The great state : essays in construction / by H.G. Wells [and others].

Date:
1912
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The great state : essays in construction / by H.G. Wells [and others]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    And yet it remains that only in the person of great individuals of genius can these multitudinous elements fuse, by a detonating spark, into fresh in- ventions for humanity. After our debts to Chance and Anangke, we owe most to Genius. We owe to it, indeed, far more than invention. It is to Genius and to the Family that humanity owes such equl- poise, love, and simplifying vision as it has attained. Genius is conscienceand consciousness at its whitest heat, bearing the subtlest implications of the Family most clearly and steadily in mind. But the soul of a child of genius requires to live long encysted and ensheathed before it flowers. Encysted, first,in the . warmth of love; and then in solitude, as were the shy souls of Shelley or Christ. The strength of Genius lies inits ignorances. For this child is Life itself, free and pure; older than its father, and abler to resort afresh to the primordial fountains. All that Polity, after the Family, can add to the instinctive endowment of the child is knowledge of the technical languages of the crafts, and of the various disciplines necessary to deal with his fellows, and to meet Anangke. But the roots of judgment on these must be learned inthe Family. The best teachers of any father are his own children. The Polity and the World have not,in the main, much to teach the child. Rather they have to learn from the ultimate judg- ments of the Family and the Child. These are the lawgivers from whom all the values radiate.