But besides this, our entire investigation dealing with the reasons for an absolutely spiritualistic conception of education should have made it very clear that it is not possible to entertain these new conceptions without introducing in the school a new spirit, which will not yield to the realistic vogue and to the materialistic, pedantic, old-fashioned education,—a spirit which will bring before us a new duty in every instant of our teaching life and in every word we utter, and which will impress us with the necessity of acting differently from what has been taught by the followers of traditional 223 pedagogical routine. Whatever the subject may be, the form of education has to be in accord with something that should by now be the common possession of us all, namely, the consciousness of the intimate spirituality and of the sacred freedom of our work, which operates not in the material schools but within the souls of our pupils. There it gives rise not to incidents that are unessential to that greater world which is the aim of our religiously, serious outlook on life, but to a process in which All is involved. The speculative side then of this form of education is not a useless and abstract theory, but a necessary moment of the moral improvement, of the spiritual enhancement, and of the general regeneration of teaching. Indifference to this reform, and the belief that men may continue to educate without bothering with the subtle problems of philosophy, mean a failure to understand the precise nature of education.

But the question of the content of education is a different one. Having identified education with spiritual reality itself, it follows that the two determinations of the content of the latter belong to the content of the former. One of these determinations is historical in character; it advances as the history of the human mind progresses, assuming now this and now that aspect in accordance with the prevailing spiritual interests. We who have censured the conception of pre-established programmes, as being most dangerous 224 prejudices of pedagogical realism, could not very well presume to determine here in the abstract, the content of every possible form of education for all places and all times. The school, like every other form of education, develops; and as it grows, it constantly changes its content, which again is nothing else than the content that the spirit gives to itself at every moment of its concrete development.

It would be just as irrational to expect a school to map out with precision the limits and the scope of a pupil’s culture. Of all the culture carved out for him at school, a boy will absorb only that much which is taken up by the autonomous growth of his personality. This will be supplemented and integrated by the culture which he gets outside of the classroom, in all possible walks of life, and will be so personal and of such a character as to admit of no prevision or pre-determination even on the part of the learner himself. Away with pre-established programmes then of any description! Spiritual activity works only in the plenitude of freedom. Horace asks: Currente rota cur urceus exit? We answer: Whether an urceus or not, what always comes from the rota is something which cannot be foreseen, for the very simple reason that what is foreseen is not the future but the past, which we (as in the case of experimental sciences) project into the future, whereas the spirit is a creation which occurs not in time but in a never-setting present.

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So every abstract discussion of the possible content of education in general, or of any given particular school, must appear crude and absurd, if we recall that education reflects the historical development of the spirit. What we need to do is to wait, observe, and have faith. For God will reveal himself to us; and God is the very Spirit of ours which at every moment prescribes its law to itself and thus determines its own content.

The other of the two determinations mentioned above is the ideal, or, as we perhaps might more precisely call it, the transcendental. It pertains to that spiritual content which never changes as it passes through the various historical determinations, and which might therefore be styled the “determiner of the intrinsic and absolute essence of the spirit.” This content upon careful consideration reveals itself as form, and more precisely as the form of the historically determined content of the spirit; or again as the concreteness of that form which has been attributed to the spirit considered in itself, which is a becoming. But qua becoming, and irrespective of all special aspects with which it historically configures itself, the spirit has already a content of its own, which cannot be absent from any of its historical configurations. In them this content will manifest itself over and over again, but constantly modified by the changes that are being historically produced. Under these varying 226 modes and presentations it permanently abides as the indefectible substance of the spirit. This substance, this ideal spirit which becomes actual in history, cannot be ignored by any kind of pedagogics which aspires to a thorough knowledge of the essence of education.

Having thus formulated the problem, and clinging firmly to the principle of educational unity, we may distinguish the forms of education which proceed from the ideal content of the spirit. But we must always keep in mind that, as these forms are only distinguishable ideally, they can in no way be effectively separated, and must be found in every concrete educative act. So that their synthesis and their complete immanence is the concreteness of educational unity in its opposition to what I have called fragmentary education. Our distinction then will turn out to be an exact logical analysis, which analyses only the terms of a synthesis and cannot therefore be dissociated from the synthesis. By analysing and by synthesising, by determining the spiritual unity without disconnecting or in any way dissociating its intrinsic ideal determinations, we strive to represent the ideal of education.

In making a rapid survey of this analysis, I must refer back to what was said of the attributes of the spirit,—that the spirit is in that it becomes, that it becomes in so far as it acquires self-consciousness, that its being therefore is consciousness in the act of being acquired. This act is surely self-consciousness, and it does mean 227 cognition, but a cognition which differs from all others in that it has for its object that very one who cognises. And this is the meaning of “I,” identity of subject and object,—an identity, however, that because of its curious nature needs to be carefully examined. It was shown in a preceding chapter that two things, to be thought as two, must yet be thought as one by virtue of the unique relationship which makes their duality possible. Here we observe the inverse: identity of subject and object means that in addition to the subject there is—nothing; it means therefore unity. And yet this unity would in no manner be intelligible if it were not also a duality, if, in other words, the identity of subject and object were not also the difference between them.

To distinguish A from B, an initial, elementary minimum difference is required. It is the difference, called otherness, by which B is other than A. Without this otherness there would not be A and B, but either A alone or B alone. The subject as it knows itself is certainly not another from the subject alone. But if it did not become other to itself, if it were not object also, as well as subject, it would never know itself. To be object as well as subject implies the necessity of distinguishing these two terms, and shows that there is otherness between them. If it sounds harsh to speak of something that first is “one” and then is “two,” we might state the situation in a different 228 and perhaps simpler way. We might say that the subject would not know itself, if remaining always that one and self-same subject, it were not both subject and object to itself.

Consciousness implies this self-alteration of the subject, which by placing itself as an object in front of itself realises itself, it being real only as self-consciousness. This is the import of the identity of the two terms, subject and object; or of the difference intrinsic to the one, which is but another way of stating it. We may insist as much as we want on the identity of the “I,” but it will always be true that this “I” is real only in virtue of its intrinsic difference. And conversely we may insist, as it is more often done, on the difference between the subjective moment of the “I,” whereby the “I” is set in opposition to all its objects, and the objective moment in which the ego vanishes. But behind the difference, identity is always to be found. Man, the more he thinks, the more he alters himself, the more objective that reality becomes which he realises by self-consciousness, the more fully he sees the variation, the development, the growth, the enhancement of the object—the world he knows.