|It was my fortune the other evening to be at dinner with a large
company of doctors. While we were assembling I fell into conversation
with an eminent physician, and, our talk turning upon food, he remarked
that we English seasoned our dishes far too freely. We scattered salt
and pepper and vinegar over our food so recklessly that we destroyed the
delicacy of our taste, and did ourselves all sorts of mischief. He was
especially unfriendly to the use of salt. He would not admit even
that it improved the savour of things. It destroyed our sense of their
natural flavour, and substituted a coarser appeal to the palate. From
the hygienic point of view, the habit was all wrong. All the salts
necessary to us are contained in the foods we eat, and the use of salt
independently is entirely harmful.
“Take the egg, for example,” he said. “It contains in it all the
elements necessary for the growth of a chicken--salt among the rest.
That is sufficient proof that it is a complete, self-contained article
of food. Yet when we come to eat it we drench it with salt, vulgarise
its delicate flavour, and change its natural dietetic character.” And he
concluded, as we went down to dinner, by commending the superior example
of the Japanese in this matter. “They,” he said laughingly, “only take
salt when they want to die.”
At the dinner table I found myself beside another member of the Faculty,
and by way of breaking the conversational ice I asked (as I liberally
applied salt to my soup) whether he agreed with those of his profession
who held that salt was unnecessary and even harmful. He replied with
great energy in the negative. He would not admit that the foods we
eat contain the salt required by the human body. “Not even the egg?”
I asked. “No, not even the egg. We cook the egg as we cook most of our
foods, and even if the foods contain the requisite salt in their raw
state they tend to lose their character cooked.” He admitted that
that was an argument for eating things _au naturel_ more than is the
practice. But he was firm in his conviction that the separate use of
salt is essential. “And as for flavour, think of a walnut, eaten raw,
with or without salt. What comparison is there?”
“But,” said I (artfully exploiting my newly acquired information about
the Japanese), “are there not races who do not use salt?” “My dear sir,”
said he, “the most conclusive evidence about the hygienic quality of
salt is supplied by the case of the Indians. Salt is notoriously one of
the prime essentials of life to them. When the supply, from one cause
or another, is seriously diminished, the fact is reflected with absolute
exactness in the mortality returns. If they don't get a sufficiency of
salt to eat with their food they die.”
After this exciting beginning I should have liked to spend the evening
in examining all the doctors separately on the subject of salt. No doubt
I should have found all shades of differing opinion among them. On the
face of it, there is no possibility of reconciling the two views I have
quoted, especially the illustrations from the Japanese and the Indians.
Yet I daresay they could be reconciled easily enough if we knew all the
facts. For example, while the Indians live almost exclusively upon rice,
the Japanese are probably the greatest fish consuming community in the
world, and anyone who has dined with them knows how largely they eat
their fish in the raw state. This difference of habit, I imagine, would
go far to explain what seems superficially inexplicable and incredible.
But I refer to the incident here only to show what a very elusive thing
the truth is. One would suppose that if there were one subject about
which there would be no room for controversy or disagreement it would be
a commonplace thing like the use of salt.
Yet here were two distinguished doctors, taken at random--men
whose whole life had been devoted to the study of the body and its
requirements--whose views on the subject were in violent antagonism.
They approached their subject from contrary angles and with contrary
sets of facts, and the truth they were in search of took a wholly
different form for each.
It is with facts as with figures. You can make them prove anything by
judicious manipulation.
A strenuous person was declaiming in the train the other day about our
air service. He was very confident that we were “simply out of it--that
was all, simply out of it.” And he was full of facts on the subject.
<b>I don't like people who brim over with facts--who lead facts about,
as Holmes says, like a bull-dog to leap at our throat. There are few
people so unreliable as the man whose head bulges with facts.</b> His
conclusions are generally wrong. He has so many facts that he cannot
sort them out and add up the total. He belongs to what the Abbé Sieyès
called “loose, unstitched minds.”
Perhaps I am prejudiced, for I confess that I am not conspicuous for
facts. I sympathise with poor Mrs Shandy. She could never remember
whether the earth went round the sun or the sun round the earth. Her
husband had told her again and again, but she always forgot. I am not so
bad as that, but I find that facts are elusive things. I put a fact
away in the chambers of my mind, and when I go for it I discover, not
infrequently, that it has got some moss or fungus on it, or something
chipped off, and I can never trust it until I have verified my
references.
But to return to the gentleman in the train. The point about him was
that, so far as I could judge, his facts were all sound. He could tell
you how many English machines had failed to return on each day of the
week, and how many German machines had been destroyed or forced to
descend. And judging from his figures he was quite right. “We were out
of it--simply out of it.” Yet the truth is that while his facts were
right, his deduction was wrong. It was wrong because he had taken
account of some facts, but had left other equally important facts out of
consideration. For example, through all this time the German airmen had
been on the defensive and ours had been on the attack. The Englishmen
had taken great risks for a great object. They had gone miles over
the enemy's lines--as much as fifty miles over--and had come back with
priceless information. They had paid for the high risks, of course, but
the whole truth is that, so far from being beaten, they were at this
time the most victorious element of our Army.
I mention this little incident to show that facts and the truth are
not always the same thing. Truth is a many-sided affair, and is
often composed of numerous facts that, taken separately, seem even to
contradict each other. Take the handkerchief incident in “Othello.” Poor
Desdemona could not produce the handkerchief. That was the fact that
the Moor saw. Desdemona believed she had lost the handkerchief. Othello
believed she had given it away, for had not Iago said he had seen Cassio
wipe his beard with it? Neither knew it had been stolen. Hence the
catastrophe.
But we need not go to the dramatists for examples. You can find them
in real life anywhere, any day. Let me give a case from Fleet Street. A
free-lance reporter, down on his luck, was once asked by a newspaper to
report a banquet. He went, was seen by a waiter to put a silver-handled
knife into his pocket, was stopped as he was going out, examined and the
knife discovered--also, in his waistcoat pocket, a number of pawntickets
for silver goods. Could anyone, on such facts, doubt that he was a
thief? Yet he was perfectly innocent, and in the subsequent hearing
his innocence was proved. Being hard up, he had parted with his dress
clothes, and had hired a suit at a pawnbroker's. The waist of
the trousers was too small, and after an excellent dinner he felt
uncomfortable. He took up a knife to cut some stitches behind. As he was
doing so he saw a steely-eyed waiter looking in his direction; being a
timid person he furtively put the knife in his pocket. The speeches
came on, and when he had got his “take” he left to transcribe it,
having forgotten all about the knife. The rest followed as stated. The
pawntickets, which seemed so strong a collateral evidence of guilt, were
of course not his at all. They belonged to the owner of the suit.
You remember that Browning in “The Ring and the Book,” tells the story
of the murder of Pompilia from twelve different points of view before
he feels that he has told you the truth about it. And who has not been
annoyed by the contradictions of Ruskin?
Yet with patience you find that these apparent contradictions are only
different aspects of one truth. “Mostly,” he says, “matters of any
consequence are three-sided or four-sided or polygonal.... For myself,
I am never satisfied that I have handled a subject properly till I have
contradicted myself three times.” I fancy it is this discovery of
the falsity of isolated facts that makes us more reasonable and less
cocksure as we get older We get to suspect that there are other facts
that belong to the truth we are in search of. Tennyson says that “a
lie that is only half a truth is ever the blackest of lies”; but he is
wrong. It is the fact that is only half the truth (or a quarter)
which is the most dangerous lie--for a fact seems so absolute, so
incontrovertible. Indeed, the real art of lying is in the use of facts,
their arrangement and concealment. It was never better stated than by a
famous business man in an action for libel which I have referred to in
another connection. He was being examined about the visit of Government
experts to his works, and the instructions he gave to his manager. And
this, as I remember it, was the dialogue between counsel and witness:
“Did you tell him to tell them the facts?”
“Yes.”
“The whole facts?”
“No.”
“What facts?”
“_Selected facts_.”
It was a daring reply, but he knew his jury, and he knew that in the
midst of the Boer War they would not give a verdict against anybody
bearing his name.
If in such a matter as the use of salt, which ought to be reducible to
a scientific formula it is so hard to come at the plain truth of things,
we cannot wonder that it dodges us so completely in the jungle of
politics and speculation. I have heard a skilful politician make a
speech in which there was not one misstatement of fact, but the whole of
which was a colossal untruth. And if in the affairs of the world it is
so easy to make the facts lie, how can we hope to attain the truth in
the realm that lies outside fact altogether. The truth of one generation
is denounced as the heresy of another. Justification by “works” is
displaced by justification by faith, and that in turn is superseded by
justification by “service” which is “works” in new terms. Which is
truth and which error? Or is that the real alternative? May they not
be different facets of one truth. The prism breaks up the sunlight into
many different colours and facts are only the broken lights of truth.
In this perplexing world we must be prepared to find the same truth
demonstrated in the fact that Japanese die because they take salt, and
the fact that Indians die because they don't take it.
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