Chapter 14, Go Out of My Class-Room, part 1

A story is told of one of the orderly pupils of Mosaism who got to know a good deal about weather and electricity; and at last he got out of patience with the people who wanted to shout and argue. And he said to them: “What is the good of all this arguing backwards and forwards about things that we do not know and cannot settle? Let us try a fair experiment. You go on shouting and doing whatever you think the Unseen Powers like; and I will do what I think will get them to do what I like. And let us agree that whichever of us can draw a spark out of a thundercloud shall be considered to know most about how to come to an understanding with ‘I Am.' ” So the other people shouted and jumped about, and cut themselves with knives; because they had taken it into their heads to imagine that the Maker of things liked to see that kind of behaviour. Why they thought so I cannot conceive. But there's no end to the rubbish that people get to think when they argue about what X is, instead of trying hypotheses in an orderly manner. The Unknown Powers let them shout all day long; and then Elijah got a spark out of a thundercloud. The same sort of thing happened again about a hundred and fifty years ago. Various sorts of priests were shouting and arguing about what “I Am” wished people to believe and to think; and then Benjamin Franklin and his friends, who had not been mixing up with the argument or making wild guesses, but quietly experimenting and dealing logically with the fact of their own ignorance, sent up a kite into a thundercloud, and got a spark down; and the consequence of that is that all kinds of people say, “What a wonderful man Benjamin Franklin was!” and all sorts of people are able to ride about in electric trams.