4 THE WORLD MACHINE 



a turtle, and the sun with Chesterfieldian urbanit}/ stood still at 

 the voice of the prophet. The imagination was unfettered and 

 untrained. The coming of the spring, the yield of the harvest, 

 the fate of battles, were conceived as in control of the gods. In 

 the storm there were demons, in the fields there were fairies, 

 in the woods the hamadryads played. There were omens and 

 signs ; the conditions of a chicken's entrails might forecast the 

 destiny of empires. In the antique world there was a universal 

 belief in the intervention of the preternatural in the affairs 

 of men. 



Little by little these beliefs fell away. In apparent chaos 

 was found an order, and instead of caprice a scheme of nature 

 in some sense understandable and in some sense predictable. 



The change was slow, the path obscure and difficult. Pro- 

 bably the hardest thing the human race has had put before it 

 to learn was the idea of fixity and consequence ; the certitude 

 that one event follows inevitably from another the notion, as 

 we say, of cause and effect ; in Hume's phrase, of invariable 

 sequence ; what we have come in latter days to style the reign 

 of law. 



Even now it has penetrated but a very little way. It is the 

 keynote of every rational work now written ; it adorns the 

 pages of amiable efforts at the conciliation of science and 

 religion. The phrase has a sort of literary vogue. Yet, at each 

 new extension of this idea of fixity and law into our daily lives 

 and thoughts, the generality cries out, just as it did at the 

 motion of the earth, at the law of gravitation, at the scheme of 

 evolution, and all the rest. 



The emotional side of the race has not changed. Law and 

 fixity it will recognise now, after a painful effort, in the march 

 of the heavens, in the course of the seasons, in the succession of 

 geological epochs, of genera and species ; even in a vague way, 

 in human development. But find this same fixity and law 

 in the rise and fall of nations, of human institutions, of human 

 beliefs, its creeds, its political doctrines ; to find this in the 

 present primacy of America and the decadence of Spain; to 

 view history as a tableau of destiny ; our daily lives, down to 

 the minutest detail of actions " good " or " evil," of thoughts 

 " noble " or " vile," as the necessary and unescapable conse- 

 quence of our surroundings which were created for us, our 

 characters and bodily constitutions which were given to us : 



