series of mental instincts, so to say; a whole circle of ideas of
moral conceptions, in a sense belonging to the Past--ideas which
were high and noble in the rudimentary being, which were beyond the
capacity of the pure animal, but which are now in great part merely
obstructions to advancement. Let these perish. We must seek for
enlightenment and for progress, not in the dim failing traditions
of a period but just removed from the time of the rudimentary or
primeval man--we must no longer allow the hoary age of such
traditions to blind the eye and cause the knee to bend--we must no
longer stultify the mind by compelling it to receive as infallible
what in the very nature of things must have been fallible to the
highest degree. The very plants are wiser far. They seek the light
of to-day, the heat of the sun which shines at this hour; they make
no attempt to guide their life by the feeble reflection of rays
which were extinguished ages ago. This slender blade of grass,
beside the edge of our rug under the chestnut-tree, shoots upwards
in the fresh air of to-day; its roots draw nourishment from the
moisture of the dew which heaven deposited this morning. If it does
make use of the past--of the soil, the earth that has accumulated in
centuries--it is to advance its present growth. Root out at once and
for ever these primeval, narrow, and contracted ideas; fix the mind
upon the sun of the present, and prepare for the sun that must rise
to-morrow. It is our duty to develop both mind and body and soul to
the utmost: as it is the duty of this blade of grass and this
oak-tree to grow and expand as far as their powers will admit. But
the blade of grass and the oak have this great disadvantage to work
against--they can only labour in the lines laid down for them, and
unconsciously; while man can think, foresee, and plan. The greatest
obstacle to progress is the lack now beginning to be felt all over
the world, but more especially in the countries most highly
civilized, of a true ideal to work up to. It is necessary that some
far-seeing master-mind, some giant intellect, should arise, and
sketch out in bold, unmistakable outlines the grand and noble future
which the human race should labour for. There have been weak
attempts--there are contemptible makeshifts now on their trial,
especially in the new world--but the whole of these, without
exception, are simply diluted reproductions of systems long since
worn out. These can only last a little while; if anything, they are
worse than the prejudices and traditions which form the body of
wider-spread creeds. The world cries out for an intellect which
shall draw its inspiration from the unvarying and infallible laws
regulating the universe; which shall found its faith upon the
teaching of grass, of leaf, of bird, of beast, of hoary rock, great
ocean, star and sun; which shall afford full room for the
development of muscle, sense, and above all of the wondrous brain;
and which without fettering the individual shall secure the ultimate
apotheosis of the race. No such system can spring at once, complete,
perfect in detail, from any one mind. But assuredly when once a firm
basis has been laid down, when an outline has been drawn, the
converging efforts of a thousand thousand thinkers will be brought
to bear upon it, and it will be elaborated into something
approaching a reliable guide. The faiths of the past, of the ancient
world, now extinct or feebly lingering on, were each inspired by one
mind only. The faith of the future, in strong contrast, will spring
from the researches of a thousand thousand thinkers, whose minds,
once brought into a focus, will speedily burn up all that is
useless and worn out with a fierce heat, and evoke a new and
brilliant light. This converging thought is one of the greatest
blessings of our day, made possible by the vastly extended means of
communication, and almost seems specially destined for this very
purpose. Thought increases with the ages. At this moment there are
probably as many busy brains studying, reflecting, collecting
scattered truths, as there were thinkers--effectual thinkers--in
all the recorded eighty centuries gone by. Daily and hourly the
noble army swells its numbers, and the sound of its mighty march
grows louder; the inscribed roll of its victories fills the heart
with exultation.
There is a slight rustle among the bushes and the fern upon the
mound. It is a rabbit who has peeped forth into the sunshine. His
eye opens wide with wonder at the sight of us; his nostrils work
nervously as he watches us narrowly. But in a little while the
silence and stillness reassure him; he nibbles in a desultory way at
the stray grasses on the mound, and finally ventures out into the
meadow almost within reach of the hand. It is so easy to make the
acquaintance--to make friends with the children of Nature. From the
tiniest insect upwards they are so ready to dwell in sympathy with
us--only be tender, quiet, considerate, in a word, _gentlemanly_,
towards them and they will freely wander around. And they have all
such marvellous tales to tell--intricate problems to solve for us.
This common wild rabbit has an ancestry of almost unsearchable
antiquity. Within that little body there are organs and structures
which, rightly studied, will throw a light upon the mysteries hidden
in our own frames. It is a peculiarity of this search that nothing
is despicable; nothing can be passed over--not so much as a fallen
leaf, or a grain of sand. Literally everything bears stamped upon it
characters in the hieratic, the sacred handwriting, not one word of
which shall fall to the ground.
Sitting indoors, with every modern luxury around, rich carpets,
artistic furniture, pictures, statuary, food and drink brought from
the uttermost ends of the earth, with the telegraph, the
printing-press, the railway at immediate command, it is easy to say,
'What have _I_ to do with all this? I am neither an animal nor a
plant, and the sun is nothing to me. This is _my_ life which I have
created; I am apart from the other inhabitants of the earth.' But go
to the window. See--there is but a thin, transparent sheet of
brittle glass between the artificial man and the air, the light, the
trees, and grass. So between him and the other innumerable organisms
which live and breathe there is but a thin feeble crust of prejudice
and social custom. Between him and those irresistible laws which
keep the sun upon its course there is absolutely no bar whatever.
Without air he cannot live. Nature cannot be escaped. Then face the
facts, and having done so, there will speedily arise a calm pleasure
beckoning onwards.
The shadows of the oak and chestnut-tree no longer shelter our rug;
the beams of the noonday sun fall vertically on us; we will leave
the spot for a while. The nightingale and the goldfinches, the
thrushes and blackbirds, are silent for a time in the sultry heat.
But they only wait for the evening to burst forth in one exquisite
chorus, praising this wondrous life and the beauties of the earth.
THE DAWN
There came to my bedside this morning a visitant that has been
present at the bedside of everyone who has lived for ten thousand
years. In the darkness I was conscious of a faint light not visible
if I looked deliberately to find it, but seen sideways, and where I
was not gazing. It slipped from direct glance as a shadow may slip
from a hand-grasp, but it was there floating in the atmosphere of
the room. I could not say that it shone on the wall or lit the
distant corner. Light is seen by reflection, but this light was
visible of itself like a living thing, a visitant from the unknown.
The dawn was in the chamber, and by degrees this intangible and
slender existence would enlarge and deepen into day. Ever since I
used to rise early to bathe, or shoot, or see the sunrise, the habit
has remained of waking at the same hour, so that I see the dawn
morning after morning, though I may sleep again immediately.
Sometimes the change of the seasons makes it broad sunlight,
sometimes it is still dark; then again the faint grey light is
there, and I know that the distant hills are becoming defined along
the sky. But though so familiar, that spectral light in the silence
has never lost its meaning, the violets are sweet year by year
though never so many summers pass away; indeed, its meaning grows
wider and more difficult as the time goes on. For think, this
spectre of the light--light's double-ganger--has stood by the couch
of every human being for thousands and thousands of years. Sleeping
or waking, happily dreaming, or wrenched with pain, whether they
have noticed it or not, the finger of this light has pointed towards
them. When they were building the pyramids, five thousand years ago,
straight the arrow of light shot from the sun, lit their dusky
forms, and glowed on the endless sand. Endless as that desert sand
may be, innumerable in multitude its grains, there was and is a ray
of light for each. A ray for every invisible atom that dances in
the air--for the million million changing facets of the million
ocean waves. Immense as these numbers may be, they are not
incomprehensible. The priestess at Delphi in her moment of
inspiration declared that she knew the number of the sands. Such
number falls into insignificance before the mere thought of light,
its speed, its quantity, its existence over space, and yet the idea
of light is easy to the mind. The mind is the priestess of the
Delphic temple of our bodies, and sees and understands things for
which language is imperfect, and notation deficient. There is a
secret alphabet in it to every letter of which we unconsciously
assign a value, just as the mathematician may represent a thousand
by the letter A. In my own mind the idea of light is associated with
the colour yellow, not the yellow of the painters, or of flowers,
but a quick flash. This quick bright flash of palest yellow in the
thousandth of an instant reminds me, or rather conveys in itself,
the whole idea of light--the accumulated idea of study and thought.
I suppose it to be a memory of looking at the sun--a quick glance at
the sun leaves something such an impression on the retina. With that
physical impression all the calculations that I have read, and all
the ideas that have occurred to me, are bound up. It is the
sign--the letter--the expression of light. To the builders of the
pyramids came the arrow from the sun, tinting their dusky forms, and
glowing in the sand. To me it comes white and spectral in the
silence, a finger pointed, a voice saying, 'Even now you know
nothing.' Five thousand years since they were fully persuaded that
they understood the universe, the course of the stars, and the
secrets of life and death. What did they know of the beam of light
that shone on the sonorous lap of their statue Memnon? The
telescope, the microscope, and the prism have parted light and
divided it, till it seems as if further discovery were impossible.
This beam of light brings an account of the sun, clear as if written
in actual letters, for example stating that certain minerals are as
certainly there as they are here. But when in the silence I see the
pale visitant at my bedside, and the mind rushes in one spring back
to the builders of the pyramids who were equally sure with us, the
thought will come to me that even now there may be messages in that
beam undeciphered. With a turn of the heliograph, a mere turn of
the wrist, a message is easily flashed twenty miles to the observer.
You cannot tell what knowledge may not be pouring down in every ray;
messages that are constant and perpetual, the same from age to age.
These are physical messages. There is beyond this just a possibility
that beings in distant earths possessed of greater knowledge than
ourselves may be able to transmit their thoughts along, or by the
ray, as we do along wires. In the days to come, when a deeper
insight shall have been gained into the motions and properties of
those unseen agents we call forces, such as magnetism, electricity,
gravitation, perhaps a method will be devised to use them for
communication. If so, communication with distant earths is quite
within reasonable hypothesis. At this hour it is not more impossible
than the transmission of a message to the antipodes in a few minutes
would have been to those who lived a century since. The inhabitants
of distant earths may have endeavoured to communicate with us in
this way for ought we know time after time. Such a message is
possibly contained sometimes in the pale beam which comes to my
bedside. That beam always impresses me with a profound, an intense
and distressful sense of ignorance, of being outside the
intelligence of the universe, as if there were a vast civilization
in view and yet not entered. Mere villagers and rustics creeping
about a sullen earth, we know nothing of the grandeur and
intellectual brilliance of that civilization. This beam fills me
with unutterable dissatisfaction. Discontent, restless longing,
anger at the denseness of the perception, the stupidity with which
we go round and round in the old groove till accident shows us a
fresh field. Consider, all that has been wrested from light has been
gained by mere bits of glass. Mere bits of glass in curious
shapes--poor feeble glass, quickly broken, made of flint, of the
flint that mends the road. To this almost our highest conceptions
are due. Could we employ the ocean as a lens we might tear truth
from the sky. Could the greater intelligences that dwell on the
planets and stars communicate with us, they might enable us to
conquer the disease and misery which bear down the masses of the
world. Perhaps they do not die. The pale visitor hints that the
stars are not the outside and rim of the universe, any more than the
edge of horizon is the circumference of our globe. Beyond the
star-stratum, what? Mere boundless space. Mind says certainly not.
What then? At present we cannot conceive a universe without a
central solar orb for it to gather about and swing around. But that
is only because hitherto our positive, physical knowledge has gone
no farther. It can as yet only travel as far as this, as analogous
beams of light. Light comes from the uttermost bounds of our star
system--to that rim we can extend a positive thought. Beyond, and
around it, whether it is solid, or fluid, or ether, or whether, as
is most probable, there exist things absolutely different to any
that have come under eyesight yet is not known. May there not be
light we cannot see? Gravitation is an unseen light; so too
magnetism; electricity or its effect is sometimes visible, sometimes
not. Besides these there may be more delicate forces not
instrumentally demonstrable. A force, or a wave, or a motion--an
unseen light--may at this moment be flowing in upon us from that
unknown space without and beyond the stellar system. It may contain
messages from thence as this pale visitant does from the sun. It may
outstrip light in speed as light outstrips an arrow. The more
delicate, the more ethereal, then the fuller and more varied the
knowledge it holds. There may be other things beside matter and
motion, or force. All natural things known to us as yet may be
referred to those two conditions: One, Force; Two, Matter. A third,
a fourth, a fifth--no one can say how many conditions--may exist in
the ultra-stellar space, beyond the most distant stars. Such a
condition may even be about us now unsuspected. Something which is
neither force nor matter is difficult to conceive; the mind cannot
give it tangible shape even as a thought. Yet I think it more than
doubtful if the entire universe, visible and invisible, is composed
of these two. To me it seems almost demonstrable by rational
induction that the entire universe must consist of more than two
conditions. The grey dawn every morning warns me not to be certain
that all is known. Analysis by the prism alone has quite doubled the
knowledge that was previously available. In the light itself there
may still exist as much more to be learnt, and then there may be
other forces and other conditions to be first found out and next to
tell their story. As at present known the whole system is so easy
and simple, one body revolving round another, and so on; it is as
easy to understand as the motion of a stone that has been thrown.
This simplicity makes me misdoubt. Is it all? Space--immeasurable
space--offers such possibilities that the mind is forced to the
conclusion that it is not, that there must be more. I cannot think
that the universe can be so very very easy as this.
BILLING AND SONS, LTD., PRINTERS, GUILDFORD
End of Project Gutenberg's The Hills and the Vale, by Richard Jefferies