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51
O.18
Stick to the rule of Play, the law of liberty. I can testify that the last half century at least has never lacked a tribe of Sir Oracles whose trade has been to colport maxims barring off one or another roadway of inquiry. August Comte, notwithstanding his having apparently produced some unquestionably genuine thinking was long the chief of this band. The particular maxim in vogue air of distinction no bygone fashion seem more
Delete the whole
52
O.32
We have to suppose that He has breathed into man His Own Spirit, so far as to render him capable of advancing endlessly in the solution of any problem he can propose to himself although in respect to the totality of objects, characters, and principles Man's understanding must ever remain at least as inadequate as that of a little creature wanting the sense of taste and inhabiting the surface of an orange with an experience in its interior proportionate to ours of the earth's inside would be to the comprehension of Man's relish for oranges. Man cannot entirely see why God inflicts pain; but he can see that pain amounts to an instinct to avoid certain feelings, and that its existence harmonizes beautifully with the general idea of the universe that ends are worked out gradually. So, too, man can see that, as long as he is driven to appease a little his
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O.32
certain truth. The abstractions of words necessarily prevents my instancing the universe-wide phenomena as they will strike the attention of the Muser. But after well considering in add breadth and depth the unspeakable variety of each of the universes, let him turn to those phenomena that are of the nature of homogeneities of connectedness in each universe of the three, and what a spectacle will be spread before him! Every small part of space and time, be it near or ever remote, has connections exactly like those of every other such part, the matter in all regions of the universe of nature is of the same elementary kinds distributed everywhere in about the same proportions, about 600 in number, of which 500 dart through the universe too swiftly to be held by the earth's gravity, Coronium being the slowest of them, while the slowest of the hundred we can handle are shorthand elements
54
O.30
Nature wills that a ball thrown upwards be back upon earth, she does not abruptly place it there nor even suddenly cause a downward celerity. She merely imparts to it a downward acceleration which gradually grows into a cessation of its upward motion and then into a descending motion ever quicker, which thus faster and faster still eats up the distance of the ball from the earth. The method of Nature, throughout. A seed gradually grows into a plant, a plant gradually into many plants, and so into a "stock" of plants of one species.
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O.39
up through all the appraisals of Plausibility to uncontrollable inclination to belief. This whole course of thought, from the notice of the wonderful phenomenon, the search for pertinent circumstances, scrutiny of them, pondering over them, the breaking out of the startling conjecture, the remarking of its peculiar lock-and-key correspondence to the anomaly, and the adoption of the Hypothesis on probation as Plausible, I reckon as composing the First Stage of Inquiry