Présentation de l'éditeur
Not in his goals but in his transitions man is great, and the truest state of mind rested in, becomes false. [C hinese Proverb.] The traveller in a foreign land who keeps to the main highways needs no guide. He does not even have to know the language of the country for a judiciously distributed pourboire will put him in touch with all the more common requirements of his surroundings. With his Baedecker in hand, he may even wander about in strange surroundings oblivious to the unknown claque about him and return to his haven of safety with an outline of the topography of the city, its bricks and mortar, and possibly its trolley cars. But were he to go into the by-ways, were he to reach out for an understanding of the rich life that is actually being lived about him, he is more or less shut off, and deaf and dumb must needs grope about if without knowledge of the language of the country. The doctor of medicine is in some such position his unexplored countries come to him, however, he does not go to them. His Baedekers Gray, Osier, and perhaps a rich library, furnishing the details of many complicated structures lead him through the more frequented paths of disease processes, but, like the real traveller he constantly finds himself lost in unexplored territory. A new language strikes his ear at every specialistic frontier that he would pass; a rich and apparently hopeless terminology has to be mastered if he would travel in new fields, and if he would know what is going on over the boundary he must make it a part of himself. It is of no service to him to rationalize his indolence by calling this strange speech new-fangled, absurd or unnecessary. To shut his eyes and ears to these new languages, refusing to learn them, only hampers himself, and the stream of active intelligence goes on, leaving him in an eddy of his own isolation. Words, concepts, generalization
(Typographical errors above are due to OCR software and don't occur in the book.)
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