How deeply sunk in the modern world are the roots of this naturalism is shown by its long course in history, paralleling humanism.  It has seeped down through the Protestant centuries in two streams.  One is a sort of scientific naturalism.  It exalts material phenomena and the external order, issues in a glorification of elemental impulses, an attempted return to childlike spontaneous living, the identifying of man’s values with those of primitive nature.  The other is an emotional naturalism, of which Maeterlinck is at the moment a brilliant and lamentable example.  This exchanges the world of sober conduct, intelligible and straightforward thinking for an unfettered dreamland, compounded of fairy beauty, flashes of mystical and intuitive understanding intermixed with claptrap magic, a high-flown commercialism and an etherealized sensuality.

Rousseau represents both these streams in his own person.  His sentimentalized egotism and bland sensuality pass belief.  His sensitive spirit dissolves in tears over the death of his dog but he bravely consigns his illegitimate children to the foundling asylum without one tremor.  In his justly famous and justly infamous Confessions, he presents himself Satan-wise before the Almighty at the last Judgment, these Confessions in his hand, a challenge to the remainder of the human race upon his lips.  “Let a single one assert to Thee, if he dare:  I am better than that man.”  But his preachment of natural and spontaneous values, return to primitive conditions, was equally aggressive.  If anyone wants to inspect the pit whence the Montessori system of education was digged, let him read Rousseau, who declared that the only habit a child should have is the habit of not having a habit, or his contemporary disciple, George Moore, who says that one should be ashamed of nothing except of being ashamed.  There are admirable features in the schooling-made-easy system.  It recognizes the fitness of different minds for different work; that the process of education need not and should not be forbidding; that natural science has been subordinated overmuch to the humanities; that the imagination and the hand should be trained with the intellect.  But the method which proposes to give children an education along the lines of least resistance is, like all other naturalism, a contradiction in terms, sometimes a reductio ad absurdum, sometimes ad nauseam.  As long ago as 1893, when Huxley wrote his Romanes lecture on Evolution and Ethics, this identity of natural and human values was explicitly denied.  Teachers do not exist for the amusement of children, nor for the repression of children; they exist for the discipline of children.  The new education is consistently primitivistic in the latitude which it allows to whim and in its indulgence of indolence.  There is only one way to make a man out of a child; to teach him that happiness is a by-product of achievement; that pleasure is an accompaniment of labor; that the