§ 247. The reaction against the innumerable number of fantastic extravagancies arising from chivalry was the idea of the spiritual chivalry which was to unite the cloister and the town, abstract self-denial and military life, separation from the world and the sovereignty of the world——an undeniable advance, but an untenable synthesis which could not prevent the dissolution of chivalry——this chivalry, which, as the rule of the stronger, induced for a long time the destruction of all regular culture founded on principles, and brought a period of absence of all education. In this perversion of chivalry to a grand vagabondism, and even to robbery, noble souls often rushed into ridiculous excesses. This decline of chivalry found its truth in Citizenship, whose education, however, did not, like the πόλις and the _civitas_ of the ancients, limit itself to itself, but, through the presence of the principle of Christianity, accepted the whole circle of humanity as the aim of its culture. III. _The Epoch of Education fitting one for Civil Life._ § 248. The idea of the State had gradually worked itself up to a higher plane with trade and industry, and found in Protestantism its spiritual confirmation. Protestantism, as the self assurance of the individual that he was directly related to God without any dependence on the mediation of any man, rose to the truth in the autonomy of the soul, and began out of the abstract phantasmagoria of monachism and chivalry to develope Christianity, as the principle of humanitarian education, into concrete actuality. The cities were not merely, in comparison with the clergy and the nobility, the "third estate"; but the citizen who himself managed his commonwealth, and defended its interests with arms, developed into the citizen of a state which absorbed the clergy and nobility, and the state-citizen found his ultimate ideal in pure Humanity as cognized through reason. § 249. The phases of this development are (1) Civil education as such, in which we find chivalric education metamorphosed into the so-called noble, both however being controlled as to education, within Catholicism by Jesuitism, within Protestantism by Pietism. (2) Against this tendency to the church, we find reacting on the one hand the devotion to a study of antiquity, and on the other the friendly alliance to immediate actuality, i.e. with Nature. We can name these periods of Pedagogics those of its ideals of culture. (3) But the truth of all culture must forever remain moral freedom. After Education had arrived at a knowledge of the meaning of Idealism and Realism, it must seize as its absolute aim the moral emancipation of man into Humanity; and it must conform its culture by this aim, since technical dexterity, friendly adroitness, proficiency in the arts, and scientific insight, can attain to their proper rank only through moral purity. _1. Civil Education as such._