Chapter III: Sleep And Death

A man imbued with the other way of thought and feeling will not be satisfied with this. Surely—he will aver—even in the manifest world nothing happens in a given locality and environment without some underlying cause. And though in many instances our science may not yet have found them, we can assume the causes to be there. An alpine flower does not grow in low-lying plains; there is something in its nature belonging to the alpine heights. So too there must be something in a human being, causing him to be born into a given environment. Nor is it adequate to look for causes within the physical world alone. To one who thinks more deeply, undue insistence on these causes is like attempting to explain the fact that one man hit another, not by the feelings of the one who dealt the blow but by the physical mechanism of his hand.