The Lost Art of Reading Part 16

Does he not keep on guessing in spite of himself? Does he not live plumped up against mystery every hour of his life, crowded on by ignorance, forced to guess if only to eat? Is he not browbeaten into taking things for granted whichever way he turns? He becomes a doleful, sceptical, contradictory, anxious, disagreeable, disapproving person as a matter of course.

One would think, in the abstract, that a certain serenity would go with exact knowledge; and it would, if a man were willing to put up with a reasonable amount of exact knowledge, eke it out with his brains, some of it; but when he wants all the exact knowledge there is, and nothing else but exact knowledge, and is not willing to mix his brains with it, it is different. When a man puts his whole being into a vise of exact knowledge, he finds that he has about as perfect a convenience for being miserable as could possibly be devised. He soon becomes incapable of noticing things or of enjoying things in the world for themselves. With one or two exceptions, I have never known a scientist to whom his knowing a thing, or not knowing it, did not seem the only important thing about it. Of course when a man's mind gets into this dolefully cramped, exact condition, a universe like this is not what it ought to be for him. He lives too unprotected a life. His whole att.i.tude toward the universe becomes one of wishing things would keep off of him in it--things he does not know. Are there not enough things he does not know even in his specialty? And as for this eternal being reminded of the others, this slovenly habit of "general information" that interesting people have--this guessing, inferring, and generalising--what is it all for? What does it all come to? If a man is after knowledge, let him have knowledge, knowledge that is knowledge, let him find a fact, anything for a fact, get G.o.d into a corner, hug one fact and live with it and die with it.

When a man once gets into this shut-in att.i.tude it is of little use to put a word in, with him, for the daily habit of taking the roof off one's mind, letting the universe play upon it instead of trying to bore a hole in it somewhere. "What does it avail after all, after it is all over, after a long life, even if the hole is bored," I say to him, "to stand by one's little hole and cry, 'Behold, oh, human race, this Gimlet Hole which I have bored in infinite s.p.a.ce! Let it be forever named for me.'" And in the meantime the poor fellow gets no joy out of living. He does not even get credit for his not-living, seventy years of it. He fences off his little place to know a little of nothing in, becomes a specialist, a foot note to infinite s.p.a.ce, and is never noticed afterwards (and quite reasonably) by any one--not even by himself.

VII

Monads

I am not saying that this is the way a scientist--a mere scientist, one who has the fixed habit of not reading books through their backs--really feels. It is the way he ought to feel. As often as not he feels quite comfortable. One sees one every little while (the mere scientist) dropping the entire universe with a dull thud and looking happy after it.

But the best ones are different. Even those who are not quite the best are different. It is really a very rare scientist who joggles contentedly down without qualms, or without delays, to a hole in s.p.a.ce.

There is always a capability, an apparently left-over capability in him.

What seems to happen is, that when the average human being makes up his mind to it, insists on being a scientist, the Lord keeps a remnant of happiness in him--a gnawing on the inside of him which will not let him rest.

This remnant of happiness in him, his soul, or inferring organ, or whatever it may be, makes him suspect that the scientific method as a complete method is a false, superficial, and dangerous method, threatening the very existence of all knowledge that is worth knowing on the earth. He begins to suspect that a mere scientist, a man who cannot even make his mind work both ways, backwards or forwards, as he likes (the simplest, most rudimentary motion of a mind), inductively or deductively, is bound to have something left out of all of his knowledge. He sees that the all-or-nothing a.s.sumption in knowledge, to say nothing of not applying to the arts, in which it is always sterile, does not even apply to the physical sciences--to the mist, dust, fire, and water out of which the earth and the scientist are made.

For men who are living their lives as we are living ours, in the shimmer of a globule in s.p.a.ce, it is not enough that we should lift our faces to the sky and blunder and guess at a G.o.d there, because there is so much room between the stars, and murmur faintly, "Spiritual things are spiritually discerned." By the infinite bones of our bodies, by the seeds of the million years that flow in our veins, _material_ things are spiritually discerned. There is not science enough nor scientific method enough in the schools of all Christendom for a man to listen intelligently to his own breathing with, or to know his own thumb-nail.

Is not his own heart thundering the infinite through him--beating the eternal against his sides--even while he speaks? And does he not know it while he speaks?

By the time a man's a Junior or a Senior nowadays, if he feels the eternal beating against his sides he thinks it must be something else.

He thinks he ought to. It is a mere inference. At all events he has little use for it unless he knows just how eternal it is. I am speaking too strongly? I suppose I am. I am thinking of my four special boys--boys I have been doing my living in, the last few years. I cannot help speaking a little strongly. Two of them--two as fine, flash-minded, deep-lit, wide-hearted fellows as one would like to see, are down at W----, being cured of inferring in a four years' course at the W---- Scientific School. Another one, who always seemed to me to have real genius in him, who might have had a period in literature named after him, almost, if he'd stop studying literature, is taking a graduate course at M----, learning that it cannot be proved that Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare. He has already become one of these spotlessly accurate persons one expects nowadays. (I hardly dare to hope he will even read this book of mine, with all his affection for me, after the first few pages or so, lest he should fall into a low or wondering state of mind.) My fourth boy, who was the most promising of all, whose mind reached out the farthest, who was always touching new possibilities, a fresh, warm-blooded, bright-eyed fellow, is down under a manhole studying G.o.d in the N---- Theological Seminary.

This may not be exactly a literal statement, nor a very scientific way to criticise the scientific method, but when one has had to sit and see four of the finest minds he ever knew snuffed out by it,--whatever else may be said for science, scientific language is not satisfying. What is going to happen to us next, in our little town, I hardly dare to know. I only know that three relentlessly inductive, dull, brittle, _blase_, and springless youths from S---- University have just come down and taken possession of our High School. They seem to be throwing, as near as I can judge, a spell of the impossibility of knowledge over the boys we have left.

I admit that I am in an unreasonable state of mind.[3] I think a great many people are. At least I hope so. There is no excuse for not being a little unreasonable. Sometimes it almost seems, when one looks at the condition of most college boys' minds, as if our colleges were becoming the moral and spiritual and intellectual dead-centres of modern life.

[3] Fact.

I will not yield to any man in admiration for Science--holy and speechless Science; holier than any religion has ever been yet; what religions are made of and are going to be made of, nor am I dating my mind three hundred years back and trying to pick a quarrel with Lord Bacon. I am merely wondering whether, if science is to be taught at all, it had not better be taught, in each branch of it, by men who are teaching a subject they have conceived with their minds instead of a subject which has been merely unloaded on them, piled up on top of their minds, and which their minds do not know anything about.

No one seems to have stopped to notice what the spectacle of science as taught in college is getting to be--the spectacle of one set of minds which has been crunched by knowledge crunching another set. Have you never been to One, oh Gentle Reader, and watched It, watched It when It was working, one of these great Endowed Fact-machines, wound up by the dead, going round and round, thousands and thousands of youths in it being rolled out and chilled through and educated in it, having their souls smoothed out of them? Hundreds of human minds, small and sure and hard, working away on thousands of other human minds, making them small and sure and hard. Matter--infinite matter everywhere--taught by More Matter,--taught the way Matter would teach if it knew how--without generalising, without putting facts together to make truths out of them.

It would seem, looking at it theoretically, that Science, of all things in this world, the stuff that dreams are made of; the one boundless subject of the earth, face to face and breath to breath with the Creator every minute of its life, would be taught with a divine touch in it, with the appeal to the imagination and the soul, to the world-building instinct in a man, the thing in him that puts universes together, the thing in him that fills the whole dome of s.p.a.ce and all the crevices of being with the whisper of G.o.d.

But it is not so. Science is great, and great scientists are great as a matter of course; but the sciences in the meantime are being taught in our colleges--in many of them, most of them--by men whose minds are mere registering machines. The facts are put in at one end (one click per fact) and come out facts at the other. The sciences are being taught more and more every year by moral and spiritual stutterers, men with non-inferring minds, men who live in a perfect deadlock of knowledge, men who cannot generalise about a fly's wing, bashful, empty, limp, and hopeless and doddering before the commonplacest, sanest, and simplest generalisations of human life. In The Great Free Show, in our common human peep at it, who has not seen them, staggering to know what the very children, playing with dolls and rocking-horses, can take for granted? Minds which seem absolutely incapable of striking out, of taking a good, manly stride on anything, mincing in religion, effeminate in enthusiasm--please forgive me, Gentle Reader, I know I ought not to carry on in this fashion, but have I not spent years in my soul (sometimes it seems hundreds of years) in being humble--in being abject before this kind of mind? It is only a day almost since I have found it out, broken away from it, got hold of the sky to hoot at it with. I am free now. I am not going to be humble longer, before it. I have spent years dully wondering before this mind; wondering what was the matter with me that I could not love it, that I could not go where it loved to go, and come when it said "Come" to me. I have spent years in dust and ashes before it, struggling with myself, trying to make myself small enough to follow this kind of a mind around, and now the scales are fallen from my eyes. When I follow An Inductive Scientific Mind now, or try to follow it through its convolutions of matter-of-fact, its involutions of logic, its wriggling through axioms, I smile a new smile and my heart laughs within me. If I miss the point, I am not in a panic, and if, at the end of the seventeenth plat.i.tude that did not need to be proved, I find I do not know where I am, I thank G.o.d.

I know that I am partly unreasonable, and I know that in my chosen station on the ridge-pole of the world it is useless to criticise those who do not even believe, probably, that worlds have ridge-poles. It is a bit hard to get their attention--and I hope the reader will overlook it if one seems to speak rather loud--from ridge-poles. Oh, ye children of The Literal! ye most serene Highnesses, ye archangels of Accuracy, the Voices of life all challenge you--the world around! What are ye, after all, but pilers-up of matter, truth-stutterers, truth-spellers, sunk in protoplasm to the tops of your souls? What is it that you are going to do with us? How many generations of youths do you want? When will souls be allowed again? When will they be allowed in college?

Well, well, I say to my soul, what does it all come to? Why all this ado about it one way or the other? Is it not a great, fresh, eager, boundless world? Does it not roll up out of Darkness with new children on it, night after night? What does it matter, I say to my soul-a generation or so--from the ridge-pole of the world? The great Sun comes round again. It travels over the tops of seas and mountains. Microbes in their dewdrops, seeds in their winds, stars in their courses, worms in their apples, answer it, and the hordes of the ants in their ant-hills run before it. And what does it matter after all, under the great Dome, a few hordes of factmongers more or less, glimmering and wonderless, crawlers on the bottom of the sea of time, lovers of the ooze of knowledge, feeling with slow, myopic mouths at Infinite Truth?

But when I see my four faces--the faces of my four special boys, when I hear the college bells ringing to them, it matters a great deal. My soul will not wait. What is the ridge-pole of the world? The distance of a ridge-pole does not count. The extent of a universe does not seem to make very much difference. The next ten generations do not help very much on this one. I go forth in my soul. I take hold of the first scientist I meet--my whole mind pummelling him. "What is it?" I say, "what is it you are doing with us and with the lives of our children?

What is it you are doing with yourself? Truth is not a Thing. Did you think it? Truth is not even a Heap of Things. It is a Light. How dare you mock at inferring? How dare you to think to escape the infinite? You cannot escape the infinite even by making yourself small enough. It is written that thou shalt be infinitely small if thou art not infinitely large. Not to infer is to contradict the very nature of facts. Not to infer is not to live. It is to cease to be a fact one's self. What is education if one does not infer? Vacuums rolling around in vacuums.

Atoms cross-examining atoms. And you say you will not guess? Do you need to be cudgelled with a whole universe to begin to learn to guess? What is all your science--your boasted science, after all, but more raw material to make more guesses with? Is not the whole Future Tense an inference? Is not History--that which has actually happened--a mystery?

You yourself are a mere probability, and G.o.d is a generalisation. What does it profit a man to discover The Inductive Method and to lose his own soul? What is The Inductive Method? Do you think that all these scientists who have locked their souls up and a large part of their bodies, in The Inductive Method, if they had waited to be born by The Inductive Method, would ever have heard of it? Being born is one inference and dying is another. Man leaves a wake of infinity after him wherever he goes, and of course it's where he doesn't go. It's all infinity--one way or the other."

And it came to pa.s.s in my dream as I lay on my bed in the night, I thought I saw Man my brother blinking under the dome of s.p.a.ce, infinite monad that he is: I saw him with a gla.s.s in one hand and a Slide of Infinity in the other, and, in my dream, out of His high heaven G.o.d leaned down to me and said to me, "What is THAT?"

And as I looked I laughed and prayed in my heart, I scarce knew which, and "Oh, Most Excellent Deity! Who would think it!" I cried. "I do not know, but I think--_I think_--it is a man, thinking he is studying a GERM--one tiny particle of inimitable Immensity ogling another!"

And a very pretty sight it is, too, oh Brother Monads--if we do not take it seriously.

And what we really need next, oh comrades, scientists--each under our separate stones--is the Laugh Out of Heaven which shall come down and save us--laugh the roofs of our stones off. Then we shall stretch our souls with inferences. We shall lie in the great sun and warm ourselves.

VIII

Multiplication Tables

It would seem to be the main trouble with the scientific mind of the second rank that it overlooks the nature of knowledge in the thirst for exact knowledge. In an infinite world the better part of the knowledge a man needs to have does not need to be exact.

These things being as they are, it would seem that the art of reading books through their backs is an equally necessary art to a great scientist and to a great poet. If it is necessary to great scientists and to great poets it is all the more necessary to small ones, and to the rest of us. It is the only way, indeed, in which an immortal human being of any kind can get what he deserves to have to live his life with--a whole cross-section of the universe. A gentleman and a scholar will take nothing less.

If a man is to get his cross-section of the universe, his natural share in it, he can only get it by living in the qualities of things instead of the quant.i.ties; by avoiding duplicate facts, duplicate persons, and principles; by using the multiplication table in knowledge (inference) instead of adding everything up, by taking all things in this world (except his specialty) through their spirits and essences, and, in general, by reading books through their backs.

The problem of cultivating these powers in a man, when reduced to its simplest terms, is reduced to the problem of cultivating his imagination or organ of not needing to be told things.

However much a man may know about wise reading and about the principles of economy in knowledge, in an infinite world the measure of his knowledge is bound to be determined, in the long run, by the capacity of his organ of not needing to be told things--of reading books through their backs.

II--On Reading for Principles

I

On Changing One's Conscience

We were sitting by my fireplace--several of our club. I had just been reading out loud a little thing of my own. I have forgotten the t.i.tle.

It was something about Books that Other People ought to Read, I think. I stopped rather suddenly, rather more suddenly than anybody had hoped. At least n.o.body had thought what he ought to say about it. And I saw that the company, after a sort of general, vague air of having exclaimed properly, was settling back into the usual helpless silence one expects--after the appearance of an idea at clubs.

"Why doesn't somebody say something?" I said.

P. G. S. of M.: "We are thinking."

"Oh," I said. I tried to feel grateful. But everybody kept waiting.

I was a good deal embarra.s.sed and was getting reckless and was about to make the very serious mistake, in a club, of seeing if I could not rescue one idea by going out after it with another, when The Mysterious Person (who is the only man in our club whose mind ever really comes over and plays in my yard) in the goodness of his heart spoke up. "I have not heard anything in a long time," he began (the club looked at him rather anxiously), "which has done--which has made me feel--less ashamed of myself than this paper. I----"

It seemed to me that this was not exactly a fortunate remark. I said I didn't doubt I could do a lot of good that way, probably, if I wanted to--going around the country making people less ashamed of themselves.

"But I don't mean that I feel really ashamed of myself about books I have not read," said The Mysterious Person. "What I mean is, that I have a kind of slinking feeling that I ought to--a feeling of being ashamed for not being ashamed."

I told The M. P. that I thought New England was full of people; just like him--people with a lot of left-over consciences.