I do not think I could now arrange into a history my travellings, my goings and returnings in my wandering effort to see and comprehend the world. And certainly even if I could arrange my facts I should still be at a loss to tell of the growth of ideas that is so much more important than any facts, to trace the increasing light to its innumerable sources, to a chink here, to a glowing reflection there, to a leap of burning light from some long darkness close at hand. But the light grew, and this vast world of man, in which our world, little son, is the world of a limited class in a small island, began to take on definite forms, to betray broad universal movements; what seemed at first , a drift and of passions, traditions, foolish ideas, blundering , careless , became confusedly , showed something and generalized at work among its multitudinous perplexity.  
I wonder now if I can put before you very the main that were growing up in my mind during my exile, the simplified picture into which I translated the billions of sights and sounds and—smells, for every part of the world has its palette as much as its palette of colors—that rained daily and nightly upon my mind.
 
Before, my eyes again as I sit here in this quiet walled French garden, the great space before the Jumna Musjid at Delhi reappears, as I saw it in the evening stillness against a glowing sky of gold, and the memory of worshippers within, praying with a devotion no European displays. And then comes a memory of that long reef of staircases and temples and buildings, the ghats of Benares, in the blazing morning sun, with a vast multitude of multicolored people and the water also swarming with brown bodies. It has the colors of a bed of splendid flowers and the light that is Indian alone. Even as I sit here these places are alive with happening. It is just past midday here; at this moment the sun sinks in the skies of India, the Jumna Musjid flushes again with the glow of sunset, the smoke of evening fires streams heavenward against its subtle lines, and upon those steps at Benares that come down the hillside between the conquering of Aurangzeb and the shining mirror of the Ganges a thousand silent seated figures fall into . And other memories and struggle with one another; the crowded river-streets of Canton, the rafts and houseboats and junks innumerable, riding over inky water, begin now to twinkle with a thousand lights. They are in Osaka and Yokohama and Tokio, and the swarming staircase streets of Hong Kong glitter with a wicked activity now that night has come. I flash a glimpse of Burmese temples, of villages in Java, of the sombre purple masses of the walls of the Tartar city at Pekin with pagoda-guarded gates. How those great outlines lowered at me in the , full of fresh memories and grim of baseness and violence and bloodshed! I sit here recalling it—feeling it all out beyond the trellised vine-clad wall that bounds my physical vision.... Vast crowded world that I have seen! going from point to point seeking for clues, for generalities, until at last it seems to me that there emerges—something understandable.
 
I think I have got something understandable out of it all.
 
What a fantastically thing is this mind of ours! My thoughts seem to me at once and . I do not know why it is that I should dare, that any of us should dream of this attempt to comprehend. But we who think are everyone to this amazing effort to get it all together into some simple generality. It is not reason but a deep-seated instinct that draws our intelligence towards explanations, that sets us perpetually seeking laws, seeking statements that will fit into infinite, interweaving , and be true of them all! There is I perceive a and magnificent stupidity about the human mind, a disregard of disproportion and insufficiency—like the ferret which will turn from the leveret it has seized to attack even man if he should . By these desperate of thinking it is that our species has achieved its victories. By them it survives. By them it must stand the test of ultimate survival. Some forgotten man in our —for every man alive was in my individual ancestry and yours three thousand years ago—first dared to think of the world as round,—an . He rolled up the rivers and mountains, the forests and plains and broad horizons that stretched beyond his , that seemed to to go on certainly for ever, into a ball, into a little ball "like an orange." Magnificent of the imagination, outdoing Thor's deep of the sea! And once he had done it, all do it and no one at the deed. You are not yet seven as I write and already you are aware that you live upon a sphere. And in much the same manner it is that we, who are sociologists and , publicists and philosophers and what not, are attempting now to roll up the vast world of facts which concern human , the whole indeed of history and archæology, into some similar imaginable and manageable shape, that presently everyone will be able to grasp.
 
I suppose there was a time when nobody bothered at all about the shape of the earth, when nobody had even had the idea that the earth could be conceived as having a shape, and similarly it is true that it is only in recent centuries that people have been able to suppose that there was a shape to human history. It is indeed not much more than a century since there was any real from theological assumptions and pure romanticism and accidentalism in these matters. Old Adam Smith it was, probing away at the roots of economics, who set going the construction of ampler propositions. From him spring all those new which have changed the writing of history from a record of dramatic and wars and crises to an analysis of economic forces. How impossible it would be for anyone now to write that great chapter of Gibbon's in which he sweeps together into one contempt the history of sixty Emperors and six hundred years of time. His note of weariness and vanishes directly one's vision the surface. Those Heraclians and Isaurians and Comneni were not history, a schoolboy nowadays knows that their record is not history, knows them for the scum upon the stream.
 
And still to-day we have our great interpretations to make. Ours is a time of guesses, theories and provisional generalizations. Our phase corresponds to the cosmography that was still a little divided between discs and and spheres and cosmic eggs; that was still a thousand years from measuring and weighing a planet. For a long time my mind about the ^............