=We become Devitalised.=—It is dreary to suppose that one may not be anybody after all, but only a momentary state of consciousness. Hope goes out of life, for there is nothing pleasant to look forward to. If something agreeable should happen next year, there is no _I_, _myself_, to enjoy it; only the ‘state of consciousness’ of some moment to come. Faith goes where all is fortuitous; when other people and ourselves are, so to speak, the circumstances of the moment. Where there are no persons, there is no possibility of that divine afflatus which we call enthusiasm; for that recognition of another on a higher plane which we mean when we say ‘I believe in so and so,’ for that recognition of the divine Being which we call Faith. We become devitalised; life is flat and grey; we throw desperate, if dull, energy into the task of the hour because we shall so, any way, get rid of that hour; we are glad to be amused, but still more glad of the stimulus of feverish work; but the work, like ourselves, is devitalised, without living idea, without consecrating aim. Our manner becomes impassive, our speech caustic, our countenance dreary and impenetrable. This is the change that is passing over large numbers of the teaching profession, men and women of keen intelligence, who might well have been inspired by high ideals, quickened by noble enthusiasms, had they not imbibed an educational faith which meets all aspirations with a _Cui bono?_ We give what we have, and only what we have. What have these to pass on to the children under their care? =This System Inadequate, Unnecessary, Inharmonious.=—But we need not sit down under this blighting system of thought. It is _inadequate_, as the best of their own prophets—Mr James, for example—freely allow; there is more in man than this philosophy has ever dreamt of. It is _unnecessary_, for, as we shall presently see, more than one other psychology accounts with greater, though never with complete, success for the phenomena which a human being presents. It is _inharmonious_ with the _movement of the age_. It effaces that personality which the age tends to exalt and magnify, and to regard with tender interest, under even sordid conditions. The principle of _solidarity_ is lost, and those of social and family life loosened; for what binding tie can there be between beings whose entity _may_ be no more than a state of consciousness?