new men, or a new
kind of men, but that Thales, Anaximenes, Hipparchus, Empedocles,
Aristarchus, Pythagoras, OEnopides, had anticipated them; each had the
same tense geometrical brain, apt for the same vigorous computation and
logic, a mind parallel to the movement of the world. The Roman mile
probably rested on a measure of a degree of the meridian. Mahometan and
Chinese know what we know of leap-year, of the Gregorian calendar, and of
the precession of the equinoxes. As, in every barrel of cowries, brought
to New Bedford, there shall be one _orangia_, so there will, in a dozen
millions of Malays and Mahometans, be one or two astronomical skulls. In a
large city, the most casual things, and things whose beauty lies in their
casualty, are produced as punctually and to order as the baker's muffin
for breakfast. "Punch" makes exactly one capital joke a week; and the
journals contrive to furnish one good piece of news every day.

And not less work the laws of repression, the penalties of violated
functions. Famine, typhus, frost, war, suicide, and effete races, must be
reckoned calculable parts of the system of the world.

These are pebbles from the mountain, hints of the terms by which our life
is walled up, and which show a kind of mechanical exactness, as of a loom
or mill, in what we call casual or fortuitous events.

The force with which we resist these torrents of tendency looks so
ridiculously inadequate, that it amounts to little more than a criticism
or a protest made by a minority of one, under compulsion of millions. I
seemed, in the height of a tempest, to see men overboard struggling in the
waves, and driven about here and there. They glanced intelligently at each
other, but 'twas little they could do for one another; 'twas much if each
could keep afloat alone. Well, they had a right to their eye-beams, and
all the rest was Fate.

* * * * *

We cannot trifle with this reality, this cropping out in our planted
gardens of the core of the world. No picture of life can have any veracity
that does not admit the odious facts. A man's power is hooped in by a
necessity which, by many experiments, he touches on every side, until he
learns its arc.

The element running through entire nature, which we popularly call Fate,
is known to us as limitation. Whatever limits us, we call Fate. If we are
brute and barbarous, the fate takes a brute and dreadful shape. As we
refine, our checks b