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still. But if his life and joy were so gigantic that he never tired of going to Islington, he
might go to Islington as regularly as the Thames goes to Sheerness. The very speed
and ecstacy of his life would have the stillness of death. The sun rises every morning. I
do not rise every morning; but the variation is due not to my activity, but to my inaction.
Now, to put the matter in a popular phrase, it might be true that the sun rises regularly
because he never gets tired of rising. His routine might be due, not to a lifelessness, but
to a rush of life. The thing I mean can be seen, for instance, in children, when they find
some game or joke that they specially enjoy. A child kicks his legs rhythmically through
excess, not absence, of life. Because children have abounding vitality, because they are
in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They
always say,  Do it again ; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead.
For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is
strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning,  Do it
again to the sun; and every evening,  Do it again to the moon. It may not be automatic
necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately,
but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of
infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we. The
repetition in Nature may not be a mere recurrence; it may be a theatrical encore.
Heaven may encore the bird who laid an egg. If the human being conceives and brings
forth a human child instead of bringing forth a fish, or a bat, or a griffin, the reason may
not be that we are fixed in an animal fate without life or purpose. It may be that our little
tragedy has touched the gods, that they admire it from their starry galleries, and that at
the end of every human drama man is called again and again before the curtain.
Repetition may go on for millions of years, by mere choice, and at any instant it may
stop. Man may stand on the earth generation after generation, and yet each birth be his
positively last appearance.
This was my first conviction; made by the shock of my childish emotions meeting
the modern creed in mid-career. I had always vaguely felt facts to be miracles in the
sense that they are wonderful: now I began to think them miracles in the stricter sense
that they were wilful. I mean that they were, or might be, repeated exercises of some
will. In short, I had always believed that the world involved magic: now I thought that
perhaps it involved a magician. And this pointed a profound emotion always present and
sub-conscious; that this world of ours has some purpose; and if there is a purpose,
there is a person. I had always felt life first as a story: and if there is a story there is a
story-teller.
But modern thought also hit my second human tradition. It went against the fairy
feeling about strict limits and conditions. The one thing it loved to talk about was
expansion and largeness. Herbert Spencer would have been greatly annoyed if any one
had called him an imperialist, and therefore it is highly regrettable that nobody did. But
he was an imperialist of the lowest type. He popularized this contemptible notion that
the size of the solar system ought to over-awe the spiritual dogma of man. Why should
a man surrender his dignity to the solar system any more than to a whale? If mere size
proves that man is not the image of God, then a whale may be the image of God; a
somewhat formless image; what one might call an impressionist portrait. It is quite futile
to argue that man is small compared to the cosmos; for man was always small
compared to the nearest tree. But Herbert Spencer, in his headlong imperialism, would
insist that we had in some way been conquered and annexed by the astronomical
universe. He spoke about men and their ideals exactly as the most insolent Unionist
talks about the Irish and their ideals. He turned mankind into a small nationality. And his
evil influence can be seen even in the most spirited and honourable of later scientific
authors; notably in the early romances of Mr. H. G. Wells. Many moralists have in an
exaggerated way represented the earth as wicked. But Mr. Wells and his school made
the heavens wicked. We should lift up our eyes to the stars from whence would come
our ruin.
But the expansion of which I speak was much more evil than all this. I have
remarked that the materialist, like the madman, is in prison; in the prison of one thought. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]