Rousseau’s repudiation of habit is first of all, it should be pointed out, perfectly chimerical. The trait of the child to which the sensible educator will give chief attention is not his spontaneity, but his proneness to imitate. In the absence of good models the child will imitate bad ones, and so, long before the age of intelligent choice and self-determination, become the prisoner of bad habits. Men, therefore, who aim at being civilized must come together, work out a convention in short, regarding the habits they wish transmitted to the young. A great civilization is in a sense only a great convention. A sane individualist does not wish to escape from convention in itself; he merely remembers that no convention is final--that it is always possible to improve the quality of the convention in the midst of which he is living, and that it should therefore be held flexibly. He would oppose no obstacles to those who are rising above the conventional level, but would resist firmly those who are sinking beneath it. It is much easier to determine practically whether one has to do with an ascent or a descent (even though the descent be rapturous like that of the Rousseauist) than our anarchical individualists are willing to acknowledge. The notion that in spite of the enormous mass of experience that has been accumulated in both East and West we are still without light as to the habits that make for moderation and good sense and decency, and that education is therefore still purely a matter of exploration and experiment is one that may be left to those who are suffering from an advanced stage of naturalistic intoxication--for example, to Professor John Dewey and his followers. From an ethical point of view a child has the right to be born into a cosmos, and not, as is coming to be more and more the case under such influences, pitch-forked into chaos. But the educational radical, it may be replied, does stress the idea of habit; and it is true that he would have the young acquire the habits that make for material efficiency. This, however, does not go beyond Rousseau who came out very strongly for what we should call nowadays vocational training.[318] It is the adjustment to the human law against which Rousseau and all the Rousseauists are recalcitrant.