186 ESSAYS OF A BIOLOGIST 



times in the day. But to a large proportion among 

 us, even sausages and marmalade at nine, or roast 

 beef and potatoes on a Sabbath noon, would prove 

 not only not attractive but positively repellent if 

 offered us on a small steamer on a rough day. I 

 will not labour the point. 



We all know how the size of sums of money ap- 

 pears to vary in a remarkable way according as they 

 are being paid in or paid out. We all know to our 

 cost the extraordinary superiority of the epochs when 

 our more elderly relatives were youthful. The fact 

 remains that we are always prone to regard the regis- 

 tering machine as a constant, and to believe that all 

 the variation comes from outside. It is easy to 

 discount the inner variation in ourselves when we are 

 seasick, or in others when they are old and reminis- 

 cent, but not only is this discounting sometimes far 

 more difficult, it is sometimes not even attempted. 



What, for instance, are we to say to those who 

 profess to find a harmony in the universe, those to 

 whom poverty and discomfort and hard work appear 

 the merest accidents, to whom even disease, pain, 

 loss, death, and disaster are ''somehow good"? You 

 and I would probably retort that we have a rooted 

 dislike to discomfort, that we should most strongly 

 deny that the loss of a friend or even of a leg was 

 anything but bad, that a toothache was not dam- 

 nably unpleasant. But I think that if they were 

 philosophically inclined (which they probably would 

 not be), they might justifiably retort that the dif- 



