eat, fresh, eager,
boundless world? Does it not roll up out of Darkness with new children
on it, night after night? What does it matter, I say to my soul-a
generation or so--from the ridge-pole of the world? The great Sun comes
round again. It travels over the tops of seas and mountains. Microbes in
their dewdrops, seeds in their winds, stars in their courses, worms in
their apples, answer it, and the hordes of the ants in their ant-hills
run before it. And what does it matter after all, under the great Dome,
a few hordes of factmongers more or less, glimmering and wonderless,
crawlers on the bottom of the sea of time, lovers of the ooze of
knowledge, feeling with slow, myopic mouths at Infinite Truth?

But when I see my four faces--the faces of my four special boys, when I
hear the college bells ringing to them, it matters a great deal. My soul
will not wait. What is the ridge-pole of the world? The distance of a
ridge-pole does not count. The extent of a universe does not seem to
make very much difference. The next ten generations do not help very
much on this one. I go forth in my soul. I take hold of the first
scientist I meet--my whole mind pummelling him. "What is it?" I say,
"what is it you are doing with us and with the lives of our children?
What is it you are doing with yourself? Truth is not a Thing. Did you
think it? Truth is not even a Heap of Things. It is a Light. How dare
you mock at inferring? How dare you to think to escape the infinite? You
cannot escape the infinite even by making yourself small enough. It is
written that thou shalt be infinitely small if thou art not infinitely
large. Not to infer is to contradict the very nature of facts. Not to
infer is not to live. It is to cease to be a fact one's self. What is
education if one does not infer? Vacuums rolling around in vacuums.
Atoms cross-examining atoms. And you say you will not guess? Do you need
to be cudgelled with a whole universe to begin to learn to guess? What
is all your science--your boasted science, after all, but more raw
material to make more guesses with? Is not the whole Future Tense an
inference? Is not History--that which has actually happened--a mystery?
You yourself are a mere probability, and God is a generalisation. What
does it profit a man to discover The Inductive Method and to lose his
own soul? What is The Inductive Method? Do you think that all these
scientists who have locked their souls up and a large part of their