So long as such a creature lives--and his life will be
difficult and short--events will continually disconcert and puzzle
him; everything will seem to him unaccountable, inexplicable,
unnatural. He will not be able to conceive the real order and
connection of things sympathetically, by assimilating his habits of
thought to their habits of evolution. His faculties being innate and
unadaptable will not allow him to correct his presumptions and axioms;
he will never be able to make nature the standard of naturalness. What
contradicts his private impulses will seem to him to contradict
reason, beauty, and necessity. In this paradoxical situation he will
probably take refuge in the conviction that what he finds to exist is
an illusion, or at least not a fair sample of reality. Being so
perverse, absurd, and repugnant, the given state of things must be, he
will say, only accidental and temporary. He will be sure that his own
_a priori_ imagination is the mirror of all the eternal proprieties,
and that as his mind can move only in one predetermined way, things
cannot be prevented from moving in that same way save by some strange
violence done to their nature. It would be easy, therefore, to set
everything right again: nay, everything must be on the point of
righting itself spontaneously.
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