Few of the minor experiences of life are, I think, more consoling than
to come across some small link in the chain of natural law, over the
right connections of which one has long groped blindly. Such a little
bit of good luck befell me only yesterday. In itself it was what one
calls the veriest trifle; simply a question as to the relationship of
certain obscure organisms, profoundly uninteresting to the world at
large. To myself it seemed, for a while at all events, to be of some
little consequence. It imparted--for fully ten minutes--an entirely new
impression of a vast, a peaceful, and a most orderly progress. It seemed
to open up vistas into the perfection, into the breadth, no less than
the complexity, of that great scheme of Life, of which we ourselves form
a part. It came as a sudden vision, as a conception of possibilities--I
hardly know what to call it--the vividness of which it would be
difficult without exaggeration to put into words.
For those who, like myself, are the mere irresponsible camp-followers of
science, the importance of any given solution seems often to be less in
what it actually teaches us, than in what it allows us indirectly to
guess at. The new fact may or may not be important, but the ideas that
it starts in our minds can hardly fail to be so. In the imaginative
realm there is literally no limit to the revelations to which the
tiniest of natural phenomena may not serve as an introduction. The fact
itself may be the minutest of facts; a mere pin-point, a scarce
perceptible chink of light, but it is a chink in the walls as it were of
a great cathedral of discovery, the doors of which may, for anything one
knows to the contrary, be thrown widely open to oneself, and to everyone
else to-morrow.
This, if I am not misleading myself, is the real attractiveness of every
pursuit which has the elucidation of Nature for its end and aim; one
perhaps most felt, or at all events most enjoyed, by the more ignorant
of her votaries. Properly directed ignorance is in truth a most
desirable haze, and when some stray beam does traverse its obscurity,
how great is the illumination which follows! What may not be possible
where there is no dead-weight of fact to keep our feet upon the solid
earth; no panoply of unescapable knowledge to bid our pleasant fancies
nay?
Even for those less comfortably unfettered by circumstances, it must be
an alleviation surely of the prose of life that in this region of the
ideas no man can ever positively say what may not be in store for him.
However tame, however dull his foreground, there is always the chance of
something ahead; something that when it comes, will sweep his thoughts
away with it to the very verge of the horizon. There is never a day,
there is hardly an hour, in which some new idea may not be upon its
road. Now a really new idea for the time being remakes life. It is a
solvent which dissolves all old impressions, and rebuilds them anew. Men
live by ideas, as surely, almost as literally, as they live by bread,
and a world into which no new idea ever entered would be a dead world,
tenanted only by corpses.
The strange thing is that we should any of us doubt this, or that in
those innermost citadels which we call our brains, we should really very
greatly care about anything else. Surely for people so oddly
circumstanced as ourselves the quest for ideas, ever larger, ever more
comprehensive ideas, is the only perfectly rational occupation? Stranded
upon the shores of the Unknown; rocked to and fro by all the winds of
mystery; ignorant of whence precisely we came, whither precisely we are
going; for people in so strange a position as this to be continually on
the quest for some new intimation, for some further hint, or
indication, seems as natural as for shipwrecked sailors to be for ever
on the watch for sails.
I remember--it is years since, yet the impression is as clear as though
it were yesterday--one who, during the vigils of a sleepless night,
slipped suddenly into a dream. And in that dream it seemed to the
dreamer as though he stood upon a narrow-topped hill, encompassed by all
the stars, and lifted high in air above the slumbering earth. And,
looking upwards, he was aware of a sky, immeasurably vaster and higher,
or so he thought, than he had ever observed any sky to be before. And,
still gazing into that vast sky, the dreamer perceived that it was
filled with what at first he took to be snowflakes. Looking more closely
he saw that, if snowflakes, then they were snowflakes lit up by all the
colours of the prism. And one of these snowflakes, just then slowly
descending, touched the dreamer’s head with a soft, but quite a sensible
impact. And as it touched him, lo, a new thought sprang up, alive,
full-fledged, wonderful, within his brain; a thought absolutely
unsuspected by him before; vast, formative, irresistible, like some new
law of Evolution, or of Gravitation. And, with it, light seemed to break
in upon him from every side at once, and a great joy, and a sense of
elasticity such as he had never known before. And a voice said--“These
are the thoughts with which this earth of yours has been built up, and
all yonder other earths, of which this is one of the very least.” And
another voice said--“They are as the sands of the sea for multitude, and
of the secrets hidden in them, and of the wonder, and satisfaction, and
delight of those secrets there is no end.”
Then that sleeper awoke, and, though the night was still long and dark,
the thought of his dream remained with him, and was like the song of a
thrush in his heart until the morning.