Chapter XIII - Page 2

Higginbotham jerked open the door and demanded to know if
he thought they were running a restaurant.

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