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The self-adjustment of the mind in the attitude of expectant attention proves again and again to be vain and futile, and it is this fact which brings home to it the slowness of the sequences of perceived fact, as compared with the rapidity of the sequences of imagination.
Only the act of recollection, the constantly renewed retreat to the quiet centre of the spirit, gives that assurance of a Reality, a calmer and more valid life attainable by us, which supports the stress and pain of self-simplification and permits us to hope on, even in the teeth of the world's cruelty, indifference, degeneracy; whilst diligent character-building alone, with its perpetual untiring efforts at self-adjustment, its bracing, purging discipline, checks the human tendency to relapse into and react to the obvious, and makes possible the further development of the contemplative power.
The cloud-masses crawl and tumble about the valleys like a brood of dragons; now creeping along the ledges of the rock with sinuous self-adjustment to its turns and twists; now launching out into the deep, repelled by battling winds, or driven onward in a coil of twisted and contorted serpent curls. In the midst of summer these wet seasons often end in a heavy fall of snow.
By an instinct of self-support and self-adjustment, that great body of men who left the military service during the latter half of the year 1865 and early in the year 1866 re-entered civil life with apparent contentment and even with certain advantages.
As Pansy stepped from behind the pines, with one long, quivering breath of final self-adjustment, she suddenly stood still, arrested by the vision of so glorious a hue and shape that, for the moment, everything else was forgotten.
Newall's telescope were downright clumsiness, had striven to devise a seeing apparatus, capable of exact self-adjustment to all degrees of light, all gradations of distance, all varieties of refrangibility, it could not have adopted a contrivance more exquisitely ingenious, or evincing more minutely accurate knowledge of the most secret laws of optics, than the mechanism of the eye apparently betokens, let it still be admitted to be not quite beyond the bounds of possibility, that not skill but the blindest and densest ignorance may have presided over the whole operation.
But this difference consists in something beyond the reach of chemistry and of physics; it is active intelligence, the power of self-direction, of self-adjustment, of self-maintenance, of adapting means to an end. It is notorious that the hand cannot always cover the flea; this atom has will, and knows the road to safety. Behold what our bodies know over and above what we know!
When Mr. Froude shall have become able to present for the world's contemplation a question respecting which the Anglo-Saxon family, in its grand world-wide predominance, and the African family, in its yet feeble, albeit promising, incipience of self-adjustment, shall actually be competitors, then, and only then, will it be time to accept the outlook as serious.
To Dom Diego's Portuguese fellow-citizens the old gentleman was the author of an erudite essay on the treatment of phthisis, emphatically denouncing the implicit reliance on milk. But Gabriel could not imitate this comfortable self-adjustment to surroundings. 'Twas but a half fight for the Truth, he felt, and ceased to cultivate the semi-recreant physician.
But this self-consciousness and self-adjustment to a given end is an element of strength and not of weakness.
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