The Erewhonians say it was by chance only that the earth and stars and
all the heavenly worlds began to roll from east to west, and not from
west to east, and in like manner they say it is by chance that man is
drawn through life with his face to the past instead of to the future.
For the future is there as much as the past, only that we may not see it.
Is it not in the loins of the past, and must not the past alter before
the future can do so?
They have a fable that there was a race of men tried upon the earth once,
who knew the future better than the past, but that they died in a
twelvemonth from the misery which their knowledge caused them. They say
that if any were to be born too prescient now, he would die miserably,
before he had time to transmit so peace-destroying a faculty to
descendants.
Strange fate for man! He must perish if he get that, which he must
perish if he strive not after. If he strive not after it he is no better
than the brutes, if he get it he is more miserable than the devils.
Having waded through many chapters like the above, I came at last to the
unborn themselves, and found that they were held to be souls pure and
simple, having no actual bodies, but living in a sort of gaseous yet more
or less anthropomorphic existence, like that of a ghost; they have thus
neither flesh nor blood nor warmth. Nevertheless they are supposed to
have local habitations and cities wherein they dwell, though these are as
unsubstantial as their inhabitants; they are even thought to eat and
drink some thin ambrosial sustenance, and generally to be capable of
doing whatever mankind can do, only after a visionary ghostly fashion, as
in a dream. On the other hand, as long as they remain where they are
they never die--the only form of death in the unborn world being the
leaving it for our own. They are believed to be extremely numerous, far
more so than mankind. They arrive from unknown planets, full grown, in
large batches at a time; but they can only leave the unborn world by
taking the steps necessary for their arrival here--which is, in fact, by
suicide.
They ought to be a happy people, for they have no extremes of good or ill
fortune; never marrying, but living in a state much like that fabled by
the poets as the primitive condition of mankind. In spite of this,
however, they are incessantly complaining; they know that we in this
world have bodies, and indeed they know everything else about us, for
they move among us whithersoever they will, and can read our thoughts, as
well as survey our actions at pleasure. One would think that this should
be enough for them; and indeed most of them are alive to the desperate
risk which they will run by indulging themselves in that body with
"sensible warm motion" which they so much desire; nevertheless, there are
some to whom the _ennui_ of a disembodied existence is so intolerable
that they will venture anything for a change; so they resolve to quit.
The conditions which they must accept are so uncertain, that none but the
most foolish of the unborn will consent to take them; and it is from
these and these only that our own ranks are recruited.
When they have finally made up their minds to leave, they must go before
the magistrate of the nearest town and sign an affidavit of their desire
to quit their then existence. On their having done this, the magistrate
reads them the conditions which they must accept, and which are so long
that I can only extract some of the principal points, which are mainly
the following:--
First, they must take a potion which will destroy their memory and sense
of identity; they must go into the world helpless, and without a will of
their own; they must draw lots for their dispositions before they go, and
take it, such as it is, for better or worse--neither are they to be
allowed any choice in the matter of the body which they so much desire;
they are simply allotted by chance, and without appeal, to two people
whom it is their business to find and pester until they adopt them. Who
these are to be, whether rich or poor, kind or unkind, healthy or
diseased, there is no knowing; they have, in fact, to entrust themselves
for many years to the care of those for whose good constitution and good
sense they have no sort of guarantee.
It is curious to read the lectures which the wiser heads give to those
who are meditating a change. They talk with them as we talk with a
spendthrift, and with about as much success.
"To be born," they say, "is a felony--it is a capital crime, for which
sentence may be executed at any moment after the commission of the
offence. You may perhaps happen to live for some seventy or eighty
years, but what is that, in comparison with the eternity which you now
enjoy? And even though the sentence were commuted, and you were allowed
to live for ever, you would in time become so terribly weary of life that
execution would be the greatest mercy to you. Consider the infinite
risk; to be born of wicked parents and trained in vice! to be born of
silly parents, and trained to unrealities! of parents who regard you as a
sort of chattel or property, belonging more to them than to yourself!
Again, you may draw utterly unsympathetic parents, who will never be able
to understand you, and who will thwart you as long as they can to the
utmost of their power (as a hen when she has hatched a duckling), and
then call you ungrateful because you do not love them, or parents who may
look upon you as a thing to be cowed while it is still young, lest it
should give them trouble hereafter by having wishes and feelings of its
own.
"In later life, when you have been finally allowed to pass muster as a
full member of the world, you will yourself become liable to the
pesterings of the unborn--and a very happy life you may be led in
consequence! For we solicit so strongly that a few only--nor these the
best--can refuse us; and yet not to refuse is much the same as going into
partnership with half a dozen different people about whom one can know
absolutely nothing beforehand--not even whether one is going into
partnership with men or women, nor with how many of either. Delude not
yourself with thinking that you will be wiser than your parents. You may
be an age in advance of _them_, but unless you are one of the great ones
(and if you are one of the great ones, woe betide you), you will still be
an age behind your children.
"Imagine what it must be to have an unborn quartered upon you, who is of
a different temperament to your own; nay, half a dozen such, who will not
love you though you may tell them that you have stinted yourself in a
thousand ways to provide for their well-being,--who will forget all that
self-sacrifice of which you are yourself so conscious, and of whom you
may never be sure that they are not bearing a grudge against you for
errors of judgment into which you may have fallen, but which you had
hoped had been long since atoned for. Ingratitude such as this is not
uncommon, yet fancy what it must be to bear! It is hard upon the
duckling to have been hatched by a hen, but is it not also hard upon the
hen to have hatched the duckling?
"Consider it again, we pray you, not for our sake but for your own. Your
initial character you must draw by lot; but whatever it is, it can only
come to a tolerably successful development after long training; remember
that over that training you will have no control. It is possible, and
even probable, that whatever you may get in after life which is of real
pleasure and service to you, will have to be won in spite of, rather than
by the help of, those whom you are now about to pester, and that you will
only win your freedom after years of a painful struggle, in which it will
be hard to say whether you have suffered most injury, or inflicted it.
"Remember also, that if you go into the world you will have free will;
that you will be obliged to have it, that there is no escaping it, that
you will be fettered to it during your whole life, and must on every
occasion do that which on the whole seems best to you at any given time,
no matter whether you are right or wrong in choosing it. Your mind will
be a balance for considerations, and your action will go with the heavier
scale. How it shall fall will depend upon the kind of scales which you
may have drawn at birth, the bias which they will have obtained by use,
and the weight of the immediate considerations. If the scales were good
to start with, and if they have not been outrageously tampered with in
childhood, and if the combinations into which you enter are average ones,
you may come off well; but there are too many "ifs" in this, and with the
failure of any one of them your misery is assured. Reflect on this, and
remember that should the ill come upon you, you will have yourself to
thank, for it is your own choice to be born, and there is no compulsion
in the matter.
"Not that we deny the existence of pleasures among mankind; there is a
certain show of sundry phases of contentment which may even amount to
very considerable happiness; but mark how they are distributed over a
man's life, belonging, all the keenest of them, to the fore part, and few
indeed to the after. Can there be any pleasure worth purchasing with the
miseries of a decrepit age? If you are good, strong, and handsome, you
have a fine fortune indeed at twenty, but how much of it will be left at
sixty? For you must live on your capital; there is no investing your
powers so that you may get a small annuity of life for ever: you must eat
up your principal bit by bit and be tortured by seeing it grow
continually smaller and smaller, even though you happen to escape being
rudely robbed of it by crime or casualty. Remember, too, that there
never yet was a man of forty who would not come back into the world of
the unborn if he could do so with decency and honour. Being in the
world, he will as a general rule stay till he is forced to go; but do you
think that he would consent to be born again, and re-live his life, if he
had the offer of doing so? Do not think it. If he could so alter the
past as that he should never have come into being at all, do you not
think that he would do it very gladly? What was it that one of their own
poets meant, if it was not this, when he cried out upon the day in which
he was born, and the night in which it was said there is a man child
conceived? 'For now,' he says, 'I should have lain still and been quiet,
I should have slept; then had I been at rest with kings and counsellors
of the earth, which built desolate places for themselves; or with princes
that had gold, who filled their houses with silver; or as an hidden
untimely birth, I had not been; as infants which never saw light. There
the wicked cease from troubling, and the weary are at rest.' Be very
sure that the guilt of being born carries this punishment at times to all
men; but how can they ask for pity, or complain of any mischief that may
befall them, having entered open-eyed into the snare?
"One word more and we have done. If any faint remembrance, as of a
dream, flit in some puzzled moment across your brain, and you shall feel
that the potion which is to be given you shall not have done its work,
and the memory of this existence which you are leaving endeavours vainly
to return; we say in such a moment, when you clutch at the dream but it
eludes your grasp, and you watch it, as Orpheus watched Eurydice, gliding
back again into the twilight kingdom, fly--fly--if you can remember the
advice--to the haven of your present and immediate duty, taking shelter
incessantly in the work which you have in hand. This much you may
perhaps recall; and this, if you will imprint it deeply upon your every
faculty, will be most likely to bring you safely and honourably home
through the trials that are before you." {47}
This is the fashion in which they reason with those who would be for
leaving them, but it is seldom that they do much good, for none but the
unquiet and unreasonable ever think of being born, and those who are
foolish enough to think of it are generally foolish enough to do it.
Finding therefore that they can do no more, the friends follow weeping to
the courthouse of the chief magistrate, where the one who wishes to be
born declares solemnly and openly that he accepts the conditions attached
to his decision. On this he is presented with the potion, which
immediately destroys his memory and sense of identity, and dissipates the
thin gaseous tenement which he has inhabited: he becomes a bare vital
principle, not to be perceived by human senses, nor appreciated by any
chemical test. He has but one instinct, which is that he is to go to
such and such a place, where he will find two persons whom he is to
importune till they consent to undertake him; but whether he is to find
these persons among the race of Chowbok or the Erewhonians themselves is
not for him to choose.