With the
premeditated effort in the state of a monk to reduce self to nothing as
the highest good, the system of passive education attains its highest
point. But the spirit cannot content itself in this abstract and dreamy
absence of all action, though it demands a high stage of culture, and it
has recourse therefore to action, partly on the positive side to conquer
nature, partly to double its own existence in making history. Inspired
with affirmative courage, it descends triumphantly from the mountain
heights, and fears secularization no more.

SECOND GROUP.

THE SYSTEM OF ACTIVE EDUCATION.

Sec. 195. Active Education elevates man from his abstract subjection to
the family, the caste, asceticism, into a concrete activity with a
definite aim which subjects those elements as phases of its mediation,
and grants to each individual independence on the condition of his
identity with it. These aims are the military state, the future after
death, and industry. There is always an element of nature present from
which the activity proceeds; but this no longer appears, like the
family, the caste, the sensuous egotism, as immediately belonging to the
individual, but as something outside of himself which limits him, and,
as his future life, has an internal relation to him, yet is essential to
him and assigns to him the object of his activity. The Persian has as an
object of conquest, other nations; the Egyptian, death; the Phoenician,
the sea.

I. _Military Education._

Sec. 196. That education which would emancipate a nation from the passivity
of abstraction must throw it into the midst of an historical activity. A
nation finds not its actual limits in its locality: it can forsake this
and wander far away from it. Its true limit is made by another nation.
The nation which knows itself to be actual, turns itself therefore
against other nations in order to subject them and to reduce them to the
condition of mere accidents of itself. It begins a system of conquest
which has in itself no limitations, but goes from one nation to another,
and extends its evil course indefinitely. The final result of this
attack is that it finds itself attacked and conquered.

--The early history of the Persian is twofold: the patriarchal in the
high valleys of Iran, and the religio-hierarchical among the Medes. We
find under these circumstances a repetition of the principal
characteristics of the Chinese, Indian, and Buddhist educations. In