"Take England. She is a democracy, if a masked one. Hence Jealousy is
the dominating trait of her citizens. Jealousy has, thousands of years
ago, invented railways, telegraphs, wired and wireless ones, telephones
and Röntgen-rays, and all the rest of the infernal machines whereby
Space, Time, and Work is shortened, curtailed, annihilated. Jealousy
has at all times sent wireless messages over and through all the houses
of a town or an entire country. It has Röntgenised the most hidden
interiors; and its poison runs more quickly through all the veins and
nerves of men than does the electric spark.
"Look at the customs, social prejudices, or views of that nation. Over
one half of them was introduced to disarm the ever-present demon of
Jealousy. Why is a man a specialist? Because in that way he disarms
Jealousy more quickly and more surely than by any other expedient. It
gives him an air both of modesty and of strength by concentration.
In reality it does neither. It is only an air. The so-called Reality
consists of nothing but unrealities, of shams, and masks. A specialist
is not a master of his subject; he is a master of the art than which
there is no greater, the art of making other people believe that you
are not what you are, but what _they_ want you to be.
"Nature has a horror of specialists; and she will reveal her secrets to
an insane poet rather than to a specialist. Most great inventions were
made either by 'outsiders,' or by young men who had not yet had the
time to harden into specialists. In specialisation there is nothing but
a total misunderstanding of Nature.
"Nature acts by instantaneous correlation and co-operation of different
parts to one end; and to specialise is tantamount to taking a clock
to pieces, putting them separately in a row on the table, and then
expecting them to give you the exact time.
"In Nature there is no evolution, but only co-evolution; there is no
differentiation but only co-differentiation. The little ones have
quite overlooked all that; and that is why so many of the statements
of co-differentiation in my zoology can be neither confirmed nor
refuted by them. Who dare say which is a 'part' in Nature? Is the hand
a 'part,' that is, something that might legitimately be told off as a
speciality? Or must it be studied in connection with the arm, or with
its homologies in the nether part of the body?
"In the same way: what constitutes a 'period' in history? Any division
of a hundred or a thousand years by two, three, or four? Or by a
division of twenty-five or thirty only? Who can tell? A man who says
he is a specialist in the thirteenth century, is he not like a man who
pretends that he is a specialist in respiration in the evening?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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