Then the difference between the motive force which Egeria exerts, and the motive force which her rival exerts, is the difference between _x_ + _y_, and _x_ - _y_, _y_ being used to symbolise the aggregate motive force of the expansive tendencies of the child's inner nature.
Such a difference is incalculable.

The scheme of education which is based on distrust of the child's nature and belief in its intrinsic sinfulness and stupidity, necessarily arrays against itself the hidden forces of that maligned and despised nature, and must needs overcome their resistance before it can hope to achieve its proposed end.

While Egeria is helping Nature to provide suitable channels for the various expansive tendencies that are at work in the child, and to guide them all into the central channel of self-realisation, her rival is engaged in digging a canal (to be filled, when finished, with dead, stagnant water) which is so designed that not only will no use be made by it of the life stream of the child's latent energies, but also costly culverts and other works will have to be constructed for it in order to divert and send to waste that troublesome current.
The waste of motive force which goes on under any scheme of education through mechanical obedience, is indeed enormous.

And what is most lamentable is that the energies of the teacher are being largely wasted in the effort to neutralise the latent energies of the child.
No wonder that, in order to produce his meagre and illusory, "results," the teacher should have to resort to motive forces which, by appealing to the lower side of the child's nature, will enable him to bear down the resistance, and, in doing so, to impede the outgrowth of the higher,--to the hope of external rewards and the threat of external punishments.

And no wonder that, owing to the teacher having to work unceasingly against the grain of the child's nature, of these two demoralising forces, the fear of punishment--which, if not the more demoralising, is certainly the more wasteful of energy--should bulk the more largely in the eyes of the child.
In fine, then, whereas the conventional type of education is so wasteful of motive force that it dissipates the greater part of the teachers' and the scholars' energies in needless friction,--in Utopia, on the other hand, there is such an economy of motive force that the very joy which, under its scheme of education, always accompanies the child's expenditure of energy, and which might be regarded as merely a waste by-product, becomes in its turn a powerful incentive to further exertion.
* * * * * "_But is there not too much joy in Utopia?
Is not the sky too cloudless?
Is not the atmosphere too clear?
Does the Utopian never act from a sense of duty?
Has he never to do anything that is distasteful to him ?_" This objection raises an interesting question.
Is the function of the sense of duty to enable us to do distasteful things?
And if so, are we to regard it as the highest of motives to moral action?
In the days when Kant's idea of the "moral imperative" was in the ascendant, the belief got abroad that the essence of virtue was to do what you hated doing.