In The Abolition of Man Lewis is using the idea "men without chests" to describe the teaching styles of Gaius and Titius in their text book because it relies very little on emotion and feeling, and even to a point discourage it. Lewis uses this example to describe their idea (about someone talking about a waterfall), "We appear to be saying something very important about something: and actually we are only saying something about out own feelings." But then one must ask: is this a bad thing? Lewis doesn't seem to argue with it, however he does go on about how it is not a good idea and that he doesn't believe that they will succeed in trying to promote the idea. He says at one point, "I think Gaius and Titius may have honestly misunderstood the pressing education need of the moment." This is so true. In life we have so many times when we gain a world of understand from just one second and to eliminate that idea fully, would stunt our growth as humans. Lewis also says, "A man would be annoyed if his son returned from the dentist with his teeth untouched..." As would he be if he returned from school with his mind blank. If there is no emotion in learning we are stuck. There is no need for education if we can't feel anything for it. If we don't care we won't learn.

“Men without chest” is the expression Lewis has chosen to describe the situation resulting from Gaius and Titius’ teachings on thought process. Apparently, Lewis feels that the modern day youth are being taught to promote reason rather than emotion when facing issues concerning their universe. He thinks that the children have lessons drilled into their consciousness before they are able to question why and therefore take the lessons as concrete fact. His belief is further perpetuated by the explanation he gives of “the Green Book.” This opening argument for his novel does not set the stage for success or excitement in future reading.

Personally, this issue that Lewis has brought to light does not warrant an entire books length of argument. We have all been through the education system here and have come across instructors who preach things as fact or tried to instill their process of reason into their students. However, this is no threat to the child’s development at all because emotion is an innate quality of mankind. Regardless of how much effort you put into raising a child “without a chest,” in the end you will be unsuccessful because eventually they will discover this side of their persona. We are all born with an inquisitive temperament, which is why parents have so much trouble controlling their teens. Besides, it is not a bad thing to have some “men without chest” because at least it is easier to keep the peace. It is the “men with chest” who typically promote chaos in society.

The term “men without chests” refers to the conditioning of the youth to be without emotion, as he explains by showing the faults in the teachings of The Green Book. He is writing about how the lessons of Gaius and Titius remove the heart from men before they are old enough to understand what is going on. He is talking about how The Green Book seeks to replace emotion with rationality and logic. It is the unconscious grooming of the next generation to not use their hearts, but their heads. “Men without chests” refers to the unfeeling, unfulfilled being that is created when school children read The Green Book and take its lessons seriously and to heart before they are old enough to question the material they are being presented with.

As for whether the topic warrants a book-length essay in response, yes it does. The danger discussed is not only presented by The Green Book. Lewis himself says that elementary textbooks are merely the starting point of his lectures. What Lewis is talking about here is a danger that faces our society as a whole, a danger we have faced for some time. It is the war between emotion and rationality, faith and fact, belief and science. A topic that concerns the youth of the world being educated towards one side or the other is of extreme importance, and definitely warrants this kind of response. My feeling on this is really that if you can write a book-length essay on something, then it is worth writing about.

First of all, I must admit that I am having some difficulty in swallowing much of Lewis’s opening chapter. Perhaps it is because I have been brainwashed by the mass media but I find myself disagreeing with his view that there is a reasonable and unreasonable way to perceive the universe, that there is one set path which all human beings must walk, and that “the aim of education is to make the pupil like and dislike what he ought.” Call me a depraved, pagan product of the times if you wish, but I believe that all humans are free to see the world, nay, even all of existence, any way they see fit. Who should have the power to tell someone what he or she should feel when, for example, a child laughs? When the rain falls? When spring passes into fall? Well, God does, apparently, or rather man’s interpretation of God. And so, God’s greatest gifts to mankind, the mind, the heart, and the soul, are reduced to automatons falling in rank and file with the “reasonable” way of things. Why not throw in a “Heil, Hitler!” for good measure?
Lewis terms the populace of the modern age “men without chests” because he feels that emotion has taken a back seat to logic in the education of today’s youth. He cites the example from this “Green Book” in which two tourists’ statements about a waterfall are reduced to the feelings the waterfall inspires in them. I agree with Lewis that the authors of this book seem to demean the value of emotion, and that logic does not encompass the entire human experience. But how can one person say which of the two tourists is right? Is there really a right or wrong when you are talking about the beauty of a waterfall? If one man says “That waterfall is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen” and the other says “That waterfall makes me miss my grandmother; We would come to this spot and talk before she passed away,” are you going to be the one to slap the mourner in the face and tell him he should be happy? There is no objective emotion. Each human being is a product of his or her own experiences, and it is natural to fall away from the norm. To hear this man say that an emotional quirk like the aforementioned example is a “defect” feels like a gross oversimplification of the most complex, beautiful creation ever to exist.
As for whether a book-length response is warranted: yes, it was. Anything that inspires reflection is worth writing about.

As Lewis stated, when he describes “men without chests” he is describing the potential product of the methods and philosophies taught by Titius and Gaius. Titius and Gaius cut out the emotional element, or the “heart” of people when describing how people communicate their thoughts and feelings. They completely write off sentiment as being a part of the human condition and of human language. This is especially true of how we educate people. More and more, we are falling into the trap of merely teaching children words without meanings, philosophy without the sentiment behind it. Lewis seems to criticize this viewpoint that feeling and sentiment are irrelevant to the point where he is saying that not only is sentiment useful, it is essential. He goes as far as to say that sentiment is the only thing that separates humans from animals. He states clearly that intellect does not overcome animalistic tendencies.
A book-length essay on this subject does seem to be appropriate given the modern day situation in education. We can teach facts and figures to children, but what are they supposed do with them if they are unfeeling as to what the facts and figures say or imply. We can teach children that honesty, patriotism and courage are good things, but if we do not put any sentiment or feeling with them, they are merely words. A child may always tell the truth simply because he or she has been programmed to do so, not because she actually believes that dishonesty is wrong. In a sense, education without feeling or sentiment, or as Lewis would put it, a “head” without a “chest”, could be said to be comparable to a computer that has been programmed with data and taught to perform a certain function.

C. S. Lewis in “The Abolition of Man” refers to Gaius and Titius and “The Green Book” as if they are the black plague. He uses “The Green Book” to show us that “Men Without Chests” are men who have no real feeling. These men only do as they are taught with no questions, emotionally or physically. It is said that “the heart rules the stomach, but only through the chest,” with a man’s head deciding matters of morality, only after the heart is consulted first. In the case of Gaius and Titius, it is true that they are by-passing the approval of the heart for deciding matters of morality and creativity. The phrase “Men Without Chests” is a great title for the first part of the book. By explaining “The Green Book” along with Gaius and Titius’ thought processes, it is easy to compare them to old ways of thinking, and also compare them with our new ways of thinking today.

The danger posed by “The Green Book” is certainly warranted an entire book-length essay. Lewis is completely correct, that in today’s time we teach children how to function, without allowing or encouraging them to be spontaneous and expand their ways of learning. Like Lewis says, “We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.” How can society expect great things to come out of the very children they only teach to survive? It is impossible. Men Without Chests are found everywhere, and Gaius and Titius are prime examples of many men not only present in history, but in today’s time as well.

In “The Abolition of Man” Lewis makes comments indicating people today are “men without chests.” “Men without chests” refers to the complete lack of emotion held by those who are brought up in a society where they are taught a lack of emotion through their education. He seems to be indicating that children are taught to believe and live as if they lack a heart, soul, and emotion. They are brought up like machines, cold and calculating, and they have lost the ability to have a heart. In society today, the children are somewhat taught in this form. They are programmed to think a certain way and in teaching, the emotions rarely make an appearance. The textbook dangers, similar to any topic, could warrant an entire book-length essay. Lewis puts forth that they entire society has been taught in this fashion and a lack of emotion is dangerous in a world where emotion is necessary in certain aspects of growing up and adult life. Considering this is a topic that Lewis is applying to all the individuals that have been through elementary education, I think it would make perfect sense to have the essay response be a length that resembles a book. Not only that, but I think it is important enough to Lewis and perhaps to the people how are reading the essay to find out more on the subject. I think this particular topic could be investigated more then Lewis did in the first section. So maybe it is best that this particular essay ended up being a book-length long. This topic warranted that kind of response.

The first thing that I noticed in reading this chapter is Lewis' use of Gaius and Titius, which I assume refer to Gaia and the Titans. By employing the names of pre-Olympian Greek gods, Lewis implies an emotionless, mindless chasm residing in the hearts (or lack thereof) of these two authors. "Men Without Chests" are products of the rationalized and intellectualized society of our time. Instead of focusing on the societal demands on men to be emotionally detached, Lewis headlines the indoctrination used by textbook authors, either on purpose or by accident, to instill a sense of apprehension towards emotion in the world’s youth.

Any topic warrants an essay-long response. As the essay lengthens, the topic has a tendency to morph into something far more useful and interesting, regardless of its primary purpose. In a sort of literary Darwinism, the meanest of lettered organisms needs only time and resources (pages) to evolve into a magnificent, many-paged creature. Therefore, regardless of what Lewis chose to write about initially, in the end, it would have warranted the time put into it. Did the shrew warrant existence? Sometimes you get an opossum, while other times you end up with a platypus. Evolutionary hindsight bias always leans towards worthiness. While Lewis’ first chapter was, at times, less than fascinating, as a whole, the work encapsulated an intriguing idea. The remainder of the essay can only escalate in value. The Abolition of Man would be long extinct if it did not evolve with each eon-spanning page.

C.S. Lewis in his, "The Abolition of Man", makes the statement that “without the aid of trained emotions the intellect is powerless against the animal organism.” It can be seen from this sentence that to Lewis, men without chests are those who lack emotion. He continues on by saying that they are not different from any other person one may cross on the street, for he is not more or less of an intellect than any other, it is just his absence of emotion deep within that renders him chest-less. One of the dangers of Gaius and Titius that Lewis comments on I do find somewhat justifiable. He says that Gaius and Titius are conditioning the youthful boy with false beliefs. Lewis quotes the two authors by saying they believe individuals “appear to be saying something very important when in reality we are only saying something about our own feelings.” To Lewis the youth is unable to discern what he is taught in school and will accept that he is supposed to make judgments in the absence of any emotion. I do see Lewis’s point that a schoolboy is vulnerable and is more open to accepting what one says than an adult who can question its authority. But, do I believe that Lewis should have dedicated an entire book to his response to Gaius and Titius? Certainly not. I believe his concerns could have been wrapped up in a much shorter fashion. I understand that I have only read the first chapter of his book but to be honest I find his writing to be quite dry and hard to want to finish. It is possible that my belief that Lewis need not devote an entire book to his response could be for my early dislike of the book and his writing style. But, while the dangers Lewis comments on makes sense he seems repetitive in his overall reasoning.

In C.S. Lewis’s The Abolition of Man, he describes men without chests, or rather, people without emotions as one of their primary tools in creating subjective thought. One of the ways Lewis demonstrates this creation is through his example of the waterfall. In the Green Book, if one believes that the waterfall is sublime, such a statement is not a reflection on the waterfall at all, but a reflection on the emotions of speaker. Lewis argues that such teachings are absurd. Of course objects can have objective value such as good and evil. In fact, without objective definitions of good and evil, what hope would we have for a peaceful, ethical society? When I opened the book, I expected Lewis’s rant on The Green Book to be a sort of prelude to his greater argument that would take up the bulk of the book. After finishing the first section, I realized that I was terribly mistaken. Needless to say, I think Lewis is being a bit anal retentive in his over-analyzation of such a seemingly trivial book. Often times I felt my heart bleeding for the authors of this book. Not only has their work been criticized, but this criticism has evolved in to a piece of literature in itself. The book seems like a vent of frustration by a retired English professor with too much time on his hands. Regardless, his works do succeed in asserting the importance of universal values, so I suppose the essay is warranted granted his critiques continue to stay fresh and relevant to life outside the green book.

In “The Abolition of Man”, C.S. Lewis refers to the conditioned youth lacking of emotions and heart with only logic and reasoning as “Men Without Chests”. I really enjoyed the way he concluded how “We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise.” Another brilliant reference leading to this conclusion was the difference between then and now, how then a bird taught its young how to fly, and the now treats them as poultry - “propagation and propaganda.” The ideas C.S. Lewis presents in “The Abolition of Man” are definitely ideas worth expanding on in an entire book-length essay; and the “Green Book” text by Gaius and Titius is a great reference to support his idea. However, I disagree with the circles he keeps making around Gaius and Titius’s textbook. While reading the book, I felt his reference to the same quote of the “Green Book’s” text about the waterfall got tiring after a while. Whereas, had he just continued his ideas without stressing the text, I would’ve been a lot more enthusiastic to continue reading. Don’t get me wrong, I find his arguments to be valid, but I think his idea can branch out to a lot of other greater points than emphasizing and overusing the same one. I really hope he’ll at least make an effort to refer to a different passage or area of the text in the next chapter; because, as of right now, this waterfall area of the text has become annoyingly superfluous.