With your penetrating judgment you quarrelled with that term “German education;” but, after all, even the appeal to be made thorough Germans proved to be too grandiose and liable to be misunderstood.  For every one said “German?  Well, I am German, and have been so from my birth, just as a mushroom is a mushroom;[103] what, then, do I want with education to teach me to be a thorough German?” What would these worthy people have said, had I asked them to train themselves to become thorough men?  Now had I planned my educational institute altogether differently, had I offered to train a special class, body-servants, footmen or housemaids, shoemakers or tailors, tradesmen or merchants, soldiers or even noblemen, then should I have gained fame and glory for the great usefulness and practical nature of my institution, for certain; and surely all men would have hastened to acknowledge it as an important matter, and as a thing to be adequately supported by the State.  I should have been held as the right man in the right place by the State and by the world; and so much the more because as a State-machine I should have been engaged in cutting out and modelling other State-machines.  But I—­I only wanted to train up free, thinking, independent men!  Now who wants to be, or who cares to suffer another to be, a free-thinking, independent man?  If it was folly to talk about educating persons as Germans, what was it to talk about educating them as men?  The education of Germans was felt to be something extraordinary and farfetched; the education of men was a mere shadow, a deceitful image, a blind enthusiasm.[104]

From this digression I now return, to continue my attempt at making myself known to you, as far as is possible, in a letter; by which I mean my real inner self, as manifested in my endeavours and my hopes.

Permit me, therefore, to go a step nearer towards what lies deepest in my soul, at least that of it which is communicable to another person.  I have started by stating my position from the side of knowledge, now let me state it also from another side.  My experience, especially that gained by repeated residences at the university, had taught me beyond a doubt that the method of education hitherto in use, especially where it involved learning by rote, and where it looked at subjects simply from the outside or historically, and considered then capable of apprehension by mere exercise work, dulled the edge of all high true attainment, of all real mental insight, of all genuine progress in scientific culture, of self-contemplation, and thus of all real knowledge, and of the acquisition of truth through knowledge.  I might almost go further, and say that its tendency was towards rendering all these worthy objects impossible.