I should be musing and thinking and dreaming somewhere else--in some distant animal maybe--perhaps a cat--by proxy of my oxygen I should be raging and fuming in some other creatures--a rat, perhaps; I should be smiling and hoping in still another child of Nature --heir to my hydrogen--a weed, or a cabbage, or something; my carbonic acid (ambition) would be dreaming dreams in some lowly wood-violet that was longing for a showy career; thus my details would be doing as much feeling as ever, but I should not be aware of it, it would all be going on for the benefit of those others, and I not in it at all. I should be gradually wasting away, atom by atom, molecule by molecule, as the years went on, and at last I should be all distributed, and nothing left of what had once been Me. It is curious, and not without impressiveness: I should still be alive, intensely alive, but so scattered that I would not know it. I should not be dead--no, one cannot call it that--but I should be the next thing to it. And to think what centuries and ages and aeons would drift over me before the disintegration was finished, the last bone turned to gas and blown away! I wish I knew what it is going to feel like, to lie helpless such a weary, weary time, and see my faculties decay and depart, one by one, like lights which burn low, and flicker and perish, until the ever-deepening gloom and darkness which--oh, away, away with these horrors, and let me think of something wholesome!
My tramp is only 85; there is good hope that he will live ten years longer--500,000 of my microbe years. So may it be.
Oh, dear, we are all so wise! Each of us knows it all, and knows he knows it all--the rest, to a man, are fools and deluded. One man knows there is a hell, the next one knows there isn't; one man knows high tariff is right, the next man knows it isn't; one man knows monarchy is best, the next one knows it isn't; one age knows there are witches, the next one knows there aren't; one sect knows its religion is the only true one, there are sixty-four thousand five hundred million sects that know it isn't so. There is not a mind present among this multitude of verdict-deliverers that is the superior of the minds that persuade and represent the rest of the divisions of the multitude. Yet this sarcastic fact does not humble the arrogance nor diminish the know-it-all bulk of a single verdict-maker of the lot by so much as a shade. Mind is plainly an ass, but it will be many ages before it finds it out, no doubt. Why do we respect the opinions of any man or any microbe that ever lived? I swear I don't know. Why do I respect my own? Well--that is different.
APPENDIX W
LITTLE BESSIE WOULD ASSIST PROVIDENCE
(See Chapter cclxxxii)
[It is dull, and I need wholesome excitements and distractions; so I will go lightly excursioning along the primrose path of theology.]
Little Bessie was nearly three years old. She was a good child, and not shallow, not frivolous, but meditative and thoughtful, and much given to thinking out the reasons of things and trying to make them harmonize with results. One day she said:
"Mama, why is there so much pain and sorrow and suffering? What is it all for?"
It was an easy question, and mama had no difficulty in answering it:
"It is for our good, my child. In His wisdom and mercy the Lord sends us these afflictions to discipline us and make us better."
"Is it He that sends them?"
"Yes."
"Does He send all of them, mama?"
"Yes, dear, all of them. None of them comes by accident; He alone sends them, and always out of love for us, and to make us better."
"Isn't it strange?"
"Strange? Why, no, I have never thought of it in that way. I have not heard any one call it strange before. It has always seemed natural and right to me, and wise and most kindly and merciful."
"Who first thought of it like that, mama? Was it you?"
"Oh no, child, I was taught it."
"Who taught you so, mama?"
"Why, really, I don't know--I can't remember.