ibility for
their own acts. The state must not go back to the psychological ethical
genesis of a negative deed. It must assign to a secondary rank of
importance the biographical moment which contains the deed in process
and the circumstances of a mitigating character, and it must consider
first of all the deed in itself. It is quite otherwise with the
educator; for he deals with human beings who are relatively undeveloped,
and who are only growing toward responsibility. So long as they are
still under the care of a teacher, the responsibility of their deed
belongs in part to him. If we confound the standpoint in which
punishment is administered in the state with that in education, we work
much evil.--

Sec. 40. Punishment as a negation of a negation, considered as an
educational means, cannot be determined _a priori_, but must always be
modified by the peculiarities of the individual offender and by the
peculiar circumstances. Its administration calls for the exercise of the
ingenuity and tact of the educator.

[Sidenote: _Three Kinds of Punishment._]

Sec. 41. Generally speaking, we must make a distinction between the sexes,
as well as between the different periods of youth; (1) some kind of
corporal punishment is most suitable for children, (2) isolation for
older boys and girls, and (3) punishment based on the sense of honor for
young men and women.

Sec. 42. (1) Corporal punishment is the production of physical pain. The
youth is generally whipped, and this kind of punishment, provided always
that it is not too often administered or with undue severity, is the
proper way of dealing with wilful defiance, with obstinate carelessness,
or with a really perverted will, so long or so often as the higher
perception is closed against appeal. The imposing of other physical
punishment, e.g. that of depriving the pupil of food, partakes of
cruelty. The view which sees in the rod the panacea for all the
teacher's embarrassments is censurable, but equally undesirable is the
false sentimentality which assumes that the dignity of humanity is
affected by a blow given to a child, and confounds self-conscious
humanity with child-humanity, to which a blow is the most natural form
of reaction, in which all other forms of influence at last end.

--The fully-grown man ought never to be whipped, because this kind of
punishment reduces him to the level of the child, and, when it becomes
barbarous, to that of a brute animal, and so is