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The paper money of the nation seemed to possess a magic power to transmute prosperity into adversity and plenty into famine. The year 1794 was exceptionally fruitful: and yet with the autumn came scarcity of provisions and with the winter came distress. The reason is perfectly simple. The sequences in that whole history are absolutely logical.
'Relative suggestion' arises when two or more objects are perceived and suggest various relations of likeness and so forth. This provides a scheme for working out the whole doctrine of the sequences of ideas so far as the sequences depend upon the mind itself and not upon external causes.
A special aversion to improvement is generated, because whatever changes our conceptions of the 'sequences of phenomena' is supposed to break the divine 'laws of nature. 'Unnatural' becomes a 'self-justifying' epithet forbidding any proposed change of conduct, which will counteract the 'designs of God. Religion necessarily injures intellectual progress.
This remark did not strike Swann as ridiculous; rather, it puzzled him. For, since a purely musical work contains none of those logical sequences, the interruption or confusion of which, in spoken or written language, is a proof of insanity, so insanity diagnosed in a sonata seemed to him as mysterious a thing as the insanity of a dog or a horse, although instances may be observed of these.
As a matter of fact, such sequences as were sought by believers in the traditional form of causation have not so far been found in nature. Everything in nature is apparently in a state of continuous change,* so that what we call one "event" turns out to be really a process.
It is sufficient to show that, with our very limited knowledge, we act presumptuously in deciding against the possibility of an answer to prayer such as may leave the established course of Nature unaltered; but there is no necessity, and no reason, for supposing that the responsive touch can only be given at a point to which our knowledge does not extend, or that, were our knowledge extended, we would have less difficulty in admitting it there, than in holding it to be possible at any lower term in the scale of sequences.
Men have not even now left off hoping for other knowledge, nor believing that they have attained it; and that, when attained, it is, in some undefinable manner, greatly more precious than mere knowledge of sequences and co-existences. The true doctrine was not seen in its full clearness even by Bacon, though it is the result to which all his speculations tend: still less by Descartes.
Sequences entirely physical and material, as soon as they had become sufficiently familiar to the human mind, came to be thought perfectly natural, and were regarded not only as needing no explanation themselves, but as being capable of affording it to others, and even of serving as the ultimate explanation of things in general.
Why was it that mere words, and their arrangement in certain sequences, gave one a delicious, creepy feeling up and down the spine? Her attitude toward him had become more and more critical, she had avoided him when she could, but when he was in this ecstatic mood she responded, forgot his red lips, his contradictions, lost herself in a medium she did not comprehend.
For ages man lived with nature as one aspect of an evolving ecological balance. Civilization's basic unit the city as it sprawls, cuts off man from more and more contacts with the earth and its multitudinous life forms; with fresh air, sunshine, starshine; with nature's sequences day and night, the procession of the seasons; with the birth, growth, death animating so many of nature's aspects.
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