Chapter XIV: Part II: opened with a suite in F Major for orchestra (op. 39) by (8)

What tricks imagination plays! Thus, if we expect a person in the street we transform a dozen impossible people into him while they are still too far off to be seen distinctly; and when we expect to hear a footstep on the stairs—as, we will say, the postman’s—we hear footsteps in every sound. Imagination will make us see a billiard hall as likely to travel farther than it will travel, if we hope that it will do so. It will make us think we feel a train begin to move as soon as the guard has said “All right,” though the train has not yet begun to move if another train alongside begins to move exactly at this juncture, there is no man who will not be deceived. And we omit as much as we insert. We often do not notice that a man has grown a beard.

iv

I read once of a man who was cured of a dangerous illness by eating his doctor’s prescription which he understood was the medicine itself. So William Sefton Moorhouse [in New Zealand] imagined he was being converted to Christianity by reading Burton’s _Anatomy of Melancholy_, which he had got by mistake for Butler’s _Analogy_, on the recommendation of a friend. But it puzzled him a good deal.

v

At Ivy Hatch, while we were getting our beer in the inner parlour, there was a confused mêlée of voices in the bar, amid which I distinguished a voice saying:

“Imagination will do any bloody thing almost.”

I was writing _Life and Habit_ at the time and was much tempted to put this passage in. Nothing truer has ever been said about imagination. Then the voice was heard addressing the barman and saying:

“I suppose you wouldn’t trust me with a quart of beer, would you?”

Inexperience

Kant says that all our knowledge is founded on experience. But each new small increment of knowledge is not so founded, and our whole knowledge is made up of the accumulation of these small new increments not one of which is founded upon experience. Our knowledge, then, is founded not on experience but on inexperience; for where there is no novelty, that is to say no inexperience, there is no increment in experience. Our knowledge is really founded upon something which we do not know, but it is converted into experience by memory.

It is like species—we do not know the cause of the variations whose accumulation results in species and any explanation which leaves this out of sight ignores the whole difficulty. We want to know the cause of the effect that inexperience produces on us.

Ex Nihilo Nihil Fit

We say that everything has a beginning. This is one side of the matter. There is another according to which everything is without a beginning—beginnings, and endings also, being, but as it were, steps cut in a slope of ice without which we could not climb it. They are for convenience and the hardness of the hearts of men who make an idol of classification, but they do not exist apart from our sense of our own convenience.

It was a favourite saying with William Sefton Moorhouse [in New Zealand] that men cannot get rich by swopping knives. Nevertheless nature does seem to go upon this principle. Everybody does eat everybody up. Man eats birds, birds eat worms and worms eat man again. It is a vicious circle, yet, somehow or other, there is an increment. I begin to doubt the principle _ex nihilo nihil fit_.

We very much want a way of getting something out of nothing and back into it again. Whether or no we ever shall get such a way, we see the clearly perceptible arising out of and returning into the absolutely imperceptible and, so far as we are concerned, this is much the same thing. To assume an unknowable substratum as the source from which all things proceed or are evolved is equivalent to assuming that they come up out of nothing; for that which does not exist for us is for us nothing; that which we do not know does not exist _qua_ us, and therefore it does not exist. When I say “we,” I mean mankind generally, for things may exist _qua_ one man and not _qua_ another. And when I say “nothing” I postulate something of which we have no experience.

And yet we cannot say that a thing does not exist till it is known to exist. The planet Neptune existed though, _qua_ us, it did not exist before Adams and Leverrier discovered it, and we cannot hold that its continued non-existence to my laundress and her husband makes it any the less an entity. We cannot say that it did not exist at all till it was discovered, that it exists only partially and vaguely to most of us, that to many it still does not exist at all, that there are few to whom it even exists in any force or fullness and none who can realise more than the broad facts of its existence. Neptune has been disturbing the orbits of the planets nearest to him for more centuries than we can reckon, and whether or not he is known to have been doing so has nothing to do with the matter. If A is robbed, he is robbed, whether he knows it or not.

In one sense, then, we cannot say that the planet Neptune did not exist till he was discovered, but in another we can and ought to do so. _De non apparentibus et non existentibus eadem est ratio_; as long, therefore, as Neptune did not appear he did not exist _qua_ us. The only way out of it is through the contradiction in terms of maintaining that a thing exists and does not exist at one and the same time. So A may be both robbed, and not robbed.

We consider, therefore, that things have assumed their present shape by course of evolution from a something which, _qua_ us, is a nothing, from a potential something but not an actual, from an actual nothing but a potential not-nothing, from a nothing which might become a something to us with any modification on our parts but which, till such modification has arisen, does not exist in relation to us, though very conceivably doing so in relation to other entities. But this Protean nothing, capable of appearing as something, is not the absolute, eternal, unchangeable nothing that we mean when we say _ex nihilo nihil fit_.

The alternative is that something should not have come out of nothing, and this is saying that something has always existed. But the eternal increateness of matter seems as troublesome to conceive as its having been created out of nothing. I say “seems,” for I am not sure how far it really is so. We never saw something come out of nothing, that is to say, we never saw a beginning of anything except as the beginning of a new phase of something pre-existent. We ought therefore to find the notion of eternal being familiar, it ought to be the only conception of matter which we are able to form: nevertheless, we are so carried away by being accustomed to see phases have their beginnings and endings that we forget that the matter, of which we see the phase begin and end, did not begin or end with the phase.

Eternal matter permeated by eternal mind, matter and mind being functions of one another, is the least uncomfortable way of looking at the universe; but as it is beyond our comprehension, and cannot therefore be comfortable, sensible persons will not look at the universe at all except in such details as may concern them.

Contradiction in Terms

We pay higher and higher in proportion to the service rendered till we get to the highest services, such as becoming a Member of Parliament, and this must not be paid at all. If a man would go yet higher and found a new and permanent system, or create some new idea or work of art which remains to give delight to ages—he must not only not be paid, but he will have to pay very heavily out of his own pocket into the bargain.

Again, we are to get all men to speak well of us if we can; yet we are to be cursed if all men speak well of us.

So when the universe has gathered itself into a single ball (which I don’t for a moment believe it ever will, but I don’t care) it will no sooner have done so, than the bubble will burst and it will go back to its gases again.

Contradiction in terms is so omnipresent that we treat it as we treat death, or free-will, or fate, or air, or God, or the Devil—taking these things so much as matters of course that, though they are visible enough if we choose to see them, we neglect them normally altogether, without for a moment intending to deny their existence. This neglect is convenient as preventing repetitions the monotony of which would defeat their own purpose, but people are tempted nevertheless to forget the underlying omnipresence in the superficial omniabsence. They forget that its opposite lurks in everything—that there are harmonics of God in the Devil and harmonics of the Devil in God.

Contradiction in terms is not only to be excused but there can be no proposition which does not more or less involve one.

It is the fact of there being contradictions in terms, which have to be smoothed away and fused into harmonious acquiescence with their surroundings, that makes life and consciousness possible at all. Unless the unexpected were sprung upon us continually to enliven us we should pass life, as it were, in sleep. To a living being no “It is” can be absolute; wherever there is an “Is,” there, among its harmonics, lurks an “Is not.” When there is absolute absence of “Is not” the “Is” goes too. And the “Is not” does not go completely till the “Is” is gone along with it. Every proposition has got a skeleton in its cupboard.

Extremes

i

Intuition and evidence seem to have something of the same relation that faith and reason, luck and cunning, freewill and necessity and demand and supply have. They grow up hand in hand and no man can say which comes first. It is the same with life and death, which lurk one within the other as do rest and unrest, change and persistence, heat and cold, poverty and riches, harmony and counterpoint, night and day, summer and winter.

And so with pantheism and atheism; loving everybody is loving nobody, and God everywhere is, practically, God nowhere. I once asked a man if he was a free-thinker; he replied that he did not think he was. And so, I have heard of a man exclaiming “I am an atheist, thank God!” Those who say there is a God are wrong unless they mean at the same time that there is no God, and vice versa. The difference is the same as that between plus nothing and minus nothing, and it is hard to say which we ought to admire and thank most—the first theist or the first atheist. Nevertheless, for many reasons, the plus nothing is to be preferred.

ii

To be poor is to be contemptible, to be very poor is worse still, and so on; but to be actually at the point of death through poverty is to be sublime. So “when weakness is utter, honour ceaseth.” [_The Righteous Man_, p. 390, _post_.]

iii

The meeting of extremes is never clearer than in the case of moral and intellectual strength and weakness. We may say with Hesiod “How much the half is greater than the whole!” or with S. Paul “My strength is made perfect in weakness”; they come to much the same thing. We all know strength so strong as to be weaker than weakness and weakness so great as to be stronger than strength.

iv

The Queen travels as the Countess of Balmoral and would probably be very glad, if she could, to travel as plain Mrs. Smith. There is a good deal of the Queen lurking in every Mrs. Smith and, conversely, a good deal of Mrs. Smith lurking in every queen.

Free-Will and Necessity

As I am tidying up, and the following beginning of a paper on the above subject has been littering about my table since December 1889, which is the date on the top of page i, I will shoot it on to this dust-heap and bury it out of my sight. It runs:

The difficulty has arisen from our forgetting that contradiction in terms lies at the foundation of all our thoughts as a condition and _sine qua non_ of our being able to think at all. We imagine that we must either have all free-will and no necessity, or all necessity and no free-will, and, it being obvious that our free-will is often overridden by force of circumstances while the evidence that necessity is overridden by free-will is harder to find (if indeed it can be found, for I have not fully considered the matter), most people who theorise upon this question will deny in theory that there is any free-will at all, though in practice they take care to act as if there was. For if we admit that like causes are followed by like effects (and everything that we do is based upon this hypothesis), it follows that every combination of causes must have some one consequent which can alone follow it and which free-will cannot touch.

(Yes, but it will generally be found that free-will entered into the original combination and the repetition of the combination will not be exact unless a like free-will is repeated along with all the other factors.)

From which it follows that free-will is apparent only, and that, as I said years ago in _Erewhon_, we are not free to choose what seems best on each occasion but bound to do so, being fettered to the freedom of our wills throughout our lives.

But to deny free-will is to deny moral responsibility, and we are landed in absurdity at once—for there is nothing more patent than that moral responsibility exists. Nevertheless, at first sight, it would seem as though we ought not to hang a man for murder if there was no escape for him but that he must commit one. Of course the answer to one who makes this objection is that our hanging him is as much a matter of necessity as his committing the murder.

If, again, necessity, as involved in the certainty that like combinations will be followed by like consequence, is a basis on which all our actions are founded, so also is freewill. This is quite as much a _sine qua non_ for action as necessity is; for who would try to act if he did not think that his trying would influence the result?

We have therefore two apparently incompatible and mutually destructive faiths, each equally and self-evidently demonstrable, each equally necessary for salvation of any kind, and each equally entering into every thought and action of our whole lives, yet utterly contradictory and irreconcilable.

Can any dilemma seem more hopeless? It is not a case of being able to live happily with either were t’other dear charmer away; it is indispensable that we should embrace both, and embrace them with equal cordiality at the same time, though each annihilates the other. It is as though it were indispensable to our existence to be equally dead and equally alive at one and the same moment.

Here we have an illustration which may help us. For, after all, we are both dead and alive at one and the same moment. There is no life without a taint of death and no death that is not instinct with a residuum of past life and with germs of the new that is to succeed it. Let those who deny this show us an example of pure life and pure death. Any one who has considered these matters will know this to be impossible. And yet in spite of this, the cases where we are in doubt whether a thing is to be more fitly called dead or alive are so few that they may be disregarded.

I take it, then, that as, though alive, we are in part dead and, though dead, in part alive, so, though bound by necessity, we are in part free, and, though free, yet in part bound by necessity. At least I can think of no case of such absolute necessity in human affairs as that free-will should have no part in it, nor of such absolute free-will that no part of the action should be limited and controlled by necessity.

Thus, when a man walks to the gallows, he is under large necessity, yet he retains much small freedom; when pinioned, he is less free, but he can open his eyes and mouth and pray aloud or no as he pleases; even when the drop has fallen, so long as he is “he” at all, he can exercise some, though infinitely small, choice.

It may be answered that throughout the foregoing chain of actions, the freedom, what little there is of it, is apparent only, and that even in the small freedoms, which are not so obviously controlled by necessity, the necessity is still present as effectually as when the man, though apparently free to walk to the gallows, is in reality bound to do so. For in respect of the small details of his manner of walking to the gallows, which compulsion does not so glaringly reach, what is it that the man is free to do? He is free to do as he likes, but he is not free to do as he does not like; and a man’s likings are determined by outside things and by antecedents, pre-natal and post-natal, whose effect is so powerful that the individual who makes the choice proves to be only the resultant of certain forces which have been brought to bear upon him but which are not the man. So that it seems there is no detail, no nook or corner of action, into which necessity does not penetrate.

This seems logical, but it is as logical to follow instinct and common sense as to follow logic, and both instinct and common sense assure us that there is no nook or corner of action into which free-will does not penetrate, unless it be those into which mind does not enter at all, as when a man is struck by lightning or is overwhelmed suddenly by an avalanche.

Besides, those who maintain that action is bound to follow choice, while choice can only follow opinion as to advantage, neglect the very considerable number of cases in which opinion as to advantage does not exist—when, for instance, a man feels, as we all of us sometimes do, that he is utterly incapable of forming any opinion whatever as to his most advantageous course.

But this again is fallacious. For suppose he decides to toss up and be guided by the result, this is still what he has chosen to do, and his action, therefore, is following his choice. Or suppose, again, that he remains passive and does nothing—his passivity is his choice.

I can see no way out of it unless either frankly to admit that contradiction in terms is the bedrock on which all our thoughts and deeds are founded, and to acquiesce cheerfully in the fact that whenever we try to go below the surface of any enquiry we find ourselves utterly baffled—or to redefine freedom and necessity, admitting each as a potent factor of the other. And this I do not see my way to doing. I am therefore necessitated to choose freely the admission that our understanding can burrow but a very small way into the foundations of our beliefs, and can only weaken rather than strengthen them by burrowing at all.

Free-Will otherwise Cunning

The element of free-will, cunning, spontaneity, individuality—so omnipresent, so essential, yet so unreasonable, and so inconsistent with the other element not less omnipresent and not less essential, I mean necessity, luck, fate—this element of free-will, which comes from the unseen kingdom within which the writs of our thoughts run not, must be carried down to the most tenuous atoms whose action is supposed most purely chemical and mechanical; it can never be held as absolutely eliminated, for if it be so held, there is no getting it back again, and that it exists, even in the lowest forms of life, cannot be disputed. Its existence is one of the proofs of the existence of an unseen world, and a means whereby we know the little that we do know of that world.

Necessity otherwise Luck

It is all very well to insist upon the free-will or cunning side of living action, more especially now when it has been so persistently ignored, but though the fortunes of birth and surroundings have all been built up by cunning, yet it is by ancestral, vicarious cunning, and this, to each individual, comes to much the same as luck pure and simple; in fact, luck is seldom seriously intended to mean a total denial of cunning, but is for the most part only an expression whereby we summarise and express our sense of a cunning too complex and impalpable for conscious following and apprehension.

When we consider how little we have to do with our parentage, country and education, or even with our genus and species, how vitally these things affect us both in life and death, and how, practically, the cunning in connection with them is so spent as to be no cunning at all, it is plain that the drifts, currents, and storms of what is virtually luck will be often more than the little helm of cunning can control. And so with death. Nothing can affect us less, but at the same time nothing can affect us more; and how little can cunning do against it? At the best it can only defer it. Cunning is nine-tenths luck, and luck is nine-tenths cunning; but the fact that nine-tenths of cunning is luck leaves still a tenth part unaccounted for.

Choice

Our choice is apparently most free, and we are least obviously driven to determine our course, in those cases where the future is most obscure, that is, when the balance of advantage appears most doubtful.

Where we have an opinion that assures us promptly which way the balance of advantage will incline—whether it be an instinctive, hereditarily acquired opinion or one rapidly and decisively formed as the result of post-natal experience—then our action is determined at once by that opinion, and freedom of choice practically vanishes.

Ego and Non-Ego

You can have all ego, or all non-ego, but in theory you cannot have half one and half the other—yet in practice this is exactly what you must have, for everything is both itself and not itself at one and the same time.

A living thing is itself in so far as it has wants and gratifies them. It is not itself in so far as it uses itself as a tool for the gratifying of its wants. Thus an amœba is aware of a piece of meat which it wants to eat. It has nothing except its own body to fling at the meat and catch it with. If it had a little hand-net, or even such an organ as our own hand, it would use it, but it has only got itself; so it takes itself by the scruff of its own neck, as it were, and flings itself at the piece of meat, as though it were not itself but something which it is using in order to gratify itself. So we make our own bodies into carriages every time we walk. Our body is our tool-box—and our bodily organs are the simplest tools we can catch hold of.

When the amœba has got the piece of meat and has done digesting it, it leaves off being not itself and becomes itself again. A thing is only itself when it is doing nothing; as long as it is doing something it is its own tool and not itself.

Or you may have it that everything is itself in respect of the pleasure or pain it is feeling, but not itself in respect of the using of itself by itself as a tool with which to work its will. Or perhaps we should say that the ego remains always ego in part; it does not become all non-ego at one and the same time. We throw our fist into a man’s face as though it were a stick we had picked up to beat him with. For the moment, our fist is hardly “us,” but it becomes “us” again as we feel the resistance it encounters from the man’s eye. Anyway, we can only chuck about a part of ourselves at a time, we cannot chuck the lot—and yet I do not know this, for we may jump off the ground and fling ourselves on to a man.

The fact that both elements are present and are of such nearly equal value explains the obstinacy of the conflict between the upholders of Necessity and Free-Will which, indeed, are only luck and cunning under other names.

For, on the one hand, the surroundings so obviously and powerfully mould us, body and soul, and even the little modifying power which at first we seem to have is found, on examination, to spring so completely from surroundings formerly beyond the control of our ancestors, that a logical thinker, who starts with these premises, is soon driven to the total denial of free-will, except, of course, as an illusion; in other words, he perceives the connection between ego and non-ego, tries to disunite them so as to know when he is talking about what, and finds to his surprise that he cannot do so without violence to one or both. Being, above all things, a logical thinker, and abhorring the contradiction in terms involved in admitting anything to be both itself and something other than itself at one and the same time, he makes the manner in which the one is rooted into the other a pretext for merging the ego, as the less bulky of the two, in the non-ego; hence practically he declares the ego to have no further existence, except as a mere appendage and adjunct of the non-ego the existence of which he alone recognises (though how he can recognise it without recognising also that he is recognising it as something foreign to himself it is not easy to see). As for the action and interaction that goes on in the non-ego, he refers it to fate, fortune, chance, luck, necessity, immutable law, providence (meaning generally improvidence) or to whatever kindred term he has most fancy for. In other words, he is so much impressed with the connection between luck and cunning, and so anxious to avoid contradiction in terms, that he tries to abolish cunning, and dwells, as Mr. Darwin did, almost exclusively upon the luck side of the matter.

Others, on the other hand, find the ego no less striking than their opponents find the non-ego. Every hour they mould things so considerably to their pleasure that, even though they may for argument’s sake admit free-will to be an illusion, they say with reason that no reality can be more real than an illusion which is so strong, so persistent and so universal; this contention, indeed, cannot be disputed except at the cost of invalidating the reality of all even our most assured convictions. They admit that there is an apparent connection between their ego and non-ego, their necessity and free-will, their luck and cunning; they grant that the difference is resolvable into a difference of degree and not of kind; but, on the other hand, they say that in each degree there still lurks a little kind, and that a difference of many degrees makes a difference of kind—there being, in fact, no difference between differences of degree and those of kind, except that the second are an accumulation of the first. The all-powerfulness of the surroundings is declared by them to be as completely an illusion, if examined closely, as the power of the individual was declared to be by their opponents, inasmuch as the antecedents of the non-ego, when examined by them, prove to be not less due to the personal individual element everywhere recognisable, than the ego, when examined by their opponents, proved to be mergeable in the universal. They claim, therefore, to be able to resolve everything into spontaneity and free-will with no less logical consistency than that with which freewill can be resolved into an outcome of necessity.

Two Incomprehensibles

You may assume life of some kind omnipresent for ever throughout matter. This is one way. Another way is to assume an act of spontaneous generation, i.e. a transition somewhere and somewhen from absolutely non-living to absolutely living. You cannot have it both ways. But it seems to me that you must have it both ways. You must not begin with life (or potential life) everywhere alone, nor must you begin with a single spontaneous generation alone, but you must carry your spontaneous generation (or denial of the continuity of life) down, _ad infinitum_, just as you must carry your continuity of life (or denial of spontaneous generation) down _ad infinitum_ and, compatible or incompatible, you must write a scientific Athanasian Creed to comprehend these two incomprehensibles.

If, then, it is only an escape from one incomprehensible position to another, _cui bono_ to make a change? Why not stay quietly in the Athanasian Creed as we are? And, after all, the Athanasian Creed is light and comprehensible reading in comparison with much that now passes for science.

I can give no answer to this as regards the unintelligible clauses, for what we come to in the end is just as abhorrent to and inconceivable by reason as what they offer us; but as regards what may be called the intelligible parts—that Christ was born of a Virgin, died, rose from the dead—we say that, if it were not for the prestige that belief in these alleged facts has obtained, we should refuse attention to them. Out of respect, however, for the mass of opinion that accepts them we have looked into the matter with care, and we have found the evidence break down. The same reasoning and canons of criticism which convince me that Christ was crucified convince me at the same time that he was insufficiently crucified. I can only accept his death and resurrection at the cost of rejecting everything that I have been taught to hold most strongly. I can only accept the so-called testimony in support of these alleged facts at the cost of rejecting, or at any rate invalidating, all the testimony on which I have based all comfortable assurance of any kind whatsoever.

God and the Unknown

God is the unknown, and hence the nothing _qua_ us. He is also the ensemble of all we know, and hence the everything _qua_ us. So that the most absolute nothing and the most absolute everything are extremes that meet (like all other extremes) in God.

Men think they mean by God something like what Raffaelle and Michael Angelo have painted; unless this were so Raffaelle and Michael Angelo would not have painted as they did. But to get at our truer thoughts we should look at our less conscious and deliberate utterances. From these it has been gathered that God is our expression for all forces and powers which we do not understand, or with which we are unfamiliar, and for the highest ideal of wisdom, goodness and power which we can conceive, but for nothing else.

Thus God makes the grass grow because we do not understand how the air and earth and water near a piece of grass are seized by the grass and converted into more grass; but God does not mow the grass and make hay of it. It is Paul and Apollos who plant and water, but God who giveth the increase. We never say that God does anything which we can do ourselves, or ask him for anything which we know how to get in any other way. As soon as we understand a thing we remove it from the sphere of God’s action.

As long as there is an unknown there will be a God for all practical purposes; the name of God has never yet been given to a known thing except by way of flattery, as to Roman Emperors, or through the attempt to symbolise the unknown generally, as in fetish worship, and then the priests had to tell the people that there was something more about the fetish than they knew of, or they would soon have ceased to think of it as God.

To understand a thing is to feel as though we could stand under or alongside of it in all its parts and form a picture of it in our minds throughout. We understand how a violin is made if our minds can follow the manufacture in all its detail and picture it to ourselves. If we feel that we can identify ourselves with the steam and machinery of a steam engine, so as to travel in imagination with the steam through all the pipes and valves, if we can see the movement of each part of the piston, connecting rod, &c., so as to be mentally one with both the steam and the mechanism throughout their whole action and construction, then we say we understand the steam engine, and the idea of God never crosses our minds in connection with it.

When we feel that we can neither do a thing ourselves, nor even learn to do it by reason of its intricacy and difficulty, and that no one else ever can or will, and yet we see the thing none the less done daily and hourly all round us, then we are not content to say we do not understand how the thing is done, we go further and ascribe the action to God. As soon as there is felt to be an unknown and apparently unknowable element, then, but not till then, does the idea God present itself to us. So at coroners’ inquests juries never say the deceased died by the visitation of God if they know any of the more proximate causes.

It is not God, therefore, who sows the corn—we could sow corn ourselves, we can see the man with a bag in his hand walking over ploughed fields and sowing the corn broadcast—but it is God who made the man who goes about with the bag, and who makes the corn sprout, for we do not follow the processes that take place here.

As long as we knew nothing about what caused this or that weather we used to ascribe it to God’s direct action and pray him to change it according to our wants: now that we know more about the weather there is a growing disinclination among clergymen to pray for rain or dry weather, while laymen look to nothing but the barometer. So people do not say God has shown them this or that when they have just seen it in the newspapers; they would only say that God had shown it them if it had come into their heads suddenly and after they had tried long and vainly to get at this particular point.

To lament that we cannot be more conscious of God and understand him better is much like lamenting that we are not more conscious of our circulation and digestion. Provided we live according to familiar laws of health, the less we think about circulation and digestion the better; and so with the ordinary rules of good conduct, the less we think about God the better.

To know God better is only to realise more fully how impossible it is that we should ever know him at all. I cannot tell which is the more childish—to deny him, or to attempt to define him.

Scylla and Charybdis

They are everywhere. Just now coming up Great Russell Street I loitered outside a print shop. There they were as usual—Hogarth’s Idle and Virtuous Apprentices. The idle apprentice is certainly Scylla, but is not the virtuous apprentice just as much Charybdis? Is he so greatly preferable? Is not the right thing somewhere between the two? And does not the art of good living consist mainly in a fine perception of when to edge towards the idle and when towards the virtuous apprentice?

When John Bunyan (or Richard Baxter, or whoever it was) said “There went John Bunyan, but for the grace of God” (or whatever he did say), had he a right to be so cock-sure that the criminal on whom he was looking was not saying much the same thing as he looked upon John Bunyan? Does any one who knows me doubt that if I were offered my choice between a bishopric and a halter, I should choose the halter? I believe half the bishops would choose the halter themselves if they had to do it over again.

Philosophy

As a general rule philosophy is like stirring mud or not letting a sleeping dog lie. It is an attempt to deny, circumvent or otherwise escape from the consequences of the interlacing of the roots of things with one another. It professes to appease our ultimate “Why?” though in truth it is generally the solution of a _simplex ignotum_ by a _complex ignotius_. This, at least, is my experience of everything that has been presented to me as philosophy. I have often had my “Why” answered with so much mystifying matter that I have left off pressing it through fatigue. But this is not having my ultimate “Why?” appeased. It is being knocked out of time.

Philosophy and Equal Temperament

It is with philosophy as with just intonation on a piano, if you get everything quite straight and on all fours in one department, in perfect tune, it is delightful so long as you keep well in the middle of the key; but as soon as you modulate you find the new key is out of tune and the more remotely you modulate the more out of tune you get. The only way is to distribute your error by equal temperament and leave common sense to make the correction in philosophy which the ear does instantaneously and involuntarily in music.

Hedging the Cuckoo

People will still keep trying to find some formula that shall hedge-in the cuckoo of mental phenomena to their satisfaction. Half the books—nay, all of them that deal with thought and its ways in the academic spirit—are but so many of these hedges in various stages of decay.

God and Philosophies

All philosophies, if you ride them home, are nonsense; but some are greater nonsense than others. It is perhaps because God does not set much store by or wish to encourage them that he has attached such very slender rewards to them.

Common Sense, Reason and Faith

Reason is not the ultimate test of truth nor is it the court of first instance.

For example: A man questions his own existence; he applies first to the court of mother-wit and is promptly told that he exists; he appeals next to reason and, after some wrangling, is told that the matter is very doubtful; he proceeds to the equity of that reasonable faith which inspires and transcends reason, and the judgment of the court of first instance is upheld while that of reason is reversed.

Nevertheless it is folly to appeal from reason to faith unless one is pretty sure of a verdict and, in most cases about which we dispute seriously, reason is as far as we need go.

The Credit System

The whole world is carried on on the credit system; if every one were to demand payment in hard cash, there would be universal bankruptcy. We think as we do mainly because other people think so. But if every one stands on every one else, what does the bottom man stand on? Faith is no foundation, for it rests in the end on reason. Reason is no foundation, for it rests upon faith.

Argument

We are not won by argument, which is like reading and writing and disappears when there is need of such vanity, or like colour that vanishes with too much light or shade, or like sound that becomes silence in the extremes. Argument is useless when there is either no conviction at all or a very strong conviction. It is a means of conviction and as such belongs to the means of conviction, not to the extremes. We are not won by arguments that we can analyse, but by tone and temper, by the manner which is the man himself.

Logic and Philosophy

When you have got all the rules and all the lore of philosophy and logic well into your head, and have spent years in getting to understand at any rate what they mean and have them at command, you will know less for practical purposes than one who has never studied logic or philosophy.

Science

If it tends to thicken the crust of ice on which, as it were, we are skating, it is all right. If it tries to find, or professes to have found, the solid ground at the bottom of the water, it is all wrong. Our business is with the thickening of this crust by extending our knowledge downward from above, as ice gets thicker while the frost lasts; we should not try to freeze upwards from the bottom.

Religion

A religion only means something so certainly posed that nothing can ever displace it. It is an attempt to settle first principles so authoritatively that no one need so much as even think of ever re-opening them for himself or feel any, even the faintest, misgiving upon the matter. It is an attempt to get an irrefragably safe investment, and this cannot be got, no matter how low the interest, which in the case of religion is about as low as it can be.

Any religion that cannot be founded on half a sheet of note-paper will be bottom-heavy, and this, in a matter so essentially of sentiment as religion, is as bad as being top-heavy in a material construction. It must of course catch on to reason, but the less it emphasises the fact the better.

Logic

Logic has no place save with that which can be defined in words. It has nothing to do, therefore, with those deeper questions that have got beyond words and consciousness. To apply logic here is as fatuous as to disregard it in cases where it is applicable. The difficulty lies, as it always does, on the border lines between the respective spheres of influence.

Logic and Faith

Logic is like the sword—those who appeal to it shall perish by it. Faith is appealing to the living God, and one may perish by that too, but somehow one would rather perish that way than the other, and one has got to perish sooner or later.

Common Sense and Philosophy

The voices of common sense and of high philosophy sometimes cross; but common sense is the unalterable canto fermo and philosophy is the variable counterpoint.

First Principles

It is said we can build no superstructure without a foundation of unshakable principles. There are no such principles. Or, if there be any, they are beyond our reach—we cannot fathom them; therefore, _qua_ us, they have no existence, for there is no other “is not” than inconceivableness by ourselves. There is one thing certain, namely, that we can have nothing certain; therefore it is not certain that we can have nothing certain. We are as men who will insist on looking over the brink of a precipice; some few can gaze into the abyss below without losing their heads, but most men will grow dizzy and fall. The only thing to do is to glance at the chaos on which our thoughts are founded, recognise that it is a chaos and that, in the nature of things, no theoretically firm ground is even conceivable, and then to turn aside with the disgust, fear and horror of one who has been looking into his own entrails.

Even Euclid cannot lay a demonstrable premise, he requires postulates and axioms which transcend demonstration and without which he can do nothing. His superstructure is demonstration, his ground is faith. And so his _ultima ratio_ is to tell a man that he is a fool by saying “Which is absurd.” If his opponent chooses to hold out in spite of this, Euclid can do no more. Faith and authority are as necessary for him as for any one else. True, he does not want us to believe very much; his yoke is tolerably easy, and he will not call a man a fool until he will have public opinion generally on his side; but none the less does he begin with dogmatism and end with persecution.

There is nothing one cannot wrangle about. Sensible people will agree to a middle course founded upon a few general axioms and propositions about which, right or wrong, they will not think it worth while to wrangle for some time, and those who reject these can be put into mad-houses. The middle way may be as full of hidden rocks as the other ways are of manifest ones, but it is the pleasantest while we can keep to it and the dangers, being hidden, are less alarming.

In practice it is seldom very hard to do one’s duty when one knows what it is, but it is sometimes exceedingly difficult to find this out. The difficulty is, however, often reducible into that of knowing what gives one pleasure, and this, though difficult, is a safer guide and more easily distinguished. In all cases of doubt, the promptings of a kindly disposition are more trustworthy than the conclusions of logic, and sense is better than science.

Why I should have been at the pains to write such truisms I know not.

XXI Rebelliousness

God and Life

WE regard these as two distinct things and say that the first made the second, much as, till lately, we regarded memory and heredity as two distinct things having less connection than even that supposed to exist between God and life. Now, however, that we know heredity to be only a necessary outcome, development and manifestation of memory—so that, given such a faculty as memory, the faculty of heredity follows as being inherent therein and bound to issue from it—in like manner presently, instead of seeing life as a thing created by God, we shall see God and life as one thing, there being no life without God nor God without life, where there is life there is God and where there is God there is life.

They say that God is love, but life and love are co-extensive; for hate is but a mode of love, as life and death lurk always in one another; and “God is life” is not far off saying “God is love.” Again, they say, “Where there is life there is hope,” but hope is of the essence of God, for it is faith and hope that have underlain all evolution.

God and Flesh

The course of true God never did run smooth. God to be of any use must be made manifest, and he can only be made manifest in and through flesh. And flesh to be of any use (except for eating) must be alive, and it can only be alive by being inspired of God. The trouble lies in the getting the flesh and the God together in the right proportions. There is lots of God and lots of flesh, but the flesh has always got too much God or too little, and the God has always too little flesh or too much.

Gods and Prophets

It is the manner of gods and prophets to begin: “Thou shalt have none other God or Prophet but me.” If I were to start as a god or a prophet, I think I should take the line:

“Thou shalt not believe in me. Thou shalt not have me for a god. Thou shalt worship any damned thing thou likest except me.” This should be my first and great commandment, and my second should be like unto it. {333}

Faith and Reason

The instinct towards brushing faith aside and being strictly reasonable is strong and natural; so also is the instinct towards brushing logic and consistency on one side if they become troublesome, in other words—so is the instinct towards basing action on a faith which is beyond reason. It is because both instincts are so natural that so many accept and so many reject Catholicism. The two go along for some time as very good friends and then fight; sometimes one beats and sometimes the other, but they always make it up again and jog along as before, for they have a great respect for one another.

God and the Devil

God’s merits are so transcendent that it is not surprising his faults should be in reasonable proportion. The faults are, indeed, on such a scale that, when looked at without relation to the merits with which they are interwoven, they become so appalling that people shrink from ascribing them to the Deity and have invented the Devil, without seeing that there would be more excuse for God’s killing the Devil, and so getting rid of evil, than there can be for his failing to be everything that he would like to be.

For God is not so white as he is painted, and he gets on better with the Devil than people think. The Devil is too useful for him to wish him ill and, in like manner, half the Devil’s trade would be at an end should any great mishap bring God well down in the world. For all the mouths they make at one another they play into each other’s hands and have got on so well as partners, playing Spenlow and Jorkins to one another, for so many years that there seems no reason why they should cease to do so. The conception of them as the one absolutely void of evil and the other of good is a vulgar notion taken from science whose priests have ever sought to get every idea and every substance pure of all alloy.

God and the Devil are about as four to three. There is enough preponderance of God to make it far safer to be on his side than on the Devil’s, but the excess is not so great as his professional claqueurs pretend it is. It is like gambling at Monte Carlo; if you play long enough you are sure to lose, but now and again you may win a great deal of excellent money if you will only cease playing the moment you have won it.

Christianity

i

As an instrument of warfare against vice, or as a tool for making virtue, Christianity is a mere flint implement.

ii

Christianity is a woman’s religion, invented by women and womanish men for themselves. The Church’s one foundation is not Christ, as is commonly said, it is woman; and calling the Madonna the Queen of Heaven is only a poetical way of acknowledging that women are the main support of the priests.

iii

It is not the church in a village that is the source of the mischief, but the rectory. I would not touch a church from one end of England to the other.

iv

Christianity is only seriously pretended by some among the idle, bourgeois middle-classes. The working classes and the most cultured intelligence of the time reach by short cuts what the highways of our schools and universities mislead us from by many a winding bout, if they do not prevent our ever reaching it.

v

It is not easy to say which is the more obvious, the antecedent improbability of the Christian scheme and miracles, or the breakdown of the evidences on which these are supposed to rest. And yet Christianity has overrun the world.

vi

If there is any moral in Christianity, if there is anything to be learned from it, if the whole story is not profitless from first to last, it comes to this that a man should back his own opinion against the world’s—and this is a very risky and immoral thing to do, but the Lord hath mercy on whom he will have mercy.

vii

Christianity is true in so far as it has fostered beauty and false in so far as it has fostered ugliness. It is therefore not a little true and not a little false.

viii

Christ said he came not to destroy but to fulfil—but he destroyed more than he fulfilled. Every system that is to live must both destroy and fulfil.

Miracles