Page:You Gentiles (1924) by Maurice Samuel 1895-1972.djvu/170

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You Gentiles

and scientific in outlook as any professor inspired by a complete knowledge of the revealed mechanics of the world. I have known cultured city dwellers, rotten with sophistication, whose surface cynicism could not hide their subjection to the terror of invisible, unrevealable possibilities.

Scientific genius is only the genius of the ingenious. Men who by their nature are materialists spend their energies in building intensely ingenious schemata wherein the known facts of life constitute the sole material. But these ingenious schemata do not alter their nature with their shape or with the quantity of their material. The mechanics of the universe might be thus or thus; things might work in this way or in that way; it might be one formula or another formula. But the spirit of the thing is the same. For hundreds of years capable minds have searched, constructed, reconciled. Their knowledge of the mechanism is infinitely greater that any man's knowledge a thousand years ago. Yet men who know as little of

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