C.S. Lewis on Textualism and Purposivism

Today is the anniversary of C.S. Lewis's death. Both to celebrate it, and as something of a remedy for the many silly and shallow things that get said about textualism, here's something from his memoir, Surprised By Joy: The Shape of My Early Life. Lewis is describing his father's deliberations about which primary school to select for his children. The choice ends up being quite wrong, as Lewis is sent to a school with a cruel master whom the students call "Oldie."

You may ask how our father came to send us there. Certainly not because he made a careless choice. The surviving correspondence shows that he had considered many other schools before fixing on Oldie's; and I know him well enough to be sure that in such a matter he would never have been guided by his first thoughts (which would probably have been right) nor even by his twenty-first (which would at least have been explicable). Beyond doubt he would have prolonged deliberation till his hundred-and-first; and they would be infallibly and invincibly wrong. This is what happens to the deliberations of a simple man who thinks he is a subtle one. Like Earle's Skepticke in Religion he "is always too hard for himself." My father piqued himself on what he called "reading between the lines." The obvious meaning of any fact or document was always suspect: the true inner meaning, invisible to all eyes except his own, was unconsciously created by the restless fertility of his imagination. While he thought he was interpreting Oldie's prospectus, he was really composing a school story in his own mind. And all this, I doubt not, with extreme conscientiousness and even some anguish.