Another sticks close to its own line of thought and follows it as far as it goes, with no heed for others' opinions, as the bishop sweeps the board in the line of his own color.And another class of minds break through everything that lies before them, ride over argument and opposition, and go to the end of the board, like the castle.But there is still another sort of intellect which is very apt to jump over the thought that stands next and come down in the unexpected way of the knight.But that same knight, as the chess manuals will show you, will contrive to get on to every square of the board in a pretty series of moves that looks like a pattern of embroidery, and so these zigzagging minds like the Master's, and I suppose my own is something like it, will sooner or later get back to the square next the one they started from.
The Master took down a volume from one of the shelves.I could not help noticing that it was a shelf near his hand as he sat, and that the volume looked as if he had made frequent use of it.I saw, too, that he handled it in a loving sort of way; the tenderness he would have bestowed on a wife and children had to find a channel somewhere, and what more natural than that he should look fondly on the volume which held the thoughts that had rolled themselves smooth and round in his mind like pebbles on a beach, the dreams which, under cover of the simple artifices such as all writers use, told the little world of readers his secret hopes and aspirations, the fancies which had pleased him and which he could not bear to let die without trying to please others with them? I have a great sympathy with authors, most of all with unsuccessful ones.If one had a dozen lives or so, it would all be very well, but to have only a single ticket in the great lottery, and have that drawn a blank, is a rather sad sort of thing.
So I was pleased to see the affectionate kind of pride with which the Master handled his book; it was a success, in its way, and he looked on it with a cheerful sense that he had a right to be proud of it.
The Master opened the volume, and, putting on his large round glasses, began reading, as authors love to read that love their books.
--The only good reason for believing in the stability of the moral order of things is to be found in the tolerable steadiness of human averages.Out of a hundred human beings fifty-one will be found in the long run on the side of the right, so far as they know it, and against the wrong.They will be organizers rather than disorganizers, helpers and not hinderers in the upward movement of the race.This is the main fact we have to depend on.The right hand of the great organism is a little stronger than the left, that is all.
Now and then we come across a left-handed man.So now and then we find a tribe or a generation, the subject of what we may call moral left-handedness, but that need not trouble us about our formula.All we have to do is to spread the average over a wider territory or a longer period of time.Any race or period that insists on being left-handed must go under if it comes in contact with a right-handed one.If there were, as a general rule, fifty-one rogues in the hundred instead of forty-nine, all other qualities of mind and body being equally distributed between the two sections, the order of things would sooner or later end in universal disorder.It is the question between the leak and the pumps.
It does not seem very likely that the Creator of all things is taken by surprise at witnessing anything any of his creatures do or think.
Men have sought out many inventions, but they can have contrived nothing which did not exist as an idea in the omniscient consciousness to which past, present, and future are alike Now.
We read what travellers tell us about the King of Dahomey, or the Fejee Island people, or the short and simple annals of the celebrities recorded in the Newgate Calendar, and do not know just what to make of these brothers and sisters of the race; but I do not suppose an intelligence even as high as the angelic beings, to stop short there, would see anything very peculiar or wonderful about them, except as everything is wonderful and unlike everything else.
It is very curious to see how science, that is, looking at and arranging the facts of a case with our own eyes and our own intelligence, without minding what somebody else has said, or how some old majority vote went in a pack of intriguing ecclesiastics, --I say it is very curious to see how science is catching up with one superstition after another.
There is a recognized branch of science familiar to all those who know anything of the studies relating to life, under the name of Teratology.It deals with all sorts of monstrosities which are to be met with in living beings, and more especially in animals.It is found that what used to be called lusus naturae, or freaks of nature, are just as much subject to laws as the naturally developed forms of living creatures.
The rustic looks at the Siamese twins, and thinks he is contemplating an unheard-of anomaly; but there are plenty of cases like theirs in the books of scholars, and though they are not quite so common as double cherries, the mechanism of their formation is not a whit more mysterious than that of the twinned fruits.Such cases do not disturb the average arrangement; we have Changs and Engs at one pole, and Cains and Abels at the other.One child is born with six fingers on each hand, and another falls short by one or more fingers of his due allowance; but the glover puts his faith in the great law of averages, and makes his gloves with five fingers apiece, trusting nature for their counterparts.
