Page:The Works of H G Wells Volume 11.pdf/215

 proper way to discuss mathematics or chemistry, is to discuss the accumulated and digested product of human thought in such matters. Only in creative literature and because of beauty are texts immortal. The reverence for texts and the "systems" of individuals in the case of philosophy is just as absurd and mischievous as it would be in the case of science. The only philosophy that a man is entitled to expound and discuss is that which he has made his own. I make no apology therefore in annexing every philosophical idea and phrase from the past that I have cared to assimilate. This is my system that I place before you in order that you should make your system. You can no more think about the world according to another man's system than you can look at it with a dead man's eyes.

Necessarily when one begins an inquiry into the fundamental nature of oneself and one's mind and its processes, one is forced into biography. I begin by asking how the conscious mind with which I identify myself, began.

It presents itself to me as a history of a perception of a world of facts opening out from an accidental centre at which I happened to begin.

I do not attempt to define this word fact. Fact expresses for me something in its nature primary and unanalysable. I start from that. I take as a typical