I
Everything spoken in this dialogue is wholly true; only it is not merely not the work of a single day, but not even the work of a single life-period; it is rather an uncompromising process of growth that can not be hastened at will, but must gradually unfold itself in four great stages and must furthermore be properly brought to maturity in each separate period, if any real and beneficial good is to arise therefrom. There may be no compulsion about it; a hastening of growth occurs only in times of suffering; the first half of every task is mostly the hardest; from that point onward it goes more quickly and easily to the end.
The first stage is the seeking for a philosophy of life, and the dissatisfaction with the usual conceptions of the universe: “How many hired servants of my father’s have bread enough and to spare, and I perish here with hunger!” The second is the turning to the eternal, supernatural truth: “Look unto me and be ye saved, all the ends of the earth; for I am God, and there is none else.” The third stage is the new life which must gradually take shape therefrom, though falling into many divisions. And the last has the promise of the prophet Zechariah: “At evening time there shall be light.” Out of the first stage the youthful man must pass with pure thoughts directed toward an ideal, with no stigma of immorality upon his conscience, with pleasure in work, and with a considerable amount of knowledge useful for his life-calling. If the second period is rightly spent, it will be devoted to the acquisition of three important things: position as a citizen of the state, a worthy marriage, and a sound religious and philosophical view of life. The third stage is that of the confirmation of this view in the struggle of life; this stage forms the real work of life. The fourth is the crowning of life with true success, and the final transition to a larger sphere of activity.
It is clear from the beginning that this course of development really rests upon self-training, and usually takes its start in that period of life in which every earnest man is tired of the “fables of the world” and is in the same frame of mind in which Dante has his great poem begin with the words: “In the midway of this our mortal life, I found me in a gloomy wood astray;” or in which St. Theresa says: “My soul was submerged in the dream of earthly things, but it has pleased the Lord to awaken me from this slumber of death, and I beseech Him nevermore to let me fall back therein.” What education can do up to this point is, as regards the inner life, merely of a preparatory and prophylactic nature, and consists in keeping the young human being away from a wholly materialistic conception of the world, as well as from a merely formal religion, both of which would make difficult his later approach to a true philosophical and religious conviction. Such children as are educated in the natural sciences alone, as well as those who have heard of Christianity too early and too often, or have been trained to make use of religious expressions and forms mechanically (often against the grain), only rarely grow up to be men who later have the power of finding the way of peace. It is the especial task of education to keep the young soul free from the strain of immorality, and inclined toward a purer life than one that is based merely upon the senses. The soil on which the noble plant of a true religion should later take root and flourish is rendered unfit for that purpose by nothing so much as by the dominance of sensuality. The soaring-power of the spirit is thereby broken, and is regenerated again only with difficulty and partially, if at all. With this, we return to the thought already expressed elsewhere, that for the education of those who are to be given a higher culture (for the boys, at least, and probably also for their mothers and governesses and women teachers) the so-called classical education is indispensable, and on the whole to be preferred to the ordinary religious and moral instruction. Christianity then comes easily of itself, later on, if any one has honestly traversed this stage of instruction in the classical philosophy (which can not and should not be the final stage); and, as history has shown, Christianity bears its finest fruits upon a classical substratum. In particular, a classically educated spirit will never be able to sink into mere ecclesiasticism, and still less into the insipidities and the trivialities which, much as they are foreign to the great and noble nature of pristine Christianity, nevertheless, to its immense harm, cling to the quite common conception of it.
Besides, Christianity undoubtedly contains an element of alienation from the world, an element that can not be so suitable for the education of a young human being still intent upon the growth of all his intellectual faculties, as it is for the self-training that comes later. Indeed, one may go so far as to say that physical well-being (though by no means the highest form of feeling nor the highest destiny), and a certain human impulse to self-exaltation (which later finds its limit in the true humility of Christianity) are natural and even necessary to the growth of youth, and for this very reason the classical examples and ideals (and those of the Old Testament also, of course) fit in better with this period than do those of the Christian era. Only, the classical education must be adapted to the circumstances of the pupils’ environment, or this environment must itself be able to be elevated at the same time, or it will often make the pupils discontented with their lot. Indeed, it is even as Flattich rightly pointed out of old in the naïve words, “Youth must have its time of raging, though not wickedly so;” and for those who do not have this period in youth, it often comes afterward, only worse and more secretly.
When education has planted in the young human being a disposition inclined toward the ideal, and has begotten in him an aversion to all that is vulgar, together with some good life-habits, then it has performed its most important duty. At present, indeed, it wants to do more than this, but in reality it accomplishes less.
Two things must be made particularly clear to the young man at the conclusion of the first life-period: in the first place, within the limits of natural laws men attain to everything, so to speak, that they earnestly desire. Only, they must begin at the right time, must proceed in the right order, and must above all things not chase two hares at once. To become rich, renowned, learned, or virtuous, there is need in every case of a single-minded and orderly struggle that suffers no competition of some rival purpose. One must therefore know what one wants to be, and choose the right thing as early as possible. Then “the man grows, of himself, along with his greater aims.” Without these, he is vainly tempted to seek his development in the artificial forcing-beds of education.
The way in which this subjectivity (not wrong at the first) comes to an end is not one that can be exactly determined, either as to the time the end takes place or as to the cause that brings it about. The change usually begins with premonitions which eventually become strong impressions. These are often called forth merely by isolated words which sometimes have been spoken by men, apparently by chance, but are more frequently derived from reading. Books that fall into a man’s hand at just the right time are nowadays most frequently the instrumentality of the summons to a higher life. Many a time, also, the soul suddenly, in moments of elevation, sees itself transported to a quite different plane from that on which it really lives. It espies, as often happens to the mountain-wanderer, a new and beautiful region quite near before it, but which is still separated from its present standing-ground by a vast chasm, over which a bridge leads, but only far below in the depths.
In this period isolated experiences also occur which may be classed as strange, as hard to be described, and as by no means essential to development. On this point mystic writers say that there are three kinds of more intimate union with the divine: first, the quite regular kind (thus already understood in the Old Testament), that comes through submission and sincere love, a union that always remains open in its nature, that nothing can interrupt save a man’s own will contending against the will of God, and that is at once reëstablished as soon as the will is again accordant; second, an extraordinary kind, that comes through devout contemplation, which can not, however, be artificially produced, but which is only a yet greater affection of the heart, waiting in patience and humility for the response that God will perhaps give thereto; and lastly, a still more sensitive feeling of nearness to God, coming for the most part quite unexpectedly, but, of all the three, the least necessary and important for the progress of the inner life.
The end of the first stage of life is not satisfying—can not and should not be. All subjectivity is a form of thinking that ends in dissatisfaction, and the nobler the soul, the more quickly and deeply it falls into it. Along with this there very often comes a certain failure in the outer life, almost enigmatical; the cause is given in very picturesque language by an Israelitic prophet, Hosea, “I will hedge up the way with thorns, and I will make a fence against her, that she shall not find her paths.” It is the genuine mercy of God when every false way a man wishes to strike into is hedged with thorns; or when he, in another beautiful Israelitic simile, like a lily among thorns, can find his growth only straight upward. Those are the sorrows of youth for which later one is most thankful.
Nevertheless, because of these things a certain sadness masters the soul, and but few noteworthy men are to be found who have not temporarily suffered melancholy in their youth. Even at best, they live in the mood which Goethe depicts in the words:
So still and thoughtful? Something is lacking; freely confess.
“Contented am I, but ’tis not well with me, nevertheless.”
But, as every brave young soul sees, life is not given us with the purpose that we may always be only “still and thoughtful,” nor that we may consume ourselves in disconsolate complaints or in the pessimism that wastes the soul’s powers. Those are the conditions that attend transition, and must appear. A new life must spring therefrom, but one feels, indeed, that a kind of death first lies between.
This is the surrender of the personal will, intent upon the selfish life; this will a man renounces with so much difficulty that Calvin was able to found upon this fact his doctrine of a formal predestination of some to this development of his true existence, and of others to a loss of it. But every such death, for those who bear within them the seed of an eternal life, is not the final goal, but the means to a new and higher development of life. Whoever is unable to hold fast to this hope with the tenacity with which Job clung to it, and yet is no longer able to find any satisfaction in the world of the senses, falls now into a gloomy asceticism which is forever shovelling at his grave; or into an idle dialogue (in diaries and letters) with his painful dissatisfaction with the universe; or into the confused Buddhistic longing for some Nirvana; or, finally, into one of the various other aberrations of the human spirit, which all agree only in considering the true way as an impossible or fantastic one.
At this point of life, for a time, the word of salvation is, Forward!