"But the socialists of today—are they following his example? No. Marx
did not believe in finalities; they make a finality of him. He sought
new knowledge. They are defending what is already old, and like
everything old, some of it is wrong now. Marx was a revolutionist—one
of the greatest. The Marxists are conservatives. Think of it. Not an
American socialist has tried to analyze Wall Street! Instead of
scrutinizing the life about them, they spend their time arguing over his
agrarian theory. No country in the world offers such glaring examples
of industrial injustice as these United States and the books they
circulate are translations from German. Some day they’ll wake up—then
I’ll join them.
"The trouble comes from thinking there are finalities in life—ultimate
truths. We’ve got to get it into our heads that truth itself evolves.
"It’s coming to me stronger and stronger that the point of attack ought
to be on our ideals of education. My God! You quit college at the end
of your freshman year and wasted exactly three years less than I did. I
feel so sure that this is the real issue that I’m losing interest in
everything else.
"A system of education which wakes up the human mind instead of putting
it to sleep! Education which begins where it ought to! At the
beginning! the process of seeing, of looking at life with our own
eyes—instead of through some professor’s spectacles. If we could only
teach the trick of original observation!
"The trouble isn’t so much that we think incorrectly. We don’t see
straight. I remember our professor used to tell us that logic is a
coffee-mill. If we put coffee in at the top it will come out at the
bottom in a more usable form. But if we put in dirt—it stays dirt, no
matter how fine we grind it. And then he switched off to train our
coffee-mills—a lot of rigamarole about syllogisms, the thirteen
fallacious ones—perhaps it was fourteen. But not a single word about how
to distinguish dirt from coffee. It’s the original assumptions that
need questioning. I don’t believe Darwin was a better logician than
Saint Augustine. But he went out into the world and looked. He used
observed facts for his coffee-mill. Saint Augustine ground up a lot of
incoherent beliefs and dirty assumptions. Anyone can learn the laws of
logic in a three months college course, or in as many weeks from a
text-book. But I don’t know of any place where they even try to teach
original observation.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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