“This education, therefore, results at the very outset in knowledge which transcends all experience, which is abstract, absolute, and strictly universal, and which includes within itself beforehand all subsequently possible experience. On the other hand, the old education was concerned, as a rule, only with the actual qualities of things as they are and as they should be believed and rioted, without anyone being able to assign a reason for them. It aimed, therefore, at purely passive reception by means of the power of memory, which was completely at the service of things. It was, therefore, impossible to have any idea of the mind as an independent original principle of things themselves.”

—  Johann Gottlieb Fichte , book Address to the German Nation

General Nature of New Eduction p. 28
Addresses to the German Nation (Reden an die deutsche Nation) 1808, Second Address

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German philosopher 1762–1814

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