Details. The Confessions of an Unscientific Mind
I--Unscientific
I
On Being Intelligent in a Library
I have a way every two or three days or so, of an afternoon, of going
down to our library, sliding into the little gate by the shelves, and
taking a long empty walk there. I have found that nothing quite takes
the place of it for me,--wandering up and down the aisles of my
ignorance, letting myself be loomed at, staring doggedly back. I always
feel when I go out the great door as if I had won a victory. I have at
least faced the facts. I swing off to my tramp on the hills where is the
sense of space, as if I had faced the bully of the world, the whole
assembled world, in his own den, and he had given me a license to live.
Of course it only lasts a little while. One soon feels a library
nowadays pulling on him. One has to go back and do it all over again,
but for the time being it affords infinite relief. It sets one in right
relations to the universe, to the original plan of things. One suspects
that if God had originally intended that men on this planet should be
crowded off by books on it, it would not have been put off to the
twentieth century.
I was saying something of this sort to The Presiding Genius of the State
of Massachusetts the other day, and when I was through he said promptly:
"The way a man feels in a library (if any one can get him to tell it)
lets out more about a man than anything else in the world."
It did not seem best to make a reply to this. I didn't think it would do
either of us any good.
Finally, in spite of myself, I spoke up and allowed that I felt as
intelligent in a library as anybody.
He did not say anything.
When I asked him what he thought being intelligent in a library was, he
took the general ground that it consisted in always knowing what one was
about there, in knowing exactly what one wanted.
I replied that I did not think that that was a very intelligent state of
mind to be in, in a library.
Then I waited while he told me (fifteen minutes) what an intelligent
mind was anywhere (nearly everywhere, it seemed to me). But I did not
wait in vain, and at last, when he had come around to it, and had asked
me what I thought the feeling of intelligence consisted in, in
libraries, I said it consisted in being pulled on by the books.
I said quite a little after this, and of course the general run of my
argument was that I was rather intelligent myself. The P. G. S. of M.
had little to say to this, and after he had said how intelligent he was
awhile, the conversation was dropped.
* * * * *
The question that concerns me is, What shall a man do, how shall he act,
when he finds himself in the hush of a great library,--opens the door
upon it, stands and waits in the midst of it, with his poor outstretched
soul all by himself before IT,--and feels the books pulling on him? I
always feel as if it were a sort of infinite crossroads. The last thing
I want to know in a library is exactly what I want there. I am tired of
knowing what I want. I am always knowing what I want. I can know what I
want almost anywhere. If there is a place left on God's earth where a
modern man can go and go regularly and not know what he wants awhile, in
Heaven's name why not let him? I am as fond as the next man, I think, of
knowing what I am about, but when I find myself ushered into a great
library I do not know what I am about any sooner than I can help. I
shall know soon enough--God forgive me! When it is given to a man to
stand in the Assembly Room of Nations, to feel the ages, all the ages,
gathering around him, flowing past his life; to listen to the immortal
stir of Thought, to the doings of The Dead, why should a man
interrupt--interrupt a whole world--to know what he is about? I stand at
the junction of all Time and Space. I am the three tenses. I read the
newspaper of the universe.
It fades away after a little, I know. I go to the card catalogue like a
lamb to the slaughter, poke my head into Knowledge--somewhere--and am
lost, but the light of it on the spirit does not fade away. It leaves a
glow there. It plays on the pages afterward.
There is a certain fine excitement about taking a library in this
fashion, a sense of spaciousness of joy in it, which one is almost
always sure to miss in libraries--most libraries--by staying in them.
The only way one can get any real good out of a modern library seems to
be by going away in the nick of time. If one stays there is no help for
it. One is soon standing before the card catalogue, sorting one's wits
out in it, filing them away, and the sense of boundlessness both in
one's self and everybody else--the thing a library is for--is fenced off
for ever.
At least it seems fenced off for ever. One sees the universe barred and
patterned off with a kind of grating before it. It is a card-catalogue
universe.
I can only speak for one, but I must say for myself, that as compared
with this feeling one has in the door, this feeling of standing over a
library--mere reading in it, sitting down and letting one's self be
tucked into a single book in it--is a humiliating experience.
II
How It Feels
I am not unaware that this will seem to some--this empty doting on
infinity, this standing and staring at All-knowledge--a mere dizzying
exercise, whirling one's head round and round in Nothing, for Nothing.
And I am not unaware that it would be unbecoming in me or in any other
man to feel superior to a card catalogue.
A card catalogue, of course, as a device for making a kind of tunnel for
one's mind in a library--for working one's way through it--is useful and
necessary to all of us. Certainly, if a man insists on having infinity
in a convenient form--infinity in a box--it would be hard to find
anything better to have it in than a card catalogue.
But there are times when one does not want infinity in a box. He loses
the best part of it that way. He prefers it in its natural state. All
that I am contending for is, that when these times come, the times when
a man likes to feel infinite knowledge crowding round him,--feel it
through the backs of unopened books, and likes to stand still and think
about it, worship with the thought of it,--he ought to be allowed to. It
is true that there is no sign up against it (against thinking in
libraries). But there might as well be. It amounts to the same thing. No
one is expected to. People are expected to keep up an appearance, at
least, of doing something else there. I do not dare to hope that the
next time I am caught standing and staring in a library, with a kind of
blank, happy look, I shall not be considered by all my kind
intellectually disreputable for it. I admit that it does not look
intelligent--this standing by a door and taking in a sweep of
books--this reading a whole library at once. I can imagine how it looks.
It looks like listening to a kind of cloth and paper chorus--foolish
enough; but if I go out of the door to the hills again, refreshed for
them and lifted up to them, with the strength of the ages in my limbs,
great voices all around me, flocking my solitary walk--who shall gainsay
me?
III
How a Specialist can Be an Educated Man
It is a sad thing to go into a library nowadays and watch the people
there who are merely making tunnels through it. Some libraries are worse
than others--seem to be made for tunnels. College libraries, perhaps,
are the worst. One can almost--if one stands still enough in them--hear
what is going on. It is getting to be practically impossible in a
college library to slink off to a side shelf by one's self, take down
some gentle-hearted book one does not need to read there and begin to
listen in it, without hearing some worthy person quietly, persistently
boring himself around the next corner. It is getting worse every year.
The only way a readable library book can be read nowadays is to take it
away from the rest of them. It must be taken where no other reading is
going on. The busy scene of a crowd of people--mere specialists and
others--gathered around roofing their minds in is no fitting place for a
great book or a live book to be read--a book that uncovers the universe.
On the other hand, it were certainly a trying universe if it were
uncovered all the time, if one had to be exposed to all of it and to all
of it at once, always; and there is no denying that libraries were
intended to roof men's minds in sometimes as well as to take the roofs
of their minds off. What seems to be necessary is to find some middle
course in reading between the scientist's habit of tunnelling under the
dome of knowledge and the poet's habit of soaring around in it. There
ought to be some principle of economy in knowledge which will allow a
man, if he wants to, or knows enough, to be a poet and a scientist both.
It is well enough for a mere poet to take a library as a spectacle--a
kind of perpetual Lick Observatory to peek at the universe with, if he
likes, and if a man is a mere scientist, there is no objection to his
taking a library as a kind of vast tunnel system, or chart for
burrowing. But the common educated man--the man who is in the business
of being a human being, unless he knows some middle course in a library,
knows how to use its Lick Observatory and its tunnel system both--does
not get very much out of it. If there can be found some principle of
economy in knowledge, common to artists and scientists alike, which will
make it possible for a poet to know something, and which will make it
possible for a scientist to know a very great deal without being--to
most people--a little underwitted, it would very much simplify the
problem of being educated in modern times, and there would be a general
gratefulness.
Far be it from me to seem to wish to claim this general gratefulness for
myself. I have no world-reforming feeling about the matter. I would be
very grateful just here to be allowed to tuck in a little idea--no chart
to go with it--on this general subject, which my mind keeps coming back
to, as it runs around watching people.
There seem to be but two ways of knowing. One of them is by the spirit
and the other is by the letter. The most reasonable principle of economy
in knowledge would seem to be, that in all reading that pertains to
man's specialty--his business in knowledge--he should read by the
letter, knowing the facts by observing them himself, and that in all
other reading he should read through the spirit of imagination--the
power of taking to one's self facts that have been observed by others.
If a man wants to be a specialist he must do his knowing like a
scientist; but if a scientist wants to be a man he must be a poet; he
must learn how to read like a poet; he must educate in himself the power
of absorbing immeasurable knowledge, the facts of which have been
approved and observed by others.
The weak point in our modern education seems to be that it has broken
altogether with the spirit or the imagination. Playing upon the spirit
or the imagination of a man is the one method possible to employ in
educating him in everything except his specialty. It is the one method
possible to employ in making even a powerful specialist of him; in
relating his specialty to other specialties; that is, in making either
him or his specialty worth while.
Inasmuch as it has been decreed that every man in modern life must be a
specialist, the fundamental problem that confronts modern education is,
How can a specialist be an educated man? There would seem to be but one
way a specialist can be an educated man. The only hope for a specialist
lies in his being allowed to have a soul (or whatever he chooses to call
it), a spirit or an imagination. If he has This, whatever it is, in one
way or another, he will find his way to every book he needs. He will
read all the books there are in his specialty. He will read all other
books through their backs.
IV
On Reading Books through Their Backs
As this is the only way the majority of books can be read by anybody,
one wonders why so little has been said about it.
Reading books through their backs is easily the most important part of a
man's outfit, if he wishes to be an educated man. It is not necessary to
prove this statement. The books themselves prove it without even being
opened. The mere outside of a library--almost any library--would seem to
settle the point that if a man proposes to be in any larger or deeper
sense a reader of books, the books must be read through their backs.
Even the man who is obliged to open books in order to read them sooner
or later admits this. He finds the few books he opens in the literal or
unseeing way do not make him see anything. They merely make him see that
he ought to have opened the others--that he must open the others; that
is, if he is to know anything. The next thing he sees is that he must
open all the others to know anything. When he comes to know this he may
be said to have reached what is called, by stretch of courtesy, a state
of mind. It is the scientific state of mind. Any man who has watched his
mind a little knows what this means. It is the first incipient symptom
in a mind that science is setting in.
The only possible cure for it is reading books through their backs. As
this scientific state of mind is the main obstacle nowadays in the way
of reading books through their backs, it is fitting, perhaps, at this
point that I should dwell on it a little.
I do not claim to be a scientist, and I have never--even in my worst
moments--hoped for a scientific mind. I am afraid I know as well as any
one who has read as far as this, in this book, that I cannot prove
anything. The book has at least proved that; but it does seem to me that
there are certain things that very much need to be said about the
scientific mind, in its general relation to knowledge. I would give the
world to be somebody else for awhile and say them--right here in the
middle of my book. But I know as well as any one, after all that has
passed, that if I say anything about the scientific mind nobody will
believe it. The best I can do is to say how I feel about the scientific
mind. "And what has that to do with it?" exclaims the whole world and
all its laboratories. What is really wanted in dealing with this matter
seems to be some person--some grave, superficial person--who will take
the scientific mind up scientifically, shake it and filter it, put it
under the microscope, stare at it with a telescope, stick the X-ray
through it, lay it on the operating table--show what is the matter with
it--even to itself. Anything that is said about the scientific mind
which is not said in a big, bow-wow, scientific, impersonal,
out-of-the-universe sort of way will not go very far.
And yet, the things that need to be said about the scientific mind--the
things that need to be done for it--need to be said and done so very
much, that it seems as if almost any one might help. So I am going to
keep on trying. Let no one suppose, however, that because I have turned
around the corner into another chapter, I am setting myself up as a
sudden and new authority on the scientific mind. I do not tell how it
feels to be scientific. I merely tell how it looks as if it felt.
I have never known a great scientist, and I can only speak of the kind
of scientist I have generally met--the kind every one meets nowadays,
the average, bare scientist. He always looks to me as if he had a grudge
against the universe--jealous of it or something. There are so many
things in it he cannot know and that he has no use for unless he does.
It always seems to me (perhaps it seems so to most of us in this world,
who are running around and enjoying things and guessing on them) that
the average scientist has a kind of dreary and disgruntled look, a look
of feeling left out. Nearly all the universe goes to waste with a
scientist. He fixes himself so that it has to. If a man cannot get the
good of a thing until he knows it and knows all of it, he cannot expect
to be happy in this universe. There are no conveniences for his being
happy in it. It is the wrong size, to begin with. Exact knowledge at its
best, or even at its worst, does not let a man into very many things in
a universe like this one. A large part of it is left over with a
scientist. It is the part that is left over which makes him unhappy. I
am not claiming that a scientist, simply because he is a scientist, is
any unhappier or needs to be any unhappier than other men are. He does
not need to be. It all comes of a kind of brutal, sweeping, overriding
prejudice he has against guessing on anything.
V
On Keeping Each Other in Countenance
I do not suppose that my philosophising on this subject--a sort of slow,
peristaltic action of my own mind--is of any particular value; that it
really makes any one feel any better except myself.
But it has just occurred to me that I may have arisen, quite as well as
not, without knowing it, to the dignity of the commonplace.
"The man who thinks he is playing a solo in any human experience," says
this morning's paper, "only needs a little more experience to know that
he is a member of a chorus." I suspect myself of being a Typical Case.
The scientific mind has taken possession of all the land. It has assumed
the right of eminent domain in it, and there must be other human beings
here and there, I am sure, standing aghast at learning in our modern
day, even as I am, their whys and wherefores working within them, trying
to wonder their way out in this matter.
All that is necessary, as I take it, is for one or the other of us to
speak up in the world, barely peep in it, make himself known wherever he
is, tell how he feels, and he will find he is not alone. Then we will
get together. We will keep each other in countenance. We will play with
our minds if we want to. We will take the liberty of knowing rows of
things we don't know all about, and we will be as happy as we like, and
if we keep together we will manage to have a fairly educated look
besides. I am very sure of this. But it is the sort of thing a man
cannot do alone. If he tries to do it with any one else, any one that
happens along, he is soon come up with. It cannot be done in that way.
There is no one to whom to turn. Almost every mind one knows in this
modern educated world is a suspicious, unhappy, abject, helpless,
scientific mind.
It is almost impossible to find a typical educated mind, either in this
country or in Europe or anywhere, that is not a rolled-over mind,
jealous and crushed by knowledge day and night, and yet staring at its
ignorance everywhere. The scientist is almost always a man who takes his
mind seriously, and he takes the universe as seriously as he takes his
mind. Instead of glorying in a universe and being a little proud of it
for being such an immeasurable, unspeakable, unknowable success, his
whole state of being is one of worry about it. The universe seems to
irritate him somehow. Has he not spent years of hard labour in making
his mind over, in drilling it into not-thinking, into not-inferring
things, into not-knowing anything he does not know all of? And yet here
he is and here is his whole life--does it not consist in being baffled
by germs and bacilli, crowed over by atoms, trampled on by the stars? It
is getting so that there is but one thing left that the modern, educated
scientific mind feels that it knows and that is the impossibility of
knowledge. Certainly if there is anything in this wide world that can
possibly be in a more helpless, more pulp-like state than the scientific
mind in the presence of something that cannot be known, something that
can only be used by being wondered at (which is all most of the universe
is for), it has yet to be pointed out.
He may be better off than he looks, and I don't doubt he quite looks
down on me as,
A mere poet,
The Chanticleer of Things,
Who lives to flap his wings--
It's all he knows,--
They're never furled;
Who plants his feet
On the ridge-pole of the world
And crows.
Still, I like it very well. I don't know anything better that can be
done with the world, and as I have said before I say again, my friend
and brother, the scientist, is either very great or very small, or he is
moderately, decently unhappy. At least this is the way it looks from the
ridge-pole of the world.
VI
The Romance of Science
Science is generally accredited with being very matter-of-fact. But
there has always been one romance in science from the first,--its
romantic attitude toward itself. It would be hard to find any greater
romance in modern times. The romance of science is the assumption that
man is a plain, pure-blooded, non-inferring, mere-observing being and
that in proportion as his brain is educated he must not use it.
"Deductive reasoning has gone out with the nineteenth century," says The
Strident Voice. This is the one single inference that the scientific
method seems to have been able to make--the inference that no inference
has a right to exist.
So far as I can see, if there are going to be inferences anyway, and one
has to take one's choice in inferring, I would rather have a few
inferences on hand that I can live with every day than to have this one
huge, voracious inference (the scientist's) which swallows all the
others up. For that matter, when the scientist has actually made
it,--this one huge guess that he hasn't a right to guess,--what good
does it do him? He never lives up to it, and all the time he has his
poor, miserable theory hanging about him, dogging him day and night.
Does he not keep on guessing in spite of himself? Does he not live
plumped up against mystery every hour of his life, crowded on by
ignorance, forced to guess if only to eat? Is he not browbeaten into
taking things for granted whichever way he turns? He becomes a doleful,
sceptical, contradictory, anxious, disagreeable, disapproving person as
a matter of course.
One would think, in the abstract, that a certain serenity would go with
exact knowledge; and it would, if a man were willing to put up with a
reasonable amount of exact knowledge, eke it out with his brains, some
of it; but when he wants all the exact knowledge there is, and nothing
else but exact knowledge, and is not willing to mix his brains with it,
it is different. When a man puts his whole being into a vise of exact
knowledge, he finds that he has about as perfect a convenience for being
miserable as could possibly be devised. He soon becomes incapable of
noticing things or of enjoying things in the world for themselves. With
one or two exceptions, I have never known a scientist to whom his
knowing a thing, or not knowing it, did not seem the only important
thing about it. Of course when a man's mind gets into this dolefully
cramped, exact condition, a universe like this is not what it ought to
be for him. He lives too unprotected a life. His whole attitude toward
the universe becomes one of wishing things would keep off of him in
it--things he does not know. Are there not enough things he does not
know even in his specialty? And as for this eternal being reminded of
the others, this slovenly habit of "general information" that interesting
people have--this guessing, inferring, and generalising--what is it all
for? What does it all come to? If a man is after knowledge, let him have
knowledge, knowledge that is knowledge, let him find a fact, anything
for a fact, get God into a corner, hug one fact and live with it and die
with it.
When a man once gets into this shut-in attitude it is of little use to
put a word in, with him, for the daily habit of taking the roof off
one's mind, letting the universe play upon it instead of trying to bore
a hole in it somewhere. "What does it avail after all, after it is all
over, after a long life, even if the hole is bored," I say to him, "to
stand by one's little hole and cry, 'Behold, oh, human race, this Gimlet
Hole which I have bored in infinite space! Let it be forever named for
me.'" And in the meantime the poor fellow gets no joy out of living. He
does not even get credit for his not-living, seventy years of it. He
fences off his little place to know a little of nothing in, becomes a
specialist, a foot note to infinite space, and is never noticed
afterwards (and quite reasonably) by any one--not even by himself.
VII
Monads
I am not saying that this is the way a scientist--a mere scientist, one
who has the fixed habit of not reading books through their backs--really
feels. It is the way he ought to feel. As often as not he feels quite
comfortable. One sees one every little while (the mere scientist)
dropping the entire universe with a dull thud and looking happy after
it.
But the best ones are different. Even those who are not quite the best
are different. It is really a very rare scientist who joggles
contentedly down without qualms, or without delays, to a hole in space.
There is always a capability, an apparently left-over capability in him.
What seems to happen is, that when the average human being makes up his
mind to it, insists on being a scientist, the Lord keeps a remnant of
happiness in him--a gnawing on the inside of him which will not let him
rest.
This remnant of happiness in him, his soul, or inferring organ, or
whatever it may be, makes him suspect that the scientific method as a
complete method is a false, superficial, and dangerous method,
threatening the very existence of all knowledge that is worth knowing on
the earth. He begins to suspect that a mere scientist, a man who cannot
even make his mind work both ways, backwards or forwards, as he likes
(the simplest, most rudimentary motion of a mind), inductively or
deductively, is bound to have something left out of all of his
knowledge. He sees that the all-or-nothing assumption in knowledge, to
say nothing of not applying to the arts, in which it is always sterile,
does not even apply to the physical sciences--to the mist, dust, fire,
and water out of which the earth and the scientist are made.
For men who are living their lives as we are living ours, in the shimmer
of a globule in space, it is not enough that we should lift our faces to
the sky and blunder and guess at a God there, because there is so much
room between the stars, and murmur faintly, "Spiritual things are
spiritually discerned." By the infinite bones of our bodies, by the
seeds of the million years that flow in our veins, _material_ things are
spiritually discerned. There is not science enough nor scientific method
enough in the schools of all Christendom for a man to listen
intelligently to his own breathing with, or to know his own thumb-nail.
Is not his own heart thundering the infinite through him--beating the
eternal against his sides--even while he speaks? And does he not know it
while he speaks?
By the time a man's a Junior or a Senior nowadays, if he feels the
eternal beating against his sides he thinks it must be something else.
He thinks he ought to. It is a mere inference. At all events he has
little use for it unless he knows just how eternal it is. I am speaking
too strongly? I suppose I am. I am thinking of my four special
boys--boys I have been doing my living in, the last few years. I cannot
help speaking a little strongly. Two of them--two as fine, flash-minded,
deep-lit, wide-hearted fellows as one would like to see, are down at
W----, being cured of inferring in a four years' course at the W----
Scientific School. Another one, who always seemed to me to have real
genius in him, who might have had a period in literature named after
him, almost, if he'd stop studying literature, is taking a graduate
course at M----, learning that it cannot be proved that Shakespeare
wrote Shakespeare. He has already become one of these spotlessly
accurate persons one expects nowadays. (I hardly dare to hope he will
even read this book of mine, with all his affection for me, after the
first few pages or so, lest he should fall into a low or wondering state
of mind.) My fourth boy, who was the most promising of all, whose mind
reached out the farthest, who was always touching new possibilities, a
fresh, warm-blooded, bright-eyed fellow, is down under a manhole
studying God in the N---- Theological Seminary.
This may not be exactly a literal statement, nor a very scientific way
to criticise the scientific method, but when one has had to sit and see
four of the finest minds he ever knew snuffed out by it,--whatever else
may be said for science, scientific language is not satisfying. What is
going to happen to us next, in our little town, I hardly dare to know. I
only know that three relentlessly inductive, dull, brittle, _blase_, and
springless youths from S---- University have just come down and taken
possession of our High School. They seem to be throwing, as near as I
can judge, a spell of the impossibility of knowledge over the boys we
have left.
I admit that I am in an unreasonable state of mind.[3] I think a great
many people are. At least I hope so. There is no excuse for not being a
little unreasonable. Sometimes it almost seems, when one looks at the
condition of most college boys' minds, as if our colleges were becoming
the moral and spiritual and intellectual dead-centres of modern life.
[3] Fact.
I will not yield to any man in admiration for Science--holy and
speechless Science; holier than any religion has ever been yet; what
religions are made of and are going to be made of, nor am I dating my
mind three hundred years back and trying to pick a quarrel with Lord
Bacon. I am merely wondering whether, if science is to be taught at all,
it had not better be taught, in each branch of it, by men who are
teaching a subject they have conceived with their minds instead of a
subject which has been merely unloaded on them, piled up on top of their
minds, and which their minds do not know anything about.
No one seems to have stopped to notice what the spectacle of science as
taught in college is getting to be--the spectacle of one set of minds
which has been crunched by knowledge crunching another set. Have you
never been to One, oh Gentle Reader, and watched It, watched It when It
was working, one of these great Endowed Fact-machines, wound up by the
dead, going round and round, thousands and thousands of youths in it
being rolled out and chilled through and educated in it, having their
souls smoothed out of them? Hundreds of human minds, small and sure and
hard, working away on thousands of other human minds, making them small
and sure and hard. Matter--infinite matter everywhere--taught by More
Matter,--taught the way Matter would teach if it knew how--without
generalising, without putting facts together to make truths out of them.
It would seem, looking at it theoretically, that Science, of all things
in this world, the stuff that dreams are made of; the one boundless
subject of the earth, face to face and breath to breath with the Creator
every minute of its life, would be taught with a divine touch in it,
with the appeal to the imagination and the soul, to the world-building
instinct in a man, the thing in him that puts universes together, the
thing in him that fills the whole dome of space and all the crevices of
being with the whisper of God.
But it is not so. Science is great, and great scientists are great as a
matter of course; but the sciences in the meantime are being taught in
our colleges--in many of them, most of them--by men whose minds are mere
registering machines. The facts are put in at one end (one click per
fact) and come out facts at the other. The sciences are being taught
more and more every year by moral and spiritual stutterers, men with
non-inferring minds, men who live in a perfect deadlock of knowledge,
men who cannot generalise about a fly's wing, bashful, empty, limp, and
hopeless and doddering before the commonplacest, sanest, and simplest
generalisations of human life. In The Great Free Show, in our common
human peep at it, who has not seen them, staggering to know what the
very children, playing with dolls and rocking-horses, can take for
granted? Minds which seem absolutely incapable of striking out, of
taking a good, manly stride on anything, mincing in religion, effeminate
in enthusiasm--please forgive me, Gentle Reader, I know I ought not to
carry on in this fashion, but have I not spent years in my soul
(sometimes it seems hundreds of years) in being humble--in being abject
before this kind of mind? It is only a day almost since I have found it
out, broken away from it, got hold of the sky to hoot at it with. I am
free now. I am not going to be humble longer, before it. I have spent
years dully wondering before this mind; wondering what was the matter
with me that I could not love it, that I could not go where it loved to
go, and come when it said "Come" to me. I have spent years in dust and
ashes before it, struggling with myself, trying to make myself small
enough to follow this kind of a mind around, and now the scales are
fallen from my eyes. When I follow An Inductive Scientific Mind now, or
try to follow it through its convolutions of matter-of-fact, its
involutions of logic, its wriggling through axioms, I smile a new smile
and my heart laughs within me. If I miss the point, I am not in a panic,
and if, at the end of the seventeenth platitude that did not need to be
proved, I find I do not know where I am, I thank God.
I know that I am partly unreasonable, and I know that in my chosen
station on the ridge-pole of the world it is useless to criticise those
who do not even believe, probably, that worlds have ridge-poles. It is a
bit hard to get their attention--and I hope the reader will overlook it
if one seems to speak rather loud--from ridge-poles. Oh, ye children of
The Literal! ye most serene Highnesses, ye archangels of Accuracy, the
Voices of life all challenge you--the world around! What are ye, after
all, but pilers-up of matter, truth-stutterers, truth-spellers, sunk in
protoplasm to the tops of your souls? What is it that you are going to
do with us? How many generations of youths do you want? When will souls
be allowed again? When will they be allowed in college?
Well, well, I say to my soul, what does it all come to? Why all this ado
about it one way or the other? Is it not a great, fresh, eager,
boundless world? Does it not roll up out of Darkness with new children
on it, night after night? What does it matter, I say to my soul-a
generation or so--from the ridge-pole of the world? The great Sun comes
round again. It travels over the tops of seas and mountains. Microbes in
their dewdrops, seeds in their winds, stars in their courses, worms in
their apples, answer it, and the hordes of the ants in their ant-hills
run before it. And what does it matter after all, under the great Dome,
a few hordes of factmongers more or less, glimmering and wonderless,
crawlers on the bottom of the sea of time, lovers of the ooze of
knowledge, feeling with slow, myopic mouths at Infinite Truth?
But when I see my four faces--the faces of my four special boys, when I
hear the college bells ringing to them, it matters a great deal. My soul
will not wait. What is the ridge-pole of the world? The distance of a
ridge-pole does not count. The extent of a universe does not seem to
make very much difference. The next ten generations do not help very
much on this one. I go forth in my soul. I take hold of the first
scientist I meet--my whole mind pummelling him. "What is it?" I say,
"what is it you are doing with us and with the lives of our children?
What is it you are doing with yourself? Truth is not a Thing. Did you
think it? Truth is not even a Heap of Things. It is a Light. How dare
you mock at inferring? How dare you to think to escape the infinite? You
cannot escape the infinite even by making yourself small enough. It is
written that thou shalt be infinitely small if thou art not infinitely
large. Not to infer is to contradict the very nature of facts. Not to
infer is not to live. It is to cease to be a fact one's self. What is
education if one does not infer? Vacuums rolling around in vacuums.
Atoms cross-examining atoms. And you say you will not guess? Do you need
to be cudgelled with a whole universe to begin to learn to guess? What
is all your science--your boasted science, after all, but more raw
material to make more guesses with? Is not the whole Future Tense an
inference? Is not History--that which has actually happened--a mystery?
You yourself are a mere probability, and God is a generalisation. What
does it profit a man to discover The Inductive Method and to lose his
own soul? What is The Inductive Method? Do you think that all these
scientists who have locked their souls up and a large part of their
bodies, in The Inductive Method, if they had waited to be born by The
Inductive Method, would ever have heard of it? Being born is one
inference and dying is another. Man leaves a wake of infinity after him
wherever he goes, and of course it's where he doesn't go. It's all
infinity--one way or the other."
* * * * *
And it came to pass in my dream as I lay on my bed in the night, I
thought I saw Man my brother blinking under the dome of space, infinite
monad that he is: I saw him with a glass in one hand and a Slide of
Infinity in the other, and, in my dream, out of His high heaven God
leaned down to me and said to me, "What is THAT?"
And as I looked I laughed and prayed in my heart, I scarce knew which,
and "Oh, Most Excellent Deity! Who would think it!" I cried. "I do not
know, but I think--_I think_--it is a man, thinking he is studying a
GERM--one tiny particle of inimitable Immensity ogling another!"
And a very pretty sight it is, too, oh Brother Monads--if we do not take
it seriously.
And what we really need next, oh comrades, scientists--each under our
separate stones--is the Laugh Out of Heaven which shall come down and
save us--laugh the roofs of our stones off. Then we shall stretch our
souls with inferences. We shall lie in the great sun and warm ourselves.
VIII
Multiplication Tables
It would seem to be the main trouble with the scientific mind of the
second rank that it overlooks the nature of knowledge in the thirst for
exact knowledge. In an infinite world the better part of the knowledge a
man needs to have does not need to be exact.
These things being as they are, it would seem that the art of reading
books through their backs is an equally necessary art to a great
scientist and to a great poet. If it is necessary to great scientists
and to great poets it is all the more necessary to small ones, and to
the rest of us. It is the only way, indeed, in which an immortal human
being of any kind can get what he deserves to have to live his life
with--a whole cross-section of the universe. A gentleman and a scholar
will take nothing less.
If a man is to get his cross-section of the universe, his natural share
in it, he can only get it by living in the qualities of things instead
of the quantities; by avoiding duplicate facts, duplicate persons, and
principles; by using the multiplication table in knowledge (inference)
instead of adding everything up, by taking all things in this world
(except his specialty) through their spirits and essences, and, in
general, by reading books through their backs.
The problem of cultivating these powers in a man, when reduced to its
simplest terms, is reduced to the problem of cultivating his imagination
or organ of not needing to be told things.
However much a man may know about wise reading and about the principles
of economy in knowledge, in an infinite world the measure of his
knowledge is bound to be determined, in the long run, by the capacity of
his organ of not needing to be told things--of reading books through
their backs.
II--On Reading for Principles
I
On Changing One's Conscience
We were sitting by my fireplace--several of our club. I had just been
reading out loud a little thing of my own. I have forgotten the title.
It was something about Books that Other People ought to Read, I think. I
stopped rather suddenly, rather more suddenly than anybody had hoped. At
least nobody had thought what he ought to say about it. And I saw that
the company, after a sort of general, vague air of having exclaimed
properly, was settling back into the usual helpless silence one
expects--after the appearance of an idea at clubs.
"Why doesn't somebody say something?" I said.
P. G. S. of M.: "We are thinking."
"Oh," I said. I tried to feel grateful. But everybody kept waiting.
I was a good deal embarrassed and was getting reckless and was about to
make the very serious mistake, in a club, of seeing if I could not
rescue one idea by going out after it with another, when The Mysterious
Person (who is the only man in our club whose mind ever really comes
over and plays in my yard) in the goodness of his heart spoke up. "I
have not heard anything in a long time," he began (the club looked at
him rather anxiously), "which has done--which has made me feel--less
ashamed of myself than this paper. I----"
It seemed to me that this was not exactly a fortunate remark. I said I
didn't doubt I could do a lot of good that way, probably, if I wanted
to--going around the country making people less ashamed of themselves.
"But I don't mean that I feel really ashamed of myself about books I
have not read," said The Mysterious Person. "What I mean is, that I have
a kind of slinking feeling that I ought to--a feeling of being ashamed
for not being ashamed."
I told The M. P. that I thought New England was full of people; just
like him--people with a lot of left-over consciences.
The P. G. S. of M. wanted to know what I meant by that.
I said I thought there were thousands of people--one sees them
everywhere in Massachusetts--fairly intelligent people, people who are
capable of changing their minds about things, but who can't change their
consciences. Their consciences seem to keep hanging on to them, in the
same set way--somehow--with or without their minds. "Some people's
consciences don't seem to notice much, so far as I can see, whether they
have minds connected with them or not." "Don't you know what it is," I
appealed to the P. G. S. of M., "to get everything all fixed up with
your mind and your reason and your soul; that certain things that look
wrong are all right,--the very things of all others that you ought to do
and keep on doing,--and then have your conscience keep right on the same
as it always did--tatting them up against you?"
The P. G. S. of M. said something about not spending very much time
thinking about his conscience.
I said I didn't believe in it, but I thought that if a man had one, it
was apt to trouble him a little off and on--especially if the one he had
was one of these left-over ones. "If you had one of these consciences--I
mean the kind of conscience that pretends to belong to you, and acts as
if it belonged to some one else," I said "one of these dead-frog-leg,
reflex-action consciences, working and twitching away on you day and
night, the way I have, you'd _have_ to think about it sometimes. You'd
get so ashamed of it. You'd feel trifled with so. You'd----"
The P. G. S. of M. said something about not being very much
surprised--over my case. He said that people who changed their minds as
often as I did couldn't reasonably expect consciences spry enough.
His general theory seemed to be that I had a conscience once and wore it
out.
"It's getting to be so with everybody nowadays," he said. "Nobody is
settled. Everything is blown about. We do not respect tradition either
in ourselves or in the life about us. No one listens to the Voice of
Experience."
"There she blows!" I said. I knew it was coming sooner or later. I added
that one of the great inconveniences of life, it seemed to me, was the
Intolerance of Experienced People.
II
On the Intolerance of Experienced People
It is generally assumed by persons who have taken the pains to put
themselves in this very disagreeable class, that people in general--all
other people--are as inexperienced--as they look. If a man speaks on a
subject at all in their presence, they assume he speaks
autobiographically. These people are getting thicker every year. One
can't go anywhere without finding them standing around with a kind of
"How-do-you-know?" and "Did-it-happen-to-you?" air every time a man says
something he knows by--well--by seeing it--perfectly plain seeing it.
One doesn't need to stand up to one's neck in experience, in a perfect
muck of experience, in order to know things, in order to know they are
there. People who are experienced within an inch of their lives,
submerged in experience, until all you can see of them is a tired look,
are always calling out to the man who sees a thing as he is going
by--sees it, I mean, with his mind; sees it without having to put his
feet in it--they are always calling out to him to come back and be with
them, and know life, as they call it, and duck under to Experience. Now,
to say nothing of living with such persons, it is almost impossible to
talk with them. It isn't safe even to philosophise when they are around.
If a man ventures the assertion in their presence that what a woman
loves in a lover is complete subjugation they argue that either he is a
fool and is asserting what he has not experienced, or he is still more
of one and has experienced it. The idea that a man may have several
principles around him that he has not used yet does not occur to them.
The average amateur mother, when she belongs to this type, becomes a
perfect bigot toward a maiden aunt who advances, perhaps, some harmless
little Froebel idea. She swears by the shibboleth of experience, and
every new baby she has makes her more disagreeable to people who have
not had babies. The only way to get acquainted with her is to have a
baby. She assumes that a motherless woman has a motherless mind. The
idea that a rich and bountiful womanhood, which is saving its motherhood
up, which is free from the absorption and the haste, keenly observant
and sympathetic, may come to a kind of motherly insight, distinctly the
result of not being experienced, does not occur to her. The art of
getting the result--the spirit of experience, without paying all the
cost of the experience itself--needs a good word spoken for it nowadays.
Some one has yet to point out the value and power of what might be
called The Maiden-Aunt Attitude toward Life. The world has had thousands
of experienced young mothers for thousands of years--experienced out of
their wits--piled up with experiences they don't know anything about;
but, in the meantime, the most important contribution to the bringing-up
of children in the world that has ever been known--the kindergarten--was
thought of in the first place by a man who was never a mother, and has
been developed entirely in the years that have followed since by maiden
aunts.
The spiritual power and manifoldness and largeness which is the most
informing quality of a really cultivated man comes from a certain
refinement in him, a gift of knowing by tasting. He seems to have
touched the spirits of a thousand experiences we know he never has had,
and they seem to have left the souls of sorrows and joys in him. He
lives in a kind of beautiful magnetic fellowship with all real life in
the world. This is only possible by a sort of unconscious economy in the
man's nature, a gift of not having to experience things.
Avoiding experience is one of the great creative arts of life. We shall
have enough before we die. It is forced upon us. We cannot even select
it, most of it. But, in so far as we can select it,--in one's reading,
for instance,--it behooves a man to avoid experience. He at least wants
to avoid experience enough to have time to stop and think about the
experience he has; to be sure he is getting as much out of his
experience as it is worth.
III
On Having One's Experience Done Out
"But how can one avoid an experience?"
By heading it off with a principle. Principles are a lot of other
people's experiences, in a convenient form a man can carry around with
him, to keep off his own experiences with.
No other rule for economising knowledge can quite take the place, it
seems to me, of reading for principles. It economises for a man both
ways at once. It not only makes it possible for a man to have the whole
human race working out his life for him, instead of having to do it all
himself, but it makes it possible for him to read anything he likes, to
get something out of almost anything he does not like, which he is
obliged to read. If a man has a habit of reading for principles, for the
law behind everything, he cannot miss it. He cannot help learning
things, even from people who don't know them.
The other evening when The P. G. S. of M. came into my study, he saw the
morning paper lying unopened on the settle by the fireplace.
"Haven't you read this yet?" he said.
"No, not to-day."
"Where are you, anyway? Why not?"
I said I hadn't felt up to it yet, didn't feel profound
enough--something to that effect.
The P. G. S. of M. thinks a newspaper should be read in ten minutes. He
looked over at me with a sort of slow, pitying, Boston-Public-Library
expression he has sometimes.
I behaved as well as I could--took no notice for a minute.
"The fact is, I have changed," I said, "about papers and some things. I
have times of thinking I'm improved considerably," I added recklessly.
Still the same pained Boston-Public-Library expression--only turned on a
little harder.
"Seems to me," I said, "when a man can't feel superior to other people
in this world, he might at least be allowed the privilege of feeling
superior to himself once in a while--spells of it."
He intimated that the trouble with me was that I wanted both. I admitted
that I had cravings for both. I said I thought I'd be a little easier to
get along with, if they were more satisfied.
He intimated that I was easier to get along with than I ought to be, or
than I seemed to think I was. He did not put it in so many words. The P.
G. S. of M. never says anything that can be got hold of and answered.
Finally I determined to answer him whether he had said anything or not.
"Well," I said, "I may feel superior to other people sometimes. I may
even feel superior to myself, but I haven't got to the point where I
feel superior to a newspaper--to a whole world at once. I don't try to
read it in ten minutes. I don't try to make a whole day of a whole
world, a foot-note to my oatmeal mush! I don't treat the whole human
race, trooping past my breakfast, as a parenthesis in my own mind. I
don't try to read a great, serious, boundless thing like a daily
newspaper, unfolded out of starlight, gleaner of a thousand sunsets
around a world, and talk at the same time. I don't say, 'There's nothing
in it,' interrupt a planet to chew my food, throw a planet on the floor
and look for my hat.... Nations lunging through space to say
good-morning to me, continents flashed around my thoughts, seas for the
boundaries of my day's delight ... the great God shining over all! And
may He preserve me from ever reading a newspaper in ten minutes!"
I have spent as much time as any one, I think, in my day, first and
last, in feeling superior to newspapers. I can remember when I used to
enjoy it very much--the feeling, I mean. I have spent whole half-days at
it, going up and down columns, thinking they were not good enough for
me.
Now when I take up a morning paper, half-dread, half-delight, I take it
up softly. My whole being trembles in the balance before it. The whole
procession of my soul, shabby, loveless, provincial, tawdry, is passed
in review before it. It is the grandstand of the world. The vast and
awful Roll-Call of the things I ought to be--the things I ought to
love--in the great world voice sweeps over me. It reaches its way
through all my thoughts, through the minutes of my days. "Where is thy
soul? Oh, where is thy soul?" the morning paper, up and down its
columns, calls to me. There are days that I ache with the echo of it.
There are days when I dare not read it until the night. Then the voice
that is in it grows gentle with the darkness, it may be, and is stilled
with sleep.
IV
On Reading a Newspaper in Ten Minutes
I am not saying it does not take a very intelligent man to read a
newspaper in ten minutes--squeeze a planet at breakfast and drop it. I
think it does. But I am inclined to think that the intelligent man who
reads a newspaper in ten minutes is exactly the same kind of intelligent
man who could spend a week reading it if he wanted to, and not waste a
minute. And he might want to. He simply reads a newspaper as he likes.
He is not confined to one way. He does not read it in ten minutes
because he has a mere ten-minute mind, but because he merely has the ten
minutes. Rapid reading and slow reading are both based, with such a man,
on appreciation of the paper--and not upon a narrow, literary,
Boston-Public-Library feeling of being superior to it.
The value of reading-matter, like other matter, depends on what a man
does with it. All that one needs in order not to waste time in general
reading is a large, complete set of principles to stow things away in.
Nothing really needs to be wasted. If one knows where everything belongs
in one's mind--or tries to,--if one takes the trouble to put it there,
reading a newspaper is one of the most colossal, tremendous, and
boundless acts that can be performed by any one in the whole course of a
human life.
If there's any place where a man needs to have all his wits about him,
to put things into,--if there's any place where the next three inches
can demand as much of a man as a newspaper, where is it? The moment he
opens it he lays his soul open and exposes himself to all sides of the
world in a second,--to several thousand years of a world at once.
A book is a comparatively safe, unintelligent place for a mind to be in.
There are at least four walls to it--a few scantlings over one,
protecting one from all space. A man has at least some remotest idea of
where he is, of what may drop on him, in a book. It may tax his capacity
of stowing things away. But he always has notice--almost always. It sees
that he has time and room. It has more conveniences for fixing things.
The author is always there besides, a kind of valet to anybody, to help
people along pleasantly, to anticipate their wants. It's what an author
is for. One expects it.
But a man finds it is different in a morning paper, rolled out of dreams
and sleep into it,--empty, helpless before a day, all the telegraph
machines of the world thumping all the night, clicked into one's
thoughts before one thinks--no man really has room in him to read a
morning paper. No man's soul is athletic or swift enough.... Nations in
a sentence.... Thousands of years in a minute, philosophies, religions,
legislatures, paleozoics, church socials, side by side; stars and
gossip, fools, heroes, comets--infinity on parade, and over the
precipice of the next paragraph, head-long--who knows what!
Reading a morning paper is one of the supreme acts of presence of mind
in a human life.
V
General Information
"But what is going to become of us?" some one says, "if a man has to go
through 'the supreme act of presence of mind in a whole human life,'
every morning--and every morning before he goes to business? It takes as
much presence of mind as most men have, mornings, barely to get up."
Well, of course, I admit, if a man's going to read a newspaper to toe
the line of all his convictions; if he insists on taking the newspaper
as a kind of this-morning's junction of all knowledge, he will have to
expect to be a rather anxious person. One could hardly get one paper
really read through in this way in one's whole life. If a man is always
going to read the news of the globe in such a serious, sensitive,
suggestive, improving, Atlas-like fashion, it would be better he had
never learned to read at all. At all events, if it's a plain question
between a man's devouring his paper or letting his paper devour him, of
course the only way to do is to begin the day by reading something else,
or by reading it in ten minutes and forgetting it in ten more. One would
certainly rather be headlong--a mere heedless, superficial globe-trotter
with one's mind, than not to have any mind--to be wiped out at one's
breakfast table, to be soaked up into infinity every morning, to be
drawn off, evaporated into all knowledge, to begin one's day scattered
around the edges of all the world. One would do almost anything to avoid
this. And it is what always happens if one reads for principles
pell-mell.
All that I am claiming for reading for principles is, that if one reads
for principles, one really cannot miss it in reading. There is always
something there, and a man who treats a newspaper as if it were not good
enough for him falls short of himself.
The same is true of desultory reading so-called, of the habit of general
information, and of the habit of going about noticing things--noticing
things over one's shoulder.
I am inclined to think that desultory reading is as good if not better
for a man than any other reading he can do, if he organises it--has
habitual principles and swift channels of thought to pour it into. I do
not think it is at all unlikely from such peeps as we common mortals get
into the minds of men of genius, that their desultory reading (in the
fine strenuous sense) has been the making of them. The intensely
suggestive habit of thought, the prehensile power in a mind, the power
of grasping wide-apart facts and impressions, of putting them into
prompt handfuls, where anything can be done with them that one likes,
could not possibly be cultivated to better advantage than by the
practice of masterful and regular desultory reading.
Certainly the one compelling trait in a work of genius, whether in
music, painting, or literature, the trait of untraceableness, the
semi-miraculous look, the feeling things give us sometimes, in a great
work of art, of being at once impossible together, and inevitable
together,--has its most natural background in what would seem at first
probably, to most minds, incidental or accidental habits of observation.
One always knows a work of art of the second rank by the fact that one
can place one's hand on big blocks of material in it almost everywhere,
material which has been taken bodily and moved over from certain places.
And one always knows a work of art of the first rank by the fact that it
is absolutely defiant and elusive. There is a sense of infinity--a
gathered-from-everywhere sense in it--of things which belong and have
always belonged side by side and exactly where they are put, but which
no one had put there.
It would be hard to think of any intellectual or spiritual habit more
likely to give a man a bi-sexual or at least a cross-fertilising mind,
than the habit of masterful, wilful, elemental, desultory reading. The
amount of desultory reading a mind can do, and do triumphantly, may be
said to be perhaps the supreme test of the actual energy of the mind, of
the vital heat in it, of its melting-down power, its power of melting
everything through, and blending everything in, to the great central
essence of life.
No more adequate plan, or, as the architects call it, no better
elevation for a man could possibly be found than a daily newspaper of
the higher type. For scope, points of view, topics, directions of
interest, catholicity, many-sidedness, world-wideness, for all the raw
material a large and powerful man must needs be made out of, nothing
could possibly excel a daily newspaper. Plenty of smaller artists have
been made in the world and will be made again in it--hothouse or parlour
artists--men whose work has very little floor-space in it, one- or
two-story men, and there is no denying that they have their place, but
there never has been yet, and there never will be, I venture to say, a
noble or colossal artist or artist of the first rank who shall not have
as many stories in him as a daily newspaper. The immortal is the
universal in a man looming up. If the modern critic who is looking about
in this world of ours for the great artist would look where the small
ones are afraid to go, he would stand a fair chance of finding what he
is looking for. If one were to look about for a general plan, a rough
draft or sketch of the mind of an Immortal, he will find that mind
spread out before him in the interests and passions, the giant sorrows
and delights of his morning paper.
I am not coming out in this chapter to defend morning papers. One might
as well pop up in one's place on this globe, wherever one is on it, and
say a good word for sunrises. What immediately interests me in this
connection is the point that if a man reads for principles in this world
he will have time and take time to be interested in a great many things
in it. The point seems to be that there is nothing too great or too
small for a human brain to carry away with it, if it will have a place
to put it. All one has to do, to get the good of a man, a newspaper, a
book, or any other action, a paragraph, or even the blowing of a wind,
is to lift it over to its principle, see it and delight in it as a part
of the whole, of the eternal, and of the running gear of things. Reading
for principles may make a man seem very slow at first--several years
slower than other people--but as every principle he reads with makes it
possible to avoid at least one experience, and, at the smallest
calculation, a hundred books, he soon catches up. It would be hard to
find a better device for reading books through their backs, for
travelling with one's mind, than the habit of reading for principles. A
principle is a sort of universal car-coupling. One can be joined to any
train of thought in all Christendom with it, and rolled in luxury around
the world in the private car of one's own mind.
But it is not so much as a luxury as a convenience that reading for
principles appeals to a vigorous mind. It is the short-cut to knowledge.
The man who is once started in reading for principles is not long in
distancing the rest of us, because all the reading that he does goes
into growth,--is saved up in a few handy, prompt generalisations. His
whole being becomes alert and supple. He has the under-hold in dealing
with nature, grips hold the law of the thing and rules it. He is capable
of far reaches where others go step by step. In every age of the world
of thought he goes about giant-like, lifting worlds with a laugh, doing
with the very playing of his mind work which crowds of other minds
toiling on their crowds of facts could not accomplish. He is only able
to do this by being a master of principles. He has made himself a man
who can handle a principle, a sum-total of a thousand facts as easily as
other men, men with bare scientific minds, can handle one of the facts.
He thinks like a god--not a very difficult thing to do. Any man can do
it after thirty or forty years, if he gives himself the chance, if he
reads for principles, keeps his imagination--the way Emerson did, for
instance--sound and alive all through. He does not need to deny that the
bare scientific method, the hugging of the outside of a thing, the being
deliberately superficial and literal--the needing to know all of the
facts, is a useful and necessary method at times; but outside of his
specialty he takes the ground that the scientific method is not the
normal method through which a man acquires his knowledge, but a
secondary and useful method for verifying the knowledge he has. He
acquires knowledge through the constant exercise of his mind with
principles. He is full of subtle experiences he never had. He appears to
other minds, perhaps, to go to the truth with a flash, but he probably
does not. He does not have to go to the truth. He has the truth on the
premises right where he can get at it, in its most convenient, most
compact and spiritual form. To write or think or act he has but to
strike down through the impressions, the experiences,--the saved-up
experiences,--of his life, and draw up their principles.
A great deal has been said from time to time among the good of late
about the passing of the sermon as a practical working force. A great
deal has been said among the literary about the passing of the essay.
Much has been said also about the passing of poetry and the passing of
religion in our modern life. It would not be hard to prove that what has
been called, under the pressure of the moment, the passing of religion
and poetry, and of the sermon and the essay, could fairly be traced to
the temporary failure of education, the disappearance in the modern mind
of the power of reading for principles. The very farm-hands of New
England were readers for principles once--men who looked back of
things--philosophers. Philosophers grew like the grass on a thousand
hills. Everybody was a philosopher a generation ago. The temporary
obscuration of religion and poetry and the sermon and the essay at the
present time is largely due to the fact that generalisation has been
trained out of our typical modern minds. We are mobbed with facts. We
are observers of the letter of things rather than of the principles and
spirits of things. The letter has been heaped upon us. Poetry and
religion and the essay and the sermon are all alike, in that they are
addressed to what can be taken for granted in men--to sum-totals of
experience--the power of seeing sum-totals. They are addressed to
generalising minds. The essayist of the highest rank induces conviction
by playing upon the power of generalisation, by arousing the
associations and experiences that have formed the principles of his
reader's mind. He makes his appeal to the philosophic imagination.
It is true that a man may not be infallible in depending upon his
imagination or principle-gathering organ for acquiring knowledge, and in
the nature of things it is subject to correction and verification, but
as a positive, practical, economical working organ in a world as large
as this, an imagination answers the purpose as well as anything. To a
finite man who finds himself in an infinite world it is the one possible
practicable outfit for living in it.
Reading for principles is its most natural gymnasium.
VI
But----
I had finished writing these chapters on the philosophic mind, and was
just reading them over, thinking how true they were, and how valuable
they were for me, and how I must act on them, when I heard a soft
"Pooh!" from somewhere way down in the depths of my being. When I had
stopped and thought, I saw it was my Soul trying to get my attention. "I
do not want you always reading for principles," said my Soul stoutly,
"reading for a philosophic mind. I do not want a philosophic mind on the
premises."
"Very well," I said.
"You do not want one yourself," my Soul said, "you would be bored to
death with one--with a mind that's always reading for principles!"
"I'm not so sure," I said.
"You always are with other people's."
"Well, there's Meakins," I admitted.
"You wouldn't want a Meakins kind of a mind, would you?" (Meakins is
always reading for principles.)
I refused to answer at once. I knew I didn't want Meakins's, but I
wanted to know why. Then I fell to thinking. Hence this chapter.
Meakins has changed, I said to myself. The trouble with him isn't that
he reads for principles, but he is getting so he cannot read for
anything else. What a man really wants, it seems to me, is the use of a
philosophic mind. He wants one where he can get at it, where he can have
all the benefit of it without having to live with it. It's quite another
matter when a man gives his mind up, his own everyday mind--the one he
lives with--lets it be coldly, deliberately philosophised through and
through. It's a kind of disease.
When Meakins visits me now, the morning after he is gone I take a piece
of paper and sum his visit up in a row of propositions. When he came
before five years ago--his visit was summed up in a great desire in me,
a lift, a vow to the universe. He had the same ideas, but they all
glowed out into a man. They came to me as a man and for a man--a free,
emancipated, emancipating, world-loving, world-making man--a man out in
the open, making all the world his comrade. His appeal was personal.
Visiting with him now is like sitting down with a stick or pointer over
you and being compelled to study a map. He doesn't care anything about
me except as one more piece of paper to stamp his map on. And he doesn't
care anything about the world he has the map of, except that it is the
world that goes with his map. When a man gets into the habit of always
reading for principles back of things--back of real, live, particular
things--he becomes inhuman. He forgets the things. Meakins bores people,
because he is becoming inhuman. He treats human beings over and over
again unconsciously, when he meets them, as mere generalisations on
legs. His mind seems a great sea of abstractions--just a few real things
floating palely around in it for illustrations. When I try to rebuke him
for being a mere philosopher or man without hands, he is "setting his
universe in order," he says--making his surveys. He may be living in his
philosophic mind now, breaking out his intellectual roads but he is
going to travel on them later, he explains.
In the meantime I notice one thing about the philosophic mind. It not
only does not do things. It cannot even be talked with. It is not
interested in things in particular. There is something garrulously,
pedagogically unreal about it,--at least there is about Meakins's. You
cannot so much as mention a real or particular thing to Meakins but he
brings out a row of fifteen or twenty principles that go with it, which
his mind has peeked around and found behind it. By the time he has
floated out about fifteen of them--of these principles back of a
thing--you begin to wonder if the thing was there for the principles to
be back of. You hope it wasn't.
As fond as I am of him, I cannot get at him nowadays in a conversation.
He is always just around back of something. He is a ghost. I come home
praying Heaven, every time I see him, not to let me evaporate. He talks
about the future of humanity by the week, but I find he doesn't notice
humanity in particular. You cannot interest him in talking to him about
himself, or even in letting him do his own talking about himself. He is
a mere detail to himself. You are another detail. What you are and what
he is are both mere footnotes to a philosophy. All history is a footnote
to it--or at best a marginal illustration. There is no such thing as
communing with Meakins unless you use (as I do) a torpedo or
battering-ram as a starter. If you let him have his way he sits in his
chair and in his deep, beautiful voice addresses a row of remarks to The
Future in General--the only thing big enough or worth while to talk to.
He sits perfectly motionless (except the whites of his eyes) and talks
deeply and tenderly and instructively to the Next Few Hundred Years--to
posterity, to babes not yet in their mothers' wombs, while his dearest
friends sit by.
If ever there was a man who could take a whole roomful of warm, vital
people, sitting right next to him, pulsing and glowing in their joys and
their sins, and with one single heroic motion of an imperious hand drop
them softly and lovingly over into Fatuity and Oblivion in five minutes
and leave them out of the world before their own eyes, it is Theophilus
Meakins. I try sometimes--but I cannot really do it.
He does not really commune with things or with persons at all. He gets
what he wants out of them. You feel him putting people, when he meets
them, through his philosophy. He makes them over while they wait, into
extracts. A man may keep on afterward living and growing, throbbing and
being, but he does not exist to Meakins except in his bottle. A man
cannot help feeling with Meakins afterward the way milk feels probably,
if it could only express it, when it's been put through one of these
separators, had the cream taken off of it. Half the world is skim-milk
to him. But what does it matter to Meakins? He has them in his
philosophy. He does the same way with things as with people. He puts in
all nature as a parenthesis, and a rather condescending, explanatory one
at that, a symbol, a kind of beckoning, an index-finger to God. He never
notices a tree for itself. A great elm would have to call out to him,
fairly shout at him, right under its arms: "Oh, Theophilus Meakins,
author of _The Habit of Eternity_, author of _The Evolution of the Ego_
look at ME, I also am alive, even as thou art. Canst thou not stop one
moment and be glad with _me_? Have I not a thousand leaves glistening
and glorying in the great sun? Have I not a million roots feeling for
the stored-up light in the ground, reaching up God to me out of the
dark? Have I not"--"It is one of the principles of the flux of society,"
breaks in Theophilus Meakins, "as illustrated in all the processes of
the natural world--the sap of this tree," said he, "for instance,"
brushing the elm-tree off into space, "that the future of mankind
depends and always must depend upon----"
"The flux of society be ----," said I in holy wrath. I stopped him
suddenly, the elm-tree still holding its great arms above us. "Do you
suppose that God," I said, "is in any such small business as to make an
elm-tree like this--like THIS (look at it, man!), and put it on the
earth, have it waving around on it, just to illustrate one of your
sermons? Now, my dear fellow, I'm not going to have you lounging around
in your mind with an elm-tree like this any longer. I want you to come
right over to it," said I, taking hold of him, "and sit down on one of
its roots, and lean up against its trunk and learn something, live with
it a minute--get blessed by it. The flux of society can wait," I said.
Meakins is always tractable enough, when shouted at, or pounded on a
little. We sat down under the tree for quite a while, perfectly still. I
can't say what it did for Meakins. But it helped me--just barely leaning
against the trunk of it helped me, under the circumstances, a great
deal.
No one will believe it, I suppose, but we hadn't gotten any more than
fifteen feet away from the shadow of that tree when "The principles of
the flux of society," said he, "demand----"
"Now, my dear fellow," I said, "there are a lot more elm-trees we really
ought to take in, on this walk. We----"
"I SAY!" said Meakins, his great voice roaring on my little polite,
opposing sentence like surf over a pebble, "that the principles----"
Then I grew wroth. I always do when Meakins treats what I say just as a
pebble to get more roar out of, on the great bleak shore of his
thoughts. "No one says anything!" I cried; "if any one says anything--if
you say another word, my dear fellow, on this walk, I will sing _Old
Hundred_ as loud as I can all the way home."
He promised to be good--after a half-mile or so. I caught him looking at
me, harking back to an old, wonderfully sweet, gentle, human,
understanding smile he has--or used to have before he was a philosopher.
Then he quietly mentioned a real thing and we talked about real things
for four miles.
I remember we sat under the stars that night after the world was folded
up, and asleep, and I think we really felt the stars as we sat
there--not as a roof for theories of the world, but we felt them as
stars--shared the night with them, lit our hearts at them. Then we
silently, happily, at last, both of us, like awkward, wondering boys,
went to bed.
III--Reading Down Through
I
Inside
It is always the same way. I no sooner get a good, pleasant,
interesting, working idea, like this "Reading for Principles," arranged
and moved over, and set up in my mind, than some insinuating,
persistent, concrete human being comes along, works his way in to
illustrate it, and spoils it. Here is Meakins, for instance. I have been
thinking on the other side of my thought every time I have thought of
him. I have no more sympathy than any one with a man who spends all his
time going round and round in his reading and everything else,
swallowing a world up in principles. "Why should a good, live, sensible
man," I feel like saying, "go about in a world like this stowing his
truths into principles, where, half the time, he cannot get at them
himself, and no one else would want to?" Going about swallowing one's
experience up in principles is very well so far as it goes. But it is
far better to go about swallowing up one's principles into one's self.
A man who has lived and read into himself for many years does not need
to read very many books. He has the gist of nine out of ten new books
that are published. He knows, or as good as knows, what is in them, by
taking a long, slow look at his own heart. So does everybody else.
II
On Being Lonely with a Book
The P. G. S. of M. said that as far as he could make out, judging from
the way I talked, my main ambition in the world seemed to be to write a
book that would throw all publishers and libraries out of employment.
"And what will your book amount to, when you get it done?" he said. "If
it's convincing--the way it ought to be--it will merely convince people
they oughtn't to have read it."
"And that's been done before," I said. "Almost any book could do it." I
ventured to add that I thought people grew intelligent enough in one of
my books--even in the first two or three chapters, not to read the rest
of it. I said all I hoped to accomplish was to get people to treat other
men's books in the same way that they treated mine--treat everything
that way--take things for granted, get the spirit of a thing, then go
out and gloat on it, do something with it, live with it--anything but
this going on page after page using the spirit of a thing all up,
reading with it.
"Reading down through in a book seems a great deal more important to me
than merely reading the book through."
I expected that The P. G. S. of M. would ask me what I meant by reading
down through, but he didn't. He was still at large, worrying about the
world. "I have no patience with it--your idea," he broke out. "It's all
in the air. It's impractical enough, anyway, just as an idea, and it's
all the more impractical when it's carried out. So far as I can see, at
the rate you're carrying on," said The P. G. S. of M., "what with
improving the world and all with your book, there isn't going to be
anything but You and your Book left."
"Might be worse," I said. "What one wants in a book after the first
three or four chapters, or in a world either, it seems to me, is not its
facts merely, nor its principles, but one's self--one's real relation of
one's real self, I mean, to some real fact. If worst came to worst and I
had to be left all alone, I'd rather be alone with myself, I think, than
with anybody. It's a deal better than being lonely the way we all are
nowadays--with such a lot of other people crowding round, that one has
to be lonely with, and books and newspapers and things besides. One has
to be lonely so much in civilisation, there are so many things and
persons that insist on one's coming over and being lonely with them,
that being lonely in a perfectly plain way, all by one's self--the very
thought of it seems to me, comparatively speaking, a relief. It's not
what it ought to be, but it's something."
I feel the same way about being lonely with a book. I find that the only
way to keep from being lonely in a book--that is, to keep from being
crowded on to the outside of it, after the first three or four
chapters--is to read the first three or four chapters all over
again--read them down through. I have to get hold of my principles in
them, and then I have to work over my personal relation to them. When I
make sure of that, when I make sure of my personal relation to the
author, and to his ideas, and there is a fairly acquainted feeling with
both of us, then I can go on reading for all I am worth--or all he is
worth anyway, whichever breaks down first--and no more said about it.
Everything means something to everybody when one reads down through. The
only way an author and reader can keep from wasting each other's time,
it seems to me, at least from having spells of wasting it, is to begin
by reading down through.
III
Keeping Other Minds Off
What I really mean by reading down through in a book, I suppose, is
reading down through in it to myself. I dare say this does not seem
worthy. It is quite possible, too, that there is no real defence for
it--I mean for my being so much interested in myself in the middle of
other people's books. My theory about it is that the most important
thing in this world for a man's life is his being original in it. Being
original consists, I take it, not in being different, but in being
honest--really having something in one's own inner experience which one
has anyway, and which one knows one has, and which one has all for one's
own, whether any one else has ever had it or not. Being original
consists in making over everything one sees and reads, into one's self.
Making over what one reads into one's self may be said to be the only
way to have a really safe place for knowledge. If a man takes his
knowledge and works it all over into what he is, sense and spirit, it
may cost more at first, but it is more economical in the long run,
because none of it can possibly be lost. And it can all be used on the
place.
I do not know how it is with others nowadays, but I find that this
feeling of originality in an experience, in my own case, is exceedingly
hard to keep. It has to be struggled for.
Of course, one has a theory in a general way that one does not want an
original mind if he has to get it by keeping other people's minds off,
and yet there is a certain sense in which if he does not do it at
certain times--have regular periods of keeping other people's minds off,
he would lose for life the power of ever finding his own under them.
Most men one knows nowadays, if they were to spend all the rest of their
lives peeling other men's minds off, would not get down to their own
before they died. It seems to be supposed that what a mind is for--at
least in civilisation--is to have other men's minds on top of it.
It is the same way in books--at least I find it so myself when I get to
reading in a book, reading so fast I cannot stop in it. Nearly all
books, especially the good ones, have a way of overtaking a man--riding
his originality down. It seems to be assumed that if a man ever did get
down to his own mind by accident, whether in a book or anywhere else, he
would not know what to do with it.
And this is not an unreasonable assumption. Even the man who gets down
to his mind regularly hardly knows what to do with it part of the time.
But it makes having a mind interesting. There's a kind of pleasant,
lusty feeling in it--a feeling of reality and honesty that makes having
a mind--even merely one's own mind--seem almost respectable.
IV
Reading Backwards
Sir Joshua Reynolds gives the precedence to the Outside, to authority
instead of originality, in the early stages of education, because when
he went to Italy he met the greatest experience of his life. He found
that much of his originality was wrong.
If Sir Joshua Reynolds had gone to Italy earlier he would never have
been heard of except as a copyist, lecturer, or colour-commentator. The
real value of Sir Joshua Reynolds's "Discourses on Art" is the man in
spite of the lecturer. What the man stands for is,--Be original. Get
headway of personal experience, some power of self-teaching. Then when
you have something to work on, organs that act and react on what is
presented to them, confront your Italy--whatever it may be--and the
Past, and give yourself over to it. The result is paradox and power, a
receptive, creative man, an obeying and commanding, but self-centred and
self-poised man, world-open, subject to the whole world and yet who has
a whole world subject to him, either by turns or at will.
What Sir Joshua conveys to his pupils is not his art, but his mere
humility about his art--_i. e._, his most belated experience, his
finishing touch, as an artist.
The result is that having accidentally received an ideal education,
having begun his education properly, with self-command, he completed his
career with a kind of Reynoldsocracy--a complacent, teachery,
levelling-down command of others. While Sir Joshua Reynolds was an
artist, he became one because he did not follow his own advice. The fact
that he would have followed it if he had had a chance shows what his art
shows, namely, that he did not intend to be any more original than he
could help. It is interesting, however, that having acquired the blemish
of originality in early youth, he never could get rid of enough of it
before he died, not to be tolerated among the immortals.
His career is in many ways the most striking possible illustration of
what can be brought to pass when a human being without genius is by
accident brought up with the same principles and order of education and
training that men of genius have--education by one's self; education by
others, under the direction of one's self. Sir Joshua Reynolds would
have been incapable of education by others under direction of himself,
if he had not been kept ignorant and creative and English, long enough
to get a good start with himself before he went down to Italy to run a
race with Five Hundred Years. In his naive, almost desperate shame over
the plight of being almost a genius, he overlooks this, but his fame is
based upon it. He devoted his old age to trying to train young men into
artists by teaching them to despise their youth in their youth, because,
when he was an old man, he despised his.
What seems to be necessary is to strike a balance, in one's reading.
It's all well enough; indeed, there's nothing better than having one's
originality ridden down. One wants it ridden down half the time. The
trouble comes in making provision for catching up, for getting one's
breath after it. I have found, for instance, that it has become
absolutely necessary so far as I am concerned, if I am to keep my little
mind's start in the world, to begin the day by not reading the newspaper
in the morning. Unless I can get headway--some thought or act or cry or
joy of my own--something that is definitely in my own direction first,
there seems to be no hope for me all day long. Most people, I know,
would not agree to this. They like to take a swig of all-space, a glance
at everybody while the world goes round, before they settle down to
their own little motor on it. They like to feel that the world is all
right before they go ahead. So would I, but I have tried it again--and
again. The world is too much for me in the morning. My own little motor
comes to a complete stop. I simply want to watch the Big One going round
and round. I cannot seem to stop somehow--begin puttering once more with
my Little One. If I begin at all, I have to begin at once. In my heart I
feel the Big One over me all the while, circling over me, blessing me.
But I keep from noticing. I know no other way, and drive on. The world
is getting to be--has to be--to me a purely afternoon or evening affair.
I have a world of my own for morning use. I hold to it, one way or the
other, with a cheerful smile or like grim death, until the clock says
twelve and the sun turns the corner, and the book drops. It does not
seem to make very much difference what kind of a world I am in, or what
is going on in it, so that it is all my own, and the only way I know to
do, is to say or read or write or use the things first in it which make
it my own the most. The one thing I want in the morning is to let my
soul light its own light, appropriate some one thing, glow it through
with itself. When I have satisfied the hunger for making a bit of the
great world over into my world, I am ready for the world as a
world--streets and newspapers of it,--silent and looking, in it, until
sleep falls.
It is because men lie down under it, allow themselves to be rolled over
by it, that the modern newspaper, against its will, has become the great
distracting machine of modern times. As I live and look about me,
everywhere I find a great running to and fro of editors across the still
earth. Every editor has his herd, is a kind of bell-wether, has a great
paper herd flocking at his heels. "Is not the world here?" I say, "and
am I not here to look at it? Can I really see a world better by joining
a Cook's Excursion on it, sweeping round the earth in a column, seeing
everything in a column, looking over the shoulder of a crowd?" Sometimes
it seems as if the whole modern, reading, book-and-paper outfit were
simply a huge, crunching Mass-Machine--a machine for arranging every
man's mind from the outside.
Originality may be said to depend upon a balance of two things, the
power of being interested in other people's minds and the power of being
more interested in one's own. In its last analysis, it is the power a
man's mind has of minding its own business, which, even in another man's
book, makes the book real and absorbing to him. It is the least
compliment one can pay a book. The only honest way to commune with a
real man either in a book or out of it is to do one's own share of
talking. Both the book and the man say better things when talked back
to. In reading a great book one finds it allows for this. In reading a
poor one the only way to make it worth while, to find anything in it, is
to put it there. The most self-respecting course when one finds one's
self in the middle of a poor book is to turn right around in it, and
write it one's self. As has been said by Hoffentotter (in the fourteenth
chapter of his great masterpiece): "If you find that you cannot go on,
gentle reader, in the reading of this book, pray read it backwards."
The original man, the man who insists on keeping the power in a mind of
minding its own business, is much more humble than he looks. All he
feels is, that his mind has been made more convenient to him than to
anybody else and that if anyone is going to use it, he must. It is not a
matter of assuming that one's own mind is superior. A very poor mind, on
the premises, put right in with one's own body, carefully fitted to it,
to one's very nerves and senses, is worth all the other minds in the
world. It may be conceit to believe this, and it may be
self-preservation. But, in any case, keeping up an interest in one's own
mind is excusable. Even the humblest man must admit that the first, the
most economical, the most humble, the most necessary thing for a man to
do in reading in this world (if he can do it) is to keep up an interest
in his own mind.
IV--Reading for Facts
I
Calling the Meeting to Order
Reading for persons makes a man a poet or artist, makes him dramatic
with his mind--puts the world-stage into him.
Reading for principles makes a man a philosopher. Reading for facts
makes a man----
"It doesn't make a man," spoke up the Mysterious Person.
"Oh, yes," I said, "if he reads a few of them--if he takes time to do
something with them--he can make a man out of them, if he wants to, as
well as anything else."
The great trouble with scientific people and others who are always
reading for facts is that they forget what facts are for. They use their
minds as museums. They are like Ole Bill Spear. They take you up into
their garret and point to a bushel-basketful of something and then to
another bushel-basket half-full of some more. Then they say in deep
tones and with solemn faces: "This is the largest collection of burnt
matches in the world."
It's what reading for facts brings a man to, generally--fact for fact's
sake. He lunges along for facts wherever he goes. He cannot stop. All an
outsider can do in such cases, with nine out of ten scientific or
collecting minds, is to watch them sadly in a dull, trance-like,
helpless inertia of facts, sliding on to Ignorance.
What seems to be most wanted in reading for facts in a world as large as
this is some reasonable principle of economy. The great problem of
reading for facts--travelling with one's mind--is the baggage problem.
To have every fact that one needs and to throw away every fact that one
can get along without, is the secret of having a comfortable and
practicable, live, happy mind in modern knowledge--a mind that gets
somewhere--that gets the hearts of things.
The best way to arrange this seems to be to have a sentinel in one's
mind in reading.
Every man finds in his intellectual life, sooner or later, that there
are certain orders and kinds of facts that have a way of coming to him
of their own accord and without being asked. He is half amused sometimes
and half annoyed by them. He has no particular use for them. He dotes on
them some, perhaps, pets them a little--tells them to go away, but they
keep coming back. Apropos of nothing, in the way of everything, they
keep hanging about while he attends to the regular business of his
brain, and say: "Why don't you do something with Me?"
What I would like to be permitted to do in this chapter is to say a good
word for these involuntary, helpless, wistful facts that keep tagging a
man's mind around. I know that I am exposing myself in standing up for
them to the accusation that I have a mere irrelevant, sideways,
intellectually unbusinesslike sort of a mind. I can see my championship
even now being gently but firmly set one side. "It's all of a
piece--this pleasant, yielding way with ideas," people say. "It goes
with the slovenly, lazy, useless, polite state of mind always, and the
general ball-bearing view of life."
It seems to me that if a man has a few involuntary, instinctive facts
about him, facts that fasten themselves on to his thoughts whether he
wants them there or not, facts that keep on working for him of their own
accord, down under the floor of his mind, passing things up, running
invisible errands for him, making short-cuts for him--it seems to me
that if a man has a few facts like this in him, facts that serve him
like the great involuntary servants of Nature, whether they are noticed
or not, he ought to find it worth his while to do something in return,
conduct his life with reference to them. They ought to have the main
chance at him. It seems reasonable also that his reading should be
conducted with reference to them.
It is no mere literary prejudice, and it seems to be a truth for the
scientist as well as for the poet, that the great involuntary facts in a
man's life, the facts he does not select, the facts that select him, the
facts that say to him, "Come thou and live with us, make a human life
out of us that men may know us," are the facts of all others which ought
to have their way sooner or later in the great struggling mass-meeting
of his mind. I have read equally in vain the lives of the great
scientists and the lives of the great artists and makers, if they are
not all alike in this, that certain great facts have been yielded to,
have been made the presiding officers, the organisers of their minds. In
so far as they have been great, no facts have been suppressed and all
facts have been represented; but I doubt if there has ever been a life
of a powerful mind yet in which a few great facts and a great man were
not seen mutually attracted to each other, day and night,--getting
themselves made over into each other, mutually mastering the world.
Certainly, if there is one token rather than another of the great
scientist or poet in distinction from the small scientist or poet, it is
the courage with which he yields himself, makes his whole being
sensitive and free before his instinctive facts, gives himself fearless
up to them, allows them to be the organisers of his mind.
It seems to be the only possible way in reading for facts that the mind
of a man can come to anything; namely, by always having a chairman (and
a few alternates appointed for life) to call the meeting to order.
II
Symbolic Facts
If the meeting is to accomplish anything before it adjourns _sine die_,
everything depends upon the gavel in it, upon there being some power in
it that makes some facts sit down and others stand up, but which sees
that all facts are represented.