Kant wrote a treatise on _The Vital Powers_. I should prefer to write
a dirge for them. The superabundant display of vitality, which takes
the form of knocking, hammering, and tumbling things about, has proved
a daily torment to me all my life long. There are people, it is
true--nay, a great many people--who smile at such things, because they
are not sensitive to noise; but they are just the very people who are
also not sensitive to argument, or thought, or poetry, or art, in a
word, to any kind of intellectual influence. The reason of it is that
the tissue of their brains is of a very rough and coarse quality. On
the other hand, noise is a torture to intellectual people. In the
biographies of almost all great writers, or wherever else their
personal utterances are recorded, I find complaints about it; in the
case of Kant, for instance, Goethe, Lichtenberg, Jean Paul; and if it
should happen that any writer has omitted to express himself on the
matter, it is only for want of an opportunity.
This aversion to noise I should explain as follows: If you cut up a
large diamond into little bits, it will entirely lose the value it
had as a whole; and an army divided up into small bodies of soldiers,
loses all its strength. So a great intellect sinks to the level of
an ordinary one, as soon as it is interrupted and disturbed, its
attention distracted and drawn off from the matter in hand; for its
superiority depends upon its power of concentration--of bringing all
its strength to bear upon one theme, in the same way as a concave
mirror collects into one point all the rays of light that strike upon
it. Noisy interruption is a hindrance to this concentration. That is
why distinguished minds have always shown such an extreme dislike
to disturbance in any form, as something that breaks in upon and
distracts their thoughts. Above all have they been averse to that
violent interruption that comes from noise. Ordinary people are
not much put out by anything of the sort. The most sensible and
intelligent of all nations in Europe lays down the rule, _Never
Interrupt_! as the eleventh commandment. Noise is the most impertinent
of all forms of interruption. It is not only an interruption, but
also a disruption of thought. Of course, where there is nothing to
interrupt, noise will not be so particularly painful. Occasionally it
happens that some slight but constant noise continues to bother and
distract me for a time before I become distinctly conscious of it. All
I feel is a steady increase in the labor of thinking--just as though I
were trying to walk with a weight on my foot. At last I find out what
it is. Let me now, however, pass from genus to species. The most
inexcusable and disgraceful of all noises is the cracking of whips--a
truly infernal thing when it is done in the narrow resounding streets
of a town. I denounce it as making a peaceful life impossible; it puts
an end to all quiet thought. That this cracking of whips should be
allowed at all seems to me to show in the clearest way how senseless
and thoughtless is the nature of mankind. No one with anything like an
idea in his head can avoid a feeling of actual pain at this sudden,
sharp crack, which paralyzes the brain, rends the thread of
reflection, and murders thought. Every time this noise is made, it
must disturb a hundred people who are applying their minds to business
of some sort, no matter how trivial it may be; while on the thinker
its effect is woeful and disastrous, cutting his thoughts asunder,
much as the executioner's axe severs the head from the body. No sound,
be it ever so shrill, cuts so sharply into the brain as this cursed
cracking of whips; you feel the sting of the lash right inside your
head; and it affects the brain in the same way as touch affects a
sensitive plant, and for the same length of time.
With all due respect for the most holy doctrine of utility, I really
cannot see why a fellow who is taking away a wagon-load of gravel or
dung should thereby obtain the right to kill in the bud the thoughts
which may happen to be springing up in ten thousand heads--the number
he will disturb one after another in half an hour's drive through the
town. Hammering, the barking of dogs, and the crying of children are
horrible to hear; but your only genuine assassin of thought is the
crack of a whip; it exists for the purpose of destroying every
pleasant moment of quiet thought that any one may now and then enjoy.
If the driver had no other way of urging on his horse than by making
this most abominable of all noises, it would be excusable; but quite
the contrary is the case. This cursed cracking of whips is not only
unnecessary, but even useless. Its aim is to produce an effect upon
the intelligence of the horse; but through the constant abuse of it,
the animal becomes habituated to the sound, which falls upon blunted
feelings and produces no effect at all. The horse does not go any
faster for it. You have a remarkable example of this in the ceaseless
cracking of his whip on the part of a cab-driver, while he is
proceeding at a slow pace on the lookout for a fare. If he were to
give his horse the slightest touch with the whip, it would have much
more effect. Supposing, however, that it were absolutely necessary to
crack the whip in order to keep the horse constantly in mind of its
presence, it would be enough to make the hundredth part of the noise.
For it is a well-known fact that, in regard to sight and hearing,
animals are sensitive to even the faintest indications; they are alive
to things that we can scarcely perceive. The most surprising instances
of this are furnished by trained dogs and canary birds.
It is obvious, therefore, that here we have to do with an act of pure
wantonness; nay, with an impudent defiance offered to those members of
the community who work with their heads by those who work with their
hands. That such infamy should be tolerated in a town is a piece of
barbarity and iniquity, all the more as it could easily be remedied by
a police-notice to the effect that every lash shall have a knot at the
end of it. There can be no harm in drawing the attention of the mob to
the fact that the classes above them work with their heads, for any
kind of headwork is mortal anguish to the man in the street. A fellow
who rides through the narrow alleys of a populous town with unemployed
post-horses or cart-horses, and keeps on cracking a whip several yards
long with all his might, deserves there and then to stand down and
receive five really good blows with a stick.
All the philanthropists in the world, and all the legislators, meeting
to advocate and decree the total abolition of corporal punishment,
will never persuade me to the contrary! There is something even more
disgraceful than what I have just mentioned. Often enough you may see
a carter walking along the street, quite alone, without any horses,
and still cracking away incessantly; so accustomed has the wretch
become to it in consequence of the unwarrantable toleration of this
practice. A man's body and the needs of his body are now everywhere
treated with a tender indulgence. Is the thinking mind then, to be
the only thing that is never to obtain the slightest measure of
consideration or protection, to say nothing of respect? Carters,
porters, messengers--these are the beasts of burden amongst mankind;
by all means let them be treated justly, fairly, indulgently, and with
forethought; but they must not be permitted to stand in the way of
the higher endeavors of humanity by wantonly making a noise. How many
great and splendid thoughts, I should like to know, have been lost to
the world by the crack of a whip? If I had the upper hand, I should
soon produce in the heads of these people an indissoluble association
of ideas between cracking a whip and getting a whipping.
Let us hope that the more intelligent and refined among the nations
will make a beginning in this matter, and then that the Germans may
take example by it and follow suit.[1] Meanwhile, I may quote what
Thomas Hood says of them[2]: _For a musical nation, they are the most
noisy I ever met with_. That they are so is due to the fact, not that
they are more fond of making a noise than other people--they would
deny it if you asked them--but that their senses are obtuse;
consequently, when they hear a noise, it does not affect them much. It
does not disturb them in reading or thinking, simply because they do
not think; they only smoke, which is their substitute for thought. The
general toleration of unnecessary noise--the slamming of doors, for
instance, a very unmannerly and ill-bred thing--is direct evidence
that the prevailing habit of mind is dullness and lack of thought. In
Germany it seems as though care were taken that no one should ever
think for mere noise--to mention one form of it, the way in which
drumming goes on for no purpose at all.
[Footnote 1: According to a notice issued by the Society for the
Protection of Animals in Munich, the superfluous whipping and the
cracking of whips were, in December, 1858, positively forbidden in
Nuremberg.]
[Footnote 2: In _Up the Rhine_.]
Finally, as regards the literature of the subject treated of in this
chapter, I have only one work to recommend, but it is a good one. I
refer to a poetical epistle in _terzo rimo_ by the famous painter
Bronzino, entitled _De' Romori: a Messer Luca Martini_. It gives a
detailed description of the torture to which people are put by the
various noises of a small Italian town. Written in a tragicomic style,
it is very amusing. The epistle may be found in _Opere burlesche del
Berni, Aretino ed altri_, Vol. II., p. 258; apparently published in
Utrecht in 1771.