He figured the human mind itself as another radiating
matter through which man had always pumped a subtler fluid.
In all this futility, it was not the magnet or the rays or the
microbes that troubled him, or even his helplessness before the
forces. To that he was used from childhood. The magnet in its new
relation staggered his new education by its evidence of growing
complexity, and multiplicity, and even contradiction, in life. He
could not escape it; politics or science, the lesson was the
same, and at every step it blocked his path whichever way he
turned. He found it in politics; he ran against it in science; he
struck it in everyday life, as though he were still Adam in the
Garden of Eden between God who was unity, and Satan who was
complexity, with no means of deciding which was truth. The
problem was the same for McKinley as for Adam, and for the Senate
as for Satan. Hay was going to wreck on it, like King and Adams.
All one's life, one had struggled for unity, and unity had
always won. The National Government and the national unity had
overcome every resistance, and the Darwinian evolutionists were
triumphant over all the curates; yet the greater the unity and
the momentum, the worse became the complexity and the friction.
One had in vain bowed one's neck to railways, banks,
corporations, trusts, and even to the popular will as far as one
could understand it -- or even further; the multiplicity of unity
had steadily increased, was increasing, and threatened to
increase beyond reason.
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