Phaethon: Loose Thoughts for Loose Thinkers

“Before that event happened, my dear fellow?  Pardon me, but your tone is somewhat irreverent.”

“Very likely.  I had no reason put before me for regarding such a change as anything but an unpleasant doom, which would cut me off, or ought to do so, from field sports, from poetry, from art, from science, from politics—for Christians, I was told, had nothing to do with the politics of this world—from man and all man’s civilisation, in short; and leave to me, as the only two lawful indulgences, those of living in a good house, and begetting a family of children.”

“And did you throw off the old Creeds for the sake of the civilisation which you fancied that they forbid?”

“No.  I am a Churchman, you know; principally on political grounds, or from custom, or from—the devil knows what, perhaps—I do not.”

“Probably it is God, and not the devil, who knows why, Templeton.”

“Be it so—Frightful as it is to have to say it—I do not so much care—I suppose it is all right: if it is not, it will all come right at last.  And in the meantime, I compromise, like the rest of the world; and hear Jane making the children every week-day pray that they may become God’s children, and then teaching them every Sunday evening the Catechism, which says that they are so already.  I don’t understand it—I suppose if it was important, one would understand it.  One knows right from wrong, you know, and other fundamentals.  If that were necessary, one would know that too.”

“But can you submit quietly to such a barefaced contradiction?”

“I?  I am only a plain country squire.  Of course I should call such dealing with an Act of Parliament a lie and a sham—But about these things, I fancy, the women know best.  Jane is ten thousand times as good as I am—you don’t know half her worth—And I haven’t the heart to contradict her—nor the right either; for I have no reasons to give her; no faith to substitute for hers.”

“Our friend, the High-Church curate, could have given you a few plain reasons, I should think.”

“Of course he could.  And I believe in my heart the man is in the right in calling Jane wrong.  He has honesty and common sense on his side, just as he has when he calls the present state of Convocation, in the face of that prayer for God’s Spirit on its deliberations, a blasphemous lie and sham.  Of course it is.  Any ensign in a marching regiment could tell us that from his mere sense of soldier’s honour.  But then—if she is wrong, is he right?  How do I know?  I want reasons: he gives me historic authorities.”

“And very good things too; for they are fair phenomena for induction.”

“But how will proving to me that certain people once thought a thing right prove to me that it is right?  Good people think differently every day.  Good people have thought differently about those very matters in every age.  I want some proof which will coincide with the little which I do know about science and philosophy.  They must fight out their own battle, if they choose to fight it on mere authority.  If one could but have the implicit faith of a child, it would be all very well: but one can’t.  If one has once been fool enough to think about these things, one must have reasons, or something better than mere ipse dixits, or one can’t believe them.  I should be glad enough to believe; do you suppose that I don’t envy poor dear Jane from morning to night?—but I can’t.  And so—”

“And so what?” asked I.

“And so, I believe, I am growing to have no religion at all, and no substitute for it either; for I feel I have no ground or reason for admiring or working out any subject.  I have tired of philosophy.  Perhaps it’s all wrong—at least I can’t see what it has to do with God, and Christianity, and all which, if it is true, must be more important than anything else.  I have tired of art for the same reason.  How can I be anything but a wretched dilettante, when I have no principles to ground my criticism on, beyond bosh about ‘The Beautiful’?  I did pluck up heart and read Mr. Ruskin’s books greedily when they came out, because I heard he was a good Christian.  But I fell upon a little tract of his, ‘Notes on Sheepfolds,’ and gave him up again, when I found that he had a leaning to that ‘Clapham sect.’  I have dropped politics: for I have no reason, no ground, no principle in them, but expediency.  When they asked me this summer to represent the interests of the county in Parliament, I asked them how they came to make such a mistake as to fancy that I knew what was their interest, or anyone else’s?  I am becoming more and more of an animal; fragmentary, inconsistent, seeing to the root of nothing, unable to unite things in my own mind.  I just do the duty which lies nearest, and looks simplest.  I try to make the boys grow up plucky and knowing—though what’s the use of it?  They will go to college with even less principles than I had, and will get into proportionably worse scrapes, I expect to be ruined by their debts before I die.  And for the rest, I read nothing but “The Edinburgh” and “The Agricultural Gazette.”  My talk is of bullocks.  I just know right from wrong enough to see that the farms are in good order, pay my labourers living wages, keep the old people out of the workhouse, and see that my cottages and schools are all right; for I suppose I was put here for some purpose of that kind—though what it is I can’t very clearly define—And there’s an end of my long story.”

“Not quite an animal yet, it seems?” said I with a smile, half to hide my own sadness at a set of experiences which are, alas! already far too common, and will soon be more common still.

“Nearer it than you fancy.  I am getting fonder and fonder of a good dinner and a second bottle of claret—about their meaning there is no mistake.  And my principal reason for taking the hounds two years ago was, I do believe, to have something to do in the winter which required no thought, and to have an excuse for falling asleep after dinner, instead of arguing with Jane about her scurrilous religious newspapers—There is a great gulf opening, I see, between me and her—And as I can’t bridge it over I may as well forget it.  Pah!  I am boring you, and over-talking myself.  Have a cigar, and let us say no more about it.  There is more here, old fellow, than you will cure by doses of Socratic Dialectics.”

“I am not so sure of that,” I replied.  “On the contrary, I should recommend you in your present state of mind to look out your old Plato as quickly as possible, and see if he and his master Socrates cannot give you, if not altogether a solution for your puzzle, at least a method whereby you may solve it yourself.  But tell me first—What has all this to do with your evident sympathy for a man so unlike yourself as Professor Windrush?”

“Perhaps I feel for him principally because he has broken loose from it all in desperation, just as I have.  But, to tell you the truth, I have been reading more than one book of his school lately; and, as I said, I owe you no thanks for demolishing the little comfort which I seemed to find in them.”

“And what was that then?”

“Why—in the first place, you can’t deny that however incoherent they may be they do say a great many clever things, and noble things too, about man, and society, and art, and nature.”

“No doubt of it.”

“And moreover, they seem to connect all they say with—with—I suppose you will laugh at me—with God, and spiritual truths, and eternal Divine laws; in short, to consecrate common matters in that very way, which I could not find in my poor mother’s teaching.”

“No doubt of that either.  And therein is one real value of them, as protests in behalf of something nobler and more unselfish than the mere dollar-getting spirit of their country.”

“Well, then, can you not see how pleasant it was to me to find someone who would give me a peep into the unseen world, without requiring as an entrance-fee any religious emotions and experiences?  Here I had been for years, shut out; told that I had no business with anything eternal, and pure, and noble, and good; that to all intents and purposes I was nothing better than a very cunning animal who could be damned; because I was still ‘carnal,’ and had not been through all Jane’s mysterious sorrows and joys.  And it was really good news to me to hear that they were not required after all, and that all I need do was to be a good man, and leave devotion to those who were inclined to it by temperament.”

“Not to be a good man,” said I, “but only a good specimen of some sort of man.  That, I think, would be the outcome of Emerson’s ‘Representative Men,’ or of those most tragic ‘Memoirs of Margaret Puller Ossoli.’”

“How then, hair-splitter?  What is the mighty difference?”

“Would you call Dick Turpin a good man, because he was a good highwayman?”

“What now?”

“That he would be an excellent representative man of his class; and therefore, on Mr. Emerson’s grounds, a fit subject for a laudatory lecture.”

“I hate reductiones ad absurdum.  Let Turpin take care of himself.  I suppose I do not belong to such a very bad sort of men, but that it may be worth my while to become a good specimen of it?”

“Certainly not; only I think, contrary to Mr. Emerson’s opinion, that you will not become even that, unless you first become something better still, namely, a good man.”

“There you are too refined for me.  But can you not understand, now, the causes of my sympathy even with Windrush and his ‘spirit of truth’?”

“I can, and those of many more.  It seems that you thought you found in that school a wider creed than the one to which you had been accustomed?”

“There was a more comprehensive view of humanity about them, and that pleased me.”

“Doubtless, one can be easily comprehensive if one comprehends good and bad, true and false, under one category, by denying the absolute existence of either goodness or badness, truth or falsehood.  But let the view be as comprehensive as it will, I am afraid that the creed founded thereon will not be very comprehensive.”

“Why then?”

“Because it will comprehend so few people; fewer even than the sect of those who will believe, with Mr. Emerson, that Harvey and Newton made their discoveries by the ‘Aristotelian method.’  The sect of those who believe that there is no absolute right and wrong, no absolute truth external to himself, discoverable by man, will, it seems to me, be a very narrow one to the end of time; owing to a certain primeval superstition of our race, who, even in barbarous countries, have always been Platonists enough to have some sort of instinct and hope that there was a right and a wrong, and truths independent of their own sentiments and faculties.  So that, though this school may enable you to fancy that you understand Lady Jane somewhat more, by the simple expedient of putting on her religious experiences an arbitrary interpretation of your own, which she would indignantly and justly deny, it will enable her to understand you all the less, and widen the gulf between you immeasurably.”

“You are severe.”

“I only wish you to face one result of a theory, which, while it pretends to offer the most comprehensive liberality, will be found to lead in practice to the most narrow and sectarian Epicurism for a cultivated few.  But for the many, struggling with the innate consciousness of evil, in them and around them—an instinctive consciousness which no argumentation about ‘evil being a lower form of good’ will ever explain away to those who ‘grind among the iron facts of life, and have no time for self-deception’—what good news for them is there in Mr. Emerson’s cosy and tolerant Epicurism?  They cry for deliverance from their natures; they know that they are not that which they were intended to be, because they follow their natures; and he answers them with: ‘Follow your natures, and be that which you were intended to be.’  You began this argument by stipulating that I should argue with you simply as a man.  Does Mr. Emerson’s argument look like doing that, or only arguing as with an individual of that kind of man, or rather animal, to which some iron Fate has compelled you to belong?”

“But, I say, these books have made me a better man.”

“I do not doubt it.  An earnest cultivated man, speaking his whole mind to an earnest cultivated man, will hardly fail of telling him something he did not know before.  But if you had not been a cultivated man, Templeton, a man with few sorrows, and few trials, and few unsatisfied desires—if you had been the village shopkeeper, with his bad debts, and his temptations to make those who can pay for those who cannot,—if you had been one of your own labourers, environed with the struggle for daily bread, and the alehouse, and hungry children, and a sick wife, and a dull taste, and a duller head—in short, if you had been a man such as nine out of ten are—what would his school have taught you then?  You want some truths which are common to men as men, which will help and teach them, let their temperament or their circumstances be what they will—do you not?  If you do not, your complaint of Lady Jane’s exclusive Creed is a mere selfish competition on your part, between a Creed which will fit her peculiarities, and a Creed which will fit your peculiarities.  Do you not see that?”

“I do—go on.”

“Then I say you will not find that in Professor Windrush’s school.  I say you will find it in Lady Jane’s Creed.”

“What?  In the very Creed which excludes me?”

“Whether that Creed excludes you or not is a question of the true meaning of its words.  And that again is a question of Dialectics.  I say it includes you and all mankind.”

“You must mistake her doctrines, then.”

“I do not, I assure you.  I know what they are; and I know, also, the misreading of them to which your dear mother’s school has accustomed her, and which has taught her that these Creeds only belong to the few who have discovered their own share in them.  But whether the Creeds really do that or not—whether Lady Jane does not implicitly confess that they do not by her own words and deeds of every day, that, I say, is a question of Dialectics, in the Platonic sense of that word, as the science which discovers the true and false in thought, by discovering the true and false concerning the meanings of words, which represent thought.”

“Be it so.  I should be glad to hold what Jane holds, for the sake of the marvellous practical effect on her character—sweet creature that she is!—which it has produced in the last seven years.”

“And which effect, I presume, was not increased by her denying to you any share in the same?”

“Alas, no!  It is only when she falls on that—when she begins denouncing and excluding—that all the old faults, few and light as they are, seem to leap into ugly life again for the moment.”

“Few and light, indeed!  Ah, my dear Templeton, the gulf between you and happiness looks wide; but only because it is magnified in mist.”

“Which you would have me disperse by lightning-flashes of Dialectics, eh?  Well, every man has his nostrum.”

“I have not.  My method is not my own, but Plato’s.”

“But, my good fellow, the Windrush school admire Plato as much as you do, and yet certainly arrive at somewhat different conclusions.”

“They do Plato the honour of patronising him, as a Representative Man; but their real text-book, you will find, is Proclus.  That hapless philosophaster’s a priori method, even his very verbiage, is dear to their souls; for they copy it through wet and dry, through sense and nonsense.  But as for Plato—when I find them using Plato’s weapons, I shall believe in their understanding and love of him.”

“And in the meanwhile claim him as a new verger for the Reformed Church Catholic?”

“Not a new verger, Templeton.  Augustine said, fourteen hundred years ago, that Socrates was the philosopher of the Catholic Faith.  If he has not seemed so of late years, it is, I suspect, because we do not understand quite the same thing as Augustine did, when we talk of the Catholic Faith and Christianity.”

“But you forget, in your hurry of clerical confidence, that the question still remains, whether these Creeds are true.”

“That, too, as I take it, is a question of Dialectics, unless you choose to reduce the whole to a balance-of-probabilities argument—rather too narrow a basis for a World-faith to stand upon.  Try all ‘mythic’ theories, Straussite and others, by honest Dialectics.  Try your own thoughts and experiences, and the accredited thoughts and experiences of wise men, by the same method.  Mesmerism and ‘The Development of Species’ may wait till they have settled themselves somewhat more into sciences; at present it does not much matter what agrees or disagrees with them.  But using this weapon fearlessly and honestly, you will, unless Socrates and Plato were fools, arrive at absolute eternal truths, which are equally true for all men, good or bad, conscious or unconscious; and I tell you—of course you need not believe me till you have made trial—that those truths will coincide with the plain honest meaning of the Catholic Creeds, as determined by the same method—the only one, indeed, by which they or anything else can be determined.”

“You forget Baconian induction, of which you are so fond.”

“And pray what are Dialectics, but strict Baconian induction applied to words, as the phenomena of mind, instead of to things, the phenomena of—”

“What?”

“I can’t tell you; or, rather, I will not.  I have my own opinion about what those trees and stones are; but it will require a few years’ more verification before I tell.”

“Really, you and your Dialectics seem in a hopeful and valiant state of mind.”

“Why not?  Can truth do anything but conquer?”

“Of course—assuming, as every one does, that the truth is with you.”

“My dear fellow, I have seldom met a man who could not be a far better dialectician than I shall ever be, if he would but use his Common Sense.”

“Common Sense?  That really sounds something like a bathos, after the great big Greek word which you have been propounding to me as the cure for all my doubts.”

“What?  Are you about to ‘gib’ after all, just as I was flattering myself that I had broken you in to go quietly in harness?”

“I am very much minded to do so.  The truth is, I cannot bring myself to believe that the universal panacea lies in an obscure and ancient scientific method.”

“Obscure and ancient?  Did I not just say that any man might be a dialectician?  Did Socrates ever appeal to any faculty but the Common Sense of man as man, which exists just as much in England now, I presume, as it did in Athens in his day?  Does he not, in pursuance of that method of his, draw his arguments and illustrations, to the horror of the big-worded Sophists, from dogs, kettles, fishwives, and what not which is vulgar and commonplace?  Or did I, in my clumsy attempt to imitate him, make use of a single argument which does not lie, developed or undeveloped, in the Common Sense of every clown; in that human Reason of his, which is part of God’s image in him, and in every man?  And has not my complaint against Mr. Windrush’s school been, that they will not do this; that they will not accept the ground which is common to men as men, but disregard that part of the ‘Vox Populi’ which is truly ‘Vox Dei,’ for that which is ‘Vox Diaboli’—for private sentiments, fancies, and aspirations; and so casting away the common sense of mankind, build up each man, on the pin’s point of his own private judgment, his own inverted pyramid?”

“But are you not asking me to do just the same, when you propose to me to start as a Scientific Dialectician?”

“Why, what are Dialectics, or any other scientific method, but conscious common sense?  And what is common sense, but unconscious scientific method?  Every man is a dialectician, be he scholar or boor, in as far as he tries to use no words which he does not understand, and to sift his own thoughts, and his expression of them, by that Reason which is at once common to men, and independent of them.”

“As M. Jourdain talked prose all his life without knowing it.  Well—I prefer the unconscious method.  I have as little faith as Mr. Carlyle would have in saying: ‘Go to, let us make’—an induction about words, or anything else.  It seems to me no very hopeful method of finding out facts as they are.”

“Certainly; provided you mean any particular induction, and not a general inductive and severely-inquiring habit of mind; that very ‘Go to’ being a fair sign that you have settled beforehand what the induction shall be; in plain English, that you have come to your conclusion already, and are now looking about for facts to prove it.  But is it any wiser to say: ‘Go to, I will be conscious of being unconscious of being conscious of my own forms of thought’?  For that is what you do say, when, having read Plato, and knowing his method, and its coincidence with Common Sense, you determine to ignore it on common-sense questions.”

“But why not ignore it, if mother-wit does as well?”

“Because you cannot ignore it.  You have learnt it more or less, and cannot forget it, try as you will, and must either follow it, or break it and talk nonsense.  And moreover, you ought not to ignore it.  For it seems to me, that you were sent to Cambridge by One greater than, your parents, in order that you might learn it, and bring it home hither for the use of the M. Jourdains round you here, who have no doubt been talking prose all their life, but may have been also talking it very badly.”

“You speak riddles.”

“My dear fellow, may not a man employ Reason, or any other common human faculty, all his life, and yet employ them very clumsily and defectively?”

“I should say so, from the gross amount of human unwisdom.”

“And that, in the case of uneducated persons, happens because they are not conscious of those faculties, or of their right laws, but use them blindly and capriciously, by fits and starts, talking sense on one point and nonsense on another?”

“Too true, Heaven knows.”

“But the educated man, if education mean anything, is the man who has become conscious of those common human faculties and their laws, and has learnt to use them continuously and accurately, on all matters alike.”

“True, O Socraticule!”

“Then is it not his especial business to teach the right use of them to the less educated?—unless you agree with the old Sophists, that the purpose of education is to enable us to deceive or coerce the uneducated for our own aggrandisement.”

“I am therefore, it seems, to get up Platonic Dialectics simply in order to teach my ploughmen to use their common sense?”

“Exactly so.  Teach yourself first, and every one around you afterwards, not the doctrines, nor the formulas—though he had none—but the habit of mind which Socrates tried in vain to teach the Athenian youth.  Teach them to face all questions patiently and fearlessly: to begin always by asking every word, great or small, from ‘Predestination’ to ‘Protection,’ what it really means.  Teach them that ‘By your words you shall be justified, and by your words you shall be condemned,’ is no barren pulpit-test, but a tremendous practical law for every day, and for every matter.  Teach them to be sure that man can find out truth, because God his Father and Archetype will show it to those who hunger after it.  Try to make them see clearly the Divine truths which are implied, not only in their creeds, but in their simplest household words; and—”

“And fail as Socrates failed, or rather worse; for he did teach himself: but I shall not even do that.”

“Do not despair in haste.  In the first place, I deny that Socrates taught himself, for I believe that One taught him, who has promised to teach every man who desires wisdom; and in the next place, I have no fear but that the sound practical intellect which that same One has bestowed on the Englishman, will give you a far better auditory in any harvest field, than Socrates could find among the mercurial Athenians of a fallen age.”

“Well, that is, at all events, a comfort for poor me.  I will really take to my Plato again, till the hunting begins.”

“And even then, you know, you don’t keep two packs; so you will have three days out of the six wherein to study him.”

“Four, you mean—for I have long given up reading Sunday books on Sunday.”

“Then you read your Bible and Prayer-book; or even borrow some of Lady Jane’s devotional treatises; and try, after you have translated the latter into plain English, to make out what they one and all really do mean, by the light which old Socrates has given you during the week.  You will find them wiser than you fancy, and simpler also.”