263

Talent. In such a highly developed humanity as the present one, each man by nature has access to many talents. Each has inborn talent, but only a few have inherited and cultivated such a degree of toughness, endurance, and energy that they really become a talent, become what they are²⁰-that is, release it in works and actions.

264

The witty man²¹ either overestimated or underestimated. Unscientific, but gifted men esteem any sign of wit,²² whether it is on the right or the wrong track. Above all, they want the man who goes about with them to entertain them well with his wit, spur them on, ignite them, move them to seriousness and levity, and, in any case, protect them from boredom like a most powerful amulet. A scientific nature, on the other hand, knows that the gift of having all kinds of ideas must be reined in most severely by the scientific spirit; not what glitters, shines, and excites, but rather the often plain truth is the fruit he wishes to shake off the Tree of Knowledge. Like Aristotle, he may make no distinction between "boring" and "witty" men; his daemon takes him through the desert as well as through tropical vegetation, so that wherever he goes he will take pleasure only in what is real, tenable, genuine.
In insignificant scholars, this results in a distrust and suspicion of all things witty; and conversely, witty people often have a distaste for science, as do, for example, almost all artists.

265

Reason in school. Schooling has no more important task than to teach rigorous thinking, careful judgment, logical conclusions; that is why it must refrain from every thing which is not suitable for these operations-religion, for example. It can count on the fact that later, human opacity, habit, and need will again slacken the bow of all-too-taut thinking. But as long as its influence lasts, schooling should force into being what is essential and distinguishing in man: "Reason and science, the supreme strength of man," in Goethe's judgment, at least.²³
The great natural scientist von Baer ²⁴ finds all Europeans' superiority, compared to Asians, in their learned ability to give reasons for what they believe, which Asians are wholly incapable of doing. Europe has gone to the school of logical and critical thinking; Asia still does not know how to distinguish between truth and poetry, and does not perceive whether its convictions stem from its own observation and proper thinking, or from fantasies.
Reason in the schools has made Europe into Europe. In the Middle Ages, it was on its way to becoming a part and appendage of Asia again, that is, to forfeiting the scientific sense that it owed to the Greeks.

266

Underestimated effect of Gymnasium instruction. One seldom looks for the value of the Gymnasium in the things that are really learned there, never to be forgotten, but rather in those things that are taught but which the pupil assimilates only with reluctance, to shake off as soon as he can. As it is carried out everywhere, reading the Classics is an odious procedure (as every educated man will admit): for young people who are in no respect ready for it, by teachers who by their every word, and often by their appearance, throw a blight over a good author. But therein lies the value that is generally underestimated: that these teachers speak the abstract language of higher culture, ponderous and hard to understand though it is, but an elevated exercise 25 of the brain; that concepts, technical terms, methods, and allusions continually occur in their language which young people almost never hear in the conversations of their relatives or in the streets. If pupils only listen, their intellect will be automatically preformed to a scientific way of thinking. It is not possible to emerge from this training as a pure child of nature, fully untouched by abstraction.

267

Learning many languages. To learn many languages fills the memory with words instead of with facts and ideas, even though in every man, memory is a vessel that can take in only a certain limited amount of content. Also, learning many languages is harmful in that it makes a man believe he is accomplished, and actually does lend a certain seductive prestige in social intercourse; it also does harm indirectly by undermining his acquisition of well-founded knowledge and his intention to earn men's respect in an honest way. Finally, it is the axe laid to the root of any finer feeling for language within the native tongue; that is irreparably damaged and destroyed. The two peoples who produced the greatest stylists, the Greeks and the French, did not learn any foreign languages.
But because the commerce of men must become increasingly cosmopolitan and, for example, a proper merchant in London must be able to make himself a necessary evil. When it finally reaches an extreme, it will force mankind to find a remedy for it, and in some far-off future time everyone will know a new language, a language of commerce at first, then a language of intellectual intercourse generally, and this as surely as there will one day be aerial navigation. Why else would the science of linguistics have studied the laws of language for a century and assessed what is necessary, valuable, and successful about each separate language!