spirit coincides with the transcending of all manifestation. From the nature which belongs to him there arises for the individual spirit the impulse towards a holy life, i.e. the being freed from his history even in the midst of its process. He gratifies this impulse negatively through the considering of what has happened as past and gone, as that which lives now only ideally in the recollection; and positively through the positing of a new actual existence in which he strives to realize the idea of freedom which constitutes his necessity, as purer and higher than before. This constant new-birth out of the grave of the past to the life of a more beautiful future is the genuine reconciliation with destiny. The false reconciliation may assume different forms. It may abstain from all action because man through this limits himself and becomes responsible. This is to despair of freedom, which condemns the spirit to the loss of itself since its nature demands activity. The abstract quietism of the Indian penitents, of the Buddhists, of the fanatical ascetics, of the Protestant recluses, &c., is an error of this kind. The man may become indifferent about the ethical determinateness of his deeds. In this case he acts; but because he has no faith in the necessary connection of his deeds through the means of freedom, a connection which he would willingly ascribe to mere chance, he loses his spiritual essence. This is the error of indifference and of its frivolity, which denies the open mystery of the ruling of destiny. Education must therefore imbue man with respect for external movements of history and with confidence in the inexhaustibleness of the progressive human spirit, since only by producing better things can he affirmatively elevate himself above his past. This active acknowledgment of the necessity of freedom as the determining principle of destiny gives the highest satisfaction to which practical religious feeling may arrive, for blessedness develops itself in it——that blessedness which does not know that it is circumscribed by finitude and transitoriness, and which possesses the immortal courage to strive always anew for perfection with free resignation at its non-realization, so that happiness and misery, pleasure and pain, are conquered by the power of disinterested self-sacrifice.