Yet the conditioners will act. When I said just now that all motives fail them, I should have said all motives, except one. All motives that claim any validity other than that of their felt emotional weight at a given moment, have failed them. Everything except the sic volo, sic jubeo has been explained away.1 But what never claimed objectivity cannot be destroyed by subjectivism. The impulse to scratch when I itch or to pull to pieces when I am inquisitive is immune from the solvent which is fatal to my justice, or honor, or care for posterity. When all that says ‘it is good’ has been debunked, what says ‘I want’ remains. It cannot be exploded or ‘seen through’ because it never had any pretensions.
Part 2»
C. S. Lewis | The Abolition of Man: Or Reflections On Education with Special Reference to the Teaching of English In the Upper Forms of Schools (New York: MacMillan, 1947), 41.
Note
1. This is a allusion, perhaps via Luther or Kipling, who famously used this same expression, to a passage in the Roman satirist Juvenal, “‘Hoc volo, sic jubeo, sit pro ratione voluntas’. ‘I will it, I insist on it. Let my will stand rather than reason’.”
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C. S. Lewis
C. S. Lewis (1898–1963) was born in Belfast, educated prep schools in England, Belfast, and earned his undergraduate degree at Oxford. He was a military veteran of World War I and, in 1925, appointed tutor in Magdalen College, Oxford. He was converted to Christianity in 1931 and became a prominent literary critic, scholar of Norse mythology, Medieval and Sixteenth-Century English, and a leading apologist for Christianity. His academic work is still appreciated by scholars and his popular fiction (e.g., The Chronicles of Narnia are beloved by millions.
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