It Is Quite Inadequate; I
Must Hope That You Will Grasp The Drift Of My Meaning.
All these
life-laboured monographs, these classifications, works of Linnaeus, and
our own classic Darwin, microscope, physiology, and the flower has not
given us its message yet.
There are a million books; there are no books:
all the books have to be written. What a field! A whole million of books
have got to be written. In this sense there are hardly a dozen of them
done, and these mere primers. The thoughts of man are like the
foraminifera, those minute shells which build up the solid chalk hills
and lay the level plain of endless sand; so minute that, save with a
powerful lens, you would never imagine the dust on your fingers to be
more than dust. The thoughts of man are like these: each to him seems
great in his day, but the ages roll, and they shrink till they become
triturated dust, and you might, as it were, put a thousand on your
thumb-nail. They are not shapeless dust for all that; they are organic,
and they build and weld and grow together, till in the passage of time
they will make a new earth and a new life. So I think I may say there are
no books; the books are yet to be written.
Let us get a little alchemy out of the dandelions. They were not precise,
the Arabian sages, with their flowing robes and handwriting; there was a
large margin to their manuscripts, much imagination.
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