should I know? I am an artist, not a quack-doctor with a universal prescription to suit all constitutions. Whether a baby ought or ought not to bite his mother, depends, as I said, on his heredity and the extent of her powers of endurance; also on her and the father’s conception of the meaning and use of family life. On the father’s conception especially. I am trying to teach you, not a code suited to all families, but the Art of Thinking on the facts presented to you by your own life and circumstances.
And you, whom the world calls mad, you at least can have no lack of material for thought. And you well know—some of you—that the so-called “sane” world is ignorant of much which you have seen, and hideously irreverent to much that you feel to be sacred. Pull yourselves together, friends, and learn to deliver your message in such-wise that the outer world must listen, and revere. You do not, you cannot, doubt the value of your own message to the world; many of you are certified “megalomaniacs” because you cannot be got to disbelieve it. What you most long for is that someone in the outer world should believe in it with you. Courage, friends; I believe in it,—because I have seen. Now, therefore, let us, who understand each other, learn some logic together, and write so that the world shall understand something of which you have caught a glimpse, and which you know to be part of the scientific framework round which must be organised anything which could claim the right to describe itself as an organic art of thinking.
