Educational agencies
ought to subserve the specific needs of the different ranks of society
and be diversified accordingly. Riehl would even hark back to wholly
out-dated and discarded customs, provided they seemed to him clearly the
outflow of a vital class-consciousness. For instance, he would have
restored the trade corporations to their medieval status; inhibited the
free disposal of farming land, and governed the German aristocracy under
the English law of primogeniture.
Altogether, Riehl's propensity for spanning a fragile analogy between
concrete and abstract phenomena of life is apt to weaken the structural
strength of his argumentation. Yet even his boldest comparisons do not
lack in illuminative suggestiveness. Take, for example, the following
passage from _Field and Forest:_ "In the contrast between the forest and
the field is manifest the most simple and natural preparatory stage of
the multiformity and variety of German social life, that richness of
peculiar national characteristics in which lies concealed the tenacious
rejuvenating power of our nation." (See p. 418 of this volume.)
The predisposition to draw large inferences coupled with that pronounced
conservatism detract in a measure from the authenticity of Riehl's work
in the department of Social Science, which to him is fundamentally "the
doctrine of the natural inequality of mankind.
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