The Abolition of Man- Some semi-heavy stuff by C.S. Lewis but well worth reading.

It is a compilation of three essays. My favorite is entitled Men Without Chests. It is about the role of an educator and what their role is not. In the essay he is critiquing a text book by authors he named Gaius and Titus so that he would not embarrass them. A few quotes I really liked... "Parents would be annoyed if their son returned from the dentist with his teeth untouched and his head filled with the dentist's philosophies." "They conclude that the best thing they can do is to fortify the minds of young people against emotion. My own experience as a a teacher tells the opposite tale. For every one pupil who needs to be guarded from a weak excess of sensibility there are three who need to be awakened from the slumber of cold vulgarity. The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles but to irrigate deserts. For famished nature will be avenged and a hard heart is not infallible protection against a soft head." "Aristotle says that the aim of education is to make the pupil like and dislike what he ought."

Lewis' comments on the definition of the Tao... " It is in reality beyond all predicates. the abyss that was before the creator Himself. It is Nature, it is the Way, the Road. It is the way in which the universe goes on, the way in which things everlastingly emerge, stilly and tranquilly into space and time. It is also the Way which every man should tread in imitation of that cosmic progression, conforming all activities to that great exemplar." But what is common to them all, is something that we cannot neglect. It is the doctrine of objective value, the belief that certain attitudes are really true, and others really false to the kind of thing the universe is and the kind of thing we are." He also says something that I struggle with from time to time... "The heart never takes the place of the head: but it can, and should obey it." We are sometimes told to "just follow our heart" it is hard to know the times when the head or the heart should lead out.

"The head rules the belly through the chest- the seat of magnanimity, of emotions organized by trained habit into stable sentiments. The Chest-Magnanimity-Sentiment- these are the indispensable liaison officers between cerebral man and visceral man. It may even be said that it is by this middle element that man is man: for by his intellect he is mere spirit and by his appetites mere animal. And all the time- such is the tragi-comedy of our situation- we continue to clamour for those very qualities we are rendering impossible. You can hardly open a periodical without coming across the statement that what our society needs is more 'drive' or dynamism., or self-sacrifice or 'creativity'. In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the gelding be fruitful.