It is clear, then, that generation after generation can come and go without discovering its own children. Without discovering, not only what its ablest are capable of, but the others also. For it is altogether probable--the newer sorts of school are accumulating evidence all the time--that conditions that raise the performance of gifted children raise the performance, also, of the rank and file. This ray of light, shining out of a few new-type schools, illuminates to some extent the whole problem of adult society, both its capacities and the way to bring them to fruition. There is no reason in the nature of things or in the nature of man why the creativeness that is fostered in schools should not be fostered also in the larger society. We need only make general the conditions that teachers are creating in schools. This would involve the reversal of a habit that custom transmits from age to age--a habit that I shall make bold to call the psychical inbreeding of adults. By this I mean that it is traditional for adults to segregate themselves as a supposedly self-sufficient portion of society and to draw their standards, their expectations, and their stimuli from among themselves. Through this inbreeding it comes to pass that each generation of grown-ups becomes the spiritual successor of the preceding generation of grown-ups, whereas it should be the spiritual successor and heir of its own childhood. Perhaps the younger portion of society will yet release us from our disillusionment. XIV SMALLNESS IN GREAT MEN AND GREATNESS IN SMALL MEN If your peace of mind depends upon your being able to bestow unmixed admiration upon the great men and the great deeds of our national or racial past, think twice before you read the present dominant types of history, biography, and character-delineation. For they are subjecting halos to spectrum-analysis! The result is that we are compelled, time after time, to qualify the approvals that are traditional with us, and to tone down our reverence. How “human,” after all, were these men and these deeds that we had supposed to be so far removed from mere us. How naïve or even gullible were many of our old attachments. We are tempted to become cynical and to feel ourselves disillusioned.