It is good sometimes, as we jog along in our smooth-riding waggon of Progress, to steal our way… to the rear of the vehicle and look back upon the road by which it has come. Then it is that we experience the mental counterpart of that physical sensation of travelling backwards so charmingly described by Margaret Fairless Barber in The Roadmender. To look backward for a while is to refresh the eye, to restore it, and to render it the more fit for its prime function of looking forwards. There is something less dynamic and more reposeful in a retreating landscape than in an advancing one. A retreating scene appears to be withdrawn gently and smoothly from our gaze; an advancing one intrudes itself with bustle, flurry, and arrogance. This contrast is more especially felt when the vehicle is a rapidly moving one. And as with physical so it is with intellectual vision. We are all the better for the repose and refreshment of an occasional glance backward, the more so since our waggon of Progress is ever being urged forward with accelerated velocities. ~E. W. Adams, “The Philosophy of Epicurus — An Unclosed Chapter in Human Thought,” in The Hibbert Journal, 1921 [A little altered. See Fairless quotation below. —tg]

~E. W. Adams, “The Philosophy of Epicurus — An Unclosed Chapter in Human Thought,” in The Hibbert Journal, 1921 [A little altered. See Fairless quotation below. —tg]