es what education meant, and which, partly from the force of
habit and partly because it is in keeping with our general attitude
towards life, we still bow down before with a devotion as ardent and
as irrational as that which inspired the cry of "Great is Diana of
the Ephesians."[32]

At its best, then, the education given by the Great Public Schools
and Universities fosters the growth of one of the expansive
instincts,--the _communicative_, a mighty instinct which opens up to
imagination and sympathy the whole wide world of human life; but
because it leaves all the other expansive instincts untended, it
gives that one instinct an inadequate and unsymmetrical training, a
training which checks the growth of the very faculties--imagination
and sympathy--of which the instinct is largely compounded and for the
sake of which it may almost be said to exist. At its second best,
this costly education fosters the growth of the _inquisitive_
instinct,--a grandly expansive instinct when trained in conjunction
with the others, but one which is constrictive rather than expansive
when trained by itself and for its own sake. At its ordinary level,
it trains no instinct whatever, and is therefore unworthy of the name
of education. Why should this be so? Why should a course of education
which lasts so long and costs so much do so little for its victims,
and do that little so badly or, at any rate, so inadequately? Because
from first to last it has looked outward instead of inward; because
it has laboured unceasingly to produce "results," and has never given
a thought to growth.[33]

Let us now go to the other end of the social scale. 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. The children of the "upper classes"
have such an advantage over the children of Utopia in the matter of
environment,--to say nothing of inherited capacity,--that one would
expect the path to do much more for their mental development than
it has done for the mental development of the Utopians, especially
as they could afford to remain much longer in the first and most
important of its stages, the stage of self-education (in the more
limited sense of the word). The gain to the whole natio