There can be no denying that from quite an early stage in the
discussion Boon was excited and presently on the verge of ill-temper.
This dragging of his will into a question of fact showed, I think, the
beginning of his irritation. And he was short and presently rather
uncivil in his replies to Wilkins.
Boon argued that behind the individualities and immediacies of life
there was in reality a consecutive growth of wisdom, that larger
numbers of people and a larger proportion of people than ever before
were taking part in the World Mind process, and that presently this
would become a great conscious general thinking of the race together.
Wilkins admitted that there had been a number of starts in the
direction of impersonal understanding and explanation; indeed, there
was something of the sort in every fresh religious beginning; but he
argued that these starts do not show a regular progressive movement,
and that none of them had ever achieved any real directive and
unifying power over their adherents; that only a few Christians had
ever grasped Christianity, that Brahminism fell to intellectual powder
before it touched the crowd, that nowadays there was less sign than
ever of the honest intellectuals getting any hold whatever upon the
minds and movements of the popular mass....
"The Mind of the Race," said Wilkins, "seems at times to me much more
like a scared child cowering in the corner of a cage full of apes."
Boon was extraordinarily disconcerted by these contradictions.
"It will grow up," he snatched.
"If the apes let it," said Wilkins. "You can see how completely the
thinkers and poets and all this stuff of literature and the study
don't represent the real Mind, such as it is, of Humanity, when you
note how the mass of mankind turns naturally to make and dominate its
own organs of expression. Take the popular press, take the popular
theatre, take popular religion, take current fiction, take the
music-hall, watch the development of the cinematograph. There you have
the real body of mankind expressing itself. If you are right, these
things should fall in a kind of relationship to the intellectual
hierarchy. But the intellectual hierarchy goes and hides away in
country houses and beautiful retreats and provincial universities and
stuffy high-class periodicals. It's afraid of the mass of men, it
dislikes and dreads the mass of men, and it affects a pride and
aloofness to cover it. Plato wanted to reorganize social order and the
common life; the young man in the twopenny tube was the man he was
after. He wanted to exercise him and teach him exactly what to do with
the young woman beside him. Instead of which poor Plato has become
just an occasion for some Oxford don to bleat about his unapproachable
style and wisdom...."
"I admit we're not connected up yet," said Boon.
"You're more disconnected than ever you were. In the Middle Ages there
was something like a connected system of ideas in Christendom, so that
the Pope and the devout fishwife did in a sense march together...."
You see the wrangling argument on which they were launched.
Boon maintained that there was a spreading thought process, clearly
perceptible nowadays, and that those detachments of Wilkins' were not
complete. He instanced the cheap editions of broad-thinking books, the
variety of articles in the modern newspaper, the signs of wide
discussions. Wilkins, on the other hand, asserted a predominant
intellectual degeneration.... Moreover, Wilkins declared, with the
murmurous approval of Dodd, that much even of the Academic thought
process was going wrong, that Bergson's Pragmatism for Ladies was a
poor substitute even for Herbert Spencer, that the boom about
"Mendelism" was a triumph of weak thinking over comprehensive ideas.
"Even if we leave the masses out of account, it is still rather more
than doubtful if there is any secular intellectual growth."
And it is curious to recall now that as an instance of a degenerative
thought process among educated people Wilkins instanced modern
Germany. Here, he said, in the case of a Mind covering over a hundred
million people altogether, was a real retrocession of intellectual
freedom. The pretentious expression of instinctive crudity had always
been the peculiar weakness of the German mind. It had become more and
more manifest, he said, as nationalism had ousted foreign influence.
You see what pretty scope for mutual contradiction there was in all
this. "Let me get books," cried Wilkins, "and I will read you samples
of the sort of thing that passes for thinking in Germany. I will read
you some of Houston Stewart Chamberlain, some of Nietzsche's boiling
utterance, some of Schopenhauer."
"Let me," said Wilkins, "read a passage I have picked almost haphazard
from Schopenhauer. One gets Schopenhauer rammed down one's throat as a
philosopher, as a deep thinker, as the only alternative to the
Hegelian dose. And just listen----"
He began to read in a voice of deliberate malice, letting his voice
italicize the more scandalous transitions of what was certainly a very
foolish and ill-knit piece of assertion.
"'Little men have a decided inclination for big women, and
_vice versa_; and indeed in a little man the preference for
big women will be so much the more passionate if he himself
was begotten by a big father, and only remains little through
the influence of his mother; because he has inherited from his
father the vascular system and its energy which was able to
supply a large body with blood. If, on the other hand, his
father and grandfather were both little, that inclination will
make itself less felt. At the foundation of the aversion of a
big woman to big men lies _the intention of Nature_ to avoid
too big a race.... Further, the consideration as to the
complexion is very decided. Blondes prefer dark persons or
brunettes; but the latter seldom prefer the former. _The
reason is_, that fair hair and blue eyes are in themselves a
variation from the type, almost an abnormity, analogous to
white mice, or at least to grey horses. In no part of the
world, not even in the vicinity of the Pole, are they
indigenous, except in Europe, and are clearly of Scandinavian
origin. I may here express my opinion in passing that the
white colour of the skin is not natural to man, but that by
nature he has a black or brown skin, like _our forefathers the
Hindus_; that consequently a white man has never originally
sprung from the womb of Nature, and that thus there is no such
thing as a white race, much as this is talked of, but every
white man is a faded or bleached one. Forced into this strange
world, where he only exists like an exotic plant, and like
this requires in winter the hothouse, in the course of
thousands of years man became white. The gipsies, an Indian
race which immigrated only about four centuries ago, show the
transition from the complexion of the Hindu to our own.
_Therefore_ in sexual love Nature strives to return to dark
hair and brown eyes as the primitive type; but the white
colour of the skin has become second nature, though not so
that the brown of the Hindu repels us. Finally, each one also
seeks in the particular parts of the body the corrective of
his own defects and aberrations, and does so the more
decidedly the more important the part is. _Therefore_
snub-nosed individuals have an inexpressible liking for
hook-noses, parrot-faces; and it is the same with regard to
all other parts. Men with excessively slim, long bodies and
limbs can find beauty in a body which is even beyond measure
stumpy and short.... Whoever is himself in some respects very
perfect does not indeed seek and love imperfection in this
respect, but is yet more easily reconciled to it than others;
because he himself insures the children against great
imperfection of this part. For example, whoever is himself
very white will not object to a yellow complexion; but whoever
has the latter will find dazzling whiteness divinely
beautiful.' (You will note that he perceives he has
practically contradicted this a few lines before, and that
evidently he has gone back and stuck in that saving clause
about a white skin being second nature.) 'The rare case in
which a man falls in love with a decidedly ugly woman occurs
when, beside the exact harmony of the degree of sex explained
above, the whole of her abnormities are precisely the
opposite, and thus the corrective, of his. The love is then
wont to reach a high degree....'
"And so on and so on," said Wilkins. "Just a foolish, irresponsible
saying of things. And all this stuff, this celibate cerebration, you
must remember, is not even fresh; it was said far more funnily and
pleasantly by old Campanella in his 'City of the Sun.' And, mind you,
this isn't a side issue Schopenhauer is upon; it isn't a moment of
relaxation; this argument is essential to the whole argument of his
philosophy...."
"But after all," said Boon, "Schopenhauer is hardly to be considered a
modern. He was pre-Darwinian."
"Exactly why I begin with him," said Wilkins. "He was a contemporary
of Darwin, and it was while Darwin was patiently and industriously
building up evidence, that this nonsense, a whole torrent of it, a
complete doctrine about the Will to Live, was being poured out. But
what I want you to notice is that while the sort of cautious massing
of evidence, the close reasoning, the honesty and veracity, that
distinguished the method of Darwin and Huxley, are scarcely to be met
with anywhere to-day, this spouting style of doing things is
everywhere. Take any of the stuff of that intellectual jackdaw,
Bernard Shaw, and you will find the Schopenhauer method in full
development; caught-up ideas, glib, irrational transitions, wild
assertions about the Life Force, about the effects of alcohol, about
'fear-poisoned' meat, about medical science, about economic processes,
about Russia, about the Irish temperament and the English
intelligence, about the thoughts and mental processes of everybody and
every sort of mind, stuff too incoherent and recklessly positive ever
to be systematically answered. And yet half at least of the
English-speaking intelligenzia regards Shaw as a part of the thought
process of the world. Schopenhauer was a pioneer in the game of
impudent assertion, very properly disregarded by his own generation;
Shaw's dementia samples this age. You see my case? In any rationally
trained, clear-headed period Shaw would have been looked into,
dissected, and disposed of long ago.... And here I have two other of
the voices that this time respects. It is all my argument that they
are respected now enormously, Boon; not merely that they exist. Men to
talk and write foolishly, to make groundless positive statements and
to misapprehend an opponent there have always been, but this age now
tolerates and accepts them. Here is that invalid Englishman, Houston
Stewart Chamberlain, who found a more congenial, intellectual
atmosphere in Germany, and this is his great book, 'The Foundations of
the Nineteenth Century.' This book has been received with the utmost
solemnity in the highest quarters; nowhere has it been handed over to
the derision which is its only proper treatment. You remember a rather
readable and rather pretentious history we had in our schooldays, full
of bad ethnology about Kelts and Anglo-Saxons, called J. R. Green's
'History of the English People'; it was part of that movement of
professorial barbarity, of braggart race-Imperialism and
anti-Irishism, of which Froude and Freeman were leaders; it smelt of
Carlyle and Germany, it helped provoke the Keltic Renascence. Well,
that was evidently, the germ of Herr Chamberlain. Here----"
Wilkins turned over the pages.
"Here he is, in fairly good form. It is a section called 'The Turning
Point,' and it's quite on all fours with Schopenhauer's 'our ancestors
the Hindus.' It is part of a sketch in outline of the history of the
past. 'The important thing,' he says, is to 'fix the turning-point of
the history of Europe.' While he was at it he might just as well have
_fixed_ the equator of the history of Europe and its sparking-plug and
the position of its liver. Now, listen--
"'The awakening of the Teutonic peoples to the consciousness
of their all-important vocation as the founders of a
completely new civilization and culture marks the
turning-point; the year 1200 can be designated the central
moment of this awakening.'
"Just consider that. He does not even trouble to remind us of the very
considerable literature that must exist, of course, as evidence of
that awakening. He just flings the statement out, knowing that his
sort of follower swallows all such statements blind, and then,
possibly with some qualms of doubt about what may have been happening
in Spain and Italy and India and China and Japan, he goes on--
"'Scarcely any one will have the hardihood to deny that the
inhabitants of Northern Europe have become the makers of the
world's history. At no time have they stood alone ... others,
too, have exercised influence--indeed great influence--upon
the destinies of mankind, but then _always merely as opponents
of the men from the north_....'
"Poor Jenghiz Khan, who had founded the Mogul Empire in India just
about that time, and was to lay the foundations of the Yuen dynasty,
and prepare the way for the great days of the Mings, never knew how
_mere_ his relations were with these marvellous 'men from the north.'
The Tartars, it is true, were sacking Moscow somewhere about twelve
hundred.... But let us get on to more of the recital of Teutonic
glories.
"'If, however, the Teutons were not the only people who
moulded the world's history' (generous admission) 'they
unquestionably' (that _unquestionably_!) 'deserve the first
place; all those who appear as genuine shapers of the
destinies of mankind, whether as builders of States or as
discoverers of new thoughts and of original art' (oh Japan! oh
Ming dynasty! oh art and life of India!) 'belong to the
Teutonic race. The impulse given by the Arabs is short lived'
(astronomy, chemistry, mathematics, modern science
generally!); 'the Mongolians destroy but do not create
anything' (Samarkand, Delhi, Pekin); 'the great Italians of
the _rinascimento_ were _all_ born either in the north,
saturated with Lombardic, Gothic, and Frankish blood, or in
the extreme Germano-Hellenic south; in Spain it was the
Western Goths who formed the element of life; the Jews are
working out their "Renaissance" of to-day by following in
every sphere as closely as possible the example of the
Teutonic peoples.'
"That dodge of claiming all the great figures of the non-Teutonic
nations as Teutons is carried out to magnificent extremes. Dante is a
Teuton on the strength of his profile and his surname, and there is
some fine play about the race of Christ. He came from Galilee,
notoriously non-Jewish, and so on; but Lord Redesdale, who writes a
sympathetic Introduction, sets the seal on the Teutonic nationality of
Christ by reminding us that Joseph was only the putative father....
"It makes a born Teuton like myself feel his divinity," said Wilkins,
and read, browsing: "'From the moment the Teuton awakes a new world
begins to open out----' Um! Um!... Oh, here we are again!--
"'It is equally untrue that our culture is a renaissance of
the Hellenic and the Roman; it was only after the birth of the
Teutonic peoples that the renaissance of past achievements was
possible and not _vice versa_.'... I wonder what exactly
_vice versa_ means there!... 'The mightiest creators of that
epoch--a Shakespeare, a Michael Angelo--_do not know a word of
Greek or Latin_.'
"The stalwart ignorance of it! Little Latin and less Greek even Ben
Jonson allowed our William, and manifestly he was fed on Tudor
translations. And the illiteracy of Michael Angelo is just an
inspiration of Chamberlain's. He knows his readers. Now, in itself
there is no marvel in this assertive, prejudiced, garrulous ignorance;
it is semi-sober Bierhalle chatter, written down; and, God forgive us!
most of us have talked in this way at one time or another; the sign
and the wonder for you, Boon, is that this stuff has been taken quite
seriously by all Germany and England and America, that it is accepted
as first-rank stuff, that it has never been challenged, cut up, and
sent to the butterman. It is Modern Thought. It is my second sample of
the contemporary Mind of the Race. And now, gentlemen, we come to the
third great intellectual high-kicker, Nietzsche. Nietzsche, I admit,
had once a real and valid idea, and his work is built upon that real
and valid idea; it is an idea that comes into the head of every
intelligent person who grasps the idea of the secular change of
species, the idea of Darwinism, in the course of five or six minutes
after the effective grasping. This is the idea that _man is not
final_. But Nietzsche was so constituted that to get an idea was to
receive a revelation; this step, that every bright mind does under
certain circumstances take, seemed a gigantic stride to him, a stride
only possible to him, and for the rest of his lucid existence he
resounded variations, he wrote epigrammatic cracker-mottoes and sham
Indian apophthegms, round and about his amazing discovery. And the
whole thing is summed up in the title of Dr. Alexander Tille's 'Von
Darwin bis Nietzsche,' in which this miracle of the obvious, this
necessary corollary, is treated as a huge advance of the mind of
mankind. No one slays this kind of thing nowadays. It goes on and goes
on, a perpetually reinforced torrent of unreason washing through the
brain of the race. There was a time when the general intelligence
would have resisted and rejected Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Chamberlain,
Shaw; now it resists such invasions less and less. That, Boon, is my
case."
Wilkins, with his little pile of books for reference, his sombre
manner, and his persistence, was indeed curiously suggestive of an
advocate opening a trial. The Mind of the Race was far less of a
continuity than it was when a generally recognized and understood
orthodox Christianity held it together, as a backbone holds together
the ribs and limbs and head of a body. That manifestly was what he was
driving at, as Dodd presently complained. In those stabler days every
one with ideas, willingly or unwillingly, had to refer to that
doctrinal core, had to link up to it even if the connection was used
only as a point of departure. Now more and more, as in these three
examples, people began irresponsibly in the air, with rash assertions
about life and race and the tendency of things. And the louder they
shouted, the more fantastic and remarkable they were, the more likely
they were to gather a following and establish a fresh vortex in the
deliquescent confusion.
On the whole, Boon was disposed to tolerate these dispersed
beginnings. "We attack truth in open order," he said, "instead of in
column."
"I don't mind fresh beginnings," said Wilkins; "I don't mind open
order, but I do object to blank ignorance and sheer misconception. It
isn't a new beginning for Schopenhauer to say we are descended from
Hindus; it is just stupidity and mental retrogression. We are no more
descended from Hindus than Hindus are descended from us; that we may
have a common ancestry is quite a different thing. One might as well
say that the chimpanzee is descended from a gorilla or a gorilla from
a chimpanzee. And it isn't any sort of truth, it is just a loud lie,
that the 'Germanic' peoples realized anything whatever in the year
1200. But all these--what shall I call them?--_moderns_ are more and
more up to that kind of thing, stating plausible things that have
already been disproved, stating things erroneously, inventing
pseudo-facts, and so getting off with a flourish. In the fields of
ideas, and presently in the fields of action, these wildly kicking
personalities have swamped any orderly progress; they have arrested
and disowned all that clearing up of thought and all that patient,
triumphant arrangement of proven fact which characterized the late
eighteenth and the first half of the nineteenth century. During that
time the great analysis of biological science went on, which
culminated in an entire revision of our conceptions of species, which
opened a conceivable and hitherto undreamed-of past and future to the
human imagination, which seemed to have revised and relaid the very
foundations of philosophical discussion. And on that foundation, what
has been done?"
"Naturally," cried Boon, "after a great achievement there must be a
pause. The Mind of the Race must have its digestive interludes."
"But this is indigestion! First comes Herbert Spencer, with his
misconception of the life process as a struggle of individuals to
survive. His word 'Evolution' is the quintessence of the
misunderstanding; his image of a steadfast, mechanical unfolding
through selfishness, masked plausibly and disastrously the intricate,
perplexing vision of the truth. From that sort of thing we go at a
stride to the inevitable Super Man, the megatherium individual of
futurity, the large egoist, and all that nonsense. Then comes a swarm
of shallow, incontinent thinkers, anxious to find a simple driving
force with a simple name for the whole process; the 'Life Force' and
'Will,' and so on. These things, my dear Boon, are just the appalling
bubbles of gas that show how completely the Mind of the Race has
failed to assimilate...."
"It is remarkable," said Boon, "how a metaphor may run away with the
clearest of thinkers. The Mind of the Race is not so consistently
gastric as all that."
"You started the metaphor," said Wilkins.
"And you mounted it and it bolted with you. To these unpleasant
consequences.... Well, I hold, on the contrary, that after the
superficialities of the sixties and seventies and eighties people's
minds have been getting a firmer and firmer grip upon the reality of
specific instability. The new body of intellectual experiment, which
isn't indigestion at all but only a preliminary attack, is all that
mass of trial thinking that one lumps together in one's mind when one
speaks of Pragmatism. With the breakdown of specific boundaries the
validity of the logical process beyond finite ends breaks down. We
make our truth for our visible purposes as we go along, and if it does
not work we make it afresh. We see life once more as gallant
experiment. The boundaries of our universe recede not only in time and
space but thought. The hard-and-fast line between the scientific and
the poetic method disappears...."
"And you get Bergson," said Wilkins triumphantly.
"Bergson is of that class and type that exploits the affairs of
thought. But I refuse to have Pragmatism judged by Bergson. He takes
hold of the unfinished inquiries that constitute the movement of
Pragmatism and he makes a soft scepticism for delicate minds with easy
ways back to any old-established orthodoxy they may regret."
"But here is my case again," said Wilkins. "It is only through Bergson
that the Mind of the Race, the great operating mass mind out there,
can take hold of this new system of ideas...."