What is of supreme importance is that in cultivating his critical faculty with an almost intensive culture, while they starve, or at any rate leave untended, his more vital and more emancipative faculties of imagination and sympathy, our Great Public Schools and Universities are doing him a serious and lasting injury.

Let us take the case of a young man of energy and ability who has just left Oxford or Cambridge, having won high honours in one of the humanistic "schools." Let us assume that, like so many of his kind, he has a keenly critical mind, but is deficient in imagination and sympathy; and let us then try to forecast his future.

That the faith of his childhood, undermined by his criticism, has already fallen to pieces or will shortly do so, is more than probable.

That he will be too unimaginative to attempt to construct a new faith out of the ruins of the old, is practically certain.

His lack of faith, in the broader sense of the word, will incapacitate him for high seriousness (which he will regard as "bad form"), and _a fortiori_ for enthusiasm (which he will shun like the plague), and will therefore predispose him to frivolity.