Questions of our day / Havelock Ellis.

  • Ellis, Havelock, 1859-1939.
Date:
[1936]
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)

Credit: Questions of our day / Havelock Ellis. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    CAN WE TEACH HOW TO LIVE? but from that period I date my disbelief in all metaphysical doctrines, save as the personal conviction of those who maintain them. Teaching, therefore, in this higher sphere, may be worse than useless. It may produce an effect the very opposite to that desired by the teacher. I am far from being alone in this realization. Authority is becoming suspect. An English writer (I will avoid terming him an authority) on mental hygiene. Dr. Gerard Howe, has lately stressed the reactions which authority tends to arouse in the individual, whether in the form of parent, or teacher, or would-be guide of adults. He has the courage to declare that authority whether in the form of parent, teacher, or grown-up, is not quite the virtuous thing it supposes itself to be. In spite of its self-conscious disinterestedness and its ostentatiously righteous motives, it inevitably fails to produce the effect it seeks. The authoritative teacher makes us afraid to be our¬ selves. We try, and in vain, to be what he thinks we ought to be. The result is too often conflict, perhaps followed by the arrival on the scene of the psycho-analyst. Now conflict is really a part of life, provided it is the balanced and wholesome conflict of legitimate natural impulses. But this kind of conflict is not natural and cannot well lead to any balanced harmony. It offers no security to the real self. I am not trying to say that living is not to be learnt, or that discipline is unnecessary. On the contrary, I would say that the notion that everything must be made easy, and that all that is needed is indulgence, is a notion that is rightly passing out of fashion. Life is an art that all must learn and all art is a discipline. But the only discipline which counts is that which lies in direct contact with the medium of the art, not in an artificial compulsion imposed from without. And this art, though it must be learnt, cannot be taught, because, if it is real, the impulse must proceed from 5