The relation between the adolescent boy and girl and the parents is of prime significance as illustrating in a way that young persons can understand the general conception of the ethical relation as _reciprocal_. The youth should be shown that he can be not only the recipient but a giver of benefits, that he can be a real help to his parents, chiefly by sympathetically entering into the problems and difficulties with which they have to contend. The parents, instead of being regarded by the young as an earthly providence, existing only for the purpose of bestowing benefits, should be seen in their true light as struggling, and often heavily burdened human beings. At the same time the young son or daughter will in this way gain an invaluable preparation for comprehending the difficulties under which the effort to live must be carried on. In regard to patriotism, it is important that the errors and mistakes committed by one’s nation in the past should not be overlooked or minimized. The school should furnish to the students various outlets for social service such as they in their period of life are capable of rendering. FOOTNOTES: [83] Compare with the spiritual conception of culture here outlined Matthew Arnold’s “knowing the best which has been thought and said”; and a recent definition of culture by an eminent American as “the knowing one thing well and a little of everything else,” without correlation of the little one knows of everything else with the one thing one is supposed to know extremely well. [84] See the chapter on “Ethical Development Extending Through Life” in _The World Crisis_. CHAPTER VII THE STATE The leading theories of the state should be kept in view for comparison with the ethical theory here set forth—the theories of Aristotle and Plato, St. Augustine and the mediæval schoolmen, Rousseau’s contract theory, and the German conceptions of the state propounded by Kant, Fichte, Hegel. Moreover, since the ideas actually embodied in governments, in the Persian monarchy, for instance, in the Greek City State, Venice, etc., are not identical with the constructions of the philosophers, the leading facts of the history of politics should be borne in mind as well as the leading theories. The state has two aspects: (1) It is the balance wheel of the vocational groups included within it. (2) It is the political expression of the national character, and its ethical purpose is to develop this empirical national character into a spiritual character. I shall speak of the first aspect in this chapter.