Before we pass on to consider the intellectual environment of the younger generation, we may note another point with regard to the general atmosphere which has been provided for it by the older. That atmosphere is one of intense absorption in the material basis of life. The older generation has lost its spiritual bearings by its mad scramble for money at any spiritual cost in order to pay for the so-called high standard of living which, to a great extent, has been due to lack of character, that character which enables a person to perceive clearly what is for his genuine good and to reject what is not as forcibly as the body tries to reject poison. The high standard is, in most of its aspects, a high standard on a low plane, and to a considerable extent it has been made possible because people have given up using their energies and resources to attain to any standard on the higher plane. Having, with all the accumulated resources of a wealthy and powerful civilization, devoted their energies to the easier task of elaborating their life on the lower, the material plane, it is little wonder that they have achieved “the highest standard” on that plane the world has seen. [Pg 68] But by devoting all their energies to the elaboration and piling up of things, to the making of the possession of things a necessity of their lives, a symbol of success and a basis of personal appraisal, they have brought about a situation in which the obtaining of money in quantities wholly unnecessary for a sane ordering of life has become the overwhelming preoccupation of their minds. The softness of intellectual fibre that makes the search for material good so much easier than the search for spiritual, that lack of character that makes us easy victims of the opinions and standards of others, that lack of resisting power that makes us the victims of any advertising expert or persuasive salesman, that fear of mass opinion, that love of luxury which is always insidious and which grows by what it feeds upon,—all combine to make us believe that we are rising to a higher life when we are in reality losing that life in a complete devoting of ourselves to the mere machinery of life.