me upon him who wants to educate youth
toward the view that man as an animal is the true man! If we educate
at all, we educate in the service of culture and civilization. All
building up of the youthful mind is itself service to human progress.
But this human progress is not a mere growth of the animal race. It
has its total meaning in the understanding of man as a soul,
determined by purposes and ideals. Not the laws of physiology, but the
demands of logic, ethics, aesthetics, and religion control the man who
makes history and who serves civilization. He who says that the
child's questions ought to be answered truthfully means in this
connection that lowest truth of all, the truth of physiology, and
forgets that when he opens too early the mind of the boy and the girl
to this materialistic truth he at the same time closes it, and closes
it perhaps forever, to that richer truth in which man is understood as
historic being, as agent for the good and true and beautiful and
eternal.

Give to the child the truth, but that truth which makes life worth
living, that truth which teaches him that life is a task and a duty,
and that his true health and soundness and value will depend upon the
energy with which he makes the world and his own body with its selfish
desires subservient to unselfish ideals. If you mean by the truth that
half-truth of man as a sexual creature of flesh and nerves, the child
to whom you offer it will be led to ever new questions, and if you go
on answering them truthfully as the new fashion suggests, your
reservoir will soon be emptied, even if the six volumes of Havelock
Ellis' "Psychology of Sex" are fully at your disposal. But the more
this species of truth is given out, the more life itself, for which
you educate the child, will appear to him unworthy and meaningless. If
the truth of civilized life is merely that which natural science can
analyze, then life has lost its honour and its loyalty, its enthusiasm
and its value. He who sees the truth in the idealistic aspect of man
will not necessarily evade the curious question of the child who is
puzzled about the naturalistic processes around him. But instead of
whetting his appetite for unsavoury knowledge, he will seriously
influence the young mind to turn the attention into the opposite
direction. He will speak to him about the fact that there is
something animal-like in the human being, but will add that the true
values of life lie just in overcomi