[...] To the question: "What do I do? What do I produce?" there was an honourable, well-wishing, effective answer, at any rate an answer in conscience - for this was the scope of his conscience; but to the question: "Who I am?" there was none. Many human beings have no knowledge of themselves except as effects. They carry within them no reconciliation of these effects, no sense of a realized or realizable individuality, no origin of the notes they give out,. They are neither musicians nor children singing; they are gramophones, mass-produced - effect-makers, good or bad. Of these, some are content, as Severidge was not; they think complacently in terms of effect, as a gramophone might be supposed to think as it came off the production-line. But some are unhappy as a gramophone might be which was aware of music's cause and that it was itself empty of this cause. Severidge resembled such a gramophone. In business, his effect-making had such a perfection which, like all perfection in its own kind, was beautiful , and, while he exercised this faculty, he had a sense of flawlessness, of innocence. He felt then: I am a good man, as a gramophone might feel: I am a good gramophone. But, observing others at school and in later life, he had found that certain men were to him what musicians are to gramophones - often extremely incompetent, but still musicians, aware of music within them; often untrue to their truth but recognizing it as theirs, their very own, the nature of their being, their stem, root and seed, their link with Earth, their unity with Nature, their not.being-lonely, their not-being-sterile-or-dead.
[...]
Charles Morgan, The Judge's Story,
Londres: MacMillan, 1950
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