#pg 129

Yet, if Dockson was to be believed, Marsh’s attitudes had changed much since that day three years before. Kelsier still found it hard to believe that his brother had given up leadership of the skaa rebellion. He had always been so passionate about his work.

Kelsier tossed the paper into the crackling hearth. “They served the Final Empire.”

Marsh’s expression darkened. “How can you be so flippitant about something like this?”

“What is this?” Kelsier asked, picking it up.

The canalization of the creative urge, exemplified in its massive reproduction of social nexūs, is for common sense the final illustration of the power of stubborn fact. Also in our experience, we essentially arise out of our bodies which are the stubborn facts of the immediate relevant past. We are also carried on by our immediate past of personal experience; we finish a sentence because we have begun it. The sentence may embody a new thought, never phrased before, or an old one rephrased with verbal novelty. There need be no well-worn association between the sounds of the earlier and the later words. But it remains remorselessly true, that we finish a sentence because we have begun it. We are governed by stubborn fact. It is in respect to this 'stubborn fact' that the theories of modern philosophy are weakest. Philosophers have worried themselves about remote consequences, and the inductive formulations of science. They should confine attention to the rush of immediate transition. Their explanations would then be seen in their native absurdity.

This is good, as I have zero interest in pulling a Anastasia—getting shot to death in a basement and then having every crazy woman in Europe pretending to be me for the next fifty years.