A Genius Is A Man Who Has

I Call That Brilliant Sequence Of Cultural Peaks The Ascent Of Man.

But Nature - That Is, Biological Evolution - Has Not Fitted Man To Any Specific Environment. On The Contrary, ... He Has A Rather Crude Survival Kit; And Yet -this Is The Paradox Of The Human Condition - One That Fits Him To All Environments. Among The Multitude Of Animals Which Scamper, Fly, Burrow And Swim Around Us, Man Is The Only One Who Is Not Locked Into His Environment. His Imagination, His Reason, His Emotional Subtlety And Toughness, Make It Possible For Him Not To Accept The Environment But To Change It.

By The Worldly Standards Of Public Life, All Scholars In Their Work Are Of Course Oddly Virtuous. They Do Not Make Wild Claims, They Do Not Cheat, They Do Not Try To Persuade At Any Cost, They Appeal Neither To Prejudice Nor To Authority . . .

It's A Sort Of Curious Phenomenon That God Is Somehow Not Quite As Nice As The Devil; The Devil Doesn't Punish You For Behaving Well, But God Punishes You For Behaving Badly.

Da Vinci Was As Great A Mechanic And Inventor As Were Newton And His Friends. Yet A Glance At His Notebooks Shows Us That What Fascinated Him About Nature Was Its Variety, Its Infinite Adaptability, The Fitness And The Individuality Of All Its Parts. By Contrast What Made Astronomy A Pleasure To Newton Was Its Unity, Its Singleness, Its Model Of A Nature In Which The Diversified Parts Were Mere Disguises For The Same Blank Atoms.