The various agencies which society has placed at the disposal of a
parent had been at work on Edwin in one way or another for at least a
decade, in order to equip him for just this very day when he should step
into the world. The moment must therefore be regarded as dramatic, the
first crucial moment of an experiment long and elaborately prepared.
Knowledge was admittedly the armour and the weapon of one about to try
conclusions with the world, and many people for many years had been
engaged in providing Edwin with knowledge. He had received, in fact, "a
good education"--or even, as some said, "a thoroughly sound education;"
assuredly as complete an equipment of knowledge as could be obtained in
the county, for the curriculum of the Oldcastle High School was less in
accord with common sense than that of the Middle School.
He knew, however, nothing of natural history, and in particular of
himself, of the mechanism of the body and mind, through which his soul
had to express and fulfil itself. Not one word of information about
either physiology or psychology had ever been breathed to him, nor had
it ever occurred to any one around him that such information was
needful. And as no one had tried to explain to him the mysteries which
he carried about with him inside that fair skin of his, so no one had
tried to explain to him the mysteries by which he was hemmed in, either
mystically through religion, or rationally through philosophy. Never in
chapel or at Sunday school had a difficulty been genuinely faced. And
as for philosophy, he had not the slightest conception of what it meant.
He imagined that a philosopher was one who made the best of a bad job,
and he had never heard the word used in any other sense. He had great
potential intellectual curiosity, but nobody had thought to stimulate it
by even casually telling him that the finest minds of humanity had been
trying to systematise the mysteries for quite twenty-five centuries. Of
physical science he had been taught nothing, save a grotesque perversion
to the effect that gravity was a force which drew things towards the
centre of the earth. In the matter of chemistry it had been practically
demonstrated to him scores of times, so that he should never forget this
grand basic truth, that sodium and potassium may be relied upon to fizz
flamingly about on a surface of water. Of geology he was perfectly
ignorant, though he lived in a district whose whole livelihood depended
on the scientific use of geological knowledge, and though the existence
of Oldcastle itself was due to a freak of the earth's crust which
geologists call a "fault."
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