C. S. LEWIS

THEABOLITIONOFMANorReflections on EducationWith Special Reference to theTeaching of English inthe Upper Forms of Schools

COLLIER BOOKSMACMILLAN PUBLISHING COMPANY

NEW YORK

Chapter 1

Men without Chests

I DOUBT whether we are sufficientlyattentive to the importance of elementarytext-books. That is why I have chosen as thestarting point for these lectures a little book onEnglish intended for ‘boys and girls in theupper forms of schools., I do not think theauthors of this book (there were two of them)intended any harm, and I owe them, or theirpublisher, good language for sending me acornplimentary copy. At the same time I shallhave nothing good to say of them. Here is a

pretty predicament. I do not want to pillorytwo modest practising schoolmasters whowere doing the best they knew: but I cannot besilent about what I think the actual tendency oftheir work. I therefore propose to conceal theirnames. I shall refer to these gentlemen asGaius and Titius and to their book as TheGreen Book. But I promise you there is such abook and I have it on my shelves.

In their second chapter Gaius and Titius

wrote the well-known story of Coleridge atthe waterfall. You remember that there weretwo tourists present that one called it sublimeand the other pretty and that Coleridgementally endorsed the first judgement andrejected the second with disgust. Gaius andTitius comment as follows: ‘When the mansaid That is sublime he appeared to be makinga remark about the waterfall. Actually he wasnot making a remark about the waterfall but aremark about his own feelings. What he wassaying was really I have feelings associated inmy mind with the word “Sublime,” or shortly,I have sublime feelings. Here are a goodmany deep questions settled in a prettysummary fashion. But the authors are not yetfinished. They add ‘This confusion is con-tinually present in language as we use it. Weappear be saying something very importantabout something and actually we are onlysaying something about our own feelings.(TheGreen Book, pp. 19, 20).

Before considering the issues really raisedby this momentous little paragraph (designed,you will relllelllber, for the upper forms inschools ) we must eliminate one mere confu-sion into which Gaius and Titius have fallen.Even on their own view— on any conceivableview—the man who

says This is sublime cannot mean I havesublime feelings. Even if it were granted thatsuch qualities as sublimity were simply andsolely projected into things from our ownemotions, yet the emotions which prompt theprojection are the corrclatives and thereforealmost the opposites of the qualities projected.The feelings which make a man call an objectsublime are not sublime feelings but feelingsof veneration. If This is sublime is to bereduced at all to a statement about thespeaker’s feelings, the proper translationwould be I have humble feelings. If the viewheld by Gaius and Titius were consistentlyapplied it would lead to obvious absurdities. Itwould force them to maintain that You arecontemptible means I have comtemptiblefeelings: in fact that Your feelings areconternptible means My feelings are contempt-

ible. But we need not delay over this which isthe very pons asinorum of our subject. Itwould be unjust to Gaius and Titius them-selves to emphasize what was doubtless amere inadvertence.

The schoolboy who reads this passage inThe Green Book will believe two propositionsfirstly that all sentences containing a predicateof value are statements about the emotionalstate of the speaker, and, secondly, that allsuch statements are unimportant. It is true thatGaius and Titius have said neither of thesethings in so many words. They have treatedonly one particular predicate of value (sub-lime) as a word descriptive of the speaker’semotions. The pupils are left to do for them-selves the work of extending the same treat-ment to all predicates of value: and no slight-est obstacle to such extension is placed in theirway. The authors may or may not desire theextension: they may never have given thequestion five minutes’ serious thought in theirlives. I am not concerned with what theydesired but with the effect their book willcertainly have on the schoolboy’s mind. In thesame way, they have not said that judgementsof value are unimportant. Their words are thatwe appear to be saying something veryimportant, when in reality we are ‘only sayingsomething about our own feelings.’ Noschoolboy will be able to resist the suggestionbrought to bear upon him by that word only. Ido not mean, of course, that he will make anyconscious inference from what he reads to ageneral philosophical theory that all values aresubjective and trivial. The very power ofGaius and Titius depends on the fact that theyare dealing with a boy: a boy who thinks he is‘doing’ his English prep’ and has no notionthat ethics, theology, and politics are all atstake. It is not a theory they put into his mind,but an assumption, which ten years hence, itsorigin forgotten and its presence unconscious,will condition him to take one side in acontroversy which he has never recognized asa controversy at all. The authors themselves, Isuspect, hardly know what they are doing tothe boy, and he cannot know what is being

done to him.

Before considering the philosophicalcredentials of the position which Gaius andTitius have adopted about value, I should liketo show its practical results on their educa-tional procedure. In their fourth chapter theyquote a silly advertisement of a pleasure cruiseand proceed to inoculate their pupils againstthe sort of writing it exhibits. The advertise-ment tells us that those who buy tickets forthis cruise will go ‘across the Western Oceanwhere Drake of Devon sailed,’ ‘adventuringafter the treasures of the Indies,’ and bringinghome themselves also a ‘treasure’ of ‘goldenhours’ and ‘glowing colours.’ It is a bad bit ofwriting, of course: a venal and batheticexploitation of those emotions of awe andpleasure which men feel in visiting places thathave striking associations with history orlegend. If (Gaius and Titius were to stick totheir last and teach their readers (as theypromised to do) the art of English composi-tion, it was their business to put this advertise-ment side by side with passages from greatwriters in which the very same emotion is wellexpressed and then show where the differencelies. They might leave used Johnson’s famouspassage from the Western Islands, whichconcludes: ‘That man is little to be envied,whose patriotism would not gain force upontile plain of Marathon, or whose piety wouldnot grow warmer among the Sins of Iona.’They might have taken that place in ThePrelude where Wordsworth describes how theantiquity of London first aescended on hismind with ‘Weight and power, Power growingunder weight.’ A lesson which had laid suchliterature beside the advertisement and reallydiscriminated the good from the bad wouldhave been a lesson worth teaching. Therewould have been some blood and sap in it—the trees of knowledge and of life growingtogether. It would also have had the merit ofbeing a lesson in literature: a subject of whichGaius and Titius, despite their professedpurpose, are uncommonly shy. What theyactually do is to point out that the luxuriousmotor-vessel won’t really sail where Drake

did, that the tourists will not have any adven-tures, that the treasures they bring home willbe of a

purely metaphorical nature, and that a tripto Margate might provide ‘all the pleasure andrest’ they required. All this is very true: talentsinferior to those of Gaius and Titius wouldhave sufficed to discover it. What they havenot noticed, or not cared about, is that a verysimilar treatment could be applied to muchgood literature which treats the same emotion.What, after all, can the history of early BritishChristianity, in pure reason, add to the motivesfor piety as they exist in the eighteenth cen-tury? Why should Mr. Wordsworth’s inn bemore comfortable or the air of London morehealthy because London has existed for a longtime? Or, if there is indeed any obstacle whichwill prevent a critic from ‘debunking’ Johnsonand Wordsworth (and Lamb, and Virgil, andThomas Browner and Mr. de la Mare) as TheGreen Book debunks the advertisement. Gaiusand Titius have given their schoolboy readersno faintest help to its discovery. From thispassage the schoolboy will learn about litera-ture precisely notiling. What he will learnquickly enough, and perhaps indelibly, is thebelief that all emotions aroused by localassociation are in themselves contrary toreason and contemptible. He will have nonotion that there are two ways of beingimmune to such an advertisement—that it fallsequally flat on those who are above it andthose who are below it, on the man of realsensibility and on the mere trousered ape whohas never been able to conceive the Atlantic asanything more than so many million tons ofcold salt water. There are two men to whomwe offer in vain a false leading article onpatriotism and honour: one is the coward, theother is the honourable and patriotic man.None of this is brought before the schoolboy’smind. On the contrary, he is encouraged toreject the lure of the ‘Western Ocean, on thevery dangerous ground that in so doing he willprove himself a knowing fellow who can’t bebubbled out of his cash. Gaius and Titius,while teaching him nothing about letters, havecut out of his soul, long before he is old

enough to choose, the possibility of havingcertain experiences which thinkers of moreauthority than they have held to be generous,fruitful, and humane.

But it is not only Gaius and Titius. Inanother little book, whose author I will callOrbilius, I find that the same operation, underthe same general anaesthetic, is being carriedout. Orbilius chooses for ‘debunking’ a sillybit of writing on horses, where these animalsare praised as the thrilling servants’ of theearly colonists in Austrailia. And he falls intothe same trap as Gaius and Titius. Of Rukshand Sleipnir and the weeping horses ofAchilles and the war-horse in the Book of Job-nay even of Brer Rabbit and of Peter Rabbit—of man’s prehistoric piety to ‘our brother theox’—of all that this semi-anthropomorphictreatment of beasts has meant in humanhistory and of the literature where it findsnoble or piquant expression—he has not aword to say. Even of the problems of animalpsychology as they exist for science he saysnothing. He contents himself with explainingthat horses are not, secundum litteram, inter-ested in colonial expansion. This piece ofinformation is really all that his pupils getfrom him. Why the composition before themis bad, when others that lie open to the samecharge are good, they do not hear. Much lessdo they learn of the two classes of men whoare, respectively above and below the dangerof such writing—the man who really knowshorses and really loves them, not with anthro-pomorphic illusions, but with ordinate love,and the irredeemable urban blockhead towhom a horse is merely an old-fashionedmeans of transport. Some pleasure in theirown ponies and dogs they will have lost: someincentive to cruelty or neglect they will havereceived some pleasure in their ownknowingness will have entered their minds.That is their day’s lesson in English, though ofEnglish they have learned nothing. Anotherlittle portion of the human heritage has beenquietly taken from them before they were oldenough to understand.

I have hitherto been assuming that

such teachers as Gaius and Titius donot fully realize what they are doingand do not intend the far-reachingconsequences it will actually have.There is, of course, another possibil-ity. What I have called (presuming ontheir concurrence in a certain tradi-tional system of values) the ‘trouseredape, and the ‘urban blockhead’ may beprecisely the kind of man they reallywish to produce. The differencesbetween us may go all the way down.They may really hold that the ordinaryhuman feelings about the past oranimals or large waterfalls are con-trary to reason and contemptible andought to be irradicated. They may beintending to make a clean sweep oftraditional values and start with a newset. That position will be discussedlater. If it is the position which Gaiusand Titius are holding, I must for themoment content myself with pointingout that it is a philosophical and not aliterary position. In filling their bookwith it they have been unjust to theparent or headmaster who buys it andwho has got the work of amateurphilosophers where he expected thework of professional grammarians. Aman would be annoyed if his sonreturned from the dentist with histeeth untouched and his headcrammed with the dentists obiter dictaon bimetallism or the Baconiantheory.

But I doubt whether Gaius and ‘I’itiushave really planned under cover of teachingEnglish to propagate their philosopily. I thinkthey have slipped into it for the followingreasons. In the first place, literary criticism isdifficult, and what they actually do is verymuch easier. To explain why a bad treatmentof some basic human emotion is bad literatureis, if we exclude all question-begging attackson the emotion itself, a very hard thing to do.Even Dr. Ricilards who first seriously tackledthe problem of badness in literature, failed I

think, to do it. To ‘debunk’ the emotion, onthe basis of a commonplace rationalism, iswithin almost anyone’s capacity. In the secondplace, I think Gaius and Titius may havehonestly misunderstood the pressing educa-tional need of the moment. They see the worldaround them swayed by emotional propa-ganda—they have learned from tradition thatyouth is sentimental—and they conclude thatthe best thing they can do is to fortify theminds of young people against emotion. Myown experience as a teacher tells an oppositetale. For every one pupil who needs to beguarded from a weak excess of sensibilitythere are three who need to be awakened fromthe slumber of cold vulgarity. The task of themodern educator is not to cut down junglesbut to irrigate deserts. The right defenceagainst false sentiments is to inculcate justsentiments. By starving the sensibility of ourpupils we only make them easier prey to thepropagandist when he comes. For famishednature will be avenged and a hard heart is noinfallible protection against a soft head.

But there is a third, and a profounder,reason for the procedure which Gaius andTitius adopt. They may be perfectly ready toadmit that a good education should buildsome sentiments while destroying others.They may endeavour to do so. But it isimpossible that they should succeed. Do whatthey will, it is the ‘debunking’ side of theirwork, and this side alone, which will reallytell. In order to grasp this necessity clearly Imust digress for a moment to show that whatmay be called the educational predicament ofGaius and Titius is different from that of alltheir predecessors.

Until quite modern times all teachers andeven all men believed the universe to be suchthat certain emotional reactions on our partcould be either congruous or incongruous toit—believed, in fact, that objects did notmerely receive, but could merit our approvalor disapproval, our reverence, or our con-tempt. The reason why Coleridge agreed withthe tourist who called the cataract sublime and

disagreed with the one who called it prettywas of course that he believed inanimatenature to be such that certain responses couldbe more ‘just’ or ‘ordinate’ or ‘appropriate’ toit than others. And he believed (correctly) thatthe tourists thought the same. The man whocalled the cataract sublime was not intendingsimply to describe his own emotions about it:he was also claiming that the object was onewhich merited those emotions. But for thisclaim there would be nothing to agree ordisagree about. To disagree with This is prettyif those words simply described the lady’sfeelings, would be absurd: if she had said Ifeel sick Coleridge would hardly have repliedNo; I feel quite well. When Shelley, havingcompared the human sensibility to an Aeolianlyre, goes on to add that it differs from a lyrein having a power of ‘internal adjustment’whereby it can ‘accommodate its chords to themotions of that which strikes them,’ he isassuming the same belief. ‘Can you be righ-teous,’ asks Traherne, ‘unless you be just inrendering to things their due esteem? Allthings were made to be yours and you weremade to prize them according to their value.’St. Augustine defines virtue as ordo amoris,the ordinate condition of the affections inwhich every object is accorded that kind anddegree of love which is appropriate to it.Aristotle says that the aim of education is tomake the pupil like and dislike what he ought.When the age for reflective thought comes, thepupil who has been thus trained in ‘ordinateaffections’ or ‘just sentiments’’ will easily findthe first principles in Ethics: but to the corruptman they will never be visible at all and hecan make no progress in that science. Platobefore him had said the same. The littlehuman animal will not at first have the rightresponses. It must be trained to feel pleasure,liking, disgust, and hatred at those thingswhich really are pleasant, likeable, disgusting,and hateful. In the Republic, the well-nurturedyouth is one ‘who would see most clearlywhatever was amiss in ill-made worlds of manor ill-grown works of nature, and with a justdistaste would blame and hate the ugly evenfrom his earliest years and would give de-

lighted praise to beauty, receiving it into hissoul and being nourished by it, so that hebecomes a man of gentle heart. All this beforehe is of an age to reason; so that when Reasonat length comes to him, then, bred as he hasbeen, he will hold out his hands in welcomeand recognize her because of the affinity hebears to her., In early Hinduism that conductin men which can be called good consists inconformity to, or almost participation in, theRta—that great ritual or pattern of nature andsupernature which is revealed alike in thecosmic order, the moral virtues, and theceremonial of the temple. Righteousness,correctness, order, the Rta, is constantlyidentified with satya or truth, correspondenceto reality. As Plato said that the Good was‘beyond existence’ and Wordsworth thatthrough virtue the stars were strong, so theIndian masters say that the gods themselvesare born of the Rta and obey it. The Chinesealso speak of a great thing (the greatest thing)called the Tao. It is the reality beyond allpredicates, the abyss that was before theCreator Himself. It is Nature, it is the Way, theRoad. It is the Way in which the universe goeson, the Way in which things everlastinglyemerges stilly and tranquilly, into space andtime. It is also the Way which every manshould tread in imitation of that cosmic andsupercosmic progression, conforming allactivities to that great exemplar. ‘In ritual’,say the Analects, ‘it is harmony with Naturethat is prized.’ The ancient Jews likewisepraise the Law as being ‘true.’ This concep-tion in all its forms, Platonic, Aristotelian,Stoic, Christian, and Oriental alike, I shallhenceforth refer to for brevity simply as ‘theTao.’ Some of the accounts of it which I havequoted will seem, perhaps, to many of youmerely quaint or even magical. But what iscomrnon to them all is something we cannotneglect. It is the doctrine of objective value,the belief that certain attitudes are really true,and others really false, to the kind of thing theuniverse is and the kind of things we are.Those who know the Tao can hold that to callchildren delightful or old men venerable is notsimply to record a psychological fact about

our own parental or filial emotions at themoment, but to recognize a quality whichdemands a certain response from us whetherwe make it or not. I myself do not enjoy thesociety of small children: because I speakfrom within the Tao I recognize this as a defectin myself—just as a man may have to recog-nize that he is tone deaf or colour blind. Andbecause our approvals and disapprovals arethus recognitions of objective value or re-sponses to an objective order, thereforeemotional states can be in harmony withreason (when we feel liking for what ought tobe approved) or out of harmony with reason(when we perceive that liking is due butcannot feel it). No emotion is, in itself, ajudgement: in that sense all emotions andsentiments are alogical. But they can bereasonable or unreasonable as they conform toReason or fail to conform. The heart nevertakes the place of the head: but it can, andshould, obey it.

Over against this stands the world of TheGreen Book. In it the very possibility of asentiment being reasonable—or even unrea-sonable— has been excluded from the outset.It can be reasonable or unreasonable only if itconforms or fails to conform to somethingelse. To say that the cataract is sublime meanssaying that our emotion of humility is appro-priate or ordinate to the reality, and thus tospeak of something else besides the emotion:just as to say that a shoe fits is to speak notonly of shoes but of feet. But this reference tosomething beyond the emotion is what Gaiusand Titius exclude from every sentencecontaining a predicate of value. Such state-ments, for them, refer solely to the emotion.Now the ennotion, thus considered by itself,cannot be either in agreement or disagreementwith Reason. It is irrational not as a paralo-gism is irrational, but as a physical event isirrational: it does not rise even to the dignityof error. On this view, the world of facts,without one trace of value, and the world offeelings without one trace of truth orfalseilood, justice or injustice, confront oneanother, and no rapprochement is possible.

Hence the educational problem is whollydifferent according as you stand within orwithout the Tao. For those within, the task isto train in the pupil those responses whichare in themselves appropriate, whetheranyone is making them or not, and in makingwhich the very nature of man consists.Those without, if they are logical, mustregard all sentiments as equally non-rational,as mere mists between us and the realobiects. As a result, they must either decideto remove all sentiments, as far as possible,from the pupil’s mind: or else to encouragesome sentiments for reasons that havenothing to do with their intrinsic ‘justness’ or‘ordinacy.’ The latter course involves them inthe questionable process of creating in othersby ‘suggestion’ or incantation a miragewhich their own reason has successfullydissipated.

Perhaps this will become clearer if we takea concrete instance. When a Roman father toldhis son that it was a sweet and seemly thing todie for his country, he believed what he said.He was communicating to the son an emotionwhich he himself shared and which he be-lieved to be in accord with the value which hisjudgement discerned in noble death. He wasgiving the boy the best he had, giving of hisspirit to humanize him as he hall given of hisbody to beget him. But Gaius and Titiuscannot believe that in calling such a deathsweet and seemly they would be saying‘something important about something.’ Theirown method of debunking would cry outagainst them if they attempted to do so. Fordeath is not something to eat and thereforecannot be dulce in the literal sense, and it isunlikely that the real sensations preceding itwill be dulce even by analogy. And as fordecorum—that is only a word describing howsome other people will feel about your deathwhen they happen to think of it, which won’tbe often, and will certainly do you no good.There are only two courses open to Gaius andTitius. Either they must go the whole way anddebunk this sentiment like any other, or must

set themselves to work to produce, fromoutside, a sentiment which they believe to beof no value to the pupil and which may costhim his life, because it is useful to us (thesurvivors) that our young men should feel it.If they embark on this course the differencebetween the old and the new education will bean important one. Where the old initiated, thenew merely ‘conditions.’ The old dealt with itspupils as grown birds deal with young birdswhen they teach them to fly: the new dealswith them more as the poultry-keeper dealswith young birds—making them thus or thusfor purposes of which the birds know nothing.In a word, the old was a kind of propagation—men transmitting manhood to men: the new ismerely propaganda.

It is to their credit that Gaius and Titiusembrace the first alternative. Propaganda istheir abomination: not because their ownphilosophy gives a ground for condemning it(or anything else) but because they are betterthan their principles. They probably havesome vague notion (I will examine it in mynext lecture) that valour and good faith andjustice could be sufflciently commended to thepupil on what they would call ‘rational’ or‘biological’ or ‘modern’ grounds, if it shouldever become necessary. In the rneantime, theyleave the matter alone and get on with thebusiness of debunking.

But this course, though less inhuman, isnot less disastrous than the opposite alterna-tive of cynical propaganda. Let us supposefor a moment that the harder virtues couldreally be theoretically justified with no appealto objective value. It still remains true that nojustification of virtue will enable a man to bevirtuous. Without the aid of trained emotionsthe intellect is power-less against the animalorganism. I had sooner play cards against aman who was quite sceptical about ethics, butbred to believe that ‘a gentleman does notcheat’, than against an irreproachable moralphilosopher who had been brought up amongsharpers. In battle it is not syllogisms thatwill keep the reluctant nerves and muscles to

their post in the third hour of the bombard-ment. The crudest sentimentalism (such asGaius and Titius would wince at) about a flagor a country or a regiment will be of moreuse. We were told it all long ago by Plato. Asthe king governs by his executive, so Reasonin man must rule the mere appetites by meansof the ‘spirited element.; The head rules thebelly through the chest—the seat, as Alanustells us, of Magnanimity, of emotions orga-nized by trained habit into stable sentiments.The Chest-Magnanimity- Sentiment- theseare the indispensable liaison officers betweencerebral man and visceral man. It may evenbe said that it is by this middle element thatman is man: for by his intellect he is merespirit and by his appetite mere animal. Theoperation of The Green Book and its kind is toproduce what may be called Men withoutChests. It is an outrage that they should becommonly spoken of as Intellectuals. Thisgives them the chance to say that he whoattacks them attacks Intelligence. It is not so.They are not distinguished from other men byany unusual skill in finding truth nor anyvirginal ardour to pursue her. Indeed it wouldbe strange if they were: a persevering devo-tions to truth, a nice sense of intellectualhonour, cannot be long maintained withoutthe aid of a sentiment which Gaius and Tituscould debunk as easily as any other. It is notexcess of thought but defect of fertile andgenerous emotion that marks them out. Theirheads are no bigger than the ordinary: it is theatrophy of the chest beneath that makes themseem so.

And all the time—such is the tragi-comedyof our situation—we continue to clamour forthose very qualities we are rendering impos-sible. You can hardly open a periodicalwithout coming across the statement that whatour civilization needs is more ‘drive,’ ordynamism, or self-sacrifice, or ‘creativity.’ Ina sort of ghastly simplicity we remove theorgan and demand the function. We makemen without chests and expect of them virtueand enterprise. We laugh at honour and are

shocked to find traitors in our midst. Wecastrate and bid the geldings be fruitful. .