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VI
SPECIALISM
It is a very curious thing to reflect how often an old platitude or
axiom retains its vitality, long after the conditions which gave it
birth have altered, and it no longer represents a truth. It would
not matter if such platitudes only lived on dustily in vapid and
ill-furnished minds, like the vases of milky-green opaque glass
decorated with golden stars, that were the joy of Early Victorian
chimney-pieces, and now hold spills in the second-best spare
bedroom. But like the psalmist's enemies, platitudes live and are
mighty. They remain, and, alas! they have the force of arguments in
the minds of sturdy unreflective men, who describe themselves as
plain, straightforward people, and whose opinions carry weight in a
community whose feelings are swayed by the statements of successful
men rather than by the conclusions of reasonable men.
One of these pernicious platitudes is the statement that every one
ought to know something about everything and everything about
something. It has a speciously epigrammatic air about it, dazzling
enough to persuade the common-sense person that it is an
intellectual judgment.
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