omit; in brief, that they shall need but to be
reminded and not to be taught. Thus, while I disclaim all desire of
being taken for an uninvited adviser on questions relating to the
schools and the University of Bale, I repudiate even more emphatically
still the role of a prophet standing on the horizon of civilisation
and pretending to predict the future of education and of scholastic
organisation. I can no more project my vision through such vast
periods of time than I can rely upon its accuracy when it is brought
too close to an object under examination. With my title: _Our_
Educational Institutions, I wish to refer neither to the
establishments in Bale nor to the incalculably vast number of other
scholastic institutions which exist throughout the nations of the
world to-day; but I wish to refer to _German institutions_ of the kind
which we rejoice in here. It is their future that will now engage our
attention, _i.e._ the future of German elementary, secondary, and
public schools (Gymnasien) and universities. While pursuing our
discussion, however, we shall for once avoid all comparisons and
valuations, and guard more especially against that flattering illusion
that our conditions should be regarded as the standard for all others
and as surpassing them. Let it suffice that they are our institutions,
that they have not become a part of ourselves by mere accident, and
were not laid upon us like a garment; but that they are living
monuments of important steps in the progress of civilisation, in some
respects even the furniture of a bygone age, and as such link us with
the past of our people, and are such a sacred and venerable legacy
that I can only undertake to speak of the future of our educational
institutions in the sense of their being a most probable approximation
to the ideal spirit which gave them birth. I am, moreover, convinced
that the numerous alterations which have been introduced into these
institutions within recent years, with the view of bringing them
up-to-date, are for the most part but distortions and aberrations of
the originally sublime tendencies given to them at their foundation.
And what we dare to hope from the future, in this behalf, partakes so
much of the nature of a rejuvenation, a reviviscence, and a refining
of the spirit of Germany that, as a result of this very process, our
educational institutions may also be indirectly remoulded and born
again, so as to appear at once old and new, wher