7.30 a. m. ...... 12.30 p. m. ......... Pigeon-holes
12.30 p. m. ...... 3.00 p. m. ......... Miscellany
3.00 p. m. ......
but the rest of the day need not concern us.
The Essayist had been reared in a stronghold of Method--a home where
the dishes were never left over and the tools were always returned to
their places, where the children always went to Sunday School and
never stopped to think that they didn't enjoy it, and their elders
always went to prayer-meeting and never missed church--in a word,
where everybody was always doing everything never and always, and
nobody ever doing anything sometimes.
Thus it came to pass that the Madness of Method followed, or rather
pursued, him all his days, and his existence was filled with devices
for the facilitation of the business of life. The big desk was one of
these devices. It had a hundred and twenty pigeon-holes, and their
labelling, especially in the rows that were to receive classified
ideas, was a triumph of invention. He had had trouble with ideas. They
got wrongly assorted, or lost, got away over night, flew at him in
parabolic curves and never came back, or flitted about his head and
would not submit to scrutiny, and otherwise flouted him. He would have
no more of it.
Just now he was contemplating with a glow of satisfaction not only
his own particular pigeon-holes, but Pigeon-holes Universal. Blessings
on the soul of that primitive man, the first really deserving to be
called ancestor of the human race, who noticed that some things were
like other things--that the world about him was not a mere
agglomeration of endless individual objects and phenomena! What an
impulse to the setting in order of the world's business, for example,
and what relief to himself, when the Lucretian father of astronomy and
history settled to the satisfaction of himself and his hairy fellows
that the same sun they saw sink behind the hills at night would appear
again next morning:
And when the sun and light of day had gone,
With wailings loud they did not roam the fields,
Crying for it among the shades of night,
But quiet lay, in slumber sepulchred,
Until the sun, with rosy torch, should come,
And bring his light into the heaven again.
Hence the pigeon-holing of day and night, of moon and stars, of
seasons and years, "seed-time and harvest, heat and hoary frost," of
all the possibilities of life and achievement. Incomparable
benefaction!
And what ineffable relief--his thoughts ran on--when men began to
realize that some human beings were like others not only in form, but
in feeling; that it was not necessary to scan each individual act of
your neighbor in order to form a basis for each of your own acts, but
that some details of conduct were _semper_, _ubique_, _ab omnibus_!
What a gain to be able to classify men into friends and enemies, to
set apart by themselves the common good and the common bane, to be
aware of correspondences of action and emotion, to judge of the future
by the past! What an advance on the high road leading to stability of
expectation and all its fruitful consequences!
And when men began to apply the principle of pigeon-holing to the
actual business of life, what economy of time and of energy!
Civilization itself, with its multitudinous associations of human
beings in common effort, was a big desk with pigeon-holes. Man had
_noticed_, and was fast approaching the peak of perfection, while the
races of wild, wide-wandering beasts, ignorant both of the blessings
and of the very conception of pigeon-holing, still lived their hard
and coarse existence among the acorn-bearing groves,
Of common welfare had no thought, nor knew
The use of law and custom among men.
With all its intelligence, effort, and boldness, what would the human
race not achieve! What had it not achieved already! The Essayist's
enthusiasm was kindled as he thought of the past and present wonders
of classification and organization--of races, nations, parties,
unions, communities, families; of the marvels of social, educational,
political, industrial, and military coöperation; of the religions and
philosophies of history; of classified and recorded knowledge. He
thought of the arts, sciences, law, and the crafts, with everything
about them all printed in books and deposited in libraries, where
anyone might read and learn. What high and rapid building, what
numerous and rushing trains, what capacious liners and freighters,
what ease and quickness of communication, what mingling of nations,
what universalization of ideas! What wise use of means, and what
efficiency! In education alone, scores of thousands of children in his
own land, large and small, rich and poor, various in blood, quality,
and color, were at that moment being instructed by common methods with
common money in common ideas and ideals--the homogeneous fine flour of
American citizenship ground in one great mill of omnicapacious hopper.
He looked next into the future, and there saw glorious visions. For
pigeon-holing was not only progress, but cumulative progress. The
greatest of its many virtues was that the more it was perfected, the
more time there was to make it still more perfect. Pigeon-holing begat
organization; organization begat leisure; leisure begat contemplation;
contemplation begat wisdom; wisdom begat action; action begat
progress; progress meant advance in civilization; and civilization
meant more and better pigeon-holing. The chain was endless.
Yes, pigeon-holing meant cumulative progress, and the cumulative
process had never been so rapid, nor given so much promise, as just
now. The world had never before possessed so many appliances to
facilitate the pigeon-holing of men and things and movements. There
had always been enormous losses in efficiency. Now, however, nothing
was being lost or wasted, as in the days when System had been a less
jealous goddess; now, everything which men found out was being
accurately recorded or neatly tied up, or carefully deposited, or put
into the general circulation of life universal, or otherwise
conserved.
And not only was everything conserved, but production itself, thanks
to pigeon-holing, was far more rapid now than ever before. The march
of civilization was quickening to double time. Pigeon-holing and
Efficiency were the two great features of the age, and walked, or
rather rushed, hand in hand. The more pigeon-holing, the more
efficiency; the more efficiency, the more time saved; the more time
saved, the more pigeon-holes; and so on, with ever increasing
momentum, _in saecula saeculorum amen_. From the labor unions that
maintained walking delegates and boycotts, to the great trusts that
were responsible for high-priced beef and long-packed eggs and
pure-food inspectors, everyone was working with the greatest possible
speed and efficiency, and everything was being pigeon-holed to the
utmost perfection. It was the age of time-tables and interest-tables,
cash registers, and adding machines; steam shovels, steam seeders,
harvesters, and threshers; cyclometers, pedometers, and taxicabs;
type-writing and linotyping and photography; telephones and
automobiles and book reviews; technical schools and teachers'
courses, education by correspondence, books on etiquette and
how-to-enjoy-the-arts, piano-players and phonographs;
library cataloguers, Who's Whos, encyclopedias, and
blanks-to-be-filled-out-and-returned-at-once; world languages,
one-class steamers, democracy, cosmopolitanism, and peace conferences;
tinned foods, department stores, and women's clubs; reference Bibles,
dictionaries of handy quotations, hints on diet, menus for the month,
short cuts to culture, wireless telegraphy, big guns and big business,
joy riding, air-ships, simplified spellings, and a universal A.B.
degree.
Let us not be surprised if the Essayist grew a trifle delirious.
Progress is a thing of enthusiasm, and its devotees are easily wrought
upon by the frenzy of the god.
What was to be the glorious goal of this cumulative progress? The
Essayist's thoughts took on aërial daring. In the realm of knowledge,
for example--what an inspiring vision! He had often thought of the
pity of it--that scholars through the ages had consumed their lives in
effort that was largely in vain: laboriously amassing the knowledge
possessed by their predecessors, only to die and leave it as scant as
when they had received it.
But that was in the olden time. Now, with the art of printing
democratized, with specialization firmly established, with all the
wonderful book-keeping and card-cataloguing that characterized
intellectual activities, with the willingness of scholars to study and
record _everything_, and of libraries to purchase and preserve
_everything_, for fear of losing _anything_, with all the learning of
the past immediately at hand, and with all the means and appliances
available for its rapid utilization, why might scholarship not aspire
to reach the absolute heights of knowledge? Might it not be possible
now for the scholar to receive the torch of learning fully ablaze, and
to run the race that was set before him without the necessity of
stopping to renew or even trim it--for him to make, so to speak, more
effective dashes at the pole of learning--or to build to the very
heaven the intellectual Tower of Babel, whose downfall would not be so
easily possible now as in an age when men had not been alive to the
need of linguistic pigeon-holes?
But intellect was not the greatest thing in the world. Might not the
ever increasing skill in pigeon-holing lead before long to a
definition of religion, the cessation of doctrinal quarrels, and the
sinking of all differences in a common ideal of administration,
conduct, and even belief? Yes; might it not lead to the final
obliteration of national and racial, and even social, distinctions?
Might it not lead, and at no distant date, not only to democracy and
social equality, but to universal democracy--when the war-drum
throbbed no longer, etc.?
Having thus in imagination surveyed the glories of pigeon-holing, the
Essayist seized upon his pen, and rapidly set his thoughts to paper,
not omitting to make liberal use of the pigeon-holes before him
whenever he adumbrated quotations with which he thought his page might
be embellished.
The task finished, he glanced at the clock. The forenoon was only half
spent. Looking over his sheets, too, he observed that his essay was
only half the length an intelligent and good-natured reader ought to
endure.
This was just as he would have it, for he had begun with the definite
intention of appearing both for and against pigeon-holes. There was
time enough left to make his work symmetrical by presenting the other
side, and to append a conveniently stated conclusion. He knew from the
editors that readers in general disliked nothing quite so much as
being left to make up their own minds.
* * * * *
So he took up the pen again.
What! After all that rhapsodizing, not a believer in pigeon-holes?
Not so bad as that. He was a believer, but not a blind believer. The
fact is, he had a lively sense of the limitations of pigeon-holing. He
had arrived at familiarity with both its virtues and its defects
through personal experience. He had dealt in pigeon-holes himself, had
made them, used them, and had been in them, and for years had been
growing more and more conscious that the use of them was a difficult
and delicate matter.
Earlier in life, it had not been so. He still remembered vividly the
time when all men were easily classifiable--into good and bad,
Christian and heathen, saved and unsaved, rich and poor, wise and
foolish, as easily as into black and white, or fat and lean; when all
nations except the United States, and all governments except
democracy, were inferior. He remembered the surprise with which he had
heard for the first time that there was a difference between
prohibition and temperance, that there were many forms of intemperance
besides drunkenness, that English government had many points of
superiority over American. He had always supposed that with those
questions it was as with slavery in the mind of Charles Sumner:
"Gentlemen, to this slavery question there can be no other side."
He also recalled the ferment started in his mind by a much respected
teacher's remark that all truth was relative, not absolute: whether a
man was good depended on what you meant by goodness; whether two and
two made four depended on whether one and one made two; grammar and
spelling were after all only fashions, and things that appeared in
print might not be true; not even the dictionary was absolute, and the
Bible was not inspired in every letter and punctuation mark.
All this shook the ground under his feet, and it took some time to
recover. That about the Bible and the dictionary was especially
confounding. He reeled to and fro, and staggered like a drunken man,
and was at his wit's end.
You will call him stupid. He was. Most pigeon-holers are, to tell the
truth. He was like them in being so busy with virtuous action that he
found but little time for thought. He used the pigeon-holes customary
in his neighborhood, without questioning the correctness of content or
label.
But in time he came to realize that there was religion outside of
sects and that there were many believers who were unconscious
unbelievers, that men might be honest and still dishonorable, that a
great deal of the most pernicious lying in the world was done without
the utterance of a syllable, that the guiltless were often criminal
and the criminal guiltless, that many democrats were really
aristocrats, many fools really wise, many a rich man poor and many a
poor man rich, many a learned man ignorant, many pessimists really
optimists, and many optimists really stumbling-blocks to progress.
By the Saturday morning on which we catch sight of him, he had come to
have a wholesome distrust of the pigeon-holes of others; and whenever
he took a specimen from his own, he submitted it to fresh examination,
tolerating pigeon-holes at all only under perpetual protest against
men's careless use of them.
For there were multitudinous differences between things to all
appearances absolutely alike. It was impossible to classify even the
inanimate without some sort of violence. Even the products of the die
and the press showed variation, however infinitesimal; and as for
Nature, in her realm there were no two things alike. Plants, animals,
persons, mountains, valleys, and streams--unending variety was the
rule. The two faces most alike in all the world proved widely
different on close examination, and the points of difference between
the persons who owned them were infinite.
And not only that. Not only _were_ all individual things really
different from all other things, but each individual thing _seemed_
different to different persons. Pigeon-holing implied pigeon-holers,
and no two pigeon-holers were alike. Like the artists in Plato, they
saw the same thing from different angles: "I mean, that you may look
at a bed from different points of view, obliquely or directly, or from
any other point of view, and the bed will appear different, but there
is no difference in reality." The same man appeared better or worse,
according to the standards of his judge; the same rain was good or
bad, according to the health or the purpose of the person under the
umbrella. One man's meat was another man's poison. No two men ever
formulated the same definition of a thing, let alone an abstraction;
and if definitions agreed in words, the words themselves meant
different things to their authors. The Essayist thought of the
desperate pass of Philosophy, patiently waiting while her disciples
fruitlessly endeavored to define each other's definitions. Lucky for
life that living did not hang on wisdom of that sort!
Yes, more than that; no thing--at least, no living thing--had ever
been seen twice in exactly the same aspect by the same person. Not
only did the object change from second to second, under the outward
impulse of sun and wind and rain and the inner impulse of expanding
cell, but the beholder himself was absolutely identical at no two
moments. He might change his physical position, or be subject to any
of the thousand mutations that sweep over the human spirit like waves
of shadow over the wheat. Everything was in the state of flux.
Becoming, not Being, was the order of all things. And more, each
reacted not only upon its fellow, but upon everything else. The
shifting of an atom affected every other atom in the universe.
Withdraw a drop of water from the ocean, and there was immediate
readjustment of all the waters that covered the earth. Withdraw a
member from human society, or change him by ever so little--in health,
so that he ate more; in stature, so that he wore more; in morals, so
that he acted differently--and the whole fabric suffered modification.
Nothing could be lost, nothing changed, without impairing in some
sort the universal order. Nothing could be duplicated.
And so in the world of ideas. There was no item of truth not connected
with and dependent upon all other truth. Let an individual idea in the
ocean of a man's ideas suffer modification, and there was instant
readjustment of all his other ideas, and of his emotions, and of his
actions; and, under their impulse, of the actions, emotions, and ideas
of all other individuals. Truth was one great, unified whole, never
yet beheld, save in partial vision, by the human mind. To know one
item in all its connections was to possess all knowledge. For the
botanist who knew completely the flower, the mystery of the universe
was solved.
What folly, then, to look for perfect pigeon-holing, when no two atoms
could be found alike, to say nothing of the motions of the human
spirit,
Swift as a shadow, short as any dream.
And what injustice and cruelty might it be guilty of, did its devotees
become too rapt in their enthusiasm!
What injustice had they not been guilty of, in the past! What violence
done to nature and to man! What forcings together and what tearings
asunder! What attenuations and amputations on Procrustean beds! What
heart-burnings they had caused, what hatred and what strife! What wars
on sea and land, what slaughter, what laying waste, what famine,
disease, and hardship, what bereavement, what languishings in prison,
what falling of men from high estates, what oppression, what rackings
and twistings and manglings of limbs, what persecutions and executions
and excommunications and banishments, what sunderings of nations and
communities, what separations of persons really congenial who would
have been friends if left to themselves, what disorders--all sprung
from men's desire to force their fellows into their own social and
religious pigeon-holes! And ideas--what struggling and bleeding and
screaming of _them_ at being forced by brutal hands into narrow and
stifling cells with other ideas in mutual hot resentment. History was
filled with the heartless compulsion of men and things and ideas into
groups where they rebelled against going.
Nor were persecutions and strife confined to the past. The injustices
of pigeon-holing were rampant in the Essayist's own enlightened time.
The old-time sets of pigeon-holes might no longer be used to such
deadly purpose, but there were others that bade fair to take their
place. The pigeon-holes of religion were less insisted on, but the
pigeon-holes of science gave promise of another tyranny hardly less
unendurable. The two prime factors in tyranny--arrogant authority and
superstitious multitude--were already clearly to be seen. The tyranny
of aristocratic pigeon-holing seemed past, but its place was being
taken by the hardly less outrageous tyranny of democracy's
pigeon-holes. In a world that boasted of producing the greatest
equality known to human kind, there were more classifiers and more
class feeling than men had ever known before. The pigeon-holes were
different, but they were there, and their partitions as impenetrable
as ever.
The very consciousness that they _were_ in different compartments kept
men from attempting to understand each other, let alone their real
differences; more, it made them hostile, and even aggressive. What
philosopher, from Thales to the latest enemy of Pragmatism, what
dogmatist, from the Stoic to the latest ridiculer of Christian
Science, what political critic, from Aristophanes to the anarchist of
yesterday, ever tried or was willing to understand his opponent, and
did not wilfully misrepresent in order to confute him? Longfellow was
right when he said that the South should come to see the North, the
North go to see the South, and then the war would be over. Let men
forsake their pigeon-holes and meet face to face, and many a problem
of religion, philosophy, sociology, industry, and pedagogy would
cease to be a problem--and many an official and professorial chair
would be vacant.
But for the most part, either from their own impulse or from
compulsion, men remained in their pigeon-holes. Many a man who had
voluntarily emerged found his fellows unwilling to stir to meet him,
or even take note of his having come forth. Many a man could not get
out, if he would, and spent his life beating against the partitions,
clamoring loudly and unheeded for redistribution on the ground of a
thousand facts.
In vain! The malefactor and the magdalen could be rescued from their
pigeon-holes only by a miracle, were they ever so repentant and filled
with good works. The world had disposed of them, ceased to consider
them, forgotten them--even though it was a loser as well as a tyrant.
What service had been lost to the State by the pigeon-holing of
party--talent and patriotism denied a sphere of usefulness because of
being among the minority! What willing hearts lost to religion because
of the pigeon-holes of creed and denomination! And there were men who
were misjudged and abused all their lives long, living sacrifices to
some accident of pigeon-holing, and to the neglect which was its usual
consequence. Give a dog a bad name, and hang him.
Away with pigeon-holing then, as violent, tyrannical, and oppressive,
a foe to individuality of men and ideas, and an obstacle to real
progress! Away with curbs and yardsticks and tapes and molds and
stamps and presses and dies, and all manner of interference with
nature and her methods of expansion! Let nature, and especially human
nature, realize itself, like any plant or flower! Fired by
imagination, the Essayist started up, glowering at his desk and
thinking of the axe. He had not yet attained, you see, to the full
measure of Scientific Calm, and was in a fair way to usurp the
functions of judge, jury, and sheriff, as well as attorney.
But he sat back again, and reflected. No pigeon-holes at all? What
heresy, thus to fly in the face of his own practice, and of evolution!
Imagine it--for men to eat only when hungry, to plan a costume for
every dinner out, to have no office hours and no fixed prices, no
churches and no schools, no coined money, no uniforms in parades, and
no parades, no laws to regulate conduct in the large, no street
numbers, no marks by which to detect a book agent or a mine promoter
before answering the door-bell, no catalogues, no voting-machines, no
diplomas, no marriage-bond, no social and religious ties at all! Why,
what was that but anarchy?
Of course it was anarchy, and the Essayist knew it all the time. You
must remember that he had set out to present both sides of the case.
If he was a bit carried away by his own pleading, that is not a bad
fault in the advocate.
And now he was ready to assume also the role of judge, and to charge
the jury--by which I mean, of course, the readers of THE UNPOPULAR.
Being a Horatian, he summed up in favor of the Golden Mean, and
recommended pigeon-holing to the favorable consideration of the jury.
It had its proper use, and it had its misuse. There was harmless
pigeon-holing, where you reduced to order dead and material things, or
classified living entities on the basis of essentials. So long as you
did no great violence, and were ready to entertain motions for
reconsideration, it was desirable for the sake of economy in time and
energy to use pigeon-holes, even at some cost. In other words, if you
were to enjoy the benefits of civilization, or, indeed, to possess it
at all, you must introduce into the anarchy of perfect individualism a
greater or less degree of the artificiality of collectivism.
But there was a limit beyond which neither individual man nor society
in the aggregate should go.
A limit, Your Honor? And pray, who was to establish the limit? That
was not so easy. Clearly, no man could establish the limit for
another man. Each man must determine for himself; and society must
determine for _its_ self, by means of that most mysterious of all
consciousnesses, the universal consciousness.
In other words, pigeon-holing was the creation of no rule; it was an
Art. The masterpiece was an individual product, a resolution of many
forces. And civilization, so closely dependent upon pigeon-holing, was
an Art, not a science--no, not even a social science. Let those who
looked to save society by invention and application of rules alone
consider well their ways. No anarchist was farther removed than they
from the truth that should make men free.
In still other words, it was the Golden Mean which society, as well as
the individual, should strive for. And this was no easy Panacea. The
Golden Mean meant struggle--a struggle constant and eternal--to
maintain an equilibrium. You had to watch unceasingly your balances,
and to shift and reshift your weights--without intermittence, and
forever. The devotion called for was so great that it took the
inspiration of religious ideals to insure it. Human society was a
Gothic cathedral--a unified and beautiful structure, but one whose
complex members exerted everlasting pressure each on each, and must
not long be left to themselves. To measure, and hew, and build, was
not all. The pile could not be finished at once and forever. Let the
architect relax his watchfulness, and decaying members soon would
spoil the symmetry of the noble lines, or even precipitate the whole
in awful ruin.
And here was where lay most of the trouble with pigeon-holing, past
and present. Man was lazy. It was not wholly the enlightened desire
for progress which had inspired him to pigeon-holing, and was
continuing to inspire. Dislike of work, and selfishness, and vanity,
all played a part as well, and not a small one.
It was so reposeful to dispose of things in the large--to educate by
the hundred thousand, to rest in the arms of creed, to stand at the
lever of a great machine, to have your tailor plan your suits and the
cook or the newspaper your meals, to have a dozen pigeon-holes into
which you conveniently popped new acquaintances and had them off your
mind forever. It was so much easier to force men to accept your own
beliefs and plans than to take the trouble to acquaint yourself with
theirs. It was so much more satisfying and final to follow mere logic
and go to the end of the process than always to be engaged in that
most laborious of tasks--thinking and forming judgments. To write a
volume embodying all the facts was much easier than to write an essay
presenting the essentials and their interpretation. A perfectly
democratic or a perfectly absolute government was far less difficult
to plan than the ideal commonwealth. It was much easier to act on
insufficient premises than to travail with thought and find that after
all there was no ground for action. It was easier to be an ignoramus
or a pedant than a real scholar, a dogmatist or an atheist than a good
preacher, a lecturer on education than a teacher, a slouch or a dandy
than a well dressed man, a persecutor or a humanitarian than a saver
of souls, a despot or an anarchist than a shepherd of the people, a
censor or an abettor than a monitor and adviser, a total abstainer or
a drunkard than a temperate man, a conservative or a radical than a
patriot, a boor or a fop than a gentleman. It was easier to be a
beast, or not to be at all, than to be a MAN.
The Essayist looked at the clock. It was twelve-thirty. Once more he
had successfully pigeon-holed the hours of his morning.