especially common in this country, though it is certainly to be found
everywhere. The passion for irrational accumulation is one example of
the error, which causes the gravest social inconvenience. The largest
part of social injustice and suffering is caused by the unchecked
indulgence of the acquisitive instinct by those who have the
opportunity of indulging it, and who have formed a blind habit of
indulging it. No one, however selfish, who had formed any reasonable
estimate of the relative values of life, would devote his whole time
to the economical exploitation of his neighbours, in order to pile up
the instruments of a fuller life, which he will never use. To regard
business as a kind of game is, from the highest point of view, right,
and our nation gains greatly by applying the ethics of sport to all
our external activities; but we err in living for our games, whether
they happen to be commerce or football. A friend of mine expostulated
with a Yorkshire manufacturer who was spending his old age in
unnecessary toil for the benefit of a spendthrift heir. The old man
answered, "If it gives him half as much pleasure to spend my half
million as it has given me to make it, I don't grudge it him." That is
not the spirit of the real miser or Mammon-worshipper. It is the
spirit of a natural idealist who from want of education has no
rational standard of good. When such a man intervenes in educational
matters, he is sure to take the standpoint of the so-called practical
man, because he is blind to the higher values of life. He will wish to
make knowledge and wisdom instruments for the production of wealth, or
the improvement of the material condition of the poor. But knowledge
and wisdom refuse to be so treated. Like goodness and beauty, wisdom
is one of the absolute values, the divine ideas. As one of the
Cambridge Platonists said, we must not make our intellectual faculties
Gibeonites, hewers of wood and drawers of water to the will and
affections. Wisdom must be sought for its own sake or we shall not