an
explanation of themselves. They want the object to be a genuine object.
That to