We talk of the world as if our sensations were the sum total of experience.
But the truth is that there is an infinity of worlds outside our
comprehension, worlds of vision and hearing and smell that are beyond our
finite capacity, some so microscopic as to escape us at one end of the
scale, some so vast and intangible as to escape us at the other end. I went
into the garden just now to pick some strawberries. One of them tempted me
forthwith by its ripe and luxuriant beauty. I bit into it and found it
hollowed out in the centre, and in that luscious hollow was a colony of
earwigs. For them that strawberry was the world, and a very jolly world
too--abundance of food, a soft bed to lie on, and a chamber of exquisite
perfumes. What, I wonder, was the thought of the little creatures as their
comfortable world was suddenly shattered by some vast, inexplicable power
beyond the scope of their vision and understanding? I could not help idly
wondering whether the shell of our comfortable world has been broken by
some power without which is as far beyond our apprehension as I was beyond
the apprehension of the happy dwellers in the strawberry.
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