s gradual deadening of active
individuality, the result of a perverted study of the classics, we find
now reacting the education of enlightenment, which we generally call the
philanthropic. It sought to make men friendly to the immediate course of
the world. It placed over against the learning of the ancient languages
for their own sake, the acquisition of the more needful branches of
Mathematics, Physics, Geography, History, and the modern languages,
calling these the real studies. Nevertheless it often retained the
instruction in the Latin language because the Romance languages have
sprung from it, and because, through its long domination, the universal
terminology of Science, Art, and Law, is rooted in it. Philanthropy
desired to develope the social side of its disciple through an abstract
of practical knowledge and personal accomplishments, and to lead him
again, in opposition to the hermit-like sedentary life of the
book-pedant, out into the fields and the woods. It desired to imitate
life even in its method, and to instruct pleasantly in the way of play
or by dialogue. It would add to the simple letters and names the
contemplation of the object itself, or at least of its representation by
pictures; and in this direction, in the conversation-literature which it
prepared for children, it sometimes fell into childishness. It performed
a great service when it gave to the body its due, and introduced simple,
natural dress, bathing, gymnastics, pedestrian excursions, and a
hardening against the influences of wind and weather. As this
Pedagogics, so friendly to children, deemed that it could not soon
enough begin to honor them as citizens of the world, it was guilty in
general of the error of presupposing as already finished in its children
much that it itself should have gradually developed; and as it wished to
educate the European as such, or rather man as such, it came into an
indifference concerning the concrete distinctions of nationality and
religion. It coincided with the philologists in placing, in a concealed
way, Socrates above Christ, because he had worked no miracles, and
taught only morality. In such a dead cosmopolitanism, individuality
disappeared in the indeterminateness of a general humanity, and saw
itself forced to agree with the humanistic education in proclaiming the
truth of Nature as the pedagogical ideal, with the distinction, that
while Humanism believed this ideal realized in the Greeks and Romans