in which the
rising sap of life strengthens the soul to resist the temptations to
undue sensual indulgence by which it is always liable to be assailed.
The victim of a repressive, growth-arresting type of education,
having few if any interests in life, not infrequently takes to the
meretricious excitements of sensuality in order to relieve the
intolerable monotony of his days. But the training which makes for
many-sided growth, by filling the life of the "adolescent" with many
and various interests, removes temptations of this particular type
from his path. And it does more for him than this. It generates in
him a state of health and well-being, in which the very vigour and
elasticity of his spiritual fibre automatically shields him from
temptation by refusing to allow the germs of moral disease to effect
a lodgment in his soul. It would be well if our moralists could
realise that the chief causes of weakness in the presence of sensual
temptation are, on the one hand, boredom and _ennui_, and on the other
hand flabbiness and degeneracy of spiritual fibre, and that the
remedy for both these defects is to give the young the type of
education which will foster rather than hinder growth.

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." Whatever tends to arrest growth tends also
and in an equal degree to demoralise Man's life; for, on the one
hand, by transforming the healthy desire for continued growth into
the unhealthy desire for mere self-aggrandisement, it generates
malignant egoism, with its endless train of attendant evils; and, on
the other hand, by depressing the vitality of the soul and so
weakening its powers of resistance, it exposes it to the attacks of
those powers and desires which we speak of in the aggregate as
sensuality. If this is so, the inference is irresistible that the
externalism of "civilised" life, with the repressive and devitalising
system of education which it necessitates, is responsible for the
greater part of the immorality--I am using the word in its widest
sense--of the present age. Contrariwise, whatever tends to foster
growth tends also, and in an equal degree, to moralise Man's
life; for, on the one hand, by transforming the desire for
self-aggrandisement into the desire, first for continued growth
and then for out-growth, it gives the soul strength to eliminate
the poison of ego