Outline

of

The Abolition of Man*

by

C. S. Lewis

Outlined by Robert A. Lotzer

In February 1943, C. S. Lewis gave three Riddell Memorial Lectures at Durham University based upon two textbooks, which he had received for review.  The two books were:  The Control of Language (1940), written by two Australian authors, Alex King and Martin Ketley and The Reading and Writing of English (1936) by E. G. Biaggini.  These two books were written to teach English to children in the upper grades and while Lewis chose at the time not to reveal their identity he was nevertheless alarmed at the books' underlying, insidious naturalistic philosophy which he felt was a prevalent and dangerous error within modern education. 

The three lectures were eventually published in one of Lewis' most famous apologetical works entitled:  The Abolition of Man:  Reflections on Education with Special Reference to the Teaching of English in the Upper Forms of Schools (Oxford:  University Press, 1943) [AOM]. 

In AOM Lewis is confronting what is known as the "emotive" approach to ethics, or what we sometimes call "relativism" ("to each his own").  Emotive ethics is based upon the philosophical worldview of naturalism or materialism.  [Naturalism is the worldview that believes that material matter is all that exists and all that ever existed, including humans, within a closed system.]  There is no supernatural    It argues that "emotion" or "feelings" is the sole factor in ethical decision making and that morals are really only examples of personal taste or preferences.  For instance, to say "murder is wrong" really means that "I don't like murder" or "I feel like murder is wrong."  Ethical statements are merely an expression of our subjective feelings.  There are no objective absolutes upon which ethics are based which are binding on all persons everywhere.  In other words, nothing is literally right or wrong.  These terms are simply the expression of emotion or our feelings and as such they are neither true nor false. 

Lewis argued that the authors teach "nothing of letters" and that their cynicism and debunking cuts the soul out of the student.  In November 1947, Lewis wrote to Dorothy Sayers explaining that the books are so dangerous because "they smuggled (relativism) in without argument in a book on a slightly different subject, for children, without probably being aware that is was controversial."

That is why in the lectures, to conceal their identity, Lewis refers to King and Ketley's book as The Green Book and its authors as Gaius and Titius (which are the Latin forms of generally representative standard fictitious names).  He refers to Biaggini as Orbilius (p. 20, probably alluding to the Roman language teacher, Lucius Orbilius Pupillus, who had a reputation as being a ruthless educator).

Peter Kreeft, in C. S. Lewis for the Third Millennium, said, "I believe the two most prophetic books of our century are Aldous Huxley's Brave New World and C. S. Lewis' Abolition of Man.  If you want to see the third millennium, read these two books."  Some have argued that AOM is the greatest defense of Natural Law ever written.

Lewis was concerned with the effects of such an approach to ethics upon little children which long after they arrived in adulthood would eventually reduce them to becoming nothing more than "trousered apes," the total loss of all humanity.

Chapter 1:  Men Without Chests

In the first chapter, Lewis begins by describing the heart of the error found within these textbooks by giving just one example from The Green Book, where the authors comment on a well-known story of Coleridge at the waterfall.  There were two tourists who were looking at the waterfall and one called it "sublime" (lofty, grand, magnificent) while the other, "pretty."  Gaius and Titius make the following comment which outraged Lewis:

When the man said "that is sublime," he appeared to be making a remark about the waterfall. . . .  Actually . . . he was not making a remark about the waterfall, but a remark about his own feelings.  What he was saying was really "I have feelings associated in my mind with the word 'sublime'" or shortly, "I have sublime feelings. . . ."  This confusion is continually present in language as we use it.  We appear to be saying something very important about something:  and actually we are only saying something about our own feelings (14). 

Lewis notes two problems with such thinking that will cause the student to think:

1.  That all sentences containing a predicate of value are statements about the emotional state of the speaker,

2.  that all such statements are unimportant (15).

While the authors may not have said such explicitly they leave it up to the child to now extend the "same treatment to all predicates of value."  What the authors end up doing is infuse the children with a subtle assumption which ten years down the line, while its origin forgotten and perhaps unconsciously, will cause them to deny all value or truth statements in their thinking (or relativism). 

What the authors end up doing is not truly teaching the child anything about literature (giving them any help to real discovery in reading), but rather instills within the child:

the belief that all emotions aroused by local association are in themselves contrary to reason and contemptible.  He will have no notion that there are two ways of being immune to such an advertisement -- that falls equally flat on those who are below it, on the man of real sensibility and on the mere trousered ape who has never been able to conceive the Atlantic as anything more than so many million tons of cold salt water (19-20). 

By removing upfront any possibility of real or true objective statements about things Gaius and Titius have effectively:

cut out his (the child's) soul long before he is old enough to choose, the possibility of having certain experiences which thinkers of more authority than they have held to be generous, fruitful, and humane . . . That is their day's lesson in English, though of English they have learned nothing.  Another little portion of the human heritage has been quietly taken from them before they were old enough to understand (20, 22).

What Gaius and Titius have effectively done was to propagate their own philosophy in a clean sweep of all traditional values, which are replaced now by their new set of values.  Rather than teach about objective truth they have become propagandists for their own relativistic philosophy and ethics.  Lewis argues that:

The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles but to irrigate deserts.  The right defense against false sentiments is to inculcate just sentiments.  [But] by starving the sensibility of our pupils we only make them easier prey to the propagandist when he comes.  For famished nature will be avenged and a hard heart is no infallible protection against a soft head (24).

But this has not been the traditional method of education until recent times.  Formerly, educators believed:

The universe to be such that certain emotional reactions on our part could be either congruous or incongruous to it -- believed in fact, that objects did not merely receive, but could merit, our approval or disapproval, our reverence, or our contempt (25).

In other words, there was some objective standard by which our value statements could be measured as either right or wrong.

For instance, Aristotle said that the aim of education is to make the pupil like and dislike what he or she "ought" to like or dislike: 

When the age for reflective thought comes, the pupil who has been thus trained in 'ordinate affections' or 'just sentiments' will easily find the first principles of Ethic:  but to the corrupt man they will never be visible at all and he can make no progress in that science (26). 

Plato before him argued that:

The little human animal will not at first have the right responses.  It must be trained to feel pleasure, liking, disgust, and hatred at those things which really are pleasant, likeable, disgusting, and hateful . . . All this before he is of an age to reason; so that when Reason at length comes to him, then, bred as he has been, he will hold out his hands in welcome and recognize her because of the affinity he bears to her (26-27).

Compare at this age what Dorothy Sayers calls the "Poll-parrot" age or the "grammar" stage of the Trivium (see the Lost Tools of Learning).

But what do we do when educators, who are supposed to be instilling in children values of right and wrong, rather teach them that there are no true, objective moral statements?  Lewis argues that we are setting up our children for a future disaster. 

But where modern educators supposed to find this ultimate standard of right and wrong.  Lewis argues that it has gone by different names among different cultures:

This conception in all its forms, Platonic, Aristotelian, Stoic, Christian, and Oriental alike, I shall henceforth refer to for brevity simply as 'the Tao' . . . It is the doctrine of objective value, the belief that certain attitudes are really true, and others really false, to the kind of thing the universe is and the kind of things we are (29). 

What Lewis calls the "Tao," we often refer to it as "the natural law" or what Paul calls the "law written upon men's hearts" or "conscience" (cf. Rom. 2:14-15).  Since the Tao is objective then modern educators can teach children that there is an objective standard by which value statements can be measured as either right or wrong and therefore our:

Emotional states can be in harmony with reason (when we feel liking for what ought to be approved) or out of harmony with reason (when we perceive that liking is due but cannot feel it) . . . they can be reasonable or unreasonable as they conform to Reason or fail to conform.  The heart never takes the place of the head:  but it can, and should, obey it (29-30).

But the authors of The Green Book exclude from the very beginning the possibility of any value statement as being reasonable or unreasonable:

This reference to something beyond the emotion is what Gaius and Titius exlude from every sentence containing a predicate of value.  Such statements, for them, refer solely to the emotion . . . On this view, the world of facts, without one trace of value, and the world of feelings without one trace of truth or falsehood, justice or injustice, confront one another, and no rapprochement is possible (30).

We are beginning to see the vast differences of a philosophy of education that is either based upon the objective standard of the Tao and those who reject it:

For those within (the Tao), the task is to train in the pupil those responses which are in themselves appropriate, whether anyone is making them or not, and in making which the very nature of man consists.  Those without, if they are logical, must regard all sentiments as equally non-rational, as mere mists between us and the real objects.  As a result, they must either decide to remove all sentiments, as far as possible, from the pupil's mind:  or else to encourage some sentiments for reasons that have nothing to do with their intrinsic 'justness' or 'ordinacy' (31).

So here is the danger in Gaius and Titius' attempt to "debunk" the traditional, objective standard of truth:  either they must reject all statements of value or they must work outside the Tao to produce their own standard, which is usually what works for the survival of the human species.  But then the educator has moved from the position of the "initiator" of the child's conscience or what Lewis earlier referred to "irrigating deserts" as opposed to "cutting down jungles" (cf. 24) and the educator has become a "conditioner" or remaking man in "their" own image.  Another analogy would be that the educators are no longer seeking to "propagate" the truth from one generation to the next, but merely "propaganda" of their "new morality."

While Gaius and Titius actually oppose "propaganda" as the means of education, nevertheless, their approach is no less dangerous because they strip away from the child the ability to discern from right or wrong.  "Without the aid of trained emotions the intellect is powerless against the animal organism" (33-34).

Plato used an analogy of the king governed by his executive, so Reason in man must rule the mere appetites by means of the "spirited element."  In other words, the head is to rule the belly through the chest -- the seat of Magnanimity, of emotions organized by trained habit into stable sentiments.  The head (reason) rules our belly (appetites or desires/urges) through our chests (passion for truth).  The chest is to be informed by the educator in values of right and wrong.  It is the Chest-Magnanimity-Sentiment which are the indispensable liaison officers between cerebral man and visceral man.  It is this element (the middle of man) that is uniquely human.  By intellect alone, man is merely spirit and by his appetite alone he is merely an animal.  But modern culture/educators have produced an entire generation "without chests" -- without a passion for good and a hatred of evil.

And these modern educators have the audacity to call themselves "intellectuals" because they set themselves up as the authority of education and therefore to attack their philosophy is to attack "intelligence" itself.

But at the end of the day, they are no more "intellectuals" than the other man and instead they are creating a generation of new men who will be anything but intellectual.  As Lewis writes:

And all the time -- such is the tragic-comedy of our situation -- we continue to clamour for those very qualities we are rendering impossible.  You can hardly open a periodical without coming across the statements that what our civilization needs is more 'drive,' or dynamisim, or self-sacrifice, or 'creativity.'  In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function.  We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise.  We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst.  We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful (35).

We want leaders with such chests but we have created a philosophy that rejects such as unreal and yet we still clamor all day long for those very men that are now impossible to exist. 

Chapter 2:  The Way

"The practical result of education in the spirit of The Green Book must be the destruction of the society which accepts it" (39).

The problem with Gaius and Titius' "subjectivism" (or, the theory that limits all knowledge to the subjective experience) is not that subjectivism per se is useless, that is as long as we are "subjective" within the Tao.  But Gaius and Titius are merely subjective about one thing -- the Tao, or traditional values.  While rejecting the Tao, they believe there are certain "other" values about which they are not subjective at all.  Why else would they have written The Green Book if they didn't believe that the propagation of "their truths" were unimportant or undesirable?

If they didn't believe in their own personal value system then their whole book has no purpose. 

For the whole purpose of their book is so to condition the young reader that he will share their approval, and this would be either a fool's or a villain's undertaking unless they held that their approval was in some way valid or correct (40).

Rather than being true skeptics of value judgments, Gaius and Titius are rather uncritically dogmatic about their own values, which are "modern" and in "vogue" for the moment.  Their skepticism only applies to "other peoples" values of which they disagree, but about their own set of values they are not very skeptical at all. 

A great many of those who "debunk" traditional or (as they would say) 'sentimental' values have in the background values of their own which they believe to be immune from the debunking process (41).

Now what will happen to a society that accepts seriously their approach?

Once all value statements are stripped of real meaning in order to get to the basic ground of the value, where will we find such "ground"?  There are two options:

First, the "innovator" will argue that the ground is "pure reason."  But what does Gaius and Titius mean by "pure reason"?  Is this too merely subjective?  Is it merely from within, derived from their own senses?

Then how will you be able to determine whose senses are correct?  You may rationally argue for the "fact" that something "is" but how do you extrapolate from that what someone "ought" to do in response? 

The Innovator is trying to get a conclusion in the imperative mood out of premises in the indicative mood:  and though he continues trying to all eternity he cannot succeed, for the thing is impossible (43-44).

Either the Tao, which the innovators reject, must inform us what we "ought" to do or we must reject all such value statements.

Second, the innovator will argue that the ground for making an ethical statement should be "instinct" among society.  By "instinct" we know that society or the human race ought to be preserved.  Therefore, as long as what is done doesn't destroy our own species then we are free to do it.  As Lewis says:

It looks, in fact, as if an ethics based on instinct will give the Innovator all he wants and nothing that he does not want.  In reality we have not advanced one step (45).

Now, how exactly does "instinct" help us to find "real values"?  And are we supposed to obey instinct?  If so, then why do Gaius and Titius write anything of value?  Why are they trying to attempt at all to cause us to go against our instincts and choose their values?

In other words, whose instincts are we going to obey?  Once you arrive at one instinct, there is another, and another -- an infinite regress of instincts.  If we have a spontaneous impulse to act in such and such way, what determines whether or not I "ought" to obey this impulse?

Telling us to obey instinct is like telling us to obey 'people.'  People say different things:  so do instincts.  Our instincts are at war . . . Each instinct, if you listen to it, will claim to be gratified at the expense of all the rest.  By the very act of listening to one rather than to others we have already prejudiced the case (48).

Without a higher court of judgment we have no reason to prefer one instinct over another.  "Either the premises already concealed an imperative or the conclusion remains merely in the indicative" (49).

Also, why should we presuppose that people have any desire to promote the benefit of the "human species"?  Why do we think that people don't just care about themselves or their own family?  Most people seem to care only about their own children or grandchildren and not some philanthropic ideal of the whole human race.

While the Tao might tell us to value other humans, there is nothing in "instinct" that tells us that we "ought" to value the human race.  How absurd can we be to say that because a mother cares for her child that she "ought" to care for every other child or even for the next generation of children?  Only the Tao can tell us that the next generation is of value.  Instinct cannot.  So how can you base your ethic of the hope of future generations upon "instinct" when you have swept away all basis for such care?

The only hope that this generation and all future generations have is to base our ethic in the Tao.  Once you reject the Tao, you have no basis, either in "pure reason" or "instinct," upon which you can find what you "ought" to do.  Every other option only gives you what "is" not what you "ought" to do in response.

In fact, every time the Innovator attempts to attack the Tao, he ends up using values derived from the Tao, for his debunking.  It is only by using the Tao that he can make value judgments against the Tao.  But, if the Tao falls, then every value falls with it.  No one value can then claim authority over another.  So where does the Innovator find his authority to pick and choose between values?

Lewis says the only option is:

This thing which I have called for convenience the Tao, and which others may call Natural Law or Traditional Morality or the First Principles of Practical Reason or the First Platitudes, is not one among a series of possible systems of value.  It is the sole source of all value judgments.  If it is rejected, all value is rejected.  If any value is retained, it is retained.  The effort to refute it and raise a new system of value in its place is self-contradictory.  There never has been, and never will be, a radically new judgment of value in the history of the world.  What purport to be new systems or (as they now call them) 'ideologies,' all consist of fragments from the Tao itself, arbitrarily wrenched from their context in the whole and then swollen to madness in their isolation, yet still owing to the Tao and to it alone such validity as they possess.  If my duty to my parents is a superstition, then so is my duty to posterity.  If justice is a superstition, then so is my duty to my country or my race.  If the pursuit of scientific knowledge is a real value, then so is conjugal fidelity.  The rebellion of the branches against the tree:  if the rebels could succeed they would find that they had destroyed themselves.  The human mind has no more power of inventing a new value than of imagining a new primary color, or, indeed, of creating a new sun and a new sky for it to move in (56-57). 

Does this mean then that there is no more work to be done with understanding exactly what the Tao says?  No.  But all the criticisms or smoothing out of possible contradictions with the Tao must be performed within the Tao itself.  It is only within the Tao that one finds the authority to modify the Tao.  Outside the Tao there is no ground for criticizing either the Tao or anything else. 

If someone comes up with a "new" value then the burden of proof is upon the reformer to show why it is of value in relation to the Tao.  Any other approach will end up destroying all statements of value.  Only those who are operating within the Tao are able to understand it and understand all other statements of value in relation to it.

Lewis wants to be clear at this point that he is not arguing for something that is unique to any one religion, such as Christianity.  Rather:

I am simply arguing that if we are to have values at all we must accept the ultimate platitudes of Practical Reason as having absolute validity:  that any attempt, having become skeptical about these, to reintroduce value lower down on some supposedly more "realistic basis, is doomed (61).

But let's say that someone will accept everything that has been said thus far and concludes that we should then just throw out all statements of value altogether.  We have mastered nature through science, so why can't we master the human conscience?  Let's throw out all values and simply make man into the way we want him.  This is the subject of the third lecture, "The Abolition of Man."

Chapter 3:  The Abolition of Man

We have taken great pride is "man's conquest of nature."  Surely there is an element of truth to this statement that man has progressed in the scientific enterprise of gaining power over nature.  However, just what has happened in our "conquest"?

Let's look at just three examples of such conquest:  the aeroplane, the wireless, and the contraceptive.  When we speak of man's power over nature, what we really mean is "some" men's power over nature.  Those who really possess the power over nature are those who control or provide others with this power.  And those who provide access to it can choose who will benefit and who will not. 

What we call Man's power is, in reality, a power possessed by some men which they may, or may not, allow men to profit by (68).

And those who truly possess the power can wield that power at their own disposal.  Others who do not control the power in the end become the subject or patient of those with power.  This includes future generations.  For instance, in the case of contraceptives:

There is a paradoxical, negative sense in which all possible future generations are the patients or subjects of a power wielded by those already alive.  By contraception simply, they are denied existence; by contraception used as a means of selective breeding, they are, without their concurring voice, made to be what one generation, for its own reasons, may choose to prefer (68).

Therefore:

What we call Man's power over Nature turns out to be a power exercised by some men over other men with Nature as its instrument (69).

We could certainly solve this dilemma by the state forcing all its members to have equal access to the power but then we would still have the power of one nation over another nation.  The power of the majorities over the minorities.  Of early generations over latter generations.

We must have a long-term perspective on our present-day scientific knowledge.  Because:

In reality . . . if any one age really attains, by eugenics and scientific education, the power to make its descendents what it pleases, all men who live after it are the patients of that power.  They are weaker, not stronger: for though we may have put wonderful machines in their hands we have pre-ordained how they are to use them (70).

Further, because we possess such power over future generations, then those who possess such power will seek to control and contain it within a smaller and smaller group of "planners" and "conditioners" of human society. 

Man's conquest of Nature, if the dreams of some scientific planners are realized, means the rule of a few hundreds of men over billions upon billions of men.  There neither is nor can be any simple increase of power on Man's side.  Each new power won by man is a power over man as well.  Each advance leaves him weaker as well as stronger (71).

The final stage is come when Man by eugenics, by pre-natal conditioning, and by an education and propaganda based on a perfect applied psychology, has obtained full control over himself.  Human nature will be the last part of Nature to surrender to Man.  The battle will then be won.  We shall have "taken the thread of life out of the hand of Clotho" and be henceforth free to make our species whatever we wish it to be.  The battle will indeed be won.  But who, precisely, will have won it? (72)

For the power of Man to make himself what he pleases means, as we have seen, the power of some men to make other men what they please (72).

Now what happens when those without a moral compass come to power and begin to legislate their relativistic morality? 

These "conditioners" of society who have no reference point for ultimate good, who are without external moral standards/a conscience, will then control the masses.  But without a moral standards, the conditioners (like Hitler) can condition the human conscience in any way they choose.  And without an objective standard of moral good there is no evil (anything is right).

But the future situation will only be worse for two reasons.  First, the power will be enormously increased. 

The man-moulders of the new age will be armed with the powers of an omnicompetent state and an irresistible scientific technique:  we shall get at last a race of conditioners who really can cut out all posterity in what shape they please (73).

Second, in the older systems, the educators wished to produce, and were themselves motivated by, the Tao in their students -- a standard to which the teachers themselves were subject and which they claimed no liberty to depart.  "They did not cut men to some pattern they had chosen.  They handed on what they had received" (74).

But in the future, value judgments are at the educators own disposal and are produced in the pupil by conditioning.  Whatever Tao there is will be the product, not the motive, of education.  Here again is yet one more part of nature they will have conquered. 

Now the Conditioners will control their subjects and produce a conscience in them that they choose for them to have.  The Conditioners will not themselves be subject to this control but will determine what kind of artificial Tao to impose upon others to produce the human race they choose. 

"Scientific control of human behavior" -- Behavioral and Social control -- cf. B. F. Skinner (behaviorist) -- social conditioners.  Skinner envisioned a new society in which scientific planners control human behavior through stimulus-response mechanisms (see Beyond Freedom and Dignity and Walden Two).  Skinner argues that the only thing that prevents us from completely controlling human behavior are those pesky traditional values which need to be swept away.

Therefore, instead of each person being held responsible for his own actions and rewarded for his achievements, a scientific analysis shifts both responsibility and achievements to the environment. 

Scientific management of human behavior is the belief that human behavior is primarily the function of either natural or historical phenomena. 

Lewis is questioning the establishment of behavioral and social control (genetic engineering) and naturalism as the theoretical model for the study of human beings.  Scientific planners to control human behavior.

For a while the lasting vestiges of the Tao may control them so that they look like the servants or guardians of humanity who are only looking out for the good of the masses.  But those last vestiges will only last for a short time and they too will submit to the control of the Conditioners.  They will now demand our duty to be conditioned by them for our "good."  But then who will define what the "good" is but the Conditioners themselves.  They have finally sacrificed their own humanity in order to define what "humanity" will now mean in their eyes.

Stepping outside the Tao, they have stepped into the void.  Nor are their subjects necessarily unhappy men.  They are not men at all:  they are artifacts.  Man's final conquest has proved to be the abolition of Man (77).

And the Conditioners will indeed act but once they have stepped outside the Tao they will be motivated only by their own pleasure.  Once they stand outside all judgments of value they cannot have any ground for preferring one of their own impulses to another except the emotional strength of that impulse (78).

Some will hope that these Conditioners will be benevolent in their control but Lewis says:

I am very doubtful whether history shows us one example of a man, who, having stepped outside traditional morality and attained power, has used that power benevolently.  I am inclined to think that the Conditioners will hate the conditioned (78).

Once the Tao is abandoned obedience to our impulses (to mere nature) is the only course left open (79).  Therefore, nature -- now liberated from the Tao -- rules the Conditioners, who in turn rules all of humanity.

Man's conquest of Nature turns out, in the moment of its consummation, to be Nature's conquest of Man.  Every victory we seemed to win has led us, step by step, to this conclusion.  All Nature's apparent reverses have been but tactical withdrawals.  We thought we were beating her back when she was luring us on.  What looked to us like hands held up in surrender was really the opening of arms to enfold us for ever (80).

But how could we ever arrive at such a state?  It begins with how we usually define "Nature"

Nature seems to be the spatial and temporal, as distinct from what is less fully so or not so at all.  She seems to be the world of quantity, as against the world of quality:  of objects as against consciousness:  of the bound, as against the wholly or partially autonomous:  of that which knows no values as against that which both has and perceives values:  of efficient causes (or, in some modern systems, of no causality at all) as against final causes. 

Now I take it that when we understand a thing analytically and then dominate and use it for our own convenience we reduce it to the level of "Nature" in the sense that we suspend our judgments of value about it, ignore its final cause (if any), and treat it in terms of quantity (81).

Once we reduce something in this world to "mere Nature" something of its reality is lost.  We reduce things to mere Nature in order to conquer them.  But what happens when we reduce human nature to mere nature?

As soon as we take the final step of reducing our own species to the level of mere Nature, the whole process is stultified, for this time the being who stood to gain and the being who has been sacrificed are one and the same (83).

Once our souls, that is, our selves, have been given up, the power thus conferred will not belong to us.  We shall in fact be the slaves and puppets of that to which we have given our souls.  It is in Man's power to treat himself as a mere "natural object" and his own judgments of value as raw material for scientific manipulation to alter at will . . . if man chooses to treat himself as raw material, raw material he will be:  not raw material to be manipulated, as he fondly imagined, by himself, but by mere appetite, that is, mere Nature, in the person his dehumanized Conditioners (83-84).

Either we are rational spirit obliged for ever to obey the absolute values of the Tao, or else we are mere nature to be kneaded and cut into new shapes for the pleasures of masters who must, by hypothesis, have no motive but their own 'natural' impulses (84).

Once we reject the Tao by reducing it to a mere natural product we have ended up explaining explanation itself away. 

You cannot go on "seeing through" things for ever.  The whole point of seeing through something is to see something through it.  It is good that the window should be transparent, because the street or garden beyond it is opaque.  How if you saw through the garden too?  It is no use trying to "see through" first principles.  If you see through everything, then everything is transparent.  But a wholly transparent world is an invisible world.  To "see through" all things is the same as not to see (91).

Appendix:  Illustrations of the Tao

See pp. 95-121 for examples of Tao.

*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 Pub. Co., 1947).