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.... 

The Chinese also speak of a great thing (the greatest thing) called the Tao.  It is the reality beyond all predicates, the abyss that was before the Creator Himself.  It is Nature, it is the Way, the Road.  It is the Way in which the universe goes on, the Way in which things everlastingly emerge, stilly and tranquilly, into space and time.  It is also the Way which every man should tread in imitation of that cosmic and supercosmic progression, conforming all activity to that great exemplar.... 

This conception in all its forms, Platonic, Aristotelian, Stoic, Christian, and Oriental alike, I shall henceforth refer to for brevity simply as 'the Tao..." 

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, is not one among a series of possible systems of value.  It is the sole source of all value judgements.  If it is rejected, all value is rejected.... 

There are progressions in which the last step is sui generis--incommensurable with the others--and in which to go the whole way is to undo all the labour of your previous journey.  To reduce the Tao to a mere natural product is a step of that kind.  Up to that point, the kind of explanation which explains thing away might give us something, though at a heavy cost.  But you cannot go on 'explaining away' for ever: you will find that you have explained explanation itself away.  You cannot go on 'seeing through' things for ever.  The whole point of seeing through something is to see 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. 

---C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man (1947).