It is a Brahminical notion that because minds young in evolution cannot grasp the higher intellectual truths, they should therefore be taught nothing but intellectual falsehoods. This has been their practice, and the degradation of the masses is a living witness to the unwisdom of this extreme practice. Philosophical verities have been carefully hidden from the millions and made the preserve of a mere few. The others have been given a grossly materialistic religion and an ethical code based on utter superstition. The consequence is that now Western ideas and modern education are beginning to spread their ripples beyond the cities to the villages and beyond the better classes to the illiterates. The moral power of religion is breaking down and the miserable masses are being left without anything better than incipient hopelessness and the educated classes without anything better than bitter cynicism. How much wiser would it have been to make the fruits of philosophy available to those who sought them, how much wiser to have carefully taught at least some of the truth about life to these younger minds instead of hiding all truth from them so completely that when the more intelligent ones wake up and discover how they have been deceived, the sudden shock of disillusionment unbalances them utterly and leaves them without ideals and with revolutionary destructive instincts. Too much concealment of the truth has led to the disaster of Bolshevik and Nazi reactions. Too much shielding of undeveloped minds from the facts of existence has left them prey to the worst superstitions and the most harmful charlatanry in the fields of thought and action. The doctrine of secrecy must not be pushed to foolish limits. Let us face the fact that man's mentality has grown and let us give it nourishment suited to its age. If the easier principles of philosophic truth are taught gradually and led up to from the superstitious dogmas which merely symbolize them, the slow revelation will not unsettle the minds of people but on the contrary will strengthen them against wrong-doing and nurture their own self-reliance.
-- Notebooks Category 20: What Is Philosophy? > Chapter 2 : Its Contemporary Influence > # 15
