Occasionalism

“ It is certain that nothing can be active without an occasion, and that what is active, being made thus by the occasion, is so far passive. The occasion, again, since it enters into the causal process—a thing it never would have done if left to itself—suffers a change from the cause; and it therefore itself is passive in its activity. If the cause is A, and the occasion B, then each is active or passive, according as you view the result as the expression of its nature, or as an adjective imported from outside. ”

“ People talk of our changing every seven years, but they make me feel as if I changed every seven minutes. What will you have, at any rate, and how can I help it? It's the grind of life, the wear and tear of time and misfortune. ”

“ Of all the individuals, however, in the community, our idle class suffer the most acutely from lack of time, though, like Charles Lamb’s gentleman, they have all there is.
From the moment a man of leisure, or his wife, wakens in the morning until they drop into a fitful slumber at night, their day is an agitated chase. No matter where or when you meet them, they are always on the wing.
“Am I late again?” gasped a thin little woman to me the other evening, as she hurried into the drawing-room, where she had kept her guests and dinner waiting. ”

“ As hour by hour, he finds himself yielding to the gradual pressure of his fate, and feels his mind assuming, one by one, the prejudices of those about him, his self-esteem falls with his condition, and he sees that the time is not distant, when all inequality between him and his fellows shall cease, and every trait of his former self be washed away, for ever. ”

“ For a brief season the order of life is changed, and the involuntary powers of the mind bear rule in place of the voluntary. The actual, with all its pains and pleasures, is for the time annihilated. The pressure of thought and the fever of emotion are both removed, and the over-taxed spirit is at rest. ”

“ The point was that we moved so oddly and consistently—as it was our only form of consistency—over our limited pasture, never straying to nibble in the strange or the steep places. What was the matter with us under this spell, and what the moral might have been for our case, are issues of small moment, after all, in face of the fact of our mainly so brief duration. It was given to but few of us to be taught by the event, to be made to wonder with the last intensity what had been the matter. ”

“ Those who have never heard that solemn voice of the ghostly clock which ticks with awful distinctness, "thou shalt," "thou shalt not," "thou shalt," "thou shalt not," are in no position to judge. Not alone in sensitive, highly organised natures is such a mental conflict possible. ”

“ He drew schedules: four hours of work, one for eating and relaxation; five hours more of work, and another for food and rest; six hours more of work, then seven for sleep, and then the cycle began again. By making a rhythm of it, he thought, rather than a program of perfectly equal work-periods, he would avoid monotony. With monotony would come despair, and with despair.... Despair of course would kill him. ”

“ People nowadays won’t travel eight miles an hour, or be satisfied to hear of events ten days after they’ve happened. Life is too short for all this now, and, as we can’t lengthen our days, we must shorten our incidents. We are all more or less like that gentleman Mathews used to tell us of at Boulogne, who said to the waiter, ‘Let me have some-thing expensive; I am only here for an hour.’ Have you ever thought seriously on the matter? ”

“ And then, such is the divine obstinacy of humanity, the turn of the year gives us an excuse for starting afresh, and forming a new ideal, and forgetting our shame in yet another organised effort. Such is the annual circle of the ideal, the effort, the failure and the shame. ”

“ I do not mean merely being in time for lectures, but mean that spirit out of which punctuality grows, that love of accuracy and precision which mark the efficient man. The habit of being punctual extends to everything—meeting friends, paying debts, going to church, reaching and leaving place of business, keeping promises, retiring at night and rising in the morning." We may lay down a system or method of work for ourselves, but it will be of little service unless we keep carefully to it, beginning and leaving off at the appointed moment. ”

“ Moreover, I can return to the beloved work which is unwillingly suspended in the bustle of town. I do not know why it is that I have so deep a sense of the value of time, when what I do matters so little to any one. ”

“ But the relation to a solitary historical event, by which rather more highly civilised peoples denote the years, can hardly, or only in isolated instances, be applied to the month: for the life of primitive peoples is very monotonous, and is not so rich in events which make an impression upon the mind that one of these will occur in every month, and even supposing that such events could be found, the months in a human life are too numerous for it to be possible to keep a series of this nature in mind. ”

“ If each one noted down at night the incidents of the day, that had occupied his time, and how much of it he had appropriated to each, I fear all that portion, that we call people of leisure would be able to show but a lean schedule either of utility or enjoyment, as the result.
Complaints of the brevity of life are equally interdicted to all those, who do not wisely improve every hour of the brief and uncertain present. ”

“ But only the small mind snaps and snarls for a regulation hour, and it is one of the most mean things to a man like me, who never thought of hours but only the work, that poor spirits here and there be jealous of the clock and down tools just because of the time of day. ”

“ Hush, Louisa! Don't let me hear that odious excuse again. Suppose it was only for a minute. Have you any more right to do wrong for a minute than for a day? You are always saying—'only a minute,' 'just a minute,' but your minutes are very apt to lengthen into hours. It was your stopping 'just a minute' when you were sent on an important errand which almost cost the poor little baby its life, last summer. It is your stopping 'just a minute' to read or play or do something else to please yourself, which makes you late at breakfast, at school, and at church ”

“ The minute which is gone can never be recalled, while the next minute is fraught with uncertainty. We are sure—not of this minute, but of this instant only, of time. Then, while we may, let us say the loving word, do the kind act, suppress the unkind remark, encourage those who are struggling by the way—this minute. ”

“ The problem of hours, minutes, seconds, and fractions of them was something they scarcely dreamed of. Nor did they need to cut their time up into such small parts. Life, as I before remarked, was not very rushing. Nobody expected to meet anybody else at a particular instant in those far-away, lazy, easy-going times, or to go anywhere on the minute. [60] If you arrived at where you were going before the darkness fell that was all even the most ambitious asked. The splitting up of time with our present-day nicety is of comparatively modern working out. ”

“ Ah, what changes a day may bring!"
"Yes, many things may be done in less than a day," said Storms, in a light if not mocking tone. "It only takes a minute or two sometimes for a man to yoke himself up for life. ”

“ It is not, therefore, our own time only that is wasted by our want of punctuality, but hours, and days, and months' and years of the precious property of others, over which we had no right, and which was not intentionally submitted to our thoughtless expenditure. ”

“ Why, in all ages and among every people, do we meet with some one of these mad festivals? Must we believe that it requires such an effort for men to be reasonable, that the weaker ones have need of rest at intervals? ”

“ Still, it would have been interesting to read some day, when I shall have forgotten the little steps—for although we've had in all only a month before the season and five weeks between New Year's and Ash Wednesday, so much has been crowded into that time. It's amazing what one can accomplish if one uses every moment to a single purpose. And I've not only used my own time, but Robert's and Jessie's and the time of their and my friends, and that of Nadeshda and a dozen other people. ”

“ But cannot society give us more? Who doubts it? Errors have been committed in this distribution of tasks and workers. Time will diminish the number of them; with new lights a better division will arise; the elements of society go on toward perfection, like everything else. The difficulty is to know how to adapt ourselves to the slow step of time, whose progress can never be forced on without danger.
August 14th, six o'clock A.M.—My garret window rises upon the roof like a massive watch-tower. ”

“ Once more it seemed to be that time when all is vivid, when every day may be the turning-point of life—the time that was consciously but a drift and floating on of hour by hour when it existed, as is the present moment—but which, looking back upon it, seemed the time of free action, of choice, of every possibility. ”

“ At one time she would have been amused at the types around her, and their various conceptions of "one crowded hour of glorious life." As it was, everything seemed sordid and trivial. Why should people lose all sense of dignity and proportion at a set period of the year? ”

“ We all feel more wearied and less inclination at this time of day for work than we do during the earlier hours. We could then be little together, but now nothing interferes with our afternoon's enjoyment of one another's society. ”

“ They say simply, 'It's the wrong time.' Following up this clue I have noticed that not only is the time for performing an act supposed to be sometimes 'wrong' and sometimes 'right,' but that the idea of time in general governs all your people like a tyrant. You can scarcely imagine a life without calendars and clocks. And just as the Waam-folk are unconsciously obsessed by their hut-thought, and see everything from that angle, so you have drifted into an unthinking fetishistic regard for time. ”

“ He ever regarded time as a gift of which the best use was to be made, and, according to his own expression, ‘he was not at liberty to lose it himself, and still less to occasion the loss of it to others.’ If he was not always exact to the hour of appointment given or accepted by him, the multiplicity of his engagements and his preoccupation of mind were the cause of the delay ”

“ We are, in fact, the slaves of time and of fixed times. We think it a great loss and misfortune to be without the correct time; and if we are away from the town-clock and the noon-gun, in some country place, we importune the city stranger, who appears to have a good watch, for the time; or we lie in wait for the magnificent conductor of the railway express, who always has the air of getting the promptest time from headquarters. ”

“ Ah, Eric, Eric! how little we know the moments which decide the destinies of life. We live on as usual. The day is a common day, the hour a common hour. We never thought twice about the change of intention which by one of the accidents— (accidents!) —of life determined for good or for evil, for happiness or misery, the colour of our remaining years. ”

“ And who knows how short our time may be? When the end comes, will it be easy to bear, the thought that we lost one day, one moment of union, out of respect for idle prejudices which vanish as soon as they find themselves ineffectual? ”

“ The control of those larger movements of thought and sentiment that make a historical epoch is still less conscious, more inevitable. Only the imaginative student, in his best hours, can really free himself—and that only in some respects—from the limitations of his time and see things from a height. For the most part the people of other epochs seem strange, outlandish, or a little insane. We can scarcely rid ourselves of the impression that the way of life we are used to is the normal, and that other ways are eccentric. ”

“ The clock is on the stroke of twelve. Most of the waiting work-people have the air of standing before the bar of justice, in torturing expectation of a decision that means life or death to them. They are marked too by the anxious timidity characteristic of the receiver of charity, who has suffered many humiliations, and, conscious that he is barely tolerated, has acquired the habit of self-effacement. ”

“ A mere moment seems an inconsiderable factor in life—only its multiplication attaining importance and signifying time. It could never have occurred to Walter Hoxer that all his years of labor, the aggregation of the material values of industry, experience, skill, integrity, could be nullified by this minimum unit of space—as sudden, as potent, as destructive, as a stroke of lightning. ”

“ I do not need to explain how—civilization (that is, the social fact of the increase of life) multiplying our tasks, rendering our moments more and more precious, and obliging us to keep a perpetual and detailed record of our whole life—the calendar has become to all one of the most necessary things. ”

“ Alas, how seldom is anything done in proper time and season! Either too fast, or too slow, is the clock of all human dealings; and what is the law of them, when the sun (the regulator of works and ways) has to be allowed for very often on his own meridian? ”

“ If the one time, necessary for change, means a single duration, that is self-contradictory, for no duration is single. The would-be unit falls asunder into endless plurality, in which it disappears. The pieces of duration, each containing a before and an after, are divided against themselves, and become mere relations of the illusory. And the attempt to locate the lapse within relations of the discrete leads to hopeless absurdities. ”

“ But whether on week-days or on Sundays, whether in youth or in old age, there are moments, rare though they be, yet for all that the most critical moments of our life, when the old simple questions of humanity return to us in all their intensity, and we ask ourselves, What are we? ”