n it, the day is not long hence
when the great host of ordered-around teachers with their ordered-around
pupils will be a memory. Copying and appearing to know will cease.
Self-delight and genius will again be the habit of the minds of men and
the days of our present poor, pale, fuddling, unbelieving,
Simon-says-thumbs-up education will be numbered.

* * * * *

Sometimes it seems as if this globe, this huge cyclorama of nations
whirling in sunlight through stars, were a mere empty, mumbled
repetition, a going round and round of the same stupendous stupidities
and the same heroisms in human life. One is always feeling as if
everything, arts, architecture, cables, colleges, nations, had all
almost literally happened before, in the ages dark to us, gone the same
round of beginning, struggling, and ending. Then the globe was wiped
clean and began again.

One of the great advantages in emphasising individuals,--the main idea
of this book,--in picking out particular men as forces, centres of
energy in society, as the basis for one's programme for human nature, is
the sense it gives that things really can begin again--begin
anywhere--where a man is. One single human being, deeply believed in,
glows up a world, casts a kind of speculative value, a divine wager over
all the rest. I confess that most men I have seen seem to me
phantasmagorically walking the earth, their lives haunting them, hanging
intangibly about them--indefinitely postponed. But one does not need, in
order to have a true joyous working-theory of life, to believe verbatim,
every moment, in the mass of men--as men. One needs to believe in them
very much--as possible men--larvae of great men, and if, in the meantime,
one can have (what is quite practicable) one sample to a square mile of
what the mass of men in that mile might be, or are going to be, one
comes to a considerable degree of enthusiasm, a working and sharing
enthusiasm for all the rest.

VII

Allons

I thought when I began to make my little visit in civilisation--this
book--that perhaps I ought to have a motto to visit a civilisation with.
So the motto I selected (a good one for all reformers, viewers of
institutions and things) was, "Do not shoot the organist. He is doing
the best he can." I fear I have not lived up to it. I am an optimist. I
cannot believe he is doing the best he can. Before I know it, I get to
hoping and scolding. I do not even believe he i