Dodd's expression indicated that it didn't take him in. He compressed his lips. Not a bit of it. "But is this in reality true? Is this what exists and goes on? We people who sit in studies and put in whole hours of our days thinking and joining things together do get a kind of coherence into our ideas about the world. Just because there is leisure and time for us to think. But are you sure that is the Race at all? That is my point. Aren't we intellectually just a by-product? If you went back to the time of Plato, you would say that the idea of his "Republic" was what was going on in the Mind of the Race then. But I object that that was only the futile fancy of a gentleman of leisure. What was really going on was the gathering up of the Macedonian power to smash through Greece, and then make Greece conquer Asia. Your literature and philosophy are really just the private entertainment of old gentlemen out of the hurly-burly and ambitious young men too delicate to hunt or shoot. Thought is nothing in the world until it begins to operate in will and act, and the history of mankind doesn't show now, and it never has shown, any consecutive relation to human thinking. The real Mind of the Race is, I submit, something not literary at all, not consecutive, but like the inconsecutive incoherences of an idiot----" "No," said Boon, "of a child." "You have wars, you have great waves of religious excitement, you have patriotic and imperial delusions, you have ill-conceived and surprising economic changes----" "As if humanity as a whole were a mere creature of chance and instinct," said Boon. "Exactly," said Wilkins. "I admit that," said Boon. "But my case is that sanity grows. That what was ceases to be. The mind of reason gets now out of the study into the market-place." "You mean really, Boon, that the Mind of the Race isn't a mind that _is_, it is just a mind that becomes." "That's what it's all about," said Boon. "And that is where I want to take you up," said Wilkins. "I want to suggest that the Mind of the Race may be just a gleam of conscious realization that passes from darkness to darkness----" "_No_," said Boon. "Why not?" "Because I will not have it so," said Boon. § 2 There can be no denying that from quite an early stage in the discussion Boon was excited and presently on the verge of ill-temper. This dragging of his will into a question of fact showed, I think, the beginning of his irritation. And he was short and presently rather uncivil in his replies to Wilkins. Boon argued that behind the individualities and immediacies of life there was in reality a consecutive growth of wisdom, that larger numbers of people and a larger proportion of people than ever before were taking part in the World Mind process, and that presently this would become a great conscious general thinking of the race together.