mainspring or instinct of its own, like a parasite; so that an elaborate
mechanism is gradually developed, where each lever and spring holds the
other down, and all hold the mainspring down together, allowing it to
unwind itself only very gradually, and meantime keeping the whole clock
ticking and revolving, and causing the smooth outer face which it turns to
the world, so clean and innocent, to mark the time of day amiably for the
passer-by. But there is a terribly complicated labour going on beneath,
propelled with difficulty, and balanced precariously, with much secret
friction and failure. No wonder that the engine often gets visibly out of
order, or stops short: the marvel is that it ever manages to go at all.
Nor is it satisfied with simply revolving and, when at last dismounted,
starting afresh in the person of some seed it has dropped, a portion of
its substance with all its concentrated instincts wound up tightly within
it, and eager to repeat the ancestral experiment; all this growth is not
merely material and vain. Each clock in revolving strikes the hour, even
the quarters, and often with lovely chimes. These chimes we call
perceptions, feelings, purposes, and dreams; and it is because we are
taken up entirely with this mental music, and perhaps think that it sounds
of itself and needs no music-box to make it, that we find such difficulty
in conceiving the nature of our own clocks and are compelled to describe
them only musically, that is, in myths. But the ineptitude of our
aesthetic minds to unravel the nature of mechanism does not deprive these
minds of their own clearness and euphony. Besides sounding their various
musical notes, they have the cognitive function of indicating the hour and
catching the echoes of distant events or of maturing inward dispositions.
This information and emotion, added to incidental pleasures in satisfying
our various passions, make up the life of an incarnate spirit. They
reconcile it to the external fatality that has wound up the organism, and
is breaking it down; and they rescue this organism and all its works from
the indignity of being a vain complication and a waste of motion.