"Certainly," said I, "it may be admitted that this gives rise to exaggeration in some cases, and that the linguistic sort of sport practised by many a scholar degenerates to a mere display of knowledge. An intellectual achievement of lasting merit has very rarely or never been the result of a superabundance of acquired linguistic knowledge. An instance occurs to me at this moment. Nietzsche became a philosopher of far-reaching influence only after he had passed the stage of the philologist. As far as our present discussion is concerned, the question is narrowed down considerably: it reduces itself to inquiring whether we do sufficient, too little, or too much Greek and Latin. I must remark at the very outset that, formerly, school requirements went much further in this respect than nowadays, when we scarcely meet with a scholar even in the upper classes who knows Latin and Greek perfectly." It is just this fact that Einstein regards as a sign of improvement and a result of examining the true aims of a school. He continued: "Man must be educated to 'react delicately'; he is to acquire and develop 'intellectual muscles'! And the methods of language drill are much less suited to this purpose than those of a more general training that gives greatest weight to a sharpening of one's own powers of reflection. Naturally, the inclination of the pupil for a particular profession must not be neglected, especially in view of the circumstance that such inclination usually asserts itself at an early age, being occasioned by personal gifts, by examples of other members of the family, and by various circumstances that affect the choice of his future life-work. That is why I support the introduction into schools, particularly schools devoted to classics, of a division into two branches at, say, the fourth form, so that at this stage the young pupil has to decide in favour of one or other of the courses. The elementary foundation to the fourth form may be made uniform for all, as they are concerned with factors on education that are scarcely open to the danger of being exaggerated in any one direction. If the pupil finds that he has a special interest in what are called _humaniora_ by the educationist, let him by all means continue along the road of Latin and Greek, and, indeed, without being burdened by tasks that, owing to his disposition, oppress or alarm him."