xistence, the necessity which exists in
the thing. But it can assign to the New, which is in it already
immediately and subjectively, no value if this has not united itself to
the already existing culture as its objective presupposition, and on
this ground it thankfully receives instruction.

Sec. 112. But Talent and Genius offer a special difficulty to education in
the precocity which often accompanies them. But by precocity we do not
mean that they early render themselves perceptible, since the early
manifestation of gifts by talent and genius, through their intense
confidence, is to be looked at as perfectly legitimate. But precocity is
rather the hastening forward of the human being in feeling and moral
sense, so that where in the ordinary course of nature we should have a
child, we have a youth, and a man in the place of a youth. We may find
precocity among those who belong to the class of mediocrity, but it is
developed most readily among those possessed of talent and genius,
because with them the early appearance of superior gifts may very easily
bring in its train a perversion of the feelings and the moral nature.
Education must deal with it in so far as it is inharmonious, so that it
shall be stronger than the demands made on it from without, so that it
shall not minister to vanity; and must take care, in order to accomplish
this, that social naturalness and lack of affectation be preserved in
the pupil.

--Our age has to combat this precocity much more than others. We find
e.g. authors who, at the age of thirty years, in which they publish
their collected works or write their biography, are chilly with the
feelings of old age. Music has been the sphere in which the earliest
development of talent has shown itself, and here we find the absurdity
that the cupidity of parents has so forced precocious talents that
children of four or five years of age have been made to appear in
public.--

Sec. 113. Every sphere of culture contains a certain quantity of
knowledge and ready skill which may be looked at, as it were, as the
created result of the culture. It is to be wished that every one who
turns his attention to a certain line of culture could take up into
himself the gathered learning which controls it. In so far as he does
this, he is professional. The consciousness that one has in the usual
way gone through a school of art or science, and has, with the general
inheritance of acquisition, been handed over to a