Lichtenberg said somewhere, “I used to know people of great scholarship,
in whose head the most important propositions were folded up in
excellent order. But I don’t know what occurred there, whether the ideas
were all mannikins or all little women--there were no results. In one
corner of the head, these gentlemen put away saltpeter, in another
sulphur, in a third charcoal, but these did not combine into gunpowder.
Then again, there are people in whose heads everything seeks out and
finds everything else, everything pairs off with everything else, and
arranges itself variously.” What Lichtenberg is trying to do is to
indicate that the cause of the happy condition of the last-named friends
is imagination. That imagination is influential, is certain, but it is
equally certain that the human understanding is so different with
different people as to permit such phenomena as Lichtenberg describes. I
do not want to discuss the quantity of understanding. I shall deal, this
time, with its quality, by means of which the variety of its uses may be
explained. It would be a mistake to think of the understanding as
capable of assuming different forms. If it were it would be possible to
construct from the concept understanding a group of different powers
whose common quality would come to us off-hand. But with regard to
understanding we may speak only of more or less and we must think of the
difference in effect in terms only of the difference of the forms of its
application. We see the effects of the understanding alone, not the
understanding itself, and however various a burning city, cast iron, a
burn, and steaming water may be, we recognize that in spite of the
difference of effect, the same fire has brought about all these results.
The difference in the uses of the understanding, therefore, lies in the
manner of its application. Hence these applications will help us, when
we know them, to judge the value of what they offer us. The first
question that arises when we are dealing with an important witness who
has made observations and inferences, is this: “How intelligent is he?
and what use does he make of his intelligence? That is, What are his
processes of reasoning?”
I heard, from an old diplomat, whose historic name is as significant as
his experience, that he made use of a specific means to discover what
kind of mind a person had. He used to tell his subjects the following
story: “A gentleman, carrying a small peculiarly-formed casket, entered
a steam car, where an obtrusive commercial traveler asked him at once
what was contained in the casket. ‘My Mungo is inside!’ ‘Mungo? What is
that?’ ‘Well, you know that I suffer from delirium tremens, and when I
see the frightful images and figures, I let my Mungo out and he eats
them up.’ ‘But, sir, these images and figures do not really exist.’ ‘Of
course they don’t really exist, but my Mungo doesn’t really exist,
either, so it’s all right!’”
The old gentleman asserted that he could judge of the intelligence of
his interlocutor by the manner in which the latter received this story.
Of course it is impossible to tell every important witness the story of
Mungo, but something similar may be made use of which could be sought
out of the material in the case. Whoever has anything worthy the name of
practice will then be able to judge the manner of the witness’s
approach, and especially the degree of intelligence he possesses. The
mistake must not be made, however, that this requires splendid
deductions; it is best to stick to simple facts. Goethe’s golden word is
still true: “The greatest thing is to understand that all fact is theory
... do not look behind phenomena; they are themselves the doctrine.” We
start, therefore, with some simple fact which has arisen in the case and
try to discover what the witness will do with it. It is not difficult;
you may know a thing badly in a hundred ways, but you know it well in
only one way. If the witness handles the fact properly, we may trust
him. We learn, moreover, from this handling how far the man may be
objective. His perception as witness means to him only an experience,
and the human mind may not collect experiences without, at the same
time, weaving its speculations into them. But though everyone does this,
he does it according to his nature and nurture. There is little that is
as significant as the manner, the intensity, and the direction in and
with which a witness introduces his speculation into the story of his
experience. Whole sweeps of human character may show themselves up with
one such little explanation. It is for this reason that Kant called the
human understanding architectonic; it aims to bring together all its
knowledge under one single system, and this according to fixed rules and
systems defined by the needs of ordinary mortals. Only the genius has,
like nature, his own unknown system. And we do not need to count on this
rarest of exceptions.
The people who constitute our most complicated problems are the average,
and insignificant members of the human race. Hume cited the prophet
Alexander quite justly. Alexander was a wise prophet, who selected
Paphlagonis as the first scene of his deception because the people there
were extraordinarily foolish and swallowed with pleasure the coarsest of
swindles. They had heard earlier of the genuineness and power of the
prophet, and the smart ones laughed at him, the fools believed and
spread his faith, his cause got adherents even among educated people,
and finally Marcus Aurelius himself paid the matter so much attention as
to rest the success of a military enterprise on a prophecy of
Alexander’s. Tacitus narrates how Vespasian cured a blind man by
spitting on him, and the story is repeated by Suetonius.
We must never forget that, however great a foolishness may be, there is
always somebody to commit it. It is Hume, again, I think, who so
excellently describes what happens when some inconceivable story is told
to uncritical auditors. Their credulity increases the narrator’s
shamelessness; his shamelessness convinces their credulity. Thinking for
yourself is a rare thing, and the more one is involved with other people
in matters of importance, the more one is convinced of the rarity. And
yet, so little is demanded in thinking. “To abstract the red of blood
from the collective impression, to discover the same concept in
different things, to bring together under the same notion blood and
beer, milk and snow,--animals do not do this; it is thinking.”[204] I
might suggest that in the first place, various animals are capable of
something of the sort, and in the second place, that many men are
incapable of the same thing. The lawyer’s greatest of all mistakes is
always the presupposition that whoever has done anything has also
thought about doing it and while he was doing it. This is especially the
case when we observe that many people repeatedly speak of the same event
and drive us to the opinion that there must be some intelligent idea
behind it,--but however narrow a road may be, behind it there may be any
number of others in series.
We also are bound to be mistaken if we presuppose the lack of reason as
a peculiarity of the uneducated only, and accept as well thought-out the
statements of people who possess academic training. But not everybody
who damns God is a philosopher, and neither do academic persons concern
themselves unexceptionally with thinking. Concerning the failure of our
studies in the high-schools and in the gymnasia, more than enough has
been written, but Helmholtz, in his famous dissertation, “Concerning the
Relation of the Natural Sciences to the Whole of Knowledge,” has
revealed the reason for the inadequacy of the material served up by
gymnasia and high-schools. Helmholtz has not said that the university
improves the situation only in a very small degree, but it may be
understood from his words. “The pupils who pass from our grammar-schools
to exact studies have two defects: 1. A certain laxity in the
application of universally valid laws. The grammatical rules with which
they have been trained, are as a matter of fact, buried under series of
exceptions; the pupils hence are unaccustomed to trust unconditionally
to the certainty of a legitimate consequence of some fixed universal
law. 2. They are altogether too much inclined to depend upon authority
even where they can judge for themselves.”
Even if Helmholtz is right, it is important for the lawyer to recognize
the distinction between the witness who has the gymnasium behind him and
the educated man who has helped himself without that institution. Our
time, which has invented the Ph. D., which wants to do everything for
the public school and is eager to cripple the classical training in the
gymnasium, has wholly forgotten that the incomparable value of the
latter does not lie in the minimum of Latin and Greek which the student
has acquired, but in the disciplinary intellectual drill contained in
the grammar of the ancient tongues. It is superfluous to make fun of the
fact that the technician writes on his visiting cards: Stud. Eng. or
Stud. Mech. and can not pronounce the words the abbreviations stand
for, that he becomes Ph. D. and can not translate his title,--these are
side issues. But it is forgotten that the total examination in which the
public school pupil presents his hastily crammed Latin and Greek, never
implies a careful training in his most impressionable period of life.
Hence the criminalist repeatedly discovers that the capacity for trained
thinking belongs mainly to the person who has been drilled for eight
years in Greek and Latin grammar. We criminalists have much experience
in this matter.
Helmholtz’s first point would, for legal purposes, require very broad
interpretation of the term, “universally valid laws,” extending it also
to laws in the judicial sense of the word. The assertion is frequently
made that laws are passed in the United States in order that they might
not be obeyed, and political regulations are obeyed by the public for,
at most, seven weeks. Of course, the United States is no exception; it
seems as if the respect for law is declining everywhere, and if this
decline occurs in one field no other is likely to be free from it. A
certain subjective or egoistic attitude is potent in this regard, for
people in the main conceive the law to be made only for others; they
themselves are exceptions. Narrow, unconditional adherence to general
norms is not modern, and this fact is to be seen not only in the excuses
offered, but also in the statements of witnesses, who expect others to
follow prescriptions approximately, and themselves hardly at all. This
fact has tremendous influence on the conceptions and constructions of
people, and a failure to take it into consideration means considerable
error.
Not less unimportant is the second point raised in the notion of
“authority.” To judge for himself is everybody’s business, and should be
required of everybody. Even if nobody should have the happy thought of
making use of the better insight, the dependent person who always wants
to go further will lead himself into doubtful situations. The three
important factors, school, newspaper, and theater, have reached an
extraordinary degree of power. People apperceive, think, and feel as
these three teach them, and finally it becomes second nature to follow
this line of least resistance, and to seek intellectual conformity. We
know well enough what consequences this has in law, and each one of us
can tell how witnesses present us stories which we believe to rest on
their own insight but which show themselves finally to depend upon the
opinion of some other element. We frequently base our constructions upon
the remarkable and convincing unanimity of such witnesses when upon
closer examination we might discover that this unanimity has a single
source. If we make this discovery it is fortunate, for only time and
labor have then been lost and no mistake has been committed. But if the
discovery is not made, the unanimity remains an important, but really an
unreliable means of proof.