The Stratagem and Other Stories

is published with all reserve as the lucubration of a very peculiar, perhaps unique, type of insanity. V. ENGLISH, M.D. NOTES: 1. It is one of the greatest cruelties of nature that all painful or depressing emotions seem to lengthen time; pleasant thoughts and exalted moods make time fly. Thus, in summing up a life from an outside standpoint, it would seem that, supposing pleasure and pain to have occupied equal periods, the impression would be that pain was enormously greater than pleasure. This may be controverted. Virgil writes: “Fortisan haec olim memi- nisse juvabit,” and there is at least one modern writer thoroughly conversant with pessimism who is very opti- mistic. But the new facts which I here submit over- thrown the whole argument; they cast a sword of infi- nite weight on that petty trembling scale. 2. This is my general complaint, and that of all research students on the one hand and imaginative writers on the other. We can only express a new idea by combining two or more old ideas, or by the use of metaphor; just so any number can be formed from two others. James Hinton had undoubtedly a perfectly crisp, simple, and concise idea of the “fourth dimension of space”; he found the utmost difficulty in conveying it to others, even when they were advanced matematicians. It is (I believe) the greatest factor that militates against human progress that great men assume they will be understood by others. Even such a master of lucid English as the late Pro- fessor Huxley has been so vitally misunderstood that he