§ 183. Nevertheless individuality must always proceed from naturalness. Esthetically it seeks nature, but the nature of the activity itself, in order, by penetrating it with mind, to make of it a work of art; practically it seeks it, partly to disdain it in gloomy resignation, partly to enjoy it in excessive sensual ecstasy, demoniacally to heighten the extravagance of its own internal feeling in wild revels. ——The Germans were not savage in the common signification of this term. They were men each one of whom constituted himself willingly a centre for others, or, if this was not the case, renounced them in proud self-sufficiency. All the glory and all the disgrace of our race lies in the power of individualizing which is divinely breathed into our veins. As a natural element, if this be not controlled, it degenerates easily into intractableness, into violence. The Germans need therefore, in order to be educated, severe service, the imposition of difficult tasks; and for this reason they appropriate to themselves, now the Roman law, now the Greek philology, now Gallic usages, &c., in order to work off their superfluous strength in such opposition. The natural reserve of the German found its solvent in Christianity. By itself, as the history of the German race shows, it would have been destroyed in vain distraction. First of all, the German race, in the confidence of its immediate consciousness, ventured forth upon the sea, and managed the ship upon its waves as if they rode a charger.—— FIRST GROUP. THE SYSTEM OF PASSIVE EDUCATION. § 184. All education desires to free man from his finitude, to make him ethical, to unite him with God. It begins therefore with a negative relation to naturalness, but at once falls into a contradiction of its aim, which is to convert the opposition to nature into a natural necessity. Spirit subjects the individual (1) to the rule of the family as naturally spiritual; (2) to the rule of the caste as to a principle in itself spiritual, mediated through the division of labor, which it nevertheless, through its power of being inherited, joins again to the family; (3) to the abstract self-determination of the monkish quietism, which turns itself away as well from the family as from work, and constitutes this flight from nature and history, this absolute passivity, into an educational ideal. ——We shall not here enter into the details of this system, but simply endeavor to remove from their differences the want of clearness which is generally found involved in any mention of them, so that the phrases of hierarchical and theocratical education are used without any historical accuracy.—— I. _Family Education._