Every colour has in it a bold quality as of choice; the red of garden roses is not only decisive but dramatic, like suddenly spilt blood.

He feels that something has been _done_.

But the great determinists of the nineteenth century were strongly against this native feeling that something had happened an instant before.

In fact, according to them, nothing ever really had happened since the beginning of the world.

Nothing ever had happened since existence had happened; and even about the date of that they were not very sure.
The modern world as I found it was solid for modern Calvinism, for the necessity of things being as they are.