My mind busied itself
with thinking how I should carry out my experiment, how I should
approach these Clarks, and how and what they were. A thousand
ways I pictured to myself the receipt of the letter: it would at
least be something new for them, something just a little
disturbing, and I was curious to see whether it might open the
rift of wonder wide enough to let me slip into their lives.
I have often wondered why it is that men should be so fearful of
new ventures in social relationships, when I have found them so
fertile, so enjoyable. Most of us fear (actually fear) people who
differ from ourselves, either up or down the scale. Your Edison
pries fearlessly into the intimate secrets of matter; your
Marconi employs the mysterious properties of the "jellied ether,"
but let a man seek to experiment with the laws of that singular
electricity which connects you and me (though you be a
millionaire and I a ditch-digger), and we think him a wild
visionary, an academic person. I think sometimes that the science
of humanity to-day is in about the state of darkness that the
natural sciences were when Linneus and Cuvier and Lamarck began
groping for the great laws of natural unity. Most of the human
race is still groaning under the belief that each of us is a
special and unrelated creation, just as men for ages saw no
relationships between the fowls of the air, the beasts of the
field, and the fish of the sea.
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