66 AS REGARDS PROTOPLASM, ETC. 



slam, shutters rattle, draughts whistle in such events, or in the 

 action of windmills and watermills, of the teeth of saws or of 

 the teeth of men, can it be pretended that we have before us 

 only dry facts, the one now and the other again, but without 

 any reason of connection inwardly that makes the one but a 

 birth out of the other 1 Is it really just once for all so, that the 

 lees sink and the scum rises, or is there an explanation for both 

 events'? When, overhearing your wonder at the strangely 

 blazing windows in a wood in France, the kindly Commere 

 threw in, "C'est par rapport au soleil, Messieurs !" was not that 

 rapport precisely the "step" the "understanding" wanted? 

 The Nile periodically overflows, but it does not only just do so 

 we now know why. An eclipse involves, not only an in- 

 variable first, and an invariable second, but a reason as well. 

 It is surely not inexplicable why bodies throw shadows. So it 

 is also with day and night, with the seasons, wdth the tides in 

 all these cases we have not only an invariable succession, but a 

 reasoned invariable succession. It is really no mystery why the 

 key fits the lock, or why Bruce's calthrops overthrew the 

 English horse. To varnish an egg preserves it, but we are not 

 left with the naked fact only, we can give an account of it as 

 well. If you turn a turtle on its back, you do not wonder at it 

 remaining so, anymore than at the cut stalk falling, or the bladder 

 you prick collapsing. You do not draw your boots on with a 

 pair of skewers, and you do not say the only reason why not is 

 that boot-hooks are the invariable antecedents. Candle-making 

 (-dipping) admits of explanation. A glass-house is not the un- 

 connected, the dry antecedent of strawberries at Christmas. 

 The navvie that digs, uses his pick first and his shovel second 

 with perfect satisfaction as well to understanding as to per- 

 ception. The paint on my house-door has its sufficient reason in 

 that painter's pot. Antarctic regions have more sea than Arctic 

 ones ; and yet, though warmer in summer, they are colder in 

 winter ; not without " rapport" perhaps, to the relative distance 

 at these seasons of the sun from either. The mason uses a 

 mallet of wood rather than a hammer of iron, and there is a 

 rationale of his act which is not uninteresting (in the case of 

 the mallet a deflection in striking hardly tells, and the action of 

 the point of the chisel is more delicately modifiable perhaps.) 

 The water that runs clear from the filter was brown when it 

 entered ; but it has left its sufficient reason behind it. A wedge 

 splits a tree this you understand, and you are not surprised 

 that a knife does not. The same breath that cools your soup 

 will warm your hands ; but in neither case is the first to the 

 second only a dry one ; it brings foison with it, and the virtue 

 that connects them. Why rag is better for a cut than paper, 

 why a watch-spring acts, why a stone hurts and a feather- 



