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 re