People like us can't adopt whole theories,
as you did. If we can do the next thing, and have an hour a day to think
in, we can accomplish marvels, but as far as any high-handed scheme of
blind dominance is concerned--we'd just make asses of ourselves."
"But, Monsignor, I can't do the next thing."
"Amory, between you and me, I have only just learned to do it myself.
I can do the one hundred things beyond the next thing, but I stub my toe
on that, just as you stubbed your toe on mathematics this fall."
"Why do we have to do the next thing? It never seems the sort of thing I
should do."
"We have to do it because we're not personalities, but personages."
"That's a good line--what do you mean?"
"A personality is what you thought you were, what this Kerry and Sloane
you tell me of evidently are. Personality is a physical matter almost
entirely; it lowers the people it acts on--I've seen it vanish in a long
sickness. But while a personality is active, it overrides 'the next
thing.' Now a personage, on the other hand, gathers. He is never
thought of apart from what he's done. He's a bar on which a thousand
things have been hung--glittering things sometimes, as ours are; but he
uses those things with a cold mentality back of them.
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