The history of men’s minds is largely what those minds have done with the strange. The individual is an extending thing; it hungers for new territory; for the self is always an intense interaction of the monotonous and the astonishing.

Reality, to every person, is strange reality and ordinary reality. If anyone looks at himself, he will see that his mind is made up of the near and far, the understood and the puzzling, the familiar and the remote, the ordinary and the strange.

To understand, for example, the Greeks, we would have to understand what was strange to them. Did a Greek girl have a feeling of strangeness, getting away from the ordinary world, the world as misty and spacious and yet as hers, when she met a young man on a hill of Peloponnesus? It has been shown, or at least implied by various writers, that she did not. If this Greek girl had this feeling of strangeness, then in her mind was present what was present in minds of, say, persons of the 18th century when they felt there was something other than streets in London or shops in Paris.

What can the strange be? What has it been to minds? Whenever something has been strange to a single mind, it is a phase of the strangeness that has been, or can be, in the world.

If an Egyptian girl mused on a civilization other than Egyptian, many centuries after her time, she would be feeling the strange. If she could imagine something like what goes on in our time, a large excitement caused by the strange, would be hers. Our routine would be her romance, across the meditated-on centuries. For the future, seen distantly enough, is the strange. If we meditated now, sufficiently energetically, on life in the year 20,004, we might faint. We can’t say that it won’t be, and we physiologically can’t admit that it will be. Still, if ourselves were large enough, the year 20,004 would leave us unmortified and cosy.