t seated
figures fall into meditation. And other memories recur and struggle with
one another; the crowded river-streets of Canton, the rafts and
houseboats and junks innumerable, riding over inky water, begin now to
twinkle with a thousand lights. They are ablaze in Osaka and Yokohama
and Tokio, and the swarming staircase streets of Hong Kong glitter with
a wicked activity now that night has come. I flash a glimpse of Burmese
temples, of villages in Java, of the sombre purple masses of the walls
of the Tartar city at Pekin with squat pagoda-guarded gates. How those
great outlines lowered at me in the twilight, full of fresh memories and
grim anticipations of baseness and violence and bloodshed! I sit here
recalling it--feeling it all out beyond the trellised vine-clad wall
that bounds my physical vision.... Vast crowded world that I have seen!
going from point to point seeking for clues, for generalities, until at
last it seems to me that there emerges--something understandable.

I think I have got something understandable out of it all.

What a fantastically courageous thing is this mind of ours! My thoughts
seem to me at once presumptuous and inevitable. I do not know why it is
that I should dare, that any of us should dream of this attempt to
comprehend. But we who think are everyone impelled to this amazing
effort to get it all together into some simple generality. It is not
reason but a deep-seated instinct that draws our intelligence towards
explanations, that sets us perpetually seeking laws, seeking statements
that will fit into infinite, incessantly interweaving complexities, and
be true of them all! There is I perceive a valiant and magnificent
stupidity about the human mind, a disregard of disproportion and
insufficiency--like the ferret which will turn from the leveret it has
seized to attack even man if he should interfere. By these desperate
feats of thinking it is that our species has achieved its victories. By
them it survives. By them it must stand the test of ultimate survival.
Some forgotten man in our ancestry--for every begetting man alive was in
my individual ancestry and yours three thousand years ago--first dared
to think of the world as round,--an astounding temerity. He rolled up
the rivers and mountains, the forests and plains and broad horizons
that stretched beyond his ken, that seemed to commonsense to go on
certainly for ever, into a ball, into a little ball "like an orange."
Magnificent