L.—EDUCATION. 229 
imperfect instrument through which a spiritual Reason alone can work for 
a structure of human society composed of imperfect physical units, which 
we call men and women, and that mind, apart from matter, is both prior 
to, and part of, a rational universe. But the one clear conclusion that no 
one can evade is that every society everywhere and, therefore, all such 
societies together on this tiny physical globe are and will continue to be the 
result of purposive human action, which by an increasing control of all 
the elements at its disposal has made things to be what they are, and is 
daily altering the process of adaptation, to fit the purposes, wise or illusion- 
ary, that it selects as ends worth pursuing. My friend, Rip Van Winkle, 
had obviously taken from Huxley the conventional distinction between the 
process of natural selection and the arbitrary interference with that 
process by man the ethical artificer—homo artifex—tor his non-natural 
but rational purposes—the relentless antagonism between a Nature with 
one purpose and a human reason with a contrary purpose—between 
Evolution and Ethics. Rip Van Winkle could not be expected to know 
that that conventional distinction has long been shattered and that it only 
survives to-day, like the human appendix, because the majority of us are 
not affected by its vestigial existence, but when it tries to exercise an 
atrophied function, we have it cut out as an intolerable nuisance. 
It is like the old metaphysics or the old psychology, when mind was 
regarded as working inside a self-sealed box and outside was the 
whole objective and material world, which surged upon the box, while 
the something inside the box exercised cognitive and apperceptive 
powers on the surge—a phenomenal world playing hide-and-seek with 
mind, which took off its blinkers, from time to time, just to see who 
was playing the fool with it. Except in Fleet Street, and some old- 
fashioned laboratories of science and some dusty class-rooms of, shall we 
say, German philosophy, we educationalists (a horrible word) have long 
recognised that mind is as integral a part of Nature and the processes of 
_ Nature as the so-called natural forces. And that if, for example, Nature 
has a pruning hook which we call war, it was forged by mind, put into 
Nature’s hand, 7.e. the hand of purposive men by mind, and that, as with 
other pruning hooks or scythes, when human minds are, as they can be, 
bad craftsmen or lose control, what was intended to cut down weeds 
gashes the user to death. You can make a razor and use it either to cut a 
human throat, or remove a carbuncle with an aseptic technique, or, like 
Peter the Great, shave your nobles as the first stage towards reconstructing 
your system of government, and in so doing you are natural and ethical at 
one and the same time, and are taking the most appropriate step, as you 
* conceive it, to achieve another stage in your interpretation of life, which 
is an inextricable mixture of the spiritual, the intellectual, the moral and 
the physical—a jumble which neither Piltsdown man nor Mr. Bertrand 
Russell nor anyone in the centuries between them has ever been able to 
disentangle into separate packets, much less prove that some of the 
packets are precedent in order of time and are, therefore, ‘ natural,’ while 
others followed later and must, therefore, be termed ‘ artificial ’—or ‘ anti- 
natural.’ 
Beethoven and Dante are useless to the Patagonian because he cannot 
fit them into his conception of social life, which really means his scale of 
