We crossed a walk to the other part of the academy, where, as I have already said, the projectors in
speculative learning resided.
It is a common amusement of
speculative minds to contrast the magnitude of the most important events with the minuteness of their primeval causes, and the records of mankind are full of examples for such contemplations.
At last, to complete a series of minor indiscretions, at a meeting of our Local
Speculative Society held at the palace of the Prefect himself, -- some extremely silly person having read an elaborate paper exhibiting the precise reasons why Providence has limited the number of Dimensions to Two, and why the attribute of omnividence is assigned to the Supreme alone -- I so far forgot myself as to give an exact account of the whole of my voyage with the Sphere into Space, and to the Assembly Hall in our Metropolis, and then to Space again, and of my return home, and of everything that I had seen and heard in fact or vision.
I found some of it hard to endure, though I am a mild-tempered man; but, certainly, when I told the captain to "shut up" I had forgotten that I was merely a bit of human flotsam, cut off from my resources and with my fare unpaid; a mere casual dependant on the bounty, or
speculative enterprise, of the ship.
It is worthy of remark that a certain
speculative writer of quasi-scientific repute, writing long before the Martian inva- sion, did forecast for man a final structure not unlike the actual Martian condition.
A moralizer might find abundant themes for his
speculative and impracticable wisdom in a garret.
Of course, we have to a very great extent got rid of any attempt on the part of the community, or the Church, or the Government, to interfere with the individualism of
speculative thought, but the attempt to interfere with the individualism of imaginative art still lingers.
I feel sure Alick meant no irreverence; indeed, I know that his mind was not of a
speculative, negative cast, and he would on no account have missed going to church on Christmas Day, Easter Sunday, and "Whissuntide.
A
speculative country, that is true," said Planchet, -- "a country that I know well.
And this was the starting-point of a
speculative theory, in his mind, that the late marquis had been a very amiable foreigner, with an inclination to take life easily and a sense that it was difficult for the husband of the stilted little lady by the fire to do so.
Nevertheless, there was a peculiar quietness in the look, as if taking merely a
speculative, not a human interest, in the young man.
When I had fully satisfied him on this head, he sighed deeply, as if relieved of some intolerable burden, and went on to talk, with what I thought a cruel calmness, of various points of
speculative philosophy, which had heretofore formed subject of discussion between us.
