I thought it unkind to argue with him. Why shouldn’t North Manchester have a celebrated prima donna costing eight hundred dollars a day? Think how the knowledge of that would add to the natives' enjoyment of her music!

“You’re right,” I said. “I hadn’t thought of that.” And out I went.

While we were trifling about getting ready to start, a singular combination of circumstances produced an odd case of repetition or duplication of a set of facts which had occurred the year before, which impressed me greatly, the more so as it corresponded exactly with a number of similar instances in my own life.

I might preface my remarks by saying that throughout my life experiences and scenes have to a certain extent tended to duplicate or repeat themselves. Nietzsche remarks somewhere that we all have our typical experiences. It is not a particularly brilliant deduction, considering the marked predilections of certain temperaments. But when we connect up the fact with chemical or physical law, as we are likely some day to do, it becomes highly significant. Personally, I am one who believes that as yet we have not scratched the surface of underlying fact and law. I once believed, for instance, that nature was a blind, stumbling force or combination of forces which knew not what or whither. I drew that conclusion largely from the fumbling nonintelligence (relatively speaking) of men and all sentient creatures. Of late years I have inclined to think just the reverse, i. e., that nature is merely dark to us because of her tremendous subtlety and our own very limited powers of comprehension; also that in common with many other minor forces and forms of intelligence—insects and trees, for example—we are merely tools or implements—slaves, to be exact—and that collectively we are used as any other tool or implement would be used by us.

Thus there is a certain species of ant, the Dorylii, which is plainly a scavenger so far as the surface of the earth is concerned, appearing at the precise moment when a dead body is becoming offensive and burying and devouring it. This may be said to be equally true of buzzards, jackals, carrion crows, creatures which a Darwinian naturalist would explain as the result of an unintentional pressure—and natural selection. On the other hand, current biology tends to indicate that all is foreshadowed, prearranged; that indications of what will be are given ages before it is permitted to appear. Ontogenetic Orthogenesis it is called, I believe. The creative forces have an amazing way of working. They may use strange means—races of men and insects, of no particular value to them—to accomplish certain results. Thus man might well be a tool intended to release certain forces in the soil—coal, iron, stone, copper, gold—and all his social organization and social striving merely the physico-legal aspects or expression of the processes by which all things are done. Multiple unit forces must work in some harmonious way, and all these harmonious processes would therefore need to be provided for. They may be the chemical and physical laws by which we are governed. How otherwise can one explain the fact that although there is apparently sufficient wisdom in the universe to sustain immense sidereal systems in order and to generate all the complex organisms which we see and can examine at our leisure, yet man remains blind and dumb as to the processes by which he comes and goes? He has examined a little. He has prepared a lexicon of laws whose workings he has detected. Beyond these must be additional laws, or so he suspects, but what are they? In the meantime, instead of nature permitting him to go on (once he has his mind prepared for thought along these lines), it strikes him down and puts new, ignorant youth in his place—new, ignorant generations of youths.

Actually (I sincerely believe this) it is not intended that man should ever be permitted to know anything. The temperaments of the powers to whom we pray are not magnanimous. Man is a slave, a tool. The fable of Prometheus and the divine fire has more of fact than of poetry in it. At every turn of man’s affairs he is arbitrarily and ruthlessly and mockingly confused. New generations of the dull and thick are put forth. False prophets arise. Religionists, warriors, dreamers without the slightest conception of the import of that which they seek or do, arise, slay, burn, confuse. Man stands confounded for a time, a slave to illusion, toiling with forces and by aid of forces which he does not understand, and effecting results the ultimate use of which he cannot possibly grasp. We burn gas! For ourselves alone? We generate electricity! For ourselves alone? We mine coal, iron, lead, etc.—release it into space eventually. For ourselves alone? Who knows, really? By reason of the flaming, generative chemistry of our bodies we are compelled to go on. Why?

At the critical moment when man becomes too inquisitive he may be once more chained to the rock, Prometheus-like, and the eagles of ignorance and duty set at his vitals. Why the astounding bludgeoning of each other by the nations of Europe? Cosmically—permanently—what can they gain?

CHAPTER XLIII
THE MYSTERY OF COINCIDENCE

As we were starting for Wabash from here, a distance of twenty miles or so, and at ten o’clock in the morning, it began to sprinkle. Now the night before, as we were entering this place, Franklin had been telling me that as he had gone through here the year before about this time in the morning, homebound from a small lake in this vicinity, some defect in the insulation of the wiring had caused a small fire which threatened to burn the car. They detected it in time by smelling burning rubber. Incidentally, it had started to rain, and they had to go back to the local garage for repairs.

“I bet it rains tomorrow,” Speed had observed as he heard Franklin’s story.