Chapter IV (5)

With all his colossal powers, he was not, perhaps fortunately for us, what is usually called a genius: his conclusions were reasoned and consistent, and his likes and dislikes reliable. But he had not that intuitive power which leads a man like a bee in a quick straight line to the essential thing, or to put vast accumulations of truth into epigrams. He was enormously instructive and always entertaining, but he was seldom suggestive. He dealt in food, rather than in condiments. He had to plod to his conclusions in his irresistible elephantine way. To get rid of Christian dogmatism, when the first page of the Westminster Catechism is enough for some men, he had to read a library; and when he was twenty-two, he wrote Spencer that he had "successively adopted and rejected the system of almost every philosopher from Descartes to Professor Ferrier."

He had his faults like the rest of us, but not as many mean ones as most of us. He was hardly ever selfish or irritable or impatient: the elephant bides his time, though he never forgets. But Fiske was better than the elephant, in that he never harbored revenge. His few faults were "childlike and bland," though, unlike those of the accepted exemplar of those virtues, never deceitful, and to a great extent they were forced upon him by circumstances, and of course were "faults of his qualities"--of a mind that could not hold itself down to the business of life. But take him by and large--and he was so very large--he was not only a very great man, but a very good man. Yet he was not, nor was ever anybody else, such a man as biographers necessarily depict if they write while there are still living those whom the whole truth could hurt.

But our present biographer has not even brought out, except as they show themselves by implication, some of Fiske's remarkable virtues. During an acquaintance of very exceptional intimacy, I never heard him curse any human being or speak of one with merciless hate. Of one who, he thought, had injured him unjustifiably and cruelly, he generally made fun; of another, who presented fewer temptations to burlesque, he often spoke admiringly, and perhaps less often with a sarcasm doubly powerful because judicial.

He had absolutely no pride of intellect: partly, perhaps, because from childhood he naturally kept himself, by his chosen reading, in contact with the greatest intellects, and so was never struck with the greatness of his own. We had not been out of college long, and I had not made much progress out of the average new A. B.'s worship of intellect, when, as we were speaking of a common friend, I said something to the effect that I wished he had more brains (I now suspect that he had more than I had) when Fiske, who had more than both of us, made a few remarks, very kind though very instructive, on the superiority to mere intellectual power, of goodness, sympathy, and refinement. Once with a friend unknown to fame, who seemed a mere pigmy beside him, he had had a long talk with one of the world's greatest men, and Fiske was heard to say that he was struck throughout by the fact that his obscure friend showed more intelligence than _he_ did. The fact probably was that his friend's intelligence really was quicker than the elephantine but irresistible movements of Fiske's great mind. But Fiske did not think of his own power, but only of the agility of his friend. The friend subsequently said that he supposed he had understood all that was in the books of his two companions, but he certainly did not understand all that was in their talk--the talk in which Fiske had ascribed to himself the less intelligence. Another illustration: many years ago, when Taine was on the lips of all American readers, Fiske said: "He's a sort of big John Fiske--a diffuser of other men's ideas, without ever having originated an idea himself." Probably this was before Fiske had developed his own idea, generally recognized as original, of the effect of long infancy in evolving the higher qualities of a species.

Yet Fiske's distinction between finders and diffusers is not necessarily as modest as, at first sight, it appears, and certainly not as simple. Newton, Darwin, Spencer, and their kind undoubtedly form a very respectable group, but so do St. Paul and all the great apostles of all the faiths, not to speak of the historians. And on which side of the line, if you run it through all writers, will you put Homer, Dante, and Shakespear?

* * * * *

The world was never as full as it is just now of what pleases to consider itself "advanced thinking." Some of it is advanced, and a little of it is thinking; but most of it, all unknown to those who spout it, has been exploded over and over again. As a mass, its quality is such that one sometimes (but very rarely, it is to be feared) feels a half-humorous self-distrust in propounding the share of it that one believes in most. The risk has to be taken, however, and we venture to state what seem to us some of the profoundest and most important of our present views of the universe and man's relation to it, which, based very largely on the discoveries of Darwin and Spencer, especially of Spencer, Fiske, on the testimony of Darwin and Spencer themselves, did more than any other man had then done, or we think has yet done, to develop and disseminate. To extract them from his voluminous writings and state them in his own language, with the brevity required here, would be impossible. We have already said that he was not a maker of epigrams: the sweep of his mind was too broad and slow. When he gave you anything, he gave you the whole of it, because, strangely often, he knew the whole of it, so far as anybody did; but he gave only its essentials: he was never a bore.

The Law of Evolution contains nothing counter to the Moral Law: it only changes the old sanctions of it. In the control of the universe, it substitutes for an anthropomorphic, tinkering, and even "jealous" God, a Law that varies not, and, despite terrible apparent exceptions, on the whole makes for righteousness and for happiness. Even now, while most of the world is steeped more than ever before in anxiety and grief, and while scores of miles are covered with slaughter, the vast preponderance of the earth's surface is covered with beauty, and the vast majority of human beings are smiling. Moreover, the Law of Evolution indicates that the favorable conditions are to increase for a period longer than we can conceive, and then gradually and painlessly disappear, to be revived in a new evolution.

The discovery of the Law of Evolution has already done much to solve the mystery of evil. Catastrophism is a corollary of it: if there were no imperfection there could be no advance. Evil comes from a lack of balance between forces. When balance is disturbed--by anything from indigestion in a protozoon up to a storm on the ocean where he lives, there is a catastrophe. Evil is not a positive thing, but merely lack of the good, or lack of proportion in the good--inadequacy or excess, the excess being when a force or a passion good in itself exceeds the forces that usually keep it within bounds--when one force of those that hold the earth's crust in equilibrium becomes excessive, and there is earthquake; when love of country seeks to expand it, at the expense of other countries, and there is war; when the appetite that creates and conserves property exceeds the respect for the rights of others, and there is theft or robbery or even murder; when the passion that perpetuates the race grows to excess, and its rightful result in the family is prevented or destroyed, often with attendant deceit, violence, murder.

When Rochefoucauld said: "Our virtues are most frequently but vices disguised," he said an impossible thing, and spoke, as most proverb makers do, from mere habit of paradox and love of it. He would have told a fundamental truth, however, if he had said: Our vices are most frequently but virtues disguised--by inflation.

But deeper in the individual soul than any of these problems, is one that Evolution has as yet directly done little to clarify. In substituting for Providence, a wisdom that (so far as our poor wits can state the conditions) provided for the exigencies beforehand by Law, instead of constantly handling them as they arise, Evolution raises the question: How far down into the details of our lives does the law go? Of all questions bearing upon our lives, there is but one deeper and more anxious: Does the law work out for good as far as it goes? Perhaps the answer can be settled only by experience, and judgment depends largely on temperament. And yet experience has provided all thinking peoples with expressions that assert a favorable solution. Job was not the first to say: "Though He slay me, yet will I trust in Him." All literatures abound in such expressions, as Pope's

All chance, direction, which thou canst not see;
All discord, harmony not understood;
All partial evil, universal good:
And, spite of pride, in erring reason's spite,
One truth is clear, Whatever is, is right.

(Never deny that it's as near right as it _can_ be.) And there are many such expressions as Tennyson's

Oh yet we trust that somehow good
Will be the final goal of ill,

or as Paul's

Whom the Lord loveth He chasteneth,

or Shakespear's

There is some soul of goodness in things evil,

or Thomson's

From seeming evil still educing good,

or Emerson's

Every evil [has] its good.

If the intuitions of these men in advance of the race are not foolishness, this matter must be regulated by some great principle--perhaps some corollary of "the law of compensation," that has been so generally guessed at--notably by Emerson, and which seems closely akin to the Law of Equilibration, whose demonstration by Spencer has no small claim to be considered the highest reach of the human mind.

Few men have given, or even recognized, an answer from their own experience. Few men, even, live long enough for experience to give very full indication. Whatever may be the egotism of obtruding here personal experience on a point so intimate, I follow what in this connection seems almost a duty, in stating the conviction of a very long life which has known its share of shadow, that in the average man under average circumstances the Divine Law does go down farther into the details of our lives than we can realize, and there work out good from apparent evil. Yet though the question as we stated it above, in terms of Law instead of Providence, is not entirely new to thinkers, before the latter part of the last century it had been as vague as had been the conceptions of Evolution. It seems but yesterday, and it is with a start that one realizes that this epoch is already superseded by one where the range of mind must be mapped out anew, and where reaches of it that Fiske pronounced impossible are declared by no mean observers to have actually been accomplished.

It is, however, questionable how far the testimony of poets and imaginative thinkers is the result of optimistic generalization, and how far the result of strict experience. As sober a man as Socrates said that his attendant monitor always kept him right. Had he had the modern conception of the universal beneficent Law, and the very modern conception of impressions, _under Law_, from discarnate intelligences, perhaps he would have regarded that attendant of his as a manifestation from the source of all Law--of that Law whose penetration into the minutiae of our lives we are now considering.

Now if you are in the habit of testing questions by the law of Evolution, ask yourself (if you have not already done so and obtained a satisfactory answer), at what point in your processes and the processes of your environment, the operation of Law, and the resulting evolution, stops. Don't bother with the paradox of Free Will and Determinism, or any other paradox that proves a question to be beyond the range of our faculties, but accept the fact which you cannot escape, that your life is the result of the interaction of two processes of Law that manifestly tend on the whole to happiness, and perhaps you will find it as hard _not_ to believe that the beneficent Law goes down to the minutest details of your life, as it is _to_ believe a conception so novel and so tremendous.

It may not be unthinkable under average circumstances, but when the world is cursed as never before with carnage and outrage, in relation to the millions suffering one hesitates even to suggest such an idea. But this is hardly the time to pass upon it. And yet many sane people do pass upon it, and believe that out of all this agony more good than evil is to come, and to come to each person concerned. Such a belief, however, is generally based on faith in the immortality of the soul. Here comes in the pragmatic argument, never so strong as now. If these millions of bright young lives have been developed merely to be prematurely snuffed out at the behest of a barbarian mad with the lust of conquest, the universe is _pro tanto_ a farce. But if, in the glory of heroism and self-sacrifice, they are advanced to a higher stage of being, the sanity and beneficence of the universe are vindicated. True, the pragmatic argument is a dangerous thing, but in this most important particular, it never had so much support from positive evidence as now. It looks as if humanity were at last evolved to the point where the intuitions of the gifted of the ages, from Socrates to Swedenborg, may soon be supported by experience open to the observation of all.

In his day, Fiske did probably more than any other man to rationalize these leading ideas that are still little more than faiths, and to keep men's minds open to the best within our knowledge, and the influences that must exist beyond it.

PLEASE EXPLAIN THESE DREAMS

Your travels, your babies, and your dreams,--these, it is said, you may talk of only at your peril. And yet I am emboldened in this instance to defy the adage, though in general I believe it to be nearly incontestable, because I think I may excite a certain curiosity by recounting a kind of dream that comes to me occasionally, a dream not wonderful in substance but one that raises a question in psychology, or in common sense, to which I know no answer. I may say at once that there is nothing preternatural about the dream, nor anything, I think, that Freudian analysts will revel in. But there is none the less a puzzle which for me and for the persons whom I have consulted has remained completely baffling. What the puzzle is had best be stated at the outset.

Everybody is familiar with the kind of story that depends for its effect upon a surprising "point" that comes at the end, unanticipated by the hearer and amusing to him largely in proportion as it is unexpected. Stories of this kind are frequently elaborate; a great deal of detail is introduced, as artfully as possible, every bit of which must tantalizingly lead towards the point that is coming, but no word of which must really divulge that point until the moment when the _raconteur_ is ready to "spring" it, as we say, with a sudden burst. Obviously the listener must not guess the point before that moment, or the story will fall flat, and just as obviously the narrator must have it in mind continually, or he could not tell the story. He could hardly recount a tale of this variety unless he knew how it was "coming out." Especially if it were considerably involved, he could scarcely pick his way through it step by step towards an end that he did not himself foresee, arranging in their places dozens of details leading he knew not where, and then come nicely to a climax that he himself did not anticipate--a climax which, in this hardly conceivable case, would obviously surprise him as much as it could his listener. The waking mind, unless by the rarest of accidents, cannot work in such a fashion. And my puzzle is, how can the dreaming mind do so? For I, at least, do dream occasionally in just this manner. I make up a story of this species in my dream, and usually a complicated story. In it I proceed from point to point without having any notion of my destination; I string together a small host of details, though I remain ignorant of their meaning and unsuspicious of any climax that is coming later to explain them; and when finally I reach that climax, and see the joke that I have plotted so unwittingly, I am myself ingenuously amused by it. And how I manage to do this is my enigma. For obviously I either do foresee the point of the story or I do not. If I do, how can I be surprised when it arrives? If I do not, how can I prepare for it so carefully? Either case supposes a manner of mentation hardly comprehensible.

Two dreams of this species I should like to offer for consideration. I have had not less than twenty others, widely different in substance though all alike in principle; but the memory of most of them is vague if not entirely obliterated. Of the first dream here related I may say that I am repeating it from a fresh memory and am following the notes I made of it in full immediately upon awakening from it. The account here given is therefore as accurate as I can make it. I may further explain that the setting of the dream is a very natural one for me. I happen to be a college professor, and lecturing to classes is my daily round. Also I have lived in France, and have studied and written about the educational system of that country; and I number among my friends a distinguished French professor now visiting America. The bearing of these facts upon the dream will be clear in a moment.

I dreamt that I was lecturing to one of my regular classes in college. In the class, upon my entrance, I was surprised to find my friend the French professor, of whom I spoke a moment ago. With him there was an impressive individual whom I somehow recognized as a French inspector of schools--one of those officials whose visits to provincial schools and whose consequent reports to the minister at Paris are the chief hope and dread of the French pedagogue. How these gentlemen should have come to be visiting my class, I could not imagine, but I do not think I was much worried in the dream over that question. I do remember telling myself that as a mere American professor I had nothing to fear from the inspector's formidable authority, though perhaps with this reflection there went also a resolution to put my best foot forward in such distinguished company. But I had not much time to ponder these matters before proceeding upon my lecture.

It was then that a real surprise began. So far as I could tell, my opening sentences were sufficiently conventional, but the way the class was affected by them was singular to a degree. Hardly had I reached the middle of the first one before all the students had their eyes fixed on me in a way that might possibly have been complimentary had not their expressions been so various and so peculiar. A few students wore a look of great relief--for all the world as if they had expected to find me dumb on that day, and were agreeably surprised to be disillusioned. A considerably larger number frowned displeasure, just as if I had disturbed them in the pursuit of something that was no affair of mine. But the large majority showed mere astonishment, and of that emotion, indeed, a good measure was written on the faces of all. I had no notion what to make of these unusual appearances. Inevitably my first thought was to glance furtively down at my clothes and shoes to see if everything was well in those departments. Also I raised my hand as unobtrusively as possible to discover whether perchance I had left my hair uncombed. In the absence of the mirror's final test I had to conclude that all was about as it should be.

Naturally my next sentences hardly came trippingly from the tongue, nor did any alteration occur in my listeners to facilitate my labors. On the contrary, what had at first been mainly mere surprise upon their faces was growing rapidly to obvious merriment with about half of the class, and to evident disapprobation with the others. "The explanation of what we call the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century," I remember hurling at them with a fine generality of dream-eloquence, "is to be sought not so much in the influence of the doctrines of Descartes proper, or of those who could call themselves consistent Cartesians, as in the general dependence upon the guidance of human ratiocination, of which dependence he was only an illustrious example." This remarkable statement did not seem to offend any of my hearers, but neither did it mollify them. By a considerable effort, however, I was regaining a measure of composure, as I proceeded into my subject, in spite of all the frowners and all the titterers in the class. There was nothing to do, I felt, but to brave both parties, and in some degree, as the minutes dragged on, I seemed to be succeeding in the effort. At least there was less staring at me, and one after another the faces of my students were turned down to the desks, and pens began to course across pages in what appeared to me to be good note-taking fashion.

But I was soon to find that my troubles had only begun. The class had indeed ceased to perform like one man in astonishment, but various individuals now began to act in fashions unaccountably extraordinary. Not only did resentment at my lecture keep lingering, and growing, on many countenances, and not only did laughter keep bubbling up in others, but now certain more specific eccentricities began exhibiting themselves. A mild instance was the action of one of my most devoted note-takers, a woman who sat on the front row. She had always taken too many notes, as I had observed; she never missed anything important, and she frequently copied down much that was far from important. And now I noticed that in the middle of certain cardinal statements I was making, and even making slowly in order that every one who wanted them in a note-book might have time to get them fully, she took her pen from the paper, and meditatively putting the end of it in her mouth, proceeded to gaze out of the window into vacancy as if trying to think what on earth to write next.

But this, as I say, was mild. That particular student was too well-bred to be ruder. So was another girl on the front row who, a little later, laid aside her pen and paper and sank her head for several minutes into her hands in such a way as to make me wonder whether she was suffering from headache or whether she was politely veiling an outbreak of laughter such as certain other members of the class were at no such pains to conceal. Certainly when her face emerged it was clear that she had not even been smiling. She looked at me fixedly for a minute, with such an inquiring though guarded glance as one might give a stranger whom one half suspected of mild lunacy, and then resumed work with her pen. There were numerous examples of similarly harmless but abnormal conduct, and I had no choice but to endure them in wondering patience. But when one sedate and trusted student, also a woman, who sat in the rear of the class, deliberately caught my eye and then impressively laid her finger tightly over her closed lips, thus giving me the unmistakable signal for silence, my astonishment and bewilderment grew amain. What on earth could be wrong with me, I asked myself, that I should be bedevilling my students in this fashion? What absurdity was at the bottom of all this? Had everybody in my class gone crazy? Or had I?

Somehow I went on lecturing. As I remember it now, the lecture seemed orthodox enough, in spite of the strange events that it inspired. I felt that I was acquitting myself moderately well, though I remember that I mopped my brow repeatedly, and longed for the end of the period as I had never longed for time to pass before. What would my visitors think of me, or of this precious class of mine? I alone had seen that mute sign for silence, to be sure, but no one could fail to notice the other preposterous things that were coming to pass. For now three men toward the rear of the class began, seemingly by agreement between them, to shake their heads at me in a solemn and unequivocal signal that I would do better to leave off my lecture. This, I thought, would be the worst; but no, in a moment one man actually stepped up to my desk, and when I paused, whispered a very apologetic request that I would not trouble the class further by lecturing on this particular day. He had listened with great interest to my former lectures, he was pleased to say, but he felt that he was speaking for the whole class in intimating that to-day I could not but disturb them, and in fact endanger them, if I continued. I told him that he could save himself from further danger by quitting the room; and this he did forthwith, his reluctance exceeded only by his apparent amazement.

The others seemed to understand what had passed between us, though I was sure that they could not have overheard a word we said. Four or five of them, indeed, rose and followed their departing brother from their room, with faces as full of bewilderment as his. But I was past wondering at anything by this time. Endeavoring to seem indifferent to their departure, I ploughed on, with a pertinacity far beyond anything I possess in a waking state, through the middle of my lecture. I had come to Rousseau and his battle with the apostles of the Enlightenment. And about this point the craziest of all the occurrences of this remarkable hour began. A man on the front row picked up a card-board box from the floor near his feet. Opening it, he produced a roll of absorbent cotton. With bits of this he deliberately set about stopping up his ears as tightly as he could. When he had stuffed them full he resumed work with his pen, but passed the cotton, with a wink, on to his neighbor, who repeated the performance. A third student filled his organs of audition and handed the box on to a fourth. I watched that blessed roll of cotton make its round of the students. One and all of them, men and women, stuffed their ears with it!

How I managed to keep on talking is rather more than I can tell. I can only say that I continued automatically, and paid the slightest possible attention to the antics with which my auditors were pleased to amuse themselves. I was but little surprised when, after a while, they began to leave. Not concertedly, but one by one, they rose and passed out, still lowering, giggling, trembling, looking askance at me, or exhibiting some other inexplicable emotion as they departed. Each one, with whatever mien, took pains to leave a record in the form of a few sheets of paper deposited on my desk as he passed out, but I was too callous or too distraught by this time to do more than barely notice the circumstance. As for my visitors from France, they had long since disappeared--not by walking out, like the students, but simply by vanishing, as people in a dream occasionally do. I kept lecturing, doggedly, until I had only three students left. But when two of these arose together and took their departure, I knew nothing to do but cease. The one auditor remaining, for that matter, was even now about to rise from his seat. I paused. I waited as he came slowly forward, with wonder and distress written on his features--he was easily the best scholar in the class. As I eyed him I could see that he, like so many of the rest, seemed to be half afraid that I had lost my mind. We shall see about that, I thought, as I addressed him.

"Will you kindly tell me, sir," I asked him, with some warmth, "Will you kindly tell me what I have done to deserve such conduct as I have seen this last hour? Have all my students gone mad, or have I?"

Evidently I had, he thought, as was obvious in his face. But he was too cautious to say so. Instead, he manifestly did his best to placate what to him was arrant lunacy.

"Well, professor," he faltered, "I've no doubt we've been behaving rather badly. But, you see, we--well, we simply couldn't make out why you should want to lecture all through the examination hour!"

So that, of all things, was the explanation! I had simply lectured straight through their examination, and small wonder they took it strangely. How I had managed to make such a fool of myself, I did not know; but at once all their queer actions of the last hour were explained to me. And what a joke on me! How like the absent-minded, umbrella-carrying professor of the caricaturists--I protest I am not that kind--to have forgotten that I had set the examination for that day, had even sent a secretary into the class five minutes ahead of me to distribute the question-papers, and to have gone in then and insisted on haranguing the class, in spite of all protest, through the whole session!

And thus laughing at my exploit, I awoke. Needless to say, my amusement continued into the waking state, though it was somewhat less whole-hearted. But it was soon cut short by my jumping out of bed to put down the notes of the dream that I have here expanded.

I fear it is not a very interesting dream in itself, but that I did not promise. Surely it is one that answers the description given at the outset, and illustrates the species somewhat elaborately. Can any one imagine a person when awake making up such a story, planning so many details of it so carefully, without an inkling in his mind of the explanation that was to come to clear up all the mystery in the end? I do not believe so. But if not, how can one do in a dream a thing so impossible in a wakeful state? I, the dreamer, involve myself in a story in which I fabricate a series of occurrences incomprehensible to me unless I have the key that explains them, a series that nobody could well string together unless he had that key. One would say that I must have had the key in my possession as I pieced together the occurrences. Well, then, how could I be totally perplexed at those occurrences as they were happening, and how could I be astounded and provoked to laughter when I produced my own explanation of them? This is surely too much like believing that a magician will be amazed at his own trick.

Let me recount one other dream of this variety, a shorter one but possibly even more pointed. As it occurred to me some months ago, and as it comprises only an after-dinner speech, I cannot now pretend to report the words of it with literal accuracy. But that is not necessary if the reader will take my assurance that though I do not give the precise words of the speech as I heard it in the dream, I offer a version similar enough to be quite as satisfactory for the present purpose, and differing in no point of principle from the original. The very vacuity of the present version will be sufficient evidence, I hope, of my endeavor to be as faithful as possible to the original. I even feel that I must request the reader not to be disdainful of the puns that embellish the oration, since it is something other than the art of rhetoric that is here in question.

"Ladies and gentlemen," said the speaker, a man who by the way is celebrated as a post-prandial artist, but who need not be blamed in person for this coruscation, "we have with us this evening a man who bears an honorable and formidable name, a name which, in at least one person who possessed it, is enrolled on the tablets of immortality. It is a bellicose name, and therefore timely enough. But it need make no one tremble, since its most illustrious possessor loved to make the world shake with laughter as well as wince before the levelled spear of his sarcasm. I will not say that our guest of the evening has all the talents of what a tipsy man might call his great 'name-shake;' but I will answer for it that he can himself give a good imitation of what our school-boys sometimes call the 'music of the spears.' However, I will 'no be speiring,' as the Scotch say, into their further similarities; I prefer simply to present to you, ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Shakespeare."

And then all the audience laughed, and I laughed with them. I laughed because I was taken by surprise when the name came and explained all the puns that had preceded it. Not by the slightest suspicion had I anticipated the name; on the contrary, I had been genuinely puzzled by the queer locutions introductory to it, for I did not even realize that they were puns upon a name that was to be pronounced later. No doubt the puns are vapid enough (though vastly amusing in a dream) but they are also fairly elaborate, and in the dream I think they were considerably more so than in the transcript here set down from memory. The question is, how can one dream a thing of this kind? For I, the dreamer, made up all those puns, since I, of course, concocted the speech I dreamed. And either I knew the name that I was punning on, or else I did not know it. If I knew it, how could I be astonished into laughter when it came to light in the dream? And if I did not know it, how could I invent a lot of puns on it? What process of cerebration was I guilty of?

I know no answer to this question, and therefore I submit it to the public. In the literature of dreams that I have perused I have found neither a solution of the present problem nor any instance of the kind of dream here mentioned. Informally I have consulted two or three psychologists of my acquaintance, but though they have been interested in the question, they have been unable to suggest an explanation. Only one other person that I know experiences such dreams as these, and he is as much interested in them as I am; but although he is himself a bit of a psychologist, he has no answer to the question here propounded. Can any one do better?

* * * * *

As has been said before in these pages, considerable attention to the topics covered by "Psychical Research" has given us a very strong suspicion that the autonomy of each mind is telepathically shared by other minds, and farther that this is due to a degree of identity of all mind somewhat similar to the identity of all force and all matter--this identity of force and matter being now well recognized, despite the individual manifestations of all three in our personalities.

Between minds a degree of identity--or at least of telepathic connection or intermingling, is abundantly manifested by the appearance of several personalities, or seeming personalities, through the sensitive persons generally called mediums, and this whether the personalities additional to the medium's ordinary one are incarnate or apparently postcarnate.

From these indications follows very directly the guess that such dreams as our contributor recounts are not really of his construction, but are constructed outside of him, and not necessarily by excarnate agencies, or even by deliberate agencies. How or where or by whom must be left for future knowledge to indicate.

We have had dreams of the nature of those described by our contributor, and have correlated them with others entirely beyond construction by our own capacities.--EDITOR.

CORRESPONDENCE

_More Freedom from Hereditary Bias_

8 State Circle, Annapolis, Md.,
9 February, 1918.

GENTLEMEN:

I have your printed circular of 25 January, with an enclosed
bill for a subscription to the UNPOPULAR REVIEW through 1918.
I have, perhaps unfortunately, not received the January issue
of the review, which you say you sent me. This is no doubt due
to my removal from Princeton, New Jersey, and to the lethargic
Princeton post-office.

I had several reasons for not renewing my subscription. One
was a need for economy, and the feeling that I could better do
without the UNPOPULAR than without such a periodical as the
_New Republic_. Of the two, the UNPOPULAR mirrors much the
more closely some of my own convictions and principles; but I
find the _New Republic_ indispensable if I am to keep in touch
with the aims and purposes of present-day American Liberalism.

Another reason I had for not renewing was that the UNPOPULAR,
starting its career with the very greatest promise, had, to my
humble mind, managed very quickly to run up various
side-tracks and blind alleys of opinion, and has
since--amiably but with complacency--stuck there. And there I
am content to leave it, for in losing reality it has lost
life.

The lightness of touch which its editor has creditably sought
to impart to its contents will not do as a substitute for
life. And even that attempt has failed; it has resulted too
often in mere pertness or a lumbering buffoonery never
agreeable to contemplate, and least of all when invoked in aid
of a cause that demands above all earnest conviction and
anything but a stupid complacency from its adherents.

Yours faithfully,
(signed) ROBERT SHAFER.

It may be interesting to compare with this a letter from another correspondent with a German name, printed in Number 17.

EN CASSEROLE

_If We Are Late_

There is every prospect that this number will be out unusually late, on account of the choke-up in transportation. At this writing the printer ought to be at work on the paper, which has already been on the way to him--from Philadelphia to Massachusetts--twenty-six days.

We hope our readers will not blame the delay to us, and that their patriotism will cheerfully endure it.

_The Kindly and Modest German_

Here are some commonplaces that should be iterated in some shape every time an American organ of opinion goes to press.

There once was such a man as the kindly and modest German, and through his virtues he had nearly obtained the industrial and commercial leadership of the world, when sudden wealth and power aroused in him the brute instincts that are latent in the best of us, and started him after more than can be had from industry, and can be had only by force. The brute instincts were nearer the surface in him than in those who have a recorded civilization of some seven or eight thousand years: for the poor Germans, at least the ruling branch of them, have barely as many hundred. Even Russia was Christianized four centuries before Prussia.

Now it is a rare parvenu who is not conceited. Germany has camouflaged the old idea of conquest by that of spreading her Kultur to the inferior portion of mankind--to the peoples that produced Homer, Dante, Shakespear, Newton, Darwin and Spencer--as if those peoples were savages whose territory could be brought under civilization only by conquest, and as if Germany alone had civilization. And this absurd idea she backs up by a crude conception of the Law of Evolution--a conception that stops with the competition of brute forces. Cooeperation, mutual help, emulation in well doing do not enter into her idea of evolution. She has thrown away her splendid success in the higher competition, and reverted to the competition of brute force,--camouflaged again by science and cunning.

When a conceited parvenu goes mad, his conceit is as mad as the rest of him. When he is at the same time bellicose and bloodthirsty, he will not stop fighting as long as the conceit is in his system, and the only way to get it out is to whip it out.

It looks as if in Germany's case we had seriously underestimated one important feature of that job. For a long time we thought that we had got to beat only the military class--that they had merely fooled the kindly and modest Germans we used to know. As lately as this Spring, a British general told the present writer that his people did not expect the war to be ended by a military victory--that without an overwhelming superiority on either side, modern warfare has at last reached the degree of perfection long ago attained by the Kilkenny cats (only the general did not put it in that way), and that before, so to speak, the tails get through fighting, the kindly and modest German people would take matters into their own hands and stop the war, give up the plunder they have got from their weaker neighbors (for after all, barring their sudden occupation of a little of France, they have with all their boasting whipped only little or undeveloped peoples), and pay damages--as far as they can be paid. But it has come to look mightily as if the general and his people were mistaken--as if the kindly and modest German no longer exists, as if the madness has seized the whole nation, and as if there will be no way out before we give one side the overwhelming superiority which was the general's alternative. Plainly we can't be too quick about it.

Before the conceit is whipped out of the Germans, they are not going to submit to any peace short of holding on to their plunder, and as long as they have enough of that to be visible, they are victors, and with all their conceit in them. It would drive them into another war as soon as they could get ready, and even meanwhile the conditions would be intolerable--intolerable not only for the small peoples they have conquered, but for the rest of us.

But things are very respectably intolerable as they are. We have barely entered the war, and yet you are exceptionally fortunate if your income has not been pinched, your affairs generally disturbed, heavy anxieties thrown upon you, and perhaps, even thus early, mourning. Possibly you have found a grim consolation in realizing that most of the time since the beginning of human records, our present lot has been the lot of the greater portion of mankind. Perhaps you have found a consolation less grim in realizing that this state of affairs has been diminishing--very notably diminishing during the century preceding this war; and it is to be hoped that you have found a consolation almost triumphant in the realization that a large portion of the world at last realizes that such conditions can be put an end to, and are grimly determined to do it. But unless it is done thoroughly, unless the Kaiser and his gang are as safely disposed of as Napoleon and his gang were after Waterloo, these conditions are going to recur indefinitely.

Waterloo put an end to _gloire_, but it did not quite end the idea of the legitimacy of conquering civilized people and good neighbors--it did not make impossible the attitude of the German statesman who, when asked by our ambassador Hill why Germany did not conciliate Alsace-Lorraine, answered without the slightest suspicion that he was showing himself a barbarian: "But we have conquered them." It was this attitude which gradually changed Germany's preparations against France's possible _revanche_ after 1870, into a scheme to conquer the world. This antiquated idea of right by conquest, and this barbarous passion for it, have done more than anything else, except perhaps dogmatic religions, for the misery of mankind. This attitude survives, among lettered nations, only in Germany and her allies. We have got to fight until we kill it, no matter how many treaties of peace intervene: and it will not be killed as long as Germany is left in possession of a foot of the territory she has seized during the present war.

All these considerations render the idea of a "Peace without victory" worse than a mere disgusting piece of sentimentalism. They render it a danger, and one that unless obliterated, sooner or later must explode.

But behind all that, it is absurd in its very conception. What could be more ridiculous than a treaty with Germany? It would of course be ridiculous on the part of a nation that did not intend to keep it, but on the part of a nation that did intend to keep it, it would be doubly ridiculous. Nothing can be plainer than that real peace cannot be reached, no matter what treaties and intervals of nominal peaces intervene, before Germany has her conceit whipped out of her, and whipped out so thoroughly that, as in Napoleon's case, there will be no need for discussion or pretended agreements, but that she will simply be told what she must do, and made to do it.

At one time there was hope that the kindly and modest German the elders among us knew, would take hold and attend to the matter himself. But he is not here to do it: we have got to do it ourselves, and we cannot afford to flinch, or dally, or stop half way.

_What the Cat Thinks of the Dog_

I am not altogether sure whether I like the Dog or merely tolerate him. It puzzles me to say just what I do, in a manner, like about my house-companion. For a certainty, his manners are very distressing, and they evoke my most hearty disapproval. I cannot abide those rude volcanic barking fits of his. Often, when lying snugly tail-enfolded by the gently warming kitchen stove, lost in a comfortable dreamless doze--how delicious this semi-Nirvana of the senses!--I would suddenly be startled into undesired wakefulness by my friend's frenzied howls. You'd think he had wanted to call my attention to a mouse recently entrapped or, at least, to the arrival of the butcher with a fat quarter of lamb wherefrom one might expect the carving of good cheer for him and me. But no! nine times out of ten it would but be some uninteresting urchin whom he had caught sight of through the window, and who was sauntering a block away with an insolent swagger that could not but arouse my profound contempt. I sometimes find it far from easy to keep my temper in such circumstances and to refrain from wishing him and his urchin a watery grave the next time they betake themselves to the river for swimming and diving sports. Yet I must not judge him harshly. An unkind nature has granted him a most unmusical, a most nerve-shattering voice, incapable of the least culture.

I take much exception also to the ungentle and ungraceful manner in which he swings his tail, or rather flips it back and forth and jerks it up and down, for one can hardly talk of swinging where no smooth delicately rounded curves are perceptible. How inferior, both by heredity and by training, is the Dog's handling of his tail to that of the Cat! How little he understands the art of curving and waving and uncurving the tail in the nicely nuanced rhythms and exquisitely designed patterns that are so familiar to ourselves! If the aerial artistry of the Cat's tail may be fitly compared to the beautifully rounded brushwork of our Chinese laundrymen when, as I have incidentally observed him more than once, he prepares his stock of wash tickets, the tail movements of the Dog remind me of nothing so much as the ugly zigzagging and unsymmetrical lines that my master's little boy produces, squeakingly, on his slate in his vain attempts to draw a locomotive (at least I gather, from various remarks that I have overheard, that this is what he has in mind). No, there is not the slightest reason to allow for an aesthetic strain in my friend's psychology. Frankly, I do not believe he knows the difference between an Impressionist masterpiece and a bill-board daub. Nothing, further, can be more absurd than the frequency with which the Dog's rapid and angular tail movements are executed. No sooner does the master, or his little boy, or the mistress, or even the garbage man appear, than this tail that I speak of is set furiously wagging and swishing, often at the cost of a cup or plate which may happen to be within reach of its tufted point. I wonder that they tolerate him in the kitchen at all. I shall never forget the time that, excited beyond control at the unexpected return of the master from a fishing excursion, he scampered about madly and lashed his tail from side to side with the utmost fury. Well accustomed by this time to his vulgar ways, I paid little attention to the hubbub but continued quietly lapping up my saucer of milk, when I was suddenly stunned by a powerful swish of the Dog's milk-spattered tail against my face. Angered beyond expression, both by the Dog's extreme rudeness and by the almost total loss of a savory meal, I was about to scratch out his eyes, but the evident unwillingness of the maid to suffer retaliatory measures, and the reflection on my part that the Dog's conduct, reprehensible as it was, had not been dictated by any unfriendly feeling for myself, prevented a scrimmage. It was as well, for nothing pains me more than to part company with my dignity, even if only for a moment.

In view of so many just grounds for complaint,--and there are many that I might add,--it puzzles me, I repeat, to say just what I like about the Dog. Can it be that, living, as we do, under the same roof, and thus forced by circumstance to put up with each other for better or for worse, we have become habituated to a common lot, and learned to ignore the numerous divergencies of taste and philosophy? From a strictly scientific standpoint, this is an excellent explanation of our mutual forbearance, but I am afraid that sincerity prevents me from accepting it as a completely satisfying solution of the problem. How comes it that, when the Dog, in company with his master, has absented himself from the house for a period of more than usual length, as once for a week's hunting jaunt, I find myself getting fidgety and morose, as though there were something missing to complete my usual feeling of contentment? And how comes it that last year, when the Dog's right forefoot was caught in the door, and he set up a caterwauling (excuse the Hibernicism) that made him a frightful nuisance for the rest of the day, I, who would ordinarily have been the first to resent such a noise, as evidencing a deplorable lack of vocal self-control and taste, did on the contrary feel no small amount of sympathy for the suffering wretch? I imagine that there was something about the tilt of my tail and the glance in my eye that communicated my compassion to the Dog, for the next day he seemed a trifle more considerate of my preferences than had been his wont. I construed this as a species of thankfulness on his part. (Yet I would not lay too great stress on this; he may merely have had an attack of the blues, as a result of his recent misadventure.) And how comes it, farther, that I felt considerably nettled the other day when the neighbor's boy kicked the Dog three times in succession? Prudence, to be sure, prevented my taking up an active defence of my friend, but I certainly felt at least an indefinite impulse in that direction.