Page:You Gentiles (1924) by Maurice Samuel 1895-1972.djvu/18

You Gentiles counter-rush of its companion stars. The law of Einstein works no less truly in the crawling of a snail than in the dizzy vibration of the fastest atomic sub-unit. These laws are more easily observed in the one set of cases than in the other: that is all.

If I have touched the truth it has been primarily through contact with life—and I have regarded books as but a class of living things, to be observed and interpreted and placed in their setting. Life itself, observation of men and women, singly and in masses, a knowledge of their works (among which books are important), a feeling for their desires, perception of their intent in cities, laws, theaters, games, wars, all this has brought me to the conception I shall set forth. All scholarship—particularly that scholarship which deals with the manifestations of man's desires and fears—consists of unauthoritative marginal notes, which are of interest chiefly as giving us some insight into the nature of those who jotted them down.

It does no harm to know the history that 14