7
Everything, therefore, must end, or perhaps already be, if not in a state of happiness, at least in a state exempt from all suffering, all anxiety, all lasting unhappiness; and what, after all, is our happiness upon this earth, if it be not the absence of sorrow, anxiety and unhappiness?
But it is childish to talk of happiness and unhappiness where infinity is in question. The idea which we entertain of happiness and unhappiness is something so special, so human, so fragile that it does not exceed our stature and falls to dust as soon as we take it out of its little sphere. It proceeds entirely from a few contingencies of our nerves, which are made to appreciate very slight happenings, but which could as easily have felt everything the opposite way and taken pleasure in that which is now pain.
I do not know if my readers remember the striking passage in which Sir William Crookes shows how well-nigh all that we consider as essential laws of nature would be falsified in the eyes of a microscopic man, while forces of which we are almost wholly ignorant, such as surface-tension, capillarity or the Brownian movements, would preponderate. Walking on a cabbage-leaf, for instance, after the dew had fallen, and seeing it studded with huge crystal globes, he would infer that water was a solid body which assumes spherical form and rises in the air. At no great distance, he might come to a pond, when he would observe that this same matter, instead of rising upwards, now seems to slope downwards in a vast curve from the brink. If he managed, with the aid of his friends, to throw into the water one of those enormous steel bars which we call needles, he would see that it made a sort of concave trough on the surface and floated tranquilly. From these experiments and a thousand others which he might make, he would naturally deduce theories diametrically opposed to those upon which our entire existence is based. It would be the same if the changes were made in the direction of time, to take an hypothesis imagined by the philosopher William James:
“Suppose we were able, within the length of a second, to note distinctly ten thousand events instead of barely ten, as now; if our life were then destined to hold the same number of impressions it might be a thousand times as short. We should live less than a month, and personally know nothing of the change of seasons. If born in winter, we should believe in summer as we now believe in the heats of the carboniferous era. The motions of organic beings would be so slow to our senses as to be inferred, not seen. The sun would stand still in the sky, the moon be almost free from change and so on. But now reverse the hypothesis, and suppose a being to get only one thousandth part of the sensations that we get in a given time, and consequently to live a thousand times as long. Winters and summers will be to him like quarters of an hour. Mushrooms and the swifter growing plants will shoot into being so rapidly as to appear instantaneous creations; annual shrubs will rise and fall from the earth like restlessly boiling water-springs; the motions of animals will be as invisible as are to us the movements of bullets and cannon-balls; the sun will scour through the sky like a meteor, leaving a fiery trail behind him, etc. That such imaginary cases (barring the superhuman longevity) may be realized somewhere in the animal kingdom, it would be rash to deny.”