I know of a large, beautiful high school in which the boys and girls
are to receive the decisive impulses for their inner life from
well-trained teachers who have had a solid college education. I have
found out that quite a number of these teachers are clients of a
medium who habitually informs them as to their future, and for a
dollar a sitting gives them advice at every turn of their lives. I do
not know whether she takes it from the tea leaves or from an Egyptian
dream book or from her own trance fancies, but I do know that the
prophecies of this fraud have deeply influenced some of their lives
and shaped the faculty of the high school. What does this mean?
Mature educators to whose training society has devoted its fullest
effort and who are chosen to bring to the youth the message of earnest
thought and solid knowledge, and whose intellectual life ought
therefore to be controlled by consistent thinking and real love for
knowledge, fall back into the lowest forms of mental barbarism and
really believe in the most illogical prostitution of truth. The double
life of Jekyll and Hyde is more natural than this. The impulse to
virtuous behaviour and the atrocities of the criminal may after all be
combined in one character, but the desire to master the world by a
disciplined knowledge and to think the universe in ideas of order and
law cannot go together with a real satisfaction and belief in the
chaotic superstitions of mediumistic humbugs. Here we have truly a
twofold personality, one living in a world of culture and the other in
an underworld of intellectual dissipation and vice. It would not be
desirable for the high school teachers who are to be models of virtue
to live a second life as gamblers and pick-pockets, but it is more
dangerous if they are the agents of intellectual culture and indulge
at the same time in intellectual prostitution.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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