ore and
more.

I will deal with your case next, before coming to literature.

X

NOTHING IN LIFE IS HUMDRUM

Art is a great thing. But it is not the greatest. The most important
of all perceptions is the continual perception of cause and effect--in
other words, the perception of the continuous development of the
universe--in still other words, the perception of the course of
evolution. When one has thoroughly got imbued into one's head the
leading truth that nothing happens without a cause, one grows not only
large-minded, but large-hearted.

It is hard to have one's watch stolen, but one reflects that the thief
of the watch became a thief from causes of heredity and environment
which are as interesting as they are scientifically comprehensible; and
one buys another watch, if not with joy, at any rate with a philosophy
that makes bitterness impossible. 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. It is
the end of all science.

Cause and effect are to be found everywhere. Rents went up in
Shepherd's Bush. It was painful and shocking that rents should go up
in Shepherd's Bush. But to a certain point we are all scientific
students of cause and effect, and there was not a clerk lunching at a
Lyons Restaurant who did not scientifically put two and two together
and see in the (once) Two-penny Tube the cause of an excessive demand