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 of these evasions about fundamental things lies the road, I believe, along which the human mind can escape, if ever it is to escape, from the confusion of purposes that distracts it at the present time.

When the intellectual history of our time comes to be written I think that nothing will more impress the students of these years than the extraordinary evasion of metaphysical enlightenment in the education of our youth. Here were exercises and disciplines essential to the proper development of any good mind; here were questions intensely attractive to any intelligent youth; here were the common tests and filters for all knowledge and decision, and the youth of the big English-speaking community was almost deliberately kept away from and cheated out of this strengthening gymnastic. No wonder that the English-speaking mind had an understanding like a broken sieve and a will as capable of definite forms as a dropped egg. Philosophical study, the common material for every type of sound adolescent education, was stuck away into remote pretentious courses, behind barriers of Greek linguistic training, as if it were something too high for normal minds, too mystical for current speech. A general need was treated as a precious luxury. At Oxford instead of calling the philosophical course "Elements," the future historian will remark, with derision, they called it "Greats."

And when this student of things intellectual has