The wind sang and split the sky like thunder all the night through; in scraps of sleep it filled my dreams with the divine discordances of martyrdom and revolt; I heard the horn of Roland and the drums of Napoleon and all the tongues of terror with which the Thing has gone forth:  the spirit of our race alive.  But when I came down in the morning only a branch or two was broken off the tree in my garden; and none of the great country houses in the neighbourhood were blown down, as would have happened if the Thing had really been abroad.

THE MAN WHO THINKS BACKWARDS

The man who thinks backwards is a very powerful person to-day:  indeed, if he is not omnipotent, he is at least omnipresent.  It is he who writes nearly all the learned books and articles, especially of the scientific or skeptical sort; all the articles on Eugenics and Social Evolution and Prison Reform and the Higher Criticism and all the rest of it.  But especially it is this strange and tortuous being who does most of the writing about female emancipation and the reconsidering of marriage.  For the man who thinks backwards is very frequently a woman.

Thinking backwards is not quite easy to define abstractedly; and, perhaps, the simplest method is to take some object, as plain as possible, and from it illustrate the two modes of thought:  the right mode in which all real results have been rooted; the wrong mode, which is confusing all our current discussions, especially our discussions about the relations of the sexes.  Casting my eye round the room, I notice an object which is often mentioned in the higher and subtler of these debates about the sexes:  I mean a poker.  I will take a poker and think about it; first forwards and then backwards; and so, perhaps, show what I mean.

The sage desiring to think well and wisely about a poker will begin somewhat as follows:  Among the live creatures that crawl about this star the queerest is the thing called Man.  This plucked and plumeless bird, comic and forlorn, is the butt of all the philosophies.  He is the only naked animal; and this quality, once, it is said, his glory, is now his shame.  He has to go outside himself for everything that he wants.  He might almost be considered as an absent-minded person who had gone bathing and left his clothes everywhere, so that he has hung his hat upon the beaver and his coat upon the sheep.  The rabbit has white warmth for a waistcoat, and the glow-worm has a lantern for a head.  But man has no heat in his hide, and the light in his body is darkness; and he must look for light and warmth in the wild, cold universe in which he is cast.  This is equally true of his soul and of his body; he is the one creature that has lost his heart as much as he has lost his hide.  In a spiritual sense he has taken leave of his senses; and even in a literal sense he has been unable to keep his hair on.  And just as this external need