Now, in spite of the wildest claims to independence, the intellectual life of today still strikes me as being mainly symbolised by the train or the track or the groove.  There is any amount of fuss and vivacity about certain fixed fashions or directions of thought; just as there is any amount of rapidity along the fixed rails of the railway-track.  But if we begin to think about really getting off the track, we shall find that what is true of the train is equally true of the truth.  We shall find it is actually harder to get out of the groove, when the train is going fast, than when the train is going slowly.  We shall find that rapidity is rigidity; that the very fact of some social or political or artistic movement going quicker and quicker means that fewer people have the courage to move against it.  And at last perhaps nobody will make a leap for real intellectual liberty, just as nobody will jump out of a railway-train going at eighty miles an hour.  This seems to me the primary mark of what we call progressive thought in the modern world.  It is in the most exact sense of the term limited.  It is all in one dimension.  It is all in one direction.  It is limited by its progress.  It is limited by its speed.

 I have said that it has not the curiosity to stop.  If the train-dwellers were really travellers, exploring a strange country to make discoveries, they would always be stopping at little wayside stations.  For instance, they would always be stopping to consider the curious nature of their own conventional terms; a thing which they never do, by any chance.  Their catchwords are regarded solely as gadgets or appliances for getting them where they are going to; they never cast back a thought upon where the catchword comes from.  Yet that is exactly what they would do if they were really thinking, in any thorough and all-round sense.  Of course it will be understood, touching these intellectual fashions, that great masses, probably the mass of mankind, never travel on the train at all.  They remain in their villages and are much happier and better; but they are not regarded as the intellectual leaders of the time.  What I complain of is that the intellectual leaders can only lead along one narrow track; otherwise known as the ringing groove of change.

-The Common Man (collection of essays published posthumously in 1950)