Innumerability

Thus he reiecteth this innumerability of Causes

Hero the lurking fallacy is unearthed; for who will seriously maintain that the innumerability of any series of objects—the stars, for instance —is a proof of their non-existence.

And its interminably repeated successions of stores of a certain kind—grocery, meat-market, delicatessen shop, “notion” store, saloon—recurring block after block, mile after mile, with paintshop, hat - store, men’s furnishing store, crockery - store, thrown in at perfectly regular intervals, are unexampled anywhere; they are, in their far-flung innumerability, a special expression of civilization in themselves. And, over all, the great, free, rapid, powerful, efficient movement of the mass: in the midst of it the new-comer begins to learn at last—especially when he has got over wanting his hulled corn and his Kennedy’s crackers— that he is really not in a “ jay town.”

I was once for the first time made aware of the Hibernian origin of a partner by his antics over an astonishing putt which won him the hole : for a moment of time his club might have been a shillelah, his feet moved to a jig. Golf brings out idiosyncrasies and peculiarities. Sometimes it brings out more than these ! Hence, perhaps, the innumerability of the anecdotes anent the irrepressibility of profanity while playing the game — a game proverbially provocative of reprehensible expletives. My eyes were lately opened to this sinister peculiarity when playing with a man, the author of a ponderous work, noted for the precision, even for the purism, of his diction. Usually he spake as he wrote\, and he wrote for gentlemen learned in the law.

But the simpler and more obvious qualities of the air would of course not be without their influence — its mobility and incessant motion ; its immateriality ; its inexhaustibility ; its seeming eternity. It is, therefore, not astonishing that with his attention thus focussed on a group of truly wonderful phenomena, the old nature-philosopher should have selected air as his primary substance — as the universal vehicle of vital and psychic force. It is of especial interest to the nature-mystic to find that Anaximenes was faithful to the doctrine that the primary substance must contain in itself the cause of its own motion. And the interest is intensified in view of the fact that his insistence on the life-giving properties of air rests on a widely spread group of animistic notions which have exercised an extraordinary influence on the world at large. Let Tylor furnish a summary.