Words&Dirt

“He had never imagined anything here could be as beautiful as that shattered red horizon and the purple and ochre cliffs. Beyond the landing field where the night’s faint dew had touched life into the hurried seeds of Arrakis, he saw great puddles of red blooms and, running through them, an articulate tread of violet…like giant footsteps.

‘It’s a beautiful morning, Sire,’ the guard said.

‘Yes, it is.’

The Duke nodded, thinking: Perhaps this planet could grow on one. Perhaps it could become a good home for my son.

Then he saw the human figures moving into the flower fields, sweeping them with strange scythe-like devices––dew gatherers. Water so precious here that even the dew must be collected.

And it could be a hideous place, the Duke thought.”

––Dune, by Frank Herbert, loc. 2119

“Nothing shews more the force of habit in reconciling us to any phenomenon, than this, that men are not astonish’d at the operations of their own reason, at the same time, that they admire the instinct of animals, and find a difficulty in explaining it, merely because it cannot be reduced to the very same principles. To consider the matter aright, reason is nothing but a wonderful and unintelligible instinct in our souls, which carries us along a certain train of ideas, and endows them with particular qualities, according to their particular situations and relations. This instinct, it is true, arises from past observation and experience; but can any one give the ultimate reason, why past experience and observation produces such an effect, any more than why nature alone shou’d produce it? Nature may certainly produce whatever can arise from habit: Nay, habit is nothing but one of the principles of nature, and derives all its force from that origin.”

––A Treatise of Human Nature, by David Hume, pg. 128