“By the fact that stones are figuratively phosphorescent in an extremely negligible degree, that Sundown is phosphorescent in an infinitely greater degree, and that you and I are so surcharged with phosphorescence that we simply burst into hissing flames of intelligence. Or, if you prefer, we’re not so tightly packed as stones; our atoms are more free to roam and collide and become interesting. Human intelligence, with all its concomitants of reasoning and speech, is a sort of transformation which is analogous to the remarkable things that happen in a laboratory when certain combinations are subjected to intense pressures and temperatures. Degrees of vitality are like the gradations of electrical force: sluggish magnetic fields, live wires, dynamos, power stations. Everything has some vital status, just as everything has some electrical status.”
“But you make everything seem so impersonal and arbitrary. Don’t you believe that human beings can voluntarily increase or decrease their voltage and usefulness? If I determine to live up to my best instincts, can’t I do so on my own initiative, without having been anticipated by Fate?”
“I think of it the other way round. Your strongest instincts, good or bad, will live up to you. They will determine your acts. The decision to live up to them begs the question, for it is they that prompted the decision, making up your so-called mind for you. You only said the words of your excellent decision after the excellent decision had surged and pulsated and battled and muscled its way through your system to the tip of your tongue. Taking a decision is like taking a train: in reality the train takes you.”
“According to that theory there’s nothing to stop the whole world from going to pot, morally speaking. What if bad instincts obtain a majority in the house?”
“Ah, but thanks be to God they won’t! Nature hasn’t gone to pot physically, for all the efforts of plague and dyspepsia. She won’t go to pot morally, either, though we may always need prisons, or their future equivalents. Nature is, in the long run, economical; she balances her books; and morality, like health, is merely a question of thrift.”
“And religion? What is it?”
“Oh,—for a slouchy metaphor, call it the sparks struck off by moral friction.”
“That’s deep water.”
“Moral: accept the concrete and don’t try to formulate the abstract. Katie would never have expected an apple to fall into the sky just because she had never heard of Isaac Newton. And when she feels that Rosie Dixon and Billy, despite arguments to the contrary, are the same age, she has got just as far as the hypothetical metaphysician who would turn her experience into a revolutionary theory of objective and subjective time,—except that Katie won’t get a Nobel prize. If she lives to be three score and ten, snug in her three dimensions, and never hears time defined as qualitative multiplicity, she will fulfil a sublime destiny; she will with unerring instinct and awe-inspiring virtuosity obey complex laws which are none the less urgent for being unformulated in her narrow skull. And when she dies, her soul, like John Brown’s, will, though in fearfully divisible, microscopic, and unrecognizable particles, go ‘marching on’.”
“Thank goodness Katie is miles down the road by this time where she can’t hear what a hash she is going to be!”