the imagination, which Wordsworth has boldly called "reason in her
most exalted mood." We may thus bring a little poetry and romance into
the monotonous lives of our hand-workers. It may well be that their
discontent has more to do with the starving of their spiritual nature
than we suppose. For the intellectual life, like divine philosophy, is
not dull and crabbed, as fools suppose, but musical as is Apollo's
lute.

Can we end with a definition of the happiness and well-being, which is
the goal of education, as of all else that we try to do? Probably we
cannot do better than accept the famous definition of Aristotle, which
however we must be careful to translate rightly. "Happiness, or
well-being, is an activity of the soul directed towards excellence, in
an unhampered life." Happiness consists in doing rather than being;
the activity must be that of the soul--the whole man acting as a
person; it must be directed towards excellence--not exclusively moral
virtue, but the best work that we can do, of whatever kind; and it
must be unhampered--we must be given the opportunity of doing the best
that is in us to do. To awaken the soul; to hold up before it the
images of whatsoever things are true, lovely, noble, pure, and of good
report; and to remove the obstacles which stunt and cripple the mind;
this is the work which we have called the Training of the Reason.




III

THE TRAINING OF THE IMAGINATION