“One thing succeeds another in the valley; pain follows pleasure, and pleasure follows pain. But the cause of all being is in bearing pain. Wherefore,” he cried, “let us seek an end to this show. Let us pray to be delivered, that at last, pain ceasing, we may pass into nothingness.”
Thus the prince, apprehending the cause of existence, felt that it was pain, and dimly comprehending how the king was bearing pain, and himself feeling the strenuousness of the effort of using the rays for which the frame of the inhabitants was unstrung, longed that existence itself might cease.
Yet all his life his deeds were noble, and he passed from tribe to tribe, bearing the burdens and calling forth the sleeping to activity.
CHAPTER V.
It is now the place in which to give a clear account of the king’s activity, and explain how he maintained the varied life of the valley.
And the best plan is to take a typical instance, and to adopt the Arabic method of description. By the Arabic method of description is meant the same method which the Arabs used for the description of numerical quantities. For instance, in the Arabic notation, if we are asked the number of days in the year, we answer first 300, which is a false answer, but gives the nearest approximation in hundreds; then we say sixty, which is a correction; last of all we say five, which makes the answer a correct one, namely, 365. In this simple case the description is given so quickly that we are hardly conscious of the nature of the system employed. But the same method when applied to more difficult subjects presents the following characteristics. Firstly, a certain statement is made about the subject to be described, and is impressed upon the reader as if it were true. Then, when that has been grasped, another statement is made, generally somewhat contradictory, and the first notion formed has to be corrected. But these two statements taken together are given as truth. Then when this idea has been formed in the mind of the reader, another statement is made which must likewise be received as a correction, and so on, until by successive statements and contradictions, or corrections, the idea produced corresponds to the facts, as the describer knows them.
Thus the activity of the king will be here described by a series of statements, and the truth will be obtained by the whole of the statements and the corrections which they successively bring in.
When the king wished to start a being on the train of activity he divided its apathy into pleasure and pain. The pleasure he connected with one act which we will call A. The pain he associated with another act which we will call B.
These two “acts,” A and B, which together form what we call an “action,” were of such a nature that the doing of A first and then of B was a process used in the organization of the life in the valley.
Thus the act A may be represented by moving the right foot, B by moving the left foot, then AB will be the action of taking a step. This however is but a superficial illustration, for the acts which we represent by A and B were fundamental acts, of which great numbers were combined together in any single outward act which could be observed or described.