Another gem from Ger­ald Stan­ley Lee, once again from The Lost Art of Read­ing, GP Putnam’s Sons, 1903. Via Odd Ends.

As with all Ger­ald Stan­ley Lee’s writ­ings, mod­ern read­ers should say it aloud, with the innu­mer­able com­mas enforced breaths. The poetry of the drawl, the long list of phrases, makes the mod­ern lim­ited mind lose the thread and start cast­ing abut for imag­i­nary sen­tences that don’t exist.

Read aloud. Preach it. Then go read the rest of his work.

Sym­bolic Facts

If the meet­ing is to accom­plish any­thing before it adjourns sine die, every­thing depends upon the gavel in it, upon there being some power in it that makes some facts sit down and oth­ers stand up, but which sees that all facts are represented.

In gen­eral, the more facts a par­tic­u­lar fact can be said to be a del­e­gate for, the more a par­tic­u­lar fact can be said to rep­re­sent other facts, the more of the floor it should have. The power of read­ing for facts depends upon a man’s power to recog­nise sym­bolic or sum-​​total or sen­a­to­r­ial facts and keep all other facts, the gen­eral mob or com­mon run of facts, from inter­rupt­ing. The amount of knowl­edge a man is going to be able to mas­ter in the world depends upon the num­ber of facts he knows how to avoid.

This is where our com­mon sci­en­tific training–the man­u­fac­tur­ing of small sci­en­tists in the bulk–breaks down. The first thing that is done with a young man nowa­days, if he is to be made into a sci­en­tist, is to take away any last ves­tige of power his mind may have of avoid­ing facts. Every­one has seen it, and yet we know per­fectly well when we stop to think about it that when in the course of his being edu­cated a man’s abil­ity to avoid facts is taken away from him, it soon ceases to make very much dif­fer­ence whether he is edu­cated or not. He becomes a mere mem­ory let loose in the universe–goes about remem­ber­ing every­thing, hit or miss. I never see one of these memory-​​machines going about mow­ing things down remem­ber­ing them, but that it gives me a kind of sad, sud­den feel­ing of being intel­li­gent. I can­not quite describe the feel­ing. I am part sorry and part glad and part ashamed of being glad. It depends upon what one thinks of, one’s own nar­row escape, or the other man, or the way of the world. All one can do is to thank God, silently, in some safe place in one’s thoughts, that after all there is a great deal of the human race–always is–in every gen­er­a­tion who by mere cir­cum­stance can­not be educated–bowled over by their mem­o­ries. Even at the worst only a few hun­dred per­sons can be made over into reductio-​​ad-​​absurdum Stan­ley Halls (that is, study sci­ence under pupils of the pupils of Stan­ley Hall) and the chances are even now, as bad as things are and are get­ting to be, that for sev­eral hun­dred years yet, Man, the Big Brother of cre­ation, will insist on pre­serv­ing his spe­cial dis­tinc­tion in it, the thing that has lifted him above the other animals–his inim­itable fac­ulty for for­get­ting things.

[Both emphases mine.]