I would have it clear, therefore, that individualism is not "toleration." What is there in my exercise of a God-given right and duty to be myself that should call for the assumption of my fellow being that HE will "tolerate" these rights? Therefore, I do not want to be "tolerant" to my fellows. I would radiate the individualism which goes ahead and thinks and acts according to the dictates of personal conscience. It is all very well to say that we should learn from the combined wisdom of the ages. I am not so sure of much of it, after all! I accept the astronomy of to-day, but by no means believe our astronomers have said the last word, any more than I believe that the great and humble Newton said the last word when he declared that man had gained the summit in the art of telescope making. Just four years after he made that foolish assertion John Dolland invented the achromatic telescope which has revolutionized the astronomical science of the world by adding infinitely to the astronomer's seeing power.
_Nothing_ in human life is yet complete. There is _no_ absolute truth carried out to its ultimate. When numbers were first discovered our forefathers thought they had gone as far as it was possible, in discovering that two and two make four. Then geometry was discovered and Euclid changed the arithmetic of the world, and the teachers said we had gone as far as it was possible. Then algebra was discovered and the world found out the teachers were wrong in limiting the science of arithmetic. Yet foolish people would not learn from the folly of the past. They wisely and sagely declared that _now, at last_, the ultimate had been reached. But Newton comes along and with his "Calculus" opens up new worlds in arithmetical science. NOW we have got it all, declares the teacher of _fixed_ truth. Yet in the year of Our Lord, one thousand nineteen hundred and six, there comes a Japanese, and in his _Handbook of Chess_ demonstrates as great an advance in arithmetical science as Newton did in his Calculus. We are yet children. We shall ever be learning so long as we are human. The knowledge we have so far gained is vast, apparently, when compared with the knowledge held in the Dark Ages, but, as compared _with what there is yet stored away for us to know_, I verily believe it is so insignificant, so slight, so small, so puny, so infinitesimal, as to excite the pity and the contempt of any superior beings who look down upon us and see us strutting in our doctor's mortar-boards and gowns in our assumed wisdom.