In this autumn of 1919, in which I write, we are at the dead season of our fortunes. - John Maynard Keynes

Education is the inculcation of the incomprehensible into the ignorant by the incompetent.

I believe that the clue to his mind is to be found in his unusual powers of continuous concentrated
introspection. A case can be made out, as it also can with Descartes, for regarding him as an accomplished
experimentalist. Nothing can be more charming than the tales of his mechanical contrivances when he was a
boy. There are his telescopes and his optical experiments, These were essential accomplishments, part of his
unequalled all-round technique, but not, I am sure, his peculiar gift, especially amongst his contemporaries.
His peculiar gift was the power of holding continuously in his mind a purely mental problem until he had
seen straight through it. I fancy his pre-eminence is due to his muscles of intuition being the strongest and
most enduring with which a man has ever been gifted. Anyone who has ever attempted pure scientific or
philosophical thought knows how one can hold a problem momentarily in one's mind and apply all one's
powers of concentration to piercing through it, and how it will dissolve and escape and you find that what
you are surveying is a blank. I believe that Newton could hold a problem in his mind for hours and days and
weeks until it surrendered to him its secret. Then being a supreme mathematical technician he could dress it
up, how you will, for purposes of exposition, but it was his intuition which was pre-eminently extraordinary
- 'so happy in his conjectures', said De Morgan, 'as to seem to know more than he could possibly have any
means of proving'. The proofs, for what they are worth, were, as I have said, dressed up afterwards - they
were not the instrument of discovery.

How long will it be necessary to pay City men so entirely out of proportion to what other servants of society commonly receive for performing social services not less useful or difficult?