White spent
so many evenings of interested perplexity before this novel began to be
written that Benham had never made any systematic attempt at editing
or revising his accumulation at all. There were not only overlapping
documents, in which he had returned again to old ideas and restated
them in the light of fresh facts and an apparent unconsciousness of his
earlier effort, but there were mutually destructive papers, new views
quite ousting the old had been tossed in upon the old, and the very
definition of the second limitation, as it had first presented itself to
the writer, had been abandoned. To begin with, this second division
had been labelled "Sex," in places the heading remained, no
effective substitute had been chosen for some time, but there was
a closely-written memorandum, very much erased and written over and
amended, which showed Benham's early dissatisfaction with that crude
rendering of what he had in mind. This memorandum was tacked to an
interrupted fragment of autobiography, a manuscript soliloquy in which
Benham had been discussing his married life.

"It was not until I had been married for the better part of a year, and
had spent more than six months in London, that I faced the plain issue
between the aims I had set before myself and the claims and immediate
necessities of my personal life. For all that time I struggled not so
much to reconcile them as to serve them simultaneously...."

At that the autobiography stopped short, and the intercalary note began.

This intercalary note ran as follows:

"I suppose a mind of my sort cannot help but tend towards
simplification, towards making all life turn upon some one dominant
idea, complex perhaps in its reality but reducible at last to one
consistent simple statement, a dominant idea which is essential as
nothing else is essential, which makes and sustains and justifies. This
is perhaps the innate disposition of the human mind, at least of the
European mind--for I have some doubts about the Chinese. Theology
drives obstinately towards an ultimate unity in God, science towards
an ultimate unity in law, towards a fundamental element and a universal
material truth from which all material truths evolve, and in matters of
conduct there is the same tendency to refer to a universal moral law.
Now this may be a simplification due to the need of the human mind to
comprehend, and its inability to do so until the load is lightened by
neglecting factors. Willi