or tongue was apprehended the necessity of placing life and man, not authority and the book, in the very center of the educational cosmos. Her gymnasia became the nurseries of the humanities and her universities the great workshops of creative minds inviting younger and ambitious souls to the confidences of their inspirations. By whatever errors the history of Germany's pedagogical theories and practices may be fringed, however one-sided this or that emphasis may have been; in the steady pursuit of the one ideal, that education of whatever grade or character to be—education shall focus in living man and not in tradition and books, from the days of the Renaissance to this hour, German masters have led the van. The wonderful philology of Germany, child of the Renaissance and the Reformation, was fruit of the passion to learn to know man and to be man. The decadence of the joy and zest in the flowing and rich life of man in Hellas to dry-as-dust grammatical micrology which forgets that accidence and syntax are made for and by language and not language for grammar, is to be deprecated, but by contrast it heightens the glory of the original intention of the humanists. German rationalism and Aufklaerung may have exaggerated the creative independence of man and the supremacy of his reason, or on the other hand in consequence of preceding overestimation of antiquity may have leaned to the opposite extreme in disregarding the historical influences and limitations; but in comparison with the disdain for reason triumphant elsewhere, even German rationalism is entitled to credentials admitting it to the front file in the regiment of man's emancipators. German rationalism, indeed, produced its own corrector.
The criticism of Kant dethroned reason as an autocrat and made it a constitutional ruler with limitations well apprehended, while Lessing heralded the deeper appreciation of history and the laws of historical development. From these two men dates the New Germany that has become the great teacher of the world. Her fondness for metaphysical constructions, which characterized her efforts during the first four decades of this century, has by many a dwarf of recent years been made the target
