One loses,
in the study of cause and effect, that absurd air which so many
people have of being always shocked and pained by the curiousness of
life. Such people live amid human nature as if human nature were a
foreign country full of awful foreign customs. But, having reached
maturity, one ought surely to be ashamed of being a stranger in a
strange land!
The study of cause and effect, while it lessens the painfulness of
life, adds to life's picturesqueness. The man to whom evolution is
but a name looks at the sea as a grandiose, monotonous spectacle,
which he can witness in August for three shillings third-class
return. The man who is imbued with the idea of development, of
continuous cause and effect, perceives in the sea an element which
in the day-before-yesterday of geology was vapour, which yesterday
was boiling, and which to-morrow will inevitably be ice.
He perceives that a liquid is merely something on its way to be
solid, and he is penetrated by a sense of the tremendous, changeful
picturesqueness of life. Nothing will afford a more durable
satisfaction than the constantly cultivated appreciation of this.
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