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We are now in a position to estimate the respective values, as moralising influences, of the path of self-realisation and the path that leads to "results."
For a certain number of years the number varies with the social standing of the child, and the financial resources of his parents the teacher can afford to disregard utilitarian considerations and think only of what is best for the child. What use will he make of those years? Will he lead the child into the path of self-realisation, and so give a lifelong impetus to the growth of his soul?
This is the provision that externalism makes for the practical inculcation of truthfulness, a virtue which its religion and its ethics profess to honour above all others. The life of self-realisation, on the other hand, is a life of genuine self-expression; and a life of genuine self-expression is obviously a life of fearless sincerity.
And not of each of his fellow-men only. In other words, he is losing himself in the lives of others, and is finding his well-being, and therefore his happiness, in doing so. But self-loss, with joy in the loss of self, is, in a word, love. The path of self-realisation is, then, in its higher stages, a life of love. He who walks in that path must needs lead a life of love.
That we may the better understand this, and the better understand what the path of self-realisation does for the mental development of him who walks in it, let us ask ourselves what type of mind the conventional type of education is likely to produce. And let us study the conventional type of education on what is supposed to be its highest level.
The active amusements and relaxations of life can only rest certain of our faculties, by indulging others; the whole self is never rested save through that unconsciousness of self, which comes through rapt contemplation of Nature or of Art. And suddenly I remembered that some believe that Art does not produce unconsciousness of self, but rather very vivid self-realisation.
It was the process, not the deed, which was interesting. It was the completing, not the completion, which was really vital. Man came thus at once face to face with nature. A new meaning grew into the art of life. The tea began to be not a poetical pastime, but one of the methods of self-realisation.
The question with which we are confronted to-day, and which our civilisation must either answer aright or perish, is not whether an individualist or a socialist state would be more conducive to the individual's self-realisation, but whether Christianity is right or wrong in its doctrine of the individual's paramount importance.
What the path of self-realisation might do for the children of the "upper classes" if they were allowed to follow it, we may roughly calculate, partly by measuring what the alternative scheme of education has failed to do for them, partly by reminding ourselves of what the path has done for the village children of Utopia.
It was to be called 'Psyché Apocalypté, and was to be a drama on the Greek model, treating of the birth and self-realisation of the soul of man. The sketch of its contents, given in the correspondence with Horne, will make the modern reader accept with equanimity the fact that it never progressed beyond the initial stage of drafting the plot.
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