were
not seen mutually attracted to each other, day and night,--getting
themselves made over into each other, mutually mastering the world.

Certainly, if there is one token rather than another of the great
scientist or poet in distinction from the small scientist or poet, it is
the courage with which he yields himself, makes his whole being
sensitive and free before his instinctive facts, gives himself fearless
up to them, allows them to be the organisers of his mind.

It seems to be the only possible way in reading for facts that the mind
of a man can come to anything; namely, by always having a chairman (and
a few alternates appointed for life) to call the meeting to order.

II

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