PHILOSOPHY
The fact that Thomism is the
philosophy of common sense is itself a matter of common sense. Yet it wants a
word of explanation, because we have so long taken such matters in a very uncommon
sense. For good or evil, Europe since the Reformation, and most especially
England since the Reformation, has been in a peculiar sense the home of
paradox. I mean in the very peculiar sense that paradox was at home, and that
men were at home with it. The most familiar example is the English boasting
that they are practical because they are not logical. To an ancient Greek or a
Chinaman this would seem exactly like saying that London clerks excel in adding
up their ledgers, because they are not accurate in their arithmetic. But the
point is not that it is a paradox; it is that paradoxy has become orthodoxy;
that men repose in a paradox as placidly as in a platitude. It is not that the
practical man stands on his head, which may sometimes be a stimulating if
startling gymnastic; it is that he <rests> on his head; and even sleeps
on his head. This is an important point, because the use of paradox is to
awaken the mind. Take a good paradox, like that of Oliver Wendell Holmes:
"Give us the luxuries of life and we will dispense with the
necessities." It is amusing and therefore arresting; it has a fine air of
defiance; it contains a real if romantic truth. It is all part of the fun that
it is stated almost in the form of a contradiction in terms. But most people
would agree that there would be considerable danger in basing the whole social
system on the notion that necessaries are not necessary; as some have based the
whole British Constitution on the notion that nonsense will always work out as
common sense. Yet even here, it might be said that the invidious example has
spread, and that the modern industrial system does really say, 'Give us
luxuries like coal-tar soap, and we will dispense with necessities like corn.
So much is familiar; but what is
not even now realised is that not only the practical politics, but the abstract
philosophies of the modern world have had this queer twist. Since the modern
world began in the sixteenth century, nobody's system of philosophy has really
corresponded to everybody's sense of reality; to what, if left to themselves,
common men would call common sense. Each started with a paradox; a peculiar
point of view demanding the sacrifice of what they would call a sane point of
view. That is the one thing common to Hobbes and Hegel, to Kant and Bergson, to
Berkeley and William James. A man had to believe something that no normal man
would believe, if it were suddenly propounded to his simplicity; as that law is
above right, or right is outside reason, or things are only as we think them,
or everything is relative to a reality that is not there. The modern
philosopher claims, like a sort of confidence man, that if once we will grant
him this, the rest will be easy; he will straighten out the world, if once he
is allowed to give this one twist to the mind.
It will be understood that in
these matters I speak as a fool; or, as our democratic cousins would say, a
moron; anyhow as a man in the street; and the only object of this chapter is to
show that the Thomist philosophy is nearer than most philosophies to the mind
of the man in the street. I am not, like Father D'Arcy, whose admirable book on
St. Thomas has illuminated many problems for me, a trained philosopher,
acquainted with the technique of the trade. But I hope Father D'Arcy will forgive
me if I take one example from his book, which exactly illustrates what I mean.
He, being a trained philosopher, is naturally trained to put up with
philosophers. Also, being a trained priest, he is naturally accustomed, not
only to suffer fools gladly, but (what is sometimes even harder) to suffer
clever people gladly. Above all, his wide reading in metaphysics has made him
patient with clever people when they indulge in folly. The consequence is that
he can write calmly and even blandly sentences like these. "A certain
likeness can be detected between the aim and method of St. Thomas and those of
Hegel. There are, however, also remarkable differences. For St. Thomas it is
impossible that contradictories should exist together, and again reality and intelligibility
correspond, but a thing must first be, to be intelligible."
Let the man in the street be
forgiven, if he adds that the "remarkable difference" seems to him to
be that St. Thomas was sane and Hegel was mad. The moron refuses to admit that
Hegel can both exist and not exist; or that it can be possible to understand
Hegel, if there is no Hegel to understand. Yet Father D'Arcy mentions this
Hegelian paradox as if it were all in the day's work; and of course it is, if
the work is reading all the modern philosophers as searchingly and
sympathetically as he has done. And this is what I mean by saying that a modern
philosophy starts with a stumbling-block. It is surely not too much to say that
there <seems> to be a twist, in saying that contraries are not
incompatible; or that a thing can "be" intelligible and not as yet
"be" at all.
Against all this the philosophy of
St. Thomas stands founded on the universal common conviction that eggs are
eggs. The Hegelian may say that an egg is really a hen, because it is a part of
an endless process of Becoming; the Berkeleian may hold that poached eggs only
exist as a dream exists; since it is quite as easy to call the dream the cause
of the eggs as the eggs the cause of the dream; the Pragmatist may believe that
we get the best out of scrambled egos by forgetting that they ever were eggs,
and only remembering the scramble. But no pupil of St. Thomas needs to addle
his brains in order adequately to addle his eggs; to put his head at any
peculiar angle in looking at eggs, or squinting at eggs, or winking the other
eye in order to see a new simplification of eggs. The Thomist stands in the
broad daylight of the brotherhood of men, in their common consciousness that
eggs are not hens or dreams or mere practical assumptions; but things attested
by the Authority of the Senses, which is from God.
Thus, even those who appreciate
the metaphysical depth of Thomism in other matters have expressed surprise that
he does not deal at all with what many now think the main metaphysical
question; whether we can prove that the primary act of recognition of any
reality is real. The answer is that St. Thomas recognised instantly, what so
many modern sceptics have begun to suspect rather laboriously; that a man must
either answer that question in the affirmative, or else never answer any
question, never ask any question, never even exist intellectually, to answer or
to ask. I suppose it is true in a sense that a man can be a fundamental
sceptic, but he cannot be anything else; certainly not even a defender of
fundamental scepticism. If a man feels that all the movements of his own mind
are meaningless, then his mind is meaningless, and he is meaningless; and it
does not mean anything to attempt to discover his meaning. Most fundamental sceptics
appear to survive, because they are not consistently sceptical and not at all
fundamental. They will first deny everything and then admit something, if for
the sake of argument - or often rather of attack without argument. I saw an
almost startling example of this essential frivolity in the professor of final
scepticism, in a paper the other day. A man wrote to say that he accepted
nothing but Solipsism, and added that he had often wondered it was not a more
common philosophy. Now Solipsism simply means that a man believes in his own
existence, but not in anybody or anything else. And it never struck this simple
sophist, that if his philosophy was true, there obviously were no other
philosophers to profess it.
To this question "Is there
anything?" St. Thomas begins by answering "Yes"; if he began by
answering "No", it would not be the beginning, but the end. That is
what some of us call common sense. Either there is no philosophy, no
philosophers, no thinkers, no thought, no anything; or else there is a real
bridge between the mind and reality. But he is actually less exacting than many
thinkers, much less so than most rationalist and materialist thinkers, as to
what that first step involves; he is content, as we shall see, to say that it
involves the recognition of Ens or Being as something definitely beyond
ourselves. Ens is Ens: Eggs are eggs, and it is not tenable that all eggs were
found in a mare's nest.
Needless to say, I am not so silly
as to suggest that all the writings of St. Thomas are simple and
straightforward; in the sense of being easy to understand. There are passages I
do not in the least understand myself; there are passages that puzzle much more
learned and logical philosophers than I am; there are passages about which the
greatest Thomists still differ and dispute. But that is a question of a thing
being hard to read or understand: not hard to accept when understood. That is a
mere matter of 'The Cat sat on the Mat" being written in Chinese
characters; or 'Mary had a Little Lamb" in Egyptian hieroglyphics. The
only point I am stressing here is that Aquinas is almost always on the side of
simplicity, and supports the ordinary man's acceptance of ordinary truism. For
instance, one of the most obscure passages, in my very inadequate judgment, is
that in which he explains how the mind is certain of an external object and not
merely of an impression of that object; and yet apparently reaches it through a
concept, though not merely through an impression. But the only point here is
that he does explain that the mind is certain of an external object. It is
enough for this purpose that his conclusion is what is called the conclusion of
common sense; that it is his purpose to justify common sense; even though he
justifies it in a passage which happens to be one of rather uncommon subtlety.
The problem of later philosophers is that their conclusion is as dark as their
demonstration; or that they bring out a result of which the result is chaos.
Unfortunately, between the man in
the street and the Angel of the Schools, there stands at this moment a very
high brick wall, with spikes on the top, separating two men who in many ways
stand for the same thing. The wall is almost a historical accident; at least it
was built a very long time ago, for reasons that need not affect the needs of
normal men today; least of all the greatest need of normal men; which is for a
normal philosophy. The first difficulty is merely a difference of form; not in
the medieval but in the modern sense. There is first a simple obstacle of
language; there is then a rather more subtle obstacle of logical method. But
the language itself counts for a great deal; even when it is translated, it is
still a foreign language; and it is, like other foreign languages, very often
translated wrong. As with every other literature from another age or country,
it carried with it an atmosphere which is beyond the mere translation of words,
as they are translated in a traveller's phrase-book. For instance, the whole
system of St. Thomas hangs on one huge and yet simple idea; which does actually
cover everything there is, and even everything that could possibly be. He
represented this cosmic conception by the word <Ens>; [Latin:
"being" etc., etc.] and anybody who can read any Latin at all,
however rudely, feels it to be the apt and fitting word; exactly as he feels it
in a French word in a piece of good French prose. It ought only to be a matter
of logic; but it is also a matter of language.
Unfortunately there is no
satisfying translation of the word <Ens>. The difficulty is rather verbal
than logical, but it is practical. I mean that when the translator says in
English 'being', we are aware of a rather different atmosphere. Atmosphere
ought not to effect these absolutes of the intellect; but it does. The new
psychologists, who are almost eagerly at war with reason, never tire of telling
us that the very terms we use are coloured by our subconsciousness, with
something we meant to exclude from our consciousness. And one need not be so
idealistically irrational as a modern psychologist, in order to admit that the
very shape and sound of words do make a difference, even in the baldest prose,
as they do in the most beautiful poetry. We can not quite prevent the
imagination from remembering irrelevant associations even in the abstract
sciences like mathematics. Jones Minimus, hustled from history to geometry, may
for an instant connect the Angles of the isosceles triangle with the Angles of
the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle; and even the mature mathematician, if he is as mad
as the psychoanalyst hopes, may have in the roots of his subconscious mind
something material in his idea of a root. Now it unfortunately happens that the
word 'being', as it comes to a modern Englishman, through modern associations,
has a sort of hazy atmosphere that is not in the short and sharp Latin word.
Perhaps it reminds him of fantastic professors in fiction, who wave their hands
and say, "Thus do we mount to the ineffable heights of pure and radiant
Being: or, worse still, of actual professors in real life, who say, "All
Being is Becoming; and is but the evolution of Not-Being by the law of its
Being." Perhaps it only reminds him of romantic rhapsodies in old love
stories; "Beautiful and adorable being, light and breath of my very being".
Anyhow it has a wild and woolly sort of sound; as if only very vague people
used it; or as if it might mean all sorts of different things.
Now the Latin word <Ens> has
a sound like the English word <End>. It is final and even abrupt; it is
nothing except itself. There was once a silly gibe against Scholastics like
Aquinas, that they discussed whether angels could stand on the point of a
needle. It is at least certain that this first word of Aquinas is as sharp as
the point of a pin. For that also is, in an almost ideal sense, an End. But
when we say that St. Thomas Aquinas is concerned fundamentally with the idea of
Being, we must not admit any of the cloudier generalisations that we may have
grown used to, or even grown tired of, in the sort of idealistic writing that
is rather rhetoric than philosophy. Rhetoric is a very fine thing in its place,
as a medieval scholar would have willingly agreed, as he taught it along with
logic in the schools; but St. Thomas Aquinas himself is not at all rhetorical. Perhaps
he is hardly even sufficiently rhetorical. There are any number of purple
patches in Augustine; but there are no purple patches in Aquinas. He did on
certain definite occasions drop into poetry; but he very seldom dropped into
oratory. And so little was he in touch with some modern tendencies, that
whenever he did write poetry, he actually put it into poems. There is another
side to this, to be noted later. He very specially possessed the philosophy
that inspires poetry; as he did so largely inspire Dante's poetry. And poetry
without philosophy has only inspiration, or, in vulgar language, only wind. He
had, so to speak, the imagination without the imagery. And even this is perhaps
too sweeping. There is an image of his, that is true poetry as well as true
philosophy; about the tree of life bowing down with a huge humility, because of
the very load of its living fruitfulness; a thing Dante might have described so
as to overwhelm us with the tremendous twilight and almost drug us with the
divine fruit. But normally, we may say that his words are brief
even when his books are long. I
have taken the example of the word <Ens>, precisely because it is one of
the cases in which Latin is plainer than plain English. And his style, unlike
that of St. Augustine and many Catholic Doctors, is always a penny plain rather
than twopence coloured. It is often difficult to understand, simply because the
subjects are so difficult that hardly any mind, except one like his own, can
fully understand them. But he never darkens it by using words without
knowledge, or even more legitimately, by using words belonging only to
imagination or intuition. So far as his method is concerned, he is perhaps the
one real Rationalist among all the children of men.
This brings us to the other
difficulty; that of logical method. I have never understood why there is
supposed to be something crabbed or antique about a syllogism; still less can I
understand what anybody means by talking as if induction had somehow taken the
place of deduction. The whole point of deduction is that true premises produce
a true conclusion. What is called induction seems simply to mean collecting a
larger number of true premises, or perhaps, in some physical matters, taking
rather more trouble to see that they are true. It may be a fact that a modern
man can get more out of a great many premises, concerning microbes or asteroids
than a medieval man could get out of a very few premises about salamanders and
unicorns. But the process of deduction from the data is the same for the modern
mind as for the medieval mind; and what is pompously called induction is simply
collecting more of the data. And Aristotle or Aquinas, or anybody in his five
wits, would of course agree that the conclusion could only be true if the premises
were true; and that the more true premises there were the better. It was the
misfortune of
medieval culture that there were
not enough true premises, owing to the rather ruder conditions of travel or
experiment. But however perfect were the conditions of travel or experiment,
they could only produce premises; it would still be necessary to deduce
conclusions. But many modern people talk as if what they call induction were
some magic way of reaching a conclusion, without using any of those horrid old
syllogisms. But induction does not lead us to a conclusion. Induction only
leads us to a deduction. Unless the last three syllogistic steps are all right,
the conclusion is all wrong. Thus, the great nineteenth century men of science,
whom I was brought up to revere ("accepting the conclusions of
science," it was always called), went out and closely inspected the air
and the earth, the chemicals and the gases, doubtless more closely than
Aristotle or Aquinas, and then came back and embodied their final conclusion in
a syllogism. "All matter is made of microscopic little knobs which are
indivisible. My body is made of matter. Therefore my body is made of
microscopic little knobs which are indivisible." They were not wrong in
the form of their reasoning; because it is the only way to reason. In this
world there is nothing except a syllogism - and a fallacy. But of course these
modern men knew, as the medieval men knew, that their conclusions would not be
true unless
their premises were true. And that
is where the trouble began. For the men of science, or their sons and nephews,
went out and took another look at the knobby nature of matter; and were
surprised to find that it was not knobby at all. So they came back and
completed the process with their syllogism; 'All matter is made of whirling
protons and electrons. My body is made of matter. Therefore my body is made of
whirling protons and electrons." And that again is a good syllogism;
though they may have to look at matter once or twice more, before we know whether
it is a true premise and a true conclusion. But in the final process of truth
there is nothing else except a good syllogism. The only other thing is a bad
syllogism; as in the familiar fashionable shape; " All matter is made of
protons and electrons. I should very much like to think that mind is much the
same as matter. So I will announce' through the microphone or the megaphone,
that my mind is made of' protons and electrons." But that is not
induction; it is only a very bad blunder in deduction. That is not another or
new way of thinking; it is only ceasing to think.
What is really meant, and what is
much more reasonable, is that the old syllogists sometimes set out the
syllogism at length; and certainly that is not always necessary. A man can run
down the three steps much more quickly than that; but a man cannot run down the
three steps if they are not there. If he does, he will break his neck, as if he
walked out of a fourth-story window. The truth about this false antithesis of
induction and deduction is simply this; that as premises or data accumulated,
the emphasis and detail was shifted to them, from the final deduction to which
they lead. But they did lead to a final deduction; or else they led to nothing.
The logician had so much to say about electrons or microbes that he dwelt most
on these data and shortened or assumed his ultimate syllogism. But if he
reasoned rightly, however rapidly, he reasoned syllogistically.
As a matter of fact, Aquinas does
not usually argue in syllogism; though he always argues syllogistically. I mean
he does not set out all the steps of the logic in each case; the legend that he
does so is part of that loose and largely unverified legend of the Renaissance;
that the Schoolmen were all crabbed and mechanical medieval bores. But he does
argue with a certain austerity, and disdain of ornament, which may make him
seem monotonous to anyone specially seeking the modern forms of wit or fancy.
But all this has nothing to do with the question asked at the beginning of this
chapter and needing to be answered at the end of it; the question of what he is
arguing for. In that respect it can be repeated, most emphatically, that he is
arguing for common sense. He is arguing for a common sense which would even now
commend itself to most of the common people. He is arguing for the popular
proverbs that seeing is believing; that
the proof of the pudding is in the
eating; that a man cannot jump down his own throat or deny the fact of his own
existence. He often maintains the view by the use of abstractions; but the
abstractions are no more abstract than Energy or Evolution or Space-Time; and
they do not land us, as the others often do, in hopeless contradictions about
common life. The Pragmatist sets out to be practical, but his practicality
turns out to be entirely theoretical. The Thomist begins by being theoretical,
but his theory turns out to be entirely practical. That is why a great part of
the world is returning to it today.
Finally, there is some real
difficulty in the fact of a foreign language; apart from the ordinary fact of
the Latin language. Modern philosophical terminology is not always exactly
identical with plain English; and medieval philosophical terminology is not at
all identical even with modern philosophical terminology. It is not really very
difficult to learn the meaning of the main terms; but their medieval meaning is
sometimes the exact opposite of their modern meaning. The obvious example is in
the pivotal word "form". We say nowadays, "I wrote a formal
apology to the Dean", or "The proceedings when we wound up the
Tip-Cat Club were purely formal." But we mean that they were purely
fictitious; and St. Thomas, had he been a member of the Tip-Cat Club, would
have meant just the opposite. He would have meant that the proceedings dealt
with the very heart and soul and secret of the whole being of the Tip-Cat Club;
and that the apology to the Dean was so essentially apologetic that it tore the
very heart out in tears of true contrition.
For "formal" in Thomist
language means actual, or possessing the real decisive quality that makes a
thing itself. Roughly when he describes a thing as made out of Form and Matter,
he very rightly recognises that Matter is the more mysterious and indefinite
and featureless element; and that what stamps anything with its own identity is
its Form. Matter, so to speak, is not so much the solid as the liquid or
gaseous thing in the cosmos; and in this most modern scientists are beginning
to agree with him. But the form is the fact; it is that which makes a brick a
brick, and a bust a bust, and not the shapeless and trampled clay of which
either may be made. The stone that broke a statuette, in some Gothic niche,
might have been itself a statuette; and under chemical analysis, the statuette
is only a stone. But such a chemical analysis is entirely false as a
philosophical analysis. The reality, the thing that makes the two things real,
is in the idea of the image and in the idea of the image-breaker. This is only
a passing example of the mere idiom of the Thomist terminology; but it is not a
bad prefatory specimen of the truth of Thomist thought. Every artist knows that
the form is not superficial but fundamental; that the form is the foundation.
Every sculptor knows that the form of the statue is not the outside of the
statue, but rather the inside of the statue; even in the sense of the inside of
the sculptor. Every poet knows that the sonnet-form is not only the form of the
poem; but the poem. No modern critic who does not understand what the medieval
Schoolman meant by form can meet the Schoolman as an intellectual equal.
FROM THE
AMERICAN CHESTERTON SOCIETY
In this age of child-psychology
nobody pays any attention to the actual psychology of the child. All that seems
to matter is the psychology of the psychologist and the particular theory or train
of thought that he is maintaining against another psychologist. Most of the art
and literature now magnificently manufactured for children is not even honestly
meant to please children. The artist would hardly condescend to make a baby
laugh if nobody else laughed, or even listened. These things are not meant to
please the child. At best they are meant to please the child-lover. At the
worst they are experiments in scientific educational method. Beautiful, wise,
and witty lyrics like those of Stevenson's "Child's Garden of Verses"
will always remain as a pure lively fountain of pleasure--for grown up people.
But the point of many of them is not only such that a child could not see it,
it is such that a child ought not to be allowed to see it--
The child that is not clean and
neat,
With lots of toys and things to eat,
He is a naughty child, I'm sure,
Or else his dear papa is poor.
No child ought to understand the
appalling abyss of that after-thought. No child could understand, without being
a snob or a social reformer or something hideous, the irony of that illusion to
the inequalities and iniquities with which this wicked world has insulted the
sacred dignity of fatherhood. The child who could really smile at that line
would be capable of sitting down immediately to write a Gissing novel, and then
hanging himself on the nursery bed-post. But neither Stevenson or any
Stevensonian (and I will claim to be a good Stevensonian) ever really dreamed
of expecting a child to smile at the poem. It was the poet who smiled at the
child, which is quite a different thing, though possibly quite as beautiful in
its way. And that is the character of all this new nursery literature. It has
the legitimate and even honourable object of educating the adult in the
appreciation of babies. It is an excellent thing to teach men and women to take
pleasure in children, but it is a totally different thing from giving children
pleasure.
Now the old nursery rhymes were
honestly directed to give children pleasure. Many of them have genuine elements
of poetry, but they are not primarily meant to be poetry, because they are
simply meant to be pleasure. In this sense "Hey Diddle Diddle" is
something much more than an idyll. It is a masterpiece of psychology, a classic
and perfect model of education. The lilt and jingle of it is exactly the sort
that a baby can feel to be a tune and can turn into a dance. The imagery of it
is exactly what is wanted for the first movements of imagination when it
experiments in incongruity. For it is full of familiar objects in fantastic
conjunction. The child has seen a cow and he has seen the moon. But the notion
of the one jumping over the other is probably new to him and is, in the noblest
word, nonsensical. Cats and dogs and dishes and spoons are all his daily
companions and even his friends, but it gives him a sort of fresh surprise and
happiness to think of their going on such a singular holiday. He would simply
learn nothing at all from our attempts to find a fine shade of humour in the
political economy of the poor papa, even if the poor papa were romantically
occupied, not in jumping over the moon, but at least in shooting it.
Of course there is much more than
this in "Hey Diddle Diddle." The cow jumping over the moon is not
only a fancy very suitable to children, it is a theme very worthy of poets. The
lunar adventure may appear to some a lunatic adventure, but it is one round
which the imagination of man has always revolved, especially the imagination of
romantic figures like Ariosto, and Cyrano de Bergerac. The notion that cattle
might fly has received sublime imaginative treatment. The winged bull not only
walks, as if shaking the earth, amid the ruins of Assyrian sculpture, but even
wheeled and flamed in heaven as the Apocalyptic symbol of St. Luke. That which
combines imaginations so instinctive and ancient, in a single fancy so simple
and so clear, is certainly not without the raw material of poetry. And the
general idea, which is that of a sort of cosmic Saturnalia or season when
anything may happen, is itself an idea that has haunted humanity in a hundred
forms, some of them exquisitely artistic forms.
It would be easy to justify a vast
number of the other nursery rhymes, in the same vein of a more serious art
criticism. If I were asked to quote four lines which sufficed to illustrate
what has been called the imaginative reason, when it rises almost to touch an
unimaginative unreason (for that point of contact is poetry), I should be
content to quote four lines that were in a picture book in my own nursery--
The man in the wilderness asked of
me,
How many strawberries grow in the sea?
I answered him, as I thought good:
"As many red herrings as grow in
the wood."
Everything in that is poetical;
from the dark unearthly figure of the man of the desert, with his mysterious
riddles, to the perfect blend of logic and vision which makes beautiful
pictures even in proving them impossible. But this artistic quality, though
present, is not primary; the primary purpose is the amusement of children. And
we are not amusing children; we are amusing ourselves with children.
Our fathers added a touch of
beauty to all practical things, so they introduced fine fantastic figures and
capering and dancing rhythms, which might be admired even by grown men, into
what they primarily and practically designed to be enjoyed by children. But
they did not always do this and they never thought mainly of doing it. What
they always did was to make fun fitted for the young; and what they never did
was turn it into irony only intelligible to the old. A nursery rhyme was like a
nursery table or a nursery cupboard--a thing constructed for a particular human
purpose. They saw their aim clearly and they achieved it. They wrote utter
nonsense and took care to make it utterly nonsensical.
For there are two ways of dealing
with nonsense in this world. One way is to put nonsense in the right place; as
when people put nonsense into nursery rhymes. The other is to put nonsense in
the wrong place; as when they put it into educational addresses, psychological
criticisms, and complaints against nursery rhymes or other normal amusements of
mankind.
FROM THE
AMERICAN CHESTERTON SOCIETY
It is doubtless disrespectful both
to the reader, nor indeed does it tend greatly to the aggrandisement or dignity
of the writer, to say that my occupation in life is catching flies. And when I
recently referred to a certain type of Feminist as a wasp, I received
remonstrances from one who doubtless considered her to have all the highest and
most royal attributes of a queen bee. Nevertheless, this unfortunate metaphor
frequently returns to my mind, and I am conscious of a truth that I could not
easily express without it. What I mean is this: that one of the chief nuisances
of our time is a swarm of little things, in the form of little thoughts, or
little sayings largely divorced from thoughts, which pervade the whole
atmosphere in a manner only comparable to that of the most minute insects:
insignificant and almost invisible, but innumerable and almost omnipresent. I
am not thinking of real thought: even of false or destructive thought. I am not
referring to the real bodies of moral and philosophical opinion, based on
principles I think wrong, or producing results I think mischievous. The views
of this kind, with which I have sometimes dealt on this page, differ very much
in their power or promise or capacity for doing harm. I disagree with Communism
as I disagree with Calvinism; but nobody would say this is the hour of
Calvinism and I admit, in a sense, it is the hour of Communism. There is a very
strong intellectual temptation to the Bolshevist implification because of the
unquestionable collapse of the old commercial complexity. On the other hand,
other theories I have quarreled with in my time are less and less prominent in
the modern quarrel. Many men of science have abandoned Darwinism. All men of
science have abandoned Materialism. but Materialism and Darwinism were none the
less thorough systems supported by thinking men, with arguments to be answered
as well as assumptions to be questioned. The kind of thing of which I am
speaking now is something at once atmospheric and microscopic, like a cloud of
midges, and not like the serious scientific theories and philosophies of the
nineteenth century, which may rather be compared, according to taste, to lions,
elephants, tigers, cultures, vipers, or scorpions.
The matter in question is the
prevalence of a sort of casual and even conversational scepticism, making even
the idle thoughts of an idle fellow busy in the interests of doubt and despair.
I mean that a man, without thinking at all, will throw off some flippant phrase
which is always (by a strange fatality) a sort of feeble revolt against all
traditional truth. It may be anything, an aside on the stage or a joke on the
political platform; it may be a mere flourish at the start of a magazine story
or a mere word dropped into an inconvenient silence; something said for the
sake of saying something. The whole point of it is that it is, in this sense,
pointless. The philosophy is not expressed when people are talking about
philosophy, but when they are talking about anything else. I have just this
moment started reading an ordinary modern story, quite well written considered
as a story; and it begins by saying that there is not much difference between
stupidity and courage, and, in fact, that courage is really only a form of
stupidity.
That is exactly typical of the
thing I mean. It is merely a casual remark; it is only very casually meant to
be a clever remark; it is actually rather a silly remark; but the point is that
a fatality of fashion causes a myriad such remarks to be made, always on the
side
of cowardice and never on the side
of courage. In point of fact, of course, it would be easy to demonstrate its
falsehood. History is full of examples of intellectual men who have been
courageous, even of highly subtle and penetrating intellectuals who have
accepted death courageously. It even contains any number of cases of thoughtful
men
who have thought a great deal
about the act of accepting death; who have thought about it for a long time,
and with complete composure, and then deliberately accepted it. Socrates is an
obvious example. Sir Thomas More is a still more obvious example. Boëthius and
many other philosophers; St. Paul and many other saints; all kinds of mystics,
missionaries, religious founders and social reformers have proved the point
over and over again. But I am interested here, not so much in the point, as in
the pointless remark. What is that itch of intellectual irritation which makes
a modern man, even in a moment
of indolence, say the cynical
thing even when it is obviously false; of kick against the heroic thing, even
when it is self-evidently true? Why do we find to-day this fast and vague mass
of trivialities, which have nothing in common except that they are <all>
in reaction against the very last of human traditions? Why has this cheap and
really
worthless sort of scepticism got
into such universal circulation? In other words, I am not now thinking of the
Gold Standard of the highest truth, or the Bimetallism of the higher scepticism,
which discusses whether there can be a rivalry in truth; or any of the more
or less precious metals which may
bear the image and superscription of this or that moral authority. I am puzzled
by the circulation of tall these millions of brass farthings, hardly more
valuable than bad pennies; I am wondering where they all come from, and why the
can be produced in such handfuls; and whether there is not something wrong with
the mint of the mind. I am wondering what has debased the currency of current
thought and speech, and why every normal ideal of man is now pelted with
handfuls of such valueless pebbles, and assailed everywhere, not by free
thought, but by frank thoughtlessness.
There seems to be no normal motive
for a human being feeling a hostility to the human virtue of courage. He may
disapprove of this or that excuse or reason for calling it forth, but surely
not of the thing itself. If the writer had said that the bravery of brave men
is used by the stupidity of stupid men, he would have said something perfectly
tenable, and, indeed, frequently true. When he says that a brave man must be a
stupid man, he wantonly says something that can instantly be disproved and
dismissed as impudent and idiotic. Why does he say it, except to relieve his feelings;
and in that case what are his
feelings? We only know that they
have never yet been the normal feelings of men, yet they seem just now to be
the almost involuntary feelings of a vast number of men. That is the problem
that I find practically pestering us on every side to-day, and that is what I
mean by comparing the buzz of dull flippancy to the screaming of gnats or
flies. It is all concerned with the same paradox, with what may be called the
omnipresence of the insignificant. A fly is a small thing, but flies can be a
very big thing. In some tropical countries, I am told, they can appear like
great clouds on the remote horizon or vast thunderstorms filling the whole sky.
The plague of locusts which afflicts many lands is something much more destructive
than the passage of a pack of wolves or the ruin wrought by a stampede of wild
bulls or wild elephants. So the seemingly insignificant individual irritation
produced by these insignificant individual perversities may be, in its
cumulative effect, more corrupting to a whole culture than the great heresies
that have been hardened and hammered into a certain intellectual solidity. The
spirit of anarchy does not work only by monsters. Even the sages and
visionaries of the East have seen a spiritual significance in the fact that
even almost invisible insects can be a plague or carry a pestilence; and the
ancient name of Beelzebub has the meaning of the Lord of the Flies.
FROM THE AMERICAN
CHESTERTON SOCIETY
Daily News, June 22, 1907
Quoted in Maycock, pp. 91-93
What modern people want to be made
to understand is simply that all argument begins with an assumption; that is,
with something that you do not doubt. You can, of course, if you like, doubt
the assumption at the beginning of your argument, but in that case you are
beginning a different argument with another assumption at the beginning of it.
Every argument begins with an infallible dogma, and that infallible dogma can
only be disputed by falling back on some other infallible dogma; you can never
prove your first statement or it would not be your first. All this is the
alphabet of thinking. And it has this special and positive point about it, that
it can be taught in a school, like the other alphabet. Not to start an argument
without stating your postulates could be taught in philosophy as it is taught
in Euclid, in a common schoolroom with a blackboard. And I think it might be
taught in some simple and rational degree even to the young, before they go out
into the streets and are delivered over entirely to the logic and philosophy of
the Daily Mail.
Much of our chaos about religion
and doubt arises from this--that our modern sceptics always begin by telling us
what they do not believe. But even in a sceptic we want to know first what he
does believe. Before arguing, we want to know what we need not argue about. And
this confusion is infinitely increased by the fact that all the sceptics of our
time are sceptics at different degrees of the dissolution of scepticism.
Now you and I have, I hope, this
advantage over all those clever new philosophers, that we happen not to be mad.
All of us believe in St. Paul's Cathedral; most of us believe in St. Paul. But
let us clearly realize this fact, that we do believe in a number of things
which are part of our existence, but which cannot be demonstrated. Leave
religion for the moment wholly out of the question. All sane men, I say,
believe firmly and unalterably in a certain number of things which are unproved
and unprovable. Let us state them roughly.
(1) Every sane man believes that
the world around him and the people in it are real, and not his own delusion or
dream. No man starts burning London in the belief that his servant will soon
wake him for breakfast. But that I, at any given moment, am not in a dream, is
unproved and unprovable. That anything exists except myself is unproved and
unprovable.
(2) All sane men believe that this world not only exists, but matters. Every
man believes there is a sort of obligation on us to interest ourselves in this
vision or panorama of life. He would think a man wrong who said, "I did
not ask for this farce and it bores me. I am aware that an old lady is being murdered
down-stairs, but I am going to sleep." That there is any such duty to
improve the things we did not make is a thing unproved and unprovable.
(3) All sane men believe that there is such a thing as a self, or ego, which is
continuous. There is no inch of my brain matter the same as it was ten years
ago. But if I have saved a man in battle ten years ago, I am proud; if I have
run away, I am ashamed. That there is such a paramount "I" is
unproved and unprovable. But it is more than unproved and unprovable; it is
definitely disputed by many metaphysicians.
(4) Lastly, most sane men believe, and all sane men in practice assume, that
they have a power of choice and responsibility for action.
Surely it might be possible to
establish some plain, dull statement such as the above, to make people see
where they stand. And if the youth of the future must not (at present) be
taught any religion, it might at least be taught, clearly and firmly, the three
or four sanities and certainties of human free thought.
FROM THE
AMERICAN CHESTERTON SOCIETY
Suppose that in some convulsion of
the planets there fell upon this earth from Mars, a creature of a shape totally
unfamiliar, a creature about whose actual structure we were of necessity so
dark that we could not tell which was creature and which was clothes. We could
see that it had, say, six red tufts on its head, but we should not know whether
they were a highly respectable head-covering or simply a head. We should see
that the tail ended in three yellow stars, but it would be difficult for us to
know whether this was part of a ritual or simply a tail. Well, man has been
from the beginning of time this unknown monster. People have always differed
about what part of him belonged to himself, and what part was merely an
accident. People have said successively that it was natural to him to do
everything and anything that was diverse and mutually contradictory; that it
was natural to him to worship God, and natural to him to be an atheist; natural
to him to drink water, and natural to him to drink wine; natural to him to be
equal, natural to be unequal; natural to obey kings, natural to kill them. The
divergence is quite sufficient to
justify us in asking if there are
not many things that are really natural, which really appear early and strong
in every normal human being, which are not embodied in any of his after affairs.
Whether there are not morbidities which are as fresh and recurrent as the
flowers of spring. Whether there are not superstitions whose darkness is as
wholesome as the darkness that falls nightly on all living things. Whether we
have not treated things essential as portents; whether we have not seen the sun
as a meteor, a star of ill-luck.
It would at least appear that we
tend to become separated from what is really natural, by the fact that we
always talk about those people who are really natural as if they were goblins.
There are three classes of people, for instance, who are in a greater or less
degree elemental: children, poor people, and to some extent, and in a darker
and more terrible manner, women. The reason why men have from the beginning of literature
talked about women as if they were more or less mad, is simply because women
are natural, and men, with their formalities and social theories, are very
artificial. It is the same with children; children are simply human beings who
are allowed to do what everyone else really desires to do, as for instance, to
fly kites, or when seriously wronged to emit prolonged screams for several
minutes. So again, the poor man is simply a person who expends upon treating
himself and his friends in public houses about the same proportion of his
income as richer people spend on dinners or cabs; that is, a great deal more
than he ought. But nothing can be done until people give up talking about these
people as if they were too eccentric for us to understand, when, as a matter of
fact, if there is any eccentricity involved, we are too eccentric to understand
them. A poor man, as it is weirdly ordained, is definable as a man who has not
got much money; to hear philanthropists talk about him one would think he was a
kangaroo. A child is a human being who has not grown up; to hear educationists
talk one would think he was some variety of a deep-sea fish. The case of the
sexes is at once more obvious and more difficult. The stoic philosophy and the
early church discussed woman as if she were an institution, and in many cases
decided to abolish her. The modern feminine output of literature discusses man
as if he were an institution, and decides to abolish him. It can only timidly
be suggested that neither man nor woman is an institution, but things that are
really quite natural and all over the place.
If we take children, for instance,
as examples of the uncorrupted human animal, we see that the very things which
appear in them in a manner primary and prominent, are the very things that
philosophers have taught us to regard as sophisticated and over-civilized. The
things which really come first are the things which we are accustomed to think
come last. The instinct for a pompous intricate and recurring ceremonial, for
instance, comes to a child like an organic hunger; he asks for a formality as
he might ask for a drink of water.
Those who think, for instance,
that the thing called superstition is something heavily artificial, are very
numerous; that is those who think that it has only been the power of priests or
of some very deliberate system that has built up boundaries, that has called
one course of action lawful and another unlawful, that has called one piece of
ground sacred and another profane. Nothing it would seem, except a large and
powerful conspiracy could account for men so strangely distinguishing between
one field and another, between one city and another, between one nation and
another. To all those who think in this way there is only one answer to be
given. It is to approach each of them and whisper in his ear: "Did you or
did you not as a child try to step on every alternate paving-stone ? Was that
artificial and a superstition? Did priests come in the dead of night and mark
out by secret signs the stones on which you are allowed to tread? Were children
threatened with the oubliette or the fire of Smithfield if they failed to step
on the right stone? Has the Church issued a bill "<Quisquam non
pavemente>?" No! On this point on which we were really free, we invented
our servitude. We chose to say that between the first and the third
paving-stone there was an abyss of the eternal darkness into which we must not
fall. We were walking along a steady and safe and modern road, and it was more
pleasant to us to say that we were leaping desperately from peak to peak. Under
mean and oppressive systems it was no doubt our instinct to free ourselves. But
this truth written on the paving-stones is of even greater emphasis, that under
liberal systems it was our instinct to limit ourselves. We limited ourselves so
gladly that we limited ourselves at random, as if limitation were one of the
adventures of boyhood.
People sometimes talk as if
everything in the religious history of man had been done by officials. In all
probability things like the Dionysian cult or the worship of the Virgin were
almost entirely forced by the people on the priesthood. And if children had
been sufficiently powerful in the State, there is no reason why this
paving-stone religion should not have been accepted also. There is no reason
why the streets up which we walk should not be emblazoned so as to commemorate
the memory of a superstition as healthy as health itself.
For what is the idea in human
nature which lies at the back of this almost automatic ceremonialism? Why is it
that a child who would be furious if told by his nurse not to walk off the
kerbstone, invents a whole desperate system of footholds and chasms in a plane
in which his nurse can see little but a commodious level? It is because man has
always had the instinct that to isolate a thing was to identify it. The flag
only becomes a flag when it is unique; the nation only becomes a nation when it
is surrounded; the hero only becomes a hero when he has before him and behind
him men who are not heroes; the paving-stone only becomes a paving stone when
it has before it and behind it things that are not paving stones.
There are two other obvious
instances, of course, of the same instinct; the perennial poetry of islands,
and the perennial poetry of ships. A ship like the Argo or the Fram is valued
by the mind because it is an island, because, that is, it carries with it,
floating loose on the desolate elements, the resources, and rules and trades,
and treasuries of a nation, because it has ranks, and shops and streets, and
the whole clinging like a few limpets to a lost spar. An island like Ithaca or
England is valued by the mind because it is a ship, because it can find itself
alone and self-dependent in a waste of water, because its orchards and forests
can be numbered like bales of merchandise, because its corn can be counted like
gold, because the starriest and dreariest snows upon its most forsaken peaks
are silver flags flown from familiar masts, because its dimmest and most
inhuman mines of coal or lead below the roots of things are definite chattels
stored awkwardly in the lowest locker of the hold.
In truth, nothing has so much
spoilt the right artistic attitude as the continual use of such words as
'infinite' and 'immeasurable'. They were used rightly enough in religion,
because religion, by its very nature, consists of paradoxes. Religion speaks of
an identity which is infinite, just as it spoke of an identity that was at once
one and three, just as it might possibly and rightly speak of an identity that
was at once black and white.
The old mystics spoke of an
existence without end or a happiness without end, with a deliberate defiance,
as they might have spoken of a bird without wings or a sea without water. And
in this they were right philosophically, far more right than the world would
now admit because all things grow more paradoxical as we approach the central
truth. But for all human imaginative or artistic purposes nothing worse could
be said of a work of beauty than that it is infinite; for to be infinite is to
be shapeless, and to be shapeless is to be something more than mis-shapen. No
man really wishes a thing which he believes to be divine to be in this earthly
sense infinite. No one would really like a song to last for ever, or a religious
service to last for ever, or even a glass of good ale to last for ever. And
this is surely the reason that men have pursued towards the idea of holiness,
the course that they have pursued; that they have marked it out in particular
spaces, limited it to particular days, worshipped an ivory statue, worshipped a
lump of stone. They have desired to give to it the chivalry and dignity of
definition, they have desired to save it from the degradation of infinity. This
is the real weakness of all imperial or conquering ideals in nationality. No
one can love his country with the particular affection which is appropriate to
the relation, if he thinks it is a thing in its nature indeterminate, something
which is growing in the night, something which lacks the tense excitement of a
boundary. No Roman citizen could feel the same when once it became possible for
a rich Parthian or a rich Carthaginian to become a Roman citizen by waving his
hand. No man wishes the thing he loves to grow, for he does not wish it to alter.
No man would be pleased if he came home in the evening from work and found his
wife eight feet high.
The dangers upon the side of this
transcendental insularity are no doubt considerable. There lies in it primarily
the great danger of the thing called idolatry, the worship of the object apart
from or against the idea it represents. But he must surely have had a singular
experience who thinks that this insular or idolatrous fault is the particular
fault of one age. We are likely to suffer primary painful resemblance to the
men of Thermopylae, the Zealots, who raged round the fall of Jerusalem. If we
are rushing upon any destruction it is not, at least, upon this.
FROM THE
AMERICAN CHESTERTON SOCIETY
The best reason for a revival of
philosophy is that unless a man has a philosophy certain horrible things will
happen to him. He will be practical; he will be progressive; he will cultivate
efficiency; he will trust in evolution; he will do the work that lies nearest;
he will devote himself to deeds, not words. Thus struck down by blow after blow
of blind stupidity and random fate, he will stagger on to a miserable death
with no comfort but a series of catchwords; such as those which I have
catalogued above. Those things are simply substitutes for thoughts. In some
cases they are the tags and tail-ends of somebody else's thinking. That means
that a man who refuses to have his own philosophy will not even have the
advantages of a brute beast, and be left to his own instincts. He will only
have the used-up scraps of somebody else's philosophy; which the beasts do not
have to inherit; hence their happiness. Men have always one of two things:
either a complete and conscious philosophy or the unconscious acceptance of the
broken bits of some incomplete and shattered and often discredited philosophy.
Such broken bits are the phrases I have quoted: efficiency and evolution and
the rest. The idea of being "practical", standing all by itself, is
all that remains of a Pragmatism that cannot stand at all. It is impossible to
be practical without a Pragma. And what would happen if you went up to the next
practical man you met and said to the poor dear old duffer, "Where is your
Pragma?" Doing the work that is nearest is obvious nonsense; yet it has
been repeated in many albums. In nine cases out of ten it would mean doing the
work that we are least fitted to do, such as cleaning the windows or clouting
the policeman over the head. "Deeds, not words" is itself an
excellent example of "Words, not thoughts". It is a deed to throw a
pebble into a pond and a word that sends a prisoner to the gallows. But there
are certainly very futile words; and this sort of journalistic philosophy and
popular science almost entirely consists of them.
Some people fear that philosophy
will bore or bewilder them; because they think it is not only a string of long
words, but a tangle of complicated notions. These people miss the whole point
of the modern situation. These are exactly the evils that exist already; mostly
for want of a philosophy. The politicians and the papers are always using long
words. It is not a complete consolation that they use them wrong. The political
and social relations are already hopelessly complicated. They are far more
complicated than any page of medieval metaphysics; the only difference is that
the medievalist could trace out the tangle and follow the complications; and
the moderns cannot. The chief practical things of today, like finance and
political corruption, are frightfully complicated. We are content to tolerate
them because we are content to misunderstand them, not to understand them. The
business world needs metaphysics - to simplify it.
I know these words will be
received with scorn, and with gruff reassertion that this is no time for
nonsense and paradox; and that what is really wanted is a practical man to go
in and clear up the mess. And a practical man will doubtless appear, one of the
unending succession of practical men; and he will doubtless go in, and perhaps
clear up a few millions for himself and leave the mess more bewildering than
before; as each of the other practical men has done. The reason is perfectly
simple. This sort of rather crude and unconscious person always adds to the
confusion; because lie himself has two or three different motives at the same
moment, and does not distinguish between them. A man has, already entangled
hopelessly in his own mind, (1) a hearty and human desire for money, (2) a
somewhat priggish and superficial desire to be progressing, or going the way
the world is going, (3) a dislike to being thought too old to keep up with the
young people, (4) a certain amount of vague but genuine patriotism or public
spirit, (5) a misunderstanding of a mistake made by Mr. H. G. Wells, in the
form of a book on Evolution. When a man has all these things in his head, and
does not even attempt to sort them out, he is called by common consent and
acclamation a practical man. But the practical man cannot be expected to
improve the impracticable muddle; for he cannot clear up the muddle in his own
mind, let alone in his own highly complex community and civilisation. For some
strange reason, it is the custom to say of this sort of practical man that
"he knows his own mind". Of course this is exactly what he does not
know. He may in a few fortunate cases know what he wants, as does a dog or a
baby of two years old; but even then he does not know why he wants it. And it
is the why and the how that have to be considered when we are tracing out the
way in which some culture or tradition has got into a tangle. What we need, as
the ancients understood, is not a politician who is a business man, but a king
who is a philosopher.
I apologise for the word
"king", which is not strictly necessary to the sense; but I suggest
that it would be one of the functions of the philosopher to pause upon such
words, and determine their importance and unimportance. The Roman Republic and
all its citizens had to the last a horror of the word "king". It was
in consequence of this that they invented and imposed on us the word
"Emperor". The great Republicans who founded America also had a
horror of the word "king"; which has therefore reappeared with the
special qualification of a Steel King, an Oil King, a Pork King, or other
similar monarchs made of similar materials. The business of the philosopher is
not necessarily to condemn the innovation or to deny the distinction. But it is
his duty to ask himself exactly what it is that he or others dislike in the
word "king". If what he dislikes is a man wearing the spotted fur of
a small animal called the ermine, or a man having once had a metal ring placed
on the top of his head by a clergyman, he will decide one way. If what he
dislikes is a man having vast or irresponsible powers over other men, he may
decide another. If what he dislikes is such fur or such power being handed on
from father to son, he will enquire whether this ever occurs under commercial conditions
today. But, anyhow, he will have the habit of testing the thing by the thought;
by the idea which he likes or dislikes; and not merely by the sound of a
syllable or the look of four letters beginning with a "R".
Philosophy is merely thought that has
been thought out. It is often a great bore. But man has no alternative, except
between being influenced by thought that has been thought out and being
influenced by thought that has not been thought out. The latter is what we
commonly call culture and enlightenment today. But man is always influenced by
thought of some kind, his own or somebody else's; that of somebody he trusts or
that of somebody he never heard of, thought at first, second or third hand;
thought from exploded legends or unverified rumours; but always something with
the shadow of a system of values and a reason for preference. A man does test
everything by something. The question here is whether he has ever tested the
test.
I will take one example out of a
thousand that might be taken. What is the attitude of an ordinary man on being
told of an extraordinary event: a miracle? I mean the sort of thing that is
loosely called supernatural, but should more properly be called preternatural.
For the word supernatural applies only to what is higher than man; and a good
many modern miracles look as if they came from what is considerably lower.
Anyhow, what do modern men say when apparently confronted -with something that
cannot, in the cant phrase, be naturally explained ? Well, most modern men immediately
talk nonsense. When such a thing is currently mentioned, in novels or
newspapers or magazine stories, the first comment is always something like,
"But my dear fellow, this is the twentieth century!" It is worth
having a little training in philosophy if only to avoid looking so ghastly a
fool as that. It has on the whole rather less sense or meaning than saying,
"But my dear fellow, this is Tuesday afternoon." If miracles cannot
happen, they cannot happen in the twentieth century or in the twelfth. If they
can happen, nobody can prove that there is a time when they cannot happen. The
best that can be said for the sceptic is that he cannot say what he means, and
therefore, whatever else he means, he cannot mean what he says. But if he only
means that miracles can be <believed> in the twelfth century, but cannot
be believed in the twentieth, then he is wrong again, both in theory and in
fact. He is wrong in theory, because an intelligent recognition of
possibilities does not depend on a date but on a philosophy. An atheist could
disbelieve in the first century and a mystic could continue to believe in the
twenty-first century. And he is wrong, in fact, because there is every sign of
there being a great deal of mysticism and miracle in the twenty-first century;
and there is quite certainly an increasing mass of it in the twentieth.
But I have only taken that first
superficial repartee because there is a significance in the mere fact that it
comes first; and its very superficiality reveals something of the
subconsciousness. It is almost an automatic repartee; and automatic words are
of some importance in psychology. Let us not be too severe on the worthy
gentleman who informs his dear fellow that it is the twentieth century. In the
mysterious depths of his being even that enormous ass does actually mean
something. The point is that he cannot really explain what he means; and
<that> is the argument for a better education in philosophy. What he
really means is something like this, "There is a theory of this mysterious
universe to which more and more people were in fact inclined during the second
half of the eighteenth and the first half of the nineteenth centuries; and up
to that point at least, this theory did grow with the growing inventions and
discoveries of science to which we owe our present social organisation - or
disorganisation. That theory maintains that cause and effect have from the
first operated in an uninterrupted sequence like a fixed fate; and that there
is no will behind or within that fate; so that it must work itself out in the
absence of such a will, as a machine must run down in the absence of a man.
There were more people in the nineteenth century than in the ninth who happened
to hold this particular theory of the universe. I myself happened to hold it;
and therefore I obviously cannot believe in miracles." That is perfectly
good sense; but so is the counter-statement; "I do not happen to hold it;
and therefore I obviously can believe in miracles."
The advantage of an elementary
philosophic habit is that it permits a man, for instance, to understand a
statement like this, Whether there can or can not be exceptions to a process
depends on the nature of that process." The disadvantage of not having it
is that a man will turn impatiently even from so simple a truism; and call it
metaphysical gibberish. He will then go off and say: "One can't have such
things in the twentieth century"; which really is gibberish. Yet the
former statement could surely be explained to him in sufficiently simple terms.
If a man sees a river run downhill day after day and year after year, he is
justified in reckoning, we might say in betting, that it will do so till he
dies. But he is not justified in saying that it cannot run uphill, until he
really knows why it runs downhill. To say it does so by gravitation answers the
physical but not the philosophical question. It only repeats that there is a
repetition; it does not touch the deeper question of whether that repetition
could be altered by anything outside it. And that depends on whether there
<is> anything outside it. For instance, suppose that a man had only seen
the river in a dream. He might have seen it in a hundred dreams, always
repeating itself and always running downhill. But that would not prevent the
hundredth dream being different and the river climbing the mountain; because
the dream is a dream, and there <is> something outside it. Mere
repetition does not prove reality or inevitability. We must know the nature of
the thing and the cause of the repetition. If the nature of the thing is a
Creation, and the cause of the thing a Creator, in other words if the
repetition itself is only the repetition of something willed by a person, then
it is <not> impossible for the same person to will a different thing. If
a man is a fool for believing in a Creator, then he is a fool for believing in
a miracle; but not otherwise. Otherwise, he is simply a philosopher who is
consistent in his philosophy.
A modern man is quite free to
choose either philosophy. But what is actually the matter with the modern man
is that he does not know even his own philosophy; but only his own phraseology.
He can only answer the next spiritual message produced by a spiritualist, or
the next cure attested by doctors at Lourdes, by repeating what are generally
nothing but phrases; or are, at their best, prejudices.
Thus, when so brilliant a man as
Mr. H. G. Wells says that such supernatural ideas have become impossible
"for intelligent people ", he is (for that instant) not talking like
an intelligent person. In other words, he is not talking like a philosopher;
because he is not even saying what he means. What he means is, not
"impossible for intelligent men", but, "impossible for
intelligent monists", or, "impossible for intelligent determinists".
But it is not a negation of <intelligence> to hold any coherent and
logical conception of so mysterious a world. It is not a negation of
intelligence to think that all experience is a dream. It is not unintelligent
to think it a delusion, as some Buddhists do; let alone to think it a product
of creative will, as Christians do. We are always being told that men must no
longer be so sharply divided into their different religions. As an immediate
step in progress, it is much more urgent that they should be more clearly and
more sharply divided into their different philosophies.
FROM THE
AMERICAN CHESTERTON SOCIETY
A permanent disadvantage of the
study of folk-lore and kindred subjects is that the man of science can hardly
be in the nature of things very frequently a man of the world.
He is a student of nature; he is
scarcely ever a student of human nature. And even where this difficulty is
overcome, and he is in some sense a student of human nature, this is only a
very faint beginning of the painful progress towards being human. For the study
of primitive race and religion stands apart in one important respect from all,
or nearly all, the ordinary scientific studies. A man can understand astronomy
only by being an astronomer; he can understand entomology only by being an
entomologist (or, perhaps, an insect); but he can understand a great deal of
anthropology merely by being a man. He is himself the animal which he studies.
Hence arises the fact which strikes the eye everywhere in the records of
ethnology and folk-lore - the fact that the same frigid and detached spirit
which leads to success in the study of astronomy or botany leads to disaster in
the study of mythology or human origins. It is necessary to cease to be a man
in order to do justice to a microbe; it is not necessary to cease to be a man
in order to do justice to men. That same suppression of sympathies, that same
waving away of intuitions or guess-work which make a man preternaturally clever
in dealing with the stomach of a spider, will make him preternaturally stupid
in dealing with the heart of man. He is making himself inhuman in order to
understand humanity. An ignorance of the other world is boasted by many men of
science; but in this matter their defect arises, not from ignorance of the
other world, but from ignorance of this world. For the secrets about which
anthropologists concern themselves can be best learnt, not from books or
voyages, but from the ordinary commerce of man with man. The secret of why some
savage tribe worships monkeys or the moon is not to be found even by travelling
among those savages and taking down their answers in a note-book, although the
cleverest man may pursue this course. The answer to the riddle is in England;
it is in London; nay, it is in his own heart. When a man has discovered why men
in Bond Street wear black hats he will at the same moment have discovered why
men in Timbuctoo wear red feathers. The mystery in the heart of some savage
war-dance should not be studied in books of scientific travel; it should be
studied at a subscription ball. If a man desires to find out the origins of
religions, let him not go to the Sandwich Islands; let him go to church. If a
man wishes to know the origin of human society, to know what society,
philosophically speaking, really is, let him not go into the British Museum;
let him go into society.
This total misunderstanding of the
real nature of ceremonial gives rise to the most awkward and dehumanized
versions of the conduct of men in rude lands or ages. The man of science, not
realizing that ceremonial is essentially a thing which is done without a
reason, has to find a reason for every sort of ceremonial, and, as might be
supposed, the reason is generally a very absurd one - absurd because it
originates not in the simple mind
of the barbarian, but in the
sophisticated mind of the professor. The learned man will say, for instance,
"The natives of Mumbojumbo Land believe that the dead man can eat, and
will require food upon his journey to the other world. This is attested by the
fact that they place food in the grave, and that any family not complying with
this rite is the object of the anger of the priests and the tribe." To any
one acquainted with humanity this way of talking is topsy-turvy. It is like
saying, "The English in the twentieth century believed that a dead man
could smell. This is attested by the fact that they always covered his grave
with lilies, violets, or other flowers. Some priestly and tribal terrors were
evidently attached to the neglect of this action, as we have records of several
old ladies who were very much disturbed in mind because their wreaths had not
arrived in time for the funeral." It may be of course that savages put
food with a dead man because they think that a dead man can eat, or weapons
with a dead man because they think that a dead man can fight. But personally I
do not believe that they think anything of the kind. I believe they put food or
weapons on the dead for the same reason that we put flowers, because it is an
exceedingly natural and obvious thing to do. We do not understand, it is true,
the emotion which makes us think it obvious and natural; but that is because,
like all the important emotions of human existence, it is essentially
irrational. We do not understand the savage for the same reason that the savage
does not understand himself. And the savage does not understand himself for the
same reason that we do not understand ourselves either.
The obvious truth is that the
moment any matter has passed through the human mind it is finally and for ever
spoilt for all purposes of science. It has become a thing incurably mysterious
and infinite; this mortal has put on immortality. [See 1 Cor 15:54] Even what
we call our material desires are spiritual, because they are human. Science can
analyse a pork-chop, and say how much of it is phosphorus and how much is
protein; but science cannot analyse any man's wish for a pork-chop, and say how
much of it is hunger, how much custom, how much nervous fancy, how much a
haunting love of the beautiful.
The man's desire for the pork-chop
remains literally as mystical and ethereal as his desire for heaven. All
attempts, therefore, at a science of any human things, at a science of history,
a science of folk-lore, a science of sociology, are by their nature not merely
hopeless, but crazy. You can no more be certain in economic history that a
man's desire for money was merely a desire for money than you can be certain in
hagiology that a saint's desire for God was merely a desire for God. And this
kind of vagueness in the primary phenomena of the study is an absolutely final
blow to anything in the nature of a science. Men can construct a science with
very few instruments, or with very plain instruments; but no one on earth could
construct a science with unreliable instruments. A man might work out the whole
of mathematics with a handful of pebbles, but not with a handful of clay which
was always falling apart into new fragments, and falling together into new
combinations. A man might measure heaven and earth with a reed, but not with a
growing reed.
As one of the enormous follies of
folk-lore, let us take the case of the transmigration of stories, and the
alleged unity of their source. Story after story the scientific mythologists
have cut out of its place in history, and pinned side by side with similar
stories in their museum of fables. The process is industrious, it is
fascinating, and the whole of it rests on one of the plainest fallacies in the
world. That a story has been told all over the place at some time or other, not
only does not prove that it never really happened; it does not even faintly
indicate or make slightly more probable that it never happened. That a large
number of fishermen have falsely asserted that they have caught a pike two feet
long, does not in the least affect the question of whether any one ever really
did so. That numberless journalists announce a Franco-German war merely for
money is no evidence one way or the other upon the dark question of whether
such a war ever occurred. Doubtless in a few hundred years the innumerable
Franco-German wars that did not happen will have cleared the scientific mind of
any belief in the legendary war of '70 which did. But that will be because if
folk-lore students remain at all, their nature will be unchanged; and their
services to folk-lore will be still as they are at present, greater than they
know. For in truth these men do something far more god-like than studying
legends; they create them.
There are two kinds of stories
which the scientists say cannot be true, because everybody tells them. The
first class consists of the stories which are told everywhere, because they are
somewhat odd or clever; there is nothing in the world to prevent their having
happened to somebody as an adventure any more than there is anything to prevent
their having occurred, as they certainly did occur, to somebody as an idea. But
they are not likely to have happened to many people. The second class of their
"myths" consist of the stories that are told everywhere for the
simple reason that they happen everywhere. Of the first class, for instance, we
might take such an example as the story of William Tell, now generally ranked
among legends upon the sole ground that it is found in the tales of other
peoples. Now, it is obvious that this was told everywhere because whether true
or fictitious it is what is called "a good story;" it is odd, exciting,
and it has a climax. But to suggest that some such eccentric incident can never
have happened in the whole history of archery, or that it did not happen to any
particular person of whom it is told, is stark impudence. The idea of shooting
at a mark attached to some valuable or beloved person is an idea doubtless that
might easily have occurred to any inventive poet. But it is also an idea that
might easily occur to any boastful archer. It might be one of the fantastic
caprices of some story-teller. It might equally well be one of the fantastic
caprices of some tyrant. It might occur first in real life and afterwards occur
in legends. Or it might just as well occur first in legends and afterwards
occur in real life. If no apple has ever been shot off a boy's head from the
beginning of the world, it may be done to-morrow morning, and by somebody who
has never heard of William Tell.
This type of tale, indeed, may be
pretty fairly paralleled with the ordinary anecdote terminating in a repartee
or an Irish bull. Such a retort as the famous "Je ne vois pas la
necessité" we have all seen attributed to Talleyrand, to Voltaire, to
Henri Quatre, to an anonymous judge, and so on. But this variety does not in
any way make it more likely that the thing was never said at all. It is highly
likely that it was really said by somebody unknown. It is highly likely that it
was really said by Talleyrand. In any case, it is not any more difficult to
believe that the <[mot> might have occurred to a man in conversation than
to a man writing memoirs. It might have occurred to any of the men I have
mentioned. But there is this point of distinction about it, that it is not
likely to have occurred to all of them. And this is where the first class of
so-called myth differs from the second to which I have previously referred. For
there is a second class of incident found to be common to the stories of five
or six heroes, say to Sigurd, to Hercules, to Rustem, to the Cid, and so on.
And the peculiarity of this myth is that not only is it highly reasonable to
imagine that it really happened to one hero, but it is highly reasonable to
imagine that it really happened to all of them. Such a story, for instance, is
that of a great man having his strength swayed or thwarted by the mysterious
weakness of a woman. The anecdotal story, the story of William Tell, is as I
have said, popular, because it is peculiar. But this kind of story, the story
of Samson and Delilah, of Arthur and Guinevere, is obviously popular because it
is not peculiar. It is popular as good, quiet fiction is popular, because it
tells the truth about people. If the ruin of Samson by a woman, and the ruin of
Hercules by a woman, have a common legendary origin, it is gratifying to know
that we can also explain, as a fable, the ruin of Nelson by a woman and the
ruin of Parnell by a woman. And, indeed, I have no doubt whatever that, some
centuries hence, the students of folk-lore will refuse altogether to believe
that Elizabeth
Barrett eloped with Robert
Browning, and will prove their point up to the hilt by the unquestionable fact
that the whole fiction of the period was full of such elopements from end to
end.
Possibly the most pathetic of all
the delusions of the modern students of primitive belief is the notion they
have about the thing they call anthropomorphism. They believe that primitive
men attributed phenomena to a god in human form in order to explain them,
because his mind in its sullen limitation could not reach any further than his
own clownish existence. The thunder was called the voice of a man, the
lightning the eyes of a man, because by this explanation they were made more
reasonable and comfortable. The final cure for all this kind of philosophy is
to walk down a lane at night. Any one who does so will discover very quickly that
men pictured something semi-human at the back of all things, not because such a
thought was natural, but because it was supernatural; not because it made
things more comprehensible, but because it made them a hundred times more
incomprehensible and mysterious. For a man walking down a lane at night can see
the conspicuous fact that as long as nature keeps to her own course, she has no
power with us at all. As long as a tree is a tree, it is a top-heavy monster
with a hundred arms, a thousand tongues, and only one leg. But so long as a
tree is a tree, it does not frighten us at all. It begins to be something
alien, to be something strange, only when it looks like ourselves. When a tree
really looks like a man our knees knock under us. And when the whole universe
looks like a man we fall on our faces.
FROM THE
AMERICAN CHESTERTON SOCIETY
Academic year 2008/2009
© a.r.e.a./Dr.Vicente Forés López
© Rafael Gil-Nogués
ragilno@alumni.uv.es
Universitat de València Press
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