was that
Froebel's love of abstract symbolism often got the better of his
sympathetic insight; and there was substituted for development as
arbitrary and externally imposed a scheme of dictation as the history of
instruction has ever seen.

With Hegel the necessity of finding some working concrete counterpart of
the inaccessible Absolute took an institutional, rather than symbolic,
form. His philosophy, like Froebel's, marks in one direction an
indispensable contribution to a valid conception of the process of life.
The weaknesses of an abstract individualistic philosophy were evident
to him; he saw the impossibility of making a clean sweep of historical
institutions, of treating them as despotisms begot in artifice and
nurtured in fraud. In his philosophy of history and society culminated
the efforts of a whole series of German writers--Lessing, Herder, Kant,
Schiller, Goethe--to appreciate the nurturing influence of the great
collective institutional products of humanity. For those who learned
the lesson of this movement, it was henceforth impossible to conceive
of institutions or of culture as artificial. It destroyed completely--in
idea, not in fact--the psychology that regarded "mind" as a ready-made
possession of a naked individual by showing the significance of
"objective mind"--language, government, art, religion--in the formation
of individual minds. But since Hegel was haunted by the conception of an
absolute goal, he was obliged to arrange institutions as they concretely
exist, on a stepladder of ascending approximations. Each in its time
and place is absolutely necessary, because a stage in the self-realizing
process of the absolute mind. Taken as such a step or stage, its
existence is proof of its complete rationality, for it is an integral
element in the total, which is Reason. Against institutions as they are,
individuals have no spiritual rights; personal development, and nurture,
consist in obedient assimilation of the spirit of existing institutions.
Conformity, not transformation, is the essence of education.
Institutions change as history shows; but their change, the rise and
fall of states, is the work of the "world-spirit." Individuals, save the
great "heroes" who are the chosen organs of the world-spirit, have
no share or lot in it. In the later nineteenth century, this type of
idealism was amalgamated with the doctrine of biological evolution.

"Evolution" was a force working itself out to its o