38 MYSTICISM AND LOGIC 



no questions, has now grown dreary and purposeless : 

 with a sense of disillusion we inquire the meaning of life, 

 and decide, perhaps, that all is vanity. The search for 

 an outside meaning that can compel an inner response 

 must always be disappointed : all " meaning " must be 

 at bottom related to our primary desires, and when they 

 are extinct no miracle can restore to the world the value 

 which they reflected upon it. 



The purpose of education, therefore, cannot be to 

 create any primary impulse which is lacking in the 

 uneducated ; the purpose can only be to enlarge the 

 scope of those that human nature provides, by increasing 

 the number and variety of attendant thoughts, and by 

 showing where the most permanent satisfaction is to be 

 found. Under the impulse of a Calvinistic horror of 

 the " natural man," this obvious truth has been too 

 often misconceived in the training of the young ; 

 " nature " has been falsely regarded as excluding all 

 that is best in what is natural, and the endeavour to 

 teach virtue has led to the production of stunted and 

 contorted hypocrites instead of full-grown human beings. 

 From such mistakes in education a better psychology or 

 a kinder heart is beginning to preserve the present 

 generation ; we need, therefore, waste no more words on 

 the theory that the purpose of education is to thwart or 

 eradicate nature. 



But although nature must supply the initial force of 

 desire, nature is not, in the civilised man, the spasmodic, 

 fragmentary, and yet violent set of impulses that it is 

 in the savage. Each impulse has its constitutional 

 ministry of thought and knowledge and reflection, 

 through which possible conflicts of impulses are foreseen, 

 and temporary impulses are controlled by the unifying 

 impulse which may be called wisdom. In this way 



