validity. In the Science of Knowledge the relation is exactly reversed: Reason alone is in itself, and individuality is but accidental; reason is the object, and personality the means to realize it; personality is only a particular manner of manifesting reason, and must always more and more lose itself in the universal form of reason. Only reason is eternal; individuality must always die out. And whosoever is not prepared to succumb to this order of things, will also never get at the true understanding of the Science of Knowledge.
This fact that they can never understand the Science of Knowledge unless they first comply with certain conditions, has been told them often enough. They do not want to hear it again, and our frank warning affords them a new opportunity to attack us. Every conviction, they assert, must be capable of being communicated by conceptions—nay, it must even be possible to compel its acknowledgment. They say it is a bad example to assert that our Science exists for only certain privileged spirits, and that others cannot see or understand anything of it.
Let us see, first of all, what the Science of Knowledge does assert on this point. It does not assert that there is an original and inborn distinction between men and men, whereby some are made capable of thinking and learning what the others, by their nature, cannot think or learn. Reason is common to all, and is the same in all rational beings. Whatsoever one rational being possesses as a talent, all others possess also. Nay, we have even in this present article expressly admitted that the conceptions upon which the Science of Knowledge insists, are actually effective in all rational beings; for their efficacy furnishes the ground of a possibility of consciousness. The pure Ego, which they charge is incapable of thinking, lies at the bottom of all their thinking, and occurs in all their thinking, since all thinking is possible only through it. Thus far everything proceeds mechanically. But to get an insight into this asserted necessity—to think again this thinking—does not lie in mechanism, but, on the contrary, requires an elevation, through freedom, to a new sphere, which our immediate existence does not place in our possession. Unless this faculty of freedom has already existence, and has already been practised, the Science of Knowledge can accomplish nothing in a person. It is this power of freedom which furnishes the premises upon which the structure is to rest.
They certainly will not deny that every science and every art presupposes certain primary rudiments, which must first be acquired before we can enter into the science or art. “But,” say they, “if you only require a knowledge of the rudiments, why do you not teach them to us, if we lack them? Why do you not place them before us definitely and systematically? Is it not your own fault if you plunge us at once in medias res, and require the public to understand you before you have communicated the rudiments?” I reply: that is exactly the difficulty! These rudiments cannot be systematically forced upon you—they cannot be taught to you by compulsion! In one word, they are a knowledge which we can get only from ourselves. Everything depends upon this, that by the constant use of freedom, with clear consciousness of this freedom, we should become thoroughly conscious and enamored of this our freedom. Whenever it shall have become the well-matured object of education—from tenderest youth upwards—to develop the inner power of the scholar, but not to give it a direction; to educate man for his own use, and as instrument of his own will, but not as the soulless instrument of others;—then the Science of Knowledge will be universally and easily comprehensible. Culture of the whole man, from earliest youth—this is the only way to spread philosophy. Education must first content itself to be more negative than positive—more a mutual interchange with the scholar than a working upon him; more negative as far as possible—i.e. education must at least propose to itself this negativeness as its object, and must be positive only as a means of
