It moves wholly by inspiration; every event is providential, every
act unpremeditated. Absolute freedom and absolute helplessness have
met together: you depend wholly on divine favour, yet that
unfathomable agency is not distinguishable from your own life.
...[But] the figures even of that disordered drama have their exits
and their entrances; and their cues can be gradually discovered by a
being capable of fixing his attention and retaining the order of
events. ...In proportion as such understanding advances each moment
of experience becomes consequential and prophetic of the rest. The
calm places in life are filled with power and its spasms with
resource. No emotion can overwhelm the mind, for of none is the
basis or issue wholly hidden; no event can disconcert it altogether,
because it sees beyond. Means can be looked for to escape from the
worst predicament; and whereas each moment had been formerly filled
with nothing but its own adventure and surprised emotion, each now
makes room for the lesson of what went before and surmises what may
be the plot of the whole."[Footnote: The Life of Reason: Reason in
Common Sense, 1905, p. 59.]
Even to-day science and philosophy are still laboriously trying to
part fancies from realities in our experience; and in primitive
times they made only the most incipient distinctions in this line.
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