eves that the artificial feeding of the mind
is not only the best method, but the only method. Nor does the
discovery that the mind is simply the brain, is simply a part of the
body, subject to the body's laws, seem materially to have lessened this
fatuous delusion.

Some of Jennings's pupils--not more than two of the forty-odd were in
genuine earnest; that is, those two were educating themselves to be
professional singers, were determined so to be, had limited time and
means and endless capacity for work. Others of the forty--about
half-thought they were serious, though in fact the idea of a career was
more or less hazy. They were simply taking lessons and toiling
aimlessly along, not less aimlessly because they indulged in vague talk
and vaguer thought about a career. The rest--the other half of the
forty--were amusing themselves by taking singing lessons. It killed
time, it gave them a feeling of doing something, it gave them a
reputation of being serious people and not mere idlers, it gave them an
excuse for neglecting the domestic duties which they regarded as
degrading--probably because to do them well requires study and earnest,
hard work. The Jennings singing lesson, at fifteen dollars a
half-hour, was rather an expensive hypocrisy; but the women who used it
as a cloak for idleness as utter as the mere yawners and bridgers and
shoppers had rich husbands or fathers.

Thus it appears that the Jennings School was a perfect microcosm, as
the scientists would say, of the human race--the serious very few,
toiling more or less successfully toward a definite goal; the many,
compelled to do something, and imagining themselves serious and
purposeful as they toiled along toward nothing in particular but the
next lesson--that is, the next day's appointed task; the utterly idle,
fancying themselves busy and important when in truth they were simply a
fraud and an expense.

Jennings got very little from the deeply and genuinely serious. One of
them he taught free, taking promissory notes for the lessons. But he
held on to them because when they finally did teach themselves to sing
and arrived at fame, his would be part of the glory--and glory meant
more and more pupils of the paying kinds. His large income came from
the other two kinds of pupils, the larger part of it from the kind that
had no seriousness in them. His problem was how to keep all these
paying pupils and also keep his reputation as a teacher. In so