On the Young Idea

him to any aunts or uncles." The grown-up person cannot in any case escape from the responsibility of influencing the child j not even if she accepts the enormous responsibility of not influencing the child. The mother can bring up the child without choosing a religion for himj but not without choosing an environment for himx. If she chooses to leave out the religion, she is choosing the environment j and an infernally dismal, unnatural environment too. The mother can bring up the child alone on a solitary island in the middle of a large lake, lest the child should be influenced by superstitions and social traditions. But the mother is choosing the island and the lake and the loneliness 5 and is just as responsible for doing so as if she had chosen the sect of the Mennonites or the theology of the Mormons. It is entirely obvious, to anybody who will think for two minutes, that this responsibility for determining childhood belongs inevitably to the relation of child and adult, quite apart from the relations of religion and irreligion. But the people who repeat these fragments of phraseology do not think for two minutes. They do not make any attempt to connect such a phraseology with a philosophy. They have heard that argument applied to religion 3 and they never think of applying it to anything else except religion. They never think of taking those ten or twelve words out of their conventional context j and seeing whether they apply to any other context. They have heard that there are people who refuse to train children even in their own religion. There might just as well be people who refuse to train children in their own civilization. If the child, when he has grown up, may prefer another creed, it is equally true that he may prefer another culture. He may be annoyed at having been brought up as a Swedenborgianj he may passionately regret that he was not brought up as a Sandemanian. But so he may regret that he was brought up as an English gentleman and not as a wild Arab of the desert. He may, as (with the assistance of a sound geographical education) he surveys the world from China to Peru, feel envious of the dignity of the code of Confucius or weep over the ruins of the great Aztec civilization. But somebody has obviously got to bring him up as something j and it is perhaps the heaviest responsibility of all to bring him up as nothing.

I could give many other examples of this fragmentary sort of argument, which everybody quotes and nobody develops. It is making, for instance, the wildest confusion in the discussions about decorum and the dignity of the body. Any number of people are content to say that the human body is beautiful 3 though that argument would lead to a conclusion which they themselves would regard as rank lunacy. The true answer of philosophy and theology is that there is nothing the matter with the human body 3 the trouble is with the human soul. But I am not so much talking about the true answer as about the absence of any answer. The point is that these people ask a question which they themselves are not prepared to answer, even along the lines which they themselves suggest. They only see the question as applied to some particular silly discussion about a French novel or an American ballet 3 and they never make any attempt to deal with the question as a whole. They only repeat the tame, controversial comment that is attached to that little local controversy. That is the thing which bears the same relation to thinking that hitting the same note on the piano a hundred and fifty times bears to playing in the style of Paderewski. We cannot all play like Paderewski or think like Plato 3 but we should be a great deal nearer to it if we could forget these little tags of talk from the daily papers and the debating clubs, and start afresh, thinking for ourselves.