§ 194. In the school of the Chinese Tao-tse, and in the command to the Brahmin after he has established a family to become a recluse, we find the transition as it actually exists to the Buddhistic Quietism which has covered the rocky heights of Thibet with countless cloisters, and reared the people who are dependent upon it into a childlike amiability, into a contented repose. Art and Science have here no value in themselves, and are regarded only as ministering to religion. To be able to read in order to mutter over the prayers is desirable. With the premeditated effort in the state of a monk to reduce self to nothing as the highest good, the system of passive education attains its highest point. But the spirit cannot content itself in this abstract and dreamy absence of all action, though it demands a high stage of culture, and it has recourse therefore to action, partly on the positive side to conquer nature, partly to double its own existence in making history. Inspired with affirmative courage, it descends triumphantly from the mountain heights, and fears secularization no more. SECOND GROUP. THE SYSTEM OF ACTIVE EDUCATION. § 195. Active Education elevates man from his abstract subjection to the family, the caste, asceticism, into a concrete activity with a definite aim which subjects those elements as phases of its mediation, and grants to each individual independence on the condition of his identity with it. These aims are the military state, the future after death, and industry. There is always an element of nature present from which the activity proceeds; but this no longer appears, like the family, the caste, the sensuous egotism, as immediately belonging to the individual, but as something outside of himself which limits him, and, as his future life, has an internal relation to him, yet is essential to him and assigns to him the object of his activity. The Persian has as an object of conquest, other nations; the Egyptian, death; the Phœnician, the sea. I. _Military Education._ § 196. That education which would emancipate a nation from the passivity of abstraction must throw it into the midst of an historical activity. A nation finds not its actual limits in its locality: it can forsake this and wander far away from it. Its true limit is made by another nation. The nation which knows itself to be actual, turns itself therefore against other nations in order to subject them and to reduce them to the condition of mere accidents of itself. It begins a system of conquest which has in itself no limitations, but goes from one nation to another, and extends its evil course indefinitely. The final result of this attack is that it finds itself attacked and conquered.