When the two paths happen to cross, however, you will be roughly
handled and thrust aside, or else shunned and isolated.

"Now, take these two parties, so different from each other in every
respect, and tell me what meaning an educational establishment would
have for them. That enormous horde, crowding onwards on the first path
towards its goal, would take the term to mean an institution by which
each of its members would become duly qualified to take his place in
the rank and file, and would be purged of everything which might tend
to make him strive after higher and more remote aims. I don't deny, of
course, that they can find pompous words with which to describe their
aims: for example, they speak of the 'universal development of free
personality upon a firm social, national, and human basis,' or they
announce as their goal: 'The founding of the peaceful sovereignty of
the people upon reason, education, and justice.'

"An educational establishment for the other and smaller company,
however, would be something vastly different. They would employ it to
prevent themselves from being separated from one another and
overwhelmed by the first huge crowd, to prevent their few select
spirits from losing sight of their splendid and noble task through
premature weariness, or from being turned aside from the true path,
corrupted, or subverted. These select spirits must complete their
work: that is the _raison d'etre_ of their common institution--a work,
indeed, which, as it were, must be free from subjective traces, and
must further rise above the transient events of future times as the
pure reflection of the eternal and immutable essence of things. And
all those who occupy places in that institution must co-operate in the
endeavour to engender men of genius by this purification from
subjectiveness and the creation of the works of genius. Not a few,
even of those whose talents may be of the second or third order, are
suited to such co-operation, and only when serving in such an
educational establishment as this do they feel that they are truly
carrying out their life's task. But now it is just these talents I
speak of which are drawn away from the true path, and their instincts
estranged, by the continual seductions of that modern 'culture.'

"The egotistic emotions, weaknesses, and vanities of these few select
minds are continually assailed by the temptations unceasingly murmured
into their ears by the spirit of the age: 'Com