e spouse of a not-quite-so-noble male: then a _Mater
Dolorosa_: then a ministering Angel: then a competent social unit, a
Member of Parliament or a Lady Doctor or a platform speaker: and all
the while, as a side show, she is the Isolde of some Tristan, or the
Guinevere of some Lancelot, or the Fata Morgana of all men--in her own
idea. She can't stop having an idea of herself. She can't get herself
out of her own head. And there she is, functioning away from her own
head and her own consciousness of herself and her own automatic
self-will, till the whole man and woman game has become just a hell,
and men with any backbone would rather kill themselves than go on with
it--or kill somebody else.

Yet we are going to inculcate more and more self-consciousness, teach
every little Mary to be more and more a nice little Mary out of her
own head, and every little Joseph to theorize himself up to the
scratch.

And the point lies here. There will _have_ to come an end. Every race
which has become self-conscious and idea-bound in the past has
perished. And then it has all started afresh, in a different way, with
another race. And man has never learnt any better. We are really far,
far more life-stupid than the dead Greeks or the lost Etruscans. Our
day is pretty short, and closing fast. We can pass, and another race
can follow later.

But there is another alternative. We still have in us the power to
discriminate between our own idealism, our own self-conscious will,
and that other reality, our own true spontaneous self. Certainly we
are so overloaded and diseased with ideas that we can't get well in a
minute. But we can set our faces stubbornly against the disease, once
we recognize it. The disease of love, the disease of "spirit," the
disease of niceness and benevolence and feeling good on our own behalf
and good on somebody else's behalf. Pah, it is all a gangrene. We can
retreat upon the proud, isolate self, and remain there alone, like
lepers, till we are cured of this ghastly white disease of
self-conscious idealism.

And we really can make a move on our children's behalf. We really can
refrain from thrusting our children any more into those hot-beds of
the self-conscious disease, schools. We really can prevent their
eating much more of the tissues of leprosy, newspapers and books. For
a time, there should be no compulsory teaching to read and write at
all. _The great mass of humanity should never learn to read and
writ