The physicists had a phrase for it,
unintelligible to the vulgar: "All that we win is a battle --
lost in advance -- with the irreversible phenomena in the
background of nature."
All that a historian won was a vehement wish to escape. He saw
his education complete; and was sorry he ever began it. As a
matter of taste, he greatly preferred his eighteenth-century
education when God was a father and nature a mother, and all was
for the best in a scientific universe. He repudiated all share in
the world as it was to be, and yet he could not detect the point
where his responsibility began or ended.
As history unveiled itself in the new order, man's mind had
behaved like a young pearl oyster, secreting its universe to suit
its conditions until it had built up a shell of nacre that
embodied all its notions of the perfect. Man knew it was true
because he made it, and he loved it for the same reason. He
sacrificed millions of lives to acquire his unity, but he
achieved it, and justly thought it a work of art. The woman
especially did great things, creating her deities on a higher
level than the male, and, in the end, compelling the man to
accept the Virgin as guardian of the man's God. The man's part in
his Universe was secondary, but the woman was at home there, and
sacrificed herself without limit to make it habitable, when man
permitted it, as sometimes happened for brief intervals of war
and famine; but she could not provide protection against forces
of nature.
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