“No,” said the student, “you only suppose; because you find it so on a great many occasions, you suppose it is so always. You are like a savage who attacks the house of a civilized man. And he tries the window, the civilized man meets him there; so he tries the door, the civilized man meets him there; so he goes back to the window, and is met there again. And he concludes there are two men in the house; and after a time he concludes there are as many men in the house as there are ways by which he tries to get in.”
The student had forgotten himself in speaking like this; and the comparison to a savage, though made in haste and in good part as an illustration, offended the professor, so he said:
“You do not believe that the law of attraction towards the metropolis is universal, and affects all the inhabitants?”
“I cannot,” said the student.
“Then you shall go to a place where you will feel it,” said the professor. “You will go to-morrow to the extreme confines of the valley, and stop there until you are of a different mind.”
He said this in a superior and gentle manner. But it was a terrible blow to the prospects of any student to be thus exiled. And yet the professor was within his strict legal right, and the student knew it. He had avoided this danger all through his college course, and now it came with crushing effect on him. For just as long ago in the valley they had had doctrines about the king, and had punished any one who did not feel them as true, and who was found out, so now when all the ideas about the king had been disproved, they had severe regulations about the belief in the laws. The learned class was a sect of priests, and whoever threatened to bring confusion and trouble by denying any of the known laws, and to lead the ignorant people to disregard them and deny them, was subject to severe punishments. In the case of this student, the error did not so much matter, because he had committed his offence in the presence of well-instructed people, who would only smile at his folly. But he had in his presumption insulted the head of the college, and his punishment was universally considered to be mild and just. And yet he was not altogether in the wrong. For it was not as though the king (when he wanted a being to move away from the metropolis) took as usual a portion of his effort in going there; and at the same time counterbalanced this by taking a still larger portion of the pain involved in his moving away from the metropolis. By no means. When the king willed a man to move away from the metropolis, he let him start afresh, as it were, according to the conditions which every being was subject to in the valley—that it was just as pleasant as painful to move in any way, and he took a portion of the pain involved in moving away from the city.
Now the student, when he was sent away, tried earnestly to see wherein he had been wrong. The place where he was exiled was on the confines of the valley, where a peaceable race of savages lived, engaged in agriculture. In the quiet, monotonous life of the place he thought over his whole course of life, but could not obtain any different feeling. And while thus buried in thought, he fell into the way of going about with the savages and doing as they did. Much to his surprise, when his preoccupation of mind passed away, he found himself singularly at home with them. Their tastes seemed to agree with his. And he came to the conclusion that he was in reality a savage who by some mistake had been admitted to the college. Having formed this conclusion, he threw himself into the life around him heartily. In course of time he won the confidence of the rude, uncultivated people, and they talked to him unreservedly.
Many curious traditions were handed down amongst them. There were some which proceeded from the time when the king had walked and talked with the children he called into activity. There were others proceeding from times when there had appeared amongst them one to whom the king had given some of his rays, so that that person had the power of making the pain less in actions for others, and of giving them motives to act, and of rousing them thus to an active state. And all these traditions they told to the exiled student.
Now their own belief was this. They thought that there was a power over them, and in this they recognized the king; but how it was that this power prompted them they did not know. Yet they connected him in some way with pleasure and pain. They thought it pained him when they had pleasure, but not in the way in which was really the case. They thought simply that it was pain to him to see them taking pleasure. They thought, moreover, that he would, if they displeased him much, take away all their pleasure and leave them nothing but pain.
Now the student saw clearly some errors, some contradictions in their belief. For instance, he knew that beings only followed pleasure, and directly pleasure was equalled by pain, sank into apathy, and then gradually vanished away. Hence he knew there need be no apprehension of the power’s acting as they thought. But the thing they said, that their taking pleasure pained this power, struck him. He did not approve the results in their life, for it was in consequence very gloomily framed, though with a good deal of unconscious cheeriness. But he knew as a scientific fact that there was a constant diminution of feeling; and since he also knew that beings in the valley did nothing except it was more pleasant, he concluded that although pleasure and pain might both be disappearing, still pain must be disappearing to a greater extent. Now since the feeling did not become nothing, but passed away out of the perception of the inhabitants, it followed that it must pass to some being. It did not disappear as feeling, but passed away from the sensation of the inhabitants. Is there a being, then, he asked himself—the power of whom these simple folks tell—who bears the difference of pain, and so makes existence pleasant to us? And is that the meaning of what they say that our pleasure pains him? Is it just the truth read backwards—the truth, namely, that by his taking pain we have pleasures, which they have had handed down to them as this—that our taking pleasure pains him.