Admittedly, it cannot be denied that in the non-mathematician's opinion all these primordial dreams were suddenly realized in quite a different way from what people had once imagined. Baron Munchhausen's post-horn was more beautiful than mass-produced canned music, the Seven-League Boots were more beautiful than a motor-car, Dwarf-King Laurin's real more beautiful than a railway -tunnel, the magic mandrake-root more beautiful than a telegraphed picture, to have eaten of one's mother's heart and so to understand the language of birds more beautiful than an animal psychologist's study of the expressive values in bird-song. We have gained in terms of reality and lost in terms of the dream. We no longer lie under a tree, gazing up at the sky between our big toe and second toe; we are too busy getting on with our jobs. And it is no good being lost in dreams and going hungry, if one wants to be efficient; one must eat steak and get a move on. It is exactly as if that old-time, inefficient mankind had gone to sleep on an ant-hill, and when the new one woke up the ants had crept into its blood; and ever since then it has had to fling itself about with the greatest of violence, without ever being able to shake off this beastly sensation of ant-like industry. There is really no need to say much about it. It is in any case quite obvious to most people nowadays that mathematics has entered like a daemon into all aspects of our life....
Actually the only people living in ignorance of these dangers were the mathematicians themselves and their disciples, the natural scientists, who felt no more of all this in their souls than racing-cyclists who are pedaling away hard with no eyes for anything in the world but the back wheel of the man in front. As far as Ulrich was concerned, however, it could at least definitely be said that he loved mathematics because of the people who could not endure it. He was not so much scientifically as humanly in love with science. He could see that in all the problems that came into its orbit science thought differently than the way ordinary people thought. If for "scientific attitude" one were to read 'attitude to life', for 'hypothesis' 'attempt' and for 'truth' 'action', then there would be no considerable natural scientist or mathematician whose life's work did not in courage and revolutionary power far outmatch the greatest deeds in history...[But]in science it happens every few years that something that up to then was held to be error suddenly revolutionizes all views or that an unobtrusive despised idea becomes the ruler over a new realm of ideas; and such occurrences are not mere upheavals but lead up into the heights like Jacob's ladder. In science the way things happen is as vigorous and matter-of-fact and glorious as in a fairytale. 'People simply don't know this,' Ulrich felt. 'They have no glimmer of what can be done with thinking. If one could teach them to think in a new way, they would also live differently.'
Now someone is sure to ask, of course, whether the world is so topsy-turvy that it is always having to be turned up the other way again. But the world itself long ago gave two answers to this question. For ever since it has existed most people have in their youth been in favour of turning things upside-down. They have always felt that their elders were ridiculous in being so attached to the established order of things and in thinking with their heart - a mere lump of flesh - instead of with their brains. These younger people have always noticed that the moral stupidity of their elders is just as much a lack of any capacity to form new combinations as is ordinary intellectual stupidity, and the morality that they themselves have felt natural has always been one of achievement, heroism and change. Nevertheless, by the time they reach years of fulfillment they have forgotten all about it and are far from wishing to be reminded of it. That is why many people for whom mathematics or natural science is a job feel it is almost an outrage if someone goes in for science for reasons like Ulrich's.
However, since taking up this third profession some years earlier, in the opinion of experts, he had done not at all badly.
(The Man Without Qualities I, Robert Musil)
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