Читать книгу The Origin of Thought and Speech онлайн

3 страница из 72

We live in an atmosphere of many and varied ideas; ideas true and false, good and bad; they pulsate in the air we breathe; they are like the winged antheral seeds which are lifted up by the slightest breeze of autumn and carried afar; they are little heeded; but should it happen that these seeds attached themselves to our garments we should notice how strikingly the one form varied from the other.

Amongst those ideas which wander at large is this aphorism—that we are ignorant of that of which we know not the commencement, or in other words of that which we do not examine from the practical point of view; he who wishes to learn how something is made, whatever it may be, must know how to begin it. This truth has so ancient a date that we cannot conceive of a time when it was absent from the mind of man; only it had the common lot of all truths with which we are so familiar that apparently there is nothing to learn from them, and this aphorism appears at first sight to be the ramblings which we hear but to which we do not listen.