The error which we must victoriously contend against is not this ingenuous and unconquered faith in the objectivity of thought (which is also the objectivity of all things). What we must fight against is mental torpor and the sloth of the heart, which induce us to stop in front of the object as soon as we get it. A deplorable failing indeed, since the object is lost in the very act by which we grasp it, and we must again resume our work and toil some more in order to attain it again. For the object, in short, does exist, but in the subject; and in order to be a living and real object it must live on the life itself of the subject. A textbook is a textbook: when it was written, and if its author was capable of thinking and of living in his thought, it too was a living thing; and a living thing, that is, _spirit_, it will continue to be for the instructor who does not through indolence allow himself to believe that all the thinking demanded by the subject was done once for all by the author of the manual. For the manual, as a book intended for the teacher, meant to be constantly awakened by teachers to an ever quickened life, the life of the spirit, can only be what the instructor makes it. He, therefore, must have culture enough to read it as _his_ book; he must be able to restore it to life, to re-create it by the living process of his personal thought. This done, he will have done but one-half of the work needed to transform himself from a reader into a teacher. For his reading must lead up to the reading of the pupils; and they ought not to be confronted with the finished product of a culture turned out, all ready-made by the mechanism of the handbook. So that we should now complete our previous statement, and say that the teacher re-creates the book when he revives it in the mind of the one for whom the book was written; when author, teacher, and pupil constitute but one single spirit, whose life animates and inwardly vivifies the manual, which therefore ought not to be called, as it is, a _hand_-book, but a spiritual guide for the _mind_. Unfortunately the oft-deplored indolence which freezes and stiffens spiritual life fastens the books to the hands of the teacher first, and then to those of the pupils.