§ 46. The form of Education reaches its limits with the idea of punishment, because this is the attempt to subsume the negative reality and to make it conformable to its positive idea. But the limits of Education are found in the idea of its nature, which is to fashion the individual into theoretical and practical rationality. The authority of the Educator at last becomes imperceptible, and it passes over into advice and example, and obedience changes from blind conformity to free gratitude and attachment. Individuality wears off its rough edges, and is transfigured into the universality and necessity of Reason without losing in this process its identity. Work becomes enjoyment, and he finds his play in a change of activity. The youth takes possession of himself, and can be left to himself. ——There are two widely differing views with regard to the limits of Education. One lays great stress on the weakness of the pupil and the power of the teacher. According to this view, Education has for its province the entire formation of the youth. The despotism of this view often manifests itself where large numbers are to be educated together, and with very undesirable results, because it assumes that the individual pupil is only a specimen of the whole, as if the school were a great factory where each piece of goods is to be stamped exactly like all the rest. Individuality is reduced by the tyranny of such despotism to one uniform level till all originality is destroyed, as in cloisters, barracks, and orphan asylums, where only one individual seems to exist. There is a kind of Pedagogy also which fancies that one can thrust into or out of the individual pupil what one will. This may be called a superstitious belief in the power of Education.——The opposite extreme disbelieves this, and advances the policy which lets alone and does nothing, urging that individuality is unconquerable, and that often the most careful and far-sighted education fails of reaching its aim in so far as it is opposed to the nature of the youth, and that this individuality has made of no avail all efforts toward the obtaining of any end which was opposed to it. This representation of the fruitlessness of all pedagogical efforts engenders an indifference towards it which would leave, as a result, only a sort of vegetation of individuality growing at hap-hazard.—— [Sidenote: _The Limits of Individuality._]