The summing up in the essay on “The Education of the Human Race.”

EDUCATION has its aim with the race, not less than with the individual. That which is educated is educated for some end. The flattering prospects which are opened to the youth, the honor and affluence which are held up before him,—what are these but means by which he is educated to become a man, a man who, though these prospects of affluence and honor should fail, shall still be capable of doing his duty? Is this the aim of human education? And does the Divine education fall short of this? What art can accomplish with the individual, shall not nature accomplish with the whole? Blasphemy! Blasphemy!

  No! it will come! it will surely come, the period of perfection, when, the more convinced his understanding is of an ever-better future, the less man will need to borrow from that future the motives of his actions; when he will choose the good because it is good, and not because arbitrary rewards are annexed to it which are only to fix and strengthen his wandering gaze, at first, until he is able to appreciate the interior and nobler reward of well doing. It will surely come, the period of a new, eternal gospel, which is promised us, even in the elementary books of the New Covenant. Proceed in thine imperceptible course, Eternal Providence! Only let me not despair of thee, because imperceptible. Let me not despair of thee, even though thy steps to me should seem to retrograde. It is not true that the shortest way is always a straight one. Thou hast, in thine eternal course, so much to take along with thee! So many sidelong steps to make! And what if it be now, as good as proved, that the great, slow wheel which brings the race nearer to its perfection, is put in motion, only by smaller, quicker wheels, of which each contributes its part to the same end?

  Not otherwise! The path by which the race attains to its perfection, each individual man—some earlier, and some later—must first have gone over. “Must have gone over in one and the same life? Can he have been a sensual Jew and a spiritual Christian in the same life? Can he, in the same life, have overtaken both these?” Perhaps not! But why may not each individual man have existed more than once in this world? Is this hypothesis, therefore, so ridiculous, because it is the oldest? because it is the one which the human understanding immediately hit upon, before it was distracted and weakened by the sophistry of the schools? Why may not I at one time have accomplished, already here on earth, all those steps toward my perfection, which mere temporal rewards and punishments will enable man to accomplish; and, at another time, all those, in which we are so powerfully assisted by the prospect of eternal compensations. Why should I not return as often as I am able to acquire new knowledges, new talents? Is it because I carry away so much at one time as to make it not worth the while to return, or because I forget that I have been here before? It is well for me that I forget it. The remembrance of my former states would allow me to make but a poor use of the present. Besides, what I am necessitated to forget now, have I forgotten it forever? Or because, on this supposition, too much time would be lost to me? Lost? What have I then to delay? Is not the whole eternity mine?