at it is the most terrible menace to
the existence of our race. We seize hold of our children, and by
parrot-compulsion we force into them a set of mental tricks. By
unnatural and unhealthy compulsion we force them into a certain amount
of cerebral activity. And then, after a few years, with a certain
number of windmills in their heads, we turn them loose, like so many
inferior Don Quixotes, to make a mess of life. All that they have
learnt in their heads has no reference at all to their dynamic souls.
The windmills spin and spin in a wind of words, Dulcinea del Toboso
beckons round every corner, and our nation of inferior Quixotes jumps
on and off tram-cars, trains, bicycles, motor-cars, buses, in one mad
chase of the divine Dulcinea, who is all the time chewing chocolates
and feeling very, very bored. It is no use telling the poor devils to
stop. They read in the newspapers about more Dulcineas and more
chivalry due to them and more horrid persons who injure the fair fame
of these bored females. And round they skelter, after their own tails.
That is, when they are not forced to grind out their lives for a wage.
Though work is the only thing that prevents our masses from going
quite mad.

To tell the truth, ideas are the most dangerous germs mankind has ever
been injected with. They are introduced into the brain by injection,
in schools and by means of newspapers, and then we are done for.

An idea which is merely introduced into the brain, and started
spinning there like some outrageous insect, is the cause of all our
misery to-day. Instead of living from the spontaneous centers, we live
from the head. We chew, chew, chew at some theory, some idea. We
grind, grind, grind in our mental consciousness, till we are beside
ourselves. Our primary affective centers, our centers of spontaneous
being, are so utterly ground round and automatized that they squeak in
all stages of disharmony and incipient collapse. We are a people--and
not we alone--of idiots, imbeciles and epileptics, and we don't even
know we are raving.

And all is due, directly and solely, to that hateful germ we call the
Ideal. The Ideal is _always_ evil, no matter what ideal it be. No
idea should ever be raised to a governing throne.

This does not mean that man should immediately cut off his head and
try to develop a pair of eyes in his breasts. But it does mean this:
that an idea is just the final concrete or registered result of living
dynamic inter