“Revelation has been within us since the origin of the World.
Let us not, indeed, be mistaken: since the origin of the world, all possibilities and all future ideas have been in existence, as seeds of potential. It is, therefore, not to the future that it is necessary to look for revelation but the power of our memory. The poet of the enlightened land who conceived in very ancient times the symbol of the Earthly Paradise: God saying, after Adam had touched the Tree of Science, “He has become like one of us, knowing good and evil”—which is to say, the for and the against, the androgynous idea—“now we must make sure that he does not touch the Tree of Life and live forever”, thus condemning man to material labor; was several thousand years ahead, not only of his own time, but of ours.
Humankind, as a whole, cannot follow the fulgurant course of an Idea; its progress is slower and “forward thinkers”—precursors—have to have the patience to wait until everyone else’s ideas have caught up with theirs: a patience often difficult for the thinker who, after being madly elevated, must return to his point of departure and, estranged by what he has seen, feels like a foreigner visiting his own world.

The usefulness of precursors.
Is it necessary to conclude that these forward thinkers, these bold recognitions, are useless? Quite the contrary, for it is in bringing superhuman heroes to life, imagining the reality of facts whose prototypes remain latent in the world of ideas, that poets and researchers construct the frame of the world. Their exceptional follies of today will become the banality of tomorrow, and the crowd will eventually hasten to take the presently-accessible steps which they are carving out in the clouds—and that crowd, in its blind course, will have been upraised without knowing it.
Without changing position, the opposition of yesterday becomes the reaction of tomorrow, the exception becomes the law in its turn; only the Idea is immutable through its successive incarnations, its changes of material form: the relativities, in a word, that we call Life. It is for us to extract the substance from the shadow and seize the eternal element of things.”