"The individual whose substance is the more elevated spirit runs through this past, in the way in which someone who takes up a higher science goes through the preparatory information he has long since absorbed, in order to bring its content to presence; he revives the recollection of it, without interest in it and without dwelling on it. The singleton must also pass through the educational stages of the universal spirit with regard to their content, but as shapes already discarded by the spirit, as stages on a way that has been prepared and levelled. Thus, as regards information, we see that what in former ages occupied men of mature spirit, has been reduced to the level of information, exercises, and even games of boyhood; and, in the pedagogical progression, we shall recognize the history of the education of the world as if traced in a silhouette. This past Being-there is already acquired property of the universal spirit that constitutes the substance of the individual and so, in appearing externally to him, constitutes his inorganic nature.—In this respect education, considered from the side of the individual, consists in his acquiring what is thus present before him, absorbing into himself his inorganic nature, and taking possession of it for himself. But, considered from the side of the universal spirit as substance, this is nothing but the fact that the substance gives itself its self-consciousness, and produces its becoming and its reflection into itself."