THE SUMMIT OF THE YEARS 



from which we had just come on an upward flight. 

 We go up to the moon or to Mars, and we turn 

 round and look up to the point of our departure! It 

 is the apparent contradiction that I cannot adjust my 

 mind to; that up and down, over and under, can be 

 abolished, that they are only forms of our experi- 

 ence, and that out in sidereal space they would have 

 no meaning; that is something hard for us to realize. 

 We apprehend it without comprehending it. Are 

 all our notions thus relative? The globe is bigger 

 than our minds. We cannot turn the cosmic laws 

 round in our thoughts. We are adjusted to the 

 sphere, not it to us. 



If the moon were to break from its orbit and fall 

 to the earth, its course would be downward, like that 

 of the shooting stars. How would it seem to people 

 on the moon, if there were people there? 



This sense of contradiction that we feel in trying 

 to adjust our minds to the idea of a round world, 

 may be analogous to the diflSculty we have in trying 

 to reach an intellectual concept of the universe as 

 a whole, or of certain of its parts and processes, 

 such as the question of the nature and origin of life, 

 or the immortality of the soul. Our minds are so 

 constituted and disciplined by our experience that 

 we look for the causes of every event or thing. We 

 make a chain of causes, the end of which we never 

 reach. A causeless event, or thing, we cannot think 

 of any more than we can think of a stick with only 



