That the art of dissociation will ever be taught in schools under direct state control is, of course, almost infinitely improbable. Those who use the power of the state always desire to preserve a certain given order of things. They therefore always try to persuade or compel their subjects to accept, as right and reasonable, certain solutions (hardly ever the best) of the outstanding problems of politics and economics. Hence the insistence, on the part of governments, that the ideas embodying these solutions shall always be associated with intrinsically pleasing images. The art of dissociation can be taught only by individuals who are not under direct government control. This is one of the reasons why it is so important that state-aided education shall, wherever possible, be supplemented by education in the hands of private persons. Some of this privately organized education will certainly be bad; some will probably exist solely for reasons of snobbery. But a few of the private educators will be genuinely experimental and intelligent; a few will use their blessed independence to make the desirable change which state-controlled teachers are not allowed to initiate. ‘Les enfants n’appartiennent qu’à la République.’ So wrote the Marquis de Sade. That such a man should have been so ardent a supporter of exclusive state education is a fact that, in the light of the history of contemporary dictatorships, is highly significant.

Using an arbitrary, but unavoidable, system of classification, I have spoken in turn of education as character-training, education as instruction, education as training of the emotions. It is now necessary to speak of another form of education, a form which must underlie and accompany all the other forms, namely the education of the body.

In the world as we know it, mind and body form a single organic whole. What happens in the mind affects the body; what happens in the body affects the mind. Education must therefore be a process of physical as well as mental training.

Of what nature should this physical training be? The question cannot be properly answered except in terms of our first principles. We are agreed that the ideal human being is one who is non-attached. Accordingly all education, including physical education, must ultimately aim at producing non-attachment. If we would discover which is the best form of physical training, we must begin by setting forth the physical conditions of non-attachment.

First of all, it is pretty clear that non-attachment is very hardly realizable by anyone whose body is seriously maladjusted. A maladjusted body affects the mind in several ways. When the maladjustment is very great, the body is subject to pain and discomfort. Pain and discomfort invade the field of consciousness, with the result that the owner of the body finds great difficulty in not identifying himself with his faulty physical processes. From a being who is potentially more than what is conventionally styled a ‘person,’ he is reduced by pain and discomfort to a being who is less than a person. He comes to be equated with one of the body’s badly functioning organs.

In other cases pain and discomfort may not be present; but the maladjusted body may be subject, without its owner being aware of the fact, to chronic strains and stresses. What happens in the body affects the mind. Physical strains set up psychological strains. The body is the instrument used by the mind to establish contact with the outside world. Any modification of this instrument must correspondingly modify the mind’s relations with external reality. Where the body is maladjusted and under strain, the mind’s relations, sensory, emotional, intellectual, conative, with external reality are likely to be unsatisfactory. And the same would seem to be true of the mind’s relations with what may be called internal reality—with that more-than-self which, if we choose, we can discover within us and which the mystics have identified with God, the Law, the Light, the integrating principle of the world.

All the Eastern mystics are insistent on the necessity of bodily health. A sick man cannot attain enlightenment. They further point out that it is very difficult for a man to acquire the art of contemplation unless he observes certain rules of diet and adopts certain bodily postures. Similar observations have been made by Christian mystics in the West. For example, the author of The Cloud of Unknowing insists, in a very striking and curious passage which I shall quote in a later chapter, that enlightenment, or mystical union with God, is unattainable by those who are physically uncontrolled to the extent of fidgeting, nervously laughing, making odd gestures and grimaces. Such tics and compulsions (it is a matter of observation) are almost invariably associated with physical maladjustment and strain. Where they exist, the highest forms of non-attachment are unachievable. It follows therefore that the ideal system of physical education must be one which relieves people of maladjustment and strain.

Another condition of non-attachment is awareness. Unawareness is one of the main sources of attachment or evil. ‘Forgive them, for they know not what they do.’ Those who know not what they do are indeed in need of forgiveness; for they are responsible for an immense amount of suffering. Yet more urgent than their need to be forgiven is their need to know. For if they knew, it may be that they would not perform those stupid and criminal acts whose ineluctable consequences no amount of human or divine forgiveness can prevent. A good physical education should teach awareness on the physical plane—not the obsessive and unwished-for awareness that pain imposes upon the mind, but voluntary and intentional awareness. The body must be trained to think. True, this happens every time we learn a manual skill; our bodies think when we draw, or play golf, or take a piano lesson. But all such thinking is specialist thinking. What we need is an education for our bodies that shall be, on the bodily plane, liberal and not merely technical and narrowly specific. The awareness that our bodies need is the knowledge of some general principle of right integration, and along with it, a knowledge of the proper way to apply that principle in every phase of physical activity.

There can be no non-attachment without inhibition. When the state of non-attachment has become ‘a second nature,’ inhibition will doubtless no longer be necessary; for impulses requiring inhibition will not arise. Those in whom non-attachment is a permanent state are few. For everyone else, such impulses requiring inhibition arise with a distressing frequency. The technique of inhibition needs to be learnt on all the planes of our being. On the intellectual plane—for we cannot hope to think intelligently or to practise the simplest form of ‘recollection’ unless we learn to inhibit irrelevant thoughts. On the emotional plane—for we shall never reach even the lowest degree of non-attachment unless we can check as they arise the constant movements of malice and vanity, of lust and sloth, of avarice, anger and fear.

On the physical plane—for if we are maladjusted (as most of us are in the circumstances of modern urban life), we cannot expect to achieve integration unless we inhibit our tendency to perform actions in the, to us, familiar, maladjusted way. Mind and body are organically one; and it is therefore inherently likely that, if we can learn the art of conscious inhibition on the physical level, it will help us to acquire and practise the same art on the emotional and intellectual levels. What is needed is a practical morality working at every level from the bodily to the intellectual. A good physical education will be one which supplies the body with just such a practical morality. It will be a curative morality, a morality of inhibitions and conscious control, and at the same time, by promoting health and proper physical integration, it will be a system of what I have called preventive ethics, forestalling many kinds of trouble by never giving them the opportunity to arise.

So far as I am aware, the only system of physical education which fulfils all these conditions is the system developed by F. M. Alexander. Mr. Alexander has given a full account of his system in three books, each of which is prefaced by Professor John Dewey.[16] It is therefore unnecessary for me to describe it here—all the more so as no verbal description can do justice to a technique which involves the changing, by a long process of instruction on the part of the teacher and of active co-operation on that of the pupil, of an individual’s sensory experiences. One cannot describe the experience of seeing the colour, red.

Similarly one cannot describe the much more complex experience of improved physical co-ordination. A verbal description would mean something only to a person who had actually had the experience described; to the mal-co-ordinated person, the same words would mean something quite different. Inevitably, he would interpret them in terms of his own sensory experiences, which are those of a mal-co-ordinated person. Complete understanding of the system can come only with the practice of it. All I need say in this place is that I am sure, as a matter of personal experience and observation, that it gives us all the things we have been looking for in a system of physical education: relief from strain due to maladjustment, and consequent improvement in physical and mental health; increased consciousness of the physical means employed to gain the ends proposed by the will and, along with this, a general heightening of consciousness on all levels; a technique of inhibition, working on the physical level to prevent the body from slipping back,