 Chapter 19 of The Lost Art of Reading by Gerald Stanley Leigh This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Book 4 What to Do Next I am he who tauntingly compels men, women, nations, crying, Leap from your seats and contend for your lives! 1. See Next Chapter It is good to rise early in the morning when the world is still respectable and nobody has used it yet, and sit and look at it, try to realize it. One sees things very differently. It is a kind of yawn of all being. One feels one's soul lying out, all relaxed on it and resting on real things. It stretches itself on the bare bones of the earth and nose. On a hundred silent hills it lies and suns itself. And as I lay in the morning, soul and body reaching out to the real things and resting on them, I thought I heard one part of me, down underneath, half in the light and half in the dark, laughing softly at the other. What is this book of yours, it said coldly, with its proffered scheme of education, its millenniums, and things? What do you think this theory, this heaven-spanning theory of reading of yours, really is? Which you have held up objectively, almost authoritatively, to be looked at as truth. Do you think it is anything after all but a kind of pallid, unreal water-color exhibition, a row of blurs of faintly colored portraits of yourself, spread on space? Do you not see how unfair it is, this spinning out of one's own little dark, tired inside, a theory for a wide heaven and earth, this straddling with one temperament, a star? Then I made myself sit down and compose what I feared would be a strictly honest title page for this book. Instead of the lost art of reading, a study of education by, etc., I wrote it, how to be more like me? A shy at education by, etc. And when I looked boldly, almost scientifically, at this title page, let it mock me a little, had laughed and sighed over it as I ought, there came a great hush from I know not where. I remembered it was the title, after all, for better or worse, in some sort or another of every book I had craved and delighted in, in the whole world. Then suddenly I found myself before this book praying to it, and before every struggling, desiring book of every man of other men, where it has prayed before and I dared to look my title in the face. I have not denied, I do not need to deny, that what I have uncovered here is merely my own soul's glimmer, my interpretation, at this mighty passing show of a world, when it comes to you, O gentle reader, not as I am, but as I would like to be. Out of chaos it struggles to you, and defeat, can you not see it? And if but the benediction of what I, or you, or any man would like to be, will come and rest on it, it is enough. Take it first and last, it is written in every man's soul, be his theory whatsoever, that may, of this great wondering world, wave after wave of it, shuddering and glorying over him, it is in this world, until he possesses it, or misses possessing it himself, feels it slipping from him, it is in what a man is, has, or might have, that he must track out his promise for a world. His life is his prayer for the ages, as long as he lives, and what he is, and what he is trying to be, sings and prays for him, says masses for his soul under the stars, and in the presence of all peoples, when he is dead. By this truth I, in my book with you, gentle reader, must stand or fall. Even now as I bend over the click of my typewriter, the years rise dim and flow over me out of the east, generations of brothers, out of the mist of heaven and out of the dust of the earth, trooping across the world and wondering at it, come and go and out of all these there shall not be one, no not one, gentle reader, but shall be touched and loved by you, by me. In light out of shadow or in the shadow out of the light our souls fleck them, fleck them with the invisible, blessing them and cursing them. We shall be the voices of the night and day to them, shall live a shadow of life with them and be the sounds in their ears. Did any man think that what we are and what we are trying to be is ours, is private, is for ourselves, boundlessly, helplessly, scattered on the world, upon the faces of our fellows, our souls mock to us or sing to us, forever? So if I have opened my windows to you, say not it is because I have dared, it is because I have not dared, I have said I will protect my soul with the street, I will have my vow written on my forehead, I will throw open my window to the passer-by, fling it in, I beg you, O world, whatever it is, be it prayer or hope or jest, it is mine, I have vowed to live with it, to live out of it, so long as I feel your footsteps under my casement and know that your watch is upon my days and that you hold me to myself, I have taken for my challenge or for my comrade, I know not which, a whole world, and what shall a man give in exchange for a whole world, and my soul said, he shall not save nor keep back himself. Who is the fool that I should be always taking all this trouble for him, tiptoeing up down the world with my little cover over my secret for him, to defy a fool I have said, speak your whole truth. Then God locks him out, to hide a secret, have enough of it, hide it outdoors, why should a man take anything less than a world to hide in, if a soul is really a soul, why should it not fall back for its reserve on its own infinity? God does, even daisies do, it is too big a world to be always bothering about one's secret in it. Who has time for it? I have said, give it out, move right on living, get another. The only way for a man in this twentieth century to hide his soul is by letting it reach out of sight. Not by locks, nor by stiflings, nor by mean little economisings of the heart, does a man earn a world for a comrade. Let the laughers laugh on the great still street in space where souls who cares to diagnosis compelled as I am as most of us are to witness the unhappy spectacle in every city of the land of a great mass of unfortunate and mutilated persons world round and round in rows and huge reading machines being crunched and educated. It is very hard not to rush thoughtlessly into the rescue sometimes, even if one has nothing better than such a pitiful, helpless thing as good advice. I am afraid it does not look very wise to do it. Civilization is such a vast hypnotizing, polarizing spectacle. As the stage so fully to itself, everybody's eyes glued on it, it is hard to get up and say what one thinks in it. One cannot find anything equally objective to say it with. One feels as if calling attention to one's self to the little private shabby theater of one's own mind. It is as if in a great theater, on a back seat in it, one were to get up and stand in his chair and get the audience to turn round and say, ladies and gentlemen, that is not the stage with the footlights over there. This is the stage here where I am. Now watch me twirl my thumbs. But the great spectacle of the universal reading machine is too much for me. Before I know it, I try to get the audience to turn around. The spectacle of even a single lad in his more impressionable and possible years reading a book whether he has anything to do with it or not, in spite of the author and in spite of himself, when one considers how many books he might read which really belong to him, is enough to make a mere reformer or outlaw or parent interferer of any man who is compelled to witness it. But it seems that the only way to interfere with one of these great reading machines is to stop the machine. One would say theoretically that it would not take very much to stop it. A mere broken thread of thought would do it if the machine had any provision for thoughts. As it is, one can only stand outside, watch it through the window and do what all outsiders are obliged to do. Shout into the den a little good advice. If this good advice were to be summed up in a principle or prepared for a textbook, it would be something like this. The whole theory of our prevailing education is a kind of unanimous colossal I can't, you can't chorus. We all of us together can't. The working principle of public school education all the way from its biggest superintendents or overseers down to its littlest toe heads in the primary rooms is a huge overbearing, overwhelming system of not expecting anything of anybody. Everything is arranged throughout with reference to not expecting and the more perfectly a system works without expecting or needing to expect, the more successful it is represented to be. The public does not expect anything of the politicians. The politicians do not expect anything of the superintendents. The superintendents do not expect anything of the teachers and the teachers do not expect anything of the pupils and the pupils do not expect anything of themselves. That is to say, the whole educational world is upside down. So perfectly and regularly and faultlessly upside down that it is almost hopeful. All one needs to do is to turn it accurately and carefully over at every point and it will work wonderfully. To turn it upside down, have teachers that believe something. Three, eclipse. When it was decreed in the course of the nineteenth century that the educational world should pass over from the emphasis of persons to the emphasis of things, it was decreed that a generation that could not emphasize persons in its knowledge could not know persons. A generation which knows things and does not know persons naturally believes in things more than it believes in persons. Even as an educator who is as forward looking and open to human nature as President Charles F. Thwing, with all his emphasis of knowing persons and believing in persons as basis for educational work seems to some of us to give an essentially unbelieving and pessimistic classification of human nature for the use of teachers. Early education, says President Thwing, occupies itself with description. Geometry, space, arithmetic, time, science, the world of nature. Later education with comparison and relations. If one asks, why not both together? Why learn facts at one time and their relations at another? Is it not the most vital possible way to learn facts to learn them in their relations? The answer that would be generally made reveals that most teachers are pessimists. That they have very small faith in what can be expected of the youngest pupils. The theory is that interpretative minds must not be expected of them. Some of us find it very hard to believe as little as this in any child. Most children have such an incorrigible tendency for putting things together that they even put them together wrong rather than not put them together at all. Under existing educational conditions, a child is more of a philosopher at six than he is at twenty-six. The third stage of education for which Dr. Thwing partitions off the human mind is the stage in which a pupil becomes capable of original research, a discoverer of facts and relations himself. In theory this means that when a man is thirty years old and all possible habits of originality have been trained out of him, he should be allowed to be original. In practice it means removing a man's brain for thirty years and then telling him he can think. There never has been a live boy in a school as yet that would allow himself to be educated in this way if he could help it. All the daily habits of his mind resent it. It is a pessimistic postponing way of educating him. It does not believe in him enough. It may be true of men in the bulk, men by the five thousand, that their intellectual processes happen along in this conveniently scientific fashion, at least as regards emphasis, but when it is applied to any individual mind at any particular time in actual education it is found that it is not true, that it is pessimistic. God is not so monotonous and the universe is not graded as accurately as a public school. And things are much more delightfully mixed up. If a great university were to give itself wholeheartedly and pointedly to one single individual student it would find it both convenient and pleasant and natural and necessary to let him follow these three stages all at once. In one stage with one set of things and in another stage with another. Everyone admits that the first thing a genius does with such a convenient three-part system or chart for a soul is to knock it end-wise. He does it because he can. Others would, if they could He insists from his earliest days on doing all three parts, everything one set of things after the other description, comparison, creation and original research sometimes all at once. He learns even words all ways at once. All of these processes are applied to each thing and a genius learns in his life not the three parts of his life. One might as well say to a child, now dear little lad, your life is going to be made up of eating, sleeping and living. You must get your eating all done up now, these first ten years, and then you can get your sleeping done up and then you can take a spell at living or putting things together. The first axiom of true pedagogics is that nothing can be taught except the outside or letter of a thing. The second axiom is that there is nothing gained in teaching a pupil the outside of a thing if he has not the inside, the spirit or relations of it. Teachers do not dare to believe this. They think it is true only of men of genius. They admit that men of genius can be educated through the inside or by calling out the spirit, by drawing out their powers of originality from the first, but they argue that with common pupils this process should not be allowed. They are not worthy of it. That is to say the more ordinary men are, and the more they need brains, the less they shall be allowed to have them. In as much then as the inside cannot be taught and there is no object in teaching the outside, the question remains how to get the right inside at work producing the right outside. This is a purely spiritual question and brings us to the third axiom. Every human being born into the world is entitled to a special study and a special answer all the way to himself. If, as President Thwing very truly says, the higher education as well as the law is to be organized by the unit of the individual student, what follows? The organization must be such as to make it possible for every teacher to study and serve each individual student as a special being by himself. In other words if this last statement of Dr. Thwing's is to be acted upon, it makes havoc with his first. It requires a somewhat new and practically revolutionary organization in education. It will be an organization which takes for its basic principle something like this. This the very essence of an average pupil is that he needs to be studied more, not less, than anyone else in order to find his master key, the master passion to open his soul The essence of a genius is that almost anyone of a dozen passions can be made the motive power of his learning. His soul is opening somewhere all the time. The less individuality a student has, the more he is like other students. The more he should be kept away from other students until what little individuality he has has been brought out. It is not only equally true of the ordinary man as well as of the man of genius that he must educate himself, but it is more true. Other people's knowledge can be poured into and poured over a genius innocently enough. It rolls off him like water on a duck's back. Even if it gets in he organically protects himself. The genius of the ordinary man needs special protection made for it. As our educational institutions are arranged at present, the more commonplace our students are, the more we herd them together to make them more commonplace. That is, we do not believe in them enough. We believe that they are commonplace through and through and that nothing can be done about it. We admit after a little intellectual struggle that a genius who is bound to be an individual anyway should be treated as one, but a common boy whose individuality can only be brought out by his being very vigorously and constantly reminded of it and exercised in it is dropped altogether as an individual, is put into a herd of other common boys, and his last remaining chance of being anybody is irrevocably cut off. We do not believe in him as an individual. He is a fraction of a room full. He is a sixty seventh or a seven hundred and thirty fourth of something. Someone has said that the problem of education is getting to be how can we give in our huge learning machines our exceptional students more of a chance? I state a greater problem. How can we give our common students a chance to be exceptional ones? The problem can only be solved by teachers who believe something, who believe that there is some common ground, some spiritual law of junction between the man of genius, the natural or free man, and the cramped, i.e. artificial ordinary one. It would be hard to name any more important proposition for current education to act on than this, that the natural man in this world is the man of genius. The church has had to learn that religion does not consist in being unnatural. The schools are next to learn that the man of genius is not unnatural. He is what nature intended every man to be at the point where his genius lies. The way out in education, the only believing, Viral, man's way out would seem to begin with the man of genius as a principle and work out the application of the principle to more ordinary men, men of slowed down genius. We are going to use the same methods, faster or slower, for both. A child's greater genius lies in his having a more lively sense of relation with more things than other children. Teachers are going to believe that if the right thing can be done about it, this sense of a live relation to knowledge can be uncovered in every human soul. That there is a certain sense in which every man is his own genius. By education, said Helvesias, you can make bears dance but never create a man of genius. The first thing for a teacher who believes this to do is not to teach. For apocalypse there is a spirit in this book struggling down underneath it which neither I nor any other man shall ever express. It needs a nation to express it, a nation fearless to know itself, a great, joyous, trustful, expectant nation. The centuries break away. I almost see it now lifting itself in its plains and hills and fields and cities, in its smoke and cloudland, as on some huge altar to supreme destiny, a nation freed before heaven by the mighty daily childlike joy of its own life. I see it as a nation full of personalities, full of self-contained normally self-centered, self-delighted, self-poised men, men of genius, men who balance off with a world, men who are capable of being at will, magnificently self-conscious or unconscious, self-possessed or self-forgetful, balanced men, comrades and equals of a world neither at slaves nor at masters. I have said I will not have a faith that I have to get to with a trap door. I have said that inspiration is for everybody. I have had inspiration myself and I will not clang down a door above my soul and believe that God has given to me or to anyone else what only a few can have. I do not want anything. I will not have anything that anyone cannot have. If there is one thing rather than another that inspiration is for, it is that when I have it I know that any man can have it. It is necessary to my selfishness that he shall have it. If a great wonder of a world like this is given to a man and he is told to live on it and it is not furnished with men to live with, with men that go with it, what is it all for? If one could have one's choice in being damned, there would be no way that would be quite so quick and effective as having inspirations that were so little inspired as to make one suppose they were merely for oneself or for a few others. The only way to save one's soul or to keep a corner of God in it is to believe that he is a kind of God who has put inspiration in every man. All that has to be done with it is to get him to stop smothering it. Inspiration, instead of being an act of going to work in a minute, living a few hundred years at once an act of making up and creating a new and wonderful soul for oneself, consists in the act of lifting off the lid from the one one has. The mere fact that the man exists who has had both experiences not having inspiration and having it gives a basis for a knowledge of what inspiration is. A man who has never had anything except inspiration cannot tell us what it is, and a man who has never had it cannot tell us what it is. But a man who has had both of these experiences, which is the case with most of us, constitutes a cross-section of the subject, a symbol of hope for everyone. All who have had not inspirations and inspirations both know that the origin and control and habit of inspiration are all of such a character as to suggest that it is the common property of all men. All that is necessary is to have true educators or promoters, men who furnish the conditions in which the common property can be got at. The only difference between men of genius, men of genius who know it, and other men, men of genius who don't know it, is that the men of genius who know it have discovered themselves, have such a headlong habit of self-joy in them, have tasted their self-joy so deeply that they are bound to get at them whether the conditions are favorable or not. The great fact about the ordinary man's genius, which the educational world has next to reckon with, is that there are not so many ways to uncover it. The ordinary man at first or until he gets the appetite started is more particular about the conditions. It is because a man of genius is more thorough with the genius he has, more spiritual and willful with it than other men that he grows great. A man's genius is always at bottom religious at the point where it is genius. A worshiping toward something, a worshiping toward something until he gets it. A supreme covetousness for God, for being a God. It is a faith in him, a sense of identity and sharing with what seems to be above and outside, a sense of his own latent infinity. I have said that all that real teaching is for is to say to a man in countless ways, a countless you can. And I have said that all real learning is for is to say I can. When we have enough great I cans, there will be a great society or nation, a glorious we can, rising to heaven. This is the ideal that hovers over all real teaching and makes it deathless, fertile forever. If the world could be stopped short for ten years in its dull, sullen round of not believing in itself, if it could be allowed to have all of it all over even for three days, the great solemn joy of letting itself go, it would not be caught falling back very soon, I think into its stupor of cowardice. It would not be the same world for three hundred years. All that it is going to require to get all people to feel that they are inspired is someone who is strong enough to lift a few people off of themselves. Get the idea started. Every man is so busy nowadays keeping himself, as he thinks, properly smothered that he has not the slightest idea of what is really inside him or of what the thing that is really inside him would do with him if he would give it a chance. Any man who has had the experience of not having inspiration and the experience of having it both knows that it is the sense of striking down through of having the lid of one's smaller consciousness lifted off in the long run his inspiration can be had or not as he wills. He knows that it is the supreme reasonableness in him, the primeval underlying naturalness in him rising to its rights. What he feels when he is inspired is that the larger laws, the laws above the other laws, have taken hold of him. He knows that the one law of inspiration is that a man shall have the freedom of himself. Most problems and worries are based on defective, uninvoked functions. Some organ, vision, taste, or feeling or instinct is not allowed its vent. It's chance to qualify. Something needs lifting away. The common experience of sleeping things off or walking or working them off is the daily symbol of inspiration. More often than not a worry or trouble is moved entirely out of one's path by the simplest possible device, an intelligent or instinctive change of conditions. The fundamental heresy of modern education is that it does not believe this does not believe in making deliberate arrangements for the originality of the average man. It does not see that the extraordinary man is simply the ordinary man keyed up writ large or moving more rapidly. What the average man is now the great men were once. When we begin to understand that a man of genius is not supernatural that he is simply more natural than the rest of us that all the things that are true for him are true for us except that they are true more slowly. The educational world will be a new world. The very essence of the creative power of a man of genius over other men is that he believes in them more than they do. He writes, paints, or sings as if all other men were men of genius and he keeps on doing it until they are. All modern human nature is a next genius. The whole world is a great gallery of things that men of genius have seen until they make other men see them too and prove that other men can see them. What one man sees with travail or by being born again whole generations see at last without trying. And when they are born the first time. The great cosmic process is going on in the human spirit. Ages flow down from the stars upon it. No one man shall guess now or ever what a man is, what a man shall be. But it is to be noticed that when the world gets its greatest man, the one who guesses most, generations are born and die to know him. All with awe and gentleness in their hearts. One after the other as they wheel up to the great sun to live. They call him the son of God because he thought everybody was. The main difference between a great man and a little one is a matter of time. If the little man could keep his organs going, could keep on experiencing acting and reacting on things for four thousand years, he would have no difficulty in being as great as some men are in their three score and ten. All genius is inherited time and space. The imagination which is the psychological substitute for time and space is a fundamental element in all great power because being able to reach results without pacing off the processes, it makes it possible for a man to crowd more experience in and be great in a shorter time. The idea of educating the little man in the same way as the great man from the inside or by drawing out his originality meets with many objections. It is objected that in as much as no little men could be made into great men, in the time allotted, there would be no object in trying to do it and no result to show for it in the world except row after row of spoiled little men drearily waiting to die. The answer to this is the simple assertion that if a quart cup is full, it is the utmost a quart cup can expect. A hog's head can do no more. So far as the man himself is concerned, if he has five sound real senses in him, all of them acting and reacting on real things, if he is alive, in other words, sincere through and through, he is educated. The true education must always consist not in how much a man has, but in the way he feels about what he has. The kingdom of heaven is on the inside of his five senses. Five. Every man his own genius. I do not mean by the man of genius in this connection the great man of genius who takes hold of his ancestors to live, rakes centuries into his life, burns up the phosphorus of ten generations and fifty years and with giant masterpieces takes leave of the world at last bringing his family to a full stop in a blaze of glory and a spindling child or so. I am merely contending for the principle that the extraordinary or inspired man is the normal man at the point where he is inspired and that the ordinary or uninspired boy can be made like him, must be educated like him, led out through his self-delight to truth. That, if anything, the ordinary or uninspired boy needs to be educated like a genius more than a genius does. I know of a country house which reminds me of the kind of mind I would like to have. In the first place it is a house that grew. It could not possibly have been thought of all at once. In the second place it grew itself, half inspiration and half common sense, with its mistakes and its delights all in it. Gloriously, frankly, it blundered into being seven generations tumbled on its floors, filled it with laughter and love and tears. One felt that every life that had come to it had written itself on its walls, that the old house had broken out in a new place for it, full of new little joys everywhere and jogs and bays and afterthoughts and forethoughts, old roofs and young ones, chumming together and old chimneys, three to start with and four new ones that came when they got ready. Everything about it touched the heart and said something. I have never managed to see it yet, whether in sunlight, cloudlight or starlight, or the light of its own lamps, but that it stood and spoke. It is a house that has genius. The genius of the earth and the sky around it are all in it, of motherhood of old age and of little children. It grew out of a spirit, a loving, eager, putting together, a making of relations between things that were a part, the portrait of a family. It is a very beautiful, eloquent house, and hundreds of nights on the white road have I passed it by in my lonely walk and stopped and listened to it, standing there in the lights, like a kind of low singing in the trees, and when I have come home later on the white road and the lights were all put out, I still feel it speaking there, faint against heaven, with all its sleep, its young and old sleep, its memories and hopes of birth and death, lifting itself in the night, a prayer of generations. Many people do not care for it very much. They would wonder that I should like a mind like it. It is a wandering, around kind of a house has thirty outside doors. If one like it it is easy to get out, which is just what I like in a mind, stairways almost anywhere, only one or two places in the whole building where there is not a piazza, and every inch of piazza has steps down to the grass and there are no walks, a great central fireplace big as a room, little groups of rooms that keep coming on one like surprises and little groups of houses around outside that have sprung up out of the ground themselves, a flower garden that thought of itself and looks as if it took care of itself, but doesn't, everything exuberant and hospitable and free on every side and full of play, a high stillness and seriousness overall. I cannot quite say what it is but most country houses look to me as if they had forgotten they were really outdoors in a great wide free happy place where winds and suns run things, where not even God says nay and everything lives by its inner law in the presence of the others exalts in its own joy and plays with God. Most country homes forget this. They look like little aisles of glare and showing off in human joylessness dotting the earth. People's minds and the houses are like the houses. They reek with sobriety. That is, they are all abnormal, foreign to the spirit, to the passion of self-delight, of life, of genius. Most of them are fairly hostile to genius or look at it with a launette. I like to think that if the principles and habits of freedom that result in genius were to be gauged and adjusted toward bringing out the genius in ordinary men, they would result in the following. Recipe to make a great man or a live small one. Let him be made like a great work of art. In general, follow the rule in Genesis one. One, chaos. Two, enough chaos. That is enough kinds of chaos, pouring all the several parts of chaos upon the other parts of chaos. Three, watch to see what emerges and what it is in the chaos that most belongs to all the rest. What is the unifying principle? Four, fertilize the chaos. Let it be impregnated with desire, will, purpose, personality. Five, when the unifying principle is discovered, refrain from trying to force everything to attach itself to it. Let things attach themselves in their way, as they are sure to do and do time, and grow upon it. Let the mind be trusted, let it not be always ordered around, thrust into or meddled with. The making of a man, like the making of a work of art, consists in giving the nature of things a chance, keeping them open to the sun and air and the springs of thought. The first person who ever said to man, you press the button and I will do the rest, was God. The emphasis of art in our modern education, of the knack or science or how of things, is to be followed next by the emphasis of the art that conceals art, genius, the norm, and climax of human ability. Any finishing school girl can out sonnet, Keats. The study of appearances, the passion for the outside has run its course. The next thing in education is going to be honesty, fearless naturalness, upheaval, the freedom of self, self-expectancy, all-expectancy, and the passion for possessing real things. The personalities, persons with genius, persons with free-working, uncrammed minds are all there, ready and waiting, both in teachers and pupils, all growing sub-rosa. And the main thing that is left to do is to lift the great roof of machinery off and let them come up. The days are already upon us when education shall be taken out of the hands of the anemic, abstracted men, men who go into everything theory-end first. There is already a new atmosphere in the educated world. The thing that shall be taught shall be the love of swinging out, of swinging up to the light and the air. Let every man live, the world says next, a little less with his outside, with his mere brain or logic-stitching machine. Let him swear by his instincts more and live with his medulla oblongata. Six. An inclined plane. This is the very pleasant and profitable ideal you have printed in this book. But teachers and pupils and institutions being what they are, it is not practical and nothing can be done about it. It is objected, respectfully submitted. One. There is nothing so practical as an ideal. For if through his personality and imagination a man can be made to see an ideal, the ideal does itself. That is, it takes hold of him and inspires him to do it and to find means for doing it. This is what has been aimed at in this book. Two. The first and most practical thing to do with an ideal is to believe it. Three. The next most practical thing is to act as if one believed it. This makes other people believe it. To act as if one believed an ideal is to be literal with it, to assume that it can be made real, that something, some next thing can be done with it. Four. It is only people who believe an ideal who can make it practical. Educators who think that an ideal is true and who do not think it is practical do not think it is true, do not really know it. The process of knowing an ideal of realizing it with the mind is the process of knowing that it can be made real. This is what makes it an ideal, that it is capable of becoming real. And if a man does not realize an ideal, cannot make it real in his mind, it is not accurate for him to say that it is not practical. It is accurate for him to say that it is not practical to him. The ideal presented in this book is not presented as practical except to teachers who believe it. Five. Every man who has been given in this world, if he is allowed to get at them, two powers to make a man out of. These powers are vision and action. One, seeing, and two, being or doing what one sees. What a man sees with is quite generally called his imagination. What he does with what he sees is called his character or personality. If it is true, as has been maintained in the whole trend of this book, that the most important means of education are imagination and personality, the power of seeing things and the power of living, as if one saw them, imagination and personality must be accepted as the forces to teach with, and the things that must be taught. The persons who have imagination and personality in modern life must do the teaching. Six. Parents and others who believe in imagination and personality as the supreme energies of human knowledge and the means of education and who have children they wish taught in this way are going to make connections with such teachers and call on them to do it. Seven. In as much as the best way to make an ideal that rests on persons practical is to find the persons, the next thing for persons who believe in an ideal to do is to find each other out. All persons, particularly teachers and parents in their various communities and in the nation who believe that an ideal is practical in education should be social with their ideal. Group themselves together, make themselves known and felt. Eight. Some of us are going to act through the schools we have. We are going to make room in our present overmanaged, morbidly organized institutions with ordered around teachers, for teachers who cannot be ordered around, who are accustomed to use their imaginations and personalities to teach with instead of superintendents. We are going to have superintendents who will desire such teachers. The reason that our over-organized and over-superintendant schools and colleges cannot get the teachers they want to carry out their ideals is a natural one enough. The moment ideal teachers are secured it is found that they have ideals of their own and that they will not teach without them. When vital and free teachers are attracted to the schools and allowed fair conditions there they will soon crowd others out. The moment we arrange to give good teachers a chance good teachers will be had. Nine. Others will find it best to act in another way. Instead of reforming schools from the inside they are going to attack the problem from the outside, start new schools which shall stand for live principles and outlive the others. As good teachers can arrange better conditions for themselves to teach in their own schools wherever practicable this would seem to be the better way. They are going to organize colleges of their own. They are going to organize unorganized colleges for such they would be called at first assemblings of inspired teachers, men grouping men about them each after his kind. Everyone can begin somewhere. Teachers who are outside can begin outside and teachers who are within can begin within. Certainly if every teacher who believes something will believe deeply will free himself let himself out with his belief act on it the day is not long hence when the great host of ordered around teachers with their ordered around pupils will be a memory. Copying and appearing to know will cease. Self-delight and genius will again be the habit of the minds of men in the days of our present poor pale fuddling unbelieving Simon says thumbs up education will be numbered. Sometimes it seems as if this globe this huge cyclorama of nations whirling in sunlight through stars were a mere empty mumbled repetition a going round and round of the same stupendous stupidities and the same heroisms in human life. One is always feeling as if everything arts architecture cables colleges nations had all almost literally happened before and the ages dark to us gone the same round of beginning struggling and ending then the globe was wiped clean and began again. One of the great advantages in emphasizing individuals the main idea of this book in picking out particular men as forces centers of energy and society as the basis for one's program for human nature is the sense it gives that things really can begin again begin anywhere where a man is one single human being deeply believed in glows up a world casts a kind of speculative value a divine wager over all the rest I confess that most men I have seen seem to me fantasmagorically walking the earth their lives haunting them hanging intangibly about them indefinitely postponed but one does not need in order to have a true joyous working theory of life to believe verbatim every moment in the mass of men as men one needs to believe in them very much as possible men larvae of great men and if in the meantime one can have what is quite practicable one sample of a square mile of what the mass of men in that mile might be or are going to be one comes to a considerable degree of enthusiasm a working and sharing enthusiasm for all the rest seven allowance I thought when I began to make my little visit in civilization this book that perhaps I ought to have a motto to visit a civilization with so the motto I selected a good one for all reformers viewers of institutions and things was do not shoot the organist he is doing the best he can I fear I have not lived up to it I am an optimist I cannot believe he is doing the best he can before I know it I get to hoping in scolding I do not even believe he is enjoying it most of the people in civilization are not enjoying it they are like people one sees on those they are not really enjoying what they are doing they enjoy thinking that other people think they are enjoying it the great characteristic enthusiasm of modern society of civilization the fad of showing off of exhibiting a life instead of living it very largely comes it is not too much to say from the lack of normal egoism of self joy in civilized human beings it has come like a kind of moral anemia people cannot get interested enough in anything to be interested in it by themselves hence no great art merely the art which is a trick or a knack of appearance we lack great art because we do not believe in great living the emphasis which would seem to be most to the point in civilization is that people must enjoy something something of their very own even if it is only their sins if they can do no better and they are their own it would be a beginning they could work out from that they would get the idea someone has said that people repent of their sins because they didn't enjoy them as much as they expected to well then let them enjoy their repentance the great point is in this world that men must get hold of reality somewhere somehow get the feel the feel of living before they try dying most of us seem to think we have to do them both up together it is to be admitted that people might not do really better things for their own joy than for other peoples but they would do them better it is not the object of this book to reform people reformers are sinners enjoying their own sins who try to keep other people from enjoying theirs the object of this book is to inspire people to enjoy anything to find a principle that underlies right and wrong both let people enjoy their sins we say if they really know how to enjoy the more they get the idea of enjoying anything the more vitally and sincerely they will run their course turn around and enjoy something truer and more lasting what we all feel what every man feels is that he has a personal need of daring and happy people around him people that are selfish enough to be alive and worthwhile people that have the habit and conviction of joy whose joys whether they are wrong or right are real joys to them not shadows or shows of joys joys that melt away when no one is looking the main difficulty is the present juncture of the world in writing on the lost art of reading is that all the other arts are lost the great self delights as they have all been lost together it has been necessary to go after them together to seek some way of securing conditions for the artist the enjoyer and prophet of human life in our modern time at the bottom of all great art it is necessary to believe there has been great believing free beautiful living this is not to say that inconsistency contradiction and insincerity have not played their part but it is the benediction the great amen of the world to say this that if there has been great constructive work there has been great radiant unconquerable constructive living behind it there is but one way to recover the lost art of reading it is to recover the lost art of living this is not saying that inconsistency contradiction and insincerity have not played their part but is the benediction the great amen of the world to say this that if there has been great constructive work there has been great radiant unconquerable constructive living behind it there's but one way to recover the lost art of reading it is to recover the lost art of living the day we begin to take the liberty of living our own lives there will be artists and seers everywhere we will all be artists and seers and great arts and great books and great readers of books will flock to us well here we are gentle reader we are rounding the corner of the last paragraph time stretches out before us on the great high road we stand together in the dawn I with my little book in hand you perhaps with yours the white road reaches away before us behind us there are crossroads there are parallels to sometimes when there falls a clearness on the air they are nearer than I thought I hear crowds trudging on them in the dark singing faintly I hear them cheering in the dark but this is my way right here see the hill there that is my next one the Sun in a minute you are going my way comrade you are not going my way so be it God be with you top of the morning to you I pass on and of section 19 and of the lost art of reading by Gerald Stanley Lee read by Joseph Tabler