VII. The Rhythmic System, Sleeping and Waking, Imitation

Our feeling for the good will also be a guide in later life if we have not been forced to observe petty rules, but have realized from the teacher's own warm-hearted words how much he loves a good deed and hates a bad one. His words can make us so warmly responsive to the good and so coldly averse from evil that we turn naturally to the good because the teacher himself loves it. Then we grow up, not bound hand and foot by dogma, but filled with a spontaneous love for what the teacher declares to be true, beautiful and good. If during the first period of school life we have learnt to adopt his standard of truth, beauty and goodness because he has been able to express them in artistic imagery, the impulse for these virtues becomes a second nature, for it is not the intellect that develops goodness. A man who has over and over again been told dogmatically to do this, or net to do that, has a cold, matter-of-fact feeling for the good, whereas one who has learnt in childhood to feel sympathy with goodness and antipathy to evil has unfolded in his rhythmic nature the capacity to respond to the good and to be repelled by what is evil. He has a true enthusiasm for the one and power to resist the other. In later life it is as though under the influence of evil he cannot breathe properly, as if by evil the breathing and the rhythmic system were adversely affected.