PHILOSOPHIC ANTS 197 



he had so eagerly awaited, something deducible in 

 general but unpredictable in all particulars. As the 

 repeated separate impacts of the ether waves had 

 condensed, at his old ordinary rate, to form the con- 

 tinuous sensation of light, so now the events of nature 

 coalesced to give new objects, new kinds of sensation. 

 Especially was this so with life : the repeated genera- 

 tions seemed to act like separate repeated waves of 

 light, blending to give a picture of the species changing 

 and evolving before his eyes. 



Other experiences he could explain less well. He 

 was conscious of strange sensations that he thought 

 were probably associated with changes in energy- 

 distribution, in entropy ; others which he seemed to 

 perceive directly, by some form of telepathy, con- 

 cerning the type of mental process occurring around 

 him. It was all strange : but of one thing he was 

 sure — that if only he could find a way of nourishing 

 and maintaining himself in this new state, he would 

 be able, as a child does in the first few years of life, 

 to correlate his puzzling new sensations, and that 

 when he had done this he would obtain a different 

 and more direct view of reality than any he had ever 

 obtained or thought of obtaining before. 



As the individual light-waves were summed to give 

 light, as the microcosm of gas-molecules cancelled 

 out to give a uniformity of pressure, so now the 

 repetition of the years coalesced into what could be 

 described as visible time, a sensation of cosmic rate ; 



