Page:How Henry Ford is regarded in Brazil (1926).djvu/21

 old theological ideas dating from the year 1000, from the days of the Plague, the period of Papal excommunication, etc. We pay no heed to the forward march of things – none at all to the forward march of ideas.

This Mr. Ford, for example, who in little more than twenty years rose from the position of workman to that of the greatest industrial magnate of all times – this man, whose industry alone produces double what the whole of Brazil produces, whence his greatness? From his ideas. From a few new ideas. From the conviction that the past has only one thing to offer us: LESSONS. From contempt for routine. From a personal examination of everything. From a central principle to which everything else is closely related, and that is: Work with Intelligence and Foresight.

It is books like his that should go from hand to hand among the people – whether man or master – instead of Escrich, Hebrew history, worm-eaten rubbish.

The world exists. Life is a reality. The brain is a force. The test is everything. But dry-rot, the Middle Ages, the fixed idea, the time-honoured fiction, the skull with Eucharist wafers instead of gray matter inside it – this is death, and death of the worst kind – that with which we fool ourselves, thinking it to be life. 19