If silence was the first requisite of learning, so obedience is that of morality. “Obedience is the beginning of all wisdom. For by this the boy’s will is brought under the reasonable will imposed from without. The boy’s will is not yet fledged, not truly independent and free. It has not learned to see the true, the objective, which makes for righteousness. If children are permitted to follow their impulses, if their self-will is unwisely yielded to, a most ugly habit of stubborn willfulness is formed” (3: p. 122). If our rationalistic philosopher does not put any faith in the natural impulses of the child, he makes equally little of the child’s individuality. He writes: “The peculiarities of man must not be rated too highly. The assertion that a teacher must carefully adjust himself to the individuality of his pupil so as to develop it--this assertion is empty. The teacher has no time for that. The individuality of the children is met in the family. But with the school begins a life in accord with a general order, after general rules for all. In school the spirit must be brought to lay aside the peculiarities, it must know and will the universal” (3: pp. 113-114). The individual experience or consciousness never wholly reveals the full content of the spiritual development or culture attained by the race or the universal soul. The individual soul must, therefore, be fed by the content of the racial soul in order to attain its fullness. This, for Hegel, is done through the spoken word or writing. For him, not the senses or personal experience, as the empiricists claimed, but speech is the organ of learning. The letters of alphabets are the beginning of instruction proper, and, “in general, speech is that airy element, that material immateriality by means of which the widening knowledge of the child is lifted more and more above the material and particular to the universal, and so to thought” (3: p. 123). This importance of instruction through speech in education applies also to morality and religion. Unless we teach, the boy, left to himself, would naturally gather erroneous and imperfect notions of things and their relations. Therefore we need an early instruction in morality and religion. Against the Rousseauean idea that children “cannot understand them, and can gather from them only words for memory,” Hegel asserts that they are “well understood by the child, by the boy, by the youth, in proportion to their age.” Again: “Our whole life is nothing else than a growing comprehension of their range and significance. We see them exemplified in ever new cases, and our knowledge of their many-sided meanings develops. In fact, were we to put off the teaching of these moral ideas until a man is able to grasp their whole meaning, very few persons need be taught, and these not much before the end of life” (3: pp. 117-118).