us say, for example, that one has learned to use a typewriter. What
has happened is like an illiterate person's learning to read and write.
Correspondence with one's friends begins to take on new meaning and to
acquire new value; one begins to find a new pleasure and stimulation
taking the place of the ineffectual drivings of an uneasy conscience.
All this, let us say, has come from the moderate outlay for a superior
mechanical instrument. And now let it be granted that it would not have
come if the fortunate individual had not been "what he was." If it has
come it is because the individual and the rest of the world were "of
such a sort" that the revival and new growth of interest _could_ take
its rise with the provision of the new instrumentality. But what,
precisely, does such a statement mean? What sort of verification does it
admit of? What fruitful insight into the concrete facts of the case does
it convey? Of _what_ sort, prior to the event, does it show the
individual to have been?

The truth is, of course, that he was of _no_ sort, then and there and
with reference to the purchase--he was of no sort decisively. He was
neither purchaser nor rejector. He was neither a convinced "typist" nor
piously confirmed in his predilection for writing "by hand." He was
neither wholly weary of his correspondence nor fully cognizant of the
importance of intercourse with his friends for his soul's good. He may
have been dissatisfied and rebellious or he may have been comfortably
persuaded that letter-writing, though an irksome labor, was even at that
sufficiently worth while. The most that can be said is simply that he
must have been willing and desirous to try the experiment for the sake
of any good, imaginable or beyond present imagination, that might come
of it. But being of "such a sort" as this could not prejudge the
issue--although, undoubtedly, in willingness to raise an issue there
lies always the possibility of change. All the plausibility of the dogma
we are here considering comes from its hasty inclusion of this general
attitude of constructively experimental inquiry and effort, this
essential character of creative intelligence, as _one among_ the
concrete interests which constitute and define our particular problems
in their inception. To say _ex post facto_ that the individual must have
been "of such a sort" as to do what he has in fact done is a purely
verbal comment which, whatever may be its uses, can assuredly b