Martin Eden had been mastered by curiosity all his days.  He wanted to know, and it was this desire that had sent him adventuring over the world.  But he was now learning from Spencer that he never had known, and that he never could have known had he continued his sailing and wandering forever.  He had merely skimmed over the surface of things, observing detached phenomena, accumulating fragments of facts, making superficial little generalizations—­and all and everything quite unrelated in a capricious and disorderly world of whim and chance.  The mechanism of the flight of birds he had watched and reasoned about with understanding; but it had never entered his head to try to explain the process whereby birds, as organic flying mechanisms, had been developed.  He had never dreamed there was such a process.  That birds should have come to be, was unguessed.  They always had been.  They just happened.

And as it was with birds, so had it been with everything.  His ignorant and unprepared attempts at philosophy had been fruitless.  The medieval metaphysics of Kant had given him the key to nothing, and had served the sole purpose of making him doubt his own intellectual powers.  In similar manner his attempt to study evolution had been confined to a hopelessly technical volume by Romanes.  He had understood nothing, and the only idea he had gathered was that evolution was a dry-as-dust theory, of a lot of little men possessed of huge and unintelligible vocabularies.  And now he learned that evolution was no mere theory but an accepted process of development; that scientists no longer disagreed about it, their only differences being over the method of evolution.

And here was the man Spencer, organizing all knowledge for him, reducing everything to unity, elaborating ultimate realities, and presenting to his startled gaze a universe so concrete of realization that it was like the model of a ship such as sailors make and put into glass bottles.  There was no caprice, no chance.  All was law.  It was in obedience to law that the bird flew, and it was in obedience to the same law that fermenting slime had writhed and squirmed and put out legs and wings and become a bird.

Martin had ascended from pitch to pitch of intellectual living, and here he was at a higher pitch than ever.  All the hidden things were laying their secrets bare.  He was drunken with comprehension.  At night, asleep, he lived with the gods in colossal nightmare; and awake, in the day, he went around like a somnambulist, with absent stare, gazing upon the world he had just discovered.  At table he failed to hear the conversation about petty and ignoble things, his eager mind seeking out and following cause and effect in everything before him.  In the meat on the platter he saw the shining sun and traced its energy back through all its transformations to its source a hundred million miles away, or traced its energy ahead to the moving muscles in his arms