First, I found the whole modern world talking scientific fatalism; saying 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 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