Section One: Religious Dualism.

...the means of propagating education and culture. The German term Bildung refers to both formal education and the holistic development of an individual’s character and spirit. Both factors Referring to language and labor, established on the previous page. are indispensable in the history of humanity, and the latter is unthinkable without them. What oral tradition accomplishes in the vestibule of history A metaphorical term for the prehistoric era or the period before written records. through the transmission of myths and legends, language fixed by writing or other monuments fulfills at the start of actual history. Through the word, the individual expresses their inner life and communicates it to others, and the cultural treasures of one nation benefit another by means of language. The culture of long-vanished empires, stored within language, is absorbed by the present; thus, language serves the future as a lever that will lift it onto the shoulders of the past and present. Language is the binding vessel in which the fruits of culture, harvested through labor, are handed over from one generation to the next, from one people to another, and from one historical period to another.

Language and labor, however, are rooted in man as a conscious and self-aware being—that is, in the human spirit—and this is the reason why the human race possesses a history. Nature and its products do not have a history in the sense that one and the same creature, like man, changes through the development of its innate potential. The lilac bush produces the same blossoms and the same black berries as it did 3,000 years ago, and the ant is just as busy today as it was in antiquity. The orangutan may indeed look similar to a human, but it has still not become his equal because it is different in its original disposition. However, the speaking and laboring human of today feels and knows himself differently; he has different needs and different views than the human of 3,000 years ago. Although the law by which he develops is an unchanging one, the cultures of long-vanished times have fallen to him, which he has made his own and processed within himself by virtue of this unchanging law.

The ground for why man possesses a language and why he approaches his destiny through labor—a fact already profoundly hinted at in the biblical story of creation—lies in human self-consciousness...