The house I live in had for a number of years been rented to an elderly Scotch woman who kept it as a “rooming house.” When she moved out she said to me, “I hear you are going to do this house over and make it your own home. Some day you may be sitting here and thinking, ‘What use to go on in this house of mine?’ It’ll be a satisfaction to you to know that you are in a respectable place. Never once in all the years that I rented out furnished rooms did the patrol wagon have to back up to this door at midnight.” The things which people find consoling both reveal and determine the plane on which their thinking takes place. I have heard a young man say with a note of defiance, “Yes, sir, I’m a single-taxer and I’m proud of it.” So involved is the ego in our dilemmas that we often require the assistance of a specialist in getting over them. Psychoanalysts whose task is chiefly that of helping people face certain facts about themselves, speak of their work as re-education. In a sense all education is re-education, the untying of the knots in which our self esteem in its defense has entangled itself. Perhaps nothing is so effective a bar to education as intellectual immodesty. A man’s education stops at the point where he becomes incapable of self-criticism. And because egotism is always a bit ridiculous, the conceited mind protects itself from criticism by making its interests sublime. In the presence of the sublime, laughter is taboo. The subject concerning which man has lost his sense of humor is just the subject concerning which criticism leads to self-criticism. There are persons who cannot take a joke about “The Grand Old Party,” or the Government at Washington, or the teachings of Karl Marx. Recently a group of church men publicly denounced the New York newspapers because of their humorous remarks about prohibition. Once when I was asked for a definition of a radical I seriously offended a prominent socialist with the innocent remark that a radical is a man who loves Labor and hates work. Lack of humor is always evidence of unteachableness. Ignorance is pompous. The holy tone with which people proclaim their convictions is uncivilized. When the American people are better educated, there will be less solemn pantomime in the land. We could not with straight faces indulge ourselves in the hysterical reforms, the bitter partisanships, religious fanaticism and race prejudice which at present show how seriously we take ourselves. Education should help people make an art of living, and the art of living, like all arts, is play. Learn to play with your ideals, even with your sublimities, and you will break the hold upon you of many a crude and hampering dilemma. CHAPTER VII THE FREE SPIRIT