Drama, you know ... and it's time for a new
drama.
THE BOY
It isn't that, with me. I can't write.... I had one splendid teacher. He
used to talk about things right in class. He said that most educated
people think that intellect is a matter of making fine distinctions--of
seeing as two separate points what the unintelligent would believe was one
point; but that this idea was _finicky_. He wanted us to see that
intelligence might also be a matter of seeing the connection between two
things so far apart that most people would think they were always
separate. I like that. It made education _mean_ something, because it made
it depend on imagination instead of grubbing. And then he told us about
the history of our subject--grammar. How it began as poetry, when every
word was an original creation; and then became philosophy, as people had
to arrange speech with thought; and then science, with more or less exact,
laws. I could _see_ it--the thing became alive. And he said all knowledge
passed through the same stages, and there isn't anything that can't
eventually be made scientific.
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