sity must
rest. It is essentially critical, and hence skeptical. The explanation
of the dogmas, which is carried on in this process of reasoning and
skeptical investigation, is completed alone in speculative thinking,
which recognizes the free unity of the content and its form as its own
proper self-determination of the content, creating its own differences.
Education must know this stage of the intelligence, partly that it may
in advance preserve, in the midst of its changes, that repose which it
brings into the consciousness; partly that it may be able to lead to the
process of change itself, in accordance with the organic connection of
its phases. We should prevent the criticism of the abstract
understanding by the reflective stage as little as we should that of the
imagination by the thinking activity. But the stage of reflection is not
the last possibility of the thinking activity, although, in the variety
of its skepticism it often takes itself for such, and, with the
emptiness of mere negation to which it holds, often brings itself
forward into undesirable prominence. It becomes evident, in this view,
how very necessary for man, with respect to religion, is a genuine
philosophical culture, so that he may not lose the certainty of the
existence of the Absolute in the midst of the obstinacy of dogmas and
the changes of opinions.

Sec. 163. Education must then not fear the descent into dogmatic
abstraction, since this is an indispensable means for theoretical
culture in its totality, and the consciousness cannot dispense with it
in its history. But Education has, in the concrete, carefully to discern
in which of these stages of culture any particular consciousness may be.
For if for mankind as a race the fostering of philosophy is absolutely
necessary, it by no means follows that this necessity exists for each
individual. To children, to women, e.g. for all kinds of simple and
limited lives, the form of the religion of the imagination is well
suited, and the form of comprehension can come only relatively to them.
Education must not, then, desire powerfully and prematurely to develop
the thinking activity before the intelligence is really fully grown.

--The superficial thinking which many teachers demand in the sphere of
religion is no less impractical than the want of all guidance into
rightly ordered meditations on religious subjects. It is natural that
the lower form of intelligence should, in contrast with the