ours, in order to pile up
the instruments of a fuller life, which he will never use. To regard
business as a kind of game is, from the highest point of view, right,
and our nation gains greatly by applying the ethics of sport to all
our external activities; but we err in living for our games, whether
they happen to be commerce or football. A friend of mine expostulated
with a Yorkshire manufacturer who was spending his old age in
unnecessary toil for the benefit of a spendthrift heir. The old man
answered, "If it gives him half as much pleasure to spend my half
million as it has given me to make it, I don't grudge it him." That is
not the spirit of the real miser or Mammon-worshipper. It is the
spirit of a natural idealist who from want of education has no
rational standard of good. When such a man intervenes in educational
matters, he is sure to take the standpoint of the so-called practical
man, because he is blind to the higher values of life. He will wish to
make knowledge and wisdom instruments for the production of wealth, or
the improvement of the material condition of the poor. But knowledge
and wisdom refuse to be so treated. Like goodness and beauty, wisdom
is one of the absolute values, the divine ideas. As one of the
Cambridge Platonists said, we must not make our intellectual faculties
Gibeonites, hewers of wood and drawers of water to the will and
affections. Wisdom must be sought for its own sake or we shall not
find it. Another effect of our _misologia_ is the degradation of
reasonable sympathy into sentimentalism, which regards pain as the
worst of evils, and endeavours always to remove the effects of folly
and wrong-doing, without investigating the causes. That such
sentimentalism is often kind only to be cruel, and that it frequently
robs honest Peter to pay dishonest Paul, needs no demonstration.
Sentimentalism does not believe that prevention is better than cure,
and practical politicians know too well that a scientific treatment of
social maladies is out of the question in this country. Others become
fanatics, that is to say, worldlings who are too narrow and violent to
understand the world. The root of the evil is that a whole range of
the higher values is inaccessible to the majority, because they know
nothing of intellectual wealth. And yet the real wealth of a nation
consists in its imponderable possessions--in those things wherein one
man's gain is not another man's loss, and which are not prov