 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 mediæval 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 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
