for the brute order
of our experience to be remodelled at all. But, as we have the
elaborate volitional constitution we do have, the remodelling must be
effected; there is no escape. The world's contents are _given_ to each
of us in an order so foreign to our subjective interests that we can
hardly by an effort of the imagination picture to ourselves what it is
like. We have to break that order altogether,--and by picking out from
it the items which concern us, and connecting them with others far
away, which we say 'belong' with them, we are able to make out definite
threads of sequence and tendency; to foresee particular liabilities and
get ready for them; and to enjoy simplicity and harmony in place of
what was chaos. Is not the sum of your actual experience taken at this
moment and impartially added together an utter chaos? The strains of
my voice, the lights and shades inside the room and out, the murmur of
the wind, the ticking of the clock, the various organic feelings you
may happen individually to possess, do these make a whole at all? Is
it not the only condition of your mental sanity in the midst of them
that most of them should become non-existent for you, and that a few
others--the sounds, I hope, which I am uttering--should evoke from
places in your memory that have nothing to do with this scene
associates fitted to combine with them in what we call a rational train
of thought,--rational, because it leads to a conclusion which we have
some organ to appreciate? We have no organ or faculty to appreciate
the simply given order. The real world as it is given objectively at
this moment is the sum total of all its beings and {119} events now.
But can we think of such a sum? Can we realize for an instant what a
cross-section of all existence at a definite point of time would be?
While I talk and the flies buzz, a sea-gull catches a fish at the mouth
of the Amazon, a tree falls in the Adirondack wilderness, a man sneezes
in Germany, a horse dies in Tartary, and twins are born in France.
What does that mean? Does the contemporaneity of these events with one
another and with a million others as disjointed, form a rational bond
between them, and unite them into anything that means for us a world?
Yet just such a collateral contemporaneity, and nothing else, is the
real order of the world. It is an order with which we have nothing to
do but to get away from it as fast as possible. As I said, we break
it: we