“You think you have shown that the feeling of disillusionment that is spreading among us is a mood and a fashion rather than a rational conviction; that the psychological evidence of our essential lowness is weak; that our motivation is not a composite of instincts; that in the evolutionary order, of which we are a part, desires as well as structures evolve, so that the unprecedented in motives occurs and is to be expected; that mind is marvellously plastic, and in unconventional childhood is beautiful; that, under favorable school conditions, creativeness bubbles up out of the commonplace; that after the hot crucible of historical criticism has brought to the surface all the dross of both great men and small, it reveals also precious gold; that even within our selfish economic order high and fine strains of desire can be seen, as if a god were struggling to create a superior species through our mastery of natural resources. You find that, in and through the complex that we call our motives there runs a demand of personal-selves-in-the-making, a demand for mutual self-realization in an order of reason, beauty, and good-will, in the creation of which they are participants. “All very soothing,” continues the cynic, “provided that you keep your eyes straight ahead. But if you look to the right or the left of this reasoning, this is what you see: In form, the argument defends the dignity of life, but it does so only by picking out facts that shine by contrast with our everyday conduct. Practically everything that has been said includes or implies a protest against the ordinary run of human motives, valuations, and habits. Thus, the passage from childhood to adulthood is admitted to be a hardening process; it is admitted that the capacities for creation occasionally displayed by the young are generally thwarted, and that the very citadels of the spirit--the home, the church, the school--are infected with the unspirituality of our current economic standards and practices. It is made to appear, further, that the economic order, which might and should have a main part in the creation of man in cooperation with God, actually is an enormous mechanism that subordinates men--capitalists and workers alike--to a part, and the lower part, of their own motives, and these largely misunderstood. “You have proved that human nature contains factors that the current disillusionment ignores or misrepresents, but you have shown also that the actual exercise of men’s wills thwarts and imprisons the superior motives that you are so concerned about.”