PR#151[A] -- Education is the art of making men ethical.

PR#151[A] -- Education is the art of making men ethical.

Education is the art of making men ethical. It begins with pupils whose life is at the instinctive level and shows them the way to a second birth, the way to change their instinctive nature into a second, intellectual, nature, and makes this intellectual level habitual to them.

At this point the clash between the natural and the subjective will disappears, the subject's internal struggle dies away.

To this extent, habit is part of ethical life as it is of philosophic thought also, since such thought demands that mind be trained against capricious fancies, and that these be destroyed and overcome to leave the way clear for rational thinking.

It is true that a man is killed by habit, i.e. if he has once come to feel completely at home in life, if he has become mentally and physically dull, and if the clash between subjective consciousness and mental activity has disappeared;

for man is active only in so far as he has not attained his end and wills to develop his potentialities and vindicate himself in struggling to attain it. When this has been fully achieved, activity and vitality are at an end, and the result - loss of interest in life - is mental or physical death.


Hegel prided himself on having taught philosophy to speak German. ( 黑格爾以他能教哲學說德文而驕傲 . . . )

The spirit is such that it PRODUCES itself and MAKES itself what it IS.