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'No,' said Karenin with his eyes upon the mountains, 'I think you
underrate the available intelligence in those early decades of
the twentieth century. Officially, I know, politically, that
intelligence didn't tell--but it was there. And I question your
hypothesis. I doubt if that discovery could have been delayed.
There is a kind of inevitable logic now in the progress of
research. For a hundred years and more thought and science have
been going their own way regardless of the common events of life.
You see--they have got loose. If there had been no Holsten there
would have been some similar man. If atomic energy had not come
in one year it would have come in another. In decadent Rome the
march of science had scarcely begun.... Nineveh, Babylon, Athens,
Syracuse, Alexandria, these were the first rough experiments in
association that made a security, a breathing-space, in which
inquiry was born. Man had to experiment before he found out the
way to begin. But already two hundred years ago he had fairly
begun.... The politics and dignities and wars of the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries were only the last phoenix blaze of the
former civilisation flaring up about the beginnings of the new.
Which we serve.... 'Man lives in the dawn for ever,' said
Karenin. 'Life is beginning and nothing else but beginning. It
begins everlastingly. Each step seems vaster than the last, and
does but gather us together for the nest. This Modern State of
ours, which would have been a Utopian marvel a hundred years ago,
is already the commonplace of life. But as I sit here and dream
of the possibilities in the mind of man that now gather to a head
beneath the shelter of its peace, these great mountains here seem
but little things....'
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