Taking the paper with him Mr. Carey retired to his study. Philip
changed his chair for that in which his uncle had been sitting (it was
the only comfortable one in the room), and looked out of the window at
the pouring rain. Even in that sad weather there was something restful
about the green fields that stretched to the horizon. There was an
intimate charm in the landscape which he did not remember ever to have
noticed before. Two years in France had opened his eyes to the beauty
of his own countryside.
He thought with a smile of his uncle’s remark. It was lucky that the
turn of his mind tended to flippancy. He had begun to realise what a
great loss he had sustained in the death of his father and mother. That
was one of the differences in his life which prevented him from seeing
things in the same way as other people. The love of parents for their
children is the only emotion which is quite disinterested. Among
strangers he had grown up as best he could, but he had seldom been used
with patience or forbearance. He prided himself on his self-control. It
had been whipped into him by the mockery of his fellows. Then they
called him cynical and callous. He had acquired calmness of demeanour
and under most circumstances an unruffled exterior, so that now he
could not show his feelings. People told him he was unemotional; but he
knew that he was at the mercy of his emotions: an accidental kindness
touched him so much that sometimes he did not venture to speak in order
not to betray the unsteadiness of his voice. He remembered the
bitterness of his life at school, the humiliation which he had endured,
the banter which had made him morbidly afraid of making himself
ridiculous; and he remembered the loneliness he had felt since, faced
with the world, the disillusion and the disappointment caused by the
difference between what it promised to his active imagination and what
it gave. But notwithstanding he was able to look at himself from the
outside and smile with amusement.
“By Jove, if I weren’t flippant, I should hang myself,” he thought
cheerfully.
His mind went back to the answer he had given his uncle when he asked
him what he had learnt in Paris. He had learnt a good deal more than he
told him. A conversation with Cronshaw had stuck in his memory, and one
phrase he had used, a commonplace one enough, had set his brain
working.
“My dear fellow,” Cronshaw said, “there’s no such thing as abstract
morality.”
When Philip ceased to believe in Christianity he felt that a great
weight was taken from his shoulders; casting off the responsibility
which weighed down every action, when every action was infinitely
important for the welfare of his immortal soul, he experienced a vivid
sense of liberty. But he knew now that this was an illusion. When he
put away the religion in which he had been brought up, he had kept
unimpaired the morality which was part and parcel of it. He made up his
mind therefore to think things out for himself. He determined to be
swayed by no prejudices. He swept away the virtues and the vices, the
established laws of good and evil, with the idea of finding out the
rules of life for himself. He did not know whether rules were necessary
at all. That was one of the things he wanted to discover. Clearly much
that seemed valid seemed so only because he had been taught it from his
earliest youth. He had read a number of books, but they did not help
him much, for they were based on the morality of Christianity; and even
the writers who emphasised the fact that they did not believe in it
were never satisfied till they had framed a system of ethics in
accordance with that of the Sermon on the Mount. It seemed hardly worth
while to read a long volume in order to learn that you ought to behave
exactly like everybody else. Philip wanted to find out how he ought to
behave, and he thought he could prevent himself from being influenced
by the opinions that surrounded him. But meanwhile he had to go on
living, and, until he formed a theory of conduct, he made himself a
provisional rule.
“Follow your inclinations with due regard to the policeman round the
corner.”
He thought the best thing he had gained in Paris was a complete liberty
of spirit, and he felt himself at last absolutely free. In a desultory
way he had read a good deal of philosophy, and he looked forward with
delight to the leisure of the next few months. He began to read at
haphazard. He entered upon each system with a little thrill of
excitement, expecting to find in each some guide by which he could rule
his conduct; he felt himself like a traveller in unknown countries and
as he pushed forward the enterprise fascinated him; he read
emotionally, as other men read pure literature, and his heart leaped as
he discovered in noble words what himself had obscurely felt. His mind
was concrete and moved with difficulty in regions of the abstract; but,
even when he could not follow the reasoning, it gave him a curious
pleasure to follow the tortuosities of thoughts that threaded their
nimble way on the edge of the incomprehensible. Sometimes great
philosophers seemed to have nothing to say to him, but at others he
recognised a mind with which he felt himself at home. He was like the
explorer in Central Africa who comes suddenly upon wide uplands, with
great trees in them and stretches of meadow, so that he might fancy
himself in an English park. He delighted in the robust common sense of
Thomas Hobbes; Spinoza filled him with awe, he had never before come in
contact with a mind so noble, so unapproachable and austere; it
reminded him of that statue by Rodin, L’Age d’Airain, which he
passionately admired; and then there was Hume: the scepticism of that
charming philosopher touched a kindred note in Philip; and, revelling
in the lucid style which seemed able to put complicated thought into
simple words, musical and measured, he read as he might have read a
novel, a smile of pleasure on his lips. But in none could he find
exactly what he wanted. He had read somewhere that every man was born a
Platonist, an Aristotelian, a Stoic, or an Epicurean; and the history
of George Henry Lewes (besides telling you that philosophy was all
moonshine) was there to show that the thought of each philosopher was
inseparably connected with the man he was. When you knew that you could
guess to a great extent the philosophy he wrote. It looked as though
you did not act in a certain way because you thought in a certain way,
but rather that you thought in a certain way because you were made in a
certain way. Truth had nothing to do with it. There was no such thing
as truth. Each man was his own philosopher, and the elaborate systems
which the great men of the past had composed were only valid for the
writers.
The thing then was to discover what one was and one’s system of
philosophy would devise itself. It seemed to Philip that there were
three things to find out: man’s relation to the world he lives in,
man’s relation with the men among whom he lives, and finally man’s
relation to himself. He made an elaborate plan of study.
The advantage of living abroad is that, coming in contact with the
manners and customs of the people among whom you live, you observe them
from the outside and see that they have not the necessity which those
who practise them believe. You cannot fail to discover that the beliefs
which to you are self-evident to the foreigner are absurd. The year in
Germany, the long stay in Paris, had prepared Philip to receive the
sceptical teaching which came to him now with such a feeling of relief.
He saw that nothing was good and nothing was evil; things were merely
adapted to an end. He read The Origin of Species. It seemed to offer an
explanation of much that troubled him. He was like an explorer now who
has reasoned that certain natural features must present themselves,
and, beating up a broad river, finds here the tributary that he
expected, there the fertile, populated plains, and further on the
mountains. When some great discovery is made the world is surprised
afterwards that it was not accepted at once, and even on those who
acknowledge its truth the effect is unimportant. The first readers of
The Origin of Species accepted it with their reason; but their
emotions, which are the ground of conduct, were untouched. Philip was
born a generation after this great book was published, and much that
horrified its contemporaries had passed into the feeling of the time,
so that he was able to accept it with a joyful heart. He was intensely
moved by the grandeur of the struggle for life, and the ethical rule
which it suggested seemed to fit in with his predispositions. He said
to himself that might was right. Society stood on one side, an organism
with its own laws of growth and self-preservation, while the individual
stood on the other. The actions which were to the advantage of society
it termed virtuous and those which were not it called vicious. Good and
evil meant nothing more than that. Sin was a prejudice from which the
free man should rid himself. Society had three arms in its contest with
the individual, laws, public opinion, and conscience: the first two
could be met by guile, guile is the only weapon of the weak against the
strong: common opinion put the matter well when it stated that sin
consisted in being found out; but conscience was the traitor within the
gates; it fought in each heart the battle of society, and caused the
individual to throw himself, a wanton sacrifice, to the prosperity of
his enemy. For it was clear that the two were irreconcilable, the state
and the individual conscious of himself. THAT uses the individual for
its own ends, trampling upon him if he thwarts it, rewarding him with
medals, pensions, honours, when he serves it faithfully; THIS, strong
only in his independence, threads his way through the state, for
convenience’ sake, paying in money or service for certain benefits, but
with no sense of obligation; and, indifferent to the rewards, asks only
to be left alone. He is the independent traveller, who uses Cook’s
tickets because they save trouble, but looks with good-humoured
contempt on the personally conducted parties. The free man can do no
wrong. He does everything he likes—if he can. His power is the only
measure of his morality. He recognises the laws of the state and he can
break them without sense of sin, but if he is punished he accepts the
punishment without rancour. Society has the power.
But if for the individual there was no right and no wrong, then it
seemed to Philip that conscience lost its power. It was with a cry of
triumph that he seized the knave and flung him from his breast. But he
was no nearer to the meaning of life than he had been before. Why the
world was there and what men had come into existence for at all was as
inexplicable as ever. Surely there must be some reason. He thought of
Cronshaw’s parable of the Persian carpet. He offered it as a solution
of the riddle, and mysteriously he stated that it was no answer at all
unless you found it out for yourself.
“I wonder what the devil he meant,” Philip smiled.
And so, on the last day of September, eager to put into practice all
these new theories of life, Philip, with sixteen hundred pounds and his
club-foot, set out for the second time to London to make his third
start in life.