The struggle for light, with its wide fellowships and high
     enthusiasms, will displace the struggle for power, with its mean
     passions, its monstrous illusions, and its contemptible ideals.

The struggle for power will end, not, as some predict, in universal revolution, which would merely set it going again in another form, but by being submerged, lost sight of, snowed under, by the greater interests that centre round the struggle for light.

     I say these things will happen.  But they will not happen unless men
     are sufficiently resolved that they shall.

Let the reader remember that those who now flock to the schoolmaster are less likely than men of the previous generation to fall into the pit of materialism.  They begin at a point which the previous generation did not believe to exist—­a visible world reduced by positive science to the invisible world of philosophy.  They confront not a quantitative universe, but a qualitative.  They almost begin at the very spirit of man; they cannot advance far before they find themselves groping in the unseen, and using, not the senses given to us by action, but the eyes and ears of the understanding by which alone the soul of man can apprehend reality.  Even the Germans have gone back to Goethe.

This, then, is the contribution which Dr. Jacks makes to modern thought.  We are to consider man as a creature of boundless potentiality, to realise that his first need is for light, and to define that mystic all-important word in terms of education.  Christianity was not concerned with the moral law; it was concerned with the transcending of all law by the spirit of understanding.

I need not guard myself against the supposition that so true a scholar is satisfied with the system of education which exists at the present time.  Dr. Jacks looks for a reform of this system, but not from the present race of politicians.

“How can we hope to get a true system of education from politics?” he asked me.  “Is there any atmosphere more degrading?  Plato has warned us that no man is fit to govern until he has ceased to desire power.  But these men think of nothing else.  To be in power; that is the game of politics.  What can you expect from such people?”

He said to me, “Men outside politics are beginning to see what education involves.  It involves the whole man, body, mind, spirit.  I do not think you can frame an intelligent definition of education without coming up against religion.  In its simplest expression, education is a desire to escape from darkness into light.  It is fear of ignorance, and faith in knowledge.  At the present time, most people have escaped from darkness into twilight; a twilight which is neither one thing nor the other.  But they will never rest there.  The quest of the human spirit is Goethe’s dying cry, Light—­more Light.  And it is from these men that I look to get a nobler system of education.  They will compel the politicians to act, perhaps get rid of the present race of politicians altogether.  And when these humble disciples of knowledge, who are now making heroic efforts to escape from the darkness of ignorance, frame their definition of education, I am sure it will include religion.  The Spirit of Man needs only to be liberated to recognise the Spirit of God.”