In the Abolition of Man, Lewis sees that an education system which reduces morality to nothing more than subjective feelings will inevitably produce "men without chests," meaning people without the ability to distinguish right from wrong. Succeeding in the best scenario would take political leaders with what C. S. Lewis called "chests." By this, Lewis did not mean the physical appendage but an ordinate love for what is objectively right, and an ordinate loathing for what is objectively wrong. .
"In battle it is not syllogisms that will keep the reluctant nerves and muscles to their post in the third hour of the bombardment" wrote Lewis in The Abolition of Man. "The crudest sentiment. about a flag or a country or a regiment will be of more use. The head roles the belly though the chest--the seat of Magnanimity, of emotions organized by trained habit into stable sentiments. The Chest-Magnanimity--Sentiment--these are the indispensable liaison officers between cerebral man and visceral man.".
In the Abolition of Man, Lewis shows a mindset in this work. But it is founded, he argues, on a grave mistake, namely that morality is entirely the product of social necessity and conditioning, that there is no such thing as a moral absolute at any level, and that right and wrong are things we invent for ourselves. After all, different societies have had very different ideas of right and wrong. .
But that, says Lewis, is historically and anthropologically false. The most striking thing about the moral codes of various societies is not how different they are, but how similar. Though there is no historical nor anthropological record of any prior associations between many of them, all emerged with amazingly consistent moral codes. .
The fundamental question, turgid as it may sound, is this: does goodness or beauty originate inside the human mind or outside it? Is it a perception we create in ourselves, or something external and real we must train ourselves to know? We are used to saying "beauty lies in the eye of the beholder.
