The More Certain Our Knowledge The Less

Rulers, Statesmen, Nations, Are Wont To Be Emphatically Commended To The Teaching Which Experience Offers In History. But What Experience And History Teach Is This - That People And Governments Never Have Learned Anything From History, Or Acted On Principles Deduced From It. Each Period Is Involved In Such Peculiar Circumstances, Exhibits A Condition Of Things So Strictly Idiosyncratic, That Its Conduct Must Be Regulated By Considerations Connected With Itself, And Itself Alone.

There Are Plebes In All Classes.

The Sole Work And Deed Of Universal Freedom Is Therefore Death, A Death Too Which Has No Inner Significance Or Filling, For What Is Negated Is The Empty Point Of The Absolutely Free Self. It Is Thus The Coldest And Meanest Of All Deaths, With No More Significance Than Cutting Off A Head Of Cabbage Or Swallowing A Mouthful Of Water.

Education To Independence Demands That Young People Should Be Accustomed Early To Consult Their Own Sense Of Propriety And Their Own Reason. To Regard Study As Mere Receptivity And Memory Work Is To Have A Most Incomplete View Of What Instruction Means.

The Ignorant Man Is Not Free, Because What Confronts Him Is An Alien World, Something Outside Him And In The Offing, On Which He Depends, Without His Having Made This Foreign World For Himself And Therefore Without Being At Home In It By Himself As In Something His Own. The Impulse Of Curiosity, The Pressure For Knowledge, From The Lowest Level Up To The Highest Rung Of Philosophical Insight Arises Only From The Struggle To Cancel This Situation Of Unfreedom And To Make The World One's Own In One's Ideas And Thought.