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Elisha Cuthbert Photos Books: Martin Eden The Pickwick Papers The Sea Wolf |
much lower than at Mr. Morses
table. The men were not grave and dignified. They lost their tempers
easily and called one another names, while oaths and obscene allusions
were frequent on their lips. Once or twice he had seen them come to
blows. And yet, he knew not why, there seemed something vital about the
stuff of these mens thoughts. Their logomachy was far more stimulating
to his intellect than the reserved and quiet dogmatism of Mr. Morse.
These men, who slaughtered English, gesticulated like lunatics, and
fought one anothers ideas with primitive anger, seemed somehow to be
more alive than Mr. Morse and his crony, Mr. Butler.
Martin had heard Herbert Spencer quoted several times in the park, but
one afternoon a disciple of Spencers appeared, a seedy tramp with a
dirty coat buttoned tightly at the throat to conceal the absence of a
shirt. Battle royal was waged, amid the smoking of many cigarettes and
the expectoration of much tobacco-juice, wherein the tramp successfully
held his own, even when a socialist workman sneered, "There is no god but
the Unknowable, and Herbert Spencer is his prophet." Martin was puzzled
as to what the discussion was about, but when he rode on to the library
he carried with him a new-born interest in Herbert Spencer, and because
of the frequency with which the tramp had mentioned "First Principles,"
Martin drew out that volume.
So the great discovery began. Once before he had tried Spencer, and
choosing the "Principles of Psychology" to begin with, he had failed as
abjectly as he had failed with Madam Blavatsky. There had been no
understanding the book, and he had returned it unread. But this night,
after algebra and physics, and an attempt at a sonnet, he got into bed
and opened "First Principles." Morning found him still reading. It was
impossible for him to sleep. Nor did he write that day. He lay on the
bed till his body grew tired, when he tried the hard floor, reading on
his back, the book held in the air above him, or changing from side to
side. He slept that night, and did his writing next morning, and then
the book tempted him and he fell, reading all afternoon, oblivious to
everything and oblivious to the fact that that was the afternoon Ruth
gave to him. His first consciousness of the immediate world about him
was when Bernard Higginbotham jerked open the door and demanded to know
if he thought they were running a restaurant.
Martin Eden had been mastered by curiosity all his days. He wanted to
know, and it was this desire that had sent him adventuring over the
world. But he was now learning from Spencer that he never had known, and
that he never could have known had he continued his sailing and wandering
forever. He had merely skimmed over the surface of things, observing
detached phenomena, accumulating fragments of facts, making superficial
little generalizations--and all and everything quite unrelated in a
capricious and disorderly world of whim and chance. The mechanism of the
flight of birds he had watched and reasoned about with understanding; but
it had never entered his head to try to explain the process whereby
birds, as organic flying mechanisms, had been developed. He had never
dreamed there was such a process. That birds should have come to be, was
unguessed. They always had been. They just happened.
And as it was with birds, so had it been with everything. His ignorant
and unprepared attempts at philosophy had been fruitless. The medieval
metaphysics of Kant had given him the key to nothing, and had served the
sole purpose of making him doubt his own intellectual powers. In similar
manner his attempt to study evolution had been confined to a hopelessly
technical volume by Romanes. He had understood nothing, and the only
idea he had gathered was that evolution was a dry-as-dust theory, of a
lot of little men possessed of huge and unintelligible vocabularies. And
now he learned that evolution was no mere theory but an accepted process
of development; that scientists no longer disagreed about it, their only
differences being over the method of evolution.
And here was the man Spencer, organizing all knowledge for him, reducing
everything to unity, elaborating ultimate realities, and presenting to
his startled gaze a universe so concrete of realization that it was Martin Eden page 50 Martin Eden page 52 |