CHAPTER THE FIRST ~~ THE BOY GROWS UP (continued 2)
Reading edition
(White could also see his dead friend's face with its enthusiastic paleness, its disordered hair and the glowing darknesses in the eyes. On such occasions Benham always had an expression of ESCAPE. Temporary escape. And thus would his hand have clutched the reading-desk; thus would his long fingers have rustled these dry papers.)
“Man has reached a point when a new life opens before him....
“The old habitual life of man is breaking up all about us, and for the new life our minds, our imaginations, our habits and customs are all unprepared....
“It is only now, after some years of study and living, that I begin to realize what this tremendous beginning we call Science means to mankind. Every condition that once justified the rules and imperatives, the manners and customs, the sentiments, the morality, the laws and limitations which make up the common life, has been or is being destroyed.... Two or three hundred years more and all that life will be as much a thing past and done with as the life that was lived in the age of unpolished stone....
“Man is leaving his ancestral shelters and going out upon the greatest adventure that ever was in space or time, he is doing it now, he is doing it in us as I stand here and read to you.”