to their natural disposition, which outweighed the influence of their bad environment, and not because of their education in any way, for otherwise all the pupils would have become good. Those who went to the bad did so just as little because of education, for otherwise all the pupils would have been corrupted; they went to the bad of themselves, thanks to their natural disposition. In this respect education was simply futile, and not pernicious at all; the real formative agency was spiritual nature. Henceforth education for manhood must be taken from the influence of this mysterious and incalculable force and put under the direction of a deliberate art, which will surely and infallibly accomplish its purpose with everyone entrusted to it; or which, if somehow it does not accomplish it, will at least know that it has not done so, and that therefore the training is still incomplete. The education proposed by me, therefore, is to be a reliable and deliberate art for fashioning in man a stable and infallible good will. That is its first characteristic.
16. Moreover, man can will only what he loves; his love is the sole and at the same time the infallible motive of his will and of all his vital impulses and actions. Hitherto, in its education of the social man the art of the State assumed, as a sure and infallible principle, that everyone loves and wills his own material welfare. To this natural love it artificially linked, by means of the motives of fear and hope, that good will which it desired, namely, interest in the common weal. Anyone who has become outwardly a harmless or even useful citizen as a result of such a system of education remains, nevertheless, inwardly a bad man; for badness consists essentially in loving solely one’s own material welfare and in being influenced only by the motives of fear or hope for that
