t for him. In other words, he is to assert
his individual self in order that he may universalise himself in his
own way, and not in obedience to the ruling of custom and authority,
in order that he may escape from himself through the real outlet of
sincere self-expression, and not through the sham outlet of hypocrisy
and cant.

What I may call the Utopian scheme of education, far from making for
antinomianism and anarchy, is the sworn enemy of individualism and
therefore, _a fortiori_, of everything that savours of licence. It is
the conventional type of education, with its demands for mechanical
obedience to external authority, which leads through despotism to
social and political chaos. The whole _regime_ of mechanical
obedience is favourable, in the long run, to the development of
anarchy. Let us take the case of a church or an autocracy which
demands implicit obedience from its subjects, and is prepared to
exact such obedience by the application of physical force or its
moral equivalent. What will happen to it when its subjects begin to
ask it for its credentials? The fact that it has always demanded from
them literal rather than spiritual obedience, and that, in its
application of motive force, it has appealed to their baser desires
and baser fears, makes it impossible for it to justify itself to
their higher faculties, rational or emotional, and makes it necessary
for it to meet their incipient criticism with renewed threats of
punishment and renewed promises of reward. But the very fact that it
is being asked for its credentials means that the force on which it
has hitherto relied is weakening, that its power to punish and
reward, which has always been resolvable into the power to make
people believe that it can punish and reward, is being called in
question and is therefore crumbling away. And behind that power there
is nothing but chaos. For the _regime_ of mechanical obedience, by
arresting the spontaneous growth of Man's higher nature, and by
making its chief appeal to his baser desires and baser fears, becomes
of necessity the foster-mother of egoism; and when egoism, which
makes each man a law to himself and the potential enemy of his kind,
is unrestrained by authority, the door is thrown wide open to
anarchy, and through anarchy to chaos. This is what is happening in
the West, in our self-conscious and critical age. In every field of
human action, in religion, in politics, in social life, in art, in
lett