presenting to his startled gaze a universe so concrete of
realization that it was like the model of a ship such as sailors
make and put into glass bottles. There was no caprice, no chance.
All was law. It was in obedience to law that the bird flew, and it
was in obedience to the same law that fermenting slime had writhed
and squirmed and put out legs and wings and become a bird.
Martin had ascended from pitch to pitch of intellectual living, and
here he was at a higher pitch than ever. All the hidden things
were laying their secrets bare. He was drunken with comprehension.
At night, asleep, he lived with the gods in colossal nightmare; and
awake, in the day, he went around like a somnambulist, with absent
stare, gazing upon the world he had just discovered. At table he
failed to hear the conversation about petty and ignoble things, his
eager mind seeking out and following cause and effect in everything
before him. In the meat on the platter he saw the shining sun and
traced its energy back through all its transformations to its
source a hundred million miles away, or traced its energy ahead to
the moving muscles in his arms that enabled him to cut the meat,
and to the brain wherewith he willed the muscles to move to cut the
meat, until, with inward gaze, he saw the same sun shining in his
brain. He was entranced by illumination, and did not hear the
“Bughouse,” whispered by Jim, nor see the anxiety on his sister’s
face, nor notice the rotary motion of Bernard Higginbotham’s
finger, whereby he imparted the suggestion of wheels revolving in
his brother-in-law’s head.
What, in a way, most profoundly impressed Martin, was the
correlation of knowledge – of all knowledge. He had been curious
to know things, and whatever he acquired he had filed away in
separate memory compartments in his brain. Thus, on the subject of
sailing he had an immense store. On the subject of woman he had a
fairly large store. But these two subjects had been unrelated.
Between the two memory compartments there had been no connection.
That, in the fabric of knowledge, there should be any connection
whatever between a woman with hysterics and a schooner carrying a
weather-helm or heaving to in a gale, would have struck him as
ridiculous and impossible. But Herbert Spencer had shown him not
only that it was not ridiculous, but that it was impossible for
there to be no connection. All things were related to all other
things from the farthermost star in the wastes of space to the
myriads of atoms in the grain of sand under one’s foot. This new
concept was a perpetual amazement to Martin, and he found himself
engaged continually in tracing the relationship between all things
under the sun and on the other side of the sun. He drew up lists
of the most incongruous things and was unhappy until he succeeded
in establishing kinship between them all – kinship between love,
poetry, earthquake, fire, rattlesnakes, rainbows, precious gems,
monstrosities, sunsets, the roaring of lions, illuminating gas,
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cannibalism, beauty, murder, lovers, fulcrums, and tobacco. Thus,
he unified the universe and held it up and looked at it, or
wandered through its byways and alleys and jungles, not as a
terrified traveller in the thick of mysteries seeking an unknown
goal, but observing and charting and becoming familiar with all
there was to know. And the more he knew, the more passionately he
admired the universe, and life, and his own life in the midst of it
all.
“You fool!” he cried at his image in the looking-glass. “You
wanted to write, and you tried to write, and you had nothing in you
to write about. What did you have in you? – some childish notions,
a few half-baked sentiments, a lot of undigested beauty, a great
black mass of ignorance, a heart filled to bursting with love, and
an ambition as big as your love and as futile as your ignorance.
And you wanted to write! Why, you’re just on the edge of beginning
to get something in you to write about. You wanted to create
beauty, but how could you when you knew nothing about the nature of
beauty? You wanted to write about life when you knew nothing of
the essential characteristics of life. You wanted to write about
the world and the scheme of existence when the world was a Chinese
puzzle to you and all that you could have written would have been
about what you did not know of the scheme of existence. But cheer
up, Martin, my boy. You’ll write yet. You know a little, a very
little, and you’re on the right road now to know more. Some day,
if you’re lucky, you may come pretty close to knowing all that may
be known. Then you will write.”
He brought his great discovery to Ruth, sharing with her all his
joy and wonder in it. But she did not seem to be so enthusiastic
over it. She tacitly accepted it and, in a way, seemed aware of it
from her own studies. It did not stir her deeply, as it did him,
and he would have been surprised had he not reasoned it out that it
was not new and fresh to her as it was to him. Arthur and Norman,
he found, believed in evolution and had read Spencer, though it did
not seem to have made any vital impression upon them, while the
young fellow with the glasses and the mop of hair, Will Olney,
sneered disagreeably at Spencer and repeated the epigram, “There is
no god but the Unknowable, and Herbert Spencer is his prophet.”
But Martin forgave him the sneer, for he had begun to discover that
Olney was not in love with Ruth. Later, he was dumfounded to learn
from various little happenings not only that Olney did not care for
Ruth, but that he had a positive dislike for her. Martin could not
understand this. It was a bit of phenomena that he could not
correlate with all the rest of the phenomena in the universe. But
nevertheless he felt sorry for the young fellow because of the
great lack in his nature that prevented him from a proper
appreciation of Ruth’s fineness and beauty. They rode out into the
hills several Sundays on their wheels, and Martin had ample
opportunity to observe the armed truce that existed between Ruth
and Olney. The latter chummed with Norman, throwing Arthur and
Martin into company with Ruth, for which Martin was duly grateful.
Those Sundays were great days for Martin, greatest because he was
with Ruth, and great, also, because they were putting him more on a
par with the young men of her class. In spite of their long years
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of disciplined education, he was finding himself their intellectual
equal, and the hours spent with them in conversation was so much
practice for him in the use of the grammar he had studied so hard.
He had abandoned the etiquette books, falling back upon observation
to show him the right things to do. Except when carried away by
his enthusiasm, he was always on guard, keenly watchful of their
actions and learning their little courtesies and refinements of
conduct.
The fact that Spencer was very little read was for some time a
source of surprise to Martin. “Herbert Spencer,” said the man at
the desk in the library, “oh, yes, a great mind.” But the man did
not seem to know anything of the content of that great mind. One
evening, at dinner, when Mr. Butler was there, Martin turned the
conversation upon Spencer. Mr. Morse bitterly arraigned the
English philosopher’s agnosticism, but confessed that he had not
read “First Principles”; while Mr. Butler stated that he had no
patience with Spencer, had never read a line of him, and had
managed to get along quite well without him. Doubts arose in
Martin’s mind, and had he been less strongly individual he would
have accepted the general opinion and given Herbert Spencer up. As
it was, he found Spencer’s explanation of things convincing; and,
as he phrased it to himself, to give up Spencer would be equivalent
to a navigator throwing the compass and chronometer overboard. So
Martin went on into a thorough study of evolution, mastering more
and more the subject himself, and being convinced by the
corroborative testimony of a thousand independent writers. The
more he studied, the more vistas he caught of fields of knowledge
yet unexplored, and the regret that days were only twenty-four
hours long became a chronic complaint with him.
One day, because the days were so short, he decided to give up
algebra and geometry. Trigonometry he had not even attempted.
Then he cut chemistry from his study-list, retaining only physics.
“I am not a specialist,” he said, in defence, to Ruth. “Nor am I