It was the knot of wordy socialists and working-class philosophers
that held forth in the City Hall Park on warm afternoons that was
responsible for the great discovery. Once or twice in the month,
while riding through the park on his way to the library, Martin
dismounted from his wheel and listened to the arguments, and each
time he tore himself away reluctantly. The tone of discussion was
much lower than at Mr. Morse's table. The men were not grave and
dignified. They lost their tempers easily and called one another
names, while oaths and obscene allusions were frequent on their
lips. Once or twice he had seen them come to blows. And yet, he
knew not why, there seemed something vital about the stuff of these
men's thoughts. Their logomachy was far more stimulating to his
intellect than the reserved and quiet dogmatism of Mr. Morse.
These men, who slaughtered English, gesticulated like lunatics, and
fought one another's ideas with primitive anger, seemed somehow to
be more alive than Mr. Morse and his crony, Mr. Butler.

Martin had heard Herbert Spencer quoted several times in the park,
but one afternoon a disciple of Spencer's appeared, a seedy tramp
with a dirty coat buttoned tightly at the throat to conceal the
absence of a shirt. Battle royal was waged, amid the smoking of
many cigarettes and the expectoration of much tobacco-juice,
wherein the tramp successfully held his own, even when a socialist
workman sneered, "There is no god but the Unknowable, and Herbert
Spencer is his prophet." Martin was puzzled as to what the
discussion was about, but when he rode on to the library he carried
with him a new-born interest in Herbert Spencer, and because of the
frequency with which the tramp had mentioned "First Principles,"
Martin drew out that volume.

So the great discovery began. Once before he had tried Spencer,
and choosing the "Principles of Psychology" to begin with, he had
failed as abjectly as he had failed with Madam Blavatsky. There
had been no understanding the book, and he had returned it unread.
But this night, after algebra and physics, and an attempt at a
sonnet, he got into bed and opened "First Principles." Morning
found him still reading. It was impossible for him to sleep. Nor
did he write that day. He lay on the bed till his body grew tired,
when he tried the hard floor, reading on his back, the book held in
the air above him, or changing from side to side. He slept that
night, and did his writing next morning, and then the book tempted
him and he fell, reading all afternoon, oblivious to everything and
oblivious to the fact that that was the afternoon Ruth gave to him.
His first consciousness of the immediate world about him was when
Bernard Higginbotham jerked open the door and demanded to know if
he thought they were running a restaurant.

Martin Eden had been mastered by curiosity all his days. He wanted
to know, and it was this desire that had sent him adventuring over
the world. But he was now learning from Spencer that he never had
known, and that he never could have known had he continued his
sailing and wandering forever. He had merely skimmed over the
surface of things, observing detached phenomena, accumulating
fragments of facts, making superficial little generalizations - and
all and everything quite unrelated in a capricious and disorderly
world of whim and chance. The mechanism of the flight of birds he
had watched and reasoned about with understanding; but it had never
entered his head to try to explain the process whereby birds, as
organic flying mechanisms, had been developed. He had never
dreamed there was such a process. That birds should have come to
be, was unguessed. They always had been. They just happened.

And as it was with birds, so had it been with everything. His
ignorant and unprepared attempts at philosophy had been fruitless.
The medieval metaphysics of Kant had given him the key to nothing,
and had served the sole purpose of making him doubt his own
intellectual powers. In similar manner his attempt to study
evolution had been confined to a hopelessly technical volume by
Romanes. He had understood nothing, and the only idea he had
gathered was that evolution was a dry-as-dust theory, of a lot of
little men possessed of huge and unintelligible vocabularies. And
now he learned that evolution was no mere theory but an accepted
process of development; that scientists no longer disagreed about
it, their only differences being over the method of evolution.

And here was the man Spencer, organizing all knowledge for him,
reducing everything to unity, elaborating ultimate realities, and
presenting to his startled gaze a universe so concrete of
realization that it was like the model of a ship such as sailors
make and put into glass bottles. There was no caprice, no chance.
All was law. It was in obedience to law that the bird flew, and it
was in obedience to the same law that fermenting slime had writhed
and squirmed and put out legs and wings and become a bird.

Martin had ascended from pitch to pitch of intellectual living, and
here he was at a higher pitch than ever. All the hidden things
were laying their secrets bare. He was drunken with comprehension.
At night, asleep, he lived with the gods in colossal nightmare; and
awake, in the day, he went around like a somnambulist, with absent
stare, gazing upon the world he had just discovered. At table he
failed to hear the conversation about petty and ignoble things, his
eager mind seeking out and following cause and effect in everything
before him. In the meat on the platter he saw the shining sun and
traced its energy back through all its transformations to its
source a hundred million miles away, or traced its energy ahead to
the moving muscles in his arms that enabled him to cut the meat,
and to the brain wherewith he willed the muscles to move to cut the
meat, until, with inward gaze, he saw the same sun shining in his
brain. He was entranced by illumination, and did not hear the
"Bughouse," whispered by Jim, nor see the anxiety on his sister's
face, nor notice the rotary motion of Bernard Higginbotham's
finger, whereby he imparted the suggestion of wheels revolving in
his brother-in-law's head.

What, in a way, most profoundly impressed Martin, was the
correlation of knowledge - of all knowledge. He had been curious
to know things, and whatever he acquired he had filed away in
separate memory compartments in his brain. Thus, on the subject of
sailing he had an immense store. On the subject of woman he had a
fairly large store. But these two subjects had been unrelated.
Between the two memory compartments there had been no connection.
That, in the fabric of knowledge, there should be any connection
whatever between a woman with hysterics and a schooner carrying a
weather-helm or heaving to in a gale, would have struck him as
ridiculous and impossible. But Herbert Spencer had shown him not
only that it was not ridiculous, but that it was impossible for
there to be no connection. All things were related to all other
things from the farthermost star in the wastes of space to the
myriads of atoms in the grain of sand under one's foot. This new
concept was a perpetual amazement to Martin, and he found himself
engaged continually in tracing the relationship between all things
under the sun and on the other side of the sun. He drew up lists
of the most incongruous things and was unhappy until he succeeded
in establishing kinship between them all - kinship between love,
poetry, earthquake, fire, rattlesnakes, rainbows, precious gems,
monstrosities, sunsets, the roaring of lions, illuminating gas,
cannibalism, beauty, murder, lovers, fulcrums, and tobacco. Thus,
he unified the universe and held it up and looked at it, or
wandered through its byways and alleys and jungles, not as a
terrified traveller in the thick of mysteries seeking an unknown
goal, but observing and charting and becoming familiar with all
there was to know. And the more he knew, the more passionately he
admired the universe, and life, and his own life in the midst of it
all.

"You fool!" he cried at his image in the looking-glass. "You
wanted to write, and you tried to write, and you had nothing in you
to write about. What did you have in you? - some childish notions,
a few half-baked sentiments, a lot of undigested beauty, a great
black mass of ignorance, a heart filled to bursting with love, and
an ambition as big as your love and as futile as your ignorance.
And you wanted to write! Why, you're just on the edge of beginning
to get something in you to write about. You wanted to create
beauty, but how could you when you knew nothing about the nature of
beauty? You wanted to write about life when you knew nothing of
the essential characteristics of life. You wanted to write about
the world and the scheme of existence when the world was a Chinese
puzzle to you and all that you could have written would have been
about what you did not know of the scheme of existence. But cheer
up, Martin, my boy. You'll write yet. You know a little, a very
little, and you're on the right road now to know more. Some day,
if you're lucky, you may come pretty close to knowing all that may
be known. Then you will write."

He brought his great discovery to Ruth, sharing with her all his
joy and wonder in it. But she did not seem to be so enthusiastic
over it. She tacitly accepted it and, in a way, seemed aware of it
from her own studies. It did not stir her deeply, as it did him,
and he would have been surprised had he not reasoned it out that it
was not new and fresh to her as it was to him. Arthur and Norman,
he found, believed in evolution and had read Spencer, though it did
not seem to have made any vital impression upon them, while the
young fellow with the glasses and the mop of hair, Will Olney,
sneered disagreeably at Spencer and repeated the epigram, "There is
no god but the Unknowable, and Herbert Spencer is his prophet."

But Martin forgave him the sneer, for he had begun to discover that
Olney was not in love with Ruth. Later, he was dumfounded to learn
from various little happenings not only that Olney did not care for
Ruth, but that he had a positive dislike for her. Martin could not
understand this. It was a bit of phenomena that he could not
correlate with all the rest of the phenomena in the universe. But
nevertheless he felt sorry for the young fellow because of the
great lack in his nature that prevented him from a proper
appreciation of Ruth's fineness and beauty. They rode out into the
hills several Sundays on their wheels, and Martin had ample
opportunity to observe the armed truce that existed between Ruth
and Olney. The latter chummed with Norman, throwing Arthur and
Martin into company with Ruth, for which Martin was duly grateful.

Those Sundays were great days for Martin, greatest because he was
with Ruth, and great, also, because they were putting him more on a
par with the young men of her class. In spite of their long years
of disciplined education, he was finding himself their intellectual
equal, and the hours spent with them in conversation was so much
practice for him in the use of the grammar he had studied so hard.
He had abandoned the etiquette books, falling back upon observation
to show him the right things to do. Except when carried away by
his enthusiasm, he was always on guard, keenly watchful of their
actions and learning their little courtesies and refinements of
conduct.

The fact that Spencer was very little read was for some time a
source of surprise to Martin. "Herbert Spencer," said the man at
the desk in the library, "oh, yes, a great mind." But the man did
not seem to know anything of the content of that great mind. One
evening, at dinner, when Mr. Butler was there, Martin turned the
conversation upon Spencer. Mr. Morse bitterly arraigned the
English philosopher's agnosticism, but confessed that he had not
read "First Principles"; while Mr. Butler stated that he had no
patience with Spencer, had never read a line of him, and had
managed to get along quite well without him. Doubts arose in
Martin's mind, and had he been less strongly individual he would
have accepted the general opinion and given Herbert Spencer up. As
it was, he found Spencer's explanation of things convincing; and,
as he phrased it to himself, to give up Spencer would be equivalent
to a navigator throwing the compass and chronometer overboard. So
Martin went on into a thorough study of evolution, mastering more
and more the subject himself, and being convinced by the
corroborative testimony of a thousand independent writers. The
more he studied, the more vistas he caught of fields of knowledge
yet unexplored, and the regret that days were only twenty-four
hours long became a chronic complaint with him.

One day, because the days were so short, he decided to give up
algebra and geometry. Trigonometry he had not even attempted.
Then he cut chemistry from his study-list, retaining only physics.

"I am not a specialist," he said, in defence, to Ruth. "Nor am I
going to try to be a specialist. There are too many special fields
for any one man, in a whole lifetime, to master a tithe of them. I
must pursue general knowledge. When I need the work of
specialists, I shall refer to their books."

"But that is not like having the knowledge yourself," she
protested.

"But it is unnecessary to have it. We profit from the work of the
specialists. That's what they are for. When I came in, I noticed
the chimney-sweeps at work. They're specialists, and when they get
done, you will enjoy clean chimneys without knowing anything about
the construction of chimneys."

"That's far-fetched, I am afraid."

She looked at him curiously, and he felt a reproach in her gaze and
manner. But he was convinced of the rightness of his position.

"All thinkers on general subjects, the greatest minds in the world,
in fact, rely on the specialists. Herbert Spencer did that. He
generalized upon the findings of thousands of investigators. He
would have had to live a thousand lives in order to do it all
himself. And so with Darwin. He took advantage of all that had
been learned by the florists and cattle-breeders."

"You're right, Martin," Olney said. "You know what you're after,
and Ruth doesn't. She doesn't know what she is after for herself
even."

" - Oh, yes," Olney rushed on, heading off her objection, "I know
you call it general culture. But it doesn't matter what you study
if you want general culture. You can study French, or you can
study German, or cut them both out and study Esperanto, you'll get
the culture tone just the same. You can study Greek or Latin, too,
for the same purpose, though it will never be any use to you. It
will be culture, though. Why, Ruth studied Saxon, became clever in
it, - that was two years ago, - and all that she remembers of it
now is 'Whan that sweet Aprile with his schowers soote' - isn't
that the way it goes?"

"But it's given you the culture tone just the same," he laughed,
again heading her off. "I know. We were in the same classes."

"But you speak of culture as if it should be a means to something,"
Ruth cried out. Her eyes were flashing, and in her cheeks were two
spots of color. "Culture is the end in itself."

"But that is not what Martin wants."

"How do you know?"

"What do you want, Martin?" Olney demanded, turning squarely upon
him.

Martin felt very uncomfortable, and looked entreaty at Ruth.

"Yes, what do you want?" Ruth asked. "That will settle it."

"Yes, of course, I want culture," Martin faltered. "I love beauty,
and culture will give me a finer and keener appreciation of
beauty."

She nodded her head and looked triumph.

"Rot, and you know it," was Olney's comment. "Martin's after
career, not culture. It just happens that culture, in his case, is
incidental to career. If he wanted to be a chemist, culture would
be unnecessary. Martin wants to write, but he's afraid to say so
because it will put you in the wrong."

"And why does Martin want to write?" he went on. "Because he isn't
rolling in wealth. Why do you fill your head with Saxon and
general culture? Because you don't have to make your way in the
world. Your father sees to that. He buys your clothes for you,
and all the rest. What rotten good is our education, yours and
mine and Arthur's and Norman's? We're soaked in general culture,
and if our daddies went broke to-day, we'd be falling down to-
morrow on teachers' examinations. The best job you could get,
Ruth, would be a country school or music teacher in a girls'
boarding-school."

"And pray what would you do?" she asked.

"Not a blessed thing. I could earn a dollar and a half a day,
common labor, and I might get in as instructor in Hanley's cramming
joint - I say might, mind you, and I might be chucked out at the
end of the week for sheer inability."

Martin followed the discussion closely, and while he was convinced
that Olney was right, he resented the rather cavalier treatment he
accorded Ruth. A new conception of love formed in his mind as he
listened. Reason had nothing to do with love. It mattered not
whether the woman he loved reasoned correctly or incorrectly. Love
was above reason. If it just happened that she did not fully
appreciate his necessity for a career, that did not make her a bit
less lovable. She was all lovable, and what she thought had
nothing to do with her lovableness.

"What's that?" he replied to a question from Olney that broke in
upon his train of thought.

"I was saying that I hoped you wouldn't be fool enough to tackle
Latin."

"But Latin is more than culture," Ruth broke in. "It is
equipment."

"Well, are you going to tackle it?" Olney persisted.

Martin was sore beset. He could see that Ruth was hanging eagerly
upon his answer.

"I am afraid I won't have time," he said finally. "I'd like to,
but I won't have time."

"You see, Martin's not seeking culture," Olney exulted. "He's
trying to get somewhere, to do something."

"Oh, but it's mental training. It's mind discipline. It's what
makes disciplined minds." Ruth looked expectantly at Martin, as if
waiting for him to change his judgment. "You know, the foot-ball
players have to train before the big game. And that is what Latin
does for the thinker. It trains."

"Rot and bosh! That's what they told us when we were kids. But
there is one thing they didn't tell us then. They let us find it
out for ourselves afterwards." Olney paused for effect, then
added, "And what they didn't tell us was that every gentleman
should have studied Latin, but that no gentleman should know
Latin."

"Now that's unfair," Ruth cried. "I knew you were turning the
conversation just in order to get off something."

"It's clever all right," was the retort, "but it's fair, too. The
only men who know their Latin are the apothecaries, the lawyers,
and the Latin professors. And if Martin wants to be one of them, I
miss my guess. But what's all that got to do with Herbert Spencer
anyway? Martin's just discovered Spencer, and he's wild over him.
Why? Because Spencer is taking him somewhere. Spencer couldn't
take me anywhere, nor you. We haven't got anywhere to go. You'll
get married some day, and I'll have nothing to do but keep track of
the lawyers and business agents who will take care of the money my
father's going to leave me."

Onley got up to go, but turned at the door and delivered a parting
shot.

"You leave Martin alone, Ruth. He knows what's best for himself.
Look at what he's done already. He makes me sick sometimes, sick
and ashamed of myself. He knows more now about the world, and
life, and man's place, and all the rest, than Arthur, or Norman, or
I, or you, too, for that matter, and in spite of all our Latin, and
French, and Saxon, and culture."

"But Ruth is my teacher," Martin answered chivalrously. "She is
responsible for what little I have learned."

"Rats!" Olney looked at Ruth, and his expression was malicious.
"I suppose you'll be telling me next that you read Spencer on her
recommendation - only you didn't. And she doesn't know anything
more about Darwin and evolution than I do about King Solomon's
mines. What's that jawbreaker definition about something or other,
of Spencer's, that you sprang on us the other day - that
indefinite, incoherent homogeneity thing? Spring it on her, and
see if she understands a word of it. That isn't culture, you see.
Well, tra la, and if you tackle Latin, Martin, I won't have any
respect for you."

And all the while, interested in the discussion, Martin had been
aware of an irk in it as well. It was about studies and lessons,
dealing with the rudiments of knowledge, and the schoolboyish tone
of it conflicted with the big things that were stirring in him -
with the grip upon life that was even then crooking his fingers
like eagle's talons, with the cosmic thrills that made him ache,
and with the inchoate consciousness of mastery of it all. He
likened himself to a poet, wrecked on the shores of a strange land,
filled with power of beauty, stumbling and stammering and vainly
trying to sing in the rough, barbaric tongue of his brethren in the
new land. And so with him. He was alive, painfully alive, to the
great universal things, and yet he was compelled to potter and
grope among schoolboy topics and debate whether or not he should
study Latin.

"What in hell has Latin to do with it?" he demanded before his
mirror that night. "I wish dead people would stay dead. Why
should I and the beauty in me be ruled by the dead? Beauty is
alive and everlasting. Languages come and go. They are the dust
of the dead."

And his next thought was that he had been phrasing his ideas very
well, and he went to bed wondering why he could not talk in similar
fashion when he was with Ruth. He was only a schoolboy, with a
schoolboy's tongue, when he was in her presence.

"Give me time," he said aloud. "Only give me time."

Time! Time! Time! was his unending plaint.