better stated by St. Paul: “If a man thinks that he knows anything, he
knows nothing as he ought,” that is nothing other than imperfectly. It
is the more difficult to deal systematically with this matter, because
we want, in our tongue, words of such relative meaning as _scire_,
_cognoscere_, _intelligere_, etc. I propose only to run together a few
such observations as simple good sense can make, and accept, and find
use for.
A great and increasing proportion of persons would, if you asked them,
maintain that all convictions are merely opinions. But it is not so. A
fool may opine absolutely that a wise man is a fool, but the wise man
knows that the fool is one. The same or opposite conclusions, political
or otherwise, may be arrived at by two persons from a view of the same
facts, and each may be equally confident; but the conclusions of one may
be knowledge, and those of the other opinion. The reality of the
difference is indicated by the difference of the feelings which commonly
subsist between those who opine and those who know. Those who opine hate
those who know, and who speak as those who know. They think it an
assumption of superiority, whereas it is only its reality, and cannot
but appear more or less in its manner of expression. Those who know, are
only contemptuous or indifferent towards such as impudently or
ignorantly opine. The consequence is that the knowledge which is wisdom
is nowhere, as an acknowledged force and factor in worldly affairs, and
is only able to assert itself _sub rosa_, or by accident, or by the more
or less underhand management of folly and ignorance.
What most people call “deep and earnest convictions” on political and
social topics are generally muddle-headed medleys of knowledge of fact
and opinion. They know that such and such a thing is an evil, and they
opine that they see a way to amend it; and if wiser people point out to
them that the evil would not be so amended, or that greater evils would
accrue from the attempt, they only feel that their “convictions” are
affronted and opposed by cold-blooded calculations. This kind of
opinion is often as confident as actual knowledge. When Carlyle said
that it was impossible to believe a lie, he can only have meant that it
was impossible to believe it with that highest kind of certitude which
consists in intellectual perception. Probably no one could believe a lie
with that degree of faith which would enable him to suffer deliberate
martyrdom for it. Protestant and Catholic martyrs have usually been
sufferers for one and the same faith, or, at least, parts of the same
faith, in which parts they have considered the whole to be involved.
Very few, if any, have ever carried the courage of mere “opinions” to
the stake.
There can be no absolute certitude about the impressions of the senses
or the inferences drawn from them. There can be about moral and
spiritual things. The knave may sincerely opine that it is best for his
interests to lie and cheat; but the honest man knows that he is a being
whose interests are above all external contingencies, and that under
certain circumstances it would be madness to behave otherwise than in a
way which would be directly opposed to every argument and persuasion of
the senses. It is only the mind of the most highly “scientific”
constitution that will have its confidence in knowledge of this kind
tried by considerations of its moral and intellectual obligations to
Hottentots and Australian aborigines. “We can live in houses without
being architects”; and we can know, without knowing or caring to know
how we came by our knowledge. The house of the gods has lasted intact
since Abraham and Hesiod, and shows no sign yet of tumbling about our
ears.
The faculty of knowing, as differing from that of opining, seems, as
might be expected from what has been said, to have as much to do with
the character of the will as of the mind. To be honest, Shakespeare
tells us, is to be one in ten thousand; and to discern intellectually,
or to know, is a part, and a very great part, of honesty. A man may have
learned a dozen languages, and have the whole circle of the sciences at
his fingers’ ends, and may know nothing worthy of being called
knowledge; indeed, there is nothing which seems to be a greater
hindrance to the acquisition of living knowledge than an engrossing
devotion to the acquisition of words, facts, logical methods, and
natural laws. It requires little learning to make a wise or truly
knowing man, but much learning may not impossibly spoil one.
Mr. Matthew Arnold has said that a thorough classical education has
often the same effects on a man’s character as a grave experience. The
reason is that it is a grave experience, a long series of small
exercises of honesty, patience, and self-sacrifice, the sum of which is
equal to a great and soul-sobering calamity. The author of the
_Imitation_ notes a kindred fact when he says, “No man can know anything
till he is tried.” Not only is the discipline of such an education,
which, in its early stage at least has much in it that is repugnant and
compulsory, fitted to qualify the character for the reception of true
knowledge, but it conveys also, in an eminent degree, the matter of true
knowledge. Without any disrespect to Mr. Huxley, Mr. Herbert Spencer,
and Professor Max Müller, we may affirm that the man who knew Plato,
Homer, and Æschylus rightly, and knew little else, would know far more
than he who knew all that these great scientists could teach, and knew
nothing else.
The man who knows, often finds himself at great disadvantage in the
presence of fact-gatherers and persons who opine. His attitude is
necessarily affirmative, and often, to the great scandal and contempt of
his adversaries, simply affirmative. It does not enter into his
calculations to have actively to defend a position which he sees to be
impregnable; and when he leaves his proper occupation of “climbing trees
in the Hesperides” to wield his club against those who know of no such
trees, he is like a Hercules fighting mosquitoes. They cannot even see
his club, and the conflict generally ends, as did that between the Lady
and Comus, with an angry and wholly unconvincing assertion of
incompetence.
Fain would I something say, yet to what end?
Thou hast nor ear, nor soul to apprehend
The sublime notion and high mystery
That must be utter’d to unfold the sage
And serious doctrine of virginity.
And thou art worthy that thou should’st not know
More happiness than is thy present lot.
Enjoy your dear wit and gay rhetoric,
That hath so well been taught her dazzling fence;
Thou art not fit to hear thyself convinced.
Wordsworth, in a still greater passion, calls his scientific adversary
“a fingering slave.” Of course this sort of thing tends to make the
relations of the parties unpleasant; and in the eyes of the world the
man of immense “information” and convinced ignorance goes off with the
laurels.
Metaphysics for the most part is justly open to the objection that it
attempts to explain things which Aristotle declares to be too simple to
be intelligible--things which we cannot see with definiteness, not
because they are beyond the focus of the mind’s eye, but because they
are too much within it. The metaphysician Hegel says that the sense of
honour arises from our consciousness of infinite personal value. This
may not be wholly satisfactory, but it is helpful; it is a part of the
truth. But what do physicists make of such things as honour and
chastity? They certainly endeavour to explain such ideas and feelings as
they do everything else, but their explanations necessarily discredit
these and all other things which profess to have “infinite value,” and
which wise men know to have infinite value.
The knowledge which can be made common to all, is a foundation upon
which a certain increasing school, finding popular “opinion” too sandy,
is endeavouring to build up a new state of things, religious, moral,
political, and social. This kind of “positivism,” which claims for its
sanction the common, that is to say, the lowest experience of mankind,
is and always has been the religion of the vulgar, to whatever class
they belong. The growth of an unconscious and undogmatic positivism
among the people at large is perhaps the most notable fact of the time.
It shows itself not only in an increasing impatience of the notion that
there is any reality which cannot be seen and felt, but in an
intolerance even of any experience which is not, or cannot immediately
be made, the experience of all. As boards and committees proverbially
have to work on the level of the least wise of their members, so the
ideal perfection of this positivism would be government by the insight
of the greatest dunderhead, since his experiences and perceptions alone
would be sufficiently communicable to have the character of
universality. Under such ideal conditions, every reality that makes life
human would be completely eliminated. A man who should be detected in
secretly entertaining principles of abstract honour, or trying to form
his life upon the pattern of a beauty unknown to the arch-dunderhead,
would fare as it fared in Athens with the man who dared to crown his
house with a pediment; and vestries, consisting of the prophets of
commonplace and popular experience, would vote everything in painting
and poetry to be “bosh” which should be more esoteric in character than
Frith’s “Railway Station” or Martin Tupper’s _Proverbial Philosophy_.
Science has already come very generally to mean, not that which may be
known, but only such knowledge as every animal with faculties a little
above those of an ant or a beaver can be induced to admit.
Incommunicable knowledge, or knowledge which can be communicated at
present only to a portion--perhaps a small portion--of mankind, is
already affirmed to be no knowledge at all. A man who knows and acts up
to his knowledge that it is better to suffer or inflict any extremity
of temporal evil, rather than lie or cheat, though he may not be able to
give any universally intelligible account of his knowledge, is already
beginning to be looked upon as a prig or a fanatic; and chastity is
already widely declared to be one of the “dead virtues,” and marriage
only legalised fornication, because “the sublime notion and high mystery
that must be uttered to unfold the sage and serious doctrine” of purity
must be taken, if taken at all by the many, upon trust.
The pure and simple ideal of life founded upon facts of universal
experience is, however, too base ever to be perfectly attained in this
world. There will always be a lingering suspicion with many that some
have powers of discernment and an experience which are not granted to
all; there will always be hidden heretics who will believe that there
are realities which cannot be seen or touched by the natural eye or
hand, or even by the rational perception of the many; and the present
downward tendency may perhaps be checked, or at least delayed, by
recalling to the minds of men that, as yet, we are all living more or
less by faith in the better knowledge of the few, and by reminding them
of that abyss towards which a new step is taken whenever any item of
that knowledge is denied, in order to widen the foundations of the
throne of popular experience.
The religion of universal experience must of course begin, as the
dogmatic positivist insists, in the denial of God, or, what is exactly
equivalent, in the assertion that, if God exists, He is altogether
unknowable and removed from the practical interests of life. Now, let it
be remembered that for a man to deny that God can be known is quite a
different thing from his not being able to affirm, from positive
knowledge, the reverse. A very small minority of mankind, but a minority
which includes almost all who have attained the highest peaks of heroic
virtue, and many who have been no less eminent for power of intellect
and practical wisdom, have declared that, to them at least, God is
knowable, communicable with, and personally discernible with a certainty
which exceeds all other certainties; and they have further affirmed that
this knowledge comes and can only come from a man’s putting himself _en
rapport_ with the Divinity by an, in the beginning, more or less
experimental faith, and by a conformity to the dictates of the highest
conscience, so perfect as to involve, for a considerable period at
least, laborious and painful self-denial. Now it would be placing
oneself upon a level with such assertors of the highest knowledge to say
that one knows that these declarations are true, however strong the
presumption of their truth may appear; but it is simply vulgar and
brutal impudence for any one to assert positively that they are untruths
or illusions, merely because his own experience and that of his
pot-companions contains nothing which gives the least clue to their
meaning. The _reductio ad absurdum_ becomes complete when the same
argument is carried into regions of more extended experience. A drunken
bargeman has exactly the same right to deny the reality of the asserted
experiences of a Petrarch or a Wordsworth as these would have to deny
those of the saint or the apostle; and to descend a few steps farther,
the amateur of abominable delights and the violator of natural
relationships would justly, upon the widest experimental grounds, claim
exemption from a condemnation chiefly founded upon an obscure perception
and an intuitive horror of which he for his part had no experience.
Popular positivism will, however, always stop short of the length to
which the doctrines of its prophets would lead it, and will, from time
to time, be beaten back into the paths of the positivism of the nobler
few on which all virtue and religion are founded, by finding itself in
contact with the tremendous paradox, that the most universally
beneficial and admired fruits of civilisation are and always have been
gathered from trees of which the roots are wholly out of common view.
The heroes themselves of the people will always refute popular
experience better than any philosopher can. Though a Gladstone may
dazzle them for a day by investing with a fatuous glamour the principles
and platitudes with which the vulgar are familiar, it is to a Gordon,
with inimitable courage and honour, the obvious outcome of
unintelligible thoughts and experiences, that they will look with
abiding reverence, and an elevating instinct that such men habitually
move about in worlds by them unrealised.
The immense and unalterable inequalities in the knowing faculties of man
are the source and in part the justification of that social inequality
which roughly and very partially reflects them. Many otherwise amiable
and conservative thinkers have, however, made the mistake of conceding
that such inequality is, abstractedly considered, an evil, though a
hopelessly incurable one. Conservative teaching would be much more
effective than it is, were it more frequently occupied with proving that
such inequality is no evil, but a very great good for all parties.
Dr. Johnson, who sometimes let fall, in off-hand talk, sayings of such
depth, simplicity, and significance that we must go back to the
philosophers of antiquity to find the like of them, once remarked that
“inequality is the source of all delight.” This saying, which must seem
surprising to most modern ears, is absolutely true and even
demonstrable.
All delight--not all pleasure, which is quite a different thing--will be
found, when thoroughly examined, to consist in the rendering and
receiving of love and the services of love. Hence the great and
fortunately inextinguishable fountains of delight in the relationships
of man and woman and of parents and children. It is true that a low and
inorganic form of national polity may, to some extent, suppress even
these pure springs of felicity; but, so long as there are women and
children in the world, it can never become quite joyless. The doctrines
of liberty, fraternity, and equality are known instinctively only by
very bad children, and most women, when once they have been in love,
repudiate such teaching indignantly, under whatever polity they may have
been born.
Between unequals sweet is equal love;
and the fact is that there is no love, and therefore no sweetness, which
is not thus conditioned; and the greater the inequality the greater the
sweetness. Hence the doctrine that infinite felicity can only arise from
the mutual love of beings infinitely unequal--that is, of the creator
and the creature. Inequality, far from implying any dishonour on either
side of the mutual compact of love, is the source of honour to both.
Hooker, writing of marriage, says: “It is no small honour to a man that
a creature so like himself should be subjected to him”; and we all know
that the honour to woman which the chivalry of the middle ages made an
abiding constituent of civilisation, was founded upon Catholic views of
her subjection, and the obligation to give special honour, as of right,
to the weaker vessel. Look also at the relations which usually subsist
between an hereditary gentleman and his hereditary unequals and
dependants, and compare them with the ordinary fraternal relations
between a Radical master-tradesman and his workmen. The intercourse
between the gentleman and his hind or labourer is free, cheerful, and
exhilarating, because there is commonly in it the only equality worth
regarding, that of goodwill; whereas the commands of the sugar-boiler or
the screw-maker to their brothers are probably given with a frown and
received with a scowl. Social inequality, since it arises from
unalterable nature and inevitable chance, is irritating only when it is
not recognised. The American plutocrat may be forced to travel for a
week in the company of a hodman, because American theories
discountenance first and third class carriages; but catch him speaking
to him! Whereas an English duke, if by chance thrown into the
companionship of an honest countryman, would be on the best of terms
with him before an hour was over, and the good understanding between the
two would be made all the easier should the latter have on his
distinguishing smock-frock. The genuine Tory is the most accessible of
persons, the genuine Radical the least so. The one takes things as they
are and must be, the other views them as they are not and cannot be,
and, kicking against imaginary evils, often pays the penalty of finding
himself firmly saddled with the realities.
“One can live in a house without being an architect,” and it is not at
all necessary that the common people should understand the English
constitution in order to feel that their lives are the sweeter and
nobler because they are members of its living organism. Not a ploughboy
or a milkmaid but would feel, without in the least knowing why, that a
light had passed from their lives with the disappearance of social
inequalities, and the consequent loss of their dignity as integral parts
of a somewhat that was greater than themselves.
The other day, walking in a country lane, I saw what appeared at a
little distance to be a dying animal. On a closer view it proved to be
the carcase of a sheep which had in great measure been actually
transformed into a mass of the soft, white, malodorous grubs known to
anglers by the name of gentles. The struggles of these creatures to get
at the food which they concealed produced a strong and regular pulsation
throughout the whole mass, and gave it a ghastly semblance of breathing.
The ordered state of England, according to its ideal, which for many
generations has been more or less realised, compared with the sort of
democracy to which we are fast drifting and have wellnigh attained, is
much like the animal in which myriads of individual organs, nerves,
veins, tissues, and cells formed subordinated parts of one living thing,
compared with this pulsating mass of grubs, each one of which had no
thought but of its just share of carrion.
Democracy is only a continually shifting aristocracy of money,
impudence, animal energy, and cunning, in which the best grub gets the
best of the carrion; and the level to which it tends to bring all things
is not a mountain tableland, as its promoters would have their victims
think, but the unwholesome platitude of the fen and the morass, of which
black envy would enjoy the malaria so long as all others shared in it.
Whatever may be the pretences set forth by the leading advocates of
such a state of things among us, it is manifest enough that black envy
is the principal motive with many of them, who hate the beauty of the
ordered life, to be ruling stars of which they cannot attain, just as
certain others are said to “hate the happy light from which they fell.”
They hate hereditary honours, chiefly because they produce hereditary
honour, and create a standard of truth and courage for which even the
basest are the better in so far as they are shamed by it. Do the United
States, some may ask, justify this condemnation? They are but a poor
approach to the idea of democracy which seems now about to be realised
among us: but they have already gone a long way towards extinguishing
that last glory of, and now best substitute for, a generally extinct
religion--a sense of honour among the people. “Why, what a dern’d fool
you must be!” exclaimed a New York shopkeeper to a friend of mine, who
had received a dollar too much in changing a note, and returned it. If
there is a shopkeeper in England who would think such a thing, there is
certainly not one who would dare to say it.
Nor, in losing sight of the sense of “infinite personal value,” which is
the source of honour and the growth of a long-enduring recognition of
inevitable inequalities, have the Americans preserved delight. Dr.
Johnson’s saying finds a remarkable comment in the observation of a
recent American traveller: “In the United States there is everywhere
comfort, but no joy.”
To conclude, it is quite possible to change the forms of social
inequality, but to do away with the fact is of all things the most
impossible. It is the trick or ignorance of the demagogue to charge
existing inequalities with the evils and injustices in which they began,
and with which they were attended for a long time afterwards. When
conquest or revolution establishes the ever-inevitable political and
social inequalities in new forms, it takes many generations of misery
and turmoil to introduce into them the moral equality which renders them
not only tolerable, but the source of true freedom and happiness.
THE END
_Printed by_ R. & R. CLARK, _Edinburgh_
End of Project Gutenberg's Principle in Art Etc., by Coventry Patmore