CHAPTER X
Gradually, thus, contact with ordinary people and experiences with certain facets, at least, of practical life had begun to give me what is called a knowledge of the world. The hot-house upbringing made this acquisition difficult as well as painful; there still remained a feeling that I was "peculiar"; ignorance of things that to other youths of twenty-one were commonplaces still gave me little shocks. Knowledge that comes at the wrong time is apt to produce exaggerated effects; and only those who have shared the childlike shelter afforded by a strict evangelical enclosure in early years can appreciate the absurd want of proportion which is one of these effects. Knowledge of "natural" human kinds, withheld at the right moment, and acquired later, has its dangers. . . .
Two things, moreover, about people astonished me in particular, I remember; they astonish me even more today. Being, in both cases, merely individual reactions, to the herd, they are easily understandable, and are mentioned here because, being entirely personal, they reveal the individual whose adventures are described.
The first—it astonished me daily, hourly—was the indifference of almost everybody to the great questions Whence, Why, Whither. The few who asked these questions seemed cranks of one sort or another; the immense majority of people showed no interest whatever. Creatures of extraordinary complexity, powers, faculties, set down for a given period, without being consulted apparently, upon a little planet amid countless numbers of majestic, terrifying suns . . . few showed even the faintest interest in the purpose, origin and goal of their existence. Of these few, again, by far the majority were eager to prove that soul and spirit were chemical reactions,
