that everything is as it must always have been, being unfolded
without fault from the beginning. The leaf on the tree is green because
it could never have been anything else. Now, the fairy-tale philosopher
is glad that the leaf is green precisely because it might have been
scarlet. He feels as if it had turned green an instant before he looked
at it. He is pleased that snow is white on the strictly reasonable
ground that it might have been black. Every colour has in it a bold
quality as of choice; the red of garden roses is not only decisive but
dramatic, like suddenly spilt blood. He feels that something has been
_done_. But the great determinists of the nineteenth century were
strongly against this native feeling that something had happened an
instant before. In fact, according to them, nothing ever really had
happened since the beginning of the world. Nothing ever had happened
since existence had happened; and even about the date of that they were
not very sure.

The modern world as I found it was solid for modern Calvinism, for the
necessity of things being as they are. But when I came to ask them I
found they had really no proof of this unavoidable repetition in things
except the fact that the things were repeated. Now, the mere repetition
made the things to me rather more weird than more rational. It was as
if, having seen a curiously shaped nose in the street and dismissed it
as an accident, I had then seen six other noses of the same astonishing
shape. I should have fancied for a moment that it must be some local
secret society. So one elephant having a trunk was odd; but all
elephants having trunks looked like a plot. I speak here only of an
emotion, and of an emotion at once stubborn and subtle. But the
repetition in Nature seemed sometimes to be an excited repetition, like
that of an angry schoolmaster saying the same thing over and over again.
The grass seemed signalling to me with all its fingers at once; the
crowded stars seemed bent upon being understood. The sun would make me
see him if he rose a thousand times. The recurrences of the universe
rose to the maddening rhythm of an incantation, and I began to see an
idea.

All the towering materialism which dominates the modern mind rests
ultimately upon one assumption; a false assumption. It is supposed that
if a thing goes on repeating itself it is probably dead; a piece of
clockwork. People feel that if the universe was personal it would vary;
if the