Page:Labour and childhood.djvu/172

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LABOUR AND CHILDHOOD

But what is that goal beyond—that higher level for which all the rest of the human system seems to labour and travail. What are those vast, silent areas, whose work is carried on in a darkness which has not been penetrated, and which seem to hold fast locked in their open yet silent hearts the mystery of our moral and mental life. Some things we know of them, that their action for example is largely one of restraint, of inhibition—that, in part at least, they act like the brakes on a machine, powerful brakes that can arrest the headlong course of primitive impulse.

Arresting power is here, and transforming power is also here, a new power of elaboration, and its exercise is seen in qualities that are more and more dominating the advancing race. And here too there is, almost certainly the same order of provision, the same kind of mechanical arrangements that determine progress of a less inspiring order. Just as there are word-storage places that make possible the development of speech and writing, so there is a storage of memories that makes possible the birth of a moral sense. Where are these memories, relating to conduct and feeling, stored? "We cannot localize them," says one of the latest and ablest specialists on this subject. "They are a very late