We are all born impressionists, and it takes the education of years to eradicate the gift from our natures; many people never lose the habit of regarding life in this queer, straightforward fashion, and go to their graves obstinately convinced that grass is green and the sky is blue in dogged opposition to the scientists, didactic dramatists, eminent divines, philosophers, æsthetic poets, and human beings born blind. Some of these subtle weavers of argument would have us believe that impressionism means just the converse of the sense in which I am using the word; that, for instance, the fact that grass is green comes to us from indirect sources, as that of our own natures we would perceive it to be red or blue. But while we believe our impressions to be our own, we know that this theory has reached us indirectly, so we can well afford to ignore it. Others, again, will have it that impressions are not to be trusted; and the majority of people, while rejecting or failing to comprehend the philosophic basis on which this doubt is founded, are only too willing to accept a theory that relieves them in some way of responsibility for their own individual actions. As a matter of fact, telling a man to mistrust his impressions is like bidding a mariner despise his compass. If our senses lie to us, we must live, perforce, in a world of lies. But as I hinted above, the young are wont to rely on their impressions from the moment when a baby first parts its lips in howling criticism of life. Children have implicit faith in the evidence of their senses until the grown-up people come along and tell grimy stories of perjured eyes and lying ears, and the unhappy fate of the unwise babes who trusted them. What is a child to do? Usually it accepts the new theory of its own inherent blindness and deafness grudgingly, but it accepts it nevertheless. It begins to rely on the experience of older human beings, as if the miracle of its own life were no more than the toneless repetition of other lives that have been before it. Wonder passes from its life, as joy passes from pencil and paper when the little fingers are made to follow certain predestined lines, instead of tracing the fancies of the moon. The child becomes sensible, obedient, quick at its lessons. It learns the beauty of the world from pictures and the love of its mother from books. In course of time its senses become atrophied through disuse, and it can, in truth, no longer see or hear. When this stage is reached the education of the individual is completed, and all civilisation’s requirements are satisfied.