ound 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 sun were alive it would dance. This is a
fallacy even in relation to known fact. For the variation in human
affairs is generally brought into them, not by life, but by death;
by the dying down or breaking off of their strength or desire.
A man varies his movements because of some slight element of failure
or fatigue. He gets into an omnibus because he is tired of walking;
or he walks because he is tired of sitting still. But if his life
and joy were so gigantic that he never tired of going to Islington,
he might go to Islington as regularly as the Thames goes to Sheerness.
The very speed and ecstasy of his life would have the stillness
of death. The sun rises every morning. I do not rise every morning;
but the variation is due not to my activity, but to my inaction.
Now, to put the matter in a popular phrase, it might be true that
the sun rises regularly because he never gets tired of rising.
His routine might be due, not to a lifelessness, but to a rush
of life. The thing I mean can be seen, for instance, in children,
when they find some game or joke that they specially enjoy. A child