art laughed.

"My dear chap, Mackenzie would have let you run your school in your own
way."

"But," I cried, "he doesn't believe in freedom!"

"He doesn't, but don't you see that he simply couldn't have jumped on
you? He would have thought you either a lunatic or a genius, and he
would have feared to condemn you in case you might turn out to be the
latter. I know an art critic in London, and, believe me, the poor
devil lives in terror lest he should damn the work of a new Augustus
John. The Futurists aren't flourishing on their merits; they are
flourishing because the critics are in a holy funk to condemn them in
case they might be artists after all."

I want to meet Smart again. I like his style.

* * * * *

I am indeed a Dominie in Doubt. What is education striving after? I
cannot say, for education is life and what the aim of life is no one
knows. Psycho-analysis can clear up a life; it can release bottled up
energy, but it cannot say how the released energy is to be used. The
analyst cannot advise, because no man can tell another how to live his
life. Freud clears up the past, but he cannot clear up the future.

Is there such a thing as Re-incarnation? I wonder. Am I living the
life that my past lives on earth fitted me for? If so analysis is
wrong. If I am suffering from a severe neurosis it is because I earned
this punishment in my past lives, and Freud has no right to cure me.
He is interfering with the plans of the Almighty. If, as I have heard
a Theosophist declare, the children in the slums are miserable because
they failed to learn their lesson in previous lives, then the people
who try to abolish slums are all wrong. I think my Theosophist would
argue that the charitable person is growing in grace, thereby rising
above his previous lives. And thus one soul helps another to rise to
perfection. It may be, and I hope it is so, for then life would have a
meaning. Pain and war would then be less terrible, for they would be
but incidents in the eternal unfolding of perfection.

Yet I find myself doubting. If I am William Shakespeare born again I
do not know it, and I am left in doubt as to whether I may not have
been Charles Peace instead. Possibly I was both.

Then there is psychical research. I have been to a medium and have
heard things that all the psycho-analysis in the world cannot account
for. I want to believe that the dead can speak to us, but wher