For the immense wealth of what has been produced in the past is precisely what makes it illegitimate for us to assign a limit in advance to what man is capable of producing in the future; or to assume that a time will come when, man’s capacity for creative innovation being exhausted, he will be doomed merely to repeat himself throughout all eternity. Thus we come to conceive of man not as an agglomeration of finite specifiable elements, but rather as an infinitely flexible, protean force, capable of appearing in innumerable guises, according to the perenially changing demands of his circumstances. Far from its being the case that humanity in its entirety achieves full fruition at some one particular moment of history, there is in each of us a multitude of unrealised potentialities, seeds which may be dormant in the ground for ever, but which may also blossom into life if called upon by the force of circumstance.

If one acquires the habit of contemplating vast horizons, overall views, and fine generalisations. one can no longer without impatience allow oneself to be confined within the narrow limits of a special task. Such a remedy (a liberal education) would therefore only make specialisation inoffensive by making it intolerable, and in consequence more or less impossible.