For this reason, then, we are justified in saying that our personality is particular when we consider it abstractly, but that concretely it realises itself as a universal and therefore also as a national personality. This conception is of fundamental importance for those of us who live in the class-room and have made of teaching our life's occupation, our ultimate end, and the real purpose of our existence. For in this conception of human activities we find the solution of a problem that has been present in the minds of thinking men ever since they began to reflect on the subject of education, or, in other words, from time immemorial. Education, we must remember, is not a fact, if by fact we mean, as we should, something that has happened, or is wont to happen, or must inevitably take place in virtue of the constancy of the law which governs it. We teachers are all sincerely convinced that education, as we speak of it, as it draws our interests, for which we work, and which we strive to improve, is not now what it was before. For there is no education that works out in conformity with natural laws. It is a free act of ours, the vocation of our souls, our duty as men. By it more nobly than by any other action man is enabled to actualise his superior nature. Animals do not educate: even though they do raise their young ones they yet form no family, no ethical organism with members differentiated and reciprocally correlated. But we freely, by an act of our conscience, recognise our children, as we do our parents and our brothers; and we discern our fellow-beings in ourselves and ourselves in others; and by the growth of our own we unconsciously develop the personality of others; and therefore in the family, in the city, in any community, we constitute one spirit, with common needs that are satisfied by the operations of individual activity which is a social activity. Man has been called a political or a social animal. He might therefore be considered also as an educating animal. For we do not merely educate the young ones, our young ones. Education being spiritual action bearing on the spirit, we really educate all those that are in any way and by any relations whatsoever connected with us, whether or not they belong to our family or to our school, as long as they concur with us in constituting a complete social entity. And we not only train those of minor age, who are as yet under tutelage, and still frequent the schools and are busily intent upon developing and improving their skill, their character, their culture. We also educate the adults, the grown-up men and women, the aged; for there is no man alive who does not daily add to his intellectual equipment, who does not derive some advantage from his human associations, who could not appropriately repeat the statement of the Roman emperor--_nulla dies sine linea_. Man always educates.