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The New Zealand Railways Magazine, Volume 6, Issue 7 (February 1, 1932.)

The Obvious and the Oblivious

The Obvious and the Oblivious.

The obvious is something everyone else is thinking, and therefore is as open to suspicion as a jemmy in a jeweller's. If everyone thinks what everyone else thinks it is usually wrong because it is founded on precedent, and precedent is yesterday's car wearing to-day's numbers. The rebels against precedent are pioneers in the realms of imagination. When Stephenson produced his whistling kettle he strayed so far from the path of precedent, that had he adorned an earlier epoch he would have made his last trip by rail before he had made his first.

Imagination, after all, is the writing on the wall, or a poster postulating probabilities unprobed. Thus it is reasonable to believe that the more unreasonable a prognosis may read the more reasonable it may be. Britain's unreasonable reasonableness in promulgating a brotherhood of notions and a notion of international forgiveness regarding the big bust of 1914 and the succeeding reverberations, brands her as a lady who profits from her mistakes.