"For it is as natural to be an explorer as it is to be a potato grower,
it is rarer but it is as natural; it is as natural to seek explanations
and arrange facts as it is to make love, or adorn a hut, or show
kindness to a child. It is a folly I will not even dispute about, that
man's only natural implement is the spade. Imagination, pride, exalted
desire are just as much Man, as are hunger and thirst and sexual
curiosities and the panic dread of unknown things....

"Now you see better what I mean about choice. Now you see what I am
driving at. We have to choose each one for himself and also each one for
the race, whether we will accept the muddle of the common life, whether
we ourselves will be muddled, weakly nothings, children of luck,
steering our artful courses for mean success and tawdry honours, or
whether we will be aristocrats, for that is what it amounts to, each
one in the measure of his personal quality an aristocrat, refusing to be
restrained by fear, refusing to be restrained by pain, resolved to
know and understand up to the hilt of his understanding, resolved to
sacrifice all the common stuff of his life to the perfection of his
peculiar gift, a purged man, a trained, selected, artificial man, not
simply free, but lordly free, filled and sustained by pride. Whether
you or I make that choice and whether you or I succeed in realizing
ourselves, though a great matter to ourselves, is, I admit, a small
matter to the world. But the great matter is this, that THE CHOICE IS
BEING MADE, that it will continue to be made, and that all around us, so
that it can never be arrested and darkened again, is the dawn of human
possibility...."

(White could also see his dead friend's face with its enthusiastic
paleness, its disordered hair and the glowing darknesses in the eyes.
On such occasions Benham always had an expression of ESCAPE. Temporary
escape. And thus would his hand have clutched the reading-desk; thus
would his long fingers have rustled these dry papers.)

"Man has reached a point when a new life opens before him....

"The old habitual life of man is breaking up all about us, and for the
new life our minds, our imaginations, our habits and customs are all
unprepared....

"It is only now, after some years of study and living, that I begin to
realize what this tremendous beginning we call Science means to mankind.
Every condition that once justified the rules and imperatives, the
manners and customs, t