blow to the
pharisaism of which I have just spoken. It has not discredited science,
nor philosophy, nor government, nor anything else that we value, but it
has shown that these things have not brought us as far as we thought.
That very knowledge, when you come to think of it, is itself a very
distinct step in moral progress. Before the war we were growing morally
conceited; we thought ourselves much better, more advanced in morality,
than we really were, and this conceit was acting as a real barrier to
our farther advance. A sharp lesson was needed to take this conceit out
of us--to remind us that as yet we are only at the bare beginnings of
moral advance--and not, as some of us fondly imagined, next door to the
goal. This sudden awakening to the truth is full of promise for the
future.

And now what is the cause of these exaggerated notions which so many of
us have entertained? I think they arise from our habit of letting
ourselves be guided by words rather than by realities, by what men are
_saying_ rather than by what they are _doing_, by what teachers are
teaching than by what learners are learning. If you take your stand in
the realm of words, of doctrines, of theories, of philosophies, of
books, preachings, and uttered ideals, you might make out a strong case
for a high degree of moral progress actually attained. But if you ask
how much of this has been learnt by mankind at large, and learnt in such
a way as to issue in practice, you get a different story. We have
attached too much importance to the first story and too little to the
second. There has been a great deal of false emphasis in consequence.
This false emphasis is especially prominent in the education controversy
which is now going on--and the question of moral progress, by the way,
is the question of education in the widest and highest sense of the
term. People seem quite content so long as they can get the right thing
taught. They don't always see that unless the right thing is taught by
the right people and in the right way it will not be _learnt_. Now
education is ultimately a question of what is being _learnt_, not of
what is being _taught_. The process of learning is a very curious and
complicated one, and it often happens that what goes in at the teacher's
end comes out at the pupil's end in a wholly different form and with a
wholly different value; and we have the highest authority for believing
that what really counts is not so much that which g