Now there was in the college of applied sensations a student who, though outwardly as proficient as the average of his companions, was in reality the most backward of all. He learned by a kind of rote all the doctrines they understood, and he could explain apparently how one feeling caused another. But in himself he had no particle of understanding. He seemed deficient in the sense of cause and effect which the others had. Of this the following instance will suffice to show the nature. The king had, in order to prevent the inhabitants from straying too far from the metropolis, kept a constant watchfulness over their movements, and had uniformly taken somewhat of the pain from any effort which they made to move towards the metropolis, and had not taken any of the pain in efforts whose tendency was to remove them to a distance from the metropolis. If there was any purpose to be served in going away from the metropolis, he took enough pain from these movements to make it worth the beings’ while to go away from the metropolis. But when other things were equal, it was a pleasurable thing to go towards the metropolis. The king made this general inclination, because if it had not been so, beings lying out of the way of his immediate attention might have drifted away and gone to the confines of the valley, away from where the busy life he was calling out was manifested, and so have been lost to others and themselves. As it was by imparting this general pleasurableness of moving towards the metropolis he held all the inhabitants together, and knew the direction in which each would tend, unless for any special reason he had made it more pleasurable for the person to move away from the metropolis. Now, as has been mentioned above, this general tendency had been observed by the inhabitants; and they knew quite well that every individual tended towards the metropolis, and was only prevented from coming into it by strong local interests, or by all available positions in it or near it being already occupied. If any situation was vacant in the metropolis, it was easily filled up by those from the surrounding country, for they all felt this tendency to press in. Now, the learned men in the valley had long recognized this as one of the most important laws of the valley. And the students in the college of applied sensations felt this law to be true law, and anything which followed from it they felt to be self-evident. But the student of whom we speak had not this happy, settled feeling with regard to this law. He could not feel as if it were necessarily true. One day the head of the college was talking to the foremost students—those who had nearly finished their course and who would take their places in the valley shortly—and he said incidentally in the course of his remarks, that those who were moving away from the metropolis were as much attracted to it as those who were moving towards it.