“One of the funny persistent fallacies of the old folks in the Nineteenth Century. It has been proved otherwise. Nothing happens now but the expected and anticipated.”
“It is glorious—magnificent—the supreme triumph of the human mind!” I ejaculated.
But he shook his head.
“A step in the right direction—scarcely more. Besides, there yet linger among us people who dare to declare that there exist objections to machine-made character. These poor weaklings seem to be the survival of a sort of madmen common in early times. They represent the aborted mental condition that went in its former dreadful development to produce poets and prophets and other unbalanced creatures, including all ‘great men,’ as they were called.”
“Geniuses, in fact.”
“That was the curious word. Great men are now not possible. A minority of twaddlers still pursue these shadows—not in the sane spirit of the antiquary, but with the affectation that the history and the rhymed nonsense of those dark ages may still be read with profit to-day.”
“Then Art is dead!” I gasped.
“Happily,” he answered.
“Romance?”
“Defunct long ago. Fiction in any sort is now practically impossible, because all life has been reduced to the glorious precision of mathematics. Given the starting-point, the rest admits of no two interpretations.”