Part 15 (1/2)

strong in will To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield,

cheris.h.i.+ng the good that falls in our way, and bearing the evil, in and around us, with stout hearts set on diminis.h.i.+ng it. So far, we all may strive in one faith towards one hope:

It may be that the gulfs will wash us down, It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,

.... but something ere the end, Some work of n.o.ble note may yet be done.

CCLIV

I do not suppose that I am exceptionally endowed because I have all my life enjoyed a keen perception of the beauty offered us by nature and by art Now physical science may and probably will, some day, enable our posterity to set forth the exact physical concomitants and conditions of the strange rapture of beauty. But if ever that day arrives, the rapture will remain, just as it is now, outside and beyond the physical world; and, even in the mental world, something superadded to mere sensation.

I do not wish to crow unduly over my humble cousin the orang, but in the aesthetic province, as in that of tine intellect, I am afraid he is nowhere. I doubt not he would detect a fruit amidst a wilderness of leaves where I could see nothing; but I am tolerably confident that he has never been awestruck, as I have been, by the dim religious gloom, as of a temple devoted to the earthG.o.ds, of the tropical forests which he inhabits. Yet I doubt not that our poor long-armed and short-legged friend, as he sits meditatively munching his durian fruit, has something behind that sad Socratic face of his which is utterly ”beyond the bounds of physical science.” Physical science may know all about his clutching the fruit and munching it and digesting it, and how the physical t.i.tillation of his palate is transmitted to some microscopic cells of the gray matter of his brain. But the feelings of sweetness and of satisfaction which, for a moment, hang out their signal lights in his melancholy eyes, are as utterly outside the bounds of physics as is the ”fine frenzy” of a human rhapsodist.

CCIV

When I was a mere boy, with a perverse tendency to think when I ought to have been playing, my mind was greatly exercised by this formidable problem, What would become of things if they lost their qualities?

As the qualities had no objective existence, and the thing without qualities was nothing, the solid world seemed whittled away--to my great horror. As I grew older, and learned to use the terms ”matter”

and ”force,” the boyish problem was revived, _mutato nomine_. On the one hand, the notion of matter without force seemed to resolve the world into a set of geometrical ghosts, too dead even to jabber. On the other hand, Boscovich's hypothesis, by which matter was resolved into centres of force, was very attractive. But when one tried to think it out, what in the world became of force considered as an objective ent.i.ty?

Force, even the most materialistic of philosophers will agree with the most idealistic, is nothing but a name for the cause of motion. And if, with Boscovich, I resolved things into centres of force, then matter vanished altogether and left immaterial ent.i.ties in its place. One might as well frankly accept Idealism and have done with it.

CCLVI

Tolerably early in life I discovered that one of the unpardonable sins, in the eyes of most people, is for a man to presume to go about unlabeled. The world regards such a person as the police do an unmuzzled dog, not under proper control. I could find no label that would suit me, so, in my desire to range myself and be respectable, I invented one; and, as the chief thing I was sure of was that I did not know a great many things that the -ists and the -ites about me professed to be familiar with, I called myself an Agnostic. Surely no denomination could be more modest or more appropriate; and I cannot imagine why I should be every now and then haled out of my refuge and declared sometimes to be a Materialist, sometimes an Atheist, sometimes a Positivist, and sometimes, alas and alack, a cowardly or reactionary Obscurantist.

CCLVII

Lastly, with respect to the old riddle of the freedom of the will. In the only sense in which the word freedom is intelligible to me--that is to say, the absence of any restraint upon doing what one likes within certain limits--physical science certainly gives no more ground for doubting it than the common sense of mankind does. And if physical science, in strengthening our belief in the universality of causation and abolis.h.i.+ng chance as an absurdity, leads to the conclusion of determinism, it does no more than follow the track of consistent and logical thinkers in philosophy and in theology, before it existed or was thought of. Whoever accepts the universality of the law of causation as a dogma of philosophy, denies the existence of uncaused phenomena. And the essence of that which is improperly called the freewill doctrine is that occasionally, at any rate, human volition is self-caused, that is to say, not caused at all; for to cause oneself one must have anteceded oneself--which is, to say the least of it, difficult to imagine.

CCLVIII

If the diseases of society consist in the weakness of its faith in the existence of the G.o.d of the theologians, in a future state, and in uncaused volitions, the indication, as the doctors say, is to suppress Theology and Philosophy, whose bickerings about things of which they know nothing have been the prime cause and continual sustenance of that evil scepticism which is the Nemesis of meddling with the unknowable.

Cinderella is modestly conscious of her ignorance of these high matters.

She lights the fire, sweeps the house, and provides the dinner; and is rewarded by being told that she is a base creature, devoted to low and material interests. But in her garret she has fairy visions out of the ken of the pair of shrews who are quarrelling downstairs. She sees the order which pervades the seeming disorder of the world; the great drama of evolution, with its full share of pity and terror, but also with abundant goodness and beauty, unrolls itself before her eyes; and she learns, in her heart of hearts, the lesson, that the foundation of morality is to have done, once and for all, with lying; to give up pretending to believe that for which there is no evidence, and repeating unintelligible propositions about things beyond the possibilities of knowledge.

She knows that the safety of morality lies neither in the adoption of this or that philosophical speculation, or this or that theological creed, but in a real and living belief in that fixed order of nature which sends social disorganisation upon the track of immorality, as surely as it sends physical disease after physical trespa.s.ses. And of that firm and lively faith it is her high mission to be the priestess.

CCLIX

The first act of a new-born child is to draw a deep breath. In fact, it will never draw a deeper, inasmuch as the pa.s.sages and chambers of the lungs, once distended with air, do not empty themselves again; it is only a fraction of their contents which pa.s.ses in and out with the flow and the ebb of the respiratory tide. Mechanically, this act of drawing breath, or inspiration, is of the same nature as that by which the handles of a bellows are separated, in order to fill the bellows with air; and, in like manner, it involves that expenditure of energy which we call exertion, or work, or labour. It is, therefore, no mere metaphor to say that man is destined to a life of toil: the work of respiration which began with his first breath ends only with his last; nor does one born in the purple get off with a lighter task than the child who first sees light under a hedge.

How is it that the new-born infant is enabled to perform this first instalment of the sentence of lifelong labour which no man may escape?

Whatever else a child may be, in respect of this particular question, it is a complicated piece of mechanism, built up out of materials supplied by its mother; and in the course of such building-up, provided with a set of motors--the muscles. Each of these muscles contains a stock of substance capable of yielding energy under certain conditions, one of which is a change of state in the nerve-fibres connected with it The powder in a loaded gun is such another stock of substance capable of yielding energy in consequence of a change of state in the mechanism of the lock, which intervenes between the finger of the man who pulls the trigger and the cartridge. If that change is brought about, the potential energy of the powder pa.s.ses suddenly into actual energy, and does the work of propelling the bullet The powder, therefore, may be appropriately called work-stuff not only because it is stuff which is easily made to yield work in the physical sense, but because a good deal of work in the economical sense has contributed to its production.