 him.
In the meat on the platter he saw the shining sun and traced its energy back
through all its transformations to its source a hundred million miles away, or
traced its energy ahead to the moving muscles in his arms that enabled him to
cut the meat, and to the brain wherewith he willed the muscles to move to cut
the meat, until, with inward gaze, he saw the same sun shining in his brain. He
was entranced by illumination, and did not hear the »Bug-house,« whispered by
Jim, nor see the anxiety on his sister's face, nor notice the rotary motion of
Bernard Higginbotham's finger, whereby he imparted the suggestion of wheels
revolving in his brother-in-law's head.
    What, in a way, most profoundly impressed Martin, was the correlation of
knowledge - of all knowledge. He had been curious to know things, and whatever
he acquired he had filed away in separate memory compartments in his brain.
Thus, on the subject of sailing he had an immense store. On the subject of woman
he had a fairly large store. But these two subjects had been unrelated. Between
the two memory compartments there had been no connection. That, in the fabric of
knowledge, there should be any connection whatever between a woman with
hysterics and a schooner carrying a weather-helm or heaving to in a gale, would
have struck him as ridiculous and impossible. But Herbert Spencer had shown him
not only that it was not ridiculous, but that it was impossible for there to be
no connection. All things were related to all other things from the farthermost
star in the wastes of space to the myriads of atoms in the grain of sand under
one's foot. This new concept was a perpetual amazement to Martin, and he found
himself engaged continually in tracing the relationship between all things under
the sun and on the other side of the sun. He drew up lists of the most
incongruous things and was unhappy until he succeeded in establishing kinship
between them all - kinship between love, poetry, earthquake, fire, rattlesnakes,
rainbows, precious gems, monstrosities, sunsets, the roaring of lions,
illuminating gas, cannibalism, beauty, murder, lovers, fulcrums, and tobacco.
Thus, he unified the universe and held it up and looked at it, or wandered
through its byways and alleys and jungles, not as a terrified traveller in the
thick of mysteries seeking an unknown goal, but observing and charting and
becoming familiar with all there was to know. And the more he knew, the more
passionately he
