“I wonder if I can put it in general terms for you at all. It is hard to put something one is always thinking about in general terms or to think of it as a whole.... Now.... Fuel?... “I suppose it was my father’s business interests that pushed me towards specialization in fuel. He wanted me to have a thoroughly scientific training in days when a scientific training was less easy to get for a boy than it is today. And much more inspiring when you got it. My mind was framed, so to speak, in geology and astronomical physics. I grew up to think on that scale. Just as a man who has been trained in history and law grows to think on the scale of the Roman empire. I don’t know what your pocket map of the universe is, the map, I mean, by which you judge all sorts of other general ideas. To me this planet is a little ball of oxides and nickel steel; life a sort of tarnish on its surface. And we, the minutest particles in that tarnish. Who can nevertheless, in some unaccountable way, take in the idea of this universe as one whole, who begin to dream of taking control of it.” “That is not a bad statement of the scientific point of view. I suppose I have much the same general idea of the world. On rather more psychological lines.” “We think, I suppose, said Sir Richmond, of life as something that is only just beginning to be aware of what it is--and what it might be.” “Exactly,” said the doctor. “Good.” He went on eagerly. “That is precisely how I see it. You and I are just particles in the tarnish, as you call it, who are becoming dimly awake to what we are, to what we have in common. Only a very few of us have got as far even as this. These others here, for example....” He indicated the rest of Maidenhead by a movement. “Desire, mutual flattery, egotistical dreams, greedy solicitudes fill them up. They haven’t begun to get out of themselves.” “We, I suppose, have,” doubted Sir Richmond. “We have.”