especially so far as they are strengthened by the practice of authorship
as a profession. They may be summed up by saying that they tend to
degrade the profession into a trade, and a trade which has as many
tricks as the least elevating kind of business. It would be, perhaps,
desirable to end by deducing some definite moral. But, in the first
place, I think that any such moral as I could give is sufficiently
indicated by the statement of the dangers. And, in the second place, I
do not think that there is any moral that can be regarded as peculiar to
authors. For an author, after all, is a man, and, as all men ought to
be, a workman. His power comes to this, that he is a man with a special
capacity for exciting sympathy. That he should be a good workman,
therefore, goes without saying; and it follows that he should have a
sense of responsibility in whatever department he undertakes; that he
should not bestow his advice upon us without qualifying himself to be a
competent adviser; nor write philosophical speculation without serious
study of philosophy; nor, if possible, produce poetry or even fiction
without filling his mind by observation or training it by sympathy with
the great movements of thought which are shaping the world in which we
live. It is a sort of paradox which cannot be avoided, that we must
warn a man that one condition of all good work is that it should be
spontaneous, and yet tell him that it should be directed to make men
better and happier. It seems to be saying that the conscious pursuit of
a given end would be inconsistent with the attainment of the end. Yet I
believe that this is a paradox which can be achieved in practice on the
simple condition of a reasonable modesty. The author, that is, should
not listen to those who would exaggerate the importance of his work. The
world can get on very well without it; and even the greatest men are far
more the product than the producers of the intellectual surroundings.
The acceptance of that truth--I hold it to be a truth--will help to keep
in check the exaggerated estimate of the importance of making a noise in
the world, which is our besetting sin, and help to make a regulating
principle of what is a theoretical belief, that a man who is doing
honestly good work in any department, whether under the eyes of a
multitude or of a few, will be happiest if he can learn to take pleasure
in doing it thoroughly rather than in advertising it widely. And,
finally, with that conviction we shall be less liable to the common
error of an author who grumbles at his want of success, and becomes
morbid and irritable and inclined to lower his standard, when in reality
he ought to remember that he is as unreasonable as a marksman who
should complain of the target for keeping out of the line of fire. "It
is my own fault" is often a bitter reflection, but a bitter may be a
very wholesome tonic.
THE VANITY OF PHILOSOPHISING.
When the Preacher exclaimed, "Vanity of vanities, all is vanity," he did
not exclude his own wisdom. "I communed with my own heart, saying, Lo, I
am come to great estate, and have gotten more wisdom than all that have
gone before me in Jerusalem: yea, my heart hath great experience of
wisdom and knowledge. And I gave my heart to know wisdom and to know
madness and folly: I perceived that this also is vexation of spirit. For
in much wisdom is much grief: and he that increaseth knowledge
increaseth sorrow." The Preacher, whoever he may have been, has uttered
thoughts upon which many eloquent followers have expatiated. More than
two thousand years have passed since the words were written;
philosophies have risen and spread and decayed; and yet, in this year
1895, can we say that they have brought more than a multiplication of
doubt? Has the increase of knowledge as yet diminished sorrow, or
established any firm standing ground from which we may look upon the
universe and say that the eternal riddle is, I will not say solved, but
brought a step nearer to solution? A great poet--I can't tell whether
he lived in the twelfth or the nineteenth century, for the phrase is
equally characteristic of either Omar Khayyam or Edward
Fitzgerald--gives the same thought:--
Myself, when young, did eagerly frequent
Doctor and saint, and heard great argument
About it and about: but evermore
Came out by the same door as in I went.
What, indeed, are eight or twenty centuries in the life even of this
planet? There are moments at which we all have suddenly felt by flashes
the sensation of being suspended in vast abysses of space and time: when
we see, for example, a chart of the heavens which has been recently
revealed to us by astronomers, and find that spaces between the stars
shown to us by ordinary eyesight are filled in every direction with
world beyond world, vast systems of worlds, worlds in every stage of
evolution, growing out of nebulous vapour or sinking into eternal
coldness: while the imagination is staggered and bewildered by the
inconceivable vastness of the spaces indicated, and its own
infinitesimal pettiness. If we stroll into a museum and look at the
petrified bones of some grotesque monster, and after rejoicing, perhaps,
that there is an end of him, we are struck by the thought of the vast
lapse of ages during which he was being slowly hammered out of some
mere primitive form, and then slowly decayed, and was gradually elbowed
out of existence by monsters a degree less preposterous than himself,
and gain a new measure of the portentous lapse of time. The greatest of
poets has summed up the impression in the phrase which Carlyle was fond
of quoting: "we are such stuff as dreams are made of": and our little
speck of existence a vanishing quantity in comparison of the infinite
above and below and around us, which we dimly infer though we cannot
distinctly realise it. If in such a mood, common at times to all who can
think or feel, we take up some philosophical work, and find the writer
complacently setting forth a cosmogony or a theory of the Universe;
explaining how things came into being; what is the reason why they are
not better or worse; what is the end of the whole drama: are we not
justified in exclaiming with Carlyle:--
The builder of this Universe was wise,
He planned all souls, all systems, planets, particles:
The plan he shaped all worlds and aeons by
Was--Heavens!--was thy small nine-and-thirty articles!
Carlyle has been, to some of us, the most stimulating of writers, just
because he succeeded in expressing, with unsurpassed power, the emotion
which I must be content with indicating--the emotion which is roused by
sudden revelations of the infinitudes, the silences and eternities that
surround us. We cannot keep it permanently before us; the present
absorbs us, and its little interests seem to be all that is important.
It is only at moments when, for example, we reflect that our action of a
minute ago is already a part of the mysterious past, sinking downwards,
and rapidly becoming invisible in the depths of the infinite ocean, that
we are startled by a momentary pang, and feel as though to live with a
constant sense of our insignificance would be to risk the paralysis of
all our powers of thought and action. That way, we are inclined to say,
lies madness. We shall lose our heads if we gaze too long into such
tremendous depths. Possibly we may restore our equilibrium by meditating
upon the infinitesimal, though possibly too we may rather feel that such
meditations only reveal another infinite. I intended to make a few
reflections suggested by such thoughts, when I found a guide, and, to a
great extent, an ally, in a writer who has lately taken up the ancient
parable. Mr. Balfour, in a book rather quaintly entitled _Foundations of
Belief_ has dwelt upon the vanity of all known philosophy, and has
shown, or appears to some of his readers to have endeavoured to show,
that it is hopeless to lay any sound foundations on the little film of
knowledge beneath which lie the great unknown abysses. He tries to
indicate some other basis, though, so far as I can understand him, the
foundations of his edifice are ingeniously supported by the
superstructure; and that is a kind of architecture which, to my mind,
lacks stability. Through a large part of his argument, however, I find
myself in the pleasanter position of an ally. He asserts, and I doubt
whether any competent thinker would materially differ from him, that
there does not, as a matter of fact, exist any established system of
philosophic truth--any system upon which we can rely, as we do, in fact,
rightly or wrongly rely, upon certain scientific doctrines. We no more
doubt the truth of the Newtonian system of astronomy than we doubt that
fire burns or that bread nourishes. But the briefest glance at the old
systems of philosophy shows us, as Mr. Balfour says, nothing but
imperishable ruins--imperishable aesthetically--but, logically, mere
crumbling fragments. We can still read Plato with delight; but the
delight is due to the beauty of style and exposition, not, certainly, to
the conviction produced by his reasoning. Aristotle's philosophy is a
marvel--for his time: but his theory of the Universe is no more tenable
than his Natural Science. The luxuriant growths of later Greek
philosophy are interesting only to the curious investigators of the
pathology of the human intellect. The vast development of scholastic
philosophy in the middle ages showed only how far unlimited ingenuity
and subtlety may lead in the wrong direction, if it starts with mistaken
principles. It ended by upsetting the doctrines which it attempted to
prove, and had finally to commit suicide, or fall before the
insurrection of living thought. The great men who revolted against its
tyranny in its later stages constructed new systems, which, to them,
seemed demonstrable, but which, to us, are already untenable. We cannot
accept Descartes, or Spinoza, or Leibnitz, or Bacon, or Hobbes, or
Locke, as giving satisfactory or even coherent systems, or as having
done more than lead to the thorough scepticism of Hume. If Kant
presented one solution of the difficulties in which philosophy was
landed, we have still to ask what precisely Kant meant; whether his
criticism was simply all-destructive, or really left anything standing,
and, if so, what it left standing; and who represents the proper line of
development. Shall we, with Schopenhauer, pronounce Hegel to be a
thorough impostor? and, if so, can we seriously accept Schopenhauer's
own system? If, here and there, some people accept his theories for
literary purposes, nobody will maintain that they rest upon any
permanently settled foundation. If, again, we believe in Hegel, we have
to make out what we mean by believing in Hegel, and to which school of
his followers we are to attach ourselves. I need not consider the
polemic which Mr. Balfour has directed against the writers who have
given a version of Hegelian principles in England. Personally, I agree
with his criticisms in a general way; but I fancy that even the
adherents of those principles would defend themselves mainly by
declaring that they do not make such pretensions as he ascribes to them.
They try, at most, to indicate a way of approaching, not of solving the
problems. But, at least, they would claim to have done one thing:
namely, to have proved the inadequacy of the rival system of empirical
philosophy, accepted by the English followers of Locke, and now mainly
represented for us by Mr. Herbert Spencer. I only add to this, that it
is not a question of the convictions of any individual thinker, however
eminent. Philosophies of every different variety have been not merely
accepted by those who first devised them, but have been taken up in good
faith by whole schools of disciples; they have been tested, on a large
scale, by systematic application to all relevant questions, and one
after the other has become bankrupt; has lost its hold on the world, and
confessed that it leaves the riddle as dark as it was before. All that
can be claimed for the greatest philosophers is, that they have, at
least, proved that certain paths which seemed to lead through the
labyrinth, end in a deadlock; that they have exposed certain fallacies
by the process of provisionally believing in them; and that they have
buoyed certain shoals, and demonstrated that no channel leads in what
seemed to be a promising direction. Is there any channel open?
Once more, I might follow--I might even, if I had time, expand Mr.
Balfour's argument in another direction. He has pointed out--not for the
first time certainly--how men's beliefs are due not to reasoning, but to
countless causes which prevent them from reasoning. The argument is too
familiar, indeed, to require much emphasis. Some one, arguing in the
days of the old orthodoxy upon the necessity of the true faith to
salvation, put the case of a couple of infants deserted by their
parents. One of them is carried off by a Mohammedan and the other by a
Christian. Each will, of course, adopt the faith of the party into whose
hands it has fallen; and the problem was, whether the infant seized by
the Mohammedan would be eternally damned, and the one taken by the
Christian go straight to heaven; and whether, on the whole, that would
satisfy our sense of justice. The argument implies the inevitableness of
error. Men not only do, but ought to hold, contradictory opinions. Take
a Scottish Davie Deans, brought up in the shadow of John Knox's pulpit;
a Tyrolese peasant, educated in the Catholic Church; and a Mohammedan,
living at Mecca; and, of course, it is plain, not only that each will
accept the creed which pervades what is for him the whole world known to
him, but that as a reasoning being each is probably in the right. That
is to say, the accessible evidence is in each case overwhelmingly in
favour of the doctrine, inasmuch as the supposed reasoner is entirely
unaware of the evidence which might be produced on the other side. But
what is true of the peasant is true of the philosopher. Measured on a
sufficient scale, the difference vanishes. This intellectual horizon is
just as much limited, though not so narrowly limited. No one but a bigot
would deny that a mediaeval philosopher might accept on perfectly
reasonable grounds the dogmas of the Catholic Church. The historical
difficulties had not even been presented to his mind. He had no reason
for doubting innumerable assumptions as to fact which have since turned
out to be erroneous; and if the method of his reasoning was itself
fundamentally vicious, the fact only came to light gradually in the
process of working out the results. We--including in the "we" the
philosophers--have to approach truth by the help of assumptions, and by
trying how in point of fact they will work; it is so hard to remember
that they are only assumptions that we generally call them self-evident
truths. Considering how many assumptions are involved even in the very
structure of language itself; how we are led into all kinds of
difficulties by the essential instrument of thought, which has been
fashioned by the unconscious logic of our ancestors; it is not strange
that the best that can be said of philosophies is, that they represent
convenient working hypotheses. That, at least, seems to be a liberal
view of their logical value. In another sense they are really to be
considered as poetry, rather than as logic. They are modes of presenting
certain conceptions of the world by apparently logical formulae, instead
of by concrete imagery; but, substantially, they represent the emotions
with which men regard their dwelling place, and are radically imperfect
if we insist upon considering them as providing us with correct plans
and drawings of its various arrangements.
Let us look for a moment at another set of reflections upon which Mr.
Balfour touches. What has been the influence of these systems upon men's
lives? Have these provisional constructions, these fluctuating,
conflicting, unstable combinations of pretentious formulae, really
decided or directed the course of human history? It would seem so, if
you read certain histories of philosophy. They seem to suggest that the
hinge upon which all the course of human affairs ultimately turns is
the growth of certain metaphysical conceptions. There is a preliminary
difficulty in seeing how such pretensions can be established. The
philosopher in his study or his lecture room discusses problems in which
the enormously preponderating majority of the race has so little
interest, that it is not even aware that there are any such problems to
be discussed. He lays down dogmas so vague and unsatisfactory that half
his hearers give up the attempt to understand, or understand them in a
sense which the more intelligent half would utterly repudiate; and that
intelligent half is itself divided into different schools, interpreting
the dogmas in radically contradictory ways. Is it not hard to believe
that speculation leads to vast results, when for ninety-nine men out of
a hundred it is practically non-existent, and with the small minority it
amounts to providing new weapons for endless controversy? We must, of
course, admit that men's conduct is in some sense determined by their
thoughts. Change the radical beliefs, and you will certainly change the
whole constitution of society. And, again, it is obvious that in one
sphere of thought the progress of inquiry is of vast importance. Nobody
can deny that scientific and mechanical discoveries have, for good or
evil, materially affected our lives. The great inventions of modern
times, from gunpowder and printing to the steam-engine and electricity,
have changed things as much as if they had altered the physical
constitution of the world. They have indeed altered it for us, for they
have given us the means of applying forces previously dormant, and
therefore for practical purposes non-existent. Such beliefs have an
immediate bearing upon the practices of ordinary human beings. But if we
are to set down all philosophies as at once untenable and as absolutely
unknown to the enormous majority of mankind, it becomes difficult to
understand by what process they come to influence, or apparently to
influence, the position of the race. A philosopher frames his scheme of
the universe to his own satisfaction; but you and I hear nothing about
it, and do not trouble ourselves to understand it, and go on working
with our good old common-sense conceptions of things, leaving it to the
philosopher to construct or destroy the fanciful system which he somehow
supposes to lie beneath them. One answer is of course obvious. Religious
and ethical systems, it is said, presuppose a philosophy: no one denies
that men are profoundly affected by the gods whom they worship and the
rules of conduct which they adopt; and therefore the sceptic who is
burrowing at the base may be ruining the whole superstructure, although
his operations are no more obvious upon the surface than those of some
minute parasite. Accordingly, we are often told that revolutions are
ultimately produced by speculation; and that old systems fall with a
crash because some shrewd witness has been boring into the foundations
upon which they really repose. The French Revolution, according to one
familiar statement, was due to the freethinkers who had set about prying
into the ultimate grounds of the old faith, and had succeeded in shaking
the convictions necessary to social welfare.
That this argument expresses a truth is what I am so far from denying
that I should be most anxious to give it emphasis. But what is precisely
the truth expressed? Destroy the belief in a church as a social system,
and the organisation will crumble. But what is the real cause of the
loss of belief? Is it the logical argument that is effective? Does the
philosophical revolution underlie the political or religious revolution,
or is that to invert cause and effect? Let me take an example to
illustrate my meaning. The doctrine of the "rights of man," proclaimed
by the whole revolutionary school, was, it is said, the cause of the
revolution. The destruction of the old order was caused by the sudden
conviction which spread through Europe of the truth of this theory, and
the consequent decay of the old authority. Now we may proceed, if we
please, to trace the origin of this doctrine back through certain
speculations to the days of the Roman jurists, themselves influenced by
the Stoical philosophy. The view suggested is that the doctrine was a
kind of germ, a something which preserved its vitality through
centuries, like the bacteria of modern physiologists, and which,
somehow, developed a baleful or a beneficial activity about a century
ago, and changed all the conditions of social equilibrium. But, if this
be true, we naturally remark that the potency of the doctrine must have
been due, not to the doctrine itself, which lay dormant so long, but to
the conditions which suddenly made it effective. The doctrine, indeed,
is so obvious, in a sense, that it is not to be doubted that anybody who
once began to philosophise about laws and political constitutions, after
they had reached a certain stage, would hit upon it in one shape or
another. It is not comparable to those scientific discoveries which
require patient thought and a dexterous combination of arguments: but
one of the primary axioms which present themselves on the very threshold
of inquiry. The mediaeval peasant who put the question:--
When Adam delved, and Eve span,
Who was then the gentleman?