I did not need the lesson of the Scala ballet—Civiltà inspired by Luce
and chasing Tenebre. I know that that light is electric. Have I not
found it in the deepest crypt of the underground cathedral of Brescia,
illuminating the two Corinthian pillars from the Temple of Vespasius?
Have I not seen in the quaint sleepy alleys of rock-set Orvieto the
wayside shrine of the Madonna utilised to hold an electric lamp? And
have I not seen that ancient marble shrine between Carrara and Avenza
supporting the telegraph wires, or the crumbling tower of Lucca the
telephones? And did I not watch the thousand-year-old cathedral of
Genoa—with St. Lorenzo’s martyrdom on its façade—preparing to
celebrate the fourth centenary of St. Caterina—“whose mortal remains in
their urn have not felt the injury of time”—by a thorough cleansing
with a vacuum cleaner? Ceaselessly throbbed the engine, like the purr of
a pious congregation, and the hose extended to the uttermost ledges of
the roof, sucking in dust immemorially undisturbed. And the cathedral
clock of Verona that looks down on Charlemagne’s paladins, Roland and
Oliver, in rude stone—did it not tell me the correct time? Yes, ’tis
the hour of Science.
And the contribution of Italy to Science is almost as great as her
contribution to Art or Religion. A country that can produce St. Francis,
Michelangelo, and Galileo, that founded at Verona the first geological
museum and at Pisa the first botanical garden, has indeed all winds of
the spirit blowing through her. But except in Da Vinci, Art and Science
have not been able to lodge together. Him the sketches for his
flying-machines in the Ambrosian library make a boon-fellow of Wright,
Voisin, and Santos, as Luca Beltrami enthusiastically proclaims. Galileo
had some pretensions to letters, writing essays and verses, and is even
suspected of a comedy. But the life of Galileo practically divides
Italy’s art period from her scientific, so far at least as the material
arts are concerned. His amanuensis, Torricelli, preluded the barometer,
and the creation of electrical science by Galvani and Volta was a main
factor in the evolution of our modern world of machinery. Venice and
Florence founded statistical science, and if Sicily and South Italy have
relapsed from the Arabic-Aristotelian stimulus administered by Frederick
II—perhaps for fear of sharing the imperial Epicurean’s furnace in the
Sixth Circle of the Inferno—North Italy has remained a pioneer of the
modern. It is not by accident that Marconi was born in Bologna, or
Lombroso in Verona—which is to hold his statue—or that the most
learned exponent of the dismal science of our day has been Luigi Cossa,
Professor of Political Economy in the Universities of Pavia and Milan.
But even Naples and Palermo have remained faithful to astronomy and the
mathematics.
Far be it from me to say a word against Science as a magnified magical
maid-of-all-work! But in so far as she pretends to set up in the
parlour, ousting her old mistresses, Theology and Poetry, let me point
out to her swains, the electro-plated youth of Lombardy, that the facts
of Science, existing as they do outside autocosms, are as substantial to
lean upon as the shadows of reeds. Of the need of a _Scientia
Scientiarum_ to put all these facts in their place, the average
scientific specialist is as unconscious as a ploughboy of the calculus.
For it follows from the doctrine of autocosms that a fact cannot exist
as such till it has settled to which autocosm it belongs. It must be
born into the world of meaning. The same raw material may go to form
part of autocosms innumerable, as the same man may be the butler at a
duke’s, the guest of honour at a grocer’s, and the chief dish at a
cannibal banquet. The same fire that beacons a ship from destruction
sucks a moth to its doom, and the same election figures scatter at once
delight and despair. The “fact,” outside an autocosm, can only be
regarded as a potentiality of entering into ratios; in other words, it
is a “rational” possibility. But since there is a definite limit to its
possibilities, and an election result cannot glut the cannibal appetite,
nor a butler operate as a beacon-fire—except in the way of Ridley and
Latimer—we are compelled to recognise an obstinate objective element
fatal to the Pragmatic Philosophy. Potential facts are stubborn things.
Pragmatism was a healthy reaction against the obsession of a world
wholly gaugeable by Reason, like the reaction of Duns Scotus against
Aquinas, but when it replaced Reason by Will, it fell into the other
extreme of error. _Both_ Reason and Will must enter into the Science of
Sciences, and they must even be supplemented by Emotion.
For the human consciousness, our sole instrument for apprehending the
world, is trinitarian. I should say we have three antennæ—Reason, Will,
Emotion—wherewith to grope out into our environment, were it not that
those antennæ are triune, and no knowledge of the outer world ever comes
to us save with all the three factors intertwined in varying
proportions. Why then should we throw away all that Will and Emotion
tell us, putting asunder what God has put together? To represent the
Report of the bare intellectual faculty as the Report of the whole
Commission is fraudulence. Will and Emotion have too meekly contented
themselves with a Minority Report. It is time they insisted on their
views colouring and fusing into the Report Proper. Even Kant, having
reached spiritual bankruptcy by his “Critique of Pure Reason,”
apologetically called in the Practical Reason to save the situation,
thereby importing into his system an absurd dualism. Kant’s Practical
Reason is simply Will and Emotion restored to their proper rank as
conjoint antennæ of apprehension. The effort to probe the universe with
an isolated antenna was foredoomed to failure. The Practical Reason
should have been called in, not after the bankruptcy as a sort of
receiver to make the best of a bad estate, but before starting
operations, as a partner with additional capital.
A fact, then, to be a fact, must be born into an autocosm, must be
caught up not only into intellectual perception, but into emotional and
volitional relations. The so-called scientific fact is thus two-thirds
unborn. It is not a fact, but a facet of a fact. ’Tis only by a
shorthand convention, indeed, that anything can be treated as purely an
object of intellectual discrimination. Every substantive in the
dictionary is a shrivelled leaf which requires the sap and greenness of
a living sentence to restore it to life. This is best seen in words with
more than one meaning, like “bark,” which needs to be in a sentence to
show whether it is canine or marine. But every word is in the same
ambiguous case, and acquires its nuance from its relations with life.
The molecule or structural unit of reality being thus triune, it is
obvious that the isolated presentation of the material aspect of things
in the shape of words under the name of Science can never be a
presentation of Truth. It is a mere abstraction from the trinitarian
wholeness of experience. Full life exists in three dimensions, Art in
two, and Science in one, like a solid, a superficies, and a line, and
the line as little reproduces the plenitude of being as the coast-line
of a map the beetling cliffs and thundering seas.
But the subject-matter of the sciences is not even the universe treated
as a material whole, but the universe cut up into abstract ’ologies and
’onomies, each of which insidiously tends to swell into a full-seeming
sphere of Truth, as when Political Economy, having proved that Free
Trade produces the cheapest article, tends to assume that humanity is
therefore _bound_ to buy in the cheapest market; so that even the Tariff
Reformer, under the same hypnosis, seeks to deny this economic law,
instead of admitting and overriding it by considerations from
supplementary spheres of Truth. Similar fallacies spring from pathology,
psychology, physiology, criminology, and other methods of vivisecting
our noble selves. We are parcelled out among the professors, each of
them magnifying his office.
“Hark, hark, the lark at Heaven’s gate sings!”
says the beautiful song in _Cymbeline_. The sciences pounce upon that
lark like hawks, and tear it to pieces between them. But the truth about
the lark—is it in the unreal abstractions of the sciences, or is it in
the poet’s perception of the lark in all the fulness, colour, and
richness of actual existence?
The little Gradgrinds, says Dickens, had cabinets in various departments
of science. “They had a little chronological cabinet, and a little
metallurgical cabinet, and a little mineralogical cabinet, and the
specimens were all arranged and labelled, and the bits of stones and ore
looked as though they might have been broken off from the parent
substances by those tremendously hard instruments, their own names.”
But it is only in the falsificatory museums of science that things exist
in little cabinets, or that the butterfly is impaled on a pin and ranged
in a glass case with other _Lepidoptera_. In the real universe it
flutters alone amid the flowers. It is full of its own vivid life; it
does not know it has been classified. This classification exists only in
some student’s mind; the truth is in the fluttering butterfly. And Truth
really flutters like a butterfly, free and joyous, winged with
iridescent splendours and subtle shades. Truth is not a dead formula,
but an airy aliveness.
When I was a youth studying mathematics and the ’ologies, I became
infected with the sense of superiority to the crowd which these pursuits
bring: such cold, logical reasoning, such rare reaches of thought! To
think that men eminent in these branches should remain unrewarded by
popular fame, while every petty scribbler with a gift of invention
commanded the applause of the mob! To be a novelist seemed a paltry
affair; yet later on I came to recognise that the crowd is right, and
that those who decry the predominance of the novel are wrong. All these
sciences and speculations deal with human life, not in its living
fulness, but with an abstractness which makes it dead, unreal, false.
The world’s instinctive distrust of pedants and students and
mathematicians is justified. They isolate one aspect of life, one thread
of the tangled skein, one _motif_ in the eternal symphony, and sometimes
drawing from reality the merest shred of tune, execute upon it an
enormous fantasia—as in the higher mathematics—which plays itself out
inaudibly _in vacuo_. The cold perfection of mathematics is due to our
having eliminated in advance all the accidents of reality, and even the
supposed infallibility of the proposition that two and two are four
shatters itself upon the futility of adding two elephants to two
speeches on the Irish question. And yet in those callow days it was to
Number that I, like Pythagoras, was fain to look for the key of the
riddle. But that was under the glittering spell of the late Monsieur
Taine, who well-nigh persuaded me that a Science was only truly
Scientific when it passed from the qualitative to the quantitative
stage. If you could only express everything by mathematical formulæ,
then at last you would catch that shy bird, Truth, by the tail. Strip
away Truth’s feathers, then the flesh, then even the bones, till you get
a meaningless world of imaginary atoms, and that, forsooth, is the
ultimate Truth. “The universe,” said Taine triumphantly, “will one day
be expressed in mathematical formulæ.” In other words, strip away all
there is to know, get rid of all that interests you, the colour and the
form and the glow of life, and then you will really know the thing. The
only way to know a thing is elaborately to prevent yourself from knowing
it.
That invaluable institution the Post Office annually provides us with
statistics. So many billion letters are sent a year, so many postcards,
so many packages, and of these so many are left open, and so many
unaddressed or unstamped, and so many go astray. These figures have as
much to do with the realities implied in this correspondence as the
figures of the quantitative sciences with the realities they are drawn
from. Even could it be proved that the ratio of unaddressed letters to
addressed is constant over a given area, or that the percentage of
postcards varies inversely with the status of the senders, how much
nearer are we to the hot passions and wild despairs, the commercial
greeds and the loving humours which are the actuality of the phenomena
under calculation?
Even the lines and angles of geometry, which have more body than
statistics, are a poor substitute for the full, rich world, with its
forests and skies. Mathematics may be indispensable to navigation, but
on the sea of life we sail very well without it. Some of the most
charming women I know count on their fingers. When
“A Rosalind-face at the lattice shows,
* * *
And Sir Romeo sticks in his ear a rose,”
it is indifferent to the situation that the rose is compact of chemical
atoms dancing in complex figures, setting to partners, visiting and
retreating.
Biron in “Love’s Labour Lost,” professing to derive his learning from
women’s eyes, which are
“the ground, the books, the academes,
From whence doth spring the true Promethean fire,”
was, though the sentiment may be unpopular in this educational age,
wiser than Faust in his study soliloquising on the curse of useless
learning. Many of the statements of science are true for the abstract
logical faculty; they are not actually conceivable. We laugh at the
mediæval controversies as to how many angels could dance on the point of
a needle, but surely our modern theory of the atomic constitution of the
needle-point justifies the question. One angel per atom would exhaust
the angelic hosts. Perhaps the sparks emitted for years by one drop of
bromide of radium on the point of a needle are really a dance of demons.
Or take the undulatory theory of light—that to produce the varying
colours of the spectrum the luminiferous ether must vibrate from 458 to
727 million of million times per second. It might as well have been a
thousand billions or ten trillions for all the difference to our
understanding. To give us such figures is like offering a million-pound
note to an omnibus conductor and expecting change. The best scientists
admit that these conceptions are but working hypotheses. Nay, I find a
worthy German actually calling them “useful fictions.” Indeed, they
cannot endure cross-examination, and if you want to see a scientific man
as angry as a theologian of the Inquisition era, you will treat his
mystic conceptions as Tom Paine treated the mysteries of religion. The
world went very well ere we knew the fairy-tales of science and learned
to dread death in every breath we took, every crumb we ate, every drop
of non-alcoholic drink we drank. As if it were not tragic enough to read
the newspapers, we are harassed with the life-histories of insects
invisible to the naked eye, thirty generations or so of which live and
die every day in a drop of ditch-water. At the same time such surface
questions as why a man lives six times as long as a dog and a tortoise
six times as long as a man are left in absolute darkness.
Men of science are to be admired for their patient and fearless groping
after knowledge, the only reward of which is the applause of that
splendid international brotherhood of learning. But this knowledge of
theirs is never more than raw material for the philosopher at the centre
to weave into his synopsis. No doubt there are men of science who
preserve their perspective, who do not view the universe as heaven-sent
material for a series of text-books, but this part of their thinking is
done, not as scientists, but as poets or philosophers. Classification is
all that Science Proper can do, and when the pigeon-holing is complete
to the last Z, the universe will remain as mysterious as before. When
the astronomers have determined the size, weight, orbit, speed, and
spectrum lines of all the four hundred millions of visible stars, we
shall still look up and say,
“Twinkle, twinkle, little star,
_How_ I wonder what you are!”
But this pigeon-holing of the universe by Science is conspicuously
_in_complete. For by a paradoxical modesty the man of science too often
forgets to include himself in the inventory.
In this way Herbert Spencer explained everything—except Herbert
Spencer. Possibly the forgetfulness is wilful, because the existence of
the man of science upsets so many of his explanations. “I find in the
Universe no trace of Will or Reason,” protested one of them to me. “I
see only the blind movement of forces, mechanical as billiard-balls.”
“Naturally,” I retorted, “if you omit to look in the one direction where
Reason and Will assuredly exist—in your own self.”
On the physical plane we get movement without will, on the animal plane
the will to live, on the human plane the will to live divinely. These
three strata cannot be reduced to a lowest common denominator of blind
force. And if they could, the miracle of their differentiation would
still remain. That blind forces should rise to consciousness and write
books about themselves is even more wonderful than an eternity of
spirit. Reduce all the seventy odd elements to one, as Chemistry hopes,
and instead of an explanation you will only get the new puzzle of how
the one could contain the seeds of the many. Even the popular Evolution
theory is but a juggling with time. You do not get rid of Creation by
shifting the beginning back to a billion years last Tuesday.
And with all my admiration for the fine qualities of the man of science
I cannot away with his cocksureness, so curiously proof against the fact
that scientific conceptions are always changing—witness the revolution
wrought by radium. Even such a simple analysis as the composition of air
has taken in many new and important constituents—argon, xenon, helium,
krypton, neon, &c.—since the days when as a schoolboy I got full marks
for stating them inaccurately. And yet to this day the scientist
recounting the constituents of air forgets to wind up, “With power to
add to their number.”
As for those sciences which do not depend on intellectual conceptions
and practical experiments, but on antiquarian research, those learned
and dry-as-dust studies which academies delight to honour, they owe all
their importance simply to antiquity’s lack of self-consciousness and
its failure to provide for the curiosity of posterity. Had the first man
who evolved from the ape drawn up a note upon his ancestor, or, better
still, made a picture of his ancestral tree, what controversies we
should have been spared! Had the builders of the Pyramids or the delvers
of the Roman catacombs put up little tablets to explain their ideas,
what scholarship would have been nipped in the bud! The reputation of
the Egyptologists depends on the fact that the writers of hieroglyphics
apparently left no dictionary. If one were to turn up, the reputation of
these savants would be gone. At present they are able to translate the
same text by “The King went a-hunting” or “My grandmother is dead”
without ceasing to be taken seriously.
But it is in the realm of Italian art-connoisseurship that the greatest
havoc would be wrought did an official catalogue come to light, say in
one of the recesses of the Vatican or in that wilderness of the Venetian
archives. For the lordly neglect of the Old Masters to put their names
to their pictures has flooded us with a tedious pedantry of rival
attributions, and the thing of beauty, instead of being a joy for ever,
is an eternal source of dulness.
“Ass who attributes it to Mantegna,” I saw scribbled on a fresco, at
Padua, of St. Antony admonishing Ezzelino, and connoisseurship is merely
politer. As long ago as 1527 a quiz or a braggart of an artist, Zacchia
da Vezzano, painted underneath a sacred picture of his, now in Lucca:
“His operis visis hujus cognoscere quis sit
Auctorem dempto nomine quisque potest.”
As who should say, “Take away the name and anybody can tell the artist.”
But experience proves the contrary.
I do not say that the virtuosi would all be exposed, as by the pedigree
of a Da Vinci bust, could we light on a source of certainty like the
contemporary slatings in the _Renaissance Review_. Some of these
sleuth-hounds might even be vindicated; and I opine that to you, _amico
mio_, who of thirty-three Titians in a London exhibition pronounced no
less than thirty-two to be hung on false evidence, the discovery of a
set of _Accademia_ catalogues would not be unwelcome. But your career as
a connoisseur would close. Dead too would be the school of Morelli,
collapsed the drapery students and ear-measurers, whose mathematics had,
indeed, as little relation to Art as it has to life.
The Sherlock Holmeses of Science and Art dig up old cities, reconstruct
forgotten civilisations, redistribute famous pictures, and amend corrupt
texts or corrupt them more hopelessly. It is but rarely that they have
imaginative and historic insight. “Learning is but an adjunct to
ourselves,” says Biron. Scholars are too often but an adjunct to
learning. For men with real insight there are enough dead civilisations
and forgotten customs still flourishing all about us. The taboo, the
fetish, the totem, the oracle, and the myth are the very atmosphere of
our being.
Our generation will leave newspapers and museums—nay, gramophone
records and the films of bioscopes; the ghosts of our shapes and voices
will haunt our posterity, and the only chance for scholars will be to
condense the too, too ample materials—there are four miles of novels
already in the British Museum—or perhaps a few beneficent fires will
give scholarship a new lease of life. At their best and richest
antiquarian studies only help to make the past present again, but how
does that help us in essential insight? The past of to-morrow is here
to-day and we are no wiser. In the hundredth century the excavator may
exhume London, but we see London even more clearly to-day, and how does
that help us in the real problems?
No; the only help for us lies in those elements of Truth which we draw
from ourselves, not receive from without—in those emotional and
volitional contacts with the essence of things which accompany all
intellectual perception; in these motor aspects of reality which drive
us along, these flashes of faith and spiritual intuition which, although
they may vary from age to age under the spell of individual poets and
prophets, and under the evolution of knowledge and civilisation,
“Are yet a master-light of all our seeing.”
They may have been intertwined with incorrect intellectual elements, but
because one antenna of the apparatus of consciousness functions falsely
we are not therefore justified in wholly rejecting the joint report.
When we think of the vast number of contradictory truths by which men in
all ages and countries have lived and died, we shall find consolation in
the thought that the emotional and volitional elements of Truth are more
important than its intellectual skeleton.
But what a curious confusion that these emotional and volitional
elements should themselves come to be treated as intellectual, and
desiccated into dogmas! This is the result of their seeking expression
in words, that unsuitable, impossible and fading medium. It is through
their felicitous escape from words that verbally inarticulate artists
and musicians paint and compose truer things than philosophers say,
things that survive vicissitudes of thought and are as true to-morrow as
yesterday. With the music of the Roman Catholic Church we all agree, and
who shall contradict the Venus of Milo?
Yes, a statue or a symphony is safe from syllogisms, at least until it
gets into the hands of the art critic and the programme-concocter. But
the truth airily embodied in words is at the mercy of system-builders
and deduction-squeezers. Taken with the hard definiteness of coins—as
if, indeed, even coins did not vary from day to day in purchasing power
and according to the country of circulation,—the words are added
together to yield a specific sum of truth. Flying prophetic phrases and
wingèd mystical raptures are shot down and stuffed for Church Catechisms
and Athanasian Creeds. As if the emotional and volitional fringe of
living words permitted them to be thus sterilised into scientific
propositions! For just as facts are the skeletons of truths, so words
are single bones, and the dictionary is a vast ossuary. Talk of the dead
languages—all languages are dead unless spoken, and spoken with real
feeling. A parrot always speaks a dead language. It is the folly of a
universal language that it assumes the same vocabulary could be used
over a vast area of varying conditions, its words never expanding nor
contracting in meaning, nor ever changing in pronunciation or colour. As
if Latin was not once universal in those countries which have gradually
transformed it into French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Provençal,
Roumanian, and Rumonsch! Idiomatic expressions cannot be torn from the
soil they grow in. Mañana has not the same meaning outside Spain nor
Kismet outside Islam. Language lays such traps for fools; the fools have
always spoiled and fossilised what the men of genius have felt and
thought. They have made logic out of poetry and have deadened worship
and wonder into theology. “What do you read?” says Hamlet. “Words,
words, words.”
A truth, then, may be formulated, but it is not true till it is felt and
acted on, and ceases to be true when it ceases to be felt and acted on.
Nor does this canon apply only to inner truths. Without an element of
feeling and volition, however shadowy, even the simple realities of the
outer world have never been perceived, and the omission of these
elements invalidates the total reality. If so many readers skip scenery
in novels, ’tis because the scene is described as though it existed in
itself. The dead chunk of landscape bores and depresses. The reader
subconsciously feels that so impersonal a vision is untrue to the
actualities of perception. Nobody has ever seen a landscape without some
emotion, if only the traveller’s desire to be at the other end of it. A
dozen persons—even omitting the colour-blind—would see it in as many
different ways, each with different accompaniments of feeling, thought,
and volition, potential or actual, just as every person in _The Ring and
the Book_ sees Pompilia differently. Let the novelist describe the
scene, not for itself, but for its relation to the emotions and purposes
of his personages, and it leaps into life. Similar is the case of
Science, whose facts in divesting themselves of all emotion and
individual error divest themselves likewise of reality. The dry
scientific coldness with which the universe must be envisaged is an
artificial method of vision. True, the scientist himself may be impelled
by the most tingling curiosity. But the passion and thrill of his chase
for truth does not appear in the quarry: that is a mere carcase. His
report on his speciality is always carefully divested of emotion. But
our emotional and volitional relations to the spectacle of existence are
as much a part of the total truth of things as colour is of the visible
world. The world is not complete without
“The light that never was on sea or land,
The consecration and the poet’s dream.”
When Lear cries to the heavens that they too are old, or Lamartine calls
on the lake to remember his happiness, Ruskin would tell us that this
suffusion of Nature with our own emotions is the pathetic fallacy. On
the contrary, its absence is the scientific fallacy. Science registers
the world as the phonograph registers sound or the camera space—without
any emotion of its own. As the former with equal phlegm records a song
or a curse, or the latter a wedding or a funeral, so does Science
register its impassive observations. For once admit such a shifting
subjective factor as emotion, and what becomes of the glorious
objectivity of Science? Away, therefore, with all but the frigid
intellectual view of things! Since the other elements of Truth elude our
grasp, let us boldly declare them irrelevant. The bankruptcy of Science,
you see, comes not at the end of its operations. Science starts
bankrupt. It has not sufficient capital to begin trading. Its methods
and apparatus are entirely inadequate for the attainment of truth. A cat
may look at a king—but its observation will not be very profound. And
Science is as little equipped for observing the universe as the cat for
observing the king. All it can perceive or establish is chains of
causation, or rather recurring sequences of phenomena, in an unconscious
_continuum_. It is a _post-mortem_ investigation to ascertain, not the
cause of death, but the cause of life.
But the universe is not a quaint collection of dead things in a vacuum,
not a museum of stuffed birds or transfixed butterflies, but a
breathing, flying, singing, striving, and suffering process—an
unfinished infinitude. This kinetic process cannot be expressed in terms
of statics. “What is Truth?” says the jesting cosmos, and does not
_stay_ for an answer. But by an artificial abstraction parts of it can
be expressed for the intellect in static ’ologies and ’onomies, on the
understanding that the intellect never forgets to put back its results
into the palpitating flux to which they belong and in which alone they
have true significance. This understanding the intellect too frequently
violates or forgets, and therefore for Truth we must go, not to the man
of science, but to the poet, who registers his universe synthetically
with soul as well as with brain. Tragedy, comedy, heroic drama, sombre
suffering, majestic mystery, all these are in the flux—more surely than
ether waves and dancing atoms—and the poet in painting the fulness of
life with the fulness of his own emotion is giving us a fuller truth
than any that Science can attain to. “We cannot really know the truth
unless we love the truth,” said Fénelon. “They who love well will know
well.” This is not mysticism but common sense, and Goethe repeated it
when he said that “No one can write about anything unless he writes
about it with love.” “To see things in their beauty,” said Matthew
Arnold, “is to see them in their truth.” It may be that the knowledge of
things through pure intellect is pure delusion, that to pigeon-hole the
universe is to make it into a cemetery. Instead of that “love is blind,”
the truth may be that only love sees. There is a sense in which every
mother’s babe _is_ the most beautiful in the world.
Knowledge, then, as a mere function of the intellect, is only the dead
knowledge that appears in school-books. But who shall say that knowledge
was meant to be only a function of the intellect, that we do not know
with our heart and soul as well as with our brains? Nay, as if to mock
at mere intellect, the universe absolutely refuses to yield up its
secret to the intellect. Hence the antinomies of Kant or Mansel or
Plato’s “Parmenides.” Follow up mere thought, however apparently clear,
and it lands us in nonsense. Perhaps wisdom does not lie that way at
all. Perhaps the fear of the Lord is really the beginning of wisdom.
For if Science is Truth in one dimension and Art Truth in two
dimensions, it is only when we complete emotional vision by volition
that we arrive at Truth’s full-orbed reality. Even love cannot bring
wisdom unless the love translates itself into action. In short, the
meaning of Truth must be changed from a dead fact of the intellect into
a live fact of the whole being. The Truth is also the Way and the Life.
Aristotle in his “Metaphysics” tells us that Cratylus carried the
scepticism of Heraclitus to such a degree that he at last was of opinion
one ought to speak of nothing, but merely moved his finger. Aristotle
does not see that in this moving of his finger Cratylus was asserting at
least the volitional element of Truth and perhaps its most important.
For the universe is not a museum, placarded “Look, but please do not
touch.” It says, “Touch, and then you will really see. Live, work, love,
fight, and then you will really know what the nature of your universe
is.”
The world of the physical sciences is only the stage-setting for the
spiritual drama. Though there is a truth of dead things called Science,
the real truth is of live things—a triple truth in which intellect,
will, and emotion are one. Our sense of this truth—obtained as it is
during emotional volition—is individual, irreducible to the simpler
planes of Science and Art, and thus incommunicable. And the measure of
our attainment of it will be the measure of our sympathetic insight and
of the depth to which we have penetrated by action into the heart of the
phenomena. Then what seemed a mass of dull facts may break into music
like a Beethoven score under the baton of a master.
The scientist who should say that a Beethoven symphony consisted of the
atoms of the paper and ink which constitute the score, or even who
expressed it mathematically as a sequence of complex air-vibrations made
by strings and holes, would be talking truth; but as incomplete and
irrelevant truth as the ignoramus who should say it was curious black
strokes and dots on ruled paper, or the statistician who should count
the semi-breves or fortissimo passages. The true truth of the symphony
comes into being only when it is interpreted by the finest performers to
souls whose life it enlarges.
And so with the universe, which is not a dead, complete thing outside of
us, but a palpitating spiritual potentiality, for the fullest truth
about which the co-operation of our own souls is needed, our souls that
create a part of the truth they perceive or aspire to. The universe, in
short, is a magic storehouse from which we may draw—or into which
put—what we will to the extent of our faith, our emotion, our sense of
beauty our righteousness. “Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye
shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you.”