THAT our ideas are baseless, or rotten at the roots, is what few who
study them will deny; but they are rotten in the same way as property is
robbery, and property is robbery in the same way as our ideas are rotten
at the roots, that is to say it is a robbery and it is not. No title to
property, no idea and no living form (which is the embodiment of idea) is
indefeasible if search be made far enough. Granted that our thoughts are
baseless, yet they are so in the same way as the earth itself is both
baseless and most firmly based, or again most stable and yet most in
motion.
Our ideas, or rather, I should say, our realities, are all of them like
our Gods, based on superstitious foundations. If man is a microcosm then
kosmos is a megalanthrope and that is how we come to anthropomorphise the
deity. In the eternal pendulum swing of thought we make God in our own
image, and then make him make us, and then find it out and cry because we
have no God and so on, over and over again as a child has new toys given
to it, tires of them, breaks them and is disconsolate till it gets new
ones which it will again tire of and break. If the man who first made
God in his own image had been a good model, all might have been well; but
he was impressed with an undue sense of his own importance and, as a
natural consequence, he had no sense of humour. Both these imperfections
he has fully and faithfully reproduced in his work and with the result we
are familiar. All our most solid and tangible realities are but as lies
that we have told too often henceforth to question them. But we have to
question them sometimes. It is not the sun that goes round the world but
we who go round the sun.
If any one is for examining and making requisitions on title we can
search too, and can require the title of the state as against any other
state, or against the world at large. But suppose we succeed in this, we
must search further still and show by what title mankind has ousted the
lower animals, and by what title we eat them, or they themselves eat
grass or one another.
See what quicksands we fall into if we wade out too far from the _terra
firma_ of common consent! The error springs from supposing that there is
any absolute right or absolute truth, and also from supposing that truth
and right are any the less real for being not absolute but relative. In
the complex of human affairs we should aim not at a supposed absolute
standard but at the greatest coming-together-ness or convenience of all
our ideas and practices; that is to say, at their most harmonious working
with one another. Hit ourselves somewhere we are bound to do: no idea
will travel far without colliding with some other idea. Thus, if we
pursue one line of probable convenience, we find it convenient to see all
things as ultimately one: that is, if we insist rather on the points of
agreement between things than on those of disagreement. If we insist on
the opposite view, namely, on the points of disagreement, we find
ourselves driven to the conclusion that each atom is an individual
entity, and that the unity between even the most united things is
apparent only. If we did not unduly insist upon—that is to say,
emphasise and exaggerate—the part which concerns us for the time, we
should never get to understand anything; the proper way is to exaggerate
first one view and then the other, and then let the two exaggerations
collide, but good-temperedly and according to the laws of civilised
mental warfare. So we see first all things as one, then all things as
many and, in the end, a multitude in unity and a unity in multitude.
Care must be taken not to accept ideas which though very agreeable at
first disagree with us afterwards, and keep rising on our mental
stomachs, as garlic does upon our bodily.