Lewis Padgett

Truth will triumph. It always does. However, I figure truth is a variable, so we're right back where we started from.

— Lewis Padgett

There's no use trying to describe either Unthahorsten or his surroundings, because, for one thing, a good many million years had passed since 1942 Anno Domini and, for another, Unthahorsten wasn't on Earth, technically speaking. He was doing the equivalent of standing in the equivalent of a laboratory. He was preparing to test his time machine.

— Lewis Padgett

The soft, woven helmet was the first thing that caught his eye, but he discarded that without much interest. It was just a cap. Next he lifted a square, transparent crystal block, small enough to cup in his palm — much too small to contain the maze of apparatus within it. In a moment Scott had solved that problem. The crystal was a sort of magnifying glass, vastly enlarging the things inside the block.

— Lewis Padgett

Candidly, I don't see the point of teaching those apes philosophy. They're all at the wrong age. Their habit-patterns, their methods of thinking, are already laid down. They're horribly conservative, not that they'd admit it. The only people who can understand philosophy are mature adults or kids like Emma and Scotty.

— Lewis Padgett

Only babies spilled food, Emma had been told. As a result, she took such painstaking care in conveying her spoon to her mouth that Paradine got the jitters whenever he watched.

— Lewis Padgett

Paradine blinked. The "abacus," unfolded, was more than a foot square, composed of thing, rigid wires that interlocked here and there. On the wires colored beads were strung. They could be slid back and forth, and from one support to another, even at the points of juncture.

— Lewis Padgett

The framework itself — Paradine wasn't a mathematician. But the angles formed by the wires were vaguely shocking, in their ridiculous lack of Euclidean logic. They were a maze. Perhaps that's what the gadget was — a puzzle.

— Lewis Padgett

Scott puzzled over the framework again. He experimented. This time there were no shocks, even slight. The abacus had showed him the correct method. Now it was up to him to do it on his own. The bizarre angles of the wires seemed a little less confusing now, somehow. It worked, Scott thought, rather like the crystal cube.

— Lewis Padgett

This was fun. Like putting on a play, only more real. The little people did what Scott told them, inside of his head. If he made a mistake, they waited till he'd found the right way. They even posed new problems for him — The cube, too, was a most instructive toy. It was teaching Scott, with alarming rapidity\xa0 and teaching him very entertainingly. But it gave him no really knowledge as yet. He wasn't ready. Later — later —

— Lewis Padgett

Emma was sliding the beads to and fro in the abacus. The motions didn't seem so strange now. Even when the beads vanished. She could almost follow that new direction\xa0— almost —\xa0 Scott panted, staring into the crystal cube and mentally directing, with many false starts, the building of a structure somewhat more complicated than the one which had been destroyed by fire. He, too, was learning\xa0 being conditioned —\xa0

— Lewis Padgett

Paradine's mistake, from a completely anthropomorphic standpoint, was that he didn't get rid of the toys instantly. He did not realize their significance, and, but the time he did, the progression of circumstances had got well under way.

— Lewis Padgett

Scott was learning fast. What he now saw in the crystal cube had little relationship to the original simple problems. But they were fascinatingly technical. Had Scott realized that his education was being guided and supervised — though merely mechanically — he would probably have lost interest. As it was, his initiative was never quashed.

— Lewis Padgett

It is difficult to admit that children lack subtlety. Children are different from the mature animal because they think in another way. We can more or less easily pierce the pretenses they set up\xa0— but they can do the same to us. Ruthlessly a child can destroy the pretenses of an adult. Iconoclasm is their prerogative. Foppishness, for example. The amenities of social intercourse, exaggerated not quite to absurdity.

— Lewis Padgett

"Such savoir faire! Such punctilious courtesy!" The dowager and the blond young thing are often impressed. Men have less pleasant comments to make. But the child goes to the root of the matter. How can an immature human understand the complicated system of social relationships? He can't. To him, an exaggeration of natural courtesy is silly.

— Lewis Padgett

Perhaps Paradine and Jane had evinced too much interest in toys. Emma and Scott took to keeping them hidden, playing with them only in private. They never did it overtly, but with a certain unobtrusive caution. Nevertheless, Jane especially was somewhat troubled.

— Lewis Padgett

We are dealing with madness. … All children are mad, from an adult viewpoint.

— Lewis Padgett

'Babies of course are not human — they are animals, and have a very ancient and ramified culture, as cats have, and fishes, and even snakes; the same in kind as these, but much more complicated and vivid, since babies are, after all, one of the most developed species of the lower vertebrates. In short, babies have minds which work in terms and categories of their own which cannot be translated into the terms and categories of the human mind.'

— Lewis Padgett

One can no more think like a baby than one can think like a bee.

— Lewis Padgett

All I say is that babies think in other ways than we do. Not necessarily better\xa0— that's a question of relative values. But with a different manner of extension—

— Lewis Padgett

The brain's a colloid, a very complicated machine. We don't know much about its potentialities. We don't even know how much it can grasp. But it is known that the mind becomes conditioned as the human animal matures. It follows certain familiar theorems, and all thought thereafter is pretty well based on patterns taken for granted.

— Lewis Padgett

Let's suppose there are two kinds of geometry\xa0— we'll limit it, for the sake of the example. Our kind, Euclidean, and another, which we'll call x. X hasn't much relationship to Euclid. It's based on different theorems. Two and two needn't equal four in it; they could equal y, or they might not even equal. A baby's mind is not yet conditioned, except by certain questionable factors of heredity and environment.

— Lewis Padgett

Holloway picked up the crystal cube. "Did you question the children much?" "He said they were building a place. His exact words. I asked him who\xa0— people? But he couldn't explain."

— Lewis Padgett

It would be interesting to know the conditions of the place where these things came from. Induction doesn't help a great deal, though. Too many factors are missing. We can't visualize a world based on the x factor\xa0— environment adjusted to minds thinking in x patterns. This luminous network inside the doll. It could be anything. It could exist inside us, though we haven't discovered it yet.

— Lewis Padgett

If the undeveloped minds have been turned into the x channel, it's necessary to divert them back. I'm not saying that's the wisest thing to do, but it probably is from our standards. After all, Emma and Scott will have to live in this world.

— Lewis Padgett

That night Paradine slept badly. Holloway's parallel had been ill-chosen. It led to disturbing theories. The x factor\xa0— The children were using the equivalent of algebraic reasoning, while adults used geometry. Algebra can give you answers that geometry cannot, since there are certain terms and symbols which cannot be expressed geometrically. Suppose x logic showed conclusions inconceivable to an adult mind?

— Lewis Padgett

Scott stirred in his sleep. Without awakening, he called what was obviously a question, though it did not seem to be in any particular language. Emma gave a little mewling cry that changed pitch sharply. Had their minds changed so that even\xa0— sleep\xa0— was different to them?

— Lewis Padgett

A little of Scott's thoughts could still be understood. But Emma had become conditioned to x much faster. Sometimes Scott himself had difficulty in following her thoughts.

— Lewis Padgett

Her mind has been conditioned unusually. It may be that she breaks down what she sees into simple, obvious patterns\xa0 and realizes a significance to those patterns that we can't understand. Like the abacus. She saw a pattern in that, though to us it was completely random.

— Lewis Padgett

Scott's thought-patterns are building up to a sum that doesn't equal this world. Perhaps he's subconsciously expecting to see the world where those toys came from.

— Lewis Padgett

This is only\xa0— part of the big place. It's like the river where the salmon go. Why don't people go on down to the ocean when they grow up?

— Lewis Padgett

In the latter half of the nineteenth century and Englishman sat on a grassy bank near a stream. A very small girl lay near him, staring up at the sky. She had discarded a curious toy with which she had been playing, and now was murmuring a wordless little song, to which the man listened to with half an ear.

— Lewis Padgett

Just what does it mean?" "It's the way out, I think," the girl said doubtfully. "I'm not sure yet. My magic toys told me.

— Lewis Padgett

She had found the toys in a box one day, as she played by the Thames. And they were indeed wonderful. But she was already too old. She never found the way.

— Lewis Padgett

It was, Paradine thought, like a Scout trail through the woods, markers in a labyrinth. But here again was the random factor. Logic halted\xa0— familiar logic\xa0— at Scott's motives in arranging the junk as he did. Paradine went out. Over his shoulder he saw Scott pull a crumpled piece of paper and a pencil from his pocket, and head for Emma, who was squatted in a corner thinking things over.

— Lewis Padgett

Paradine, his mouth working, his nerves ridiculously tense, forgot the phone and raced up the stairs. The door of Scott's room was open. They went in fragments, like thick smoke in a wind, or like movement in a distorting mirror. Hand in hand they went, in a direction Paradine could not understand, and as he blinked there on the threshold, they were gone.

— Lewis Padgett

On the carpet lay a pattern of markers, pebbles, an iron ring — junk. A random pattern. A crumpled sheet of paper blew towards Paradine. He picked it up automatically.

— Lewis Padgett

Paradine looked at the paper he held. It was a leaf torn from a book. There were interlineations and marginal notes, in Emma's meaningless scrawl. A stanza of verse had been so underlined and scribbled over that it was almost illegible, but Paradine was thoroughly familiar with Through the Looking Glass. His memory gave him the words —

— Lewis Padgett