Philosophy and the Daemon.
Philosophy, it has been said, is the art of bearing other people's
troubles. The truest philosopher I ever heard of was a woman. She was
brought into the London Hospital suffering from a poisoned leg. The
house surgeon made a hurried examination. He was a man of blunt speech.
"It will have to come off," he told her.
"What, not all of it?"
"The whole of it, I am sorry to say," growled the house surgeon.
"Nothing else for it?"
"No other chance for you whatever," explained the house surgeon.
"Ah, well, thank Gawd it's not my 'ead," observed the lady.
The poor have a great advantage over us better-off folk. Providence
provides them with many opportunities for the practice of philosophy. I
was present at a "high tea" given last winter by charitable folk to a
party of char-women. After the tables were cleared we sought to amuse
them. One young lady, who was proud of herself as a palmist, set out to
study their "lines." At sight of the first toil-worn hand she took hold
of her sympathetic face grew sad.
"There is a great trouble coming to you," she informed the ancient dame.
The placid-featured dame looked up and smiled:
"What, only one, my dear?"
"Yes, only one," asserted the kind fortune-teller, much pleased, "after
that all goes smoothly."
"Ah," murmured the old dame, quite cheerfully, "we was all of us a short-
lived family."
Our skins harden to the blows of Fate. I was lunching one Wednesday with
a friend in the country. His son and heir, aged twelve, entered and took
his seat at the table.
"Well," said his father, "and how did we get on at school to-day?"
"Oh, all right," answered the youngster, settling himself down to his
dinner with evident appetite.
"Nobody caned?" demanded his father, with--as I noticed--a sly twinkle in
his eye.
"No," replied young hopeful, after reflection; "no, I don't think so,"
adding as an afterthought, as he tucked into beef and potatoes,
"'cepting, o' course, me."
When the Daemon will not work.
It is a simple science, philosophy. The idea is that it never matters
what happens to you provided you don't mind it. The weak point in the
argument is that nine times out of ten you can't help minding it.
"No misfortune can harm me," says Marcus Aurelius, "without the consent
of the daemon within me."
The trouble is our daemon cannot always be relied upon. So often he does
not seem up to his work.
"You've been a naughty boy, and I'm going to whip you," said nurse to a
four-year-old criminal.
"You tant," retorted the young ruffian, gripping with both hands the
chair that he was occupying, "I'se sittin' on it."
His daemon was, no doubt, resolved that misfortune, as personified by
nurse, should not hurt him. The misfortune, alas! proved stronger than
the daemon, and misfortune, he found did hurt him.
The toothache cannot hurt us so long as the daemon within us (that is to
say, our will power) holds on to the chair and says it can't. But,
sooner or later, the daemon lets go, and then we howl. One sees the
idea: in theory it is excellent. One makes believe. Your bank has
suddenly stopped payment. You say to yourself.
"This does not really matter."
Your butcher and your baker say it does, and insist on making a row in
the passage.
You fill yourself up with gooseberry wine. You tell yourself it is
seasoned champagne. Your liver next morning says it is not.
The daemon within us means well, but forgets it is not the only thing
there. A man I knew was an enthusiast on vegetarianism. He argued that
if the poor would adopt a vegetarian diet the problem of existence would
be simpler for them, and maybe he was right. So one day he assembled
some twenty poor lads for the purpose of introducing to them a vegetarian
lunch. He begged them to believe that lentil beans were steaks, that
cauliflowers were chops. As a third course he placed before them a
mixture of carrots and savoury herbs, and urged them to imagine they were
eating saveloys.
"Now, you all like saveloys," he said, addressing them, "and the palate
is but the creature of the imagination. Say to yourselves, 'I am eating
saveloys,' and for all practical purposes these things will be saveloys."
Some of the lads professed to have done it, but one disappointed-looking
youth confessed to failure.
"But how can you be sure it was not a saveloy?" the host persisted.
"Because," explained the boy, "I haven't got the stomach-ache."
It appeared that saveloys, although a dish of which he was fond,
invariably and immediately disagreed with him. If only we were all daemon
and nothing else philosophy would be easier. Unfortunately, there is
more of us.
Another argument much approved by philosophy is that nothing matters,
because a hundred years hence, say, at the outside, we shall be dead.
What we really want is a philosophy that will enable us to get along
while we are still alive. I am not worrying about my centenary; I am
worrying about next quarter-day. I feel that if other people would only
go away, and leave me--income-tax collectors, critics, men who come round
about the gas, all those sort of people--I could be a philosopher myself.
I am willing enough to make believe that nothing matters, but they are
not. They say it is going to be cut off, and talk about judgment
summonses. I tell them it won't trouble any of us a hundred years hence.
They answer they are not talking of a hundred years hence, but of this
thing that was due last April twelvemonth. They won't listen to my
daemon. He does not interest them. Nor, to be candid, does it comfort
myself very much, this philosophical reflection that a hundred years
later on I'll be sure to be dead--that is, with ordinary luck. What
bucks me up much more is the hope that they will be dead. Besides, in a
hundred years things may have improved. I may not want to be dead. If I
were sure of being dead next morning, before their threat of cutting off
that water or that gas could by any possibility be carried out, before
that judgment summons they are bragging about could be made returnable, I
might--I don't say I should--be amused, thinking how I was going to dish
them. The wife of a very wicked man visited him one evening in prison,
and found him enjoying a supper of toasted cheese.
"How foolish of you, Edward," argued the fond lady, "to be eating toasted
cheese for supper. You know it always affects your liver. All day long
to-morrow you will be complaining."
"No, I shan't," interrupted Edward; "not so foolish as you think me. They
are going to hang me to-morrow--early."
There is a passage in Marcus Aurelius that used to puzzle me until I hit
upon the solution. A foot-note says the meaning is obscure. Myself, I
had gathered this before I read the foot-note. What it is all about I
defy any human being to explain. It might mean anything; it might mean
nothing. The majority of students incline to the latter theory, though a
minority maintain there is a meaning, if only it could be discovered. My
own conviction is that once in his life Marcus Aurelius had a real good
time. He came home feeling pleased with himself without knowing quite
why.
"I will write it down," he said to himself, "now, while it is fresh in my
mind."
It seemed to him the most wonderful thing that anybody had ever said.
Maybe he shed a tear or two, thinking of all the good he was doing, and
later on went suddenly to sleep. In the morning he had forgotten all
about it, and by accident it got mixed up with the rest of the book. That
is the only explanation that seems to me possible, and it comforts me.
We are none of us philosophers all the time.
Philosophy is the science of suffering the inevitable, which most of us
contrive to accomplish without the aid of philosophy. Marcus Aurelius
was an Emperor of Rome, and Diogenes was a bachelor living rent free. I
want the philosophy of the bank clerk married on thirty shillings a week,
of the farm labourer bringing up a family of eight on a precarious wage
of twelve shillings. The troubles of Marcus Aurelius were chiefly those
of other people.
"Taxes will have to go up, I am afraid," no doubt he often sighed. "But,
after all, what are taxes? A thing in conformity with the nature of
man--a little thing that Zeus approves of, one feels sure. The daemon
within me says taxes don't really matter."
Maybe the paterfamilias of the period, who did the paying, worried about
new sandals for the children, his wife insisting she hadn't a frock fit
to be seen in at the amphitheatre; that, if there was one thing in the
world she fancied, it was seeing a Christian eaten by a lion, but now she
supposed the children would have to go without her, found that philosophy
came to his aid less readily.
"Bother these barbarians," Marcus Aurelius may have been tempted, in an
unphilosophical moment, to exclaim; "I do wish they would not burn these
poor people's houses over their heads, toss the babies about on spears,
and carry off the older children into slavery. Why don't they behave
themselves?"
But philosophy in Marcus Aurelius would eventually triumph over passing
fretfulness.
"But how foolish of me to be angry with them," he would argue with
himself. "One is not vexed with the fig-tree for yielding figs, with the
cucumber for being bitter! One must expect barbarians to behave
barbariously."
Marcus Aurelius would proceed to slaughter the barbarians, and then
forgive them. We can most of us forgive our brother his transgressions,
having once got even with him. In a tiny Swiss village, behind the angle
of the school-house wall, I came across a maiden crying bitterly, her
head resting on her arm. I asked her what had happened. Between her
sobs she explained that a school companion, a little lad about her own
age, having snatched her hat from her head, was at that moment playing
football with it the other side of the wall. I attempted to console her
with philosophy. I pointed out to her that boys would be boys--that to
expect from them at that age reverence for feminine headgear was to seek
what was not conformable with the nature of boy. But she appeared to
have no philosophy in her. She said he was a horrid boy, and that she
hated him. It transpired it was a hat she rather fancied herself in. He
peeped round the corner while we were talking, the hat in his hand. He
held it out to her, but she took no notice of him. I gathered the
incident was closed, and went my way, but turned a few steps further on,
curious to witness the end. Step by step he approached nearer, looking a
little ashamed of himself; but still she wept, her face hidden in her
arm.
He was not expecting it: to all seeming she stood there the
personification of the grief that is not to be comforted, oblivious to
all surroundings. Incautiously he took another step. In an instant she
had "landed" him over the head with a long narrow wooden box containing,
one supposes, pencils and pens. He must have been a hard-headed
youngster, the sound of the compact echoed through the valley. I met her
again on my way back.
"Hat much damaged?" I inquired.
"Oh, no," she answered, smiling; "besides, it was only an old hat. I've
got a better one for Sundays."
I often feel philosophical myself; generally over a good cigar after a
satisfactory dinner. At such times I open my Marcus Aurelius, my pocket
Epicurus, my translation of Plato's "Republic." At such times I agree
with them. Man troubles himself too much about the unessential. Let us
cultivate serenity. Nothing can happen to us that we have not been
constituted by Nature to sustain. That foolish farm labourer, on his
precarious wage of twelve shillings a week: let him dwell rather on the
mercies he enjoys. Is he not spared all anxiety concerning safe
investment of capital yielding four per cent.? Is not the sunrise and
the sunset for him also? Many of us never see the sunrise. So many of
our so-termed poorer brethen are privileged rarely to miss that early
morning festival. Let the daemon within them rejoice. Why should he
fret when the children cry for bread? Is it not in the nature of things
that the children of the poor should cry for bread? The gods in their
wisdom have arranged it thus. Let the daemon within him reflect upon the
advantage to the community of cheap labour. Let the farm labourer
contemplate the universal good.