ot live in simple marriage, but strove for the piquant pleasure of
making the wife of another the lady of his heart, and this often led to
moral and physical infidelity. And, finally, the knight did not obey
alone the general laws of knightly honor, but he strove, besides, to
discover for himself strange things, which he should undertake with his
sword, in defiance of all criticism, simply because it pleased his
caprice so to do. He _sought adventures_.

Sec. 247. The reaction against the innumerable number of fantastic
extravagancies arising from chivalry was the idea of the spiritual
chivalry which was to unite the cloister and the town, abstract
self-denial and military life, separation from the world and the
sovereignty of the world--an undeniable advance, but an untenable
synthesis which could not prevent the dissolution of chivalry--this
chivalry, which, as the rule of the stronger, induced for a long time
the destruction of all regular culture founded on principles, and
brought a period of absence of all education. In this perversion of
chivalry to a grand vagabondism, and even to robbery, noble souls often
rushed into ridiculous excesses. This decline of chivalry found its
truth in Citizenship, whose education, however, did not, like the
[Greek: polis] and the _civitas_ of the ancients, limit itself to
itself, but, through the presence of the principle of Christianity,
accepted the whole circle of humanity as the aim of its culture.

III. _The Epoch of Education fitting one for Civil Life._

Sec. 248. The idea of the State had gradually worked itself up to a higher
plane with trade and industry, and found in Protestantism its spiritual
confirmation. Protestantism, as the self assurance of the individual
that he was directly related to God without any dependence on the
mediation of any man, rose to the truth in the autonomy of the soul, and
began out of the abstract phantasmagoria of monachism and chivalry to
develope Christianity, as the principle of humanitarian education, into
concrete actuality. The cities were not merely, in comparison with the
clergy and the nobility, the "third estate"; but the citizen who himself
managed his commonwealth, and defended its interests with arms,
developed into the citizen of a state which absorbed the clergy and
nobility, and the state-citizen found his ultimate ideal in pure
Humanity as cognized through reason.

Sec. 249. The phases of this development are (1) Civil ed