ator is necessarily the representative of authority, and the
pupil is a personality by the very endowment of nature," resumed Eric.
"There is continually then a balance to be adjusted between the two, a
treaty of peace to be made between the contending forces, which shall
at last become a real reconciliation. To train one merely as an
individual is to place a child of humanity outside of actual existence,
and for the sake of freedom to isolate him from the common life, and
make it burdensome to him; to subject him merely to prescribed laws is
to rob him of his inborn rights. The human being is a law to himself,
but he is also born into a system of laws. It was the great mistake of
Jean Jacques Rousseau, and the French Revolution, that in their
indignation at the traditions contradictory to reason, they thought
that an individual and an age could develop everything from themselves.
A child of humanity neither contains all within himself, nor can he
receive all from without. I think then that there is a mingling of the
two elements, and there must be an hourly and an imperceptible
influence exerted both from within and from without equally, inasmuch
as man is a product of nature and a product of history. It is through
the last, only, that man is distinguished from the beasts, and becomes
an heir of all the labors and all the strength of the past
generations."

Sonnenkamp nodded acquiescingly. His whole mien said, This man lays
down very aptly what he heard yesterday from the lecturer's desk; and
Eric continued,--

"Man alone comes into an inheritance, and an inheritance is the
heaviest human responsibility."

"That is something new to me. I should like to ask for a fuller
explanation."

"Permit me to illustrate: the beast receives from nature, from birth,
nothing except its individual strength and its stationary instinctive
capacity, while the human being receives from his progenitors and from
humanity a superadded strength which he has not in himself, but of
which he becomes possessor, and so he is the only inheritor. And let me
say further, that it is difficult to decide whether it is harder to
turn to good advantage that which a man is in himself, or that which he
may receive, as for example your son will, as an inheritance. Most
persons are of account only through what they possess. I consider this
last of no trifling importance, but--"

"Wealth is no sin, and poverty is no virtue," Sonnenkamp interrupted.
"I a