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the man of broad, clear, imaginative vision, not
Let us get that proposition straight...
“It was all a question,” this scientist maintained, “of whether Nollie could make good her vagary. If she could, and grew in strength of character thereby, it was, “ipso facto, all right; her vagary would be proved an advantage and the world enriched.”
To the higher type of scientist — the man of broad, clear, imaginative vision, not the puttering experimenter incapable of a synthesis — it would have been fairly obvious that our social forms are themselves the pragmatic selection of a thousand centuries, and are rigid because their strict maintenance is believed to work better, by and large, than any trimming to the convenience or growth of individuals. Such is the way with the majority of “advanced” thinkers; they are so advanced that they have left all the lessons of history behind them.
ex Lacy Lockert — in his moralizing rant on/around John Galsworthy’s Saint’s Progress (1919) — “Some of Mr. Galsworthy’s Heroines,” in The North American Review 215:2 (February 1922) : 255-266 (259)
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Lacy Lockert (1888-1974?)...
Career: Kenyon College, Gambier, Ohio, assistant professor of English. 1916-25; retired early in order to study and write...
1912
Mother dies; family home broken up and Lockerts move to Nashville, Lacy suffers nervous breakdown which interrupts his doctoral studies at Princeton; treatment was in Nashville.
1915
Returns to Princeton in January. Nelle Ramsay dies in California in June.
source :
finding aid, Lockert, Charles Lacy, Jr. Papers, MSS.0263 (Vanderbilt University)