136 BIRDS OF THE COUNTRYSIDE 



" I cannot," writes William James, " but consider the talk of 

 the contemporary sociological school about averages and general 

 laws and pre-determined tendencies, with its obligatory under- 

 rating of the importance of individual differences as the most 

 pernicious and immoral of fatalisms. It is almost incredible 

 that men who are themselves working philosophers should 

 pretend that any philosophy can be, or ever has been, constructed 

 without the help of personal preference or belief or divination." 



And again : " Not an energy of our active nature to which it 

 (the personal and theistic view of life) does not authoritatively 

 appeal, not an emotion of which it does not normally and naturally 

 release the springs. At a single stroke it changes the dead blank 

 it of the world into a living thou with which the whole man 

 may have dealings." 



For me a blue and a great tit feeding from a cocoa- 

 nut by my window animated the universe into a 

 living thou. 



