Читать книгу The Origin of Thought and Speech онлайн

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In short, progress exists, but not all along the line. As thought travels slowly in its own domain, so mental science is behindhand. A true idea is not mechanically reproduced, it must be tended for it to bear fruit, but what tendance would avail, if it is only with difficulty that we discriminate between what we know already, and what we do not yet know, for this distinction must accompany conscious progress.

Everything around us tends to keep us in this penumbra, which is so favourable to inertia, ignorance, sleep. Certain groups of philosophical ideas become condensed and systematised; in some systems there are one or two great thoughts only. This suffices—these systems remain, germinate and direct contemporaneous generations as well as those of the future. It may also happen that these same ideas invade brains little prepared to receive them, and thus deviate from their course, err as they advance, and end by becoming so travestied that it is no longer possible to know what they were at their origin—a swerving movement has taken place, which causes suffering to contemporaries, and, still more, to those who come after. Thus the bulk increases, the bulk of truth and the bulk of error; and this fatal expansion of the true and the false, intertwined the one with the other, pursues its encroaching and troublous way.