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.

III

Duplicates: A Principle of Economy

I do not suppose that anybody would submit to my being admitted--I was
black-balled before I was born--to the brotherhood of scientists. And
yet it seems to me that there is a certain sense in which I am as
scientific as anyone. It seems to me, for instance, that it is a fairly
scientific thing to do--a fairly matter-of-fact thing--to consider the
actual nature of facts and to act on it. When one considers the actual
nature of facts, the first thing one notices is that there are too many
of them. The second thing one notices about facts is that they are not
so many as they look. They are mostly duplicates. The small scientist
never thinks of this because he never looks at more than one class of
facts, never allows himself to fall into any general, interesting,
fact-comparing habit. The small poet never thinks of it because he never
looks at facts at all. It is thus that it has come to pass that the most
ordinary human being, just living along, the man who has the habit of
general information, is the intellectual superior of the mere scientists
about him or the mere poets. He is superior to the mere poet because he
is interested in knowing facts, and he is superior to the minor
scientist because he does not want to know all of them, or at least if
he does, he never has time to try to, and so keeps on knowing something.

When one considers the actual nature of facts, it is obvious that the
only possible model for a scientist of the first class or a poet of the
first class in this world, is the average man. The only way to be an
extraordinary man, master of more of the universe than any one else, is
to keep out of the two great pits God has made in it, i