ity, and
all "higher" emotions, these alone are genuine feelings, all the rest
are false, to be rejected.

With what result? The upper centers are developed to a degree of
unnatural acuteness and reaction--or again they fall numbed and
barren. And then between parents and children a painfully false
relation grows up: a relation as of two adults, either of two pure
lovers, or of two love-appearing people who are really trying to bully
one another. Instead of leaving the child with its own limited but
deep and incomprehensible feelings, the parent, hopelessly involved in
the sympathetic mode of selfless love, and spiritual love-will,
stimulates the child into a consciousness which does not belong to it,
on the one plane, and robs it of its own spontaneous consciousness and
freedom on the other plane.

And this is the fatality. Long before puberty, by an exaggeration and
an intensity of spiritual love from the parents, the second centers
of sympathy are artificially aroused into response. And there is an
irreparable disaster. Instead of seeing as a child should see, through
a glass, darkly, the child now opens premature eyes of sympathetic
cognition. Instead of knowing in part, as it should know, it begins,
at a fearfully small age, to know in full. The cervical plexuses and
the cervical ganglia, which should only begin to awake after
adolescence, these centers of the higher dynamic sympathy and
cognition, are both artificially stimulated, by the adult personal
love-emotion and love-will into response, in a quite young child,
sometimes even in an infant. This is a holy obscenity.

Our particular mode of idealism causes us to suppress as far as
possible the sensual centers, to make them negative. The whole of the
activity is concentrated, as far as possible, in the upper or
spiritual centers, the centers of the breast and throat, which we will
call the centers of dynamic cognition, in contrast to the centers of
sensual comprehension below the diaphragm.

And then a child arrives at puberty, with its upper nature already
roused into precocious action. The child nowadays is almost invariably
precocious in "understanding." In the north, spiritually precocious,
so that by the time it arrives at adolescence it already has
experienced the extended sympathetic reactions which should have lain
utterly dark. And it has experienced these extended reactions with
whom? With the parent or parents.

Which is man devouring his own