sition for current education to act on than this,
that the natural man in this world is the man of genius. The Church has
had to learn that religion does not consist in being unnatural. The
schools are next to learn that the man of genius is not unnatural. He is
what nature intended every man to be, at the point where his genius
lies. The way out in education, the only believing, virile, man's way
out, would seem to be to begin with the man of genius as a principle and
work out the application of the principle to more ordinary men--men of
slowed-down genius. We are going to use the same methods--faster or
slower--for both. A child's greater genius lies in his having a more
lively sense of relation with more things than other children. Teachers
are going to believe that if the right thing can be done about it, this
sense of a live relation to knowledge can be uncovered in every human
soul, that there is a certain sense in which every man is his own
genius. "By education," said Helvetius, "you can make bears dance, but
never create a man of genius." The first thing for a teacher who
believes this to do, is not to teach.

IV

Apocalypse

There is a spirit in this book, struggling down underneath it, which
neither I nor any other man shall ever express. It needs a nation to
express it, a nation fearless to know itself, a great, joyous, trustful,
expectant nation. The centuries break away. I almost see it now, lifting
itself in its plains and hills and fields and cities, in its smoke and
cloud-land, as on some huge altar, to supreme destiny, a nation freed
before heaven by the mighty, daily, childlike joy of its own life. I see
it as a nation full of personalities, full of self-contained, normally
self-centred, self-delighted, self-poised men--men of genius, men who
balance off with a world, men who are capable of being at will
magnificently self-conscious or unconscious, self-possessed and
self-forgetful--balanced men, comrades and equals of a world, neither
its slaves nor its masters.

I have said I will not have a faith that I have to get to with a
trap-door. I have said that inspiration is for everybody. I have had
inspiration myself and I will not clang down a door above my soul and
believe that God has given to me or to any one else what only a few can
have. I do not want anything, I will not have anything that any one
cannot have. If there is one thing rather than another that inspiration
is for, it is that whe