Page:Hare and Tortoise (1925).pdf/138

 ing. What if bad instincts obtain a majority in the house?"

"Ah, but thanks be to God they won't! Nature hasn't gone to pot physically, for all the efforts of plague and dyspepsia. She won't go to pot morally, either, though we may always need prisons, or their future equivalents. Nature is, in the long run, economical; she balances her books; and morality, like health, is merely a question of thrift."

"And religion? What is it?"

"Oh,—for a slouchy metaphor, call it the sparks struck off by moral friction."

"That's deep water."

"Moral: accept the concrete and don't try to formulate the abstract. Katie would never have expected an apple to fall into the sky just because she had never heard of Isaac Newton. And when she feels that Rosie Dixon and Billy, despite arguments to the contrary, are the same age, she has got just as far as the hypothetical metaphysician who would turn her experience into a revolutionary theory of objective and subjective time,—except that Katie won't get a Nobel prize. If she lives to be three score and ten, snug in her three dimensions, and never hears time defined as qualitative multiplicity, she will fulfil a sublime destiny; she will with unerring instinct and awe-inspiring virtuosity obey complex laws which are none the less urgent for being unformulated in her narrow skull. And when she dies, her soul, like John Brown's, will, though in fearfully di-